Don’t get me wrong. I know the vehicle itself will have way lower emissions and than a regular gas or diesel vehicle, but what I’m confused on is that they will have to mine to get the raw materials to make these batteries and then once the battery is done it’s lifespan they will need to find a way to dispose or recycle these batteries. Imagine doing that capacity when the whole world has transitioned to EV.
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Let’s take the most generous (to the pro-gasoline crowd) interpretation, which is that the electric company is polluting just as badly as a car engine by burning fossil fuels to generate the electricity in the first place. Even if we assumed that was true, (that for X amount of energy the same amount of polluting burning happens whether it’s at the power company or in your car, and then you have to transmit it to charge your car so that’s allegedly “worse” according to the pro-gasoline argument.)
The flaw in that thinking is that measures to try to mitigate the pollution from combustion can take up space and weight, which *isn’t relevant when* they have to be placed in a stationary building like they are when they’re *part of the vehicle that has to move*.
In other words, Adding 500 kg to an electrical power plant building, heck adding 5000 kg to an electrical power plant building, doesn’t make the power generation any less efficient once installed because it *doesn’t need to move*. Contrast that with trying to install a device like that on the car, which does have to move. Then the car becomes less efficient because of that extra weight, mitigating any pollution savings it might have given.
The advantage of having your fuel combustion happen in a stationary building like a power plant rather than happening inside the moving vehicle is that you don’t care about the extra weight the machinery to make that combustion less polluting adds if that weight isn’t being moved once the building is done being built.
For an extreme example of that, take nuclear power. which is less pollutant than pretty much anything else. (Yes, the waste is bad, but it’s small and containable. Nuclear power only pollutes in a major way when there’s a big big error. As opposed to coal, which always pollutes constantly *when things are working normally.*) But, you can’t put a nuclear reactor in your car. To be safe it needs a LOT of strong containment. You’re not going to be driving a vehicle with a 3 meter thick concrete block in the middle of to contain the reactor. But take that very same heavy technology – the need for a thick concrete containment, and do it at a power plant building that *doesn’t need to move* and it becomes do-able.
There’s other advantages to electricity as well, such as being universally convertible to whatever new energy source we start using tomorrow. In a city with 1 million combustion cars, switching from a more polluting form of fuel to a less polluting form of fuel would mean having to get 1 million people to buy new equipment for their cars, or buy new cars. But in a city with 1 million electric cars, where the polluting happens in one central spot at the power plant building, switching from a more polluting fuel to a less polluting fuel means you have to only change it in one place – at the power plant, NOT in 1 million places with 1 million customers all buying into it.
It’s a hell of a lot easier to perform pollution oversight regulations at a few power plants than in millions and millions of cars.
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