Watch for the Next Shoe to Drop on Electric Cars

If everyone switches from gasoline to electric cars, with super-duper batteries that will last 70 miles instead of 45, what a wonderful world it would be. Maybe.

It behooves us to remember that just because we will be burning nothing under the hood, that doesn't mean that nothing has to burn. Indeed, something must burn somewhere.

Timothy Carney at The Washington Examiner, notes today that ethanol was once regarded as a clean source of fuel before reality set in.

However promising a gasoline-free automobile may sound, anyone who followed the government’s mad rush to ethanol fuel in recent years has to worry about the clean promise of the electric car yielding dirty results.

Ethanol — an alcohol fuel made from corn or other plants — has been pushed relentlessly on the American people by a Congress under the influence of a powerful ethanol lobby. Touted as a clean fuel, the government-created ethanol boom has contributed to water pollution, soil erosion, deforestation and even air pollution.

Lithium could be the new ethanol, thanks to the government push for electric cars. Lithium is an element found in nature, and lithium-ion batteries are at the heart of the next generation of electric cars. Compared with lead acid (the standard car battery) and nickel metal hydride (the batteries in today’s hybrids), lithium-ion batteries are less toxic, more powerful and longer lasting.

But what would happen if electric cars and these batteries gain wide use?

Do you feel a big "uh, oh!" coming?

Before we even get to the batteries, recall that although all-electric, plug-in cars emit nothing, somebody needs to burn something for the car to move. Here, the burning happens at the power plant instead of under your hood.

The Department Energy estimates that coal provides half our electricity. A recent Government Accountability Office study reported that a plug-in compact car, if it is recharged at an outlet drawing its juice from coal, provides a carbon dioxide savings of only 4 to 5 percent. A plug-in sport utility vehicle provides a CO2 savings of 19 to 23 percent.

If the cleaner and cheaper fuel of a plug-in causes someone to drive even a bit more, it’s a break-even on CO2. GAO co-author Mark Gaffigan raised the question to CNSNews.com; “If you are using coal-fired power plants and half the country’s electricity comes from coal-powered plants, are you just trading one greenhouse gas emitter for another?”

More bad news: Lithium is mostly found in South America, and about half of that in (currently socialist) Bolivia.

The GAO report warns that “extracting lithium from locations where it is abundant, such as in South America, could pose environmental challenges that would damage the ecosystems in those areas.”

Those more concerned with energy independence than green fuels also have reason to doubt electric cars: About half of the world’s lithium reserves are in Bolivia. A major shift to lithium-powered cars “could substitute reliance on one foreign resource [oil] for another [lithium],” the GAO writes.

There's more. Educate yourself.

Cash for Clunkers? Not So Much

The "Cash for Clunkers" program -- inspired by Government Motors and passed into law by Congress -- may turn out to be a lot less of a windfall for everyday folks than promised.

Over at Planet Gore, Edward John Craig posts an e-mail from a reader, which we reprint, that notes:

The hapless Democrats believe their “cash for clunkers” bill, promoted to help the environment, will save the auto industry, too. Somehow a $3,500 voucher will entice me to trade in my van, which is paid for, to assume a $20,000 debt on a new vehicle which will get as little as 2 mpg better mileage. The $3,500 voucher will be nullified by the depreciation on my trade-in, which will be practically worthless since the bill requires the dealer to scrap it. Also, this wasteful scrapping of a serviceable vehicle is being pushed by Democrats who also complain we use too much of the world’s resources. And where did the Democrats get the idea for this bill? From GM, a company suffering from too many of its ideas already.

Once again the Law of Unintended Consequences bites the Progressive redistributionists in the behind.

500 Cigar Jobs Weren't Created or Saved

"We can't afford to make these cigars in the U.S. anymore."

That sums up the plight of Tampa, Florida, based Hav-a-Tampa Cigars, a firm in production since 1902 is preparing to lay off nearly 500 workers and move its production runs to Puerto Rico.

Cause of death: higher federal taxes brought about by SCHIP.

Altadis tried to keep the plant open by closing it for a week or two at a time and furloughing workers. Eventually, though, the company couldn't cope with a steep drop in consumer demand, brought on by the recession and a large new tax on tobacco products, McKenzie said.

Work that had been done in Tampa will now be performed in an Altadis plant in Puerto Rico, where it has extra manufacturing capacity, McKenzie said. The company is not closing its nearby distribution center off U.S. 301, where it employs about 150 people.

Employees on Tuesday were digesting how they would find work in an economy where more than one in 10 people in the area already are unemployed.

[SNIP]

Several things conspired to hurt Altadis' sales, McKenzie said, including the recession and the growth of indoor smoking bans. The bans have especially hurt sales in cold-weather states, where it's impractical to smoke a cigar outdoors in the winter, he said.

However, the company attributed much of its trouble to the State Children's Health Insurance Program, or SCHIP, a federal program that provides health insurance to low-income children. It is funded, in part, by a new federal tax on cigars and cigarettes. McKenzie couldn't say how much sales of Hav-A-Tampa cigars had fallen off, but the numbers have dropped significantly, he said.

Previously, federal excise taxes on cigars were limited to no more than a nickel, said Norman Sharp, president of the Cigar Association of America trade group. The tax increase, which took effect April 1, raises the maximum tax on cigars to about 40 cents, Sharp said.

The "logic" -- a word our president likes to use -- of financing a health insurance program for "children" using taxes on vice has never been real clear.

But that's logic of progressives who once upon a time brought us Prohibition. That went over real well too.

The Unstimulating Calm Before the Stimulus

O Beware the Law of Unintended Consequences!

More evidence, courtesy of Jim Geraghty at The Campaign Spot at NRO, that human nature never changes. A viewer who heads up a large medical institution e-mailed:

I am in charge of several large construction projects that are already budgeted and ready to go . . . in effect they are “shovel ready” . . . however, as soon as the stimulus bill was signed into law they all came to a screeching halt. They’ve been put on hold in hopes that the Federal Government will pay for them.

Unfortunately no one knows how much money our institution will be allotted, and how exactly we’re supposed to apply for said money. Meanwhile, these projects will just sit and wait, just in case. My fear is that we won’t find out if they’ll be government funded until sometime in the fall, which will be in the next financial year, and then there will no longer be funds in our budget for these projects.

I suspect that this thinking is not unique to my employer. I’m sure that other institutions plus state and local governments are all putting projects on hold in hopes that they can get someone else to pay the bills. So, from what I have seen; the “Stimulus” has resulted in a slowdown in the economy.

That's why Porkulus was so much more appropriate. Everyone would rather get a freebie from Uncle Sugar than have to repay for these projects through normal means.

Get in line boys. It may be a long wait.

A Scientific Goof in the South African Corn Crop

A big "oops!" in South Africa.

Monsanto GM corn harvest fails massively

South African farmers suffered millions of dollars in lost income when 82,000 hectares of genetically-manipulated corn (maize) failed to produce hardly any seeds.The plants look lush and healthy from the outside. Monsanto has offered compensation.

Monsanto blames the failure of the three varieties of corn planted on these farms, in three South African provinces,on alleged 'under-fertilisation processes in the laboratory". Some 280 of the 1,000 farmers who planted the three varieties of Monsanto corn this year, have reported extensive seedless corn problems.

However environmental activist Marian Mayet, director of the Africa-centre for biosecurity in Johannesburg, demands an urgent government investigation and an immediate ban on all GM-foods, blaming the crop failure on Monsanto's genetically-manipulated technology.

One observer noted that you couldn't tell merely by looking whether the corn was defective or not.

"One can't see from the outside whether a plant is unseeded. One must open up the cob leaves to establish the problem,' he said. The seedless cobs show no sign of disease or any kind of fungus. They just have very few seeds, often none at all.

The South African supermarket-chain Woolworths already banned GM-foods from its shelves in 2000. However South African farmers have been producing GM-corn for years: they were among the first countries other than the United States to start using the Monsanto products.

The South African government does not require any labelling of GM-foods. Corn is the main staple food for South Africa's 48 million people.

Let's examine this problem by looking at foundational principles.

God is the Author of life, not Monsanto. (Our Founding Fathers would have said "Nature's God" but it is One and the Same.)

Should anyone be tampering with the genetic traits of food crops for profit? It is one thing to crossbreed crops to get hybrid varieties: that kind of science was popularized by Mendel, a green-thumbed religious monk. It is another to snip genes from insects and graft them onto corn in order to produce a trait that not only does not occur in nature and probably never would even with millions of years of opportunity.

But Monsanto, and a handful of other multi-national companies, goes Nature's God one trick better. God made food crops so that the prudent farmer could save some of his seed and grow another crop next year. What idiotic generosity! Monsanto makes sure that the seed from its crops is sterile; it will not reproduce, not next year or any other year. This way the hapless farmers are forced to come back to Monsanto for next year's seed.

If they're lucky, there won't be a lab screw-up, and something will actually grow.

Now you can call me old-fashioned, a religious zealot, a right-wing extremist, if you wish, but I believe with all my heart that if Nature's God wanted seeds to reproduce, year in and year out, without the helping hand of white-coated lab scientists involved, then anyone who bio-engineers them otherwise is anti-God. If we continue to allow them to do this, we are aiding and abetting un-Godly acts.

I'm not comfortable being in that position.

Furthermore, if Natural Law suggests that I should love my neighbor as myself, then why do I want to put him behind the GM 8-ball every planting season? It's a moral sin to do this, and it ought to be a crime.

Monsanto is responsible for the loss of crop production on 202,625 acres of South African land. That's 316 sections of land one mile square. Good corn can easily produce 130-140 bushels per acre, so we are looking at a loss of up to 28 million bushels. That's a lot of corn, and a lot of empty bellies on the world's most famine-prone continent. Oops, indeed!

This is just one of the unintended consequences of genetic modification. There are potentially many others.

What is Monsanto paying the South African farmers? Last year's corn crop in the U.S. brought $7 per bushel, although right now the price is about $4. Even at the low end, Monsanto ought to "shell out" $112 million, don't you think? Somehow I doubt that the reimbursement rate will be anything close to that.

I know this post is long, and somewhat technical, but I think it's important that as Americans we pay attention to what American-based corporations are doing in our name. I'm not anti-business or anti-profit -- far from it -- but I am pro-morality, and what is taking place is not moral.