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Comment by xchaotic | Hacker News Reader

What TFA doesn't mention is where the actual pollution happens - at the factories producing batteries with dangerous chemical such as lithium, and where the electricity is produced - coal power stations, or if renewables are used, where the renewables are manufactured - for example rare earth minerals such as gallium needed for solar panels being mined in conflict zones with no environment regulation. Yes sometimes the pollution is many levels removed, but in the end Earth is a closed system and as far as I can tell, at least for now, an electric car supply chain produces more pollution over its lifespan than a regular car. It's just that the pollution doesn't happen inside the owners bubble, which the bioweapon experiment so ironically exemplifies.

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The difference is that electricity can be produced any number of ways, not just by burning coal, and if some amazing eco-friendly battery alternative appears at some point in the future, existing EVs can easily be retrofitted with them. On the other hand, a fossil fuel vehicle bought today will still be a fossil fuel vehicle 100 years from now, regardless of technological advancements.

No, EVs aren't perfect and may not be for years to come, but they offer flexibility to make up for that. Sitting and waiting for the perfect replacement for ICEs is fruitless; alternatives must first be embraced if they're to ever develop sufficiently.

Even if we were to fuel EVs from oil power plants, those power plants would be more efficient than ICEs (enough to offset transmission/storage losses) and can have much better filtration systems.

Yes, I always shrug reading convoluted arguments like that. In Norway all of the grid power comes from hydro, so the (sizeable by now) fleet of EVs does have zero carbon footprint without any fine print.

I agree with your sentiment. However, wouldn't a person pitching that argument then counter that Norway built their hydro grid in part using oil exports, ie that Norway is responsible for enabling a lot of global pollution per capita in order to pay for that grid (and the on-going vast per capita oil exports necessary to continue supporting it)? What's the counter to that premise?

Norway also exports and imports energy to Europe to exploit the potential for energy price arbitrage. In effect, any country that is connected to an international energy grid has partial responsibility for bringing down global CO2 emissions.

I don't see how this is an argument against electrical vehicles. In fact electric vehicles should increase the incentive to reduce the carbon emissions of electricity production since now at least improvements there will have a material effect on the carbon efficiency of transportation.

(Norway built out most of its energy grid before the oil industry got started, by the way -- but we do maintain out grid partly using tax money from the oil sector, just like all parts of our public sector).

No, the power generation in Norway, like pretty much elsewhere, is paid for by the power consumers, not oil revenues; it also predates discovery of oil deposits in the North Sea.

Well, is your argument that, had Norway not exported oil, the actual use today would be lower?

Would countries use less energy if not for Norway's oil exports?

This has been debunked over and over - here is one source covering co2 emissions http://www.ucsusa.org/clean-vehicles/electric-vehicles/life-...

Lithium-battery factories in the US (where Tesla is building its new megafactory) don't produce any air pollution or any significant pollution at all.

Coal is certainly polluting, but "where the renewables are manufactured" doesn't make any sense — where are sunlight, rainfall, and wind "manufactured"?

Gallium is not a mineral at all or a rare-earth element, most solar panels don't contain either gallium or rare-earth elements.

Rare-earth elements are almost entirely mined in China, except for a recently reopened mine in the US, which are not usually considered "conflict zones".

Gallium is nearly half recycled, but as for mining, it's mostly mined in China, Germany, Kazakhstan, and the Ukraine, of which only Ukraine is a "conflict zone" — although Nazarbayev is guilty of many human-rights abuses, there is no real insurgency there. Germany has some of the most stringent "environment regulation" in the world. Gallium primary production is actually mostly a product of aluminum production.

Earth is not a closed system: we're mostly concerned about energy here, and Earth constantly receives energy from the Sun at a rate of ten thousand times world marketed energy consumption, almost all of which is either reflected or reradiated into space as heat.

As far as I can tell, you just put a bunch of words into your comment with no concern whatsoever as to what they meant or whether any of them were true. Maybe you meant to satirize ignorant pseudo-environmentalism, but environmental damage is a real problem that needs careful discussion. Posting paragraphs of lies, as you did here, is a bad thing to do, because it effectively reduces the intelligence of the people who read your comments — it confuses them to the point that they are less able to make effective decisions.

Please don't post things like this any more.

The main contributor to green house gas emissions from electric cars is from their use, not production. If you want to reduce your carbon footprint electric cars is still a good choice [1].

The LCA literature shows the main contributor to GHG emissions of EVs is the use, and the most important factors in estimating those emissions are the electricity mix, vehicle lifetime, and driver behavior. Battery manufacturing and battery end of life are still being developed and researched, and manufacturing batteries is a large contributor to the manufacturing emissions of EVs.[1]

[1] http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40518-015-0033-x

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