Joe Biden’s disaster of a “Transportation Secretary” Pete Buttigieg testified before Congress last week. Buttigieg is the former, unimpressive mayor of South Bend, Indiana, so he’s not exactly qualified to manage a nation’s transportation systems. Instead of doing his actual job, Buttigieg is still obsessing about racist roads and forcing everyone to drive electric cars so that he can save the weather. Unfortunately for Buttigieg, at least one Member of Congress is an electrical engineer, and he understands the futility of trying to force everyone into an electric car.
The brilliant plan of Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg is to force 50% of households into electric vehicles by 2030. There’s no possible way that this nutty pipe dream can ever come to fruition. Even if half of American households wanted electric cars (which they obviously don’t), there’s simply not enough electricity to meet that demand.
Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) pointed this out when Buttigieg was trying to lecture everyone about his virtuous policy of saving the weather. Massie noted that if a two-car household switches to two electric cars, it adds the equivalent electric demand of 25 refrigerators to the grid. There’s no possible way to match that demand for electricity based on current environmental policy in the US. Unless we start building coal factories at the same rate as Communist China (about three new plants per week), we will never be able to meet that demand.
Massie says that this is a dangerous form of political science and has nothing to do with sound engineering. He’s right. Democrats are trying to manufacture consent for a major market shift that no one wants and which no one but politicians and radical left-wing communists are asking for.
The market for electric vehicles has been pretty much tapped out by this point. Every person who wants one of these silly toys already has one. The only reason why electric vehicles are still even a thing is because the market is being artificially propped up by government subsidies. Governments have been using rebates, sales tax exemptions, loans, grants, tax credits, and other methods of trying to lure people into buying electric cars.
It’s not working. Car dealerships across the country now report that they’ve got a huge inventory of EVs gathering dust on their lots. Nobody else wants to buy these things. Yet the taxpayers are going to continue subsidizing this product—for which there is no demand—to the tune of $393 billion in the coming years. That’s equal to the entire GDP of Hong Kong.
If government subsidies went away tomorrow, this entire electric car fad would go away overnight. Who wants to add 25 refrigerators to their monthly electric bill anyway?
The climate cultists have somehow managed to convince more than half the population that carbon—which we all need to live—is somehow a harmful substance for the planet. Yet EVs consume a tremendous amount of carbon-powered electricity in the home countries where the rare earth metals for their batteries are mined (not to mention the fact that child slave labor is used in the cobalt mines of the Congo, which is another reason why mentally healthy people don’t want an EV).
There’s nothing green about EVs. They don’t take more petrocarbons out of the mix when it comes to generating electricity. It just rearranges things on the grid. There is no possibility that adding the equivalent of 25 refrigerators to every household is going to use less electricity. It’s a pipe dream.
