Extreme cold turns electric vehicle charging stations into ‘car graveyards’ in Chicago

Extreme cold turns electric vehicle charging stations into ‘car graveyards’ in Chicago
By: Lifesite News Posted On: January 18, 2024 View: 9

CHICAGO (LifeSiteNews) — Electric vehicles have been rendered immobile in Chicago as frigid winter temperatures blast the Upper Midwest. The news came as proponents of the climate change agenda push for a switch toward electric and away from traditional combustion engine vehicles.

“Public charging stations have turned into car graveyards over the past couple of days,” Fox 32 Chicago reported as the Prairie State endures intense winter weather that has seen temperatures dip below-zero degrees Fahrenheit.

RELATED: Wind, solar power nearly leave Alberta without electricity as temperature drops below -40

Fox 32 reported that “dozens of Tesla owners” were “trying desperately to power up their cars at the Tesla supercharging station in Oak Brook,” a suburb of Chicago. “[L]ong lines and abandoned cars” were also observable “at scores of other charging stations around the Chicago area.”

While a local automotive expert informed the outlet that some of the problem redounds to user error and that electric vehicle owners need to “precondition the battery … up to the optimal temperature to accept a fast charge” when contending with freezing conditions, the issue does point to some of the problems with switching from traditional fossil-fuel-based vehicles and toward electric cars.

Additional complications posed by a switch to EVs include currently limited availability of EV charging stations, high vehicle prices, and extraneous costs related to the cars. While proponents of the vehicles tout lower overall operating costs, an analysis last year from the Texas Public Policy Foundation found that total costs to power an electric vehicle amounts to an equivalent of about $17.33 per gallon for a traditional car. 

Electric vehicle advocates say the equivalent cost is more like $1.21 per gallon, but Center Square reported that the study authors argue that estimate “excludes the real costs born by taxpayers for subsidies, utility ratepayers for energy investments, and non-electric vehicle owners for mandate-and-environmental-credit-driven higher vehicle costs, which they say total $48,698 per EV.”

Regardless, the push to trade out traditional vehicles for electric cars has ramped up in recent years and continues apace.

In October 2022, the European Union struck a deal to ban the sale of new combustion engine vehicles in the 27-country bloc by 2035. The report came after the U.S. states of California and New York already moved to halt new sales of fossil fuel-reliant cars and trucks by the same deadline, with over a dozen other states expected to follow suit.

Fit for 55, also known as the “European Green Deal,” will drastically reduce and then effectively ban the sale of new gas-powered cars by aiming to slash greenhouse gas emissions by 55% by 2030 and 100% by 2035, Euronews reported in late October.

Left-leaning states in the U.S. had preempted some of Europe’s green energy maneuvers by opting to phase out combustion engine vehicles by 2035 even before the approval of Fit for 55.

READ: EU follows California and New York with plan to ban sale of new gas-powered cars by 2035

In addition to instituting a plan to phase out traditional cars and trucks, California even moved to outlaw sales of personal gas-powered heaters, despite the state’s struggles to keep its electric grid functioning thanks to outdated infrastructure inefficiently offset by less reliable “clean energy” sources like wind and solar.

“This is the most impactful step our state can take to fight climate change,” California Gov. Gavin Newsom said in a press statement, arguing that gas-powered cars “pollute the air,” contribute to asthma, “make wildfires worse,” and “melt glaciers or raise sea levels threatening our cherished beaches and coastlines.”

New York also flipped the kill switch on future combustion engine vehicle sales in September 2022. Democrat Gov. Kathy Hochul ordered the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation “to take major regulatory action that will require all new passenger cars, pickup trucks, and SUVs sold in New York State to be zero emissions by 2035.”

The shift to “clean energy” exemplified in California, New York, and Europe has been a central plank of the global left-wing climate agenda and a major component of the WEF’s “Great Reset,” which “seeks to ‘push the reset button’ on the global economy” and “reimagine capitalism.”

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