this post was submitted on 23 Dec 2023
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Look, if you think that replacing gas cars with another kind of car is going to save the planet, you've lost the plot. Less than 10% of carbon emissions come from personal vehicles, and electrification doesn't offer significant relief.
If you want to pretend that carbon credits don't exist, you can do that, but they do exist and "eco-friendly" companies just sell them for profit so that someone else can pollute on their behalf.
If electric cars offer any benefit at all, it is basically irrelevant because carbon emissions aren't going down, and carbon credits literally cancel out the good. Those carbon credits are badly over-allocated to EV companies, because those companies overstate their impact, so its likely they are just making things worse.
Elon Musk isn't going to save you.
That’s a short-sighted way to look at it. Less than 10% might come from personal vehicles but 31% comes from commercial transportation which can also be electrified. On top of that, 37% of remaining emissions come from generating energy and electricity from fossil fuels. As more of those sources become alternative sources like wind, water, solar, etc., electric vehicles (including commercial vehicles) take a huge chunk of emissions and dirty forms of energy away.
http://climatechange.chicago.gov/ghgemissions/overview-greenhouse-gases
We don’t need carbon credits. We need clean sources of energy that are sustainable. If we were really desperate, we could come up with nuclear sources but that would need more public support and is rife with bad waste.
No one said anything about Elon. But you’re wrong about electric cars.