Tag Archives: markets

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

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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.

Logistics Matters…

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…far beyond the process of getting soldiers and consumables to a battlefield and to the battlers.

In the aftermath of Germany’s—and much of Europe’s—considered decision to make themselves dependent on Russian natural gas and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s equally considered decision to limit and cut off natural gas supplies to Europe to try to coerce behaviors acceptable to Putin, Germany, et al., are (re)discovering the need for better logistics and logistical execution.  The lessons are available to the US, too, if the government is willing to learn.

Europe’s energy crisis has unleashed a global battle over natural-gas tankers….

And [emphasis added]

European countries ramped up their purchases of liquefied natural gas from the US, Qatar, and other sources this year as Russia cut supplies to the continent. They are competing with peers in South Korea and Japan—where gas demand has surged during a heat wave—for a finite amount of supply ferried by a limited number of vessels.

LNG-capable tankers are long-lead items that take specialized equipment to keep the natural gas cooled and under pressure. They’re also expensive, hence the interest in only limited inventories of such ships—they’re expensive even simply to have, if they’re just sitting around in port unused.

It’s not just the complexity of the ships, though, that contribute to the present long-lead times.

Shipmakers in South Korea, the world’s biggest producer of LNG tankers, don’t have free capacity for new orders until 2027[.]

However, the wonders of Europe have known for some time that they needed more LNG tankers.

LNG and the tankers that carry the fuel were in high demand even before the conflict, as extreme weather curtailed hydropower, and many economies sought to ditch coal to reduce carbon emissions.

The complexity of these logistics is further illustrated by this little fillip: the price of steel is rapidly rising, an accelerated increase driven by demand from a broad reach of needs in addition to simply making boats.

The lessons for the US?

The need for more natural gas (and oil) production, more flexible production, better and expanded distribution grids to refiners, and in the present context, expansion of port facilities able to convert natural gas to liquid natural gas and then to transfer that LNG to LNG-capable tankers.

And maybe build some of our own LNG tankers. And get rid of the Jones Act.

An Interesting Exercise

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Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot has announced that Chicagoans can look forward to her planned bump in their property taxes of 2.5%, effective next year.

Maybe the increase is warranted, maybe it isn’t. Here’s the exercise. Lightfoot needs to release, for each of the prior five years, detailed line-item allocations of budgeted property tax collections and the production schedule for each of those allocated-for items.

In parallel with that and for each of those same five years, she needs to release detailed line-item actual expenditures, supported by receipts for each expenditure, for every step of the supply/expense chain from allocation through intermediate purchases/expenses—including identifying intermediate and final suppliers, wages suppliers paid for production of each item at that stage of the chain, the services and hard goods bought, the date of each purchase, the date of actual delivery of each purchase—through to final allocated-for product delivery and the date of that final delivery. For those projects not yet completed and those items not yet finally delivered, she needs to release the originally scheduled dates, their current status, and concrete, measurable reason(s) for the delay, if any.

The exercise, also, would be as informative as it would be interesting.

0% Inflation

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That’s what President Joe Biden (D) said, just a few days ago, when overall inflation came out unchanged in July vs June. (I’ll elide, here, the year-on-year inflation rate of 8.5% in July, which is a little different from 0%.)

Today we received news that our economy had zero percent inflation in the month of July. Here is what that means: while the price of some things went up last month, the price of other things went down by the same amount.

Among those things whose price went up is food, which all of us need for survival, even as we don’t need gasoline or airline tickets just to survive.

…in July, food prices accelerated further, the Labor Department reported on Wednesday. The food at home category, which tracks the cost of groceries, surged 13.1% over the last year, the most significant increase since March 1979. On a monthly basis, prices jumped 1.4%.

The increase in the cost of food for our families was somewhat more than zero. In fact, annualized, that 1.4% month-to-month increase works out to 18.2%, even larger than that realized annual increase of 13.1%.

Biden is determined to make a big deal about one short-term inflation statistic, and he’s equally determined to pretend another short-term inflation statistic, one that’s critical to families, doesn’t exist. He’s speaking Newspeak, not English.

Food or Fuel?

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That’s the choice being forced on Americans by the push for “clean” fuel for our cars, even as the Left and the Progressive-Democratic Party push for elimination of gasoline-burning cars. Dave Loos, Illinois Corn Growers Association’s Director of Biofuels and Research, actually is proud of that diversion of food to fuel.

Illinois has 13 ethanol plants that can produce 1.6 to 1.7 billion gallons of ethanol annually.

A bushel of corn produces 2.8 gallons of ethanol. That’s roughly 590 million bushels of corn diverted from food in Illinois alone. Illinois corn farmers produced 2.13 billion bushels of corn in 2019. The equivalent (because it’s not only Illinois corn in those plants) of more than 27% of Illinois’ corn production is diverted away from food production in Illinois’ plants.

Food or fuel? Food—corn—diverted from Americans’ tables and from ranchers’ animal feed (and so diversion of meat from Americans’ tables) is being sacrificed to produce ethanol for vehicles that are intended to not exist in any great number in a few short years.

And this doesn’t address the environmental and economic damage done by the Renewable Fuel Standard—the Federal government’s ethanol mandate. From Environmental outcomes of the US Renewable Fuel Standard, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences last winter:

[T]he RFS increased corn prices by 30% and the prices of other crops by 20%, which, in turn, expanded US corn cultivation by 2.8 Mha (8.7%) and total cropland by 2.1 Mha (2.4%) in the years following policy enactment (2008 to 2016). These changes increased annual nationwide fertilizer use by 3 to 8%, increased water quality degradants by 3 to 5%, and caused enough domestic land use change emissions such that the carbon intensity of corn ethanol produced under the RFS is no less than gasoline and likely at least 24% higher.

That’s an example of the irrationality of Left and of their politicians.