While electric vehicles are essential to reducing carbon emissions, their production can exact a significant human and environmental cost.
They are "essential" but they are evil. Let's all switch — we must! — and then, when our trusty old gas cars are gone, we will be told electric cars are hopelessly bad. The argument is visibly cued up! What are we supposed to do? Not worry about that point in the future, but just concentrate on giving up the gas cars?
To run, EVs require six times the mineral input, by weight, of conventional vehicles. These minerals, including cobalt, nickel, lithium and manganese, are finite resources. And mining and processing them can be harmful for workers, their communities and the local environment.... [An EV has] an approximately 900-pound battery block containing materials that have been mined from the ground, sent around the world and put through complex chemical processing....
Go to the link to view complicated graphics showing where in the world these various minerals are mined and processed. Not only are people in poorer countries exploited in the mining, but more than half of the processing happens in China. We are becoming more and more dependent on China.
It troubles me that going EV requires dragging around those really heavy batteries. EVs are much heavier than gas cars, as this Axios article shows:
Electric vehicles can be anywhere from hundreds to thousands of pounds heavier than similarly sized gas vehicles because EV batteries are so much heavier than engines. For example, the 2023 GMC Hummer EV, a full-size pickup, weighs more than 9,000 pounds, sporting a 2,900-pound battery. In comparison, the 2023 GMC Sierra, also a full-size pickup, weighs less than 6,000 pounds, according to Kelley Blue Book....
We're told to worry about more severe traffic accidents and the collapsing of parking garages. And we may think EVs need to go much farther on a charge before we'd want one, but how can that happen without making these things heavier and heavier and using more and more of those minerals that exploit poor miners and make us dependent on China?
But never forget: "Electric vehicles are essential to reducing carbon emissions."
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96 comments:
Prediction: gas cars won't be off the road before people begin to castigate those who drive electric as "killing the planet".
You can't outrun progress. The kids will always come up with a reason why you are at fault they didn't turn out to be a Disney princess.
It's important to pour a libation to the climate-alarm gods before you speak heresy. At least the WaPo, of all places, wrote about real concerns.
Professora, go to the head of the class: you have identified the real goal of the Watermelons (green on the outside, red on the inside, and utterly poisonous all the way through).
Now that you’ve gained this new insight: what will you do about it?
Therein lies the key to the con—basically all “renewable” energy relies on battery technology that doesn’t exist.
In a proper market economy, we’d be years away from EVs, wind farms, solar, etc., but impatient and ignorant leftists think you can legislate technological advancement. They use the violence of government to force people to do things they would not freely choose and in so doing they have us on an anxiety treadmill; forever fleeing an imaginary problem, pursuing an illusory solution.
To run, EVs require six times the mineral input, by weight, of conventional vehicles. These minerals, including cobalt, nickel, lithium and manganese, are finite resources. And mining and processing them can be harmful for workers, their communities and the local environment....
This is all going to change in the relatively near future. Once we start exploiting/mining the Moon and the asteroids, these minerals will become much cheaper and available. Then the complaint will be that we are depriving these countries by bypassing them and gathering materials in space instead. It is a damned if you do, damned if you don't.
But never forget: "Electric vehicles are essential to reducing carbon emissions."
"Four legs good, two legs better" works very well with a certain demographic. Repeal the 19th.
“From my cold dead hands!”
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WTdO-w3xnpw
If one is looking to debate a liberal, one cannot use logic. It's unfair! Libs can't define a woman, libs can't define when life begins, the vaccine prevents you getting Covid, the border is closed, roads are racist.
Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!
Trains maximises control.
The hard left / green left has been in la-la land with dreams of an electric salvation for a long time. They have aggressively demonized politically-neutral scientific critics of the climate change establishment and the carbon 0% vision for decades, just as they later demonized the COVID vax and policy critics. Scientists are not "right wing" when they poke holes in silly dreams. Dreams often reveal stupid and untested wishful thinking...no human can walk on water.
There is no path to a 100% green future that does not pass through several decades of nuclear and likely coal power with inch-by-inch changes and a gradual population decline. The only way to rapidly achieve a 100% green world is through a global genocide / extinction event. Some of the extreme zealots may well try to do that with COVID-2026.
Bill Gates, calling Bill Gates. Mr. Gates, your food-energy-vax genetic engineering lab is ready for use.
This is one of my hot buttons…. The need to reduce carbon emissions is a scam. The whole climate change issue is a scam. Yet we have politicians spending trillions of our tax dollars on it, and trying to force us to convey ourselves as they dictate. They’re enticing auto companies with subsidies - our money - to force us to drive vehicles we don’t want. They’re threatening gas stoves. It’s mind-blowing how out of whack this is. I will not comply.
The climate computer models are worthless. The IPCC is a political body, not a scientific one. Carbon dioxide is essential to life. We have to quit going along with this nonsense! Throw the bums out!
Automobiles did not replace beasts of burden overnight. In some small parts of the world, they still haven't.
Despite the best efforts of our green friends the conversion from carbon-based transportation to sun-based will take some time ... measured in decades.
"While electric vehicles are essential to reducing carbon emissions...."
This is what happens when you let the people the Obama administration called "27 year old know nothings" write the news.
Electric vehicles don't reduce carbon emissions. Burning coal downtown emits as much carbon as burning gasoline in your car. The whole fad is nonsense.
Nothing new here. I have been reading and bookmarking articles that agree with the WaPoo one for close to ten years. These articles don't get any lamestream coverage and the authors are treated as heretics.
The idiot left have a legislative trifecta up in Minnesota and do you think they will pass any legislation helpful to mining rare earth minerals up on the MN Iron Range and make further electrification possible? Of course not.
The greens want you in public transport that they control. Owning your own conveyance is a detriment to the hive.
The 15 minute city is much more appealing when you outlaw cars.
In the meantime, how many people park on the street or in apartment lots?
Chargers for them?
Not really looking forward to our streets resembling those of Cuba.
Wake up People
We are 3 years into covid. We are at the stage were all the experts are claiming they never said what they demanded.
Catastrophic, Anthropological Global Warming Is exactly the same.
If fossil fuels were a problem, All electricity would generated by nuclear.
All the rest is shiny stuff to distract.
There are half dozen mathematical equations that prove the "solution" can never attain the stated goal.
Electric cars are the future transportation technology. They eliminate the need for cooling systems, fuel systems, lubrication maintenance, that come with combustion vehicles. They also can power all the sensors and compute needed for autonomous capabilities.
Unfortunately the current power plant tech for the car is insufficient. Lithium batteries are costly, heavy, take long to charge, highly volatile and dangerous, and rely on materials mined in dirty ways.
Until a revolution in electricity storage occurs, we will be using ICE cars for a while.
“While electric vehicles are essential to reducing carbon emissions”
Begs the question.
Why is reducing carbon emissions essential?
YOU WILL OBEY...OR ELSE.
“What are we supposed to do? Not worry about that point in the future, but just concentrate on giving up the gas cars?”
Yes. And then we’ll own cars we’re not allowed to charge or drive. The people “in charge” of us are the underpants gnomes only with authority.
If we have to accept essential and evil at the same time, let's stick with fossil fuels. So that the dinosaurs will not have died in vain.
Now that you’ve gained this new insight: what will you do about it
Nothing. Cruel neutrality, don't you know.
"Four legs good, two legs better" works very well with a certain demographic. Repeal the 19th
Gahrie wins the internet today.
And FJB.
And release the ENTIRE Audrey Hale manifesto now. I want the trans to squirm.
Read the book "Cobalt Red" by Siddarth Kara for some insight on the mining of minerals needed for your EVs, smartphones, tablets. Then consider that the lithium batteries used in the EVs have a tendency to...burn.
The EV rush is like the wind turbine rush and the solar panel rush. We're not ready to eliminate fossil fuels to switch over to alternate energy sources. We're just not at the point where we've refined either the gathering of the mineral resources and materials, or proven the alternatives can actually power a modern society at full. Not with rolling blackouts, not with rationing energy use. But at full power. If we're not at full energy power, we won't be moving forward as a civilization.
The attempt by Biden, John Kerry, Democrats, Hollywood, and the WEF to insist that we shut off fossil fuels and rely on alternatives- TODAY!- is both absurd and suicidal as a civilization.
It all makes when you consider the ideology comes from Stalin's Soviet Union.
I was recently in Charleston, SC where a sign on a parking garage prohibited the parking of electric vehicles due to possibility of fire.
Who can afford a new battery when it dies, and WHERE are we going to put all the dead batteries containing lithium??
I wonder if there is a Gell-Mann term for leftist ideals. They are wrong about everything but most people believe in the fairy tales because they sound reasonable. Once you realize how many things the left pushes is harmful you will stop believing anything they advocate. They have done so much harm to so many people in the name of doing good. You are negligently harmful if you don't take the time to look into everything in great detail to learn the truth. Remember, the media is in on the game, so they are not your source. To vote for leftism is to be a participant in real harm.
Remember when incandescent bulbs were outlawed? To save Electricity? You know, that stuff the we now require you to use to run your cars? Irony anyone. Plus, remember the technology then? CFL bulbs with that very safe "you can almost eat it with a spoon" element called Mercury? Look at the history of technology. Long before the problem becomes real, technology found the solution. But it is always slower than it could be because the government forces resources to be allocated to the wrong things.
False premise: "While electric vehicles are essential to reducing carbon emissions." CO2 does not drive the climate. Increased CO2 is greening the planet, increasing vegetation. Until I see reproducible test data on how CO2 changes the atmosphere's heat transfer, the AGW hypothesis is just bunk.
The Vikings were farming barley in Greenland during the Medieval Warm Period and the Romans were raising wine grapes in England during the Roman Warm Period. None of those activities occurs today.
It's never been the least bit mysterious what the plan is. They want you to ride the bus. I might also say that they intend to put you on trains. In more ways than one if they can figure out how to get away with it. I saw an Op-Ed in the Irish Times yesterday stating that "we" will just have to make air travel much more expensive. The likes of Ryanair are ruining the environment. Ruining the favorite holiday locations more like. The world will be much nicer for the .0001% once they have culled a few billion people and put the machines in place to do most of the dirty work.
Right when I’m ready to give up on you, Madam Professor, you manage yet again to break the code.
If EVs (or wind and solar power) was so damned good, they wouldn’t need to make it so you have to buy one. All the ‘green” options have ridiculous subsidies but people still aren’t buying. That should tell you something, but the Biden Administration is so tied to environmental community that it’s all we can expect. The enviros have their heads so far up Biden’s ass he can taste the Brylcreem.
Seems like this is the setup from the left explains why, now, they don’t want to push EVs, and that they were never for it because of their new-found knowledge of the ‘human cost’. (Which, btw, is something that ‘right-thinking’ people have known and said for years).
But how will this be weaponized against conservatives (irony) and republicans?
During a blizzard you crash your EV and are injured. The ambulance that brings you to the hospital and the tow truck that fetches your crunched EV will both be non-electric.
"The argument is visibly cued up! What are we supposed to do? Not worry about that point in the future, but just concentrate on giving up the gas cars?"
Others have said this, but I'll add my voice to the crowd. The end game is to eliminate all private transportation - except for the privileged few - as a means of control.
And now Biden wants the military to have electric tanks... Imagine a 50 Ton Abrams with one heck of a battery!!!
They are bamboozling people folks!! It is all a LIE!!
AA, “ We are becoming more and more dependent on China.”
Doubly so. The Cult of Net Zero also demands that we switch our grid to solar and wind. About 90% of solar panels are from China. Solar and wind are unreliable and expensive. Our rates will triple.
A massive battery with lethal potential, redistributive environmental harm, finitely accessible resources, and intermittent, unreliable minority available Green energy.
You can't outrun progress. The kids will always come up with a reason why you are at fault they didn't turn out to be a Disney princess.
It's rebellious, man. Generational, ladies. Real monotonic.
The nonsense of the carbon obsession is discussed by Richard Lindzen.
Veteran climate expert Dr Richard Lindzen made a name for himself before the fundamentally flawed field of climate science that we know today was invented. In an interview with the pioneering atmospheric physicist and former emeritus professor of meteorology at MIT, he recounted events that occurred in the 1980s, which gave birth to the all-consuming climate change narrative that prevails today.
Having begun his research on climate change in the mid-70s motivated by a sincere interest in understanding the Earth’s climate regimes, Lindzen’s assessment of the various elements paraded as scientific evidence of an impending climate catastrophe is remarkably sensible.
What’s particularly revealing from his recollection of events is how complicit the media and politicians have been in forcing the disastrous climate change narrative upon an unsuspecting and trusting public from the very beginning.
Breezy: My hot button issue too. CAGW is the biggest scam in the history of the world. And scam is the correct word.
Temujin. $ENVX has solved the fire problem for lithium batteries. The legendary TJ Rodgers is on its Board and owns millions of the debt and equity. I own a big position. Do your own DD.
"Once we start exploiting/mining the Moon and the asteroids, these minerals will become much cheaper and available."
No, they will not. A tremendous amount of energy is required to get anything off the earth. Space is extraordinarily inhospitable. And spacecraft are remarkably complicated and expensive. The first two can't be changed, and the third can only get so much better.
"This is all going to change in the relatively near future. Once we start exploiting/mining the Moon and the asteroids, these minerals will become much cheaper and available."
When we start mining the moon in the "relatively near future"??? You are an intelligent, insightful commenter who throws his brain out the window when the topic of electric cars rolls around. Sure, they're an engineering marvel worthy of our admiration, but jeez Louise, take off the rose colored EV glasses.
and the electric needed to run the battery cars?
We will soon be told by the dot.gov crooks and liars who run the show that we can only drive on certain of the week.
The covid shut downs delighted these assholes... It was their grand experiment.
It's important to pour a libation to the climate-alarm gods before you speak heresy.
Oh, Kate, well said!
EVs for everybody is a part of the larger 'electricity for everything' rush that is completely unthought out. Francis Menton has a blog where he regularly asks for the engineering analyses as to how the grid is supposed to work when the only input is wind and solar. There aren't any of any substance There are studies, which he highlights, which point out that the whole scheme, as currently envisioned, can't work without energy storage technology which doesn't exist. It is mind boggling that we are barreling down this highway with no real plan for how this will all work. This is a political movement that threatens to kill us all. I'm hoping when the calamities start appearing, like millions freezing to death in a winter grid collapse, that we aren't too far down the road to step back from the precipice.
Where does the electricity to power these cars come from?
We need about 300 gigawatts of additional generation to power these cars.
@300 nuclear plants
Or
600,000 large windmills (2mw nominal,0.5mw actual)
Or
40,000 square miles of solar panels
Double that for trucks etc.
Just in the US
John Henry
Stop with the "carbon emissions" bullshit, please.
Carbon is not the alleged problem. Carbon dioxide is.
Co2 has no more in common with carbon than hydrogen does with water.
Carbon is not only not a greenhouse gas, it's not even a gas!
John Henry
"While electric vehicles are essential to reducing carbon emissions...."
No they are not.
With very rare exceptions they are forced on the public by virtue signaling grifters.
In a real market economy, if a need was seen, the market would develop naturally and inefficiencies would have been dealt with. The way we are doing it now inefficiencies are built into the system. Third party players, in this case the government, always skew markets to the detriment of the consumer. Real efficiencies are delayed by decades.
If reducing carbon emissions is the goal then we're going about it in all the wrong ways.
It's been twenty years and climate wise things haven't gotten any worse. In fact everything is pretty much the same.
The problem of battery weight is basically unsolvable if you have to have a battery that can propel the vehicle at highway speeds for 300+ miles on a single charge. There will be from this point forward only very, very modest (energy capacity)/(weight improvements). Electrochemistry is a very mature science that has been a subject of study for over 200 years. You end up with lithium batteries because the lithium ion is the lightest weight cation available- we won't be discovering a lighter one- lithium is it. The Teslas, the longest range pure EVs, have battery masses of over 550 kgs (1200 pounds), and those cars are small sedans, not SUVs or trucks. The GMC Hummer is claimed to have the same range, but with a larger vehicle mass to propel, has a correspondingly heavier battery- that relationship is basically linear. A semi able to pull a full trailer load for 300+ miles at highway speed will have to have a battery weight of at least 10,000 lbs+.
The only economically viable niche, in my opinion, for pure EVs is in small sedans meant to go only 30-60 miles on a charge. And none of this addresses the issue of increasing the grid power and capacity to take over all the energy needed to charge 300 million EVs. We are headed for an economic catastrophe in pushing these vehicles with nudges and outright mandates.
Sean said...
"Electric cars are the future transportation technology. They eliminate the need for cooling systems, fuel systems, lubrication maintenance, that come with combustion vehicles. They also can power all the sensors and compute needed for autonomous capabilities."
Just a few points.
Any system that converts energy to motion creates heat. The batteries in electric cars are cooled with glycol. Through radiators. The fuel is batteries which have a shelf life and are, right now, very expensive. They did a battery swap in my daughters Prius. It was $1500.00 to swap ten on the cells. That was a bargain. Metal on metal requires lubrication. There are bearing surfaces all over a vehicle that require grease and oil. On a regular basis. Tesla uses oil to cool its drive motors. Your kayak is made from oil.
The world will always need fossil fuels.
And Temujin is correct- even if all this Green Energy nonsense actually works, it would then become the new target for elimination. There is simply a large minority, very vocal and very active, that wants to go back to subsistance civilization. They will always be with us.
I've a FB friend (very preachy, die-hard Democrat) who has an EV -- the mustang. It weighs one ton more than my little car. I asked him how accelerating that extra ton of weight is better for the environment somehow than a lighter gas-powered vehicle. No reply.
I once was in a state of equipoise between belief and disbelief in the catastrophism at the core of the green movement. Once the evidence demonstrated that the movement was about power, not science, it set off a chain reaction. I started to see how much of what I was being fed on other topics was part of a con.
The continuing challenge is to discern the elements of truth that make the con work. Just because it's a con doesn't mean it's 100% false.
The “environmentalists” won’t be satisfied until the impoverish everyone — except themselves.
"They are "essential" but they are evil."
Correct.
"What are we supposed to do?"
Submit.
"It troubles me that going EV requires dragging around those really heavy batteries."
You are right to be troubled. But that's only a detail in the green revolution. Until you and people like you consistently resist the prog project (which you can clearly see "cued up"), even when it means allying yourself with deplorable opponents of abortion, and voting on the basis of policy rather than personality, progs will tolerate your being troubled, and move forward.
The people mandating EV's are not serious people. Energy Sec. Jennifer Granholm says she supports efforts to require the U.S. military to implement an all-electric vehicle fleet by the year 2030, telling lawmakers that she believes “we can get there." This will get people killed and it won't be our adversaries.
No problem. We have Alfred E. Neuman in charge.
I can see you’ve really thought through this issue with a lot of research, understanding and good-faith argumentation!
Anyway: But never forget: "Electric vehicles are essential to reducing carbon emissions."
Are you disagreeing with that or disagreeing with the fact that it’s an important point to remember? You’re intelligent enough to let us know what you really think in a well-reasoned and occasionally factual way without being sneaky or coy about whatever it is that you’re commenting on.
“The attempt by Biden, John Kerry, Democrats, Hollywood, and the WEF to insist that we shut off fossil fuels and rely on alternatives- TODAY!- is both absurd and suicidal as a civilization.“
GOOD POINT! I think that’s what caused the downfall of Rome, if I’m not mistaken. Sumeria too, for that matter!
Don’t let Toynbee tell you any differently.
The use case for plug-in electric cars is currently limited to drive-local-home-every-night-charge-at-home. And it is similar for commercial vehicles such as UPS and USPS ... drive-local-back-to-the-garage-every-night-charge-at-the-garage.
And in the above use cases we should start with high-mileage users.
Most anything else is an inconvenient and expensive form of Carbon-Dioxide-Theater.
I will not be convinced that the anti-CO2 brigade is serious until they build their first nuclear-powered generator. Nuclear: Cheap, clean, reliable.
(Cheap to run, not to build)
In California they just passed a new rule that will ban diesel locomotive engines that are more than 23 years old by the year 2030. They don't care about the fact that diesel locomotives are amazingly fuel efficient. A diesel locomotive averages moving one ton of freight 500 miles on just one gallon of diesel fuel.
They also passed a rule, taking effect on 1/1/23, banning diesel truck engines that were built before 2010 and then a few days ago they announced that they will ban the sale of all new diesel trucks by the year 2036.
There's a cheesy, 1981, sci-fi film called, The Last Chase. It stars Lee Majors, Chris Makepeace and Burgess Meredith. It's about a future where all private vehicles are banned. Lee Majors is a former race car driver and he breaks the law by rebuilding his race car and makes a break to a place where people can still be free. (and own cars) Ironically, the place that he is heading to is called "Free California."
Agree w/Gahrie @ 5:23. Moon-mining will solve Earth-mining issues. And as far as I can tell, China is most active in that pursuit.
It is becoming more and more apparent to more and more people that the "climate change" hysteria is a scam, a gigantic hustle on which a few are getting enormously rich, and the result of which, if carried out to its final absurdity, will reduce to serfdom all of the rest of humanity -- those it doesn't condemn to death by starvation and/or exposure, that is.
I'm an old man, and my current ICE vehicle should last out my time. I will never buy an EV, and I will always oppose all of the totalitarian attempts to foist them on the general public.
"Dreams often reveal stupid and untested wishful thinking...no human can walk on water."
Apparently you've never been to Wisconsin in January.
The solution to our energy problems is simple. You know those novelty toy drinking birds with the red liquid that take a drink from a glass of water, cooling off the head, causing the red liquid in the birds body to rise up until the head has enough liquid to take another drink? As long as the glass is full of water, they'll just keep going for ever.
Imagine placing a turbine at the axis. Every time the bird takes a drink, the turbine turns and a little bit of energy is produced. Not a lot of energy, but if you made them 300 feet tall and covered the hills and plains with them, I believe all of our energy problems would be over.
"The whole climate change issue is a scam."
Every single Progressive issue is a scam. Take the claim of disenfranchisement. It simply doesn't exist. How do we know this? Because Progressives have yet to produce a single human being who was prevented from voting. Not one. Ever.
And if they ever did find one, that person would be famous and paraded around from coast-to-coast appearing on shows like The View, and Congress would be tripping over itself coming up with an all-encompassing voting rights law named after that person. But such a person does not exist. And yet we hear about them ad naseum.
Every single Progressive issue is a scam. All of them.
Right now, I am taking down fruit trees that I planted over 25 years ago. Trees like cherry pear, and apricot don't live much longer than that, so they have to be cut down. There were 16 of them.
Now I am in favor of eliminating the use of gasoline powered engines whenever possible, so I have been taking all of these trees down with a handsaw and an ax. It's a shit-ton of work, but at least I'm not burning any fossil fuels. Because I care about the earth.
When I get the branches limbs and trunks broken down to a manageable size, I burn them in my firepit. I figure for the last quarter century, these trees have been pulling carbon out of the air and storing it in the wood. By burning that wood, I'm returning all of that carbon back into the atmosphere from whence it came.
So I ask you, what could be more carbon-neutral than that?
They want to destroy the planet in order to save it. The MSM never wants to look at the dirty underbelly of so-called green renewables. This article surprises me.
For some people, an image of proletarian hordes dressed in Zhongshan "Mao suits" and clogging major urban thoroughfares on poorly-made three-speed bicycles is a masturbatory fantasy.
That is the end game.
There are a variety of minerals needed to make the batteries, the solar panels and wind mills required for the EV revolution. Very few are mined and refined in the US as the 'greens' think all that mining is evil. So they mostly come from China, South America, Africa, etc. Also, if you calculate the amount of minerals needed, how much is being mined and refined currently , you can calculate how long it will take to accumulate the necessary amounts for the US to go all EV. The shortest time for any one mineral is about 400 years and most are in the 1000 plus years.
This is for the US, not the world. You cannot get there from here, and no amount of force by any government is going to change that. The push is to force a way of life on people that cannot work, and frankly is not supposed to. This is to create chaos and destruction. The death of the civilized world is being pushed forht by people who truly believe that none of the badness will happen to them.
When we start mining the moon in the "relatively near future"???
Mining on the Moon will begin in the next decade, and in the asteroid belt within twenty years.
People have no concept of how revolutionary Starship will be when it is operational.
"Once we start exploiting/mining the Moon and the asteroids, these minerals will become much cheaper and available."
No, they will not. A tremendous amount of energy is required to get anything off the earth.
True. Luckily we are watching the development of the most powerful rocket in history as we speak. This rocket can carry tremendous payloads into space at an extremely low price.
Space is extraordinarily inhospitable.
So was much of Earth. Human history is about changing inhospitable environments to better suit human needs, or adapting ourselves to better survive them.
And spacecraft are remarkably complicated and expensive.
Were. All of that is about to change. Falcon-9 has brought the cost and availability of spaceflight down a long way already. Starship is about to do for commercial spaceflight what the DC-3 did for commercial flight.
" The death of the civilized world is being pushed forht by people who truly believe that none of the badness will happen to them."
That's 100% Mansonian. The guy truly was a visionary just like the Manson girls said.
I am not anti-car. I often drive for fun, unless it's bumper to bumper, stop and go, I enjoy driving. I drive a stick, again, because it's more fun than automatics. I drive a VW Beetle to keep myself out of trouble and drive at least semi-responsibly. (I have a lead foot) By the way, Beetles are remarkably quick and responsive to drive even if there is no top end speed.
I love EV cars not because I believe in AGW, (I don't) but because in the end they are better cars. I also happen to be a historian, so I know that a little over 100 years ago you guys would have been saying:
"Horses reproduce naturally. Who is going to want to pay for a machine to replace them?"
"My horses eat grass which grows naturally...how are you going to provide a consistent, affordable fuel for automobiles?"
"There is no infrastructure for cars, no service stations and they require roads to drive on. I can ride my horse and feed it anywhere."
"Automobiles are unsafe. They catch on fire all the time and are dangerous to drive. They scare horses and little old ladies."
"Automobiles are a conspiracy to make us give up our horses and become reliant on corporations."
"Automobiles are too expensive and difficult to make".
"Working conditions in automobile factories are dangerous and unpleasant."
All of which were true, until they weren't.
Who can afford a new battery when it dies, and WHERE are we going to put all the dead batteries containing lithium??
"As InsideEVs calculates, 12 percent battery degradation over 200,000 miles would mean approximately 1 percent loss per 16,667 miles, or 1 percent loss every 67 charging cycles (at 250 miles per cycle). It's a pretty reliable result, and should mean there won't be too many full battery pack replacements for future older and used Tesla vehicles, since their original packs retain so much energy even with heavy use."
https://www.motortrend.com/news/tesla-model-s-x-battery-health-over-time/
That weight comparison is deceptive- a bit too apples and oranges. True comparable ice/ev comes in much less…but what’s the point, really? It’s not like you’re effing up your gas mileage by hauling the batteries around…The human atrocity thing with the mines can also be overcome. Demand creates its own supply.
None of these are deal breakers. The engineers will be hard at work improving electron loss throughout the powertrain and will creep toward Lucid and beyond for the fleet. That said why not just keep your ICE vehicle if you want? So far I haven’t heard a great argument for getting rid of them…
Not something I'll have to worry about but what happens when we start moon mining?
We will be reducing the mass of the moon and increasing the mass of the earth.
At some point masses will change enough to affect orbits.
John Henry
Stay ship is amazing and will change many things. What it won’t change is the energy cost to get payload into orbit.
“Who can afford a new battery when it dies, and WHERE are we going to put all the dead batteries containing lithium??”
The minerals will be recovered and reused. At least there’s that!
The minerals will be recovered and reused. At least there’s that!
No, it's not economical to deconstruct a lithium battery, unlike a lead-acid battery. Lithium batteries go straight to the landfill.
We have the cult of climate change and the cult of trans. All progressive fantasies.
"Mining on the Moon will begin in the next decade, and in the asteroid belt within twenty years."
I don't believe it, but for the sake of argument let's accept that as true. When will moon mining reach the industrial scale required to put an EV (or two!) in every garage?
What happened to the environmental statement, “Act locally, think globally”? The Climatistas are not factoring in the global impacts of mining and processing all those materials needed to build batteries for electric vehicles. They’re not facing the environmental impacts of their “green energy” fantasies, much less the economics impacts. They call their dreams the Green New Deal, but it is closer to Mao’s deadly Great Leap Forward. That’s why I call it the Green Leap Forward. It will likely end just as disastrously as the Great Leap Forward. If we’re fortunate, we won’t have the millions of deaths. People don’t understand just how dependent modern society is on a reliable and economically viable electric grid.
CA, OR and WA want to eliminate diesel- and gas-powered trucks and trains. I say give it to them. We need to require all deliveries to state and local governments be via electric vehicles only, from the supplier’s location to the government receiving site. All vehicles, trains and airplanes involved in transporting those goods must be EVs. Why wait? Give it to them good and hard. Let them starve, run out of paper and red tape when they can’t be resupplied.
hpudding said...
I can see you’ve really thought through this issue with a lot of research, understanding and good-faith argumentation!
Anyway: But never forget: "Electric vehicles are essential to reducing carbon emissions."
They do not decrease carbon emissions because to create them requires a massive expenditure of carbon causing energy.
Ann Althouse said...
“Who can afford a new battery when it dies, and WHERE are we going to put all the dead batteries containing lithium??”
The minerals will be recovered and reused. At least there’s that!"
Except for the loss of sulfides as the batteries deteriorate. And then the extremely energy inefficient refining process starts all over again. People seem to think that if we only convert to electric vehicles our environmental problems will all disappear. They won't. We'll just be diverting them to another area. There ain't no such thing as a free lunch. Either way we pay.
My grandmother had an electric car. She didn't own it for long. She could tell everyone a few things about electric cars. She knew about the same things back then as we know about today: weight, limited range, limited charging stations, toxic chemicals, mining waste, expensive to buy and maintain, etc. But, she was born in 1898 and she can't tell you about electric cars anymore.
But I listened then and there is no way I will every buy this foolish method of transportation. What next? Steam?
Rusty, don't waste your time- we call him hpuddinghead for a reason.
Jennifer Granholm needs to ride in a tank in Ukraine to smarten TF up.
What if the science behind global warming is wrong? All this is not only for nothing but at an extremely large cost. “Science” hasn’t been doing very well lately. It seems politicized and is not open to seeing the another side. That isn’t science.
Once we have only public transportation, and no cash, we'll need a credit card. Connected to our social credit score. See Trudeau and the truckers.
Some years ago, traveling in another time zone, our credit card failed to pay the merchant. Being smarter than us, he said to call our customer service office and tell them we are, indeed, traveling. It's not that our card was stolen. Point is, they can reach out and shut you down with techbikigy available a dozen years ago.
Rusty is a genius who believes an environment with more fires, flooding, drought and species loss would be a great “trade-off.” All farmers should quit growing food and follow what machinists like him tell them to do.* Real genius stuff.
*And of course, he didn’t get his information from ever taking a physics course or conducting an experiment of any sort - but because the oil lobbies told his tribal political party what to say, and therefore told him what to think. (After their own scientists had already made the case of how much of a problem AGW would be).
Rusty is a genius who believes an environment with more fires, flooding, drought and species loss would be a great “trade-off.” All farmers should quit growing food and follow what machinists like him tell them to do.* Real genius stuff.
*And of course, he didn’t get his information from ever taking a physics course or conducting an experiment of any sort - but because the oil lobbies told his tribal political party what to say, and therefore told him what to think. (After their own scientists had already made the case of how much of a problem AGW would be).
We humans are the carbon emissions they want to eliminate.
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