State has created an electric vehicle mess
Transportation issues are vexing Gov. Ned Lamont again. The Greenwich Democrat’s first year in office was marred by his calamitous proposals to make working families pay tolls to use the state’s major highways. Lately, Lamont has been keen for the state to adopt California regulations that would begin the disruptive process of phasing out the purchase and sale of internal combustion engines in the next decade.
Lamont and Department of
Energy and Environmental Protection Commissioner Katie Dykes executed an awkward retreat when they withdrew regulations on electric vehicles, or EVs, at the end of last year. It had become clear that the legislature’s Regulations Review Committee was not going to pass the rules. Lamont, Dykes and Democratic leaders of the legislature vowed to fight on. They would bring them before the House and Senate for approval. And then events intervened. Lamont and legislative leaders were going to convene a special session of the legislature this week to vote on the regulations. The regular session of the legislature begins on Feb. 7 but a special session to begin the process of narrowing consumer motor vehicle choices would emphasize the urgency of the moment — and score an early win.
Legislators, even ones in safe seats, may have been reluctant to begin an election year for them but not the governor by casting to begin phasing out their gas-powered cars and trucks. Major changes in the way we live and spend money require explanations and advocacies, neither of which have been present in early EV policy.
Lamont subscribes to the Mae West philosophy when it comes to EVs. The 20th century film star and writer declared, “Too much of a good thing can be wonderful.” She just had to think of and toss off a clever line. Lamont needs to oversee enormous increases in the state’s supply of electricity to propel hundreds of thousands of new EVs at a price that does not make it impossible for consumers to afford.
A brutal cold snap in Chicago this month saw reports of many EV drivers stranded by a shortage of chargers and weather that depleted batteries. It gave one pause.
At the same time, optimism that Connecticut can create clean, renewable energy is fading. Last year saw an international energy giant abandon a significant offshore wind farm that would generate electricity for Connecticut. Two offshore New Jersey wind farms met the same unhappy fate at the same time.
Lamont opposed the expansion of natural gas as a source of energy that is plentiful in the United States and considerably cleaner than oil. Its advocates believe it can serve as the bridge to a renewable future and eventually a backup supply of energy when the sun does not shine and the wind refuses to turn those turbines.
Here’s something we know but requires repeating: a reliable supply of energy remains essential to a prosperous modern society. Free societies are wonderful innovators. Solar is becoming more affordable but there is growing resistance to living near or even driving by large solar farms.
Akio Toyoda, chairperson of Toyota, the world’s number one
carmaker, said recently that EVs will not account for more than 30% of car sales. He believes a broader approach should include hybrids, fuel cells, and hydrogen power. Toyota has been the leading enthusiast for hydrogen power but has seen no significant breakthrough in that technology.
Toyoda has the spirit. Government is usually not the best predictor of innovation successors.
Free markets in free societies are. Freedom includes debates about something other than technology itself. EV batteries require the rare mineral cobalt. The Democratic
Republic of Congo has plenty of cobalt reserves and is mining them under horrific conditions. Human rights activists and others have taken note that one cost of supplying prosperous countries will be imposing misery on the poverty stricken, including child laborers, of DR Congo, a country that is not meticulous in its environmental regulations.
The primitive and dangerous conditions in those cobalt mines ought to prompt a broad and serious debate at the price others are paying far from our comfortable lives. The cobalt diggers, as young as 6 or 7 years old, according to a France 24 documentary, have no rights.
Since cobalt can sell for as much as $70,000 a ton, there is an incentive for others to find new supplies or alternatives to it. Last year the first cobalt mine since 1982 opened in the United States. Cobalt’s value provides a powerful economic incentive to create the technology that recycles the mineral, eventually reducing the need to mine it, but that is a long way off.
We require leaders with a proper mix of informed optimism tempered by sober realism of the promise of what innovation will eventually bring — without sending African children into mines.