After COP26, EVs Galore!

"I've become a connoisseur of the ways pundits deceive themselves that the passenger cars you and I drive, which sit idle 95% of the time, are a solution to global warming. Up pops a specimen every five minutes, including a recent example from Bloomberg News.

First the article observed that the "transport sector" is responsible for "about a quarter" of global emissions, then it carefully added that "passenger vehicles are the largest chunk of this, releasing about 45% of carbon dioxide."

Forty-five percent sounds like a lot but notice that we're talking about 45% of 24% (to use the actual number from Oxford University's Our World in Data) -- or about 10.8% of all global emissions, and this is for every sort of road transport.

In the U.S, a taxi typically is used for one or two 12-hour shifts a day. A passenger bus grinds out 43,647 miles of mostly stop-and-go driving. In contrast, a Tesla covers about the same mileage as any other personal car, about 12,500 miles a year, and otherwise spends the vast majority of its time idly sucking power from the grid to top off its battery and keep multiple onboard computers ticking over.

Do I also need to mention that 63.3% of global electricity is produced from fossil fuels? Or that copper, nickel, cobalt and lithium mining for electric-vehicle batteries makes their production a lot more CO2-intensive? Or that when you drive a Tesla, you make it cheaper for someone else to consume gasoline?

 

Estimates are hard to find, but private nonbusiness passenger vehicles likely account for no more than 6% of global emissions, of which at best half might be eliminated if consumers could be impelled to switch to electric cars, which they have good reasons to avoid.

 

Don't get me wrong. Ways exist of encouraging less consumption of fossil fuels if that's worth doing, but subsidizing electric cars for affluent taxpayers is not one of them. It allows politicians to pretend to be taking action while avoiding unpopular discussions about carbon taxes and nuclear-power expansion. It's a silent bribe to green voters and lobby groups to play along. When the top federal tax rate for affluent U.S. voters is 40.8% and headed to almost 52% under pending Democratic legislation, the appeal of serving up this influential bloc of voters a big wet deduction for treating themselves to an electric car is obvious but it has nothing to do with climate change.

 

It's worth recalling Donald Trump's exact words about the climate lobby: "It's a money-making industry, OK? It's a hoax, a lot of it."

 

This is so consistent with human nature and political incentive, it's a wonder anyone bothers to argue.

Which brings us to the surreal COP26 climate summit that just wrapped up. Joe Biden, according to the Washington Post, in private White House planning recognized that countries would not live up to their emissions goals. It didn't change anything he publicly said or did.

Propagandizing for the cause, the New York Times devoted a lengthy article to accusing West Virginia's Democratic senator, Joe Manchin, of choosing a future of climate-caused flooding for his state in order to save coal jobs. But the only choice facing a West Virginia politician is whether to protect coal jobs or not, climate change being beyond his control. Falsifying such an obvious political reality advances only the cause of souring the public on the quality of news analysis.

Or take the orchestrated folly of private business "sustainability." This is pure smokescreen: Only governments can create meaningful incentives for humanity to use less fossil fuels and they haven't done so.

It seems academic at this point, but a democratically plausible strategy for reducing emissions has always dangled before us. Every country's tax code is an incubator-in-waiting of coalitions for a carbon tax in return for cutting other taxes. Coalition building, though, hasn't been the agenda of the environmental movement, which finds it thrives better by promoting green pork while vilifying heretics.

In the meantime, the stock market is telling us something. The path of least political resistance, while doing nothing meaningful about alleged climate risks, will be throwing money at electric cars. Rivian, the electric-truck company that has sold a handful of electric trucks, debuted recently at a market value of $120.5 billion. Lucid Group, which delivered its first car a few days ago, is worth more than Ford or GM.

The granddaddy of them all, Tesla, has seen its market value triple to $1 trillion in less than a year, and climb 18-fold in two years, without any revolution whatsoever taking place in its expectations. Tesla remains a smallish car maker whose profits depend largely on regulatory credits.

There may be plenty of reasons to think less of Mr. Biden since he became president, but his participation in the EV scam, proposing massive new subsidies for car buyers and charging stations, isn't one of them. He's not even more of a fraud in such matters than President Obama was." [1]

 Lithuania's ruling scammers are dripping saliva and considering all sorts of ways to squeeze more taxes out of the poverty-stricken Lithuanian population. Any lie is suitable for this. The lie was recently released that we, Lithuanians, can already buy electric cars, but they forgot to say that we cannot use them, there are not enough charging stations. Given our salaries and prices, such news must cause laughter. But this news is used to tax everyone who has a car, in addition and a lot. The next time you vote for conservatives and liberals, think about what you are doing.

 "It is true - Gentlemen, you will play not very long time with your nonsense. Lithuanians are patient, but when that patience ends, you will not stop them. Maybe you want us to buy an electric car for every Lithuanian, the worst of which costs from 35000EUR, although these are full buckets, bins and go with a full load only about 150km, I'm not talking about better and more expensive like Tesla. As I understand it,  you want to get Lithuanians out of their own cars and transfer them to public transport or electric cars, and is that public transport developed, is it convenient and fast? Is the charging infrastructure for electric vehicles developed? Develop public transport and charging infrastructure for electric cars first, and only then you will  be taxing diesel and petrol, as well as cars with internal combustion engines. Why do you do it the other way around, always placing the carriage in front of a horse?"  

1. After COP26, EVs Galore!
Jenkins, Holman W; Jr.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 24 Nov 2021: A.13.