The data to back up my scepticism on battery powered vehicles

I said yesterday that the government's 2035 target for banning petrol and diesel vehicles was Wishful Thinking without WYDIs. In part of his Sunday Times column today Dominic Lawson has provided hard data to back that up:

Last June a group of scientists led by Professor Richard Herrington, the Natural History Museum’s head of earth science, warned the government that to replace all cars on British roads with EVs, UK demand for the batteries needed would require almost twice the world’s current yearly supply of cobalt, the total amount of neodymium produced globally every year, three-quarters of the world’s annual supply of lithium and at least half its copper supply. No prizes for guessing the effect of this (even if it were feasible) on the prices of these minerals, and therefore the ultimate cost to the consumer. And what about the CO₂ emissions generated by this vast excavatory process (chiefly in the Democratic Republic of Congo, home to most of the world’s cobalt reserves)? According to Tim Worstall, a former trader in rare elements: “VW has released the comparative numbers for its new electric Golf against the diesel version. The all-clean, all-climate-friendly version must do 120,000km [75,000 miles]” to break even, “given the emissions required to make the thing.”

I’d add that the bulk of the next generation of electric cars are set to be made in China, where coal is still the largest element in the energy used for industrial production. This will be a continuation of the process in which the UK claims “global leadership” in the reduction of CO₂ emissions, by not taking account of the fact that we have been offshoring our manufacturing. As Dieter Helm, professor of energy policy at Oxford, told the BBC’s Today programme last year: “Global emissions have actually increased as a result of our de-industrialisation . . . There are no plans in the net-zero carbon target which address that.”

One can't help thinking that the government's answer to "what you do is" is to make up another arbitrary target because the PM is about to appear with St Attenborough and needs to appear to be sufficiently woke and right on.

Which doesn't make it remotely credible or actually move us a millimetre further forward.

PS I know Dieter Helm from when I worked in energy economics in the 1980s and we were both young whippersnappers. He's a good guy and I'd back him to be right on just about anything and everything in this subject area.