Why is it that greens want everyone to drive electric cars but don’t want people to have electricity? Or, it seems, the cars.

I noted last week in these pages how the people who want everyone to have an electric car in the garage have also been pursuing policies that, per the North American Electric Reliability Corporation’s latest report, are likely to result in rolling blackouts this summer. //

Fossil and nuclear plants are being taken offline (bye, Indian Point!) while their replacement with “renewables” like wind and solar lags and often fails to produce power when it’s most needed.

Nothing has improved on that front. But the thing about electric cars is that they don’t just need electricity, they also need batteries to store it in. And electric motors.

That’s awkward because those cars and batteries require lots of copper and other metals, plus the extraction of “rare earth” minerals that come mostly from China and Africa, where they’re often produced by child or slave labor.

(We used to mine rare earths in America, but the enviros basically got that shut down. It’s easier for companies to get the stuff out of the ground in places where there aren’t sandal-wearing scolds everywhere.) //

These organizations are much quieter about the exploitation of minerals — and people — in places like China and Africa. //

But the bottom line is: If you endorse the spread of electric cars, you by extension endorse the extraction of the resources it takes to build and charge them. //

If you support a policy but oppose its prerequisites, then you’re either a fool or a fraud. Or maybe both.

A realistic and sensible electric-car policy would support reliable, safe, environmentally friendly power to charge them — which means plants fired by nuclear power and fracked gas. //

Honestly, when people start working to bring us cheap energy and metals from the Moon and the asteroids, environmentalists will probably complain about that too. And they’re entitled to complain if they want.

What they’re not entitled to is to be taken seriously.