Along with the massive recent manufacturing investments in electric vehicle (EV) technology and talks of a greener, decarbonized future, there are some not-so-green problems.
In its latest New Energy Finance report, Bloomberg News predicts there will be some 730 million EVs on the road by 2040. The year before, Bloomberg predicted half of all U.S. vehicle sales would be battery electric by 2030.
In Canada, too, there’s talk of a big economic boost with the transition to EVs — including 250,000 jobs and $48 billion a year added to the nation’s economy through the creation of a domestic supply chain.
Governments have already invested tens of billions into two EV battery manufacturing plants in southwestern Ontario. However, they come with the environmental dilemma of what to do with the millions of EV batteries when they reach the end of their life.
“The rules are non-existent,” said Mark Winfield, a professor at York University in Toronto and co-chair of the school’s Sustainable Energy Initiative. "There is nothing as we talk to agencies on both sides of the border, the federal, provincial, state levels.
“In the case of Ontario, the answer was actually that we have no intention of doing anything about this.”
Housing prices in walkable urban neighborhoods say otherwise. The reality is that there’s huge demand for dense, walkable urban places. But the NIMBYs, car companies, and fossil fuel companies don’t want that.
There’s a lot of people who do want to live in dense neighborhoods, enough to drive up prices fighting over the tiny supply, but from a whole population point of view it’s a minority. Politicians still listen exclusively to the suburbanites. Even in the dense neighborhoods, the NIMBYs are listened to more than anyone wanting our cities to look more like Europe or (the good parts of) Asia.