Why Do Conservatives Still Hate On Electric Cars?

Many conservatives have long derided electric cars as an inefficient “green scheme” that doesn’t even help save a planet they don’t think needs saving anyway. But electric cars are getting better, and some conservatives are still trying to use the same old arguments against them.

The Wall Street Journal carries a recent hatchet job by Bjorn Lomborg, who cherry-picks from a study to make electric cars seem less green than they are:

A 2012 comprehensive life-cycle analysis in Journal of Industrial Ecology shows that almost half the lifetime carbon-dioxide emissions from an electric car come from the energy used to produce the car, especially the battery… By contrast, the manufacture of a gas-powered car accounts for 17% of its lifetime carbon-dioxide emissions. When an electric car rolls off the production line, it has already been responsible for 30,000 pounds of carbon-dioxide emission. The amount for making a conventional car: 14,000 pounds.

Of course, part of the reason electric cars produce “almost half” their emissions at production is that they emit so little after production. Using high school math skills, I conclude that if “almost half” = 30,000 pounds of CO2, then electric cars emit 60,0000-70,000 pounds over their lifespan, and if “17%” = 14,000 pounds, then gas-powered cars emit 82,000 pounds, which is still more.

But apparently Lomborg trusts the production part of that study without trusting the lifespan part of that study, because he spends the next few paragraphs arguing that electric cars probably won’t be driven enough to make up for that extra production emission. Now the whole study may be bunk, but it’s interesting that Lomborg takes the part that supports his bias and discards the rest.

Furthermore, Lomborg envisions the worst possible scenario for charging the cars – “if the energy used to recharge the electric car comes mostly from coal-fired power plants…” – without mentioning that coal’s share as a power source has dropped precipitously in the US in recent years as it is being replaced by cheaper and cleaner natural gas.

Lomborg also ignores the potential for clean solar charging. That may have been a fantasy argument even a few years ago, but solar power is becoming more efficient all the time, and Tesla is already beginning to unveil solar car charging with Elon Musk’s other company Solar City. Now maybe the solar panels are built with coal-powered energy – maybe it’s emissions “all the way down” – but as solar panels increase in efficiency, the emission advantage of electric cars over gas-powered cars will only increase.

Lomborg finally gets around to arguing that the federal government should stop subsidizing electric cars, which I completely agree with, but not because “the electric car might be great in a couple of decades.” If the electric car will be great in a couple decades, that requires some people to buy the less-great ones now so innovation can continue; that’s almost an argument for subsidizing.

It’s true that liberal greenies have overshot their claims of “zero emissions,” but it’s also true that innovation is bringing us closer and closer to that goal; it’s already a stretch to scoff that those cars might cause “just 24% less carbon-dioxide emission,” and that gap will continue to grow. Like many conservatives, I’m not too worried about the planet, but the argument that electric cars don’t even help save it anyway is becoming increasingly less true.

Conservatives would do better to stop arguing that we should stop subsidizing electric cars because they’re so bad that they don’t do any good, and start arguing that we should stop subsidizing electric cars because they’re getting so good that they don’t need the subsidies anyway. The economic arguments about the dangers and waste of government investment in specific industries are still true, but unlike the efficiency arguments, they will become more relevant, not less.

Yet some may ask, “Wouldn’t that admit that the government subsidies were successful while they lasted?” Not necessarily. We all know that when you subsidize something, you get more of it. So it should come as no surprise that subsidization of electric cars has led to innovation on that front. But that still doesn’t mean the subsidization was worth it; we don’t know how much longer it would taken to get here without the subsidies, and we’ll never know the opportunity cost of what other innovation has been crowded out.

For example, when we started these electric subsidies, we didn’t know the natural-gas revolution was coming; could we have better CNG or LNG cars by now if we had a more open market? Just as with ethanol, government tends to be too short-sighted and too slow-moving in the activities it encourages. Maybe it always would have been better to let the market decide what kinds of efficient cars to build, but that argument gets even easier to make as the subsidized ones become more successful.

I get why conservatives want electric cars to fail. It would seem to prove everything they’ve been saying about the government propping up inefficient industries without even accomplishing the government’s stated goal. And for awhile, that’s what has been happening – government tends to fail at market interventions a lot. But it’s important to recognize that government doesn’t always fail, and it’s OK to admit the exception of an apparent success; it would not prove that liberals are generally right about government subsidization. But I think a tribalistic bias against electric cars is preventing many conservatives from seeing this.

4 thoughts on “Why Do Conservatives Still Hate On Electric Cars?”

  1. Short answer: conservatives hate on electric cars because of what they symbolize.

    Long answer: conservatives hate on electric cars because electric cars are still crap. To put it simply, electric cars offer minimal gains (they reduce carbon emissions by 22 tons per car over their life cycle) in exchange for radically higher costs (including initial outlay in some instances, as well as government subsidies that everyone pays for either in taxes or inflation) and more inconvenience (they have a limited range, and their range decreases with use thanks to battery cell degradation that is common to all lithium-ion batteries). Not only that, they also impose new environmental problems (just check out the environmental issues with producing the batteries), and pose a greater risk (if the battery catches fire, it is difficult to put out, and the risk of injury is far greater). Electric cars also cost more to repair, especially when there is an issue with the electrical system because the battery makes working on these sort of cars quite dangerous, and mechanics charge more to compensate for the increased danger, as well as the additional knowledge it takes to be able to diagnose and fix the problem without getting injured or killed in the process.

    But the bigger issue with the environmental movement is that it itself is full of crap. In the concluding chapters of Superfreakonomics, Levitt and Dubner demonstrated that it was not necessary to impose massive amounts of regulation on human behavior. Instead, most of the environmental problems the world faces can be solved cheaply and with minimal disruption to anyone’s way of life. Most environmental activists refuse to bring this up.

    Not only that, the environmental movement itself is responsible for causing most of what it alleges to be the problem. In this video, the speaker claims that environmentalists, to save the environment, burn off 1 billion hectares of grassland annually. He says that burning off a single hectare of grassland releases roughly six thousand cars’ worth of pollutants. Thus, environmentalists do more damage every year in the name of saving the environment than six trillion cars ever could. He also claims, in that same video, that as an environmentalist he recommended killing off tens of thousands of elephants to save the planet.

    One thing that is generally true of the environmental movement, at least from what I’ve read and experienced firsthand, is that most environmentalists, especially activists, are more concerned with symbolically demonstrating their concern for the environment than actually doing something to help it. They support policies that are inconvenient and destructive, even though these policies are unnecessary. They’re policies are shallow and misguided (eg. the ban of incandescent light bulbs is counterproductive because the vast majority of CFLs are manufactured overseas, which means more carbon emissions are required to get them into people’s homes; the presence of mercury in these bulbs makes improper disposal a huge environmental problem; and in some cases, the bulbs don’t even last as long or reduce energy costs, depending on socket they’re placed in), and often result in more environmental damage.

    Furthermore, most environmentalists have absolutely no grasp of nature’s cyclicity, which results in them looking at a single aspect of one “problem” and proposing a policy that is, frankly, quite stupid. The issue with carbon dioxide emissions is a case in point. It has not actually been proven that CO2 leads to warmer temperatures (the East Anglia Institute controversy from a couple years ago suggests that all the data points to the opposite correlation, that warmer temps lead to CO2, but even this is not proven), and the data shows only a moderate correlative link. The assertion is predicated on the knowledge that, in labs, CO2 can trap heat. But even if it is true that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, this doesn’t merit the conclusion that we should reduce CO2 levels because a) an increased greenhouse effect would equal more arable land further north and south of the equator and b) plants need CO2 to live (which would kind of be implied in the whole “greenhouse” name, since greenhouses are where you grow plants). And even if CO2 emissions did lead to warmer temps, which in turn melted off the polar ice caps to some effect, the earth appears to have a built-in mechanism for dealing with this which would lead to the earth cooling down (in fact, Al Gore shows precisely how this mechanism works in his movie An Inconvenient Truth).

    Pretty much everything the environmental movement does is shallow, stupid, and deadly to humans, animals, and the environment. They are self-deluded narcissistic twats who masquerade behind a moralistic pseudo-science that does not have a holistic understanding of the natural world. In addition, they have a strong tendency towards self-righteous smugness and moral preening that is irksome, and their continued demands that everyone bow down and make sacrifices to Gaia smacks of crusaderism more than a carefully considered, dispassionate policy recommendation based on actual, non-falsified evidence and actual, proper science.

    The electric car debate, then, is really nothing more than the environmental movement’s continued moral preening. While some of their claims and advances may be legitimate (I still reserve judgment because I’m not yet convinced that lower CO2 emissions are good for plant life, and I’m not convinced that a lower surface temperature is necessarily a good thing), it does not follow that every last policy recommendation they offer is cost-effective or even productive. While conservatives have their own tendency to preen about different moral issues, they are quite correct in noting that the modern environmental movement is nothing more than an organized religion that lacks the self-awareness to realize it’s actually a religion. And conservatives are also quite correct to be annoyed with environmentalists’ tendencies to use the state to shove the religion of environmentalism down everyone’s throat.

    1. I don’t know how many tons of CO2 can be reduced by electric cars. I suspect that the number varies greatly by model and use. But I do know that the number is getting larger. I believe many of the other issues you raise are also getting better, or are disputable (ex. Repairs may cost more, but there are also a whole lot fewer engine parts that can break down)

      I’m generally opposed to environmentalism also, but that has nothing to do with whether or not electric cars are good or getting better. “They’re not really green” and “They’re crap” are both increasingly losing arguments if we want to use them to convince people we should stop subsidizing them.

      Sure, you can switch to “well who wants to lower emissions anyway,” but I don’t think you’ll get too far with that, primarily because more green (less energy) often equals more green (more money). I thought the incandescent ban was a stupid intervention too, and CFLs are both not-green and crappy, with little signs of improvement on either front (unlike electric cars). But now that LEDs are getting cheaper and legitimately good, I’m buying them because it saves me money – and energy to boot. I’m optimistic that electric cars are becoming less like CFLs and more like LEDs, especially if solar charging takes off in a few years. But I suppose time will tell.

    2. “To put it simply, electric cars offer minimal gains (they reduce carbon emissions by 22 tons per car over their life cycle) in exchange for radically higher costs (including initial outlay in some instances, as well as government subsidies that everyone pays for either in taxes or inflation) and more inconvenience (they have a limited range, and their range decreases with use thanks to battery cell degradation that is common to all lithium-ion batteries). ”

      Where do get that figure from? More current data shows you are off by orders of magnitude

      “He says that burning off a single hectare of grassland releases roughly six thousand cars’ worth of pollutants. Thus, environmentalists do more damage every year in the name of saving the environment than six trillion cars ever could.”

      You apparently arent clear on how carbon gets into plants in the first place and again you are off by orders og magnitude. Reguardless of whether Savoy explained it or not the point is the grassland burning is net zero. Since the grass regrows.

      “He also claims, in that same video, that as an environmentalist he recommended killing off tens of thousands of elephants to save the planet.”

      Nope, he never claims that. He says they culled the elephant herds in the national park to bring the elephants to a level that the parks grazing land could sustain. He also says it was a mistake (which you leave out obviously because it doesn’t support you argument).

      “Furthermore, most environmentalists have absolutely no grasp of nature’s cyclicity, which results in them looking at a single aspect of one “problem” and proposing a policy that is, frankly, quite stupid. The issue with carbon dioxide emissions is a case in point. It has not actually been proven that CO2 leads to warmer temperatures (the East Anglia Institute controversy from a couple years ago suggests that all the data points to the opposite correlation, that warmer temps lead to CO2, but even this is not proven), and the data shows only a moderate correlative link. The assertion is predicated on the knowledge that, in labs, CO2 can trap heat. But even if it is true that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, this doesn’t merit the conclusion that we should reduce CO2 levels because a) an increased greenhouse effect would equal more arable land further north and south of the equator and b) plants need CO2 to live (which would kind of be implied in the whole “greenhouse” name, since greenhouses are where you grow plants). And even if CO2 emissions did lead to warmer temps, which in turn melted off the polar ice caps to some effect, the earth appears to have a built-in mechanism for dealing with this which would lead to the earth cooling down (in fact, Al Gore shows precisely how this mechanism works in his movie An Inconvenient Truth).”

      Not really any point responding to unsunstantiated nonsense. But I will say CFL use less power and have a proven ROI over incandenscents.

      “The electric car debate, then, is really nothing more than the environmental movement’s continued moral preening. ”

      Hmmm, no it isn’t. Companies like Nissan don’t plan decades or centuries ahead on a whim. They forsee a need (rising fuel prices) and they work to fill it. EVs have literally been around since cars were invented and their sales used to exceed petrol autos. But again you don’t mention that because it doesn’t support your argument. Suffice to say hybrids and EVs make sense finanicially, they are more effecient do not cost “huge amounts” more and as a side effect they use fewer resources.

      “While some of their claims and advances may be legitimate (I still reserve judgment because I’m not yet convinced that lower CO2 emissions are good for plant life, and I’m not convinced that a lower surface temperature is necessarily a good thing)”

      While some plants might benefit from elevated C02 levels it is clear that people likely won’t. There is already extended droughts in some areas, rising sea levels displacing people and more diesease and invasive species. Data says otherwise, look it up sometime or not it is a free country.

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