Both-sidesism at its finest. For every environmental announcement, got to find somebody who disagrees with it, and the people paid to say the earth is flat are right there to provide you with the quote you need.

https://www.desmogblog.com/david-kreutzer : "According to a report Kreutzer co-wrote at The Heritage Foundation: “No consensus exists that man-made emissions are the primary driver of global warming or, more importantly, that global warming is accelerating and dangerous.” "

* even when accounting for losses, the CO2 output of ICE is worse (today)

* electric cars allow us to tap into "free" energy (i.e. base load we can not turn off at night)

* we can innovate much more on electric (generation, transmission, storage) than we can on ICE (gains are largely realised)

* centralised emissions are easier to manage than decentralised emissions

Does electric pollute? Yes. Should we stick to ICE? Hell no.

> but they do have emissions at the power plant

While objectively true and ignoring the fact of renewable energies that a sibling comment pointed out... power plants are cleaner than cars, even when one were to burn the same fuel - simply because modern power plants have enormously powerful particulate filters and other exhaust post-processing: fine-particulate removal using high voltage, "gas washing" to get rid of sulphur, afterburning to get rid of dioxines and other nasty compounds...

This is something that the EPA has been trying to get people to believe since at least the 80's. It's called "point source pollution."

Instead of having a million lawn mowers each belching out pollution, you use electric mowers and have all the filth at the power plant, where it can be cleaned and scrubbed better. And when new technology comes along to clean better or shift to a new form of energy production, you only have to upgrade one power plant instead of making a million people buy new mowers.

Somehow it never caught on. I don't know why.

The lawn mower example is really good. Lawn mowers and leaf blowers have horrible pollution issues - until 2016 they were entirely unregulated in the European Union.

To make it worse, people are directly near the exhausts of these machines which means that this is way, way more harmful than whatever a car manages to emit.

Because battery powered mowers and blowers aren't good. They require impractically large battery mass.

A laptop runs at 20W. A lawnmower runs at 1200W.

Hell even if power plants were on the whole worse? Air pollution is a huge health and human development issue* being able to move the source of emissions from high population areas to the middle of fucking nowhere is still a win

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_pollution Outdoor air pollution alone causes 2.1[4][5] to 4.21 million deaths annually.[1][6] Overall, air pollution causes the deaths of around 7 million people worldwide each year, and is the world's largest single environmental health risk.[1][7][8]

Productivity losses and degraded quality of life caused by air pollution are estimated to cost the world economy $5 trillion per year.[9][10][11] Various pollution control technologies and strategies are available to reduce air pollution.[12][13]

Power plants are also more efficient than cars/lawnmowers/etc. e.g. a combined cycle power plant can be ~64% [1], compared to ~40% for car engines [2].

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_cycle_power_plant [2] - https://www.sae.org/news/2018/04/toyota-unveils-more-new-gas...

or, using an economic argument: if it was better to have a generator in your house or apartment than to use the grid for getting electricity, everybody would have one.

Yeah, no kidding. My first reaction was, "Has this guy not heard about solar and wind energy?"

I guess so.

Or hydro. Or nuclear. It's not like it's a new thing.

But they have emissions at the mfg plant, says the same folks.