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
First, you’re not at all wrong, that’s an important thing to note. A lot of people just think “electric car good” and stop thinking, it’s good that you’re wondering past that.
There are three parts to the answer. The first is, even when power comes ultimately from coal or natural gas, it’s still generally better than just burning gas on the road and releasing the emissions directly into the air. Maybe not much better, but better. On top of that, there are better power sources like wind, hydro, or solar, and you’re getting some power from that, so even if coal were no better than gasoline, you’re still using less of it than you’d be doing in an internal combustion machine.
The second is that the cars themselves are more efficient. Gasoline cars have to be running the entire time they’re on, you can’t just easily start and stop them at lights. Electric cars use their power much more efficiently. It will use up less total power on most trips, which means less energy gets used.
And lastly, this is one step in the process. Not every step is going to be, “and the problem is solved”. If we did get most or all of the electricity in the world from clean sources, but still had gasoline cars, that would be a big problem. As we switch to electric cars, at least we’ll be in a position where, once our power grid is clean, it’ll mean that both problems get solved.
But good of you to question it! Good of you to wonder. The people who solve problems are the ones who never stop thinking and just accept “well this is prolly taken care of”.
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