• Dudewitbow@lemmy.zip
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    5 months ago

    theres only two temporary reasons. 1. the environmental reason is less the gas vs battery situation, but more the EVs are heavy, and the biggest pollutant are car tires. this tied with US consumer obsession of SUV sized vehicles dont help.

    the other is not all places have an equivalent “gas tax” which is used for road maintainance usually for EVs since, well they dont use gas.

    both fixable problems but can be considered a problem

    • blazera@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      the tire wear thing was a very warped interpretation of a study. Tire wear emits more particulate pollution than exhaust does. Pollution from exhaust is primarily gaseous.

      If my math is right, about 2.6 million tons worth of tires are sold in the US annually. While co2 emissions from vehicles amount to around 1.5 billion tons. Even completely vaporizing every tire sold in a year wouldnt come close to tailpipe emissions.

    • Nurse_Robot@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Isn’t it also that sourcing the raw materials for the batteries results in a lot of pollution, and the charging is often provided by coal burning plants?

      • AA5B@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        No one burns coal anymore!

        But seriously I saw one model by energy portfolio per US State, calculating how long you’d need to drive to make up for the additional emissions during construction

        • all had a threshold where the EV came out ahead, lifetime emissions
        • a couple states with cleaner power, had a threshold as low as two years typical driving, then it’s all gravy
        • West Virginia and Wyoming were the worst, with high reliance on coal for power generation. The threshold was 14 years, so an EV would still come out ahead if it lasted its expected lifetime (Teslas are supposedly good for 15 years, 250k miles before replacing battery)

        WV and WY are heavy red, rural, sparsely populated states, so not a good scenario for EVs anyway. But there’s also a point there about how heavily polluting they are, how the efforts if like 379M to reduce our impact on the environment are sabotaged by less than 1M owned by coal companies

      • shunir@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        Sure it is, but oil drilling also require electricity provided by same plants and isn’t exactly clean either.

      • Dudewitbow@lemmy.zip
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        5 months ago

        ofc its one, but that can be said about a lot of resources. the latter was already mentioned which is why i didnt mention it.

      • masquenox@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        Isn’t it also that sourcing the raw materials

        This also leads to a shit-ton of attendant neocolonial shitfuckery - but nobody in the US really cares about that.

    • BezzelBob@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      I didnt know tires where the biggest polluters, I’m all for getting rid of cars in general but the public transit sucks which makes me think it’s just wishful thinking