For green activists, electric cars are next for the chop
E-cars will surely soon join petrol, diesel and witches blood powered cars on the naughty step?
Electric cars are understandably touted as the environmentally clean alternative to the combustion engine. Even taking higher environmental construction costs into account, over their lifetime they seem to be likely to be perhaps 25% lower in carbon costs than other vehicles. That includes cleaner ‘ad blue’ type diesel engines.
It’s well known that where coal is the main source of electricity, like China, the environmental costs of e-cars are much higher than in most of Europe, the US and elsewhere. That naturally reduces the worldwide benefit of e-cars in the meantime. But the general feeling amongst most people, it seems, is that lower environmental standards in developing countries shouldn’t stop developed countries from doing what we can to get to net zero. The ‘What about China?’ effect is, in practical terms muted because most public discourse has discounted for it.
However, less is known amongst the general public about the effects of scaling up production of the materials needed to create most (although not quite all) e-cars; notably their batteries. Elements like lithium and vast amounts of copper.
Rare earths are central here too. China processes 97% of the world’s rare earths, because they mine the biggest proportion and import almost all the stuff mined elsewhere. Rare earths aren’t actually rare for the main part; they’re under the soil of many developed Western states. Until 1990, most of the world’s rare earths in circulation were mined at Mountain Pass in California; rising environmental awareness and lower costs as China industrialised saw the US offshore most of it to China.
Rare earths are found alongside radioactive materials and mining them cheaply is dangerous to life and limb in all the ways. Campaign groups can hardly argue that we should help the environment by killing people in the developing world. And they can’t yet argue against what most people see as the big environmental solution to cars’ combustion engines. So there’s really only one way for campaigners to go in the short term.
The new angle is to demand that lithium and rare earth materials and whatnot should be extracted in the developing countries which get most benefit from lithium batteries; to flag the so-called ‘dirty secret’ (actually not any kind of secret at all) as a campaign strap line. But of course, unless maybe green campaigners want to insist on vast mining projects in Scottish and Welsh beauty spots, they know there’s no possibility of production and processing in the West.
Meanwhile, e-cars are already very expensive; government initiatives which subsidise them are well-meant but they can’t last long since they’re regressive and only help the best off amongst us. But even e-cars’ high present price is heavily supported by the low environmental and health and safety standards involved in producing the materials needed for batteries.
It’s certainly true that China is making genuine and important efforts to improve its environmental and health/safety games. But of course this is a very long game and not likely to lead to Western standards there anytime soon. There seems really only one direction campaign groups can go very soon, then, and that is to comdemn wide ownership of e-cars.
Green groups are conservative; this is not to criticise — conservatism is often a profoundly important thing. It’s easier to break good things than to construct better ones, and all that. And this is one place, like the countryside, where the socially rationing effects of green conservatism seems likely to come into play.
Green groups will therefore very soon begin to demand that few of us should own e-cars; that e-cars are essentially a harmful development and high prices should been designed to have the effect of ensuring that only a relatively few (i.e. the rich) own them.
Soon, if you’re rich enough to be able to afford a Tesla, you’ll find that from an environmental campaining point of view, you’ve jumped out of the frying pan and into the fire. As governments try to encourage the private sector to effect charging point roll-outs, Tesla owners will find protestors glued to the ground at service stations demanding; ‘No e-car charging facilities here!”
