Saturday, January 21, 2017

What's wrong with electric cars?

  • Sprawl. All cars promote sprawl. Sprawl means each house with its own leaf-blower, snow blower, heating and cooling, etc. Sprawl wastes energy.
  • Growth. More cars enables more babies.
  • Manufacture:
Tesla’s Electric Cars Aren’t as Green as You Might Think | WIRED: "...At this mine, those rare earths amounted to 0.2 percent of what gets pulled out of the ground. The other 99.8 percent—now contaminated with toxic chemicals—is dumped back into the environment. That damage is difficult to quantify, just like the impact of oil drilling...."
But the biggest problem with electric cars is that many people see them as a solution to climate and energy problems. By the time the hype has cleared, precious time will be lost, time needed to implement actual solutions.