When I say they want us serfs to live in unheated hovels and travel by shank's mare, I mean exactly that

Here's the Next Damn Way the Left Will Go After Your Car

Stephen Green

Your car is killing the planet, you, and other living things in a brand new way that will surely give environmentalists yet another justification to try and eliminate personal car ownership.

This time, it’s your tires.

The Drive’s Lewin Day late last week reported on a number of studies showing that “tire emissions pose a threat to global health.”

There may even be “a whole host of toxic chemicals being shed from tires and brakes that have been largely ignored until now,” according to Yale Environment 360. One of those, known as 6PPD-q, is supposed to be “highly toxic to multiple fish, including coho salmon,” although the report doesn’t indicate whether that’s true in amounts actually found in the environment.

It all sounds rather ominous to learn that “tire rubber is made up of over 400 different chemical compounds, many of which are known to have negative effects on human health,” and that the “toxic chemicals being shed from tires and brakes” actually exceeds those from “a typical car’s exhaust output.”

Left out of all of these biased studies is how cars save lives, lengthen lives, and improve lives. Life expectancy and the quality of life have both risen hand-in-hand with the rise of the automobile. The Left can spin it all they want — and they will and do — but from a life-saving trip in an ambulance to a pleasant life in the suburbs to our abundance of food to that road trip to spend Christmas with Grandma and Grandpa — all those things are made possible by the internal combustion engine.

No wonder Lefties hate it.

… But here’s the kicker: electric vehicles actually make the problem, such as it is, even worse. According to the report, “EVs tend to shed around 20 percent more from their tires due to their higher weight and high torque compared to traditional internal combustion engine-powered vehicles.”

You won’t be surprised to learn that regulators are already all over this absolutely life-threatening issue. In Europe, “the Euro 7 standards will regulate tire and brake emissions from 2025,” and of course “the California EPA will require tire manufacturers to find an alternative chemical to 6PPD by 2024.”

Gas furnaces and kitchen appliances are being regulated out of existence — without lawmakers having to take the unpopular step of outlawing them outright — with impossibly expensive emission standards. Similar rules are slowly being applied to gas and diesel engines until nobody will be able to build them to satisfy the bureaucrats. But that’s OK because nobody would be able to afford to buy one.

With this report from The Drive, now you know how they’ll come after electric vehicles, too: by making the tires impossible to afford.

It’s not even four years since the Left’s radical COVID power grab, and we’ve already arrived at a place where the median American income will no longer buy a median-price home or a median-price new car. The American middle class as we’ve understood it since the end of World War II doesn’t exist anymore.

In other words, “Bidenomics is working,” to borrow a phrase from the White House — and add a dash of truth to it.