Teslas
Teslas (1) are, at the end of the day (like a long 50 year day), a more efficient way to burn oil with some very minor worldwide greenhouse gas reductions (again over many decades). A real automobile payoff, that is orders of magnitude more in CO2 or greenhouse or ozone or whatever, will only come from driving less and biking, busing, training (rail, that is), and walking MORE. And this “real payoff” is really tiny in total CO2 because transport by cars and vans is only 8% of global CO2 emissions. I will repeat this 8% number again latter in this blurb for dramatic effect…well…not really…it just that it’s the main point I’m trying to make.
The electrification of transport is here and it's going to continue but the so-called energy transition away from oil is a fiction. Oil is way more than just a hard act to follow. For the next x-decades (you guess the x) it will remain an IMPOSSIBLE act to follow.
The IEA has written policy, since 2017, that we need EV’s to go to 30% of the car market by 2030 to reach the Paris Accords. What they don’t tell you is that to achieve this, humanity is going to have to dig up (with diesel machinery) continents to get the amount of minerals needed for the batteries. Lots of minerals…like copper and cobalt and nickel and palladium and vanadium and of course lithium. Let’s not forget LITHIUM, Elon. Also hundreds and hundreds of power plants will have to be built just to keep the electric grid alive if everyone is charging a Tesla. And ps: recycling won’t save us…in fact most of it is absolute balderdash (2).
EV’s are potentially part of the solution to have less pollution (in cities). Politics (basically a nice simple-certain-confident message {to get re-elected}) is sending us along this route. There will be lots of businesses created. But they will do what every other business has ever done to succeed…it will act locally and send its externalities (real costs) elsewhere…..this means the “free” ocean and the “free” atmosphere!
Let’s talk for a second, about CO2 which is all that the newspaper headlines stress. It is actually way more complicated than that, but our politicians, fixated on kissing the ass of every vocal activist group, talk about CO2 being the only reason for every heat wave and forest fire (btw-cold kills way more-just way slower than heat). What they don’t seem to mention (here is the main point again, lol) is that only 8% of the world’s CO2 emissions are from transportation by gas car and van. If you add in trucks (3), diesel trains, bunker oil ships, and real expensive refined kerosene fueled airplanes you double that number.
Notice that I am not saying Elon is one of the greatest hucksters of all time or the car industry is trying to reinvent itself simply for increased profits….which any smart business would do. I'm just saying that in the future with energy at 10X or 100X the cost from where it is now, people are not going to be able to AFFORD to live a hundred miles away from where they drive to work every day. I mean why the hell would you want to?
Here are some boring facts to consider. An average car is 4,000 pounds which is mostly transmission and engine by weight. A car carries ONE 150 pound person (the actual number for the USA is 1.2, for Europe it is 1.9…and the weight is more like 250 pounds in the good ol’ USA). A bike is 20 pounds so the payload ratio is at least two orders of magnitude greater than any production car for that 250 pounder person. For the last little while on this planet there have been 80 million new cars made each year and 40 million scrapped each year. There are 1.2 billion cars in the world. In the average developed country there’s a mile of road (asphalt from oil) for every square mile of land.
Ninety percent of a Tesla’s weight is plastic, steel, or battery. These three things come completely from oil---a distillation column (plastic)--- an arc furnace (steel)---or diesel machinery digging up the ground for minerals (lithium et al). As Vaclav Smil (4) has written about at length, the world is addicted to concrete and steel and plastic and fertilizer and they all come from oil. And don't forget that the asphalt on which we drive our cars, also comes from oil.
With the marvels of capitalism (5) (based on “free” transport energy) we have forgotten frugality (except for money, of course). We are wasteful. Paradoxical things happen in capitalism with essentially zero cost of transport. Scottish fishermen catch cod. It is then sent to China to be processed. It is then sent back to Scotland to be eaten.
Someday we’ll live in communities of work where we walk. Most likely people won’t own a car but will rent one or summon an Uber if they need a ride.
Notes:
1) For this article Tesla=EV and oil=fossils
2)The real problem is getting the right residue to the right factory for processing. Also most products are not manufactured with recycling in mind. Take the phone for instance. Most cell phones on this planet are now in a drawer with five other old cell phones. When they sit in a drawer long enough they are thrown in the garbage with all their expensive rare metals. The sad truth is that the phone was not engineered to be recycled.
https://www.centrumbalticum.org/files/5598/BSR_Policy_Briefing_2_2023.pdf
3) Hydrogen sidebar. There are only three ways to store energy. You put it in electricity (batteries), you put it in chemicals (hydrogen) or you put it in gravity (pump it uphill). Big transport like trucks, and rail, and maybe ships is painted as having this supposed rosy future with hydrogen. What is not talked about too often is how much energy it takes to make hydrogen. Hydrogen only stores energy as it has to be made first. It will go “three times longer” than a Tesla as the weight is less. However with some minimal assumptions, the use of hydrogen for heavy transport power would mean the grid fails.
4) How The World Really Works by Vaclav Smil 2022
5) I am singling out Ricardo’s law of comparative advantage. Basically it means that a sandwich costs you $5 at the Seven Eleven vs. $50,000 if you had to make it from scratch…like from the forest floor.