He’s right honestly, cars, especially electric cars, produce a large portion of their CO2 emissions when they are manufactured.
We would all be better off if people kept their “gas guzzlers” but only used them rarely. A car in a garage has zero co2 emissions.
nah even an ICE car in a garage is not neutral : it needs oil & filters changes every 1-2 years if you want to keep it running, and gas does not like to be stored more than 3-6 months.
This said, so you are so right we should stop using cars as much as possible and walk, bike, take public transports, or rent when needed.
Genuine questions:
Does the creation of lubricating oil actually cause a notable level of CO2 emissions? (I guess that depends on synthetic vs mineral?)
Does gasoline “going bad” and having to be disposed of produce CO2 emissions? or, since it’s destroying gas that would otherwise be burnt, is it actually carbon negative?
Which is one reason this anti WFH campaign pisses me off so much. We could cut emissions quite a bit just from that but we can’t even do that little because: greedy assholes.
Was I the only one who, during covid lockdowns, was amazed at how fucking clear the air was? Did everyone just forget? Idk why most humans can’t look at that and go “we all need to make this permanent” and then do it. But we evolved to prefer the worst of us in charge.
Anyway. Yeah. I WFH and drive about 5000 miles a year. And we tend to keep our cars 10-15 years. It’s way more affordable than a new car every few years, assuming you get a car that has low maintenance costs. More people oughta do that.
Anti-WFH is because companies know workers have so much mobility and a virtual workforce can leave to work for any company in the world. It’s a form of lock-in. People don’t like disruption or change, so they are less likely to leave for a higher paycheck. To be honest I’m surprised more American companies haven’t leveraged work from home to shift non customer-facing white collar jobs to Eastern Europe.
Anti wfh I think is run by business office real estate owners. I could be wrong, but wfh fucks them the most. Their investments gotta pay off and real estate is never supposed to go down in price, I’ll fucking stab you bitch or something like that, the conversations I have heard at charity galas.
Seriously… Covid was an eye opener me as well.
It was so much quieter outside. The air was cleaner. Animals were returning to previously deserted areas at remarkable rates.
Everyone was itching to get back to “normal,” but normal was what was causing all of the destruction on the first place.
The government should literally be paying people to stay home and do nothing. I remember reading somewhere that it is more cost effective in the long run. Rather than fixing damage and rebuilding cities after increasingly severe natural disasters.
I live on a really busy parish road and I noticed the same thing. The first 3 months of the COVID timeline were great. My company sent everyone home and we all worked remotely and the traffic on the road at my house dropped to almost nothing. It was glorious. I’m still working from home because my company sold the office building they owned and hasn’t built a new one. I can’t say the same for other companies because traffic is horrible in front of my house. The noise and the air quality are back to pre COVID levels of suck.
I live in a car city but I only use it to go groceries or maybe an event. I go twice a week tops.
All my friends told me I should have gotten a Tesla and that because I’m a tech guy that I’d buy a Tesla. I’m like, I don’t drive enough, so I bought a used Civic.
By the time this Civic needs to be retired, there should be plenty of affordable options for me? Or maybe I can move to a place that doesn’t require one.
They offset all those emissions by the time they’ve reached like 80k km in places where electricity is produced using coal (compared to a gas vehicle that increases its total emissions as time goes) so no, he’s not right actually.
That’s not even taking into consideration the wear on emission equipment and cars age.
If like the guy further up this thread you only drive 8k km a year that’s going to take 10 years to reach parity. The Li-Ion battery may not even last that long.
Obviously if you drive for work or commute long distances that can’t be covered by public transport then an EV makes sense, but with the expansion of WFH it may not for many.
That’s 80k km if you live somewhere where electricity comes 100% from coal, where I live with hydro it’s under 20k km. You’re also making an assumption without knowing how much that 8k km emits with their gas car.
To give an example with numbers…
Gas car produces 5 tons of CO2 when being manufactured and then emits 1 ton a year driving 8k km
Electric car produces 10 tons of CO2 when being manufactured then emits 0.25 tons a year driving 8k km
After 6 ⅔ (we’ll round it up to 7) years the EV compensated for the extra CO2 required for its production and has emitted 10 + (7 x 0.25) = 11.75 tons of CO2. Meanwhile the gas car has emitted 5 + (7 x 1) = 12 tons of CO2 and the difference will keep increasing.
As for the battery failure scare, it’s a non issue with the vast majority of models and it ignores the extra maintenance required on the gas car that also pollutes.
That’s the thing though, no it isn’t.
If you continue driving a gas car it continues to generate emissions, if you switch to an electric car it offsets it’s emissions (compared to switching to another gas car or keeping the same gas car) after max 80k km and after that it’s a better car for the environment than whatever gas car you would have been driving instead and that you keep driving and that keeps increasing its carbon footprint.
If most people replace their cars every three years they’re not getting to 80,000 km before they buy a new one.
Do they though?
And it’s not as if these cars were sent to the scraper, they’re sold on the used market and replace gas cars.
Yeah, this is the industry blaming a famous person for making sense.
Replacing the gas guzzlers with EVs would be great, but the cost/benefit ratio isn’t there. If you need a new car and can afford an EV, get one.
Car manufacturers need to do more to make EVs more affordable. They need to do a better job making their argument that they are good cars with significant environmental benefits.
They won’t, because they still want to sell gasoline cars.
Conversions are another option that just aren’t being used because of red tape. The paperwork takes nearly as much work as the actual conversion.
