When Green Isn’t Green

On Monday the Wall Street Journal posted an article by Bjorn Lomborg,  director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center in Washington, D.C., is the author of “The Skeptical Environmentalist” (Cambridge Press, 2001) and “Cool It” (Knopf, 2007). The article explores the idea that electric cars actually have a smaller carbon footprint than regular cars.

The article reports:

A 2012 comprehensive life-cycle analysis in Journal of Industrial Ecology shows that almost half the lifetime carbon-dioxide emissions from an electric car come from the energy used to produce the car, especially the battery. The mining of lithium, for instance, is a less than green activity. By contrast, the manufacture of a gas-powered car accounts for 17% of its lifetime carbon-dioxide emissions. When an electric car rolls off the production line, it has already been responsible for 30,000 pounds of carbon-dioxide emission. The amount for making a conventional car: 14,000 pounds.

…If a typical electric car is driven 50,000 miles over its lifetime, the huge initial emissions from its manufacture means the car will actually have put more carbon-dioxide in the atmosphere than a similar-size gasoline-powered car driven the same number of miles. Similarly, if the energy used to recharge the electric car comes mostly from coal-fired power plants, it will be responsible for the emission of almost 15 ounces of carbon-dioxide for every one of the 50,000 miles it is driven—three ounces more than a similar gas-powered car.

Mr. Lomborg states that he is not opposed to electric cars–he believes that eventually we will find a way to design and manufacture them to be environmentally friendly. Unfortunately, right now we are spending money subsidizing the industry and the people who purchase electric cars rather than putting the money into research. It is quite possible that at some point in the future we will have an electric car that makes sense environmentally, but right now all we have is symbolism over substance.

Enhanced by Zemanta