Electric vehicles are another bait-and-switch
Tom KirkmanIndependent Project Manager
“… Electric vehicles are another bait-and-switch. There are an estimated 30 million fossil fuel cars in Britain. That’s not counting the trucks that move all the commodities; there’s a quarter of a million of those, as well. We’re invited to think that one fine day, every one of those dirty old gas-guzzlers will be replaced with a shiny new electric alternative. Forget it. That lofty notion is just the bait. The switch is the reality. Most of us won’t have any sort of car at all, unless the demand for cars, any sort of cars, drops drastically. There’s no way to hit the emissions targets our governments have loudly committed us to.
That’s where the “fifteen-minute cities” come in. We’ll be expected to walk or cycle. Do you see the scam yet? They advertise a world of electric cars, but what we’ll end up buying is lives lived on foot, within fifteen minutes of our homes.
Round the corner from where I live, the council installed a rank of electric vehicle charging points. The electricity in them is free at the moment – has been for months. Anyone who wanted could park up and charge their car for nothing. I say “free”, but of course there’s no such thing as free. Someone was paying, which is to say the poor old council taxpayers of Sterling. Those Teslas and the rest might as well have been taking their charge from the private home they were parked outside, while the owner of the house footed the bill.
That whole stunt was more bait, pushing that illusion that electric cars are the cheap option. Next week, those bays will start charging for the electricity. There’s the switch.
But the bait has gone bad. More and more people smell something fishy, and are waking up to the reality of electric vehicles. It’s becoming hard to ignore that those massive batteries full of lithium and cobalt obtained by raping environments and destroying ecosystems, the dirty work done by the poorest of the poor, children included, scrabbling in the dirt with bare hands – those batteries, which are so wildly energy-intensive to make, and that can’t be recycled when they fail after twenty years – those batteries don’t like the cold, which is a bit of a bummer if you live in a country that actually has winter.
Like here, for instance. In winter, those batteries lose up to half their charging capacity. “Oh dear, what a pity, never mind.” There’s that switch again! Second-hand car dealers, in the main, won’t touch electric cars. I wonder why.
You can’t make electric cars with renewable energy; there’s literally not enough energy in it, so it takes fossil fuels. In Shanghai, where there’s been a large uptake of electric cars, the city’s charging points are powered by fossil fuels. The air pollution in Shanghai is on the increase as a result. Save the planet, my backside!
By the time everyone wakes up, it will be too late, and all the cars that worked will be gone. …”
(Jump to 2:40 in the video)