Interesting: A cut-and-paste attack on electric vehicle batteries and renewables is spanning the globe. But is it right? The Guardian.
Quote:Across social media, internet forums and some climate science denier blogs, there has been furious cutting-and-pasting of chunks of common text attacking the environmental credentials of electric vehicles, solar panels and wind turbines.
About 200 tonnes of the “Earth’s crust” needs to be mined for each electric vehicle battery, and 11 tonnes of brine are needed just for the lithium, claims the text, which also says solar panels and wind turbine blades can’t be recycled.
Some claims are made definitively and without context, and don’t try to compare electric vehicle batteries to the fossil fuelled cars they are replacing. Solar panels can be recycled and fully recyclable turbine blades are now being produced.
The former resources minister and Queensland senator Matt Canavan was another to share some of the text that sat above a picture of a hollowed-out landscape. It took a few seconds to discover the scary but irrelevant image was of a diamond mine in Canada.
On Facebook, some posts using extracts are being marked with a label saying “Missing context. Independent fact-checkers say this information could mislead people.”
One fact check site categorises one post as a “scare tactic” containing only partial truths.
An Australian climate “sceptics” group posted a version of the essay the extracts come from earlier this year.
Prof Peter Newman, a sustainability expert at Curtin University and a senior author of an upcoming UN climate assessment on mitigation, said the numbers related to the resources needed to produce electric vehicle batteries were “nonsense” because they referred to the early days of lithium battery development.
Newman told Temperature Check the claims around brine and lithium were “based on the fears associated with brine extraction in the Andes’s countries, especially Chile, and human slavery in the Democratic Republic of the Congo over Cobalt.”
But he said lithium extraction was moving away from brine to a mineral called spodumene, with Western Australia now its biggest producer. That mining, Newman said, was “ethical and sustainable.”
The WA government says the state now produces 49% of the world’s lithium – meaning that at least half of the world’s supply comes without processing salty brine in places like Chile.
Commenting more generally, Newman said “rumours about critical minerals” had been spreading for too long.
“Their time is up. The world is replacing oil with sunshine made possible because of the dramatically successful Lithium Ion battery.
“Compare [this] with the numbers on air pollution deaths at 10,000 a day, the wars created over oil and the climate change impacts.”
But what are the origins of the text extracts?
Versions have appeared on Facebook and LinkedIn, many crediting the work to a different writer – including the version promoted by Canavan.
But it appears those versions were taken from an essay written last November by a US-based writer.
Temperature Check asked the writer where he had sourced his facts. He said he “tried to find at least two credible sources for each of the things I claim” and said “all of the statements are readily available on the internet.”
His work was “designed to be fun to read and to get people thinking”, he said.
It’s worth saying here that most people appreciate any new purchase – whether that’s a fossil-fuelled car or an e-bike – has an environmental cost and that raw materials have to be mined.
But electric cars are not permanently tied to fossil fuel production and the associated greenhouse gas emissions in the same way that internal combustion engines are; Australia’s motor vehicles burn 33bn litres of fuel every year.