Ornoth

With so many environmentally-conscious people replacing fossil fuels for electric power for their cars and household gadgets, it’s time for a bit of a sanity check.

While your modern electric vehicle does have lower emissions than older cars, you’re forgetting to take into account the pollution caused by generating the electricity it needs. As you can see in the US Energy Information Administration Electricity Generation chart at right, two-thirds of our electricity is generated by burning fossil fuels to boil water and power steam turbines. And another 20 percent comes from nuclear power. Bottom line: only 10 percent of the electricity you use comes from a clean, renewable source.

The pollutants, greenhouse gases, and waste heat produced by individual petroleum-powered vehicles have only been hidden: transferred from your tailpipe to massive power plants that are conveniently not in your back yard.

You might think that those facilities do a better job handling the negative impacts of fossil fuels than millions of internal combustion engines. However, there’s immense inefficiency involved in burning tons of coal to boil water to turn steam turbines, store and transmit the resulting electricity far across country to your convenient location, and then condense the steam, cool the water, trap the pollutants, and at the same time rake in enough money to keep the utility companies economically viable. And outside of governmental regulation, utilities have no economic incentive to reduce the negative side effects of power generation.

Proclaiming that electric power is any “greener” than fossil fuels—when two-thirds of our electricity comes directly from burning fossil fuels—is just as disingenuous as flat earthers, holocaust deniers, anti-vaxxers, and Kim Jong-Trump’s Twitter feed.

Thanks to Fox News, Donald Trump, and the radical right, we live in a post-truth world; so if you want to feel self-righteous about doing your part to stop global warming, feel free to create your own “facts”.

But if you live in the real world, there are only two ways to become greener: to utilize cleaner methods to generate power, or to use less power. Neither of those are easy, as evinced by America’s lack of meaningful progress since the ecology movement began nearly fifty years ago.

Having been blogging for eight years now, you’d think I would have covered pretty much all my hot button issues. But no, humans—and Americans in particular—keep finding new and inventive ways to demonstrate that they “have been Educated Stupid,” as the infrequently-insightful Gene Ray would gladly tell you.

This particular rant was ignited by the following two gems. The first is this Globe article: Yamaha offers electric scooters for green errands. The second was an email a well-intentioned friend sent to me, which read:

We have an electric mower because B. wanted to use something greener than the traditional gas-powered.

These kinds of moronic statements utterly fail Critical Thinking 101. There is absolutely nothing greener about electric engines than gasoline engines.

It’s never been a secret that nearly all of this country’s electricity is generated by burning fossil fuels. To be more specific, this US Dept. of Energy report states that last year, 69.2 percent of the electricity generated in the US came from the burning of coal, coke, petroleum, natural gas, and other gases. And an additional 20.2 percent was generated at your friendly neighborhood nuclear power plant.

If you do the math, that means only 10 percent of our power comes from hydro and all other energy sources combined. That ratio means that running an electric car or lawn mower is at best only 10 percent more environmentally responsible than burning fossil fuels directly.

But it gets worse, because generating electricity in a power plant is not as efficient as fueling an engine with the equivalent volume of fossil fuel. An electrical plant must not just burn fossil fuel, but also inefficiently heat water to inefficiently drive immense steam turbines to inefficiently generate electricity which is then inefficiently transported hundreds, perhaps thousands of miles to the end user, who then probably stores it in an inefficient and environmentally hazardous battery before using it to perform work. Every step along the way contributes to making electricity less and less environmentally friendly than simply running a gasoline engine directly.

Sure, in theory someday we might generate more than a tiny fraction of our electricity from hydro plus solar plus wind plus tidal, but that just isn’t the present reality. Right now, almost all the electricity you use comes from power plants that burn fossil fuels, which simply centralizes the environmental devastation of burning oil, coal, and gasoline and hides the evidence from the end user. Somehow Americans—including all those smug, misinformed Prius owners—have become stupid enough to believe that just because they don’t see the pollution themselves, they think it isn’t happening.

Well, it is happening. Our finite reserves of fossil fuels are being depleted and pollution is being released every single time you tap into the electrical grid, whether it’s to recharge your precious iPad, to waste your hours playing Halo 3, or to power your “environmentally friendly” Prius.

“Zero emissions” doesn’t actually mean zero emissions, people!

So yeah. I have an issue with people who think using electricity is any “greener” than using fossil fuels.