Electric cars make pollution.
What?! Yep … they do.
I personally like electric vehicles a lot, but recently, I’ve heard some folks pushing back against electric cars, electric energy and a “greener, non-polluting, sustainable, cleaner economy”.
The argument they make goes something like this: the production of electric cars and even the production of batteries for electric cars makes a lot of pollution.
Yep … all true.
Making electric cars by burning fossil fuels and making batteries for electric cars by burning fossil fuels DOES make pollution. These are simply facts.
But here’s the deal.
The problem is not with the electric vehicle. The problem is the carbon burning machines that create the energy needed to build the pollution-free car.
Did you get that?
It’s not the electric car itself that’s making the pollution folks associate with it. It’s the making of the car that’s dirty and polluting.
So, got a problem with “electric car pollution”? Stop giving the car a hard time! It’s the system that creates the energy needed to make the car that’s the problem.
To say we should stop making electric vehicles because making them creates pollution is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
It’s short sighted because the goal is to make our whole economy cleaner and we have to start somewhere.
To stop making electric vehicles right now would be similar to giving up on a little bitty baby because it can’t walk right now.
Babies are pathetic. They can’t even walk. Sometimes they can’t even roll over by themselves. Should we give up on them? Should we stop their progress?
With anything hard we set out to do, we will be wobbly in the beginning. But we know where we’re going and it’s somewhere important.
We are heading towards a greener way of working with our home – Planet Earth.
That baby has a goal. Babies can’t even roll over when they are newborns. Once they do, the goal is for them to crawl, then walk, and maybe even, eventually, run.
So we don’t stop them at the beginning when they really can’t do anything. If anything, we do the opposite: we help them roll over. We give them encouragement and we hold them up. We give them time to grow and get stronger. We model for them what walking looks like. We give them time to make mistakes, time to not be perfect, but the goal is for them to walk.
The argument is the same for electric vehicles.
We know that humans burn a lot of carbon and it gets dumped into the atmosphere and into the oceans. This is measurable and it’s not good. It impacts the world around us and so we move towards the goal of reducing our impact on the planet and towards reducing the carbon we burn and release into the world we live in.
So, no, we don’t get in the way. We show the baby how. We love on her. We give her positive reinforcement. We do it because we know the goal is a good one: that baby will be able to go and do some amazing things … someday … maybe someday soon that baby will walk.
That’s how it is with electricity and the “green economy”. We are barely crawling now but to give up on our baby steps because we are not instantly “walking” is shortsighted.
Electric cars do make pollution now, but we can do better. We can find ways to make them without also making pollution.
So, let’s set our goal on an economy that keeps working towards cleaner and greener. Let’s keep moving from crawling to walking. Let’s keep reducing our impact on the planet while allowing people the mobility to go and do and be.
It’s a good plan.
Now go hug a baby!
She needs the encouragement.
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Written by Steve Trash www.stevetrash.com
