Intentional deception or total incompetence

This post has to do with a couple of Wattsupwiththat posts, one from last week, and one more recent.

The first is by Willis Eschenbach, The Mirage of Electric Vehicles. Eschenbach is ridiculed as a non-scientist by climate zealots. He blogs at WUWT.

Climate zealots are usually dismissive of anyone without scientific credentials who criticize their work, while at the same time ignoring the fact that Al Gore and Bill McKibbon are without credentials, with Gore in fact having had trouble with both science and math in college. Here’s Wikipedia in his defense:

Gore was an avid reader who fell in love with scientific and mathematical theories,[21] but he did not do well in science classes and avoided taking math.[20] During his first two years, his grades placed him in the lower one-fifth of his class. During his second year, he reportedly spent much of his time watching television, shooting pool and occasionally smoking marijuana.[20][21

In order to fall in love with scientific and mathematical theories, one must first possess enough brain power to comprehend those theories, even to the point of self-realization that we can all be wrong, very wrong about what we think. Anyway, call it what it is – Gore is in the crowded field of climate zealotry, and so can be as wrong and stupid as he can be, and outfits like Wikipedia will still defend him.

Back to Eschenbach, who holds no scientific degree. He seems to understand math, a field Gore avoided.

The Department of Energy’s Argonne National Lab has just released a study showing that in 2021, US privately-owned plugin hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) and electric vehicles (EVs) “saved about 690 million gallons of gasoline.”

I have often asked the question of electric vehicles, just where do they get their electricity? The standard answer, “from charging stations,” begs the question. Where does the electricity that charging stations put out come from? The answer, according to Eschenback, is that 61% of electricity generated in the US comes from fossil fuels. Add in a few other factors, and EVs are essentially only saving about one third of the Argonne claim.

The Argonne report also says that from 2010 to 2021, EVs have saved 2.1 billion gallons of gas. So let’s be generous and say that in 11 years, EVs have saved about a third of that, the equivalent of about 750 million gallons of gas.

Now that sure sounds like a lot of gasoline, three-quarters of a billion gallons.

However, as always, a sense of perspective is required. The US uses about 370 million gallons of gas per day … so that’s only about two days’ worth of gas.

I say again. Over the last eleven years, electric vehicles in the US have saved Two. Days. Worth. Of. Gasoline.

And the cost is huge, $10 billion in subsidies to date, more on the horizon.

The second article is from The Manhattan Contrarian, included in our blogroll. (The Manhattan Contrarian Energy Storage Paper has Arrived.) I wrote about this issue last May (link), quoting reporter Emily Blunt of the Wall Street Journal. She wrote, concerning future projected energy shortages, that

  • “The challenge is that wind and solar farms—which are among the cheapest forms of power generation …”
  • “While a large amount of battery storage is under development … “
  • “Large, sustained outages have occurred with greater frequency over the past two decades, in part because the grid has become more vulnerable to failure with age and an uptick in severe weather events exacerbated by climate change.”

All three of those points are dead-wrong. Wind and solar are “cheap” only if one ignores immense subsidy behind them; and we are not having severe weather events “impacted by climate change.” The Wall Street Journal is supposedly a rigorously fact-checked news outlet, more trusted than liberal sources like New York Times and Washington Post, and still puts out nonsense as above.

Regarding her second point, this brings us to the Contrarian. He has put out a 22-page paper to the Global Warming Policy Foundation, whom I do not trust as anything more than controlled opposition. Nonetheless, the paper stands or falls on its own. It is summarized the the linked article.

MC deals with two estimates of the amount of power storage we will need from batteries to back up wind and solar for Germany, and arrives at two numbers from two different sources. They are 25,000 GWh (gigawatt hours), or 56,000 GWh, so that we can presume to know an answer is one or the other, or something in between. 

To the left (or above), taken from the MC piece, is a 150 MWh battery storage facility in Australia, currently under construction. Notice I emphasize “M“, or megawatt, which is at 150 only 15% of one gigawatt. To supply us with enough of these units to fill in the current shortfall in German battery storage, we would have to build from 167,000 (25,000 GWh) to 373,000 (56,000 GWh) of them.

Do you begin to see the enormity of this undertaking? Do you sense what I sense? It is unfeasible. Hence the title of this post, taken from MC, that we are dealing with either intentional deception or total incompetence.

Take heart. Germany is planning a “20-fold” expansion of battery storage by the year 2031. That sort of news reporting passes unchallenged, and is made to sound impressive. According to MC, that expansion would lift Germany’s storage capacity to 8.81 GWh.

Rather than tens of thousands of GWh, it’s single digits. How does that stack up in percentage terms against the projected requirements?:

In other words, the amount of energy storage that Germany is planning for 2031 is between 0.016% and 0.036% of what it actually would need. This does not qualify as a serious effort to produce a system that might work.

Again, we are dealing with an unfeasible goal.

We are like lemmings being led over a cliff, but the ones leading the jump will not themselves take a fall. It is the rest of us. And yes, I do not imagine total incompetence in leadership circles. It can only be intentional (and deadly) deception.

24 thoughts on “Intentional deception or total incompetence”

  1. IMO (as an EV driver myself), EVs are just as much a dead need as the ICE (internal combustion engine). have been convinced for a while that the current EV craze is a well-thought out plan to give us another non-solution because we can only buy what’s on the market. Even disregarding the production and raw material issues EVs are just another ploy to keep us controlled and limited because power can be turned off at the flick of a switch.
    My little Leaf has saved my life during ‘CV’ when I lost all my income and recently when gas prices went sky high. I love how beautiful it drives. However, it’s an early one and the battery is giving out. I am faced with an expensive repair or throwing it out.
    We really have to stop fighting between gas and electric vehicles. What we need is real technology, for for this age, that provides real solutions.
    The deeper issue is that ‘they’ -DS, WEF, cabal! call them what you will – do not want us mobile at all.

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    1. My 2018 Tacoma is advanced technology. EVs have been around from the beginning, but petroleum products won that contest, as they are clean and efficient and very reliable. And targeted for elimination losing to inferior technology. You just gave reasons why your EV is not a good choice, imagining that its problems have been solved in newer models. I guess they are going to have to pry my cold dead hands off the steering wheel.

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      1. No, you didn’t get my point at all. I never said newer models had solved the issues. I said both technologies are dead end and not real solutions. If you consider your Tacoma ‘advanced technology’ I’m afraid I can’t help you. Because it’s obsolete, no matter how fancy they may dress it up.
        I don’t know why I never get a friendly conversation going on your site. Be that as it may, I’m tired of your condescension and for the sake of peace will not be back.

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        1. A little cryptic, and anyway, since you are doing a storm out (certain people need that satisfaction, but I have no use for it) there is no point. I don’t know if you are talking George Jetson or Fred Flintstone in terns of advanced technology. I only know that there is no future in EVs until they solve the battery problem, and as this post maintains, they are not even close. As such, those leading us in that direction are malevolent. It is nasty business, centered around depopulation. That’s what I write about. Not Tacomas.

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          1. “And yes, I do not imagine total incompetence in leadership circles. It can only be intentional (and deadly) deception.”

            The population part of the equation is the only thing that makes sense given present and near future capacity. There are a couple of UN Agenda 21 maps that have been floating around for years that depict the smart city corridors where people will live and the re-wilding of the rest. It always seemed impossible until now.

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        2. Anita,

          ICE (internal combustion engines) sure as hell are not “obsolete”.

          Especially given cleanliness and reliability (good for 300k + miles).

          Can you do that? Can you create something from nothing …to that effect?

          No..I didn’t think so.

          Drive your Petro car…and drive some more.

          We don’t hate you for hating technology..we don’t hate you for hating engineering.

          Just wise up…please

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  2. I’m beginning to think that such hollow scams are happening because there is so little resistance to anything these days. No time to develop a high quality scam when low caliber ones will have emptied all the pockets before you can put it into place.

    Watching college football I kept seeing a commercial for an HIV drug (yes I know that’s B.S. to start with). Its motto was “U = U” for “Undetectable = Untransmittable.” A shot every 2 months would allow for buggery with a clear conscience, I guess. It would push the HIV below “detectable limits.”

    Quite a transparent admission of the sham of allopathic medicine. What a country!

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  3. It was once ‘unfeasible’ to agree the Earth circles the sun. All things are possible, given time and the inevitable advance of technology.

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    1. That sounds like magical thinking. Practically speaking, what do you have for us? [BTW, really bad analogy. The official story is that Galileo had it right, but that the Catholic Church owned “truth”, and so confined him to quarters for life. These days Climate Change zealots own “truth” and work hard (and together) to damage lives and reputations of any who disagree. They are the modern anti-scientists.]

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  5. Manufactured fear strategy has been around as long as I can remember and I turn 90 this coming May. From what I read, it was used for years before I arrived on the planet. I am no history scholar but I venture to guess that the castle dwellers instilled fear into their serfs to grasp crops and manpower in any scheme to annex the assets of a neighboring monarch. I remember something from high school history class about Germans in Mexico around the first World War.

    I remember that when I was eight years old, growing up on Staten Island (then a bucolic part of NYC) the government gave us all gas masks and a rudimentary fire-fighting bucket with a manual pump to extinguish the flames from prospective German bombers. Overlook the fact that the Luftwaffe had challenging fuel problems just crossing the Chanel and returning to their home bases.

    And in school, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki and much touted atomic bombs four years later (I was then in 6th grade), during periodic “drills” they had us moving away from windows and crawling under our little school desks to avoid injury and death. These frightening drills were probably mandatory. I doubt that our teachers thought them up themselves.

    As I grew older we all enjoyed movies of Bikini Atoll, mushroom clouds, and soon to come details of H-bombs, Neutron bombs, intercontinental ballistic missiles, terrorists, an anthrax scare, HIV, swine flu, bird flu, H1N1, ebola, and a recent Covid pandemic. These followed a series of psychopathic mass murderers, Charles Manson’s and O.J. Simpson’s brutal killings, and school kid massacres. It difficult, while watching TV, to separate possible facts from obvious fear propaganda. Let’s all read Miles W. Mathis for the fun of it.

    When I retired to Florida there was a tall pole at the entrance to Lido Beach with colored horizontal lines showing where the rising waters of the Gulf would flood everyone in only a few years. It has been taken down, at least temporarily. Lovely Lido Beach looks the same to me as it did 35 years ago.
    I guess we can move on now to reflect on global warming, future epidemics,
    China, Russia, and who knows what else, real and imaginary, our own leaders
    have in store for us all. The irony is that what we have had to imagine is likely to be tame compared to the real horrors being programmed for us.

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      1. Mark,
        I wrote a blog on my Bigeye.com (somebody gave me $20k for the domain-name and poof! the website vanished). That blog had gone viral probably due to its catchy title, “The 911 Cat is Out of the Bag”. I was 100% wrong at the time. Gordon Duff invited me to write for “Veterans Today” and I did for 10 yrs, 34 columns and a “featured columnist”. All my 911 columns were removed April 2017 along with my pic and bio. C’est la vie. When Simon Shack rescued them for me I put them on Bigeye and look what happened! I enjoyed the $20k. Check our my new Bigeye.ORG and be sure to enjoy http://www.Bigeyeblog.com – get back to me before I die of covid shots never taken, lead shots, covid-schmovid (short, long, or medium), or suicide by a couple of head shots as my 1996 online pal, Gary Webb.

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        1. I am only a little familiar with Veterans Today, mostly via Jim Fetzer. As I like to say of him, the only thing I know for sure is that when he dies, it will be in the middle of a sentence.

          I will for sure to check out Bigeye.org, but not now, as it would distract me, and I have a big day ahead of cooking and plumbing. I also imagine that I will sit down and watch football*, but when I do that I am easily distracted and give it up.

          What part of Florida are you in? We just spent eight days in Palmetto.

          *Soon will appear, as in other places, a bumper sticker that says “Bring professional football to Denver.” The Broncos franchise was purchased by members of the Walton (Walmart) clan, largest purchase price ever, and thus ensued two of the biggest fuckups in NFL history, a trade with Seattle giving up high draft picks and bodies to acquire Russell Wilson, and then signing him to a five-year $245 million dollar deal, two years guaranteed. Seattle will get the first, second or third overall pick in the coming draft, courtesy of dumbfuck Denver. Russell, as Seattle knew, was washed up.

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          1. As a Raider fan from my youth, this comment warms my heart. But until we move on from Carr, we will be sharing the basement with you unfortunately.

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      2. Mark, I answered via your website. Apologize for beingless that techie-pro. I assume you got it. Anyway, hereis what I sent you: “Mark, I wrote a blog on my Bigeye.com (somebody gave me $20k for the domain-name and poof! the website vanished). That blog had gone viral probably due to its catchy title, “The 911 Cat is Out of the Bag”. I was 100% wrong at the time. Gordon Duff invited me to write for “Veterans Today” and I did for 10 yrs, 34 columns and a “featured columnist”. All my 911 columns were removed April 2017 along with my pic and bio. C’est la vie. When Simon Shack rescued them for me I put them on Bigeye and look what happened! I enjoyed the $20k. Check our my new Bigeye.ORG and be sure to enjoy http://www.Bigeyeblog.com – get back to me before I die of covid shots never taken, lead shots, covid-schmovid (short, long, or medium), or suicide by a couple of head shots as my 1996 online pal, Gary Webb.”

        I enjoy your site. Cusiously, you mention reading recently some of myfavorite books. I read “Mask of Sanity” during the couple of years thatI hung out in the Ohio State Univ. medical school library. I recall thatduring that period I was impressed by Ernest Jones’ 2-vol. “Essays onApplied Psychoanalysis” and his “Hamlet and Oedipus”. I discoveredthere Wilhelm Reich’s “Listen, Little Man”, and “The Mass Psychologyof Fascism”. Also, a book called “Doctors of Infamy” along with a bunchof others that I don’t remember offhand. Oh, I found there the works ofDr. Thomas Szasz. His “Law, Liberty, and Psychiatry” sticks with me afterall these years. I digested his studies and conclusions about szichophrenaand I have in my home his small volume, “The Second Sin” that is a coolwork about language. “Political Ponerology”, which you mentioned, is afavorite given to me by an MD friend in Sarasota who wisely retired youngand rich. I’ve lost track of him. David Irving is a favorite. I have had thepleasure of spending time with him personally and had some time a few years ago exchanging emails. Of course, I have several of his amazing books. He is a genius. I am approaching 90 and have had real info verbally and interesting historical facts that very likely nobody else has that will die with me. I have had a mutual friend with Aristotle and Jackie Onassis, MariaCallas, the JFK kids, and turned down a phone call from Larry King and,believe it or not, Pres. Bush Jr. At present I am absorbed with stuff that we are definitely not supposed to know, for reasons yet to be understood. I am referring to additional Assyrian tablet material and data I have unearthed since reading Graham Hancock’s “Magicians of the Gods” a couple of years ago: John Anthony West, Robert Bauval, Robert Schoch, David Mathisen,”Hamlet’s Mill”, and a small shelf of pertinent stuff. You can find interests online at my bigeye.org site and its old links put on the original .com version since 1995. This is a too long comment from one book lover to another. Keep up the interesting work. Cheers,   StewartPS/ on Bigeye – a long time ago I put https://www.bigeye.org/szasz.htm

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        2. That’s all very interesting, and I am not familiar with most of the titles. You did answer the question I asked before reading this comment, which is “Sarasota”. Some years back I drove with family from Bonita Springs to Sarasota to watch a professional baseball game, the Reds doing spring training there. My takeaway: Florida has some of the most aggressive drivers in the country. Compared to you, I’ve had hardly any brushes with fame. Write on, as I am all eyes.

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            1. I have been wrestling with this, the fact that you are 90 and will likely die before I do. I could lay some platitudes on you. When I turned 70, I finally had to admit that I am old. Before that not so much. 90 … I do not imagine that I will make it, or that I want to. I love my life, my wife, my family. But I am not sure that I want to be 90, and alone.

              Mel Brooks is in his 90s and involved in a movie project. Clint Eastwood made Cry Macho at age 92. But the point is that the 90 milestone has finality about it. Rarely do any of us make it that far. That you have sound mind and humor about you, and know your end is not far away, I tip my cap. At age 72 I have a cap,,and it is tippable. I sincerely wish that you can tip your age 90 cap to me as well. God bless you.

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  6. There are charges in various areas in my area, there is a Tesla supercharger spot, has 5 stalls, charges .40 cents / kWh, and if look 20 feet a way you can see the huge generator hidden behind some trees. I think most of these generators run on? Diesel fuel. So why not have cars that run on diesel and save the hassle of the chargers?

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