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Electric Cars Emit 50 Percent Less Greenhouse Gas Than Diesel, Study Finds (theguardian.com)
entirely_fluffy shares a report from The Guardian: Electric cars emit significantly less greenhouse gases over their lifetimes than diesel engines even when they are powered by the most carbon intensive energy, a new report has found. In Poland, which uses high volumes of coal, electric vehicles produced a quarter less emissions than diesels when put through a full lifecycle modeling study by Belgium's VUB University. CO2 reductions on Europe's cleanest grid in Sweden were a remarkable 85%, falling to around one half for countries such as the UK. The new study uses an EU estimate of Poland's emissions -- at 650gCO2/kWh -- which is significantly lower than calculations by the European commission's Joint Research Centre science wing last year. The VUB study says that while the supply of critical metals -- lithium, cobalt, nickel and graphite -- and rare earths would have to be closely monitored and diversified, it should not constrain the clean transport transition. As battery technology improves and more renewables enter the electricity grid, emissions from battery production itself could be cut by 65%, the study found.
No way that generating electricity from coal to power an EV is less CO2 intensive than an IC.
... Jeremy Clarkson isn't going to like this.
That study is a eco-warrier lie. Even cars burning coal direckly produce less Carbon Die Oxyde then cars burning soler pannels.
Stop giving my money to soler greeny SJW warriers and you are not going to get my gasoline car until you Prius from my cold dead hans.
Hail a Murka! We are Nummer One!!!
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Where's the link to the Guardian article? I want to read it...
Also, let's compare keeping an old Japanese gasoline 4-cylinder for 25 years rather than some diesels. I'm on years 19 and 11 with mine, and neither show any signs of dying soon. And they get better mileage than most of the new models from both of their manufacturers.
I suppose ending is better than mending though, good thing we crushed metric shit-tons of perfectly usable already manufactured (the carbon-cost to make them was already sunk) cars under the guise of environmentalism to prop up the auto industry during the recession.
Once the electric fad is over...
Carbon dioxide may be classified as a pollutant, but there is no clear evidence that it actually causes harm. I accept that particulate matter from burning diesel actually is dangerous because a direct link can be established to human health. For carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, which are increasing in the atmosphere, there is no clear indication that the increases have actually resulted in warmer temperatures. If you selectively correct for certain factors and adjust the temperature data, a process that is arbitrary and generally lacks transparency, it's possible to show a warming trend. No such warming trend exists in the raw data prior to the adjustments, and viewing the data does not give the appearance of warming. I can think of another statistically significant correlation that appears when selective adjustments are applied to data: vaccines and autism. This is rightly dismissed as pseudoscience, and global warming is its next of kin. Claims that greenhouse gas emissions are causing the Earth to get warmer are pseudoscience and should be dismissed as such.
Whenever an electric car puts on brakes, they charge their battery. So yes, even an electric car powered by a coal burning power plant will be more efficient than a normal gas engine. A quick look at gas mileage, show good gas engine is about 30mpg, hybrid is just less than double that mpg, and electric is about 4 times as efficient as a gas engine. That factor of 4 is why even coal burning charging an electric will produce less pollution.
Carbon capture in a centralized production location like coal plants is much more efficient than in distributed consumer cars. That efficiency comes at significant capital cost but that is part of running the plant itself. Regardless of how energy is generated, the promise of EV transportation etc. is precisely that the pollution is more concentrated in production both for the energy and for the vehicle. Both cases are much easier to control and filter to avoid environmental damage that kills people and damages property.
Is all the greenhouse gas released from making the electronic cars. It's worse.
Please learn to spell. Even creimer winced when he tried to read that.
Unfortunately batteries are only about 80-90% efficient (lifetime average), electricity transmission is around 90% (allowing for max/min usage transitions), and the generation of the electricity is about 60% efficient.
and no, an electric drivetrain has only a small advantage over an IC drivetrain unless you have wheel motors-which no one does - probably in the region of 10% better.
Now, static generation Is more efficient that an IC motor, by around 20%.
So, if you are talking about hydrocarbon power for both, electric has 2 additional losses (batteries, transmission) which acount for around 20% loss, but IC is about 30% lower from the motor and drivetrain.
So we are talking about 10% or so difference.
HOWEVER, if the power is from nuclear (and no, solar/wind are not going to produce enough for a nation scale car fleet any time soon) then electric is HUGELY better for CO2 - but not if it is coal/gas electricity..
HOWEVER++ they are talking diesels. DIESEL ENGINES ARE ACTUALLY GREENHOUSE NEGATIVE!
WTF you say? Well they produce NO (which is what everyone complains about). That reacts with atmospheric methane and removes it! methane is thousands of times worse as a greenhouse gas than CO2. The net effect of your average diesel car is a LOWERING of the atmospheric greenhouse gas effect!
So, what we need to battle greenhouse effect are more nuclear power stations, and more diesels!
Sorry, facts are so inconvenient, aint they..
1) The study only takes into account the CURRENT methods of production of electricity. So (a point in electric cars favor), as solar power grows, so will the CO2 efficiency of electric cars. Instead of sitting in the company parking lot, those cars could be plugged into the grid, with solar also plugged into the grid, charging during the day you're at work, the car is doing nothing, and the sun is out generating electricity.
2) In petrol cars favor, they don't consider E85 powered cars. Here in Thailand E85 is widely available, it's 85% ethanol, usually made from palm oil, and lots of cars can use it without modification (and before that E20 , 20% alcohol previously could be used by most cars in the last decade). Grown alcohol is CO2 neutral, so I assume an 85% alcohol car would beat electric cars in these current numbers because it would generate only 15% of the CO2.
i.e. it's nice to compare *today's* diesel against *today's* electric. But if you're deciding what to do next, then your effects won't be there for 5 years, so shouldn't you use the future estimates 5 years from now, 10 years from now etc.??
It may turn out that switching cars to E85 works out better in terms of CO2, or some hybrid situation where short term cars are migrated to e85 (including those currently on the road), and longer term switching to electric, but this report doesn't dig those numbers.
This feels more like 3 card monty w/ physics. So how do they bend statistics to get around conservation of energy. Because if our most efficient systems top out in 70% range, & most engine systems never get close to the peak ~70% area.
My hunch is that they just assume really efficient scrubbers are whisking away the coal pollution..... REalllly efficient scrubbers, almost mythical.
P.S. I hope fossil fuels are not being burned at all in the near future. They are so much more useful, for things like expanding our control of the solar system, etc.
Those numbers are the little end of the deal, irrelevant.
Lets look at the environmental cost of manufacturing batteries and disposing of them at the end.
That is the big nut to crack.
There is another fallacy in the green car BS the carbon cost of producing ethanol is a ridiculous number over what is saved, it actually causes more pollution than gasoline.
Huh?
It follows pretty obviously that as countries clean up their power grid, electric vehicles become a better idea. The data shown in this paper, though, does not indicate that electric vehicles are cleaner to use compared to diesel or gasoline cars in every EU country. The reference data from the linked paper is from 2013, but this "old" paper was only published three months ago, not last year. In three months, we now have updated data? That's great, and it makes sense that electricity is cleaner today than four years ago, but where is that new data? Are we talking about a newspaper article or another peer reviewed publication? This is a horrible summary.
I assume the lifetime of a car is predefined? I'd expect an electric car that lasts 10 years to produce less carbon waste than a diesel car that lasts for 20 years.
That study is a eco-warrier lie. Even cars burning coal direckly produce less Carbon Die Oxyde then cars burning soler pannels.
Stop giving my money to soler greeny SJW warriers and you are not going to get my gasoline car until you Prius from my cold dead hans.
Hail a Murka! We are Nummer One!!!
Bah!! Electric caveman!! Coal rat!!
Ah, the good old strawman argument, with America-shaming thrown in at the end for good measure. Triggered
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
It sounds like you're trying to throw in a misleading statement ("ecological disaster") to noise over a simple issue. E85 is 85% alcohol from carbon neutral oil, it is not an ecological disaster, quite the opposite, its a farmed crop.
Palm TREES are a crop that is cultivated in large plantations, and the number of palm trees is increasing as the demand for palm oil increases* (they simply plant more plantations). Palm OIL is made from palm seeds (and misleading AC below confused coconuts and palm).
Since E85 is 85% ethanol from renewables and assuming the processing is about the same as the distillation and extraction of oil, then an E85 driven car generates only 15% of the CO2 of a diesel car. The technology for burning ethanol, and diesel is very similar otherwise.
So I'm from The Netherlands and I've had the chance to drive a Renault Zoe now, for a couple of times. Its range is 400 km (250 mi). My commute is 66 km (41 mi) one-way. Parts of that, I can drive 130 km (81 mi) per hour, so I turn off "eco mode" and just set the cruise control to 136 km/h or so. So if you drive like that, the effective range in a modest Autumn is about 180 km, or much more if you stick to 100 km/h (60 mi/h). With this range, I have no range anxiety whatsoever. I just don't give a shit and drive. And it's very silent inside. Personally, I think it's magnificent.
Can anyone comment on whether the Renault Zoe is available in the US? I guess you guys just get the Bolt, right?
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
Fig 3 shows how GHG emissions from the use of EVs varies across the EU: while in Sweden the use of BEV would produce only 7–9 gCO2eq/km, in Latvia EVs emit 169–234 gCO2eq/km and the EU average is 65–89 gCO2eq/km (the first number of these intervals refer to the 14.5 kWh/100 km BEV while the second to the 20.0 kWh/100 km BEV). According to these figures, the use of BEV in countries relying on big shares of nuclear or renewable electricity would contribute to reducing GHG emissions at the national level, while, in countries with a highly carbon-intense electricity mix, electric cars would not necessarily contribute to GHG emission reduction targets than relying on ICE vehicle fleets.
tl;dr the paper itself says if your country has clean energy then electric vehicles are cleaner than diesels, whereas if you have dirty energy, like much of the USA or worse, India, electric vehicles are a wash.
Id add that looking at fig3 it also looks like the worst countries would benefit more CO2 wise from hybrids than electrics at least in the short term till the power isn't so dirty.
Did you just misspell creimor?
Ezekiel 23:20
To say that electric cars are producing CO2, unless by burning brakes or any other compound that contains C and it's being oxidized into CO or CO2, is a lie, propaganda, nonsense, and crime against life on this planet, playing right into the fossil fuel industry narrative.
Hello sheeple, now say baaa.
Because, the RIGHT thing to do is to identify CO2 sources in the energy PRODUCTION phase, ie. the plants. Put it right there and talk about it right there, and only then can some progress be made to reduce pollution THERE.
Because if our society is to thrive and grow, we need electricity in massive amounts, we need stuff powered by it, and we need it produced cleanly.
As long as you fucking idiots think that electric cars are producing CO2 (unless by directly oxidizing C somehow), you're being blinded to the actual problem, and are part of that problem.
Forget about emissions. Buy an EV because they are awesome cars. I have a Tesla and I get a kick out of racing from every liquefied dinosaur burner out of the traffic lights. Every wannabe in a BMW, Mercedes, Subaru, Porsche that tries loses. Every. Single. Time. Sometimes they even get angry. That really makes my day.
Sounds like you guys are making the case for hybrids.
Couple a limited size Formula 1 engine for efficiency at optimum efficiency and your waste heat makes for high efficiency winter heat...
We know how to close the carbon cycle. CO2 dissolves from the air into any water exposed to the atmosphere and we know how to get it out very efficiently. Byproducts of this process on seawater is oxygen, hydrogen, and desalinated water. Take the carbon dioxide and hydrogen, run it through a process we've known about for 100 years now, and we get hydrocarbon fuels. The fuel produced not only closes the carbon cycle on transportation fuels (jet fuel, gasoline, diesel fuel) but has none of the sulfur and other nasty stuff that petroleum fuels have.
Here's a five minute video giving the highlights:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
We don't need new cars, we need new fuels.
The average life of a typical car is about 10 years. A cargo ship or passenger airplane have lifespans that can exceed 30 years. Even if we were to switch to all electric cars today we'd still be burning considerable amounts of petroleum products for at least 50 years.
Switching to how we get our fuels means we can keep our vehicles, and much of our petroleum oil based infrastructure. If people still want electric cars then nothing will stop them from buying them. I'd think that new fuels, which would be just like the old fuels, would be a much easier sell to the public that want to keep their current cars.
Maybe getting the infrastructure needed to create carbon neutral fuels would also take 50 years. Since we already know how it's done the hard part is behind us, we just need to optimize the process and scale it up to industrial scale. There's no new technology involved. We can do two things at once. We can build electric cars AND research new fuels. If it works then we just cut the time to transition away from fossil fuels. If it doesn't then we still have electric vehicles to use.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Even to be mentioned in the same sentence as the great Creimer, Mangler of Language! The honour...it is too much!
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
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Am I the only one that find that comparing the GHG impact of the car and everything around it (the source of it's fuel/power production, the manufacturing process etc.) isn't giving us the real picture?
Yeah I understand, we can't ignore that electricity isn't always green. But the feeling I get from a study like this is almost like EV are responsible for the GHG impact of the electricity production. Hey, Tesla model S isn't so green when it's powered by a coal plant!
First, the choice of a car is a consumer one while the electricity production is (usually) government responsibility. So even if TFA told me that EV emit exactly the same GHG as diesel vehicle (and why diesel while I'm at it? Why not gas?), it's still a "mostly" consumer GHG responsibility VS a mostly government GHG responsibility. In my mind, this is an important factor that should be taking into consideration.
Furthermore, as many other said, it's stupid to put a "global average" of the GHG impact of electricity production while the standard deviation between country is so small (e.g. some country use mostly coal while others mostly nuclear and/or hydroelectric).
In the end, what I would like to know is the consumer GHG impact of EV vs Gas. Or, in other word, if we suppose that the electricity is 100% clean, what are the new number of this study?
Elok
Is not saying much - The few they have that work pretty well when new and well kept are rare, (The injectors are the weakest point). But drive behind an old one that smokes like a chimney or accelerates hard. . Ulgh! Diesel stresses the brain, scroll down a bit and see: https://www.sciencedaily.com/r... Diesel is bad, for lungs(carcinogenic): polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH), adhere easily to the surface of the carbon particles and are carried deep into the lungs. http://www.jabfm.org/content/2... I'm hoping that all of this does not apply do Bio-Diesel engines. Rudolf Diesel originally invented them that way. Oil companies had other plans for his engine and him. He went "missing" at sea.
So how much greenhouse gas does the source of the electricity emit?
What about the 10 times the amount of so called emissions, pollution required to BUILD them, not to mention the toxic disposal of the battery?
Quantum sig! Hah!
Electric Cars don't "emit" any greenhouse gases. That's why there's no tailpipe. However, their powersources may emit carbon and that is extremely variable per vehicle, not just per region.
For context: https://www.epa.gov/energy/egr...
That map divides the nation up into various regions as determined by their emissions profile for electricity generation. But the profile isn't uniform throughout the region. While I live in CAMX where it's estimated that each MWh is responsible for X metric tons of carbon, there's a big variation between customers of Southern California Edison and Pacific Gas & Electric. Moreover, there's a large amount of rooftop solar here. One of my former employees has 2 electric cars would get paid ~$11/month by SCE because of the electricity he was sending into the grid. Thus, his two EVs were responsible for ZERO carbon emissions.
Moral of the story: you can't compare apples to oranges. Just as the MPGe figure is a horrible way to describe EV "fuel efficiency", saying that an EVs "emit 50% less greenhouse gas" is a really bad statement.
Incidentally, the Prius is a waste of a hybrid engine. The problem is the U.S. measures fuel economy in MPG. Fuel economy is actually GPM - how much fuel you burn to travel a fixed distance. Because MPG is the inverse of fuel economy, the bigger MPG gets, the less fuel is saved per mile driven. This is why the CAFE standards use a harmonic mean. That corrects for MPG being the inverse of fuel economy. e.g. Suppose you're going to travel 100 miles.
6.25 MPG tractor trailer = 16 gallons consumed
12.5 MPG SUV = 8 gallons consumed
25 MPG sedan = 4 gallons
50 MPG Prius = 2 gallons
100 MPG supercar = 1 gallon
Notice how every time you double MPG, the fuel saved is only half the previous step? The 12.5 MPG jump from a Suburban to a sedan saves you 4 gallons, while the what many people assume-to-be-bigger 25 MPG jump from a sedan to a Prius only saves you 2 gallons.
In other words, if the true goal here is to reduce fuel consumption, we should be concentrating on improving the efficiency of trucks. That's where we should be trying to add hybrid powertrains. Converting an economy car into a hybrid is barely worth the trouble. The MPG increase may seem big, but it's an almost insignificant amount. If you can improve a tractor trailer's economy from 6 MPG to 7 MPG (just a 1 MPG improvement or 17%), you've saved more fuel per mile driven than switching from a sedan to a Prius (a 25 MPG improvement or 100%). 100/6 - 100/7 = 2.38 gal saved per 100 miles. Vs 100/25 - 100/50 = 2 gal saved per 100 miles. You know how environmentalists scoffed at hybrid SUVs? That was actually one of the best types of vehicles to convert into a hybrid.
To avoid this problem of inverse fuel economy, the rest of the world uses liters per 100 km, which is analogous to GPM and a correct measure of fuel economy. This is the problem I have with the current push for clean energy - so much of it is about appearance and bragging rights (including calling EVs zero emissions when they clearly aren't), instead of actual results.
I like the idea of electric cars but not the reality - If you don't have a garage and don't work somewhere that has chargers, where do you charge it without spending time going out of your way and wasting 30 minutes on top of that every day?
And currently all electric cars are insanely expensive, not to mention *huge* and *heavy* - I'm seeing lots of people in Tesla Model S', and they are awesome on the motorway, but it's really funny watching them trying to move around in tight potholed streets and deep speed cushions. Even the smallest electric shitboxes like the fugly miev and the almost-normal-looking Leaf, which don't have the range to last me even a day, do not look like they cope with tight twisty potholed roads that are the day-to-day travel surface of Greater London.
I'm hanging into my tiny sub-3.5mtr-long 600-mile-per-tank diesel until someone makes an electric car roughly the size of an Aygo that has at least 300 miles of range. And a HUD. And AC. And a Sunroof. Sliding rear seats would be cool too.
Take one country that ranks in the middle of the pack in terms of green energy production. Replace all diesels with electric. Allow the system to run for 20-30 years and then evaluate the consequences. How many of the original vehicles will still be on the road? How often do their battery packs need to be replaced and at what cost in terms of both cost to the user and environmental costs of producing new packs and disposing of the old ones? (Yes, the Old Ones, the ones who made us). How often does the power generation infrastructure need to be replaced and what are the monetary and environmental cost associated with that. How does that country's GDP change over that 20 year period? The goal of the study is to evaluate sustainability.
At least you spell "honour" correctly :D ... ;D
Strangely it is red underlined while I type here
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
My net electricity use (including charging my Leaf) is essentially zero. You were saying?
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Other studies show all battery vehicles containing nickel are far and away dirtier than plain ol' diesel vehicles. Mining, transportation and coal all being added factors in the green battery production. So, which are fact and which are fiction?
What greenhouse gasses do electric vehicles "emit", exactly? I understand that they have a greenhouse gas footprint, particularly owing to their manufacture, but afaik, the vehicles themselves are actually emissionless.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Was this particularly unexpected?
This sounds like one from the Bleedin' Obvious dept to me.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
The study didn't count the real pollution to the Earth.
Chemicals that nature can't convert like lithium.
Perhaps the 50% number will help offset EV's horrible foot print to market.
Does this study take into account the strip pit mining of the lithium?
One important point in the discussion is where the pollution happens: I prefer ev's in town even if being powered by a coal power plant out of town. On the motorway, it doesn't matter so much as combustion engines are very efficient and not a lot of people live along motorways.
Dennis Onstenk
For ICE vehicles it's mostly in the fuel that's burned. Which means for biodiesel it's close to zero because it's a closed cycle (fuel -> CO2 -> plants -> fuel). For EVs, it's the process used to generate electricity (including transmission and charging losses).
Note that biodiesel has overhead in transporting the fuel as well.
With EVs, it's also possible to generate your own 'fuel' right at your house with solar panels. Kind of hard to generate your own biodiesel. :)
Ain't it a shore ta gawd lucky thang theys dozens an dozens o trucks onna road fir eechen avery car. I thank so anywayz. Coz if thet wernt the true, then it wood make a lotta sense ta make a hunnert or a thousint lil cars use soler then one big truck.
Muh haid hurtz.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
When the Chevy Volt came out, by the time you took into account the pollution footprint of the manufacturing of the batteries and the life expectancy of the vehicle, etc. The Volt had a larger pollution footprint than the Hummer. The lithium is mined in one county, shipped to another for refining, shipped to another country to make the batteries, and yet another to be installed in the vehicles.