The 55th Earth Day arrived, and with it the usual fervor over “saving the planet.”

In addition to mostly peaceful protests, traditional constructive activities are undertaken such as tree plantings, river cleanups, and wetland preservation.

This year, though, a new planet-saving opportunity has presented itself: Saving a Tesla.

Before Elon Musk became Public Enemy #2 to leftist activists (right behind President Trump as Public Enemy #1), Mr. Musk was an earth savior with his “non-polluting” electric vehicles. He immediately fell out of favor when he became President Trump’s friend. Then, he dared to drift out of his lane to sideswipe the enormous national debt by trimming the fat from bloated bureaucratic programs.

Many of those programs contained huge financial lifelines for leftist projects, thus the extreme angst.

But are reputed environmentalists missing the revered forest because of the one knotty tree?

The forest, other plant life, and people survive best in a healthy environment. Air, water, and land quality are essential to a thriving ecosystem. Yet, by burning Teslas and charging stations, the Musk haters are producing some of the most toxic air emissions, water effluents, and solid refuse.

The production of electric vehicles and associated chargers requires a large variety of raw materials that, when incinerated, discharge harmful fumes such as hydrogen fluoride, hydrogen chloride, sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide, particulate matter, and a variety of metals related to battery chemistry like lithium, cobalt, nickel, and manganese. Nasty stuff.

The dispersion of the toxic gases leads to unhealthy chemical concentrations in the ambient air. The potential for increased heart and respiratory ailments surely is a result.

Other biosphere impacts can occur from runoff of fire retardants and dissolved charred material that end up in surface water and groundwater. Removing not just the electric carnage but also the disposable equipment connected with firefighting presents more problems with respect to solid waste.

Assaults continue. Besides the usual professional hazards of firefighting, arson endangers unintended property and personnel.

Keying cars is also not nice. People and the planet suffer under the burdens associated with vehicle repair. Bodywork requires paint jobs. Painting fumes and shop waste are not typically friendly to the environment.

Whatever happened to praising one of the most perceptive, productive people on the planet, Elon Musk, for his efforts to reduce greenhouse gases (besides all his accomplishments in rocketry, satellites, robotics, neurotechnology, and software)? Some on the eco-conscious left crave Mr. Musk’s deportation, as if he were a dangerous transplant or invasive species from South Africa.

Since when is it a negative when a successful, patriotic intellectual, acting for free, focuses on streamlining government and tackling the waste, fraud, and abuse of public funds? Rather, positives abound from such a service, even for the environment. More monies earmarked for ecological improvements can actually go toward those improvements and not so much toward more raucous, ineffective remonstrating.

As usual, unrighteous anger accomplishes unreasonable destruction and is counterproductive. So, here’s beneficent advice, at least on Earth Day, the holiest day of the environmentalist year: Save the planet by saving a Tesla.

This article first appeared in American Thinker and is reprinted here by the author’s permission.

Photo by BoliviaInteligente on Unsplash.