Electric Cars Aren't Really Green; They're Just Less Gray

I’m a big fan of electric cars and their potential to help our beleaguered climate. But I’m an even bigger critic of false solutions such as the idea that we can somehow consume our way out of the climate crisis. So with the green blogosphere getting all googly-eyed over the advent of electric dream cars, and Nissan Leaf commercials dancing all over my TV, I just can’t resist the urge to be a bit of a buzz-kill and ask the potentially blasphemous question: Are electric cars truly green?

It’s a question that’s been asked plenty of times before, and at least insofar as it refers to the relative greenhouse gas emissions of electric cars versus their internal combustion brethren, the answer is "yes": Electric cars are indeed green; or at least greener. They aren't a homerun, however, because they aren't truly zero emissions. Instead, in an electric car, emissions are simply diverted from the tailpipe to the coal-fired power plant smokestack -- barring, of course, a renewable energy revolution to power our electricity grid. Still, studies show that electric cars do lower emissions because they are more efficient energy-conversion machines compared to the typical gas guzzler.

But fixating on only emissions as a gauge of the electric car’s greenness is mistake. Why? Because the destructive impacts of burning coal don't end with carbon dioxide. Even if coal weren't lethal to our climate, our dependency still entails all good things such as destructive mountaintop removal mining, poisoned waters and food supplies, mining disasters, and the threat of catastrophic coal slurry floods. Unless we somehow ensure that all electric cars are powered by off-peak energy [PDF], shifting from an oil-powered car fleet to a coal-powered one will only expand the coal industry and the financial power it wields.

And there's another big green catch this entire discussion overlooks. Under our current growth-based economic model, growing the electric car market just means growing the car market overall. In the next few decades, the number of cars on the road is projected to potentially double to 2 billion. And not all of those will be electric cars. Not by a long shot. But even if they were, powering them cleanly would mean bringing enough solar and wind on-line to nearly equal the energy output that we currently get from oil. The result? We don't really win with a huge electric car market. Of course there would by marginal reductions of CO2 emissions compared to business-as-usual, but overall emissions would continue to rise. In other words, the fundamental problem isn’t that we have too many cars burning fossil fuels, but that we have too many cars, period.

It’s the same problem with the economy as a whole, as I wrote earlier this week in the Huffington Post. Economic growth is simply incompatible with real climate solutions. To fix the climate, we’ve got to take our foot off the accelerator, and get the economy moving at a steady state so that real solutions have time to catch up.

Bottom line: without accompanying political efforts to move us toward a clean-energy-powered, steady-state economy, electric cars can’t really be called green; at best they’re just a tad less gray. In a world fixated on growth and powered largely by dirty energy, the truly green transportation solutions are ones that will stabilize and then shrink our vehicle fleet – solutions like expanded mass transit, and bicycling. So, if you really want to be green, it’s better to get pumped about light rails instead of Leafs.

Photo credit: Cliff1066, Flickr

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