Greens Are Coming for All Cars
Greens (and Reds) Don’t Like Cars, Period
Late last month, Joe Biden was mocked for posting a photo of himself in an electric vehicle (a GMC Hummer) that costs $110,000 and up... In other words, the 46th president was ripped for confirming the stereotype that electric cars are a vanity passion for rich green liberals.
But what was less noticed, at least by the right, was that left-wing greens didn’t like Biden’s photo-op, either. You see, Middle Class Joe insists that he wants to replace internal-combustion vehicles with electric vehicles (EV), but the hardcore greens - including those within his own administration - want to get rid of cars, period. At certain times, as when he is trying to appeal to the far left during his campaign for the 2020 Democratic nomination, Biden has said that he wants to get “millions of vehicles off the road.” ...
One of the greens’ key concerns about EVs is lithium... lithium production is currently only about 100,000 tons annually, so WEF’s projections show that the needed ramp-up in lithium production will have to be, well, exponential.
One leading auto expert sees the day when the automakers will be phasing out of cars as we have known them. In a 2017 essay about the future of automation, Bob Lutz, a Detroit legend, connected EV to AV (autonomous vehicles). In Lutz’s view, cars of the future will not be cars, they’ll be “modules” in a mass-transit fleet, a kind of blend of Uber and a bus company. Lutz, born in 1932, is himself an old-time car enthusiast—a “gearhead”—and so he didn’t pretend to be happy about such a development. As he wrote in Auto News, “Everyone will have five years to get their car off the road or sell it for scrap or trade it on a module.” In other words, the Little Deuce Coupe—or any other kind of car that speaks to individualism and the freedom of the open road—will be replaced by Big Brother and the Driving Company, controlled by some combination of the Department of Transportation and Silicon Valley. Sound good to you?...
As an aside, have you noticed that the same people pushing transport “modules” have also been pushing Covid lockdowns, mask mandates, and vaccination requirements? There is a commonality of control.
Related
Electric Vehicles Are Anti-Market and Anti-Environment, by Daniel Șterbuleac, Lew Rockwell, 20 February 2023:
... a recent analysis reached an initial conclusion that one should drive an EV for about 700,000 kilometers (430,000 miles) to break even with the environmental impact of an ICE car. Later revisions of the hypotheses underlying the model lead to a lower mileage in between 67,226 and 151,259 kilometers....
... there are more and more details surfacing about the actual environmental impact of the EV, especially when it comes to producing the batteries and transporting the electricity:
- Batteries are made using many different minerals, especially lithium. Lithium is mined using a huge amount of water; in parts of the world, lithium mining already depleted more than half of the water reserves, affecting drastically the lives of indigenous farmers. Lithium can also leak into underground water, altering the soil and killing fauna and livestock...
- Cobalt mining is another socio-economic disability: most of its mining (around 70%) takes place in Congo, but the mines are owned and/or controlled by Chinese companies. You have the Chinese companies controlling the monopoly of a rare metal in a poor African country; slavery, poor payment, child labor...
- Massive amounts of toxic waste are created for rare earth elements (e.g. dysprosium and neodymium) mining: around 2,000 tonnes for 1 ton of rare earth element;
- Simply put, there are not enough minerals to cover for practically building the necessary batteries and electricity transportation grids. For copper, miles-deep mines would need to be excavated. It would take millennia to extract the needed lithium to fully replace ICE cars...
I will end with a quote attributed to Thomas Sowell: “Everybody is an environmentalist in the sense of not wanting to breathe polluted air or drink polluted water. But in practice the term has come to refer to a pagan nature worship cult that readily sacrifices other human beings on the altar to their dogmas.”
