Switching To Electric Cars Isn't Going To Be Enough To Save The Planet, But Don't Let That Stop You

You’re probably wondering whether we’ve gone half-mad, but then again, maybe you’re not.

Electric cars are going to become a reality for a lot more of us over the next 10 years or so, and after that the avalanche will start. In 20 years it might be that most of us have electric daily drivers. But for all our environmental conscience in the West, certain American leaders excepted, it’s not going to stop global warming.

When the Asian markets finally tip over the edge of the precipice into the rapid expansion of the middle classes, car purchases are going to go through the roof. As happened in Europe and the US during the post-War period, economies grew and people got richer. They bought cars, bigger houses and started going on holidays abroad.

The same is going to happen across Asia as surely as the sun is to rise in the east tomorrow. We’re already warming the planet worryingly quickly, according to actual science (as opposed to alternative science), so an explosion of new, basic, cheap, inefficient cars in countries with a combined total of several billion people is not going to do anyone any favours. This problem isn’t localised: if the global atmosphere suffers, we all suffer.

Oil giant BP this week predicted that global oil demand would still be growing in 2035. “It’s not Teslas and the US. It’s the fact that 2 billion people, much of that in Asia, are moving to middle incomes, can buy their first motor car and that drives up oil demand. It’s that stuff that really matters,” said Spencer Dale, BP group’s chief economist.

It gets worse. In fact, the company expects that demand for oil won’t peak until 10 years later, sometime in the mid-2040s. Greenpeace was furious, naturally. Why should BP be realistic when instead they should be blindly insisting that we’ll all be in Nissan Leafs by March?

Anyway, the fact is that, barring something world-changing, Asia is about to start burning so much fuel that it’ll make today’s American consumption look like a quick sip at the global oil well. But that’s exactly why the rest of us need to start taking action to offset that as much as we can. Investing in cleaner technologies, renewable energy and zero-emission cars is something we shouldn’t be fighting, or disputing the merits thereof. It’s something we should be accelerating.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t want internal combustion banned (ever), and I don’t want today’s cars to be legislated off the road with excess taxation or fuel costs. I want us to be free to continue to enjoy the fruits of suck-squeeze-bang-blow for the rest of time, if we want to. But it’s surely beyond reasonable argument that we need to stop burning vast quantities of stuff that’s not exactly very good for the planet. Using our glorious V8s a bit less wouldn’t hurt, would it? Using the plug-in ecobox in the week and then taking our pride and joy out at the weekend would be the best of both worlds, right?

Some people will argue that Asian growth makes Western environmentalism pointless, but that same growth is the exact reason we need to take global warming more seriously, working in whatever ways we can to offset the rampant consumption in the East. And, by proxy, that means we need to start taking electric cars more seriously. Far from this being the end of the world as we know it, we might just help preserve it for our grandkids.