Electric cars don’t emit zero emissions when electricity is generated by coal power plants, but so what?

This morning it is clear and sunny, the sky is clear and cloudy, so you have to go out and go for a walk to warm up your body to prepare for the Christmas weekend. So that’s exactly what I did.

Two hours and almost 8km later, I feel refreshed but at the same time a little nauseous. My entire upper respiratory tract feels like it’s covered in mucus. The clear blue sky makes the day look fresh and clean, but in reality the air feels a bit thick, to be honest it looks like a bit chalky.

Source – internal combustion engine car pollution, it’s everywhere. Even as I sit here writing this story on the first floor of a shopping mall while drinking a cup of coffee, the atmosphere is horrible because of the heavy traffic of cars and motorbikes.

I must admit that I have put myself in this situation. After all, walking 2 hours outside and sitting outside in a cafe are completely optional situations. “Non-essential” activities, a popular phrase not long ago in Malaysian history.

But this is something that many people go through every day. Think of kids waiting for their transportation at school. Have you seen the massive traffic jam of cars running and idling? Or the people who work in the small kiosks next to the parking area. Or the stalls at highway rest stops. Or security guards in a parking lot. Or traffic police trying to relieve morning traffic.

In 2013, one 9-year-old girl dies of asthma attack in the UK. She lives near a major road in south-east London. A coroner ruled that air pollution was the official cause of death, because she was exposed to levels of nitrogen dioxide and particulate matter that exceeded WHO guidelines.

Her main source of exposure is traffic emissions. Her mother said that if it was said that air pollution contributed to her daughter’s illness, she would have moved. In the three years before her death, she had been in and out of the hospital nearly 30 times.

An estimated 4.2 million deaths a year are caused by air pollution. A major source of human-inhaled air pollution is not caused by coal-fired power plants, but by traffic pollution. And children are the most vulnerable because of their developing lungs, but they breathe in astonishing amounts of diesel particulate pollution while waiting for a vehicle to move, and as they sit on a bus or truck. students are not properly sealed from traffic pollution. That is a minimum of 2 hours of exposure per school day.

It even affects people before they are born. Based on an article by WHO, when pregnant women are exposed to polluted air, they will easily give birth prematurely. It also affects neurodevelopment, cognitive ability and increases the likelihood of cancer and cardiovascular disease in children.

Research by scientists at the University of Aberdeen UK found that infants have air pollution particles in their developing lungs and other vital organs as early as the first trimester. That’s right, air pollution is already damaging your baby’s lungs even before he takes his first breath of air.

Ten paragraphs later, I think it’s time I understood what I was trying to say. Well, in a country where coal-fired power plants are used to generate electricity, electric cars aren’t really zero-emissions.

However, there are clear benefits to burning coal for electricity far away from where people live, in a far more efficient power plant with cleaner emissions than an internal combustion engine that is started every morning. and left idle on the porch to “warm up,” allowing its emissions to seep into every house on the street where it parked.

Overall, zero carbon emissions is the ultimate goal, a perfect solution and would be good for the environment, but there are immediate health benefits to eliminating sources of emissions of all types (carbon, nitrous oxide, soot particles, etc.) from where people live, where our children live, play, ride bicycles.

There is something called the nirvana fallacy, in which we tend to compare the real things with unrealistic, idealized alternatives, or the tendency to assume that there must be a perfect solution. for a problem, choose to reject a realistically achievable possibility to wait for an unrealistic one. The solution may be better because some part of the problem that needs to be solved will persist after it is done. It’s like refusing to wear a seat belt because some people will still die in car crashes.

Our power generation mix will become cleaner, and so will electric car technology. Both electric and electric cars will be less harmful to the environment when manufactured over the next decade.

According to a study by TNB, electric cars are 23% cleaner in carbon emissions (I repeat, this is just carbon) than ICE cars and under TNB’s own plan to reduce dependence on energy coal in the next few years to decades, it will improve to 32% by 2040 and it will only get better after that. The goal is to be coal-free by 2050.

So yes, while on paper you see this as only 23% cleaner, I guarantee if all the cars lining up outside the school to pick up your kids were electric, it would be healthy. their health and their lungs 100%. will thank you for that.