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.