When President Joe Biden was campaigning, he repeatedly promised to end fossil fuels in America. There’ll be “no more drilling, including offshore,” he said. “No ability for the oil industry to drill. No more pipelines.”
Since his election, he has taken many steps to make drilling for oil more difficult to impossible. The point is to force Americans to adopt electric cars. But electric vehicles are MUCH MORE expensive than conventional gasoline and diesel vehicles. Stopping drilling for oil will make them even more expensive.
Biden’s and the “Green-New-Deal” left’s absolutist approach to eliminating oil drilling ignores the fact that the materials to make electric cars include many materials that are MADE from oil. In fact, almost everything we buy includes petroleum products.
Here are a few of the components of automobiles that are at least partially made from petroleum:
- paint and primer
- fiberglass and carbon fiber body panels
- lubricants and bearing grease
- battery enclosures and cables
- dashboards and consoles
- plastic parts of all kinds
- nylon parts
- electrical cables
- tires and other synthetic rubber parts
- upholstery, foam rubber and carpeting
- adhesives
- and more.
Plastics alone represent 50% of an electric car’s components by volume, but only 10% of its weight (source). That’s one of the big advantages of using plastic – weight reduction – which is extremely important to the efficiency and travel range of electric vehicles. Replacing petroleum-based products such as plastic with non-petroleum-based products (if such replacements could be found – metal? wood?) would be more expensive AND add weight, reducing the travel range and making electric vehicles less practical.
Of course gasoline-powered cars are made from the same materials, so eliminating oil drilling would increase the price of ALL vehicles and could destroy the American auto industry, requiring all auto manufacturing to be done overseas, where they would not prevented from producing oil, but then we would have lost control of the market yet another product. The prices would inevitably go up and we would have no recourse.
