The idea of cruising silently to work in an electric car is appealing. Besides saving considerable money on energy costs and maintenance, it would produce no emissions to foul the air. I could feel quite environmentally virtuous.
Or could I?
A U.S. study estimated that an electric car driven in Colorado would have the same carbon footprint as a gasoline-powered car of similar size, one that got about 33 miles per U.S. gallon. The emissions wouldn’t be coming out of the tailpipe, but from polluting coal-fired power plants.
If that car were driven in California, though, it would be responsible for far few emissions, about the same as a gasoline car getting 79 miles a gallon. That’s because California’s power sources are cleaner than Colorado’s.
Given that B.C. gets its electricity from hydro and gas-powered generation, I could safely assume that my hypothetical electric car would add far less pollution to the atmosphere than a gasoline-powered car.
Still, natural-gas power generation pushes a lot of carbon dioxide into the air and hydroelectric power, too, has undesirable side-effects. Perhaps I should charge my car from some other source.
A wind turbine sounds good. Let the breezes power my daily commute, with no greenhouse gases to worry about from either the car or the energy source.
But windpower generation is not as environmentally innocent as we might believe. I have driven through Tehachapi, California, where the mountains and ridges are covered with thousands of wind turbines, their blades whirring merrily in the constant wind.
On the ground, it’s not so merry. The hillsides are massively scarred by access roads and power lines. A few graceful wind turbines on a distant horizon can be a beautiful sight. Ugliness dominates the landscape near Tehachapi. The power comes at less cost there, but it is still not free.
So let’s space out the turbines, ensure they don’t make the landscape ugly and kill all the birds.
But the pollution, while out of sight, should not be out of mind. Those wind turbines require magnets, and to make those magnets, you need neodymium, a rare-earth mineral mined and processed in China’s Inner Mongolia region, which has 90 per cent of the world’s rare earths.
The factories that produce the magnets spew toxic smoke and have created a vast lake of poison that is making thousands of people sick and killing farmland. Every big wind turbine we build adds to that dump of toxic chemicals in China.
Well, solar panels then.
But the manufacture of solar panels is responsible for millions of kilograms of polluted sludge and contaminated water.
And even if I could manage to find an energy source completely free of pollution, there’s still the making of that electric car. The factories where those cars are made emit more pollution than conventional car factories, requiring more toxic minerals, such as nickel, copper and aluminum, than gasoline-powered cars.
So let’s just power our cars with ethanol, OK?
Yes, but the process to produce ethanol is not so innocent. Growing corn and other grains for ethanol involves huge quantities of fossil fuels, fertilizers and agricultural pesticides.
“The life-cycle emissions of ethanol — from seed to tailpipe — depend on how the ethanol is made and what it is made from,” says a report from the Union of Concerned Scientists. “The best ethanol can produce as much as 90 per cent fewer life-cycle emissions compared to gasoline, but the worst ethanol can produce significantly more life-cycle emissions than gasoline.”
We shouldn’t give up on renewable energy sources — Ibelieve they are our future. Much research is dedicated to increasing efficiency and reducing pollution, and progress is being made.
But we shouldn’t be too quick to pat ourselves on our backs for being environmentally pure, just because we can’t see the pollution we create.
That bicycle is looking better all the time.
