"This review shows that assuming the current level of emissions from manufacturing, the electricity mix of the production location greatly impacts the total result. This is due to the fact that the manufacturing is a large part of the life cycle, and that most of the production energy is electricity."<p>If the world's energy systems continue to be dominated by fossil fuels, then manufacturing and transporting goods will continue to generate GHG. On the other hand, if we manufacture lots of Li-ion batteries to electrify our cars and run them on solar- and wind-generated electricity (which we make more useful by incorporating Li-ion batteries for peak smoothing), then their life cycle emissions will decrease.<p>If you intend to change a system, the system will not yet be changed at the beginning of your effort. Boy you are bad at changing things!<p>If you are going to count to 10 on your fingers, when you say "1", you haven't counted very far, have you?
The interesting question is what greenhouse gas emissions will look like once transport becomes mostly electrified and electrical generation becomes mostly non-emitting.<p>It's no surprise that producing batteries in the current carbon-heavy economy emits carbon. The big benefit will come when you can start to close the loop and take advantage of these non-emitting technologies in order to build more non-emitting stuff.<p>To make a crappy analogy, imagine pushing cars in the late 19th century as a solution to the problem of hose droppings accumulating in the streets. (Which was a real problem at the time.) It might be interesting to look at how many horse droppings are produced just supplying an automobile factory and how that compares to the horse droppings saved by the automobiles they produce, but it doesn't really tell you what the world will look like when automobiles become common, and especially when they can start being used to transport materials and workers to the automobile factories.
Where in the study did it cite 8.2 years as a break even point?<p>By comparing to a gas car, you would need to calculate the CO2 cost of manufacturing an internal combustion engine, fuel pump, transmission, catalytic converter, etc<p>I think the headline you posted is quite misleading.
I wonder what's better : decentralized burning of oil in heat engine cars or centralized burning of whatever to produce electricity for electric cars...
TL'DR:<p>- this swedish government study analyses CO2 emissions from battery pack production<p>- for a Tesla S3, the emissions at purchase are 17.5 tonnes of CO2<p>- That means 8.2 years of driving to just break even with an equivalent petrol car [0]<p>- for the smaller battery Nissan Leaf, it is 5.2 tonnes of CO2 and 2.7 yrs of driving to break even<p>- vast advances in battery production are needed to have climate impact w/ electric vehicles.<p>- Or battery production close to abundant clean energy sources.<p>Additional source:
[0]: <a href="https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=https%3A%2F%2Fing.dk%2Fartikel%2Fsvensk-undersoegelse-produktion-elbilers-batterier-udleder-tonsvis-co2-200080&edit-text=" rel="nofollow">https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&pr...</a>