The massive push to increase electric vehicle adoption and restrict gas-powered car sales could inadvertently lead to higher emissions and consumer costs.
The article is kinda vague, but has some gems:
“It depends on when and where you charge the vehicle,” he told Fox News Digital. “Then you have to add to that, the emissions that occur before you get the vehicle in your driveway for the first time because all vehicles entail CO2 emissions associated with the energy you use to build the vehicle. You use of materials and machines to build everything.”
“For an internal combustion engine, something on the order of 15 to 20% of the emissions that is associated with the vehicle over its lifetime of operating occur before you drive it,” he continued. “With an electric vehicle, the share of emissions range from 15% to 100% of total lifecycle emissions. And they’re far greater than the conventional vehicle because you’re building a fuel tank, a battery, on difficult-to-acquire metals.”
The conclusions are misguided to say the least and it’s extremely clear the authors have an agenda to push but some of the facts are indeed true.
If you look at lifetime data, BEVs do not save all that much in GHG emissions. About 30% in the German energy mix. Technologically, that’s an amazing leap in efficiency but not even close to getting us carbon-neutral because the reference (ICE) is extremely bad. “Less extremely bad” is not “good”.
The conclusion they come to that we should therefore be buying more “efficient” ICE cars instead is laughably stupid as I’m sure everyone here knows but the current “strategy” (if you can call it that) of “converting” every current ICE to a BEV will not solve the problem either. That’ll get us maybe 30-40% of the way there, probably less.
The future of transport is less cars, not cars but with different motors. And with less, I don’t mean a little less, I mean a fraction of what we have today.
The small fraction of cars left should ideally be BEVs but it wouldn’t make a huge difference in absolute terms at that point and shouldn’t be the focus of any discussion of future transport.
@Atemu @Aatube This is my standard response to FUD about EV carbon emissions.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/factcheck-how-electric-vehicles-help-to-tackle-climate-change/
EVs do improve the situation. And the electricity mix is rapidly improving in most countries, it must continue to do so, and frankly it’s low-hanging fruit compared to some of the other problems. But I agree that we will have a faster transition if we have fewer cars. More and cheaper buses will get us maybe 30%, but for the rest we’ll need to change cities, change housing, build new rail lines etc. A lot of degrowth measures involve large amounts of construction, social change, and political challenges. They take time, potentially more time than we have.
We need to do *both*.
@Atemu @Aatube Also, replacing every ICE car with an EV isn’t happening. It isn’t a coherent strategy. With current technology and infrastructure, anyone who doesn’t have a garage or a driveway will pay a lot more per mile at a lot less convenience.
Sure, we could build charging points down the side of every street. We could wait for better EVs. But both improving public transport and expanding EVs to 100% will take time and cost significant infrastructure development and materials, beyond a certain point.
The drivers who will stop driving in response to cheaper faster more available buses are not the ones who will buy an EV. We can get them at both ends.
@matthewtoad43 @Atemu @Aatube There’s an important political side effect to EV adoption. Carbon taxes have been a heavy political lift, mostly because people don’t want to pay more for gas. Once 51% are driving EVs, tho, carbon taxes will be popular, and that will speed a host of useful adaptations.