Carney on ‘Kudlow’: Electric Vehicles Won’t Really Help the Environment

 

Audio Version 

 

Despite the Biden administration’s full embrace of “zero-emission” vehicles, electric vehicles (EVs) will have little impact on the environment, Breitbart Economics Editor John Carney said in an interview Thursday with Fox Business host Larry Kudlow.

 

Kudlow opened the interview with a monologue about the new tailpipe emissions regulations proposed by the Biden administration’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) yesterday. The new regulations are the strictest ever proposed by the agency and would require that electric vehicles comprise up to two-thirds of all new vehicles sold in the United States in nine years’ time.

 

“What the Biden administration is doing is not about clean air, which in the U.S. is already the cleanest of any large economy,” Kudlow said. “No, no, what they’re trying to do is destroy the fossil fuel industry. Period, full stop. They’re also aiming for a command-and-control takeover of the entire U.S. auto industry. This is the biggest industry takeover since Joe Stalin met Vladimir Lenin.”

 

Kudlow continued:

 

This was the Biden agenda from day one. He has been captured by the most radical climate people who also double as central planning socialists. Millions and millions of jobs are going to be lost. And everything Joe Biden says about creating new jobs through these tailpipe restrictions is all a flat out lie. Now, is this going to have any impact whatsoever on the climate? Highly doubtful.

 

Consumers don’t want electric vehicles because they’re too expensive. They’re not affordable, except for rich people. Survey after survey shows that 50 to 60 percent of folks have no interest in an unaffordable EV.

 

What’s more, we don’t have the infrastructure in place to end gas-powered cars in 10 or 12 years, and there are not enough charging stations. Anyway, they take too long. But probably most important, our electricity grid is not ready for the added burden if the Bidens had their way and two thirds of all new cars were in play in a dozen years. Where is this added electricity going to come from? The Bidens are trying to shut down fossil fuels that supply—wait for it—roughly 80 percent of the new power required for all these EVs. But the Bidens are shutting down fossil fuels, so where is the power going to come from? Wind farms? Solar? I don’t think so.

 

So, there’s no transition. There’s no thoughtfulness. There’s no infrastructure. There never has been an alternative structure with facts and figures and common sense laid out by these left-wing rabid climate people. They are dreamers, and they’re going to ruin this country. And where are we going to get the minerals for the batteries since the Biden dreamers won’t provide permits to mine for minerals? Well, I know, and you know, and they may know that this is the China bailout program.

 

Kudlow wrapped up his monologue by summarizing the futile absurdity of the situation: “So, we got a bunch of electric cars coming down the road with insufficient electricity, insufficient batteries and minerals, almost non-existent supply chains, and the product is too expensive for the average middle class family.”

 

Carney chimed in to note that the purported reason for this massive transition to electric vehicles is also a bust.

 

“It doesn’t really do anything to clean up the environment because, as you said, the power to run the electricity still has to come from somewhere,” Carney said.

 

He then highlighted an article from 2020 by this writer, which explained the devastating impact then-candidate Joe Biden’s green energy policies would have on the U.S. auto industry.

 

“My colleague Rebecca Mansour wrote a great article in which she said they’re not eliminating pollution; they’re just extending the tailpipe for miles,” he added. “And that’s what’s happening here. We’re going to be generating as much pollution. It’s just coming from the electricity.”

 

The “longer tailpipe” analogue came from an auto industry insider quoted in the 2020 article:

 

[A]ny environmental benefit gained from Biden’s electric vehicle push is nullified by the need to charge EV batteries on the existing fossil fuel-based power grid, not to mention the environmental problems associated with mining the minerals needed to make these batteries and the unresolved issue of how to safely recycle them.

 

Simply put, EVs are not “zero emission” vehicles. They are powered by our fossil fuel burning electric grid.

 

“They’re not reducing any carbon footprint with electric vehicles. They’re just trading for a longer tail pipe,” one auto industry insider from Michigan told Breitbart News. “They’re going to end up polluting more to charge these batteries, all the while pretending like they’re saving the environment. They’re wiping out countless jobs just so the right people can get rich. And the right people are all tied to China — because guess what they don’t have in China? Our oil reserves.”

 

Taken as a whole, Biden’s energy policies would replace America’s reliable fossil fuel-based energy infrastructure with an unreliable renewal energy grid that is vulnerable to rolling blackouts. And at the same time, his policies would also dramatically increase the strain on our power grid from all the electric vehicles that will need to be plugged in to be recharged.

 

What’s more, Carney noted the difficulty of maintaining the mineral supply chains needed to produce these electric vehicles.

 

“We can’t get our hands on all of these high-tech minerals that we need for the batteries.”

 

He noted in particular our inability to mine enough copper for electric vehicle production. “An electric vehicle takes far more copper than a traditional vehicle,” he explained. “We’re not mining anywhere in the world enough copper to come up with that.”

 

Rebecca Mansour is a Senior Editor-at-Large for Breitbart News. Follow her on Twitter at @RAMansour.

Source:    Breitbart