Uncle Joe has a car you can’t refuse
Washington Examiner
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It’s hard to tell what is most preposterous about President Joe Biden’s new mandate that two-thirds of all new cars sold in 2032 must be electric vehicles. The competition is tough.
Is it the huge shortage of critical minerals needed to meet such a goal? Is it that our electrical grid has nowhere near the capacity to charge that many electric vehicles? Or maybe it is the fact that the charging infrastructure does not exist and has no chance of coming into being in eight short years.
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Take your pick.
The bottom line is that you should be prepared to spend money preserving your existing combustion engine vehicle form. If Biden has his way, all you’ll find on the market eight years from now will be $70,000 paperweights.
More than 80% of drivers do not want to buy an electric vehicle. Who can blame them? Not only are they expensive — the average EV costs just under $70,000 — but without a special plug installed at your house, it can take 50 hours to charge an electric car. It can take 10 hours even if you invest in a 240-volt outlet.
The fastest commercial outlets take 20 minutes, several times as long as filling your tank with gasoline, and good luck finding a working charger. The University of California, Berkeley, studied the San Francisco Bay Area’s public chargers and found that more than 1 in 4 doesn’t work. A 2022 national study by J.D. Power placed the broken public charger rate at 20%.
But remember, that is the rate of broken chargers that exist. There are 3 million electric vehicles on the road and 103,000 public chargers. That’s a 29-1 ratio. A California Energy Commission study recommended a 7-1 ratio. That means hundreds of thousands of new charges would have to be installed nationwide just to meet current needs. Considering the laborious permitting process that Biden has reimposed on infrastructure spending, there is simply no way that infrastructure will be built in time.
Even if you find a working charger, the electrical grid may not be able to meet demand from all the new electric cars that people are supposedly going to buy — upward of 2 million per year, based on current new car sales. Environmentalists talk of how much oil the United States will save from going electric, but just because oil isn’t being burned doesn’t mean energy isn’t being consumed. Studies estimate that electrical demand will go up by at least 25% thanks solely to electric vehicles. Where is that energy going to come from? Not from wind and solar power.
Where will all the lithium, copper, and cobalt come from that are needed to make batteries for electric cars? Biden has put environmentalist activists in charge of the Interior Department, so those critical minerals won’t come from American mines.
A recent Scientific American study found that world production of lithium would need to triple overnight to maintain — not build, just maintain — an all-electric American fleet. The copper needed to meet the mandate would require more copper to be produced over the next 25 years than has been produced in the last five millennia.
The minerals are going to have to come from overseas, almost certainly from China. No country benefits more than China from the gap between Biden’s environmental daydreams and cold hard economic reality. The U.S. might even be at war with China between now and 2030.
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Finally, even if you can afford an electric car and you can find a working charger and the energy grid hasn’t collapsed, don’t drive your new BidenMobile in the cold or up a hill. Electric batteries are 25% less efficient in freezing weather and 40% less efficient if you want to heat the car so you don’t freeze while driving.
So enjoy your reliable gas guzzler. In eight years, you may not be able to replace it. Thanks, Biden.