Are Electric Cars Really Sustainable?
For the 21st century, the answer is a definite “no.” They can be sustainable in a 22nd-century circular economy, but we may well have better alternatives by then.
Three previous articles in this series have outlined why electric cars offer no clear climate benefits, how the materials required in their batteries cause grave environmental damage, and why they will create strategic supply dependencies substantially worse than oil. But surely, EVs must be far more sustainable than gasoline cars, right? After all, they can be charged by wind and solar energy that will never run out.
Unfortunately, this is not the case either. As this article will demonstrate, the wind/solar/EV strategy is far less sustainable than advertised and, in the long run, hydrocarbon fuel can be just as sustainable as batteries.
The Fossil Fuel Dependence of Green Technologies
Wind turbines, solar panels, and EVs are just as dependent on fossil fuels as the rest of the economy. First of all, since the inherently diffuse nature of wind and solar energy demands such vast blade and panel areas, their construction requires large amounts of primary materials from “hard-to-abate” fossil-dependent…
