In
my post Environment 1 I banged on about clueless one liners dished up,
typically, in pub conversations. Sadly, there are people who
go a stage further than this, by dressing up their clueless one liners with
pictures and getting them into print.
I
came upon an example of this in, of all places, PrivateEye,
a periodical I love and respect. It shows, as far as I remember,
people in an electric car congratulating themselves on their
non-polluting worthiness. In the background we can see the
putheringly polluting power station which is providing the car with its
so-called green fuel.
I
made a mental note to write this up as yet another example of the
ignorant publicising their ignorance in the mistaken impression that the rest of us are the dim ones. However, in my own dim way, I forgot to
save the mag and it went out with the recycling. So, I did a bit of
Googling to see if I could pick it up online. I didn't find that
specific cartoon, but I did discover that it is just one example of a
lazy cartoon trope: there are loads of them all making that same
wrong point.
So let's nail it:
- Even if a car runs on electricity from coal fired power stations, it still has a smaller carbon footprint than petrol or diesel.
- While electric cars create more emissions during their manufacture than do conventional cars, this is soon paid back because of their very low output after that.
- An electric car's emissions will improve as time goes by because of the increasing use of non-fossil generation by power stations. A conventional car cannot get better and may get worse as it ages.
Then
there are additional but less quantifiable benefits:
- A good deal of battery charging takes place overnight for obvious reasons. There is often a surplus of grid energy at that time so charging doesn't add anything to already existing emissions.
- In America, many electric car owners use solar panels to help with charging. While not providing the total energy needed, they do reduce the demand these cars makes on the grid. We can expect that practice to spread as panels get cheaper and better. (The 100W panel on my boat cost only £100. My 56W panel cost 3 times that much 10 years ago.)
- As with all early stage technology, cars and batteries are set to improve over time.
These points are taken from here:
The article dates back to 2014 so it's getting on a bit. It uses research quoted by the Union of Concerned Scientists so it's a good idea to follow the link to their website and search around for more up to date stats.
Here is a more up to date article (2017) which gives clear comparisons between the various sorts of car - plug in, hybrid, diesel etc.
These articles are clear about the sources of their stats, and are careful and moderate in their commentary. There's lots of stuff about the subject on the net. But please don't buy the kind of ignorant smartarsery that prompted me to write this post in the first place.
