I sometimes wonder if I’m just moving down the wrong path. Then something like the spending bill that has recently passed congress comes along and voila, I’m proven right again. It does make one feel a tad better.
Look, I’m all for electric vehicles. If you want one, buy one. More power to you. Just don’t ask me to pay for it. That being said, let’s review the bidding:
The bill that recently passed congress extends the $7500 rebate for EV’s. So I end up subsidizing your EV. But wait – it turns out that if the parts in the EV, read that battery, comes from a country that we don’t get along with, read that China, no rebate. 77 percent of all batteries come from China. The idea is to motivate auto manufacturers to source batteries here in the US. The manufacturers say they can’t do that, and even if they could, that it will take years to create manufacturing here.
The problem is that the raw materials that goes into batteries, lithium, nickel, and cobalt, are by their nature very messy to dig out of the earth. They make oil drilling look like an operating room. So in the NIMBY fashion, the Greens are adamantly opposed to sourcing these metals here in the US. It’s ok to ruin countries in Africa and South America, you know, ‘over there’ but not here in the good old US of A.
Let’s don’t even get into the issue of the power grid, or the fact that 88% of the power on that grid is from non renewable sources. As Fox Business Host Charles Payne noted the other day:
Then Payne emphasized, “Here’s the crazy thing. We just have to look to Europe. France and Germany. Their electricity rates will be 1000% higher this winter. One-thousand-percent higher than the average price for the last ten years.”
Payne reiterated that there are significant costs to the green energy “transition” that politicians, who have almost no idea how energy is generated, tout. “All this is a money transfer. We’re transferring money to the richest Americans out there. Progressives who voted for Joe Biden. That is all this is.”
Whenever the government is involved, problems arise. This new law basically does nothing for the environment, causes problems for automakers, and will increase the battery costs and increase non environmental extraction of metals from the earth in countries that don’t particularly care about keeping such activities environmentally pure.
I wonder if we had just left well enough alone, the free market would have enabled the EV companies. If they weren’t able to get funding from private sources, maybe the technology wasn’t there yet or the tech would have moved more slowly, allowing the support system to keep up with it.
Is this new law a classic example of Unintended Consequences? I think so.
I’m going to ask my green friend down the street who owns a Tesla and a monster gas guzzling Jeep why he replaced his Chevy Tahoe with another gas guzzler. I’ll keep you posted.
JVH
