Environmental considerations of electric cars

The argument

Producing and charging electric vehicles has environmental costs of its own, and this argument holds that those costs will limit how far electric mobility spreads. Consumers buy electric cars with the expectation that they are cleaner, so their environmental impact may deter people from buying them once the fuller picture is understood. The first set of costs is incurred before the car is ever driven. Batteries for electric vehicles require rare minerals and take longer to construct than combustion engines. Some of those minerals are lithium, cobalt, and copper, and mining for minerals causes pollution, damaging the environment where it takes place. The batteries themselves are complex and take longer to make than combustion engines, and the extra hours means more energy is being consumed. That energy usually comes from fossil fuels, which produces greenhouse gas emissions. An electric vehicle therefore begins its life having already emitted more than its conventional equivalent — the emissions have not been removed so much as moved, from the road to the mine and the factory. The second set of costs continues for as long as the car is used. Once electric vehicles are on the road, they continue to contribute to greenhouse gas emissions when they are charging. They consume large amounts of electricity, usually generated by power plants burning fossil fuels, so the cleanliness of the vehicle is only ever as good as the grid behind it. The scale of the problem grows with adoption rather than shrinking. If everyone were to get an electric vehicle, electricity consumption would dramatically increase, increasing fossil fuel consumption — meaning the more successful the transition, the heavier the demand placed on the generation that supplies it. For this reason, the environmental detriments of electric vehicles will prevent this trend from becoming widespread.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Though electric vehicles have some negative environmental impacts, they are still cleaner than internal combustion engines. The majority of their environmental costs are from the manufacturing process, but once that is finished, they are much cleaner than traditional cars, which continuously burn fossil fuels. Since electric vehicles are cleaner than traditional cars, people looking to purchase new cars and decrease their carbon footprint will buy electric cars.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Manufacturing emissions are real but are incurred once, and lifecycle assessments consistently find the higher production footprint is repaid within the first years of driving. [Rejecting P2] The charging claim ignores the direction of travel in generation. Grid carbon intensity has been falling as coal capacity retires, so the same vehicle gets cleaner across its life — whereas a combustion engine's emissions are fixed at the point of manufacture. [Rejecting P3] The conclusion is about consumer behaviour and does not follow. Adoption is driven by price, range, charging availability and regulation, and buyers who weigh the environmental case at all generally reach the opposite conclusion — which is why sales have grown rather than stalled.