Petrol, electric or something else entirely?
the unsupportable burden of cars
A friend sent me links to these articles written by two opposing parties. The first by Rowan Atkinson questionning whether or not electric cars are really the way to go and the other by Simon Evans defending such cars as climate saviours.
Atkinson contends that electric cars may be a false path and that hydrogen is probably the way to go. Evans defends electric cars maintaining that they radically reduce greenhouse gas emissions when compared to petrol and diesel cars.
The two authors skip and dance around different studies and facts and figures to defend their different points of view. Both articles reveal that once again it is possible to get blinkered, myopic and binary views published in a major newspaper. Maybe this isn’t surprising but it is frustrating.
Neither of the authors spend any time discussing the major negative impacts of vehicules other than greenhouse gas emissions:
Plastic micro-particles from tyre wear, it has been estimated that globally around 6 million tonnes of tyre micro particles are released into the environment each year. This particles are from the synthetic petroleum based products used to make the tyres and are mostly very harmful to human and biosphere health.
The Earth is covered with an estimated 21 million kms of roads and this study estimates that by 2050 this could be extended by 3 – 4.7 million km additional road length. Road building and maintenance is hugely environmentally damaging and depends almost entirely on petrochemical based products for the building/maintenance process and for the tarmac often used to surface the roads.
In the USA alone, it has been estimated that a land area of approximately 9104 km2 is occupied by car parks, that’s 910,400 hectares, sufficient to feed a lot of people.
Road accidents are responsible for 1.3 million annual deaths and 50 million injuries globally. Which is a lot.
Road traffic kills animals. In the UK 8,580 small mammals a year. Birds 4,652 a year. Large mammals 1,000 a year. There are no real estimates for the number of invertebrates killed, this has certainly reduced simply because there are fewer insects around.
After a certain speed engine noise from petrol and diesel cars is drowned out by the noise of tyre to road surface impact. Electic cars are quiet at speeds below 40 Km/h after which road noise increases and at highway speeds there is no human discernanble noise difference between electric and petrol cars.
There are 600,000,000 passenger cars and this number continues to grow. The production and distribution of these vehicules is a burden of colossal proportions on the biosphere, whether they are electric or petrol.
Air conditioners in passenger cars, vans, buses and freight trucks consume almost 2 million barrels of oil equivalent per day. These air-cons produce greenhouse gas emissions at around 420 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent (MtCO2-eq). GHG emissions from refrigerant leakage account for 30% of this total.
About 75 percent of end-of-life vehicles, mainly metals, are recyclable in the European Union. The rest (∼25%) of the vehicle is considered waste and generally goes to landfills. I haven’t been able to find any research that study the energy cost of this recycling and disposal process but it is certainly energy intensive.
The average British motorist will spend in excess of £200,000 in car costs over a 63-year driving career which can be compared to the average UK house price which was £256,000 in March 2021.
In 2015 Dutch motorists lost almost 40 hours in traffic jams each that year and French motorists nearly 30 hours each.
Nor do either of the authors cited at the begining of this article ask whether or not private cars and lorries are the way forward? One of the axioms in Permaculture design is to remove from any system those things which are toxic and in any way damaging to human and biosphere health. Private cars and lorries fall firmly into this category. The question then arises as to how to encourage people to give up their cars? This leads onto analysing what people use their cars for, in the UK in 2021 the most common purpose for a trip by car was for leisure with 31%. This was followed by shopping (19%), commuting (15%). None of these forms of car use would seem to be essential and they could all be replaced with less costly and destructive and better organised systems.
Leisure use includes short trips to ‘take the dog for a walk’, visits and longer trips when heading off on holiday. People use their cars to go shopping because out of town shopping centres with their huge carparks have replaced in-town shops. Despite the fact that motorists waste so much of their lives each year stuck in they continue to get into their cars to head for work. Children are driven to school, one of the reasons given for this is that parents are worried about the danger posed to their kids by the traffic. As most cars are still petrol or diesel this perceived risk exacerbates the real risks posed by vehicular pollution, electric cars will still shower our children with toxic micro-particles.
In France Railcoop estimate that 90% of the population lives at less than 10 kms from a railway station. Trains no longer stop at 30% of these stations. Railcoop has taken up the task of putting opening these stations, opening closed lines and increasing freight by rail transport. Night trains are once again becoming popular. Most holiday destinations have a railway station so heading off for a break by rail should be relatively easy. Most of these destinations have bikes and ebikes to rent. Why would anyone need to drive to a holiday resort? One reason is the lack of investment in the railways and the often catastrophic management of the rail companies. This has to change and local tourism must also become ‘the thing to do’,
Public transport in general must be increased and improved with better organisation of flows. It must also be seen as being option number one, I never agreed with the music group the Fatima mansions that “Only Losers Take the Bus”!
Out of town shopping malls must be replaced by in-town shops providing, as much as possible, locally produced goods (this reduces freight transport and thus the number of lorries).
Relocalisation of jobs and approaches such as ‘urban villages’ or the so-called 15 minute city can help reduce, even eliminate, the car burden.
Cars are also widely seen as being a status symbol despite them being so destructive of lives and the environment. This is something else which must change. Because of the comfort of modern cars they have become as a second home to people who have difficulty imagining living without said perceived comfort when they travel. The externalities of private cars the stink, the danger, the destruction of the biosphere are ignored. We have to encourage a sea change and this has to be done strategically. People tend to ignore or respond badly to ‘stick’ approaches, they don’t like being told not to do something. ‘Carrot’ approaches encouraging drivers to switch to calmer, less expensive and pro-social means of transport work better.
Some cities are experimenting with different approaches to reduce urban traffic, they would do well to learn from and encourage each other. That said some of the initiatives are simply absurd greenwashing, ‘Paris Respire’ is an example of this, some small areas are closed to traffic on sundays and bank holidays. If this was the beginning of a strategic plan to rid Paris of cars it would be start but this isn’t the case. ‘Paris breathes’ but only on sundays and bank holidays.
We have to act now to massively reduce GHG emissions, that’s for certain, but we cannot do this with blinkered approaches that ignore the big picture. Simply switching from petrol to electric cars is not the way to go, we must rid the world of these fatuous machines that kill, maim and pollute. We must reorgnise our local areas to be car free and accessible by other means. Our children should be able to play once again in the street and walk together to school. We should be able to cycle and walk without the stress and the danger of cars continually passing by.
Having a car isn’t a basic human right, despite what car manufacturers might want us to believe. Clean air, clean water, safe streets, quiet environments should be the birthright of all of us. Changing petrol heads for electron heads isn’t going to help deal with all the other catastrophic problems associated with private cars.
Great article 🙌🏾