The March of Progress

I saw this cartoon on Facebook the other day ...

... and it reminded me of a question that's been bothering me about the so-called "zero emissions" electric cars: where does the electricity that powers them come from?

Now granted, when the car is tooling along on full battery power, it's not burning fossil fuels or generating any nasty pollutants, and so its manufacturer proudly proclaims it to be a "clean" or "environmentally friendly" vehicle, and its owner whirs down the highway and looks down his nose at all the less environmentally responsible people who are driving gasoline-powered vehicles and pumping pollutants into the air.

But riddle me this, Batman: where does the electricity to charge those batteries come from in the first place?

That car may not be generating pollutants when it's running, but the electricity which charged its batteries in the first place obviously had to come from some source of generation. It may have been a coal-burning power plant that pumps its own pollutants into the air and depends on the environmentally problematic mining of coal. It may have come from a nuclear power plant, which generates waste that will be deadly for so long that we don't even have ways to warn people that far in the future that it's still dangerous. Or perhaps it came from a hydroelectric plant powered by a dam that blocks a river and causes environmental damage of its own. And let's not forget that the batteries in that car will need to be disposed of at some point in the future ... probably in a landfill that has its own environmental issues.

The bottom line is that there's no such thing as a free ride ... everything's a trade-off. We can build a car that may not directly generate pollutants on its own, but which comes at the end of a production and supply chain that isn't environmentally friendly at all.

If we want cars, there are limits to how green we can go and problems with just about every power option ...

We just need to decide what the tradeoff point is between our desire to drive and fly, and our desire for breathable air and drinkable water. Too bad we probably won't decide until it's too late.

Have a good day. More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo