I’ve seen a lot of posts here on Lemmy, specifically in the “fuck cars” communities as to how Electric Vehicles do pretty much nothing for the Climate, but I continue to see Climate activists everywhere try pushing so, so hard for Electric Vehicles.
Are they actually beneficial to the planet other than limiting exhaust, or is that it? or maybe exhaust is a way bigger problem?
First priority is to get rid of cars in general. Try to use bicycles and public transportation. If you don’t need a car to get to work, consider a car share service to replace your private car/private parking space.
EVs probably have around 1/10th the lifetime emissions of a gas car, which is still really significant.
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consider the cost of the car in those estimates. Cars cost over $10k a year to own and maintain in the US. Local corner stores encourage local business and walkable neighborhoods, whereas supermarket chains depend on government subsidies to exist.
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The goal is to take the car as little as possible. It sounds like visiting the beach and visiting your friend isn’t possible without a car, and that’s not something that you need to worry about. If there are car sharing services available in your city, like zipcar. You can still do that without committing to the $10k/year cost of owning a private car.
Let’s say you use a car 3 times a week, twice to visit friends, and once to go to the beach. Zipcar offers a $11/hour rate, and we’ll assume you spend 4 hours on each trip. That comes out to $132/week, or $6870/year, saving you over $3k/year over owning a car. You’d no longer have to worry about maintenance or car insurance. This would also be much better for the environment, since you can use a shared car instead of dedicating a car to yourself. Any week where you don’t go to the beach, or your friend visits you, would be pure savings for you, too.
This video is a really good video about why car-sharing is so useful:
https://youtu.be/OObwqreAJ48
Source for $10k/year number:
https://newsroom.aaa.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/2021-YDC-Fact-Sheet-FINAL-8-9-21.pdf
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Do you have a source for that because that’s radically better than any number I’ve heard. Most analyses I’ve seen have been more like 40-60%.
Doesn’t this hugely depend on the power generation in your area?
No source, but I remember hearing that EVs earn back the cost of their manufacturing through their zero emissions within about a year. I extrapolated based on that with the assumption that a car will last about 10 years. I live in Sweden where our electricity is carbon free/ carbon neutral.
What you heard was probably about tail-pipe emissions which are very low compared to ICEs indeed but they only represent a small part of an EV’s lifetime emissions.
In the EU, EVs reduce lifetime emissions by about 30%. Certainly not nothing but not anywhere close to solving our transport emissions problem.
It’s basically “refuse, reduce, reuse, recycle” except for cars it’s “refuse, cycle, public transport, car pool”