Transcription
As countries around the world phase out the sale of new petrol and diesel cars, it's predicted that by 2030 there will be 145 million electric vehicles on the road, all of which will be fully emission-free at the tailpipe. But while electric vehicles' total emissions are still lower than their petrol and diesel equivalents, when you consider the humanitarian and environmental impacts from their manufacturing processes, it leaves us with some difficult questions about the transition to EVs.
If we take a look at an electric vehicle, you can see that the engine, powered by a battery, has only 20 moving parts; that's down from 2000 in a petrol or diesel equivalent. It's great for reliability and efficiency, but if we examine the manufacturing process a little closer, we'll see where problems still remain. Electric vehicles are being introduced to reduce carbon emissions, yet it's estimated that up to 60 percent more carbon goes into the making of an electric vehicle than a petrol or diesel-powered one.
A great deal of this comes from the mining and refining of rare metals needed for batteries, such as cobalt and lithium, during which a lot of carbon is produced. For example, for every tonne of extracted lithium, between 5 and 15 tons of carbon is created. Manufacturing batteries also produces long carbon journeys where raw materials are shipped around the world, usually to China where they are refined and then shipped back across the world to be put into cars. Those are just a couple of examples looking specifically at the carbon impact of the manufacturing process of EVs, but there are a whole host of other environmental, human rights, and geopolitical concerns that are created in the making of electric vehicles.
When you consider the billions of litres of water being lost from delicate ecosystems during lithium refining, child labor issues surrounding cobalt mining in the DRC, EVs with larger batteries producing more airborne particles from tyre wear according to some studies, we can begin to see that while electric vehicles are an answer to reducing our harmful reliance on fossil fuels, they are by no means a silver bullet.
Taking a step back from the manufacturing process, there's a complicated environmental issue that goes beyond just making the vehicles themselves, and that's that EVs are only as green as the power grid they draw from. For example, if you drive an electric vehicle in Norway, where most electricity is powered by near-zero-emission hydroelectricity, then you're contributing much lower levels of CO2. But if you drive the same car in China, where most electricity comes from coal-fired power stations, then you may be contributing as much CO2 equivalent as that of using two-thirds of a tank of petrol. In fact, one study found that over 90,000 miles, a petrol-powered car created only 24 more carbon dioxide than a similar-sized EV run on electricity produced from natural gas.
So yes, EVs do create less CO2 than petrol and diesel vehicles across their life cycle, but without clean electricity to power them, they won't deliver the net-zero carbon emissions we need.
Despite all the complications we've covered, electric vehicles are undeniably better for the environment than diesel or petrol-powered ones. But if we're serious about driving down our emissions, then we need to rethink the relationship we currently have with our cars. Rather than simply swapping one car for a less polluting car, we should be demanding greener, integrated public transport systems and reducing our reliance on personal transport. Currently, 98% of all the world's electric buses are used in China, which indicates that we have the technology but not the political will to use it.
So, in the meantime, rather than waiting for future technological advancements to clean up our battery production, we should look to some of the cleaner solutions that are already available, such as cycling and walking and other forms of active travel, as well as car-sharing schemes. And there's a fundamental thing we need to consider, and that's simply, where possible, reducing the number of car journeys we take. [Music]