– Luke Tonachel, Natural Resources Defense Council
TRUE FACTS:
Speaking of the mercurial Elon Musk – who also happens to be CEO of Tesla, Inc. – it is becoming increasingly difficult to avoid stories about how electric vehicles, or EVs, will help save us from impending climate change disasters. Sadly, those stories have become, like nearly everything else in the USA, highly politicized. Prior to 2016, Fox News published stories like this one in which reporter Lisa Boothe complained that “the problem is President Obama’s entire green agenda is rooted in fanaticism rather than reality.” Sure enough, two years later the left-wing Huffington Post informed its readers that Electric Vehicles Are Taking Over Big Oil and Gas Cars. In fact, electric cars account for fewer than 1% of the vehicles on the road in the USA.
MIT’s Institute for Data, Systems, and Society complicated things when four of their researchers published this article in Nature Energy, which has been cherry-picked by the left and the right. Even the MIT News seemed to be confused about how to interpret the results of that four-year study. The News’s David L. Chandler wrote this:
For days on which energy consumption is higher, such as for vacations, or days when an intensive need for heating or cooling would sharply curb the EV’s distance range, driving needs could be met by using a different car (in a two-car home), or by renting, or using a car-sharing service.
Wait, what? Now I have to buy two cars? That’s got to come as a shock for people who live in places like Houston (about 6 million drivers in the greater metro area), where the “intensive need for cooling” runs roughly eight months every year.
It turns out that, apart from limited driving range, slow battery recharging, and sticker-shock, environmentally-conscious consumers also have to consider where they plan on driving their Teslas, LEAFs, and Ioniqs. If you live in West Virgina or Kentucky, more than 90% of your electricity comes from coal-fired electrical plants. Electricity is an energy carrier, not an energy source. If you are driving an electric car in either of those states, you are really driving a coal-powered car. If you live in Idaho, on the other hand, then none of your electricity comes from coal. But then Idaho is one of the most sparsely populated states in the USA, and therefore one of the least likely to adapt to an EV world.
And there is the deflating matter of start-up costs. No matter what sort of car you drive, a big chunk of your carbon footprint comes from manufacturing. About 28% of the CO2 emissions you and your car are responsible for come simply from making the car in the first place. That number is more or less the same for EVs and gas-powered cars. The Union of Concerned Scientists, which has been generally supportive of EVs, admits that production of EVs likely results in a higher carbon footprint, due mostly to battery manufacturing.
If we make serious progress in converting our national electrical grid to clean energy sources, EVs could play a significant if only supporting role in reducing greenhouse gases. Until that happens, there is a risk that we might be mollified into thinking that solving the complexities of climate change is only a matter of buying a new car. Or two.
