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They're cleaner, no doubt. But are they clean enough that a 1-1 replacement could avert massive ecological destruction à la global warming? No they are not.
They are a bridge towards lowering emissions but they cannot get us to zero or negative emissions. For as long as they are in use cars will simply remain "part of the problem". Acutely, personal vehicles used for quotidian trips are a large part of the contribution towards carbon emissions and can easily be phased out with improved urban and residential design patterns, public/collective transport infrastructure, and low-tech solutions like bikes, draft animals, etc .
Just stop it. You’re not going to convince (at least in America) people in the suburbs and rural areas to give up their lifestyle. It’s just not going to happen. People are not going to ride a scooter 15 miles to and from the grocery store in freezing weather.
You say that as if 15 miles to the grocery store is an unavoidable fact of life. Grocery stores can and should be a lot closer to where people live. My grocery store (in Amsterdam) is a 5 minute walk from my home.
The big problem is that everything in the US has been designed around extreme car dependency, and more than that: extreme gas consumption. Because American cars are also much larger and heavier than they reasonably should be. Much about how American life seems to have been explicitly designed to maximise oil use and oil profits, even to the point where it stops making any kind of sense.
So if there's a reason this can't change, then it's because oil companies hold far too much power over American politics and over the way people think.
See also the recent conspiracy protests against "15 minute cities". The only meaningful reason I can think of why anyone would oppose that, is because it's going to hurt oil profits.
We just have to get better at City Planning in the States. It’s difficult, but not that difficult. Almost all of Western Europe has figured this out (along with health care and education). Dense cities with mixed zoning and good public transit are so much more enjoyable and efficient than the urban hellscapes we create in the USA. I have no delusions we will make any changes, but the changes can be made.
> It’s just not going to happen.
You say this as though we have any choice. It will happen; we can either do it ourselves, or we can wait until environmental collapse does it for us.
(I know which way I'd have preferred to go, but I seem to have been outvoted...)
But two or three miles, no biggie. Bundle up and hit the road.
Everyone will have to pile into cities so they can ride a scooter to and from the grocery store in freezing weather. They simply will have to adjust or die.
Don't people in suburbs have winter coats?
> But are they clean enough [....] ? No they are not.
1) Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
2) Accept that people are not going to stop using cars, and work with what you have, unless you have a mysterious power making you able to compel mankind to change their lifestyle, or you are able to invent something they will actually want more than cars.
> Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
This is what I meant by "a bridge." I don't think you really understand the point of my comment.
> unless you have a mysterious power making you able to compel mankind to change their lifestyle
I know you are being facetious but I ironically, yes there is a mysterious power that compels mankind to change their lifestyle. That's how we got here; it's not like the enclosure and industrialization was a grassroots effort or an accidental happenstance. Its called the industrial revolution for a reason. The truth is it was directed by a privileged minority with a lot of power. It was not done democratically. It certainly wasn't privileged consumers saying, "hey I want to give up generational farming of inherited land to live in an urban slum and work in textile mill". Their hands were forced by policy and in some cases violence. Societies are reticent and often reactionary. When that reluctance endangers the progress of the governing interests (capital here for all intents and purposes) suddenly "mysterious power"s become less fun to talk about.
But hey you don't have to listen to me; it also doesn't matter what we think anyways because like I'm saying its not like there is much personal choice in this shift -- unless youre in the really upper echelons, I guess then you can do whatever you want.
But don't let good be the enemy of better either.
I think it's important to realize that "People will always use cars" and "We can and should reduce car usage" are not contradictory. We need to both offer and incentivize alternatives, find ways to reduce car dependency, etc and make sure that remaining car usage is as clean as possible. (This applies to both the car usage that we can get rid of in the mid- to long-term but haven't yet and the "residual" car usage that we can't seem to get rid of.)
IMO the BEV is a far more flexible platform for transporation than the ICE.
Batteries are still made as cells. Need one for a car? Put 10,000 together. Need one for an e-bike? Put 10-20 together. Need one for a scooter? Put 5-10 together.
Cell economics are generally the same.
Furthermore, you can make the battery in an ebike or scooter removable and recharge it at work or at a friend's house. No gasoline stink. Or you can make the scooter/blade foldable and haul it in. Again, no gasoline stink.
For urban transport, BEV scaling provides the opportunity to affordably enable these energy efficient modes better than stinky dirty two stroke crap.
I think what can also happen is that you buy a city car with a 100 mile range, but if you need to go far, you rent an "extension battery", maybe a very energy efficient trailer, or even an ICE range extender. Or maybe it just attaches to the back of the vehicle, or if the battery is swappable, you swap in a rentable long range one.
And remember, don't concentrate on current battery economics. Between higher density sodium ion + LFP, sulfur chemistries, solid state, and maybe lithium air batteries, densities will go up by 2-3x in the next ten years. That means less materials, lighter vehicles / battery "rocket equation" for more range from a lighter battery with the same power storage, etc.
Zero or negative emissions is perfect being the enemy of bad. BEVs are an enormous opportunity to mitigate massive amounts of emissions AND be a better product that is cheaper for people.
There does not exist a practical political path to zero emissions right now, as much as it pains me to say so.
What we do need (and there is some political opportunity to do so) is massive funding of BEV transporation at all levels / form factors. There should be a 300-500$ price credit (phasing out 10% per year) for scooters and ebikes to get them prevalent. Make them stupid cheap to adopt.
Fund the hell out of battery development. Double down on all the national lab work on batteries (that lithium air paper recently was nice, we should see stuff like that out of every single national lab).
It will help us getting to a place where we don't pump up stuff from below ground which ultimately ends up as CO2 in the atmosphere. If we stopped pumping oil out of the ground, we would have left other CO2 sources which are from cyclical sources, and which we can deal with other ways.
> They're cleaner, no doubt. But are they clean enough that a 1-1 replacement could avert massive ecological destruction à la global warming? No they are not.
This is the main reason why I sold my Tesla and went back to my horse and buggy.
The real issue is that Americans are too rich and pampered.
If you reduce disposable income massively in line with the rest of the world, then they won't be able to afford private vehicles and the change will come naturally.
You could provide even rough numbers to back up your claims. For example, personal cars being a "large part" of carbon emissions. A single container ship outputs more emissions than tens of millions of cars. What percentage of carbon emissions are actually associated with cars compared to the other behemoth polluters in the world?
In theory yes it can.
If all energy for making ev comes from renewable.
The ideal solution is always going to be mass transit. But if that isn't possible, then the next best idea would be fuel cell cars. They are also a type of EV and therefore zero emissions, but unlikely battery cars they do not have the massive mining requirements.
I read through one of the papers and a key assumption that the energy mix powering the grid will more halve its co2 output over the next 10 years and cites Germany as the baseline trend. This is a crazy optimistic assumption to make
I don’t think that year figure changing really matters though.
Let’s say Germany halves its CO2 output in 25 years instead. What does that mean? Does it mean we should all stop buying EVs now and just buy combustion engine vehicles for eternity? Nope.
The biggest environmental concern always cited for EVs is the source of electricity, which has a decent chance of being renewable, going forward. Fossil fuel ICEs have zero chance. They will always be dirty.
The second biggest concern is mining for the lithium used in EVs, which hopefully soon will be a much smaller concern as Sodium batteries become the norm. Again, there is a risk we could still be mining lithium in 20 years, but it's a risk rather than a certainty.
It might mean the switch to EVs are insufficient if it bakes in unrealistic expectations of future benefits. The cost and subsidies to EVs might be better spent elsewhere. I’m not making a comment on pro/against EVs only that the cited paper makes an assumption I believe to be overly optimistic
Germany halving its CO2 output would be commendable, but likely not enough to offset even a moderate increase of CO2 production by China, India, and the growing economies of Africa and Asia. They just can't afford switching to electric processes unless solar / wind plus storage, or nuclear, is a clearly and significantly cheaper option. (Which it is not yet.)
I agree, and it will stay true for a long time.
Two issues, the first one small and improving : the smelting is energy expensive and does polute a lot. We're improving fast though, now that material scientific research got more credits.
The big one: as we use more and more minerals, it's harder to find ore as easely accessible or as concentrated. If in the next decade we manage to build tidal/solar mining rigs, I'll be more optimistic about the future.
There's also recycling. It's possible to recycle the lithium in batteries for example but not possible to recycle all of the oil that is pulled out of the ground to produce gasoline.
In my state, more than two thirds of the electricity is produced by natural gas fired power plants. Does this claim hold up in that case?
Definitely. Natural gas burns cleaner than coal, and even the dirtiest coal power plant is still cleaner than an internal combustion engine. Internal combustion engines are extremely inefficient. Even felt the tailpipe of a car with a running engine? (Don't!) It's hot. That's all wasted energy.
Most of the energy used by a car goes into producing wasted heat (power plants are much better at winning back useful energy from that heat). Most of the rest of the energy used by a car goes into moving the weight of the car itself. Only a tiny part goes into moving the actual occupants of the car. That's why even electric cars are still wasteful: they're still too big and heavy and moving their own weight around. Bikes or mass transit are far more efficient. But EVs are still more efficient than ICE vehicles, even if the energy they use is dirty.
Larger stationary engines are typically far more efficient than the engines that we find in our cars. Natgas is up to 55% efficient, where cars are 35% at the top-end. On top of that, the fuel you use in your car has to be transported to your gas station by another car. Natgas and coal are transported over pipes and rails.
Even if an EV is powered by 100% coal, it still only produces the same CO2 as a 50mpg ICEV. Natural gas produces significantly less CO2 than coal. Most locations have a mix of power sources that are at partially or majority renewable.
An EV gets cleaner as the grid it charges from gets cleaner over time. A petroleum powered vehicle remains dirty for its entire lifetime. EVs allow you to electrify mobility and transition to renewables in parallel.
(Global renewables investment is hovering around $1.5T/year)
Yes natural gas has less Co2 emissions per BTU than oil and natural gas can be burned very efficiently in a power plant at nearly 60% vs say 40% for diesel or 30% for gasoline in an ICE.
Natural gas burned at scale is incredibly efficient. It's one of the reasons Obama was such a big proponent - that and we have an ocean of it in Texas.
People have forgotten that you used to have to power wash buildings yearly in the Northeast from all the coal pollution. Natgas is NOT perfect, but it's about as good as fossil fuels can be - no tailings, no ash piles, easy to transport via pipeline.
I still think Offshore Wind is going to get us to the finish line though. It acts a lot more like baseload generation than onshore.
Isn't the usual answer to this something about how those power plants have to adhere to pollution control regulations as well as there being regenerative braking?
Don't forget air pollution as a positive factor for evs
This article and information cited doesn't seem realistic to me. I don't have time to do a deep dive into their calculations but the claim that EV's are 10x more energy efficient over their lifetime just doesn't hold water to me or is based on invalid assumptions, e.g. all EV electricity comes from a "clean power source" such as nuclear power, wind, hydroelectric. Excess power for more EV's largely does not come from clean power sources.
Most "excess power" for EV's comes from fossil fuel -- that is, given our current power infrastructure and supply of clean energy, when add power demand from more EV's... that supply is mostly coming from natural gas (maybe some coal too, yikes).
EV energy lifecycle is roughly: (0) recover/frack/process natural gas out of ground and transport to power station (1) Burn natural gas to make electrical energy, (2) transmit electricity to charging station... which has transmission loss, (3) charge EV... which has loss, (4) discharge energy from battery to motors...which has loss, (5) convert electrical power to mechanical power to the wheels in the motor... which has loss.
Internal combustion engine (ICE) energy lifecycle is: (0) recover crude oil and refine crude to fuel, transport to gas station (1) fill car... very low energy loss, much lower than charge dishcarge of EV's (2) burn fuel in ICE
Thermodynamic efficiency of burning natural gas is about 45-55% depending upon plant design. There are transmission and charge/discharge/conversion losses associated with getting the electricity to EV's and using it.
Burning petrol fuels in an ICE is about 30-35% efficient in modern engines. There are higher carbon associated with recovering and processing crude oil relative to natural gas.
When discussing fossil fuel power plants: natural gas plants are about 2x to 2.5x more carbon efficient than coal or other fossil fuel plants on mass of CO2 per kWh generated.
I'm not going to run detailed numbers but more than 10x carbon operating efficiency for EV's over ICE's is high. I think the operational efficiency benefit is only 2-3x, which is still a lot. I also think these studies are probably under reporting energy requirements for EV battery production because so much of the supply chain is in the developing world or China and it is hard to get accurate data.
That all being said, EV's are a big part of our future and part of the solution toward building a more energy efficient world.
the US doesn't have the energy infrastructure to have everyone jump on EVs anytime soon
US drives 3.4T vehicle-miles per year[1]. At 3mi/kWh (which is low for an EV), that needs 1133TWh total electricity per year. Last year the US grid produced 4108TWh[2]. So to accommodate all that extra need, the production needs to grow by about 27%. Not all cars are replaced right away, so this can be a growth of a few % per year.
But everyone jumping to EV would increase pressure to upgrade infrastructure, which is probably a good thing.
Some US states (Texas!) don't even have the energy infrastructure to keep all houses warm and lit during winter. But that's something that a more responsible government could invest in. Don't complain that it can't be done, but vote for a government that will do it.
for this article to reference the EPA is laughable.
The EPA is run by former lobbyists of the world’s major polluters and producers of pesticides/herbicides/fungicides.
"Climate change" scam is run by corrupted politicians who do scaremongering over decades just because people have short memory.
We need listen to rational arguments and statistically verifiable concepts if we are seeking the truth instead of focusing on personalities.
I was more optimistic about EVs until I learned about the amount of CO2 produced by electricity generation in countris like Germany.
nuclear energy has been largely phased down for political reasons and CO2 emissions are still on a level where EVs might not be much cleaner in comparison, see https://app.electricitymaps.com/map
Have you considered that replacing a billion cars will take a couple decades, and it’s really not important that the grid is ready at the beginning.
I’ve been having this discussion for a decade. The “do you know where the electricity comes from” group gets a little quieter every year.
What’s really critical is getting the EV market jumpstarted.
Controlling the emissions at several thousand power plants vs a billion cars is orders of magnitude easier.
Your map shows that today Germany got about 35% of its power from coal, 15% from natgas and 50% from zero-carbon sources (nuclear & wind primarily).
A coal powered EV has roughly equivalent emissions to a gasoline car, and a natgas powered EV has roughly 2/3 the emissions of a gasoline car.
So a German EV would have roughly 0.35 + 0.15x2/3 + 0.5x0 = 0.45 the emissions of an EV.
And you cherry picked one of the higher polluting countries.
The EV will be better even if the energy mix was 100% brown coal? Just takes longer to offset the climate effects of making the battery.
It’s just so wildly more efficient in operation.
Yes, but it is still a better situation to be in because then when you do start to moving toward renewables (which seems almost inevitable with the lowering costs of solar and batteries (battery improvements largely coming from EV development(?))) it will have more impact.
EV's also have some other side benefits, like less noise (noise pollution is a real thing) and less air pollution (tires and asphalt are also a large part of car related air pollution).
That is just one part of the same legacy technology problem. As part of moving away from fossil fuels in general, we want to electrify transport and transform the grid to renewables or greener alternatives to fossil fuels.
Not everywhere is doing well at the second part of the problem, but Germany's grid is already at 30% renewables, and has time to transform toward renewables while we attempt to electrify the vehicles.
You can also shortcut the process if you own a house, by putting solar on your roof and charging from that. Places like California and South Australia have immense deployments of rooftop solar generation that have rocketed the states toward their renewables goals. South Australia generates over 70% of it's power from renewables. It went from 1% renewable to 70%+ in just 15 years.