According to the timeless wisdom of Forest Gump’s mother, stupid is as stupid does. I’d like to expand on that a bit: Stupid is also as stupid demands others to do. No special interest group on the planet is more mindlessly demanding of others than the climate change cult. So, are they stupid?
The greenies love batteries. They come in a clean and compact package. When attached to a motor, wonderful things can be done. The only byproducts of doing work are torque and heat – nothing that could possibly damage Mother Earth – if only the batteries are considered.
President Gremlin demands that 50 percent of all cars be battery powered electric vehicles (EVs) by 2030. Leading the way to climate utopia, California has mandated that 100 percent of new cars be battery powered by 2040. Now there’s a huge scramble to install enough chargers for the expected nationwide fleet of EVs. Congress even approved $7.5 billion to install chargers. Sometime in the next 20 years they’ll finish the environmental impact studies and get around to installing a few of them – with whatever money is left.
But there’s a fundamental problem with EVs, that goes beyond the availability of chargers. It’s a misunderstanding that the greenies can’t seem to wrap their climate-focused minds around. EVs don’t run on batteries. They run on power, generated outside the car, transmitted via electricity, and stored in the battery. Just like my truck’s gas tank, batteries aren’t a source of energy. They’re merely a storage device. The source for EV power is actually natural gas, coal, nuclear, and hydro-electric. Batteries are simply an intermediary device in the chain of equipment from point A to point B. Unfortunately, the actual sources energy used by the EVs, are despised by the greenies, and we’ve taken so many of them offline, that we lack the capacity to charge the mandated fleet of EVs.
So, has our mad dash to battery powered cars been a well thought out plan, or does it fail the Gump test?
But wait, the greenies have an answer to our overloaded grid problem – renewable energy. We’ll avoid the use of planet destroying burners of fossil or nuclear fuels by using limitless supplies of wind power, solar power, and plant-based fuels.
Of course, wind and solar have one tiny little problem. They don’t produce electricity when the weather is uncooperative – and as every farmer knows, the weather doesn’t always cooperate. Mother nature gets to decide when we can have electricity, and we won’t be getting any at night or on calm days. Electricity from wind and solar is a “use it or lose it” commodity. When the sun isn’t shining, and the turbine blades aren’t turning, our refrigerator won’t be preserving either.
The greenies will say: But, but … batteries! We’ll use windmills and solar panels to charge batteries on the good days, and use the electricity from the batteries on the bad days. That’s the mantra from the likes of “I’m the real President” Gore, Saint Greta of Hamas, and Sir DeCaprio of Davos (i.e., technology idiots).
Batteries are fine for cordless drills and smart phones. But they rely on rare earth elements, for which there’s an inadequate, readily available supply to support a national grid. Unfortunately, rare earth elements are … rare. To manufacture enough batteries to power a national grid through 12 hours of darkness, would require turning the Earth into a wasteland of strip mines and toxic waste dumps.
So, is turning the Earth into a global super-fund site a sound plan to save the Earth? Or is it stupid?
Of course, there’s still bio-fuel – the most prominent of which is corn-based ethanol. We could convert our farmlands from producing food, to producing fuel – in the form of corn. It’s like growing money on trees – only it’s automobile fuel from corn stalks. What could be better than getting something of great value, that grows in nature for free?
But if it’s free, why does the government need to subsidize it – to the tune of $5.4 billion in 2010? Because it’s not as free or sustainable as the greenies would have us believe.
David Pimentel, professor of ecology and agriculture at Cornell University, conducted a study in which he analyzed the energy associated with maintaining the soil, planting seeds, harvesting corn, producing the ethanol, and providing transportation throughout the process. He concluded that corn-based ethanol requires 29 percent more fossil fuel energy, than the resultant ethanol energy. The yield is even worse for other forms of biomass. That means we burn more gas to produce the ethanol, than the gas the ethanol replaces. It’s like paying 4 bucks to get 3 bucks back, and calling it sustainable – at least until the government runs out of other people’s money with which to subsidize the scam. Proponents argue that ethanol production efficiency has now made it competitive with fossil fuels. However, our government subsidy of the industry would argue against that.
Trading more energy for less energy passes for wisdom in Congress, but does it save the planet?
Maybe there’s a solution to the green energy quandary. Wind and solar fail for lack of an energy storage method, and ethanol is a way to store energy – chemically. Why not store the energy from wind and solar in ethanol? Who cares about the whole 4 bucks in to get 3 bucks back, if the 4 bucks is free wind and sun power.
We just need to install enough wind and solar capacity to power the production of magical, ethanol on the sunny and windy days. Then we’ll burn the ethanol on the cloudy and calm days – when the people at the ethanol plants are laid off – to make the electricity needed to charge all of the EV batteries (as well as run the electric stoves, electric furnaces, electric water heaters, 60-inch TVs, blah, blah, blah).
We’ll just need two things to make it work. We’ll need more internal combustion engines to burn the ethanol, turning the generators, to make electricity. Then we’ll need to address the little issue that burning ethanol exhausts carcinogens into the atmosphere.
The ultimate “save the planet” solution is to:
- Build more internal combustion engines,
- To burn ethanol produced with windmill and solar panel electricity,
- To charge the batteries of the EVs,
- So that we can reduce the planetary impact of internal combustion engines.
Where on the smarts scale does building fuel burning engines, to replace fuel burning engines fall?
Inquiring minds would like to know: rather than building more gas engines – and a bunch of intermediary machinery – to replace gas engines, why don’t we just use energy we can pump out of the ground to power the engines we’ve got? Is there any answer other than that the decision makers are idiots?
This brings me to a binary question, based on Mrs. Gump’s wisdom. Do the consensus science people lack the intellectual capacity to follow the science, or do they understand all of this and think we’re stupid? If it’s the latter, what are they trying to sell us? Is it a coincidence that all their Earth saving solutions involve less personal freedom, and more government control? Or is that the point? Perhaps they aren’t environmentalists at all. Mabe they’re communists, trying heard us into servitude. Read the Green New Deal, as articulated by our self-proclaimed Socialists in Congress – then decide.
Author Bio: John Green is a political refugee from Minnesota, now residing in Idaho. He has written for American Thinker, and American Free News Network. He can be reached at greenjeg@gmail.com.
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