None Dare Call It A Scam!

But it is.

And an expensive one, too:

Without massive state help, EVs are a niche market for rich virtue signalers. And, come to think of it, that's sort of what they are now, even with the help. A recent University of California at Berkeley study found that 90% of tax credits for EVs go to people in the top income strata. Most EVs are bought by high earners who like the look and feel of a Tesla. And that's fine. I don't want to stop anyone from owning the car they prefer. I just don't want to help pay for it.

Really, why would a middle-class family shun a perfectly good gas-powered car that can be fueled (most of the time) cheaply and driven virtually any distance, in any environment, and any time of the year? We don't need lithium. We have the most efficient, affordable, portable, and useful form of energy. We have centuries' worth of it waiting in the ground.

Climate alarmists might believe EVs are necessary to save the planet. That's fine. Using their standard, however, a bike is an innovation. Because even on their terms, the usefulness of EVs is highly debatable. Most of the energy that powers them is derived from fossil fuels. The manufacturing of an EV has a negligible positive benefit for the environment, if any.

And the fact is that if EVs were more efficient and saved us money, as enviros and politicians claim, consumers wouldn't have to be compelled into using them, and companies wouldn't have to be bribed into producing them.

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In just a couple months, Canada has put up $24 billion for foreign carmakers to build electric vehicle batteries on Canadian soil. First, there was $13 billion for Volkswagen to build a battery “gigafactory” in St. Thomas, Ont. And then $11 billion for Stellantis to build a similar facility in Windsor, Ont.

This is corporate welfare at a level utterly unprecedented in Canadian history. And given how the next few years shape up, this could well have the makings of the most expensive boondoggle in Canadian history. ...

 

The most recent JD Power survey had 66 per cent of Canadian drivers saying they were “unlikely” to consider an EV for their next vehicle purchase. That’s 13 points higher than the number of Canadians who rejected an EV in 2021 — which is all the more remarkable given that the interim 12 months have yielded some of the highest fuel prices in Canadian history.

And even if EV sales keep pace with projections, there’s no guarantee that the cars are going to be powered by the batteries rolling out of factories in St. Thomas and Windsor.

Toyota has been a conspicuously late entrant to the EV field. Although the company’s 1997 debut of the Prius singularly helped to popularize hybrid vehicles, Toyota began selling its first all-electric vehicles just last year.

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One reason for the company’s hesitancy might be that they’re waiting on better batteries. Just last week, Toyota announced that it was on the cusp of a “technological breakthrough” that would produce solid-state batteries with double the range of conventional liquid-state lithium-ion batteries — and with charging times of only 10 minutes.

Toyota might be blowing smoke, but they’re not the only carmaker to have avoided going all-in on lithium-ion batteries just yet. Porsche, for instance, is seeing about running their zero-emission cars with hydrogen.

If the bottom drops out of the EV battery market, Canada won’t lose the entire $24 billion. Although the details of the contracts with Volkswagen and Stellantis have been strenuously kept from the public, they are partially tied to production.

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In the case of VW, the Canadian government and Ontario are both fronting $1.2 billion to build the factory, but much of the rest of the $13 billion will be rolled out over the next 10 years in the form of per-battery subsidies and tax credits.

Notably, the contracts stipulate that the subsidies will stop the moment that the U.S. halts its own program of showering government money on the green energy sector.

 

Ahem:

Canada is “in the driver seat” with unprecedented electric car battery subsidies, Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne’s department wrote in a briefing note. Figures acknowledged the subsidies for one VW plant are equal to the production of Canada’s entire auto sector last year: “This is a game changer.”

 

Certainly not environmentally-conscious or ethical:

Electric vehicle tires produce up to 20 percent more pollution than their gas-powered equivalents, experts have revealed, meaning EVs could be coming at a higher environmental price than many owners are aware of. 

For decades, the impact of tailpipe emissions from gas-powered cars has been the primary draw of battery-powered vehicles. 

But experts are warning that tires, which are often overlooked as a source of pollution, are releasing chemicals and microplastics into the environment. While switching to an electric car no doubt helps lower how much carbon you generate, it actually exacerbates the problem of tire emissions. 

EVs typically weigh much more and accelerate faster than their gas-burning counterparts, so tiny particles are shed into the air as the tire wears down.  

According to road tests by research company Emissions Analytics, under normal driving conditions a gas car sheds around 73 milligrams per kilometer from four new tires. A comparable electric vehicle, however, sheds an additional 15 milligrams per kilometer - some 20 percent more. 

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“The intent is not to necessarily force people into an electric vehicle,” Morano went on. “The intent is to collapse our plentiful freedom of movement and force us to use mass transit. They want us on the subway.” It’s a global collusion. “They want us on buses. That is what this is about,” Morano insisted. “[Former UK PM] Boris Johnson’s transportation secretary said owning a car was outdated ’20th-century thinking’. They are rationing vehicle use. It’s very simple. You can look at Cuba to see how that turned out; you are going to have a lot of used cars.”

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COBALT is essential to modern technology. All sorts of electronic devices rely on it, along with other elements such as lithium. Solar panels and electric vehicles (EVs) wouldn’t function without them. While the environmental degradation associated with both lithium and cobalt extraction is well established, the issues around cobalt are even more poignant because of the manner in which it is mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

A new book, Cobalt Red: How the blood of the Congo powers our lives, published in January this year, details the human suffering, especially of children, directly involved in the mining. Written by a Nottingham University professor, Siddartha Kara, from first-hand knowledge gained by visiting the Congo ...