"Electric cars need to be light, which means they include a lot of high-performing metals. The lithium in the batteries, for example, is super light and conductive - that's how you get a lot of energy without adding a lot of weight. Other, rare metals are sprinkled throughout the car, mostly in the magnets that are in everything from the headlights to the on-board electronics.

But those rare metals come from somewhere - often, from environmentally destructive mines. It's not just Tesla, of course. All electric vehicles rely on parts with similar environmental issues. Even solar panels depend on rare metals that have to be dug out of the earth and processed in less-than-green ways, says David Abraham, author of the book The Elements of Power. (Disclosure: I helped edit some chapters of the book.)

We can't look at mining as an over-there thing and at Tesla as an over-here thing. They're intricately linked.

Rare metals only exist in tiny quantities and inconvenient places - so you have to move a lot of earth to get just a little bit. In the Jiangxi rare earth mine in China, Abraham writes, workers dig eight-foot holes and pour ammonium sulfate into them to dissolve the sandy clay. Then they haul out bags of muck and pass it through several acid baths; what's left is baked in a kiln, leaving behind the rare earths required by everything from our phones to our Teslas.

At this mine, those rare earths amounted to 0.2 percent of what gets pulled out of the ground. The other 99.8 percent - now contaminated with toxic chemicals - is dumped back into the environment. That damage is difficult to quantify, just like the impact of oil drilling.

And, as in every stage of the process, mining has hidden emissions. Jiangxi has it relatively easy because it's digging up clay, but many mines rely on rock-crushing equipment with astronomical energy bills, as well as coal-fired furnaces for the final baking stages. Those spew a lot of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in the process of refining a material destined for your zero-emissions car. In fact, manufacturing an electric vehicle generates more carbon emissions than building a conventional car, mostly because of its battery, the Union of Concerned Scientists has found."



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The REAL truth is....both of the forum idiots are OWNED.
-BOTH of them have no clue who their owner is.
-They are both card carrying narcissists.
^These are PROVED facts.