The Mississippi Energy Institute authored and sponsored this post.
Federal policies on transportation fuels and automobiles are becoming evermore convoluted and nonsensical. You can bet the result of these will be all of us paying more for cars/trucks and fuels. Here's a quick summary:- Years ago, during the Bush Administration, the great biofuel plan was put in place by Congress. Ethanol and biodiesel were going to reduce our reliance on imported energy and replace it with home-grown energy from food sources. While ethanol is a good additive to gasoline, it is simply hard to produce in huge quantities. EPA was given the authority to decide how much biofuels should be blended with petroleum-based fuels. The result: Through the years, refineries typically cannot blend enough to meet the EPA requirements, so they must purchase credits called RINs, which have added artificial costs to gasoline and diesel in the U.S. ever since. Did you know you've been paying for this program for years, pennies at a time? Aside from that, it has been found that lots of land, fertilizer, food and diesel are required to make ethanol, so the environmental impact is negligible.
- By rule, the Obama Administration forced auto manufacturers to aggressively increase fuel economy standards in the early days of the war against U.S. oil and natural gas. Their goal was to reduce gasoline consumption, but the price was higher vehicle costs and decreased safety.
- Now, the Biden Administration is aggressively pushing electric vehicles, so their agenda is in contrast to the great biofuel plan that has worked so well. Biden and his EPA are between a rock and a hard place with Midwestern corn farmers and electric vehicle industry proponents. Now, the Biden EPA has proposed a rule that will require 2/3 of cars made in the U.S. in 10 years to be battery powered electric vehicles. If they get their way, there will hardly be a need for ethanol. And, you guessed it, all types cars will likely be far more expensive due to the drastic supply chain changes mandated not by law, but by agency rule.
Automobile ownership is a part of life for most of us, and most people want the same thing - the freedom to choose the type of vehicle that best fits them and to obtain it at a reasonable cost. Some people like new cars, some like used cars. A growing number of consumers are purchasing electric vehicles (about 6% of new purchases last year), but most consumers currently don't want or can't afford an electric vehicle. For those who choose to buy an EV, should they get a $7500 tax break for that?
The point is, the years of big policy ideas from DC to "improve" the future of cars and transportation fuel have steadily driven up costs of cars and fuel while distorting the marketplace. Now, there's a chance that trend may accelerate if the new proposals become reality.
On new technology options like electric vehicles, would it be crazy to let consumer demand dictate what auto manufacturers make?
36 comments:
The wheels to the EV market are falling off. The green boondoggle will saddle our future generations with a confiscatory debt service level the effects of which we can't begin to imagine today. The elites never learned from world history. When the upheaval arrives they'll be first.
People are starving and we're turning food into ethanol. Renewable energy sources are not economically sound without subsidies, and storage is a major issue. EVs are expensive and the replacement batteries are too. The EPA and Climate Accord demand carbon reductions while China pumps tons into the atmosphere. And, then there's cow farts... At some point, the states need to tell the Federal Government to STFU.
Leftists-democrats-commies resent freedom and curtail it at every opportunity.
The whole save the planet is pure BS! This green energy is all about control. Anyone with half a brain knows that we cannot support this country without fossil fuels. It would be impossible on green energy. Further more China and India, the two largest populations in the world are not about to abandon fossil fuel.
It is impossible to predict the future and anticipate what technology advances will occur. We will never be rid of fossil fuels in the near or long, and I mean very long term, regardless of what the elites say. Fossil fuels are the only source of completely portable energy. Wind and solar are not. Think about that. Hydrogen is looking more promising as various hurdles are identified and addressed, but it is a very long way from practical application. Elites are either unwilling or incapable of calculating the true cost or even showing the least bit of curiosity about the real practicality of their goals.
I'm simply not convinced that 1) CO2 is causing catastrophic damage to the environment in the form of rising sea levels, severe weather, droughts, etc.; nor 2) that eliminating or greatly reducing man-made CO2 is feasible or would be effective, assuming the theoretical predictions are accurate.
Good luck prying the steering wheel of my gas eating SUV from my cold stiff fingers. FJB!
2:26 have you seen Club of Rome and World Economic Forum elite, Dennis Meadows' 2017 interview? "86% of you are going to have to die, that's a done deal, we hope you'll just accept it, I hope it can be a shared experience. The earth can support 9B, but with only 1B there will be more freedom and a higher standard of living and we.ve decided that is more important". Yall dont think they might put something in a no-liabilty vaccine do you?
The best way to control CO2 is limit the underlying cause-people.
I just do not understand why we cannot generate energy from burning our garbage. Other countries do it, we generate plenty of garbage, so why not?
Rush used to say that anyone who believes that mankind could impact the climate is really ignorant.
This EV thing is just another form of controlling the masses. It's what the deep state Marxists/commies love to do to reach their goals. They would love the U.S. to be another Cuba/Venezuela, etc. Does anyone actually believe the Biden would turn in his limo/jets for EVs?
They deliver tankers full of CO2 to the huge greenhouses in Canada because the plants die when consume all of the available CO2 in the greenhouses. This is how CO2 originally became known as a “greenhouse gas” and it provided no heat for the plants.
Reminder that population reduction is always a priority for the 1%
Reduce the energy, reduce the food supply, reduce the jobs, reduce the housing, then consolidate the DNA of the planet.
@2:29 - I'm with you- ain't buying it. The fact is, climate change has been going on for thousands of years, long before we were driving cars and burning oil. It's the epitome of hubris for man to think that he controls everything.
@3:13 Pm
Name one country?
Japan spends a considerable amount of fuel burning their garbage.
There isn’t enough combustible rubbish to burn the non-combustible rubbish.
Plus, it is the law in Japan to sort the trash into separate bags.
Americans can’t even be expected to properly sort recyclables.
They do this because they don’t have enough land for landfills.
Japan does capture as much of the heat from their trash burning as they can.
However, their efforts do not correlate into a net-energy production.
FYI: Japan has restarted all of their Nuclear reactors and extended their lives by 40 years.
Nuclear is the ONLY solution we have that really works long-term.
We could have an EV utopia if we reduced the population to less than 2 billion and built brand new nuclear reactors.
Boy, this post sure brought out the nutjobs. Wtf
"Rush used to say that anyone who believes that mankind could impact the climate is really ignorant." Here, here. George Carlin also stated the same during his comedic rants.
https://www.google.com/search?q=george+carlin+climate+change+routine&oq=george+carlin+and+climate+change&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUqCAgBEAAYFhgeMgYIABBFGDkyCAgBEAAYFhgeMggIAhAAGBYYHtIBDTY0MDU5ODIxajBqMTWoAgCwAgA&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:a1dc1024,vid:BB0aFPXr4n4
I care to neither hear from the government nor the Mississippi Energy Institute about what type of automobile I choose to drive.
Which is worse: an overbearing government or a parasitical "not for profit" think tank which cannot exist apart from an overbearing government?
Just go look at your local coal mine to understand that climate change has taken place over millions of years.
Further evidence democrats can screw up a good wet dream.
DEI and ESG will solve all our problems until we become a totalitarian state the left craves.
There is no climate change, it’s only 93 with a heat index of 102 right now at 8pm.
All of the EV stuff is about the exchange of wealth. Getting government assistance to shift wealth from one group to another through legislation. Eventually the general public won’t have enough money to eat and will rely on Uncle Joe or some other puppet for everything.
Evil learns from evil so Democrats know “if you tell a lie big enough, and regularly repeat it, people will eventually come to believe it."
A May 17, 2023 Reuters headlines reads: “US power grids vulnerable to extreme heat conditions this summer, NERC says,” - but the Biden EPA has proposed a rule that will require 2/3 of cars made in the U.S. in 10 years to be battery powered electric vehicles???
It’s one thing that Democrats have been successful preying on the poor and ill-informed and convinced them, as an example, that defunding/abolishing being anti-police was going to make their lives better. But what’s amazing is how they’ve also “educated/indoctrinated” these younger generations into becoming blind followers that refuse to ask the simple questions.
I see that Big Oil has arrived at JJ with misrepresentations and outright lies, supported by Big Stupid, which arrives in response to every post on the Blog Page.
@4:25 PM Which rock did you crawl out from under, or was it a road apple?
@4:43, Country sure would benefit from George Carlin right now.
3:13pm
Burning garbage, especially plastics and tires, releases toxic fumes: whatever energy creation benefits might result would be diminished by poisoning the air. The cleanest practical use of fossil fuels, nuclear energy and putting more humans, especially prisoners and the homeless, on bicycle type generators seems a practical mix of energy creation to me.
I used to think most people learned in school that the earth went through ice ages follower by heating back up. Men think in short term relative to the age of the universe. No one here has gone through an ice age. The earth is coming out of the last one and it will continue to heat up. Then there will be another ice age. No one living today will live to see it. Man has their four seasons. Earth has two seasons. It sure is hard to explain things to people who do not farther into the future of back in the past than 24 hours.
June 30, 2023 at 4:07 PM - Climate change has been going-on for BILLIONS of years. As Dennis Miller has been known to opine, humans have only been measuring temperature accurately for 150 years, and using indoor plumbing for less than that, but we think we can control the climate of the earth.
There's not enough lithium in the earth to mine to power all the cars in the US alone. Let alone the world.
Electric cars are too powerful for average drivers. Still don’t like that the Republican states are banning direct sales to customers in order to protect legacy auto dealerships. It’s bad for consumers, but good for the politicians’ pockets.
Climatards mostly silent today in re this post. They must be outside grilling veggieburgers and sipping Chardonnay, snacking on honey-dipped crickets.
I toured a waste facility in Japan some years back now. They did burn the garbage at this facility; there was never any smoky exhaust from this, and I passed near enough to it often enough that I would have seen it.
The energy they produced in burning trash for, I would estimate, a community of about 500,000 people was only enough that it powered the waste facility but nothing else. It wasn’t providing lights and A/C for anybody else.
@12:52 PM
Please tell us the name of the facility you toured in Japan.
The auto industry as well as many others will need to make some changes eventually. The issue will be getting all the countries globally to agree. Not sure that will ever happen so it seems pretty likely that whatever climate damage happens is inevitable. Money is the driver of change not future sustainability.
I have dump trucks, have you ever seen an electric one? You already can't afford a new house, if this happens you won't be able to afford the dirt under it!
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