So the UK gov have bought forward the date where all new cars must be electric or hybrid.
Now forgive my ignorance but I get the damage that oil/petroleum does to the environment but surely there’s a negative impact to this ‘green’ tech too? Am I overlooking how much lithium or cobalt will be needed for this mass change? Surely having a huge need for these resources will mean just as much mining or seabed trawling to the degree that it’s not really ‘green’ any more…
In: Earth Science
>Now forgive my ignorance but I get the damage that oil/petroleum does to the environment but surely there’s a negative impact to this ‘green’ tech too?
That really depends on how you define ‘green’. It’s true that even hybrids and electric cars have their own negative environmental impact. However, this is also true of every possible method of transportation – even walking and cycling have negative impacts because of food energy input requirements. This mean that defining ‘green’ as having zero negative impact is meaningless, because that goalpost cannot be reached by any transportation alternative.
Instead, the useful view of ‘green’ is something that has a notably lower environmental impact than the current status quo. By that definition, hybrids and electric cars are, in fact, greener than gas cars. This remains true whether you measure that green-ness in terms of [emissions and energy use](https://www.ioes.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/ev-vs-gasoline-cars-practicum-final-report.pdf), or [in terms of harm to human health, ecosystem diversity loss and resource quality loss](https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/es903729a) (via the EcoIndicator 99 benchmark) to capture impacts that the former two metrics don’t adequately portray.
This is in large part due to the fact that, for any given car, operations dwarfs manufacturing in overall impact, as evidenced by the lifecycle analyses above. Even a relatively small improvement in operational efficiency can translate into a sizeable overall impact over the car’s life, and the efficiency gains of hybrids and EVs over gas cars is anything but small. At a bare minimum, even if you account for the resources needed to build the batteries, hybrids and EVs are still better for the environment than gas cars.
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