The road to hell

Are our good intentions to help the planet doing more harm than good?

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We all want to do the right thing. None of us wants to destroy the environment of the planet we live on. And yet, somehow, we’ve ended up at a crisis point, where we have very little time to make the changes necessary to prevent irreversible damage to our climate. Why is it so hard?

On the one hand, we know that vested interests have attempted to create confusion and block action. And we may doubt the value of our individual actions, when we realise that just 100 companies are responsible for 70% of greenhouse gas emissions since 1988. But, assuming we are committed to doing something personally, there’s still the question of what we should do.

One action that many people are thinking about at the moment is buying an electric vehicle. The recent announcement of a rebate on electric vehicles has increased the incentive to buy them. But how much difference do they really make? Are they really “zero emission”, as some advertisements claim?

The disappointing, but obvious, answer is ‘of course not’. New Zealand generates 20% of its electricity from fossil fuels, so running a car from the electrical grid is still emitting some carbon. On the other hand, that means that 80% of our electricity is coming from renewable sources. We are doing much better than Europe where, on average, just over 30% of their electricity comes from renewable sources. And in some countries, such as Poland and India, where much of the electricity generated is from coal, electric cars result in more carbon emissions than petrol and diesel vehicles.

Although running an electric car in New Zealand is not “zero emissions”, it’s still a big improvement on running a petrol car. But what about emissions during the production of electric vehicles? And what about other impacts? I know that I’ve heard concerns about the metals used in the manufacture of vehicles and especially the batteries. Overall, are electric vehicles better?

The most recent figures we have for New Zealand were published in 2015, and they are encouraging. A study commissioned for the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Agency found that, over their entire life cycle, electric vehicles were responsible for emitting 60% less carbon than a conventional petrol vehicle. That’s a good reduction, but it’s a long way from “zero emission”. The flaw in electric vehicles, when it comes to reducing carbon emissions, is the manufacturing process. Electric vehicles use significantly more energy during manufacturing than petrol vehicles. And there’s a sting in the tail of the data – that 60% reduction is based on us driving our new electric cars for as long as we drive our petrol cars, an average of 210,000 kilometres over their lifetime (although the study did assume the electric vehicle would have one battery replacement in that time).

What does this mean for electric car buyers? Well, if you go out tomorrow and buy a new electric car, your good intentions will have put more carbon into the atmosphere than if you kept your petrol car, or even if you bought a new petrol car. Over time, though, the balance will shift. There’s a break-even point, where you will have done more for the environment by buying an electric (or plug-in hybrid) vehicle. The economic calculations to work out this break-even point are beyond my skills, but it’s clear that if we all bought a new electric car every couple of years, we wouldn’t do the climate any good at all. That’s unlikely to be what actually happens though – many of us will continue to buy our cars secondhand – out of financial necessity as well as to help the planet.

But there are other costs to electric cars as well, and we do need to consider these. Electric vehicles require lithium for batteries, as well as rare-earth metals such as neodymium. I’ve heard concerns that manufacturing electric vehicles uses a lot of non-renewable resources. Are we creating another problem while we try to fix climate change? Fortunately, the same report from the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority shows that electric vehicles aren’t substantially different from petrol vehicles in terms of resource depletion. Lithium and rare-earth metals aren’t the main issue. In fact, most of the resource consumption in electric vehicles comes from constructing the chassis and engine, and replacing lead-acid batteries, which supply auxiliary power. Since petrol vehicles also have a chassis, engine and lead-acid batteries, there isn’t all that much difference.

In terms of other impacts, such as their contribution to air pollution (other than CO2) and general environmental toxicity, electric vehicles are either better than petrol vehicles, or at least not any worse. The exception appears to be in human health toxicity, where electric vehicles are quite a bit worse, perhaps twice as bad as petrol vehicles, although the figures are highly uncertain. This difference seems to come from the greater need for copper in electric vehicles. That’s going to create a problem, but it’s a problem that isn’t confined to electric vehicle manufacture. Conventional vehicles also use copper, as do heat pumps, washing machines and computers. In fact, wherever there is electricity, there is copper. We can’t overlook the copper problem, but it’s not a compelling reason to avoid electric vehicles.

All of this leads to the conclusion that electric vehicles are better overall, but they aren’t “zero emission” and they certainly aren’t “zero impact”. This means that initiatives to reduce our reliance on private motor vehicles are still important, and we still need to look at other solutions to climate change.

Another commonly-quoted action to reduce climate change is eating a vegan diet, or at least eating less meat and dairy. But this is a challenging suggestion for New Zealanders. Although New Zealand ranks fifth in the world for the percentage of people who eat a vegan diet, meat and dairy account for 40% of the value of our exported goods, so they are important to our economy. And the way we produce our meat and dairy differs from other countries – we don’t usually keep our beef cattle in feedlots and stuff them with grain, for example (although there are exceptions). This means that we need to look at New Zealand-specific data when we consider the carbon footprint of meat and dairy.

There is some good news for carnivores, but not much. Specific data from New Zealand, admittedly funded by NZ Beef and Lamb, shows that our beef and lamb has a lower carbon footprint than the global average. For example, producing 1 kg of New Zealand beef produces the equivalent of 22kg of CO2, compared to a global average of 26.6kg, while producing 1 kg of New Zealand lamb produces the equivalent of 19kg of CO2, compared with a global average of 25.6kg. While that’s an improvement, beef and lamb production emits at least 4 time the amount of carbon that fish farming and chicken production do, in relation to the amount of protein. But plant-based proteins have a lower carbon footprint – the equivalent amount of protein from soybean results in around 10% of the carbon emissions of beef and lamb, and the figures are even lower for other legumes like lentils and chickpeas.

Overall then, eating less meat, even in New Zealand where our cows and sheep eat grass, does make a contribution to reducing climate change.

There’s another action, though, that we can take in relation to food, and it’s not often talked about. That is reducing food waste. Globally, food production is responsible for about a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions, but a quarter to a third of that food is lost or wasted. This means that around 6% of the total greenhouse gas emissions come from the production and disposal of food that is never eaten. Of course, not all of this is the result of people who forget about food in the back of the fridge. In lower-income countries, much of the waste occurs before the food reaches consumers – damaged by pests in the field, or spoiled by a combination of poor infrastructure for storage and processing, and, usually, warmer climates. In wealthier countries, quality preferences play a big role in wastage.

Although the food waste that we control as individuals is only a small proportion of the total, avoiding waste as much as possible is a personal action we can take that has no environmental downside. If you find that you often miscalculate with the food you buy, and end up throwing food away, then reducing your waste is a good intention that you should be working on. It will save you money as well.

There’s another action that we can take that has no environmental downside, and that’s reducing consumption and waste overall. It’s not just about cars and it’s not just about agriculture. Everything that is produced has an environmental cost, and even if the cost of an individual item is small, it adds up. On average, the carbon emissions related to an individual product are around 6 times the weight of that product. That’s a lot of carbon every time you go shopping.

The impact on climate change of our consumption – whether cars, food or “stuff” – is a reminder that switching to better alternatives is only a part of the solution. If we really want to do the right thing for our planet’s future, we need to consume and waste less. We need more than good intentions.

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