The Electric Car Debate: Are They Actually Bad for the Environment?

Bjorn Lomborg, an environmental economist and director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center has some pretty harsh criticism to make against electric vehicles (EVs). But is he correct?

Here are a few of the points Lomborg makes against electric vehicles:

• Coal-burning power plants generate the electricity used to charge them.
• Coal is more polluting than gasoline.
• Lithium mining for the batteries is environmentally harmful.
• More CO₂ is emitted when manufacturing an EV than a conventional vehicle.

Those are fairly valid points of critique, but if you're looking at your Prius right now with the disdain of an unfaithful lover, hold on! Here's how we would counter:

• Many EV owners use home charging stations hooked up to solar panels.
• Coal doesn't have to be the primary source of grid electricity in the U.S. Investment in renewable energy is growing daily.
• Even if all of our grid electricity came from coal, it would still be more efficient than burning gasoline in a car's engine. This is because power plants are more efficient due to their large scale, and because they always operate at their optimal rpm. Car engines operate at a less efficient scale and rarely run at their optimal rpm.
• Lithium is mainly extracted from evaporating brine these days, a process which is not especially environmentally harmful (especially compared with oil drilling).
• Improvements in the manufacturing process will reduce CO₂ emissions.

So what do you think? Will electric cars lead the way to a greener future, or are they a dead end? If protecting the environment is something you care about, then remember when you buy a pre-owned vehicle from Route 15 Used Car Center instead of a new one, you are saving all the natural resources and carbon that would have gone in to producing a new vehicle.