Although numerous reports have documented that the benefits of electric vehicles far outweigh their environmental impacts over time, a Redditor has shared a misleading tweet from 2022 about the mining required for EV battery materials.
The tweet included a photo of a diamond mine that was supposed to somehow drive its point home.
Most of the commenters were aware that this tweet was skewed, if not entirely false, especially since this particular meme has been circulating for years and was fact-checked by Agence France-Presse in 2022.
A long-standing debate has existed about the benefits of electric vehicles compared to internal combustion engine cars. While EVs have room for improvement, they're far more efficient and have lower lifetime emissions than gas-guzzlers — even when accounting for extracting materials and producing batteries, as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has noted.
The average lithium-ion EV battery requires around 408 pounds of minerals to construct, according to a 2024 Mining Industry analysis.
The shared post claimed that 500,000 pounds of earth is excavated for a single battery, which an expert quoted by AFP said was "not the right metric for comparing environmental impact."
Much of a battery's materials can be reclaimed through recycling efforts, along with the rest of a vehicle's components. Studies have shown that new recycling techniques under development can already recover 99.99% of lithium from decommissioned batteries.
"One of the biggest things people hold against EVs might turn out to be one of its biggest benefits in the long run," said Daan Walter, one of the authors of a 2024 report from climate think tank RMI, per Canary Media. "Battery minerals have a tremendous benefit over oil, and that's that you can reuse them."
The report explained that without the past decade's worth of technological advancements in the sector, the demand for key mined battery minerals would be 60% to 140% higher than it is today.
If trends continue, we may reach peak demand for newly mined battery minerals by the mid-2030s, according to the report's authors.
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Definitely 💯 Plus, when you consider factors such as the rapid advancement in battery design, efficiency, and recycling, the report stated that we could reach net-zero mineral demand by the 2040s.
Researchers at Argonne National Laboratory calculated the emissions of both a gas-powered car and an EV with a 300-mile range, and the electric vehicle won easily, as the EPA noted.
While emissions from electric vehicle manufacturing and end-of-life are higher than making ICE vehicles due to the battery, those gas guzzlers continue to spew planet-warming gases into the atmosphere every day they're driven.
"When it comes to raw materials, there is simply no comparison," said analyst Lucien Mathieu, per Transport & Environment. "Over its lifetime, an average fossil-fuel car burns the equivalent of a stack of oil barrels, 25 [stories] high. If you take into account the recycling of battery materials, only around 30 kilograms of metals would be lost — roughly the size of a football."
A self-proclaimed combustion-engine fan shared in response to the Reddit post, "I have serious doubts about the rest of the math there. I am not one to adopt electrics either, but dishonesty is dishonesty."
Another actually did some of their own calculations and summarized things by saying, "This is propaganda."
"When an EV battery dies, all the metal you took out of the earth is still there," they added. "Unlike the burned gasoline, you can recycle that metal into more EV batteries over and over, so in the long run, EVs take far less out of the earth."
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