Recent history is littered with the gold-plated corpses of failed green schemes. From Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard’s billion-dollar, literally deadly, boondoggles like “Cash for Clunkers” and home insulation schemes, to Britain’s disastrous “green homes” scheme, to Barack Obama’s billion-dollar white elephant, Solyndra.
Just to prove that they’re immune to the lessons of history, the climate hysterics are pushing yet another massively expensive, taxpayer-subsidised green bandwagon: electric cars.
Three guesses how it’s turning out.
Electric cars are not the answer for many people, for a host of practical reasons. These include their upfront cost, limited range, the time it takes to charge batteries, the new infrastructure needed for charging points and the extra power required to supply them.
Even more alarmingly, a report in the journal Nature suggests that because electric cars are heavier than other vehicles, they will likely kill more occupants of other vehicles in traffic accidents.
But… but… climate change!
As for climate change, electric cars will do little to arrest it. So for now, at least, they are one of the least effective and most expensive ways to cut carbon — and economically they are a bad bet.
Just last week, a report by the Commons Transport Committee found that taxpayers face an eye-watering £35 billion bill to plug the gap created by the switch to electric cars. At present, owners of such cars pay neither fuel duty, which nets £28 billion every year, nor vehicle exercise duty, which brings in £7 billion. The revenue is spent on schools, hospitals and other priorities such as the police, as well as fixing roads.
And not only do they reduce government revenue, they also demand costly subsidies.
So — dangerous, dirty, expensive… and very, very, bourgeois. Despite its rhetoric about “inequality”, electric cars are yet another example of the green-left espousing policies that hurt the poor and benefit the rich.
Who is buying the cars is another concern. A study by the U.S. National Bureau of Economic Research suggests that almost all electric car subsidies go to the wealthiest 20 per cent, for whom the purchase of an extra car is no great sacrifice. In addition, 90 per cent of electric car owners also have a fossil-fuel vehicle they use for longer journeys.
It’s not just the subsidies for luxury smugmobiles that are hurting the poor and undermining the “climate change” virtue-signalling.
And what of the huge increase in power production needed to charge millions of electric cars? Climate policy is already adding more than £10 billion annually to Britain’s electricity costs, as inefficient renewables continue to need support. If the extra power required for charging the cars is generated from fossil fuels to keep electricity costs down, much of the environmental gain would be lost.
And all of this will make nine-tenths of sweet f-a to the climate.
The International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates that if every nation achieves their ambitious targets on increasing electric car ownership, it will reduce CO2 emissions in this decade by 235 million tons.
That, according to the UN Climate Panel’s standard model, will reduce global temperatures by about one ten-thousandth of a degree Celsius (0.0001c) by the end of the century.
Daily Mail
Well, that’ll make all the difference, I’m sure.
And all it will take is trillions of dollars, millions of further-impoverished poor people and an environment blighted by the toxic waste from making billions of batteries.
It’s a textbook green scheme, all right.
