March 2, 2023
We’ve had enough of the left’s guilt-tripping anyone who drives a gasoline-powered car. If anyone should be ashamed, it is those who are smugly plugging in their cars each night.
They are the ones responsible for raping the planet, poisoning entire communities, enriching genocidal tyrants, and creating a massive hazmat problem while doing nothing to stop “climate change.”
Does that sound harsh?
Here’s one recent bit of evidence. A Bloomberg investigation found that the aluminum Ford is using to build its “eco-friendly” EV pickup comes from Brazil.
“There, in the heart of the Amazon, rust-colored bauxite is being clawed from a mine that has long faced allegations of pollution and land appropriation,” it found. A class action lawsuit against the mining company accuses it of polluting the water, causing cancer, hair loss, neurological dysfunction, birth defects, and increased mortality.
While all cars use aluminum to cut pounds, EVs use far more to offset the enormous weight of the batteries themselves.
“For consumers seeking to lower their carbon footprints, the environmental and social costs of electric vehicles may be greater than they realize,” Bloomberg says.
No kidding.
Here’s the dirty, rotten truth about EVs.
EVs aren’t “zero emissions” vehicles. All an EV does is shift the emissions elsewhere — namely, over to gigantic monopoly power companies that burn natural gas, coal, garbage or, horror of horrors, employ nuclear fission. Plus, making electric cars releases far more CO2 than is emitted in the production of conventional cars.
EV enthusiasts say these aren’t problems because over its lifetime, an EV will produce fewer total CO2 emissions.
But that claim depends on a wide range of variables — such as the range of an EV, how long the batteries last, the energy source used to produce electricity, etc. — that can dramatically affect the EV’s carbon-cutting picture.
One study by the University of Michigan found that EVs can emit more CO2 than conventional cars. It said that depending on the fuel used by power plants in a given area, an EV can produce as much CO2 as a gas-powered car that gets just 29 miles per gallon.
EVs aren’t cheaper to operate. Another selling point of EVs is supposed to be that, while they are far more expensive to buy, they are cheaper to drive. But that depends entirely on the relative cost of electricity and gasoline.
A study by the Anderson Economic Group found that with gas prices on the decline and electricity costs climbing, it’s cheaper to operate a mid-priced gas-powered car than a comparable EV, particularly when you factor in the extra time and hassle involved in recharging an EV.
EVs are built with slave labor. While gasoline is produced almost entirely from domestic supplies of oil, the lithium, cobalt, graphite, and rare earth minerals needed to make batteries mostly come from places such as China, Congo, Indonesia, Iran, and other countries that are noted for gross human rights violations, and are often mined and produced using forced and child labor.
“The road many of these materials take to consumers is littered with human rights abuses,” says Human Rights Watch.
Take the cobalt mines in Congo, where most of that stuff is found. Siddharth Kara, a fellow in public health at Harvard, describes it as “modern-day slavery. It’s not chattel slavery from the 18th century where you can buy and trade people and own title over a person like property. But the level of degradation, the level of exploitation is on par with old-world slavery.”
EVs are environmental rapists. Mining and refining the minerals needed to make EV batteries is also an environmental disaster. To make just one EV battery requires 25 pounds of lithium, 60 pounds of nickel, 44 pounds of manganese, 30 pounds of cobalt, 200 pounds of copper, and 400 pounds of aluminum, steel, and plastic.
Writing in these pages, Ronald Stein noted that “you must process 25,000 pounds of brine for the lithium, 30,000 pounds of ore for the cobalt, 5,000 pounds of ore for the nickel, and 25,000 pounds of ore for copper. All told, you dig up 500,000 pounds of the earth’s crust for just one battery.”
In Indonesia, where nickel for EV batteries is largely produced, “polluted air and water are causing respiratory problems, sickness, and eye injuries and destroying forests and fisheries. The rush to expand production has pushed local communities and infrastructure to the brink of collapse,” Wired reports.
“So, the next time you are thinking about purchasing an electric vehicle or driving your EV car, before congratulating yourselves on saving the environment, remember that it came at a cost of entire mountains in developing countries, thousands of square miles of land, and billions of gallons of oil and fuel,” Stein writes.
Processing this stuff also requires massive amounts of water. It can take half a million gallons of water to produce a metric ton of lithium, for example.
Aimee Boulanger, executive director of the Initiative for Responsible Mining Assurance, told the Washington Post that “It is hypocritical to say we are here with these electric vehicles to solve our climate problems if, in making them, we contaminate a community’s drinking water or dry up the irrigation wells they rely on.”
There’s also the looming problem of what to do with the mountain of used lithium-ion batteries that will soon pile up, along with their tendency to burst into flames and emit toxins into the air, ground, and water.
It’s time to end this hypocrisy.
It’s time to admit that EVs are being wildly oversold.
It’s time for EV owners and manufacturers to answer for the environmental and human rights crimes they are bankrolling in the name of “climate change.”
It’s time for those of us who drive gasoline-powered cars to take pride in the fact that our vehicles are safe, efficient, reliable, and don’t require ritual human sacrifices to build.
— Written by the I&I Editorial Board