RUTHFULLY YOURS

All the cool kids say humanity has to abandon fossil fuels and rely on wind and solar for our electricity and battery-operated cars (which remind us of the toys we played with as kids) to get around. It’s the future, they say. So why does it seem more like the past?

Let’s begin with a fascinating “fer instance”:

“Classic Cars,” says a Motorious headline from late last  month, “Are Greener Than Electric Vehicles.” The story below the headline refers to a study from ​​British insurance company Footman James, which is “refreshing,” says the article’s author, “because it doesn’t talk emotional rage, sticking  instead to the inconvenient facts.”

And what are those facts?

• “A classic car notching up the national average of 1,200 miles emits 563kg of CO2 a year. By comparison, a new Volkswagen Golf has a carbon footprint of 6.8 tonnes of CO2 the day it leaves the factory, a figure it would take our average classic 12 years to match.”
• “For an electric vehicle, the footprint is even greater. A battery-powered Polestar 2 creates 26 tonnes of CO2 during its production, emissions that would take a typical classic more than 46 years to achieve. By which time, the EV’s cutting-edge lithium-ion battery would have long since lost its ability to hold a charge and been consigned to the nearest recycling facility.”
• “Footman James rightly points out that within that 46-year period, the Polestar 2’s battery will need to be replaced, maybe even swapped for a new one twice or more,” writes Steven Symes for Motorious. “And what happens to the battery? Can it really be recycled? The answer for now is no. Meanwhile, the classic car keeps running without contributing significantly to a landfill. But you should feel bad for driving such an awful pollution machine, or so we’re told.”

The narrative says EVs are greener but that’s because the true-believers “just look at tailpipe emissions, behaving as if that’s everything in the equation. They don’t consider pollution generated by the manufacturing process,” says Symes.

That’s not something Symes has made up. It’s the reality. EVs are dirty … and racist.

So what else have the Green Shirts given us?

Blackouts. “Rush toward green energy has left U.S. ‘incredibly’ vulnerable to summer blackouts, expert warns,” says a Fox News headline from Monday. “I think the entire country is incredibly vulnerable, because the entire country is facing a huge energy shortage and I don’t think there is any place that is truly safe,” Daniel Turner, founder and executive director at Power the Future, told the network.

Power rationing. Things are so bleak in Great Britain due to high energy costs (always a hallmark of renewables) and the war in Ukraine, that the government might have no choice but to ration electricity “in a manner similar to Edward Heath’s three-day week in the 1970s,” reports the Daily Mail. The scenario could have been avoided, says Watts Up With That, “if Britain maintained coal capacity and developed shale gas reserves.”

Famine. A presidential ban on chemical fertilizers last year wrecked Sri Lanka’s harvest. Even though the ban was lifted “after widespread protests,” says Reuters, “only a trickle of chemical fertilizers made it to farms, which will likely lead to an annual drop of at least 30% in paddy yields nationwide.” Other media reports indicate that a “spiraling food crisis looms,” in the country. Similar environmental nincompoopery is threatening food production in the agriculturally rich Netherlands, where the government has proposed cutting nitrogen oxide and ammonia emissions by half by 2030.

While the political-activist-media industrial complex continually promises a grand future of green energy powering a clean planet, our world is becoming more primitive. This is a rotten tradeoff, but it’s how things are and will be until more of us realize the “cool kids” aren’t so cool after all.