It's all the rage to be an environmentalist. The Citizens' Climate Convention is a perfect example. I tried to join.
     When I came across an advertisement offering an electric car for the ridiculous price of €47.00 per month for two years, after a substantial initial payment and the deduction of various and sundry bonuses generously offered, I was tempted to discover the new Hollywood darling and, why not, allow myself to be contaminated, me who had hitherto denigrated this mode of transport.
     Then I coughed like a Covid patient when I discovered on the Internet that the offer was too tempting. My disgust with the advertising and my definitive rejection of this mode of transport, not as a vehicle but for its false energy, became unyielding.
     In the first place, the Kia brand wanted to sell off a few unsold models from the previous generation. Only a small number of dealers who had it in stock were able to offer it to a very limited number of buyers. This in itself is tantamount to deception, tempered, it's true, by the appealingly synthesised clarification that "there won't be enough for everyone".
     Then I wondered about the origin of the subsidies and bonuses that allow the buyer to make financial, if not ecological, savings on the real price. Answer: bonuses offered by a generous government, deducted, of course, from the state budget and therefore from the taxpayer.
     But why go to such lengths to privilege what is a veritable swindle that only neurons completely detached from reality could have conceived? Especially in times of economic catastrophe.
     For ecological reasons, to avoid pollution, to preserve the planet, to reverse the climate and other nonsense for the gullible.
     Nothing is perfect, so I stayed behind the wheel of my diesel Rolls to return to my unheated château at 130km/h (at least) and devour a grilled prime rib. No offence to the one hundred and fifty hallucinated climate conference delegates whose bio-fed neurons must have been contaminated with claviceps purpurea.
     Let's face it, nine months of palaver over such an amalgam of inept demands, silly bans and worrying repressive measures does little to reassure us about the toxic climate that will prevail in future societies. If we don't ban childbirth too.

What is an electric car? The manufacture of any machine - from aircraft carriers to scooters, from cars to battery-powered hedge trimmers - requires the use of materials derived from either recycling or mining, both of which are equally energy-intensive processes. Not to mention the equally exorbitant assembly costs that follow.

      But the worst is yet to come when it comes to recycling rechargeable devices, especially the battery that powers them! Zoé's battery, now lithium-based, is much larger (325 kg, ten times the weight of an ordinary battery) than that of the previous hedge trimmer and, like the others, it is crushed at the end of its life to recover its various components. The operation costs around six thousand euros per tonne. After sorting, bins and crates full of lumpy components are sent to pyrolysis furnaces, where they are gutted at 500°C to oxidise their contents.
     The resulting materials are then transported to another processing site where various processes are used to produce powders and ingots from the recovered ores and rare earths for further use.
     Two plants are in operation, one in Moselle and the other near Lyon. One processing plant is located in Aveyron.

      Batteries for all applications currently account for 65% of world demand for lithium, a mineral that is more efficient and longer lasting than cadmium or nickel; energy is produced by the exchange of a lithium ion between a cobalt or manganese cathode and a graphite anode, both electrodes immersed in a lithium salt electrolyte. Charging - a misnomer as no electricity is stored - does the opposite, forcing the cathode ions back to the anode. Apart from its inherent disadvantages (the lithium-ion battery heats up or can explode), to make such a battery (it's the same technology found in tablets, laptops, cameras, etc.) we use lithium, which is mined like salt, in a kind of salt marsh. The largest reserves are in the Bolivia-Chile-Argentina triangle. Demand has exploded and the price of lithium has risen by 850% in just a few years. There is no fear of a shortage, with reserves estimated to last a million years at current rates.
     Cobalt, on the other hand, requires a Congolese workforce exploited in appalling conditions in hand-dug mines, with children dying after working like convicts.
     Graphite, for its part, is either extracted from mines - half of which are in China, with the rest spread across the Americas, Indonesia, Europe and Madagascar - or synthesised from petroleum coke, anthracite or recycled waste.
     Cobalt is easier to extract than lithium, which is known to be corrosive to soils if left unused. On the other hand, not all batteries are made of the same metals: some contain manganese or nickel, copper or aluminium, while older batteries contain lead, and their regeneration requires adapted methods that are not necessarily equivalent or sufficiently developed. With the associated risks of finding piles of batteries abandoned on forest roads.
     The production and recycling of batteries and bodywork, which involves transport and handling between different factories, is therefore just as problematic, costly and polluting as conventional models.
     One element is thought to be the secret of the non-thermal car craze: the so-called fuel, in this case electricity. This is because it produces no CO2 downstream. It would also be a mistake to think that it is a source of savings. Even if the battery is recharged at home, the cost is in the order of 20 euro cents per kw/h, which means that for batteries of around 50 kw/h (such as the Zoé's) and a claimed but unattainable range of 400 km, the cost is 10 euros, rising to 40 euros if the battery is recharged on the motorway, with a long wait.

      Last but not least, the spread of electric vehicles, if it goes ahead as environmentalists and opportunistic managers would like, will generate a multiplied demand for the above-mentioned elements, as well as the need for an overproduction of electricity, which photovoltaic panels or wind turbines - the construction of which is polluting - will not be able to sustain due to their uncertain operation, let alone compensate for the programmed decline in nuclear production.
     The solution I'm tempted to propose is a vehicle equipped with a tiny nuclear cell that produces its own energy. Silently and with respect for the sacrosanct greenhouse effect. I can already hear the cheers my perfectly conceivable solution would elicit. But why not start by powering trains? Aircraft carriers, submarines and other ships already do. I'm sure I'll hear objections about the risk of radiation accidents when two vehicles collide, explosive flights and, of course, the waste to be disposed of. Inconveniences that can easily be minimised, if not eliminated.

The other option is the hydrogen fuel cell, which converts gas energy into electricity (hydrogen + oxygen → electricity + water + heat) by exchanging ions from the anode (the hydrogen molecule releases electrons thanks to the electrolyte: 2 H₂ → 4 H⁺ + 4 e-) to the cathode (oxygen ions from the air combine with protons to form water). Totally non-polluting, provided that the gas is obtained by electrolysis of water, not methane, using cheap energy such as nuclear power (fusion, not yet feasible, will be the process of the future, if it ever is). Simple and inexhaustible.
     Algae photosynthesis is currently being studied to obtain this fuel, which only gives off water (H₂O).
     The hydrogen fuel cell is still expensive because it requires the use of platinum to catalyse dissociation, which we're trying to replace with a synthetic metal, and hydrogen itself is still expensive, around 10 euros per kg of gas, price and quantity to travel 100 km, but no more than current fuels, or even less if taxes rise.
     On the other hand, a full tank of hydrogen (at the very few stations in Paris) takes just five minutes, for a range of around 500 km, rising to 700 km in the near future. Of course, the high-pressure tanks, battery and booster take up space. The cars cost twice as much as our good old limousines for the same performance.
     So nothing is perfect. Except my Rolls.