Electric cars: rethinking the narrative in the face of ecological crises
Tesla cars loaded onto carriers at the Tesla electric car factory in Fremont, California on May 13, 2020. California wants electric vehicle sales to triple over the next four years to 35% of all purchases of new cars.
AP - Ben Margot
Text by: Léopold Picot Follow
7 mins
In Europe, as in the world, purchases of electric cars are booming.
However, some voices question their ecological interest.
Not as green as it looks, dirtier than diesel, greedy in rare earths… The electric car, as polluting as thermal?
Beyond a complicated debate, it's a whole story that needs to be imagined.
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In Europe, between 2018 and 2021, sales of electric cars increased sixfold, from just over 200,000 units sold to 1.2 million in just four years.
A dynamic propelled by the development of charging stations, the establishment of purchase subsidies, and by the rise in fuel prices.
The European Union has even decided to
ban the sale of thermal vehicles from 2035
.
The trend is not just European.
Three times more electric cars were sold in 2021 than in 2018 worldwide: 4.8 million units compared to 1.5 million.
These figures may seem huge, but are low compared to the sales of thermal cars: more than 75 million in 2021. Does the manufacture and use of these millions of new electric cars make it possible to fight effectively against ecological crises, despite their cost? high in resources and energy?
The answer is, as is often the case in ecology, more complex than a simple yes or no.
A rather effective weapon against emissions
The fight against global warming is only
one of the many ecological crises
sweeping across our planet, but it is the most publicized.
To reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, electrifying the car, and more generally transport, is one of the levers of human action.
Nearly a quarter of global GHG emissions are due to transport, of which slightly less than half is due to land transport.
The
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC) even states: "
Electric vehicles powered by low-emission electricity offer the greatest decarbonization potential for ground transportation, based on the life cycle .
»
The life cycles of electric cars, Thomas Gibon knows them well.
He is an engineer at the Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology (LIST) in industrial ecology, a discipline that assesses the environmental impact of products, services, technologies, whose main tool is life cycle analysis.
"
It brings together all the flows of materials, energy, waste, emissions that we will have directly or indirectly, in connection with a final product, whether it is a car, a TV or even a territory
", defines the searcher.
This thus makes it possible to have a complete picture of the production of a good, and to understand its environmental consequences.
The Climobil site developed by Thomas Gibon and his colleagues makes it possible to compare the complete life cycle of an electric vehicle and a thermal vehicle, like here a Peugeot 508 and a Tesla model 3. It will soon be updated with new models.
© Screenshot / RFI
In 2017, while the German media sharply criticized the ecological impact of the electric car, the Luxembourg government called on LIST to answer a parliamentary question on the reality of these accusations.
It is Thomas Gibon who will be responsible for answering them.
From this request stems
a website
, Climobil, which is particularly intuitive, which makes it possible to compare GHG emissions between different models of thermal and electric cars, based on the life cycle.
In the vast majority of cases, the electric car is always more virtuous.
In detail, it is mainly the release of GHGs during use that will weigh down the life cycle of the combustion engine vehicle, while for the electric car, it is the releases during manufacture, in particular from the battery.
“
This is a phenomenon that we observe for most new low-carbon technologies: emissions due to infrastructure are higher than emissions due to use.
It's the same for wind turbines, for photovoltaic panels
,” says the engineer.
Green electricity and rebound effect
The decarbonization of the electricity produced is a huge challenge: it is the parameter that will accentuate the difference between thermal and electric.
“
If you recharge your car in France, most of the GHGs will be emitted during the manufacture of the car, because electricity production is very carbon-free in France.
If it is recharged in Poland, the majority of GHGs will be concentrated during use, as for a thermal vehicle, because Polish electricity is produced by coal-fired power stations
,” summarizes Thomas Gibon.
Belgium and Poland are the only two EU countries planning to generate more than HALF their electricity from fossil fuels in 2030.https://t.co/vYG0oSWch1 pic.twitter.com/JCHWQy5nTU
— Ember (@EmberClimate) November 9, 2020
The development of the electric car also raises fears of a rebound effect, this principle according to which the savings achieved thanks to the improvement of a product leads to its overconsumption, which cancels out this same saving.
In the context of the electric car, for example, the coming drop in its price and its low cost in use, risks increasing the number of kilometers traveled by each individual, and therefore canceling out the ecological gain of his electrification.
Resources to extract
But the fight against carbon emissions is far from being the only ecological challenge of this century.
The fall in biodiversity, linked to environmental degradation, soil, air and water pollution or even the scarcity of the latter are all crises that could be accentuated by the electric car.
The extraction of raw materials to produce batteries is a very polluting activity, even if the resources, such as lithium, are immense.
From an ethical point of view,
the extraction of cobalt
, mainly located in the Democratic Republic of Congo, raises questions.
A child breaks rocks mined from cobalt mining at a copper and cobalt mine quarry in Lubumbashi, Democratic Republic of Congo, May 23, 2016. AFP - JUNIOR KANNAH
In this context, it is urgent to establish extraction standards that are more respectful of the environment and more ethical.
Electrification, vital in the fight against global warming, will also require an increase in the use of batteries: setting up efficient recycling channels is another major challenge.
Recycling that can be facilitated by simple rules, explains Thomas Gibon.
“
We must impose the eco-design of batteries, that they be easily removable so that we can easily remove the various components.
It is necessary to prohibit the deposit of batteries in landfill, so that they are necessarily recycled, which implies extending the responsibility of battery producers so that
insists the engineer.
Paradigm shift
The car, electric or not, will always be problematic, regardless of the efforts put in place by the sector.
Consumption of space in towns and countryside, cost of raw materials for the manufacture of roads, production of fine particles by the abrasion of tires, extraction of resources, accidents, the negative impacts are multiple.
They are also noted by Aurélien Bigo, associate researcher of the Energy and Prosperity Chair at the Louis-Bachelier Institute.
🟡 On the other hand, it (almost) does not change anything on:
👉 Space consumption: parking, congestion, impacts on biodiversity, visual pollution...
👉 Physical inactivity and its health impacts
👉 Accidentology
👉 And remains financially costly
— Aurélien Bigo (@AurelienBigo) June 8, 2022
The researcher specializing in the energy transition of transport, like Thomas Gibon,
questions the
dominant paradigm of the individual car.
“
The car is a tradition.
There are millions of people in France alone who are employed thanks to the car.
So it's going to be very difficult to get out.
It's much easier to ask yourself the question of which car I want, which mobility I want
,” explains the Luxembourg-based engineer.
And all this while keeping in mind the basic principles of low-carbon mobility:
1⃣ live without a car if you can
2⃣ choose a small, robust, economical, and shared
vehicle 3⃣ choose electric if you can https://t.co /mtaGr9XH6c
— Thomas Gibon (@ThomasGibon) January 13, 2021
In this fight against the narrative of the individual car, the political powers have enormous power.
They can, in particular, develop public transport, multiply and secure cycle paths, create carpooling sites to get to work, subsidize soft mobility.
The solutions are there, they exist.
It is up to politicians and citizens to adopt them and it is up to the media to change the narrative on the individual car.
►
To read also: In Senegal, the challenge of bioclimatic construction
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