Electric vehicles are trendy, but not very environmentally friendly, affordable or emission-free
Paul Driessen
Tesla may be synonymous with electric vehicles right now. But within a few years, GM, Volvo and many other manufacturers will mostly or only produce electric vehicles because they are emission-free, climate-friendly, socially and environmentally responsible and more affordable every year. That explains why we need subsidies to get people to buy and mandates to make people buy.
President Biden wants all new light and medium vehicles sold by 2035 to be electric vehicles. Vice President Harris wants only ZEVs (zero-emission vehicles) on America’s roads by 2045. Various states are considering or have already passed similar laws. Some would even ban sales of new gasoline and diesel vehicles by 2030. Climate gazer John Kerry will likely be happy to buy electric vehicles to expand his fleet of twelve cars, two yachts, six homes, and the private jet he flies in to accommodate climate-friendly crusader prices.
AOC would use their Green New Deal to “massively” expand the production and use of electric vehicles. She now drives an electric vehicle herself, most likely a Tesla Model 3 Long Range valued at $ 48,000 (350 miles per charge).
Mini AOC also has an EV, pink and suitable for a 10 year old. She started her GND and bought her mini car after watching “the most important documentary on climate change. It’s called Ice Age 2: The Meltdown. I am not saying that. This is science! “She explained.” My Green New Deal is going to cost about $ 93 trillion. Do you know how much that is? Neither do I. Because it’s absolutely worth it. If the sea levels keep rising, we can’t go to Hawaii! ” once in their EV!)
For some people, electric vehicles are an easy choice. But why the high subsidies? Why do the rest of us need mandates and dictations – and a new Henry Ford dictum that allows consumers to have any type of car they want as long as it’s electric. Regardless of needs or preferences. (But at least we can choose the color.)
More importantly, who actually gets the subsidies? and who pays for them? What other costs and unintended consequences are Big Green, Big Government, Big Media and Big Tech silent about?
A 2021 Tesla Model S Long Range can travel 412 miles on a charge of several hours. The MSRP is $ 80,000. The Model Y all-wheel drive costs $ 58,000. A Nissan Leaf costs “only” $ 34,000 but only drives 149 miles. The mileage of course assumes that the temperatures are moderate and that the drivers neither use the heating nor the air conditioning of the car. Similar sticker shock prices apply to other EV makes and models, making them out of the reach of most families.
Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) plans to spend $ 454 billion to install 500,000 new EV charging stations, replace US government vehicles with EVs, and fund cash for clunkers discounts to help at least some Families control this transport transformation.
Politicians are being pressured to keep the $ 7,500 per car tax credit (and cute state tax breaks), which will expire once a manufacturer’s cumulative vehicle sales hit 200,000 since 2009. EV drivers also want other incentives: free charging stations, access to HOV lanes for plug-ins only with the driver, and not paying fees that replace gasoline taxes to fund the construction, maintenance and repair of highways, on which they ride.
A 2015 study found that the richest 20% of Americans received 90% of these generous EV subsidies. No wonder there. Lobbyists are clearly more valuable than engineers to manufacturers and drivers of electric vehicles.
This perverse reverse Robin Hood system also means subsidies are funded by taxpayers – including millions of working class and minority families, most of whom can never afford an electric vehicle.
Any money spent on clunker programs will make the problem worse. By enabling sufficiently wealthy families to trade fossil fuel cars for electric vehicles, millions of perfectly drivable cars and trucks will be created that would instead be squashed and melted into used car lots. Basic supply and demand laws mean that the average cost of used ICE vehicles will rise by thousands of dollars and will be out of reach even for millions of low-income families. They will be forced to buy junk pieces or ride buses and subways overcrowded with people they hope won’t carry next generation COVID.
The United States will begin to look like Cuba, where there are still legions of classic cars from the 1960s and 1970s, maintained and kept on the road with engines, brakes, and other parts cannibalized from wrecks and even old Soviet cars become. As soon as states and federal associations ban the sale of gasoline, that will end too.
Perhaps even more ironic and perverse: The term “zero-emission vehicle” only refers to emissions in the US – and only if the electricity required to manufacture and charge ZEVs comes from non-fossil-fuel power plants. Texans now know how well wind turbines and solar panels work when “out of control global warming” is recording cold and snow. The Californians have to avoid future power outages.
For several years now, production engineers have been considering how systems can be converted from ICE to EV motors. They’d better think about ways to convert and power all of their factories – and our planet.
Given that many politicians and environmentalists alike are being rejected by nuclear and hydropower, having a power source will soon be a recurring challenge. Reliable, affordable electricity will be a pipe dream. There will simply be enough electricity to replace all of today’s coal and gas electricity generation, fuels for combustion vehicles, natural gas for cooking, heating and emergency power, coal and gas for smelters and factories, and myriad other uses for fossil fuels – a miracle.
Every home, neighborhood, and city will also need to replace existing gas and electricity systems to handle the added loads. More trillion dollars. It’s also about nasty, poisonous and irreversible lithium battery fires – now in cars and soon in private households, parking garages and replacement batteries.
We’re talking millions of wind turbines, billions of solar panels, billions of battery modules, and thousands of kilometers of new transmission lines. They kill birds and bats, disrupt or destroy sensitive habitats, and affect or eliminate hundreds of plant and animal species. If electricity prices rise, US factories cannot compete against China and other nations that do not have to and will not stop using fossil fuels.
Zero-emission fantasies also ignore the essential role fossil fuels play in making ZEV (and pretending to be renewable energy systems). From extracting and processing the myriad of metals and minerals for EV battery modules, wiring, powertrains, and bodies, to actually manufacturing the components and finished vehicles, every step requires oil, natural gas, or coal. Maybe not in California or America, but elsewhere on planet earth, especially in Africa, Asia and South America, mostly with Chinese companies in leading roles.
A single EV battery module consumes about 30 pounds of lithium as well as many other metals and materials weighing at least 1,000 pounds total: from common iron, copper, aluminum, and petroleum-based plastics to “exotic” materials such as cobalt and several rare earth elements. An electric vehicle requires three times more copper than its ICE counterpart. A single wind turbine requires around 3.5 tons of copper per megawatt of electricity.
And for every 1,000 tons of finished copper, around 125,000 tons of ore are mined, crushed, refined and smelted – and thousands of tons of overburden and surrounding rock removed in order to reach the ore. The same applies to all of these other materials, especially rare earths. Try to imagine the cumulative global impact of all of this mining and fossil fuel use – so that AOC, Al Gore, Leo Di Caprio, and other wealthy, holy people can drive “clean, green, climate-friendly” electric cars. (That’s fine. Neither can Mini AOC.)
Worse still, many of these materials are being excavated and turned into “virtuous” electric vehicles, wind turbines and solar panels – in China, Congo, Bolivia and elsewhere – regardless of child labor, fair wages, safety at work, air and water pollution, toxic and radioactive waste, endangered species and land reclamation. It’s all far away, out of sight and mind, and therefore irrelevant. And amidst it all is the thorny issue of the genocide of the Uyghurs and their people being sent to re-education / slave labor camps to face China’s mineral, electric vehicle and other export markets.
How long will we let real social, environmental and climatic justice take a backseat to the EV mythology?
Paul Driessen is Senior Policy Advisor to the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and the author of books, reports and articles on energy, the environment, climate and human rights issues.
Like this:
Loading…
Comments are closed.