If electric vehicles are the way to go to reduce emissions, wouldn’t charging them use up a lot of power, therefore still being costly and polluting? How does it work?

Question

I know very little about today’s climate actions despite routing for them, so I just want to take an opportunity to better understand them. How some things may just be temporary solutions or revolutionary ones.

I do not want climate change debates, I just want to know if powering electric cars has its trade offs or are really going to help.

In: Engineering

Answer 1

I won’t comment on the emissions aspect, because many people have already done so excellently. (The et emissions are always lower basically.) As for other tradeoffs, the mining process for the heavy metals in the batteries is pretty destructive, although that is not to say that it is, as a whole, worse than the gasoline life cycle (oil -> refinery -> gas distribution network -> cars -> atmosphere). Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles or nitrogen (ammonia) powered vehicles use less heavy metals than a battery powered car. Another con is that while exhaust is lower, pollutants from tires and brake pads is not, and congestion is still bad. Regardless of what makes a car go, that method of transport will always have stuff that makes it less ideal to mass transit options. If only the US had the infrastructure 🙁