Transportation can be carbon neutral. So you can remove that from equation. At least there are many ways people are trying to reduce transportation carbon emissions to as close to zero as possible.
At this point, I don't think anyone that makes a heavy duty truck doesn't sell an EV version.
Volvo started selling an EV concrete mixer this year.
https://www.teslarati.com/daimler-freightliner-ecascadia-pen...
And we'll ignore carbon to manufacture the truck and create and maintain the roads, warehouses, and other transport infrastructure.
The per-mile CO2 emissions for my EV are definitely less than an equivalent ICE even if it was powered 100% by combined cycle natural gas. But its powered by like 30%+ renewable which have overall lifetime emissions far less than even a CCNG plant. Sure, the EV had higher emissions to be built but it's probably already reached its break-even point.
And that's ignoring the benefits to local air quality. Commercial trucks have absolutely terrible levels of local emissions which are massively reduced. Far better to have the emissions happen at a centralized CCNG plant where they have a good opportunity for scrubbing and being in an overall less impactful area.
This honestly feels like I slipped into a separate timeline when I wasn't watching, last I heard of the topic Nikola was a pump and dump scam, everyone seemed sceptical about battery mass lowering payload to useless levels and range being crap, these things requiring beyond megawatt chargers to get reasonable charging times, you name it. That's somehow all gotten solved in the past few years?! I mean I'm all for it, just seems almost impossible to believe.
I don't imagine all loads are perfectly suited for EV semis, I imagine we'll continue to have a mix of different technologies for a while. Companies will do what makes economic sense.
Transportation uses energy, therefore transportation is not carbon neutral.
e.g. Transportation using EVs that get all of their charging from a solar installation.
You can't just say "look, I am carbon neutral because I consider that the carbon that was extracted to make my electricity counts for somebody else", that's just naive. Either you live in a carbon neutral world, or you don't.
Fact is, we are not even remotely close to living in a carbon neutral world, and renewable energy does not remotely promise to replace fossil fuels. Hence the more energy you use, the bigger your carbon footprint. We need to use less energy, that's all. There is no green energy.
First, we are living a mass extinction, and that's not because of climate change. Species disappear essentially because of habitat loss, pollution, pesticides, deforestation, etc. The mass extinction is due to how we live with all that cheap energy we have. Finding an infinite clean energy would not change that. Hence we need to use less energy.
Second, fossil fuels are screwing up the climate, which will add to the biodiversity problem we already have. But this is just getting started. The thing is that we don't have a solution to replace fossil fuels at scale. And if we did, that would still leave us in a mass extinction. Hence we need to use less energy.
Technology is not the solution, it's mostly the problem. We need to do less with less. Urgently.