When Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg callously remarked recently that Americans would never have to worry about high gasoline prices if they bought electric vehicles, it was a reminder that the ruling class is determined to force the entire nation into EVs. Which is interesting, because electric vehicles are guilty of transgressions that our progressive superiors have identified as mortal sins. “Green” cars are careless polluters and racist, as well.
It’s not well known but it is a fact that EVs are dirty. We’ve covered that ground and we’ll get back to it in a moment. For now, though, let’s consider their racist effect.
“Without access to charging stations, black and Hispanics communities may be left behind in the era of electric vehicles,” reads the headline of the Washington Post’s Dec. 9 effort to yet again make everything in America about race.
The story moaned about “charging deserts” in black and Latino neighborhoods,” “mobility justice,” the politically decided placement of chargers, and EV use “growing rapidly in well-to-do, mostly white communities.”
“Come and see the systemic racism of electric vehicles,” is the headline to Ed Morrissey’s sharp analysis of the story in HotAir.
“If we want to avoid” the racist traps mentioned by the Post, “maybe we shouldn’t implement a scheme with this much systemic racism built into it,” writes Morrissey. “Who knew the humble internal-combustion engine was so woke?”
No, the Post doesn’t claim that EVs are outright racist. But since Barack Obama arrived on the national scene, no one has ever had to do or say anything racist to be labeled a racist by Democrats, their media team members, shallow celebrities and the usual assortment of demented activists.
All that’s been needed to be tagged a racist is holding a point of view that goes against the narrative established by the self-appointed arbiters of race relations. Or in the case of EVs, a campaign insufficient for living up to the demands of equity, which is a perverted sense of fairness created by race baiters.
Given their inherent racism, it’s easy to forget that these “clean” cars are quite dirty. But fortunately there are diligent people who will remind us.
“Electric Vehicle Push Is Sparking Massive Deforestation, Environmental Damage,” says the headline of a Daily Caller article last week.
The reporter mentions “a major nickel mine in a Philippines rainforest … mowing down acres of trees as global demand for minerals essential for electric vehicle manufacturing surges,” “an increased runoff of toxic waste” from the mine “into the environment,” and destruction of the area’s ecosystem.
“In what world does it make sense to destroy the environment to save the environment from ‘climate change’? But, this is the way climate cultists think,” writes Pirate’s Cove blogger “Willam Teach.”
Here are a few more things Americans should know about electric vehicles:
- Assembling a “midsize EV would produce about 15% more emissions than the process of building a similar-sized gasoline powered vehicle,” says the left-leaning Union of Concerned Scientists.
- Each new EV incurs a “carbon debt” even before it leaves the lot. The debt can be paid off but that can take up to two years – or longer.
- “The birthplace of most electric cars is the Democratic Republic of Congo, a country where the diamond trade has helped finance civil war,” we reported earlier this year. “There, reports the Deseret News, ‘slave labor‘ is feeding ‘big tech’s quest for cobalt,’ an element used in the batteries that drive EVs.”
- One-fifth of cobalt supplied from the DRC comes out of small-scale artisanal mines, which are notorious for child labor and human rights abuses.
- According to the United Nations, mining for lithium, another element needed for EV batteries, “uses nearly 65% of the water” in Chile’s Salar de Atacama region, “one of the driest desert areas in the world, to pump out brines from drilled wells.”
- Because of groundwater depletion and pollution, local farmers and herders have had to abandon ancestral settlements in Salar de Atacama. The U.N. says lithium mining “has also contributed to environment degradation, landscape damage and soil contamination.”
Progressives in politics and in the press want to force the country into electric cars because it gives them an opportunity to show how virtuous they are, and provides an outlet for their urge to dictate others’ lives. The downsides mean nothing to them. They claim they want to save the planet, but in the beginning, and in the end, it’s all about them.
— Written by the I&I Editorial Board
And don’t you need coal, or some other fossil fuel, to make electricity?
Let’s no also forget that the electricity to recharge all those EV batteries has to come from somewhere, mainly coal or natural gas-fired generators. There are areas of the country with larger sources of hydroelectric and even nuclear generation capacity, and there’s also the minuscule amounts of solar, wind and geothermal generation, but let’s be honest: EVs are coal-powered vehicles.
Of course, we should all remind ourselves of the “watermelons:” Green on the outside, red on the inside.
Another strike against EVs: the environmental impact of recycling all those batteries at their end of life. They can either be sent to a landfill, a bad idea, or recycled to recover their cobalt, nickel, and lithium using processes that release still more CO2 into the envt.
And nary a word about the underlying lie that anthropogenic CO2 emissions cause global warming.
Until the greenie fruitcakes can explain the last several dozen glaciation cycles, each separated from one another by warming periods lasting tens of thousands of years, virtually all of which were warmer than our planet is today, their entire justification for the push for EVs is based on junk science.
Recharging the batteries to your Electric car with a Fossil Fueled Generator makes as much sense as having Save Energy ads on TV