The virtues of electric vehicles, I believe, are vastly exaggerated.
Buy them, get rid of polluting fossil-fuelled machines and end climate chaos.
This sort of hyperbole is behind their rise.
Sure, they have cut some greenhouse gas pollution, and sales have rocketed as mankind apparently moves global transport from dirty internal combustion engines to "zero-tailpipe-emission" battery-electrics. Marketeers have tapped into rich people's infatuation with cars. They're the glamour-pusses of "planet-saving artificial intelligence" and "clean technology".
Don't get me wrong. Electric cars have a place in our carbon-neutral stakes.
They just don't deserve to be on an unimpeachable pedestal, and they're not enough to overcome our ecological emergency. There's plenty of additional positive environmental action we must take.
The electric vehicle reboot began in 2008 when Tesla released its sporty Roadster. Its mass-market model 3 was unveiled in April 2016. Within that week, Tesla had 325,000 paid model 3 reservations. World-wide, new car sales include about one in seven being electric. Such growth, plus relentless assurances of even better things to come, implies revolutionary impetus.
A few things need perspective. The biggest electric vehicle market has been China, followed by Europe then the US. Poor, developing countries aren't seriously buying. Most mainstream consumers in rich countries aren't fully convinced either. Of all current cars in use globally, only about 2 per cent are electric. Electric cars comprise just 1 per cent of all cars on Australian roads. This is enormously short of Australia's net zero carbon target, which requires a sales ban on all new petrol and diesel cars by 2035.
Electric car sales are not tied to renewable energy. They should be, I believe.
In Australia, the vast majority of electric vehicles are still regularly recharged with highly-polluting coal-fired electricity. Alarmingly, global greenhouse emissions continue rising. In 2023 they went up 410 million tonnes, to 37.4 billion tonnes. There are about 1.5 billion vehicles on the world's roads. Scientists say their total excretion is about 12 per cent of all man-made greenhouse pollution.
So, if every one of these 1.5 billion vehicles magically became electric today and were all charged with 100 per cent non-polluting renewable energy they could reduce our overall pollution by only about 12 per cent. That would still leave about 88 per cent of our climate emergency to deal with.
Major change is needed across the spectrum: industry, agriculture, buildings, other forms of transport, waste, chemicals and (believe it or not) artificial intelligence.
Early electric car adopters deserve credit, but the track ahead for cars appears littered with potholes. These include, high purchase prices, environmental manufacturing impacts, opposition from internal combustion engine and hybrid competitors, driving range, recycling doubts, the push for other propulsion technologies such as hydrogen and sodium-ion cells, ammonia, synthetic fuels and solid-state batteries.
The mindset around electric cars is also a major concern. They are part of our eternal economic growth fantasy. As if buying more stuff assured that money would trickle down fairly from the rich, as if everyone could have the same decadent lives and, worst of all, as if our poor planet could cope with the perpetual rape of its limited "resources" and contamination of air, land and water.
Manufacturers are not driven by philanthropy. It's not in their financial interests to make vehicles with extraordinary longevity that need little maintenance and go long distances on free sun-power.
The most crucial climate chaos beating step is carbon neutral energy replacing fossil fuels. On the transport front, along with electric cars, more public transport, driving less, walking more, using bikes, planting millions of trees to soak up carbon and cradle-to-grave circular recycling have to be embraced.
And the other 88 per cent of humanity's greenhouse impacts requiring simultaneous action includes the end of intensive animal-based agriculture and coalmining, alternative power for industry, iron, steel, cement, chemicals and making buildings sustainable.
