[thinking4real]

“Electric vehicles are progress… has the potential to become renewable”

How do you contradict yourself so quickly and not see it?

Our electric cars aren’t using “renewable energy” (what a shifty term). They’re using oil being converted to electric energy (at a cost of losing some of the efficiency)

Maybe someday these cars will use energy purely generated from the sun or wind, but given the volume of cars in the planet Im suspicious we’ll ever generate that much. This ignores a growing population where each year we collectively consume more and more

Fusion would be a way to do it, or even fission, but for some reason we can’t consider fission and we don’t put nearly enough money into researching fusion

[telchior]

> They’re using oil being converted to electric energy

Classic conservative talking point. The next bit after this is "let's do nothing, gas burning cars are the future!". Anyone who actually wants to think for real about what the energy usage of an electric vehicle in their area is can refer to the EPA's Power Profiler: https://www.epa.gov/egrid/power-profiler#/

If you're in California, about half is gas. The other half is primarily nuclear, solar, wind and hydro. Transmission losses from power plant to home, and home to charged battery, are 10-20%; but then, electric drivetrains lose much less to efficiency than gas drivetrains. At the end of the day, emissions from driving an electric are better pretty much anywhere in the world; and in most places, massively better.

I think saying that electric "has the potential to become renewable" is quite reasonable. It'll certainly take a lot of time and isn't a certainty, but the generation mix is probably, all in all, an easier problem than the emissions from manufacturing batteries.

[amanaplanacanal]

Where I live the great majority of electricity generation is renewable. Switching from internal combustion to EV is absolutely a net positive.

[thinking4real]

And where you live is no doubt a minority use case for the global situation. Right?

[kolinko]

Even in Poland - the coal capital of Europe - EVs lifetime co2 emissions are now lower than ICEs.

[imtringued]

Almost nobody generates electricity from oil in significant quantities.

[Krssst]

OP probably meant fossil fuels in general (gas/oil/coal).

[andrewjl]

All 3 have very different impact on CO2 emissions.

[Schroedingersat]

This is wrong on so many levels. Just adding regenerative braking and using a larger, more efficient steam turbine pays for the extra embodied CO2 in an EV in about 200 charges (out of 5000 or so an LFP battery lasts). After that the EV is producing under half the emissions even running on pure coal burnt in a subcritical plant delivered over an inefficient third world grid.

As of 7 months ago 13% of annual world electricity generation over the preceding year was wind and solar (and this goes up several percent a year), a little under 10% is nuclear and 15% is hydro. Along with minor renewable resources like landfill gas (distinct from wood biomass which should not be included) fossil fuels are under 60%.

Anyone in Brazil or Norway or one of many othernplaces has about two orders of magnitude less marginal emissions.

The amount of sunlight that hits a car over an average december day in Ireland could move it further than 80% of people drive. It's not yet possible to gather most of it, but in 80% of the world >90% of grid powered charging by covering one of the places the car parks on the regular with PV and buffering a day's power in a battery 10% the size of the car's.

[cultofmetatron]

> How do you contradict yourself so quickly and not see it?

where is the contradiction? yes, switching to an electric car when its oil converted to electricity isn't much better but it still represents progress because it creates incentive for an electrical supply chain that can take inputs from things other than oil. The idea is that it creates an opening for renewables to take a foothold where ice presented a blockade.