Atkinson has basically noticed that the manufacturing of EVs involves rather a lot of carbon emissions.
Rowan Atkinson, Mr. Bean (or, if you prefer, and I do, Blackadder) is worried about climate change, which he refers to as a “crisis,” has a couple of engineering degrees, and loves cars. He was also early, he writes in The Guardian, to buy a hybrid and then early to buy an electric car (if we exclude the fact that EVs were the auto-industry leaders at the beginning of the last century until they lost out to, ahem, a superior technology).
Atkinson likes electric cars, and his experience has been good (“notwithstanding our poor charging infrastructure”).
But:
[I]ncreasingly, I feel a little duped. When you start to drill into the facts, electric motoring doesn’t seem to be quite the environmental panacea it is claimed to be.
Atkinson has basically noticed that the manufacturing of EVs involves rather a lot of carbon emissions:
In advance of the Cop26 climate conference in Glasgow in 2021, Volvo released figures claiming that greenhouse gas emissions during production of an electric car are nearly 70% higher than when manufacturing a petrol one. How so? The problem lies with the lithium-ion batteries fitted currently to nearly all electric vehicles: they’re absurdly heavy, many rare earth metals and huge amounts of energy are required to make them, and they are estimated to last upwards of 10 years. It seems a perverse choice of hardware with which to lead the automobile’s fight against the climate crisis.
Well, “perverse choices” are what central planners have a way of making. Of course, car manufacturers have been known to make a few perverse choices of their own — we all can think of some truly shocking models — but the discipline of the marketplace means that if that choice is not working out, they have to move on. That’s not true of central planners. If they are in charge, they can stick with a bad, bad idea for a very long time. See the Soviet Union for details.
Decarbonization is, in many respects, a massive exercise in central planning, and that includes the decision to “encourage” the switch to EVs, not least by using the power of the state to squeeze out or shut down rival technologies (including the internal-combustion engine), leaving car companies little choice other than to go electric. As a way of discouraging innovation that takes some beating.
Atkinson goes on to discuss various alternative technologies, including:
[So]o-called solid-state batteries . . . that should charge more quickly and could be about a third of the weight of the current ones — but they are years away from being on sale, by which time, of course, we will have made millions of overweight electric cars with rapidly obsolescing batteries.
He also discusses alternatives such as hydrogen, synthetic fuels (“the environmental problem with a petrol engine is the petrol, not the engine”) and, indeed, the role that can be played by cars that are already on the road.
In Atkinson’s view:
[O]ur honeymoon with electric cars is coming to an end, and that’s no bad thing: we’re realising that a wider range of options need to be explored if we’re going to properly address the very serious environmental problems that our use of the motor car has created.
But car companies dragooned, bribed, or seduced into EV manufacturing will have a vested interest in protecting their enormous investment in this technology. They may not have enough capital left over to invest in alternatives. And even if they do, will they want to? Why spend huge sums undermining the value of the investment they have made in EVs?
The new capital may well have to come from elsewhere. If it’s there.