🌍 This week we heard more ominous news on the climate front, including record-breaking temperatures in Brazil and the World Meteorological Organization calling 2023 the hottest year on record.
🔥 Yet, we should get used to that: as we keep pumping more carbon into the atmosphere each year, global temperatures will keep rising mechanically. The only way to stop this is by ending our carbon pollution.
🚙 This brings us to electric cars. Some folks would still like you to think that electric cars have a worst environmental footprint than cars that burn fossil fuels. This fallacious argument takes many forms, doubting the carbon footprint of EVs, overestimating their impact on global mining, or diminishing their role in decarbonizing transportation.
💰 True, electric cars today remain too expensive for most and carmakers are just starting to introduce more affordable models. 🔋 Recharging costs can be confusing, though more stations are being deployed in Europe.
🤔 But make no mistake, arguments against EVs are the latest form of climate denialism, which these days focuses on criticizing low-carbon technologies that can actually address the climate crisis.
💡 And this is why it is so important to stick with facts about the real benefits of EVs. That’s precisely the focus of Cédric PHILIBERT’s latest book, Why the electric car is good for climate, published today in French as “Pourquoi la voiture électrique est bonne pour le climat.”
🤓 A former expert at the International Energy Agency (IEA) Energy Agency, where I first met him many years ago, Cédric dismantles these myths and demonstrates the decisive role of electric cars in the success of climate policies in France and around the world.
✅ Yes, it is true that producing electric cars generates more CO2 than old-fashioned petrol cars, mostly because it requires more energy to manufacture their batteries. But over their entire lifetime, when people actually drive them, EVs they will generate way less carbon than petrol cars.
✅ This impact today is likely to be underestimated as the share of renewable power increases. In fact, many still fail to grasp the truly explosive nature of the deployment of wind and solar power throughout the world, and thereby underestimate the climate advantage of electric cars.
✅ Another trope is the impact that electric cars will have on mining. But while demand for some metals, such as copper, will increase, overall mining activity will fall in the energy transition as demand for coal collapses.
📙 There’s a lot more in the book, which as the IPCC author François Gemenne, writes in his preface, “puts things in their rightful place in the face of the large-scale disinformation that is being spread regarding electric cars."
I couldn’t agree more. As we’re confronted to the drumbeat of dire news on the climate catastrophe, it is well past time to focus on actual solutions to our crisis – and EVs are undoubtedly one of them. 🙂 👍
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Order here 👇
