Environment bills remain a bad deal for Virginians

The 2024 session of the General Assembly gives our elected representatives an opportunity to correct two fundamentally flawed pieces of legislation enacted during the Northam administration: the “Clean Car” law and the net-zero greenhouse gas emission goals contained in the Virginia Clean Economy Act (VCEA).

The Clean Car law mandates that all new vehicles sold in Virginia must be electric by 2035. The VCEA mandates reductions in the emission of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases to the point where emissions are completely offset by the amount of such gases removed from the atmosphere.

The VCEA sets goals to achieve net-zero emissions for electric generation by 2045 and for the entire Virginia economy by 2050. None of these utopian milestones can be achieved. Enormous economic and social damage will be done in the futile attempt to do so. Even if the milestones were achievable, and achieved, the result would do nothing to reduce the global emissions of the greenhouse gases said by environmentalists to be the primary cause of global warming.

Laws mandating the forced or subsidized deployment of electric vehicles ignore the law of supply and demand.

Every car that runs on electricity simply leaves more gasoline and diesel available for someone else to consume at a lower price. That will always stimulate additional demand. Indeed, worldwide consumption of motor fuels continues to grow even as EV mandates proliferate.

Currently, there are more than 8.4 million motor vehicles registered in Virginia. Of those, only about 40,000, or 0.48%, are electric. It will cost a staggering amount of money to change out Virginia’s vehicle fleet in an attempt to meet the pointless 2035 mandate.

There will be other costs as well.

The mining of the minerals needed for EVs often results in severe damage to the environment and great dislocation to the communities located near the mine sites.

Communist China controls much of the mining and processing capacity used to produce these minerals. There’s no case to be made for electric vehicles; that’s why their deployment has been mandated.

Nor can any case be made for the VCEA’s net-zero emission goals.

The Electric Power Research Institute, the respected research arm of the utility industry, has published a detailed study showing that no combination of technologies — wind, solar, hydro, nuclear, battery, atmospheric carbon dioxide removal

— can get our country to net-zero by

2050. The study estimates that attempts to achieve the impossible goal will cost hundreds of billions of dollars.

The government-certified North American Electric Reliability Corporation has issued a series of reports warning that the reliability of the electric grid is increasingly threatened by the continued pursuit of environmental policies such as net-zero that force the premature retirement of reliable fossil-fueled generating resources to meet aggressive carbon reduction goals while subsidizing and mandating the aggressive deployment of less-reliable weather dependent solar- and wind-powered resources.

Political power is closely divided in the General Assembly between the Republicans and Democrats. Some are predicting that not much can be done during this session, but members of both parties should realize these are serious mistakes that need to be corrected for the sake of all Virginians.

Those who favor the status quo should be asked why Virginians should be denied the freedom to choose the type of vehicle they drive, and why the energy and economic policies of the commonwealth should be defined and driven by unachievable goals.

They have no answer. There is no case to be made for the status quo.