Once you start counting the emissions and energy burned in the power plants that supply the electricity, electric car’s environmental benefits have been way oversold. Now Mazda has a extraordinarily efficient diesel/gas hybrid engine that will be cleaner than electric cars, if the energy electric cars take from grid is accounted for. Watch the video, the technology is pretty damn exciting. From Eric Peters at theburningplatform.com:
f you were counting calories, would you exclude the deep-fried shell of the taco you’re planning to eat?
Probably not – unless you weren’t really counting calories.
What has this to do with cars? A lot, it turns out. In particular, electric cars – which are touted as being “zero emissions” cars. For the most part, this is like not counting some of the calories you consume.
You are only fooling yourself.
Utility plants use fossil fuels to generate electricity, which generates emissions.
And the justification for regulating it.
Carbon dioxide has been lumped in with harmful to both air quality and to people’s health compounds precisely because those compounds have been all-but-eliminated and are no longer a public health or air quality worry.
A new hobby horse had to found – in order to justify the continuation (and expansion) of regulation.
But more on that in a moment.
If carbon dioxide is an “emission,” then certainly the output of C02 from utility plants that generate the electricity which powers electric cars ought to be factored into the total “calorie count.”
This is Mazda’s entirely reasonable argument, at any rate.
Just what we need, a less reliable technology that is unproven, and likely to be excruciatingly expensive to repair.