“The electric car seems to be the ultimate in sustainability. It is only in appearance“. Who has read Federico Rampini’s latest book, entitled “Stopping Beijing. Understanding China to save the West ”, he knows that the writer and famous journalist reserves this reflection for Tesla, who, led by its founder Elon Musk, is leading the electric mobility revolution. There has never been a lack of controversy surrounding the real share of sustainability of electric cars in general, and Rampini also agrees to this discourse: cars will be truly zero-emission when the entire supply chain around them will also be zero-emission.
“First of all, as long as the structure of the utilities that produce energy does not radically change, the electric car just displaces pollution from urban centers to the areas where the power plants are located. If the latter continue to run on coal or natural gas, the electric car pollutes by consuming those fossil energies, even if the CO2 emissions do not leave the engine in the form of exhaust gas. – explains the author of the text – Then there is another type of environmental impact: the devastation created to extract rare minerals that are used in electric batteries and the landfills where these generators, which are anything but recyclable, end up at the end of their productive use. The impact of the electric car is the tip of the iceberg of a gigantic ideological imposture ”. And Tesla, according to Rampini, is a emblematic case of this narrative.
The author of the book also traces the stages of long-distance war between the United States and China which saw Tesla as its protagonist, accused by the Chinese government of espionage activities. The Palo Alto automaker has become collateral victim of the escalation of tension between the two superpowers: the Beijing government had decided to hit this company symbol of American technology, making an accusation that in many respects follows the campaign that in reverse the United States had conducted against Huawei technology for telecoms fifth generation or 5G. The move made this time by China, however, seems to have hit the mark: the Asian country also wants to dominate the global electric car market and an American competitor like Tesla can represent a big problem, so much so that after the accusation by the Beijing government sales of Elon Musk’s company in China have dramatically declined.
According to Rampini, the environmental rhetoric of governments, which has become a liturgy, hides a reality: China and the United States are convinced that the next war for the primacy in strategic technologies will concern this area, and in particular the electric car. Both countries want to have world leadership, which means having control of the entire production cycle. “In my generation, when we were young, the ABC of geopolitics required us to know the world maps of oil wells: they were the red lines of the clashes between powers – explains the author – For our children and grandchildren, it is urgent to discover the maps of lithium, palladium, and the rare minerals used for electric car batteries. One of the reasons why there is a turning point on the issue of the Green Economy, therefore, is that it constitutes the field on which the two superpowers will face: it is a question of strategic primacy, another theater on which the second cold war takes place“.
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