The true cost of EVs, making the US as bad as California and other commentary

“Fewer drivers are interested in electric vehicles today than ever before,” as “electric cars are inferior products . . . bad for the environment and damaging to the economy in hidden ways,” explains Jason Isaac at The Hill. “The most obvious reason for consumer disenchantment is the hassle of charging EVs.” On top of that, “cobalt, an essential component of EV batteries, is primarily mined in the Democratic Republic of the Congo,” where “children as young as four labor in toxic dust, earning just a dollar or two a day.” “Every EV sold places nearly $50,000 in additional costs on taxpayers,” and “overwhelmingly, it is coal and natural gas that generate electricity for EVs.” “The Biden administration should . . . let the free market tell auto dealers what it is consumers want.”

At the nation’s “great loss,” President Biden is living up to progressives’ hopes he’d “turn America into California again,” snarks Joel Kotkin at UnHerd. Last week, the Golden State’s “last two large oil producers, ExxonMobil and Chevron,” announced “$5 billion in write-offs” in the state. “Climate hysteria” has hollowed out California’s “once giant fossil fuel industry,” leaving it dependent on tech and fueling unemployment and poverty. Meanwhile, “White House officials are so soaked in green ideology that they have abandoned the basic logic of geopolitics,” such as by halting permits for new liquified-natural-gas ports, making countries like Russia, Iran and Qatar winners. Our allies are also “in trouble”: Though they embraced Biden over the “odious” Donald Trump, they may be “growing to regret it.” 

Former Oberlin girls’ lacrosse coach Kim Russell is “being denounced by Capitol Hill Democrats on C-SPAN, rather than pacing the sidelines,” observes Elaine Mallon at The Spectator World — because she said of trans swimmer Lia Thomas, “A natural born male should not be competing with biological females.” Mallon notes, “Oberlin’s athletic director demanded she write letters of apology”; Russell was “hauled in for another meeting with her team in the presence of three administrators” and eventually removed from her coaching duties. At Oberlin, “administrators collegially brand you ‘filled with hate’ so that you may constructively kowtow to your betters.” But “the ‘arc of the moral universe’ progressives so often invoke does appear to be bending.” And “its ideological enforcers are likely to be disappointed by its direction.”

New York Cap-and-Invest, the state program that aims to reduce greenhouse emissions, “appears designed to hold back much of the program’s sticker-shock until January 2027 — after the 2026 election,” groans the Empire Center’s Ken Girardin. A preliminary analysis shows “the price ceiling” will “more than double at the beginning of 2027, with NYCI adding “13 to 21 cents to the cost of a gallon of gasoline in 2026 — and 22 to 48 cents in 2027.” Once again New York is “moving climate-policy timelines to mitigate electoral blowback.” But given the policies aim to “make things cost too much for people to keep using them, doing it after an election makes perfect sense.”

“Playbills, programs, cast-change inserts, tickets: these objects once physically accompanied the theater’s visual and verbal delights,” recalls Bailey Sincox at Public Books. But because the “pandemic accelerated a decade-long trend toward digital ticketing,” you can “spend an evening on Broadway without handling a physical document.” It’s really a revolution: Such items “transcended their momentary purpose to become mementos, imbued with the sights and sounds that they accompanied and invested with the warmth of human experience.” Playbills in museums have patrons’ notes “about how mournfully Mr. Garrick addressed Yorick’s skull at Drury Lane,” for example, and how Dickens sounded in a “semidramatic staged reading” of “Oliver Twist.” It’s certainly “hard to imagine yourself” reminiscing while “scrolling through a Google Photos album of digital tickets with your grandchildren.”

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board