Do the Con's of Renewable Energy Outweigh Fossil Fuel Use?
I saw a post on social media recently that showed the massive battery system required to power a Tesla and listed out all the environment downsides that go into the extraction. The article estimated that it takes 7 years of driving the electric vehicle before it starts to pay off the environmental harms caused by creating the battery. It also said that the battery life is about 10 years, giving it 3 years of environmental gains, something fossil fuel will never have.
The post wasn’t necessarily wrong, there are downsides to electric vehicles (EV), including the fact that our grid system is not yet capable of fully electric systems (luckily adoption is slow and wont happen overnight giving time for the grid to catch up). But it failed to look at the other side of the issue and that is that fossil fuels are even more damaging than the batteries needed to run an EV and have put us in a situation where our climate is changing rapidly and causing billions of damage annually. Clean energy may not be perfect, but it’s far better than fossil fuels. We can’t let perfect be the enemy of good. Making progress is better than continuing to rely on an energy source that is damaging the environment we live in and is a supply that is running out.
As the EPA states “All forms of electricity generation have an environmental impact on our air, water and land, but it varies.” Knowing that we are never going back to a world without electricity (unless any of the various end of the world TV shows become a reality), we need to find ways to more efficiently produce energy. Renewable energy production—wind, geothermal, and solar— does not burn fuel when producing energy and therefore does not contribute to climate change or air pollution when used. When only considering the energy generation, renewable energy is far better than fossil fuels which have major negative impacts, not only in its use but in its extraction and production as well.
Another positive to renewable energy is right in its name—its renewable. Once you burn a gallon of oil its gone forever and the supply of fossil fuels will eventually run out altogether. Fossil fuels are plant and animal matter that died millions of years ago and have been under heat and pressure all this time. Given the amount of time it took to make what we’re using today, we need to look to other sources for the future. Estimates indicate we have about 100 years left of coal production, 50 years of crude oil, and 50 years of natural gas.
One weakness of clean energy is in the mining for metals, but even here, MIT has concluded that mining for clean energy metals is clearly better than mining for fossil fuels. The article states that the comparison between the two isn’t a straightforward one to one assessment because the extraction and processing methods are different for oil and coal than metal. Some comparisons that support metal mining as a more environmental process are:
We mine far more fossil fuels today than the amount of clean energy minerals we will need in the future.
Emissions for extracting minerals for clean energy production are minimal compared to burning fossil fuels.
So while the batteries used in our current EV’s are unsightly today, I have confidence that as technology advances and we find new ways to produce clean energy, the entire process will improve. We can’t stick to fossil fuels just because renewable energy isn’t perfect today. Had we done that decades ago when the first computers took up an entire room to power I probably wouldn’t be writing this on a laptop at my kitchen table right now. While we wait for improvements however we as individuals can lessen our reliance on energy; using less energy is another great way to cut emissions. Some ways to start:
Walk or bike for shorter trips and errands
Use public transportation
Reduce, reuse, recycle in all aspects of your daily routine
Purchase second hand clothing and goods
Purchase quality products that can be repaired rather than tossed
Turn off lights and appliances when not in use
Rely on natural daylight instead of lights when conditions are good
Open windows instead of turning on the air conditioning when possible
As I made this list, these are the most obvious to me, but almost everything in our lives takes energy to produce so the list of ways to reduce energy consumption is really endless. We can’t cut it out completely, so focusing on a few small ways that work for our individual routines is a good place to start. Since I’m writing this on New Years Day, what better time to make a resolution to use less energy in at least one area of your life!
