YGTBSM

Another installment, this one from Canada—Vancouver, BC.

That city has a brand new fire engine. It’s all electric: not a drop of evil hydrocarbon in it for fuel or any other power. Never mind that it can’t function as a fire engine. It’s ALL ELECTRIC. Yay.

[T]he new e-truck will cost $300,000 more than a comparable diesel model, pump 40 per cent less water and have such a short range (30 km) because of its enormous weight that it will have to have backup diesel power in case it runs out of juice on the way to a blaze.
But, the city points out, it won’t give off diesel fumes and will be much quieter than existing diesel fire trucks.

Jayjuz.

They’d have done better with a horse-drawn, hand-powered pumper.

More here.

H/t Ralph Schwarz

States Aim to be Zero-Emissions in their Cars by 2035

California has decided to ban all ICE car sales in the State by 2035—in the name of only zero-emission cars being allowed to be sold.

Never mind that it’s an impossible task, or that California, Washington, and Massachusetts are deceiving all of us and themselves with their claim of and demand for zero-emissions in cars sold in those States. This is, to use the technical term, a crock. Zero-emission cars are an impossibility, and it will be an impossibility for the foreseeable future of human history.

Mining for the raw materials for the batteries for these cars, and mining for the metals and other minerals that go into making any car, is not zero-emission: it takes energy to do all of that, and that energy comes from burning fuel—coal, oil, natural gas.

Shipping those raw materials to processing plants takes energy, and that energy comes from burning fuel—coal, oil, natural gas.

Processing that raw material into the components—batteries, car parts, wiring for the cars—takes energy, and that energy comes from burning fuel—coal, oil, natural gas.

Shipping those finished components to the final assembly plants takes energy, and that energy comes from burning fuel—coal, oil, natural gas.

Delivering those finished cars to their dealers for sale takes energy, and that energy comes from burning fuel—coal, oil, natural gas.

The energy for charging and recharging the batteries in those “zero-emission” cars takes energy, and that energy comes from burning fuel—coal, oil, natural gas.

Expanding the electric grid and building out a national network—or even just a city-wide network—of charging stations takes energy, and that energy comes from burning fuel—coal, oil, natural gas.

And getting the raw materials, components, assembly, shipping along the way to get the components for the grid build-out and to get those recharging stations—see above.

And that’s just a high-level view of the energy requirements for producing electric cars. Electric cars are not at all zero-emission vehicles.

That’s Huge

The Progressive-Democratic Party’s just passed Climate Correction Act/Inflation Reduction Act—Party can’t decide which it is—as doing wonders for Earth’s climate.

The Biden administration claims the law will enable the US to reduce carbon emissions in 2030 by around 40% below 2005 levels.

Environmentalist and Copenhagen Consensus President Bjorn Lomborg offered some actual data on the matter.

If you plug the predicted emissions decline into the climate model used for all major United Nations climate reports, it turns out the global temperature will be cut by only 0.0009 degree Fahrenheit by the end of the century. This is assuming the law’s emission reductions end when its funding does after 2030. But even if you charitably assume they’ll somehow be sustained through 2100 without any interruption, the impact on global temperature will still be almost unnoticeable, at 0.028 degree Fahrenheit.

That’s noise, not signal. Day-to-day—year-to-year—temperature varies, up and down, by that much.

But the Biden administration is perfectly willing to trash our economy and damage the lives of hundreds of millions of us Americans through that economic damage so it can virtue-signal and, especially, protect its political standing with the extreme Left.

That’s huge.

Climate and Party

Here is the Progressive-Democratic Party’s goal with the Build Reduced Back Act just passed unilaterally by Party in the Senate and about to be passed unilaterally by Party in the House, in a nutshell as summarized by the Wall Street Journal:

[It] won’t reduce inflation, won’t reduce the budget deficit, and it won’t reduce the world’s temperature. What it will do is transfer some $369 billion from taxpayers and drug companies to the pockets of green energy businesses and investors.

Notice that. The Act isn’t about correcting the planetary climate. Never mind the arrogance of claiming the US can impact the planet’s climate when the People’s Republic of China and India are rapidly expanding their use of/dependence on fossil fuels and the associated alleged pollution output of CO2, or that Africa cannot switch to “renewable” energy. It’s strictly about passing billions of American taxpayer dollars to the Climate Funding Industry in return for (Party hopes) Climate Funding Industry campaign funding, votes, and political power maintenance/enhancement.

CO2 Emissions

In Monday’s Wall Street Journal Letters section concerning net-zero and carbon emissions, a writer asks

When can we have an honest discussion of a plan to reduce carbon emissions?

We cannot until we have an honest discussion of the context of carbon emissions and why we should care about them. That context includes all the epochs of higher planetary temperatures and lush life, epochs of higher atmospheric CO2 concentrations and lush life, and those separate sets of epochs’ lack of correlation with each other.