Are electric cars, like, actually not clean?
Welcome back to Bright Ideas, a weekly newsletter about the rise of clean energy.
I’m your host, Julian Spector. I report for Greentech Media by day, and I write this for fun. The NBA Bubble is to basketball what Bright Ideas is to my social life. You can’t see the fans but they’re having a grand old time, so subscribe here if you haven’t yet.
And if you’re a repeat reader, I challenge you to think of someone in your life who you’ve spoken with about clean energy, fossil fuels, climate change, electric cars, or tiki drinks. Do them a solid and share Bright Ideas.
I’m in the midst of a running series of debates on pressing issues in the ascendancy of clean energy. Here’s what we’ll cover this time:
Reader feedback on the energy truth missing from the VP debate
New debate: Are electric vehicles actually dirty? Two openings, two rebuttals
Camping Tarp is my quarantine MVP
Readers have spoken
Last week, I argued that the VP candidates obscured key truths about the American energy landscape, including the status of coal, competitiveness of renewables, and the popularity of a Green New Deal. Here’s what y’all had to say about that:
I thought you were very evenhanded, especially in highlighting how both Harris and Pence could have served the electorate better in that VP debate.
~Corey M.
While there's this idea that Biden/Harris are dialing back support for the GND (and dialing up support for fracking) to appeal to white working-class swing voters, I think they're mostly doing it to appeal to wealthy donors. The majority of Pennsylvanians oppose fracking; the Texas AFL-CIO passed a Green New Deal-style resolution in 2019. Ordinary people more or less get it; it's the political contributors who have something to lose from a retreat from fossil fuels who are pressuring candidates to back away from decarbonization plans.
~Casey W.
A drive through certain parts of West Virginia ties you to wind country. I imagine there’s a workforce that would trade tunnels, dynamite, noise, and coal-dust for working in the fresh air of WVA building the new age of renewables… The future is a better place to make things better than using the past to make the future worse.
~Steve from Washington, DC
Of the debate topics I’ve covered so far, this is the one you’re most likely to encounter in the wild. It comes from different quarters: a fan of the status quo trying to pump the breaks on a shift in the beloved automotive space, or a deep environmentalist worried about the knock-on effects of a trend that seems good on the surface.
Either way, as I covered, electric cars are coming, and they’re going to reshape the car, oil, and electric industries, simultaneously. It’s important to scrutinize their impact and discern which critiques deserve attention.
Who wins this week? Send me your verdict, by replying to this email, leaving a comment, or tweeting me (@JulianSpector). Please include how you’d like me to refer to you, and location or affiliation if you choose.
Electric cars are dirtier than you think
You’ve probably heard the story that electric cars will save the world from climate change. That narrative comes to us, naturally, from people like Elon Musk who will profit from electric cars, and their allies.
But here’s the thing: electric cars charge up on electricity, so the carbon emission impact of driving them depends on how dirty your grid is. If you live off-grid and charge from rooftop solar, that’s a pretty clean car (though it’ll take a few days to fully charge). But if you’re in, say, Ohio, the coal is strong in the mix. Driving electric displaces carbon emissions to the point of power production, away from the individual driver.
They’re also expensive, meaning the people who can afford them get cleaner air, while the generally less well off people who live near power plants still get to breathe dirty air. Maybe even dirtier air, as electric cars increase demand for electricity.
Buying an electric vehicle delivers a warm glow of altruism to the wealthy, but the climate problem and environmental injustice are structural. Individual buying habits are not sufficient to fix them.
Lithium mining in Argentina, not super clean and dainty. (Photo credit: OBT/Flickr)
The biggest disruption to the fossil industry
Let’s be clear: the switch from fossil-powered transportation to electric transportation is one of, if not the biggest movements to upend the climate changing habits of the present.
The exact magnitude depends on where you are. In places that already have clean grids, like California, transportation currently produces more carbon emissions than the power sector. The easiest and quickest route to eliminate it is to electrify most vehicles, and pursue other technologies like hydrogen for the long distance and heavy duty vehicles that batteries don’t serve well.
What’s hard for critics to grasp is that several trends are colliding. Saying the grid is dirty now, and battery supply chains are messy now, may be true in discrete cases. But we aren’t planning on a perpetual 2020 (heaven help us). We’re planning for a world where:
The grid becomes progressively cleaner as coal shuts down and renewables dominate new power plant construction.
Batteries become progressively cheaper, making electric cars cheaper up front than gas-powered counterparts sometime in the middle of the 2020s.
Once a critical mass of batteries reaches the public, new batteries can be made by recycling materials in old ones, closing the supply loop.
But even where the U.S. grid is coal-heavy today, driving electric is still cleaner than driving gas-powered, studies have found. Even in conditions most favorable to the “electric cars are dirty” argument, it fails to convince.
Dirty from the ground up
OK, maybe the “electricity makes electric cars bad” argument is specious and unconvincing. But let’s talk about supply chain.
In the era of Amazon, it’s easy to think of a product as springing fully formed from the internet the moment you click buy. But manufacturing “clean” cars is energy intensive, creating carbon emissions before the vehicle rolls off the lot. And these vehicles require battery components mined from far flung parts of the world.
Activists have flagged battery component cobalt as particularly susceptible to abusive labor conditions overseas. But lithium mining also impacts the environment and indigenous rights in places like the Andes. Some go so far as to label lithium “the new oil” for its potential instigation of resource conflicts going forward.
In fact, Elon Musk himself admitted a connection between lithium and political intervention in an infamous tweet about the November and 2019 regime change in Bolivia. Here’s ousted President Evo Morales calling him out:
Mining for battery materials is not clean. Ignoring it may feel nice for the people buying and selling the cars, but it doesn’t help the people whose homelands get despoiled to make all that possible.
It gets better
Yes, manufacturing takes energy. So it’s a good thing that the grid is getting cleaner, because that takes care of most of the emissions from manufacturing. Some carmakers are already sourcing clean power for their operations.
The mining supply chain is a trickier problem, but let’s start with clarifying that “lithium as oil” is a garbage analogy. For one thing, lithium is all over the place, which means entire nation states will never rise or fall based on control of it. Also, you don’t burn up lithium (except when you add it to water in chemistry class). After using it in a battery, we know exactly how to recycle it for use in new batteries. There just isn’t a big enough population of used electric vehicle batteries to support widespread recycling just yet.
And while Musk’s tweet didn’t earn him any new friends on Leftist Twitter, it’s clearly more trolling than admission of guilt for a vast international conspiracy.
In the past year, no hard evidence has arisen to suggest lithium motivated a secret battery coup there, in the vein of historical interventions over oil. In the meantime, Tesla acquired mining rights to a 10,000-acre lithium deposit in Nevada, which it will extract and send straight to its domestic factories. For anyone concerned about mining impacts, it’s hard to beat doing it right here in the U.S. under environmental and labor regulations.
The attacks on electric vehicles boil down to the assertion that it’s possible to do them badly. But there’s no reason we have to do them badly. Companies are already eliminating cobalt from their chemistries, localizing mining in places with clear environmental and labor laws, and sourcing clean energy for manufacturing. Electric vehicle detractors need to find some charges that stick.
That’s the debate! Hit me with your quick verdict, by email or comment or tweet, for a chance to be featured in next week’s newsletter.
Camping Tarp is my quarantine MVP
Approximately six years ago, I acquired a waterproof, matte gray tarp to fit the underside of my new tent. I don’t remember what I paid. With California’s mountains largely on fire these days, I haven’t shouldered the tent into the wilderness for quite some time, but the tarp has become my most prized possession.
Tarp, pictured bottom left, stopping for a view halfway up the 10,000-foot peak of Mount Baldy.
Lightweight and unbreakable, it turns any location into, if not a home, at least a front porch. I walk it down to Echo Park Lake to sit on the grass and read until the sun sets. I haul it up mountains to have a spot to sit when I break for fennel sausage and cheese. At the beach, it forms the first line of defense against sand, upon which I layer a thicker blanket for comfort and then towels to absorb salt water from my back.
I don’t know if any other single item works as well in as many contexts. I don’t need hiking boots at the beach, and flip flops up the 10,000 height of Mount Baldy is a recipe for Hieronymus-Boschian suffering.
Quarantine has inspired investment in highly particular items that may not have seemed necessary before (see my tiki binge from a few weeks ago). But the tarp exemplifies more classical virtues, meeting every task with humility and competence. Knowing I have it rolled up in the trunk of my car means I can go anywhere and claim a patch of it as my outdoor home for the afternoon. And that feels a little bit like freedom.
Tarp, intercepting the Malibu sand on behalf of Blanket and Towel.