• AA5B@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    No one burns coal anymore!

    But seriously I saw one model by energy portfolio per US State, calculating how long you’d need to drive to make up for the additional emissions during construction

    • all had a threshold where the EV came out ahead, lifetime emissions
    • a couple states with cleaner power, had a threshold as low as two years typical driving, then it’s all gravy
    • West Virginia and Wyoming were the worst, with high reliance on coal for power generation. The threshold was 14 years, so an EV would still come out ahead if it lasted its expected lifetime (Teslas are supposedly good for 15 years, 250k miles before replacing battery)

    WV and WY are heavy red, rural, sparsely populated states, so not a good scenario for EVs anyway. But there’s also a point there about how heavily polluting they are, how the efforts if like 379M to reduce our impact on the environment are sabotaged by less than 1M owned by coal companies