Transcript of EV Mandates vs. Freedom with Mark P. Mills

Dick. Some of you might have read his stuff. If you ever watched the movie Minority Report, that book was written by Philip K. Dick. He said, and I love this line, we use this as a tagline on every part of the webpage of our new institute, “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”

Current EV Market Realities

Some of the realities are already visible in the headlines in recent months regarding electric vehicles. And the epic financial losses and retransmissions from the likes of GM and Ford and Volkswagen because they are squandering money in the rush to build EVs for everyone and to pledge fealty to the demand that they build EVs for everyone.

This is another reality check-in consumer behavior, wherein the growth rate in EV sales has collapsed this year, both in the United States and in Europe. The growth rate is down more than twenty percent. So the accelerating growth has decelerated. We’ll see where it goes in the coming years.

But let me make the obvious point. In the face of that kind of news about what’s going on in the real world, EV advocates, they see this as—to use the obvious analogy—they just see this as bumps in the road to the all EV future where everybody will be driving only electric cars. And you know that there’s a dozen states, as I said, that have mandates that you could only buy an electric car about half dozen years from now. There’s more than a dozen countries with such mandates, and our current EPA rules essentially make that the mandate early 2030s, 2032, that most of the cars built in America will have to be EVs.

That date, by the way, in model terms for the industrial sector, means that in 2025 and 2026, they’ll have to begin to change their factories. It will have an impact on the cost and availability of their cars within the next year. And none of those mandates have been reversed, well, yet, I guess you’d say.

The Twin Cannons of EV Orthodoxy

So the mandates in these inducements are based on what you would call the twin cannons of EV orthodoxy, both of which are fundamentally technology claims.

The first, the combustion-free cars, EVs, will radically cut global oil use. And the other is that EVs constitute, as they’ve said over and over again, a fundamental revolution in personal transportation. In fact, EV boosters, as you know, frequently analogize EVs with the great mobility revolution of a century ago when we stopped using horses and buggies.

So that analogy, just consider a simple thought experiment. Imagine it’s 1850. No one would have called it a revolution if someone changed the food given to horses. Battery electric cars are still cars. They have a different fuel and different powertrains, the same wheel, but the same wheels, the same tires, same seats, windows, same infotainment systems. And infotainment is what sells cars now, especially the Gen Zs and the Gen Xs. But—and I like infotainment systems as much as the next guy.

And as every car dealer knows, there are many reasons that people choose to buy a car, different options. The fuel systems and the powertrain are just one of the options. And the propulsion and the fuel system do matter. It’s not that they’re trivial, but they’re just an option. It’s an option. It’s not a revolution in the car.

The optimal propulsion system, of course, is determined at the intersection of the obvious two domains, what the use of the vehicle is and then, of course, the nature of the engine economics around making a vehicle for that particular use. And of course, that’s where the EV or the sort of all the tropes around EVs start to fall apart. Battery electric vehicles, all battery vehicles, are not universally optimal. In fact, quite the opposite.

The Reality of Oil Demand

So it’s sort of received wisdom that “big oil,” air quotes, is worried that EVs will radically cut oil use. In fact, the World Economic Forum, the sages there wrote, and I’ll quote them, “rapid growth of electric vehicles will potentially disrupt the traditional oil market.” These are silly statements. You can know they’re silly by doing simple arithmetic.

If it were the case that half of all the world’s vehicles were electrically propelled, burdened on oil, which is a goal that’s functionally impossible to achieve in the remotely foreseeable future. But even if that were to happen—and by the way, half of all the world’s vehicles becoming EVs is one hundred-fold growth of where we are today. It’s a lot of growth. But even were that to happen, it would reduce the world’s need for oil by about ten percent. This is not an existential threat to big oil.

Meanwhile, what’s actually happening, consider these facts, that even as the number of EVs has risen, and it has, from nearly zero about a decade ago to more than forty million EVs in the world now, that is all-electric vehicles. And that’s a big number. Forty million is a significant number of all-electric vehicles. But that didn’t stop the growth in the consumption of gasoline.

This year, gasoline consumption globally is reaching record peaks, blowing past the peak gasoline consumption that took place just prior to the great and feckless lockdowns from COVID. So most you could say about EVs is that they will moderate the growth in oil demand going forward. Probably, that will be a good thing because the magnitude of pent-up demand for vehicles in the world is really epic. So this moderating growth in demand turns out to be a useful thing for competitive markets.

The CO2 Emissions Reality

Of course, cutting oil use wasn’t the objective per se. As you know, the purpose of these policies, the policies of force-feeding EVs on everyone, is the belief that that will radically cut carbon dioxide emissions, CO2 emissions.

The International Energy Agency’s accounting bragged in their most recent report that globally, EVs are already avoiding one hundred and fifty megatons of CO2 emissions. Sounds like a big number. Well, you could do the math on this. That’s about zero point four percent of global CO2 emissions. Not such a big number.

Or maybe for context, in a more grotesque way, the oil-burning war machines that are rampaging across Ukraine right now, those machines are emitting more new CO2 every six months than all the world’s EVs combined have eliminated. And wars, sadly, continue. We hope this one will end since the new President has a new pen, but we’ll see.

The reality is that no one really knows how much, if any, CO2 emissions are being eliminated by driving a car that doesn’t burn gasoline. And here’s the interesting thing, and it’s a curious thing. You cannot measure the CO2 emissions associated with the EV, electric vehicle.

And it do emit carbon dioxide, and I’ll explain why. But it’s really unlike conventional cars. We know exactly how much carbon dioxide, if you’re worried about it, is emitted by your car. We just count the gasoline that you purchase. There’s a one-to-one relationship between the gasoline you burn and the CO2 that’s emitted by your car. So we know precisely how much CO2 regular cars emit.

But for EVs, the emissions occur elsewhere. They’re elsewhere emitters. They occur when you charge the car, of course, depending on when you charge it, where you charge it and specifically the time of day you charge it. But what’s more important and more challenging to figure out is the upstream emissions, the emissions that are created to build the EV in the first place.

This factor is much bigger than most of the EV advocates realize. And it rises from a really simple fact. A typical EV battery, Dominic’s parents’ Tesla, has a one thousand pound battery. The fuel tank weighs one thousand pounds. The gasoline fuel tank in your car, if you drive a gasoline car, is about eighty pounds.

The Environmental Impact of Electric Vehicles

The one thousand pound fuel tank is made from a complex set of chemicals and minerals that require mining somewhere. In fact, for that one thousand pound battery, you have to mine somewhere in the world five hundred thousand pounds of rock. Those five hundred thousand pounds of rock per car are mined with oil burning machines, really big machines burning diesel fuel. They’re carried by really big diesel fuel burning machines, shipped on ships burning diesel fuel all over the world, crushed by large coal-fired electric producing power plants and big grinders to crush the rock, to dissolve it, to get the minerals up. The list goes on.

You get the point. Car emits carbon dioxide emissions just to make it. Those emissions, what they are specifically is highly difficult and complex to figure out because of labyrinthine supply chains. There are global supply chains. Much of the supply chain is in China, where it burns coal to provide two-thirds of its electricity.

So we actually don’t know precisely what a particular EV’s emissions are. But we do know the range, and it can vary by a factor of three hundred percent. And at the higher end of the range, the emissions associated with building the EV are greater than the emissions that you will save by never driving the gasoline car you turned in for the EV. Advocates respond, well, eventually, though, the emissions reductions will be real because we’ll get more efficient. We don’t know how—what they—even if we don’t know what they are, they’ll be free emissions reductions.

The Myth of EV Simplicity

They cost nothing because this is the other trope that there’s no inherent cost in those emissions reductions because EVs will eventually be cheaper cars. And if they’re cheaper cars, people buy them voluntarily, the subsidies will end, and we get some free emissions reductions because EVs, you’ve heard this said over and over again, are inherently simpler vehicles. And because they’re inherently simpler vehicles, they, therefore, will ultimately be cheaper vehicles to manufacture, and everybody will be happy. Well, EVs aren’t simpler vehicles. They’re just differently complicated.

A conventional car has a fairly complicated thermomechanical engine made of hundreds of parts and a very simple fuel tank with one part fuel pump. The EV swaps the complexity. The drivetrain is a very simple electric motor with one or two parts. The fuel tank is a battery with thousands of parts, thousands of welds, a cooling system, a structural system, power electronics and safety systems. It’s a very complex electrochemical machine that also wears out, is difficult to make.

It is not simpler. It is, as I said, differently complicated. So it shouldn’t be surprising if I tell you that despite the claims around the automotive strike where the workers were worried that they were losing their jobs because we were told the EVs are simpler, taking away labor, that’s not true. EV labor is not less than conventional vehicle labor. The labor just shifts, like the complexity, to different places and different people.

That’s what the strike was about. In fact, the EV supply chain overall requires slightly more labor hours to make an EV than to make a conventional car. More, not less. It’s just labor elsewhere. And if we count the upstream labor, where the upstream CO2 emissions comes from, if we add that in, which one doesn’t do because autoworkers don’t work in mines, they assemble vehicle parts that are made from metals that are mined in the mines.

But if we add that in and you count that for both kinds of vehicles, the total supply chain from mine out to your doorstep involves twenty percent more labor hours to make an EV than it does to make a conventional vehicle. But most of those labor hours, when I count those, are in China.

The Mineral Supply Challenge

Of course, this is the central issue that is the ultimate—you could use the obvious analogy, the bridge is out. There’s no bridge to the EV future because there aren’t enough minerals being mined in the world. The fundamental challenge EVs have is that the vision of massive global forced EV rollout will require increase in the mining of critical minerals like copper and nickel and aluminum and manganese and lithium, of course.

You notice I didn’t say anything about rare earth metals, those too. They’re not rare, by the way. They have rare properties, and they are more commonly mined in China because we gave up that market twenty-five or thirty years ago. We drove it out of business because of the U.S. EPA.

To meet the goals of building as many EVs as were imagined by the policymakers who are forcing the subsidies and the mandates into the system will require an increase in global mining of these metals of four hundred percent to seven thousand percent. Even the International Energy Agency, which is an advocate of this path, the All EV path, even they have pointed out repeatedly that the world is not now mining enough of those metals, is not planning to mine enough of those metals, has no plans to mine that many metals of any kind. And further, by their own analysis, it takes ten to sixteen years to open a net new mine. And we’re having goals ten years from now that will require us to increase mining by four hundred to seven thousand percent with mines that we can’t build for the next ten to sixteen years.

These are, to say the obvious, maybe the most polite thing to say about it is they’re incommensurate goals. I guess a simpler word for it in honor of peanut is that they’re nuts. I guess I should be kind. But here’s the problem. The mere pursuit, whether by fiat or subsidy, the mere pursuit of the goal is to get that much more material mined out of the earth and put into machines like electric vehicles, but also windmills and solar panels.

They also require this massive increase in mining. The mere pursuit of that at a time when there aren’t enough materials being produced, this is Economics 101. I’m sure it’s taught at Hillsdale. If you have that much demand pressure with limited supply, you get massive price escalation. Of course, that makes a lie of the claim that these vehicles are going to become inevitably cheaper.

They will become inevitably more expensive if we keep pushing harder to force the manufacturing system to acquire that many materials that aren’t available.

The Infrastructure Challenge

And so far, I haven’t even addressed the other technology challenges associated with this rapid and forced push of an all-electric transportation future. And I’m not talking here about niche use of EVs, picking on Dominic’s parents again. Lots of people like EVs, lots more than we purchased. There’s a lot of applications for electric vehicles.

That’s not what’s in contention. What’s in contention here is the claim, the demand and the requirement that states and countries sell only EVs to consumers in the extremely near future. All electric, only EV future. So EVs for everyone means that we have to shift how we deliver energy to society, to give you another sense of the engineering and technical challenge.

Self-evidently, to get the energy to the vehicle you use, instead of sending liquids in pipes, trucks and tanks, I have to send electricity on wires and through transformers. Sounds simple. But here’s one of the odd things in physics of energy transport. And I’ll confess, I was a little surprised when I did the research on this some years ago because you can’t see electricity. It’s ethereal. It’s got to be easy to move.

Gasoline, you can see. It’s heavy. You’ve to pump it. But it’s roughly five to 10x more expensive to use to move a unit of energy as electricity than the same unit of energy as gasoline. It costs more in the hardware. It costs more capital to move energy in electron form amazingly than it does in the form of gasoline.

The effect of that means that if I want to move the same amount of energy that goes through pipes, tanks and trucks and move that quantity of energy into wires and transformers, we know exactly what that would cost because we’ve been doing this for a very long time. We’ve been moving the energy that way for a century. We know what the equipment costs. There’s no magic. There’s no mystery. And this part of the infrastructure is not part of the Inflation Reduction Act.

The reason it’s not is because utilities build that. They don’t have to order utilities to do it. Utilities are happy to spend capital because they get rate of return on capital. If the states or the government or the utilities build it, they will build it. The question you’d want to know is, first of all, how much will that cost to swap out the tanks, pumps and trucks for wires and transformers. Not for the power plants to make the electricity, not for the ignominious failures on deploying seven billion dollars worth of chargers to build a half dozen chargers. Not that. The in-between stuff.

The answer is about three trillion dollars. That was the earlier three trillion dollars I told you about that gets induced into the system. That’s a lot of money. It will raise electric rates. Worse than that, it actually won’t happen. We don’t—there aren’t enough transformers being built in the world.

Transformers are those odd electrical machines that convert high voltage electricity to useful low voltage power that you see on telephone poles all over the country.

The Reality of Technology Change

So EV boosters, where they see these kind of challenges and limits, what they usually say is, well, technology will get better. That will solve the problem. And for some of the challenges, they’re right. It’s a fair claim. Many things do get better rapidly and some things radically, but not this kind of thing and not in that kind of time frame.

And what we know about history is that when you try to force technology change through mandates and taxes and subsidies, what you do is you lock in yesterday’s technologies. You’re subsidizing the old stuff. You don’t get the new stuff that way.

So the rate of adoption for EVs, it’s going to slow down. It’s already slowing down long before this sort of battery dominated future ever happens. We’re going to run out of money. We’re going to run out of minerals. And probably, we’ll run out of political tolerance on the electorate, which is maybe what we saw in some senses last week. And we’re going to run out of our appetite for buying most of the materials from China.

China manufactures, produces, mines and refines between fifty percent and ninety percent of all of the world’s input materials to make things like electric motors and batteries for electric cars.

The Realistic Future of EVs

So none of this changes the fact that a lot of people, again, I’ll say it again, will buy lots of EVs in the future. There were in fact, I think the market for EVs in the United States is probably number like thirty million to fifty million, which is a lot more than there are on the road today. But there are more registered cars in the United States than there are registered drivers. There’s nearly three hundred million cars in America of various kinds.

So thirty million to forty million is a lot, but it doesn’t change the world. It’s not a revolution. They’re certainly significant. They’ll make a difference. But when the IEA and others gushed at EVs are seeing exponential growth, these are just silly statements.

I mean they’re just prima facie silly statements. The automotive cognizanti, there may be some of you out there. I used to work as a mechanic, and I like engines, and I like electric cars. But for those who follow the automotive industry’s history, we did see exponential growth for new models of cars in history. And all of them are far, far faster than the growth in EV option.

You can imagine which ones I’m going to mention. The popular sports car became a popular car option with a Mustang. The growth rate and the adoption without subsidies of sports cars like Mustang was 100x faster and bigger in volume than we’ve seen for EVs. The minivan, which was revolutionary in a car option, exploded into the market much faster than EVs have. And of course, now the dreaded SUV has seen far greater adoption.

In fact, such an astonishing adoption that as of this year, fifty percent of all cars purchased in the world, not in America, in the world, were SUVs, which tells you something about where consumer appetites are.

But still look, there’s still a very good chance that EVs will become popular enough to rival—think of it this way, on a per capita basis in the United States, they’ll rival the popularity on a per capita basis of horses circa 1900. If you look at the data, that’s about where we’ll get. Now, of course, there’s a lot more cars than there were horses today because—well, the reason there’s a lot more cars than horses is that interesting economic fact. Think of it this way.

The average priced car in the United States requires about ten weeks of the average income to buy. The average priced horse and buggy in the late 1800s required ten years of the average wage at that time. That’s why there’s lots of cars.

Meanwhile, if policymakers’ goals were really about reducing automotive petroleum use, there’s far easier ways to do that and far more certain ways to do that. Combustion engines have already been built, designed or commercial. They are twice as efficient as the average car on the road today.

So even the IEA did an analysis a few years ago before they really got full into the Kool-Aid of only EVs. They did an analysis half dozen years ago that concluded that promoting more efficient internal combustion engines over the next decade would reduce oil use by more than the than would three hundred million EVs pushed into the market. Since we know the former is cheaper than the latter, the logical thing you’d wonder about is why if you really feel compelled to subsidize something, if you can’t stop yourself here in Congress, you feel a compulsion, which Congress does, to subsidize using your money to subsidize other people. At least subsidize that.

The Economics of EV Subsidies

I mean who would you subsidize? Well, rather than subsidize the wealthy who drive EVs taxing the middle class, if we’re going to subsidize somebody, why don’t we subsidize the lower income drivers who drive long distances? These are called superusers. Superusers of gasoline constitute ten percent of drivers and use thirty percent of all the gasoline in the United States. An obvious target, a high leverage target, and they tend to be the people that don’t get subsidies.

These tend to be the people that mow the lawns in Silicon Valley and drive their F-150s eighty or ninety miles to work and have to drive home. But that’s not really the goal of those in the EV-only lobby. They are, by self-admission, anti-car. The real agenda of the personal mobility revolutionaries, and it’s openly discussed, it’s openly analyzed, it’s pursued, is to take away your car or at least make it incredibly inconvenient to use one. And if you do use one, it’s going to have to be electric.

The True Agenda Behind EV Mandates

The serious EV boosters, they, in fact, do know all the facts I lay out for you. They know that they’re true. They’re aware of them. In fact, the IEA is also aware of them in detailed analyses. So they know that mandates won’t do the job alone.

So what do they propose? Well, let me read you what they propose. They need, in these words, “behavioral intervention.” I think you know what that means. Consumers who need to be convinced are forced to drive less in general and travel more by bicycle, ride sharing, mass transit or on foot.

The IEA’s net zero plan, this is the plan to get carbon dioxide down, explicitly calls for “increasing the share of people who don’t have a car.” Notice how they want to increase the share of the homeowners in the world who don’t have a car from today’s forty-five percent. So forty-five percent of people in the world don’t have a car. They want to increase that share to seventy percent of people not having a car by 2040 in order to meet their emissions goals.

California, which is always really eager to be on the leading edge of these kinds of dystopian trends, has also explicitly stated that in their enshrined goals passed into law, they are going to require citizens in the near future to drive twenty-five percent fewer miles a year than they did thirty years ago. That’s going to be the benchmark for reducing driving.

So you’d have to say, rarely have governments at any level—federal, state, local, cities, towns—devoted so much effort to constrain and even outright ban a nearly universal product, a car, personal mobility device, and a near universal behavior: driving a personal car. And for the record, again, in America, there are more cars than there are licensed drivers. So this is an epic effort to restrict your access to a car, and it has not abated.

And it is a whole-of-government effort here and in twelve states and in dozens of countries. So even though the automobile is a spectacular freedom-enabling economic machine, the anti-car movement views this car culture as somehow toxic and inherently unnatural. This is from last year in New Yorker magazine. I read it so that you know the line so that you don’t have to: “The grip of a car is the metaphor for liberty, is as firm as that of guns, if perhaps with similarly destructive results.”

So another analyst put it in a different piece that the problem with cars is that there’s a cultural attachment to them. On that last point, I’d agree with them.

The Fifteen-Minute City Concept

The car prohibitionists, when they couch their thesis as being a way to break the car culture, want to paint a picture of a future that’s not only desirable but inevitable, where we won’t any longer be car-centric and that we’ll embrace what is now being called “micromobility,” which means bicycles, whether you’re pedaling it or it’s electric powered, walking and shared rides. And they are also claiming, of course, that the Internet, Zooming and telecommuting, are rapidly eliminating the need for commuting anyway. So the future is happening.

And in fact, the latest trend is to promote, demand, force a new class of urban organization called the Fifteen-Minute City. I wonder how many of you have heard this. You can look it up. The Fifteen-Minute City. That’s a city, and there’s some appeal to this, I grant you.

I like walking around Paris. And I like walking around London. There are a lot of old cities, and I don’t like walking around Washington where I live very much. The Fifteen-Minute City idea is that it’s a city designed such that you can—this is the key part—you can walk, bicycle or take mass transit to anywhere you want to go and get there within fifteen minutes.

Note that the approved transport options do not include your car. Now look, I like to walk, but I like to choose when I walk more than I like to walk. But a lot of cities are embracing this, and they’re very aggressive. So you all see it depending on where you travel and where you live. New York City, by one example, in the last eight years, has increased the number of bike lanes by six hundred miles.

There’s six hundred miles in New York City of dedicated bike lanes, taking the real estate from cars and congesting cars, which, of course, was the intention. It makes the car far more inconvenient. The IEA had the temerity to brag about the oil savings from micromobility in cities. They pointed out in their latest World Energy Outlook that micromobility, bicycles in Fifteen-Minute Cities, is already saving a laughable seventy thousand barrels of oil per day globally. Again, this is arithmetic.

That’s 0.07 percent of world oil. China increases its oil consumption that much, I think, every three days. I mean, it’s a number like that.

Who Benefits from Bicycle Lanes?

So who, you could ask, benefits from this enthusiastic embrace of city bicycles? I mean, you might have anecdotal experience with who you see using bicycle lanes in cities. I do. But let me tell you what the data show because there are data on this. And in our country, at least, here’s what the Census Bureau tells us from last year: 0.5 percent of all U.S. commuters use a bicycle. Think about the percentage of bike lanes you’re seeing in cities. Seventy percent of American commuters use a car driving alone.

And for those who bicycle to work—I’m not talking about weekend entertainment, having fun on a bike—for those who bicycle to work, the average age is twenty to thirty. Over seventy percent are male, seventy percent are white, and eighty percent have college degrees. So much for the claim of equitable micromobility. It’s shocking that there hasn’t been more shock about the demographics of the corruption of city streets for that demographic. Maybe it’s a revenge thing. I don’t know.

The Myth of the Car-Free Generation

But nonetheless, the widely circulated trope in the chattering classes is that we live in a time of generational shift, to not just the micromobility and battery-powered bicycles. It’s because—and this is what Goldman Sachs wrote last year—”Millennials have been reluctant to buy items such as cars and are turning to a new set of services that provide access to products without the burden of ownership, giving rise to what’s being called a sharing economy.” You’ve seen this said by many, many people. It’s repeated all the time. Data show nothing like that going on.

This is just silly typing on computers, making PowerPoints by the chattering classes in Wall Street. An MIT study found, looking at millennials, the first generation of the Internet era—they grew up with the Internet, they’re the largest share of the population now, two years ago having passed the absolute number of human beings that will be labeled boomers. So they’re the big cohort.

And this is what the MIT study found about studying what millennials do with cars. Quote, “there’s little difference in preference for vehicle ownership between millennials and boomers.” The study also found, quote, “in contrast to anecdotes, we find higher usage in terms of vehicle miles traveled by millennials.” And the data also show that the Gen Zs, as soon as they get money, are buying cars at a faster pace than the previous generation.

In fact, earlier this year, the French bank, BNP Paribas, did a global survey, fourteen countries, looking at the attitudes of the youth. By that, they mean thirty and under, specifically, their attitudes towards cars because BNP is fully embracing the micromobility future. I love this study. It’s got lots of great data in it. It’s a delicious study, really nicely done, massive surveys, cohorts, scientific. The bottom line on the front page of the study, quote, “we were quite surprised by the views put forward by the under-thirties surveyed. To put it simply and bluntly, they love cars,” end quote. They were shocked. I mean, they were surprised. They used the British expression—they were gobsmacked.

This was true across all fourteen countries. It was not isolated to the evil Americans. It was true in Germany and in Italy and in Bruges.

In fact, what the researchers found out was that the young cohort offered as the principal reason that if they didn’t have a car—here’s another shock—to use the vernacular, “no duh.” They want a car. Its price matters. And what should be a political red flag for the anti-car crowd, this is what the survey found that was fascinating: they tested their attitudes toward the car. Seventy percent to ninety percent across all cultures were attached to their car. They liked their car. And when they were plumbed, why did they like their car? It didn’t have to do with—one of the reasons was they got them to work. That was one. But it was not the primary reason.

The Deurbanization Trend

So the pillar of this “peak car” thesis is that it’s not just a generational change (and there isn’t one), but there’s a continuing urbanization, which will make it easy to diminish the need for cars in the first place. You’ve heard this repeated over and over again. The problem is, again, that’s not true in the data.

In fact, it’s really remarkable. And this surprised me because I like data. I’ve been following these trends for a long time, especially now, given my age. I work for Reagan, so you know what that means. What the Census Bureau has found is that the United States has been deurbanizing since before 2010.

The trend began fifteen years ago. It got accelerated by the idiotic COVID lockdowns. Lots of people bolted out of urban cities. But the most recent census data through early this year shows the trend has continued at almost the same pace with the exit from urban cores and going out to suburban and exurban cores. For demographic planners, city planners, they’re trying to parse out what this means.

But I can tell you what it means for driving. If you’re an urban escapee and you live in an exurban area, you need a car. The extent to which the Internet is a factor in this deurbanization is probably quite real. But remember, the trope there was everybody would telecommute and not drive. That’s apparently not what’s going on.

What’s going on is there are still telecommuters and physical commuters. They may be working three days a week instead of five. There might be four, but they’re still commuting. And they’re driving and what kind of cars do you drive if you have to drive a long way? A bigger, more comfortable car, which is exactly what the trends show.

The Rise of the Supercommuter

In fact, the data show that this category of commuter—and this category of commuter is called the supercommuter, not a supercomputer that runs the cloud that lets them stay there—the supercommuters now constitute five million Americans. Those are people that drive more than ninety minutes each way to work. The growth rate in supercommuters is rising at 3x the growth rate of the workforce.

That trend has obvious impacts and relevance to the kind of cars that people want to use and will use. In fact, way back in 1999, at the first peak of digital enthusiasms, that was the era of irrational exuberance, there was a brilliant British sociologist, John Urry, who wrote at that time when he looked at the effect of the Internet on behaviors, both online and driving. And I quote him. He said, “Travel through one medium”—this is an academic talking, you know, excuse him, we’re in academic environments, so I’m sure you all understand what he’s trying to say—”Travel through one medium overall increases travel through other media.” End quote.

What did he mean? As we use more of Internet, we’re going to use more airplanes, the two different media for travel, your virtual travel and physical travel. He predicted both would increase together. They did. It’s exactly what happened in the Internet era. Both have risen.

Car drivers do things now with cars that they didn’t do with cars fifty years ago. Cars were primarily commuting vehicles fifty to eighty years ago. Now they’re primarily used to visit family, friends, entertainment. Commuting is still a function, and the commuting function has migrated to exurban domains and is rapidly rising, going further and going more often and doing things for pleasure, which, again, migrates people back to certain kinds of buying behaviors, bigger cars.

The True Revolution in Mobility

So where are the true revolutions in mobility? I mean, it’s not a revolution to change the fuel. For supercommuters, the revolution would be vehicle autonomy, a robocar, obviously. You could sleep on the way to work. You can watch a movie on the way to work. You can work on the way to work. I mean, that would be a true revolution.

The Economics and Future of Electric Vehicles (continued)

That’s also true in dense urban cores, which are very annoying to drive in stop-and-go traffic. Vehicle autonomy is coming. It’s just much more difficult than the enthusiasts thought to make it safe and reliable. But it will happen. It will happen in due course.

It will be an option. It will be available. It will be a safe option. It will be an affordable option, ultimately. But what will it do if we have vehicle autonomy?

Well, it’ll encourage more supercommuters because you don’t have to pay attention if the car is driving you safely. It will encourage more people to be in cars that can’t now drive, that is underage and aged out or infirm. All the serious analysts that look at the trends will tell you that there’ll be more cars in the world if that happens rather than fewer cars. Oh, and the trope that we’ll all share the cars together, nobody wants to own their private car. This is first, there’s no trends like that anywhere in history.

That’s why the United States now has more cars than there are licensed drivers. Why do you need three cars? You can’t drive three cars at once. Why do you own a personal car? Why don’t you share them all?

Because we’re human beings. We want our own stuff. And the geniuses that want to plan the future think human nature will change. Human nature isn’t going to change. So there are other revolutions coming.

I think some revolutions in air travel are nascent, but they’re a long way away. And if we do have lots of robotaxis, and we will, that will increase the number of cars on the road, too, because you’ll expect them to be convenient. In order for them to be convenient in the physics of the universe we live in, you’ll need more of them circulating empty, waiting to come at your beck and call, which will be really annoying because where are they going to park? You want to see a bunch of empty cars driving around when you’re—this is going to be crazy. So the real challenge for the urban planners is what do I do with these cars?

And it won’t be easy to solve, frankly. But if it’s your car that’s autonomous, problem is easy to solve. But if the prohibitions that are being planned do take effect, it will happen before the EVs are cheap and before vehicle autonomy is around. So there’s going to be one predictable consequence. If the state governments and our federal government or any country bans the sale of inexpensive, affordable, available cars, the price of all cars will go up.

The price of used cars will go up a lot because people will buy a used car if they can’t buy a new car. And most cars people buy are already used cars. Seventy-five percent of all cars bought in the United States are used cars. Why? The youth answered the question.

Price. If mandates are implemented, they will lead to the most massive misallocation of capital possibly in American history, given the scale of the money that’s being pushed into it. And it will do nothing, zero, bupkis, to reduce global CO2 emissions. It’ll just make life more miserable and taxes higher. This is why I think it will end, and it’s already beginning to end.

The Future of Mobility

And this debate matters because the quantity of money involved is astronomical. This unprecedented level of intervention in this market by governments. The future of the revolution for EVs, lots more EVs, but it’s not a revolution. The future of cars, lots more cars. The future of mobility generally, pretty interesting stuff happening in autonomy.

Elon Musk is getting very close. He may be closest. I think Waymo has done a very good job. So that’s the big race now to find a way to do it so it’s safe. It will happen.

But what won’t happen is the impossible. So when you think about future technologies, I sort of want to keep in mind something that Richard Feynman said. He was a great physicist, a Nobelist, one of the great physicists of the twentieth century. And he had a terrific line. He said it almost exactly fifty years ago this month.

And he said, quote, “For successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled,” period. So I think Dr. Feynman was talking not only about the physical laws of nature but also the laws of human nature.

So we can conclude—I think we’ll conclude with a prediction in keeping with Feynman. And is that the reality and the importance of affordable, ubiquitous, personal mobility will take precedence over government PR. And EVs will continue to be appealing to millions of citizens, but the economic and physical realities of what it really means for the putative all-EV future are really dystopian and unachievable. In fact, I’ll say it again, I think what the EV future will look like in per capita terms is that they’ll become roughly as popular as the horse and buggy was circa 1900. Thank you.

[UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER:] Thank you, Mr. Mills. We now have time for Q&A. Well, two questions. First easy one. Are you going to publish your paper so we can send it to politicians?

[MARK P. MILLS:] Yes. Well, I think you published these papers. But yes. Yes, it will be.

[UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER:] My more serious question is China doesn’t have to import its oil. They have a reason to have electric vehicles. We—

[MARK P. MILLS:] Yes. Correct.

[UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER:] So how does that fit into your equation of how this works?

[MARK P. MILLS:] Well, it’s a brilliant trade on the Chinese part.

So they are the biggest importer of oil in the world. They have a massive population underserved in cars. So they’d like to import less oil. They don’t want those drivers using oil. So they massively subsidized the EV infrastructure of China, roughly at the same level or higher than what we’re trying to do, but late to the game.

And what they are doing is selling to us the stuff to make our EVs in order to avoid buying oil from us. So the wealth transfer on this is utterly brilliant on their part. I mean, it really it truly is. It’s a brilliant maneuver. And it involves an exchange of give or take in the $5 trillion range net to their benefit in terms of trade flow that’s coming from—we buy their stuff to make EVs that we subsidize with taxpayers’ money, which means we’re giving money to the Chinese.

And they subsidize the EVs there with our money to keep their citizens from using too much oil. Great trade geopolitically for them. It’s also allowed them to build up their critical minerals industry in a way that gives them global dominance that is geopolitically worrisome and problematic. So we need metals for all kinds of things, not just weapon systems and EVs, but everything, all the tech industry. China’s market share in critical metals is between fifty percent and ninety percent.

And a few critical specific materials and metals like neodymium and praseodymium, some of these exotic elements, they have ninety percent to one hundred percent global market share. So when we wave the sticks saying we’re going to not sell them things or put a tariff on things that they send here, I think we hope it’s going to be—it’s going to be a challenge for the President to thread this needle because they have tools they haven’t used yet in the geopolitics of materials and minerals. So China has played it brilliantly, frankly. That wasn’t very encouraging, I realize that, but that’s the truth.

[AUDIENCE QUESTION:] Yes. Thank you for your presentation. With the increase in commuting that your data shows and the heavier that the EVs are with one thousand pound batteries and all this mileage, what does your data show about road maintenance? If you live in a state such as ours, we’re not in a good place now.

[MARK P. MILLS:] Yes. Well, yes, that’s been a knock on EVs. EVs are, on average, heavier than their counterparts. So car for car, the EV is heavier. It’s light weighted a lot by using aluminum so that the one thousand pound penalty becomes a five hundred pound penalty by using more aluminum than steel. But it’s really not a fair knock because the real trend that’s increasing the weight of vehicles is that you all are buying SUVs, and they weigh a lot more.

If you want to take the stress off roads, drive Mini Coopers and Nissan Leafs and tiny cars. But that’s not what Americans do. They drive big cars. And so the net change in weight on the roads is really marginal. It’s not a reasonable knock.

The other one is that the particulates from the tires are coming off faster because they’re heavier. Yes, yes, that’s true. But it’s true for SUVs, too. It’s true for big trucks. It’s really—it’s a bridge too far in the knock.

The problem is it’s just too expensive and inconvenient for most uses.

[AUDIENCE QUESTION:] When I go home and plug my Tesla in to charge it overnight, the energy is coming out of my electric socket, and it’s being generated somewhere, for the most part, by coal, fuel oil and natural gas. Have you examined the actual saving of CO2 going into the air, considering the fact that the energy I’m charging my Tesla with is generated with fossil fuel?

[MARK P. MILLS:] Yes. So there’s a lot of very good data on this. In fact, there’s computer models, as you imagine, you have to build to know precisely what is your electricity when you’re actually charging it, what is the electricity being produced with. If you live in Norway, it’s going to be hydroelectric at night. If you live in Washington State, it’s going to be hydroelectric at night. If you charge it during the day in New Mexico, it’s going to be solar panels.

And if it’s a windy day in West Texas, you’re going to be wind power. But all in, the way it works out, if you take the average battery and the average grid in the United States, you have to—and you count the emissions from charging the battery and building the battery. You count the emissions from the car. For the first fifty thousand miles you drive the EV, you have emitted more CO2 than the regular car. After fifty thousand miles, give or take, then the EV, counting the average electricity on how we make it, starts to save.

So by the end of the life, one hundred and twenty thousand miles, the EV has reduced emissions compared to the gasoline car by ten percent or twenty percent. This isn’t the idealized model counting what you’re talking about. But what I told the Norwegians when I was in Norway because they love Teslas there. They love EVs. Twenty-five percent market share of cars on road are EVs.

Half of all new cars purchased there are EVs. They’re rich, by the way, because their per capita income is fifty percent higher than Americans. After Qatar, they’re the richest country in the world, and you know why. They sell oil and gas to Europe. It’s delicious.

And they have hydro dams. And with the free money and they—and by the way, Norwegian citizens are distributed a dividend check each year from all the oil wealth, and they’re still building a sovereign wealth fund that has, like, four trillion dollars in it. And they use this extra money to buy Teslas, which they charge at night on hydro dams. But I did tell them that probably the Teslas, because they buy big ones, that you’re buying emitted more CO2 being built than the diesel car they still own and drive. I mean, they all sell three or four cars.

So it’s a—the shell game of counting CO2 is impossible to do right, but we do know, roughly speaking, it’s making no difference because we can measure what’s going on in the real world. We can measure CO2 in the atmosphere. It’s going up. So the ten trillion or twenty trillion dollars spent in the last two decades by Europe and the United States to avoid burning hydrocarbons has had no effect on the increased consumption of hydrocarbons. They’re higher.

I mean it might have slowed the growth rate, but they’re higher. And global CO2 emissions are up. So it’s—but the specific answer to your question is in a paper I wrote years ago, which is at the Manhattan Institute website from when I was there. It has all the data citations and the graphs that show when you break even. It was an interesting exercise, but the bottom line is it might never break even.

And in ideal situations, you break even halfway through the life.

[UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER:] We now have time for one more question.

[AUDIENCE QUESTION:] Thank you for your speech. It was very, very thorough and informative. But you mentioned that the mines used for the EVs take a lot longer to actually create and open. And I’m not sure which resource or renewable resource is less abundant, those for EVs or those for regular cars. But I know the battery life for EVs is, like, ten to twenty years. And usually, when the battery goes, that’s it for the car. How can persons advocating for this field think that is still more sustainable? My dad has a shell of an engine back home from the 1980s, which I plan to rebuild. So I mean, it doesn’t make sense to me.

[MARK P. MILLS:] By the way, thank you for saying that was thorough. That’s high praise at a university. Appreciate that. No, it’s a very good question. So fundamentally, if you use the word sustainability in the right context of the word and you look at resource utilization from mine mouth to disposal, EVs are not sustainable. And your instincts are correct. It’s far easier, far cheaper, far less land use, far smaller footprint on the land, far less pollution, drilling oil, making gasoline and running a car than digging up megatons and gigatons of the earth to get copper, lithium, cobalt, nickel to make a battery.

And yes, the battery lasts ten or twenty years. But that’s the longest it’s going to last. I have an old car. It was an ’89. It’s in great shape.

The Economics of Sustainability and Trade-offs

It’s a classic. I mean, you can see—look, you go to Cuba. They’ve been driving 1950s cars since the 1950s because of the communists, and they keep rebuilding them and using them. You can’t do that with a battery. When the battery is exhausted, it’s garbage because its electrochemistry has exhausted itself.

And you can repair a high-quality engine. These machines, when they’re well made, can run for a century. So that’s more sustainable by definition. Your instincts are exactly right. The core bugaboo here is obviously the unhidden elephant in the room is carbon dioxide.

And it’s beyond obvious if you burn oil, you make carbon dioxide. That’s the point of burning it. I mean, it’s chemistry. You get heat by combining carbon and oxygen to get an exothermic reaction. That’s the point of it.

CO2 is not a pollutant. It’s an objective of the activity. So this is sort of a bizarre construct. And sure, CO2 is a global warming gas by definition. So are a lot of other things in the atmosphere.

But that’s the hyperfocus, what this is all about, which is why I focused on the CO2 accounting. Say, well, you can count the CO2 over here, but you’re being dishonest about counting it over there. You can say you’re worried about the future of the planet because it’s going to get warmer in your computer models. Okay. Fair enough.

Hidden Costs and Moral Considerations

I mean I don’t have to debate your models. I’m worried about the future of the planet, too. I’m worried about digging up the earth, polluting water. I’m worried about ruining people’s lives with digging things, disposing them in illicit and illegal ways in South America and Africa. So I’m worried about these tradeoffs.

So what you in effect, this whole thing distills to one side calls those who are not sufficiently agitated about CO2 as climate deniers. It’s silly invective. Whereas what they really are, are tradeoff deniers. There’s no path to perfection in the life we live. That’s the afterlife.

So there’s always tradeoffs, and they are completely denying the existence of these tradeoffs, which are epic, in your point, of sustainability. And they’re epic in terms of human life because the mining in Africa is tragically done often with slave labor, children, pregnant women. Doesn’t have to be. We could try to find a way to thread the needle to help that not be the case, but that’s a generational problem. Pushing it in there now means that they’re using slave labor and children.

We know that for a fact. And to turn a blind eye to that is profoundly immoral, which is, in fact, what’s going on. So they’re denying the existence of those tradeoffs. At least admit the existence of the tradeoff. That’s a start, right?

Economic Reality and Public Response

But it will distill to in our politics of stopping this, in honor again of Peanut, to stop the nutty policies will be the money. The money is what’s going to collapse it. It’s an unbelievably expensive exercise, which is economically destructive and will fuel inflation. And that will be what its undoing is, ultimately. It will be about the money.

People will be exhausted because it’s obvious. I don’t have to be a theoretician to look for where are the emissions, who’s mining what. You could just look at the cost, look at the bills, look at your electric bills and look at the cost of cars. And people will revolt. They have revolted.

And if it keeps going, they’ll revolt again. I mean the challenge this Congress will have is not doing what’s happened in England. They had an election, threw the bums out and made it worse. So I don’t think that will happen here, but that’s what we don’t want to have happen.

[UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER:] Please join me in thanking Mr. Mills.

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