I suggest you watch the video above your post.
I've seen it before. I don't think it obviates any of my points and i think it reinforces some of them.
For one thing, considering 'cradle to grave' emissions is essentially a straw man. Noone believes in it because noone applies it to anything else about cars in general. What is the co2 burden of creating an 8000lb f250 vs a 2200lb Mitsubishi Mirage? Would anyone like to give up their King Ranch and get into a shiny new Mirage? The graphs are talking about 100,000 miles, 200,000 miles.. Hmm! What if we just, drove less! Noone wants to talk about any of the other low hanging fruit when you talk about cradle to grave. It's explicitly marched out by those in opposition to EVs, and then not applied to ANY other aspect of ANY other car, in their own lives or anyone elses.
Cradle to grave responsibility means the price of EVERYTHING goes up. Are you cool with not getting plastic bags at a grocery store, or straws with your drinks? Nobody is for cradle to grave accounting because noone wants to pay anything extra for anything they already do, or lose access to anything they already have access to. It's only used to argue against things that require
other people to pay, or other people to change, or other people to narrow their possibilities etc. The second we apply cradle to grave in a universal way, it'll be a reckoning day for all of us. Everything would have to change.
Light transportation in general is a scapegoat in the whole climate change issue. Light transportation is targeted for ONE reason: Lack of organized resistance. If you target a $1000/ea fee at 10 million machines owned by 10 people who are wealthy enough to own 10 million machines, you will get massive, well-funded, orchestrated resistance. You will probably lose your job, and depending on who the 10 people are, you may even disappear. Those guys will do pretty much anything to avoid losing 10
billion dollars. If you target a 1000/ea fee at 10 million machines owned by 10 million separate people, you will get essentially
no resistance because damn near every one of them will bend over and fork out $1000 before they organize sufficiently to 'out-influence' the 10 rich guys and their lobbyists. This is how light transportation came to have so much emissions regulation, equipment and technology in place, when other gross polluting industries didn't. Because generations of car owners failed to argue to regulate industry, and instead willingly bent over and paid for regulations on themselves. Shit rolls downhill and industry shifted the cost of emissions to the lowest man on the totem pole who couldn't effectively fight back. That's US, guys.
And now some of the same people sitting on gas cars that are already 99% cleaned up, cleaned up by forces they can take no credit for, unwittingly paid a LOT of money for, and had essentially no power to oppose anyway, are comparing the cleanliness of gas cars NOW, after all that, to EVs as if it's apples to apples and it's not. Gas cars are clean NOW because the people buying them have spent decades
losing the fight of who is to blame for 'emissions', and
paying out the ass to improve those gas cars to the point that they can now 'arguably',
maybe have less lifetime emissions than some hybrids or EVs, which are in their relative infancy and have essentially NO equivalent efficiency or emissions standards to aspire to! If we squeezed EVs for 50 years the way we've squeezed gas cars, they'd probably end up running DIRECTLY ON Co2 and skipping powerplants entirely. Maybe if we'd started squeezing 30-40 years ago, we'd practically be there by now! It was barely over 50 years ago gas engines were using 'puke tubes' to direct their crankcase emissions at the ground, because heck if it landed there and you kept moving, it wasn't your problem right.
Now you can lock yourself in your garage with your 2022 Camry running and die of boredom before the car runs out of gas. When they open it up the smelliest part of that garage will be you.
So there's nothing intrinsic to either gas or EV that leads to how they 'stack up' in these emissions comparisons. EVERYTHING about it is down to how each thing has been
treated in the past. The current result is a reflection of the past. If we change how we treat them, we change the trajectory. But blaming the current positions on the rankings on anything but
ourselves, is disingenuous. It's not intrinsic to the materials or the technology. The materials and the technology are where they are in 2022, because of all the policies and regulations we presided over, for the past decades. If we don't
try harder, things won't get better. If we don't
force money to be invested to develop the new technology by regulating that it has to be implemented whether it's perfect or not, it will not be developed further at anything but a snail's pace. Early catalytic converters were a fucking joke. Guess what, we mandated things anyway, regular people paid out the ass for shit products that made their cars run worse, and now they're great and noone cares that they sucked in 1972. If we hang the fortunes of large companies and very wealthy people on somehow making sure EVs have less lifetime emissions than gas cars, we'd be foolish to bet that it wouldn't work. They'll make it happen, because they'll have proper accounting of what it will cost to fail. Unlike us. We'll just pay the $1000 to make the next gas car 0.1% cleaner, and turn around and shit talk EVs
for free.
