Everyone knows that electric vehicles are supposed to be better for the planet than gas cars. That’s the driving reason behind a global effort to transition toward batteries.
But what about the harms caused by mining for battery minerals? And coal-fired power plants for the electricity to charge the cars? And battery waste? Is it really true that EVs are better?
The answer is yes. But Americans are growing less convinced.
The net benefits of EVs have been frequently fact-checked, including by NPR. "No technology is perfect, but the electric vehicles are going to offer a significant benefit as compared to the internal combustion engine vehicles," Jessika Trancik, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told NPR this spring.
It’s important to ask these questions about EVs’ hidden costs, Trancik says. But they have been answered “exhaustively” — her word — and a widerange of organizations have confirmed that EVs still beat gas.
Not surprising. There has been a pretty successful campaign by the right to paint EVs as worse for the environment because we get our electricity from coal (we barely get anything from coal) and mining; more expensive to fuel up (using the highest priced fast charging vs lowest price of gas); and worse from a humanitarian perspective (cobalt mining).
Things to refute this: EVs, even with coal power as their energy source, emit less CO2 over the lifespan of the vehicle compared with gas vehicles. Mining sucks and is indeed environmentally damaging but oil is also fucking terrible. The benefit of EVs is that the vast majority of a battery can be recycled whereas oil is single use. So to meet a consistent demand, we do have to ramp up mining but once the demands is met, mining can be scaled back dramatically.
For fuel costs, it’s easy to do the basic math but many don’t. I’ve seen people complain that their electricity bill will just skyrocket. When I suggested my parents get a battery powered riding mower, my mom thought they would be more expensive and that the electricity bill would be just as much as the gas bill. The price of the mower is the same and the electricity cost was about 1/15th of what has is and you don’t have to be riding around in gas fumes.
As for the humanitarian angle, the right obviously does not really give a shit. You could easily point out the atrocities that oil companies have done over the years. You could also point out that cobalt is being phased out. We could also do the mining here instead of having our done abroad. And there is the previous point that most of this just had to be done once then mining can be scaled back.