Ornoth

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.