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Biden’s Inflation Increase Act intends to spend $7.5 billion taxpayer money to build charging stations for electric car owners. Two years later, no EV chargers were built. And that’s good.
The modern sheen of the electric car is running into the medieval state of American cities.
Seattle began installing dozens of EV chargers only for thieves to show up and raid at least eight of the charging cables for copper requiring thousands of dollars worth of repairs.
In response, the city is planning to put the chargers high up on poles that can only be lowered by an app. This will cost even more money and in an environment in which brazen copper thieves toppled an FM radio tower in Oklahoma, isn’t likely to deter the criminals.
EV owners who suffered from copper theft while leaving their cars to be charged in public places were told by the Seattle Police Department to “stay with the vehicle if you can while it’s being charged,” Considering that it can take an electric car hours to charge, that’s gonna be a wait.
In Oakhurst, CA , every cable was cut on a Tesla ‘supercharger’ station almost as soon as it had been set up. At a nonprofit in Van Nuys, 38 cables were stolen. Since the thieves rarely see any real punishment in cities where property crime has effectively been legalized, it’s getting worse.
The problem has become commonplace enough that Biden’s Department of Energy rolled out a special guide to stopping charging cable theft by warning that “the theft of EV charging cables can lead to a decrease in the use of EVs, which can have a negative impact on the environment.” Proposals from the DOE include charging your electric car at home.
Not that only charging electric cars at home is enough because thieves have taken to going after charging cables right in driveways as the EVs are being charged overnight.
Charging cables for the already overpriced electric cars can cost over $1,000.
Thieves on bicycles ride from suburban house to house, seizing cables and riding away with them. It’s estimated that an experienced crook can make off with one cable in 13 seconds.
And so electric car owners are warned to make sure that they lock their car in the garage. Then they’re told to lock their cables with padlocks and make sure their insurance covers their cables.
The incredible convenience of electric cars is now such that owners can only charge them while locked in their garages, with a padlock on the cable and the cable under the car’s wheel.
But it’s not just Teslas. Copper thieves are coming for every piece of ‘green’ infrastructure.
In Fresno, CA, $100,000 in copper wire was stolen from a solar farm, but wind farms, because they’re often far away from people, are an even more attractive target for copper thieves. And wind turbines have massive amounts of copper in them, making them even more desirable.
Copper thieves cut into a turbine, haul out cables and then drive away causing as much as millions of dollars in damage. Such thefts have been reported from Arizona to Minnesota to Iowa to Massachusetts, Internationally in the UK, there was a 48% increase in solar and cable ‘green’ copper theft, and 5,000 major solar thefts across Europe.
But where is all that copper going? The answer is appropriately green. It’s being recycled.
After the copper is stolen, it’s taken to recycling centers, many of which boast of their “sustainability” and contributions to the planet. There the copper is resold, often to China, which spurred the original copper boom, and transformed into more green energy equipment that the copper thieves will steal and then recycle to continue the cycle of environmental crime.
Green energy gear, from EV charging cables to solar panels and wind turbines, require a lot of copper. This demand for copper raises the price of copper and drives copper thefts.
Recycling soda and beer cans depended on homeless people digging through the trash and hauling giant garbage bags full of cans to be exchanged for 5 cents each. Copper theft is a more advanced version of the same game. The perpetrators are often addicts stealing copper and turning it over to organized criminals or selling it to recyclers and buying fentanyl.
Videos have documented trucks picking up ‘harvested’ copper and providing fentanyl.
That’s the kind of dysfunctional misery that the green revolution rests on and always has. The recycling junkie thieves aren’t just looking through the trash for Coke cans, they’re tearing up copper wire, but that’s a difference in scale, not in substance. Recycling was always theft.
Biden’s Department of Energy claims that looting electric cars is a threat to the planet. “EVs are an essential part of the transition to a more sustainable future, and any obstacles to their adoption must be addressed,” it warns. But it doesn’t call for cracking down on crime.
And it’s the electric cars and other green tech that’s driving the copper theft wave.
Electric cars use four times as much copper as real cars. One Tesla needs a mile of copper just to hook up the battery packs. Solar panels need 5.5 tons of copper for each megawatt. A wind farm can use as much as 7,000 tons of copper. There’s nothing ‘green’ about any of this.
Green energy demands a lot of mining and then outsources that to Communist China. And China helps the cartels manufacture fentanyl which they trade to junkies for copper.
From the Chinese Communist perspective, it’s a beautiful virtuous cycle.
The zombies they create steal our copper, send it to them and they resell it to us. The more we go ‘green’, the more copper we need, and the more China makes money by selling us ‘green’. And the more Americans it can turn into fentanyl zombies to steal it back to China.
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The post Green Crime: An Electric Car, Wind and Solar Crime Wave appeared first on Energy News Beat.
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