• Droggelbecher@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    Can you elaborate on the first bit? It’s counter intuitive, considering electricity needs to be produced somehow, so I’d love to learn the background.

    • absentbird@lemmy.world
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      18 hours ago

      Usually using electricity in something like an electric car requires more emissions to generate the power than would be emitted from the food and respiration required to walk the same distance.

      Bicycles are interesting because they improve efficiency so much that it offsets the emissions needed to make the bike, and e-bikes are able to leverage that high efficiency to get 80+ km of travel per KWh (compared to ~6 from something like a Tesla)

      chart showing distance per kg of CO2

      • Droggelbecher@lemmy.world
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        14 hours ago

        That is super interesting, thanks! Granted, public transport transports more than one person, so if possible, it’s still much more efficient, and batteries are made of very finite resources, which is a whole different issue to consider.

        • absentbird@lemmy.world
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          14 hours ago

          True! A fully loaded train is about the most efficient way to move humans from one place to another, and has been for over a hundred years.

          Lithium is limited, but you can make 150 e-bikes with a single electric car battery. If we could figure out some sort of solid state sodium battery chemistry it wouldn’t even be an issue.