It's a quandary. A dilemma. They call it the "nickel pickle." And they call it that because they don't know how to fix it.
In order to slow down climate change, the world needs to lower greenhouse gas emissions. Which means the world needs to produce more electric vehicles. (And juice them with renewable energy, not coal and oil. But that's another rabbit hole.)
In order to keep transportation going, the EVs have to have batteries. Those batteries contain metals that are expensive and hard to get to. Getting to some of them puts a lot of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. There's the pickle: To get the metals to lower emissions, mankind has to emit more gases.
Nothing's just easy.
Nickel is one of those metals. The Wall Street Journal says getting nickel out of the ground "is particularly environmentally unfriendly." And not only are the bulldozers bulldozing, and coughing up fumes, but the nickel is under rainforests. Those forests have to be felled. And more "carbon sink" is lost. Not to mention all the animals hiding in those rainforests.
And when the nickel is finally mined?
"Refining it is a carbon-intensive process that involves extreme heat and high pressure, producing waste slurry that's hard to dispose of," according to the Journal.
Ah, the matter of waste: What's left over after the nickel is mined is sometimes put into reservoirs, and in Asia, with earthquakes and monsoons, sometimes waste dams break apart, releasing the waste. You can guess who protests against building more waste dumps: environmentalists. And we're not saying they protest without reason. Would you want such a waste dump (and an unsteady one) near your home?
Mining companies say that they replant trees--millions of them--to replace the lost carbon sink, and EV makers say it only takes a couple of years before their cars "pay for themselves" environmentally by replacing coughing gas guzzlers.
That's if they're juiced with renewable energy, and not coal plants. But that's another rabbit hole.
Nothing's just easy.