climate change

As the left continues to crow that we need to switch to electric vehicles to save the planet, they are overlooking the fact that the nation just doesn’t have the electrical generating capacity to do that. As I post this, two thirds of the nation is facing the possibility of blackouts due to insufficient power generation capacity to handle the power demands of air conditioning that deals with the summer heat. Why? Because the nation’s electrical generating companies have been closing coal and oil fired power plants rather than pay for expensive repairs and upgrades caused by the government’s efforts to deal with “climate change.”

By 2035, automakers will have turned away from the internal combustion engine. The electric grid doesn’t have the capacity to charge all of those new cars, trucks and buses. This will cause an increase in electric demand that would require 50% more electricity than we generate now. There isn’t enough land area to rely on wind and solar for our current needs, much less adding that much more.

For example, Florida is second in the nation in electric vehicles with over 100,000 of them, but ranks 42nd in the infrastructure needed to charge them with 24 cars in the state for each charging station.

Gee, I wonder why Greta Thunberg deleted this tweet. pic.twitter.com/tqY89HrAHf

— •Ɛɱɱყ• (@brixwe) June 15, 2023

Allow me to refer back to the 80’s:

Sixteen years ago, the left was warning us that global warming was going to destroy the world within a decade.

There is an old physics joke that goes like this: “There’s this farmer, and he has these chickens, but they won’t lay any eggs. So, he calls a physicist to help. The physicist then does some calculations, and he says, um, I have a solution, but it only works with spherical chickens in a vacuum.”

The joke here is that theory frequently ignores reality. In order for the theory to match reality, one has to assume that things like irregularly shaped chickens living in contact with the real world don’t exist, because they make it impossible for theory to match reality. Which brings us to today’s post.

The claims about EVs are that they are more efficient than internal combustion engines. The claims are that even an F-150 gets an equivalent to 65 miles per gallon. What are they using for an equivalent? Some bullshit math that is purely theoretical and has no basis in reality? Or are they representing the actual facts?

The EPA is the one who decides, through what they call ‘advanced computer modeling’ what the Miles Per Gallon equivalent is for each car. The EPA says one gallon of gasoline contains 115,000 BTUs of energy–which equates to 33.7 kilowatt-hours, equaling 3,412 BTUs per KW-hour.

A natural gas powered generator like this one uses 301 cubic feet of gas to generate 20 kilowatt hours of electric power. Since  1 cubic foot of natural gas = 1,037 BTU, then one KW of electricity costs 15,606 BTUs to create in the real world. What this means is that the EPA is claiming that electric generation is almost 5 times more efficient in theory than it is in practicality. Why? Because a lot of the energy in that natural gas is lost to inefficiencies like friction in the bearings, hysteresis losses, and other things in the generating process that generate heat.

Perhaps it’s more efficient in large power plants? Nope, it turns out that large powerplants are inefficient as well.

In theory, 3,412 Btu of thermal energy is equivalent to 1 kWh of electric energy. For existing coal-fired power plants, heat rates are typically in the range of 9,000 Btu/kWh to 11,000 Btu/kWh. 

There are also line losses. That is, the electric lines, transformers, and other parts of the electric grid have their own losses caused by imperfect conduction and distribution. Physics is a bitch.

The game that they are playing here is obvious. They are taking the theoretical value for gasoline and electricity and ignoring the losses that occur due to inefficiencies in generation and transmission of electricity so that they get a number that far overstates the efficiency of electricity, making EVs seem far more efficient than they are.

This is why that F-150 that is supposed to be the most efficient pickup truck only has a range of 58 miles when towing a boat. My F-150 with its 36 gallon fuel tank has a range of over 300 miles towing my 18 foot pontoon boat.

Since we know that they are vastly overstating the efficiency of electric vehicles, that calls the environmental value of electric vehicles into question. Even using the EPA’s faulty metrics, one must drive an EV for over 20,000 miles before it becomes ‘greener’ than than an internal combustion powered vehicle. This is due to the toxic and environmentally unfriendly battery.

The thing is, the battery must be changed out much sooner than the engine in an ICE powered car. The US government requires that a battery on an EV be warrantied for 8 years or 100,000 miles. That is apparently the limit for batteries, as one Florida family recently discovered. I once had a car with over 250,000 miles on it. I still saw it driving around town for years after I sold it.

Over all, I think that there is a shell game being played with EVs. They are not nearly as efficient or as environmentally friendly as we are being led to believe. So the question remains: Why are we being misled, and to whose benefit?

An Electric Vehicle company is claiming that their electric school buses are “sending energy back to the grid to help conserve and reduce emissions.” They do nothing of the sort. All they are doing is returning a portion of the energy that they used in being charged back to the grid.

Energy is not created or destroyed, it merely changes form. In changing form, some of that energy is converted to heat, and is thus lost. Charging the bus causes losses as the batteries heat up. When the busses discharge into the grid, more energy is lost. Then the bus has to be charged again in order to be driven, meaning that even more energy is lost.

I don’t know if the left is stupid or thinks we are. On second thought, perhaps it is the left who is stupid, because they actually believe that it is possible to have perpetual motion devices. I guess arts majors don’t know anything about the First Law of Thermodynamics.

After it was pointed out that, should Americans switch to electric cars, it would require 4 times more electricity to charge them than Americans use on air conditioning, CNN tells us that we don’t need air conditioning because Europe doesn’t use it.

Let’s begin with a geography lesson. Berlin, the town where the author of the article lives without air conditioning, is at 52.52 degrees north latitude. The entire continental US is south of that line. The closest North American city to that latitude is Calgary, in Alberta, Canada, which is located at 51 degrees north.

Rome is located at about the latitude of Boston. Atlanta is on the 34th parallel, which places it as far north as Beirut and Tripoli. Orlando is near the 29th parallel, which places it as far north as Kuwait city. Miami is near Luxor, Egypt in latitude.

During the summer, Rome is ten degrees Fahrenheit cooler than Miami, on average. Hell, in Arizona it gets too hot for airplanes to fly. The US is warmer in summer, and colder in the winter than most of Europe.

Right now, all I am seeing on the news is the people in Europe whining like little bitches about how hot it is over there, because it is 100 degrees in the afternoon. Here in central Florida, we call that June, July, and August. They are closing roads because it looks like this:

A14 Westbound Bottisham
*Please approach with caution* @HighwaysEAST in attendance with a lane closure until the road surface can be assessed.
Whilst this ramp may seem appealing to the more adventurous of you, it’s proving to be hazardous and may result in a closure.
1830 pic.twitter.com/GYpq9d72kg

— BCH Road Policing Unit (@roadpoliceBCH) July 18, 2022

Pussies. Our roads look like that when they are new. And what’s this about house fires? Do British homes spontaneously combust at 100F?

So Europe can go fuck themselves.

This is how Germany went green by becoming woke. It’s a model that we are going to follow. Step one, close half of your nuclear plants:

Step two, replace them with Solar and Wind:

Step 3, go woke by refusing all Russian natural gas:

Step 4: Now that you are going broke, switch to coal

Yeah! Way to fight the fight.

The Key deer is a subspecies of the whitetail deer. They only live on one small island of the Florida Keys. At one point, there were only 75 of them left. Now, there are more than 750. This has been such a success story that the Florida Fish and Wildlife Service wants them removed from the endangered species list. The director of the FWS wrote:

This determination is based on the best available scientific and commercial information, which indicates that the threats to [Key Deer] have been eliminated or reduced to the point that the species no longer meets the definition of an endangered or threatened species.

Florida Fish and Wildlife Service Director Leo Miranda

The left can’t have that. Instead of being happy and taking the win in saving an endangered species, they need emergencies to give themselves power. So they insist that the deer are still endangered by climate change, and use 2017’s Hurricane Irma as evidence that climate change is going to wipe out the deer. They claim that rising sea levels will wipe out the deer in 100 years unless we do something.

Never let a crisis go to waste when there is money to made and power to be wielded.

Dodge is cancelling the Hemi V8, despite the fact that it is an immensely popular engine. Why? Woke bullshit. Bad decisions like this are why the government shouldn’t bail companies out of financial woes.

There are those who can’t stand that you can get into your privately-owned vehicle at any time of the day or night and drive virtually anywhere you please. These budding authoritarians view that and all other forms of personal freedom as threats to their power.