With the entire world trying to combat global warming, governments are looking more toward renewable energy rather than fossil fuels. Legislation in the U.S. has proposed to mandate the sole sale of electric cars by a certain year in states such as California and New York. Are politician’s requirements for full electric cars by 2035 really in order to help the environment, or rather to increase their popularity and votes?

One must look past the fact that electric cars have zero emissions, and factor in the environmental cost of the batteries or the way that the electricity fueling Tesla’s charging stations is sourced. A closer look reveals that there is more going on in the electric car business than meets the eye.

While it is very important for the world, as a whole, to curb its carbon dioxide emissions to reverse climate change, electric cars don’t seem like the best place to start. Rather, one must start at the sources of these emissions, which are the factories that produce electric cars as well as the electricity used to fuel these cars. As more and more automobile companies make fully electric alternatives to their most popular cars, one must be educated when buying into electric cars. Since the electricity used to fuel their inefficient batteries involves fossil fuels, their overall production is harmful to the environment, and the way that the batteries are sourced is unethical.

The fact is, electric cars affect the environment because of the way that their fuel is sourced. Most consumers know that electric cars don’t convert fossil fuels like oil into the energy that powers their engines. However, these cars are made in factories where fossil fuels such as coal are made into electricity which is then sent to recharge the batteries of electric cars. The average consumer isn’t aware of the fact that their fully
electric car is still, in a way, using fossil fuels as fuel. Gwyn Morgan, the former director of five global energy corporations in Canada, says that “the fact that some 80 percent of Ontario’s electricity is generated by hydro and nuclear makes electric cars look green. But it’s not that simple. Those millions of new electric cars will require massive expansions of Ontario’s power systems.” Morgan then goes on to explain that a massively expensive action plan for renewable energy would have to be established. Canada would never, in a million years, have enough affordable renewable energy to fuel all these new electric cars. Combined with the fact that wind and sun is unpredictable in Ontario due to short, cloudy daylight hours in the winter, more reliable facilities such as natural gas plants and coal plants would have to back up the renewable fuel supply. All this leads back to the fact that electric cars are only as green as their fuel supply. 

Although the batteries replace normal combustion engines, these batteries have to be assembled in factories. The problem with this is that a majority of car manufacturing companies outsource their manufacture of their cars to places such as Japan, China, and South Korea, where generation of electricity remains heavily dependent on fossil fuels, including coal, which increases the carbon footprint of electric car batteries. Therefore, electric cars are producing air pollution from factories on top of the fuels used to recharge their batteries once their assembly is finished and they are purchased by consumers. It is much more difficult for companies to impose their renewable energy plans on these producers in different countries rather than the native country of their company, meaning that fossil fuels will be used in those countries for years
to come.

A German study sought to logically quantify the amount of carbon emissions that the production of each battery produced which ended up with the conclusion that each Tesla battery requires between 23,000 and 32,000 pounds of carbon emissions to be created. Then by applying this information to the 368,000 cars that Tesla produced in 2019, it shows that the production of these batteries for electric cars created 11.8 billion pounds of carbon dioxide emissions. By combining this with the inefficient recharging of these batteries, one can truly see the magnitude of which electric cars are still harming our environment, even if they may seem “clean” to many consumers.

Nevertheless, the majority of the population believes that electric cars and hybrid cars are better for the environment than combustion engine gas alternatives since most people observe electric cars or hybrid cars from the surface without doing further research. Hybrid cars, which are cars that have both batteries and a classic gas powered engine have gained some support due to their superior range over electric cars. Many people notice that a main problem about electric cars is their limited range and hybrid cars try to solve this problem by having the best of both worlds. Or so it seems. It is estimated that hybrid cars can reduce lifetime costs by 20 percent and decrease greenhouse gas emissions by half. Of course, this only takes into account the emissions from the car itself, not the amount of energy used or pollutants emitted during the manufacturing process or refueling of the car.

Hybrid cars are also even more inefficient since they add another conversion of energy to convert energy from the engine to the battery on top of the energy conversions present in order to recharge the battery in the car. While hybrid cars might be better than fully electric cars, they still have carbon emissions which contribute to climate change. Along with the intensive manufacturing process, materials have to be sourced to be crafted into batteries and cars in the first place, thus creating another issue. That is, the unethical exploitation of children; which doesn’t only negatively affect the environment of earth overall, but the environment of child workers in dangerous mines as well. Both previously mentioned hybrid cars, as well as electric cars, need raw materials and elements such as lithium, cobalt, and manganese that are extracted from the earth in mines to have their batteries created. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, families send their children to these mines in order to try and earn money for them to pay for their own clothes,
food, and education. In this region, more than half of the world’s cobalt is extracted by children as young as seven years old. Is it worth it for children to be working in these mines only to create cars that may be worse for the environment? Think of the emotional toll that these children have to go through, only because greedy companies, supported by the government through subsidies, want more profits with electric cars. The overall extraction process is also very damaging to the physical environment in which it is extracted from.

Still after the entire process of manufacture, sale, use, and then eventual disposal of electric cars, the lithium-ion batteries need to be discarded which presents another problem. There are barely any recycling opportunities for the batteries after their use.

Governments around the world should try to focus on renewable energy production first, rather than using fossil fuels for the energy in electric cars. Most of the energy that goes into recharging the batteries for electric cars and even hybrid cars comes from non- renewable sources such as coal plants. Even the way that electric cars are made hurts the environment since raw materials such as cobalt are extracted by child laborers in Africa. These mines often have horrible conditions for their child laborers purely to fuel the materials that factories, which use fossil fuels like coal to assemble electric car batteries and cars themselves, need.

When someone says that hybrid cars and electric cars are better for the environment since they don’t emit any pollutants while driving, one must realize, that that person hasn’t observed the entire process that occurs when fueling and producing electric and hybrid cars to begin with.