A just-so story is making the rounds.
Consumer range anxiety is the stumbling block to increased sales of electric vehicles and also the reason carmakers have been reduced to rolling out plus-sized EVs with batteries so big they defeat the purpose of emissions reduction.
Range anxiety is indeed a hang-up for consumers as shown in surveys. [emphasis, links added]
But this doesn’t even scratch the surface of what has gone wrong—one might say, insane—in our EV policies.
If the goal were to reduce emissions, the world would impose a carbon tax. Then what kind of EVs would we get? Not Teslas but hybrids like Toyota’s Prius.
“A wheelbarrow full of rare earth and lithium can power either one [battery-powered car] or over 90 hybrids, but, uh, that fact seems to be lost on policymakers,” a California dealer recently emailed me.
His numbers apparently originate with Toyota, setting off a small donnybrook in the green lobbying community.
The same battery minerals in one Tesla can theoretically supply 37 times as much emissions reduction when distributed over a fleet of Priuses.
This is a shock only to those who weren’t paying attention. It certainly isn’t lost on the government.
Chris Atkinson, the Ohio State University sustainable transportation guru whose slogan I’ve cited before—“the best use of a battery is in a hybrid”—was a key official in the Obama Energy Department.
Our policies don’t exist to incentivize carbon reduction, they exist to lure affluent Americans to make space in their garages for oversized, luxurious EVs so Tesla can report a profit and so other automakers can rack up smaller losses on the “compliance” vehicles they create in obedience to government mandates.
Mining the required minerals produces emissions. Keeping the battery charged produces emissions.
Only if a great deal of gasoline-based driving is displaced would there be a net reduction in CO2. But who says any gasoline-based driving is being displaced?
When government ladles out tax breaks for EVs, when wealthy consumers splurge on a car that burns electrons instead of gasoline, they simply leave more gasoline available for someone else to consume at a lower price.
This may be a secret to you, the public. It’s not to economists.
In Joe Biden, alas, we have a president less likely than many to distinguish something that sounds good from something that actually does good.
The press is not much better.
Even when willing to acknowledge policy irrationality, it remains cloyingly committed to the electric car as a virtue signal.
EV policy fulfills only one criterion of policy sustainability—it transfers consumer and taxpayer wealth to special interests in ways that voters can be conned into supporting.
The problem here is the problem with any plan to subsidize our way to emissions reduction. Humans are perfectly capable of consuming both renewable and dirty energy in ever-growing quantities if the price is right.
The emissions data prove as much.
How to explain, along the way, the coevolution of the climate empty gesture with climate rhetoric that increasingly shouts the unfounded claim that climate change threatens human survival?
I explain it this way: When it became clear nobody was going to do anything about climate change, it became safe to engage in hysterical rhetoric about climate change.
At the very outset of my career, a wise mentor said of the then-new climate issue, “So what?” By which he meant he couldn’t see humanity giving up fossil fuels. …snip…
A perhaps apocryphal Edwardian statesman sent his newspapers to the cellar because, he said, only in 20 years would it be clear which news was important.
Feel free to ignore every climate headline until one arrives saying humans have started injecting sulfate particles into the atmosphere to reduce the amount of sunlight falling on Earth.
Only then will somebody be doing something about climate change.
h/t Steve B.
Read full post at WSJ
So just when will Biden the Blunder be using Wind and Solar when will all those Diplomats be using it as w ell when will Gore the Bore be going Solar?
Gore has been solar-powered for decades. My own household and electric cars are primarily powered by the PV solar system on the roof. It paid back in three years in gasoline savings alone and now gives us free power.
Do you still have to pay for electricity and gasoline?
Whole lot of missing info there George. Tell us, honestly, did you pay for your set up out of pocket, without subsidies? How many miles per day do you drive? The article points out that the type of vehicle that utilizes all inputs most efficiently is a Prius – type car. Refute the claim.
Favoring electric vehicles over hybrids can be traced to the climate model RCP8.5. This is an extreme model with apocalyptic predictions. It is also regarded as very improbable or impossible even by many climate activists. However, it is soo useful for those advocating the most extreme action. RCP8.5 is the bases of the US current climate assessment. That has moved the goal of reducing emissions to Net Zero. For those incapable of thinking or poorly informed, electric vehicles produce zero emissions. Hybrids produce some emissions, but the level is lower than conventional vehicles. “Some emissions” is not capable with Net Zero.
Use Solar to dry the clothes in the Spring and Summer when the weather was clear and warm and hurry outside to gather up the dry clothes when a Thunderstorm came up Colder Months used a Dryer which Biden the Blunder would want banned