Electric

Alan Weiss's The Uncomfortable Truth®

We’re going to need tens of millions of electric charging stations to satisfy goals for electric cars in six years set by the government. It looks like we might have 500,000. Electric cars might represent zero carbon footprint improvement. The mining of lithium is dirty and expensive and requires a lot of energy. Disposal of the batteries presents similar problems. Fires are a danger and are harder to extinguish. Hertz is returning or cancelling orders for a thousand electric vehicles because they are not in demand for rentals and are hard to maintain. Ford has pulled back investment in battery plants. Toyota has committed solely to hybrids. I’ve driven in them and driven them myself. Meh. Not a big deal, and still limited ranges. We’re going to have to overcome our own hubris and realize that climate change isn’t going to be reversed and maybe not even halted. We can’t build (and insure) housing on the water’s edge or in forests. We can’t expect to ban internal combustion engines, gas stoves, and gas leaf-blowers (which is ludicrous). What we DO need in the US is energy independence (which we once had and can easily have again with our huge reserves), control of the southern border to permit legal immigration for white and blue-collar jobs, and a vast improvement in educational equal opportunity. Otherwise it may be “lights out” for reasons other than insufficient electrical power.