Disposal of toxic batteries and other things usually go to third world countries where there is little or no environmental regulations. Same for lithium and cobalt mining. People in those places actually turn color mining toxic minerals. It’s nasty stuff, and people who gloss over electric cars....seem not to care much about it. Copper mines, open pit, are also very nasty. In Nevada they are all over the place, leaching out mercury and other nasty things into soil and water. Old mines that have not been reclaimed.

I thought that article was well-written and accurate.

German car companies are at huge risk. They banked on diesel, architecting a regulatory regime and tax scheme to support it. EU emissions regulations focus on CO2 and CO while the USA regulations are heavy on NOx and particulate matter. This makes diesel an obvious choice for EU companies and as long as they could deliver increase fleet fuel economy, which diesel does for them, they get a two-fer. In the USA, the development of EVs has been happening at a pace that allowed them to tinker and make long term announcements, but not worry about delivering anything to the market at scale until Tesla started delivering the Model 3. Then, as they say, $hit got real. Dieselgate really harmed these companies at a strategic level, they are paying a price for it now.

Electricity isn’t free and not without it’s own emissions. True but that misses a big point, which is that electricity demand has been flat for years and this has been freaking out the publicly-owned utilitities that have to pay for infrastructure and have capped rates. Manufacturing... biggest user of electricity and it has been declining. The widely touted “x% of electricity comes from renewables” also fails to recognize that those stats are compiled from “utility-grade electricity generation” along with “small-scale utility generation”. In other words, it doesn’t count home-installed solar... which is why wind is the largest component of renewable enery consumption stats.

Now on to natural gas, which is 50% cleaner than coal but still emits CO2. Basically, 1/2 the amount of CO2, 1/3 the amount of NOx, and 1% the sulfer of coal. It’s a fair trade-off and a great choice for on-demand power. Coal plants have to be fired up and when they are running you really loath having to shut them down for any reason. Natural gas plants are turbines, you just hit the switch and you have power. Awesome.

Fracking in America has transformed the energy map of the world, not just because we are now exporting oil again but becuase natural gas is unleashed by frackers. The USA has the 4th largest *proven* reserves of natural gas (behind Russia, Iran and Qatar, in that order) but that is proven reserves and our number have been growing. Horizontal drilling can be done anywhere in the world, but fracking is something that, at this point, seems to favor the geology of North America. We’ll see. At any rate, we have something like 200 years of natural gas.

Back to German brands, yeah they are catching up but I would not automatically say “they will catch up”. Building modern cars is not an excercise in physical engineering, it’s all technology and this is something the Europeans have really struggled with, for decades. The thing that has always fascinated me about Tesla, even though I refuse to buy one of their cars because I’m stubborn and like European cars, is how simple they are. Musk has removed every system that gives someone like Porsche an advantage, with the exception of brakes and steering. A Tesla is a rolling network of computers and a lot of proprietary software that no one else has.

The Supercharging network is another area that European, indeed all, manufacturers are going to have to confront. GM didn’t have to build a gas station network as part of their growth strategy, they need one now. EVs are disrupting the market because it is not just about the car itself. The supercharging network, which Porsche is addressing in their own strategy, along with an entirely new approach to buiding and delivering features (OTA) is forcing these companies to rethink the entire model year paradigm that is at their core.

Bottom line, yeah the Germans are facing an existential threat to their car manufacturing industry, and I loved the quote about “Germany, a company town for car companies.” I don’t doubt that they will address the challenge, much like they did when the Japanese entered luxury car markets, but make no mistake about it, nothing is going to be the same for them.

LNG is expensive to produce, CNG is stored in the vehicle at around 3,500psi, which creates it’s own challenges from an engineering standpoint. Natural gas produces less energy per unit than gasoline, which means you have to use more of it and range becomes an issue in light and medium duty vehicles. Then there is the expense of building a national refueling network that would become obsolete as EVs overtake ICE, eventually.

The lithium and cobalt question is legitimate, I don’t know. However, I will note that whenever an obscure natural resource becomes valuable, we start looking for and finding it in more places.