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Comment by orthecreedence | Hacker News Reader

Where are the numbers? It just says batteries are an upfront cost, gas is ongoing. Well, yeah, duh...but how many gallons of gas (or how many miles) does an ICE car need to cover before it overtakes the carbon cost of the same car with a battery pack?

And are we adjusting for energy generation and loss in transit? There's a carbon cost to produce/deliver gas, and there's energy loss in transmission lines. So what's the carbon cost of the oil rig, refining, delivery and what's the carbon cost of the solar plant (including all of its batteries) amortized over its lifetime and the coversion of that cost into Kw adjusted for loss in transmission?

I'm not necessarily against EVs at all, but so far I've yet to see a good, deep analysis as to how much of an improvement they are. This article is running away from that anlysis as fast as it can.

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Manufacturing an EV requires 14 ton CO2e, whereas an ICE requires 10 ton CO2e. A gallon of gas emits 9 kg of CO2 (most of the weight is air oxygen). So equivalence is hit once you burn 450 gallons of gas. IOW, not very long.

(This ignores the carbon cost of electricity generation which varies widely. But it also ignores the carbon cost to create & transport the gasoline, which adds about 50% to the CO2 per gallon).

The article links to the actual studies. This is an NPR article! not a scientific thesis.. As far as pop articles go it’s far more well referenced than the average.

Thanks, I guess I missed the links.

For reference, here's one that answers some of what I'm asking:

https://theicct.org/publication/a-global-comparison-of-the-l...

This is too dense! Can anyone link to a more readable article??

So Like the original NPR article that gives a high level explanation? (while establishing credibility by providing supporting references for cross checking)

https://text.npr.org/1250212212

I think the person was making fun of me and not actually looking for resources.

Okay… but the reference they called out wasn’t very long and had a clear bar chart comparing different vehicular types that included battery manufacturing as one of the components.

One could even ignore all the text and just look at the bar chart for the numbers.

Any original analysis that’s worth its beans is going to be far denser than that reference or the NPR article. Scientific and technical publications aren’t quite as bad as reading legalese but they’re close, full of jargon and precise language.

Since that short reference with the bar chart was too dense, then what you’re looking for definitely seems to be a pop-sci type summary - like the original NPR article.

> what you’re looking for definitely seems to be a pop-sci type summary

I found what I was looking for already. Both the NPR article and the chart were digestable for me. I originally complained the article had no numbers, but you prompted me to read it more closely at which point I found a study with the easy-to-read chart. I posted that study directly in a comment, then "ortusdux" made a snarky comment about needing a simpler article, which I assume was directed at me because I didn't originally find the references in the NPR article.

Oh… I thought your recent comment was also from that guy my bad, so yeah ignore what I’d replied. Guess I didn’t pay close enough attention

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