The scooter and the big picture

Blog post 5: The scooter and the big picture

Unless you walk or pedal-bike everywhere you go, your personal movements have a carbon footprint. Your car burns petroleum. Your EV, though powered by electricity, ultimately is powered from some source, most likely coal or natural gas. The size of your footprint, and the 300 million other people in this country who need to get around, form the transportation segment of the nation's carbon footprint. Scooters, though, and e-bikes, use way less electricity than an electric car. My scooter, when recharging, draws about 600 watts for four hours. That works out to 2,400 watt-hours, or 2.4 kWh. At 10 cents/kWh, that costs 24 cents of electricity. Since I get 25-30 miles on a charge, that means a day's travel costs about a quarter. If that electricity was coal-fired, that would add 0.86 pounds of CO² to the atmosphere. Compare that to a gasoline car which gets 20 mpg. Thirty miles would be 1.5 gallons of fuel, which works out to about 30 pounds of CO² to get the work done. 

I am not saying you need to get rid of your car. I am saying that by transferring some percentage of your travel from car to scooter or e-bike, you will not only reduce your carbon footprint, you will be saving yourself considerable money and extending the life of or increasing the resale value of your car.

We still need to work on improving the amount of electricity produced from non-carbon sources, particularly as we move our transport from fossil to electric power. But mile per mile, we would be putting less CO² in the air through use of more EVs of whatever size than we are now using, and the smaller the EV -- like my scooter -- the less even still CO² we would dump into our air.


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