EV Cleanliness Skepticism Grows in America

Everyone knows that electric vehicles are supposed to be better for the planet than gas cars. That's the driving reason behind a global effort to transition toward batteries. But what about the harms caused by mining for battery minerals? And coal-fired power plants for the electricity to charge the cars? And battery waste? Is it really true that EVs are better? The answer is yes. But Americans are growing less convinced.

The net benefits of EVs have been frequently fact-checked, including by NPR. "No technology is perfect, but the electric vehicles are going to offer a significant benefit as compared to the internal combustion engine vehicles," Jessika Trancik, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told NPR this spring. It's important to ask these questions about EVs' hidden costs, Trancik says. But they have been answered "exhaustively" — her word — and a widerange of organizations have confirmed that EVs still beat gas. But the share of car-buying Americans who believe that has gone down by 5 percentage points in the last two years, from 63% to 58%, according to data that the market research firm Ipsos shared exclusively with NPR.

The decrease is small, but statistically significant. It's also not evenly distributed. People who say they are interested in buying an EV, known in the auto industry as "EV considerers," remain solidly convinced that EVs have an environmental benefit. (And it's important to note that the size of this pool — people considering EVs — has been holding pretty steady over this time frame.) It's people who are not open to getting an EV who are increasingly skeptical of those vehicles' green credentials. "The true story to me is that rise of skepticism among the non-considerers specifically," Ipsos researcher Graham Gordon says. "They are becoming more and more unified in their idea that it is not better for the environment."

Where is this skepticism coming from? Partly, it could be a misinterpretation of accurate reporting. Electric vehicles have no tailpipe emissions, which is why they are called "zero-emission vehicles." But they are not entirely zero-emission: Pollution and other environmental costs are associated with building them and charging their batteries. Journalists have done a lot of work explaining those environmental harms, and the public has noticed. That's good news: Trancik, of MIT, says people should ask questions about the true environmental costs of all technology. But the mountain of research determining that EVs are still cleaner than gasoline-powered cars doesn't seem to have gotten as much traction. The complexity itself can be frustrating. EV fans and skeptics alike say it's difficult to figure out for themselves how the harms compare. "I don't have the expertise to evaluate this," one non-EV driver told NPR. "It's hard to really know," another said.

Meanwhile, EVs have gotten caught up in the culture wars, where complexity and nuance go to die. EVs are associated with coastal, urban progressive elites. Plans to phase out gas cars in California and other regions have sparked fierce and sometimes misleading resistance from the fossil fuel industry. Memes that exaggerate or distort the real harms of EVs — or that simply fail to compare them with the damage caused by gas cars — frequently circulate online. This spring, a game of telephone took place. The Wall Street Journal ran an op-ed criticizing California's EV mandate that included a statistic from a company called Emissions Analytics. That caused other outlets to discover Emissions Analytics' work, including the New York Post, which ran this headline: "Electric vehicles release more toxic emissions, are worse for the environment than gas-powered cars: study." That headline, in turn, spread far and wide. "I just saw this thing that said that the environmental impact of electric cars is actually worse overall than the environmental impact of a traditional combustion engine," Joe Rogan said on his popular podcast. "Is that true? Because that sounds crazy."