In Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City, historian Peter Norton documented that by the 1920s the disproportionate numbers of children and young women killed by cars spurred protests, demonstrations, and attempts to limit the speed and capabilities of automobiles. Cars allowed drivers to go faster than other road users, but as they intruded into shared streets with rules and norms adapted to lower speeds, the death toll began to mount. When the automobile emerged, it found itself in competition with trains, streetcars, carriages, bicycles, and people’s own legs as the means for people to get around. Still, their growing presence on city streets prompted a backlash. Sprawling suburbs that enforced car dependency had not yet been built automobile-produced air pollution caused by the mass adoption of cars was still decades away cars were associated with touring instead of hours stuck in traffic and their contribution to the climate crisis was an unimaginable concern. In his influential work Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design Since 1880, the late British urban planner Peter Hall wrote that, “at the end of the 1920s, it was still possible to see the car as a benign technology.” 2 The car had not yet cemented its dominance over North American streets, let alone those of Europe, and as a result its drawbacks were not immediately clear. But as interests converge around EVs, their environmental benefits are being exaggerated: the absence of tailpipe emissions is being used to paint them as a silver bullet for sustainable mobility and to distract from the many problems they don’t solve-and the new ones they’ll create. Vehicle batteries account for much of the growth in mineral demand, and it won’t be extracted without serious consequences.įollowing decades of delay, it’s refreshing to see political leaders finally beginning to recognize the climate crisis and the transportation sector’s contribution to it. Their batteries are highly resource-intensive, requiring minerals from all over the world, and rising demand for EVs will produce a rush to increase extraction. EVs may not need to be filled with gas, but that doesn’t mean they’re clean, green driving machines. The oil industry won’t be happy to lose such a major source of demand, but the mining industry is eager to capitalize on the shift and use it to greenwash their extractive operations. All the major companies are in the process of rolling out electric models and announcing ambitious targets for more, and some are even setting dates for the phase-out of the internal combustion engine that has powered our vehicles for the past century. This time, automakers seem to be taking the transition seriously. Bush administration, it was reversed in 2003. In 1990, the California Air Resources Board mandated automakers to begin selling EVs, but after opposition from car companies, the oil industry, and the George W. 1 It’s a comprehensive plan for a large-scale effort, and industry seems to be on board. To encourage that, the government is providing financial incentives for drivers to buy them, installing new charging stations across the country, helping build the supply chain, and extending support to retool the factories that are manufacturing these supposed cars of the future. By 2030, the president wants half of all new vehicle sales to be electric. Last year, the Biden administration announced ambitious targets to increase the adoption of EVs, along with funding for a number of measures aimed at making them more attractive to Americans. After years of false starts, the electric vehicle (EV) finally seems to be picking up steam.
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