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New York State To Launch Electric Vehicle Rebate (foxnews.com)
An anonymous reader shares an AP report: New York state will soon launch a rebate intended to make electric vehicles more price competitive with traditional cars. Officials said they'll launch the initiative by April 1. The rebate of up to $2,000 will be available for zero-emission and plug-in electric hybrid vehicles. It's part of an effort to reduce automotive carbon emissions, the state's largest climate change contributor. "We want to make electric vehicles a mainstream option," said state Assemblywoman Amy Paulin, a Westchester County Democrat who leads the Assembly energy committee. "They are becoming more affordable and we need to encourage them." Environmentalists supported the rebate when it was approved by lawmakers in 2016 and have been eagerly awaiting the launch.
The working man now only owes $38,000. Environment and affordability problems solved. Praise the lawmakers.
I would love to own an electric car. However, I'm not going to kid myself and say it's helping the environment. With current processes for extracting Lithium from the ground resulting in 0.02% lithium and 99.8% dirt that is now contaminated by the toxic chemicals used to extract the lithium and the resource depletion on local water sources as water is shipped to lithium mines in salt flats, plus the fact that electricity to charge the cars likely comes from burning fossil fuels anyway, I'm going to guess the net environmental impact of an electric vehicle over the course of its life is only nominally better than a combustion engine. People have this idea that if the pollution isn't directly coming out of their tailpipe, they aren't causing it.
Neither. Why: 1) Most power is still generated by burning fossil fuels. You're just moving your tailpipe elsewhere.
Half true. Points to consider:
(1) "most" is not "all"
(2) electric power is capable of transitioning to solar, and in fact car charging is a good application for solar,
(3) there is economy of scale. Large power plants are more efficient in producing energy, even from fossil fuel sources, than small engines (like car engines). This should be obvious: if car engines were more efficient than gas turbines, a power plant would consist of a million car engines. Large converters can use bottoming cycles to utilize the low-grade waste heat. Cars, on the other hand, just reject the waste heat; it's not worth the effort to do a bottoming cycle on such a small engine.
2) Cars don't contribute anywhere near as much to greenhouse gasses as we are led to believe. Cow farts are actually the #1 source.
Nope, not even close. You are right that methane is a better infrared absorber than carbon dioxide, but cows just don't produce that much methane. Methane-- all sources-- produces about 15% of the anthropogenic contribution to greenhouse warming, and cows produce only a small portion of that.
http://eesc.columbia.edu/cours...
The rest of the post consists mostly of unsourced assertions.
1) Most power is still generated by burning fossil fuels. You're just moving your tailpipe elsewhere.
While at the same time, there are detailed analysis (google is your friend) concluding that :
- Even in countries that mostly produce electricity by burning fossils - like TFA's US - electric cars still have a better carbon foot print simply because this "moved away giant tail pipe" is much more efficient that the "original small one" attached to an ICE.
In other words: yup, us power plant also produce carbon. BUT us power plants produce less CO2 per km than would an ICE, simply because the are optimised mostly for their efficiency, whereas the ICE is also optimised for size and for peak acceleration.
- In country that don't burn fossils that much for electricity (e.g.: lots of central or northern european countries), carbon foot prints are even better than the above.
- Very few countries like China, India, Australia and a few african countries (so nothing to do with NY) are so much reliant on dirty electricity that, electric cars and ICE don't differ that much in their emissions.
2) Cars don't contribute anywhere near as much to greenhouse gasses as we are led to believe. Cow farts are actually the #1 source. Buying basic goods made abroad also contributes significantly to the problem.
Yes the industry (including agricultural industy) also produce greenhouse gasses, and in bigger quantities than cars.
That doesn't mean that you shouldn't use electric cars, that only means that you *should also* try to recude the industry's greenhouse gaz emission.
(Which is beyond the point of TFA. Also, I don't know in the US, but several countries in Europe are also working toward lowering industry/agriculture emitted greenhouse gazes. e.g.: encouraging local grown food. So it's not as if electric cars were at the detriment of fight emissions in the industry)
3) The manufacturing of batteries in electric and electric hybrids is an incredibly dirty process.
4) The batteries in these cars aren't recyclable at all and will have degraded significantly after about 5 years of use. ICE cars don't need a new fuel tank every 5 years.
Yeah because ICE cars grow on tree. Organic trees.
Not.
Check detailed studies, most of the serious one also take the battery manufacture into account.
So again, in anything but the few top most fossil heavy countries, the production of the battery is still offset by the reduced emissions while driving.
That includes the US (even if it relies more on fossils than others and thus the advantage is less visible).
6) ICE cars can actually be carbon-negative. Boeing developed a workable method to grow ethanol in the world's deserts. Think about it: the Sahara Desert turned into a carbon sink. (Link: http://energypost.eu/exclusive...). With such a fuel, it would actually be better if everyone drove a gas guzzler until we meet an agreed upon level of carbon in the atmosphere.
Nice story, bro. But :
- It's still only one of those dozens "soon, new technology will make everything better..." over-hyped big media spin on some scientific advance. (I don't want to denigrate the scientific advance, but it takes a lots of steps between the lab and actual mass production). It's still only a story in some news paper.
Whereas electric cars are currently available from several manufacturer. And low-emission electricity is also a reality in lots of countries.
Until Boeing starts producing and selling huge amounts of their bio-fuel, it makes sense to support electric cars.
- Carbon foot-print gets negative *only if* this production method consumes more carbon than the bio-fuel releases at the end.
(e.g.: if only the fruit of a plant are used for fuel, and the rest of the plant stays keeping its carbon
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