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Comment by conductor | Hacker News Reader

Are you sure it will reduce the pollution (genuine question)? The cars will stop polluting directly but the electricity producers will start producing much more electricity (which is much more pollution) to feed the cars. So, which of these two pollutions is better - nuclear waste/pollution or co2?

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Are you sure it will reduce the pollution (genuine question)?

I live in NYC. I was thinking specifically of the air quality in NYC which its almost sure to improve, rather than total pollution.

However, I think it will improve total pollution as well. I'm fairly certain that natural gas fired combined cycle generation (which is most of the new generation being added) is both more efficient and lower polluting than the internal combustion engine, so total pollution should decrease.

The economies of scale in electricity production are immense, so yes it is indeed an improvement to move to electric cars even if all electric cars are fed by dirty pollutants. Which they aren't.

Also, a move to a less polluting industry is more than the sum of the direct effects; you must also consider research and momentum - as more electric cars are built, solar power and battery efficiency will also improve. If you take the opinion that an electric car is the same as a gas car because at some point they both pollute, you'll never make any progress anywhere.

The majority of electricity in Norway comes from renewable sources — mostly from hydro-electric power (which is, inevitably, relatively easy in a mostly sparsely populated, mountainous country).

The efficiency of a large closed-loop stationary turbine such as is used in power generation is massively better than that of a small internal combustion engine and the oil needs far less messy processing to use as a fuel, so even if all of the power generation was oil based, switching the cars to electric would still reduce CO2 emissions and other pollutive effects.

The people that are complaining about pollution rather than global warming might be thinking about the particles that aren't pleasant and/or healthy to breath in. Global warming is a problem for everyone (though the effects of it may vary depending on where you are on the planet), while pollution is for some a more local problem. If, for example, all cars in a city were converted to electric cars there might be more net pollution (maybe - could be all hydroelectric for example), but the pollution itself would be concentrated around the power plants, not in the city itself. So then you won't have to deal with pollution if you live close to one of the main arteries of that city.

There would still be less net pollution in your example though as the total pollution from using petrol to power the cars would still exceed the amount of pollution from an oil burning power station producing electricity to power the cars.

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