We’re kidding ourselves if we think EVs are a drop-in “solution.” Building an EV burns about twice the carbon of making an ICE,
More like 1.6x. But they break even by 11k miles in Europe. (The exact number varies by location; this is an average.)
and scrapping a perfectly functional ICE adds nearly another tonne of COe.
You seem to be under the false assumption that Europe is forcing people to scrap ICE cars. They're not. They're forcing companies to not build *new* ICE cars. This is not changing the number of cars that get scrapped at all. It is ensuring that the cars that replace the cars that were being scrapped anyway are efficient.
Run the numbers: ramping up EV sales by 10%/year for a decade actually adds ~650 million tonnes of COe from manufacturing, even after accounting for fewer ICEs scrapped.
No, it doesn't. The break-even point in Europe is about 11,000 miles, which is less than a year. So by one year after they are sold, they have reduced CO2 emissions by as much as was released producing them. There is no "per year for a decade" here, because by the end of a year of driving, the manufacturing becomes effectively carbon-neutral.
So no, you're not adding 650 million tonnes of CO2. It takes 9 months to break even, which means at any given point in time, the average extra emissions from manufacturing each car would be half of that, so add up the extra CO2 emitted by manufacturing all cars as EVs for 4.5 months, and that's how much you've added. Not cumulative. One-time.
But it gets better than that, because you don't stop driving these cars after 9 months. So after that, they're carbon-negative. That means after 18 months, they've used as much as the next 9-month group of cars produced during their manufacturing, and so have those cars, so your next nine months of manufacturing are free. So after 18 months, the total CO2 from the changeover becomes effectively zero. After 27 months, the total CO2 from the changeover is negative by several months of driving by the cars made in the last 9 months. And so on.
That’s just swapping one carbon-intensive system for another — tailpipes for furnaces and mines. The problem isn’t just the drivetrain, it’s the scale: 75 million new cars every year.
The problem is that you apparently still haven't realized that a car gets built once, but is typically used for decades, and that the emissions for manufacturing are tiny compared with the emissions used during their ongoing operation, so even massive increases to the manufacturing emissions result in reductions in emissions over the relatively *short* term, much less the long term.
The real win isn’t “replace every ICE with an EV,” it’s cutting the carbon out of steel, aluminum, and batteries, cranking up recycling, and maybe even questioning whether churning out this many new cars is sustainable at all.
Churning out the new cars is a drop in the bucket compared with the CO2 savings. Again, nine months after they are made, they've reduced as much CO2 as the excess CO2 spent producing them. Even if we assume that the ICE car wouldn't have been made otherwise (which is not the case), the break-even point would still be only on the order of three years. And after that, they're reducing CO2 emissions more than the total emissions from manufacturing the vehicle. So the time to question sustainability is *after* you transition everyone over to EVs, not before. Doing that now is saving a tiny bit of emissions in the short term while costing you a *lot* of emissions over the long term.
