Britain showcases what US and global future will really look like with “sustainable” EVs
Duggan Flanakin
Joe Biden, his fellow Democrats, and apparently big U.S. automakers, have joined the rush to transform America’s transportation to 100% electric vehicles (EV) whether We the People want it or not. During an October town hall, Biden asserted that his plan would save “billions of gallons of oil” and help create a million auto industry jobs, in part by banning the sale or manufacture of new internal combustion (IC) engine vehicles by 2030. How this will happen in the Real World, he didn’t say.
Biden’s California-inspired vision excludes hybrid vehicles, includes installing 500,000 EV charging stations, and provides “cash for clunkers” style rebates for new EV buyers. But as of 2018, nearly half of EV registrations (256,800 out of 543,600) were in California, with Hawaii, Washington and Oregon not far behind. Yet as of 2018, EVs comprised less than 2% of California’s 15 million total vehicles – despite huge tax credits, free charging stations, free access to HOV lanes, and other subsidies and incentives.
Only 727,000 electric vehicles were sold in the USA in 2019, and nearly half were plug-in hybrids. Hybrid sales peaked in 2013, but by 2019 had fallen to 2.3% (about 400,000 vehicles) of all light-duty vehicle sales, largely due to shunning by EV purists. Compare those numbers with the 6.3 million total vehicles sold in 2016, or to the 273,600,000 passenger cars, motorcycles, trucks, buses and other vehicles on U.S. roads in 2018.
Following China’s lead, U.S. automakers – not just Tesla – are all aboard for this big switchover. As IC vehicles are replaced and gasoline stations are transformed into EV charging stations, the pressure will rise to ditch remaining IC vehicles and buy more EVs. China-friendly General Motors plans to spend $20 billion on EV and self-driving vehicle technology through 2025, including 23 different EVs by 2023. Ford Motor Company has pledged to invest $11 billion by 2022 on EV development.
Biden is following in the footsteps of British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, whose new climate plan includes banning sales of gasoline-powered vehicles by 2030, and hybrids by 2035. But, as economist and Global Britain think tank director Ewen Stewart argued, this is “frankly one of the most illiberal and economically destructive policies ever to come from Whitehall. It risks hundreds of thousands of livelihoods and much-needed exports for the most marginal benefit.”
“The implications of this ban [in a country with only 1% EVs] are immense in terms of manufacture, supply chains, investment, sunk capital, employment, infrastructure, consumer choice, value of existing stock, and so much more,” Stewart explained. “Never before has a government dared to close down an entire and critical industry almost overnight, by diktat.”
It is delusional, he continued, to believe that destroying a successful British industry by banning IC engines – rather than letting consumer choice determine the market – will be good for the economy. Today’s British automotive sector comprises a fifth of the nation’s manufacturing base, with over 80% of the 1.3 million cars it manufactures being exported. That’s 13% of the UK’s entire export market.
The UK automotive industry employs over 180,000 Britons directly and many hundreds of thousands more indirectly. But the United Kingdom cannot compete with China for the global EV market, because UK labor costs are far higher, and its energy is increasingly far more expensive and unreliable.
Worse, Stewart pointed out, this virtue signaling will have at best a miniscule benefits for the UK and global environment, but will be devastating for automobile owners. The British government already vastly diminished the value of the nation’s 12 million diesel vehicles with surcharges that cost owners of pre-2015 diesel vehicles up to $67 per week just to drive in “ultra-low-emission zones.” Other costs included doubling parking permit rates and higher taxes for diesel vehicles.
The new initiatives will do the same to gasoline-powered vehicles. They will phase out gasoline pumps, cause resale value to plummet, and devastate the nation’s export market.
Andrew Montford, deputy director of the Global Warming Policy Forum, says the misguided British plan could cost motorists £700 billion (US$938 billion). Several aspects of EVs, Montford contended, make them more costly than petrol cars: replacing expensive batteries, installing home charging stations (often requiring upgrading household wiring), time and inconvenience during battery recharges, and more.
Montford estimated that by 2050 the average household might have spent an extra £19,000 (US$25,460) – if they can still afford to own a vehicle. Moreover, with other government mandates driving up the cost of electricity, the cost of motoring could double, driving working classes entirely off the roads.
The absurdity of this British assault on its own existing auto industry is made even more ridiculous by the fact that wide-scale electrification doesn’t change current mobility patterns – and only manages to reduce transportation greenhouse gas emissions 15% by 2050, Spanish systems engineering expert Margarita Mediaville explained. To call EVs “green” or “sustainable” is patently absurd.
Ms. Mediaville’s company also found that manufacturing all those new EV batteries would deplete proven global reserves of copper, lithium, nickel and manganese, unless mining and/or recycling rates grow enormously by 2050. But opening new mines, mostly in other countries, as the European Union proposes, would have “devastating repercussions on water, biodiversity and the human rights of local communities.”
Mining and processing ores, and manufacturing batteries, would also require enormous amounts of fossil fuels, involve hundreds or thousands of tons of ore and overburden for every ton of finished metals, and result in prodigious emissions of pollutants and carbon dioxide. Indeed, a new report by Competitive Enterprise Institute analyst Ben Lieberman concludes that replacing gasoline with electricity as the energy source for vehicles does not eliminate those emissions, but only changes where they are emitted.
Yet another downside of vastly increasing the number of EVs is that the metals and minerals increasingly come from countries like China, Chile and Congo – where fair wage, child labor, workplace safety and environmental standards are far below anything the US or EU would tolerate. EV batteries also require more energy to manufacture than batteries and engines for IC vehicles. Recycling them is likewise complicated, expensive, and fraught with pollution and public health risks.
The financial firm UBS found that replacing global sales of conventional IC vehicles with electric versions would require a 2,898% increase in lithium production; a 1,928% increase in cobalt; a 524% increase in graphite; a 105% increase in nickel; a 655% increase in rare-earth minerals; and at least a tripling of copper production. Coal, diesel and gasoline burning would also skyrocket, to fuel the work.
A separate report from Securing America’s Future Energy indicates China controls nearly 70% of electric vehicle battery manufacturing capacity, compared to just 10% by the USA. The report projects that 107 of the 142 EV battery manufacturing projects scheduled by 2021 will be in China, with only nine in the U.S. Moving toward mandatory EVs will clearly enrich China at America’s expense.
Before taking any steps toward converting America to EVs and non-fossil fuel electricity generation, U.S. policymakers must carefully examine the human and environmental costs – in precise numbers, including rising lung disease, cancer, injury and death rates in foreign mines, processing plants and factories.
They must also consider the impact on American workers and communities from outsourcing battery manufacturing to Chinese companies. The Chinese, with assistance from a President Biden, will happily take most of those manufacturing jobs back to the Middle Kingdom, while saddling American families with soaring costs for unreliable electricity, short-range driving and collapsing industries. Incredibly, our dependence on China for minerals and component parts for high-tech military equipment will also soar!
All these issues demand the attention of our legislators and regulators, environmentalists and journalists. Unless of course they’re just engaging in cheap virtue-signaling, and actually don’t give a hoot about American workers and energy consumers, the U.S. and global environment, or global adult and child workers who will put their health and lives at risk providing EV and other technologies.
Duggan Flanakin is Director of Policy Research at the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org)
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Ford Motor Company has made this plan clear in its recent ad campaign. “We have electrified the Mustang!” and on and on with their pledge to “save the planet” and “decarbonize” their plants and the car buying future..
They have read the writing on the wall and have decided to go “all in” with the electric car madness.
Why not? Hey it’s what the kids want and the culture is pushing it so they would be stupid not to exploit this madness.
I hope that someone will call them, and the rest of the idiots pushing this nonsense, out and cash he party with reality.
But. sadly, I think it will take ten to fifteen years of idiocy and failed auto market, spurred by irrational government policy, to correct this lunacy.
Virtue marketing. Looks good and gets good publicity. Same as VW converting their entire line to EV. Not entire production.
This is a fine example of how the affluent classes, given an unearned confidence in their own moral authority, have no trouble crushing the less affluent. What this looks like is, if you’re not quite wealthy, you may not operate a motor vehicle. Rich people have to breathe the air you pollute, you working class schlubs. Is that fair to rich people? No.
On a positive note some here (Eric) will be happy Teslas shares have fallen lately. But, not so happy it’s because there’s a new battery company that seems to be a major threat. Actually one new and one old (Toyota look to be working on an EV that looks pretty clever). Checkout Quantumscape. Saying their battery will charge in 15 minutes. Not there quite yet, but one would not bet against some clever stuff happening over the next 10 years from them.
Well, you’re right there, Simon. Clever stuff does happen. The problem is that electric cars must displace an already successful and ubiquitous technology, gas-powered cars, and the odds that that can happen in the next ten years are low.
Right now, in Canada, if you buy an electric car, you must pay fifteen times more for it than you’d have to pay for a gas-powered car, and the electric car would be far inferior in operating capacity to the gas car. Why? You can buy a fully operational used gas car for about $4000. You couldn’t find a good EV for less than $60,000. That’s a price factor of 15. You can drive the gas car anywhere without worrying that you won’t be able to refuel it. It has a far greater range in the cold weather that is a five months a year feature of living in Canada. The EV may be useful for driving around town and charging at night, but you wouldn’t want to take it on a hundred mile trip to another city, and in Canada there are no charging stations yet.
The future of EVs will depend on a breakthrough in battery performance but that is a physical problem that may be impervious to human ingenuity. If it is solvable it will depend on a new invention on the order of industrial advancement of the inventions of the transistor or the jet engine. Possible, but obviously a long shot.
I would like to look at two use cases presented in your argument: Local vs Long Distance.
Lets say that 90% of the use case involves local driving where a range of X is more than enough.
What does one do with the 10% use case where the range of four times X is required?
Batteries are both expensive and heavy. They create design changes to accommodate the bulk, cause compromises on ride and handling quality, and require beefier components (like structure and brakes) which compounds the weight and size issues. What percentage of buyers consider rentals of long distance models, over those who buy the high capacity models for those longer trips and then have to amortize the cost and waste energy moving battery bulk?
A lot of largely unused battery capacity is going to not only have to be mined out of the earth, more money tied up in the cost of the batteries and components, and will require even more electrical power generation to move the bulk.
It seems to me to be a lot of waste.
And we haven’t even addressed the issues of a pick-up truck or SUV that spends most of its life as a commuter but occasionally tows a trailer, or has to actually carry something heavy in its bed through not so low-ground-clearance friendly terrain.
“The problem is that electric cars must displace an already successful and ubiquitous technology”
Exactly.
Look how long it took cars to replace horses. The first car was invented before the USA even existed (Stugnot’s steam powered automobile in 1769), the first ICE engine came at the dawn of the 19th century (Wischett’s hydrogen car in 1803 ), Karl Benz introduced the first production model petrol-powered vehicle in 1885, and Henry Ford introduced the first mass produced petrol-vehicles in at the dawn of the 20th century. Yet, horse and other animal powered vehicles were still ubiquitous in the USA and Europe during WWII, 35 years after Ford released the Model-T. Animal-powered farming is still ubiquitous in many parts of the world even today, a quarter-millennia since Stugnot’s steam car and over a century since the Model-T changed the production paradigm.
The notion that we will be able to completely flip to electric vehicles in less than a decade is preposterous.
People seem to believe that all it takes to convert a factory from ICE cars to EV cars is throwing a switch. One day one, the next day the other.
The reality is that it takes time to first redesign a factory, and more time to then shut the factory down so that the production lines can be re-laid out. Unless they have already started designing the new factories, it’s unlikely that they could completely switch over every factory by 2030.
Regrettably, Steve, as so many posters on this thread have pointed out, the green guys don’t actually intend that electric cars shall replace gas cars. They just want to ban gas cars. Replacing them with electrics will be somebody else’s problem.
There is already a strong undercurrent of loathing of personal cars. During the pandemic in some Canadian cities, some roads were converted to multiple usage, meaning cars and bikes on the same roadway, with bikes having the right of way. The biking movement is a Trojan horse (so to speak) to suppress driving, and it is strangely popular with city councils here in Canada, even if ordinary citizens trying to drive to work oppose it.
A lot of people hate cars, or at any rate hate the thought that other people drive them. They long for a carless paradise, in which fit, healthy people get around on bicycles, or ride in electric trains. Of course this movement is purely elitist, and has little support from most people. Unfortunately, the elites have real power, which is why we call them elites. There are few things that elites hate more than democracy, because they hold most people in contempt.
My question is “For what purpose?” Why in hell would we do this? Obviously, it is being force-fit by government edict, not by consumer demand. And when you start running the air conditioner and/or heater the power drain is enormous. I also wonder about waste disposal. Will there be another debacle like used up turbine blades?
There isn’t a new battery. There is a new proposal. They don’t even have it working in the lab yet, much less have it in commercial production.
Progressives are really into self delusion.
Wow! 100% electric vehicles. Electric cars is bad enough. Trucks are going to be a problem. Railways can be electrified even though issues arise. Electric boats are possible in theory, but ships are going to be a big problem. At least you won’t need any oil tankers, but how are we going to get the woodchips for our powerstations? Complete nonsense with aircraft. It definitely means an end to any space program. I presume you will be able to return to horse and cart, or do horses have to be electrified too. Might as well have some electric sheep for androids to dream of too. It is a dystopian near-future after all.
Do not be fooled into thinking the government wants you to drive EV’s. They don’t want you to drive at all. Or, more specifically, they don’t want the majority to drive – leave the roads clear for the elites. That’s the plan. And it’s predicated on 2 factors: 1) the majority won’t be able to afford new EV’s (especially if they live under permanent depression, but that’s another story), and 2) there won’t be enough used EV’s available for everyone – nowhere near enough (think about it).
This is medieval feudalism for the 21st century. Wave to your lord as he drives past in his Tesla.
I plan to buy a good IC car just before 2030 and hang onto it. As people are forced into EVs and the price of gas falls and the price of electricity skyrockets I’ll just hang onto it. As the prices of the remaining IC cars climb year after year I will happily sail past the crowds waiting around at charging stations. If the fools persist in their folly long enough they will eventually wise up, but it will be a painful journey.
Sidenote to LdB: there is abundant copper on earth. The main value of asteroid metals is that they are already off the earth, thereby bypassing the enormous cost of lifting them off the planet. In other words, their value is in mining and smelting and manufacturing in place the things needed off earth.
Electric vehicle shock treatment.
It’s the unsuspecting public who are going to need shock treatment when it finally dawns on them what a monumental cock up this is. I wonder if they’ll wake up before it’s too late, I doubt it.
There is an understory here that people should be aware of. There is no way that every automobile that currently operates in the U.S. can be “replaced” by an electric vehicle. The masters of the universe want very few automobiles to be on the roads. They will push MASS TRANSIT and human powered transport like in Asia and the days of a car in every garage in the U.S. will be GONE. Don’t kid yourself. They want to fundamentally change life in America to be more like life in Asia or Africa.
Which means Americans can act like people in Asia and Africa and make open war on the elites. OK, if that is what elites want they shall receive it.
Liberals are not good economists. That is why they are liberals. They don’t understand cause as effect. They are like children in this way. They see an electric car drive 20 miles and they say ‘there, it just saved a gallon of gas’. They have no concept of how that gallon will get burnt somewhere else. It’s too abstract. On the other hand liberals are good politicians. Having seen that electric vehicles are starting to edge into cost effectiveness they want to take credit. The idea of just letting things take their natural course and let there be a generational transition to EVs as battery technology progresses. No can’t do that. Need to boss people around. Take away their freedom so they can feel like a big ___________ .
“Having seen that electric vehicles are starting to edge into cost effectiveness”
Where is this happening? Around here, electrics have to be massively subsidized in order to get anyone to buy them.
All very interesting but the real problem is simple: There will not be enough electricity. Boris wants to ditch gas heating in the UK, and turn that electric, although heat pumps do not work very well with our cold weather. Then he wants to rebuild all the inadequately insulated housing stock. He is totally delusional on all fronts as all this will take 100 years at the current replacement rate of properties. Green nuts are beginning to cause me severe doubts about life at all, I suspect that he wants to kill 90% of the UK population!
From the article: ” Hybrid sales peaked in 2013, but by 2019 had fallen to 2.3% (about 400,000 vehicles) of all light-duty vehicle sales, largely due to shunning by EV purists.”
That’s just silly!
The purists shun nuclear powerplants, too.
Climate alarmist/Greens purists aren’t very smart.
Being a progressive/green requires one to believe many things that simply aren’t possible.
Like the idea that the government is capable of designing and running an economy.
Who was it who referred to believing ten impossible things before breakfast?
Another point
Somewhere above someone suggested a battery that can be charged fully in 15 minutes. Do they realise that this would take 0.25MW of electricity, the same as the average street? So a Motorway services would probably need a 50MW supply, the same as a medium Town. The total of Motorway services would need more than 10% of our total electricity supply capability, and a single car with a fault would probably destroy the surrounding 50 or more. Wonderful ideas these, more like bad dreams!
From the article: “A separate report from Securing America’s Future Energy indicates China controls nearly 70% of electric vehicle battery manufacturing capacity, compared to just 10% by the USA.”
It looks like the U.S. needs a “Buy American” policy when it comes to EV batteries. That would increase that 10% share.
We should not be sending money to the Chicoms. They’ll just go buy weapons and people to use against us. We shouldn’t pay for our own demise.
I’m not seeing some Golden Age of Travel at the end of their rainbow. Less travel, more internet, more dependence, more authoritarianism.
Complete lunacy of course! Even if it’s possible we can’t currently charge all these oh so wonderful and unwanted machines on our current grid. With these geniuses working to destroy the grid as well as forcing everyone into electric heat poverty it simply cannot work – so there should be some fun times ahead…
I am cringing while we wait for someplace that actually has cold winters to try and go electric only. (California has it easy that way) I suspect even the useful idiots will rebel as they did when Ontario implemented this foolishness recently.
Simon, if Quantumscape batteries can be charged to 80% in 15 minutes, does that mean they require 8hrs/0.25 = 32 times more current to charge them. Where is all of that power coming from and who pays to upgrade every neighborhood wiring to carry that current?
Electric vehicles cost about $10,000-$15,000 more than equivalent gasoline powered vehicles, not including tax credits. Do not expect the price to come down much due to mass production (manufacturers currently are losing money on every sale). Do not expect price differential to change unless the price of commodities also significantly lowers. I am driving a nice 2020 Hyundai Kona EV. 250 mile range. Level 1 charger charge time, 55 hours. Level II charger charge time, 10.5 hours. Can not accept a charge above 75KW. A 50 KW charger requires 75 minutes charging time for a 80% charge (200 miles range). With a 75KW or greater charger, requires 55 minutes charge time. Current time to fill a tank with gasoline, 4 minutes. Many people will not have access to home chargers apartments, town homes etc). If I do not have a home charger I will need to go to a public station at least ever two days. If I had a gasoline car, I can drive 350+ miles, fill the tank in 4 minutes. If I only had an EV, I would need 110 minutes, (1 hour 50 minutes) to 150 minutes (2.5 hours) ever other day to charge my car. This is assuming a charger is available and I do not have to wait in line for one. Something to think about.
I regularly drive two days to get from one place to another. Two 11 hour days in the van, lugging a lot of toys to use when I reach my destination. If I was forced to go electric, first of all I wouldn’t be able to drive a vehicle capable of hauling bikes and boards and other recreational equipment and, second, even if such a vehicle was available, I would almost be adding an extra day to my trip due to recharging times. That alone would make my trip much more expensive and shorter, due to the extra night in lodging and the time lost that I could be using for recreation. Add to that the cost of buying an electric vehicle–assuming a commensurate vehicle to mine even existed–and I’d be unable to afford the trip. Last summer on one of these trips, a guy in a Tesla blew by me like I was standing still, but an hour later I cruised by him, perhaps because he was running out of battery out in the middle of the Wyoming outback. And while he was charging his battery, I was a hundred or more miles down the road. Electric cars might–MIGHT!–work in urban areas, but things change out in the West, where distances are greater and weather is nastier.
This is all wrong in so many ways that a person hardly knows where to start an honest critique. Money, talent, labor, materials, transportation, industrial capacity, technology, reality, physics/chemistry, direct and indirect impacts on other needs — all inadequate or toxic to the proposal. Look what happened to Scotland when it pressed ahead with the Darien colony in what is now Panama, and which suffered most of the same defects. I really wish it were possible to allow this to occur in selected places as an experiment to see how it does. First “innovators” usually get wiped out, as Roger’s classic work on the diffusion of innovation shows.
EVs make sense for China. The country has huge coal and uranium reserves. Using them domestically gives China a great deal of energy independence. Likewise their rare earth reserves and processing facilities fit well into the picture.
That’s why the Chi-Coms have about 400 new coal fired plants in some phase of construction.
The US has similar factors in their favor but won’t use them. This si why China will dominate the global economy and cutting-edge technology for the rest of the century.
Why am I still waiting to see a list showing the Government agencies number of EV they have in their fleet. A Life-Flite helicopter just flew over our house. With only EVs there will be no more of that, or other emergency vehicles.
Paul
Hunter’s laptop is rechargeable, he just forgets where he left it.
Just as Obie said “we’re gonna fundamentally transform America.”
Biden is clueless – his plan for government subsidies for EVs will take money away from hard-working families (us) and redistribute it to a small group of (affluent) people who don’t need tax breaks to buy or operate a vehicle. If wealthy Americans want to purchase EVs, that’s great. Let them buy them with their own money, not ours. In an earlier study the Manhattan Institute found that Tesla buyers had an average income of around $286.000; another study found that buyers of the less expensive Ford Focus EV had an average income of $199,000. To put into perspective, the median household income in the U.S. in 2019 was was around $66,000 while typical prices for EVs range from around $50,000 to $100,000 depending on model, with some going much higher. In addition, around half the states now charge an annual fee of up to or higher than $100 per year for EV owners.
My virtue signaling spread sheet.
Large cruising sloop sailboat 5 stars
Diesel auxilary 2 stars
Large truck to pull boat 2 times a year from the crane to the boat yard 1 star
Boat fiberglass and epoxy resin from crude 1 star
E-bike 2 miles today and 25 miles yesterday 6 stars
Bike is good for 15-20 miles based on wind and goes way down in the cold. It is assist.
4 hours to charge for 1 hour of power.
I have battery indoors. Go out and ride and the temps are in the 20’s, my distance is down a third. Cars will NOT have good heat and defrost without loss of range. If you have cold winters and car outside, electric will not work. Then a garage but parked outside all day at will work if commute is short.
My consultant is my daughter. EE PhD Power systems BS Aeronautical engineering and MS Architectural engineering. She runs Ultra marathons and does bike racing. She says future is bleak because of costs and regulation hindrances. Every element of “green” power has a negative environmental issue in it. From toxic materials to other pollution.
Litigation, regulation and poor efficiencies plus the cost of new grids will drive up power as much as medical costs.
Let’s try it in California first and see how it goes!
Any switch, reset of whatever means end of the West, as anything meaningful. The reason begin lack of talent. According to Dutton&Woodley (“Our Wit End”) the west is loosing intelligence at rate of 1 IQ point per decade, being genetically 15 points behind Victorian times. There won’t be enough talent to “Great Reset” the civilization to something new in 2050, unless of course such Great Reset leads to the lack of civilization.
The continuation is possible – just incrementally improving existing technologies like an internal combustion engine can work even with demographic-based loss of talent.
The government already controls the planes and trains. Once all the cars and buses are electric, it’s a simple matter to shut down the power for charging and lock everyone. but government people. in place. A dream of dictators everywhere.