I had a particularly long underground journey today. This meant that I read one of those free newspapers until I couldn’t find a word left to read, so I solved a Sudoku puzzle. Good thing I had my pen with me. There was a small news bit that said that the conservative party (UK) was taking advantage of how bad labour looks like with respect to the environment by promising to get people to switch to electric cars if they win the elections. My question is how is that supposed to help the environment?

When it comes to cars two words make them sound really clean, electric and hydrogen. In both cases it is not necessarily true. Electric cars are clean on the spot, because they have no direct emissions. The electricity in them however was not. To produce this electricity some power plant must have generated some pollution, unless of course it was a renewable. If it was a coal power plant then we are better off leaving cars to burn their fuel.

The same thing applies for hydrogen. How you produce your hydrogen is really the key factor in determining how clean it is. Is it solar hydrogen, nice! Is it hydrogen produced through electrolysis where the current was supplied by a coal power plant, not nice! Simple.

So the next time someone promises you an electric or hydrogen fuelled car, please ask them where they intend to generate those from.