One of my favorite things to consider is what the world will look like in a hundred years I would love to live long enough to see it for myself. Of course, I’m only a few years away from what a hundred-year picture will look like for me. If the next hundred years of change are like the past, the picture will be one none of us can recognize. What is more challenging to fathom is what it would look like if we went backward in time instead of forward. I won’t go there, but I will move forward.
Today, my solar panels are covered in snow, and it got me thinking about what will happen in the future when we have successfully electrified the country and a snowstorm stops us from getting electricity. I must have seen a magazine or something that prompted me to see the Indianapolis 500 car race, and I asked myself what that would look like when gasoline is no longer the energy source for cars.
Some things came to mind immediately:
1. The race starter will no longer be able to begin the race with “Gentlemen, start your engines.”
2. The race would be silent or maybe just whiny.
3. Pit stops may take eight hours to get a fresh charge.
4. There will not be any competition between automakers for the best engine.
5. Ford, Chevy, and Chrysler will be replaced by who knows what.
6. There will not be anymore fiery crashes.
7. There will not be any gears to shift to
8. No more spilled gas in the pits.
9. Battery explosions and fires will predominate.
10. Drivers may be replaced by AI Robotic driverless cars.
11. Races may be limited to: One lap, a few laps, or the most laps in the least amount of time
The entire car racing industry will evolve into something we won’t be able to envision. All forms of racing will be affected: Twenty-four hours of LeMans, Baja 500, Daytona 500, Nascar Series, Drag racing, you name it, and it will be different. Some forms of car racing will cease to exist, but man’s ingenuity will drive them to invent new ways to compete using electricity.
As I thought about one of the biggest impediments to electric cars, which is a source of charging stations for power, the name of Henry Ford came to mind. How did Ford overcome the impediment of not having gas stations and roads? He didn’t solve the problem; he only fostered it by selling more cars. Early drivers found gasoline in local drug stores. It was being sold as a spot remover. Then, it progressed to gasoline entrepreneurs who sold gasoline in bulk from tanks outside cities. Car owners filled buckets and cans to take home. From there, it progressed to the formation of gas stations and eventually evolved into the modern filling stations of today. Gasoline was already known as a fuel for internal combustion engines, and it was up to the car buyer to figure out how to get gas. They bought the car and then figured it out. This sounds like what we see today. People are buying electric cars and worrying about getting electricity as somebody else’s problem. As long as they can plug in at home, they are okay. Traveling long distances is still a problem, but slowly, it is evolving into an industry. Until charging stations become commonplace like gas stations are, we will keep using electric cars within 50 miles of home. It worked for Henry, and it will probably work for Elon too.
Today, I read a piece of junk mail which was eight pages long and printed on shiny paper. It contained but one topic namely lithium. The article went on about all the reasons why lithium is really a hot commodity. The main reason is our government’s love affair with creating a green new world, but it never mentioned the part that the government plays in promoting this brain wash. The main reason is the need for batteries to furnish energy to propel electric cars. One thing I thought interesting is the paragraph about power companies that are building huge batteries to store electricity generated by wind and solar.
Countries around the world that sit on lithium deposits are being touted as great investments. I compare this rush to find lithium the same as the rush to find gold in the 1850’s. The difference being that simple people are not leaving their jobs, to sell belongings to buy a mule loaded with shovels, and picks and life sustaining supplies. The one and only message coming at me from this fancy paper was that I should be selling my belongings to invest in lithium. Lithium is the main driver for electric transportation. I see the lithium battery as a simple replacement for a gas tank. The battery needs to be charged (filled) with power producing charge, while the ancient evil mode of transportation that got this world to where it is today needs to be filled with gasoline to work. The gas powered car relies on a metal tank to hold fuel which probably weighs under a hundred pounds and costs a couple hundred dollars to make. The electric car relies on a battery pack filled with lithium cells that weigh closer to a twelve hundred pounds and cost upwards of twenty thousand dollars to replace. Yes, batteries will need to be replaced after ten years of recharging. They won’t be dead but they will not hold as much charge as they did when they were new. So, an electric car that was able to drive three hundred miles on a charge will only be able to go a hundred and fifty miles after the battery becomes depleted. No problem, just drive to a dealer within the limits of the charge left and have them replace the old with a new battery pack, and you are good to go another three hundred miles per charge.
Part of the sell in this article is the financial opportunity that comes with the green new deal. The whole reason the entire world is foisting this fraud upon us is that the world will be cleaner and air will be purer, and nature will be happier. Except, they leave out the part about trashing the world to dig the lithium out of planet earth, and the environmental damage that will come as a result. A good look into the future of a lithium world can bee seen on the program “Gold Rush.” This reality TV program is a documentary of how modern day miners extract gold from Mother Earth. Basically they rip millions of cubic yards of soil to filter out the ounces of gold contained within. You wind up with a giant hole or trench and a huge pile of dirt, and rocks next to it. The labor involved in mining is as large as the machinery used to do the job, and the amount of fuel used to power the machines is in the thousands of gallons. Mining lithium is very much the same, except for one big difference, i.e. the extraction ponds used for settlement are filled with caustic fluid which is not healthy to man nor Mother Earth.
We are in a totally new world with this process. Past President Obama preached that he wanted to transform the United States. He never said what the transformation would be. He probably meant we were going to go electric and would rape Mother Earth for it’s latest gifts by desecrating the environment without regard to nature. Throughout this desecration there is not one mention of why we are doing this, like wanting to save Mother Earth from melting polar ice caps. Instead of losing land to pure antarctic ice-water we blindly and happily pollute the air and the earth with killing chemicals. The asthma created by releasing burned hydro-carbons will be replaced by asthma and cancer from inhaling toxic elements of batteries.
I suppose that I shouldn’t be worrying about health aspects of batteries since my life is nearer to the end than most citizens of the world, but I have lived through the battle to clean the air and water of the USA, and can proudly state that we did a fantastic job of cleaning things up. I do not want to put my offspring to the same levels of pollution that we enjoyed in the fifties and sixties. Instead I see a world that is jumping off the cliff into the cesspool of the unknown. Good luck!
When I saw the title of this lecture, especially with the picture of the scantily clad model, I couldn’t resist attending. The packed auditorium was abuzz with questions about the address; nobody seemed to know what to expect. The only hint was a large aluminum block sitting on a sturdy table on the stage.
When the crowd settled down, a scholarly-looking man walked out and put his hand on the shiny block, “Good evening,” he said, “I am here to introduce NMC532-X,” and he patted the block, “we call him NM for short,” and the man smiled proudly.
“NM is a typical electric vehicle (EV) car battery in every way except one; we programmed him to send signals of the internal movements of his electrons when charging, discharging, and in several other conditions. We wanted to know what it feels like to be a battery. We don’t know how it happened, but NM began to talk after we downloaded the program.
Despite this ability, we put him in a car for a year and then asked him if he’d like to do presentations about batteries. He readily agreed on the condition he could say whatever he wanted. We thought that was fine, and so, without further ado, I’ll turn the floor over to NM,” the man turned and walked off the stage.
“Good evening,” NM said. He had a slightly affected accent, and when he spoke, he lit up in different colors. “That cheeky woman on the marquee was my idea,” he said. “Were she not there, along with ‘naked’ in the title, I’d likely be speaking to an empty auditorium! I also had them add ‘shocking’ because it’s a favorite word amongst us batteries.” He flashed a light blue color as he laughed.
“Sorry,” NM giggled then continued, “Three days ago, at the start of my last lecture, three people walked out. I suppose they were disappointed there would be no dancing girls. But here is what I noticed about them. One was wearing a battery-powered hearing aid, one tapped on his battery-powered cell phone as he left, and a third got into his car, which would not start without a battery. So I’d like you to think about your day for a moment; how many batteries do you rely on?”
He paused for a full minute which gave us time to count our batteries. Then he went on, “Now, it is not elementary to ask, ‘What is a battery?’ I think Tesla said it best when they called us Energy Storage Systems. That’s important. We do not make electricity – we store electricity produced elsewhere, primarily by coal, uranium, natural gas-powered plants, or diesel-fueled generators.
“So, to say an EV is a zero-emission vehicle is not at all valid. Also, since forty percent of the electricity generated in the U.S. is from coal-fired plants, it follows that forty percent of the EVs on the road are coal-powered, n’est-ce pas?” (French language for “isn’t it so.”)
He flashed blue again. “Einstein’s formula, E=MC2, tells us it takes the same amount of energy to move a five thousand pound gasoline-driven automobile a mile as it does an electric one. The only question again is what produces the power? To reiterate, it does not come from the battery; the battery is only the storage device, like a gas tank in a car.”
He lit up red when he said that, and I sensed he was smiling. Then he continued in blue and orange. “Mr. Elkay introduced me as NMC532. If I were the battery from your computer mouse, Elkay would introduce me as double-A, if from your cell phone as CR2032, and so on. We batteries all have the same name depending on our design. By the way, the ‘X’ in my name stands for ‘experimental.’
There are two orders of batteries, rechargeable, and single-use. The most common single-use batteries are A, AA, AAA, C, D. 9V, and lantern types. Those dry-cell species use zinc, manganese, lithium, silver oxide, or zinc and carbon to store electricity chemically. Please note they all contain toxic, heavy metals.
Rechargeable batteries differ only in their internal materials, usually lithium-ion, nickel-metal oxide, and nickel-cadmium.
The United States uses three billion of these two battery types a year, and most are not recycled; they end up in landfills. California is the only state which requires all batteries be recycled. If you throw your small, used batteries in the trash, here is what happens to them.
All batteries are self-discharging. That means even when not in use, they leak tiny amounts of energy. You have likely ruined a flashlight or two from an old ruptured battery. When a battery runs down and can no longer power a toy or light, you think of it as dead; well, it is not. It continues to leak small amounts of electricity.
As the chemicals inside it run out, pressure builds inside the battery’s metal casing, and eventually, it cracks. The metals left inside then ooze out. The ooze in your ruined flashlight is toxic, and so is the ooze that will inevitably leak from every battery in a landfill. All batteries eventually rupture; it just takes rechargeable batteries longer to end up in the landfill.
In addition to dry cell batteries, there are also wet cell ones used in automobiles, boats, and motorcycles. The good thing about those is, ninety percent of them are recycled. Unfortunately, we do not yet know how to recycle batteries like me, or care to dispose of single-use ones properly.
But that is not half of it. For those of you excited about electric cars and a green revolution, I want you to take a closer look at batteries and also windmills and solar panels. These three technologies share what we call “environmentally destructive embedded costs.”
NM got redder as he spoke. “Everything manufactured has two costs associated with it, embedded costs and operating costs. I will explain embedded costs using a can of baked beans as my subject.
In this scenario, baked beans are on sale, so you jump in your car and head for the grocery store. Sure enough, there they are on the shelf for $1.75 a can. As you head to the checkout, you begin to think about the embedded costs in the can of beans.
The first cost is the diesel fuel the farmer used to plow the field, till the ground, harvest the beans, and transport them to the food processor. Not only is his diesel fuel an embedded cost, so are the costs to build the tractors, combines, and trucks. In addition, the farmer might use a nitrogen fertilizer made from natural gas.
Next is the energy costs of cooking the beans, heating the building, transporting the workers, and paying for the vast amounts of electricity used to run the plant. The steel can holding the beans is also an embedded cost. Making the steel can requires mining taconite, shipping it by boat, extracting the iron, placing it in a coal-fired blast furnace, and adding carbon. Then it’s back on another truck to take the beans to the grocery store. Finally, add in the cost of the gasoline for your car.
But wait — can you guess one of the highest but rarely acknowledged embedded costs? NM said, then gave us about thirty seconds to make our guesses. Then he flashed his lights and said, “It’s the depreciation on the 5,000 pound car you used to transport one pound of canned beans!”
NM took on a golden glow, and I thought he might have winked. He said, “But that can of beans is nothing compared to me! I am hundreds of times more complicated. My embedded costs not only come in the form of energy use; they come as environmental destruction, pollution, disease, child labor, and the inability to be recycled.”
He paused, “I weigh one thousand pounds, and as you see, I am about the size of a travel trunk.” NM’s lights showed he was serious. “I contain twenty-five pounds of lithium, sixty pounds of nickel, 44 pounds of manganese, 30 pounds cobalt, 200 pounds of copper, and 400 pounds of aluminum, steel, and plastic. Inside me are 6,831 individual lithium-ion cells.
It should concern you that all those toxic components come from mining. For instance, to manufacture each auto battery like me, you must process 25,000 pounds of brine for the lithium, 30,000 pounds of ore for the cobalt, 5,000 pounds of ore for the nickel, and 25,000 pounds of ore for copper. All told, you dig up 500,000 pounds of the earth’s crust for just — one — battery.”
He let that one sink in, then added, “I mentioned disease and child labor a moment ago. Here’s why. Sixty-eight percent of the world’s cobalt, a significant part of a battery, comes from the Congo. Their mines have no pollution controls and they employ children who die from handling this toxic material. Should we factor in these diseased kids as part of the cost of driving an electric car?”
NM’s red and orange light made it look like he was on fire. “Finally,” he said, “I’d like to leave you with these thoughts. California is building the largest battery in the world near San Francisco, and they intend to power it from solar panels and windmills. They claim this is the ultimate in being ‘green,’ but it is not! This construction project is creating an environmental disaster. Let me tell you why.
The main problem with solar arrays is the chemicals needed to process silicate into the silicon used in the panels. To make pure enough silicon requires processing it with hydrochloric acid, sulfuric acid, nitric acid, hydrogen fluoride, trichloroethane, and acetone. In addition, they also need gallium, arsenide, copper-indium-gallium- diselenide, and cadmium-telluride, which also are highly toxic. Silicon dust is a hazard to the workers, and the panels cannot be recycled.
Windmills are the ultimate in embedded costs and environmental destruction. Each weighs 1,688 tons (the equivalent of 23 houses) and contains 1,300 tons of concrete, 295 tons of steel, 48 tons of iron, 24 tons of fiberglass, and the hard-to-extract rare earths neodymium, praseodymium, and dysprosium. Each blade weighs 81,000 pounds and will last 15 to 20 years, at which time it must be replaced. We cannot recycle used blades. Sadly, both solar arrays and windmills kill birds, bats, sea life, and migratory insects.
NM lights dimmed, and he quietly said, “There may be a place for these technologies, but you must look beyond the myth of zero emissions. I predict EVs and windmills will be abandoned once the embedded environmental costs of making and replacing them become apparent. I’m trying to do my part with these lectures.
Thank you for your attention, good night, and good luck.” NM’s lights went out, and he was quiet, like a regular battery.
* * *
The format is stupid, but the info is right on target. If you want to inflict maximum damage on the environment, you support EVs, wind turbines and solar panels – all with their associated batteries. They don’t even come close in being as environmentally clean as coal, natural gas, and nuclear power. Likewise, their (EVs, WTs, and Solar) cost is going to be exorbitant. WTs and Solar reliability is poor.
Electric vehicles are taxpayer subsidized for the purchase of each hybrid or fully electric vehicle with a discount of about $7,000. Then, the government does not collect road-use taxes. Further, the new infrastructure bill provides several billion dollars of taxpayer funds to build charging stations. Do we really want our Government in the “electric filling-station” business?
This is exactly what all these self-proclaimed, highly educated, intellectual, “ECO Nazi-es” need to read.
Never mind, they’re too intellectually deficient to comprehend how intertwined this information is with the damage being inflicted on our earth’s environment thanks to their “Green New Deal”
