Are electric cars the answer?

I recently read an article in The Wall Street Journal that reinforced what I had suspected about electric cars: they aren’t so green after all.

Let’s start with the energy used for their manufacture. A 2012 comprehensive life-cycle analysis in Journal of Industrial Ecology shows that almost half the lifetime carbon-dioxide emissions from an electric car come from the energy used to produce the car, especially the battery. The mining of lithium, for instance, is a less than green activity. By contrast, the manufacture of a gas-powered car accounts for 17% of its lifetime carbon-dioxide emissions. When an electric car rolls off the production line, it has already been responsible for 30,000 pounds of carbon-dioxide emission. The amount for making a conventional car: 14,000 pounds.

Then there are the continual battery charges. Owners have to use electricity overwhelmingly produced with fossil fuels. Thus, the life-cycle analysis shows that for every mile driven, the average electric car indirectly emits about six ounces of carbon-dioxide. This is still a lot better than a similar-size conventional car, which emits about 12 ounces per mile. But, as the article pointed out, the production of the electric car has already resulted in sizeable emissions—the equivalent of 80,000 miles of travel in the vehicle.

What’s the bottom line? Unless the electric car is driven a lot, it will never get ahead environmentally. And that turns out to be a challenge. For example, the Nissan Leaf has only a 73-mile range per charge. That makes for short trips rather than lengthy tours of nearby states.

But the news is even worse than the above stats would indicate. The batteries in electric cars fade with time, just as they do in a cellphone. Nissan estimates that after five years, the less effective batteries in a typical Leaf bring the range down to 55 miles. As the MIT Technology Review cautioned last year: "Don't Drive Your Nissan Leaf Too Much."

The article crunched some numbers to show the problem. If a typical electric car is driven 50,000 miles over its lifetime, the huge initial emissions from its manufacture means the car will actually have put more carbon-dioxide in the atmosphere than a similar-size gasoline-powered car driven the same number of miles. Similarly, if the energy used to recharge the electric car comes mostly from coal-fired power plants, it will be responsible for the emission of almost 15 ounces of carbon-dioxide for every one of the 50,000 miles it is driven—three ounces more than a similar gas-powered car.

But our government plunges ahead as if the electric car has all the answers. The feds essentially subsidize electric-car buyers with up to $7,500. In addition, more than $5.5 billion in federal grants and loans go directly to battery and electric-car manufacturers.

Of course, the electric car might be great in a couple of decades, but as a way to tackle global warming now it does virtually nothing.