Peter Zeihan

But the carbon cost of generating the vehicle, especially the battery in the front end, is just so much more.

And if you're living in a place that's predominantly coal and you're driving an American-style sedan, you're over the long term –

generating a lot more carbon than anything before.

Now, those are some very broad statements and there are a thousand exceptions to them based on local situations.

So, for example, the Chinese vehicles from a weight basis are less than half that of the American vehicles.

They would never pass our safety tests, but they're smaller and they

kill a lot of people but because there's so much lighter a lot of what i just said does not apply to the chinese situation so a chinese chinese ev can break even on a carbon cost basis within 10 years maybe but at the price of a few pedestrians

Um, it's disgusting in every sense of the word.

Yeah.

environmentally, chemically, and socially.

I didn't top off my study for this.

A big one's graphite.

Graphite's basically a synthetic form of carbon.

There is a natural graphite, which is vastly preferred, but the chemical structure is very limited to a few specific mines, so the cost goes up as more of it's used.

There's a synthetic version.

Basically, you're using it for the electricity

regulating the electricity flow in a battery.

And if the graphite is not the right kind, you basically get the electricity starting to leak out into the battery itself, which can get a little blammy, but more likely it's just going to be a huge efficiency loss.

Copper, obviously.

Anything that uses electricity is going to use a huge amount of copper, lithium we've already covered, cobalt's a mess, manganese, using a lot of alloys for both copper and steel.