Sacred Headwaters #24: "Cars to drive or a planet to live in?"

Mainstream "green" narratives and climate strategies are focused on rapid electrification. But is a world full of electric cars actually sustainable, or do we need more radical transformation?

Sacred Headwaters is a bi-weekly newsletter that aims to guide a co-learning process about the existential issues and planetary limitations facing humanity and about how we can reorient civilization in a way that will enable us to thrive for centuries to come. If you’re just joining us, consider checking out the first issue for some context and head over to our new table of contents to browse the whole library. The newsletters are not strictly sequential, but this exploration is meant to build on knowledge and understanding over time. Subscribe below if you haven’t already, and please share with friends, family, and colleagues who may be interested:

Table of Contents

Sacred Headwaters has a rudimentary table of contents intended to allow readers to “catch up” more effectively, facilitate using Sacred Headwaters as a reference, and give a better picture of what the newsletter is about for those who are just joining us.

Announcement and a Favor

Issue 24! That means we’ve been doing this for 12 four-week periods, which I realized while editing this is not actually an entire year. I hope you’re all getting as much out of it as I am and that the issues are serving as a long-term resource. In light of our almost-one-year anniversary, I’d like to ask each of you a favor: please share the newsletter with one or more friends or colleagues you think might be interested in learning with us. Social media shares are always appreciated, but direct contact is a far more effective way to engage, so please consider sending someone an email telling them about Sacred Headwaters and why you subscribe. And as always — feedback to me is more than welcome!

Issue #24: “Cars to drive or a planet to live in?”

The science is clear and the public rhetoric is even starting to catch up: we need to stop burning fossil fuels. But the majority of the discourse is focused on how, and how quickly, we build the capacity to live more or less as we do now, without fossil fuels. We identify major sources of emissions — car travel, concrete and construction, food production, and so on — and then ask, how can we make those sources emit less? But we deliberately forgo the question, can we do those things less, or in fundamentally different ways? Can we build a just and equitable society that involves less individual car travel, less new construction, less waste? Perhaps more importantly, if we don’t do less of those things, will we actually end up mitigating the holistic ecological crisis and bringing humanity back within planetary boundaries? Will we even achieve a modest degree of mitigation of the climate crisis?

In this issue, we’re going to explore some of the problems with the electric vehicle narrative. To be clear from the start: I’m not writing this to suggest that we should not transition to BEVs (“battery electric vehicles”), and I doubt that any of the authors included would argue that. Instead, I am aim to call into question the sustainability of the model and culture of car ownership and individual travel that Western countries subscribe to and are rapidly exporting to the Global South, regardless of the source of energy used to power those vehicles.

Imagine, as a thought experiment, that all ICE (internal combustion engine) vehicles are replaced with electric vehicles tomorrow, complete with charging infrastructure and so on, and all vehicles produced going forward are BEVs. Then consider some trends: we passed one billion vehicles on Earth in 2010. The growth rate of number of vehicles has not slowed and the “motorization rate” (number of vehicles per person) is continuing to increase.

The production of every BEV emits a not-insignificant amount of greenhouse gasses and requires a variety of minerals that are, of course, both fundamentally finite and typically extracted from Global South countries by multinational corporations. Energy production to drive those BEVs is subject to the same constraints, and in many parts of the world (including parts of the US and other wealthy countries), energy production remains carbon-intensive enough that BEV operating emissions are comparable to efficient hybrid vehicles. That latter point is subject to change as we transition away from coal and natural gas, but even lower-emissions energy production is not “free” from either a sustainability or global justice standpoint.

Given the above, imagine a world with 2.5 billion cars by 2050. Is this realistic?

It almost certainly isn’t, even with radical improvements in battery technology, energy efficiency, and emissions-free energy production. But our discourse is constrained: the best policy tools right now are to subsidize electric vehicle production and other so-called “green growth” strategies. These tools help accelerate the substitution of BEVs, but they do nothing to reduce overall use of destructive technologies or consumption, and they actually risk — by lowering the market price of goods — increasing consumption.

We read a couple weeks ago about how the oil industry has deliberately mislead the public for decades to allow itself to profit at the world’s expense. I compared that to the tobacco industry, industrial agriculture, and pharmaceutical companies, asking the question: in our current socio-political and economic configuration, can large corporations actually act in ways that prioritize planetary well-being over shareholder profit, or is that impossible? I think that’s important to keep in mind as we watch the business of “green growth” — electric vehicles, renewable energy, and so on — become the driving force of the global economy. There is nothing structurally different about these companies and their technologies aren’t “externality-free.” How can we avoid making the same mistakes again?

A numerical assessment – Cars to drive or a planet to live in? (10 minutes)

Remarkably, a committee in the UK government stated (in 2019),

In the long-term, widespread personal vehicle ownership does not appear to be compatible with significant decarbonisation.

In this article, Geoff Beacon walks us through a back-of-the-envelope assessment of the committee’s statement. He looks at something called the “fair personal remaining carbon budget,” a rough, global, per-capita distribution of the amount of CO2e we can still emit while still maintaining a reasonable (66%) chance of limiting Earth’s warming to +1.5C. This is, of course, a frighteningly stark metric for those of us in the rich part of the world: in the US and Canada, we will expend our fair personal budget in under three years. Even an average global citizen will do so in about seven years. The author uses a global budget from this paper; some estimates are higher, but not significantly, and some are lower, including the very real possibility that we’ve already exceeded the “budget.” Beacon walks us through a straightforward (numerically, at least) assessment of the lifetime emissions for a BEV and concludes that yes: personal vehicle ownership is, essentially, incompatible with the remaining carbon budget for +1.5C.

Electric vehicles: the future we made and the problem of unmaking it (40 minutes)

The whole paper takes about an hour. Section 2 focuses on the state of emissions and how insufficient the Paris NDCs are, let alone the progress we’re actually making towards them. I find it’s good to be reminded of this from time to time, but it’s something most of you are probably familiar with, so I’d recommend reading sections 1, 3.1-3.4, and 4.

This paper is an overview of the problems and complexities inherent in our global plan to reduce emissions by substituting electric vehicles for fossil fuel powered vehicles. First and foremost, Morgan points out that this logic has a big question mark in the middle of it: step one, switch to EVs. Step two, ?. Step three, profit! Or, in this case, dramatically reduce emissions, trending towards zero. From there, he dives into a number of the potential issues, including the lifecycle emissions question that the previous article talked about. Imagine that we achieved a rapid transition to a full electric fleet by 2030, something that not even the most optimistic forecasts come close to. Each BEV, depending on size, energy supply, and other factors, requires 2-6 years to “pay back” the battery’s production emissions and make the vehicle an improvement over the ICE vehicle it replaced. If you imagine a staggered replacement of the existing global fleet over the next ten years, suddenly we’re looking at what could actually amount to increased emissions by 2030. Even if the long-term emissions are lower than the equivalent had we not replaced the ICE vehicles, we absolutely can’t afford that. Another frame that Morgan depicts is equally problematic: we talk about BEV uptake as though it is unequivocally correlated to reduced total emissions. But the reality is and will continue to be that the majority of BEV market growth is in China and corresponds to overall growth of the auto market. To put it simply, the lifecycle emissions of those BEVs represent emissions that don’t currently exist. He goes into a variety of the other issues including slow overall adoption, unavoidable emissions in vehicle manufacturing and assembly beyond the battery, the social and “techno-political” lock-in that car culture and infrastructure create, and the potentially limited or limiting supply of materials like cobalt and lithium. I’d highly recommend reading the whole thing as I am far from covering all the important points, but I’ll leave you with this quote:

BEVs are technology, technologies have social contexts and social contexts include systemic features and related attitudes and behaviours. Technocentrism distracts from appropriate recognition of this. At its worse, technocentrism fails to address and so works to reproduce a counter-productive ecological modernisation: the technological focus facilitates socio-economic trends, which are part of the broader problem rather than solutions to it.

What Green Costs (15 minutes)

Riofrancos brings the BEV and renewable energy discussion to the extractive frontier, the Atacama desert, high in the Andes near the border of Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile. She paints a picture of a beautiful and unique ecosystem that, along with the Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples that live in the area, is being significantly damaged by lithium extraction. This is an important lens to view the energy transition through because it makes it clear that if we’re not careful — and, thus far, we haven’t been careful — we’re going to replicate (or perpetuate) the five hundred years of European colonialism in our efforts to transition to a more sustainable world. Riofrancos talks about the work local communities are doing to fight what she calls “green extractivism.” They aren’t fighting the global transition to a low-carbon world, they’re fighting the way we’re trying to accomplish it, because if that transition depends on continued resource colonialism, it’s almost guaranteed to fail to achieve sustainability (or, obviously, any semblance of international justice).

Riofrancos was featured in a recent podcast episode, “We Can’t Talk About Tech Without Talking About Resources,” that touches on these issues and may be of interest.

To be clear, we could easily have an entire issue (or series of issues) dedicated to the colonial nature and international injustice of our current “green capitalism” trajectory; I don’t want this to seem like an afterthought even though it’s just a small part of this particular issue.

In this now-deleted Tweet, Elon Musk jokingly claims responsibility for the US-backed coup in Bolivia last year. While I don’t believe that Musk orchestrated the coup, the reality is that the US has, since the end of World War II, repeatedly toppled democratically elected governments in order to guarantee access to resources and markets for US businesses and capital interests. It’s easily within the realm of plausibility that access to lithium was a major factor behind American involvement in the Bolivian coup. On a semi-related note, Chile voted in a landslide yesterday to throw out their country’s constitution, a constitution created by Chile’s oppressive military dictator Augusto Pinochet, who — you guessed it — took power from the democratically elected Salvador Allende in a coup with CIA backing. You can even read about it — and about how the CIA was directly lobbied by US businesses to remove Allende from power — on the CIA website!