Are electric cars as clean as we think they are?

Whenever we hear about pollution, part of what also comes up is car usage and the gas we use and how it harms our planet. 

In the late ’90s, the first hybrid car, the Toyota Prius, was put onto the market.  Following the next decade, other car manufacturers started following and the idea of an electric car was beginning to be popular.  

Somewhere in that time, it also gained the title of being a cleaner option than regular cars.  Without the use of gas, it was expected that poof! there would be no more negative effects on the environment due to transportation.  

How clean are these cars actually?

For one, probably the most used and popular argument against electric cars is the concerns running around the battery.  The batteries used for these cars are used from rare metals that are difficult to find and take lots of work to do. The process of extracting and manufacturing the batteries have been proven to worsen carbon emissions.  Despite this, not all countries create batteries equally and have more consequences than others. Batteries produced in China have significantly higher levels of CO2 emissions than the United States or European nations.

It is definitely arguable that the production of electric cars is damaging to the planet but it can also be argued that the overall emissions after a lifetime may be less than regular cars.  

However, with the amount of electricity needed to power electric cars, it also produces significant numbers of emissions, compared to cars run on gas.  It has been found that sometimes it is almost worse to be driving an electric car.

This post was not to slam electric cars, but instead to also point out other things that are wrong with them and also say that they may not be as clean as companies are putting out.  In conclusion, most sources of transportation have a negative impact on our planet, but we can do our best to reduce that by taking public transportation, carpooling, riding bikes and even just walking!