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Why EVs won’t save the world
Switching to electric vehicles helps—but it’s not enough. Tackling climate change means rethinking nearly everything we do on a planet straining under 8 billion people.
If and when the world’s vehicle population fully converts to all-electric, how much difference will it make to climate change? Many readers.
Not enough. Indeed, it is not certain it will make any difference at all, because it will depend on how the electricity they use is generated, whether future technical advance reduces the energy used in their manufacture, and whether it offsets the additional weight etc. that electric vehicles impose with other negative impacts on the environment, and so on.
And even if we are optimistic about those factors, even if we significantly reduce the net global warming effect of motor transport itself, about eight billion of us are still doing lots of other things that are damaging and unsustainable.
Some of them are even more damaging than exhaust fumes. And the fossil fuels that are no longer burned in car engines won’t vanish or become non-hydrocarbonic – they will be “repurposed”.
And it cannot be stated too often or too loudly what 8 billion means. One million seconds (tick, tick, tick) is 11 days. One billion seconds is...33 years!
Motoring is not a minor element, but there are many others and some of them are much (much!) bigger. We have smoke-stack industries, we chop down forests, we pollute water sources, we farm cattle, we build and heat (or cool) buildings, we have nuclear plants that need an ocean to cool them down, we scrape the ocean floor for food and minerals, we use technology to extract finite resources with unprecedented and increasing speed, power and quantum, we fly thousands of jet aeroplanes every day that burn 15 tonnes of kerosene per trip, and we procreate at more than double the rate of double Kenya’s entire population...annually!
We cannot continue to do all that and expect to maintain an unchanged lifestyle.
Even if the transition to EVs is achieved rapidly and successfully; even if that turns out to be a net “good thing”; we damage our prospects if we kid ourselves (or the general public) that we have completely solved “the problem”. The gain will be important, but it will be partial, and it will be minimal. No matter what.
We need to address, with similar vigour and determination, just about everything we do. Never before have we had the power to make our finite planet uninhabitable to human beings. Now we do. We need to use that power more wisely.
