I’m not against change, and I encourage it. But We also can’t put all of our eggs in one basket. I am glad people are buying EVs, but we can’t let a market for an inherently disposable item dominate over another option (ICE vehicles) that will outlast an EV a substantial proportion of the time. The automotive producers are licking their lips at the thought of getting us all into vehicles that will be be effectively unusable in 10 or 15 years–batteries age with use and also time, unlike steel and aluminum.

I am an environmental engineer and I have worked on remediation projects for oil and gas, as well as other types of natural resource exploitation such as mines. The damage caused by mining metals from the ground is extreme, and it will last decades, if not forever. “Centralizing” pollution isn’t a good thing–we’re best off distributing our pollution so that the Earth can have a fighting chance of repairing it piece by piece, which may never happen in areas that have undergone certain types of mining and other industry. Look at an old oil and gas site, and you would never even know it was there after 10 or 50 years. CO2 is a problem, for sure, and so is methane, but methane degrades in the atmosphere after just over a decade. Mining causes damage to the air, ground water and surface water, and to the nearby wildlife. Look up Tar Creek in Oklahoma, the Questa Moly Mine in New Mexico, and do you remember what happened in Colorado when the EPA accidentally released an entire mine full of acid drainage into the nearby river? Nothing but dead marine life for miles and miles. Mines take some of our most beautiful natural areas and destroy them.

If you think modern mines are going to circumvent all of these issues, they aren’t. They’re going to have accidents and cause damage just the same as the fossil fuel industry–some ways, even worse.