February 15, 2023

Jargon Watch: The Nirvana Fallacy

The Nirvana fallacy consists in comparing existing solutions with ideal, perfect ones—which are often unrealistic.

I have often been accused of letting the perfect be the enemy of the good, particularly when it comes to electric cars and giant electric pickup trucks. They still clog our streets and murder pedestrians and cyclists and making them emits vast amounts of upfront carbon. I like walking, transit, bikes and e-bikes, 300 of which can be made of the materials in one e-Hummer. Oh, and I like denser cities where people don’t have to ride their bikes as far to get what they need, dense enough to support a butcher, a baker and a candlestick maker within a 15-minute city.

I also liked the recent study, Achieving Zero Emissions with More Mobility and Less Mining where Thea Riofrancos and her team calculated that making all those big electric vehicles for the US market alone will require the mining of three times as much lithium as is currently mined. She calls instead for smaller and fewer vehicles and investment in alternatives.

“This report finds that the United States can achieve zero emissions transportation while limiting the amount of lithium mining necessary by reducing the car dependence of the transportation system, decreasing the size of electric vehicle batteries, and maximizing lithium recycling. Reordering the US transportation system through policy and spending shifts to prioritize public and active transit while reducing car dependency can also ensure transit equity, protect ecosystems, respect Indigenous rights, and meet the demands of global justice.” 

Allysia Finley of the Wall Street Journal has her own interpretation of the report in an article titled “The climate crusaders are coming for electric cars too.” The subhead: “a new report makes clear the ultimate goal: tiny uncomfortable apartments and bicycles for all.”

“The re­port of­fers an hon­est look at the vast per­sonal, en­vi­ron­men­tal and eco­nomic sac­ri­fices needed to meet the left’s net-zero cli­mate goals. Pro­gressives’ dirty lit­tle se­cret is that every­one will have to make do with much less—fewer cars, smaller houses and yards, and a sig­nif­i­cantly lower stan­dard of liv­ing.”

Finley says it’s clear from the report that they want us all to live like they do in hellholes like Vienna or Copenhagen.

“But what about sub­ur­ban­ites who need cars to get around? Re­duc­ing “car de­pen­dency” will re­quire “den­si­fy­ing low-den­sity sub­urbs while al­low­ing more peo­ple to live in ex­ist­ing high-den­sity ur­ban spa­ces,” the re­port says. Trans­la­tion: Force more peo­ple to live in shoe-box apart­ments in cities by mak­ing sub­urbs denser and less ap­peal­ing.”

According to energy expert Paul Martin, Riofrancos and I are suffering from the “Nirvana Fallacy.” I looked it up: “The Nirvana fallacy consists in comparing existing solutions with ideal, perfect ones—which are often unrealistic.” or another definition: “Comparing a realistic solution with an idealized one, and discounting or even dismissing the realistic solution as a result of comparing to a “perfect world” or impossible standard, ignoring the fact that improvements are often good enough reason.”

Martin writes on Linkedin about the report and the WSJ response:

“It's not pragmatic environmentalists who are heaping on the nirvana fallacy arguments against EVs, wind, solar and the rest- it's the fossil fuel industry and its hangers-on. The true enviro-religionists are however already lined up against EVs, pointing out that electrified public mass transport, moving information instead of people, and active transport and micromobility are better still- and they are. But in cities designed around cars, re-densifying them around electrified mass transport is a 70+ yr, multi-trillion dollar problem. Until then, we'll need cars- and EVs are, on a good grid like mine, capable of reducing GHG and toxic emissions by nearly 2 orders of magnitude even relative to a hybrid like my Prius. They're a no-brainer environmentally, on a lifecycle basis.”

In a later comment, Martin says “We need to be more adult and pragmatic. And the nirvana fallacy needs to be called out EVERY TIME it is encountered. No real technology can ever compete against imaginary perfection.”

So lets be adult and pragmatic and admit that the Riofrancos study didn’t say “let’s get rid of cars,” it said let’s build smaller cars with smaller batteries, and make it possible to have fewer cars, by improving transit and bike infrastructure. As for increasing density, that doesn’t mean people have to live in “shoe-box apartments.” They can be very nice apartments, like they are in Vienna.

It is not nirvana fallacy to claim that trucks like this do not belong in cities when they are known to kill at three times the rate of cars, and that electrifying them is going to magnify the problem because of their increased mass.

It’s not nirvana fallacy to note that bigger electric trucks consume more materials. As Peter Huether of the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE) notes: bigger trucks means more stuff.

"The environmental impact of EVs isn’t just about the electricity generated to power each mile. The manufacturing process also causes the release of greenhouse gases at several stages, known as the embodied emissions of the vehicle. EVs in particular—with heavy battery packs—use minerals that need to be mined, processed, and turned into batteries. The pursuit of greater driving range and larger vehicles requires increasing battery size, also increasing embodied emissions."

It’s not nirvana fallacy to propose more multiple-unit housing in our cities and suburbs. And it’s not nirvana fallacy to promote e-bikes as alternatives to cars or bike infrastructure. Not everyone can drive, and not everyone can afford an electric car, and the e-bike revolution is a great way to help solve what Martin calls a “70+ yr, multi-trillion dollar problem.” New micromobility technology can solve it for a small fraction of that time and money.

The Nirvana Fallacy is real. Claiming wind power is bad because the blades are not recyclable (yet) is one good example. I am not linking to the horrid site which claims that “[Three] billion tons of mined metals and minerals will be needed to power the energy transition” – a “massive” increase especially for six critical minerals: lithium, graphite, copper, cobalt, nickel and rare earth minerals.” This an egregious example, given that we dig up eight billion tons of coal per year.

But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be frugal and efficient with what we do dig up for the energy transition. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t think about what is sufficient: What do we need to get around? How big a place do we need to live? How much green space and farmland do we want to give up to sprawl? What is enough?