As the FedGov and other governments and environists around the world push to rid the planet of traditional fuel-burning vehicles, electric vehicles are their strongly-preferred choice.
For some reason, no one is promoting horses, oxen, camels, llamas, or reindeer to replace diesel- and gasoline-burners. We here at TPOL cannot imagine why.
Electric vehicles, we are told, are sustainable and prevent evils like manmade global warming (caused by producing too much carbon dioxide), destruction of ecosystems by drilling, pipelines, refineries, and waste disposal facilities. To say nothing of excessive consumption of water, production of smog, and generating obscene profits for Big Oil and its sisters.
On the other hand, electric vehicles (EVs) are clean and green. They produce none of these nasty impacts. They are, we are told, to be worshipped as saviors of the planet and humankind.
Or do they?
Or, do they?
For some of us (engineers and management analysts) here at TPOL, this is not as obvious as it is to your normal Woke college student, government-funded college professor and high-school teacher, or SJW and environist activist.
Take your greedy corporate tyrants, living off both the sweat of their workers (especially the non-unionized) and their customers. Big Oil and Big Auto and Big Mining (and Big Government) do indeed make fortunes from manufacturing and selling internal combustion vehicles. And then fueling them. (And Big Government really makes a killing – they not only tax the selling of the vehicles, they tax people for owning the vehicles, year after year. And of course, they rake in the loot from the sales of motor vehicles fuels.
But… none of the folks making EVs are running or working for non-profit organizations. They make big profits, and we are told, courtesy of government subsidies, their profits are very, very good. Their cars and trucks are made by the sweat of workers – either directly or through the construction and maitenance and repair of robots. While these companies are often condemned as Woke, what evidence is there that they treat their employees, or the employees of their suppliers, any better than Big Auto.
And while at least some electricity is produced by not-for-profit cooperatives or even government agencies, most is produced by evil, money-grabbing investor-owned utilities. And of course government rakes in the taxes for every kW-hr produced in various ways.
And not only is most electricity, in most countries, still produced by burning fuel (coal, natural gas, etc.) but it is usually transported great distances by powerlines which desecrate the landscape, and cause fires. And line losses which mean that much of the power produced is lost in transmission. Of course, electricity can be produced by nuclear fission – and maybe one day by nuclear fusion (other than what old Sol produces). Oh, dear – nuclear power is even more evil, dangerous, and environmentally-damaging than all that other nasty stuff.
But then we must get serious. Producing electricity – even from sustainable methods like wind, solar, and (dare we say it) hydroelectric – requires vast quantities of materials. Materials that must be mined and processed. With all the environmental costs of such activities. Poor, poor Mother Earth. And rich, rich government, which rakes in big bucks (or Euros or yen or rupees). And we can (and must) talk about the environmental damage of vast windfarms and solar arrays and dams.
(And notice, we aren’t even talking about ethanol and soydiesel and growing all those plants and processing all that.)
And then we talk about the vast amounts of rare earth and special metals that solar and wind power – and the EVs themselves – need to be manufactured and operated. More mining and more damage to poor old Mother Earth – our air and water and soil and plants.
More and more studies are demonstrating that electric vehicles (in their lifespan – and again, we aren’t talking about processing and recycling and all that) almost certainly cause significantly more environmental impact – including the production of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases – than coal- and gas- and oil-burning vehicles.
(Dare we mention the possibility of nuclear-powered trucks and aircraft and cars? “Look, mommy and daddy, all the neighbors are coming up to the house and giving us a parade of lights! Aren’t the torches and pitchforks a neat feature?)
Sigh.
But to give hope to the various environists and other Woke types, the news recently got out that there are some environmental benefits to electric vehicles. At least in Italy. An electric bus drove off a 50-foot overpass, killing 21 or more passengers unable to be rescued and probably dying because the fire caused by the bus’s batteries prevented their rescue. They are hardly the first to die from that – and highly unlikely to be the last. Many first responders are terrified of having to deal with EV battery fires due to accidents. They are much different from fires involving natural gas or gasoline or diesel.
But how is that an environmental benefit, you ask? Well, those 21 people will not be producing tons of CO2 every year – not just from not breathing, but from not consuming all the products that produce CO2 and do other environmental damage all their lives. And those people will not have health problems in their older years sucking up additional resources which must be mined, grown, and produced. And their quality of life will not deteriorate as they have to flee the encroaching waters of global warming. Or breathing polluted air. Or drinking contaminated water. Their worries, and their burden on this poor planet, are over.
If you choose to believe the governments and the Woke.
The Price of Liberty 
“Production of smog” may be one of the best selling points for electric vehicles. Not because they reduce pollution GENERALLY, but because they CAN reduce pollution in particular areas. The pollution is shifted from bazillions of tailpipes on crowded streets to a couple of smokestacks out in the sticks.
For me the big selling point for solar is non-intermittency — although Big Oil apologists will claim the opposite. A home solar array with plenty of battery storage doesn’t go out every time a hurricane takes down lines or a drunk driver hits a pole. And if MY solar array goes out for some reason, my neighbors’ refrigerators keep on running.
I keep hearing politicians running their yaps about “strengthening” grids with more interconnectedness, etc. I’d prefer to see “grids” go away and decentralization — down to small neighborhood nuclear reactors and household solar, etc. — maximized so that one point of failure doesn’t cause thousands, or even millions, of households to go dark.
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Tom, you make some excellent points. If you live in urban areas, especially, as regards smog. But to counter that, the impact on rural areas of both massive wind and solar projects can be devastating to particular areas as well – but admittedly areas with less dense populations and fewer people.
We definitely agree about “grids” – and that is a reasonable part of solar that many politicians and others don’t want: either because of so-called esthetics (“ugly solar systems make our neighborhood property values go down” and other nonsense) or because they want people more dependent on the partnership between government and business. (Isn’t there a name for that?) You point to self-sufficiency which can exist even in suburban areas, if not in core cities.
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While I’m viscerally sure that large wind and solar projects can have negative impacts on rural areas, I can’t think offhand of what those negative impacts might be other than e.g. bird kills. In my own area, we recently had a kerfuffle over a solar panel farm because “it’s adjacent to an historically black neighborhood,” but I’ve never figured out why a solar farm was considered a negative there or anywhere else.
Some positive potential effects:
* All energy EVENTUALLY expresses as heat. Diverting a bunch of photons into electrical current instead of just letting them go immediately to heating the ground might actually bring the local temperature down a tiny bit. Which, in hot areas, could make life a little nicer, although I’m sure “environmentalists” will eventually start complaining that it contributes to “climate change” (after they’ve killed off everything else on that excuse).
* We’re producing more and more food on less and less land. If I owned farm land and was feeling the pressure of lower and lower prices due to that, I might be interested in running (or selling my land off to someone to run) a solar farm instead of a soybean farm, and I’d probably get more for it for that than for an increasingly unlooked for use.
* I prefer rural life. By all means, stick several hundred acres of solar panels between me and my nearest neighbor!
* Speaking of which, 100 acres of solar panels creates a lot less annoying neighborhood traffic than does 100 acres of those horrible “housing developments” with cookie cutter “homes” six feet apart.
But above all of it, I’m a market fundamentalist. I’m for cutting off all subsidies and letting the various energy generation options compete for customers on price, reliability, quality, etc. My own preference (which I’ll do my best to implement when and if I stop renting and start owning) is robust rooftop solar. But then I live in a high sunshine area. Other people might have different situations and preferences.
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Tom, first and absolutely, we are all in support of cutting off subsidies and let the market decide. Subsidies and evil government powers and policies (eminent domain, zoning, etc.) generally make the impacts on rural and suburban communities worse.
There are definitely environmental impacts from solar and wind operations beyond the bird-kill problem and well beyond the trumped-up “environmental justice” claim, just starting to be thrown in front of more and more projects and operations. Direct impacts include “micro-climate” impacts which result in problems with local water, soil, and therefore ecosystem impacts, not just from construction but operation, maintenance, and eventually decommissioning and deconstruction/abandonment. Many of the negative environmental impacts are indirect and little different from the impacts of traditional coal or natural gas-fired power stations. In addition to the various rare earths, and even heavy consumption of copper and other mined materials, the massive requirement for concrete and structural materials (steel, etc.) is much higher – on a megawatt by megawatt comparison, to those traditional plants.
While you may be right about having excessive farmland, the impact of wind farms and solar farms on rural land is much larger than just the footprint. Access roads, powerlines (overhead and underground), construction and maintenance and disposal facilities all increase the short-term, long-term, and permanent impacts.
You are right about the impact versus the “ticky-tacky” sprawl of suburbia (I think you are old enough to remember Pete Seeger’s “Little Boxes on the Hillside” song from the early 1960s. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Boxes). But while relatively better, it doesn’t make them great! As always, it is “location, location, location” that is key: some rural areas believe that they benefit while other areas can demonstrate the deterioration of conditions due to the hundreds of wind turbines and thousands of elevated solar panels planted in their communities.
Thanks for the insightful comments!
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I’m familiar with that song, but not old enough to remember when it was new (I’m about to turn 57).
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