"For me, the easiest people to empathise with are those with a blanket hatred of cars. They just hate ‘em, and it’s not hard to see why. People who live in urban areas (85% of us in the developed world) can use public transport, walk or ride a bike. So for car nuts like me it’s important to remember that for many people, cars represent the number one mistake of all human development.
By Robert Llewellyn on June 20, 2011 1:59 PM
When you look at what was once a village green next to a quiet river, say Hammersmith in West London, which is now a massive lump of tarmac clogged with stinking, noisy vehicles and brutal concrete flyovers, you have to admit they’ve got a point.
However, there is a group who have what seems to me to be an irrational hatred of a specific type of car above all others. This clench-fisted, furious loathing has really come to the fore with the advent of the mass-market electric car – the LEAF, the i-MiEV, the iOn, the Fluence Z.E. etc. Like a beast in the primeval forest, searching for proof that the all-consuming fire in the belly is indeed justified.
Skip now to another part of the human universe – a research body set up to lower transport emissions, funded partly by Her Majesty’s Government, partly by the automotive industry. So it’s a low carbon research body funded in part by people who make oil-burning cars. Lots of oil-burning cars.
The body, called the Low Carbon Vehicle Partnership, has issued a report that points out how important it is to be able to measure “whole life carbon emissions” of cars in order to compare vehicle performance.
It then goes on to state how electric vehicles are clearly the lowest carbon option and with an increase in renewables and low carbon electricity generation this gap is set to get wider.
There is also some semi-informed guess work – nothing more than that – on how much carbon is released in the manufacture of the twenty thousand electric vehicles produced last year; compare that with the truly breathtaking 73 million vehicles produced and the obvious economies of scale therein. They state that due to battery manufacture, electric cars emit more carbon in their construction than their grubby old-fashioned cousins.
I won’t go into the details of why this is hotly contested in the scientific community, but let me just say that it is.
So, a fairly plausible and well-constructed projection about the possible future, clearly stating all the way through that these figures are estimates and with the introduction of composite materials instead of steel in the construction process the carbon emission figures will drop.
Well, forget about that folks, because all around the world, the irrational anti-electric vehicle lobby has had a field day: ‘British Report Proves Electric Vehicles Aren’t Green After All!’
Every right wing blogger, newspaper columnist and proto-Clarksonian ranter has exploded with self-righteous delight. All this nonsense about ‘green’ cars is a con, global warming is a con, Obama is a communist Muslim and we can get back in our massive, inefficient, overweight cars and sit in another traffic jam in the middle of a city next to a primary school and know we are in the right.
Now, jump back a few years. There’s this bloke called Tim Berners Lee, who worked out that one person could create a computer document, put it on a ‘page’ on the internet and link it with other pages in a global network. What he called the World Wide Web enabled a more coherent, peer-reviewed bank of data and improved the human condition.
Given this fairly well understood and useful invention, it’s odd that not one of these rants linked to the source material, they only ever referred to ’a report’, often stating that it was from “the British Government”, which it isn’t, and that it proved green cars were worse than fossil burners, which it doesn’t.
I quote from the report (another thing the anti-electric vehicle lobby never do): “This work dispels the myth that low carbon vehicles simply displace the emissions from the exhaust to other sources.”
So my question is, why does this subject raise the hackles of a small group of very vocal, white, middle-aged men? I can be that specific because that is who writes and shouts and lobbies and rants about this topic.
It is very rare that you hear a woman say, “electric cars are terrible, and they look so fugly.” Some do, I’ll grant you, but most aren’t bothered. They just want something that will get them from A to B.
The psychology of white males connection to the car is long, deep and contradictory; I know because I’m one of them. But I’ve driven plenty of electric cars and they work, they’re fine, they do the same job as the old fashioned ones. It’s obvious from the reaction that a bigoted opinion is an ignorant opinion.
Very, very few of the people who have jumped on this non-story have driven or in many cases even seen an electric car. Essentially they don’t know what they are talking about, so it’s hard to understand this kind of blinkered negativity."
Em: http://www.thechargingpoint.com/opinion ... -then.html
