As PolitiFact enters another contentious election year, we want to explain to you, our readers, how we’re maintaining transparency about our fact-checking.
Independence and transparency are the heart of journalism and are especially important in fact-checking journalism. Our readers should understand how our journalists decide what statements to fact-check and we consult sources and analyze data to reach conclusions.
We care deeply about our relationship with our readers. We want our work to help you be an informed participant in democracy. And we want you to understand how and why we do accountability-driven fact-checking.
Over the summer of 2023, PolitiFact’s audience engagement team tested different methods of sharing our principles, mission and process on social media. We responded to comments, filmed videos, made it easier to find our process page and more.
We’re taking what we learned and implementing it in 2024. Here’s how.
We’re answering reader questions
“Why isn’t this Pants on Fire?”
“Who funds you?”
“Who fact-checks the fact-checkers?”
Across emails, direct messages and social media comments, PolitiFact receives these questions frequently, and they’re good ones. This year we commit to enthusiastically answering your questions
For example, we’re often asked, “Who funds PolitiFact?” We’ve answered this in different ways, sometimes directly responding to social media comments, other times creating short video answers.
When PolitiFact visited New Hampshire this year to fact-check the primary election, we asked our Instagram followers what they would like to know about us. One user asked, “How do you know you’re finding the most reliable sources?” Senior Correspondent Louis Jacobson answered them in a video.
Our 2024 goal is to answer at least one reader question in our comments each week, and to film at least one video each month that discusses our process and mission.
We have a long-standing practice of publishing reader feedback about our work. If you disagree with our rating on a fact-check, think we didn’t consider a certain angle or just want to say you think we got it right, you can send us an email at [email protected]. (We won’t publish abusive or hateful comments.)
We also invite readers to share their thoughts on the topics we fact-check. As we worked on the ground in New Hampshire, we asked our newsletter subscribers and social media followers what issues mattered most to them in 2024. You can read their responses here.
As we go forward in 2024, we will ask our audience members what they want us to explore. If you want to follow along, subscribe to one of our newsletters.
We’re making our principles more accessible
To explain our work, we at PolitiFact lay out our fact-checking mission and process in both writing and videos. We disclose who gives our nonprofit newsroom money. We list our sources for each fact-check.
But we also recognize that if you find our work on social media or through an internet search, you might not know all of these resources exist.
All PolitiFact fact-checks include an “If Your Time Is Short” section, which lists the main points of a fact-check a reader needs to know to understand our rating. We will now include a bullet point on all checks that take you to our principles page. This detailed page explains how we pick statements to check, choose Truth-O-Meter ratings, correct our mistakes and more.
We will also link to our principles page regularly on social media so our followers can easily access this information. Our goal is to help readers understand how and why we’ve reached our ratings, plus answer anything else they might wonder about our editorial process.
PolitiFact also understands we can’t do this work alone. If you have suggestions for how we can be more transparent and earn your trust in 2024, please tell us at [email protected]. (It’s checked by real humans.)
Fox News host Jesse Watters recycled a claim climate change deniers have been making for years.
“Hottest year on record, huh?” Watters asked Jan. 31 on “Jesse Watters Primetime,” his skepticism apparent. He expressed doubts about the longevity and accuracy of global temperature records, then criticized the legitimacy of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s temperature data collection.
NOAA, the federal agency that studies weather, oceans and the climate, is “putting the thermometers in the cities … on concrete and asphalt,” Watters said.
“You ever been to the city in the summer?” he asked. “You ever walk around in your bare feet on a city sidewalk in August? It’s hot. That’s where we’re putting the thermometers to measure the world’s temperature. On little heat islands.”
Concrete and asphalt attracts and retains heat more than countryside landscapes, Watters said. “It can be 10 degrees hotter in the city than the country on the same day.”
“The government’s been placing thermometers to measure global warming on airport runways,” he said, adding that others were found in parking lots, rooftops and “in exhaust fans of (air conditioning) units.”
“No wonder we think the Earth’s warming,” Watters said. “We’re literally cooking the books.”
(Internet Archive)
That claim is misleading: Climate scientists know a weather station’s site conditions can affect temperature data, and therefore use algorithms to adjust the data accordingly, experts say. Also, climate change analysis focuses on trends over time, and independent groups that track temperature data around the world all report that annual global average temperatures are rising.
The claim’s source: An outdated report and erroneous depiction of urban heat islands
During the segment, Watters shared a Jan. 29 X post that said, “Documents clearly show that 96% of U.S. temperature reporting stations are improperly located” in places that produce “unrealistic warming” because of heat islands. That refers to the effect of urban infrastructure like roads and bridges retaining and re-emitting the sun’s heat, causing higher temperatures than in more natural landscapes.
Watters didn’t show it in the broadcast, but the post linked to a 2022 blog post titled “96% of U.S. climate data is corrupted” about a report by the Heartland Institute, a conservative think tank. Climate experts criticized the report, which was written by someone climate scientists called a “well-known climate denialist.” In 2022, we rated that 96% climate data claim False.
The 2022 Heartland Institute’s report analyzed 128 temperature stations out of several thousand volunteer-run stations and found that 96% of them failed to meet NOAA’s placement recommendations. Experts said the report then incorrectly extrapolated that data to falsely claim that improper station placement undermined long-term climate change trends.
Many of Watters’ claims — such as the idea that thermometers used to measure global temperatures are in asphalt parking lots, at airports or near air conditioners — echoed details in the Heartland Institute’s report.
We also contacted Fox News, and a Watters spokesperson provided a link to an EPA site on the “Heat Island Effect.”
“Daytime temperatures in urban areas are about 1–7°F(ahrenheit) higher than temperatures in outlying areas and nighttime temperatures are about 2-5°F higher,” read the passage the spokesperson identified.
Kristina Dahl, the principal climate scientist for the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Climate & Energy program, cautioned against using the urban heat island effect to explain the documented rise in global temperatures.
“It might be easier to make urbanization the villain here or to try to pin the temperature trends observed at stations around the globe on urbanization alone,” she said. But “comparing temperature trends from urban vs. rural weather stations shows that warming is happening in both types of environments.”
Scientists who track climate data account for the urban heat island effect when evaluating temperature changes, NASA said on its website.
Global data show rising temperatures
NOAA data shows that temperatures have warmed by about 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit since the agency began tracking climate data in 1850, Dahl said.
“Other climate agencies in the U.S. and around the world show the same thing,” Dahl said. “All of those agencies also found that 2023 was the hottest year on record.”
A cyclist finishes his ride early to beat high temperatures, Monday, July 10, 2023, in Phoenix. National Weather Service says Phoenix has had 10 consecutive days of 110 degrees or above. (AP)
Dahl said there’s no merit to Watters’ claim that NOAA is rigging data to ensure it shows rising temperatures.
“Both NOAA and NASA rely on data from a global network that includes thousands of weather stations as well (as) water temperature measurements from ships and buoys in the ocean,” she said. Those stations are in a variety of places. “When I look at stations within the San Francisco Bay Area, for example, there are some in dense urban areas, some in city parks, some in coastal mountain ranges, and some in small towns.”
Robert Rohde, the lead scientist at Berkeley Earth, a California-based organization providing global temperature data, told PolitiFact in 2022 that NOAA and the National Weather Service have two programs to monitor U.S. weather conditions. The volunteer-run program, which was the Heartland Institute’s study’s exclusive focus, has less rigorous standards for where temperature stations can be installed. The other program has more sophisticated, automated weather stations and more stringent location requirements.
Temperature stations for global temperature analyses are “from a blend of urban and rural locations” and meet requirements for equipment and location standards, said Karin Gleason, monitoring section chief from NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information.
“Homogeneity algorithms are applied to the data collected so that they can be compared with stations from around the world on more equal footing,” she said. “This allows for an apples-to-apples comparison, removing bias from artificial environments.”
Dahl said she has no concerns about potential bias in NOAA’s temperature station locations. If NOAA’s data were biased, she said it’s unlikely its findings “would consistently be reproduced by other climatological organizations around the world that use different methodologies to deduce global temperature trends.”
Our ruling
Watters claimed that “we think the Earth’s warming” because “we’re literally cooking the books” with NOAA’s flawed global temperature data.
His claim was based on a misunderstanding of the urban heat island effect and a 2022 report that falsely concluded 96% of U.S. climate data is corrupted. Climate scientists know a weather station’s site conditions can affect temperature data, and therefore adjust the data accordingly, experts say.
Climate change analysis focuses on change over time, and independent groups that track temperature data around the world all report that annual global average temperatures are rising.
We rate this claim False.
RELATED:Fact-checking a talking point about ‘corrupted’ climate change data
Here’s the thing about altered photos: They lie, and they lie, and they lie — a billion little times.
A photograph circulating on social media shows superstar Taylor Swift holding a Trump flag on the red carpet before winning album of the year for an unprecedented fourth time at the Grammys Awards. The flag reads, “Trump won, Democrats cheated!” But it has been altered.
An Instagram user shared a screenshot of an X post of Swift holding the flag, which has a Variety magazine watermark with text reading, “Taylor Swift blends politics and fashion on the #GRAMMYs red carpet.”
(Screenshot from Instagram)
This post was flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)
The screenshot was taken from a video shared on X by an account called Poo Crave that satirizes a media company, Pop Crave, which posts celebrity-related content. A community note on the post says the video was edited.
The Instagram post’s comments showed some users recognized the photo as satire, but others were confused. “Is this real?” one user asked.
PolitiFact rated Pants on Fire another altered photograph that showed Swift holding the Trump flag at a Kansas City Chiefs football game.
Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election by 74 electoral votes and 7 million more popular votes than former President Donald Trump. Claims that it was stolen are false.
Swift has been the target of conservative conspiracy theories falsely claiming she is a government operative and that her romance with Chiefs star Travis Kelce is orchestrated so Swift can endorse Biden at the Super Bowl.
Swift so far has not endorsed a candidate in the 2024 presidential race. She endorsed Biden in October 2020.
We rate the claim that Swift was photographed holding a “Trump won, Democrats cheated!” flag at the Grammys Pants on Fire!
As inflation has cooled since its peak in summer 2022, President Joe Biden has been increasingly eager to tout the trend of moderating prices.
In a Feb. 4 post on the social media platform X, Biden wrote, “Experts said that to get inflation under control, we needed to drive up unemployment. We found a better way. Under my plan, unemployment has been under 4% for two full years now, and inflation has been at the pre-pandemic level of 2% over the last half year.”
What Biden said about unemployment is accurate. But what about inflation being “at the pre-pandemic level of 2% over the last half year”?
It depends on which measure you use.
How inflation is measured
The most common inflation statistics broadcast to Americans in economic news coverage come from the consumer price index. These statistics, calculated by the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics since 1947, use surveys to measure how prices for a variety of consumer items in a set basket of goods rise or fall from month to month.
However, the consumer price index, also known as CPI, is not the only way to measure inflation.
The other major measure is personal consumption expenditures, or PCE. It is calculated by a different federal agency, the Commerce Department, and derives from data from federal agencies and private-sector business groups.
Most economists pay closer attention to PCE because it’s based on past purchases consumers make rather than prices consumers are offered. The different methodologies mean that PCE captures choices consumers make to substitute one type of less expensive good for another; CPI does not.
Importantly, the Federal Reserve — the independent entity focused on fighting inflation — puts more emphasis on PCE data when deciding whether to raise or lower interest rates, economists say.
What the numbers show
Using the consumer price index, Biden’s statement in the X post is incorrect.
For the past six months, year-over-year inflation as measured by the CPI has hovered near 3%, not 2%. Because the Federal Reserve has said it’s aiming for steady 2% inflation before it lowers interest rates, being at 3% means the Fed wouldn’t be ready to loosen the reins yet.
So, is Biden right using PCE? Not using year-over-year data. For both November and December 2023, the PCE method pegged year-over-year inflation at 2.6%. And for the four months before that, the rate ranged from 2.9% to 3.3%.
What the White House says
When asked about metrics, the White House said it was using PCE — but not the year-over-year figure.
Instead, it’s using the “six-month annualized rate.” This measures price increases over the last six months, then doubles that figure to see how much prices would have risen at the same rate over a full year.
Using this method, annualized inflation has been 2% over the past six months.
Economists told PolitiFact that this is a credible metric.
“If you want an indicator of the underlying trend in consumer price change, with less month-to-month variability,” the metric the White House is using “probably does a better job,” said Gary Burtless, an economist with the Brookings Institution, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank.
Economists said although the White House is on solid ground with the numbers, it courts confusion.
Most media coverage focuses on CPI, so that’s how ordinary Americans are used to framing the issue, said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of the American Action Forum, a center-right think tank.
In the public, “no one thinks about PCE,” Holtz-Eakin said. “If you’re the White House and want to make this your core message, you should note that you’re referring to PCE and explain what that is. If you haven’t done that, it feels like cherry-picking.”
Our ruling
Biden said, “Inflation has been at the pre-pandemic level of 2% over the last half year.”
Because the Fed has said it’s aiming for steady 2% inflation before it lowers interest rates, being at 3% means the Fed wouldn’t be ready to loosen the reins yet.
Using most basic form of the two main metrics, inflation has ranged from 2.6% to 3% over the past six months.
The White House said it’s referring to a version of one of the metrics that gauges inflation over the past six months and then projects that out to a full year. That figure is currently 2%.
Economists said this metric is credible, but added that its obscurity risks misleading ordinary Americans who are familiar with more commonly cited measurements.
As former President Donald Trump runs for office again, he faces a myriad of legal battles from civil defamation lawsuits to charges of insurrection in federal court.
An Instagram video claims President Joe Biden has admitted to being behind his political foe’s legal challenges. In the Jan. 30 post, the video utilizes three different videos: one that features White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre wearing an animated “lie detector” hat and two of Biden speaking.
“Keep voting Democrat,” a text on the video says sarcastically followed by a clown emoji. “Exposing the insane hypocrisy of the Biden administration. The biggest contradiction to sit in office,” the text added.
The post was flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)
But this Instagram post is misleading. It splices together unrelated videos that are months apart to craft a narrative of Biden admitting to using the Justice Department to attack Donald Trump.
One clip shows Jean-Pierre answering a question in November 2022 about the appointment of Jack Smith as special counsel to investigate Trump’s handling of classified documents and the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riots. The special counsel is an independent actor, does not take orders from the president and was specifically appointed to address concerns of partisan prosecutions. A different special counsel has also been appointed to investigate Biden’s handling of classified documents when he was vice president.
The first video featuring Biden is also from November 2022 and shows the president answering a journalist’s question about how he intended to allay world leaders fears that Trump would not stage a comeback.
“Well, we just have to demonstrate that he will not take power by — if we — if he does run,” Biden said. “I am making sure he, under legitimate efforts of our Constitution, does not become the next president again.”
Biden’s comments preceded the announcement of Smith as special prosecutor and was four months ahead of Trump’s first indictment in a case brought by Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney. New York residents elected Bragg and he does not report to Biden.
In the third video, Biden reiterates in a June 2023 press conference that he does not tell the Justice Department “what they should do or not do, relative to bringing a charge or not bringing a charge.”
As PolitiFact has previously reported, even if Trump is convicted, it does not bar him from running for president. The U.S. Constitution requires presidents to be natural-born citizens, to be 35 years old and be U.S. residents for at least 14 years. A criminal conviction doesn’t stop someone from running for president.
This is not the first time social media posts have suggested that Biden has said he was behind the prosecutions to stop Trump from being reelected. Independent fact-checkers have previously debunked claims that use videos to claim that Biden is admitting to pulling the strings.
We rate the claim that Biden admitted to using the Justice Department to pursue Trump False.
Republican lawmakers who oppose a new bipartisan Senate immigration bill are using the words of one of the bill’s sponsors to bolster their opposition.
During a Feb. 6 news conference, Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., held up an X post, blown up on a poster board, written by Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn.
“You can see this with Chris Murphy’s tweet,” Scott said, pointing to the board for the cameras. One line was highlighted: “The border never closes.”
“Chris Murphy was very candid,” Texas Sen. Ted Cruz said during the same press conference. “You know, they say in Washington a gaffe is when a politician accidentally tells the truth. Well there you go, Chris Murphy: ‘the border never closes’ the Democrats’ opening position is, ‘We will not close the border.’”
What did Murphy mean?
On Feb. 4, the day the bill was released, Murphy posted a thread on X explaining the legislation. One post said: “A requirement the President to funnel asylum claims to the land ports of entry when more than 5,000 people cross a day. The border never closes, but claims must be processed at the ports. This allows for a more orderly, humane asylum processing system.”
PolitiFact has fact-checked, and rated False, claims that the bill allows 5,000 migrants to enter illegally every day. The legislation gives the Biden administration the Biden administration emergency authority to bar most asylum seekers if border officials record an average of 5,000 encounters a day. Encounters, however, track the number of times officials stop people trying to enter, not the number of people released into the country.
Murphy worked to clarify what he meant when he said the border “never” closes in a subsequent post, replying to Cruz, who had said Murphy was bragging about the bill being an “open borders victory.”
Murphy wrote: “Uh there’s $2 BILLION a day in trade that crosses the border. Our economy would die if we ‘closed the border.’ We should control the border (which our bill does), not close it.”
Murphy’s press office told PolitiFact that the bill’s border emergency authority would not affect trade and lawful international travel for U.S. citizens and authorized residents and that ports of entry would remain open for asylum seekers.
The bill’s “emergency authority” provision allows the president and Homeland Security secretary to suspend asylum for those crossing illegally into the U.S. between ports of entry.
But it preserves access for people to apply for asylum at official ports of entry, such as international airports, seaports and road and rail crossing on a land border, with a cap of 1,400 applications per day. Migrants currently have this option, but because these locations typically have limited space and require appointments with long backlogs, many try to cross into the U.S. illegally between ports of entry.
Meanwhile, the authority’s effectiveness would still hinge on available resources and Mexico’s cooperation accepting non-Mexican nationals deported by the U.S., experts previously told PolitiFact.
“Given the limited avenues for lawful admission into the United States, there will always be some noncitizens who seek to enter unlawfully,’” said Kevin Johnson, dean at the University of California’s school of law. “Absent extreme measures (such as those employed in the old East Germany to halt efforts to leave the country) that are inconsistent with our values and Constitution, the border cannot simply be shut down.”
PolitiFact previously reported that current immigration law enables presidents to stop entries. But that same law also says that people can come to U.S. borders and ask for asylum, even if they enter without authorization.
Immigration experts said that although the president’s power is broad, it can’t be used to override other parts of immigration law.
PolitiFact Staff Writer Maria Ramirez Uribe contributed to this report.
RELATED: Ask PolitiFact: Can Joe Biden ‘shut down the border’ on his own?
RELATED: No, the Senate immigration bill does not allow 5,000 people to illegally enter the U.S. daily
Q: Are electric cars really better for the environment than gasoline-powered cars over their lifetimes?
A: Yes. Electric vehicles typically release fewer greenhouse gas emissions than internal combustion engine vehicles during their life cycles, even after accounting for the increased energy required to make their batteries. And their carbon footprints are expected to get smaller in the near future.
FULL QUESTION
Hi. I have been sent this facebook post regarding Electric car battery information which does not seem factual to me but I would like to know for sure.
FULL ANSWER
After seeing various versions of a viral post on social media that plays up the environmental costs of electric vehicles, readers have been asking us if EVs are really better for the environment than conventional gasoline-powered cars. The post, which includes false and misleading claims, shares a photo of a Tesla car battery and is accompanied by a long caption highlighting the minerals and energy needed to manufacture the battery — ultimately claiming that EVs take a full seven years to begin lowering carbon emissions compared with a conventional car.
The production and use of all kinds of vehicles and fuels have environmental costs. Large amounts of raw minerals and other materials have to be extracted, manufactured and transported globally to make automobile bodies, engines, batteries and other components. Then the vehicles need to run — either on fuels such as gasoline or diesel, which also need to be extracted, refined, produced and distributed, or on electricity, which is generated from fossil fuels, nuclear power or renewables. And when vehicles no longer work, materials need to be recycled or disposed of. At each of these stages, vehicles are responsible for producing heat-trapping gases, known as greenhouse gases, that contribute to climate change. The total emissions across a vehicle’s lifetime are called life cycle or cradle-to-grave emissions.
The transportation sector had the largest share of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. in 2021, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Most of these emissions are carbon dioxide emissions that come from the combustion of fossil fuels in conventional gasoline or diesel vehicles. Light-duty trucks, such as SUVs, pickup trucks and minivans, were the largest contributors of the sector’s emissions (37%), while passenger cars accounted for 23%. These emissions will need to be nearly eliminated to achieve the ambitious climate target of net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, set by President Joe Biden’s administration.
Electric vehicles, or EVs, could play an important role in achieving that goal. Currently, making an EV is more carbon intensive, and expensive, than making a conventional car — largely because of the energy needed to make a battery. Yet studies show that even accounting for those emissions, over their entire life cycle, EVs contribute fewer greenhouse gas emissions than gasoline-powered cars. That’s because once they hit the road, the emissions associated with their operation are much lower relative to gasoline-powered cars.
“Electric vehicles are better for the environment. Full stop,” Austin Brown, director of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Vehicle Technologies Office, told us in a phone interview. “There are tons of complexity underneath that, but … in every metric that we use to measure environmental impact, that we know how to really quantify, electric vehicles are better for the environment now, and they will continue to improve.”
Jarod C. Kelly, principal energy system analyst at the DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory, co-authored a 2023 study that analyzed cradle-to-grave greenhouse gas emissions and economic costs of electric and conventional cars. Kelly said the study found that under current conditions it would take an electric car 19,500 miles, or less than two years of typical driving in the U.S., to pay back the increased emissions of the manufacturing process and break even with a comparable gasoline car.
Electric vehicle charging station in use in Fairfax County, Virginia. Photo by Robert Knopes/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images.
“After that, your electric vehicle is going to be reducing greenhouse gas emissions relative to a comparable conventional vehicle,” he told us in an interview. That payback time, he added, will get shorter as the electrical grid adds more renewable energy — Biden’s goal is to reach “100% carbon pollution-free electricity by 2035” — and the battery manufacturing process gets cleaner.
Even though EVs have no tailpipe emissions and don’t need to internally burn fuels to operate, they do need electricity, which is generated by a mix of fuels and energy sources. The emissions associated with driving an electric car, therefore, vary from region to region, depending on how carbon intensive the electricity mix is. For example, driving an electric car in California will result in lower emissions than driving the same car in West Virginia, since the latter is highly reliant on coal and uses fewer renewables to generate electricity. Other variables, such as size and model of the vehicle, driving patterns, and manufacturing location, can also make the comparison between EVs and conventional cars complex, Carbon Brief, a U.K.-based climate-focused website, has explained.
But in most scenarios, EVs win out with fewer carbon emissions. Similar to the DOE analysis, a 2021 white paper by the International Council on Clean Transportation, a research group that aims to improve transportation energy efficiency, found that the lifetime emissions of an average medium-size electric car were lower compared with a gasoline-powered car by “66%–69% in Europe, 60%–68% in the United States, 37%–45% in China, and 19%–34% in India.”
Misleading Viral Posts
Despite these analyses, thousands of social media users shared the post many readers sent to us, which incorrectly suggests there are few or no environmental benefits in owning an electric car. Similar claims — and others about EVs — have been debunked by some of our fact-checking colleagues.
“It takes SEVEN years for an electric car to reach net-zero CO2,” the post says. “The life expectancy of the batteries is 10 years (average). Only in the last three years do you begin to reduce your carbon footprint. Then the batteries have to be replaced and you lose all the gains you made in those three years.”
There are several inaccurate claims in those sentences.
To begin with, there are CO2 emissions associated with driving an EV.
“EVs are not zero-emitting vehicles. Hence, they never reach net-zero,” Sergey Paltsev, deputy director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, told us in an email after reviewing the post.
The post may have meant to claim that it takes “SEVEN years” for an EV to make up for the emissions required to manufacture it, when compared with the emissions of a conventional vehicle. But that’s false, too.
As we said, manufacturing an EV currently emits more CO2 than manufacturing a similar gasoline-powered vehicle. “Typically, EV manufacturing (including batteries) produces about 50% more emissions than manufacturing of the comparable ICE vehicles,” Paltsev said, referring to internal combustion engine vehicles and based on a 2019 study for which he was one of the lead investigators.
But, he added, “This increase is more than offset by lower emissions from fuel consumption by EVs.”
It takes between one and two years of typical driving for an EV to pay back its higher initial emissions, compared with a gasoline car, depending on where the EV battery is produced and where the car is charged. The payback time will go down as the electrical grid and the battery manufacturing process get cleaner in the future.
Hannah Ritchie, deputy editor and lead researcher at Our World in Data, estimated last year that, based on data from MIT’s CarbonCounter.com, “the average driver in the US could reduce emissions by half by switching to an EV.”
Chart by Hannah Ritchie / Sustainability by numbers.
“As soon as you start driving, EVs start to pay back their carbon ‘debt’ quickly. In fact, after just two years of driving, EVs are already better. This gap grows year after year. After 10 years of driving, the Nissan Leaf would have half the emissions of the Fiat 500,” she wrote, after comparing cumulative emissions of two mid-range cars, one electric and the other powered by gasoline, for 15 years.
According to her calculations, “EVs emit much less than fossil cars” even if the battery was produced in a country with an electricity mix that is 100% coal — an extreme example that does not reflect reality. Currently, the majority of batteries are produced in China, which has an electric grid that is about 60% coal, she wrote.
Emissions associated with manufacturing EVs are expected to decrease in the future by moving parts of the production to the U.S., since the American grid is cleaner than China’s. Battery manufacturing capacity in the U.S. is expected to support the production of 10 million to 13 million electric vehicles each year by 2030, according to DOE.
While battery recycling is currently difficult, researchers have been developing new technologies to make it easier. In 2019, the Department of Energy launched a center to work on new lithium-ion battery recycling technologies, and car companies are also involved in this type of research. Improving recycling would not only reduce the cost of batteries, but also the emissions associated with making and disposing of them.
The post also claims that EV batteries last an “average” of 10 years, but that’s not exactly accurate. Currently, batteries are expected to last between 10 and 20 years. A DOE spokesperson told us electric cars being sold today are “designed to be consistent with conventional vehicle performance,” which is roughly a lifetime of 178,000 miles.
Most cars won’t need the battery replacement the post misleadingly claims they will. “We don’t expect most vehicles to need a new battery,” DOE’s Brown said.
Many EV manufacturers provide a warranty that the battery will retain 70% of its capacity for eight years or 100,000 miles, whichever comes first. That minimum warranty will soon be required in California, starting with 2026 model vehicles, and may become required nationally for 2027 EVs, if proposed EPA rules are finalized.
Minerals Required for EV Batteries
Other parts of the post focus on the mining required to make an EV battery. The post includes lists of the amount of minerals supposedly required to produce one Tesla Model Y battery; the machinery, fuel and labor needed to mine them; and the price of the batteries and the cars.
“Finally you get a ‘zero emissions’ car,” the post says, sarcastically.
It’s true that more minerals and mining are required to make an EV.
“Simply put, EV’s require more mining and processing,” Corby Anderson, director of the Kroll Institute for Extractive Metallurgy at the Colorado School of Mines, told us in an email.
According to the International Energy Agency, a typical electric car needs “six times the mineral inputs” of a gasoline car. A single electric car lithium-ion battery pack “could contain around 8 kg of lithium, 35 kg of nickel, 20 kg of manganese and 14 kg of cobalt,” according to Nature. These minerals are scarce, expensive and carry other environmental and sociopolitical costs.
For example, nearly 70% of the cobalt production comes from Congo, where “up to 40,000 children work in extremely dangerous conditions” in artisanal mines, according to the United Nations. In Chile, the country with the largest lithium reserve, environmental groups and communities living near the Atacama’s salt flats say the extraction from brine deposits, which requires large volumes of fresh water in a desert, alters the water supply and hurts critical flamingo populations, according to Reuters.
In the U.S., Biden’s goal is for half of new car sales to be electric by 2030. As we’ve written, emissions standards proposed by the EPA in 2023 are “projected to accelerate the transition” to EVs, which could mean 67% of new light-duty vehicle sales are electric by 2032. Experts expect the global demand for lithium batteries to grow more than fivefold in five years.
But the specific figures in the post on the mining needed to obtain the EV battery minerals — which are presented without pointing to any source — are difficult to interpret, experts said.
Kelly, from the DOE, told us it’s impossible to understand the numbers that are presented.
“This is really too vague to be able to fact-check what they mean by any of that,” he said. “The truth is we live in an industrial world,” he added, and most people are not fully aware that mining is required for almost anything we use, “so I think that there’s a little bit of shock value with some of these numbers.”
Anderson, who reviewed the values in the post sent by our readers, told us the numbers are a mixed bag in terms of their accuracy.
It’s worth noting that batteries may be produced with fewer minerals in the future. New designs of batteries already use less nickel and cobalt, and some are aiming to be cobalt- and/or nickel-free.
But more to the point, requiring “more rock to be mined” doesn’t mean that EVs are worse for the environment, David Manley, lead economic analyst at the Natural Resource Governance Institute, a nonprofit that works with several countries on managing natural resources and sustainable development, told us in an email. The post uses “false reasoning,” he said, because it ignores the environmental costs of fossil fuel extraction.
Drilling for oil, for example, can harm ecosystems, and oil spills can be environmentally damaging. As MIT’s Climate Portal explains, it’s difficult to directly compare the environmental harms that exist for both EVs and conventional vehicles — context that is missing from the post.
“This extraction and transport of fossil fuels has to be done constantly to fuel a [gas-powered] car, while the extraction of metals for an EV is done once,” he said.
Editor’s note: FactCheck.org does not accept advertising. We rely on grants and individual donations from people like you. Please consider a donation. Credit card donations may be made through our “Donate” page. If you prefer to give by check, send to: FactCheck.org, Annenberg Public Policy Center, 202 S. 36th St., Philadelphia, PA 19104.
Sources
“Alternative Fuels Data Center.” U.S. Department of Energy. Accessed 25 Jan 2024.
Kelly, Jarod C., et al. “Cradle-to-Grave Lifecycle Analysis of U.S. Light-Duty Vehicle-Fuel Pathways: A Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Economic Assessment of Current (2020) and Future (2030-2035) Technologies.” Osti.gov. 1 Nov 2023.
“Sources of Greenhouse Gas Emissions.” U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Accessed 25 Jan 2024.
“National Climate Task Force.” The White House. Accessed 25 Jan 2024.
“Electric Vehicle Myths.” EPA. Accessed 25 Jan 2024.
Bieker, Georg. “A new life-cycle assessment of the greenhouse gas emissions of combustion engine and electric passenger cars in major markets.” The International Council on Clean Transportation. Jul 2021.
Brown, Austin. DOE’s Vehicle Technologies Office director. Phone interview with FactCheck.org. 19 Jan 2024.
Kelly, Jarod C. DOE’s Principal energy system analyst. Phone interview with FactCheck.org. 19 Jan 2024.
Shaiq, Samah. DOE Press secretary. Email to FactCheck.org. 16 Jan 2024.
Nguyen, Andy. “CO2 output from making an electric car battery isn’t equal to driving a gasoline car for 8 years.” PolitiFact. 11 May 2021.
Baruah, Anuraag. “CO2 emitted in making an EV battery isn’t equal to driving a petrol car for 8 years.” Climate Fact Checks. 5 Sep 2022.
Petersen, Kate S. “CO2 emissions from gas cars outweigh electric, even with battery manufacturing | Fact check.” USA Today. 23 Jan 2024.
Paltsev, Sergey. Deputy director of MIT Joint Program on Science and Policy Global Change. Email sent to FactCheck.org. 22 Jan 2024.
Ritchie, Hannah. “Electric cars are better for the climate than petrol or diesel.” Sustainability by numbers. 26 Jan 2023.
Sisson, Patrick. “How does an EV battery actually work?” MIT Technology Review. 17 Feb 2023.
“California Vehicle and Emissions Warranty Periods.” California Air Resources Board. 13 Apr 2018.
Najman, Liz. “New Study: How Long Do Electric Car Batteries Last?” Recurrent. 27 Mar 2023.
Evans, Simon. “Factcheck: 21 misleading myths about electric vehicles.” CarbonBrief. 24 Oct 2023.
Hausfather, Zeke. “Factcheck: How electric vehicles help to tackle climate change.” Carbon Brief. 13 May 2019.
Anderson, Corby. Director of the Kroll Institute for Extractive Metallurgy at the Colorado School of Mines. Email to FactCheck.org. 18 Jan 2024.
“The Role of Critical Minerals in Clean Energy Transitions.”International Energy Agency. May 2021.
Castelvecchi, Davide. “Electric cars and batteries: how will the world produce enough?” Nature. 17 Aug 2021.
Tabuchi, Hiroko, and Brad Plummer. “How Green Are Electric Vehicles?” New York Times. 23 Jun 2023.
Stone, Andy. “Raw Materials Pose ESG Challenge for EV Industry.” Kleinman Center for Energy Policy. 7 Jun 2022.
“Electric Future.” United Nations Climate Change. 23 May 2022.
Villegas, Alexander, and Ernest Scheyder. “Chile plans to nationalize its vast lithium industry.” Reuters. 21 Apr 2023.
Villegas, Alexander, and Cristian Rudolffi. “In Chile’s Atacama, lithium mining stirs fight over flamingos.” Reuters. 23 May 2022.
Villegas, Alexander. “How Chile’s progressive new plan to mine lithium faces Indigenous hurdles.” Reuters. 20 Jul 2023.
Steckelberg, Aaron, et al. “The underbelly of electric vehicles.” Washington Post. 27 Apr 2023.
Chang, Agnes, and Keith Bradsher. “Can the World Make an Electric Car Battery Without China?” New York Times. 16 May 2023.
“Insights into Future Mobility.” MIT Energy Initiative. Nov 2019.
McCrary, Eleanor. “Fact check: Viral image shows coal mining machine, not lithium mining.” USA Today. 6 Oct 2022.
Nguyen, Andy. “Instagram post misleads about lithium mining and Tesla cars.” PolitiFact. 13 Dec 2022.
“FACT SHEET: Biden-Harris Administration Announces New Private and Public Sector Investments for Affordable Electric Vehicles.” The White House. Press release. 17 Apr 2023.
Krisher, Tom. “The EPA’s ambitious plan to cut auto emissions to slow climate change runs into skepticism.” AP. 6 Aug 2023.
“Global demand for lithium batteries to leap five-fold by 2030- Li-Bridge.” Reuters. 15 Feb 2023
Manley, David. Lead economic analyst at the Natural Resource Governance Institute. Email to FactCheck.org. 16 Jan 2023.
“Reducing Reliance on Cobalt for Lithium-ion Batteries.” DOE. 6 Apr 2021.
McFarland, Matt. “The next holy grail for EVs: Batteries free of nickel and cobalt.” CNN. 1 Jun 2022.
Trafton, Anne. “Cobalt-free batteries could power cars of the future.” MIT News. 18 Jan 2024.
Lienert, Paul. “For EV batteries, lithium iron phosphate narrows the gap with nickel, cobalt.” Reuters. 23 Jun 2023.
“FOTW #1271, January 2, 2023: Electric Vehicle Battery Manufacturing Capacity in North America in 2030 is Projected to be Nearly 20 Times Greater than in 2021.” DOE. 2 Jan 2023.
“Biden-Harris Administration Announces $192 Million to Advance Battery Recycling Technology.” DOE. 12 Jun 2023.
Moseman, Andrew. “How well can electric vehicle batteries be recycled?” MIT Climate Portal. 5 Sep 2023.
Morse, Ian. “A Dead Battery Dilemma” Science. 20 May 2021.
Swanton, John. California Air Resources Board. Email sent to FactCheck.org. 5 Feb 2024.
Gore, D’Angelo, et al. “Trump’s Misleading Claims About Electric Vehicles and the Auto Industry.” FactCheck.org. 2 Oct 2023.
“Oil and petroleum products explained.” U.S. Energy Information Administration. 1 Aug 2022.
Ferreira, Fernanda. “How does the environmental impact of mining for clean energy metals compare to mining for coal, oil and gas?” MIT Climate Portal. 8 May 2023.
Ornes, Stephen. “How to recycle an EV battery.” PNAS. 26 Jan 2024.
McDermott-Murphy, Caitlin. “Coming Soon to a Grid Near You: Clean Energy (Batteries Not Included).” NREL. 15 Nov 2023.
Powell, Shayla R. EPA office of public affairs. Email to FactCheck.org. 6 Feb 2024.
Hawley, Dustin. “How Long Do Electric Car Batteries Last?” J.D. Power. 21 Sep 2022.
Kunz, Tona. “DOE launches its first lithium-ion battery recycling R&D center: ReCell.” DOE. Press release. 15 Feb 2019.
Jones, Nicola. “The new car batteries that could power the electric vehicle revolution.” Science. 7 Feb 2024.
If conservative pundit Nick Adams is to be believed, former President Donald Trump has someone who’s come back from the dead to support him: the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
On Feb. 2, Adams posted a photo of Trump alongside four well-known Black figures and the text “Black History Month.” His caption read, “Black America is rallying around President Trump!” The four men are Baltimore Ravens quarterback Lamar Jackson, rapper Lil Wayne, retired football star and former U.S. Senate candidate Herschel Walker and King.
(Screenshot from Facebook)
This post was flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)
If you’re familiar with King, you would likely know that this claim cannot be true.
King was assassinated on April 4, 1968. Trump — who was born on June 14, 1946 — was only 21 years old then.
He was decades out from starting his political career; at the time, he was still attending what was then the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Finance and Commerce. He graduated on May 20, 1968. Trump is now seeking the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.
As for the other men in the photo, two have been known to support Trump. Walker’s senatorial campaign in 2022 was backed by Trump. He has deep ties to Trump, who gave Walker a 1984 contract extension when he played for the United States Football League’s New Jersey Generals.
Lil Wayne expressed support for Trump in October 2020, when he posted on X, then Twitter, “Just had a great meeting with @realdonaldtrump @potus besides what he’s done so far with criminal reform, the platinum plan is going to give the community real ownership. He listened to what we had to say today and assured he will and can get it done.” Trump later pardoned Wayne over a firearm charge.
In April 2020, Jackson posted “Truzz Trump” on X, then Twitter, in response to Trump’s comment on his getting drafted by the Baltimore Ravens. He later clarified that he wasn’t making a political statement. In a press call that same month (at the 1:59 mark here), Jackson said, “I see you making a statement about me being a great pick, my teammate congratulating me and stuff like that, so I was just like, ‘Appreciate that. Truss.’”
“I wasn’t making no political statements or anything like that,” he said later at the 4:40 mark. “But I was just, like I said, just agreeing to what he was saying about me and my teammate. That’s all.”
But Martin Luther King Jr. is not and has never supported Trump. That’s Pants on Fire!
There’s little doubt that former President Donald Trump has been popular in Oklahoma: In 2016 and 2020, Trump won more than 65% of the votes cast in the Sooner State. But did he set a record by winning all 77 counties?
That’s what Trump told conservative radio host Dan Bongino in a recent interview.
The topic arose Feb. 5 because of Trump’s opposition to a bipartisan immigration legislation crafted in the Senate. Trump has assailed the proposal as a “betrayal of America.” And he told Republican senators to “blame it on me” if they get criticism from their constituents for voting it down the measure, which had a Republican from Oklahoma, Sen. James Lankford, among its leading negotiators.
Calling in to Bongino’s show, Trump said he “did not endorse” Lankford (which is false; Trump endorsed him in 2022). In Oklahoma, he said, “I won 77 out of 77 counties. Ronald Reagan is second with 56.”
Although Trump did win every Oklahoma county, he is far from the first to do so.
“Not a single county in Oklahoma has voted Democratic in a presidential election since 2000 — a 385-for-385 record for the GOP,” wrote the Almanac of American Politics 2024, a biennial reference book. (The author of this article is a senior author of the Almanac.)
The Republican presidential nominees in 2004 (George W. Bush), 2008 (John McCain) and 2012 (Mitt Romney) preceded Trump in winning all 77 counties in Oklahoma.
The last Democrat to win any Oklahoma county was Al Gore, who ran against George W. Bush in 2000. Gore won nine counties, mostly in the eastern part of the state; these counties were ancestrally Democratic but like many other rural parts of the U.S. increasingly shifted allegiance to the GOP.
Reagan also did better than Trump said he did. In 1980, he won 58 Oklahoma counties, and in 1984, he won 74.
In 2020, Oklahoma was one of only two states in which Trump swept every county; West Virginia was the other. Trump came close to sweeping a few other states: Kentucky, where he won all but two of 120 counties; Indiana, where he won all but five of 92 counties; and Tennessee, where he won all but three of 95 counties.
Our ruling
Trump said that in Oklahoma, “I won 77 out of 77 counties. Ronald Reagan is second with 56.”
Trump won each of Oklahoma’s counties in 2016 and 2020, but he was far from the first to do so. Other Republican presidential nominees accomplished this feat in 2004, 2008 and 2012.
The two times Reagan was on the ballot, he won 58 and 74 counties in Oklahoma, which is higher than Trump said.
Days before the U.S. Supreme Court is expected to hear former President Donald Trump’s appeal of his removal from Colorado’s March 5 Republican primary ballot, social media users compared his electoral plight with Abraham Lincoln’s in 1860.
A Jan. 26 Instagram post reshared a video in which a man describes efforts to remove Trump from the ballot. The man compared the situation with the 1860 election, and said President Abraham Lincoln was removed from ballots.
“The last time Democrats removed a Republican from the ballot was 1860,” he said. “That candidate was Abraham Lincoln. He still went on to win, and the Civil War started the next year. He also won that.” He claimed that Trump was being removed from the ballot “for saying the elections were rigged.”
The video was originally shared by its creator in a Dec. 20, 2023, Instagram post that garnered more than 150,000 likes.
We have seen numerous similar claims in recent months, comparing efforts to remove Trump from ballots with Lincoln’s 1860 election. Many said that Lincoln was removed from ballots in 10 slaveholding states. One TikTok video shared a video of Fox News host and commentator Jesse Watters making the false claim on his show.
The Instagram post was flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)
Like the Instagram video’s claim, the posts are wrong about why some are seeking to remove Trump from the primary ballot in dozens of states, and about Lincoln’s ballot status in 1860.
Trump ballot challenges
Formal challenges to Trump’s inclusion on Republican primary ballots have been made in at least 35 states, according to a New York Times review. Of those, only Colorado and Maine have taken steps to remove Trump from their state’s ballot, although those cases are being challenged in court. As of Feb. 3, 17 states have rejected efforts to remove Trump from the ballot, and cases in 16 states are unresolved, the Times said.
The challenges are not for simply questioning the election results, as the Instagram video says, but over Trump’s actions on or before the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by his supporters.
In December, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that Trump was ineligible for the White House and should be removed from the state’s Republican March 5 primary ballot based on the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment, Section 3, which says that no person who has “engaged in insurrection” can hold the office of president.
The Colorado lawsuit was filed by a group of Republican and independent voters. The U.S. Supreme Court is expected to hear oral arguments in the case Feb. 8, and a decision will likely impact challenges to Trump’s candidacy in other states.
On Dec. 28, Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, a Democrat, unilaterally removed Trump from the Republican primary ballot after three challenges by voters, also citing the 14th Amendment’s insurrection clause. Trump has appealed that decision to a Maine Superior Court.
Was Lincoln removed from ballots in 1860?
Historians told PolitiFact that the claim comparing Trump’s ballot removals to the Lincoln era shows a misunderstanding about how general elections worked in the 1800s. (Primary elections didn’t come into general use in the U.S. until the early 20th century.)
Jonathan W. White, a Christopher Newport University American studies professor, said in the mid-19th century, political parties were responsible for printing and distributing their own ballots to supporters. Other experts said because there was little support for Lincoln in slaveholding Southern states, the Republican Party didn’t waste resources printing and handing out ballots there.
“To be fair to the gentleman in the video, I’ve heard professional historians make the mistake of saying that ‘Lincoln wasn’t on the ballot.’ The truth is that nobody banned him,” White said. “It’s just that there weren’t any Republican Party organizations, or voters, in most of the South, which meant that there wouldn’t be any Republican ballots for Lincoln to be on.”
Cecily Zander, a Texas Woman’s University assistant history professor, said after being “frustrated” by the “erroneous” comparison, she wrote a blog post about it on Emerging Civil War, a website that shares scholarly articles about the Civil War.
Voters in Lincoln’s 1860 election would have submitted a “party ticket” — supplied by their party — in the ballot box at their polling place, Zander wrote. That ticket wouldn’t include candidates from opposing parties, only the candidates for one party. Because the Republican party didn’t expect a large number of votes in places such as Alabama or Mississippi, which at the time were majority Democratic, it didn’t distribute tickets in those states, she wrote.
“It was a waste of time and resources to send thousands of Lincoln ballots to the South, just to have them sit in unopened boxes on Election Day,” Zander wrote.
She shared an image of an 1860 Republican ticket in Iowa in her post, and more examples can be seen on this National Museum of American History webpage.
Louis Masur, a Rutgers University American studies and history professor, said Democrats didn’t remove Lincoln from ballots. He didn’t appear because the Republican party “in effect, did not exist in those states.”
Our ruling
A man in an Instagram video said, “Last time Democrats removed a Republican from the ballot” was Lincoln in 1860.
Comparisons with Lincoln’s 1860 election ignore the differences between elections then and now, historians said. Political parties were responsible for providing single-party tickets to voters; Republicans had little support in the South, so chose not to distribute tickets in some states.
No ballot featured candidates from multiple parties, like those used in today’s general elections, so Lincoln could not have been removed from one.
