Quote:
Originally Posted by FenwickHockey65
Batteries can be recycled.
And there are many other sources for electricity now, and many many more in the future.
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Many more sources for electricity... like? Together, coal and nuclear power supply over 3/4 of the electricity in the United States. Both are extremely inefficient (nuclear even less than coal, despite what many think) and coal is very unclean. Recycling lithium-ion batteries costs money that would have to come out of nowhere due to the low scrap value of the materials, which is exactly why they aren't recycled now. Almost all of the lithium ion batteries we use go straight to landfills after about 500 or so charges because they are supposedly safe to discard (LOL!). The electricity has to come from somewhere and just shifting the energy dependency we have on crude oil to coal and nuclear power is not a solution to our problem. If we are going to use electric cars and want to solve ANY of the problems we are having with oil, we need to find a much more efficient, cleaner energy source to get the electricity from than we currently use. Otherwise we are just going to delay the exact same problems. Electric cars have been introduced and reintroduced, but have never succeeded. I hope they don't now because it will just delay research and development to solve the problems that must be solved eventually. Just to give you a little background on where my information is coming from, I am an environmental science/engineering major. That's not to say I know more about the subject than anyone else here, but my information isn't coming from some article on AOL news or CNN.