Yes, as it should be. Currently at Lake Mead with temperatures 15 degrees above average, and Washington state is getting a foot of rain, and the midwest is about to have a 40-50 degree temperature swing. This is climate change, and we are too late.
Meanwhile, some EV owners smugly recharge their vehicles from carbon burning facilities that then transmit hundreds of miles before it even gets to them, on top of all the manufacturing and battery associated environmental costs.
Some reports[0, Table 1] show these coal fueled 'electric' cars are about equivalent to a ~30mpg ICE car all in, but of course at least the ICE driver is paying a motor fuel tax, meanwhile the smug EV owner is paying only a tiny amount of tax on electric utilities. Thus the externalities look way worse for the coal powered electric driver.
Of course, if you fuel off of something like solar or natural gas you can do far better, but a lot of people are just stopping at the point they have electric and then patting themselves on the back as superior.
The neat thing about electric cars is that they get cleaner as the grid gets cleaner. If you bought an EV in 2015 (when this report was published) and were worried about the grid mix, I have good news for you. Electricity production from coal in the US is in the process of falling off a cliff, dropping to 15% of the electricity mix in 2023 from over 30% in 2015. https://wolfstreet.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/US-electri...
> Of course, if you fuel off of something like solar or natural gas you can do far better, but a lot of people are just stopping at the point they have electric and then patting themselves on the back as superior.
I don't think making up a smug EV owner is a very substantial comment. I haven't. met anyone who thinks like this. I imagine most people with electric vehicles would be happy if their energy came from cleaner sources.
Yes that's why the #1 EV company king in the US was embedded with the candidate who had practically a campaign line of bringing back coal, and a large portion of his customers were enthusiastic about this.
Yeah Elon is a dangerous dumbass, and people that support Trump voted to burn the planet. Doesn't really change that most EV owners are environmentally conscious, and if anything, had a strong backlash to Elon's dive into backwards politics
EV owners are a dominating reason why Trump came into power. The incredible increase in value of Tesla allowed Elon to buy twitter, and his manipulation of twitter was arguably what pushed the scale just over a balance.
Coal power is only about 20% of the US power generation at this point so it's not all or even most of a hypothetical EV's power source. So even where it is used 30 MPG is still actually pretty good gas mileage as well especially for their weight and size.
