Source: Ignore that bomb, someone lit a fire-cracker!
On exploding EVs, bird-killing windmills, and why it’s easy to demonize the new
OCT 24, 2023
Two weeks ago today, a fire broke out in the parking garage at Luton airport in the UK. Before it was out, 1,500 cars had been destroyed, and the the structure had collapsed from the heat. And while it was still burning, people were spreading rumors on social media that it had been caused by an electric vehicle. Those rumors kept spreading, aided by the anti-environmental amplifiers across social media; before long, for instance, a widely-read Australian climate denial website was exulting that “EV’s Luton Fire Just Killed the EV Market.” As the website’s author admits, there’s no actual evidence that the fire was caused by an EV save for a series of Youtube videos by a “car nerd,” but the rumors were “a big deal to a lot of people, and he argues, a turning point in the quest to get everyone driving an electric vehicle.” In fact, the writer says, “it doesn’t matter — everyone thought it was an EV anyway, and he argues — it will destroy electric car sales either way.”
In fact, the fire was caused by a diesel car—the source for that is not someone on twitter who also wrote a book about “Gender Madness: One Man’s Devastating Struggle with Woke Ideology,” nor a dude with a Youtube channel who thinks the Clinton Foundation is trying to outlaw automobiles. The source for that fact is the, um, Bedfordshire Fire and Rescue Service, which, um, responded to the fire. Also, there’s literal footage (this being the cellphone era) of the car burning—it was a 2014 Range Rover. When social media users continued to insist it must at least have been a hybrid, those sticklers at the, um, Daily Mail were forced to point out Range Rover hadn’t been making hybrids back then, but that they had recalled a number of cars because they, um, caught on fire.
More importantly, a few seconds worth of googling would have uncovered the fact that according to insurers, and to the Scandinavian experts who have been studying the countries with the highest concentrations of electric vehicles, EVs are 20 to 80 times less likely to catch on fire than their fossil fuel counterparts. Which if you think about it isn’t too surprising given that fossil fuel is quite flammable. I mean, when bad guys on tv want to cause a fire they literally slosh gasoline around and toss a match…
…And relative to the status quo is how we should judge things, not relative to some standard of perfect safety. So, yes, windmills can kill birds. But a very small number compared to other things (cats, tall buildings, wires); in fact, new data from MIT shows that fossil fuel kills 27 times more birds per unit of energy produced than wind turbines. And the gravest danger to birds by far is the rapid heating of the planet (read Adam Welz’ superb new book The End of Eden), which windmills will help forestall. So it makes no sense to oppose windmills on these grounds—you might suggest a few migration corridors where we should avoid siting them, but only in the context of building more somewhere else. Similarly, whales and offshore turbines: the data indicates no great threat, and other data makes abundantly clear that the use of fossil fuels, which windmills displace, is heating and acidifying the ocean in which whales must live. If nothing else, 40 percent of the world’s ship traffic is just carrying coal and oil and gas back and forth; think of the cetacean paradise if we eliminated that….
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Psychologists have done their best to explain why we’re more scared of possible dangers from new things than obvious dangers from old ones (“this reaction may have to do with our amygdala, which research suggests plays a role in detecting novelty as well as processing fear”), and marketers have done their best to exploit it. But the rest of us have to do our best to fight it in ourselves and others.
A good and pertinent example: there’s been a lot of fear and angst about the new mining for metals like lithium and cobalt required for the clean energy transition. In one sense this is useful: as we move into this new endeavor, we should take all the steps we can to make it clean and humane. But mining always comes with some damage, and so will this. The question is, relative to what? It takes orders of magnitude less mining (by one estimate 535 times less) to power the world with renewables than it does with fossil fuel. And breathing the smoke from fossil fuel combustion kills nine million people a year, one death in five—that’s far more than will ever be affected by mining. And it helps short-circuit the rapid warming of earth, which is the deepest threat to the poorest and most vulnerable people on earth.
Social media in particular transmits shocking novelty far more effectively than common sense; if you see a post about a government document showing how many lives were saved by mass vaccination campaigns, it’s less interesting than somebody railing that their favorite athlete was killed by his covid shot. (Which, on examination, never turns out to be true anyway). And in the case of climate change, we have a multi-trillion dollar industry whose business model utterly depends on us not making the transition to a cleaner, cheaper, simpler system of powering our world.
So expect the disinformation to continue; our job is to do what we can to step back, look at the larger picture, and help people see the forest for the burning trees.
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