Conrad Black: Coercing Customers to Buy EVs Goes Against the Realities of the Market

Electric cars sit parked at a charging station in Corte Madera, Calif., on July 28, 2023. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Commentary

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.

There is no doubt that electric cars have their allure. Their silence, and the absence of gasoline generally—a messy and extremely flammable liquid—are assets, and the progress of these vehicles, from being highly experimental and of indifferent performance, to their present standards of reliability has been remarkable. Former Canadian Elon Musk deserves great credit and the immense wealth he has accumulated because of his pioneering and championship of this new method of transport. He has rightly seen it as a step towards unmanned taxis and other revolutionary developments in how people will get around, and how goods of all kinds will be transported.

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.

Nor have remotely adequate steps been taken to ensure that these vehicles can be produced in sufficient numbers, in a way that responds to popular taste, which clings to a love of the internal combustion engine. Our automobile industry is shrinking radically, and many thousands of skilled auto workers are losing their jobs as a result, and the once mighty workers of Bob White’s Canadian Auto Workers union are now clinging desperately to the forestry workers in a polyglot union that speaks in a variety of commercial tongues.

Of course, the long-standing consensus that was assembled in favour of the Climate Fear Project is disintegrating, as the countless predictions of imminent disaster have steadily failed to occur. It has been decades since some leaders told us we had 10 years to avoid calamity, and that by now the glaciers would long have melted, the country of Tuvalu would be under water entirely, the polar bear would be extinct, and every river in the world from the Yangtze to the Zambezi to the Nile and the Seine, the Thames and the Tiber, the St. Lawrence, Hudson, and the Mississippi, would be overflowing their banks by 20 feet (6 metres) or more.

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.

No sane person urges that we do anything other than act with caution and intensify research until there is a genuine consensus—not a fabricated and false one—about what should be done. Fortunately, the tedious refrain that 98 percent of scientists are united behind the pursuit of a goal of zero carbon emissions has been exposed as a complete fraud. There is no such consensus on any aspect of this subject other than vigilance and the desirability of as little pollution as is practically possible.

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.

There can be little doubt that the sensible thing our federal government should do, be it the current one or a future one, is to cancel what is left of the compulsory transition to electric vehicles. History will view this era as resembling the tulip madness of the 17th century, or the South Sea Bubble of the 18th century. At least here, it has been championed by a formidable political movement, which demonstrated a remarkable capacity for self-reinvention, even if it had no just claim on the imperatives of science.

Electric car sales will continue to flag, and the Chinese will not be taking over our automobile market any time soon.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.