Fossil fuels cause pollution and waste and are inefficient sources of energy. Replacing fossil fuels with clean energy should be a priority for national energy policy.

But not like this.

A picture is worth a thousand words. The absurdity of a fossil-fuel powered vehicle towing another fossil fuel powered generator charging an electric car is just dumb.

In this vid, we see a GM spokesperson showing off an electric car. Somebody asks her what is powering the electric car battery. Listen until the very end when she realizes that the coal-fired energy plant powering the building is also powering the electric car.

Climate Czar Gina McCarthy says:
"Clean Energy" is cheaper than Fossil Fuels . .🤔

Watch til end . . pic.twitter.com/l2BZNXl1HN

— Lawyerforlaws (@lawyer4laws) January 27, 2021

I’m all for getting rid of fossil fuels. But we need a rational green strategy. Electric cars aren’t going to cut it.

There isn't Enough Electricity

Toyota CEO agrees with Elon Musk: We don't have enough electricity to electrify all the cars:

Toyota CEO Akio Toyoda’s comments at the company’s year-end press conference deserve notice and no little amount of respect. He knows more about cars and their economic ecosystem than just about anyone else on the planet:

The Wall Street Journal was in attendance and noted the CEO’s disdain for EVs (electric vehicles) boils down to his belief they’ll ruin businesses, require massive investments, and even emit more carbon dioxide than combustion-engined vehicles. “The current business model of the car industry is going to collapse,” he said. “The more EVs we build, the worse carbon dioxide gets… When politicians are out there saying, ‘Let’s get rid of all cars using gasoline,’ do they understand this?”

CarBuzz has mischaracterized Toyoda’s comments. It’s not “disdain for EVs” he’s expressing. It’s disdain for the failure to count the cost of what politicians are proposing. More EVs will demand more electricity.

Toyoda is getting at two things. One, EVs are not powered by magical unicorn emissions, they are powered by the means we use to generate electricity. In Japan, the United States, and everywhere else, that’s fossil fuels to the tune of a huge majority of our electric power generation (61% in the U.S., with wind and solar making up about 17%...

If the politicians who are pushing to ban gas cars and force everyone over to EVs with renewables at their present or near-future state of development do understand any of this, they’re not letting on. They’ll wreck modern industry.

Toyoda isn’t alone in this reality check. Elon Musk recently sounded a similar note. Note well that he also has no “disdain” for EVs. He’s building his empire on EVs, and his Teslas make EVs flashy and desirable. Yet he’s sounding a similar warning to Toyoda’s.

Perhaps two of the world’s leading car experts should be listened to before Tokyo, Washington, or any other capital follows California’s lead and bans gas cars without considering the ripple effects

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/bryan-preston/2020/12/21/toyota-ceo-agrees-with-elon-musk-we-dont-have-enough-electricity-to-electrify-all-the-cars-n1222999

Disposal Problems

Electric cars are supposed to be more environmentally friendly, avoiding the stink and pollution of fossil fuel vehicles. But there’s another side to this story.

The disposal of used electric batteries poses a terrible pollution problem, similar to that of nuclear waste.

More than 1 million electric vehicles were sold worldwide in 2017. The study authors estimate that those cars alone will ultimately result in 250,000 tons of discarded battery packs. If those were to end up in landfills, they’d run the risk of going through a process called “thermal runaway,” which is basically a chemical reaction in the battery that can cause it to heat up, potentially to the point of burning or exploding. (It’s the reason why TSA prohibits spare lithium-ion batteries in checked baggage when you board a plane.)

The electric vehicle industry needs to solve its battery  disposal problem.

https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/6/20951807/electric-vehicles-battery-recycling

How much waste would be generated if millions more electric cars were sold each year?

Moreover, batteries used in electric cars contain cobalt. Two-thirds of the world’s cobalt production comes from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a communist dictatorship that sends tens of thousands of African kids into mines, scrabbling and retrieving cobalt. These kids get sick and even die.

From CNBC: “The African nation supplies more than two thirds of the world’s cobalt but human rights groups have raised concerns that the industry relies on child workers.”

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/16/tesla-glencore-cobalt-gigafactory.html

Oops. We don’t worry too much about the inconvenience of human rights in our Brave New World run by AI, Big Tech, and multilateral corporations interested only in the bottom line.

While virtue-signaling drivers in the West proudly show off their electric cars – trying to solve a global warming problem that might not even exist – African kids are being exploited and dying. Battery waste is piling up.

Pesky problems like human rights get brushed under the rug in the name of economic “progress” and climate change activism. This is the new scientific materialist technocratic state that is being pushed by Big Tech and our “elites.”

The “new normal” and “build back better” doesn’t include real research into clean, unlimited sources of energy. It’s about time we as a nation rearranged our priorities.

Changing Energy Research Priorities

We need a massive investment in R & D to study overunity devices – devices that can take energy from the vacuum, or utilize what Tesla called “cosmic energy.” We need to study the push-pull effect of permanent magnets, which hold their charges indefinitely. Properly arranged, permanent magnets could turn a generator rotor or induce a flow of current through a wire.  

Instead, we get absurd “Green New Deals” that rely largely on fossil fuel technologies, and use conservation to make people do without. Meanwhile, the elites fly on private jets and live in mansions with the carbon footprint of small towns.

The United States is known for its ability to innovate. Let’s get off the fossil fuel bandwagon and on to some real research into frontier physics. We can do it! It will be public money well spent.

Update 2/24:

Mexico gives up on renewables, revives coal industry

Mexico, the eleventh biggest population on Earth, was all enthused about renewables a few years ago, but now they are actively winding back wind and solar and reactivating coal projects. Mines are being reopened, coal miners are being hired and the state owned Federal Electricity Commission (CFE) has been told to buy electricity from its own coal generators before they buy electricity from the privately owned renewables generators."

https://joannenova.com.au/2021/02/un-greening-mexico-gives-up-on-renewables-revives-coal-industry/

NPR reports that China is building more than 300 NEW coal-fired energy plants around the world. Why? Because renewables aren't reliable as of yet. We need a lot more research into non-fossil fuel solutions.

Update 4/10-2021:

Solar panels (another green energy source) are also beginning to create pollution problems. Wired magazine states in an article titled, Solar Panels Are Starting to Die, Leaving Behind Toxic Trash: Photovoltaic panels are a boon for clean energy but are tricky to recycle. As the oldest ones expire, get ready for a solar e-waste glut:

Solar panels are an increasingly important source of renewable power that will play an essential role in fighting climate change. They are also complex pieces of technology that become big, bulky sheets of electronic waste at the end of their lives—and right now, most of the world doesn’t have a plan for dealing with that.

But we’ll need to develop one soon, because the solar e-waste glut is coming. By 2050, the International Renewable Energy Agency projects that up to 78 million metric tons of solar panels will have reached the end of their life, and that the world will be generating about 6 million metric tons of new solar e-waste annually. While the latter number is a small fraction of the total e-waste humanity produces each year, standard electronics recycling methods don’t cut it for solar panels.

https://www.wired.com/story/solar-panels-are-starting-to-die-leaving-behind-toxic-trash/

"Helping the environment" by buying electric cars and using solar panels is not a panacea for a green earth because these technologies create enormous pollution problems. A massive change in national energy research is needed.