A new study in Nature Sustainability confirms that EVs pollute less overall: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/mar/23/electric-cars-produce-less-co2-than-petrol-vehicles-study-confirms. No lung-destroying emissions at source, and less CO2 emissions, even when the grid isn’t very clean; an exception seems to be one country whose grid is 100% dirty, because there nothing will make a difference until the grid is cleaned up. This is not the first time we’ve advanced this position, nor the first time that EV haters have claimed the opposite.
So where does the electricity for EVs come from? One source is solar energy. Well, in fact, that’s the only source - all energy on this planet is originated by the sun’s nuclear reaction (other than nuclear reactors we build here, but we need the sun’s energy to build those too, and look at Chernobyl and Fukushima for how that can end). Most fossil fuel - oil, coal, most "natural gas" - is hundred-million-year-old photosynthesis products that we dig up and burn.
Solar cells represent our best hope for capturing energy at its original source: the sun. All our energy comes from there, either directly or indirectly or very indirectly. But even making them creates some carbon dioxide emissions. The two main types are silicon (Si-PV), used in most existing installations, and perovskite, not widely used yet. This new process for injecting perovskite into inert sealed chambers gives them longer life by avoiding oxygen contact (which causes, you may guess, oxidation).
Let us recognize that we are in a period of transition from traditional dirty fuel sources to cleaner ones.
Let us therefore thank, not criticise, those who used fossil fuels to get us where we are.
Let us, however, criticise those (including carmakers, oil companies, and others) who strive to maintain the status quo of burning crap now that we know the effects it has (both local pollution and global climate change) and especially now that cleaner energy sources are available.
The fire in every gasoline-powered device shall indeed heat the deep, as Tennyson predicted in The Kraken Wakes. But the monster we’re awakening is not some mythical Kraken created by God at the beginning of time, but the monster of climate change created by people since the industrial revolution. Anthropogenic climate change (ACC, "global warming") is heating the oceans more quickly than the land.
But gasoline also heats up locally, very, very quickly.
It is immediately obvious to anyone in an industrialized society why we light our homes with electric light bulbs instead of burning lamp oil: combustion’s lung-killing emissions, its inefficiency, its risk of fire, its greater operating cost, and so on. Since every one of those vices attaches equally well to the insanely complicated gasoline engine, it should be equally obvious that we should propel our cars, motorcycles, snow machines, lawn mowers, etc.
This site is about Electric Vehicles, primarily cars but also "trains and boats and planes", i.e., all means of transit and transport. Well, not including teleportation, but that will be electric too when it arrives.
Ian Darwin has been an EVaholic or EVangelist for years, and currently drives a Tesla Model 3. The reasons for this choice are spread across most of the pages in this site.
Ian is also a computer software developer, book author, trainer/mentor, and is perhaps best known for his Java Cookbook and Android Cookbook.
