Frederick Krantz
Isranet, Apr. 17, 2023
The car companies brought this “backlash” against EVs on themselves, drooling over federal subsidies for electric cars. And the article omits key negative considerations—the pollution issuing from the daily need to generate—ironically, through continuing use of coal, oil, and natural gas–enough electricity to charge over 230 million electric cars; the failure to implement a really accessible network of high-speed chargers, rural and urban, necessary given the distances driven in the U.S. and the short (and climate-affected) range of current EV technology; and the enormous amounts of CO2 and trillions of tax-payer-sourced investment dollars, that assuring such immense amounts of electricity will entail (and have already been invested).
Just the need to mine the rare-earth minerals used in battery construction, makes each electric vehicle an enormous polluter even before it’s used (not to mention the moral issue of exploitation of cheap native and child labor in places like the Congo). Moreover, what to do with the millions of batteries’ dangerous contents when they wear out is unanswered, even as Biden ignores the political-military implications of even further dependence on China, source of both most of the rare-earth materials and of EV batteries).
And all of these electric cars—so long as China, India, SE Asia, Africa, etc,, remain dependent on coal and oil for energy–will have little impact on global “climate change”, but a great deal of influence on power, on the ability of the state to control us (e.g., by controlling access electronically to the road system, by limiting charging access, imposing weekly/monthly/annual travel quotas [directly verifiable electronically], etc). Isn’t there a basic Constitutional issue here? What right has the state, through executive decrees, to tell individuals what kinds of car/engine they can buy/use? How can the EPA (an agency whose right to “legislate” is currently being challenged by the Supreme Court) impose by edict a transformation of such fundamental and far-reaching societal importance, which should be made only by the people’s duly-elected representative body, Congress?
Behind this assault on the gasoline-powered internal combustion engine is not “climate change”, a politically clever euphemism whose supposed inevitability is challenged by many scientists, but a highly-ideological radical utopian vision of a controlled society in which personal mobility is dependent on arbitrary state control. (See here the “l5-minute city” vision of utopian radicals, in which cars are supposedly unnecessary because “basic needs” [defined by state authority] are nearby and can be accessed either through walking/bicycling or public transportation.) But behind this vision, as always with the radical Democrats, is power, manifested in the drive arbitrarily to control individuals [which, again, involves de facto abrogation of Constitutional guarantees—much safer than a politically-risky direct assault on the Constitution] by limiting individual liberty and due process).
The Biden Administration has already, inter alia, erased America’s former oil- and gas-based energy independence, undermined the integrity of America’s southern border, fostered the spread of “wokism” on and off campus, weakened American, foreign policy in the Middle East, Latin America, and elsewhere, and caused a domestic inflationary spiral which may well issue in recession and much-feared “stagflation”. Now it is risking a collapse of America’s pioneering industrial leadership in a key sphere of modernity, the automotive revolution, pioneered by Henry Ford’s cheap, mass-produced Model T, and expressed in General Motors’ motto “See the USA/In your Chevrolet”. If the Bidenistas have their way, soon we’ll all be singing a different tune: “Put your EV away/Uncle Joe says no travel today”.