When the heat finally broke in New York City a couple weeks back, a neighbor and I decided to take a nice, long walk at the end of the day on a Friday. We meandered along our usual route, which snakes through the eastern edge of Fort Tryon Park in one of Manhattan’s northernmost neighborhoods. At the top of the park, the path opens onto a heavily trafficked road, where we were met almost immediately with the rumble of cars speeding toward a nearby highway onramp.
I grumbled something about how loud one SUV was. My neighbor commented on the whrrrrr of a hybrid as it zipped by, noting how strange the world will sound when the majority of our fleet is electric. (Dare to dream!) Our conversation then turned, as these often do, to the challenges of decarbonization. Not just EVs, but also solar panels and wind turbines. Ya know, typical Friday evening banter. 😉
“We gotta figure out how to make these things in a way that doesn’t bleed the planet dry,” my friend said. I immediately felt defensive, but I tried to stay chill. These conversations are tricky. You might have heard similar lines of thought tagged “whataboutism,” but I call them the “yes-but spiral:" They start with a positive, then swat it away with an argument against climate progress. This conversation stuck with me because it's a pattern we see playing out a lot; misinformation about renewables and EVs is rampant.
Guess what: Everything is extractive to some extent. Everything is bad for something. Everything has a downside. But is that reason enough to hit pause? No.
It's unreasonable to talk about EVs as if gas cars are shooting sunshine and rainbows out of their tailpipes. Or to talk about renewables as if there’s some mythical energy source with zero downsides.
There are dozens of threads to pull here, but, so this doesn’t become a 20,000-word white paper, let’s zoom in a bit on the materials discussion. The many challenges (and sins) of mining what’s necessary to make EV batteries certainly gets the most attention. But other decarbonization technologies have their issues, too. Producing solar panels hoovers up much of the world’s silicon and an ever-increasing share of the globe’s silver reserves, and refining them involves energy intensive and often polluting processes. A lot of the world’s copper and aluminum stores—both essential to photovoltaics—are located on Indigenous lands.
Did I tell my walking buddy to ignore all this? That it's not worth the time and effort it will take to figure out these messes? Of course not. The goal isn’t to Polyanna away the unpretty parts, but to avoid the spiral. The danger is that knowing there are downsides can prime us to latch onto other arguments against progress that might be unfounded. And that can make us more willing to accept the status quo. It’s the kind of defeatism that all-too-easily descends into climate doom, an evolution of climate denial that more-or-less shrugs and accepts an inevitable fate: “Everything’s f*cked, so why bother?”
My darling neighbor, though, is a Virgo—a perfectionist. (I’m a Libra, so I sympathize.) I know the intentions behind these questions are good. And, though we may wish that the path to decarbonization were totally benign, that’s never going to be the case. But it's also unreasonable to talk about EVs as if gas cars are shooting sunshine and rainbows out of their tailpipes. Or to talk about renewables as if there’s some mythical energy source with zero downsides.
Avoiding the spiral hinges on making smart comparisons. Let’s take the turning of silicon into the polysilicon that makes up the majority of solar panels as an example. Nearly 80% of the world’s supply comes from China, which means its production is largely powered by coal—that nation’s top energy source. That is a prime contributor to the total greenhouse-gas footprint of solar panels, but you can’t look at this fact in a vacuum. According to a 2021 analysis from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, photovoltaic panels produce 43 grams of carbon-dioxide equivalent emissions per kilowatt hour (kWh) of power they generate over the course of their entire lifetime. Natural gas produces 486 grams/kWh, oil 840 grams/kWh, and coal 1,001 grams/kWh.
If we’re talking trash, things shake out similarly. While materials scientists are making strides in reclaiming materials from spent solar panels, achieving mass circularity here is still very much a work in progress. Again, though, no vacuums: A 2023 study compared the waste created by solar to coal ash and oil sludge in a future in which we don’t transition to renewable energy. The amount of coal ash would be 300 to 800 times greater than solar waste, and oil sludge would be two to five times more. Worse: The authors wrote that unfounded fears over solar waste are actually slowing decarbonization.
You’ve undoubtedly heard dozens more yes, but… statements about the whole gamut of decarbonization technologies that may have grains of truth in them. That radiation or low-frequency noise from wind turbines can harm human health. That EVs are crap in winter. We have to refute these falsehoods, but also understand that doing so doesn’t mean we’re OK with forced laborers mining copper and cobalt in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Clearing the noise can actually bring focus.
I told my friend that zeroing in on what the real challenges are with decarbonization is a good thing. Failures, missteps, and bad deeds are happening largely in the public eye, whereas the fossil-fuel industry has worked to obscure the truth about the planet-warming impacts of burning coal, oil, and gas since the mid-1950s.
That doesn’t excuse the ill actors in any stage of the decarbonization chain—not by a long shot. But if we’re going to have the “yes, but…” talk, I’d rather be on this side of the equation.
