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?
Here’s what the Union of Concerned Scientists has to say about electric vehicles. In short, they’re a win.
https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/electric-vehicles-are-cleaner
No product is good for the environment.
But an EV is a hell of a lot better than an ICE.
People who say EVs do nothing just want to complain for the sake of complaining a lot of the time. EVs aren’t ideal, but they are better and more crucially they shift the consumer thinking away from ICE cars and towards alternatives.
But it’s also really dumb to go the other way and focus so much on EVs, isn’t it? Why replace our cars with slightly-different cars, build a whole new charging infrastructure for them, and then phase them out, say, another 40-50 years down the line? It’s not just tailpipe CO2 emissions at issue, it’s poor land-use causing a major housing crisis, it’s the cost of cars skyrocketing out of financial reach of many people, it’s habitat destruction causing populations of wild animals to crash and many to go extinct, it’s particulate matter from tires causing human maladies like dementia and cardiovascular disease, it’s an epidemic of social isolation and loneliness, it’s traffic violence killing over a million people a year, it’s sedentary lifestyles leading to diabetes and cardiovascular problems, it’s CO2 emissions from manufacturing cars and building the infrastructure that they need, it’s the large-scale use of fresh water for manufacturing, it’s the loss of autonomy for children, it’s municipalities going broke trying to maintain car-centric infrastructure, it’s the burden on people in poverty needing to buy and maintain a car, etc. etc.
I mean, the ultimate solution is to have cities and towns that don’t force us to get in the car to drive everywhere, for every little thing, every day. There’s little meaningful difference between transitioning cities away from ICE cars and transitioning cities away from electric cars. We could just start now, and maybe Millennials might be able to see some benefit before they retire. EVs are fine as a stop-gap measure while we work on that, but I see them being treated as the main event.
I don’t think we are focusing completely on EVs, they’re just a very hot topic for some reason. There’s plenty of high speed rail projects, pedestrianisation and other non car related innovations coming through
EVs do something - they’re better than ICE. But we’re wasting a lot of money on them that could go towards better public transit. We desperately need less cars and the EV vs ICE debate can distract from that - I think that’s why you see so much of a pushback against EVs.
Hybrids are great, but straight evs only work if you have two vehicles and use the EV to commute around locally in a city. EVs lose around 1.5 to 2% of range per year and lose 30% of their range during cold weather. Then if the battery fails in a long range EV you’re looking at a $10,000 to $25,000 bill to replace it, making all those vehicles you can see now that are 20 years old and still road worthy a thing of the past. If the US actually swapped to mostly EV it would destroy anyone who has to rely on buying older vehicles to get by.
EV also in its current state is no good for anyone in apartments or renting or places that can’t easily plug in their vehicles from home. A for lightning for instance takes like 4 days to charge on a 120v outlet and while it advertises a range of 300 miles, it’s cold weather mileage is about 210 and stopping at a fast charge station to quick charge up to 90% will cost you $50. No better and often worse on prices than an ice. In this sense it only works out well if you have a house with a garage for your vehicle and an added bonus if you have solar panels. Right now though, that’s not most of the population at all.
I have a different experience with EVs.
I’ve got an EV with 265mi of range and an ICE car. I almost never use the ICE car, except for 2 reasons: is a 7-seater and sometimes I need both cars at the same time. In 100% of all cases, no matter how short or long the drive is, no matter the temperature outside (I live in an area where we get all the way to -40 and multiple months below 32F/0C.
I’ve never had any problem with that. I mostly charge home, this is where I agree that it’s a lot more convenient if you have a driveway, but all new and recent constructions are required to come with EV plugs in apartment complexes, etc. More and more lvl2 chargers are being installed throughout the city. Spent 5 days at my sister in law’s in the city while we lost electricity at home, I simply charged at work during the week and one time I went to charge at the corner of the street (<2min walk) for a few hours. It was actually a lot easier than I thought it would be.The range decrease is no real issue during winter, my day starts with 100% of range everyday and in long road trips I will stop more frequently, but only for about 15-20 min max every few hours and will cost about 10$/charge. Super simple.
I thought I’d wanted to keep an ICE car as the second one, but already I see no point in it.
The only concern I think is valid is degradation in the long run. But best EV cars have very little degradation (as you mentioned), but also we technology improves, the batteries get better and better as well as cheaper, so I believe the batteries in 20 years will be incredible compared to today’s which is already super impressive. Also the infrastructure will be a lot better. Replacing a battery won’t cost as much.
2 years with an EV now and I can’t see many reasons to use ICE cars. Only left are heavy lifters (pickup trucks who tow big trailers everyday in winter, that’s a 75% range reduction). But this will also improve.
There is enough money to fund both EVs and public transit. No need to cut money from one to give to the other. We should take this money from the funding for military or religious purposes.
In terms of Carbon, they produce about one third of the damage which an equivalent internal combustion engine car would.
There’s a lot of factors that go into the final figures, like the specifics of the vehicle and the source of the energy used to charge it.
It’s a bit like vaping instead of smoking. Neither are good for you but one is clearly worse than the other.
Does that third also take into account any differences in manufacturing them? In other words, the entire lifecycle.
That’s the best figure I’ve seen for the total lifetime impact.
It depends on a like for like comparison. A really massive and inefficient EV will not stack up so well against a small efficient ICE, for example.
There’s just too much variation for any one figure to be both simple and accurate
First priority is to get rid of cars in general. Try to use bicycles and public transportation. If you don’t need a car to get to work, consider a car share service to replace your private car/private parking space.
EVs probably have around 1/10th the lifetime emissions of a gas car, which is still really significant.
I’d go broke without a car. I live close to work but shop in the suburbs. The price of groceries at the “bodegas” are shockingly offensive.
consider the cost of the car in those estimates. Cars cost over $10k a year to own and maintain in the US. Local corner stores encourage local business and walkable neighborhoods, whereas supermarket chains depend on government subsidies to exist.
My car does not cost $10k/y. $833/m? I would probably have to spend that much on inflated city prices. Not to mention the crazy inconvenience that public transportation would create when venturing outside the city—like the beach, where I enjoy going frequently.
I’d need to be able to get places in a reasonable amount of time, not waste my day on a slow bus system that takes an hour or more.
I’m not trying to support oil, but we need better options than “take the bus” which aren’t going to happen, sadly.
Edit:
I did the math on the time loss. It would take 4 hours round trip to visit my best friend. We hang out twice per week. Driving takes about 50 minutes round trip.
Also, I stay there until 11 or midnight. The busses don’t run.
The goal is to take the car as little as possible. It sounds like visiting the beach and visiting your friend isn’t possible without a car, and that’s not something that you need to worry about. If there are car sharing services available in your city, like zipcar. You can still do that without committing to the $10k/year cost of owning a private car.
Let’s say you use a car 3 times a week, twice to visit friends, and once to go to the beach. Zipcar offers a $11/hour rate, and we’ll assume you spend 4 hours on each trip. That comes out to $132/week, or $6870/year, saving you over $3k/year over owning a car. You’d no longer have to worry about maintenance or car insurance. This would also be much better for the environment, since you can use a shared car instead of dedicating a car to yourself. Any week where you don’t go to the beach, or your friend visits you, would be pure savings for you, too.
This video is a really good video about why car-sharing is so useful:
Source for $10k/year number:
https://newsroom.aaa.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/2021-YDC-Fact-Sheet-FINAL-8-9-21.pdf
I understand. I think your math is wrong though. Also, it’s not $11 anymore. Also, the closest zip car to me is a 31 minute walk…. Which I could use, but… that’s an hour both ways and an hour is walking on the street in the snow or rain.
The earth is already toast. Even if we all stopped driving, humanity pollutes like crazy. Nothing we do matters anymore because we are already past the tipping point. Science can back that up. We are far warmer than we predicted. We will probably hit +6 by 2030 at this rate.
It’s basically “refuse, reduce, reuse, recycle” except for cars it’s “refuse, cycle, public transport, car pool”
EVs probably have around 1/10th the lifetime emissions of a gas car
Do you have a source for that because that’s radically better than any number I’ve heard. Most analyses I’ve seen have been more like 40-60%.
Doesn’t this hugely depend on the power generation in your area?
No source, but I remember hearing that EVs earn back the cost of their manufacturing through their zero emissions within about a year. I extrapolated based on that with the assumption that a car will last about 10 years. I live in Sweden where our electricity is carbon free/ carbon neutral.
What you heard was probably about tail-pipe emissions which are very low compared to ICEs indeed but they only represent a small part of an EV’s lifetime emissions.
In the EU, EVs reduce lifetime emissions by about 30%. Certainly not nothing but not anywhere close to solving our transport emissions problem.
Removed by mod
Exhaust and noise are still a problem. It won’t do much on a climate level, but even if we manage to reduce car usage having the remaining cars be electric is useful. Both noise pollution and particulate pollution have negative effects on human health.
Maybe it’s just my bubble but most climate activists I see are primarily pushing for renewable electricity generation, and consumption reduction across the board in all aspects of life. They are usually also against cars generally but it’s a secondary subject.
It will actually have a huge impact on noise imho. I live near a intersection between 2 freeways, and lots of REALLY loud cars out there due to stupidly sized engines, or modified mufflers… The majority of the noise isn’t the movement of the car imho.
Also, it does have an impact on the climate too (it’s been researched multiple times, and even with current tech, the overall emissions are substantially lower). Obviously Public Transport and Bicycles and such is better, but this is still a huge step in the right direction.
In fact, if technologies like Lithium-Air are developed, it will have an even bigger impact (because you can effectively reduce the battery weight 15x with the same range). Because you can also reduce the size of the car too, and the weight, you increase the efficiency further too. Sodium ion batteries being released this year already have an impact.
If they want more people to switch to EVs specifically, they absolutely need to try to make some changes if they can.
Chargers: In a world where many people are living in old apartment buildings and condos, people are going to need public chargers. I don’t just mean enough for 20 people. If we want a big societal switch, we need to be able to assure people that they won’t encounter what happened in Texas recently. 60 chargers is still pretty rough if your city has half a million people in it.
Cost: MANY people can only afford used vehicles. This is not only because of the up-front cost. Parts for repairs can become a massive factor when deciding what type of car to buy. Even if you can get a used car for 6K, you might not go for it if you know that certain important repairs will cost you up to 20K.
Design: There are concerns for a lot of people with things being too screen-based. Some people like knobs that you can change without having to look away from the road. How many functions will be stuck behind a subscription? Will an update brick your car? Is it ok to tow normally, or will it sometimes require a special flatbed that most people can’t afford? Do we have the battery fire thing under full control yet?
If every single car eventually becomes too expensive, driving will either become a “caste” thing, or people will put things together at home that might be even worse for the environment. Shoddy DIY repairs can also count for this.
Reducing car use to a car driving caste is clearly an objective of the fuck cars movement. They want cars gone, if then public transit improves, that’s great but even if it doesn’t happen, at least the cars are gone.
Not if there are going to be hundreds of millions of them, no.
Why
We need less cars.
Fewer (sorry I had to) but got it that makes sense. I just wasn’t entirely clear on the thrust of your comment.
If I were a fewer man I’d object to that correction.
Lol well played. Honestly, I shouldn’t have made the correction, there’s no way to do that without coming across like an asshole.
Because ultimately the problem with cars is how many of them there are, not what kind of engine they use. If there were only ever, say, 50,000 cars in the entire world we might not even notice the environmental costs. But Google tells me that there are over a billion.
Put another way, a diesel bus carrying 50 people is better for the environment than those 50 people each driving a separate EV car. Not because the bus has less engine emissions, but because it’s a more efficient use of materials and energy.
Yes, ideally 0 cars is better. Thats not realistic though
Ahhh ok I can get behind that. The intention of the comment was just a little unclear to me.
In the USA, out of every economic sector, transportation creates the most GHG emissions [EPA1], and the majority of that is from passenger vehicles [EPA2]. Significant portions of the industrial sector’s emissions come from refining automotive fuel [EPA3]. US total GHG emissions are down around 20% from their peak in 2005, but almost all of that has come from the electrical power sector [CBO1][CBO2]. Vehicular pollution has dramatic direct health impact on top of GHG emissions [HSPH].
Transport emissions are the long pole in the tent for the US. Solutions to that will be the focal point of US climate strategy for the next decade. Barring the demolition of the majority of US housing to re-establish walkability, our two best solutions are EVs and public transit.
EVs cut lifecycle emissions by about 55-60%. [UCS][ANL][MIT][ICCT][BNEF][CB][MIT][IEA]
Public transit cuts lifecycle emissions by… about 55-60%. [IEA][AFDC][USDOT]
Neither is a magic bullet. Both get their asses kicked by bicyles (and to a lesser degree, microcars). Both get better with increased passengers per vehicle. Both can be fueled with renewable energy for additional reduction. Both can be manufactured with renewable energy for additional reduction. Both take surprisingly equivalent amounts of raw resources and energy. EVs need batteries that are carbon-intensive under current practices, but rail needs large quantities of steel which is equally carbon-intensive under current practices.
There are a ton of factors I can barely touch on here, so here’s a rapid-fire overview. Public transit offers unique advantages from an urbanist perspective and the liveability of cities [ST], but that’s objectively different from sustainability. The US has such low average ridership/occupancy that our busses have more emissions per passenger mile than our cars [AFDC1][AFDC2], and that was before the pandemic – it’s even worse now [NCBI]. Low ridership can be partly attributed to the incompatibility of American suburbs with public transit – which could be a major roadblock because 2/3rds of Americans own detatched homes [FRED], representing $52t [PRN] in middle-class wealth that they will likely defend with voting power. Climate solutions will need to maneuver around this voting bloc. I personally think individual EVs and intercity rail are complementary technologies – the more cheap (short-ranged) EVs are out there, the more people will lean on public transit for long trips. Heavy rail gets way better efficiency per vehicle mile than light rail or commuter rail and I have no clue why [APTA][ORNL], but I’m not as impressed by light rail as I expected to be. Since public transit and personal transport leverage different raw resources and face different challenges to adoption, we will achieve the most rapid decarbonization if we do both at the same time.
TL;DR
This is a huge, huge question, and anything short of a dissertation would fail to answer it objectively. My best answer is that the most effective solutions to climate change are diverse, engaging multiple technologies in parallel. EVs are a piece of the puzzle, but not a one-size-fits-all solution.
The best solution is 0 cars anywhere.
A more realistic solution, is to replace planet-murdering cars with planet-kicking cars.The math that I have seen on when an EV becomes better for the planet compared to an ICE is kinda all over the place, mostly due to how the power is generated.
Where I live, with a high amount of coal, buying a used ICE vehicle makes more sense than buying a new EV. If we drove more than just our weekly grocery trip, it might make more sense.
A more realistic solution, is to replace planet-murdering cars with planet-kicking cars.
What a sad truth. Maybe we can add “and fewer of them”.
Its all about efficiencies even on a coal fired grid an EV produces less emissions a prius.
As long as you would drive enough so that difference can offset the fabrication of the EV. Most people will hit this number in less than five years.
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/when-do-electric-vehicles-become-cleaner-than-gasoline-cars-2021-06-29/We drive about 350km a year on a high-coal grid, so we won’t drive enough for a new EV to be better for the environment than getting a used car that was headed for disposal.
I know people who drive more per day than my household drives per year, so I know that we are going to be a fairly rare case.
Regulated Emissions and Energy Use in Technologies (GREET) model
Wasn’t that the fun model where they ignored the emissions of producing the vehicle?
GREET is broken into 2 models; GREET1 which is just about the use of the vehicle, and GREET2 which is just about the manufacturing of the vehicle.
Sounds like you need a used EV.
The best solution is a reasonable number of cars and still having commercial vehicles like we have today… ideally those vehicles will be electric and most people will walk/bike/public transit to work.
Framing it as all or nothing is pretty unhelpful.
Here is a source with lots of detail on how carbon emissions compare: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/dec/23/do-electric-cars-really-produce-fewer-carbon-emissions-than-petrol-or-diesel-vehicles
The tl;dr is that EVs have lower lifetime emissions. If the relevant grids use low-carbon sources then emissions are far lower. (But not as low as bicycles.)
“Pretty much nothing” is an exaggeration, but they aren’t wrong in stating that it isn’t the ideal solution. You’ve pobably already seen them talk about how shitty the Lithium mines are for the environment, and if you’re still getting your electricity from, like, coal plants or other environmentally unsustainable places, well, you’re not emitting CEO2, but the plant that outputs the electricity that fuels the car is now outputting more. It’s still better than nothing, though
My personal issue with EVs isn’t so much that they aren’t perfectly ecofriendly, but that the biggest pushers of EVs are still capitalists with an industry to make money. The best we have in terms of solutions is better civil engineering for walkable cities and a robust and efficient public transport system. 5 EV buses is better than 50 EV cars. Thing is, companies making EV cars still want to make money. They have no incentive to actually push for public transport (Some like Tesla seem actively hostile towards the idea), as they would make more money on 50 electric cars than 5 electric buses. Considering how much power companies have in politics, especially in the US (which is from where I’m speaking), things don’t look good
I’m certain that EVs are less of an issue in, like, the Netherlands, where public transport is better, and people can just bike everywhere. Again, though, I am speaking as an ignorant American, seeing how things are playing out here. Either way, EVs are generally preferable to ICE cars, but they are a far-cry from the actual solution they are being marketed as
It is all about people who either are arguing in bad faith, or are focused on perfection.
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?
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.
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.
