If all vehicles go electric, that’s just a first step

Many of the headlines coming out of Detroit during the North American International Auto Show will be about electric vehicles – from new electric concept vehicles from Nissan and Infiniti to an emerging partnership between Ford and VW on electric and autonomous vehicles. By all means, environmentalists and others should celebrate progress in bringing more EVs to market. But they should not assume such progress absolves the world from working hard on other fronts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. When I speak about energy, I find too many people in my audiences putting far too much hope in the lone measure of phasing out petro-powered cars.
There’s a particular psychological phenomenon at work here: All humans tend to focus on one or two solutions to incredibly complex problems. Robert Jervis, a political science professor at Columbia University, writes about how the brain can account for only a limited number of factors in considering any particular phenomenon. As a result, each of us tends to fixate on a small
number of facets, and to give priority to ones we understand.
So it makes sense that so many people have a tendency to focus intensely on electric cars as the antidote to climate change. Unlike many other technologies that could prove significant – such as cleaner energy production from fusion, or carbon capture and storage to reduce existing greenhouse gas – even the nonscientists among us instantly grasp the idea of driving a car powered without oil. Moreover, the intuition is correct in many ways: In the US, as in many other countries, the transportation sector generates more greenhouse gas emissions than any other sector. And over 90 percent of the fuel used in transportation is petroleum based. It therefore seems logical that if we can wean our own cars and trucks off of oil, our climate prospects will be dramatically improved.
There are, of course, some important details. The first is that much of the reduction in carbon emissions in an EV-friendly scenario comes about not just from the switch from running vehicles on oil to electricity. It also results from decarbonising the electricity grid – moving away from coal and natural gas to alternative forms of energy such as nuclear, solar and wind to generate electricity. Right now, more than a quarter of US emissions come from electricity sector. The advent of EVs and grid decarbonisation must come together for maximum impact on carbon emissions. EVs running on electricity produced from coal is hardly a step in right direction.
This fact is explained in a recent report produced by the International Energy Agency called Global EV Outlook. When comparing scenarios with different EV adoption rates and grid decarbonisation standards, it finds that, at a global level, moving the grid to low-carbon energy sources can more than double emissions reductions that come from simple electrification of road transport.
That reality does not seem like too much a splash of cold water for the EV advocates. After all, it is in the power sector that renewables are making the most progress. Renewables are now the fastest-growing energy source; according to US Energy Information Administration, nearly two-thirds of the capacity added in the US power sector for 2019 will be from wind and solar. But we can’t be complacent. The uncomfortable fact is that while renewables are meeting much of the growth in global demand for electricity and the share of coal in electricity generation declined, the absolute amount of coal consumed in the world has
remained virtually constant.
In many ways, the global growth of EVs on the road from one million in 2015 to two million in 2017 to over three million in 2018 is impressive, even in the context of approximately 1.3 billion vehicles in the world. However, even some of the most ambitious projections for global EV market penetration suggest it will be decades before EVs account for even half the market.
But let’s be real optimists and assume that many of the obstacles to more rapid EV penetration are overcome more quickly than even those ambitious scenarios project. Let’s imagine all the world’s cars, trucks become completely electric in the coming decades. And our electricity grids go completely carbon free.
Not quite. Even if all passenger transport and road freight were electrified, approximately half of the world’s consumption of oil would remain untouched. Some of this remaining oil use would fuel aviation and shipping, but nearly a third would feed the global petrochemicals sector. That sector is booming, churning out more plastics, fertilizers, tires, detergents, medical equipment and clothing than ever before. Petrochemicals are the third-largest industrial emitter of greenhouse gases.
The growth in petrochemicals is quietly poised to continue. Last autumn, the IEA released another report, this one offers a variety of scenarios, including its reference one, in which plastics become more central to oil demand growth than road passenger transport by 2050. The report predicted that carbon emissions from the petrochemicals sector – led by growth in production of plastics – would increase by 20% by 2030 and 30% by 2050.
After 2018 delivered so much sobering news about climate change, we should be entitled to applaud the advance of technology that will be on display in Detroit. At the same time, we need to be conscious of our human tendency to focus on one or two factors when tackling a complex problem like climate change. We cannot hope or assume that the march of progress in electric vehicles will be sufficient to bend emissions curve alone.

—Bloomberg

Meghan L. O’Sullivan is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. She is a professor of international affairs at Harvard’s Kennedy School, and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations