Mr. Clean
With so many environmentally-conscious people replacing fossil fuels for electric power for their cars and household gadgets, it’s time for a bit of a sanity check.
While your modern electric vehicle does have lower emissions than older cars, you’re forgetting to take into account the pollution caused by generating the electricity it needs. As you can see in the US Energy Information Administration Electricity Generation chart at right, two-thirds of our electricity is generated by burning fossil fuels to boil water and power steam turbines. And another 20 percent comes from nuclear power. Bottom line: only 10 percent of the electricity you use comes from a clean, renewable source.
The pollutants, greenhouse gases, and waste heat produced by individual petroleum-powered vehicles have only been hidden: transferred from your tailpipe to massive power plants that are conveniently not in your back yard.
You might think that those facilities do a better job handling the negative impacts of fossil fuels than millions of internal combustion engines. However, there’s immense inefficiency involved in burning tons of coal to boil water to turn steam turbines, store and transmit the resulting electricity far across country to your convenient location, and then condense the steam, cool the water, trap the pollutants, and at the same time rake in enough money to keep the utility companies economically viable. And outside of governmental regulation, utilities have no economic incentive to reduce the negative side effects of power generation.
Proclaiming that electric power is any “greener” than fossil fuels-when two-thirds of our electricity comes directly from burning fossil fuels-is just as disingenuous as flat earthers, holocaust deniers, anti-vaxxers, and Kim Jong-Trump’s Twitter feed.
Thanks to Fox News, Donald Trump, and the radical right, we live in a post-truth world; so if you want to feel self-righteous about doing your part to stop global warming, feel free to create your own “facts”.
But if you live in the real world, there are only two ways to become greener: to utilize cleaner methods to generate power, or to use less power. Neither of those are easy, as evinced by America’s lack of meaningful progress since the ecology movement began nearly fifty years ago.