A number of people in the United States argue for increasing the number of electric vehicles as a percent of the automobile stock.
Their argument is that in the United States, transportation contributes 29% of the total carbon dioxide emissions. (Everything that follows is 2017 data.) Industry contributes 22%, electricity contributes 28%, commercial and residential contribute 12%, and agriculture contributes 9%. A friend of a friend tells me that light-duty transportation vehicles account for 59% of that 29%, which is 17% of total CO2 emissions.
Imagine that replacing all light-duty transportation vehicles with EVs reduces their contribution by the full 17 percentage points. (Of course, it wouldn’t because the electricity for EVs must be generated, so the 17 percentage points is an overestimate.)
Now let’s see what that does for CO2 emissions worldwide. In 2014, the United States accounted for 15% of worldwide emissions. Assuming that hasn’t changed, an overestimate of the percent by which replacing all light-duty vehicles with EVs in the United States is therefore 15% of 17%, which is 2.6%.
HT2 Francois Melese
READER COMMENTS
Kevin Dick
Sep 16 2019 at 9:14pm
Doing things with small effects is not really the issue here. The issue is abatement cost.
If everyone did a bunch of small things with low abatement costs, that might make a dent. So looking at any individual action’s impact is a mistake. Just like saving a little bit here and there adds up over time.
But the abatement costs on all battery electric vehicles are very high. I’d post a link, but every time I do, EconLog’s filters put my comment in purgatory. It’s by Gillingham at Yale and Stock at Harvard.
“Dedicated Battery Electric Vehicle Subsidy” costs $350-640/MTon. That’s several times where even the Obama administrations inter agency report put the extremely risk adverse version of the social cost of carbon.
The abatement cost of an all out mandate would be even worse.
Rebes
Sep 16 2019 at 9:33pm
2.6% of global CO2 emissions is not insignificant. More importantly, every single category anywhere, even coal consumption in China, is a fraction of global emissions. If the argument against any particular change is that it’s not big enough to make a difference, nothing will ever change, so I don’t think it’s a convincing argument.
Don’t take this as an endorsement of any particular policy, and I am not questioning the math. I am questioning the implied conclusion that it is “only” 2.6%.
Ted
Sep 16 2019 at 9:35pm
Some basic logic
Some people argue that if a small step doesn’t take to your destination, you shouldn’t take that small step. (Don’t worry David, not you – just some invisible straw men that I won’t quote or link to.)
Their argument is that if you take a small step, and you aren’t at your destination, then the small step was pointless, because the point of the small step was to get to your destination.
What they don’t realize is that it sometimes takes multiple steps to get somewhere. Say, 10 or even 20 steps. If you take one step, you won’t get to your destination. But you will get closer.
Even if taking one step doesn’t get you to your destination, it gets you closer than taking zero steps. If your goal is to get your destination, you should take steps rather than sit still.
Ted
Sep 16 2019 at 9:38pm
Rebes gets it.
It turns out that any pie can be sliced. Depending on you choose to slice it, you can make the slices small. But you should always be cautious before averring that a small slice is insignificant. Sometimes a pie is cut into entirely small slices, and by calling each slice insignificant, you risk calling the pie insignificant, even when it is not.
AlexR
Sep 16 2019 at 11:34pm
Measured in billions of kilowatt hours produced, electric power generation comes predominantly from fossil fuels (about 64%). Among fossil fuels, coal predominates at 35% share, the balance being mostly natural gas, at 27%. See:
https://whttps//www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3
The remaining sources of generation, mainly nuclear and hydropower, release no CO2, but the supply of these is very inelastic, for reasons both political (nuclear) and natural (hydro). Powering 100 million electric cars on the road would require building at least 100 additional nuclear reactors. I don’t see that happening. The inputs into electric power that are elastically supplied are the fossil fuels. Electric cars are mostly glorified toys, built for sporty acceleration and virtue signaling.
AlexR
Sep 16 2019 at 11:43pm
Sorry, the url above got garbled. It should be:
https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3
nobody.really
Sep 17 2019 at 3:22pm
When would people power their electric vehicles? Clearly, this depends on usage. But most commuters could plug in their cars at night and drive to work/public transit in the morning.
What else happens predominantly at night? Ok, that, too–but I’m talking about wind. Wind turbines really crank out power at night. (Solar, not so much; go figure.)
The big wrap on wind is that it’s intermittent: You can’t count on it blowing precisely when you need it. But if you’ve got an 8-10 hr window of time to charge a battery, then moment-to-moment fluctuations don’t matter so much.
Wind power + storage is a pretty cool combination.
Steve Fritzinger
Sep 17 2019 at 9:22am
I wonder how much CO2 will be emitted building all those new EVs. How long will they have to be in service to pay back that CO2? Will they ever do it?
Dylan
Sep 18 2019 at 5:41pm
Does the manufacture of EVs take significantly more carbon than that of IC vehicles? I know there are more rare earth metals because of the batteries, but I don’t think the carbon footprint of the manufacturing process is much different, but I admit I haven’t looked into it in detail.
RPLong
Sep 17 2019 at 12:31pm
I agree with the calculations, and I agree with the comments above that suggest that the proliferation of EVs is not a viable strategy to combat CO2 emissions.
One point not yet covered is the very substantial cost of converting all American consumers and transportation infrastructure to support EVs. How many charging stations will we need along those lonely desert roads out West, for example? All that must be paid for. Even if we accept that the CO2 reductions are significant, and environmentally desirable, we still have to consider whether there are any emissions-reducing moves that can be made which are either equally as impactful at a lower cost, or more impactful at the same cost, or both more impactful and cheaper. I’m only guessing, but I bet there are a few such moves to be made.
One move that I think might reduce CO2 emissions by a lot is reducing the use of plastics. Plastic is certainly cheap today, and I’m no expert, but I often wonder how much oil subsidies and policies distort the prices of plastics and their alternatives.
Thaomas
Sep 17 2019 at 4:43pm
It would be a mistake to try to completely eliminate CO2 emissions from any given activity (like transportation). Rather, a revenue neutral tax on net emissions of CO2 would the the market convey the correct information to decide the best amount (not necessarily zero) of CO2 emitting technology to use.
Joe Born
Sep 18 2019 at 4:04pm
If the atmosphere contains 3.1 trillion metric tons of CO2, U.S. cars emit 1.2 billion metric tons per year, 45% of that accumulates in the atmosphere, and equilibrium global-average surface temperature increases by 3°C. for each doubling of the atmosphere’s CO2 concentration, then even through the end of the century switching tomorrow to all-electric cars would avoid less than 0.06°C. of warming.
That approximately equals the altitude-caused temperature difference you experience in climbing to your local swimming pool’s 10-meter platform.
David Henderson
Sep 17 2019 at 5:32pm
RP Long,
Good points in first paragraph.
Re second paragraph, the subsidy to oil, if there is one, is very small. On the other hand, the barriers in the way of producing oil, such as off the coast of California, are large.
Thaomas
Sep 18 2019 at 5:44pm
Percentage depletion is a large subsidy to natural resource extraction.
Dylan
Sep 18 2019 at 5:47pm
David,
Can you share your source for the level of subsidies for oil production and consumption? I’ve seen estimates vary by a huge margin, and certainly some of the really big numbers take into account some things that I think at the very least shouldn’t be considered 100% oil subsidies, but the low estimates seemed to be disregarding quite a bit that should be included. Would be interested to see what you would include and not include.
David Johnson
Sep 17 2019 at 4:05pm
One thing that troubles me is most articles on CO2 never diclose the percentage of earth’s atmosphere is CO2. It is 4/100 of one percent or 400 parts per million.
When you consider that the US is 15% of CO2 emissons one wonders what affect any part of our contribution is significant.
If the global warming crowd really believes what they say and write we should push more natural gas conversions of coal fired power plants.
Also the only true carbon free production of electricity is nuclear power.
Count me a skeptic.
Thaomas
Sep 17 2019 at 4:38pm
Considering life cycle costs, not even nuclear power is carbon free, but it does not need to be. It’s likely that the optimal energy using profile will include fossil fuels to some degree, off set by CO2 sequestration.
Thaomas
Sep 17 2019 at 4:31pm
There is little in this arithmetic that bears on whether it is good policy to encourage (and in what way?) a switch from fossil fueled powered vehicles to electric vehicles.
The key parameter needed is how much harm is avoided by the emission of CO2 into the atmosphere. That would permit estimating by how much it might make sense to tax the fossil fuel emission conventional vehicles and tax the emissions of electricity generation to the extent it is based on fossil fuels. These taxes would give the appropriate amount of incentive to vehicle users to switch to electric powered over conventional vehicles or not.
Jon Murphy
Sep 17 2019 at 5:35pm
Yes, but you need to know what effect, if any, the EV fleet would have on CO2 before you could properly structure such a tax. That’s precisely where this calculation comes into play.
Thaomas
Sep 18 2019 at 5:53pm
I don’t see this. You set the tax trajectory at the marginal cost of net emissions and let the market adjust to it. Of course the margin will change as markets and CO2 emitting/sequestering and climate change mitigation technologies change.
Chris Elhardt
Sep 19 2019 at 3:52pm
David: You might want to recalculate some of those percentages when oxy-fuel combustion gets out of the pilot stage. There are at least four pilot plants operating now.
Heating the nitrogen component of air during combustion uses a significant fraction of the heat of combustion. An oxy-fuel system starts with a plant that removes much of the nitrogen from air first, burns the fuel in a high oxygen environment and uses the heated gases to run turbines. The flue gas is enriched in carbon dioxide and can be compressed and stored underground. I’ve seen some numbers that claim this system is more fuel efficient even after the oxygen enrichment than present open air combustion.
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