In March, Maryland Governor Wes Moore unveiled a plan to ban the sale of gas-powered vehicles. He called the move "a major step in the state's acceleration to improve air quality and combat the effects of climate change."
The announcement garnered surprisingly little media attention, perhaps because no fewer than six states had already announced similar plans, a trend that began in 2020 with California Governor Gavin Newsom's order to prohibit sales of gas-powered cars by 2035.
"By 2035" is the key caveat, of course. Politicians like Moore and Newsom get to bask in the virtue of (eventually) saving the world from CO2, while avoiding the practical problems and tradeoffs of such a ban—and there are tradeoffs.
Basic economics teaches that everything comes with tradeoffs. This includes energy.
Fossil fuels, which currently supply about 80 percent of the world's energy, come with tradeoffs. Renewable energies and green technologies come with tradeoffs. There are pros and cons to each.
The problem is that people often look at fossil fuels and focus solely on their cons—they are finite, cause pollution, and so on—and ignore their benefits. With so-called "green" technologies and energies, people tend to do the opposite.
Wind and solar power, for example, have benefits, but also come with their own adverse impacts. The same can be said of electric vehicles (EVs).
While people like to point out the carbon footprint of gasoline-powered cars, few seem to recognize that EVs also come with a massive carbon footprint, especially during production.
The reality is, it requires a lot more energy to produce EVs than petrol cars, which means they produce a lot more CO2 in the production phase. How many pounds of CO2 does it take to create a single Tesla battery? German researchers asked this question a few years ago. The answer? About 30,000 pounds.
It's not just Teslas, of course. A few years ago Volvo raised eyebrows at a climate summit when it conceded that its C40 Recharge needed to be driven nearly 70,000 miles before it had a lower carbon impact than a gasoline-powered version.
The reasons for this are not hard to fathom. EVs require a lot of energy to produce, and that is not easily offset once a car hits the road. After all, EVs don't just use fossil fuels in production; they also run on fossil fuels. The electricity that powers them isn't produced magically. It's generated, often by fossil fuels. In fact, about 60 percent of the electricity in the U.S. is generated by fossil fuels, according to the Energy Information Administration.
Shifting from petrol cars to EVs will not reduce CO2 emissions nearly as much as many believe. In fact, a recent Wall Street Journal analysis found that shifting all personal vehicles in the U.S. from gas to electric power will reduce global CO2 emissions by only 0.18 percent.
That's a small reduction, you might say, but it's something.
The problem is that such thinking ignores other adverse impacts of EVs. Put CO2 aside. Do you know where the nickel and copper for EVs come from? Or how much lithium and cobalt are used in a single battery?
It takes a tremendous amount of mining to harvest these elements, and the process is hard on the environment. "You have to mine, somewhere on Earth, 500,000 pounds of minerals and rock to make one battery," physicist Mark Mills of the Manhattan Institute recently told John Stossel.
What's more, consider that a single EV can require a mile of copper wiring.
Where do we get all these natural resources? Well, there's a concerted effort to not get them here. It's far too hard on the environment, so manufacturers rely on Chile, Argentina, and Bolivia (the world's so-called Lithium Triangle) for lithium even though the U.S. holds what is quite possibly one of the largest lithium deposits in the world.
Instead of strip mining for copper ourselves, we again turn to Chile, the world leader in copper production. For nickel we turn to the rainforests of Indonesia and the Philippines.
When I was a kid, we were still trying to save the rainforests. Today, we're plundering them for natural resources to make way for the new "green" economy—one that comes with greater costs than people want you to believe.
Jon Miltimore is managing editor of FEE.org, the online portal of the Foundation for Economic Education. Follow his work on Substack.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
