Did Mr. Bean Just Do the EV Industry a Favor?

The British comedy actor Rowan Atkinson is most famous for playing “Mr. Bean,”  a character known for taking a chaotically impractical approach to everyday tasks. Perhaps he was channeling his namesake last month when he published an op-ed with the Guardian entitled “I love electric vehicles – and was an early adopter. But increasingly I feel duped.”

The core of Atkinson’s argument is that keeping an old gas-powered car is more environmentally friendly than buying a new electric car, due to the environmental footprint of making batteries for electric cars. The same way his character once tore up a home to make a window next to a table rather than just moving the table to the window, it seems Atkinson outsmarted himself, and focused too much on the micro picture rather than the macro.

Perhaps us climate advocates owe Mr. Atkinson thanks for drawing attention to this issue, so the world can take a closer look at the facts and data around electric cars. Let’s examine some key information:

First, it’s true that there are greenhouse gas emissions associated with manufacturing batteries and other components for EVs, and that these emissions are typically higher than those associated with building gas powered car today. However, the bulk of emissions from combustion-engine vehicles come not from their manufacturing, but from their consumption of gasoline over the course of their life.

According to a study from MIT, building the lithium-ion battery in a Tesla Model 3 creates 16 metric tons of CO2 in the most carbon-intensive manufacturing scenario, and as little as 2.5 metric tons of CO2. But once they’re on the road, even accounting for the emissions of the power grid charging electric cars, EVs emit dramatically less CO2 per mile than gas powered cars.

In the most CO2-intensive battery manufacturing scenario, it would take a little under five years for an electric car to be less environmentally harmful than a gas car - meaning, the emissions saved from not using gasoline would surpass the emissions caused by making the battery. But in many cases, it would take less than one year for this to be the case.

Another study from the University of Michigan and Ford Motor Company cites 1.5-1.9 years as the typical time it takes for electric cars to “break even” with their combustion engine counterparts on CO2 emissions.

Even better - those studies are likely highly conservative estimates of the environmental benefits of adopting EVs, because they use assumptions about the emissions intensity of battery manufacturing and the power grid today, rather than the lower-emissions manufacturing and power we’ll have in the not-so-distant future. The MIT study uses what’s called “short run marginal emissions factors,” meaning it doesn’t fully account for the fact that energy is becoming cleaner over time.

Mr. Atkinson’s overall premise also fails to look at the larger picture of how the world needs to decarbonize all of transportation, rapidly. In the US, the transportation sector is responsible for more emissions (28%) than any other sector, and that’s largely a result of the gas we use to fuel our vehicles. We desperately need to break our addiction to gasoline, and part of how we’ll do that is by electrifying all cars rapidly.

Our group co-founded the MIT Climate Pathways Project, which has taught over 250 governors, senators and members of congress plus over 1000 CEOs and investors an interactive climate solutions modeling tool called En-ROADS. The model shows that as we reduce fossil fuels from the electric power sector, electrifying vehicles is the one of the next big “levers” we can pull to drive down global greenhouse gas emissions. This drives home a larger point: climate problems and solutions need to be examined using systems-level thinking, not just by looking at one gas car at a time.

Mr. Atkinson’s analysis is not only factually flawed, but it also fails to account for the larger need to eliminate the global dependence on fossil fuels as quickly as possible in order to address climate change. Despite the misinformation referenced throughout Atkinson’s piece, we can thank him for bringing so much attention to the subject and enabling the science and the data to speak for itself.