LogFAQs > #956616274

ParanoidObsessive posted...

It's also worth remembering that electric cars aren't necessarily carbon-neutral or "green", either, because that electricity still needs to come from somewhere, and unless you're getting it from fully hydroelectric/geothermal/wind-powered/solar-powered sources, there's still a carbon cost. Along with the environmental impact of batteries, plastics, and other manufacturing elements.

EV's are the ideal moving forward because of the possibility that the electricity fuelling them will eventually be clean. By contrast, you can never run a gas-powered car without burning gas (outside of weird fringe cases where people have re-engineered their cars to run on fried eggplants or whatever). The costs that go into manufacturing EV's do also offset some of the potential savings even with clean energy (to say nothing of the non-zero environmental cost of that "clean" energy in the first place), but that's also something that has room for improvement.

Also, as much as you're still ultimately burning gas or whatever to produce the electricity for those cars, burning gas for electricity production is much more efficient than burning it to move a car. The fact that cars have radiators at all (which ultimately amount to "get rid of all the energy we can't capture from that gas") is a testament to that. Power plants, on the other hand, capture every joule they possibly can from the fuel they burn. Also, because of the limitations in what batteries can actually hold (hydrocarbons are much, much more efficient as energy storage per unit of volume/weight than even the best batteries will ever be), making EV's viable has entailed making a lot of modifications that improve their energy efficiency, most notably regenerative braking (which just blows my mind at how elegant a solution it is), allowing them to get significantly more mileage out of the energy that's put into them.

EV's certainly aren't as perfect a solution to the climate crisis as people would like to think they are, but they are a major step in the right direction, and will only get better.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

The other thing a lot of people forget is the sheer size of the US, and how absolutely s*** mass transit is in most places. Cars are pretty much a necessity here in ways that they aren't in other countries. So we're pretty much going to generate far more waste in that respect than most other places, regardless of whether we're using combustion engines or electric.

Really, the size of the US should be incentivizing mass transit, not discouraging it. Using a personal vehicle for long-distance travel is hideously inefficient, and the fact that the country's been deliberately designed around doing so is stupid.

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