You can literally take the oil we use right now to power cars and dump it in a generator to get electricity, and not only would you go farther but do it with less pollution at places where pollution matters less.

"Where will the electricity come from" is unadulterated FUD.

I mostly agree, but still laugh a little when people purchase cars to be "green" in a location where most of the electricity comes from coal. Without an EV they never wouldn't have been able to find a car that runs on coal.

This is still a win: it’s easier to replace one centralized fossil fuel burner than a bunch of cars.

Even when you take into account the huge environmental cost of those batteries??

What huge envrironmental cost of batteries?

Australia mines >50% of the world's lithium and 1% of worlds oil, and for them oil pollutes more

And lithium is recycled, oil is not.

Oil is a biohazard, we had massive oil spills wich posioned areas as large as fukushima exclusion zone. Pour barrel of oil in a forest, and everything dies

How many lithium spills were there? Zero. If you sprincle lithium in a forest, nothing happens.

I don’t know enough about the battery supply chain: but, generally speaking, centralizing problems often makes it easier to fix them by giving maximizing the leverage of improvements.

Gasoline doesn't just magically appear at the pump. Oil extraction has huge environmental costs too.

Even in places which are pretty decent about green sources like the UK, most populated areas in the country have very dirty electricity - rated at about 250-300g/CO2 per kWh produced. In terms of emissions per mile driven, that's worse than some modern petrol and diesel cars. Yes, you can purchase green electricity from your supplier, but it doesn't change the fact that the electrons going into your car are not from a clean source at all.

That is flat out incorrect. Even in places that use only coal to generate electricity, EV CO2 emissions per mile are lower than gas vehicle emissions. See for yourself:

https://afdc.energy.gov/vehicles/electric_emissions.html

So I don't know why you're linking a US study when I specifically said UK where the emissions are 300g/kWh in some areas, but ok, I mean I can do this too.

Where I'm from(Poland) the biggest power plant is the Bełchatów power plant, which burns lignite for power - the CO2 emissions per kWh generated from that power plant are about 1kg/kWh produced[1]. At such an insane CO2 emissions rate even the most efficient EV - let's take a Model 3 - is worse than a modern petrol car.

According to this site[0] Model 3 is incredibly efficient, using only 11.9kWh for every 100km travelled. So that's about 120Wh per km. If you're getting electricity from the Bełchatów power plant, that also means that Tesla is "emitting" 120g of CO2/km travelled.

There are many modern cars that have their CO2/km emissions at less than 120g of CO2/km. But even if they are slightly above that, it doesn't change the fact that the emissions from driving an EV are not zero like some people say they are. Even if we go back to the UK and use that 300g of CO2/kWh figure, the Tesla is still emitting 40g of CO2/km travelled. That's not zero.

[0] https://thedriven.io/2020/10/20/model-3-achieves-record-low-...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be%C5%82chat%C3%B3w_Power_Stat...

At 300g/kWh an EV would have to consume 500Wh/km to match combustion cars in terms of emissions.

Highway driving in the winter is the only scenario where an EV can reach 250Wh/km.

Those power plants could implement stronger emission controls.

So we can just use coal then?

Of course it matters. Unless the goal is just out of sight out of mind.

Where will all the charging station access come from is the problem, not the electron count.

Everyday this community outs itself more and more as a phony "smart guy club". I stated factual reality and am met with vitriol and attacks.

I never said it wasn't slightly better.

Even moving the combustion byproducts from where the people are to where the power plants are is a small win. That the plants can more easily install scrubbers for some pollutants is a further small win. That they are more efficient (even with 15% charging losses) is another small win. That the use of renewables can grow over time without car owners having to upgrade is another small win.

Stack up enough small wins and you can get to sizeable gains.

We've always got Nuclear energy and that will scale pretty much to the moon - old generation reactors have all sorts of fatal flaws including requiring a fuel that we have trouble acquiring, but that problems mostly been solved.

Nah - I think your gut reaction is mostly just decades of propaganda painting fossil fuels as a necessary evil.

On the topic of pure renewables - hydro definitely can't scale, we can get a lot more out of it then we currently are but it's comparatively not clean and most locations don't have unlimited options for power harnessing - wind and solar scale up pretty ridiculously and in most parts of the world one or the other is going to be quite accessible and, we've also got geothermal and some other options that we can look at.

Beyond that we can look into demand reduction, the dead simplist of these is insulation/passive cooling requirements on housing and taxing private transportation to encourage ride-sharing especially in the commercial realm.

We've got some great options to look at if only the coal barons would STFU and go away.

Even if a given EV uses electricity produced by as much fossil fuel as it would have taken to fuel an equivalent ICE car, it's a win because a fossil fuel burning electric plant on the grid is stationary. An ICE car moves.

With the ICE car, any equipment you add to try to capture emissions adds to the weight of the car, in turn making it burn more fuel, and you are also limited in the total weight that the car can have and still drive safely (or at all). You've also got space limitations.

With the stationary power plant, by picking a place with sufficient space there are no weight limits on how much emission capturing equipment you can add to the plant.

Stationary power generation even with fossil fuels is still more efficient than ICEs. This is just FUD.

Actually to clarify: its not so much stationary as it is constant speed. I'm sure not having to be able to move around is a factor too though.