In conclusion, the article ends, “the journey towards adopting electric vehicles as a sustainable alternative to fossil fuel-powered transportation is fraught with complex challenges, particularly concerning the environmental and ethical implications of battery production.”
Thomas Edison strongly advised Henry Ford to go internal combustion engine (ICE), not electric vehicles (EVs) in the late 19th century. EVs dominated the market until the advantages of ICE prevailed more than a century ago. Yet multi-pronged government intervention at the expense of taxpayers and ICE owners is desperately trying to create an industry that consumers do not like.
The economic and environmental problems of EVs are on full display–and the mainstream press is not afraid to report on them (unlike with on-grid wind and solar). A shining example of this was a recent article in Auto Overload (May 11, 2024): “21 Unfortunate Electric Vehicle Flaws That No One Is Discussing.”…
“Many people think that the threat of ‘global warming’ arose only towards the end of the twentieth century…. Climate change, either natural or anthropogenic, has been discussed from the classical age onwards, evolving from the expected benefits of climate engineering to today’s fear of global disaster.”
– Hans von Storch and Nico Stehr, “Climate Change in Perspective,” Nature, June 8, 2000, p. 615
It is all gloom, what Michael Mann cautioned against as “doomism.”[1] Such alarm has been the mainstream narrative—and wrong—since the 1960s. And warnings about how exaggeration can backfire (New York Times: “In Climate Debate, Exaggeration Is a Pitfall“) have been thrown to the wind in the futile, costly pursuit of Net Zero.
This post presents the climate alarm quotations of today with the quotations from Paul Ehrlich and the Club of Rome in the late 1960s/early 1970s for historical perspective.…
“A new ice age would flood the world’s coastal cities and further lower temperatures to build up new glaciers that could eventually cover huge areas.” (1971)
The warming alarmists dismiss the cooling alarmists of yesterday as fringe and ignorant. But some of the biggest names of the day back then would not take too kindly to the know-it-alls of today.
Alex Epstein has coined the term catastrophicism to describe the age-old Malthusian itch. Back in the 1970s, top scientists such as NASA’s S. I. Rasool, an atmospheric physicist at Columbia University, and Stephen Schneider of National Center for Atmospheric Research, were making headlines about future climate change–from people, not nature.
“Scientists have long debated whether man’s activity is actually heating or cooling the earth,” the Washington Post article below notes.