It’s not about EVs. It’s about driving your car.

 

John Hinderaker at PowerLineBlog explains why we’ll never be driving electric vehicles:

Electric Vehicles Are Not The Future

The mania for electric vehicles is a fad that is driven 100% by government regulation. The consumer verdict on EVs has been in for a century. Some of the earliest cars were battery-powered, but they lost out to gasoline-powered cars because gasoline-powered vehicles are better.

Those who have been paying attention understand that there is zero chance that our existing motor vehicle fleet will be converted to EVs. Mark Tapscott sums up some of the reasons. I want to focus on just one of his points, the fact that the lithium batteries needed to replace our current vehicle fleet would require ridiculous amounts of mining of minerals, particularly lithium, the price of which is already sky-high. How do liberals intend to accomplish this unprecedented global mining project?

Answer: they don’t. Mark quotes from a report by an environmental organization:

This report finds that the United States can achieve zero emissions transportation while limiting the amount of lithium mining necessary by reducing the car dependence of the transportation system, decreasing the size of electric vehicle batteries, and maximizing lithium recycling.

Reordering the US transportation system through policy and spending shifts to prioritize public and active transit while reducing car dependency can also ensure transit equity, protect ecosystems, respect Indigenous rights, and meet the demands of global justice.

This is what liberal politicians are not telling you–yet. They don’t really plan to replace your car with an EV, they don’t want to replace it at all. . . .

"Transit equity"?  That's New World Order-speak for all of us peasants; the elites will travel in limousines and private jets. We'll ride the bus.  Read the rest of the column 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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Another reason to oppose EVs

 

As we watch the footage of the damage in the aftermath of Hurricane Ian, Thomas Lifson (American Thinker founder and editor) explains in detail why converting to all-electric vehicles is such a bad – and dangerous –idea:

. . . It is fortunate that as of the current moment, electric vehicles constitute only about 100,000, out of nearly 8 million vehicles registered to drive on Florida’s roads. What if they all were electric, the (impractical) dream of greenies?

Depending on how heavily loaded they were, even assuming everyone had a full battery charge, cars from southern Florida would start running out of juice after 100 – 250 miles. They would then have to spend hours at recharging stations, which would rapidly be clogged with other cars and trucks waiting their turn, since an electricity “fill up” can easily take an hour or more, as compared to a couple of minutes for gasoline.  Cars waiting to be charged would spill onto the highways, potentially blocking traffic.

Those cars that ran out of juice on the highway would block traffic. Even assuming that emergency service vehicles could get to them (unlikely if the entire fleet were electric cars), towing a portable generator (powered by fossil fuels, of course) and recharging the stalled vehicles would take plenty of time, as well, further blocking traffic.  The stranded cars would, of course, have no air conditioning, no wipers, no GPS.

In all likelihood, the highways would become vast parking lots, trapping their passengers wherever they happened to be stalled, waiting for the storm and flood waters to reach them, unable to get to safety. . . .

More 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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