The Next Car You Buy Should Be Electric

> But of course all this push to EVs is a huge regressive tax applied to the less-off people which is constantly ignored from the public discourse, so this type of attitude does not surprise me at all.

Easy just tax the rich more, tax carbon, subsidize EVs

I'm aware of those numbers, and they are still both an environmental cost, regardless of how they happen. EVs swap high environmental running costs for high environmental manufacturing costs, and then we in developed countries externalise those costs by sourcing most of the component parts from other countries, and tell ourselves that we have done something great for the world.

Edit: It takes 25MWh to manufacture just the battery pack for a Tesla, or about 18,000Kg CO2 (assuming a 0.6Kg/kWh CO2 ratio for the Chinese power grid, which is a very optimistic number).

Assuming the power grid where the EV will be used is 100% sustainable (which is very very far from the truth), given that the CO2 output for gas/petrol is 0.3kg / kWh or 2.3kg / liter, and assuming an average of 35 mpg or 7.7 miles per liter, as well as adding a factor of 1.5 to account for refining, storage, and transport losses (which I think is very generous) you would have to drive your new Tesla for around 40,000 miles on 100% renewable power before you've paid off the increased CO2 debt of its manufacture over an ICE. That mileage, by the way, is the number of miles the petrol-engined car would have to drive to produce the 18,000kg CO2 that it took to manufacture the EV battery pack. I am also assuming that the manufacturing cost of the rest of the EV is comparable to an entire ICE car, which I think is fair, as EVs generally contain a lot more electronics (which are very energy-intensive to manufacture), as well as at least one electric motor. An ICE is basically a lump of metal, which has a surprisingly low relative cost of manufacture.

The UK has a relatively "green" power grid, for a developed country, and even here, the difference in CO2 output between the grid and an ICE is so small, you would basically never break even in overall CO2 emissions between an ICE and an EV. For reference, the calculated CO2 output of the UK grid is 0.23kg/kWh.

Also, just for fun, the embodied energy of a 1960's Fiat 500 (assuming its entire 500kg weight is made of steel, which is probably a good enough approximation) is 3MWh, or three laptops.

So what is more sustainable? Claiming that I am making an "dishonest comparison" just ignores the issues with the "green maths" of EVs.

> It's definitely not too late, this sort of defeatist attitude is not only wrong but dismissive of the dangers.

I'm not suggesting _nothing_ be done and we carry on as usual. But there are 7.6 billion people on this planet and nearly every single one of them either has, or is working towards a modern standard of living. You can't go from 600 million people in 1700 to 7.6 billion people in 2021 without severely harming your ecosystem.

11,000% more people, and each one of them uses _far_ more resources than their 1700 equivalent. They didn't travel except by muscle or by sail, they consumed locally produced food or food imported by sail and muscle power, and the most technologically advanced good available to the average person was an oil lamp.

There isn't an electric car, reusable bag, ethically produced wool sweater, or synthetic burger that can get you back to anywhere near that kind of resource usage.

As for the dangers, I'm aware of the worst case scenarios and the best case scenarios. They're all terrible. At worst, we die out, at best we end up struggling to maintain a comfortable existence due to shortages and a fragile ecosystem while reminiscing about the good old days. But we need to look at the problem clearly and realistically and work towards feasible, realistic _mitigations_ (solutions are impossible) rather than passing nonsense populist laws like banning plastic straws or electric car subsidies and hoping the next generation figures it out.

> This is also dead wrong, a quick switch to EV will substantially reduce the amount of carbon pollution, no need for mass killings. We simply need the government too provide right incentives to switch to cleaner and less energy usage

I'm not opposed to this, and I certainly don't advocate mass killings (see above re: realistic mitigations). I do realize that the lifetime emissions of an electric car are lower than most ICE vehicles. But again, this isn't a solution. You still need a lot of infrastructure and a lot of emissions to manufacture, install, maintain, and eventually replace that infrastructure. Sticking a solar panel on every roof and a wind turbine in every neighborhood isn't going to solve the fundamental problem of "organism is using resources in an unsustainable way".

A quick, forced switch to EVs is going to win the "carbon emissions" line-graph competition so we can all virtue-signal to each other about how well our countries are doing, but it's not going to get us out of the hole we dug, even when combined with _all_ the current popular emissions reductions proposals.

Thank you for this. I don’t see how we make any significant changes to our trajectory without accepting a “lower” quality of life than what we have now. We need to localize, we need to rid ourselves of continuous consumption of useless junk, and we need to reconnect our resource use to the planet that sustains us.

None of that is accomplished by the virtue signaling you mention of replacing one luxury item with another different one.

Oh man, I will vote for you...