The environment is not a real world problem. <br><br>And if you believe electric cars are worse than other cars, you were lied to. Air conditioning does more damage, pocket calculators do more damage, etc. light bulbs are phenomenal. Etc. The things that you take for granted as recyclable, are often worse for the environment.<br><br>If you believe that cars are environmentally friendly, then you don’t really understand the environment. Nothing that people do, helps. It’s never a zero sum, and recovery is not a problem that can be achieved. <br>And, it’s not a problem that can be fixed with technology alone. <br><br>Should you care ? Maybe not.<br><br>There’s also the relativistic nature of waste and recycling. Recycling is just as bad, or worse than the effort to claim or reclaim minerals and precious metals. If you calculate the entire cost to a global account, then it’s a difficult organisation to calculate. <br><br>After all, people don’t improve the environment. <br><br>Prior to batteries being used in cars, they were used in toys, computers, phones and medical equipment, military equipment, weapons, furniture, etc. <br><br>The “carbon cost” is not a real or practical assessment. You have to understand the chain of industries and machinery operating to clear forests, pay warlords, pirates, officials. And the RAV4 example is hilariously dumb. <br><br>Mining and refining is not practical, and it’s not all about batteries. Everything you buy in a week, requires hundreds of tonnes of waste.<br><br>The entire chain of processing of Petroleum versus the process with refining metals in battery storage, is 0.1% of the scale. And, as noted by many, the mining of nickel, cobalt and lithium isn’t the most flawed or cruel. <br><br>The loss of life in petroleum isn’t clean either, especially if you include the local warlords created to defend the regions and villages in the area. <br><br>Most manufacturing and refineries are “messy” at best, because there’s a scale and volume of refining and waste, that seems to be enormous, until you realise how vast the volumes of materials are. And how badly the waste from precious metal refining has become. Especially because of the demand and scale. <br><br>The waste generated to build a house, piece by piece, is beyond your imagination. Appliances. Plastics. Bricks. Timber. Etc.<br><br>And, notably the land mass and recycling of electronics, cars, tyres and timber, plastics and organic waste… makes mining look clean in comparison.