Climate Alarmists Aren't Telling Kids The Truth



Instead of anti-science doomsday predictions, this is what children should know about the environment.





Battery Derangement

Electric vehicles won’t save the planet and won’t survive without subsidies.

Electric vehicles stand at the center of every “green energy” initiative. Multiple jurisdictions mandate and subsidize the inevitable transition to “clean” transportation. Some policymakers have gone further, setting deadlines for outright bans on the internal-combustion engine (ICE), and Green pundits regularly issue forecasts promising the imminent dominance of electric vehicles (EVs).

The EV is central to the notion that we’re on the cusp of a grand shift to a “new-energy economy.” In addition to its putative environmental benefits, the EV, we’re told, is a better machine than an ICE. It’s easier to manufacture, uses less labor, and will—eventually—cost less. Since consumers will soon demand an all-EV future, we should embrace policies to accelerate the transition.

Rarely have so many claims about a product been so wrong. The only unequivocal fact in the EV narrative is that more EVs exist today—approximately 4 million—than ever before. Lithium-battery chemistry—the inventors of which received the 2019 chemistry Nobel Prize—along with advances in power electronics, has made it possible to build practical, if expensive, electric cars. But everything else in the popularized EV storyline is deeply misguided. Advocates claim that EVs are far simpler machines than combustion engines. But the essential “engine” for both is similarly complicated. While the EV’s electric motor is simple, its battery is a half-a-ton electrochemical machine with thousands of parts and welds, along with wiring, electronics, and cooling. It’s every bit as complex as—and far more expensive than—the combustion-mechanical drivetrain that it replaces.

Manufacturing automotive batteries is surprisingly labor intensive. Tesla’s gargantuan battery factory in Nevada produces about 1,000 propulsion batteries per year per 12 workers. Meantime, a modern engine and transmission factory produces about 1,000 mechanical-propulsion systems per year per four workers. EVs don’t reduce total labor requirements; they simply outsource American labor. Since most automakers aren’t capable of fabricating batteries, EV-battery jobs reside mostly in Asia. China alone produces 60 percent of the world’s lithium batteries. There’s no prospect of creating a domestic EV supply chain anytime soon, regardless of incentives.

To EV enthusiasts, U.S. job losses are beside the point because ending our reliance on fossil fuels and saving the planet takes precedence. But it requires the energy equivalent of about 100 barrels of oil to fabricate one battery capable of storing the energy contained in a single barrel of oil. Importing batteries manufactured on Asia’s coal-heavy grid means that consumers are just exporting carbon-dioxide emissions, along with jobs. It takes years to offset those emissions when the EV is plugged into our real-world power grid, where coal and natural gas still account for 70 percent of electricity generation.

Then there’s the array of primary minerals—lithium, cobalt, manganese, carbon, nickel, copper, aluminum—needed to produce a 1,000-pound automotive battery. Accessing the necessary minerals for that one battery entails mining, moving, and processing some 500,000 pounds of raw materials. Embracing batteries at automotive scales would lead to an unprecedented global expansion in mining, with all the accompanying negative environmental effects that tend not to be palliated in developing countries.

None of this seems to concern China, which boasts 60 percent of global EV sales. There, the EV supply chain’s labor intensity is a feature, not a bug. After all, Western nations have largely given up on the related manufacturing, as well as materials-mining and chemical-refining industries. China has spent $60 billion cumulatively in domestic subsidies in order to become the dominant global player, but it ended the EV gravy train this year, cutting subsidies by 65 percent, with plans to eliminate them entirely next year. The result? China’s vaunted EV sales growth went negative. Having abandoned direct subsidies, China will now simply require that EVs make up 3 to 4 percent of all domestic car production. Policymakers in democracies and autocracies find mandates appealing because they are a de facto hidden tax wherein industries, rather than government, get blamed for resulting higher costs.

Mandates and bans can enhance EV sales for as long as markets and consumers tolerate them. But that approach makes a lie of claims that “EV sales are accelerating.” Capitulating to a mandate, much less one set to a mere 4 percent, means that we’re miles away from seeing a new-energy transportation system. Sales data show what consumers actually want. Light trucks—SUVs and pickups—make up 70 percent of all vehicle sales in America. This trend accelerated after the Great Recession, during a period of supposedly rising “climate awareness” and the emergence of the millennial car buyer. There isn’t a battery option for SUVs at a price that consumers, rather than governments, will pay. The few successful EV-SUVs are strictly for the 1 percent crowd.

In reality, 96 percent of America’s consumer vehicles are gasoline-fueled ICEs, and 3 percent have the diesel option, the latter outselling electrics. The ratios are similar globally. Odds are the EV option will eventually do far better than the venerable diesel, but the jury is out on how much better. And arithmetic reveals that even a 100-fold growth in EVs wouldn’t displace 10 percent of world oil.

In one of history’s ironies, the Tesla Model S was introduced in 2012, exactly 100 years after Studebaker ended production of its lineup of electric cars. Back then, EVs had dominated car sales for nearly 25 years. It’s taken one century since then to invent a useful battery. But an EV is still a car with the same features consumers focus on when making buying decisions: body style, paint, seats, cup-holders, cool touchscreens, and so on. Changing a car’s fuel source is about as revolutionary as changing the feed for a horse.

Choosing a battery over an ICE isn’t a revolution. It’s an option—an expensive one—that reduces neither total labor nor environmental impacts.

SOURCE 





Electric-Car Owners Shocked by California Blackouts

Everybody knows that electric cars are going to save the planet from climate change or something. Unlike regular cars, which run on gasoline and make all the polar bears cry as they sink into the sea, electric cars are powered by... um... magic? Mjölnir, the hammer of Thor? That must be how it works, or else owning an electric car would impose some sort of cost to the environment. And that can't be, or those guys wouldn't be so insufferably smug.

You know those intentional blackouts they're having in California to reduce the risk of wildfires? Well, guess what happens now?

John Pearley Huffman, Car and Driver:

Weeks can be a long wait if you’re looking at a Model 3 in your garage with a drained battery, no electrical power to charge it, and the closest grocery store with power 80 miles away. But such is life in the Golden State, where forests and chaparral are all on hair triggers ready to ignite with slightest transformer malfunction or transmission line break.

And the political environment demands minimal risk after the 2018 fire season produced 8527 conflagrations burning an astonishing 1,893,913 acres of wild lands and more than 18,000 structures...
California is experimenting with its power-generation future. And right now, that experiment is hurting. Particularly those electric-car owners with dead batteries.

So if you're a Californian who bought an electric car to save the environment, now you can't drive it because of the risk to the environment. If you really cared about the planet, you wouldn't go anywhere or do anything or participate in 21st-century life at all.

Whatever happened to those algae-powered cars we were supposed to have by now? Remember Obama talking about those? Imagine driving around smelling like a dirty fish tank. Smirking at all those planet-killing dummies in their outdated electric cars. That's the thing about being woke. There's always somebody woker.

SOURCE 





Piers Morgan rips into 'hypocritical' climate activist and her 'own carbon footprint' issues: 'Why don't you practice what you preach?

British television host Piers Morgan earlier this week blasted a climate activism leader as a hypocrite for not reducing her "own carbon footprint" while telling others to do so.

The "Good Morning Britain" host targeted Skeena Rathor, co-founder of Extinction Rebellion — a radical, left-wing outfit that's been staging demonstrations in the U.K. to force attention on climate change.

What was said during the segment?

Morgan began by asking Rathor how she got to the studio — to which she replied that the station sent a car to pick her up.

"Do you have a TV at home?" Morgan pressed.

Rathor was clearly taken off guard, speaking with a halting voice while completely sidestepping the question.

Morgan continued to query the activist, who said his question was "not relevant to the planet's emergency."

Here's the meat of Morgan's point:

Do your kids use iPads or computers — yes or no? Can you answer these questions? Do you have air conditioning? Do they have it in their schools? Do you walk your kids to school? ... You see the problem with all this. You go on about "my kids can't get out of bed because they're all so terrified" — I'm not surprised they're terrified 'cause [their] mom's telling them every day that the planet's about to end, and yet I bet your own carbon footprint on all the stuff I've just mentioned is terrible.

So why don't you give your computer, give up your television, give up your air conditioning, walk your kids to school, get a bike to the studio? Why don't you practice what you preach?"
'Really not about individual carbon footprints'

Rathor defended herself and other climate activists by saying "it's really not about individual carbon footprints" but that climate change is a "systems-wide issue," and everyone is stuck in it. She's just trying to "raise the alarm" from within the system, Rathor said — and couldn't do so, after all, if she lived off the grid in the woods.

Morgan still harped on Rathor and others like her who lead "completely hypocritical lives. If you genuinely believe the planet's about to end, start with you're own carbon footprint ... you do one thing, and you say another."

SOURCE 





Ocasio-Cortez Says Her ‘Dreams Of Motherhood’ Are ‘Bittersweet’ Because Of Climate Change

Let's hope her dreams are bittersweet enough to prevent her procreating.  One of her is enough

Democratic New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said Friday that climate change has made her “dreams of motherhood now taste bittersweet.”

Ocasio-Cortez told attendees at the C40 World Mayors Summit in Copenhagen that, “I speak to you as a human being, a woman whose dreams of motherhood now taste bittersweet, because of what I know about our children’s future. And that our actions are responsible for bringing their most dire possibilities into focus.”

“I speak to you as daughter and descendant of colonized peoples who have already begun to suffer. Just two years ago, one of the deadliest disasters in the United States struck in the form of Hurricane Maria. The climate change powered storm killed over 3,000 Puerto Ricans, American citizens. My own grandfather died in the aftermath, all because they were living under colonial rule, which contributed to the dire conditions and lack of recovery,” she added.

Ocasio-Cortez said she made the international trip to the climate conference because federal governments “are failing to act on the climate crisis.” She took a cross-country flight last month to attend a climate rally in Colorado. (Bernie Sanders, Climate Hawk, Spends Nearly $300K On Private Jet Travel In Month)

The congresswoman previously questioned whether it’s morally acceptable to have children.

She claimed in an Instagram livestream in February that the “scientific consensus that the lives of children are going to be very difficult, and it does lead, I think, young people to have a legitimate question,” she said, asking: “Is it okay to still have children?”

SOURCE 

***************************************

For more postings from me, see  DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  

Preserving the graphics:  Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere.  But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases.  After that they no longer come up.  From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site.  See  here or here

*****************************************