Electric cars are not as green as you might think
SAVE the planet, screams at us from every hoarding. Yes I would really like to do that. So do not drive a nasty old petrolusing car and least of all a diesel one. Switch to electric power motor transport and save the world.
A slight question mark. It is called Drax. Sounds like a Bond villain? No, it’s a power generating plant in Yorkshire, a huge one. It used to be coalfired but that was considered very bad indeed so it switched to wood pellets.
Now vast tracts of primal forest in the USA are being felled by chainsaws that pump out carbon monoxide. The logs are ground down into pellets for Drax, using even bigger quantities of poison gas. Then the cargoes are trucked to the coast. Even more CO. The ships across the Atlantic don’t actually run on goodwill. More poison gas. Then from our coast even more filth-churning trucks run the cargoes inland to Yorkshire.
Still, at last the pellets from the middle of the USA are burned to make good, clean British electricity. Except that it has been discovered the pellets create more waste gases than the British coal used to do. And that came from a few miles away.
So pop into your local garage and fill up your nice electric car on mega-priced electricity. I suspect that between the American forest and your car battery it will have generated more eco-filth than Arthur Scargill ever saw. Do you sometimes get the impression those who govern us are not very bright?