In truth I find your comment quite disingenuous since it is trying to force the burden of responsibility on end consumers - currently the market is strongly indicating a desire for renewables including the high demand for electric and hybrid cars and the fact that in a lot of areas consumers have actually put up with reusable grocery bag laws. Those are nothing but cost and inconvenience to the end consumers and yet it's become much more normalized, don't forget that charging for plastic bags twenty years ago would have driven a grocery store out of business.
Also, just to note, EVs are getting heavy investment right now and will be able to dominate the market without any infrastructure investments.
That shows about 57 tons of CO2 over a 150,000 mile lifespan of a conventional (non-hybrid) car - even more if you assume a larger lifespan.
Estimates I can find for the embodied CO2 of an EV car are around 10-30 CO2 tons. A smaller hybrid would be on the lower side, while an EV SUV would be on the higher side. Also, instead of looking at the entire cost of the CO2 from the car, we should really be using the additional CO2 over replacement, by subtracting how much C02 it takes to create the alternative, a conventional car. Let's just look at the battery. This thread shows Tesla batteries require about 5-14 tonnes of CO2 to create: https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/6sm6rs/the_rea.... Compared to the 57 tonnes of CO2 from a conventional car's lifetime, we're somewhere around a factor of 5-10x better for EVs.
We should be working on encouraging conversion to EV when older cars age out, eventually maybe there'd be a cutoff for on-road usage, but I'd be amazed if that were any closer than 15 years out, and that's super close already.
1. Re-configuring production lines is expensive, it'd likely be environmentally wasteful to force early conversions of production lines by manufacturers - giving them a window to convert allows them to cease any R&D investment into gas only vehicles and invest more in EVs.
I doubt there's a single ICE car on the market that creates as much CO2 to make as it does to run.
The additional CO2 for making an EV is on the order of 5-10x lower than the CO2 it can save (when running on renewable power). Even making a new EV on the order of operating an existing ICE car for ~50k-ish miles.
Er, what? The tar sands products wouldn't be coming to the west coast consumers, myself included, unless it was refined first. The whole point of the pipeline expansion is to add mass export for the diluted bitumen product, which is to be sold for overseas refining and use.
Some of the current pipeline capacity is indeed for end use out here, but I don't think it's got anything to do with the tar sands.