The Future is Electric!

// That's the story we're being sold. But not all electric transport is created equal.

Here are the facts: globally, transportation is the second-largest contributor to emissions, after energy and heat production. But as energy production is getting greener, thanks to the rather startling progress being made in the spread of solar and wind technology, transport is about to claim first place. In many rich nations, transport is already the leading contributor of emissions. So, by tackling the transport issue, we go a long way to solving the emissions problem.

As readers of this blog will know, a lot of places are mandating a shift from fossil-fuel based transport to electric. In Norway, which isn't part of the EU, electric cars now outnumber ICE cars. The European Union is requiring an end to the sale of internal-combustion engine (ICE) vehicles by 2035. But these goalposts have a habit of shifting the closer a jurisdiction gets to them. This happened in the UK, under Rishi Sunak; the Conservatives decided a ban on petrol cars meant to begin in 2030 was best kicked down the road by half a decade, a betrayal I wrote about in this blog post. The message is: the future is green! We're working on it! (Read: promises are cheap, and we probably won't be in power then, anyway.)

I've written in detail about my problems with the simple fix of swapping out ICE cars for EVs. (Put succinctly: it's just consumerist More-of-the-Sameism—you don't have to change your lifestyle, just buy our more expensive, heavier, more deadly product! Which does nothing to reduce sprawl, deaths and injuries from crashes, and micropollutants from all that rubber hitting the road. And that's before I learned about what happens when an EV catches on fire—think tens of thousands of gallons of water—rather than a couple of hundred—to extinguish an EV fire, and the creation of a very durable toxic waste site.)