CORRECTION
Crandles
those aren't tonnes but 1000 lbs weight. There are 2.2 lbs to the kg so you need to divide the figures you gave by 2.2 to corretly state tons of CO2e.
Thanks. That now makes more sense. I had previously assumed that the embodied carbon per car was about 4 tonnes CO2e.
The estimates in
A Roadmap to Climate-Friendly Cars: 2013 (
1) when converted to metric tonnes CO2e are:
Electric Car 12.3
Gas Car 7.4
Hybrid Car 7.1
The personal remaining carbon budget (for 1.5C) that I guestimate (based on
Carbon Brief's argument is 25 tonnes CO2e. That budget it would be reached with the embodied carbon in just two electric cars or three other cars. That leaves nothing for food, travel, heating, entertainment and breathing.
CAN EMBODIED CARBON BE REDUCED?
ghoti
The CO2e estimates for batteries have never been credible. That said what will the claim be when Tesla makes all their batteries in a factory completely run on wind and solar power?
Perhaps those estimates are over estimates. Perhaps Tesla will build solar and wind farms to make batteries but there are complicated arguments here. First both solar farms and wind farms are high in embodied carbon when current manufacturing technology is used. This creates a carbon hit in the short to medium term. Isn't this when it matters?
NUCLEAR POWER
Jim Hunt
Your document implies that if you're going to build lots of electric vehicles it would be a really good idea to use "low carbon" electricity to do so. However for some strange reason whilst Climate Central does mention places like Vermont it fails to mention France, at present surely the best place on the planet to build an EV production line?
The first issue here is one similar to the use of recycled steel in building. If it's used in one building, the stock of recycled materials decreases so more virgin steel is produced. See
The ICE approach to recycled materials in (
No High Buildings). (*) With nuclear electricity, using it means that demand has to be satisfied through non nuclear sources.
However, if demand increases for nuclear electricity, the response might be to build more nuclear power stations. This may be good for global warming (**) but nuclear power stations are at risk from global warming. Natalie Kopytko, of the University of York, (
wrote in the Guardian)
No matter how well they build them, nuclear power plants require lots of water. As such, the plants need to be either on the coast or near a large body of water at an inland site. The loss of off-site power commonly happens during storms, particularly at coastal locations. So a strong storm, probably stronger than the historical records used in the estimates for design, could cause flooding that leads to an accident similar to the one we are witnessing.
And what if industrial civilisation fails? The expertise and resources to manage the problems of the safe disposal of nuclear waste will disappear and then ...
WHAT ABOUT ICELAND?
jai mitchell
Especially considering that they are being made out of aluminum! Very electricity intensive production.
That suggests
Iceland to me.
PUMP PRIMING AND SPENDING OUR REMAINING CARBON BUDGET
If we are going to postulate a world where our cars and buildings have little embodied carbon we ought to look at how we get there. We could argue that we must expect to spend some of our remaining carbon budget to prime the pump of a low carbon future (i.e. laying down the infrastructure for low carbon manufacturing and construction) but ...
What is the carbon cost of priming this pump? and
How much of our remaining carbon budget can we afford?
(*) Having said that, there will be a (small?) secondary effect: greater demand for steel will mean more steel is recycled.
(**) Are there some embodied carbon issues here too?
