Posted Nov 25, 2019, 8:10 PM
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ARTchitecture
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Join Date: Feb 2011
Location: Cala Ghearraidh
Posts: 22,842
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Ooof. Just started my specialization in sustainability this semester, and just got this article sent to me by my prof... it'll certainly gonna be a kick in the teeth to the "environmentalists" who don't really know anything about supply chains and resource extraction. Very good, quick read.
Are electric vehicles really so climate friendly?
EVs produce more CO2 than say diesel – it’s just they emit via the power plant not the exhaust pipe
Hann-Werner Sinn | THE GUARDIAN | November 25, 2019
Quote:
Germany’s automobile industry is its most important industrial sector. But it is in crisis, and not only because it is experiencing the effects of a recession brought on by Volkswagen’s cheating on emissions standards, which sent consumers elsewhere. The sector is also facing the existential threat of exceedingly strict European Union emissions requirements, which are only seemingly grounded in environmental policy.
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But the EU’s formula is nothing but a huge scam. Electric vehicles also emit substantial amounts of CO2, the only difference being that the exhaust is released at a remove – that is, at the power plant. As long as coal- or gas-fired power plants are needed to ensure energy supply during the “dark doldrums” when the wind is not blowing and the sun is not shining, EVs, like ICE vehicles, run partly on hydrocarbons. And even when they are charged with solar- or wind-generated energy, enormous amounts of fossil fuels are used to produce EV batteries in China and elsewhere, offsetting the supposed emissions reduction. As such, the EU’s intervention is not much better than a cutoff device for an emissions control system.
Earlier this year, the physicist Christoph Buchal and I published a research paper showing that, in the context of Germany’s energy mix, an EV emits a bit more CO2 than a modern diesel car, even though its battery offers drivers barely more than half the range of a tank of diesel. And shortly thereafter, data published by VW confirmed that its e-Rabbit vehicle emits slightly more CO2 than its Rabbit Diesel within the German energy mix. (When based on the overall European energy mix, which includes a huge share of nuclear energy from France, the e-Rabbit fares slightly better than the Rabbit Diesel.)
Adding further evidence, the Austrian thinktank Joanneum Research has just published a large-scale study commissioned by the Austrian automobile association, ÖAMTC, and its German counterpart, ADAC, that also confirms those findings. According to this study, a mid-sized electric passenger car in Germany must drive 219,000 km before it starts outperforming the corresponding diesel car in terms of CO2 emissions. The problem, of course, is that passenger cars in Europe last for only 180,000km, on average. Worse, according to Joanneum, EV batteries don’t last long enough to achieve that distance in the first place. Unfortunately, drivers’ anxiety about the cars’ range prompts them to recharge their batteries too often, at every opportunity, and at a high speed, which is bad for durability.
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With Germany’s energy mix, the EU’s regulation on fleet fuel consumption will not do anything to protect the climate. It will, however, destroy jobs, sap growth, and increase the public’s distrust in the EU’s increasingly opaque bureaucracy.
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Full story: https://www.theguardian.com/environm...imate-friendly
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