Well it’s baffling to me to have “pollution” as the first point of that list. It’s just beyond my comprehension how one could state that a non-combustion car doesn’t help with pollution problems. Yes alright, there’s still microplastics… But hey, please visit a city like Beijing and tell me again that EVs don’t combat pollution on a massive scale.
It’s nice to be critical and yes, cars are shit for our society. Nevertheless our society has been built around them and people will drive cars. They might do so less in 50 years but right here right now with the way society is organised EVs do definitely play an important part in reducing emissions. Change takes time. And people like the ones protesting against the Gigafactory prefer to ignore this context. To me this line of thinking is naive to say the least and can also be seen as self-righteous and delusional by those for whom no alternative is available now. Lecturing people about their lifestyle is not going to change anything.
Car tires are literally the main contributor of micro plastics in oceans, and by an overwhelming factor. There’s also the brake dust which is a huge issue. Both of those problems are not just not going away with EVs, they’re actually increasing. It’s because the way we build EVs increases their weight to ridiculous levels, even compared to the already obese ICE cars. All while we actually know how to make EVs that would actually reduce those problems. Just because there’s places where it is worse, often also due to the lacking regulations, doesn’t mean we should accept those issues.
Nevertheless our society has been built around them and people will drive cars.
Yeah, because people constantly make those type of excuses, ultimately accepting all the bad instead of fighting back. That’s what communities like them do.
I wouldn’t be too sure about that brake dust: Electric motors make for much better brakes than ICEs, and it’s not exactly rare for the brake pedal to regen instead of applying the brakes, at least if you’re braking gently enough.
That all might be overshadowed by EVs being worse with their tyres, though. Steel on steel, if necessary mediated by sand, is definitely better for the environment as well as commuters because who wants to be stuck in traffic when you can have someone drive you.
You can try to teach people what a good consumption decision is w.r.t. global change. But it won’t work in 99% of cases. People are often emotionally attached to their way of living and many have tied a part of their identity to it.
I don’t care about what counts as excuses because there is no ethical consumption in capitalism. What I care about first and foremost is reducing GHG emissions effectively, within the system that we’re currently living in. And for everything else you have to offer people real alternatives if you want them to change their behaviour. And changing that behaviour will not come true by only making factual arguments but by understanding people’s emotions and identities and accounting for those in your argument. It’s clear that people in rural communities (and a large share of the population lives there) will drive cars for many years to come and these cars have to be EVs.
Oh I know, hence why I also know that we’re completely fucked in regards to climate change. No one actually wants to do shit.
That being said, you still continue to make excuses, especially for yourself.
Car tires account for a third of microplastics emissions in Germany. Cars are a major source of pollution, especially compared with alternatives like Bikes or Public transport.
And that is purely talking about operational emissions. The production and disposal of EVs is another huge source of pollution and GHG emissions.
