The Flase Hope Of Clean Energy

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Well, you've got some really good stuff here about electric
cars that I'm excited about. As a guy who drives
an electric car about half the time, it kind of
is the same track. But yeah, I hear you. So
a couple of headlines. Washington State passed a bill to
target that all vehicles model year twenty thirty or later
sold purchased registered in Washington State be electric vehicles. As

(00:22):
of twenty thirty, you can't even register an old gas car.
Not a chance that's doable. As you know, I don't
know what for the I could look it up, Maybe
somebody else can look it up. With the percentage of
cars in Washington are are that are electric vehicles, but
nationwide it's less than two and um, I'm sure it's
not a lot higher in Washington. There's no way you're

(00:45):
getting everybody switched over. Um. You know, the whole electric
car thing, there's so many aspects to it that Joe's
about to get into. But the the the first electric
car that's come along that's even come close to making
a dent as a test, because it's the first time
there's been a car that goes far enough and you
can fit enough people in and is comfortable enough and

(01:07):
everything like that that anybody'd even consider driving it. And
it's really expensive, so I mean, just it's not gonna work.
It's talking to somebody, yes to you had a Nissan
Leaf and they said it was just it would go
about forty miles. You could barely fit you when you're
in one kid in there in a soccer ball. It's
just the the there's just unrealistic ideas of the electric
car thing. You know. It's it's that surprising because the

(01:29):
vehicle named the Leaf seems big and burly and powerful.
It's uh, it's um it's activists in New York and
San Francisco either don't own cars or drive a tiny
little car a little ways who are trying to dictate
to the rest of people who have all kinds of
uses for vehicles that they're gonna drive electric cars. Meanwhile,

(01:49):
in Canada, America's hat the always amusing neighbor, except when
they're practicing, uh like trying out totalitarian is m. Canada's
announced that um I just do went away from it.
They'll ban the sale of combustion engine passenger cars. By
there's no way that's gonna happen, you know, as as
you said yesterday. I think it's aspirational. It's either like

(02:13):
a gesture and we'll try real hard and we know
will fall short and will amend the law just in time,
or it's just utter fantasy. So uh, Washington saying, oh, yeah,
I wonder, I wonder win California. How soon California way
a second Washington and in Canada are getting a lot
of attention. We need to be, don't you. Don't you

(02:34):
dare try to outprogressive US can I hate to tell
my son. My son dreams of when he gets to
drive a car. For some reason, he's just super into cars.
All of his posters and calendars and screen savers are
like classic cars, muscle cars. He's super into that. He
hates that I have a Tesla because he's really into
gas muscle cars and that sort of stuff. And uh,
there's a chance that you won't be able to register

(02:56):
a gas car by the time he's old enough to drive. Wow. Wow,
you you probably have to pay some like exorbitant special
permit to have them. But anyway, I just don't see
this happening. Yeah, yeah, you got to Uh, you've got
to play him Russia's song The Red bar Chetta from
the Moving Pictures album. He'll enjoy that. It's about a

(03:17):
future where machines are or engines are outlawed anyway. So
all these laws saying you've got to have a an
electric car by twenty th or whatever year might be
in your local municipality, uh, came across a couple of
things that are so interesting about the utter fantastic nature
of that declaration. Number one, you should know that every

(03:42):
input to a battery battery for an electric car is
skyrocketing in price right now, and and that may level
off to some extent when the Russian invasion of Ukraine
finally settles down. But China is working as hard as
they can to corner the market or at least grab
up a huge share of the market in these medals.
So there is no time when this stuff is going
to be cheap and plentiful, No chance. So uh, this

(04:05):
is an essay from an engineer passed along by a
friend who is also an engineer who writes batteries. They
do not make electricity. They store electricity produced elsewhere, primarily
by coal or uranium, natural gas power plants or diesel
fuel generators. So to say, an e V is a
zero emission vehicle is not at all valid. Also, since

(04:26):
forty percent of the electricity generated in the US is
from coal fired plants, it follows that the vs on
the road are coal powered. You see what I mean.
But that's not the half of it. For those of
you excited about electric cars and the green revolution, I
want you to take a closer look at the batteries
and also, heck, while we're at it, windmills and solar panels.
A typical e V battery weighs a thousand pounds about

(04:47):
the size of well, he says a travel trunk who
uses a travel trunk hud thirty years old, but the
size of a female oxen. If one were to take
the Queen Mary from London, tough colonies on light employer
travel trunk, anyway, where were we that? It contains twenty
five pounds of lithium, sixty pounds of nickel, forty four

(05:09):
pounds of manganese, thirty pounds of cobalt, two hundred pounds
of copper, and four hundred pounds of aluminum, steel and plastic.
Insider over six thousand individual lithium ion cells to manufacture
each e V auto battery. You must process twenty five
thousand pounds of brine for the lithium, thirty thousand pounds
of ore for the cobalt, five thousand pounds of ore
for the nickel, and twenty five thousand pounds of ore

(05:31):
for copper. All told, you dig up five hundred thousand
pounds of the Earth's crust for one battery um and
then he goes into well, the main problem with solar
arrays is the chemicals needed to process silicate into the
silicon used in the panels. So, and I'm sorry, Before
we move on from electric vehicles, it's also worth noting
that all of those processes, the digging up and processing

(05:51):
and transporting and and and finalizing all of those materials,
use a tremendous amount of pill in the blank. That's right,
fossil fuels chinormous amounts to produce a battery for an
electric car, which is at least ironic. The main problem
with solar rays now is the chemicals needed to process

(06:14):
silicate into the silicon used in the panels. To make
pure enough silicon requires processing it with hydrochloric acid, sulfuric acid,
nitric acid, hydrogen fluoride, tried chloroethane and acetone. In addition,
they also need gallium arsenide, copper indium, gallium dicelenide, and
cadmium telluride, which are all highly toxic. I feel like
you're making at least half of these up. I maybe

(06:36):
silicon dust is a hazard to workers and the panels
cannot be recycled now windmills. Windmills have always struck me
as ridiculous. I mean, they might be able to to
boost your your energy by two percent on windy days,
I guess, but uh, he points out, windmills are the
ultimate in embedded costs and environmental destruction. Each way tons

(06:59):
the equip one to twenty three houses and contains dred
tons of concrete, tons of steel, forty eight tons of iron,
twenty four tons of fiberglass, and the hard to extract
rare earth's neodmium. Oh, I'm not even gonna try that one,
and dysprosium. Each blade weighs eight pounds and will last
fifteen to twenty years, at which time it must be replaced,

(07:21):
and we cannot presently recycle used blades. There may be
a place for these technologies, but you must look beyond
the myth of zero emissions. Going green may sound like
the utopian ideal, but when you look at the hidden
and embedded costs realistically with an open mind, you can
see that going green is more destructive to the Earth's
environment than meets the eye. For sure, I'm not opposed

(07:41):
to mining electric vehicles, wind or solar, but I just
want you to see the reality of the situation, right
I I too. I I don't work for the oil company.
If if you know, God Almighty or Elon Musk or
or I don't know, Chairman Shia China could snap his
fingers and we would need fossil fuels anymore. It's fine

(08:01):
with me, So I'm fabulous as far as I'm concerned.
I just don't appreciate the fraud. I mean, we've got
a clip here of like uh AOC go ahead play
twenty two for us, Michael, would you While the president
is is making a decision to release some strategic reserves
to release some of the pressure on pricing, I think
a lot of these fossil fuel and oil and gas

(08:23):
companies also need to do their part, and we have
to understand that sometimes it's about taking a smaller profit margin.
You know, I could explain to you why that's so dumb.
The idea that having them make less money on the

(08:43):
oil will somehow free up the market, um is idiotic.
But you know, she's a cute girl with like a
super great Instagram account. Her her day job is no,
this is this is the truth. This. I will stand
by these words. Whatever that means. Cute girl with a

(09:04):
fabulous Instagram account. She is a hot chick with lots
of Instagram followers. But instead of her day job being
a bartender, which it used to be, or are a hairdresser,
or maybe she's a dental hygenist or an accountant or something,
her day job happens to be. She got elected to
Congress in a tiny little burrow, in a tiny little

(09:25):
neighborhood and in New York. But she's she's a cute
girl with an Instagram account. So I don't it's it's
fun to you know, to a tongue lasher, But what's
the point on the issue as opposed to my personalities
of electric cars? I feel like I don't know this,
but as a guy who is in the tesla world,

(09:46):
I feel like this might be the golden age for now.
Of getting to drive electric cars, and it's gonna be
a victim of its own success. And the success is
going to be bottomed down, not you know, or a
top down, not bottom up. We just not the way
success should work. The government is going to force you
into electric car before you're drawn toward electric cars for

(10:06):
more most people. But when there are enough electric cars
in the road, what is electricity gonna cost? And and
what will charging stations be? Like I wonder about that,
you know, the Tesla charging stations. At least so far,
I've never pulled into one where all the stalls were full,
so you can just pull right in and charge right
away and leave. But when they start getting full and
you show up and you have to wait a half

(10:27):
hour in line before you can even plug in, uh,
you know, when you're making your rounds and all that
sort of stuff, What is that gonna do to people's
want of an electric car? Right? And right? And there's
there's nobody seems to be anticipating what would happen in
Washington if everybody was an electric car all of a sudden,
were they going to charge him? What's electricity gonna cost? Right?

(10:49):
And how are we going to produce all of the electricity.
We had one guy email and it was a lovely email.
He said, guys, there's plenty of capacity on the grid
at night, which is when most people charge their cars,
and that's and what you get out of a full
charge is plenty of miles for the next day. It's
a good point. But the number of people who do
need to charge during the day, making a longish journey
or whatever, you can see it already happens. I have

(11:11):
a handful of friends with Tesla's and they talk all
the time about yeah, I gotta stop and charge and
blah blah blah. So if and that's with two three
of the cars in America being electric, I think it's
two right. Uh can you imagine if that explosed by
ten times, so that a monstrous twenty percent of the
cars in America are electric. I mean, all the infrastructure

(11:32):
is just going to be, you know, crushed under the
weight of the demand, and we're gonna have to produce
all that electricity with fossil fuels. Yes, Michael, I think
the biggest thing is right now charging stations are free.
That won't last. Well, they're free if you bought before.
If your cars before seen or something that went away
even with Tesla's after a few years. But you know,
one more thought, because I am in favor of quote

(11:54):
unquote green energy or renewable energy. But we're at the
stage imagine, you know, you decide your your your furnace,
it's too expensive, and uh, you know I I picture
me declaring to Judy, honey, we're ripping out the furnace.
And I rip it out and I say, now we're
going to get heat through this. And I point to
this little like wood pellet stove in the corner of
the living room, which is clearly not able to provide

(12:16):
enough heat for our house. I mean not even close.
I have prematurely blown up what worked in favor of
something that clearly is not even close to technologically advanced enough.
And that's where we are on the whole green energy thing.