The toxic environmental and antisocial truth of electric vehicles

Do you recall the news about the ship that sank in the Atlantic recently? Loaded with 4,000 luxury vehicles, many of them electric. This electric car batteries not only burned, they probably caused the ship to sink, and that also led to a toxic ocean spill that no 'greens' or 'environmentalists' seem to want to notice. So here is some food for thought, with key excerpts, below.

A cargo ship called the Felicity Ace, carrying 4,000 luxury cars collectively worth around $438million, caught fire last month. Thankfully, the crew members were not harmed and managed to quickly abandon ship. The fire, however, burned for a week. This was because the lithium-ion batteries inside the electric vehicles (EVs) in the consignment kept the fire alive. The fire only died once the supply of combustible material on board was exhausted.

Something similar happened in July last year. In Victoria, Australia, a 13-tonne Tesla ‘Megapack’ facility – which uses a vast array of lithium-ion batteries to store energy generated by intermittent renewables – caught fire. This fire eventually burned itself out after three days. In that time, it created numerous ecological hazards, including toxic smoke, which engulfed local residents. But firefighters could do little more than monitor the environmental damage – they had to wait for the fire to put itself out.

‘The most significant danger of a lithium-ion battery is that [fires] are almost impossible to put out once they are ignited’, notes engineer Robin Mitchell. ‘No matter how many safety systems are put in place’, he says, ‘a fire started by a lithium-ion battery is far too challenging to manage’. Such technology, Mitchell concludes, ‘may only be suitable for small-scale systems such as smartphones and EVs’. Even so, the fire risks posed by EV batteries are not insignificant.

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Lithium extraction is filthy and it uses huge amounts of groundwater. In Chile, mining activities in the Salar de Atacama region consume 65 per cent of the area’s water. Toxic chemicals from the mining process have been known to leak into water supplies. Researchers in Nevada found that fish as far as 150 miles downstream were being impacted by mining operations.

Lithium-ion batteries also need a lot of cobalt – typically around 14kg per car battery. Extracting this is dirty and dangerous. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, the world’s largest supplier, children as young as seven wash and sort ores as ‘artisanal miners’, according to an Amnesty report from 2016.

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This, then, is an environmental story that has failed to make the usual species leap from academic researcher to NGO media campaigner to TV news producer. This is odd, given that the precautionary principle has been a staple of environmentalist campaigning for five decades now. For instance, shale-gas exploration cannot proceed, green activists argue, because fracking risks causing ‘earthquakes’, even though these tend to be largely imperceptible. Yet when it comes to EVs and lithium-ion batteries, the precautionary principle seems to have been laid to rest for a while.

The dangers of lithium-ion batteries are evident in the number of high-profile product recalls. Dell recalled four million batteries in 2006. HP recalled more than 100,000 laptops in 2019 because of battery-fire risks. After causing fires on flights, Samsung’s Note 7 smartphone was recalled – twice – and then sidelined completely.