Fashionably Green

A good friend once opined that 'without chain fights, motorcycle gangs are merely a fashion statement.' That said, neither he nor I begrudge the beer-bellied hog aficionados their cuttes or patches or Sunday rides in the slightest. We each pursue our own happiness.

Nor do I begrudge the residents of an affluent neighborhood I know where seemingly every household has a $150K Mercedes G Wagon in its driveway… because keeping up with the Joneses probably predates the Roman Empire. Again, pursue your own happiness.

I'd say 'so it goes' with the green movement, and in particular the headlong rush to electric vehicles (EVs), but for the fact that it's not just individuals doing as they please.

California recently announced that it will ban the sale of new gas-powered vehicles in the state starting in 2035. Other "blue" states are hinting that they may do the same. The feds are underwriting EV production in myriad ways, and big automakers are retooling their lineups, their factories, and their employment rosters in an aggressive shift toward EVs.

All supposedly in the name of saving the planet from carbon heat death.

However, as Holman Jenkins reports at the Wall Street Journal, the numbers simply don't add up. The big automakers' EV fleets skew to the luxury market, the nature and range of those EVs creates a substantial carbon deficit (more carbon produced by their manufacture than by building gas-powered cars) that will take a long time and many miles to "pay back," and this EV activity is cannibalizing the other parts of the companies.

Taken en toto, the likely outcome is an economic stratification of passenger cars, where the wealthy get to roll around in their high-end EVs with big batteries, long range, ample luxury, and high performance, while the masses will have to get by with a shrinking assortment of cheaper gas-powered cars - and with eventual bans on those pending, increasingly rely on the used car market, with less reliability, fewer modern features, and more "nursing along." There'll be pressure on that market just as there has been of late, thanks to supply chain problems that slowed production, and used cars will become more expensive.

Meanwhile, the power grids are nowhere near ready to charge large quantities of EVs, and that's before we even start to look at the sources of all that power. The howler of the week was California’s near-simultaneous urging that residents not charge their cars during a heatwave.

For it is beyond doubt that the notion of getting America's power production to net-zero carbon via wind and solar power is nothing more than a fanciful, conceited delusion. So, those EVs are going to be sucking up oil and coal and natural gas-made electricity (unless we get off our asses and build nuke plants like crazy), meaning the actual impact on global warming and atmospheric carbon will not even approach the already-trivial improvement being touted.

Nevertheless, the affluent will buy their luxury EVs. The stratospheric valuation of Tesla stock attests to the allure of EVs. Tesla, which sold 930K cars last year, has a market cap of $850B. By contrast, GM sold 6.3M cars, but has a market cap of $56B. Ford, 4.3M and $60B. Toyota, 9.3M and $235B. The cheapest of Tesla's four models starts at $45K, and there is only one EV, the Nissan Leaf ($28.5K), that sells under $30K. By contrast, the ten cheapest cars on the market today run $16K-$21K new.

"Green" has long been a luxury masquerading as a do-good feel-good necessity, and the EV market is doing nothing to change that reality. "Green" costs more, a lot more. If it didn't, the government wouldn't have to work so hard and spend so much of our money to make it happen - market forces would take care of that.

The government's distortions are reshaping the car market toward a "haves" vs "have-nots" outcome. If it continues, the poor and working classes will increasingly be corralled into relying on old vehicles, and more and more of them will find themselves priced out of having any car at all. Our Best-and-Brightest won't be bothered by this - they prefer the masses rely on trains and buses (easier to control, easier to keep clustered in high-density areas, less likely to urban-sprawl, etc) anyway. That those masses may not be happy about this is of no concern.

In Cuba, cars from the 1950s remain on the roads to this day, kept alive by sweat and effort and creativity. The US embargo and a concurrent Cuban ban on American car imports there created the shortage that led to this state of affairs. If the domestic green lurch is left unchecked, a similar situation could easily arise here, with people stuck keeping their clunkers on life-support, and only the wealthy getting to drive newer, more advanced, safer cars.

All for nothing more than a fashion statement. As I've often detailed here, the current form of the green movement stands no chance of affecting global warming, and geopolitical realities are blowing up green delusions around the globe. Reality doesn't enter into the calculus, however. Like the G Wagon, patch vests, and hardtail Harleys, it's more about appearances and a desire to hang with the cool kids. Which, again, would not be a problem, but for the harm inflicted on everyone else by government coercion.

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