Bjorn Lomberg on “green” cars’ Dirty Little Secret:
While electric-car owners may cruise around feeling virtuous, they still recharge using electricity overwhelmingly produced with fossil fuels. Thus, the life-cycle analysis shows that for every mile driven, the average electric car indirectly emits about six ounces of carbon-dioxide. This is still a lot better than a similar-size conventional car, which emits about 12 ounces per mile. But remember, the production of the electric car has already resulted in sizeable emissions–the equivalent of 80,000 miles of travel in the vehicle. So unless the electric car is driven a lot, it will never get ahead environmentally..
Hang your head, Ms. Green:
If a typical electric car is driven 50,000 miles over its lifetime, the huge initial emissions from its manufacture means the car will actually have put more carbon-dioxide in the atmosphere than a similar-size gasoline-powered car driven the same number of miles…
What??? That’s not confirmation of what I already believe and know MUST be the truth….therefore I didn’t just read this…..there I feel better already. (Sarc. off)
economics triumphs again. the energy was always built into the price
There is one certainty here, if the greens and government praise it, you know it will be expensive and perform opposite to their claims.
That article was one of Lomberg’s finest. The problem of widespread innumeracy is really hitting home when no-one in government did the calculations (or was unable to understand how to perform them) which show electric vehicles are environmentally unfriendly. I expect what we’ll find is huge transfers of government funds going to people connected with the dumbocrat party and similarly large sums coming back from the government sponsored industries to corrupt politicians. Likely the whole electric car fiasco was an elaborate money laundering scheme. Considering it’s the taxpayers money which was obtained by theft, anyone involved in this enterprise belongs in jail, not a position of power.
I like Lomberg’s taking into account refueling time in electric vehicles to give an average speed of 6 mph. I walk at that speed! A bicycle will easily give one 20-30 mph and represents mature technology. If the US had a president interested in saving taxpayer money, then the government would have started a massive campaign to get people on bicycles along with a subsidized target practice campaign to help women feel more comfortable on a bicycle at night than in a vehicle (CCW when riding a bicycle in many urban areas of the US is a must). This would lower the obesity rate, let farmers grow food instead of fuel and also reduce carbon emissions (as if that statistic is of any use except to make watermelons happy).
Instead, we have the potential for starvation if the world temperature drops any lower as we’re using more energy than we produce to make ethanol to burn. Making ethanol to drink is a perfectly valid use of corn but using corn as automotive fuel is the height of stupidity. In the US CO2 emissions are dropping because of deindustrialization and higher gasoline prices and will likely soon drop to neolithic levels/capita if the Obozo plan for destroying the US is not stopped.
I agree, cars are damaging to the environment. It would be more beneficial for the environment if people lived within walking distance of work. Or in a pinch, people can opt to take public transit.
Tim, wonderful if you can do it. I’ve managed to live within walking distance of work for decades but that is definitely not the norm. (for me walking distance from work is less than 4 miles). As far as public transit; I’d much rather walk 10 miles before I’d get on a bus in Vancouver. With bedbug infested welfare recipients and widespread Panton-Valentine toxin producing MRSA I’ll take my chances with the Chinese maniacs on the road instead
bedbug infested welfare recipients and widespread Panton-Valentine toxin producing MRSA
More reasons I don’t live in a city and why I work from a home-office.
tim, Stalin thought so to. That is why in Russian and Ukrainian cities all the factories and nuclear power plants are scattered all over the cities.
Loki, you are right, this is lunacy.
Kate already linked to this column yesterday:
http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/archives/we-dont-need-no-260.html#comments
I did a little math in the comments that some readers may find of interest.
north_of_60, you’re ahead of me in being able to work in a home office. Very glad I moved out of Vancouver and the online bedbug map of Vancouver has ensured I only make short one day visits to that city as infrequently as possible. If I was still making my living as a software developer I’d be able to work from home, but unfortunately I have to see a lot of sick people both at my clinic and the hospital. After a few respiratory virus infections this winter I’ve again started fantasizing about a humanoid robot that I’d control remotely that would be able to provide me with the necessary clinical data on a patient. Patients don’t respond well to physicians who approach them in biohazard suits so a trustable doctor persona android is something I’d love to get my hands on now.
Every time my job takes me to a hazardous workplace environment [like a sewage treatment plant], I remind myself that professionals like you deal with far more hazardous conditions every day. I guess wearing a mask while seeing patients isn’t an option.
With all the technological advances on the horizon, it won’t be long before a patient can punch your number into their cell phone at home, then shove the phone up their a s s for you to run diagnostics with the built in aps.
And his figures do NOT include the manufacture/price of new batteries,plus the disposal cost of the old ones. Any bets most of those old batteries end up in the place as curly bulbs,especially when the owner is charged an extra 2G’s for disposal.(as an enviromental fee,not a tax,of course)
This is all a plot by the Petroleum Motor Industrial Complex. They have bought Lomberg and all those naysayers in the article. Electric cars are obviously superior. The only reason they were never used in the last 100 years was the nefarious plots by Edison, Rockefeller and JP Morgan to promote gasoline powered cars back in 1902. They were so successful that even the Germans, French, Britons, Russians and Japanese were suckered by their schemes.
Electric Cars are the transportation of the Future!
The environmentalists have known this for the last 50 years!!!
/s
Several flaws with your statements. To begin with there were very few enviro weenies 50 years ago just as there were no electric cars. EV’s are fine if you have the money to buy a inferior product, believe the governments BS, never plan to take a vacation by car, live in the city and never plan to travel, never get into a accident and expect zero trade in allowance at the ten year mark. The electric car was not killed by big oil, but rather by consumer apathy for the same reasons it’s struggling today. It’s over priced. It’s inferior to combustion engines and the technology to make it equal is not there yet. You can polish a turd to your heart’s content….but it remains a turd. A overpriced turd.
“…If a typical electric car is driven 50,000 miles over its lifetime,…”
50000 miles is about 80000km. That’s a pretty short lifetime for a car. My Jeep had 260000 km before the engine died, and my Escort has 290000 on it, still going strong.
People will choose the transportation option that best suits their lifestyle. Criticizing someone for the type of car they choose to drive is like criticizing them for the brand of beer they drink or the sports team they follow.
We live in a society where free will and choice is important. Try to remember that when criticizing other peoples choices. You no doubt wouldn’t like them criticizing yours.
Choice is fine as long as it isn’t mandated by law(ethanol in gasoline which will wreck my car) and subsidized with my taxes.
People who choose to drive EVs are an enabling force behind legislation that plans to destroy my way of life in service to the LIE of Global Warming which is currently destroying the economies of European nations who are funding alternative energy and modes of transportation.
It ain’t at all morally equivalent to merely selecting brands of beer or sports teams, Buckwheat.
This BS is killing people in Africa and the Middle East.
My wife is in the last stages of MS. Her immune system is virtually non-existent. For that reason taking forms of public transport like airplanes is out of the question…which is why I spent a lot of time driving her to Costa Mesa for some experimental treatment for her condition (it didn’t work, but benefited the US economy to the tune of $17K…same treatment available in Canada, costing the Medicare system $300, but Health Canada refuses to authorize it for MS patients).
I personally don’t like public transit in Vancouver and refuse to use it. It is populated with smelly drunks and drug addicts who refuse to pay the fare. And the transit system contunues to do nothing to alleviate the fare evasion problem on the buses.
Yeah my tax dollars are supporting the system, but I’ll leave it to the dregs of society to actually use it.
Yes. Electric cars currently run on electricity generated by fossil fuels. But how else are we supposed to get to a post carbon economy? The whole point of this process is to develop a viable, affordable electrical vehicle and anticipate the day when we wean ourselves off of carbon. What will that look like? Beats the hell out of me. Hydro? A more advance form of solar? Wind? Thorium nuclear? Fission? Fussion? All of the above? Who knows?
But bottom line, it’s going to take a while for the electric car to get to where internal combustion engines are now, and we can’t wait until the other parts of the puzzle take shape. So relax. Nobody is fooling themselves about their electric cars being perfect.
This is one of the top comments on the story. If this is true, the study is garbage because the engine the looked at was not a car engine at all, but an industrial monster:
“When they calculated the materials that went into making electric motors for cars, they accidentally used a static electric motor (the sort of thing you’d use to drive a large milling machine or industrial lathe) instead of a small, compact motor that would be found in a Nissan Leaf or similar car. Their calculations were for a 1,000 kg motor, the motor in the Nissan Leaf weighs 53kg. As you can imagine, an error of this magnitude could skew the figures rather badly.
Well, their entire prognosis rests on the amounts of materials used and the ability to re-cycle those materials efficiently and economically at the end of the car’s life. A 1,000 kg motor contains 91 kg of copper, copper is expensive and it’s mining and production has, without question, a negative environmental impact. All cars use a lot of copper, the wiring loom, the starter motor etc. Electric cars use a little bit more, that phrase is accurate, they use a little bit more. Not 90kg more.
The report also ‘casually misjudges’ the size, weight and copper content of the frequency inverter, the bit of an electric car that transforms the AC current fed in from the electricity supply, into the DC current stored in the battery. These units do indeed contain copper but the report happened to measure a large, industrial scale frequency inverter you’d find in a factory tool shop. The factory one contains 36kg of copper, the one in the Nissan Leaf is 6.2 kg, total weight, most of which is the steel box it’s housed in.
They then analysed battery chemistry which no EV maker uses, battery capacity that no plug in car uses, then skewed the figures of how much coal is burned to generate the power to charge the non existent batteries in the mythical car.
Essentially, the report is trash from start to finish. It’s sad really because it raised some very important points. The main one being we really should stop burning coal to make electricity. That I totally support. But in their zeal to prove their utterly spurious point they pushed too far. They’ve shot themselves in the foot and the BBC likewise.”
~
I’m sure there are some other straws you cavemen can scrounge around for to argue against technological progress. Perhaps you’d like to make a case for us heading back to the trees? OH wait. That’s right. There is a significant chance that you don’t believe we evolved from tree swingin’ apes, but instead were moulded from clay by a lightning tossing, virgin lovin’ sky ghost.
Yeah, you guys got all the answers.
My wife is in the last stages of MS. Her immune system is virtually non-existent. For that reason taking forms of public transport like airplanes is out of the question…which is why I spent a lot of time driving her to Costa Mesa for some experimental treatment for her condition (it didn’t work, but benefited the US economy to the tune of $17K…same treatment available in Canada, costing the Medicare system $300, but Health Canada refuses to authorize it for MS patients).
I personally don’t like public transit in Vancouver and refuse to use it. It is populated with smelly drunks and drug addicts who refuse to pay the fare. And the transit system contunues to do nothing to alleviate the fare evasion problem on the buses.
Yeah my tax dollars are supporting the system, but I’ll leave it to the dregs of society to actually use it.
“The whole point of this process is to develop a viable, affordable electrical vehicle and anticipate the day when we wean ourselves off of carbon.”
~John
No need.
There is no Global Warming, anthropogenic or otherwise.
There is no shortage of carbon fuels, we are not running out for several hundred years.
“We all want progress, but if you’re on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive.”
~C.S. Lewis
This BS is killing people in Africa and the Middle East.
Posted by: Oz
Bullfudge, and so what if it is? It’s an overpopulated world, fewer Muzzies is not a problem.
the LIE of Global Warming
The planet has been gradually warming since the Little Ice Age in the late 1700s, humans have almost nothing to do with it. It will continue to warm until the onset of the next ice age. If humans have any effect, it’s delaying the inevitable cooling by a few decades.
Developing alternatives to fossil fuels is valid work, don’t confuse it with the AGW scams. There is no cause and effect relationship. Alternative energy development predates the whole AGW scam by decades. They seized on it to prop up their cause. Don’t be duped by false logic and wearing blinders.
If you don’t like electric cars then don’t buy one.
People who choose to drive EVs are an enabling force behind legislation that plans to destroy my way of life
ROTFL… that’s as ridiculous as the assertion that people who buy ‘assault rifles’ are mass killers about to snap and go on a killing spree.
Urban pollution from fossil fuel vehicles is a significant health problem, electric cars can reduce it. It’s a health issue, don’t be confused by propaganda.
ethanol in gasoline which will wreck my car
then don’t buy gasoline with ethanol. If you’ve been paying attention on SDA you’ve been told how to test for ethanol in gas and how to avoid it. Smarten up.
“Alternative energy development predates the whole AGW scam by decades.”
No, tax funded implementation of wind and solar farms, especially on the scale we are seeing, does not predate the AGW scam.
EVs are literally rolling taxfunded billboard advertisements for the Global Warming scam. Fortunately, few people are buying them.
You’re conflating people’s own private buying choices with a tax funded political movement. A political movement which is the most over-reaching and invasive/intrusive I’ve seen in my entire 53 years.
I wouldn’t care if people recycled or blew their own money on stupidity as long as they didn’t insist that I pay for it and take part in it too.
But that’s not how the Left approaches the world. They’re so damned self-righteous that they’ve got to drag the rest of us in the direction they’re going, and they’re going down to destruction.
His name is Lomborg.
i would be very concerned if CO2 was in any way detrimental to the planet but it is not so, no problem.
Tim said: “It would be more beneficial for the environment if people lived within walking distance of work.”
Yes. In barracks. Where three people use the same bunk in shifts, and all their possessions fit in a 2’x6′ locker. Sounds awesome Tim, sign me up.
John said: “But how else are we supposed to get to a post carbon economy?”
This is what I love about Greenies. Greenies decide what needs doing, and the rest of us are just supposed to trot along smartly in the direction they decide to go.
Hey John. Do you understand the concept of “putting the cart before the horse”? FIRST you come up with a “post-carbon” power source which is -better- than burning carbon, THEN the rest of us decide if we want to use it or not.
Let me give you an example. Currently on offer are two -viable- types of engines for vehicles. Gasoline and diesel. I have decided I like diesel better for a variety of reasons that I consider important. If I were like you, I would now engage in a national campaign to ban gasoline engines because “diesel is better!!!”
Putting it in smaller words for you John, we are not “supposed” to “get to” a post carbon economy. That’s not the collective goal of Western civilization, and no matter how much you boys lie about global warming it isn’t about to be.
If somebody presents me some day with a fusion generation system for electricity that works better/cheaper than the existing carbon system, I will happily run my house with it. If somebody comes up with an all-electric truck that’s faster/better/cheaper than my diesel, I’ll happily drive it around.
But really, I’m not going to drive around in a $40k Nissan Leaf “people’s car” when I can have a one-ton dually crew cab that your friggin’ Leaf will fit in the back of.
You don’t get to decide what I need, John.
North-of-60 said: “then don’t buy gasoline with ethanol.”
Kinda difficult when ALL gasoline sold in Ontario is government mandated to contain some percentage of alcohol, depending on octane rating and season. Unless you want to run on $15/gallon 110 octane race gas or aviation gas, which is oh so easily available at your corner gas station… oh, wait…
Choosing not to participate is only a possibility when there’s a choice, N-60. That’s my point to Johnny and Timmy above. They don’t want anybody to -have- a choice, which is not only immoral, its also been an horrific disaster in every place that it has been tried.
Human beings will not live a coerced life. Sooner of later they always burn everything down to the ground no matter how much murder and terror they’re subjected to. Greenies/Lefties seem incapable of learning that lesson.
Ask Kulak, he seems to have seen that particular elephant up close.
The Phantom, thank you, you say it well. And yes, my family has seen the monster of coercion that Tim and John seem to like up close. In fact quite close and some of whose bones lie in mass graves with bullet holes in the back of the head. They started off by imposing punitive taxes and when that didn’t work they used confiscation and when that didn’t garner the proper re-education they used the labour camps or the brick wall and the rifle.
Snake oil is snake oil even if dressed in a green mantle.
Heads are so firmly lodged within rectums here that there is nothing short of surgery that could get them out. Guys, every major scientific body on the planet is in concurrence that climate change is happening, and is fed by human activity.
All of your conspiracies about scientists working to trick the public to squeeze out more funds is effing hillarious, since in fact it is “think tanks” funded by oil companies doing this very thing to eternally create doubt around the issue. It’s even the same dudes working on it who did the same thing with tobacco a few years back.
Unbelievable.
John, the only reason your head isn’t up your rectum is that you can’t squeeze it past David Suzuki’s d***.
Shell’s 91 grade gas is ethanol free and 89 grade has 5% ethanol.
John screeched: “Guys, every major scientific body on the planet is in concurrence that climate change is happening, and is fed by human activity.”
Well John, “every major scientific body on the planet” is in love with gun control and central planning too. That was kinda my point. Which you missed, evidently.
To put it bluntly John, they’re lying. For money. You’ve put your faith in guys who lie as a profession. Awesome.
For the record I put my faith in myself, family and 12 gauge slugs. All others pay cash.
Incidentally you’ll find Kate’s latest post at the top of the blog (1:11pm) to be of interest. Let’s just say it doesn’t support your assertion. A lot.
It’s not worth the effort trying to convince John he might be wrong. He’s already been brainwashed beyond repair.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdxaxJNs15s&NR=1&feature=endscreen