Not necessarily disagreeing with you, but I visited friends in Vallejo (from Los Angeles) soon after I got my hybrid about 35 years ago. I didn’t stop once for gas and still had about a quarter tank left when I got to my destination. I can still remember when I did have to re-fuel, this one guy was interested in my car. He was amusingly impressed that I could make the trip with less than a tankful-plus.
As usual, an honest question that deserved an honest answer has devolved into attacks on the right using old stereotypes applied in the nastiest way possible. For example, I am willing to guarantee that a vanishingly-small number of conservatives think about gasoline in any sort of religious terms.
So for an answer as to a conservative-liberal split on the issue, consider that most liberals live in cities and most conservatives live in rural and suburban areas. Also consider that liberal rhetoric and overreach, like saying we will stop selling all gas vehicles by 2030 or 2035, strikes such people as being dangerous and fanatical.
I lived on a small farm. We had a 50-year-old gas powered tractor, a newer 20-year old gas tractor, a gas combine, gas pickup trucks, gas augers, etc. Since electrical power on farms can be inconsistent in winter (power lines go down) we had a 500 gallon tank of gas on the farm and a generator.
If someone came along and said, “we’re shutting all that down in 20 years and forcing you into an entire new equipment stack” we would have pushed back super hard on that because not only would it have been impossible, but if they tried they would have bankrupted us. There’s a reason we had old equipment - we couldn’t afford anything new. And we do not have large electric tractors, Even today, they are simply not feasible. You aren’t pulling a powered cultivator on a field for 8 hours on batteries. There are some electric garden tractors and other light-duty machines, but we are nowhere near being able to cultivate a section of land with a battery-powered tractor.
I just watched a video in which a Ford Lightning towing a 9500 lb trailer up a 7% grade lost 16% of its battery charge in 8 miles. And a Ford Lightning has a HUGE battery. A typical farm tractor can burn anywhere from 15-20 gallons per hour, depending on what it’s doing. A gallon of diesel has about 40 kWh of energy. So we’re talking about 600-800 kWh of energy per hour. A Ford Lightning has one of the biggest EV batteries on the market, and it’s 133kWh. Now, electric propulsion is more energy efficient by a factor of four or so, so a Lightning battery would run a working tractor plowing a field for maybe an hour.
I am a big proponent of EVs. But they won’t work for everyone for a very long time, and there are huge issues with widespread, accelerated adoption. The power grid itself has to be upgraded and about 25% more capacity added overall for charging all the electric vehicles.
But a larger problem is that city infrastructures will need serious upgrades. Many homes have 60-100A services, which will not charge long-range EVs well. Upgrading services after a point requires upgrading the whole infrastructure - neighboorhood distribution transformers, wiring, etc.
You want to convert a gas station to superchargers? A Tesla supercharger charges at 250kW. Twelve of those is 3 MW. You would have to convert every gas station to handle the demand, except that charging takes much longer than filling a tank of gas, so we might need more. Has anyone considered the time and cost of decomissioning gas stations and converting them to charging places? The environmental challenges of decommissioning all the underground tanks alone is daunting.
Anyone here still happy that we made a big push for bio-fuels? They were all the rage for about two years - just long enough for the government to mandate them and create giant agricultural subsidies to provide them. We forced bio-fuels on ourselves, then discovered that they did nothing for global warming, perhaps made it slightly worse, raised the cost of food, converted treeland to grow corn, and created a permanent subsidy structure that costs us all billions of dollars per year for nothing.
That’s what happens when you try to force ‘big ideas’ without understanding the details. Did you know that many grain silos had to be rebuilt with different angles for the grain chutes? Corn is slipprier than wheat, and using chutes made for wheat caused damage to the corn. I guarantee not a single politician considered that issue when advocating for a bio-fuel subsidy, or the hundreds of other unintentional consequences of the switch.
Look what’s happened by trying to rush wind and solar in Euriope and shut down nuclear before alternatives were truly ready for prime time - they simply forced Europe into buying gas from Russia, enabling a war in Ukraine by giving Putin energy leverage over Europe and giving him a huge war chest. The Ruble is now the strongest currency in the world, and Putin is making billions of dollars per month selling fossil energy to Europe that used to be provided by local nuclear, coal, and gas plants. Global warming hasn’t budged an inch, but the worst actors in the world are being strengthened and the west is being diminished. Good work.
It’s been said that conservatives are more anti-science than liberals. If that’s true, I’d say that liberals are more anti-engineering than conservatives. Science trades in big ideas and abstract ideas, just like liberals. Engineering is about making things actually happen in the real world. Science is high level, engineering is details. This even plays out in universities, where the engineering faculties tend to have the most conservative students and profs than any faculty other than business.
Liberals grab hold of a big idea like powering everything with solar and wind. The science says it can be done, and it’s a good thing, so let’s just DO IT. Conservatives go, “okay, but what about X and Y and Z? How do we do those?” and get called deniers or anti-science.
Conservatives point out that we have an evolved, incredibly complex energy distribution system that can’t be simply hand-waved away. They point out that a large energy facility takes years or sometimes decades to build, and we’d need thousands more of them. Conservatives point out that no matter how much wind and solar you build, you will still have long periods of time where they simply can’t provide all the energy you need, requiring the existance of a complete back-up energy system, which makes electricity more expensive.
They point out that you absolutely need base-load power and some means of storing electricity in huge quantity for long periods of time, and get ‘talk to the hand’ in response from people who are just certain they are correct despite knowing nothing about the details of what they imagine they can demand to be re-designed on schedule. They brush off feasibility concerns by simply assuming that with the right government in power we’ll just ‘figure it out’. It’s maddening.
But where are we now after 20 years of the liberal plan for global warming? Let’s see - brownouts and blackouts in Europe and North America, with more coming. Re-invigotation of the economies of the worst actors in the world. A war in Europe facilitated by energy shortages. Sky-high energy costs. Political fractures and increases in polarization. And not a damned thing actually done about global warming.
I said on this board twenty years ago that if we went down this path without Russia and China on board it would be extremely dangerous because we would be impoverishing ourselves and creating incentives for heavy industry to move to China and Russia. And every ounce of CO2 we saved would be an ounce they don’t have to worry about, incentivizing them to continue with fossil fuels. And that’s EXACTLY what has happened.
And so what’s the liberal answer to this? Is there any acknowledgement that what we have been doing has been counterproductive or at best useless? On the margins there seems to finally be slightly more acceptance of nuclear power, but the policy still seems to be to ramp up energy taxes, issue mandates, pass laws demanding general change, shut down drilling and new fossil plant construction, and… what? A better world will just appear? The energy system slowly constructed over a century will just be shut down and replaced by something better, somehow?
The ‘conservative’ plan that’s been pushed for years included a rapid ramp-up of nuclear power, natural gas used for ‘peaking’ power, with coal phased out and replaced with a combination of nuclear, solar, wind, geothermal, and whatever else makes sense. Perhaps as much as 20-30% wind and solar. As batteries get better, grid storage batteries could begin supplementing gas for load-following. Gasoline for cars will eventually be phased out in the market in favor of electric (that’s already starting, even without goverment ‘helping’), but it’s dangerous to push it before it’s ready not just because there are plenty of use cases where electric vehicles still don’t work, but because there are huge secondary industries that use petroleum and refined products from the oil used to produce gas.
A plan like that could have reduced CO2 by 50% by now, while maintaining complete energy security and even lowering the cost of electricity (see France). But no, we can’t have nuclear, and we must have solar and wind do everything because science has spoken. The perfect is, as always, the enemy of the good. Or the reasonable.
The incandescent light bulb issue is a perfect example of the tension between ‘big picture’ and the little details that matter.
Looked at simplistically, sure, incandescent bulbs are inefficient. Their purpose is to provide light, but they produce mostly heat along with the light. That’s pretty inefficient.
Based on that simple fact, Incandescent bulbs of certain sizes were banned throughout North America. But let’s look at two different situations:
In California on a hot day, incandescent bulbs are a double whammy. Not only do you lose energy to heat, but you have to expend more energy on air conditioning to get rid of the waste heat. Incandescent bulbs are really inefficient in hot climates.
But we also banned them in Canada. Our city replaced all our incandescent traffic signals with LED. But guess what? It turns out that in traffic lights, the ‘waste’ heat is critically important to keep the lenses from icing up in winter. So we either go back to incandescent, or we have to wire little heaters into each trasffic light. So much for the energy efficiency of LEDs in that application.
In Canada, our furnaces run 24/7 in winter, and typically run in the evening or on cool days in summer. But if you are reading under an incandescent bulb, the ‘waste heat’ is radiating on you, warming you up. This means you can run your house a little cooler. Change over to LED, and you have to turn the furnace up and heat the whole house instead of the nearby bulb just heating you, which is more efficient. On the other hand, bulbs in ceiling fixtures heat interstitial spaces more, which isn’t that helpful. So even in the context of a single home how ‘inefficient’ the bulbs are is very dependent on how they are used.
The real world is complex. Big government solutions and plans cannot deal with complexity and unknown unknowns. That’s why conservatives and libertarians focus more on incentives and allow the market to find its own solutions. Because your mileage may literally vary, and what’s good for person A might be terrible for person B. Markets solve problems in detail. Government uses large brushes and top down coercion to force everyone into the same choices.
As a Constitutional Conservative/small-l-libertarian, I have ZERO problems with electric vehicles/all-electric economy…in concept.
Devil’s in the details. How are we going to generate the additional electricity to replace the fossil-fuel energy sources? How are we going to expand and update our electric grid to carry the additional load? Who’s bearing the brunt of the cost of doing that? IMO, it’ll be the consumer. Are charging stations going to be prevalent and convenient? Even for renters in apartment complexes?
Where are the mineral resources going to come from to make the hundreds of millions, perhaps billions of car batteries? What’s the plan for recycling these batteries after their useful service life expires? What’s the price point going to be on new/replacement batteries, and how often am I , the working-stiff consumer, going to have to shell out for these new batteries?
What’s out transportation infrastructure going to do? Stay on diesel for all of the OTR truckers? Our rail network/trains?
It’s hilarious that you think politicians are the origin for the bio-fuel push, and that the farmers were the ones paying for all this stuff that was imposed on them.
Right. That’s why they’ve long pushed to address the cost of climate change externalities through market-based solutions. Oh wait, actually they just denied the whole thing existed.
I came here to say this. Sam, I will 100% agree that liberal policies to address climate change have been laughably bad. We need drastic changes, and unfortunately the only ones proposing drastic changes are both fundamentally flawed, but also considered a “progressive fringe” of the Democratic party without any real power to enact such a plan.
Conservatives could totally own this issue with a free market solution. Namely, make crude oil expensive. Ludicrous expensive. And do so very, very quickly. Plastic should be stupidly expensive, gas should be like $15-20 a gallon. This is the sort of drastic change we need to address the existential crisis we’re facing.
I guarantee you that if crude oil were priced to reflect the damage it’s doing to the planet, the free market would sort out what we actually need it for in a hurry. It’s excellent at doing that.
Sadly, while liberals in power are gutless when it comes to addressing climate change, conservatives are gutless AND deny that climate change is even a problem to begin with. What a wonderful choice we have at the ballot box, then.
Actually, I pointed around then that your ants are not working as you thought… 
I mean, one basic point that me and others made (not just liberals, you are again ignoring how many conservative scientists and economists talked about this) was that not investing in renewables, like the Chinese were doing, would mean that China was going to eat our lunch. Also, at the same time Trump’s administration delayed or removed many changes needed in the USA, discouraging other nations like China into doing what was needed.
Of course, as it was pointed before, that China may increase the use of coal thanks to the latest crisis, that is not ignored, most “liberals” (as usual you miss that not all critics of using coal are liberals) do think that pressure should increase to make China follow their commitments to become carbon-neutral or to reach zero emissions.
I think the oil industry have always been generous with supporting those who support them. And certain states, provinces and countries have benefited from these industries and so there is historical support. It should also be mentioned that oil and gas are obviously very useful and so are many of the derivatives and similar products.
“Conservatives” is a word meaning different things to different people. I suspect there is a generational divide. Older conservatives are likely more unreceptive to broader ideas of social values, accepting climate science and other issues than some younger ones; varying from place to place. In the past some claims have been made for the timing and amount of power generation for alternatives like solar and wind, which are more effective in some places than others. Still, The Economist has accepted climate science for a decade or two and most of the Conservatives I know in Canada do as well, with a few exceptions. A few drive hybrids. I think overgeneralization here is easy but unhelpful.
I am sure that some are less receptive than others to new technologies or making sacrifices. Still, Canada is a cold country where many drive long distances. We have done a poor job of meeting targets. Better alternatives would help, and a magic one with less pollution even better. We did get rid of the coal plants in Ontario which raised prices but was, to my minds, the best thing done by that government.
Indeed. When it comes to actually using capitalist, free market solutions, Sam’s preaching to the choir as far as I’m concerned. We’d be much further along if we quit with the subsidies and simply put a price on carbon emissions that reflects the cost. As you say, the free market would very quickly figure out the best path forward.
The trouble of course is that conservatives in the US only favor the free market when it helps them or hurts the opposition. EV subsidies are bad, oil subsidies are good. Charging station subsidies are bad, ethanol subsidies are good. And so on.
Thoughtful conservatives have had so many opportunities to use their professed ideology to do the right thing, but they’ve made the wrong choice each time. An example I came across recently: Australia has much higher rooftop solar penetration than the US. Why? Because they’ve optimized the permitting process down to an online form, while in the US it can take weeks or months to get approval.
Where are the hordes of conservatives clamoring to rip out all this red tape? They don’t seem to exist. This kind of thing should be like cats to catnip. Instead they spend their time sneering at solar and making up fake calculations about their utility.
The more left idea of just subsidizing everything you want, ignoring the various knock-on effects or how they might collide (we want EVs to help the planet, but we want cheap gas to help the poor people…), is not great. But it’s better than the complete denialism we get from the right.
This is not a complex issue. We already have nuclear plants in populated areas near all manner of aquifers. There is no way this is an issue storing the material in the desert (away from populations) using the same containment protocols.
If you mentioned the Yellowstone Caldera then that’s a different point to make and that should be a consideration in location selection.
So… uh… you don’t like the news.
Here’s something that might surprise you. Everyone in this thread, and everyone in the world, believes a lot of things they didn’t hear on the news. People, all people, learn things from a variety of sources.
You may take some comfort in thinking that people who disagree with you sit around waiting for the news to tell them what to think, but, bad news, that is simply false.
Of course I watch the news. In most cases I find it factual in contact but delivered in such a way as to misrepresent the issue it associates something with.
This is exactly what I think is dangerous and wrong-headed. The idea of just ramping up prices on ‘bad’ things to accelerate a ‘transition’ assumes that there is something to transition TO.
Just what do you think would happen if you magically made gas $15/gallon tomorrow? I can tell you what I think would happen: Businesses would go bankrupt, inflation would go up even faster, peoole everywhere would be screaming bloody murder, and the politicians who enacted such a policy would get tossed out on their asses and replaced by people who promise cheap gas forever. You would do your cause immense harm.
The idea of using tariffs or taxes to drive up the price of one good to force transition to another is sound economics, but might be very bad public policy. Everyone who could afford it would run out and try to buy an electric car - but we are already production limited, with more demand than there are cars. So there would be multi-year waiting lists, and in the meantime people would suffer. Thry’ll also hate you for forcing them to buy something they didn’t actually want before you intervened, giving your opponents a political advantage.
And if your heavy incentives forced the car companies to radically restructure to EVs, you will have a lithium shortage, and a shortage of rare earths and other materials which will drive up prices and affect availability. New lithium mines take 5-10 years to go from exploration to production. What are you going to do in the meantime? Just watch people suffer under your tariffs?
And after maybe 10-20% of peoole transition to EVs, the rest will start discovering that they can no longer get high current charges installed in their homes because the electricity infrastructure needs to be upgraded. My neighborhood can handle only two or three service upgrades before the entire neighborhood infrastructure has to be upgraded.
Transitioning a transportation network and energy grid cannot be done quickly. Cars last on average over 12 years now, and forcing them out of aervice while they still have serviceable life is a huge amount of wealth destruction, Many people will not be able to afford EVs, and will be stuck paying huge prices for gas.
Some problems are just not amenable to fixing by fiat or by handing out carrots and sticks. Certainly not in the short term.
Cars are one of the hardest problems to solve rapidly, butmtye entire transportation system only consumes about 28% of our total energy, and light duty vehicles (cars, light trucks, motorcycles, vans, SUVs) are about half of that. You are choosing to solve one of the most complex, expensive problems that has relatively low impact.
If you could convert half the fleet of light duty vehicles to electric in ten years (a really impossible goal), you’d lower fossil fuel use in the country by about 7%, IF you don’t use fossil energy to charge them. But attempting to force this change with high expenses on fuel will simply destroy the public’s willingness to go along with climate change policy.
Currently, EV’s mke up about 8.6% of new passenger car sales. At that, we are facing shortages of batteries and other materials. We are making them as fast as we can. Raising the price of gas to $15 might change the long term percentages, but would do nothing about supply today. You’d just bankrupt a lotmof people, likely including the car companies you need to make and sell your evs because demand for new gas cars would plummet, but there aren’t enough EVs to make up the difference.
What CAN be done is a rapid transition to nuclear power. France went from 0% nuclear to 70% nuclear in about 15 years. China is bringing 4GW nuclear plants online for about $4 billion dollars in about five years. Compared to the trillions we’ve been borrowing and spending, that’s peanuts. You could build 400 of them for the cost of the last ‘infrastructure’ bill, and they would provide more energy than the entire transporation network consumes.
Do that, replace coal with them, and you can leave the rest of the infrastructure intact. No need to remake the world. This would have a much greater impact on global warming than any other intervention, and it wouod do it while increasing energy security and lowering the cost of electricity, incentivizing the shift tomelectric vehicles. No one needs to be punished.
Maybe if we had slowly ramped up the carbon costs for the past 25 years, we could have had a transition slow enough to not be disruptive. Instead we got tax breaks for Hummers.
Conservatives are the masters at delaying action until there’s a real emergency, and then whining that the only remaining solutions are heavy-handed.
Oh, I’m aware. Ever since Al Gore made everyone aware that there was a certain Inconvenient Truth we were all ignoring, every politician who’s made a lick of sense on the issue has been ignored so that rubes who tell morons “drill baby drill” could get elected.
That movie came out 16 years ago, when conservatives could have started ramping up oil prices.
But look, I don’t want EVs to replace gas cars. I want gas cars to become more rare. I want driving to become more rare. I want tractors to become rare because people stop growing so much goddamn soy to feed to cows so that people can have beef at every meal. We need to consume less, and making things expensive is exquisite at that. We don’t need to replace everything with “green” versions, we just need to use less. A lot less. We can do that with existing technology, and the existing tool we can use is making fossil fuels more expensive.
Ramp it over over 15 years if you want, I don’t care, but start today. Start 15 years ago, ideally. But we couldn’t, because we’ve spent this long arguing about whether or not climate change is even real, because morons would much rather believe the charlatans who tell them pleasant lies.
Not exactly true. Reducing our impact might get us through the next 50 years, but if we want civilization to be around for another 1000 years, we need sustainable energy. That means no fossil fuels. It doesn’t mean no oil–oil is a valuable chemical, and we’ll synthesize it when necessary–but the stuff in the ground will run out pretty soon, even if consumption is cut dramatically.
The metals and stuff in our landfills aren’t a problem. We can mine those when necessary; it’s cheaper now to mine the ore currently, but when that gets expensive we’ll turn to the stuff that’s already sitting in nice dense piles. It’s not going anywhere, unlike the oil that’s rapidly being converted to CO2 and water vapor.
Nuclear power as it’s currently used isn’t all that sustainable. That could be fixed with breeder reactors, throium reactors, etc., but that’s not happening much at the moment. Solar and wind are highly sustainable. Their materials are either ubiquitous or recyclable.
The best time to plant an oak tree is a hundred years ago. The second-best time is now.
You can go back to living like that if you want, but I don’t think many people are going to join you in living like it’s 1800.
I can’t think of anything farther from "free-market’ than the government manipulating a price of a commodity.
It’s manipulation in the same way that the government telling you that they’ll start charging you for dumping your garbage onto your neighbor’s lawn is manipulation.