EVs and Hybrids are not going to save the planet.
For starters, the Planet doesn't care one whit if it's Human-habitable or not, it's got 4 billion years left and it isn't going anywhere. So the Planet doesn't need to be saved, it's safe as is, or it's doomed by some future colossal collision that breaks it into more than one piece (unlikely) but aside from that, the future is bright, up until the inevitable full-on death, eaten by the Sun, presumably.
The technology is reasonably mature, but is expensive compared to internal combustion types due to a massive reliance on Rare Earth Minerals and a colossal CO2 emission in manufacture, vs the IC motor's CO2 emission recycling.
Which brings up the point that the EV advantage is not as large as some might think, since there is also a per-mile CO2 penalty due to the cost of electric generation versus the per-mile CO2 penalty of burning refined gas, diesel, natural gas or some other less commonly nused but perfectly reasonable fuels like acetylene or propane.
Similarly, although the EV is recyclable, so is the IC vehicle, and with more to recycle and more difficult materials to actually recycle, there is an additional CO2 penalty in dismantling the existing E-vehicle, a penalty put off into the future.
But the real nail in the EV coffin is the fact that to replace the energy currently used by IC engines requires an increase in Electric Generation power that is orders of magnitude greater than any current plans. Put another way, if all the world's IC cars magically turned into EVs tomorrow morning, a high 90th percentile would not be able to move due to a lack of generating power, a situation that takes 5~25 years to rectify, if it's even possible to rectify, especially since we are also looking at the largest explosion in individual car ownership the world has ever seen, with possibly a billion new owners within 20 years.
We haven't even mentioned that all that plastic requires oil to manufacture.
Every little bit helps but some of the emissions penalties of EVs are not even accounted for at all, so the definitive answer is they are less "Green" than they are purported to be, we just don't know by how much since we don't calculate those inputs. That is not due to some sinister plot, it's due to the massive complexity of the calculation, in some cases the input is known to be greater than zero but we simply can't calculate how much do to that complexity.
How complex? It took six years to calculate the environmental cost to manufacture a 1990-era 286 PC vs a 1965 Cadillac (the Caddy won, by the way). To do such an assessment today, even with massive data processing improvements, is probably still too complex. We can figure out the environmental cost of inputs to make a smartphone, given a year or three. (It isn't pretty, by the way). But a whole car? Beyond our ability.
I don't want to put people off buying an EV or Hybrid if it makes sense to them, but you aren't going to "save the planet"* that way. You "save the planet" by walking to work.
* "save the planet" means but does not say "save the planet for human habitation". According to some, we're about half way to burying the thing in garbage and moving to a new one to ruin.
For starters, the Planet doesn't care one whit if it's Human-habitable or not, it's got 4 billion years left and it isn't going anywhere. So the Planet doesn't need to be saved, it's safe as is, or it's doomed by some future colossal collision that breaks it into more than one piece (unlikely) but aside from that, the future is bright, up until the inevitable full-on death, eaten by the Sun, presumably.
The technology is reasonably mature, but is expensive compared to internal combustion types due to a massive reliance on Rare Earth Minerals and a colossal CO2 emission in manufacture, vs the IC motor's CO2 emission recycling.
Which brings up the point that the EV advantage is not as large as some might think, since there is also a per-mile CO2 penalty due to the cost of electric generation versus the per-mile CO2 penalty of burning refined gas, diesel, natural gas or some other less commonly nused but perfectly reasonable fuels like acetylene or propane.
Similarly, although the EV is recyclable, so is the IC vehicle, and with more to recycle and more difficult materials to actually recycle, there is an additional CO2 penalty in dismantling the existing E-vehicle, a penalty put off into the future.
But the real nail in the EV coffin is the fact that to replace the energy currently used by IC engines requires an increase in Electric Generation power that is orders of magnitude greater than any current plans. Put another way, if all the world's IC cars magically turned into EVs tomorrow morning, a high 90th percentile would not be able to move due to a lack of generating power, a situation that takes 5~25 years to rectify, if it's even possible to rectify, especially since we are also looking at the largest explosion in individual car ownership the world has ever seen, with possibly a billion new owners within 20 years.
We haven't even mentioned that all that plastic requires oil to manufacture.
Every little bit helps but some of the emissions penalties of EVs are not even accounted for at all, so the definitive answer is they are less "Green" than they are purported to be, we just don't know by how much since we don't calculate those inputs. That is not due to some sinister plot, it's due to the massive complexity of the calculation, in some cases the input is known to be greater than zero but we simply can't calculate how much do to that complexity.
How complex? It took six years to calculate the environmental cost to manufacture a 1990-era 286 PC vs a 1965 Cadillac (the Caddy won, by the way). To do such an assessment today, even with massive data processing improvements, is probably still too complex. We can figure out the environmental cost of inputs to make a smartphone, given a year or three. (It isn't pretty, by the way). But a whole car? Beyond our ability.
I don't want to put people off buying an EV or Hybrid if it makes sense to them, but you aren't going to "save the planet"* that way. You "save the planet" by walking to work.
* "save the planet" means but does not say "save the planet for human habitation". According to some, we're about half way to burying the thing in garbage and moving to a new one to ruin.
