Over the past few years, I have got to know David Blackmon as guests on each others podcasts, from his writing for Forbes and of late, his “Energy Absurdity of the Day” on Twitter and Substack.
In today’s article, he does a great job synthesizing the thoughts, and perhaps fears we’ve been having about politicians blatantly ignoring the lack of mineral mining to make EVs batteries. It’s so obvious you almost wonder if they are doing so on purpose and today’s piece addresses just that. It is especially good timing on the heels of this Super Bowl ad, which I personally thought was the best in a long list of horrible ones. Sadly, the miss is that the truck SHOULD BE a hybrid rather than EV as hybrids use less minerals and give the benefits of both world’s while reducing the use of fossil fuels. That- apparently - is the goal. Nonetheless, world wide “premature electrification” seems to be happening everywhere, including in your kitchen.
The Wall Street Journal carried an op/edwritten by Alyssa Finley on Monday that hits on several themes I’ve been writing about for a couple of years now. Those themes encapsule trends that, if allowed to continue, will render the owning of new cars a goal the rich can only hope to attain. Taken together, they will ensure that EVs become a classic “bridge to nowhere” for average auto consumers.
Finley points to a new report issued by Cal Davis University which concludes that “Replacing all gasoline-powered cars with electric vehicles won’t be enough to prevent the world from overheating. So people will have to give up their cars.”
Oh. Well, most people will have to do that, but we can be sure that the global elites who make all these decisions for the rest of us will be able to keep theirs.
The report attempts to measure the sacrifices and changes that must be made by individuals to reach the highly arbitrary “net zero by 2050” goals being pushed upon us by the climate alarm movement. The conclusion, as Finley puts it, is that ”Progressives’ dirty little secret is that everyone will have to make do with much less—fewer cars, smaller houses and yards, and a significantly lower standard of living.”
Yep. This “final solution,” increasingly being talked about out loud at all the annual COP and WEF conferences, has been building for years now. We must, the alarmists demand, go back to what would essentially become a 19th century mode of living - isolated, uncomfortable, hungry, immobile and poor - if we are to prevent a 1.5 degree warming of the planet that even the IPCC’s most extreme modeling scenarios project would result in just a 4% decrease in global domestic product by 2100.
Where EVs are concerned, Finley lays out the strategy for ensuring their costs keep rising in three steps:
Problem No. 1: Electric-vehicle batteries require loads of minerals such as lithium, cobalt and nickel, which must be extracted from the ground like fossil fuels. “If today’s demand for EVs is projected to 2050, the lithium requirements of the US EV market alone would require triple the amount of lithium currently produced for the entire global market,” the report notes.
…
Problem No. 2: Mining requires huge amounts of energy and water, and the process of refining minerals requires even more. According to the report, mining accounts for 4% to 7% of global greenhouse-gas emissions. Auto makers have made a priority of manufacturing electric pick-up trucks and SUVs because drivers like them, but they require much bigger batteries and more minerals.
…
Problem No. 3: “Producing EVs and building and maintaining roads, highways, and parking lots are energy- and emissions-intensive processes with high levels of embodied carbon,” the report says. “Electrification of the US transportation system will massively increase the demand for electricity while the transition to a decarbonized electricity grid is still underway.”
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Taken all together, what these three key problems add up to is constantly rising costs for and scarcity of electric vehicles, which the same alarmists insist are the only solution to ridding the world of the internal combustion engine.
It’s genius, really, when you think about it: When you’re able to force an alternative that you know cannot replace the designated “problem” in any affordable, scalable way, you know that leads inevitably to your preferred Final Solution.
As Finley points out, this is far from some wild theory held only by the far-left fringes of the climate alarm movement. Check out this excerpt:
But what about suburbanites who need cars to get around? Reducing “car dependency” will require “densifying low-density suburbs while allowing more people to live in existing high-density urban spaces,” the report says. Translation: Force more people to live in shoe-box apartments in cities by making suburbs denser and less appealing.
All this may sound crazy, but it isn’t a fringe view on the left. A Natural Resources Defense Council report last year on lithium mining also concluded that the government needs “to reduce long-term dependency on single-passenger vehicles.” The Inflation Reduction Act included billions of dollars to promote bicycling and so-called livable neighborhoods.
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Now, you might consider the NRDC to be a leftwing fringe group, but trust me: That group is right in the mainstream of climate alarmist thought these days. The same is true of the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI), whose recent study the Biden administration continues to cite as its justification for trying to ban your gas stoves.
What used to be “far left” is now the core of the Democrat Party’s voter and funder base.
Bottom Line: We must discard the silly notion that the goal of the climate alarm movement is to have us all driving abundant and affordable EVs instead of ICE cars in the future. The real goal is to make all cars so costly that they can only be afforded by the globalist elites who fly their private jets to Davos each January for the annual WEF conference.
That’s where all of this is going, and we pretend otherwise at our own, and our children’s own, peril.
That is all.
And nevermind the fact that EV owners don't have to pay to maintain and build roads and bridges (yet). The "inconvenient truth" is that the cost of energy of all kinds will be going up. Cheap money and cheap oil and gas encouraged us to drive bigger cars, live in bigger houses, buy more stuff than we otherwise would have. We're at the beginning of the Great Unwind in a standard of living that 8 billion people can't have. But that doesn't mean that everyone except the 1% needs to live in a tiny house and walk to work.
Insightful, as always... (sigh) ah, to live in a post-factual age.