Allan Milne Lees
1 min readMay 23, 2023

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It is important to remember that Tesla ekes out a tiny profit purely from selling carbon offsets to other companies - and the value of these offsets is falling every year. Minus the revenue from selling carbon offsets, Tesla likewise loses money on every vehicle and the recent price cuts will exacerbate that problem. The fact is, EVs exist because governments are mandating them; auto manufacturers are hoping that at some point the economics can be made to work. It's a very precarious state of affairs and one that is actually a little bit mad because EVs are more polluting than ICE vehicles unless at least 90% of the electricity used to charge them comes from renewables. Today, only Switzerland and Norway generate most of their electricity from renewables, so in the USA EVs are, over the entire lifecycle, actually a bit more Earth-harming than ICE vehicles. Lithium mining & smelting is very environmentally unfriendly, and most Cobalt currently comes from countries where the miners are basically slaves.

EVs are the soundbite answer to a complex problem and as is generally the case, soundbite answers cause far more harm than anything else.

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Allan Milne Lees
Allan Milne Lees

Written by Allan Milne Lees

Anyone who enjoys my articles here on Medium may be interested in my books Why Democracy Failed and The Praying Ape, both available from Amazon.

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