This study evaluates whether electric vehicles (EVs) in China have delivered on their “green” promise by improving air quality and reducing private ownership costs. Combining city–month data on EV adoption and air pollution with detailed vehicle-level transaction records, we find little evidence that rising EV adoption reduces concentrations of major pollutants or greenhouse gases. Both the traditional instrumental variable (IV) and the Bartik IV estimations show that the null effects persist after addressing potential endogeneity. The limited environmental gains are largely attributable to the continued dominance of coal in electricity generation and to a sizable rebound effect whereby lower operating costs increase vehicle usage. On the private side, although EVs reduce energy expenditures by roughly CNY 16,747, their faster depreciation leads to an average net loss of about CNY 18,175 over the ownership period relative to fuel vehicles (FVs). Counterfactual simulations show that EVs match the emissions of fuel vehicles when the coal share falls to about 55%, deliver measurable benefits below 49%, and require a reduction to around 31% once higher utilization is considered. The results show that the environmental benefits from EV adoption depend on a transition toward cleaner electricity generation.

Lithium demand in China has grown rapidly with the popularization of 3C electronics, electric vehicles, and other products. As an important part of the global processing of lithium products, China still relies on importing a vast majority of raw lithium materials, which significantly affects the supply security of China's lithium market. Therefore, this study used material flow analysis to analyze the supply and demand characteristics of China's lithium trading market from the trade material flow and industrial material flow. The results showed that that the import of lithium resources in China is mainly concentrated on lithium carbonate, which is the raw material for power batteries, and the import of lithium accounts for 72.5% of the consumption in China. With the increasing demand for lithium in China, secondary lithium recovered from end-of-life (EoL) batteries is expected to become an important lithium source.