Electric Cars and the Future of Transportation
ELECTRIC CARS AND THE FUTURE OF TRANSPORTATION
The Electric car - a beacon of hope in our oil-soaked world. At a time when governments have been slow to react to the climate crisis, the free market has given us a green transportation revolution with the electric car at the vanguard. Quiet and luxurious, electric cars are a transformative response to the planet-destroying internal combustion engine vehicles (ICEVs) that have had a stranglehold on the automobile industry for a century. Whatever else we manage to achieve in the fight against climate breakdown, we have at least managed to bring about an age of clean climate-friendly travel.
Or so goes the narrative we've been fed since the hybrid engine Prius first captured the zeitgeist over a decade ago, promising a future where ultra-efficient environmentally-friendly vehicles reigned supreme. We've heard the story a million times over: By using the grid to refuel, electric cars can reduce emissions and improve air quality as they empower us to travel guilt-free using clean, renewable energy.
In recent years, as Tesla takes its place as the poster child for green capitalism, electric cars have made the next leap forward and left the orbit of carbon-conscious suburbanites, entering the mainstream as the vehicle of choice for ambitious entrepreneurs, aspiring tech moguls, and the conscientious financially endowed consumer with an eye toward the future.
Though Tesla’s reputation as a trendy cutting-edge luxury vehicle certainly drives its fair share of sales, the climate-and-environmental-friendliness of electric cars has been, and remains, the key promise at the heart of their appeal. As climate anxiety worsens and desperation for action grows, so, too, do the articles and think-pieces propping up the electric car as the solution to our climate woes. Battery-powered vehicles are increasingly presented as an ideal, and inevitable, next step toward lowering our emissions and growing an ecologically sustainable economy.
The question for many isn't if the electric car is the way of the future, because of course it is, the question instead is how fast that future will arrive, and if it will arrive in time. From the mainstream media to major environmental nonprofits, the message is clear: To care about climate change, to care about the future, to acknowledge the economic reality is to embrace electric vehicles.
But what if electric vehicles aren’t actually a solution? What if the Prius, Tesla, Volt, and every other Green Car are little more than branding schemes meant to stave off real change, instead keeping us tethered to an industry that is structurally incompatible with slowing climate collapse?
What if the electric car is part of the problem?
The numbers
The average household in the United States produces roughly 1,200 pounds of CO2 emissions per megawatt hour of electricity consumed, and the average US household uses a little under 1 megawatt hour of electricity per month.
Each month, then, millions of US households are producing a little more than half a ton of CO2 emissions. These aren’t emissions we observe directly - they’re not coming from tailpipes or, for the most part, smokestacks on top of your house - but they're just as real all the same and they build up in all sorts of little ways. For the most part, everything that requires electricity produces some amount of CO2 emissions when it’s in use, or even just when it’s plugged in. Most of these emissions are going to be negligible on their own - turning on a lamp, for instance, produces just a fraction of an ounce - but together they add up. If you add an electric car into the mix, then, every time you charge it you’ll be drawing on power from sources that generate carbon dioxide*, just the same as a gas powered vehicle, only with a level of remove that makes the environmental impact less obvious than the smoke coming from a tailpipe.
*Of course, not all power is generated through fossil fuels.
Renewable energy is a central part of the argument in favor
of electric vehicles, but the fact remains that the vast
majority of electricity generation everywhere on earth comes
from fossil fuels.
We'll revisit this point later on, however, and explore
just what exactly happens if we try to power electric cars
exclusively on renewable energy.
Now, it just so happens that the vast majority of electric cars are charged at their owner's home, meaning that most of an electric vehicle's lifetime energy-related emissions come from home energy use (just in case you're wondering: emissions don't fair much better if you’re charging at public ports). Since the capacity of electric car batteries is measured in kilowatt hours (kWh), and there are 1,000 kilowatt hours in a megawatt hour, we can generally assume that every kilowatt hour of use from an electric car produces the same 1.2 pounds of CO2 we noted before when looking at average household emissions (assuming that one is charging their vehicle at a typical home or public port).
This gives us a rough baseline to work from when comparing EV emissions to gas vehicle emissions. On the other side of the equation, when used for car fuel, gasoline produces about 19.4 pounds of CO2 per gallon. These are the numbers we'll be working with when comparing the “tailpipe” emissions of electric cars to those from gas-powered cars.
Before we get to that comparison, though, we need to get one thing out of the way.
There’s an often unspoken assumption at the heart of the discussion around electric vehicles: that we will, or even must, continue to use personal automobiles for the majority of our transportation needs. This is the core premise used to argue that electric cars are part of the fight against climate breakdown - that they are an environmentally friendly alternative to a highly polluting, but necessary, part of our lives (including the indefinite buying, selling, and repairing of said cars).
It’s important to address this at the top because it means that proponents of electric vehicles begin by eliminating the most environmentally friendly option of all: not buying a car in the first place.
If you want to make your own comparison using specific vehicles, this tool allows you to compare the efficiency of specific models of electric and hybrid cars in your zip code against a typical 29 mpg gas vehicle
We’ll return to this part of the argument later, but for now, consider that the implication that we need to continue buying cars at all means that when we compare the emissions impacts of electric cars to gas cars we ought to compare the most modern and advanced model of each. After all, battery electric vehicles wouldn’t just be replacing '98 Civics, they’d be replacing the future and current models of all cars using internal combustion engines.
Since the environmental argument in favor of electric cars is one based on a car-dependent future, it's being made not against alternatives to cars (public transit, biking, etc), but against increasingly efficient gas powered cars. Thus, that's the comparison we'll begin with.
Now, with that out of the way let's take a look at two comparable vehicles: one electric and one gas.
Tesla Model 3 Long Range, Photo Credt: Spongebobsqpants
For our electric model we'll use the 2023 Tesla Model 3 (currently the most recent model) and for our gas car we'll use the 2024 Hyundai Elantra. They each represent a widely available consumer car in their respective classes that’s available for under $50,000 and that are of comparable size and range capacity (that said, most gas vehicles have a greater range than their electric counterparts, so there's still a gap between the two models’ capabilities).
The weight of a vehicle also impacts its overall emissions. Vehicle exhaust isn’t the only source of polluting emissions; vehicles also produce particulate matter which consists of PM10, inhalable particles, with diameters that are generally 10 micrometers and smaller; and PM25, fine inhalable particles, with diameters that are generally 2.5 micrometers and smaller.
Electric vehicles are on average heavier than ICEVs (internal combustion engine vehicles) and so produce greater PM emissions. This study, comparing the particulate matter emissions of EVs against ICEVs, found that EVs were on average 24% heavier than ICEVs and giving them equivalent particulate matter emissions.
The Tesla Model 3 is a battery electric vehicle that can be purchased with a 82 kWh battery giving it a maximum estimated range of 341 miles and weighing in at 4,048 lbs. Meanwhile, the 2024 Hyundai Elantra is an all gas car that averages 35 mpg (31 city, 41 highway) with an estimated range between 448 city miles to 574 highway miles depending and a weight of 2895 lbs.
Using the above figures, a 310 mile trip in a Hyundai Elantra would produce ~173 pounds of CO2 emissions, while a 310 mile trip in a Tesla Model 3 would produce ~90 pounds of CO2 emissions (assuming it was charged on a power mix reflective of the average US home). If the Tesla were charged at a source heavily reliant on coal power, its emissions would be about the same as the Hyundai (Coal produces roughly 1,000 grams of CO2 per kWh, which equals roughly 2.2 pounds. Therefore charging a 75 kWh battery on coal would produce ~165 pounds of CO2).
In any case, on a CO2 emissions-per-mile basis, the Tesla handily beats the Hyundai. But the direct emissions associated with driving a car are only one part of its total lifecycle emissions (from production through the end of its use).
If we want to compare the total environmental impacts of electric cars versus internal combustion cars then we’ll need to dig a little deeper.
the CIRCLE OF LIFE
When we talk about emissions we typically focus on those we experience most directly, both physically but also temporally - it’s the environmental impacts we can observe in the immediate present that tend to get the most attention, hence why those generated from charging electric cars often get lost in the conversation. Similarly, the emissions and environmental impacts of vehicle production rarely enter into the conversation around transportation and sustainability despite playing just as, if not more of, an important a role in the overall lifecycle emissions of a car than its actual usage.
Building a car requires extensive mineral extraction from across the globe, the shipping of those minerals to processing facilities, the processing of those minerals into usable materials, the shipping of those finished materials to manufacturing facilities, the manufacturing of those materials into a finished vehicle, and then, the transporting of that finished vehicle to a final location to be sold to the public. Each of those steps produces emissions and has its own set of environmental impacts. Electric vehicles are no exception.
That leaves us with two obvious questions when discussing the overall environmental value, and impacts, of electric cars: Are the emissions produced from the manufacturing of electric cars offset by the emissions they save relative to gas vehicles? And, if so, are the savings great enough to justify replacing already manufactured gas vehicles with new electric models?
The authors of this report comparing the lifecycle emissions of different types of vehicles suggest that the standard gasoline vehicle is estimated to have lifecycle emissions of 24 tonnes of C02. Meanwhile, a standard battery vehicle is estimated to produce lifecycle emissions of around 19 tonnes of C02. According to this report then, battery electric vehicles only produce ~20% fewer lifecycle emissions than their gas counterparts, a much smaller gain than our earlier comparison looking at fuel emissions alone.
This is because despite the potential gains in fuel economy, there is an enormous difference between gas and electric vehicles when it comes to production emissions.
The report estimates that around 8.8 tonnes, or 46%, of the electric car's 19 tonnes of lifecycle emissions come from its production. On the other hand, only 5.6 tonnes, or 23%, of a gasoline car’s emissions result from its production.
Battery Electric Vehicle
Standard Gas Vehicle
[50% of the non-production emissions from the gas car = 9.2 tonnes and 50% of the non-production emissions from the battery car = ~5.1 tonnes so 9.2-5.1 equals a 4.1 tonnes difference in emissions]
Looking at these numbers it makes sense when Mike Berners-Lee and Duncan Clark explain that, for the most part, you're better off maintaining your current car as long as possible than ditching it for a battery electric one:
“The upshot is that – despite common claims to contrary – the embodied emissions [production emissions] of a car typically rival the exhaust pipe emissions over its entire lifetime. Indeed, for each mile driven, the emissions from the manufacture of a top-of-the-range Land Rover Discovery that ends up being scrapped after 100,000 miles may be as much as four times higher than the tailpipe emissions of a Citroen C1.
With this in mind, unless you do very high mileage or have a real gas-guzzler, it generally makes sense to keep your old car for as long as it is reliable – and to look after it carefully to extend its life as long as possible. If you make a car last to 200,000 miles rather than 100,000, then the emissions for each mile the car does in its lifetime may drop by as much as 50%, as a result of getting more distance out of the initial manufacturing emissions.”
The high impact of production also means that any plans or programs that could accelerate adoption rates for electric cars would be largely counterproductive. A government buyback program to take current gas cars off the road, or tax credits issued to incentivize people to replace their existing gas cars with new electric models would ultimately create more emissions than would be saved, as the emissions from producing new electric vehicles would outweigh their lower tailpipe emissions relative to people just continuing to drive their current car, whatever it is.
From a climate perspective, we're better off encouraging people to make their gas cars last as long as possible than to push for early adoption of brand new electric cars.
But even when a gas car has reached its limit and can reasonably be replaced with an electric model, as long as our energy systems rely on fossil fuels, the total emissions savings from switching to electric vehicles aren't nearly as significant as proponents suggest. Reducing a car's lifecycle emissions by 20% is not insignificant (and remember, this is the best case scenario of low coal usage - in places where coal power dominates, those emissions gains vanish), but it isn't exactly the environmentally friendly miracle that’s being promised, either, and it’s certainly far from sufficient for meeting increasingly urgent emissions targets.
The elephant in the room is, of course, renewable energy. The strongest argument being made for electric cars is that, unlike gas cars, they could, in theory, be manufactured and powered entirely on low-to-zero carbon energy making them, again theoretically, compatible with long-term emissions reductions.
Before we address that point, however, we need to talk about costs.
Green Economics and you
Since this is often the first point to come up when discussing the high price tag of electric cars let's get it out of the way first: Costs go down as technology improves and production scales up. The present day cost of a high-performing electric car is far greater than what the cost of a similar car would be a decade from now.
But hypothetical future affordability doesn't help us; we're working within a strict time limit set by the accelerating rate of climate breakdown. The questions then become: Are the economics of electric cars a significant barrier to adoption and if so, can that barrier come down fast enough to address climate change?
We'll start by returning to the cars from our initial example: The Tesla Model 3 and Hyundai Elantra Eco.
The Hyundai is available starting at $20,550 whereas the Tesla starts at $44,000. This is a massive difference in price at first, but there are two things that help close the gap.
First, every state in the US offers an income tax credit ranging from $2500 to $7500 for the purchase of an electric car, depending on vehicle size and battery capacity. In the case of the Tesla, buyers can receive the full $7500 credit which would bring the cost down to $36,500.
Second, the maintenance and fueling costs of electric cars are significantly lower than their gas counterparts. This study looking at the various costs associated with gas, hybrid, and battery electric vehicles across Japan, the US (as represented by averages from California and Texas), and the UK found that in the US, average annual maintenance costs for gas cars were ~$368, compared battery electric owners who paid around $268, a 27% savings. On top of this, annual fuel costs for gas cars were estimated at around $1712 whereas annual average charging costs were estimated to be around $940, a 45% savings.
However, the above study actually overestimates charging costs. In reality, the average American is paying about $0.13 per kWh of electricity. If we use the Model 3 with its 75 kWh hour battery as an example (and factor in a slight cushion since some energy is lost in the charging process), it would cost around $10.50 for a full charge. Assuming you get the full 310 miles out of that charge, and assuming you drive 15,000 miles per year, you'd pay around $525 per year in charging costs or about $1,187 less than you would in gas costs (~69% in savings). All told, you'd save roughly $1,287 every year by driving an electric instead of gas vehicle.
This still means that it would take over 13 years for the savings to make up for the difference in cost between the Tesla and the Hyundai, but from a daily use/cash flow standpoint, an electric car is generally going to be far cheaper than its gas counterpart.
Over time, this advantage will only grow more stark as battery electric vehicle production scales up (thus lowering their cost) and oil prices continue to rise (due to climate policy and dwindling supplies), while electricity costs remain relatively stable. Assuming electric cars continue on their current trajectory, it will only be a matter of time before buying electric is the most economical choice.
As great as all of this might sound, cheaper and more energy efficient car travel could actually end up being worse for the climate than the status quo because of something called the Khazzoom-Brookes postulate.
In the case of the electric car, the Khazzoom-Brookes postulate has far greater implications than simply net increased consumption,. Particularly in the United States, car travel has played a fundamental role in how our cities, social norms, and economics have developed.
Take commuter culture, for example. The vast majority of Americans who commute don't use public transit. Instead, they drive alone in their cars. Imagine how that might change if car travel became cheaper and more accessible. Or consider the interstate highway system and associated infrastructure spending. All of that would change in ways both predictable and unforseen if the cheaper, lower maintenance electric car took the place of the gas one that dictated the designs of these systems over the last century.
While our focus is primarily on the immediate consumer impacts of reduced costs, that's only the tip of the iceberg when looking at the ways cheaper, more efficient car travel would impact society.
The Khazzoom-Brookes postulate is a well-documented modern interpretation of the Jevon's Paradox. The postulate says that "energy efficiency improvements that, on the broadest considerations, are economically justified at the microlevel lead to higher levels of energy consumption at the macrolevel than in the absence of such improvements."
Simply put, as technology becomes more energy efficient, overall energy use goes up because it becomes even easier and cheaper to use the technology in question.
In our case, being able to travel just as far on a third of the cost wouldn't simply translate to driving the same amount and saving the difference in costs. Instead, it would make travel, particularly over long distances, cheaper and more accessible, meaning more trips, more driving, and more emissions.
Just consider this study which looked at bus and rail use in response to gas price fluctuations. For every 10% gas prices increased, bus use increased by 4% and rail use increased by 8%. But this worked the other way as well. As gas prices lowered, so too did the use of public and mass transit. With electric cars fuel prices wouldn't increase or decrease by 10%, they'd drop by nearly 70%.
From where I live I could hop on a 240 mile train to Chicago and pay $38 for a one-way ticket, or I could take my gas car and pay $30-40 in fuel costs on the way there and another $30-$40 on the way home. But if I had an electric car, the entire round trip would cost me less than $20. All of a sudden travel that was previously cost prohibitive becomes easily accessible. It wouldn't just mean more trips for those already inclined to make them, it would also mean new access to long-distance travel for millions of people who previously couldn't afford it.
There are plenty of examples for why this would be a good thing - improved travel accessibility, greater social cohesion through access to wider geographic networks, more diverse economic opportunities for local and small businesses, etc. - but as our chief concern is addressing climate breakdown, the benefits of lower vehicle operating costs aren't so clear (there are also other ways to achieve those same improvements without the downsides of personal automobiles). Barring some regulatory effort to constrain car travel, replacing gas cars with electric models would likely lead to a jump in miles driven and ultimately, an overall increase in the amount of energy being consumed.
Taken as a whole then the climate value of electric cars is ambiguous at best, and detrimental at worst.
Of course, all of this is contingent on the particular climate circumstances we face and by now you might be wondering just what exactly those circumstances are. After all, it's the primary metric we've been looking at when talking about electric cars despite the fact that there are numerous other environmental considerations (air quality, land use, water use, etc.) that electric cars could positively, or negatively, impact. We all know climate breakdown is a problem, but we still lack a public consensus around just what exactly that problem entails.
Before we go any further, then, let's break it down: What's the current climate situation and how much time left do we have to solve it?
Typhoon in Hong Kong, Photo Credt: Mcyjerry~commonswiki
Climate change: timelines and targets
The trouble with discussing the dangers of climate breakdown is that it's not a discreet threat, rather it's a threat multiplier - it amplifies the severity and frequency of existing hazards and catastrophes. The risk with climate breakdown isn't about a single disaster or apocalyptic event, it's about the potential for existing disasters, crises, and unknown-unknowns to become catastrophic or unmanageable.
Climate breakdown is also no longer something we can stop from happening. The climate has already been significantly altered by human activity and will continue to adjust to our impacts for hundreds or thousands of years. Any talk of "stopping" climate breakdown is really shorthand for saying, "Stop making things worse". The window to halt the process itself has long since closed.
Most important of all is that the fact that climate breakdown isn't inherently apocalyptic. But without the right steps, it can be.
While it may be too late to stop climate breakdown from occurring, it's not too late to prevent runaway climate breakdown, wherein the climate warms enough to trigger natural feedback loops that cause the atmosphere to continue to warm beyond human influence until the planet is too hot to sustain the ecosystems necessary for 95% of life on Earth to survive.
It's this last point that fundamentally defines the conversation around tackling climate breakdown. We've passed the point of no return for "safe" levels of warming - right now our main priority is avoiding runaway climate breakdown, followed by doing everything we can to mitigate the impending impacts from the warming we've already "baked in" and adapting to the inevitable consequences.
Unfortunately, we don't know what exactly the threshold is for triggering runaway climate breakdown. It could be that we've already crossed it (unlikely) or it could be that we've got more time than we thought (extremely unlikely). Right now, it appears as if we're skirting key tipping points relating to Arctic sea ice melt and the collapse of specific ecosystems.
The situation appears to be deteriorating by the day.
Our best guess is that the risk for runaway climate breakdown increases markedly beyond 2 degrees Celsius (herein simply "2C") of warming above the pre-industrial global temperature average, therefore our best chance for stabilizing the climate is to do everything we can to stay below that limit.
You can view up-to-date measurements of CO2 concentrations by visiting NASA's tracking page here.
CO2 concentrations tend to spike early in the year (as a result of higher energy consumption during winter months in the global North) before going down during the middle of the year, so whatever the current number is likely going to be different than what the year-end average will be.
In any event, we are now firmly above 400 ppm and will likely remain so for for decades or centures to come, meaning we have less than 50 ppm left before we are more likely than not to cross the 2C threshold.
The general consensus is that we must keep atmospheric CO2e concentrations below 450 ppm to have a reasonable shot at avoiding more than 2C of warming (though this target is largely politically motivated. There's plenty of reason to believe that number is too high to ensure we stay below 2C, but for our purposes we're going to err on the side that gives us the most time possible).
The 450 ppm target can in turn be thought of in terms of an emissions budget - we only have a certain amount of greenhouse gases we can emit before we exceed 450 ppm. According to the latest synthesis report from the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), "Multi-model results show that limiting total human-induced warming to less than 2°C relative to the period 1861–1880 with a probability of >66% would require cumulative CO2 emissions from all anthropogenic sources since 1870 to remain below about 2900 GtCO2 (with a range of 2550 to 3150 GtCO2 depending on non-CO2 drivers)."
This handy countdown clock put together by The Guardian takes those numbers and shows our remaining CO2e budget as well as how much time we have left at our current rate of emissions before crossing the 450 ppm threshold.
According to the IPCC, in order to have a “likely” chance (~66%) of avoiding 2C of warming we must reduce our emissions globally 40-70% by 2050 and reach near net neutral emissions by 2100.
But there's a problem here.
That scenario has us exceeding 450 ppm by reaching up to 480 ppm before coming back down again. How is that possible? By mass deployment of carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies that currently do not exist combined with global afforestation efforts.
The mild language of this proposal belies just how absurd and dangerous this scenario is.
Reaching 450 ppm would already give us a greater than one in three chance of exceeding 2C and potentially triggering runaway climate change. Exceeding that by up to another 30 ppm increases that risk even more so even with a plan to bring it back down again. Keep in mind, too, that for almost the entirety of our species' history we've lived on a planet with atmospheric CO2 concentrations around 280 ppm. A world at 450 ppm might avoid 2C of warming (though this is unlikely), but it would still mean mass devastation and the displacement of hundreds of millions of people.
It's worth noting at this point that while the science behind the IPCC is not exactly dishonest - the reports don't contain bad data or erroneous measurements - their reports do markedly underestimate the severity of the climate crisis. This is because major IPCC reports are vetted by participating nations before they can be published. Any conclusions considered politically contentious can be vetoed and removed from the documents, say for instance if the report concludes our carbon budget is much lower than previously assumed.
On top of this, the data and research represented in the IPCC reports neglects significant high risk components of climate change (such as a large number of natural feedback loops), as well as the aforementioned modeling based on the deployment of non-existent technologies.
As a result, while the data contained in IPCC reports serve as a reliable baseline for assessing climate change, the IPCC should generally be understood as providing the most conservative science-based perspective on climate science. Any particular component of the climate crisis is almost always going to be more extreme and dire than what's reported by the IPCC.
We're far past the point of "safe" climate change. Every part per million of carbon we add to the atmosphere means more death, more disease, and more disaster.
Basing any of our climate change strategy around an assumption that we'll be able to suck enough carbon out of the atmosphere fast enough to prevent 2C of warming would be like finding a gas leak in your home and deciding to wait it out inside with the windows closed figuring that you can always be brought back to life in case you die.
The stakes of climate change are simply too high for us to assume hypothetical future technological marvels will come to our rescue after we've crossed key tipping points.
So what is a reasonable goal for preventing runaway climate change? Based on current technologies and realistic future prospects, for us to have a ~66% chance of avoiding 2C of warming we must reduce our annual carbon emissions by 80-90% by 2030, reaching net zero emissions by 2040.
The first part of that goal, 80-90% reductions by 2030, is crucial to ensuring we stay below 450 ppm. The longer we wait the more drastic the cuts will have to be and the less feasible it will become to make those cuts (it's a lot easier politically, economically, and socially to cut emissions by 9% per year over a decade than it is to cut emissions by 20% a year in half that time). The sooner we make serious cuts the greater cushion we'll have for the last few percent before reaching net zero emissions.
Unfortunately, the wider political community views such targets, scientifically sound though they are, as being politically and economically unfeasible. As a result, there's a good deal of support for the exceedingly generous IPCC estimates, despite their being based on wildly unrealistic models and assumptions. These targets are often referenced as the gold standard for policy discussions precisely because they provide the most lenient conditions for climate action while retaining the veneer of legitimacy.
For the sake of our discussion, then, we'll focus on a goal that's somewhere in the middle: Complete fossil fuel phaseout by 2050, or in other words, 0% fossil fuel emissions by 2050.
This is a goal that's received support in the US Senate and would get us significantly closer to net zero emissions as fossil fuels account for roughly 88% of total global emissions . This doesn't address all of our climate concerns, but as fossil fuel emissions and land use changes make up the vast majority of the climate impact of the transportation sector we can use this target - no fossil fuel use by 2050 - as a baseline for evaluating the viability of electric cars in addressing climate change.
What this means for electric cars is that to be a part of the solution to climate change we would need 100% of the cars on the road by 2050 to be electric and for all of their power and manufacturing to come from clean, renewable energy.
Easier said than done.
Traffic jam in Miami, Photo Credt: B137
a billion cars and counting
There are over 1.3 billion cars and trucks on the road.
In the United States alone there are roughly 268 million registered vehicles, including cars, motorcycles, trucks, and buses. Since buses and motorcycles combined only make up a little under a million vehicles, and trucks make up around 15.5 million, that leaves over 250 million active cars and light-trucks driving across the US.
It is that 250 million we'd be looking to replace with electric cars by 2050.
In 2017, there were 17.85 million vehicles sold in the US (up 3.9% from the previous year) and of that roughly 6 million of those were passenger cars with almost all the rest of US vehicle sales coming from light trucks (a vehicle type yet to feature an electric alternative). Of those total sales, a little under 200,000 came from electric cars, an increase of 25% over 2016.
If overall vehicle sales level off and remain stable (no small feat given the auto industry in the US is currently estimated to continue growing at 2 percent annually while auto sales globally are expected to rise 1.5%), and electric cars can maintain average annual sales increases of 25% or more, then it would theoretically be possible for electric cars to hit our 250 million vehicle target by 2050.
Of course, in practice it wouldn't be nearly so simple and certainly wouldn't happen organically. From Americans' strong preference for light trucks to the US' meager electric vehicle infrastructure to the aforementioned fact that many gas vehicles are better off being kept on the road than replaced with electric ones, there are far too many barriers for a timely transition to electric vehicles to happen without serious government intervention including:
Ongoing subsidies in the form of direct rebates or tax credits for electric car buyers
Massive ongoing infrastructure spending to install charging stations across the country as well as battery replacement centers and recycling facilities
Buyback programs to encourage people to get rid of their gas vehicles once they’ve reached their maximum efficiency for lifecycle emissions
Expansive auto-industry regulation to gradually pare down development and production of gas cars while ramping up production of electric vehicles, including light trucks or comparable models
New legislation regulating the manufacturing, distribution, and disposal of electric car batteries
New housing regulation to determine minimum charging port requirements for apartment complexes and public housing
These are just a few examples of potential regulations, policies, and programs the government would need to put in place to ensure we'd switch over to 100% electric vehicles by 2050. There'd be little room for error, either, as transportation is now one of the largest drivers of CO2e emissions.
Just looking at the US, transportation (meaning the use of vehicles not including their manufacturing) accounts for roughly 28% of our total CO2 emissions with about 60% (about 16.8% of overall emissions) coming from ‘Light-Duty Vehicles’ (to keep this simple we’ll assume all light duty vehicles could be made electric).
But even if we were to make the switch to electric vehicles tomorrow (and if the Khazzoom-Brookes postulate didn't take effect) we’d only see an immediate ‘Light-Duty Vehicles’ emissions reduction down to about 10.9% (from 16.8%) as a result of electric vehicles' greater energy efficiency. While that's an almost 30% improvement, it still leaves us a long way to go before reaching net zero emissions.
That improvement, however, doesn't tell the whole story as it doesn't factor in manufacturing emissions or the sunk cost emissions if we were to scrap existing gas cars that still have life left in them. These are no small omissions since as we've already seen, around one-third of an electric car's lifecycle emissions come from its production. Moreover, moving to electric vehicles wouldn't magically make them last forever and we would still need to account for the ongoing costs of producing and maintaining new electric vehicles.
Right now the average US car is over 11 years old, while the average life expectancy (the time before sale or trade-in) for a new car made today is around 8 years. Let's give electric cars the benefit of the doubt by imagining they'll last longer than the current average and make it to 11 years, giving us roughly three cycles of electric car purchases before 2050.
This means building not just the renewable capacity to account for producing and powering all those new vehicles, but also recognizing that any technological innovations achieved with electric cars won't be realized immediately. This may sound obvious, but it's an oft ignored fact that today's efficiency improvements or tech revolutions don't take effect right away. In other words, if in a few years electric vehicle battery technology somehow becomes three times as efficient that efficiency benefit won’t be realized until the existing fleet of electric cars are naturally retired a decade or so later.
It takes many years for improvements to filter down to consumers as new tech often gets adopted only when old tech fails and typically starts off too expensive for their average user to get in at the ground floor (which is a good thing from an emissions standpoint. We don't want people constantly upgrading their tech, we want them making it last as long as possible to get the most out of the upfront emissions from manufacturing).
Once again, government buy back programs or incentives to accelerate the adoption of newer, more energy efficient vehicles wouldn’t help – that would just mean increasing the production emissions burden.
What we're left with then is a process that must simultaneously happen slowly and immediately. For electric cars to be viable in addressing climate change we need to rapidly transition to their use while at the same time making our existing fleet of gas cars last as long as possible, all the while rapidly expanding our renewable energy infrastructure (itself a carbon intensive task as that infrastructure must be produced using energy from fossil fuels) to meet future production demands and fuel needs.
And of course, none of this factors in what it would mean to mine the materials necessary to replace the 250 million or so cars in the US alone, or what the long term viability of such an industry would be given the continued need to mine materials for new vehicles. (There are cases to be made for improved recycling and re-purposing but even the most efficient and refined recycling systems aren’t 100% efficient and are often far less so. There would always be a need to mine virgin materials of which there is only a dwindling and finite supply).
This brings us to the central argument in favor of electric cars, and indeed the only long term justification for them: the theoretical potential for electric cars to be built and run entirely on carbon-free renewable energy.
As long as the sun shines and the wind blows
As solutions to climate breakdown go nothing beats renewable energy.
The inflexibility of our timeframe is crucial when evaluating the viability of powering electric cars on renewable energy.
If we could produce and power electric cars on 100% clean renewable energy, but it would take us until 2100 to do so then electric cars would be useless. Whatever transportation solutions we come up with for addressing climate change will need to be in place by 2050 and carried forward from there.
It's easy to imagine the theoretical potential of hypothetical future technologies but the key thing to remember with any vision for the future is that a significant amount of our time, energy, and money will be going toward dealing with disasters, migration, and the negative impacts of climate change. Growing our technology and comfort won't be our top priority when hundreds of millions of people are dying and being displaced. Whatever solutions we come up with must be able to be sustained through the wide range of conflicts climate change will throw our way.
The sun and wind may theoretically provide more energy than we could ever need, but that doesn't mean we'll be in a position to harness it all any time soon.
Fossil fuels are by far the single biggest contributor to global warming meaning a transition to renewable energy is the most important part of any plan for addressing the climate crisis. As it stands, however, excluding biofuels (which are of suspect value for combating climate change) renewable energy only makes up 4.5% of the global energy supply, while nuclear (the only other carbon free option) makes up 9.8%. Those two energy sources will not only need to replace all existing fossil fuel sources by 2050, they'll also need to scale up to meet the world's growing energy demands as electricity access expands to regions that have gone without.
When we talk about powering electric cars with renewable energy, we're talking about adding more than 1.3 billion vehicles to the energy burden renewables and nuclear will have to bear over the next 30 years.
Moreover, regardless of how much renewable capacity we try to add or how much fossil fuel infrastructure we replace, manufacturing renewable energy systems has its own emissions footprint. When China added 48 MW of wind power (with on-grid power of 95.97 GWh ), it produced 11,120 tCO2 in emissions (equivalent to the combined annual emissions of almost 20,000 US homes) during construction. For comparison, the average US coal plant supplies 278 MW of power.
The overall global energy capacity is estimated to be 18 TW, or roughly 18,000,000 MW. For an example of how the above situation would scale globally, in 2016 humans collectively consumed roughly 120,000 TWh worth of energy from fossil fuels, meaning if we were to replace the world’s fossil fuel infrastructure with wind farms like the one in China, it would require building more than 1.2 million such wind farms in the next 30 years.
However, once again, we’re not just trying to replace existing infrastructure (no mean feat in itself), we also need to greatly expand our energy infrastructure to reach the parts of the world that still lacks basic amenities like electricity and clean water. Our energy needs are only going to grow going forward, no matter what we decide to do about transportation.
But suppose we do attempt to add enough renewable energy to power all the world's cars - just how much extra capacity would we have to add to account for switching to 100% electric vehicles?
According to the US Department of Transportation, the average American drives 13,476 miles per year. If use the Tesla Model 3 as our baseline with its 310 mile range and 75 kWh battery capacity, it would take about 3,262 kWh (3.2 MWh) of electricity for a year's worth of travel. Multiply that by 250 million cars and you have roughly 800,000,000 MWh worth of extra electricity you need to generate from renewable power, or about 365,296 MW of power.
To power our goal of 250 million electric vehicles in the US, and assuming we continue to drive about the same amount as we do now and the average electric vehicle is as efficient as the Tesla Model 3, we're looking at adding at least 365,296 MW of power, the equivalent of adding over 1,300 new coal plants on top of our existing energy demands.
It isn't impossible to imagine our love for cars being so great that we decide it's worth it to tackle adding that much energy capacity just for car travel but with such a brief window left to act, and such stringent demands on our resources, it's hard to justify focusing our time and energy on that particular project when so many others are more pressing and when better alternatives exist.
Of course, any alternative transportation solution we come up with will have it’s own emissions and energy needs associated with it.
The most scientifically sound and politically tenable alternative to replacing gas cars with electric ones would have us expanding light and long distance rail systems as well as bus and bike access. We wouldn’t eliminate cars entirely, but they’d be reserved for a small number of people with specialized needs and circumstances as well as certain types of taxi services.
While these alternate systems would still have their own costs and emissions impacts they would be vastly more efficient and lower impact than any system centered around personal automobiles.
Consider, for example, just some of the impacts associated with a car-based transportation network: emissions costs in the repair and maintenance of roads and bridges, the ecological and material cost of parking lots and garages that could instead be parks or farms or housing, the human health costs of traffic accidents and particulate emissions, the impacts of industries built around car accessories and competitions, and the social cost of road rage and atomized transportation culture. Roads and bridges would still need maintenance in a world more reliant on buses and trains, but with lower volumes of traffic, less wear and tear, and significantly reduced space demands, the associated infrastructure costs would be far less than what they are today.
Consider this look at the carbon footprint of railway infrastructure that compares the impacts of a trip from Paris to Amsterdam by train, car, and plane which finds trains vastly more efficient than the alternatives. Trains have less than a third of the total overall emissions compared to cars, including infrastructure and production costs.
There's no politically feasible climate solution that doesn't allow for consistent and affordable travel, but personal automobiles remain one of the least sustainable, highest cost options available (second only to planes).
There is one argument left for the electric car that we haven't talked about yet: branding.
moving the cultural needle
The idea of the electric car as the environmentally friendly vehicle of the future has always been, intentionally or not, about marketing climate solutions as being copacetic with existing norms.
Which begs the question: Do electric cars have value as a symbolic form of climate action? Even if they aren’t ultimately viable as a practical means for addressing climate breakdown, couldn't electric cars be useful for winning over people otherwise hostile to climate action?
The answers are, quite simply, No and No.
There are two main objectives with addressing climate breakdown: Managing the ongoing impacts of our changing global climate system and preventing runaway climate breakdown - the process where the Earth’s climate slips into a series of warming feedback loops wherein the planet warms until past the point of human extinction.
The second objective - preventing runaway climate breakdown - takes priority over just about everything else and is the primary reason why acclimating people to half measures is not only unhelpful, but could actually hamper our ability to make the changes that are ultimately necessary.
We don’t just need people to accept that climate breakdown is happening, nor do we need them to agree upon the abstract notion of taking action to address it. We need people to accept and support the scientifically mandated measures to prevent catastrophe, whatever those measures may be. If electric cars are not going to be part of our long term plan (and by now I hope we can agree that they ought not be), then they don't belong in any discussion of climate action.
Selling the public on electric cars as being a key part of addressing climate breakdown only sets us up for having to later tell those same people that this idea we’ve spent years selling them on is actually wrong and they need to give up on cars altogether.
Not only does that add an extra unnecessary step on the way to our ultimate goal, we would be undermining the public’s trust in climate action through our own inconsistency and spreading of misinformation. We already have enough work ahead of us without adopting messaging that we’ll later have to double back on, especially given the sordid history of climate messaging and public misunderstandings.
Whatever gains we might make in the short term by bringing the car community on board with climate action will be undone in short order the minute we tell them the car they just spent $30,000 on has to go, never to be replaced again.
Which brings us, finally, to the only question many people will care about: Should I buy an electric car or not?
If you’re ready to sell or scrap your current gas car and are trying to decide what would be best choice for the climate, then taking public transit for long distance travel and biking or walking for shorter distances would be the best option. That said, if you need to own a car, then a hybrid or battery electric vehicle would be a better purchase than another gas vehicle (of course, if you can't afford an electric car, you shouldn't feel guilty for driving a gas one as the difference in emissions is insignificant relative to the overall emissions picture).
If, however, your current car is still in decent shape, then you are far better off repairing and maintaining it for as long as possible to maximize the value of the emissions that have already been generated from its production (and to save on the emissions that would come from buying a new vehicle).
When it comes to climate breakdown, electric cars are subject to the same rule of thumb that applies to all consumer choices: The most environmentally friendly thing you can do is to not buy anything at all.
If you have to buy something, the “greener” option is rarely worse, but it is also never going to be the key to saving our species from climate collapse. In the case of the electric car, it is, in fact, still part of the problem and will ultimately need to go, alongside plenty of other familiar parts of our world.
The best thing you can do as an individual to address transportation emissions is to get yourself and your community comfortable with the idea that halting climate breakdown will mean letting go of cars and learning to embrace sustainable alternatives. Get involved in state politics, fight for new rail lines and expanded train service, push your city to consider re-introducing trolleys or increasing funding for bus systems, organize for protected bike lanes and more green space in your community, do whatever you can to fight for structural change at the level you can affect it. And, if you have to drive a car and can afford to do so, buy the most fuel efficient model available when the time comes to give up on your current vehicle.
Ultimately, though, cars as we know them cannot be part of a sustainable, survivable world. From here on out, only radical action will suffice and no personal automobile is radical enough to have a place in our climate-changed future.