There’s nothing like the angst of the truly offended to spur a dedicated columnist back to the keyboard and rumination. And none are more easily offended — at least judging by last week’s column — than the dedicated proponents of the electric vehicle. Loud is their outrage any time their anointed savior is castigated.
Thankfully, among all the detritus (usually anonymous, by the way) was a gem from Tony Catterall, a reporter whose previous beats included covering the German auto industry in the 1980s and ’90s.
Proving that there’s nothing new under the sun, Catterall sent along his “Electric cars may drive pollution levels higher” story that was published in London’s The Observer on Aug. 4, 1991 that predated — by 20 years (quite the scoop, Tony!) — my column detailing the University of Tennessee’s contention that EVs may actually result in more overall pollution than gasoline-fuelled automobiles.
That report studied 34 Chinese cities and found that, because 75% of China’s electricity is fuelled by coal, the emissions associated with driving an EV actually caused more pollution than tooling around in a conventionally powered automobile.
As contentious as the University of Tennessee’s study is, Catterall’s now-ancient missive proves its conclusion is hardly new. Indeed, 20 years ago, Catterall reported the same results from Germany’s Institute for Environmental Protection and Energy Technology. According to Dr. Hansgert Quadflieg, Catterall’s story noted, the institute had even then determined that, although electric cars “don’t themselves emit any harmful gases … if we’re going to introduce them on any large scale, we also have to look at overall emissions.”
Catterall also reported that a Technical Control Board Rhineland (Germany’s sometimes-infamous TUV) computer simulation replacing all the internal-combustion-engine cars in Cologne — then a city of just less than one million — with electrically powered vehicles would have required an additional 7,000 to 9,000 megawatt/hours a day of electricity generation.
Since about two-thirds of Germany’s electrical generation at the time was generated by fossil-fuelled power stations, Quadflieg told Catterall that overall carbon dioxide emissions “could rise by up to 20%.” He also noted that sulphur dioxide — a major cause of acid rain (my God, do you remember the kerfuffle that used to cause?) — would also increase.
Of course, power-generating technology has advanced somewhat in the last two decades, although Germany still relies heavily on coal for electricity. As well, it must be pointed out that Canada’s reliance on coal for electricity generation is minimal, meaning that EVs driven here actually significantly decrease emissions compared with a gasoline-powered automobile.
However, as I noted in last week’s Motor Mouth, the world’s two biggest consumers of automobiles, China (where, according to The New York Times, the increase in global warming gases from China will probably exceed that for all industrialized countries combined over the next 25 years) and the United States (where coal plants are responsible for about one-third of all carbon dioxide emissions), still get the preponderance of their electricity from coal, with neither looking to phase it out.
It’s also worth noting that, according to worldcoal.org, 42% of the world’s electricity generation stems from coal. The U.S. has approximately 540 generators, more than a third of which are 40 years or older, while China is reportedly building coal-fired plants at the rate of one a week.
In perhaps worse news, a 2008 Massachusetts Institute of Technology study revealed that the true problem with Chinese coal power generation was not its powerplants lacking cleaning technology but that the coal being used was of such poor quality. Even more perversely, numerous sources conjecture that the cooling effect of the enormous amount of sulphur the low-tech Chinese plants are pumping out is masking some of the climate-changing effects of its carbon dioxide emissions, something that may cause global temperatures to spike in the near future.
All of this is just a long way of saying that moving Chinese and American drivers into EVs is far from the climate change panacea many imagine. But, then, if we had all read Catterall’s story 20 years ago, we’d already know that.
While admitting that EVs have their place — “They can be very useful in niche areas such as local delivery and service rounds. And they help in the fight against local smog, for example in Los Angeles …” — Quadflieg concluded that “we have to keep in mind that with present electricity-generating technology, all [electric vehicles] do is transfer the pollution somewhere else.”
Sadly, there’s another part of the EV phenomenon that remains equally consistent. One of the letters in response to Catterall’s story accused him of deliberately carrying out an “assault on batteries.”
