The greenest car in America isn't an EV
washingtonpost.com
The greenest car in America isn't an EV
1–10 of 37 posts
Re: The greenest car in America isn't an EV
#2Re: The greenest car in America isn't an EV
#3The less you drive an EV the harder it is to offset the embodied carbon involved in manufacturing it. There will be a point where, if you don't drive much, an EV emits more carbon than a internal combustion engine car. If you drive a bit more, the EV is more efficient than an ICE but less efficient than a hybrid with a smaller battery. If you drive a bit more the EV will be more efficient than either. The article picks one usage level and uses this single data point to claim the hybrid is more efficient than the EV which is both interesting and misleading.
Re: The greenest car in America isn't an EV
#4Seems like a little bit of a switch-up to conflate “green” with “energy-efficient”. Obviously an efficient hybrid is better than a full ICE car, but what happens when (if?) the energy system is fully electrified?
That said, I understand not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. The concerns about the extra weight, embodied carbon, etc in EVs is all too often swept under the rug. With that in mind, would it make more sense for an energy efficiency think-tank to lobby for alternative transport systems?
Re: The greenest car in America isn't an EV
#5This is a big red flag:
> "The GreenerCars report analyzes 1,200 cars available in 2024, assessing both the carbon dioxide emissions of the vehicle while it’s on the road and the emissions of manufacturing the car and battery."
First, fossil fuel consumption, not carbon dioxide emissions, is the important metric if you're concerned about climate. Humans eat food and breath out carbon dioxide; it's not going to change atmospheric CO2 because photosynthesis. EVs do not consume fossil fuels; hybrids do.
Second, fossil fuel use during manufacturing depends entirely on the power sources used to run the whole manufacturing chain and in the real world may be all over the map, depending on whether coal, gas, nuclear, or solar/wind are the primary energy inputs to the process.
This is the kind of low-quality inaccurate and slanted reporting that I've come to expect from the big three US papers - NYT, WaPo, WSJ.
Re: The greenest car in America isn't an EV
#6The less you drive an EV the harder it is to offset the embodied carbon involved in manufacturing it. There will be a point where, if you don't drive much, an EV emits more carbon than a internal combustion engine car. If you drive a bit more, the EV is more efficient than an ICE but less efficient than a hybrid with a smaller battery. If you drive a bit more the EV will be more efficient than either. The article pic…
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Re: The greenest car in America isn't an EV
#7This is a big red flag: > "The GreenerCars report analyzes 1,200 cars available in 2024, assessing both the carbon dioxide emissions of the vehicle while it’s on the road and the emissions of manufacturing the car and battery." First, fossil fuel consumption, not carbon dioxide emissions, is the important metric if you're concerned about climate. Humans eat food and breath out carbon dioxide; it's not going to change…
The “consumption” of fossil fuels is not the important metric from a climate change perspective. It is the CO2 emissions that result from that consumption. There is a direct relationship between the amount of consumption of fossil fuels and the amount of emission of CO2. The article is entirely correct in using CO2 as the measure.
Yes, CO2 is emitted by multiple processes and there are some counter processes that return that CO2 back into carbon and oxygen. The problem is that the rate of production has exceeded the rate of CO2 return resulting in increased concentrations in the atmosphere. It takes very little CO2 to capture more heat in the system.
Re: The greenest car in America isn't an EV
#8During this energy transition phase more emphasis should be on PHEVs since
1. We have the infrastructure to build PHEVs faster than EVs. Since they are mostly modifications of current vehicles.
2. With the same amount of battery material to make 1 EV we can make ~10 PHEVs and adding that to the fact that most people drive less than 40 miles per day, the effective electric range of a typical PHEV, you are utilizing the battery supply at a much higher level.
I think the current incentives and tax breaks that favor high end luxury EVs have been a mistake. If you can afford a Tesla Model S or a Rivian you don't need a tax incentive to buy it!
Re: The greenest car in America isn't an EV
#9During this energy transition phase more emphasis should be on PHEVs since 1. We have the infrastructure to build PHEVs faster than EVs. Since they are mostly modifications of current vehicles. 2. With the same amount of battery material to make 1 EV we can make ~10 PHEVs and adding that to the fact that most people drive less than 40 miles per day, the effective electric range of a typical PHEV, you are utilizing th…
Yeah I think the main issue with PHEVs is essentially that people don’t charge them / do the majority of their kilometers / miles on the ICE engine :). See https://theicct.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/real-world-ph...
Re: The greenest car in America isn't an EV
#10The less you drive an EV the harder it is to offset the embodied carbon involved in manufacturing it. There will be a point where, if you don't drive much, an EV emits more carbon than a internal combustion engine car. If you drive a bit more, the EV is more efficient than an ICE but less efficient than a hybrid with a smaller battery. If you drive a bit more the EV will be more efficient than either. The article pic…
Good points.
In the grand scheme of things, I don’t think the CO2 emissions associated with EVs matter at all. Is our goal for to cut emissions by 10%? No. It’s to cut emissions by 100%. To reach that goal, we need all vehicles to be pure BEVs (approximately.. some ICE on biofuels/e-fuel could work, but it’s not sustainable on a large scale), materials must be near 100% recycled, and whatever mining is done most be done with electric equipment. To get there, the hard requirement is that we need to mine a certain amount of battery materials and build a certain amount of EV infrastructure. Hybrids contribution to this is mainly that they have some batteries, so they drive battery development and material production. Plug-in hybrids help drive EV infrastructure to a small degree. But nothing is better than just going pure BEV. The small short term CO2 emission gains that might be had with hybrids could easily be outweighed by the long term increased emissions associated with delaying the progression to a 100% renewable 100% carbon neutral ecosystem. But I won’t fault anyone from buying hybrids. Pushing for a more aggressive transition needs to be a policy decision. If hybrid makes more sense than EV from economic or practical point for you then that’s what you should go for.