They Just Don't Get It

TL;DR: The insurmountable problem with electric cars is that they are cars.

Phil Scott got a new truck. Brenda Siegel wants it too, and also wants everyone else to get an electric car. The F150 Lightning is a fine pickup truck, I'm sure. But will the planet survive 8 going on 10 billion people cruising around in electric vehicles? Clearly, no.

Phil and Brenda just don't get it. It doesn't matter how green a car is. It could have zero embodied emissions from production and zero emission during its operating life. It could be free of mining, shipping, and casualty costs. It's the fact that it's an automobile with tires, one that takes up space and infrastructure, in a garage or rolling down a road -- fundamentally incompatible with a living planet. 

Roads themselves are sufficiently damaging to make everything else associated with them unacceptably unsustainable. Vermont's rural road system is the worst of the worst. Vermont has 30% more lane miles per capita than the next-worst New England state, Maine, and almost 90% more than New Hampshire. In most of the country, it's the suburbs that are the problem. In Vermont, where so many of us live in even more sprawling exurbia, the problem is that much worse.

Potholes everywhere, town and state living from infrastructure grant to grant, we are overextended on infrastructure. Indeed, even if there was no environmental impact, our roads and attendant land use patterns remain utterly unaffordable. Strong Towns has done a good job explaining why infrastructure is such a fiscal problem.