Look don’t read too much into this or make this a conspiracy theory yet, but here’s an article from the world economic forum that talks very directly about electric vehicles. Is this transition already in trouble before it even gets off the ground?  

The WEF is a very powerful, influential group that puts pressure on government agencies and companies to do certain things, whether you agree with it or not or think it’s a big conspiracy or not, doesn’t really matter. But what they’ve identified is that shifting from fossil fuels to renewables requires huge amounts of critical metals. We’ve talked about this before on electric vehicles you need nickel cobalt, lithium all kinds of very rare earth metals. Recycling alone won’t be enough to sustain the number of materials needed. It tells you right there that there are not enough of these materials to build the electric vehicles that are needed for everybody to have one. It’s very clear and this is from the side of the opinion that wants people to transition from gasoline vehicles and fossil fuel vehicles. This organization is pushing the switch from fossil fuel vehicles and they’re saying that there are not enough metals to build the batteries for these cars. 

What’s their solution? Increase sharing of the vehicles. What does that mean? What are they trying to accomplish? Number one to go from owning to using, what they’re saying is that nobody should own a car. They should have community vehicles that everybody shares and you just use them when you want to, rental style. Sharing can reduce ownership of equipment and usage, and car-sharing platforms have already seized that opportunity to enable a broader transition. They also want to change the design of things. Things like unlocking, and keyless systems, but also designing cities to make people live closer together so you don’t need to drive as far. What do you mean by that? The mindset is to redesign cities to reduce private vehicles. That’s their solution. Nobody owns a car and you put everybody in the city so you don’t have to drive out into the country or dry far to use the vehicle. 

Why would they want to do this? Well, it says right here an obvious route was to mine more Virgin material but this comes with its own costs and potentially unintended consequences. It’s very likely that mining these metals for electric vehicles might cause more environmental harm than just continuing to use petroleum products, gasoline, and diesel. And they talk about recycling but they’ve also noticed that there is not enough currently in circulation, not enough metals to build all the cars that are needed, even with recycling. Mineral production is still forecast to increase by 500% and that may not still be enough. 

So what the heck is going on here? Are electric vehicles going to happen or not? Electric vehicles right now represent about 2-3% of all the vehicles on the road worldwide. Vehicle ownership increases by about 5- 6% per year. So in 10 years, vehicle ownership increases by 40-50%. So if you want to have a hundred percent electric vehicles in 10 years, you have to almost increase the number of vehicles by a factor of 50- 60 times. Not percent 50-60 times the amount of electric vehicles that are being produced right now. Is there enough production for that? Is there enough electrical power for that? Forget about the mining of materials, if all these vehicles on the road are electric, is there enough grid capacity? It doesn’t even get into that in this article, so what the heck is going on here? 

Are we missing something? Is there something about this switch to electric vehicles that is more than meets the eye? It just doesn’t make sense. What are your thoughts in the meantime? What do you want to buy? Do you want an electric vehicle? Do you want to plug-in vehicle? What are you looking for? Does this knowledge raise any red flags or questions for you?