If you are in agriculture, you know that growing food using older pesticides and other inputs has a cost - more economic expense and more environmental stress. California is the only state that requires all pesticides, including those that lobbyists get put on the organic list, to be specified. Copper sulfate is certified organic because it is old, not because it is less toxic. It is known to be more toxic to aquatic invertebrates and have greater environmental persistence than products like atrazine.(1)
To be effective you need to use 400% more of the legacy organic stuff. All for a tiny sliver of the public.
It is much the same with electric cars. Without subsidies and mandates, the industry would collapse. And without 5 wealthy states it would never have existed. We're all forced to pay higher costs - especially in California where gasoline and utility rates are among the highest in the nation due to government mandates to pass along the costs to poor people - all so the literal 1% who can afford an average $65,000 cost.
It is feeding the rich, and California, in its war on ride-sharing companies, wants to make the problem worse by forcing gig drivers to buy electric cars - but not tax the super-rich to pay more for their Teslas. Yet though all California consumers pay, electric cars are less than 2% of all vehicles on our road - and nationwide they are only 0.6% of all registered vehicles.
Democrats sometimes wonder why poor people vote Republican and the same argument can be made for why poor Democrats gush about electric cars. Both groups are being aspirational. But anyone in America can get rich if they try, and electric cars in their current form will never save the environment.
NOTE:
(1) Copper sulfate toxicity, and our effort to get all pesticides on food listed after environmentalists lobbied for only conventional ones to be stated, is why they dropped their effort to create more awareness about competitors and went back to filing lawsuits. They don't want organic food shoppers to know how many pesticides their food has.
