Her vehicle died. She purchased a second hand EV and is still using it years later.
Aside from not owning a car she did the next best thing for an environmentally conscious person can do.
Did you even read the article you posted?
this post was submitted on 02 Jan 2024
1 points (100.0% liked)
Fuck Cars
9622 readers
833 users here now
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
Rules
1. Be Civil
You may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.
2. No hate speech
Don't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.
3. Don't harass people
Don't follow people you disagree with into multiple threads or into PMs to insult, disparage, or otherwise attack them. And certainly don't doxx any non-public figures.
4. Stay on topic
This community is about cars, their externalities in society, car-dependency, and solutions to these.
5. No reposts
Do not repost content that has already been posted in this community.
Moderator discretion will be used to judge reports with regard to the above rules.
Posting Guidelines
In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:
- [meta] for discussions/suggestions about this community itself
- [article] for news articles
- [blog] for any blog-style content
- [video] for video resources
- [academic] for academic studies and sources
- [discussion] for text post questions, rants, and/or discussions
- [meme] for memes
- [image] for any non-meme images
- [misc] for anything that doesn’t fall cleanly into any of the other categories
Recommended communities:
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Yes I did read the article. I'm not saying that she shouldn't have replaced her vehicle, in fact she probably did make the smartest choice by going for a second hand EV. I'm just frustrated by the people that assume an electric vehicle is somehow "good" for the environment when it is not.
She refers to her car in the following ways:
- "a car that [does] not emit pollution"
- "Zero emission gave me peace of mind that I made the right choice for a world facing climate change"
- "earth-friendly"
Also this statement shows she is concerned about the environment:
"suddenly remembered my intention for buying an EV in the first place. I should have spoken up. Greenhouse gas emissions, carbon dioxide, climate crisis ... These words jumbled in my head. Nobody had even mentioned this life-or-death issue we all are facing."
But EVs are not some sort of silver bullet for the climate crisis. Do we yet have any studies confirming that they are better for the environment over ICE vehicles when considering lithium mining, vehicle production, battery replacement, tire pollution etc?
I hope that the EV revolution is a net positive solution over ICE vehicles, but they are not some sort of magical product that is going to save the planet.
You must account for
The sourcing of materials
The manufacturing costs
The transportation costs
The usage costs (electricity generation, tires, batteries, parts)
The cost of the infrastructure (roads, car centric design making things farther away, massive parking lots, maintaince and snow clearing)
And the cost of disposal when the product is finished its life.
This type of analysis is called a lifecycle analysis.
The EV is here to save the car industry, not the planet.
Asking purely from a point of ignorance - is that not the same for ICE cars? Sourcing of battery components is a clear difference, but ICE cars also require materials to be sourced, manufactured, transported, usage input costs, drive on the same infrastructure, and also require disposal after they're no longer operable.
Are these metrics truly that different between EV and ICE cars? If not, then all we're really saying is that "making cars is not good for the environment" which, while accurate, seems like an insane point to use against EVs when comparing them to ICE
Yes, thats the point. EVs are still cars and have a massive individual resource and space requirement. Shifting away from car centric design would save energy and space in urban environments. Transit shares it's life cycle with many more people than private vehicles do which spreads its larger resource and energy demand accross a signifcantly larger ridership.
Everyone here agrees with that sentiment or they probably wouldn’t be here. However an individual can’t just whistle up a transit system. Even in the best of cases, transit takes years or decades to develop
I live in a part of the US with decent transit, and have commuted by rail where possible. I’m a big fan of rail and advocate for it. My town is centered on a train station and is zoned for higher population density near the center, creating a nice active walkable downtown with a traditional “Main Street “, and a quick train ride to the nearby city. We do everything right, to a greater extent than most of the US, but I still need a car
Anyhow, working from home is even better for the environment than transit, I walk to restaurants and parks, and still need a car. My electrical provider only has 20% renewable energy thanks to NIMBYs , but coal is long gone so overall my EV is pretty clean, and I use it less every year
Overall I am pro electrification of cars, I just don't like that they are pushed as some ultra green revolution. The overall energy expenditure on them is still massive. Other cities should focus on becoming more walkable and transit friendly like yours is, that way people actually have the option to travel in truly more effecient ways like walking or transit. Pushing just electricfication of cars while not addressing any of the other concerns of them like the economic and zoning costs of roads and extensive parking lots is just making an ineffecient system slightly less ineffcient.