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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.
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.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Perhaps it isn't any cleaner, but I'd rather have my car using power from natural gas or nuclear than other sources that are more likely to come from outside my country. The geopolitics of sending our dollars to Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, or elsewhere unfriendly isn't a good idea, so even if the pollution level is the same, electric is superior to gasoline/petrol.
Even if ALL of the electricity to power EVs was generated from the dirtiest coal plants, it would STILL be cleaner than every single car carrying around its own heavy, petrol burning, ICE. Also you have the benefits of localizing pollution somewhere less populated. This smells like a big oil hit piece.
Now, there is a separate conversation about other forms of transportation being even better than personal automobiles. Trains and even airplanes might be better in some scenarios than everyone racing around pell-mell with their own car, but that's a different issue. If we, as a society, have decided that everyone will be driving their own vehicle, the question is how to make that scenario least damaging; and the answer is electric vehicles.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
According to my "the cheapest thing is the best for the environment" theory, this was easily predictable.
Energy means fossil fuels. To a first approximation, other energy sources can be ignored. And in the modern economy, money ~ energy. When fuel (i.e. energy) prices go up, the effect ripples through the whole supply chain, touching absolutely everything that is manufactured and shipped. The costs associated with most products are dominated not by human labor costs but by energy costs. And since our modern agriculture essentially exchanges energy for food, even human labor comes down to energy costs.
Therefore, TO A FIRST APPROXIMATION, the cheaper of two alternatives is better for the environment.
Electric cars are more expensive than gasoline cars, and often would never exist except for subsidies. If they were really more economical, they would already be popular. Ergo, per The Theory, they are worse for the environment.
"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.
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
The linked article takes you to a 1-page analysis. They must have put a lot of time into that! Corporate mission-statements frequently use more ink.
By comparison, the union of concerned scientists made a more robust, and likely more earnest attempt at understanding total fuel consumption using the "well-to-wheels" benchmark. You can read about it here: http://www.ucsusa.org/assets/documents/clean_vehicles/electric-car-global-warming-emissions-report.pdf
Page 11 (of 48) gives at least an approximation of CO2 consumption as measured in equivalent MPG for EVs, depending on what what's being used to push the electrons to the car in the first place. Coming in first place is geothermal, with an eMPG or 7600, and coal comes in last at 30 eMPG.
Whether somebody involved in this study or that study has erred or has been disingenuous is hard to say, but my guess is that the union of concerned scientists probably followed an actual scientific process where their work is available for full scrutiny by the rest of the scientific community.
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.
#DeleteChrome
There's a powerful smell of bullshit coming off that link.
For example - "Additionally, electric car batteries must be replaced after about four years". REALLY??!!?
Most of the RAV4 EVs and original Priuses are still on their original batteries, some after more than 200,000 miles. And every carmaker selling EVs is guaranteeing battery life of approx 8 yrs. They can't all be so stupid to guarantee free replacements for twice the expected life of the product.
And, the batteries are not exhausted after those 4 or 8 yrs but reduced to ~70% - that still a heckuva lot of life and can be recycled or refurbished into other products such as UPSes or some other stationary storage with weight and performance characteristics that'll stomp lead-acid.
By the way, have a look at the bios of the good people at the IER - not a single scientist or engineer among them
http://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/staff/
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
Stipulating that at present *every* method does not include all the externalities, the actual cost of any product, method or system reflects the environmental cost to the extent that the cost has been de-externalized. One way that happens is that, increasingly, cleanup costs are charged to and paid for by the producer/shipper and their insurance companies. And reporting is at least one, maybe two orders of magnitude better than it was 30 years ago. That _should_ be true for oil, for wind, for solar, etc. And it is increasingly true. At this point it's probably more true for oil than for any of the others (I suspect coal is still getting a break but I dunno.)
One example of externalities not presently charged to the electric vehicle industry is the lack of cleanup and mitigation in Canada and Russia around the big nickel mining areas, where according to legend 100s of square miles of territory are devoid of living vegetation. (/.ers: is this true? I keep hearing it...)
As it turns out, shipping the oil is not one of the bigger costs of oil. IIRC from two-three years ago, the cost of shipping is only about 18c per gallon (US cost). I think the actual bulk-carrier-tanker-ship part of that is only two or three cents - my memory may have failed me on that but Wikipedia agrees. That includes the cost of insurance and the overall amortized risk to the companies involved (if it were not, the companies would have been out of business long ago). Which means that it includes the costs to the companies including fines and mitigation costs, of all the oil spills and other pollution. It also includes the costs of the newer double-hull ships with additional spill prevention and mitigation equipment that is now required. One cost that isn't being included yet is the smokestack pollution from the tankers, and all other shipping.
To the extent that externalities of all the methods are included, that cost demonstrates that pollution is actually not a very large problem for oil _compared to total production_, so electric vehicles and their power sources (wind, whatever) will have to work hard to match the true cost/benefit of oil.
Discussion: people don't realize the sheer volume of oil that goes through the system every day - counting fuel and products, around 150 million barrels (6+ billion gallons, 24+ billion liters) per day. As of 2000, the total amount spilled in 20 years in the US from causes was about 300 million gallons (about 1/576000 over 20 years), and had decreased by 50% in that 20 years. The rate has continued to decrease since then. This is equivalent to about 2/100 of one cc out of a barrel - or an invisible speck that pops out of a bubble when you open a carbonated beverage and little bubbles pop.
note: some of this data was loosely adapted from this analysis. Also, a USA Today article followed that trend - from 2005 to 2009, there were an average of 22 spills per year of more than 50 barrels (down from some 8000 in 1980. This is not to excuse, but to provide perspective. Interestingly, the New England states had the highest number of spills per square mile 1980-2002.
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Heavier doesn't hurt economy much. A small linear contribution from rolling resistance. Losses in getting it moving are recovered on braking. heavy hurts non-hybrids because they are non-regenerative. And given two identical cars, the lighter will always be better because of the rolling resistance, but compared to the IC losses, weight is inconsequential.
Learn to love Alaska
Perhaps you should RTFA, which points out that, in the UK, power stations are only about 36% efficient at delivering energy to end users. Add in the 80% efficiency of an electric car and now you have something similar to that of a gas (petrol)-powered car.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
electric cars are not green
On an absolute scale, nothing is green except killing yourself and your children,so that you stop using Earth's resources. Which nobody is prepared to do, so that definition of "green" is irrelevant.
The relevant question is relative green-ness: given that a new-car buyer is going to buy a new car(*), is it better to buy X or Y? How much more (or less) energy does it take to produce an electric car instead of the gas-powered car you would have bought instead? How much more (or less) energy does that car require over its service life? How is that energy generated? How will it be generated 10, 20, 50 years in the future?
These questions don't have easy or obvious answers, and conditions change all the time. If electric cars aren't "more green" this year, they might easily become so next year (as advances in battery technology make batteries more powerful and/or less carbon-intensive to produce). But what remains true is that at some point, fossil fuels will become sufficiently scarce, and/or the costs of carbon loading in the atmosphere will rise, to the point where gas-powered cars aren't practical anymore; and at that point will we be glad we have electric-car technology on hand to transition to.
(*) I'd personally rather see more people go by bike instead, as bikes are significantly greener and healthier than any car... but if that's not an option for someone, then it's not an option for them.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Two of the biggest benefits to an electric car are:
(1) When you're stopped, your motor doesn't keep running. Think of all the fuel you've wasted either letting your car warm up, or sitting at a light, or stuck in traffic.
(2) Regenerative braking technology converts your momentum back into usable power instead of just wasting it as heat.
These, combined with the fact that your car doesn't care where it gets electricity from, and that a coal plant is still more efficient overall than thousands of independent engines, is precisely why this article is probably OPEC propaganda. :D
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