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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Remembering on Memorial Day

 

Scott Johnson at PowerLine:

In observance of Memorial Day 2007 the Wall Street Journal published a brilliant column by the late Peter Collier to mark the occasion. The column remains timely and is accessible online here. I don’t think we’ll read or hear anything more thoughtful or appropriate to the occasion today. 

The entire column is worth reading; it begins:

Once we knew who and what to honor on Memorial Day: those who had given all their tomorrows, as was said of the men who stormed the beaches of Normandy, for our todays. But in a world saturated with selfhood, where every death is by definition a death in vain, the notion of sacrifice today provokes puzzlement more often than admiration. We support the troops, of course, but we also believe that war, being hell, can easily touch them with an evil no cause for engagement can wash away. And in any case we are more comfortable supporting them as victims than as warriors.

. . .

Not long ago I was asked to write the biographical sketches for a book featuring formal photographs of all our living Medal of Honor recipients. As I talked with them, I was, of course, chilled by the primal power of their stories. But I also felt pathos: They had become strangers–honored strangers, but strangers nonetheless–in our midst.

***

In my own boyhood, figures such as Jimmy Doolittle, Audie Murphy and John Basilone were household names. And it was assumed that what they had done defined us as well as them, telling us what kind of nation we were. But the 110 Medal recipients alive today are virtually unknown except for a niche audience of warfare buffs. Their heroism has become the military equivalent of genre painting. There’s something wrong with that.

Mr. Collier vividly describes actions taken by Medal of Honor recipients, and then closes his column:

We impoverish ourselves by shunting these heroes and their experiences to the back pages of our national consciousness. Their stories are not just boys’ adventure tales writ large. They are a kind of moral instruction. They remind of something we’ve heard many times before but is worth repeating on a wartime Memorial Day when we’re uncertain about what we celebrate. We’re the land of the free for one reason only: We’re also the home of the brave.

The full column is here.

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Vote-by-mail and voter fraud

Glenn Reynolds posted this at Instapundit:

“Absentee ballots remain the largest source of potential voter fraud.” That quote isn’t from President Trump, who criticized mail-in voting this week after Wisconsin Democrats tried and failed to change an election at the last minute into an exclusively mail-in affair. It’s the conclusion of the bipartisan 2005 report of the Commission on Federal Election Reform, chaired by former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker III.

Concerns about vote-buying have a long history in the U.S. They helped drive the move to the secret ballot, which U.S. states adopted between 1888 and 1950. Secret ballots made it harder for vote buyers to monitor which candidates sellers actually voted for. Vote-buying had been pervasive; my research with Larry Kenny at the University of Florida has found that voter turnout fell by about 8% to 12% after states adopted the secret ballot.

You wouldn’t know any of this listening to the media outcry over Mr. Trump’s remarks. “There is a lot of dishonesty going on with mail-in voting,” the president said Tuesday. In response, a CNN “fact check” declares that Mr. Trump “opened a new front in his campaign of lies about voter fraud.” A New York Times headline asserts: “Trump Is Pushing a False Argument on Vote-by-Mail Fraud.” Both claim that voter fraud is essentially nonexistent. The Carter-Baker report found otherwise.

Intimidation and vote buying were key concerns of the commission: “Citizens who vote at home, at nursing homes, at the workplace, or in church are more susceptible to pressure, overt and subtle, or to intimidation. Vote buying schemes are far more difficult to detect when citizens vote by mail.” The report provides examples, such as the 1997 Miami mayoral election that resulted in 36 arrests for absentee-ballot fraud. The election had to be rerun, and the result was reversed.

There are more recent cases, too. In 2017 an investigation of a Dallas City Council election found some 700 fraudulent mail-in ballots signed by the same witness using a fake name. The discovery left two council races in limbo, and the fraud was much larger than the vote differential in one of those races. The case resulted in a criminal conviction. . . .

It is often claimed that impossibly large numbers of people live at the same address. In 2016, 83 registered voters in San Pedro, Calif., received absentee ballots at the same small two-bedroom apartment. Prosecutors rarely pursue this type of case.

Mail-in voting is a throwback to the dark old days of vote-buying and fraud. Because of this, many countries don’t allow absentee ballots for citizens living in their country, including Norway and Mexico. Americans deserve a more trustworthy system.

The above extract is via Instapundit; the original article in the WSJ is behind a paywall.

And here’s an article by a reporter who demonstrated how easy it is to game the system: “Mail-in Ballots Make Voter Fraud Easy. I Know Because I Did It”.

Ohio voters had their Election Day cancelled, and voters had nothing to say about it. The most recent Cleveland Tea Party blog on this is here.

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Buckle Up

 image credit: dartmouth-hitchcock

Eric Georgatos at American Thinker thinks the battle is just beginning. His essay opens:

In four consecutive days, what a lineup of events to illustrate the upheaval America is going through.  We had the I.G. report delivered on December 9; we watched Attorney General Barr step up on December 10 with two explosive interviews with the basic message that the I.G. report is the bare minimum in terms of describing the official wrongdoing that's already fully understood by Barr and is going to be exposed by John Durham; and we watched on December 11 I.G. Michael Horowitz's extraordinarily damaging-to-the-FBI-and-DOJ testimony at the Senate Judiciary Committee. 

And on the fourth day, the kicker "tell" for the turmoil that lies ahead: the Wall Street Journal — one of the last bastions of at least a whiff of objective journalism among the mainstream media — comes out with a print edition on December 12 where the front page has not one story on Horowitz's Senate testimony the previous day.

The WSJ has plenty of sophisticated writers who can patch together some erudite-sounding explanation for their front-page story selections.  But the elephant in the room stands: the events of this week demonstrate that every single element of the American ruling class — eight-plus years' worth of Deep State Obama leftists; the Uniparty Senators — like Richard Burr; Mark Warner; and yes, Lindsey Graham; the MSM; rigged-trade, anti-Trump globalists — every one of them is at risk of collapse in power and prestige, not to mention financial setbacks.  The fact that the WSJ appears to have adopted a move-along, nothing-to-see-here posture at a time when the demand for accountability should headline the news — well, it signals that the ruling class still believe they can lead on the ignorant masses with their lies, censorship, and suppression of information, and keep on keepin' on. 

So it is going to fall on the people of this country to hold the wrongdoers accountable, to refuse to "move along," to insist that this level of malfeasance must be punished.  The comeuppance must be sustained public outrage, institutional house-cleaning, and ultimately an electoral smack-down like America has never seen before.

Read the rest here.

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Facebook censors another conservative voice

Pamela Geller reports:

In a breathtaking act of chutzpah, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg took to the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal to – wait for it – defend freedom of speech and freedom of expression.

Go here: Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg Makes The Case For Free Speech in WSJ OpEd While Censoring and Banning Conservatives

Then via Freedom Headlines:

By Freedom Headlines, October 17 2019:

Facebook is stepping up their game to try and prevent Donald Trump from winning reelection. They are quite literally meddling in the election process by using their influence and reach to censor the internet and prevent people with opposing views from sharing anything from a conservative viewpoint.

The social network giant just removed one of the largest (if not the largest) pro-Trump Facebook fan pages.

They cited that it was because, “It looks like recent activity on your Page doesn’t follow the Facebook Page Policies regarding impersonation and pretending to be an individual or business.”

. . .

“Donald Trump Is Our President” with 3,276,000 fans, which we paid FB around $100,000 to build, using ‘page like ads’ was removed yesterday. Please help me spread the word so we can help Facebook know and fix, what I am sure is an honest mistake.

I have made my identity perfectly clear, I am, in no way associated with President Donald J. Trump, nor have I ever claimed to be. This was/is a fan page, we make that abundantly clear in many places on the page.

On top of that Facebook approved the name change back in 2016 …. So why now, all of a sudden has my life’s work been ‘unpublished.’ I’m sure this is a mistake, but please help me alert FB so we can get this cleared up, thank you! – Mark Sidney

Full report with screenshots of postings is here. If you are on FB (I am not), perhaps you can register objections to this latest censorship.

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The Pocahontas / Fauxcahontas Factor

 image credit: watcherofweasels.org

Kimberley Strassel at the Wall Street Journal fills in some of the details behind Richard Cordray’s run for Ohio Governor ("Biggest Loser: Elizabeth Warren"):

For a decade Ms. [Elizabeth] Warren, 69, has been busy trying to remake Washington in her progressive image. Her role in creating a new financial regulatory apparatus gave her outsize influence over the bureaucracy. Her successful 2012 Senate bid gave her a megaphone to rail against “billionaires, bigots and Wall Street bankers”—and Donald Trump. The left begged her to challenge Hillary Clinton in 2016 and rebrand the Democratic Party as a populist, progressive force. Ms. Warren demurred, leaving the field to Bernie Sanders.

She instead carefully designed this year’s midterms as her launchpad to the presidency. Ms. Warren seeded into key races several handpicked progressive protégés, in particular Richard Cordray, former director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (who ran for Ohio governor), and a former law student, Katie Porter (who ran in a California House district). Ms. Warren geared up a shadow war room, built ties with some 150 campaigns, directed millions of fundraising dollars to select candidates, and thereby earned chits. She dispersed staffers to early primary states and crisscrossed the country herself. A week ago she was dominating Ohio headlines at rallies for Mr. Cordray. If Mr. Trump was on the ballot nationally, Ms. Warren was on it in the Buckeye State.

The lead-up to Tuesday had already been brutal for her. Hoping to elbow her way back into the headlines after Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation, Ms. Warren chose in mid-October to release a five-minute video and piles of documentation aimed at proving she really is at least 1/1,024th Native American. The ridicule was ruthless, matched only by the anger Democrats directed at her for distracting from the election.

But Tuesday compounded the disaster. Ms. Porter—who campaigned in Orange County on single-payer health care, expanded Social Security and debt-free college—flamed out to two-term Rep. Mimi Walters. In Ohio, Mr. Cordray lost to Attorney General Mike DeWine.

Read the rest here.

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The Consumer Financial Protection Czar and the Trump Administration

The Wall Street Journal has a report about the ill-advised Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) and its director Richard Cordray. (The article link is to the CETUS website, since WSJ articles are usually behind a paywall). Cordray was appointed by the Obama administration in 2012 to head up this agency. Prior to that appointment, he had been Ohio Attorney General but had lost his Senate race against Mike DeWine.

In 2011, Cleveland Tea Party’s Ralph King pointed out that the position of the Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is, “in more accurate terms Consumer Financial Protection Czar”:

The director of the CFPB is empowered to regulate almost any industry for any reason and cannot be removed for any reason other than malfeasance. The position is a five-year term, so the next president will have to deal with Cordray regulating our economy, despite the president’s wishes.

And now that next president, President Trump is having to deal with it. And the Wall Street Journal (article titled “Trump to Cordray: You’re Not Fired”) reports that the “Treasury Department has made an excellent case for dismissal.” Further in:

The problem is that Mr. Cordray won’t accept curbs on his power. Dodd-Frank states that the President may remove the director only for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office” rather than at-will like other agency heads. Yet the report enumerates a litany of ways in which Mr. Cordray has flouted the law.

Treasury notes the “CFPB has avoided notice-and-comment rulemaking and instead relied to an unusual degree on enforcement actions and guidance documents.” The Administrative Procedure Act requires regulatory agencies to issue formal rule-makings, or at least formal guidance, to explicate law. Mr. Cordray says “facts and circumstances” guide the bureau’s legal interpretations.

. . .

Mr. Cordray’s term doesn’t end until July 2018, and implementing Treasury’s reforms as well as attendant rule-makings could take more than a year. Meantime, Mr. Cordray can continue shaking down businesses with enforcement that he hopes will propel his expected campaign for Governor in Ohio.

Some take-aways: The WSJ may point out the excellent case for Cordray’s dismissal (not to say the elimination of the agency itself), but it’s not about legal niceties, it’s all about politics and power. Mr. Trump is still surrounded by hostile deep state operatives, bureaucracies, and Congressional Uniparty opponents who ignore Obama Administration scandals and refuse to respect existing laws  (think Lynch, Comey, and the FBI; or Susan Rice unmasking of political opponents; or Lois Lerner’s IRS scandal, and on and on)….  So it may be obvious that Cordray and the CFPB are on the wrong side of the law, but The Uniparty and Corporate Media don’t much care. Trump is probably choosing his battles.

I decided to blog on this not only because the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and its director represent more of the swamp to be drained, but also because Richard Cordray may very well run for Governor of Ohio. Voters should know what he’s been doing. The full WSJ report is here.  

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