Democrats have been trying, by hook or by crook, to force electric cars onto a skeptical public.
The sales pitch usually involves telling people that even with sky-high price tags, buying an electric car will save the consumer in the long run – but that may not be true.
Largely because of Democrats, California has astronomical electricity prices, and those prices are poised to bring a shock to Biden’s green dreams.
California’s Democrat Governor Gavin Newsom signed an executive order in 2021 banning new traditional gas vehicles by 2035 and President Joe Biden outlined a nationwide goal of having electric vehicles account for half of total car sales by 2030.
California may be at the cutting edge of whatever the latest leftist fad happens to be at any given moment, but there is a reason ($$$$) the state is losing population relative to the nation as a whole.
Fresh off his extended paternity leave, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg told Americans that they should buy electric vehicles to avoid the fluctuating costs of gasoline.
Buttigieg did this seemingly unaware of the fact that a $60,000 electric vehicle probably isn’t the most logical or even possible purchase for everyday Americans already struggling to pay $5 ($7 in parts of California) gasoline prices.
California has some of the highest energy prices in the nation with the state’s largest energy providers reporting average monthly bills dwarfing those of other states in 2021, and those prices are forecast to continue skyrocketing.
If prices keep rising, as current projections say they will, electric vehicles will continue to be more expensive than traditional gas-powered cars.
According to a 2021 report by the California Public Utilities Commission, it is “cheaper to fuel a conventional internal combustion engine vehicle than it is to charge an EV.”
Severin Borenstein is the director of the Energy Institute at the University of California, Berkeley and says, “It’s a huge problem. We’re going to mandate electrification and then there’s just going to be huge political blowback. Mandating electrification when you’re charging people 30 or 40 cents a kilowatt-hour is going to be immensely expensive.”
The high charging costs may dissuade people from going with an electric vehicle when they hear about it from family and friends.
Mark Toney is executive director of the Utility Reform Network and at a recent forum said, “If you want people to make big investments in electrification, there needs to be some kind of a payoff for them. And the payoff has got to be that we make electricity rates look very affordable by comparison to the alternatives.”
All this means unfortunately that if the far-left gets its way, the cost of everyday expenses will continue to climb.
And as more Californians continue to flee the high cost of living for greener pastures in other less expensive states, let’s hope they remember to reject the policies that led them to move in the first place.
Stay tuned to Blue State Blues for any updates to this ongoing story.
