Pound for pound, mining and processing minerals for batteries has a much smaller environmental impact compared to extracting and processing fossil fuels for gas.
I'm not sure if I believe that, at least the "pound per pound" bit.
Extracting oil usually involves drilling a hole and getting a material you can mostly (I think about 80%) turn into useful products, though hydrofracking involves handling a lot of water and oil from some places in Saudi Arabia contains a lot of sulfur that has to be removed.
On the other hand, many minerals are found in concentrations of less than 10%, often much less
The real advantages of the minerals are: (i) a car consumes about its own weight in fuel every year so in its lifetime it consumes maybe 10x it's weight in fuel, (ii) the use (as opposed to production) of that fuel has environmentally unacceptable effects, (iii) the minerals ultimately will be incorporated in a "circular economy".
Note that the automobile industry is a lot more circular than many (say food packaging) in that your local junkyard sells whatever parts it can (I know a guy who just bought a used Ford truck with doors rusted out who just bought two doors from a junkyard) and will send what is left to get crushed when metal prices are high. If you smack your car up at 110,000 miles likely you will get some body panels from this source.
Battery recycling is not a big industry now but it will be. Mining will still be more important than recycling as long as the world is in transition to electric cars. I was quite amused to find that the techniques planned for battery recycling are very similar to both established and in development techniques for recycling spent nuclear fuel.
What the hell are "environmental inequalities"? And isn't the goal to make the environment cleaner, not just to equalize something about it. These guys may as well point out that dramatically reducing the size of the sun would "reduce the inequality between the size of the sun and the moon". Who cares?
Air pollution is worse in some places than other places. Back in the 1960s inner cities black kids got an extra dose of fumes from tetraethyl lead in gasoline, that damaged their brains, lowered I.Q. and possibly caused a crime wave
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[ 5.5 ms ] story [ 592 ms ] threadIt's not nothing, but way less.
Extracting oil usually involves drilling a hole and getting a material you can mostly (I think about 80%) turn into useful products, though hydrofracking involves handling a lot of water and oil from some places in Saudi Arabia contains a lot of sulfur that has to be removed.
On the other hand, many minerals are found in concentrations of less than 10%, often much less
https://www.sgs.com/-/media/sgscorp/documents/corporate/broc...
The real advantages of the minerals are: (i) a car consumes about its own weight in fuel every year so in its lifetime it consumes maybe 10x it's weight in fuel, (ii) the use (as opposed to production) of that fuel has environmentally unacceptable effects, (iii) the minerals ultimately will be incorporated in a "circular economy".
Note that the automobile industry is a lot more circular than many (say food packaging) in that your local junkyard sells whatever parts it can (I know a guy who just bought a used Ford truck with doors rusted out who just bought two doors from a junkyard) and will send what is left to get crushed when metal prices are high. If you smack your car up at 110,000 miles likely you will get some body panels from this source.
Battery recycling is not a big industry now but it will be. Mining will still be more important than recycling as long as the world is in transition to electric cars. I was quite amused to find that the techniques planned for battery recycling are very similar to both established and in development techniques for recycling spent nuclear fuel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead–crime_hypothesis
See also “environmental racism”
https://www.nrdc.org/stories/what-environmental-racism
which is very much a real thing even if it didn’t really work as a rallying point to organize around in the 1990s which activists were hoping for.