Cars require roads. After all, what use is a car without a road to drive it on? Whether a car uses fossil fuels or is electric, all cars require roads.
Roads are terrible for the environment. Aside from fragmenting habitat and creating an influx of pollutants into surface water and soil, the cars and trucks that drive on roads kill a huge number of animals every year. Roadkill numbers are hard to come by because no one is keeping tally and virtually no one is studying the impacts of vehicles on animals.
A recent study in the journal Global Ecology and Biogeography is one of few studies on road death of non-human animals caused by vehicle collisions. The study finds that:
“[I]n Florida, vehicle collisions are responsible for 90% of known bear deaths, according to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.
For the endangered Florida panther, more than 85% of recorded panther deaths were due to vehicles in 2020, according to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.
Florida panthers share a similar increased risk of extinction with bears based on the study’s data for their species, Puma concolor, where a 10% increased risk of extinction for the species occurs if at least 27% of the population is killed by traffic.”
For animals with low populations, death by car can have a big impact on the species and possibly tip the species into extinction.
Replacing fossil fueled cars with EVs will not save the animals who are being killed by the millions every year by cars and trucks driving on roads. It will not stop the trillions of pieces of micro plastic shed by car tires that poison the environment every day. And we already know that attempting to replace cars with EVs will increase the amount of mining around the world by at least 6 times the current rate of global mining in just the next 2 to 3 decades (according to the International Energy Agency).
Replacing fossil fueled cars with EVs will not “save the planet”. In fact, it will help to destroy what’s left of the planet. We must not let this happen. Join us. Say no to the car industry, to car corporations, to car battery makers, to roads, and say yes to life.
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