EV Mandates vs. Freedom | Mark P. Mills

I thank Hillsdale for inviting me back I I don't think I offended people sufficiently last time so I'm back to try again I feel like I should have had a picture of peanut behind me after Matt's invocation uh it's quite amusing I'm going to talk about electric cars and U Dominic tells me that his parents are proud owners of a Tesla so I'm not beating up on Elon Musk or the Teslas but I'm going to talk about the vision of the all electric car future that's not just an idea but as all of you know

is something that's being uh essentially mandated and pushed by our federal government 12 States dozens of countries so I guess the question you'd have to ask excuse me so you know in the aftermath of last week you know the election generates the normal uh fallout of uh really a blizzard of opinions about who won who lost who's going to win who's going to lose in the future what kind of policies are going to change one of the issues that's at the center of this sort of Blizzard of policy angsting because now we move from politics

to policy this is the cycle of course of Elections at the center of these policy debates in Washington of course is the electric vehicle future the subject of my assignment and I take assignments seriously when Hillsdale College assigns me a topic I deliver on my assignment otherwise I won't get invited back I understand and it's nice to come back here I like it here so when it comes to the province of What government policy makers can do in energy domains broadly speaking and in about cars in particular there just really two categories to consider in

order to attempt to do some useful you know predicting forecasting the first category is about money in politics by definition that's that's the the anchor category and the second category is about physics and Engineering they relate to each other but they can often be independent magisteria as we know Congress regularly passes laws that violate the laws of physics they pass law I'm a physicist so I take offense they pass laws that violate the laws of common sense um but there is a democracy so we're allowed to do that usually eventually physics wins you know nature

wins so these two categories I want to start with the money and the politics and specifically the epic epic and utterly unprecedented quantities of money that are now being deployed or yet to be deployed to influence energy markets broadly through taxes grants subsidies regulatory mandates it's hard to predict what the uh incoming Administration and the Congress will do to modify or perhaps even repeal some or all of the uh enormous complex Labyrinth of energy policies have been put in place in recent years it's a very very deep wide and you know the expression whole of

government effort to bend energy markets towards what policy makers want but um the task is enormous that itical and legislative tasks to unbend this will not be will not be easy I'll explain why the illn named inflation reduction act according to its Advocates not according to me is and I quote the largest climate policy in US history that means by definition it's the largest energy policy in US history consens all the programs in the ira all the spending all the mandates essentially all of them are directed at the energy sector and by various estimates not

the cbos but the estimates once the bill was passed by various serious estimates from banking firms including um the Congressional um research service the IRA will lead to nearly $3 trillion do in direct spending induced into the economy and an additional $3 trillion of spending will be required to accommodate the mandates that that are extent in the inflation reduction act and this is a staggering out amount of money even by modern Washington standards to give you uh some perspective on that it is the single biggest piece of legislation ever passed in American history context it

this way the United States so we're talking $3 trillion piece of legislation of direct spending and $3 trillion of induced spending the United States spent $4 trillion in inflation adjusted terms to prosecute World War II it's a utterly staggering quantity of money AVS are a centerpiece of this Monumental energy policy and it Bears noting as a maybe a specific example to give you a sense at the personal device level the National Bureau of economic research recently completed an analysis of what the IRA will deploy in terms of subsidies for v s electric vehicles they estimate

that the IRA will spend between 23 and $32,000 per car per EV this is it's fair to say a sort of a China level industrial policy like you could say rarely has there ever been an example such a dramatic example in history of the execution of the line and you'll remember this from President Obama you know the line I've got a pen President Obama delivered that line 10 years ago go and we Now understand what it means when you got a pen I think the jury is out on what president Trump will do now that

he has the pen but I'm not sure what will happen I have guesses and opinions only so I'm going to restrict my remarks to the second category when it comes to making predictions about the future of electric vehicles and I want to be specific here I'm talking about the all electric vehicle the so-called battery electric vehicle that has no engine it's not a hybrid and it's the vehicle that the government wants us to to purchase and only purchase in coming years this sort of worldview that I want to paint for you is I'll call it

the reality based category you know a realities that are anchored in the U laws of physics um an anchored in the principles of engineering and the nature of human behavior nature of human nature if you like there's a great uh line from the science fiction novelist Philip K dick some of you might have read St 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 web page of our new Institute reality is

that which when you stop believing in it doesn't go away kind of like that so some of the realities are already visible in the headlines in recent months regarding electric vehicles and the Epic Financial losses and retrenchments from the likes of GM and Ford and Volkswagen because they are squandering money in the rush to build EV for everyone and to pledge uh fty to the demand that they build EVS for everyone there's another reality check in consumer Behavior Where in the growth rate in EV sales has collapsed this year both in in this in the

United States and in Europe the growth rates down more than 20% so the accelerating growth has decelerated we'll see where it goes uh in the coming years but let me 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 they see this as you know 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 a 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 at early 2030s 2032 that most of the cars built in America will have to be EVS that date by the way in in model terms for the industrial sector means that in 2025 and 26 they'll have to begin to change their factories it will have an impact on the cost and availability of cars within the next year and none of

those mandates have been reversed well yet I guess you'd say so the mandates in these IND inducements are based on you know what you would call the twin Cannons of EV Orthodoxy both of which are fundamentally technology claims that first that comb combustion free cars EVS will radically cut Global oil 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 uh as you know frequent frequently analogize uh EVS with the great Mobility revolution of a century ago you know when

we stopped using horses and Buggies so that analogy just consider a simple thought of thought experiment imagine it's 18 50 no one would have called it a revolution if someone changed the food given to horses battery electric cars are still cars the different Fuel and different Power trins the same Wheels but the same Wheels same tires same seats Windows same infotainment systems and infotainment is what sells cars now especially the genz and and the uh gen X's but and I like infotainment systems as much as the next guy and as every car dealer knows there

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 that 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 uh what the use of the vehicle is and then of course the nature of the engineering economics around making a vehicle for that particular use and of course

that's where the EV the sort of all the tropes around EV start to fall apart battery electric vehicles All Battery vehicles are not universally optimal in fact quite the opp Opposite there sort of received wisdom uh that big oil you know in 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 tradition oil Market close quote but this is 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 burn or 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 a hundredfold 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 10% this is not an existential threat to Big Oil meanwhile you know 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 more than 40 million EVS in the world now that is all electric vehicles and that's a big number 40 million is is a significant number of 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 U feckless lockdowns from Co so most you could say about EVS is that they will

moderate the growth in oil demand going forward probably that'll 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 of course cutting all use wasn't the objective per se as you know the 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 uh bragged in their most recent report that globally EVS

are already avoiding 150 megatons of CO2 emissions sounds like a big number well you could do the math on this that's about 0.4% of global CO2 emissions not such a big number or maybe for context in a more sort of in a way grotesque way the oil burning war machines that are rampaging across Ukraine right now those machines are emitting more new CO2 every 6 months than all the world's EVS combined mind 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 EV like elect vehicle and 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 onetoone 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 the 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 a 1,000lb battery the fuel tank weighs 1000 ,000 lb the gasoline fuel tank in your car if you drive a gasoline car is about 80 lb that 1,000 lb fuel tank is made from a complex set of chemicals and minerals that are require mining somewhere in fact for that one 1,000lb battery you have to mine somewhere in the world 500,000 lbs of rock those 500,000 lbs 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 the list goes on you get the point each 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 the Labyrinthian supply chain CHS there are Global Supply chains much of the supply chain is in China where Burns coal to provide 2third of its electricity

so we actually don't know precisely what any particular ev's emissions are but we do know the range and it can vary by a factor of 300% and at the higher end of the range the emissions associated with it 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 you know eventually though the emissions reductions will be real because we'll get more efficient and we don't know how what they if even if we don't know what they are they'll be

free emissions reductions they cost nothing because this is the other Trope that there's no inherent cost in those e EV 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 we get some free emissions reductions because EVS you 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 Eves aren't simpler Vehicles they're just complicated they just differently complicated a conventional

car has a fairly complicated thermomechanical engine made of hundreds of parts in 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 just as I said differently complex 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 EES are simpler taking away labor that's not true EV 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 is 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 Auto Workers don't work in mines they assemble vehicle parts that are made from metals that are mind and the minds but if we add that in and you count that for both kinds of vehicles the total supply chain from mind mouth to your doorstep involves 20% 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 of course that's this is the the

the central issue that is the ultimate uh you could use the obvious analogy the 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 twoo 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 25 or 30 years ago uh we drove it out of the out of business because of the US EPA but to meet the goals of building as many EVS as are imagined by the policy makers who are forcing the subsidies and the mandates into the system to meet those goals will require an increase in global mining of these metals of 400 to 7,000 per. 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 it by their own analysis it takes 10 to 16 years to open a net new mine and we're having goals 10 years from now that will require us to increase mining by 400 to 7,000 per with mines that we have can't build for the next 10 to 16 years these are to say the obvious in maybe the most polite thing to 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 shouldn't should be kind but here's the problem the the mere Pursuit whether by Fiat or subsidy the mere pursuit of the goals to get that much more material minded out of the earth and put into machines like electric vehicles but also windmills and solar panels they also required is 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 and so far I haven't even addressed the other technology challenges associated with s of this rapid and forc push of an all electric transportation future and you know I'm not talking here about Niche use of EVS picking on Dominic's parents again

lots of people like EVS lots more of 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 eveve future so EES 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 a liquids in pipes trucks

and tanks I have to send electricity on wires and through Transformers sounds simple but here's one of the the odd things u in the physics of energy transport and 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 got to pump it but it's roughly five to 10 times 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 doing been moving energy that way for a century we know what the equipment costs there's no magic there's no mystery the and these

that part of the infrastructure is not part of the infl 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 $7 billion doll worth of chargers to build a half dozen Chargers not that the in between stuff the answer is about3 trillion doar that was the earlier three trillion 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 on telephone poles all over all over the

country so EV boosters that where they see these kind of challenges and limits what they usually say is well you know technology will get better that will solve the problem and for some of the challenges they're right it's a 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 uh ever happens we're going to run out of money we're going to run out of minerals and probably we're 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 our our appetite for buying most of the materials from China China China manufactures produces mines and

refines between 50 90% of all of the world's input materials to make things like electric motors and batteries for electric cars so none none of this changed is the fact that a lot of people again I'll say it again we buy lots of EVS in the future there were in fact I think the market for EVS in the United States is probably a number like 30 to 50 million which is a lot more than they're on the road today but there are more registered cars in the United States than there are registered drivers there's nearly

300 million cars in America various kinds so 30 to 40 million is a lot but it doesn't change the world it's not a revolution they're certainly significant they'll make they'll make they'll make a difference but when the iea and others gush that EVS are seeing exponential growth these are just silly statements I mean they're just Prima fasy silly statements the automotive cognic anti 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 goow through new models of cars in history and all of them were far far faster than the growth and EV option you can imagine which ones I'm going to mention the popular sports car became a popular car Option with an Mustang the growth rate and the adoption without subsidies of sports cars like Mustang was a 100 times faster and bigger in volume than we've seen for EVS the minivan which was a revolution in in a car Option exploded into the market much faster than EVS have and of course now the dreaded SUV

has seen far greater uh adoption in fact such an astonishing adoption that as of this year 50% 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 about this on a per capita basis in the United States they'll 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 were horses today because well the reason there's a lot more cars and than horses is an interesting economic fact um think of it this way the average priced car in the United States uh requires about 10 weeks of the average income to buy the average pric horse and buggy in the late 1800s required 10 years of the average wage of that time that's why there's lots of cars meanwhile if policy makers 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 of already been built designed or commercial they're twice as efficient as the average car on the road today so even the Ia 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 uh decade would reduce oil use by more than the the than would 300 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 you're in Congress you feel compulsion which Congress does to subsidize using your money to subsidize other people at least subsidize that 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 super users super users of gasoline constitute 10% of drivers and use 30% of all the gasoline in the

United States an obvious Target a high leverage Target and they tend these tend to be the people that don't get subsidies this tend to be the people that mow The Lawns in Silicon Valley and drive their F-150s 80 or 90 miles to work and have to drive home but that's not really the goal those in the EV only Lobby they are by self- admission anti-ar 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 so 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 Ia is also aware of them in their in their detailed analyses so they know that mandates won't do the job alone so what what do they propose well let me read you what they propose they need in these words quote behavioral intervention end quote I think you know what that means consumers will need

to be convinced are forced to drive Less in general and Travel More by bicycle ride sharing mass transit or on foot the The ia's Net Zero plan this is the plan to you know get carbon dioxide down explicitly calls for increasing I love the use of the reversal of this uh language increasing the share of people who don't have a car notice how they they want to increase the share of of the homeowners in the world who don't have a car from today's 45% so 45% people in the world don't have a car they want

to increase that chair to 70% of people not having a car by 2040 in order to meet their emissions goals California which is always you know really eager to be on the Leading Edge of these kinds of dystopian Trends uh they've also explicitly stated that and in their enshrined goals passed into law they are going to require citizens in the near future to derived 25% fewer miles a year 25% fewer miles a year than they did 30 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 uh local cities towns that voted so much effort to constrain and even outright ban a nearly Universal product car personal Mobility device and a near Universal Behavior driving a personal car and and for the record you know again in America there are more more cars than there are licensed drivers so this is this is an epic effort to restrict your access to a car and it is not abated and it is a whole of government effort here and in 12 States and dozens of countries so even though the automobile is

a a spectacular Freedom enabling economic machine the anti-car movement views this car culture is somehow toxic and inherently unnatural this is from uh last year in New Yorker magazine I read it so that you know the line so that you don't have to quote the grip of the car is a metaphor for Liberty is as firm as that of guns if perhaps with similarly destructive results end quote so another analyst uh put it in a different piece that the problem with cars is that there's a cultural attachment to them you know on that last point

I'd agree with them but the car prohibitionists they when they cure a thesis uh is is being a way to break the car culture what they want to paint a picture is that there's a future that's not only desirable but inevitable where we we won't any longer be car Centric and that will Embrace what is now being called micromobility which means you know bicycles whether you're pedaling it or it's electric powered walking and shared rides and they're also claiming of course that the internet you know zooming and telecommuting are rapidly eliminating the need for commuting

anyway so the future's happening uh in in fact the latest trend is to promote demand force a new class of urban organization called the 15minute city I wonder how many of you have heard this you can look it up the 15minute city that's a that's a city and you there's some there's some appeal to this I I grant you I like walking around Paris it's and and I like walking around London there a lot of old cities and I don't like walking around Washington where I live very much but the 50-minute city is the idea

is that it's it's a it's a city's designs set that you can this is the key part you can walk bicycle or take a mass transit to anywhere you want to go and get there within 15 minutes note that the modes of Transport do not include your car now look I I like to walk but I like to choose when I walk more than than I like I like to walk but a lot of cities are embracing this and they're very aggressively so and you all see it depending on where you travel and where you

live New York City by Way by one example in the last eight years has increased the number of bike Lanes by 600 miles there's 600 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 tarity to brag about the oil savings from micro micromobility in cities they pointed out in their latest world energy Outlook that micromobility bicycles and 15minute cities is already saving a laughable 70,000 barrels of oil per day globally

again this is arithmetics that's 0.07% of world oil um China increases its oil consumption that much Pro I think I every three days I mean there a number like that so who who you could ask benefits from this enthusiastic Embrace of City Bicycles I mean you 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% of all us commuters

use a bicycle think about the percentage of bike Lanes you're seeing in now 70% of American computers use a car driving alone and for those who bicycle to work I'm not talking about weekend entertainment having fought on a bike for those who bicycle to work the average age is 20 to 30 over 70% are male 70% are white and 80% of college degrees so much for the C 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 it's but nonetheless the widely C circulated trop on the shattering classes is that we live in a time of generational shift you know the to not just the micromobility uh 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 quote turning to a new set of services that provide access to products without the burden of ownership giving rise to what's been called a sharing economy end quote you've seen this said by many many people it's repeated

all the time the data show you nothing like that going on this is just silly typing on computers making PowerPoints by the chattering classes in Wall Street they an MIT study found looking at Millennials that the first gener this is 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 would be labeled Boomers so they're the they're 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 V 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 Z's as soon as they get money are buying cars at a faster Pace than the previous generation in fact earlier this year ver a a the French Bank P&B parabas did a global survey 14 countries looking at the attitudes of the youth by that they mean 30 and under specifically their attitudes towards

cars because the pnb is fully embracing the micr mobility future um I love this study it's got lots of great data in it it was it was a delicious study really nicely done massive 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 30s surveyed to put it simply and bluntly they love cars shocking and are neither ready nor willing to live without them end quote they were shocked I mean they surprised they were they they were they use

the British expression they were gobsmacked they didn't this was true across all 14 countries it was not isolated to the evil Americans it was true in Germany and in Italy and in Bru in fact the what the re researchers found out that the young cohort offered as the principal reason that they if they didn't have a car here's another shock cost like this is to use the vernacular you know a NOA they want a car its price matters and what should be a political red flag for the anti-ar crowd this is what the survey found

that was fascinating they tested their attitudes toward the car 70 to 90% 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 Fact one of the reasons was it got them to work and that was one but it was not the primary reason and you know what the other reasons were so the the pillar of this peak car thesis is that it's not just it's a generational change and there isn't but there's 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 this surprised me because I like data I've been following these trends for a long time especially now given my age I worked for Reagan so you know you know what that means what they what the sis Bureau has found is that the United States has been deurbanization since before 2010 the trend began 15 years ago it got accelerated by the

idiotic Co 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 the exit from Urban cores and going out to Suburban and exurban cores it's for demographic planners city planners it's these they're trying to P parse up what this means but I can tell you what it means for driving if you're an urban escape and you live in an exurban area you need a car the extent to which um the internet is a factor in

this this deurbanization it's 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're 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 in fact the data show that this category of commuter in this category of

Compu commuter is called the super commuter not a super computer that runs the cloud that lets them St there it's a super commuter the super commuters now constitute 5 million Americans those are people that drive more than 90 minutes each way to work the growth rate in super commuters is rising at three times the growth rate of the workforce that trend has obvious impacts and relevance to the kind of cars that that people want to use and will use in fact way back in 1999 at the first peak of digital enthus enthusiasms that was remember

that was the era of irrational exuberance uh there was a brilliant uh a brilliant British sociologist John Erie 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 academic talking you know you know I have excuse him we're in an academic environment so I'm sure you all understand what he's trying to say travel through one medium overall in Ines travel through other media end quote what did he mean as we use more 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 um do things now with cars that they didn't do with cars 50 years ago cars were primarily commuting Vehicles 50 to 80 years ago now they're primarily used to visit family friends entertainment communting still a function and the commuting function has migrated to ex Urban domains and rapidly Rising going further and going more often in doing things for pleasure which

again migrates people back to certain kinds of buying behaviors bigger cars so where are the true Revolutions in Mobility I mean that's not it's not a revolution to change the food for super commuters 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 that's will also be true in dense Urban cores which are very annoying to drive in and stop and go traffic vehicle

autonomy is coming it's just much more difficult than than the Enthusiast thought to make it safe and reliable but it it will happen it will happen in due course it will be an option that'll be available it'll be a safe option it'll be an affordable option ultimately but what will it do if we have more we have vehicle autonomy well it'll encourage more Super commuters 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 all in the Trope that will all share the cars together nobody wants to own their private car you this is first there's no trends like that anywhere in history that's why the United States now has more cars than 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 some Revolutions in air travel are nent but they're they're a long way away uh and if we do have lots of Robo taxis and we will uh 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 back 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 we Wix you know be assertive when what do I do with these cars and it will it won't be easy to solve frankly but if it's your car that's autonomous problem is easy to solve so if but if the prohibitions that are being planned

do take effect uh it it will happen before the EVS are cheap before vehicle autonomy is around so there's going to be one one predictable consequence if if the state governments in our federal government or any country bans the sale of inexpensive affordable available cars the price of all cars will go up the price 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 75% of all cars bought in the United States are used cars why

the youth answer the question price if the if the mandates are implemented they they will they will lead to the most massive misallocation of capital possibly in American history given the scale scale of the money that's being pushed into it and it will do nothing zero buus 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 and this debate matters because the quantity of money involved is is astronomical this is 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 I I Ela musk is getting very close he may be closest I think we Mo 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 are is the impossible so when you think about future Technologies I sort of want to keep in mind the um

something that Richard Fineman said he was a great physicist the Nobelist of the one of the great physicists of the of the 20th century and he had a a terrific line he said it almost exactly 50 years ago uh this month and he said quote and he was thinking about technology he was not just a scientist for a te for Su successful technology reality must take precedence over public relations for nature cannot be fooled period so I think Dr fan was talking not only about the physical laws of nature but the also the laws of

of human nature so we can conclude I think I'll conclude with a prediction in keeping with with Fineman and and is that the reality in the importance of affordable ubiquitous personal Mobility will take presidence 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 uh dystopian and unachievable in in fact I'll say it again I think what the eveve future will be look like in per capita terms is that they will become roughly

as popular as the horse and buggy was circa 1900 thank [Applause] you thank you Mr Mills we now have time for a Q&A if you have a question please make your way to the microphone student questions will be given preference well two questions the first easy one are you going to publish your paper so we can send it to politicians yes I think I think uh I think you publish these papers but I'll yeah yes it will be my more serious question is China doesn't has to import its oil they have a reason to have

electric vehicles yes we don't correct so how does how does that fit in your equation of how this works 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 UND served in cars and so they'd like to import less oil they don't want those 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 and what they are doing is selling

to us the stuff to make revs in order to avoid buying oil from us so the wealth transfer on this is 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 half trillion dollar range uh net to their benefit in terms of uh trade flow that's 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 a great a great trade geopolitically for them it's also um 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 Weapons Systems and EVS but everything all the tech industry China's market share in critical metals is between 50 and 90% and a few critical specific materials and metals like neodymium and prium some of these exotic elements they have 90% to 100% global market share so

when we wave uh sticks saying we're going to not sell them things or put a tariff on things that they send here I think I think we it's going to be a very it's going to be a challenge for the president to to thread this needle because they have they have tools they haven't used yet in the geopolitics of materials and minerals so China's played it brilliantly frankly that wasn't very encouraging I realized that but but that's the truth yes sir yes thank you for your presentation with the increase in commuting that you uh your

data shows and the uh the heavier that the EVS are with th000 PB 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 yeah well yeah I that's been a a knock on EVS EVS are on average heavier than their counterpart so car for car the EV is heavier it's it's lightweighted a lot by using aluminum so that the 1000lb penalty becomes a 500 lb 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 a lot more if you want to take the stress offroads you know Drive mini Drive Mini Coopers and Nissan Leafs and tiny cars U but that's not what Americans do they drive big cars and so the the net change and weight on the roads is really marginal um it's it's not a reasonable knock the other one is that the you know particulates from the tires are coming off faster because they're heavier yes that's true but it's

true for SUVs too it's true for big trucks it's really it's it's a a bridge too far in the knock the problem is just too expensive and inconvenient for most uses yes sir when I go home and plug my Tesla in to charge it overnight the energy is coming off of my electric socket and it's being generated somewhere MH for the most part by coal fuel oil and natural gas have you examined the actual saving of of CO2 going into the air considering the fact that the energy I'm charging my Tesla with is generated with

fossil fuel yeah there's a lot of very good data on this in fact 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 a Hydro Dam at night if you live in Washington state it's going to be a hydram 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 all 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 50,000 miles you drive the EV you have emitted more CO2 than the regular car after 50,000 miles give or take then the EV counting the average electricity on how we make it uh starts to save so by the end of the life 120,000 miles the EV is

reduced emissions compared to the gasing car by 10 or 20% that's is in the idealized model counting what you're talking about but what I told the Norwegians when I was in when I was in Norway because they love Teslas there and they love EVS uh 25% market share of cars on road are EVS half of all new cars purchase their EVS they're rich by the way because you know their per capita income is % higher than Americans to after cutter 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 like $4 trillion do in it and they use this extra money to buy Teslas and which they charge at night on hydro on hyrams but I did tell them that probably the Teslas cuz 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 they all still three or four cars so it's a it 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 we can measure a CO2 in the atmosphere it's going up so the 10 or 20 trillion dollar 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 might slowed the growth rate but

they're higher and Global CO2 emissions are up so it it's the but the specific answer to your question is in a paper I wrote a year and a half ago um which is at the Manhattan Institute website from when I was there it has all the data citations and the graphs that show you know 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 yes sir oh we now have time for one more question um thank

you for your speech it was very very thorough um and informative but you mentioned that the Minds used for the EVS are a lot take a lot longer to actually create and open and I'm not sure which resource um nor renewable resource is less abundant those for EVS or those for regular cars but I know the battery life for EVS is like 10 to 20 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 um a shell of

a engine back home from the 80s which I plan to rebuild so I mean it doesn't make sense to me well by the way thank you for saying I was thorough that's a High Praise at a University thank appreciate that that's a very good question um so fundamentally if you if you use the word sustainability in the right context of the word and you look at resource utilization from mind mouth to disposal EVS are are not sustainable and and your 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 then digging up megatons and gigatons of the earth to get copper lithium Cobalt nickel to make a battery and yes the battery last 10 or 20 years but that's that's the longest going to last um I have an old car that was an ' 89 it's great shape it's a classic I mean you can you see look you go to Cuba they've been they've been driving 1950s cars since the 1950s because of the communist and they keep rebuilding them and using them

you can't do that with a battery when the batter is exhausted it's it's garbage because its electrochemistry is just it's exhausted itself and um you can rep repair a high quality engine um these machines when they're wellmade can run for a century so that's more sustainable by definition your instincts are exactly right the the core Bugaboo here is obviously the unhidden elephant in the room is carbon dioxide and the and it's beyond obvious if you burn oil you 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 so this bizarre construct and sure CO2 is a global warming gas by definition so are a lot of other things in the atmosphere but so that's the the hyperfocus what this is all about which is why focused on the CO2 accounting say well you 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 of it's going to get warmer in your computer models okay fair enough 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 ruining people's lives with digging things disposing them in in in illicit in illegal ways in uh South America and Africa I'm worried I'm worri about these are these are tradeoffs so what you in effect this whole thing distills to one one side calls those who are not sufficiently agitated about CO2 as climate deniers it's

silly invective whereas what they they really are are trade-off deniers there's no 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 trade-offs which are epic 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 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 trade-offs at least admit the existence of the tradeoff that's a start right to but but it will distill to in our politics of stopping this the you know 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 it's unbelievably expensive exercise which

is economically destructive and will fuel inflation and that will be what its undoing is ultimately it'll 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 can 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 uh not doing what's happened in England

you know they they had an election threw the bums out and made it worse so I don't think that'll happen here but that's that's what we don't want to have happen please join me in thanking Mr Mills