More Green to be “Green”

Guest Post by Eric Peters

The Green New Deal isn’t just an attack on driving. It’s also an attack on mowing – and growing.

On everything that gets done using equipment powered by internal combustion – which results in the production of carbon dioxide, the bogeyman of our time.

This includes lawn mowers – and hay balers.

There are electric versions of the former but not of the latter. And electric lawn mowers – like electric cars  – only go so far and then take an awfully long time before they can go anywhere again. Longer, actually, than EVs – which can be “fast” charged in about 30-45 minutes . . . if you have access to a 240 volt charger.

But electric lawn mowers (and trimmers) charge up the old-fashioned way, on standard 120 volt household current – like portable drills.

Which takes hours.

You could run an extension cord and avoid losing charge – and so, having to recharge. But what if you have to mow more than a quarter-acre or so? That’s going to take a long extension cord.

The Green New Deal is as much an assault on rural living – and farming – as it is on driving, the cost of which will go up by 30-50 percent if people are forced to buy only electric cars and the much-promised (but yet to be delivered) “breakthrough” in battery technology that will supposedly reduce the cost of electric cars by 30-50 percent and so make EVs cost-equivalent with non-electric cars doesn’t happen.

It certainly hasn’t happened yet.

As a point of comparison, the least expensive EV on the market is the Nissan Leaf, which stickers for just under $30,000.

By $10

Its base price is $29,990 – which sounds better than $30,000. Which is about twice the cost of a Nissan Versa Note, the automaker’s otherwise similar economy hatchback.

That’s for a Leaf with a best-case range of 150 miles.

Italicized because EV range is much more variable than the range of IC cars – because everything that’s powered in an EV – including power accessories such as the AC and heater – is powered by the battery pack and so draws down the battery pack’s charge.

Also, batteries are greatly affected by extremes of heat and cold – as EV owner n the Midwest discovered last winter during a cold snap. The advertised range of their EVs plummeted by as much as 40 percent just from the cold. You’d have to have a leaking gas tank to have a similar problem with a non-electric car.

The EV range problem wouldn’t be such a big problem were it not for the EV recharge problem – which imposes a time cost on the EV owner, even if a “fast” charger is available.

Nissan offers a Leaf with more range – 226 miles – for several thousand more ($36,650). This version of the Leaf goes about half as far as any current non-electric economy car (most can go 400 miles or more on a tank) and costs about $20,000 more than the price of a non-electric economy car such as the Versa Note ($15,650).

Will similar costs be imposed on outdoor power equipment – and farm equipment – in the name of the Green New Deal?

if so, eating is also going to get a lot more expensive. Unless, of course, an exemption is given to heavy farm equipment as well as to the heavy trucks that deliver the food.

Cows, too.

These emit a lot of carbon dioxide – and there’s no way to reduce their “emissions” without reducing the number of them. This will mean either fewer steaks – or much more expensive steaks.

Maybe, like electric cars, steaks will be something for the rich only.

That’s how future – our present – was portrayed back in the 1973 dystopian film, Soylent Green. A steak was as much a luxury as a private car – or a private apartment. The cattle – who ended up being processed into Soylent crackers – lived a life of austerity.

Green New Deal proponents don’t mention any of this, of course – for the obvious reason that most people aren’t going to knowingly vote themselves into poverty – much less starvation.

Instead, they imagine a utopian future of electrified everything that costs them nothing -either in money or time – to solve a problem that’s as hyped as the solutions to it.

There’s got to be some kind of way out of here . . . said the joker to the thief.

But maybe not.

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