OPINION

Weighing EV risk

Re: "Jockeying for pole position", (Business, Jan 20).

Thailand's National EV Policy Committee incentivises electric vehicles and pegs incentivisation against CO2 emissions. It is noteworthy that winter's annual assault on national public health is not due to CO2, which is a gas efficiently respired by humans, but by harmful particulates and toxic chemical aerosols suspended in the air.

EVs affect public health in complex ways which their adherents often fail to consider. Whether in your phone, a garage, storeroom, battery factory, recycling centre, or on the highway, high energy density lithium batteries are causing a worldwide epidemic of explosions and fires.

People die not merely because of rapid incineration or explosions, but also from inhaling the copious amounts of highly toxic fumes such fires produce.

E-bike battery fires are the leading cause of fire in New York City. There were 270 blazes last year claiming 18 lives. A recent fire at a battery recycling centre in Kilwinning, Scotland burned for several days requiring the government to warn nearby residents to remain indoors with windows closed.

Buses and trucks require much larger batteries and when they combust the results can be truly horrific. A Tesla truck which crashed into a tree near Sacramento last year burst into 1,000-degree flames which required 15 hours and 50,000 gallons of water to extinguish. Firefighters had to disperse fire retardants over the site from the air.

The risk of disaster increases exponentially with grid-scale storage batteries often associated with solar generating arrays. In May 2024, a fire at the Gateway Energy Storage facility in San Diego burned for 11 days, leading to evacuation orders and calls for a moratorium on new battery storage facilities.

Heavy metals leach into the ground and water after EV battery fires and resulting toxic fumes are nearly impossible to mitigate.

While EV's generate no particulates from burning diesel fuel, their tyres produce substantial air pollution of a more complex and hazardous nature, just like their IC cousins do.

A rigorous cost-benefit analysis of EVs, which includes the environmental and social cost of mining lithium, shows that their batteries are highly problematic. Far better are the water based, in-situ generated hydrogen powered vehicles proposed by Toyota and others.

Wire bias

Re: "Media stirs the pot", (PostBag, Jan 31).

Michael Setter accuses Reuters and AFP of being anti-Trump.

These are two of the oldest and largest international news agencies in the world. They are respected as being independent and unbiased news sources.

They do not "exclusively employ politicised views and divisive rhetoric" as he asserts. They are not part of the polarised news complex in the USA.

If the news they report doesn't align with his world view, perhaps he needs to re-examine his convictions?

Smog season

Re: "A darkening skyline", (PostBag, Jan 27) & "Toxic shroud", (Front page picture, Jan 25).

While agreeing wholeheartedly with the sentiment expressed by Ellis O'Brien in lamenting the polluted state of Bangkok's air, I do find the quotation from John Keats slightly out of place here in Thailand. "The season of mists and mellow fruitfulness" refers of course to autumn in England which Keats, one of the most sublimely gifted poets in the English language, apostrophises in his poetic masterpiece "To Autumn".

Regrettably, Thailand offers precious little in the way of mellow fruitfulness even in its most attractive seasons. What comes most often to my mind as our all too brief cool season is ushered out by increasingly oppressive heat is the opening line of a different English poetic masterpiece whose title, "The Waste Land", does often seem horribly apt in the context of contemporary Thailand. Its opening line begins "April is the cruelest month…"

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