THE INCONVENIENT TRUTH ABOUT CHINA AND NORWAY
Nations held as examples of EV adoption fuel their conversions with coal and oil
If there is one constant refrain from the electric vehicle lobby, it is the deification of Norway and China as leaders in the automobile’s green revolution. Indeed, “Why can’t we be more like Beijing or Oslo?” is probably the most popular comment on any internet forum relating to the lack of progress in electrifying our North American fleet.
It’s an image both countries take pains to promote. One of the key speakers at this year’s Canadian International Auto Show was Morten Edvardsen, senior political adviser for the Norwegian EV Association, whose whole message seemed to be “Why can’t Canada be more like Norway?”
At first glance there is much to covet. Norway, as Edvardsen took great pains to point out, has the highest penetration of electric vehicles per population, with 216 per 10,000 inhabitants or roughly 20 times than that in Canada, and market share — about 35 per cent of all cars sold in Norway in 2017 were plug-ins. More importantly, as Edvardsen reminded the audience, Norway’s climate is similar to Canada’s yet it has built an infrastructure that allows long-distance EVers to recharge at their convenience. “Why aren’t you more like us?” was understood by one and all in the audience.
The issue not discussed is that Norway is paying a huge toll for its greenness. The incentives Norway offers — Edvardsen dismisses them as mere “tax breaks” — are generous enough to make Kathleen Wynne seem parsimonious. All cars sold in Norway, for instance, face a costly value-added tax similar to our HST and — you guessed it — all government tithes are waived if the car plugs in, cutting the price of an EV roughly in half, says The Financial Times. But that’s just the beginning. There are road taxes waived, toll-road fees forgiven, and there is free electrical charging throughout the land. Tally it up and Norway’s success, according to FT, is a result of hundreds of millions of dollars in tax revenues making it almost free to drive an electric car.
“It is normal,” says The Financial Times, “for a Norwegian to buy an electric car in addition to a petrol vehicle for daily use to save money.”
It’s an advantage not lost on Norwegian consumers, one Tesla owner telling the newspaper, “To be honest, the reason for buying this was a little bit about the environment, but mostly the savings.” He’s not alone: According to the Norwegian Electric Vehicle Association, about 72 per cent of buyers choose an electric car for the subsidies and just 26 per cent for environmental reasons, not a welcome prospect should the country try to wean itself off the incentives.
More problematic for those proposing Norway as the model for environmental righteousness is that all the money for these subsidies comes from oil. Yes, good old-fashioned hydrocarbons. Fully 12 per cent of Norway’s GDP and a whopping one-third of all its exports comes from crude oil. In fact, Norway has the world’s largest sovereign fund — over US$1trillion, or US$190,000 per citizen — largely built on oil exports.
And for those environmentalists thinking that part of the Norwegian miracle is that the country is weaning itself off deadly hydrocarbons, think again. The same government offering generous incentives to its citizens to clean up its air is also ladling massive subsidies on its oil companies to find new sources of crude in the environmentally fragile Arctic. Indeed, the irony seemingly lost on Edvardsen and his fellow proselytizers is that if, as he proposes, all countries follow the Norwegian example, the one nation that won’t be able to afford electric cars will be his own. The scary thing in this worship of foreign EV programs is that China’s hypocrisy might be even more egregious.
The Chinese government recently garnered major kudos by claiming it was cutting back on its reliance on coal-generated electricity while also trumpeting the electrification of its automotive fleet. The reduction of fossil fuels generated headlines far and wide.
As it turns out, what it is really doing is slowing the rate of building new coal-fired generating plants while also, to its credit, making the new fossil-fuelled plants cleaner than before. Nonetheless, depending on where you get your statistics, coal-fired electricity could increase by as much 100 gigawatts by 2020. It is also worth noting that coal still fuels 60 per cent of the country’s electricity.
But that is not the country’s greatest fossil fuel mendacity. No, according to The New York Times, China is exporting its coal-fired electricity-generating technology worldwide. Even worse, says the Times, is that many of the countries being blessed with Chinese largesse have little history of generating electricity from coal. In other words, this is all brand-new nitrogen oxide-spewing, greenhouse gas-emitting electricity. Egypt, for instance, currently uses virtually no coal-fired electricity, but will soon add 17,000 coal-fired megawatts to its grid. Ditto Pakistan, which will go from 190 MW to 15,300 MW thanks, in large part, to China’s US$15-billion investment in a dozen coal-fired plants.
So, in the end, what we have is the country credited with the greenest automotive fleet in the world financing its conversion to electric vehicles by shipping ever-increasing amounts of crude oil abroad, while the government credited with the most advanced electric vehicle development program is (partially) financing its research by building coal-fired electricity plants around the world. To borrow a quote from the immortal George Carlin — in his commentary on the American war machine’s assertion that it was “fighting for peace” — building an electric vehicle market based on exporting greenhouse gases is a little like “screwing for virginity.”
I think those looking to champion the adoption o f electric vehicles should choose their heroes more wisely.