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Comment by havblue | Hacker News Reader

"EVs will/will not create more pollution than they eliminate."

I'm just skeptical about the heavy push for passenger EVs: while they're a small fraction of the carbon emissions pie in the world, they manage to be what we spend the most time talking about. It just seems like getting new cars has the added benefit of us buying shiny new stuff without concentrating on the heavy lifting. (Or disrupting industries that would lower gdp)

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Transportation accounts for a third of American CO2 generation and is the largest non-industrial source of American GHG emissions. We need to make dents here through every manner possible, including electrifying the existing modeshare, while promoting much more energy efficient modeshares like cycling and transit.

Passenger car emissions are ~8% of total CO2. Trucks etc are easier to greenify, replace with trains etc.

Passenger cars are 33% of transport-related GHGs, the single largest category for transportation-related GHGs. Transportation-related GHGs is the largest category of GHGs in the whole pie for the US and comprises 27% of US GHGs. 33% of 27% is 8.9%. Light-duty trucks are 17.2% of transportation-related GHGs, so 4.6% of overall US GHGs. The US already has a heavily used freight-rail network.

[1]: https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/fast-facts-transportation-...

[2]: https://nepis.epa.gov/Exe/ZyPDF.cgi?Dockey=P10153PC.pdf

Electric trucks are in the works too

Transportation accounts for over one third of CO2 emissions in the U.S., and decarbonization of electricity generation, which is another third, is already well underway. It makes perfect sense why we talk a lot about decarbonization of transportation in the United States.

Exactly its especially crazy to see the huge SUV EVs. Instead of driving less, using public transport and bicycles, you can just swap to an EV.

It’s not crazy, it makes perfect sense given the reality most Americans live in. You see EV replacements for existing SUVs rather than people using public transit because… there is not good public transit for most Americans. People can’t wait for their government build public infra - they need to be able to get to the grocery store today.

No it is exactly the point. Most towns and cities have bus lines even if they dont have trains. People should move to apartments and give up their suburban mc mansion. The fastest growing areas are AZ, TX, FL, the new suburbs there are vast and car centric its enabled by cheap gas and cheap cars. People just prefer that because they can.

It's not simply because "they can," but that the towns and cities get built so that things are distributed and not served comparably by bus lines. For example, in my median-density medium-sized city, by USA standards, my grocery store is 16 minutes away by bus, but 5 minutes by car. A coffee shop I'd go to is 29 minutes by bus and 6 minutes by car. Things are much worse for where >60% of Americans live too...

Sure, I'm sure you can move to an apartment that is more central, cheaper and more efficient to heat as well. People would rather not do that.

EVs -> no emissions in transport, 27% of US emissions. EVs drive lower battery cost and capacity needed for renewable energy adoption - 17% of total installed and 60%+ of new power generation capacity. Your skepticism is impeding the single most impactful factor in mitigating climate change.

In a previous life, I learned that the fleet of all Toyota vehicles out there produced 320.5 million tons of CO2 in 2019. See line 11 of table I on pg 37. https://global.toyota/pages/global_toyota/sustainability/rep... Basically the vast majority of CO2 Toyota produces are from cars on the road.

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