Cam Slater: A Good Point, Who Indeed?

Josie Pagani writes at Stuff about the huge cost of the Government’s climate change policies, and outlines how most of those costs have been poured into the pockets of the wealthy in the leafy suburbs.

No, thank YOU Tesla buyers for saving us.

The EV subsidies going to brand-new Teslas alone total $80 million. Every dollar subsidising the world’s richest toddler, Bubba Musk, is a dollar that hasn’t been spent on, say, hiring more bus drivers and paying them well. Or buying a train track inspection.

Reporters this week established that the recipients of EV subsidies live almost exclusively in leafy suburbs. People who live in struggle street do not buy brand new $80,000 motors, or even relatively affordable brand new Toyotas.

And it is not just an $8000 handout to buy a new Tesla. They also get an ongoing $2000 a year top-up bonus of unpaid road user taxes. EVs still use the roads, don’t they?

Over 10 years, a Tesla owner is getting another $20,000 handout. Bludgers.

Stuff

She’s dead right, they are climate bludgers, having the poor and middle income subsidise their gay electric cars.

But wait, all this push is actually achieving stuff all to help the climate.

The International Energy Agency estimates that if the whole world achieves its electric vehicle targets by 2030, we will save an additional 235 million tons of carbon. Sounds good, but the world produces about 37 billion tonnes each year, so that is a 0.1 percent reduction in carbon emissions.

If I were more cynical, I would say that the people who have told us that taxing wealth is off the table also have an EV policy that looks like more middle-class capture than effective climate strategy.

Stuff

Spot on Josie, it is an expensive and ultimately pointless exercise in virtue signalling. All these EV drivers are actually creating are clouds of smug.

She then goes on to make a rather sensible statement about how we’d be better off by spending the vast sums differently.

You will never get the majority of people to support a clean energy transition that makes them pay more for less. Better to spend the EV subsidy on working out how to make electric vehicles cheaper than petrol cars. Only then will most of us switch.

Stuff

Or even better work out a way for EVs to deliver everything an ICE vehicle can, including being able to tow a boat or a horse float without so drastically reducing its range as to make such an idea a complete folly.

When an emergency like Cyclone Gabrielle hits EVs become next to useless, other than for charging cellphones. When the proverbial really hits the fan and you need emergency services or heavy machinery then you can’t beat diesel power. When the power is out for weeks your flash Tesla becomes a driveway ornament, while everyone else gets by with ICE vehicles, sniggering quietly as the virtue-signalling idiots with their EVs fume inside their cloud of smug.

There weren’t too many EV rescue vehicles working in the Hawkes Bay or out at Piha. When the proverbial hits the fan it is fossil fuels all the way, baby!

It is hard to have a debate about which climate policies work best without being called a ‘climate delayer’, as if doing the wrong thing quickly is better than doing the right thing more carefully. But let’s at least have a debate about who pays.

If donating to the rich to save the planet works, I only ask that Teslas give way to me at intersections.

Stuff

Truth bombs right to the end. The poor and middle classes are paying so the people in leafy suburbs can create vast clouds of smug at the expense of the suckers who can’t afford a new EV.

The funny thing is this is doing nothing for the poor in South Auckland who almost exclusively drive nine-seater, fossil-fuelled, poly-wagons, and it is being done by a Government that professes to ‘care’ for the poor. They might say they care for the poor, but their actions say they actually care for those in the leafy suburbs.

Cam Slater is a New Zealand-based blogger, best known for his role in Dirty Politics and publishing the Whale Oil Beef Hooked blog, which operated from 2005 until it closed in 2019. This article was first published HERE