Another "Life Cycle" claim about EVs

oh yeah right ... better to slash and burn all of the Brazilian rainforest so that you can get a few good years out of nearly sterile rainforest land for corn growth. Then once you use up what few nutritional elements there are in the slashed and burned rainforest land - you slash and burn more rain forest, just so you can get a few more rotations of corn growth . That's one of my favorite all time unbelievable wastes of Natural Resources.
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Wow. Talk about being uneducated. When did Brazil grow corn to make ethanol?

They grow sugar canes. Sugar canes is known to have positive net energy unlike corn. Instead Bush and Congress (both parties) decided to put 100% tariff on importing ethanol fuel. Brazil had so much ethanol that they sold them to China/India (Brazil tried to sell to US first) since our government needed to support corn farmers and domestic ethanol refiners.

The slash and burn thing, I agree. But does US growing corn and taking away a food source be okay to you? You should be more pissed since it is energy negative to use as fuel.

 

+1

Other than the batteries plug-ins have the same or less environmental impact as hybrids in production. Now in the CNW case the highest production energy needs are in the lowest volume car. And this is absolutely correct, it takes materials to build the factories and equipment to build cars. Fisker, because they produced very few cars, had a high amount of energy per car from the production facilities, most of which were in Finland. Now if one were to compare the batteries in plug ins and electricity, versus the gasoline in an ice car, we are going to have a lot of opinions. If you want the plug-in to look bad you put them all in heavy coal and cold winter indiana and have it only last 50,000 miles, you claim that all the plug-ins ever to be built have already been built, so all the production energy needs to be costed. Lots of assumptions. The CNW assumption the prius would stop selling, and hummers would go on forever, using those factories. Lithium batteries are more environmentally friendly than nimh, but have some small cost. The environmental cost is very small compared to the environmental cost of gasoline the batteries displace, but the enviromental cost of electricity needs to be weighed. To you figure out the electricity these cars are actually using or do we pretend none of the owners spring for reneables (39% are solar in california where 1/3 are sold), and that the US grid is getting dirtier.

+1

Absolutely the argument is less oil not cleaner whatever cleaner means. There would have been more of a fight if it cleaner but left the country more dependent on foreign oil. Getting off of oil addiction is a shared desire of many of all political sides, with only a small minority hoping for oil shortages so they can profit.

I would say both were also sold with a jobs justification, and I don't see those jobs materializing. Those jobs excuses made ethanol more wasteful, as the use could not import it, and led to some loans grants that seem foolish now (fisker had to be about jobs right? ener1?)

 

...once I met with Congressional or Senator's aide drafting a legislation, so I got some flavor. They try to throw a boundary up and say here's a new area for jobs that is protected and the big companies are not supposed to play in there, new business development is encouraged. The big companies would "roll over the small companies in their sleep" I still remember she said and that was decades ago. Taken as a whole the alternate fuels act you can see how many small companies they made for biomass-to-fuels and EV/plug-in development was in there too.

 

Reminds me of a joke i read a while back, er.. i mean, something a politician said :
Washington state lawmaker: Cycling emits more carbon than driving - UPI.com

 

Hmm.... I believe a FOOD tax is called for to be paid as a fuel tax. I better shut up before liberals see as a new source of revenue.