The Push for Electric Cars:
For the Sake of Profit, Not the Environment

Sep 16, 2024

The following is the text of a presentation given at the Spark Festival on August 11, 2024.

The federal government announced new pollution standards for cars in March 2024. Federal officials say that these new standards will force car manufacturers to make cleaner and cleaner cars—so that, by 2032, more than half of the cars sold in the U.S. are “zero-emission” vehicles. What’s called zero-emission are battery electric vehicles (EVs), plug-in hybrid EVs, and fuel-cell electric EVs. For simplicity, all of these will be referred to as “EVs” or “electric cars” in this presentation.

Before this announcement from the federal government, in 2022, the state of California had announced its own standards for cars, which amount to a ban. California has mandated that, by 2035, all new cars and light trucks sold in California must be EVs. And since 2022, 13 other states and the D.C. have jumped on the bandwagon and adopted California’s EV mandate.

This mandate, which is being imposed on nearly one-third of the U.S. population, is quite drastic. In 2023, less than 8% of all cars sold in the U.S. were electric. So, according to these state bans, more than 92% of all vehicles sold in the U.S. last year would not be allowed to be sold in about 10 years from now.

A Huge Gift to Auto Companies

This means auto manufacturers would have to change the way they build the majority of their cars and restructure the majority of their plants. It would be costly, but the federal government has a huge handout for the auto companies. Under the pretext of “investing in clean energy,” the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) will be funneling more than 200 billion dollars to the coffers of big companies over the next ten years.

That’s not all. The federal government is giving car buyers a subsidy for the purchase of electric cars assembled in the U.S.—a tax credit of $7,500 for the purchase of a new car, or up to $4,000 for used cars no older than two years, if purchased from a licensed dealer. This subsidy might enable some people to buy an electric car, but since customers can use this money only to buy an electric car and nothing else, this money is really an additional gift to car manufacturers.

Taxpayers are supposed to pay for this huge handout to auto companies. And that means lower-income people, that is the working class, would shoulder a disproportionately large share of the burden.

Electric Cars Also Cause Pollution

Politicians who run the government say they want to promote electric cars because they are cleaner and better for the environment. Yes, gasoline-powered vehicles cause large amounts of pollution and put a lot of carbon dioxide gas into the air, which speeds up the warming of the earth. But still, this is a false argument. Electric cars also cause pollution and carbon dioxide emissions—and not necessarily less than gas-powered vehicles do.

One source of pollution in cars is the fine dust that is produced by wear and tear of car tires and brakes. EVs generally cause more pollution of this kind than gas-powered vehicles, because EVs are generally heavier than gas-powered vehicles of similar size.

In addition, the Big 3 auto companies prefer to build and sell large cars that are more profitable than smaller cars, whether electric or gas-powered. Currently, two-thirds of electric cars produced in the U.S. are SUVs or large vehicles, with large, heavy batteries. So, there will be more wear and tear in the tires and brake pads of these cars, and more dust in the air. This kind of pollution is actually very hazardous; it causes serious health problems and premature death in millions of people. But for auto companies, their profit comes first—so we all get to inhale air that’s more sickening.

As for the warming of the earth, it is not clear if EVs cause less carbon dioxide emissions either. Yes, EV engines don’t emit carbon dioxide, but where does the electricity needed to charge EVs come from? More than half of the electricity generated in the U.S. comes from burning fossil fuels (mainly natural gas and coal). And the energy used to work the metals and build the devices used in cars—for that also, we mainly burn fossil fuels.

The extraction process of metals used in electric cars, such as lithium, cobalt and so-called rare metals, is another source of pollution. These metals typically are found in small proportions in rocks, bonded together with other, more abundant metals such as iron, copper, zinc or lead, from which they have to be separated.

This whole process—the extraction and purification of these metals—is extremely polluting. After crushing the rocks in which these metals are found, mining companies use very hazardous chemicals, such as sulfuric and nitric acids, along with thousands of gallons of water, to separate them from other substances. Rivers, lakes, the soil and the underground water all get poisoned with these nasty acids.

In the U.S., for example, the company Lithium Americas is set to mine for lithium in a pristine high desert, Thacker Pass in Nevada. This company also uses massive amounts of sulfuric acid and underground water to separate the lithium. Lithium Americas not only has permission to do this, but it is actually getting a 2.26-billion-dollar, low-interest loan from the U.S. Dept. of Energy for it, and General Motors will be paying 650 million dollars for the mine’s lithium. And all this is happening with federal IRA funding, supposedly in the name of “clean energy.” It’s a cruel joke.

Local residents have been protesting, but it is an uphill battle. With billions of dollars of federal money up for grabs, mining companies are lined up at the trough. According to Center for Biological Diversity data, there are more than 120 lithium mines in the western U.S. alone, most of them in Nevada. Anticipating a big bonanza, the mining companies are already calling Nevada the “Silicon Valley of lithium.”

Can such massive pollution be avoided? Yes, if not completely, then at least significantly—by using different, less hazardous chemicals during the separation of minerals, for example, or by using other metals in batteries. But that would mean for the mining companies to spend more money on their operations and on research. So, they don’t do it.

War and Exploitation

It’s not just pollution. The mining companies’ operations—and profit drive—can have other, horrendous effects on millions of human beings, as in the case of cobalt. About 80% of the world’s cobalt ore comes from one single country, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). In the south-east of the country, militias have been fighting for control of the mines, with big multinational mining trusts behind them. This never-ending, brutal war has cost more than 6 million lives since 1996, and more than 6 million people remain internally displaced in eastern DRC.

In addition, the mining of cobalt involves the worst kind of exploitation. While most cobalt is produced in giant industrial mines, nearly 20% of cobalt mined in the DRC is extracted by individual miners, including some 40,000 children, according to an estimate by Amnesty International.

This is the kind of massive human suffering and exploitation that lies at the root of the enormous profits big capitalists in the major industrialized countries—and their spokespersons in the media who comment on the economy—brag about.

Companies Neglect the Electric Grid

One of the biggest issues associated with EVs is charging them. Charging an EV consumes as much as 10,000 watts at any given time, which is more than eight times the power U.S. households consume on average. And an EV has to be hooked to power for hours to fully charge its battery. In other words, only a very small, wealthy percentage of the U.S. population can safely charge their electric car at home without jeopardizing the entire power supply of the house.

Then there are the millions of people who live in apartment buildings where they can’t charge their EVs. So, for most working-class people, even if they were somehow able to afford an electric car (which itself is not likely, considering that millions of working-class people can’t afford a car—any car—in this country today), they would not be able to charge their cars at home.

And then consider the people who will be traveling. If electric cars are to replace gas-powered cars, millions of public charging stations would be needed, both in cities and along highways. Millions more than what’s there today, because even today, with only a small percentage of the cars on the road being electric, there are not nearly enough public charging stations.

But installing millions of charging stations alone would not be enough either—the power these charging stations draw would have to be supported by the electric grid. Not so long ago, in the fall of 2022, California banned charging of EVs during peak hours.

The existing electric grid can’t even meet the needs of the population in the U.S. today—think of all the power failures, pre-emptive blackouts, etc. So, with millions of more electric cars, the electric grid would have to be extended a lot AND upgraded a lot too—which utility companies have not been doing for decades. That’s why the existing grid is in such a sorry state in the first place.

In the end, with or without electric cars, the big problem in capitalist society is that electricity in particular, and energy in general, is produced and distributed by private companies. Such vital resources need to be produced and distributed in planned fashion, and according to the needs of the whole society, not the profit calculations of a small number of speculators—as is the case today.

Behind Pollution Is the Profit System

Pollution, climate change and the destruction of the environment are serious problems linked to the burning of fossil fuels (coal, oil and natural gas). Lately, politicians and media commentators have been saying that driving electric cars (instead of gas-powered ones) can solve, or at least ease, these problems: A technological solution for a technological problem.

But as discussed above, we can’t really call electric cars clean, at least not now, and probably not in the near future either. So, electric cars, and also the electric power grid, need to be made cleaner.

But the same can be said, and could have been done, for gas-powered vehicles as well. And auto companies have not done that.

The engines of gas-powered vehicles could have been built in a way that they are more fuel-efficient and produce less pollution and carbon dioxide. Knowledge and technology to make this possible has existed for decades and can be further developed. But auto companies have never made fighting pollution or climate change their priority. So, they have never chosen to invest money into that kind of research and development. No, their priority is profit.

Instead of investing into building cleaner car engines that generate energy more efficiently, the auto companies chose to lie. For decades, these companies denied that the vehicles they made contributed to the warming of the earth—even though, as we now know, scientists working for auto companies told company executives about the rising danger of climate change as early as the 1970s. The big bosses suppressed these reports and continued to pay scientists and institutions who denied that burning fossil fuels contributed to the warming of the earth.

Now the same auto companies are telling us that they will make and sell more electric cars, because they want to reduce pollution and carbon dioxide emissions. But who can believe anything they say?

It’s not even certain yet if the auto companies will produce electric cars on a bigger scale. Electric car sales took a downturn within the past year—which is perhaps not a surprise, considering the problems such as the difficulty of charging an electric car. And the auto companies themselves may have been reacting to this development, when they announced that their plans for battery plants were “on hold” for now—the same battery plants that they had been hyping up just months ago.

Companies make all their decisions behind closed doors, based on their own profit calculations. And that’s where the core problem is—not in what kind of engine is used in cars. In capitalist society, everything is produced for private profit. As long as profit, and not the needs of the whole society, is the driving force behind the economy, we can’t expect things to get better in terms of pollution, the destruction of the environment—or, in general, the future of human society.