this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2023
380 points (73.8% liked)
Fuck Cars
12978 readers
955 users here now
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
Rules
1. Be Civil
You may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.
2. No hate speech
Don't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.
3. Don't harass people
Don't follow people you disagree with into multiple threads or into PMs to insult, disparage, or otherwise attack them. And certainly don't doxx any non-public figures.
4. Stay on topic
This community is about cars, their externalities in society, car-dependency, and solutions to these.
5. No reposts
Do not repost content that has already been posted in this community.
Moderator discretion will be used to judge reports with regard to the above rules.
Posting Guidelines
In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:
- [meta] for discussions/suggestions about this community itself
- [article] for news articles
- [blog] for any blog-style content
- [video] for video resources
- [academic] for academic studies and sources
- [discussion] for text post questions, rants, and/or discussions
- [meme] for memes
- [image] for any non-meme images
- [misc] for anything that doesn’t fall cleanly into any of the other categories
Recommended communities:
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
My main problems with EVs is that they don't reduce car dependency and the upfront manufacturing environmental cost of making them do not make them more eco friendly across their lifespan (especially with the trend of bigger and heavier cars). Car manufacturers are just jumping on the bandwagon to keep cars relevant in the mind of the consumer and clean their image of more obvious pollutants such as gas and oil.
Electric cars will just perpetuate all the other problems with cars, while tricking consumer into thinking they're making an environmentally sound choice and clean their conscience. There was still a giant environmental cost to making them, children still mined lithium for them, tyre rubber will still fill the lungs of people, etc etc.
EVs start their life with a higher environmental burden than ICE vehicles, but the math comes out so that the burden becomes lower after between 15k-20k miles.
By the end of life of an EV, they are more eco friendly than an ICE vehicle of similar build.
Also, “Environmental burden” and “eco friendly” are generic buzzwords used to lump other environmental issues like micro plastics or habitat destruction in with the reduction of green house gases.
I wonder how the math would work out when it is strictly about reduction of greenhouse gases and factors unrelated to our dependency on fossil fuels are not skewing the results.
Good point. I was referring to analyses I read that were calculating the carbon footprint specifically. Apologies for using vague language.
If that's true then I've been fed some misinformation, could you provide a link/source verifying this?
I found this article by the European Environment Agency. There's also the Green NCAP website where you can check the environmental impact of different vehicles over their entire lifetime.
As far as I was aware, the environmental impact is still considerably less than a ICE car, even if powered from dirty power. The impacts are different, making a simple comparison difficult, but generally EV win out.
I'm not saying electric cars are perfect, far from it. However, the change is pushing in the right direction. Think of it as a 2 front battle. Public transport Vs car, and EV vs ICE cars. Your arguments have very little bearing on the public Vs private transport argument, but heavily affect the EV Vs ICE argument.
I'd strongly prefer cities with public transport so good that there is little need for cars etc. However, I would also rather have a city with EV cars over ICE cars. The change over from ICE to EV will also help change habits. That is a perfect time to push public transport into the mix.
Picking a fight with EV is just going to leave both groups bloody. Big oil etc will egg it on, while laughing all the way to the bank.
I mean it makes sense at a first principles level.
An ice car connected to a transmission has a lot of losses, additionally, the engine is constantly in and out of various power and efficiency ranges.
Even if you are just hooked up to a generator somewhere else, the generator can run at peak efficiency consistently to charge the battery instead of constantly varying.
You could translate it to any power source. A large wind turbine is going to do better than a small one on top of the car.
Lithium isn’t mined it is gathered by pumping water into salt flats so the lithium rises to the surface and it isn’t done by children. You’re repeating misinformation.
There is an environmental cost for absolutely anything we make. Do you suggest we stop making anything and everything?
Electric cars are the more environmentally sound choice. They are a required first step to ending our dependence on fossil fuels. Without them we cannot end our dependency.
https://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory/us-measure-ban-products-mineral-mined-child-labor-100610654
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2016/01/child-labour-behind-smart-phone-and-electric-car-batteries/
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alanohnsman/2023/02/08/battery-push-by-tesla-and-other-ev-makers-raises-child-labor-concerns/
https://financialpost.com/commodities/mining/china-lithium-ion-batteries-child-labour-us-trade-war
Your first three articles are about children mining COBALT in Africa. Not mining lithium like I said.
Cobalt is not required for making EVs. It is just an ingredient in one of the many different battery types.
Your 4th link is about using child labor in China to build batteries. Not mine material.
Conclusion: you either didn’t read the articles or you are trying to move the goalpost.
And they're needed in the construction of Lithium-Ion batteries, which the vast majority of EVs use, you're clearly arguing in bad faith over semantics. My bad, since children are dying mining for some other mineral it's okay, my mistake.
Again, cobalt isn’t needed to make batteries and there are many other battery chemistries that can be used in EVs. If that is really a concern of yours then you would be arguing for EV manufacturers to use a different battery chemistry. Which they are already transitioning to.
But you aren’t arguing for manufacturers to change battery chemistry. You’re cherry picking information to argue that EVs are the same as ICEs vehicles. Which makes your intentions obvious.
You argue against EVs then claim to want to end car dependency. So you want everyone riding busses and trains run on diesel?
Climate change is real and we need to end our dependency on fossil fuels to prevent the extinction of our species and EVs are a required step in doing that.
No matter how you power it, bringing 6000lbs of steel with you to go anywhere or do anything is unsustainable.
It's not even just that! Bringing a thing that takes a 10'x20' space to store with you everywhere is unsustainable.
Even a 2000lb Mazda Miata takes up the same number of parking spaces -- one -- as a Ford Excursion, which means it contributes just as much to parking lots destroying walkability as the big SUV does. It also contributes just as much to the "need" to widen roads, since you can only have one car per lane and the longitudinal space is dominated by safe following distance, not the length of the vehicle itself.
The bottom line is that all cars ruin cities, even the small ones. (And before somebody chimes in with "but whatabout Kei cars/compact parking spaces," I'll note that Japan doesn't even let you buy any car -- including a Kei car -- without proof that you have an off-street parking space to store it in, and such spaces are far and few in between in cities since Japan's zoning code is relatively sane. In other words, the total number of cars is substantially limited and that's the saving grace, not the Kei cars themelves.)
I upvoted you despite this inaccuracy.
The problem with electric cars is that they're only a marginal improvement over fossil-fuel cars (note: not the same as "ICE")*, when, as you said, what we need are the transformative gains from ending car-dependency. (I.e., changing the zoning code to encourage walkable density instead of prohibiting it and ending subsidies on car infrastructure.)
(* IMO internal combustion is not the right distinction to make, since things like biodiesel and gasoline synthesized from CO2+H20+electricity could be carbon-neutral too.)