Transportation Geography
How much lithium do we really need?
Ten percent of new cars sold in the world last year were electric, most of which were in China. The US lagged well behind the global average, coming in at six percent. In a push to increase electric vehicle (EV) adoption, the Biden administration has been touting the Hummer EV, a 9,000 pound behemoth that is by far the heaviest mass-produced personal vehicle you can buy (it also does not qualify for the federal EV tax credit because it costs more than $80,000). EVs weigh substantially more than their internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicle counterparts because of their lithium-ion battery packs; the Hummer EV’s battery pack accounts for around one-third of its overall weight. Is this progress?
Since April of last year, I have been working with an amazing team on a project to sort of answer that question, and now it is finally out: Achieving Zero Emissions with More Mobility and Less Mining. I encourage you to read the full report, which is not nearly as long as it looks due to charts, graphics, citations, and whatnot. Our research ties together transportation decarbonization and supply chain justice and shows that what’s best for mobility justice—reduced car dependency—is also what's best for global climate and environmental justice.
We used both quantitative and qualitative research that analyzed lithium extraction—where it’s happening and what the effects are—and modeled the lithium requirements for various transit transition scenarios with different levels of transit mode share, recycling, EV battery sizes, and EV warranty periods. Lithium is a particularly important resource because it is currently the only non-substitutable mineral needed for lithium-ion battery packs, which are already the largest source of lithium consumption even at presently low levels of EV adoption. Consequently, replacing ICE vehicles with EVs will require a substantial increase in lithium usage and therefore mining; according to our analysis, US lithium demand for EVs alone could be three times higher by 2050 than all global lithium production today. But exactly how much lithium is demanded and extracted is, like all production, an open question contingent on policy and planning decisions.
The US transportation system is heavily oriented around cars, a political choice that has been made and remade throughout the country for many years. Beyond the obvious problem of planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions, this perpetuates numerous well-documented and often racialized harms, including crashes, roadkill, particulate air pollution, tire and brake dust pollution, segregation, less walkable communities, and regressive monetary costs. This status quo is being reflected and reified in a present US policy focus on subsidizing EVs rather than reducing car usage by investing in public transit, walkability, and bikeability (electric or otherwise). The latter is a more holistic and transformative approach that would make decarbonization much easier and more just by reducing energy usage and material requirements.
As our report highlights, lithium mining comes with a number of social and ecological costs, including violations of Indigenous land rights, threats to pastoral livelihoods, pollution, biodiversity loss, ecosystem degradation, and freshwater depletion in already arid areas like the Atacama Desert in Chile. Less lithium demand will mean less lithium extraction and therefore a reduction in these harms.
Building an ecologically sustainable transportation system throughout the entire supply chain in a country as car-dependent as the US would be challenging on its own, but it is made even more onerous by the enormity of our personal vehicles. This trend has increased markedly in recent years, as you have undoubtedly noticed—all those shiny, gargantuan trucks and SUVs are hard to miss. Over the last 30 years, our pickup trucks have gotten 32% heavier and their annual sales have increased by 500%. Larger vehicles are more dangerous to pedestrians, cyclists, animals, and other drivers both because they hit with more force and because their height reduces visibility. They cause more wear-and-tear on roads and require greater parking accommodations.
Merely electrifying this oversized vehicle fleet will have unnecessarily large mineral and energy requirements to manufacture and power. Our report shows that one of the most important ways to reduce lithium demands for a decarbonized transportation system is to reduce EV battery sizes, which necessarily means smaller vehicles. So we need to both reduce the number of cars on the road and reduce their size—which, per our model, could reduce US lithium demand by as much as 92%.
The existing policy regime that favors tax credits for EVs is woefully insufficient, and would be even if it was more targeted to incentivize smaller EVs and expanded to more evenly distribute its carrots to other transportation modes. This is because cars make all other forms of mobility more onerous and/or difficult. Without the safe infrastructure to use it, a rebate to purchase e-bikes is not nearly as useful as it could be, and car traffic makes bus service slower and less reliable. We need fewer cars on the road, which should be incentivized with government funds (Barcelona offers free three-year transit passes for people who ditch their cars). Municipal governments have to reclaim cities for people by making permanently car-free streets, building dedicated bus lanes and protected bike lanes, and designing dense, mixed-use communities. Transportation planners must stop the traffic-inducing madness of endless highway expansion and invest in robust public transit instead. And state and federal governments need to not only robustly fund a massive expansion of public transit capacity, they must reign in the scourge of monster trucks with much stricter size limits on personal vehicles (and stringent union labor sourcing requirements).
Given the way that cars—and especially large trucks—have become a core part of conservative identity politics in this country, such policies would face some public and industry resistance. Corporations have long marketed personal car ownership as being synonymous with freedom, and this idea is now deeply woven throughout US culture. But this ostensible freedom for the individual depends on networks of support, infrastructure, and subsidies, and it also comes at a great cost, eroding the freedom of others to use alternative modes of transit and from experiencing the various forms of harm and inconvenience that come from car supremacy. Regardless, there is little to no causal relationship between public opinion and political outcomes in this country, and even policies that face some resistance at first may be ultimately experienced as improvements.
We should conceive of the transportation system not just in its end use—cars, trains, buses, bikes—but as an interconnected global web of supply chains, resources, and ecologies from mine to metropolis. An EV is not just a car; it is labor, lithium, aluminum, copper, plastic (made from fossil gas), etc. along with tire and brake dust pollution. It is also all the infrastructure required for that car to function—from charging stations to roads to parking lots—and the material and spatial costs required to build and maintain them.
This is an important inflection point in which a nation that has built and rebuilt around cars along with exploiting people and the planet for resources has an opportunity—and a necessity—to reimagine mobility, urban planning, and global justice and solidarity at the same time. Reducing car dependency is both a means of mitigating the climate crisis and an end in itself by ameliorating the potential social and environmental harm of EVs (and cars in general) by reducing mining and creating healthier and more vibrant societies.