myglaren wrote: ↑07 Nov 2019, 11:35
While I agree that electric cars have a lot going for them I am unconvinced that they are as good as claimed considering the pollution caused by the generation of electricity - currently - and the increased demand that they cause, combined with the pollution caused in the building of them.
Just shifting the problem out of sight of the majority.
You can be unconvinced if you like but peer reviewed research shows that even with today's energy mix in the UK of about 60% gas generation EV's generate far less pollution per mile than a Petrol / Diesel car, and what pollution might be caused where power is generated is a long way from the streets and neighbourhoods where we spend our time breathing, so the concentration levels are a lot lower than the overall reduction in total pollution levels might suggest.
The fact that many localities like schools have "no idling" signs and you can be fined by the police for idling a parked car unnecessarily makes it clear that local concentrations of pollution are just as important if not more important than overall globally averaged levels of pollution - which are actually very low when ou consider all the uninhabited or sparsely inhabited parts of the world.
As for pollution building an EV - ICE vehicles generate a lot of pollution during their manufacture too, so it's unfair to count one and not the other. Most CO2/pollution generation during the production and delivery of a car is common to both EV's and ICE vehicles, including the manufacturing of raw materials like steel, power and heating at factories where cars are made, transportation of cars from the factory to the owner (EV's are still delivered by Diesel powered ships and lorries - today anyway..) and so on. There is some pollution in the mining of raw materials for batteries of course but expect that to eventually reduce when recycling of the raw materials like Lithium from old batteries supplies a large proportion of the raw materials to make new batteries. At the moment new batteries are made almost entirely of newly mined minerals as there aren't enough old batteries yet for a recycling ecosystem to take off.
Minerals for battery production have the potential to become a largely closed cycle eventually, unlike drilling for oil, refining it into petrol and Diesel and burning it in the atmosphere, where you start with crude oil under the ground and end up with CO2 and pollutants in the atmosphere which do NOT end up being converted back into crude oil again on any sort of human timescale, so is effectively an open cycle.
or they'll be banning gas boilers next and I hate the cold.