Richard Heinberg: GM Pines for Electric Car

[depakid]

In just two years we’ve gone from a film documentary called Who Killed the Electric Car? to an article in Canada’s Globe and Mail titled Who Revived the Electric Car?. This is a deliciously ironic turn of events.

Those of us who understand the perils of oil dependency have been advocating the electrification of transport for years: not only can an electric transport system access renewable sources of energy like solar and wind, but electric motors are far more efficient than internal combustion engines, so electric cars use less energy than gasoline-fed cars do—and emit less CO2 even if their power comes ultimately from a coal-fired generating plant.

So naturally it’s gratifying to see General Motors, the villain of Chris Paine’s excellent film, rushing to bring out its Volt—a battery-powered car on which the company seems to be staking its hopes for economic survival in the era of $100+ oil.

The Volt is slated for debut in 2010, just in time for the world peak in oil production. Maybe at its unveiling GM’s ad department will feature Hubbert curves on flipcharts surrounding the diminutive car, its winsome young driver and passengers clutching cloth shopping bags stuffed with fresh-picked organic produce.

Still, one can’t help but wonder whether the Volt will be GM’s breath of fresh air or its last gasp.

Cars are inherently inefficient. Yes, we can make them smaller and lighter; we can power them with renewable electrons instead of nasty old hydrocarbons. But in the final analysis, pushing a ton or three of steel down the highway just to move a two-hundred pound person to and from a shopping mall is both wasteful and plain stupid in a multitude of ways.

Consider just two: tires and asphalt.

The prosthetic hooves on that high-tech chariot are made largely of non-renewable petroleum, and after 40,000 miles or so they tend to wear out (Americans discard them at a rate of one tire per person per year).

Then there’s the stuff that roads are made of. We build roads compulsively so as to give our precious cars more places to roam, but those roads also soon wear out, so we have to constantly repair them; this requires enormous amounts of asphalt (25 million tons annually in the US). But asphalt is, once again, a petroleum product, and as oil gets scarce the building and maintenance of roads becomes unmanageable.

Electric cars are a sparky idea if you consider only what they are designed to replace. But we really need to be thinking about how to reduce our need for motorized transport altogether by redesigning our cities and shortening our supply chains. And where something more than a scooter is necessary, we should move people and freight by rail or water rather than by highway.

Maybe, if it really wants to get with the 21st century program,Chevrolet should consider making bicycles or locomotives. It would be entertaining to see what the GM ad execs would come up with to advertise the company’s future flagship product, an electric light-rail car seating 40. Maybe they could call it the Hummer.

http://postcarbon.org/GM-pines-electric-car

[Tesha]

1. GM *USED* to make locomotives. Damned fine ones.

But they sold EMD off a while ago.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electro-Motive_Diesel

Tesha

[GliderGuider]

2. Heinberg is getting more interesting by the day

Here's an excerpt from a two week old essay intitled Losing Control:

The trajectory of our relationship with control is about to change. With the end of cheap fossil fuels, and therefore the end of cheap energy, our ability to control our environment begins to wane. This of course has abundant practical implications, but also a collective psychological, even spiritual impact.

Once we lived with a sense of our own limits. We may have been a hubristic kind of animal, but we knew that our precocity was contained within a universe that was overwhelmingly beyond our influence. That sensibility is about to return. Along with it will come a sense of frustration at finding many expectations dashed.

Will the waning of human control over the environment lead to a religious revival? Perhaps. Given our propensity for language-making and hence question-posing and story-telling, it is likely that many of us will find mythological lessons in this historic transformation (recall Icarus or Prometheus).

Whether or not it’s ultimately good for us morally to have a sense of limits, the reality is that our powers are indeed limited, and our ability to control our environment must ever be subordinated to the imperative to live in harmony with it.

The man sounds more realistic and aware with every essay.

[NoFederales]

3. Why does GM pine for the electric car? They had the Impact, now the Volt; they could

have marketed a vehicle. GM is as risk-challenged as they are visionary-challenged.

Transportation methods clearly need reforming,but I can't see it happening with a lead from Detroit or from Washington.

NoFederales

[wtmusic]

4. So we'll go to the shopping mall by rail or water?

Here's an inconvenient truth: Americans will reject out of hand any proposal which drastically reduces convenience.

What unseen force is preventing them from simply firing up the EV-1 line again? What they are likely pining for is a way out of messy contractual obligations which are sinking their company.