This is an excerpt from Are we there yet?, a Globe Opinion newsletter about the future of transportation in the region. Sign up to get it in your inbox a day early.
Electric cars: They’re still, well, cars.
That, in a nutshell, is the gist of a critique of electric cars that seems to be picking up steam among some urbanists.
Articles in The Atlantic, MIT Technology Review, and elsewhere have made variations of the argument that if the country simply switched to EVs, it will have lost an opportunity to leverage the climate challenge to remake communities into safer, more liveable places.
By showering incentives on electric cars, bemoans a writer in the Atlantic, “policy makers are further codifying the supremacy of the biggest, most dangerous automobiles.”
“When we face such a unique opportunity to rethink the foundations of our transport system, should we stop there?” asks Paris Marx in MIT Technology Review, who calls for the government to push smaller electric vehicles and “expand alternatives like public transit and cycling infrastructure in cities across the country so it will be easier for more people to choose not to drive in the years to come.”
Mining the minerals needed for batteries, such as cobalt, also means “poisoning water supplies, increasing rates of cancer and lung disease, and even making use of child labor,” Marx wrote.
Locally, an overreliance on electric cars — and the financial incentives offered for buyers of them — formed one of the more trenchant criticisms of the Baker administration’s climate policies. The former administration placed “all its bets on the hope that every driver in Massachusetts will own an [electric vehicle] by 2050,” wrote James Aloisi, a former state secretary of transportation, instead of providing more non-car options like better bus and train service.
The points are well taken — and, I would argue, totally beside the point.
Well taken because they’re right: If somehow the whole country miraculously switched to electric vehicles tomorrow, we’d still have all the downsides of America’s car dependency, from suburban sprawl to an epidemic of highway fatalities. But also beside the point, because changing the cars people drive can happen on a radically faster timeline than the deep systemic changes EV critics offer as alternatives.
The average age of cars on the road, according to Kelley Blue Book, is 12.2 years. Assuming that’s a rough indicator of how long Americans hold on to their cars, it means there will be a huge amount of turnover over the next decade, creating plenty of opportunities for consumers to switch to electric vehicles. Transforming the nation’s transportation system in a similar time frame is not realistic — a single T project, the Green Line extension in Somerville, took three decades to complete. Just replacing the T’s Orange and Red Line trains has taken eight years and counting.
To some degree, the critiques of electric cars reflect a large schism within climate activism. Is the way to build broad support for climate policies to marry climate action to other broad social causes? That was the logic of the Green New Deal, which positioned environmental policy within a larger social policy framework of single-payer health care and other reforms (including, apparently, changing American policy in the Israel-Palestine conflict).
The other way to view the problem, though, is that injecting other priorities — no matter how worthy — only makes it harder to win broad support for climate action and turns away people who might be willing to drive an electric car but aren’t ready to be foot soldiers in a revolution.
I’d argue that convincing Americans to stop driving cars (or embrace single-payer health care) is a much longer-term endeavor — one that may never fully succeed. Climate policies, on the other hand, have to succeed and should meet Americans where they are — even if that’s at the end of a driveway, in a SUV, in the suburbs.
Alan Wirzbicki is Globe deputy editor for editorials. He can be reached at alan.wirzbicki@globe.com.