Why the ‘e’ in e-car actually stands for evil – by Lawrence Solomon (Financial Post – October 6, 2017)

http://business.financialpost.com/

Electric vehicles are for city folk. For most rural residents, their role is to give, give, give

Electric cars, the vehicles of choice for the virtue signallers among us, epitomize the confusions and the divisions in society. These vehicles aren’t environmental exemplars, as their touters claim. And they of course aren’t economic. They excel in one area above all: in exploiting rural regions and their inhabitants, mostly for the benefit of affluent urbanites.

Electric vehicles — now a trivial proportion of cars on the road — do benefit the urban environments in which they operate, by limiting harmful vehicular emissions such as NOx, SOx and ground-level ozone.

If electric vehicles ever obtained a broader market, that urban benefit would increase. But it would come at a much greater cost to the rural environment, which electric-vehicle proponents would seek to sacrifice to provide the cities with electricity for charging.

To fuel electric cars with “green” power, the social engineers pushing them plan to vastly expand the use of renewable electricity. When the electricity comes from industrial wind turbines, rural lands are lost.

When the wind farms are located at distant sites — a typical occurrence because that’s where the wind happens to blow strongest — the immense transmission corridors needed to carry the power to urban markets consume more land, despoiling farm and cottage country in the process.

For the rest of this column: http://business.financialpost.com/opinion/lawrence-solomon-why-the-e-in-e-car-actually-stands-for-evil