Are Electric Cars Worse For The Environment? Myth Busted

Hope everyone's having a great day! I put a ton of time into researching this video, and was surprised numerous times to learn about the differences in lifecycle emissions between gasoline cars and electric cars. It's a fascinating subject and I'm sure we can keep the discussion below civil! (That was a joke 😜). If you were curious about the battery video referenced towards the end, here's the link: https://youtu.be/1mXSMwZUiCU

The greatest point made here was that using a 3000 lbs vehicle to transport a 150 lbs person isn't efficient

My bicycle only emits when I activate the turbo. Powered by brown beans.

Fun fact about the Atacama desert where the 7% of the lithium in your car battery may have been mined: There are parts of that desert where rainfall has never been recorded, and where it has never even been known to have rained. NASA has sent it's MARS rovers there for training, and they have sampled the soil and in some areas found literally no signs of life.

One thing that always bugged me when comparing running emmisions is that for EVs they take into account the emmisions for producing the power, but my feeling is that for ICE it’s only the tailpipe emmisions. If you take into account the emmisions for producing the fuel, I think this will be a very different story.

This guy looks 50 and 17 at the same time

Great explanation! But I think you only missed one point here. the gas doesn't magically appear at the gas station, a lot of emissions on transporting (dirty ships) and refinning oil, the later is big, 6kwh of eletricity to refine 1 gallon of petrol.

In terms of overall environmental savings, public transportation would win out easily. 1 bus could carry about 40 people. So having efficient and smart public transit might take 40 cars off the road. The problem is the US doesn't push for public transportation that much. Instead, we keep adding more and more lanes and pushing EVs

During the calculation of the running CO2 do you calculate the CO2 needed to extract, refine and transport the fossil fuel ?

Great video, very thorough. One thing you didn't explore, however, is accidents. The reason why I bring this up is because Rich Rebuilds recently pointed out how Tesla discards essentially brand new cars that might only need a moderate amount of work rather than repairing them, which is a huge waste. Given that Tesla is not very friendly towards third-party repair, we kind of have an Apple situation on our hands where usable parts and salvageable cars end up going to waste simply because the manufacturer doesn't want other people working on them and they don't want to fix them themselves. Granted, Tesla is not as bad as Apple in this regard, as Apple really goes out of their way to both prevent repair and prevent parts from getting into the second-hand market (even shredding perfectly good computers), but with Tesla doing things like disabling supercharging on salvaged vehicles, they're certainly not making themselves appear to be much better.

The comparison takes into account carbon produced to manufacture a battery. But gasoline doesn't magically appear at a gas station. Does this comparison take into account the carbon produced to pump, transport the oil (on a boat?), refine oil to gasoline, and the transportation (using a truck) of gasoline to a station? For transportation electricity flows over a wire which I believe produces no carbon.

It’s great to see an analysis on this. I always wondered what the environmental payoff really is. But I can’t believe that disposing of (or recycling) all those battery packs is a trivial matter.

Remember: this video is 3 years old & now there are more efficient ways to manufacture batteries, even without cobalt. Also the energy mix got cleaner in the last years.

I'd love to see you do this again on 5 years so we can see if there was progress or significant progress for both ICE and EV.

If you included the CO2 emissions of battery production, you should have compared it to C02 emissions of Gasoline production. It won't be fair not to include both, what powers each vehicle.

Great analysis. Just a few points of concerns: 1. It is false that desserts don't have life forms. In fact a dessert can be one of the richest areas of life on Earth. We just tend to assume that is not the case because we can't think of living without water in a hot dry place. 2. We need to think about the scarcity of cobalt and other minerals and the human impact it has. Often the mining companies for cobalts, nickels, etc. tend to have some of the most inhumane work conditions in the world, even resembling to slavery in some places. In saying that, I'm an avid advocate for electric cars, I just believe that we need to be more conscious of all the impacts it has and addresses those concerns instead of blanketing the whole process as "better than oil" in order to morally good without doing any work.

Would love to see an updated comparison today with the escalation of renewable energy, especially focusing on at home from solar generation.

Upvoted even just because he was talking about the importance of citing/sourcing information.

you forgot to faktor in the emissions from the production of the gasoline, the transport to the gasstation, refining etc. If you factor in the production of the electricity you also have to factor in the production of the gasoline

Didn’t mention anything about the abhorrent cobalt mining conditions in the Congo. Child labor, slave wages, no ppe for workers, etc.