Opponents of clean energy love to make misleading claims about the emissions needed to construct, manufacture, or operate solar power plants, wind farms, electric vehicles, or electric industrial equipment like electric arc furnaces. They are working hard to create doubt in the hope that they can stop or delay a transition to cleaner, cheaper products, which enriches their funders. Their claims aren’t accurate.
When it comes to electric vehicles, CarbonBrief covered this issue well here: https://www.carbonbrief.org/factcheck-21-misleading-myths-about-electric-vehicles/#:~:text=“An%20EV%20has%20to%20travel,carbon%20debt”%20from%20its%20battery.
One of the most common false claims made against EVs is that they offer little or no climate benefit over conventional cars, due to the emissions associated with making their battery.
In a Twitter post promoting his anti-EV comment article for the Daily Mail, for example, the climate-sceptic former Conservative peer Matt Ridley claimed:
“An EV has to travel 50,000+ miles to break even with an ICE [internal combustion engine] car. That number is growing, not shrinking.”
This is doubly false. As Carbon Brief showed in its 2019 factcheck, it takes less than two years for a typical EV to pay off the “carbon debt” from its battery. Over the full vehicle lifecycle, carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from an EV are around three times lower than an average petrol car.
In reality, therefore, an EV in Europe will pay off its carbon debt after around 11,000 miles(18,000km), according to the International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT).
Moreover, the lifecycle benefits of EVs are increasing over time as electricity grids get cleaner.
In a 2021 lifecycle analysis, the ICCT found that an EV bought in Europe would cut emissions by 66-69%, relative to a conventional car. By 2030, this emissions saving would rise to 74-77%, the ICCT said, “as the electricity mix continues to decarbonise”.
New Carbon Brief analysis shows that a Tesla Model Y, the world’s best-selling EV, would pay off its “carbon debt” after around 13,000 miles in the UK (21,000km), as shown in the figure below.
This would take less than two years for the average UK driver.
Typically, claims to the contrary argue that the higher emissions created during production of an EV are only very slowly paid off, or perhaps not at all, during the vehicles’ full lifecycle.
Yet these claims almost always make the same three key mistakes, which serve to underplay the emissions from combustion-engine cars and overestimate those from EVs.
First, these claims routinely overstate the emissions associated with manufacturing EV batteries, often cherrypicking older studies with the highest estimates.
Second, they usually take fuel-efficiency figures at face value, ignoring the long-standing issue that vehicle test cycles are unrealistic – with real-world efficiency around 40% worse than stated.
(Combustion-engine car test cycles were the subject of deliberate manipulation exposed by the “dieselgate” scandal. While real-world EV mileage is also lower than in test cycles and some electricity is lost during charging, this only adds around 19% to energy use, according to the ICCT.)
Third, they generally ignore the significant amount of CO2 associated with fuel production, including refining, which adds at least 20% – or more – to that emitted from the car’s tailpipe.
Taking these together, the ICCT concludes that combustion-engine cars have lifecycle emissions that are “twice as high as official tailpipe CO2 values”.