Matthew Damiani and Timothy Mooney

 

Response:

Over the last decade, electric vehicles have become more and more integrated into our lives. Now more than ever are people using these vehicles, under the impression that they are helping the environment by not putting out any carbon emissions. However, the production of these vehicles uses a large amount of rare natural resources. These vehicles do not use a traditional internal combustion engine, but instead a set of large batteries that can be recharged. To make these kinds of batteries, rare elements must be used such as neodymium, platinum, dysprosium, lithium, and other lithium based metals. According to Lesley Stahl, a CBS reporter, “Hybrids, in particular use a lot more [rare earth elements] because they contain electric motors that would not function without rare earth elements. A prius has roughly 25 pounds of rare earths.” (Stahl) In addition to this, the demand for these kinds of vehicles does not seem to be going down anytime soon, according to Jamie Speirs from Strategic Energy Technologies Information System, “the International Energy Agency estimates that by 2050 annual sales of battery electric vehicles will reach ~50 million vehicles a year…projected electric vehicle market growth suggests that future demand for lithium and neodymium could become many times current lithium or neodymium supply.” (Speirs) The combination of these two pieces of information suggest that we may deplete our planet’s rare metal source in the near future. This can serve to be a very large problem, as many of our technological and electronic devices use these rare metals. For example, cell phones use lithium-ion batteries, and headphones rely on neodymium to produce sound. Research must be done into the electric car batteries to cut down the cost of rare elements for them to truly as beneficial as people think they are.

On the surface, driving an electric car seems like the obvious environmentally-friendly choice as opposed to a conventional gasoline powered car. Just looking at the surface, this assumption would be correct. The problem is, there’s many layers to the environmental cost of electric cars that many people don’t consider. As previously talked about, electric cars require the mining of rare metals found in the earth’s surface and unfortunately there’s no “green” way to get these vital products from the ground. Lizzie Wade points out in her article for American magazine“Wired” that “…many mines rely on rock-crushing equipment with astronomical energy bills, as well as coal-fired furnaces for the final baking stages. Those spew a lot of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in the process of refining a material destined for your zero-emissions car,” (Wade 2016). She goes on to the highlight the fact that producing an electric car creates more carbon emissions than building its gasoline powered counterpart. With that being said, some still try to justify that even though the production may be more environmentally harmful, you will have a zero-emissions vehicle as opposed to a car that will spew carbon emissions from its tailpipe for the next 10 to 20 years. That’s undeniably true, based on what we see. It’s what we don’t see that causes the major environmental problems. Electric cars need to be charged, usually every night. This electricity must be generated from somewhere. The source is electric power plants, a.k.a the big smokestacks we’ve grown familiar with. The problem is, “…those smokestacks, many attached to coal-fired power plants, are the single-largest source of greenhouse gas pollution in the U.S.,” (Biello 2016). So to sum this all up, your “zero-emissions”, environmentally friendly electric car spews more carbon emissions in the air during its production versus its conventional counterpart and it adds to the epidemic of smokestack pollution from electric power plants. That eco-friendly car starts to not look so good after the facts begin to be uncovered.

The major question that needs to be asked when determining if electric cars are actually more eco-friendly than conventional cars, is a question that probably won’t be answered for a long time because electric vehicle technology is in its infancy compared to conventional car technology. Electric cars haven’t even been around long enough to see how long their lifespan will be, so there is still decades of research that needs to be done about this technology. In theory however, if we were to perform such an experiment to answer this question, the testing would have to start at the pre-production phase of the cars. For electric cars, the volume of carbon emissions, as well as the destruction of the environment, due to all the machinery required to mine the vital rare earth metals from the ground, would have to be measured and compared with the emissions of any machinery needed during this assembly phase of conventional car production. Of course, it would be difficult to document these kinds of measurements, so experts in environmental science would be needed in this part of the experiment. After, we must survey how much coal would have to be burned to charge an electric car each night, and compare it to the volume of carbon emissions put out of a gasoline engine’s tailpipe per day and evaluate these measurements over a long period of time. Once again, this would be difficult to measure and results would be very rounded and averaged. After all the emissions data had been documented, the environmental footprint of electric cars must be compared to the environmental footprint of conventional gasoline powered cars. Since experiments such as these are either still in their infancy, or have not been performed, we will have to just debate if the electric powered engine is more environmentally friendly than the gasoline powered engine.

 

Citations:

Biello, David. “Electric Cars Are Not Necessarily Clean.” Scientific America, 11 May 2016, www.scientificamerican.com/article/electric-cars-are-not-necessarily-clean/. Accessed 1 Sept. 2017.

 

Speirs, Jamie. “Electric vehicles and critical metals – Jamie Speirs, Imperial College Centre for Energy Policy and Technology.” Setis.ec.europa.eu, Feb. 2015, setis.ec.europa.eu/setis-reports/setis-magazine/materials-energy/electric-vehicles-and-critical-metals-jamie-speirs. Accessed 1 Sept. 2017.

 

Stahl, Lesley. “RARE EARTH ELEMENTS.” CBS News, 60 Minutes, 19 July 2015, www.cbsnews.com/news/rare-earth-elements-china-monopoly-60-minutes-lesley-stahl-2/. Accessed 1 Sept. 2017.

 

Wade, Lizzie. “TESLA’S ELECTRIC CARS AREN’T AS GREEN AS YOU MIGHT THINK.” Wired.com, 31 Mar. 2016, www.wired.com/2016/03/teslas-electric-cars-might-not-green-think/. Accessed 1 Sept. 2017.