Electric cars are hyped to an almost religious status. Companies, both old and new, from Tesla and Rivian, Ford and Mercedes, all are going electric. However, they are ineffective at solving climate change. We should focus our efforts elsewhere, writes Conor Bronsdon. 

Elon Musk is wrong; Tesla won't save the planet from climate change.

Electric cars might look great in your driveway, but they're also a symbol of a systemic problem: a consumer and car-based approach to addressing transportation's climate impacts. Not only that, they're an ineffective one.

Transportation-related carbon emissions are the top source of US carbon emissions

Transportation-related carbon emissions account for 14% of our global carbon emissions and are the largest source of US carbon emissions at 29%. Therefore, it is crucial that the US cuts our transportation emissions to meet the Paris Climate accords' goal —50% of our 2017 emissions. While the COVID-19 pandemic temporarily lowered some of these transportation emissions in 2020, the long-standing trend is that we've failed to make a dent in our transportation-related emissions – they've stayed all but constant for the past 15 years.

Suppose we fail to address climate change and the air pollution emissions from gas vehicles. In that case, we have significant problems looming: mass species die off, increasing natural disasters, destruction of our fisheries, horrible air pollution, wars over water, and much more. 

With 82% of US emissions in 2018 coming from road vehicles, it’s clear that we need to cut our emissions from cars by taking combustion engine vehicles off the roads as rapidly as we can. The solution that has been popularized for this? Electric cars vs gas vehicles—and electric vehicles don't go far enough. 

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This is the problem with Tesla; they’re not intent on finding the best solution to our climate crisis

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Carbon Lock-In: the #1 problem with electric cars

The biggest problem is carbon-lock in—when we spend to build something like a power plant or an electric car, the economics, and sociology of the new production incentivizes continued operations. After making significant investments in a solution, companies and governments don't want to switch to a better solution immediately—they make considerable capital investments in new construction or purchases, and they pay off those investments over time. 

With manufacturing lines for cars, new power plants, or oil pipelines, there are also jobs associated with new facilities, and this further complicates shutting down such efforts due to economic and social entanglements. This is the problem with Tesla; they’re not intent on finding the best solution to our climate crisis.

Due to this, temporary solutions—such as a mass retrofit to electric cars—are hard to move on from. Just like when a family purchases a gas vehicle, they're unlikely to buy a new electric car or stop driving that car the very next year due to the sunk cost of the vehicle. We can't afford to take half measures; the investments we've already made in today's energy system may already push us past the goals of the Paris climate agreement, even if we immediately stop investment in new fossil fuel infrastructure. We need to think bigger and reimagine the systems we use to address the climate crisis, move people, build, and more. 

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The massive investment in electric vehicles is one that could be spent on other solutions with significantly more impact: such as building mass transit and changing construction practices to increase density enabling walkability and micromobility options. 

We can't continue to be locked into a car-based system—that's not thinking big enough.

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