In 2006, Sony Classic Pictures released a documentary titled Who Killed the Electric Car, which featured a bevy of Hollywood B-list celebrities including Alexandra Paul, Peter Horton, and Ed Begley. It’s narrated by Martin Sheen. The film is a Michael Moore-style documentary with a dash of Perry Mason whodunit thrown in. It comes complete with a list of suspects who may or may not be responsible for “killing” the EV1, GM’s battery-powered electric car which was test marketed in California and Arizona in the late 1990s. It was never mass-produced, and the filmmakers demand to know why. GM claims they shelved the EV1 because the product wasn’t viable – it cost more to produce than the consumers were willing to pay at the time. The filmmakers aren’t gullible enough to buy such a far-fetched claim, though. Who could imagine anyone not wanting an electric car, no matter the price? Besides, neither Tom Hanks nor Mel Gibson complained about their lease payments for the EV1, so clearly the problem couldn’t be the price tag. The film runs down a number of conspiracy theories to crack the case wide open, arriving at conclusions that are both predictable and humorous.
To summarize, GM created the EV1 and offered it to a select group of people on a lease basis for testing purposes. All of the individuals profiled in the film raved about the car’s performance and its environmentally friendly profile (the EV1 was a zero-emission vehicle). During the test period, the California Air Resource Board (CARB) got wind of the EV1, and thought it was such a great idea that they decided to enact the Zero Emission Vehicle (ZEV) mandate. This law originally specified that by 1998, 2% of all new cars sold by the seven major auto manufacturers in the state of California would have to meet ‘zero emission’ standards. The bar would then rise to 10% of all vehicles sold by 2003. The penalty for not meeting the ZEV mandate? $5000 per car. California is the world’s fifth-largest economy. Given the number of vehicles sold there each year, a $5000 penalty per car amounts to some serious cash.
So here we have a case in which a major multinational corporation, following nothing but its own profit motive, attempted to deliver the Holy Grail of environmentalism to the state of California on a silver platter. And what was GM’s reward for bringing the world’s most environmentally friendly car to market? A threat from CARB. Anyone but Martin Sheen could see how that might change the calculus a bit. Companies expect a certain level of risk associated with research and development projects. However, that risk is usually limited to the dollars that have been invested in the projects under consideration. Thanks to California’s ZEV mandate, however, GM was no longer merely risking just its R&D investment in the EV1 – now it was risking its entire California market solely on the basis of an experimental product. That’s a very different proposition, and GM responded accordingly by suing the state of California to prevent the mandate from taking effect. They then shelved the EV1.
Now I don’t pretend to know all there is to know about the history of the EV1. The little I do know was learned from the movie. Who Killed the Electric Car is a very slanted, ideologically driven film, but the funny part is they answer their own question without even realizing it. The filmmakers blame the EV1’s demise on the left’s usual list of villains – George Bush, the oil companies, and the automobile manufacturers. Although they do lay some blame on the California Air Resource Board, it is only because CARB backed off its original mandate – not because CARB threatened the car manufacturers in the first place. Even if we are to take the filmmakers’ presentation of events at face value and reject GM’s claim that the EV1 was not economically viable at the time, it is clear that the real source of the problem was the initial mandate itself. Unfortunately, Martin Sheen et al are so blinded by their own ideology that they are incapable of recognizing this simple truth – even though they are the ones presenting it to us!
And to me this illustrates the problem with the environmental movement as a whole. It sees capitalism and the profit motive as an enemy of conservation and environmentally-friendly progress. Instead, every “solution” they offer to every environmental problem, real or perceived, is nothing but ever-increasing degrees of global socialism. As Lew Rockwell once quipped, “It’s as though the socialists realized their policies caused poverty, so they renamed themselves environmentalists and made poverty their goal.”
As someone who has spent significant time in the developing world, I can assure the reader that the richer the country, the cleaner it is. Rich countries are rich only because they have embraced capitalism to a greater degree than the poor countries. The world’s most polluted areas are not in the United States, Japan, or Germany. Russia and China, on the other hand, have always had the highest levels of socialist government control of natural resources and the highest levels of environmental contamination. This is not a coincidence, and it should serve as an important lesson for environmentalists everywhere. Only capitalism has the necessary built-in incentives for conservation, since greater profit is derived when one is able to find ways to increase output while reducing inputs. In contrast, socialism seeks to eliminate the price mechanism and the profit motive. In doing so, it also eliminates the incentive to conserve and maintain precious natural resources.
The most polluted areas in any country are those which are managed by government. In fact, the largest single polluter in the US is the federal government. This is completely predictable, of course. Whenever there is no ownership of a resource, the incentive is to take as much from the resource as quickly as possible before someone else does. This is known as the tragedy of the commons. The rational way to resolve this problem is to privatize the commons, thus providing the owners of the resource an incentive to maintain that resource in order to protect future revenue streams. The environmentalists’ solution to any issue, however, is always to increase the commons through more and more government control.
Take global warming, for example. The allegation is that the earth is getting warmer, that it’s man’s fault, and that it will be uniformly bad for everyone on the planet. The solution? Massive wealth transfers from the productive capitalist countries to the unproductive socialist countries. I’m a little fuzzy on how this is supposed to lower global temperatures. Maybe Swiss bank accounts held by corrupt Russian bureaucrats act as carbon sinks, like forests.
And I find it very telling that supporters of the Kyoto Treaty and other government-managed “solutions” to global warming refer to those scientists who dispute the standard narrative as global warming “skeptics.” In the realm of real science, skepticism is not a pejorative – it’s a requirement. Scientists do not accept any theory on faith. They form hypotheses, conduct experiments, and analyze the results. The fact that Al Gore attempts to disparage those who disagree with his Chicken Little story by calling them “skeptics” tells me that we are no longer within the realm of science, but rather that of religion.
All of this is a real shame, since no one disagrees with the overall goal of maintaining a clean environment. Unfortunately, the hostility that some environmentalists show toward capitalism and rational, property-based solutions leads one to wonder if they really wish to fix the problems, or whether their real goal is just more socialism, more government control over our lives, and more poverty for future generations.
