I wish the article mentioned the matrix materials for the electrolyte which AFAIK are pretty problematic poly-fluorated organic compounds. I wonder whether the pyrolysis is turning them into really nasty chemical waste.
Tesla seems to have used the same dirty trick used by oil companies to convince the public that plastics were largely "recyclable" by conflating economically productive (for Tesla) re-use of decommissioned batteries from Teslas and "recycling" of actual cells. I support the work of Elon Musk, obviously many here do not and call him a fraud, however I do take issue with how he uses this line to call the battery tech Tesla uses "renewable".
Tesla's previous CTO and Co-founder, JB Straubel (who spent 15 years at Tesla), left to found Redwood Materials [1] (which intends to scale up battery recycling processes).
Fortum, a Finnish clean energy firm (correction provided by @Sharlin), has reached an 80% recycling rate as of 2019 [2].
It's always going to be cheaper to pour end of life cells into a remanufacturing process than to extract raw lithium from brine ponds, so it makes economic sense to do the R&D to do so. It's also going to be cheaper to reuse existing, functioning cell modules (such as folks harvesting cell packs from Teslas and other EVs for stationary storage) than to landfill or recycle those materials.
Batteries are mostly recyclable currently, full stop, although there is work required to make them 100% recyclable.
>> Batteries are mostly recyclable currently, full stop
SOME lithium batteries are recyclable, but ALL oldschool lead acid batteries are recyclable. For installations where weight/size are secondary concerns, old fashioned wet car batteries are more "green" than anything involving lithium.
A used lead-acid battery is not a liability. It is a useful and profitable product that can be easily turned into other useful products... today.
"Did you know you can make money recycling your old lead-acid batteries? Why not put a little extra cash in your pocket this season. *Earnings vary depending on weight. If you have 3 or more, please call (855) 701-7171 for a quote. It pays to recycle. "
I don't know anyone using lead acid for new stationary storage or electrified transportation applications, although you are correct that lead acid are entirely recyclable.
I know lots of people. The bulk of residential off-grid solar installations use lead-acid battery banks. Most all RVs and boats use lead-acid. And virtually every new car/truck/motorcycle/ATV/snowmobile/jetski, including the hybrid cars, ships with a 12v wet lead-acid battery.
Even full EVs have old school 12v lead acids in them because they still have a full 12v system to run ~everything in the car that aren't actual traction motors (for compatibility with the existing automotive supply chain if nothing else).
There's a regulation at least in the US that says the HV system also has to be physically disconnected when the car isn't being used so if the 12v battery dies you're still stuck like a regular car, because you need the 12v battery to close the HV relay.
I have owned no less than three Kia Soul EVs. The first two would succumb to a flat 12V battery, but the latest (a 2020 model) will connect the HV battery to charge the 12V battery if needed, even when the car is parked and switched off. You can see it in action, as a blue light on the dash will flash while this goes on.
Oh that's neat. I hope tesla adopts that, because one of the biggest issues has been the 12 v batteries dying quickly. I'm not sure if anyone's figured out the root cause, but IIRC people think that they abuse the battery in some way that an alternator wouldn't.
That's interesting. I hadn't realized that full EVs still needed 12v batteries. I have jump-started a couple hybrids over the years (lights left on etc) but never a full EV. I would love to make a meme out of a Tesla needing to be jumped by my little honda.
I remember my surprise when I learned EVs have regular car batteries in them.
The funny thing is, I can imagine a future where "jumper cables" isn't a hefty set of thick wires intended to supply the current needed for a starter. Instead, people will have a 20' long cable with cigarette lighter plugs on both ends. The HV relay can't require that much current to close, right?
Maybe, but the dead battery is still in the circuit. So a tiny wire won't provide enough current to raise the voltage enough across the entire circuit. (I assume that it requires something akin to a the solenoid of a IC car.) You don't need the cranking amps, but you will still need something thicker than a USB cable.
Ah, good point. I guess it matters whether your battery is drained, or dead. Sometimes the battery just doesn't have the juice to turn the starter (you hear the clicking of the solenoid when trying to start, but no cranking). Other times it's so depleted that an external current supply will be sucked up by the thirsty battery.
It probably won’t take a large current, but I expect you need more than just enough to close a relay. Most likely, you’ll need enough to power some CPUs and data buses as well. That’s still tiny compared to the current required to run a starter motor, though.
Actually it’s normal for heavy machineries to have separate low voltage power for computers and high voltage large current for actuators. Even open source 3D printers has provisions to do that if so desired.
Can't they leak hydrogen, potentially causing an explosion? I admit my only knowledge of this comes from perusing the Wikipedia page on them and an episode of Mr. Robot.
This is precisely the literary slight of hand I was talking about! Similar to Musk's hilarious dismissal of hydrogen technology. Hydrogen will obviously in time become the ideal source of energy for electric aircraft and electric long haul trucks.
Has hydrogen storage been solved? How big would a hydrogen tank have to be to power a plane for more than an hour? And what is the conversion rate of hydrogen to electricity?
Hydrogen storage is definitely not a solved problem. It was a hot funding topic for the US DOE a few years ago, but sufficient energy density and operating pressures are super challenging targets to hit.
Efficiency depends on fuel cell type and operating conditions and such, but I think it’s generally pretty high for the useful life of the catalyst material. (The catalyst is another materials challenge itself, since I think most of the good materials are super expensive like Pt/Pd alloys, and they’re vulnerable to carbon monoxide poisoning)
I interpreted the original quote "Batteries are mostly recyclable currently, full stop" to mean "all batteries are mostly (i.e., >=80%) recyclable" i.e., even lith-ion batteries are ~80% recyclable and 80% constitutes "mostly". The original quote is confusing, and I think you might be interpreting it as "most batteries are recyclable" or perhaps "most lith-ion batteries are recyclable". In whatever case, I wanted to jump in and clarify.
Uhuh, Fortum[1] is not exactly a startup. It is a state-owned corporation with annual revenue of about 5 billion and one of the largest players in the Nordic energy sector.
> It's always going to be cheaper to pour end of life cells into a remanufacturing process than to extract raw lithium from brine ponds, so it makes economic sense to do the R&D to do so.
I make the assumption based on existing evidence. I could be be wrong if it gets drastically cheaper to source lithium, nickel, and iron from mining operations versus concentrated ore in end of life cells. Doesn’t seem likely based on mining costs and the demand curve (demand will increase as fast or faster than reserves can be sourced), as well as jurisdictions mandating manufacturers stand up recycling supply chains for the products they're building and selling (California did this with solar PV, many others have done it for electronics recycling in general, for example).
I would be willing to make a Long Bet [1] on this point. Accountability is important.
Lithium does not suffer from undesired pigmentation and overabundance of too many completely different types of lithium the way plastics do. Plastics are composites so if you were to extract the elements out of them then you would end up with carbon and hydrogen which unfortunately aren't plastic. With lithium all you have to do is extract the lithium elements.
Aluminum and iron recycling is viable because they are elements in their own right.
The preference order is Reduce, Reuse, then Recycle. If they're going hard on Reuse, that's better than if they jumped straight to Recycle from a green perspective.
If Tesla is ending up with all these batteries in the end, we've also done another good thing for recycling, which is forcing Tesla, the producer, to deal with how to dispose of them, which is not the case with oil companies
I'm having trouble following your argument. Are you saying it's bad that Tesla batteries are being reused instead of recycled? Or are you claiming that Tesla is taking credit for the reuse and that's bad?
Musk has stated publicly that they will recycle Tesla batteries once they become available in enough volume to make it viable. He'd be stupid not to -- they will be a cheaper source of nickel and cobalt than digging it out of the ground.
But reuse is better than recycling, so recycling should remain in the future as long as possible.
Re-use of a battery is fine, but it's a stop-gap. The battery will eventually reach a state of health where it isn't useful in any application anymore, so recycling is still necessary. The "re-use" step just delays that a bit.
AFAICT, used Tesla battery packs fetch a decent price on ebay etc. They're more valuable for reuse than they are for recycling. Reuse is better than recycling.
True and I agree, however batteries have a limited lifetime, and at the end of said lifetime, lithium batteries become dangerous. Does anyone risk putting a secondhand battery in their phones for example? Might be okay for old Nokia style batteries, but the integrated ones, not a chance.
Another problem is that with EV battery packs, they're not really viable to be disassembled and repaired (e.g. by replacing individual cells), they're built pretty solid and integrated. Not saying it's impossible, just that it's likely not viable, not to mention very dangerous work. I could be wrong though.
There are lots of 18650 "manufacturers" that actually just buy used batteries, re-wrap them, and sell them as new. I imagine that used Tesla battery packs may be used for this purpose pretty frequently. Unfortunately while this activity provides a great value for the players involved, the batteries are often passed off as new high-discharge cells to consumers who use them for vaporizers or flashlights. Using old spent cells for both of these use cases can be dangerous, but it's particularly worrying in vaporizers because the battery may fail catastrophically inches from the consumer's face.
No one is putting cylindrical cells on phones. These go to stationary storage. Also some people test and save each cell separately and put them in new packs.
It depends. What kills the batteries is fast charging or discharging and to an extent, leaving them sitting around fully charged or discharged. If the batteries are retired to do grid storage (or home storage), I would expect the charge and discharge rates to be fairly sedate, and charge levels to be managed so as not to have the battery level too low or too high for very long. I can easily imagine the batteries lasting a long time under such conditions.
Space and weight are also much less of a concern. A stationary infrastructure battery with less than half its original capacity wouldn't be unusable the way it would be for a car.
Industrial carbon capture coal electricity production is substantially more expensive than renewables or natgas at this point, no reason to turn to it.
And at that point it'll cheaper to "mine" those batteries for their cobalt, nickel and lithium than it will be to pull it out of the ground. At that point recycling will be viable because they'll have a large amount of fairly homogeneous batteries to recycle rather than the random hodge-podge of tiny batteries they have to deal with now.
Tesla isn't the only EV manufacturer. Others are ramping up production. Are their used batteries in such high demand?
Then there is the practical question. You have a 5 year old EV that doesn't get enough miles for your use any longer. So, you have someone swap out the batteries for new ones. Do the people who swap out the batteries actually resell them for reuse or try to recycle them? If it's not easy or financially viable they will likely not do it.
Just having technology isn't enough. It needs to be accessible to the people who will engage with it.
The lie that electric vehicles are better for the environment than internal combustion needs to stop. Lithium batteries will pollute the world. We will exploit impoverished counties and extract their lithium reserves while destroying their environments. We will not clean up when we finish. Lithium batteries will pollute our water supplies here at home when they aren't properly disposed. This is a giant environmental scam promoted to make us feel good about "saving" the earth. I don't believe for a second that corporate democrats care about the environment.
We need widespread renewable electricity generation first anyway. Otherwise our electric cars will be running on coal.
> We need widespread renewable electricity generation first anyway. Otherwise our electric cars will be running on coal.
Even this is preferable to internal combustion engines. ICEs really aren’t very efficient, and electric car is easily 3x more energy efficient than an ICE. Which means that’s even if you include transmission losses and heat losses at a coal power station, you’re still ahead. Because of coal power stations are significantly more efficient than ICE.
All that is ignoring the other benefits like being able to perform carbon capture at source, filtering waste gasses for pollutants etc. Additionally as the grid gets greener, so does your electric car. Something that will never be true of an ICE car.
> Lithium batteries will pollute the world. We will exploit impoverished counties and extract their lithium reserves while destroying their environments.
This is clearly a concern, and thankfully we’re taking big steps to reduce the amount of rare Earth metals needed to manufacture batteries. Additionally that largest produces of lithium aren’t small countries, they’re places like China and the US.
But heavy metal pollution, and toxins produced through the refining process are still a serious concern. But I would argue less a concern than CO2 release. At least the heavy metals a d toxins can be easily contained, they don’t have a tendency of floating into the atmosphere and spreading around the earth.
Simple fact is that modern western society is currently unsustainable, just because we don’t have all the answers, and don’t have perfect solutions, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. I suspect even you wouldn’t be prepared to make the sacrifices needed for a sustainable future using only the technology we have readily available to us today.
Another big advantage is removing pollutants from densely populated areas, especially unburnt hydrocarbons, nitrous oxides and microparticles emitted by diesel engines.
Lithium is a mine once, use forever resource. It's an element. It will cost energy to recycle it, but that energy is increasingly sourced by clean energy sources. Let me cite the oil company, BP.
Coal is in terminal decline. Solar and wind have been growing exponentially, and are on a path to pass coal within the decade. Projections to the contrary have to explain why decades of industrial economics theory are wrong, where manufactured goods (like solar and wind generators) get cheaper by a fairly consistent % every time you double production. This creates a virtuous cycle that will drive coal and other fossil fuels out of business through profit seeking alone. (We are past the tipping point on costs here.) The burden of proof is on the fossil fuel advocates like yourself at this point. (This article is from 2015, and the IEA and similar keep getting it wrong since then.)
The article goes into why this is incredibly difficult. The vast majority of lithium batteries are in landfills, compressed between all our other garbage because maybe 2% of people on the planet properly dispose of e-waste.
As far as clean energy, have you watched Planet of the Humans (2020)? I want to say, I despise Michael Moore emotional bullshit, but despite his influence on the film's production, the case it makes is solid: the vast majority of "renewables" are actually trees. When you hear "woodchips" .. there is no amount of industrial wood scrap waste that is viable without also cutting down trees. You start burning fast-growing trees (often planted for paper or lumber) for fuel and you get a system of power production that makes no sense over traditional gas or oil.
Solar and wind may have been growing exponentially, but they still require oil/gas standby plants. They also take a lot of resources to make. Wind turbines aren't currently recycled.
The fact of the matter is, we have one real hope left. The ITER. If real fusion power is possible, we'll find out once it's completed. If ITER fails to produce sustainable and efficient power, it's unlikely anyone else will get the funding to build a bigger reactor.
It's not coal that's in terminal decline ... it's everything. No amount of increasing consumption or building "more green" is going to change that. We need to consume less, and let's face it ... that's fucking impossible.
> The vast majority of lithium batteries are in landfills, compressed between all our other garbage because maybe 2% of people on the planet properly dispose of e-waste.
Is this representative of small electronics and not vehicles? It will obviously be a lot harder and more economically significant to improperly dispose of a battery pack for a car than a cell phone.
You're ignoring current SMR technology in nuclear.
Old style giant, expensive nuclear power plants are a non starter, but small modular reactors have a lot of promise, are zero emissions once running, and can be built using green energy in factories instead of constructed on site.
Fission power plants are pretty much the only way to go fully "green"... renewables are great and have a big place in the future, but unless humanity wants to drastically change their consumption of technologies and products requiring large amounts of energy for production (like Aluminum), they don't provide power in the right amounts and time spans.
Unless there are major breakthroughs in nuclear technology which become commercially viable in the near future - that is, in this 21st century - nuclear power, as it stands, is running out of time, and it does so faster then most people assume.
> The number of hits on this page since 1996 Feb 12
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> Last-Modified Sat, 27 Jan 2007 02:38:36 GMT
Stating that these aren't "the latest insights" would be putting it mildly.
My comment referred to commercial viability. It at this point in time, Uranium has only been extracted from seawater in a laboratory setting, per the Wikipedia article I referenced.
Yes, there's always "but technology will advance to a point where it will be viable". But then I'd argue: Beware of optimism bias when predicting the future. You don't know whether economic, social and political circumstances will converge over the next decades towards such trajectory that extracting uranium from seawater and using it in nuclear reactors becomes a commercial viable enterprise.
You yourself may be confident they will, but that doesn't make it so.
Yes, John McCarthy hasn't updated his web page in a while, because he's been dead for nine years. Have some respect for the man who invented Garbage Collection!
But more importantly, do you think a lot of uranium has disappeared in the last 13 years? Has the use of uranium increased by an order of magnitude in the last 13 years? Have we forgotten how to extract uranium from low grade ore in the last 13 years? No?! Then how the hell is the age of this web site (13 years) or Bernard Cohen's book (35 years) even relevant?
> My comment referred to commercial viability.
Don't move the goal posts! You specifically wrote "Uranium is finite", and the counter point is that it is practically infinite. As McCarthy points out, this doesn't even depend on seawater extraction, because low grade uranium ores (phosphate ores, later Conway granites) are plentiful.
Absolutely. I understand that there are alternatives and options. My concern isn't scarcity. It's that the confidence in those options is rooted in tenuous predictions about commercial viability in the far future.
That is, how a transition to these alternatives would conceivably integrate in and have an impact on larger market dynamics, and they way they might be either furthered or impeded by local, regional or geo-political dynamics.
and we've wasted so much of our uranium making bombs that can never be used as fuel. There is research in trying to use highly enriched uranium as a fuel source, but I doubt that will ever be a safe reality.
It's the other way around. Highly enriched uranium has been easy to use as a fuel source for decades. Using less enriched material has always been a problem, actually. CANDU (Canadian design) did a pretty good job making it work, though.
Nuclear weapons didn't use much uranium, they manufactured and processed plutonium.
By the way, a lot of nuclear fuel in the past few decades has been reprocessed material from weapons that were decommissioned. I believe the US even traded with the Russians for their spare plutonium.
Molten salt, breeder and Thorium reactors can achieve orders-of-magnitude improvements, and aren't exactly groundbreaking technology. Reprocessing as well. Several examples from decades ago, and new designs in the pipeline. The main problems are politics and lack of funding.
The Wikipedia page highlights that there's certainly discussion, doubt and controversy surrounding those technologies.
The decisive factor of change I can see here is the unproven commercial viability of alternatives at the moment as Uranium is still cheap. Whether or not those alternatives become viable once Uranium prices increase isn't easily predicted.
So, I remain highly skeptical towars claims that dismiss the issue as merely a problem of "politics and lack of funding".
Did you read the part about breeder reactors above?
You can create fuel for the SMRs via a centrally administered and controlled (to avoid nuclear proliferation) reactor, so no need to worry about uranium... in fact, it might make sense to avoid the ecological impact of uranium mining anyway.
SMRs are being developed that use other fuels, too, that are available in abundance, like Thorium:
> Lithium is a mine once, use forever resource. It's an element. It will cost energy to recycle it
... and human labor, and other chemicals. I'm not sure if you read the article, but it claims that recycling is still a somewhat tenuous economic proposition vs digging more out of the ground. This is especially true given the glut of lithium, while cobalt and other rare minerals are slowly being phased out of battery designs.
The second company described in the article claims to recycle using nothing but catalysts, and simply grinds up the used batteries in a giant vat before transportation (rendering them inert, and easier to safely move).
It sounds like their main problem at this point is continuing to scale the business to meet supply (they are already the largest lithium recycler in the US), and that the challenges there are logical, not the underlying technology.
What human labor and chemicals are you referring to?
Some amount of human labor will be required for operations, say maintenance of the in-situ automated systems, or intervention when things go wrong. These costs can't be eliminated with renewable energy, and won't be fixed with robots for some time yet (decades, minimum).
And if a mine can be automated to yield orders of magnitude more material than recycling for the same labor costs, you would need some other financial incentive (government subsidies, backroll by Tesla for marketing purposes) to make it viable.
> Lithium is a mine once, use forever resource. It's an element. It will cost energy to recycle it
It's not at all obvious to me that recycling is easy/practical. E.g. recycling the alloy from alloy steel is not done because it is too costly to separate. I'm not sure why batteries would be much different.
1. Reduced dependency on oil = less money in oil = less money for a lot of countries that historically act quite poorly on the world stage.
2. 100% better for global warming than combustion cars.
3. Is mining lithium & disposing on lithium batteries incorrectly worse for the environment than oil manufacturing, production & transport? I don't know 100% but the massive oil spills we regularly have would make me think lithium is actually better here.
4. Lithium batteries at grid-scale reduce blackouts which means you don't spin up a bunch of local generators. They also make wind & solar power generation available off-peak reducing reliance on coal & natural gas.
5. Are car batteries likely to be improperly recycled? I would think legislation would minimize the problem. Even without legislation, my impression is that today's used car batteries are still extremely valuable & end up being reused rather than recycled.
6. More investment in lithium ion batteries = more money & investment in better batteries (lithium ion or otherwise). This improves efficiency across the board for mobile applications, cars, grid applications, etc (something we don't get with internal combustion engines).
The incomplete reasoning in your post is you're evaluating lithium standalone instead of examining the cost vs replacement (how does lithium ion fare against alternatives? are there better alternatives). Can you propose what you see as better alternatives rather than just making blanket complaints and blaming corporate democrats? (Also, lithium batteries are now a left/right idealogy thing? WTF).
I though the point was that the high energy-density was convenient for mobility, but poor on most other metrics, including manufacturing complexity, stability, and safety.
Grid-scale wouldn't need to care so much about energy density versus stability and maintenance, in which case lead-acid, or compressed-gas storage should shine.
Currently in the Texas grid interconnection queue, there are more GW of lithium ion storage than there are of new gas generation (figure labeled Exhibit 2):
Lithium ion is currently king here, it's easy and fast to deploy, with lots of off the shelf components, and cheap.
Texas' grid composition responds really quickly to economic changes, because anybody can connect and start making money. More highly regulated grids have been much slower to adapt to the new reality of cheap storage.
For your other points, I believe you are correct, but the reason lithium gets used anyway is because it’s now really cheap compared to the alternatives.
As Tesla has demonstrated Lithium-ion is pretty critical for balancing out a grid that has renewables in the mix. It drastically cuts costs and improves efficiencies because it can detect instability in the grid more quickly and arbitrage different power sources more efficiently (+ coal plants take a while to start up so it’s an important stop gap).
> Otherwise our electric cars will be running on coal.
With modern coal plants, that isn't _too_ bad actually. Modern coal plants reach 46% efficiency[0], compared to the 30-35% for modern passenger cars (older cars = less efficient). This is a 30-50% [1] efficiency gain, while also emitting 30-45% more CO2 for the same amount of energy released (gasoline vs bituminous coal and anthracite, for diesel it's 25-40%).
So, depending on the coal burned, the efficiency of the car that is replaced, and the coal plant making the electricity, you could quite reasonably have a lower carbon footprint by driving a car 100% on coal-powered electricity instead of gasoline or diesel.
Also consider industrial carbon capture. It would be costly, but it seems it would easier to capture carbon emissions at the primary coal burning sites than with distributed burners. We still should be looking at non-coal, renewable options and I'm glad we are, but we still have a lot of milage with "cleaner" fossil-fuel based approaches. This IPCC Report[0] suggests 80%+ CO2 sequestration rates extrapolated from known technologies (built on smaller scales).
Tesla EVs were marketed to the upper-middle class as a status symbol based on cutting-edge looks and performance, and to merely 'signal' environmental consciousness. Most people I know who aspire to own one work in finance and consulting roles, and don't really care that much about the environment, they just want something cool. The poser environmentalism just comes along for the ride.
Likewise, when people upgrade to the latest iPhone every generation, they aren't thinking about their recycling program, let alone the environmental cost of extraction of rare earth materials, or the workers at Foxconn.
That Elon Musk didn't bother working on the waste part of the equation, doesn't surprise me.
You can list out the harms of lithium ion production, which I agree with, but they are vastly dwarfed by ICE harms. ICE warms the entire planet and changes the climate, which is a much more vast problem than the also problematic issues of resource extraction for lithium ion or any other resource, including fossil fuel too by the way.
Others have gone into the efficiency trade offs and I would add to that removing the local pollution effect of internal combustion engines is a great benefit. Even electric cars "powered by coal" move pollution away from population dense areas and allow large scale environmental harm reduction e.g. carbon capture. However, coal is a declining power source and a lot of the places with high numbers of electric cars already have significant carbon neutral or renewable electricity generation in place.
All you have described, the environmental impact, exploitation, pollution, etc... applies to current fossil fuel usage, if not more, so it's not a black and white choice, as you seem to present it. Fossil fuel had over a century of ever-increasing usage and global environmental damage without having to do anything significant to mitigate the effects. Whereas the relatively new high performance battery industry is already tackling this issue. Without the widespread need generated by electric cars it's questionable if that would happen. It is very rare, possibly unheard of, for such a significant technology to be launched with a perfectly formed lifecycle management in place. The market is created only once the need arises.
Not the OP but civilisation didn't start with the invention of the motor car. If you look at our general wellbeing it hasn't shifted one iota over the period that cars become pervasive.
Cars became pervasive around the early 1900's. Are you seriously suggesting the average person's general wellbeing hasn't changed since 1908? I guess we could debate if cars were a critical technology to spur such change, but I don't know I can debate someone who disagrees that the average person was just as well off in 1920 compared to 2020. In what measures would you consider the person in the developed world in 1920 to be just as well off as the average person in the developed world in 2020? I limit this to just developed world because that would be where automobiles would have had the greater impact or lack of impact despite pervasiveness.
That’s a bold claim, especially in context of running out of transport fuels starting from where we are now. What date range are you using for the period over which cars became pervasive?
Yes, and same with fracking. Documentaries like Gasland have gotten some deserved criticism because there is evidence of methane and natural gas coming out of water pipes/wells way back at the turn of the century. But that doesn't dismiss the other points of fracking fluid being incredibly toxic and how they will destroy watersheds (you can't just pump that crap into the Earth and say 'well it's below the water table' .. how do you even know?!)
I do agree electric vehicles are a pretty big lie. You can't buy yourself out of an environmental disaster. We can't just consume more. The "Green New Deal" is about replacing tons of buildings and infrastructure that are perfectly fine, and will cause TONS of new waste in an effort to .. reduce waste.
The best thing you can do for the environment: don't buy a new car. Just keep driving your current gas vehicle and maintain it (so long as it was made within the past 20 years with good fuel efficiency) and when you do decide to toss it for an electric: buy a used one if possible.
