Electric Vehicles: Not a Magic Bullet
Namrata Kantamneni
The Biden Administration recently announced an infrastructure budget proposal that includes $600 million set aside for electric vehicles. This has been the latest development in a series of pushes towards automotive electrification, a longtime staple of the American way of life. The new infrastructure proposal, with its massive allocation towards vehicle electrification, is new, radical, and full of promises, generating a great amount of optimism.
But I am less optimistic.
We still rely on massive amounts of energy to move us around; electric vehicles don’t change this. These vehicles’ energy may not come from the typical internal combustion engine, but it still indirectly generates pollution through electricity production and raw metal mining.
But why do we even view a car as a necessary appendage? In this necessity to own a car lies a fundamental problem: in the United States, sprawled out development is the norm. Homes are extremely distant from each other, partly as a result of increased home size, which has substantially grown over the past 50 years. In addition, the typical American lawn also adds empty space between homes, only increasing distance and enabling a car-centric society.
That’s not the only issue. Modern zoning laws make it incredibly difficult to place homes near common areas like offices, schools, and grocery stores, making it nearly impossible to survive without a car. Effectively, zoning segregates land based on usage: all single-family homes must be in one area, industry in another, commercial space in another, schools in another, etc. This clusters places with similar uses together, but it also makes it hard to move from one place to another. Sprawl-oriented development combined with zoning laws forces us to remain distant from each other, forcing a reliance upon cars, and it’s only getting worse. In 2018, the transportation sector was the leading greenhouse gas emitter, accounting for 28% of all greenhouse gas emissions. In fact, SUVs were the second largest contributor to increasing global carbon emissions from 2010-2018, and they have only increased in popularity Today, SUVs account for almost half of all vehicles sold, all the while consuming about a quarter more energy than medium-size cars. This has led to a push for electric vehicles to be a magic solution for vehicle emissions.
However, electric vehicles don’t actually tackle most of the aforementioned issues: zoning laws, sprawl-based development, preference for larger vehicles like SUVs. As long as people prefer living in suburbs and using large SUVs to go everywhere, there will be exorbitant waste. Take the problem of large vehicles (like SUVs): 100% of the increase in demand for oil in passenger cars was driven by the popularity of larger vehicles, so why wouldn’t this increase demand for electric vehicles? Therein lies the heart of the problem: our desire for more, for things that are bigger and more expansive. Why else is it that even as vehicles have become more fuel efficient, as families have gotten smaller and smaller, that we have still had an increase in temperature and emissions? I think it’s a never-ending cycle of wanting more.
It won’t matter if everyone switches to an electric vehicle if we live further apart in McMansions in isolated suburban enclaves and have to drive longer distances to go to school or work or to visit friends. It won’t matter if all our energy is produced via solar energy if we all continue to use large SUVs. And if growth in the SUV industry is similar to how it has been for the past decade, the benefits from nearly 150 million electric vehicles will be completely nullified. In addition, electrifying bigger vehicles like SUVs is hard and slow. Even if larger vehicles are electrified, they will still require more energy than normal vehicles, which means that if consumer demand holds up for large electric vehicles, there will still be excessive amounts of emissions, something we cannot afford.
Even if every large SUV was swapped with a small electric vehicle, the reality of the matter is that almost 60% of the electricity produced in the world comes from coal and gas (fossil fuels). That means that if we were to switch to electric vehicles on a large scale, there will still be large sources of pollution (albeit slightly less than combustion-engine cars); the only big difference will be the source of pollution. For example, in Germany where the majority of electricity is generated from coal and gas, a person driving an electric vehicle has to drive over 100,000 kilometers for its relative environmental benefit to manifest. For there to be a true decrease of emissions, we have to rethink electricity generation as a whole—requiring investment in emissionless sources of power, like nuclear energy.
Even if we were to completely overhaul the current electrical grid and switch to nuclear energy, how will we mine the rare metals necessary for vehicle manufacturing in the first place? If we were to solely rely on EVs to decarbonize transportation, half our electricity demand will be from transportation alone and critical rare earth metals such as lithium, cobalt, and manganese will become even scarcer. In order to offset that drain on electricity and energy used in mining metals, we must own fewer cars and drive less overall.
And even if we were to somehow make EVs several orders of magnitude more efficient, we still require tons of space for cars in the form of parking lots, garages, highways, and roads. In fact, a recent photograph from the City of Muenster in Germany shows how much space is taken up by cars vs. buses vs. bicycles, perfectly displaying the inherent wastefulness of cars in the form of space taken. This space doesn’t come out of thin air: we take this space from forests and woods and meadows, from animals and plants and the soil and earth itself. Every time we build a new highway to relieve traffic congestion, or we build a new massive parking lot surrounding a high school so that high schoolers can drive instead of taking the bus, or we choose to pave over a part of the forest so that we can have a 3-car garage home instead of a 2-car garage home, we are taking land from the world around us as though it is ours to take. And no amount of electrification of vehicles will solve this issue.
We cannot try to solve the issue of climate change by simply switching to electric vehicles. We have to build a society where a child can ride their bicycle to school and the parent can walk to work while the grandparent takes a stroll to the farmer’s market to shop for groceries.
When was the last time you walked or bicycled to the grocery store?
Or to school? Or to college? Or to work? Or to the cinema or to a friend’s house or to a mall?
If it seems like a long time ago, that’s because it probably was a long time ago.
But we can fix this. Rebuilding society for people rather than cars is an arduous task, but it can be done. And so, reader, I leave you with an image of the prime minister of the Netherlands (a country famously known for its bicycling culture) riding his bicycle.
Prime Minister Mark Rutte and Assaf Zamir ride bicycles on the streets of Tel Aviv (source: Assaf Shilo, Wikimedia Commons)
