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Is Keeping your Old Car Better for the Environment?

drcarric2650

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I don't fool myself into thinking that I'm "doing something for the environment" by purchasing a new $80K truck. I want to own a car for lifestyle reasons (skiing, hiking, adventuring...) and that kind of car needs to be able to store my gear, haul my dogs, and power through snow/mud/etc. This is the first electric car that can do that effectively and it happens to look pretty cool too. That's enough for me.

The only way we meaningfully impact the environment is through much more widespread, coordinated action. Norway heavily taxes ICE cars and subsidizes electrics. Share of EVs in US is about 2% and in Norway it's 60%. The Nissan Leaf is the best seller there -- a modest city-dwelling grocery-getter. (They don't have nearly the same number of oil/gas lobbyists crafting their policies.)

The US contributes the 2nd most carbon in the world (behind China). About 30% of what we create is from the transportation sector, which also includes boats and trains. Each of our individual decisions will have so little impact that it's barely worth trying to calculate. If we early-ish adopters help to subsidize the charging network, drive down the cost of EVs, increase competition for Tesla, and make EVs "cool" then maybe that's worth something.

I personally want to avoid anything that continues to prop up oil/gas/coal, so I'm thrilled to go electric but I'm not about to try to calculate the individual impact nor worry about it.
Seems a bit like saying, if I pollute, it doesn't amount to much... but you need to multiply that by a few billion people.

However, having said that, I like to concentrate on what you did say, these EV's beat any ICE rivals hands down, and that is what will sway the world in the end.
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DucRider

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If you will be purchasing a new vehicle anyway, it's a no brainer to look to an EV.

If your old vehicle replaces a less efficient/more polluting vehicle for the next owner, that is also a good thing.
However, the environmental ROI of producing any new vehicle vs keeping one on the road that spews smoke and drips oil is likely never, but it's not easily quantifiable. How much will not moving quickly to EVs negatively impact climate? How much will fast adoption help reverse the patterns we've seen?

I don't know all the answers, but I am pretty certain that I will never purchase an ICE vehicle again.
 

yizzung

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Seems a bit like saying, if I pollute, it doesn't amount to much... but you need to multiply that by a few billion people.
Yeah, sorta. I'm actually just saying that it's a really complicated model IRL and attempts to try to make individual environmental impact calculations in a spreadsheet are a little futile and that the results are suspect at best. It ultimately matters more in the aggregate (link) and if my decision to go electric helps nudge the next billion in that direction, great. But we aren't going to get where we need to go without much larger incentives, much cheaper EVs for the masses, and much bolder attempts to de-carbonize the grid.
 

Jarico75

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Interesting video. Does anyone know if the emissions numbers on ICE vehicles include the impact of refining and transportation of the fuel? EVs seem to always include the cost of power generation, but ICE vehicles do not consider the refining and transportation costs. Doesn't seem like the video addressed this.

Would also think that alternative energy adoption rates should also impact the curve.
 

Craigins

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Interesting video. Does anyone know if the emissions numbers on ICE vehicles include the impact of refining and transportation of the fuel? EVs seem to always include the cost of power generation, but ICE vehicles do not consider the refining and transportation costs. Doesn't seem like the video addressed this.

Would also think that alternative energy adoption rates should also impact the curve.
Many articles cite numbers from the Argonne GREET model. https://greet.es.anl.gov/index_files/index.html

Which appears to take in the upstream cost of fuel.
 

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timesinks

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JeremyP

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