As is so often the case, it appears that the far left and the mainstream media have not really honestly analyzed how dirty electric vehicles actually are. Electric vehicles are treated almost like magical creatures that drive on pixy dust: some view EVs to be almost magical and imagine they drive around not polluting. This is utter nonsense. EVs may actually pollute more than traditional internal combustion vehicles.
I have heard very few realistic discussions from liberals or the media about the vast amount of mining of expensive and poisonous rare earth minerals necessary to produce electric vehicles. The choice is not between hydrocarbon production and completely clean electric vehicles; the choice is between hydrocarbon production and vast earth mineral mining production. That is how you make clean EVs – through lots of dirty mining operations, mining rare earth elements like lithium, cobalt, and neodymium. These materials are toxic, and extensive mining operations to harvest the vast amounts of rare earth minerals the world will need to transition to electric vehicles will cause a lot of pollution, including runoffs of dirty minerals into nearby rivers, and other environmental contamination. Some experts believe EVs are dirty than standard gas-powered cars.
Moreover, a vast amount of energy will have to be consumed to generate all the electricity needed to charge electric vehicles. Currently, only 12% of US electricity comes from so called green energy. For liberals who can’t do math, that means 88% of all electricity comes from burning hydrocarbons. Tragically, President Biden’s war on US energy is making things much worse. One of the few countries that made any progress during the Paris Climate Accord was the US. Our remarkable shift to clean burning natural gas actually lowered US emissions by 1-2%. Upon being sworn in, Biden immediately cancelled the Keystone Pipeline, which is the safest, cleanest way to transport hydrocarbons, and which immediately eliminated significant numbers of American high paying jobs. He also took other steps to damage and discourage US energy production, which is the main reason gas prices have spiked during his presidency.
Sadly, instead of allowing the US to develop more clean burning natural gas for the world, Biden is stupidly asking the dirty producers, like Russia, to pump more oil, seemingly forgetting that pollution goes everywhere and is not just limited to China, India, and Russia. When America produces less clean energy, the world must produce more dirty energy. That is currently happening in China, where they are busy constructing 184 new coal power plants. Are liberals going to put a clear, glass bubble over China, like in the Simpson’s movie?
Ironically when renewable sources of energy failed in Europe, for want of adequate wind, (excluding all the methane flatulence, including Biden’s embarrassing fiasco), the result was that the Europeans began to burn more coal. Guess where the energy for the US electrical grid is going to come from? With Biden’s war on US cleaner fossil fuel production, much of it will come from burning coal. Again, only 12% of US energy currently comes from renewable resources. The other 88% will have to come from burning coal and other hydrocarbons. That is where the energy is going to come from for the pixie dust powered electrical grid that is supposed to allow a bunch of rich people to drive around in their expensive but dirty, and heavily subsidized, electric vehicles. Far from reflecting a substantial step forward in controlling greenhouse admissions, the EV revolution increasingly looks like a badly thought-out exercise in rich persons’ feel-good vanity.
By Paul H. Beattie
Notes from the Secular Right 