I just read that John Neville, who played Baron Munchausen in The Adventures Of ..., and the Well-Manicured Man on The X-Files, has died. In stories, Munchausen was a comical hero able to lift himself to the moon by his own bootstraps, or out of a swamp by his own hair, and so on.

In the 1970s, I wanted an EV so I could avoid sitting in gas lines. On the one hand pretty girls would walk up and down the line selling coffee, doughnuts, and Washington Posts but on the other there were fistfights and guns drawn over one's place in line. I bought a 120 mpg moped and filled it from my car's tank, so my fingers smelled like gasoline but I only had to refill every 1000 miles.

Then a Consumer Reports article panned the two-stroke moped engine for its dirty exhaust and advised that I'd be better off driving with six people in a station wagon. (For those that are too young to remember, a station wagon was a vehicle much like a longer, lower SUV.) So I figured electric vehicles would be cleaner. I just assumed that even if gasoline became scarce and expensive, I'd still have to get to the office in my clean, quiet EV. And I waited.

In the meantime, I read that electrical generating plants were throwing away power overnight anyway, so EVs were a great way to leverage that power for good use. But there still was only the EV-1 on the other coast.

Then I read that electrical plants weren't throwing away quite that much power because some plants could be shut down quickly. But conversion losses from coal to heat to electricity dwarfed anything that a few EVs would use. And the EV-1s were being crushed.

Anyway, a respected architect named McDonough writes that lifecycle is important, so I've been trying to find cradle-to-cradle assessments of vehicles. Lifecycle studies aren't all that easy to view for free, but I found another one - Life Cycle Assessment of Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Plug-in Hybrid Vehicles: Implications for Policy from the Department of Engineering and Public Policy, and Department of Civil and  Environmental Engineering at Carnegie-Mellon University - PDF reposted at GWU. This study only compares Conventional internal combustion  Vehicles (CV), Hybrid Electric Vehicles (HEV) and Plugin Hybrid Electric Vehicles (PHEV) with ranges of 30, 60 or 90 km.

The Ricardo study (pdf) used an emissions intensity of 500 g/kWh in the UK. The CMU study starts with 670 g/kWh, based on average US emissions intensity, and admits the possibility of either carbon-intensive and low-carbon futures:

For the base-case scenario, electricity used to charge PHEVs has a life cycle GHG intensity similar to the average intensity of the  current U.S. power portfolio, or 670 g CO2-eq per kWh of electricity (30, 33). The carbon-intensive scenario, at 950 g CO2-eq/kWh,  represents a case where coal (the most carbon-intensive fuel) is the predominant fuel for electricity generation. The low-carbon scenario describes an energy system where renewables, nuclear, or coal with carbon capture and sequestration, account for a large share of the generation, thus making the GHG intensity of electricity low, at 200 g CO2-eq/kWh. Table S6 outlines a representative electricity mix for  the low-carbon scenario and shows direct and upstream emissions of each generation technology.

Looking at CMU's Figure 2 makes it clear that while HEV emissions are always about 30% less than CVs, PHEV emissions are only less than HEVs' when the generating plant GHG intensity is less than about 750 g/kWh. The lower that intensity number, the better PHEVs, and presumably EVs, look from an emissions perspective. With dirty power, the low tailpipe emissions of PHEVs, and presumably EVs, become much less compelling.

Although Munchausen could defy gravity by the exercise of will, we can't lift ourselves out of a high CO2 future simply by driving low emission vehicles. Which future we get to depends on what powerplants we build, and how we build them:

While it is evident that GHG intensity of the electricity used to charge PHEVs greatly affects their ability to reduce GHG emissions from transport, a policy discussion regarding electricity supply decisions and PHEVs deserves wider attention and dialogue. U.S. power generation facilities, especially aging coal power plants, are generally nearing the end of their useful lives and will have to be replaced or overhauled within the next two decades. Because power plants typically are in service for 30 years or more, technology decisions regarding new generation capacity have profound and long-lasting GHG impacts (44, 45). The Department of Energy reports plans to build 50 GW of coal power plants in the next 5 years and a total of 154 GW within the next 24 years (36), and the U.S. Energy Information Administration reference case forecasts a 2030 electricity mix with higher carbon intensity than today’s mix (46). ... Large reductions in the GHG intensity of the electricity sector within the next 30 years will only be realized by sustained replacement of retired carbon-intensive capital with low-carbon generation.

And there's the rub because every sort of large-scale power generating plant is an investment in infrastructure expensive to fund, and energy-intensive to build. Every power company rejects environmental regulation, saying they can't make money unless they clearcut the forest, or pollute the water, or remove the mountaintop, or leave radioactive wastes.

What's a comical hero to do?