Environment & Energy
In reply to the discussion: Electric/hybrid cars for low mileage drivers [View all]NNadir
(34,757 posts)I am well aware of the dangerous and pernicious popular belief that electricity is "green."
I regard these as uninformed opinions, rather the equivalent to the belief that ivermectin cures Covid.
Ivermectin doesn't cure Covid and electricity isn't "green."
Chanting these opinions to the contrary repeatedly will not have any effect on the observed results of science.
Amory Lovins, the antinuke asshole who wrote this awful piece of bullshit, Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken?, often fires off numbers in his writing without explicitly stating whence they came. The text of "Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken?" contains the word "Study" nine times, without a single fucking reference to the study itself that one could find. That's right, the "genius" antinukes most famous line of shit contains zero references, zero, and, in my opinion, zero sense.
Regrettably, the "road" he proposed was taken, with the result of extreme global heating, extreme global forest fires, extreme glacier melts, extreme weather, and extreme destruction of precious ecosystems.
I will have been here at DU for 22 years next month, hearing continuously these reactionary opinions about electric cars and so called "renewable energy", almost all of them involved with soothsaying as opposed to observation of real data. When I joined DU in 2022, the concentration of the dangerous fossil fuel waste CO2 was 376.18 ppm. Here's what's reported this morning:
Week beginning on October 06, 2024: 422.17 ppm
Weekly value from 1 year ago: 418.47 ppm
Weekly value from 10 years ago: 395.73 ppm
Last updated: October 12, 2024
Weekly average CO2 at Mauna Loa
When I joined DU, the 52 week running average of weekly data in comparison to that ten years previously showed a rate of increase was 16.65 ppm/10 years. As of last week it was 25.45 ppm/10 years. Still the chants remain.
I've been listening, in increasing horror as these numbers worsen, to Lovinsian rhetoric being chanted the whole time I've been her, almost 22 years.
The data just posted from the Mauna Loa Observatory suggests so much for the value of all the chanting.
The Disastrous 2024 CO2 Data Recorded at Mauna Loa: Yet Another Update.
Of course, over the years, I watched Eloon Musk going from electric car hero to something quite different in the general sensibility of this website, although there is still traces of Tesla and Powerwall® worship here, quite clearly. The bullshit electric car fantasy, in all of its ugly manifestations, including but not limited to cobalt slavery, has done nothing, zero, zilch to address climate change.
Let me repeat something I've repeated previously in this thread:
The corresponding author, Dr. Jeremey Michalek, has over 145 scientific publications, and his top ten papers have been cited well over 3000 times, his full output having been cited 7,523 times overall.
Jeremy J. Michalek
If someone wishes to write Dr. Michalek, whose h index is 42, to tell him that the scientific paper I cited reminds them of a 2008 article by a journalist in Slate his email is available. I wouldn't expect Dr. Michalek to take such a correspondence seriously.
Email: jmichalek@andrew.cmu.edu
The link is a "reference," and is coupled with a description of the credibility of the author, whose paper is filled with data and references, 54 of them, almost all to the primary scientific literature, in which Dr. Michalek himself is referenced over 7,500 times.
I have prided myself in my tenure here, when writing about the causes and effects of extreme global heating now observed in spite of all the chanting, battery worship, hydrogen worship, wind turbine worship, solar cell worship - all of which I argue has left the planet in flames - on citing the primary scientific literature and referencing it, as often as I can, explicitly. It should be clear where my ideas originate, although I have also learned to think critically about the places I go to form them.
I would contrast my approach with that of the "genius" of Amory Lovins, who in a Trumpian fashion likes to carry on about his big brain, unreferenced balderdash vaguely presented. Inside Amory Lovins Brain.
Fuck all the marketing! What I think of Lovins' brain is that it's fairly empty, and what is otherwise in it is ossified propaganda.
One of the advantages, I claim, of my approach of reading and citing direct sources in contrast to that of Lovins and his electric car/hydrogen car worshipping minions and fellow travelers is that in my approach to reality, in a long life in which I found my generation to be as disappointing as hell, is that I have been able to change my mind and do so by finding things out and reflecting upon them. If that's iconoclastic, so be it.
Once I was uneducated enough to have actually believed that people like Lovins and Musk were geniuses; among the last pleasures of life which is running out, is that I built a pretty good bullshit detector, of which I am proud. I have learned to detest Lovins and Musk and many similar people famous for alleged "genius." I may not be a genius, but I'm happy to claim I'm able to detect what isn't genius.
Have a nice weekend.