MIT Study Finds Gas Cars Aren't Secretly Better For The Planet Than EVs, Despite What Everyone On Facebook Says
4 months ago by sanitation to c/technology
*grok speaks against the favor of petroleum industry and is taken offline to be lobotomized yet another time*
What we really should have done is made the Car Talk guys president. If there's one thing I know for sure, it's that those two would never have forced me to listen to what some MIT grad thinks.
Absolute gold! (The hosts of Car Talk were both MIT grads)
MIT Study VS Facebook posts. Hard choice.
Look at everything the MIT has done for us!
Well the headline alone is misleading disinformation.
People shouldn't blindly trust that MIT is somehow immune from the failures of capitalist science. It's literally the heart of the MIC. Endless bullshit coming out of there.
EVs beat me up and killed my dog.
Trans trees! And bushes! Trans nature!
Is that what you want!?
The solar panels on my roof that I use to charge my car suck up all the sun and stop my grass growing
To be fair the scientists only invented the vaccine, and modern scientists are inventing plenty of vaccines and medical technologies today, including vaccines for infamously difficult to stop diseases like HIV.
Eradicating smallpox was a feat of international cooperation and administration. If we put in the effort in those areas today we could eliminate measles or polio. Or in the near future we could begin the process of eliminating HIV (it would take a long time because it's not a death sentence anymore). Now I'm mad we aren't engaged in a global fight to eliminate HIV the way we did for smallpox.
Speaking as someone who has worked on plenty of gasoline powered cars.... Duh. The most obvious waste product an internal combustion car makes other than the exhaust is the used oil. Have to do something with it. Have to make sure the engine isn't leaking out into the environment when it's running.
Even if you are charging your car from a coal plant, it's more efficient. A coal power plant runs at one speed/output all the time. Gas cars have to throttle up and down. Each gas car has to be maintained by the person owning it, while the power plant has a maintenance team and inspections.
Also to the throttling up and down, the power plant, or even a gasoline generator sitting in the car itself, will always run at peak efficiency. Even a gasoline car sitting on the highway for 4hrs isn’t running at peak efficiency and a lot of that energy is lost in heat through the transmission.
I can tell you that keeping an existing decent ICE is better than buying a new EV. But once you have to buy a new car anyway, and an EV fits your usage pattern and operational environment there are no reasons not to buy one.
Yeah, it's a bullshit clickbait headline to ignore this fact.
The batteries do contain rare minerals like lithium but these can be recovered and recycled. EVs can be charged with solar, wind and other renewables even tho many places in the USA still burn coal or natural gas.
Once you burn gasoline in your ICE vehicle then it’s gone, it turns into gasses that go into the atmosphere and can’t easily be recovered into anything of much use.
EVs are the future and we all know it. Gasoline will continue to become more expensive and more difficult to extract.
I’d argue with the level of shit were in with the climate, the no cars lifestyle should be the future.
It might be in a few nations with strong public transit already like Japan and a number or European nations but honestly idk if it will ever happen in the USA at least not in my life time.
Then I guess surviving the climate collapse will be just as realistic.
Incrementalism is what has killed us. Incrementalism plus crony capitalism equals absolute zero.
worst part of getting old is watching everyone around you gradually get dumber
I love Alex, literally just watched his fan video, but you can't act like that one video is all we need on the subject. "There's already a video on that" doesn't really help anyone trying to bring awareness to a massive issue
When somebody says "You're wrong, watch this hour long video by a youtuber to find out why", have you ever watched the videos they linked?
Of course you can. It just takes patience.
It's literally what psychologists do for a living
I like technology connections but no way in hell should you be advocating for people on Facebook to get their facts from youtubers.
More like gaylord_factmaster
The only “everyone” are trolls, paid or otherwise, the ignorant, and right wingnuts parroting the trolls and ignorant.
And there are a shitload of them who all seem to want to show off that opinion.
Half my family believes this it’s one of the major reason they don’t switch to EVs despite being believers of climate change.
Pretty insane how well that disinformation works. If you are worried about nickel, mangan and cobalt, just get a car with an LFP battery, which doesn't need those heavy metals (it is based on lithium and iron phosphate). The only other critical resource in appreciable amounts is neodynium for permanent magnets. We are talking about 1-3 kg per car.
If you think that makes EVs worse for climate or environment than ICE vehicles, think again.
Especially their numbers
I think the ignorant still fall into trolls category (paid or not). They’re just an extension of them being effective.
And idiots who spend lots of money on overpriced ice cars to impress their mates
That's why they are so concerned about the resell value in a years time, because they're not buying the car they want, only one that is fashionable
How do I wat?
Theys easy to find. Opinions make you cry when you cut them.
I didn't realise anyone still uses facebook. Like in developed countries I mean.
I live in Atlanta and when I turned 21 (a couple years ago, but post 2020) I was kinda irritated because literally everything in the entire city was planned on Facebook Events, and I hated using Facebook.
It's overwhelmingly popular, especially in the 30+ crowd, not even restricted to your 55+. Genuinely everyone would create Facebook events (before Partiful got popular) to invite people over on a Saturday
Edit: spelling
Hey you keep us 30 somethings out of this. I don't know anyone my age still on Facebook. We're leaving Instagram too. Fuck social media and fuck platforms owned and controlled by billionaires.
Amazing how an entire age group doesn't think and act the same tho - it's almost like they're made up of individuals. Who would have guessed?
I'm still on there, primarily because a band I'm in uses it for events invites and uses Messenger for coordination group texts
People platform-independently use social media echo chambers to reinforce their own biases and suppress contrary thinking. I think it's an attempt to find comfort zones and avoid self-questioning, which is inherently uncomfortable and involves effort.
Is lemmy the same kind of comfortable echo chamber?
Of course fossil fuels are worse, but that doesn't mean EVs are a magically green utopia machine either.
Really? The manufacturers certainly seem to push such allusions in their advertising.
Article leaves out tires and tire wear pollution which is significant and bad stuff. It's also worse in heavier vehicles. Yes, EVs, especially if CATL can get their sodium battery line off the ground, are better overall, but let's not oversimplify. Also, the most environmental car is still a car...
A second hand ICE car is still better than a new EV though.
We kinda solved cars 15 years ago as an ICE car from 2010 is almost indistinguishable from a new one. I'm waiting for my 2008 toyota to retire but it just keeps on going to the point where I think it'll last me 10 more years. I don't drive much but it takes e20 as fuel (heavily dilutated gasoline) and with CVT gearbox it's super cheap to maintain so I really don't feel like me upgrading to an EV would make any difference other than promote EV infrastructure.
My next car will definitely be an EV though primary because I expect battery tech to be much better by then.
A second hand EV is better than a second hand gas car though, so... What's your point? What's with this entirely outdated talking point at all? There are EVs old enough to vote.
Yeah I guess India where they're still working on adopting anything that isn't either a moped or 2 ton diesel, but pretty much everywhere else you can get a second hand EV. Even in the rural US.
I feel you. My 20 year old Honda that I bought for $3k cash 3 years ago is reliable and easy to work on.
I do like the idea of not ever buying gasoline again, but I also like the idea of a $32 a month insurance payment and no car note, too...
A second hand ICE car is still better than a new EV though.
It's amazing how this article ignores this obvious fact and even more amazing that people downvote it.
car from 2010 is almost indistinguishable from a new one.
Don't forget the shitty electronics and spyware in newer cars.
You can buy EVs secondhand. You'd be hard pressed to find a sub 10k EV "beater" but there are plenty of used EVs in the 15-25k price range in my area, and are equivalent in features to used cars in the same bracket.
You can't really. The world is a bit bigger than you think and mass adoption global cars like byd dolphin etc. Only started appear 4 years ago. So how can a second hand ev market develop?
Huh, I didn't realize you can't buy second hand EVs. Gonna have a tough time explaining the my wife why the Mustang is gone.
I don't think I understand the argument against EV's for their electricity source very well. Isn't the electricity for the car being generated anyways? It'd be like saying your television is polluting worse than an ICE car or your hot tub/clothes dryer for a more power hungry example.
It takes some guy gasoline to truck gasoline to the electric pump and the powered gas station to fill your car with gasoline. Like am I missing something or are people arguing just to argue?
Unless this whole article was satire and it whooshed right over me.
The general idea is that the production of the electronics is far more destructive than making an ICE drive system. I am not well read on recent changes, but there was a point where that statement was true, but even then the electronics weren't worse from greenhouse gas standpoint, just from other toxins.
It's an elaborate plot, if u were paying any attention you would know that the world is run by a race of reptilians that live inside the core of the flat earth. They desperately want to superheat our planet so they can shed their human disguises and bask naked in the heat of our polluted world.
The general idea is that the production of the electronics is far more destructive than making an ICE drive system.
That's the general idea of this article. But many people have the correct general idea that it's better to drive an old ICE car then to build a new EV. This is not debunked or even mentioned by this article.
Burning petroleum is one of the most destructive things you can do and it is absolutely common to do it. Everyday a single vehicles emits enough pollution to kill countless people. It gives them cancer and when combined with lead has resulted in hundreds of millions of deaths. It is absolutely insane people continue supporting this technology.
Everyday a single vehicles emits enough pollution to kill countless people.
Considering that since there are over 1.6 billion cars in use worldwide, I think if each one killed more than one person per day there would soon be none of us left.
Collectively they do cause some 246,000 deaths each year, from pollution alone, with several times that figure being attributable to motor vehicle collisions. So I do think the regular use of fossil fuel vehicles needs to be phased out, along with a drastic reduction in personal vehicle use in general in urban areas and the implementation of systematic safety principles in road design.
Try seeing how long you can suck on a car exhaust and live? My point stands.
Lead in gas in cars wasn't even phased out until 1996 and only in 2021 was is declared officially over. Meanwhile the entire planet has been blanket by lead leading to startling facts like burning wood releases a ton of lead.
https://www.theguardian.com/...
Our entire ecosystem needs a EPA style Superfund cleanup. Hundred of millions of people have already died just from lead. The lead left over in our environment, mostly from gas burning, kills anywhere from one to five million people every year to this day.
That means thirty years since leaded gasoline was first banned we have lost anywhere between 30-150 million people. This lead is not going away as demonstrated by the trees.
I swear we have lost close to a billion people from pollution in the last 50 years or so. Lead is only an additive, we haven't even gotten into all the problems with the rest of it. Petroleum is a huge part of this loss of life. This is the true cost, a future of environmental degredation.
My point stands
But your stats are from your ass.
Are you acting obtuse on purpose?
https://healthpolicy-watch.news/96476-2/
As I said the range is anywhere from 1-5 million a year.
You can take your petroleum apologist nonsense somewhere else. Imagine someone bootlicking when then know millions of people have died and will continue to die.
Try seeing how long you can suck on a car exhaust and live? My point stands.
And you'd sink and down pretty quickly if the world were made of pudding.
provably
Where!
MIT Study Finds (New) Gas Cars Aren't Secretly Better For The Planet Than (New) EVs, Despite What Everyone On Facebook Says
Fixed that disinfo for ya.
No, no you didn't. But that's okay little buddy. Someday your fantasy will be true.
Strange that the post didn't go into the mining/manufacturing side.
This may come as a shocker to some people, but ICE cars are mined and manufactured in almost the exact same way as an EV. The main difference is EVs tend to weigh a bit more.
Also, once you mine the materials for an EV, you're done. My car runs on sunlight and wind. Once you mine and manufacture an ICE, you are locked into mining, manufacturing, and transporting resources for it for the rest of it's existence.
Maybe cause its a separate issue? Look, yes it is costly to extract the resources for a battery, but once we have it, we have it for good. Batteries are incredibly recyclable at this point (90%+ recoverable, conservatively), and a new battery can be almost entirely created using previous batteries.
This is in comparison to fossil fuels, which you get to burn exactly once, after which point you have to go extract more. The environmental costs of extracting oil (not even burning it) are well documented.
Where a ICE car requires ongoing environmental devastation, an electric one does not inherently require it. As more of the materials for batteries enters circulation, there's less need to go extract more, and as grids transition from fossil fuels to renewables the climate impact of charging can be lessened as well.
Of course this isn't to say that an electric car is the climate endgame. More walkable places, better public transit, better regulation of corporate polluters, etc. are the real meat and potatoes. But saying that EVs are just as bad as ICE cars is just not true.
It's what those Facebook actually people fall back on so it isn't a separate issue. It's the issue being addressed.
I'm aware of everything you said, I just find the article of low value for not being able to use as a retort to the people it claims to refute.
Because the existence of oil rigs destroys that separate, and even dumber, talking point entirely by itself?
Ok, but can you show me even one time those oil rigs have caused an environmental disaster? OK, but that was only once. OK, those 15 other times you linked. OK, but clearly they can't be that bad, the hippies cleaned up the the birds and BP said they were sorry.
Efficiency of processes is different in every situation, including long-standing ones, like one area having plenty of seawater and some other area having just lots of sand, some places being moderate-temperatured and some like central Siberia with hot summers and cold winters, things like that.
Meaning that one can't say that gas cars are "better for the planet" or "worse for the planet" than EVs. Period.
This study is true for some set of conditions, but it's pretty clear that people referring to it will use it outside of the scope.
There are better arguments than unprovable claims. Say, EVs use "universalized" energy, that is, can be charged from the grid, while gas cars require different kinds of gas depending on the specific engine and regulatory requirements. EVs have electric machines in them, pretty similar to those in electric trains or whatever else, but that's not as important as less wear and more universality. EVs in theory should require less maintenance, but since these are usually new fancy cool things, their electronic components might have the common downsides of all new cars. Fire hazards are different between them. On the other side, gasoline can be stored more easily.
I mean, one would think civilization can exist without choosing just one.
That's a lot of words for "I want to sound clever"
If you listen carefully, you can hear them moving the goal posts from "countering Facebook knowledge" to "must be universally better in every scenario"
Sounds like fingers on a chalkboard
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Let me ask Facebook how credible this study is...
save