Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Welcome to Skeptical Sunday. I'm your host, Jordan Harbinger. Today I'm here with Skeptical Sunday co-host, writer and researcher, Nick Pell. On the Jordan Harbinger Show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you.
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Just visit jordanharbinger.com slash start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Today on the show, electric vehicles aren't exactly new, but something about them still feels futuristic. You see one glide by and it's silent, sleek, often with that signature blue glow. It's one of the few examples we have today of feeling like you're looking at the future.
And if it's a Tesla Cybertruck, you can't help but stare. Whether you think it's brilliant or a Samsung refrigerator on wheels, it's hard to ignore. But for all their high-tech promise, a growing number of people are asking uncomfortable questions. Are EVs really the clean, green revolution we've been promised?
Or are they just the next chapter in a century-long story of selling us salvation through consumption? Because here's the thing. Electric cars aren't a new invention. They've been around almost as long as the automobile itself. The idea of battery-powered transportation predates the Model T. So what changed?
How did we go from early experiments and abandoned prototypes to a world where Tesla, Ford, Hyundai, and even luxury automakers like BMW are locked in an electric arms race? And maybe most importantly, are modern EVs actually better for the planet, or have we simply swapped out one set of environmental problems for another? Mining, manufacturing, and electricity all come with costs.
The question is whether those costs are worth it. Here today to help me go under the hood, or whatever EVs have instead of one of those, is writer and researcher Nick Pell. Nick, do you own an EV? Not until they make a car truck. Did you know the very first cars were battery-driven? Yes, duh, everybody knows that.
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Chapter 2: What are the environmental impacts of electric vehicles?
A lot of people chalk this up to conspiracy. There's this idea that big oil killed the electric car. And to be fair, there's some truth to that. The oil industry did spend much of the 20th century lobbying against policies that would make EVs competitive. Cheap gasoline infrastructure built around the internal combustion engine
and heavy investment in oil refining all created a self-reinforcing system. This was not exactly a level playing field, but it's also not a mustache twirling plot so much as it's a case of technological and economic inertia. Gas cars were cheaper, they were faster to refuel, they were more convenient.
Early EVs were limited by lead-acid batteries that sometimes barely got you across town before dying. And when the hand crank disappeared and electric starters made gas engines easy to use, consumers overwhelmingly chose power and distance over quiet and clean. By the time lithium-ion batteries arrived in the 1990s, the world had already spent nearly a century building around fossil fuels.
The infrastructure, the culture, the industry, these were all locked in. And the 2006 documentary, Who Killed the Electric Car?, blames corporate and political collusion. And it's not wrong, but... The bigger story is that the technology simply wasn't ready yet. The economics didn't favor it. In other words, it wasn't just who killed the electric car, it was who failed to keep it alive.
The development of lithium-ion batteries is a big reason why we have electric cars today. I doubt that lead-acid batteries are practical at all for automobile transport.
This does make some sense, because if you think about it, yeah, maybe the automotive industries or big oil sort of teamed up, and other countries aren't necessarily immune to that, but I don't know. You'd think they would have just built electric cars in Korea, and then everyone would have one suddenly. But if the technology, it makes more sense the tech was just sort of not ready for prime time.
And lead-acid batteries, certainly not practical at all for automobile transport. They're super heavy. They take a long time to charge. You can't discharge them all the way down if you ever want to charge them up again. The Ford Model T, along with the Texas oil boom of 1901, I think that was kind of the end of electric cars. The Model T was cheap. It was mass-produced.
It ran on gas, which, as you said, was just a much more cost-effective way of getting around in your car. So for about 50 years, the only EVs that you see are these, like, Yeah, basically golf carts and forklifts. Neither of those are known for performance. You don't drive them long distance. So when does the comeback happen here?
The comeback happens during the oil crisis of the 70s when the cheap oil part of the equation comes to an end. Almost all of Detroit's development ends in prototypes that never get mass produced because, well, they're just glorified golf carts. You can't take them long distances. They top out at about 40 miles an hour. They're wildly impractical.
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Chapter 3: How does the manufacturing of electric vehicles affect their carbon footprint?
I think some people bought it because it was super efficient and seemed futuristic. And a lot of people are just like fewer trips to the gas station now.
Yeah, I think that's fair. I part of me just wants to make fun of a Prius, but I think that's fair. Same.
Right.
But I'm sure there's somebody out there who's going to disagree with this, but I just don't think anyone thinks a Prius is a cool car. Like, Teslas? Yeah, that's a cool car.
Chapter 4: What are the ethical concerns surrounding cobalt mining for EV batteries?
But Priuses? Prii? I don't know. Prii? Prii? Who's the guy who's like, man, this is a cool car?
Prii. I'm sure the comments section and Reddit will jump to correct you on this. I don't know. We're sort of just having a laugh at the Prius owners. I mean, sorry. I'm not the arbiter of taste. Sorry, Prius owners. Exactly.
So what the Prius had, though, that would prove transformative was the nickel metal hydride battery system. They're lighter. They charge faster. You can charge them all the way down. You can go further on them. They're just so superior to the lead acid battery that they're basically a totally different animal. Then you get the Nissan Leaf, the Chevy Volt.
But what Tesla really does is make a cool looking car you'd actually want to be seen in. The Tesla Roadster was also the first fully electric vehicle to be highway legal and get over 200 miles of range without being prohibitively expensive. The charging stations were light years better and Tesla took a gamble on making their own charging stations expensive. Which paid off.
You know, it helped to overcome one of the biggest hurdles to adoption, which is range anxiety.
Range anxiety. Tell us about that. Is that being worried that you're not going to find a charging station in time and you're going to get stranded somewhere?
Yeah, that's exactly it. You know, people also have issues with the range in cold weather, so... If there's one charging station that you can get to on a normal day, you may not be able to get there when it's 20 degrees out. The batteries don't give the same range in the cold. Their capacity degrades over time. These are real issues.
China, for what it's worth, also really wants electric vehicles to be a thing. So there's huge investment capital that just previously was not there for the electric vehicle industry. I'm a little skeptical of them as a market phenomenon because they're very heavily subsidized, which gives them some degree of advantage that they wouldn't have otherwise.
They might be the most single heavily subsidized product in America, some argue. With that said, EVs now account for between 15 and 20% of all cars on the road. So regardless of government meddling in the market, It's a significantly growing market share.
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Chapter 5: What are the economic factors influencing electric vehicle ownership?
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JordanHarbinger.com slash news is where you can find it. Now, back to Skeptical Sunday. So, say that I do live in West Virginia or India and I drive a Tesla. Does this mean that my car is dirtier than a traditional gas-powered vehicle?
It's hard to say, but probably not. Okay. You're probably producing about 70% to 80% of the carbon of the average gas-powered car. The problem is that your electric vehicle starts with what you might call a carbon debt. Because yes, electric vehicles are almost certainly more environmentally destructive to manufacture.
But won't the advantage that electric vehicles have improve over time as the grid gets cleaner?
Honestly, green energy is kind of a whole other show. Yeah. I am very skeptical that green energy is a viable alternative to fossil fuels. I'm certainly not alone in this.
Once again, we have a basically unlimited energy supply in the form of magic rocks that boil water, aka uranium, and there are tons of countries building nuclear power plants out the wazoo, having no problems whatsoever with their nuclear-powered grid. So that would maybe be the place to start looking for a replacement for dinosaur juice.
And this is all without the development of fusion power that lets you create tiny little suns you can harvest power from. Anyway. Yes.
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Chapter 6: How do electric vehicles compare to gas-powered cars in terms of emissions?
Yes. There's also a big difference in terms of environmental impact. Iron ore mining isn't harmless. It results in massive deforestation, tons of energy use, which almost always means carbon emissions. This is for the smelting of the iron, which you need to do to have a useful finished product. Cobalt is typically a byproduct of copper or nickel mining.
It requires sulfuric acid leaching and generates toxic tailings. Lithium is extracted from either hard rock spodumene, which requires high temperature processing or brine evaporation ponds and which pumps underground saline water to the surface to dry out. Brine extraction consumes massive amounts of water, about 500,000 gallons per metric ton of lithium in some of the driest places on Earth.
Yeah, that all sounds just terrible, super inefficient, and really, really dirty. I'm betting it's also, you said the driest places on Earth. I'm going to go ahead and assume it's some of the poorest places on Earth as well. Yeah.
Yeah, it's pretty bad. Lithium and cobalt can permanently damage ecosystems where they're being mined and we're just getting started. Iron and aluminum are easily recycled. There's tons of infrastructure to do it. This is not true of lithium and cobalt. Part of this is just a technology and infrastructure issue.
There are definitely people who have a financial interest in seeing lithium and cobalt recycled more easily.
Mm-hmm.
You're also looking at where the rare earth minerals are mined and what being a miner there is like.
You're going to say more about that at some point, right? Because I've heard about this. I think I've even done shows about this.
Oh, I'm one step ahead of you. There are lots of hidden costs to electric vehicles on the environment and the people who make them. So the mining and the effect on the people in the environment. Iron and aluminum mining is a global phenomenon, but it's pretty heavily concentrated in countries with strong labor laws, relatively high levels of unionization, especially in the field of mining.
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