Comments:Electric vehicles can be less green than classic fuel cars, Norwegian study finds

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still brief can be good

VERY biased. I wonder who funded the research? If the 32m cars in the UK were on monday all EV, we would need to control pollution at 71 fossil fuel power stations (a decreasing number), rather than 32m mobile ones (a number increasing). It's a NO BRAINER, before you start to consider pollutant cost of getting the oil, the old oil from petrol/diesel cars, etc etc. I would not trust this report 1cm, I would look into who benefits from its distortions.

According to one of the cited sources, "Their research was partly funded by the Norwegian Research Council under the E-Car Project".

Please point me to the bias. I don't see any.

Or maybe, just maybe, you might like to look at the carbon cost of making the sort of batteries these vehicle use. They almost-invariably involve rare-earth metals, which can be as-difficult to extract as oil.

After reading the study, I think the bias is in the blog post used as a source. I agree with Mike Peel that the title should read something like "Electric vehicles could be less green than classic fuel cars, study finds"? Mrchris (talk) 11:55, 7 October 2012 (UTC)

After a bunch of internal discussion, we've tweaked the headline by inserting the words "can be". This is an example of a change we couldn't make once our archiving policy kicks in, 24 hours after publication.

all of u should justr buy a 350 ford. screw the enviroment.

The abstract of the paper gives three examples of the fractional benefit of EV to fuel, of 100,000, 150,000 and 200,000 miles - in all three cases EV comes out better (e.g. "An assumption of 100,000 km decreases the benefit of EVs to 9% to 14% with respect to gasoline vehicles and results in impacts indistinguishable from those of a diesel vehicle."). Of course, the implication is that cars that end up doing less than 100,000 miles are less beneficial than fuel cars. So saying that they are unequivocally "less green", as the title of this article currently does, is wrong - they're less green in some cases, more green in others, rather than absolutely one or the other. Perhaps a better title would be "Electric vehicles can be less green than classic fuel cars, Norwegian study finds"?

"Because of its share of hard coal and lignite combustion, the use of average European electricity for EV transportation does not lead to significant improvements relative to ICEVs. Significant benefits may only be expected for EVs using electricity sources with sulfur intensities comparable to or lower than that of natural gas."

That's in Europe, where there are quite a lot of wind turbines (and windbags like Donald Trump to make them spin unfeasibly fast). Ship them over to the U.S. and you've more of a problem. Push them into India, China, and other countries that say they can't afford clean electricity production? Disastrous.

But you're partially right. Assuming we improve, and clean up, electricity production they will have less impact over the full lifecycle. I don't think that's not going to happen; but, I expect it to be fought hard by vested interests in the energy sector. The impact widespread adoption of electrical vehicles would have on electricity consumption is, I strongly suspect, likely to be dealt with by use of 'dirtier', but well-known, forms of electricity production in the short-to-medium term.

So basically the "less green" part is mostly because they assume coal fired power generation. The idea behind the EV as a green alternative is based on the generation of electricity in a clean way. Interestingly the conclusion is that it is possibly pointless at this time to use EVs on a large scale because it would only be a POTENTIAL in reducing GHG emittions. Instead the focus should rather be on actually reducing GHG emissions now - by shutting down coal fired power plants, reduce energy consumption including energy consumption by transportation.

The title should read something like "Electric vehicles could be less green than classic fuel cars, study finds"?