Dear Jeffery Prosserman,

In your letter to the mayor of NYC you had a couple points I agreed with. You explained your desire to do better for the environment and create a clean and healthy environment for your child. However, you approached it from the totally wrong angle. You support electric cars and advocate for the mass use of them and charging stations to make this possible, but electric cars in themselves are toxic and bad for the environment.

Electric cars have massive 1,000lb lithium-ion batteries that are rechargeable. As the batteries are used more and longer, These batteries have a lifespan of 10-20 years but after that you are left with the dead battery. For context, batteries have toxic metals like cobalt, nickel, manganese, lead, and mercury that take over a hundred years to decompose, and the chemical components in the battery take hundreds of thousands of years to decompose— some never do. This leaves you with a toxic hunk of a battery that you can’t throw away. So what’s the solution? Well, there are places that will recycle the batteries, however this isn’t a large-scale process and only five percent of lithium batteries are recycled. Not only do these batteries prove a problem after they’ve expired, but also in accidents where the battery is harmed. Lithium-ion batteries can explode when they are ignited, and these fires can burn for days emitting toxic fluoride gas all the while. How green is fluoride gas compared to carbon dioxide? Not very. Fluoride gas can harm your eyes, lungs, and skin and can even be fatal. As well as proving to be hazardous and toxic, the batteries prove to be problematic when charging.

Electric cars use electricity as fuel to move and power the vehicle, but they have to get this electricity from a charging station, either at home or in public. These charging stations are provided with power from many different sources. Burning coal is the primary way energy is produced, followed by fossil fuels, the use of nuclear power, wind energy, and solar power. Burning coal and fossil fuels at power plants produces the same greenhouse gas emissions as it does burning it in an engine, it’s just a different location. There is cleaner sourced energy in wind and solar power, however these sources are not reliable and they cause fluctuations in the cost of charging an EV due to limited power generation periods.

So, Mr.Prosserman, I encourage you, on your journey to a better environment, to take a minute and question if you have really found a solution to dive head first into, or if there are better alternatives that provide energy without editing the same gasses and leaving behind toxic chemicals.

Sincerely,

An intrigued reader