“Who Killed the Electric Car” is an iconic film about what went wrong with the American Auto Industry.
In 2006, as many as 5,000 modern electric cars were destroyed by the major car companies that built them. Today, less than 5 years later, the electric car is back… with a vengeance.
In Revenge of the Electric Car, director Chris Paine takes his film crew behind the closed doors of Nissan, GM, and the Silicon Valley start-up Tesla Motors to find the story of the global resurgence of electric cars. Without using a single drop of foreign oil, this new generation of car is America’s future: fast, furious, and cleaner than ever.
With almost every major car maker now jumping to produce new electric models, Revenge follows the race to be the first, the best, and to win the hearts and minds of the public around the world. It’s not just the next generation of green cars that’s on the line. It’s the future of the automobile itself.
I used clips from the original movie in my first “Solutions” video, which still does a pretty good job of describing the surprising synergies that the electric car will bring to society.
The problem is that no-one is getting the message that to make a real difference with AGW, we have to cut our consumption back to about 12% of what we currently take for granted. All of the cars featured in that trailer are same-old, same-old. Just shifting the CO2 emissions from the exhaust pipe to the power station.
I’ll believe it when I see motor vehicles equivalent to a 250cc 3-wheeler. Or cities rearranged so commuting distances are reduced to a tenth or so, tonnages of freight likewise, homes and businesses so well insulated they hardly need any heating or cooling, meal portions reduced substantially, wardrobes shrunk to one suitcase, etc etc etc.
Well, I think the “shifting from tailpipe to powerplant” issue is not as big a deal as some say, and you can watch
the video I posted to see why.
As far as the other stuff, there are plenty of issues to work on, so choose one.
How are electric cars green?
“More than one half of our national energy grid is powered by coal, and in areas where PHEVs are charged through coal-provided electricity, says NRDC, there is the possibility of increased levels of soot and mercury emissions.” Scientific American
Lynn
http://www.10in10diet.com/
For a small footprint and a small grocery bill
The idea would be, electric cars or no, that we get off coal within 20 years. That’s a given.
EV’s can make sense with new energy systems which now available.Rooftop solar
panels produce energy which can be stored in lithium batteries,which in turn can charge your car.
The electric car is the future.Governments and corporations understand this developement.
There are too many forces pushing EV’s forward.
Climate change is only one of those forces.
EV’s are easier to produce and cheaper to operate.
Also,we need to preserve our fossil fuels for food production.We do not know how produce large ammounts
of food without chemical fertilizer and pesticides.
The “tailpipe versus power plant” issue is often over-simplified. Saying that an electric car will use the same amount of fuel and produce the same emissions as a gas car is immensely over-simplified.
The “Renewables Solution of the Month” video covers the economic benefit of peak shaving, but electric vehicles also have a substantial well-to-wheel efficiency benefit as compared to gas vehicles.
Power plants have the benefit of producing power in bulk quantities, where the heat efficiency can be optimized. Fossil fuel power plants are generally sited nearby their primary fuel source, or along a major transportation route such as a train track or waterway (lower fuel transport costs). The efficiency of a power plant at night is pretty terrible at the moment since auxiliary functions need to be kept online even when the plant is idling. Charging electric cars at night isn’t exactly free energy, but it will increase the overall efficiency of a coal plant quite a bit. Also, our grid is made up of more than just fossil fuels; nuclear, hydro and renewables play a role in our grid and should play a larger role in the future. Electricity is the “equal opportunity” energy carrier that powers almost everything in our daily life… except for our vehicles.
Compare that with a gas car. Currently, we have to ship much of our fuel source from all corners of the globe to a refinery. The refinery has its own efficiency, emissions, and toxic waste. Then, we ship the gasoline to a network of stations scattered all across the country. Then we burn the gas in millions of separate engines, almost all of them with worse overall operating efficiency than the worst coal-fired power plants. The tailpipe CO2 can almost certainly NOT be sequestered, unlike a coal plant where Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS) is currently being tested. Granted a lot of other useful products come from oil through the refining process, but the gas we get for our cars is a far less efficient fuel source from well to wheel than electricity from coal… the dirtiest fuel for electricity production we can find.