Everyone knows that electric vehicles are supposed to be better for the planet than gas cars. That’s the driving reason behind a global effort to transition toward batteries.
But what about the harms caused by mining for battery minerals? And coal-fired power plants for the electricity to charge the cars? And battery waste? Is it really true that EVs are better?
The answer is yes. But Americans are growing less convinced.
The net benefits of EVs have been frequently fact-checked, including by NPR. “No technology is perfect, but the electric vehicles are going to offer a significant benefit as compared to the internal combustion engine vehicles,” Jessika Trancik, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told NPR this spring.
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Your dad and mine somehow don’t remember how atrocious the old supply is and all the spill disasters are past mitigated events. Even when their own cars leak oil in the streets, make pretty rainbows, and gave them something else to tell their kids to not touch, it’s all… Normal. Inconsequential. It came from a factory they didn’t see leak and it does down a sewer into a system they can’t see. But, EV mines? We’ll if yours beleives the mines are dirtier than petrol cars, I assume it’s the same as mine: the belief that their crusty “old school” cars are being targeted for removal and that their way of life is at stake and that some elite progressive group wants to make them poor by way of expensive EVs. Just ignore the part where mine brags about affording ever-in creasing gas prices in a gas guzzler personal vehicle.
And we’re too dumb so we try to respond with facts but it’s 100% about their feelings.