New stuff, particularly high tech new stuff, requires significant resources, which, at this point means oil, as we didn't bootstrap our civilization with oil as Buckminster Fuller advised in 1969. We built and ran on oil. I'll admit, the scope of this paper is impressive. What it is missing is the back-end, though. Consider the moon shot circa late sixties. If we just analyze lander, rocket, guidance, even the control room, with the methods used in this article, we would not get a good idea of the amount of carbon released and other negative externalities associated with the Apollo program. There is a huge ecosystem behind it.
This is also why the greenwashing exists. High tech solutions have money behind them: jobs, power... all of the tributaries of the global supply chain brought to bear on new stuff. Where does that paint, CPU, Home Depot Battery bracket, LCD screen, datacenter-behind-network come from?
There were 90 million GM small block V8s created. And true, machining them over time causes environmental damage, but they already exist. One of my favorite anger moments was when Chrysler decided to destroy the molds for American Motors parts. Those unibody Ramblers with the rust treatment could/would have lasted for decades, but instead we got the garbage cars presumably because of tailpipe emissions compliance (but the destruction of the parts was suspicious). You can rinse/repeat over history here. No matter what the "we are creating new things in the public interest" moment is, air bags, tailpipe emissions, etc., the end result was that we got new things, which meant that companies in power made more money, and the global supply chain got deeper and wider. Keeping an old 63 American running like, say, Tom Jennings (a personal hero of mine), I'd wager, takes much fewer resources, all told, than a modern EV and creates much less overall damage. (And, no, I have nothing like the detailed report to back up that statement. I am just using these ideas to get any readers thinking before they just swallow these kinds of articles whole.) My thought is that the damage is often misleading. Do any of you remember the revelations we all had in the early 2000s about the environmental damage of all of the "recycled" 386, 486, 586 etc. machines? (Let alone the datacenter hardware refreshes.)
On a related note, and in line with my above suspicions, I've noticed that low-tech solutions that have better analysis, Ye Tao's MEER, for instance, seem to get crickets overall. It is almost as though our intellectual capacity and autonomy has been hijacked by interests that make money at the constant "creating new things in the public interest" cycle.
I also admit, that my level of criticism is much broader, and almost impossible to address. I am writing this from within peak industrial civilization. The theory of many is that we will just keep growing in complexity, changing. We will feed resources into chip fabrication plants into datacenters into global internet connectivity into, look Ma, a car that runs on this battery (connected to datacenters). I just don't think we have thought this all through... back to Buckminster Fuller. In this case the EV turtle is on turtle on turtle on turtle... but the final turtle exists and it is the balance of the ecosystems that support vertabrates.
