Maryland's Looming Environmental Disaster
Adoption of California's all-electric car mandate is going to be a boondoggle of epic proportions.
If you’re not watching Yellowstone….well first off, why not? But if you aren’t watching it, here’s an important scene from the show's most recent episode.
That scene reminds me a lot of this:
Maryland legislators and environmental groups are urging Republican Gov. Larry Hogan’s administration to adopt California’s new electric vehicle standards by the end of the year, or risk falling behind the Golden State.
California’s regulation requires an increasing percentage of light-duty vehicles sold in the state to be zero-emission. By model year 2035, all new passenger cars, trucks and SUVs sold in the state will need to be electric, with a maximum of 20% of models being plug-in hybrids.
The rule was approved by the California Air Resources Board in August, following a 2020 executive order from California Gov. Gavin Newsom.
According to Maryland’s Department of Legislative Services, Maryland must eventually do the same. That’s because in 2007, state legislators passed a law pledging to adopt and maintain California’s vehicle emissions standards, which were stricter than the federal government’s.
Because Maryland has to be a follower when it comes to policy leadership, and because Maryland Democrats love trying to be California (Exhibit A, Exhibit B, Exhibit C, and more) we are married to California’s emission laws.
Never mind the fact that California is a larger market than Maryland.
Never mind the fact that California has different environmental factors than Maryland.
Never mind that California consumers have access to fewer options than Maryland residents do.
Maryland Democrats don’t care about any of that. They are more concerned with trying to keep up with the Californians when it comes to implementing insane pie-in-the-sky doomed-to-fail boondoggles Democratic Socialism.
The legislators and environmental groups are crying foul about the Hogan Administration not implementing these standards. That is all performance and related to Hogan’s impending Presidential Campaign as much as anything else. We already know that Wes Moore in his quest to turn Maryland into a left-wing hellscape utopia will implement these California standards quickly into his term. Since Moore is practically a tableau rosa with an insane ambitious climate agenda, he may even try to move to Maryland more rapidly than California.
If all that sounds like a disaster waiting to happen, you’re right.
Economically, it’s going to be a mess for Maryland taxpayers. Electric cars are more expensive to purchase and more expensive to maintain than combustion-powered engines. We should call the all-electric mandate what it is: a tax on working people and families who will be forced to may more to own a vehicle. While major car manufacturers have pledged to go all-electric by 2035, that does not mean that they are suddenly running charities.
But the real disaster is the environmental damage that all-electric cars will do.
The Power Has To Come From Somewhere: Moore’s environmental plan also pledges to adopt policies that ensure Maryland generates 100% clean energy by 2035. Practically that’s just twelve years and is both ill-advised and virtually impossible to meet.
Have you ever taken a look to see how many Megawatt Hours are generated by each source of electricity generation in Maryland?
You will notice that a minuscule 4.4% of Maryland’s electricity is generated by hydroelectric and nonhydroelectric renewables. The rest comes from fossil fuels (59.3%) and nuclear (36.5%).
So where is the renewable electricity going to come from by 2035? It’s just not. So what you will wind up with are fossil fuel power plants being used to generate electricity to keep “environmentally friendly” electric cars charged. And, I don’t know if you know this, but power plants fire off much, much more pollution than a gasoline-powered car.
Electric Cars Generate Excessive Pollution: Here’s a fun fact for you.: “a single car lithium-ion battery pack (of a type known as NMC532) could contain around 8 kg of lithium, 35 kg of nickel, 20 kg of manganese and 14 kg of cobalt.”
Here now are some not-so-fun facts:
The increase in lithium mining carries its own environmental concerns: current forms of extraction require copious amounts of energy (for lithium extracted from rock) or water (for extraction from brines). But more-modern techniques that extract lithium from geothermal water, using geothermal energy to drive the process, are considered more benign. And despite this environmental toll, mining lithium will help to displace destructive fossil-fuel extraction.
Researchers are more worried about cobalt, which is the most valuable ingredient of current EV batteries. Two-thirds of global supply are mined in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Human-rights activists have raised concerns over conditions there, in particular over child labour and harm to workers’ health; like other heavy metals, cobalt is toxic if not handled properly. Alternative sources could be exploited, such as the metal-rich ‘nodules’ found on the sea floor, but they present their own environmental hazards. And nickel, another major component of EV batteries, could also face shortages.Emphasis mine. The Democrats and these “environmental activists” want to move to electric cars while conveniently forgetting that their wishes will create an environmental disaster in the Congo and other cobalt mining communities. The environmentalists don’t care about this even though it is even more of an environmental disaster for those communities than air pollution is here.
Pollution Comes From Elsewhere: Speaking of air pollution, do you know how big the Chesapeake Bay Airshed is?
The air over the Chesapeake region travels here from as far away as Canada in the north and Indiana and Kentucky in the west. This "airshed" is 570,000 square miles—more than nine times the watershed itself.
This “airshed” looks something like this.
Want to know what’s not happening in most of that airshed? the adoption of draconian California standards for cars, SUVs, and light trucks. The dirty little secret about air pollution is that most of it seeps in from the Ohio Valley and beyond. While stopping the sales of fossil-fuel-powered vehicles will have a limited impact on ground-level pollution, it will have no widescale beneficial impact on overall air pollution. And what positive impact there will be mitigated by the likely need for fossil-fuel power plants to keep electric vehicles on the road.
Even if you assume that the environmental concerns that I raise are overblown, there are still a few serious reality checks that proponents of this cockamamie scheme need to consider.
Did you know people don’t buy new cars every year? I bought my car in 2012 and am driving it until it drops dead. Many others do the same. More people will likely do so once new fossil-fuel car sales are required and they keep wanting to drive a reliable car that doesn’t require a second mortgage to purchase.
When it does come time to buy a new car, who said that people will buy an electric car in the first place? Did you know that Maryland borders four other states? Everybody does, but it seems like Democrats forget this every time they pass a law. Do you really think that a person living in Cumberland, Frederick, or Salisbury just won’t drive to a neighboring state to get a more affordable gasoline-powered car instead? Of course they will, meaning that there will be fewer all-electric vehicles in circulation than activists claim there will.
Did you know that other people drive into Maryland? Many people commute from Delaware, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and West Virginia to Maryland. People from around the country drive across the state with great frequency. Those cars will continue to pump pollution into Maryland in a way that not at all be impacted by Maryland’s laws.
It’s clear that the all-electric mandate is coming to Maryland. It is going to create a nightmare for Maryland consumers and it is going to create an environmental disaster with all of the additional fossil-fuel power generation that will be required to power Maryland’s all-electric cars. The mandate to follow California standards remains a recipe for disaster. It is a mandate that both the Moore Administration and the General Assembly should, but won’t, seek to repeal and avoid.