That's not really the point I was trying to make. I was just trying to say "what if" we had the climate scientist's wish and all gas car were magically EVs. Would that actually be better from an emissions perspective?
For mitigating climate change, reducing GHGs (in this case CO2) is the most important factor.
If you are looking instead at air pollution, ie particulate matter, then tires are a larger contributor than exhaust, and EVs due to weight are often worse than ICE cars.
It's 2030, sales of gasoline-powered passenger cars have been banned in California because of their immeasurable impact on the global climate. You've been tasked with replacing them:
1. Make cars, but powered by electric batteries! Don't mind me, just driving my 2000 lbs of batteries to the store and back! If I hit someone they'll suffer grave injury, I require monopoly access to city roadways, a parking lot that dwarfs the land use of the building I'm visiting, direct regular contact with the government for licensing, and a long list of negative externalities. Check it out though, less CO2 maybe?
Right so these are orthogonal problems. We could solve the transport element of carbon emissions while solve none of the other problems of personal vehicular transport. Or we could solve multiple of those problems.
But it makes no sense to critique a solution to problem A by saying it is not ALSO a solution to problem B.
I believe regenerative braking does help with some PM2.5. Tires are still an issue (perhaps worse than normal due to higher weight), but less brake pads friction is a big deal as well.
CO2 emissions definitely are a problem. Because carbon in the atmosphere causes climate impacts globally. Switching an ICE car to an EV car reduces carbon emissions significantly, perhaps by a factor of 2x to 5x.
Particulate emissions are a separate problem. A local one but also important. Poor air quality contributes to diseases and deaths and EVs don't solve this one completely, although they do 1. reduce tailpipe particulate emissions (especially conpared to diesels) and 2. Use regenerative "engine braking" meaning less particulates from brake pad wear. However they still have tyre wear and that may be rather worse than an ICE car partly due to weight and partly due to immediate delivery of high torque to the drivetrain.
Sure. It's better than a gas station, which pollute the soil for decades, and they really degrade the experience for the neighbors (constant roaring in/out of cars/trucks/...).
Better yet, replace most of the car traffic with walking and bikes and trams.
I'm continually bewildered at the additive approach to cars versus a much better subtractive approach. Though I guess cars are more easy to measure for GDP. What's the GDP contribution of a sidewalk? Hard to relate that directly to new businesses and such.
I think in a lot of cases (all?) you don't actually have to rebuild. There are easy wins like removing mandatory parking minimums. In downtown Columbus, Ohio around where I live we have a lot of surface parking lots. Those could be housing. We can run a street tram on a 5 mile N/S loop and eliminate traffic, etc. We don't have to build suburban sprawl either. It's not rocket science. We spent I think a billion dollars reconfiguring a highway that runs through downtown. Projects like that are low ROI and largely just make existing problems worse.
I would say it certainly requires thinking, but we also know that we can't (and economic physics will dictate this whether we like it or not) continue with car-only infrastructure and we also know for a fact that EVs won't fix many of the problems they seek to address. Emissions can be one area that they help in, but they're not a silver bullet and they're laughable compared to things like busses, biking, walking, street trams, etc. when it comes to addressing emissions (never mind traffic, premature deaths, cost, etc.).
Stuff like getting rid of parking minimums might help, but making it less convenient to have a car is one part of the solution alternative transit option, it's mostly just going to frustrate all involved.
I think the problem is we already have suburban sprawl. Rezoning and rebuilding the community with mass transit, buses or better yet subways/trams is not cheap. Then you need to get the community that has already invested in their suburban homes, to put their tax money into such public infrastructure.
There isn’t anything that needs rebuilt in the suburbs (at least where the housing is) you just need density and allowing other types of dwellings and structures to be built, like parks or neighborhood grocery stores and cafes. Really we don’t even need to do the mass transit piece of it to start with and I think when you focus on the huge undertakings you psyche yourself out from being able to do smaller things that have an impact.
I do think it would be a monumental task to get people to re-examine how they live and are handicapped by cars, but transit is just one piece of the puzzle there.
Agreed. I don't think anything needs to be redone. Just a general thickening of what's already there. And dial in alternatives in what exists. Roads in the US are so so wide already. Start with carving out BRT, bike-lanes, ... so people find it safe and convenient to bike or take a bus. Won't even impact drivers. Congestion is mostly due to total car volume and number of intersections/bottlenecks, not number of lanes.
EV’s are 4-5 dB less noisy than similar ICE at low speed when driving at steady speed. But
at about 30 km/h the difference in emitted noise is not significant. For speeds higher than 30
km/h the tire/road noise gets dominant and from there on the choice of tire is more essential
to noise reduction.
Define city speeds? Because this is pretty objectively false at the speeds cars usually drive in all the cities I've lived in. Even the pdf you linked has an EV being recorded louder than an ICE at only a single speed out of all the different speeds and cars they chose.
Love it when people make a claim and post a PDF like it's evidence.
From your PDF:
"The steady speed results of the Nissan Leaf and the Golf variant and the polynomial trend lines are shown in Figure 8. For all the measurements speeds the Leaf [EV] emits less noise than the Golf [ICE]."
This is measuring 10kph to 70kph.
Also these are small European vehicles compared to other small European vehicles. You won't see those so much in a downtown US city.
Consider that the volume in US cities is from the noisiest cars. It doesn't matter if the average car is just as quiet as an EV - it matters what the average total noise is, and that depends on a few loud cars. Likewise pollution. One "rolling coal" fuckwit is all it takes.
I'm sorry you don't agree with a conclusion that is based on facts just because your country is different. Still the facts are facts. At 50km/h -city limit in most of EU- EVs are louder.
I'm pro EVs so please stop reading things into what I said that I didn't actually say. I specifically said the problem is the tyres.
You are responding to an article about EVs in the USA with data for Europe.
But lets stick with Europe and your PDF.
You have cherry picked the exact one place where "EVs" are "louder". Specifically you picked:
1. A commercial EV van.
2. Traveling at 50km/h.
3. At a steady state.
In every other measurement, the EVs were quieter:
1. The passenger EV is always quieter.
2. The commercial EV is quieter at any other speed.
3. Both EVs are quieter at anything other than steady state, i.e accelerating or decelerating.
My experiences of European towns and cities are that cars stop and go a lot. In pedestrian areas or residential areas are often limited to below 50km/h.
And again, I remind you that these vehicles were themselves cherry picked and are not representative of vehicles on the road in the USA or Europe. My mum drives a diesel passenger car and it is assuredly not quieter than any EV even when it's not moving - and that's a car that is in good working order.
And even then, the conclusion from this paper is: "In urban areas where the speed it often above 30 km/h the introduction of EV’s will not have a great influence on the traffic noise."
This implies USA per capita emissions from cars = 4 metric tons.
Current total USA per capita emissions is 14.86 tons. So reducing the car emissions by 75% (by switching to EV) will take total per capita emissions down to 11.8 tons.
I believe the acceptable level of per capita emissions for the 1.5C target is 2.3 tons [1].
Thank you, this makes more sense. It highlights the fact that switching everyone to driving EVs is not enough to counter climate change. We need to think about trucks too. In fact, switching all trucks to EVs is likely to have a bigger impact on our emissions targets. Ergo we should focus our energies here first.
No, we're out of time. We need to focus our energies on everything significant. That's electricity generation, transportation (both personal and commercial), heating and agriculture.
Getting electricity to ~90% carbon free, switching heating from fossil fuels to heat pumps and switching personal transport to EV's are unique in that they are win-win -- they are cheaper than fossil fuels in the long run.
Trucks are a poor fit for pure EV’s due to weight limitations and their usage patterns. Regenerative breaking really doesn’t hemp them much which is why gas electric hybrids never caught on.
We’re much better off transferring large trucks to either in road charging or trains.
That’s a massive underestimate as the manufacturer and transmission of gasoline produces massive quantities of CO2. Roughly 30% of total gasoline pollution comes before it enters your car. Making the total 12kg of CO2 per gallon of gas. https://innovationorigins.com/en/producing-gasoline-and-dies...
Also, electricity and thus EV’s has gotten a lot cleaner over time and that trend is continuing. US per capita emissions in 2004 were 9t oil, 7.4t coal, 4.1T natural gas, and 0.4t other. In 2021 that fell to 6.3t oil, 4.9t natural gas, and 3t coal keeping 0.4t other. https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-fuel
The US grid effectively traded 4.4t of coal for 0.8t of natural gas + renewables. The specifics vary, but globally electricity is getting a lot cleaner per kWh which makes both manufacturing and use of EV’s less polluting over time.
This is why people are pushing EV’s. Over their lifetime they don’t use todays grid they use todays grid and the grid that’s going to exist in 20+ years. Their infrastructure that scales with however green we can make the grid which will likely be very green in the future.
As a thought experiment? We will have polluted the Earth from all the mining and haphazard disposal processes that are common where these rare earths are, and will have done little to nothing about over all GHG release as policy in places like California have de-incentivized residential solar to prop up the profits of the utilities and most charging will likely be done using carbon based sources from an archaic grid.
Believe me when i say this, I worked for VW during diesel-gate and thought the solution was EV being embraced by the largest auto manufacturer: VAG. But the reality it's far more complex than that: we have to enforce as much WFH as possible, in conjunction with realizing we must have a conglomerate of energy sources including fossil fuels, but also see that what we have been doing is entirely unsustainable and not even desirable in terms of large scale transportation and logistics.
it doesn't even fit the mould since younger millennials and Gen Z do not want nor can they afford cars; so who is going to buy these things after it's main demographic has been exhausted?
I'll save you a click:
Conclusion
I predict that if all gasoline vehicles were replaced by EVs we would see total C02 produced drop from 3 trillion lbs per year to 810.1 billion lbs per year, a 73.0% decrease. Comparing this result using data from [8] we see a 77.9% decrease predicted. We consider this validation for such a simplistic, high level approximation with the goal of being understandable to people outside of academia. We performed a separate calculation using 24.2 mpg for the fuel economy for gas powered vehicles in the U.S. and calculated the total annual emission to be 3.3 trillion lbs. This value lands in between the previous two methods of calculating total annual gas emissions.
The predicted decrease in emissions is compelling but it is still important to expand on these of calculations to include more environmental effects that distinguish the impact of these two types of vehicles. The type of impact is most likely not completely characterized by carbon emissions alone
> haphazard disposal processes that are common where these rare earths are
Which rare earths are those? Because there's only one rare earth in motors and zero in batteries. There are rare earths in most electronics, but not really any more in EVs than in any other car.
The rare earth in motors -and not even in all motors- is neodymium, which is the second most common. There are huge deposits worldwide and *the US gets over 85% of its REE domestically.*
> The rare earth in motors -and not even in all motors- is neodymium, which is the second most common. There are huge deposits worldwide and the US gets over 85% of its REE domestically.
Has that changed? This was my understanding of the situation:
“I think most people outside our industry would be shocked to learn that there are virtually no factories in the US building these magnets at scale,” said Shilpan Amin, GM vice president for global purchasing and supply chain. “Well that’s about to change.”
Yes, 92% of Nd magnets are made in China. Large amounts of the REE used to make those magnets are imported. The implication that all that mining is just in China is false, and cheap labor is the only reason it isn't all in the US. The US supplied almost ALL of the planets REEs until cheap labor outcompeted it.
> The US supplied almost ALL of the planets REEs until cheap labor outcompeted it.
I fail to see how that is untrue then, if the labour arbitrage holds then nothing is being refined in the US and is then still solely taking place in China were Xi has made it a priority to remediate destroyed soil after decades of dumping waste as Cheaply as possible during its Industrialization, mainly for export make to the West.
Is 24mpg really correct? I'm in Europe driving a small hatchback and I'd typically get around 45-50mpg (UK, I know American mpg is lower, but it wouldn't be halving the figure!).
Depending on how I drive, that can be up to about 60mpg, which is where the car definitely tops out.
It would appear that the Ford F-150, the most popular car in America, has an average MPG of 23 mpg [0], so there's possibly some accuracy here. I do understand that's a very American-centric view, but its one explanation.
American driver here, I don't know about others but my small hatchback gets between 30 and 35 mpg. If I am driving on the highway, I can get up to 37 ~ 40 mpg depending on what speeds I use and how hilly it is. NE Georgia.
Smaller cars and diesels are more common in Europe, which probably helps statistically. But I imagine the method of testing mpg between Europe and the EPA in the US could be different and is likely contributing to some of the discrepancy. Also didn't VW get caught lying about their numbers?
I thought VW lied about emissions not miles to the gallon, and the numbers I've said are what my dashboard shows for avg consumption when I'm driving, they ain't the testing numbers (which do tend to be ridiculously high)
24mpg seems right. I drive a pretty medium sized car - Subaru Outback - and I pulled 25.5mpg on a big road trip. My right foot is a little heavy.
Trucks and the fat SUVs that are super popular here get astronomically bad fuel mileage. Think low 10s MPG. Even worse when towing stuff.
Small cars do alright but are decreasing in popularity. Looking around the parking lots I frequent, where everyone has new vehicles, it's insane. All SUVs. Even when it's dominated by "smaller" SUVs like Mazda CX-5, Honda CR-V, Toyota RAV4, Lexus RX370... Those are still big boys.
One thing that I am hoping to get introduced to is better sources for the data points I use. I think they are mostly ok but I am no expert, so I could easily be citing something that is generally understood to be incorrect. Also, I could be citing very biased sources without even knowing it.
In particularly, this number of 24mpg (as an American) seems pretty in line with my expectations, so I decided to use it.
Electric cars do emit particulate matter from their tires, a greater amount than ICE vehicles do because they’re heavier. The PM is also a microplasic (rubber). But obviously near zero COx/NOx/SOx.
Imagine if climate change was a myth, and the only thing we got from all this effort was air that was safe to breathe. Wouldn’t that still be worth it?
You're assuming the average person would rather have breathable air than another kitchen appliance from China that they won't even use, which is a wild stretch of the imagination from the people I know.
> Imagine if climate change was a myth, and the only thing we got from all this effort was air that was safe to breathe. Wouldn’t that still be worth it?
Such a great sentiment! ICE cars don't only contribute to global warming, they pollute the _local_ environment. And not just the emissions, noise too. Neighbor bought a hybrid. In the mornings, they zoom away to work. Before, they'd wake me up with the rumble of the einge. Nothing to do with global warming, but a very real increase in quality of life.
I think you’re underestimating atmospheric transport. NOx from China makes up a large portion of the pollutant in California, more than enough to offset local reductions over the past couple decades.
NOx is a product of combustion with an excess of oxygen (too little O2 and you get hydrocarbons; both lead to ozone). You don’t need to make EVs with fossil fuels, so there’s no need for the air pollution to happen at all. Pollution from mining is another problem altogether of course.
>It’s kind of shocking when you consider the volume of material removed from both tires and breaks over time * the number of cars.
Is it? Everyone that owns a car or has lived with some that owns a car knows that tires and brakes wear down and need replacing. We're talking a 1/4" of a tire and however thick a brake pad is. We know precisely (other than my rounding from laziness of looking it up) how much material is removed.
> Everyone that owns a car or has lived with some that owns a car knows that tires and brakes wear down and need replacing.
When I was a kid, I just assumed it all fell on the road. Let’s be honest, adults never consider the full lifecycle of every product they buy. We only know what we can see in front of us.
Knowing that stuff disappears doesn’t mean you think about what happens to the missing material.
I personally didn’t make the connection to air pollution until well after graduating college and I would be surprised if many people make the connection on their own instead of assuming it’s just landing on roads etc.
Even considering the climate benefits of EVs over gas cars, I am skeptical of large scale public investment in EVs because it pulls funding away from what cities really need: public transit and better biking/walking infrastructure. Regardless of the climate, cities just work better for humans when they're not clogged up with cars, EV or not.
EVs unfortunately also double down on cars' need for parking in busy areas (due to the need for charging stations) which totally disrupts urban fabric and wastes valuable land that could be housing, businesses, or parks.
For rural areas, though, I can see the climate benefit of the EV transition. Without the climate benefit, though, I am just not sure whether the side effects of EVs, like lithium battery production and disposal, would outweigh "cleaner air".
Because (even if we put aside concerns like charging spots, batteries, and increased road damage due to EV weight) there is a finite level of funding available on all levels of government.
If private companies want to fund a conversion to EVs, great. But that's not exactly what's happening. There are huge federal and state subsidies happening to incentivize the transition, and those subsidies could instead be used to repair and public transit systems, which at least in my city are literally crumbing, and improve safety for cyclists and pedestrias.
Your second point there has always been the thing that surprises me the most about the climate change stuff. Ok so lets say that climate change is fake. What do we get out of going green?
- Huge amounts of economic growth during a transition period that requires skills all up and down the skill ladder.
- Significantly cleaner air and water which will save hundreds of thousands of lives each year.
- Significantly cheaper electricity as the cost of the input to the system(wind, sun, tides, etc) are free.
- Actual energy independence as enemy states cannot block our import of solar energy.
I'm sure there are more benefits. The list of negatives is basically just: a bunch of people entrenched in the current system lose money and power.
I just really struggle to understand how beyond those who'd lose money/power anyone opposes this transition.
I would agree on the main point that either way, having cleaner air, water, etc. has its benefits beyond the veracity of man made climate change. I would disagree that it also causes huge amounts of economic growth and significantly cheaper energy. I think that it generally is more expensive to manufacture things in a more "green" manner and I think it is hard to beat nuclear for price per watt, despite what I hear bandied about in the discussions of Germany shutting down the nuclear reactors.
Opposition might be based on a consideration that the benefits you cite don't outweigh the actual costs and the opportunity costs. Economic growth for its own sake is not a benefit - that's like saying that jobs are valuable.
Unfortunately, it has significant costs as well as benefits:
-What makes you think we'll get huge economic growth from building very expensive infrastructure?
-An excellent goal, but we can get this for example with gas turbines which provide cheap, reliable power, or nuclear.
- If renewables provide cheaper electricity, then we don't need to do anything, they'll dominate the market! Although they do provide cheap power when operating, reliable power remains expensive and people want reliable power. Of course this doesn't mean we shouldn't build wind/solar!
- The US has energy independence with fossil fuels now. Its expensive to convert renewables to storable form, whereas fossil fuels can be stockpiled in huge quantities.
The primary negative is cost! To give an example, a recent report estimated solar at $20/MWh, gas at 45, and solar with four hours of storage at 160! That's for electricity, the easiest area to reduce fossil fuels, but only 20% of energy consumption.
Currently, 20% of US power generation comes from coal. Replacing this with gas would halve CO2, as well as providing huge air quality benefits. Just one example of a relatively easy small win that we have available short of green everything.
8 minute energy is selling solar with four hours of storage to California for $40/MWh. If it's actually costing them $160/MWh, they're losing a lot of money!
Sorry, I should have made the sarcasm more obvious. $40/MWh pricing is profitable for 8minute energy, their costs are less than $40/MWh. Anybody saying it costs $160/MWh is using outdated figures.
I'm having trouble believing that its that cheap- battery prices have not fallen 8x in the last two years. I believe the report I was reading was from 2021.
The report is from 2021. The sources they used for prices are from earlier. 160 -> 40 is 4x. That's about 3 years worth of price drops at the rate they fell in the 2010s.
Sure, you can sell solar for cheaper when the sun shines. But if we want to consider replacing the entire grid, we need to look at the cost including storage and not accounting for slack in other generation sources!
I saw a I think legit gov funded study that compared emissions by type and by vehicle class. It's a little dated.
From memory. Passenger cars produce about 5-10 times more PM-2.5 from exhaust than tires. And about the same for brake dust.
Older diesels are filthy. As are older motorcycles without cats. Newer ones are a lot better.
My conclusion is EV's are probably trading reduced PM-2.5 from brakes to increased PM-2.5 from tires. Over all it's still significantly less PM-2.5. Although I'd be concerned about difference in health effects because PM-2.5 from exhaust, tires, and brakes aren't identical.
Edit: Friend has been doing studies on how air pollution reacts on surfaces including PM-2.5. Makes me think the subject is actually very complicated. And state of knowledge is incomplete.
Any calculation on cars that does not factor in commercial trucks is flawed. Over the past two decades, we have seen an enormous increase in commercial freight traffic. The last numbers I remember from [1] estimated that cars account for 40% of tailpipe emissions, whereas trucks account for ~60%, and this was estimate from before the pandemic. I am certain the ratio is more skewed in favour of trucks now.
To the point: 73% of what exactly? 80% of total emissions? 40%? 10%? Given the externalities, it may mean the difference between worthwhile or irrelevant.
How is it flawed? I state that I am doing the calculation for cars. How can not including trucks be a flaw in calculating the value for cars?
>To the point: 73% of what exactly? 80% of total emissions? 40%? 10%?
I do not understand what you are asking. What are all these percentages? The number I calculated was an estimate of the decrease in carbon emissions if you replaced all gas cars with EVs in the US.
They include vans and light trucks in the car numbers, but the electric vehicle are all passenger.
To do this correctly they simply need to use the average MPG for a passenger car. That's it - from just that you can do all the math, you don't need the total fuel consumption in the US.
>We can also use 24.2 mpg as the average fuel economy for a gas powered vehicle in the U.S. [10] to expand on our approach, slightly. Using this value we find a slightly largely value for total gallons of gasoline burned per year of 163 billion.
That is a good point about passenger EVs vs vans and light trucks. I'm not sure if it makes the analysis "deeply flawed" as it would proceed the same way just possibly switching the actual number used in one place.
It isn't misleading. I state this in the first paragraph.
> I ignore the potentially, important environmental impact of the manufacturing processes of the two types of vehicles.
And in the second paragraph I discuss it further.
>This is a naive and simplistic approach but it is a starting point and allows us to highlight this very important aspect of the topic. Furthermore, these values are still relevant in more complex calculations which take into account other factors like manufacturing, maintenance, longevity, etc
Manufacture of ICE cars requires energy just like manufacture of EVs.
That comparison is essentially manufacture of batteries + electric motors vs. manufacture of gas tank + IC engine + mechanical drivetrain like gearbox.
Energy required for manufacture does not necessarily imply CO2 emissions. Could be renewable or nuclear powered car factory.
Raw materials is a different matter of course. Lithium vs. steel (mostly).
Driving around: electric power vs. inefficient, polluting & noisy ICE. So EVs for the win there. :-)
BTW, thanks for all the feedback! I am not some climate scientist or anything, I've just wondered about this question and started putting down notes and decided to make a little capsule about it. It has actually evolved a lot already, so certainly feedback from this post will definitely get incorporated.
I will change it all to be Wh or kWh. It is unnecessarily confusing. But I do believe the math does work. Thanks for taking a look! Would love to have confirmation from someone else that I didn't do something stupid.
This is a typical green propaganda dumbass calculation .
You assume that people drive BEV as often and as far as they drive ICE. They don't.
You assume people always charge BEV from the grid. People can also use solar panels.
You assume gasoline forever has to be fossil. It does not need to be.
You forget the carbon footprint of manufacturing of either kind of cars.
You assume all people can afford buying new cars. They don't.
You assume there will be as big second hand market for BEV and it is now for ICE. It won't be, because of the battery degradation.
You assume that current grid can handle simultaneous loading of all BEV. It can't, and you don't include the carbon footprint of grid extension and increase of the generation power in your calculation.
And last but now least, a typical green propaganda trick, you are only calculating one variable and ignoring negative effects in another variables:
- people waste more time waiting for charging
- people forced to switch to inferious means of transportation
- people reducing their leisure travels
- a two-class mobility with the lower class of poor people living in apartments without own charging possibility who cannot afford a BEV or are forced spending hours per day charging at public stations, and the higher class of home owners with solar panels, charging their cars for free
- higher prices for taxi, delivery services (and therefore all retail prices), facility management, mobile nurses, construction worker and other people who drive more miles per day as one over-night charge can give.
- special service vehicles like firefighting trucks, police cars, military vehicles, super-heavy trucks etc. cannot use fragile battery energy only, and need to use gasoline, which becomes very expensive and hard to get, if 99% of other cars are BEV and so all gas stations are closed.
So you should either stop publishing shit or invest a lot more time in your calculation.
I couldn't be further from a pusher of "green propaganda."
I just thought I'd go after the lowest hanging fruit, like if EVs didn't even lower emissions when ignoring everything else, then it's a slam dunk. But after doing this rough first pass at the calculation, EVs at least seem to pass that test.
The thing is, I may not include everything but you can easily see how I came to my conclusion. That was a large motivation for this. To actually put out easily accessible numbers and have a discussion. It sucks that you can't present your critique in a reasonable manner but I appreciate you commenting.
99 comments and only 22 points? I also noticed this post drop from the front page #18 to somewhere like 500 in an instant. I guess some mod decided to tank this post. Why?
102 comments
[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 157 ms ] threadIf you are looking instead at air pollution, ie particulate matter, then tires are a larger contributor than exhaust, and EVs due to weight are often worse than ICE cars.
1. Make cars, but powered by electric batteries! Don't mind me, just driving my 2000 lbs of batteries to the store and back! If I hit someone they'll suffer grave injury, I require monopoly access to city roadways, a parking lot that dwarfs the land use of the building I'm visiting, direct regular contact with the government for licensing, and a long list of negative externalities. Check it out though, less CO2 maybe?
2. Anything else?
3. Increase availability and production of electric bikes
4. I don't really care how we get there. We do not have a choice in the matter.
But it makes no sense to critique a solution to problem A by saying it is not ALSO a solution to problem B.
Particulate emissions are a separate problem. A local one but also important. Poor air quality contributes to diseases and deaths and EVs don't solve this one completely, although they do 1. reduce tailpipe particulate emissions (especially conpared to diesels) and 2. Use regenerative "engine braking" meaning less particulates from brake pad wear. However they still have tyre wear and that may be rather worse than an ICE car partly due to weight and partly due to immediate delivery of high torque to the drivetrain.
They are less noisy, less stinky and much smaller, they blend in much better with existing infrastructure e.g. parking spots, driveways.
I'm continually bewildered at the additive approach to cars versus a much better subtractive approach. Though I guess cars are more easy to measure for GDP. What's the GDP contribution of a sidewalk? Hard to relate that directly to new businesses and such.
I would say it certainly requires thinking, but we also know that we can't (and economic physics will dictate this whether we like it or not) continue with car-only infrastructure and we also know for a fact that EVs won't fix many of the problems they seek to address. Emissions can be one area that they help in, but they're not a silver bullet and they're laughable compared to things like busses, biking, walking, street trams, etc. when it comes to addressing emissions (never mind traffic, premature deaths, cost, etc.).
I think the problem is we already have suburban sprawl. Rezoning and rebuilding the community with mass transit, buses or better yet subways/trams is not cheap. Then you need to get the community that has already invested in their suburban homes, to put their tax money into such public infrastructure.
I do think it would be a monumental task to get people to re-examine how they live and are handicapped by cars, but transit is just one piece of the puzzle there.
(PDF warning)
https://www.vejdirektoratet.dk/sites/default/files/publicati...
Quoting the conclusion:
EV’s are 4-5 dB less noisy than similar ICE at low speed when driving at steady speed. But at about 30 km/h the difference in emitted noise is not significant. For speeds higher than 30 km/h the tire/road noise gets dominant and from there on the choice of tire is more essential to noise reduction.
>For speeds higher than 30 km/h the tire/road noise gets dominant and from there on the choice of tire is more essential to noise reduction.
City speed is 50km/h and EVs for some reason comes with loud tires.
I have never lived in any city with anything else than 50km/h being the limit and closely to the average.
From your PDF:
"The steady speed results of the Nissan Leaf and the Golf variant and the polynomial trend lines are shown in Figure 8. For all the measurements speeds the Leaf [EV] emits less noise than the Golf [ICE]."
This is measuring 10kph to 70kph.
Also these are small European vehicles compared to other small European vehicles. You won't see those so much in a downtown US city.
Consider that the volume in US cities is from the noisiest cars. It doesn't matter if the average car is just as quiet as an EV - it matters what the average total noise is, and that depends on a few loud cars. Likewise pollution. One "rolling coal" fuckwit is all it takes.
I'm pro EVs so please stop reading things into what I said that I didn't actually say. I specifically said the problem is the tyres.
But lets stick with Europe and your PDF.
You have cherry picked the exact one place where "EVs" are "louder". Specifically you picked:
1. A commercial EV van.
2. Traveling at 50km/h.
3. At a steady state.
In every other measurement, the EVs were quieter:
1. The passenger EV is always quieter.
2. The commercial EV is quieter at any other speed.
3. Both EVs are quieter at anything other than steady state, i.e accelerating or decelerating.
My experiences of European towns and cities are that cars stop and go a lot. In pedestrian areas or residential areas are often limited to below 50km/h.
And again, I remind you that these vehicles were themselves cherry picked and are not representative of vehicles on the road in the USA or Europe. My mum drives a diesel passenger car and it is assuredly not quieter than any EV even when it's not moving - and that's a car that is in good working order.
And even then, the conclusion from this paper is: "In urban areas where the speed it often above 30 km/h the introduction of EV’s will not have a great influence on the traffic noise."
It's a delight.
Even if it were polluting just the same forever, it would be a significant improvement.
Gasoline cars emissions = 3e9 lbs = 1360777110 metric tons
This implies USA per capita emissions from cars = 4 metric tons.
Current total USA per capita emissions is 14.86 tons. So reducing the car emissions by 75% (by switching to EV) will take total per capita emissions down to 11.8 tons.
I believe the acceptable level of per capita emissions for the 1.5C target is 2.3 tons [1].
[1] https://policy-practice.oxfam.org/resources/carbon-inequalit...
No, we're out of time. We need to focus our energies on everything significant. That's electricity generation, transportation (both personal and commercial), heating and agriculture.
Getting electricity to ~90% carbon free, switching heating from fossil fuels to heat pumps and switching personal transport to EV's are unique in that they are win-win -- they are cheaper than fossil fuels in the long run.
We’re much better off transferring large trucks to either in road charging or trains.
Also, electricity and thus EV’s has gotten a lot cleaner over time and that trend is continuing. US per capita emissions in 2004 were 9t oil, 7.4t coal, 4.1T natural gas, and 0.4t other. In 2021 that fell to 6.3t oil, 4.9t natural gas, and 3t coal keeping 0.4t other. https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-fuel
The US grid effectively traded 4.4t of coal for 0.8t of natural gas + renewables. The specifics vary, but globally electricity is getting a lot cleaner per kWh which makes both manufacturing and use of EV’s less polluting over time.
This is why people are pushing EV’s. Over their lifetime they don’t use todays grid they use todays grid and the grid that’s going to exist in 20+ years. Their infrastructure that scales with however green we can make the grid which will likely be very green in the future.
Believe me when i say this, I worked for VW during diesel-gate and thought the solution was EV being embraced by the largest auto manufacturer: VAG. But the reality it's far more complex than that: we have to enforce as much WFH as possible, in conjunction with realizing we must have a conglomerate of energy sources including fossil fuels, but also see that what we have been doing is entirely unsustainable and not even desirable in terms of large scale transportation and logistics.
it doesn't even fit the mould since younger millennials and Gen Z do not want nor can they afford cars; so who is going to buy these things after it's main demographic has been exhausted?
I'll save you a click:
Conclusion
I predict that if all gasoline vehicles were replaced by EVs we would see total C02 produced drop from 3 trillion lbs per year to 810.1 billion lbs per year, a 73.0% decrease. Comparing this result using data from [8] we see a 77.9% decrease predicted. We consider this validation for such a simplistic, high level approximation with the goal of being understandable to people outside of academia. We performed a separate calculation using 24.2 mpg for the fuel economy for gas powered vehicles in the U.S. and calculated the total annual emission to be 3.3 trillion lbs. This value lands in between the previous two methods of calculating total annual gas emissions.
The predicted decrease in emissions is compelling but it is still important to expand on these of calculations to include more environmental effects that distinguish the impact of these two types of vehicles. The type of impact is most likely not completely characterized by carbon emissions alone
Which rare earths are those? Because there's only one rare earth in motors and zero in batteries. There are rare earths in most electronics, but not really any more in EVs than in any other car.
The rare earth in motors -and not even in all motors- is neodymium, which is the second most common. There are huge deposits worldwide and *the US gets over 85% of its REE domestically.*
Has that changed? This was my understanding of the situation:
“I think most people outside our industry would be shocked to learn that there are virtually no factories in the US building these magnets at scale,” said Shilpan Amin, GM vice president for global purchasing and supply chain. “Well that’s about to change.”
0: https://www.theverge.com/2021/12/9/22825948/gm-ev-motor-rare...
https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2022-02/Neodymium...
I fail to see how that is untrue then, if the labour arbitrage holds then nothing is being refined in the US and is then still solely taking place in China were Xi has made it a priority to remediate destroyed soil after decades of dumping waste as Cheaply as possible during its Industrialization, mainly for export make to the West.
Depending on how I drive, that can be up to about 60mpg, which is where the car definitely tops out.
24mpg to me seems like madness!
[0]: https://www.caranddriver.com/ford/f-150
Trucks and the fat SUVs that are super popular here get astronomically bad fuel mileage. Think low 10s MPG. Even worse when towing stuff.
Small cars do alright but are decreasing in popularity. Looking around the parking lots I frequent, where everyone has new vehicles, it's insane. All SUVs. Even when it's dominated by "smaller" SUVs like Mazda CX-5, Honda CR-V, Toyota RAV4, Lexus RX370... Those are still big boys.
In particularly, this number of 24mpg (as an American) seems pretty in line with my expectations, so I decided to use it.
Imagine if climate change was a myth, and the only thing we got from all this effort was air that was safe to breathe. Wouldn’t that still be worth it?
Such a great sentiment! ICE cars don't only contribute to global warming, they pollute the _local_ environment. And not just the emissions, noise too. Neighbor bought a hybrid. In the mornings, they zoom away to work. Before, they'd wake me up with the rumble of the einge. Nothing to do with global warming, but a very real increase in quality of life.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/03/03/518323094...
It’s kind of shocking when you consider the volume of material removed from both tires and breaks over time * the number of cars.
Is it? Everyone that owns a car or has lived with some that owns a car knows that tires and brakes wear down and need replacing. We're talking a 1/4" of a tire and however thick a brake pad is. We know precisely (other than my rounding from laziness of looking it up) how much material is removed.
What point were you actually wanting to make?
When I was a kid, I just assumed it all fell on the road. Let’s be honest, adults never consider the full lifecycle of every product they buy. We only know what we can see in front of us.
I personally didn’t make the connection to air pollution until well after graduating college and I would be surprised if many people make the connection on their own instead of assuming it’s just landing on roads etc.
EVs unfortunately also double down on cars' need for parking in busy areas (due to the need for charging stations) which totally disrupts urban fabric and wastes valuable land that could be housing, businesses, or parks.
For rural areas, though, I can see the climate benefit of the EV transition. Without the climate benefit, though, I am just not sure whether the side effects of EVs, like lithium battery production and disposal, would outweigh "cleaner air".
We are always going to have cars: whether gas or electric.
If private companies want to fund a conversion to EVs, great. But that's not exactly what's happening. There are huge federal and state subsidies happening to incentivize the transition, and those subsidies could instead be used to repair and public transit systems, which at least in my city are literally crumbing, and improve safety for cyclists and pedestrias.
- Huge amounts of economic growth during a transition period that requires skills all up and down the skill ladder.
- Significantly cleaner air and water which will save hundreds of thousands of lives each year.
- Significantly cheaper electricity as the cost of the input to the system(wind, sun, tides, etc) are free.
- Actual energy independence as enemy states cannot block our import of solar energy.
I'm sure there are more benefits. The list of negatives is basically just: a bunch of people entrenched in the current system lose money and power.
I just really struggle to understand how beyond those who'd lose money/power anyone opposes this transition.
-What makes you think we'll get huge economic growth from building very expensive infrastructure?
-An excellent goal, but we can get this for example with gas turbines which provide cheap, reliable power, or nuclear.
- If renewables provide cheaper electricity, then we don't need to do anything, they'll dominate the market! Although they do provide cheap power when operating, reliable power remains expensive and people want reliable power. Of course this doesn't mean we shouldn't build wind/solar!
- The US has energy independence with fossil fuels now. Its expensive to convert renewables to storable form, whereas fossil fuels can be stockpiled in huge quantities.
The primary negative is cost! To give an example, a recent report estimated solar at $20/MWh, gas at 45, and solar with four hours of storage at 160! That's for electricity, the easiest area to reduce fossil fuels, but only 20% of energy consumption.
Currently, 20% of US power generation comes from coal. Replacing this with gas would halve CO2, as well as providing huge air quality benefits. Just one example of a relatively easy small win that we have available short of green everything.
https://www.lazard.com/media/2ozoovyg/lazards-lcoeplus-april...
And that's for 100MW solar with 50MW of 4-hour storage
$10 + $130/6 = $31.67. Sell for $40/MWh and profit.
From memory. Passenger cars produce about 5-10 times more PM-2.5 from exhaust than tires. And about the same for brake dust.
Older diesels are filthy. As are older motorcycles without cats. Newer ones are a lot better.
My conclusion is EV's are probably trading reduced PM-2.5 from brakes to increased PM-2.5 from tires. Over all it's still significantly less PM-2.5. Although I'd be concerned about difference in health effects because PM-2.5 from exhaust, tires, and brakes aren't identical.
Edit: Friend has been doing studies on how air pollution reacts on surfaces including PM-2.5. Makes me think the subject is actually very complicated. And state of knowledge is incomplete.
Airless tires should dramatically reduce this, in testing right now: https://wgno.com/automotive/internet-brands/french-postal-va...
(wgno.com)
Why should airless tires make any difference to that specific issue?
Some ugly accidents with batteries catching fire?
Prices would increase as more batteries are needed (so, increasing the price of some goods)?
Solar power generation would increase and become widespread, and prices would decrease as competition would become higher?
To the point: 73% of what exactly? 80% of total emissions? 40%? 10%? Given the externalities, it may mean the difference between worthwhile or irrelevant.
[1] Sustainable Energy: Without The Hot Air: https://www.withouthotair.com/
>To the point: 73% of what exactly? 80% of total emissions? 40%? 10%?
I do not understand what you are asking. What are all these percentages? The number I calculated was an estimate of the decrease in carbon emissions if you replaced all gas cars with EVs in the US.
They include vans and light trucks in the car numbers, but the electric vehicle are all passenger.
To do this correctly they simply need to use the average MPG for a passenger car. That's it - from just that you can do all the math, you don't need the total fuel consumption in the US.
>We can also use 24.2 mpg as the average fuel economy for a gas powered vehicle in the U.S. [10] to expand on our approach, slightly. Using this value we find a slightly largely value for total gallons of gasoline burned per year of 163 billion.
That is a good point about passenger EVs vs vans and light trucks. I'm not sure if it makes the analysis "deeply flawed" as it would proceed the same way just possibly switching the actual number used in one place.
> I ignore the potentially, important environmental impact of the manufacturing processes of the two types of vehicles.
And in the second paragraph I discuss it further.
>This is a naive and simplistic approach but it is a starting point and allows us to highlight this very important aspect of the topic. Furthermore, these values are still relevant in more complex calculations which take into account other factors like manufacturing, maintenance, longevity, etc
That comparison is essentially manufacture of batteries + electric motors vs. manufacture of gas tank + IC engine + mechanical drivetrain like gearbox.
Energy required for manufacture does not necessarily imply CO2 emissions. Could be renewable or nuclear powered car factory.
Raw materials is a different matter of course. Lithium vs. steel (mostly).
Driving around: electric power vs. inefficient, polluting & noisy ICE. So EVs for the win there. :-)
> 282,000,000 vehicles * 14,000 miles/(year vehicle) * 241.4 Wh/mile * 0.85 lbs C02/kWh = 810.1 billion lbs of C02/year
Aren’t Wh and kWh being conflated in this calculation?
You assume that people drive BEV as often and as far as they drive ICE. They don't.
You assume people always charge BEV from the grid. People can also use solar panels.
You assume gasoline forever has to be fossil. It does not need to be.
You forget the carbon footprint of manufacturing of either kind of cars.
You assume all people can afford buying new cars. They don't.
You assume there will be as big second hand market for BEV and it is now for ICE. It won't be, because of the battery degradation.
You assume that current grid can handle simultaneous loading of all BEV. It can't, and you don't include the carbon footprint of grid extension and increase of the generation power in your calculation.
And last but now least, a typical green propaganda trick, you are only calculating one variable and ignoring negative effects in another variables: - people waste more time waiting for charging - people forced to switch to inferious means of transportation - people reducing their leisure travels - a two-class mobility with the lower class of poor people living in apartments without own charging possibility who cannot afford a BEV or are forced spending hours per day charging at public stations, and the higher class of home owners with solar panels, charging their cars for free - higher prices for taxi, delivery services (and therefore all retail prices), facility management, mobile nurses, construction worker and other people who drive more miles per day as one over-night charge can give. - special service vehicles like firefighting trucks, police cars, military vehicles, super-heavy trucks etc. cannot use fragile battery energy only, and need to use gasoline, which becomes very expensive and hard to get, if 99% of other cars are BEV and so all gas stations are closed.
So you should either stop publishing shit or invest a lot more time in your calculation.
I just thought I'd go after the lowest hanging fruit, like if EVs didn't even lower emissions when ignoring everything else, then it's a slam dunk. But after doing this rough first pass at the calculation, EVs at least seem to pass that test.
The thing is, I may not include everything but you can easily see how I came to my conclusion. That was a large motivation for this. To actually put out easily accessible numbers and have a discussion. It sucks that you can't present your critique in a reasonable manner but I appreciate you commenting.