He makes great points! BUT "renewable sources" of energy still produce a HUGE about of waste and are damaging to the environment. If we would encourage Nuclear power as the main source of power, the amount of effect on the environment would be by far the lowest.
HILARIOUS! As though creating renewable energy doesn't create C02. I'll just throw 2 fun facts (2 of MANY) about wind turbines. 1) Each turbine requires 750 YARDS of concrete! Hmmm... wonder what they did to conjure that up? 2) Each turbine blade has a serviceable life of about 15 years, after which they are removed, then BURIED (they're made of carbon-fiber and are not recyclable) in giant landfills where earthmoving machines carve out shallow graves for them - they are about 120 feet long.
In my VAST expertise! LOL. Maybe, we could actually get people in Congress that truly understand Neuclear Power and how Clean, Reliable, and Safe it is. Then use it as a "middle" ground between the left and the right???? Whether there truly is global warming and IF it is truly influenced by "Man," no of that matters. We can't depend on fossil fuels forever. There is a limited amount. IF we start to build nuclear power plants again AND continue to use ALL sources of energy until the plants are up and running.....we could be truly "energy independent " (making the right happy) AND truly "Green" (once the vast majority of our power is nuclear) thus making the left happy. It would be a WIN/WIN.
@@patrickf7182 The carbon payback time of a turbine is generally under a year and for solar cells it's generally less than 3 years. Solar cells have service guarantees starting at 20 years now and I would expect roughly the same from turbines. If a turbine does indeed fail after 15 years, that's still >15x carbon savings. Recycling them is indeed a problem but there is no silver bullet and companies are working on recycling the resins and fiberglass blades.
@@Arkir24 Nuclear Reactors can effectively run in perpetuity. 20 years is not a long time. Not only have companies complained that they didn't last as long as stated, they're going to be replacing them every day.
He was doing fine until he claimed that renewable electric energy sources (solar and wind) produce no CO2. He needs to include the CO2 produced during their manufacture and operation. Windmill blades are produced from composite materials in which most of the components are derived from petroleum.
He also doesn't address what happens when there is no sun and wind? Neither has renewable energy come up with a way to produce enough consistent power to run industry, i.e. smelters & refineries, which product the components needed to make batteries and renewable energy components.
@@lautoka63 No way, the energy cost to produce a wind tower will never be recouped by the wind tower over it's life, not to mention ongoing maintenance, breakdowns and waste when it is decommisioned
I'd like to see him go into the carbon footprint of the production and lifespan of solar and wind powered sources. never mind the recyclability of them or lack of.
Every year, I see more wind farms and solar panel fields going up. They are eating up agricultural land and wildlife habitat. All this in an effort to meet an insatiable demand for electric power. Most of the solution needs to occur on the demand side. How much energy do we really need? No one talks very much about Fusion power, but truly it could be mankind's salvation. It could lead the way to viable fuel cells, ability to generate freshwater from salt, weaning the global shipping industry from carbon fuels.
He shows how much emissions is produced generating electricity but forgets to mention how much emissions are produced mining and transporting gasoline and diesel fuel
@peterkrass5528 that's exactly my point! Im saying that this guy is saying producing electricity is more emissions than a car produces. And he includes all of the emissions that comes from beginning to end for electricity (including transporting and producing the coal/oil) and compares it to the what a car's emissions is. But he doesnt add in the transportation and production that it takes to get that fuel in a car from beginning to end. It's a very one sided calculation. And why the hostility? I'm pretty sure we've never met before
Don't forget. It makes more sense from a green perspective to keep your old car running and well-maintained as long as you can. There are significant environmental costs to both manufacturing a new automobile and adding your old car to the ever-growing collective junk heap.
I had a 1973 Plymouth Satellite that I kept 19 years and 236,000 miles; and later a 2000 Ford Taurus that I kept twelve years and 150,000 miles. I'm doing my part...
my 30yo Honda Civic is still fun to drive and reliable - my main problem (apart from the lack of airbags - I'm a safe driver) is the cost of registration and third-party insurance - nearly $1000pa for a car I only drove about 1000km last year so local share cars I can rent for $10/hour look relatively attractive - except I had a huge fight over a $1500 charge for a fake/scam 'repair' from a major car rental firm - I got it refunded after 3 months of 20 emails and threats but I lost a lotta sleep - so that's put me off those kinda businesses
This argument is mostly used to encourage inaction. The environmental impacts caused by each problem are not equal. The pressing issue is atmospheric carbon. There is also an issue with waste recycling, landfill usage, etc but those are not as dangerous to the future of the planet even in the long term. Don't take a 1 year old car off the road to replace it with electric. But don't drive it for 20 year either. We need most of the world to be on electric cars in about 20 years and for the grid to be mostly renewable in 30
@Pèék Selling the green dream. That’s what the environmentalists do. But by doing so altruism becomes avarice as they profit from it. We’re going too fast and derailment is imminent and the only solution.
@@Mike-vd2qt says the Marxist. Lol, yeah, Marxist ends so well, doesn't it? I'm sure you consider everyone outside your group-think to be a crackpot. BTW, modern monetary theory doesn't work. Hence the reason we have Bidenflation.
It takes a lot of energy to produce these vehicles, so hold onto your vehicles longer, your clothes, phones etc longer. However, big companies don’t want this to happen.
Unfortunately, under this current administration household budgets are stretched or worse. The objective of converting America to EV's and other alternatives is Biden's catch 22. With spending power gone, most people will reuse the old worn out vehicles and goods that are now less environmentally friendly out of necessity.
Making quality products that last long time & keeping them is big part of solution that is ignored. Better public transportation would also make bigger difference than EV cars.
It's called "planned obsolescence" or pure greed...... they don't want you to own anything, they want your very existence to be a service they can charge you for......
In this case this is better. This video is at least 2 Years old and complete BS. His sourced data is about 4-8 years old. Newer studies shows that including also the the full picture on combustion cars, these are less ecological than BEVs at the first driven mile.
@Fritösen-Admiral you see rising numbers of EVs because that is what is being pushed. That doesn't support your argument and the video said we need more time to improve on the way EVs are made... data gets 'old' the minute it is released
I'm in the renewable energy field and even that needs to be looked at. During construction and operation of a wind or solar farm, thousands of gallons of diesel are burned every day, not to mention the environmental impacts on tree clearing on a large scale. Plus the life cycle of wind turbines is usually 20-30 years and large components arrive on ships (which burn 2000 gal of heavy diesel per hour) and major components like the blades end up in landfills when the site is repowered as they are not recyclable. Nuclear is the best thing we have so far.
Wind turbine blades only last 7 years, if that. The neseil which is the main component is 7 years. Depending on whether it's a 3-piece or a four-piece Tower each section is good for 20 years.
And is oil flying from the ground into the cars? It is shipped with millions of transportation in every possible form causing insane destruction. How many pumps, pipes, ships, trucks etc are built and used purely to transport oil? If we want to caunt in really everything (we must) the picture for oil will look much much worse. How many oil ship disasters have we seen? How many wars and kills for oil fields? I could list all the sh!t that comes with oil all day long..
@@BryanArd62 "Electric Horseman." Also with Willie Nelson, Valerie Perrine, Wilford Brimley, and John Saxon. Also some great shots of Las Vegas before it got terminally overbuilt. Willie Nelson has the line that brings down the house, but I won't repeat it here....
Ie such as an electric scooter or bicycle with range of 10-20 miles for scooters and 30-60 miles for the bike. Horse has about the same range as the scooter for the average horse and about the same range as the bike when accustomed to the riding but the human on the bike would have to be conditioned as well.
Please do an expanded version of this talking about the batteries, what it take to produce them, there life span, and what happens to them when they have reached the end of their efficient life span.
@@A3Kr0n green believers don't have a problem polluting other parts of the world or they would demand they be built and manufactured in the U.S. which has strict laws. Of course, that will cost more and the is the crux of the problem. They want green, but it has to be cheap.
And the impact on the environment of old dead batteries. It is really startling to think that fossil fuels overall may be better, especially the cleaner kinds such as Natural Gas, etc. Our research keeps making us dumber...
@@hickstylezhis math could also be said to be satire. He claims that the average cumulative driving emissions for combustion non-hybrid is 30 tons. Over 180k miles that’s about 151g/co2 per mile. The official EPA emissions for a Toyota Camry non hybrid is about 280g/mile. For the hybrid variant about 170g/mile. He is showing data that is off by more than 80% compared to a sedan which isn’t even representative of what average people drive in the US. Take all the trucks and SUVs, the EPA estimates about 350-400g/mile for US average. That drastically changes his argument.
This reinforces my belief around the importance of buying less, but when we do buy, buying the most durable/quality products on the market and then taking care of them for maximum life.
@Andrew Earle I agree, but cumulative emissions are what matter now; we're at a moment when we have to leave all fossil fuel use behind as fast as possible. Ditching ICEVs now makes more sense than hanging onto them & emitting more GHGs & other pollution, then ditching them later. It's important to make sure they're recycled, not resold, unless they're still good, & go to people with the most polluting cars, which must get scrapped. Subsidies are important, & not just regressive measures like tax credits. We need to turn over the world's ICEV fleet as fast as possible, & replace them with BEVs to avoid perpetuating fossil fuel use. EVs pay off the $, energy & carbon costs of their construction in an average of 2 years compared to ICEVS, & of course even old EVs keep getting cleaner as the grids that power them get cleaner, which they are, though too slowly. Transport emissions will only go down by retiring or not using ICEVs. The best ways to make that happen are staying put, walking, bicycling, & PUBLIC TRANSIT! (Including a state of the art national/international high speed rail network to replace flying & long distance driving.) But where vehicles are necessary, sharing, renting, or leasing EVs is smart so the valuable metals, time, & other resources of ICEVs can be better used right away. One place durability is crucial is in wood use---buildings, furniture, recycling paper... not on just a personal level but with government policy making it easier, if not required, setting up processes & institutions... Whatever's needed.
@@robertchiarizia9463 Climate catastrophe is an existential crisis. We have to eliminate GHG emissions as fast as humanly possible with a comprehensive emergency Green New Deal. That means renewablizing everything that burns fuels, which means electrifying almost all primary energy. That means electrifying transportation, the main source of GHGs & some other air pollutants in the US. Cleaning up power generation, transportation, industry, & buildings all at the same time yields synergistic effects.
Great talk. I'm disappointed that you didn't talk about how challenging it is to recycle all of the toxic elements inside the batteries. What a huge oversight.
It isn't challenging at all recycling batteries uses less than 5% of the energy that mining the materials does and is a simple well understood process.
A good analysis, but surprisingly he missed the amount of CO2 emitted in mining rare earth elements for solar panels and wind turbines, not to mention they contain massive amounts of processed petroleum products we often refer to as plastics.
@@gordcross1266 you got data to back that up? Also, the oil extraction is constant for the life of the vehicle whereas the rare earth metals are only during production of the vehicle.
With so called renewable energy, emissions for the production of solar panels (and the recycling of failed ones) also needs to be taken into account. As a mechanic I do service hybrid cars also and so many of them can't even reverse out of the service bay without the petrol engine starting and when test driving the petrol engine spends more time running than you think.
Absolutely correct. Solar panels are made from toxic metals (the mining of which is monopolized by the Chinese), and end up in landfills once they go kaput, because they can't be recycled. The same is true for EV batteries. The people touting batteries and solar panels act like these things just magically appear out of nowhere and don't have any harmful costs/externalities. Green energy is dangerous fraud.
i too service and own a hybrid vehicle and yes some instance mine does start when its been sat in the 'READY' mode or a while... i think my petrol engine kicks in at 20mph but i would sooner have that than a all electric .... even the battery tech on mine is more stable that of the lithium cells
@@vandamonium1731 ... yes was going to say I've seen plenty of hybrids back up on elec. mostly depends on charge levels in batteries.. but overall a hybrid engine runs LESS than comparable non hybrid when you compare MPG..
Excellent presentation, but I still wonder why nuclear is never part of the solution. There is nothing remotely close to it in clean energy production, and over all the years we've used it, very little damage has occurred, and always when safety protocols were ignored. I would love to see the graphs with nuclear energy used. Oh, and we also have reactors now that can reuse the waste, producing basically no nuclear waste. Why not?
Because nuclear is "scary". Chernobyl, 3 mile Island, Fukushima are still in people's minds. Though Fukushima only slightly elevated background radiation and 3 Mile Island wasn't really an accident.
He makes very good points, but he forgot one important factor. The energy necessary to produce the wind turbines and solar power cells. They don't come from thin air and produce an enormous amount of waste.
Not to mention outsourcing the mining and environmental damage to 3rd world developing countries, as well as national security issues when the resources are under Chinese/Russian direct or indirect control.
@@urbanothepopeofdeath Statistics show that a vastly larger number of bird deaths are due to collisions with windows in buildings rather than the wind farms, UTPOD.
It’s worse than he’s saying because he’s omitted the enormous amount of new global infrastructure required to get enough electric stations around the world. The oil/plastic coated cabling alone would run into millions of miles.
Nor did he mention the co2 produced in manufacturing solar panels and wind turbines which is enormous! And let's not get into having to replace them due to a short lifespan. Nor shall we mention their disposal impacts on the environment. He deliberately mislead his audience in the end!
Like the global infrastructure that needed to be built to support the gasoline industry (an infrastructure that will soon be useless as we run out of fossil fuels). Electric stations should be standalone and solar powered, we know this can be done.
never mind half the human race doesn't even have electricity right now. how are they MAKING that electricity they are charging the cars with...? hrmm yep.
This talk is quite misleading. While he correctly pointed out that there's a carbon footprint to generating electricity and making an EV, he mentioned nothing of the energy or carbon footprint in extracting crude oil, refining it to produce gasoline, and then the transportation and storage of said gasoline. According to research conducted by Argonne National Laboratory, the "well to pump" emissions of gasoline adds another 25% more CO2 emissions per volume of fuel. So essentially, when looking at his graphs for the gasoline vehicles, raise the line by 25% and you'll get a more accurate carbon footprint.
Exactly, and also doesent say that hybrids fill the battery using fossil fuel!, plus the holes created by drilling are not propery seald using methane to leak etc.
You also realise, no doubt, that every first world country (no-one else cares about the spurious climate claims) will need to produce nearly twice as much electricity than the current grids to power all the electric vehicles. Calculate that.
This video reminds me of something similar: recycling. Recycling was designed to make people feel better about over consuming products. The recycled materials are sometimes shipped long distances creating a penalty. Similar marketing strategy to sell a product that makes people feel good.
we literally just tip plastics collected in recycling trucks down mine shafts in Australia no other country will accept it and the Australian ones that were claiming to recycle were just stockpiling and then illegally dumping
Excellent talk. Only thing is he never mentioned the toxic waste lakes generated by mining the rare earth minerals required to make the electrical components of electronics. This needs to be solved as well.
Missing a ton of things actually, like what it takes to make 'renewables' like solar etc. Solar isn't actually a good thing at all in how we currently build them. Also those batteries in both solar systems and electric cars are not recyclable so no one is talking about the waste generated from them. All in all conventional cars and conventional energy are actually better for the environment than any of these 'renewable' and 'green' alternatives.
@@haitchteeceeeightnineeight5571 Nothing like lithium mining which takes 500,000 gallons of water to mine one metric ton of lithium. How long before all that leeches into soil and waterways?
@@pylotlight How many batteries (that are not recyclable) will a electric car need to make it on the roads 20 years? I have a 2000 lexus and a 2003 acura both still on the road to this day all original with 200k miles + lets see this from an electric vehicle
Cobalt (a necessary element for EVs) is a blood metal in the Congo, the world largest sourse of it. China owns the most mines in the DRC, by far. There's a YT video by WION.
In 2004, my company asked me if I wanted to work from home and I said yes. Telecommuters work longer hours, have great quality and goof off less. That is being green. I have saved over 30,000 in fuel.
"Telecommuters work longer hours, have great quality and goof off less." I absolutely believe in the much better QoL, but you might be an exception when it comes to longer hours (which would suggest *less* QoL, no?) and less goofing off. I don't have any original data, but I've read that many companies -- including Elon's -- want people back in the office simply because too many apparently don't do quality at-home work. (There's also more meaningful team interaction, I understand, when face-to-face instead of zoom-ing.)
LOL. no one is disputing that. The problem is, the claim that EV's are emissions free is an complete and utter lie. Now the question for you is, "How about the emissions from the TOTAL production of EV's". That includes everything required in the production of EV's.
@@guido1866It takes a typical EV about one year in operation to achieve "carbon parity" with an ICE vehicle. If the EV draws electricity from a coal/fired grid, however, the catchup period stretches to more than five years. If the grid is powered by carbon/free hydroelectricity, the catchup period is about six months.
I absolutely agree that the energy / pollution / CO2 equation for electric vehicles has to include the source of the energy that powers the vehicle. What I didn't hear you say is that the same should be done for fuel burning vehicles. The petrol (gasoline) or diesel fuel you put into your car didn't magically appear in the tanks of the gas station. The energy costs, pollution and emissions of oil exploration, oil well construction, pipeline construction, pumping, shipping, refining, road transport etc all have to be added to the emissions "produced" by your Internal Combustion car, in the same way you ask that the emissions from power stations should be added to the electric vehicles' emissions. Also, if you want to point out (correctly) that in many parts of the world, electricity comes from burning fossil fuels, then you also have to consider that there is a lot of electricity inherent in each gallon of gasoline or diesel. Research the electricity consumption of oil refineries (absolutely huge), realise that liquid fuels are often pumped with electrically powered pumps etc. One university study concluded that the amount of electricity inherent in a gallon of gasoline would drive an electric car at least half the distance that the liquid fuel would drive an internal combustion car. So yes, look at the whole picture for electric vehicles, but also look at the whole picture for internal combustion cars, hydrogen cars and all alternatives. I drive (and love) an electric car, but I have solar panels and live in New Zealand where over 80% of our electricity comes from renewable resources, especially at night when the vast majority of electric cars are charged.
There are studies that prove that the CO2 produced for manufacturing processes for cars with petrol/diesel engines versus battery operated cars are similar. So the CO2 produced is less with the electric car.
I get 6.5 to 7 L/100 with my Outback in Alberta by driving to conserve instead of 10 or 29 k above the limit. This guy is correct, in the future for most people when tech is higher.
Its a bs steel man of ice vehicles and has no basis in reality... AI will be able to scan all this documentation and hold all these people responsible one day.
Did not hear him mention the CO2 emitted during the whole process of getting the metals out of the ground when creating solar panels for the renewable energy. But this is a great start for a conversation on the topic.
Yes, and all those metals that have to be mined,refined, machined, and transported to assembly plants to build the ICE based drive trains that require hundreds of parts.
@@makerspace533 Well said MakerSpace. I’d go a little further. Any man made thing has a negative environmental impact when it’s creation, use, support, maintenance and salvage are accounted for inside the box. Any “green” product description leaves me suspicious of motive.
Also renewable energy plants such as wind and solar do not last a long as traditional power plants. That being said conventional cars don't require power plants to fuel the car, only to manufacture. Conventional cars do however require fuel processing, but most of these drilling sites are already active. I would totally love to see another video comparing all of these other factors. Great video, lets keeps looking at all the factors before committing to electric. Others mentioned the impact on the ozone from the electric motor also.
Thank you for explaining this. Ive been thinking weve been moving towards fully electric everything far too quickly myself and keep trying to explain to people why but havnet had the knowledge..
The TED speaker's information applies to an EV with a 125mile range. That means it isn't a Tesla. Every Tesla has 200mile+ range. Teslas have more efficient motors and batteries so they use a smaller battery to produce a longer range. This is true even 2 years ago when Conway made this speech and batteries have come a long way since then. The EV revolution is here. EVs are better than ICE cars in pretty much every way, except for long road trips where charging will take longer than filling up with gas. It doesn't matter who gets involved to speed up or slow down the transition to EVs. There are countless websites and videos on youtube where you can learn about the pros and cons of EVs.
@@Hardwaregeekx 200 mile range means bigger batteries more carbon to produce. tesla vehicles do not use any parts that are not used by other manufacturers. tesla hasn't created any new technology, thats just spin.
@@Hardwaregeekx tesla also recycles all their batteries at the end of life. Also his button hypothetical doesn’t make sense bc you can’t have the tech without the infrastructure. And the infrastructure enables technology to succeed. So if you can’t have one without the other then it’s a bad example. Id push that button every time. Here’s a button changes all your horses into cars and then what? It doesn’t make sense. The competition driving evs now will make batteries more efficient through the need to sell vehicles. In 10 years newly manufactured ice cars will be exotics. Using California as a barometer, as the industry does, last year tesla took 2 of the top 5 slots for most cars sold losing just barely to Toyota. Electric vehicles are spreading so fast and nobody should be slowing them down based on his charts we should be speeding them up. Oh and go nuclear. Get over the fear and just go nuclear asap. This whole anti nuclear thing has gone too far. It’s safer, cleaner, more efficient than any other form of generating electricity and it’s not used out of stupidity.
@@TaylerMade you’ve obviously never been in a Tesla or driven one to say that “they have created no new technology” that’s a statement born of ignorance.
A few thoughts: Finally someone points out some of the "hidden" costs of EVs. I didn't realized green plants could distinguish between horse generated CO2 and exhaust generated CO2. Speaking of horse generated, what about all that methane from horse emissions? Animal emissions are already being targeted for elimination. There is also the environmental concerns with the heavy metal leftovers of depleted batteries - the cost of properly disposing of all those depleted batteries is huge. Current renewable energy solutions are unreliable in the best of applications - i.e. the sun doesn't shine all the time and the wind doesn't blow all the time. Nuclear Is a great solution but not on the table in most cases - why?
"the sun doesn't shine all the time and the wind doesn't blow all the time." That's why networks of solar panels and wind turbines should be looked at. I've always wondered what would happen if only the 100 or so houses in my little neighbourhood had solar roofs. We could likely be sharing energy between us. But I'm with you re nuclear power. I lived between two nuclear power plants just east of Toronto.
Sustainable farming is the answer to your animal emission question. The reason it’s become an issue is the factory farming problem, so many animals being kept on so little land, desertification happens and the natural cycle of methane emissions from animal droppings is broken on compacted soil.
I have a problem though. I love what he said, right up to his talk about renewables, wind and solar. He doesn't apply the same penalty CO2 to bring those entities to market.
@John Dulio The only question that answers is the way we always did it. Q: "Do we know if this new product will cause harm to the earth in the future?" A: "No. We will have nuclear waste. It's dangerous and we don't know what to do with it exactly except store it for the next few years." Q: "Do we care?" A: "No, let's go!"
@@gabbymcgibson984 yes, many useful things, depleted uranium ammunition, nuclear weapons. The CO2 emissions from a limited nuclear exchange destroying, say, five cities, should probably factor into the equation.
"Birth to Scrap" is an engineering concept that should also include the CO2 (and $$ cost) impact of the manufacture of solar panels and wind turbines materials & manufacturing). ALL facets of energy production/usage need to have an accounting in order to truly appreciate the electric car global impact
@@grahamnicholls6070 The point is not mutually exclusive as you appear to presume. Failure to mention the one should not necessarly lead to a conclusion that the poster was ignoring the other. In environmental engineering cradle-to-grave is a "GIVEN" and it's not defined by a person's (perceived) biases of winners or losers - it applies to all that is relevant to the topic.
@@clivephillips4021 plant life is essential to feed animal life, if an animal doesn't eat plants it eats another animal that does, that's the food chain. Plants need CO2 as much as animals need oxygen. At times in the earth's history the CO2 level in the atmosphere was far higher than it is now, these periods saw very abundant growth of plant life and this is what reduced the atmospheric levels of CO2 to what we see now. It is very important that the tropical rain forests be preserved as these are the world's oxygen factory, this factor is not talked about in the global warming debate as these mostly third world countries would object. The warming crowd complains that the snows of Mt. Kilimanjaro in tropical Africa are disappearing, when the mountain was surrounded by a rain forest that supplied the waters to make the snow, that forest has been depleted by uncontrolled logging and the use of wood as a cooking fuel in Africa, bring the forest back and the snow will return, stay on the current path and the Sahara will get larger.
He tells us to view the EV as a whole yet he didn't account for Co2 emissions of processing a barrel of oil to gasoline. One barrel of oil to gas (42 gallons) produces 520 pounds of Co2 (237kg)
It is so wonderful to find someone that feels the same way about electric vehicles as I do...as a hotrodder I LOVE ELECTRIC CARS !!!! but there are many points against going full electric on a national or even world level that you addressed so wonderfully. My only issue with your talk is the use of solar and wind generators...to go back to the pollution emissions you talked about in batteries the same can be said about solar and wind. On a recent trip down to Texas I had the opportunity to see the wind farms across the nation being repaired/updated and the carbon footprint created by this exercise far outweighs the benefits to this endeavor. As we see in today's news California is having an issue as to what to do with the outdated and burned out solar panels that contain toxic metals....they have driven out all recyclers able to deal with this and are now resorting to just burying them which will cause future ecological issues (liberal hypocrisy at it's finest I guess) We should ask ' Why are the most efficient solar panels banned from being imported into the US?' but we are afraid of the answer. Why is wind power pushed so hard when it shows it can not provide power equal to it's pollution defecate (that word is wrong but google correct can't fathom so...) ? As I said...as a hotrodder I am all for electric vehicles....I have followed 'Gone Postal' , 'Killacycle' and many others and they are awesome ! I agree with everything you said...except...the solar and wind power point....Nuclear and Hydro are the only proven clean energy systems that we can rely on.
I'm totally with you on the nuclear side. And hydro too but that is more geography specific. In some places it can be virtually impact free on nature while in others it does cause harm.
@@chrisbauer1925 Unfortunately it is not that simple. I am a big fan of nuclear, but for most countries around the world it is not economically possible to go fully nuclear. France, the nuclear superpower, is facing a huge issue having outdated reactors long after the end of life cycle, that will be super expesive to replace/renew, and they might be possibly shut down in near future. Hydro, as you mentioned, can be a local ecological disaster, and also produces co2 and methane due to a large standing body of water with stuff rotting inside, but still, it is one of the cleanest. Just saying that no solution is easy, and it will take time to mitigate the issues. We should focus on all aspects, not just one. Make solar less toxic, make wind more efficient, nuclear cheaper, use hydro where safe, live less wasteful lives, vote for environmentally aware parties... Yeah the last two are actually the hardest to achieve
Great points but Conway works for Southwest Research Institute which does a lot of work with oil and gas and has many patents related to fossil fuels. He claims that the average cumulative driving emissions for combustion non-hybrid is 30 tons. Over 180k miles that’s about 151g/co2 per mile. The official EPA emissions for a Toyota Camry non hybrid is about 280g/mile. For the hybrid variant about 170g/mile. He is showing data that is off by more than 80% compared to a sedan which isn’t even representative of what average people drive in the US. Take all the trucks and SUVs, the EPA estimates about 350-400g/mile for US average. That drastically changes his argument.
I always love the fact that this comparisons bring up the CO2 created producing electricity but never account for the CO2 produced refining and transporting gasoline.
That's assuming CO2 is bad. guess what plants need it to survive and at the preindustrial levels plants were starving for food (CO2) that's why commercial greenhouses BURN NATURAL GAS to pump CO2 into their greenhouses to make their plants grow better LOL. . Well about your argument how about the CO2 for all transporting digging up the rare earth minerals for the batteries... shipping the rare earth minerals to china to make the batteries , shipping the batteries somewhere to make the cars shipping the cars back to the US or wherever, transporting the let's say Teslas to the show room .... burning the coal to power the Tesla to drive on the asphalt made from oil, to use the stoplights, powered by coal , dug from the ground, shipped by train, using a diesel , to a coal fired power plant that Jack built, so that Elon can shoot rockets into the air for joyrides that produce untold amounts of CO2 AND pollutants, built on the kids in the Congo with cobalt lung. good day
no discussion on the AMOUNT of water needed to manufacture the components that end up in either vehicle. Fresh, potable water is a huge environmental aspect that needs to be taken into consideration.
@@roykowalski4125 Everything humans do has effects. The harm done by fuels is so phenomenally, extraordinarily, tremendously huge, that RE & EVs are a tiny fraction of it, & get smaller as more RE & EVs are added to the grid & to manufacturing. ICEVs only get worse, as EROEI gets smaller & fuels get farther, deeper, scarcer, & more diffuse, which they’ve been doing for a while. People need to stop paying attention to the insane right wing climate-denying delayalist & ARF (anti-renewable fanatic) blogs & the politicians & media they own. They’re lying to you.
@@J4Zonian And people need to do there own homework and really analyze the data rather than paying attention to left wing climate and renewable energy fanatics. Look at California and Germany for example. The cost of renewable energy sources has come down (solar panels, turbines) yet the cost of electricity keeps rising. How come no one is talking about how many years we went backwards in "harm done" during covid lockdowns world wide, no one was driving. Reason is because there was no significant change to talk about. How come when when climate fanatics say things like "The earth hasn't been this hot in 3,000 years" no one asks the reason the earth was this hot 3,000 years ago? The problem is people either go all in left or all in right and have done zero research or are have the data to take either position. Partisan politics has gotten to the point where even science will be on one side or the other. Researchers don't get funding unless they lie on one side or the other.
How do they do it in Saudi? Local municipalities will NEVER allow desalinization, because they want total control over water production, but you will never hear this on the news.
I don't want to go back to the time where the average life expectancy is 50. Where there is no such thing as online shopping. Where your best product is for own use and not for the whole world to enjoy.
I've said this for years. And working in the field of producing EV batteries I see another problem and that is recycling of the batteries. Once glued and welded together they are almost impossible to get apart without destroying them. Creates an awful lot of work in trying to recycle. One that requires cheap labor. And that means shipping them back to where they were created. And how do you measure the amount of CO2 created in all of the shipping of the batteries from the raw materials to the production of the cells to the shipping of the cells to the production of the battery packs and then shipping the packs to the auto manufactures? These things are heavy. They need a lot of space and special handling. And at the end of the cycle you want to recycle them? That requires even more shipping and special handling. I've always said that the green is in the money it makes and nothing else.
I think it'd be nice if more companies could would make the batteries easily disassemble-able...like the Leaf. Maybe the new 4680s will enable that. That being said, we're a long way from battery recycling being an issue. Used EV batteries still pull in quite a premium because of the diy market.
@@willburk you can always reuse the modules. It's the modules that are glued and welded. That's were the diy market comes in. The issue is that once those go you have no other choice but to try and take them apart to recycle. The pack is made up of many modules. For instance on a new SUV we used 2 layers increasing the storage from the standard ones which are anywhere from 80 to 140 kwh to 208 kwh. This is accomplished by just adding an additional layer of modules.
@@ericaarseth7811 OMG, I think you might be right! Have you contacted the media about this? If you could just get on the Ed Sullivan Show and explain it to America, we might be able to solve the problems. Elon Musk said he was going to fix the problems, but then he di'nt. I was very disappointed about that. But I really think you're onto something brilliant with the "money" angle. I heard one of those nice ladies on The View mention it, but she di'nt really go into detail. This story could really blow the lid off the Deep State! I'm not gonna be able to sleep tonight...
I don't understand how the cycle from oil to automobile to CO2 can't include the CO2 continuing to plant life? When I was young the oil in the ground was understood to be "fossil fuel" from deposits of dead plant and animal life. Makes for a long cycle, but still a cycle. This is an interesting talk with some interesting analysis.
Yes. Ultimately it's is a cycle. Eventually the produced CO2 would get sequestered at the bottom of the ocean and deposited as new coal, oil etc. The problem is that this cycle is extremely long at least on our civilization scale (we are talking about 10 -100 million years). We have been here as a species for a couple 100k. Some 10k since the end of Stone Age. We burned all fossil fuels so far in like 200 years. The natural cycle is just too slow to be useful to us.
Because fossil fuels bring in long stored 'co2 deposits'. If you bring that in, you also need to get that back out in a similar way. Sure the planet itself can deal with such a long term cycle, but most current life (including us) can't. There are attempts at putting co2 back underground for long term storage similar to how the gas ,coal and oil was locked away, but these are very very expensive systems and not very efficient.
Probably right about the same like the "recycling" of wind turbines at their often far-earlier end of life than modelled...the glass-fibre parts get burned in waste incineration plants (or buried in the earth), the concrete foundations are simply covered up with soil (because they are not usable for more modern turbines) and the shaft of the turbines are the only thing that see a second life as raw material. Batteries up to this day can't be recycled without absurd amounts of new power, ruining every calculation at being "clean"...
MIT had a study. I don't know much about it but it gave the number 12X the energy to get rid of an electric vehicle. Furthermore, batteries need special storage because of the toxic chemicals they contain.
and then there's the total energy output required to mine, manufacture and maintain solar and wind farms.. not to mention what happens to these sources when they all degrade..
"But not today". It's not about waiting until everything else provides the perfect environment for EVs, it's about making small, incremental progress on a lot of fronts. At some point, you find that a lot of progress has been made on many fronts.
@@bluedog562: The Pilgrims Gov. Thomas Bradford discovered that principle in the 1620's! I.E. government playing God brought only death & disharmony ! Then ha switched to a Free Market economy, and the rest was history, tell today's back to the 1620's all over again like déjà vu!
CO2 from the corvette is also absorbed by plants and converted to O2, thus the greening of the planet. Atmospheric CO2 ppm continued to rise during the Covid-19 lockdown period of reduced admissions as reflected in the raw data. This happened due to mostly oceanic off-gasing, but assisted by other natural causes such as increased global volcanic activity. EV transportation simply does not have the grid capacity to support meaningful integration on a global scale.
Plants do not know if care where the CO2 comes from anymore than we would care where the oxygen we need for metabolism comes from. This is such a complicated, multifactorial and global problem that one “solution” is not gonna solve it. An eclectic approach is the one that will allow us to adapt to whatever happens. I do agree w him on that!👍🏼
The more the co2 the better it seems...we could actually make ourselves plants and animals larger by increasing co2 emissions - the more co2 a plant processes the more oxygen it produces...
Great talk. He seemed to make the same mistake though: he didn’t draw the box around the solar panel or the wind turbines? Would be interesting to see the numbers for that.
He tells us to view the EV as a whole yet he didn't account for Co2 emissions of processing a barrel of oil to gasoline. One barrel of oil to gas (42 gallons) produces 520 pounds of Co2 (237kg)
It is true to say that todays solar panels have a carbon footprint but as time goes by solar panels and wind etc will gradually replace all carbon emitting manufacturing processes, we have to start somewhere 🙂
@@daliborzak2485 Same thing with solar. Look into tellurium some time, and the whole mountainsides that China has to blow up to keep pace with the US' and Europe's demand for solar panels.
@@captainphoenix Stop cherry picking; stop with the false equivalency. Stop lying. Total mining in the world will be drastically reduced as we switch to 100% renewable energy. The harm done by mining & other industrial processes would also be dramatically reduced by getting rid of capitalism & the Wetiko disease that causes it.
This always seems like a taboo, but what about investing in nuclear energy? Wind and solar are great, but they require an exponential amount of land conversion to generate the same amount of energy as a nuclear power plant. They also require some rare earth materials (particularly solar) and they don't last as long as other power plants. I know nuclear is scary because of Chernobyl and Fukushima, but I think it's time for us to have serious discussion about this form of energy.
The first nuclear power plants were invented in the 1950’s. By the 1970’s the U.S.A. stopped building them, because they were dangerous (3 mile island). So, they stopped building them around 20 years from conception, won’t build new ones with technology and safety improvements made in the last 50 years, thus 70 years since inception. And they weren’t so bad that they tore them all down. I don’t see the logic. Yes existing plants have a had some improvements but that’s not at the same level as better designs from scratch. Proof in the pudding: France is mostly nuclear powered and has had no major incidents. Another topic is to make smaller nuclear plants that are much easier to manage in the event of an incident. It’s not like half the size is half the danger, I think it’s closer to exponential than 1:1. More smaller plants distributes generation, lesser affects of a plant going offline, shorter distances (which create loss), etc. I read an article on Wikipedia about micro nuke plants the size of a truck that can be operated remotely for underdeveloped countries. So, imho there is a lot of merit to your inquiry and a lot of information and technology developed in the last 50 out of 70 years.
@@kenkoehler594 I often wonder if governments consider nuclear plants as easy, catastrophic targets during war, and therefore don't want to build them.
Might have been mentioned before, but the steel needed to make a single wind turbine for energy uses about 400 tons of non-renewable steel, and the CO2 emissions from processing that steel into sheets and blades is unaccounted for in the graph. Solar is only about 18% efficient, and probably won't ghet any more efficient until a new superconductor material is found that makes converting thermal energy into electricity much more efficient. The other cost of lithium batteries is that once the batteries are exhausted, they become a huge contaminating pile of environmental waste that cannot be dealt with using current tech. Not to mention all the child labor used to mine lithium in countries where child labor laws are not nearly as strict.
If you read the IPCC analysis of GHG emissions you would know that solar produces about 48g/kWh hydro is 24g/kWh and wind is 12g/kWh. Also, what is non renewable steel, exact y?
OMG is this a Toyota shill? The answer isn't any specific type of private cars, it is public transit, micro transport and bikes. This talk misses the whole point.
You should also mention the thousands of endangered birds and animals killed by wind turbines and solar collectors, as well as acreage no longer available for agriculture and food production.
@@reaality3860 Why, as it happens I was at one of our local turbines a few months ago. It was quite early in the morning, and I had to wade through knee high piles of birds because the guy who normally cleans up the night kill had not done that yet. Oh wait, I made that up. Just like you did...
I wish our government and OEMs can use his logic. I was also hoping he would pitch for nuclear energy as solar and wind turbines need lots of CO2 to build and not efficiently transferring electricity.
@@MyVideosDon I agree. Thank you. Efficiently is best for nuclear energy if we put politics aside. But we are not smart…we should study France versus Germany
He should put his CO2 model he uses for vehicles into the renewable generation. In other words, how long will a wind turbine have to run to offset the CO2 produced from its manufacture
Some nice thoughts. But, I think it overlooks some of the costs (and carbon use) of operations. Especially, batteries have limited lives - eventually, they won't hold a charge. Before they are completely dead, they hold significantly less than their nominal charge. For conventional cars, this isn't an issue as long as the battery will start the engine. For hybrids, decreasing battery capacity will mean that the gasoline engine will operate more and more. For electric vehicles, vehicle range will decrease. At some point, the batteries will have to be replaced. The carbon cost of replacing a battery in a conventional car is very small, because the battery is very small. The carbon cost of replacing a battery in a hybrid is larger, because the battery is larger and uses more exotic materials. The carbon cost of replacing a battery in an electric vehicle is larger still, because the battery is much larger. I suspect that the whole life cycle carbon use, including battery replacement, is higher for electric cars. Switching to all-renewable electricity will neatly solve all these problems. Unfortunately, the record so far is that increasing renewables in electricity means that electricity becomes more expensive and less reliable, with fossil-fuel generation required to provide backup for intermittency. We may get to the renewable promised land, but we are a very long way.
That's hardly true, out of my german perspective i can say: watching renewable energy growing and become more and more a thing, means at the same time watching the prize for renewable energy going straight down, outcompeting even nuclear power. Today in germany, Solar Power ist the cheapest energy you can get. Expensive energy comes mostly from politics. Believe me, renewables are way better then their reputation, just let them grow and develop on the technical side. But i agree: it's still a long, but worthy to walk for sure.
@@kornelwojtkowiak9435 Does that trip to renewables include cutting and burning wood for available heat this winter in places around Europe? I think there is a problem there!
Not all parts of new technologies develop or evolve at the same pace -- ESPECIALLY WHEN CURRENT TECHNOLOGIES HAVE FOR-PROFIT REASONS FOR STALLING AND BLOCKING. What's important is that we start, and solve challenges as we move forward.
@@chuckscholl9928 Sorry mate, but i dont see this thing happening here. Exept maybe for Ukrane right now, but that's ofc another topic. It's really more like people getting big solar installation to heat their outdoor pools with air-to-heat. Don't mean to brag, but that's the reality here.
Your Corvette has 400+ horsepower; yet, it only emits as much carbon dioxide as one horse does - that's amazing! :D Celebrate modern internal combustion engines! They haven't even reached their full potential yet... o.O
@@sloreo8278 I am very sarcastic, but not this time. It’s clearly explained in the video that co2 exhaled by a horse is naturally recycled therefore it’s environmentally friendly and co2 from the cars isn’t.
The only problem with solar energy is that the same arguments he made about electric cars can be made about solar panels that only have a 25 year life span and are made with materials that are mostly not recyclable, same with the batteries to keep your energy working at night. Wind farms kill 300k to 500k birds per year, and the manufacturing of the windmills has an ecological cost. You also would have to take up a shitload of land and disrupt many ecosystems to have enough windmills to replace our current energy. Windmills also require 80 gallons of oil to operate. This oil is replaced every year. The average wind farm has 150 turbines. For those who don't feel like breaking out the calculator, that's 12k gallons of oil per wind farm, per year. We'd also basically be sentencing nearly every species of bird to death by windmill. And where does the energy come from when the wind stops blowing? Don't worry... Batteries save the day again. Actual research shows that nuclear energy is by far the cleanest energy to produce, and the plants don't take up much space at all (energy.gov).
1000% Correct. And if we can put nuclear power plants in submarines, can we little ones in vehicles? (at least public transportation maybe?) France generates 75% of it's electrical power from nuclear. The rest of the world needs to get the facts about nuclear safety and waste storage, and stop being afraid of nuclear.
@Aqua Fyre the 1st Prius I purchased in 2005 new and we loved it. Wife needed a car so we purchased a new 2021 Prius since we both worked in opposite directions. So poof, we have two Prius vehicles. One gets about 50mpg and the new Prius gets about 65mpg. Great vehicles, great miles per gallon.
@Aqua Fyre BTW: We lived in California and now live in Nevada, we live about 20 miles to most big box stores and there is no mass transit available in our area. 🤓
its only gonna be temporary though because once the required amount is built, no more will be needed so no more being built and no more emissions made from making them
@@grommitt1385Not true, solar panels and turbine blades wear out and need to be replaced regularly. Turbine blades in particular are literally just buried in massive landfills as they can't be feasibly recycled. Still better than a coal power plant? Surely, but nothing is perfect.
I saw this video, then was going to put a long reply about the carbon footprint and other issues created by making, maintaining and disposal of all the wind and solar panel farms which have a finite life of about 25 years, but I see just about everyone has sussed this one out. Why is it most average humans have it all worked out anyway! Well done Mr and Mrs average human that’s commented here! 👏👏👏👏
Fascinating! Good data! Assumption is that CO2 is a problem. Given that CO2 lags temperature increases it cannot be causative. Ergo, it's not the problem. If it's not the problem, then no need for this monumental shift in our economy to address the wrong problem. Renewable energy is no better. The massive environmental costs of recycling solar cells and batteries is a great concern but no one wants to talk about that. Better to focus on other sources of energy: fusion nuclear, fuel cells, etc.
The claim that CO2 can drive temperature increases is settled science. If you want to contradict that science, you're free to, but you'll need to post some links to the evidence or your claims can be safely ignored. As an aside, I agree that nuclear and fusion need to be the foundation of our power moving forward. Fuel cells, on the other hand, are best thought of as a kind of very fragile battery. Hydrogen is a royal PITA and currently is almost entirely reformed natural gas, though work is continuing on improving the efficiency of electrolysis above 25%. At 25% efficiency, we might as well just use Fischer-Tropsh and synthesize gasoline and diesel.
@@gazlives The pollution that chokes cities is not CO2. For millions of years, CO2 has been a natural part of Earth's atmosphere, until our dear leaders declared CO2 to be pollution in order to sell their EV society. In fact, CO2 is essential for life to exist. Without CO2 all life on Earth would die.
I think he missed an important part in his storytelling. He said that when a horse emits CO2 that it is then taken in by plants and thus creates a circle. Is there some reason that plants do not use the CO2 that is generated in the production of electricity? Do plants know where the CO2 comes from? It would seem to me that the most effective way to combat climate change is to stop destroying forests and start planting more and more plants. That should tell us that this narrative is all about power and money. Take from one source and give it to another source in order to change the power dynamic.
The horses are using carbon recently captured from the atmosphere as the grasses grew. Cars running on oil pull carbon out of deep storage and release it into the atmosphere, and the plants will not be able to absorb all of this at the same rate.
@@randomvideosn0where the more trees and plants that are planted the more CO2 that will be absorbed. No one ever stated that it had to be at the same rate. As the presenter stated, this is a global issue, not limited to one nation. There are literally billions of people in this world and the largest majority by far will not be able afford electric vehicles. The number of electric grids in most nations will not be able to handle the massive amounts of power demanded. How many nations in this world rely on heat and air conditioning? How many natural resources are destroyed to build the housing and infrastructure needed for these people? How many forests are destroyed to simply build housing? How many forests are destroyed to plant crops to feed these billions of people? How much potable water is demanded to meet the thirst of the world's population? Yet how much water is wasted throughout the manufacturing processes demanded by society. The climate change problem being faced by this world is indeed caused by man but is not related in my opinion by fossil fuels which are naturally occurring resources. They are no different than any other natural resource. The problem is mankind in general. Their desire to have more and more. Gluttony not only in foods but power and wealth. Why is it that billions of people live in a constant state of starvation while a much smaller number have an abundance of food? In most of the world people only have a limited amount of clothing yet in first world nations the average individual has more clothing than they will ever wear. We have a huge number of clothing stores abd and department stores filled with enough clothing to meet the world's clothing needs but instead of caring about their fellow man they sell the clothes to generate massive profits. How many natural resources including petroleum products are used to make these products? Have you stopped to research exactly how many products that are used by society on a daily basis rely on petroleum products in the manufacturing process?
@@steveostrander5182 Carbon is thought to play a role in maintaining current climates globally. Balance is only going to be achieved through reduced emissions. The planet currently defaults to plants so the only way to increase absorption of carbon is to allow developed areas to revert back to plants or create plants that absorb more and these do not seem feasible at this time. Given that most people would not support measures to decrease human population, and people will generally be unwilling to decrease their standard of living, we need to choose the least harmful methods of achieving these goals.
Well carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide are 2 different forms. Try pumping a tailpipe into your greenhouse and see what grows, or how about the health effects from smog in large cities....they've even discovered birth defects in babies from workers in who spend their whole lives working in a toxic environment created by fossil fuel burning. Fossil fuel emissions are full of toxic chemicals that infiltrate our air, water and earth beneath our feet. Just like this guy is trying to get people to look at the bigger picture, so should you.
I love how conveniently leaves out how much Co2 is produced every time you refuel. Raffination cost, transport of gas ecc. Every one is a scientist today
Instead of legislating the duration of durability, why not consider a model where the manufacturer of "durable" goods takes back and legally disposes of the product when it reaches the end of its useful like. One such model is where consumers would buy the service the product performs but not the product itself - the product would continued to be "owned" by the company that produced it. When it ceases to perform the service purchased that company would take it back and dispose of it.
How about you make these products yourself see how that works out. As you sit around your house or apartment surrounded by all the goods you own that were produced with the help of fossil fuels. Not to mention the grid that’s powering your computer , lights Tv, stove , fridge, etc., etc, etc, Thank You, John D. Rockefeller for providing us with cheap abundant fossil fuel.
There are so many holes in this talk that I don't even know where to start...but let's start where he started...today was once tomorrow of yesterday...we must start walking if you ever hope to get anywhere...and today is the best day.
@@vrrnonorem4266 It’s actually uncountable and I’m gonna rush right now maybe I’ll get back to this later on but I’m tired of defending electric I’ve heard every damn argument there is about it pros and cons and I’m going electric.
Definitely! These arguments always have one fundamental flaw … they leave out the entirety of what it takes to produce oil. If you’re going to “expand” the box around electric vehicles, you’ll also need to around ICE vehicles and include the defense budgets to secure the oil fields, transportation costs, refinement costs, environmental disaster costs, etc.
Pretty sure that you could replace oil fields with the rare earth mines that would be needed, which would have their own ecological problems, bottom line you would still need all those for electric cars. Also battery packs do not have a great Lifespan compared to combustion,major problem which would seem to increase ev overall co2
@@RobertWhite-zo9tf sorry, but modern battery packs have a life expectancy much longer than any combustion engine! Early ones had their problems, but that is a thing of the past!
He also works for Automotive Division at Southwest Research Institute; they work on engines a LOT. So, the more he can convince people to use ICE or hybrids, the more money they make. His graph also shows a few bad things. For EV's he uses the least efficient ones. For the ICE, he uses the most efficient ones, and for the hybrids he also uses the most efficient ones. None are the "average" as he said. The conventional would be MUCH higher in emissions if he used the average and the electric would be lower. I wouldn't trust an actor, especially when the description also says; "NOTE FROM TED: This talk only reflects the speaker's personal views and interpretation. Several claims in this talk lack scientific support. We've flagged this talk because it falls outside the content guidelines TED gives TEDx organizers. "
Although this guy clearly understands the issues that most do not know, and his talk is mostly very good, at ~11:30 minutes, he hypocritically implies that wind and solar are so-called "renewables", although it takes a lot of energy to make THEM, too.
He does make good points but he is not producing the whole picture. He also neglects to mention the CO2 produced by vehicles that transport the fuel all around the globe to all the gas stations to support these vehicles. The gas does not magically appear at the gas station. He also false claims that combustion engines have not be been optimized. This is a matter of opinion. He also gives a simplistic idea of what development, research, and investing. People with billions to invest don’t generally give away that money on proof of concept alone. Things need to been scalable.
@@lybiwinzenz2880 Turbine blades have been found to degrade much faster than expected in regions with blowing sand like deserts or salt particles like offshore.
I enjoyed your presentation. However, I would like to see your presentation after you have studied the ecological cost of Wind Farms. They are NOT a viable alternative either, in their current state of evolution. As of today, many are being shut down and dismantled. The cost is too high from many points of view.
as far as shutting them down, in Texas if you allow one of these on your property, they pay you. yearly monthly, what ever, BUT when that thing breaks or the lil ghost company goes broke, guess who owns that thing and responsible for removing it at their own expense? yep, the land owner. there is no recycling for wind turbine blades.
On a more serious note: _"house cats kill 3 billion birds annually, wind turbines kill 300,000"_ that's 10,000 more bird kills by cats. Please stop spreading non sense
_"in their current state of evolution"_ I don't know where you got you information from, but ever heard about chicken egg issue? Make those turbines, improve them along the way, and you will have a different story.
Solar wind and nuclear are the main electricity sources, along with thermal and some others. Renewable energy is growing with a pace of 30% a year and can easily take the demand of electric transport.
I can’t take talks on climate seriously if they don’t discuss nuclear, especially 4th generation molten salt reactors, and don’t talk about the true environmental cost of solar and wind turbines.
We would love to put the waste barrels in your swimming pool out back. How about we have you work at the mines. YOU do not take the environment seriously. Nor did you learn anything from this talk.
There was talk about thorium reactors that can't melt down but haven't heard anything in a while. The meltdowns in Japan are still a giant disaster no one talks about
@@johnh8546 Exactly. The only people who fear nuclear energy are the scientifically illiterate. Instead they watch ridiculous dramatisations on TV that both validates and exploits their ignorance by making money from sensationalist crud.
There is a glaring problem with this analysis, first it's assumed the whole car is just scrapped after 180k miles, whereas in reality a battery can be recycled over 90%, so the next car that is built doesn't have the same emissions. Secondly, research is ongoing for new battery technologies and mining with BEV, if the whole chain of producing a battery was CO2 neutral then the initial emissions would also be lower and third the production of "green" gasoline would require vast amounts of crop fields that cover the entire earth to produce enough ethanol to satisfy the whole fleet of ICE vehicles. So it's a complex problem, but BEV is the way to go together with replacing our old coal/oil/gas powerplants with renewables and nuclear. But replacing all cars now isn't realistic, if I had such a button it would just as easily be a button for replacing the whole grid with renewables :)
As an ecologist, there was a huge problem with his horse analogy. The CO2 in the atmosphere-all CO2-is reabsorbed into organic plant matter. So, whether it is burned by an auto or breathed by a horse, it goes back into the cycle. The difference is that digging out of the ground puts more CO2 into the cycle than was initially there at time t-1. This is a problem because his reductive argument missed the notion that increased biomass compensates for increased CO2. Just like a famine or pandemic, though, politics prevents the natural progression of the CO2 cycle from increasing biomass to offset CO2.
Was about to comment the same- embarrassingly simplistic, but so is most discussion on 'climate change' and extraordinarily narcisistic to think that we can make a larger impact on global climate systems than the environment itself.
Didn't see any consideration of the C02 cost of retrieving, refining and transporting the fuel for normal ICE vehicles? Having worked in the marine Oil industry, I can tell you that's a fair amount to take into consideration. There is also the consideration of generating electricity on large scale vs small scale usage of fuel. I live and work in Norway, where all electric power is generated from hydro electric sources (so that flattens out the graph for electric cars quite drastically, cutting down the CO2 crossover point with ICE cars to somewhere between 2 to 4 years of usage) - which I know is a luxury situation (Norway has over half of Europe's hydro capacity I believe) The gas and oil produced in this country is mainly exported to other countries for them to burn ;-), with the exception of the fuel refined for all forms of transport (road vehicles, air transport and shipping) - although a lot of money and energy has recently been put into coming up with a gas power plant with CO2 scrubbers. My personal opinion is that the electric motor is the way to go for small vehicles, but batteries are maybe not the power source we should be using. Hydrogen is the fuel that should be the focus, but unfortunately the current ways of utilising it are expensive to manufacture, require elaborate storage solutions and quantities of rare metals in the fuel cells (which hinders mass production). Battery technology is currently advancing at a healthy rate, so I don't see hydrogen tech attracting the necessary big bucks (until a 'eureka' breakthrough happens in any case). Most renewable sources of energy that are being invested in are also intermittent sources (solar, wind) which will only be effective when combined with an energy storage solution (which in most cases is looking like battery storage at the moment). I personally don't understand why more money isn't being put into geothermal and infra red energy harvesting, as these both have the potential to provide a constant stream of energy 24/7
"There is also the consideration of generating electricity on large scale vs small scale usage of fuel" There is also battery charging/discharging losses to consider. The thermal problem with batteries needing their own cooling system is its own efficiency drain on electric cars - both the battery losses and the cooling system power + weight. "I personally don't understand why more money isn't being put into geothermal and infra red energy harvesting" 1) Geothermal will get a boosted by a move to use gyrotrons (like magnetrons for megawatt power output) to increase drilling efficiency for reaching the much deeper super hot rock layer that most of the world (outside the active geological zones) needs for viable geothermal power - this drops the price of drilling to about $500k instead of $millions. 2) Infra red energy harvesting is already utilised in some variants of solar power, specifically thermophotovoltaic cells which have an extra layer of energy harvesting material to absort IR which is reflected back when the main PV cell heats up from absorbing bandwidths of light it cannot convert.
I like norways approach to using hydro. Sadly here the intent is on demolishing our dam systems. And everybody is afraid of nuclear, so we’re sold the idea that solar and wind are adequate. Nobody seems to be approaching reservoir or mass-based energy storage and only wants to talk about batteries. It’s like they think the sun and wind are always there and batteries just pop out of a factory with no environmental repercussions. I almost don’t even think it’s about clean energy anymore.
He also did not factor in the cost of building renewable generated power, or the cost of maintaining an electricity network, or the energy cost to transmit electricity, or the fact that the batteries currently being used in our electric cars will only last for around 60,000 miles.
@@mnomadvfx there was a company that had a working prototype IR panel about 10 years ago, using micro antennae. I haven't seen anything about it for a long time - it was shown on a program about transmitting energy wirelessly
I just wrote a comment on exactly the same problem. And there's also the thing where he artifically inflated the CO2 costs of an electric vehicle by insisting that it needs to have a 400 mile range.
Another factor that he failed to include would be the life span of those batteries in the cars/solar system and the disposing of them after they are replaced. Not to mention the chemicals used in the use of solar panels and disposing of them after their life span.
Solar panel recycling is already done very well in Europe. So it is possible, no obstacle there. Battery recycling is indeed much harder but there already are companies doing it. But most importantly, after EV batteries degrade enough to need replacing they still have enough capacity to be used for grid storage. So they can have a much longer lifespan then the car itself.
@@walterschwarz29 unfortunately recycling is a hoax as well as using old batteries for grid storage. It's a fantasy, not realistic, no rules or laws will change this. Electric vehicles have a place but they will not replace a diesel nor gas motor, with gas motors becoming more efficient, albeit more than an electric motor in some cases, and types of diesel becoming cleaner as well as electrics not having the range of diesel as well as making that electricity does and will produce pollution. Can't have it both ways and you're blind if you don't look at the WHOLE PICTURE.
1) The cells in the battery from an electric are still useful after it is no longer suitable for a car, those batteries can be repurposed such as in stationary storage. They do not need to be 'disposed'. 2) Over 90% of the materials in those batteries can be recovered and reused. And this can be done more cheaply than mining new materials. They do not need to be disposed. Please remind me how much of car exhaust can be recovered and reused.
But you are ignoring the fact that there is already solid state batteries being made by Toyota that get rid of the environmental impact almost all together. the production of EV's will get cleaner while Petrol cars won't change much. Also the battery life of an EV is far longer already then the general lifespan of a Petrol car. If we take the usual 300KM as write off point you can already fit 3 petrol cars in the distance of an EV. so that changes the whole game a lot.
It would be interesting to hear him again, 4 years on, with the latest data available. It appears the world has changed a lot faster than he anticipated or predicted.
His statements were half-truths at best even 4 years ago. Studies from 2018 that included full life cycle emissions concluded that the average 250 mile range BEV's break even point was around 40,000 miles back then. Now it's under 20,000 miles. This man is not an unbiased presenter, he works on ICE vehicle manufacturing. It's like those ads that said 4 out of 5 Drs. recommend Salem cigarettes but the doctors were all board members at Salem.
Yeah the CC left love to omit thing like the Corvette is still in the loop, and that it does not produce methane but farting, as the horse does, but remember these same people want to out law meat since cows farting raises the temperature. Also they love to discard the effects of solar, and cosmic radiation in their data. It is all a scam as we know.
Solar is scalable and can be used in a small village in Africa or a large city in China. It can be put over reservoirs and reduce water evaporation. It can be put on top of warehouses and super stores. It can be put on homes. It can be put on farms while still growing particular crops and eventually it could be on oceans. It is not efficient with land usage but there are a lot of available places that will keep it in business and it is very flexible and prices dropping everyday. I say over build with solar, wind, hydroelectric, geothermal and crack water into hydrogen (which is getting cheaper everyday)!
The Netherlands and Germany has done a good jib of putting fear in people about nuclear power. Closing nuclear power plants and now building new coal power plants. Also Rotterdam banned diesel cars and build 3 new coal power plants . Strange world.
Germany tried the whole solar energy thing, spent billions on it. They're now going back to coal powered plants. Experiment tried and failed. I love solar myself, but I'm not trying to save the planet. Just don't like making the power company richer. God can handle taking care of the earth. He created it, so I trust him to protect it. Thanks God !
Something different to make us think rather than just accept. In many countries there are already national blackouts, and both construction and farming machines among others, require a lot of power, and these should also be included in the picture for the future.
You will go crazy with the cost and time spent to buy food and wait for highway and construction projects if battery power is required for heavy and agricultural equipment.
I'm an electrician and a huge fan of Tesla , the man not the company , I've known this for years , in the future these cars will be a game changer , but not till battery tech , and energy generation and transmission catches up, The laws of thermodynamics are the ceiling in this problem, they are the brick wall
More than anything, it's just that EVs aren't cost-effective yet. They still use much less energy to drive than ICE vehicles, and they're compatible with any energy source. That's the whole point. They have plenty of potential--but, it doesn't matter if there's no cost advantage. Better in any way doesn't matter if they cost too much.
@@amorgan5844 Never mind justifying it, affording it is the more important issue. I'd love a Tesla or similar "normal" style electric car with a decent range, but £30k-£40k is just insanely unaffordable. My cars are usually bought used for around £6k and last another 5-7 years after I buy them. I think that is far more sustainable at the moment, both environmentally and financially on a personal level.
@@amorgan5844 Not many can justify the exorbitant price of many mainstream ICE cars, either. They buy them because they have no choice--they gotta get to work somehow.
Great presentation, I try to explain this to people all the time, most don't even understand or willfully ignore me. There is 1 other thing... if we turned even 75% of all gas/diesel burning vehicles into electric with a snap of your fingers we do not have the electrical infrastructure to handle it. Not even close, it would/will take many decades to build it up to a point where it wouldn't adversely affect all other area's of electricity consumption. Do what makes sense now and for the future but let's use our brains and not let ourselves be used as political footballs.
Nobody is trying to turn 75% of all ICE vehicles to electric with the snap of a finger. It will be a long transition, but we're way behind the ball, so yes, let's build out the infrastructure as fast as possible, while also transitioning energy generation to renewable (plus storage). BTW, that will allow us to BUILD every car without CO2 emissions, so the BEV will be zero emission (which mine essentially are since they're using 100% solar from my roof or wind from the utility), but the ICE is still generating CO2 while burning fuel. In your mind, how much longer should we wait and just maintain the status quo that's already cooking the planet?
If you have a parking place next to your house, an electricity supply and an alarm clock you have the infrastructure already. In the UK 90 percent of charging is done at night when about 40 percent of generation is switched off. The average car does 22 miles a day which means 2 hours charging at 3 kW. Not a big deal. The problem arises because 40 percent of households don't have attached parking
@@ambassadorfromreality1125 I am not refering to the charging infrastructure but the electricity grid itself. Where does the electricity come from? I don't know about all countries but in the U.S. we have enough problems meeting the needs already and with more and more EV's it will get far worse. Not to mention where does it come from, a lot of it from coal. It will be solved, it might take decades but it will come.
@@alittlelooney5361 Correct - it will be solved, so let's work on getting it solved as soon as possible, rather than slow it down with questionable claims. The grid can already handle a lot of charging *IF* it's done at off-peak times when the utility has, in many cases, more power than they know what to do with. That also means that they don't have to upgrade the infrastructure in your neighborhood (if your transformer is able to handle 1 MW and most of that is actually being used at peak load, but you and your neighbors only use 100 kW at night, then 900 kW are available at night for EV charging).
@Jon VB So true. People don't realize that even if we took the oil and used it to generate electricity (power plants), we would STILL generate less CO2 than transporting and refining it, and then burn it in an ICE car. Not that I'm advocating for that, but it's an interesting result of how inefficient the ICE and that whole process is.
Electric cars Electric appliances Electric tools Electric air conditioning Electric refrigerators Oh no where will it all end Quick pass me a cold beer from the fridge
Glad this is on youtube thank you ! and I hope this gets more viewers. I wonder about emissions footprint of recycling at end of life of gas/hybrid/electric vehicles.
I have wondered about the end of life of the battery packs too. Who is going to pay for this? The consumers? The car companies? The Gov't? Our kids?? Read an article not too long ago where the guy ran numbers with a friend of his, and they figured he'd have to own his Tesla for 111 yrs before he would see any real savings from it. 111 yrs was shocking in the least. Wish I could find the article
@@jackkennedy1936 I hope that is a rhetorical question. The consumer pays for EVERYTHING one way or the other. Just like tires, there's a disposal fee when you get them replaced which gets passed on.
As I (layman) thought more about this - if recycled efficiently (reclaim Li, Co etc) then, in the long run, should lower the initial CO2 footprint of the future electric vehicle to be made.
Only way to be completely accurate is to start from the ground up when producing the vehicles/engines/batteries and then as well from the ground up producing, refining and transporting the fuel/electricity to the point of where it gets used, also the products/services related to maintaining each type.
If you do that, then count all the wars fought over oil and gas. And the consequences of the wars (e.g. starvation resulting from the Russian 'special operation'). Add in oil spills, air pollution, oil pipelines, etc.
Sure. We can't even figure what to do with the nuclear waste we created from the 50's and you want to create more. Almost 40 years after Congress decided the United States, and not private companies, would be responsible for storing radioactive waste, the cost of that effort has grown to $7.5 billion, and it’s about to get even pricier. With no place of its own to keep the waste, the government now says it expects to pay $35.5 billion to private companies as more and more nuclear plants shut down, unable to compete with cheaper natural gas and renewable energy sources. Storing spent fuel at an operating plant with staff and technology on hand can cost $300,000 a year. The price for a closed facility: more than $8 million, according to the Nuclear Energy Institute. The U.S. Energy Department “has been clinging to unrealistic expectations,” said Rodney McCullum, senior director for decommissioning and used fuel at the institute, an industry trade group. “The industry was never supposed to have this problem.”
I enjoy it when they compare electric vehicles to petrol ones, but they always seem to miss a significant aspect: how is the petrol produced? I would like to see the entire process and the costs involved in extracting oil, transporting it to refineries by boats or trucks, and, upon completion, using trucks to transport it to service stations.
Hey mate, that's another important aspect to put into the equation. I would like to see a video where all aspects of production, maintenance, and end-of-life for these products are compared. By this, I mean all the money spent on research, extraction, etc., for battery materials, including all the associated ecological damage, and the same goes for the production of both electric and internal combustion engines. In short, with concrete data, which of the two is ultimately less polluting?@@wrends
@@RidwanRidwan-tq7rxyeah that’s another valid point! I would love to see a complete study about it! And how they produce the electricity, what’s the cost involved etc.
He's absolutely right! Electric cars DO move pollution out of urban areas! Just go to Butte, Montana and visit the Berkeley pit. One of the EPAs largest superfund cleanup sites! An 1800 acre (1800 football fields) gigantic pit with a toxic lake of heavy metals and arsenic polluted water that kills thousands of migrating waterfowl every year! In order to mine all the lead, Copper, Silver, Nickle, etc. etc. To make the hundreds of millions of batteries to create all the electric cars...would mean digging ten of those pits....in every state in the nation!! Then stop and realize that those batteries only last about ten years before needing replaced...which costs between ten and twenty THOUSAND dollars!! Then you have to dispose of the old batteries!! Oh! And i recently heard that the laws will be implemented that you can't legally sell a used EV without replacing the batteries!! Now let's talk about EV fires from exploding batteries and recalls ALREADY ordered on GM electric vehicles, and owner's manuals instructing people to NOT park the car inside garages or public parking structures or close to other vehicles!! Great...but how do OTHER drivers know to not park near you? It also warns owners to not leave the car unattended while charging! Well...THAT'S convenient! Just sleep in shifts while guarding your home from a ticking bomb!
And what about all the pollution from leaking oil wells, the gigantic pits from coal mining, and the polluted groundwater from fracking? And I believe the Berkeley pit was from mining until 1982 when it was abandoned. Your complaint is not about modern EVs, but with the mining companies that are irresponsible about the environment. That is the perfect example of why we need good government, to prevent the abuse of power of the large, wealthy corporations. No one seemed care when this mine was in operation. My question, why isn't ARCO, the last company to operate that mine, now responsible for the clean up? Same with the abandoned oil wells and coal mines?
@@UNCGS so you see that pattern. And with all that powerful logic and reasoning....your best suggestion is to trust an entire global industry to corrupt mine owners and Federal agencies to suddenly have an attack of conscience, and start mining responsibly....just because it's for electric vehicles....which will somehow increase their integrity and accountability? You still sit in the out in the back yard every halloween waiting for the great pumpkin to arrive, don't you? I guess the old addage is truer than ever...those who don't learn from their mistakes are bound to repeat them!
Ask the green beans what is going to bring power to all the infrastructure that will be needed to make electric vehicles viable, answer, coal or natural gas fired generators......
Thanks for simplifying some of the big issues. However, you’ve left out the net CO2 emissions from production, distribution, maintenance and disposal of wind and solar, as well as ignoring the obvious environmental impact of all the increased mining for every aspect of power production and grid-based distribution capacity.
Just like it has been left out the environmental costs of offshore oil platforms, tankers and massive refineries, imagine the co2 that went into building those?
@@jaytheblader6701 and all of that has lead us to the point where we can pivot...a delicate point of balance of change...we need eclectic not electric...but we need to move away from oil.
It is shocking that this needs to be said. Common sense and simple laws of physics should lead people to this conclusion, but very well put together Graham!
re: "simple laws of physics should lead people to this conclusion..." unfortunately that's a oxymoron, as using the term "simple" to describe even basic Physics is a bit misleading. for the average citizen (which is to say 98% of Planet Earth) who has NEVER sat through a single University level Chemistry or Math lecture, "simple" Physics is ALL GREEK. yeah they just don't get it. sure Engineers get it... but the average Joe...? not so much.
“Smart people” have big heads… Everything makes so much sense to you in your world that you are blind to everything else. I deal with big headed people all the time. “Common sense” is a term that refers to a judgement shared by “all people”… or a great majority… it’s clearly not the case if the great majority.. or “the common” don’t share it.
250 mile EV with the occasional fast charge when going farther in a day works well for most anyone. If you factor in 250 mile range EV into his chart his argument against EVs falls apart. Hybrids are just too complicated to be anything more of a stepping stone; a stepping stone from a decade ago. I just threw down some common sense and physics.
He fails to point out in his "if we had all electric cars tomorrow" scenario is that if we all had to charge our electric cars the power grids would collapse. Most power grids are currently stressed during summer or winter just heating and cooling our homes. Now they want us to plug our cars into every one of those homes too. Good luck with that! There's also a very limited supply of lithium on the planet to build the batteries for electric cars for everyone.
@@xxwookey Clearly you've never owned an electric vehicle. I have to charge my Tesla twice if not three times a day, and wait hours every time while it charges. I can't just leave whenever I want to meet with friends, or keep up with family or coworkers on long trips when they have gas powered cars. I'm not sure what planet you live on, but here on earth no electric vehicle has ever stored electricity and given it back to the grid to stabilize it. Electric vehicles only drain and add to the load strain on the power grid. I'm an engineer, and I have YET to hear anyone explain how electric vehicles could in any way stabilize the grid, especially compared to gas vehicles that don't drain the grid AT ALL, so please do enlighten us with your wisdom...
@@aloha_ohana My next-door neighbour's EV is connected to the grid for stabilisation (UK trial), and has been for 2 years, so actually it does happen. I agree it's not widespread yet, but new cars are coming with export functionality (Ioniq5, EV6, F150). Surely it's obvious how many GWh of battery plugged in can help with grid load balancing? So you own a Tesla and do 400-600 miles/day or more in order to need to charge 2 or 3 times? That's an extreme case and would indeed lead to a lot of charging.The national daily average, even in the US is 35 miles, so most people just plug in when they get home, and often not every day.
@@larrylacause1899 The Demonazi's gave all the uranium to Russia. So them giving the lithium to China was no real surprise. Wonderful? No. They're intentionally dismantling us from within with help from China, Soros, and the like.
Engineering is all about trade-offs. There is seldom one single best answer because there are too many variables. This talk does an excellent job illustrating that and proposes one or two different ways of trading things off.
He's pushing ICE and hybrids in 2022. While hybrids are viable, EVs are the way. There is just no cogent argument against EVs while pushing ICE that I could find. It's all just cherry picked and twisting facts to demonize the EV.
We here in the U.S. can expound all we want on how to solve "Climate change", but until the majority of other large polluters in the world join us it will be for naught. Wind borne Emissions know no geographical boundaries. For example: If i live on a street with many houses and we all have big yards and large trees. When the Fall comes my trees drop there leaves. I go out and rake them up so my yard is nice and clean. However, my neighbors don't care as much as I do, so as soon as the Wind blows my yard is full of leaves again. I can repeat my behavior over and over, but until my neighbors agree to clean all of our yards, my efforts will have a limited effect. Let's not forget this before we try to mandate or legislate ourselves needlessly.
Can't argue, except to say the polluting countries will not feel any pressure to "clean up" until clean becomes the norm. If no one takes the first step then the solution will never come.
Windmills and solar panels also need to be manufactured and maintained, and the manufacturing and maintenance processes generate carbon dioxide. I continue to believe that all the major innovations will be on the demand side of the equation... UNLESS we choose nuclear which has been demonized as relentlessly as fossil fuels.
Nuclear has a bad name because of the system we chose. From what I have seen, Thorium is a better choice. It leaves no toxic waste. It could have made the promises of Redi-Kilowatt come true.
@Paul Fry Unless someone is grinding grain there are no windmills in this story. And you got everything else even more wrong. Trying to deceive by false equivalence is despicable. Stop. Nukes are too slow, too expensive, too dangerous, too water-killing, too anti-democracy & equality, & have far too many other problems to even be considered. Fortunately, the alleged free market (actually the oligarchical corporate market) has decided, & eve though the oligarchs who swear it as their religion start sinning anytime they don't like the commandments, it seems to be working this time. Unfortunately, they have managed to delay everything long enough to doom the world to violence, chaos & destruction. So your belief is absurd; it's based on lies. Improvements, price drops, & production improvements in clean safe fast cheap reliable renewable energy, batteries, EVs, & transit continue to outpace projections by experts, let alone those of nuke shdullps (shills? dupes? Who knows?) like you. Give it up. Nukes lost. RE is the energy of the 21st century.
@@J4Zonian Hi, i'd like to understand your perspective here! Do you think renewable energy is economically sustainable right now? Should we invest more money into researching renewables so we can make energy cheaper, or is it better to invest in current technology directly? Also, what do you mean by "Nukes are too slow, too expensive, too dangerous, too water-killing, too anti-democracy & equality"? Are you talking about bombs? There's a difference between reactors and bombs, i think. Anyways, i'd just like to know what your views are on this.
@@J4Zonian science is not something you can just wish into existence. I have high hopes for hydrogen fuel cells but based on where we are in 2022, Mr.Fry is exactly right.
I'd like to see the cost of the Middle East Wars and the CO2 released during them factored into the cost of the gasoline cars. Veterans benefits etc. You know, let be honest about it.
Plants absorb CO2 however that is produced. If they absorb the CO2 from a billion horses, they also absorb the CO2 from a billion corvettes. Of course, the corvette doesn't eat plants, so we land with more or bigger plants. This is well recorded to be happening.
your third sentence is confusing, I'm not really sure what your stance is lol. but the concept of the CO2 in horses being in a cycle that the CO2 from corvettes is not, is derived from the corvette CO2 coming from the ground, a closed system, but is now in the open atmosphere, increasing the overall amount of gasses filling our air and increasing the burden we put on plants to convert it to oxygen.
@@isaacringling3823 A part is a reasoning that falls in the category of CO2 capturing. But CO2 only stays captured in the wooden parts of trees if we don't let the plants die and rot (that releases almost all the CO2!). So every year the amount of excess CO2 needs to be captured by new planted trees. Died trees should be shot to Mars (to there create a biosphere) in a CO2-free rocket 😄 The other part is that higher levels of CO2 give raise to plants absorbing more CO2 (larger plants). But as plants die, it doesn't help to reduce the effective CO2.
Don’t forget about the construction process of each solar or wind farm. Lots going on there and a ton of maintenance to keep up. What’s the answer to heavy machines and tractor trailers? I’m a farmer and often haul 10-20k pounds of hay with a diesel truck. That’s hard to do without internal combustion. We definitely should be considering alternatives but forcing us into something that’s not sensible is absurd and has dangerous repercussions. Thanks for sharing.
Battery storage would be enormous. Imagine the power to transport a vehicle and its contents between recharge either very short lived or enormous explosion hazards in any accidents.
He forgot to factor in the CO2 and rare metals used in wind and solar production. He also didn't touch the recyclability of each. It is a complex problem.
Was scanning comments for this one! EXACTLY! Most of his logic was reasonably sound, BUT, this omission of the facts makes me feel as if his presentation was somewhat disingenuous.
Everyone of my friends who bought an electric car, did so to save money on gas. They didn’t want to pay $7/gallon for gas anymore. The last thing they cared about were the emissions
@@floydlarken3148 No kidding! The prices will come down. Remember the first cell phones? We paid by the minute and only the cool kids had them. My sister leased for $239/mo and has 300 mile range. Her gas used to be $400/mo. Have u heard of Flex Fuel? In Colorado it’s like $2.99/gal. Only u have to have a Flex Fuel car.
@@okthisisthelasttimeipromise Hey how do u like it? I’ve looked at those and I know the range is less but they all keen to have very low mileage and good prices.
He makes great points! BUT "renewable sources" of energy still produce a HUGE about of waste and are damaging to the environment. If we would encourage Nuclear power as the main source of power, the amount of effect on the environment would be by far the lowest.
HILARIOUS! As though creating renewable energy doesn't create C02. I'll just throw 2 fun facts (2 of MANY) about wind turbines. 1) Each turbine requires 750 YARDS of concrete! Hmmm... wonder what they did to conjure that up? 2) Each turbine blade has a serviceable life of about 15 years, after which they are removed, then BURIED (they're made of carbon-fiber and are not recyclable) in giant landfills where earthmoving machines carve out shallow graves for them - they are about 120 feet long.
But the same leftists that were screaming about nuclear in the 70's will start screaming again. How do you and Greta handle that?
In my VAST expertise! LOL. Maybe, we could actually get people in Congress that truly understand Neuclear Power and how Clean, Reliable, and Safe it is. Then use it as a "middle" ground between the left and the right????
Whether there truly is global warming and IF it is truly influenced by "Man," no of that matters. We can't depend on fossil fuels forever. There is a limited amount. IF we start to build nuclear power plants again AND continue to use ALL sources of energy until the plants are up and running.....we could be truly "energy independent " (making the right happy) AND truly "Green" (once the vast majority of our power is nuclear) thus making the left happy.
It would be a WIN/WIN.
@@patrickf7182 The carbon payback time of a turbine is generally under a year and for solar cells it's generally less than 3 years. Solar cells have service guarantees starting at 20 years now and I would expect roughly the same from turbines. If a turbine does indeed fail after 15 years, that's still >15x carbon savings. Recycling them is indeed a problem but there is no silver bullet and companies are working on recycling the resins and fiberglass blades.
@@Arkir24 Nuclear Reactors can effectively run in perpetuity. 20 years is not a long time. Not only have companies complained that they didn't last as long as stated, they're going to be replacing them every day.
He was doing fine until he claimed that renewable electric energy sources (solar and wind) produce no CO2. He needs to include the CO2 produced during their manufacture and operation. Windmill blades are produced from composite materials in which most of the components are derived from petroleum.
True, but the total energy cost is still much less.
CO2 is not a pollutant and CO2 concentration is closer to plant starvation than over saturation.
Yes making them recyclable, right?
He also doesn't address what happens when there is no sun and wind? Neither has renewable energy come up with a way to produce enough consistent power to run industry, i.e. smelters & refineries, which product the components needed to make batteries and renewable energy components.
@@lautoka63 No way, the energy cost to produce a wind tower will never be recouped by the wind tower over it's life, not to mention ongoing maintenance, breakdowns and waste when it is decommisioned
I'd like to see him go into the carbon footprint of the production and lifespan of solar and wind powered sources. never mind the recyclability of them or lack of.
They have made great strides. Lots of articles with updates.
Yes, without doing that analysis, the conclusions of his video do not make sense, I am afraid.
Every year, I see more wind farms and solar panel fields going up. They are eating up agricultural land and wildlife habitat. All this in an effort to meet an insatiable demand for electric power. Most of the solution needs to occur on the demand side. How much energy do we really need? No one talks very much about Fusion power, but truly it could be mankind's salvation. It could lead the way to viable fuel cells, ability to generate freshwater from salt, weaning the global shipping industry from carbon fuels.
the future is nuclear
@@colin591 the only future in fact but people are too scared because of a few incredibly rare incidents.
He shows how much emissions is produced generating electricity but forgets to mention how much emissions are produced mining and transporting gasoline and diesel fuel
it's less emissions than mining and transportation of coal, Einstein.
@peterkrass5528 that's exactly my point! Im saying that this guy is saying producing electricity is more emissions than a car produces. And he includes all of the emissions that comes from beginning to end for electricity (including transporting and producing the coal/oil) and compares it to the what a car's emissions is. But he doesnt add in the transportation and production that it takes to get that fuel in a car from beginning to end. It's a very one sided calculation.
And why the hostility? I'm pretty sure we've never met before
Don't forget. It makes more sense from a green perspective to keep your old car running and well-maintained as long as you can. There are significant environmental costs to both manufacturing a new automobile and adding your old car to the ever-growing collective junk heap.
That's not necessarily true. It depends on how much you drive, the mileage your old car gets, and what you plan to replace it with.
I had a 1973 Plymouth Satellite that I kept 19 years and 236,000 miles; and later a 2000 Ford Taurus that I kept twelve years and 150,000 miles. I'm doing my part...
my 30yo Honda Civic is still fun to drive and reliable - my main problem (apart from the lack of airbags - I'm a safe driver) is the cost of registration and third-party insurance - nearly $1000pa for a car I only drove about 1000km last year
so local share cars I can rent for $10/hour look relatively attractive - except I had a huge fight over a $1500 charge for a fake/scam 'repair' from a major car rental firm - I got it refunded after 3 months of 20 emails and threats but I lost a lotta sleep - so that's put me off those kinda businesses
This argument is mostly used to encourage inaction.
The environmental impacts caused by each problem are not equal.
The pressing issue is atmospheric carbon. There is also an issue with waste recycling, landfill usage, etc but those are not as dangerous to the future of the planet even in the long term.
Don't take a 1 year old car off the road to replace it with electric. But don't drive it for 20 year either. We need most of the world to be on electric cars in about 20 years and for the grid to be mostly renewable in 30
@@NotMyActualName_ you ought to take a look at the total percentage of carbon emissions that come from passenger vehicles.
"There are no solutions, only tradeoffs."
-Thomas Sowell
Well, I like the sentiment, but Sowell is a crackpot when it comes to economics.
@Pèék Selling the green dream. That’s what the environmentalists do. But by doing so altruism becomes avarice as they profit from it. We’re going too fast and derailment is imminent and the only solution.
@@Mike-vd2qt Says the... fill in the blank.
@@Mike-vd2qt says the Marxist. Lol, yeah, Marxist ends so well, doesn't it? I'm sure you consider everyone outside your group-think to be a crackpot. BTW, modern monetary theory doesn't work. Hence the reason we have Bidenflation.
Wow... You are sadly, sadly mistaken.
It takes a lot of energy to produce these vehicles, so hold onto your vehicles longer, your clothes, phones etc longer. However, big companies don’t want this to happen.
Unfortunately, under this current administration household budgets are stretched or worse. The objective of converting America to EV's and other alternatives is Biden's catch 22. With spending power gone, most people will reuse the old worn out vehicles and goods that are now less environmentally friendly out of necessity.
Making quality products that last long time & keeping them is big part of solution that is ignored. Better public transportation would also make bigger difference than EV cars.
The video is only about vehicles.
So right! Recycle, re-use and repurpose!
It's called "planned obsolescence" or pure greed...... they don't want you to own anything, they want your very existence to be a service they can charge you for......
Most Americans will NEVER hear this information because we are a headline news country.
In this case this is better. This video is at least 2 Years old and complete BS. His sourced data is about 4-8 years old. Newer studies shows that including also the the full picture on combustion cars, these are less ecological than BEVs at the first driven mile.
@@muten861 Admiral your ship has been sunk
@@mochiebellina8190 I see rising numbers of EVs. Please explain me, where the sunken ship is located.
@@mochiebellina8190 Please
@Fritösen-Admiral you see rising numbers of EVs because that is what is being pushed. That doesn't support your argument and the video said we need more time to improve on the way EVs are made... data gets 'old' the minute it is released
I'm in the renewable energy field and even that needs to be looked at. During construction and operation of a wind or solar farm, thousands of gallons of diesel are burned every day, not to mention the environmental impacts on tree clearing on a large scale. Plus the life cycle of wind turbines is usually 20-30 years and large components arrive on ships (which burn 2000 gal of heavy diesel per hour) and major components like the blades end up in landfills when the site is repowered as they are not recyclable. Nuclear is the best thing we have so far.
Oil production has all of the same problems without the benefit of resulting in carbon free energy.
Wind turbine blades only last 7 years, if that. The neseil which is the main component is 7 years. Depending on whether it's a 3-piece or a four-piece Tower each section is good for 20 years.
And one wind turbine produces barely enough to to power one home lol
@@NSWvet83 what kind of a home is using more than 6 million kwh in a year?
And is oil flying from the ground into the cars? It is shipped with millions of transportation in every possible form causing insane destruction. How many pumps, pipes, ships, trucks etc are built and used purely to transport oil? If we want to caunt in really everything (we must) the picture for oil will look much much worse. How many oil ship disasters have we seen? How many wars and kills for oil fields? I could list all the sh!t that comes with oil all day long..
He makes a good argument for the development of the electric horse
Lou suSi - Clever.... lol !!!!!
It's been done. Robert Redford and Jane Fonda, 1979.
@@williamwingo4740 Wasn't that "The Electric Cowboy"?
@@BryanArd62 "Electric Horseman." Also with Willie Nelson, Valerie Perrine, Wilford Brimley, and John Saxon.
Also some great shots of Las Vegas before it got terminally overbuilt.
Willie Nelson has the line that brings down the house, but I won't repeat it here....
Ie such as an electric scooter or bicycle with range of 10-20 miles for scooters and 30-60 miles for the bike. Horse has about the same range as the scooter for the average horse and about the same range as the bike when accustomed to the riding but the human on the bike would have to be conditioned as well.
Please do an expanded version of this talking about the batteries, what it take to produce them, there life span, and what happens to them when they have reached the end of their efficient life span.
Or how much energy and waste it takes to make solar cells. And how that's pushed off to other countries so all the pollution is NIMBY.
@@A3Kr0n green believers don't have a problem polluting other parts of the world or they would demand they be built and manufactured in the U.S. which has strict laws. Of course, that will cost more and the is the crux of the problem. They want green, but it has to be cheap.
And the impact on the environment of old dead batteries. It is really startling to think that fossil fuels overall may be better, especially the cleaner kinds such as Natural Gas, etc. Our research keeps making us dumber...
@@davidlemons5650 plus combustion engines don’t necessarily have to be run on fossil fuels.
They are recycled like other valuable materials
Like George Carlin said, "When the earth is ready, it will shake us off like fleas. Regardless of what we do to it".
He also said that humans could not impact the environment.. but i believe that was deeep satire.
@@hickstylezhis math could also be said to be satire.
He claims that the average cumulative driving emissions for combustion non-hybrid is 30 tons. Over 180k miles that’s about 151g/co2 per mile. The official EPA emissions for a Toyota Camry non hybrid is about 280g/mile. For the hybrid variant about 170g/mile. He is showing data that is off by more than 80% compared to a sedan which isn’t even representative of what average people drive in the US. Take all the trucks and SUVs, the EPA estimates about 350-400g/mile for US average. That drastically changes his argument.
This reinforces my belief around the importance of buying less, but when we do buy, buying the most durable/quality products on the market and then taking care of them for maximum life.
@Andrew Earle I agree, but cumulative emissions are what matter now; we're at a moment when we have to leave all fossil fuel use behind as fast as possible. Ditching ICEVs now makes more sense than hanging onto them & emitting more GHGs & other pollution, then ditching them later. It's important to make sure they're recycled, not resold, unless they're still good, & go to people with the most polluting cars, which must get scrapped. Subsidies are important, & not just regressive measures like tax credits. We need to turn over the world's ICEV fleet as fast as possible, & replace them with BEVs to avoid perpetuating fossil fuel use.
EVs pay off the $, energy & carbon costs of their construction in an average of 2 years compared to ICEVS, & of course even old EVs keep getting cleaner as the grids that power them get cleaner, which they are, though too slowly. Transport emissions will only go down by retiring or not using ICEVs. The best ways to make that happen are staying put, walking, bicycling, & PUBLIC TRANSIT! (Including a state of the art national/international high speed rail network to replace flying & long distance driving.) But where vehicles are necessary, sharing, renting, or leasing EVs is smart so the valuable metals, time, & other resources of ICEVs can be better used right away.
One place durability is crucial is in wood use---buildings, furniture, recycling paper... not on just a personal level but with government policy making it easier, if not required, setting up processes & institutions... Whatever's needed.
When people watch something that already matches their beliefs; GL trying to change them.
No one makes a quality vehicle any longer, all plastic pieces of junk.
@@J4Zonian automobiles are not the primary polluter. Industry and power plants are the primary source of air Pollution
@@robertchiarizia9463 Climate catastrophe is an existential crisis. We have to eliminate GHG emissions as fast as humanly possible with a comprehensive emergency Green New Deal. That means renewablizing everything that burns fuels, which means electrifying almost all primary energy. That means electrifying transportation, the main source of GHGs & some other air pollutants in the US. Cleaning up power generation, transportation, industry, & buildings all at the same time yields synergistic effects.
Great talk. I'm disappointed that you didn't talk about how challenging it is to recycle all of the toxic elements inside the batteries. What a huge oversight.
It isn't challenging at all recycling batteries uses less than 5% of the energy that mining the materials does and is a simple well understood process.
Can't these batteries be reused?
@@joshuarhoades5569 Yes, but its less expensive to landfill them. So what do you think happens to them?
@@robertportillo7723 Landfill them? Sounds like a problem
@@joshuarhoades5569 yes they can and they are
A good analysis, but surprisingly he missed the amount of CO2 emitted in mining rare earth elements for solar panels and wind turbines, not to mention they contain massive amounts of processed petroleum products we often refer to as plastics.
And oil extraction or construction of drilling equipment doesn't emit CO2?
@@Javaman21011 Of course oil extraction emits co2, just less than rare earth materials.
@@gordcross1266 you got data
to back that up?
Also, the oil extraction is constant for the life of the vehicle whereas the rare earth metals are only during production of the vehicle.
At around 8:15 he does address the mining of rare earth minerals.
@@sayeager5559 Fair enough. I think I missed that chart on first watch.
With so called renewable energy, emissions for the production of solar panels (and the recycling of failed ones) also needs to be taken into account. As a mechanic I do service hybrid cars also and so many of them can't even reverse out of the service bay without the petrol engine starting and when test driving the petrol engine spends more time running than you think.
Absolutely correct. Solar panels are made from toxic metals (the mining of which is monopolized by the Chinese), and end up in landfills once they go kaput, because they can't be recycled. The same is true for EV batteries. The people touting batteries and solar panels act like these things just magically appear out of nowhere and don't have any harmful costs/externalities. Green energy is dangerous fraud.
i too service and own a hybrid vehicle and yes some instance mine does start when its been sat in the 'READY' mode or a while... i think my petrol engine kicks in at 20mph but i would sooner have that than a all electric .... even the battery tech on mine is more stable that of the lithium cells
@@vandamonium1731 ... yes was going to say I've seen plenty of hybrids back up on elec. mostly depends on charge levels in batteries.. but overall a hybrid engine runs LESS than comparable non hybrid when you compare MPG..
Excellent presentation, but I still wonder why nuclear is never part of the solution. There is nothing remotely close to it in clean energy production, and over all the years we've used it, very little damage has occurred, and always when safety protocols were ignored. I would love to see the graphs with nuclear energy used. Oh, and we also have reactors now that can reuse the waste, producing basically no nuclear waste. Why not?
Because it doesn’t feed greed …
@@m3photo726 what doesn’t feed greed and whose greed are you talking about?
@@johnoliver1207 Come on man use some imagination. Whose greed indeed… Try Exxon, Chevron, Shell, to name just a few.
The French are still using and building Nuclear power plants aren't they. So all is not lost.
Because nuclear is "scary". Chernobyl, 3 mile Island, Fukushima are still in people's minds. Though Fukushima only slightly elevated background radiation and 3 Mile Island wasn't really an accident.
He makes very good points, but he forgot one important factor. The energy necessary to produce the wind turbines and solar power cells. They don't come from thin air and produce an enormous amount of waste.
Not to mention outsourcing the mining and environmental damage to 3rd world developing countries, as well as national security issues when the resources are under Chinese/Russian direct or indirect control.
@@cliffc2546 and how many birds of prey these chopping fans kill every year and the ridiculous sound they make etc
@@urbanothepopeofdeath Statistics show that a vastly larger number of bird deaths are due to collisions with windows in buildings rather than the wind farms, UTPOD.
@@ljprep6250 so what you are saying is 300-500k birds are still killed by by wind farms, and buildings add another 500k + bird deaths a year.
@@gqrob28 "statistics"...
It’s worse than he’s saying because he’s omitted the enormous amount of new global infrastructure required to get enough electric stations around the world. The oil/plastic coated cabling alone would run into millions of miles.
You presume no local power, this is why many Tesla Superchargers have Solar arrays supplying them …
Nor did he mention the co2 produced in manufacturing solar panels and wind turbines which is enormous! And let's not get into having to replace them due to a short lifespan. Nor shall we mention their disposal impacts on the environment. He deliberately mislead his audience in the end!
Like the global infrastructure that needed to be built to support the gasoline industry (an infrastructure that will soon be useless as we run out of fossil fuels).
Electric stations should be standalone and solar powered, we know this can be done.
never mind half the human race doesn't even have electricity right now. how are they MAKING that electricity they are charging the cars with...? hrmm yep.
Great point.
This talk is quite misleading. While he correctly pointed out that there's a carbon footprint to generating electricity and making an EV, he mentioned nothing of the energy or carbon footprint in extracting crude oil, refining it to produce gasoline, and then the transportation and storage of said gasoline. According to research conducted by Argonne National Laboratory, the "well to pump" emissions of gasoline adds another 25% more CO2 emissions per volume of fuel. So essentially, when looking at his graphs for the gasoline vehicles, raise the line by 25% and you'll get a more accurate carbon footprint.
Exactly, and also doesent say that hybrids fill the battery using fossil fuel!, plus the holes created by drilling are not propery seald using methane to leak etc.
You also realise, no doubt, that every first world country (no-one else cares about the spurious climate claims) will need to produce nearly twice as much electricity than the current grids to power all the electric vehicles. Calculate that.
This video reminds me of something similar: recycling. Recycling was designed to make people feel better about over consuming products. The recycled materials are sometimes shipped long distances creating a penalty. Similar marketing strategy to sell a product that makes people feel good.
if recycling were more resource-efficient, it woiuld reflect in prices. but there's no economic incentive to recycle, only political
Interesting observation
we literally just tip plastics collected in recycling trucks down mine shafts in Australia no other country will accept it and the Australian ones that were claiming to recycle were just stockpiling and then illegally dumping
@@JReklis suspicious fires break out in recycling plants from time to time
@@JReklis only use for plastics is to burn them to power recycling plants that can and will process other actually recyclable goods.
Excellent talk. Only thing is he never mentioned the toxic waste lakes generated by mining the rare earth minerals required to make the electrical components of electronics. This needs to be solved as well.
Have you seen a gold mine? Or a coal mine? Talk about scorched earth.
Missing a ton of things actually, like what it takes to make 'renewables' like solar etc. Solar isn't actually a good thing at all in how we currently build them. Also those batteries in both solar systems and electric cars are not recyclable so no one is talking about the waste generated from them. All in all conventional cars and conventional energy are actually better for the environment than any of these 'renewable' and 'green' alternatives.
@@haitchteeceeeightnineeight5571 Nothing like lithium mining which takes 500,000 gallons of water to mine one metric ton of lithium. How long before all that leeches into soil and waterways?
@@pylotlight How many batteries (that are not recyclable) will a electric car need to make it on the roads 20 years? I have a 2000 lexus and a 2003 acura both still on the road to this day all original with 200k miles + lets see this from an electric vehicle
Cobalt (a necessary element for EVs) is a blood metal in the Congo, the world largest sourse of it. China owns the most mines in the DRC, by far. There's a YT video by WION.
In 2004, my company asked me if I wanted to work from home and I said yes. Telecommuters work longer hours, have great quality and goof off less. That is being green. I have saved over 30,000 in fuel.
"Telecommuters work longer hours, have great quality and goof off less."
I absolutely believe in the much better QoL, but you might be an exception when it comes to longer hours (which would suggest *less* QoL, no?) and less goofing off.
I don't have any original data, but I've read that many companies -- including Elon's -- want people back in the office simply because too many apparently don't do quality at-home work. (There's also more meaningful team interaction, I understand, when face-to-face instead of zoom-ing.)
Sweet..
Ya know that Mister Mister lady? I think I killed her...
Telecommuting is a joke for most companies. Productivity falls through the floor.
@@kenalanvoices There are studies coming out about it now. Huge difference... Companies en masse are abandoning telecommuting for this very reason.
How about the emissions from the production of fuel?
LOL. no one is disputing that. The problem is, the claim that EV's are emissions free is an complete and utter lie. Now the question for you is, "How about the emissions from the TOTAL production of EV's". That includes everything required in the production of EV's.
@@guido1866It takes a typical EV about one year in operation to achieve "carbon parity" with an ICE vehicle. If the EV draws electricity from a coal/fired grid, however, the catchup period stretches to more than five years. If the grid is powered by carbon/free hydroelectricity, the catchup period is about six months.
I absolutely agree that the energy / pollution / CO2 equation for electric vehicles has to include the source of the energy that powers the vehicle.
What I didn't hear you say is that the same should be done for fuel burning vehicles. The petrol (gasoline) or diesel fuel you put into your car didn't magically appear in the tanks of the gas station.
The energy costs, pollution and emissions of oil exploration, oil well construction, pipeline construction, pumping, shipping, refining, road transport etc all have to be added to the emissions "produced" by your Internal Combustion car, in the same way you ask that the emissions from power stations should be added to the electric vehicles' emissions.
Also, if you want to point out (correctly) that in many parts of the world, electricity comes from burning fossil fuels, then you also have to consider that there is a lot of electricity inherent in each gallon of gasoline or diesel.
Research the electricity consumption of oil refineries (absolutely huge), realise that liquid fuels are often pumped with electrically powered pumps etc.
One university study concluded that the amount of electricity inherent in a gallon of gasoline would drive an electric car at least half the distance that the liquid fuel would drive an internal combustion car.
So yes, look at the whole picture for electric vehicles, but also look at the whole picture for internal combustion cars, hydrogen cars and all alternatives.
I drive (and love) an electric car, but I have solar panels and live in New Zealand where over 80% of our electricity comes from renewable resources, especially at night when the vast majority of electric cars are charged.
There are studies that prove that the CO2 produced for manufacturing processes for cars with petrol/diesel engines versus battery operated cars are similar. So the CO2 produced is less with the electric car.
Excellent response to this video which has a very misleading & much too narrow perspective.
I get 6.5 to 7 L/100 with my Outback in Alberta by driving to conserve instead of 10 or 29 k above the limit.
This guy is correct, in the future for most people when tech is higher.
If only everything was true.
Its a bs steel man of ice vehicles and has no basis in reality... AI will be able to scan all this documentation and hold all these people responsible one day.
Did not hear him mention the CO2 emitted during the whole process of getting the metals out of the ground when creating solar panels for the renewable energy. But this is a great start for a conversation on the topic.
😂
Interesting how he applied “inside the box” thinking to wind and solar. Totally agree with Sapper6N.
Yes, and all those metals that have to be mined,refined, machined, and transported to assembly plants to build the ICE based drive trains that require hundreds of parts.
@@makerspace533 Well said MakerSpace. I’d go a little further. Any man made thing has a negative environmental impact when it’s creation, use, support, maintenance and salvage are accounted for inside the box. Any “green” product description leaves me suspicious of motive.
Also renewable energy plants such as wind and solar do not last a long as traditional power plants. That being said conventional cars don't require power plants to fuel the car, only to manufacture. Conventional cars do however require fuel processing, but most of these drilling sites are already active. I would totally love to see another video comparing all of these other factors. Great video, lets keeps looking at all the factors before committing to electric. Others mentioned the impact on the ozone from the electric motor also.
Thank you for explaining this. Ive been thinking weve been moving towards fully electric everything far too quickly myself and keep trying to explain to people why but havnet had the knowledge..
The TED speaker's information applies to an EV with a 125mile range. That means it isn't a Tesla. Every Tesla has 200mile+ range. Teslas have more efficient motors and batteries so they use a smaller battery to produce a longer range. This is true even 2 years ago when Conway made this speech and batteries have come a long way since then. The EV revolution is here. EVs are better than ICE cars in pretty much every way, except for long road trips where charging will take longer than filling up with gas. It doesn't matter who gets involved to speed up or slow down the transition to EVs. There are countless websites and videos on youtube where you can learn about the pros and cons of EVs.
don't rely on this guy! He doesn't know half of what is out there now, and is just trying to create a name for himself with his false claims!
@@Hardwaregeekx 200 mile range means bigger batteries more carbon to produce. tesla vehicles do not use any parts that are not used by other manufacturers. tesla hasn't created any new technology, thats just spin.
@@Hardwaregeekx tesla also recycles all their batteries at the end of life. Also his button hypothetical doesn’t make sense bc you can’t have the tech without the infrastructure. And the infrastructure enables technology to succeed. So if you can’t have one without the other then it’s a bad example. Id push that button every time.
Here’s a button changes all your horses into cars and then what? It doesn’t make sense. The competition driving evs now will make batteries more efficient through the need to sell vehicles. In 10 years newly manufactured ice cars will be exotics. Using California as a barometer, as the industry does, last year tesla took 2 of the top 5 slots for most cars sold losing just barely to Toyota. Electric vehicles are spreading so fast and nobody should be slowing them down based on his charts we should be speeding them up.
Oh and go nuclear. Get over the fear and just go nuclear asap. This whole anti nuclear thing has gone too far. It’s safer, cleaner, more efficient than any other form of generating electricity and it’s not used out of stupidity.
@@TaylerMade you’ve obviously never been in a Tesla or driven one to say that “they have created no new technology” that’s a statement born of ignorance.
Note: Graham Conway works on the engineering of internal combustion engines.
A few thoughts:
Finally someone points out some of the "hidden" costs of EVs.
I didn't realized green plants could distinguish between horse generated CO2 and exhaust generated CO2.
Speaking of horse generated, what about all that methane from horse emissions? Animal emissions are already being targeted for elimination.
There is also the environmental concerns with the heavy metal leftovers of depleted batteries - the cost of properly disposing of all those depleted batteries is huge.
Current renewable energy solutions are unreliable in the best of applications - i.e. the sun doesn't shine all the time and the wind doesn't blow all the time. Nuclear Is a great solution but not on the table in most cases - why?
"the sun doesn't shine all the time and the wind doesn't blow all the time."
That's why networks of solar panels and wind turbines should be looked at. I've always wondered what would happen if only the 100 or so houses in my little neighbourhood had solar roofs. We could likely be sharing energy between us. But I'm with you re nuclear power. I lived between two nuclear power plants just east of Toronto.
Nuclear definitely the better option. If only we could channel wasted funds in the space race and use them to best contain Nuclear waste.
Sustainable farming is the answer to your animal emission question. The reason it’s become an issue is the factory farming problem, so many animals being kept on so little land, desertification happens and the natural cycle of methane emissions from animal droppings is broken on compacted soil.
@@grantviney1236
"in the space race"
There is money. The US military budget, for example, is insane.
@@SamIAm-kz4hg There are plenty of areas where we could get extra funds and absolutely defence is one.
I have a problem though. I love what he said, right up to his talk about renewables, wind and solar. He doesn't apply the same penalty CO2 to bring those entities to market.
@John Dulio How much CO2 released in building a nuclear plant?
@John Dulio The only question that answers is the way we always did it.
Q: "Do we know if this new product will cause harm to the earth in the future?"
A: "No. We will have nuclear waste. It's dangerous and we don't know what to do with it exactly except store it for the next few years."
Q: "Do we care?"
A: "No, let's go!"
@@4nz-nl Nuclear waste can be used to produce many useful things like ammo and export products.
@@gabbymcgibson984 yes, many useful things, depleted uranium ammunition, nuclear weapons. The CO2 emissions from a limited nuclear exchange destroying, say, five cities, should probably factor into the equation.
@@seabirdsolar We must figure out a way to cycle it. Possibly trap it in a food supply aquaponic system.
"Birth to Scrap" is an engineering concept that should also include the CO2 (and $$ cost) impact of the manufacture of solar panels and wind turbines materials & manufacturing). ALL facets of energy production/usage need to have an accounting in order to truly appreciate the electric car global impact
And the end-to-end costs of the use of fossil fuels, funny how you forget to mention those.
@@grahamnicholls6070 The point is not mutually exclusive as you appear to presume. Failure to mention the one should not necessarly lead to a conclusion that the poster was ignoring the other. In environmental engineering cradle-to-grave is a "GIVEN" and it's not defined by a person's (perceived) biases of winners or losers - it applies to all that is relevant to the topic.
People need to stop falling for the "OOOH, CO2 is a villain!" CO2 feeds everything on earth.
@@clivephillips4021 plant life is essential to feed animal life, if an animal doesn't eat plants it eats another animal that does, that's the food chain. Plants need CO2 as much as animals need oxygen. At times in the earth's history the CO2 level in the atmosphere was far higher than it is now, these periods saw very abundant growth of plant life and this is what reduced the atmospheric levels of CO2 to what we see now. It is very important that the tropical rain forests be preserved as these are the world's oxygen factory, this factor is not talked about in the global warming debate as these mostly third world countries would object. The warming crowd complains that the snows of Mt. Kilimanjaro in tropical Africa are disappearing, when the mountain was surrounded by a rain forest that supplied the waters to make the snow, that forest has been depleted by uncontrolled logging and the use of wood as a cooking fuel in Africa, bring the forest back and the snow will return, stay on the current path and the Sahara will get larger.
He tells us to view the EV as a whole yet he didn't account for Co2 emissions of processing a barrel of oil to gasoline. One barrel of oil to gas (42 gallons) produces 520 pounds of Co2 (237kg)
It is so wonderful to find someone that feels the same way about electric vehicles as I do...as a hotrodder I LOVE ELECTRIC CARS !!!! but there are many points against going full electric on a national or even world level that you addressed so wonderfully.
My only issue with your talk is the use of solar and wind generators...to go back to the pollution emissions you talked about in batteries the same can be said about solar and wind.
On a recent trip down to Texas I had the opportunity to see the wind farms across the nation being repaired/updated and the carbon footprint created by this exercise far outweighs the benefits to this endeavor.
As we see in today's news California is having an issue as to what to do with the outdated and burned out solar panels that contain toxic metals....they have driven out all recyclers able to deal with this and are now resorting to just burying them which will cause future ecological issues (liberal hypocrisy at it's finest I guess)
We should ask ' Why are the most efficient solar panels banned from being imported into the US?' but we are afraid of the answer.
Why is wind power pushed so hard when it shows it can not provide power equal to it's pollution defecate (that word is wrong but google correct can't fathom so...) ?
As I said...as a hotrodder I am all for electric vehicles....I have followed 'Gone Postal' , 'Killacycle' and many others and they are awesome !
I agree with everything you said...except...the solar and wind power point....Nuclear and Hydro are the only proven clean energy systems that we can rely on.
I'm totally with you on the nuclear side. And hydro too but that is more geography specific. In some places it can be virtually impact free on nature while in others it does cause harm.
@@chrisbauer1925 Unfortunately it is not that simple. I am a big fan of nuclear, but for most countries around the world it is not economically possible to go fully nuclear. France, the nuclear superpower, is facing a huge issue having outdated reactors long after the end of life cycle, that will be super expesive to replace/renew, and they might be possibly shut down in near future. Hydro, as you mentioned, can be a local ecological disaster, and also produces co2 and methane due to a large standing body of water with stuff rotting inside, but still, it is one of the cleanest.
Just saying that no solution is easy, and it will take time to mitigate the issues. We should focus on all aspects, not just one. Make solar less toxic, make wind more efficient, nuclear cheaper, use hydro where safe, live less wasteful lives, vote for environmentally aware parties...
Yeah the last two are actually the hardest to achieve
They cause a bigger carbon footprint print then a combustion engine
yes !!!
Great points but Conway works for Southwest Research Institute which does a lot of work with oil and gas and has many patents related to fossil fuels.
He claims that the average cumulative driving emissions for combustion non-hybrid is 30 tons. Over 180k miles that’s about 151g/co2 per mile. The official EPA emissions for a Toyota Camry non hybrid is about 280g/mile. For the hybrid variant about 170g/mile. He is showing data that is off by more than 80% compared to a sedan which isn’t even representative of what average people drive in the US. Take all the trucks and SUVs, the EPA estimates about 350-400g/mile for US average. That drastically changes his argument.
I would like the same talk on wind farms and solar arrays to the amount we use.
The most efficient solar capture devices are plants (vegetation), and the efficiency would be increased if the CO2 levels were higher.
@John Dulio yup
Watch the documentary “ planet of the humans” .
Michael Shellenberger has a tedx talk on exactly that and lo and behold, they aren’t great either. Nuclear power is the answer
Nobody is stopping you except yourself.
They don't remove pollution, they merely redistribute it in different forms.
He didn't account for all the emissions involved in drilling refining and transportation of petroleum products.
I always love the fact that this comparisons bring up the CO2 created producing electricity but never account for the CO2 produced refining and transporting gasoline.
Absolutely! This part of the equation seems to be forgotten more than anything else.
It also doesn't take into account the amount of co2 created in the manufacture of every and their batteries.
@@ksteiger and the giant holes in the earth mining materials for this..
Yes, his analysis is flawed based on the omission of an assessment of the carbon generated drilling and distributing fossil fuels
That's assuming CO2 is bad. guess what plants need it to survive and at the preindustrial levels plants were starving for food (CO2) that's why commercial greenhouses BURN NATURAL GAS to pump CO2 into their greenhouses to make their plants grow better LOL. . Well about your argument how about the CO2 for all transporting digging up the rare earth minerals for the batteries... shipping the rare earth minerals to china to make the batteries , shipping the batteries somewhere to make the cars shipping the cars back to the US or wherever, transporting the let's say Teslas to the show room .... burning the coal to power the Tesla to drive on the asphalt made from oil, to use the stoplights, powered by coal , dug from the ground, shipped by train, using a diesel , to a coal fired power plant that Jack built, so that Elon can shoot rockets into the air for joyrides that produce untold amounts of CO2 AND pollutants, built on the kids in the Congo with cobalt lung. good day
no discussion on the AMOUNT of water needed to manufacture the components that end up in either vehicle. Fresh, potable water is a huge environmental aspect that needs to be taken into consideration.
@williamhamer How true. And it comes out wildly in favor of RE & EVs.
@@J4Zonian How does it favor EVs? From what I understand, just mining Lithium for the batteries requires a lot of water.
@@roykowalski4125 Everything humans do has effects. The harm done by fuels is so phenomenally, extraordinarily, tremendously huge, that RE & EVs are a tiny fraction of it, & get smaller as more RE & EVs are added to the grid & to manufacturing. ICEVs only get worse, as EROEI gets smaller & fuels get farther, deeper, scarcer, & more diffuse, which they’ve been doing for a while.
People need to stop paying attention to the insane right wing climate-denying delayalist & ARF (anti-renewable fanatic) blogs & the politicians & media they own. They’re lying to you.
@@J4Zonian And people need to do there own homework and really analyze the data rather than paying attention to left wing climate and renewable energy fanatics. Look at California and Germany for example. The cost of renewable energy sources has come down (solar panels, turbines) yet the cost of electricity keeps rising. How come no one is talking about how many years we went backwards in "harm done" during covid lockdowns world wide, no one was driving. Reason is because there was no significant change to talk about. How come when when climate fanatics say things like "The earth hasn't been this hot in 3,000 years" no one asks the reason the earth was this hot 3,000 years ago? The problem is people either go all in left or all in right and have done zero research or are have the data to take either position. Partisan politics has gotten to the point where even science will be on one side or the other. Researchers don't get funding unless they lie on one side or the other.
How do they do it in Saudi? Local municipalities will NEVER allow desalinization, because they want total control over water production, but you will never hear this on the news.
More horses and more trees, sounds like the best option to me.
Ride on , love horses 🐎, and I have ridden them .
Horses are one of the most dangers form of transportation on the planet.
You better look into it before getting a horse.
I don't want to go back to the time where the average life expectancy is 50. Where there is no such thing as online shopping. Where your best product is for own use and not for the whole world to enjoy.
If we abandoned motorized transport and tried to rely on horses at least half the population of the world would die of starvation.
I've said this for years. And working in the field of producing EV batteries I see another problem and that is recycling of the batteries. Once glued and welded together they are almost impossible to get apart without destroying them. Creates an awful lot of work in trying to recycle. One that requires cheap labor. And that means shipping them back to where they were created. And how do you measure the amount of CO2 created in all of the shipping of the batteries from the raw materials to the production of the cells to the shipping of the cells to the production of the battery packs and then shipping the packs to the auto manufactures? These things are heavy. They need a lot of space and special handling. And at the end of the cycle you want to recycle them? That requires even more shipping and special handling. I've always said that the green is in the money it makes and nothing else.
And ocean liners produce more pollution than anything.
Money is king, and unless or until that changes, nothing else will, - unless there is a lot of money to be made from it!
I think it'd be nice if more companies could would make the batteries easily disassemble-able...like the Leaf. Maybe the new 4680s will enable that. That being said, we're a long way from battery recycling being an issue. Used EV batteries still pull in quite a premium because of the diy market.
@@willburk you can always reuse the modules. It's the modules that are glued and welded. That's were the diy market comes in. The issue is that once those go you have no other choice but to try and take them apart to recycle. The pack is made up of many modules. For instance on a new SUV we used 2 layers increasing the storage from the standard ones which are anywhere from 80 to 140 kwh to 208 kwh. This is accomplished by just adding an additional layer of modules.
@@ericaarseth7811 OMG, I think you might be right! Have you contacted the media about this? If you could just get on the Ed Sullivan Show and explain it to America, we might be able to solve the problems. Elon Musk said he was going to fix the problems, but then he di'nt. I was very disappointed about that. But I really think you're onto something brilliant with the "money" angle. I heard one of those nice ladies on The View mention it, but she di'nt really go into detail. This story could really blow the lid off the Deep State! I'm not gonna be able to sleep tonight...
I don't understand how the cycle from oil to automobile to CO2 can't include the CO2 continuing to plant life? When I was young the oil in the ground was understood to be "fossil fuel" from deposits of dead plant and animal life. Makes for a long cycle, but still a cycle.
This is an interesting talk with some interesting analysis.
Yes. Ultimately it's is a cycle. Eventually the produced CO2 would get sequestered at the bottom of the ocean and deposited as new coal, oil etc. The problem is that this cycle is extremely long at least on our civilization scale (we are talking about 10 -100 million years).
We have been here as a species for a couple 100k. Some 10k since the end of Stone Age. We burned all fossil fuels so far in like 200 years.
The natural cycle is just too slow to be useful to us.
Because fossil fuels bring in long stored 'co2 deposits'. If you bring that in, you also need to get that back out in a similar way. Sure the planet itself can deal with such a long term cycle, but most current life (including us) can't. There are attempts at putting co2 back underground for long term storage similar to how the gas ,coal and oil was locked away, but these are very very expensive systems and not very efficient.
great video. It would be good to look at CO2 emissions on disposal of end of life vehicles
CO2 feeds all life. CO2 cannot heat anything.
Have people heard of bicycles. No one is above taking the bus or the Subway. Have you have seen how obese many people are. Tell me I am correct.
Probably right about the same like the "recycling" of wind turbines at their often far-earlier end of life than modelled...the glass-fibre parts get burned in waste incineration plants (or buried in the earth), the concrete foundations are simply covered up with soil (because they are not usable for more modern turbines) and the shaft of the turbines are the only thing that see a second life as raw material. Batteries up to this day can't be recycled without absurd amounts of new power, ruining every calculation at being "clean"...
MIT had a study. I don't know much about it but it gave the number 12X the energy to get rid of an electric vehicle. Furthermore, batteries need special storage because of the toxic chemicals they contain.
@@1s3ngr1m Well said and great points.
References please. Especially for the CO2 requirements for vehicle and Battery Pack construction.
It is easy to talk about numbers, needs the facts to support it.
His numbers are totally exaggerated to help his claim, which is why you see no sources.
But before references he needs to talk about the CO2 created of drilling oil, transporting it, refining it, and transporting it again.
@@Sam-gf1eb yes! And the environmental damage of oil spills.
and then there's the total energy output required to mine, manufacture and maintain solar and wind farms.. not to mention what happens to these sources when they all degrade..
"But not today". It's not about waiting until everything else provides the perfect environment for EVs, it's about making small, incremental progress on a lot of fronts. At some point, you find that a lot of progress has been made on many fronts.
Just let the free market determine their progress. No government subsidies.
@@bluedog562: The Pilgrims Gov. Thomas Bradford discovered that principle in the 1620's! I.E. government playing God brought only death & disharmony ! Then ha switched to a Free Market economy, and the rest was history, tell today's back to the 1620's all over again like déjà vu!
@@bluedog562 OK. Let’s stop subsidizing oil then. Oil and gas receive faaar more money than EVs. You want the market to be free, yeah?
@@jonathanfields4ever absolutely. No corporate subsidies or bail outs.
@@bluedog562 Alright. I appreciate the consistency.
CO2 from the corvette is also absorbed by plants and converted to O2, thus the greening of the planet. Atmospheric CO2 ppm continued to rise during the Covid-19 lockdown period of reduced admissions as reflected in the raw data. This happened due to mostly oceanic off-gasing, but assisted by other natural causes such as increased global volcanic activity. EV transportation simply does not have the grid capacity to support meaningful integration on a global scale.
Plants prefer horse CO2. But that’s covered in another video…
Plants do not know if care where the CO2 comes from anymore than we would care where the oxygen we need for metabolism comes from. This is such a complicated, multifactorial and global problem that one “solution” is not gonna solve it. An eclectic approach is the one that will allow us to adapt to whatever happens. I do agree w him on that!👍🏼
The more the co2 the better it seems...we could actually make ourselves plants and animals larger by increasing co2 emissions - the more co2 a plant processes the more oxygen it produces...
Yes
And Corvettes also breathe O2
Great talk. He seemed to make the same mistake though: he didn’t draw the box around the solar panel or the wind turbines? Would be interesting to see the numbers for that.
Actually wind turbine never produce enough "green" electricity in it's life time to offset CO2 required to build the turbine at the first place
He tells us to view the EV as a whole yet he didn't account for Co2 emissions of processing a barrel of oil to gasoline. One barrel of oil to gas (42 gallons) produces 520 pounds of Co2 (237kg)
It is true to say that todays solar panels have a carbon footprint but as time goes by solar panels and wind etc will gradually replace all carbon emitting manufacturing processes, we have to start somewhere 🙂
@@daliborzak2485 Same thing with solar. Look into tellurium some time, and the whole mountainsides that China has to blow up to keep pace with the US' and Europe's demand for solar panels.
@@captainphoenix Stop cherry picking; stop with the false equivalency. Stop lying.
Total mining in the world will be drastically reduced as we switch to 100% renewable energy. The harm done by mining & other industrial processes would also be dramatically reduced by getting rid of capitalism & the Wetiko disease that causes it.
This always seems like a taboo, but what about investing in nuclear energy? Wind and solar are great, but they require an exponential amount of land conversion to generate the same amount of energy as a nuclear power plant. They also require some rare earth materials (particularly solar) and they don't last as long as other power plants. I know nuclear is scary because of Chernobyl and Fukushima, but I think it's time for us to have serious discussion about this form of energy.
Nuclear energy is the obvious answer, send the waste to the moon or mars or China...
The first nuclear power plants were invented in the 1950’s. By the 1970’s the U.S.A. stopped building them, because they were dangerous (3 mile island). So, they stopped building them around 20 years from conception, won’t build new ones with technology and safety improvements made in the last 50 years, thus 70 years since inception. And they weren’t so bad that they tore them all down. I don’t see the logic. Yes existing plants have a had some improvements but that’s not at the same level as better designs from scratch. Proof in the pudding: France is mostly nuclear powered and has had no major incidents. Another topic is to make smaller nuclear plants that are much easier to manage in the event of an incident. It’s not like half the size is half the danger, I think it’s closer to exponential than 1:1. More smaller plants distributes generation, lesser affects of a plant going offline, shorter distances (which create loss), etc. I read an article on Wikipedia about micro nuke plants the size of a truck that can be operated remotely for underdeveloped countries. So, imho there is a lot of merit to your inquiry and a lot of information and technology developed in the last 50 out of 70 years.
Nuclear is the only alternative. Wind and solar don't work, because grid storage batteries don't exist.
@@chrisidema They exist it is just at that scale and the current level of tech are great big toxic waste bombs waiting to go off.
@@kenkoehler594 I often wonder if governments consider nuclear plants as easy, catastrophic targets during war, and therefore don't want to build them.
Might have been mentioned before, but the steel needed to make a single wind turbine for energy uses about 400 tons of non-renewable steel, and the CO2 emissions from processing that steel into sheets and blades is unaccounted for in the graph. Solar is only about 18% efficient, and probably won't ghet any more efficient until a new superconductor material is found that makes converting thermal energy into electricity much more efficient. The other cost of lithium batteries is that once the batteries are exhausted, they become a huge contaminating pile of environmental waste that cannot be dealt with using current tech. Not to mention all the child labor used to mine lithium in countries where child labor laws are not nearly as strict.
If you read the IPCC analysis of GHG emissions you would know that solar produces about 48g/kWh hydro is 24g/kWh and wind is 12g/kWh. Also, what is non renewable steel, exact
y?
OMG is this a Toyota shill? The answer isn't any specific type of private cars, it is public transit, micro transport and bikes. This talk misses the whole point.
or we can just invest into train NOW.
You should also mention the thousands of endangered birds and animals killed by wind turbines and solar collectors, as well as acreage no longer available for agriculture and food production.
@@reaality3860 Why, as it happens I was at one of our local turbines a few months ago. It was quite early in the morning, and I had to wade through knee high piles of birds because the guy who normally cleans up the night kill had not done that yet.
Oh wait, I made that up. Just like you did...
I wish our government and OEMs can use his logic. I was also hoping he would pitch for nuclear energy as solar and wind turbines need lots of CO2 to build and not efficiently transferring electricity.
@@MyVideosDon I agree. Thank you. Efficiently is best for nuclear energy if we put politics aside. But we are not smart…we should study France versus Germany
He should put his CO2 model he uses for vehicles into the renewable generation. In other words, how long will a wind turbine have to run to offset the CO2 produced from its manufacture
Some nice thoughts. But, I think it overlooks some of the costs (and carbon use) of operations. Especially, batteries have limited lives - eventually, they won't hold a charge. Before they are completely dead, they hold significantly less than their nominal charge. For conventional cars, this isn't an issue as long as the battery will start the engine. For hybrids, decreasing battery capacity will mean that the gasoline engine will operate more and more. For electric vehicles, vehicle range will decrease. At some point, the batteries will have to be replaced. The carbon cost of replacing a battery in a conventional car is very small, because the battery is very small. The carbon cost of replacing a battery in a hybrid is larger, because the battery is larger and uses more exotic materials. The carbon cost of replacing a battery in an electric vehicle is larger still, because the battery is much larger. I suspect that the whole life cycle carbon use, including battery replacement, is higher for electric cars.
Switching to all-renewable electricity will neatly solve all these problems. Unfortunately, the record so far is that increasing renewables in electricity means that electricity becomes more expensive and less reliable, with fossil-fuel generation required to provide backup for intermittency. We may get to the renewable promised land, but we are a very long way.
That's hardly true, out of my german perspective i can say: watching renewable energy growing and become more and more a thing, means at the same time watching the prize for renewable energy going straight down, outcompeting even nuclear power. Today in germany, Solar Power ist the cheapest energy you can get. Expensive energy comes mostly from politics.
Believe me, renewables are way better then their reputation, just let them grow and develop on the technical side. But i agree: it's still a long, but worthy to walk for sure.
@@kornelwojtkowiak9435 Does that trip to renewables include cutting and burning wood for available heat this winter in places around Europe? I think there is a problem there!
batteries demand one of the most scarce minerals on earth. also don't forget about the amount of co2 the machines use to exstract those minerals
Not all parts of new technologies develop or evolve at the same pace -- ESPECIALLY WHEN CURRENT TECHNOLOGIES HAVE FOR-PROFIT REASONS FOR STALLING AND BLOCKING. What's important is that we start, and solve challenges as we move forward.
@@chuckscholl9928 Sorry mate, but i dont see this thing happening here. Exept maybe for Ukrane right now, but that's ofc another topic. It's really more like people getting big solar installation to heat their outdoor pools with air-to-heat. Don't mean to brag, but that's the reality here.
As a Corvette owner, I am glad to learn it is as eco friendly as a horse.
And yet it produces several hundred horsepower. How cool is that?
Well, you didn't learn anything then, because it isn't :)
Your Corvette has 400+ horsepower; yet, it only emits as much carbon dioxide as one horse does - that's amazing! :D Celebrate modern internal combustion engines! They haven't even reached their full potential yet... o.O
@@yareksad there might be a TED talk on sarcasm out there for you :D
@@sloreo8278 I am very sarcastic, but not this time. It’s clearly explained in the video that co2 exhaled by a horse is naturally recycled therefore it’s environmentally friendly and co2 from the cars isn’t.
The only problem with solar energy is that the same arguments he made about electric cars can be made about solar panels that only have a 25 year life span and are made with materials that are mostly not recyclable, same with the batteries to keep your energy working at night.
Wind farms kill 300k to 500k birds per year, and the manufacturing of the windmills has an ecological cost. You also would have to take up a shitload of land and disrupt many ecosystems to have enough windmills to replace our current energy. Windmills also require 80 gallons of oil to operate. This oil is replaced every year. The average wind farm has 150 turbines. For those who don't feel like breaking out the calculator, that's 12k gallons of oil per wind farm, per year. We'd also basically be sentencing nearly every species of bird to death by windmill. And where does the energy come from when the wind stops blowing? Don't worry... Batteries save the day again.
Actual research shows that nuclear energy is by far the cleanest energy to produce, and the plants don't take up much space at all (energy.gov).
Yup....
Coal power stations kill more birds than wind turbines.
You should lobby for a nuclear power plant in your area. Very good arguments.
@@thereplacementfordisplacement And who wants the waste in their backyard?
1000% Correct. And if we can put nuclear power plants in submarines, can we little ones in vehicles? (at least public transportation maybe?)
France generates 75% of it's electrical power from nuclear. The rest of the world needs to get the facts about nuclear safety and waste storage, and stop being afraid of nuclear.
Right on point. I own two Hybrd vehicles and they are awesome. This guy really sounded like he objectively looked at the issue and made great points.
Probably because he's a REAL scientist and not just yakking for political points.
@Aqua Fyre the 1st Prius I purchased in 2005 new and we loved it. Wife needed a car so we purchased a new 2021 Prius since we both worked in opposite directions. So poof, we have two Prius vehicles. One gets about 50mpg and the new Prius gets about 65mpg. Great vehicles, great miles per gallon.
@Aqua Fyre BTW: We lived in California and now live in Nevada, we live about 20 miles to most big box stores and there is no mass transit available in our area. 🤓
Building wind and solar does produce lots of emissions also.
It doenst produce anything the vast amounts of CO2 and CH4 that increase and maintain the greenhouse effect
Old saying: "There is no such thing as a free lunch."
its only gonna be temporary though because once the required amount is built, no more will be needed so no more being built and no more emissions made from making them
@@grommitt1385Not true, solar panels and turbine blades wear out and need to be replaced regularly. Turbine blades in particular are literally just buried in massive landfills as they can't be feasibly recycled. Still better than a coal power plant? Surely, but nothing is perfect.
Do solar panels have to be produced every day that they're being used, like oil does? No. Try to actually use your brain.
I saw this video, then was going to put a long reply about the carbon footprint and other issues created by making, maintaining and disposal of all the wind and solar panel farms which have a finite life of about 25 years, but I see just about everyone has sussed this one out. Why is it most average humans have it all worked out anyway! Well done Mr and Mrs average human that’s commented here! 👏👏👏👏
30 US Tons for 180.000 miles = 151 g/mile CO2 emission, for the "conventional car" (gasoline, non hybrid)
Find that car, average human...
Fascinating! Good data! Assumption is that CO2 is a problem. Given that CO2 lags temperature increases it cannot be causative. Ergo, it's not the problem. If it's not the problem, then no need for this monumental shift in our economy to address the wrong problem. Renewable energy is no better. The massive environmental costs of recycling solar cells and batteries is a great concern but no one wants to talk about that. Better to focus on other sources of energy: fusion nuclear, fuel cells, etc.
i'd rather not have local pollution in my towns and cities thanks so i'll stick with the EVs so i can actually breathe when i walk the streets.
The claim that CO2 can drive temperature increases is settled science. If you want to contradict that science, you're free to, but you'll need to post some links to the evidence or your claims can be safely ignored.
As an aside, I agree that nuclear and fusion need to be the foundation of our power moving forward. Fuel cells, on the other hand, are best thought of as a kind of very fragile battery. Hydrogen is a royal PITA and currently is almost entirely reformed natural gas, though work is continuing on improving the efficiency of electrolysis above 25%. At 25% efficiency, we might as well just use Fischer-Tropsh and synthesize gasoline and diesel.
@@gazlives The pollution that chokes cities is not CO2. For millions of years, CO2 has been a natural part of Earth's atmosphere, until our dear leaders declared CO2 to be pollution in order to sell their EV society. In fact, CO2 is essential for life to exist. Without CO2 all life on Earth would die.
@@sub08Angstrom whatever it is that's polluting our cities and causing cancer EVs don't have it so i want us all to have EVs rather than ICE vehicles.
It's just taken for granted that CO2 = bad.
As if.
I think he missed an important part in his storytelling.
He said that when a horse emits CO2 that it is then taken in by plants and thus creates a circle.
Is there some reason that plants do not use the CO2 that is generated in the production of electricity? Do plants know where the CO2 comes from?
It would seem to me that the most effective way to combat climate change is to stop destroying forests and start planting more and more plants.
That should tell us that this narrative is all about power and money. Take from one source and give it to another source in order to change the power dynamic.
India planted a massive amount of trees and has brought their carbon levels down.... let's plant trees
The horses are using carbon recently captured from the atmosphere as the grasses grew. Cars running on oil pull carbon out of deep storage and release it into the atmosphere, and the plants will not be able to absorb all of this at the same rate.
@@randomvideosn0where the more trees and plants that are planted the more CO2 that will be absorbed. No one ever stated that it had to be at the same rate.
As the presenter stated, this is a global issue, not limited to one nation. There are literally billions of people in this world and the largest majority by far will not be able afford electric vehicles. The number of electric grids in most nations will not be able to handle the massive amounts of power demanded.
How many nations in this world rely on heat and air conditioning? How many natural resources are destroyed to build the housing and infrastructure needed for these people? How many forests are destroyed to simply build housing? How many forests are destroyed to plant crops to feed these billions of people? How much potable water is demanded to meet the thirst of the world's population? Yet how much water is wasted throughout the manufacturing processes demanded by society.
The climate change problem being faced by this world is indeed caused by man but is not related in my opinion by fossil fuels which are naturally occurring resources. They are no different than any other natural resource.
The problem is mankind in general. Their desire to have more and more. Gluttony not only in foods but power and wealth.
Why is it that billions of people live in a constant state of starvation while a much smaller number have an abundance of food? In most of the world people only have a limited amount of clothing yet in first world nations the average individual has more clothing than they will ever wear.
We have a huge number of clothing stores abd and department stores filled with enough clothing to meet the world's clothing needs but instead of caring about their fellow man they sell the clothes to generate massive profits.
How many natural resources including petroleum products are used to make these products?
Have you stopped to research exactly how many products that are used by society on a daily basis rely on petroleum products in the manufacturing process?
@@steveostrander5182 Carbon is thought to play a role in maintaining current climates globally. Balance is only going to be achieved through reduced emissions. The planet currently defaults to plants so the only way to increase absorption of carbon is to allow developed areas to revert back to plants or create plants that absorb more and these do not seem feasible at this time.
Given that most people would not support measures to decrease human population, and people will generally be unwilling to decrease their standard of living, we need to choose the least harmful methods of achieving these goals.
Well carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide are 2 different forms. Try pumping a tailpipe into your greenhouse and see what grows, or how about the health effects from smog in large cities....they've even discovered birth defects in babies from workers in who spend their whole lives working in a toxic environment created by fossil fuel burning. Fossil fuel emissions are full of toxic chemicals that infiltrate our air, water and earth beneath our feet. Just like this guy is trying to get people to look at the bigger picture, so should you.
I love how conveniently leaves out how much Co2 is produced every time you refuel. Raffination cost, transport of gas ecc. Every one is a scientist today
If they really cared about the environment they would legislate a minimum of at least 10years durability on all consumer products
INDEED
Instead of legislating the duration of durability, why not consider a model where the manufacturer of "durable" goods takes back and legally disposes of the product when it reaches the end of its useful like. One such model is where consumers would buy the service the product performs but not the product itself - the product would continued to be "owned" by the company that produced it. When it ceases to perform the service purchased that company would take it back and dispose of it.
How about you make these products yourself see how that works out. As you sit around your house or apartment surrounded by all the goods you own that were produced with the help of fossil fuels. Not to mention the grid that’s powering your computer , lights Tv, stove , fridge, etc., etc, etc, Thank You, John D. Rockefeller for providing us with cheap abundant fossil fuel.
Sure, make the " government" more of a baby sitter.
Or stop killing people who make engines that run on hydrogen.....
There are so many holes in this talk that I don't even know where to start...but let's start where he started...today was once tomorrow of yesterday...we must start walking if you ever hope to get anywhere...and today is the best day.
Word salad
Waiting for u to debunk his facts
@@vrrnonorem4266 It’s actually uncountable and I’m gonna rush right now maybe I’ll get back to this later on but I’m tired of defending electric I’ve heard every damn argument there is about it pros and cons and I’m going electric.
Definitely! These arguments always have one fundamental flaw … they leave out the entirety of what it takes to produce oil. If you’re going to “expand” the box around electric vehicles, you’ll also need to around ICE vehicles and include the defense budgets to secure the oil fields, transportation costs, refinement costs, environmental disaster costs, etc.
EXACTLY
Excellent remark!
Pretty sure that you could replace oil fields with the rare earth mines that would be needed, which would have their own ecological problems, bottom line you would still need all those for electric cars. Also battery packs do not have a great
Lifespan compared to combustion,major problem which would seem to increase ev overall co2
@@RobertWhite-zo9tf sorry, but modern battery packs have a life expectancy much longer than any combustion engine! Early ones had their problems, but that is a thing of the past!
He also works for Automotive Division at Southwest Research Institute; they work on engines a LOT. So, the more he can convince people to use ICE or hybrids, the more money they make. His graph also shows a few bad things. For EV's he uses the least efficient ones. For the ICE, he uses the most efficient ones, and for the hybrids he also uses the most efficient ones. None are the "average" as he said. The conventional would be MUCH higher in emissions if he used the average and the electric would be lower. I wouldn't trust an actor, especially when the description also says; "NOTE FROM TED: This talk only reflects the speaker's personal views and interpretation. Several claims in this talk lack scientific support. We've flagged this talk because it falls outside the content guidelines TED gives TEDx organizers. "
There, for the teska owners who think, they’re saving the world.
Although this guy clearly understands the issues that most do not know, and his talk is mostly very good, at ~11:30 minutes, he hypocritically implies that wind and solar are so-called "renewables", although it takes a lot of energy to make THEM, too.
He does make good points but he is not producing the whole picture.
He also neglects to mention the CO2 produced by vehicles that transport the fuel all around the globe to all the gas stations to support these vehicles. The gas does not magically appear at the gas station.
He also false claims that combustion engines have not be been optimized. This is a matter of opinion.
He also gives a simplistic idea of what development, research, and investing. People with billions to invest don’t generally give away that money on proof of concept alone. Things need to been scalable.
Any repair eg wind turbine blades made of laminated ie glued polycarbonate ie fossil fuel products.
But they last a long time.
@@lybiwinzenz2880 Turbine blades have been found to degrade much faster than expected in regions with blowing sand like deserts or salt particles like offshore.
@@lybiwinzenz2880 no they don't
I enjoyed your presentation. However, I would like to see your presentation after you have studied the ecological cost of Wind Farms. They are NOT a viable alternative either, in their current state of evolution. As of today, many are being shut down and dismantled. The cost is too high from many points of view.
And they kill birds
as far as shutting them down, in Texas if you allow one of these on your property, they pay you. yearly monthly, what ever, BUT when that thing breaks or the lil ghost company goes broke, guess who owns that thing and responsible for removing it at their own expense? yep, the land owner. there is no recycling for wind turbine blades.
On a more serious note: _"house cats kill 3 billion birds annually, wind turbines kill 300,000"_ that's 10,000 more bird kills by cats. Please stop spreading non sense
_"in their current state of evolution"_ I don't know where you got you information from, but ever heard about chicken egg issue? Make those turbines, improve them along the way, and you will have a different story.
Solar wind and nuclear are the main electricity sources, along with thermal and some others. Renewable energy is growing with a pace of 30% a year and can easily take the demand of electric transport.
I can’t take talks on climate seriously if they don’t discuss nuclear, especially 4th generation molten salt reactors, and don’t talk about the true environmental cost of solar and wind turbines.
We would love to put the waste barrels in your swimming pool out back. How about we have you work at the mines. YOU do not take the environment seriously. Nor did you learn anything from this talk.
There was talk about thorium reactors that can't melt down but haven't heard anything in a while. The meltdowns in Japan are still a giant disaster no one talks about
@@shenanigansnsuch1442 the meltdown in Japan is a massively overblown low level disaster.
@@johnh8546 Exactly. The only people who fear nuclear energy are the scientifically illiterate. Instead they watch ridiculous dramatisations on TV that both validates and exploits their ignorance by making money from sensationalist crud.
@@shenanigansnsuch1442 1 person offically died due to radiation sickness
There is a glaring problem with this analysis, first it's assumed the whole car is just scrapped after 180k miles, whereas in reality a battery can be recycled over 90%, so the next car that is built doesn't have the same emissions. Secondly, research is ongoing for new battery technologies and mining with BEV, if the whole chain of producing a battery was CO2 neutral then the initial emissions would also be lower and third the production of "green" gasoline would require vast amounts of crop fields that cover the entire earth to produce enough ethanol to satisfy the whole fleet of ICE vehicles. So it's a complex problem, but BEV is the way to go together with replacing our old coal/oil/gas powerplants with renewables and nuclear. But replacing all cars now isn't realistic, if I had such a button it would just as easily be a button for replacing the whole grid with renewables :)
As an ecologist, there was a huge problem with his horse analogy.
The CO2 in the atmosphere-all CO2-is reabsorbed into organic plant matter. So, whether it is burned by an auto or breathed by a horse, it goes back into the cycle. The difference is that digging out of the ground puts more CO2 into the cycle than was initially there at time t-1. This is a problem because his reductive argument missed the notion that increased biomass compensates for increased CO2. Just like a famine or pandemic, though, politics prevents the natural progression of the CO2 cycle from increasing biomass to offset CO2.
Was about to comment the same- embarrassingly simplistic, but so is most discussion on 'climate change' and extraordinarily narcisistic to think that we can make a larger impact on global climate systems than the environment itself.
Didn't see any consideration of the C02 cost of retrieving, refining and transporting the fuel for normal ICE vehicles? Having worked in the marine Oil industry, I can tell you that's a fair amount to take into consideration. There is also the consideration of generating electricity on large scale vs small scale usage of fuel. I live and work in Norway, where all electric power is generated from hydro electric sources (so that flattens out the graph for electric cars quite drastically, cutting down the CO2 crossover point with ICE cars to somewhere between 2 to 4 years of usage) - which I know is a luxury situation (Norway has over half of Europe's hydro capacity I believe) The gas and oil produced in this country is mainly exported to other countries for them to burn ;-), with the exception of the fuel refined for all forms of transport (road vehicles, air transport and shipping) - although a lot of money and energy has recently been put into coming up with a gas power plant with CO2 scrubbers. My personal opinion is that the electric motor is the way to go for small vehicles, but batteries are maybe not the power source we should be using. Hydrogen is the fuel that should be the focus, but unfortunately the current ways of utilising it are expensive to manufacture, require elaborate storage solutions and quantities of rare metals in the fuel cells (which hinders mass production). Battery technology is currently advancing at a healthy rate, so I don't see hydrogen tech attracting the necessary big bucks (until a 'eureka' breakthrough happens in any case). Most renewable sources of energy that are being invested in are also intermittent sources (solar, wind) which will only be effective when combined with an energy storage solution (which in most cases is looking like battery storage at the moment). I personally don't understand why more money isn't being put into geothermal and infra red energy harvesting, as these both have the potential to provide a constant stream of energy 24/7
"There is also the consideration of generating electricity on large scale vs small scale usage of fuel"
There is also battery charging/discharging losses to consider.
The thermal problem with batteries needing their own cooling system is its own efficiency drain on electric cars - both the battery losses and the cooling system power + weight.
"I personally don't understand why more money isn't being put into geothermal and infra red energy harvesting"
1) Geothermal will get a boosted by a move to use gyrotrons (like magnetrons for megawatt power output) to increase drilling efficiency for reaching the much deeper super hot rock layer that most of the world (outside the active geological zones) needs for viable geothermal power - this drops the price of drilling to about $500k instead of $millions.
2) Infra red energy harvesting is already utilised in some variants of solar power, specifically thermophotovoltaic cells which have an extra layer of energy harvesting material to absort IR which is reflected back when the main PV cell heats up from absorbing bandwidths of light it cannot convert.
I like norways approach to using hydro. Sadly here the intent is on demolishing our dam systems. And everybody is afraid of nuclear, so we’re sold the idea that solar and wind are adequate. Nobody seems to be approaching reservoir or mass-based energy storage and only wants to talk about batteries. It’s like they think the sun and wind are always there and batteries just pop out of a factory with no environmental repercussions. I almost don’t even think it’s about clean energy anymore.
He also did not factor in the cost of building renewable generated power, or the cost of maintaining an electricity network, or the energy cost to transmit electricity, or the fact that the batteries currently being used in our electric cars will only last for around 60,000 miles.
@@mnomadvfx there was a company that had a working prototype IR panel about 10 years ago, using micro antennae. I haven't seen anything about it for a long time - it was shown on a program about transmitting energy wirelessly
I just wrote a comment on exactly the same problem.
And there's also the thing where he artifically inflated the CO2 costs of an electric vehicle by insisting that it needs to have a 400 mile range.
Another factor that he failed to include would be the life span of those batteries in the cars/solar system and the disposing of them after they are replaced. Not to mention the chemicals used in the use of solar panels and disposing of them after their life span.
Solar panel recycling is already done very well in Europe. So it is possible, no obstacle there.
Battery recycling is indeed much harder but there already are companies doing it. But most importantly, after EV batteries degrade enough to need replacing they still have enough capacity to be used for grid storage. So they can have a much longer lifespan then the car itself.
@@walterschwarz29 unfortunately recycling is a hoax as well as using old batteries for grid storage. It's a fantasy, not realistic, no rules or laws will change this. Electric vehicles have a place but they will not replace a diesel nor gas motor, with gas motors becoming more efficient, albeit more than an electric motor in some cases, and types of diesel becoming cleaner as well as electrics not having the range of diesel as well as making that electricity does and will produce pollution. Can't have it both ways and you're blind if you don't look at the WHOLE PICTURE.
@@walterschwarz29 recycling also uses lots of chemicals for leeching and separation and lots of energy as well. Recycling is not a green process.
1) The cells in the battery from an electric are still useful after it is no longer suitable for a car, those batteries can be repurposed such as in stationary storage. They do not need to be 'disposed'. 2) Over 90% of the materials in those batteries can be recovered and reused. And this can be done more cheaply than mining new materials. They do not need to be disposed. Please remind me how much of car exhaust can be recovered and reused.
But you are ignoring the fact that there is already solid state batteries being made by Toyota that get rid of the environmental impact almost all together.
the production of EV's will get cleaner while Petrol cars won't change much.
Also the battery life of an EV is far longer already then the general lifespan of a Petrol car. If we take the usual 300KM as write off point you can already fit 3 petrol cars in the distance of an EV.
so that changes the whole game a lot.
It would be interesting to hear him again, 4 years on, with the latest data available. It appears the world has changed a lot faster than he anticipated or predicted.
Even china made new record. 40% of electricity from renewable energy in 2024.
His statements were half-truths at best even 4 years ago. Studies from 2018 that included full life cycle emissions concluded that the average 250 mile range BEV's break even point was around 40,000 miles back then. Now it's under 20,000 miles. This man is not an unbiased presenter, he works on ICE vehicle manufacturing. It's like those ads that said 4 out of 5 Drs. recommend Salem cigarettes but the doctors were all board members at Salem.
Amazing! I never realized that plants like grass can differentiate between CO2 from a horse vs. CO2 from a car!
Love the point you're making!
That's the point where I stopped watching.
Trees, forests too.
Yeah the CC left love to omit thing like the Corvette is still in the loop, and that it does not produce methane but farting, as the horse does, but remember these same people want to out law meat since cows farting raises the temperature. Also they love to discard the effects of solar, and cosmic radiation in their data. It is all a scam as we know.
Cars do not breathe the way horse do...do you get it. The car net exports gas. The horse imports and then exports the gas unlike the car.
What many people fail to mention is the amount of energy it takes to make, transport and install solar and wind. Nuclear is the way forward
Solar is scalable and can be used in a small village in Africa or a large city in China. It can be put over reservoirs and reduce water evaporation. It can be put on top of warehouses and super stores. It can be put on homes. It can be put on farms while still growing particular crops and eventually it could be on oceans. It is not efficient with land usage but there are a lot of available places that will keep it in business and it is very flexible and prices dropping everyday. I say over build with solar, wind, hydroelectric, geothermal and crack water into hydrogen (which is getting cheaper everyday)!
What many people fail to mention, is the amount of energy it takes to make, transport and store oil and gas for ICE vehicles. (it works both ways) ;-)
The Netherlands and Germany has done a good jib of putting fear in people about nuclear power. Closing nuclear power plants and now building new coal power plants.
Also Rotterdam banned diesel cars and build 3 new coal power plants .
Strange world.
Germany tried the whole solar energy thing, spent billions on it. They're now going back to coal powered plants. Experiment tried and failed. I love solar myself, but I'm not trying to save the planet. Just don't like making the power company richer. God can handle taking care of the earth. He created it, so I trust him to protect it. Thanks God !
@Kyle Ramsey Yea because it's always 20 years away, ; )
Something different to make us think rather than just accept.
In many countries there are already national blackouts, and both construction and farming machines among others, require a lot of power, and these should also be included in the picture for the future.
You will go crazy with the cost and time spent to buy food and wait for highway and construction projects if battery power is required for heavy and agricultural equipment.
@@karlsnow5281 *starve to death
Love the awareness he is bringing and the truth to the conversation. Well done
I'm an electrician and a huge fan of Tesla , the man not the company , I've known this for years , in the future these cars will be a game changer , but not till battery tech , and energy generation and transmission catches up, The laws of thermodynamics are the ceiling in this problem, they are the brick wall
More than anything, it's just that EVs aren't cost-effective yet. They still use much less energy to drive than ICE vehicles, and they're compatible with any energy source. That's the whole point. They have plenty of potential--but, it doesn't matter if there's no cost advantage. Better in any way doesn't matter if they cost too much.
@@devilsoffspring5519 $20,000 more on average than an ICE. not too many people can justify that.
@@amorgan5844 Never mind justifying it, affording it is the more important issue. I'd love a Tesla or similar "normal" style electric car with a decent range, but £30k-£40k is just insanely unaffordable. My cars are usually bought used for around £6k and last another 5-7 years after I buy them. I think that is far more sustainable at the moment, both environmentally and financially on a personal level.
But the truth is, the US has the cleanest air in the world, and Gas Vehicles are no problem in the first place.
@@amorgan5844 Not many can justify the exorbitant price of many mainstream ICE cars, either. They buy them because they have no choice--they gotta get to work somehow.
Great presentation, I try to explain this to people all the time, most don't even understand or willfully ignore me. There is 1 other thing... if we turned even 75% of all gas/diesel burning vehicles into electric with a snap of your fingers we do not have the electrical infrastructure to handle it. Not even close, it would/will take many decades to build it up to a point where it wouldn't adversely affect all other area's of electricity consumption. Do what makes sense now and for the future but let's use our brains and not let ourselves be used as political footballs.
Nobody is trying to turn 75% of all ICE vehicles to electric with the snap of a finger. It will be a long transition, but we're way behind the ball, so yes, let's build out the infrastructure as fast as possible, while also transitioning energy generation to renewable (plus storage). BTW, that will allow us to BUILD every car without CO2 emissions, so the BEV will be zero emission (which mine essentially are since they're using 100% solar from my roof or wind from the utility), but the ICE is still generating CO2 while burning fuel.
In your mind, how much longer should we wait and just maintain the status quo that's already cooking the planet?
If you have a parking place next to your house, an electricity supply and an alarm clock you have the infrastructure already. In the UK 90 percent of charging is done at night when about 40 percent of generation is switched off. The average car does 22 miles a day which means 2 hours charging at 3 kW. Not a big deal. The problem arises because 40 percent of households don't have attached parking
@@ambassadorfromreality1125 I am not refering to the charging infrastructure but the electricity grid itself. Where does the electricity come from? I don't know about all countries but in the U.S. we have enough problems meeting the needs already and with more and more EV's it will get far worse. Not to mention where does it come from, a lot of it from coal. It will be solved, it might take decades but it will come.
@@alittlelooney5361 Correct - it will be solved, so let's work on getting it solved as soon as possible, rather than slow it down with questionable claims. The grid can already handle a lot of charging *IF* it's done at off-peak times when the utility has, in many cases, more power than they know what to do with. That also means that they don't have to upgrade the infrastructure in your neighborhood (if your transformer is able to handle 1 MW and most of that is actually being used at peak load, but you and your neighbors only use 100 kW at night, then 900 kW are available at night for EV charging).
@Jon VB So true. People don't realize that even if we took the oil and used it to generate electricity (power plants), we would STILL generate less CO2 than transporting and refining it, and then burn it in an ICE car. Not that I'm advocating for that, but it's an interesting result of how inefficient the ICE and that whole process is.
Your opening comments were correct!
👏🏼
Electric cars
Electric appliances
Electric tools
Electric air conditioning
Electric refrigerators
Oh no where will it all end
Quick pass me a cold beer from the fridge
Glad this is on youtube thank you ! and I hope this gets more viewers. I wonder about emissions footprint of recycling at end of life of gas/hybrid/electric vehicles.
Spot on Davy, what about the impact of the disposal (recycling?) of the batteries?
I have wondered about the end of life of the battery packs too. Who is going to pay for this? The consumers? The car companies? The Gov't? Our kids?? Read an article not too long ago where the guy ran numbers with a friend of his, and they figured he'd have to own his Tesla for 111 yrs before he would see any real savings from it. 111 yrs was shocking in the least. Wish I could find the article
@@jackkennedy1936 I hope that is a rhetorical question. The consumer pays for EVERYTHING one way or the other. Just like tires, there's a disposal fee when you get them replaced which gets passed on.
As I (layman) thought more about this - if recycled efficiently (reclaim Li, Co etc) then, in the long run, should lower the initial CO2 footprint of the future electric vehicle to be made.
Only way to be completely accurate is to start from the ground up when producing the vehicles/engines/batteries and then as well from the ground up producing, refining and transporting the fuel/electricity to the point of where it gets used, also the products/services related to maintaining each type.
If you do that, then count all the wars fought over oil and gas. And the consequences of the wars (e.g. starvation resulting from the Russian 'special operation'). Add in oil spills, air pollution, oil pipelines, etc.
@@chrismartin7579 Also take into account petroleum is used extensively in building and operating electric cars.
How he missed on nuclear power is just amazing.
Research Galen Winsor on nuclear power.
Every town in America could have mini nuclear reactors and have almost free power for everything.
Sure. We can't even figure what to do with the nuclear waste we created from the 50's and you want to create more.
Almost 40 years after Congress decided the United States, and not private companies, would be responsible for storing radioactive waste, the cost of that effort has grown to $7.5 billion, and it’s about to get even pricier.
With no place of its own to keep the waste, the government now says it expects to pay $35.5 billion to private companies as more and more nuclear plants shut down, unable to compete with cheaper natural gas and renewable energy sources. Storing spent fuel at an operating plant with staff and technology on hand can cost $300,000 a year. The price for a closed facility: more than $8 million, according to the Nuclear Energy Institute.
The U.S. Energy Department “has been clinging to unrealistic expectations,” said Rodney McCullum, senior director for decommissioning and used fuel at the institute, an industry trade group. “The industry was never supposed to have this problem.”
he misses on a lot of things... like the fact that the grid is getting cleaner and cleaner by the day.
yea, i also question his numbers
I enjoy it when they compare electric vehicles to petrol ones, but they always seem to miss a significant aspect: how is the petrol produced? I would like to see the entire process and the costs involved in extracting oil, transporting it to refineries by boats or trucks, and, upon completion, using trucks to transport it to service stations.
well well well, how are the freakin batteries produced pal???
Hey mate, that's another important aspect to put into the equation. I would like to see a video where all aspects of production, maintenance, and end-of-life for these products are compared. By this, I mean all the money spent on research, extraction, etc., for battery materials, including all the associated ecological damage, and the same goes for the production of both electric and internal combustion engines. In short, with concrete data, which of the two is ultimately less polluting?@@wrends
yeah, and how about the energy loss on the power lines? and the maintenance, spare parts for the power lines?
@@RidwanRidwan-tq7rxyeah that’s another valid point! I would love to see a complete study about it! And how they produce the electricity, what’s the cost involved etc.
He's absolutely right! Electric cars DO move pollution out of urban areas! Just go to Butte, Montana and visit the Berkeley pit. One of the EPAs largest superfund cleanup sites! An 1800 acre (1800 football fields) gigantic pit with a toxic lake of heavy metals and arsenic polluted water that kills thousands of migrating waterfowl every year! In order to mine all the lead, Copper, Silver, Nickle, etc. etc. To make the hundreds of millions of batteries to create all the electric cars...would mean digging ten of those pits....in every state in the nation!! Then stop and realize that those batteries only last about ten years before needing replaced...which costs between ten and twenty THOUSAND dollars!! Then you have to dispose of the old batteries!! Oh! And i recently heard that the laws will be implemented that you can't legally sell a used EV without replacing the batteries!! Now let's talk about EV fires from exploding batteries and recalls ALREADY ordered on GM electric vehicles, and owner's manuals instructing people to NOT park the car inside garages or public parking structures or close to other vehicles!! Great...but how do OTHER drivers know to not park near you? It also warns owners to not leave the car unattended while charging! Well...THAT'S convenient! Just sleep in shifts while guarding your home from a ticking bomb!
@Flynn Spunks If he's not right then how is he wrong? Be specific.
@Flynn Spunks how do you make the electricity you are charging those cars with?
@@sYd6point7 wind and solar primarily. It’s coming whether you like it or not.
And what about all the pollution from leaking oil wells, the gigantic pits from coal mining, and the polluted groundwater from fracking? And I believe the Berkeley pit was from mining until 1982 when it was abandoned. Your complaint is not about modern EVs, but with the mining companies that are irresponsible about the environment. That is the perfect example of why we need good government, to prevent the abuse of power of the large, wealthy corporations. No one seemed care when this mine was in operation. My question, why isn't ARCO, the last company to operate that mine, now responsible for the clean up? Same with the abandoned oil wells and coal mines?
@@UNCGS so you see that pattern. And with all that powerful logic and reasoning....your best suggestion is to trust an entire global industry to corrupt mine owners and Federal agencies to suddenly have an attack of conscience, and start mining responsibly....just because it's for electric vehicles....which will somehow increase their integrity and accountability? You still sit in the out in the back yard every halloween waiting for the great pumpkin to arrive, don't you? I guess the old addage is truer than ever...those who don't learn from their mistakes are bound to repeat them!
Been trying to tell folks this same message for a while. Thank you!!
Ask the green beans what is going to bring power to all the infrastructure that will be needed to make electric vehicles viable, answer, coal or natural gas fired generators......
they don't wanna listen. Just like when I promote nuclear energy. Folks are stuck in the past, and believe what they are told.
Thanks for simplifying some of the big issues. However, you’ve left out the net CO2 emissions from production, distribution, maintenance and disposal of wind and solar, as well as ignoring the obvious environmental impact of all the increased mining for every aspect of power production and grid-based distribution capacity.
Just like it has been left out the environmental costs of offshore oil platforms, tankers and massive refineries, imagine the co2 that went into building those?
@@jaytheblader6701 'Imagine'... Sure that sounds like some solid numbers you have there.
@@jaytheblader6701 oil is much more power dense that any renewable source. The only thing better is nuclear.
Change is hard, I know.
@@jaytheblader6701 and all of that has lead us to the point where we can pivot...a delicate point of balance of change...we need eclectic not electric...but we need to move away from oil.
it would interesting to review the talk after 4 years and innovations. where are we today?
His data was out of date or simply fabricated even 4 years ago. Wondering like me why he provides no sources for data?
It is shocking that this needs to be said. Common sense and simple laws of physics should lead people to this conclusion, but very well put together Graham!
Right there is where you have drifted a little, Common sense is not a big factor for many people.
re: "simple laws of physics should lead people to this conclusion..." unfortunately that's a oxymoron, as using the term "simple" to describe even basic Physics is a bit misleading. for the average citizen (which is to say 98% of Planet Earth) who has NEVER sat through a single University level Chemistry or Math lecture, "simple" Physics is ALL GREEK. yeah they just don't get it. sure Engineers get it... but the average Joe...? not so much.
“Smart people” have big heads…
Everything makes so much sense to you in your world that you are blind to everything else. I deal with big headed people all the time. “Common sense” is a term that refers to a judgement shared by “all people”… or a great majority… it’s clearly not the case if the great majority.. or “the common” don’t share it.
250 mile EV with the occasional fast charge when going farther in a day works well for most anyone. If you factor in 250 mile range EV into his chart his argument against EVs falls apart. Hybrids are just too complicated to be anything more of a stepping stone; a stepping stone from a decade ago.
I just threw down some common sense and physics.
@@crcurran - 9:20, he addresses long range batteries and nothing seems to fall apart.
He fails to point out in his "if we had all electric cars tomorrow" scenario is that if we all had to charge our electric cars the power grids would collapse. Most power grids are currently stressed during summer or winter just heating and cooling our homes. Now they want us to plug our cars into every one of those homes too. Good luck with that! There's also a very limited supply of lithium on the planet to build the batteries for electric cars for everyone.
All those car batteries will _help_ the grid be stable, not bring it down. They are a very significant storage, stablisation and backup resource.
@@xxwookey Clearly you've never owned an electric vehicle. I have to charge my Tesla twice if not three times a day, and wait hours every time while it charges. I can't just leave whenever I want to meet with friends, or keep up with family or coworkers on long trips when they have gas powered cars. I'm not sure what planet you live on, but here on earth no electric vehicle has ever stored electricity and given it back to the grid to stabilize it. Electric vehicles only drain and add to the load strain on the power grid. I'm an engineer, and I have YET to hear anyone explain how electric vehicles could in any way stabilize the grid, especially compared to gas vehicles that don't drain the grid AT ALL, so please do enlighten us with your wisdom...
ha , U write Lithium , , China is already got the Lithium market , , aren't the demoRats , wonderful , , ,
@@aloha_ohana My next-door neighbour's EV is connected to the grid for stabilisation (UK trial), and has been for 2 years, so actually it does happen. I agree it's not widespread yet, but new cars are coming with export functionality (Ioniq5, EV6, F150). Surely it's obvious how many GWh of battery plugged in can help with grid load balancing?
So you own a Tesla and do 400-600 miles/day or more in order to need to charge 2 or 3 times? That's an extreme case and would indeed lead to a lot of charging.The national daily average, even in the US is 35 miles, so most people just plug in when they get home, and often not every day.
@@larrylacause1899 The Demonazi's gave all the uranium to Russia. So them giving the lithium to China was no real surprise. Wonderful? No. They're intentionally dismantling us from within with help from China, Soros, and the like.
Engineering is all about trade-offs. There is seldom one single best answer because there are too many variables. This talk does an excellent job illustrating that and proposes one or two different ways of trading things off.
He's pushing ICE and hybrids in 2022. While hybrids are viable, EVs are the way. There is just no cogent argument against EVs while pushing ICE that I could find. It's all just cherry picked and twisting facts to demonize the EV.
Except for the argument he makes.
@@glennsills excerpt for arguments that are cherry picked or straight up distortions
Wake me up when they get to gravitics...
We here in the U.S. can expound all we want on how to solve "Climate change", but until the majority of other large polluters in the world join us it will be for naught. Wind borne Emissions know no geographical boundaries. For example:
If i live on a street with many houses and we all have big yards and large trees. When the Fall comes my trees drop there leaves. I go out and rake them up so my yard is nice and clean. However, my neighbors don't care as much as I do, so as soon as the Wind blows my yard is full of leaves again. I can repeat my behavior over and over, but until my neighbors agree to clean all of our yards, my efforts will have a limited effect. Let's not forget this before we try to mandate or legislate ourselves needlessly.
We have the same argument in New Zealand but both our countries have some of the worst emissions per capita in the world.
Can't argue, except to say the polluting countries will not feel any pressure to "clean up" until clean becomes the norm. If no one takes the first step then the solution will never come.
Windmills and solar panels also need to be manufactured and maintained, and the manufacturing and maintenance processes generate carbon dioxide. I continue to believe that all the major innovations will be on the demand side of the equation... UNLESS we choose nuclear which has been demonized as relentlessly as fossil fuels.
Nuclear has a bad name because of the system we chose. From what I have seen, Thorium is a better choice. It leaves no toxic waste. It could have made the promises of Redi-Kilowatt come true.
@Paul Fry Unless someone is grinding grain there are no windmills in this story. And you got everything else even more wrong. Trying to deceive by false equivalence is despicable. Stop.
Nukes are too slow, too expensive, too dangerous, too water-killing, too anti-democracy & equality, & have far too many other problems to even be considered. Fortunately, the alleged free market (actually the oligarchical corporate market) has decided, & eve though the oligarchs who swear it as their religion start sinning anytime they don't like the commandments, it seems to be working this time. Unfortunately, they have managed to delay everything long enough to doom the world to violence, chaos & destruction.
So your belief is absurd; it's based on lies.
Improvements, price drops, & production improvements in clean safe fast cheap reliable renewable energy, batteries, EVs, & transit continue to outpace projections by experts, let alone those of nuke shdullps (shills? dupes? Who knows?) like you. Give it up. Nukes lost. RE is the energy of the 21st century.
@@J4Zonian
Hi, i'd like to understand your perspective here!
Do you think renewable energy is economically sustainable right now? Should we invest more money into researching renewables so we can make energy cheaper, or is it better to invest in current technology directly? Also, what do you mean by
"Nukes are too slow, too expensive, too dangerous, too water-killing, too anti-democracy & equality"?
Are you talking about bombs? There's a difference between reactors and bombs, i think.
Anyways, i'd just like to know what your views are on this.
@@J4Zonian science is not something you can just wish into existence. I have high hopes for hydrogen fuel cells but based on where we are in 2022, Mr.Fry is exactly right.
Yes, I was in total agreement with this guy until 11:00 when he talked about pushing RE, it has a place but in a very niche energy market.
Now, the next step is to factor in the energy required for producing renewable energy generators and their lifecycles.
I'd like to see the cost of the Middle East Wars and the CO2 released during them factored into the cost of the gasoline cars. Veterans benefits etc. You know, let be honest about it.
This was four years ago. Recently the USA produced more energy from renewables than coal for the first time in history.
Plants absorb CO2 however that is produced. If they absorb the CO2 from a billion horses, they also absorb the CO2 from a billion corvettes. Of course, the corvette doesn't eat plants, so we land with more or bigger plants. This is well recorded to be happening.
your third sentence is confusing, I'm not really sure what your stance is lol. but the concept of the CO2 in horses being in a cycle that the CO2 from corvettes is not, is derived from the corvette CO2 coming from the ground, a closed system, but is now in the open atmosphere, increasing the overall amount of gasses filling our air and increasing the burden we put on plants to convert it to oxygen.
Additionally, a combustion engine releases Carbon MONOXIDE not Carbon Dioxide. CO = not good - CO² = Fourth building block of life itself.
@@isaacringling3823 A part is a reasoning that falls in the category of CO2 capturing. But CO2 only stays captured in the wooden parts of trees if we don't let the plants die and rot (that releases almost all the CO2!). So every year the amount of excess CO2 needs to be captured by new planted trees. Died trees should be shot to Mars (to there create a biosphere) in a CO2-free rocket 😄
The other part is that higher levels of CO2 give raise to plants absorbing more CO2 (larger plants). But as plants die, it doesn't help to reduce the effective CO2.
Unless heat and drought kill the plants…….
@@JohanHaspeslagh what are houses made from?
Don’t forget about the construction process of each solar or wind farm. Lots going on there and a ton of maintenance to keep up.
What’s the answer to heavy machines and tractor trailers?
I’m a farmer and often haul 10-20k pounds of hay with a diesel truck. That’s hard to do without internal combustion.
We definitely should be considering alternatives but forcing us into something that’s not sensible is absurd and has dangerous repercussions. Thanks for sharing.
Battery storage would be enormous. Imagine the power to transport a vehicle and its contents between recharge either very short lived or enormous explosion hazards in any accidents.
He forgot to factor in the CO2 and rare metals used in wind and solar production. He also didn't touch the recyclability of each. It is a complex problem.
or that solar and wind just isn't practical nor feasible on a large scale, certainly not to the extent of replacing conventional power generation
He also left out the recycling of batteries that have outlived their lives.
Wind and solar produce less energy than required to manufacture, install, maintain and repair.
Windmills require oil and grease lubricants.
I like how the plants only use CO2 if it comes from horses.
Right! It's CO2, so technically more oxygen? Or should we get rid of animals we don't need then problem solved?
Was scanning comments for this one! EXACTLY! Most of his logic was reasonably sound, BUT, this omission of the facts makes me feel as if his presentation was somewhat disingenuous.
The earth already has a box around it.
It's called the atmosphere.
hybrids are as good as it gets and it's really all you need
Yep that extra mile per gallon really adds up
Everyone of my friends who bought an electric car, did so to save money on gas. They didn’t want to pay $7/gallon for gas anymore. The last thing they cared about were the emissions
I can afford the gas better than I can afford the sticker price of an electric car
@@floydlarken3148 No kidding! The prices will come down. Remember the first cell phones? We paid by the minute and only the cool kids had them. My sister leased for $239/mo and has 300 mile range. Her gas used to be $400/mo. Have u heard of Flex Fuel? In Colorado it’s like $2.99/gal. Only u have to have a Flex Fuel car.
@@PJ33333 👍
I bought a 2015 Nissan Leaf for $7k about 2 months ago.
@@okthisisthelasttimeipromise Hey how do u like it? I’ve looked at those and I know the range is less but they all keen to have very low mileage and good prices.
Very well said and the best part is it's the absolute TRUTH!
Tell me that you have no experience in the auto/diesel industry without telling me that you have no experience in the field
@@jorgecabrera3694 hahahaha. If you only knew.
@@bobbycone2 I do know. I'm a mechanic with a background in auto/diesel and aviation.
@@jorgecabrera3694 I meant if you only knew about me.