Title.
I feel like the only way electric cars can be truly “environment friendly” is if the carbon produced is captured at the plants.
Not sure if it’s at all possible, though.
In: Engineering
Others have better answered your title question, but I want to address this:
>I feel like the only way electric cars can be truly “environment friendly” is if the carbon produced is captured at the plants.
No passenger vehicle is truly environmentally friendly in and of itself. They, however, are much friendlier to the environment relative to an ICE vehicle. Beyond that basic comparison, you’re trimming away at the margins. It’s like haggling with a car salesman over a $100 coupon after the car you want to buy was discounted from $100,000 down to $20,000.
Where one places the bar for qualifying as “environmentally friendly” is subjective. There are some out there who argue that the most environmentally friendly thing we can do as a species is stop reproducing, since more people means more carbon emissions. Some folks recognize the role humanity has to play as active participants in correcting the course toward climate catastrophe, and so instead focus on minimizing per-person carbon footprint–these folks would argue against anything except urban multi-family housing with no personally owned passenger vehicles and all-vegan diets. Others think that simply “not littering” is adequate to be considered environmentally friendly. Others still think that burning fossil fuels is *good* for the planet’s climate because plants need the carbon dioxide that fossil fuel combustion produces. Me, personally, I think the four subsets of people I just described are nihilist, unrealistic, naive, and flat wrong (respectively).
The most environmentally friendly thing people can do as individuals *for transportation* is to live within walking distance of every place they need to go to in their day-to-day lives, while taking public transportation (preferably an electric train, but after that buses/airplanes) to go to places farther away which are less frequently visited. The whole of humanity cannot live this way–there are simply too many of us, with too few megacities in existence to support it. We need people to live outside of urban centers, and with that style of living comes the need for non-walking transportation in your day-to-day life. And it is unrealistic to expect people to all live along non-urban routes and corridors where public transportation can meet their daily needs.
So if people need passenger cars, then how can they own them in the most environmentally friendly way? That’s really the question that electric vehicles answer. They use far less energy to travel a given distance than is used by ICE vehicles. That energy used can be generated in a variety of ways–some of which, sure, are *more* environmentally friendly than others. But that doesn’t change that even an EV driving on 100% coal-fired electricity is still eventually better for the environment than almost any ICE vehicle. There is no contest to it at all: when it comes to efficiently using energy to travel a certain distance, EVs have ICE vehicles blown way out of the water. Consider giving [this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2IKCdnzl5k) a watch to get a better handle on how an EV is more environmentally friendly than an ICE vehicle.
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