Get ‘Plugged In’ to the Future

 There are ways to get around without getting oil involved: walking, biking, or hopping on a train. Riding a bus or car-pooling also helps reduce the amount of fuel required to get around. Even if we ditch the car keys and rely on footpower, most of our food requires a truck or plane to guzzle gas on the way to our dinner tables. If there’s any hope for us to avert climate calamity, we need to change the transportation system.

Thankfully, a new WWF report was released yesterday called Plugged In, addressing the need to change transportation from oil-dependent, to electric, and efficient. 

The report’s author is Dr Gary Kendall, Senior Energy Business and Policy Analyst for the WWF Global Climate Change and Energy Programme based in Brussels. He joined WWF in 2006 after nine years in the petroleum industry in Europe and Asia. “Automotive transport is ripe for transformation,” said Dr Kendall. He writes that there should be more vehicles with “diversified primary energy sources” available for sale, to pave the way for a sustainable, renewable, energy future.

You don’t need a PhD to recognize the urgent and timely nature of the report. But when we talk about climate change, many of my friends ask me hard questions like, “Don’t electric cars still cause emissions because generating electricity also releases greenhouse gases?” Lacking a PhD and a history in the oil industry myself, I am particularly thankful to have Plugged In on hand to deal with such queries.

In answer, electric vehicles can be four times more efficient than their internal combustion counterparts. In a conventional mechanical vehicle, only 18-23 per cent of the energy contained in the fuel is converted into motion, whereas electric vehicles make use of up to 75 per cent of electricity taken from the grid. That’s a lot of energy saved, and considering that not all power generation comes from greenhouse gas emitting sources, electrification is the best option.

It’s easy to get stuck in the present moment, and imagine that the status quo is fine, and that thirty years from now, little will have changed. But the whole world can change in an instant. It was only in 1901 that cheap, plentiful oil was discovered at Spindletop, Texas, kicking off the petroleum-dependency of the 20th century. Now, accessible oil is in such short supply that exploiting the Alberta tar sands seems reasonable! It’s hard to picture what the post-petroleum future will look like, but Plugged In can point us in the right direction. Check out the report summary in the What’s New section: http://thegoodlife.wwf.ca/Articles/plugged_in___summary_final.pdf

by Maggie MacDonald