Obviously, Facebook, and probably much of the techie universe for that matter, is enthralled by hair-on-fire climate alarmism. So much so that they put a “context warning” on a cartoon that was attached to one of my recent posts about the EV craziness sweeping the halls of power, a politicized professoriate, their young charges mobbing the public square, and the beautiful people in the culture. It’s crazy, just think about it. I’ll explain.
Some people are braving the hostility of today’s unofficial (and official) Inquisition who, like Galileo, just stepped forward to say, “Wait a minute!” There are voices out there other than the lefty Union of Concerned Scientists. One such voice is the Cornwall Alliance (https://cornwallalliance.org); there are others. They raise some glaring questions that few if any denizens in big media newsrooms would know enough to ask.
Right off the bat, Cornwall and most others don’t deny the existence of man-caused (anthropogenic) climate change – i.e., global warming. They assert, however, that the doom-mongering is not science. One should never say “the science says”. “Science” has no vocal cords. It’s a method that comes close to “trust but verify”, or “where’s the beef”, or simply “prove it”. Waiting for “science” to say something treats the whole endeavor as if it were a homogenized mass of one mind. May as well put up a huge picture of Mao to represent all of China, er “science”, in one fell swoop. People that wallow in “the science says” aren’t scientists and wouldn’t know which end of the telescope to use, or explain a hypothesis, or how to conduct a fitting test for one, the essence of science. Thus, it’s easy for the scientifically illiterate to jump to doom.
Such stunted science-minds would never consider, or ask, the following:
* What is the nature of the warming? Much of the available evidence indicates that the warming is concentrated in the upper latitudes and affects average daily low temperatures (mostly at night) and not the highs.
* What are the actual effects of the warming? Are they all bad? No, and on balance, they are likely to be positive. Warmer global temps in the upper latitudes extends the growing season and expands the amount of the earth’s surface for agriculture. The growing season starts earlier and ends later. Plants love CO2. Conversely, history shows that bad things happen with cooling (the Black Death, famine, for instance).
* What about droughts? They come and go, and are sensitive to localized conditions, like cold/warm water currents. El Nino is a result of warm ocean water; La Nina is born of cold. Warm water warms the air above it and warmer air has more room for more water vapor for more rain. The jet stream accommodates and sends it to one area and away from another. One place is in drought, and another can’t handle the deluge. The cycles are called “decadel” because they come and go every 7-12 years on average. Welcome to nature, and not a soccer mom’s preference for an SUV.
* Are the scare stories of an avalanche of “extreme weather” accurate? No, the evidence suggests that our current weather patterns haven’t varied from the historical record going back in time using tree rings and core samples. If anything, they prove that climate, and its short-term equivalent, weather, varies around a mean, sometimes quite dramatically, and also that climate (long term weather patterns of at least 30 years) has never been steady-state. The earth wobbles on its axis; the orbit slightly shifts; and solar radiation jumps up and down. And we have always put in and taken out stuff since we ventured out of the cave. Variation, like all of nature, is the chief characteristic of our weather and climate.
* Is the nation of Micronesia, or the Obama estate on Martha’s Vineyard, about to disappear in rising sea levels? No, because we are talking about inches in the single digits covering centuries if not thousands of centuries. It’s manageable. Talk to the Dutch who’ve been dealing with holding back the North Sea for at least a half of a millennium or more.
So, why are our science semi-literates in power so gung-ho to ruin our lives? Simple, for them, Chicken Little is a divine oracle. The apocalypse is nigh. For them, we can’t adapt our way out of the doom. For them, we must mitigate, and that means turning our lives upside down, declaring war on fossil fuels, and erecting the Soviet to oversee our wants and desires.
Actually, we can adapt, not mitigate, because their Chicken Little is essentially a witch doctor. A sea wall can handle a few inches of rise in coastal waters protecting Obama’s mansion investment on Martha’s Vineyard and Oprah’s luxurious enclaves in Montecito (Santa Barbara) and Maui. Receding ice sheets in the polar regions is more than compensated by more land open for farming and a longer growing season. Feeding more people sounds good to me. More greenery from more CO2 has a tremendous upside.
This war on fossil fuels throws common sense out the window. What do we gain (benefits) by handcuffing millions and billions of people to a crippled grid and treating the possession of an SUV as a war crime? What are the costs? The forced exchange of what works for what doesn’t will mean that more people will enter the ranks of the poor. Pencil it out. We’ll have less CO2 in the air and more filth and poverty on the ground. It’s insane.
Yep, this is our moment of insanity.
RogerG
Sources:
* Additional YouTube presentations on green matters, the other side to the debate:
1. Michael Shellenberger, “Why renewables can’t save the planet”, at https://youtu.be/N-yALPEpV4w?si=-frZCso5LEaCVNIj
2. “’What Percent Of Our Atmosphere Is CO2?’: Doug LaMalfa Stumps Entire Panel With Climate Questions”, Rep. Doug LaMalfa (R-Ca.), 2023, at https://youtu.be/bJfrKNR3K2k?si=9Cn0wiMwaqa8DQfe
3. Stephen Hayward, “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Global Warming”, 2014, at https://youtu.be/RZlICdawHRA?si=WiZZs82W58z6D0ns
4. A balanced assessment of EV’s: The Car Guys, “THE BIG EV LIE. Why They Won’t Save the Planet & All About Dirty Electricity”, 2021, at https://youtu.be/sytWLB4-W-M?si=34ck2aFrRkRiql9n
5. Pete Buttigieg’s slick glibness. Watch him skate around the immense problems associated with an EV life. One key problem is generating the electricity to make it all work. He talks about the grid but not about the sources for an immense expansion of the necessary generation of the electricity. “’Which Uses More Electricity…A Refrigerator When It’s Running Or Electric Car When It’s Charging?’”, in questioning of Buttigieg by Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky), 2023, at https://youtu.be/avi9iBC8opU?si=LoSEVadXpLZK09J1
* This is not a comprehensive list but is a sample of a robust debate that exists outside attempts in the media to quash it. Real science cannot be suppressed.
They are coming for more than your family sedan. They are going to upend, disrupt the entire system that brings everything to your home, grocery store, et al. You’re going to be hit big time in your pocketbook and in every facet of your life. Get prepared for it is coming, if not stopped.
Is Biden determined to turn me into a Trump voter? Trump, no doubt, is the ugly face of my party, but Biden and his donkey party are trying to construct a totalitarian state on a preposterous green agenda. Animating the whole venture, as is true with all totalitarian crusades, is a belief system on how best to organize and control people. To gain popular traction, it’s best for all such crusades to contain a strong apocalyptic element, one powerful enough to justify stampeding the people into acceptance of its dictates and regimentation. It’s happening before our eyes, right now! Say goodbye to the republic and hello to the Soviet.
The EPA is the chief engine of the transformation from citizen republic to rule by all-powerful commissars. Under the guise of “climate change”, we are being ordered to scrap our already immense sunk costs in affordable and reliable transportation for the mirage of something that doesn’t exist, and if it does, it’s a catastrophe as a replacement. Prepare for a calamity, one that’ll conspicuously fall more seriously upon our children and generations to come. Your kids will be the real victims.
March is turning into a deadly month for the health of our constitutional republic. The EPA earlier in the month announced its intention to follow the template of California, one of a few states famous for turning many of its residents into refugees. Like the authoritarian clown car in Sacramento, tighter emissions for “light duty” vehicles (cars, trucks, many SUV’s) will be imposed from 2027 through 2032, eventually sealing the death warrant for the production of nearly anything with an internal combustion engine (see #1 below). Say goodbye to more than the citizen republic. Say goodbye to that thing in your garage that allows you to get the kids to school, or you to work, or pay a visit to grandma for Thanksgiving, for its life will be wrung out of it by regulating and taxing it to death in escalating licensing fees and costs for upkeep, parts, and fuel. Manufacturers will be forced to eliminate their production. The comrades in power plan to leave you with no way out but into their approved and glorified golf cart. This is nothing but totalitarianism “for your own good”. And, of course, they know better about what’s good for you. Right?
On the heels of that monstrosity, the commissars proclaimed a similar rule for the fleet of big vehicles that bring everything from produce to your grocery store to all things from an Amazon distribution center, everything that fills a shelf (see #3 below). It’ll be much worse for those people who choose to live outside the controllable and tight confines of an urban area. Think about it, all that stuff that was affordably made available at your fingertips will be crammed onto battery-powered big rigs (fuel cells create their own immense problems, see #2 below) of limited capacity, range, and tremendous recharging difficulties.
The mammoth costs of so-called “innovating” our way out of these imposed problems will only short-circuit the necessary wealth to satisfy other necessities of life. These blinkered potentates have no understanding of the gargantuan trade-offs that they are inflicting on us. Either that or they don’t care.
My bet is that they don’t care. Why? They possess a religious fervor for an ideology that justifies, in their mind, taking over more and more of your life. For them, they are busy saving the planet, even if it means destroying your standard of living. You see, their religio-ideology is founded upon a robust, promethean definition of “social cost” and “externalities”. Like a canon law in the church, their “church”, the two doctrines give overriding weight to real or imagined costs for all of society for everything that you do. Where’s the limits? Practically, there aren’t any. Thus, the creeds become the supreme, open-ended excuses for the EPA, or any commissariat for that matter, to do anything that they want.
In the past, it was national socialist race justice to prevent defilement of the “race”, or the dictatorship of the proletariat to cram equality of condition on all of humanity to prevent exploitation. Today, it’s saving the climate, leaving aside the lack of any credible, peer reviewed evidence that anything that they’re doing will positively affect a global atmosphere under which billions of people are acting independently and beyond the reach of the EPA. Pardon me for concluding that this is nothing but pure stupidity.
In the end, the Biden claque and his Democratic Party are seemingly intent on destroying our way of life and replacing our citizen republic with rule by totalitarian zealots. It’s Petrograd 1917, Berlin 1933, or Beijing 1949. Keeping this crowd in power would have us see the end of much that we cherish. So, if the choice is between the abominable Trump or this gang of totalitarian fanatics, one can be forgiven for preferring boorishness to Big Brother.
RogerG
Sources:
1. In Orwellian language, the EPA announcement: “Biden-Harris Administration finalizes strongest-ever pollution standards for cars that position U.S. companies and workers to lead the clean vehicle future, protect public health, address the climate crisis, save drivers money”, March 20, 2024, at https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/biden-harris-administration-finalizes-strongest-ever-pollution-standards-cars-position
2. A survey of the literature on the shortcomings of fuel cells:
* “Hydrogen Fuel-Cell Vehicles: Everything You Need to Know”, Car and Driver, 9/26/2022, at https://www.caranddriver.com/features/a41103863/hydrogen-cars-fcev/
* “A review of PEM hydrogen fuel cell contamination: Impacts, mechanisms, and mitigation”, ScienceDirect, 3/20/2007, at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0378775306025304
* “Fuel Cells”, University of Illinois, at https://publish.illinois.edu/fuel-cells/benefits-and-disadvantages/
* “How Fuel Cells Work”, How Stuff Works, at https://auto.howstuffworks.com/fuel-efficiency/alternative-fuels/fuel-cell.htm
3. The same Orwellian language for heavy-duty vehicles: “Biden-Harris Administration Finalizes Strongest Ever Greenhouse Gas Standards for Heavy-Duty Vehicles to Protect Public Health and Address the Climate Crisis While Keeping the American Economy Moving”, EPA, 3/29/2024, at https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/biden-harris-administration-finalizes-strongest-ever-greenhouse-gas-standards-heavy
4. National Review articles that provide excellent overviews of the issues:
* “Biden’s Vehicle-Emissions Gaslighting”, Luther Ray Abel, 3/20/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/bidens-vehicle-emissions-gaslighting/
* “Electric Vehicles: The EPA’s Fast Track to Fiasco”, Andrew Stuttaford, 3/25/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/03/electric-vehicles-the-epas-fast-track-to-fiasco/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=right-rail&utm_content=capital-matters&utm_term=second
* “Biden Admin Imposes Strict Pollution Standards for Buses and Heavy-Duty Vehicles”, Caroline Downey, 3/29/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/biden-admin-imposes-strict-pollution-standards-for-buses-and-heavy-duty-vehicles/
May 8, 2020, at a charging station in Dongguan, China, where an electric car caught fire when being plugged into a charger.
While perusing my news feed, I found a recent Fortune magazine article on the problems that electric vehicle owners are having with their cars, 80% more difficulties on average than conventional combustion vehicles (see below). The writer tried to deflect the problems into the category of “growing pains” for the new industry.
Yes, I agree with him, but he seems unaware of the much more fundamental issue. Problems or no, the EV is a politically driven product and, like any such good or service, has politically driven trade-offs. Growing pains? Growing pains or no, the whole EV industry probably would be immensely smaller but for politics. Politicians constructing their road to utopia understand that people must be bribed, and coerced, to mass adopt something that makes their lives worse off. The things still don’t make much economic sense compared to those efficient muscle engines.
Gasoline direct injection engine.An EV battery pack weighs on average 1,000 pounds. Your typical combustion engine and its transmission can vary from 300 (4-cylinder) to 1,000 pounds (V-8 powerhouse).
Lest we forget, politicians are camp followers, always with their fingers in the wind discerning the next fashionable thought or issue. Those leaning to the Left already have a laundry list of ready-made issues, just add water – i.e., donors’ money.
But there’s one huge complication: Politics is a poor driver of an economy. Utility (use and practicality) occupies first place in a normally functioning economy. Sellers invent and continue to produce the stuff that buyers find useful and enhances their lives. If it’s not as good as the alternatives, it’s essentially junk. It’s the economic definition of junk. When politics enters the fray, utility disappears from the equation. Practicality and usefulness take a back seat to powerful groups’ ideological demands. When the movement rises in prominence due to their momentary occupation of the commanding heights of the culture, they quickly gain the reins of political power to impose their preferences, and the artificially driven esteem for junk rises.
Trade-offs and opportunity costs are tossed to the wind. If pressed, the true believer can always interject their own wholly invented, unprovable costs into the equation. Prominent among the hypothetical eco-costs is the existential end of the planet. That’s always the gambit for the zealot: scare people into adopting the zealot’s choices. The Left’s ownership of the cultural commanding heights has made it easy for already Left-leaning politicos to engage in the hyperbole. Consequently, political power is married to an ideology’s agenda. In the end, your family sedan is forced into oblivion.
So, as politically inspired junk is imposed on the population, what is lost, or the opportunity cost? On the EV front, the auto producers’ resources are plowed into the less-useful and away from the more-useful. That’s a trade-off, and it’s unavoidable. The loss of the opportunity for producing the more useful things (opportunity costs) increases, and that’s equally unavoidable.
An EV depleted of chargeVandals cut and removed charging handles from this charging station on Vancouver Island, B.C.
What does all this mean for you? Your life changes, and for the worse. It always pencils-out that way when you are forced to choose the worst alternative. How bad is that alternative? The whole eco-agenda cascades onto you with its abundant unintended consequences. It goes beyond the problems with charging and the batteries (some of them catch fire) in the article. The additional resources to make the thing work as the numerous glitches of the impractical (“growing pains”) raise the costs of producing the impractical which will always translate into an increase in the cost of living. Higher standards of living do not ride the back of higher costs of production and living. The more that you try and do that, the worse it gets.
Save the planet by being worse off? But you aren’t saving the planet. Do you think for a moment that India and China and the rest of Donald Trump’s “shitholes” are going to give up cheap energy? Come on, get a grip. China is building new coal-fired plants at the same clip as they are warships. India, soon to be the planet’s most populous country, wants relief from the oppressive heat. Sorry, solar panels and windmills won’t cut it. Economies of scale in energy production, meaning a grid and power plants, is the only thing that’ll elevate people out of the sweat and filth. Everyone, if they were honest, knows it, except AOC, John Kerry, and our culture’s eco-barkers.
Wait a minute. That’s quite a crowd who’ve bought into the nonsense. And nonsense it is. The leap of faith from a period of warming temperatures to the apocalypse more resembles a religious doctrine than science. “Follow the science” is no such thing. It’s follow the eco-Pope.
That Genius of Lansing, Mi., Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, has decided to go California and follow the eco-Pope. She’s hellbent on bringing blackouts and skyrocketing utility bills to the wolverine state. She signed two bills establishing energy central planning (see below). The state must be 100% “clean energy” by 2040, 60% by 2035. That means a massive increase in solar and wind, 1.5 million acres more (Mackinac Center report, see below). The costs will be humungous, and it will be taken out of the hide of Michiganders. And out of the sovereign powers of localities. Their power to regulate these gargantuan scars on the land in their neighborhood will be proscribed. Expect each family in the state to shell out an additional $2,746 per year for energy (Mackinac Center report).
Declaring war on gas and petroleum and monopolizing all energy needs onto an electrical grid suffering from “intermittency” (solar and wind) is absolute folly. Do you want to live worse off? Do you want your children to be worse off? Don’t think for a moment that at least you’ve saved the planet, as they’ve made most people’s lives more challenging. By the way, it won’t be true for Jeff Bezos, nor Mark Zuckerberg, nor John Kerry, who married into the Heinz fortune.
Albert Gore and his mansions
The planet will be the same as before, and you’ll be less well off. All this brought to you by people who don’t know what they’re doing.
On second thought, they do. And it’s hooey.
RogerG
Read more here:
* “Electric vehicle owners report 80% more problems than with conventional cars and trucks amid ‘growing pains’ for the industry, Consumer Reports says”, Tom Krisher of the AP, Fortune, 11/23/23, at https://fortune.com/2023/11/29/electric-vehicle-reliability-more-problems-gas-powered/
* “Michigan Gov Whitmer signs sweeping green energy bill forcing transition from fossil fuels”, Thomas Catenacci, Fox News, 11/30/23, at https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/michigan-gov-whitmer-signs-sweeping-green-energy-bill-forcing-transition-from-fossil-fuels/ar-AA1kJF4I
* “New Energy Bills Would Increase Costs and Blackouts”, Holly Wetzel, Mackinac Center, 10/27/2023, at https://www.mackinac.org/pressroom/2023/new-energy-bills-would-increase-costs-and-blackouts
esla unveils its new electric semi truck at a presentation in Hawthorne, Calif., in 2017. (Alexandria Sage/Reuters)
I begin with a tripartite revolution, of which the charade is a manifestation.
The sudden onset of a cultural and political revolution is bedeviling us. It’s a three-legged revolution. One leg is the “woke” revolution with its reverse pogrom against the vast majority of the population and the entire civilization itself. Think of it as the reverse of the sanctioned riots – pogroms – against Jews, a small minority in imperial Russia. Currently, a resurrected cadre of Red Guards (of Maoist infamy), defames, and defaces our cherished institutions, beliefs, customs, and commemorations, and are on the hunt to eradicate a mystical and vague “privilege” of “whiteness” or the “rich” or whoever they wish to pillory as their enemy. The parallel with Mao’s carnage is stunning.
That’s not all. With the assault of the “woke” comes the second leg: an intensified zealotry for the battle against “climate change” and a newfound veneration of the pagan goddess Gaia. A suddenly intense and fanatical war on man-made carbon is the tip of the spear of the revolution. States like California are leading the way into what will probably result in a decline much like the descent into Medieval times. One of the chief vehicles to undermine our quality of life is the loosely-defined “green energy”, and that means a love affair with “renewables” and electric everything. In the end, it can only produce a broad, sustained misery.
The third leg is the erection of a monster state to make it happen, for without it, the dreams of utopia will not be realized. This turns the struggle into a war against human nature, the existence of which they have brushed aside in congeries of rhetoric in order to reimagine people as fully malleable to their designs. It’s a calamity at the end of the day. Think of it as a full-court, state-sponsored destruction of prosperity.
The vocabulary of “sustainable” or “renewable” is a chimera and an evisceration of our quality of life. Solar, wind, geothermal, and small hydro is the mantra but their enfeebled productivity is the reality. Lenin’s Bolsheviks toyed with the elimination of a financial system (money, banking, etc.), discovered that it only produced chaos, and settled on state-ownership of the economy. In the end, that system collapsed under the weight of its own internal contradictions. The same fate awaits this latest copy of dreams supplanting reality.
In Bolshevik Russia, a vast array of commissariats was found to be necessary to oversee the state-manipulation of ordinary life. Human beings don’t naturally behave in ways complimentary to the official utopian template. In California and other greenie states, and now the Biden federal government, similar government impositions are required to turn inherently deficient “renewables” into the energy backbone of a state and nation. A flim-flam is necessary to hide the truth, much like the paper-shuffling in the Soviet Gosplan (state economic planning agency). California has AB32 – the official, legally mandated set of commandments for greenie energy – CARB and an assisting regulatory labyrinth of support agencies. Biden has his EPA and the entire federal Leviathan to make the incoherent appear coherent.
Soviet politburo under Gorbachev
How incoherent is the whole scheme in California? One need look no further than the spinoffs and unintended consequences of the greenie energy campaign. To paper over the scant production and the fact that “sustainables” can’t meet energy needs, certificates – Renewable Energy Certificates (REC’s) and Environmental Attributes – are issued to solar, wind, and hydro producers in an elaborate carbon-credit scam who then peddle them, independent of their source, to purchase “dirty” power to make up for the abundant shortfalls. “Dirty” instantly becomes “green” with an REC or Energy Attribute pasted over it.
The energy deficits are real because renewables are chronically untimely and deficient in their production – solar spikes at around 3-4 pm and rapidly declines after, which doesn’t coincide with actual usage; wind only contributes when there’s wind; and hydro adds only when there’s sufficient stream flow. This certificated wallpaper is peddled by Investor Owner Utilities (IUO’s) – PG&E, Southern California Edison, etc. – and a new organizational Frankenstein called Community Choice Aggregators who are smaller energy collectives mostly composed of counties who virtue-signal their commitment to 100% pure renewables (Community Choice Energy), which isn’t, to their chagrin. In the end, after all the gamesmanship, just as much carbon is released into the air as before, just with more bureaucracy, middle men, and paperwork to turn the simple provision of energy into a more expensive shell game.
Got it? If not, you are not alone. Just remember one thing: all of us would benefit from the acknowledgment of a simple facet of the real world – trade-offs. More resources in time, resources, and capital spent on one thing means that they are not available for other things. Greenie energy is more costly in so many ways. How much have we unwittingly given up in new medical cures, inventions to make life easier and more productive, and greater prosperity as we spin our wheels in pursuit of a costly mirage? This is what declining civilizations do.
So, the effort to make crippled electricity everything gave us the PR stunt of Biden tooling around in a parking lot in an electric F150 and extolling its alleged virtues. It absolutely makes no sense. Without the internal combustion engine, the categories of utility vehicles and freight haulers (18-wheelers) would never have come into existence in the first place. Commerce and ranch work would revert back to the Middle Ages without it. Imagine the food supply more dependent on local production and the return of local famines as natural disasters periodically lay waste to the nearby food supply. The supermarket is inconceivable without the internal combustion engine.
The electric vehicle is a tony appurtenance for people who plan a life in a pampered urban cage, a life lacking in self-reliance and reveling in hedonistic indulgence. It’s a tailor-made booster of totalitarianism, whether of the soft or hard variety, since a cooped-up population is easier to control. It’s easier to make people greenie-compatible and keep them that way. Say goodbye to a real functioning citizen republic.
California, of course, is leading the way to this bleak future. The advances in fossil fuels and power efficiencies from better lubricants, tighter manufacturing tolerances, improved materials, fuel injection, solid-state ignition, and emission controls are now to be junked in an overnight leap into lithium batteries. It’s a disaster-in-waiting.
Think about all the “don’ts” you’ll have to anticipate. Don’t charge the ev overnight. It degrades the battery, without which, junk the $60,000 thing in a few years. Don’t buy one if you live in the routine path of hurricanes. Those batteries ignite if submerged in water. Don’t throw luggage into the trunk at the start of that long-anticipated road trip to Yellowstone. You might have to spend the night in the car waiting to be rescued – charging stations being quite sparse outside your urban cocoon. Don’t mindlessly grab that charging wand at some defaced public charging station. Think of the kilovolts passing through the wires just millimeters from your fingers. Insulation breaks down, especially when exposed to weather, vagrants, thousands of careless users jamming the things into their charging ports, and roving bands of teenage delinquents. The utility companies constantly warn us not to touch or go near downed power lines. What’s the difference? At least with gasoline, you’re safe so long as you don’t play with fire while filling up.
And then there’s the weight of the thing – the battery, that is. Weight matters a lot when getting from point A to point B, and when hauling anyone or anything. The family sedan has a thousand-pound one; the Ford F150, 1,500 pounds; the Hummer, 5,000, the weight of a light tank. The more weight, the less you can haul and the less distance you can haul it, making the trip through flyover country an anxiety-plagued, white-knuckled adventure as we are swallowed up in a geographical vacuum of charging stations.
Batteries for an electric pickup
The asylum-by-the-coast called California is showing the world additional ways to muck things up. Along with shoe-horning soccer moms into ev’s, the California Air Resources Board (CARB), the state’s preeminent greenie commissariat, is doing the same thing to truckers. It has declared that all new drayage trucks (the ones used around ports) are to be emission-free by 2026. By 2035, all trucks must be. So, getting freight from ship to warehouse could turn into a real comedy skit. No practical alternative to diesel exists to do it.
Better yet, avoid California ports entirely – and while you’re at it, the entire west coast. Gulf Coast governors are waiting to welcome you in open arms. Trucking companies might very well be joining the middle class in fleeing California.
Have you seen the battery-powered 18-wheeler? Tesla has a prototype – MAN, Scalia, Triton, Freightliner, and Volvo too. But what are we giving up as we bow to the climate-change Inquisition? Answer: money (lots of it), reduced hauling capacity, the need for more trucks to make up for the smaller hauls, a vast increase in hauling time, the added expense of a specialized fleet of trucks impractical for anything but specialized use (drayage).
You’ll experience sticker shock at the price of that electric 18-wheeler. Try doubling the price of a new diesel one (around $185,000). A price jump of that nature will limit the number of companies financially capable of competing in a freight hauling market now artificially skewed to the big, big capitalized boys. An already distorted market will be further mangled beyond recognition.
Guess what? That battery powering the contraption makes an ev hauler about 5,400 lbs. heavier than the diesel version. Given the fact that the legal total weight of truck and freight can’t be over 80,000 lbs. without crumbling the roads and bridges, the load in the trailer must be smaller. More hauls, more trucks to do it, and jacked up prices for everything delivered by Amazon and to every brick-and-mortar store. Expect sparser offerings on the shelves and inflation at the register. Out the window goes Amazon Prime’s 3-day shipping and its current price tag.
The whole concept of refueling takes on a new meaning. A diesel truck takes about 15 minutes; the battery-powered behemoth takes hours. The very people driving their trendy Nissan Leaf to Whole Foods will notice the attendant price increases and shortages. Given their pattern of partisan proclivities, the residents have voted to turn their world upside down. Last I checked, Manhattan, or inner-city anywhere, wasn’t famous as a verdant agricultural region or node of food packing and processing. Everything must be trucked into the hipster lair. I wonder how carefree is their lifestyle when scarcity turns from being more than theoretical background noise to real deprivation. Rents may become cheaper since people no longer want to live there, and all of it as a byproduct of hours-long refueling and trucks crippled in their carrying capacity.
Empty produce shelves at Whole Foods Market, Longmont, CO, March 13, 2020
People adjust, and in ways not foreseen by CARB central planners. Their greenie ukases will push the population into crippled transportation and onto a crippled grid. California will have to generate 11.5 gigawatts of more electricity from sources that are already strained to the breaking point to meet the 2026 deadlines. Where’s that coming from? Not from inside the state. More limited and spasmodic energy from wind and solar won’t cut it. I suspect more of the paper flim-flam to disguise the reliance on “dirty” sources. It’s the truth that can’t admitted in polite company.
The state is already experiencing blackouts. Watch produce and other perishables rot as the state scrambles to reenergize the lines. That won’t be the end of it. The ultimate result is a descent by baby steps into a way of life that doesn’t work as well as our grandparents’. The green movement is a social suicide pact.
And to think that I haven’t even mentioned the monumental task of disposing of the batteries, spent solar panels (a lifespan of 10-15 years), and wind mills and their parts. Recycling only eats up more of the grid and consumes other scarce resources. All the toxic materials run the risk of seeping into our ground water. Think of it: we are making such humungous efforts to move our pollution from the air and into the ground, and our way of life will get hammered as never before. Our water supply might end up like the Salton Sea (Remember the MTBE scare? Look it up.). Whew, what a mess.
Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832): “Oh what a tangled web we weave when at first we start to deceive.”
RogerG
Read more here:
* For an account of California’s drayage truck mandates: “California’s latest environmental regulation may have unintended consequences for truckers”, Rachel Premack, FREIGHTWAVES, 5/25/2023, at https://www.freightwaves.com/news/californias-latest-trucking-emissions-regulation-may-have-unintended-consequences
* Thanks to Dominic Pino for his piece of 5/25/2023 in National Review Online, “Electric Trucks Are Worse than Diesel Trucks”, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/electric-trucks-are-worse-than-diesel-trucks/
* For an account of the new electric big rigs: “Semi-truck maker Freightliner has a test fleet of 40 rigs, with availability in 2022”, Mark Vaughn, Autoweek, 5/21/2021, at https://www.autoweek.com/news/green-cars/a36506185/electric-big-rig-semi-trucks/
* More on the reduced hauling capacity of electric 18-wheelers: “Electrifying trucking will mean sacrificing critical weight for heavy batteries, eating into already-slim margins”, Bianca Giacobone, Business Insider, 2/2/2023, at https://www.businessinsider.com/electric-trucks-longhaul-batteries-tesla-heavy-cargo-weight-problem-2023-2
* Here’s a little synopsis of the MTBE scare: “MTBE controversy”, Wikipedia, at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MTBE_controversy
“Democracy dies in darkness.” — From the masthead of The Washington Post.
President Joe Biden speaks about infrastructure spending, much of it greenie, at the La Crosse Municipal Transit Authority, Tuesday, June 29, 2021, in La Crosse, Wisconsin. (photo: Evan Vucci/AP)
Yes, democracy, and civilization also, dies in darkness – the “darkness” of ignorance and foolishness. Few things today are more foolish than the EV craze and the climate-change mania that undergirds it. Even more absurd is the renewed faith in central planning to ramrod the country into the foolishness. We are reliving the failed Bolshevik experiment.
What precipitated my reaction? I ran into a Yahoo! Finance article by Rick Newman, “Hold on tight to your gas-powered car” (see below). There’s much to recommend the piece, but much of it is still predicated on slipshod, ideologically laden “science”. The people who write about climate change and most everything related to it rely on arguments from authority. That’s the lazy man’s rationale for people who never developed an understanding of science and the scientific method. They’ve got the ideology down – man is an inveterate defiler of the environment – but depend on “experts” who are similarly corrupted by ideological biases to lend a large measure of confirmation bias to the scribbler’s contentions. It’s frilly political theater until it metastasizes into central planning – the Sovietization of life – and then becomes dangerous to the health of a civilization.
At the point of Sovietization, life will spiral downward. Remember the Soviet Union? Maybe not, for anyone who reached puberty after the collapse of the USSR in 1991. Biden and his cohorts are busy resurrecting central planning on American soil. A newly announced policy issued from a DC commissariat, the EPA – much like the Bolshevik’s Gosplan (the USSR’s economic planning agency) and its Five-Year Plans – will punish owners and producers of internal combustion engines (ICE) with leaps in emissions’ standards to kill them off and herd the population into EV’s (see below). Classic central planning.
Long lines to buy shoes in 1970’s Soviet Union.Empty shelves in the government stores, 1970’s and 80’s.Waiting in line for clothes at a government clothing store.Long lines waiting to charge for electric vehicles at a California charging station, 2022.
Whether we’re talking about Stalin’s industrialization/dekulakization plans or Biden’s zero-emission schemes, they are reflections of one another and will suffocate prosperity. How? Why? Much of it has to do with Hayek’s knowledge problem: something as multitudinous and multifaceted as a society cannot be managed by a small group of centralized “experts” or “elites” (see below). No one knows and cannot know enough to do it, except God. Not surprisingly, a delusion of godliness is the companion of central planning.
When top/down controls are issued, expect the litany of unintended consequences. In prior efforts to dictate choices regarding fuel efficiency, cars became “light-weighted” and accident fatalities increased. And the gains in fuel efficiency unexpectedly led to more fuel consumption, not less – something heartily detested by the gang at the Sierra Club.
SNAFU, the refrain of WWII GI’s: situation normal all #&?%!@ up. And the prominence of snafu rises with the boldness of the plan, like forcing 330 million people in the span of a couple of decades to relinquish the second biggest investment in their adult lifetime and coerce them into an electrified and inconvenient alternative chosen by their commissars.
Biden’s EPA commissar, Michael Regan, announces new tailpipe emissions standards.
Of course, with this clique of dullards, the failures of central planning are to be met with . . . more central planning. They’ll never admit failure. Don’t underestimate the creativity of these powerful zealots to conjure more reasons to centrally plan, thus this latest round of EPA ukases. The climate-change gambit has been particularly expedient in expanding the Leviathan. A casualty of it all will be the existence of markets, if you discount the mangled kind that limply survives the administrative state’s waterboarding. Central planning and healthy markets are matter/antimatter to each other.
Markets are what happens when buyers and sellers spontaneously come together under conditions of freedom. They cannot exist without personal freedom. As with markets, freedom and central planning cannot coexist. A huge part of the sales job to accept the assault on freedom is to convince a governing chunk of the franchise that freedom is bad, even on the most mundane things. You are shamed for wanting a SUV with a v-8. You see, in repeated shouts of fevered gibberish, you’ll be browbeat into believing that buying that 5.7L Chevy Yukon will rain down on the planet extreme weather and California’s forever-drought. Hysteria works great to make people want to be controlled.
As if in a real-world experiment, watch the home base of the frenzy, California, descend into feudalism.
Biden is following California’s lead. And all for what? The political leverage afforded by politicized “science”? Physics is bastardized into the simplicity of Lego blocks or Lincoln Logs. Forget about the physics of quantum mechanics, the general theory, and energy pathways. The complex workings of nature are debauched by ignorant die-hards with a cause. In their playroom of the mind, the temperature of the multi-layered atmosphere of varying composition can be regulated like a finger pressing a touch screen on a wall thermostat. Need to lower global temperatures? Just command an x-amount reduction in fossil fuel usage for an x-amount temp decrease; it’s all so simple in the mind of a child. But both the prognosis and cure are what you’d expect from people more influenced by the unstable teenager Greta Thunberg than the lessons of real science.
The hysterical teenager Great Thunberg.
Combine the crusaders with scientists who have forsaken science for politics, and we have the makings of central planning. After all, what were the Bolsheviks, as harbingers of central planning? They were Marxists. Marxists are followers of Karl Marx as he tried to turn history into science, the “science” of his totalitarian revolution. Add a little Lenin with his “vanguard elite” to lead the revolution and direct the construction of the utopia and we’re back to central planning. And we get to relive the Soviet experience of an ossified economy of chronic food shortages and empty store shelves.
Karl Marx was right about one thing when he wrote that historical incidences occur “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce”. Welcome to another one of Biden’s farces, this time through his EPA commissariat.
RogerG
Read more here:
* “Hold on tight to your gas-powered car”, Rick Newman, Yahoo! Finance, 4/12/2023, at https://finance.yahoo.com/news/hold-on-tight-to-your-gas-powered-car-193629839.html?fr=sycsrp_catchall
* “Biden administration proposes toughest auto emissions standards yet: The rules, which would dramatically reshape the auto industry, could cut as much as 10 billion tons of carbon emissions by 2050, the EPA projected”, Rose Horowitch, NBC News, 4/12/2023, at https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/biden-administration-proposes-toughest-auto-emissions-standards-yet-rcna79304. —- It’s a press release that solely functions as a rah-rah statement for draconian cuts in vehicle emissions to herd the population into EV’s. You have to dig deeper to find the specific actions that drive the policy.
* “Biden-Harris Administration Proposes Strongest-Ever Pollution Standards for Cars and Trucks to Accelerate Transition to a Clean-Transportation Future”, EPA, 4/12/2023, at https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/biden-harris-administration-proposes-strongest-ever-pollution-standards-cars-and
* For Hayek’s knowledge problem thesis: “The Use of Knowledge in Society”, F. A. Hayek, at https://fee.org/articles/the-use-of-knowledge-in-society
Golden State Warriors guard Steph Curry, in an April 21, 2022, game in Denver, has voiced his opposition to townhomes near his San Francisco Bay Area mansion. (David Zalubowski / Associated Press)
Have you heard this? Steph Curry of the NBA’s Golden State Warriors doesn’t want a 1.5 acre, 16-unit “affordable” townhouse development near his $30 million mansion in the exclusive Bay Area community of Atherton (see below). It’s too easy to expose the obvious hypocrisy given the guy’s outspoken progressive views. Rich people of lefty inclinations seem to run away from their lefty beliefs as soon as the consequences get too close. But Curry has legitimate concerns of safety and privacy for a celebrity like himself and his family. The bigger issue, though, isn’t affordable housing in a state woefully deficient of it. It’s the central planning that inherently comes with lefty/progressive thinking of the type running the show in California.
It’s borrowed from Stalin, a fellow lefty. He abandoned his orthodox seminary as a young man and radicalized himself into an atheist revolutionary. Off went the priestly frock and traditional beliefs and on came the drive to build the utopia on totalitarianism in league with a clique of fellow bomb throwers and statue topplers. Sound familiar? Portland? Almost any urban complex or campus in the so-called golden state? Central planning is one of the quintessential expressions of totalitarianism.
Soviet poster proclaiming the Five-Year Plan of industrialization.
Now in control, to Stalin, the utopia means industrialization at breakneck speed no matter the cost and turmoil to people’s lives. Sound similar to “zero carbon”, the Green New Deal, Biden announcing the end of fossil fuels, Newson and his one-party state destroying energy production and herding the entire population of the state into ev’s? As for Stalin, he ordered more steel from his politburo to Gosplan (state economic planning agency) who then gets the furnaces billowing at full blast to produce more of something that few can and want to use. It piles in heaps outside the foundries.
Ditto for Governor Newsom and housing. Not enough affordable housing? He ordered the regional governments in the state (like SoCal Area Governments – SCAG – for instance) to create precise plans for more “affordable housing”. Atherton, within ABAG (Assoc. of Bay Area Governments), did its part with 348 new housing units – 16 of which are to be plunked down next to the Curry estate.
Aerial view of Atherton, Ca.New home development in Atherton with bungalows starting from between a stripped-down $620,000 to three-quarters of a million.The $3.2 million mansion sold by Steph Curry and wife.Rear view of Curry’s new $31 million mansion in Atherton, Ca
That’s how central planning works. Need something like cheaper housing? Well, just order it as Stalin did steel, while ignoring the Russian realities of the absence of a trained workforce, the infrastructure for a supply chain, whether the stuff is any good, the absence of contingent enterprises that could use it. Equally oblivious as Newsom is, the land in question in Atherton probably goes for $8 million per acre. Do the math: $12 million for the land and sixteen “affordable” units at $250,000 each will bring in . . . wait for it . . . $4 million. Oops, it doesn’t add up.
Watch “affordable housing” turn into “unaffordable housing”. To cover just land costs, each unit will have to go for $750,000. Add other incidentals like labor, engineering, materials, energy (fuel, electricity, etc.), the inevitable California delays, fees, taxes, and approvals, and you’re back to California’s housing crisis. Stalin ended up with the world’s largest steel ingot and crappy tractors. Newsom commands cheaper housing and ends up with fewer units and a huge subsidy bill to fund from the depleted state, county, and municipal treasuries and the state’s beleaguered taxpayers. My bet: the units don’t get built.
Don’t worry, Steph. The state’s buffoonish central planning and incompetence will protect you.
The housing situation won’t improve because the political eco-system for development in the state hasn’t changed. It’s the same one that caused the problem. Layer upon layer of bureaucracy smothers the housing industry. Powerful interest groups perch like vultures waiting to pounce. EIR’s and EIS’s and related “public” hearings filled with NIMBY’s and the state’s militant eco-utopians make a mockery of the process. CEQA, the Coastal Commission, the planning agencies in every jurisdiction in the state, the overlay of air quality management districts throughout the state, Cal. Fish and Game, USFWS, and their endangered species lists are poised to tear their claws into the project.
The endangered Lord Howe Island stick insect (female). Photo Courtesy San Diego Zoo.
To tell the truth, the state has a housing crisis because it wants one. They must want it, or they’re insane. Anyone with an ounce of common sense must know that punishing a behavior, like building more housing, will mean less of the behavior. It’s been the reality since the eco-industrial complex discovered the Delta Smelt, the Tipton Kangaroo Rat, and the evil of humans attempting to live better.
It gets worse. Newsom’s affordable housing imperial decree is ready to clash with a recent California court’s decree extending California Endangered Species Act protections to invertebrates – i.e., insects (see below). Californios will quickly learn that bumble bees count more than anything affordable in the state. Karl Marx was wrong about much, but he got one thing right: “. . . history repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.”
Stalin’s central planning created the Holodomor and dekulakization which devastated the Ukraine, the Donbas, the Russian peasantry and agriculture, and created the stirrings of the bloody purges in the hunt for “wreckers”. Newsom thinks that he can wave the magic wand of an imperial decree and, voilà, “affordable housing” appears. Just announce it and it will be so. Forget about Marx’s tragedy stage; the state quickly jumped to farce.
RogerG
Read more here:
* “NBA’s Steph Curry joins neighbors in opposing affordable-housing plan for ritzy Atherton”, Howard Blume, LA Times, 2/3/23, at https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-02-03/nba-star-steph-curry-fights-affordable-housing-atherton
* “California court ruling opens door for protection of insects as endangered species”, Liz Kimbrough, Mongabay, 6/2/22, at https://news.mongabay.com/2022/06/california-court-ruling-opens-door-for-protection-of-insects-as-endangered-species/
(L to R) Main characters Stantz, Venkman, and Zeddemore in “Ghostbusters”.
Of course, I’m thinking of “Ghostbusters”, the movie. The story follows a group of academics in a semi-academic field – the paranormal – who don’t, and won’t, conform to the demands of the campus powers-that-be. They bust out on their own, form a business, and run into the widening tentacles of the eco-regulators in the person of Walter Peck, inspector of the EPA, third district of New York City. Please watch below.
Making the tale more relevant, Biden’s EPA is a clone of California and New York’s entangling web of eco-regulators. So filled with arrogance and hubris, they are busy jettisoning their middle class and a good portion of their economies to other states, just like Peter Venkman and company fled the campus and opened shop in the commercial district of 1980’s NYC. The script’s parallels with our times are nothing short of fascinating.
Back to the real, Mark Wahlberg has put his Los Angeles 12-bedroom, 20-bath mansion on the market and is decamping for Nevada. The reason is the same as the one for 300,000 other people who have bolted the state over the past couple of years. He’s an entrepreneur and family man and finds Nevada a better place for his economic health as Ghostbusters’ Venkman, Stantz, and Spengler would discover in fleeing the college.
Mark Wahlberg in April 2022
About the only occupational category whose growth prospects look sunny in California, for instance, is government regulator/inspector. The equation is simple: more laws, more regulations, more state government employees. Each year, the buffoons in the asylum formerly known as the state legislature add to the number of Pecks. One law taking affect this year would require more inspectors of private insurance to enforce a ban on co-pays for abortions. The state’s minimum wage is on legal auto-pilot and is scheduled to jump to $15.50/hour which means more investigators. A new law, effective Jan. 1, 2023, would add to the government workforce to compel compliance with the state’s newfound role of sanctuary for the mutilators of children in transgender medical procedures. New state land use laws will layer more complexity, and regulators, on an already suffocating building industry. In total, Newsom signed 997 new laws, most to take effect on Jan. 1 of this year.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom displays a state bill signed by him shielding abortion providers and volunteers, June 24, 2022.
Thus, California has turned itself into a sanctuary for immigration lawbreakers, child sexual mutilators, and the country’s budding Walter Pecks.
Kathy Hochul’s State of New York is California, Jr. How appropriate that the setting for “Ghostbusters” is New York City. It may as well be Los Angeles or the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Area. These blue havens are awash in Peck-like busybodies. No wonder Texas and Florida added congressmen and the Bear Flag Republic and the Empire State lost some. Expect it to continue.
Walter Peck, the EPA guy, in “Ghostbusters”
RogerG
Read more here:
* Mark Wahlberg’s departure from California to Nevada: “Mark Wahlberg left California for Nevada to give his kids ‘a better life’”, Marianne Garvey, CNN, 10/13/22, at https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/13/entertainment/mark-wahlberg-california-nevada-move/index.html
* “New California Laws on Abortion, Jaywalking, Rap Lyrics”, AP, USN&WP, 12/30/22, at https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/california/articles/2022-12-30/new-california-laws-on-abortion-jaywalking-rap-lyrics
Screenshot from CNN report: ‘It’s like living in an igloo.’ People are turning off their heat as prices surge.
Referring to her home, “It’s like living in an igloo”; so says Charmaine Johnson of Philadelphia this weekend (Nov. 19-20, 2022) who works as an operator at a non-profit call center assisting low-income people heating their homes, and also personally experiencing the awful tradeoff of eat or freeze.
Here we go again. We have another government-sponsored trainwreck to add to history’s ever-lengthening ribbon list of failure. Yes, today, many people have a choice between eating or hypothermia. We never seem to learn that meddlesome ideologues with power screw things up. It makes no different if they’re commissars of the Soviet central planning agency, Gosplan, or Biden’s climate-change zealots. The consequences were famine in the Donbas, or massive shortages and waste and mismanagement in Soviet factories, or today’s sky-high heating bills dropped in American mailboxes. The misery has the same source: government with too much power.
The French word for the culprit is dirigisme, or an economic doctrine in which the state exercises a strong directive over a capitalist market economy.
Charmaine recently spent $1,000 to fill her fuel oil tank. Tim Wisely of Philadelphia, completely reliant on his Social Security benefits, will pay $1,500 to fill his. Wiseley said that he won’t raise the thermostat till his “teeth chatter”. He says, “It’s 50 or 55 degrees in here. To me that’s not unbearable yet.” He adds, “You can’t go food shopping and get oil. It’s one or the other.”
Tim Wisley’s thermostat settingScreenshot from CNN report: “It’s like living in an igloo.”
Nationwide, the cost of heating your home jumped 17% last year with another 18% for this year. The numbers are statistical abstractions until you run into people like Charmaine and Tim.
What’s amazing is that the source of the story, CNN’s Gabe Cohen, can’t bring himself to mention that the looney policies of Biden and his people are a principal cause of the misery. Anything but government is the go-to in our lefty newsrooms. Citing another government agency, the Energy Information Agency (EIA), Cohen repeats the agency’s desultory list of suspects which includes the Ukraine War (of course), OPEC+, increase energy exports, reduced energy inventories, and a higher demand for natural gas for electricity generation. Wait a minute, take a breath, isn’t this the all-too-common evidentiary slime trail of government-empowered zealots run amok?
It’s hard to blame Putin and the Ukraine War since heating bills began to spike in 2021 (17%), long before the thrust to Kiev in February 2022. A stronger correlation aligns with January 20, 2021 (Biden’s inauguration). The best that can be said to hide the donkey party’s full culpability is that Putin made worse what Biden triggered.
Suspect #2, the decision of OPEC+ to cut production, like Putin’s Ukraine adventure, is another after-the-fact that magnifies the fallout of Biden’s well-established ambition to lower the sea levels around Obama’s Martha’s Vineyard estate. Biden and his people accuse OPEC+ of doing what he intended to do: lower production — to assist a “transition” to a California-style Shangri-la. Everything from denying permits on federal lands, increasing the regulatory hoops to explore and produce, starving producers access to capital with new and demonizing SEC regulations, and vetoing pipelines works in the same manner as OPEC’s announcement of a 2,000-bpd cut. Do you believe for a moment that in this atmosphere anyone with capital to spare would spend it on a new refinery? I’m sure that the Sierra Club’s c-suite is dancing a jig over $7-pg diesel.
Los Angeles in a blackout?
Higher demand for natural gas? This is winter. Has anyone checked with Buffalo? Do ya think that Exxon isn’t aware of the seasons? This excuse makes farce look like a compliment.
Then there’s the “increase in energy exports”. What “energy exports”? It’s natural gas, liquified natural gas to Europe, the thing that Biden is trying to transition us from. You see, Biden is attempting to copy Europe in “net-zero” buffoonery. Germany did it . . . and became dependent on Putin. Hitching your wagon to Putin’s ambitions is a scarry energy strategy. But they did it, along with all the vast landscapes devoted to windmills and solar panels. The erratic production must be supplemented by something, and a hugely expensive infrastructure to make the erratic more stable. All for what? A hypothetical 1.5-degree Celsius increase in a century? We’ve had warming periods in the past. Heck, Britain once had vineyards. And cooling periods aren’t great for the food supply and public health (the Black Death). Europe and Biden adopted a “transition” to anguish.
The 2022 midterms were a referendum on . . .? I can’t believe it was a preference for this. Surely, people don’t desire vulnerability. Besides the retort “Don’t call me Shirley”, people must realize that they are exposed to bankruptcy and increased threats to their health. Biden’s “transition” is only a nice sounding word for vulnerability to misery. In the annals of state-sponsored misery, Biden’s greenie die-hards join the ranks of Robespierre’s Committee of Public Safety, Lenin’s politburo, Soviet Gosplan, Mao’s Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward, and the North Korean Kim dynasty’s “Juche”, the dirigisme of “self-sufficiency” and “self-isolation”.
Biden has ample company, and now, we get to experience the same results as the rest of the world’s hoi polloi. I can’t help but be reminded of the definition of insanity. You know, doing the same thing but . . . .
RogerG
Read more here:
* “‘It’s like living in an igloo.’ People are turning off their heat as prices surge”, Gabe Cohen, CNN, Nov. 20, 2022, at https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/18/success/home-heating-prices
* “OPEC announces the biggest cut to oil production since the start of the pandemic”, Hanna Ziady, CNN, Oct. 5, 2022, at https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/05/energy/opec-production-cuts/index.html
* “Heating costs forecast to soar this winter”, Chris Isidore, CNN, Oct. 12, 2022, at https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/12/energy/heating-costs/index.html
* “Biden Has Bungled Fossil-Fuel Policy”, Casey B. Mulligan, National Review Online, Nov. 2, 2022, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/11/biden-has-bungled-fossil-fuel-policy/
Electric vehicle catches fire in Florida after Hurricane Ian.
In Rob Reiner’s “This Is Spinal Tap”, the boys in the band are asked about the unexpected deaths of some of their drummers, including one who mysteriously erupted in spontaneous combustion.
It’s hilarious, but not so funny for Florida electric vehicle (EV) owners in the wake of Hurricane Ian. We now know that water and EV batteries don’t mix. The things don’t need a spark. After the deluge and submersion in flood waters, they’ll just quietly simmer in a super-hot chemical reaction, smoke a little, and then erupt. Watch the Good Morning in America (GMA) report below.
The EV is the darling of our eco-central planners and the eco-acolytes who sit atop many of our institutions. For the elected ones, they didn’t gain their seats of power and influence by accident. We chose them. Through the franchise and Electoral College, we made the choice to give power to those who would force us out of our deep family investments in clean and fuel-efficient sedans, mini-vans, and SUV’s and into the thing that could set a packed parking lot and neighborhood ablaze. Add to that the range anxiety from inoperable, scarce, and inconvenient charging stations; dishonestly advertised operational distances if one takes into account running life-support and other systems like air conditioning and the heater; and the threat of hypothermia as we wait the hour or two for enough juice to get the thing up and running in a Michigan winter.
Wait, there’s more. The same folks who are foisting the EV on us are creating the most unstable grid distributing the most expensive electricity. An ever-growing expanse of giant windmill forests and broadening seas of solar panels marring ever greater portions of the earth’s surface will be our future if they have their way. And if that isn’t enough, much of that grid is exposed to the annual seven-month firestorm season from eco-crazed forestry practices that annually belches millions of tons of carbon dioxide into the air, like the 130 million tons from last year’s conflagrations in California – the equivalent CO2 of 25 million regular autos. So, they shove everyone into EV’s to allegedly save the planet as they encourage the buildup of debris to burn it up. Go figure.
Trees and brush erupt in flames in a California wildfire from 2019.
Incidentally, try to find a place to charge up the thing if you happen to be in the path of the flames, the lines are down, and the cell towers are incinerated. It’s a perpetual motion machine of eco-nuttery. Lesson: Don’t sell that old Camry with the regular unleaded in the gas tank.
Who’s at fault? We are. We elected the clowns who thought that showering the country in paper money was economically righteous and think that eco-central planning is somehow different from the Soviet variety.
It’s not that the donkey party hid it from us. Nancy Pelosi and The Squad have been busy concocting the Green New Deal since Pelosi took the gavel (2019) and Biden the oath of office (2021). Anyone above the sentience level of a worm should have known. Biden repeatedly bellowed their intent when he, for instance, looked into the eyes of a teenage girl (a real XX-chromosome one) in 2019 and said,
“I want you to look at my eyes. I guarantee you. I guarantee you. We’re going to end fossil fuel.”
Democratic presidential candidate former Vice President Joe Biden pumps his fist as he speaks during a campaign stop, Friday, Sept. 6, 2019, in Laconia, N.H. (AP Photo/Mary Schwalm)
True to his word, he’s trying to euthanize the entire industry: practically ending oil development on federal lands and offshore, axing pipelines, lavish spending on loopy “sustainables”, and a quiet strangulation of the energy companies by frightening financial capital away from them. For this gang, real, affordable energy is a dragon to be slain.
The choice of candidates in the 2020 presidential race was between the uncouth with the right policies (for the most part) and a revolutionary ethos of class warfare, neo-Marxist race-baiting, transgenderism, open borders, law unenforcement, and greenie fanaticism. As it turned out, a majority preferred the revolution. Look no further than the mirror for the cause of our troubles if you thought that the uncouth drove you into the arms of the revolutionary. A candidate is much more than the fact that he’s not the other guy.
RogerG
Read here for more:
* “Red Tape Is Making Wildfires Worse”, Shawn Regan and Tate Watkins, National Review Online, Oct. 4, 2022, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/10/red-tape-is-making-wildfires-worse/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=right-rail&utm_content=capital-matters&utm_term=third
* “About Those Green Jobs . . . They Keep Vanishing”, Andrew Follett, National Review Online, Oct. 15, 2022, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/10/about-those-green-jobs-they-keep-vanishing/
* “Climate Policy Should Pay More Attention to Climate Economics”, John H. Cochrane, National Review Online, Sept, 3, 2021, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/09/climate-policy-should-pay-more-attention-to-climate-economics/
* “In intimate moment, Biden vows to ‘end fossil fuel'”, Steve Peoples, ABC News, Sept, 6, 2019, at https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/intimate-moment-biden-vows-end-fossil-fuel-65442382
Michigan Democratic Senator Debbie Stabenow enthused about receiving her new electric car (EV) by saying in a June 7 Senate hearing, “I got it [EV] and drove it from Michigan to here [Washington DC] this last weekend and went by every single gas station, and it didn’t matter how high it was.” Adding, “And so I’m looking forward to the opportunity for us to move to vehicles that aren’t going to be dependent on the whims of the oil companies and the international markets.” Well, the Wall Street Journal had eight of its reporters in four countries, most in the U.S., spend three weeks of their lives in reliance on an EV as their principal mode of personal transportation (watch below). One main conclusion: Don’t underestimate the ability of partisan ideology to cloud a senator’s mature judgment. Either that, or she’s lying.
Senator Debbie Stabenow, a Democrat from Michigan, speaks during a hearing in Washington, D.C., US, on Tuesday, June 7, 2022. (Photographer: Sarah Silbiger/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Here’s some takeaways from WSJ’s experiment. First, some of the people with power in the corporate boardroom are looney. Take GM’s Rick Spina, VP of EV Infrastructure. He details three reasons for the shift to EV’s in the industry: (1) “public opinion, public awareness of climate change”; (2) “there’s legislation around the world supporting the move”; and (3) “in the long run, electric vehicles are going to be cheaper to own and operate”. Two of the three reasons are political, not empirical, in nature. The highly touted wave of climate change concern might show in opinion polls, but it hasn’t translated into a rush to the showroom to buy them. Why? They’re impractical . . . as you will see.
Spina’s claim of the supposed rise of “public awareness” in climate change ranks a fourth-place tie with health care behind the economy, immigration, and abortion in a recent University of Massachusetts Amherst survey. And “awareness” doesn’t mean a broad public embrace of the EV as the solution. The public is simply not buying them in sustainable numbers. The climate change concern could just as easily translate into greater support for the increased use of natural gas and nuclear power than a willingness to pay a $10,000-$20,000 premium on a car of limited practicality. GM is making a bet on something that isn’t a clean match with the so-called “awareness”.
#2 in his rationale is purely political. Legislation is politics pure and simple. Politics has never been shown to bring the greatest good to the greatest number. When politics becomes the arbiter to separate winners from losers, life quickly becomes a zero-sum game: some people win only at the expense of others. Boat loads of subsidies, cash, capital, tax preferences, and punishments for making the politically incorrect decision deprive resources to other pleasant and more appealing alternatives. The economic concepts of opportunity costs and tradeoffs explain the reality. People are herded like cattle down the wrong chute, or the chute that they wouldn’t take voluntarily. Free markets do that – operate on voluntarism, that is – but people like Stabenow and her colleagues want to substitute their judgment for ours. The result is the Soviet world of central planning, queuing up, shortages, and junk nobody wants, and no amelioration of “climate change”.
The last of Spina’s justifications is based on hope, the wishful thinking that the things will be cheaper . . . in the future. They might be more affordable if we sink enough government coercion and largesse into them, but remember, you’ll never realize the things that you gave up (after all, the government aborted them before they were allowed to be real) as gazillions are pumped into making the EV work. It’s like taking one step forward and then three steps back in terms of prosperity.
Enough of Spina. Back to the real world. Notice the appearance of “range anxiety”, the worry that you’re running low on juice and may be stranded before you get to a charging station? It’s much more than a shortage of charging stations. It’s the whole technology. More charging stations means more opportunities to wait hours. It might mean spending a Michigan winter night in the car waiting for a station to free up and charge the batteries so you can get to safety. Speaking of those outside temperatures below freezing, those lithium-ion batteries don’t like the cold. They take even longer to charge. And don’t forget, the batteries that power the wheels energize the heater element and blower to keep you and your kids from hypothermia. More anxiety. A 10-hour trip quickly became 30-hour one.
Which brings up another matter: “gaming” the technology to get more range out of it. What does that mean? You’ve got to turn off all systems to free up more power to the wheels making for an interesting experience driving from LA to Las Vegas in 100+ degree weather on Interstate 15, not to mention a winter drive up the MIchigan peninsula. Range anxiety is instantly transformed into survival anxiety.
Another interesting aside is the identification of EV success with tyrannical regimes, like Red China, the only place with fewer complaints in the test. It makes sense for a system whose stock-and-trade is social engineering. The politburo can simply order an all-EV existence, no great surprise for a Big Brother regime controlling individual conscience, religion, massive surveillance of the population, and genocide, with a gargantuan secret police to make it all happen. Pushing EV’s is small potatoes. But still, if you watch closely, the air is filthy as an American auto exec in China is driven around Shanghai or Beijing. The totalitarians may be shoving their people out of gas cars, but they aren’t so deluded as to think that windmills and solar panels will be sufficient to charge the all-electric things. They are a prime customer for American coal. Imagine, if you will, EV traffic jams in polluted air basins. Has anything about climate really changed?
Beijing in 2015
The WSJ report proved that the EV is almost purely an urban artifact. They’re great for people who live their lives within the city limits running errands. Get out on the open road and range and survival anxiety overhangs the excursion. Plus, unsurprisingly, the published 250–300-mile range is a fantasy. Due to weather and the use of the car’s other system’s such as cabin climate and entertainment, the purported range evaporates. All of this doesn’t matter to a person whose idea of a road trip is to the airport. The EV is a car for a strictly urban life. Outside of that, life is riskier in it.
That’s why some participants in the test suggested a gas-powered car to supplement the EV. So, in Stabenow’s version of the proper life, a one-car purchase is suddenly a two-car purchase. For a family struggling to make ends meet in an existence crafted by Stabenow’s policies, a $40,000 compact EV requires an additional $30,000 fossil fuel sedan if the family wants to have a vacation and family visits beyond the city limits. Maybe in the millionaires’ club called the U.S. Senate, living in domiciles with multi-car garages, having two SUV’s in both modes is pro forma. For the rest of us reeling from inflation, crime, high taxes, rampant homelessness, skyrocketing housing costs, spikes in utility costs, poor schools, and transgenderism threatening to change the lives of our kids forever, an additional car purchase to make the first one practical is lunacy.
That’s why one of the reporters exclaimed in a sigh of relief after the test that “Fumes never smelled so sweet.” First, watch the video if you’re inclined to heed the advice of Gavin Newsom. Don’t say that you haven’t been warned.
RogerG
Read more here:
* “Michigan Democrat brags about driving expensive electric car to DC, avoiding gas stations amid historic prices”, Jessica Chasmar, Fox News, at https://www.foxnews.com/politics/michigan-democrat-electric-car-expensive-dc-gas-prices .
* “Poll: Economy, Immigration Top List of Most Important 2022 Election Issues”, Hannah Bleau, Breitbart, May 14, 2022, at https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2022/05/14/poll-economy-immigration-top-list-of-most-important-2022-election-issues/ .
* “Running on Fumes”, Heather Wilhelm, National Review, Sept, 29, 2022, at fumes/https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2022/10/17/running-on-fumes/ .
* “Pollution prompts 2nd Beijing “red alert” in a month”, CBS News, Dec. 18, 2015, at https://www.cbsnews.com/news/china-second-smog-red-alert-beijing-air-pollution-in-month/ .
