The UK transport and environment department have created a tool to help do the check for people. Unlike the ice assessment which calculates the carbon cost of making the electric car, but left out the cost of making the ice car (why such an unfair comparison wasn’t laughed out of existence, I don’t understand) this assessment looked at everything; from mining of materials to build the cars, batteries for the electric car, extraction of fossil fuels and end of life dismantling costs including reductions in the carbon cost of battery production by recycling materials; an area which if fully utilised could reduce manufacturing battery costs so much that electric and ice cars have similar building carbon costs in entirety.
Ice car producers have also pointed at the dirty nature of grid electricity, however the grid is rapidly cleaning. At the moment, running on the most polluting electricity in the world electric cars have 22% less pollution than diesel, and 28% less than petrol.
Furthermore, with improvements to the grid, planned by 2030, electric cars average co2 emissions per mile will be 4 times smaller, than fossil fuel cars- it’s carbon footprint per mile is already 3 times smaller right now.
In this assessment they also used real world fossil fuel emissions, as this are far higher than what is measured in the lab.
To be fair this assessment also counts the carbon cost of building the solar farms and wind turbines predicted to be built over the next decade.
So the next time a friend starts quoting studies that say different, you can point out the difference between a scientific calculation of the environmental cost and one done by industry who rely on halting or slowing the decarbonising of transport to survive.
