Electric vehicles have become the centerpiece of the plan to ward off climate change by drastically reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The Biden administration seems to feel that if we can just get people to plug in their cars to a non-emitting electrical socket instead of filling up with carboniferous fossil fuels – voila! By 2050 we’ll be at zero-carbon emissions, no problem.
That would be a nice world, but it’s not the one we live in. In fact, EVs check virtually every box indicating an unrealistic policy bound for failure.
For starters, personal vehicles aren’t even the right target, despite the claim of the Union of Concerned Scientists that they are a “major cause of global warming.” The New York Times agrees that cars are a “major driver of climate change.”
Really? Transportation globally accounts for 20% of total emissions, but cars and vans are only 8% while personal vehicles, because they accumulate less mileage, generate just 3% of all emissions. But the U.S. owns just 12% of the world’s cars. That means that just 0.36% is the global carbon reduction we would achieve if every American car were electrified and if all carbon emissions were thereby eliminated.
But it gets worse. EVs don’t necessarily reduce carbon emissions at all. Energy must still be produced to power them, like any other car. It just happens in a different location.
The net emissions of an EV depend on how its electricity is generated. Since fossil fuels still generate the bulk of our power, many EVs are a little more than carbon neutral. Moreover, the manufacture and eventual disposal of the required batteries are intensely energy consuming.
California, New York, and other states plus the EU have promised to be fully EV by 2035. But these states are already straining under the increased demands of a power-hungry world even without EVs.
The task of fueling all these EVs would be overwhelming. According to one estimate, achieving a “net-zero economy” for New York would require building 2,500 giant, 680-foot tall turbines, which would hopefully generate electricity 40% of the time.
The turbines would require 110,000 tons of copper alone, for which 25,000,000 tons of copper ore would have to be mined and processed, after removing 40,000,000 tons of overlaying rock. Then, birds, bats, and endangered species would be regularly massacred by the millions. And that’s only for one state.
The unwelcome fact is that sustainable fuel sources have received massive subsidies for years to “help them get started.” Yet wind, solar, and other minor sources of energy still produce just 12% of global demand and have yet to demonstrate the potential to replace fossil fuels in the future as the main source of energy for EVs.
EVs are more popular with green activists than with drivers. They accounted for just 5.8% of all auto sales last year, despite being heavily subsidized. Buyers benefit from generous production subsidies, from fueling subsidies, from special driving privileges such as use of HOV lanes, and are unfairly excused from participating in the fuel taxes which fund road construction and repair.
Yet most consumers still find the extra cost of an EV is not justified. Automakers, with the notable exception so far of Tesla, are beginning to feel the pinch. Many were bull rushed into EV production by government pressure and subsidies as well as fear of getting left out of the presumed coming boom market.
But now Ford, for one, expects to lose $3 billion on EV production this year. Volkswagen is cutting back on EV production as well, stating that “we are noticing customer reticence quite vehemently in the electric world.” It’s going to take a mountain of subsidies and mandates to get anywhere near 100% EVs by 2035.
There are other big problems too. The batteries average 1,000 pounds or so in weight, resulting in excessive wear to roads and bridges. Collisions are more damaging – for the other guy. There are not nearly enough mines, metals, and minerals on earth to supply EV battery manufacture. EVs are an ineffective solution to an exaggerated problem. We can only hope environmental alarmists come to their senses before their unrealistic dreams bankrupt us all.
Dr. Thomas Patterson, former Chairman of the Goldwater Institute, is a retired emergency physician. He served as an Arizona State senator for 10 years in the 1990s, and as Majority Leader from 93-96. He is the author of Arizona’s original charter schools bill.
It looks like we struck a nerve at one of the largest universities in the United States. Last week, the Free Enterprise Club published an article on Arizona State University’s (ASU) failure to uphold free speech. The article came in the aftermath of an event held by the T.W. Lewis Center for personal development—a center of the Barrett Honors College—that featured prominent conservative speakers like Robert Kiyosaki, Dennis Prager, and Charlie Kirk.
While the event was allowed to proceed, it faced a campaign from 39 of the 47 faculty from the honors college who tried to shut it down. Then, in the months following the event, the center was not only dissolved, but two staff members lost their jobs. Now, ASU has offered a “fact check” of our article in a desperate attempt to save face. And as you might expect, it’s another swing and miss…
Have you heard the outrageous story of what happened recently in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania’s capital? Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-Pa.), elected in 2022, had campaigned on school choice for tens of thousands of children, mostly minorities, who are forced to attend failing public schools in places like Philadelphia.
“It’s what I believe,” Shapiro, then state attorney general, assured voters as he ran for governor. Last month on a national Fox News broadcast, Shapiro was unequivocal in his support for school choice because “every child of God” deserves “a quality education.”
But there’s a force far more powerful in politics than Shapiro’s convictions, such as they are. And that force is the teachers unions. They put on a full-court press to stop the roughly 10,000 vouchers for the poorest kids in Pennsylvania’s worst school districts even though the state budget bill gave billions more for the public schools. It didn’t matter that this voucher program comprised less than 0.5% of state spending. The union brass commanded Democrats to vote no on even a single penny going to schools that work.
In the end, Shapiro did a full flip-flop. He vetoed his own promise. He might as well have declared that black lives don’t matter.
Shapiro has presidential ambitions — so he figures he needs the teachers unions behind him. But if he can’t face down Randi Weingarten, how is he ever going to stand up to bullies like China’s President Xi Jinping or Russia’s President Vladimir Putin?
This story isn’t just about Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania. In North Carolina, Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper declared a state of emergency in the Tar Heel State because the legislature wanted to fund vouchers for kids to go to the best schools possible. Egads!
In Arizona, Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs wants to defund a school choice program that is already serving tens of thousands of kids, most of whom are Hispanic, with proven results of better performance and higher test scores. Why would she kill a program that is working? The teachers unions want the money and the kids under their control.
In New York City’s Harlem neighborhood, charter schools are flourishing. They are alternatives to public schools but are still regulated by the state. They are oversubscribed because parents want to choose the best school for their kids. Now, the Democrats want to put a cap on the charter schools because the teachers unions want to warehouse the kids in public schools where a majority of the kids can’t read or do math at grade-level proficiency. In other words, many of the public schools are worse than mediocre. And it’s not for lack of money. New York spends more than $20,000 per child in public schools.
Did I mention that in nearly every one of these cases across the country, the Democrats blocking private and Catholic school options went to private schools themselves? Or they send their kids to private schools. But poor black kids aren’t allowed that same opportunity? These are hypocrites with a capital H.
There’s a cruel historic irony here. Sixty years ago this summer, Alabama Gov. George Wallace stood before the doors of schools to prevent black children from attending the schools with white children. He was trying to preserve the stain of segregation.
Today, Democrats are employing the same tactic to keep minority kids from attending excellent schools. Why? They say that school choice will hurt public schools or cause more segregation.
Wrong on both counts. Monopolies are always bad for consumers and competition improves service. Education choice requires public schools to compete. Would you get good and friendly service if there were only one restaurant in town?
Instead of draining public schools of money, studies show that per-pupil funding rises when some kids take advantage of vouchers to attend alternative schools. Charter and Catholic schools tend to be, in most cases, more racially diverse than inner-city public schools.
I’m a parent of five boys, so I know that each of my kids has different skills, interests, behavior issues and attention spans. To warehouse them all in the same schoolroom is madness. Schools should be tailored toward the kids and serve their interests — not those of the $1 trillion a year public-school-industrial complex.
More importantly, as an economist, my biggest worry about America’s future is what happens when kids are graduating without being able to read their diplomas and with no useful skills. There are hundreds of schools around the country where not a single child can pass a basic math or reading test.
That’s an economic, civil rights and national security tragedy. Shame on Democratic leaders, and some Republicans, too, for putting their own political ambitions ahead of our nation’s children.
Stephen Moore is a contributor to The Daily Caller News Foundation, senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, and a co-founder of the Committee to Unleash Prosperity. His latest book is “Govzilla: How the Relentless Growth of Government Is Devouring Our Economy.”
Bad ideas never seem to go away. And in politics, they often get recycled every 10 years because consultants need to make money. That’s why it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that we’re seeing another push for jungle primaries in the state of Arizona.
If you’re not familiar with a jungle primary (or open primary), it is an election in which all candidates run in the same primary regardless of their political party. The top two candidates who receive the most votes then advance to the general election.
Several years ago, California adopted this “solution” under the guise that it would result in more moderate policies and candidates being elected there. Go ahead and read that again. When you think of California, do you think of a state with moderate policies and candidates? That should tell you all you need to know about jungle primaries. And yet, now we have groups like Save Democracy telling us that we need to act more like California to improve Arizona…
By cutting off oil and gas exploration as part of a global campaign to achieve net zero emissions by 2050, policymakers aligned with climate activists are “misdirecting scarce innovation resources,” according to an analysis of energy transition efforts.
While proponents of Environmental, Social, and Governance investing continue to seize upon the International Energy Agency’s (IEAs) “roadmap” for reaching net zero as a plug for their ambitions, the authors of a new study probing into the agency’s projections find that they are based on faulty assumptions.
The net zero initiatives that IEA foresees can only materialize if demand for coal, oil, and natural gas plummet while consumers gravitate toward so-called renewable energy in the form of wind and solar. But as the report from the RealClearFoundation and the Energy Policy Research Foundation makes clear, this is a dubious proposition.
“Rather than being a plausible description of the future, demand for hydrocarbons withering away is best thought of as an expression of a political or an ideological aspiration, as opposed to an objective assessment of the future,” the report says. “The failure to invest in increased supply is far more likely to result in upwardly spiraling prices as demand increasingly exceeds supply, as the Biden administration understood when it used the Strategic Petroleum Reserve for the nonstrategic purpose of tamping down gasoline prices.”
The foundation is a nonprofit group founded to examine energy economics and policy with an emphasis on energy security. The geopolitical implications of net zero policies and ESG investing figures into its analysis of IEA’s roadmap. A big part of the problem lies with the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, widely known as OPEC, and the leverage it could gain over western nations including the U.S.
If the demand for petroleum is higher than what is projected in IEA’s roadmap, which is highly likely, the foundation estimates that OPEC’s share of global oil market could rise to an astonishing 82 percent by 2050. OPEC includes Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela.
“Wittingly or otherwise, ESG investors are undermining the security interests of the West during a period of rising geopolitical tensions,” the foundation warns in its analysis. The upshot is that the west is well positioned to maintain a healthy level of independence from OPEC with the right mix of policies. The foundation points out that IEA was initially established in response to the “first oil price shock” in the early 1970s “to act as a buyers’ group of western nations in an attempt to counteract OPEC market power.” But given how politically fashionable “net zero” efforts have become, the agency has clearly strayed from its mission.
“The IEA could have chosen to remain faithful to its original mandate, but as the Energy Policy Research Foundation report shows, in seeking to become a cheerleader for net zero, the IEA has allowed itself to be used as a tool for climate extremism, has misled policymakers, and has endangered the world’s economy and Western security, all while forsaking the purpose for which it was created.”
A key part of the foundation’s report focuses on the negative consequences that would flow from halting investment in new oil and gas fields based on the idea that a seamless transition can be made to renewables. American energy consumers can expect to take it on the chin.
In the first decade under net zero emissions, the foundation estimates that global oil and gas fuel receipts will be between $12.2 trillion and $52.6 more than what IEA envisions under its policy scenarios. Put simply, consumers will have to pay more for less oil and gas along with all the costs associated with making the energy transition.
The foundation’s analysis also highlights the environmental degradation that could result from a headlong rush toward net zero that does account for financial and technological realities.
“Reducing oil and gas supply will contribute to various environmental and health effects around the world. First, it will likely lead to a resurgence of coal consumption, as many low- and middle-income countries may struggle to afford higher-priced natural gas for heating, cooking, and electricity generation,” the report warns. “As a result, coal-to-gas switching in many countries may regress, increasing local air pollution and exacerbating health crises in many urban areas.”
Self-described environmentalists might also want to take a hard look at the amount of land wind and solar could gobble up. The foundation calculates that solar and wind generation capacity needed to achieve net zero requires an area equivalent to the combined size of California and Texas while the bioenergy needed for electricity production would be about the size of France and Mexico combined.
Apparently, there’s more than just raw economics at stake. What environmental advocacy groups typically describe as clean, and green is neither.
The geopolitical, economic, and environmental costs of net zero call out for a political course correction.
Kevin Mooney is a contributor to The Daily Caller News Foundation and the Senior Investigative Journalist at the Commonwealth Foundation, Pennsylvania’s free-market think tank. He writes for several national publications. Twitter: @KevinMooneyDC
Universities are supposed to be the “marketplace of ideas.” With a “green light” rating from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), you would think that Arizona State University (ASU) would understand this. But apparently, the school would rather be just another woke university that shuts down free speech. Now, the T.W. Lewis Center for Personal Development—a center of the Barrett Honors College—and its executive director Ann Atkinson have found out the hard way.
Back in February, Atkinson organized an event on “Health, Wealth, and Happiness” as part of a series from the Lewis Center focused on connecting students with professionals who can offer career and life advice. Speakers for the event included Rich Dad, Poor Dad author Robert Kiyosaki, radio talk show host and founder of Prager U Dennis Prager, founder and president of Turning Point USA Charlie Kirk, and heart-transplant cardiologist Radha Gopalan. For a university that offers classes on subjects like witchcraft and critical theories of sexuality, this event felt pretty tame by comparison. But the mere mention of these conservative speakers caused more than 75 percent of the Barrett Honors College faculty to have a meltdown…
