Coercing Customers to Buy EVs Goes Against the Realities of the Market

By Conrad Black

As the colossal fear-mongering operation that has accompanied the obsessive pre-occupation with climate change is abandoned by former adherents—an operation that strains credulity with the uneventful passage of time—Canada’s commitment to electric vehicles appears more and more absurd. But we seem at least to have spared ourselves the billions committed in the United States to set up new charging stations for road vehicles, which has so far resulted in only a handful being opened.

Meanwhile, many automakers are scaling back their electric vehicle manufacturing plans.

Canada’s initial plan was to force and incentivize the entire country into electrically fuelled vehicles with inadequate thought to who would provide the nickel for the batteries, how the batteries would be rendered safe in the event of fires or flooding, how the entire country would be adequately served by the huge numbers of charging stations that would be required, who would be manufacturing these vehicles, and what would happen to the many thousands of auto workers whom it was proposed simply to disemploy as a result of this headlong lunge into a substantially untested form of mass transport.

But the fact remains that the coordination between the scientific empirical analysis of safety and supply complexity as generated by a swift and physically coercive move into electric vehicles, and the source of supply for such vehicles and of its chief components, has not been completed. Our government, like those of a number of European countries and the United States, have prematurely plunged into this field, claiming the force majeure of “existential” necessity is because of the imminent threat of radical climate change that will require a draconian reduction in carbon emissions to prevent unassimilable dehumanization of much of the world.

Of course, the non-sensical failure of these dire predictions to come true does not permit us for an instant to be complacent about the changes that are occurring to the climate, and above we must continue to try to reduce pollution of the world’s air and water as much as we practically can without inflicting unjustifiable economic hardship for the population of the world. The climate has evolved but is well within established cycles as they have been measured over the last more than 500 years. It has never been clear from the vast amount of evidence that has been assembled what, if at all, is the anthropogenic or man-made element of these changes. There was no discernible effect on the climate or the world’s temperature despite the horrible assault upon the environment every day for six years caused by World War II, concluding with the only two military detonations of atomic bombs in history.

This entire subject is gradually returning to the political framework in which it was founded. As I have had occasion to mention here and elsewhere many times before, the climate change fear suddenly emerged after the decisive defeat of the international left in the Cold War in the early 1990s. With astonishing agility and an unsuspected talent for improvisation, the international left crowded aboard the environmentalist bandwagon, which had heretofore been occupied by authentic conservationists and enthusiastic naturalists. They seized control of the movement and transformed it into a battering ram from which to attack capitalism from a new perspective, while claiming to be defending life itself and the security and future of the planet.

As long as this claptrap could be represented as the informed collective opinion of the scientific community, and as long as they weren’t especially costly, it was relatively easy to maintain a consensus for these goals. Now that the voting populations of the West—the only part of the world that embraced this theory—are face-to-face with insufferable gasoline and home fuel costs, the fashionable nature of the environment has been jettisoned and the politicians who enjoy maintaining their incumbency are revisiting the issue.

First published in the Epoch Times