The myth is pushed by environmentalists, in a jihad against fossil fuels, that they see as the root of all environmental evils, that electric vehicles are zero emissions, or some such nonsense. According to energy analyst Mark P. Mills, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a faculty fellow at Northwestern University‘s McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science, “You have to dig up about 500,000 pounds of materials to make a single 1,000-pound battery.” “It takes 100 to 300 barrels of oil to manufacture a battery that can hold one barrel of oil equivalent of energy,” he said. “Just manufacturing the battery can have a carbon debt rate ranging from 10 tons to 40 tons of CO2, and the plans that are in place to increase the use of batteries will require an increase in production of minerals like lithium, cobalt, zinc – demand for those minerals will increase between 400 percent and 4,000 percent.” “There isn’t enough mining in the world to make enough batteries for that many people for their car.”
The electric vehicle mania will lead, like all environmental fads and follies, to utter disaster.