Today’s London Times has two articles almost adjacent to one another that are closely related, although I am not sure the newspaper understands that. First: No petrol or diesel by 2030? Carmakers say EVs are going nowhere fast.
Labour’s manifesto committed to forcing car manufacturers to stop selling new petrol and diesel vehicles by 2030.
Six years from now. Right.
The carmaking industry has howled that the targets are unachievable, particularly given the lack of charging points across the UK for longer journeys and the difficulty of plugging in at home for people who do not have their own garage or driveway.
Now, the chief executive of one of the most important providers of components to the auto industry, Dowlais — better known by its old name of GKN — has predicted that we will be lucky if we get global new car production to 50 per cent electric vehicles (EVs) by 2045.
I would call that unlucky, not lucky, and absurdly optimistic from the perspective of EV makers. Electric vehicles are essentially an obsolete product. Many of the first cars were electric, and in 1901 The Washington Post predicted that they would soon surpass gasoline-powered cars. They have been underperforming ever since. Gasoline-powered vehicles won out because they were better, and they still are. Even if you put aside the fact that the electric grid can’t possibly cope with an all-electric automobile fleet, and if we simultaneously switch the grid to feeble and intermittent wind and solar, the result is a train wreck.
The second story: Lab-grown meat promised a brave new world. What went wrong?
What went wrong is that people are perfectly happy eating beef, chicken, pork, seafood, etc. There was never any demand for lab-grown meat; on the contrary, normal people found the concept disgusting.
What these stories have in common, of course, is that they derive from global warming hysteria. I don’t think anyone would have tried to revive failed electric vehicle technology or to grow “meat” in a laboratory without that impetus. Many think that global warming fanatics are well-meaning but misguided. I disagree. I think they are trying to pull off a heist, the biggest transfer of wealth since the Industrial Revolution, shifting trillions of dollars out of some industries and into others. And guess who benefits.
What these stories show, and others like them, is that social engineering on the scale envisioned by the Greenies is not easy to achieve.
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