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Electric Vehicles Might Not Benefit the Environment After All
New submitter countach44 writes "From an article in IEEE's Spectrum magazine: 'Upon closer consideration, moving from petroleum-fueled vehicles to electric cars begins to look more and more like shifting from one brand of cigarettes to another. We wouldn't expect doctors to endorse such a thing. Should environmentally minded people really revere electric cars?' The author discusses the controversy and social issues behind electric car research and demonstrates what many of us have been thinking: are electric cars really more environmentally friendly than those based on internal combustion engines?"
Reader Jah-Wren Ryel takes issue with one of the sources, and offers a criticism from Fast Company.
Of course it depends on the energy source. I purchase wind powered offsets to power my focus electric. This changes the equation greatly.
"Should environmentally minded people really revere electric cars?"
I'm environmentally minded. Guess what I revere. Yep, you got it, since it's a no-brainer: bicycles. Best machine humans have ever created. Good for the body and good for the earth. I've never owned a car, and I don't want to. I use car sharing programs when I need to drive and bicycle or use public transportation (or both) otherwise.
And before anyone says "Well, but bicycles don't work for everyone: kids, job, blah blah," let me just squash that fallacious argument. Bicycle advocates *never* are saying we *all* have to ride bicycles. Just more of us. Everyone who wants to should feel they can. I bet you want to. Wind in the face, endorphin high, the feeling of doing things with your body, the joy of not destroying the earth to do the daily drudge: who doesn't want that?
The central power station is not making its emissions a few feet from the sidewalk. Its pollution controls aren't restricted by weight or the need for portability.
It's also way more efficient.
Electrifying the vehicle fleet is like modularizing your code. Instead of being tied to petroleum, with an electric fleet you can snap in nuclear, tidal, wind, geothermal, hydroelectric, or whatever else turns out to be a good idea.
Even if we don't make the switch to cleaner sources, it's still a win. Collecting or cleaning up the emissions at a few thousand power plants should be easier, more efficient and cost-effective than doing it at tens of millions of tailpipes.
Plus, it means that you don't get the smog-forming exhaust and ground-level ozone in your population centers. You also get some noise reduction since EVs are quieter and there's no engine idling.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
While charging your electric car with coal power sounds like a bad deal in the short term. The electric doesn't care where that power comes from, so in the long term that gives us the flexibility to operate an energy economy that is based on a wide range of sources. Also, diversity in the market also means stability and theoretically fair prices. (but we'll probably cock that up)
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
That's a pessimistic point of view.
All other things are equal, one could argue that concentrating the hydrocarbon production might be a good thing, because it at least gives us the opportunity to efficiently process those emissions in one place instead of spewing it from millions of cars (or installing millions of scrubbers). I'm not saying that they WILL do better -- just that they could, and that it would likely be more efficient than anything you could slap onto a few million cars.
Similarly, we would have the ability to start switching everyone to green power if everyone has an electric vehicle. Seen that way, keeping everyone on fossil fuels has a very high opportunity cost, because you can't switch a gasoline motor to solar/wind/nuclear.
Unless we switch to solar, wind and/or nuclear for the bulk of our electricity generation, all electric cars do is concentrate where we burn the hydrocarbons to power them.
and that's a good thing because the concentrated hydrocarbon cremation facilities can generate energy with >80% efficiency, while a car burning the same hydrocarbons generates energy with only 20% efficiency. This means you need to burn about three times as much hydrocarbons if you burn it in the car instead of at a power plant.
The portable power plant you find in a car (internal combustion engine) does not even come close to the efficiency you find in a stationary power plant. The car simply wastes most of the fuel's energy as heat, and then wastes even more energy to get rid of all that heat it by swirling liquid around in a "radiator": a device whose sole purpose is to waste as much energy as possible to prevent the engine from melting itself. What's more, is when you step on the brakes all of the car's kinetic energy is wasted as even more heat. The whole thing is hugely wasteful and inefficient.
Basically we keep looking for "green" alternatives that don't require us to be even slightly inconvenienced or to change our lifestyles at all - and it's probably not possible.
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