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In fairy dust and unicorn fart world!

The Biden Meat Puppet Administration continues its push to greenify America.  Can’t afford gas?  Buy a Tesla!  Can’t afford groceries?  Buy a Tesla!  Rolling blackouts coming this summer so you can’t charge an EV?  Buy a Tesla!

At the same time, they’re shuttering coal and even nuclear power plants with nothing to replace them, promising to mandate electric vehicles, raising manufacturer gas mileage standards to unachievable levels, and telling people not to charge their EVs at night to prevent rolling blackouts, which is the only time most people can charge them.  Oh yes, and there is a substantial shortage of computer chips and EV batteries because most of the world’s supply of the minerals needed to make them is either in China, processed by China, manufactured by China, or controlled by China.  Afghanistan, for example, which Gropin’ Joe abandoned, is now a Chinese colony and has enormous supplies of those minerals.  So in other words, all is going according to plan.

By the way, have you ever wondered why, since EVs are battery powered, manufacturers don’t just make their battery packs easily swappable?  Instead of waiting hours for a partial charge, why not just swap battery packs?  Because they weigh at least 1000 pounds—see this article–cost about 1/3 the MSRP of the vehicle, and are extraordinarily dangerous to handle.  That and with the slightest damage, they’ll explode—actually explode—in flames.  AA batteries they are not, as these photos of a recent EV bus fire demonstrate:

It was just sitting there, and the battery suddenly exploded.

Fortunately, it was mostly empty and no one was hurt.

The SMM EV archive is here.  

Nor do they care…

Our self-imagined elite live in an imaginary world of fairy dust and unicorn farts, where electricity magically appears at every wall outlet in inexhaustible quantities.

They have no idea from where electricity comes, nor do they particularly care.  They want woke/green/sustainable energy and they want to impose it on the little people now!  Let us, gentle readers, review some interesting facts, beginning with this from—of all sources—CNN:

Bob Galyen has spent his career building electric car batteries. And he thinks the United States has a problem.

Galyen, who engineered the battery for the General Motors EV1, the first mass-produced electric vehicle, and also served as chief technology officer at a Chinese company that’s the top battery producer in the world, isn’t the only one.

Yes gentle readers, the Chinese make most EV batteries too.

Elected officials, automakers and customers in the US are all excited about the possibility of electric cars, and those cars will be key to the US meeting its climate goals.

Notice CNN takes for granted Americans are clamoring for EVs.  We’ll see how non-clamorous that clamor is shortly.

Simply building and selling electric cars, or providing subsidies for the people who make and buy them, isn’t enough. Electric cars need batteries the same way combustion cars need fuel — and the metal in those batteries can be just as precious and hard to get as gas.

Gas isn’t precious or hard to get, unless the government won’t let us produce or refine any, which, coincidentally, is exactly what they’re doing.

People like Galyen are worried the US simply isn’t ready for that switchover, or doing enough to get ready.

The United States sources about 90% of the lithium it uses from Argentina and Chile, and contributes less than 1% of global production of nickel and cobalt, according to the Department of Energy. China refines 60% of the world’s lithium and 80% of the cobalt. Those metals are critical for electric vehicles.

Galyen said he’s struggled to get the United States to create a long-term plan for electric batteries, instead watching as priorities shift depending on what political party holds the White House. The Biden administration has pushed for electric vehicles, yet halted mining projects in Arizona and Minnesota that would boost domestic supply of electric vehicle materials.

Wait, the Meat Puppet Administration is demanding EVs, but won’t let us mine the minerals necessary for EV batteries?!  Nobody ever said woke/green made sense.

‘We have neither the raw materials nor the manufacturing capacity,’ Galyen told CNN Business. ‘If the wrong country goes to war with us, we don’t have enough batteries to support our military.’

Which is why Biden wants China to control our economy, and with that control, everything else.  Why, one might almost think he was doing this on purpose.

A challenge for US leaders is what to do when the country’s values come into conflict, including electrical vehicle adoption, environmental preservation and halting America’s historic mistreatment of indigenous people.

Last month the Biden administration canceled leases for a planned nickel mine in Minnesota, called Twin Metals, due to environmental concerns. Last year Biden slowed a copper mining project in Oak Flat, Arizona that the Trump and Obama administrations had previously pushed for alongside Congress. The Biden administration said it wanted to better understand the concerns of Indigenous people and environmental impacts.

Oh yes, there’s nothing Bidenites care more about than “Indigenous people.”  Just ask Elizabeth Warren.  You’re making up that stuff about China!  OK.  Let’s see what the Wall Street Journal has to say about that:

The Biden administration wants to spend billions on electric-vehicle subsidies and charging stations because, as Vice President Kamala Harris put it in a Dec. 13 speech, ‘climate change has become a climate crisis and it demands urgent action.’ But rushing to replace gasoline-powered cars with electric vehicles would hand the keys to the American transportation sector to China, given Beijing’s near-monopoly on rare-earth elements like neodymium and dysprosium, which are used in the high-output motors of most electric vehicles.

The Journal reported Dec. 3 that the Chinese government is consolidating assets from state firms to create a new global champion called the China Rare Earth Group. The state-run Global Times quoted a manager at a state-owned rare-earth enterprise based in Ganzhou: ‘The new company will enforce stricter rules on the production quantity as well as the export volume of rare earths, which may also drive up prices.’

But the Chinese aren’t bent on world domination or anything, no.  Nothing to see here; move along, move along.

The White House’s Dec. 13 press release on charging stations, which includes a section on electric-vehicle batteries, mentions the need to increase domestic production of lithium to bolster the ‘battery supply chain,’ but it mentions neither rare earths nor China.

But wait a minute: didn’t we just learn Biden is preventing American mining?  Why yes we did.

In May, the International Energy Agency reported that an electric-vehicle motor requires ‘upwards of 1 kilogram,’ or more than 2 pounds, of rare-earth elements. The same report found that China controls about 85% of the global supply of those elements and that the ‘geographical concentration of production’ of critical minerals—including rare earths, lithium, copper and cobalt—‘is unlikely to change in the near term.’

Definition assistance: “unlikely” = “no way in Hell.”

Even if the U.S. could increase quickly the mining of rare earths—an unlikely prospect given the difficulty of gaining permits for new mining operations—

Notice how the WSJ slipped a bit of reality in: “the difficulty of gaining permits”?

the IEA explains that processing rare earths ‘often generates toxic and radioactive materials’ that can leak into groundwater, and that ‘this has been a serious issue in China.’

“Often.”  These guys crack me up.  As if the Chinese cared about such things.

Some auto makers, including Nissan and BMW, have developed electric-vehicle drive trains that reduce or eliminate the need for rare earths. But even if the auto industry doesn’t need them, the wind-energy industry does. According to the IEA, offshore wind turbines require as much as 500 pounds of rare earths per megawatt of installed capacity, including some 400 pounds of neodymium. Those are big numbers considering that the Biden administration wants to deploy 30,000 megawatts of offshore wind by 2030. The IEA predicts that the global wind-energy industry’s need for rare earths ‘is set to more than triple by 2040.’

Oh.  That would be bad.

The punch line here is obvious: Since the 1973 oil embargo, U.S. policy makers have decried America’s dependence on foreign oil to fuel our transportation sector. But now, in the name of climate change and the much-hyped ‘energy transition,’ [Biden recently rebranded the “transition.”  It’s not a “turn.”] the U.S. is positioning itself to be dependent largely on China for rare earths, and it will do so at the same time that the U.S. and China are increasingly at odds over the origins of Covid-19, Taiwan sovereignty, control of the South China Sea, and genocide and crimes against humanity against predominantly Muslim Uyghurs in Xinjiang, including forced labor to produce polysilicon for solar panels.

By forcing electric vehicles into the market, the U.S. will trade reliance on domestically produced gasoline and diesel fuel for reliance on Chinese neodymium, terbium and dysprosium. What a lousy trade.

Hey, no sweat, because CLIMATE CHANGE!  And how is the bold charge ahead with charging stations going?

In order to match the 2,000 cars that a typical filling station can service in a busy 12 hours, an EV charging station would require 600, 50-watt chargers at an estimated cost of $24 million and a supply of 30 megawatts of power from the grid. That is enough to power 20,000 homes. No one likely thinks about the fact that it can take 30 minutes to 8 hours to recharge a vehicle between empty or just topping off. What are the drivers doing during that time?

As regular readers know, I’ve been pointing this out for some time.

ICSC-Canada board member New Zealand-based consulting engineer Bryan Leyland describes why installing electric car charging stations in a city is impractical:

‘If you’ve got cars coming into a petrol station, they would stay for an average of five minutes. If you’ve got cars coming into an electric charging station, they would be at least 30 minutes, possibly an hour, but let’s say its 30 minutes. So that’s six times the surface area to park the cars while they’re being charged. So, multiply every petrol station in a city by six. Where are you going to find the place to put them?”

Thirty minutes is a ridiculously optimistic figure.  When an EV battery reaches 80% charge, the charger has to slow dramatically down to keep from overheating and exploding the battery, so we’re talking hours, not 30 minutes.

The government of the United Kingdom is already starting to plan for power shortages caused by the charging of thousands of EVs. Starting in June 2022, the government will restrict the time of day you can charge your EV battery. To do this, they will employ smart meters that are programmed to automatically switch off EV charging in peak times to avoid potential blackouts.

But that would never happen in the US!  Oh yes it would.

In particular, the latest UK chargers will be pre-set to not function during 9-hours of peak loads, from 8 am to 11 am (3-hours), and 4 pm to 10 pm (6-hours). Unbelievably, the UK technology decides when and if an EV can be charged, and even allows EV batteries to be drained into the UK grid if required. Imagine charging your car all night only to discover in the morning that your battery is flat since the state took the power back. Better keep your gas-powered car as a reliable and immediately available backup! While EV charging will be an attractive source of revenue generation for the government, American citizens will be up in arms.

A home charging system for a Tesla requires a 75-amp service. The average house is equipped with 100-amp service. On most suburban streets the electrical infrastructure would be unable to carry more than three houses with a single Tesla. For half the homes on your block to have electric vehicles, the system would be wildly overloaded.

Although the modern lithium-ion battery is four times better than the old lead-acid battery, gasoline holds 80 times the energy density. The great lithium battery in your cell phone weighs less than an ounce while the Tesla battery weighs 1,000 pounds. And what do we get for this huge cost and weight? We get a car that is far less convenient and less useful than cars powered by internal combustion engines.

But other than that, EVs are great, and so much better for the environment!  We just need to mine a lot more fairy dust and unicorn farts, if only the Bidenites would let us mine anything. But wait, how does all this translate to the real world?  The WSJ recently took a four day, New Orleans to Chicago, EV road trip: 

The Wall Street Journal reported this weekend on a four-day road trip from New Orleans to Chicago and back in an electric vehicle (EV) that ended up as a disaster — one that left the author grateful for her ordinary car, even at today’s high gas price.

The Journal article, by Rachel Wolfe, was titled: ‘I Rented an Electric Car for a Four-Day Road Trip. I Spent More Time Charging It Than I Did Sleeping.’

Take the link to see the reality-based wonders of EV ownership and travel.  And speaking of reality, remember that 48-mile traffic jam in Virginia back in January?

The not-so-unprecedented event — essentially a repeat of what happened on a wintry night in the D.C. area 11 years ago this month — therefore provides a reality check on the push by government and business to electrify cars and trucks.

It is a scientific fact that batteries of all kinds lose capacity more rapidly in cold weather, and that includes the sophisticated lithium-ion ones used by Teslas and other EVs. Carmakers can, and do, mitigate cold-weather ‘range anxiety’ through various technologies; Tesla is touting a new ‘heat pump’ to extend winter range. Drivers can save battery power by, say, turning off the heat. The issue cannot be eliminated, however, as Tesla acknowledges on its corporate website.

It’s a hassle in ordinary winter situations but potentially much worse than that on a night like Monday.

Any EV driver stuck on I-95 was right to be anxious — not only about a rapidly dying battery but also about recharging it. Cold would make that process much more time-consuming, assuming there was a charging station nearby, and that the electric power system hadn’t gone out (as it did in parts of Virginia on Monday).

Take the link, where we find the problem wasn’t just one of inconvenience.  Without the kindness of gas-powered motorists, EV drivers and their passengers were in danger of freezing to death.  EVs are ridiculously unsuitable for winter conditions, and actively dangerous.  The Meat Puppet Administration is continually bragging about Ford’s commitment to become an all EV all the time manufacturer.  How’s that reality working out for Ford?  Not so well:

Major U.S. automaker Ford blamed its sizable investment in electric vehicle (EV) company Rivian for its dramatic revenue decline in the first quarter of 2022.

Ford reported revenue of $34.5 billion between January and March, a 5% decline relative to the same period in 2021, and a net loss of $3.1 billion, according to the company’s earnings report released Wednesday. The Detroit automaker said its large investment in Rivian accounted for $5.4 billion in losses during the first quarter.

As regular readers might recall, GM lost money on every Chevy Volt–which it no longer makes—it ever made, potentially more than $100,000 dollars and more lost. Ford is also losing money on it’s Mustang Mach-E, so it’s raising prices to make even pocket change on that vehicle.  No company can long survive with those kinds of losses.  Ford might be beginning to realize maybe Americans really don’t want to pay European luxury car prices for basic transportation:

The Biden administration’s push to get more people driving an electric vehicle (EV) has hit a roadblock: EV prices have surged from a year ago, data released Monday shows.

The average sticker price for an EV in the United States in May was up 22 percent from a year ago, to about $54,000, according to research from data and analytics firm J.D. Power, cited by the Wall Street Journal.

UPI points out the average price for an internal-combustion vehicle rose 14 percent over the same period to close on $44,400.

Automakers have ramped prices to capitalize on new interest fueled by surging gas prices and offset the soaring cost of raw materials like nickel, cobalt and lithium for their large batteries due to supply chain issues, according to the WSJ.

Keep in mind, gentle readers, EV availability is plummeting, which also drives costs up.  I suspect, as with all media/government reporting on inflation, the actual costs of EVs are much, much higher.  But hey, when you can’t afford to pay your bills, the logical choice is for government to print more money and for you to buy an EV you can’t afford, and install an EV charger you can’t afford either.  Fairy dust and unicorn farts.