The battery question

Column: from the perspective of a student who has heard it more often than he'd like.

There is a law of nature for birthday parties: mention an e-bike, and within thirty seconds someone says "but what about the battery". Always in the same tone, not curious, more relieved. As if an exit has just been found.

The question deserves a serious answer nonetheless, if only because waving it away is exactly the raw material greenwashing is made of. So: producing an e-bike, battery included, costs a one-off 250 to 350 kilos of CO2. That is real, and it counts. Against that: a petrol car emits 170 to 200 grams per kilometre, while an e-bike charged on Dutch grid electricity emits 3 to 5. The gap is so large that the manufacturing debt is repaid after 1,500 to 2,000 replaced car kilometres. Anyone cycling a daily twenty kilometres that would otherwise have been driven clears it within six months; everything after that is profit, roughly 800 kilos of CO2 a year. The battery itself manages five hundred to a thousand charge cycles, tens of thousands of kilometres, and the recycling chain becomes a little less embarrassing every year.

One caveat belongs here, because without a caveat it's advertising: whoever uses the e-bike only to replace ordinary cycling kilometres ends up worse off. The gain is never in the device; it is always in what the device displaces. That, incidentally, is true of almost everything currently sold as sustainable, and it would help if it were said out loud more often.

More interesting than the answer, meanwhile, is why the battery question remains so popular. Presumably because it is so comfortable. As long as things seem complicated, nothing has to happen. "It's complex" is the sleeping bag under the climate debate: everyone likes to crawl into it. But this is not complex. It is a calculation that fits on half a sheet of paper, and it has been coming out the same way for years, which models are currently being watched most closely is neatly tracked by a platform like Risegoods.

For those who don't own a car, which is most students, the gain runs one level deeper: every e-bike that postpones the purchase of a first car by a few years prevents the entire chain that comes attached to that ownership.

Which leaves a question for the next birthday party, to be asked once the battery has come up and the answer has been given. If the maths is right, and it is, what exactly was the objection? To the bike? Or to changing?