Electric vehicles are not free or eco-friendly, it takes a lot of pollutant emissions industrial mining to make the metals, glass, plastics, batteries & electronics, utilized to manufacture modern EV's, especially the lithium ion batteries. Lithium production, cobalt mining, nickel mining, there is no such thing as an eco-friendly metal mine. Cobalt is produce in the DRC with child slave labor. So wipe that smug look off your face if you have an EV, you are not saving anyone from anything. With more than 100 onboard computers & miles of wiring for ADAS & differing levels of autonomy, all of those integrated circuits are made using toxic manufacturing processes that release pollutants into the biosphere of Earth, where other people are breathing, drinking & eating it!
Conventional gasoline & diesel production at oil refineries from crude oil or petroleum inputs not a free lunch either. Refining oil one of the largest electricity consumption activities since electric precision boilers are essential to the applied chemical engineering. Burning gasoline & diesel in a piston engine releases a lot of CO2 & some CO, mostly H20 vapor & a trace of toxic air pollutants like HC or unburned hydrocarbon, PM or particulate matter, & CO2 or carbon dioxide dissolves in H2O making acidic carbonic acid, or acid rain, though its really the gas oxides of nitrogen like nitrogen dioxide that make dilute nitric acid rain when it dissolves in rain drops falling. Sulfur oxide gases make dilute sulfuric acid when mixing with rain forming acid rain. They remove sulfur during fuel production in the oil refining processes. Low sulfur diesel now widely available at common fueling stations for On Road use.
While most fuels are unleaded, some piston powdered helicopters still use 100LL or 100 octane low lead. Lead was added to fuels as a lubricating anti-knock component. Sulfur also acts like a lubricate in diesel fuel, along with lubricating oil, to reduce damaging friction rubbing of the steel parts in the engine, and also to prevent corrosion, since fuel combustion produced acidic components that fuel the oil, which is one reason oil changes are so important. Acid rain & acid blowby are complicated side effects or externalities of fuel combustion.
Emissions controls helped by placing ceramic honeycomb coated with noble metals into catalytic converters that converts oxides of nitrogen back to nitrogen & oxygen, for example, so as to reduce tailpipe emissions of the toxic gases that create air pollution & acid rain. A 3 way catalytic converter reduces tailpipe emissions by up to 95% once its is fully hot. The engine control unit varies the fuel air mixture during warmup to allow spillover of HC into the catalyst so that it can "warm" up, since fuel vapor hitting the hot catalyst combusts, producing reaction heat that activates the noble metal activity, where the palladium & platinum are able to exchange electrons off the oxides of nitrogen to reduce them back to their non-toxic gas forms, oxygen & nitrogen. Thus catalytic converters were a major environmental win in terms of reducing toxic vehicle emissions. Traffic congestion zones smell less worse because of this. No free lunch making catalytic converters either. Oil exploration & oil refining has a lot of emissions too.
LED might last 20x longer & consume 90% less energy, but making LED chips just as eco-toxic as making GPU & CPU chips. Chip making also a huge consumer of fresh water, that has to undergo additional eco-toxic expensive energetic material filter consuming ultra purification to get to the purity levels needed for the various rinsing stages during wafer processing & clean purging of the equipment. The energy required to air handling, filter & other consumables used to keep the cleanroom clean are not a free lunch or eco-friendly either. Sure, tungsten & glass used to make traditional incandescent lamps & bulbs was not eco-friendly. Neither are all the rare earths used to coat the glass tubes in fluorescent bulbs, tubes & lamps.
There is no free lunch in physics, doing anything creates an impact. Every choice you make creates impacts, often on the other side of the world or in an ecosystem damaged, that you might never encounter or know about. Your making all sorts of choices that have negative impacts on ecosystems on Earth, even when your being "Eco-friendly" with "Clean Technology" / I get it, I am an environmental scientist obsessed with energy efficiency, not wasting things, being frugal & intelligent. There is simple no way to make the food & water & electricity we use, for free. Cost means emissions. There is no way to do anything without creating toxic emissions! Even just being alive & breathing releases CO2 & to make & move the food you eat creates diesel emissions! Your fridge runs in part on coal power because of the way utility companies mix sources of grid power, so keeping your milk, eggs, meat & veggies cold is creating coal power emissions. Coal emission are the leading source of radioactive pollution, as metal fly ash, since radioactive metals are present in the coal. When the coal combusted to make heat to boil water to spin power producing turbines with steam pressure, the elements other than carbon are exposed to the high temperatures in the combustion reaction & form soot, particles, metals like mercury & arsenic boil off as vapor particles, lead, uranium, thorium & other heavy metals, even gold & platinum, are present in small amounts in coal. Coal burning on a massive scale to make thermal energy at coal power plants, thousand of tons of coal, so even these small amounts end up being emitted as air pollutants.
This is why human overpopulation & the scale of human activity so problematic at causing ecosystem degradation, increasing species extinction rates, making air, water, soil, light & sound pollution. The world is going crazy with human activity. Look at what Russia is doing in the Ukraine for example! Watch the crime mentioned on the local evening news, another school shooting, armed robbery, murder, or worse. Its not roses & sunshine outside, outside are the wolves, bad people in sheep clothing that will kill you for your nice wrist watch if society degenerates during a long power outage. There are people with nothing to lose roaming around looking for a fight, to take advantage of or hurt other people. There are deranged sickos running the government & large corporations, like Jeff Bezos, who are so overly obsessed with money, all they care about is their next space rocket; they don't care who they hurt at the Amazon Fulfillment Warehouse, what eco-system they destroy, they don't care about you & me & other regular people. I always carry a weapon because I do not trust other people, and I have a lot of reasons why! I know that 95-99% of people I encounter are reasonable sane people who I can trust, but I can't know that ahead of time. I look at what's happening online & know that there are bad people roaming around freely, people who belong in a padded room or prison, out hurting other people, including sickos running soda pop companies, big alcohol companies, big tobacco & big pharmaceutic, big agrochemical, big pesticide, big chemical companies, there are sick governments like the CCP in the PRC, there are unethical immoral psychopaths in the world who are just on the take, willing to do anything to make more money. They don't care who they hurt or what they damage or degrade, they are obsessed with making more money. Watch the "Wolf of Wall-street" movie & see what I am talking about!
You can use less water at home by taking showers less often, by running clothing loads on cool or warm instead of hot settings, by hang drying some of your laundry when that's practical. You can buy a more fuel or energy efficient vehicle instead of one that wastes fuel making more emissions. You can save more of your money & spend less to reduce downstream or upstream emissions. Having less stuff can make a happier life, many people develop wisdom about this when they become older & downsize, streamline & simplify their homes with less junk, less stuff. Its even more intelligent to not go there in the first place! Stop buying new tech, new clothes, stuff you do not really want or need, things that will not make a real positive difference in your life. Invest in healthier food & exercise & staying mentally & morale & physically fit! Become a brighter higher functioning version of yourself & stop wasting your time shopping online. Spend more time learning or teaching or fixing or repairing or being a good relative, good employees, good owners, be the best you can at whatever you are doing. Waste less, wasting rarely ever intelligent! (sometimes waste required, & even the best solution at the time) // every person different, every day is different, every language unique, cultures are unique, countries are unique, there is something for everyone. You can have a happy life with less stuff, with buying less stuff & you know it!
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