Fail: Electric cars could produce higher emissions over their lifetimes than petrol equivalents

President Obama hardest hit...

(The Australian) — Electric cars could produce higher emissions over their lifetimes than petrol equivalents because of the energy consumed in making their batteries, a study has found.

An electric car owner would have to drive at least 129,000km before producing a net saving in CO2. Many electric cars will not travel that far in their lifetime because they typically have a range of less than 145km on a single charge and are unsuitable for long trips. Even those driven 160,000km would save only about a tonne of CO2 over their lifetimes.

The British study, which is the first analysis of the full lifetime emissions of electric cars covering manufacturing, driving and disposal, undermines the case for tackling climate change by the rapid introduction of electric cars.

Earth Hour May Actually Increase Carbon Emissions

Al Gore just can't win anymore. Is he on suicide watch yet?

The Telegraph reported:

Earth Hour, organised by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), will see millions of people switch off their lights for an hour this weekend.

But the fall in electricity use for such a short period is unlikely to result in less energy being pumped into the grid, and will therefore not reduce emissions.

Even if power stations are turned off, the upsurge in turning the lights back on one hour later will require power stations that can fire up quickly like oil and coal.

Energy experts said it could therefore result in an increase in carbon emissions "rendering all good intentions useless at a flick of a switch".

1,200 limos, 140 private planes, caviar wedges and climate change fraud

Many world leaders will gather in Copenhagen to 'save the planet' from carbon emissions. They will fly in on their private planes, jump into their limos and scurry to a banquet to munch down some caviar. This sounds like a sarcastic form of satire, but is the actual truth. Meanwhile, the Climategate scandal continues and world leaders and the state run media continue to pretend to ignore the obvious. The Earth has stopped warming in spite of rising CO2 levels. Liberal world leaders don't think reality is a good enough reason to abandon their plan to raise the worlds taxes by trillions of dollars in the name of environmentalism.

The Telegraph reported:

Ms Jorgensen reckons that between her and her rivals the total number of limos in Copenhagen next week has already broken the 1,200 barrier. The French alone rang up on Thursday and ordered another 42. "We haven't got enough limos in the country to fulfil the demand," she says. "We're having to drive them in hundreds of miles from Germany and Sweden."

New Study Indicates Global Warming Climate Models May be Wrong

Data from Ocean buoys and other temperature charts indicate the earth's temperature has stabilized or even declined in the last few years. Arctic ice is now expanding and the polar bears are saved. All this evidence against anthropogenic global warming is mounting while global CO2 levels rise rapidly. The most logical explanation is climate models predicting global warming from carbon emissions are wrong. This new study strongly indicates that fact.

From USA Today:

Could the best climate models -- the ones used to predict global warming -- all be wrong?

Maybe so, says a new study published online today in the journal Nature Geoscience. The report found that only about half of the warming that occurred during a natural climate change 55 million years ago can be explained by excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. What caused the remainder of the warming is a mystery.

"In a nutshell, theoretical models cannot explain what we observe in the geological record," says oceanographer Gerald Dickens, study co-author and professor of Earth Science at Rice University in Houston. "There appears to be something fundamentally wrong with the way temperature and carbon are linked in climate models."

Recently, NASA admitted solar activity was affecting global warming and a Danish study, released in January, indicated magnetic fields are affecting temperatures.

GAO: Electric Cars Won't Reduce CO2 Emissions

The startling conclusion of a new GAO report is there would be no reduction of carbon emissions from switching to electric vehicles.

From Hot Air:

The push for conversion to plug-in electric cars will do nothing to stop carbon emissions, a report by the GAO warns, throwing cold water on a push by Democrats to get more plug-ins on the road. In fact, the problem could be made worse as demand goes up at coal-fired electrical plants. Plus, the need for batteries may just have the US changing the dictators to which we’re chained, as IBD reports:

It’s a beautiful theory — highways full of electric cars emitting no greenhouse gases or pollutants after being plugged into an outlet in our garages overnight. The problem, according to a new Government Accountability Office report, is that the effort may only shift the problem somewhere else.

“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?” asks Mark Gaffigan, co-author of the GAO report. The report itself notes: “Reductions in CO2 emissions depend on generating electricity used to charge the vehicles from lower-emission sources of energy.”

The GAO report says a plug-in compact car, if recharged at an outlet drawing its power from coal, provides a carbon dioxide savings of only 4% to 5%. If the feeling of saving the environment from driving an electric car causes people to drive more, that small amount of savings vanishes entirely.

Electric cars might get us out from under the heel of OPEC, but we would just have a new overlord.

The GAO also points out that electric cars would have the US trading one set of dictators for another in order to power our cars. The batteries for electric vehicles are lithium-ion, and for the experimental production levels in the US at this moment, we have enough lithium resources to keep pace. However, once we start building electric cars in mass numbers, we will quickly run through our proven stores of lithium. We would most likely have to do business with Hugo Chavez lackey Evo Morales of Bolivia, where half of the world’s proven stores of lithium reside. Even if we didn’t buy directly from the leftist leader, Morales has the ability to set the global price — just as Saudi Arabia and OPEC do with oil.

Set the flux capacitor to 1875

The year 1875 is the last time Americans' carbon emissions matched the goals set by the Waxman-Markey legislation. This legislation wants the US to reduce it's carbon emissions to that low level by the year 2050. We will need somewhere to hitch our horses and we can really save on electricity. This is the same level as Haiti currently has. Of course, Haiti is hardly a bastion of environmental paradise. It is a nation swimming in bacterial and protozoal diarrhea, hepatitis A and E, typhoid fever, dengue fever and malaria, with 47 percent illiteracy and a life expectancy of 49 years. No thanks, Al Gore, Barack Obama and Henry Waxman. There is also the matter of the cost. The CBC claims they can not even calculate the actual cost of Cap and Trade legislation. According to the Washington Times:

Their solution is embodied in the momentarily stuck Henry A. Waxman-Edward J. Markey global warming legislation, the goal of which is to banish one of the world's most ubiquitous elements from our lives. Its proponents call it "back to the future." They're not kidding, either.

Nobody understands exactly what the legislation means in dollars and cents - more on this later - but to experience how it would feel to lower your personal carbon footprint to the size this bill proposes, set the flux capacitor to 1875. That's the last time Americans' carbon emissions matched the goals set by the Waxman-Markey legislation.

What, the old DeLorean is up on cinder blocks in the front yard again? In that case you can test drive Waxman-Markey by sailing down to Haiti, because current CO2 emissions are where Waxman-Markey wants America's to be in 2050. Radical environmentalists think such a CO2 level will be heaven on Earth, but the place that has actually achieved it is a nation swimming in bacterial and protozoal diarrhea, hepatitis A and E, typhoid fever, dengue fever and malaria, with 47 percent illiteracy and a life expectancy of 49 years. So excuse me if I remain unconvinced.

Just why anyone beyond reliably liberal politicians and environmental activists would support cap-and-trade is getting harder to understand. It is true that some utility companies that used to be suspicious now embrace it, but probably only so long as they get their free emissions permits.

Others say the bill is only alive because the Obama administration needs the revenues produced by cap-and-trade to pay for its broad expansion of government. The revenue impact is between $646 billion and $2 trillion over the next 10 years, but the longer the legislation lies out in the sun, the less appetizing it becomes.

Now even Democrats are getting concerned that it will damage their districts. One Democrat on the Energy and Commerce Committee put it this way in a question to former Vice President Al Gore: "What do I tell a single parent, for example, in my district with two children, two young children, making $8 an hour? What can I say to reassure her that she will be able to afford the cost of this legislation?" The vice president didn't know, and neither does anybody else.

Republicans had hoped that the Congressional Budget Office would be able to put a price tag on the bill. But the CBO's analysts finally told us they could not estimate its cost without having access to the actual numbers on permit allocations. A Democratic supporter responded by lecturing that "any witness who is familiar with this can adequately analyze these without numbers."