Footprints Of Carbon
Your Foot Is Bigger Than You Think
You’ve watched the deliveryman from the local appliance store hook up your new electric stove and haul away that old gas-powered one that had been polluting your kitchen environment with carbon monoxide and formaldehyde fumes for years. Although you never noticed any ill effects from these deadly gases, that doesn’t mean they weren’t there. The added bonus is that you’re kitchen has become a lot Greener.
You’ve traded in your 12-year-old SUV for a shiny, new Electric Vehicle. The charger in your garage has been wired into the panel by a licensed electrician, and you’re all set. All you have to do is plug in the car when you come home from work, and you’ll never have to go to a gas station again. Even that battery-powered lawnmower is a source of pride.
You are now as Green as you can get, and you’re feeling pretty good about yourself. These are terrific moves, and I applaud you for them. Except that, you’ve just become part of the problem.
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For starters, the carbon footprint of building that EV (even that lawnmower) is a whopper. The mining, transportation and building of those batteries in your EV comes at a huge environmental cost (not to mention the human rights issues associated with the extraction of the necessary materials). Where producing the average gas-powered vehicle leaves a footprint of about six metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions, the average EV generates ten metric tons.
The only way to make that EV environmentally friendly is to drive it. A lot. The more you drive, the quicker your EV will shrink its overall footprint. Kelly Blue Book research shows a wide range of how many miles you have to drive. It can take anywhere from 28,000 to 68,000 miles to make your EV less polluting than a gas car. Many people trade in their new car before they reach mileages like that, meaning their purchase of an EV will leave a permanently larger carbon footprint than if they had bought a gas car.
If you do put high mileage on that EV, it’s going to need new tires. Every time you slap on a set of new rubber, you add another half a metric ton of carbon pollution to your footprint.
Now, let’s look at where the electricity you use to top off those batteries comes from. It varies from region to region but, nationwide, more than 60% of electricity is generated by fossils fuels like natural gas, coal, and oil. An additional 18.2% comes from nuclear power. Those are sources that leave massive carbon footprints, not to mention the forever problems of spent nuclear fuel. Although production of electricity from renewable sources is rising in the U.S., it’s still only about a fifth of the stream. Your EV would be a whole lot greener if the U.S. generated 100% of its electricity from renewable sources, like we do here in Costa Rica.
That generation of electricity is the real problem facing the U.S. It’s not just your electric car that is adding to the burden. All of industry is working to become greener as well. As our work and lives become more centered on computer based things like artificial intelligence, cloud-based computing and bitcoin mining, massive “data centers” are springing up all over the country. These places house enormous volumes of computer equipment that suck up electricity like nothing before them. The demand for this invisible power source is experiencing exponential growth. The International Energy Agency says data centers ate up 4% of the nation’s electrical energy in 2022, and will rise to 6% in just four years. It will only grow from there. Power companies and their infrastructure are facing a reckoning of epic proportions.
The Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C. are a hot spot for this expansion. 75 new data centers that drive about 70% of all internet traffic worldwide have become operational around Arlington and the Dulles corridor since 2019, and dozens more are planned or being built. They will suck up the equivalent of several large nuclear power plants…plants which are not being built. The state of Georgia estimates it will need 17 times more new electricity than it estimated only recently. No one knows where all that electricity is going to come from.
This is the dark side of a tremendous expansion of manufacturing and business formation in the United States. The Biden administration’s push to grow the nation’s industrial base has created a robust economy that constantly surprises economists, growing by 3.3% in just the past three months. That success means jobs are available, wages will rise (albeit grudgingly), and the country will likely avoid recession anytime soon. But, the power grid may have more to do with the success and failure of these initiatives than any governmental policy.
“There are real risks some regions may miss out on economic development opportunities because the grid can’t keep up,” warns Grid Strategies. How will the lights stay on if electrical demand exceeds capacity? The only answer at the moment is to continue building capacity while keeping old power plants operating longer than planned. Because of this meteoric rise in demand, old coal and other fossil fired generating stations, along with nuclear plants, are going to have to stay operating much longer than hoped. Expansion of the limited (and much maligned by right-wing leaning politicians) green sources of energy has to ramp up in a big way. The grid of power lines transferring that energy to the demand points is going to have to be expanded. Huge data centers may have to build their own power plants. Some planners of these centers are already thinking about small-scale nuclear plants that would feed their appetite for electricity.
The Greening of America is long overdue, and even the RepubliCult Party is going to have to accept this simple fact. But the entire nation also needs to recognize that there are going to be a lot of growing pains that will leave a significantly larger carbon footprint than desired.