Why you won’t hear me advocate for electric cars

This is a guest post by Tim Adriaansen, a community, climate, and accessibility advocate.

I won’t shut up about climate breakdown, and whenever possible I try to shift the focus of a climate conversation towards solutions. But you’ll almost never hear me give more than a passing nod to electric cars. Here’s why.

Messaging an attractive future

If you don’t already follow the fantastic work of Mike Casey and Rewiring Aotearoa, I suggest you head over to rewiring.nz and sign up for their newsletter (it takes some scrolling to find the signup, or follow them on LinkedIn).

Rewiring Aotearoa shows us how our lives can be made better when we shift away from fossil fuels and the damaging pollution those fuels create.

With a sales pitch for a better future, Mike Casey blends Kiwi-bloke charm with technical can-do to share a positive, refreshing and inspirational lifestyle which New Zealanders can look forward to when we electrify everything—the constructive way of saying “ditch fossil fuels”.

For those working in climate communications or advocacy, it’s a brilliant example of selling something better rather than banging on about why what we have now is bad.

This messaging is key to gaining popular support and generating the necessary political economy to move away from climate-damaging technology at scale and pace. If the audience is unaware of how their lives will be better off with what we’re selling, they’re never going to buy it.

This post, like all our work, is made possible by generous donations from our readers and fans. If you’d like to support our work, you can join our circle of supporters here, or support us on Substack!

Selling cities of abundance

When it comes to cities, we have an unequivocal opportunity to promote a better life for everyone. More than 80% of Aotearoa’s population lives in urban areas, making our towns and cities the most attractive target for big-impact policies and systemic changes. Tackling something as broad and complicated as climate breakdown requires us to use tools as powerful and complex as towns and cities.

Neighbourhoods that provide suitable homes within walking distance of day-to-day needs are neighbourhoods which offer a high quality of life. They also create the conditions for low-pollution lifestyles. Per-capita emissions in dense, walkable communities are typically two to three times lower than national averages. As this recent World Economic Forum report concludes:

Achieving a better urban form is one of the most powerful things we can do for the climate – and it also means we need to build many fewer clean energy assets to reach net zero.

We will need fewer electric vehicles, solar farms, wind turbines, batteries and land (and have fewer siting and permitting battles), making the energy transition faster, easier and cheaper. This will also mean better health, greater equity and stronger economic development.

Climate-aligned urbanism offers an abundant, positive life – not scarcity – and a blueprint for a just, prosperous and irresistible urban future.

“Better urban form” means an upgrade to existing sprawling suburbs. Low-density neighbourhoods offer ample opportunity and plenty of space to shift towards walkable urban villages. We can get there by investing in shared amenities; and by enabling the construction of multi-family homes and mixed-use developments, in and around existing neighbourhood centres.

This investment pathway is significantly lower cost than attempting to connect all parts of an urban area with free-flowing roads (an approach with rapidly diminishing rates of return and little evidence of success), and caters to future growth without expanding a city’s infrastructure outwards (at further cost to current and future residents).

Shifting urban and transport planning to centre around the development of urban villages instead of expanding suburban sprawl offers a higher quality of life, at lower cost, while also reducing climate damaging pollution.

It should be an easy sell. So why isn’t it?

Finding the edge pieces

If you’ve ever solved a complex jigsaw puzzle, you’ve probably stumbled upon a few key strategies for success.

One of the most common is to seek out the edge pieces—those with a single flat side—enabling the assembly of a framework from which the remainder of the puzzle can be put into place.

When we start out, a tabletop jumble of puzzle pieces is near-impossible to decipher. But as more and more pieces fall into place, an image appears, eventually creating a captivating picture.

If we want people to see a picture of a better city, we need to put as many puzzle pieces as we can into place for them. The best way to do that is to start with the edges. 

Those edges are the positive outcomes of “better urban form”.

Down one side we might have community connectedness: The social encounters that a village creates. It’s the barista at the local cafe who knows your name and how you like your coffee; the work colleague you see while riding to the office; the other parents you chat to while walking your child home from school.

Across the top edge we might have the environmental benefits: The air is cleaner and smells fresher, the streets are made greener with trees and gardens, they’re quieter and you can hear the birdsong. The way we live in an urban village helps to protect people and nature outside of our city by reducing microplastic runoff from car tyres and climate-damaging pollution from their tailpipes. In an urban village, the community can feel proud of their contribution to wider human efforts.

Another side might be the significantly reduced cost of living thanks to lower rates of vehicle ownership, less money leaving the local economy to pay for fossil fuels and a much cheaper forward infrastructure programme which focuses on local efficiency rather than regional expansion. Housing is more affordable and people spend less time commuting, allowing more time and energy for other activities.

Or it could be equity: Everybody in this picture gets an affordable home that meets their needs, be it a young family with children, a professional living alone, or a couple of older adults with limited income. They are able to get to things that make their life healthy and enjoyable regardless of their age, income or abilities. And the community is interwoven: Everybody is welcome here and supported as part of the wider team—an outcome best achieved through cosmopolitan interaction.

Finding the pieces that make up these edges and communicating them to the wider public will help assemble the picture of towns and cities that offer fantastic living—without the pollution.

One frame at a time, please

Now imagine you’re beginning to sort the pieces of a complex puzzle, putting aside those with a flat edge and making piles according to colour or pattern.

All of a sudden, somebody comes along and drops, right on top of your workspace, a thousand pieces of a different puzzle. One with similarly sized and coloured pieces, but which creates an entirely different image.

The job of creating an easily understood picture just became much more difficult.

While urban villages enable abundant, joyful and connected lifestyles, they achieve a reduction in costs, resources and pollution through one key lever: Reduced car dependency.

By contrast, car-centric development inherently produces sprawling, inefficient suburbs and limits people’s imaginations around what else could be possible.

When we communicate the solutions to climate breakdown, our audience has limited bandwidth to process what they are hearing. The situation is already confusing enough—with a myriad of solutions to different environmental issues tossed in with the disinformation of sunset industries (like oil and gas companies or the automotive lobby), all competing for audience attention, emotion and action.

To the average viewer, understanding how to solve our climate challenges looks like a collection of advocates, politicians and companies threw a dozen mixed-up puzzles on top of each other hoping the audience would make sense of it all (or, in the case of some industry disinformation-spreaders, hoping the mess would be exactly as indecipherable as it is).

When we start assembling a puzzle with electric cars as a main feature, we inherently mess up the ability of others to create a picture where cars take a back-seat to more liveable urban environments. The two concepts compete for mental bandwidth, and end up creating a muddled pile of pieces which is more difficult for both the people working to assemble the puzzle, and the people who we hope will interpret it.

Electric cars cannot solve (and sometimes make worse) problems with safety, affordability and fairness. They cannot resolve transport or access issues created by car dependency—like congestion, isolation, physical inactivity and transport poverty. Even when electrified, cars are highly polluting and resource-intensive. To resolve these issues, we must illustrate a better way to live in our towns and cities.

The good news is that electric cars are an important part of a thriving urban environment, so we don’t need to cut them out completely. If we look at the picture of an urban village, we’ll see a variety of electric vehicles ready to be put to use to meet the community’s needs. And much as Rewiring Aotearoa promotes, they’ll be charged with renewable energy and support a balanced local electrical grid. The cars are there, but they’re not what the picture is about.

For advocates and climate communicators, it’s critical that we don’t mess up each other’s work by putting electric cars front-and-centre when the big picture frame we need to create is one of fewer cars, not newer cars.

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