Reddit mentions of The Elements of Power: Gadgets, Guns, and the Struggle for a Sustainable Future in the Rare Metal Age

Lot you're still not understanding here.

First, you're getting taken in by Tesla corporate PR about its factory, which makes your "shill" accusations especially ironic. Repeat after me: ALL energy requires carbon emissions. Solar requires quite a bit less, which is why it's a good idea to move to it, but it's still pretty substantial -- something like 5% of the life-cycle-emissions (might want to familiarize yourself with that term) of coal, 10-15% of natural gasSource. So when you repeat Tesla's corporate talking points that their factory is "carbon-neutral," you're exposing yourself as ignorant of even the most basic environmental analyses.

Ride-sharing is great, but even extremely-efficient use of cars is an energy hog compared to bicycles and frequent trains. This is due to a few considerations: trains pack people in together in the same vehicle, and therefore don't need to maintain absurd following distances at highway speeds. (Recall that stopping distances increase quadratically with speed.) This means that cars take up a LOTTTT more route-space even while in transit than trains. Have you noticed that Lyft and Uber haven't prevented traffic jams, even in places like L.A. where they've exploded in popularity? That's why. Cars are stupidly inefficient for urban trips, and making them autonomous is just putting a band-aid on the deeper, structural engineering problems associated with their use.

You say that biking is incompatible with suburban living. Well, so much the worse for suburban living! Suburbs would have never existed if auto companies hadn't lobbied the fuck out of state and federal governments to build car-friendly development. Of course, we can't change our residential infrastructure on a dime, but that doesn't mean we can't work hard to densify our suburbs, re-zone them so bike/transit commuting becomes an option for more people, and put a stop to building new 20th-century urban-planning monstrosities.

You can't just assume that it's cheaper to operate EVs over the lifetime of the vehicle. At current electricity and energy prices, marginal costs of operating a car are $.04/mile for a Tesla (assuming roughly 3 miles per kWh), and $.05 for a car getting 45 mpg Source. Assuming you keep the car for 150,000 miles, this means that the the electric car can't cost more then (150,000$.01) $1,500 more than the conventional vehicle. But we all know electric cars are far more relatively expensive than that -- usually around $10,000 more than a comparable ICE vehicle.

Biking in the snow isn't inherently unsafe. By far the biggest contributor to fatal bike accidents are the cars that you're addicted to. Like I said, it's not an option for everyone, but the more people do it, the less car infrastructure we need, which is an enormous boon from land-use, emissions, and equity angles.

Electric batteries are a beast to recycle, and so is rarely done. The book [The Elements of Power*](https://www.amazon.com/Elements-Power-Gadgets-Struggle-Sustainable/dp/0300196792) is well-researched and can help you obtain a good base understanding of the issues involved in rare-earth mining.

Bikes have less than 2% the lifecycle emissions per passenger mile as conventional cars. Because electric cars are only about a quarter to half as bad as ICE cars, this means that bikes are still better than electric cars on a per-mile basis by over an order of magnitude -- about 3-6% of the energy per mile.

Biking the equivalent from Boston to NYC twice will take you about a month if you bike 6 miles to work and back every day. And thanks for linking that article -- it nicely explains all the reasons bikes whoop the shit out of cars in the sustainability department, many of which are independent of whether it's electric or ICE.