Then we add in electric cars, which are now on the same path – converting a staid, slow moving industry (traditional auto companies like GM) into a disruptive technology driven one (innovators like Tesla). Electric cars will accelerate the end of fossil fuels by joining with renewables to create a system shift, both directly by using clean power to charge them and indirectly by driving battery costs down to create storage for distributed renewables.

What I'm about to say may bring to mind the old saying about how a man won't believe anything his paycheck is dependent on not believing...but I'm still unsold on the electric car as "disruptive." (Firstly, that's not a word that applies in this case, as electric cars aren't new, and Tesla trades more on coolness than anything, but I digress.) GM tried to sell electric cars years ago, and they flopped. GM and Nissan are both selling electric cars now, and neither is getting customers to flock to them. Tesla sells luxury cars and keeps promising an affordable alternative, but can't come up with one. Anyway, it's not their wheelhouse, and as soon as they can make one, all of a sudden their diluting their own brand; they have a lot of reason not to make one.

But anyway, all this is beside the point. Let's imagine a world where everyone is driving electric. My fundamental question that I've never seen addressed, and one that I think is non-trivial, is what will be the fate of all those batteries? Batteries are among the most polluting things you can put in a landfill, and if we're talking about, say, 20,000,000 cars per year (assuming they will sell more cars in the future than they do now), that's not nothing. I don't know if it's enough to make a large scale environmental disaster, but it's a problem of trading a low toxicity, huge volume pollutant, to a high toxicity, low volume pollutant. And this is assuming that the number of batteries is equal to the number of cars. It won't be, because they only way full adoption will ever take place is if batteries can be swapped instead of charged (as I doubt long driving distances will cease to be a thing if it's even cheaper to drive in the future than the present, especially if the cars will navigate themselves to your destination).

All this isn't to say that I don't long for advent of renewables. I just think it might not be so cut and dry with cars.