Your dirty green car.

So you're thinking about being a little greener and picking up that new electric car? You are going to be so green it'll give Kermit a run for his money!

Slow down Cap, you may not be the hero you thought you were.

The electric car is still in it's infancy and as such is underdeveloped to take over for the dinosaurs just now, if it ever can. I'm not saying it can't or we don't need to break our dependency on oil because we do. What I'm saying is coming off gas for electricity right now is like coming off cocaine, for heroine. Let me explain.

The first issue with electricity is the practical application for everyday use. To have an electric means you cannot travel more then 169km maximum on a charge not including such lavish luxuries such as heat, air conditioning, or a radio, you find that range is quickly reduced with the examples cited.

Next toss your greenness into stop and go. Plus it's Canada so it's damn cold which reduces capacity further....... Lets make our range 76ish kilometres. Not bad you still say? The average commute is 11km one way so 22 km/day from 76 = 54 km left over for anything else. Now 54 km doesn't sound that bad, but don't leave town... No really don't! You may not make it back. Say I went to visit a friend in Campellford a scant couple hours by car, a trip of relative distance I have made quite often, truthfully at least every other weekend since I began to drive. So from Toronto to Campbellford a trip of 180km I should run out of charge ....... well at the least 21 km outside of town. It's not a simple top off either. A three hour quick charge will get you 80% range. That makes a trip that by all law abiding speeds that takes only two hours, a five hour epic journey. But wait. The quick charge requires a quick charger, which is a piece of infrastructure that plainly does not exist in the middle of nowhere, so an 8 hour wait....... 10 hours to visit a friend less then 200km away?

That trip to Montreal by car is right out of the question.

                                               Pictured: Electricity in the middle of nowhere

OK so you're an unemployed shut-in environmentalist living in the heart of a major city with no need to leave, an electric will help you save the environment from your studio apartment filled with plastic water bottles and paper cups with plastic lids while still being able to arrive at the club in style.

Well not so fast G Q. Your carbon footprint (buzz word of the moment) may not be a hummer, but the guy beside you in the Fiesta burning barney juice ain't so bad himself. In the US a Nissan leaf will use 87g/km of carbon, but because power generation in a country dictates the footprint of an electric vehicle, somewhere less environmentally concerned, that number skyrockets. In India for example it becomes 133g/km. What does it mean in comparison? Well a diesel Fiesta creates a footprint of 98g/km universally, regardless of geographical location or power generation. Something of a comparable size petrol say a Honda Fit still only has a footprint of 101g/km. Taken across the scope and compared to population density, electrics are very comparable with similarly sized Dino dependents.

                                                 Pictured: Battery beach AKA: a brine pond.

So you think breaking away from Saudi is the idea and civilisation will march forward with no wars over commodity because the oil wars are over? Well you're dead wrong-- battery beach is smack dab in the middle of Bolivia. Bolivia just happens to have the worlds largest stretch of lithium rich salt flats in the world. Bolivia also doesn't much appreciate the rest of the world either, by this I mean they hate us. Bolivia and it's bat shit crazy dictator Evo Morales would really prefer to see you dead than to make a dime mining lithium for your Volt. 

Even if our buddy Evo let us in there's still the question of morality. Your Starbucks-fetchin'-bitchin' ride would be based on lithium from a country without the faintest idea of workers rights, or proper remuneration for exposure to carcinogenic lithium, among a myriad of toxins. Hundreds if not thousands of south America's indigenous people would need to be relocated to mine lithium, as the process kills the land by requiring chlorine to cut the Lithium from the brine, pulling scarce water from the desert floor and leaching toxins from extraction. Lithium can also be strip mined. Same toxins, deeper scar.

 
 There's also the little question on production numbers. We buy, globally, 13.6 million cars annually so let`s say we want less than half to be electric, a nice round number of six million. We will need 420,000 tonnes of Lithium carbonate, or six times the current production output. That only accounts for very small cars, more range would require more and larger batteries; in truth production needs to be expanded tenfold to account for that volume of electrics, and those production numbers do not account for other consumer electronics like cellphones and laptops.

 

                                      An abandoned lithium strip mine Kings Mountain  NC USA


Lithium once claimed has one last little problem, its completely unstable. If in contact with air it oxidises almost instantly, and burns in water. I mean like instantly white hot on fire kind of burn. It has to be transported in ..... Oil. 

                                                       Delivering lithium powered cars.



But you say there are other batteries, like current hybrids with NmHi batteries. Yeah, those aren`t a great deal better for mining either. In fact the trailings can be environmentally devestating. A little cyanide kills a whole lot.

This may look like the surface of mars but I assure you it's Sudbury Ontario. It's trailings from the nickel mine. No colour filter, that is actually what it looks like. And notice the trees..... About a KM back from this little toxic river. Nickel is also still pulled from the earth in a scarring, violent way; the evidence of our digging will be evident for tens of thousands of years.

Sudbury Ontario

I could go on about the previously mentioned power generation required to fuel these "clean" cars. You're looking at taxing a already strained electrical grid, that will require instant solutions for a lack of power. The easiest and fastest way to fill the gap is by re-firing coal powered plants, or a few more nukes. 

A cooling pond filled with nuclear waste, it'll be good in 5,000 years but so green.

 A coal mine to power your green car

I get some of the counter arguments, but to come off of petroleum, only to embrace another limited natural resource that is as toxic as the original and herald it as green is simply ignorant. To trade the surface of the earth and groundwater for a slight reduction in greenhouse gas seems backwards. Particularly when we can look at petroleum improvements, such as cleaner diesel as a stop gap until the next viable real green alternative is available. Diesels can be made to burn pre-produced carbons in the form of bio-diesel, and used cooking oil, they also have ranges that are far and above gasoline, and tenfold that of an electric vehicle, while remaining practical for true everyday use. 

Bought electric, thought it was the solution.

That`s not to say electric isn't the future, but with what we have right now it becomes an overbearingly irresponsible choice. We need to focus on extracting the required resources for battery technology in a responsible manner, both socially and environmentally. We also need to improve our infrastructure with true clean energy generation, and make fuelling safe and seamless for the consuming public. We can`t sit on our haunches and proclaim that the future is here, because frankly it isn't. Electric needs development, alongside fuel cell technology and needs to be validated before it can be proclaimed as the great successor to the evil gasoline.