A pair of psychologists and an economist at the University of Turku, in Finland, have found that because the average electric vehicle (EV) owner is wealthier than the average person, they still have a bigger than average carbon footprint.
Maybe EVs are not a comprehensive climate solution??
Public transport would be a much more effective and cheaper solution, but we’re all looking at EVs because it means not having to change anything about the status quo.
The problem is that to effectively fight climate change you need to cut emissions in five to ten years, and not fifty to a hundred, and in a nation where even a solidly blue locality openly dedicated to fighting climate change can take ten years and hundreds of millions of dollars to open a bus lane, it should not come as a surprise that many people with the resources to do so are choosing an imperfect solution now rather than running for office so they can get a bus line to their neighborhood in a few decades.
This is before we get to the fact that even nations which world leading public transport systems known for connecting to every small village and house still have plenty of cars and highways, people just don’t try and use them to for every trip in a dense city and plenty of people can get by without owning a car at all. We need to eliminate all emissions, not just city emissions, and we needed to do so ten years ago.
Yes north america needs more common, frequent, and reliable mass transit and the fact that the richest country in the world’s mass transit is in such a state is a national disgrace, but that is not opposed to the quick elimination of oil burning cars but rather should be done in parallel to them.
Generations? The average American passenger vehicle is 14 years old, so if tomorrow all new cars were electric, you would have haved car transport emissions within 15 years, and be at a 75 percent reduction within the first generation. Cut out fossil fuel subsidies so people are paying the 8 or so dollars per gallon it actually costs for gas and incentivize US manufacturers to actually build affordable cars and you’ll see much quicker adoption that what normal wear and tear causes.
Of course that isn’t going to happen tomorrow in the US, but you are also going to have a lot of vehicles already sold in the decades prior and which tend to stay on the road longer.
Compared to the fifteen or so years it takes to build a single light rail line, much less intercity high speed rail, and you are not going to be able to replace half of all car traffic in a single build cycle, much less reach 75 percent within thirty years, by which point you’re trying to replace all traffic in the very small towns and unincorporated areas that even nations renowned the world over for their public transit connectivity often struggle to reach.
Does the US need to build more mass transit, yes. Can it do so faster than it already buys new cars, no.
America specifically doesn’t want to build sane infrastructure, we’ve gone too deep on car culture over the last century+. Going out of the way to build self-driving cars rather than running more rail (or even bus, or trolley) is a solution hunting for a problem that shouldn’t exist. Especially given how much car prices have sharply increased in the last decade. Nobody will be able to afford personal transport, people will continue to use older cars for longer periods of time, or get into insane mortgage-sized car loans.
…but we want our “independence” and “freedom” dammit! … /s
Even so, the status quo changes with EVs. You see it with dealerships/shops charging more for simple repairs, manufacturers trying to go to subscription models for basic car features.
So much of the US is car-based:
Regular maintenance at a shop to pay for parts and fluids
The oil industry living at its current large size (it will still need to exist even if we were all EV, until every other product that uses it switches to something else)
Refueling at gas stations that can upsell you on impulse-buy food, drink, smoke, booze
Gas station price wars to spur pointless driving around, pointless media attention (which causes further driving around of media vehicles), pointless arguments and chaos
Supply chains generating every part, widget, and accessory, with the assumption there will be frequent replacement
Training for mechanics and techs on servicing all these convoluted chemical powered mechanical systems
Emissions testing and regulation used by municipalities as a money grab
The engineers paid to design these machines
Tax on fuel and other car consumables
The aftermarket accessory market selling upgrade gizmos to customize, trick out, make louder, make more powerful, make coal-rolling
Even parts theft like catalytic converter theft rings
Public transport would be a much more effective and cheaper solution, but we’re all looking at EVs because it means not having to change anything about the status quo.
The problem is that to effectively fight climate change you need to cut emissions in five to ten years, and not fifty to a hundred, and in a nation where even a solidly blue locality openly dedicated to fighting climate change can take ten years and hundreds of millions of dollars to open a bus lane, it should not come as a surprise that many people with the resources to do so are choosing an imperfect solution now rather than running for office so they can get a bus line to their neighborhood in a few decades.
This is before we get to the fact that even nations which world leading public transport systems known for connecting to every small village and house still have plenty of cars and highways, people just don’t try and use them to for every trip in a dense city and plenty of people can get by without owning a car at all. We need to eliminate all emissions, not just city emissions, and we needed to do so ten years ago.
Yes north america needs more common, frequent, and reliable mass transit and the fact that the richest country in the world’s mass transit is in such a state is a national disgrace, but that is not opposed to the quick elimination of oil burning cars but rather should be done in parallel to them.
Thanks for such a well reasoned response 😁 My knee jerk “public transport good” response did miss a lot of the subtlety you’ve captured here!
Which automatically excludes “The Great eCar Transition” as that takes generations.
Generations? The average American passenger vehicle is 14 years old, so if tomorrow all new cars were electric, you would have haved car transport emissions within 15 years, and be at a 75 percent reduction within the first generation. Cut out fossil fuel subsidies so people are paying the 8 or so dollars per gallon it actually costs for gas and incentivize US manufacturers to actually build affordable cars and you’ll see much quicker adoption that what normal wear and tear causes.
Of course that isn’t going to happen tomorrow in the US, but you are also going to have a lot of vehicles already sold in the decades prior and which tend to stay on the road longer.
Compared to the fifteen or so years it takes to build a single light rail line, much less intercity high speed rail, and you are not going to be able to replace half of all car traffic in a single build cycle, much less reach 75 percent within thirty years, by which point you’re trying to replace all traffic in the very small towns and unincorporated areas that even nations renowned the world over for their public transit connectivity often struggle to reach.
Does the US need to build more mass transit, yes. Can it do so faster than it already buys new cars, no.
America specifically doesn’t want to build sane infrastructure, we’ve gone too deep on car culture over the last century+. Going out of the way to build self-driving cars rather than running more rail (or even bus, or trolley) is a solution hunting for a problem that shouldn’t exist. Especially given how much car prices have sharply increased in the last decade. Nobody will be able to afford personal transport, people will continue to use older cars for longer periods of time, or get into insane mortgage-sized car loans.
…but we want our “independence” and “freedom” dammit! … /s
Even so, the status quo changes with EVs. You see it with dealerships/shops charging more for simple repairs, manufacturers trying to go to subscription models for basic car features.
So much of the US is car-based: