• corm@beehaw.org
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    2 years ago

    Oh shut up, ecars cause less environmental damage than normal cars by far. Yes they require lithium. The lithium required doesn’t get close to the damage of 300k miles worth of gas.

    “but power plants burn coal for that electricity”

    Not mine. I live in portland and have signed up for 100% renewable power. That’s a your-city problem. You should work on that.

    • 1993_toyota_camry@beehaw.org
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      2 years ago

      I think you’re arguing points that weren’t made.

      Individually owned automobiles and the systems required to support them are wasteful and polluting no matter how you power them.

      Electric cars are better, yes. But their popularity is in a large part because they allow us to mostly maintain the status quo.

      Do you think they are a sustainable long-term solution? Should we be planning our future around paved roads made almost exclusively for personally owned mostly single-occupant vehicles?

      • corm@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        It’s two months later and I’ve done a 180 on this opinion and went from “fuck gas cars” to “fuck all cars”.

        The car infrastructure is the shitty part, not so much the cars

        • CurtAdams@urbanists.social
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          1 year ago

          @corm @1993_toyota_camry Sort of? All cars ruin our lives. But gas cars also ruin the planet, where electric are substially better now and will be almost carbon free in 30 years or so. Getting rid of cars in general is very desirable, but getting rid of gas cars is an existential necessity.

      • vldnl@feddit.dk
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        2 years ago

        Not to mention that the only reason electric cars seem somewhat sustainable, is that at the moment only the most wealthy people (globally) can afford to own a car. Just imagine what it would look like if the global middle class also got access to cars, electric or otherwise.

      • bstix@feddit.dk
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        2 years ago

        I’m commenting on your first sentence, not the bullet points.

        Electric cars are better for the environment, no doubt about that, even if the electricity is produced by fossil fuel, because the production is done in a controlled environment instead of happening in thousands of cars, which can only utilise a fraction of the energy and outputs the exhaustion directly in the air.

        I’m not saying EVs solve the car dependency problems at all, but they are better for the environment than combustion engine cars.

          • bstix@feddit.dk
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            2 years ago

            No, obviously not. I’ve never heard anyone seriously claim that electric cars alone could save the environment.

            Transport as a whole only accounts for something like 20% of carbon emissions and only 40% of that is from cars, making it 8% total.

    • zephyreks@lemmy.ca
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      2 years ago

      Electric cars help pollution like filtered cigarettes help smoker health. It’s a tangible improvement, but on the grand scale of things it’s not a significant improvement.