I’ve seen a lot of posts here on Lemmy, specifically in the “fuck cars” communities as to how Electric Vehicles do pretty much nothing for the Climate, but I continue to see Climate activists everywhere try pushing so, so hard for Electric Vehicles.
Are they actually beneficial to the planet other than limiting exhaust, or is that it? or maybe exhaust is a way bigger problem?
I once calculated that my upper-middle class EV (2.1 tons in kerb weight, sadly) is better for the environment (indeed, carbon neutral since I’m only using clean energy) starting at 70,000km of driving usage. I’m at 20,000km now, so I’m already 28% there :)
Short term EVs aren’t making a lot of difference due to the higher energy costs of manufacturing them. Long term cars are just a terrible transportation method, especially within cities, and we really need alternatives so that we can get rid of most of them.
On the other hand as renewable energy sources take over the grid the energy costs of manufacturing EVs will be less relevant to climate change, and it’s just going to be faster to switch power plants and new car manufacturing over than it will be to rebuild the entire transportation infrastructure on all of Earth, especially North America. That time difference will have a large effect on how bad things will get by the end of this century. EVs are dumb, but also a necessary stopgap.
Buying an electric vehicle does not make the world a better place, but buying and using a gas vehicle makes the world worse by a bigger margin, so if you’re buying a vehicle, an electric vehicle is probably better.
This is a good way to put it. If you’re in the market and need a car, ICE you are knowingly hurting the planet a lot. Buying an EV you’re at least not making the planet worse.
The #1 problem with EVs is not the energy and materials used to create the battery because that is eclipsed many times over by not using gas during the battery’s life- the biggest problem is that the entire car becomes e-waste as soon as the battery is damaged or degraded in any way.
They also produce just as much tire waste as an ICE car.
I hope moving forward, EVs will be regulated and have modular parts, and can still be user repairable, unlike (most) smartphones.
I don’t want them to have that “vendor lock in” that Apple and Samsung are famous for, component wise.
There’s already a few videos of home mechanics replacing their own battery packs. Not a big thing yet, but as an engineer in related systems, it’s great to see a first effort already happening.
The replacing the battery is simply a supply issue.
There is such a demand and so little supply, that if you want to buy just a battery (and not the entire car) you are out of luck. They’ll put that battery in a new car and sell it before selling it to you as a replacement.
But that’s short term. There are a huge number of battery plants already breaking ground and coming online.
In 2 years or so, the price to replace the battery will be a HELL of a lot lower, and the issue you linked above will be long gone.
I hope so but I doubt it. It’s not the price that’s so much of an issue but the fact that the packs are non-standard, non-serviceable, and the car is worthless without it. Manufacturers make money selling their own custom batteries at markup. It’ll take government regulation to force companies to begin using a modular system because there is literally negative incentive for manufactures to do it on their own.
government regulation to force companies to begin using a modular system
Yeah, that’s fair. But the issue is also similar to cell phones.
Each battery is unique because it needs to fit the unique layout of the vehicle. Not to mention the battery tech is moving so fast, that the chemistry of the battery itself is changing every few years.
I suspect China’s approach to a vehicle where you hot-swap the batteries instead of charging will be the way it goes. Someone will do it, it will be most $$$ efficient and therefore profitable, and then it will force them all to adopt the same approach.
I totally agree, hot swap modules are the only way it can work- treat them like propane tanks!
What is the carbon footprint, particularly of the batteries, during both manufacture and disposal. How does that compare to internal combustion engines?
Better after some mileage, the specifics of which depend on things like your country’s power generation and what kind of ICE car you are replacing. It’s within the first 15,000 miles / 25,000 km unless your country runs entirely on coal or something. Over the lifetime of the car it’s significantly better.
They’re better than ICE cars so provide a path for improvement on the existing installed base for transportation whilst not requiring people to significantly change their habits or large public investment.
However they’re not the environmentally best solution for transportation in urban and even sub-urban settings: walking, cycling and public transportation (depending on distance) are vastly superior realistic solutions from an environmental point of view in those areas (they’re seldom very realistic in the countryside, hence why I’m being very explicity about it being for urban and sub-urban areas).
However making cities and, worse, suburbia, appropriate for those better alternatives requires public investment (and we’re in the late ultra-capitalist max-tax-evasion neoliberal era, so it’s very much “screw collecting taxes and spending that public money for the public good”), time and even changes in housing density in many places (US-style suburbia is pretty shit at the population density and travel distance levels for realistic commuting by bicycle or public transport).
So Electric Cars are a pragmatic environmental improvement in such areas (and pretty much the only realistic solution outside them) and one where the economic elites don’t have to pay taxes like everybody else since unlike for public transportation the cost of upgrading is entirelly born by consumers.
They’re marginally better but we don’t need marginally better, we need to get our shit together right now.
They are two separate solutions for different phases of the problem.
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Buying electric vehicles over internal combustion engines now is practical because most of us don’t live in a reasonable commuting distance to our jobs.
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Vote for politicians that support pedestrian friendly zoning practices, remote work, and mass transit for the future so that less people are stuck in that situation in 20 years.
Doing only one of them doesn’t fully solve the problem, you either continue to pollute now or you are stuck polluting, albeit less, forever.
I’m sure it annoys people that both are necessary and if you happen to live in a situation where the first is unnecessary for you, it can look like it’s not necessary for everyone. But most Americans live at least 20 miles from their workplace so the vast majority of us can’t just wait for policy solutions.
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In case you missed it, co2 is causing global warming, which has the ability to extinct mankind in the future. EV don’t produce any co2. Some idiots will talk about indirect emissions, but the point is moot. You don’t remove indirect emissions by removing EV, you remove them by cleaning power grid and logistic lines.
EV are a necessity on a short term basis. Developing public transports and alternative to cars are also a necessity.
I’m sorry, did you just handwave away indirect emissions? You do understand that the vast majority of our energy production still dumps large amounts of CO2 in the air?
What we need instead of EVs is well designed walkable cities with mixed use buildings where one no longer NEEDS a car.
If all you need for 95% of your travel is your legs or a bike, most people will actually just opt out of owning an expensive vehicle that they no longer need.
What we need is good a public transportation system in the form of busses for middle range and trains for long range transportation.
EVs is little more than a patch to keep the status quo on horribly designed cities.
In the Netherlands I could go everywhere (and did go everywhere) walking, or by bike. I sometimes used a train for longer distances but in the end I didn’t need a car for anything.
No, they didn’t and you pretty much just said the exact same thing they did with more words.
You do realize how long and how much money it would take to actually redesign and construct our cities to be bike/walkable? We should definitely start but it will not be done in time. We NEED EVs in the mean time. Even then it only works for cities and the majority of America is spread too far for it to work. I’m not riding my bike 20 miles to and from work when it’s -20 outside.
EVs are less than a drop in the bucket. Yes, please, for the love of God develop them and adopt them as much as possible, but the reality is that the carbon emissions problem is one where our impact as private citizens is as close to nil as it can be.
is one where our impact as private citizens is as close to nil as it can be
Individual choices aggregate into large scale consequences, and individual choices do matter at scale.
There are a TON of issues with EVs as a first line approach to emissions. Manufacturing emissions is a big one, admittedly that one will come down as infrastructure gets up to date with what we have already for vehicle manufacturing.
A much more important factor, however, is the fact that the individual’s contribution to emissions is negligible. It doesn’t really matter what we, as private citizens, do when corporations or billionaires produce so much carbon emissions. When Taylor Swift’s JET ALONE produces more carbon annually than 1000 individuals driving their car daily, it doesn’t matter one iota what kind of vehicle the average joe drives.
We need infrastructure, and we need governance. Pointing the finger at regular guys and saying you’re the problem because you drive a combustion engine is folly at best.
We need to shit down billionaires planes indeed. But we also need to remove all cars that produce co2. Their emissions are significant. It means we won’t survive if we don’t remove them.
The problem you’re touching is the one of whom will pay the price of the transition. And indeed it’d be better if rich people were paying.
When Taylor Swift’s JET ALONE produces more carbon annually than 1000 individuals driving their car daily, it doesn’t matter one iota what kind of vehicle the average joe drives.
Amazingly, you’re missing your own point. If it’s not about individuals, well, even Taylor Swifts jet by itself is a rounding error when considered in the context of global emissions.
But more importantly, it seems like you are contradicting yourself in a pretty fundamental way. You are perfectly comfortable taking Taylor Swift’s emissions and holding her responsible for those due to her belonging to a class, namely folding her into membership of “corporations/billionaires”. So Taylor, insofar as she represents the collective actions of that class, gets moral responsibility.
But individual consumers are also contributing significant emissions when conceived of as a class, which is a way of conceptualizing individual actions that, by your own Taylor Swift example, you are perfectly comfortable doing.
It doesn’t mean it’s the only thing we should strive to change, but it definitely is one of them, because the global collective emissions of people using internal combustion engines is in fact a significant input into CO2 levels, and we can reason about these things at those scales if we choose to.
I pointed out in another post that yes, please, do what you can as an individual. That means, when your car reaches its natural end, then yeah, go for an EV. The point I’m aiming for though is that if each and every person switched to EVs overnight, it’s not going to have the impact we need it to to arrest the carbon emissions problems we have.
We have megacorps that don’t have a reason to limit their production. We have countries seemingly actively working to make shit worse. EVs aren’t a magic bullet, they’re not something that we need to be quite so aggressively pursuing when there are other very real things that we can do to make an actual impact.
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There are studies after what kind of mileage an EV outperforms a regular car.
But the question is: Where do you get your electricity from? Is it regenerative energy?
the thing is that EVs are agnostic to their energy source. you could get 100% from your own home solar panel setup if you wanted to
Sure. I meant you have to pay attention and do it right. In theory you can do all kinds of things. Drive super dirty vehicles to none at all and use your bicycle and the train. But the actual CO2 emissions depend on what we all actually decide to do. A solar panel would be a excellent. Especially if you live in the south where you get plenty of sun.
A commercial scale coal power plant has a much cleaner output per kWh than your car running on gasoline (which requires excessive refining before it can be used). EVs are better but we should also look at modernizing grid plants.
Ah, Thanks. I found an old Reuters article: https://www.reuters.com/business/cop/is-your-electric-car-eco-friendly-you-thought-2021-11-10/
It’s for the EU. The USA is probably somewhere amongst the not so good countries. Wikipedia says 61% of natural gas and coal, 20% nuclear and just 18% renewable.
Seems complicated. But generally true if you have some clean energy in the mix. I think we should go competely for renewable, the sooner the better. I mean in the end neither coal nor gasoline is sustainable. We’re going to run out of both eventually. And there is the CO2. I mean the prediction is that well known oil deposits will run out in 30 years. And coal lasts us for 150 years. So we have to dig and find some more oil, but EVs and renewables are the future.
Even looking only at the healthcare costs of the exhaust-induced unhealth, you see massive economic benefit.
It’s the old star-topology vs decentralized-mesh-topology question…
It is much more efficient to have 1 giant windmill, rather-than a zillion little ones.
It is much more efficient to have electric-trams than the number of cars required to move the same number of people.
As for electric-cars vs internal-combustion-engine-cars, the relocation-of-cost from always buying gasoline, to just plugging-in at night, is something that many people have openly adored.
The Engineering Explained yt channel bluntly stated that if you’re in the city, it’s a no-brainer.
Rurally, or in the arctic, you can be screwed, however.
I’ve no idea what the equation is for how much exhaust per mile-driven is produced, between
- star-topology fuel-burning electric-grid powered cars
- mesh/distributed-topology of the same number of I.C.E. cars
but it wouldn’t surprise me if it is significantly more efficient, just due to getting the maintenance up to industrial standards.
( sloppy maintenance costs, and some companies push sloppy maintenance, not changing oil frequently enough, e.g. in order to produce engine-wear, forcing required-replacement.
Some yt mechanics call-out this practice. )
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EVs are good for the environment overall but you are not going to fix climate changing by buying more things.
Most of the criticism towards EVs comes from the idea that buying the shiny new thing is a net positive when it’s actually less harmful than buying a traditional car.
Tldr: if you are going to buy a car, buy an EV, but don’t just buy a new car just to switch to EV if you don’t need it.
Yeah that’s what people being annoyed at the push towards EVs seem to always misunderstand, too. It’s not about immediately throwing all your current stuff away. It’s the same with heat-pumps for heating: Should you immediately throw away your gas furnace you installed 2 years ago? Of course not. Should you get a heat pump if you need to replace your heating anyways? Hell yeah!
The criticisms are also that companies use slavery to acquire the materials to make EVs. And they don’t work well in the cold (see current cold snap in Canada), the lifetime of the batteries aren’t great, and we still need to destroy huge swaths of land to create cars, park/store cars, and drive cars.
EVs are only going to save the car industry. To fix it requires a redesign of cities (see Strongtowns, not justbikes, city beautiful, etc.).
That’s only because the US and other first world countries have shied away from mining rare earth elements because it is traditionally a very dirty and polluting industry. So poor and developing countries did it their way… with slavery and incredibly ecologically damaging techniques.
New techniques are being developed in the US that solve those problems. It originally wasn’t worth the effort because we had plenty of lithium to make 18V drill batteries. Since BEVs have proven to be capable and desireable over the last decade, critical material supplies just didn’t keep up and those new techniques were just a twinkle in the eye of some smart people.
If you’d like to learn more about how we can completely avoid the slavery and pollution problems related to getting lithium, take a look at the Salton Sea enhanced geothermal projects. I am personally going to invest a portion of my life savings in that company if given the opportunity.
They haven’t shied away, it is just more profitable to mine outside your borders using slave labour. The fact of it is, with planned obsolescence being the best way to ensure a steady demand of a product, and the environmental destruction required to support the manufacturing and use of EVs, they still are not a solution. They are a market solution which means it is profitable, and a lateral move at best, and a back step at worst.
If EVs help the environment that is secondary.
https://miningwatch.ca/publications/2023/9/6/contemporary-forms-slavery-and-canadian-mining-industry
Wasn’t there just recently a study that found that contrary to what was predicted, the lifetime of the batteries is actually exceeding even manufacturer expectations? As in, they’re losing capacity less than estimated?
Maybe, it sounds familiar. But if past trends are any indication, once enough of the market is dominated by EVs, there will be a lot more money to be made by lowering quality to a bare minimum.
And the infrastructure argument still stands in that case.
EVs are only going to save the car industry. To fix it requires a redesign of cities (see Strongtowns, not justbikes, city beautiful, etc.).
Nail on the head! EVs fix one problem, but the biggest problem is the idea of the personal vehicle. Most people shouldn’t have a personal vehicle, especially for people who live in medium cities or larger. There should be a sort of car share instead.
Another point is that cars, car infrastructure, and car oriented development is one of the single most wasteful ways to use land. Building smarter cities with alternative transit systems, mixed use areas, and actually using all 3 dimensions like many newer cities in China could protect so much habitat from needlessly being destroyed. There’s hardly any truly wild land left on the east coast, it’s hard to tell what things used to look like now that practically everything is covered in suburbs and strip malls.
I fully agree, cars are just not needed most of the time.
it’s actually a pretty simple to figure out carbon footprint for gas powered cars. Gasoline is just a bunch of carbon atoms loosely linked together. You add heat, you add oxygen, and the carbon molecule bonds break in favor of bonding with oxygen to form carbon dioxide/monoxide, and release energy in the process. That’s how combustion works. None of the carbon is destroyed in the process, all of the gasoline just gets converted into a gas; a greenhouse gas. Its why cars are the largest source of emissions in the US.
All of that is cut in an EV. With renewable energy sources there doesnt have to be any greenhouse emissions with EV’s.
It is cut locally at the point of use by offloading the pollution and energy generation elsewhere. EV battery production as it is currently practiced is terrible, but also very far from where people actually use them.
They are net positive for sure, but only because of the potential for using less pollution energy generation instead of burning fossil fuels to move.
Where I live eaectric is 100% wind. with that and solar many places have a significat renewable Part. Even in the worst case fossil fuels are 2 or 3 times more efficent than a car engine.
EV battery production as it is currently practiced is terrible
Nah. Fossil fuel industry want people to think it is, and most people assume it is thinking there has to be a catch. Lithium “mining” is pretty low impact compared to traditional metal mining, and theres not that much lithium per battery anyway.
Yes, that’s the point.
Gasoline is only part of the picture, however. For one, the chemical reaction by which concrete cures releases CO2, and concrete is responsible for 4-8% of emissions globally. Unless we’re going to drive those new-fangled EVs on old-fashioned dirt roads, they account for significant greenhouse gases.
