DO ELECTRIC CARS REPRESENT AN ACCEPTABLE LEVEL OF ECOLOGICAL IMPACT?
Despite the clean and green image, each electric car represents massive amounts of carbon emissions, water pollution and habitat destruction from roads and lithium mines.
A conversation with Julia Barnes, Producer, Writer and Director of the film “Bright Green Lies.”
HART HAGAN: Let's talk about cars. You’ve visited Thacker Pass in Nevada. The reason for Thacker pass is to mine lithium. Lithium is going to be used for many different battery applications, but the majority of it promises to be for electric cars. So if we replace the internal combustion engine with an electric motor, you don't have any exhaust coming out of the tailpipe. What's not to like about that?
JULIA BARNES: The process for making electric cars is just like any of these other technologies. It involves a lot of mining, right now mining is being used for lithium batteries.
If you look at the site where lithium is mined, currently in other parts of the world, in Bolivia or Chile, you see huge destruction to the natural environment and oftentimes local opposition.
Indigenous people are saying, “We don't want this.” There have been some successful opposition to certain mining projects because people really don't want these going in.
These are usually places where there's not a lot of water to begin with, and the mining is something that's going to take water. It's going to pollute the water table. It’s just a disaster for the local environment where the lithium extraction is happening, but now they're looking at putting a lot of lithium mines in Nevada.
A lithium mine is something like an open pit coal mine, and it looks very destructive. And people are rightfully against that, but an open pit lithium mine in Nevada is not going to look very different from an open pit coal mine.
They're going to destroy Thacker Pass, for example. This area is a really beautiful pristine desert habitat that is home to some species who are threatened and endangered and some who live nowhere else on Earth and will be wiped out because of this project.
And it's all to build single person vehicles, to make batteries for these luxury items that are electric vehicles, so that people can zip around and travel places faster and feel good about themselves and feel like it's good for the planet.
But the majority of emissions that go into making a car--or at least a very large portion of the emissions that go into making a car--are in the manufacturing process. The majority of emissions that come from a vehicle are from the manufacturing stage.
We see very visually what comes out the tailpipe, and obviously, that's a problem. I'm not advocating for the continued use of combustion vehicles. But what most people don't see is that there's a huge chunk of emissions that goes into manufacturing a vehicle, whether it's an electric vehicle or a gas-powered vehicle.
So I don't think that we should look at an electric car and say that this is zero emissions. There were a lot of emissions that went into making that car. There are a lot of harms that come with making the batteries for those cars.
On top of that, emissions are not the only problems with cars. Roads fragment habitats. Cars hit a lot of vertebrate and invertebrate animals. And then there’s microplastics, such as tire wear from cars. One of the leading causes of micro plastic pollution in the ocean is the erosion of car tires, as they drive.
So there are a whole host of problems that come with cars. We can't just slap a battery in there and suddenly make cars okay. They're still very much not a good thing for this planet.