In perfect Democratic Party form, the Biden administration has dropped another government burden on the private sector. Two days ago, the White House rolled out “the toughest-ever” automobile emissions standards. The objective, of course, is to force Americans to buy the cars that the ruling class wants them to drive. There’s a big problem here, though – the grid won’t be up to the task of keeping tens of millions of electric vehicles charged.
The headline from a Bloomberg story last week summed up the plan: “Biden Set to Crack Down on Auto Emissions to Accelerate EV Sales.”
Rules decreed by the Environmental Protection Agency are intended to “propel electric vehicle sales well beyond current levels,” says Bloomberg. “The EPA has projected that to meet proposed mandates, electric models would need to make up roughly two-thirds of car and light truck sales in 2032 — up from less than a tenth last year.”
This is no noble effort to prevent a climate catastrophe. Democrats, eco-activists and the thoroughly compromised media continually argue that we have to move to EVs to save the sky, but the federal rules and state mandates they propose and issue are part of a larger plan to drive Americans out of cars and into public transit, which is failing across the country.
There are a number of problems with the march to EV-topia. They’re not zero-emission vehicles, they’re an extravagant purchase, costly to repair, expensive to insure, hazardous to own, and they create a new class of hazmat problems.
On top of all that, charging them is a hassle, which is only going to become worse. America, in 2024, is already running out of power.
“Vast swaths of the United States are at risk of running short of power as electricity-hungry data centers and clean-technology factories proliferate around the country, leaving utilities and regulators grasping for credible plans to expand the nation’s creaking power grid,” the Washington Post reported earlier this month.
This “power crunch imperils” utilities’ capacity to provide the massive amount of electricity “needed to charge the millions of electric cars and household appliances required to meet state and federal climate goals.”
As the grid coughs, wheezes and sputters, as construction of solar and wind farms can’t keep up with the retirements of natural gas and nuclear plants, politicians such as Joe Biden and a small mob of governors that includes Gavin Newsom, California’s one-man demolition crew, are busy outlawing automobiles that run independent of the power supply (outside of the electricity needed to run gas pumps).
But that’s OK because Americans will be buying EVs, and when they can’t be charged because the demand for power outstrips the supply, we will hop on buses, trains and subways – exactly where those politicians and planners want us. Our self-appointed superiors even admit they wish to “help get people out of their cars,” and lead a shift from “ownership to usership” of vehicles.
In their way of thinking, only the elites should have the freedom that automobiles deliver. Everyone else must be sardined into mass transit. The EV fetish is nothing but a navigation point on the left’s route to a world in which a car is a luxury item that only few will have.
— Written by the I&I Editorial Board
