“Making a new car creates as much carbon pollution as driving it, so it’s often better to keep your old banger on the road than to upgrade to a greener model.” [Mike Berners-Lee]
.
A lot of the noise against EVs is coming from climate sceptics who are eager to sow confusion and discord over alternatives to petrol/diesel vehicles – that Electric Vehicles Aren’t Clean or Practical or Unsold Electric Cars May Be Signaling a Death Spiral for the Auto Industry.
As pointed out recently, “Climate sceptics’ denying of the science is declining. Opposing the policies is the new tactic”:
In the media, the good news is that those opposed to acting on climate change – sometimes called climate deniers or climate sceptics – are not challenging the science nearly as much as they used to. The bad news is that they are now using “response scepticism”. This means obstructing policies with arguments like “it costs too much”, “what about China’s emissions?”, “stopping flying is too extreme, do something else”, “infringement on civil liberties” and “whataboutism”, explains James Painter at the Reuters Institute, University of Oxford, who summarises his co-authored paper...
And EVs are one of those examples of ‘response scepticism’.
And yet, as with any ‘scepticism’, there are serious points which can’t be side-lined – such as EVs are heavier than petrol/diesel vehicles, Electric cars are not carbon neutral because they need not only lots of carbon to produce but lots of electricity to run, and EVs need more charging points than we can provide.
Well if EVs are that bad [and they are not that bad…], how bad are conventional petrol/diesel cars?
Well, we know they stink and create lots of pollution and not just tonnes of CO2s.
So, why don’t we just drive our current cars a little less?
As Mike Berners-Lee, a leading expert in carbon footprinting says:
“Making a new car creates as much carbon pollution as driving it, so it’s often better to keep your old banger on the road than to upgrade to a greener model.”
…