In a widely shared comment piece for the Guardian, comedian Rowan Atkinson said he felt “duped” by the green claims about electric vehicles (EVs).
In support of his contention, however, Atkinson repeats a series of repeatedly debunked talking points, often used by those seeking to delay action on the climate crisis.
Moreover, he suggests alternatives to EVs that are not yet widely available, would be less beneficial to the climate and are guaranteed to be more costly.
Atkinson’s biggest mistake is his failure to recognise that electric vehicles already offer significant global environmental benefits, compared with combustion-engine cars.
While EVs won’t solve all of the problems associated with car use – from traffic congestion through to our increasingly sedentary lifestyles – they are an essential part of tackling the climate emergency.
In its latest report, for example, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said, with “high confidence”, that EVs have lower greenhouse gas emissions than conventional cars. The IPCC said that electric vehicles not only “offer the greatest low-carbon potential for land-based transport”, but their use would save money. (Despite elevated electricity prices, EVs are still much cheaper to run than petrol cars in the UK.)
Indeed, without a widespread shift to EVs, there is no plausible route to meeting the UK’s legally binding target of net zero greenhouse emissions by 2050 – and the same is true globally.
Contrary to Atkinson’s article, EVs cut emissions in the “bigger picture” taking into account vehicles’ full life cycles, from the extraction of oil or mining of lithium for batteries through to actually driving the cars.
As Carbon Brief noted some years ago, EVs already cut planet-warming emissions by two-thirds on a life cycle basis relative to combustion engine cars in the UK – and the benefits are growing.
Atkinson cites Volvo figures showing emissions from producing EVs to be 70% higher. This is misdirection. While many details of the Volvo study have been thoroughly debunked, the more important issue is that the emissions from producing batteries, while significant, are quickly outweighed by the CO2 emissions from fuelling petrol and diesel cars.
Atkinson is also wrong to say that the UK government’s plan to ban the sale of new petrol and diesel cars from 2030 “seems to be based on conclusions drawn from only one part of a car’s operating life: what comes out of the exhaust pipe”.
For starters, the government’s cost-benefit analysis of its policy plans for cars talks in detail about life cycle emissions. Specifically, it ment
