All about EV: A Bunch of Greenhorns Blowing their own Green Horns.

 

Addison DeWitt: We all come into this world with our little egos equipped with individual horns . If we don't blow them, who else will?

The Green Party's zero-emission plan is ...

BROKEN

Refusing to face the facts that there is no such thing as either clean energy or green automobiles, the NYT today ponders how we, as in the US, can effectuate “fleet turnover”, something that sounds like a pastry at an evacuation center. Which perhaps isn't by accident, as the entire concept is half-baked, it's most remote possibility so last-century, it belies science, political reality, and economics. But because it is considered, also despite science, reality or economics, the Green thing to do, none of that enters into their calculations. Instead, the main concern of the post's appropriately-named author, Brad Plumer, is how soon it can be accomplished, as he worries that any ICE machines still on the road in 2035 may still be plying them in the year 2050, by which time we are going to be a zero-emissions economy (I'll pause for a moment to give you time to stop laughing).

The air pollution that is right now, in 2021, so egregious that it is described as a slow-moving pandemic, in that it kills oh, I don't know, 5 million people a year, is apparently not high enough to satisfy the morbid wishes of the Green meanies.

The bestselling vehicle in North America is the F-150 pickup truck. There are no pickup trucks in what is called the fleet, which pertains to cars.  

The manufacture of cars, a category that, although it doesn't include pickup trucks, does include EV's, is the largest contributor to CO2 production in the industrial world, it is the sine qua non of consumer-driven manufacturing, one whose supply chain is the longest, and therefore, most impacted by the pandemic, and for a variety of reasons:

Cars are computers on wheels, housing thousands of semiconductors in each vehicle, they control the windows, the power train, infotainment system, even the doorlock mechanism, and that doesn't even include the A/C, which ,as the temperature in 2035, never mind 2050, is already going to be so much  hotter in the summer, will vie with range as the largest drain on an EV's battery: windows up, the heat chokes you, windows down, you suffocate without A/C. Semi-conductors have an energy and hydro-intensive manufacturing cycle of their own, and it is not a green one, their silicone base alone requires extensive mining to produce the requisite sand, and mining is one of the most CO2-intensive activities in industry. Yet in order to even scratch the surface of an entire fleet replacement, before one molecule of CO2 from an ICE machine is kept out of the atmosphere, CO2 from the INcrease in mining for lithium, for the batteries; cobalt, from slave and child-labor Chad; and copper, to begin the multi-trillion dollar rebuild of the current electrickety infrastructure, alone would punish the atmosphere with billions of tons of additional CO2.

Yet that doesn't even take into account the plastic content of EV's, which have every bit of much of it as ICE machines do. Plastics require petrochemical plants, and petrochemical plants require ethane, a fossil fuel, for cheap feedstock to form all those man-made hydrocarbon chains from nature's hydrocarbon chains. Using sequestered carbon dug out of the ground to manufacture sequestered carbon that will end up polluting the ground and befouling the air. Green air to match the green algae-choked waters of the Gulf and numerous lakes.

And speaking of chains, the supply chain for the manufacturing of cars is the longest for any consumer good. That supply chain requires the manufacture and shipment of storage containers, all of which are metal which requires more carbon-intensive processes be undergone before the dirtiest one, that of transporting the goods to ports and then inland to factories, has even begun. There are right now so many of theses containers sitting off the coast of California that China can't ship any more of their finished products to the US. 

Now you may argue that those processes occur anyway, even with ICE machines; I would counter, however, that were that pipedream of an all-EV fleet to come true by 2035, which it won't, in the meantime, it will be a plus one: both will be manufactured together, and, as I've pointed out, the largest selling vehicle in the USSA isn't even a car, so it isn't even counted in the "fleet".

Like Ford, GM is trying to protect the production of its highly profitable full-size pickup trucks and SUV's. Remember, the EPA mpg rules were hand-written by industry to exclude trucks. Having won this concession in the eighties, the manufacturers started using truck chasses to build their SUV's, thus resulting in more CO2 being exhausted into the atmosphere, sanctioned by the very law meant to reduce it ... (sound familiar? It should, Because that's the exact same dynamic that is going on with EV's while the green crowd gives it their unthinking support).

Right now in 2021, while we are concocting plans to pour additional billions of tons/year of CO2 into the atmosphere, plans that would abrogate any reduction goal we have agreed to under the auspices of the Paris Accords, the Great 2021 Melt in the Arctic has already begun. As optimistically-termed "Perma" frost starts to melt, and the zombie fires in Siberia flame up, the fracking industry is beginning to shake off the Covid doldrums and the rig count is already rising, up to more than 400 from the 250 it had sunk to during the worst days of the crisis. Yet the CO2 content in the atmosphere, a year after the largest reduction in manmade GHG in ... well, Ever, has never been higher, the amount added to the running total, never larger in one year, as one carbon sink after the other gets turned into a carbon generator:

The fires in the rainforests in Indochina have already begun choking Malaysia

The above-mentioned Siberian fires have started igniting

Brazil's rainforests have never emitted more CO2, yet it has already started increasing 

 

All of these are, well, were, major carbon sinks, and they are now carbon generators, explaining why the biggest drop in manmade emissions evinced no reduction in the inexorable growth in CO2 accumulation.

No wonder Beijing is already smogged in.

And this is the time that a political group calling themselves "Green" have picked to institute a manufacturing renaissance; one for not only an entirely new line of vehicles, but the energy infrastructure necessary to power them: 

Texas is the one of the richest States in the United States, with more natural gas than most countries, natural gas, that, with the increase in the rig counts, means more CO2, because rather than use it, Texas opts to flare it, which basically translates into each and every rig being a CO2 production facility; it generates more electricity from wind facilities that any other state, and is the country's refining hub and center of petroleum production, yet Texas Transmission capability is so stymied, so rifled with graft and corruption that it is in the same sorry state as that of many "developing" economies (can an economy that can't weather a temperature drop of tens of degrees (The Russian economy weathers drops of more than 80 degrees every year) really be considered a "developed" economy?)

But wait ... there's More!

All that electrical grid upgrading is necessary for a reason: to charge batteries; batteries that don't exist, so that will require yet another plus one, yet another entirety new highly polluting manufacturing industry, together with its mining components, be created from the ground plane up to be added to the mix, all so that we can Decrease our carbon footprint ... somehow ... by 2050. By which time, given that we are adding, at the minimum, (as this year most surely must have been at, given the more than half of a million dead in the country whose industries  produce $600billion dollars shy of what its citizens consume each and every year), 3.1 ppm's of CO2, will be 20 X 3.1 = 62.0, added to the current ~ 418 = 480 ppm ... at minimum ... and we'll be (well, you'll be, I'll be long gone by then) only halfway through this century.

At the current 418ppm, the Arctic is already thawed enough in winter to allow a shipment of LNG to be transported from Russia to China to great fanfare ... in other words, the world thinks that it's a great reason for celebration, like the launching of the Titanic, and Russia is using the great thaw to implement its plans for resource extraction from the Arctic, a push that  will result in an ecological disaster that makes the Exxon Valdez spill look like a minor blip, the Deep  Horizon's disaster a frat brat party gone a little sideways. So what will it be like in 2050 when there will be 480 ppm?  ...and that's just CO2; as you know, the growth in methane being released into the atmosphere is growing at a much faster pace than that of CO2. You know, methane, whose heat-trapping capability far exceeds that of CO2? And it is being released from the ESAS (East Siberian Arctic Shelf) in exactly what's probably the worst place on the globe for it to be concentrating methane in: The Arctic.

                                                     

Note how the escalation of methane exactly coincides with the ramp up of the USA’s fracking production.

EV's are indeed a great technological marvel. But, guess what? So were nuclear reactors, the internal combustion engine, the Green Revolution, and the internet, but for every other species on planet earth besides man, they've also all been disasters. So is it really such a good idea to add yet another marvelous machine, along with its requisite infrastructure, to the list of ecological nightmares created by mankind? The biggest bane of the automobile is how it has become vital to run even the simplest errand (as a boy, I used to deliver newspapers, now they’re driven to my door, wrapped in a plastic bag in a State that is in “exceptional” drought ... all across the parched West, millions of plastic bags, every single day, designed to keep newspaper dry, are needlessly choking landfills) yet the EV will if anything, only make that situation worse. So must we really go on pretending that this one will cut down on fossil fuel use (a claim also made by pushers of the internet, btw, yet the internet-enabled mining of bitcoins alone adds the CO2 of an entire country the size of Chile/Argentina to the already onerous accumulation, likewise the so-called Green Revolution), and therefore CO2 generation, when it is already doing exactly the opposite?