Exposing the Myth that Electric Vehicles are Green
How can an electric car be called “Green” when it contains more than 700 pounds of plastic?? Electric vehicle (EV) manufacturers are using more plastic to lower the weight of the car due to the massive battery used, weighing more than 1,000 pounds. Unfortunately, plastic is still made from petrochemicals, the so-called “Dirty Fossil-fuel Industry.”
So, without petrochemicals, the manufacture of electric cars would be extremely difficult. And the primary feedstock for plastic is natural gas liquids (NGLs). Due to the rapid rise in NGLs production, especially in the United States, plastic production has surged. We can see in the chart below, that the United States accounted for nearly 90% of global NGLs production growth since 2007.
So, with all this extra NGLs production, the United States has a monopoly on the Global NGLs Feedstock for going GREEN. Of the 3.8 million barrels per day (mbd) of NGLs global production growth since 2007, the United States accounted for 3.4 mbd of that total.
In tearing apart the “Green Electric Vehicle Myth,” I will focus this article only on the plastic component.
There seems to be this notion that cars manufactured 50 years ago were much heavier than vehicles today due to a higher percentage of metals used. This turns out to be false when we look at the data. According to an Autoweek article by Murliee Martin titled, 50 years of car weight gain: from the Chevelle to the Sonic, the Fairlane to the Focus, a 1967 mid-sized Chevy Chevelle weighed in at 2,915 pounds versus a 2,955 pounds for a 2017 Chevy Sonic subcompact car:
(image courtesy of Autoweek.com, General Motors & Pinterest)
Looks are deceiving… eh? If you read the article linked above, the 1967 Chevy Chevelle with all that metal and very little plastic actually weighed 40 pounds less than the subcompact 2017 Chevy Sonic. Go figure…
I know what you all might be thinking. How much plastic was in that 1967 Chevy Chevelle? Well, I don’t have the exact figure, but using data from the Chemical & Engineering News article, Plastics makers plot the future of the car, the chart below provides the amount of plastic for each year.
I estimated about 30 kilograms (66 pounds) of plastic for the 1967 Chevy Chevelle and 150 kilograms (331 pounds) for the 2017 Chevy Sonic. So, with both cars weighing about the same, the 1967 Chevelle only contained 2% of plastic while the 2017 Sonic consisted of 11% plastic.
How interesting… the newer cars contain more than 10% plastic, but the vehicle’s weight is heavier than the older cars built 50 years ago. Again, the 1967 Chevelle is 40 pounds lighter than the 2017 Chevy Sonic… and the Sonic is a smaller car.
Now, let’s move to the supposed “GREEN” Electric Vehicles. To keep the weight of the EV as low as possible, more plastic is being used. In the VisualCapitalist.com INFOGRAPHIC, How Much Oil Is In An Electric Vehicle, they provided the following quote:
…According to IHS Chemical, by 2020, the average car will use 772 pounds of plastic.
That is where I found the figure for the 2020 Tesla Electric vehicle in the chart above. The approximate average weight of a Tesla EV is 5,000 pounds +/-. Please understand, these figures are just guidelines, not actual amounts… but I would imagine they are in the ballpark.
How can the Electric Vehicle Industry be called “Green” if it consumes a massive amount of petrochemicals in the form of plastics?? Thus, each Electric Vehicle contains at least 15% of the weight in plastic, and I believe this amount will only increase going forward.
The entire GREEN RENEWABLE ENERGY mantra is nothing more than a warm-fuzzy Techno-Delusion. There is nothing Green about Electric Vehicles, Wind and Solar power. The only thing renewable about the Wind and Solar is that the wind will continue to blow, and the sun will continue to shine.
Without Oil, Natural Gas, and Coal, there wouldn’t be any Electric vehicles, Wind or Solar power. When the world wakes up to this fact, then we can start to consider “DEGROWTH” as an option than wasting more fossil fuels on pointless UN-RENEWABLE NON-GREEN EVs, Wind and Solar power.
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James Kamis
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In addition to using large amounts of plastics electrical cars have many other negative effects on earth’s environmental systems.
65% of the USA’s electricity is from fossil fuels. Another 20% from nuclear. Only 15% is from sanctioned environmentally safe sources. Converting to 100% renewables will be extremely costly and will need to be built using huge amounts of fossil fuel generated: electricity, plastics, and mined metals.
Electricity loses 6% in transmission and 4% in distribution. So not very efficient.
There are 170,000 gas stations in the USA which will need to be refitted along with massive changes to electrical lines. This will be incredibly costly and require huge changes to a towns surface and subsurface configuration.
Michael Moore’s “Planet of the Humans” movie states that industrial wind farms, solar farms, biomass, and biofuels are wrecking natural environments.
Electrical car batteries, solar panels , and wind turbines require significant amounts of mined rare earth metals; lithium, cobalt, manganese, nickel, iridium, tellurium, gallium, and silver to function.
Electric vehicle engines rely on rare earths, as do the permanent magnet-based generators inside some wind turbines. Solar panels gobble up a significant share of the world’s supply of , along with a sizable fraction of mined silver and indium.
“Batteries can be recycled through smelting (a process involves using power to melt batteries), direct recovery, and other, newer processes. A smelting process is used to recover many minerals (e.g. lithium, cobalt, nickel) contained in the battery. After a battery is smelted, the lithium ends up as a mixed byproduct and extracting it is costly”. By products of this process must be disposed.
I am all for saving earth’s environmental systems, however there are many hidden problems with electrical cars.
James Kamis
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Brian James
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“Small is the number of people who see with their eyes and think with their minds.” Albert Einstein
Apr 21, 2016 Fossil Fuels: The Greenest Energy
To make earth cleaner, greener and safer, which energy sources should humanity rely on? Alex Epstein of the Center for Industrial Progress explains how modern societies have cleaned up our water, air and streets using the very energy sources you may not have expected–oil, coal and natural gas.
https://youtu.be/BJWq1FeGpCw
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