The Future is Electric!

That's the story we're being sold. But not all electric transport is created equal.

Here are the facts: globally, transportation is the second-largest contributor to emissions, after energy and heat production. But as energy production is getting greener, thanks to the rather startling progress being made in the spread of solar and wind technology, transport is about to claim first place. In many rich nations, transport is already the leading contributor of emissions. So, by tackling the transport issue, we go a long way to solving the emissions problem.

As readers of this blog will know, a lot of places are mandating a shift from fossil-fuel based transport to electric. In Norway, which isn't part of the EU, electric cars now outnumber ICE cars. The European Union is requiring an end to the sale of internal-combustion engine (ICE) vehicles by 2035. But these goalposts have a habit of shifting the closer a jurisdiction gets to them. This happened in the UK, under Rishi Sunak; the Conservatives decided a ban on petrol cars meant to begin in 2030 was best kicked down the road by half a decade, a betrayal I wrote about in this blog post. The message is: the future is green! We're working on it! (Read: promises are cheap, and we probably won't be in power then, anyway.)

I’ve written in detail elsewhere about my problems with the simple fix of swapping out ICE cars for EVs. (Put succinctly: it's just consumerist More-of-the-Sameism—you don't have to change your lifestyle, just buy our more expensive, heavier, more deadly product! Which does nothing to reduce sprawl, deaths and injuries from crashes, and micropollutants from all that rubber hitting the road. And that's before I learned about what happens when an EV catches on fire—think tens of thousands of gallons of water—rather than a couple of hundred—to extinguish an EV fire, and the creation of a very durable toxic waste site.)

If we're talking smog, it's obviously better to have EVs in your city than ICEs, because they generate less local air pollution, though two-thirds of the electricity that fuels them still comes from burning fossil fuels in distant power plants. Somebody else's problem, unless you live on the planet earth, where it becomes your problem eventually.

[SOUND OF NEEDLE SUDDENLY BEING LIFTED FROM VINYL] I’m going to stop right here. I’m no longer publishing things on Substack. I write about why I decided to leave the platform in this post. (Spoiler: I don’t like Fascists, white supremacists, anti-Semites, Islamophobes, or any of their brethren; nor do I want to be published by a publisher that derives part of its income from disseminators of hate. No shade on those who decide to stay; this is a personal decision.)

I’ve moved my archives to a new site, which is hosted by Ghost. (So far, no complaints.) Doing this took a lot of time, I have to admit. Frankly I’m getting sick of running around trying to escape from toxic billionaires and their acolytes who claim to be in favour of free speech, and then create hellscapes of algorithmic exploitation—looking at you X/Twitter. I’m currently posting things at Bluesky, where the atmosphere is, for the moment, better (you can find me posting at this address). All of this camp-shifting gets in the way of what I really like to do, which is get out into the world, rub up against new places and ideas, and write about what I’ve learned. But it’s necessary. (Next thing you know, we’re going to have to go full samizdat.)

So please head over to www.straphanger.blog if you want to keep on reading my Straphanger dispatches. You’ll get most of them for free; some are paywalled, and you can sign up for a monthly or yearly subscription—which really makes my day (and month, and year).

Sorry for the bait-and-switch, but a lot of people still seem to be signing up here at Substack, where I most emphatically am not.