[J-dawg]

Can we not pretend that electric cars don't pollute the planet?

To be clear, I am a big fan of electric cars. But this seems to have become another one of those things that has become so polarised you're not even allowed to express healthy skepticism.

[unethical_ban]

ICE vehicles have very little headroom for "environmental growth" whereas electric seems to have very high levels of headroom. Batteries from more common elements, better recycling, more renewable energy to charge them. As much as I love big trucks, there is no "zero carbon diesel".

So it isn't pretending, they really are a lot better for the planet in the mid-term and forward.

[J-dawg]

I agree with most of what you said.

Also, the fact that EVs produce almost zero local pollution makes them incredibly compelling. So much so that I'd still be in favour of them even if they produced the same amount of CO2 overall. Just to make it clear which "team" I am on.

I'm just pointing out that the EV debate seems to have become one of those things where people pick a side and then stop accepting any nuance.

The comment I originally replied to was making the typical glib lazy assertion that ICE cars are some terrible medieval technology and EVs are all sunshine and rainbows. It's more complicated than that.

[asdff]

there is also the environmental cost of replacing the worldwide fleet of vehicles with EVs, and replacing fuel based infrastructure with electric infrastructure. I would love to see a study done on the environmental impact of car ownership in a place like Cuba, where they fix and reuse 70 year old cars to this day due to sanctions. They've certainly avoided all the shipping pollution that the auto industry would have imposed at least.

I think our disposible lifestyle needs to be fixed. Replacing your perfectly good thing with shiny new x% better thing is not necessarily green when you consider the costs of manufacturing that thing, shipping it to you, and disposing with your old thing.

[dschuler]

> there is no "zero carbon diesel".

There is, it’s called biodiesel. It’s certainly possible to be net zero carbon with synthetic fuels.

[CydeWeys]

And it's insanely expensive and thus not ever going to be remotely economically feasible. The only reason it might falsely appear to be so now is because it is heavily subsidized (way more heavily subsidized than EVs are).

[dschuler]

Economic feasibility is a different question, but we can say the same thing about EVs in Norway - they're not currently economically feasible there without significant incentives. That doesn't mean technology can't catch up.

[audunw]

Is anyone pretending that electric cars don't pollute? It seems like the pollution of EVs has been widely discussed in all kinds of media. Even extremely pro EV site like Electrek or CleanTechnica writes about it all the time.

The pitch has always been that they pollute less globally (and that how much depends on the electric energy mix, but will generally decrease over time) and way less locally. EVs is also the only solution to have a viable path to net zero lifetime CO2 impact. It'll take a zero-emission grid and zero-emission mining, but we need those anyway, and EV tech will help make mining zero-emission.

[Tade0]

With Norway's ultra-clean gird four people commuting in a 40kWh EV have, after 130k km, a smaller carbon footprint than four cyclists doing the same.

EV pollute the planet, but so does everything else - including making the food that's turned into energy spent on cycling. It's not all that clear cut.