Climate Change Tracker

I'm starting to wonder whether the conventional wisdom of reducing carbon emissions in favour of more electricalisation is really solving the actual problem. As is often pointed out on HN, electrical cars are substantially heavier than their fossil fueled alternatives, and generate other pollution along the way. Furthermore, we're digging our lithium brines from the environment, without really understanding what all this lithium will do once it's leached out into the environment or what impact the mines themselves will have.

With the recent advances of turning CO2 into other substances, such as propane, should we be focusing more on closing the carbon cycle and simply be producing fossil fuels from the waste products of yesteryear?

Naively, it feels like we understand C, O and H, better than we understand some of the rare metals we're now introducing in the name of climate change.

Electric cars vastly reduce the environmental impact of cars. Everyone who's run the numbers agrees on this [1][2][3]. Battery vehicles aren't that much heavier than gasoline vehicles, and the volume of metals needed to make a battery is a tiny fraction of the volume of oil needed to fuel a car across its lifecycle. Power plants are much more efficient than small engines in cars, and as the grid decarbonizes the emissions of battery electric vehicles move towards zero. Electric cars really are far better for the planet than burning gas, there isn't a catch.

I get the worries, Lithium mining causes ecological damage, but every sort of resource extraction causes ecological damage. Every kilogram of pollution generated from lithium mining prevents many times more pollution generated from oil extraction and emissions. Lithium, cobalt, and the rest aren't exotic materials, the battery industry is huge and has many decades of experience building batteries.

Synthesizing hydrocarbons is an important technology. But that process is incredibly energy intensive, and it's much more efficient to use electricity to just charge a battery. The scale of production of synthetic hydrocarbons isn't anywhere close to where it would need to be to make a dent in climate change. I think that electrofuels will be very important in aviation - they're the only apparent pathway to run jet engines without emissions. But it will be a long time, if ever, before that technology is mature enough to fuel passenger vehicles at a meaningful scale.

[1] https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/comparative-l...

[2] https://afdc.energy.gov/vehicles/electric_emissions.html

[3] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S136403212...