Are Electric Cars the Solution?
What we really need to do is seriously imagine a society with fewer vehicles and drivers — human-scaled technology.
What we really need to do is seriously imagine a society with fewer vehicles and drivers — human-scaled technology.
But if we’re ready for a serious response to the climate emergency, we should be rapidly curtailing both the manufacture and use of cars, and making the remaining vehicles only as big and heavy as they actually need to be.
Thacker Pass is the site of a proposed lithium mine that would impact nearly 5700 acres—close to nine square miles—and which would include a giant open pit mine over two square miles in size, a sulfuric acid processing plant, and piles of tailings.
In the US, transportation is said to be the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions. The most common solution put forth is a false one: “we’ll electrify all our cars, maybe our trucks too.” Planes and ships are usually not proposed for replacement by electric versions, but trains are. So what’s wrong with this idea?
Electric cars are not a panacea, but they do represent an important transition technology; electrifying much of the global car fleet can buy us the time we need to build zero-emission train and transit systems.
A lot of hope is riding on the wheels of the world’s three million electric cars. So, how’s the EV revolution going? And even if it’s going well, is it really the best strategy? Those are the questions I want to address here.
Chris talks with Mason Inman about his new book The Oracle Of Oil, the first in-depth biography of M. King Hubbert, to learn more about the genesis of the Peak Oil theory.
Electric vehicles are all the rage right now, and hopes are high that we might finally be able to transition off of oil and on to electric cars…preferably, cars powered by clean renewable electricity and not by coal-fired grid power.
A truly green transportation system probably wouldn’t rely on electric cars that much because it wouldn’t be relying on cars that much.
Forecasting is a dangerous business, but here are six predictions you should keep an eye on.
A decade ago electric cars were a lost cause. The popular 2006 documentary Who Killed the Electric Car?, highlighted the role of carmakers, oil companies and politics to explain why a technology with a lot of promise never caught on.
Electric vehicles (EVs) are already cheaper to run than internal combustion engine (ICE) automobiles.