Tucker Carlson: Electronic vehicles are a disaster for the environment
Fox News host Tucker Carlson voices his concerns over liberal environmental policies on 'Tucker Carlson Tonight.'
On April 24 of last year, and you may have missed this, the state of California finally achieved what the Green Movement has dreamt about for decades. It happened. The State Energy Authority in California was able to generate 95% of its total power from entirely renewable sources. They said it couldn't be done. We said it couldn't be done, but just months into the Joe Biden administration, California did it.
"It sends chills down my spine," announced Elliot Mainzer, who runs California's biggest power grid. "It's amazing. We're making a real dent in the state's carbon emissions." April 24th, 2021, ladies and gentlemen, remember that date. It's a moment that will live alongside Thomas Edison's invention of the incandescent light bulb, alongside Neil Armstrong's stroll on the surface of the moon. It is a day we saw a glimpse of humanity's future.
That's what the news accounts told us, but actually, there were some caveats to this achievement. For starters, April is not the time to test the power grid. It's the most temperate months of the year when electricity use is at its lowest. Nor was the grid in question statewide. It didn't, for example, supply power to Los Angeles, which is by far the biggest city in California, and now that we're being honest, it wasn't entirely renewable. As the L.A. Times conceded in a far lower paragraph, despite its press release about renewables, the state of California was actually, "also burning a bunch of natural gas."
Now, according to scientists, natural gas qualifies as a fossil fuel, and it's not technically renewable and then there was this amazing but thoroughly downplayed fact: the green energy miracle that sent chills down the spines of California power executives, the event they described as "amazing" lasted for a total of (can you guess?) 4 seconds. Not days or hours, seconds, 4 seconds. That's what California politicians were bragging about: 4 seconds of not actually renewable energy, but the celebration obscured an inconvenient fact.
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California Gov. Gavin Newsom speaks during a bill signing ceremony. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images) (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
Just a few months earlier, in mid-August, California's green energy grid had collapsed completely. Half a million residents lost power in the middle of a heat wave. Grid operators warned it was about to get a lot worse. From late afternoon until evening, they predicted, at the times people returned to their homes and were hoping to use electricity, as some Americans do, the state would be short thousands of megawatts and that meant millions of Californians would be without any power whatsoever and that would be a catastrophe, an undeniable one. So, to fight it, the state implemented a strategy the developing world has come to know, well: rolling blackouts.
"It's almost 3 p.m.," the mayor of Los Angeles tweeted on September 6, 2020. "Time to turn off major appliances, set the thermostat to 78 degrees, or use a fan instead. Turn off excess lights and unplug any appliances you're not using. We need every Californian to help conserve energy," except, of course, for the mayor of Los Angeles who gets to be on Twitter whenever he wants, but really, the message was clear: We give up. We're no longer pretending to provide a first world standard of living to our citizens, the most heavily taxed in America. We are Tegucigalpa now. Please play along and for the most part, patient Californians did play along, but the problem did not improve. In fact, it got worse.
The California Energy Commission has just issued a report predicting widespread power outages in the state of California for the next five years at least and of course, September will always be the worst month. As the vice chair of the commission put it, "Securing energy reliability is a tremendous responsibility. The responsibility is becoming increasingly difficult to fulfill with the tools we have in hand."
Oh, stop whining. Keep the power on, but no, we don't have enough tools. What happened to all the tools? Well, those tools would include the famous nuclear plant at San Onofre, but that plant was shuttered a decade ago after 40 years of protests by green activists, supposedly on behalf of something called the environment, something with which they are personally unfamiliar, but it didn't matter. The state shut it down. What happened next? What was the effect of shutting down San Onofre?
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Well, scientists estimate that closing San Onofre led to the release of 37 million metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Now, if you believe that carbon dioxide is a pollutant and they all do, that would qualify as a very bad thing. But it didn't stop California from plowing forward anyway and doing more of the same: polluting in the name of saving the environment. Now the state has announced a plan to close the San Luis Obispo Diablo Canyon nuclear plant. That plant supplies energy to millions of other Californians. So as a result of these and many other closures of actual power plants, the state of California now imports a third of its energy from elsewhere and that would seem to be an embarrassing display from what is supposedly our richest state.
So, say what you will about California politicians, like them or not, it's indisputable that on the question of energy, they have no idea what they're doing and we know this because their track record of incompetence is lengthy and unbroken. They are majestic in their ineptitude. So naturally, they want more power over power. There's just so much more to destroy. This week, the state's surgically enhanced governor, Gavin Newsom, announced a new way to overburden California's already collapsing energy grid. He's got an idea. He wants to ban gasoline-powered engines and force everyone to drive an electric vehicle, a vehicle that has to be plugged into outlets that in the state of California no longer work. We're not kidding, by the way. Watch this.
NEWSON: We will be the first jurisdiction in the world to require all new cars to be sold to be alternative fuel cars. We are going through one of the great transformations in our history, energy transformations, and the electrification is the architecture for economic transformation.
So, here's a guy who's never had a job, who couldn't fix a broken lawnmower lecturing, you about energy and architecture and transformation. The same guy who's presided over a state that can no longer power your washing machine is telling you he's going to control what kind of car you drive. Now, just think broad for 1 second. If that guy can tell you what kind of car you're allowed to drive, what can't he tell you? Why can't he tell you what kind of job you can have, what kind of food you can eat, who you can sleep with? So, of course, the instinct behind all of this is totalitarian, which is to say total control over you and banning the gas engine is, among many other things, an attack on your autonomy.
Electric vehicles can be, above all, controlled by the people who control the grid and that means the next time that California's energy regulator decides to shut off the power, you can't go anywhere. You can't leave California. Now, a few things you might notice about this. First, they're doing this because they're so concerned about carbon emissions and burning fossil fuels adds to carbon emissions and is destroying the planet. If you actually were worried about that, what's the first thing that you would ban? Well, private jet travel obviously, private jet travel emits a lot of carbon. In just 60 minutes, a private jet emits more carbon dioxide, in fact, than the average American household emits in three months in one flight.
So, private jet travel is responsible for more greenhouse gases than the nation of Denmark. (They) pollute at a rate about 15 times higher than commercial planes. So, you would think since most people who fly private are affluent by definition, and the global warming cult is the most popular with the affluent, that these same people would have given up private jet travel because it's just such an obvious offense against the climate, but no, just the opposite. Private jet travel has become more popular since the pandemic. Business jet travel is up more than 22% since 2019. More than 70% of all private jet flights take place in the United States. What are they doing? Well, they're faring politicians like Gavin Newsom, who does not fly commercial, and of course, celebrities like Taylor Swift, famously. Her jet emitted 8,300 tons of carbon this year so far. Oh, interesting.
So if you're looking to reduce carbon emissions, you would think they'd worry a little less about your minivan and a little more about their G4. Oh, but they're not worried at all about their G4 and that's why Taylor Swift, Gavin Newsom and Nancy Pelosi and all the other people out there lecturing about climate will never give up their private planes because when you fly private, you're not only immune from COVID, like you don't have to wear a mask on a private plane. Are you kidding? You poor or something? Shut up, but you're also immune from the immutable laws of climate change.
So, California has no interest in preventing people who are making the rules like Gavin Newsom, from traveling anywhere they want. They want to control the way that you travel. Now that's California. So, you are tempted to say, "Well, okay, California's beautiful, but it's obviously run by lunatics who are turning it into a third-world country. So maybe this is just part of their slate of ideas to wreck the prettiest place on the planet," but no, it's not just California. It's not just happening there.
It's also happening in more reasonable places like Virginia. Law in Virginia currently requires gasoline engines, gasoline cars, to be phased out by 2035, which is pretty soon. States of Massachusetts and Washington have similar laws. So does New York, so does Oregon. In all, 15 states have supported California's plan to force zero-emission vehicles, none of which are actually zero-emission, they're just electric and could therefore be controlled by the energy grid and the regulators who oversee it, and it's not just 15 states, it's the federal government. According to the Biden administration, everybody will be required to drive an electric car by 2035.
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Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm speaks during a press briefing at the White House, Nov. 23, 2021, in Washington. (AP) (AP Photo/Evan Vucci, File)
SECRETARY GRANHOLM: We obviously are all in on making sure that we meet the president's goals of getting to 100% clean electricity by 2035 and net zero carbon emissions by 2050 and, you know, if you drive an electric car, this would not be affecting you clearly.
SENATOR ED MARKEY: There's no reason why you have to pay $4 or $5 a gallon for gasoline when you can have an all-electric vehicle.
SENATOR DEBBIE STABENOW: After waiting for a long time to have enough chips in this country to finally get my electric vehicle, I got it and drove it from Michigan to here this last weekend and went by every single gas station didn't matter how high it was.
PETE BUTTIGIEG: The more pain we are all experiencing from the high price of gas, the more benefit there is for those who can access electric vehicles.
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Another cascade of unemployable morons, every one of whom has a long track record of failure. Not one of whom has ever done anything in the real world, all of whom giving you a moral lecture about how your car is destroying the planet when they're flying private. How long is the country going to put up with this? There's no reason to pay $4 or $5 for gas, even electric vehicles, says Ed Markey, who's lived at public expense his entire life and has no idea what anything costs. A typical electric vehicle costs more than 60 grand, but that's only part of the cost. Charging an electric vehicle in countries that have a lot of electric vehicles, a lot of them is now more expensive than filling your tank with gasoline.
As Swedish journalist Peter Imanuelsen put it, "Electricity prices in Norway are set to reach about $1 per kilowatt hour. At these prices, it would cost $100 to fully charge one Tesla." And yet, all over the world, countries, politicians who may or may not have deals with the electric car companies are forcing people to buy products they don't want, and force is the word. This is not a transformation that is taking place voluntarily as it would in a democracy where people get to govern themselves and choose the way they live. No, this is being imposed by a small number of people on top again, the ever the revolution aimed downward as always.
A bank in Australia has announced it will be ending loans for gas vehicles. You just can't buy one. You can't finance it. The EU Parliament has just voted to support a ban on the sale of new gasoline and diesel cars beginning in 2035 in all of Europe. Now Europe, as we told you last night, is a place where they're turning off traffic lights because they don't have enough energy to keep them on. So, how is this going to work? Well, the fact it's happening at all is amazing. Take three steps back. Banning gasoline engines, which we've had for more than 100 years, which have completely defined modern society and that if you're a normal person in this country and don't use the subway from the Upper West Side to Midtown every day, but actually drive like the overwhelming majority of Americans, this is the biggest change in your lifetime. Have you been consulted on it? Has there been a debate about it? No.
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All you hear is you must do this because it's good for the environment, but that's a lie. It's measurably a lie. Electric vehicles are terrible for the environment. Roger McGrath took the time to spell it out recently in Chronicles magazine. As he noted, supplying the materials necessary for the battery of an electric car alone, just the battery, requires, and we're quoting "processing using fossil fuels, of course, of at least 50 tons of ores." It takes a lot of energy to process ore.
A single battery for an electric car needs at least, "30 pounds of lithium, 60 pounds of cobalt, 130 pounds of nickel, 90 pounds of copper, 190 pounds of graphite and roughly 500 pounds of steel, aluminum, magnesium, plastic and other materials," all of which are derived from mining. Where's that mining going to take place? In third-world countries with no environmental regulations whatsoever. How is this good for the environment? Speak slowly so we can understand.
And yet, in California, under Gavin Newsom's new order, every vehicle would require those materials. Here's the problem. We don't have that much lithium or cobalt in the United States. So, where are those elements going to come from, which are required for electric vehicles? Well, lithium mines in China. Did you know the answer to that already? Probably did and the Congo. Let's go exploit Africa so we can feel virtuous. As The New York Times reported last year and we're quoting, "Production of raw materials like lithium, cobalt and nickel that are essential to (electronic vehicle) technologies are often ruinous to land, water, wildlife and people," and by the way, land, water, wildlife and people are exactly the four things that the environmental lobby has no interest at all in. They don't care about the land. They don't care about the water. They don't care about the wildlife and they don't care about the people. It's not about that at all.
It's a religion. It's about making them feel like good people and increasing their control over you. Period. By the way, none of this even addresses the national security implications of this. Just as with solar panels and wind turbines, the materials required for electric vehicle batteries come from and you know the answer, China. China processes 40% of the world's raw lithium. China's market share for lithium ion batteries is about 80%. That's according to Bloomberg and even if we somehow avoid that problem by mining lithium volcanoes in, say, Nevada and polluting the environment there, then what? Well, then you have hundreds of millions of Americans dependent upon cars that the government can turn off in a second that are, by the way, running software that tracks your every movement.
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Now, in a high trust society where everyone thinks the government is on their side, a society that hasn't just hired 87,000 armed IRS agents to crush small business and anyone who's vote for them in a society like that, like maybe Sweden, 30 years ago, that would be totally fine because we trust that they're on our side, but in a country in which the president of the United States is giving a speech two days from now declaring half the population a criminal element, probably not a good idea to turn your vehicle over to those people.
This is the vehicular equivalent of digital currency. Electronic vehicles are a disaster for the energy grid, a disaster for the environment and a disaster for your personal autonomy. If this happens, it will represent the single biggest change in the way you and your family live in generations and yet no one's even talking about it.