Danish professor Morten Sommer (DTU) is now being criticized for equating gasoline and electric cars when it comes to consumption of the Earth's resources.
Researchers from the University of Southern Denmark and Aalborg University criticize a new book that questions electric cars as a sustainable means of transportation.
In the book, "Is my life sustainable?", written by professor of microbiology at DTU, Morten Sommer, there is a graph showing the harmful impact of electric cars on the Earth's resources.
Sommer claims that the difference in sustainability between a gasoline car and an electric car is smaller than many people think.
– The difference in sustainability between a petrol car and an electric car is smaller than some might think, he tells videnskab.dk .
The graph in the book shows that electric cars have a significant resource consumption. Especially due to the production of batteries. According to Sommer, you use up to four times as many resources when driving an electric car, compared to what is considered sustainable within the limits of the planet.
– If you drive a good 10,000 km in a large electric car (the calculation is made on a Tesla Model S), you reach almost 382 percent of your safe margin in terms of annual resource consumption. If you drive a small electric car, you reach 230 percent, explains Sommer.
For comparison, the graph shows that a regular gasoline car uses 69 percent of the "safe margin" for resource consumption in a year.
However, this presentation has been criticized by Henrik Wenzel, a chemical engineer and professor of green technology at SDU. He calls Morten Sommer's graph "cheesy" and fears that it may deter car owners from replacing their gasoline cars with electric cars.
Soren Lokke, an engineer and associate professor of sustainability at Aalborg University, shares Wenzel's concerns. He believes it is important that graphene is not allowed to stand alone without criticism.
The debate about electric cars and sustainability thus continues, and it is clear that there are different perceptions of how environmentally friendly electric cars actually are.
However, there is little doubt that there are problems with the way electric cars are manufactured. Organizations have repeatedly criticized car brands for their way of sourcing materials for electric car batteries. Boosted has uncovered this in an article from December 2024. Read more about it here .
