The Devil is in The Details

In today's world of hype, we are continually bombarded with messages about products that are "environmentally friendly" and going to Save The World from ourselves.  But - let's look under the hood.  How good are some of these items for us, anyway?

Electric cars never really made any sense. They are cloaked in the sanctimony of the green movement, because they don't use nasty fossil fuels like gasoline. Instead, they use electricity, which is sent out through power lines from big power plants, which generate this electricity—how? Oh yes, by burning fossil fuels like oil, coal, and natural gas. This is known as the "long tailpipe," which goes from the car charging up in your garage all the way back to the smokestack of a coal-fired power plant. And don't forget, electric cars also have giant batteries made from nasty toxic metals like lithium and cobalt, the manufacture of which frontloads carbon dioxide emissions.

So the electric car was always more an exercise in green paternalism—it is the future, as selected for us by our betters—than a serious attempt to solve any real or imagined problem.

But the folks at Tesla have gotten swept up in the quasi-religious hype of environmentalism. They're not just manufacturing a curiosity for hobbyists. They're saving the planet, one preening and sanctimonious upper-middle-class driver at a time.

In service to this environmentalist posturing, they've turned the whole purpose of technology on its head. We have to use more of our, human resources—more of our precious time and effort—in order to save natural resources. The machines can't serve us, because we have to serve nature. Instead of making labor-saving devices, they're making labor-sucking devices. And if we complain that the new green technology isn't good enough, we're told that it is we who are not good enough for the technology.

That's why the electric car, in its current incarnation, is a technological abomination.

If a technology provides great improvement for us, of this be sure.  Private companies will build it, then make pots of money off of it. 

We do not have to have the government subsidizing success.

 

 

Comments

[Demon test]

Thanks for the great article..