• To emphasize that an electric car is less "green" than a thermal car, a viral montage on social networks is captioned incorrectly.
  • What is presented as a lithium mine is, in reality, according to a reverse image search, a copper mine in the United States, operated by the Kennecott company, owned by the Anglo-Australian mining giant Rio Tinto.

The viral montage regularly resurfaces on social networks. And wants to emphasize that an electric car is less clean or "green" than a thermal car. Two photos would show, according to their caption, first, "a freshly finished pipeline", illustrated by a green path in the heart of a forest. Below, a second photo shows a landscape ravaged by a mine, is indicated "a lithium mine for your Tesla", lithium being an essential metal used in electric car batteries, but also computers or mobile phones.


A damning observation? Not so sure, because by performing a reverse image search, it is certain that one of the photos does not match its caption (we did not find an occurrence for the other photo).

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Thus, what is presented as a lithium mine is, according to a reverse image search, a copper mine in the United States, operated by the Kennecott company, owned by the Anglo-Australian mining giant Rio Tinto. The mine is located at the Bingham Canyon site in the Salt Lake City area of Utah. The image was spotted on the Viator website, a TripAdvisor apartment offering online sightseeing excursions. It is "one of the largest open-pit copper mines in the world," boasts Viator.

Comparing the images on the Rio Tinto website, we can recognize the presence of the Oquirrh Mountains in the background. On the Viator site, we also distinguish the huge salt lake, the Great Salt Lake, which gave its name to the city, and is located behind the mountains (which is verifiable on Google Maps).


Open since 1903, this mine mainly mines copper, silver and gold. Precision: copper, which is a thermal and electrical conductor, is also used in the manufacture of electric vehicles as well as thermal vehicles. Open-pit lithium mines do exist: it is possible to see the one in Arcadia, Zimbabwe, certainly less impressive than that of Utah, on the media Jeune Afrique.

"There is no such thing as a clean vehicle"

The problem of raw material resources is frequently advanced against the development of electric vehicles, a reality that is not ignored by those who defend it. "There is no such thing as a clean vehicle," Pierre Lefaivsle, transport manager of the Climate Action Network, told us last June. This group of associations defends electromobility to limit greenhouse gas emissions, under certain conditions. Such as reducing the size of the car fleet, guaranteeing the sustainable and environmental aspect of the sectors from design to recycling or ensuring the transparency of extraction channels.

However, "an electric vehicle pollutes three to five times less than a thermal vehicle," also recalled Pierre Lefaivsle. To affirm this, it relies on the life cycle analysis tool (from production to the energy needed to run the vehicle) developed by the Transport and Environment association and which makes it possible to compare CO2 emissions between thermal and electric vehicles. For example, even in Poland, which has the most polluting electricity supply in the EU, electric vehicles emit 22% less CO2 than gasoline cars, the Transport and Environment Association said in 2021.



However, reducing CO2 emissions, a greenhouse gas generated by human activity and responsible for this disruption – along with methane, is crucial. In the world, the transport sector is the second largest emitter of CO2, it is the first in France, according to the 2021 edition of the Key Figures on Climate France, Europe and World, published by the Data and Statistical Studies Department of the Ministry of Ecological Transition.

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