EV’s Switch-Pitch

If your wallet’s groaning out-loud due to pump price escalation, no problem.  Simply force your savings account (or debt load) to groan even louder by purchasing a typically much more expensive electric vehicle (EV).  There, all better.

The administration is now pounding the drum and hitting the gas (literally) with verbal and tax-credit encouragement for Americans to solve the pump headache by going electric.  Rather than stepping up and solving the high gasoline prices, domestically, which could be done by a reality-based administration, which we now quite obviously lack in America, the advice from on high is to exchange the pump for a plug.  Sadly, this is currently feasible for only well-to-do Americans, but not for those in the nation’s very large less-well-to-do clan whose household budgets are now suffering from pump shock.

So, while the EV chorus offers from on-high this “simple,” sorry, ridiculous & impractical, solution for most of us down here at street-level, while purposely overlooking the real solution, which is to unshackle the nation’s regulatorily-hand-cuffed fossil fuel industry, the American public is being treated like the fools we’re considered to be and treated to a classic switch-pitch. Being distracted from the real issue and offered a slick and shiny new solution that most Americans cannot afford.  As with a magician, we’re trying to watch both government hands at the same time and getting cross-eyed in the process.

This “EV’s are the solution” pitch, or purposeful distraction if you will, goes back to a famous statement made during the Obama years by his then-chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel.  The time-frame was 2009 in the midst of what was then referred to as the “Great Recession,” when the economy was in the tank.  The solution then, as now, was distracting the public’s attention from personal economic cost & price misery to the magician in the White House with “gray skies are gonna clear up” distracting solutions.  As Emanuel said back then: “Never let a serious crisis go to waste.”  When times are the worst, the time is perfect to introduce a plan or “solution” that, politically, could never be approved or widely supported when times are great.  Enter: Electric Vehicles!

Now, while EV’s will solve the angst at the pump, they are not without negatives.  Distance on a charge is one.  Lack of available charging stations is another (unless charging in your garage at home).  Charging time is notably longer than a gasoline fill-up.  No more quick fill-and-go with EV’s.  The unknown, or seldom reported, is the cost of “quick” charge at stations and that of a full night of charging at home.  “Rapid” charging (along the highway) is said to degrade car batteries more rapidly than slow at-home charges. And electric car batteries are very expensive to replace, while worse yet, we are currently dependent on China for many battery components (efforts are underway to eventually bring more battery components and manufacturing back to the U.S.).  Because of the large size of EV batteries, cargo space is limited.  And here’s one no one ever talks about: the electricity needed to charge EV’s will be produced, gasp, by oil, natural gas, and coal.  No one in the current administration will ever mention that, under penalty of being officially unplugged.

And to emphasize automakers current dependence on China, particularly for battery components: “China controls the processing of nearly 60% of the world’s lithium, 35% of nickel, 65% of cobalt, and more than 85% of rare-earth elements – all necessary (minerals) to produce a range of EV batteries.  The U.S. has some of those materials available within its borders, but officials need to start reducing timelines for approval so companies can start mining for those materials sooner rather than later.”

Due principally to driving range anxiety, at present, it appears that most EV’s are second cars at home.  An AAA poll determined that almost 80% of EV owners also own a gasoline vehicle. That makes sense, depending on the EV for perhaps work commute and local shopping trips, which the gasoline car is depended on for more distant over-the-road travel.  With more build-out of charging stations nationwide that may change, but perhaps not for quite awhile due to the extended charging time, even for quick chargers.

Again, this is just a renewed example of not letting a “serious crisis go to waste.” Rather than fix the problem (gasoline supply), change the subject and offer a solution (but not the right one) that can only satisfy a financially privileged few.  Taking advantage of a sudden crisis-propelled head start on forcing Americans to stop our dependence on fossil fuels, the foolish mantra of an administration convinced, apparently, and falsely so, that our continued use of oil and gas will, within just a few years (!), cause the destruction of America, along with the remaining world.  Since our processed oil and gas is the cleanest in the world, that popularized climate-change, doomsday scenario is likely never to occur here.  Meanwhile, as said many times before, the only current dependable renewable source is nuclear, and few in prominence ever mention that word.

Wrote Harold Hamm last week in the Wall Street Journal: “Thanks to abundant and affordable clean-burning natural gas, brought to us by horizontal drilling, the reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions was the most successful in the industrialized world.”  While China reportedly continues to expand its coal-burning power plants, U.S. fossil fuel energy producers have made great strides toward the production and use of cleaner fossil fuel power.  All of which does raise the musical question:  If today’s cleaner burning fuel is still destined to bring our part of the world to an end, why is it that smoke-stack American back in the developing and roaring industrial age, on up through World War II, when black smoke and other harmful particulates were belching, 24/7, from countless stacks at massive factories across the land, why, then, was America not already destroyed back then, in that overwhelmingly dirty, coal-burning pollution era?  Kinda makes one wonder why today’s environment, in particular, is said by the climate changers to be threatening the end of our existence.  Or could this all just be a convenient hoax to cover for politically-favored-and-subsidized Progressive and woke unnecessary energy “reforms”?

Commented the ever-brilliant Victor Davis Hanson: “Only in crises do they feel that the political Left and media can merge to use apocalyptic times to ram through usually unpopular approaches to foreign and domestic problems.  We saw that last year: fleeing from Afghanistan, the embrace of critical race theory, trying to end the filibuster, pack the court, and nationalize voting laws.  These ‘new orders’ and ‘resets’ always entail far bigger government and more unelected, powerful bureaucracies.  So, we common folk must quit fossil fuels, but not those who need to use corporate jets.”

And, so, back we go to electric vehicles!  EV’s made up just 3% of U.S. vehicle sales in 2021.  Currently, there is a $7,500 federal tax deduction incentive to encourage an EV purchase.  Reportedly, it should be noted, however, that once a vehicle maker reaches 200,000 in EV sales, the tax credit decreases and eventually ends.  It is projected that more and more EV models will be introduced over the next three years. Reportedly, the Biden administration intends to spend almost $3-billion (that’s with a B) “to fund domestic battery manufacturing projects in the coming months,”per the Department of Energy.” Still more huge debt-ridden-Treasury-spending to attempt to force more EV purchases in the years ahead.  Strange, I don’t remember America’s gasoline stations getting huge subsidies or federal investments to initially establish or expand!!  That was, and still is, a private capital requirement.  But for EV manufacturing, it’s clearly back to “most favored nation status,” it appears, in order to pursue yet another, costly, non-emergency pipe-dream, aimed at controlling our climate (impossible), because, honest, spend-thrift Progressives really do want to save all of we little people from extinction.  Just by exerting massive bureaucratic control over what type of vehicle we’ll be required to drive in the future.  Spending more and more of our money to “eliminate” the federal debt (per noted economist Nancy Pelosi), while not letting “a serious crisis go to waste.”  Thank you, federal government, for taking such darned good care of us. We can already feel the climate not-changing!

 

(Clean burning natural gas quote via The Wall Street Journal, Harold Hamm, 3-14-22; Political Left and media merge quote via jewishworldreview.com, Victor Davis Hanson, 3-24-22; 2021 EV sales percentage via breitbart.com, Penny Starr, 3-18-22; Federal tax credit diminishes via Consumer Reports, Mike Monticello/Staff, April, 2022; China controls needed minerals quote via Foxbusiness.com, Peter Aitken, 1-9-22; AAA poll via dailycaller.com, Thomas Catenacci, 12-23-21; Energy Dept. $3-billion investment in battery projects via dailycaller.com, Thomas Catenacci, 2-11-22).