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“Cobalt Red”: Smartphones & Electric Cars Rely on Toxic Mineral Mined in Congo by Children
(www.democracynow.org)
this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2023
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Biofuel is not gasoline. Gasoline is a nonrenewable petroleum product. Biofuel is a renewable clean burning ethanol or methanol fuel made from grain or wood byproducts.
There are not enough rare earth metals to replace combustion engine vehicles with electric vehicles, let alone enough to replace the batteries of said vehicles. Electric vehicles are not sustainable.
Can you explain how this works?
Only part of the reason petroleum products are an issue is because they are nonrenewable. The primary complaint is that their combustion produces CO~2~ (and other greenhouse gases like NOx).
Ethanol, methanol, and any other hydrocarbon that undergoes combustion produces CO~2~ (and other gases). That's how combustion works. For example, the combustion equation for methanol is: 2CH~3~OH + 3O~2~→2CO~2~ + 4H~2~O.
The only way around this while still performing combustion is by combusting hydrogen, where the combustion equation is simply: 2H~2~ + O~2~→2H~2~O.
Biofuel combustion still produce CO~2~, and I don't believe at a significantly different rate than petroleum combustion, even if it does have the added benefit of being renewable.[^1]
[^1]: Yes, this view is missing a few variables. For one, biofuel production itself can be less carbon-intensive than oil drilling and processing processes. Biofuels can also be used to "recycle" other carbon-containing (waste) material. That being said, combustion is still the largest problematic factor at play here.
Right, we’re not magically sucking CO2 from the atmosphere at a rate higher than we combust the biofuel.
The process is not neutral.
That doesn't make any sense to me, and it's been awhile since my biofuel class but I don't think that's true.
The carbon in the combustion product comes from the biofuel, the biofuel comes from plants, the plants get the carbon from the air. Therfore, by definition, every gram of Co2 released by combusting a biofuel came originally from the atmosphere.
It has to be neutral, otherwise where is the magical extra carbon coming from?
Absolutely. Compared to gasoline, it might be better. And if there were literally no other alternatives for powering engines, it could be acceptable. But there's no point in taking "the lesser of two evils" when non-evil solutions do exist.
Do they, though? How much rare-earth metal is mined ethically? How much of it is controlled by "evil" empires (China, Russia)? How can hydrogen or electric vehicles be made cheap enough to be sold as non-luxury vehicles?
The fact of the matter that is, until non-evil solutions are actually designed, switching from petroleum fuel to biofuel shouldn't be overlooked. Ignoring biofuel in favor of non-solutions like electric and hydrogen vehicles isn't going to slow down global warming. We'll just keep burning oil instead of much cleaner biofuels in the meantime.
https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/edg/media/BiofuelsMythVFact.pdf
Just because mining may not currently be done ethically doesn't mean it can't be. The whole system needs to be upturned, not just moving away from gasoline, but making sure every step of the supply chain is ethical and environmentaly sound.
See above.
Several ways. One way, an approach being taken in the USA, is subsidies both to manufacturers and buyers to encourage buying greener vehicles. Also the assumption that production costs will never change--will forever remain high--is nonsense: technological advancements increase efficiency and decrease cost, amortized costs become paid off, and international competition between manufacturers all help keep prices low.
You can pretend the solutions that are materially in front of you don't exist, but they do. You act as if they're pies in the sky, or undiscovered future technology. They're neither. They exist, materially, in the real world and are in use now. And they can only get better (more efficient, cheaper, more ethical, etc).
Here's the problem with your reasoning: if we say "let's move to biofuels", you're just going to provide reason to keep producing ICEs. As long as ICEs are being produced, purchased, and used, there is inherently less demand for alternatives. People are also not going to buy better solutions if they've recently purchased an ICE vehicle.
As I said earlier, the whole system needs to be upturned. There is no reason every human needs their own car; there is no reason people need to drive an hour each way to work, or half an hour each way to a shop, all the while having a single person in the car. Your concern of overpriced alternatives is not an issue when the cost is consolidated into, say, a slightly more expensive (up-front) bus. People need to walk, bike, and take public transport more. More and better public transportation needs to be designed and implemented. Cities need to be designed to make having a car not only less necessary, but less desirable.
I'd say your ideas are significantly more pie-in-the-sky than mine. Rare earth metals aren't going to get more common; they will only get more rare as more of them are extracted. That extraction process will become more expensive and more damaging to the environment, and as a result, electric vehicles will get more expensive.
Contemporary battery technology cannot replace ICE vehicles. We need to reduce vehicle emissions now, not wait until some undetermined future time when an alternative is finally viable. Biofuel is how we do that.
But sure, go ahead and ignore the overwhelming evidence and cling to your outdated idea of replacing combustion engine vehicles with electric vehicles.