The Highwire with Del Bigtree - LITHIUM’S EXPLOSIVE SECRETS

Episode Date: August 31, 2024

While governments around the world are demanding a net zero transition, elected officials are pushing back, notably on the extreme electric vehicle mandates. New data breaks down why many forms of “clean energy” aren’t clean at all and how new technology in the lithium batteries powering these electric vehicles are prone to “thermal runaway”, resulting in battery fires or even explosions, responsible for severe injuries and deaths.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-highwire-with-del-bigtree--3620606/support.

VW is the main kind of vehicle driver for that economy. The auto industry is a huge driver for that economy. And VW and Porsche, they share the similar heads there. Germany falls way behind EV targets as VW and Porsche delay electric plans. So they're 2030 transition. They're blaming a slump in sales. You know, think about this. You have some financial issues, and a lot of countries right now,

it's crashing headlong into this mandate. for expensive vehicles. So there's a slump there. There's still conversations about should we fully ban gasoline engines at this point. So that's stopping it as well. It's good that people can actually have a debate on this. But this pretense that electric is good was sold to the,

it was sold, it was marketed and governments pick this up. They subsidize this transition that's happening right now. But let's take a moment for a second. I came across an article and it really broke down what an electric car is all about. So it says, why driving an electric car is all about? So it says, why driving an electric car isn't green at all. And so I'm going to read this here, just to give it a snapshot. It says,

let's consider a Tesla Model Y battery in this picture. It takes up all the space under the passenger compartment of the car. To manufacture it has been estimated that you need. Here it is, 12 tons of rock for lithium, five tons of cobalt minerals. Most cobalt is made as a byproduct of the processing of copper and nickel ores is very difficult to obtain and is very expensive. Three tons of nickel ore, 12 tons of copper ore. In addition, you must move 250 tons of of soil to obtain 26.5 pounds of lithium, 30 pounds of nickel, 48.5 pounds of Maganese, 15 pounds of cobalt to manufacture the battery also requires 441 pounds of aluminum, steel and or plastic, and 112 pounds. Still with me? It goes further. A Caterpillar 994A

vehicle is commonly used for the earth moving to obtain the essential minerals. It has been estimated to consume between 250 and 775 gallons of diesel in 12 hours. Finally, you get a zero emissions car. Presently, the bulk of the necessary minerals for manufacturing the batteries comes from China or Africa, and much of the hard labor for acquiring the minerals in Africa is done by children. And the grand finale, it takes seven years for an electric car to reach net zero, CO2. The average life expectancy of the batteries is 10 years. Only in the last three years do you begin to reduce your carbon footprint. Then the batteries have to be replaced, and you lose all the gains you made in those three years.

I wondered what the one thing I don't even see in there is the equating for the fact that some, somewhere you're burning coal or some form of energy to create the electricity that you're charging your car with. So in many ways there's a gas pump. It's just not the one right next to your car. It's off somewhere else. You know, I want to sort of throw a little bit of a different angle in here because I know that there's people that watch this show. They write in that are very environmentally conscious. My own brother, who's amazing, drives a Prius, you know, lives in a tiny house. and is just really efficient in all the things he does. I love the fact that he doesn't just talk about it. He really tries to live a very efficient life, and I think it's super cool.

I also want to say that, you know, I too think we've got to be looking at ways to be reducing the pollution in the air. How much work would we have to do here, Jeffrey, at I can, to try and work on, you know, curbing all the childhood illness and chronic disease if we had clean air. If we were not breathing exhaust all the time, no doubt about it, that's a serious problem. You know, how many people are, you know, keylating mercury right now trying to get out of the kids? They're finding it in their hair only because the fish that we're eating is being polluted. Our water is being polluted by things like smoke stacks, coal stacks, all of those things. So all of these things matter to me. I mean, I genuinely, genuinely want a cleaner earth.

But what we're talking about is does, is this the salvation? Is this the solution to this problem? And I also think, you know, as I think we've talked about this, it's sort of like that what we're taught growing up just about eating, right? Everything in moderation, like, you know, a little bit of everything, have a diverse diet, probably better than just only eating one thing. And in many ways, that's what this feels like to me. It's like, sure, I think there's probably going to be much better technologies beyond, you

know, the battery, the lithium battery, the car. Just like I feel like natural gas was brought in as this answer from environmentalists, right? You know, I think President Obama was huge in pushing natural gas, is the clean energy, but we're using hundreds of millions of gallons of clean water to frack and get to it. It has a problem. It's releasing methane there. So it's not perfect, right?

And so I think with all of these things, can we just slow our role for a second and say, those that can get some electric cars great. The market's coming around. It's making sense, especially you've got solar panels all over your house. Maybe you're not even using that coal burning plant to get it. But let's not go ahead and mandate that every car has to change over because it's that balance ship that causes child labor issues all over the world. Everything gets out of balance.

Then we find like, oh, lo and behold, the thing has its own pollution problems. I just think moderation, and I know you have more to talk about, but I just want to make that clear because people do write in, We do read your points. We are listening. I am an environmentalist. I'm with you. But can we, you know, can't we look at everything we're doing and be honest?

We want clean air. We want clean food and water. Is this like the solution? Or is it just one of many things we should be trying to evolve our energy usage around? I just want to put that out there. Yeah. And for the record, I am not against electric cards either. It's about efficiency.

And if we're trying to get to efficiency, I mean, obviously the same equation could probably be done with a gasoline powered car. However, they're not being mandated on us. And also this transition is not happening within a five-year period. What you said leads to a lot of infrastructure problems. And at the worst end of the slave labor, straight up slave labor in Africa to get these essential minerals and a domination of these minerals by China. So there's a national security issue at that point.

So you mentioned the electricity that uses a charge this. Well, that's good, but not even the charging stations are really up to speed at this point. So a new research by Harvard that came out. This is the headlines that we're making. One in five public EV chargers in the U.S. don't work, study finds. And this is the study here. The state of EV charging in America. Harvard research shows charges 78% reliable in pricing like the Wild West.

So they're saying basically that the pricing on these could go anywhere from $21 to fill up the car, the charge the electric battery, and there's no, there's no really oversight in the pricing, and there's not a lot of oversight in the maintenance of these electric charging stations, so there's a lot of failures that are happening as well. So there's still a lot of bugs to iron out. And again, in a rapid transition, you have rolling blackouts that are going to affect this, like we saw in California. These are just problems that are not just kind of minor problems. If you have a whole vehicle class of cars that are on the road now mandated to your people, that is a problem when you have electricity problems on top of that or the charging stations aren't working.

So these are just issues, and that's actually a problem people have cited. This is one of the headlines here. America is now less likely to buy an electric vehicle and worry about the charging options. So overall, people have said they were likely to buy a car that dropped now to 58% in this study. It was 8,000 people by Joe Mortar. So, you know, Jeffrey, I think, you know, I've had a Tesla for a little while when we were living in California. And, you know, one of the things that was, it was really great for commuting. If all you're doing is going to work and back, you know, and you're inside of that sort of 250-mile range, I think is what the car had while we had it.

But I tried to go skiing with it once, right? We'd go up to Mammoth with the family. And I have to tell you, it was like a white knuckle. It was like, I equated it to like scuba diving, right? You dive, you're going. Then you're like, can I, like, how much further can I go, you know, and you're trying to look at what the next station is. You're not really getting a clear read out because you're actually burning energy fast.

It's not, you know, even. And then you're trying to slow down to save energy. And you're like, am I going to make it to that next super charging station? Because if I have to go to a regular one, I'm going to spend seven hours charging. And then you get there, then you're sitting there for an hour. And it just, like, the whole, it was actually like very pan. panic inducing. You got your kids in the car. You know, if you're like me, you're really pushing it and you're like, oh, my God, are we going to get to that next station? You know, it was, I said, okay, we're going to go ahead and take the SUV ski from now on. Tesla only for, and eventually we let that car go. I'm not saying we would never own one again, but for those of me even considering it, stick to commuting, you know, circumnavigating, you know, counties and state lines can be very, very, very nerve-wracking an electric car.

Yeah, you know, and American states are no stranger to severe weather conditions when it comes to winter. So, I mean, having stranded on the side of the road if those go out, that's a problem too. But now, let's bring something back to what we talked about before. So some of the things we do on the show is almost like a public service announcement

to make sure people really are aware of things that a lot of people are not telling them. And one of them are, the batteries in these cars are clearly, they're not perfected technology yet. And one of the issues is when they get damaged, there's a collision or whatever happens. Sometimes there's thermal runaway, which means the battery starts to smoke,

it starts to go up and it explodes. And even in the Tesla manuals and firefighters is common knowledge now, you really can't pour water on these because this excites it even further and accelerates that reaction. So you just have to let them burn. And so this happened in South Korea recently, a headline that was coming out of that,

exploding Mercedes-Benz EV prompts parking garage electric vehicle bans in South Korea. So we have some B-roll of this video here. You can see this. I'm going to keep reading this article. It says an unplugged electric Mercedes-Benz sedan caught fire last Thursday in an underground car product at an apartment complex in Ichun, west of Seoul. According to fire authorities, more than 700 residents were evacuated due to water and power outages

and the blaze damaged some 140 cars, according to the Echin Metropolitan City government. 23 people were hospitalized. So in South Korea currently, they're considering banning all types of electric cars and parking garages. Because when those go up, not only you have infrastructure problems because it's burning all the cars, you have the gasoline cars in there, but you also have other electric batteries that go up.

And it kind of has another layer on top of that thermal runaway. So that's another issue that a lot of people aren't talking about with these electric cars is this battery issue. But it's not just electric cars, because these lithium ion batteries are in everything from our cell phones to scooters, to skateboards, to you name it. And so there's been a lot of video

coming out. And I think this is important. People really need to post these videos and continue showing the reality of this situation that we're in. So someone posted recently a dog chewing on a lithium ion battery. And this was in a house. And you can see this is an issue here because it's a highly flammable mattress right in the middle. And you know, here's spoiler alert. The dogs are fine. So the this thing goes up and you can see the dogs kind of just came out going. What do you mean the dogs are fine, Jeffrey? What's wrong with those dogs have PTSD for life? They have no idea what just happened there. That's true. That's true. Yeah. And so you have you have those situations. Thank God someone was home. Thanks God they were able to. But I mean, if this happened in a garage next to your,

your, you know, your lawnmore gasoline. If you have that there, you get some problems. And you can see these things, you're not just going to go over there and put a pot over it and make it go out or throw some water on that and make it go out. This is this is a situation that will probably take out your house. And you know, even individual people. So a lot of apartment buildings, we reported on this all the way from New York to London everywhere are banning electric scooters because that's a way a lot of people use to get around in these large cities and they put them in hallways of apartments and when those go up and those batteries go up obviously you have a huge situation here and there's another video this is out of China a lot of people are using these type of batteries this is a gentleman here

he gets into an elevator and this is probably the most nightmares situation you can possibly think of having it go up in an elevator and you're trapped and so this is this is why we're reporting out. Let's be clear for anyone watching that. We didn't show you the rest of it. That, I don't think that person survives in the end. They drag a severely burned human out of the bottom of the one that finally opens up down below.

It's really a horrifying situation. You know, Jeffrey, we have been showing these videos. And I went, you know, my wife Lee watched the last time we did this and she said, oh my God, ever our son has his electric skateboard just sits, you know, up. on his wood shelves. So, you know, I grabbed it. And I was like, oh, yeah, let's get it out of here. And I was like, where do I put it?

I mean, if I put in the garage, that's still the same rafters of my head. If it goes up and there, it's going to, you know what I mean? And I was like, I don't want to leave it out in the rain. I was like, really like, do I put it in my barn? I mean, everywhere you look, it was kind of like, I mean, it's almost like they got to make outdoor containers you keep these things in or something. Because I really, honestly, no matter where I put that, if it burns, I got a problem. Right. And I think for people watching, I think it's important to just get those as far away from where you sleep as possible and have your fire detectors check your batteries, make sure those are on.

Because those fire detectors will go off right away because the smoke those create instantly when they go up. I mean, if someone's home and hopefully they don't have ear plugs in, they'll be able to hear that piece. So I mean, just those two bits alone, that's going to save, you know, hopefully help a lot of people.