EVs are actually EEVs: Emissions Elsewhere Vehicles

Renewables do not reduce overall carbon emissions

While electric vehicles or EVs, wind turbines, and solar panels are promoted as the only means to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, the reality is that they only move the points of carbon emissions.  Carbon dioxide emissions are not eliminated or even reduced by EVs, wind, and solar. Instead, they increase the need for fossil fuels.

Wind turbines are manufactured with fossil fuel-dependent steel, plastic, concrete, rebar, and tons of rare earth minerals mined in China and transported to the US in ships that burn diesel and heavy fuel oil. Like EVs, wind turbines and solar panels are emissions elsewhere machines that must be backed up with natural gas-fired electricity when the wind isn’t blowing, and the sun isn’t shining. Think of natural gas-fired electricity as the batteries that bail out unreliable wind and solar.

This fact is supported by the official energy analysis arm of the U.S. Department of Energy, the Energy Information Administration, which forecasts that fossil fuel consumption in the US will continue to increase for decades even though electric vehicles, solar, and wind usage grows substantially.

Then why is there so much focus on EVs, wind, and solar you might ask? In part, it’s because the wind, solar, and EV lobbies have replaced the climate lobby with even bigger money and influence. The “green” movement is no longer about climate if it ever was. The talking points are the exact—climate change bad, fossil fuels bad, nuclear bad—but the money and influence on policy are now much bigger than the climate lobby ever was.  The Senate bill currently moving through Congress that provides hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies for solar and wind didn’t happen without big wind, big solar, and big EV lobbyists.

Outside the US, fossil fuel use, especially coal, continues to increase exponentially, negating all US carbon reductions. In an interview with Robert Bryce, Toby Rice, the CEO of EQT, the largest producer of natural gas in the US, said: “The reality is we’ve reduced our emissions by over a billion tons in the last 15 years, (while) the rest of the world has increased their emissions over 4 billion tons; that wipes out everything we’ve done… four times over. “The Power Hungry Podcast,” June 21, 2022).

So what should be our energy policy? The means to reduce worldwide carbon emissions is right under our feet here in the United States. The best possible climate policy is to facilitate the production and use of natural gas, the cleanest burning fossil fuel.

The US has been the largest natural gas producer in the world since 2011 because we are blessed with shale deposits that hold hundreds of years of natural gas reserves and have developed the technology to produce shale gas and export it to the world in the form of LNG. Our natural gas reserves are unrivaled in the world. The natural gas reserves in the Marcellus Shale are equal to Russia’s. 

One of the major problems holding back our natural gas production is insufficient pipeline capacity.  The anti-pipeline movement has been successful, especially in the Northeast US. Supposedly the Senate spending bill currently being considered will allow the completion of the Mountain Valley Pipeline, which will transport Marcellus Shale gas from West Virginia to southern Virginia. That is just one of the many pipeline projects that need to be completed.

Hopefully, US energy policy will embrace the reality that fossil fuels are critically important and do not need to be replaced anytime soon.  As Alex Epstein says in his new book, Fossil Future, “global human flourishing requires more oil, coal, and natural gas—not less.”