Electric Vehicles and CO2 Emission Abatement

Frequent commenter Glenn Doty writes:

What would really be nice is an infographic comparing the cost of mitigating CO2 with various alternatives… just to put the different alternatives into proper perspective.

For instance, how much more does it cost to abate CO2 emissions by setting up a rooftop solar panel in NJ as compared to installing additional insulation in an office building in Texas or setting up a wind farm in the Dakotas?

This would be extremely instructional to your readers in terms of what policies would make more sense… and it would be fun to look at how you graph the negative CO2 abatement value of EV’s.

I respond:

Ha! I was reading along here, wondering when you were going to make your point about EVs, and lo! (a good word for the season), there it was.

Seriously, please send me a high-level treatment of your reasoning.

At a minimum, there are two things I don’t get.

1) What’s the matter with this reasoning: There are many different reasons that we need to knock off our addiction to oil, of which climate change is only one. What about the financial and human cost of war? What about national security and empowering terrorists?

2) And where’s the flaw here: While the short-term impact of a few EVs may be debatable (most don’t see it that way, but whatever), the evolution to EVs is paralleling the medium-term evolution to renewables, smart-grid, and storage, which will have an enormous impact. Are we to suppose we’ll be burning coal and driving Hummers in the year 2050? Of course not. Then why not phase in electric transportation, let it scale, let the costs come down and the value to the consumer increase, as we use technology to integrate more renewables in parallel?  Solar’s going to be $1/Watt soon, and the levelized cost of a number of other forms of clean energy is also falling. The opposite is the case with oil, where the costs, both financial and ecological, of extracting and refining shale oil are huge and growing.

As always, thanks for your thoughts.