Last week, I looked at our food supply and eating habits, where we have a clash between leftist, utopian ideals such as veganism and the same group's more reachable, yet still unrealistic, ideals about all-natural, organic agriculture.  Basically, they're pitting an animal-free diet versus animal poop fertilizer.  This isn't, by far, the only area where the left descends into absurdity.  Leftists habitually deny the truth in just about every position they take, from economic to medical to environmental to societal concerns.  Of course, their position is always coupled with the accusation that we normal people are guilty of something dire; that is, destroying the planet, racism, sexism, etc.  It's all transference — whatever we're accused of, it's exactly what they are doing themselves.

This time, let's look at the push toward eliminating fossil fuels and the gasoline car engine, in the name of lessening pollution and slowing global warming.  You may think you're helping the environment when you buy an all-electric vehicle, but reality will head-butt you.  I keep hearing Tom Hanks's voice in my mind, saying his one great line: "stupid is as stupid does."

I've always questioned the all-electric car phenomenon, given the price and the unlikelihood that they would be pleasant on a long trip.  You'd spend way too much time waiting for the darn thing to charge every few hundred miles.  Even if those "rapid" public charging stations that are supposedly about to spring up everywhere actually appear, there will be predictable problems.  I suspect that those problems will make the old Jimmy Carter gas lines look tame, with rapid being a relative term.  Also, you need to install a charger at home, and, unless you get a dozen solar panels to run it when the sun's shining, you are paying ever-increasing electric rates to power your car.

We know that power generation these days is becoming iffy, with the push toward using bird-killing solar and wind — which is currently generating less than a quarter of California's needs, despite the state burning every fossil fuel bridge to make it happen.  The faster they shut down fossil fuel production, the more brownouts we can expect in summer.  Texas, a couple of winters ago, was very instructive about the folly of relying on wind and solar in a winter storm.  How many people died because the windmills froze?  Bottom line: If the power is down, that fancy car might as well be a metal sculpture.

Image: Car tire by sandret.

But wait…it gets worse!  According to research from Green Car Reports, that trendy, expensive E.V. brings pollution to new highs rather than reducing it.  How is that possible?  It's all about increasing car weight (a battery-operated car adds 1,000-1,500 pounds) and the effect that has on tires.  It turns out that tires cause particulate pollution.  When you add the extra pounds from the big battery in an E.V., you get lots more of the bad pollutants from the tires — enough to offset any gain from eliminating tailpipe emissions, and then some.

So you never thought about tires being a polluter?  Me neither!  But as the report I linked states, tire particulate emissions are many times worse for our environment than tailpipe emissions.  Some of them go into the air we breathe, but a lot are larger particles will go directly into the soil, polluting it.  Poisoning the earth, in other words.

No matter what you do, cars are going to cause pollution.  Being self-righteous about driving electric, however, just doesn't hold water.  If tires cause pollution that is worse than tailpipe emissions, and battery packs are getting bigger and heavier so that cars (and trucks) can drive more miles without charging back up, it's going to skew the equation even more.  The more weight, the worse the particulates — and those include microplastics that now have invaded human lungs.  The results, as this microplastic invasion increases, remain to be seen, but reports of immune system problems and reproductive toxicity seem like unwise trade-offs.