While electric cars are often touted as the future of transport and a crucial part of the effort to reach “net zero” greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, in reality they are not a meaningful solution.
Road transportation accounted for 11% of global GHG emissions last year, representing a sector where drastic emissions cuts are needed. Automobile companies, helped by substantial government subsidies, have made significant investments in developing and scaling up the production of electric cars.
The International Energy Agency predicts that the number of electric vehicles (EVs) could reach 525 million in 2035, representing about a quarter of total vehicles on the road. However, even in a “best case” scenario and relying on government policies, EVs will not come close to replacing conventional vehicles.
Even if electric cars could be cheaply mass-produced at a volume that could quickly replace conventional cars, it would not solve the fundamental problems associated with global car dependence.
Strong lobbying from the automobile industry has influenced governments to enact policies and urban planning that favours infrastructure dedicated to cars and chronically underinvests in public and active transport. The resulting high levels of car dependence have grave impacts on human health and the environment.
Globally, road accidents kill at least 1.19 million people and injure 20–50 million every year — accounting for 97% of annual transport-related deaths.
Cars are an inherently inefficient mode of transport, especially in densely populated cities, which results in high levels of traffic congestion. On average, drivers in Dublin, Lima, Mexico City, Bucharest, London and Milan spent about six days stuck in peak-hour traffic last year, which has various negative impacts on mental and physical health.
Replacing conventional cars with EVs will not solve road deaths and congestion. Instead, governments should be radically scaling up investment to create mass, free and accessible public transport.
This could be funded by the huge subsidies that governments globally hand to the car industry.
European Union governments provide a staggering €42 billion (A$68 billion) in subsidies every year for company cars alone, which represent 60% of new cars registered in the EU.
While in many countries, governments are giving subsidies to the EV industry and have schemes to facilitate individual purchases, electric cars remain too expensive for most people.
For example, in Australia there are limited rebates, tax breaks and registration discounts for those who purchase EVs. But the average cost of an EV last year was A$96,384, which is well out of the reach of most working people.
The marketing of personal EVs as a major solution to reducing global GHG emissions also individualises responsibility for climate action and overlooks the structural changes needed to secure a safe climate future and enable people to move about their towns and cities.
Social and environmental cost
At the same time, the manufacture of EVs comes at a huge social and environmental cost.
EVs are the biggest consumers of lithium and cobalt, which are extracted in a carbon-intensive process to form essential components of lithium-ion batteries. As a result, half of an electric car’s lifetime GHG emissions are released in its production.
The process used to extract these minerals is socially and environmentally damaging. Countries in the Global South and indigenous communities bear the brunt of the impacts caused by mostly transnational companies racing to cash in on the so-called “green transition”.
The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) produces about 70% of the world’s cobalt supply, which is mined by workers in toxic slave-like conditions — often with child labour — and produces devastating environmental effects.
Kolwezi, a city of about 500,000 people in the DRC’s southern cobalt-copper belt, has been called a “sacrifice zone”, due to mining operations harming health, food security and livelihoods.
However, sacrifice zones are not only created in the Global South, but imposed on indigenous communities in rich countries.
Australia is the world’s biggest lithium producer, accounting for nearly half of global supply. But the exploitation of transition minerals is violating Aboriginal land rights and has environmentally damaging impacts.
A study released in July found that nearly 80% of mines extracting 14 “critical minerals” — like lithium, copper and cobalt — are on land subject to granted or pending Native Title claims.
Under Australian law, mining companies are not required to get free, prior and informed consent from Aboriginal communities for mineral projects, which continue causing environmental contamination long after the mines have stopped operating.
The Redbank copper mine in the Northern Territory ceased operations in 1996, but left behind a legacy of contaminated surface and ground water on the lands of Garawa Traditional Owners.
The world’s biggest reserves of lithium are in the salt flats of Chile, Argentina and Bolivia — the so-called “lithium triangle” — accounting for 63% of the world’s known reserves.
Lithium mining in Chile, Argentina and Bolivia uses colossal amounts of water — about 2.2 million litres are needed to produce 0.9 tonnes of lithium. Argentina and Chile produced 53,600 tonnes of lithium last year, consuming about 118 billion litres of water.
In Chile’s Atacama salt flat — one of the driest areas in the world — mining activities are responsible for 65% of the region’s water use.
Aside from water depletion, other impacts include water contamination, soil degradation and contribution to climate change through the release of carbon dioxide, which affects the health and agricultural production of local communities.
Green capitalism
New forms of “green” capitalism and colonialism are emerging that perpetuate unjust relations between countries of the Global North and South, and between the rich and poor within countries.
Even as Western countries move to ban fracking and power their electricity grids with renewable energy, they offer support to multinational corporations to continue plundering the Global South.
Chinese and European transnationals own nearly all the industrial mines in the DRC, reinforcing colonial relationships. US-based Albemarle Corporation and FMC Corporation control significant swathes of the lithium triangle, along with a host of British, Australian and Chinese companies.
These corporations are racing to profit from the growing demand for “transition” minerals, and at the same time greenwash their image.
Sabrina Fernandes wrote in the International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society that the political approach that favours market-based solutions to the climate crisis “condemns large parts of the world, especially in the Global South, to continue to be sacrifice zones for the benefit of the global market and unsustainable modes of living promoted by capitalism”.
False solution
The Latin American Mining Conflict Observatory, in a 2021 report on mining and human rights in the lithium triangle, condemned the violations being committed in the name of a “green transition”.
“This new supposedly ‘clean’ version of electric mobility is seriously endangering ancient and complex salt flat ecosystems … unsustainability [is] inherent in this false solution: the electric car for mass consumption at the expense of the destruction of Andean salt flats.
“You cannot explain to communities that have ancestrally and sustainably inhabited their ecosystems and territories that the solution to climate change is the destruction of Andean salt flat ecosystems.”
The Ecosocial and Intercultural Pact of the South — a network of grassroots organisations from across Latin America — released a manifesto last year calling for “an ecosocial energy transition”.
It highlighted the deeply unequal and unjust ways that rich countries are imposing a “neocolonial energy model” on countries of the Global South.
“This decarbonisation of the rich, which is market-based and export-oriented, depends on a new phase of environmental despoliation of the Global South.”
“Substituting electric vehicles for internal-combustion cars is insufficient, for the entire transportation model needs changing, with a reduction of energy consumption and the promotion of sustainable options.”
While EVs could certainly play a limited role in a just energy transition, their current overemphasis is hampering a genuine overhaul of the global transportation system.