Are Electric Cars Worse For The Environment? Myth Busted

Are Electric Cars Greener Than Gasoline Powered Cars?
The Facts About Electric Cars & The Environment - Sponsored by FE

Electric cars are touted as a solution for reducing emissions and improving the environmental impacts of transportation, but are electric cars actually any better for the environment than gasoline cars? This video looks to answer three main questions:
1) Doesn't EV battery production cause a lot of emissions?
2) Don't electric cars get their power from fossil fuels?
3) Isn't lithium mining terrible for the environment?

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[jaredbennett]

The greatest point made here was that using a 3000 lbs vehicle to transport a 150 lbs person isn't efficient

[sjoerdvelzen]

My bicycle only emits when I activate the turbo.
Powered by brown beans.

[Thentz]

One thing that always bugged me when comparing running emmisions is that for EVs they take into account the emmisions for producing the power, but my feeling is that for ICE it’s only the tailpipe emmisions. If you take into account the emmisions for producing the fuel, I think this will be a very different story.

[mikemcmo]

Fun fact about the Atacama desert where the 7% of the lithium in your car battery may have been mined: There are parts of that desert where rainfall has never been recorded, and where it has never even been *known* to have rained.
NASA has sent it's MARS rovers there for training, and they have sampled the soil and in some areas found literally no signs of life.

[xexas]

Great explanation! But I think you only missed one point here. the gas doesn't magically appear at the gas station, a lot of emissions on transporting (dirty ships) and refinning oil, the later is big, 6kwh of eletricity to refine 1 gallon of petrol.

[mikecapatina]

Didn’t mention anything about the abhorrent cobalt mining conditions in the Congo. Child labor, slave wages, no ppe for workers, etc.

[simondalling]

During the calculation of the running CO2 do you calculate the CO2 needed to extract, refine and transport the fossil fuel ?

[LONZ]

I'd love to see you do this again on 5 years so we can see if there was progress or significant progress for both ICE and EV.

[newchangeunlisted_viewer]

This guy looks 50 and 17 at the same time

[Mohad]

In terms of overall environmental savings, public transportation would win out easily. 1 bus could carry about 40 people. So having efficient and smart public transit might take 40 cars off the road.
The problem is the US doesn't push for public transportation that much. Instead, we keep adding more and more lanes and pushing EVs

[neatroxhd]

Remember: this video is 3 years old & now there are more efficient ways to manufacture batteries, even without cobalt.
Also the energy mix got cleaner in the last years.

[PaulBiagi]

The comparison takes into account carbon produced to manufacture a battery.
But gasoline doesn't magically appear at a gas station.
Does this comparison take into account the carbon produced to pump, transport the oil (on a boat?), refine oil to gasoline, and the transportation (using a truck) of gasoline to a station?
For transportation electricity flows over a wire which I believe produces no carbon.

[rarsn]

Great video, very thorough. One thing you didn't explore, however, is accidents. The reason why I bring this up is because Rich Rebuilds recently pointed out how Tesla discards essentially brand new cars that might only need a moderate amount of work rather than repairing them, which is a huge waste. Given that Tesla is not very friendly towards third-party repair, we kind of have an Apple situation on our hands where usable parts and salvageable cars end up going to waste simply because the manufacturer doesn't want other people working on them and they don't want to fix them themselves.

Granted, Tesla is not as bad as Apple in this regard, as Apple really goes out of their way to both prevent repair and prevent parts from getting into the second-hand market (even shredding perfectly good computers), but with Tesla doing things like disabling supercharging on salvaged vehicles, they're certainly not making themselves appear to be much better.

[prateektayal]

Basically, a used EV is the most environmentally friendly family car

[gameofyou]

It’s great to see an analysis on this. I always wondered what the environmental payoff really is. But I can’t believe that disposing of (or recycling) all those battery packs is a trivial matter.

[blueknyght]

If you included the CO2 emissions of battery production, you should have compared it to C02 emissions of Gasoline production. It won't be fair not to include both, what powers each vehicle.

[richy]

Why do people not factor in the CO2 created when making the gas to drive the gas car if we are looking at the cost of producing "fuel" for electric cars shouldn't you also factor in the cost of producing fuel for gas cars? If I am wrong someone please explain.

[Phaggable]

Lithium mining considerations should include how many millions of litres of fresh water are needed to produce the lithium for the battery and where did that water come from? As well as how are the communities near the mine suffering because they don't have sufficient fresh water?

[MartyMasterjohn]

If you’re going to be fair, you also need to include the amount of CO2 generated in refineries to produce the gasoline burned by the ice cars

[lukasbeckers]

you forgot to faktor in the emissions from the production of the gasoline, the transport to the gasstation, refining etc. If you factor in the production of the electricity you also have to factor in the production of the gasoline