As some might remember, in 2019 that autistic girl promoted by globalists aka Greta Thunberg made news by taking an ultramodern yacht to cross the Atlantic and publicly show her commitment to a supposedly "zero carbon" lifestyle. But almost all her handlers flew first-class to NYC and once her sanctimonious speeches in NYC were over, she also quietly flew back to Sweden. While I could write a lot more about how and why this delusional mentally-ill white girl is still being promoted as the “global” face of environmental activism, it is best left for another post. Instead I will talk about how electric cars and "renewable green energy" are nothing more than virtue signaling scams popular among parasitic white liberals.
Readers might remember that in the past I have written a couple of posts about how anthropogenic climate change is a form of secular apocalypticism and the factors behind its ascendancy in the west. I have also stated that Tesla Motors is largely an image driven scam supported by too many upper-middle class people who want to look cool and “progressive. This is not say that electric automobiles are impossible. Indeed, electric vehicles with performance equivalent to their internal combustion powered equivalents have been technologically feasible since, at least, the late 1990s. My main objection to the popular delusion that future of automobiles will be electric is based on many factors other than technological feasibility. For starters, the electrochemistry which underlies rechargeable battery technology puts an upper limit on the amount of energy which can be stored by this method.
In other words, the amount of energy stored in carbon-carbon or carbon-hydrogen chemical bonds (fossil fuels) will always be at least a magnitude more than a battery utilizing the most optimal electrochemistry. But that, by itself, is not the Achilles heel of electric automobiles. As you know, it is fairly easy to build electric vehicles with pretty decent performance using currently available battery technology. The bigger and related problem is as follows: how do you get all that lithium, cobalt etc to build batteries on a large enough scale to displace ICE powered vehicles. This problem becomes tricky rather quickly, even if we assume better than 95% recycling of all metals used in such batteries. There is also the issue of obtaining enough of those pesky lanthanides aka 'rare earth elements' for building their electric motors.
But the electric car scam gets truly exposed once you consider how all that electricity used to power and recharge them is generated. As things stand today and in the near future, most of that power is going to come from coal and gas fueled power stations. Some will come from hydroelectric or nuclear powered stations. My point is that only a small minority of the power used to recharge electric vehicles is going to come from "renewable energy sources". In other words, using electric cars instead of normal ones merely shifts the location where carbon fuels are being burnt, not the amount. And it gets worse. Let me ask you a related question. How large will be the "carbon footprint" of the industrial and transportation infrastructure necessary to build, install and maintain all those solar cells and windmills?
And it just keeps on getting worse. Ever wondered why hydroelectric power has long been the dominant way to generate renewable energy? Well, think about it this way.. the amount of water which flow through a river, while varying from season to season, is reasonably constant over a period of several years. It can be easily stored for future use over multiple years. To make another long story short, generating a constant and predicable amount of power is much easier if your source of “renewable” energy is water than wind flow or sunshine. The same is true for power plants using coal, oil, gas or nuclear fission. In contrast, the two most touted sources of "green energy", namely wind flow and sunshine, are notoriously fickle and dependent on weather.
Do you think it is possible to run massive “renewable” power grids which can withstand the whims of weather? Some will say- why not build "green energy" power plants with.. say.. 10x the capacity you need? Well for starters, it starts becoming far more expensive and maintenance intensive than conventional power plants. But more importantly, building even 10x capacity doesn't give you the same level of confidence in power grid stability as conventional power plants have been known to provide for many decades. Imagine running an electric grid which will fail on a massive scale many per year and during extreme weather events when such power is necessary. But couldn't we just store the energy from renewables?
Well.. sure, we can store energy from fickle sources and release it in a more gradual manner. But doing so introduces more complications. Building huge rechargeable batteries of any known electrochemistry is expensive and they not as reliable as many want to believe. To make matter worse, if that is possible, their malfunctions can be far more catastrophic and harder to repair than is the case for conventional peak power plants. The other way to store excess energy or moderate its fluctuations involves the use of pumped storage. While this particular technology is very mature and routinely used in hydroelectric plants for providing extra juice for certain times of the day, constructing such an installation requires certain topographical features in addition to lots of water. In other words, you can't set them up in most locations.
But what about a "smart" grid? Wouldn't having a "smart and connected" grid solve the problem? Well.. not really. Leaving aside the part where you actually have to first possess enough energy to distribute it properly, there is the issue of whether these "smart" grids are robust enough to deliver power without massive and frequent failures. You don't have to a genius to figure out that anything connected to a large network or the internet can and will be hacked. And even if does not get hacked, a "smart" grid is much more sensitive to large cascading failures due to component malfunctions than your old-fashioned "dumb" grid. Of course, you can always use coal, gas, nuclear and hydropower plants for generating the base load and backup. But then, how much "renewable green energy" are you using and more importantly- WHY?
If your use of "green energy" is not sufficient to reduce your sins.. I mean carbon dioxide output.. by over 80%, what is the point of spending all that money on building and maintaining these white elephants? Did I mention the part where most countries in Asia and Africa do not go much further than giving lip service to the cause of "renewable green energy". Yes.. you heard that right. For all the noise the leaders of some developing countries make about "green energy", when push comes to shove they simply build more conventional power plants. For them, "green energy" is, at best, a way to provide some peak energy and keep a few more people employed.
Electric cars and "green energy" are solutions in search of a problem which does not exist. Sure, they have some good niche applications. For example, using electric cars in densely populated cities would certainly improve air quality. Similarly using solar panels to augment peak power usage for air-conditioning and refrigeration in warm countries with lots of sunshine makes sense. But let us not pretend that people are going to give up a comfortable life to perform penance.. I mean, pay much more and get far less.. to please the insatiable gods of environmentalism. Moreover, attempting to do so via rules and regulations is guaranteed to piss of the majority and result in the election of more right-wingers nutcases such as Trump.
What do you think? Comments?
I own an EV, well its a plug in hybrid, I like it, its a better drive train IMO, and the fuel is cheaper than petrol/diesel, diesel and petrol went over €2 a litre where I live, (this will get worse as the war in the Ukraine drags on) so I'm saving money faster than I expected. thats the mistake you're making, not everyone driving an EV cares all that much about the environment, I think Greta Thunberg is a muppet, as for "green energy" who knows, I only really care about price, I may invest in a PV system soon