A feature, not a bug, because their intention is not to put us all into battery cars, it's to deny us cars altogether
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Robert Hinderaker has posted some interesting charts, as well as commentary on this lunacy
“Robert [Bryce] offers a series of charts that document the problems the EV industry is facing. Sales of EVs (55% of them Teslas) are concentrated in a few states and a handful of very blue counties. Fewer vehicles are being sold overall, and an increasing number of Americans say they won’t consider buying an EV. One reason why consumers don’t want to buy EVs is that they understand charging them is a permanent problem that will prove insoluble if government mandates are actually enforced. Thus:
In 2019, Southern California Edison, one of the biggest investor-owned utilities in California, estimated the amount of juice needed to electrify transportation in the state. The utility found that trying to do so “will increase electric load by nearly 130 terawatt hours — representing more than one-third of the grid-served load” by 2045. The same report estimated the state will need to add at least 80 gigawatts of new zero-carbon electricity generation capacity over the next two decades. But … California’s electricity use is falling. Some of that decline is due to people and industry leaving the state. The other factor may be the high cost of power in the state. Further, California will not add 80 GW of new generation capacity over the next 20 years. The permitting process is far too long, and the costs of trying to do so are too high.
“Electric vehicles will always be much more expensive than internal combustion vehicles because they need vast quantities of raw materials:
Hinderaker: “Then we come to the availability of needed natural resources. Apart from the fact that the Chinese control the current supply, we have the question: how will the vastly increased demand for raw materials be met?”
[I]f [Richard Herrington, the head of earth sciences at the Natural History Museum in London, and seven colleagues’] numbers are right, electrifying all of U.S. motor vehicles would require roughly 18 times the world’s current cobalt production, about nine times global neodymium output, nearly seven times global lithium production, and about four times world copper production. Even if there were sufficient political will — and money — to attempt an electric overhaul of the transportation sector, there may not be enough cobalt or rare earth elements to meet demand.
And that is just for the U.S. Western European countries are electrifying (or pretending to electrify) their automobile fleets, too. And you could to a comparable calculation for the alleged transition from fossil fuels to wind and solar energy. Even if you assume that the Earth somewhere holds enough raw materials to meet this enormous demand, the mining, manufacturing and transportation effort needed to carry out these mandates would be the greatest since the Industrial Revolution. And how much of that mining do you think would take place in the U.S.? Little or none, under current political conditions.
Electric vehicles are a novelty item and have been for over a century. There is no way that our automobile fleet will be converted from internal combustion to batteries, just as there is no way we can or will replace fossil fuels and nuclear power with wind- and solar-generated electricity. The while thing is a fantasy. But the damage that will be done to our economy, our livelihoods and our national security, in pursuing that fantasy, is incalculable.
