Tag Archives: political parties

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.

Contempt for us Americans

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President Joe Biden (D), leader of the Progressive-Democratic Party is building on the contempt Herb Croly, one of the founders of the modern Progressive movement, held for us average Americans, and he’s following in the footsteps of those modern Progressive-Democrats, ex-President Barack Obama, of Bible- and gun-clinging bitterness of flyover country Americans infamy, and Hillary Clinton, of 10s of millions of us being irredeemably deplorable odium.

At a Bethesda, MD, fundraiser for his Progressive-Democratic Party last week, Biden had this to say about half of all of us Americans:

What we’re seeing now is the beginning or the death knell of an extreme MAGA philosophy. It’s not just Trump, it’s the entire philosophy that underpins the—I’m going to say something, it’s like semi-fascism.

This is a part of what makes this fall, and the fall of 2024, so important.

It’s Not Even That

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The Wall Street Journal thinks President Joe Biden’s (D) write-off of $10,000 worth of student loan debt is a “forgiveness coup.”

It has that effect, but I don’t think Biden is operating that deviously. This is nothing more than Biden and his Progressive-Democratic Party syndicate nakedly buying votes for this fall and 2024. It’s the bread part of bread and circuses, with the circuses being staged by his Party supporters in Congress alternately touting his having bypassed Congress to do this and bleating that he didn’t go far enough in the doing.

But at what cost is Biden buying those votes? Purely fiscally, he’s forcing us taxpayers to pony up $300 billion to make good on Biden’s largesse, according to Penn Wharton, and as much as twice that according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

Politically, the move seriously angrifies a major fraction of us American citizens and voters. Perhaps chief among these are the majority of us who have no student debt to pay off: we never went to college/university; we went to work, instead, vis., in the trades, without which no house, no office building, no road, no mine or well, no part of our nation’s infrastructure gets built. Or we went to other than Ivy League schools to get quality educations in marketable areas of study, didn’t borrow to do so, and got jobs. Or we went to Ivy League or those Other Than schools, borrowed, and paid off our loans—because we got degrees in marketable areas and so got jobs.

We are the folks Biden and his syndicate are explicitly tapping to cover his forgiveness. We’re the folks who have demonstrated a grand capacity to pay off debt, so Biden is calling on us to use that skill some more.

Morally, it’s costing those bailed-out students the practice of actually keeping their own commitments, and it’s trapping them into the welfare cage of being too used to government welfare to get out of it. Because that’s the easy way out for them, and that’s what this sort of “forgiveness” teaches them.

There’s also the potential financial cost to these bailed out persons: now they have money to buy their first house, start a family, buy a car, …? Who’ll lend them the money? Are they now too great a credit risk, expecting as they might, simply to be able to walk away from that loan, too, when repaying it becomes inconvenient to them? Who’ll be willing to hire them, with potential employers looking askance at their willingness to walk away from inconvenient commitments.

The answers to those last questions will unroll only over the next few years—possibly to no serious effect, possibly to the great detriment of these persons, and thence to our economy.

One other thing is certain: colleges and universities will raise their tuition and other charges to absorb this Progressive-Democrat donation. That will leave none of us in the real economy better off.

That’s Huge

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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.

Turley is Right

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He’s also wrong. Jonathan Turley, Shapiro Chair for Public Interest Law at George Washington University, in his op-ed regarding AG Merrick Garland’s dishonest (my term) leaks about the DoJ/FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago wrote, in part,

Someone is clearly lying. The Trump Team said that it was cooperating and would have given access to the government if it raised further objections. The Justice Department has clearly indicated that time was of the essence to justify this unprecedented raid on the home of a former president. Yet, Attorney General Merrick Garland reportedly waited for weeks to sign off on the application for a warrant and the FBI then waited a weekend to execute that warrant. It is difficult to understand why such communications could not be released in a redacted affidavit while protecting more sensitive sections.

Someone clearly is lying. One of the someones is empirically demonstrated to be Merrick Garland. Time plainly was not of the essence with those blatant, carefully considered delays in getting the warrant and then in actually executing it.

Whether Trump is also lying—both could be; press pontifications notwithstanding, this is not an either/or situation—could be just as empirically demonstrated: release the affidavit, wholly unredacted. Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart surely has a copy in the court records that he could release should Garland continue to be intractable. That Trump is calling for the affidavit’s unredacted release is indicative of whether he’s lying. That Garland is resisting the affidavit’s release, even in redacted form, also is indicative of whether Trump is lying.

But Turley also is wrong.  [R]elease[]…a redacted affidavit while protecting more sensitive sections.

There are no “more sensitive” sections in the affidavit. There are no serious investigations that could be compromised by release of the unredacted affidavit. None in progress by an FBI that routinely lied to the FISA courts to get secret warrants. None by an FBI that falsifies evidence in pursuit of warrants. None by an FBI that colluded in the manufacture of a Russia collusion hoax by trading on a fake dossier. None by an FBI that attempted entrapment by faking a kidnap-the-Governor case.