Thanks as always to Pirate’s Cove, The Daley Gator, The Other McCain, Whores and Ale, Flappr and Bacon Time for the Rule Five links. If you aren’t checking these sites daily – you should be!
Scientific American reported last month that even if every person were simply handed the cash to replace all existing gas-guzzlers with EVs, such a thing would still be impossible. For it would require three times as much lithium as the entire world produces each year just to maintain the fleet.
And that’s assuming that everyone is given a more generous timeline of 2050 to make the conversion. In the next 27 years, not only would massive new sources of lithium have to be found, but there would likely be huge environmental problems from mining it all. Lithium mining is a dirty job, one reason there is only one lithium mine in the entire United States. Environmentalists constantly resist the expansion of domestic mining, such that most lithium mining is done in countries with lax environmental protections, such as Argentina and China.
In other words, this whole business of inducing or even forcing everyone into electric vehicles just isn’t going to happen — not in 2035, not in 2050, and maybe not even in 2082.
So where does this leave the radical environmental Left? The answer has to do with the true nature of its movement.
The true nature of the movement, of course, being control. Forcing a radical ideology on the “incorrect” among us, who mostly just want to be left alone to do our own damn thing and not be bothered. As I’ve stated plenty of times, Alaska is full of just such people, ourselves included, who live where we want to live and if we have to drive thirty miles to a WalMart or a grocery store, that’s our business and nobody else’s. But these people want to prevent that.
Here’s the onion:
There is already a way to eliminate global warming — simply adopt nuclear power everywhere. The technology already exists, and its negative externalities are still obviously preferable to the end of the world, if that’s really what humanity is facing from global warming.
Environmentalists’ rejection of nuclear power, which is the only viable option for decarbonizing the world’s energy economy and the only one worth considering, therefore evinces the more sinister motives behind all of their activism. The point is not to save the planet but to end capitalism. Their ideology is not about the survival of species but the lowering of human living standards. This is why they don’t want you heating your home or cooking your meals with natural gas. It is why they want to make it impossible for you to eat meat or travel in airplanes. It is why they keep trying to force the issue of eating bugs, even though no one wants to do it. It is why they wanted to maximize pandemic restrictions, even after the pandemic ended two years ago — because for the first time they were forcing people to stay home and consume fewer resources. It is why, when they describe an ideal future, it is one in which you “own nothing” and are “happy.”
I’ll vote “none of the above,” thanks. We own a couple of acres of land, a house and some outbuildings, and we’re trying to buy adjacent lots that will take us up to about five acres. And that’s how we’re going to live. If anyone wants to make us give it up and live in some high-rise where we can walk to pick up our rationed bug-meal, well, they’d better come a’shooting, because we aren’t leaving. The Davos gang can fuck right off.
Build reactors!
