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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Even coal power plants are better at cleaning the exhaust emissions than an individual combustion engine. Personal vehicles just don’t have enough space to implement emission control devices as effectively as a large power plant.
Others have explained why the engine itself is greener, but I want to discuss the long term goals of making the entire lifespan of the engine greener.
As you say, right now we need a lot of energy and produce a lot of emissions for the creation and disposal of engines. But a long term goal is to move completely to renewables for the process.
So you will have things like solar, wind and tidal energy powering the factories, and powering the machines that both create, transport and decommission engines. This reduces emissions. The over all goal is to make every aspect of the process as green as possible.
On a side note, one of the big issues we’ll be hitting is with vehicles that require powerful combustion engines. We’ve had a difficult time creating EV heavy goods and construction vehicles, and are still a long way away when it comes to transport ships and planes.
You can produce energy (electricity) more efficiently in a power plant than you can produce it locally at the vehicle via gasoline. So all things equal, you make less bad stuff for the same amount of energy to make things go.
Technical shortcomings of EV transition can and will be overcome. However, most of the opposition to EVs is political. Denial of climate change is one of the prime tenets of the ‘patriot’ belief system. EVs are seen as just another method for the Globalists to control the population. Climate change denial and the almost religious adherence to fossil fuels is a problem much more difficult to overcome than any technical issue having to do with EVs and renewable energy
https://afdc.energy.gov/vehicles/electric_emissions.html#wheel
If you want to see vehicle emissions by state and the way electricity is produced check this out
The larger issue you are dancing around is the underlying implication that we need to 1:1 swap ICE cars for EV cars. The better solution is more diverse options, i.e. walkable neighborhoods, bikes and bike infrastructure, perhaps inductive EVs, buses, trains, etc. Essentially we need to break the auto habit we’ve developed over the last 60 or so years and live more like the rest of the world.
There are a lot of good points others have said. I’m conducting PhD research on vehicle hybridification and electrification.
One of the big factors is decoupling the vehicle from the energy source. If you have an internal combustion engine you rely on fuel and an entire supply chain to get the fuel to you which also consumes energy (think pipelines, ships, trains, tractor trailers, etc.). If you switch to bio fuel the supply chain will be slow to adapt.
This is true for EVs too but the main point is that every place in the developed has electricity and it can come from any source… coal, natural gas, hydroelectric, wind, nuclear… it makes no difference to the car.
So with batteries from a decade ago being charged by coal aren’t necessarily better than a normal car. However, gradually transitioning to EV as we make easier/cleaner/greener batteries and more energy from hydro/wind/nuclear/solar is the goal.
I tell people, imagine if car batteries could be easily recycled by your own municipality and were charged by power harvested down the street or by your house.
Also, batteries are recyclable or reusable. There are several companies which reuse batteries for energy storage systems. Current recycling technologies is able to recycle about 95% of the battery. These are also industries at the beginning of their lifespans, and will only become more efficient.
Try finding a way to take the much larger mass of the total exhaust produced by an ICE, collect it together, and recycle it. Note that “plants do that” isn’t an answer as we already overwhelmed the ability of all the world’s plants to recycle all the carbon dioxide we produce, about 70 years ago.
At the end of its life, a battery is all in one place, is much less mass, and even if the industrial process for recycling it is hard, it’s not like mining the raw materials was any different. Besides, most of the battery is nickel anyway.
The point is moot however, as the real solution is to roll back the giant project to make America completely dependent on the automobile. People should have options for transportation besides car ownership for a hundred other reasons besides “its bad for the environment”. “Not everyone is rich” should also be a good enough reason.
ELIV version is that the pollution that goes into creating EVs is a lot less than the pollution that goes into creating and operating an ICE vehicle.
All of the comparisons have been done, and are readily available for you to Google for, if you would like to leave the ELIV level of detail.
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