In a post in December 2021, I first asked which state or country would be the first to hit the “Renewable Energy Wall” — described as “a situation where the electricity system stops functioning, or the price goes through the roof,” or some other aspects of impossibility become so unavoidable that the zero carbon fantasy must be abandoned. In subsequent posts I have explored various ways that the Wall was starting to manifest — for example, cancellation of offshore wind energy developments, and abandonment of large investments in producing so-called “green hydrogen.”
Although the coming of the Wall has been obvious to intelligent observers for a long time, the green energy fantasists had set their statutory and regulatory mandates sufficiently far into the future that there was no immediate reckoning. But now, five and more years on, that is starting to change. The first of the impossible mandates are suddenly looming. The arrival of President Trump on the scene has also been a huge negative for the green energy crowd. But for today I’ll focus on a subject that has much more to do with reality than with any action of the President. That subject is fully electrified heavy duty trucks.
Here in New York, our State and City governments have gone nuts adopting one after another green energy mandate that is impossible and will never happen. The majority of them came with the State’s Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA) and the City’s Local Law 97, both adopted in 2019. For the most part, the impossible mandates only begin to kick in in 2030. So, no Wall there yet.
But in 2021 Governor Hochul sought to do the CLCPA one better by adopting a regulation called the Advanced Clean Truck Rule. This Rule requires a certain percentage of heavy duty trucks sold in New York to be “zero emissions,” i.e., all-electric. It so happens that New York copied this Rule and its percentages from California. For the 2025 model year, now under way, the relevant percentage is 7%.
All-electric heavy duty trucks? Did anyone think this one through? Clearly not. The New York Post today reports that two upstate legislators of the Democratic Party have now introduced legislation to postpone the electric heavy-duty truck mandate until 2027. The legislators are Jeremy Coney Cooney of Rochester and Donna Lupardo of Binghamton. The two call the mandate “nearly impossible for the trucking industry to comply with.” Here is one among several noted problems:
The legislators noted that an average diesel truck can be refilled in about 10 minutes and can drive for about 2,000 miles. By comparison, an electric, zero-emission heavy-duty truck takes approximately 10 hours to charge and can run for about 500 miles. . . . “Battery charging times are . . . a challenge and will remain so until new technology emerges and is commercialized,” [Lupardo] said.
Does anybody really think that this battery charging issue is going to be solved within a couple of years? People have only been working on batteries that are suitable for this purpose for about 100 years or so. Other issues noted by the legislators include “lack of charging infrastructure” and “cost.” On the cost front, it the Post reports that the price of a fully-electric heavy-duty truck can be as much as triple that of a diesel competitor with comparable load capacity. Exit quote from these legislators:
“As we transition to a clean energy future, there is no point in putting an entire industry at risk in the process.”
Needless to say, all of the New York environmental groups are lined up on the other side. From the Post:
[E]nviromental groups opposing the proposed rule delay include the Alliance for Clean Energy New York, Environmental Advocates of NY, Earthjustice, Environmental Defense Fund, New Yorkers for Clean Power, Sierra Club, Tri-State Transportation Campaign and Union of Concerned Scientists.
Here is their perspective on the matter:
“Delaying implementation is not only a foolish response to a false crisis whipped up by manufacturers, who are looking to rig the market in their favor, but it will lead to more ER visits, people suffering from asthma, and increased health costs, particularly for communities of color and low-income,” said a memo co-signed by the New York City Environmental Justice Alliance. “Our organizations urge the governor and the legislature to stand up for vulnerable communities and reject this legislation, and any effort like it.”
The enviros seem to think they can get their way by claiming to speak for “vulnerable communities.” As far as I’ve ever been able to determine, greenhouse gas emissions have almost nothing to do with rates of asthma or other health issues. I live right here in the middle of Manhattan, with hundreds of diesel trucks passing by each day, and we don’t have noticeably worse health than people anywhere else. Meanwhile, don’t “vulnerable” communities, or at least low-income ones, have an interest in not having the cost of delivering their groceries and other goods increased by a multiple by an all-electric truck requirement?
So far, here at the consumer level, the impact of the electric truck mandate has not been noticeable. The mandate only applies to manufacturers’ sales, not to the actual fleets of the truck operators. The manufacturers seem to have figured out some workaround for themselves that is working at least for the moment. (Maybe they are making a few electric trucks that may or may not work and selling them to themselves or friends for a dollar.). But that won’t help for long. The 7% goes to 10% next year, 15% in 2027, 20% in 2028, 25% in 2029, and on up from there.
California apparently has tried to apply its percentage mandates to the fleets of the truck operators, rather than just to the sales of the manufacturers. That has been nixed by the incoming Trump administration.
There are ten states (including California) that have adopted the California rules on fully-electric heavy-duty trucks. As far as I can determine, New York is the first one showing signs of blinking. Without the miraculous arrival of some new technology within the next year or two, there is no way that this can go on much longer. The likelihood of the miraculous new technology is about zero.
The initiative of Assemblymembers Cooney and Lupardo is unlikely to succeed this year. Next year, or maybe the year after, it will likely be a different story.
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It goes without saying there is nothing worse than crappy government.
Ready, shoot, aim!
Ready, aim, fire!
When it is done right.
Battery fire?
One part of the US government asserts asthma has an unknown cause. Another part, the EPA, asserts it is caused by pollution. How convenient.
Are asthma rates greater in submarines than in the general population? If not, the the answer is obvious.
While that is a valid point, it does not account for the distribution of biological factors of a submarine’s crew versus the general population.
CO2 = plant food. Many commercial greenhouses have carbon dioxide generators installed to maintain air concentrations of between 1 000ppm to 1 200ppm – none of them “boil” or catch fire.
Each day, a major truck stop, open 24/7/365, is visited by a few hundred 18 wheelers, otherwise the restaurant would not have enough customers to survive.
Every major truck stop would need two 25 MW power plants, plus a fuel storage system.
Two power plants are required, because one power plant could be down for maintenance.
The cost of extending the grid to each major truck stop would be excessive.
Remember, the replaceable, 1000 kWh battery packs of these Electric trucks would last at most 6 to 8 years, whereas the rest of the truck would still be useful for service.
All this looks good on paper, but in reality it is a super-expensive, unnecessary Rube Goldberg.
Plus, it would do NOTHING measurable regarding the climate
Plus, the batteries weigh 4tons each so that’s 8 tons of capacity sacrificed.
And how many loads of “perishables” will be lost when the battery dies before the truck reaches the next “charging station?”
That’s a point! Has anyone factored in the additional battery drain if the truck has to be refrigerated? What percentage of battery capacity is that going to absorb, even when stationary?
Some items might require some level of heating. Some items do not like being frozen.
For a ridiculous idea like this to work, those major truck stops would have to become like the Pony Express stations of the old west. Truckers would hurry to them before their batteries ran out, then drop off their trucks for a 10 hour charge while they grabbed another truck that had been rested and recharged, hitch it up to their load to continue on their way.
A very efficient use of labor. Not to mention you’d need 4 to 5 trucks instead of one to make a cross country trip.
There might be some mileage (pun intended) in the “Pony Express” idea but it would probably be overly expensive to have to have all those additional tractor units that will be unproductive whilst on charge.
Question? Where are those 4 ton batteries located? In the cab? If yes, I would never drive one. Bad enough when a 5000 pound car battery ignites.
Check out https://www.edisonmotors.ca/ hybrid electric logging trucks
Those are HYBRID trucks. They still have a diesel engine to charge the battery!
Based on various Internet sources (Edison and green leaning news blogs), the semi uses a serial hybrid design (diesel driving a generator) combined with a 350-450 kWh battery pack. Claimed list price is $150K over standard diesel semi, with an alleged 2-3 year payback from improved fuel efficiency. Nobody showed their work in the sources I reviewed, so underlying assumptions are unknown (including whether payback was just list price difference or something more appropriate to trucking accounting for payload difference). One other observation: not much info about Edison other than a pretty website. I saw a lot of those in my aerospace R&D career working for the US Air Force that had very little behind them. Can’t say if the pictures of hybrid semis even had powertrains in them. Privately owned, seeking capital investment, not in production yet. Familiar story. There may be more information out there that would make me less skeptical, but I couldn’t find any.
And just one of those 1000 kWh battery packs going terminal and you can close the truck stop. You know shit happens!
Addition
Remember, the replaceable, 1000 kWh battery packs of these Electric trucks would last at most 6 to 8 years, whereas the rest of the truck would still be useful for service.
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Each 18-wheeler would be equivalent of 12 to 14 EV cars
About 100 charging stations would be needed; some would be down for maintenance.
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The existing fuel pumping/storage system would remain in place during the “decades long transition period” to switch over from Diesel to Electricity.
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All this looks good on paper, but in reality it is a super-expensive, unnecessary Rube Goldberg.
Plus, it would do NOTHING measurable regarding the climate
Speaking as someone holding fundamental patents in a class of energy storage materials based on a new, validated, mathematical model of the underlying Helmholtz physics, and having been active in the general energy storages field since 2006, I can assure everyone here that there will not be for many decades—if ever— an electricity storage system enabling practical electric heavy duty OTR trucks.
Rivian just died trying, after the founder was convicted of fraud for the hype that got Rivian’s initial funding, and then Biden’s green supplement. (They towed a Rivian nonfunctional prototype up a long hill road, then filmed it driving down ‘under its own power’. Just a bit of gravity assist not mentioned to investors.
States that have mandated them will eventually have to repeal their mandates, either before or shortly after very solid reality walls are hit. Personally, I am going to enjoy the ‘splat’ noises already coming out of New York.
Rud: I believe it was Nicola that pulled the gravity power EV Truck fraud, not Rivian. Either way both companies a virtually dead – you might say “road kill”.
Rick, you are correct:
“Nikola founder Trevor Milton, 41, was sentenced to four years in prison. He was also issued a $1 million fine.”
Their Semi was towed up a hill and then it rolled down on gravity power. No electricity needed!!
Your area of technological expertise – essentially, electric field storage devices – is the only one for which there is any hope of a significant technological advance in portable electrical energy storage. Chemical batteries, on the other hand, all store electrical energy as chemical potential in the form of oxidation-reduction (redox) reactions. My area of expertise may not at first sound applicable, but it is. I’m a rocket propulsion engineer. My profession has studied every redox reaction there is in search of one thing: the reaction that releases the most energy per unit mass of reactants possible. We’ve identified the most energetic reactions there are, and can state with absolute certainty that there will never be more energetic reactions – the nature of atoms and the atoms of nature don’t provide any path to a “breakthrough” by any “technological” means. They are what they are. And that means that even if all of the practical aspects of storing electrical energy (by using it to separate products back into reactants), and then recovering it (by letting the reaction happen, and intercepting the work in the flow of electrons that results), the chemicals can only store so much energy per unit mass. So batteries can never, no matter what, get lighter than those chemicals. We are pretty close to the limit of how light we can make the stuff that holds those chemicals and manages the energy input/output, and that stuff is the only avenue for battery weight improvement.
I know that some of you out there will take a “never say never” attitude because things once thought impossible have been achieved by technological “miracles.” But there are no miracles in technology, and it would quite literally require a miracle to get a battery lighter than the chemical reactants having the highest specific energy capacity. It can’t happen, ever, and appending the phrase “barring a technology breakthrough” (or words to that effect) at the end of a discussion of battery drawbacks gives the technically uneducated a false hope for the future. Worse than false, in fact: delusional. Stop saying it.
Well said. There is simply no way to evade the Laws of Thermodynamics. Anyone with a background in Chemistry will know that there is no conceivable way an element lighter and more electropositive than lithium will ever be found.
It’s important to keep the whole context, which is that a “battery” uses a self-contained redox reaction. It isn’t just the mass of the electropositive fuel (reducing agent) that’s involved, but also that of the electronegative oxidizer. The oxidizer needs to be carried along in a redox device. There isn’t a more electronegative element than fluorine, whose atomic mass is 19 as opposed to oxygen’s 18. Either oxidizer atom is more than 2. 5 times heavier than the fuel atom, AND you need more than one of them per reaction.
If an airplane had to carry both its regular fuel and the oxygen it can find wherever it flies, there would be no aviation.
Story tip – Kingsburg Truck Center Wins California DGS Contract to Supply Workhorse Electric Trucks to State Agencies :: Workhorse Group, Inc. (WKHS)
I suppose E trucks could work in small niches with heavy subsidies, but it all seems rather unsustainable.
A few Workhorse trucks exist.They are smallish step down delivery vans that only need limited range. Not close to heavy trucks, and not close to OTR. And this contract os for California state agencies wanting to virtual signal no matter the cost.
That means any state agency.
If they ever put enough batteries in a really BIG truck like are used to haul waste rock in a large open-pit mine, imagine the conflagration if the batteries were to spontaneously ignite!
Bigger batteries have more cells. The more cells, the more likely one of them will decide to self combust. As soon as one cell goes up, the whole battery goes up.
“They” already have.
Caterpillar appears to have been the first to try with their “793” prototype, and according to this linked article they delivered some 2nd-generation “793 XE” trucks to Newmont “for testing and validation” last September.
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Caterpillar’s approach seems to be almost identical to Fortescue’s “Roadrunner” truck, which according to this second article has the following battery specifications :
NB : Most media articles I’ve come across so far just say “… can be charged in just 30 minutes, and …”. For some obscure reason they keep editing out the “using a 3MW ‘fast’ charger” qualifier.
I vaguely recall an article about a mine that had a particular geography allowing them to use the “regenerative braking technology, enabling it to recharge while driving downhill” option to provide enough charge during the (loaded) downhill part to get the (unloaded) truck back up the hill again for the next load, but I can’t find it again right now.
Note that this is not generally applicable to 40-ton trucks trying to go 2000 (or even 500) miles across “mostly flat” areas of the USA between recharges.
In yet other article there are more details on the Fortescue battery :
OK, they “paralleled” the battery cells to distribute the 3MW of recharging energy evenly, but that still leaves a lot of scope to “imagine the conflagration” if 15 tons of “batteries were to spontaneously ignite”.
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In this final article it looks like Hitachi opted for a different approach to the “recharging” phase of such big batteries :
So the truck comes with a pantograph, and “all” the mining operator has to do is install a set of overhead “trolley / tram line” HVDC wires over the designated “going uphill” pathways …
Yeah, good luck trying to sell that to hard-nosed mining companies !
Indeed — Wikipedia has an article on the “haul trucks” used in mining https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haul_truck#:~:text=Haul%20trucks%20are%20off%2Droad,and%20exceptionally%20demanding%20construction%20environments.
They are huge, not road legal and mostly diesel electric. Their load capacity is hundreds of tons. The article suggests that most have batteries and use regenerative braking. Sounds like a perfectly reasonable niche application.
Indeed, my expectation has always been that EVs currently make the most sense in niche applications such as rural mail delivery. Creeping along the road at 10kph and stopping very frequently to check roadside mailboxes seems to me a quite inefficient way to use an ICE engine.
Diesel electric vehicles have been on the road since WWII, perhaps earlier (not sure about trains).
So, a modern cable car.
FYI, the 15 ton battery pack is not just batteries. The case and other mechanical aspects do not charge or discharge and a lot of it is intended as fire prevention.
That nit aside, I would not want to be sitting near one on a long haul and hopefully the truck stop restaurant is far enough away from the recharger to minimize injury.
They used to use electric power milk delivery carts.
Golf carts are also powered by electricity
These trucks have an impressive 150 miles range. 🙂
The milk float.
Still alive and kicking since 1967
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milk_float
Perfect for the job it does
We call it “Ernie” the fastest milk cart in the west….
In California?! Where they already have “rolling blackouts” due to their destruction of their own electric grid with bone-headed STUPID “green energy” policies?! 😆😅🤣😂
I lived in Southern California for 28 years, and fled in 2008. In 1980, the I-10 freeway was literally like a washboard surface for miles. It was so bad that if you drove the speed limit, it would excite your car’s suspension system and drive it into a resonance so strong that it would render you unable to speak, and was intolerable for any length of time. CALTRANS executed a multi-year project to shave the road surface flat, recover it with a new, specially developed concrete, and as a bonus add rain grooves. The washboard was due to the truck traffic, specifically the start and stop truck traffic during rush hour. Heavily laden trucks would stop, putting the road into shear in the forward direction, then accelerate, putting it in shear in the reverse direction.
The electric trucks will have to carry the same freight load, or they’ll be so uneconomical that it will have far-reaching impact on the U.S. economy. They’ll destroy the California roads (which have deteriorated again to the point of being almost undriveable), which will have a huge economic impact on the U.S. economy (the rest of the country will pay for repairs via federal highway taxes, and it will be the equivalent of rebuilding the interstate highway system).
California can’t not know this, can they?
Silly question…
Beyond the issues of charging time and availability of sufficient charging stations is the issue of capacity and competitiveness. All major highways have gross vehicle weight limits – typically 80,000 pounds. A battery with reasonable capacity will take up a very significant proportion of what would be cargo capacity. An all electric truck might well have a cargo weight capacity of 50% less than an ICE rig. The difference would also effectively increase cost for highway maintenance and operator expenses for tire replacement.
If this nonsense continues there will be a big business opportunity at the borders of states like NY and CA where loads are transferred from EV trucks to far more cost effective ICE semis.
I spent 5 years working for a logistics company that supplied a supermarket chain. The company had depots around the UK. Loads were relayed from warehouse to warehouse and suppliers in a trailer and the tractor brought another load back. Scotland was a problem as suppliers used local hauliers to transport goods. Bringing empty trailers back from anywhere was to be avoided if at all possible.
It was quite a complex operation to keep the drivers within the law regarding driving hours and rest times.
Your solution sounds quite simple by comparison.
Better yet it will all be shipped “intermodal” in rail cars.
It seems that many alarmists suffer from the King Cnut (Canute) Syndrome.
I think the alarmists are playing the part of King Cnut’s sycophantic courtiers. Cnut himself knew that he couldn’t stop the tide coming in.
The way to reduce NOx emissions would be for trucks to use AdBlue exhaust additive.
Mr. P: The story goes that those toadies in his court could not figure out how to pronounce his name. “See-nut” said one; “no, Ka-noot it must be” said another. A third thought, why not ask the king? So he asked, “your highness, how may we pronounce your name? And the king said, “Sven.”
“a situation where the electricity system stops functioning, or the price goes through the roof,”
Seems like two ways to describe the same situation
“The arrival of President Trump on the scene has also been a huge negative for the green energy crowd.”
Seems like they’ll be happy to have someone to blame, plus fill the time between tv commercials (per old tv revenue model)
“For the 2025 model year, now under way, the relevant percentage is 7%.”
Trucks or dollars?
Pretty sure it’s trucks, based on the rest of the paragraph.
If I were in the legislature and I thought that BEV trucks were a bad idea, I would insist on accelerating the mandate. They won’t hate it until it is force fed to them and they get sick from it.
I am thinking of a great scam for trucker retailers you only have to license 7% of new sales. So you have 1 electric truck you license it then take it out the back change the VIN numbers and license it again over and over again. You add the cost of licensing the truck and a cost to cover buying the EV truck to the sale on new ICE trucks. You meet compliance without ever actually selling an EV truck to a customer.
With a devious mind like that, you should be a lawyer.
Or a politician.
Nah, democrat representative. 🤣
It would be nice to see regulations on truckers rolled back. Get rid of DEF, get rid of the onerous regulations on trucke age, rolling frames, etc. it’s time to be unburdened by what has been. Every regulation on truckers and trucking is a tax paid y you and me in the cost of goods and energy.
The net zero fantasy pays a handful of people very well. And keeps unimpressive people desperate for relevance gainfully employed. I don’t expect that to stop anytime soon. Green wall or not.
The USSR ended about the time warmunism ramped up.
I don’t think it’s planned or a conspiracy. It’s just that having an expansive government with no competition to keep it in check and plenty of tax dollars to spread around encourages leeches and parasites to look for ways to spend all that money, and as one juicy sink runs out of credibility, they fish around for another.
Doesn’t need to be planned or a conspiracy. Just millions of committed communists with the object of their devotion suddenly gone. They needed some other cause to justify their hatred of successful people, and over time, climate alarmism emerged as the brightest new prospect for their devotion.
The solution is simple. Stop selling “heavy trucks” in New York effective immediately. Companies can buy their trucks in Pennsylvania and New Jersey.
I’m sure NY truck dealers don’t want to be stuck with EV crap they can’t sell anyway.
Sorry, New Jersey is mandating this as well.
If we can make a computer that can fit in a pocket, surely, we can make a giga Wh battery that fits in a compact car and can be charged in less than 5 minutes. /sarc
I assume that it is impossible to drive trucks in NY that were bought in other states. Otherwise this rule would be pointless, wouldn’t it?
Here in Cali if you buy a 1/2 ton PU out of state and bring it into Cali in less than a year or so, like I did, it cost me an extra $1400 to register for a Cali license plate. Just think what they would do on a big truck.
Why do you need to register it to use it in a different state? In Australia we just ignore that requirement, mostly.
Put your company in Nevada and license your trucks in Nevada, not California. A license in any state is good in all states, and I think any law otherwise will infringe the dormant Commerce Clause. Californians might wind up paying a little more for shipping because it’s no longer just a truck running from point A to B inside CA, but a truck running a route that begins and ends out of state with stops at point A and B – but not as much as they’d pay for deliveries from a much more expensive truck that can only be recharged when there’s an excess of electric power available.
Extraordinary, isn’t it? Electric trucks cannot replace diesel in moving today’s freight. Getting freight to a level where electric trucks could handle it? Pretty much impossible too, the social and economic changes would be huge. And even if you managed to do both, it would have no impact on national or global emissions or climate.
So why on earth do people want to do this, and why do they think its possible? Its really incomprehensible.
People see what they want to see, not what is really there. Not all people, but too many people.
“A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.”
— Simon and Garfunkel, The Boxer
I’m not from the US but when I think about it, trucks have to cross large distances through the middle of nowhere with truck stops/ parking lots. How much energy is needed to say charge 60 trucks? This requires a lot of infrastructure to get the energy over such long distances. That’s just insane. How how would charging costs be if a private investor wants to make money from his investment? Yes, we will subsidize, but that’s your money.
Transport will have less cargo and longer times, it’s just not economical possible. That’s what I think. One thing that baffles me is the complete lack of realism from politicians. They are on a suicidal path.
The whole point is to destroy western civilization and reduce the world population to under 1B.
Another poster cited 3MW charging stations for 1/2 hour charges – range on a charge wasn’t given. A truck stop with even just one 3MW charger is not a site you just plug into the power grid, but a site that requires new power lines run to it specifically for the load. Or if you want it up and running in less than several years, a site with its own power plant. (Probably diesel.)
Possibly the most logical category of vehicles to electrify is trash collection (formerly “garbage”) trucks. Lots of energy-rich stop and go during the workday and “home” to their own garage to re-charge overnight. And they would be relatively quiet.
Which will be the first green city to start writing checks for a fleet of new trucks and charging facilities? Manhattan? LA? Washington DC? Come on folks — stop talkin’ and pony-up.
School buses can also be charged overnight, travel short distances, make a lot of stops, and they transport mostly air. Yet, they have been a total bust. There is no evidence to back a hypothesis that electric trash collection trucks would be any more successful.
And when we get Mr. Fusion, less goes into the land fill and more is used to power the truck.
Climate alarmists accusing others of “..a foolish response to a false crisis..” ?!?!?!
Does it exist, or it is just a calculation for a hypothetical one?
Too easy. Treclic transport just needs a bit of careful forethought and central planning with the incentivation and bobsyeruncle-
EV tax break blowout will cost Australian tax payers $560 million a year
Then there’s the three tonnes batteries which take up space, limit carrying capacity – which together with long charging times means more trucks on the roads – increase damage to road surfaces, threaten load-bearing structures, and the load required to recharge fleets of trucks cannot be carried and distributed by current local grid infrastructure. And initial high cost.
But apart from all that…
Bravo Sierra Club, more like.
If Edmunds.com reports that in May 2024 electric car sales in the US amounted to only 6.8% of overall car sales; and if plug-in hybrids are included, only 8.5%, why would anyone to expect electric truck sales to be any higher? As the article says, the technology has a long way to go before the demand for and sales of electric vehicles in general becomes even respectable. Yet their promoters along with green bureaucrats, academics and environmentalists keep believing that mandates for their purchase will cause widespread sales and adoption of them, regardless of cost.