Overtime, the development and advancement of electric vehicles has exponentially increased. In the early 2000s, when electric vehicles were first introduced, the milage range of these vehicles was usually topping out at 80 miles. Today, most electric vehicles are pushing well over 300 miles in range. The green movement is always encouraging to move away from gasoline and replace them with EV. Since EVs don’t burn gasoline or diesel fuel, they do not emit CO2 into the air, and this is one of the major advantages of EVs. There are also other positive things about EVs. They are quiet and relaxing but can also be fast and exciting. And since they have smaller engines and their very large batteries can be laid out underneath the vehicle, they have more luggage space and more legroom for passengers.
Despite these benefits, some believe there has been a rush to impose EVs on the public. For example, some states have banned gas-powered cars altogether. “California Gov. Gavin Newsom issued an executive order banning them by 2035,” Stossel wrote. “Oregon, Massachusetts, and New York copied California. Washington state’s politicians said they’d make it happen even faster, by 2030,” just several years from now. As stated by physicist Mark Mills of the Manhattan Institute, “Electric cars are amazing. But they won’t change the future in any significant way (as far as) oil use or carbon dioxide emissions.”
Mills stated “Inconvenient fact 1: Selling more electric cars won’t reduce oil use very much. ‘The world has 15, 18 million electric vehicles now,’ says Mills. ‘If we [somehow] get to 500 million, that would reduce world oil consumption by about 10%. That’s not nothing, but it doesn’t end the use of oil. “Inconvenient fact 2: Although driving an electric car puts little additional carbon into the air, producing the electricity to charge its battery adds plenty. Most of America’s electricity is produced by burning natural gas and coal. Just 12% comes from wind or solar power.” “You have to mine, somewhere on Earth, 500,000 pounds of minerals and rock to make one battery,” Mills said.
Nevertheless, Battery-powered cars now make up the fastest-growing segment of the auto market, with sales jumping 70 percent in the first nine months of the year from the same period in 2021, according to data from Cox Automotive. Sales of conventional cars and trucks fell 15 percent in the same period. Buyers of battery-powered cars are concerned about climate change, but lower costs are also a powerful attraction, according to more than 3,000 respondents to a request for stories about electric car purchases on The New York Times’s website. Driving on electricity is generally much cheaper than gasoline.
However, there is also the argument that the production of EVs causes higher pollution. Studies have found that, though it’s true that the production of a EVs causes more pollution than a gasoline-powered counterpart, this greenhouse-gas emission difference is erased as the vehicle is driven. And erasing the difference does not appear to take very long. In a study conducted by the University of Michigan, the pollution equation evens out between 1.4 to 1.5 years for sedans, 1.6 to 1.9 years for S.U.V.s and about 1.6 years for pickup trucks, based on the average number of vehicle miles traveled in the United States.
So, the picture of electric vehicles to help save our environment from CO2 is a fuzzy one. And when costs and other factors are figured in, some believe EV is not yet a viable choice for millions of vehicle owners, especially those living in California, Oregon, Massachusetts, New York, and Washington. As technology evolves, how we produce electricity, the capacity of our electric grid, and the prices involved will continue to improve. The same way the mileage range of electric vehicles has increased over the last few years. Although Mark Mills states that increasing the amount of EVs on the road will only reduce oil by 10%, he didn't take into account the other green energy that would be scaled up along with EVs. Whether EVs are being forced too fast into the market or not is debatable. Nevertheless, I believe that this implementation is inevitable, so why not start now? As we go through this transition there will be unavoidable roadblocks, so why not develop solutions to these sooner rather than later?
This article brings up a really good point, I have always had the perception that electric cars were end all be all for reducing and/or eliminating pollution and oil usage. It's clear now that although it is a help, it isn't the actual solution and we should still be actively searching for more ways to clean the environment.
You bring up a really interesting point. I think most people, myself included, think of electricity as a clean energy, and to an extent it is, but certainly don’t think about how electric grids are powered. Understanding this makes it clearer that EVs will not be the saving grace of climate efforts, but I do still think that even the 10% reduction in oil is better than nothing.
You bring up a good point about trying to solve these issues now to ease the process for the future. There is no need to rush the switch to electric cars because it will cause more problems than it would if we took the time to stop the roadblocks before they happened. It is also interesting to hear that there have been studies saying EVs cause higher pollution. Electric cars are a great step forward to a safer environment but it does not need to be so forced that it may end up not actually helping the environment.