That depends on where the electricity is produced. If the electricity is produced by fossil fuel then they are not greener.
"Not necessarily. Or better said, not always. If the source of energy to power these cars doesn’t come from solar panels, wind turbines or even nuclear or hydroelectric, their CO2 emissions will be much higher. For instance, if the electricity used to charge cars comes from the burning of fossil fuels, it doesn’t matter if the EC are not polluting while being driven, as this pollution was already released in some distant power plant.
This means that if you’re driving an electric car in the US, where fossil fuels accounted 62,7% of the country’s energy production in 2017, you’ll probably release more CO2 into the atmosphere than if you’re driving it in Iceland, that runs almost entirely on hydro, geothermal and solar energy."
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And the article forgets about how much CO2 is released in lithium production and for other rare earth mining for the batteries…
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Dem
3
Why do you think there is a push for renewable energy?
Can’t just make EVs and call it a day.
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Shouldn’t we get the renewables before running EV’s off coal plants etc?
“The direct climate impacts of wind power are instant, while the benefits of reduced emissions accumulate slowly,” said Keith. “If your perspective is the next 10 years, wind power actually has — in some respects — more climate impact than coal or gas. If your perspective is the next thousand years, then wind power has enormously less climatic impact than coal or gas.
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Axxowiz
6
The documentary Michael Moore did called Planet or the Humans is what the whole documentary is about how todays electric and wind tech is not that much better over its entire lifetime than none electric and wind.
Needless to say even though Michael Moore is on the left and a true believer of AGW he was literally filleted by the left and critics. If they will go after one of their own for mildly questioning some of the ways of the climate church, what would they would do to us if they could.
I think when you hear the words deplorables or as Trudeau said people who don’t believe in science and take up space answers that question. All Moore was trying to say was I believe in climate change but we are going about it wrong.
What Moore should have known better these is much big money tied to green energy those companies as well as scientists profiting from it are not going to go without a fight.
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Solar panels are starting to die. What will we do with the megatons of toxic trash?
Oh, no they will impact the land fills and leach out toxic waste…
SixFoot
8
Yes, but that would be the smart thing to do, not the emotional thing to do.
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It depends on a lot of variables on whether EVs are cleaner than modern internal combustion vehicles. Generally speaking, ICEs are cleaner for about 50-75,000 miles due to lithium mining being and extremely dirty business when you include that aspect in the metrics. After that, even if your EV is powered off of coal, the EV tends to pull ahead in terms of environmental friendliness in terms of its active lifecycle. Now there is another area where gas burners can catch back up. Recycling. Lithium ion batteries are difficult to dispose of environmentally and there isn’t much you can actually recycle. Where as a gas engine block itself can actually be recycled and used in other applications after being melted down.
Electric cars do win out on efficiency of work thanks to the electric motors themselves. 90% of what you put into them is converted directly to working energy. For a gas engine, it’s about 40%; the rest is wasted as heat. Diesels are a little better at energy conversion than gas engines.
However batteries have a terrible return in terms of energy density. Basically a gallon of gasoline contains orders of magnitude more energy than a battery cell. Which is why EVs have to use enormous batteries and most of them don’t match the range of internal combustion cars using much smaller fuel tanks.
The Tesla Model 3 Standard uses nearly a thousand pounds of battery cells and it’s range maxes out at 230 miles. By comparison, my Honda Civic Si can travel 430 miles on just 10.5 gallons of fuel assuming I’m being conservative with my driving. That’s about 63 pounds of fuel on board. That’s a huge win for gasoline there if we are talking solely about efficiency of “fuel.” The Model 3 uses its “fuel” far more efficiently than my Civic Si does (90% is converted into work whereas I’m wasting 60% of my input as heat) but my fuel source is so much more energy dense that I end up getting a lot more out of it.
With all that said, I do believe that in the end, EVs will beat out ICE cars in most metrics and will become the dominant cars on the road. The reason? They’re significantly simpler; most don’t even need a transmission to transfer power to the ground. They are more reliable. They are cheaper to operate. And eventually they will be cheaper to buy since producing them is far easier than traditional ICE vehicles. For the average driver, an electric car makes more sense now. It’ll make even more sense ten years from now.
We have to remember that the ICE car paradigm has had nearly a century of development put into it. And we are hitting the limits of what we can do with them to make them cleaner and more efficient. The modern electric car is only on its 20th year since they made their comeback in the late 90s. And serious development is really recent; only about eight years by manufacturers other than Tesla.
Give them time. EVs are getting better every year.
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We wouldn’t be having this problem had the anti-Nuke leftists not killed nuclear fission in the United States.
Funnily enough despite living in what those leftists would call a “backwards red state” my electricity comes from clean and efficient nuclear power from the Grand Gulf power plant. The most powerful single reactor nuclear facility in the United States.
Dem
11
Agreed. I’ve been saying the left needs to get onboard with nuclear for years now. The problem is that Fukushima, Chernobyl, and Three Mile Island have left a fear of nuclear. People don’t want those plants near them in case of accidents.
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To add to my other post, I do think ICE can survive. If we solve the issues with liquid hydrogen fuel.
What’s really cool is that if we switch to liquid hydrogen we may see the Rotary engine make a comeback. Beyond the issues with the fuel itself, another problem is that traditional piston engines have high compression ratios. Hydrogen burns much more quickly than gasoline. So that’s a no go in your run of the mill piston engine; you’ll suffer immense pre-detonation issues, otherwise known as fuel knock. That can destroy a piston engine. We can always knock back the compression ratio, but at low compression piston engines are horribly inefficient.
That’s where the rotary comes in. Wankel (another term for Rotary) engines, by nature of their design, are low compression engines. Their compression ratios aren’t much higher than the early primitive piston engines we used in the early 20th century. But due to other parts of their design, they thrive in a low compression algorithm, providing far more usable power with a smaller displacement than an equivalently specced piston engine. That makes them ideal for burning hydrogen as their fuel, since rotaries are immune to fuel knock from compression.
What killed rotaries in automobiles was that the world primarily use gasoline and diesel fuels. The low compression of Wankels mean that they are horribly inefficient at maximizing energy gain from gasoline or diesel; a 1.3L rotary gets similar fuel economy to a 5.7L V8 when both are installed in similarly sized cars. But with hydrogen, it would be the exact opposite situation.
But oddly enough during the time Mazda used them, it was found that rotaries were basically perfect engines for turbocharging. The low compression allowed Mazda to run extremely high turbo boost pressures without causing pre detonation. People are running 40 psi turbo set ups on mostly stock 13B engines. They easily handle it. Whereas for a gas burner you’re going to need to really beef up the engine to even approach 40psi, much less maintain it for a drag pull.
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I live close enough to grand gulf that if there ever was a level 7 accident and the winds were heading my way, I’d have to evacuate temporarily until the iodine-131 decayed to a safe level. Otherwise I could say goodbye to my thyroid. There’s other stuff too but the good news most of those particles half lifes are measured in seconds or minutes. Iodine 131 has a half life of eight days.
I’m alright with that knowledge. I sleep fine at night knowing it. Mainly because I know that nuclear power has a far better safety record than gas or coal fired plants.
SixFoot
14
We could have Small Modular Reactors independently powering homes by now, but nooooo!
Now we have “Green” energy, in that over 2/3rd’s of it comes from inefficiently burning actual, wet, green vegetation. You know how some facilities make up for that inefficient burning? Adding rubber, rail ties, etc…
They call it “Biomass”. Catchy phrase. lol
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They have a trash to energy plant near me that burns all the garbage of an entire county of about 800,000 people, as well as all the plastic that gets kicked out of the recycling stream, which is a lot. Any plastic food jar that is not rinsed out for example, gets the boot and it adds up to many tons annually.
Never even noticed anything and I drive by it once or twice a week, sometimes more.
SixFoot
19
That’s good at least. They must be burning it all the way down to clean beautiful CO2. 
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Must be some kinda hot fire I know that much. Plastic is nasty to burn.
