The European Union’s ban on petrol and diesel cars from 2035 sanctions an evolution already underway on the markets: sales of electric cars are progressing at breakneck speed, in some parts of the world they are already a quarter of the total. But the conversion of our car fleet collides with the Western resistance to digging underground to extract the raw materials needed for electric vehicles.
E in California an authoritative environmentalist manifesto causes a sensation because it also declares war on the electric car: too polluting, it’s not a solution. The announced death for the petrol or diesel car receives formal approval from the European Parliament, but the direction of travel is already clear for many consumers. In 2022 for the first time electric cars have passed the threshold of 10% of the global total. 7.8 million were sold, an increase of 68% in just one year. The world average hides much more advanced peaks. At the forefront are China and Germany.
on the German market electric cars have already caught up 25% of production last year, on the Chinese one almost 20% of new registrations are totally electric. All these data exclude hybrids which would raise the percentages even higher. The European average is 20% like the Chinese one. The United States they remain further behind (6% of electric cars on the total sold in 2022) despite having a world champion like Tesla, still number one for electric car sales on the planet.
Ma the Inflation Reduction Act passed by Joe Biden contains tax incentives so generous for electric vehicles, that a jump in sales is expected even in America (the name of the Inflation Reduction Act can be misleading, in reality it is Biden’s Green Deal, generous with subsidies for green technologies and sustainable transition).
Another significant signal that comes from the market is this: electric cars are rapidly approaching the prices of petrol or diesel ones. The drop in list prices derives both from tax breaks and from savings on production costs which occur when the volumes churned out by factories increase. Speaking of factories, however, another American piece of news shines a light on our contradictions (ours as Westerners). Ford announces construction in Michigan of a new factory to produce batteries for its electric cars, investing $3.5 billion and hiring 2,500 employees. But he will produce under license from Catl, the Chinese number one in electric batteries. Our dependence on China in this area is only increasing.
Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act or Green Deal is a perfect example of the contradictions of which we are prisoners. On the one hand it tries to reduce the overwhelming Chinese monopoly in green technologies – electric batteries or photovoltaic panels – on the other hand the same Biden administration gives in to pressure from some environmental lobbies and disseminates obstacles against the exploitation of local resources. Starting with rare earths and strategic minerals used in batteries or solar panels. With one hand Biden orders his Energy Department to finance a lithium project in Nevada for 700 million, 300 million for a graphite factory in Louisiana. But with the other hand, Biden authorizes his Interior Ministry to block a new copper, nickel and cobalt mine in Minnesota.
They are all minerals and metals that are essential for electric batteries. For now they are mostly extracted in emerging countries, then processed and refined in China: therefore due to the type of industrial processes used in those countries, they pollute much more than if we did the same things at home; however, pollution takes place “out of sight, out of mind”, so for Westerners the problem does not exist. In fact, America is divided in two on mining activities: it is possible to proceed expeditiously with new extraction projects only in those US states where the Republicans govern, and where mining industries with ancient traditions often already exist.
A case in point is Nebraska, where a new project was recently started to mine rare earths including titanium, scandium and niobium. The governor of Nebraska is the Republican Jim Pillen, the mining industry is well rooted in the state, and the local population considers it a “patriotic duty” to approve extraction to free themselves from China.
Quite different is the message that comes from California, cradle of modern environmentalism. Californian ecologists played a pioneering role in the 1970s. Today, many of them embrace the more extremist versions of what appears to have become the religion of anti-development. A striking example comes from a new report titled “Achieving Zero Emissions with More Mobility and Less Mining”. They drafted it University of California academics gathered under the umbrella of the Climate + Community Project. It will certainly have considerable influence, like all the environmental proclamations that come from California. This Report contains a real one declaration of war against the electric car. Starting from obvious considerations: the electric car is by no means zero-emissions, many of its components require polluting activities to be produced, starting precisely with metals and rare earths, ending with the construction of the distribution network (the chargers).
The list of misdeeds of the electric car is well known to those who have studied it closely. But until recently, highlighting the “impurity” of electric vehicles was such a taboo, that director Michael Moore suffered a lynching on social media and a real censorship by the single environmentalist thought, when he made a documentary on the dark side of the transition to a world of Tesla. The contradictions are not unique to America.
Sweden recently announced the discovery of new deposits of rare earths, the richest deposit in all of Europe. The Swedish company in charge of exploiting these resources, Luossavaara-Kiirunavaara Aktiebolag, or Lkab, could carry out the extraction and processing while minimizing carbon emissions: Northern Sweden abounds in renewable energy, from hydroelectric to nuclear to wind . Mining and handling rare earths in Sweden certainly pollutes much less than doing it in China. However the mining industry is still hindered: it is still “dirty”, and then there is the noise pollution, in short, no one likes having it in their own home.
It is thus that between disputes, consultations with the local population, technical tests and permits, Swedish forecasts speak of at least 10-15 years to draw on this new deposit. The harmony between the problems of Sweden (the land of Greta Thunberg) and the Californian Report mentioned above, the result of the academics who have appointed themselves the guardians of the purity of the environmental movement, is evident. If they are against the electric car, what do they propose as an alternative? A world populated by pedestrians, bicycles and trains is their idea of mobility. A very typical idea of ”ZTL”, by privileged people who live in urban centers well served by public transport. More realistically, if this new crusade of the most extreme fringes of environmentalism wins, it means that we will be slaves more than ever to the autocracies and their monopolies.
