Electric vehicles (EVs) promise to be the future of transportation.
There are a few problems with this:
- The metals that go into battery technology is finite and mining of these metals is ethically flawed.
- Battery recycling is also a fairly primitive field right now.
- Mining is also an expensive process. We don’t have the metals to support this transition.
- The power grid needs to be expanded a monumentally large factor. This means energy production needs to scale up, efficiency, transmission, to a level that we cannot support right now.
- EVs are also just cars. This means we’re still locked into car dependency and our cities still won’t be environmentally friendly and will sprawl out. See Carmageddon.
So we can’t replace every gasoline vehicle one-to-one with EVs. We need to expand investment in public transit. Another big question is what we do with end-of-life batteries before disposal/recycling. One idea is to use them for energy storage in homes or smaller locations.