Roy, sometimes I think I admire your incredible ability to divide, draw boundaries, and simply conclude that the first thing is good and the second is bad. There is no electric car for you. In Roy's universe: The battery is terrible. Gasoline is good. My 30 years of environmental law practice and experience in resolving legacy environmental impacts proved otherwise. As the Eagles sing so beautifully: "Every form of refuge has its price." Whether the energy is oil, natural gas, nuclear power, electricity/battery, wind, waves (you know), extraction, production, storage, consumption -And the remainder-both indicate that current and future impacts must be considered. ...And, as the Eagles have told you, don't believe your liar eyes. Michael Mullen

In addition to his disagreement with Roy Exum's negative views on the benefits of electric vehicles, I am a little confused about Mr. Mallen's "praise electric vehicles" comment. 

I am not against electric vehicles at all, but I believe that there are reasonable problems with the overall environmental benefits of electric vehicles. Some people question the environmental hazards of mining materials used to produce EV batteries. People are even more worried about environmental hazards due to the disposal of electric vehicle batteries that are currently obviously unrecyclable. 

Let us not turn a blind eye to these issues. They reminded me of the current questions about the overall benefits of curbside recycling, which Louise Mann outlined in several review articles submitted to this publication. 

Although electric vehicles and recycling work have their place, they can also have a negative impact if they are not handled properly.

Mr. Mallen, regarding the actual cost of electric vehicles mentioned by Roy Exum: Your rebuttal has no data to refute those terrible assertions, and I am worried that these assertions may be true. The assertion that the use of electric vehicles destroys the environment and frustrates billions of people who have very limited energy for transportation, home and work, agriculture or manufacturing, not to mention the provision of health care. All of these require reliable and available energy.   

Yes, the electric cars of the richest 2% will not break, but I am worried about expanding to 8 billion people on the planet. What’s wrong with the main assertion that the only cost mentioned by “environmentalists” is that the inherent cost of electric vehicles far exceeds operating costs? What is your estimate of the scale of the use of rare earths to mine and manufacture batteries and the use of metals and plastics to make new cars (maybe 1 billion to replace the current global over 1 billion)?  

The Exum article also pointed out the huge cost of building solar cell farms and wind turbines. Isn't there a huge environmental and monetary cost for these? true and false?  

The mining of all the above materials makes me shudder, because I imagine the days when coal mining is replaced by lithium mining. In any case, countless water is polluted and requires incredible electricity.  

Then, what about the assertion that the battery is only a storage device: The energy "stored" in the battery must come from somewhere and be distributed anywhere. I see again the astronomical cost of real money and environmental damage.  

Mr. Mallen, I did not see any specific "facts" in your comments that deny the "facts" in the Exum article. 

(Footnote: I voluntarily joined a major Chattanooga conservation organization. Thanks to EPB’s wonderful SolarShare program, I got some solar battery power and drove a PZEV frugally. So I saw a dilemma : If we continue to use fossil fuels in large quantities, we will continue to encounter huge problems, but please note that electric vehicles are not the perfect solution either.) 

The virtues of electric vehicles, no matter how large or small, cannot be denied, and should not be exaggerated and praised beyond reality and rationality. One detail that is often overlooked is that electric cars are still cars in essence-ordinary cars that happen to have relatively unusual power plants. The Prius is the same weight as the Corolla, Civic, Accord, Jetta, or PT Cruiser, which means it contains the same amount of material as other more ordinary cars — and, in most cases, the same amount of material. Therefore, in the production and maintenance of electric vehicles, in addition to the details of certain power plants, all the good, bad and irrelevant factors related to the production and maintenance of ordinary vehicles (and all their parts) are included in the production and maintenance of electric vehicles. in maintenance. Of course, for a hybrid car, you have both a standard engine and an electric motor. Engineering originality may have the right to brag, but it is not necessarily environmental correctness.

The difference in this kind of power plant has its advantages and disadvantages. Yes, electric motors have certain advantages over internal combustion engines in certain applications. Electric motors are just electric motors. Of course we know how to manufacture them effectively, but the copper involved in the manufacture of electric motors is more rare and expensive than the iron and aluminum in most internal combustion engines and copper in the mining and production of copper. It has its own special problems and Negative environmental impact; in many ways, copper is as "dirty" as iron.  

The cleanliness of refueling is considered to be a major advantage of electric vehicles. Plug in the power and walk away. There is no local toxic fumes like gasoline, no local explosion hazard as detectable as gasoline at corner stations, and direct personal out-of-pocket costs per mile may be lower than many gasoline-powered vehicles. This is such a neat, clean and reasonably priced process. fine.

But stop, wait a minute: the same argument applies to buying food in any modern grocery store instead of growing your own food on the farm. Grocery stores (by law) are neat and tidy; working farms (by nature) are usually very messy places. Yes, buying a naked turkey or ham in a store and cooking it at home is very clean and tidy-and most of us can usually afford it. Milk, eggs, cheese; fresh, frozen or canned vegetables; even bread, cakes and pies, or the flour and sugar needed for baking at home-all these are almost everywhere and relatively affordable.

However, the other side of the food delivery process, the dark side, can easily be overlooked. Agriculture is hard, dirty, and messy work. It is often seen that farmers wear knee-high rubber boots for a reason-it is not for comfort or fashion. Pigs are notorious for being dirty animals, but in any rainy season, they are easily compared with cows. That kind of mud just walked around in the damp farmland. Then there is the excrement problem-this problem can be subtly avoided by buying beef and pork from the colder parts of the grocery store. The dirty side of food processing is not your problem at all-it's like driving an electric car.

And chicken and turkey? Oh, it's sad; you won't smell the smell until you are among thousands of stinky birds-and this smell is not even the worst. The air is full of dust, feces, and loose feathers, all of which can cause food production to become filthy. Even those beautiful, original eggs bought in hard plastic cartons-trust me, they are cleaned and disinfected long before you take them from the freezer. The chicken itself is not a neat animal.

Even grains and vegetables—wheat, oats, corn, soybeans, cabbage, carrots, etc.—have a similar background to hard and dirty work. The fuel for tractors is expensive and "dirty", the machine itself has a standard industrial history, and then the actual labor required-almost every step is a process of dirty, dusty, air-polluted and air-polluted. However, as long as you buy flour, bread, etc. in an air-conditioned supermarket, you can easily ignore the ugly side of the food purchasing cycle. It is easily overlooked, just like producing complex electric "fuel" for your EV.

Your precious, original, local pollution-free electric car has its own filthy, filthy, filthy "industrial" history. This secret has no background than the biggest gas-guzzling hot rod, pickup truck or luxury car It's more beautiful on the road. Yes, the differences in design and construction of electric vehicles are relatively small, but they contain almost as much iron, aluminum, glass and plastic as any other vehicle on the road-plus they are becoming increasingly rare And the additional consumption of expensive copper and other rarer elements used in motors, batteries, and control systems.

So far, as far as I know, electric cars in the United States are part of a technology that most people can afford only because of federal subsidies. The same is true for solar and wind energy-remove the huge funding of those brave "entrepreneurs" in the field of solar and wind energy, they will soon find something else to pursue, some other cool adventures at the moment, to get involved at the expense of others It seems that few smart people invest their money in solar and wind energy, no matter how reliable and beneficial these technologies may eventually become. When a wind turbine disintegrates or wears out and must be replaced, you should investigate the mess left; it is not beautiful, and the worthless wreckage is not even as recyclable as our worst old cars and trucks.

Hey, here is a detail that has been easily overlooked by the mass media for at least 10 years: As early as 2011, when driving on typical streets, a new American mass-produced car with all pollution controls was identified in a dirty American metropolis. Exhaust gas is being "sprayed out", which is actually cleaner than the "air" they breathe in. That's right, American mass-produced cars have been making urban air purifiers for ten years! That detail is correct. The current kind, not the cleanliness of electric cars as imagined, they actually have their own ugly traces of pollution; this ugliness is not visible in the places where vehicles are sold and operated.

Remember the old adage about love, "It doesn't hurt to see the heart"? This also applies to other situations-including the dirty aspects of car design and production. Listen to the words of an old engineer who has experience in farms and in the automotive industry: It may be very dirty, and electric cars do not really bring a golden halo to buyers. Not yet anyway.

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