Electric/hybrid cars for low mileage drivers

[NNadir]

18. Maybe you can write to the authors of the paper to tell them that Elon Musk's marketing department...

...with only a modicum of soothsaying, is freeing their cobalt slaves. I'm not entirely convinced it will mean much to them.

In the graphic what is described is the carbon cost of making the fucking batteries, process cost, which includes the mining of lithium, isolating it, trucking it around. If Elon Musk frees his cobalt slaves, batteries will still have a carbon cost involved in making them. The paper from which the graphic came didn't even refer to cobalt.

As for the electricity to charge the batteries, I've been informed in this space that engineers have managed solve all of the problems of the wind industry by making the vanes bigger and bigger and bigger in the industrial parks that used to be benthic ecosystems, this in connection with my posts on the short life times reported by the Danish Energy Agency. I was told "that's what engineers do."

Um...um...um...

And of course, the solar industry will be fine; the extreme weather, which in my opinion is tied to extreme global heating generated by reactionary wishful thinking, fear and ignorance, and mindless bourgeois (and ultimately very expensive) penny pinching with more than a dollop of fear and ignorance, that cut the power to the quartz mine in North Carolina didn't damage the mine. Maybe they can haul out a bunch of solar cells and Powerwalls to start the thing up, get the diesels started and help us on our happy way to nirvana.

However, right now, in 2024, an electric car on my grid is dirtier than an internal combustion engine, according to the reference cited.

Of course, we were going to industrialize New Jersey's coastal benthic shelf for a big wind industrial park. It's not happening, in my opinion, happily.

The disintegration of these giant wind turbines in offshore industrial parks has be widely reported. The whole fucking Vineland plant is shut while they try to figure it out. All of the external carbon costs of building Vineland are stranded. It's not the only place.

I'm familiar with all the soothsaying and "what if's" in connection with these wind and solar fantasies that to my mind left the planet in flames. I've been hearing it all for many decades, during which the planet's major arboreal ecosystems began bursting into flames.

And, of course, I heard all the time from my moral superiors that nuclear energy is "too expensive," unlike Hurricanes like Helene and now Milton and too many other to remember, the burned forests are not "too expensive," the air pollution deaths are not "too expensive," and of course, natural gas that keeps all this horseshit flowing is not "too expensive."

I find the whole idea that the reactionary approach of returning our energy system to dependence on the weather in order to support a bourgeois car CULTure and whatever to be intellectually insupportable.

To be perfectly clear, this kind of thinking leaves an appalling hole in my sense of decency.

One doesn't want to believe one hears these things, but one does.