Book Club: Why trains, not electric cars, will save the world

An extract from Gareth Dennis’ How the Railways Will Fix the Future. Plus that exciting announcement I’ve been trailing.

Before we get to this month’s book extract, I promised you guys an exciting announcement. On Thursday, Foyles announced the shortlist for its 2024 Book of the Year. And in a slightly surreal turn of events, my book, A History of the World in 47 Borders: The Stories Behind the Lines On Our Maps was on it. 

That seems strange and unlikely enough, but it actually gets slightly weirder. In years gone by, the iconic booksellers on London’s Charing Cross Road has run three different Book of the Year lists, for fiction, non-fiction and children’s books. This year, though, it’s just the one. 

Which means I will be slugging it out with the latest from Sally Rooney, a translated novel from Olga Tokarczuk who is a literal Nobel Prize winner, a collection of anonymous sexual fantasies from women around the world edited by Gillain Anderson off The X-Files and so on… but not one other non-fiction title. 

This is not something I ever expected to happen. But bloody hell I’m delighted by it. 

Well, would you look at that: the window display on Charing Cross Road. Image: Catherine Owen.

If you are London-based and would like to hear me talk about the book, then come to Backstory in Balham on 20 November. If you’d like me to sign a book in the presence of a lot of other authors and also mulled wine, you can come to Foyles on 28 November.

Right, that’s quite enough of me. Now it’s over to the rail engineer and writer Gareth Dennis for our feature presentation…

The case against electric cars

At the start of October, the Resolution Foundation released a report called “Getting the green light” that made bold claims about the inability of public transport to help reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, and argued that we needed to prioritise a shift to electric cars above all else.

The report couldn’t have been more devoid of vision or aspiration. It ignores essentially all of the problems with retaining the status quo of cars being the dominant mode of passenger travel nationally. It was entirely incurious about how we could do things better. It is difficult to conclude that it wasn’t written by people with an extremely limited understanding of mobility and its impact on society.

Thankfully for them, I’ve got a book out in November that can help fill in the gaps for them, and Jonn has very kindly let me reproduce a bit of it here. If you want to know why we cannot just swap petrol and diesel for electric cars and call it “job well done” then this abridged extract from How the Railways Will Fix the Future: Rediscovering the Essential Brilliance of the Iron Road should paint a useful picture... 

In the 1960s – barely three decades after extreme lobbying from the petrochemical and automotive industries had changed our language, our streets and our attitude towards mass death (not least of children), all on the altar of the motor car – across the motorised world it was realised that the reshaping of our society in favour of private transport led only to the total flattening of our urban realm, and of the rural realm beyond it.

Today, road collisions account for well over a million deaths a year, and are the leading cause of death globally for children and young adults (those between the ages of five and thirty). As many as fifty million people are injured. While deaths of those inside vehicles are on average reducing, the number of deaths and severe injuries of vulnerable road users such as pedestrians and cyclists is increasing. Road deaths are an epidemic that we have accepted as part of modern society, and it is absolutely appalling. And if we are to accommodate reductions in carbon emissions and increases in mobility mostly through the expansion in our use of private vehicles, whether battery powered or not, then the number of fatalities is going to increase. There is, at best, a paucity of evidence to support claims that driver aids will limit this rise, not least as these are fitted only to the most expensive cars, inaccessible to the majority of drivers.

Further, air quality in many cities continues to worsen, even with the proliferation of electric vehicles. The largest source of microplastics in the atmosphere and ocean is car tyres, and this is only going to increase as cars get heavier to accommodate batteries and larger to meet the profit demands of the automotive industry.

Car dominance and dependence have even more egregious secondary effects. The urban realm has been twisted, homogenised, fragmented and flattened to satisfy the needs of these metal boxes. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the US, where whole communities, most often non-white, have been bulldozed to facilitate the growth of highways. Finding somewhere to put all these cars means levelling enormous tracts of cityscape. This is bleakly demonstrated in Detroit, where little remains of its city centre other than acres of open concrete. Head to the suburbs and the construction of low-density housing has resulted in cities built almost deliberately to make them difficult to serve with public transport.

This change to our built-up spaces has fragmented populations, shattered communities and entrenched isolation for hundreds of millions of people worldwide. For the global north, this is resulting in an enormous burden of care as our ageing populations are consequently less and less independent without the mobility provided by walkable cities augmented by good public transport. This results in more reliance on frontline healthcare services, in turn resulting in worse overall outcomes for everyone relying on their nation’s health system. No technology can solve this, despite the claims of the tech industry and its coalition with liberal politicians across the globe.

We’re a half-century down the line from the first big realisations about the dangers of car dominance, and the need for humanity to limit its resource consumption, carbon emissions and land use has grown catastrophically acute. Thus the need to exploit and expand railways has grown in tandem, even if you also account for our concurrent need to reduce unnecessary travel and consumption.

The reduction of greenhouse gas emissions must come from modal shift from road (and to a lesser extent air) to rail travel. Even with an overall reduction in travel, research from various quarters has established that at least a doubling in overall rail usage is required well before the middle of this century for the UK to achieve even its own emissions reduction targets. The picture is even more stark for countries like the US, where only a very small percentage of passenger travel is not conducted by private car.

The energy density of batteries versus fossil fuels means that electric goods vehicles cannot replace their diesel equivalents like-for-like. We will never be able to generate enough electricity or create the required surplus in vehicles to retain existing road-focused supply chains. We have to rethink freight mobility entirely.

Only the significant expansion of rail services, and in turn the railway network, can achieve this. While the running of modern electric trains emits as little carbon as any country’s electricity grid, civil engineering work has an unavoidable carbon cost. Strategic rail-construction projects emit carbon in the order of millions or even tens of millions of tonnes of CO2 equivalent. However, this should be compared with, for example, the replacement of a country’s private cars with electric cars, which can be estimated to involve carbon emissions in the order of hundreds of millions of tonnes of CO2 equivalent. Meanwhile, each month in any given country, road transport will emit millions or tens of millions of tonnes of CO2 equivalent, a figure that is not reducing thanks to the proliferation of larger and larger personal vehicles outweighing any benefit from increased electric vehicle take-up.

Further to this, relying on low-occupancy vehicles for transport locks us into highly resource-intensive mobility. Every car requires two tonnes of steel, plastic and, for battery electric vehicles, mined minerals. We may not be able to avoid the use of lithium in our future, but we should not be making active policy choices that increase our consumption instead of reserving its use for where no alternatives are available. Meanwhile, emissions-free rail transport requires no lithium whatsoever.

The 21st century and the digital age have seen increasing reliance on a very wide and diverse range of minerals and materials. The tools harnessed by modern society also rely on a number of core components and systems, such as microprocessors, sensors, mechanical assemblies and insulated wires. Interrupt the flow of these minerals or components, and the global economy will start to wheeze within a few days. A sustainable future will require more resilient pathways for their transportation, but also cognisance of the challenges of relying on such a diverse range of base minerals, particularly ones that necessitate significant environmental or social upheaval in their extraction – even after tackling child labour and exploitation.

To lay it out clearly: the future cannot and will not be saved by ever more complicated technologies, because these technologies are invariably resource and mineral intensive. This doesn’t mean retreating into caves; far from it. It does, however, require us to reassess the complexity of our solutions and technologies, prioritising those that deploy simplicity and security of resources.

Possibly the most widespread example is batteries. Do we need to include them in every single consumer product? Is it right to be planning for a future that swaps every internal combustion engine with a lithium-ion battery? Should we be developing or deploying battery-powered trains when overhead electrification, which requires far less dubious materials, is only unfavourable because of its perceived up-front costs? Sodium-ion batteries may offer some potential relief, but their deployment is years if not decades from full realisation, even after which they’ll always be inferior to lithium in terms of energy density. In any case, until the environmental and social exploitation that keeps lithium cheap is eradicated, companies will not make the leap of faith to sodium.

Over the last half century, the global north has shifted mineral extraction to the global south, where compliant governments allow landscapes to be scarred beyond recognition, workers to be exploited with dreadful pay and conditions, and tax burdens to be swapped for bribes and bungs. Indigenous populations are ignored as the dollar signs glisten.

Not even 20 miles from Chile’s breathtaking Los Flamencos National Reserve, and within the boundaries of the Salar de Atacama – Chile’s largest salt flat – is an enormous lithium-evaporation-pond facility operated by Sociedad Química y Minera. This complex is visible from space, with the bright yellow and orange rectangles in stark contrast to the greys, greens and browns of the natural salt flats. The scale of this mining operation, one of the largest sources of lithium in the world, is matched by the volume of water extraction it necessitates, damaging the surrounding natural ecosystem and threatening the livelihoods of indigenous Chileans. The small-scale subsistence farming which has trodden lightly in the region for centuries is seeing its irrigation systems dry up, and locals are being left without food or income.

As the greatest consumers, countries in the global north must make the greatest change to their patterns of consumption. Resource demands must be simplified, minimised and as far as possible localised. The less distance a supply chain involves, the more robust it is against climate change. The proliferation of containerisation and globalisation has enormously reduced the prices of goods the world over, but it can be completely unravelled if the pathways of movement are interrupted. And this is precisely what climate change is bringing.

Much of the world’s child labour is focused on resource extraction. Whether as casual labour in agriculture or in indentured servitude extracting cobalt for use in lithium-ion batteries, children aren’t just suffering as a result of the future we’ve left them; they are being actively corralled into building it for themselves. Exponential demand for food, resources and cheap labour invariably means exploitation of the most vulnerable in society, and that inevitably means children.

In 2016, Amnesty International reported on the use of child labour in the extraction of cobalt. The cobalt mined in appalling conditions by children as young as six is transferred via a Chinese mineral conglomerate to companies manufacturing batteries for the largest brands in the technology and automotive industries. Apple, Microsoft, Sony, Daimler, Volkswagen, Tesla – these companies are all still selling products manufactured using the labour of 40,000 Congolese children. Around the world, tens of millions more children are being put to work instead of being free to play, learn and live the lives that children deserve to. It is imperative, therefore, that the demand for these materials is limited, and technologies that minimise or entirely avoid the use of batteries are critical tools in solving the climate crisis justly.

Taking a step back, surviving the future means making the most efficient use of the resources we have and minimising the extraction of new resources. Putting rail’s immense energy efficiency benefits to one side, it is difficult to get a handle on exactly how much less resource-intensive railways are than alternative modes. However, we can paint a broad and inescapable picture.

Aviation moves small amounts of goods at great speeds, but modern aircraft require a lot of specialist resources in their manufacture to keep them light and reliable, and the airports and ancillary facilities they require are a highly resource-intensive infrastructure.

Shipping may well be resource efficient given the large loads moved with only a single (albeit massive) engine, but low speeds also mean many more ships are required for those goods than if they were moving faster.

When it comes to road, the comparison is clearer. One train can move the equivalent of tens or even hundreds of individual trucks. Each of those trucks requires an individual engine, tonnes of metals, plastics and more besides, all to carry a few tens of tonnes. Likewise – and given the average occupancy of private motor vehicles is never more than two – passenger transport is clearly significantly more resource efficient when using rail.

As humanity sticks more and more high-density batteries in everything, demand for lithium and cobalt in particular has grown enormously. Pressures on ecosystems and local indigenous communities, as well as the exploitation of child labour, represent the worst indulgences of capitalism and colonialism that people might normally associate with centuries past, not the 2020s.

In 2023, there were around forty lithium mines around the world, concentrated in Chile, Argentina, China and Australia. With demand at its current trajectory, this number will need to rise to as many as seventy-five mines by 2035. Production of lithium has more than quadrupled since 2010. As demand drives prices ever higher, the big players will stop at nothing to dump more lithium onto the market. What impact will this have on the ecosystems and communities neighbouring these mines? And given the majority of the materials are being extracted for goods sold in the global north, to what extent does this rush for minerals represent a new wave of colonialism?

Perhaps a more constructive question is: What are the alternatives to just expanding the consumption of minerals?

Research work by Professor Thea Riofrancos and the Climate & Community Project gives us the answer. The difference between the worst- and best-case consumption scenarios represents a 92% reduction in lithium demand by 2050 for the US alone. This is only achievable if private vehicle sizes are limited, numbers are reduced and public transport alternatives are greatly ramped up.

Not all electric vehicles are created equal, and most government policies of like-for-like replacement of internal combustion engine cars with battery electric cars are a road to ruin, so to speak. While an electric bike requires around 0.02 kg of lithium and an electric bus requires around 0.5 kg of lithium per rider, small cars require 1.6 kg and large SUVs require as much as 5 kg per rider.

Meanwhile, conventional electric trains powered by overheads require next to zero lithium in their manufacture. Yet politicians in anglosphere countries, more than anywhere else, are desperate to dispense with the tried, tested and highly efficient overhead electrification that railways have relied on for over a century, instead opting for the use of batteries as a perceived cheaper alternative.

Lithium is only one example among countless others, including refined or processed materials such as plastics, rubbers, lubricants, cement, steel and so on. Not only are such resources finite, but their extraction or manufacture has environmental and carbon implications – significant implications if we think of concrete and steel manufacture.

One of our most precious resources is space – the sprawl of human development has fragmented and flattened our biosphere, and this has only accelerated as we have embedded car dependence into our built environment in the last three-quarters of a century.

Making better use of the space we’ve already occupied and limiting how much more we take up are surely prerequisites of any sustainable transport plan. And thanks to their resource and space efficiency, deploying railways at a far greater scale than today is how we get our space back.

Gareth Dennis is a railway engineer and commentator. How the Railways Will Fix the Future: Rediscovering the Essential Brilliance of the Iron Road is published 12 November.