What is in doubt—in fact, what won’t happen—is realizing the aspiration of an accelerating transition to an EV-dominated future. Separating aspiration from reality wouldn’t matter if this were just a debate between advocates and skeptics making private bets. This debate matters because hundreds of billions of dollars in public spending will be deployed via the misnamed Inflation Reduction Act to push EVs into markets—and because a proposed rule from the EPA, with comparable legislation in more than a dozen states, will make it impossible to buy a new car unless it’s an EV within the decade. The unprecedented magnitude of government intervention gives EV enthusiasts confidence that it will all “spur consumer demand.”

But government diktats and largesse can’t change reality. The putative EV revolution will stall out for three main reasons, and not because of “dead robots” or the other road bumps in recent news. What will happen is that we’ll run out of money, we’ll run out of copper, and car drivers will run out of patience in putting up with inconveniences. But before unbundling these truths about the practical limits of EV dominance, we have to deal with some of the myths that anchor all EV enthusiasms.

[This is a fairly comprehensive run-down on the known knowns and known unknowns around an EV transition, but it doesn’t address the biggest known unknown: finding the power to charge all those batteries. That may be a bit outside the scope of Mills’ argument, but it’s really the most glaring flaw in the Green New Deal. We’re not producing enough electricity to keep up with demand now, especially in states like California that forbids fossil-fuel-based generation. Rolling brownouts have become the norm in peak seasons, and that’s with most cars still running on gasoline. — Ed]