[N_Fiddledog]

Lawrence Solomon: Why the ‘e’ in e-car actually stands for evil

$1:

Electric cars, the vehicles of choice for the virtue signallers among us, epitomize the confusions and the divisions in society. These vehicles aren’t environmental exemplars, as their touters claim. And they of course aren’t economic. They excel in one area above all: in exploiting rural regions and their inhabitants, mostly for the benefit of affluent urbanites.

Electric vehicles — now a trivial proportion of cars on the road — do benefit the urban environments in which they operate, by limiting harmful vehicular emissions such as NOx, SOx and ground-level ozone. If electric vehicles ever obtained a broader market, that urban benefit would increase. But it would come at a much greater cost to the rural environment, which electric-vehicle proponents would seek to sacrifice to provide the cities with electricity for charging.

To fuel electric cars with “green” power, the social engineers pushing them plan to vastly expand the use of renewable electricity. When the electricity comes from industrial wind turbines, rural lands are lost. When the wind farms are located at distant sites — a typical occurrence because that’s where the wind happens to blow strongest — the immense transmission corridors needed to carry the power to urban markets consume more land, despoiling farm and cottage country in the process.

If electric vehicles ever obtained a broader market, that urban benefit would increase

Most of the power to fuel this electrified transportation system of the future is expected to come from large hydro dams, however, where the consumption of land, and the resulting environmental damage, takes an even greater toll. BC Hydro’s Site C dam, an $8.8-billion white elephant slated to flood 83 kilometres of the agriculturally rich Peace River Valley, is but one of some 40 large dams that Canada’s environmental planners believe would be needed over the next three decades to keep more electric vehicles on the road.

Other forms of renewable electricity — such as biofuels and solar photovoltaic arrays, which claim forests and fields — are again based in rural areas, and again require rural pain for urban gain. To add insult to injury, none of these renewables are economic, none would exist if the private sector were free to meet consumers’ actual needs. All these schemes raise power rates and all exist only because government planners redirect industry to meeting the presumed needs of their imagined future.

Most of the virtue-signalling e-car purchasers have no reason to question the planners’ policies, and so are unaware of the costs of their choices to the rural environment. They also might not give a second’s thought to society’s wasteful investment in refuelling stations and related infrastructure. Or to the free ride they’re getting from their fellow citizens who drive gasoline-fuelled vehicles, whose taxes at the pump help pay for the roads electric cars proudly coast on.

For most rural residents, there are no freebies for the taking, and no opportunity for virtue signalling

But all e-car purchasers are aware of the direct subsidies that they obtain when they opt for an electric car. Under Ontario’s Electric Vehicle Incentive Program, for example, the government kicks in $14,000 for someone taking the wheel of a Volkswagen e-Golf or 40 other models, whether as a purchase or on a three-year lease. Those subsidies need to be rich to overcome the prohibitive price tag affixed to electric vehicles, and to make virtue-signalling affordable. When those subsidies are removed, sales plummet, as happened in Denmark and Hong Kong where they plunged by more than 90 per cent.

Electric vehicles are for city folk. Charging stations are few and far between in low-density areas. For most rural residents, there are no freebies for the taking, and no opportunity for virtue signalling. Their sole role is to give, give, give — through inflated taxes for subsidies to lower the capital costs of the electric vehicles, through inflated electricity bills to lower the operating cost of the electric vehicles and through a degraded rural environment, without which the high-priced power for the high-priced vehicles could not even be contemplated. In contrast, the role of the urbanites acquiring electric vehicles — whether they realize it or not — is to take, take, take.

Those who signal their virtue most, the ancient sages have told us, are not the most virtuous among us. Had they seen the modern species of virtue signallers, they would also have philosophized on how virtue signalling begets vice.

Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe, a Toronto-based environmental group. [email protected]

http://business.financialpost.com/opini ... s-for-evil

[N_Fiddledog]

[herbie]

BC Hydro should start saying they need Site C for all the electric cars coming soon.
IT would probably stop half the opposition to it!

[BeaverFever]

Energy Probe is a Climate change denial institute funded by oil and gas and also lobbies for deregulation of the oil industry and against nuclear power.

The whole article is just what he supposes might happen because of cars but there’s no real direct linkage. EVs aren’t the primary cause of windmills and lack of EVs don’t cause lack of windmills, for staters. Secondly I don’t know that fossil fuel power plants don’t pose many of the same problems.

[fifeboy]

EEEEVIL, OH MY GOD EVIL....

[herbie]

If I was King Shit I'd place fish barriers around giant electrodes at every dam. When demand goes down it would crack the water, venting the oxygen into the atmosphere and compressing hydrogen into huge tanks.
Existing cars can be converted to run on it pollution free. Coming fuel cells could use it. I'd build the distribution grid and offer grants to convert with $1000 fines for every climate denier we hunted down on the Internet.
Hell maybe even capture the oxygen and build a pipeline just to see who'd protest that...

[fifeboy]

https://goo.gl/images/TNaLRg
Damn, forgot the W

[herbie]

One of the things no one actually realizes is that we use WAY LESS hydro than a generation ago even though we use way more electrical equipment.
No one uses electrical heat anymore. Lighting uses bugger all these days, my whole house uses as much power as the bulbs in the fridge and the freezer. Most people use a laptop, uses 1/5th the power of just my old tower (sorry gamers, I used to ask all the guys asking for a 1200W power supply at the store if they were cooking their KD dinner on top while they played WoW).
Just doing a repair yesterday and the guy mentioned how at his hunting cabin he'd added solar and has light, TV, cell phone and Internet at night. For a couple hundred bucks at Crappy Tire.
If 1/4 the cars in Vancouver were electric and recharging late at night, we wouldn't need more capacity. That's why many are saying we don't need SiteC.
I'm of the opinion its already begun, we need more power in the future, we can export it and it's going the be the very last dam that ever gets built here.

[Zipperfish]

But I guess Mr Solomon thinks that gasoline just magically appears in pumps.

[Zipperfish]

But I guess Mr Solomon thinks that gasoline just magically appears in pumps.

[N_Fiddledog]

Actually, I think Solomon is pro-nuclear and natural gas, isn't he?

[Zipperfish]

N_Fiddledog N_Fiddledog:

Actually, I think Solomon is pro-nuclear and natural gas, isn't he?

I have no idea. But he complains about the footprint in rural areas of windfarms and dams. Pipelines have footprints too, and oil wells and oil sands strip mining operations.

[PluggyRug]

$1:

Anyone who tells you that the electric car in your future will be just as convenient as the gasoline-fueled vehicle you’re currently driving is lying. If not overtly, then at least by omission. Nor can they plead ignorance, the calculations required to reach this conclusion hardly the stuff of graduate-level physics. Indeed, judging from the experts I’ve spoken with, plenty have been the warnings proffered to the politicians, policy makers and futurists advocating an all-battery-powered future.

Read more....http://www.msn.com/en-ca/autos/news/mot ... spartandhp

[N_Fiddledog]

Zipperfish Zipperfish:

N_Fiddledog N_Fiddledog:

Actually, I think Solomon is pro-nuclear and natural gas, isn't he?

I have no idea. But he complains about the footprint in rural areas of windfarms and dams. Pipelines have footprints too, and oil wells and oil sands strip mining operations.

I think his critique has more to do with the hypocrisy resulting from the added stress to the rural that only serves to pamper the urban at non-urban expense. He seems to believe this creates smug, undeserved, holier than thou poses from the urbanites who benefit only by this new allowance to virtue signal.

[N_Fiddledog]

Although, you know...from a purely environmental perspective something like what herb is talking about evaporates when you consider his new technology is reliant on rare earth metals. Most come from China where rape of the Earth is rampant. It lacks Western controls, and yes, the West does have such controls. Although as the need for rare earth metals increase more discoveries are being made in the West and even here there are problems.

With natural gas and even increasingly with just oil, fracking is taking up much smaller area per unit. Pipelines get covered over and grow back. Leakage is negligible in relation to the natural spaces lost to say a single hydro-electric damn.

Then there's Solomon's pet - nuclear. He has has arguments on that one. I'm not an expert. I don't know how good they are, but I do know he has them. For example here he is arguing less room is needed for nuclear waste than thought.

http://business.financialpost.com/opini ... lear-waste

Oh, and if Beave is interested in seeing the rebuttal to the smear of Solomon's environmental group, Google told him about, here it is:

http://business.financialpost.com/opini ... oven-right