The promise of electric vehicles was once very strong. We were told they would eventually cost around the same as their gas-powered counterparts. We were told availability of public charging stations would be sufficient to keep them going. We were told charging times would be comparable to filling up a tank of gas.
Those promises were made in the early-90s and the projections to achieve those goals were set for a decade away at the time, right around the turn of the millennium. Two decades after EVs were supposed to be practical, we’re not even close to seeing any of those promises kept.
But that’s not stopping automakers from succumbing to public and political pressure and attempting to force the issue. According to the LA Times:
Automakers have announced a whopping $526-billion collective investment in electric vehicles through 2026, more than double the amount they mapped out over a similar forward time frame a couple years ago.
Because the industry isn’t doubling its total capital spending, all that investment in EVs — tallied by consulting firm AlixPartners — will come at the expense of development dollars for new and redesigned internal combustion engine vehicles.
Makes sense, right? The hot growth is in EVs. But hang on. General Motors has said it aspires to go all electric by 2035, and other companies are saying 2040 or later. That means consumers will be able to buy a brand-new gasoline-burning vehicle for 15 or 20 more years.
If models running on fuel will be available that far into the future, but most of the investment is going into EVs, auto dealers will be selling some very stale sets of wheels in the coming years.
What will those cars look like? For starters, automakers will not be investing in sprucing up their powertrains. Engines and transmissions are going to get long in the tooth now that automakers can see a point at which they’ll be phasing them out altogether.
Changes to powertrains will be done for reasons of efficiency and to meet tougher emissions rules, not to make cars faster or smoother.
Styling also could take a back seat. As carmakers watch sales of their combustion models decline, they’re more likely to tweak on the margins, rather than go through the rigmarole of complete redesigns. Mark Wakefield, who runs AlixPartners’ auto industry practice, said some vehicles could get the kind of freshening that costs $100 million or so. All-new models tend to cost $1 billion or more.
Bank of America Global Research recently forecast in its closely watched Car Wars report that by 2026, the U.S. market will have about 135 EVs models for sale and an equal number of internal combustion vehicles.
If automakers spend less on their traditional models, those cars could eventually become more of a bargain hunter’s option for consumers who can’t afford EVs or don’t have plentiful access to charging infrastructure.
This could also mean some interim pain both for automakers and their suppliers, who will start to struggle as sales volumes drop. AlixPartners estimates it could cost the big manufacturers and their Tier 1 suppliers $70 billion between now and 2030 to either fund new sources of internal combustion vehicle parts or help vendors survive the transition.
It isn’t exactly a rosy picture, and lest we forget this is the extremely woke LA Times trying their best to paint this move by automakers as a positive.
The reality is this: We’re likely at least three decades away from having the technology, resources, and infrastructure to make electric vehicles truly practical. They’re being sold on a series of lies, and it’s not just climate change alarmists who are spreading falsehoods. Check out this very telling Twitter thread revealing how much a lawmaker “saved” by commuting with an EV:
1/3
Payne: EV or $5 gas? Tracking Sen. Stabenow's Chevy Bolt EUV journey to Washington, D.C. https://t.co/qTSihKPj3q via @detroitnews— Sandy 〽️ (@RightGlockMom) July 9, 2022
3/3
Once gas dips below $4.25/gallon, Deb is operating at a loss in her "let them eat cake" trip back to Washington.Finally, we DO NOT HAVE the grid to support everyone making this dumb vehicle choice.
Blackouts predicted.— Sandy 〽️ (@RightGlockMom) July 9, 2022
As a conservative environmentalist who embraces nuclear and who believes we can ween ourselves off of fossil fuels in the next couple of centuries, the notion of forcing this green agenda today is disgusting to me.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
