Electric cars are not green.

There’s some work on electric cars reported in the New York Times that says:

• People who own all-electric cars where coal generates the power may think they are helping the environment. But a new study finds their vehicles actually make the air dirtier with 3.6 times more soot and smog deaths than petrol – but they are beneficial as they produce more atmospheric plant food (aka CO2)
• Ethanol isn’t so green, either. “It’s kind of hard to beat gasoline” for public and environmental health, said study co-author Julian Marshall, an engineering professor at the University of Minnesota. “A lot of the technologies that we think of as being clean … are not better than gasoline.”

But this is hardly surprising. The general rule of enerconics is that energy and GDP/money (inflation adjusted) are largely the same thing. So, if something costs more, it usually means that when all the “carbon costs” are taken into account, then something that costs more uses more energy. So an electric car that costs more than petrol to run, is almost certainly going to use more energy.
So cost means not only more financial cost, it usually means more energy cost. So more expensive technology – even if it is baded as “renewable” is usually far from green (except in the sense of naive)
The reason it can look less is that much of that energy can be hidden. In electric cars some of the big energy consumers are the batteries which take a lot of energy in production and which need regular replacement.
Likewise for a bird-mincer, the foundations and steel work use a huge amount of energy and so once all these costs are included I still doubt most bird-mincers produce more energy over their lifetime than is consumed in producing and installing them.