The challenge of 'renewable' energy.
Secure energy is prerequisite to the prosperity that lifts people out of poverty. At the same time, we want to protect the environment while providing this secure energy. Achieving that will require competing interests to play together in the “radical middle” where conflicting goals collide around energy, the economy and the environment.
More than half of what we consume in the world today is made in countries that use coal to make it. So, we sometimes close our ears and eyes, and say, “We’re green. Just keep making our stuff over there and we’ll buy it on Amazon and have it delivered to our door one small thing at a time.” This is not good for the climate.
Emissions in Asia go into the one unique atmosphere that we all share, and by not reducing our consumption of products, we are simply moving the source of those emissions far away.
Kale is healthy, but it is not dense calorically, so you would have to eat a lot of it. Beef is dense with calories to sustain life, but too much of it is not all that healthy. Wind and solar and hydroelectric power are like kale, ideal if only you could live on the energy it provides. Coal and oil and natural gas and nuclear power are like cow, less benign, but energy dense. Not just a little denser. Several hundred times denser.
Opinion | You Want an Electric Car With a 300-Mile Range? When Was the Last Time You Drove 300 Miles?
By improving home charging for urban apartment dwellers and prioritizing vehicles with smaller batteries, rather than road-trip-enabling charging stations and big batteries, we could maximize the miles we can affordably electrify. In an era of battery scarcity, we could have two 150-mile E.V.s for the battery capacity in every 300-mile E.V. Or, using the same 300-mile E.V. battery, you could have six plug-in hybrids with 50 miles of electric range for daily driving and a gasoline engine for those rarer road trips or many, many more e-bikes.
Rather than holding E.V. adoption hostage to our ability to make batteries match internal combustion in every way, government policy should focus on the cases where E.V.s have advantages that internal combustion will never match: waking up every morning with a full “tank” sufficient for daily commuting and errands.