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The Battery Car Delusion

Gautam Kalghatgi
UK
2020
GWPF- Global Warming Policy Forum
Electric vehicles in general don't make sense from an environmental perspective. A battery to store large quantities of electrical energy is a lot more damaging to the environment than a steel tank to store energy from gasoline. Even in France that has plenty of clean nuclear energy, electric transportation is best provided by electric wire powered busses, trolleys, subways, and freight and passenger trains than by battery powered electric cars. France is far ahead of much of the world with nuclear power and electric transportation. But building charging stations to replace gas stations is a costly and impractical way to improve transportation and protect the environment.

Gautam Kalghatgi: Battery electric vehicles (BEVs) do not represent a significant improvement over internal combustion engine vehicles (ICEVs) in terms of their carbon dioxide footprint unless all the energy for their manufacture and use is CO2-free. That is not likely to happen in the next ten years. A large investment in infrastructure is needed to enable wide deployment of BEVs and possibly continuing incentives to encourage people to buy them. Also, a large increase in BEV numbers will bring other problems, such as the impacts on human health of mining for the minerals, although these take place far away and are often ignored. Even with a hundred-fold increase in BEV numbers to 10 million by 2030, over 85% of transport in the UK will still run on internal combustion engines.