Re: Am I the only one
> Is that good for environment to extract lithium?
Not particularly, no. But it's also no worse than extracting petroleum. In fact, I'd say it's much better than extracting petroleum because petroleum gets used once only, whereas lithium in the existing batteries is used again and again and again each time it is charged and then dischared. 100's of times. It's not a single use item like petroleum is. And it is recycleable, petroleum is not. While there may not be a lot of recycling yet, that is an industry that is still being built up and long term there will be recycling. It just isn't possible to recycle petroleum (combusted in an internal combustion engine to produce power) at all, ever. It's just gone (well, besides the pollution its combustion has caused that is). And you have to extract more petroleum for the next use of the vehicle.
> Produce electricity from gas or coal?
Why do you say this? Those aren't the only sources, even now, of electricity. Hydro. Nuclear. Thermal. Wind. Solar. All of those contribute a significant proportion of electricity right now. In some countries (e.g. France) Nuclear produces more electricity than coal and gas. In others, e.g. Canada, hydro is a huge component of their grid. And those sources are gowing over time. And yes, actually, grid-scale coal and gas electricity generation is, in fact, much, much, more efficient and cleaner (relatively speaking, it's still dirty) than burning petroleum products in a car engine to produce power. For starters, they benefit from efficiencies of scale. Being stationary, they can implement efficiency measures that the extra weght to implement just isn't possible in a mobile device like a car. There is less waste of energy as compared to with a IC car, a gas or coal plant can run at its most efficient level in terms of turbine speeds and the burn-rate of coal and gas to maintain that speed for months on-end, no wasting extra fuel on speeding up, slowing down, speeding up again, idling at lights, and so on.
> Produce a new car using resource and energy to replace a still working one?
Why do you say this? At the current price of BEVs, they aren't purchased by the type of people who run a car into the ground over 20+ years. They are mostly purchased by the sorts of people who buy new cars every 3-10 years (often on lease-type arrangements), replacing perfectly good internal combustion cars with other combustion cars. Therefore buying a BEV does reduce internal combustion engined cars, because the purchaser hasn't replaced their IC car with yet another IC car, which they would be doing anyway, but a BEV. And, are you honestly, seriously saying with a straight face that a 3-10 year old IC car is going to be scrapped? Really? You haven't heard of the 2nd-hand car market? No. The IC car replaced by the typical buyer of a BEV will end up in a used car yard, being purchased by the sort of people who do run their car into the ground after 20+ years, to replace their 20+ year old, hugely inefficient by todays standards IC car, and that piece of shit car will then be recycled. Thus a buyer replacing their 3-10 year old IC with a BEV will result in some 20+ year old car, built to older emissions standards, being taken off the road as it is replaced by their 3-10 year old, more modern, more efficient, better emission-standard compliant vehicle that they traded in for their BEV.
> And what about recycling it?
Recycling what? Their IC they replaced with a BEV? They have done better than recycling, they will have reused it by putting it on the used-car market to replace an even older car, as per my previous point. And reusing is better than recycling for the environment, with recycling being better than tossing out.
If you mean recycling their BEV, what of it? Apart from the battery, the rest of the car (shell, chassis, etc.) can be recycled by normal scrap-metal recycling, as any current car is. The battery can be recycled too. In case you hadn't noticed, BEVs haven't been around for very long, therefore the recycling of the battery is an industry still in its infancy, as is the entire BEV market. They currently take up an absolutely tiny percentage of cars on the road today. As the volume increases, more recycling will come on line to deal with the batteries. What? You expected capitalism to have the entire end-to-end process in place before they started selling BEVs? As each part of the end-to-end lifecycle (building from 'virgin' materials, new-mined lithium, etc., then those getting recycled to be used in later production) starts to build to commercial vialble levels, later stages will come online as it becomes economic to implement those parts of the system. Since BEVs have only been on the roads for about 10 years, and only any significant volume in the last 5, very few batteries from those vehicles relative to the overall production rate have 'worn out' or otherwise need to be dealt with.
There already is recycling of batteries, many countries have legal requirements for what to do with lead-acid, alkaline, NiCad, NiMH, and Li-ion batteries. They already do recycle these types of batteries, just not at the scale that will be required as the volume of BEVs increases. But, hey, it's an existing industry, it can be scaled up as soon as the economic incentives are there for them to do that.
