Spic and Spandemic of Clean Energy Meme a Mask of Red Death.

 

“You can vaccinate your whole population and control the problem only for a short period if, in another place in the world, a new variant appears,” she said. “It will get here one day.”

Similarly, you can jerry-rig your own economy so it appears that it is "Green", and control the problem for a short period in your own country, but since you've done so by moving that pollution to another place in the world, it's impact is not only not lessened, it is exacerbated by the carbon costs of off-shoring. Like the virus, CO2 knows no national boundaries, but  unlike the virus, there is no possibility that "It will just go away ... it'll be like a miracle".

In a Corporate puff piece for EV's, the NYT recently published an article by Hiroko Tabuchi and Brad Plumer in which they ask, 

"How Green Are Electric Vehicles?"

A question that sounds like it's out of one of Dr. Seuss' children's books. But this one won't be banned, as they answer their own question, stating, despite its obvious falsehood:

"In short: Very green."

As commented on ad nauseum, but quite accurately, by Caitlin Johnstone, self-styled "Rogue Journalist", in articles highlighted on Yves Smith's Naked Capitalism site, when NYT's and other MSM outlets publish such garbage they're responsible for lending credence to the former failed president's accusations of "Fake News".

There is no green electric vehicle anywhere in the world, or for that matter, in the entire universe. So a VERY green vehicle is just a slap in the face, an offhanded backhand to your intelligence and a paid-for advertisement for the EV industry. Half of the weight in modern vehicles comes from composite materials such as plastic. A hybrid SUV weighs more than the block-long Cadillac's of the 70's, and that weight is from more than a ton and a half of plastic, a burden of weight no EV will be asked to carry less of ... so now we're being asked to believe that plastic is not just green, but, that it's, "Very green"?

This dynamic duo of yellow-green journalism is the Chartreuse Goose and the Gilets val Jaunes.

Chartreuse Chanteuse.

They then proceed to build a case for their outright lie: 

"General Motors has said it aims to stop selling new gasoline-powered cars and light trucks by 2035 and will pivot to battery-powered models. This week, Volvo said it would move even faster and introduce an all-electric lineup by 2030." 

Really? That's it? "GM has said"? Oh! ... Well then ... 

I know these kids are young, but are they so young they never heard about the financial debacle of 2008, where, right in the middle sat GM and their lending arm, GMAC, with lies they filled their investor statements with? There is an entire new financial company called ALLY Finance, started in the wake of the financial crisis because GMAC was so riddled with corruption and peppered with fake loans that would never be paid that GM needed an entirely different entity to finance the purchase of their vehicles by customers that can't afford them. And THIS is the corporation your basing your prognostications on? And worse, that you expect us to believe is a reliable source of data, taking it for granted that all your readers are as clueless as you are?

But let's forget about that for a moment, and look at what it is they're saying, namely, that,

 "General Motors has said it aims to stop selling new gasoline-powered cars and light trucks by 2035 ... 

Notice the verbal legerdemain in that statement? 

It is careful not to state that "General Motors will stop manufacturing new gasoline-powered cars and light trucks by 2035", for the simple reason that it won't. 

Just as GMAC was the only part of General Motors that was making a profit by 2008, the wholly-owned subsidiary that GM will start in order to sell the fleet of gasoline-powered cars and light trucks it will still be manufacturing in 2035, will be the source of its profits, as it sells EV's at cost, the price tag otherwise being too onerous for the pocketbooks of the vast majority of working Americans. The higher price tags of EV's having been completely left out of the Tabuchi/Plumer puff-piece.

As if Corporations do what they say they'll do a full decade hence. They'll just move ICE machine production to another company, continent, offshore haven ... and there's nothing to stop them, au contraire, everything is in place already to enable them to do exactly that. Perfectly legally.

As for Volvo, who they state,

 " ... said it would move even faster and introduce an all-electric lineup by 2030." 

Once again, it's "They said"; did they now? Alrighty then, what is it they said? That 

 " ... it would move even faster and introduce an all-electric lineup by 2030." 

There are currently three types of automobiles on the market, ICE machines, powered by internal combustion engines, EV, electric vehicles running on batteries that need to be charged up, and hybrids; so an all-electric line-up simply means they will have a line-up of all-electric vehicles by 2030. That doesn't even imply that they won't have a similar line-up of all-Internal combustion engine, or an all-hybrid line-up of vehicles to sell right along side of them.

However, I have seen it phrased less ambiguously elsewhere, that Volvo says it will sell only electric vehicles by 2030.

Okay. But can it really be a coincidence that both manufacturers are careful not to say they will only manufacture EV's? That both of them say they will only sell EV's? There's nothing that actually  commits them to it, so the same argument goes for any Corporation that applies to GM, they simply "spinoff" a division that manufactures ICE machines, or buys a brand in China that will be able to pollute to their hearts' content. Every one of the OECD nations has been off-shoring their polluting industries for decades, and now claim that, using the same twisted logic of our authors here, that a nation can be green and still have economic growth, even though all the pollution they were responsible for before is still occurring, in order to satisfy OECD demand, not that of the country to which the plants have been moved, and so the global production of CO2 is in fact aggravated by the lax, if any, laws controlling such pollution in the country they moved their worst polluters to, and added to that is the onerous cost, environmentally as well as economically, of shipping those self-same products thousands and thousand of miles in shipping containers loaded onto cargo ships burning the dirtiest fuel on the planet. Like The Knights who Say "Ni", Corporations merely need to demand you "Bring me some Greenery" (and make it pretty ... and not too expensive) and any sleight of hand is accepted, even though the net result is the creation of an even more ponderous load of CO2 being vented into the atmosphere. 

So yes, Volvo has said it would introduce an all-electric lineup by 2030, and they may even do so, but in order to make it true, they will make the carbon footprint of their manufacturing industry that much larger, but because they place ads in newspapers of record whose "journalists" will cover for them, lest it jeopardize the only source of their profits, paid advertising by corporations, that matters not a jot. They have their green vehicles and their green credentials, so science can just take a holiday ... except of course, it actually can't. 

"Are they really as green as advertised?", they dare ask (the key word being "Advertised" ... one manufacturer would have you believe that ICE machines are made with "Love", so there's that). Of course they aren't as advertised. Advertisements are paid-for corporate propaganda, so what in the world makes one think anything would be "as advertised"? An entire industry devoted to making specious claims carefully worded to avoid saying anything as obviously false as the failed former President's rally cries, why would anything be taken for more than a grain of salt from such a source?)

 "Electric vehicles are more emissions-intensive to make because of their batteries."

 "An all-electric Chevrolet Bolt, for instance, can be expected to produce 189 grams of carbon dioxide for every mile driven over its lifetime, on average. By contrast, a new gasoline-fueled Toyota Camry is estimated to produce 385 grams of carbon dioxide per mile. A new Ford F-150 pickup truck, which is even less fuel-efficient, produces 636 grams of carbon dioxide per mile."

Okay ... but unless the savings in emissions adds up to the extra carbon-cost incurred during manufacturing, a cost that doesn't include the enormous carbon footprint made by the increase in mining necessary to provide the host of REE's, lithium, and cobalt, as well as to supply the grid with the exponential increase in demand for copper such a rapid boost in demand for electricity would necessitate, the overall emissions won't decrease.  The authors also don't bother to publish the CO2 produced by an EV the size of an SUV. Anyone penning an article about emissions and EV's knows that the fastest-growing segment of the American automotive market is SUV's, so a Chevy Bolt's emissions are hardly relevant when the lion's share of vehicles bought will weigh in at twice the Bolt's weight. It's like comparing apples to watermelons.

In a world where the CO2 content has jumped 2ppm in just a week, despite the economies of every  nation in that same world, (with the lone exception of China) experiencing such slow growth rates that the richest State in the richest country on earth has dropped the mandate for its citizens to wear masks, insuring that thousands more will die, solely in order to restart the largest generator of methane and CO2 production in the world, the emissions generated by the transition to a nation of electrified personal conveyances fantasized by the greenies is actually more dangerous than the continued excavation of fossil fuels. The counter to which argument is, "Yes, but in the long run .... "

But that is exactly my contention ... The amount of CO2-forcing the zero-emission economy will create -has already created - despite being but a nascent phenomenon, in order to eventuate its realization will ensure that there will be no long run. How else to explain the authors insistence, along with China's, that natural gas is "Clean"? The amount of natural gas flared by just the two states of North Dakota and Texas amounts to enough natural gas as would satisfy the entire electricity demand for their respective states. This outsized amount of combustion, with its attendant CO2 pollution powers not a single EV. You cannot say natural gas is "clean" simply because the pollutants coming out of the generating plant's chimney contain less CO2 than coal. 

There are two more problems associated with our authors' vision of a "very" green exogenously-fueled vehicle, one they dismiss, the other, like the carbon footprint of the mining industry expansion needed to build the transmission infrastructure to sustain the burdensome load of juicing up all those EV's, they simply ignore.

The first is batteries. They admit that the estimated recycling rates for lithium-ion batteries is only about 5 percent ... "but with time and innovation, that’s going to increase.” But "increase" doesn't quite cut it, does it? If it were to double, which in any process is quite a jump (but that's not what they claim ... recycling isn't going to "jump"; at best, it will only increase), but even if it were to double, the recycling rate would still be only 10%. But that's not a problem, per our intrepid reporters, as there is a promising approach wherein used batteries are re-used as backup for grid storage. There are a raft  of problems with this, that include logistics and fire hazards being conglomerated at the heart of our energy system, but let's just look at the suggested scenario and ask ourselves, "What's wrong with this picture?"

The reason we have the need for a large increase in the capacity for backup in the electric grid storage is the inclusion in the power mix of solar and wind, with solar's contribution dropping to zero after nightfall. At that time, when all the EV's are being plugged into the system to recharge their batteries, the phalanx of old, used EV batteries will then be called upon to send their stored loads across miles of transmission lines, generating waste heat and losing at the least 10% of their already depleted load along the way, to charge up their newer counterparts encased in their owners' EV's. But why would you do that? (And by "you", I don't mean you, but an industry, a country, a society). Why would you not simply take the battery out of your EV, replace it with a new one, then plug in the old battery during the day to allow it to charge up, then use the old battery to charge your new battery when you return in the evening? The energy savings would be enormous, for both the system and the individual, since, having the battery locally recharged during off-peak demand hours would help make the overall system more resilient, and for the same reason, the off-peak rates being that mush lower, save the consumer money (ie energy. Remember, all money, as far as I've bee able to ascertain, is generated via the application of energy resources, so the more money you save, the less energy you're using. An equation completely missing from any of the so-called Green solutions for the simple reason that it isn't in Corporate interest to have a polity aware of such an obvious truism. The Green solution is the Corporate solution because it keeps the status quo of cocooning the populace in a comfortable electric blanket).

And that brings me to the second problem they chose to ignore. Those batteries, according to the article, have to be recycled while they can still recharge to 80% of their capacity because, unsurprisingly, the EV's range is thereby reduced by 20%, and I guess more than that is unacceptable.

But how long before that happens, and how expensive is it to replace? Well, because of thieves already cashing in on the fact that stealing the battery pack basically is stealing the heart of the car, it's become apparent that owners will be called on to replace that heart well before they have paid off the loan it was necessary to take out to procure the vehicle.

And that's the second problem the article ignores: demand.

Or more specifically, the lack thereof. 

Although there is a sizeable segment of the population that wants to want EV's, they can't justify the extra expense and inconvenience they would have to incur to actually own one. The protest movement in France of the Gilets Jaunes mentioned above was spurred by an increase in the tax on diesel fuel. A tax that required nothing close to the increase in outlay that owning an EV vis-à-vis an ICE machine requires. And that's in France, where a nuclear-powered grid would require no extra CO2 be generated to increase the electric supply to recharge the nation's EV fleet. So, here in the US, where SUV's rule the road, how on earth are you going to prod a population convinced it is their god-given right to drive, such that they spend $50 to fuel up an out-sized vehicle occupied by exactly one person (but fitted out to carry nine), to drive to a foodbank and wait for hours, burning up that fuel, to collect $45-worth of "free" food?

In other words, far from having a pent-up demand for these vehicles, there is a lot of resistance (well, they are electric, after all) for a host of reasons but that are very real.

Perhaps you consider, when perusing my posts on the green economy, wherein I state my objections, that I am against the implementation of clean tech. Nothing could be further from the truth, however. In the years I was employed by the telecom/computer industry, I spent many ours aboard planes, and, living in California, got to look down at the vast sun-drenched landscape, and wonder, why isn't the West powered by solar? Or, while driving by the windfarm in Altamont Pass, wondering, "Why aren't there more windfarms?" In terms of pollution, eyesore, environmental destruction, how is there any comparison? Well, then I researched how many households that scenic 576 megawatts (MW)  power generator served, and discovered it was less than 50,000, in a State with 40 million people in it. I was sorely disappointed.  

More digging revealed that when demands are made on wind to displace fossil fuel plant production, the question that must be asked is: what is providing wind shadowing/backup? (as wind, which our authors have demonstrated by their own voluble blowing of it up our ass, is unreliable). So system reliability and power quality considerations come to the fore, such that the shadowing/backup is what is displacing the fossil fuel production, and wind is displacing some small measure of the shadowing/backup. But a wind project that relies on fossil generators to shadow the wind machines may provide little net fuel or CO2 displacement and in some cases may actually increase fuel use and emissions. The same, of course, applies to solar.

So what we have ended up with is two camps, each relying on a chimera. The one denies that climate change has happened, and is now ongoing and, from all indications, some of which they actually have to float on or bake under, is not only ongoing, but intensifying. The other camp is the one expressed by our authors in this article. That there is a green solution, a clean energy, zero emission future that we can drive to in our ICE machines, build toward with solar plants, attain by moving the carbon-generation out of our sight, into our past.

Neither is possible because both insist on the same paradigm: unending growth, untrammeled access to energy, and uninhibited mobilization via the mass marketing of a vast fleet of automobiles, relying on the government to provide the upkeep and construction of a boundless, all-encompassing highway system, literally using highway robbery to force non-drivers to pay for its support. A highway system that means one Lone Star State can decide its citizens no longer should be required to give up their freedom by virtue of a mask mandate, enabling them to thereby deliberately spread a deadly microbe to every other state in the union, a virus they idiotically insist to be a Hoax, while more than half a million people are no longer laughing, will never laugh again, because they are corpses. And onto this pile of deceased humanity, more bodies are destined to accrue, as it takes but one state to decide they no longer give a flying fuck, to destroy the efforts of all the others. With intransigence such as this, inspired by the requirement to wear a simple strip of cloth in front of your nose and mouth, is it really conceivable that such people will pay even a nickel more to switch from their gas-guzzling SUV's to the constraints to their Freedom, required by the use of EV's? That simply doesn't seem at all likely to me.

 I have been searching for decades, ever since the oil shocks in the 70's, to see what science and industry has to offer on the aspect of decreasing energy demand, and a cleaner way to satisfy it, and every single one of them has ended up being just another boondoggle, a pseudo-solution such as ethanol from food, that not only costs billions of dollars, but creates so much CO2 in its realization that it never has time to make up for the extra burden it's created via the reduced emissions it promised. Yet precisely because of that, once it's in place, it continues to get subsidized with yet more billions of dollars (ie, remembering that dollars are amassed only by the combustion of energy resources, by generating even more CO2 pollution). Not the least of reasons is that the science of its ability to reduce emissions was flawed right from the start (I would argue purposely so ... there were, after all, as in the case of not only EV's, but also solar, hydro, nuclear, and wind, billions in federal funds to be garnered; there have been no, in this Vampire Capitalistic society, efforts, not one, by even a single Corporation, to provide any substitute energy source for fossil fuels that hasn't used public monies to fund research to boost their private gain. That should tell you something right there), but most of all we've lost precious time. Time such articles as this make clear we think we still have plenty of. But that lost time can't be gotten back. 

Mais il n'y a aucun moyen de rattraper le Temps Perdu: we've built our own rat trap, eh?

 Last year I remember watching the CO2 emissions to see if we'd get to 420ppm by 4/20/2020. A year later, after the worst rate of economic growth in  each and every one of the most polluting countries in the history of the world, reflected by the largest drop in  recorded man-made emissions ... ever ... there is every sign that we will reach 420ppm by March 20'th. Who knows how much we'll be at by April 20? But at this rate, it'd be 430ppm, which is quite alarming, as China has already recorded a temperature anomaly of +40(!) in Beijing one day last month. Meanwhile the rapid accumulation of the even more powerful GHG of methane goes all-but ignored. Even as Texas is champing at the bit to restore its facilities for CO2 and water vapor production, euphemized as "flaring", to their pre-pandemic levels.

If that doesn't scare the hell out of you, you must have just come from a Masque of Red Death CPAC rally. Poe thang.