I note the installation of a solar voltaic charging station at the UWI’s St Augustine campus’ Faculty of Engineering. Well done to the institution, but that’s only useful for electric vehicles of staff and students.

It is unrealistic for a citizen living in, say, Port of Spain to come all the way to St Augustine to charge their car, that’s if they don’t have one at home and if there will be enough time to charge it so that they won’t reach late to work. Will campus security even allow vehicles without parking passes to enter?

The electricity we get in our outlets comes from fossil fuels. If everybody were to sell their gasoline and diesel vehicles and buy electric vehicles, we would still need fossil fuels to generate electricity to power the electric vehicles, exponentially more as a matter of fact.

If we aren’t then, we’ll need a lot of solar panels, a lot of windmills and a lot of batteries to charge the EVs and we’ll need fossil fuels to manufacture those too.

In an event such as a power outage, is it reliable for an electric ambulance to leave Maracas headed for the hospital with a critically ill patient? Same with a fire truck or an airplane? In an emergency or as a passenger, you’re not interested in the volume of carbon dioxide the vehicles emit, you need to get to your destination in one piece.

Why should I invest in an electric vehicle which is supposed to be in the best interest of the earth’s climate, when countries like China, North Korea and Russia are continuously focusing on fossil fuels and moving towards nuclear energy? Don’t we breathe the same air as them?

It is impossible to eradicate fossil fuels from our consumption. Carbon emissions are not altering the climate, the climate is doing what it does and we need to adapt to it. Electric vehicles are not the future, the future remains oil and gas.

KENDELL KARAN

Chaguanas