Basically, there are some states where the dirty energy producers have been so successful in preventing post-1970 power generating and exhaust scrubbing technologies from being implemented, that their power generation is actually worse than burning gasoline for motive force.
This is not a problem with the electric engine, though, it’s straight up regulatory capture! The fix may involve pitchforks and torches and a trip to Dr. Frankenstein’s castle.
Fossil fuel engines, even internal combustion engines aren’t really going anywhere any time soon. We tend to think about these things only in terms of cars on the road, or power generation.
But most boats still run of fossil fuels, And marine engines are shockingly inefficient. Even where bigger ships are electric drive, they generate power onsite with diesel generators or turbines. More efficient than direct drive, but not so efficient overall. And certainly not green.
Youre also not building a practical electric aircraft any time soon.
So even if electric cars and trucks become the default. We still need to push efficiency for ice engines, turbines and the like.
I was under the impression that thanks to the ginormous cylinder sizes and slow combustion rates that big marine engines were among the most efficient in terms of extracting energy from the fuel.
Their problem is that they burn incredibly dirty heavy fuel oil and thus release more soot and sulfur pollution than literally all of the cars in the first world put together. They basically burn the stuff they take out of gasoline and kerosene to make it burn cleaner.
The problem is that it’s hard to convert a container ship over to pure electric, because nobody has figured out how to put recharging stations in the middle of the ocean.
Or the famous Deltic. This is a good example of an engine that was better in many ways (more efficient, powerful, compact, etc…), but was too unreliable and mostly unsuccessful in the long term.
This is an analytic problem, because the cars didn’t come from those states and it’s a tough thing to compare head-to-head. I could also say that all the dino-burners in California are better at emissions than all the forest fires. Yes, we are talking products of combustion, but that’s where the similarity ends.
To do the comparison correctly, I think it should be at the aggregate level. Add up all the emissions produced by the states in generating power, figure out the portion that is attributable to electric vehicles (adjusted by case mix for each state), and then compare it to all the emissions by the cars. You could even throw in emissions from manufacturing each type of vehicle, batteries and refining the fuels. More like a life cycle analysis.
My seat-of-the-pants guess (truly knowing nothing about it) is that a total life cycle analysis of pollution produced by an electric vehicle vs. a combustion engine vehicle of the same size, age and weight …is going to be basically a wash.
If you read my other post, and this has been pointed out elsewhere, it isn’t just me, running our cars on batteries isn’t the magical fix. Aside from the practical facts that electric motors aren’t great for every task, there are many hidden environmental factors.
Some of them are:
Environmental impact of lithium and other mineral mining and their shipping and processing. Recycling or disposal of old batteries. Depending on what ones’ power plant runs on, and where they get their fuel and what that fuel is, it too will increase the carbon footprint.
Increasing the efficiency of the most popular motor on the planet, especially when that is all many people have access too, it is a no brainier it should be looked into.
Now this doesn’t PRECLUDE continued work into alternative power sources and capabilities.
That is certainly my impression. My understanding is that the nature of shipping by big boat means that they are the most efficient in terms of fuel per tons moved a mile. It may even be more energy efficient to ship stuff from China, where the average worker consumes less energy than to have more profligate Americans producing the same consumer good.
Don’t confuse IC engines with fossil fuel burning. We burn gasoline and diesel fuel because they are cheap and we have the infrastructure set up which makes it convenient to do so. But we could just as easily use carbon neutral biofuels in IC engines instead.
Until we get a massive breakthrough in battery technology (which doesn’t look like it’s going to happen anytime soon), burning flammable liquid in an IC engine is going to remain the best way to get a lot of usable energy packed into a small space. The more efficiency we can squeeze out of IC engines, the better.
A carbon tax would make bunker fuel less cost effective than wind for time insensitive cargo.
I’m still hopeful for a major biofuel breakthrough, most probably a cellulose based conversion. I bought a house with a brand new oil tank in the basement, and I left it when I converted the boiler to gas, just in case.
But if we’re going to address climate change, we have to move forward with systemic change in all systems at once. So just because it’s a wash today, doesn’t mean it will still be a wash in 5 or 10 years time, as the power grid gets greener. But if we lock in now to selling more ICE vehicles (rather than building electric as fast as we possibly can), most of those vehicles will still be on the road producing emissions in 10-15 years time when a greener grid might (otherwise) make a huge difference.
We can certainly get to zero global emissions eventually; the real question is whether we can do it fast enough to avoid making large parts of the planet uninhabitable.
But remember the forest is composed of atmospheric carbon captured through photosynthesis - burning it simply continues an age-old carbon-neutral natural cycle - while cars release pollutants that have been geologically sequestered for millennia. Big, big difference! Heating with wood is “green” compared to heating with propane or fuel oil.
I’ve read dozens of analyses of this. I am a very boring person. But anyway here’s how it seems to work:
Building electric cars makes more pollution than building cheap econobox ICE cars. But only slightly more, mostly due to battery rare element mining.
The slight difference in construction pollution is quickly offset by the huge difference in pollution over the operating lifetime of the car, unless you live in one of the few places where electricity production is insanely filthy - from brown coal plants in a few spots in eastern Europe and Asia, for example, or in one of the King Coal areas of the USA.
(Electric drivetrains are far more reliable and durable than internal combustion ones simply because of the vast reduction in number of working parts. Consequently, they can be expected to last longer, which also contributes to their cradle-to-grave efficiency, but this is rarely or never noted in studies. But I digress!)
Anyway, in the end it’s still about your local power plant. If you are in a region where energy is purposely produced in a dirty fashion, you can buy a high efficiency Japanese gas car and come out ahead pollution-wise. Anywhere else in the world, electric cars are a big win for humanity. And if you can power your car from your own sustainable home power plant (solar, wind, whatever) you’re making a huge difference.
I am going to resist sending you to LMGTFY
Cleaner Cars from Cradle to Grave (warning, PDF link) presents the overall picture without diving into regional power mixes. I like to put this first!
Spatial and temporal heterogeneity of marginal emissions (another PDF) delineates effects on emissions caused by marginal increases in electricity demand, in different parts of the country, at different times of the day, showing how when and where you charge the car can produce different results.
Fuleeconomy.gov’s online calculator attempts to show emissions from different fuel sources used by different vehicles in different parts of the USA. (I do wonder how long this calculator will continue to exist, because currently it shows that EVs only produce higher pollution in a very few locations in the USA, and, well, President Trump, 'nuff said, right?)
Our assessment of the life cycle air quality impacts on human health of 10 alternatives to conventional gasoline vehicles finds that electric vehicles (EVs) powered by electricity from natural gas or wind, water, or solar power are best for improving air quality, whereas vehicles powered by corn ethanol and EVs powered by coal are the worst.
The only way to know whether it’s too late is to try as hard as we possibly can and still fail. Anything else is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
It’s certainly technically feasible. There are plenty of studies of possible scenarios that would get us there (eg see http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/wcc.324). But we don’t know whether any of them are politically and socially feasible.
Perhaps instead the problem is the fact that it is more “efficient” (in exactly and literally one sense of the word: economic) to ship goods ten thousand miles instead of producing them locally.
You mean economically feasible. Because that’s what “politically” feasible comes down to. We have to stop treating the usage of resources for wealth generation instead of societal necessities, but until we can get people to understand that it’ll never happen.
Here in Ontario, my carbon footprint went down dramatically when the province replaced coal fired power plants with an expanded nuclear power plant a few years ago.
For the future to be a place we’d like our children to live in, we need to go all-electric for everything we can, and use biofuel engines only where electric is not a realistic option - airplanes, ships, probably trains, large trucks, and construction equipment. There isn’t enough arable land to switch all our transportation to biofuels without turning huge amounts of land over to biofuel production, with serious negative impacts on the ecosystem and biodiversity.
You know as well as I do there’s too many moving parts to make definite predictions, and we each could link dozens of articles, and I’m not advocating geo-engineering in lieu of reducing carbon emissions. I’m just skeptical that given where we are today (globally, not just USA or Europe) it’s politically and economically feasible to reduce emissions enough, and plenty of scientists say the same thing. Carbon levels are high enough already that geoengineering will be needed to avert catastrophic sea level rise. Living at about 9 ft above sea level, I’m pretty interested in this issue! Sandy flooding missed us only by blocks.
