Yes, environmentalists want to take your car away — just slowly
Washington Examiner
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Non-Californians were treated to an amusing spectacle last summer. In the Gilded State, it wasn’t so funny.
California’s electrical utilities, you may recall, had to beg the state’s residents not to charge their electric vehicles at night because it was putting too much stress on the state’s fragile grid and potentially forcing rolling blackouts. This urgent request came six days after California passed a new regulation banning the sale of gasoline-powered vehicles beginning in 2035.
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Perhaps you see the problem here. As others have pointed out, it is wishful thinking to believe that California will be able to produce enough electricity by 2035 to charge all the cars it is trying to force its residents to buy. And although California’s situation is especially dire due to its risky gamble in making unreliable renewable energy sources central to its grid, many other states would likely face the same problem, were they to attempt similar coercive measures to replace gasoline- and diesel-powered cars.
Only it gets worse, because the electrical grid, it turns out, is not the only and perhaps not even the biggest bottleneck when it comes to forcing everyone into electric vehicles.
An even bigger problem is lithium, the light, reactive alkali metal that is a key component in rechargeable batteries, including those used in EVs. Based on a study conducted at the University of California, Davis, Scientific American reported last month that even if every person were simply handed the cash to replace all existing gas-guzzlers with EVs, such a thing would still be impossible. For it would require three times as much lithium as the entire world produces each year just to maintain the fleet.
And that’s assuming that everyone is given a more generous timeline of 2050 to make the conversion. In the next 27 years, not only would massive new sources of lithium have to be found, but there would likely be huge environmental problems from mining it all. Lithium mining is a dirty job, one reason there is only one lithium mine in the entire United States. Environmentalists constantly resist the expansion of domestic mining, such that most lithium mining is done in countries with lax environmental protections, such as Argentina and China.
In other words, this whole business of inducing or even forcing everyone into electric vehicles just isn’t going to happen — not in 2035, not in 2050, and maybe not even in 2082.
So where does this leave the radical environmental Left? The answer has to do with the true nature of its movement.
There is already a way to eliminate global warming — simply adopt nuclear power everywhere. The technology already exists, and its negative externalities are still obviously preferable to the end of the world, if that’s really what humanity is facing from global warming.
Environmentalists’ rejection of nuclear power, which is the only viable option for decarbonizing the world’s energy economy and the only one worth considering, therefore evinces the more sinister motives behind all of their activism. The point is not to save the planet but to end capitalism. Their ideology is not about the survival of species but the lowering of human living standards. This is why they don’t want you heating your home or cooking your meals with natural gas. It is why they want to make it impossible for you to eat meat or travel in airplanes. It is why they keep trying to force the issue of eating bugs, even though no one wants to do it. It is why they wanted to maximize pandemic restrictions, even after the pandemic ended two years ago — because for the first time they were forcing people to stay home and consume fewer resources. It is why, when they describe an ideal future, it is one in which you “own nothing” and are “happy.”
The point is not to make everyone drive an electric car — that is a mathematical impossibility, as the data show. The point is eventually to make it impossible to own any car. Is that the vision for the future that you want — one in which your children and your children’s children will…have to ride the bus?
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