The common pitch of car commercials, and any commercials that sell products, is that they make you feel good and therefore worth spending your money. Driving a new [fill in the brand] car makes you feel noticed, safe, special, happy, and so on. Life is good; even amore!
With electric vehicles, we are being sold the colossal canard that owning one “is better for the planet!” A recent example comes with a pizza. If you order Dominos Pizza delivery, you can feel better because the company’s car fleet is going all electric! And who can forget that hilarious 2022 Super Bowl ad with Arnold Schwarzenegger and one of my favorite femme fatales, Salma Hayek, hawking EVs?
Memo to Arnold, Salma and the latest one-time A-lister, Kevin Bacon, and now Will Farrell during this year’s Super Bowl, all cashing in on EVs: it is past time to examine this folly. Electric vehicles bring environmental harm; do not net reduce carbon emissions in any appreciable way; are regressive against America’s poor to middle class; exploit the masses in the developing world; and empower Communist China, which is the biggest national security threat to the United States.
Electric vehicles require massive batteries that weigh about 1,000 to 3,000 pounds that comprise metals such as cobalt, manganese, nickel and graphite. These materials come mostly from developing nations, primarily Congo, which uses child labor to extract them from underground. Moreover, there is insufficient capacity to mine enough materials to even contemplate replacing gasoline vehicles.
Mining for energy is one of the reasons the so-called environmental green activists and organizations despise oil, coal and natural gas, though hypocrisy under the banner of “fighting climate change” means never having to acknowledge the obvious, much less say you’re sorry.
Studies have shown the fossil fuel energy to mine and transport metal ingredients and to manufacture batteries (especially in China), combined with the same energy necessary to power the electric grid, basically negates EVs purported benefit of lower carbon emissions. A 2015 study by the National Bureau of Economic Research found EVs had a more negative impact on the environment than gasoline vehicles. And, with residential electricity costs rising 10.5 percent in 2022, the cost to operate EVs is exceeding gasoline vehicles in some places.
Electric cars are expensive, averaging more than $65,000, akin to a luxury car, which makes them a virtue-signaling toy for mostly upper-income and wealthy. Since the U.S. government subsidizes the purchase of these vehicles with a $7,500 tax credit, it means every non-wealthy taxpayer is helping buyers with household income up to $300,000 become EV owners. Call it “reverse Robin Hood” policy.
Beyond the dubious impact on carbon emissions (assuming that even matters, which is a whole other debate), and the perversity of the working poor subsidizing upper-income earners purchase EVs, there are broader problems to transforming the U.S. car fleet to electric.
Electric vehicles represent a 21st century version of colonialism and will soon become an economic and national security vulnerability for the United States.
This is due to our biggest adversary, China; specifically, the Communist Chinese Party. This is the same bunch who just sent a spy balloon over America with impunity; persecutes millions of minorities within its borders; threatens militarily U.S. allies in the Pacific; and is infiltrating the U.S. by purchasing farmland, bankrolling universities, dictating movie content to the Hollywood film industry, and stealing government and industry secrets by the bushel.
China is inexorably creating a global monopoly on battery materials by investing heavily in mining in Africa and elsewhere while the Biden administration just closed 225,000 acres of northern Minnesota from mining, even though it contains the nation’s largest mineral deposits. While President Biden reduces the U.S. capacity to manufacture electric vehicles even as he pushes to increase their numbers on the road, American livelihoods are becoming increasingly vulnerable to the Chinese Communist Party.
After the coronavirus was unleashed by China and the knowledge that our own pharmaceuticals were so dependent on Chinese production, one would think our masters in government would be weaning us off dependence on China. No such luck.
Instead, President Biden, “Climate Ambassador” John Kerry and his entire administration are Play-doh in China’s hands, more concerned about offending its ruling politburo. One of the reasons for this, among several, is the credulous hope that they can make some sort of climate deal with China.
Government policymakers and lawmakers obsessed with “climate change” seem blind to the ugly realities of their own policies. Force-feeding electric vehicles on Americans is a regressive fool’s errand that won’t impact the climate, will necessitate more mining and exploitation of laborers in the developing world, and will put our economic well-being and security at the mercy of the Chinese Communist Party.
Still feel good about driving that electric car?