Dear Editor,
We in B.C. are $66 billion in debt, but no problem, we can just tax, spend, and subsidize our way to prosperity.
There is no money for schools, but let’s borrow another $10.6 million tax/debt and give it to our friends, in the name of environmentalism.
Clean Energy Vehicles (CEVs) are spun as incentives, rather than subsidies, to ease your suspicious pain for new electric/hybrid or hydrogen fuel cell vehicles – and $5,000 off list price goes to the new car dealer, $6,000 for a hydrogen CEV.
Then, there are the investment subsidies in the charging stations infrastructure around the province.
Electric cars don’t emit CO2 on the road, but the energy used for their manufacture and battery-charges far negate any benefits.
Yet another study confirms that almost 50 per cent of lifetime CO2 emissions come from the energy used to produce the electric car, especially the battery. Compare that to the manufacture of a gas-powered car at 17 per cent of its lifetime CO2 emissions.
The electric car, fresh off the production line, has already used up the equivalent of 128,700 kilometres of travel emissions, more than twice that of the gas car.
Without subsidies, electric vehicles would not be selling on their own merits, as they are inefficient in cold Canadian winters.
The electric/hybrid is merely a status symbol that has about a 15-year average payback period.
People who purchase electric/hybrids are higher income earners, so through taxes, it’s the struggling lower-income class subsidizing the more affluent class.
Roland Seguin, Langley