Click and Clack, on Car Talk, on PBS, used to say that electric cars are coal powered. They also went forth on how the parts were shipped all over the world. All the same, I have a plug in hybrid, and I like it. I average 70+ miles a gallon, with highs of 200 mpg on local errands. I have to put stabilizer in the tank because I only fill up every several months. I try to charge it during the day, when the array is suppling the electrons. Yet I drive on the same roads as the gas guzzlers, they pay the taxes. There have been proposals of taxing by the mile driven. Which would require some sort of tracking...? No thanks.

But I am realistic. EV's and plug in hybrids, and most "carbon free" tech still extoll their cost on the planet. When I tell people I work for the mining industry, they ask how I can do that. I tell them that I like their mountain bike, do they know how much rock was mined to make it? Or their cell phone?

Lithium mining is mostly solution mining, but still has impact. Rare Earth Elements are nasty business. Ore deposits are rare. The US has several but only one(?) actively mining. It's the processing that produces nasty by-products. That's why China is the biggest producer and looking for projects in the third world. And no really tasty copper deposit has been discovered in years. The big un-mined ones are in very eco-sensitive areas.

There's another issue. Petroleum also produces many other useful products, not just gasoline. Without the revenue for gas, everything else goes up in price. Asphalt, naphtha, plastic, grease, motor oil... While there are substitutes, concrete for asphalt, for example, still has an eco-cost. And if asphalt and all those other hydrocarbon products are still needed, what happens to the excess gasoline produced as part of the distilling process of petroleum if it doesn't go in cars? Would that then be used to produce electricity because it becomes a waste product and very cheap? So EV's go back to being gasoline powered?