Why do greens want everyone to drive electric cars but not want people to have electricity? Or, it seems, cars.
Last week I noticed on these pages that folks who want everyone to have an electric automotive of their garage were also implementing a policy that can likely lead to power outages this summer, according to a recent report by the North American Electric Reliability Corporation.
Fossil and nuclear power plants are shutting down (bye, Indian Point!) while replacing them with “renewable” sources resembling wind and solar is delayed and infrequently fails to generate power when it’s needed most.
Nothing has improved on this front. But the thing about electric cars is that they not only need electricity, but also batteries to store it. And electric motors.
That is inconvenient because these cars and batteries require a variety of copper and other metals, in addition to the mining of rare earth minerals, which come mainly from China and Africa, where they are sometimes produced by children or slave labor.
(We used to mine rare earths in America, but the enviros principally shut it down. It’s easier for corporations to mine this stuff from the ground in places where sandal-wearing bastards aren’t all over the place.)
Well, now it looks like we’ve an answer to the problem.
Norway has found vast reserves of metals and rare earth elements on the seabed off its coast and has begun preparations to mine them in an underwater region roughly the size of Germany.
According to the Norwegian Petroleum Directorate, which manages seabed resources, the seabed comprises polymetallic nodules containing magnesium, cobalt, niobium and rare earth minerals.
Perfect for the production of batteries and motors for electric cars, in addition to windings for wind turbines.
Naturally, environmentalists around the world were delighted.
“This enables the production of wind turbines and electric cars without the environmental damage and human rights violations related to today’s mining. As well as, this material comes from a contemporary NATO country, not from a hostile country like the People’s Republic of China,” one spokesman said. “It is a win for everybody.”
Haha just kidding. They said nothing of the sort.
As an alternative, environmentalists are calling for a (possibly long) halt to such mining for environmental reasons.
Sometimes evidently the last invention these people accepted was the wet blanket.
The International Seabed Organization, an arm of the United Nations, is anticipated to issue recent regulations this summer to regulate the exploitation of the seabed.
The World Wildlife Foundation calls such mining an “avoidable ecological disaster”, saying that “there are lots of unknowns and far to be done in ocean science, policy and industrial innovation before any seabed mining activities are permitted.”
Greenpeace hates him too.
These organizations are much quieter about exploiting minerals — and other people — in places like China and Africa.
But the most significant thing is that when you support the proliferation of electric cars, by extension, you support extracting the resources needed to construct and charge them.
When you support a policy but oppose its preconditions, you might be either a idiot or a fraud. Or perhaps each.
A practical and sensible electric automotive policy would support reliable, protected and environmentally friendly energy to charge them – meaning nuclear and fracked gas-fired power plants.
And he would support the protected, clean and humane extraction of essential minerals, which presumably means deep sea mining.
When you are against this stuff, you might be not being realistic and reasonable, and your political proposals – or demands or mandates which have turn out to be calls for electric cars – needs to be ignored and even ridiculed.
Environmentalists are principally against this stuff, which suggests they needs to be ignored and even ridiculed.
In fact, the planet has its needs, and these deserve respect.
But people even have needs, and when environmentalists seem to reflexively oppose any recent way of manufacturing energy or resources, it seems a bit suspicious.
Opposing any recent enterprise might be good for fundraising, like the alarming “Save the Sea!” the emails likely attract dedicated associates to open their wallets (Venmo).
But in case your positions are driven by each fundraising and science, there isn’t any reason anyone else should take them seriously.
Frankly, once people start working to bring us low cost energy and metals from the moon and asteroids, environmentalists will probably complain about it too. They usually have the right to complain in the event that they want to.
What they’re not entitled to is to be taken seriously.
Glenn Harlan Reynolds is a law professor at the University of Tennessee and founding father of the InstaPundit.com blog.