My first university degree was in electrical and electronic engineering, with a subsequent master's in control systems.

Combine this, perhaps surprising, academic pathway with a lifelong passion for the motorcar, and you can see why I was drawn into the early adoption of electric vehicles.

I bought my first electric hybrid 18 years ago and my first pure electric car nine years ago, and (notwithstanding our poor electric charging infrastructure) I have enjoyed my time with both very much.

Electric vehicles may be a bit soulless, but they're wonderful mechanisms: fast, quiet and, until recently, very cheap to run.

But increasingly, I feel a little duped.

When you start to drill into the facts, electric motoring doesn't seem to be quite the environmental panacea it is claimed to be.

As you may know, the government has proposed a ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars from 2030.

The problem with the initiative is that it seems to be largely based on conclusions drawn from only one part of a car's operating life: what comes out of the exhaust pipe.

Electric cars, of course, have zero exhaust emissions, which is a welcome development, particularly in respect of the air quality in city centres.

But the situation is very different if you zoom out a bit and look at a bigger picture that includes the car's manufacture.

In advance of the Cop26 climate conference in Glasgow in 2021, Volvo released figures claiming that greenhouse gas emissions during the production of an electric car are nearly 70% higher than when manufacturing a petrol one.

How so?

The problem lies with the lithium-ion batteries fitted currently to nearly all-electric vehicles: they're absurdly heavy, huge amounts of energy are required to make them, and they are estimated to last only upwards of 10 years.

It seems a perverse choice of hardware with which to lead the automobile's fight against the climate crisis.

Unsurprisingly, a lot of effort is going into finding something better.

New, so-called solid-state batteries are being developed that should charge more quickly and could be about a third of the weight of the current ones - but they are years away from being on sale, by which time, of course, we will have made millions of overweight electric cars with rapidly obsolescing batteries.

Hydrogen is emerging as an interesting alternative fuel, even though we are slowly developing a truly "green" way of manufacturing it.

It can be used in one of two ways.

It can power a hydrogen fuel cell (essentially, a kind of battery); the car manufacturer Toyota has poured a lot of money into the development of these.

Such a system weighs half of an equivalent lithium-ion battery and a car can be refuelled with hydrogen at a filling station as fast as with petrol.

If the lithium-ion battery is an imperfect device for electric cars, concerns have been raised over their use in heavy trucks for long-distance haulage because of the weight; an alternative is injecting hydrogen into a new kind of piston engine.

JCB, the company that makes yellow diggers, has made huge strides with hydrogen engines and hopes to put them into production in the next couple of years.

If hydrogen wins the race to power trucks - and as a result, every filling station stocks it - it could be a popular and accessible choice for cars. Continue reading

A report released by the London-based Business & Human Rights Resource Centre (BHRRC) revealed that these supply chains provide batteries to major companies such as Panasonic, Tesla and Toyota.

The lack of transparency in EV battery supply chains allows end-user companies to distance themselves from lower-level abuses and evade responsibility for associated risks, according to the BHRRC's report titled "Powering Electric Vehicles."

The BHRRC identified the Rio Tuba Nickel Mining Corporation (Rio Tuba) in the Philippines, as well as Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt (ZHC) and CNGR Advanced Materials (CNGR), two Chinese companies operating in Indonesia, as responsible for the "rising incidents of human and environmental rights violations."

"The human rights abuses in electric vehicle supply chains need to be urgently interrogated and mitigated … and supply chain transparency and accountability must be at the heart of this," said Pochoy Labog, the BHRRC's Southeast Asia researcher.

The mining operations of these companies have had detrimental effects on local communities, including the loss of food security, destruction of rainforests, water contamination, harm to marine life and health-related problems such as respiratory issues.

Additionally, the BHRRC stated that the companies failed to obtain free, prior consent from indigenous communities before mining their lands.

Negative consequences of mining are evident

The mining and processing companies involved in these supply chains have refuted the claims made by the BHRRC, stating that their activities do not significantly impact the environment and that their own investigations have not found any rights violations.

However, the report highlights the negative consequences of these mining operations in various regions.

In Central Sulawesi, Indonesia, forests are being destroyed, mine tailings have contaminated rivers and streams, and coral reefs are being affected by the contaminated waters.

In Palawan, the Philippines, Rio Tuba's mining operations have led to water contamination, loss of food security and the destruction of rainforests.

Locals have reported health issues such as coughs and respiratory diseases, prompting water quality tests that revealed the presence of hexavalent chromium, a human carcinogen, in river water samples.

Greenpeace Philippines country director Lea Guerrero said mining is unsustainable since "extractive activity itself is highly destructive."

"We need to change how we use materials as a society," she told BenarNews. "Many mining concessions are located in islands where many biodiversity and ecosystems are destroyed just to extract minerals."

Indonesia, the world's largest producer of nickel, with 21 million metric tons (4.6 billion pounds) in proven reserves, and the Philippines, ranking fifth in reserves but second in nickel production with 330,000 metric tons (728 million pounds) in 2022, play crucial roles in the global nickel market.

"As the globe transitions to these cleaner sources of energy, companies must recognise their role in mitigating the endemic human rights issues in EV battery supply chains - and must use their leverage to hold suppliers accountable for risks in their value chains," BHRRC said.

Sources

Radio Free Asia

Business Green

CathNews New Zealand

Consumer NZ, with support from Te Manatu Waka-Ministry of Transport, decided to investigate to see if these suggestions were true.

They assessed fuel use in five PHEVs and five hybrids from five brands, the subsequent Consumer magazine report says.

Their aim was to see how real-world fuel consumption compares with the manufacturers' claims.

"While it's a small sample, it has generated some useful insights," Consumer says.

Manufacturers' fuel efficiency figures come from laboratory tests conducted under controlled settings, they point out.

"However, in reality, fuel efficiency is likely to be lower - and lower still if you don't drive with efficiency in mind."

Crucial info

Consumer notes that in New Zealand, the Clean Car Discount Scheme uses the published fuel use to calculate fees and rebates for each car.

Having the fees and rebates set to the right level is crucial for encouraging people into the right sort of vehicles.

"We also tested the real-world fuel efficiency of hybrids, PHEVs and electric vehicles (EVs) in 2020.

"We uncovered that the price of running a Hyundai Ioniq PHEV for a week compared very similarly to the hybrid version.

"It was a surprising result - we expected the PHEV cost to be much lower," Consumer says.

Consumer's real world test

"Each vehicle we trial gets the same treatment: a week of commuting in rush hour from Lower Hutt to Consumer HQ (a round trip of 28km); a run to the supermarket; and a drive over the Remutaka Hill and back to see how it goes on a longer weekend trip. In total, one week's usage makes for about 270km of motoring.

"We record fuel use (both actual and on the trip computer) and measure electricity usage where appropriate, with PHEVs.

"The actual fuel use is measured by filling the tank to the brim at the start of the trial and then again at the end, and comparing numbers.

"It's an inexact science that doesn't use any specialist or calibrated equipment, but it's still a repeatable, real-world appraisal."

Drawing some conclusions

Consumer says a summary of their findings shows:

• PHEVs averaged 45 percent over their claimed fuel use on their trip computers and 73 percent over with the fuel measured at the pump.
• Hybrids averaged 10 percent over their claimed fuel use on their trip computers and 20 percent over with the fuel measured at the pump

Although Consumer has included a chart showing numerous vehicles' percentage difference from claimed fuel usage, it's urging readers to treat them with caution.

"It's important not to sensationalise those figures - it's not robust science," Consumer says.

"Rather, it's real-world driving with the percent gains blown out by the small numbers in the PHEV claims.

"Even so, it is quite telling in our sample that the figures were much higher than claimed."

Source

• Consumer magazine

That would seem to be good news, as the world tries to wean itself off fossil fuels that are wrecking the global climate. But as electric cars become more popular, some question just how environmentally friendly they are.

The batteries in electric vehicles, for example, charge on power that is coming straight off the electric grid — which is itself often powered by fossil fuels.

And there are questions about how energy-intensive it is to build an EV or an EV battery, versus building a comparable traditional vehicle.

Are electric vehicles greener?

The short answer is yes — but their full green potential is still many years away.

Experts broadly agree that electric vehicles create a lower carbon footprint over the course of their lifetime than do cars and trucks that use traditional, internal combustion engines.

Last year, researchers from the universities of Cambridge, Exeter and Nijmegen in The Netherlands found that in 95% of the world, driving an electric car is better for the environment than driving a gasoline-powered car.

Electricity grids in most of the world are still powered by fossil fuels such as coal or oil, and electric vehicles depend on that energy to get charged. Separately, EV battery production remains an energy-intensive process.

A study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Energy Initiative found that the battery and fuel production for an EV generates higher emissions than the manufacturing of an automobile. But those higher environmental costs are offset by electric vehicles superior energy efficiency over time.

In short, the total emissions per mile for battery-powered cars are lower than comparable cars with internal combustion engines.

"If we are going to take a look at the current situation, in some countries, electric vehicles are better even with the current grid," Sergey Paltsev, a senior research scientist at the MIT Energy Initiative and one of the study's authors, told CNBC.

Paltsev explained that the full benefits of electric vehicles will be realized only after the electricity sources become renewable, and it might take several decades for that to happen.

"Currently, the electric vehicle in the U.S., on average, would emit about 200 grams of CO2 per mile," he said. "We are projecting that with cleaning up the grid, we can reduce emissions from electric vehicles by 75%, from about 200 (grams) today to about 50 grams of CO2 per mile in 2050."

Similarly, Paltsev said MIT research showed non-plug-in hybrid cars with internal combustion engines currently emit about 275 grams of CO2 per mile. In 2050, their projected emissions are expected to be between 160 to 205 grams of CO2 per mile — the range is wider than electric vehicles because fuel standards vary from place to place.

Decarbonization is the process of reducing greenhouse gas emissions produced by burning fossil fuels. Efforts to cut down pollution across various industries are expected to further reduce the environmental impact of EV production and charging over time.

"When you look forward to the rest of the decade, where we will see massive amounts of decarbonization in power generation and a massive amount of decarbonization in the industrial sector, EVs will benefit from all of that decarbonization," Eric Hannon, a Frankfurt-based partner at McKinsey & Company, told CNBC.

Batteries are the biggest emitter

EVs rely on rechargeable lithium-ion batteries to run.

The process of making those batteries — from using mining raw materials like cobalt and lithium to production in gigafactories and transportation — is energy-intensive, and one of the biggest sources of carbon emissions from EVs today, experts said.

Gigafactories are facilities that produce EV batteries on a large scale.

"Producing electric vehicles leads to significantly more emissions than producing petrol cars. Depending on the country of production, that's between 30% to 40% extra in production emissions, which is mostly from the battery production," said Florian Knobloch, a fellow at the Cambridge Centre for Environment, Energy and Natural Resource Governance.

Those higher production emission numbers are seen as "an initial investment, which pays off rather quickly due to the reduced lifetime emissions."

China currently dominates battery production, with 93 gigafactories producing lithium-ion battery cells versus only four in the U.S., the Washington Post reported this year.

"I think the battery is the most complicated component in the EV, and has the most complex supply chain," George Crabtree, director of the U.S. Department of Energy's Joint Center for Energy Storage Research, told CNBC, adding that the energy source used in battery production makes a huge difference on the carbon footprint for EVs.

Batteries made in older gigafactories in China are usually powered by fossil fuels, because that was the trend five to ten years ago, he explained. So, electric vehicles that are built with batteries from existing factories are going to have large carbon footprints.

But that's changing, he said, as "people have realized that's a huge carbon footprint." Continue reading

Nestled in western Arizona's Big Sandy River Valley, the ranch protects Ha' Kamwe' — hot springs that are sacred to the Hualapai and known today in English as Cofer Hot Springs.

As the shadows lengthened, Bender saw something surprising — men working on a nearby hillside.

"I asked them what they were doing," Bender recalled.

"They told me they were drilling."

As it turns out, along with sacred places including the hot springs, ceremony sites and ancestral burials, the valley also holds an enormous lithium deposit.

Now, exploratory work by Australian company Hawkstone Mining threatens those places, and with them, the religious practices of the Hualapai and other Indigenous nations.

But this threat is nothing new: Centuries of land expropriation, combined with federal court rulings denying protection to sacred sites, have long devastated Indigenous religious freedom.

Cholla Canyon Ranch, where Bender is the caretaker, includes approximately 360 acres about halfway between Phoenix and Las Vegas, flanked to the west by the lush riparian corridor of Big Sandy River.

The valley is part of an ancient salt route connecting tribes from as far north as central Utah to communities in Baja California and along the Pacific Coast, documented in the songs and oral traditions of many Indigenous nations.

"There are stories about that land and what it represents to the Hualapai Tribe," Bender said.

"To me, it holds a really, really sacred valley of life in general."

According to tribal council member Richard Powskey, who directs the Hualapai Natural Resources Department, the Hualapai harvest native plant materials along the river corridor for everything from cradle boards to drums.

The mining company (USA Lithium Ltd., which has since been acquired by Hawkstone Mining Ltd.) hadn't told the Hualapai Tribe it was searching for lithium on nearby Bureau of Land Management lands.

That evening, Bender was shocked to see the destruction taking place.

The company eventually bulldozed a network of roads, drilling nearly 50 test wells more than 300 feet deep in the sacred landscape.

This summer, Hawkstone plans to triple its exploratory drilling, almost encircling Canyon Ranch and the springs it protects.

In the next few years, Hawkstone hopes to break ground on an open-pit mine and dig an underground slurry to pipe the ore about 50 miles to a plant in Kingman, Arizona, where it will use sulfuric acid to extract the lithium. Lithium, which is listed as a critical mineral, is crucial for reaching the Biden administration's goal of replacing gas-guzzling vehicles with electric vehicles, and Big Sandy Valley is relatively close to the Tesla factory in Nevada. Altogether, Hawkstone has mining rights on more than 5,000 acres of public land in Arizona for this project. Yet tribes whose sacred sites are at risk have almost no say in their decisions.

Public lands from Bears Ears to Oak Flat contain countless areas of cultural and religious importance.

But when tribes have gone to court to protect these sites — and their own religious freedom — they've consistently lost.

Courts have narrowly interpreted what counts as a religious burden for tribes, largely to preserve the federal government's ability to use public lands as it sees fit. Continue reading

• Maya L. Kapoor is a writer and editor based in Lotus, California. She was formerly an associate editor at High Country News.

"We shouldn't delude ourselves electric cars are good. They're just not as problematic as what I call ‘fossil cars'."

The study, published in Transportation Research Part D, was led by PhD graduate Dr Arif Hasan (now at the Ministry for the Environment), with the director of the University's New Zealand Climate Change Research Institute, Professor David Frame, another co-author.

They were motivated by the fact that, despite New Zealand having an "old" light-vehicle fleet with an average age of 14.1 years in 2018, nobody had attempted to calculate the full per-kilometre cost of ownership (PCO) for various cars.

Their study investigated the PCOs of new and used light-duty electric vehicles (EVs) and petrol-powered cars (internal combustion-engined vehicle, or ICEVs) over 12 years. They also looked at the emissions reduction potential of EVs.

They found the cost of owning a used EV was the lowest, at an average of about 25.5 cents a kilometre, compared with 31.5 cents for a used petrol-powered car.

Also, they calculated that replacing a light petrol-powered ICEV with a light EV could reduce carbon emissions from the use by 90 per cent if New Zealand can maintain its low-emission grid electricity.

Chapman says EVs clearly need to be part of the solution.

"But, and it is difficult to get this across, even fully electric vehicles have a significant carbon footprint because there is all that manufacturing, shipping of them around the world, recycling the battery - so, when you consider not just emissions from ‘use' but all the emissions involved, switching from a fossil car to an EV saves only about 50 per cent of your total emissions.

"So you can save 50 per cent roughly, but you can't save the other 50 per cent — they are still a carbon-intensive beast, and way worse than electric buses or electric bikes, or even car-share.

"So a better solution lies out there and it is a mix of some EVs and getting a whole lot of people to see there is another way of living, around active travel, bikes, walking, and living more centrally, in apartments and townhouses.

"The ideal would include, if they want to get around a bit further, sharing an EV parked down the road in the EV car-share park."

EV drivers shouldn't get a "free pass" on motorways or toll roads, or have free registration or road-user charges, says Chapman.

"They should be paying all those fees, but much less than fossil cars, which ought to be heavily penalised.

"In terms of carbon emissions, you don't really want to encourage people to buy electric vehicles. What you really want to do is discourage any sort of private motor vehicle, especially fossil vehicles."

Chapman says there have been 70 years of unrelenting car domination and investment on behalf of the car.

"That whole culture around cars is very hard to change. It is shifting but needs to shift radically. Continue reading

• Image: DNV.com

"Soon we will start collaborating with automobile manufacturers who are able to provide electrical vehicles for evaluation," said Roberto Mignucci, director of workshops and equipment for the office governing Vatican City State.

He told L'Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, Nov. 10 that an electric fleet was perfect since the average annual mileage for each of their many service and support vehicles is less than 4,000 miles (6,000 km) given the small size of the 109-acre city state and the close proximity of its extraterritorial properties, such as the papal villa and farm at Castel Gandolfo, 13 miles south of Rome.

Read More

The study considered the production of batteries as well as the German electricity mix in making this determination.

Germany spent thousands of euros on electric car subsidies per vehicle to put a million electric vehicles on the road, but those subsidies have done nothing to reach the country's greenhouse gas emission targets.

This is just the latest example of government programs expecting one outcome and getting quite another, instead.

To some it is ironic; to others it is funny.

At IER, we believe it to be sad, as it is a waste of time and money that could be better put to use solving real problems.

The researchers compared the carbon dioxide output for a Tesla Model 3 (electric) and a Mercedes C220d sedan (diesel).

• The Mercedes releases about 141 grams of carbon dioxide per kilometer driven, including the carbon emitted to drill, refine, and transport its fuel.
• The Tesla releases between 156 and 181 grams, including battery production.

Mining and processing the lithium, cobalt, and manganese used for batteries consume a lot of energy.

A Tesla Model 3 battery, for example, represents between 11 and 15 metric tons of carbon dioxide.

Given a battery lifetime of 10 years and an annual travel distance of 15,000 kilometers, 73 to 98 grams of carbon dioxide are emitted per kilometer.

Germany's growing reliance on coal for electricity generation was also considered in the study.

The country relies on coal when the wind is not blowing and the sun is not shining. As a result, charging a Tesla in Bavaria releases about 83 grams of carbon dioxide per kilometer driven.

The European Union also provides benefits for manufacturers of electric vehicles, by allowing them to claim zero emissions under its strict emissions limits.

Not all European countries may emit more carbon dioxide from electric vehicles than from diesel or gasoline vehicles, however.

In France, for example, electric vehicles may emit less carbon dioxide than diesel vehicles because France gets the majority of its electricity from nuclear power.

But in many other European countries, that is certainly not the case.

Other Alternatives

According to the German researchers, the European Union target of 59 grams of carbon dioxide per kilometer by 2030 corresponds to a "technically unrealistic" consumption of 2.2 liters of diesel or 2.6 liters of gasoline per 100 kilometers.

The researchers believe it would be preferable to look at other sources of power for automobiles—for example, methane engines, "whose emissions are one-third less than those of diesel motors."

Other Studies

A study in 2017 by researchers at the University of Michigan found that the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by electric cars varied wildly by country. Continue reading

Image: Money Control

Correction

Since publication, it has been ponted out the study has faced a raft of criticism over selective use of data, reports German press.

According to "WirtschaftsWoche" the study contradicts "in a blatant manner as well as all serious, international studies in recent months," while mobility expert Don Dahlmann explains that the study is counting on wrong numbers. The Federal Environment Agency points to an extensive earlier study, according to which e-cars perform better than diesel cars.

The point has also been raised that in the calculations of the production of electricity, other emissions involved in the production of the cars were not taken into account, reports Spiegel.