Let me give an example of why this is questionable.
Suppose you have the choice between burning up an electric vehicle pack in your car, which will wear out after supplying 1000 gallons worth of gasoline-equivalent energy to your car, or burning the gasoline directly. The energy to charge the battery comes from solar cells.
The electric vehicle pack costs $10,000, and the gasoline costs $4 a gallon, or $4000.
You do some quick figuring on the battery pack. $9000 of the cost is labor and capital equipment, and $1000 is the cost of the raw materials. You determine that the energy to make the materials and assemble the battery, such as mining the ores, producing the plastics, and so on is a lot less than the energy contained in 1000 gallons of gasoline.
However, what about the $9000 that is paid to the workers who built the battery? Those workers will drive home to their houses in trucks and run the A/C at home, they will consume lots of consumer goods bought with their salaries that use lots of energy, and so on. If you choose to burn gasoline, the gasoline is cheaper because fewer workers are involved in producing it, and those workers (in theory) are doing other tasks for the economy that producing batteries.
So if the green technology were more expensive over the long term, but were adopted universally (say the government made the dirty technology illegal), would it really save on CO2 emissions?
In the long run, if everything is priced fairly, the cheapest option will be a pretty good proxy for the most environmentally-friendly. Not perfect, but good enough for back-of-the-envelope estimates.
There are two catches, though. First, most alternate energy technologies aren’t into the long run yet. They’re still being developed, and the cost of that development is a major part of the cost of the tech. So using a hybrid car, say, might not be helping the environment right now, but it’s driving the further development of hybrids to the point where they will.
Second, not everything is priced fairly. You pay for gasoline, or for coal, but you don’t pay for air. If you did have to, then running a car on gasoline would suddenly get a lot more expensive, maybe even enough to make the hybrid worth it. To be fair, most other things would also get more expensive, since almost everything involves fossil fuel energy at some point in its supply chain, but not everything would get more expensive to the same degree.
Your numbers completely confuse one time cost, one time price, ongoing cost and ongoing price, so I can’t say anything quantitively.
Obviously, all money you spend goes to other people who will in turn spend it, part of it on stuff that pollutes the environment. But the real question is: what would you do with the money you’d save? Maybe buying some oil and burning it in an inefficient engine is made up for by all the trees you plant using the money you save. But probably not.
Batteries of any kind need to get their energy installed into them, either at manufacture or during recharging. Electrical power, in general, is said to be much cleaner than burning fossil fuels – but – all it really does is relocate the pollution from the place where the energy is used, to the far-away place where it is generated.
This question was raised during the construction of BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) in the early 1970’s. Having an electric commuter train was supposed to reduce pollution, compared to all the cars and buses that commuters would otherwise be taking. But an argument was raised that this just removed the pollution to the vicinity of the electric generation plants.
It depends, of course, on how the electricity is generated. If you drive a battery-operated car and those batteries were charged by coal-burning electricity, then the pollution has simply been moved. But if the batteries were charged by solar, wind, or hydroelectric electricity, then you’ve helped to save the world.
It’s still not very clean, but even if your electricity is generated 100% from coal (the dirtiest of all fossil fuels), it’s still, on net, cleaner than burning gasoline in a car. In either case, there’s a step in the process where you’re burning a fossil fuel to produce heat to drive a heat engine. That step, in either case, is so inefficient that the inefficiencies of all other steps (extracting the fossil fuel, transporting the fuel across the country, transmitting the electricity, etc.) are all insignificant in comparison. And the efficiency of a coal-fired power plant is much higher than that of a car’s internal combustion engine, mostly because it can operate at a higher temperature.
It’s a pretty straight-forward statement. Either you are buying gasoline and some maintenance, or you are buying electricity and batteries. The problem with the lithium ion batteries used in anything - electric cars included - is that they decay very rapidly. Fully charging them breaks them really fast. So does fully discharging them. Using them at all damages them. Using them under high or low temperatures damages them. Charging them fast damages them, so does discharging them fast.
In short, they are “burning up” much much faster than a reliable gasoline or diesel engine. The exact lifespan depends on how much “mistreatment” they get - see the conditions above - but it’s typically about 500-1000 charge/discharge cycles. If the car has a 300 mile range, that’s a new battery every 150k-300k road miles.
The battery itself, for a car with a 300 mile range, costs more like $15,000-$30,000. It’s hugely more expensive than purchasing a replacement ICE.
I only care about ongoing cost. Prices are never mentioned in my post. Cost is what the actual real world resource movements are and determines long term equilibria. One time costs and prices do not exist in the real world.
This really needs to be emphasized. One Harvard study concluded that the externalized costs of coal are on the order of a half-trillion dollars. That is equivalent to $0.18/kW-h.
18 cents per kW-h is huge. If coal plants were forced to pay that, it would be instantly unprofitable and solar and other renewables would look astonishingly cheap in comparison.
Sure, even “green” energy has some externalities (such as the pollution caused by solar cell production in China), but it’s clearly not nearly as bad as coal. As such, it’s really hard to compare based on price alone.
Another factor here is that we’re still in the ramp-up phase for electric vehicles, and therefore they are currently using a high fraction of newly-mined materials (lithium, etc.). But all this stuff will be recycled and in the long run only a fairly small percentage of new material will be needed to cover the overall vehicle growth rate.
You should really look up how Li-ion chemistry works (hint cycle life is a almost insignificant factor, mainly a carryover from previous battery types NiCD and later Nimh) and don’t assume things like cell battery chemistry is used for car batteries (hint much longer expected life in car batteries, even given abuse, different anodes used for this IIRC,).
I have. You don’t know what you are talking about. There are cell chemistries that can be used in cars with long lifespans, but they are not what major electric cars currently use. Merely letting the battery discharge fully to zero kills it permanently.
So? If you don’t put the $9k there, won’t you eventually put it in some other sector?
The only question that really matters, it seems to me, is whether we are making progress towards a set of technological, economic, and social conditions in which people living life, and the economic activity that entails, are not automatically doing harm. Because if we can’t get there, the species is screwed, right? So, is a given “green” tech a helpful step on this road? Then it’s a good thing.
Third, and the most important and significant and the one that must be offset, The law supply and demand applies, and the effect is as simply obvious… If many people stop using petroleum, petroleum should become cheaper due to over-supply and competition between suppliers. For example, many taxes work at a percentage, and so they do not strongly hold up the price. Some taxes (excise, surcharge, levy, duty, etc,) , may be an absolute (per unit…) but overall government doesn’t set a high minimum price.
The proper way is to charge a carbon/CO2 levy on unit volumes… the levy could work so as to set a minimum price …
It only takes a small bit of circuitry and components to ensure that the battery is not drained below a minimum voltage. To the user , this is zero.
This makes some sence as below a minimum voltage, the power available is unreliable… They must reduce the number of times a driver gets stuck on a railway crossing due to lack of power.
That kind of logic is twisted because it can be applied to many areas, such as :
The price of new houses that Americans buy is really twice (or some multiple) than what they pay - because they are built by illegal immigrants who require free medical care, offset jobs for Americans who then need support, …
Americans should really pay 3 (or X) times for the produce they buy at the grocery stores since there are huge costs associated with cleanup of the fertilizer overrun from the farms, and illegal immigrants are used as farm help and are drying out our water resources.
Americans should really pay 3(or X) times for meat and dairy since cows are green house gas emitters, antibiotics get into the drinking water system and it consumes great amount of water resources.
1> Really good : CFL / LED light bulbs, Non leaded gasoline, Catalytic converters, Conversion of Coal plants to Natural gas plants …
2> Not that good but subject to debate : Hybrid cars, Ultra -low water use flush toilets (since people flush many times), Non-phosphate dishwasher detergent (doesn’t clean well and people buy TSP separately), Capacitors without PCBs (Just a lot of capacitors keep failing) …
3> Really bad : These survive usually due to lobby or political opinion - such as biomass to power, biomass to fuel, hydrogen fuel cell …
Some green technologies are great for some locations / price points / economy. For example - solar power in remote areas or solar power in urban areas with high peak electricity rates.
If the actual analysis done to come to your conclusions are objectively sound, then yes, all of the things you said are true. Ultimately, if we as a society are actually paying these costs, then by not making the individuals at the point of use pay the cost, we are effectively taxing everyone else to give those individuals a subsidy.
What you’re describing, if it were correct, essentially means everyone who does not own a home pays for the Americans buying homes. Everyone who doesn’t eat fresh produce is paying for those who do. Ditto for meat.
Hmm, the interesting bit is in all 3 examples you gave, *nearly *everyone is doing those things. So it’s more like “every American gets a cheap house, but then pays for it elsewhere due to lower wages, higher taxes, and so forth”.
The reason to step in as a government and internalize the externalities is that if you see the true cost of your actions reflected directly in the sticker cost for something, you will have an incentive to choose another action. If it were actually true that every kilowatt of coal power costs 25 cents, (you’re paying the difference in higher health insurance/medicare premiums), and wind cost 15, then if the cost were shown up front everyone would choose wind power.
You’re mixing together a few different things there, but there’s nothing twisted about it. Correctly accounting for externalities is crucial for markets to work.
In the case of pollutants it’s relatively easy to draw a straight line between the emitters and the health costs they impose on the rest of the population. It’s very reasonable to charge that cost back to the utilities. Maybe tough to agree on the true dollar cost (what’s the worth of a person-year of life?), but we deal with this all the time in other areas.
The illegal immigrant thing is a pretty different issue. It’s not so much an externality so much as an enforcement issue on the part of the IRS, etc. Or in other words, if existing law were enforced, the issue would go away by itself (i.e., all employees would be paying taxes, etc.).
At any rate, it’s certainly true that there are huge unaccounted externalities all over the place, and our economy would look very different (and mostly better) if they were accounted for and the costs charged to the right parties.
Weirdly, it works out almost the opposite in practice. Home ownership is massively subsidized in the US via the mortgage interest rate deduction. But all it’s really done is raise the price of housing since a given mortgage payment goes farther. Higher home costs do mean higher property tax, though, which partially offsets the subsidy, but that money goes to a different party. It’s pretty screwy overall and should probably be abolished.
