Monday 22 July 2013

Electric Cars Among Dirtiest Transportation

This seems a bit suspect and still doesn't look like a whole world solution - mainly aimed at a backward infrastructure stuck on coal!!!

Electric cars lead to hidden environmental and health damages and are likely more harmful than petrol cars and other transportation options according to a peer-reviewed report published today in IEEE Spectrum.

The report, Unclean at Any Speed, indicates that the recent billions spent on subsidies for the Tesla, Nissan Leaf, and other electric cars may actually be doing more harm than good after considering full electric vehicle lifecycles. It recommends shifting electric car subsidies toward more robust options backed by research, including emissions testing, bicycle infrastructure, smog reduction initiatives, and land-use changes.

The paper's author, Ozzie Zehner, was once an electric car enthusiast but has since changed his position. "Upon closer consideration, moving from petroleum-fueled vehicles to electric cars starts to appear tantamount to shifting from one brand of cigarettes to another," writes Zehner, a visiting scholar at the University of California -- Berkeley and the author of Green Illusions (http://www.greenillusions.org/).

His paper identifies how electric cars merely shift negative impacts from one place to another: "most electric-car assessments analyse only the charging of the car. This is an important factor indeed. But a more rigorous analysis would consider the environmental impacts over the vehicle's entire life cycle, from its construction through its operation and on to its eventual retirement at the junkyard."
from the wall street journal

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