President Reagan had a great time telling funny stories about life in the Soviet Union. His stories, repeated many times, had the function, like tales, of constructing a certain idea of the world. Through the president’s humor, everyone understood that the Soviet system was rotten, while avoiding questioning the one in which they all lived, too happy to be at least on the side of the laughing.
Reagan said that, among the Soviets, a delivery delay of several years was required before an automobile was delivered to its purchaser. Ten years of waiting, said the American president. “In ten years, should we come in the morning or in the afternoon to pick up our car? asked the Soviet citizen in the story. What importance can it have, replied the manager, since it is so long away? “It’s because the plumber comes in the morning,” replied the buyer played by Reagan… And his audience laughed.
The other day on the radio, in a telephone forum at Nathalie Normandeau, listeners hastened to call to speak with a pope of the electric car. Numerous citizens explained to him that they had acquired one. They were waiting for him. Two years of waiting, in several cases. Sometimes more.
In 1988, at the end of the Reagan era, 500 million cars were on the road in the world, twice as many vehicles as in 1970. Today, the planet has 1.4 billion. At this rate, there will be 3 billion cars in 2050.
For a century, cars have increasingly destroyed the space of cities. They take up as much space as possible. They cause 1.3 million deaths every year. Not to mention the consequences of traffic jams, pollution, repairs, fines, all this orgy of consumption that they generate.
Look at what the automotive industry spends despite everything to convince you that its cars will bring you closer to nature, freedom, autonomy, independence! This industry is ready to do anything to give you a clear conscience, while glad that you are dumb enough to believe it.
The age of fossil fuel belongs to the XXe century. He is behind us. Within a few years, all cars will have to be powered by electricity, say various governments, while continuing to fund the steady expansion of the road network and urban sprawl as before. The delirious project of the third link of the CAQ – 6.5 billion dollars of public funds to gain ten minutes between Lévis and Quebec – is to be located in this stride.
Clean, electric cars? They require as many materials as the others. After a few years, if you haven’t been convinced to upgrade to a newer model, your Tesla or similar car will need a new battery. Replacement cost: between $15,000 and $20,000. It’s that the nickel, lithium, cobalt and other rare metals needed to make these batteries are expensive. Their extraction is extremely polluting. At a time when thousands of dreadful charging stations are being added to the streets to feed these cars, we never wonder if all this, in the end, is not the pursuit of the same delirium, that of transport individual carried out by means that are hardly different and not necessarily less polluting than before.
In 2008, during the financial crisis, the car giants were almost all pulled out of bankruptcy by massive inflows of public funds. In the United States, Presidents Bush and Obama granted aid totaling $42 billion to the automobile industry to boost its growth. This continues today, this time under the guise of vehicle electrification.
If you have the means to buy yourself an Audi, a BMW, a Tesla, in short electric vehicles at more than $65,000 that are not sober, why should the state coffers give you 13 $000 in grant? These luxurious individual vehicles, financed for the sole benefit of a few, also give you the right to drive on reserved lanes, even when you are alone in your car. As a bonus, they allow you to park in the best places in town. Electric is chic. All the more so when the private sector is thus subsidized by the public.
Meanwhile, Quebec continues to be poor in terms of public transit, both in the city and in the countryside. 40 years ago, my little village was served by bus and train. Nothing now, as in many places.
The CAQ Minister Éric Caire, former MP for Mario Dumont’s ADQ, this great admirer of the Reagan era, went so far as to say that he would fight to the “last drop of blood” in favor of the third link. The fight of his life, in other words, is for the automobile.
During his studies, reported in 2005 The ADQ letterMr. Caire had dropped out of university to better devote himself to his passion for role-playing games, in particular Dungeons and Dragons. Did he continue to live in a parallel world where his blood can flow in the name of any nonsense?
It cannot be said so easily of François Bonnardel, the Minister of Transport in title, that he is not qualified to defend the same ideas. After all, Mr. Bonnardel has solid experience in transportation. He was a used car salesman at Sweetsburg Auto in Granby and manager of a windshield repair business there.
In this poor collective horizon, the fabricated story of the greening of our travels thanks to the unbridled consumption of electric vehicles does not hold water. Maybe it’s high time we considered more public transit projects before we run out of lithium to power the batteries of all those sad electric cars.