EVs still have a ton of embodied carbon in their production. Creating those batteries is not easy, we still haven't figured out how to remove carbon emission from the steel production process, and at the end of the day we can't beat climate change with out reducing our overall resource consumption substantially.
I looked up the numbers and did the math a few years ago, and best case scenario - an EV fueled entirely by non-emitting sources - is that an EV cuts emissions by 85% in a full lifecycle analysis.
And that's actually a pretty rare case. Most people getting EVs right now are charging them on grids that are still mostly powered by fossil fuels. Which complicates matters even further. Where I live, if I were to use an EV charged on the grid, I would actually be _increasing_ my emissions over a reasonably fuel efficient gas powered ICE.
For most people, car use doesn't have to be necessary. With intelligent design of our cities and a shift in culture, most people could get around primarily by foot, on bike, or by mass transit and forgo car ownership. So drastically reducing car ownership needs to be the bigger part of the equation. Those who absolutely still need to own a car can go EV. But we can't hit our carbon targets by simply replacing all the ICE vehicles with EVs.
Right but a problem that exists in 100 places is far easier to solve than a problem that exists in 283,000,000 places (in the case of ICE vehicles in the US).
+1 to cities needing to be less car friendly regardless of how they're manufactured, but the reality is that large parts of the world (especially the US), there's just huge, huge, huge amounts of investment in a (yes, broken) model of urban planning that requires cars. Undoing that will be really hard and I don't think we can afford to wait – we should take every solution we can find, even if it's partial.
Yeah, I agree we can't afford to wait for the urban planning model to change (and that changing it is going to require massive investments) so in the mean time we need to be encouraging people who can to go EV. But we need to do that alongside education about the urban planning model and the need to eventually get off cars entirely.
We can't go around saying "Everyone go EV to solve climate change!" because it's not a solution, it's an iterative step to a mid-point towards a carbon neutral society.
What we need to be saying is "Walk, bike, or ride the bus if you can. If you can't, look at your community and figure out why you can't, then work to change your community so you can. And in the mean time, drive an EV if you can afford it, or a fuel efficent used ICE if you can't."
> Where I live, if I were to use an EV charged on the grid, I would actually be _increasing_ my emissions over a reasonably fuel efficient gas powered ICE.
Given how efficient even something like a coal power plant is compared to vehicle engine (with a transmission, and stopping and going at traffic lights every so often), this is incredibly unlikely bordering on impossible in realistic conditions.
From the US Department of Energy. You can get emissions numbers per Kw for each location. You can get miles per KW for most EVs. From that you can calculate emissions per mile for an EV. Which is a number you can get for most standard gas engines. Then you can compare.
But actually, I probably should have said "highly efficient ICE or hybrid" rather than reasonably efficient. It's been a while since I ran those numbers and the piece of info my brain stored was "Don't get an EV until I can charge it from solar". Either way, my overall point stands - EVs don't actually lead to the major emissions cuts advertised in most real world scenarios.
I just did the math on my EV history (~3.5mi/kWh) and compared to the EPA emissions for my region, Texas. That came out to ~0.122kg/mi of CO2 emissions. If I'm reading this other EIA chart, there's 8.1kg of CO2 per gallon of finished motor gasoline. So for a 30mpg car, that's .27kg/mi of CO2 emissions. So I would need to get on average at least 66mpg to match the CO2 emissions from my EV in Texas.
How many crossovers do you see on the market get >66mpg?
Also, this is entirely ignoring the transmission factors, this is purely a gallon of gas on its own being burned compared to the production at the plant. In reality you'd need to add a significant amount more emissions to the gas as there's tons of trucks having to drive that fuel to local fuel stations all over the place, meanwhile transmission of the electrical energy is pretty darn efficient in comparison.
I looked up the numbers and did the math a few years ago, and best case scenario - an EV fueled entirely by non-emitting sources - is that an EV cuts emissions by 85% in a full lifecycle analysis.
And that's actually a pretty rare case. Most people getting EVs right now are charging them on grids that are still mostly powered by fossil fuels. Which complicates matters even further. Where I live, if I were to use an EV charged on the grid, I would actually be _increasing_ my emissions over a reasonably fuel efficient gas powered ICE.
For most people, car use doesn't have to be necessary. With intelligent design of our cities and a shift in culture, most people could get around primarily by foot, on bike, or by mass transit and forgo car ownership. So drastically reducing car ownership needs to be the bigger part of the equation. Those who absolutely still need to own a car can go EV. But we can't hit our carbon targets by simply replacing all the ICE vehicles with EVs.