The point here is it's easier to control emissions at large-scale power generation plants than it is on millions of individual vehicles. How many cars would fail an inspection if exposed to one?
The same cannot be said about power plants.
There's also the renewable angle. Surplus wind power, as experienced in Spain, would basically provide free power for recharging vehicles overnight. You cannot do this with gasoline.
The sealed room is also a way of presenting what we're doing to our climate, that the automobile emissions don't just go "into the air", but become part of the environment.
I don't dispute the electric cars are, overall, clean. Just that the image that Arnold is promoting with his "Gedankenexperiment", per my quote above (that electric cars are somehow 100% clean and environmentally harmless) is simply false, anti-intellectual, and unscientific.
One of my thoughts was that if you enter the first room you're only poisoning yourself. If you enter the second you've already polluted areas and/or people that have no interested in your transport.
Bit of a silly analogy though, as many are.
Would not say that is 'anti-intellectual' though.
Like I said, I understand the tradeoffs, and agree that it looks like they'll tilt favorably to electric cars, in the longer run.
My point is that the rhetoric Arnold is using is a classic form of what psychologists call "extremifying," i.e. presenting a danger or tradeoff as much more dangerous or binary than it really is -- in order to, you know, get people to "do the right thing". (Or perhaps because he can't really tell the difference).
And in a world beset with ignorance, chronic attention deficit and a lack of critical thinking skills all around, this is not a good thing.
The same cannot be said about power plants.
There's also the renewable angle. Surplus wind power, as experienced in Spain, would basically provide free power for recharging vehicles overnight. You cannot do this with gasoline.
The sealed room is also a way of presenting what we're doing to our climate, that the automobile emissions don't just go "into the air", but become part of the environment.