Imagine That!

Tuesday, December 2, 2025

It’s funny how things work out.  What we think will never happen does and what we think should happen never materializes.  That’s one of the reasons the social engineering our government too often attempts these days is almost universally a bad idea.  We think we know how things will work out, but we are almost always wrong.  It’s like Dirty Harry said.

Chernobyl – a presumed waste land.  And yet, last year stories emerged of cancer resistant wolves in the region.  Now we are finding strains of fungus that thrive on the radiation.  (There is a really good 1950’s B-movie in that, it’s a shame they don’t make them anymore.  But I digress.)  The so-called “fragile” ecosystem, whatever ecosystem we may be talking about, is anything but.  It is highly adaptable even to the most extreme of conditions.  Speaking of B-movies (maybe I didn’t digress?), the Jurassic movie series that is the modern day version of B-movies started as a film adaptation of a very scientific and philosophically insightful book by Michael Crichton.  In the original film, Spielberg did manage to capture Crichton’s essential point, before the mayhem ensued, in this speech by Jeff Goldblum – “Life, uh…finds a way.”

It is wholly unremarkable that life in the Chernobyl exclusion zone is adapting to conditions there.  It should be expected.  Instead, we find ourselves standing around in wonder, proclaiming “Imagine that!”

That phrase of befuddlement also will soon appear on the lips of Democrats and their allied eco-warriors everywhere as electric vehicles fade into niche market obscurity.  The latest:

Sales of EVs plummeted by nearly one-third in October after President Trump and congressional Republicans killed the $7,500 federal tax credit.

The end of EV subsidies followed a trio of regulatory changes that eliminated mandates on automakers to produce electric vehicles.

Imagine that!  An artificial market. created almost entirely out of government subsidies of one form or another is collapsing when those subsidies disappear.  It was entirely predictable.  If there was an actual market, it would have developed organically.  Imagination is not necessary to predict this market collapse.

But let’s spin this out a bit.  Thousands of EVs in inventories across the land, unsellable.  Their disassembly and disposal likely to create a far bigger environmental mess than their sales would have avoided.  And that cost will be at the car maker’s expense, not the expense of the government that forced them into making them to begin with.  And then their are all those people that took advantage of those subsidies that now own EVs.  What happens when they need a new car?  Their current vehicle will have nil aftermarket value, no trade-in, no private sale.  They will likely have to pay for its disposal, costing far more than the money they “saved” with the original purchase.  Look for a similar phenomenon to develop with all those solar panels that have sprung up on rooftops and parking lots across the land – those subsidies are drying up as well.  Like life, the market finds a way.

“Imagine that,” is a phrase we mutter when we discover just how wrong we are, but don’t really want to face that fact.  We would be far better off if it were replaced by, “I guess I was wrong, I won’t make that mistake again.”  But if there is anything that is predictable in this world it is human hubris, so sadly that’s not happening.