There are many reasons to like Tesla Motors’ new aerodynamic sedan without a tailpipe, in production for the last year. Consumer Reports called it the best car they have ever tested, electric or not. “Filling up” my Model S overnight after driving 250 miles costs less than $10 of electricity, whereas my trade-in required $60 of gasoline.
Most electric vehicles are mere modifications of an existing car model; take out some machinery under the hood, fit in some new. But the Model S shows what a fresh start can do. The floor is the rigid compartment housing 7,000 small batteries. The quiet electric motor is between the rear wheels; there is no transmission. Together this makes for a low center of gravity and excellent stability.
The crash tests reported last week turned out, as Tesla’s designers had predicted, to be five star as well. Indeed, another best ever. What’s under the hood is a well-designed crumple zone, with no heavy machinery to threaten front seat occupants. It’s used as the second trunk. To see any machinery, one must crawl under the car.
The Tesla itself may have zero emissions but the electrical energy has to come from somewhere. Here in Seattle, 98 percent of our electricity comes from sun-powered renewables: hydroelectric, photoelectric, and wind. Switzerland also has 98 percent clean electricity, half from hydro and half from nuclear, also clean except for the mining of uranium.
But most places get their electricity from some less guilt-free mix of clean and traditional. If I recharge while driving through Wyoming, nearly all of the electricity will come from burning the most damaging fossil fuel of all, coal. And until the environmental cost of producing its batteries comes down (Panasonic uses Japan’s electricity mix, now very heavy on fossil fuels), the emissions from manufacturing a Tesla are higher than for a hybrid. That will change as new battery factories are built in the clean energy regions that supply Tesla’s aluminum.
Celebrating Tesla’s success does, however, miss the Big Picture on climate. Many people still confuse carbon dioxide emissions (a yearly rate) with the accumulation over decades (an amount)–which is like confusing miles per hour with miles traveled. Our extreme weather episodes mostly come from the accumulation of past emissions in the circulating air, not from this year’s additions. Fixing emissions does not fix even the current climate problems.
We have already added 43 percent more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere than was there 200 years ago. Natural processes are going to be slow to remove it; even after a few centuries, one-fourth will remain. That is not quick enough to affect our alarming trend towards more extreme heat waves, drought, deluge, sea level rise, and ocean acidification. All it took to set up most past civilizations for a human population crash was just one of them, prolonged regional drought.
Reducing fossil fuel use is only an emissions reduction strategy, putting Tesla’s green aspect in the same class as efficiency improvements, smokestack capture of some of the carbon dioxide emissions, and using the less obnoxious natural gas instead of coal.
But mere reductions in yearly emissions still allow the accumulation to grow and the climate to worsen. However much zero emissions worldwide could have prevented our menacing climate problem if they had started forty years ago, it cannot fix it now.
Emissions reduction is a preventative measure, rather like brushing your teeth. Once you have a toothache, however, the solution is not more brushing. You need a repair job to make sure that the tooth survives long enough to enjoy the benefits of better prevention.
So we now need climate repair in addition to prevention measures. But shading us a little by generating a high haze is not as straightforward as it appears. Uneven cooling from an uneven application of the haze can detour the moisture-bearing winds, a setup for even more drought and deluge. To safely back out of our precarious position, we must instead reduce the excess carbon dioxide in the air, where unevenness is prevented by mixing within two years.
Climate repair thus means recapturing the excess carbon dioxide from the air, not merely the smokestack, then stashing it safely for millennia. But by now the cleanup problem has become so large that only the oceans are big enough to do the job within 20 years via more photosynthesis–and then only if the new green stuff is piped down into the ocean depths before it can revert to carbon dioxide.
We have to subtract carbon dioxide, not merely reduce what we add, and that takes a new approach. We need to quickly re-think the climate problem, just as Tesla re-thought car design.
William H. Calvin is an emeritus professor at the University of Washington’s School of Medicine in Seattle. His proposal “Emergency 20-year Drawdown of Excess CO2 via Push-Pull Ocean Pumps” is a geoengineering finalist in the Climate CoLab competition at MIT.
Yet another refugee from that black hole at oped@nytimes.com.
