Originally Posted By: 440Magnum
It always cracks me up when non-technical web- or magazine-article writers "discover" conservation of energy (or when they forget it and argue that charging your phone, or worse an electric car, is "free").
Of COURSE every darn little electrical load you turn on in the car requires a little bit of gasoline from the tank to run it. But if you didn't charge your phone in the car, you'd charge it on the electrical grid and *that* would take a few more lumps of coal dust per hour per phone burned at the power plant, or a few more atoms fissioned per hour per phone, or a little more water released downstream per hour per phone. Every joule of energy we use *anywehere* comes from *somewhere*, and then eventually winds up as heat released into the atmosphere and radiated away into space.
I was reading on reddit (full of young, very left swinging young people who have no understanding of how the world works) - according to many people on there, electric cars are the solution to China's smog problem.
Nevermind the fact that the problem is not from ICE buses, cars producing the smog, but the coal fired power plants. Using more electric cars means more coal burned ...