In the course of his new memorandum on climate change, which I discuss here, Bill Gates turns his attention to electric vehicles (EVs) and, for the most part likes what he sees, but it was interesting to see this in the second sentence of this passage:
Nearly one in four cars sold in 2024 was an EV, and more than 10 percent of all vehicles in the world are electric. In some countries including the U.S., they still have disadvantages, such as long charging times and too few public charging stations, that keep them from being as practical as gas-powered cars. [My emphasis added.]
Oh.
And in the course of his recent article on changing attitudes to climate change, which was the subject of this week’s Capital Letter, Hoover Institution economist John Cochrane also touches on EVs in a couple of spots:
Why should Europe, or California, substantially reduce its economic prosperity — double its electricity and gas prices, tax to subsidize uneconomical vehicles, houses, and more — when those efforts have no or minuscule effects on climate? The only argument has to be as a sort of demonstration of moral purity, with the hope that China, India and Africa admire our purity and choose to follow that lead. Good luck.
And:
California voters can scratch their heads at the assertion that the way to mitigate wildfires, rather than forest management, is to force everyone to buy an electric car, which will make the planet only a tiny bit less warmer than it is already in 100 years.
As so often happens, the top-down, moralistic nature of climate policy has meant that sensible risk-reward analysis has been dispensed with.
The problems with EVs noted by Gates might have been reduced had those in charge taken account of a simple principle that Cochrane sets out elsewhere, although doing so would have run against the central planning mindset typical of so much of climate policy:
The moonshot [the top-down Paris approach] is the mistake. New technology always starts where it makes economic sense and then diffuses. Solar panels make great sense in out of the way places far from the grid or countries that do not have the state capacity to maintain a centralized grid. EVs make great sense as second city cars, not replacements for the Family Truckster.
There would have been nothing wrong with governments giving a gentle nudge to help with EVs. They often lend a helping hand to potentially promising new technologies. But the poisonous mix of bribery, threats, and targets pulled seemingly out of the air meant that the launch of mass market EVs, above all in the developed world, has been a ruinously expensive, poorly thought-through shambles. The natural discovery process that would have accompanied an organic development of the EV sector would, for example, have picked up far earlier on the charging issues that have dogged EVs (and did so over a century ago, too) and resolved them before the roll-out of mass-market electric cars had gotten so far. Instead, and as is so often the case with central planning, a followed c, and c preceded b.