Comment by mrpopo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrpopo | Hacker News Reader

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> Any time somebody already planned to replace their car and chooses electric over ICE is a win for the planet.

This is sadly not really true, especially in China, the biggest electric vehicle market, where most of the electricity is coal-generated. You end up with a car requiring more energy (e.g. more fossil fuels) to produce AND to run.

The situation is not very pretty in the USA yet either, but if you are hopeful in the next decade that the USA will decarbonate their electricity, then maybe you will get a positive return on GHG emissions over your car lifetime.

Electric cars as a means to reduce GHG emissions todaly only make real sense in specific countries with a low-emissions electricity profile, such as France and northern Europe (Sweden etc).

Not having the byproduct waste of energy production pumped into populated areas is a _massive_ gain(regardless of whether there is overall increase in usage of GHG).

Waste from coal powered electricity isn't emitted by every consumer in populated areas. It's emitted in a plant which

a) generally has more advanced particular matter capture technology &

b) to reduce emission further, only the place emitting the emissions needs to be upgraded(not the vehicle of every end consumer of that energy) &

c) is more readily replaceable by a cleaner source with minimal disruption.

But electricity has the advantage of being easy to convert to. Cars last on average 20 years. If all your cars are electric but your electricity is dirty, you can legislate that electricity needs to be cleaner, affecting only a few players, rather than having to convince millions of car owner.

Look at what happened in France when the government changed its mind on which carburant is cleaner and tried to force millions of consumer via taxes.

Also, keep in mind that China is trying to get cleaner electricity as shown by the giant damns they are building.

Even in the US, it really depends where you live.

In Northern California, you are looking at 0 to 30% of electricity coming from fossil fuels, of which is almost entirely natural gas. An EV in NorCal is almost certainly polluting a lot less than an ICE car.

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