The United Nations (U.N.) announced in August 2020 that the electric car boom will result in a number of devastating ecological side effects for the planet. While the shift to electric cars reflects ongoing efforts to reduce the world’s dependence on fossil fuels, the UN warns that the raw materials used to produce electric car batteries are highly concentrated in a small number of countries and their extraction and refinement pose a serious threat to the environment. The U.N. trade body, UNCTAD, has issued a new report breaking down some of the unintended negative consequences of the shift, which include ecological degradation as well as human rights abuses.

The production of these raw materials “is often associated with undesirable environmental footprints, poor human rights and worker protection,” the report asserts. In Chile, for instance, “lithium mining uses nearly 65% of the water in the country’s Salar de Atamaca region, one of the driest desert areas in the world, to pump out brines from drilled wells,” the U.N. notes, because nearly 2 million liters of water are needed to produce a ton of lithium.

IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol said that in 2018, electric cars saved 40 million tons of CO2 worldwide, sufficient to reduce global temperatures by a mere 0.000018°C — or a little more than a hundred-thousandth of a degree Celsius — by the end of the century. “If you think you can save the climate with electric cars, you’re completely wrong,” Birol said.