• 133arc585
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    1 year ago

    How much rare-earth metal is mined ethically?

    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.

    How much of it is controlled by “evil” empires (China, Russia)?

    See above.

    How can hydrogen or electric vehicles be made cheap enough to be sold as non-luxury vehicles?

    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.

    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

    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).

    We’ll just keep burning oil instead of much cleaner biofuels in the meantime.

    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.

    • BaldProphet
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      01 year ago

      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.