Over the course of their lives, do electric vehicles create more or less toxic pollution than standard cars?
Correct Answer
Politicians are encouraging, subsidizing, and mandating the use of electric vehicles while claiming they produce "zero-emissions." Though electric vehicles have no tailpipe emissions, a 2021 paper in the Journal of Cleaner Production found that manufacturing, charging, and disposing of them increases "fine particulate matter formation (26%), human carcinogenic (20%) and non-carcinogenic toxicity (61%), terrestrial ecotoxicity (31%), freshwater ecotoxicity (39%), and marine ecotoxicity (41%) relative to petrol vehicles." The study found that the lifetime CO2 emissions of electric cars are 48% lower than that of standard cars, but CO2 is an inert gas which has no significant adverse effects on humans until concentrations exceed at least 6 times the level in Earth's atmosphere.