Iss2/Ch3 When your green energy transition is addicted to a white, powdery substance

As seen in Chapters 1 and 2, the only solution to the harms of mining is to do less mining. There is no technological solution capable of sealing off tailings indefinitely, no way to open-pit mine without removing all vegetation, no way to fully replace fossil fuels in the mining and smelting process – the list of unsolvable challenges goes on and on.

This leads to two questions. First, can we reduce our energy and resource use while maintaining or improving our quality of life? And, if so, are such reforms possible under our current political and economic system? We will spend the rest of this issue exploring these questions, using electric cars as a case study.

Throughout this issue, we have identified electric cars as a key villain for two reasons. First, the electric cars themselves require an extraordinary amount of minerals to manufacture. Second, electric cars require an enormous amount of electricity to operate. In sum, it makes most sense to use electric cars as a case study because any opportunity to reduce the number of electric cars we need will vastly reduce the mineral needs of a green energy transition.

However, there is one more reason why electric cars are a crucial case study. Fossil fuel-powered cars are one of humanity’s largest contributors to greenhouse gas emissions, and to prevent catastrophic climate change, fossil fuel-powered cars must be urgently phased out: “Currently, transportation is the leading cause of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States, and the only sector in which emissions are still steadily rising. 57 percent of emissions [of the transportation sector] come from light-duty vehicles—cars, trucks, and SUVs.”

Less mining without sacrificing anything

To dramatically illustrate how electric cars are a false solution to climate change, researchers at UC-Davis modelled demand for lithium for the US passenger transportation sector through 2050. To understand this modelling, we need to clearly define two terms.

A green energy transition refers to the replacement of fossil fuels with energy from fossil fuel-free sources; one type of green energy transition is a full green energy transition. For a full green energy transition, every fossil-fuel-powered item would be replaced with a green energy equivalent: every single gasoline-powered minivan would be replaced by an electric minivan, every gasoline-powered SUV by an electric SUV, and so on.

To establish a “business as usual” or baseline scenario, UC-Davis researchers started by modeling the US transportation sector’s need for lithium to make a full green energy transition. Although the report is limited to lithium, the overall trends would be the same for other minerals: as discussed in Chapter 1, a single electric car can uses 44 pounds of cobalt, 20 pounds of lithium, 110 pounds of nickel, and 117 pounds of copper.

There are 350 million gasoline-powered cars in the US, so a full green energy transition would need to replace all 350 million gasoline-powered cars with electric ones. UC-Davis researchers assumed an average battery size of 77kWh in each electric car: this is both the sales-weighted average battery size of electric cars in the US, as well as the approximate battery size of Tesla cars, the most popular make of electric car. In other words, 77kWh is representative of the size of battery most commonly used by auto manufacturers, now and for the foreseeable future.

Manufacturing 350 million electric cars, each with a 77kWh battery under the hood, would require an eye-popping amount of lithium. Such a feat would require triple the amount of lithium that is currently being produced for the entire global market, every single year, for the foreseeable future. This is true even if all worn-out car batteries were recycled with perfect efficiency: obviously, batteries would not be available for recycling until electric cars begin reaching the end of their lives (it is important to note that we currently do not have the technology to recycle electric car batteries). The necessary expansion of lithium mining worldwide would be staggering. As of 2021, the US only accounts for 12% of the global market for lithium, yet a full green energy transition for passenger cars in the US would require the entire global market for lithium, times three, annually. Somehow, the world’s lithium mines would also have to meet the greatly expanded lithium needs of every other country as well, plus the entire world’s lithium needs outside of passenger cars. This is a truly astounding amount of mining, necessitating severe and complex impact on the planet.

What would it take to reduce this colossal demand for lithium? Researchers next modeled demand for lithium assuming an average battery size of 54kWh, or 30% smaller batteries. Researchers assumed that Americans would not change their driving habits after switching from a gasoline-powered car to a 54kWh electric car: Americans would continue to make the same number of trips and drive the same number of miles per year.

It’s important to note that reducing the size of an electric car battery by 30% does not necessarily mean reducing its range by 30%. A larger vehicle requires more energy to move. The Toyota Yaris sedan gets 35 miles per gallon of gasoline, or more than double the gas mileage of a Toyota Tundra pickup (14 miles per gallon). A Yaris with five gallons of gas can drive further than a Tundra with ten gallons of gas, simply because the Yaris weighs less and is more aerodynamic. Assuming this efficiency is consistent, an electric Yaris would be able to travel the same distance with a 31kWh battery as a Tundra would on a 77kWh battery.* UC-Davis researchers highlight that electric car manufacturers have been favoring larger cars like SUVs and crossovers, rather than lighter, more efficient sedans. Clearly, a 30% smaller battery (77kWh to 54kWh) would not necessitate less driving if auto manufacturers focused on making sedans rather than electric SUVs, crossovers, and pickup trucks.

Plugging these assumptions into the model, UC-Davis researchers reached the astonishing conclusion that, if we drove sedans with 54kWh batteries instead of SUVs and crossovers with 77kWh batteries, we could reduce the lithium needs of a green energy transition of passenger cars by 29%, without changing the number of miles driven or trips taken. Let that sink in: without sacrificing anything, we could reduce our lithium needs by a third. That’s a third less mining, a third fewer people toiling under forced labor, a third fewer tailings dams, a third less radioactive waste, a third fewer trees clear-cut, a third fewer ecosystems destroyed. All without sacrificing anything.

Clearly, it is possible to reduce our energy and resource use while maintaining our high quality of life. Yet auto manufacturers are committing to large batteries, and governments worldwide are declining to create regulations to prevent them. Evidently, within our current political and economic system, environmental concerns are essentially a nonconsideration; we can reduce the environmental impact of driving by a third without giving up anything, yet are choosing not to. This should not surprise us: why else would we be facing a climate crisis?

Can we reduce lithium needs further?

But why should we drive cars at all? As a mode of transportation, cars are stunningly inefficient, requiring substantially more energy per passenger compared to buses or trains. If climate change has made it imperative to reduce energy use, why shouldn’t we explore the possibility of phasing out cars?

Currently, only about half of Americans have access to public transportation (though most of that access is to grossly underfunded transit systems that barely function), most roads are unsafe for bikes, and few can walk for daily errands like buying groceries. In other words, cars are mandatory. Outside of a few special urban areas, you can’t live without a car in the US without making great sacrifices in personal safety and mobility. UC-Davis researchers built another model that considered the possibility of greatly expanded access to public transportation, bike lanes, and walkable infrastructure. In this model, people in rural areas would use electric cars with the larger, 77kWh battery, but outside of rural areas, cars would become unnecessary. When researchers modeled such a scenario, they found that the lithium needs for the US passenger transportation sector would be reduced by a whopping 66%. Cars are an exceptionally inefficient form of transportation.

Combining these two efforts – smaller cars with smaller batteries and a transportation system that does not require people to own a car – would reduce our need for lithium by an astounding 74%. That’s three-quarters less mining, three-quarters fewer people toiling under forced labor, three-quarters fewer tailings dams, three-quarters less radioactive waste, three-quarters fewer trees clear-cut, three-quarters fewer ecosystems destroyed. We can reduce the mineral needs of our transportation system by three-quarters without giving up anything: we will still be able to get from place to place, albeit by different modes of transportation. If you have never heard of this idea before, it probably seems absurd, if not impossible, that your life could be better without your car. However, as we explore in detail in Chapter 4, our lives would be substantially better – happier, healthier, more financially secure – if we phased out cars in favor of other forms of transportation.

Again, the researchers only modeled lithium demand. But demand for other minerals, like nickel, rare earths, and cobalt, would show similar drops in demand, as would overall energy use.

People hate the idea of giving up their car – until they try it. As we explore in much greater detail in Chapter 4, if we created a transportation system where a car wasn’t necessary, we would all be much happier, healthier, and more financially secure.

Electric cars are a lite form of climate denialism

This modeling on lithium usage hints at impressive possibilities, but what is actually possible in the real world? It may sound nice to reorient our transportation system away from cars and in favor of rail, buses, bikes, and walking, but is such a dramatic change really feasible?

In fact, transitioning from fossil fuel-powered cars to electric cars in time is not feasible. The contours of this debate are beyond the scope of what we can cover here, but the UC-Davis researchers point out that scientists are sure that as fast as we can decarbonize cars, it won’t be fast enough to avert catastrophic climate change. Again, there are 350 million gasoline-powered cars in the US. Replacing 350 million gasoline-powered cars with electric cars is an unimaginably massive project, and auto manufacturers are only just getting started producing electric cars. But a bigger problem is the electricity needed to keep a fleet of 350 million electric cars charged and running. We currently lack the electricity generation capacity to charge 350 million electric cars: to operate a fleet of 350 million electric cars would require all the electricity the US currently generates.

The US still generates the bulk of its electricity from burning fossil fuels. Thus, to achieve a full green energy transition, we would have to replace all of our fossil fuel power plants with green energy just to run our electric cars. We’d also have to build out enough green energy to meet all of the current US electricity needs, including everything from lightbulbs to electric stoves and furnaces to every computer and every hospital. And, we’d have to build out enough green energy to power the electric replacements to everything else that currently runs on fossil fuels (like gas stoves and furnaces, industrial applications, etc). And we’d need to build out enough green energy to electrify all non-passenger transport (every semitruck, delivery truck, freight train, etc). And we’d also need to more than double the capacity of our electrical transmission lines to carry all this electricity. There is simply no possibility of building enough green energy generation capacity and the expanded transmission capacity to carry it in the few short years we have to avoid catastrophic climate change.

What’s more, there are serious doubts that we can even dig up all the necessary minerals quickly enough to actually build all the electric cars, green energy, and transmission lines. As discussed in Chapter 1, green energy requires a staggering amount of minerals, and UC-Davis researchers note that industry analysts nearly unanimously agree that mines can’t be opened and operated quickly enough to provide enough minerals for a full green energy transition in time to avoid catastrophic climate change.

The to-do list for a full green energy transition of American cars is mind-boggling. Manufacturing 350 million electric cars; replacing all of our fossil fuel power plants with green energy, then more than doubling our electrical output; more than doubling our electricity transmission capacity; digging out enough minerals to build all of these things – none of these tasks can individually be accomplished in time to avoid catastrophe, let alone accomplished in addition to phasing out fossil fuels from every other part of our world. Arguing that electric cars are a solution to climate change is almost as crazy as arguing that climate change is not real: both are in denial of scientific consensus.

Finally, and crucially, as we have discussed throughout this issue, fossil fuels cannot be fully removed from mining and smelting because electric motors lack the necessary power for mining, and we do not have a way of using electricity to generate the high industrial temperatures needed for smelting. Similarly, there is no way to eliminate deforestation – another massive contributor to climate change – from the mining process. Mining is estimated to contribute a whopping 10% of humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions. Accessing all the minerals needed for a full green energy transition would require greatly expanded mining, which in turn would accelerate greenhouse gas emissions and the destruction of carbon sinks at the same time. Clearly, electric cars are a false solution: this “solution” to climate change actually accelerates climate change.

But is it possible to totally reorient our transportation system away from cars?

It might seem intuitive that reorienting our transportation system from one based on cars to one based on buses, bikes, trains, and walking would require an unattainable amount of work, resources, and money. However, this is incorrect for two reasons.

#1: Small investments can lead to big changes

According to the Department of Transportation, 16.5% of all car trips in the US are one mile or less, and 27.7% are 2 miles or less – meaning they could be easily taken by walking. And a majority of trips (51.6%) are under 6 miles, meaning they could be easily taken by bike. Clearly, much driving can be eliminated simply by making biking and walking safer. The ways to make biking and walking safer are very, very cheap: protected bike lanes require no more than a few signs and some barriers, routing bike lanes between a parking lane and the sidewalk, lower speed limits, more crosswalks with signage, longer walk signal times – the list of very cheap fixes goes on and on.

Ensuring mobility over longer distances would be a greater challenge, but we should not overstate the difficulties. Bussing can be greatly expanded without much infrastructure investment: bus-only lanes and giving buses priority at stoplights are very cheap and easy solutions. Eliminating fares for public transportation could literally be done overnight and would dramatically boost ridership. At first blush, eliminating fares may seem an expensive idea, but collecting fares is expensive, and in some cases, the cost of collecting fares actually exceeds the revenue from the fares. Free fares have been tried with overwhelming success in so many places (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13), with increased ridership and less dwell times per passenger (time saved from not having to collect a fare). As we explore in Chapter 4, even ‘expensive’ fixes like free fares would cost very little relative to the cost of car infrastructure, like highways, expanded road capacity to accommodate car traffic, and parking spots.

Houston has been singled out here as an example of car-centric development out of control. But when Houston redesigned its bus system after carefully studying how Houstonites actually need to get around, it saw a massive growth in ridership. This was due to better-planned routes, not expanded service. A great deal can be accomplished with comparatively small investment.

Changes can happen quickly. When Charlotte built a light rail line that allows commuters to make a trip in 30 minutes that would take 2 hours during rush hour, massive development quickly followed along the entire route. If we build out convenient, quality transportation systems, people will move closer to take advantage: a path to phasing out cars is thus clear. This idea is known as “transit-oriented development,” and it has proven effective across the US and around the world (transit-oriented development can lead to a rise in housing prices, but there are many available policy levers to deal with this problem).

#2: The fragility of car infrastructure

Because car infrastructure is astonishingly fragile, reorienting our transportation system away from cars and towards walking, biking, bus, and rail would require less work and investment than it would to simply maintain our current car-centric infrastructure. Roads overall have a lifetime of just 16-31 years. That’s why road construction seems like it never ends: it doesn’t. The short life of roads would be further shortened by electric cars: electric cars are substantially heavier than gasoline-powered cars and would cause even greater wear and tear on our fragile roads. Moreover, the Interstate System – accounting for 49,000 miles of America’s freeways – requires substantial work in addition to the already-extensive resurfacing needs. According to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, “parts of the [Interstate] System [are] nearing or beyond the end of their design lives.” Maintaining our car-centric transportation system means an extraordinary amount of construction to simply maintain what we’ve got, easily dwarfing the construction required to expand bus, bike, walking, and rail options.

The contrast between the longevity of car-centric infrastructure and that of walking, biking, and rail infrastructure is stark. According to the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, sidewalks have a service life (the point at which the costs of ongoing maintenance exceed the cost of replacement) of 80 years (p15); this is for Canada and its harsh winters. The lifetime of passenger rail is complicated and depends on many factors, but is on the scale of decades. In addition to being longer-lasting than roads, rail has the advantage of being substantially smaller and more efficient. Rail can move at least ten times as many passengers as can be moved via cars on a highway (1, 2, 3). In New York City, about 31% of all trips are by walking, 30% by car, and 21% by subway. NYC has 6300 miles of streets and highways, whereas the entire subway system is only 842 miles. In other words, New York’s subways account for 70% (21% / 30% = 70%) as many trips as cars do, but on only 13% (842 / 63,000 = 13%) of the length (this is a significant undercount because this tally counts rail lines in both directions, whereas roads are counted in one direction). This matters because not only is rail more durable than roads, but substantially less material is needed to replace worn-out rail than worn-out roads. Moreover, the subway is capable of even higher ridership, whereas New York roads have legendary congestion and are not capable of increased use, with cars already creeping along slower than walking.

Crucially, reorienting transportation away from cars has already been done with success. We know that these changes can be made successfully. UC-Davis researchers ended their report by hinting at this possibility:

Faced with the abject urgency of decarbonization[,] cities have already begun to realize dramatic mode shifts [ ] in matters of 10-20 years. In Paris, car use declined nearly 30 percent from 2001 to 2015, and has been continuing to fall since then; in Lyon, the number of cars entering the city declined 20 percent over 10 years; in London, car use fell by nearly 40 percent from 2000 to 2014. In Amsterdam, the share of trips by bicycle, which had plummeted nearly 60 percentage points over two decades, began to rise dramatically again in the 1970s after the city began to implement policy and infrastructural shifts in response to activism from street safety and cycling advocates, which reversed the city’s emergent car dependency. While the mode shifts…may seem dramatic, many precedents show they are possible — and that the policies that enable them consistently become extremely popular once implemented.

More fundamentally, however, it should be obvious that we do not need cars. Cars only became common in the 1930s and widespread in the 1950s. Booming economies and technological and cultural advances are clearly possible without cars. In 1910, every town in the United States with at least 10,000 people had at least one electric streetcar line, and even small towns were connected to each other by rail. People still got from place to place without cars, and you could, too.

There is no reason we need cars. You might not like giving up your car in exchange for a robust public transportation system, but faced with the choice between a liveable planet and your car, you will choose your planet. If we reach the catastrophic climate change described in Iss1/Ch4, where would you drive to anyway?

The carbon footprint on the back of the climate movement

The mission of Finite is to give ordinary people the information they need to work together to solve the climate crisis. However, due to the dominance of misinformation about the climate crisis, just having the right information is not enough for anyone to understand the problem. Misinformation must also be corrected. Understanding how fossil fuel corporations use the carbon footprint idea to intentionally cloud how people think about climate change helps to explain why electric cars – a non-solution to the climate crisis – are widely considered a sound solution to the climate crisis, whereas phasing out cars is not.

The idea of the carbon footprint is to calculate and reduce the amount of fossil fuels we personally are responsible for burning. How much gasoline do we personally burn by driving each year, and can we reduce it? How much natural gas do we burn to heat our own home? How much fossil fuel must a power plant burn to provide the electricity for our refrigerator and other electrical appliances we personally own?

The most shocking fact about the carbon footprint is that it was literally invented and promoted by the fossil fuel industry. The idea of a carbon footprint wasn’t developed by Greenpeace or the Sierra Club – it was created by a public relations firm hired by the fossil fuel corporation BP. Obviously, phasing out fossil fuels is an existential threat to fossil fuel corporations, so when a fossil fuel company comes up with an idea to help society phase out fossil fuels, we should be extremely suspicious.

In 2004, BP launched its “carbon footprint calculator,” allowing anyone to figure out their annual contribution to greenhouse gas emissions. There are several major reasons why BP and other fossil fuel corporations have been such enthusiastic supporters of the carbon footprint.

#1 It won’t work

A carbon footprint-based approach to fighting climate change cannot possibly work:

MIT researchers calculated the carbon emissions for “a homeless person who ate in soup kitchens and slept in homeless shelters” in the U.S. That destitute individual will still indirectly emit some 8.5 tons of carbon dioxide each year.

“Even a homeless person living in a fossil fuel powered society has an unsustainably high carbon footprint,” said Stanford’s Franta. “As long as fossil fuels are the basis for the energy system, you could never have a sustainable carbon footprint. You simply can’t do it.”

In other words, there is no plausible way for individual efforts to lead a transition away from fossil fuels, even if every single individual person tried to act as climate-consciously as possible. Grocery stores do not sell food that did not use fossil fuels at some point, whether for planting, fertilizing, harvesting, or transport. You cannot plug your refrigerator into a different outlet that connects to wind turbines instead of a fossil fuel plant. Trying to solve climate change based on understanding and reducing our carbon footprint is certain to fail. Of course, fossil fuel corporations support an approach to phasing out fossil fuels that can’t possibly work because they don’t want the world to succeed in phasing out fossil fuels.

But we can take this logic a step further. The reason you have such a large carbon footprint is because of how our world is assembled, rather than how any individual acts within those broken systems. We use our cars so much because it is unsafe to bike, not possible to walk, and not practical to use our anemic public transportation system. We live in homes with large utility costs because those are the homes subsidized by the government, whereas homes with lower utility costs are not. If you moved to one of the scarce units of housing with adequate access to public transportation, you would succeed in lowering your personal carbon footprint; however, this would not lower humanity’s carbon footprint because there would still be the same number of homes without access to reliable public transportation.

In other words, we need systemic change to how our world works. No amount of effort to reduce one’s personal carbon footprint will phase out fossil fuels.

#2 It neutralizes the climate movement by supporting a bad set of strategies

When people think about climate change in terms of a carbon footprint, they think about climate change as the sum of individual actions, rather than what it really is: the logical result of a totally broken political and economic system. To halt climate change, we need a strategy to fix these broken systems.

How do we fix broken systems? By joining political organizations that push for changes in public policy. In Issue 3, we will learn about how ordinary people have successfully made sweeping changes to public policy and how the climate movement can reproduce these successes.

But when we see climate change through the lens of the carbon footprint, our strategy to fight climate change is highly individualized: you should install new windows. You should bike to work. But what’s actually needed is not to obsess over our personal decisions, but to join the fight for public policy changes. More important than a single person’s decision to ride their bike to work on a single day is supporting measures that would make it safer for everyone to ride a bike; more important than a single person deciding to ride the bus on a single day is to fix the gross underfunding of our public transportation system. But you can’t create such sweeping changes as an individual – you need to join a political organization.

Put another way, a carbon footprint calculator will never tell you to join a political organization, even though that is the most effective thing you can do to help phase out fossil fuels.

#3 The powerless are blamed, and the powerful avoid accountability

The carbon footprint idea places all blame for the climate crisis on individuals who have no power to solve it: you should replace your leaky windows; you should ride your bike to work. But our personal decisions are not the important factors driving the climate crisis, and changing them would have a negligible impact on worldwide greenhouse gas emissions. As we pointed out in Iss1/Ch4: ride your bike, and the government will continue to subsidize the fossil fuel industry and approve new drilling projects. Eat more climate consciously, and the world’s richest will continue to invest in fossil fuel corporations. Buy reusable grocery bags, and the world’s largest banks will continue to pour money into fossil fuel projects. Forgo straws, and corporations will continue to renege on climate pledges. Sort your recyclables, and fossil fuel corporations will continue to spread misinformation about climate change, as they have prolifically since the 1950s.

Clearly, the responsibility for and the ability to address the climate crisis lie with corporations and governments. But in a carbon footprint calculator, your decision to ride your bike is of utmost importance, while government permitting of fossil fuel projects is a nonconsideration. Your decision to take the bus is of utmost importance, but investor and bank financing of fossil fuel projects is a nonconsideration. Placing blame on ordinary people for problems corporations and governments knowingly caused obviously suits BP and corporations writ large.

Carbon footprints and Issue 2

Since coining the term “carbon footprint” in 2004, BP hasn’t reduced its production of fossil fuels, and a major reason why has been the success of the carbon footprint campaign.

The connection to this issue should be obvious. When we see climate change through the lens of the carbon footprint, our strategy for reducing emissions concentrates on our own individual choices rather than the necessary systemic changes. Faced with roads that are unsafe for biking and a grossly underfunded public transportation system, the only realistic way to reduce our carbon footprint in transportation is to buy an electric car. But as we’ve seen throughout this chapter, that’s a false solution; the real and viable solution is changes to public policy in favor of biking, walking, and public transit.

Conclusion

We started this issue with the green energy deal with the devil: to save the planet from climate change, it is necessary to sacrifice parts of the planet. In order to obtain the minerals necessary to phase out fossil fuels, open-pit mining and tailings waste will wipe out ecosystems and destroy the lives of people living near places that happen to contain the minerals needed to build out green energy infrastructure. In Chapter 2, we saw that this was a lie: first because the mining process itself requires massive carbon emissions that cannot be fully eliminated, and second because mines are most likely to be opened not where the highest quality ore is, but where people lack the political power to stop a mine from being opened.

In this chapter, we have exposed two more ways that the green energy deal with the devil is a lie. First, a full green energy transition calls for massive amounts of mining because replacing every fossil fuel-powered item with an electric equivalent requires an extraordinary amount of minerals. However, we can halt climate change with substantially less mining by looking for opportunities to reduce our energy and resource use. Using electric cars as a case study, this chapter demonstrates that we can dramatically reduce resource and energy use without sacrificing our quality of life: we could reduce the mineral and energy needs of our transportation system by a third, simply by driving smaller cars with smaller batteries, and we could reduce mineral and energy needs by three-quarters by supporting other, more energy-efficient forms of transportation, like trains, buses, walking, and biking.

Yet American public policy is sprinting in the opposite direction. There are no regulations limiting electric car battery size. Across the country, public transportation systems are facing severe deficits due to the expiration of pandemic-era support. Spending on rail has decreased, and spending on highways has increased. Taking a longer view of American public policy, these decisions are even harder to accept because cars have been recognized as a disproportionate contributor to climate change for as long as climate change has been understood. Policymakers could have massively reduced society’s greenhouse gas emissions in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s with laws limiting the size of cars and by promoting rail, bus, bike, and walking – the exact policies we need now to limit the harm of mining for electric cars. Instead, decades of public policy favoring driving generally and large cars specifically have substantially worsened the climate crisis we face today. Cars have always been a disproportionate environmental problem, and by failing to learn from the past, we are doomed to repeat it. Clearly, we need to change more than how we get around – we need a political and economic system that does not default to such irresponsible decisions.

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The second way this chapter has exposed the green energy deal with the devil as a lie: we cannot actually complete a full green energy transition in time to avert catastrophic climate change, and electric cars are the clearest example. Experts are unanimous that we cannot successfully replace gasoline-powered cars with electric cars in the few short years we have to avoid catastrophic climate change. Setting aside the catastrophic environmental and human consequences of all the mining required to do so, there is not enough time to build an electric car to replace all 350 million gasoline-powered cars in the US and build out the electricity generation capacity to keep 350 million electric cars charged and running, and also build out enough green energy to power the essentials of daily life, from cooking and heating our homes to running hospitals and grocery stores. It is a climate imperative to phase out cars.

Fortunately, we have thrived as a species without cars: they’re not necessary for mobility, booming economies, thriving culture, scientific advances, or a good life. Today, in some of the most desirable places to live – New York, London, Paris, Amsterdam, Tokyo, etc – car ownership is unusual. We can do without cars. As this chapter has demonstrated, reorienting our transportation system around walking, biking, bus, and rail would allow us the same amount of mobility with vastly lower resource and energy requirements.

Chapter 4 explores a yet much loftier claim: that your life would actually be better without cars.

The section on the carbon footprint is excerpted here.

*A gasoline-powered Tundra is 40% as fuel efficient as a Yaris (14 MPG / 35 MPG = 40%). If this ratio is the same for electric cars (a reasonable assumption), an electric Yaris would be able to drive the same distance with a 31kWh battery (77kWh x 40% = 30.8kWh) as a Tundra could with a 77kWh battery.