Electric Vehicles Aren’t the Answer to Pollution

There is no such thing as “environmentally-friendly” electricity

Among my restricted electives at uni, one was a seminar about energy, electricity, and their effects upon the environment. Forty years ago, after the oil crises of 1974 and 1979, energy policy was based on the understanding that we had less than a decade’s worth of oil and gas reserves (the stuff we could get out of the ground and process easily) and maybe twice that volume of resources (the stuff that was in the ground, but would take advanced engineering and a lot of work to process, making it considerably less cost-effective). While we’ve obviously found more oil and gas than we thought we had back then, we understand that these fuel sources are limited and our use of them needs to be restrained.

Fossil fuels release energy as heat when ignited, either by burning or by exploding. This heat can be used directly, as when we cook with gas (or a charcoal grill), or the heat can be used indirectly to force a “working fluid” (usually water, steam, or the gases from controlled explosions) to run an engine (such as a locomotive, steamboat, or car).

Using heat to run an engine requires either heating and pressurizing a “working fluid” (usually water or steam), forcing it to push a mechanism that will turn wheels (such as trains or paddlewheels), or by controlled small explosions which cause a liquid (such as gasoline) to become a high-pressure gas, and — again — push a mechanism that turns wheels. In any case, the fuel that has been used to create heat also creates a form of waste, often in the form of noxious gases and some sort of soot or ash. These form the base of much of our “carbon footprint”.

Most electrical power plants work the same way as engines. They burn the same fossil fuels that we use to heat our homes and run our cars and use the heat released to pressurize steam, which is forced through the same sorts of mechanisms that turn wheels — only these wheels have wire wrappings that convert the energy of motion into electrical energy. Nuclear energy works in a similar fashion, except that instead of burning fossils, the heat comes from atoms that are being split apart (fission), and its wastes are mostly solids and take longer to return to “earth-friendly” forms. (That said, much less nuclear fuel is needed to create a given amount of electricity.)

Hydroelectric power uses the natural force of water from a river to move these same wire-wrapped wheels; wind energy works in a similarly direct fashion. Energy from the sun can be harnessed in two different ways: to heat water that can then heat a room (solar thermal energy) or to excite atoms in such a way that they release energy which can be captured as electricity (solar photovoltaic energy).

Solar, wind, and hydroelectric are considered “renewable” energy sources because they are assumed not to take anything from the earth that would permanently damage the environment.

That assumption is wrong.

The production of solar cells requires the use of arsenic, tailings of which are released into the water table. At the time I was in school, photovoltaic cells were still a pretty new thing and not yet produced in the bulk they are today, when all the telephone poles and half the neighborhood houses sport arrays of solar photovoltaic panels. Forty years ago, there was already measurable arsenic contamination in the bodies of water near solar-cell production facilities. I have little reason to think that this has improved over the decades.

The solar electric cycle also requires the mining of hard-to-find metals such as gadolinium, gallium, and indium for photovoltaic cells, as well as lithium for the batteries that store this electricity for on-demand use. All of these need to be mined from the ground, causing illness, injury, and environmental pollution in the countries from which they are sourced. (Many of these countries also employ child labor as part of their mining operations.) Lithium in particular can be highly reactive under the wrong conditions — you may recall the “exploding phone” phenomenon of a few years ago, when one particular model of smartphone had some serious battery issues.

Well, skip solar, you say. What about hydroelectric?

Water energy is harnessed by building large dams. These change the waterscape, flooding some areas to create reservoirs and starving others. We have been hearing reports that the traditional hunting and fishing grounds of a number of Indigenous peoples have been utterly destroyed by these changes. There is also the issue of a dam itself failing, with the potential of large-scale flooding. There have been recent reports of cracks in the structures of concrete (or reinforced concrete) dams built by lowest-bid (or closed-bid) contractors. In some cases, there has been enough concern that plans to deconstruct the dams are being considered.

And now we get to wind energy.

We thought wind energy would be a great thing, but then people started worrying about the noise of windmills. We saw news reports of storms and gusts knocking over some of these tall, ungainly structures, and photos of vanes breaking and falling out. There have been questions of whether or not we are interrupting bird migration patterns. In my area (coastal state), there have been concerns that the vibrations from offshore wind farms have been disrupting the normal direction-finding of whales, fish, and other sealife. The jury’s still out here: despite the news headlines, we had fewer sealife beachings than usual last year.

In short, renewables aren’t so eco-friendly after all.

Which brings us back full-circle to those fossil-fuel-powered electric plants. (I’m ignoring nuclear power because it’s become politically untenable in too many quarters.)

One maxim of energy use is that every time you convert energy from one form to another, there will be efficiency losses. This goes back to the very basics of thermodynamics: that hot will warm cold, that cold will cool hot, and that things naturally move from more orderly to less orderly. And that there is no way to escape these truths. So every time we burn fossil fuels to generate electricity to turn on the TV, there is an efficiency loss. That said, the TV requires electricity to run, so we accept the loss for the sake of entertainment.

I see no reason to accept that loss for automobiles.

Now, not to leave on a completely “down” note, I do see viable alternatives. Most of them depend on not relying on personal fossil-fuel-powered (or electricity-powered) vehicles for as much as we rely on them today. Things like walkable communities, well-designed and -maintained public transportation systems, and peripheral parking complexes (you can keep your car, you just keep it garaged at the edge of town for those times you need to go somewhere that you can’t get to by public transit). “Complete streets” — again, which must be properly maintained — that encourage not just walking, but jogging, bicycling, skating, skateboarding, and so on.

Now, whether our vehicular fossil fuels are used more by personal and public transit or by shipping, industrial, and farm equipment — that’s a different (but not unrelated) question.