Electric cars sales are up 66% this year.
President Joe Biden promotes them, saying things like, “The great American road trip is going to be fully electrified” and, “There’s no turning back.”
To make sure we have no choice in the matter, some left-leaning states have moved to ban gas-powered cars altogether.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom issued an executive order banning them by 2035. Oregon, Massachusetts and New York copied California. Washington state’s politicians said they’d make it happen even faster, by 2030.
Thirty countries also say they’ll phase out gas-powered cars.
But this is just dumb. It will not happen. It’s magical thinking.
In my new video, I point out some “inconvenient” facts about electric cars, simple truths that politicians and green activists just don’t seem to understand.
“Electric cars are amazing,” says physicist Mark Mills of the Manhattan Institute. “But they won’t change the future in any significant way (as far as) oil use or carbon dioxide emissions.”
Inconvenient fact 1: Selling more electric cars won’t reduce oil use very much.
“The world has 15, 18 million electric vehicles now,” says Mills. “If we (somehow) get to 500 million, that would reduce world oil consumption by about 10%. That’s not nothing, but it doesn’t end the use of oil.”
Most of the world’s oil is used by things like “airplanes, buses, big trucks and the mining equipment that gets the copper to build the electric cars.”
Even if all vehicles somehow did switch to electricity, there’s another problem: Electricity isn’t very green.
I laugh talking to friends who are all excited about their electric car, assuming it doesn’t pollute. They go silent when I ask, “Where does your car’s electricity come from?”
They don’t know. They haven’t even thought about it.
Inconvenient fact 2: Although driving an electric car puts little additional carbon into the air, producing the electricity to charge its battery adds plenty. Most of America’s electricity is produced by burning natural gas and coal. Just 12% comes from wind or solar power.
Auto companies don’t advertise that. “Electric vehicles in general are better and more sustainable for the environment,” says Ford’s Linda Zhang in a BBC interview.
“She’s a Ford engineer,” I say to Mills. “She’s not ignorant.”
“She’s not stupid,” he replies. “But ignorance speaks to what you know. You have to mine, somewhere on earth, 500,000 pounds of minerals and rock to make one battery.”
American regulations make mining difficult, so most of it is done elsewhere, polluting those countries. Some mining is done by children. Some is done in places that use slave labor.
Even if those horrors didn’t exist, mining itself adds lots of carbon to the air.
“If you’re worried about carbon dioxide,” says Mills, “the electric vehicle has emitted 10 to 20 tons of carbon dioxide (from the mining, manufacturing and shipping) before it even gets to your driveway.”
“Volkswagen published an honest study (in which they) point out that the first 60,000 miles or so you’re driving an electric vehicle, that electric vehicle will have emitted more carbon dioxide than if you just drove a conventional vehicle.”
You would have to drive an electric car “100,000 miles” to reduce emissions by just “20 or 30%, which is not nothing, but it’s not zero.”
No, it’s not.
If you live in New Zealand, where there’s lots of hydro and geothermal power, electric cars pollute less. But in America, your “zero-emission vehicle” adds lots of greenhouse gasses to the atmosphere.
Politicians and electric car sellers don’t mention that. Most probably don’t even know.
In a future column, three more inconvenient facts about electric cars.
When my car is sitting in my driveway it emits no pollution. It could sit for years and leave no green house effect.
But the nat gas power station runs constantly waiting for my neighbors tesla to plug in.
More electric cars means more and bigger demands for powerstations to run longer to charge these vehicles
“You have to mine, somewhere on earth, 500,000 pounds of minerals and rock to make one battery.”
FUN FACTOID TO SPRING ON IDIOTS.
The electric cars and the green new deal is totally about making environmentalists rich beyond anyone’s imagination and feeding politicians lust for more power. Nothing more, nothing less.
There’s no way the electric car is progress; it’s absolutely regressive. It is a very limited vehicle and has many negative consequences, not to mention it’s more expensive to drive than a combustion engine.
Here’s an inconvenient truth no one talks about: a brand new Tesla has a 150 mile range on the highway! You need to recharge after that. The cost of that recharge, at a Tesla supercharger station at Spacex is $60! That means 150 miles = $60. Not to mention the recharge time is two hours!!!
If I put $60 in my Mercedes GLB, I can drive $450 miles non-stop! I can drive all the way from Vegas to Los Angeles and have gas left over. If I drive an electric car, I will need to stop and recharge my vehicle three times for a total of six hours charging time.
Think about that and let it sink in. As more and more people switch over to glorified golf carts, the price of electricity will be more in demand than it already is and the price will skyrocket accordingly.
How many people are aware that the USA and Europe have already given electric cars a good try. When I was growing up my neighbor had an electric Maxwell. Pretty car but I remember my dad towing it a lot.
Yes, there were electric autos in the early 1900s, but they didn’t go very fast or very far, and were not competitive with gas powered vehicles. There was even at least one steam powered car – the Stanley Steamer.
And Ken doll Newsom will mandate that you not plug in your Prius during the frequently increasing black-outs.
I’m certain his gas powered limousine will remain mobile to get him to the next fundraiser (or the hell outta Dodge, during the next wildfire.)
“You would have to drive an electric car “100,000 miles” to reduce emissions by just “20 or 30%,”
And by that time you will need to replace the batteries.
Which will, by then, be as much or more than the original purchase of the car.
Also, who wants to spend $45,000 or more for an electric car when they can buy a small car getting 35 miles per gallon for less than $25,000. Second, I just read an article whereby a car owner has an electric car which required repairs. The cost was $6,000 dollars to replace the entire battery pack.
Let’s NOT forget the TAX CREDIT for buying the EV’s! If they are so wonderful why do they need a tax credit and given that, why did the EV companies RAISE their PRICES by, coincidentally, the amount OF the CREDIT?? Who can afford a $60,000 “toy”?? Probably the same people who the turnip in the White House is giving a break on their student loans – RICH FAMILIES! I know one thing for certain, if I’m tooling down the road in my earth destroying ICE truck and see someone on the side of the road needing a ride because their battery died I WILL stop. I’ll ask if there are children who need assistance and if so help all of them get to somewhere safe. If no children and it’s just the decisions makers then I’ll have to inform them that I empathize with them but would not further embarrass them by offering a ride in my EARTH DEATH MACHINE!
And here I thought electric cars were powered by unicorn farts. BTW, a lot of purchasers of these vehicles are going to have a major surprise should they need to replace their cars’ batteries. I just read where the Ford electric F-150 will cost about $28,000 to replace the battery with the lower range replacement battery and about $35,000 to get the longer range replacement battery. Ouch!
Once that sinks in those owners will probably start driving their gas powered vehicles more to save the electric one.
And that will make things worse because the batteries decline if not charged too.
Another point not brought up is the weight of these electric cars. In San Diego county where there is a large amount of these electric cars. Drivers contribute as much damage to roads as small to med size trucks, yet pay no gas taxes that go towards road repairs. But, most importantly the Highway Safety Dept is keeping under wraps, the danger of adding so many heavy vehicles to our roadways. In the past you always had full size SUV’s and trucks. Now you have people that drive a sedan or lighter vehicle driving a sedan with the weight of a conventional F-150. Accidents and road wear are never discussed.
Illegal for a EX-ORDER to discontinue gas cars is unconstitutional and they have no right telling commerce manufacturing and we the people what to drive, what to eat, how much water we should use, when they themselves are exempt from their mandates and they do what that want by the millions of laundered tax payers money they got rich while in office and when golf courses are so green and we are told via valley water in San Jose we should not water our grass, etc.
Environmentalists are such for three reasons and three reasons only. I got my info from an environmentalist who was retired at the ripe old age of 38.
He told me there are three types of environmentalists
1) those for the money.
2) those for the power.
3) those for the power and the money.
It doesn’t take much to see how true that is.
Someone once said It Works Better When you Plug it In so just plug in you EV and hope it don’t burn your house down because Biden is being a total idiot
From the following 2017 article:
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/11/battery-batteries-electric-cars-carbon-sustainable-power-energy/
“It takes nine years for an electric car to be greener than a diesel car, assuming an annual average mileage of 13,500 km (as was the case in Germany in 2002, compared to 12,700 km in England in 2013).
Most consumers will have bought a new car by then.”
Environmentalism is all about the power and money, that is why the democrats push it so hard, it helps bring about the communist agenda to redistribute the money from the poor and middle class to the leftist elites, sooo, much, easier.
When I fill up with gas, I consume a depleting resource with other drivers. When you charge up your EV, you consume a depleting resource, but the cost is shared with countless others who don’t even drive. Socialism at its finest.
BINGO!!! Try explaining it to a greenie, you’ll just get a blank stare.
The greenies can’t see beyond their virtue signaling. The facts about production, from depleting resources from foreign countries to over-taxing our electric grid, are of no concern to them. It’s all about “we’re saving the Earth” except, for them, the world ends at the U.S. borders. You can’t see strip-mined, into poverty, countries in S. America or Africa from L.A. and brownout/blackouts are a small price to pay until 100% green is achieved. These people are truly regressive and won’t realize it until they are under the thumb of the tyrants they support.