More subsidies from exhausted California taxpayers cannot compensate for hard realities
Paul Driessen
The first justification was that internal combustion engines polluted too much. But emissions steadily declined, and today’s cars emit about 3% of what their predecessors did. Then it was oil imports: electric vehicles (EVs) would reduce foreign dependency and balance of trade deficits. Bountiful oil and natural gas supplies from America’s hydraulic fracturing revolution finally eliminated that as an argument.
Now the focus is on climate change. Every EV sale will help prevent assumed and asserted manmade temperature, climate and weather disasters, we’re told – even if their total sales represented less than 1% of all U.S. car and light truck sales in 2016 (Tesla sold 47,184 of the 17,557,955 vehicles sold nationwide last year), and plug-in EVs account for barely 0.15% of 1.4 billion vehicles on the road worldwide.
In recent months, Tesla sales plunged to nearly zero in Hong Kong and Denmark, as huge government subsidies were eliminated. Now Tesla’s U.S. subsidies face extinction. Once its cumulative sales since 2009 reach 200,000 vehicles in the next few months, federal tax rebates will plunge from $7,500 per car to zero over an 18-month period. The same thing will happen to other EV companies that reach 200,000.
Subsidies clearly drive sales for EVs, which are often double the cost of comparable gasoline-powered vehicles. Free charging stations, and access to HOV lanes for plug-ins with only the driver, further sweeten the deal. For those who can afford the entry fee, the ride is smooth indeed. In fact, a 2015 study found, the richest 20% of Americans received 90% of hundreds of millions in taxpayer EV subsidies.
Where were all the government “offices of environmental justice” when this was happening? How much must we subsidize our wealthiest families, to save us from manmade planetary disasters that exist only in Al Gore movies and alarmist computer models?
Perhaps recognizing the reverse Robin Hood injustice – or how unsustainable free EV stations are for cash-strapped cities – Palo Alto (where Tesla Motors is headquartered) announced that it will charge 23 cents per kWh to charge plug-in vehicles in city parking garages. Others communities and states may also reduce their rebates, HOV access and free charging, further reducing incentives to purchase pricey EVs.
Meanwhile, Lyft and Uber are also decreasing the justification for shelling out $35,000 to $115,000 or even $980,000 for an electric car that gets very limited mileage per charge. Long excursions still need internal combustion engines or long layovers every few hundred miles to recharge EV batteries.
Intent on advancing its renewable energy and climate change agenda, the California legislature recently enacted a new cap-and-trade law that will generate revenues for Tesla and the “bullet train to nowhere,” by increasing hidden taxes on motor fuels, electricity and consumer products – with the state’s poor, minority and working class families again being hit hardest. State legislators are also close to passing a $3-billion EV subsidy program, primarily to replace the $7,500 federal rebate that Tesla could soon lose. Electric vehicle buyers could soon receive up to $40,000 for buying Tesla’s most expensive models! Coal-billionaire and California gubernatorial hopeful Tom Steyer vigorously supports the new subsidy.
We can also expect a battle royale over extending the federal EV subsidy beyond 200,000 vehicles – demonstrating once again that lobbyists are now far more important to bottom lines than engineers, especially when lobbyists can channel enormous contributions to politicians’ reelection campaigns.
As U.S. government agencies prepare to reassess climate change science, models and disaster predictions, it’s a good time to reexamine claims made about all the utopian electric vehicle and renewable energy forecasts, expanding on the land and raw material issues I raised in a previous article.
In his Forbes article on Battery Derangement Syndrome, energy and technology analyst Mark P. Mills notes that Tesla is also getting $1 billion in taxpayer subsidies to build a huge $5-billion lithium battery factory in Nevada. Batteries, it’s often claimed, can soon replace fossil fuels for backing up expensive, intermittent, unreliable, unpredictable wind and solar power. Mills explains why this is … deranged.
In an entire year, all the existing lithium battery factories in the world combined manufacture only enough capacity to store 100 billion Watt-hours (Wh) of electricity. But the USA alone uses 100 times this capacity: more than 10,000 billion Wh per day. Worldwide, humanity uses over 50,000 billion Wh daily.
Focusing on solar power, Mills notes, that means storing electricity for 12 hours a day – to power homes and businesses around the globe for the 12 hours per day that photovoltaic systems will generate power on sunny days in the 100% solar world of the utopian future – would require 25,000 billion Watt-hours of battery power (ignoring future electricity needs to recharge electric vehicle batteries).
Replacing the gasoline in the tanks of 1.4 billion vehicles worldwide with electric power would require another 100,000 billion Watt-hours. That brings total global demand to well over 125,000 billion Wh of storage. That means it would take 1,250 years of production from every existing lithium battery factory worldwide to meet this combined demand. Or we would have to build 1,250 times more factories. Or we could build batteries that are 10 to100 times more powerful and efficient than what we have today.
Says Mills, the constraints of real world physics on battery storage mean this latter option will not happen.
In a world where we are also supposed to ban nuclear (and most hydroelectric) power, the very notion of eliminating the 80% of all global energy that comes from oil, natural gas and coal – replacing it with wind, solar and biofuel power – is fundamentally absurd. Can you imagine what would happen when the power goes off and on repeatedly while we are smelting iron, copper, aluminum, cobalt or lithium ores … forging or casting metals into components … or running complex fabrication and assembly lines?
In the sustainability arena, has anyone calculated how much lithium, cobalt and other metals would be required to manufacture all those batteries? Where they would be mined – with nearly all the best U.S. metal prospects off limits to exploration and production, and radical environmentalists increasingly rallying to block mining projects overseas? The mines would have to be enormous, and operated by huge corporate consortiums. Will anti-corporate activists on our campuses suddenly have a change of heart?
Will homes, neighborhoods and communities have the electrical service (200 amperes or more per home) to handle all the lighting, computing, entertainment, air conditioning, medical equipment and other requirements of modern living – AND the power required to charge all the predicted electric vehicles? What will it cost to upgrade neighborhood power grids, and home and commercial electrical systems?
Lithium batteries and their component metals pose unique fire and explosion risks. What safeguards will be established to minimize those dangers, in battery factories, homes and public parking garages?
Some factories and batteries will invariably be poorly built, handled or maintained. Some will invariably malfunction – causing potentially catastrophic explosions. The bigger the factory or battery, the bigger the cataclysm. Will we apply the same precautionary principles to them as more rabid environmentalists insist on applying to drilling, fracking, pipelines, refineries, factories, dams and nuclear power plants?
What is the life expectancy of batteries, compared to engines in gasoline-powered cars? Two or three times shorter? What does it cost to replace battery packs compared to engines? Two to three times as much? What is the true overall cost of owning an EV? Four to six times higher than a gasoline car? How will we dispose of or recycle millions or billions of batteries and their dangerous, toxic components?
Is the real goal of all this crony-corporatist wind, solar and battery enthusiasm – and anti-fossil fuel activism – to slash living standards in industrialized nations, and ensure that impoverished nations are able to improve their health and living conditions only marginally?
We would do well to raise – and answer – these and other essential questions now, before we let activists, journalists, legislators and regulators con us into adopting more of their utopian, “planet-saving” ideas.
Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power – Black death.
[update, Math error corrected 100,000 billion Watt-hours~ctm]
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With the positive reviews and loyal support of Tesla customers I doubt the lack of rebates will kill their sales. I think it’s much more likely that publicized ending of rebates Hong Kong and Denmark caused potential buyers to make their purchases before the rebates ended. Time will tell whether sales in those countries rebound.
I’m sure states like California will continue to reward customers making buying decisions that support the green agenda.
Bill J
Yes you are correct, the months prior, and particularly the last month before rebates ended folks purchased giving abnormally high sales, Sales may trickle back up after the price sticker shock normalizes.
Electric vehicle sales will not die, neither should they.
At some point they will get it right, and remember the last time oil was at $140 a barrel for no other reason than greed.
Ozone, I’d like to quibble with you a bit when you write: “At some point they will get it right, and remember the last time oil was at $140 a barrel for no other reason than greed.”
That’s certainly a succinct analysis, but it might be misleading.
The price of oil went up when the US started bombing the folks in the Middle East and killing them in large numbers for crimes they didn’t commit. That would be the Legacy of GWB, or “W” to his friends. It (the price of oil) went back down as a result of increased exploration efforts and the use of more advanced extraction technologies that resulted in that sharp price rise. So in some ways, the Iraq/Afghan incursion resulted in a lower oil price for US consumers by “incentivising” US oil explorers to do more exploring.
Lots and lots of folks died by the numbers in that effort. It’s my opinion there was a better way to accomplish those ends.
Sorry. “…resulted from that sharp price rise”
Bartleby, tying the price of oil to Iraq and Afghanistan may be popular opinion, but you may not realize how misleading it is.
The prices of oil was in the $40’s when W became President, and it was in the $40’s when Obama took over as President. It didn’t go past $80 until 2006, years after invading Afghanistan and the restarting of the war in Iraq, and stayed above $80 for about two years under Bush. Prices stayed below $80 until US troops pulled out of Iraq in 2010, but then spent five years over $80 during Obama’s tenure. The price of oil just did not correlate with US military action.
Regardless of the fact that you don’t understand the the effective declaration of war by Afghanistan or for ending the cease-fire in Iraq, it is a fact that the number of civilians that died per year in Iraq since 2003 has been far less than the numbers that were dying while Saddam was in power. That would be the legacy of George W Bush.
Ted, you don’t understand. People killed by brown people don’t count.
It’s only evil when a westerner kills a brown person.
The sharp increase in oil prices in 2008 that lead to $140 / barrel oil was due to the increase in construction for the Summer Olympics held in China. I know it is fashionable to blame greedy oil producers, or speculators, but the Chinese will able and willing to buy oil at a price that most of the world would not pay. There is really no doubt about what caused that spike, and also no doubt about what caused the price to crash as soon as the Chinese had finished the large projects that were on a tight schedule.
The price of oil went up for a number of reasons.
On the whole, it was because total demand exceeded supply by a few million barrels per day.
There was the housing boom, and the consequent boom in all support activities, from mining and materials processing, ship building, etc… on down the supply chains.
On top of that, production was limited by a pullback in exploration following the collapse in prices during the 1990s that extended into the beginning of the 2000s.
Once the price was high, exploration exploded, substitutions began to be made, etc.
But production was held down artificially by such things as Obama banning offshore drilling and new explorations in the gulf, and by refusal to open up exploration on public lands. All of the increases in production that led to the eventual oversupply that caused prices to collapse…all of it was on private lands, which is a fraction of the land available in the US for exploration.
But eventually supply exceeded demand, and price once again collapsed.
The peak oil BS caused a lot of traders to bid up the prices long past the time that supply was once again equal to or greater than demand…total production was more than was being used, and oil was being stored everywhere it could be stashed.
Price was high because of demand, not because of greed.
Greed caused the supply to once again increase to match demand
The Chinese Olympics was one factor, but the exploding economy in China had many reasons…the Three Gorges dam project, feeding the worldwide and esp US building booms and associated wealth effects, etc.
Also, a series of hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico caused shutdown of offshore platforms which caused some huge price spikes in a short period of time.
There was never any one cause, as there was not one cause for prices to collapse.
Among the factors in the collapse was OPEC pushing production to the limit in spite of oversupply in an effort to bankrupt the US shale producers and shut down exploration here.
Anyone who was an energy trader ought to remember each of these very well.
I was back then, before moving on to biotech and big pharma.
Cannot wait for the next commodity super cycle…I will not make the same mistakes twice.
Thanks, Griff. So your response to “it’s physically impossible” is, “well, the Chinese gov’t commanded it be so.” Whose d#nying basic physics now? And another bad comparison from RelativistSkeptical, once again struggling to tell apples from oranges.
So far it seems no one has mentioned the temperature problem. Batteries just don’t work in sub-zero (F) temperatures, and they don’t work very well in sub-freezing (F) either. It’s not like high latitudes aren’t inhabited; I doubt very much you’ll find many EVs rolling around Montana in the winter. I used to ranch NW Wyoming, south of Jackson and I can assure you there’s a reason snow machines have pull starters.
Batteries will never solve that problem, but capacitors can. The reality is that EVs won’t ever replace IC motors until our capacitor technology advances. The major problems with EVs are cold climate operation and charge time, both of which are solved by capacitors.
There’s a promising technology I just stumbled on in Nature Microsystems and Nanoengineering titled “Rapid synthesis of transition metal dichalcogenide–carbon
aerogel composites for supercapacitor electrodes”. This is the sort of research that’s needed to make EVs possible. Needless to say, this isn’t a technology that’s ready for prime time.
It’s pure stupidity for Brown to write checks to Musk using working Californians as his bank. Venal? You bet. Brown needs to have his butt handed to him on a plate for this sort of nonsense. If he and his friends wan to fund Tesla, they can buy stock in the company just like anyone else.
When the time comes that the technology needed to make EVs work is really here, government might get involved in improving public infrastructure. Until then it needs to sit down and shut up. Hope you’re listening Jerry because right now you’re looking like a buffoon.
I forgot the link:
https://www.nature.com/articles/micronano201732
And just “By The Way”, when government and private industry hold hands like this, it’s called Fascism. I’m well aware of Godwin’s Law, but I’m still going to point out that Brown and his political cronies are nothing less than Nazis. National Socialists.
Some of us have been down that road before and it doesn’t end well.
Well, Norway has a huge number of EVs, thanks to local incentives…
And they don’t seem to have any problems, though that’s a cold and snowy place…
Griff,
nice shiny new Tesla’s, bought by the well heeled at £64K or so a time (whatever that is in Norwegian currency) with a nice fat taxpayer subsidy to help pay for it.
And if you’re not well heeled, and can’t afford a £64K car, your tax money goes to help the rich buy a nice shiny new Tesla and you get stuck with a normal ICE car.
So much for wealth distribution and shrinking the gap between the rich and poor. It’s socialist green policies that make the wealth gap bigger by actively taking money from the poor and handing it to the rich.
And when subsidies for EV’s are withdrawn, sales drop like a stone, as in Hong Kong and Denmark. When states impose change on their voters, it invariably fails, better to leave these things to market forces.
there IS a battery with the desired performance: it is called FOSSIL FUEL
the original solar power!
‘We can also expect a battle royale over extending the federal EV subsidy beyond 200,000 vehicles – demonstrating once again that lobbyists are now far more important to bottom lines than engineers, especially when lobbyists can channel enormous contributions to politicians’ reelection campaigns.’
Lobbyists are a symptom, not a cause. Reign in government power, and the lobbyists will disappear.
I’m watching my copy of Woodstock for the first time in years and I watch a young man ask, during the torrential downpour, ” why are they seeding the clouds. I’ve seen the planes passing over ” trailing white clouds.
The bastards have been trying to harm us for over half a century and this young man was probably one of the first on record to acknowledge it.
john in cheshire
Not seeding but vapour trails from the combustion of hydrocarbons in the engines. The hydro of the hydrocarbon is Hydrogen which when burned produces water vapour that forms a cloud behind the engine. The trails will appear and disappear depending if condensation nuclei are present where the plane is flying. Not scary just physics.
White clouds have been trailing airplanes since the advent of airplanes.
It was a major problem during WWII as German fighters would use the contrails to sneak up on fighter formations.
I told you not to eat the brown acid!
The Amount of ignorence in this article is out of this world. A classic example of writing out of your ass to push an agenda. Everything this guy says sounds right to someone who doesn’t know much about the subjects at hand. Do your research about what everything this guy says and you will see through the lies. A couple of hundred years ago this was the guy crying witch and you morons would have burned a woman alive because you believed all the bull [snip] he spews.
Reply: Nothing like misspelling ignorance to make a point~ctm
As someone who has done research and I can proclaim that the one spouting bull[snip] is you.
Didi
fantastic, logical, scientific dismantling of the article in question from the mind of a genius.
Do you have any other blunt instruments you can utilise?
I’ll add the sarc\ tag for your benefit alone, because everyone else, even Griff, will have got the gist of my comment, even if you don’t.
Could you explain this world manufacturing capacity of lithium? Over what time period do they produce this much battery? Because if it is daily then in 3 months they will have enough storage to handle the entire electric grid.
Guess again, Einstein.
This article was obviously financed by the Koch brothers and Paul unashamedly spews long ago debunked claims about electric vehicles with the intention of slowing their adoption to benefit the financial interests of the oil and gas lobby. For the truth if you can handle it Google Union of Concerned Scientists State of Charge.
Reply: My Koch funded lavish lifestyle is calling. Get off of me scantily clad women. I have science to do!~ctm
What’s funny is that this tool actually thinks the “union of concerned scientists” does science.
JimGord,
You display the typical — divorced from reality — viewpoint of those who think that there is only the truth and propaganda from corporate interests. It speaks volumes about your mindset that you can’t imagine that there are legitimate, honest objections to the world view of zealots.
JimGord, is there no pipelines you need to be out protesting against?
Didi has it nailed. As I read these breathtakingly ignorant-of-facts comments. I bet all the real denier websites like “skeptical of science” are having a ball out of your dumb uninformed comments.
#1. When anyone sends their car in for trash, its not buried. They recycle it. You don’t think for one minute that expensive boron steel chassis is a use once feature? No, you rent it up front for a decade. Same for Lithium. Its a waste product from sea salt. Unlike crude, its reused.
#2 Even the hugely rapid and weighty Tesla consumes at a highway 248Wh/mile. Smaller cars average 220Wh/mile. (The 100KWh battery version has a highway speed range exceeding 300+ miles.). So ignore the trash about litre = 10KWh because heat engines as they do, throw most energy out as heat.
Besides, over 10% of liquid fuel is electricity bill, to mine, extract, crack, process and deliver the stuff.
#3 Battery fires. Like fuel fires are always caused through a reason. Easy to replicate. Force one into a reverse charge then recharge it up. It gets hot and burns. The oxides and cobalt makes it easier.
MinH being safer? No, deadly poison, far over half to quarter the capacity per volume/mass and expensive (inefficient) to recharge. Toyota’s folly.
No Nissan Leafs have ever had a battery fire to date. This is down to good engineering.
As goes subsidies. More fool you for not taking our tax money back that’s offered out like candy. I’m not all for it but have to say my Leaf through free street charging in the UK plus far reduced rates for costs (and servicing, nothing to go wrong) has already paid for itself in four years over an equivalent vehicle – which cannot come anywhere near the pleasure to drive as this has.
I get the usual. Disdain, curiosity then, “Oh damn this is something else”.
DRIVE ONE!
Andyj July 23, 2017 at 7:40 pm
“Same for Lithium. Its a waste product from sea salt.”
Could you please advise just what % of the world’s lithium comes as a waste product from this source…I suspect it’s a drop in the ocean/sea! But I am more than happy to be educated by you on this.
“…my Leaf through free street charging in the UK…”
OK, you may think it’s free but some other poor fellow is having to pay for your car charging. Why should you expect someone else to pay for your fuel whether it’s gasoline or electricity?
Right there with his comment about free charging, Andyj indicates that he has no connection to economic reality.
Alastair Brickell
“OK, you may think it’s free but some other poor fellow is having to pay for your car charging. Why should you expect someone else to pay for your fuel whether it’s gasoline or electricity?”
He’s a green socialist, so of course he’s going to take every subsidy going and claim it as his right, no matter who else suffers for it.
Finally someone putting the facts out. Fantasy and feelings will not keep the lights on. These big dreams are just that, yet we will all be forced to go along and pay for it or face the wrath of those who think they are going to save the planet.
Are they saving the planet or just enjoying the free ride on someone else’s nickel ?
‘Focusing on solar power, Mills notes, that means storing electricity for 12 hours a day’
Not really. It is more like 19 hrs per day, with solar panels giving the equivalent of 5 hrs of full power per day. Sometimes six. The rest of the time the battery will be putting something out, assuming the load is continuous.
As loads are not continuous, and because peak consumption does not occur during the middle of the day, a detailed look at when the batteries have to be putting out power and when they can receive it. All things considered, especially materials, recycling and cost, we are far better off using ceramic super capacitors which have virtually an indefinite number of charge cycles and in the end, can be ground up to make concrete.
It is also possible to capture lightning using super capacitors. Now there’s a thought.
I think the phrase is “lunch time power”, on a good day.
peak consumption sometimes occurs during the day – it depends on the country and on the season.
In the UK there is always a high demand on any week day around mid day…
In the winter the highest demand is in the early evening, though otherwise it is highest at mid day.
Notice how little Griff changes the argument in order to hide the fact that he has no argument.
To him, it’s sufficient that power is generated in the same day that it is needed.
Mark, are you proposing power only get generated in advance? Not following your argument…
Where can we go buy ceramic super capacitors?
Change always brings naysayers. Always has, always will. We have an ever expanding population, we will need alternative transportation. God forbid we start developing it now….we wouldn’t want to be prepared now would we.
Nobody is saying dont develop it, but for god sake do something useful. Many people confuse action with effectiveness
Sometimes the naysayers are right.
If you want to develop an alternative, feel free. Just don’t rob me to pay for it.
One thousand billion is one trillion.
Golly!
For real?
This article is so full of falsities and lies and twisted facts that it is worthless to even comment. One thing I can say with assurance, you don’t know a single thing about electric vehicles.
because?
What, is it lunch hour at Skeptical Science and DeSmog Blog?
Doug, you are right about one thing…your comment is worthless.
I agree Douglas. The ignorance, blind prejudice and false scare stories just leave you speechless.
Another content-free comment.
John Hardy demonstrates the near 100% ability of warmistas to psychologically project their character defects onto others.
I know you can’t drive from Melbourne to Sydney in 10 hours in an EV.
You can’t do that in a ICE driven car, unless you break the speed limit 😉
Google lists it as 878 km (550 miles). How low are the speed limits?
Translation: I can’t refute a single thing the author said, but I have to defend my religious beliefs.
As someone who never refutes anything Mark, I think you are on thin ice there!
Which ice is that?
I thought it was all gone.
Content-free comment.
“Focusing on solar power, Mills notes, that means storing electricity for 12 hours a day ”
Maybe so in California, but in the UK winter you’d need about two months’ worth of storage.
This interesting new UK initiative was announced today:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-40699986
“Consumers in the UK could save billions of pounds thanks to major changes in the way electricity is made, used and stored, the government has said.
New rules will make it easier for people to generate their own power with solar panels, store it in batteries and sell it to the National Grid.
If they work, consumers will save £17bn to £40bn by 2050, according to the government and energy regulator Ofgem.
The rules are due to come into effect over the next year.
They will reduce costs for someone who allows their washing machine to be turned on by the internet to maximise use of cheap solar power on a sunny afternoon.
And they will even support people who agree to have their freezers switched off for a few minutes to smooth demand at peak times.
They’ll also benefit a business that allows its air-conditioning to be turned down briefly to help balance a spell of peak energy demand on the National Grid.
Among the first to gain from the rule changes will be people with solar panels and battery storage. At the moment they are charged tariffs when they import electricity into their home or export it back to the grid.
The government has realised that this rule must change because it deters people from using power more flexibly in a way that will benefit everyone.”
In Griff’s world, if the government pays for something, it really is free.
There are several levels of discussion to be had here…
does it work? (yes)
are they really going to do that? (yes)
and what it costs is another separate discussion
Here’s an analogy to this “smart grid” thinking. We find round tires are bad for the environment so we’ll compensate for our square tires with really big shock absorbers.
And not charging for grid connection services is a subsidy.
California would consider electing a Governor that wanted to give $40,000 to every smug, already-overcompensated, virtue signaling person for buying an expensive Tesla? From the Department of Other People’s Money Can Make Water Run Up Hill Which is Necessary to Save The World Because Some Rich Virtue Signaling Vanity Monger Said So..
Denying climate change won’t make it go away.
We are in a dangerous feedback loop and must take action.
Please provide references for this “dangerous feedback loop” since I think you are merely parroting something you have no understanding of.
Crying wolf won’t make wolfs appear either.
I’ll believe in catastrophic climate change when you can point out some.
PS: You can tell you are dealing with someone who doesn’t know what they are talking about when they declare that feedback loops are dangerous.
Name one person that denies that the climate changes.
Dangerous feedback loop, huh?
Where?
Everyplace I have seen has green grass and trees, lush farm fields, blue sky, white clouds, wet rain, and no problems that are not regular weather.
Winters are cold and snowy, Summers are warm and crops grow in bountiful profusion, birds are chirping in the trees, and everything is fine and beautiful.
Where the heck do you live, Heikki?
Have you been outside recently?
Seems like you need some air.
I would strongly like to point out that all vehicle and current home infrastructure hasn’t been around until now, when he claims it will take 125 years of Li Ion production to meet our current demand, he is grasping at straws, with up to 10 Gigafactories expected to be built, economies of scales & scope, and extremely high productivity negates his highly unqualified and biased opinion. Write an article that uses basic common sense and doesn’t pander this unintelligent bias. Plus, the guy cannot add using basic adding, not even at an algebra level. I hate that writing articles requires no actual skill or knowledge, I’m so glad idiots can smear their way into the spotlight with no real understanding of what they are talking about. Not one source was actually cited or valid.
You would sound a little less whinny if you actually brought up some examples of where the author is wrong and proved it mathematically.
As to your mantra chanting about how economies of scale are going to drastically cut the cost of batteries, that’s just more evidence of your ignorance.
Super capacitors using nano technology might be the answer in the future.
“Super capacitors using nano technology might be the answer in the future.” And they might not! To make a substantive contribution, can you provide any reliable estimates of probability? If not, then your remark is, at best, inane.
So might fusion power.
But so far…um, no.
No such thing yet…not one product on the market.
Since we are discussing things that might happen, it might get colder over the next ten years, and this whole alarmist crybaby bedwetting mass delusion will evaporate.
In the meantime, people who are not deluded have the responsibility to explain reality to the miseducated dopes running around with their panties in a twist.
Bolt with discount and tax rebates $20,000. Solar to recharge it 50-75 miles a day $5000 after incentives. Annual gas saved $2500. Return on investment 12%. Energy independent. Yes I am, now. Taxpayers thanks for the help. Join me.
I drive 200 miles a day and need a truck to carry all of my equipment and haul my trailer around.
Leech, screw you for putting your hand in my pocket and stealing my hard earned money to fund your silly toy.
To the Green statists, the answer is obvious. We must reduce human usage of energy to the point where renewables and batteries are enough.
No, we must produce all the energy we need renewably…
for example, one scenario proposed by the UK’s National Grid envisages doubling UK electricity generation (but all renewable)
Griff,
While your personal Holy Grail may provide you with a sense of divinity, focusing on renewability is very narrow in its scope. You are conveniently ignoring all the probable unintended consequences and turning your back on valuable alternatives. That is the behavior of a zealot, not a realist.
BTW, did you ever publicly apologize for your remarks about Susan Crockford? If not, then you need to realize that further establishes your credentials as a zealot who doesn’t feel a need to admit to and atone for mistakes because the end justifies the means.
Take that cigarette out of your month and wake up to the true about burning fossil fuels.
Reply: Now now, if you want to convince us of the true, you need to be nicer~ctm
You mean the truth of humans living longer than ever, common folk being healthier and better fed than kings were a few hundred years ago, not having to spend the bulk of our time trying to get enough food to eat, enough shelter to survive, and not having to work our bodies into twisted lumps on mundane tasks?
Do you mean the truth of plants and trees growing faster than at anytime for the past twenty million years, or of deserts becoming green, or of no major famines in this entire millennium, anywhere on Earth?
The truth is life before fossil fuels made us all prosperous was filthy, brutal, dangerous, and short.
And now it is not, for the first time in all of human history, for hundreds of millions of people.
The truth is, life has never been better on Earth, and we are all of us alive among the luckiest humans to have ever existed on the planet.
Start acting like it, take that joint out of your mouth, and do something productive.
Awesomely said.
The answer for a world without oil is simple but no one wants to face reality.
Nuclear + Hydrogen
Nuclear to generate electricity, and using electricity to generate hydrogen via cheap electrolysis of water which can be used whenever a portable energy source is needed.
That is the only way to power vehicles etc after the oil is gone.
“Cheap” electrolysis is only as cheap as nuclear power – which currently is expensive. Future nuclear from Gen IV designs using MOX or thorium fuel has the power density at competitive cost to meet future demand. Risk comparison with other sources is favorable.
To power land transport with hydrogen made from nuclear is feasible though murky. Infrastructure to liquify H2 (for fuel cells) and distribute/dispense globally for auto/bus/truck is a bigger challenge than battery storage for renewables.
Air transport is a candidate for H2 as the infrastructure can be limited to airports. Equip airports with modular nuke plants for power to make and compress H2 fuel and thus eliminate the entire fuel distribution infrastructure. The hurdle for H2 air transport is not the fuel but need for a H2 turbine with sufficient thrust, a total new air frame for fuel volume, and all new avionics to handle H2 pressure/temperature charactaristics.
Modular nuke plants also permit electric power ocean transport.