Posted on 02/03/2014 5:17:02 AM PST by SeekAndFind
In 2010, President Obama said he wanted 1 million electric cars on the road by 2015. They won't be there, and it wouldn't matter if they were. A nation full of electric cars will make no ecological difference.
So what if nearly half of us were driving EDVs (hybrid, plug-in hybrid, and battery electric vehicles) by 2050? Wouldn't that mean a cleaner environment? After all, it's those fossil-fuel-burning dinosaurs that are ruining the world, isn't it?
Not necessarily. A recent North Carolina State University study "indicates that even a sharp increase in the use of electric drive passenger vehicles (EDVs) by 2050 would not significantly reduce emissions of high-profile air pollutants carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide or nitrogen oxides."
Joseph DeCarolis, an assistant professor of civil, construction and environmental engineering at the school, said the study "wanted to see how important EDVs may be over the next 40 years in terms of their ability to reduce emissions."
What it found was "that increasing the use of EDVs" to 42% of passenger vehicles in the U.S. "is not an effective way to produce large emissions reductions." One reason, of course, is that electric cars, the EDVs that the political left believes have magical healing powers, also burn fossil fuel.
Hybrids have to burn gasoline at times and plug-ins, both hybrids and battery-powered cars, need electricity from coal- and gas-fired generating plants to charge their batteries. Yes, the Tesla owner so proudly driving that "zero emissions" electric car is actually a polluter.
The production process needed to build battery-powered cars is also dirty. It emits pollutants and greenhouse gases in larger amounts than the production process of conventional autos.
Indeed, a Norwegian university estimates that the manufacture of electric vehicles creates about twice the emissions that gasoline car production does.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.investors.com ...
Yeh....I'll take two...
Not necessarily. Electricity can be generated by hydro or nuclear, with zero emissions.
By 2050, the POV of the article, we could be generating 100% of our electricity from these two sources if we decided to. The obstacles are political, not technical.
Electricity can even be produced by wind or solar, though those are a lot more expensive and inefficient.
Okay.
Don't Expect Electric Coal-Powered Cars To Save The Environment
Why are we continually hearing this nonsense about CO2 being a pollutant? If the people who spout this ever read a science book,they’d know better.
I agree with you. Another point to add is that the performance configurations of an electric motor, unlike an I.C.E., are virtualy limitless. Once they perfect the battery issues and can produce a car that can get at least 300 MPGe and recharge in less than 15 minutes you can sign me up!
http://www.teslamotors.com/supercharger
I don’t expect electric cars to save the environment. But in the next 15 years I do think that electric cars will be responsible for killing the demand for oil and therefor killing the price of oil and therefor killing the guilt offerings that gulf crabs pay to madrases all over the world that supply the new recruits for various jihad movements. Without money these madrases will close down and the supply of jihads will dry up. War over.
In 2011 the USA produced 20,000 electric cars. In 2013 the USA produced 90,000 electric cars. This is a drop in the ocean. But the trend is good. Tesla alone expects to double their production of cars this year from 2013’s 20k cars to 40k cars in 2014. Tesla alone wants to be producing 500k cars globally and 250k cars domestically by the end of the decade. Still a drop in the bucket for world wide demand.
But Tesla is spurring the other automakers to push their production of electric cars so worldwide production of electric cars will run to several million in 2020. This is still a small fraction of worldwide purchases of automobiles. However, from a base of several million purchases in 2020—world wide production of electric vehicles could easily grab half the world’s demand for cars in the following decade.
Some technological developements will need to happen. Tesla promises to have an electric car that can go up to 300 miles for 35k in 2016. If they succeed, that will be decisive.
As well, the new demand for electricity will have to be met by such things as fourth generation nuclear reactors like lftr thorium reactors.
Likely in a year or three a very public world wide competition among several countries and companies will break out to be the first to develop lftr thorium reactors.
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