by Ken Falkenstein
Today Volvo made the astonishing announcement that beginning in 2019, it will manufacture only electric cars. Volvo will be the first car manufacturer since the invention of the automobile in the 19th century to no longer produce any cars with internal combustion engines.
I support this move, but not for the reasons that Volvo is doing it.
Volvo has gotten on the anti-oil bandwagon, a environmentalist cause dating back decades. Environmentalists argue that gas emissions pollute the environment. The truth, however, is that contrary the propaganda promulgated by movement environmentalists and mindlessly repeated in the establishment “news” media, electric cars do more damage to the environment than internal combustion engines.
You read that right. On balance, electric cars cause more pollution to the environment than gas-fueled cars.
A peer-reviewed study published just 6 months ago in the highly respected journal Nature, concluded that “electric vehicles are more detrimental to the environment than petrol-powered vehicles thanks to the pollution created in generating electricity.”
Stephen Holland at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and his colleagues modeled air pollution from motor vehicles by region. Nearly all electric vehicles are less detrimental to global climate than petrol-powered ones, but the team found a significant variation in benefit across the country. For example, in the western United States, where a sizable amount of electricity comes from clean energy sources, electric vehicles produce less air pollution than petrol-powered cars. But in the Midwest the situation is reversed, because electricity comes mostly from coal-fired power plants.
In short, although there are some areas in which electric motors are more environmentally friendly than gas-powered engines, in many other places throughout the country electric cars are worse because they are powered by coal-fired power plants. These areas outnumber the “cleaner” areas.
The environmentalists will ignore or attempt to suppress this information because their objective has never really been environmental protection. The environmentalist movement is the modern home of the socialist movement, and their objective has been to undermine capitalist economies in order to promote their socialist agenda. Attacking oil – literally the fuel of all of the great capitalist economies on Earth today, is one of their primary tactics. (Promoting the myth of global warming, which goes hand-in-hand with attacking oil, is another.)
So, although Volvo is abandoning gas-powered engines in an effort to protect the environment, their action actually will have the opposite effect.
I support this decision anyway.
I understand that switching from gas to electric will harm the environment, but that’s a marginal sacrifice as compared to the great benefit of doing so: the disempowerment of the Arabs.
The Arab world culturally has remained largely in the 7th century because it has never needed to evolve into the modern world. They were blessed with a miraculous accident of geography: They happen to be located on top of trillions of barrels of oil, so they’ve been able to base their economies solely on oil revenues without having to innovate and evolve either culturally or economically.
Those oil revenues have enabled the Arab governments to relentlessly attack the Jewish state of Israel, the only capitalist democracy in the region, and to undermine the interests of the western world generally. Every single Arab government is a dictatorship in which the people depend on the generosity of the government for their survival. Those governments all spend enough of the oil revenues on the people to prevent uprisings, but they also corruptly pocket billions of dollars and funnel billions more into offensive weapons and international terrorism directed against Israel and the rest of the western world.
I’m a proud Zionist. The Holocaust proved beyond any reasonable dispute that the Jewish people have a need for a homeland after two millennia of mistreatment throughout the diaspora. They also have a right for that homeland to exist in their ancestral lands, to which they have had a claim for over 3,000 years.
The Arab nations reject these facts and, on numerous occasions, have tried to conquer Israel by military force and terrorism and “throw the Jews into the sea.”
Israel has survived and thrived based on her people’s incredible will to survive and innovative genius. (Israel doesn’t have the oil resources of its Arab antagonists and therefore must exist in the modern world.) But, unlike every other country, Israel has had her fundamental right to exist challenged from her inception through today by the Arabs and others under the Arabs’ influence.
What the Arabs have failed to accomplish on the battlefield (and blown up delis and buses) they have worked tirelessly to achieve through diplomatic channels, particularly through the United Nations, which has passed more resolutions condemning Israel than every other nation combined. (In the eyes of the UN, Israel is more evil than North Korea, Myanmar, Iran, and Sudan combined.)
How do the Arabs win those votes at the UN? By asserting the enormous economic power that they derive from their enormous oil supplies.
But what if the world’s economy no longer depended on Arab oil? Would western democracies like Germany, France, and England continue to vote against its fellow western democracy, Israel?
I doubt it. If the Arabs no longer wielded great economic power, the international community’s economic incentive would be to support the one country in the region that shares an evolved culture and strong economy, that regularly produces innovative new technology, that has developed arguably the greatest military in human history, and that displays more respect for human rights than any other country ever has.
So, yes, I support efforts to do away with the internal combustion engine, not out of misplaced concerns about the environment, but because I support Israel and want to see her survive and thrive. Step one to accomplishing that objective is disempowering her Arab antagonists by ending the world’s dependence on their oil.
So, kudos to Volvo for taking a wonderfully positive step for humanity – even if it was for the wrong reason.
Author: Committed Conservative
Conservative News pieces under our collective name represent news items collected by members of the CC team, which include our three editors, whose bios are all available on the site. It’s news … and it’s conservative news.
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