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Originally Posted by Photonfanatic
Yeah I just mean which one actually turns out to be greater, and by how much? Since the gasoline itself isn't actually burned to produce electricity to fuel the electric cars. It is the fuel itself.
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The amount of pollution from charging an electric car off 100% coal (as dirty as you can get) is about the same as driving a gasoline vehicle that gets around 90mpg and that is before you add on the environmental impact of extracting the crude oil and refining it.
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Kind of like how you have to weigh the overall efficiency of solar panels, when their production is quite toxic, and they only last so long before the very sun they're harvesting kills them.
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Do you have a source for that statement? I hate to have this thread get off topic, but PV panels have a 50+ year life span (25 year warranty is standard) and most of the toxic metals that are used to make them are kept in a closed loop system in the factory and I'm not sure what the current energy pay back on making PV panels are, but 10 years back or so it was less then 3 years to and I think I've heard that their embedded energy pay back is now less then a year, Home Power magazine has published info on this in the past.