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  • New Zealand Listener

    POWER of CHOICE

    Mar 07, 2021 10 minutes
    by ANDREA GRAVES

    It’s odd when you think about it. Kiwis rely on four million large hunks of steel to move us around while we rest on soft seats. Private vehicles would seem like unfathomable luxury to the people who lived during the previous 250,000 years that modern humans have existed.

    During the past two centuries, we’ve forsaken our feet or animals’ hooves and outsourced the energy we need to get around. We found it irresistibly convenient to harness energy stored as carbon in coal and then oil.

    But carbon dioxide (CO2) exits vehicle tailpipes, enters the atmosphere and persists for centuries. It mingles with pre-existing CO2 plus the vast amount released by burning coal and gas, which we have also released from deep in the Earth.

    We’ve shifted so much of it skywards We’ve shifted so much of it skywards that CO2 has reached levels not known for at least three million years. The surge has happened with unprecedented speed compared with the historical records provided by air bubbles inside polar ice cores. Earlier hikes in CO2 inched upwards over many thousands of years, so species had time to adapt to the ensuing heat. This one happened in the geological blink of an eye.

    The Commission recommends that most vehicles being imported for everyday use are electric by 2035.

    One way to stop stuffing the air with carbon is to instead harvest energy from the sun, wind and moving water as electricity. Batteries are a prime way to store that electricity

    The Climate Change Commission last month recommended that battery-powered vehicles be widely adopted. Electric vehicles (EVs) are, it says, key to Aotearoa reducing its emissions sufficiently to play our part in avoiding catastrophic climate change. That’s because about a third of our long-lived carbon emissions come from

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