The Right to Charge

As electric cars grow in popularity, their use has necessitated a renegotiation of drivers’ notions of ownership, common property, and responsibility in everyday city spaces like parking lots, community centres, and shopping malls. Identifying charging infrastructure as a crucial barrier to entry for would-be consumers, electric vehicle (EV) advocates are arguing for the “right to charge”—that is, the ability of EV owners to install charging stations in privately owned lots (such as condo parking garages), and to access convenient public charging.11Josh Tzventarny, “Enabling Electric Vehicle Charging in Condominiums,” Canadian Condominium Institute Toronto and Plug’n Drive, http://www.plugndrive.ca/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Enabling-EV-Charging-in-Condominiums.pdf. The cost and spatial requirements of EV charging necessitates considerable reviews to transportation infrastructure and policy.

The use of a “rights” framework for electric vehicle charging indicates how deeply car culture is entrenched both in urban infrastructures and in personal expectations of mobility. The all-encompassing nature of car use is termed “automobility” by social scientists, demarcating a field that studies the arrangement of built space, work, social life, and identity around personal vehicles.22John Urry, Mobilities (Cambridge: Polity, 2007). As sociologist Harvey Molotch puts it, automobility is “intimately bound up with an aesthetics of movement, technology of rolled steel, a teen’s rite of passage, drive-in malls, insurance provisions, freeway maps, tract houses, cup holders, the Beach Boys, first dates, traffic courts, strings of gas stations.”33Harvey Molotch, quoted in John Urry, Climate Change and Society (Cambridge: Polity, 2011), 57.

While Molotch’s references are dated (and gas stations are joined by charging stations), the conventional understanding of automobility as inherently tied to oil is being reformed by consumers who now proudly drive without tailpipe emissions. One unforeseen implication of this shift, however, is that Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area EV owners report driving further and more often than conventional car users.44Plug’n Drive, “Driving EV Uptake in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area,” 10 May 2017, http://www.plugndrive.ca/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/EV-Survey-Backgrounder.pdf.

In principle, increased use of zero-emissions vehicles does no environmental harm, if the electrical grid on which it relies is emissions-free. In Ontario, the grid is largely powered by nuclear energy and hydroelectric dams. Both are claimed as low-emissions by energy providers,55“Clean Air. Made in Ontario,” Ontario Power Generation, https://www.opg.com/generating-power/Pages/generating-power.aspx. but their environmental consequences should be seen for their diffuse effects beyond emissions alone. Dams often dramatically reshape rivers and lands for power generation, with profound implications for nearby inhabitants and the environment.66See, for instance, http://makemuskratright.com. Nuclear energy is best understood using life-cycle analysis, where comprehensive accounting of production, generation, and waste products show it to be far less clean than its newer counterparts such as solar, wind, and biomass.77Benjamin K. Sovacool, “Valuing the Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Nuclear Power: A Critical Survey,” Energy Policy 36, no. 8 (2008): 2950–2963.

Life-cycle analysis puts the greenness of electric vehicles under equal scrutiny. The impact of EVs is concentrated in their production and recycling, due to the rare earth metals used in their batteries and electronics.88Felipe Cerdas, Patricia Egede and Christoph Herrmann, “LCA of Electromobility,” in Life Cycle Assessment, ed. M.Z. Hauschild et al. (Switzerland: Springer, 2018). With these resources overwhelmingly extracted from and disposed of in Southeast Asia, the toxic pollution created from their manufacture and disposal is geographically remote from their benefits in Ontario.99Plug’n Drive, “Electric Vehicles: Reducing Ontario’s Greenhouse Gas Emissions,” May 2015, http://www.plugndrive.ca/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Electric-Vehicles-Reducing-Ontarios-Greenhouse-Gas-Emissions-A-Plugn-Drive-Report.pdf. When greenhouse gas emissions are taken singularly as an indicator of sustainability, many of the impacts of industrial production are left unaccounted for.

A large part of EV advocacy and enthusiasm follows a logic of substitution: trading combustion engines for batteries. While movement away from combustion engines is welcome in principle, exaggerated claims of EV greenness, and the increased driving habits they foster, highlight the fact that personal consumption decisions are not systemic changes. As such, policy documents published by Mississauga and Peel governments unequivocally assert the need for greater mass transit and active transportation options to reduce traffic and pollution in the region, questioning the scalability of continued car use for the existing road network.1010The Long Range Transportation Plan Update (Region of Peel, 2016); Living Green Master Plan (City of Mississauga, January 2012); Strategic Plan (City of Mississauga, April 2009).

A more cautious approach to the rise of electric vehicles should take note of how they reinforce car culture, rather than shift it; EVs substitute tailpipe emissions for other kinds of pollution that are geographically distant, and they potentially increase automobile reliance. As such, electric vehicles should be seen alongside public transit and active transportation as one small part of the challenge to decarbonize transportation. An equally important step will be the cultural shift that revisits our commonly held assumptions about mobility.