July 28, 2017
Exclusive: Despite resistance
from the oil industry and Team Trump, the transition to electric vehicles is
accelerating, with key foreign countries and some U.S. states taking the lead,
writes Jonathan Marshall.
By Jonathan Marshall
Even as the Trump
administration scrubs
federal web sites of data about climate science and clean energy and appoints
coal industry lobbyists to senior policy positions, other nations are
responding vigorously to the reality of global warming.
Great
Britain and France
have recently announced ambitious timetables for phasing out fossil-fueled cars
by 2040. Even bolder are Norway,
which expects all new cars sold by 2025 to be electric, up from 37 percent
today, and India, which set 2030 as its target date for going all-electric.
Together with the rising
domestic popularity of all-electric and hybrid electric vehicles, the
potential political contagion from such foreign programs is spurring major U.S.
fossil fuel producers into spending millions
of dollars to kill clean transportation alternatives.
A shadowy outfit called Fueling U.S. Forward, devoted to
promoting greater use of oil and natural gas, recently produced a misleading
attack video called “Dirty Secrets of Electric Cars.” The New York Times exposed
the group as “a public relations group for fossil fuels funded by Koch
Industries, the oil and petrochemicals conglomerate led by the
ultraconservative billionaire brothers David H. and Charles G. Koch.”
The stakes, both financial and
environmental, are high. The U.S. transportation sector currently consumes
14 million barrels of petroleum products every day. Transitioning away from all
that gasoline and diesel to cleaner electric transportation will be critical to
lowering carbon emissions before global warming wreaks havoc on human
civilization and natural ecosystems. It will also help alleviate vehicle air
pollution that kills an estimated 50,000
people each year in the United States alone.
Unlike the power sector, where
the renewable energy revolution is well
underway across the nation, transportation remains largely stuck in the
last century. In my car-friendly state of California, for example, thanks to a
boom in solar and wind energy, electric power today accounts for only about 20
percent of statewide greenhouse gas emissions. Transportation, by contrast, contributes
36 percent, far more than any other sector.
When charged by clean solar,
wind, hydro or nuclear power, electric cars and trucks contribute almost no
greenhouse or toxic air emissions. Even in states with a high proportion of
coal-fired generation, efficient electric vehicles (EVs) account for fewer
emissions than the average new gas-powered car.
With coal-burning plants
increasingly giving way to cleaner natural gas-fired plants and renewable
generation of energy, more than 70 percent of Americans now live in areas where
EVs cause fewer emissions even than the cleanest conventional cars, according
to recent research by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS). On average,
across the country, EVs create as little carbon pollution as gasoline-powered
cars that get 73 mpg — if such cars even existed.
Critics, like the Koch-funded
Fueling U.S. Forward, complain that it takes more energy to manufacture an
electric car than a gas-powered car, mostly because of the need for big
batteries. But those manufacturing emissions are more than offset by the
reduced emissions from driving a mid-sized electric car after just 5,000 miles,
the UCS report notes.
Electric Vehicles on a Roll
Electric vehicles today number
only about 2 million, or just 0.2 percent of all light passenger vehicles in
use globally today, according
to the International Energy Agency (IEA). The good news is that their numbers
are growing about 60 percent per year. In the United States, customers
bought 53,000 electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles in the first six months
of 2017 — not counting Tesla sales — up from 33,000 in the same period a year
ago.
Momentum is growing in the EV
industry. Tesla briefly this year enjoyed the highest
market cap of any U.S. automaker. In July, Volvo announced
that it plans to produce only hybrid or all-electric vehicles by 2019. China,
which now leads the world in EV sales, has
tough incentives to increase them further. A multi-nation coalition called
the Electric
Vehicles Initiative — including Canada, China, Finland, France, Germany,
India, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Norway, South Africa, Sweden, United Kingdom, and,
for now, the United States — is encouraging the global deployment of 20 million
EVs by 2020.
IEA cites estimates that the
global stock of electric cars will range between 40 million and 70 million by
2025, if governments continue to support R&D, purchase incentives, and
charging infrastructure. The transition to EVs may accelerate if, as some experts
forecast,
they become fully cost competitive with gasoline-powered cars within a decade.
Bloomberg New Energy Finance
projects that “cars with a plug [will] account for a third of the global auto
fleet by 2040 and displace about 8 million barrels a day of oil production —
more than the 7 million barrels Saudi Arabia exports today.”
The Trump administration can
be counted on to do what it can to slow this revolution, but 10 states have
aggressive programs to promote the adoption of electric vehicles: California,
Connecticut, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Oregon,
Rhode Island and Vermont. Just as with renewable energy, their success may pave
the way for similar programs in other states, even “red” ones.
Fiscal conservatives should
applaud their efforts to jump-start the EV market. A study
by the American Lung Association in California last year documented health
costs of $24 billion a year — for lost work days, respiratory illnesses, and
premature deaths — from vehicle emissions in just those 10 states. The report
estimated an additional $13 billion in climate-related costs (agricultural
losses, flooding, fires, etc.). Converting two-thirds of cars on the road to
electric vehicles by 2050 would save those states about $21 billion a year,
well worth the effort.
And if they succeed, proponents
may also prove instrumental in helping U.S. automakers like Tesla, GM, and Ford
remain world leaders in the fast-growing market for electric vehicles. The
United States can’t afford to be stranded in the slow lane of adapting its
economy to climate change while the rest of the world speeds ahead.
Jonathan Marshall is a regular
contributor to Consortiumnews.com.
The only way to defeat Trump—
and to redeem what is worth saving in liberal democracy—is to detach ourselves
from liberal democracy’s corpse and establish a new Left.
Elements of the program for
this new Left are easy to imagine.
Trump promises the
cancellation of the big free trade agreements supported by Clinton, and the
left alternative to both should be a project of new and different international
agreements.
Such agreements would
establish public control of the banks, ecological standards, workers rights,
universal healthcare, protections of sexual and ethnic minorities, etc.
The big lesson of global
capitalism is that nation states alone cannot do the job—only a new political
international has a chance of bridling global capital.
Excerpt from:
“We Must Rise from the Ashes
of Liberal Democracy”
http://inthesetimes.com/article/19918/slavoj-zizek-from-the-ashes-of-liberal-democracy
