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We look at carbon emissions of electric, hybrid, and combustion engine vehicles through an analysis of their life cycle emissions.
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You have to make wayyyyy too many assumptions for this to be a useful comparison.
There’s a lot of people who live in places with electricity generated mostly or entirely through renewables for instance.
I’m assuming (ha!) that like the rest, this is an estimated average. Of course every person and car will vary, it’s not like it’d make sense to break out every car, every factory and their individual emission costs, etc either.
It’s based on a use phase of 16 years and a distance of 240,000 km. That’s a pretty conservative estimate of ~9300 mi/year.
A missing, but important, element in this discussion is vehicle disposal/recycling capability and environmental impact. The current state of battery recycling adds another layer of complexity to this equation.
https://www.autoblog.com/article/electric-car-battery-recycling-reuse-storage/
@SmolderingSauna That’s a false argument that the fossil fuel lobby loves to bring up. The reason there isn’t widespread recycling of EV batteries is because 99% of all the EV batteries that have been made are still in operation. The batteries typically outlive the cars, and are put to secondary uses for stationary applications.
https://blog.ucsusa.org/hanjiro-ambrose/the-second-life-of-used-ev-batteries/
https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/energy-storage/used-ev-batteries-are-storing-solar-power-at-grid-scale-and-making-money-at-itIf you want to ring your hands about battery waste, the US throws out about 54 megawatt-hours worth of lithium battery storage each month in the form of single-use electronic vapes.
US throws out about 54 megawatt-hours worth of lithium battery storage each month in the form of single-use electronic vapes.
Whoa… I’m gonna look that up.
I’m coming from a vehicle OEM. Down cycling isn’t recycling: we can’t decompose EV batteries and reuse/recycle like we can, say, steel.
@SmolderingSauna Sorry, I’m coming from a PhD in chemistry, and that’s BS. There is more than one process to recycle the the metals in batteries, and they’re all >98% recovery. Atoms are atoms. They’re not alchemically trasmuted into other elements.
The reason that they’re being used is because they’re still good. When they’re no longer good, they can be recycled. It’s just going to take another decade before we have a substantial need for recycling them. That’s not a bad thing.
@Nessussus that’s great insight. I recall reading a paper about using magnetic fields to enhance performance of some EV battery cells.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2211285521009538
There is so much research into new, innovative ways, to build a better battery and increase performance. I have no doubt that the total carbon footprint of EVs will continue to decrease. Smaller batteries, lighter weight, increased range, faster charging. All good things.
Can you recommend any relevant papers about EV battery recycling? I’d be interested to learn more about that process.
Source is article that references PR from EV manufacturer? Not science.
It’s not great is it? Reasonably we just need less vehicles
Are we seeing the same chart? 2/3rds of the carbon emission from the EV comes from the ridiculous way that many communities are still generating electricity. But that’s totally fixable!! We are generating more and more electricity thru renewables every day, and eventually nobody will have the audacity to claim that wind turbines are bad for the environment. Or at least no one will believe them.
Yes, we’re seeing the same chart. Now add a bicycle, or replace 60 stupid little Tesla’s with a bus.
We are not at a point where electric car ownership is a viable solution, we’re at least 20 years too late. Even the manufacturing cost us too great.
The problem is that you can’t simply add bicycles and buses in most places. We fucked up big time when we embraced the car and started living the spread out life. Our cities and rural communities worried literally have to be completely redesigned for that. When I lived in Miami (where I’m from), I rode a bike everywhere. Even though it’s very spread out, it’s flat and relatively easy to ride around in. Even the rain isn’t an issue because while it rains almost every day in the rainy season, you mostly know when it’s going to happen. My university was 8 miles from home and that wasn’t too bad of a ride. And if something was really far I could ride my bike to whatever bus was going a long way. I couldn’t see a lot of people living like that, but it was certainly possible.
But now I live in a rural community in New England. I simply can’t ride my bike to school (where I work) everyday. And a bus doesn’t make sense because we’re all coming from different, spread out places and going to different, spread out places.
Changing how we generate electricity is orders of magnitude easier than trying to convince 400 million people to change how and where they live. It’s as simple as that.
It’s not enough. Cutting transport emissions by two thirds is simply not enough. We can change planning now to make it hurt slightly less when we have to get rid of cars or we can continue the current path and leave a load of people stranded when the rug gets pulled, which do you think sounds better?
So it’s what then? Genocide? A new trail of tears where people are forced to leave their rural homes and move into massive cities that don’t currently exist?
Yes, those are the two sole options, cars and genocide. Fucking idiot. Have you heard of a bus?
3.4 billion people live in rural areas around the world. Areas where public transportation is not viable. I’m asking what you would do with them once you take away their only travel option.
The 2/3rds was how much of the EV emissions would be cut by generating the electricity used to charge from renewables. The emissions cut by switching from a combustion engine to an EV is higher: from 47 tons of CO2 down to 13 tons, which is almost 3/4 (72%). And 9 of those tons come from manufacturing the vehicle itself, not the batteries. I’m sure at least SOME of that manufacturing emission had to do with how fossil-fuel energy generation in the manufacturing process so you could save even more.
That in itself would not fix the problem, but it would slow it down and give us more time to keep working on solutions. Buses are not the solution.___
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Your own source says that 1000x more birds are killed by windows. Turbines are a fraction of a percent of human caused bird deaths. Not really a reason to stop making wind turbines. Climate change would be much more disastrous for the birds.
I’m not saying it’s a reason to stop making them, but to say they’re entirely without negative environmental impact seems disingenuous.
I’m assuming a silent /s here. I certainly hope so.
Why does pointing out a documented issue with wind turbines need to be sarcastic?
Because it’s rare to see someone include a link to support their argument, that actually demolishes their argument. Unless that person is being ironic/sarcastic.
To be clear. The articles does not say that wind turbines destroy “entire flocks of birds”. It points out that in the grand scheme of things, wind-turbines are a net positive for bird populations, and goes on to say that while numbers of bird deaths aren’t negligable - work is going on to reduce numbers further.
How this happens: person feels a need to prove a point but has literally no knowledge of a subject. Searches for an article they hope will prove their point (for example: “turbine bird deaths”). First article disproves their assertion, skip. Second, third. Ninth looks promising but christ what a long article. CTRL+F until what they see vaguely matches their argument. The rest of the article is probably fine. Copy/paste article URL, type up a “haha so there” comment.
And pollution from fossil fuels is responsible for much, much, much more harm to birds specifically, not to mention all of the other effected species.
EDIT: You deleted your comment about wind turbines so I’m assuming you see the point.
It’s still a net improvement, even with the incorrect assumption that everyone’s electricity is equally filthy. Can we as a species please stop letting the perfect be the enemy of the good for like five minutes?
We have programs where I live that enable you to have 100% of your electricity use covered by renewable sources without needing to install solar on your home or build a wind turbine. The fossil fuel plants may ultimately be where the exact energy being used is generated currently, but the added costs enable further investment in renewable infrastructure and the individual use is fully offset by renewable generation elsewhere.
I encourage anyone that’s environmentally conscious but doesn’t think they have an path to accessing green energy sources to research similar programs with their energy provider.
I never said we need to be perfect, you’re dismissing the argument to save your feelings.
I said we need to drive less. It’s not hard, it’s not perfect, and it’s the centre of most European planning efforts to mitigate climate change.
Electric cars are and industry solution to an industry problem, they’re not a reasonable response to climate change
It is in fact very, very hard, when your entire country is planned around the automobile. You’re talking about building infrastructure that doesn’t exist, and replanning every single town.
When I lived in Chicago, I drove once a week, for groceries, because I lived in a food desert. Otherwise I rode my bicycle (yes, in the winter too). That’s not even remotely practical now, because I live in a very rural area.
Again: don’t let perfect be the enemy of better.
Yes, build the damn infrastructure, now. It’s not about perfect it’s about working toward a minimum viable output and electric cars miss that mark.
I don’t think you have any idea how difficult that is, particularly since the US isn’t a totalitarian dictatorship. There are a lot of factors in play for the average person, and you need to convince that person that they should change everything about their life and pay far more in taxes, for something that a significant percentage don’t believe in or care about. You can’t win with a fact-based argument; you need to successfully appeal to emotion. And so far, climate activists are doing a really, really bad job at that. Getting people to make incremental change is more likely to be effective, even if make reform is needed.
There’s also a prisoner’s dilemma here; if we bankrupt the country building this infrastructure, and China and India don’t, then not only is climate change not significantly affected, but we also lose economically.
No country in the EU is a totalitarian dictatorship either we’ve worked out busses and footpaths, it’s not hard, your cities and counties still have planning offices, public servants decide these things. It makes little difference to the cost or scope of projects to design things so people can use them.
I think you’re grossly underestimating how expensive dragging your heels on climate is going to be for everyone. Changing infrastructure now is cheap in comparison. Your economy is going to be fucked by climate change regardless of what china does, there is no prisoners dilemma.
If only we promoted more public transport/trains…
Careful now, the model that is referenced defines the lifecycle of battery EVs as 16 years and hybrid and combustion as 18 years. Normalizing fuel production and maintenance to 18 years would put the BEV at 43.
It’s also assuming that you would use a single battery pack until the end of life of the vehicle and that we are steadily progressing towards 100% fossil free energy production (targeting 2033 as the completion date).
Global adoption rates, change resistance, production rates, raw material availability, economic impact, leaders who care more about power and money… I just don’t know that it’s feasible and the burden is all being placed on the lower and middle classes.
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There needs to be plug-in hybrids in this type of analysis.
They’re included … middle of the pack, still pretty grim statistics.
That’s a regular hybrid, not a plug-in hybrid.
Would the difference, even considering a somewhat larger battery, be that significantly different compared to an EV or an ICE?
The ICE would only occasionally run, while at the same time you don’t have to have such a big battery. That could be greener than any of the three options listed.
Any vehicle with two power sources is, by definition, exceptionally inefficient and therefore, unnecessarily expensive. I personally am eagerly awaiting safe hydrogen storage so vehicles can truly be zero emission. Toyota just announced they’re close; GM tried for decades and gave up. We’ll see…
Yes, hydrogen cars in the long avoids both. No ICE nor giant battery.
