Another Invented Injustice, EVs and Chargers

I believe that some Marxists stay awake at night trying to find novel ways to subjugate the rest of the population whose free-market ideology they despise. They certainly do not believe in supply and demand, they believe in centralized communist planning and forced equity of outcomes.

In addition to environmental justice, gender justice, sexual justice, tree and shade justice, a recent Washington Post article dedicated an entire page to “A New Source of Inequality: Access to Charging Stations.” (Sunday, December 19, 2021)

Apparently Black and Hispanic neighborhoods have a complete lack of access to electric car charging stations in Chicago’s “preeminent Black neighborhoods” and are thus in danger of being left behind in the era of electric cars. Naomi Davis, an environmental activist, is determined to change that. She is the founder of the 14-year-old environmental advocacy group called Blacks in Green.

The author of the article points out that the lack of electric charging stations and the vehicles that depend on them deepens the environmental injustice that Blacks and Hispanics suffer as they are “relegated” to gasoline-powered cars that are cheaper to buy but “more expensive to fuel and maintain.”

Electric vehicles are quite expensive for the average American no matter what their skin color. I see in the Washington, D.C. suburbs a lot of Millennials driving shiny and bright new Tesla cars and SUVs. In the last few months, the Smart Cars seem to have disappeared off the roads.

And the EV electricity is not cheap, it is generated mostly by fossil fuels; electricity appears cheaper to fuel cars than gasoline because it is subsidized by the government largesse. The average consumer does not understand economics, so they believe what they are told by the MSM that the electric cars run on fairy dust and save the planet from man-made pollution and global warming Armageddon. The highly toxic lithium batteries, their manufacture and disposal do not come into consideration at all.

Gasoline prices have escalated due to gas taxes added to the price and because of the Biden administration stated policy to terminate fossil fuel use by shutting down pipelines and denying drilling rights beginning on his first day and week in office.  

A community partnership in Chicago is considering the lack of EV charging stations issue from the “environmental justice” standpoint. Billy Davis is quoted in WaPo, “Interstate construction disrupted the chain of wealth-building, and it has a negative health impact.”

According to WaPo, Davis believes that “Covid-19, which has stricken polluted Black communities harder than well-to-do White ones, emphasized the disparity,” he explained. “Our proximity to the negative effects of fossil fuel production, to the interstate highway, puts us at risk.” Why African-Americans may be especially vulnerable to COVID-19 | Science News

Never mind that there is no such connection scientifically without a huge bias, but it sounds convincing in print.

The article connects, through extreme mental gymnastics, the lack of charging stations to white racism, to a Chicago 14-year-old resident, Emmett Till, “brutally murdered by White racists on a trip to visit his relatives in 1955 Mississippi.”

The environmental project purchased a house next to where the child lived with his family, and they want to install an EV charger there. “Historical injustices persist today” – no wonder there are 180 charging stations in mostly white areas and 39 in mostly black and Hispanic areas of Chicago. The numbers are not the result of basic economics of supply and demand, it is pure “historical racism” and “social injustice.”

Quoting a 2019 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, non-Hispanic white people (there are Hispanic white people) have a “pollution advantage.” Through their consumption, they experience 17% less pollution, while Blacks and Hispanics have a “pollution burden” of 56% and 63% excess exposure. Apparently lower income folks suffer most from air pollution because they live in “transit deserts.” Inequity in consumption of goods and services adds to racial–ethnic disparities in air pollution exposure | PNAS

And the evil boils down to combustion engines and the inability to charge in the street a highly expensive car that most middle class white, black, or Hispanics cannot afford to purchase or maintain.

I own a 15-year-old combustion engine vehicle and have no desire to buy an $80,000 Tesla nor do I feel deprived or discriminated against in any way by those who do. It is economics not racism or injustice.

But I do get angry every time I have to fuel the engine at double the cost of gasoline from a year ago, thanks to Biden’s purposefully destructive energy policies. And the false allegations of racism continue to pay off for Blacks and Hispanics even when, in Shakespeare’s words, there is “much ado about nothing.”