The first time I saw the sticker of shame was in California.
A baby-blue Tesla glided by in Los Angeles and plastered on the boot was: “I bought this before Elon went crazy.”
It was in September 2024, before Donald Trump was re-elected US president and before Tesla chief Elon Musk was tasked by him with gutting the US federal administration.
Imagine how the hapless Tesla owner feels now, the halo effect of green branding sullied by a mercurial genius who turned this symbol of planetary cleanliness into a dirty joke about power. The “Elon is a Nazi” software update was not in the handbook.
One of the reasons for buying any prestige car is advertising. The first thing any expensive car says is: “I have more money than you.” The more you spend, the louder you are shouting: “I’m rich.”
If you buy a Ferrari, you have issues that go well beyond being prepared to invest more than $500,000 in a car that cannot legally hit top gear anywhere in Australia or safely navigate suburban driveways faster than a 1960 Fiat.
For a time Tesla stood alone in both advertising wealth and purring planet-saving street cred. This was a marketer’s triumph: a status symbol badged as a moral triumph. You weren’t just buying a car, you were buying indulgences from the pantheist church.
Being pagan, this is largely a church of the left. The right-wingers are driving Range Rovers and Mercedes G-Wagons to the school drop-off.
Don’t buy this argument? Then consider this: if the Los Angeleno Tesla owner did not buy the car – at least in part – for virtue signalling, then why the sticker disavowing the company owner? The sticker is also advertising. It proves the owner bought the car for all the right reasons, so please don’t key it.
When you think about it, the Tesla is the perfect symbol of the Western world’s “energy transition”: an expensive, materially intensive, performative illusion that offers net-zero benefit to the planet. A monument to motion without progress, as China’s coal-powered electric vehicle industry churns out better, cheaper cars.
The truth is, the Tesla was never saving the planet one commute at a time.
Electricity is only as green as its energy source. Unless you have a solar array capable of charging your car, then in California about 42 per cent of your fuel comes from locally burned or imported natural gas. Nine per cent of it is nuclear.
On mainland Australia’s east coast, your Tesla’s fuel is mostly black coal and brown coal.
It will come as no surprise to learn that Canberra is fast becoming the Tesla capital of Australia. Here the stickers of shame are multiplying as owners fear their peers will see the “T” on their bonnet as screaming “Trump” as loudly as a presidential post on Truth Social.
Happily, the many public servants counted among the ranks of Tesla owners are now spared a daily commute to work because the election underlined the fact that forcing them to go to the office was an abuse of their human rights.
On their rare trips out, the capital’s Tesla drivers no doubt find comfort in the ACT government’s boast that the territory runs on 100 per cent renewable energy.
Alas, this is based on creative accounting, not generation. The territory sits in the middle of the NSW grid, where the dominant fuel is black coal. Its green credentials rest on the annual surrender of renewable energy certificate offsets, and the bookkeeping is opaque.
Welcome to net zero, where what you say matters more than what you do. Governments set targets based on a zombie word: ambition. Only some – such as Australia – are actually trying to hit those targets. The ambition of others is to do nothing. Just like believing buying a Tesla will save the planet, it’s a fraud.
Turns out your electric vehicle has devoured enormous amounts of energy and minerals before you drive it off the showroom floor. The International Energy Agency says a typical EV needs about six times the minerals of a conventional car.
Energy savant Professor Vaclav Smil calculates that a 450kg lithium car battery contains about 11kg of lithium, nearly 14kg of cobalt, 27kg of nickel, more than 40kg of copper and 50kg of graphite, as well as about 181kg of steel, aluminium and plastics.
Getting all of that demands ploughing up a lot of earth to save the planet.
“Supplying these materials for a single vehicle requires processing about 40 tons of ores, and given the low concentration of many elements in their ores, it necessitates extracting and processing about 225 tons of raw materials,” Smil writes.
“And aggressive electrification of road transport would soon require multiplying these needs by tens of millions of units per year!”
To put that in perspective: if all the earth needed to be dug up to extract the ores for one car were piled into a mound of dirt, it would be about the height of a two-storey building and as wide as a tennis court.
So there is a job of work to do here. As of the end of 2023, there were about 1.5 billion light vehicles in the global fleet and only about 2.7 per cent of them were electric.
A submission to a parliamentary inquiry into electric vehicles by expat Australian Simon Michaux of the Geological Survey of Finland, found that to get Australia’s vehicle fleet to 100 per cent electric by 2050 demands an increase “of the order of 770,000 EVs of various vehicle classes, and 650,000 EV charging stations, each year for the next 26 years”.
Surely this trifle can be overcome by government fiat. Or more ambition.
Canadian public policy think tank the Fraser Institute has run the numbers and found that meeting the 2030 targets for electric-vehicle mandates adopted by Western governments would require 388 new mines.
“The sheer scale of mining required to meet EV mandates raises serious questions about the timelines being imposed by governments,” study author Kenneth Green said.
You get the drift. The road ahead is long and the energy needed to build just electric cars will be staggering. And transport is just one element of it. There is nothing green about this revolution.
No matter. We live in the era where performance trumps truth. What counts is not what is real but what we choose to believe.
And believing electric vehicles are better for the planet is yet another article of faith on this religious pilgrimage.
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