As Joe Biden’s gas reaches for the Left’s price-point G-Spot the Twitter-titter of giggling schoolgirls has filled the echo chamber with the glories of Electric vehicles (EVs). Not so fast.
We’ve covered this dozens if not hundreds of times. Electric cars have a huge carbon footprint no matter how you charge them. The front and back end of an Electric car battery’s life is nasty. And contrary to the stated goal they do not lower the amount of ‘CO2’ released into the atmosphere.
It’s as useless an endeavor as allowing the government to insist that what it wants to do would make any difference.
Lithium mining, transport, processing, and disposal are a carbon-intensive headliner. Another is the manufacturing process to create these huge batteries, their transport, and eventual disposal. And one aspect of all of that which is under-reported recently caught my eye thanks to TreeHugger, of all places.
The Modern electric vehicle power plant uses a lot of nickel. Most of it is mined in Indonesia, Brazil, Cuba, the Philippines, and Russia. Canada and Australia also have nickel mines.
Like any open mining operation, it has a huge carbon footprint, but what concerns the TreeHuggers is that “nickel is not usually mined in an environmentally sensitive way …[And] “The rock contains only about one percent nickel, so it generates a lot of waste…”
Dirty and Expensive
The price of nickel is up 92%, and the demand created by the Left’s push for an electrified fleet will amp up mining and waste and make it more expensive.
EVs are already a lot more expensive than a typical combustion engine if you hadn’t noticed. The majority of those who drive them are in the top 5-10% of wage earners. Yes, mostly “rich people” have been collecting the generous government taxpayer-backed incentives to get people behind the wheel of these coal and gas-burning beauties.
And speaking of coal, you can’t make steel without it or aluminum. All that talk about net-zero steel ignores the fact that you can’t make steel without coal. Period. And if there is no steel, then no Windmills (with unrecyclable blades to power your nickel-cobalt-manganese electric car battery).
Aluminum requires massive amounts of electricity to process, which will use some of the capacity needed to charge the millions of new not-so-green EVs so, sorry, you can’t charge it right now.
And while we’re ignoring all of these problems
Let’s not forget that the Left wanted rising gas prices to get people into EVs. But we lack the material, manufacturing, supply chain, infrastructure, and grid capacity to charge them at the pace the Left claims we need to adopt.
But we’re doing it anyway?
Picture it like being herded toward the edge of a cliff where they plan to put a bridge that no one is sure how to start let alone finish – but they want you on the other side now.
And to get there at anywhere near the pace these chicken little’s demand will have a more massive environmental impact than the problem they claim we need the EVs to solve (without exploring the human cost of the third world sweat shop slave-level labor mining).
It will also require trillions of dollars that don’t exist, that no one but they want to spend, making the cost of all of that (and everything else) exponentially more expensive (inflation).
So, let’s ruin the environment to make something no one (but they) will be able to afford that they (honestly) don’t even want you to drive.
It’s all carbon smoke and mirrors, and they either know that or are too stupid to realize it, and either case is justification for their removal from any role in government or public service.
