Kill Your Car?

The tagline on the noon news was enough all by itself: “California to ban the sale of gas-powered vehicles by 2035.”

This is another one of those ideas that sounds so good, and yet is so problematic at the same time. The good is easy: It is becoming increasingly apparent that humans are contributing to the changing climate — and therefore all of the negative impacts that seem to accompany it — through the introduction of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. Sure, we’d love to blame “bovine flatulence” from feedlots in Texas for the amount of additional methane, but really… I think we all know that it’s the additional carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels that is the main contributor.

So what do we burn fossil fuels for? Well, the two main culprits are electrical power plants and internal combustion vehicles. Get rid of both, and the amount of additional CO₂ injected into the air is bound to decrease, and along with it the pace of climate change. “Post hoc ergo propter hoc” as my pops would remind us.

So California’s proposed ban on gas-powered vehicles — and their replacement by electrical-powered cars and trucks — would seem to be a good thing, and something that the younger generation would likely embrace with all their hearts.

But what about the creation of electricity? According to the United States Energy Information Administration, in a report dated February 2022, turbines powered by the burning of fossil fuels generated a whopping 60.8% of all electricity used in the U.S. in 2021. That leaves 39.2% from other sources, including nuclear (18.9%), and renewables: wind (9.2%), hydropower (6.3%), and solar (2.8%), with the remainder from various other relatively minor contributors.

Assuming that nuclear power has truly frightening environmental issues of its own (consider the earthquake that nuked the Fukushima power plant in 2011, and what is going in Ukraine today), and we are certainly seeing how atomic fission may not be the long-term savior we were hoping for.

That leaves petroleum to give us the majority of the volts and watts we need to power our lives, including the electrical vehicles that California (and likely others as the years wear on) would seem to desire.

“But wait!” as Billy would have said on all those TV commercials, there may be a problem. The Rules of Reality — in this case the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, which tells us that as energy is transferred or transformed, more and more of it is wasted — may get in the way.

It is a given that energy is always happiest when it is moving from one place to another, but it is also one of The Rules that anytime you change energy from one form to another there is a loss due to an irritating factor called “Resistance.” What this means is that you can burn gas in your car and convert the energy into mechanical motion, or you can burn it in a power plant to make electricity… and then shove it into your car and convert it into mechanical energy.

See the conundrum here? Anyone who can count to three should be able to. Gas direct into your car involves a single change — and a single loss of efficiency due to resistance. Cycle it through a power plant and suddenly there is a second change, and a second loss of efficiency due to electrical resistance.

So you have to ask yourself: Is moving to an electrical transportation grid actually going to cut greenhouse gas emissions if 60% of the electricity is generated by burning fossil fuels, or would there be fewer CO₂ emissions overall if we just put the gas directly into our cars and cut out the middleman?

This is surely a tough one! The good news is that human technology has found ways to circumvent many of The Rules of Reality, and some kid smarter than me may find a way to get past the Laws of Thermodynamics as well.

One can only hope…