This whole argument always struck me as silly, for two reasons.<p>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?<p>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.
It's nuts how widespread these ideas about EVs are, even amongst people where I honestly would have expected something more.<p>A lot of people I've talked to rely on two main arguments.<p>1) Producing EVs is far more polluting than normal cars<p>2) They're running on dirty grids anyway<p>OH, and a third popular argument<p>3) How are we supposed to build enough EVs for everybody when considering the environmental impact of producing the batteries?
> proposed phasing out internal combustion engines by 2035.<p>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?<p>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.<p>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).<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.)<p>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.<p>I haven't really seen any discussion of EV cash-flow lifecycle, anyone have any pointers?
AKA the "long tailpipe" fallacy<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_long_tailpipe" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_long_tailpipe</a><p>Plenty of hits for that search term, e.g.<p><a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/enriquedans/2018/08/19/myths-and-shibboleths-about-electric-vehicles-the-long-tailpipe-theory/?sh=6982e8ca7f26" rel="nofollow">https://www.forbes.com/sites/enriquedans/2018/08/19/myths-an...</a>
To be honest, I didn’t think the big benefit of electric vehicles was in fact going to be a massive direct reduction of greenhouse gases, but rather the decoupling of vehicles from a fuel source that emits greenhouse gases.<p>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 actually think power grids are adapting faster than vehical type is changing. You still see large trends towards large trucks(speaking for North America). But Fords E150 fits right into that along with having 220v and replacing a generator, they will do well with contractors and construction crews, I think.<p>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.
I'm wondering if there's similar type of analysis for renewable electricity sources like solar panels and windmills?<p>There's been criticism regarding longetivity and degradation of performance of solar panels.<p>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 ...
Two big dubious assumptions that this conclusion rests upon:<p>> 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.<p>> 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.<p><i>le sigh</i>
A not insignificant amount of the price of gasoline and diesel goes to taxes. [1] What analyses have been done to address the economic impact (regarding taxes) of transitioning from gas/diesel to EV?<p>[1] <a href="https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=10&t=10" rel="nofollow">https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=10&t=10</a>
Yah, i'd rather take my bike, buses and train. I do transport my kite board with public transportation, and yeah, it IS annoying, but i'm pretty sure i'm not destroying my carbon budget. A car is fine as rental, a few day in a year. Ill take EV cars now.
This is interesting, but I have many questions.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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?<p>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?<p>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...<p>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?