New report suggests EV’s are out of reach for the average American, and broad adoption will actually cause an increase in traditional air pollution
It asks whether the internal combustion engine is on its way out. It soon will be, according to advocates for “zero-emissions vehicle” (ZEV) technologies, especially battery-powered electric vehicles. They claim that ZEVs will offer superior performance, lower cost, and, most importantly, “emissions-free” driving.
Sound too good to be true? That’s because it is, according to a new report published by the Manhattan Institute. Dr. Jonathan Lesser, the author of “Short Circuit: The High Cost of Electric Vehicles,” argues that critics of the internal combustion engine fail to consider just how clean and efficient new cars are.
Using a recent forecast prepared by the U.S. Energy Information Administration, Lesser’s analysis shows that, over the period 2018 – 2050, the electric generating plants that will charge new EVs will emit more air pollution than the same number of new internal combustion engines, even accounting for air pollution from oil refineries that manufacture gasoline.
What’s more, EV subsidies benefit the wealthy at the expense of the poor. A nationwide survey of EV owners in 2017 found that 56% had household incomes of at least $100,000 and 17% had household incomes of at least $200,000. In 2016. median household income for the US as a whole was less than $58,000.
It’s time to hit the brakes on the government’s drive for electric vehicles.
Short Circuit: The High Cost of Electric Vehicle Subsidies
Abstract
Many claim that “zero-emissions vehicles” (ZEVs), especially battery-powered electric vehicles, should replace most, if not all, cars and trucks powered by gasoline-burning internal combustion engines. The primary rationale is to reduce air pollution and carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.
To effect this change, governments are spending billions of dollars to subsidize electric vehicles. These subsidies include state and federal tax credits for purchasing ZEVs and programs to subsidize the installation of vehicle-charging infrastructure in businesses, households, and along highways. Several states also have mandated the sale of ZEVs. For example, an executive order signed by California governor Jerry Brown in January requires 5 million ZEVs to be on the state’s roads and highways by 2030.
Will these subsidies and programs accomplish their objectives? And at what cost? A review of the literature finds few cost-benefit studies on these key questions.
KEY FINDINGS
- Broad-based adoption of ZEVs will increase overall emissions of sulfur dioxide, oxides of nitrogen, and particulates, compared with the same number of new internal combustion engines. The simple fact is that, because of stringent emissions standards and low-sulfur gasoline, new gasoline-powered cars and trucks today emit very little pollution, and they will emit even less in the future.
- While new ZEVs will reduce CO2 emissions compared with new internal combustion vehicles, the overall reduction will be less than 1% of total forecast energy-related U.S. CO2 emissions through 2050. That reduction will have no measurable impact on world climate—and thus the economic value of CO2 emissions reductions associated with ZEVs is effectively zero.
- Subsidies for ZEVs and the required infrastructure to support them benefit the higher-income consumers who can afford to purchase them at the expense of lower-income consumers who cannot. In California alone, the total cost of ZEV subsidies, including federal tax credits and state rebates for ZEV purchases, as well as subsidies for private and public charging infrastructure, is likely to exceed $100 billion.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Electric vehicles like all mechanical transportation in the US will need to be preceded by the construction of the roads and rails(internal combustion cars and trains). The ability to charge while driving will need to be solved. Of course, the additional electric power requirements to replace 20 million barrels of oil per day will require the at least twice as much energy equivalent as the oil.
Corrrect me if I am wrong, but if EV’s replace the ICE, then refineries will not run/exist in their current form. From where will all of the hydrocarbons come, hydrocarbons that are used worldwide to produce plastics, pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, rubber (for the EV’s tires), etc.? You won’t be able to make the car to make use of the battery and motor!
There will still be refineries. They will be smaller and fewer in number.
Sorry, but that is wishful thinking. Today’s refineries are optimized to produce the most economic mix of components. If a refinery cannot produce transportation fuels that will sell for a profit, that refinery will not be able to produce the hydrocarbons necessary to make the polymers, etc. that this world craves. You do not have an answer, period.
Necessity is the mother of invention, EVs are not yet necessary. When it becomes necessary, that is when electric storage technology and grid capacities will meet the requirements.
I have always said that laziness was the father of invention. When people want an easier way to do things they find it or invent it. As of now, it is much easier to use a ICE car than an EV. No waiting to recharge, pull in to a gas station, fill’er up, grab a cup of coffee and be on your way for another 400 miles or s in just a few minutes.
There has been a necessity for storing electricity since decades… the electric motor has not been invented for EVs a few years ago… electric trains, trams, metro, etc… have been around for more than a century now…
The fact is that Mother Nature has decided that storing one coulomb of electric charge is “difficult”, and no technology, of any kind, will be able to change that… the consequence being that batteries are and will remain bulky and/or heavy.
The obvious solution is anti-matter, light weight, high energy density.
What’s not to love?
For an all-encompassing comparison between similar el. and gas. cars see:
masterresource.org/electric-vehicles/energy-usage-cost-gasoline-vs-electric/
Way back in the 1970s I drove a Honda CVCC. If I kept my right foot off the floor, which was hard to do since it was a fun car to drive, I would get 40 mpg in town and well over 55 mpg on the highway. Trying to see just how good a mileage I could get I actually got close to 60 on on trip. Since then I have owned a hybrid, not as much fun to drive, but because of safety equipment primarily, barely got over 40 on the highway. Appreciate some of the same people demanding we all drive EVs, or no cars at all, were the ones that forced all the safety requirements on the modern car. The difference in weight between my Honda CVCC and the hybrid was around a thousand pounds.
I have a pure ICE Honda Civic that gets between 40 and 48 mpg on the highway without the need of an expensive battery and hybrid drive train. Coastal highways it gets 48 mpg and inland hilly highways it gets closer to 40.
I am in the process of restoring my 1994 Honda Civic VX that got 64 mpg on one coastal highway trip. usually was in the mid to high 50s on most interstate trips. Only 800 and some made so finding parts is my major holdup. (plus I need to rewire the whole thing.) Of course it only has a steering wheel airbag and the crumple zones wouldn’t pass today’s test standards, but still miss its fuel sipping ways.
Which goes to the comment above:
Many Chinese electrics they’re building are little more than enclosed electric carts. Not all, but a good percentage. There’s no way they’d survive EU or US crash tests.
Public charging stations have been created by some govts,but thos charging staions are slow, and cheap
and basically useless. The new CCS protocol fast charging stations are being built by automaker and oil companies and private charging companies. There wil be no govt subsidies for hese stations.
The main reason electric cars will prevail has nothing much to do with emissions, but the fact that electric cars are so superior in their design and the low cost of their fuel. This is difficult to see in the recent past, where electric cars like Tesla were very expensive and complicated – expensive so that the high cost of batteries could be hidden. There will be low cost electrics before long, which will be simple, require virtually no maintenance (like your refridgerator) cheap to fuel and cheap to maintain. Then it will become very apparent the advantages of electric cars
I agree. Once the problem of driving range is solved there will be no drawbacks and lots of advantages. I wonder if a way can be found to charge batteries “on the fly.”
Further to the above, I wonder if a high voltage cable can be embedded in the roadway that generates enough of a field so that a pickup in an EV can extract enough power to keep going. Or maybe several cables.
Great! Since they’re so superior, taxpayers don’t have to subsidize them, right?
Just looking ahead. I agree subsidies should be phased out.
Same “long tailpipe” nonsense that’s been debunked repeatedly. Here’s the biggest flaw with his study: EVs do NOT increase coal pollution.
Coal electric plants are BASELOAD. A baseload plant doesn’t follow changing electricity demand. The plant is run up to full output and left there. Changes in electricity demand are handled by medium and peaking plants (not coal.)
Coal pollution therefore exists at a fixed level. You can’t make a plant already running 100% run any harder. Coal plants are baseload because the huge boilers can take DAYS to ramp up or down – they can’t react fast enough to follow changing demand. So plugging a dozen EVs, or 10,000 EVs can’t make coal pollution increase.
The only scenario in which EVs make coal pollution increase is if more coal plants get built because of EVs. But NOBODY is planning this. Natural gas plants today are cheaper to build and operate.
The decision on how to supply an increasing load should be purely an economic one and not driven by any presupposition that CO2 is a “pollutant.”
i used to think that subsidies for the rich were at the expense of the poor, but it’s not really true. The poor don’t actually pay enough in taxes to support their own services. This is just the rich getting their own money back.
….while calling for carbon taxes on the poor.
Utility subsidization makes the poor pay disportionately. A greater percentage of their income goes for utilities than does for the wealthy. When utility rates are used to subsidize it’s far more regressive than a flat tax.
Yes, but the main reason is the rest of the economy will have to work overtime to pay for the broad adoption rate of tax credit mining that underlies this scenario.
The report has a huge weakness. They just compare how may tons of particulate emissions we have from the car tailpipes versus the power plants without taking into account that the taipipe emissions are lokal, where people breath, and the power plants emissions are from tall chimneys.
I can think of two reasons for this omission, eigther they have a hidden agenda to bash electric vehicles, or they are just stupid.
/Jan
Please do. Compare particulate emissions for gasoline cars to the average combustion electric powerplant fuel mix in the US.
Jan, are you sure you’re talking about a real problem?
https://junkscience.com/2016/09/fact-sheet-particulate-matter-in-outdoor-air-does-not-cause-death/
“EPA has tested a variety of air pollutants — including very high exposures to PM2.5 — on over 6,000 human volunteers. Many of these volunteers were elderly or already health-compromised — the very groups EPA claims are most susceptible to dying from PM2.5 exposures. EPA has admitted that there have been no deaths or any dangerous adverse events clearly caused by these PM2.5 exposures.”
I do think that the problem is real. The relation between lung cancer and various forms of airpollution is very well Established.
It is also well known that PM2.5 is taken up in the blood and can contribute to inflammation in the veins and ultimately heart failure.
There will always be some report around which object to well estabished facts, but the minority may not be right every time.
Jan, I understand your point. However, are EV’s the right way to go? Moscow ones considered to only allow citizens in Moscow to register LPG driven cars, in order to improve air quality in the city.
To me, this sound much more feasible than EV. A feasibility study involving usability, economics and durability, in addition to time frames, drawbacks and development time, should always precede any undertaking. I have been doing R&D in the industry for decades and this has always been a must, before you go anywhere. I doubt this has been done adequately when it comes to EV’s. To me it all sounds more like a “feel good” concept, that will give politicians a better foothold.
Yes, LPG is definitely better for the evironment than gasoline an diesel. They may have a role in an intermediate time frame, but I am convinced that EV’s will take over in the end because they are better in many areas. They have better performance, have better energy economy, have the potential to be completely emission free, and they give a more comfortable driving experience.
My car is a 1992 Lexus (in very good condition, thank you) which gets 20 mpg. I drive it about 4000 miles a year, and think it’s as ecological a transportation choice as I could make. Consider the mining and refining, raw materials, transport, recycling and manufacturing, required to make a new car. Consider, also, the ecological cost of disposing of my previous car. Instead, all I require is some gasoline, and a few parts now and then. If somebody buys a plug-in EV, the car itself requires even more to manufacture — and though it requires no gasoline, it still requires energy, generated (mostly) by fossil fuels and subject to transmission and conversion losses along the way.
I was raised by parents who went through the depression. They had a little verse: “Use it up, wear it out; make it do, or do without.” That’d be a better rallying cry for climate alarmists than MORE WINDMILLS!
Yes, electric vehicles will always have the advantage that centrally generated power can have particulates, hydrocarbons, O3, NOx, SOx, scrubbed out at source, which is easier to engineer. (I ignore CO2 completely because it is not pollution).
But modern engine technology means any extra gains from either source are now marginal at best. It is a moot point. But too many greens think there is more to be gained from imposing ever stricter standards that in reality may be too stringent for a pristine montane forest to meet.
Most of the EPA’s work is mostly done. The agency should be shrunk, Scott Pruitt. It should not be allowed to run on, consuming precious resources, just to satisfy green vanities. If someone did an analysis of the actual incremental benefit to the environment of EPA funding, I suspect the results would be embarrassing. But that is exactly the sort of question modern environmentalists should be asking themselves. They are 50 years out of date.
Pruitt for President in 2024. You heard it here first.
“over the period 2018 – 2050, the electric generating plants that will charge new EVs will emit more air pollution than the same number of new internal combustion engines”
This claim is sooooo ridiculous. I may only believe it if “CO2 emissions” was the only consideration when accounting for “air pollution”. And still I am sure I would find something wrong with the numbers. It just doesn’t pass the smell test.
This is from the document: EIA estimates total electric generation of 4,198 TWh (106) and total SO2 and NOx emissions of 1.25 million tons and 1.01 million tons, respectively.(107)
When looking at the references, the key reference 107 used for pollution generated during the generation of electricity just says “Ibid”. What the f*** is that “Ibid”? I’ve looking for it in the internet with no success. And those two values of 1.25 million tons and 1.01 million tons totally affect the conclussions.
Ibid. (Latin, short for ibidem, meaning “in the same place”) is the term used to provide an endnote, footnote, or bibliography citation or reference for a source that was cited in the preceding note or list item.
Here meaning 106 EIA Annual Energy Outlook 2018, table 8.
Thanks a lot. If the source is supposed to be “EIA Annual Energy Outlook 2018, table 8”, then there is a porblem because that table ONLY provides information on the sources of the energy and not on the emissions of pollutants of such sources.
I correct myself, the table does include this information, scroll bar was a bit hidden
And now that I can compare the expected evolution of energy production and pollution caused by such production, I can see that it does NOT make any sense. Production by 2030 is expected to increase by less than 200TWh compared to currently, and renewable energy will increase by more than 300TWh, which means that energy produced by other non-renewable means will decrease. Coal in particular decreases by more than 60TWh. However, despite this, they claim that emissions of SO2 increase by a whopping 25%. Totally ridiculous.
So the problem is not really on this paper but on its ridiculous source “EIA Annual Energy Outlook 2018”.
I’ve found another source for SO2 emission intensity in USA between 1996 and 2012.
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/2013EF000196
According to this source, current (2012) value of SO2 emission intensity for Coal is roughly 1.5 g/kWh and for natural gas it is just 0.01g/kWh oe lower, meaning that it is negligible compared to coal. And they are both going down quickly. However the EIA expects emissions of SO2 to increase by 25% at the same time that it expects a reduction in Coal use and a small increase in Natural gas use. Really silly.
It seems like some people here see coal power as virtually pollution free when renewable alternatives are discussed, but as huge polluters when they are sources for electricity to electric vehicles.
It is something in that logic that evades me.
If the MATS emission standards is implemented they will be very clean indeed, but the opposition to that is also strong.
Formula E vs. Formula 1
Top speed
225 vs. 370 kph
0-100 kph
3.0 vs. 2.4 seconds
Power
270 vs. 750 HP
Operating time
0.5 vs. 3+ hours
http://hanabi.autoweek.com/sites/default/files/styles/gen-932-524/public/_R3I9974.jpg
So government subsidies of electric vehicles simply enable wealthy people to “virtual signal” at the expense of taxpayers while doing nothing to benefit the environment. When you do things by consensus, what you’re really doing is following the latest fad without regard to actual science and without considering the unintended consequences.