Have The Greens Won?

In the Comments to yesterday’s post,  Longtime Reader and Friend geekWithA.45 said this:

And if you start to dissect exactly where this premise that the internal combustion engine must be phased out, and by what authority such decrees are proclaimed, you end up with a lot of nudge and smoosh; hints of legitimate authority, but without its actual substance.  A regulation here, and interlocking requirement there, a dash of social opprobrium there, it all adds up with zero accountability, socialized responsibility, and no single bad actor to point your finger at.  The art of smiley faced fascism reaches a new high.

Looking across The Pond, where this Green foolishness has reached its apogee, you get statements like this one:

Junior transport minister Trudy Harrison, 45, told a sustainability conference owning a car was outdated ’20th-century thinking’ and the country should move to ‘shared mobility’ to cut carbon emissions.

“Shared mobility” means at best enforced carpooling and such, and at worst public transport, which denies people the freedom to go anywhere except where the bus routes and train lines so they can.  Individual choice, then, is left to bicycles or this confounded electric scooters.

But note the condescension towards “20th-century thinking” — that would be the twentieth century which outdid the Industrial Revolution in its engineering development and progress, that created the explosion of knowledge distribution which outdid the invention of the printing press, and gave individuals all over the world freedoms unknown since the beginning of recorded history.

In fact, if you think about it, the junior minister’s statement would put individuals back onto trains, buses and bicycles — i.e. the transport systems of the nineteenth century — and no doubt for reasons of animal cruelty, no horseback travel would be allowed, thus making the twenty-first century’s inhabitants even worse off than their nineteenth-century forebears.

A couple years ago, BritPM Boris Johnson decreed that internal combustion-engined cars would be banned from manufacture by 2027 — by what law he didn’t say, which is a topic all by itself — thus making the hapless subjects of the Crown eventually reliant on electric-powered transport, to be powered by an electrical system which is even now insufficient for its existing purpose, let alone the gargantuan future needs of all-electric transportation — hence the suggestion of the junior minister (age 45).

All the same is true over here, although I would suggest (or hope) that any U.S. president who decreed the end of car manufacture as we know it would be thrown out of office at the next election — if not before — and the sheer size of the U.S. market would make the demise of gasoline-powered cars and trucks a remote eventuality indeed.

Although, as The Geek has suggested, the internal combustion engine will most likely meet its end by the death of a thousand cuts rather than by any single authoritarian decree.

It may well be, however, that the key word here is “remote”.  I’ve seen several studies among the future generation (under 25 years old) that they are all in favor of the above foolishness — electric cars, mass transport systems etc. — and to be perfectly blunt, if all this is a matter of demographics, then fine:  let the future generations revert to nineteenth-century transportation and be governed by twenty-first century totalitarianism.

My generation will all be dead by then, and the little buggers can live with the consequences of this Green silliness that they and their parents adopted oh-so willingly.

18 comments

  1. The greens have won, I’ve known that for a decade.
    Just as I have known since “the collapse of the Soviet Union” that that was only another show put up to blow dust into the eyes of the “capitalists” and make them stop being vigilant against the continuing and growing influence and indoctrination of their countries by communist ideologues.

  2. I like those little electric rental scooters, since I live right next to a small nightclub district.

    On Friday and Saturday nights, it’s entertaining as hell to watch the drunks try to ride one of those things home in the dark.

    That way, when they fall off they (usually) only hurt themselves, instead of running over a random pedestrian or managing a head-on collision.

  3. The Greens cannot even get through a normal winter season without problems, when we really have a new mini ice-age all that preening will not keep them warm.
    The ICE will survive through the determination of farmers, ranchers, miners, woodsmen, etc., who need them to keep providing the People with food, lumber, and natural elements vital for the continuing survival of civilization.

  4. I have read yesterday and this morning from the Greener Talking Heads that the tornadoes that tore through the upper south Friday night were all the result of Globull Worming. Such iconic climate legends as Eric “The Moron” Swalwell and Noel “Dumber than a Rotted Stump” Scovell (former climate expert and writer for David Letterman,) both lay the blame for all that death and destruction squarely at the feet of Rand “I Swear I Didn’t Know I Had That Kind of Power” Paul.

  5. I’m so green I pre-bought 6 tons of wood stove pellets for $66/ton, delivered 1 ton at a time. It’s my back up heating system, but sometimes I just fire it up to piss off a tree hugger.

  6. Yes the internal combustion engine is on its way out but it’s on its way out due to technology and economics. Petrol here is £1.44 a litre. That’s $7.25 for a US gallon. Self-driving cars can’t come quickly enough. Once people can summon one in 5 minutes then it’s game over for most cars. Another game-changer would be rapid recharging.

    The internal combustion engine is not going to disappear from the UK any time soon. It will be needed whereever charging points are scarce. Farm vehicles are the big one. And when you absolutely need your vehicle to go when you need it. Emergency and military vehicles are the big ones here, but doctors, nurses, vets, and others also.

    The UK isn’t America. We have a much better developed mass transit infrastructure. And we’re much smaller. What works in the UK may not work in the USA.

  7. Some months ago, I saw an engineering report on what it would take to get us to all electric vehicles by 2035. That would be a new 200 MW nuclear plant be finished every three weeks from now until then. Not gonna happen.

  8. Love to hear what Clarkson, Hammond, and May have to say about this despite in the past reviewing many an E-vehicle…espexially Clarkson’s take since he’s operating “the farm” and runs the biggest Lambo tractor they sell.

  9. I’m not giving up on ICE just yet.

    All those advocates seem to think everyone lives in an urban or suburban setting. I’m at least 1 hour away from the nearest public transit system. I also haven’t seen any hint that International Harvester, Case, Caterpillar or John Deer are developing rechargeable Farm Equipment. Just how do they expect their food to be produced and transported? It doesn’t just appear in the supermarket by magic. And Kenworth and other don’t appear to be concerned of recent reports of Tesla Semis in production.

  10. The trick is making the Leftists live in their dystopia FIRST. Especially the ruling elite.

    And you don’t let up. The objective is not a painful lesson, it’s an example to others. That the sin of Folly means you starve to death in the cold and the dark.

    1. Banning ICE vehicles from Martha’s Vineyard would prove interesting – plus closing the airport, and mandating the ferries to be powered by sail or electricity.

  11. Always remember that mass transit is government controlled transportation. You can only travel when and where the government allows it.

  12. If you don’t think they can ban internal combustion engines, where are you buying your 100w incandescent bulbs these days?

    1. The stores around here, NW Chicago suburbs, have no shortage of incandescent light bulbs. Buy as many as you want in whatever wattage you want.

  13. The only thing that will save transportation freedom AND the piston engine (limited), will be if we use hydrogen as our energy storage medium.

    Toyota still is placing rocks in that basket — the reason being mainly “recharge” time and their fear of battery reliability.

    Toyota makes Very Good ™ energy converters. High uptime, low maintenance (anecdotes and personal preferences aside). Fuel cells are a natural follow on. Batteries not so much.

    Also, I would love to know what folks in rural areas are going to do when a hurricane destroys all of the infrastructure that carries the light to customers. You need gasoline or diesel generators, and you can’t power those if we are no longer selling those fuels in large quantity.

    Anyhow, the American people are choosing (kind of, if you ignore vote fraud) this green route. We have had chance after chance to change tracks. But we don’t, and the inexorable march to a no-carbon-fuel future is all but unstoppable at this point. It would take 4 terms of carbon-positive presidents & 2 decades of legislatures to change directions at this point, and the first time the green folks get back in office, they will throw it overboard. They have proven that, this time around, no change is too radical in the first year.

    What it all boils down to, IMO, people have given up their freedoms. When you can’t let the market decide on the right fuel or energy storage medium, then you have defacto said you have to regulate towards the correct choice. Our constitution only holds onto 2 freedoms really, and both are in severe danger: 1st amendment and 2nd amendment. Every year, “they” chip away at it a little more at the time…

    One thing positive — if you have a diesel power generation device, you will be fine for a while as long as it is legal for the manufacturers to sale parts. The reason is that you can still burn cooking oil in diesels.

    But once they outlaw the sale of diesels and parts, that avenue is gone as well.

    This wouldn’t be so bad if batteries were actually good. Just because a lithium ion battery can run your drill or even drive your tesla to 60mph in <2.0s, does NOT mean you can go camping on a lithium ion battery and never have to recharge. The power density is still not even in the same zip code as gasoline, much less the same ballpark. And packing in solar cells for charging your lithium battery packs (and depending on the sun in the winter to power those cells), is not at all very practical.

    What we really need is something with a lot more umph for the size than lithium batteries. But the TPTB don't care, it's go electric or die trying. Battery research seems dead — no major developments in over a decade. Tesla keeps marginally improving the tech on their cells, but there has been no massive improvement and seems to be none on the horizon.

Comments are closed.