Why Electric Cars Suck and Make Climate Change Worse
Electric cars are a symbol of a systemic problem: an ineffective, car-based approach to addressing transportation's climate impacts.
When most people imagine the changes that we must make to battle climate change, one of the first topics are always electric cars or autonomous vehicles.
It is easy to talk about a topic you can relate to. Something that many of you are interacting with every day.
In the last few years, car manufacturers like Tesla, Volkswagen, GM, Ford and others have been pushing electric cars as the green solution to when it comes to tackling climate change.
Well, I do believe that electrifying everything is a step in the right direction.
Oftentimes in their marketing, electric cars are portrayed as solving the fossil fuel dependency or bringing on an era of sustainability.
However, most of these messages have no real foundation and are just what these companies want reality to be like.
It’s marketing baby!
“We will simply innovate our way out of everything and you, fellow consumer, don’t need to change your lifestyle in any way! Just buy our product and innovate with us…”
Yes. electric cars are a step in the right direction and they are superior to gas cars in a few different metrics. But they really only start becoming more environmentally friendly than your existing gas car after around three to five years of ownership and this all depends on their battery size.
This is because electric cars have a lot more rare earth materials and these materials take a lot of CO2 to mine and process. So even if your electric vehicle doesn't produce any CO2 emissions while running, it produces quite a few tons more than gas cars while being manufactured. Then the juice you put in your car also plays a huge role in how green it is, and most electric grids still rely heavily on fossil fuels.
Maybe cars are the problem?
Ok, hear me out. What if we use our oversized monkey brains to imagine that we didn't need cars in the first place?
Now we stumbled on the fundamental problem: No matter what type of car you use it is simply not going to be sustainable.
I know what you're thinking now “oh well, we got to invest in future technologies like autonomous vehicles so that no one individually owns a car”.
Nope! That's not what I mean because it's not just the vehicles that aren't sustainable. It's everything that cars use. Of course, if you live off in the wilderness in the middle of nowhere cars will probably always exist, but most people live in cities!
Cars need an insane amount infrastructure to work properly. Sure, a lot of bridges and roads would exist even without so many cars. But just for you, fellow suburbanite, to be able to commute to work, all infrastructure needs to be supersized into oblivion!
Here's a great example:
This is the densest area of Denver, Colorado, and every single one of those yellow spots are just parking spaces for cars. On top of destroying the entire cityscape, I guarantee that most of the time those places don't even have cars parked in them…
See the problem with cars?
Electric cars are no different. They also require driveways and parking lots, which along with needing space for parking cars also needs additional space for larger roads to handle more cars for those parking lots. Needing more space for those roads forces a lot of services and buildings to be farther apart continuing the vicious cycle of needing larger and larger roads and forcing everything farther apart with parking.
Then people think that they need to live farther and farther away from the center of towns and cities because why would you want to live next to so much traffic and parking lots?!
See, this all compounds itself into oblivion.
So, if we are serious about tackling climate change, we should be building more amenities for people that live downtown instead of promoting “green” cars.
Buildings can be incredibly versatile if we let them . Not only can you have a store or school on the bottom floor. In the same building you can also have living spaces or apartments. This is what's called mixed use development and it makes any city or suburb more walkable and bikeable. You don't need a car if the city is built the correct way because mixed use can be really dense and still be cute and cuddly enough for all you suburban lovers.
Suburbs suck so much more than you think
Now I know what you're probably thinking: “This is fine, but people should be able to live the way they want. Look at this car hater! He doesn't understand that not everyone has access to transit and not everyone wants to live in a city!“
The problem is, people in car dependent suburbs consistently have the highest carbon footprint of anyone in the entire world!
If you live in a car dependent suburb your carbon footprint is automatically super high, even if you live on a vegan diet and never buy plastic bags at the grocery store!
It might not be your fault; you might have bought a home in the suburbs because it was the only affordable place near your job, but understand that you should be trying to change these places for the better.
Let me remind you that we are all affected by climate change. This planet is your home and it is my home and I hope that you treat it as such.
Also, these suburbs consistently lose value over time because all of this car-centric infrastructure is extremely inefficient compared to a city or a dense suburb.
The car infrastructure forces your water and sewer systems to be longer, contain more water and use more energy to pump all of that water around. The same goes for electrical systems: More wire, more transformers and more transmission losses over the distance that is needed to be traveled. You also need more streets, more asphalt, more concrete, more traffic lights etc. etc. You get my point.
So even if you come from an economic standpoint, it's way more cheaper to build walkable and bikeable towns. Disconnected suburban developments will always be incredibly inefficient and they only exist because we make all of these terrible design philosophies just to service the automobile,
and you know what, electric cars will not change any of this!
This article was inspired by Alan Fischer’s video about why electric cars are not sustainable (link HERE).