Biden’s Electric Vehicle Initiative Faces Harsh Truth: Copper Isn’t Found on Trees

If nothing else, the push for electrical vehicles shows that when it comes to progressive fantasies, reality has a way of getting in the way.

Whether it’s replacing the simple act of topping off a tank with the potential nightmare of finding a suitable charging station or exchanging the price of relatively affordable traditional cars with exorbitantly expensive EVs, the ideocrats behind the electric vehicle invasion have shown a remarkable ability to ignore the very real obstacles in their road.

But a new report is raising questions about whether the earth itself can provide everything the EV fanatics are demanding, when they demand it.

According to a study published by the International Energy Forum — an organization of energy officials from around the globe — the pell-mell push to electrify the global automotive fleet is creating a demand that current copper production simply can’t keep up with.

And copper, as the saying goes, doesn’t grow on trees.

The metal is so important to electrical production that even at the current rate of demand, copper will need to be produced in jaw-dropping amounts.

Adding EV government mandates — like California’s push to get rid of internal combustion powered vehicles by 2035 or President Joe Biden’s 2021 executive order to electrify the entire government fleet by the same year — will be almost impossible.

“Just to meet business-as-usual trends, 115 percent more copper must be mined in the next 30 years than has been mined historically until now,” wrote the study’s authors Adam C. Simon, a professor at the University of Michigan, and Lawrence M. Cathles, a professor emeritus at Cornell University.

“To electrify the global vehicle fleet requires bringing into production 55 percent more new mines than would otherwise be needed. On the other hand, hybrid electric vehicle manufacture would require negligible extra copper mining.”

To put those numbers in perspective, it takes three to five times more copper to produce an EV than it does a vehicle powered by an internal combustion engine, as the website Engineering and Technology noted in a report on the copper study.

“A normal Honda Accord needs about 40 pounds of copper,” Simon told Engineering and Technology. “The same battery electric Honda Accord needs almost 200 pounds of copper.

“We show in the paper that the amount of copper needed is essentially impossible for mining companies to produce.”

“Impossible” is the kind of word that makes progressives put their finger in their ears, of course. But they can hold their breath and stomp their little feet, it’s not going to change the reality that their dreams simply aren’t feasible.

Meanwhile, as American Thinker Deputy Editor Olivia Murray wrote in a piece published Tuesday, all that copper has to come from somewhere. And liberals, with their worship of environmentalism, won’t like that either.

“Now, copper mining is largely ‘open pit mining’ (as opposed to underground mining) which is extremely destructive to the environment and a landscape,” she wrote — hastening to add that it was not an argument against mining, just a statement of fact.

“the amount of copper needed is essentially impossible for mining companies to produce.” $OCO $ORRCF https://t.co/8iCR6DzYDB

— Mariusz Skonieczny (@ClassicValueInv) May 27, 2024

Of course, most normal Americans, whose taste for EVs is nowhere near what leftists would demand, understand that life is generally a trade-off — requiring the benefits of a desired item or goal to be weighed against the cost of achieving it.

Making that decision is where being an adult who believes in freedom comes in.

No self-respecting capitalist begrudges a fellow consumer’s desire to own an electric vehicle — even if it seems unwise or hideously expensive. No sane American — no decent human being, for that matter — wants to tell his neighbors what kind of vehicles they can or can’t own.

And if hybrid vehicles that combine the best of electric power with the best of the internal combustion engine are the way to go — as the copper study argued — then more power to them. The economy and the infrastructure will adapt on their own.

What conservatives and other well-balanced humans want to see is an automotive evolution that matches the march of progress over the 20th century — when the internal combustion-powered engine won over consumers and governments because of its reliability, adaptability and affordability.

What conservatives despise is the idea of a government mandating individual behavior beyond abstaining from criminal conduct — and conservatives especially despise mandates that don’t correspond with practical use.

And the new study raises new flags about how practical the headlong rush to EV use is.

As much as it might shock the First World left, the billions of humans around the globe have other priorities, and there are better uses for copper than feeding a liberal fantasy.

According to Engineering and Technology, for instance, there are about 1 billion people on earth who have no electric grid at all.

Maybe they have a better idea for how copper could be used in more productive ways than making D.C. progressives, or liberals from Boston to Chicago to the San Francisco Bay, feel better about themselves.

But facts are the last thing that matter to liberals when an ideological point is at stake.

Biden and his Democratic Party are committed to forcing EVs on the rest of the country. But reality has a way of getting in the way.