Electric vehicles to reduce carbon
Recently there have been a number of articles in the press criticising the environmental cost of electric vehicles (EVs) - in particular because of the exotic elements needed in battery manufacture.
There is also an often expressed opinion that the best sort of car is no car - people should use public transport instead.
Public transport only might be an option for some younger city dwellers but it doesn’t at all address the needs of less densely populated areas, or of people with limited mobility, or people with small children or pets, or anyone trying to transport a large load… the list goes on.
An on demand, always and everywhere available, taxi service which costs 10p per mile, would address all of those objections and would indeed make “no car" a viable option for almost everyone, although exactly the same question of what propulsion technology to use for the taxis still exists.
In the absence of that, an EV still makes sense. It is true that batteries demand exotic and fairly rare elements (predominantly lithium and chromium), which have localised environmental impact in the countries which mine these elements. But so does oil extraction and refining. Oil spills and pipeline leaks also exact an environmental toll. This doesn’t include the environmental and human costs of the many wars which have been fought over oil.
The environmental cost of running a car on fossil fuels affects everyone, everywhere. A small petrol car doing 10,000 miles per year emits 1900 kg of CO2 for every year that the decision to go electric is postponed.
In the meantime, battery technology is improving quickly and there are many teams focussed on ways to reduce the exotic element requirements of making a battery.