The Electric Vehicle Bubble Bursts. In Fact, it Explodes
Trying to “save the planet” by buying an electric vehicle (EV) is like deciding to make a unicorn by buying a thoroughbred horse and soldering a narwhal’s horn to its forehead: a costly, even cruel way to accomplish nothing at all.
It’s highly debatable whether, even if every car owner in the West could afford to switch over to EVs, it would have much impact on our climate at all — not when the hungry half of the world is unapologetically burning coal. According to the Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air’s 2024 report: “China approved 114 gigawatts (GW) of coal power capacity in 2023, up 10% from a year earlier. Construction started on 70 GW of new coal plants last year, up from 54 GW a year earlier.”
Right there, China blotted out every arguable improvement that pricey, environmentally toxic EVs might have offered. But at least Red China’s getting rich selling us rare earth elements to make those EV batteries.
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The narwhal tusk is gradually slipping off the man-made unicorn. Sales of EVs slumped in 2023. Dozens of EV car manufacturers, including Ford Motor, General Motors, and Mercedes-Benz, are cutting back or postponing their electric vehicle initiatives because of poor sales and billions in losses.
“The expectations for EV growth in the U.S. market have shifted from ‘rosy to reality,’” says Cox Automotive. An analyst from Cox noted how “a few years ago, there were wildly ambitious ideas of how EV sales would go, and it seemed like nobody was thinking about bumps in this road.” Even the largest market shareholder Tesla (more than 50%) is expecting a low sales growth rate in 2023.
Don’t mourn the fading of the EV fever dream. These vehicles aren’t just pricey and unreliable. They’re also bad for the planet in ways Henry Ford never dreamed of.
EVs Might as Well Run on Leaded Gas
You’ve had it drilled into you via every form of media that the exhaust from conventional internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles is poisoning the earth. Combine this with speculative claims that mankind is changing our climate … and that’s the entire case for switching to EVs. Not efficiency, cost, or reliability; gas-powered cars are vastly better on all those fronts, which are what matter most to the 99 percent of people on the planet who don’t have money to burn.
But how bad, really, is the exhaust from those demonized internal combustion engines compared to the environmental impact of costly, toxic EV batteries and other components?
Let’s assume that human health is the standard by which we judge these questions. (That’s not necessarily what “green” globalists who want to reduce the world population by 80% care about, but we Christians do.)
According to the EPA, there are two kinds of emissions primarily considered bad for human health, “particulate matter” (PM) classified by size as PM 2.5 and PM 10. Some 60% of PM 2.5 and 73% of PM 10 from cars don’t come from the exhaust. They’re produced by the other parts of cars that EVs have as well.
Some 19% of a tire is composed of natural rubber, and 24% is made up of synthetic rubber, a plastic polymer. The remaining components consist of metal and various other chemical compounds. As tires wear down, they release small plastic polymers into the air, contributing to air pollution. Brakes and tires (in a typical ICE car) release 1,850 times more particulate matter (PM2.5 and PM10) than modern tailpipes with filters that effectively reduce emissions.
EVs Are Dangerous for Children and Other Growing Things
Guess what? Electric vehicles don’t produce the same amount of non-exhaust particle pollution as internal combustion cars. They produce far, far more. That’s right, and the reason is simple: their tires are about 30 times heavier. That means more plastic polymers and more pollution. And EV tires wear out a good deal faster, since their battery packs are so much heavier than gasoline engines.
Speaking to The Guardian, a UK tire start-up founder says the issue of EV tire pollution “has just been overshadowed. You can’t really claim the title of zero-emission vehicle if there are all these non-exhaust emissions.” So if you follow the logic of the EPA, it’s EV vehicles that should be regulated or banned. Even if we believe that CO2 emissions are damaging the climate, it makes no sense for governments to promote EVs as the alternative. Electric cars will kill far more people than any plausible outcome of climate for decades to come.
But the costs of the EV dream don’t end with more people dying from pollution. Shifting from self-contained, efficient gas engines to EVs parasitical on the electrical grid will raise the price of home heating and lights for the poor around the world. It makes blackouts and unheated homes in the middle of winter more common. And as I’ve documented before, it also directly contributes to child slavery in the cobalt mines of Democratic Republic of Congo that keep the EV battery sector alive.
Here’s the grimly funny part: EVs often do nothing at all to reduce carbon output, since in developing economies, the electricity for EV vehicles comes predominantly from the “dirtiest” fossil fuels. So that $100,000 Tesla the bureaucrat drives around in Asia or Africa is really fueled by coal — like a locomotive in 1850.
According to International Council on Clean Transportation, over the lifespan of two vehicles, one EV and one gas-powered, the electricity generated for an electric car’s lifetime operation in India will emit more greenhouse gases.
Nice Bike You Have There. It’s Be a Real Shame If It Exploded …
E-bikes are becoming popular. However, hidden dangers lurk within these “seemingly sustainable” alternatives: random catastrophic fires. Lithium-ion batteries are susceptible to thermal runaway, which means that their internal temperatures increase uncontrollably, potentially resulting in fire or explosion. This risk shoots up during charging, especially if you do it indoors — as poor people commonly do.
In New York City alone, lithium-ion batteries caused 216 fires, 147 injuries, and 6 deaths in 2022. According to a U.S. Homeland Security Committee, these numbers increased in 2023, with 267 fires, 150 injuries, and 18 deaths. There are currently 65,000 e-bikes in use in New York City. In February this year, a journalist lost his life during a fatal apartment fire caused by lithium-ion battery in Harlem. In a bid to escape residents of the St. Nicholas Place apartment building resorted to leaping out of windows, injuring 17 of them.
Speaking of e-bike batteries, New York City Fire Commissioner Laura Kavanagh says,
when they fail, they fail quite spectacularly … . Once one of these ignites, there is a huge volume of fire, often so much so that the person in their home can’t get out and the firefighters can’t get in to get them.
In the UK, the London fire brigade says it has been “called to, on average, an e-bike or e-scooter fire once every two days” in 2023.
Blowing Up the Third World, One Bike Messenger at a Time
But the scale of this fire hazard is far higher in less developed economies where bikes are preferred transportation mode. More than 80% of all households in Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam, and Malaysia own a scooter or a bike. Electric motorbikes in Asia, where roads are worse, are more heavy-duty than Western models, with larger batteries. That’s a recipe for more deadly explosions and fires — which also release huge quantities of pollutants.
2022 saw a 305% increase in EV bike sales in India, amounting to an excess sales of 500,000 vehicles. China sold a total of 50 million e-bikes in 2022. With that spike in sales comes a surge in in fire incidents, injuries, and deaths. 2022 could be termed as the year of e-bike death onset in Asia. In China, there was a 31% increase in EV fires in 2022. A fire in a e-scooter outlet in India killed 8 people. Manufacturers Pure EV and Okinawa collectively issued recalls for over 5,000 EV scooters due to fire incidents caused by “unknown reasons.”
In short, EVs are highly polluting and deadlier than we ever thought. It is easy to hide these facts behind the pricey veneer of “sustainable” luxury vehicles. But the truth is that these EV machines are neither green nor clean. They are stained with blood and pollution, imposed by lies and coercion, and just one more part of the Great Reset’s agenda for centralizing wealth and power in the hands of the few.
Jason Jones is a film producer, author, activist, popular podcast host, and human rights worker. He is president of the Human-Rights Education and Relief Organization (H.E.R.O.), known for its two main programs, the Vulnerable People Project and Movie to Movement. He was the first recipient of the East Turkistan Order of Friendship Medal for his advocacy of the Uyghur people. Jones was an executive producer of Bella and an associate producer of The Stoning of Soraya M. His humanitarian efforts have aided millions in Afghanistan, Nigeria, and the Ukraine, as well as pregnancy centers and women’s shelters throughout North America. Jones is a senior contributor to The Stream and the host of The Jason Jones Show. He is also the author of three books: The Race to Save Our Century, The World Is on Fire, and his latest, The Great Campaign Against the Great Reset. His latest film, Divided Hearts of America, is available on Amazon Prime.