Deep within a southeastern cove of Brooklyn lies Dead Horse Bay. Vintage debris washes up on its shores thanks to a decomposing underwater landfill. Old Clorox bottles, tires, men’s work boots, and shards of broken glass toss back and forth on the tide, continually churned together with old horse bones.
The bones come from an 1850s-era factory that used the carcasses of dead horses to make glue, fertilizer, and other materials near the bay. That such a factory was necessary — and that thousands of old horse bones line a small bay in Brooklyn — point to the fact that horses were a way of life in New York City before cars replaced them. Nearly 200,000 horses lived on the small island of Manhattan at the end of the 19th century, meaning piles of dead horse carcasses and giant mounds of manure were a daily occurrence for city residents at that time.
Note that the average horse produces around 30 pounds of manure a day. If you do some back-of-the-envelope math, that means New Yorkers literally put up with dumping more than 1 million tons of excrement on their streets every year to preserve their freedom of mobility.
That’s what climate activists and their allies in the corporate press don’t seem to get. As leftists push Americans to make the cumbersome and extremely expensive switch to electric vehicles, they forget that Americans already can go wherever they want, whenever they want, thanks to gas-powered cars. Why would they give that up and pay more in the process?
An Axios article titled “Electric car road trips are perfectly doable — if you plan ahead” is a prime example of leftist tone-deafness. To get more Americans to go electric, an Axios journalist went on a road trip to show readers how, erm, easy it is to embark on the great American road trip with an EV.
Yet, the globetrotter admits, the trip was “not without its challenges.” This includes dealing with “glitchy charging equipment touchscreens, billing questions and inoperable plugs” as well as “juggling route-planning apps and billing accounts with various charging companies.” Not to mention having to wait roughly an hour each time your EV has to charge, depending on the quality of the charger. For seasoned road-trippers, for whom time is of the essence, this is an immediate turnoff.
While the article aimed to persuade readers to go electric, it had the exact opposite effect. For the average American, the car symbolizes freedom, autonomy, and adventure. The open road is there to be explored, with a low barrier to entry thanks to the prevalence of gas-powered cars. Americans can go just about anywhere, as long as the keys are in the ignition and there’s gas in the tank.
But going electric kills the romanticism of the road trip by stripping its simplicity. When you own an EV, you can’t just get in your car and drive. You have to plan your route around EV charging stations, worry about the logistics of driving an EV (Muller’s husband drove 151 miles through the Michigan cold without heat to avoid stressing the car’s battery), and pray to God that your battery lasts between charges. The barrier to exploring the open road with an EV is much higher than with the typical gas-powered car, and Americans don’t want to deal with it. They shouldn’t have to, either.
This is why electric cars make up only 5 percent of new car sales and despite years of massive government subsidization still comprise just 1 percent of all cars on the road. It’s a hassle to own an electric car.
It’s also extremely expensive. EVs typically average $20,000 more to purchase than a gas-powered car, meaning only the upper-middle class and up can afford such a splurge. And for what? Sleek design and shiny new controls? You’re definitely not choosing an EV for your cross-country road trip from Boston to Los Angeles. It’s just not practical.
That’s why most Americans aren’t interested in making the switch to electric. And that is why California is banning the sale of new gas-powered cars by 2035 to force its residents to go electric. This misguided policy fails to take into account the circumstances in which EVs aren’t a “greener” choice than gas-powered vehicles and the carbon-intensive process of mass-producing new EVs creates all-new environmental problems that regular cars don’t have.
This will inevitably bite California progressives in the butt whenever the state experiences a massive heat wave — like it did this past summer — that will inevitably cause rolling blackouts and lead to a shortage of electricity. What will EV owners do when they can’t charge their car and their freedom of mobility is gone?
Freedom-hating leftists aren’t interested in finding out. They’d rather sacrifice their fellow citizens to the climate gods just so they can feel good. Never mind that it takes twice the amount of carbon emissions to manufacture electric vehicles than it does gas-powered cars, with some studies saying EVs are worse for the environment. Not to mention that EV batteries are made with foreign slave labor.
EVs are not so sexy when you know the facts, but outlets like Axios don’t exist to inform people. Like the rest of their leftist buddies, they exist to keep people stupid and immobile.
Victoria Marshall is a staff writer at The Federalist. Her writing has been featured in the New York Post, National Review, and Townhall. She graduated from Hillsdale College in May 2021 with a major in politics and a minor in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @vemrshll.
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