Apropos one of the memes from Margolis’s Meme-manic Monday email, to which I am a subscriber, which I’ll append at the end of this post so’s none of y’all will miss out.
Going electric requires electricity. Who knew?
A lead article in the sober-sided New York Times is seldom funny. Yet ‘A New Surge in Power Use is Threatening US Climate Goals’ earlier this month cracked me up. Check out this sternly dramatic first paragraph: ‘Something unusual is happening in America. Demand for electricity, which has stayed largely flat for two decades, has begun to surge.’ Personally, I’d have headlined that article ‘Well, duh’ – perhaps with the subhead ‘Aw, shucks’.Lo and behold, when you push people to electrify everything in their lives – cars, cookers, heating systems – while bribing them to go all-electric with lavish government subsidies, it turns out they use more electricity. Who would have thought? I guess this is why we need all those brainiac experts to analyse the ultra-complicated technical details of environmental policy.
One such expert worries in the Times: ‘The numbers we’re seeing are pretty crazy.’ America’s paper of record warns that in the past year the nation’s utilities have nearly doubled their estimates of how much more power they’ll need to provide in the next five years, during which an extra California’s worth of demand will be dumped on the US grid. So allow me to lead you through all the ‘well, duh’ bullet points of this hugely entertaining piece.
Electric vehicles need electricity. Surprise! Apparently simply stippling the landscape with new EV chargers, which Joe Biden’s farcically titled Inflation Reduction Act is meant to finance, isn’t quite enough. Gosh, darn it. Nobody pointed out that the chargers have to be connected to actual electricity. So far, it looks as if no one in government has worried about where it will all come from. Oh well. That’s understandable. These important people have so many other weighty matters on their minds.
Burning fossil fuels to not burn fossil fuels is a tad inconsistent. Utilities all over the US are busy building gas-fired power plants to meet rising demand for electricity, when the whole point of this exorbitant energy ‘decarbonisation’ is to stop burning the likes of gas. The Times calls it an ‘ironic twist’ that the demand for electricity from green technology is imperilling the whole point of green technology, but I call that instead ‘wholly foreseeable’. And I call this comical: one Kansas utility is keeping a coal-fired plant online that it had planned to retire – the better to power a giant EV battery factory.
Lots more to this one too, read all of it. Being a Spectator UK article it’s paywalled, although for some reason the link got me access to the entire article just this once. If it doesn’t work for you, try running the URL through either 12ft Ladder, archive.is, or the venerable Wayback Machine, that orta do the trick. If all else fails, simply disable javascript in your preferred web browser’s settings until you’ve finished reading; JS is how these paywall nuisances work in the first place.
Oh yeah, almost forgot the meme:
Of course, as CF Lifers already know, it IS “just pretend.” The stupid, self-defeating EV push isn’t really about Climate Change (formerly Global Warming, formerly Global Cooling, formerly The Weather)™ or anything else but what it always and forever is; say it with me one time, people: Power, and Control. Personal vehicles are the front-line face of liberty and individual autonomy, and FederalGovCo hates that kind of thing to the very marrow of its bones.
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With the utter and complete failure of the EV plan occurring, I’m seeing even more strident cheerleaders for EV’s doubling and tripling down on teh stoopid.
They always do…
You know, every now and then I get the idea that we’re not being led by the best and brightest.
By Design.
Necking is better with fossils fuels: