Sure, it’s not easy changing our outlook on the environment, but we really have no choice

The Spanish government’s announcement this week that it intends to ban manufacture and sale of all internal combustion powered vehicles from 2040 has triggered debate in Spain, highlighting the difficulties in changing long-held assumptions.

Setting 2040 puts Spain ahead of the US government and many others that have not even begun to discuss such a ban, but behind Germany, Austria, Korea, Denmark, Ireland, Israel, the Netherlands and Norway, which set dates from between 2020 and 2030. The many critics of the measure are unable to imagine 32 million electric vehicles in circulation, and much less, for them to be recharged each night. Let’s put things in perspective: firstly, the idea is not to replace the current fleet with electric vehicles, a move that wouldn’t solve the main problems we face, and secondly, because not every single electric vehicle would need to be fully recharged every single night.

As said, the goal is not to replace the same number of vehicles with electric ones: while we may have cleaner air, such a move would simply recreate the same traffic problems. We have to completely rethink the concept of car ownership and start seeing cars as a service. Within a decade, city dwellers will have access to a huge range of transportation options, among them fleets of self-driving cars, thus ruling out the need to own a vehicle. In addition to Waymo, which is already launching completely autonomous transport next month and will then expand to other cities, Ford also plans to launch a fleet of several thousand vehicles in 2021, while Daimler and Bosch are finalizing the launch of autonomous taxi fleets in several US cities, BlaBlaCar has invested in bus fleets and a range of companies are doing the same around the world. Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles are another alternative that is coming into play as economies of scale are progressively reached.

The time has come to look to a future in which we will no longer need to pay out huge sums of money for an object that is idle for at least 95% of the time. That may be difficult for some of us, but it’s where we’re headed: very few of us will be able to justify owning a car. Autonomous vehicles are going to redefine many things, and the shape of our cities is one of them. This future, less than 10 years away, will give us cleaner cities where we’ll use apps to plan our trips, enjoy efficient public transport and a myriad of alternatives such as bicycles, scooters and fleets of clean vehicles. Possessing a car with an internal combustion engine in a city will increasingly will be subject to a range of restrictions, among them heavy fuel taxes and limited parking.

The denialists continue to trot out arguments such as the long exhaust pipe theory, insisting that we’re simply going to transfer pollution from cities to the areas around power plants. The problem with this hypothesis, as I have noted on a number of occasions, is that it overlooks the fact generating electricity in power plants, even using fossil fuels, is much more efficient than car engines, and that anyway, we will increasingly move toward renewables and distributed generation. Within a decade, the roofs of our homes will be producing electricity that will be stored in batteries and then used when the sun does not shine. Battery technology is evolving quickly and will increasingly benefit from scaling up. Once again, Tesla saw the future coming.

Another argument worth demolishing is that our electric future will simply see us move from dependence on oil to lithium or cobalt: to start with, burning oil poisons us, while those materials are not destroyed to create energy and are recyclable. In short, all the arguments against the changes we must make have no substance. It’s as simple as that; we have to get on the program.

And you? Are you going to continue coming up with absurd excuses and accepting fallacies and misinformation that don’t stand up to scrutiny, or are you going to start thinking about changing your outlook?

(En espa?ol, aquí)

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