Electric cars are promoted as the chic harbinger of an environmentally benign future. Ads assure us of “zero emissions,” and President Obama has promised a million on the road by 2015. With sales for 2012 coming in at about 50,000, that million car figure is a pipe dream. Consumers remain wary of the cars’ limited range, higher price and the logistics of battery-charging. But for those who do own an electric car, at least there is the consolation that it’s truly green, right? Not really.
For proponents such as the actor and activist Leonardo DiCaprio, the main argument is that their electric cars - whether it’s a $100,000 Fisker Karma (Mr. DiCaprio’s ride) or a $28,000 Nissan Leaf - don’t contribute to global warming. And, sure, electric cars don’t emit carbon-dioxide on the road. But the energy used for their manufacture and continual battery charges certainly does - far more than most people realize.
A 2012 comprehensive life-cycle analysis in Journal of Industrial Ecology shows that almost half the lifetime carbon-dioxide emissions from an electric car come from the energy used to produce the car, especially the battery. The mining of lithium, for instance, is a less than green activity. By contrast, the manufacture of a gas-powered car accounts for 17% of its lifetime carbon-dioxide emissions. When an electric car rolls off the production line, it has already been responsible for 30,000 pounds of carbon-dioxide emission. The amount for making a conventional car: 14,000 pounds
While electric-car owners may cruise around feeling virtuous, they still recharge using electricity overwhelmingly produced with fossil fuels. Thus, the life-cycle analysis shows that for every mile driven, the average electric car indirectly emits about six ounces of carbon-dioxide. This is still a lot better than a similar-size conventional car, which emits about 12 ounces per mile. But remember, the production of the electric car has already resulted in sizeable emissions - the equivalent of 80,000 miles of travel in the vehicle.
So unless the electric car is driven a lot, it will never get ahead environmentally. And that turns out to be a challenge. Consider the Nissan Leaf. It has only a 73-mile range per charge. Drivers attempting long road trips, as in one BBC test drive, have reported that recharging takes so long that the average speed is close to six miles per hour - a bit faster than your average jogger
Charlie Drevna, president of the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers, on how Washington’s fuel standards are increasing the price of cars and gas.
To make matters worse, the batteries in electric cars fade with time, just as they do in a cellphone. Nissan estimates that after five years, the less effective batteries in a typical Leaf bring the range down to 55 miles. As the MIT Technology Review cautioned last year: “Don’t Drive Your Nissan Leaf Too Much.”
If a typical electric car is driven 50,000 miles over its lifetime, the huge initial emissions from its manufacture means the car will actually have put more carbon-dioxide in the atmosphere than a similar-size gasoline-powered car driven the same number of miles. Similarly, if the energy used to recharge the electric car comes mostly from coal-fired power plants, it will be responsible for the emission of almost 15 ounces of carbon-dioxide for every one of the 50,000 miles it is driven - three ounces more than a similar gas-powered car.
Even if the electric car is driven for 90,000 miles and the owner stays away from coal-powered electricity, the car will cause just 24% less carbon-dioxide emission than its gas-powered cousin. This is a far cry from “zero emissions.” Over its entire lifetime, the electric car will be responsible for 8.7 tons of carbon dioxide less than the average conventional car.
Those 8.7 tons may sound like a considerable amount, but it’s not. The current best estimate of the global warming damage of an extra ton of carbon-dioxide is about $5. This means an optimistic assessment of the avoided carbon-dioxide associated with an electric car will allow the owner to spare the world about $44 in climate damage. On the European emissions market, credit for 8.7 tons of carbon-dioxide costs $48.
Yet the U.S. federal government essentially subsidizes electric-car buyers with up to $7,500. In addition, more than $5.5 billion in federal grants and loans go directly to battery and electric-car manufacturers like California-based Fisker Automotive and Tesla Motors TSLA +1.61% . This is a very poor deal for taxpayers.
The electric car might be great in a couple of decades but as a way to tackle global warming now it does virtually nothing. The real challenge is to get green energy that is cheaper than fossil fuels. That requires heavy investment in green research and development. Spending instead on subsidizing electric cars is putting the cart before the horse, and an inconvenient and expensive cart at that.
Mr. Lomborg, director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center in Washington, D.C., is the author of “The Skeptical Environmentalist” (Cambridge Press, 2001) and “Cool It” (Knopf, 2007).
A version of this article appeared March 11, 2013, on page A15 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Green Cars Have a Dirty Little Secret.
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Matt Ridley talks about Fossil Fuels are Greening the Planet
In a comment on the WUWT article about the abject failure of the United Kingdom Weather Office (UKMO) weather forecasts, Doug Huffman wrote,
“Each forecast must be accompanied by the appropriate retro-cast record of previous casts”
I pointed out years ago that Environment Canada (EC) publishes such information. In doing so they expose a similar horrendous story of absolute failure. This likely indicates why it is not done by others, but provides adequate justification for significantly reducing the role of the agency.
Both EC and UKMO predictions fail. The failure parallels Richard Feynman’s comment.
“It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong.”
If your prediction (forecast) is wrong; your science is wrong. Unlike the IPCC, they cannot avoid the problem by calling them projections, not predictions. They can and do avoid accountability.
We recently learned that the UKMO have revised their forecast for the period 2013 to 2017. In a press release they,
“confirmed that over the next five years temperatures will be 0.43 degrees above the 1971-2000 average, instead of the previously forecast 0.54 degrees, a 20 per cent reduction.”
That amount of change means the science is wrong, which they won’t admit. Instead, they claim the effects of CO2 are being surprised by “natural cycles.” What nonsense! They are saying when temperatures are flat or even cooling it is because of natural cycles. If temperatures increase it is because of CO2. These are statements would fail a first year university climate paper. The error indicated by the amount of reduction is sufficient to close the department.
Initially I thought EC was admirable for publishing results of how wrong they were. Now I realize it only shows arrogance and sense of unaccountability: we fail, but you must listen, act, and keep paying. It underscores the hypocrisy of what they do. More important, it shows why they and all national weather agencies must be proscribed. It is time to reduce all national weather offices to data collection agencies. When bureaucrats do research it is political by default. The objective rapidly becomes job preservation; perpetuate and expand rather than solve the problem.
EC is a prime example of why Maurice Strong set up the IPCC through the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and member national weather agencies. EC participated and actively promoted the failed work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) from the start. An Assistant Deputy Minister (ADM) of EC chaired the founding meeting of the IPCC in Villach Austria in 1985. It continues, as they sent a large delegation to the recent Doha conference on climate change. Their web site promotes IPCC work as the basis for all policy on energy and environment. They brag about their role as a world class regulator. All this despite the fact their own evidence shows the complete inadequacy of their work.
See the post here for the forecasts and verifications.
Everyone knows that regional weather forecasts are notoriously unreliable, especially beyond 48 hours. This fact weakened the credibility of the IPCC predictions with the public from the start. Some supporters of the IPCC position tried to counteract the problem by saying that climate forecasts were different from weather forecasts. It is a false arguement. Climate is the average of the weather, so if the weather science is wrong the climate science is wrong.
Some experts acknowledge that regional climate forecasts are no better than short term weather forecasts. New Scientist reports that Tim Palmer, a leading climate modeler at the European Centre for Medium – Range Weather Forecasts in Reading England saying,
“I don’t want to undermine the IPCC, but the forecasts, especially for regional climate change, are immensely uncertain.”
In an attempt to claim some benefit, we’re told,
“...he does not doubt that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has done a good job alerting the world to the problem of global climate change. But he and his fellow climate scientists are acutely aware that the IPCC’s predictions of how the global change will affect local climates are little more than guesswork.”
The IPCC have deliberately misled the world about the nature, cause and threat of climate change and deceived about the accuracy of their predictions (projections), for a political agenda.
Some claim the failures are due to limited computer capacity. It makes no difference. The real problems are inadequate data, lack of understanding of most major mechanisms, incorrect assumptions, and a determination to prove instead of falsify the AGW hypothesis.
Einstein’s definition,
“Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”
applies. However, EC do the same thing over and over with results that indicate failure yet fail to make adjustments as the scientific method requires. What is more amazing and unacceptable is they use public money, are essentially unaccountable yet demand the public and politicians change their energy and economic policies. On their web site, they state;
“The Government of Canada supports an aggressive approach to climate change that achieves real environmental and economic benefits for all Canadians.”
They could begin by reducing EC to data collection. Their failures are more than enough to justify termination in any other endeavour. Another is their involvment and political promotion of well documented IPCC corruption.
See Steve McIntyre’s post where a deceptive cherry picking by Michael Mann who claims Hensen’s forecast has been accurate (accomplished by using only land temperatures and stopping in 2005). and the devious and dangerous and totally delusional Naomi Oreskes (my dog knows more about climate than this phoney) who claims of all things they are too conservative! I hear from attendees that this duo did a marvelous imitation of dumb and dumber at this year’s AGU, which is racing with the AMS to see which society can go downhill faster.
Oreskes’ starting point was that models had supposedly under-estimated relative to observations - a starting-point that seems oddly disconnected to the IPCC graphic shown above but, hey, Oreskes is an expert in manufactured disinformation. If Oreskes was not in fact wrongfooted by Mann, then one would like to know the provenance of her assertion that models were “underestimating” observed temperature increases.
Oreskes then purported to ponder on the institutional factors that supposedly caused such under-estimates by climate scientists. Oreskes had no doubt as to where the “blame” lay. Not with the scientists themselves. of course not. Oreskes placed the blame squarely on climate skeptics. According to Oreskes, their intimidation had led climate scientists to pull their punches and make forecasts that were too conservative.
See this great response to Mann’s response to McIntyre’s recounting of the attempt by two of the worst offenders to try and save a failing science.
Last week I received a “Home Energy Report” flyer from Commonwealth Edison, my electricity provider in northern Illinois. The leaflet compared my energy usage to neighbors over the last two months and declared, “You used 41% MORE electricity than your efficient neighbors.” Should I be concerned about this?
My wife and I use energy, but don’t waste it. For years I’ve driven my family batty, turning off lights in vacated rooms. During the summer, my wife dries laundry in the sunshine, rather than in the dryer. We also have many of the compact fluorescent bulbs. We take these measures to lower our energy bills, not for other motives.
Isn’t it odd that ComEd, a company in the energy business, is encouraging their customers not to use it? Imagine a mailer from Coca-Cola pointing out that you drank 41% MORE soft drinks than your neighbor. Or a letter sent from Apple telling you that you needed to reduce your iPhone
and iPad purchases.
A visit to the ComEd website provides some answers. First, the company is required to use part of customer payments to urge Illinois customers to reduce electricity consumption by the Illinois Public Act 95-0481. But second, the website is filled with ideological nonsense. In the Saving Energy section of the website, we find a yellow “Power Bandit” and the statement, “Saving Energy was never so much fun! Beat the Power Bandit and learn lots of ways to save energy, save money and help save the planet!” Does ComEd really believe that we can save the planet by changing light bulbs?
For decades, environmental groups have waged war on energy. They warn that increased energy usage will pollute the Earth, destroy the climate, and rapidly exhaust natural resources. They demand substitution of dilute, intermittent, and expensive wind, solar, and biofuel energy for traditional hydrocarbon or nuclear power, which is an excellent way to reduce energy usage. They tell us that nations which use the most energy do the most environmental damage.
National and state governments have swallowed the “energy usage is bad” ideology hook, line, and sinker. Twenty-nine states have enacted Renewable Portfolio Standards laws, requiring utilities to use an increasing percentage of renewable energy or be fined. Hundreds of federal and state policies subsidize and mandate renewable or reduced energy usage, including light bulb bans, vehicle mileage mandates, wind and solar subsidies, ethanol fuel mandates, and energy efficiency programs. These policies collect additional taxes from citizens and boost the cost of electricity.
But, actual trends and empirical data show that our planet is not in imminent danger. Air and water pollution in the United States is at a fifty-year low. According to Environmental Protection Agency data, airborne levels of six major pollutants declined 57 percent from 1980 to 2009 even though energy usage was up 21 percent and vehicle miles traveled were up 93 percent. International data shows that pollution is lowest in high-income nations that use high levels of energy, such as Canada and Sweden, but highest in developing nations, such as India and Indonesia. The best way reduce pollution in developing nations is to increase per capita incomes, not to restrict energy usage.
Similarly, there is no empirical evidence to show that mankind is destroying Earth’s climate. Mankind’s comparatively tiny emissions of carbon dioxide, a trace gas in our atmosphere, cause only an insignificant part of the greenhouse effect. Global surface temperatures have been flat for more than ten years despite rising atmospheric CO2. Hundreds of peer-reviewed studies report warmer temperatures 1,000 years ago than temperatures of today. A review of history shows that today’s storms, droughts, and floods are neither more frequent nor more severe than past events.
Nor are we rapidly exhausting Earth’s energy resources. We’re at the dawn of a hydrocarbon revolution, triggered by the new techniques of hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling. Mankind now has access to centuries of petroleum and natural gas from shale fields, which can be accessed with cost-effective and environmentally-safe methods.
Yet, the “energy is bad” ideology continues. Grade school students are taught that renewable energy is good and that hydrocarbon energy is bad. The EPA is waging a war on the U.S. coal industry. Demonstrators urge President Obama to stop the Keystone pipeline. And utilities tell us how we can “save the planet.”
By the way, reports state that the 20-room Tennessee house of former Vice President Al Gore devours more than 20 times the national average electricity usage. I wonder what rating Mr. Gore would get in a ComEd “Home Energy Report?”
Steve Goreham is Executive Director of the Climate Science Coalition of America and author of the new book The Mad, Mad, Mad World of Climatism: Mankind and Climate Change Mania.
Crops are suffering but few here are convinced global warming is to blame
“We may not raise a bushel of grain here this year but it will not be because of global warming,” says Kenny Henriksen, a crop and livestock farmer in Jewell County, Kansas.
Henriksen is meeting five farmer friends at Pinky’s coffee shop in the close-knit town of Courtland, population 340, for one of their regular get-togethers. They discuss farming matters such as how much they get for a bushel (about 25kg) of corn.
Just 40 miles east of the geographic centre of the 48 United States on continental America, Courtland has fared better than many towns where crop production has been threatened by a severe two-year drought across Kansas and other states on the US plains and midwest.
Farmers in Courtland draw on surface water to feed their crops, and don’t need to drill for water like their counterparts in western Kansas. They have also invested heavily in centre pivots, the spider-like rotating sprinkler systems that dot the land, watering areas of up to half a mile wide.
Kansas, the 15th-largest US state by size and 33rd by population, is the country’s largest wheat producer and sixth-largest corn producer.
The state traditionally makes up almost a fifth of the total US wheat production, yielding a crop worth about $1 billion a year.
This year the state will struggle to reach its typical production levels. Kansas and her neighbouring states - Colorado to the west, Nebraska to the north and Oklahoma to the south - are enduring a severe drought or worse, according to official US climatology statistics.
The shortage of moisture on the land is threatening the new crop planted last autumn and recent data suggests there is no sign of rain coming any time soon, threatening millions of acres of wheat.
The US government has designated 1,297 counties across 29 states as disaster areas, making farmers eligible for billions of dollars of low-interest emergency loans.
The government also subsidises crop insurance for farmers, which, along with high crop prices, has saved many communities. Farmers are also paid federal grants on a per-acre price for turning their farms into conservation grasslands to prevent over-farming and to ease the strain on water supplies.
Rainfall
The average rainfall across Kansas is normally between 15 and 35 inches of rain a year. Last year just 11 inches fell on average, coupled with an exceptionally hot summer of soaring temperatures.
By the time the Republican River reaches the farmers in northern Kansas from Colorado via the many wells dug in Nebraska, there is not enough water to nourish their farms.
In the face of this devastating drought and climate-related disasters, President Barack Obama has marked the fight against climate change high on his list of second-term goals.
“Some may still deny the overwhelming judgment of science, but none can avoid the devastating impact of raging fires, and crippling drought, and more powerful storms,” he said in his recent inaugural speech, drawing much focus as part of his ambitiously progressive plan.
The farmers in northern Kansas are not convinced that climate change is to blame, however. They and their fathers suffered droughts in the 1930s and 1950s, and as a recently as 2004 - the past two years are just another cycle, they argue.
“There is a lot of scientists and PhDs wanting to claim this is climate change and we are going to be dealing with this for years. It’s not something that is in our thoughts,” says Courtland farmer Brad Peterson.
“I don’t know if I believe that global warming is the reason,” says another farmer, Richard Lindberg. “We have been held back and have been limited to the water we use in irrigating our farms.”
‘Natural phenomenon’
Further east, where the drought is much more severe, the opinion is no different.
“In western Kansas we sit to the east of the Rocky Mountains, where it is drier. I remember the 1955/56 drought and 1988. My dad went through the 1930s and had to move to the west coast,” said Ron Neff, a farmer in Selden, 150 miles west of Courtland.
“It is a natural phenomenon. They want to talk about carbons and needing to take pollutants out of the air but I don’t think it is connected.”
In 2008, one of the better harvest years, Neff produced about 130 bushels per acre of “dryland corn”; last year the land yielded just 15 bushels an acre on average.
Rise in temperatures
Chuck Rice, a professor of soil microbiology and a climate change expert at Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kansas, says there is no doubt that droughts are cyclical but temperatures clocked last year in the most recent dry spell have beaten historical records.
“The records weren’t just slightly broken; they were significantly higher,” he said.
Icecap Note: No sir only in the stations that were not around in the 1930s to 1950s.
Corn yields were down modestly despite the worst drought since perhaps the middle 1950s. They were much lower in the worst hot lower, but despite the broad coverage of drought, for the US the yields were comparable to the 1900s and well above the levels of 1988 and the 1950s and 1930s. Of course a lot of the improvement in hybrids, better practices, increased irrigation, better fertilizer and disease controls.
Some farmers acknowledge that this drought is the worst they have ever seen, he says, though he accepts that most argue that it is no different from anything that went before.
“n the heartland of the US that is the prevailing view among many because we have these cycles all the time,""said Rice. “But our analysis over 100 years shows we are seeing longer growing periods, with earlier springs and later falls. With a longer growing season you are going to need more water.”
Farmers aren/t convinced, and in a “Red” state like Kansas, Republican supporters believe Obama’s concerns about climate change are driven by something else.
“Everything he says is for his agenda,” says Kenny Henriksen, without elaborating, before sipping on a coffee in Pinky’s diner.
I live in a historic part of a historic New England town: East Greenwich, Rhode Island, to be precise.
It’s tough to walk five minutes in any direction here without running across a cemetery or two with graves from two or three centuries back. The cemeteries range in size from 20 plots to 2,000.
Our part of town is known as the Hill. You can see it in the picture I chose for the blog today. In fact, the church spire in the background of the photo is the one belonging to our family church, St. Luke’s Episcopal. The open space in the right foreground is Academy Field, where sledding, baseball, soccer, and dog exercising manage to share time and space with admirable ease throughout the year.
In last weekend’s blizzard, the town got covered by pretty much exactly two feet of snow, which had the effect of turning it, for a time, into another town entirely. Street corners, after the endless plowing, were piled so deep in the white stuff that it looked unreal somehow, as though trapdoors had been opened at strategic spots in the clouds. The reality of the event took days to process.
By contrast, the storm that clipped us last night was less than generous in terms of what it left us. Although it is hard to know exactly, so powdery was what fell, and so strong the wind that blew, I will say that we received between 4 and 5 inches.
Intriguingly, though, the taste of winter from the more recent event is stronger than what the blizzard gave. The storm, like last week’s, wound up offshore so intensely that an eye formed, and the wind that has blown all day has covered the once-cleanly plowed streets with snow for a second time.
Walking my dog just now under the black trees and the cold stars and the sliver of frozen moon, the wind sent up puff after puff of snow, some of it local, but some of it, inevitably, from fields, farms, and homes to our west. It’s that kind of night, and that kind of wind, when a thin spray of snow is in the air all the time and gusts spill ground snow onto the streets in feathered gobs.
The temperature is 20 degrees, but when the wind gusts, the assault of cold on skin, flesh, and bones is what crazy kids from California like myself yearn for: Arctic fury, old time winter, here and now.
The neighborhood is quiet, apart from the loud gusts of wind whooshing by. Not a lot of people consider it prime walking weather, and of course I understand. That said, I am noticing a curious thing in modern New England. So little time do people spend outdoors that they barely notice when an old-timey winter takes place right outside their door. They rush to and from their cars, dressed for temperatures 40 degrees warmer than what the elements call for, shiver for a few minutes until the heat takes the chill off in their vehicles, and then rush from the car to wherever they’re going on the other end.
Sure, there are people who sled and ski and skate and run and walk in winter. But, increasingly, they are exceptions to the rule. The mass of humanity here that retreats from the elements has gotten so insulated from nature, and from the glory of a night like to night, for instance, that they can be led by the nose when it comes to weather and climate. Whole world’s burning up? Must be, it says so right here. Plus, didn’t I see a video of a glacier melting, or something? Winter’s a thing of the past? Must be, I don’t even need a jacket anymore. And so on.
Is it a little depressing to hear people talk of global warming, knowing that they’re really talking about the growing wedge between themselves and the natural world, in all too many cases?
