Will there not be just as much of a carbon footprint from mining materials to make batteries for all the new electric cars?
And all the precious metals that go into making electronics to make that car operate?
Plus the power generation associated with charging everyone’s vehicle.
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> Plus the power generation associated with charging everyone’s vehicle.
Turning fossil fuels into energy at a power plant is a _lot_ more efficient than distributing gasoline to individual cars and having every car convert it into energy through a combustion engine. Power plants can be a lot more sophisticated, take advantage of economies of scale, and implement features that just aren’t practical to include in cars.
For a simple example, even if you made a power plant that was simply a giant car engine burning gasoline, you could use its heat exhaust as the energy input to a separate steam engine, capturing much of the energy a car would just lose to the surrounding air. But you would never put a second engine into a car just to capture the extra energy, and if you did, manufacturing and maintaining that engine would offset a lot of the savings. For a power plant, though, it’s a no-brainer, and for reasons like this even a ‘dirty’ power plant generating electricity can be 3x as energy-efficient as a gasoline-powered car.
That’s obviously before you get into the ability of electrical systems to gradually make more and more use of geothermal energy, wind energy, solar energy, and so on. Then you get into the other benefits, like more centralized pollution (so the power plant can have efficient pollution-capturing or filtering systems it wouldn’t be practical to attach to every single car separately), less waste material and waste production associated with maintenance, etc.
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