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Biden’s EV Mandate Means More Dirty Mines and More Slave Labor
Work harder, kid. Biden wants more EVs.
According to a Gallup poll released Wednesday, 41% of Americans said they would not buy an electric vehicle. But White House Climate Adviser Ali Zaidi doesn’t care about what dumb Americans think — he knows better.
“Whether you measure today’s announcements by the dollars saved, the gallons reduced, or the pollution that will no longer be pumped into the air, this is a win for the American people,” Zaidi gushed.
If this actually is a win for the American people, government wouldn’t have to force it on us. But the government and media assure us that more EVs are an unalloyed good.
As Thomas Sowell said, “there are no solutions, only trade-offs.” A vast expansion of EVs means a vast expansion of mining lithium, nickel, and cobalt. Mines which these same environmentalists aggressively oppose.
Most cobalt comes from Chinese-owned mines in the “Democratic” “Republic” of Congo, which have ravaged the environment and employ child slave labor. I guess EVs matter more than Black lives these days.
Nickel is available more widely, with major sources being Australia, Canada, Indonesia, Russia, and the Philippines. These mines create “plumes of sulfur dioxide choking the skies, churned earth blanketed in cancerous dust, and rivers running blood-red,” according to environmental watchdogs.
Most of the global lithium supply comes from extraction ponds in Australia, Chile, and Argentina. All require large quantities of water from arid regions, create massive mineral waste, and increase respiratory problems among residents.
(Don’t get me started on rare-earth elements.)
This reveals the big problem with all these so-called green initiatives: our leaders think of energy production as less a matter of physics than one of morality.
Slaves extracting minerals is somehow “good,” while well-paid workers drilling oil under strict environmental controls is “evil.” EVs are only clean and efficient for the end user in an advanced society; it’s not like upper-middle-class Tesla owners vacation in the Congo anyway.
It has ever been thus. Energy sources like hydroelectric, nuclear, and natural gas were initially sold as clean and green but became demonized the instant they turned a profit or revealed trade-offs.
Oil and coal are dirtier, but they’re cheap and efficient. Dams alter the environment but provide reliable power and mitigate flooding downstream. (They also create man-made reservoirs, which environmentalists alternately love and hate.) Nuclear produces vast amounts of energy and emits only water vapor but holds the risk of radiation and long-term waste storage.
Despite progressive activists pushing renewable energy sources as cure-alls, similar trade-offs exist. Currently, solar and wind produce minimal energy at very high cost, yet both are renewable and are a great option for certain applications (especially off-grid living). But they also fillet/roast birds and other wildlife, damage local ecosystems, etc. Pick your poison.
Powering our cars on sunshine and summer breezes sounds eco-friendly. But solar panels, windmills, and the batteries that store their energy require mined materials. A lot of them. Chinese communists and Congolese autocrats think this is great. Biden seems to agree. His EV mandate just means the Democrats are endorsing a lot more slave labor and strip mines.
Published in Energy, Environment
I don’t know, man. Hard call.
Of course this plan simply shifts the demand for energy to electric power plants which must expand appropriately.
U.S. utility-scale electricity generation by source, amount, and share of total in 2022:
https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3
We can cover the country in solar panels and windmills, ignoring for the time being that sometimes the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow. Or we can start building nukes.
Given the lead time on building nuclear power plants in this country, if we are going 100% EV in four years, we should have started building new plants in the 20th century.
We are not a serious country.
Some favorites:
How can they just order this?
I would guess EPA regs. Or one of the others.
Why not just outlaw all gas cars?
The list unintended consequences of the left will be long. One of my favorite is the “no-nukes” movement of the late 70s. It was around the use of nuclear power. All of the same set of lefties complained about it’s use. Imagine the amount of extra carbon emissions caused by this movement.
The flaws, problems, and cruelties in this course of action are so blatant that it should be easy to stop. We need to have some sort of British-style nationwide work stoppages to protest it every time someone in Washington proposes it.
Meanwhile Toyota the largest car manufacturer in the world is going with Hybrids and not EV’s.
California also has a bunch of ridiculous mandates right now, that are in effect on trucks. They require the replacement of diesel with Electric trucks. One big problem. Electric big rigs dont and will not exist for another decade at a min.
I have said this for years. Solar panels are cool, until some day they are profitable to make without being subsidized. Then their manufacturers will be denounced as capitalist exploiters
I think the slave labor and environmental effects of mining are fruitful avenues on which to push back against mandates for electric vehicles and “renewable” energy, as those effects appeal to the sensibilities of the very people pushing electric vehicles and “renewable” energy. Thus those appeals are more likely to convince people than technical arguments based on factors like power generation and transmission capacity.
Imagine if taxes weren’t withheld by your employer, and people just stopped sending in their tax payments to the gov’t.
They might stop doing so much stupid. They *might*.
Congress does have the power to tell the EPA that “no, the regulatory power Congress granted to the EPA does not include the power to remake the American vehicle industry, so STOP.” But that would require Congress-critters to grow some spine, which looks unlikely.
The courts could also overrule the regulations on the grounds that the regulations exceed the authority Congress granted to the EPA, as the U.S. Supreme Court did last year with EPA regulations that tried to remake the American electric power generation industry. But court challenges are expensive and take a long time.
Hey, you can’t expect Congress to get involved in such a minor issue as the forced transformation of a couple of America’s largest industries.
Stupid, ignorant, immoral, and generally bad behavior is a recurring theme in societies that have become wealthy, dominant, and peaceful. The society forgets how it became wealthy, dominant, and peaceful, and thinks it can ignore or go against everything that allowed it to become wealthy, dominant, and peaceful. Until later when reality bites, and the society becomes impoverished, subjugated, and torn apart by violence. Just read the Old Testament of the Bible. Many more recent examples crop up in history books.
These mandates need to be opposed on 1st Amendment grounds. They are the establishment of a religion – the pagan religion of environmentalism. They are religious in nature and not scientific.
Related:
“Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded–here and there, now and then–are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty. This is known as ‘bad luck.'” — Robert A. Heinlein, “Notebooks of Lazarus Long”, Time Enough for Love, 1973
Wait until they strike Lithium in Cambodia.
There is a term called ” green colonization”. It’s when the developed nations of the world, ( green ideologues), tell the developing nations ( think African)…
” it’s lovely that you have untold trillions of dollars worth of untapped natural gas, coal, and oil under your feet”.
” However, you’re gonna have to leave it there, because we can’t have all those dreaded carbon emissions destroying the planet”!
“Oh, and by the way, we’re going to confiscate, er, borrow untold millions of acres of land, to erect massive wind farms, and solar arrays”!
“How do you like them apples”!
P.S. ” Black Lives Matter”!
I should also add that electric cars will be regarded as awesome only up until the point that new gasoline and diesel vehicles have been driven from the marketplace. Then the green left will start talking about the downsides of electric cars and reverse the subsidies and ask for heavy taxation on them.
I think bicycles will be safe forever. Even the most rabid greenies aren’t going to say you need to give up your bicycles and walk because the resources consumed to manufacture bicycles are too great. I don’t think even the Khmer Rouge took away privately-owned bicycles, but perhaps @dmak can correct me if I am wrong.
You want to see work stoppages? Force the working class out of their gasoline powered vehicles. Most of the workforce won’t be able to get to work.
I have lived long enough to see many of these “same environmentalists,” who spent their early decades demonstrating–not always peacefully–against genetically-engineered crops, animal medical research, effective pesticides, farm and livestock feeds with added antibiotics and growth hormones, and to save the whales, discover in their middle years that it’s perfectly OK–in fact, often desirable and even required–to pump confused human children of one sex full of life-altering chemicals and to set their feet on the path to lifelong infusions of artificial hormones–and eventually disfiguring surgery–so that those same children can pretend to be someone they are not.
Nothing surprises me anymore.
Piffle. Just relocate the poor people to no more than fifteen minutes’ walk from their assigned work site.
Next problem?
Except the “who cares as long as it’s not happening here?” seems to be a factor in the environmental stuff as well as the war in Ukraine.
Was the party of slavery… still is.
No, my daughter’s 10th grade history teacher told her the parties switched. So when they read about pro-slavery and pro-segregation Democrats they should think Donald Trump and when they see pro-freedom Republicans they should think Joe Biden. My daughter laughed. Why is a 15 year old smarter than a teacher with an advanced degree?
Because the 15-year-old lacks an advanced degree in education. An advanced degree in education is virtually an imprimatur of ignorance.