Coal Confusion

In a post about the problems with oil, Matthew Yglesias writes:

I think nobody's all that surprised to learn that the president's oil addiction talk is largely bogus. I think it's worth saying, however, that the debate over this on all sides tends to get very confused. There are three kinds of problems that people tend to have about oil. The most politically salient of them is that people are concerned that gasoline costs too much. The most longstanding of them is that gasoline is bad for the environment. The chic high-minded one is that gasoline is bad geopolitics.

People keep wanting to get on the right side of all three of these concerns, but it's worth appreciating that they're somewhat in tension. Somebody might invent a really awesome electric car tomorrow that let us stop relying on gasoline to power our automobiles. Rapidly switching over to such cars would address the alleged geopolitical issues.

So far, so good. But then Matt commits a major error that needs correction:

If the car was genuinely awesome it might address the cost concern as well -- we have pretty cheap ways of making electricity. But the prime cheap way we have of making electricity is to burn coal to do it. But coal is dirtier than oil, so this would make the environmental problem worse.

Actually, it wouldn't. If all of our cars were electric vehicles, and all of them were powered by coal-fired plants (even older models) we'd still come out ahead.

We'd immediately lose all of the pollution currently emitted from car tailpipes, but we'd gain from increased power generation. The neat thing about EVs, though, is that they're roughly 4-5 times as efficient as internal combustion engines, so even if they're charged by coal, they emit much less pollution. The Union of Concerned Scientists says that an average electric car would be responsible for 99% fewer emissions.

There's some additional bonuses: The problem of controlling emissions is shifted from 200 million cars to a few thousand generating stations, most of whom can quickly be retrofitted to much higher standards.

And from a human health perspective, the emissions have shifted away from the dense city streets to wherever the generating station is, meaning that commuters don't poison pedestrians and cyclists everyday.

From an Ontarian perspective, most of our electricity is generated by Nuclear or Hydroelectric, so EVs would be a no-brainer.

I've harped on and on about electric cars for about as long as I've had this blog, and there's a really good reason - if we can crack the problems of a) range, and b) charging times, then the problems of global warming, pollution, and preserving human mobility in the 21st century are all a lot less intractable than many believe.