I've heard people say that one reason why we shouldn't bother with electric cars is that they still generate a lot of carbon from their production supply chain. All the minerals and metals mined, the parts being shipped around, the energy in manufacturing, etc.
But things like this demonstrate why that is the wrong way to look at it. We can, and absolutely should, electrify everything. The whole supply chain.
The truck in the mine, the smelting factory, the assembly line, the warehouse, and the big rig that delivers it to you. There's no reason why every one of these couldn't run on renewable electricity. The only reason they don't is because until recently it was more expensive, but that is no longer true. The total lifecycle carbon impact of everything we make can go to nearly zero as all these points electrify and as our grid migrates over to renewables.
That it can't happen all at once is no reason not to start.
>I've heard people say that one reason why we shouldn't bother with electric cars is that they still generate a lot of carbon from their production supply chain. All the minerals and metals mined, the parts being shipped around, the energy in manufacturing, etc.
"A lot" = 15% more.[1] Approximately 1 ton of extra emissions, which it takes a daunting 4,900 miles to pay back- less than 5 months of the average American's driving. A great deal of this pollution comes from energy use- that report[1] says that if the grid was powered by 80% green energy then manufacturing a BEV would produce 25% less pollution than a normal car.
Right, all things considered they're still less carbon intensive than and ICE car, especially with a few hundred thousand miles on the odometer. People seem to conveniently forget that an ICE car requires a lot of carbon to manufacture, and then creates even more with every mile driven. So even at the start the EV is ahead (or as your source says, within 5 months it's ahead).
I'm a little triggered when people bring up BEVs being more intensive to manufacture. That report I linked was used as the posterchild for why BEVs are garbage, like Wired's "Tesla's electric cars aren't as green as you might think"[1]. But the report is amazing! It put to bed fears that electric cars needed 50% or more as much to make, that they needed to be driven 150,000 miles to break even, etc etc. On top of that it says that BEVs will be cleaner than conventional cars to build. It was an incredibly great result to that investigation, but people still turned around and portrayed it was a bad thing. That really annoyed me, since it was more optimistic than even most proponents of electric cars had expected. I personally thought electric cars would always produce more waste just by virtue of weighing more, but they are so much simpler to create that that isn't true.
Even if 100% of electric generation was coal power and regenerative braking wasn't a thing it still makes sense.
Once you get the consumers all using one fuel it's an order of multiple magnitudes easier to then switch out the energy supply with something cleaner.
Until the majority of the world's energy usage is electrified, it's a completely pointless thing to bring up how that electricity is actually generated.
Electrifying everything is a good goal, but you need to be a bit careful how quickly you do it if you don't want to increase your overall CO2 production. For example building solar panels too quickly can increase total CO2: http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2015/04/how-sustainable-is-pv...
But things like this demonstrate why that is the wrong way to look at it. We can, and absolutely should, electrify everything. The whole supply chain.
The truck in the mine, the smelting factory, the assembly line, the warehouse, and the big rig that delivers it to you. There's no reason why every one of these couldn't run on renewable electricity. The only reason they don't is because until recently it was more expensive, but that is no longer true. The total lifecycle carbon impact of everything we make can go to nearly zero as all these points electrify and as our grid migrates over to renewables.
That it can't happen all at once is no reason not to start.