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Article: It Turns Out “Green” Cars Aren’t So “Green” After All

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Ho Hum - Yawn. When will they stop criticizing the CO2 footprint of electricity production without a corresponding critique of gasoline and oil production -as if gas appears at the pump out of nowhere? I guess they are following the dictum that if you repeat a big lie often enough, people will believe it.
 
I hate seeing biased articles like this:

It Turns Out “Green” Cars Aren’t So “Green” After All
It Turns Out "Green" Cars Aren't So "Green" After All | The Federalist Papers

ugh; that article is awful.
"polar ice is thicker than ever"? on what planet? Here on Earth, while East Antarctica has added a little to its cap, it doesn't come close to offsetting the losses of ice from West Antarctica and from Greenland. and if they're talking about the Arctic Sea, well, we might be setting a record for the least amount of ice there in March.

and "overly optimistic assumption that gas and electric versions are equally efficient"? overly optimistic for whom? for the gasoline car, yes, that's crazy optimism. but the article implies the opposite. and at least get your units straight: it's a kWh or kW-h, not a Kw/h. or maybe the author is inventing new units because they can't make a cogent argument with actual units.

The arguments in the article are so bad it's remarkable.
 
I hate seeing biased articles like this:

It Turns Out “Green” Cars Aren’t So “Green” After All
It Turns Out "Green" Cars Aren't So "Green" After All | The Federalist Papers

IMO the author of the article should study a little bit of thermodynamics. In fact he claims that ICE cars are more efficient than electric cars. :scared:

- - - Updated - - -

then it is the fault of the electric cars generating greater heat than gasoline engines."

Same comment about thermodynamics :scared:
 
That article uses the handiwork of a Han Baumann who made some napkin mathematics calculations and gets it all wrong:

The Myth of the Electric Car


One of the biggest problems with anyone doing this kind of calculation for the first time is that they don't know everything goes into the calculations in order to get a proper comparison. Hence the moment one of these articles starts making claims by discussing any number of efficiencies, if the article isn't a published journal article, chances are it gets things wrong. If they started with the Argonne National Labs GREET model and properly discloses adjustments to the assumptions in order to get proper Well to Wheel (WtW) calculations, the we might want to pay some attention. Otherwise, they're going to be wrong. Mr. Nathan Weiss's work, for example, highlights the folly of doing it on your own.

In any case, Mr. Baumann here is looking to do a hit job. He spends a bunch of words discussing efficiencies on the electric motor side, but then on the gasoline engine side, his entire comment is:

"According to Wikipedia, the average gasoline powered motor has an efficiency of 37.5 percent."
What Wikipedia actually says is this:

Most steel engines have a thermodynamic limit of 37%. Even when aided with turbochargers and stock efficiency aids, most engines retain an average efficiency of about 18%-20%.

So he's wrong right away and anyone that deals with gasoline engine efficiencies knows this right away. Even without correcting anything else, his calculations of the electric motor side is 25.4% and that already beats the 18-20% efficiency of a gasoline engine given by the University of Washington.

Of course, he assumes that gasoline magically appears in the tank of the ICE vehicle while making all sorts of pains to sort out the production and the transport of electricity to an electric vehicle.

He also neglects that coal and oil production plants aren't the only way, and in many places, not even a significant way of generating electricity.

I could go on and on, but it's clear that this is work by Mr. Baumann is a sophomoric hit job. Then you add to it the commentary by various right wing nut jobs that don't bother to examine if the work is correct or not and it just gets worse.