Back in ’03, as a shiny new arsenal of light trucks dominated the Detroit Auto Show, an anti-SUV movement took to the streets to protest that the gas-guzzlers inside. The trucks, they are argued, were underwriting the terrorists we were fighting in the Middle East.<\/p>\n
Their slogan: “What would Jesus drive?”<\/p>\n
Led by influential left-wing millionairess Arianna Huffington, a powerful coalition of Democratic lawmakers, green groups, journalists, national church groups and Hollywood celebrities launched the “Detroit Project,” an ad campaign that contended that cars were a moral decision and that American sinners must move to hybrid electrics and declare energy independence from abroad or else continue to fuel nefarious petro-dictatorships (in the words of the New York Times Thomas Friedman) and their destabilizing policies.<\/p>\n
Now, fueled by billions in green stimulus subsidies, a $4-a-gallon gas scare, and a 35 mpg decree from the greenest president in history, that movement has culminated in this month’s GM roll out of the first iconic plug-in hybrid, the Chevy Volt. The Volt embodies the Green movement’s ideal auto. It can drive 40 miles without using a drop of gasoline. It is one of a fleet of vehicles – including cars from Nissan, Tesla, and Fisker – that rely on batteries for power.<\/p>\n
But would Jesus drive them? No, concludes influential Car & Driver columnist Aaron Robinson.<\/p>\n
In a pair of devastating columns, Robinson shows that the lithium battery-powered revolution looks a lot like the oil status quo that Greens have spent the last decade denouncing. The essential elements of lithium-ion batteries must be imported from thuggish, foreign regimes. The batteries in the electric Nissan Leaf contains about nine pounds of lithium. Nissan claims capacity for a half-million electric cars per year by 2015, meaning it will need about 2,250 tons of lithium annually.<\/p>\n
Goodbye oil dependence, hello lithium and cobalt dependence.<\/p>\n
“Wherever energy has been discovered in the past century, fortunes have bloomed,” writes Robinson in his September column, “As We Go Green with Clean Electric Cars, Somebody’s Going to Get Dirty.” Bolivia’s lithium-rich, 4000-square-mile Salar de Uyuni salt flats “has earned it the title of the ‘Saudi Arabia of lithium. And the Bolivians are not the only ones in South America getting measured for sheik’s robes. Argentina’s Salar del Hombre Muerto (“Salt Lake of the Dead Man”) and the salt playas in Chile’s high Atacama Desert represent about 80 percent of the world’s easily exploitable lithium reserves.”<\/p>\n
The majority of that reserve is in Bolivia, home of half the world’s known lithium deposits – and ruled by Evo Morales, a populist socialist closely aligned with anti-American Venezuelan President Hugo Ch\u00e1vez, who likes to say things like: “Either capitalism dies or else Planet Earth dies.” You know Chavez? He’s one if the petro-dictators that lithium batteries are supposed to liberate us from. Venezuela is a major U.S. oil exporter.<\/p>\n
The authoritarian Chavez is a model for Bolivia’s Morales, who want s to nationalize the lithium industry as Chavez nationalized the Venezuelan oil company, CITCO. Morales, reports The New Yorker magazine, is “friendly with Fidel Castro, of Cuba, and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian President. Ahmadinejad visited La Paz in November to announce a joint project to study lithium technology. ‘I’m a big admirer of you and your people,’ Morales told him. ‘Our people have the mandate to liberate ourselves from the empires.'”<\/p>\n
And cobalt – also an essential ingredient in the green-preferred lithium power plants? Cobalt extraction typically goes hand in hand with copper and nickel mining,” writes Robinson in the magazine’s October issue. “About 80 percent of the world’s cobalt supply is believed to be in central Africa’s “copper belt,” a band of ancient, mineral-endowed soil straddling Zambia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). . . . The mining of these minerals takes place amid ‘one of the worst conflict situations in the world,’ says Congo policy analyst Aaron Hall of the Enough Project, a left-wing group funded by Democratic billionaire George Soros.”<\/p>\n
“In the DRC’s eastern provinces of North and South Kivu, various rebel factions and the national army conduct mining at gunpoint or extract levies at checkpoints along the roads that fund their fighting. . . . (while the) the open pit mining that produces cobalt is causing serious environmental degradation,” he goes on.<\/p>\n
“EVs are touted as clean transportation for socially-responsible types,” write Robinson. “You know these people they’re the ones the ones in the Whole Foods carefully reading the package labels.” Yes, we know the ones. They were the same people that said electrics were the guilt-free solution to the gas engine – the moral choice for a new generation of Americans.<\/p>\n
“Does anyone living in our modern consumer paradise care if their vehicle purchase helps pay for murder and environmental ruin in Africa?” concludes the Car & Driver columnist.<\/p>\n
We await the “What would Jesus Drive?” protest signs at the green 2011 Detroit auto show.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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