"So excited for the zero-exhaust future."
Is it zero exhaust? Where do you get your energy from? Is it from a caol plant? A nuclear plant? Its more you don't see the exhaust.
Is it zero exhaust? Where do you get your energy from? Is it from a caol plant? A nuclear plant? Its more you don't see the exhaust.
In the medium/long term, the trend is towards renewable energy power.
In the short-term, these cars, whether running on renewable or dirt-power, mean that we, and our children, don't have to suck up exhaust fumes.
"Thank you" are the words you're looking for.
No. Valid argument. For the moment we are shifting emissions from one place to another. While that might change in the future, for the moment the environmental impact only happens somewhere else. This should not be forgotten, therefore those uncritical claqueurs are misplaced.
Burning gasoline in a car is far less efficient than burning coal in a huge power plant. The gasoline refining process is also power-hungry. As an added bonus, it's also possible to capture at least some of the pollution from a power plant in ways that aren't possible when you have to shrink things down to car size.
An average EV charged off a coal plant still pollutes less than an average gasoline powered car.
Check out the maps at https://www.quora.com/How-are-electric-cars-better-for-the-e...
Well not exactly, we're replacing a product that will by necessity produce polluting emissions (and not only CO2, btw) from fossil fuels, with one that is able to use whatever source might be available, from coal and nuclear to solar and wind power. In programming terms, decoupling the responsibility of energy production from that of transportation, with all the flexibility that this entails. You become free to optimize energy production as a completely isolated problem from that of the vehicles that drive you around.
No, we aren't. There are lots of renewable energy sources already on the market, and more coming online every day. You just have to be willing to use them.
In Michigan, as one example, for just one extra cent per kilowatt/hour you can have 100% renewable electricity in your home right now. No new wires, no extra setup.
Not really. The electrons all go through through the same wires regardless of where they come from. I think the extra cent does in some way incentivize renewable power, but you don't literally get 100% renewable energy.
Yes, you actually do. Consumers Energy literally generates that amount of renewable energy instead of the equivalent from Natural Gas.
You are technically correct that my home does not get the specific "renewable electrons" that the wind farm itself generated, since the grid is all interconnected. But that doesn't change the fact that the power company burned less Natural Gas that month, for every user who opted instead for renewable energy.
The total systemic carbon footprint depends on the fuel and technology used for electricity generation in the particular country or region in question.
Electric cars’ carbon emissions can vary from similar to the average gasoline car (for countries with lots of dirty coal-fired plants) to less than half those of the best hybrids vehicles (in countries with lots of renewable power generation).
Nope, still entirely invalid. Switching from combustion to electric in vehicles decouples emissions from energy consumption in transportation, which is step 1. From that point on, it's generally up to the larger players e.g. governing bodies, energy suppliers, etc. to make the switch -- but not entirely so. There's already enough funding/incentives on the table to encourage people to not just decouple emissions from transport, but to eliminate emissions entirely eg by powering via their own renewable energy setup. Prices have dropped by more than 60% in five years down to just over 3 dollars a watt, and if that trend maintains itself, we'll be under a buck fifty in the next five. The only way that trend keeps going is if everyone, large players and small, have access and incentive to keep buying and drive costs down.
But none of those trends sustain themselves if the necessary energy decoupling doesn't take place, and that's what electric cars are aiming to do in transportation.
hey, words have meanings. you didn’t invalidate the argument nor did you even argue against it. invalidating an argument would have been pointing out a structural deficiency in the logic. arguing against would be pointing out the falsity of one or more points with counterfactuals. you did neither.
it’s true that emissions are transferred from car to power plant, so that’s a valid argument (edit: because it’s logically sound, not just because it’s true). you accepted and built on that argument by saying it’s a good thing for a bunch of reasons. so your opening sentence was entirely unnecessary.
Different readers will infer different argument structures, but what I find interesting is that the assumed answers to the questions are conditioned on effort expended in becoming greener. So the questions are implicitly polarizing.
People with Tesla's who have taken steps to ensure zero emissions are more likely to respond no to each question. They are also more likely to do this, because they've invested significant resources toward producing an environment that doesn't have externalities. It isn't a random sampling. For someone who assumes no or for whom the assumption of no being possible is obvious, the implied argument is invalid. For others, it's easier to arrive at a yes to every question. Neither answer is correct though, because these questions are not able to be answered in a yes or no fashion. The actual answer is that this is conditioned on investment in green energy infrastructure. You'll notice many arguing in other comments to the effect that this is a boring argument, entirely on the basis of ongoing investment into green energy infrastructure. That doesn't happen randomly. They've thought through the implied argument structure and moved beyond it to the causally important factor on which the not quite an argument hinges.
And they call the argument boring; which it is, especially if you've ever bothered to consume any Tesla marketing since it tackles this question (spoiler alert: the efficiency gain is one of the reasons to buy a Tesla, not an argument against).
yeah, nobody tried to argue that, so i'm not sure who you're arguing with.
It was not a valid argument structure. The definition of valid is that an argument is valid if the argument structure is such that if the premises were true, the conclusion must be true. The stated conclusion of the post many parents is up is that the amount of emissions is higher. If you agree with me that this argument was not actually made, than you ought to agree with me that what was done must not be a valid argument: that conclusion is not reachable via the questions posed in the post, therefore, it is not a valid argument.
I'm a fan of syllogistic logic, so I shared your care for the definition of the word valid. Also, totally understandable to lose the context. This discussion is nested quite deeply. If I hadn't thought about the comment chain for an hour before giving my reply, I would have lost the context too.
Thanks to regenerative braking, a Tesla gets the equivalent of 120 mpg, much better than any ICE car.
In fact the energy used in refining gasoline to drive an ICE car is a given distance approximately the same as the energy to drive an electric car the same. Which means that before you've accounted for turning the ICE car on, the electric car has already arrived at its destination.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/12/24/climate/how-e...
In VT's case, they shut down a nuclear plant with no in-state replacement for the power, and now they buy 60% of their power from out of state. A lot of which comes from Hydro-Quebec, so it's often still renewable in their case.
In an ICE, every car comes with its own power plant burning gasoline to produce energy.
With electric cars, power generation is distributed among a much, much smaller amount of power plants. Upgrading those is much more expensive, but by upgrading one, you've instantly upgraded all the electric cars powered by that power plant.
Sure, many countries are still on coal. But there are other considerations as well. Cities are hotspots for emissions, and need not be. Another important point is that nitrogen byproducts form simply from the high temperatures in internal combustion engines, not just from fuel.
Nuclear still has exhaust, it just takes the form of waste heat dumped into some environment to the plant and then spent fuel, which needs to be managed somehow.
(I do think nuclear needs to be a part of the solution, but I'd hardly call it 'zero exhaust', unless you are strictly speaking carbon emissions.)
My main point, though, is that the idea these cars are 'zero emission' is only true in a localized sense. As always, there are tradeoffs that the elevator pitch tends to gloss over.
[0] https://afdc.energy.gov/vehicles/electric_emissions.html
edit: grammer
If electric cars do take over, that will cause a substantial increase of needed power, something I don't know if it can today. Right now the USA hasn't built a nuclear reactor in decades. I would love to see a more distributed power network (I.e. every home has solar and wind power).
Renewable energy production is not in line with our peak demand times (noon, evening, morning to a lesser extend).
Somehow we need to be able to save the energy produces/harvested when it's not needed and provide it to handle the demand spikes to ensure grid stability.
I can only hope we spin up more nuclear.
So even if power plants were as dirty as ICEs, it would be a win.