EV Caution, Part 1

This potentially criminalizes many kinds of actions and statements by a President that a prosecutor deems to be false. You don’t have to be a defender of Donald Trump to worry about where this will lead. It makes any future election challenges, however valid, legally vulnerable to a partisan prosecutor. And it might have criminalized the actions by Al Gore and George W. Bush to contest the Florida election result in 2000.--wsj

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The deficit in the first nine months of this fiscal year hit $1.39 trillion, up 169% from the same period the year before. The deficit is supposed to shrink when the economy grows, but revenue isn’t keeping pace with runaway spending. The debt-ceiling deal this year did little to curtail the spending bulge still in the pipeline from the first two Biden years. Interest on the debt this year is expected to be $663 billion, which is $188 billion more than all corporate tax revenue.---wsj

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Political lies felonious? Can't wait. Will we be able to go back in time, like reparations, to balance the score?

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EV Caution, Part 1


"...it still might be a good idea to tap the brakes on expectations, especially in the wake of new emission standards announced in April by the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The new EPA mandate calls for carbon dioxide emissions for new cars and light trucks to decrease by 49 percent from 2027 to 2032.

Analysts—and even the EPA itself—say that meeting this new standard would ostensibly require EVs to account for 67 percent of new cars sold by 2032.

Is that goal realistic? For perspective, consider that only an estimated 1.5 million of the roughly 276 million vehicles currently driven on American roads are EVs. And EVs accounted for only 5.8 percent of car sales in 2022, according to market-research firm Motor Intelligence.

Furthermore, the average age of an internal-combustion engine (ICE) passenger vehicle currently stands at a record 12-1/2 years, according to S&P Global Mobility.

“I think the (EPA) standards are a disaster,” says David R. Henderson, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, a public-policy think tank based at Stanford University in California. “The thing is if someone buys an EV now, there are distorted incentives to do so. But at least people get to choose to do so. But mandates blow past all market signals and that’s one big argument against them.”

In a recent blog post, Alan Reynolds, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, says the belief that replacing ICE vehicles with EVs can reduce global warming is “a childish fantasy.” He claims that passenger vehicles contribute only 16.4 percent of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States—far below the number normally cited by EV proponents.

EVs still produce ancillary emissions:

Other realities also are tamping down expectations. Take the supposed reduction in greenhouse gases EVs will achieve. While it’s true an EV emits no tailpipe emissions, it takes massive amounts of energy to manufacture them, not to mention the energy required to mine, process and transport the minerals needed to make EV batteries—and to manufacture the batteries themselves, contrarian experts observe.

In fact, some researchers contend that manufacturing batteries alone tacks on nearly 40 percent more in greenhouse gas emissions for EVs, compared to the carbon footprint of an ICE vehicle. For example, China—the dominant player in refining minerals required to make EV batteries as well as in manufacturing the batteries—obtains 60 percent of its energy from burning coal, according to the American Energy Alliance, a not-for-profit energy and environmental advocacy organization.

“When you take into account how electric cars and batteries are produced, you have some real problems with saying they’re zero-emission vehicles,” Henderson says. “You’re exchanging one (emission) problem for another, plus you’re imposing huge costs in the process, with no net reduction in emissions and global warming.”

Jeffrey Miron, vice president of research for the Cato Institute and the director of graduate and undergraduate studies for the Department of Economics at Harvard University, says the argument that EVs are more eco-friendly than ICE vehicles fails to account for how the energy used to charge batteries is produced.

“The analysis fails to take into account all of the relevant factors,” he says. “There tends to be a presumption that EVs necessarily are ‘green,’ and that’s inaccurate in a significant way.”

“Discussions don’t focus on the most fundamental aspect: where the energy comes from to charge EV batteries,” he continues. “If it comes from burning oil or coal, then it generates carbon emissions, and possibly more emissions than gasoline-burning cars do. If the switch to EVs occurs more in parts of the country where electricity is produced from coal, we’re going to increase emissions, not decrease them.”


(To be continued)