Plenty of Ink: Feeble new Senate energy bill does give electric cars a boost. Time for reporters to dig into the claims on their efficiency?
The last few days have seen a burst of political ink on the foundering of a once sort-of-ambitious U.S. Senate energy bill - now stripped of significant tactics aimed at curbing greenhouse gas emissions. But it does have a few things of green tinge, including a $400 million program to boost use of electric cars. And that leads this morning to one story with a troubling suggestion that the platoons of environment and energy journalists in this country have not done much of a job challenging, verifying, or just plain chewing on the idea that electric cars cut greenhouse emissions very much. Don’t get me wrong – I think they do, but on intuition. It’s time reporters looked for facts or, as there likely are competing compilations of them, at least give readers an idea which “authorities” are most believable.
First a few of the straight news stories:
- The Hill (blog) Ben Geman: Senate energy plan bolsters electric cars ;
- The New Republic (blog) Bradford Plumer: Senate Energy Bill Drops — And Electric Cars Get A Surprise Jolt;
- and for general background on gov’t subsidies for electric cars: E&E Climate Wire (via NYTimes) Saqib Rahim: Electric Carmakers Focus on Incentives, Not Carbon Prices ;
And now the showstopper for me:
- Inside Science News Service (Amer. Inst. of Physics) : Eric Betz: Sparks Fly over Electric Car Funding ; In this long, analytical story Betz reports serious disagreement whether all-electric, battery-only cars are much of a benefit to climate stability. I’d heard of course people say if it’s a coal plant making the juice, such cars are no big whoop. And also, from various places, they still come out well ahead. This story cites a long MIT study as saying they have little green merit. I looked at the study. It’s true that it says so (and that Ford paid for the work, ahem). This one likes hybrid cars (and ahem II, Ford makes some of those), but not all-electric ones and not even plug-in hybrids so much.It cites some electric car makers as arguing strenuously that their vehicles reduce emissions significantly – by implication, even in an all-up life cycle analysis. The news story also cites alternate, credible outfits, such as the Electric Power Research Institute, as declaring plug-in electric hybrids a sensible tool against greenhouse emissions. Who you gonna believe?
If there are some serious reporters out there who have already looked deeply into whether a push to electric cars could have much impact, or are mere niche vehicles for urban-only local drives, I’d like to know. And certainly a few more investigative analyses seem to be in order.
One could ask for a similar deep look into the presumptions behind another, even bigger subsidy to new-fangled ways of pushing a car down the road – as seen in this:
- Reuters – Bernie Woodall, Kevin Krolick: Natural gas vehicles and proposed US subsidies; $4 billion? Really? Wow.
Pic: Nissan Leaf chargeport.
- Charlie Petit
August 3rd, 2010 at 11:58 am
Another set of relatively untouched question:
1. How much of the fleet in, say, the U.S., would need to be converted to electric-only cars to make a significant change in emissions?
2. How much additional electricity would those cars consume?
3. Where’s that electricity going to come from?
4. How much of a hit would the environment take from producing that electricity?
August 9th, 2010 at 7:18 am
the electric cars is the wonderful ways to deal with environmental issues, someone said the most key point is the Superior performance of the battery.