How Green Was My Prius

Electric cars have gone from being a drawing-board pipe dream to being in every major automobile manufacturer's inventory. They are popular, at least in part, because they are perceived as being better for the environment. They aren't; not yet, anyway. But if we weren't making and selling them now, perhaps they would never realize that potential.

Back in November of '08, part of an article I wrote dealt (briefly) with the Chevrolet EV-1, a fledgling electric car that worked well, was manufacturable, was practical, and was inexplicably killed by General Motors. (What color is you're lifejacket?, November 20, 2008.) It seemed then that the electric car was far off in the future. Not so far, as it happened; electric cars are now offered by every major car manufacturer. And people are buying them. It's time (well past time) to take another look at this subject.

Deceptive color, green.

Consider the battery. There are few endeavors as destructive to the environment as the production of electric batteries. Environmentalists will (justifiably) eschew the production of batteries for toys and CD players and flashlights and the like, while loudly championing electric cars as the saviors of the planet even though the batteries in them are far more environmentally destructive to produce than those in your flashlight. At the current time, an electric car is as environmentally destructive as the gas-guzzler it would replace.

This leads to the kind of math that I am terrified by: Just how many human deaths is it worth to save the planet? I am not sure that we can assign such values to things without resigning our humanity.

If you think that I am saying that we shouldn't be driving electric cars, I am definitely not saying that. The problems of the electric car, and the batteries that it relies upon, are indeed large but I do not think that they're insurmountable. But who's going to climb that mountain if improvements in these technologies aren't needed, now? It may, in fact, come to pass that things like electric cars will indeed be the saviors of us all, but only if we can find a way of producing their components and developing their technologies without killing ourselves. I am sure that such problems cannot be overcome without research, that getting such research done will require a market, and that market won't exist unless we are pushing products like electric cars that require such research to fulfill their potential.

This is the reality of capitalism...nothing ever gets done without there's a profit in it. We may decry the fact that our way of life is driven by the relentless pursuit of profit, we may even be striving mightily to change that (or maybe just blogging about it), but no matter how earnestly we may want it to be otherwise it is what it is. For now, anyway, and even if we can change that can we really hope to change it in time?

This should be a point that the conservatives are making, and loudly. It isn't.

We live in a time when the electric car is perceived as a "left wing" thing by the right, and this perception is fueled by Barack Obama's strong support of the concept. This is unfortunate, since whatever Obama supports is automatically denigrated in conservative dogma. This is in defiance of the marketplace, the deity at whose alter all conservatives sacrifice, because the electric car is succeeding in that marketplace. In their rush to demonize anything that Obama supports, they are willing to likewise demonize a technology that is, despite their efforts, succeeding. 

A quick Google search turned up some glowing rhetoric from manufactures (naturally) and the left (naturally) extolling the virtues of the electric car along with some vitriolic rhetoric from the right (naturally) warning that the evil electric car is economically and environmentally unsound. But while the noise from the manufactures (and the noise from the left) is ignoring the dire warnings from the right, the noise from the right is ignoring the very real economic and environmental necessity of doing this now if we're ever going to do it better in the future.

So go ahead and buy that Prius (or Volt or Leaf or whatever) and drive it without embarrassment (if you can) but don't fool yourself that you're doing anything for the environment. You aren't...not today, anyway. But maybe, just maybe, you're making it possible for something truly great to happen tomorrow.

The Blues Viking

The thoughts here expressed are mine and if you don't like them you can get your own damn blog.