Welcome to tonight’s event. Intelligence Squared is proud to present the second event in the Intelligence Squared Energised series: Will electric vehicles make our roads green and clean? with Enrique Meroño and Christian Wolmar, chaired by Kamal Ahmed.To join the debate on Twitter please use the hashtag #IQ2energised

As a cyclist, I can tell you that the noise of an electric car, certainly at speed, is very similar to that of a petrol car. Weird, but true.

Most car noise these days is from the tyres

Discussion of the ‘dirtiness’ of electricity needs to take into account the ‘dirtiness’ of oil exploration, extraction ion and processing

People don’t drive more when petrol is slightly cheaper

Do we not need to charge for road use more effectively to avoid the problem of congestion?

Why do you not want people to make journeys? In an ideal world where we all have an air powered jet pack, or beaming up like Star Trek, what would be the problem with that?

Those smaller journeys will be done in shared autonomous electric vehicles within 10 years

What about Hydrogen cars? Should we all wait until they are ready?

Thinking about journeys should be the centre of new philosophy. Do we all need cars which take up parking space which could be used for rewilding, pedestrian streets, playing fields for school children etc etc. Most of us use our cars for less than 10% of the time we own them. What a waste of all that space used for parking. Let's think about passenger journeys and how we meet individual demand for these

The answer to small use of your car is to belong to a car club

Or get a taxi

Most hydrogen is produced in a very dirty way, and needs transport to point of supply to cars

Surely Hydrogen would be deployed as Fuel-Cell, not Combustion as just described?

The electric car is a fantastic product but where are the raw materials for the batteries are going to come from?

And where are the battery materials going to go end-of -life?

Hydrogen as a fuel is spoken of by widely varied proponents. Those that I think are mostly unbiased in their reviews doubt the viability of hydrogen based energy for industry and/or transportation.

Fast public charging is essential, but there is really not a problem with longer charge times when parked at home or work. It actually takes less time for the person than refueling with petrol.

Yes, to more accesibilty, and to less travel

On water consumption: it takes 3 gallons of water to produce 1 gallon of petrol

What about energy dependence? Last months electricity prices have been terrible. European countries need not to depend so much on Russian, North African, Arabian...oil and gas. Electric vehicles + Renewables seem the solution.

Given that most cars are used in urban / suburbanareas where air pollution is a serious problem for human health, is it not important and urgent to dramatically reduce such air pollution from vehicles ?

The vast majority of lithium/cobalt etc. for batteries, as well as the disposal of such, is related to cell-phone batteries today, not EVs

The key thing that’s missing in this debate is the fact that it takes more energy to make a typical fossil-fuelled than ALL the energy it consumes during the course of its working life; and - simply because an EV requires so much more rare earth ores and so energy in its making - the EV takes very substantially MORE. Coupling this with the fact that the average car is only used for 5% of its working life, if we are to be serious about energy reduction, the key thing is to be build substantially FEWER cars in the first place by sharing them in urban environments so that they each be used 5-6 times more; and to make them as SMALL AND LIGHTWEIGHT as possible in the urban environment.

It is early days for EV batteries to be reaching end-of-life - these batteries are much larger than cell-phone batteries!

LA has invested in a dramatic expansion of it's public transit system over the last decade,

It has but the ridership hasn't followed

What about the subsidies to the oil companies?

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