> (Assuming we need to build some kind of car anyway?)

Why do you assume that, given the parent comment explicitly talks about retrofits?

Some retrofits will happen. I would guess, though, that 90% of electric vehicles will be manufactured as electric vehicles, rather than as retrofits. So to focus only on retrofits to make the argument is rather misleading.

that's quite a nice strawman you have there.

I haven't claimed that electric cars are bad for the environment, just that replacing a perfectly working vehicle by another one is not necessarily a win.

Cars don't appear out of thin air and that manufacturing process ? it pollutes a ton.

If the replaced vehicle is used in some way, it’s a net win.

It sound like a tough sell to me if the vehicle can be retrofitted to capture 90% of the CO2 it emits.

To be fair, once it is captured, I am guessing (e.g. no data) that using it as fuel would release CO2 as well, so we would be somewhere below these 90%.

Still, the new vehicle won't appear out of thin air, and the electricity it uses won't either (hopefully it is nuclear or renewable).

Either way, I don't see why such a tech gets rejected outright. I hate gas cars as much as everybody and can't wait to see them replaced by good public transit systems, LMV and yes electric cars.

In the meantime, we have an enormous pool of gas car in circulation, anything that can help reduce their environmental impact is a win in my book.

Well because it's 90 percent efficient vehicles will emit 10% the amount of CO2, but the thing is all the CO2 eventually gets emitted, just more slowly. That might be ok if we weren't already at the world's carrying capacity for CO2, instead we need to be drastically reducing our emissions this is just an expensive stopgap measure that keeps us digging up carbon.

As others have pointed out we're not just burning the Amazon, we are burning all the Amazons back through geological time.

>As others have pointed out we're not just burning the Amazon, we are burning all the Amazons back through geological time.

I agree 100% and it disturbs me very deeply, along with the hundreds of other insane things going on these days, climate grief is definitely a good way to describe how many people feel about the magnitude of these issues.

>but the thing is all the CO2 eventually gets emitted, just more slowly

Not necessarily, we could (and should) sequester CO2.

Capturing 90% of the CO2 is a nonsense claim.

how so ? that's the claim of the article.

I am not claiming that this makes it automatically true, but some data to back why it is false would help.

Thermodynamics: the energy produced by the engine comes from forming CO2 and heat in the first place. Capturing 90% of it without using all the energy produced by the combustion doesn’t make sense, it defies the laws of physics because entropy is being reversed.

They're bad because the world isn't producing nearly enough electricity for us all to go electric. And producing more electricity IS going to be bad for the environment.