Electric Vehicles are NOT Environmentally Friendly !

Lately, there has been a lot of attention being paid to Hybrid and Electric Vehicles. Frankly, that annoys the heck out of me. When people discuss the ecological impact of switching to a hybrid or electric vehicle, their thinking stops at the tailpipe !

Stop & think about the "solution" from end to end... The conventional wisdom is that if we switch a vehicle propulsion system from gasoline or diesel fuel to electricity, the tail-pipe emissions will drop to zero. That I won't argue. The carbon footprint of operating the vehicle drops. But you don't just buy the car ! You still have to run it.

Where do fossil fuels come from ? Iraq ? The Alberta tar-sands ? The Gulf of Mexico ? All "bad" places, which are purported to contribute to the ecological impact of running each & every  vehicle on the road. Since that's not really the point of this article, I will ignore the source. But needless to say, the ecological impact of fossil fuels is very heavy.

Where does electricity come from ? In the USA alone, some 65% of the electricity produced comes from the burning from the burning of fossil-fuels - specifically coal ! The CO2 emissions from a coal plant ARE way higher than the cars they could power ! So all an electric vehicle does is transfer the point of impact from the tail-pipe to the coal-fired plant. Until the sources of electricity are converted to a more ecologically friendly means, then the argument becomes a wash.

But wait ! Let's consider the end of the car's life-cycle. In a conventional (gas, diesel, etc.) car, disposal is as simple as sending it to the crushers. From there, the car can be smelted & recycled. What happens with an electric car ? How can we safely dispose of the batteries that store the electrical energy ? Frankly, the current methods are toxic, and disposal is quite expensive. Lead-acid & lithium-polymer batteries are made up of dangerous chemicals.

Equally as bad is the fact that when involved in accidents, the chemicals in the batteries are extremely flammable & dangerous. When (not if) they leak in a collision, they become a haz-mat nightmare. The chemicals burn invisibly, endangering the lives of the occupants, fire-fighters & other nearby people.

I am a firm believer in doing everything we can to examine alternate fuel sources for our vehicle, but let's try to use our heads, shall we ?

The opinions expressed are purely those of the author. Opinions are like noses - everyone has one, and they are entitled to it !