
by Larry Elder
April 24, 2025
from
TownHall Website

AP Photo
Rich Pedroncelli
Are
electric vehicles
better for
the planet
than
gasoline-powered vehicles?
This is
the question we explore
in a new
documentary
"Electric
Vehicles: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly"...
Whether one agrees with former President
Joe Biden, who calls
climate change "an existential
threat," or whether one agrees with the late physicist Freeman
Dyson, who dismissed
Al Gore and his "An
Inconvenient Truth" as,"lousy science," this question
remains:
are electric vehicles better for planet Earth
than "gas guzzlers"...?
After all, fossil-fuel-generated energy is
required to manufacture an electric vehicle and then to transport it
to the dealership.
The electricity required to charge it comes
mostly from fossil-fuel-generated power.
Electric vehicles are a triumph of technology,
with incredible features.
They are quiet, fast and fun to drive.
The self-driving feature, while not
foolproof, will likely save lives because human driving error is
more common. (There are some gas-powered cars with a similar
feature.)
There are concerns about driving range, as
well as the availability for charging stations for long drives.
Right now, an EV compared to a gas-powered car of
similar size may be more expensive.
There are still tax incentives available, but
they may be reduced, if not phased out at some point. With the more
expensive purchase price, mandates to buy an EV or to restrict the
sale of gas cars stand to hurt those less well off.
Then there is the China factor...
The computer chips required for the EV
disproportionately come from China.
The minerals in the batteries - lithium,
nickel, cobalt, manganese - are mined, processed and
manufactured in China, or in places under China's control, such
as the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Take cobalt in the Congo...
Two years ago, NPR
wrote,
"How 'modern-day slavery' in the Congo powers
the rechargeable battery economy."
It featured the work of Siddharth Kara,
author of the book "Cobalt
Red."
Kara said:
"People (including children) are working in
subhuman, grinding, degrading conditions.
They use pickaxes, shovels, stretches of
rebar to hack and scrounge at the earth in trenches and pits and
tunnels to gather cobalt and feed it up the formal supply
chain...
Cobalt is toxic to touch and breathe - and
there are hundreds of thousands of poor Congolese (workers)
touching and breathing it day in and day out.
Young mothers with babies strapped to their
backs, all breathing in this toxic cobalt dust...
There's complete cross-contamination between
industrial excavator-derived cobalt and cobalt dug by women and
children with their bare hands (for $1 or $2 a day)."
As for reviews about "Electric Vehicles - The
Good, the Bad and the Ugly," Paul Bond, veteran journalist
formerly of "Newsweek" and "The Hollywood Reporter," wrote:
"Larry Elder's latest documentary... begins
with... provocative claims:
EVs might harm the planet more than
gas-powered cars, they rely on child labor and open the door
to privacy invasions and hacking...
Whether you're waving a Trump flag or
preaching clean living, Elder's film demands a second look at
the EV craze.
It's not just about cars... it's about who
controls your life, your data, and your future."
Tyler O'Neil of The Daily Signal
wrote:
"While environmental activists and EV
manufacturers have crafted a narrative that EVs are not just the
cars of the future but our only clean solution to an ostensible
climate "crisis", Elder uncovers the dirty truth:
EVs require more energy to produce,
provide less freedom for drivers, empower America's chief
rival in the world, and actually make things worse for the
environment.
'Mass delusion has
always fascinated me,' Elder says in the film,
'Scientists, media people, politicians, academics have
convinced the average person that our climate is in
peril and if we don't do something real fast to get us
off fossil fuels, we're going to be in trouble.
I just, intuitively, am skeptical
about that'."
"He asks the hard questions and comes
away with unsettling answers... for the proponents of EVs.
Ironically, only the oft-demonized fossil
fuels give viewers a sense of hope for the future, and many
political and ideological forces are attempting to snuff out
the lights powered by the internal combustion engine."
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