Reader Question: EVs and Unspoken Emissions?

Here’s the latest reader question, along with my reply!

Mark asks: Why is it that the emissions issue is never seriously addressed when electric cars are discussed? Obviously, electricity production at the Four Corners plant generates emissions just the same as an internal combustion engine in a vehicle. How do the two sources compare in terms of “miles per gallon” or “miles per square ft of carbon footprint?

My reply: EV emissions – those produced during manufacture as well as those produced via the generation of the electricity that powers EVs – are not usually mentioned because the pushing of EVs is not about emissions. It is about pushing people into EVs so as to push most people out of cars, period (achieved by making them unaffordable and impractical, two signature EV attributes). The “emissions” thing is a straw man. Designed to guilt-trip and justify the force-feeding of the EV.

As regards the actual emissions. I know of no direct comparison; however, almost all EVs are high-performance EVs designed to be very quick and so are very heavy due to all the batteries they need to be quick. They are arguably wastefully quick in that no one needs – to use the term beloved by the left – “ludicrous speed” and it is ipso facto wasteful – another term the left loves – to build an EV that needs 1,000 pounds of batteries to get to 60 in 4 seconds when getting to 60 in 10 seconds is plenty for basic transportation needs.

These huge batteries draw twice or more the power – and burn it up, so to speak – faster than a basic EV that was designed to meet the needs of basic transportation would. So there is something beyond obnoxious about being lectured that an $18k Corolla “emits” too much carbon dioxide via its IC engine but a $50,000 Tesla that gets to 60 twice as quickly and sucks a huge amount of current from the grid, which emits plenty of C02 to generate it, is “environmentally friendlier.”

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