Everyone knows that electric vehicles are supposed to be better for the planet than gas cars. That’s the driving reason behind a global effort to transition toward batteries.
But what about the harms caused by mining for battery minerals? And coal-fired power plants for the electricity to charge the cars? And battery waste? Is it really true that EVs are better?
The answer is yes. But Americans are growing less convinced.
The net benefits of EVs have been frequently fact-checked, including by NPR. "No technology is perfect, but the electric vehicles are going to offer a significant benefit as compared to the internal combustion engine vehicles," Jessika Trancik, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told NPR this spring.
It’s important to ask these questions about EVs’ hidden costs, Trancik says. But they have been answered “exhaustively” — her word — and a widerange of organizations have confirmed that EVs still beat gas.
Of course they’re cleaner. As long as your electricity isn’t coming from coal, you’re doing better by the environment than an ICE.
Even if your energy comes from coal they’re still more efficient.
can you really blame us?
let me run through the last 8 years of American history with four words, “we were lied to”. doesn’t matter from whom, doesn’t matter what. we’re constantly being lied to. truth is, it’s been true for longer than 8 years, but the last 8 have been especially transparent.
we’re learning that the upper echelon only trusts the American public to do three things; consume, produce, and die. if you can’t even do that for them, you’re removed as an undesirable.
so yeah, trust in the system is broken. it’s going to take at least a generation or two just to repair it ** if they work on it**.
I can’t fault anyone who’s untrusting of a system that continuously covers lie after lie with more lies.
I can’t fault anyone who’s untrusting of a system that continuously covers lie after lie with more lies
I can and will. Learn some basic critical thinking skills and apply them. Throwing your hands up and ranting about how “the system is broken” is mopey teenager shit.
Things are far more complicated than your whiny rant. They world is shades of gray rather than the simplistic “bad guy in black / good guy in white” situation that you characterize it as.
You overestimate the general populations intelligence.
Very true.
8 Years?
How long did fossil fuel companies know about climate change?
How long did the fuel industry know about the effects of leaded petrol?
How long did cigarette companies know about links to cancer?
How long did pharma companies know about opioid addiction risk?
How long did social networking companies know about psychological manipulation?
How long did the sugar lobby know about their links to diabetes and obesity?
How long did the manufacturing companies know about PFAS and microplastics?I would say you have always been lied to.
Your forgot that plastic manufacturing knew it wasn’t recycled or recyclable.
Lololol, what a fucking worthless right wing rant
lulz jokes on you.
Fuck Trump, fuck republicans.
Because the conservative machine, despite the love of Elon’s right-wing antics, never stop talking about how bad EVs are. Funny, the only time they act like they care about the environment is when they talk about how bad the EV batteries are to manufacture. While they roll coal and drive gas-guzzling mall cruiser bro-dozers all over the place.
Give him a few years into a potential Trump victory, and he will make Tesla to manufacture petrol cars.
Propaganda works.
There should be penalties for spreading such lies.
I was always under the impression that the source of the electricity to charge electric vehicles matters greatly. Some areas use coal burning to generate power while others use hydroelectric.
While true, it’s way better better for a power source to be inefficient than all consumers using inefficient/dirty appliances.
Once the aging coal plant is decommissioned in favor of a new nuclear reactor in a state like Wyoming, anyone using stuff like electric water heaters, heatpumps or electric bikes/buses/cars/scooters is instantly using 100% renewable power.
Even in screwed up states like Texas, there is so much load on the grid (and the fact they cannot buy power from other states) means that cheap solar panels, battery storage and wind are way faster to put up than expensive methane/natural gas generators.
I don’t consider nuclear as renewable, but they do reduce CO2 production.
It does matter in terms of how much less polluting it would be. Even in case of coal plant bonansa it reaches a point where it becomes less poluting than gasoline car . Alghtough much slower. Its also not realy important since renewables became so cheap that there is practicly no country that dosent have a fairly significant renewable share ( and by that i mean > 10 % ).
https://www.iso-ne.com/ Looking at my own region of New England, renewables are only at about 8% right now. And that includes burning wood, refuse, and landfill gas as renewable sources.
Also 24% nuclear and 3 hydro which somehow dosent count as renewables
If you got the most ridiculous EV (the Hummer) and drove it primarily in West Virginia (86% coal generated electricity), it would have worse lifetime CO2 emissions than an ICE.
Literally any other combination, and it’s better.
And it would still be worlds better than the worst ICE cars, it would only be worse than average.
Not the case, they still get 100mpge + so they’re always better
Definitely better to charge an EV with clean energy. But it’s probably better to charge an EV with dirty electricity than it is to keep using a combustion vehicle.
IIRC a gas vehicle is something like 20% thermally efficient, whereas a coal/oil power plant can be up to 60%. So even if my EV is charging off oil or coal, I’m getting 3x the energy per unit of emissions compared to a gas vehicle (though who knows how that translates to miles of range).
I want to see data. Coal emissions also aren’t the same as gasoline emissions. Mile for mile, calorie for calorie, do we know how efficient an EV battery needs to be if it was powered by coal electricity in order for it to match the same total emissions as an ICE? I’m all on board for electric, but I’m not gonna shell out double the cost for an EV that an ICE car would cost if the difference is negligible. I’d rather just not drive.
Its about 40% more power efficient per mile but theres a couple of other trade-offs, still better yeah.
Public transportation is even better yet
And when we actually get that going I’ll stop making sure I always have a car available.
yay for privilege I guess but we can’t all do that
Can’t all use public transportation? I don’t know what you read up there, but I’m in favor of it, I just don’t think we’re ever going to do it. We’ll bring back corporate owned worker’s barracks with corporate scrip before we actually give ourselves good public transportation.
No. The other thing.
Ah okay.
For inner city folk yes.
You can still have public transit/trains on suburban areas. See Germany or the Netherlands.
Or Japan, or China, or South Korea, or Italy, or Argentina, or Lancaster PA, or parts of New Jersey even. Fuck man so many places have public transit.
How I’m imagining public transportation in Lancaster, PA:
I mean close but instead think a fleet of like 20 bus routes that spread out in every direction for miles and miles into suburbs and farmland. And the buses have real time GPS tracking.
But otherwise very similar.
Japan beats everyone.
Its not a “you can” problem. Its a “we don’t” problem. I cannot get to work on time (7am) using the only public transport we have (bus) in a county with a million people. Also would take about 1.5hrs longer than by car. to be 15m late (assuming the bus is on time) every day. puts it around 4 hours travel to/from work, so work takes up ~12 hours of your day.
The trip length is certainly an issue but bosses in the US need to be more on board their workers arriving when the bus system can reasonably get them there instead of demanding a ~25,000 dollar investment just to get to work.
deleted by creator
Saw a rural bus system working perfectly fine in South America. If they can figure it out, so can we.
deleted by creator
Even just taxes. I pay taxes. I’d like to breathe less shit from all the commuters and have all the people I depend on at their work. This aversion to taxes in the US is terminal unless we get rid of it.
The US used to have an incredibly comprehensive rail network, combined with street cars in every town. This “public transit is only for cities” nonsense is pro car propaganda.
I used to live outside a town of 3,000 people. Prior to the 1950s it had a trolley that would take you to the 15 miles to the nearest city, and from there you could catch a train to go pretty much anywhere.
I believe it, but I don’t give a shit. I buy a car/truck because of how capable it is, and how easy repairs are to do myself, not because of how many smug Californian’s circlejerk over it.
Having just pulled repaired and put an engine back in one of my cars. No ICE cars are much harder to repair. Range will probably be an issue for a while. What I’m really excited for is hybrid light duty vehicles like a 1 ton hybrid would be great.
Hell yeah brother! Witness me.
removed by mod
Hybrids actually have the best longevity and repair scores, however.
The longevity of the vehicle actually does count towards its ecological impact, because if you have to replace it sooner, you’re creating a bigger ecological impact of creating a short-term use device before more energy has to be used to recycle parts of it.
So, at the moment hybrids win that battle. I think its simply because hybrids have been around longer, not because they’re special. Give it about 10-15 more years and I think you’ll see a flip to EVs taking over that spot from hybrids.
EDIT: Also, the bad build quality of Teslas and the early adopters of EVs mostly being Tesla owners also means that the sample of hybrids having better longevity and repair scores is impacted by Tesla specifically being so bad. If you cut out Teslas from the equation, I bet EVs and hybrids would probably have similar longevity and repair scores.
I’d like to see a source that says hybrids, with two separate engines plus the mechanical linkages between them plus the transmission, have better repair scores than a pure EV with no transmission, no mechanical engine, and a simpler drivetrain.
Anecdotal, but my parents bought a first-gen Prius way back in 2000 and it had zero mechanical issues until my niece rear-ended someone in 2012. Since it was so old it was totaled, but the battery pack was still very healthy.
I’m skeptical that hybrids with ICEs and transmissions at their heart really do have more longevity than BEVs and electric motors. ICE and especially hybrids are inherently more complex than BEVs, and have many more moving mechanical parts to wear out over time. So while BEVs may technically be “harder to repair”, there’s actually much less to repair in the first place. not to mention less maintenance like dozens of oil changes over the life of the car.
Where did you get that info about the hybrid longevity, an episode of Comedy Bang Bang? Could it be due to hybrids not running the gas engines full-time (less wear hours of usage per mile) ?
The only hybrid I’ve driven tends to run the engine more as a power generator than to drive the wheels, and often uses no gas engine. I could see how the engine would be less worn from that kind of usage vs driving the wheels all the time.
Put them in a sealed room with a gas engine running and you’ll see how fast they realize that they’re cleaner
Isn’t the whole point that the gas engine equivalent is just in somebody else’s room though?
In any case, I’ll take whatever partial climate wins we can get.
Even if we assume all the electricity is coming from carbon sources (there’s no need for any of it to be carbon sources) it’s still more efficient because power plants are way better at turning that chemical energy into electricity. Even with the losses in the lines, charging, and in your motors, electric cars are still significantly more efficient on a mile per kg CO2 basis than gas cars. Throw some solar panels on your roof and they become essentially carbonless.
It’s really easy to understand why too. You completely waste most of the heat energy you produce in IC engines. They’re incredibly inefficient and always will be.
Yeah, what is it, 70% energy lost to heat in an ICE?
Solar, wind, and nuclear energy: are we a joke to you?
Fair, but the first rebuttal is going to be “go into a sealed room with a coal fire burning”
I’d happily hang out in a sealed room with a nuclear reactor.
… how is that an argument?
The argument is that all you’re doing is moving the carbon emissions from the car directly in your vicinity to the coal-fired power plant a long distance away. Move that same coal-fired power plant into the sealed room, and suddenly it’s no longer far away, and the “unclean” nature of the electric car, so the thought process goes, becomes obvious.
That’s the thought process if you just stop thinking when you get to a point that reaffirms one’s biases. If you continue down that train of thought you’d realize it’s a lot easier to regulate and monitor the emissions of a coal power plant than it is every single car on the road. Plus you don’t need to use coal to make electricity.
zombie engineer voice “traiiiiiins”
Not surprising. There has been a pretty successful campaign by the right to paint EVs as worse for the environment because we get our electricity from coal (we barely get anything from coal) and mining; more expensive to fuel up (using the highest priced fast charging vs lowest price of gas); and worse from a humanitarian perspective (cobalt mining).
Things to refute this: EVs, even with coal power as their energy source, emit less CO2 over the lifespan of the vehicle compared with gas vehicles. Mining sucks and is indeed environmentally damaging but oil is also fucking terrible. The benefit of EVs is that the vast majority of a battery can be recycled whereas oil is single use. So to meet a consistent demand, we do have to ramp up mining but once the demands is met, mining can be scaled back dramatically.
For fuel costs, it’s easy to do the basic math but many don’t. I’ve seen people complain that their electricity bill will just skyrocket. When I suggested my parents get a battery powered riding mower, my mom thought they would be more expensive and that the electricity bill would be just as much as the gas bill. The price of the mower is the same and the electricity cost was about 1/15th of what has is and you don’t have to be riding around in gas fumes.
As for the humanitarian angle, the right obviously does not really give a shit. You could easily point out the atrocities that oil companies have done over the years. You could also point out that cobalt is being phased out. We could also do the mining here instead of having our done abroad. And there is the previous point that most of this just had to be done once then mining can be scaled back.
EVs have a lot of advantages over ICEs. It’s good that things are evolving finally to make EVs more than a niche. It however doesn’t remove the problem that they are still a car with all of those negatives, even if they pollute much less. In some ways providing an individual solution could harm efforts to reduce the number of cars on the road. It’s not a final solution, only a step to fix a few of the most obvious problems while retaining others.
Most US metro areas are just too spread out for mass transit to be a worthwhile solution for most people. The only solution to significantly reducing cars in the US is telecommuting; unfortunately businesses generally don’t like it, so we need to find a way for this to be encouraged by the government with subsidies or something.
Even if you live in an area where busses are, they’re slow and limited routes. Times are often inconvenient to work schedules. 1h 30m by bus, 50m biking, 3h 10m walk. A drive to work takes me 15 mins on average.
If you can drive to work in 15 minutes. Properly funded and prioritized transit can get you there in 10. Hourly bus service is not good transit.
Absofuckinglutely not
Those 15 minutes usually are on low traffic roads, getting you straight from the point you depart to the point you need to go. A bus route on its own would be at least 20 minutes if it has almost no stops. And that is without counting the travelling beyond the bus stops, because it is impossible to have a stop at every single building.
Those buses aren’t going to be driving faster than cars are allowed either.
A tram could go faster and have signal prioirty at intersectuons. Buses are the lowest tier and lowest quality of transit.
Absofuckinglutely not
Looooool.
Genuine question - are EVs better for the environment if the main source of electricity of my country is coal based? Most of the coal plants are pretty old too…
Yes, whether your electric plant is coal, natural gas, or honestly even if it was diesel. Larger engines are more efficient than smaller ones. It’s been a long time since I broke down the math over 10 years so my information is probably wildly out of date but even 10 years ago when you broke down the math charging an EV from a fossil fuel plant of any kind was still ultimately more efficient than a gas car in the long term.
Couple that with the ability of many EV now to also act as a battery for your house and that just goes wildly into the EVs favor if you utilize that for peak demand offset. Which many people could do easily even if it meant not having their battery fully charged in the morning when they go to leave for work because let’s face it very few people drive more than 60 miles full round trip in a day so even with their battery at say half they would have more than enough for their whole day plus extra.
Do we actually have hard data to determine if coal power delivering your electricity is indeed cleaner than what an ICE emits?
Yes the MIT link covers coal. At worst it’s on par with gas cars. They get better as the energy source mix does but they aren’t worse than gas powered cars.
Yes you can get the emissions per equivalent kilowatt hour of both. Especially since there are many electric generators that are just using a car engine. And it’s a known fact that at least in terms of energy generation larger motors a better conversion rate of fuel to electricity and power plant Motors are quite a bit larger than most cars. Unfortunately I only really have my phone available to me at the moment and I’m a little busy so I don’t have time for much more than these quick replies but over the next couple days if I get a moment I will come reply to this again after finding the actual figures if you haven’t already found them yourself which please do reply to this with them if you find them
It’s pretty simple really if you look at commuter traffic. Each stopped electric vehicle does nothing while stopped.
Aside from heating or cooling the occupants, that is.
Yeah, compare 500w heating to 30kw starts. But it does matter if you’re gonna be there eternally for 8 hours or something. Heating is inefficient when you’re not doing something else with the water before hand.
Somehow instead of having a GPS app tracking traffic to top off the batteries before you get there, I much rather have an app try to convince me to park my car, take a bus and try again tomorrow.
The “break even” point is still somewhere around 150k miles for big batteries (above 75 kWh). And while there are many EVs that have 200k on their first battery, that isn’t necessarily the status quo for most of them. A simple lump of Aluminum or Cast Iron takes a lot less energy to make and can even be produced completely renewable If you factor in synthetic fuels, things look even more grey - especially with algae, there can be huge benefits growing algae in sea water (see the Arctic Algal Boom and the connected pytho plankton growth). BEVs are not “THE” answer, they are one answer to specific questions.
Not only that, the issus (environmental, child labour, etc) with rare earth elements are still not solved and the environmental damages through lithium mining are not something to just sweep under the rug.
Or maybe 13,500 miles. But what’s a few zeros between friends?
Argonne assumes the batteries are produced with renewables AND they assume EVs are going to be charged over the day, when most of the renewable energy is “present”. Most BEVs are charged over night, where only Hydro or Geothermal makes power. Meaning, the Co2 footprint grows exponentially, because at night most of the power is made with fossile fuels - a kWh easily can have a rucksack of over 700 gr/kWh of Co2. But hey, what’s a few assumptions here or there in favour of either side, huh? Oh and go talk to China about them producing the batteries “environment friendly”. Just because something uses less Co2 doesn’t mean it’s cleaner. A few ppm more Co2 in the Atmosphere is bad for the Climate, sure, but a few ppm more Mercury in natural habitats, rivers and lakes? Pff, who cares!
A recent study from the Association of German Engineers did factor in that most EVs are charged over night - even after 130k Miles (~ 200k km), a Golf TDI has roughly a 33 Ton Co2 rucksack, where an EV produced with renewables (ID.3) had 36 Tons.
“Most BEVs are charged over night, where only Hydro or Geothermal makes power”
Maybe in Iceland; anywhere with wind and nuclear power, this really is not the case.
And in most areas, how much share have nuclear and wind? Somewhere around 30-40% combined on average
About 30% in Europe/US; half that in China.
Electricity consumption drops sharply during the night - when wind power typically peaks. There are power companies that offer substantially cheaper rates at night for charging EVs for this very reason.
So something a swappable and universal battery design would solve that would allow lithium to be phased out by sodium batteries and would allow the usage of only the amount of batteries you’d actually need. So why are you against that as well? Or just BEVs in general?
Who said i’m against that? But with that argument, phasing out fossile fuels would solve a lot more issues than a few EVs.
Yes. That’s the entire point here. The answer is yes.
