A 2022 study found that electric vehicles (EVs), which left-leaning governments in Canada, the United States, and elsewhere are pushing on the population, pollute at a rate far higher than their gasoline or diesel-powered counterparts.
The 2022 study from the U.K.-based Emissions Analytics group found that during a 1,000-mile journey, EVs release 1,850 times more pollutants into the surrounding environment than gas-powered vehicles due to the heavier weight, which eats through tires.
While many think of emissions from exhaust, tire wear plays a significant role in emitting pollutants. The synthetic rubber used to create tires includes certain chemicals that get released into the air, and EVs are significantly heavier than conventional cars because of massive lithium batteries.
Overall, EVs weigh about 30 percent more than gas-powered vehicles and cost thousands more to make and buy. These issues are in addition to the fact that they are not suitable in colder climates (such as Canada and the northern U.S.), offer poor range and long charging times (especially in cold weather), and have batteries that take tremendous resources to make and are hard to recycle.
Both the government of Canada under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the government of the United States under President Joe Biden are hoping to ban, or severely limit, the sale of new gasoline-powered cars after 2035 despite these deficiencies. The EU (European Union) also has an EV mandate in place for the same year.
EVs don't fill me with confidence. And it's no surprise to see upside-down and backwards priorities from our illustrious leaders, Trudeau and Biden.
2 comments:
EVs still have a long way to go. Do I think that the advantages will eventually outweight the disadvantages? Yeah, I do. But we're definitely not there yet.
It's tricky, because on the one hand EVs as they currently are have a lot of downsides, but I also think that the idea of moving away from fossil fuels is a good one (obviously, this also needs to happen in the generation of the electricity that runs EVs in the first place). So I think we need to continue development on EVs, even if they currently aren't living up to the promise.
(The only way I would be convinced that we shouldn't continue development on EVs would be if there were a better way to wean ourselves off of fossil fuels in transportation. Given the American dependency on cars in particular, though, I don't see another option right now.)
Nothing to disagree with here. My problem with so many "environmental" solutions is that we usually discover that the solution hasn't been thought through very thoroughly. As development continues, though, we hopefully edge closer and closer to the asymptotic maximum for that paradigm before we finally have to move on to a new paradigm.
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