Yves here. We’re doubling up on environment-related posts today to make up for having neglected this area a bit of late. This offering crystalizes an issue I have not articulated myself, and I realize also contributes to my annoyance with electric cars as climate change hopium. We need far more radical reductions in energy and materials use to have any hope of escaping worst outcome that pretty much all Green New Deal schemes contemplate. The Green New Deal is at its core, “Let’s use techno-fixes, better shopping, and some mild activity dis-incentives to allow us to preserve the way we do business now.”
Aside from the near-necessity of cars for dispersed single family homes, another climate-costly addiction, the auto industry is a massive source of economic activity, both directly and through procurement and sales networks (and in the US, financing!). As proof, look at how the US is fighting tooth and nail to prevent the entry of cheap Chinese EVs, which would eat considerably into the sale of US EVs and conventional cars. It’s too late now, but if we had more lead time, imagine the economic displacement caused by a serious and well funded effort to improve public transportation (even with that more forceful measure not being adequate either). Horrors!
Opening comment by Bill Haskell at Angry Bear. Original text by Emily Atkin and published at Heated
Contrasting EVs to gas powered vehicles. And will EVs be as bad or worst that gasoline powered vehicles. And some promoters of EVs go in the opposite direction over promoting EVs or what the article calls green washing EVS.
~~~~~~~~
Financially motivated EV misinformation comes from both sides of the aisle (the lane?). Industries that see EVs as a threat exaggerate their harms in a bid to get you to hate EVs. And industries profiting from EVs greenwash their benefits in a bid to get you to love EVs.
Most often, you can recognize EV misinformation by its attempts to promote black and white thinking. It’ll either be “Electric cars are bad and gas cars are good” or “Electric cars are good and gas cars are bad.”
But the truth is, when it comes to the environment, there really is no such thing as a “good” car. The real question is: how bad are these cars in relation to one another? This is where most EV misinformation lies.
Misleading: It’s more environmentally harmful to make an EV than a gas car.
This statement, by itself, is technically true. ”To run, EVs require six times the mineral input, by weight, of conventional vehicles, excluding steel and aluminum,” the Washington Post reported in 2023.
That’s because each EV has a 900-pound battery block containing roughly 353 pounds of crucial materials or metals including cobalt, nickel, lithium, manganese, aluminum and copper. Gas cars don’t have that, so it’s less emissions-intensive to create a gas car than an electric car.
What’s misleading about the statement is not the statement itself, but the context in which gas car proponents say it. Usually, they’re saying it to convince you that electric cars are way worse than gas cars for the environment. And that’s just frankly illogical, because the vast majority of pollution that comes from cars does not come from making the car. It comes from driving the car.
If you’re only buying a car to simply look at it and never drive it, then absolutely, it would be way more environmentally-friendly to buy a gas-powered car.
But if you do, in fact, intend to actually drive the car you buy, then an EV is going to be the less environmentally harmful choice—even if coal is part of your local electricity mix.
That’s not according to me, either. That’s according to a peer-reviewed study funded by the Ford Motor Company, a company that makes most of its profits from gas-powered vehicles.
That study, conducted by the University of Michigan, found that EVs become less emissions-intensive than gas cars after “1.4 to 1.5 years for sedans, 1.6 to 1.9 years for S.U.V.s and about 1.6 years for pickup trucks, based on the average number of vehicle miles traveled in the United States.”
Another study, conducted by Ricardo PLC for the nonprofit Fuels Institute, similarly found that driving a gas car is far worse for the planet than EVs, even when coal is part of the electricity mix.
Over 200,000 miles of driving, it found, a gas car emits 66 tons of greenhouse gas emissions, while an EV using the current average U.S. electricity mix emits 39 tons. In states that already have low-carbon electricity, an EV becomes less emissions-intensive than a gas car within 19,000 miles.
As time goes on, experts expect that it will take less and less driving time for EVs to become cleaner than gas cars. That’s not only because the electricity mix is expected to become cleaner; but also because the majority of battery materials used to make the cars are likely to be recycled.
Recycling and reusing the minerals used to make EV batteries “will drastically cut down the amount of wasted material compared with fossil fuels which disappear invisibly but harmfully to heat the planet,” the Guardian noted in December. The story cited data that suggests that “after recycling, battery material waste over an electric car’s life will be about the size of a football, or 30kg, by 2030.”
Of course, we all know how trustworthy corporations have been about recycling. But the point stands: anyone who says the creation of EVs makes them environmentally worse than gas-powered vehicles is either misinformed or trying to mislead you.
Myth: Because gas-powered cars are worse for the environment, we don’t need to worry about the harms of EVs.
Gas-powered cars are worse for the environment than EVs. But this does not mean EVs are good for the environment. Anyone telling you that is either misinformed or trying to mislead you.
In a recent investigation of this same debate, the Guardian found that gas vehicles were worse for the planet than electric vehicles. But it also ended on this important note: “the green credentials of electric cars [do not] absolve the buyers of battery minerals of responsibility for abuses in the supply chain.”
As Washington Post climate advice columnist Michael J. Coren wrote last year:
Mining minerals is never a clean affair. Cobalt from Congo, lithium and graphite from China, nickel from Indonesia and Russia, and battery supply chains that run through Xinjiang, in the Uyghur region where forced labor has been rampant: All of these have immediate problems, which The Washington Post explored in our “Clean Cars, Hidden Toll” series. Guinea, home to the world’s largest bauxite reserves for aluminum, yields misery for local communities. Nickel refiners in Indonesia are adopting a risky technology. Mineworkers in South Africa, the world’s largest producer of manganese, face neurological ills.
“The transition to low-carbon fuels is not a magic bullet with no negative outcome,” Sergey Paltsev, a senior research scientist at MIT, told Cohen. “There is no free lunch. But it’s much less harmful than if we stay with fossil fuels. That’s the conclusion.”
Misleading: The U.S. electric grid can’t handle widespread EV adoption.
HEATED reader Oscar asked us to research the widespread claim that a large increase in electric vehicle adoption would place massive stress on the U.S. electric grid.
Oscar also wanted to know how much current U.S. infrastructure would need to be updated to accommodate a massive increase in EV adoption.
For a really detailed answer to both questions, I recommend reading this 2022 article in Scientific American, “Why Electric Vehicles Won’t Break the Grid.” But if you don’t have time, here’s the gist in one quote:
“We can’t just sit back and say, ‘OK, the grid can handle it; it’ll take care of itself,’” Baldwin added. “It will take attention, and it will take some adjustments to how things have been done in the past, but all in all, I’m optimistic that this is something that we can do.”
A big conclusion I took from the article is how much gas car proponents are exaggerating the strain on the grid from EVs:
In California—the national leader in electric cars with more than 1 million plug-in vehicles—EV charging currently accounts for less than 1 percent of the grid’s total load during peak hours. In 2030, when the number of EVs in California is expected to surpass 5 million, charging is projected to account for less than 5 percent of that load, said Buckley, who described it as a “small amount” of added demand.
But as people continue to buy EVs—and they are, across the world—it’s true that utilities will need to make adjustments to accommodate increases in demand. But experts say it’s not the huge deal gas car proponents are making it out to be.
“We’re talking about a pretty gradual transition over the course of the next few decades,” said Ryan Gallentine, transportation policy director at Advanced Energy Economy. “It’s well within the utilities’ ability to add that kind of capacity.” …
That success will hinge on utilities being proactive in planning for millions of additional EVs on the roads in the coming decades. It will also take some adjustments, experts said. EV owners and utilities must take advantage of up-and-coming charging technologies that will save the grid from unnecessary stress.
More EV Claims, Untangled
The Guardian’s “EV mythbusters” series, written by financial journalist Jasper Jolly, has been incredibly helpful in furthering my own understanding of EV misinformation.
Here are some of the questions Jolly tackles, and key quotes from his findings if you don’t feel like reading the whole thing:
- Do electric cars pose a greater fire risk than petrol or diesel vehicles?
Key quote: “‘All the data shows that EVs are just much, much less likely to set on fire than their petrol equivalent,’ said Colin Walker, the head of transport at the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit thinktank.” However: “There is a definite puzzle for firefighters, as battery fires require more water to put out, can burn almost three times hotter, and are more likely to reignite, according to EV FireSafe.” - Is it right to be worried about getting stranded in an electric car? Key quote: “Banishing range anxiety is tricky because it relies on electric vehicles’ use patterns as well as the charging network. It is not yet possible to say that every journey is well served … Most authorities are clear, however, that range anxiety should not be a problem for most people.”
- Are electric cars too heavy for roads, bridges and car parks?
Key quote: “Some car park owners may be affected, and if electric trucks are heavier when they become widespread that could add to road maintenance costs.But almost all of the direct costs will be borne by infrastructure maintenance budgets. The ECIU’s Walker said concerns about extra weight for EVs were simply “massively overstated”. However, he added that carmakers do have a responsibility to produce smaller electric cars, after years of focusing on the most profitable SUVs.” - Do electric cars have an air pollution problem?
Key quote: “It is certainly the case that ever heavier cars almost certainly produce more [tire] particulates. Electric cars are – for now – heavier still than equivalents. But even so, [tire] pollution appears roughly comparable between petrol, diesel and electric cars.” - Are electric cars too expensive to tempt motorists away from petrol and diesel vehicles?
Key quote: “For mostly urban drivers in cities such as Los Angeles, it “makes a lot of sense” financially but it is another calculation for Texas highway drivers, Shivers said. “It’s going to be very person-specific because everybody’s case is different,” he added. - Will hydrogen overtake batteries in the race for zero-emission cars? Key quote: “The answer is no,” said Liebreich, without a moment’s hesitation. Carmakers betting on a large share for hydrogen are “just wrong”, and heading for an expensive disappointment, he added.
EV mythbusters, The Guardian, Jasper Jolly
74 comments
Comments are closed.
Let’s assume for a moment that the environment is not an issue. Then the question becomes what type of auto is a better deal.
According to the US Dept of Energy, at least, “All-electric vehicles typically require less maintenance than conventional vehicles because:
The battery, motor, and associated electronics require little to no regular maintenance.
There are fewer fluids, such as engine oil, that require regular maintenance.
Brake wear is significantly reduced due to regenerative braking.
There are far fewer moving parts relative to a conventional fuel engine.”
https://afdc.energy.gov/vehicles/electric-maintenance#:~:text=All-electric vehicles typically require,oil, that require regular maintenance
If the Chinese are able to make affordable EVs and maintenance costs on EVs prove to be significantly reduced, I’d say that by blocking Chinese imports, the so-called free market is being abandoned in order to screw the American consumer.
The other key issue with EV’s is scalability. The most popular EV’s aren’t cars – they are electric bikes, scooters, etc., or even the increasingly popular quatricycles like the Citroen Ami. They are also increasingly safe and efficient minibuses, delivery vehicles trains and even high speed buses. As you say, they are inherently much simpler and once things scale up they will inevitably be cheaper (its not just the Chinese who are making very cheap and robust EV cars). But that itself will be a problem if we make too many of them.
I would NEVER ride a scooter of any sort, sorry. I would like not to have any more metal parts in me.
You have to add to that that EVs are harder on tires and wear them out about 20% faster than a regular car does. And that means a larger problem as to what to do with all those tires-
https://www.caliber.com/services/auto-care/tires/why-do-electric-vehicle-tires-wear-out-so-quickly
EV tires are bigger because the cars are heavier. Cost more!
One neglected factor influencing tyre wear is the regen torque.
Pretending the environment is not an issue, then the solution to the problem of Chinese electric cars being so much better and also so much lower priced than American electric cars that letting them sell here will exterminate the American car industry and further reverse-develop America is not to ban the sale of Chinese cars here.
It is to force the Chinese car companies to build car factories and parts factories here and make their cars here, the way the Germans and Japanese did several decades ago. That way some Americans will at least retain jobs and thingmaking knowledge, and China gets to repatriate all the profits to China and we get to buy Chinese cars made-in-America, so that we will still have just enough money to be able to buy Chinese cars at all in the long run.
I am skeptical of this article. The loss of electrical power over transmission lines is about 40 percent; electrical power is much less efficient than gas power. The life of an EV is only 5 years before battery replacement is needed–about 15 grand.
From my reading, EVs are more of a means of controlling peoples’ movement and elite NGO-Activist-Grift.
You are incorrect about EV battery life.
https://blog.evbox.com/ev-battery-longevity
I take umbrage at having to waste my scarce time, which is much better spent on new posts, debunking reader fabrications. If you are going to make claims like that, you need to provide a link that substantiates it, otherwise your comment will not be approved. If you make repeated false claims, you will be blacklisted.
One word: trains.
That train has sailed with Elon Musk’s Hyperloop.
Given the genius that he is though, he’ll come up with the next best environmentally friendly option: teleportation!!! You might arrive at your destination in pieces or missing several pieces, but I’ve heard that it uses less electricity than Bitcoin or those AI models!!
Elon Musk invented tunnels not so long ago, and must be one step away from putting electric trains in them and inventing proper subway.
https://www.boringcompany.com/tunnels
Yes, the US used to have streetcars in many major cities. Used to ride them in Pittsburgh before the auto industry lobbied to have them all retired. I would like to live somewhere where do not require a car. Open to good suggestions.
LA had the Big Red Cars, which flourished until the year of my birth, and then went away.
The closest thing I ever used that approximated it was the streetcars in Melbourne, which were excellent.
Toronto, Montreal, London UK, Paris, Moscow. Shanghai, etc., etc.. Maybe New York if you are in the USA.
If we entice the private industry with a PPP (not that I care for PPP because the Private industry will take all the profits) then perhaps we’ll get what we want in hi speed trains,
Cars are the problem – or at least one of them. They have destroyed our cities and societies.
The problem is that we can’t easily reverse a century of urban engineering based around the car. Its not just a matter of density, its deeply structural – even very high density Chinese or Korean cities with often excellent public transport are also simultaneously auto dependent because of the manner they’ve allocated land use. In Japan, with its dense urban areas, strict traffic controls and outstanding railway system, you still have a very substantive aging population dependent on cars (and they are mostly responsible for the surprisingly high death rate on Japans roads). It is, as Yves would say, a feature, not a bug. Pretty much every country with auto industry aspirations (which is most countries), have succumbed to the temptation to facilitate rather than control car usage.
Reversing this is not without its own costs – providing public transport to low density exurbs would be very expensive, require a lot of concrete, steel and lithium in its own right, and have its own issues with space allocation. High speed rail looks great until someone decides the most efficient alignment is 50 yards from your house.
So for now, we really are stuck with cars, or at least, a substantive proportion of the worlds population is stuck with them. EV’s are not the solution, but they are part of the solution – not just because they are very much less polluting (all those studies trying to indicate otherwise are almost all deliberately misleading). But they also strengthen the grid (car batteries in the future will be a very important element in load balancing), and they open up the way for more varied forms of urban and near-urban rural transport, such as mixing public transport with electric powered bikes, scooters, and maybe eventually, some forms of self driving public vehicles.
Meh … weight alone has huge dramas mate e.g everything before was built on X curb weight I.e. parking lots et al.
Have you considered increased flooding and how that might change things …
Economics of the past will not save us, will be a tomb stone.
According to Wikipedia the Japanese road death rate is one of the best in the world. How is this surprisingly high?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate
It depends on how you count road deaths (there are more than one ‘standard’ metric – some look at deaths by population levels, others at mileage, or car ownership, etc). Japan road death rates are low per head of population, but around the same as the safer European countries – its around the same (2-3 deaths per 1,000,000) per person as the UK or Ireland, despite being perceived as a much less car dependent society (if you rank as deaths per car journey, it comes out significantly higher). This surprises many analysts because traffic speeds are almost universally very slow in Japan, speeding is not tolerated and is rare, and traffic calming is the norm, not an exception.
The usual explanation given by traffic safety experts is that this is due to the very high number of elderly drivers, plus very high pedestrian/cyclist activity in urban fringe areas. Having once or twice been nearly taken out while cycling by half blind octogenarians in kei cars, I can confirm this is possibly true. But there are also other issues, like the utter refusal of Japanese drivers to give way to other road users if they perceive they would be breaking the law by doing so (by, for example, crossing the central median).
Investing in networks of trains and trams would help and they would have to be subsidized to make them cheaper than using a car whether it was gas powered or an EV. But the car & tire corporations would fight this tooth and nail and would seek to destroy them like they did successfully a century ago. But this whole model breaks down when you are talking about the countryside where homes and infrastructure are widely dispersed. Here EVs are not a serious solution. So like you say it will be a matter of a mix and match solutuon for transport.
~But the car & tire corporations would fight this tooth and nail and would seek to destroy them like they did successfully a century ago.
General Motors streetcar conspiracy [April 9, 1947 Sherman anti-trust indictments against GM, Firestone Tire, Standard Oil et. al. and 1949 convictions*]
GM was fined $5,000, I’m sure they maintained that they didn’t do it and wouldn’t do it again.
*They were acquitted of conspiracy charges.
Though it was before my time, I have had many older friends in Detroit recount that the city had a robust streetcar system and before the expressways went in during the ’50s was quite a viable and vital place. But the developers saw gold in the farmlands around it, the cars and the expressways punched their tickets. The 142 square miles for two million inhabitants was abandoned for two thousand square miles for four million. Now getting about is a huge headache with a car, and a nightmare without.
I’m with Yves that we simply have to do with less. But we’ve wrecked the place.
China went for automobiles, as it tore down its bike lanes and invested late in mass rapid transit. Beijing only had two lines before the 2008 Olympics. Now it has the world’s longest system, and is still expanding.
China is using electric vehicles to leapfrog the rest of the world’s auto industry, much like it used 5G wireless and now LFP batteries to make industry dominance.
As for what can be done in the US, I think a first step is making it safe and convenient for electric bikes and golf carts (see Netherlands, Finland, and Florida). I would like to bike the 7 miles to my work, but the roads are not safe, lacking shoulders or sidewalks, much less separated bike lanes.
It will be difficult to make e-biking safer. The rider is essentially un-protected, more than likely travelling at 20+ MPH, and not paying attention to other travelers. Head-on collisions, with other bikers, at 20MPH will be near fatal (speed kills).
While e-bikers are the most vulnerable on the roadway, it is the pedestrian/cyclist who has most to fear from the e-bike on the bike path.
In 10 years there will be kids who are not strong enough to pedal a standard bicycle.
A quote from the Penguin Book of the Bicycle: “Ultimately, the bicycle’s most important role was to create the idea of private rather than public transport for everyone…”
Now I think the the bicycle is the most civilized mode of transport for many people in urban to suburban areas; but cars and trucks will still be needed for rural areas and people who cannot ride. Enforcement of traffic laws on everyone is one thing many (most) jurisdictions need to improve.
The horse had already created the idea of private transportation for everyone who could afford a horse. Or a horse-drawn carriage.
Note that cars were first referred to as “horseless carriages”.
Easy to make e-biking safer. Limit the speed. In the US, we have regulations on e-bike classes. It’s the same for any vehicle, especially cars, SUVs, light trucks. Speed limits need to be lower across the board.
In my corner of Europe, for it to be an ebike it needs to a) have a max motor assisted velocity of 15 mph (25 km/h) and b) only run the motor while pedaling. Otherwise it is an electric scooter and runs under different laws. So all e-bikes sold here are are limited thusly. By the software, so hacking or importing from other juridictions are possible in order to break the law, but most people don’t do that.
Of cour se you can bike faster then 15 mpg if you pedal a lot, but you can do that with regular bikes too.
Unfortunately, public transport has been heavily pushed in both Britain and the EU. The result? Higher fares and fewer services where profits cannot be squeezed out of passengers.
Margaret Thatcher famously declared that anyone over 30 who takes a bus is a failure in life. A mentality reflected in the state of trains and buses, often in need of a decent clean, and where many people, especially women travelling on their own, are reluctant to use for fear of their personal safety.
Public transport should be a public service, with fares far cheaper than travelling by car or air (not often the case these days).
The environmental cost of private cars should be factored into the price of car use, along with the health and societal costs of deaths and serious injuries in road traffic accidents.
Frequent low cost bus, tram and train services in clean and safe vehicles are the only real way to get people out of cars. Maybe, like tobacco and alcohol, car adverts should be banned as well.
Why should customers be made to pay so much? Your comment says the failure is in not subsidizing the transport more, particularly given, as you indicate, the high fully loaded cost of private cars.
Ah, for some reason, the word privatisation has got lost in the first sentence. I meant to write:
Can you edit this in, please?
Unfortunately, the privatisation of public transport has been heavily pushed in both Britain and the EU.
Public transport as such is viewed as a poor alternative to private cars outside the big cities. And as often as not, more expensive, especially for more than one person, and far less convenient than going by car.
Mining minerals is never a clean affair. Cobalt from Congo, lithium and graphite from China, nickel from Indonesia and Russia, and battery supply chains that run through Xinjiang, in the Uyghur region where forced labor has been rampant: All of these have immediate problems, which The Washington Post explored in our “Clean Cars, Hidden Toll” series.
———
Washington Post had to plug “Uyghur region where forced labor has been rampant”.
The issue of mining minerals for EV’s is a gigantic red herring. The amount of mining required for the minerals for electrifying our transport and energy systems is a rounding error compared to mining for fossil fuels. The IEA (a very fossil fuel friendly research organisation) identified a need for an extra 45 million tonnes of minerals to 2030 for a net zero target for the energy transition to renewables. This has to be compared to the 15 billion tonnes of fossil fuels extracted each and every year. So its not even a rounding error, its a miniscule fraction.
Hannah Richie does a good job in crunching the numbers.
Whichever way you crunch the figures – toxicity levels, mineral waste, energy used, etc., a transition to renewables uses vastly less materials than remaining dependent on fossil fuels. There are a number of ‘experts’ who are funded by the likes of the Koch Brothers who are very active in spreading misinformation on this topic all over social media, and it is often mentioned by people who should know better.
That is a very true statement. However, if the replacement of ICE vehicles with EVs were to take place at scale, there would not be enough lithium, nickel, cobalt, manganese, graphite, and copper to go around.
ICE vehicles will be with us for a while. We all don’t like that, but it is a fact. We’d best get cracking on building sustainable mass transit systems to replace our current car-based system. Car hegemony is strong, so a major revolution is ahead if change is to take place.
This is true, but any crunch in the key materials is likely to be medium term and temporary – primarily because once the first cycle of materials kicks in, recycling will take up much of the slack.
Again, Hannah Ritchie has crunched the numbers.
Predictions of raw materials crunches are almost always wrong if there is any demand flexibility. Cobalt demand is actually falling as manufacturers have learned to reduce the amount needed. Sodium for batteries is now rapidly growing to balance out lithium demand. Copper in most uses can be replaced with aluminium. And so on.
We are undergoing an enormous revolution in energy supply, and its a surprising good news story. Wind and solar are overtaking hydro this year as the main worldwide source of energy. Next year it will surpass coal. And its only just building up momentum now – the sheer scale of how solar and battery storage is ramping up is unprecedented. Even five years ago few would have predicted this.
For cobalt from the Congo see Siddharth Kara and Cobalt Red. Eight year olds digging it with their bare hands for pennies. Grim.
Private cars are luxury enough, as are private jets and yachts.
But what to do if one lives 30 miles from where one works?
Actually, and reality-based speaking-wise, here in America at least; having the private car is the involuntary forced-upon-one necessity, and being able to live withOUT a private car is the luxury.
I, for example, have the luxury of living a bus-ride away from my job, and the further luxury of not having a family. This gives me the luxury of not having to have a car. So I don’t have a car. And that is indeed a luxury which most Americans are not able to indulge themselves in.
Seems to me it all comes back to scale. How many friggin batteries are we going to need? Maybe, here in the US anyway, our crumbling infrastructure will cure us of our drive lust.
Obviously I need to read all of the quoted studies but why are we believing “authorities” about the reliability of the grid, now or in future? The grid can’t handle weather extremes now, failing us when it is very hot, during and after storms… Also, I am not worried about the expense of infrastructure maintenance like extra wear and tear on roads and bridges but I am worried about the environmental costs of having to increase the work of road and bridge maintenance – more asphalt, more manufacturing? It all adds up as more burden on Mother Earth. And again, it is not the financial cost of having to replace tires more often, it is the environmental burden of manufacturing more tires that is concerning. I am firmly in the camp of believing that we all need to drive less, advocating neither EV nor ICE. But as others have pointed out, we’re decades away from reliable public transit, if ever. And again, building that comes with environmental costs. As someone almost in need of a new car and who lives in a rural area, I am leaning towards a used, but newer than my current, ICE. In my heart I know that cars and driving in general simply need to be reduced. But of course it is anything but simple.
Ev batteries for a small one 50kwh are around 900#. But most are up in the 1200-1700 and up to 2000# for the higher kWh ones.
As to the ice cars are they comparing to a 20mpg or 62 mpg Toyota?
These are not trivial variables.
Yes EV’s win out, but the exact comparison will vary the amount of miles it takes.
And to ignore hybrids is just a huge mistake.
As an owner of an older small leaf, I will absolutely say range anxiety is very real. You forgot to plug it in or you had an emergency trip these are real world issues, which lots of charging stations would ease of course except they don’t exist yet.
I’d still like to see cars like the VW XL1 be made.
Finally as to lithium batteries. Given how fast new chemistry batteries are coming on line, ones that use salt and all sorts of easy to get materials, I’d give lithium less than 10 years and probably 5 before they are replaced.
I should add that there is a huge difference between PHEV and HEV, which the graph in the article doesn’t specify which hybrid type its talking about. Most that i’ve seen are talking about HEV, not PHEV.
All of the detailed analysis’s I’ve seen show PHEV to have the lowest carbon foot print and as always the details matter, if you’re part of that “typical” daily driver that usually is within the battery range and the ICE is little used.
As a technical point an EV doesn’t have to have a 900 lb battery. That was a choice made by Tesla in order to market their cars as having the same range as an ICE car. Lack of range was perceived as being one reason for the earlier failure of the EV push in California (those GM electrics).
And as pointed out above electrics can be quite small indeed including electric bikes–which I increasingly see where I live–and even smaller electric scooters.
The real enemy here is therefore Detroit which glamorizes and promotes bloated vehicles designed to range across a wilderness that their owners likely almost never visit (thereby risking their very expensive possession). Perhaps we should force auto advertising to have the health warnings that eventually did in cigarette ads (Warning: this product may destroy the planet).
Downsizing the American ride might do as much to fight AGW as many many EVs.
The Hukki curve tells you how much energy (and money) is required to reduce a piece of material (in the real physical world. you should visit some time) to smaller pieces for processing. It’s an exponential function. The smaller the pieces of metal in an ore are, the larger the amount of energy consumed for reaching desired size of particle. For example: copper. Copper ore has to ground down to a size where metal surfaces are exposed. This is called “liberating” the metal. Then you can put the ground up ore in a flotation tank. The exposed metal binds to the air bubbles flowing through the tank because copper is hydrophobic. Copper accumulates in a flotation bed on the surface. Flotation layer is 25% copper which is good enough for smelting. In 1990 copper ores of 2% were the cut-off for financing. Today the industry is beginning to look at .1% ores. The bits of metal in such ores are much smaller. The energy and cost requirements for processing such lower and lower quality ores will be prohibitive (Hukki relation). This problem is hidden from us because WE ARE USING EXISTING PIPELINE. We have barely started to scale up. It takes 10-20 years to bring a new mine into production. When we get serious about scaling up we will hit the proverbial brick wall. This is only one problem that the geniuses who think they run the world haven’t considered. All the glib talk about the energy transition is like the Monty Python skit in which John Cleese explains how to play the flute.
It is good that the conversation can be more deeply enjoined around the particulars of mining and how complex that whole topic is. Any talk of building our way to a better future must engage very seriously and deeply with this metallurgy aspect.
Also, at a time when basic building materials like sand and wood are in critical short supply, any discussion of more construction for whatever reason, needs to be carefully scrutinized.
I genuinely believe that when we finally abandon the car, civilization will have leveled up, advanced, unlocked a major achievement. But to reach this level cities need to build cycling infrastructure.
Lest anyone think it’ll be easy, in Toronto there is an interesting situation – the Gardiner, a major highway to and from the downtown core, is undergoing two year construction. Traffic impacts from this are cascading across the city, disrupting traffic patterns and making driving excruciatingly more painful than usual, car commutes are significantly longer. The result is a huge visible increase in GO train, subway, bus, foot and cycling traffic. Which is great, right?
Of particular interest, a major cycling path along Queen’s Quay is dangerously congested during rush hours, it’s obvious even the newly built dedicated path is not sufficiently handling the number of riders. Complicating the situation is the cycle traffic is a mix of normal bikes, high end Tour de France bikes, ebikes, eScooters, hoverboards, all of wildly varying speeds, each trying to use a single lane. This is very different from Amsterdam which, while also mostly one lane, is reasonably flat and where most bikes are old fashioned Dutch style, so speeds are reasonably saner, traffic less chaotic as people ride at a calmer pace with fewer overtakers. Toronto has managed to mess this up, even with dedicated bike lanes which should make cyclists feel safer, leading to more people to adopt cycling, which should be greater for the environment, some of those bike lanes have become dangerous, chaos, life-threatening even.
Bike routes were planned by city planners who never envisioned high volume and before such things as eBikes, scooters and hovercraft. They do need to get back to the drawing board to make the abovementioned civilizational achievement possible before we can finally lose the car.
If we cut back on cars, where will we paste our pro-environment bumper stickers?
Bicycle baskets.
And if bicycle baskets are not big enough to place all the bumper stickers we would like, we can install special rear-bumpers on bikes strictly to place bumper stickers on.
I can think of a catchy bicycle-bumper-sticker slogan right off the bat.
” My other bike is a pair of shoes.”
What I am missing is an overall assessment of polluting caused by cars – meaning its total lifecycle including production, utilization and complete disposal based upon an average annual mileage over a period of about ten years. To begin with just to get a simple picture recycling options and possible technical improvements should be excluded for obvious speculative reasons. Is anyone aware of those kind of calculations? It would be interesting to see if EV’s would fare better than ICE’s.
There are plenty of full lifecycle studies out there.
This one, one by the IEA, and this one. Hannah Ritchie (an excellent source for neutral numbercrunching), has also summarised some studies.
There is absolutely no question but that EV’s are better than ICE or BEV’s, even with coal powered electricity (and that is rapidly disappearing). Every independent lifecycle study has confirmed this. The primary reason is that EV’s are fundamentally more energy efficient than ICE vehicles, even allowing for the extra weight. Anyone arguing otherwise either hasn’t read the easy to find studies or is a bad faith actor.
Thanks a lot, much appreciated
Work at home and And bicycles are even more efficient.
But even those do not address the problem of having too many humans on the planet.
Hard for Americans to even think about cars as other than the embodiment of their freedom. It has been thus for 70+ years. Just listen to Dinah Shore. Having said that, my father worked on the assembly line in the Dodge DeSoto plant in Dearborn in his early-20’s when this TV commercial was produced. He took the bus to work every day.
The old Dodge plant 8505 Warren Avenue, west of Wyoming, the map shows east of Wyoming, but either way near the border of Detroit and Dearborn. 40 years ago I lived just down the street in Detroit. Even then taking a bus was an invitation to mischief or even mishap. Today, well, mishap is more the order, certainly for an older female type. I often think of how the society would/will react with a gas price of $20 a gallon, or more.
If Americans really value their freedom they will revolt against all the snooping by the NSA, TSA, Cops, Corporations and Cities.
When It Comes to the Environment, There Really Is No Such Thing as a “Good” Car’
My car runs on hydrogen generated by solar electrolysis. If it wasn’t for the cost of registration, insurance, toll booths, system maintenance, the occasional Windex, and the time it takes to get there and back again, I’d drive for free.
Meanwhile, in operation, the only pollution generated is entropy. When it comes to the environment, nothing humans do is good, but that is true of anything alive on Earth, all of which takes something good and gives back something bad. Ultimately there’s no way you can win this. All living things reduce their own entropy by increasing the entropy of the environment by an even greater amount, and the 2nd Law guarantees it can never be merely an offset.
dS = dQrev/T. Remember that.
I once did the calculation for how many solar panels I would need to run a hydrogen car in the UK for 20 miles a day. Due to the efficiency of the process being less than 10%, I calculated about 10 solar panels, my whole roof.
Can you give us some figures for your set up.
H₂ production from solar panels is so yesterday, Grim. You can already get 10% efficiency out of direct photoelectrolysis without the intermediate hardware:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-023-01247-2
Anybody who understands oxidation-reduction potentials knows there’s only so much you can get out of any conceivable battery; in no way can batteries feasibly replace fossil fuels, so that tech is tacitly pushed by the Carbon Industrial Complex because they know it’s a huge wrong turn that protects their cartels.
But it no longer matters. The move to totalitarianism via mass psychogenic disordering (now expotentiated by AI) guarantees the impossibility of managing catastrophic risks (list deferred). The collapse of civilization is a process, not an event, and is already well underway. Enjoy it while you still can.
Old Charlie stole the handle
And the train it won’t stop going
No way to slow down.
True about entropy, and it is certainly true that chemical pollution is the result of the transition to a high entropy state. It has been a long time since I took Physical Chemistry for the Chemistry/Biochemistry/Physics majors. Thinking about this induces flashbacks. But it is important to remember that the Second Law of Thermodynamics is valid for a closed system. The universe is (probably) a closed system and the heat death awaits, long after the species Homo sapiens is extinct. It is also important to remember that some thermodynamic transitions are path dependent and some are not. The Law of Conservation of Mass is inescapable on this little speck of the universe, but planet Earth is not an energetically closed system as long as the sun shines. All life on earth is a low-entropy energy hog; this is what keeps bacteria and humans alive. We are entropy machines but the sun is the offset, in the form of fossil fuels and sunshine. The key to a long and pleasant duration for life on earth is for us to use as little material throughput as possible while harvesting the unlimited energy from the sun (for the next several billion years) to get by. This is not a difficult concept, but has become impossible in practice, especially since WWII. In any case, to quote the late, great Herbert Stein again, “What can’t continue won’t continue.” Our successors will figure this out, or not. In the meantime we, as a political culture and political economy, make hope difficult but not impossible.
Do you really suppose the laws of thermodynamics might be invalid in open systems, K? Think about it. You’re not going to get the arithmetic over your measurements to line up properly in real-world systems, but the laws are still operating. That’s why anything works. Besides, there’s no such thing as a perfectly closed hypothetical system anyway. That’s just for conceptual purposes.
True. There is no appeal from the laws of thermodynamics. You cannot make a negative heat pump. But there is an offset in an open system. My favorite example that is much easier to understand than the Carnot cycle or anything else in Berry, Rice, and Ross: I did not truly understand the Second Law in the real world until we had children. No equations or mathematical formalism required. Kids are entropy generators, mental–social–physical. Parents supply the free energy to offset the disorder, until they just learn to live with it in their little closed system.
A hundred years ago there was a debate about entropy and evolution. How do you get more complexity in biological evolution if the Second Law is the final arbiter? “Because the sun shines” is the short and correct answer. To me. A billion years from now? The Second Law will probably have won. And I fully realize my argument is one of those YMMV things.
I view this argument similarly to those who insist Planck, Bohr, Dirac, et al. invalidated Newton. Not really. We live in a Newtonian world, where indeterminacy has nothing to do with Heisenberg or anything else in modern physics. You don’t need the quantum to play billiards.
Since you are discussing thermodynamics, let me throw in one of my favorite blog posts outside of NC
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist/
“When it comes to the environment, nothing humans do is good, but that is true of anything alive on Earth, all of which takes something good and gives back something bad.”
What?? – please define good and bad……like..is a plant bad because it’s alive – is all life bad???
and what is good – rocks and chemicals all devoid of life??
A bit confused about that statement
That success will hinge on utilities being proactive in planning for millions of additional EVs on the roads in the coming decades. It will also take some adjustments, experts said. EV owners and utilities must take advantage of up-and-coming charging technologies that will save the grid from unnecessary stress.
jevons paradox.
Proactive utilities will sell supply to the elephant in the room.
Data centers.
I realize some foilyality…but right now today data centers need more power than we have, and I have long thought/seen the corporates say one thing and mean another. The public can be brought to make sacrifices “for the good of the planet” and finance more power generation, which will be hoovered up by the usual suspects, who will then say there was no alternative, it had to be done for security and then claim that if you are a good person you will understand that the answer is moar power generation, which will then lead to…see beginning
A bit of a snide comment- “the best car for the environment? It’s the one your driving right now”
Make sure your vehicle is in good repair and drive it like an elderly person. Wait until it is totally depreciated and more-expensive-to-repair-than-replace, then consider a hybrid or electric (even used might be a good deal). I am juggling this very notion with 14 yo Subaru Outback, do I fix the transmission and oil leak (requires pulling the transmission and engine) for 2500 and see if it lasts until my teenager start driving in three years, or trade it and defer my teens driving needs until that moment requires action? The car has 211k, lbs at $2900, we purchased it new.
I’m at the same mileage as you on my 14 year old Taco too, and there’s a Tacoma hybrid I was thinking about, but it only gets 3 mpg more than a fully gassed up version and costs a bunch more, where’s the incentive?
This. My 2005 Honda CR-V with a manual transmission just had it’s 19th birthday and passed 170k miles. I put $6K into it last year for 2 major repairs. If I could buy something similar, I would have replaced it last year, but I can’t buy a new car with a manual transmission, no infotainment center, and no “helping functions” not to mention the privacy concerns that I would have to deal with.
I’ve just replaced a dead 17 year old dumb flat screen TV and I’m dreading setting up the new one which will be full of “features” that I don’t care about and will want all my information. Not to mention that I highly doubt it will last 17 years. The normal life seems to be 5 years based on my circle of friends. We still use the old fashioned CRT TV we bought 24 years ago.
If the intake and oil consumption aren’t issues with your Taco, I would say “let it ride”. 2010 Tacos are very, very good trucks.
I completely agree. My old truck made it to 315k before I sold it for parts. My current car has 320k and I still get 30 mpg.
I’m surprised at the lack of attention paid to the civic design we call “sprawl” (or CSD – Conventional Suburban Development). Yves mentions this in passing, but virtually no one else does. Sprawl requires every single trip (to work, school, shop, home, etc.) be in an auto–typically with a single occupant. Any kind of transit will fail in such neighborhoods. There aren’t enough patrons for transit or neighborhood commerce within a walk of the stops or stores, and the walk is (by design) as uncomfortable as possible, with berms, barriers, disconnected sidewalks and positively dangerous street crossings.
The alternative (“Transit-Oriented Development” or “Traditional Neighborhoods”) has pedestrian connections to neighborhood commerce, schools, etc. Good (set-back) sidewalks, and small curb radii (that quarter circle at the corner of the street). Large curb radii in sprawl mean that cars can take the turn at higher speed, and pedestrians have a longer distance to traverse.
Unfortunately to create Traditional (pedestrian-friendly, mixed-use, mixed-income) neighborhoods would mean society would take care of its least fortunate. Traditional downtowns now stagger under the weight of homeless people. In fact the denial of federal aid to NYC (by the Ford administration) is what kick-started Trump’s real estate development career.
There are an awful lot of sunk costs in the suburbs. Digging out of this hole won’t be fast or cheap, and any transit would have to be heavily subsidized. One hopeful sign: the state of California now mandates “Complete Streets” (that accommodate pedestrians, and cyclists as well as autos).
I need to add that people pay premiums to live in pedestrian-friendly, mixed use neighborhoods. The blessing of the magical market has been given.
Friends of mine lived in a “suburb” of Chicago for many years. I would visit them sometimes. It was a “railroad” suburb, such that my friend ( and many other people) walked from their suburban-style single family homes to the train station to take it into work.
They also had a car to go to the places where a train / bus / etc. didn’t go, or for getting amounts of things which you couldn’t move at one time on a train/ bus/ etc.
So rail station suburbia was a whole genre of human habitation before the Standard Oil of New Jersey/ General Motors Corporation/ Firestone Tire and Rubber three-way-conspiracy to exterminate every trace of rail travel within their reach all over America.
There is a lot of handwaving to those defences of EV’s.
The objection that they are much heavier is very real. EV’s are much heavier. They chew through tyres 50% faster as a result and do more road damage (which is proportional to fourth power of axle weight, I.e. double axle weight causes 16x the damage). These issues increase both private and externalised costs of ownership.
Worse, car parks were built for assumed weights of cars. Too many EV’s will stress the structure, which in an old car park may prove fatal. One collapsed in NYC in last couple of years. If the rebar in concrete car parks is rusting badly, the danger limit may be much closer than the design limit….
There are many historic bridges in the UK road network that were built for horses and have low weight limits (there’s a three tonne limit bridge between our house and the city centre which has been incorporated into a one way system and now we cannot drive in the direction that uses the bridge because the weight limit is enforced indirectly with a width limit and our car is too wide….). EV cars will have to be banned from these structures like goods vehicles.
EV’s also represent a very significant change in fire risk models. I am seriously concerned by EV’s on passenger ferries (which we use several times a year to France and Ireland). A car park at Luton airport was lost to an EV fire (hybrid Range Rover) and a car transporter ship was lost similarly at sea in the past year. The danger of changing an element in a system without reevaluating the whole system is substantial: the fire suppression on ferries cannot suppress an EV chemical fire and the compartmentalisation model assumes it can….
These are not reasons to maintain ICE vehicles – although displacing liquid fuels from HGVs is probably a pipe dream – but they are real issues and it diminishes the credibility of EV enthusiasts when they wave the details away. It becomes propaganda.
The best EV is a plugin hybrid EV because the battery cells of a single EV can be used to make many PHEV’s, each of which delivers most of the benefits of an EV if used correctly. PHEV’s are also lighter than EV’s (but as heavy or heavier than ICE cars).