Electric vehicles alone can’t solve transportation’s climate problems: to cut heat-trapping emissions, we also need to reduce car use.
Electric vehicles alone can’t solve transportation’s climate problems: to cut heat-trapping emissions, we also need to reduce car use.
To cut heat-trapping emissions, we also need to reduce car use.
while the headline is a bit self-evident, the article itself covers a lot of interesting ground on the politics and practical implementation of doing this, and what places around the world are doing to try and reduce car usage
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Clickbait title. The problem has nothing to do with EVs themselves.
The problem the article states is that converting that many vehicles takes time and we need to reduce GHG output while still transitioning, along with converting the GHG emitting power grids that are feeding the EVs we are getting.
In the long term, switching to EVs would allow us to use them the same or more than we currently do without having any GHG issues.
I mean really all EVs help us shift the responsibility of emissions from the consumer to governments and power companies. To reduce green house gases EVs and at the same time regulations against coal power plants and other green house gas emitting power plants. While incentivising nuclear, wind, solar, ect.
Regardless of the fuel, single-passenger vehicles are an incredibly inefficient mode of transportation. There's no reason for many cities and city centers to be as car-centric as they are, and any energy savings that could be achieved with EVs in these cities would only be multiplied if wide roads were replaced with walkable paths and effective public transport.
My biggest problem (as an engineer) is that the hype around EVs ignores the possibility that there are better solutions. It's easy to get invested in a cool idea but you can't fixate on it and forget about the problem that you set out to solve in the first place.
Except for one pesky problem: there is only enough lithium and cobalt to power a fraction of the world's 1.5 billion motor vehicles electrically. And that's just passenger vehicles. Not construction equipment, not agriculture, not the thousand other vehicular and non-vehicular demands for li-ion batteries.
It's mathematically impossible with current battery tech for everyone to be driving EV's. Battery efficiency would need to improve by orders of magnitude for this to work.
We've got about a dozen battery technologies in late stage development right now, that problem is solved, it just needs funding. No point funding it when lithium is still available at reasonable prices.
I'll believe it when I see it. Got any links?
CATL (massive Chinese battery manufacturer) has sodium-ion batteries coming to EVs later this year or next year.
They don't quite match lithium yet, but they're close enough to be commercially viable already.