China's Electric Cars Are Actually Pretty Dirty

I found the title to be misleading. How clean electric cars are, as the article discusses, is determined by the sources and processes used to generate electricity. It's a national energy infrastructure problem, much bigger than electric cars alone.

I don't quite understand the logic either. Yes, electric cars may be powered by coal, but the coal plants were there anyway. If they kept with combustion engines instead of shifting, they'd have the same coal plants but additionally CO2 emissions from the combustion engines.

The argument would only make sense if electric cars were so inefficient that they caused more CO2 to be burned by power generation than a combustion engine would cause by burning fuel.

Also the point stated by others that electric cars can later reduce "their" emissions should power generation be switched to renewables. In contrast, the emissions of combustion engines are fixed.

The article is focused on the "now" part of the equation instead of the future. "Now" quite a lot of places in Europe and US rely on renewable sources for production lowering their "total carbon output".

This might be resolved as things go forward. That said article is kind of clickbait. The actual point is hidden towards the end - "both the manufacturing of the batteries and the operation of the vehicle produce more pollution than they would elsewhere."

That said recycling figures, though they are for steel and not batteries are concerning. Its "renewable" only if it can be reused.