This article first appeared in our COP29 special issue of My Green Pod Magazine. Click here to subscribe to our digital edition and get each issue delivered straight to your inbox
I’m a veteran London cyclist – 50 years and counting. I shudder to think about the state of my lungs!
I’ve just loved watching the number of little green flashes on London number plates ticking up year after year, each one marking the disappearance of one more filthy, polluting internal combustion engine (ICE). Yay!
But these celebrations don’t last long. Electric vehicles (EVs) may be better but they are not good.
Looking ahead, I bet that it won’t be long before climate campaigners, having seen off the majority of petrol and diesel vehicles in our towns and cities, will turn their firepower on those little green stripes!
I can’t get into the whole rural transport challenge here, but campaigners would do well to recognise that far more people need a car in rural areas, and it’s not a particularly big deal, relatively speaking, whether it’s an EV or an ICE. Focus on those much bigger urban prizes!
There are about 1.4 billion vehicles on the world’s roads today – the vast majority being ICEs. All other things being equal (such as politicians remaining catastrophically complacent about the climate crisis), that will rise to around 1.7 billion by 2030.
It’s been calculated that replacing all of those ICEs with EVs by 2035 would require an annual production level of between 75 and 80 million new EVs every year. Great for economic growth. Another hammer blow for life on planet Earth.
Back in 1991, Heathcote Williams wrote a book called Autogeddon, a penetrating critique of our obsession with the motor car, laying bare what would happen if the number of cars on our roads kept on rising.
So who’s up for a 21st-century equivalent: EV-Mageddon?
The charge sheet against electric vehicles is already long – and it’s getting longer.
All those precious metals (such as nickel, cobalt, copper and lithium) and all those rare earths (most of which are mined in countries where workers are screwed over as exploitatively as the environment, be that in China, Africa or south-east Asia), all that pollution (EVs are heavier, so tyres get worn down quicker) and so on.
This is a charge sheet much loved by the oil industry as it does everything it can (legal and illegal) to extend the life of today’s ICEs.
But the fact they rely on it, with increasing desperation, to try and undermine today’s unstoppable shift to EVs, doesn’t make it any the less telling.
So, the answer to my question (‘EV or not EV’) is (obvs!) ‘EV’ – but based on a radically different prospectus from that of today’s EV growthists,
driven by two complementary revolutions.
This is all about the battery. Today’s lithium-ion batteries are technological nightmares: resource-intensive and expensive, with a relatively short lifespan and hard to deal with at end-of-life.
Fortunately, despite near-total market dominance today, they’re destined for as rapid a demise as that of the ICE.
Both sodium-ion batteries and iron-air batteries are getting closer and closer to commercialisation – just one small part of the emerging revolution in storage technologies that would bring joy to people’s hearts (if they didn’t find anything to do with energy storage so totally boring!).
I’m still slightly astonished that so many governments have summoned the courage to commit to phase-out timetables for the ICE.
Car manufacturers and investors have had no option but to face up to that inevitability – notwithstanding a few pushbacks!
That was the hard bit. Now they just need to row in behind the rest of the policy revolution, sorting out the ‘end-of-life dilemma’ by regulating for minimum levels of disassembly and materials recycling.
All that nickel, cobalt and copper is just as important to the renewables industry as it is to battery manufacturers – maximum reuse and recycling must be the order of the day, even if it makes things more expensive in the short term.
To be honest, that’s still relatively easy to sort out through smart policy design, implementation and enforcement.
It’s much harder for politicians to deal with human behaviour! Because what we now need is an unambiguous acknowledgement that the days of the private motor car in our towns and cities are numbered.
All policies must now be geared to improvements in public transport and in cycling and walking infrastructure, as well as in car-sharing schemes and car clubs (all EV of course!). And that demands a revolution in people’s mindsets – which is still some way off in the future.
Jonathon Porritt is an author, campaigner, founder-director of Forum for the Future and former chair of the UK Sustainable Development Commission (2000-2009).
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