1905 electric car |
The environmental
“Green” politicians and our government have tripled the price of gasoline through
its anti-fossil fuel economic policies from day one of this disastrous
administration, in hopes that Americans will rush to buy their expensive and
unaffordable electric vehicles (EVs) as mandated by the Green New Deal which is
neither green, nor new, nor a deal.
To use a
phrase that the globalist left and the United Nations have concocted in 1992, “sustainable,”
to describe just about everything we do in life and in any economy, EVs are not
“sustainable” for many reasons. They are just a toy for the rich and for young
Americans with trust funds or money to burn on the latest fad.
You don’t
have to be an engineer to realize that there are huge problems with the total replacement
of fossil fuels and combustion engines with electric cars powered by lithium
batteries.
Young
engineers claim that the United States would only need to increase its energy
production by 30 percent to accommodate all the possible EVs Americans would drive.
But the theory of energy needed is quite short-sighted and leaves out a large
swath of our giant economy and its commercial needs. The calculations only
take into account private driving and not our industrial and transportation
needs, i.e., big trucks, ships, airplane fleet, military, hospitals, schools, businesses,
etc.
Few mention
our aging grid that needs huge upgrades in order to prevent crashing. The patch
grid currently in use fails frequently during power surges and larger needs due
to inclement weather and heat/cold waves. Blackouts are already occurring without
millions of EVs in use and in need of charging.
Lithium
batteries have a lifespan of 7-8 years and the cost of a new battery is
$10,000. The rare metals are not in endless supply and lithium must be mined in
certain countries where pollution is rampant and child labor is used.
Construction
and disposal of lithium batteries is controversial as they are seldom recycled,
they must be buried.
Producing
such lithium batteries is certainly not carbon neutral at all even though the
engine of an EV may not pollute the environment.
We know that
time is money and the downtime between charges, somewhere along the highway, is
certainly an issue that must be taken into account. There is a huge opportunity
cost to such collective downtime that nobody has bothered to calculate.
Gas stations
service hundreds of cars a day, filling the tanks quite rapidly. In order to
have a large electric station that could charge even a fraction of cars in much
longer time, one needs acres and acres of space to accommodate EVs sitting
there for half hour or more at each station terminal.
People
living in high rise condos and apartments would be unable to charge their EVs
overnight unless they run electric cables out the windows which is totally
impractical or park in garages that are retrofitted with electric chargers for
each parking space, a cost that would be collectively astronomical to invest
in.
EVs draw
serious amps to charge, thus popping transformers like corn in a kettle.
The
electricity for charging stations is generated mostly by fossil fuels, not
carbon neutral fairy dust as claimed by proponents. To say that solar panels could provide the
electricity needed for EVs is ludicrous when you consider that a town of 45,000
people would need 15 square miles of solar panels to support its electricity
needs.
Owners of
EVs, if they can afford the high prices, will become slaves to a designated
dealer for service. Insurance rates for EVs are certainly higher, and first
responders to an accident would need specialized equipment to deal with a crash
or the ensuing lithium battery fire.
Are there
enough rare earth metals such as lithium, cobalt, nickel to produce just
batteries for EVs?
Without fossil
fuels, how do the “Greens” propose to mine the metals for the EV batteries,
with picks and shovels?
What happens
when the metal resources for EV batteries dry out?
Until all of
the above problems are solved, hybrids are a good interim solution to cut back
on air, water, and soil pollution.
Until such
time that the grid is seriously updated and not patched, and the proper infrastructure
to accommodate EVs is established, EVs are just more expensive toys for rich
people and millennials to virtue signal what good earthers they are and what dangerous
polluters the rest of us are.
Of course the cheer leaders for electric cars conveniently ignore the fact that the minerals needed for the batteries are mined using slave labor, frequently involving children. Many of those minerals come from Africa where children are used to mine most particularly cobalt which is deadly. The hypocrisy is breathtaking.
ReplyDeleteI fully understand how easy is ti be caught in the EV propaganda...but where is the stored electricity coming from? FRom coal, oil, gas or from the super-expensive solar panels or brd-killing windmills? The roaming ghost of Diesel and Ford are scared to DEATH!
ReplyDeleteFrom Kimmie Wilson, commenting at Canada Free Press: "I can hardly wait for an “electric vehicle only” mandate...or the end of gas power cars...Then sit back and watch electricity prices skyrocket...thanks to the monopoly on electric vehicles and there being no other options for powered transport. This is all the usual shell game of industry. But this time it is actually the industry that will be running what used to be an elected government...Call it totalitarian corporate communism...and YOU will pay with outrageous electricity charges and taxes...can’t wait to hear all the “climate change” suckers complain about the cost of “renewable electricity” once the cost is no longer hidden in the tax costs of today...while they still wait for rising sea levels at Obama and Kerry’s Waterfront mansions."
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