> The alternative to buying a ICE car isn’t necessarily buying an EV car, it could be a bike, taking trains, taking ride services, or any combo of things.
That's blatantly false for anyone not living in a metropolitan area. Ride-share / car rental places simply don't exist in many places out in the countryside, and a bike is only a partial substitute.
Punishing people for bad behavior (buying ICE cars) only puts more people deeper into debt, and lowers the overall number of cars purchased by raising the market floor. Encouraging good behavior (making transit more available, subsidizing EV) encourages more people to consider alternatives to ICE such as EV who otherwise wouldn't be able to afford it or wouldn't otherwise have access.
Taxing bad things encourages not using them. Subsidizing winners picked by lobbyists will increase that product’s usage but it’s not necessarily the “best” answer for the core problem.
Nobody actually cares about EV usage besides EV makers. We just want to go from point A to point B with minimal cost and environmental impact. If that’s electric, gas, or nuclear fusion, it’s all the same.
Generally speaking, dont like either the subsidy or the tax approach, but if the goal is to get more EV than ICE purchases, you're going to hurt a lot of people along the way by going the tax approach, and we're not set up to mediate the regressive effects of doing so.
In Norway if you don’t make decent money you wouldn’t get a car because they are very expensive (so much more a luxury item) and public transport is very good.
I think subsidies and taxes are probably both needed. Sweden added a budget-neutral measure where those who buy new cars get a tax penalty if the car isn’t environmentally friendly and that money is used for tax breaks for those that do get the greener cars.
Obviously the EVs are still more expensive and this measure raises the cost of the cheaper ICEs, but it’s marginal for small cars and more significant on larger luxury cars.
Or they might just buy fewer, smaller cars, use more public transport, and get jobs close to where they live, and not move to a place without public transport in the first place.
I'm sorry, but that is absurdly bigoted and naive. Pretty much everything you use and own- from cotton, wood, glass, metal ore, food- comes from someplace that isn't a high-density urban city.
Most of those things are produced by people with middle or working class jobs, and public transit isn't an option to get there, nor are they buying extraneous cars to just have lying around. Not only that, but those people have needs too, and so many jobs are located near where they live- everything from grocery stores to car mechanics to regional hospitals.
If they go EV, they're going to get a smaller car, and it's going to cost substantially more than the equivalent ICE. Double the cost of ICE cars, and you're really doing is punishing them for not being wealthy.
I suggest you a small game: we all depend on society but there are various level of dependency; for instance in a country house you may:
- have fuel stocks enough for a month or two or even three so while you still depend on fuel supply you may not depend too much on constant supply like you do not suffer casual strikes, emergencies etc;
- have food stocks (big freezers in garage) that let you live comfortably for a month and you may integrate them and re-supply from various sources, including a little bit from nature (hunting, fishing, vegetable garden+proper preservation);
- have enough water stock (rainwater recovery / sources) to not suffer both aqueduct outages or contamination;
- have enough tools and prime matter to being able to repair a bit your home in case of need for long time;
On contrary in dense cities you haven't space to stock food, water, fuel, ... you can't even heat yourself in the winter burning wood in a stove. So you depend completely on city infrastructure, without option in case of even short outages. City infrastructure in turn depend on few countrywide networks that's are similar but LESS important than the countryside.
Today's, and not from today's, people inhabited to have anything at their fingertips do not think at those vulnerabilities not much different than many today's programmers that treat web services like a thing that always run and it's always available...
We have only to wait to see the results.
To avoid pollution we need a "circular" economy as much as possible. We do a little in that sense, like using aluminum that we can fully recyclable instead of steel that can't essentially be recycled (at maximum you can recycle high quality steel to low quality one, one single time). We can restart mass using glass instead of plastic for many food containers even if being heavy means a higher transportation cost, we can recycle paper and cardboard but not forever, at maximum one/two time so we need to use it far, far less to being able to have forest grown again etc.
Things are complex and the vague and simplistic idea that we can have smart Riviera's (did you see how most of "green future houses" are single isolated homes in the nature, not cities?) or never-really-designed smart cities it a sketch from a dream and marketing, not reality.
You probably pollute FAR more with EVs than actual car's, only perhaps you pollute someone's else land, for a while, until climate change and environment contamination knock at your door and in that's case is too late.
>You probably pollute FAR more with EVs than actual car's, only perhaps you pollute someone's else land, for a while
Every study I have seen does not confirm this so I would like to see your source.
Me, myself and I, as a reasoning citizen even before being an engineer... I see exactly zero conclusive study about how to dismantle/dismiss used EV batteries and actual solution is to ship them in some part of Africa and least developed countries of Asia, the same for ship demolition, plastic etc. So there is NO viable strategy. Few peoples push totally absurd ideas like "reuse them for home energy storage" of various kind but again beside they are absurd because of costs they do not say a word about what to do when even least residual capacity will be over.
And even beside that there is exactly no real conclusive study on the effective environmental impact of EV batteries production, again the problem remain cached since work is done in China or other non-western countries.
Please do not confuse press-spread ideas from unknown with scientific study, they are a totally different beast and you can even quickly discover many of them simply thinking on what they say instead of being pampered by well constructed dreams.
If you’re a very light driver (eg: a short commute to work and back. Some people make 2 trips a week: church and grocery store), your carbon footprint from buying a Tesla is probably higher than comparable ICE cars.