Essay by Eric Worrall
h/t Dr. Willie Soon; Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, who last month pocketed 1.6M exercising share options on an Electric Vehicle company, has suggested people experiencing gasoline pain should just buy an EV.
Biden’s Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm insists high gas prices are ‘a very compelling case’ to buy an electric car: Official is worth $8million and recently exercised $1.6m stock option in electric car company
- Granholm, in a clip surfaced Tuesday, made the case for going electric amid sky high gas prices
- ‘If you filled up your EV [electric vehicle] and you filled up your gas tank with gasoline, you would save $60 per fill-up,’ she said
- Granholm made similar points in a White House press briefing in May 2021. ‘If you drive an electric car, this would not be affecting you,’ she said then
- Granholm, who is worth $8million according to Forbes
- Last month she also exercised stock options in Proterra, an electric vehicle company where she served as a director
- She ended up pocketing $1.6 million on the transaction, according to an energy department spokesperson
By STEPHEN M. LEPORE FOR DAILYMAIL.COM
PUBLISHED: 11:39 AEST, 15 June 2022 | UPDATED: 12:34 AEST, 15 June 2022
President Joe Biden‘s Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm became the latest Democratic politician to suggest the solution to high gas prices was to buy an electric vehicle.
Granholm, in a clip tweeted out by the Republican National Committee Tuesday, made the case for going electric amid sky high gas prices.
‘If you filled up your EV [electric vehicle] and you filled up your gas tank with gasoline, you would save $60 per fill-up by going electric rather than using gasoline but it’s a very compelling case, but again, we want to bring down the price at the point of purchase,’ Granholm, the former governor of Michigan, said.
Her comments come as the national average price for one gallon of gas has skyrocketed to over $5.
Granholm made similar points in a White House press briefing in May 2021, according to Fox News.
‘If you drive an electric car, this would not be affecting you,’ she said at the time.
Granholm, who is worth $8 million according to Forbes, recently served as director of an electric car company – and held millions in the firm’s stock.
Last month she exercised stock options in the company, called Proterra, pocketing $1.6million from the transaction, according to an energy department spokesperson.
…
What a charmer – Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm financially benefitted from a company whose value is soaring thanks to a gasoline price crisis which the Biden administration she serves helped to create, via their war on oil pipelines and oil and gas exploration.
No word yet if any of the Biden family serves on the boards of EV companies Jennifer is involved with.
Update (EW): Breitbart reports Biden has instructed Granholm to meet with oil companies, to figure out ways to boost production and reduce gasoline pump prices. This follows on from a letter Biden sent to oil companies, which contained the ominous warning “my Administration is prepared to use all reasonable and appropriate Federal government tools and authorities to increase refinery capacity and output in the near term”. Biden expects oil companies to bring an explanation for their lack of production to their meeting with Granholm.
Amtrak auto train
ev no power disruption in off loading of autos for hours
condo neighbor bought leaf
has to drive five miles to charge
I will take my RAV4 hybrid
I can just imagine the howls from the Green Blob, should such a public figure advocate the public buy a big, gas guzzler, after buying shares in Ford!
And of course the electricity used to recharge her EV is at zero cost? Does she purposely ignore that there has to be an energy source on the other end of her EV plug in cable and it is being provided by 97% hydro-carbon fuels?
Here politics and money are one and the same.
They are synonyms.
In the US political sphere does the concept of “conflict of interest” even exist?
only if it benifits the commies, otherwise there is no such thing
Biden sets up barriers to production then sends a threatening letter to producers to find ways to bypass his orders limiting production. And she, who is wealthy, invests in EVs and has the boldness to lecture people on what they should purchase.
Using government to enrich themselves and to force the public into their investments somehow looks illegal and dastardly.
WH Memo: Jenn, look busy with oil companies and congrats on your stock sale before the EV bankruptcy.
Hey Jenn, where does aluminum come from and how much electricity goes into making it?
Tesla hikes U.S. prices across car models (cnbc.com)
old EIA report
U.S. Energy Information Administration – EIA – Independent Statistics and Analysis
Not true; high fuel prices will push up electricity prices. They are a leading indicator of pending increases everywhere else in the economy. The disparity in residential electric prices is greater than gasoline. In Georgia residents pay an average of 12.97¢ per KWh; Californians pay 23.44¢ and Hawaiians pay 34.30¢. Fuel prices are higher in California than Georgia, but they are not double; electricity is.
The July issue of Consumer Reports contains the inexcusably misleading claim that specific electric and plug-in hybrids will save up to $9,000 over 5 years. They base this on comparisons obtained from the site https://fueleconomy.gov. Digging into details there, the savings are “compared to the average 2022 model getting 27 mpg.” This is a meaningless comparison; people don’t decide between one model and “the average 2022 car”. They decide between two or more specific models.
The claim also does not take into account the significantly higher cost to purchase EVs and plug-in hybrids.
Take for instance the Toyota RAV4 Prime plug-in hybrid, which CU claims (echoing fueleconomy.gov) will save $7,000 over 5 years. The calculation assumes driving 15,000 miles each year at today’s national average gas and electricity prices, yielding annual fuel+electricity costs of $1,050 or $5,250 for the first 5 years. The electric operation was assumed to provide 3.5 miles per KWh, which is quite optimistic.
The base model MSRP is $40,300. Assuming $300 to install a dedicated 240V outlet, a 20% down payment and financing the rest at 4.5% over 5 years, the total cost to own (TCO) over that period is $49,673. The 10-year TCO is $54,923. Compare with a straight hybrid RAV4 with MSRP $39,075, 5-year TCO $40,583, and 10-year TCO $49,333. In other words, instead of saving $7,000 over the first 5 years, the RAV4 Prime costs $9,100 more than the RAV4 hybrid.
The case for a full EV is even worse. The Kia Niro EV (MSRP $39,900) touted by CU as saving $9,000 has 5 and 10-year TCO values of $46,985 and $49,985. The Kia Niro hybrid (MSRP $24,690) numbers are $34,532 and $42,032. At the 5 year point, you are $12,450 worse off with the full electric Niro compared with the hybrid.
In reality the disparity is most likely even greater as some states charge sales tax on the purchase price and others charge an annual ad valorem tax at registration, so there is an extra bite to the higher price.
If I personalize the calculation for Hawaii fuel and electric prices ($5.75/gal and 34.3¢/KWh), the Niro EV costs just $200 less per year for electricity than the hybrid model does for gas. I.e., a much higher price for essentially no savings.
We’ll meet again at $6 gasoline and $140 oil.
At which point natural gas prices, coal prices, and ELECTRICITY prices will be…
See, it’s like this . . . Joe Biden promised repeatedly during his campaign to “follow the science”, so why would he want a person lacking in science knowledge/experience such as Jennifer Granholm to head the US Department of Energy? Maybe, just maybe the “science” Biden wants to follow is first caliber junk science.
Summarizing Granholm’s education and career as provided in Wikipedia:
She attended the University of California, Berkeley, graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1984 and then a Juris Doctor from Harvard Law School. She then clerked for Judge Damon Keith of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, became an assistant U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan in 1991 and in 1995 she was appointed to the Wayne County Corporation Counsel. Thereafter, she was a career politician (becoming Michigan’s first female governor), a book author, and most recently a political commentator on TV before being given her current post in the Biden administration.
There is NOTHING in her published listing of education and career experience that indicates she has even rudimentary understanding of what’s involved with the physics, technology and math associated with energy extraction and use and the environmental consequences of such.
Her comment, “If you drive an electric car, this would not be affecting you” reflects her ignorance in spades: she obviously has no idea that the major fuel used currently to generate electrical energy in the US is natural gas (ref: https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-in-the-us.php ) and that, largely as a result of BIden’s fossil fuel policies, natural gas prices have risen an incredible 270% in just the last year:
— on May 7, 2021 the NG spot price was $3.07 per thousand cubic feet
— on May 4, 2022 the NG spot price was $8.32 per thousand cubic feet
(source: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/natural-gas-price-14-year-high/ )
Anyone really believe that the cost of electricity for all uses, not just recharging EVs, is not going up?
Remember the “Peter Principle”? . . . “Members of a hierarchy are promoted until they reach the level at which they are no longer competent.” Well, in this case Ms. Granholm never was.
This is the person who should have been monitoring the Oil and Gas industry, noting the pandemic affect, including refinery capacity losses, and been advising the administration on how critical it was for the industry to have access to capital to support the US recovery from the pandemic. Fueling industrial production as well as the trucks, ships, planes and personal vehicles of workers to help the supply side of the recovery in order to mitigate inflation is economics 101.
Instead, we get another swamp elitist likely giving thumbs up to the Treasuries push to
hobble an industry so critical to recovery.
Can you imagine the impact on the Democrat Party if all high schools had to teach basic
economic principals to students? Think how many more people would see the utter
stupidity of their management of the economy.
She came from a crooked county to be horrible governor (not as bad as Gretchen Whitmer) and now is an inept cabinet member. Typical Democrat.
I doubt if there are more than 25,000 EVs in inventory right now. If I buy one, my gasoline powered trade in will be scooped up by someone else. No decrease in demand for gasoline, no change in C02 emissions.
Well, someone has to uphold the tradition of bad or no energy policy in the U.S. It might as well be a Canadian.
I’m surprised! Do policy makers in the USA remain able to trade shares/stocks when they have a clear conflict of interest?
In the UK, government ministers have to sell or place into a blind trust any shares or stocks until they leave office.
Otherwise the urge to give oneself a ‘secret bonus’ is too much of an urge for some…
We just returned home , north of Sacramento , CA after a trip to the central coast, 380 miles each way.
Our Chevy Malibu got 33 mpg at 70-75 mph , so at $6.30 /gallon, 300 miles used 9.1 gallons and cost $57.30.
A Tesla battery will be nearly fully discharged at 300 miles, so it will need 100 kWhr of recharge. The freeway FastDC chargers are costing $0.59 to $0.69 per kWhr.[ unless they find a tesla supercharger].
So, this is costing from $59 to $69 , similar to, or more that the outrageously priced gas in CA.!
Our local Walmart is charging $5.85 / gal so the 1st part of our trip, 300 miles, cost $53.
Charging an EV at home , in PG&E territory, will be at $0.32- $0.39 per kWhr….so when gas prices eventually return to our ‘normal’ price of $3.00 , the EV will still cost more to drive than my ‘gasser’.
Oh, and we saw only a few Teslas, most driving faster than the other traffic, and 1 Lucid.
However, there was a huge number of trucks on I-5, in both directions; more than we have usually seen. One ‘convoy’ was 20 trucks, and all of them were driving a 65 mph, 10 mph over their 55 mph limit, vs the auto speed limit of 70, with a lot of cars going 80+.
We only saw 2 CHP cars. So maybe the fuel costs are causubf them to reduce their driving ?
With the currrent efforts to constrain capital availability to Oil & Gas industry and the substantial reduction in refining capacity, what makes you think $3 gas will return?
Hope in a hopeless state
If we can return to the previous administration policies; restart the XL pipeline, unlock the exploration of oil, those will indicate the intent to produce more US oil.
Yes, CA is run by a bunch of eco-fools. Only the 10-15 percent of those of us that live outside the liberal cities, are conservative/ libertarians.
“my Administration is prepared to use all reasonable and appropriate Federal government tools and authorities to increase refinery capacity and output in the near term”.
Yeah that will work use war powers to take over and run the refineries.
We all know how well government run operations work especially oil. Just look at Venezuela their doing a great job.
James Bull
Manipulate a startup EV stock before it drops, peasant.
She embodies the attitude of the entire leftist cabal on the planet. She just says it out loud.
Left wing people are by nature not very good at foreseeing consequences of current actions. They think in words not numbers. Buy an electric car sounds great until you do the numbers.
“Let them eat lithium.”
The peasants have a problem Jennifer-
VW U.S. chief warns of industry challenges with EV battery shift (msn.com)
Nothing for it but to declare a wartime dooming emergency and conscript all those enthusiastic climate changer uni types for the mines and production lines eh?
Gaia needs YOU!
Granholm asserts that buying an EV is the quickest way for my family to escape current all-time highs in fuel prices.
I assert that voting in November is the quickest way to escape them. Let’s see who wins…
Thanks Jenn for doing your part in this….you too Pete
Biden approval rating at 39% amid economic fears; 47% ‘strongly disapprove’: USA TODAY/Suffolk poll (yahoo.com)