"Electric cars only move the pollution from the city's and towns to the countryside
Were power stations are so the pollution falls on the farms and pollutes the food chain! What is the benefit in that !"
As with all things green, there is a great deal of smoke & mirrors.
However, to be (a bit serious) for a moment, it's about pollution V population density. The majority of people in the developed world live in Cities (the fools). These cities are packed full of terrible pollution sources, be they Cars, Buses, Wood burning stoves, Diesel Trains, whatever. As there are a lot of people & a lot of pollution all packed tightly together the pollution has a greater measurable effect on those people living in the city. Add to this the fact that politicians are more worried about urban populations that they are rural ones & you start to see why politicians are so keen to promote electric vehicles. It reduces the amount of pollution in Cities & makes large urban populations measurably healthier.
On the flip side, in rural areas, even near to large power stations, the population density is much lower as is the pollution density. So for any given level of pollution (that will invariably be lower than in a city anyway) the effect on the population will be less, add to this the fact that most politicians couldn't give a stuff about rural communities & it all becomes clear.
This of course has nothing to do with fuel efficiency, as burning a fossil fuel in an internal combustion to drive a car down the road, even an 80 year old Austin Seven, will invariably be considerably more energy efficient that burning something to boil steam, to drive a turbine to generate electricity, to transmit it down inefficient lines, to drive inefficient transformers which charge inefficient highly polluting batteries made of rare earth metals that will inevitable become depleted, to drive cars down the road.
As the population of our planet hurtles towards 9 billion, we are going to have far more difficult decisions to make than whether to buy a hybrid car or not.
Were power stations are so the pollution falls on the farms and pollutes the food chain! What is the benefit in that !"
As with all things green, there is a great deal of smoke & mirrors.
However, to be (a bit serious) for a moment, it's about pollution V population density. The majority of people in the developed world live in Cities (the fools). These cities are packed full of terrible pollution sources, be they Cars, Buses, Wood burning stoves, Diesel Trains, whatever. As there are a lot of people & a lot of pollution all packed tightly together the pollution has a greater measurable effect on those people living in the city. Add to this the fact that politicians are more worried about urban populations that they are rural ones & you start to see why politicians are so keen to promote electric vehicles. It reduces the amount of pollution in Cities & makes large urban populations measurably healthier.
On the flip side, in rural areas, even near to large power stations, the population density is much lower as is the pollution density. So for any given level of pollution (that will invariably be lower than in a city anyway) the effect on the population will be less, add to this the fact that most politicians couldn't give a stuff about rural communities & it all becomes clear.
This of course has nothing to do with fuel efficiency, as burning a fossil fuel in an internal combustion to drive a car down the road, even an 80 year old Austin Seven, will invariably be considerably more energy efficient that burning something to boil steam, to drive a turbine to generate electricity, to transmit it down inefficient lines, to drive inefficient transformers which charge inefficient highly polluting batteries made of rare earth metals that will inevitable become depleted, to drive cars down the road.
As the population of our planet hurtles towards 9 billion, we are going to have far more difficult decisions to make than whether to buy a hybrid car or not.