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Electric Vehicles, Driving Toward Net Zero

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The deeper the climate crisis gets, the faster the shift to electric vehicles accelerates. EVs are no longer a niche choice for early adopters — they've become the driving force reshaping the entire global auto market.

In 2022, Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) projected that global EV sales would grow from 6.6 million units in 2021 to 20.6 million units by 2025. What's striking is how close that forecast came to reality. Actual sales in 2025 topped 20 million units. A three-year-old prediction landed within rounding distance of the truth.

▲ BNEF's 2022 forecast of "20.6 million by 2025" turned out to be almost exactly right. Actual 2025 sales topped 20 million units, and 2026 sales are projected to reach 23 million.Source: IEA, Global EV Outlook 2026

At the time, BNEF expected Europe and China to drive most of 2025's global EV sales. The market moved in roughly that direction. China in particular, leveraging price and manufacturing scale, has established itself as the world's largest EV market.

▲ Electric vehicle sales by type as of 2021.Source: BNEF

The rise of EVs hasn't just reshaped the auto market. In 2025, electric vehicles are estimated to have displaced roughly 1.2 million barrels of oil demand per day. Meanwhile, sales of internal combustion vehicles peaked in 2017 and have been declining ever since. This shift in cars has begun to shake the future of the oil refining industry and the broader energy market.

Norway leads the pack. About 96% of new passenger car sales in 2025 were fully electric. Buying a new car there isn't really a special choice anymore — it's close to the default.

If Norway leads by share, China is rewriting the game by scale. In 2025, more than one in every two new cars sold in China was a new-energy vehicle in the EV family. It's not an exaggeration to say the center of gravity of the global EV market has shifted to China.

▲ Norway's EV share rose from 90% to 96% (fully electric only), and China's rose from 20% to 55% — both in just three years.Source: IEA, Global EV Outlook 2026

As the buyer base has broadened, China has gradually moved away from relying purely on direct purchase subsidies. The market is transitioning from a fledgling industry under policy protection to a mainstream industry competing on its own footing.

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EVs Are Clean While Driving, But…

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By this point, EVs look like the obvious answer for a carbon-neutral era. But the story gets more complicated from here.

Some ask whether EVs are just another form of greenwashing. If there are no tailpipe emissions, does that automatically make them green? Once you factor in how the battery is made, how the electricity is generated, and what happens at disposal, the answer isn't so simple.

*Greenwashing: a portmanteau of "green" and "whitewashing," referring to the practice of presenting something as more environmentally friendly than it actually is. (Related Sunhak Peace Prize article on greenwashing (KR))

Critics argue that we need to look at a car's entire life, from birth to disposal. This is called Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) — accounting not just for tailpipe emissions, but for raw material extraction, vehicle manufacturing, power generation, and disposal all together.

The battery sits at the center of the debate. Manufacturing and processing the battery — the heart of an EV — requires enormous amounts of energy and minerals. If that energy comes from fossil fuels, an EV's carbon footprint inevitably grows.

◎ CO₂ Emissions per km (South Korea Ministry of Environment)

According to 2016 data from South Korea's Ministry of Environment, CO₂ emissions per km driven were 86.9g for EVs, 137g for diesel vehicles, and 177g for gasoline vehicles. Looking only at the driving phase, EVs came out lowest.

◎ CO₂ Emissions from Production and Disposal

But the picture shifts once you compare emissions from production and disposal alone. Converted to a per-km basis, production and disposal emissions came to 49.12g for EVs, versus 44.55g each for diesel and gasoline vehicles. The burden of battery manufacturing pushed up the initial emissions.

▲ Volkswagen's four-stage Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) concept diagram, showing carbon-reduction strategies at each stage: supply chain, production, driving, and recycling.Source: Volkswagen AG

◎ What Does the Full Picture Look Like?

A 2025 European study by the International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT) offers a more refined answer. Lifecycle emissions came to 235g/km for gasoline vehicles and 234g/km for diesel, compared to just 63g/km for EVs charged on the average EU grid — 73% lower than gasoline vehicles.

Because of battery production, EVs emit roughly 40% more carbon than combustion vehicles when they're first manufactured. But that initial burden gets offset after just one to two years of driving, or around 17,000 km. From that point on, EVs stay ahead for good.

In the end, it comes down to the same thing: an EV's environmental performance hinges less on the car itself and more on how the battery is made and what powers the grid. The cleaner the electricity and the longer the vehicle is driven, the bigger the advantage becomes.

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Emissions Drop, But the Battery Burden Remains

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◎ CO₂ from Battery Production

EV batteries rely on critical minerals like lithium, nickel, and cobalt. Mining and refining these minerals requires large amounts of water and energy. That process releases carbon and can pollute soil and water. Just because tailpipe emissions have disappeared doesn't mean the environmental burden has disappeared with them.

The UK's Channel 4 current affairs program Unreported World reported from cobalt mining sites in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Mines lacking basic protective equipment, and the surrounding pollution, reveal another cost hidden behind the EV's clean image.

▲ A cobalt mining site in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.Source: Unreported World

It also matters that a significant share of the world's cobalt supply is concentrated in the DRC. When mining pressure concentrates in one region, it raises not just environmental damage but also supply chain instability.

That's why efforts are underway to reduce the amount of cobalt and rare metals in batteries, or to develop cobalt-free chemistries like sodium-ion batteries. Technology to recover minerals from spent batteries and reuse them is also advancing quickly.

In short, an EV's environmental credentials can't be judged by tailpipe emissions alone. What minerals the battery is made from, how clean the electricity is, and how the battery gets recycled once its life is over all need to be part of the picture.

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Where Do Spent Batteries Go?

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◎ CO₂ from Battery Disposal

Batteries leave a problem behind even after their working life ends. If spent batteries — packed with metals and electrolytes — aren't handled properly, they can cause fires and soil and water contamination. Greenpeace projects global spent-battery volumes could reach roughly 12 million tonnes a year by 2030.

Many countries still do little more than store spent batteries in dedicated facilities, since reuse and recycling systems aren't yet fully built out.

Fortunately, technology for giving batteries a second life is advancing fast — repurposing batteries that have degraded for automotive use as stationary energy storage systems (ESS), or disassembling them to recover lithium, nickel, and cobalt.

SNE Research projects the global spent-battery recycling market could grow to roughly 600 trillion won by 2050. What looked like waste is turning into a new resource mine.

▲ The Johan Cruyff Arena in the Netherlands, which repurposes EV batteries as part of its solar energy system.Source: Electrek

German recycling company Duesenfeld says it can recover up to 96% of the nickel, manganese, cobalt, and lithium in lithium-ion batteries.

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EVs Running on Renewable Energy

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What fuels an EV matters too. If the electricity used for charging comes from coal and gas, the carbon that disappeared from the tailpipe may simply have relocated to a power plant smokestack.

That's why the shift to EVs has to move together with the shift to renewable energy. Change the cars alone while the electricity stays the same, and you won't get the emissions cuts you were hoping for.

▲ A residential energy storage system powered by solar.Source: Tesla

Tesla has pitched a model combining solar power with its home battery system, the "Powerwall," so a car can be charged with electricity generated at home. The car, the home, and the grid become one connected energy ecosystem.

Volkswagen's analysis found that charging with renewable energy can significantly lower an EV's driving-related emissions. The same electric car can have a completely different climate impact depending on what powers it.

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What We Can Do for Cleaner Transportation

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An EV's carbon footprint varies with a country's power mix, vehicle size, where the battery was made, and how far it's driven, along with the methodology used. That's why the numbers differ slightly from study to study. Still, recent lifecycle assessments broadly converge on one conclusion: EVs come out ahead of combustion vehicles for the climate.

Some early studies weighted the battery production burden heavily, but assessments have shifted as battery manufacturing and power grids have improved. It's a field where the answer changes as the technology does.

Calculations that overstate battery manufacturing emissions, assume a short battery lifespan, or assume power grids will stay fossil-fuel-dependent forever can distort the real picture. On the other hand, calculations that count only driving emissions while ignoring supply chain human rights issues and spent-battery problems aren't complete either.

The 2025 ICCT study discussed earlier reflects this latest thinking. Its finding that EV lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions run 73% lower than gasoline vehicles is largely down to how quickly Europe's power grid is shifting to renewables.

▲ As Europe's power grid shifts rapidly toward renewables, estimated EV lifecycle carbon emissions fell from 83g/km in 2021 to 63g/km in 2025 — 73% lower than gasoline vehicles (235g/km).Source: ICCT, 2025

▲ Lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions of internal combustion vehicles (ICEVs) versus battery electric vehicles (BEVs), compared by country.Source: ICCT

The transport transition toward net zero by 2050 needs to accelerate. Multiple international scenarios call for a sharp increase in the share of zero-emission vehicle sales between 2030 and 2035. The target is clear, but this transition won't be complete just by swapping out cars.

In the end, the question isn't "are EVs good or bad?" What matters more is what powers the charge, what minerals go into the battery, and how spent batteries get returned to use. And alongside switching to electric vehicles, we also need cities and lifestyles that depend less on cars in the first place.

Electric vehicles aren't a perfect green technology. But that's no reason to go back to combustion engines either. What's needed now isn't blind praise or blanket suspicion of EVs — it's building a cleaner, fairer mobility ecosystem.

It's not enough to swap out one engine. Only when we also change how electricity is generated, how minerals are mined, and how batteries are given new life will EVs truly be able to drive us toward net zero.

Written by Sharon Choi
Director of Planning, Sunhak Peace Prize Secretariat