Enviro-Leftist plotting makes our lives more difficult and expensive, which is a fact we've been hammering home here at The Pipeline for years now. Where, for instance, do we get the money to fund our ongoing highway maintenance? Gasoline taxes collected at the pump. That being so, which group of our fellow citizens are able to avoid paying such taxes? Those who drive battery-operated electric vehicles.
And aside from frost heave in the northern states, what is probably the primary causes of damage to highways across the nation? Vehicle weight. It’s why truck weights are regulated and enforced, and trucks often lane-controlled. The goal is to keep the highway damage within known parameters of repair and cost.
But one underappreciated fact about electric vehicles is that they are heavier than gas-and-diesel driven cars. A lot heavier. Consequently, they cause more particulate matter to be released into the air as their brakes and tires wear out more quickly, dumping millions of little pieces of tire and brake pads all over the road and into the air (not to mention our lungs), along with microplastics into the ocean (not to mention our food).
"[A study] found that brakes and tires on EVs release 1,850 times more particle pollution compared to modern tailpipes." Strange how the Left obsessively refers to carbon dioxide emissions as "pollution," when CO2 is one of the gasses which make life on Earth possible, while ignoring this stuff, which is what the word "pollution" has traditionally referred to.
In any event, the weight of EVs also does something similar to the road -- increasing airborne particulate matter by breaking up and wearing down roadways. And yet, as mentioned above, EV owners don’t pay to repair those roads. You do.
Heavier cars. deeper potholes.
And it's not just roads. Older parking garages may not be able to bear the weight of some number of EVs. How many? No one knows. And you get the impression that they don't want to know either. Because if they found out, they'd have to regulate it, and our government prefers only to regulate what it wants to destroy.
The weight concern, by the way, doesn't stop with grinding roads to dust. It's also that significantly heavier cars have more inertia, mass and momentum, all the things that contribute to crashes and injuries. In fact, "a 2011 study from the National Bureau of Economic Research estimated that a 1,000-pound (453-kilogram) increase in vehicle weight resulted in a 47 per cent increase in fatality risk.
Essentially, drivers of battery cars are subsidized not only as they buy these toys, but as they drive them and crash them. It’s other people’s money subsidizing the purchase. Other people’s money paying outright for the road repairs. Other people’s money installing the recharging stations, rather than building a gas station in response to actual demand.
And who is paying for the electricity generated for and delivered to those recharging stations, and the transmission networks, employees and systems to do so? Other people; the large majority of Americans who have no interest in electric vehicles and just want to drive a real car.
There is one positive return on all of those subsidies of course: the winter fun of driving past nearly, or fully, dead EVs as their owners try in vain to recharge their batteries in the cold. Thank heaven for small blessings, I suppose.
In any event, the green vision of the world is deeply incompatible with the world as it actually exists. Time to pull the plug.
Article tags: carbon emissions, electric vehicles, green energy, Oil and Gas, Virtue Signalling
