Republican introduces new bill to end the $7,500 federal tax credit for electric cars

[progree]

23. Some insights into why I perhaps myopically focus on the U.S.

The world is getting much, much hotter, and the efficiency of anything electrical goes down under hot conditions.

So does the efficiency of gasoline IC engines. And for now, we're only talking a very few degrees F ambient. We'll all be dead if we go beyond that. The efficiency of our machinery is the least of our problems with warming.

Suppose that some of these efficiency's fall to 85%. It is well known that electric cars generate considerable heat - and heat is entropy - it's why they are known to sometimes spontaneously burst into flame.

Gasoline cars are known to catch on fire too.

Of course, we could build all new power plants, but what we will build clearly in these benighted times will be gas plants. A combined cycle gas plant operating at 50% thermal efficiency is still a gas plant, and thus a crime against all future generations.

Again we are talking about replacing gasoline IC cars with electric cars. Gasoline IC cars (and regular non-plug-in hybrids) are 100% fossil-fueled. An electric grid with a mix of nuclear, fossil, and renewable is not 100% fossil fueled.

(I realize that renewable, even with adequate storage, is very resource intensive. And I don't want to see the entire landscape covered with windmills either)

We can quibble forever about scrubbers on power plants in the US; none of them "scrub" carbon dioxide. The thermodynamic penalty for doing that is vast when compared to the thermodynamic penalty of scrubbing sulfates, mercury and lead.

No way either to scrub CO2 from the tailpipe of gasoline IC cars. And what we do scrub from IC cars is also at considerable penalty to fuel economy.

The key difference between your focus and my focus however is that you are concerned only with the United States - a provincial country - and I am interested in the world at large.

There more than a billion people in China; in purely human terms, China is far more important than we are; they matter; we don't, except to the extent that we consume per capita way more than our fair share.

No, I'm not only concerned about the U.S. (Sigh). The reason I ask about the U.S. is that's because it's where I and most of the people reading DU live and where the politicians we write to and vote for live, and the editors live where we write letters to the editor and so on. And if we buy an EV, it's the regional grid that we are plugging into.

We DUers can't influence what China does. We can at least try to influence what happens in the U.S. Yes, we're just a drop in a very big bucket of 330 million fellow citizens (and in a world of 7.4 billion people). But why not try? Anyway, I can't just drink and zone out all the time and hope that the next generation will figure it all out for us.

I gave my farm to Population Connection (formerly Zero Population Growth) in 2016 because I am perhaps trying to quixotically influence family planning program advocacy, knowing full well it was maybe (after considering the actuarial cost to them of the charitable gift annuity I got in return) less than 2% of their budget for just one year.

I'm well aware that China is the biggest GHG emitter in the world, and it, along with India are the fastest growing GHG emitters. And their GHG growth dwarfs that of the U.S. (Actually, U.S. has declined a bit over the 3 years through 2016). What foreseeable policy changes the U.S. makes will make only a tiny percentage difference in world-wide GHG growth.

I am not really ethically willing to have enslaved children dig cobalt in the Congo to get 1 or 2% - should they exist at all, and I doubt that they do - for thermal efficiency of cars in the United States, should such an advantage exist, which I highly doubt.

And I'm not ethically willing to continue polluting the Niger Delta and Ecuador and Congo rainforests and kill the indigenous people and anyone else who resists for oil to power gasoline IC cars. Or pollute ours and other peoples' coasts. The oil industry is not a patty-cake walk either.

The "efficiency will save us" scheme is as much a failure as the "renewable energy will save us" fantasy.

The "doing nothing and everything will work out somehow fantasy" is worse.

You seem to have great hopes in your sons' generation. What is it that they are going to do about all this?

the citizens of China did not agree to remain desperately impoverished so suburban Americans could smugly drive to the mall in electrified SUV's at Christmas time to buy Sierra Club calendars.

Nor did they agree to remain desperately impoverished so suburban Americans could smugly drive to the mall in gasoline-power SUVs and monster pickup trucks to wherever to buy whatever.

Nothing, not even marvelous sources of energy like nuclear, can make the car CULTure sustainable, primarily because it is distributed energy writ large, and distributed energy will always involve distributed, diffuse, and thus impossible to manage, pollution. From what you wrote, you seem to get this, but not so much that you are willing to question the whole damned enterprise.

I do, but for now, not knowing what else to do, I push for any improvement, however incremental, that I can. Just saying we should all stop driving and cut our living standards by 80% (and that assumes world population growth stabilizes) isn't going to do a damn bit of good.

I drive such a small amount of miles a month that if I said what the number is, people would ridicule me for not having a life (a lot of truth to that, but oh well, but I'm quite content with it). I cheat and take the bus too, but that comes to only about 500 miles a year.