Green-Gov Stupidities, Part Two

Now that they've been out on the road for a couple years, subjected to real-world conditions, electric vehicles are beginning to show their downside.  

First, there are the revelations about EV construction.  Those enormous batteries require a lot of Lithium, and there are problems with that.  First, most Lithium deposits are found in China, which is notorious for playing economic warfare with the rest of the world.  Second, Lithium mining is dangerous, difficult -- therefore expensive -- and does no great good for the environment.  Third, processing Lithium into those big batteries is likewise difficult, expensive, and not good for the environment;  the waste products are a problem to dispose of safely.  There are ominous studies showing that the pollution caused by Lithium battery production is greater than the pollution caused by both petroleum production and petroleum emissions.

Then there are the performance problems.  Pound-for-pound, EVs simply can't match the power of liquid-fuel-burning vehicles, piston or diesel.  Worse, they've displayed a troublesome tendency to catch fire under a much wider range of conditions than liquid-fuel cars, and the fires are a lot harder to put out.  Still worse, smoke from burning EVs is more toxic than smoke from burning gasoline, diesel oil, Ethanol, Methanol, liquified syngas or E85. Finally, there's the fact that all that electricity to run the EVs has to come from somewhere, and not enough has been done to improve electricity generation.  We've all seen that solar and wind alone are just not enough.  Altogether, flex-fuel cars are safer, cheaper, more efficient and more environmentally friendly than EVs.  

Even Elon Musk is beginning to pull back from EV production.

You'd think that government officials would keep track of such developments, but obviously not.  Last week Gov. Newsome boasted that the California legislature had passed his merrily ambitious bill to reduce the number of new gas-powered cars that can be sold in California every year.  That number is supposed to shrink year by year, until no new gas-powered cars will be sold in California in 15 years.  Newsome also urged the governments of other states to follow his lead, and a few seemed eager to do that.  

Nobody seems to have thought this through.  There are easily 100 million gas-powered vehicles on the US roads today, and they're not going to vanish quickly.  Cuba has kept its old 1960s cars running for half a century and more.  Not all states will follow California's lead, and increasing improvements in gas-car efficiency will make succeeding years' cars still more efficient than EVs -- not to mention cheaper -- and the state will have a hard time forbidding non-EVs to even enter its territory.  So much for its Zero Emissions goals.

The real irony is that, just yesterday, Gov. Newsome put out an appeal to the people of California to not run their washers or dryers and not charge their electric cars to prevent "stress" on the electric grid during the current wave of triple-digit temperatures, when the state's air conditioners will by running most of the day.  Yes, the weather in the southwest has been unseasonably hot for the first week of September, and there's a heavy draw on the grid.

Could it be that the gods are trying to tell Newsome something?

--Leslie <;)))><