We hear much ballyhoo about the supposed environmentally friendly nature of electric cars. But there are problems that the Mother Earth worshiping fanatics seem unaware of, or are willfully ignoring. First, switching to EV vehicles will not save on fossil fuels because poor countries that mine the essential minerals use fossil fuels to mine them and process them for export. Second, many of the most essential minerals required for EV vehicles, like lithium, cobalt, manganese, and graphite are primarily located in places that the Feds Gone Wild have unthinkingly imposed sanctions on, like Russia and China, and these countries are not inclined to sell to the US even if the US allows their purchase.
Third, and perhaps most important since politics can change quickly, EV cars cannot be simply junked into landfills as fossil-burning cars heretofore have been, but must be carefully dismantled upon end of use by scarce teams of men in hazmat suits who must disassemble them, especially discarded lithium batteries, in order to avoid extensive contamination of soil and ground water. This may well become prohibitively costly and result in huge price rises in the original purchase cost once this becomes widely understood.
Like the construction of large wind turbines, which require extensive concrete runways resulting in high CO2 output, the mining of rare minerals also expend large amounts of CO2 in addition to additional burning of fossil fuels. Overall, it seems presently that the switch to EV vehicles will result in even higher amounts of CO2 than ever, with little reduction if any in the burning of fossil fuels. And this doesn’t even examine the impact of using ever greater amounts of scarce electricity which can only be provided at the present time by additional power plants that must use natural gas to produce the additional electricity.
Frankly, I wonder if it would actually have been better if Europeans still maintained their UN mandated colonies in the Third World so that extraction of these essential minerals were done in a more environmentally friendly way than currently done. My conclusion is that the entire Environmental movement reflects an ill-thought obsession with the PC Cult’s worship of a fantasy Mother Earth, a religious cult that I describe at length in this website, and in my upcoming book: A Beginners Guide to the PC Cult.
Of course, if the Cultists really were so concerned about Mother Earth, and not with old-fashioned power politics, they would not have pushed the world to the brink of nuclear war by imposing a decade of economic sanctions on Russia thus forcing much of Europe to abandon the use of natural gas and switch to burning wood and coal. But what else can one expect from morally superior, power-mad, religious cultists?