YouTube’s Loaded With EV Disinformation::When it comes to articles on a website like CleanTechnica, there are two kinds of articles. First, there are the … [continued]
YouTube’s Loaded With EV Disinformation::When it comes to articles on a website like CleanTechnica, there are two kinds of articles. First, there are the … [continued]
To be fair EVs only solve the tail pipe emission problem of cars and not like the 50 others. It’s would be much better to focus on public transit and pedestrian and bike infrastructure, that solves more issues and is accessible to everyone.
They solve tailpipe emissions AND all the emissions associated with mining, refining and transporting the fuel - which is enormous and usually left out of the calculations. Public transportation / walkable infrastructure is god-tier but lots of people live away from dense neighbourhoods. Ev’s are not a golden bullet solution to climate change but they’re pretty good and neither is anything else. It makes sense to attack the issue from as many angles as possible instead of getting all tunnel-vision about one particular solution.
Except it’s nowhere near that simple. Manufacturing and shipping batteries is hardly a clean process. And the impact of the fuel is dependent upon the method used to generate the electricity, and both in the US and globally fossil fuels are still used widely for that.
Plus a lot of the pollution and carbon generation is virtually identical for personal vehicles regardless of how it’s powered. You still have tires that wear, tons of plastics and fluids (even EV’s need lubrication), and of course all of the metals involved. Then of course there is road infrastructure: thousands upon thousands of miles of asphalt and concrete separating neighborhoods and habitats. Acres upon acres of impermeable pavement soaking up heat and occupying valuable space that could be used for something more productive.
EV’s are better than ICE options because they at least will get greener as the electrical grid does, but still have the same fundamental issues that all personal vehicles do. You could add in bil-diesel and hydrogen cars too. It’s saving pennies when things like better public transportation and more walkable cities saves pounds.
The pollution from EVs is far lower than ICEs even if they are powered by 100% coal - the absolute worst electricity source. This is because a large generator is inherently more efficient than lots of small ones simply due to the efficiency of scale. And most grids are far cleaner - the UK uses almost ZERO coal.
The problems that you’ve just described are real and I support your solutions to them - but they apply to the entirety of modern industrial society. Public investment should absolutely go to these things, but since people are spending their private money on EVs ( which in many cases makes economic sense AND are better on emissions ) , why push against that? They are two totally different revenue streams. Spending on one doesn’t detract from the other. A private individual can’t buy a bus. American suburbia is not going to become walkable any time soon.
Except it’s not private money. Private vehicles have been heavily subsidized for almost a century in the US. We’ve had decade after decades or tax credits, interest-free loans, and bailouts to the oil and automotive industries. Most local road maintenance is financed with debt, and that debt has started to bankrupt municipalities. Minimum parking requirements encourage sprawl and reduce the tax base by filling these municipalities with land that is economically unproductive.
This all applies to electric too. Tesla famously would not exist if not for years and years of government money propping them up and artificially lowering their prices. Plus all the incentives for building owners to add charging stations, and the billions of dollars going towards expanding EV charging infrastructure in general.
And if you want to optimize for efficiency, personal EV’s are still not even close to buses or trains. Personal vehicle ownership absolutely does NOT make economic sense for anyone except the owners and managers of the companies who profit from them.
American suburbs aren’t ever going to become walkable if everyone just keeps saying “well it’s just too hard to have nice things” and keeps throwing money at perpetuating the problem instead of using that money to get out of the hole.
EVs are a good stopgap solution for climate change while we rework our urban environments to be less car-centric.
But we have to start somewhere, and as an individual I can pester my representatives to improve public transit & infrastructure and at the same time look at EVs next time I buy a car. One doesn’t preclude the other, and EVs are still a step in the march towards carbo-neutrality. They’re not the destination, but they absolutely have a role to play in getting there.
There are also tire and brake emissions that no one talks about.
Tires sure, the vehicles all need to get lighter and smaller. EV Hummers just straight up don’t need to exist and are a danger to anyone near a road or parking lot.
Brakes however, are largely used less than in ICE vehicles. Regenerative braking turns much of the kinetic energy that would become heat and brake dust back to electricity (and some heat) instead.
Smaller vehicles will help reduce brake use even more. We need to limit heights, weights and sizes of vehicles since there’s no near term way to eliminate them. Even Texas is raising taxes base on the weight of the vehicle.
These are bad from a local air-quality perspective, but they’re not relevant to climate change.
then we should focus on creating a 15 minute city
This takes time and a lot more money. It’s something we should do in parallel, but even if we started this today, any EV sold in the next decade would be long off the road before sizable impactful progress had been made on 15min cities.
Not trying to be pedantic… But, EVs have the same essential issue, their batteries require the same mining, refining, and transportation process as any other powered vehicle. And if your electricity isn’t sourced from renewables, you’re just kicking the problem down the road.
Partially. With the exception of maybe coal, fossil fuel energy plants are more carbon efficient than an internal combustion engine can be just due to difference in scale.
The better option is to have it powered through 100% renewable, but it isn’t an automatic lost cause.
The mining only happens once. The materials in batteries are infinitely recyclable.
Oil is single use and the impacts of mining it has caused sooooooo much damage, news agencies don’t even bother covering it anymore.
While it is recyclable unfortunately no one is doing that as recycling is more expensive than mining.
Highly dependent on the grid you use to charge the car.
Not really though.
If the grid is powered completely by coal, and the government has no plans to phase out said coal and the grid is going to stay all coal for the next 30 years. Then yes, in that case EVs aren’t a great choice.
But like anything else and the “but the grid is currently not clean” arguments don’t really hold water.
Or both…?
Yeah this sort of either or mentality and that “perfect is the enemy of good” is an absurd argument.
Make things better if even a little and iterate. At least you’re moving in the right direction.
infrastructure and public transit solve the same issue but infinitely better while EVs are accessible only for people with enough disposable income and are comparably very bad at helping with climate change so I’d rather focus on a more accessible solution that helps more.
In my country people buy used cars pretty much always because of cost and used EVs aren’t really a thing I have seen. There also aren’t many charging stations and local power is mostly produced from oil shale so EVs do squat to help with anything. Public transit on the other hand is easy to advocate for because it’s widely used and most people prefer the tram over car in my city already which is like the best form of transportation over short distances.
I get that. But I think it’s extremely important to not mix climate policies with ideology. You risk alienating a very large chunk of the population, especially in the US, who are ideologically against public transportation.
We need everyone to get onboard with the green transition. Also conservatives.
I’m not in the US so I’m not advocating for anything there as I have no power to do that. Here advocating for public transit over cars is pretty simple and accessible, also not alienating to any group I’m aware of. I’m just saying EVs are not very helpful in comparison to public transit.
While public transit is great. It’s a lot more expensive to setup, and even more expensive to make convenient if the city wasn’t built with public transit in mind.
It’s just not a medium term solution for most north american cities, I do desperately hope that cities will start investing more in public transit, and encourage more dense housing, but realistically that is a 30-80 year timeframe. And that’s assuming 100s of municipal governments all get on board. The political lift here is also very large.
The reality right now in North America is, if you’re heavily advocating against electric vehicles, all you’re really doing is adding support to the oil and gas industry trying to stop the outright ban of ICE cars.
We need to do more public transit, and we need to stop using ICE vehicles.
Actually maintaining car infrastructure is quite a lot more expensive than setting up public transit. The issue is that the effects of climate change are here and will get worse faster and faster while EVs are a drop in the ocean as far as solutions are.
Sure, advocate for EVs if you want but don’t pretend they will have a meaningful effect with the environment unless you can replace every ICE vehicle globally and even then public transit would have a massively higher impact while easier and cheaper to implement.
The highest impact for climate change would be to force the 10 or so companies that produce like 70% of CO2 to not do that or just bomb their factories or something.
Which car infrastructure are you talking about in this case?
Roads and parking mostly
Roads don’t really go away with public transit, they might need less maintenance overall, but they still need to exist in some form, and roads lasting 10% longer doesn’t seem like a huge savings
Parking is mostly privately owned, so saving money on parking doesn’t really make more money available to invest in public transit.
Tram tracks last forever and don’t need roads. Also cars and trucks are responsible for like 90% of road damage, for example pedestrian roads last decades with zero maintenance. If cars and trucks got Thanos snapped the budget for road maintenance would be miniscule.
They also introduce their own share of issues like increased road wear due to weight and environmental costs from the mining of rare metals like cobalt and lithium.
With the fact that vehicle size is generally trending towards larger, at least stateside; we’re looking at a situation where those shiny electric pick up trucks that need a battery that’s four to eight times larger than a compacts or sedans battery are going to require further scaling of rare metal mining and are going to result in vehicles that blow way past the weight of anything our roads were designed to handle. Public transit is just far more sustainable. Trains can be hooked directly to a grid so no ridiculously heavy battery, buses carry the same number of people on a road that it would take… Let’s be generous… 30 cars, so even if they were using a cell larger than a pick up truck, their wear would be far lower than the 30 or so cars they could replace.
Of course the issue with America is we’ve got bigger fish to fry like boys who kiss boys and people who want to fuck without having kids.
The damage to roads from added weight is absolutely tiny, practically negligible. Even pickup trucks barely cause any damage. Semis do exponentially more damage.