There is an old truth in urban planning: more roads equals more traffic. It’s called induced traffic: roads are congested, so more roads are built; drivers flock to the new roads thinking they will be empty; the roads get congested; more roads are built. Repeat until the end of time. This cycle of endless sprawl is only going to get worse: cars pollute less; the average person feels less guilt about driving; they drive more. This is part of the reason we should be deeply concerned about the narrow focus of the EV revolution.
Electrifying as much of the transportation sector as possible is non-negotiable if we are going to limit warming to 1.5 °C this century. But cars are bad for the planet and everything on it in all sorts of ways. If we focus only on the source of their energy and ignore the havoc they wreak elsewhere, we risk missing the goal of the transition in the first place: to make the world safer and healthier.
Of course, cars and their associated infrastructure are not going anywhere. There are projected to be two billion cars on the road by 2040, according to research by the investment firm Bernstein. We live in a world of tradeoffs, not perfection, and EVs are undoubtedly better for the world than internal combustion engines are–and it really isn’t close. Take just one example: 100% of oil mined for ICE vehicles is lost forever and every additional mile requires more oil. The cycle is inherently unsustainable. But, as Reuters reports, with EVs most of the mining f0r battery materials is done once and then can be recycled over and over again.
Still, the cost of that mining is significant and shouldn’t be ignored. According to a report by the International Energy Agency, there will be 350 million EVs on the road by 2030. And each of those cars will have a battery that requires six times the amount of minerals a typical ICE requires, the Washington Post found. The mines and roads required to extract those finite minerals endanger workers, damage the local ecosystem, and harm nearby communities, as study after study has found.
Regardless of what powers the car, their sheer size is what makes them most immediately deadly. Studies from Smart Growth America and the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety directly link bigger, heavier cars to more pedestrian and cyclist deaths (In 2021, over 7,000 pedestrians were killed in car accidents according to tracking by the IIHS. Pedestrian deaths are at a 40-year high.) The Environmental Protection Agency’s Automotive Trends Report details that cars have steadily become bigger and heavier over the last two decades. The average weight is almost certainly going to continue to increase: EVs can weigh thousands of pounds more than their ICE counterparts.
Cars are not much safer for wildlife. In his new book Crossings, journalist Ben Goldfarb reports that “more birds die on American roads every week than were slain by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.” The Federal Highway Administration estimates that animal collisions cost Americans $10 billion a year.
Roads multiply this harm far beyond the car itself. Because it can be difficult for animals to cross busy roads and highways, roads end up fragmenting ecosystems and locking animals into smaller and smaller pockets of habitat, according to Goldfarb. That makes it harder for them to find food and mates. Ultimately, fragmentation can lead to local extinction or extreme population declines, as we’ve seen with California mountain lions or Wyoming mule deer.
Highways also facilitate the invasion of ranchers, miners, and other extractive industries. “Name an environmental problem, and it’s exacerbated by the access that roads provide and the incentives they create,” Goldfarb writes.
There are many potential solutions to these problems: increased density, more walkable cities, better public transportation. None of them are easy, but none of them are impossible, either. Building EVs for their own sake is not the goal. Building a safer, cleaner, more stable world is.