Why are some Americans growing less convinced that electric vehicles are better for the planet than gasoline? There’s lots of evidence that they’re indeed better for the planet.
ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
There’s a lot of evidence that electric vehicles are better for the planet than gas cars, but some Americans are growing less convinced of that. NPR’s Camila Domonoske has been looking into why. Hi, Camila.
CAMILA DOMONOSKE, BYLINE: Hi.
SHAPIRO: Why did you start exploring this question in the first place?
DOMONOSKE: Earlier this year, we did a call-out for questions from listeners – what they were wondering about EVs. And, Ari, we looked at them by popularity. And question No. 1, 2 and 3 were all about the EVs’ environmental impacts. Fundamentally, are they actually better than gas cars, given, you know, mining for batteries and coal power plants making electricity to charge them – things like that?
So we answered these questions in this podcast that we did, but I was just so struck by how many of these questions we got, and I wanted to see if there was data about whether what Americans believe about the environmental impacts of EVs has been shifting across the board.
SHAPIRO: So what did you find?
DOMONOSKE: Well, it took a little bit because I had to find a group that had the same question over several years. But it turned out that Ipsos, a market research firm, had this data. They shared it with us. And if you ask people, do EVs have any environmental benefit over gas cars at all, a majority of people still agree with this. But that majority – it’s gone down by five percentage points since 2022. And it is specifically people who are not thinking of buying an EV, who aren’t interested in them who are getting more skeptical about their environmental benefits.
SHAPIRO: Any idea of what is influencing their views?
DOMONOSKE: Yeah. Well, there’s been a lot of reporting about EVs’ environmental impact – real impact, right? Mining for batteries – that’s a real thing. Power plants – that has a real footprint. If you see those headlines and you don’t read closely, it could be easy to miss the fact that, compared to gas cars and the huge damages of fossil fuels, EVs are still better. You know, I talked to Austin Kampen, who is one of our listeners who wrote in this spring, and he told me he’s not in the market for an EV, which means he’s not really digging into this deeply.
AUSTIN KAMPEN: If I was to invest money in, like, an electric vehicle or something, I would do a lot more research in it, but I’m just kind of going off hearsay.
DOMONOSKE: And the thing is some of that hearsay is not solid reporting about EVs’ environmental impact. There’s also a lot of really misleading information out there. EVs have gotten very politicized. They’re caught up in the culture wars. And so in addition to things that might be easy to misinterpret, you also have outright falsehoods that are floating around.
SHAPIRO: Can you give us an example?
DOMONOSKE: Sure. So there are lots, but there was one study that inspired a whole bunch of headlines, and the headlines sort of gave the impression that EVs are overall worse for the planet. But I talked to the researcher behind that study, who said that’s completely untrue. He looked at one specific kind of pollution – particulates, the rubber that rubs off of tires. He did not look at greenhouse gases at all by design. So saying that his work is about the environment overall is leaving out climate change, which is a total distortion of his actual work.
SHAPIRO: And is this misinformation impacting EV sales?
DOMONOSKE: You know, the people who are the most skeptical about EVs now, who are losing faith in their green benefits, are the ones who are not likely to buy an EV anyway, especially not for the climate benefits, according to this data from Ipsos. And meanwhile, if you look at people who are considering EVs and saying no, according to J.D. Power, most of those people are citing charging. So probably the driving force behind disappointing sales right now is not this confusion about green benefits but more practical considerations.
SHAPIRO: NPR’s Camila Domonoske. Thank you.
DOMONOSKE: Thank you.
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