One of the biggest myths about EVs is busted in new study
theverge.com
theverge.com
Yes, you’re still using fossil fuels for power. But are you using the same amount of fossil fuels? Are power plants, with much fewer design constraints, the same as car engines in terms of efficiency?
And even if the situation today is not great on the first point, you can’t easily convert an ICE car into a different powertrain, but new power plants would sort of automatically convert EVs to using whatever power source.
A lot of people I've talked to rely on two main arguments.
1) Producing EVs is far more polluting than normal cars
2) They're running on dirty grids anyway
OH, and a third popular argument
3) How are we supposed to build enough EVs for everybody when considering the environmental impact of producing the batteries?
It’s not nuts, they’re just bad faith arguments.
The current average age of cars in the US is 12 yrs. How's that supposed to jump by 50% ? I understand electric engines themselves are simpler and more durable, but you still get accidents, chassis issues, steering issues, vandalism/theft, evolving fashion and tech... and you add battery issues: a smartphone's battery barely lasts 5yrs, I understand car batteries are sturdier, but ... 3.5x longer-lasting ? If they need replacing, that's a major source of extra pollution.
I'm all for cleaner cars, I actually don't own a car myself. But a study based on 18 years (+50% !) of product life isn't convincing, unless they prove cars in general and batteries in particular can last that long.
It seems like a vehicle with a 12 year life you still produce fewer emissions than a ICE vehicle.
One interesting example of how weird this can get was in the mid-2000s when various places started circulating hit pieces on Rachel Carson claiming that banning DDT had killed millions of people by letting malaria spread. This was scientifically nonsense (resistance evolves rapidly & was a major problem by the late 1950s) but it circulated enough to get mainstream coverage, especially as various right-wing outlets (Reason, Cato, CEI, Fox, etc.) started pushing it as justification for ignoring climate change. For a period, a fair number of people felt it reasonable to ask whether it might in fact have been better to allow unrestricted DDT use even though they had none of the political or financial ties motivating the original spreaders, simply because it was successfully introduced as a topic people should have an opinion on.
The campaign traced back to tobacco company lobbyists who were trying to discredit the WHO in Africa so their anti-smoking campaigns would be less effective:
https://web.archive.org/web/20080517020543/http://www.prospe...
Has there been any discussion about the impact of EVs on less wealthy people on the basis of their lifecycle cashflow due to battery replacement?
My partner got a very inexpensive used Nissan leaf a couple years back, with us full in the understanding that we would need to replace the battery in a couple years, we priced the battery out at the time and were happy with it.
Come time to replace it earlier this year we found that Nissan had substantially increased the replacement battery cost, so much so that for the price of the replacement we could get a much newer used leaf for less. Worse, the replacement was still just the original battery with limited range (about 80mi).
Fortunately, we found that with some hacks it was possible to replace the battery with a newer model year one and managed to get double the range for about the amount we originally expected to spend on the battery, so that ultimately worked out.
But I think back to the first car I bought-- which was $800 (back in the 90s, so maybe $1400 in today-dollars), and then I just had to spend incrementally on gas and maintenance. The car served me fine for many years.
Back then having to make a periodic outlay of thousands of dollars at a time would have been ruinous for me. (Whatever maintenance costs I might get surprised with wouldn't be worse than whatever it cost to just replace the whole car with another similar one.)
So even though an EV could deliver better $/mile the greater portion of the operating costs showing up as big battery replacement costs seems like it will create serious cash-flow problems for people who aren't wealthy. This might also increase their dependency on usurious-rate financing, and harm their economic mobility.
I haven't really seen any discussion of EV cash-flow lifecycle, anyone have any pointers?
Maybe things are a bit different on the lower end, but I haven't looked into it - the range on a Nissan Leaf is extremely low as you point out, and likely rules it out for many in the US regardless of $/mile calculations.
A quick internet search suggests that the cost of carbon credits to offset emissions for gas come out to $0.1 per gallon.
I'm guessing adding this in wouldn't change the result being discussed.
Due to how CA cap/trade works I can't directly figure out the marginal cost difference there, though it looks greater than the market offset rate (as you note these rates depend on caps).
Obviously I don't think that offset capture the total externality, but if a comparison is to be made some figure is needed. Even our 'green energy' figures don't capture their own substantial carbon footprint entirely.
When was the last time you were able to double the mileage of a decade-old gas car for less than its value?
In most of the world poor people can't afford cars. We should be increasing the supply of places people can live without cars, not subsidizing more cars.
I probably shouldn't have mentioned the range except it was gulling that they wanted so much and it didn't even increase the range as a side effect. (and also that we did manage to fix it, and increased the range and spent what we originally expected).
Even at the original/expected price the big lump sum cost would create cashflow problems for people who aren't wealthy. And I think this is a new consideration for EVs that doesn't exist for IC cars and should probably be a factor in our public policy.
> When was the last time you were able to double the mileage of a decade-old gas car
Range is not mileage. A standard IC car has a range many times what we're talking about here. We got the EV because we were prepared to make lifestyle affordances for the limited range.
Range is also not dependent of battery life. These batteries have substantially better life if you charge them to only 80% most of the time, which was something we found we couldn't do on the shorter range battery, but have no problem with on the longer range battery.
> In most of the world poor people can't afford cars. We should be increasing the supply of places people can live without cars
In the US today people can afford cars and we've designed our cities and economies in ways where people need them. That's the cards currently in our hand. I agree that it is good to reduce the need for cars, but that is orthogonal to the impact that we'll have on the public when we push hard into EVs.
Has there been any discussion about the impact of global warming on less wealth people?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_long_tailpipe
Plenty of hits for that search term, e.g.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/enriquedans/2018/08/19/myths-an...
If our cars run on electric, that’s one less huge thing that stops us from switching over to non-fossil fuels and it doesn’t matter if we fuel the car by solar panel, wind turbine or oil power station.
I think EVs are a brilliant thing, none the less. It’d be no good replacing the grid with clean energy whilst we still burnt dirty fuel to get to work.
They’re more efficient use of power and decoupled from the source of power. Even bigger argument for them!
Subtitle:
> Even EVs that plug into dirty grids emit fewer greenhouse gases than gas-powered cars
Less CO, CO2, nitrogen compounds, and brake dust (possibly containing asbestos!) near residential and commercial areas is a good thing.
I had been holding onto my ICE car because "well maybe it's better to keep a used car" but now I wonder if I should trade to a 2-year-old used PHEV.
Don't forget the exotic catalyst metals continuously ablating in the exhaust stream one can literally mine from the shoulders of busy freeways.
This is an important observation. With a centralized power plant you can take measures that would not be feasible/economical for individual cars.
I barely drive at all, and paying $3,000 - $6,000 to trade my perfectly-good ICE for a PHEV of the same model year is basically just buying myself a toy I'll hardly use.
Maybe I'll get lucky and move to a walkable town where I don't need a car, before the ICE starts to die on me.
Right now a lot of old coal infrastructure is going offline and being replaced with solar/wind. So the makeup of that electricity is trending towards green. Even natural gas is better than coal. But it’s a huge amount of generation to change too.
There's been criticism regarding longetivity and degradation of performance of solar panels.
And windmills have been criticized for amount of concrete (and with that CO2) that base requires, and same as for solar panels about longetivity, being hard to recycle ...
> It’s important to note that the study assumes that the vehicle was registered in 2021 and will be on the road for around 18 years.
> Study authors ended up with a range of potential emissions reductions for each region by looking at the energy mix under existing policy, as well as projections from the International Energy Agency for what the future electricity mix will look like as climate policies develop.
le sigh
A huge amount of the low price of fossil fuels comes from the tax breaks and other subsidies to producers. Imagine the benefits of halting that, and maybe subsiding clean energy instead.
https://www.imf.org/en/Topics/climate-change/energy-subsidie...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-07-22/fossil-fu...
Gasoline taxes in the USA are lower than in other industrialized countries
First, it is quite disrespectful to answer an honest query with an insult. (I am referring to "WhatAboutism.") I am aware of the corn subsidies in the US and the problems that it causes with various state and local budgets, and how it influences consumer prices for all sorts of products. However, I know very little about the tax structures and political tradeoffs for gasoline taxes. Hence, my question.
Second, the responses do not address the tradeoffs, which is what I queried about. Society is not about raw numbers; people are not machines. Just as the US has not transitioned to the metric system for what may seem like irrational reasons, a transition from gas/diesel to EV involves many complex, often irrational, factors. One of those factors -- the one I queried about -- is what happens when the transition impacts a complex system of political budget factors.
To reiterate the first point, immediately responding with an insult is not only disrespectful, but also discourages others from asking honest questions. Educating is great, but hurling insults is not.
First of all, as a premise, to me the only practical question of interest is, "which technology is better for the long term health of ecosystems". Greenhouse emissions are one critical factor among many that need to be considered when asking this question.
Given that, how does one accurately compare the relative environmental impact of greenhouse emissions versus that of heavy metals, plastics and other synthetic substances that result from the mass production and distribution of batteries and charging stations? I have never seen a convincing explanation of how this comparison could be done in a principled, empirical way.
Even putting aside the issue of being able to compare across pollutant types, are we able to confidently forecast the potential energy costs associated with the future remediation, reclamation, and/or storage of these substances?
Given that many of these materials and production biproducts (cadmium, mercury, lithium processing biproducts, PCBs, etc.) have catastrophic health effects on both humans and animals, how do we account for the energy costs of attempting to fix, manage or avoid those potential health and long-term ecosystem consequences?
If there is an agreed upon scale for comparing the environmental risk of plastic and heavy metal waste to that of emissions, where can I read about it? How was it determined, by which organizations, and what are the standards? Is there a "time preference" included as a parameter in the risk model? Do we account for worst case potential effects of bioaccumulation? and so on...
tldr: great news for EVs, greenhouse emissions are a serious issue, but how can we be certain that we have the right relative risk model?
You're just being rude. Maybe you're having a bad day. I'll give you the chance to apologize now, in front of everyone.