First things first: Yours is a straw-man argument. I said that electric cars are not “green energy” because it matters how the energy is produced. You, however, argue for the better efficieny vs. combustion engines. I did not even MENTION combustion engines. So watch your tone, dumbass :p /s

Regarding your straw-man, I’ll bite:

Efficiency of an electric car is up to 65% including losses when charging. Efficiency of a Diesel powered car is up to 45%. Producing a liter of diesel costs about 1.13 times as much energy as is contained in a liter of Diesel fuel, which - even assuming 100% efficiency on winning that energy - is further bringing down the efficiency to 45% * (1 / 2.13 ) = 21% (one unit gained per 2.13 units invested). A coal power plant is at best reaching 45% energy efficiency, bringing the overall efficiency of an electric car down to 65% * 45% = 29.3%. That makes an electric car operating on coal generated electricity about 29.3% / 21% = 1.395 or about 40% more efficient than a Diesel powered car.

And this does NOT include that electrical vehicles are - due to the weight of batteries - around 50% heavier than combustion engine cars, and that battery life is much shorter and then generates a lot of electronic waste.

Accordingly:

The dirtiest, least efficient coal power plant is still IMMENSELY more efficient than a car combustion engine

Not true. Numbers for the most efficient coal power plants are just about equal with the efficiency of the best Diesel engines. But even moderate Diesel engines stay around 40% efficiency, whereas coal plants can be in the 30%-40% range easily.

When you don’t have to make your energy generating device mobile, you can get a LOT more power from your fuel.

1. generally, larger generator = better efficiency, yes, however:
2. see above: this does not necessarily hold true when the batteries increase the total weight of your car by 50%

While - all things considered (I honestly did not expect the production of Diesel to be quite so energy-inefficient) - electric cars fare better if driven at constant speed (or with good energy recuperation mechanisms on braking) and not taking into account the battery life, energy investment into that and chemical waste produced on production / disposal, they are far from getting “a LOT more power” from an “IMMENSELY more efficient” power plant.

Maybe spend some time learning about a subject before you make claims about it. There’s less chance of looking like an ignorant fool that way.

Likewise.

1. Solar panels need to run for a couple of years before they produce net energy considering the energy invested into production

2. Source on battery production being less reliant on rare earths?

3. Speak English, please - I am not looking up abbreviations to argue with you

4. See my other reply here: https://lemmy.world/comment/12349903 Efficiency of an electrical car is better, but absolutely not “incredibly” better, as per the numbers I checked while writing that comment

5. How much cleaner EVs are, depends on the source of energy mix (which at charging stations outside your home, you can hardly control) - if renewable energies are used, they are certainly cleaner. If fossil fuels are used, they are at best (not counting the waste from battery production and disposal) as much cleaner as the efficiency improvement (which is about 40% over Diesel engines, by what I calculated from sources that were acceptably credible for writing an internet comment as opposed to a scientific paper)

6. I was not speaking about “mineral” resources, I was speaking about mineable rare earths. Because there are plenty in the Earth’s mantle, but we can’t get to those.

7. Again, source please on how EVs do not need rare earths for batteries

8. Agreed for the time being, but if research allows to improve the process for generation of hydrogen, it could be a cleaner combustion fuel

In summary: I am not arguing for combustion cars, I am arguing against EVs not for individual use cases, but as a “this solves all problems with combustion engines” - because it is not a solution applicable to the world market for personal mobility.

The best solution is a proper public transportation system - good bus connections and trains that can operate “by wire” without the need for batteries.

As I was saying in my first comment: If energy is produced by renewable sources, then they can be clean, so there’s no argument here.

Re:

https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/lithium-electric-vehicles

1. the article focuses on lithium, which is not the only problematic material used in electric batteries
2. the first source I checked (on total lithium in the world) was offline, so I could not confirm my suspicion that the author was talking about the total amounts including those inaccessible in the Earth’s mantle
3. the author admits herself that we have “enough lithium for decades to come”, which is in-fucking-credibly stupid, because this planet has been around for billions of years, and one of the biggest flaws of mankind has been to empty a natural resource over a few decades “coz profits”. Creating a demand for a resource that would only make it last a few decades would create another clusterfuck like all the wars and blood shed over crude oil. As a matter of fact, for mining conditions, we already have this clusterfuck, if you look at e.g. how cobalt is mined in the “democratic” republic of Congo

Finally, like I asked another commenter: could you provide a source on EV batteries made without rare earths?

By the way - sodium requires salt, and that’s also limited on Earth. Knowing mankind, we’d extract locally (desalinification hurts the ecosystem there) and dump waste locally in another location (again, hurting the ecosystem).

My overall point is: the world’s car market is just too big and we need to shrink it, but mankind as a whole is too fucking selfish and stupid and short-sighted to accomplish that, and I WISH time will prove me wrong on that.