Moving the environmental damage from "everywhere in the atmosphere", to mining sites and power plants is a good thing. Power plants can be replaced with carbon free energy sources, but synthetic fuels have such terrible efficiency that they only make sense for niche applications.

I mean if you don’t care about African mines and Chinese rivers that factories dump their effluent into, sure. But there is absolutely an environmental cost, just less to the wealthy nations that pay to move the damage elsewhere.

Mining problems have the huge benefit that they're relatively localized and get a lot less severe when you choose to stop mining there. Fixing environmental problems from mining also doesn't require global coordination.

Global warming on the other hand threatens the whole biome and stopping the release of CO2 doesn't stop global warming once tipping points are reached. You also need global agreement to meaningfully do something about it.

(You also have to keep in mind that fuel for ICEs doesn't magically appear. Extracting oil and transporting it isn't particularly good for the local environment either.)

If you're talking about cobalt you should know that it's also used to refine oil. Battery makers are moving away from it and Tesla have already invented batteries that use no cobalt at all (see battery day)

I think his point was that the damage moves from "everywhere" to certain places like factories and mines. Than you can add better filters/cleanup to the factories and mines.

It's a simpler problem to tackle if you have a few thousands polluting agents than billions of polluting agents everywhere.

Doesn’t most of Norway’s power come from hydro?

About 96%-99% of Norway's power come from hydro.

True, 96% of their power is produced from hydro, but two things have to be considered

- Norway has a population of 5 million

- because of the incentive to use electricity, the annual electricity consumption was about 26-27 MWh per inhabitant during 2004-2009 when the European union (EU15) average in 2008 was 7.4 MWh. Norway’s consumption of electricity was over three times higher per person compared to the EU 15 average in 2008

For comparison, Italy makes 41% of its power from hydro, but have to serve a population of 60 million

I don’t know, but Norway has profited immensely from oil and gas through their sovereign wealth fund, which is also used as a model for how other countries should establish social safety nets.

If Norway was truly sorry, they should liquidate all of their oil profits and use it to invest in research to make a carbon neutral future. As it stands they ruined the environment and now will profit off the backs of the rest of the world through the legacy of their fossil fuel extraction.

I doubt Norway is "sorry". Also, they're barely on the 13h place... what does US do, at the policy level?

https://www.worldometers.info/oil/oil-production-by-country/

[edit] For all those who scale with population: it doesn't really matter for production. Population matters for consumption, and emissions (if they were producing 5% of US CO2, it would really look bad for Norway; but they don't - per capita the emit half than what US does per capita[1]). I guess it could matter in "benefit per capita"... if that were a thing (outside Norway maybe). I.e. how much did you benefit from US oil production, vs. how much Exxon benefited? I mean, yeah US citizens benefited from cheap gas - but that's because of middle-east production, so in reality the production elsewhere in the world should count on the US as "pollution".

[1]https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/norway?country=~NOR#p...

I think you should somehow scale that by country size. For example, there are about 5½ million Norwegians. I think that, in production per capita, only smaller countries such as Kuwait and Qatar score higher.

Having said that, because of the law of large numbers, in any ranking scaled by size, the outliers typically are the smaller entities.

I know nothing much on this topic, but worth considering Norway's population is 5 million, versus 330 million in the US.

All of a sudden it doesn't seem that impressive if Norway is only producing 15% the amount of the US

Norway's sovereign fund doesn't invest in companies which only carry out exploration & production, and invests in fossil fuel companies only if they also fund renewable research (although that may be token efforts for some). In all that's about 6% of the fund. It also invests a lot in renewable focused companies. Not perfect, but steps in the right direction and Norway is very aware of the contradiction in it's energy usage and fossil fuel production.

Off topic: Nuclear power isn't renewable energy. If we keep it up and cannot find methods to extract it more efficiently, the current rate of consumption would consume conventional uranium reserves by 2080. Some say we can add 100 years for potentially undiscovered ones, but it is certainly limited. Especially if we increase usage further, currently NP just serves around 12% of energy worldwide.

I know that NP is hip right now, but it really has its own problems at scale.

At scale we'd probably switch to breeder reactors once fresh Uranium becomes too expensive. Normal reactors only extract a few percent of the energy in the fuel.

Am I right in believing an EV has a lower carbon output per unit distance than an ICE vehicle even if charged by thermal coal power?

Possibly, the relatively new Polestar marque has published it's transparency report about lifetime emissions, and references 'Global' and 'European' power mixes along with 100% wind in it's sums about after how many miles it will have produced less CO2 overall (inc. production emissions) vs. a ICE equivalent. Polestar's figures for the 2 are (vs the XC40 on the same underlying platform):

Global power mix: 112,000 km (69,594 miles) European power mix: 78,000 km (48,467 miles) Wind power: 50,000 km (31,068 miles)

The electrical emissions data comes from GaBi, but I can't see reference to the specific mixes they mention in the GaBi professional database, so I don't know what the exact breakdown of the mixes are.

Thanks for the numbers.

I didn't realise the numbers were so high!

Many EVs will be carbon-better only once their second hand vehicles!

Sorry, forgot to post the link, which contains a reasonably detailed white paper alongside the headlines on the webpage: https://www.polestar.com/uk/electric-sustainability/transpar...

I expect you're right about the equilibrium extending beyond the first owner in many instances. Volvos are renowned for their longevity (100,000mi is not uncommon) so will be interesting to see how Polestars fair with battery degradation. It would be interesting if Polestar go the way of Apple and try to recapture cars at end-of-life to recycle them and reduce subsequent generation car production emissions.