If You Like Colonialism and Exploitation, You’ll Love Electric Vehicles

It’s difficult to think of any technology that is doing more harm to the environment than electric vehicles, or EVs. That’s a shocking statement to many, but it holds up under scrutiny once all the facts are known.

In the first place, the electricity for EVs does not come out of the sky. It comes from the power grid, which is maintained by a variety of power plants using coal, natural gas, diesel fuel, and in some cases nuclear energy or hydroelectric energy.

Wind turbines and solar panels play a very small part in maintaining the baseload power of the grid. That’s unlikely to change in the future because wind and solar are intermittent sources. Solar doesn’t create power at night or on cloudy days. Wind turbines don’t create power when the wind doesn’t blow.

Nuclear power plants have been unpopular since the Three-Mile Island incident in 1979. There are currently only two new nuclear reactors being built in the United States, both in Georgia.

Hydroelectric plants are efficient but enormously expensive, opposed by environmentalists, and limited by geography in terms of where they can be built. EVs will create enormous new demand for electricity. So, you’re stuck with coal, natural gas, and oil if you want to charge them up.

If you can imagine a Tesla pulling a coal wagon like a nineteenth-century locomotive, that’s a pretty good image of where the electricity comes from.

It gets worse. EVs run on batteries. The batteries are made from lithium, nickel, cobalt, manganese, and palladium among other metals. Those metals come from mines; many in Russia, South America, and Africa. Many of those mines are in the poorest countries on earth.

As described in this article, the effort to mine those metals uses some of the world’s dirtiest mining techniques. This has resulted in harsh working conditions akin to slavery in some cases. The mining itself results in economic exploitation because those taking the minerals and metals are getting rich from EV manufacturing, while the countries that host the mines are left with pollution, human rights violations, and other abuses done both by the mining companies and the corrupt governments in those countries.

Gasoline and diesel offer the most power by weight of any fuel except uranium (and it’s difficult to imagine driving around with a fusion reactor in your car). Gas and diesel are by far the cleanest and most efficient ways to power vehicles.

EVs hurt the environment, both due to mining for battery materials and because of coal-fired power generation needed to charge batteries. Remember that the next time you pass a Tesla on the highway.

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