4) Cars soon unaffordable for 50% of Germans, expert warns
No Tricks Zone, 12 April 2023
5) Peak EV: Electric vehicles will fade as their true costs become clear
Mises Institute, 12 April 2023
6) Ruy Teixeira: The working class isn’t down with the green transition
The Liberal Patriot, 13 April 2023
Cars soon unaffordable for 50% of Germans, expert warns
No Tricks Zone, 12 April 2023
Ideological green policies are tearing Germany’s economy apart
In an interview, Prof. Kurt Lauk, former economic council head and automobile manager, warns half of Germans “will no longer be able to afford a car.” Socially explosive…”a disgrace”.
He also warns of a rapid demolition of Germany’s economic backbone: the automotive industry.
Story at Pleiteticker here.
“It is a disgrace what is sitting in the chair of Ludwig Erhard or Graf Lambsdorff. The hostility to technology coming from the Ministry of Economics is unbearable.
Everywhere where we are or were world market leaders, we have gone about abolishing it,” Lauk said in an interview . It is the “worst thing that could happen” for German industry.
“For several years now, we have been working hard to destroy this competitive advantage of German industry or to hand it over to other nations. We now have ‘economic heads’ sitting in the Ministry of Economics who have no other professional qualifications,” Lauk added.
Lauk says Germany’s technological advantages are now in jeopardy because the backbone of Germany’s economy and driver of innovation is the country’s automotive industry. “This is where most of the jobs are.”
150 years of technological experience “thrown away”
“The technological advantage of German carmakers through 150 years of experience with the combustion engine, transmissions etc. is being recklessly abandoned, Lauk said. “We are throwing away our competitive advantage and adopting the ‘Chinese drive’. Because 80 per cent of the battery drives come from China. That means China has driven us up against the wall in a strategic situation. And with our naivety, we didn’t realize what was happening.”
Unaffordable for the bottom 50%
Lauk warns that because of e-cars being considerably more expensive than conventional combustion engine vehicles: “The bottom fifty percent of the income pyramid will no longer be able to find a vehicle for less than 40,000 euros.” and thus this group will see significantly restricted mobility.
Tinder dry social powder keg of the haves and have nots
“Today you can get a cheap, suitable vehicle for 15,000, 18,000 or 20,000 euros. That will no longer be the case. We are running into a huge social conflict with this idiotic, singular policy to drive with electric batteries.”
5) Peak EV: Electric vehicles will fade as their true costs become clear
Mises Institute, 12 April 2023
“On Wednesday, the Environmental Protection Agency plans to announce tough new tailpipe emission standards designed to effectively force the auto industry to phase out the sale of gas-powered cars,” reports The Verge, with the provocative headline “The End Is Nigh for Gas-Powered Cars.”
Environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) is the newest religion, and we all know who the practitioners are. Electric vehicle (EV) owners sing “Hallelujah” when they pull out of their garages. The investor-class ESG evangelists believe the new belief is in its beginnings. Whatever the Biden EPA does, investor Harris Kupperman thinks it’s likely just the Church of What’s Happening Now.
Kupperman, referred to as Kuppy by Real Vision’s Maggie Lake, told her, “Well, I think we’re nearing peak ESG, which is probably a good thing, honestly.” He explained,
“And it’s like religions kind of come, they peak, they die out. No one practices Roman religions anymore. I can name three of the gods and I’m a Roman history major.
These things, they peak, they crest, and this little religion of ESG, it’s been around for a while. It peaked. And now there’ll be some die hard adherence, but I think the vast majority of investors want to make money. And it’s great if they’re doing something that has a social good, but most of them just want to save for their retirement.”
As to all those fancy Teslas silently cutting you off in traffic, their drivers teeming with superiority, thinking they are saving the planet, Kuppy sees them going the way of T. rex. “No. I think EV is going to be something you’re going to go to a museum with my kids and be like, wow, that was an evolutionary dead end and we always [waste] trillions of dollars on this. No, I think that there’s no future to EV.”
“Really, why?” an aghast Lake wondered.
Next, Kuppy comes with the hard facts amateur environmentalists and government enforcers don’t consider.
“Because it [the EV] destroys energy. You have this concept called EROI, which is the return on energy you put in. An EV, you put more energy in than you get out. And so as a result, it’s just like a thermodynamic rule—it won’t work unless you subsidize it.
What’s the reason for EVs? It’s because it supposedly produces less carbon. But through the full life cycle of owning an EV, because so much carbon has to go into the stupid thing, it doesn’t use less carbon. You’re better off having a gas guzzler.”
Yikes. Maybe EV owners are not as heroic as they believe.
Kupperman says that without government subsidies, consumers will stick to internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles. In fact, even with subsidies, most people, like Kupperman, will buy ICE vehicles. But there will always be snobs.
