Posted on 03/08/2022 9:40:05 AM PST by bitt
Vice President Kamala Harris and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg were criticized Monday for a “tone-deaf” event focused on promoting electric buses as gas prices soared for most Americans.
Rep. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.), a member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, tweeted, “The Biden Administration could not be more tone-deaf.”
“Vice President Kamala Harris and [Transportation] Secretary Pete Buttigieg spent the afternoon promoting electric vehicles and Green New Deal policies.
“Are you kidding me?” Mullin wrote.
Harris and her possible 2024 rival Buttigieg teamed up for an event celebrating the first anniversary of the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act, which passed last March with only Democratic support.
Neither Harris nor Buttigieg specifically mentioned gas prices while speaking in the White House-adjacent Eisenhower Executive Office Building — or the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which threatens to send those prices even higher.
Harris asked her audience to “imagine a future” with electric vehicles.
“Imagine a future: the freight trucks that deliver bread and milk to our grocery store shelves and the buses that take children to school and parents to work. Imagine all the heavy-duty vehicles that keep our supply lines strong and allow our economy to grow. Imagine that they produce zero emissions. Well, you all imagined it,” she said.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
It’s worse! California generates 48% of it’s electricity from natural gas which has gone up 25% in the last 2 weeks. So how are EV car owners not going to be impacted? Oh nickel has gone up so much, EV’s cost another $1,000 to built! Way to go Brandon!
The typical EV owner makes over $100k a year.
“How many people made $100,000 or more in 2021? 28,756,346 workers, or 16.5% of all individual workers”
Another part of the affordability problem is EVs cost more to repair and insure than ICE cars (Marketwatch, today).
EVs are going to have to get a lot cheaper to buy and own for them to grow their percentage of the market. And the materials needed to produce them are skyrocketing in price.
Make the low income pay taxes so the wealthier people can buy a brand new electric car...
There should be a way to retrofit our gas driven cars with electric drive at 10% of the cost of a new EV. $60,000 for a EV is not do-able for most Americans.
"While talking about gas prices & Ukraine, VP Harris
said America needs to develop an Electric Tank to save environment."
< /Sarcasm >
Never let a crisis go to waste.
Good point. But to be fair, often when there's a hurricane the power is out for many square miles sometimes for a week. That includes powering gas pumps. My daughter has experienced that near the gulf.
Tornadoes are different. Yes, they bring down power lines too. But usually (not counting the April 2011 tornado Alabama experienced, that's an outlier) it's very localized and only one or two gas stations will have no power for a couple of days (easy to go to another gas station).
However, if your house isn't damaged and if you have solar panels and a fairly sizeable battery storage, your power doesn't go out (assuming you don't sign up for the power buyback program which forces your system to shut off when the grid goes down). That's what happens for me when the power goes out. I currently don't have an EV and my current system is powerful enough to power only 55% of the power my all-electric house needs. The saving alone from the 1st year has taught me it'll pay for itself in 10-11 years (including paying interest on the HELOC I took out to buy the solar system).
If I get an EV I plan to upgrade it until it provides about 90% of my power, including my EV use. It's not worth upgrading if I don't get an EV -- I'm running against the law of diminishing returns. But an EV changes the math. The cost of an EV truck like the low end F-150 Lightning (relative to the cost of every 5 or so years buying an old used pickup truck like I've done for decades), the miles per kWh vs the mpg, the cost per kWh vs cost per gallon of gas, but getting about 85% to 90% of my power from the solar system, interest on car payments for the first time in decades, increase in my car insurance, but saving on oil changes, etc. And it would all pay for itself on about the 12th year. And because 90% of my power would be for free I'd drive it most of the time even when the power goes out, even if the Dims force the whole country to experience power blackouts like 3rd world countries such as California experience.
To me it's not a green energy vs fossil fuel argument or gas car vs EV argument. It's about how much ownership of my own needs can I take on so I worry less about gubment control of our lives. More and more it's become clear that the Dims are using energy to control us. So more and more I want to be energy independent in ways that'll pay for itself in 10 or so years.
You want “electric vehicles”?
First step: a couple of hundred new nuclear reactors; they can be water or molten-salt, I don’t care.
Second step: upgrade substations and other distribution nodes.
Get all that done and maybe we will have enough power to handle as much as a 50% EV population
“There should be a way to retrofit our gas driven cars with electric drive at 10% of the cost of a new EV. $60,000 for a EV is not do-able for most Americans.”
Not even close. The frames and suspensions can’t handle the weight, and batteries are about $4-18k depending on size of car, range, etc.
The average gas engine sedan weighs 4,100 pounds.
The average Tesla weighs 4,500.
My income is now completely allocated (and then some) just covering basic necessities. The illegal administration's inflationary policies have seen to that.
So first they are going to have to reign in fuel prices and inflation. Then some time later I may have recovered financially enough to once again consider an EV. Of course EV technology will also have to improve some to make it a serious contender. So I'm thinking maybe in the 3rd or 4th year of President Trump's second term...
Thanks for the information. It tells me there is no way for an EV retrofit. It also tells me that extra weight adds to wasted energy.
“ I would rather imagine a future where busy bodied sluts , and fudge packing queers don’t have any effect on my future.”
Isn’t that the truth!
We would need more power generation capacity. Someone suggested there is enough capacity if we run power plants at full capacity around the clock and people only charge at night when other demands are low. Good luck coordinating that. We're going to need more capacity.
Oh, but building more coal or gas powered plants kind of goes against the theme. So we're going to need a lot more solar farms and wind farms. The EPA and environmentalists are just going to have to get over it - we're going to cover most anything that isn't farm land with solar panels, we're going to put up wind turbines where-ever the wind blows. We're going to damn every river with a drop sufficient to support hydro-power.
Of course we're going to have to significantly ramp up mining of copper to provide enough reliable, redundant power transmission grid capability.
Ditto we're going to have to significantly ramp up mining of various other minerals and metals to provide magnets for motors and batteries for storage. After all, night falls and storm clouds block the sun so we are going to need a lot of excess battery capacity.
We're going to need various new technologies to economically recycle/refurbish motors and batteries. Also going to have to figure out if/when/how to recycle the double-digit tons of non-decomposing waste from every wind turbine at end-of-life.
So yeah, just a few technical, environmental, and economic challenges with this whole notion of "going green." ;-/ But sure, let's just decree it 'cause it sounds good and makes us feel good about ourselves, like we're really doing something!
“I had this neighbor whose son would drive a 2- 2.5 hr trip, depending on traffic, to see her. When he switched to some electric car the trip took him usually over 5 hours as he had to stop to charge and many times had to wait.”
BS. EV’s can make that trip non-stop.
What do they think supplies the electrical power to charge those EV’s?
Hat tip to ya.
Another issue, road wear is caused by weight. That’s why semis have those signs on the back saying they pay 4-5k in road taxes a year. More EVs, more road wear.
The play is to push gas prices so high combustion vehicles become economically unreachable for the common man. For those who can afford electric vehicles, recharging will confined in such a way that one can only travel locally. Airline prices will be regulated beyond the reach of most people. Hence movement will restricted to areas the lefttards approve. IF you buy into their BS EV idiocy.
We use Gasoline not Toxic 900lb batteries
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