Think Twice Before Buying an Electric Vehicle

 

Enrico Trigoso at BasedUnderground has a report that should make every driver think twice before switching to an electric vehicle (EV):

The corporate-controlled media is finally coming around to accepting the truth about the electric vehicle (EV) revolution, which is not even close to being as environmentally friendly as its supporters and promoters claim.

Reuters published a piece this week revealing that even the smallest EV accidents, including minor fender-benders, almost always result in insurance companies having to total the entire car. The reason for this has to do with EV batteries, which are so expensive to replace that it makes more sense to just replace the entire car.

“We’re buying electric cars for sustainability reasons,” said Matthew Avery, research director at the automotive risk intelligence company Thatcham Research. “An EV isn’t very sustainable if you’ve got to throw the battery away after a minor collision.”

The battery pack in your average Tesla, for example, costs tens of thousands of dollars to replace. The battery pack alone represents a sizable portion of the vehicle’s overall price tag, it turns out.

Tesla and many other EV manufacturers have made battery packs a structural component of their cars in order to reduce costs for end consumers – but at what cost to the environment? Unless EV manufacturers change the ways in which they incorporate battery packs into their cars, all this needless waste will continue to pile up. . . .

. . .

(Related: It will never be possible for the electric grid as it currently exists to charge everybody’s EVs once gas-powered vehicles are gone.) . . .

More at the link here.

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The Coming Crash of the Climate Cult

 

cartoon credit: saltbushclub [click to embiggen]

 

And it is a cult.  Viv Forbes “started his life with candles, kerosene lights, and a wood-burning stove.  His parents milked cows and harvested corn by hand.”  Over time, as energy sources improved, the result was a dramatic increase in the farm's surplus of food."  Now Mr Forbes has a prediction at American Thinker about the future of the Green New Deal:

. . . But what keeps trains, elevators, hospitals, and refrigerators going if we have a still night followed by another cloudy day?  More batteries or Snowy 9 Pumped Hydro?  And if the still cloudy weather continues, what will recharge the Big Batteries and re-pump the hydros?  And will Greens apply the same conservation standards and delaying tactics to wind, solar, hydro, and power line construction that they now apply to coal mines?

. . .

Soon after the last coal power plant is demolished, in a snap of still, cold, cloudy weather, the lights will go out, electric trains will stop, and battery-powered food deliveries to the cities will falter.  There will be uproar in Parliaments, and all Green/Teal/ALP governments will fall.  The media will blame "climate change."

Energy Realists will take over.  They will immediately place orders for dozens of modular nuclear power plants.

But this energy reality will come too late.  Long lines of city-dwellers with bicycles, wheelbarrows and old diesel utes [utility vehicles] will flee from the hungry cities.

Read the article here.  

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Reasons to oppose Electric Vehicles

 

John Hinderaker at PowerLine shares some common sense objections to California's mad dash to electric vehicles (and yes, it's coming to Ohio also):

Are people finally starting to catch on to the fact that electric vehicles are a terrible idea? I hope so. Bjorn Lomborg makes the case in accessible form in the Wall Street Journal. To begin with, EVs don’t even save much on CO2 emissions:

Over its lifetime, an electric car does emit less CO2 than a gasoline car, but the difference can range considerably depending on how the electricity is generated. Making batteries for electric cars also requires a massive amount of energy, mostly from burning coal in China. Add it all up and the International Energy Agency estimates that an electric car emits a little less than half as much CO2 as a gasoline-powered one.

What does that up to, in terms of climate?

If every country achieved its stated ambitious electric-vehicle targets by 2030, the world would save 231 million tons of CO2 emissions. Plugging these savings into the standard United Nations Climate Panel model, that comes to a reduction of 0.0002 degree Fahrenheit by the end of the century.

On that basis alone, the left’s mania to make us all drive electric vehicles is insane. But from there on, the story is all negative:

Electric cars’ impact on air pollution isn’t as straightforward as you might think. The vehicles themselves pollute only slightly less than a gasoline car because their massive batteries and consequent weight leads to more particulate pollution from greater wear on brakes, tires and roads. On top of that, the additional electricity they require can throw up large amounts of air pollution depending on how it’s generated. One recent study found that electric cars put out more of the most dangerous particulate air pollution than gasoline-powered cars in 70% of U.S. states. An American Economic Association study found that rather than lowering air pollution, on average each additional electric car in the U.S. causes additional air-pollution damage worth $1,100 over its lifetime.

. . .

Left-wing governments are on a collision course with normal Americans. Governments want to force Americans to rely on wind and solar energy, but those sources can’t keep the lights on and are ruinously expensive. Similarly, governments want to force us all into electric vehicles, which are not as functional as gas-powered vehicles, despite being more expensive. And they are a net detriment to the environment. Lomborg is optimistic, perhaps more so than I am:

Read the rest here.

And Mr. Hinderaker didn’t even get to the problems with existing minerals required to produce the batteries, or the disposal of spent batteries, or the horrific damage done by strip mining to extract, say, the lithium (see aerial image at the top).

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