France and the United Kingdom plan to ban the sale of gasoline and diesel vehicles since 2040, transplanting the entire population of the country on electric cars. In this issue we will explain why this is being done and whether such machines are safe for the environment.
Exhaust gases cause significant damage to the ecology of the planet, and the number of their emissions in Russia alone exceeds 20 million tons per year, which is at least 40% of the total air pollution. Combustion products contain hundreds of harmful substances, including extremely dangerous for all living carcinogens. According to a study by the Royal College of Physicians of Great Britain, the presence of large amounts of exhaust gases in the air exacerbates diseases such as asthma and diabetes, and also increases the risk of heart attacks, strokes and cancers.
Electric cars will really improve the lives of people living on the roads, reduce noise, which affects millions of people in cities of health and, of course, reduce emissions of harmful substances into the atmosphere. But nothing is black and white. The fact is that the engines of such machines require the presence of light and capacious lithium rechargeable batteries, and lithium itself is far from being as accessible as the same gasoline. For example, according to Ilona Mask, the creator of the Tesla car, to produce half a million of his cars within a year, all the lithium in the world will be required.
In the production of electric cars, a much larger amount of carbon dioxide enters the atmosphere of our planet than when creating their gasoline counterparts. Recycling and mining of lithium requires a huge amount of energy, constituting more than half of harmful emissions in the process of industrial production. Moreover, the electric power itself, which will serve as fuel for the machines, is still, for the most part, produced at coal-fired power plants, which poison the atmosphere of the Earth. Well, in addition to this, it is worth saying about cobalt, which is the most important component of lithium batteries. Most of it is produced in the Republic of Congo. Here it occurs in inhuman conditions, with contamination with solutions of sulfuric acid and ammonia of all nearby soils and water bodies, as well as using child labor.
In conclusion, we would like to say that the prospects for the use of electric transport may be much better, subject to the abandonment of coal sources of electricity and the transition to less toxic batteries, which still require complex processing after the expiration of the period of use. At the same time, our country is also not standing still, and the State Duma is already drafting a project on restricting the entry to resort towns of cars with gasoline engines.