OAN destroys Anderson Cooper after he disses Christina Bobb
Author: Papa Giorgio


Gregg Jarrett & Alan Dershowitz On The DOJ’s Abuse of Power
Gregg Jarrett and Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz joined ‘Hannity’ to weigh in on the FBI raiding the home of former President Donald Trump.
MIKE DAVIS BONUS
Mike Davis- President Trump declassified and took his copy of the crossfire hurricane records Russia collusion records and those are damming for the Biden Obama Hillary Clapper Susan Rice the FBI the intel community – that is what has terrified them- that is what has precipitated this
KASH PATEL BONUS
BOOM! Kash Patel: This Entire Raid on Mar-a-Lago Was to Prevent Disclosure of Declassified Russiagate Documents that Implicate FBI!

TCJA | Trump Tax Cuts vs Rhetoric (FLASHBACK)
This is to bring into one place a few of my past posts regarding the tax reforms Trump passed via the TCJA (Tax Cuts and Jobs Act). They are not reforms in the way conservatives think of them. But neither did they overwhelmingly benefit “the rich” and large corporations and did little or nothing to help middle class families — as Democrats state it.
In March, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., called the 2017 Trump tax cuts a $2 trillion “GOP tax scam.”
Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., accused Republicans of hypocrisy for supporting the tax cuts but opposing Congress’ massive spending spree.
The Biden White House issued a press release claiming “the Trump tax cuts had added $2 trillion to deficits over a decade.”
But the numbers tell a different story. Despite the political rhetoric, tax revenues are up.
(DAILY SIGNAL – June 1, 2022)
I will date my posts as I add them in a mixed order. But first… let us start this grand flashback with YAHOO NEWS (February 13, 2019):
…data reflects a single week of tax filing season and it is likely that the size of refunds will increase as tax season continues – Morgan Stanley analysts have predicted that refunds will increase by 26 percent.
In addition, the size of a tax refund means nothing without also comparing the change in paychecks. In net, the overwhelming number of filers will be better off as an estimated 90 percent of Americans are seeing a tax cut.
[….]
the success of the TCJA is clear. In the months following passage of the tax cuts, unemployment fell to a 49-year low and key demographics including women, African-Americans and Hispanics have seen record low unemployment rates.
Job openings have now hit a record high of 7.3 million and over 300,000 jobs were created last month, as most private-sector businesses continued hiring despite the government shutdown. Year-over-year, wages have grown 3.2 percent and the economy is projected to grow at 3.1 percent over 2018.
This positive news is not anecdotal.
According to Guy Berkebile, the owner of Pennsylvania-based small business Guy Chemical and one of the witnesses at the Ways and Means hearing, the bill has been a net positive for businesses.
“On the business expansion front, Guy Chemical was able to build a new laboratory that was five-times larger than our previous one, invest in new chemical compounding equipment and purchase new packaging line,” Berkebile told lawmakers on Wednesday.
Not only was this good for the businesses, it also benefited employees as noted in the testimony of Mr. Berkebile: “We were also able to pass down much of the financial savings to employees. More specifically, we were able to raise wages, expand bonuses by up to 50 percent, start a 401(k) retirement program and create 29 new jobs. These changes also instilled a sense of optimism among our staff, which has produced a less stressful and more enjoyable work environment.”
This is not an isolated story. Workers across the country have seen increased take-home pay, new or expanded education and adoption programs, and increased retirement benefits, while consumers are seeing lower utility bills.
More Good News
To use a few examples, Firebird Bronze, an Oregon-based manufacturer was able to afford to give its nine employees health insurance for the first time while McDonald’s has used tax reform to allocate $1,500 in annual tuition assistance to every employee working more than 15 hours a week.
Visa has doubled its 401(k) employee contribution match to 10 percent of employee pay, while Anfinson Farm Store, a family-owned business in Cushing, Iowa (population 223) has given its employees a $1,000 bonus and raised wages by 5 percent.
In addition to these employee benefits, America’s middle class is seeing direct tax relief.
A family of four with annual income of $73,000 is seeing a 60 percent reduction in federal taxes — totaling to more than $2,058. According to the Heritage Foundation, the typical American family will be almost $45,000 better off over the next decade because of higher take-home pay and a stronger economy.
Tax reform doubled the child tax credit from $1,000 to $2,000, giving over 22 million American families important tax relief. The standard deduction was doubled from $6,000 to $12,000 ($12,000 to $24,000 for a family) giving tax relief for over 105 million taxpayers that took the deduction prior to tax reform and simplifying the code for tens of millions Americans that will not take the standard deduction instead of itemizing.
While the rhetoric of the left has sought to portray the Republican tax cuts as a negative for the middle class, nothing could be further from the truth. The reality is, the middle class has seen strong tax reduction, higher take home pay, more jobs and more economic opportunity……
NOTE:
- The TCJA reduced the average federal tax rate from 20.8 percent to 19.3 percent for all filers. The bottom 20 percent of earners saw their average federal tax rate fall from 1.2 percent to nearly 0 percent. (TAX FOUNDATION | August 5, 2021)
RPT: December 28, 2017
(As an aside, I sent the “calculator” linked below to my wife’s uncle as he expressed concern in a private discussion to him paying more.)
Larry Elder plays CBS’ tax special with three families (watch the CBS video here at TOWNHALL) from different incomes: (a) little under $40,000 a year; (b) more than $150,000 a year; (c) couple’s combined income was $300,000. Turns out ALL THREE will get a tax return. The Democrats know they are in trouble!
Here Are The Winners And Losers Of The New Tax Law — In that article is a link to THIS TAX CALCULATOR
END
There are critics however, as noted by Robb Sinn at THE FEDERALIST (November 02, 2020):
Many on the left refuse to admit President Trump’s populist policies have provided massive benefits to working-class Americans. Matthew Yglesias argued at Vox that Trump’s refusal to endorse a federal $15 per hour minimum wage proves Trump has abandoned populist ideals. Progressives claim the Trump economy helps billionaires, not workers, and snidely dismiss his outreach to minorities.
Yet, during the first three years of the Trump presidency, wage growth was off the charts, especially for low-income workers and African Americans. The third-quarter economic data released Thursday confirm once again that Trump is on the job for U.S. workers.
The Biden campaign has tried to tie COVID-linked economic devastation to Trump’s leadership. The new third-quarter economic data once again shows that’s wrong. The total number of U.S. wage earners increased more than 5 percent in that period, and the third-quarter rebound for African Americans occurred at a 17 percent faster rate than for wage earners as a whole.
Trump campaigned on exiting the China-centric Trans-Pacific Partnership and renegotiating North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Trump claimed his tax and trade policies would benefit American workers.
Even though evidence shows they are highly effective, Trump’s economic ideas have consistently underwhelmed pundits. Democrats hated his tax cuts. Liberals predicted a worldwide economic crisis if he was elected in 2016 and scoffed at Trump’s “middle class miracle.” Leading up to the 2016 election, economists including eight Nobel laureates derided his economic ignorance and called his proposals “magical thinking.”
[….]
The story grows quite interesting when we focus on wage earners in lower brackets. According to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the 20-year growth trend for the 10th percentile weekly wage was $2.03 per quarter. For Trump’s first three years, wage growth was $4.95.
What about in the Obama era? Even cherry picking Obama’s last three years and ignoring the 2009 recession leaves us with growth of $1.68 per quarter, well below both the historic trend and Trump’s. Table 1 shows striking wage growth under Trump, a reversal of prior patterns, not a continuation, especially in the lowest wage brackets.
Trump Benefited Black Americans More Than Obama Did
During the final presidential debate, President Trump boldly stated he has done more for black Americans than any president since Abraham Lincoln. And he is not so sure Abe did better. While liberals fact-checked his hyperbole, we may employ the quaintly anachronistic approach of using data and logic. The Obama era proved dispiriting for many African American wage earners. The first three years of the Trump administration were a comparative godsend.
Obama oversaw the addition of 2.1 million African American wage earners during eight years in office, about 250,000 per year. Table 2 reveals the tepid results in terms of wage growth. Trump oversaw the addition of 1.3 million African American wage earners in his first three years, more than 400,000 per year. Excellent wage growth occurred across the spectrum. The results for the 10th and 25th percentiles were remarkable.
The 10th percentile U.S. weekly wage grew by $3.25 per quarter for African Americans during Trump’s first three years, nearly double the historic rate of $1.65. The best Obama growth rate was only $1.68. Perhaps having a businessman at the helm of the world’s largest economy is not such a bad idea. Will any deniers admit they were wrong?
……
Here are the links one should enjoy spending time in via my membership retirement org, AMAC:
- TCJA lowered the average federal tax rate for all filers: TCJA reduced the average federal tax rate from 20.8percent to 19.3 percent for all filers.
- The lowest income earners paid less in taxes: The bottom 20 percent of earners saw their average federal tax rate fall from 1.2 percent to 0 percent – a lower rate than the previous 40-year average.
- The highest earners paid the highest share of taxes: The top 1 percent of households saw their share of federal taxes paid increase from 25.5 percent in 2017 to 25.9 percent in 2018.
And please note this as well:
- …Wages for all workers and measures of real wages show similar upticks. Census Bureau data also show that real household income reached an all-time high in 2019, growing by $4,400 (a 6.8% one-year increase). … (HERITAGE FOUNDATION | March 24, 2021)
RPT: December 4, 2017
GAY PATRIOT [now, sadly, defunct] comments on the main idea that the Left are a bunch of babies with almost zero understanding of anything economic:
The tax “reform” bill the US Senate passed last night is pretty lame, actually. It keeps the current ridiculous progressive structure of seven separate tax rates. (The House reduced it to four, and the correct number ought to be one.) Susan Collins was bought off by retaining the mortgage interest deduction on vacation homes for millionaires. Freeloaders at the lower income brackets still pay nada. Some high income progressives from blue states are whining because some of their state and local taxes are no longer deductible. Sucks that you progressives in high tax blue states forgot to elect any Republican senators.
There has also been a lot of howling from the “suddenly we’re concerned about the debt” progressive left that the bill will add $1.5 Trillion to the National Debt over ten years. That figure represents less than 3% of Government expenditures in that time period. Cut Government spending 3% (I’m sure we can get by on 97% of the Government). Problem solved.
It’s a lame bill. Really, the best part of the Senate Bill passing has been watching the histrionic meltdown on the Progressive Left. (But even that gets a little boring considering the progressive left has a histrionic meltdown at literally everything Donald Trump does.)
Oh, Patti, don’t feel so bad. There are lots of other countries you can move to. Have you considered Mexico? No Republicans there. Strict gun control, too. The Government is very progressive, taxes are very progressive, and economic activated is highly regulated. It’s a lot like California, come to think of it. But with fewer Mexicans……..
POWERLINE opines well with two RAMIREZ TOONS:
- It is comical to see Democrats feigning outrage over the claim (likely false) that the GOP tax reform plan will add to the national debt. Talk about a head-snapping about face! Where was the Dems’ concern about debt when the Obama administration ran up $10 trillion of it?
….A remarkable thing happened over the weekend; Democrats rediscovered their concern about the national debt, state’s rights, and voter fraud.
The same Democrats who had no problem helping Barack Obama double the national debt to a mind-blowing $20 Trillion have attacked the Republican Senate’s limpwrist “tax reform” bill claiming it will add $1.5 Trillion to the national debt over ten years.
$1.5 Trillion represents less than 3% of Government spending over the next ten years. If that’s a problem, then, by all means, cut spending by 3%.
Democrats are also suddenly hollering about “state’s rights” because Congress is looking to make concealed carry licenses valid across state lines; like driver’s licenses. (And, yes, most states require training and a background check before a concealed carry license is issued.) The Democrats have suddenly taken a position analogous to claiming Rosa Parks only had the right to sit in the front of the bus while she was in Alabama…..
END
RPT: May 25, 2022
(OG Post was March of 2016)
The bottom small section was posted March of 2016… the updated information comes to us as a way of emboldening the comparisons between Hillary’s tax plan and Trump’s compared. With the predictions made about Trumps’ plan coming to fruition.
UPDATE
The WASHINGTON EXAMINER (Dec 2021) has a tracking of how these tax plans worked out (note the highlighted portion readers):
President Joe Biden and congressional Democrats’ Build Back Better Act would increase taxes on higher-income earners and expand business levies to help cover its $2.4 trillion price tag.
Biden and many Democrats in Congress have argued that their plan to raise taxes in the midst of an economic recovery is justified because it would help offset or reverse important elements of the Republican tax reform passed in 2017. Democrats have long claimed that the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act needs to be repealed or heavily altered because it unjustly benefits the wealthy at the expense of working and middle-class families.
However, the most recent personal income tax data from the IRS prove that this claim is completely false. The 2017 tax law has disproportionately benefited lower- and middle-income working families. The data show the law has also led to substantial improvements in economic mobility for middle-income and upper-middle-income households.
A careful analysis of detailed tax data from 2017 and 2018, the first year the TCJA went into effect and the most recent year for which detailed IRS income data are available, reveals that over just one year, households with an adjusted gross income of $15,000 to $50,000 saw their total tax bills cut by an average of 16% to 26%, with most filers enjoying at least an 18% tax cut. Similarly, filers earning between $50,000 and $100,000, one of the largest groups of taxpayers, experienced a 15% to 17% tax cut, on average, from 2017 to 2018.
Higher-income households also experienced sizable tax cuts, but not nearly as large as the tax reductions provided by the law to working and middle-class families. Those with AGIs of $500,000 to $1 million, for example, had their taxes cut by less than 9%, and filers earning $5 million to $10 million received a 3.4% cut, the lowest of any bracket provided by the IRS.
The data also show that wealthier filers ended up providing a slightly higher proportion of total personal income tax revenue in 2018 than they did in 2017. In 2017, filers earning $500,000 or more provided 38.9% of all personal income tax revenues. In 2018, the same group provided 41.5% of revenues.
That means the Trump-GOP tax cuts made the income tax code more progressive than it had previously been. That’s a remarkable finding. After all, Democrats have spent the past few years insisting the TCJA provided a huge windfall to the richest income brackets while leaving everyone else behind!
Perhaps most importantly, the tax cuts caused substantial upward economic mobility. Despite an increase in the total number of tax returns filed in 2018 compared to 2017, the number of people filing who claimed an AGI of $1 to $25,000 fell by more than 2 million. But every other income bracket above $25,000 increased, with many seeing huge gains.
The number of filers claiming an AGI of $100,000 to $200,000, for example, increased by more than 1 million in a single year……
And in April of 2022 AMERICAN’S FOR TAX REFORM noted that this delve into the IRS data shows strongly that the “Trump Tax Breaks for the Rich” helped the middle class the most:
The Internal Revenue Service’s released 2019 Statistics of Income (SOI) data, the agency’s most recent available data, shows that middle income American families saw a significant tax cut – measured as the percentage decrease in “total tax liability” between 2017 and 2019 – from the Trump-Republican Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA). Similarly, Americans saw significant decreases in tax liability from 2017 to 2018.
Total tax liability includes federal income taxes as well as taxes listed on IRS form 1040 such as payroll taxes including social security and Medicare taxes. The TCJA significantly reduced federal income taxes but did not modify payroll taxes.
As the data notes, Americans with incomes between $50,000 and $100,000 saw a substantial decline in their tax liability:
- Americans with adjusted gross income (AGI) between $50,000 and $74,999 saw a 15.2 percent reduction in average tax liabilities between 2017 and 2019.
- Americans with AGI of between $75,000 and $99,999 saw a 15.6 percent reduction in average federal tax liability between 2017 and 2019.
Middle-class Americans in key states were delivered significant tax cuts:
- Floridians with AGI between $50,000 and $74,999 saw a 19.6% reduction. Floridians with AGI between $75,000 and $99,999 saw a 17.2% reduction.
- New Yorkers with AGI between $50,000 and $74,999 saw a 18.9% reduction. New Yorkers with AGI between $75,000 and $99,999 saw a 12.4% reduction.
- Californians with AGI between $50,000 and $74,999 saw a 18.4% reduction. Californians with AGI between $75,000 and $99,999 saw a 14% reduction.
The TCJA also caused millions of Americans to see an increased child tax credit, and millions more qualified for this tax cut for the first time. The TCJA expanded the child tax credit from $1,000 to $2,000 and raised the income thresholds so millions of families could take the credit.
The TCJA also repealed the Obamacare individual mandate tax by zeroing out the penalty. Prior to the passage of the bill, the mandate imposed a tax of up to $2,085 on households that failed to purchase government-approved healthcare. Five million people paid this in 2017, and 75 percent of these households earned less than $75,000.
[….]
Additionally, the TCJA enacted a high alternative minimum tax (AMT) exemption and raised the income level at which the exemption begins to phase out. Congress enacted the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) in 1969 following the discovery that 155 people with adjusted gross income above $200,000 had paid zero federal income tax. Over time, the AMT grew so large that millions of Americans paid the tax and millions more saw increased tax complexity. The TCJA caused the number of AMT taxpayers to fall from more than 5 million in 2017 to just 263,720 in 2018.
For years, President Joe Biden has falsely claimed that the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) passed by the Congressional Republicans and President Trump overwhelmingly benefited “the rich” and large corporations and did little or nothing to help middle class families.
Even left-leaning media outlets have (eventually) acknowledged the tax cuts benefited middle class families. The Washington Post fact-checker gave Biden’s claim that the middle class did not see a tax cut its rating of four Pinocchios. The New York Times characterized the false perception that the middle class saw no benefit from the tax cuts as a “sustained and misleading effort by liberal opponents.” ……
Yep, another Democrat myth about Trump bites the dust. Here is the small original post:
ORIGINAL 2016 POST
This is with thanks to the US Tax Center:
(to enlarge right click on image and “open in another tab”)
END

Trans Women Should Be Legally Treated as Women | UC Berkeley
Christopher Hitchens was my favorite atheist, I have to say Peter Boghossian is now in the #1 spot
Discussion abounds regarding the definition of “woman,” often focused on social and emotional factors of womanhood. This claim at the University of California Berkeley raises the stakes: “Trans women should be legally treated as women.”
One woman, a molecular geneticist, strongly disagrees with the claim, while another woman, an aspiring molecular geneticist, agrees. The third participant, a man, initially stands on the “disagree” line but recalibrates his confidence toward the end of the conversation.
Participants discuss how gender identity should be handled in hospitals, prisons, and legal identification documents (like driver’s licenses). The safety of biological women is a major point of consideration.
This conversation was filmed at UC Berkeley on April 19, 2022.

Are Electric Cars “Clean”
(MEDIA FILES UPDATED 8-28-2022) This is part five of a conversation at a friends house on Christmas. This conversation included: CO2; Rising Oceans; Year 2014 Being the Hottest; Polar Bear Fraud. LOMBORG BOTTOM LINE: Typical gasoline-powered auto engines are approximately 27% efficient. Typical fossil-fueled generating stations are 50% efficient, transmission to end user is 67% efficient, battery charging is 90% efficient and the auto’s electric motor is 90% efficient, so that the fuel efficiency of an electric car is also 27%. However, the electric car requires 30% more power per mile traveled to move the mass of its batteries. (See more here) GREEN ENERGY GRID But manufacturing the famous gasoline-electric hybrid can be a dirty business. Toyota studied the car’s total environmental impact from factory to junkyard. In fact, when looking at the “materials manufacturing” phase of the car’s life cycle, the Prius was worse than the class average across all five emissions categories. (AUTO SPIES) Also, this from Reuters a few years back to put an emphasis on Dr. Lomborg’s $44 dollars of savings subsidized with $7,500 in tax-payers monies: (REUTERS) – General Motors Co. sold a record number of Chevrolet Volt sedans in August — but that probably isn’t a good thing for the automaker’s bottom line. Nearly two years after the introduction of the path-breaking plug-in hybrid, GM is still losing as much as $49,000 on each Volt it builds, according to estimates provided to Reuters by industry analysts and manufacturing experts. Cheap Volt lease offers meant to drive more customers to Chevy showrooms this summer may have pushed that loss even higher. There are some Americans paying just $5,050 to drive around for two years in a vehicle that cost as much as $89,000 to produce…. SO, to be clear… it requires A LOT MORE energy to produce the electric or hybrid car, and takes more energy to “fuel” them. From Lomborg’s USA TODAY editorial: It is time to stop our green worship of the electric car. It costs us a fortune, cuts little CO2 and surprisingly kills almost twice the number of people compared with regular gasoline cars. Electric cars’ global-warming benefits are small. It is advertised as a zero-emissions car, but in reality it only shifts emissions to electricity production, with most coming from fossil fuels. As green venture capitalist Vinod Khosla likes to point out, “Electric cars are coal-powered cars.” The most popular electric car, a Nissan Leaf, over a 90,000-mile lifetime will emit 31 metric tons of CO2, based on emissions from its production, its electricity consumption at average U.S. fuel mix and its ultimate scrapping. A comparable diesel Mercedes CDI A160 over a similar lifetime will emit 3 tons more across its production, diesel consumption and ultimate scrapping. [….] Comparing Apples to Apples [….] Yes, in both cases the electric car is better, but only by a tiny bit. Avoiding 3 tons of CO2 would cost less than $27 on Europe’s emissions trading market. The annual benefit is about the cost of a cup of coffee. Yet U.S. taxpayers spend up to $7,500 in tax breaks for less than $27 of climate benefits. That’s a bad deal. (See also WUWT, where Lomborg notes that “…large battery pack [cars]… avoids nothing or even *increases* total CO2 emissions”) This post will deal with two areas, the main one will be to simply compare the lifetime environmental impact of electric cars to regular gas cars and diesel cars and their carbon footprint. I will add some newer information here as well as combining some older posts herein. The second part is simple, where does the energy come to charge these Electric Vehicles (EVs). SUBSIDY for CARS These subsidies mainly benefit the rich, Tesla’s increased sales are directly linked to tax breaks offered to the wealthy on the backs of gas and diesel drivers: …This means that CDA leader Sybrand Buma’s comments that ‘prosecco-drinking Tesla drivers’ have profited from the tax break at the ‘expense of the ordinary man in the street’ are largely true, the paper said. It points out that the subsidies for electric cars are mainly funded by higher taxes paid by petrol and diesel car owners… Follow the sources below to subsidy sites in purchasing an electric vehicle: California just put another $116 million toward clean vehicle rebates (source)…. Administered by CSE for the California Air Resources Board, the Clean Vehicle Rebate Project (CVRP) offers up to $15,000 in electric vehicle rebates for the purchase or lease of new, eligible zero-emission and plug-in hybrid light-duty vehicles (source). A side note. California, as a government, does not make money like a normal business. It CAN ONLY tax people to get the money it spends. If it gets money from the Federal government, THEY [the Federal government] can only tax people or print money [weakening the dollar if it does this too much]. So, this $116-million comes from somewhere, and, is really just a redistribution of peoples money to an area the State thinks is important ~ but! is in fact, based on bad science. TOYOTA SAYS! So let’s start with some Prius examples. AUTOMOTIVE NEWS documents a study done by Toyota that bursts greenies bubbles: The Toyota Prius is among the greenest cars to operate. But manufacturing the famous gasoline-electric hybrid can be a dirty business. Toyota studied the car’s total environmental impact from factory to junkyard. Not surprisingly, the fuel-efficient Prius was better than average in its class of vehicles in lifetime emissions of carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxide and sulfur oxide, according to Toyota. But it was slightly worse than average in emissions of nonmethane hydrocarbons and particulate matter. Toyota says this is because producing hybrid-only parts such as motors, inverters and nickel-metal hydride batteries consumes more energy and creates more emissions. In fact, when looking at the “materials manufacturing” phase of the car’s life cycle, the Prius was worse than the class average across all five emissions categories. One proponent (now detractor) of EVs is Dr. Ozzie Zehner who has written quite fairly on the issue of alternative energy, and has an open chapter in his book for people to read. The following is via HotAir: …An environmental activist who once pushed for EVs and now works as a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley now calls electric vehicles “unclean at any speed” in a recent article for the engineering journal IEEE Spectrum (via Weasel Zippers and UPI): The idea of electrifying automobiles to get around their environmental shortcomings isn’t new. Twenty years ago, I myself built a hybrid electric car that could be plugged in or run on natural gas. It wasn’t very fast, and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t safe. But I was convinced that cars like mine would help reduce both pollution and fossil-fuel dependence. I was wrong. I’ve come to this conclusion after many years of studying environmental issues more deeply and taking note of some important questions we need to ask ourselves as concerned citizens. Mine is an unpopular stance, to be sure. The suggestive power of electric cars is a persuasive force—so persuasive that answering the seemingly simple question “Are electric cars indeed green?” quickly gets complicated. Ozzie Zehner, who worked on the experimental EV-1 at GM before it got shelved, says some of the complications are due to the economics of science and scientific research. Most of the funding comes from interested parties, which tends to produce research that supports their positions… The article HotAir references is actually really long, well balanced, and informative. I suggest the serious reader delve in as “Unclean At Any Speed” touches on the many aspects of the alternative energy push right now. One aspect noted in the article is the large rare-earth metals needed (mined) and energy used in the extraction of these and the destruction of large swaths of land mass in order to produce the batteries and magnets involved in EVs. Prius vs. Hummer I will combine a graphic from Dr. Zehner article with another noted study comparing the Prius to a Hummer (the better comparison will come later with a diesel and electric cars): (click to enlarge) Some have called the Hummer/Prius comparison into question, some of which is even hashed out in the comment section of the post where the bullet points are from, fine. (A diesel Hummer H2 would surely beat the total lifespan footprint of the comparison.) But the impact on the environment (note the moon-landing stat) and overall comparisons to diesel’s is what interests me. The author of the above article updated his post with this [for the curious]: UPDATE: Apparently the Prius was only ranked #12 in overall green-ness, behind several diesels, city roadsters, and smart cars. Experts expect the ranking to be even worse next year. See also SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN’S article entitled: “Electric Cars Are Not Necessarily Clean: Your battery-powered vehicle is only as green as your electricity supplier“ This brings me to another idea noted in the aforementioned article, even given a growth pattern in alternative fuels diesel in 2030 is still projected to be the best in low impact on the environment: Environmental Impact This is an area that might be surprising. At face value, with high gas mileage and low emissions, hybrids seem like the easy answer. But as we have previously covered at Digital Trends, vehicles with batteries may not be nearly as “green” as is often claimed. This is a complicated issue. Essentially, batteries – particularly lithium-ion batteries – are both incredibly energy intensive and also toxic to produce. This means that the carbon footprint for hybrid production is much larger than a gasoline-only or even diesel-powered car. In fact, according to some studies, fully electric vehicles have a bigger carbon footprint than diesel powered vehicles in areas where most electricity is produced using fossil fuels. Modern diesel-cars should not be compared with truck engines that blast clouds of panda-killing soot into the air. Thanks to improvements in technology, current diesel cars are comparable in terms of particulate emissions to any other gasoline-powered car. In fact Volkswagen and Audi’s clean diesel technology makes cars like the Passat TDI cleaner than 93 percent of other cars on the road. As with price, there will be specific exceptions to this rule, but diesel is greener than hybrid technology. Solar/Wind Energy Environmental Impact So diesel hybrids are the ideal for those concerned about the environment. But the rare-earth metals and substances used to make the batteries and magnets are in much less supply than coal, oil, and the like. In fact, in the 70’s it was predicted that we would be running dry of oil this year, but in fact we have at least 200-years worth of supply, the highest ever in the history of man (see point #3). To be clear, the impact on land and energy to get these materials is worse than normal automotive choices: This section is a response of sorts to Dr. Lomborg, who is interviewed in the opening video. And it is very simple, alternative energy sources create more pollution than they will save (carbon footprint wise). WIND Wind farms will create more carbon dioxide, say scientists Thousands of Britain’s wind turbines will create more greenhouse gases than they save, according to potentially devastating scientific research to be published later this year. The finding, which threatens the entire rationale of the onshore wind farm industry, will be made by Scottish government-funded researchers who devised the standard method used by developers to calculate “carbon payback time” for wind farms on peat soils. Wind farms are typically built on upland sites, where peat soil is common. In Scotland alone, two thirds of all planned onshore wind development is on peatland. England and Wales also have large numbers of current or proposed peatland wind farms. But peat is also a massive store of carbon, described as Europe’s equivalent of the tropical rainforest. Peat bogs contain and absorb carbon in the same way as trees and plants — but in much higher quantities. British peatland stores at least 3.2 billion tons of carbon, making it by far the country’s most important carbon sink and among the most important in the world. Wind farms, and the miles of new roads and tracks needed to service them, damage or destroy the peat and cause significant loss of carbon to the atmosphere, where it contributes to climate change. [….] “This is just another way in which wind power is a scam. It couldn’t exist without subsidy. It is driving industry out of Britain and driving people into fuel poverty.”… Wind power cannot meet demands, and are dependent on weather conditions, as the above graph shows. Here is a snippit of the issue at hand with Germany’s electric grid: You can see the extreme volatility of wind power. Such volatility plays havoc with the electric grid and makes fossil fuel backup generation more expensive to run because it must constantly change production rate; it cannot be run efficiently. Those constant changes cause production of more emissions than would be produced without having to contend with the quirky wind power contribution. Gosselin (a US citizen living in Germany, who received a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Arizona) notes that “Resistance to wind power in Germany is snowballing.” “The turbines, which the German government says will become the ‘workhorse’ of the German power industry, ran at over 50% of their rated capacity only for 461 hours [out of a possible 8,766], or just 5.2% of the time.” In addition to the unreliable power produced by allegedly “green” wind power, it is becoming increasingly obvious that wind generation is taking a large toll on wildlife and has deleterious effects on human health. [….] “The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) and American Bird Conservancy say wind turbines kill 440,000 bald and golden eagles, hawks, falcons, owls, cranes, egrets, geese and other birds every year in the United States, along with countless insect-eating bats. Wind turbines killed 600000 bats last year. “Renewable energy technologies simply won’t work; we need a “We get a tax credit if we build a lot of wind farms. “Suggesting that renewables will let us phase rapidly off fossil (LINK TO ARTICLE IN POWER PLANT PICS) Put another way: “A fundamental principle of information theory is that you can’t guarantee outcomes… in order for an experiment to yield knowledge, it has to be able to fail. If you have guaranteed experiments, you have zero knowledge” ~ George Gilder Interview by Dennis Prager {Editors note: this is how the USSR ended up with warehouses FULL of “widgets” (things made that it could not use or people did not want) no one needed in the real world. This economic law enforcers George Gilder’s contention that when government supports a venture from failing, no information is gained in knowing if the program actually works. Only the free-market can do this. [See my post on Capitalism.]} Wind power, in fact, pollutes the environment in a much more thorough manner… Via Independent IE “Technology” page: ….But on huge wind farms the motion of the turbines mixes the air higher in the atmosphere that is warmer, pushing up the overall temperature. Satellite data over a large area in Texas, that is now covered by four of the world’s largest wind farms, found that over a decade the local temperature went up by almost 1C as more turbines are built. This could have long term effects on wildlife living in the immediate areas of larger wind farms. It could also affect regional weather patterns as warmer areas affect the formation of cloud and even wind speeds. It is reported China is now erecting 36 wind turbines every day and Texas is the largest producer of wind power in the US. Liming Zhou, Research Associate Professor at the Department of Atmospheric and Environmental Sciences at the University of New York, who led the study, said further research is needed into the affect of the new technology on the wider environment. “Wind energy is among the world’s fastest growing sources of energy. The US wind industry has experienced a remarkably rapid expansion of capacity in recent years,” he said. “While converting wind’s kinetic energy into electricity, wind turbines modify surface-atmosphere exchanges and transfer of energy, momentum, mass and moisture within the atmosphere. These changes, if spatially large enough, might have noticeable impacts on local to regional weather and climate.” The study, published in Nature, found a “significant warming trend” of up to 0.72C (1.37F) per decade, particularly at night-time, over wind farms relative to near-by non-wind-farm regions. The team studied satellite data showing land surface temperature in west-central Texas…. ….According to Prinn and Wang, this temperature increase occurs because the wind turbines affect two processes that play critical roles in determining surface temperature and atmospheric circulation: vertical turbulent motion and horizontal heat transport. Both processes are responsible for moving heat away from Earth’s surface. In the analysis, the wind turbines on land reduced wind speed, particularly on the downwind side of the wind farms, which reduced the strength of the turbulent motion and horizontal heat transport processes. This resulted in less heat being transported to the upper parts of the atmosphere, as well as to other regions farther away from the wind farms…. Via Gateway Pundit, and the part on birds is found here: Not only do wind farms kill off high-profile bird species like golden and bald eagles and California condors, the farms also cause global warming. After hundreds of millions in blown taxpayer money and thousands of dead birds the latest research shows that wind farms cause warming. Reuters reported, via Free Republic: Large wind farms might have a warming effect on the local climate, research in the United States showed on Sunday, casting a shadow over the long-term sustainability of wind power… …The world’s wind farms last year had the capacity to produce 238 gigawatt of electricity at any one time. That was a 21 percent rise on 2010 and capacity is expected to reach nearly 500 gigawatt by the end of 2016 as more, and bigger, farms spring up, according to the Global Wind Energy Council. Researchers at the State University of New York at Albany analysed the satellite data of areas around large wind farms in Texas, where four of the world’s largest farms are located, over the period 2003 to 2011. The results, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, showed a warming trend of up to 0.72 degrees Celsius per decade in areas over the farms, compared with nearby regions without the farms. “We attribute this warming primarily to wind farms,” the study said. The temperature change could be due to the effects of the energy expelled by farms and the movement and turbulence generated by turbine rotors, it said. “These changes, if spatially large enough, may have noticeable impacts on local to regional weather and climate,” the authors said. But the Democrats will continue to dump billions into the costly energy source anyway. It makes them feel good.
fundamentally different approach.” – Top Google engineers
That’s the only reason to build them. They don’t make
sense without the tax credit.” – Warren Buffett
fuels in the United States, China, India, or the world as a whole
is almost the equivalent of believing in the Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy.”
– James Hansen (The Godfather of global warming
alarmism and former NASA climate chief)
Can you imagine the polluted, destroyed world we would have if the left had their way with green energy?
Environazis, like all progressives, care about two things: other people’s money and the power entailed in imposing their ideology. Prominent among the many things they do not care about is the environment, as demonstrated by a monstrosity planned for Loch Ness:
A giant 67 turbine wind farm planned for the mountains overlooking Loch Ness will be an environmental disaster thanks to the sheer quantity of stone which will need to be quarried to construct it, according to the John Muir Trust. In addition, the Trust has warned that the turbines spell ecological disaster for the wet blanket peat-land which covers the area and acts as a huge carbon sink, the Sunday Times has reported.
According to global warming dogma, carbon sinks are crucial in preventing human activity from causing climatic doom.
The planet isn’t the only victim of this ideologically driven enterprise:
Around one million people visit the picturesque Loch Ness, nestled in the highlands of Scotland each year, bringing about £25 million in revenue with them. Most are on the lookout for the infamous monster, but if Scottish and Southern Energy (SSE) get their way the tourists will have something else to look at: the Stronelairg wind farm – 67 turbines, each 443ft high, peppered across the Monadhlaith mountains overlooking the Loch.
- Is “green” energy, particularly wind and solar energy, the solution to our climate and energy problems? Or should we be relying on things like natural gas, nuclear energy, and even coal for our energy needs and environmental obligations? Alex Epstein of the Center for Industrial Progress explains.
NEW INFORMATION on the low frequency noise made by wind farms shows a direct connection to the health of ones heart.
Interviewed in Allgemeine-Zeitung, Vahl said that the Low Frequency Noise generated by wind turbines can weaken the heart muscle and change the blood flow.
According to NO TRICKS ZONE:
Prof. Wahl became interested in infrasound and its impact on health after a friend who lived near a wind park had complained of feeling continuously sick. It is known that all around the world people living near wind parks often experience health issues – some being severe.
The group led by Prof. Vahl conducted an experiment to find out if infrasound has an effect on heart muscle strength. Under the measurement conditions, the force developed by isolated heart muscle was up to 20 percent less.
The strength of the heart muscle is important in the event the aortic valve becomes caked up and thus more narrow. According to Dr. Vahl: “This changes the blood flow and the flow noise.”
Now researchers are discussing whether these changes can pose an additional risk to the function of the heart, the Allgemeine Zeitung reported.
Citing the results, Prof. Vahl said: “The fundamental question of whether infrasound can affect the heart muscle has been answered.”
The researchers conclude: “We are at the very beginning, but we can imagine that long-term impact of infrasound causes health problems. The silent noise of infrasound acts like a heart jammer.”
There has long been anecdotal evidence that wind turbines are injurious to human health. I first heard these stories myself on a visit to Australia in 2012 when I met several people who had experienced serious health problems from the effects of wind turbine infrasound – and had been forced to abandon their homes. Subsequently, I also spoke to people in the UK who were also victims of Wind Turbine Syndrome.
- You can read the first report I wrote on the subject here.
- Here is a more recent one, full of useful links, titled: Donald Trump is so Right to Wage War on Wind Farms
The wind industry is a massive class action suit waiting to happen. [Especially now that the World Health Organisation has confirmed the health risks – which, of course, just like Big Tobacco, Big Wind has been covering up for years] Indeed, of all the scandals to emerge from the great global warming scam, the wind industry is in my view the worst….
This realization has hit Google scientists squarely in the common sense thinking center. Google (and Apple) had grand dreams of going 100%-powered by alternative means. They have all but given up:
“Even if one were to electrify all of transport, industry, heating and so on, so much renewable generation and balancing/storage equipment would be needed to power it that astronomical new requirements for steel, concrete, copper, glass, carbon fibre, neodymium, shipping and haulage etc etc would appear. All these things are made using mammoth amounts of energy: far from achieving massive energy savings, which most plans for a renewables future rely on implicitly, we would wind up needing far more energy, which would mean even more vast renewables farms – and even more materials and energy to make and maintain them and so on. The scale of the building would be like nothing ever attempted by the human race.”
I must say I’m personally surprised at the conclusion of this study. I genuinely thought that we were maybe a few solar innovations and battery technology breakthroughs away from truly viable solar power. But if this study is to be believed, solar and other renewables will never in the foreseeable future deliver meaningful amounts of energy.
Solar
Low-Tech Magazine notes that new “research shows, albeit unintentional, that generating electricity with solar panels can also be a very bad idea. In some cases, producing electricity by solar panels releases more greenhouse gases than producing electricity by gas or even coal.” Continuing, they point out that…
Producing electricity from solar cells reduces air pollutants and greenhouse gases by about 90 percent in comparison to using conventional fossil fuel technologies, claims a study called “Emissions from Photovoltaic Life Cycles”, to be published this month in “Environmental Science & Technology”. Good news, it seems, until one reads the report itself. The researchers come up with a solid set of figures. However, they interpret them in a rather optimistic way. Some recalculations (skip this article if you get annoyed by numbers) produce striking conclusions.
Solar panels don’t come falling out of the sky – they have to be manufactured. Similar to computer chips, this is a dirty and energy-intensive process. First, raw materials have to be mined: quartz sand for silicon cells, metal ore for thin film cells. Next, these materials have to be treated, following different steps (in the case of silicon cells these are purification, crystallization and wafering). Finally, these upgraded materials have to be manufactured into solar cells, and assembled into modules. All these processes produce air pollution and heavy metal emissions, and they consume energy – which brings about more air pollution, heavy metal emissions and also greenhouse gases.
Similarly, Solar Industry Magazine notes that this process is very caustic:
There are also practical dangers to the first res ponders as well:
So an electrical grid powered by alternative fuels or “renewable energy is really a pipe-dream. Take the projections of that giant bird killing plant on the California-Nevada border:
….A solar power plant in the Mojave Desert that’s attracted negative attention for its injuries to birds is producing a whole lot less power than it’s supposed to, according to Energy Department figures.
According to stats from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, a number-crunching branch of the U.S. Department of Energy, the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System in San Bernardino County has produced only about a quarter of the power it’s supposed to, with both less than optimal weather and apparent mechanical issues contributing to the shortfall.
[….]
As Danko points out, Ivanpah’s owners have recently sought extensions on the repayment schedule for the $1.6 billion in government-backed loans that paid for Ivanpah’s construction, hoping to delay writing checks until the firms can secure a government grant they hope to use to pay down the loan… .
(SEE MORE)
BATTERIES
In an excellent post linking to a German documentary (30-minutes) and study showing the devastation to Chili of lithium mining, we find the following:
German ZDF public television recently broadcast a report showing how electric cars are a far cry from being what they are all cracked up to be by green activists.
The report titled: “Batteries in twilight – The dark side of e-mobility” [now not available] shows how the mining of raw materials needed for producing the massive automobile batteries is highly destructive to the environment. For example, two thirds of the cobalt currently comes from the Congo, where the mining rights have been acquired by China. Other materials needed include manganese, lithium and graphite.
Every electric car battery needs about 20 – 30 kg of lithium.
The mining of the raw materials often takes place in third world countries where workers are forced to work under horrendous conditions and no regard is given to protecting the environment. When it comes to “going green”, it seems everything flies out the window….
- The production of lithium through evaporation ponds uses a lot of water – around 21 million litres per day. Approximately 2.2 million litres of water is needed to produce one ton of lithium. (EURO NEWS)
AGAIN… here is a Facebook post of the same thing regarding Lithium Fields:
This is a Lithium leach field.
This is what your Electric Car batteries are made of.
It is so neuro-toxic that a bird landing on this stuff dies in minutes.
Take a guess what it does to your nervous system?
Pat yourself on the back for saving the environment.
Chile, 2nd largest lithium producer, is having water-scarcity problems as this technology takes so much water to produce battery-grade lithium. 2000 tons: 1 ton.
And the current version of the “inflation reduction act” wants 100% of EV battery components produced in the US.
Lead, nickel, lithium, cadmium, alkaline, mercury and nickel metal hydride.
Batteries are a collection of things that are extremely deadly.
Alternative fuels/energy is a DIRTY BUSINESS… but the left who live in the seclusion of the New York Times and MSNBC would never know this. I can show a graph showing skyrocketing carbon emissions worldwide for the past decade and that the temperature has dropped during this time by a small amount, and it is like showing them instructions to build an IKEA bookcase with instructions written in Gaelic!
What about the impact and supply of the materials needed to produce batteries? TreeHugger has a good post that mentions some of these environmental pitfalls. These issues involve many devices we use daily (cell phones, lap-top computers, rechargeable batteries, etc.), but add to this burden a mandated or subsidized car industry:
…lithium batteries take a tremendous amount of copper and aluminum to work properly. These metals are needed for the production of the anode & the cathode, cables and battery management systems. Copper and aluminum have to be mined, processes and manufacturing which takes lots of energy, chemicals and water which add to their environmental burden.
[….]
First of all, this study emphasizes that there would be less Lithium available than previously estimated for the global electric car market. It also states the fact that some of the largest concentrations of Lithium in the world are found in some of the most beautiful and ecologically fragile places, such as The Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia. The authors note:
“It would be irresponsible to despoil these regions for a material which can only ever be produced in sufficient quantities to serve a niche market of luxury vehicles for the top end of the market. We live in an age of Environmental Responsibility where the folly of the last two hundred years of despoilment of the Earth’s resources are clear to see. We cannot have “Green Cars” that have been produced at the expense of some of the world’s last unspoiled and irreplaceable wilderness. We have a responsibility to rectify our errors and not fall into the same traps as in the past.”
[….]
The report estimates that there would be less Lithium available than previously estimated for the global electric car market, as demand is rising for competing markets, such as cellular telephones and other electronic devices. At the same time, due to a great concentration of Lithium found in Chile, Bolivia and Argentina (70% of the world’s deposits), the United States and other developed countries needing the material will be subject to geopolitical forces similar to those they have already encountered from the member countries of OPEC…
Click HERE to go to larger file (use mouse wheel to zoom in)
In an excellent article we see the projected demands on other metals involved in the battery and transit goals:
….Regarding the demand for the different minerals, in the case of aluminum, according to our results, the demand for minerals from the rest of the economy would stand out, with the requirement for batteries having little influence. Copper would have a high demand from the rest of the economy, but it would also have a significant demand from vehicles, infrastructure and batteries. Cobalt would be in high demand because of the manufacture of batteries with the exception of the LFP battery that does not have this mineral, in the case of its demand from the rest of the economy it can be stated that it would be important but less influential than the demand for batteries. Lithium would have very high requirements from all the batteries and with a reduced demand from the rest of the economy. Manganese would have an important but contained demand coming from LMO and NMC batteries, since the requirements for this mineral would stand out in the rest of the economy. Finally, nickel would have a high demand from NMC and NCA batteries, but its main demand would come from the rest of the economy.
The batteries that would require the least materials are the NCA and LFP batteries. The NMC battery has been surpassed in performance and mineral usage by the NCA. The LiMnO2 battery has a very poor performance, so it has been doomed to disuse in electric vehicles. In addition, the LFP battery, the only one that does not use critical materials in the cathode (other than lithium), also has poor performance, requiring very large batteries (in size and weight) to match the capacity and power of batteries using cobalt.
Charging infrastructure, rail and copper used in electrified vehicles could add up to more than 17% of the copper reserve requirement in the most unfavourable scenario (high EV) and 7% in the most favourable (degrowth), so these are elements that must be taken into account…..
(GEEDS)
Half of all Cobalt made goes into electric cars.
Are Electric Vehicles really clean? | They run on dirty energy and blood of children as young as 6. | Electric cars drive human rights abuse and child labour. | China is one of the villains in this story. | Are electric carmakers equally guilty too? | Palki Sharma Upadhyay tells you.
Siddharth Kara is an author and expert on modern-day slavery, human trafficking, and child labor. Look for his new book, “Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives,” on January 31, 2023
TO MAKE MATTERS WORSE….
…. lithium is also not the only battery ingredient with a dark side. Perhaps the darkest of all is cobalt, which is commonly used, alongside lithium, in the batteries of many electric vehicles.
More than half of the world’s cobalt is mined in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). According to a 2016 Amnesty International Report, 20% of the cobalt exported from the DRC comes from artisanal mines, in which miners use either their hands or very basic tools to dig out rocks from tunnels deep underground, often for as little as $2 a day.
Worse still, UNICEF estimates 40,000 of the workers in these mines are children under the age of 18, with some as young as 7 years old. Cobalt mining also comes with serious health risks. Chronic exposure to dust containing cobalt can cause the potentially fatal lung disease “hard metal lung disease.” Many fatal accidents have also been caused by mines not being constructed or managed safely.
Clearly then, in the face of such widespread environmental damage and human rights abuses, the ethics of electric vehicles is far more complicated than the expensive car adverts and glowing newspaper headlines would have us believe…..
(VARSITY)
From the video description:
This is pretty lame. I wonder how many people think this power just comes out of the ground? Perhaps these greentards think this is magic solar power that is leached from the sun and stored in invisible floating Tesla flywheels. Bet that went right over most heads. Anyway this is a real problem for shoppers at WalGREENS. Weather they are asked or not they are subsidizing this climate hoax and paying for the fuel that is getting these FARCE-CARS from point “a” to point “b.”
And there are a lot of tax-monies/incentives used even for the above charging stations. Wiki has some pretty good references in regards to this:
Plug-in conversion kits
The 2009 ARRA provided a tax credit for plug-in electric drive conversion kits. The credit is equal to 10% of the cost of converting a vehicle to a qualified plug-in electric vehicle and in service after February 17, 2009. The maximum amount of the credit is $4,000. The credit does not apply to conversions made after December 31, 2011.[142][149]
There was (through 2010) a federal tax credit equal to 50% of the cost to buy and install a home-based charging station with a maximum credit of US$2,000 for each station. Businesses qualified for tax credits up to $50,000 for larger installations.[144][150] These credits expired on December 31, 2010, but were extended through 2013 with a reduced tax credit equal to 30% with a maximum credit of up to US$1,000 for each station for individuals and up to US$30,000 for commercial buyers.[][]
(See more HERE)
CLIMATE/WEATHER
Another factor regarding optimal output and electric vehicles is hot and cold weather. I will let a wonderful WIRED MAGAZINE article explain:
…EV drivers have other factors to consider in winter weather: How far they can go, and how long it will take them to recharge.
Cold temperatures can hurt both, especially when it gets as severe as Winter Storm Jaden, which has triggered states of emergency across the country and will subject more than 70 percent of the US population to subzero temperatures over the next few days. That’s because the lithium-ion batteries that power EVs (as well as cellphones and laptops) are very temperature sensitive.
“Batteries are like humans,” says Anna Stefanopoulou, director of the University of Michigan’s Energy Institute. They prefer the same sort of temperature range that people do. Anything below 40 or above 115 degrees Fahrenheit and they’re not going to deliver their peak performance. They like to be around 60 to 80 degrees. As the temperature drops, the electrolyte fluid inside the battery cells becomes more sluggish. “You don’t have as much power when you want to discharge,” says Stefanopoulou. “The situation is even more limited when you want to charge.”
Modern cars are designed to take that into account, with battery thermal management systems that warm or cool a battery. But while an internal combustion engine generates its own heat, which warms the engine and the car occupants, an EV has to find that warmth somewhere else, either scavenging the small amount of heat that motors and inverters make or running a heater. That takes energy, meaning there’s less power available to move the wheels.
Additionally, to protect the battery—the most expensive component of an EV—the onboard computer may limit how it’s used in extreme low temperatures. The Tesla Model S owners manual warns: “In cold weather, some of the stored energy in the Battery may not be available on your drive because the battery is too cold.”…
In a conversation between EV owners and others at WATTS UP WITH THAT, a comment that sums up the above but in a short paragraph, reads:
- It’s not just bigger, it’s huge. Unlike an IC powered car, where cold weather won’t really affect it much, an electric car is severely disadvantaged. Drop outside temperatures down to -10 degrees F (not uncommon in Chicago) and that 300 mile range drops to 75 miles. Commute 20 miles to work on a frigid winter morning and 20 miles home in slooow traffic in a snowstorm with lights, wipers, and defroster on hi, and you just might not make it.
And another story of Minnessota doo gooders plans failiung them:
The Twin City buses were supposed to go 150 miles on a single charge, but the actual range was closer to 75 miles.
Minnesota cities worked to shift toward clean energy in public transit, but complications from acquired electric vehicles have prompted significant overhauls and additional expenditures to keep the buses operational.
In Duluth, Minn., technicians installed diesel-powered heaters on electric buses as the city’s electric fleet struggled to perform. In 2015, the city received a $6.3 million federal grant, according to MinnPost, for seven battery-electric buses from Proterra, which were delivered in 2018.
Proterra, which went bankrupt in August, sold 550 buses. The company enjoyed outspoken support from the Biden administration, but the buses have given transit districts across the country extensive problems. Many of the buses, which were purchased with sizable federal grants, have broken down, and repairs have been slow going as a result of a lack of parts.
The Proterra buses in Duluth struggled to make it up steep hills and to keep riders warm in winter. Proterra technicians installed diesel-powered heaters on the buses and increased the battery capacity so they could handle steep hills and subzero temperatures, which degrade the performance of electric vehicles.
In the Twin Cities, meanwhile, the transit department received another $1.7 million federal grant for eight more electric buses from Canada-based New Flyer. The Twin City buses were supposed to go 150 miles on a single charge, but the actual range was closer to 75 miles. The buses further failed to meet 20% of their scheduled operating miles because of needed battery replacements. In 2021, the buses were out of service for most of the year because of charging station issues at the garage…..
Reality is a Bitch!
THE DAILY MAIL notes that “[e]lectric cars have 40 per cent less range when the temperature dips below freezing, new research has revealed.” Wow. Canadians are well-aware of the issue — as are the people in the northern states.
IN~OTHER~WORDS, this “venture is a giant boondoggle and these charging-stations would never survive outside of transferring wealth from business owners and those that drive the economy to cover this failure of a “choice.”
AGAIN:
“A fundamental principle of information theory is that you can’t guarantee outcomes… in order for an experiment to yield knowledge, it has to be able to fail. If you have guaranteed experiments, you have zero knowledge” — George Gilder
Interview by Dennis Prager {Editors note: this is how the USSR ended up with warehouses FULL of “widgets” (things made that it could not use or people did not want) no one needed in the real world. This economic law enforcers George Gilder’s contention that when government supports a venture from failing, no information is gained in knowing if the program actually works. Only the free-market can do this. [See my post on Capitalism.]}

Joe Biden and KJP Call Republicans Fascists
Republicans are #ultramaga FASCISTS now.
RPT’s thoughts:
- MAGA want smaller government. Fascism demands a government so large that they can come in and tell social media companies to censor climate change challenges, to censor news stories about pay for play evidenced in emails from a family members laptop. So big as to audit and disallow conservative orgs from forming, to push companies and schools to hire based off ethnicity and sex rather than SAT scores or production and contribution to the company. So powerful they can shut down your business, force kids to be “vaccinated” in order to attend school. So large that your daughters have to be in a locker room with men, or that these girls get to the top of their game through many hard hours and extra coaching and training only to have a bottom tier male “athlete” set records by unbeatable margins for women and girls. So large as to force racist material and faux history in schools. Who have the power to legislate what lightbulb you buy to what kind of car you must purchase. Etc., Etc.
TO WIT… Thomas Sowell made clear distinctions he was seeing (as an economist and historian) in the Obama admin and terminology (via PATRIOT POST).
SOWELL:
It bothers me a little when conservatives call Barack Obama a “socialist.” He certainly is an enemy of the free market, and wants politicians and bureaucrats to make the fundamental decisions about the economy. But that does not mean that he wants government ownership of the means of production, which has long been a standard definition of socialism.
What President Obama has been pushing for, and moving toward, is more insidious: government control of the economy, while leaving ownership in private hands. That way, politicians get to call the shots but, when their bright ideas lead to disaster, they can always blame those who own businesses in the private sector.
Politically, it is heads-I-win when things go right, and tails-you-lose when things go wrong. This is far preferable, from Obama’s point of view, since it gives him a variety of scapegoats for all his failed policies, without having to use President Bush as a scapegoat all the time.
Government ownership of the means of production means that politicians also own the consequences of their policies, and have to face responsibility when those consequences are disastrous – something that Barack Obama avoids like the plague.
Thus the Obama administration can arbitrarily force insurance companies to cover the children of their customers until the children are 26 years old. Obviously, this creates favorable publicity for President Obama. But if this and other government edicts cause insurance premiums to rise, then that is something that can be blamed on the “greed” of the insurance companies.
The same principle, or lack of principle, applies to many other privately owned businesses. It is a very successful political ploy that can be adapted to all sorts of situations.
One of the reasons why both pro-Obama and anti-Obama observers may be reluctant to see him as fascist is that both tend to accept the prevailing notion that fascism is on the political right, while it is obvious that Obama is on the political left.
Back in the 1920s, however, when fascism was a new political development, it was widely – and correctly – regarded as being on the political left. Jonah Goldberg’s great book “Liberal Fascism” cites overwhelming evidence of the fascists’ consistent pursuit of the goals of the left, and of the left’s embrace of the fascists as one of their own during the 1920s.
Mussolini, the originator of fascism, was lionized by the left, both in Europe and in America, during the 1920s. Even Hitler, who adopted fascist ideas in the 1920s, was seen by some, including W.E.B. Du Bois, as a man of the left.
It was in the 1930s, when ugly internal and international actions by Hitler and Mussolini repelled the world, that the left distanced themselves from fascism and its Nazi offshoot – and verbally transferred these totalitarian dictatorships to the right, saddling their opponents with these pariahs.
What socialism, fascism and other ideologies of the left have in common is an assumption that some very wise people – like themselves – need to take decisions out of the hands of lesser people, like the rest of us, and impose those decisions by government fiat.
The left’s vision is not only a vision of the world, but also a vision of themselves, as superior beings pursuing superior ends. In the United States, however, this vision conflicts with a Constitution that begins, “We the People…”
That is why the left has for more than a century been trying to get the Constitution’s limitations on government loosened or evaded by judges’ new interpretations, based on notions of “a living Constitution” that will take decisions out of the hands of “We the People,” and transfer those decisions to our betters.
The self-flattery of the vision of the left also gives its true believers a huge ego stake in that vision, which means that mere facts are unlikely to make them reconsider, regardless of what evidence piles up against the vision of the left, and regardless of its disastrous consequences…….
TOWNHALL TWEET
BONUS: Biden’s Wisdom…

CNN Hits The Nail On The Head (Mar-a-Lago)
Q: If this becomes a presidential records act violation, not more, do you think it is enough to warrant all of this?
Paul Callan: No, it’s not enough to warrant all of this.
‘Constitutionally, Yes’: CNN Legal Analyst Dumps Cold Water On Dem Hype Over Mar-A-Lago Search

“No Honest Person Could Believe This” (Tucker Carlson)
Fox News host Tucker Carlson shreds the FBI’s raid on former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home on ‘Tucker Carlson Tonight.’

Royal Air Force Only Offering Pilot Jobs to Women and Ethnic Minorities
There is a word for this — it’s called… RACISM.
(GATEWAY PUNDIT) The British Royal Air Force has suspended job offers to white men to meet their diversity targets.
No longer will white men be hired to pilot the RAF planes. They are the wrong color and gender.

“This Trial Is Worse Than the First One” (Julie Kelly)
Hat-tip to the WAR ROOM:
….Now, Kelly says the DOJ is regretting their decision to re-try the pair.
“This trial is worse than the first one. These two defense attorneys are going so hard at the government for what they did… Their main informant … has been on the stand for two days… I thought the guy was gonna crack at one point today … because not only did he once against illuminate his key role … in organizing all these events. He was paid at least $60,000 by the FBI!”…
On Julie Kelly’s TWITTER she reposted Tucker’s commentary on this:
SEE ALSO 100% FED-UP

Megyn Kelly says “Bull-Shit!”
Megyn Kelly says “Bull Shit!” (ACE OF SPADES and REAL CLEAR POLITICS hat-tip)
This is about January 6. If you believe this has to do with classified documents, having to do with bullshit Trump took with him when he left office, your head is in the sky. This is about January 6 and the never-ending desire to get Donald Trump on something. They don’t want him to run for election again. They’re mad that he did not get convicted on the first or second impeachment, they are mad that he did not get pursued criminally by the New York D.A.
They are mad Russia-gate fell apart and they are made he is ahead in the polls, crushing DeSantis, and that his candidates of choice all [won primaries] last week, and the Democrats are prepared to play dirty.
[Attorney General] Merrick Garland is clearly willing to go along with that. He’s been moving in, in concentric circles toward Donald Trump over the past several weeks, going after his top advisor with subpoenas, we’ve seen close Trump advisors in handcuffs, dragged away as if they’re like mobsters. This is really getting alarming and the American public deserves answers.

They Can Make All Russiagate Documents Classified Again (Kash Patel)
Kash Patel: Now That FBI Has Another “Ongoing Counterintel Investigation” They Can Make All Russiagate Documents Classified Again (REAL CLEAR POLITICS)
TRANSCRIPT:
KASH PATEL: And, look, it starts and ends with Russiagate. The corruption and the two-tiered system of justice that Devin and I exposed during Russiagate has been carried out, to the Hillary Clinton e-mail investigation scandal, to the Hunter Biden laptop, to Jan. 6, and now to the raid on President Trump’s home.
And let me clarify. Basically, the same corrupt FBI government gangsters, the same agents that were involved in Russiagate, the same counterintelligence agents that were involved in making the bad false call on Hunter Biden’s laptop, you’re going to see are the same counterintelligence agents that helped raid or assist in the raid to President Trump’s home.
And why is that a problem? Because these agents knowingly break their — violate their oath of office and the law, get promotions. And we need to demand their names, guys like Auten (ph) and Tibbels (ph) and other guys who also stood up to fake Whitmer prosecution in Michigan.
When Devin and I first marched down to DOJ to expose the likes of Peter Strzok, they laughed us out of the building, but what happened? He was placed on administrative leave because he broke his oath of office. And you’re going to find that exactly is what’s happening here.
And that is a counterintelligence investigation. It means it’s being run on an FBI headquarters as a national security case by these same select few of corrupt politicians who are acting as FBI agents.
…
President Trump named me his — his representative to the National Archives months ago. And we have been in a bureaucratic battle. As Devin and I have always had to, we found whole sets of documents we meted out to the American public from Russiagate. We got out about 60 percent.
That’s why President Trump made it his mission to declassify and be transparent. In October of 2020, he issued a sweeping declassification order for every Russiagate document and every single Hillary Clinton document. Then, on the way out of the White House, he issued further declassification orders, declassifying whole sets of documents.
And this is a key fact that most Americans are missing. President Trump, as the sitting president, is the unilateral authority for declassification. He can literally stand over a set of documents and say, these are now declassified, and that is done with definitive action immediately.
The fact that the bureaucrats at NARA, who referred — remember, the National Archives are the ones that referred this to the Department of Justice. But they — the same principle failed to refer Hillary Clinton to the Department of Justice when they got their hands on the classified e-mails from those servers.
And switching gears a little bit to the national security officials involved, me, as a former national security prosecutor in the National Security Division, where this case is being run out of, it’s no surprise that the likes of John Carlin, who was the assistant attorney general for national security, who authorized the Russiagate hoax to begin with, is now the number three officials at DOJ.
And Lisa Monaco is the number two official, who was his superior back then.
These folks — and this is — this is a thing I want to stress with. Now that this is a — quote, unquote — “ongoing FBI counterintelligence investigation,” they will come out to the American public and be able to say, ongoing C.I. investigation. You will never be allowed to see the Russiagate docs or any other docs that President Trump lawfully declassified.
And they will hide it from the public.
And Congress has a monumental lift ahead of them. Come November, they better start subpoenaing these documents immediately and putting these people before the American public. Merrick Garland and FBI Director Chris Wray have failed in their mission to uphold the law. They have become political hucksters. And they are completely destroying our Constitution and putting on a two-tiered system of justice.