Lithium is not the answer.

Hailed as our savior in clean mobility and finally fully embraced by the automotive industry, lithium or ³Li is the main component in the electric car batteries. Tesla Motors jump-started this e-car revolution and its founder Elon Musk took over from the late Steve Jobs as charismatic, genius inventor. It seemed too good to be true. No emissions paired with sleek design. No oil changes. Ordered online and delivered to the house, the Tesla car is essentially a computer in a car shell. It can be upgraded and modified by a download, I assume, directly on the car’s big iPad cum console.

I must confess that I was a fan. Tesla cars are a work of art and the acceleration of a computer is smoother and faster than a Ferrari. And without any noise. It’s less of a ‘look at me’ and more of a ‘watch me fly away’. And flying is glorious. I drove a Prius before we exchanged it for our Achilles inflatable dinghy, before we sailed away. I loved that hybrid car and driving it was more like riding a bicycle, when I had speed I scooted as long as possible before pressing the gas pedal again. Five years ago the Prius was everywhere in Southern California. I only recognized mine in the parking lots by it’s solar panel on the roof (kept a fan running inside to cool the car in hot weather). This year the Tesla is the new Prius, you see them everywhere. With the midsize model for the price of a conventional midsize car, it will soon outcompete any other car. All German car makers vowed to jump (late) on the electric car craze and will make up for lost time by changing their entire fleets into electric cars within the coming years.

Time to check into production, environmental impact and recyclability. What is lithium and where does it come from? It was created when the Big Bang formed our universe, I read, along with hydrogen and helium. It is a very light chemical element, rare but found all over the world, harvested from lithium containing slosh pumped up from below and dried in basins or also mined in rocklike form. Half of the worlds lithium mining in in Australia (news link), second is the ‘Lithium Triangle high up in the Andes of Argentina, Bolivia and Chile, third is China link. Smaller mines are in Zimbabwe (politics link), Portugal (mining company commercial with fly-over link), Brazil, Namibia, and in Nevada/US. Mining of the last centuries has already devastated huge landscapes around the world, most often leaving ecological disaster zones in their wake. Lithium will not be different. Most urgently the area of the Andes’ Lithium Triangle area is a ecologically very important area and inhabited by native tribes who farm the land with the sparse water of the mountain desert for centuries. Mining lithium takes a lot of water and will take all of the regions precious ground water. The lithium lobby and international mining companies are strong and the Natives of the region don’t officially own their land, so the regional government sold it to the highest bidder. Interesting DW docu segment on the politics of lithium in the Andes link. Portugal is moving into Lithium mining fast and strong resistance is mounting against it link (map of all prospective mining areas in Portugal link).

It was too good to be true. There are enough lithium reserves to turn all one billion cars worldwide electric, even if lithium batteries only last five years and cannot be recycled into new batteries. The main problem with lithium batteries is that they need to be charged. We will need produce all this electricity and this will keep us dependent on coal or nuclear power until clean power sources are available worldwide. So, in effect, what we save in emission pollution with electric cars we either pollute when we source the energy or we accept the danger of nuclear energy. Germany gets its electricity 40% from coal, 30% from nuclear plants and 27% from renewables link but wants to ‘phase out both nuclear and coal by 2038 ‘… but other sources than coal and nuclear are not efficient enough yet to replace coal’ link .

When we entered the world of cell phones and laptops, we entered the world of lithium batteries. They were small, gave us mobility. We didn’t ask for AAA batteries any more and liked the tiny, high-powered new batteries. We should have known better. I watched a German program on electric cars the other day where they had calculated the ecological impact of electric versus fossil-fuel-burners, that is for production, consumption and after-life recycling. The result was that conventional, fossil-fuel-burning cars have half of the ecological impact of electric cars if the battery isn’t recycled. So far (2019), there is only one factory in Holland recycling lithium batteries and the harvested lithium cannot be used for a new battery. Conventional lead-acid batteries win out on this comparison as well as they can be fully and easily recycled.

Now we are back to square one. The race for an environmentally sound battery is still on. What happened to the hydrogen fuel cell cars of the 1990s? Toyota, Honda and Hyundai still believe in it and haven’t stopped to develop hydrogen cars and many projects in Europe link.

Let’s face it, we will not be able to continue living as we have for the past fifty years in the western world. Consuming expansively, buying instead of fixing, producing fast-breaking goods with build-in value decline, buying cheap goods which are produced without labor laws. We will not exchange our current needs one-to-one with environmentally responsible solutions. We need to change our wants and habits about everything. The motto ‘reduce, re-use, recycle’ translated for mobility is ‘walk, bike, use public transport, buses, trains, and share cars’. Keep your car until it falls apart and don’t buy a new one. That is precisely what the automobile industry doesn’t want hence they fed us the nice little lie about ³Li as clean.