The only green in the new Rivian truck is if it comes in that color.

For Americans in the upper percentiles of income, education, social awareness, and environmental awareness, electric vehicles (EVs) have become the latest status symbol, virtue signal, and silver bullet (green bullet?) for reducing global warming. This suggests that they might be just as susceptible to misleading advertising, emotionalism, and political manipulation as their fellow Americans in the lower percentiles—just as I have been snookered too many times in my life.

It’s not as easy to snooker me on environmental issues, however, because I once headed an influential environment group and dealt with the associated political game-playing, the media’s attention deficit disorder, and the public’s cognitive dissonance.

An example of dissonance is a new electric pickup truck made by Rivian, a company that has no vehicles in production but is already swamped with orders and is worth more than the entire planet, which is an exaggeration but not by much.

Speaking of the planet, vehicles like the Rivian truck will do more harm than good to the planet.

The car guy at the Wall Street Journal recently drove a test model of the truck. According to his review, the behemoth he tested has a target price of $76,865 and weighs “around” 7,000 lbs., which is about as much as the mammoth Ford Super Duty 250. Yet it has a payload of only 1,764 lbs., versus the Ford’s 4,500 lbs. This is a truck for show, not work, just as Land Rovers are for going to Whole Foods to buy gluten-free spaghetti, not for traversing the Serengeti.

The truck’s four electric motors generate 835 horsepower and rocket the 3.5 tons of aluminum, steel, plastic, glass and massive tires from 0 to 60 mph in three seconds. If someone on your block ends up owning one, expect the lights in the neighborhood to dim when its large batteries are recharged at night.

Of course, the truck’s carbon footprint will depend on what kind of power source it is plugged into; that is, whether the source is fossil fuels, windmills, solar panels, nuclear energy, or hydropower. Each of these has costs and benefits, but when all tradeoffs are considered, mini nuclear plants are the best option for producing the energy required by an industrial society and by poor countries that will need massive amounts of energy to industrialize to escape poverty.

The size of the truck’s carbon footprint goes beyond the energy expended to recharge its batteries. It includes the fossil fuels used to mine the natural resources that go into its parts, the fossil fuels used to manufacture those parts, and the fossil fuels used to assemble those parts. The bigger the vehicle, the more energy used to produce it. 

Having worked in the mining and manufacturing industries, I’m familiar with the huge amounts of energy that the industries consume, as well as other impacts on the environment. Take tires, or more specifically, take one of the main ingredients in tires: carbon black. Resembling furnace soot, carbon black is produced by the incomplete combustion of heavy petroleum products. If you were to tour a carbon black plant, as I have, you’d come out looking like a coal miner, with the stuff even getting into your underwear.

Most carbon black plants are staffed by lower-percentile workers (a.k.a. deplorables) in the Texas panhandle and along the Gulf coast near Houston, far away from the Hamptons and other upper-percentile places—places where Rivian trucks with big tires will be parked someday in front of 15,000 square-foot houses owned by people who pretend they’re green.

Studies show that over their life expectancy, EVs will emit less carbon per miles driven than cars with internal combustion engines, with the actual reduction in carbon dependent on the power source used to recharge EVs batteries.  However, it’s less clear that there are significant differences between the two in terms of the carbon emitted in their manufacturing and in the mining of necessary natural resources. EVs require fewer parts, because they lack the internal combustion engines, drive trains, radiators, water pumps, gas tanks, and fuel pumps of cars that run on gasoline; but the mining of lithium for their batteries takes a lot of energy and causes a lot of environmental harm.  

There are also geopolitical issues with lithium, given that China controls something like 80% of its processing. Because demand for lithium has skyrocketed, prices of the material are up 240% for the year.

Another geopolitical issue is Canada’s complaint that the U.S. is subsidizing EVs in violation of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade pact, thus putting the Canadian auto industry at an unfair disadvantage. Canada’s complaint is in response to the EV tax credits in the Build Back Better legislation. EV buyers would get an $8,000 credit if the vehicle is made at a non-union U.S. plant, or $12,500 if made at a union plant. The credit drops to $500 if the vehicle’s battery isn’t made in the U.S.

Most of these political maneuvers and malinvestments would disappear if EV tax credits were eliminated and carbon taxes were instituted. Moreover, sales of land barges like the Rivian truck would fall, as would the hypocrisy of upper-percentile phonies.

Global elites regularly decry the supposedly “existential” threat purported human-caused climate change poses to the environment, civilization, and even human survival.

These elites propose policies intended to avert global climate disaster, almost all of them involving ending the use of fossil fuels and fundamentally changing how people live, forcing us to live in high-density urban settings along mass transportation nodes and eat locally supplied vegetarian diets. But the elites don’t act as if they believe their rhetoric.

The alarmed climate elites’ hypocritical “do as I say, not as I do; hair shirts and gruel for thee, but not for me” attitudes were on full display at the U.N. climate conference, COP-26 for short, held in Glasgow, Scotland from October 31 through November 13.

If world leaders and the mandarin bureaucrats who supposedly serve them and the wider public were really concerned human greenhouse gas emissions endanger the Earth, they could have hosted the entire conference, backroom negotiations and all, via Zoom, Skype, Streamyard, or any of the numerous other conferencing services. After all, the world just spent a year on lockdown with media interviews, international negotiations, and legislation still getting done.

Barring virtual communication, COP-26’s participants could have arrived via commercial or shared transport and eaten only locally sourced vegetarian or vegan meals, as they propose for the unwashed masses. They didn’t do that. Instead, according to the Scotsman, carbon dioxide emissions from COP-26 were more than double those of COP-25 and more than any previous international summit in history. Sixty percent of the conference’s more than 100,000 tons of emissions was from transportation alone, with the remainder coming from water use, heating and cooling of five-star accommodations, and meat-heavy gourmet meals made with food flown or shipped in from around the world.

The world’s leading climate scolds, those wealthy, self-appointed saviors of the Earth who would have common people give up air travel and private cars, arrived in a stream of more than 400 private jets, spewing more emissions in two weeks than is emitted by more than 1,600 average people in the United Kingdom in a year. If their own pronouncements of planetary doom are to be believed, it seems Bank of America, Jeff Bezos, and other multibillion-dollar businesses and individuals feel you must first kill the Earth before you can save it.

Conference host Boris Johnson, prime minister of the United Kingdom, jetted in from a meeting of the G-20 in Rome (where climate was also discussed), only to berate the world for its profligate use of fossil fuels.

Johnson harangued the assembled attendees for their nations’ alleged climate crimes, saying, “When it comes to tackling climate change, words without action, without deeds are absolutely pointless.” Yet, after being on the ground in Glasgow for about a day, he took a private jet back to London instead of taking the train, which emits far less carbon dioxide. Later, near the conference’s end, Johnson jetted back to Glasgow to express his belief that hard commitments to reduce carbon dioxide emissions significantly were vital to saving the world. His actions spoke loudly, and they belied his words.

To be fair, COP-26 is hardly the first time those in power—who are constantly telling the poor of the world they must live with less to save the planet—have declined to live up to the ideal they set for others. President Joe Biden’s climate czar, John Kerry, is famous for using his family’s private jet to attend climate negotiations and award dinners. His excuse: he’s important! Evidently, this somehow means he is to be held to a lower standard than others. BTW, John, usually if you want to set an example you hold yourself to a higher standard than others. Just a thought.

Then there is actor/activist Leonardo DiCaprio, who once again made an appearance at a climate summit. We all know actors set the lifestyle example to which an environmentally conscious person should aspire. To his credit, for once DiCaprio flew commercial. Perhaps his image needed burnishing. After all, he is widely known for travelling repeatedly for pleasure every year via private planes and private yachts. DiCaprio has real chutzpah. As detailed in Luxury Launches,

Despite coaching viewers to “work together” to fight climate change while accepting his first Oscar in March, DiCaprio chose to fly private to pick up an award from a clean-water advocacy group at the Riverkeeper Fishermen’s Ball and back to Cannes to attend an AIDS benefit gala 24 hours later.

DiCaprio excuses his personal carbon profligacy by saying he pays someone to plant trees on his behalf. That reminds me of the medieval Catholic Church selling indulgences to wealthy sinners who could afford it.

Then there is our climate Cassandra-in-chief, former vice-president Al Gore, who profited handsomely off fossil fuels, raking in $70 to $100 million for the sale of his cable news network, Current TV, to Al Jazeera.  After years of claiming we must abandon oil and gas production and promoting legislation and lawsuits to force people to do so, Gore sold his station to a company primarily owned by the government of Qatar. That government makes most of its annual revenue from oil production and is a member of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). It’s akin to Baptists taking donations from bootleggers.

Not to be outdone, former president Barack Obama appeared at COP-26 to complain about climate hypocrisy. “For most of your lives you’ve been bombarded with warnings about what the future will look like if you don’t address climate change, but you see adults who act like the problem doesn’t exist,” Obama opined. “You are right to be frustrated.”

With whom should they be frustrated? Obama spent eight years as president warning climate change was causing the seas to rise rapidly and they would soon swamp much of the U.S. Eastern seaboard. Upon retiring, however, he bought an $11.75 million beachfront home in Martha’s Vineyard, just inches-to-feet above sea level. As far as I can tell, he isn’t investing in sea walls to keep out the supposedly rising tides.

None of the famous people who claim we are causing planet-killing climate change through human energy use, housing infrastructure, and agricultural systems live as if they believe this is true.

That’s something to think about the next time such a person gives a speech or appears on television saying you should give up your car, air travel, hamburgers and barbeque, and standalone single-family home in order to save the planet. They aren’t including themselves among those who should be forced to give up things.

The policies elitists are proposing will impose higher energy costs, which many people—the working poor, those on fixed incomes, and those on lower-middle incomes—will struggle to pay for. Yet the elites make no sacrifices themselves. Even if they did, the cost of their policies to them would be beneath their margins of error at the bank.

Wealthy climate alarmists apparently have a two-year-old’s self-awareness and ability to delay gratification. They remind me of Democrat apologists who claim inflation is a good thing or at least not so bad, admonishing the poor to “suck it up” and pay the higher costs without complaint. It’s not a good look, and it certainly doesn’t inspire confidence that they really believe the Earth hangs in the balance.

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This article was published on December 2, 2021, and is reproduced with permission from The Heartland Institute.