Featured WSJ - Are Electric Cars Really Better for the Environment?

again?

 

Maybe this thread won’t get hijacked.

Bob Wilson

 

They're just going around in circles trying to find the best way to write it.

I'm still looking for the take that starts with "Life is awesome when you live thousands of miles away from all the pollution your lifestyle creates- and here's how to start!"

 

you mean - like mining & processing brown coal in Australia ? .... then sending the resulting hydrogen to Japan & calling hydrogen car's exhaust clean?

.

 

Well, that's certainly one of many villains in this hero-free story.

 

That version of the article is different than the print version. Much more fun to read.
But the print version has a much easier to read and understand graph that makes the point much more obvious.
The point would be: yes, EV manufacturing produces more CO2, but that this is dwarfed by the CO2 per mile that ICEs produce.
And you can see that the crossover is (IIRC) around 20K miles, but the typical car lasts 200K miles.

IMO, by trying to be flashy for the young crowd (and non-print subscribers) they have made the message more obscure.

Now, if I was commenting on the nice graph in the print edition...
The CO2 produced by the RAV4 graph would be the single line as shown.
But the "line" for the Tesla is based on just the average grid in the US (as noted in the article).
But there are many more possible lines (should be drawn as a cone) and most of them are below that line since your own solar PV brings it way way down.
Finally, the line (or cone) should bend downwards over time (actually miles in the graph) since the grid will produce less CO2 per mile in the future, but the RAV4's use of gasoline will get no benefit over time since a gallon of gas will produce the same amount of CO2 in 10 or 15 years as it does today.

Mike

 

Actually, recovering oil tends to take more energy/is dirtier, over time. So gas powered anything will emit more CO2 over time.