Among other things, the big, omnibus legislation Donald Trump is expected to sign today does away with federal incentives for electric vehicle purchases. While the GOP is trying to ensure the dominance of the internal combustion engine with this big bill, a baker’s dozen of states still offer some kind of incentive, a tax break or rebate, encouraging their citizens to purchase electric cars. California leads the way, with 23 incentives. Even very red Texas has four incentives for electric vehicles.
As they produce far fewer emissions—about one third of a gas-powered vehicle, depending on the the amount of electricity you may get from renewables—electric cars are thought to be a technology that will stave off global heating.
Electric cars might be greener as far as emissions go, but those Teslas and Rivian trucks still need four tires between their carriages and the roadway. According to the EPA webpage Where the Rubber Meets the Road, more than three billion automobile tires are produced every year, the production of which “requires massive amounts of natural resources, including fossil fuels, water, and agricultural space to grow natural rubber, which has been linked to deforestation.”
Electric vehicles are exacerbating the environmental effects of all those tires. Being heavier than their gas guzzling counterparts, electric vehicles wear out tires up to 30 percent faster. Every EV that replaces an old Subaru or Chevy Silverado EV is heavier and uses up tires in possibly months instead of years.
All that rubber comes from somewhere
Rubber is made from a milky substance harvested from the Para rubber tree, which is native to the Amazon forest. Latex harvesters now grow the tree in plantations, mostly in Southeast Asia.
Despite the billions of tires we use every year, the ramifications of converting forest to rubber tree monoculture had been overlooked for decades, largely because satellite imagery has been unable to distinguish natural forest canopy from rubber plantations. But in 2023, the Royal Botanical Garden Edinburgh, Kunming Institute of Botany, and other institutions, relying on new developments in space-based observations and cloud computing, demonstrated that deforestation from rubber plantations could be three times greater than previously estimated.
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