The Electric Car Snow Job

The United States is being taken for a very expensive ride by an unholy alliance between climate ideologues and business opportunists, who have exerted undue influence over public opinion and government institutions in the name of climate change. The misnamed Inflation Reduction Act, signed into law by President Biden last Tuesday, allocates $369 billion to climate initiatives – a hugely expensive exercise in virtue-signaling that can be expected to reduce global warming by the year 2100 by only 0.0009 to 0.028 degrees Fahrenheit. It’s a tour de force of political showboating, and the electric vehicle (EV) aspects may be the bill’s most egregious example of non-cost-effective spending.

Pushing EVs is essentially selling snake oil with limited benefit at astronomical cost. To start with, U.S. passenger vehicles produce less than 1% of global greenhouse gases because the U.S. accounts for about one-seventh of global emissions of which the transportation sector is 14%, with passenger vehicles well below 40% of that. This calculation renders the potential benefit for even universal EV adoption essentially meaningless, even before accounting for the offsetting emission of CO₂ (around 95% of greenhouse gas emissions) in EV battery production and recycling. Manufacturing an EV battery produces from 10 to 30 tons of CO₂ (depending on battery size and manufacturing considerations), which offsets two to five years of emissions savings from EV adoption. And that ignores the environmental impact of producing the required charging electricity, but more on that below.