Guest Post by John Stossel
Politicians praise electric cars. If everyone buys them, they say, solar and wind power will replace our need for oil.But that’s absurd.Here is the rest of my list of “inconvenient facts” about electric cars.”The future of the auto industry is electric,” says President Joe Biden. He assumes a vast improvement in batteries. Better batteries are crucial because both power plants and cars need to store lots of electric power.But here’s inconvenient fact 3: Batteries are lousy at storing large amounts of energy.”Batteries leak, and they don’t hold a lot,” says physicist Mark Mills.
But future batteries will be better, I point out.
“Engineers are really good at making things better,” Mills responds, “but they can’t make them better than the laws of physics permit.”
That’s inconvenient fact 4. Miracle batteries powerful enough to replace fossil fuels are a fantasy.
“Because nature is not nice to humans,” explains Mills, “we store energy for when it’s cold or really hot. People who imagine an energy transition want to build windmills and solar panels and store all that energy in batteries. But if you do the arithmetic, you find you’d need to build about a hundred trillion dollars’ worth of batteries to store the same amount of energy that Europe has in storage now for this winter. It would take the world’s battery factories 400 years to manufacture that many batteries.”
Politicians don’t mention that when they promise every car will be electric. They also don’t mention that the electric grid is limited.
This summer, California officials were so worried about blackouts they asked electric vehicle owners to stop charging cars!
Yet today, few of California’s cars are electric. Gov. Gavin Newsom ordered that all new cars must be electric by 2035! Where does he think he’ll get the electricity to power them?
“Roughly speaking, you have to double your electric grid to move the energy out of gasoline into the electric sector,” says Mills. “No one is planning to double the electric grid, so they’ll be rationing.”
Rationing. That means some places will simply turn off some of the power. That’s our final inconvenient fact: We just don’t have enough electricity for all electric cars.
Worse, if (as many activists and politicians propose) we try to get that electricity from 100% renewable sources, the rationing would be deadly.
“Even if you cover the entire continent of the United States with solar panels, you wouldn’t supply half of America’s electricity,” Mills points out.
Even if you added “Washington Monument-sized wind turbines spread over an area six times greater than the state of New York, that wouldn’t be enough.”
This is just math and physics. It’s amazing supposedly responsible people promote impossible fantasies.
“It’s been an extraordinary accomplishment of propaganda,” complains Mills, “almost infantile … distressing because it’s so silly.”
Even if people invent much better cars, wind turbines, solar panels, power lines and batteries, explains Mills, “you’re still drilling things, digging up stuff. You’re still building machines that wear out … It’s not magical transformation.”
Even worse, today politicians make us pay more for energy while forcing us to do things that hurt the environment. Their restrictions on fossil fuels drive people to use fuels that pollute more.
In Europe: “They’re going back to burning coal! What we’ve done is have our energy systems designed by bureaucrats instead of engineers,” complains Mills. “We get worse energy, more expensive energy and higher environmental impacts!”
I like electric cars. But I won’t pretend that driving one makes me some kind of environmental hero.
“There’ll be lots more electric cars in the future,” concludes Mills. “There should be, because that’ll reduce demand for oil, which is a good thing. But when you do the math, to operate a society with 5 or 6 billion people who are living in poverty we can’t imagine, when you want to give them a little of what we have, the energy demands are off the charts big. We’re going to need everything.”
That includes fossil fuels.
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I find this article very hurtful, it’s full of facts that I can’t believe because it goes against my feelings. Everybody out there knows that math is racist white privilege and we got this physicist Mark Mills saying things that just futher white hegemony (I can tell he’s a white supremist just by his name)
Maph is hard
Ran into a few morons that claimed their entire city was run on just wind and solar. These are the idiots that would’ve been eaten by lions in the past.
Millenials or Zoomers?
C: Both.
The plan is not to replace real cars with electric cars, the plan is to ban private ownership of cars.
That’s the plan. It won’t work, but it will cause lots of pain in the process of failure.
Bingo……The leftists are evil not stupid…..they know that its idiotic ……but what better way to get control over your mobility……electric vehicles are trackable and can be rationed electronically……you can drive only on Mon and Thurs and no more than 50 miles…….we (the gov’t) turn it off on the other days and at 50 miles of usage….”For the Planet”…..If your social credit score falls below a certain level…they just brick the vehicle……until your attitude improves and you learn to love big brother.
Thank you, I am glad someone besides me is paying attention.
The battery in your ICE car is just an improved version of a battery discovered in Bagdad from around 2,000 years ago. Improved battery technology is dependent on the laws of chemistry so in order for electric cars or grid level energy storage to even come close to being feasible an earth shattering discovery in chemical reactions or flywheels would be needed.
Just put a windmill on your electric car and it will charge itself while you drive and the faster you go, the faster it will charge. When you get home, just plug the windmill into your house and it will power it all night, too. /s
I shit you not, I have had people suggest EXACTLY that.
I was sitting in the engineering office with an EE and one of our salesman came in and interrupted our conversation about electric cars and the problems with charging them. He said “why don’t they just put wind generators on electric cars so they recharge while driving?”.
The EE an I both started laughing, thinking the salesman was kidding. Then we noticed he wasn’t laughing and looked confused as to why we were.
To this day, I don’t think he knows why we laughed, or that we were laughing AT him.
Thermodynamics and the perpetual motion machine. Funnier than hell.
If there is enough wind to turn the blades of a windmill, you’d do better just to equip your car with a sail and dump the extra weight of the battery.
You create your own wind as the motors propel you down the road.
The real force behind the “GREEN ENERGY” BS are all smart enough to know it’s an impossible goal without serious life style alternatives like sweating in summer and shivering like a dog shiting razor blades in the winter and walking or peddling where you need to go . Fortunately for the elitist few they are already to exclude themselves from the suffering of the great unwashed !
For several decades I installed wind generators and solar panels on sailboats and with a few battery upgrades and a good monitoring system we could keep beer cold , steaks frozen and lights on !
But Baby if you want heat or air conditioning you had to fire up that diesel generator.
Until some scientific and engineering breakthroughs we either burn the fossil fuels or do without a whole hell of a lot of stuff and creature comforts !
Don’t tell Joe Biden this , just explain to the Whitehouse Staff LMAO 🙉🙈🙊🌈
RAINBOWS & UNICORN FARTS
See the French Electric Car Cemetery.
The photo was posted as an electric car cemetery in France but the “fact checkers” say it isn’t.
“they’ say it isn’t…but what else could it be? They don’t say. Hmmmm…
Considering how poorly they are parked, maybe it’s a League of Women’s Voters convention.
Fact Checker: “It’s not an electric car cemetery because those are electric cars and not coffins. Also, they have not been buried.”
Ah, yes. Truth prevails. Nothing to see here…
considering frog successes with vehicles, I’d believe a bone yard.
That said, I did own a Peugeot 504D back in the eighties. Slow as hell but once you got it wound up, it was a going concern. Tiny looking, spacious interior, rode like a Caddy and handled like an F1.
Sorry, I just find it hard to not hate on frogs!
Peace, L.
It is in China. And they are all electric cars.
Several hundred more not seen in this photo too.
If we had 100 – 200 million fewer people, everything would be OK.
I’ve got a list going…..
Nah, the goal is at least 7 billion fewer.
I was speaking strictly about the US.
The socialist elites can easily achieve this by rounding up their own sheeple, put them on barges, and ship one way, no return, to Antarctica. Once there, they can create their utopia, complete with magic windmills, gender-fluid solar panels, and unicorns that fart pixie dust and rainbows.
Of course, in order for this to work, nobody from the outside can be allowed into Antarctica to bring them supplies. After all, socialist elites are superior to everyone else. They can create everything they need out of nothing.
Providing those were all liberals……
No, electric cars are not needed or helpful.They waste much more energy than gasoline cars, because batteries and charging facilities lose huge amounts of money..where is the electricity coming from? Fossil fuels or nuclear, and those are far from unlimited…
Never mind the energy losses the happen during transmission from the power plant to the charging station. It varies by distance and air temperature, but the standard measurement used by electrical engineers is 15% loss.
There’s simply not enough silver.
Over the years so much silver has been used up that the above ground ratio of available silver to gold is about 1 to 1.
True price discovery is prevented by so many paper contracts.
The real price of silver, even with the current buyer’s premium is less than it was in 2011.
Once the vaults at the comex, are depleted and people demand delivery the price is going skyrocket.
Considering that gold is also manipulated, and that its true value is much higher, and since silver is actually more valuable because of its industrial uses and rarity (it’s being used up quicker than its production) $2,000.00 an ounce silver is not out of the question, and that’s based upon the current value of the dollar.
Silver is needed for so much of what they are proposing. There won’t be enough to go around. Certainly not in any way to be affordable for large scale industrial production.
As for wind turbines. The break even point from an energy point of view is about ten years longer than their production life.
Spot on comment.
electric car radiation induces cancer and of course promotes infertility. couple that with a “vaccination” or two, and you can have some real woketard elimination.
You’re missing a part of the equation………when they kill off 7.5 billion people (agenda 21) there will be plenty of grid power for the elites, and a little for the servants.
I’m still waiting for my flying car, and now they are talking about electric cars? That’s just wrong.
WEF: “Once we have freed the useless eaters from their physical bodies, they will be able to travel anywhere they desire with zero energy usage!”
Only the little people are stupid. A problem is being created. The people behind the curtain want to change the way of living, you know. They know it’s not possible as presented today. In the end, there will be less driving. Smart mega cities, home office. There will be a synthesis, it’s Hegelian dialectic. Let’s face climate change sane! – They’ll ask. The ‘rona insanity is a call for real science too, technocracy. This is what communism always was about, the science of society. It’s a trap, they make people desire to be ruled by science. That’s what they do. There’s even less freedom down that road.
Give me a call when you can build anything using any metal or plastic without using coal, oil or gas. I hope that simplifies things for ya’ll.
Try making plastic without oil.
Bakelite is a plastic made from coal tar. But your point is otherwise still valid because bakelite has application limits.
try getting the raw materials needed without petroleum usage.
Plenty of bio plastics. Made from corn.
Expensive energy hurts the poor people much more than the elites and hurts poor nations much more than the rich.
Win-win for them.
Electric cars are the new “rooftop solar panels”. People are just now realizing that the whole solar panel boondoggle was just another way to separate them from their hard earned cash, and in a few years they will understand that electric cars are just the same swindle repackaged.
Solar is great! It is just not cheap.
Freedom from the grid and the control it enables, is priceless.
But it is still nowhere near financially sensible where grid power is available. But that will change.
For me it is not about the cost but the independence.
But but but Elongated Muskrat said it would only take 50km2 of solar panels to power the US!