We are surrounded by idiots inspired by morons like those running California. Climate dolts who have embraced a chain of lies whose solution is the Climate Cult equivalent of dumping western garbage on third-world countries.
But instead of garbage scows its carbon emissions, a joke wrapped inside a deception with a carbon-intensive punchline. A gag that you begin with this cold hard truth. If you genuinely believe emissions are an immediate threat to the globe, you should be on your way to China, Africa, and India.
Reducing emissions in the US is like yelling at one guy about some smoke from his woodstove while ignoring all the neighbors burning tires to stay warm. It’s ineffective and backward, but so is the tailpipe dream of zero vehicle emissions.
It’s political theater.
If global human emissions are killing the planet, this is burying the bodies in someone else’s backyard.
The problem with the problem
Let’s pretend CO2 emissions are harmful and transportation is an opportunity to reduce them. This idea moves Political money (your money) towards ramping up EV infrastructure: more charging stations, an EV-friendly world.
Let’s pretend none of that infrastructure will result in one particle of emitted carbon from fabrication to transportation to operation to end of life, now, or ever. It’s a big lie, but we’re going to swallow it.
Let’s pretend the energy used by charging stations is also so clean you would let your baby play in it.
We shall also pretend that the green energy infrastructure to make that clean energy, primarily wind and solar fabrication, transportation, construction or deployment, use, and end of life require not one bit of emitted carbon, nor will they result in a sliver of “harm” to the planet or its people before during, or after its life cycle.
These are all lies, and most of them do satisfy our emissions relocation (offshoring) premise, but we’re going to look the other way.
We’re going to focus on lithium batteries. You can’t run an EV without them. You have to mine the earth metals, ignore how that happens, transport them, process them, fabricate them, transport the finished product, charge, test, install, deliver, eventually replace and scrap them or exchange more energy to recycle them.
Just the batteries.
The political left has gone to great lengths to debunk the idea that this is not harmful or more carbon-intensive. Still, none of those fact-checks addresses all of the factors involved in just building batteries – let alone all the facts above we chose to ignore that are also necessary.
That the extraction processing, and transportation of battery-making materials at the source are carbon-intensive and produce significant amounts of unregulated emissions and not just CO2 (and a few human rights abuses).
In other words, the people who say they are serious about the effect of emissions on global climate are not interested in total emissions at all.
They plan to drive up energy and vehicle costs regardless of the side effects on people and livelihoods here. All to make their solution look more appealing while offshoring all the emissions it takes to make their plan possible.
They’ll say we reduced transportation emissions 35% or 50% in Vermont, Massachusetts, or California, but that’s a lie. They didn’t reduce anything. They relocated the emissions to another part of the planet, possibly increasing them in the process while making life harder for the people there and you here.
All based on three flawed assumptions, even more absurd than anything else I’ve written here today. We have no idea what the best average natural temperature is for the earth. That human behavior could disrupt that process in any meaningful way. Or that politicians, even absent partisan interests, could do a damn thing to fix it if we did know.
And again, even if there was a problem and everything they said was true, Americans switching to EVs is arranging deck chairs on the Global Emissions Titanic.
It improves your green street cred but only if people ignore the truth and refuse to ask the right questions.
It’s another act of fraud.
