Category: Eco-Crap

Non-Starter

Corporate Fuckery, Drive Time, Eco-Crap

The old legend of Saxon king Cnut sitting in a chair on the beach attempting to stop the incoming tide by royal command is, of course, total bullshit.  Yes, he did that;  but he was attempting to show his idiot courtiers that his royal power had limits, and that there were forces over which no human authority had control.  It was far from being an object lesson in overweening pride and hubris (as it so often is used today), it was the precise opposite.

And here’s its modern-day manifestation.

Anyone with half a brain would have known that battery-powered trucks were a non-starter, for the simple reason that trucks aren’t cars:  they require power, lots of power, to move heavy loads, and sometimes over long distances or over power-demanding terrain withal.   Ferrying humans to and from the supermarket or soccer practice, sure.  Gadding about city streets, absolutely.  But that’s not what trucks were designed for.

So despite boutique efforts like Tesla’s dumpster-looking pickup (surely ol’ Elon was just having us on), all EV pickups were doomed to fail, as has just been proved:

Ford Motor Company is halting production of its electric F-150 Lightning pickup truck at a Michigan factory, the auto giant announced Thursday. Just three years ago, President Joe Biden and Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D., Mich.) visited the plant to celebrate the truck’s rollout, calling it an “incredible facility” that shows there’s “no limit to what American ingenuity and manufacturing can accomplish.”

Ford—which, like other major automakers, has struggled to keep its EV business afloat—will shutter the Dearborn, Michigan, manufacturing plant beginning on Nov. 18 and until Jan. 6, 2025. “We continue to adjust production for an optimal mix of sales growth and profitability,” the company said in a statement Thursday. 

Expect the plant to continue that suspension way past Jan 6, 2025 despite the weasel corporate-speak, because when it comes to pickup (or any other) trucks, EV production will never achieve an “optimal mix of sales growth and profitability”.  (As an aside:  anything hailed by FJB, including his choice for VP, has the automatic stench of failure about it.)

So here’s where the Cnut example becomes more relevant than ever:

Ford’s halt in F-150 Lightning production highlights the disastrous impact of federal EV mandates driven by the Biden-Harris administration,” Jason Isaac, the CEO of the American Energy Institute, told the Washington Free Beacon.

In other words, just because the .dotgov says it must happen, that doesn’t mean that it will.

We’ve seen it before with the laughable sustainable energy mandates, where wind- and solar power hasn’t even come close to expectations of consistent electrical delivery (nor will it ever, because — and I hate to repeat myself — anyone with a brain could have told these terminally-deluded dreamers of that outcome).

But control freaks of the ecological- and socialist persuasion [redundancy alert]  persist in thinking that if they simply order Net Zero to happen by x date, it will happen.

The collapse of the EV market is simply a signal — a foreshadowing, if you will — that as these idiots remain sitting stubbornly in their chairs on the beach, the tide is most assuredly coming in and will drown them.

We should be so lucky.

The problem is that these assholes are trying to force us all to sit with them.

“American automakers and workers are paying the price for policies that ignore real consumer demand,” Isaac continued.

…and it’s not just automakers and workers.  It’s everybody.

Piling On The Misery

Bad News, Drive Time, Eco-Crap

Continuing the saga of electric vehicles (EVs), we learn about the fire risk.  An excerpt from the catalogue of catastrophes:

It is now, or should be, common knowledge that electric vehicles—cars, trucks, buses, bikes, scooters—under conditions of even low humidity or water damage, are prone to catching fire, owing to the unstable nature of the lithium-ion battery. As Chris Morrison writes at The Daily Skeptic, EVs are known to explode “with the force of a bomb blasting super-heated jets of flame, melting and decomposing nearby structural materials including metal and concrete, and sending vast amounts of toxic fumes into any enclosed atmosphere.”

Jammed into underground parking garages or packed in ferries, EVs are harbingers of almost unimaginable disaster—ecological and safety menaces to which the Net Zero fanatics among our political leadership are comatosely indifferent.

  “Willfully indifferent” is the more appropriate term, because as with all faith-based belief systems, danger is set aside as an acceptable risk provided that the goal thereof (in this case, Net Zero) is laudable.

My solution, which is that every time one of these EV things catches fire spontaneously we should toss a Greenie into the flames, would no doubt strike some as excessive.  Nevertheless, even the threat of such an action should shut these assholes up.

Kicking Against The Pricks

Eco-Crap, Resistance, Watermelons

The title of this post is an old English idiom, and it refers to rebelling against authority.  It was a common theme expressed to me as a schoolboy, and were it still in use, or in use in the U.S. at all, it would no doubt still be used against me.

I mistrust and dislike most authority figures, and always have.

In the old days, of course, it was largely political institutions and their acolytes (cops, etc.), but in recent times that’s grown to include busybody scolds such as the Climate Hysterics.

Which makes the following story all the more delicious.

An Irish pub has won plaudits for its devastating reply to a local tourist centre after it told them off for using a traditional peat fire. 

JJ Houghs Singing Pub, in Banagher, Ireland posted a picture to their Facebook page of two customers innocently enjoying the first turf fire of the season on Friday.

But local tourist centre Working Holiday Ireland was not happy about the use of turf (also called peat) as fuel and decided to publicly reprimand the owners of the 250-year-old pub.

In the comment section, they said: ‘I see you’re burning turf?! Carbon footprint guys…’

The response from JJ Houghs was immediate, and savage:

‘It’s how we heat the pub. Looking at your page you rely on tourists from abroad coming to Ireland correct? How do they get here? They hardly swam.

‘How would you quantify and compare the emissions of a Boeing 747 to a small turf fire. How do your guests get around Ireland when they arrive, do they walk?

‘I also see by your page you promote Dunnes Stores, who have 138 stores in Ireland and abroad, do you query their carbon footprint? When your guests are here do you check their clothing to ensure they aren’t made of synthetic polyester, a byproduct of petroleum? Did you write your critique of my turf fire on a phone or laptop? Both of which were developed and are powered by fossil fuel technology. 

‘Maybe think before criticising a small family run pub’s turf fire. Maybe call in some day and I’ll give you my carbon footprint up your hole.’

If ever I get to Ireland, I shall go to the Singing Pub and drink and eat excessively, because they are a place after my own heart and deserve my (and everybody else’s) support.

And to hell with these simpering, self-righteous assholes who have set themselves up as Guardians of the Galaxy, or something.  A pox on them all, the interfering killjoys and wokescolds.

No Room For Screwups

Eco-Crap

…and by “room” I mean space, or area, not a room inside a building.

The first problem with Britishland is that it’s tiny — I mean, the entire United Kingdom can pretty much fit inside Oregon.  The other problem is that (outside the cities) British countryside is unspeakably gorgeous. The third problem is that when (say) a political party screws up, the effect on the population as a whole can be nigh-catastrophic.

Here in Murka, by way of contrast, you can build a 2,500-acre solar- or wind farm with 600-ft turbines in, say, West Texas or anywhere in Nebraska and the chances are that unless you put it next to an interstate or similar, nobody’s even going to know it’s there.  So when the solar panels are destroyed by a lightning strike or the wind turbines get blown over, it’s the proverbial tree falling over in a forest — nobody notices.

The problem is that in Britishland, 2,500 acres is a big deal, and anything you build there (e.g. those 600-ft turbines) will not only be visible, but the chances are that they will, in the words of Jeremy Clarkson’s county planning commission, spoil an Area Of Outstanding Natural Beauty.  And still on Clarkson’s farm, remember how the local council gives him a hard time on his farm of only 1,000 acres — less than half of one of those solar/wind farms as mentioned above.  How much more trouble would said councils kick up over so large an intrusion?

Well, not much, as it turns out.  Why?

The new Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero didn’t waste any time in announcing his approval of a solar farm on the Cambridgeshire and Suffolk border covering 1,000 hectares or nearly 2,500 acres. This £600million development, Miliband said, was ‘crucial to achieving Net Zero’ and would provide ‘an abundant source of cleaner, cheaper energy on the mission towards 2030’. This is just one project out of many across the farmland and moors of Britain.

Miliband is also planning the imposition of wind turbines up to 200 metres (656ft) in height, again ignoring the wishes of local residents and their potential harm to the countryside. For example, there are plans to site 65 turbines of 200 metres on 2,300 hectares of Walshaw Moor, in Calderdale, West Yorkshire. Campaigners against the scheme believe it will be damaging to bird life, such as skylarks and curlews, and increase the risk of flooding. Up to 10,000 tons of concrete will be needed to support these turbines at their base, together with quarried material for 22 miles of access roads. The unsightly structures will be visible for miles in a beloved part of the country. These developments include the construction of a network of transmission pylons across the countryside.

Not to be outdone by Ed Miliband, deputy prime minister Angela Rayner has decided that part of the green belt should be relabelled grey to help build a target of 1.5million homes in five years. And while Rayner thinks some green belt land is ugly, she has dropped the need for aesthetically pleasing buildings. She protests that she isn’t going to build unsightly houses yet she is dismissive of the concept of beauty, commenting that ‘beautiful’ means nothing really, but ‘one thing to one person and another thing to another’.

Remember that of all the terminally-destroyed habitats in the world (e.g. the Aral Sea in the former U.S.S.R.), pretty much all of them are to be found in socialist- or formerly-socialist countries.

Nothing, it appears, gives a Stalinist (e.g. the aforementioned Rayner) greater pleasure than to screw up the environment — whether it’s to fulfill the latest Glorious Five-Year Plan or, as above, Net Zero (a nominally eco-sensitive initiative).  After all, as Rayner admits, beauty is just a bourgeois concept, after all.

I am amazed that the average British voter cannot see (or refuses to see) that all the great socialist dreams are never actually in pursuit of their stated goals (improve the lot of the peasants/proletariat, or “save” the environment), but are rather simply a nostrum for oppressing and controlling people’s lives.  But whatever, the Brits voted these foul Stalinists into power, and now they’re going to reap the whirlwind of the consequences.

Ordinarily in a situation like this, I’d just ask Pontius to hand over the basin;  but the fact is that I’m truly saddened by what’s going to happen to one of the most beautiful countrysides on Earth, a countryside that I’ve visited often and love — love a lot more than the British governing class, to start off with.