energy grid

Here’s the nitty-gritty on electric vehicles: they are extremely fast, quite luxurious, and loaded with enhanced technology. But they are also expensive, highly impractical, environmentally unsound, and possess the potential to stretch the grid to the breaking point. President Biden can claim, as he did earlier this week from outside the Rose Garden, that Americans can “buy any kind of car they want,” but he failed to disclose his actual intentions. The Environmental Protection Agency’s new emissions standards are designed to limit the availability of new gas cars and trucks and push the cost of traditional vehicles out of reach for most Americans. This would coerce many into purchasing electric contraptions they clearly do not want.

Why are Biden and the Democrats so beholden to this plan?

As I disclose in my new book Climate Cult: Exposing and Defeating Their War on Life, Liberty, and Property, this is all part of the global climate agenda, which has nothing to do with a pristine environment. Birthed in the bowels of the United Nations and aimed at deposing America from its preeminent status in the world, it’s a scheme that demands zero carbon dioxide emissions by 2050. In fact, Biden’s Executive Order 14057 precisely mandates this standard. According to a press release from the administration’s Chief Sustainability Officer, “By leveraging its power of procurement, the Federal Government will accelerate the country’s transition to a clean energy economy…”

This strongarmed government energy plan will make our grid as reliable as North Korea’s.

As I reveal in the book, electric vehicles are hardly green. Manufacturing your average sedan with an internal combustion engine creates about six metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions, while manufacturing an electric sedan creates more than ten metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions. The reason for the sharp contrast is because of the mining, refining, transportation, and manufacturing of raw materials required to make the batteries for these vehicles. The chassis of a Tesla X consists of 7,104 lithium batteries—that amounts to loads of emissions along the production chain.

Charging an electric vehicle also requires fossil fuels. Currently, over half the electricity in the United States (59.3 percent) is derived from the use of natural gas and coal. Thus, when an EV plugs-in, most of its charge is coming fossil-based fuel. Wind accounts for 10.2 percent of the energy mix, solar just 3.4 percent. Nuclear power (which the left loathes) accounts for 18.2 percent of our grid’s power, and most of those plants are nearing the end of their lifecycles.

Currently, only one percent of all registered vehicles are electric, and our grid is already overstretched. On a hot summer day in California, it is not uncommon to see signs above the highways warning, “POWER ALERT. DO NOT CHARGE EVS BETWEEN 4PM AND 9PM.”

The median household in the US uses 886 kWh of electricity per month. Based on the standard of fourteen thousand driving miles per year, the average EV needs to be charged with 408 kWh/month. That’s almost half of an entire household’s electricity demand for the same period. If there are two EVs in the driveway, it’s like adding the electricity requirements of another home on the block.

But, as I share in Climate Cult, the green masterminds at Princeton have a plan. By their calculations, in 2050, when net zero is forecast to be running at full strength, a region equaling the size of Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Illinois, Kentucky, and southern Indiana is envisioned to be one humongous 250-million-acre wind farm. Solar energy would occupy 17.5 million acres, about all of northern Indiana.

And when the sun is not shining or the wind not blowing, MIT has come up with plans for a massive battery backup. Price tag? More than $2.5 trillion.

Americans, not Biden and his elite clique, deserve the freedom to determine what they would like to drive.