In the name of climate, make cars political again
Will Ferrell is a 'kinetic elite.' Replacing all cars with EVs may be impossible and distracting, research says.
Climate technologies require enormous amounts of metal. I’m Ian Morse, and this is Green Rocks, a newsletter that doesn’t want dirty mining to ruin clean energy.
“People who live in cities, traveling within the city to get to work or to do grocery shopping, they are a prime candidate for getting out of a car and onto a bike or onto a bus or onto their feet. Electrifying their vehicle is a lot less bang for your buck. You could have a much larger impact by removing that vehicle altogether.”
— Cameron Roberts, researcher at Carleton University
Of all the technologies expected to curb greenhouse gases, electric vehicles may require the most minerals. Each is a hunk of steel, lead, and aluminum — not to mention the more scarce metals like nickel and neodymium and the fossil-fuel-based plastics and tires. 100 million new cars hit road every year. If we are to escape climate catastrophe, gas powered cars need to be off the market by 2035.
But who says we need to swap each one of those cars with an EV?
Well, for one, companies pushing to mine the unexplored deep ocean believe EVs are necessary to avoid climate catastrophe. There are only five million on the road today, but with more minerals scraped from the seabed, there could be one billion. Will Ferrell also wants to spread EVs, if his Super Bowl ad is indicative of his support for the expansion of General Motors (who until last year supported climate deniers).
Transportation needs to decarbonize because lives depend on it. EVs emit less carbon over their lives than gas-powered vehicles. EV makers are working to address their own climate impacts, and their influence is prompting industrial emitters to address their footprints, too.
However, mounting evidence is telling us two things:
There may not be enough minerals and batteries to make everyone’s car an EV.
Converting every car to electric may potentially slow climate action and produce less equitable cities.
Many of you have asked me to write more about alternatives to extraction. Cities are a good place to start. “EV policy is, in effect, a new urban policy,” wrote transportation geographer Jason Henderson in an article last year entitled EVs Are Not The Answer. So how can urban policy affect mining and speed up the transition to clean energy?
The design of cities is intertwined not only with the prosperity of urban dwellers, but also with the resources extracted from around the world. Cities have been quick to respond to the need to decarbonize. Around the world, 1,886 cities have declared a climate emergency. Most of the world lives in these relatively recent residences, and an estimated three-quarters of CO2 emissions are released in cities. A large chunk of that is transportation, which itself comprises roughly a quarter of global emissions. Transportation is also the fastest growing source of emissions.
Urban transportation is where all the great Green Rocks topics intersect: decarbonization, resource use, and environmental justice.
The first issue is that there is probably not enough metal to convert all cars into EVs. So some quick math:
1.2 billion cars on the road today.
100 million are produced every year.
By 2028, EV makers will be able to produce 40 million a year, according to published plans.
For Tesla to produce just 20 million cars a year, it would require 23 more nickel mines, by one estimate.
At that rate, it will take 35 years to convert all cars into EVs. (EV batteries have a 10-15 year life, so as those die, they will need to be replaced, and it will likely be much longer.)
To keep temperature rise under 2°C, 90% of US cars will need to be electric by 2050.
The most optimistic projections of production and uptake only see 50% of cars being electric by 2050, according to the International Energy Agency.
Given constantly rising demand for cars, the EV industry will likely be unable to produce enough cars to stop transportation emissions ballooning global temperatures into climate catastrophe.
“That doesn’t mean that electric vehicles aren’t useful. That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be promoting them very heavily. But it does mean they can’t be the one solution,” says Cameron Roberts, a postdoctoral researcher at Carleton University in Ottawa.
“We need to get a pretty large number of people who are driving cars today to stop driving cars by 2030 or 2040,” he says. Electric and gas cars.
The bulleted figures above are public and summarized in two articles from Roberts and Alexandre Milovanoff.
When I spoke with Roberts last week, he told me he wants to “re-politicize” cars. As a historian of technology, he studied when cars were once steeped in politics. As they spread early last century, farmers would sabotage their own roads to prevent loud cars putt-putting by, scaring their horses and disrupting their income. Most drivers were wealthy men who treated the cars as ostentatious toys, which were believed to be more masculine than women’s electricity-powered cars. In the 1920s and 30s, cars were cemented as a core element of urban life.
In the urban world, he says, government has decided that one of its primary goals is to support the movement of motor vehicles. Need parking? Build parking. Too much traffic? Build roads. It hasn’t set up cities to be equitable or resilient, he says.
“There is no viable, sustainable mobility solution that will not somehow disrupt that consensus, and change it into something else,” he says. “It’s not easy to change, and to change it, you need to re-politicize it.”
Much of the climate and EV story has assumed the technology will replace all gas-powered cars. Researchers call this the 1:1 trade. It’s an appealing narrative, Roberts says, but it’s misleading.
“People are going to naturally gravitate toward that and avoid the less comforting story which says that, no, actually a lot of people are going to have to change. A lot of people are going to have the courage — and the incentives, it’s not entirely on the individual — to change their habits.” That means more bicycles, buses, trains, walking, and all those things working together.
The second issue is that an exact swap of gas to electric cars may disadvantage communities who are already feeling the worst of the crisis.
It’s easy to see where cars can be improved. “There are a lot of problems that we never really fixed. We mitigated them to some extent then agreed to just accept them,” Roberts says. Each year, more than a million people are killed on roads around the world —tens of thousands just in the US. Chemicals from tires seep into waterways, shrinking wildlife populations. Cars also require the carbon-intensive processes of steel making, tire manufacturing, and road building.
You might think that people who live in cities don’t spend as much on transportation, considering everything is so close. Aren’t cities meant to bring people together? Cities in the US, however, are no longer the dense, walkable streets, markets, and workplaces of seventy years ago. Enabled by the individually owned vehicle, people spread into suburbs, an urban sprawl that allowed well-endowed families to live outside the city while working in it. Highways for commutes split mostly lower income communities of color, bringing pollution-caused illnesses next to traffic. Gentrification has pushed those who can’t afford rising rent into places where they need to buy a car: away from public transit and further from jobs. And cars just take up so much sheer space, preventing communities from creating public services that shape their own neighborhoods. Sometimes it’s half the land of a city.
In EVs Are Not The Answer, Henderson connects EVs to the “kinetic elite,” or wealthy citizens who are highly mobile between various parts of the city. “The rush to mass EV uptake could be a huge miscalculation,” Henderson wrote.
The kinetic elite, embodied recently in a General Motors-funded, iPhone-wielding Will Ferrell, stands to benefit the most from EV subsidies. They and their neighborhoods are in a position to convert cars and buy the supporting infrastructure like charging stations, parking spaces, insurance, maintenance, and new transmission lines. Henderson concludes that “this feeds into class resentment because the lower class and working class are left with an inferior conventional car system, public disinvestment in transit, and deeper inequality and mobility stratification.” Providing charging infrastructure in low-income neighborhoods might become a new form of gentrification.
Here’s the fortuitous connection.
Roberts and Milovanoff say that if there are not enough batteries for individually-owned passenger EVs, industries could focus on electrifying other vehicles, like busses, trains, and heavy-duty machinery. Even electric bicycles, which make two-wheeled access more equitable, can become more central in climate policy.
Buses, trains and bicycles and their infrastructures reduce pollution and make cities more accessible to more people, which can shrink emissions at the same time. Larger vehicles or smaller bikes can also use different kinds of batteries, some of which use much more abundant and less polluting materials like sodium.
And as political scientist and friend of the newsletter Thea Riofrancos says, “A transit system or an energy system that is more equitable on the user end also involves less resource use on the extractive end.”
Two recent articles inspired by Green Rocks topics
If you can read behind PV Magazine’s paywall, check out my piece on nickel waste.
If you’re interested in stellar mining photos and neat stories in the global market, check out my piece on mining for aluminum in Indonesia:
These topics are relevant to anyone who consumes energy. If you know someone like that, pass this along!
Having seen that my Tory MP here in NE England, Peter Gibson, reported as having spoken in Parliament in favour of government support for deep-see mining for minerals which, as I pointed out to him in an email with copious evidence, would be catastrophic. His response was, naturally, that electric vehicles, renewable energy etc. needs these minerals and who could not be in favour? The idea of consuming less, not having a private car, using public transport instead - way out of his comfort zone as a pro-capitalist Conservative. Let's change the conversation to less, instead of carrying on as we are but with renewables.