On Tuesday, E&E ran a piece by Maxine Joselow that makes full use of italics to beg the question in a headline: Is widespread EV use really bad for the climate?
No, electric vehicles are not bad for the environment, Joselow explains via all the actual experts who criticized the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s new report claiming that more EVs would be bad for the environment because of the mining required for batteries and such. For example, David Reichmuth of the Union of Concerned Scientists pointed out that while yes, “you do have higher emissions from making an EV than from making a traditional gasoline car, but the important thing is that you quickly make up that debt while using the car. And at the end of their lifetime, there is a large savings of emissions.”
The CEI report’s author, Ben Lieberman, when asked by Joselow about this, “did not dispute the findings by UCS, although he urged the environmental group to further study the higher emissions from manufacturing EVs.” So the guy basically admits that the argument is bunk, but doubles down anyway! Similarly, Lieberman declined to dispute Ben Jervey of DeSmog, who noted that since “it's obvious from published records that the oil industry and oil refiners provide a huge share of CEI's revenue, it would stand to reason that they would publish a report that deceives the public on electric vehicles”.
As for why CEI is attacking EVs on supposedly environmental grounds, David Pomerantz of the Energy and Policy Institute explained that CEI seems “to have gotten the message” that outright denial of climate change is a losing strategy, “so now they’re saying it is a problem and EVs can’t solve it, which is sort of a tell of what their actual agenda is, which is protecting the industries that fund their organization.”
Pomerantz expanded on that point in an email to DeSmog’s Dana Drugmand, who also covered the report and debunked its arguments: “If someone has spent much of their career denying climate change is a problem, and now that person writes an opinion piece masquerading as a white paper essentially saying ‘EVs are bad because they don't do enough to address climate change’ — and that person is writing on behalf of an entity funded by oil companies — perhaps we ought not take their arguments, all of which have been made and debunked before, in good faith.”
Reichmuth hammered that point home by pointing to CEI’s legal shenanigans, where despite claiming in the report that increased fuel mileage standards are better than shifting to EVs, they’re suing over the Trump administration’s rollback of gas mileage standards - because they think they didn’t roll them back far enough. “To claim the benefits of the Trump vehicle standards on reducing emissions at the same time you’re literally in court arguing we shouldn’t have those efficiency standards, it just shows this isn’t a good faith argument.”
As one part of the fossil fuel industry’s disinformation machine appears to be flailing, another industry is picking up the playbook. DeSmog announced Tuesday a new Agribusiness database, complete with an investigation on how major (petro-)chemical companies are using climate change as a marketing tool to sell more pesticides and other chemical farming inputs.
Much like the idea of clean coal or climate-friendly natural gas, the industry is seizing on environmentally-friendly agricultural concepts with debatable environmental benefits in order to maintain a stranglehold on its profits, generally at the expense of people and the planet.
Same schtick, different industry!
