LF: ‘Zero Emission’ Electric Cars

Did you happen to see the picture of the electric car “fast” charger being charged by the diesel generator? It’s Kodachrome evidence of the Moon-baying lunacy of this whole Electro-Kool Aid slurping.

Better to forget the EV charger, use the diesel engine to power a car directly – cut out the middleman – and be done with it.

Instead we are hectored about the virtues of the middleman – the EV charger. Which enables the EV owner to pretend – and posture – that his car is “zero emissions.” The picture makes it clear there are emissions – just usually emitted at a distance.

In this case, it’s just a few feet from the EV – which conveys the inconvenient truth pretty succinctly.

It’s easier to pretend – and posture – when the source of the emissions is farther away (wherever the utility plant is) and engage in magical thinking about the “clean” electricity being piped into one’s EV.

Maybe Elon will figure out a way to harness lightning and transmit it directly to EVs. In which case, hurrah – because electricity obtained that way would be free as well as emissions-free.

But wait a minute. Let’s examine this emissions business.

Anything produced as byproduct of combustion – whether for locomotion or generation – can accurately be described as an “emission.” Something came out of the tailpipe – or the smokestack. The salient question is whether what’s being emitted is harmful.

Certainly, things like unburned hydrocarbons, oxides of nitrogen and particulates can be harmful. If emitted in large quantities. But they aren’t being. At least, not from the tailpipe. Emissions of these compounds from modern cars – actually, cars made since the ’90s, which was a long time ago – are a fraction of what they were circa 1970.

Many new IC cars built since the early 2000s qualify as Partial Zero Emissions Vehicles (PZEV) notwithstanding that they aren’t electric cars.

But they are very close to being zero emissions – by any meaningful standard.

About 95 percent of a late-model non-electric car’s emissions consists of water vapor and carbon dioxide – neither of which were even characterized as “emissions” . . . until just a few years ago, Suddenly Susan-style.

Which curiously coincides with the elimination – in meaningful terms – of the compounds which had previously been characterized as emissions. And which were a problem – meaningfully, in terms of smog formation and such.

The change in marketing was a necessary strategic move that had nothing to do with air quality or protecting people’s health – that mission having been accomplished. Which was becoming obvious even to the dull. The air was not opaque. People didn’t have to wear face masks. All was well.

Excepting the absence of a pretext for new and onerous regulations. The marketing change was necessary to justify the ongoing existence – and expansion – of the federal regulatory apparat.

Thus, carbon dioxide became – presto! -an “emission.” (It’s interesting to speculate as to why water vapor – also a potent “greenhouse gas” – isn’t of interest to the regulatory apparat. Maybe later.)

But is this “emission” harmful?

Potentially, yes. See Venus. But it’s the quantity that determines this – whether on Venus or on Earth.

Leaving aside for a moment the source of these emissions, the quantity of carbon dioxide in the mix (in the air) is currently about 400 parts per million – which is higher than 100 years ago. But it’s lower than it was 12,750 years ago – which was long before humans emitted anything except the biological stuff.

See here.

And C02 ppm levels have been even higher longer ago than that.

See here.

This implies C02 “emissions” are naturally variable – a real stumbling block for the proposition that we naked apes are responsible for the variations today.

Most people – not being scientists and so easily scared by propagandists – do not know that our geologic era, the Holocene, has been a period of unusually low carbon dioxide PPM levels. This unusually low level – around 280-300 ppm – has been used as the false premise to hystericize current slightly higher-than-recent (in geological terms) ppm levels.

Also hystericized has been the rise in temperature attributed to this. It has been about 1 degree in fact but that has been projected to increase by 3 percent or more in the very near future – over the course of the next 30 years – which has created the current “crisis” narrative.

Something Must Be Done. Now!

But the projected increase is based on computer modeling. Which is based on premises that are by no means established fact – and which leave out facts, such as historically low CO2 ppm levels in the Holocene and much higher ppm levels in the geologic past.

Also shoved under the rug – and the reason for the change in branding from “global warming” to “climate change” – is the inconvenient truth that the warming hasn’t increased as catastrophically projected.

In fact, it peaked back in the ’90s – when some will recall The End was also Nigh. And then wasn’t.

If “global warming” was correct, the warming should have inexorably continued; it didn’t. Instead of this being taken as contrary evidence that the “science” wasn’t “settled,” the “science” became overtly political.

But it is antithetical to the very idea of science to peddle a theory (a hypothesis, really) that can be made to fit anything. And that’s exactly what “climate change” theory does. It can’t be pinned down – fact checked – because the climate constantly changes. Its eponymous assertion – that the climate changes – can’t be questioned.

Such a person is a “denier” – an interestingly religious term.

Which is what we’re dealing with here. A Doomsday Cult, actually. Led by professional Jim Joneses, who aren’t interested in mass suicide but mass control.

Once you understand this, you understand everything else.

In any event, the “anthropogenic” emissions of carbon dioxide – whether by non-electric cars directly or indirectly, by electric cars, at the power-generating source – are literally fractional relative to the quantity emitted by natural sources we naked apes can’t regulate, such as volcanoes. So even if the climate is changing, there’s not much if anything that can be done about it.

One of the few incidentally honest Climate Change priests, Andrew Yang, actually admitted this during the Democratic would-be-Decider debate two weeks ago. And was practically excommunicated for saying so.

The “crisis” must not only by hyped, it must be portrayed as something that can be prevented . . . if only we’ll do as we’re told.

By High Priests who will, of course, do very differently as regards themselves.

. . .

Got a question about cars, Libertarian politics – or anything else? Click on the “ask Eric” link and send ’em in!

Not entirely true. There are HUGE wind "farms" in some sections of the country that produce electricity from wind using HUGE fan blades and solar cells to store it. There are several not too far from me,and every time I pass by one of them some of them are turned off because they ran out of space to store any energy they would have produced.

I don't know how true it is,but I have been told they sell their excess electricity to the local power companies.