Greens (and Reds) Don’t Like Cars, Period
Late last month, Joe Biden was mocked for posting a photo of himself in an electric vehicle (a GMC Hummer) that costs $110,000 and up.
And for touting a $7,500 federal tax credit that doesn’t apply to vehicles that cost over $80,000. [emphasis, links added]
In other words, the 46th president was ripped for confirming the stereotype that electric cars are a vanity passion for rich green liberals.
But what was less noticed, at least by the right, was that left-wing greens didn’t like Biden’s photo-op, either.
On my watch, the great American road trip is going to be fully electrified.
And now, through a tax credit, you can get up to $7,500 on a new electric vehicle. pic.twitter.com/n3iZ9etL4A
— President Biden (@POTUS) January 30, 2023
You see, Middle-Class Joe insists that he wants to replace internal-combustion vehicles with electric vehicles (EV), but the hardcore greens–including those within his own administration–want to get rid of cars, period.
At certain times, as when he is trying to appeal to the far left during his campaign for the 2020 Democratic nomination, Biden has said that he wants to get “millions of vehicles off the road.”
But that was then: Now Biden, eyeing his re-election campaign, wants to play the champion of Main Street, where they have cars, not the New York City Metropolitan Transportation Authority.
Still, history shows that when green activists draw a bead on something, they often hit their target.
That’s been the whole story of the green movement this past half-century, as it has shifted the Democratic Party from its New Deal blue-collar orientation to its current affluent-suburban affectation.
One of the greens’ key concerns about EVs is lithium. As we shall see, they can’t live without it, but they also can’t live with it.
The World Economic Forum (WEF, think Klaus Schwab and Davos) relates that each EV battery needs about 18 lbs of lithium.
And since WEF calculates that two billion EVs will have to be on the road by 2050 to meet its Great Reset climate targets, that’s a lot of lithium.
And of course, all the lithium a Great Resetted world needs won’t just go into car batteries; the element is needed for a wide variety of industrial and ecological uses.
But lithium production is currently only about 100,000 tons annually, so WEF’s projections show that the needed ramp-up in lithium production will have to be, well, exponential.
For their part, greens don’t like to hear about the exponential growth of anything economic.
A particular flashpoint has been the effort to start up a lithium mine in Thacker Pass, Nevada, near the Oregon border. That proposed $3 billion venture has been met by pushback from a coalition of greens, Native Americans, and NIMBYs.
Needless to say, that was all the signal the Main Stream Media needed to choose a side. NBC News headlined last year: “The cost of green energy: The nation’s biggest lithium mine may be going up on a site sacred to Native Americans.”
And The New York Times added some more green, liberal perspectives:
The fight over the Nevada mine is emblematic of a fundamental tension surfacing around the world: Electric cars and renewable energy may not be as green as they appear. Production of raw materials like lithium, cobalt and nickel that are essential to these technologies are often ruinous to land, water, wildlife and people.
For its part, the Biden administration, mindful of its environmentalist base as well as its EV goals, has tried to avoid taking sides in the fight. Just on February 7, a federal judge ordered a further review of the project, so its future is unclear.
The hardcore greens want action against lithium—and against EVs and against the Biden administration.
One such is Kate Aronoff, who writes for The New Republic, a venerable liberal publication, dating back to 1914, that has lately gone woke and left, as well as hard green.
Aronoff tweeted her own mockery of Biden for his Hummer tweet and then wrote in her magazine, “Investing in mass transit, walkability, biking infrastructure, and other means of reducing personal car ownership . . . could reduce the amount of lithium needed.”
Warming to her anti-auto theme, Aronoff lamented that cars and trucks are getting bigger:
“The best-selling vehicle in the U.S., the F150 Ford pickup truck, has ballooned in size since it debuted in the 1970s … Even the comparatively diminutive Mini Cooper has gotten 64 percent heavier since it debuted in the 1950s, and 61 percent larger.”
To Aronoff, this is all part of the grave crisis; indeed, the section of the magazine that she writes for is called “Apocalypse Soon” (see below).
Moreover, Aronoff is not just worried about lithium, or the size of cars—she’s worried about the cars themselves.
In her article, she cited Andre Gorz, a 20th-century French Marxist, who wrote in 1973, “The worst thing about cars is that they are like castles or villas by the sea: luxury goods invented for the exclusive pleasure of a very rich minority, and which in conception and nature were never intended for the people.” So we can see: 50 years ago, Gorz was a red who thought cars were only for rich people. (As a general rule, Marxists need to get out more.)
Read rest at Breitbart
Hi there colleagues, how is the whole thing, and what you wish for to say about this
article, in my view its in fact remarkable for me.
The desire by some “to get rid of cars, period” goes back at least to 1970. Climate change is just a convenient excuse. The article is wrong when it says, “Middle-Class Joe insists that he wants to replace internal-combustion vehicles with electric vehicles.” With some there might be the desire, but there certainly isn’t the means. The average American family can not afford a brand new gasoline car. Electric cars are even more expensive. Most in the middle class meet their transportation needs with used cars. These are not viable with electric vehicles because of horrendous cost of replacing the batteries.
These greens that live in cities are making top down plans for the entire country. They haven’t a clue of the needs that exist in many parts of the country. Where I live it is so remote that we will never be serviced by public transportation. As is the case of most of the middle class, the costs of electric cars are way beyond our reach. There are even problems with partially using public transportation. When my daughter started attending the University Of Washington in Seattle, she would drive half the distance to a park and ride and then take the bus from there. Using the bus for half of the distance tripled the time of the commute. College students don’t have a lot of time so she ended up driving the entire distance despite the cost of parking.
Another group that these greens ignore is those who have limited mobility. For many replacing driving with walking or biking isn’t an option.
There will probably be shortage of lithium, but the calculations of the WEF are devoid of common sense. There are currently an estimated 1,446 billion private cars in the world. Estimating two billion by 2050 is reasonable. However, at an average of $66,000 for an electric car, replacing just the current cars would be a world wide cost of $95.3 trillion. Getting to $2 billion EV’s would be $132 trillion. The price of electric cars is sky rocketing (up 13% last year) so the actual cost would be much higher. That sort of money doesn’t exist.
They want to turn Freeways an INTERSATTES in stupid Bile Paths and Elevated Bike Paths force us all to ride Bicycles like they do in CHINA