Should electric vehicles be a Lowimpact.org topic?

Some of the topics on our site are problematic – i.e. it’s questionable as to whether they’re truly low-impact or ‘convivial’ (a term coined by Ivan Illich, meaning controlled by and beneficial to communities) – and top of the list of problematic topics is electric vehicles.

The problem with private cars – whatever the fuel

There’s no way that private cars can be labelled ‘low-impact’. Their negative impact on nature, communities and people’s lives is huge. Cars destroy the countryside, wildlife, communities and front gardens, and funnel wealth and therefore power to the corporate sector, whether they’re powered by petrol, electricity or fairy dust.

Transporting a 70kg person in a 2000kg vehicle just doesn’t add up, in terms of sustainability, and there are enormous environmental costs around batteries, metals, plastics, mining, manufacturing and distribution.

Also, their global supply chains and complex technology mean that they won’t be available in a post-collapse scenario, so we should develop alternatives and organise ourselves differently right now.

Cars are the problem, not (just) their fuel. As a society, we subscribe to some absurd ideas around cars – for example, that:

• we need to dig holes in the earth and send poor people down them to bring up huge amounts of metals and minerals for EV batteries;
• we need to use enormous amounts of energy and materials to build large factories around the world, so that ..
• we can build 2-tonne metal boxes to transport people around the planet, instead of organising our settlements in ways that support walking, cycling and public transport, and connecting those settlements with railways;
• an individual in a typical car has to use all that energy to move themselves around, with, in effect, an empty armchair next to them and an empty sofa behind them, so that ..
• most of the energy generated is used is for moving the vehicles rather than the people;
• we have to put up with our towns and cities being unsafe, unpleasant and unhealthy, just for cars;
• millions of front gardens get paved over just to park them;
• kids can’t play in the street any more;
• cycling is less safe next to cars (including and perhaps especially when drivers open doors);
• the countryside gets destroyed by motorways, roads, service stations and car parks;
• wildlife and pets are killed in their millions on the roads;
• and here’s more on the environmental damage caused by electric vehicles and their batteries.

Let’s just look at tyres. In 2017, the International Union for Conservation of Nature estimated that up to 28% of all the microplastics in the ocean come from the abrasion on roads of the synthetic rubber in tyres. At the end of their lives they’re either landfilled, and leach heavy metals and toxic chemicals into the earth, or they’re burnt and emit them to the atmosphere instead. And this is just tyres, let alone the rest of the vehicle, the mining to obtain the raw materials, the road-building or the fuel! The car industry is a nightmare for the global ecosystem and can only harm us in the long run, electric or not.

Children and pedestrians have slowly been pushed off the streets to make way for more and more cars. All for what? Corporate profits, destructive transport systems and boring pub conversations.

Can renewables power all the world’s cars?

Electric vehicles aren’t any better for the environment if the electricity they use is not from renewables. Then it’s a comparison between burning fossil fuels in the vehicle or in a power station. But it’s not possible to run the world’s vehicle fleet with renewables, let alone a global capitalist economy that has to grow forever (which means the world’s vehicle fleet will grow too). The global economy is already way too big to be run by renewables, and an ever-growing renewables sector destroys nature just as surely as fossil fuels. To run the world with renewables (which we absolutely should), we’ll have to shrink both the world’s vehicle fleet and the global economy. See here , here, here and here for more. (That last link is interesting. Don’t think that I’m on the same side as someone like Shellenberger, for whom questioning perpetual growth is anathema – he’d rather trust in nuclear and imaginary technologies and double down on capitalism and yet more growth to fund them).

At the moment, the use of renewables is growing, but they’re not replacing fossil fuels. Fossil fuels are being massively subsidised, and the growth in renewables is adding to fossil fuel use, rather than replacing it. Switching completely from fossil fuels to renewables is something that no government would entertain, because it would cause massive upheavals and restrict economic growth (sacrilege in a capitalist system).

We’ve been pushed into using cars

Transitioning away from cars will be difficult in a capitalist economy, in which growth and corporate profits are paramount – and the car industry is much better for GDP growth and corporate profits than other forms of transport.

The problem is that towns (and in fact the whole of society) have been designed so that it’s difficult to live without a car. The situation is worse in the hyper-corporate US than in Europe, and there, public transport, walking and cycling have been made difficult and sometimes impossible by the car, road and fossil fuel lobbies and individualistic culture. One example: an alliance of car, oil and rubber corporations played a part in the demise of urban light rail / trolleybuses.

Another: with the help of designer Norman Bel Geddes, GM hosted ‘Futurama’, portraying a car-centric future dreamt up by the company, at the New York World’s Fair in 1939, and introduced millions of visitors to something closely resembling today’s America. GM proposed a future centered around the convenience of the personal vehicle, complete with a massive interstate freeway system, suburban sprawl, and the extinction of public transportation. In 1956 President Eisenhower, with the help of Secretary of Defense Charles Wilson (who happened to be GM’s president), leveled entire city neighbourhoods to make room for highways. Minorities and low-income families comprised an overwhelming cohort of these communities, and they’ve been hit hardest by the environmental effects of “urban renewal” and the widened divide from their wealthy suburban counterparts.

See here, here and here for more on the corporate contributions to transport problems in the US.

Alternatives to cars

Owning an electric car signals virtue and success, which is the wrong driver for transport choices. The right approach is public transport, cycling, walking and working from home.

There are reasons for optimism. In Japan, car ownership is declining, especially among young people, due largely to the regularity and reliability of trains. Tokyo has the lowest car use of any major city – people prefer walking, cycling and public transport.

European cities are showing the way too. Barcelona has been experimenting with “superblocks,” – 9-block grids of cyclist- and pedestrian-first zones. Cycling and walking have increased, pollution has decreased and children play in the street.

And even in the US there are signs that things may be changing – although it will be hard to reverse so many decades of urban sprawl and ribbon development with many services only accessible by car. But it can’t last, and so the quicker we do it, the better it will be for us.

Maybe a car-centred approach to transport would be fine if there were fewer of us. Maybe 100 million cars on the world’s roads could just about be sustainable. But in a world where the human population is approaching 10 billion, most of whom aspire to live like Americans, it’s not just impossible, it’s suicidal.

So, should electric vehicles be a topic on Lowimpact.org?

It was touch and go as to whether this topic made it onto the site. The only reason it did is that some people absolutely need a private vehicle for their livelihood or due to disabilities. That, and to bring to people’s attention the problems caused by cars of any kind.

We’re only including this topic on the site because if you really, really have to have a private car, then a petrol/diesel car is worse in terms of carbon emissions in use (this goes for public transport and emergency vehicles too), but EVs don’t solve any of the other problems mentioned in this article.