EN — LARRY ROMANOFF: The Politics of Electric Cars (EVs)

The Politics of Electric Cars (EVs)

By Larry Romanoff

 

Solar Powered EV. Source

 

Why are the Western countries not flooded with electric vehicles today? The reason is simple: there are some very powerful people who don’t want electric cars. These powerful people control much of the extraction of petroleum as well as most of the marketing, and they also control major auto manufacturers like General Motors and have their hooks deeply into many others. These same people also have a virtual 100% policy control over the governments of the Western countries, as well as much of Eastern Europe and Japan. They also have a virtual monopoly on the Western world’s mass media and, through this control of the microphone, they severely limit the kind and amount of information that is publicly available. From this media monopoly, they can set the agenda and control the debate. They can more or less ensure that the crucial facts and details regarding EVs and auto fuels never come to light, thus preventing us from obtaining anything resembling an accurate picture of the world of private transportation.

 

Home Solar Charging For Car Solar Evse Product on Alibaba.com. Source

 

You should, of course, naturally ask (a) Who are these people? and (b) why don’t they want electric autos to become the world’s default method of transportation? Let’s first deal with (b); the reasons.

 

Entrenched Interests

 

You might loosely want to term this “self-interest” or “self-preservation”. We could accept the first definition, and at least understand the second, but these definitions cannot be excused, primarily due to the vast implications they contain for us all. In simple terms, the self-interest, or even the (financial) self-preservation of a small number of individuals cannot be permitted to take precedence over the welfare of the entire world’s population. Yet, that is precisely what is happening. The entrenched self-interest of a very small number of very powerful people has been dictating the environment and landscape of private transportation for more than 100 years, with calamitous results that are at best only dimly understood by the general public in any country.

 

Auto Parts and Financing

 

One of the main challenges is that the major auto makers, most notably General Motors, derive far more profit from financing vehicle purchases and the sale of auto parts than from the sale of new vehicles. Prior to its bankruptcy, GM was making three times as much profit from both its finance arm and auto parts divisions, than from making and selling cars. Essentially, they discovered that usury and price gouging were each three times more profitable than was manufacturing.

 

While auto companies like GM have very much become “financialised”, the price gouging is by no means immaterial. Replacement parts are priced so high that to assemble a car from parts would cost at least ten times as much as purchasing the vehicle from a dealer. Auto makers like GM have resorted to extreme forms of extortion to protect these unconscionable profit levels. It was obvious to manufacturers everywhere that they could make replacement parts for the major auto brands, sell these parts for far less and still make huge profits. The auto-makers immediately responded by threatening to void the warranty on any car that used replacement parts from another supplier. That act should qualify as criminal extortion, but the auto companies were able to avoid prosecution.

 

There is more here. The auto industry, especially in North America, and again especially General Motors, were renowned for poor quality of manufacture. This was so true that former GM employees testified that auto parts were designed “to last only as long as the warranty period”. Many other observers swore this to be the normal manufacturing strategy: make the parts as cheaply as possible so they required constant maintenance and repeated replacement.

 

Auto dealerships share this price-gouging model, where service and parts sales constitute less than 10% of their revenue but 50% of their profit. The systemic problems here are extremely serious. Electric vehicles have less than half the number of parts as their gasoline-powered relatives, and very few moving parts – almost none of which break or need regular replacement. EVs are more reliable and require much less maintenance or service than do gasoline-powered vehicles. As we all know, it isn’t only the cost of the repairs and replacement parts, but the labor and service charges levied during maintenance and repair, that make gasoline-powered autos so expensive to maintain after a few years. If the Western world were to move to electric cars, this one factor alone would eliminate a major portion of the revenue – and the bulk of the profits – of both manufacturers and their dealers, forcing a massive reorganisation of the entire auto/transportation industry.

    

Below is a diagram for which I have lost the source. It displays some of the parts comprising a gasoline-powered auto, and by no means are all the parts displayed here.

 

Car parts; Internal Combustion Engine

 

Contrast the above photo with this one below of a complete platform for a Volvo EV. The only “moving parts” here are the wheels and suspension, and of course the electric motors that turn. Add a body shell and seats, and you have a car. And there are almost no other moving parts in the vehicle, meaning that almost no items will require either maintenance or replacement. You can see the problem: if 50% or more of profits evaporate overnight, the industry could not survive in its present form.

 

Volvo EV; courtesy Volvo cars

 

The Genuine Threat – Electricity

 

Electric cars are an existential threat to the international bankers in The City of London who are the final beneficial owners of most of the major oil companies and who control in one way or another much of the world’s petroleum extraction, shipping and insuring, as well as holding heavy stakes in the major Western auto makers. Thus, witnessing the trend to electric cars is like watching in slow motion the approach of one’s own funeral procession, one which appears unstoppable. The production and distribution of electricity cannot be controlled by these bankers because there are too many producers of electricity, mostly local or provincial governments who will not sell their infrastructure, and electricity is already widely distributed in almost every conceivable place. If nations turn to electric autos and generate their own electricity, our international bankers will suffer total losses in the trillions of dollars. You can see the urgency felt by these extractive vampires to control the world’s sources of automotive fuel. From all past experience, we already know they will stop at nothing to prevent the emergence of EVs, resurgence in spite of the vast environmental and social damage their products inflict.

 

The False Solution – Hydrogen

 

Around the 1990s, the US auto industry, led by GM and hugely supported by the mass media (the same mass media controlled by these same people), initiated a noisy propaganda campaign to eliminate electric vehicles as much as possible from the public mind and government attention, using the promotion of hydrogen fuel cell development as a fraudulent distraction. Hydrogen is far from a viable alternative for widespread public use, with many serious safety and distribution issues. Some manufacturers have produced concept cars, but we are still decades from a useful implementation which may never occur.

 

I don’t believe hydrogen can ever serve as fuel for other than highly-regulated specific uses. For one thing, hydrogen is extremely flammable and intrinsically lethal, and no amount of science will alter this. Most fires burn yellow and make a lot of smoke, so we know when there is a fire. But hydrogen fires are colorless and thus invisible. The only way you will know if your hydrogen-powered vehicle is on fire is when you suddenly find yourself burning to death. Even worse than buying a Tesla. Simply put, hydrogen is much too dangerous to be used as a common fuel by billions of people in uncontrolled circumstances.

 

I noted above that hydrogen is still far from a viable alternative for auto fuels, with many serious safety and distribution issues, but this is not the real problem. Driving the frantic push to hydrogen fuel cell vehicles is the fact that the only useful source of hydrogen in the quantities necessary for auto fuel is petroleum or, more precisely, natural gas – methane. If these few people can force the conversion from gasoline to hydrogen, they will not only avoid the massive and costly restructuring looming for the auto industry with the change to electric cars, but will continue forever to control the entire worldwide production and distribution system for vehicle fuels. They were so desperate that some years ago Toyota was bludgeoned into offering unlimited use of its thousands of fuel-cell patents without license fees, in the hope of kick-starting the process, in their words hoping to “spur development and introduction of innovative fuel cell technologies”. This small group of wealthy criminal bankers was forcing – and funding – an enormous push for cooperation between all possible parties, in what they have called “unconventional collaboration”, in an attempt to instill so much speed into the process as to overwhelm and kill electric automobiles and other forms of auto fuel.

 

There is also the aspect of economic and political control, which is not a small thing. The small cabal of European bankers and industrialists who beneficially control most of the world’s international oil companies are on public record as stating that “If you control the oil, you control the world’s economies”. This is what is at stake; it is not merely their petroleum profits but their political and economic control of nations, that are severely threatened by the move away from petroleum fuels. Consider the fierce economic attack on Russia and Venezuela in late 2014 and 2015 by the dramatic depression in the price of oil, meant almost exclusively to collapse Russia’s petroleum-based economy. Such ‘sanctions’ would be equally successful if the world moves to methane-based hydrogen auto fuel, but would be futile with electric cars.

 

The matter is even more serious than mere control of the economies of other nations. The US military is counting on the power of its naval fleet to cut off China’s petroleum supply routes in the event of a war. A military without fuel is no military; all those ships and planes become immobile, useless hardware, as Japan discovered in 1940 when the US engineered a total embargo on oil to Japan, setting in motion the strike on Pearl Harbor. If China moves to fully electric autos, its domestic petroleum supplies might be sufficient for the military, thereby denying the US a major advantage. Thus, the push to hydrogen fuels is as much about political and military domination as about bankers’ profits.

 

In terms of environmental effect, the production of hydrogen from methane is more damaging than is driving gasoline-powered cars, since the hydrogen extraction process actually releases more CO2 into the atmosphere than does the burning of gasoline, on a per-liter basis. It is also more expensive to produce than is gasoline. In addition, hydrogen is much less efficient than direct battery power, so fuel cell autos will be almost twice as expensive as pure electric cars. The only advantages of a fuel cell are the prospect of longer range and shorter refueling times, but battery development will no doubt remove these differences in time.

 

There is a further problem in that for at least the past 40 years the main scaffold propping up the US dollar is that of pricing the world’s petroleum exclusively in US dollars. If the world moves fully and quickly to electric cars, the price of oil will collapse with the current artificial demand for the US dollar right behind it, settling somewhere around $0.30, making the US the world’s richest banana republic. This is such a sensitive issue that when the US agreed to pay Saudi Arabia the much higher oil prices in the early 1970s, a condition was that all petroleum would be priced and sold exclusively in US dollars and that to do otherwise “would be considered an act of war.”

 

Today, China is building huge numbers of pure electric vehicles, filling not only Chinese roads, but increasingly being exported to other nations and even building EV factories in other countries. The demand for EVs is astonishing, suggesting that the entire world’s public is ready for this transition. But these bankers and financiers in The City of London are not giving up without a further fight. Indeed, it seems they have only just begun their war on electric vehicles and their sales promotion for hydrogen-fueled auto fires.

 

In early 2025, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen promised a transformative clean industry agreement, that Brussels officials see as key to challenging China in “the global battle for supremacy in clean technologies”. But it isn’t a battle for “clean technologies”; it’s a battle for control of the production and sale of transportation fuels. Their plans include creative ways to “streamline the gas market” and to effectively eliminate taxation on companies producing hydrogen as transportation fuel. You can’t be clearer than that: make it very easy to access natural gas and produce hydrogen from it tax-free. This is called “decarbonization” instead of “surreptitious push for global power”. [1]

 

Their second thrust is to be the creation of “lead markets”, which would be meant to “stimulate demand” for hydrogen. They also intend to “boost financing” and “promote global markets and international partnerships”, thus rallying all sympathetic parties into one last big push to have hydrogen replace gasoline as auto and transportation fuel, and to kill EVs forever. The EU documents reflect von der Leyen’s earlier comments that the EU puppet-masters will not give up easily and plan to “stay the course” on climate action. But of course, this has nothing to do with climate action, nor about saving the environment. It is all about financial power and political control. The idealized nonsense about a “90% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2040”, is just foolish propaganda for the sleeping masses to believe these people care when they don’t care. The most sensible way to eliminate toxic emissions is to ban gasoline-powered autos and trucks.

 

According to various EU reports, “Hydrogen is expected to play a key role in a future climate-neutral economy, enabling emission-free transport.” [2] The report tells us further that “Almost all EU Member States recognise the important role of hydrogen in their national energy and climate plans for the 2021-2030 period. About half have explicit hydrogen-related objectives, focused primarily on transport and industry.”

 

According to another EU report, “Renewable hydrogen has the potential to play a significant role in the energy system as a versatile energy carrier and feedstock that can help decarbonise a variety of applications in areas such as transportation, and electricity generation.” [3] You may want to read that a second time, to be sure you understand what they are really proposing. The puppet-masters at the EU are not only stating that hydrogen should be used as transportation fuel, but also to be burned in the generation of the electricity that would power EVs if they happen to win this war. In case you haven’t noticed, the word “transport” appears in every statement about hydrogen made by the bankers behind the EU Parliament and Ms. von der Leyen. The EU reports make vague concessionary mentions of “industry” or “manufacturing”, but it is clear their entire intent is toward transportation fuel. And the environment be damned, along with electric cars.

 

How Did We Get Here?

 

This story begins more than 100 years ago, the same battles being fought then as now. I will include here some extracts from two earlier articles on this topic, similar versions which cover all the elements in more detail. [4] [5] I will provide here only a summary of the history of this enormous travesty that is still being inflicted on the world.

 

In the early 1900s when the US was busy industrialising, mass public transportation consisting of electric trains and trams was filling much of the nation’s needs. Autos were rapidly evolving at the same time, but gasoline-powered transportation, whether by private auto or mass transit, was on its way out. Almost all of the nation’s local and inter-city train transport was electric, and electric automobiles were rapidly gaining ground over their gas-powered rivals. By 1900, nearly 40% of all US cars were electric, and so popular that New York City had a fleet of electric taxis. Early electric cars outperformed their gas competitors and people liked them because they didn’t have the smell, noise, or vibration of gasoline cars, were easier to operate, and didn’t require cranking or gear changing. It appeared a certainty that electric vehicles were the wave of the future, but then within only about three years the transportation landscape irreversibly changed and electric vehicles, like the dinosaurs, suffered a fatal climate change and died. This is why:

 

At that time, General Motors and the major oil companies were facing a multiple crisis. The auto market had already been saturated and sales growth so anemic that in the decade prior to the Depression, General Motors had lost enormous amounts of money, $65 million in one year alone and large amounts in later years. From 1927 to 1933, sales of GM’s main brands, Chevrolet and Buick, dropped by 50% and 80% respectively. GM was at the end of its rope and heading for bankruptcy before the end of the 1930s, oil company revenues and profits sharing this dismal future.

 

But then suddenly GM came to life with a vengeance and virtually remade the social and transportation landscape of North America. Those who controlled GM realised their only hope for salvation was to eliminate their one rival – mass public transport, and hatched a plan that would forever change the course of American society itself. One hundred years ago the people behind General Motors and John Rockefeller’s (Rothchild-financed) Standard Oil, using very large sums of money and every form of deception, coercion, extortion and intimidation short of murder, singlehandedly killed the US electric auto and train industry by buying up and destroying the rolling stock of almost 1,000 US railroads and tramways, almost totally killing off mass public transit in the US.

 

GM scrapped streetcars

 

But how could this happen? Do you have any idea how much money it would take to buy up all the electric locomotives and tram cars contained in 1,000 railroads? And it wasn’t only the rolling stock; GM purchased all the rights of way through which the railroads and tram systems passed, then chopped up those lands into small pieces and resold them so that the rights of way could never be reassembled to permit electric railroads again.

 

Understand that this massive expense was not like spending billions on the construction of a new factory that could be expected to produce high profits within a year or two. All that rolling stock was simply scrapped, and the money lost forever. But GM was essentially bankrupt, so where would this money come from, to not only remain in production, but to embark on this extravagant venture that had no possible revenue or profit? The required sums would be enormous, extraordinary, countless billions in today’s dollars.

 

No one in the US had this kind of loose cash during the Great Depression, and certainly not to simply trash and throw it away. The only source of funds of this magnitude would have been the Jewish bankers in the City of London. Since that time, GM has been essentially a criminal organisation, specialising in money rather than automobiles, with an almost insane level of greed on occasion, exhibiting all the typical signs of Khazar/Mafia organised crime including bullying, extortion, fraud, deliberate quality degradation, and an astonishing contempt for the lives of its customers. This unconscionable sabotage of America’s transportation infrastructure by a few powerful people evidences their criminal ability to effect sweeping changes in public life and culture, without public accountability or debate, or even awareness.

 

When California legislated that a percentage of all vehicles sold in the state had to be electric, GM not only fought for years, but eventually sued the state, joined in the lawsuit by the US government itself, and forced California to back off. When their lawsuit was successful, GM immediately repossessed all the electric vehicles it had sold, and crushed them for scrap. That was the second time that GM killed the electric car.

 

There was another matter, relating to battery capacity and range. A firm named Ovonics had developed new NiMH technology that would have increased the range of electric vehicles to at least 400-500 Kms between charges, thereby making private electric transportation possible on a mass scale. GM immediately bought – at a very high price – the exclusive worldwide patent rights to this NiMH technology and locked it in a closet, refusing to license any firms to produce these batteries for auto use. GM later sold these patent rights to US-based Texaco-Chevron oil, who even today refuses access to this technology. NiMH has proven to be the best battery for plug-in electric cars, but manufacturers have been forced into lithium technology (which is about 6 times as expensive and with no recycle value) because of GM’s determination to prevent electric autos from ever becoming a reality. And so, for the third time, General Motors successfully killed the electric car.

 

It is tragic that electric automobiles were killed off so early in their life. Had that transition been permitted to occur at its inception, we would have now had more than 100 years of intense battery research and development and incalculable benefits to the world’s environment. We can only guess at the possible results. Our electric autos would today easily have 1,000 miles of range; we would have electric airplanes; small drones and flying taxis might have emerged 50 years earlier.

 

The following quote is so compellingly true it should be engraved on the mind of every citizen:

 

“The long-term negative effects of this conspiracy of some of America’s most ruthless corporations are literally beyond calculation. The forced switch from environmentally-friendly public transit to the private car and diesel buses results in squandering irreplaceable petroleum resources and all the murder and mayhem which has gone to secure or steal oil around the world. The conspiracy to destroy electric autos and electric mass transport has resulted in vastly increased pollution and, ultimately, in climatic change. The engineered obsession with the private car has led to millions of excess deaths and injuries in automobile accidents, hundreds of billions of dollars in debt for Americans and a catastrophic change in the way American cities have developed, with the devastation of urban neighborhoods, the destruction of urban small business and countless other economic and sociological effects.” (Making the World Safe for Hypocrisy)

 

A Brief Note on the Great Depression

 

It would help you to obtain a full perspective of this war against electric cars, and understand that it was really a war against people. The Great Depression was a worldwide phenomenon, but initiated in the US by the bankers from The City of London who control the US FED. Perhaps only 50% of the depression was financial; the balance was environmental, but the combination was a human catastrophe. During this period of perhaps ten years, few people had a job. Farmlands were devastated by drought; crops withered and died and anything remaining was eaten by hordes of insects. Countless millions of farm animals died and no one counted the human carnage. Few families had enough to eat. There are many recorded instances of families offering to sell (or even give away) their children because they had no money to feed them. The poverty was unimaginable. I am not fond of Americans today, but one’s heart must ache when witnessing the misery of Americans during the 1930s.

 

 

 

 

 

And yet it was directly in the midst of this almost unimaginable human suffering that the psychopathic gangsters in The City of London chose to totally destroy the entire public infrastructure of the US, merely to protect their petroleum profits. The inhumanity of this, the savagery, is almost incomprehensible. But they did it and, by rewriting history, they have escaped condemnation.

 

There are two related articles you may care to read. One is titled “The Richest Man in the World”, [7] which will add much perspective to your understanding of the people behind these events and circumstances. The second is titled, “The City of London”. [8] Both contain information you will not find anywhere else, and should be considered mandatory reading for those wanting to understand our world today.

 

Epilogue

 

So, why isn’t the Western world flooded with electric cars? Because the Jewish bankers in The City of London don’t want them. And that’s the whole story.

 

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Mr. Romanoff’s writing has been translated into 34 languages and his articles posted on more than 150 foreign-language news and politics websites in more than 30 countries, as well as more than 100 English language platforms. Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West. He is one of the contributing authors to Cynthia McKinney’s new anthology ‘When China Sneezes’. (Chap. 2 — Dealing with Demons).

His full archive can be seen at

https://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/ + https://www.moonofshanghai.com/

He can be contacted at: 2186604556@qq.com

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NOTES

[1] Leaked document: EC plans to replace fossil fuels with hydrogen and reduce carbon emissions by 90%

[2] EU hydrogen policy – European Parliament

https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/BRIE/2021/689332/EPRS_BRI(2021)689332_EN.pdf

[3] EU rules for renewable hydrogen

https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/BRIE/2023/747085/EPRS_BRI(2023)747085_EN.pdf

[4] The American Love Affair with the Automobile”

[5] Americans and Automobiles: Capitalism and Propaganda

[6] The History of the Electric Car

https://www.energy.gov/articles/history-electric-car

[7] The Richest Man in the World

[8] The City of London

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This article may contain copyrighted material, the use of which has not been specifically authorised by the copyright owner. This content is being made available under the Fair Use doctrine, and is for educational and information purposes only. There is no commercial use of this content.

 

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