Mark P. Mills is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a faculty fellow at Northwestern University’s McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science.
California Insider interviewed Mark Mills and asked him if it was possible to transition to EV vehicles by 2035 when the sale of gas-powered cars will be banned in California.
Mills responded:
“There is no such thing as a zero-emissions vehicle.
“You have to dig up about 500,000 pounds of materials to make a single 1000-pound battery. It takes 100 to 300 barrels of oil to manufacture a battery that can hold one barrel of oil equivalent of energy. Just manufacturing the battery can have a debt rate ranging from 10 tons to 40 tons of CO2. And the plans that are in place to increase the use of batteries will require an increase in production of minerals like Lithium, Cobalt, Zinc. Demand for those minerals will increase between 400% and 4000%. There isn’t enough mining in the world to make enough batteries for that many people for their cars,” he said.
Democrats know this can’t work.
Watch:
— Rob 🏴 (@Rob88486978) September 15, 2022
The Chinese communists have cornered the rare metal market. Take Lithium for example. It is in short supply, and the prices are going insane. That doesn’t even begin to address the cleanup from the mines and the dead batteries. The demand is already outpacing supply.
Bloomberg reports:
For over a year, a semiconductor shortage has battered the auto industry, creating supply strains and sending prices for both chips and cars soaring. Now, carmakers are preparing for another bottleneck: lithium, a key element in electric car batteries. Electric car sales are at an all-time high, with companies including Tesla, Volkswagen, and Mercedes all posting record shipments in the first three months of 2022.
But because of the surge in demand, experts are unsure whether enough lithium is available. “In the next two years, even though there will be significant growth in supply, it will be less than demand, so the gap will just continue to grow,” lithium and mining expert Joe Lowry, who has earned the nickname Mr. Lithium, recently said in an interview with Bloomberg.
Only a handful of countries mine Lithium, and the working conditions for the miners are terrible.
Also, there is no plan to build the necessary infrastructure to accommodate all these new cars. The grid can’t even handle the current load. California suffers from an energy shortage. There is also no plan for the disposal of used batteries.
Perhaps worst of all, we don’t have one prototype of this transition working, not one city, or town, or small village.
In the end, if we all have electric cars, we’ll end up looking at them in our driveways instead of driving them.
Is this a typo? Don t you mean 5000 pounds ??
…“You have to dig up about 500 pounds of materials to make a single 1000-pound battery…
Agree EVs, and “alternative energy” in general, are NOT ready for prime time. Maybe sometime, maybe not. But there’s no question we’re not there now. But I have a big problem with the insistence on making “CO2” some kind of boogeyman. It’s harmless. Plants depend on it for survival. CO2 is non-toxic and non-reactive. It’s just there, and it does… Read more »
They have no intention of us having electric vehicles.
Here is even more proof: It is not enough that China is buying Russian oil at a discount due to western sanctions put on Russia because of its invasion of Ukraine, but now President Biden’s Department of Energy (Sec. Granholm) with approval is selling to China oil from the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR)—a source that is meant for national… Read more »
I waited to to install a solar system until I was happy with the costs and the payback time for the investment. I was assured that by now the cost of the battery would be halved. Instead it has steadily risen and I can’t see how the savings would ever pay back the additional cost. This article shows why. We… Read more »
PS I will save enough on electricity costs in four years and three month to pay back the loan and interest borrowed (from myself) to pay for the solar, and no I did not get cheap panels from China, but the highest rated available.
how did you do that ? average payback is about 8 years …and that includes tax credits which you don’t mention
I am looking at a less than a 5 year ROI for my Solar System. Doing your homework and installing the system yourself can cut the price in half. My electric co-op is talking about at least a 50% increase in rates next year. That will drop the ROI to under 4 Years. I also have enough clear land to… Read more »
Maybe sometime in the future, who knows, but “alternative energies” are not here now, as you point out. And since the sun doesn’t always shine, and winds don’t always blow, all of it brings some serious drawbacks that will always be there. And don’t forget the huge mining and manufacturing front-end on all these wonderful “alternative energy innovations”. At any… Read more »
I won’t hold my breathe for a Wuling Hongguang MINIEV. The Traitor Joe Regime will Regulate an American version to death. Instead of 5K an American version would be 50K.