What if electric cars made pollution worse, not better? What if they increased greenhouse gas emissions instead of decreasing them? Preposterous you say? Well, consider what’s happened in Sweden.
Through generous subsidies, Sweden aggressively pushed its citizens to trade in their cars for energy efficient replacements (hybrids, clean diesel vehicles, cars that run on ethanol). Sweden has been so successful in this initiative that it leads the world in per capita sales of ‘green cars.’ To everyone’s surprise, however, greenhouse gas emissions from Sweden’s transportation sector are up.
Or perhaps we should not be so surprised after all. What do you expect when you put people in cars they feel good about driving (or at least less guilty), which are also cheap to buy and run? Naturally, they drive them more. So much more, in fact, that they obliterate energy gains made by increased fuel efficiency.
We need to pay attention to this as GM and Nissan roll out their new green cars to great fanfare. The Chevy Volt, a hybrid with a lithium-ion battery, can go 35 miles on electric power alone (after charging over night, for example), and GM brags on its website that if you limit your daily driving to that distance, you can “commute gas-free for an average of $1.50 a day.” The Volt’s price is listed at a very reasonable $33K (if you qualify for the maximum $7500 in tax credits). The fully electric Nissan Leaf is advertized for an even more reasonable $26K (with qualifying tax credits, naturally). What a deal—and it’s good for you, too, the carmakers want you to know. As GM helpfully points out on its website, “Electricity is a cleaner source of power.”
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