Bad news for alarmists won't change their ways

The good news is bad news and the bad news is, well, worse for Louisiana’s Governor’s Mansion, a few City Halls, and other catastrophic anthropogenic global warming cultists scattered throughout the state.

Into September and no named hurricanes have formed in the Atlantic Ocean, the first time since 1941 none have popped up as yet after Independence Day. It’s good news for a state in recent years plowed into by some storms, yet for some it’s, but man-made climate change!

Because, according to the CAGW faith, increased carbon dioxide output is supposed to translate into more and more intense storms. Never mind to them that neither the record nor the science supports such alarmism (to the relief of the state’s brown pelicans), and the only man-made threat to trigger such warming that might cause this is the enormous amount of hot air coming out of the mouths of cultists on this subject.

However, it gets worse for them. It turns out that Arctic ice has increased over the past decade while record levels of greenhouse gases escape into the atmosphere, which according to them should induce a significant decrease in that ice through warming (the same flawed reasoning lay behind a recent scare story about melting Greenland ice, easily debunked.) And, the Great Barrier Reef’s size has expanded to all-time highs, despite doomsayers alleging global warming will destroy it.

So, water won’t be lapping up on the Vieux Carré anytime soon. But here’s the genuine bad news for Louisiana, as a consequence of both physical reality and stupid decision-making pushed by the Democrats like Gov. John Bel Edwards: plans to escalate rapidly electric vehicle production, as an alleged tactic to reduce carbon emissions, will be both self-defeating and needlessly more expensive for Louisiana taxpayers.

It starts with the lunacy behind mandating away future sales of fossil fuel-burning new vehicles, as California recently has proposed doing, which means several states will follow, although this just mimics several countries across the globe. Ironically, just days later California’s utilities issued a plea for consumers not to charge EVs during certain hours of the day because of power shortages (even as the state depopulates) caused by its headlong dash into renewable energy.

That points out the absurdity behind the movement towards EVs as a solution to greenhouse gas production: a huge proportion of the electricity used by them is generated by fossil fuels. Of course, this is all a moot point as there won’t be a huge move into EVs anytime soon because of nature’s constraints with the amount of lithium available – especially outside the autocratic world – to make the batteries needed for these vehicles, much less those to attach to renewable sources to store enough energy to charge those EV batteries, a shortage that can’t be ameliorated except by catastrophically-higher costs and greater environmental damage (due to the enormous level of water used in the process).

It's all just such a house of cards that falls apart at the first tug of reality. And Louisiana loses at the macro level because the mania by some policy-makers to jettison any kind of non-renewable fuel means reduced demand for Louisiana’s important fossil fuel energy sector (and revenues state and local governments derive from that).

But it also loses at the micro level when densely idiotic officials like Edwards are allowed to make policy. Some months ago Edwards announced he would start replacing the state’s fleet of internal combustion engine vehicles with EVs as the former aged out. (New Orleans has done something similar.) At the time, back-of-the-envelope calculations showed this would cost taxpayers an extra $144 million.

In just a few months, that has proven optimistic. Under various price pressures, the price difference between ICE and electric vehicles has risen to over $22,600, meaning Edwards’ plan now will cost Louisianans an extra $226 million, for nothing. That makes it all the more imperative that in next year’s budgeting the Legislature puts in a provision that money can’t be spent on EVs unless they are priced lower than comparable ICE vehicles. That would be more good news for everybody except the alarmists. 

Because these cultists won’t take the good news and adjust their policy-making to match. And that’s bad news for everybody else.