Bank Australia announces that it will stop giving loans for all cars. They are going to give car loans for solely electric vehicle purchases from 2025. The bank’s move was justified by the chief impact officer, saying it is their responsibility to stop the purchase of fossil fuel cars. “We think that the responsible thing for us to do … is to ensure that our vehicle lending doesn’t lock our customers into higher carbon emissions and increasingly expensive running costs in the years ahead.”
However, the question is whether it will be more difficult for hard-working men and women to obtain affordable vehicles that run on reliable energy really the “responsible thing” to do. That’s exactly the premise that environmental extremists would have everyone believe, even though electric vehicles are significantly more expensive to purchase than vehicles that run on gasoline. Not to mention the fact that the asking price of an electric vehicle does not appear to be going down anytime soon.
The cost of the raw materials for electric vehicles more than doubled during the COVID pandemic thanks to increases in costs of materials such as cobalt, nickel, and lithium, which are essential to produce electric vehicle batteries. There’s also the high price tag associated with replacing an electric vehicle battery, as well as installing or using a charging station and paying for the electricity used to charge the battery, which often is, ironically, powered by fossil fuels.
Electric vehicles
Also, even if the overall price tag of an electric vehicle were equal to or less than that of a gasoline-powered vehicle, as the woke crowd asserts, the true costs go beyond mere dollars and cents. While liberal elitists are quick to point to the alleged environmental benefits of driving an electric vehicle, many conveniently turn a blind eye to the instances of child and forced labor that have been identified in the electric vehicle supply chain. It’s no secret that cobalt mining in the Congo for electric vehicle batteries has placed countless children in harm’s way, and that ethnic minorities suffer in forced labor camps at the hands of the Chinese Communist Party.
It costs families more money to purchase an electric vehicle; many electric vehicle batteries are charged by coal and natural gas, and there’s an ongoing humanitarian problem of child and forced labor being used to source the materials for electric vehicles. However, the absurdity of professing the moral and fiscal superiority of electric vehicles isn’t contained to Australia. California regulators recently took the farce to the next level here in the U.S. . They banned the sale of new gasoline-powered vehicles starting in 2035.
