For this week’s post I am writing about transportation and a very interesting study on the Life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions from passenger cars in the European Union published by International Council on Clean Transportation.
Among the key findings of this study :
– Life-cycle emissions of battery electric cars are 73% lower than gasoline cars.
– When using only renewable electricity, the reduction is up to 78%.
– Life-cycle emissions of hybrids are just 20% lower than gasoline cars.
– Life-cycle emissions of plug-in hybrids are 30% lower than gasoline cars.
– Fuel cell cars – with hydrogen – can lower emissions even further than battery EVs.
WIthout further ado, here are their main findings on a graph form. It’s quite something to look at :
So reading this, one just think that we should all be switching to electric cars, right ? Or… maybe not. Here are a few hot takes on this :
First and foremost we all need much more cycling and walking in our communities. Given how most people use their cars – very short distances under 5 km / 3 miles, this would have strong co-benefits on the obesity epidemic we are facing as well as on lowering air pollution as this would essentially drop CO2 emissions and other polluants to zero.
To get there, we need infrastructure : protected bike lanes, dedicated parkinge-bikes charging stations and so on. All this requires courageous political leadership. There are many bright examples to follow : Paris for its promotion of cycling, New York and London for congestion pricing that decreased the amounts of cars in the city centers…
For longer distances within cities, there are no ways to cut it : public transportation with electric buses or bus rapid transit. Cheaper to run, cleaner and more silent, here is an old blog post on how mass adopting electric buses can be a game changer. Outside of cities, trains are the way but this is a whole other topic.
Manufacturing a whole new car emits a lot of carbon and consumes a lot of energy. The larger models such as the SUVs currently being sold, doubly so. Thus, retrofitting older cars to electric needs to be done on a large scale. This can be done relatively easily and am sure the price could be very competitive if the entire industry switched to this.
So yes, we need electric cars, but not as the sole sustainable transportation solution. It has to be part of a whole ecosystems.
Photo by CHUTTERSNAP on Unsplash
