Referenced from Graham Conway’s lecture on the topic mentioned in the title.
Climate change is a hoax. And the electric vehicle is an abomination. Someone once told me that to capture an audience’s attention, you need to offend them.
And what better way to offend people than to denounce climate change? Because if there’s one thing the world may unanimously agree upon, it’s that we’d all like it to be here in the future. So now that I have your attention, let me revisit those opening comments. I do actually believe in climate change, but I do have a problem with the way we define electric vehicles.
So this talk will still offend some people. I can almost see the comments on this article now. It isn’t pretty.
But this talk is not about demonizing the electric vehicle unfairly. I absolutely believe they are the future of personal transportation. They do a fantastic job at moving pollution out of densely populated cities.
They’re fun to drive, and you can get free parking too sometimes. And I know this because I owned an electric vehicle for three years. And it was a great car.
There will absolutely be a place for the electric vehicle in our future. But not today. Let me start with a question.
There are one billion passenger cars on the world’s roads today. If I gave you a button which would turn them all into electric vehicles, would you push it? The problem of climate change is a global one. It is believed to be caused by increasing CO2 concentrations in our atmosphere.
If you put a box around the earth and measured the gases trapped inside that box, you would indeed find CO2, and that CO2 levels are rising. What is causing CO2 levels to rise? Well, one source is the cars and trucks that we drive. These emit CO2 from the tailpipe.
And the way the industry currently measures this CO2 is like putting a special box around the vehicle and measuring what’s inside the box. Society’s solution to the problem is the electric vehicle. Because if you put a box around the electric vehicle and try to measure CO2, you won’t find any.
So based on this way of measuring CO2, we’ve decided to call these zero emissions, or we call these dirty. But let me show you why this is wrong. Consider that instead of changing all vehicles into electric vehicles, we instead change them into horses.
Now, a horse breathes in air, and it breathes out CO2. So if you put a box around the horse, you would measure CO2. If you rode that horse the same distance as you drove the car, you would find something quite shocking.
The horse emits as much CO2 as a Corvette. So you can see, based on this way of measuring CO2, our only possible conclusion is that if we changed all cars into horses, we would be emitting as much CO2 as one billion Corvettes. And that doesn’t sound very good for the environment, does it? But as you sit there, I’m sure something deep inside of you is saying, that doesn’t sound right.
And you’d be correct. But of course, if we changed all cars into horses, our climate would be better. And here’s why it would be better.
You see, even though the horse breathes out CO2 into the atmosphere, that CO2 is then absorbed by plants and converted back into oxygen, which the horse breathes in again. And so you see, the CO2 is in a cycle. And because it is in a cycle, it doesn’t increase.
In contrast, the car is different. Because with the car, we dig oil out of the ground, we burn it, and we produce CO2. And it isn’t in a cycle, so it is increasing.
So you were right to be sceptical. But based on how we currently measure CO2, you could not possibly have come to this conclusion without doing this type of analysis. Let’s go back to the electric vehicle.
Remember the way we quantify CO2 is to measure it from the tailpipe. But the electric car doesn’t burn fuel. But it does use electricity.
So we have to look at where that comes from. A large proportion of our electricity comes from coal. Now, we dig coal out of the ground in large quantities.
We then burn it in power stations, which produces CO2. You can see there is no arrow along the top of this diagram. That CO2 is not in a cycle, and it is increasing.
But you couldn’t possibly know this by only measuring the vehicle’s tailpipe. What we need to do is expand our imaginary box to include everything. And coal isn’t the only way we generate electricity.
We also burn natural gas, and we burn oil. These two produce CO2. Now, you might be sitting there and saying, Hang on a minute.
I charge my electric vehicle from solar panels on my roof. So that’s okay, right? Well, for you, maybe. And many developed nations are moving away from coal and natural gas to renewable energy sources.
But CO2 is a global problem. So let’s have a look at things on a global scale. How much of the world’s electricity is produced by burning fuel, which creates CO2? It’s about two-thirds.
So you can see, when you plug your electric vehicle in, you are probably producing CO2. It just isn’t being measured. You see, the automotive industry has cleverly found a way to move the problem, not solve the problem.
But is the electric vehicle really worse? Well, to understand if it’s worse, we need to look at how much emissions are produced during the life of the vehicle. The average age of a vehicle before it gets scrapped is around 180,000 miles. You can see the conventional vehicle produces about 30 tons of CO2 over its lifetime.
How does the electric vehicle look? Pretty good, right? Because some of that electricity comes from renewable sources, and because the electric motor is far more efficient than the internal combustion engine, it produces less CO2. But there is a problem with this graph. This graph says that at zero miles, zero CO2 has been produced.
And if you think about that for a second, it means the two cars have magically appeared in the showroom out of thin air. In reality, a huge amount of CO2 is produced just making a vehicle, because you have to dig raw materials out of the ground, transport them to factories where they can be formed into car parts, before finally being assembled into vehicles. Each step requires energy, and so we create CO2.
So you can see the conventional vehicle comes to the showroom having generated about six tons of CO2. And now this is the critical part. Making a battery isn’t easy.
The materials required are harder to find, and making a battery cell requires a huge amount of energy. So the battery vehicle comes to the showroom having generated about 12 tons of CO2. And you can see you’d have to drive it around 80,000 or 90,000 miles before you offset that CO2 penalty.
But it is better in the end. So the electric vehicle still looks good here as well, right? Well, this is where it gets interesting. You see, the conventional vehicle has a 400-mile range, while the electric vehicle in this example has a 125-mile range.
Now, 125 miles might be enough for some of you, but most of us want more. We’d like to be able to drive great distances across the states. Or if you’re here in Texas, you might just want to get to the next city.
So really, we need to be comparing a 400-mile range electric vehicle. And as you may have guessed, a longer range requires a larger battery, which means a larger CO2 penalty. And now you start to see the problem.
Over its expected lifetime, it has emitted more CO2 than the conventional vehicle. It has contributed more to climate change than the conventional vehicle, and that is the crux of the problem. It has produced more CO2, but we’ve measured none.
And so society is happy to continue to call these zero emissions. But that is dangerous and unproductive. But there is something we can do today, using technology we have today, which will make a difference today.
And that is to look at hybrids. Hybrids are far more efficient than conventional vehicles because at low speeds, where the engine is inefficient, the electric motor compensates and says, don’t worry engine, I’ve got this. You stay turned off until we need you.
And critically, a hybrid has a small battery. So the initial CO2 penalty is similar to the conventional vehicle, while the end-of-life emissions are far lower. In fact, to offset the CO2 from the electric vehicle, you would need to drive it around 450,000 miles before you offset that CO2.
But again, I don’t want to demonize the electric vehicle. I just don’t think we should adopt them today based on the way we generate our electricity and the way we make our batteries. But how can we help the electric vehicle meet its potential? Well, we need to invest in making our electricity generation from renewable sources around the world.
So that when we plug our electric cars in, we know there is no CO2 being generated. We can do this by building solar and wind farms. If we did that, then you can see the difference we can make to the emissions created during the life of the vehicle.
We can go further too. We can invest in new battery technologies, battery production techniques, to help offset that initial CO2 penalty. And so you can see the potential of the electric vehicle.
You can see what it could look like in the future. It’s just as a society we are trillions of dollars and decades away from achieving this. But we will get there one day.
But what we don’t want to do today is mislead people into buying electric vehicles by falsely calling them zero emissions. What we need to do instead is to continue to invest in the internal combustion engine. It hasn’t met its maximum potential yet.
And we can look into renewable fuels. This is where we combine water with the waste CO2 to create fuels for our vehicles. Now there is a good reason we don’t do this today.
It requires a huge amount of energy to do this. But if all that energy comes from renewable sources, then it isn’t a problem for the climate. So you see we’ve created a new CO2 cycle.
And you can see how fantastic that looks for the hybrid vehicle over the lifetime emissions. Even without renewable fuels, we should still consider buying hybrids today if we want to impact climate change now. In the future, there will be conventional vehicles, hybrid vehicles, and electric vehicles where they make sense.
The future is not just electric. The future is eclectic. So let me leave you with this.
If I gave you that button, based on what you now know, would you push it?