“[Fire chief Palmer] Buck said the advent and rising popularity of electrical cars presents new, unique challenges to firefighters who respond to crashes involving the vehicles, including high-powered batteries not normally seen outside of factory or industrial settings as well as a maze of electrical wiring that can still be live and shock first responders.”
It crashed and burned, and it took more than 23,000 gallons of water to finally extinguish the lithium-ion battery.
So do you still want to buy a Tesla for a status upgrade?
Maybe your loved ones will say: don’t spend the extra money and the time searching for recharging stations when it is not safe. Accidents do happen, but can Tesla be trusted with its promises for driverless technology?
The lesson of the story is that government intervention to force inferior technology onto the market has not only anticipated but also unanticipated consequences.…
Ed. Note: The Cato Institute has long been an intellectual and advocacy force for climate realism (the global lukewarming school), as well as free-market energy policies in the face of climate alarmism. This post shares Cato’s work on both issues in this historic week of climate activism to, in President Biden’s words, “set America on a path of net-zero emissions economy by no later than 2050.”
This post will be updated with any new material from Cato on these subjects.
………………..
[Nothing on Earth Day] [!!]
[April 23rd: Electric Vehicles and the Biden Infrastructure Plan]
This post by Chris Edwards is just regular fare with little-to-nothing to do with the climate/energy transformation war raging outside of Cato’s windows.
The piece is also very shallow and politically correct, trying to make the argument that more government subsidies are not needed because electric vehicles (EVs) can now stand on their own….…
This reprint from a collection of essays at Julian Simon.com is published as an ode to Earth Day (tomorrow). This piece was finalized in Simon’s treatise, The Ultimate Resource 2 (1996), pp. 604–607. Simon’s relative politeness to his adversary is a tribute to open, honest, and respectful debate (versus the Paul R. Ehrlich approach).
“When you launch a space shuttle you don’t trot out the flat-earthers to be commentators. They’re outside the bounds of what ought to be discourse in the media. In the field of ecology, Simon is the absolute equivalent of the flat-earthers.” (Paul Ehrlich, quoted below)
For economy of treatment of the matter of attack rhetoric, let’s focus on just one critic, Paul Ehrlich, who has directed a great deal of colorful language in my direction (see also his comments in the Afternote to Chapter 15, and my interchange with him in Simon, 1990, Selection 43).…