Quote:
Originally Posted by Soterios
I'm not near my PC to pull this up, but you can pretty easily do the math on greenhouse gas emission. The fact that a coal fire plant and a car both burn fossil fuels does not make them equal. Power plants are considerably more efficient than a car in terms of emissions per power output. Somewhere in the ballpark of 1/2 for coal/gasoline for CO2 emissions.
In terms of lithium mining and recycling, this is something else that, as you said, needs a bit more study. That said, I really doubt that material collection and recycling comes close to what our coal plants are expelling. They're also something we're improving upon. So as I said before, they're getting 'greener' while the ICE isn't (significantly)
Investment greener energy and electric vehicles is absolutely a value added enterprise.
When I get back to work on Monday, I'll try to pull up some good studies to post. For the record. I'm an electrical engineer in the power industry. I work with generation and distribution. This is a constant discussion in my industry.
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My point is broader ... in that we really don't know the stem to stern environmental impacts of EVs vs. ICE. When I consider environmental impacts, I am not just considering GHGs, but the vast habitat and other environmental damage caused by constructing hydro-electric dams, harvesting oil from tar sands, fracking, off-shore drilling, mountaintop removal mining, etc.
Intuitively, EVs caused significant environmental damage; irrespective of whether they are marginally or even measurably better from a GHG perspective. I would much rather see investment in technologies that hold the potential to significantly alter the equation (eg. thermocatalytic decomposition and/or wind/solar electrolysis for manufacturing hydrogen as a fuel source) than the current rush to treat EVs as a panacea for all our environmental ills. It has not been studied enough and both industry and government are behaving irresponsibly).