Category: Econuts

EVs Are Supposed to Be Cheap to Maintain—Our Kia EV6 Isn’t So Far
The EV6’s first service visit left us scratching our heads and $200 poorer.

Our 2022 Kia EV6 recently went in for its first scheduled service, something we initially assumed would be an easy, mundane task. Electric vehicles, after all, have simple powertrains with fewer moving parts than their gas-powered counterparts—and no oil changes! This is supposed to make EVs cheaper to maintain. So you can imagine my surprise when it came time to pick up our EV6 and I was slapped with a $230 invoice. Thank goodness for company credit cards.

The shocking bill capped off what began as a crummy Sunday morning. While I was loading the EV6 for a day at the beach with my pup, I noticed a completely flat driver’s side rear tire thanks to a screw. It was in a spot on the tread that looked patchable, but since the EV6 doesn’t have a spare tire (only a liquid seal kit that would’ve ruined the tire), I decided to take advantage of Kia’s free roadside assistance and have it towed to my local dealership with a service department that was open on Sundays. Big kudos to them for that.

Requesting roadside service was easy and quick, with the tow truck arriving at my house within 30 minutes. Once we arrived at the dealership, it was quickly determined the tire was not patchable and needed to be replaced. Thankfully, they had one in stock. Our EV6 was just a few hundred miles away from needing its first service, so I requested to have that done while I was there.

According to the owner’s manual, the 8,000-mile service includes a tire rotation and inspection. The list of items to inspect includes brakes, suspension, drive shafts, the 12-volt battery, in-cabin air filter, and more. Nothing out of the ordinary. Which is why we left scratching our heads at the $230 bill, including an “EV service port cleaner” procedure that I didn’t request but was performed nonetheless for $51. If we subtract that interesting port cleaning service, the total for this routine service visit was $179. Still a pretty penny for what amounted to a peek under the frunk and shuffling around a few tires (one of which was getting worked on anyway).

We appreciate this dealership taking us in on a Sunday and Kia’s quick and free roadside tow, but the excessive service cost soured the experience. Thankfully, our encounter appears to be an anomaly. For starters, the same service performed on our otherwise identical long-term Hyundai Ioniq 5 only set us back about $50. And numerous EV6 forums show other owners paying anywhere between $20 and $50 for the first service. We found none over $100, and some were complimentary. Which is what it should be. What better way to build rapport and loyalty than providing free inspections? If such a dealership exists in the L.A. area, we’ll be sure to go there for our next service visit.

Do Gun-Control Groups Care What Really Causes Mass Shootings? Everytown Lawsuit Says No

The Biden administration has already put nearly 2,000 gun sellers out of business in just two years. Just a few years ago, a lawsuit helped drive the 200-year-old Remington Arms into bankruptcy. But activists won’t stop suing gun shops and anyone else that comes close to the industry.

Last week, attorneys from Everytown Law, the legal arm of Michael Bloomberg’s gun-control group Everytown for Gun Safety, filed a lawsuit against a shop that sold the gun used in the fatal shooting of 10 people at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York, in May 2022. The murderer is a racist who specifically targeted racial minorities. Everytown claims the attack “could have been prevented,” but in fact, the gun seller performed all of the proper background checks.

Others are also being sued, including the 18-year-old murderer’s parents and social media companies that allegedly “transformed and addicted” the murderer by allowing extremist content on their sites.

But the lessons from this shooting, like many other mass public shootings, are hiding in plain sight. One needs only to read the killer’s manifesto.

“Areas where CCW [carrying a concealed weapon] are outlawed or prohibited may be good areas of attack,” wrote the shooter. “Areas with strict gun laws are also great places of attack.”

But Everytown ignores those quotes. Nor does the organization mention that the Buffalo mass murderer self-identified as an “eco-fascist national socialist” and a member of the “mild-moderate authoritarian left.” The shooter expressed concern that minority immigrants have too many children and will damage the environment. “The invaders are the ones overpopulating the world,” he wrote. “Kill the invaders, kill the overpopulation and by doing so save the environment.”

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Evergrande.

The news was all over the media. The default wasn’t yesterday; they got in trouble in 2021 and had sought a “moratorium” in the first week of 2022!

So how is it that nobody gave a crap for the last two years? You’d be carried out on your shield by now and long-ago eaten by worms if you shorted the US market into the original default 2 years ago.

Witness Lahaina. HE, the power company, spent basically all of their money on “green” initiatives rather than basic maintenance and hardening to reduce wildfire risk. They were trading close to $40 before the fires and yesterday touched close to $10; a wild-eyed 75% collapse. That’s a utility and of course now there is a serious financial risk from lawsuits — richly-deserved, if the article in the WSJ is all factual.

But that’s a microcosm of all the distortions that have been embedded in the so-called “green economy”; the virus was also part of it, and the government had their foot on the scale in the “rah-rah” side of it because everyone loves a higher stock market.

The problem is that how you got it matters.

If you got it because the company expanded its business organically, it beat others in the market because they were at least two of “better, faster, cheaper” then you’ve got a sustainable and reasonable price.

If you got it because the government subsidized bad behavior — uneconomic things that cannot work over time because they violate the laws of thermodynamics and are predicated on feelings and political promises then you get a crash because there is nothing under any of the so-called “improvement” beyond hot air.

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‘Man-made climate change’ is ‘manufactured nonsense’ driven by profit motive: climate change scientist

A once darling of the climate alarmism community-turned skeptic climate scientist Judith Curry told John Stossel that the “man-made climate change” narrative is a “manufactured consensus” because researchers found that they could make money pushing it.

The video released on Tuesday pointed out how some scientists take aggressive attempts to hide data that shows that climate change isn’t a crisis. She said they do “Ugly things” such as “Avoiding Freedom of Information Act requests. Trying to get journal editors fired.”

“The origins go back to the…U.N. environmental program,” Curry said about the “climate changed industry.” She noted that some UN officials were motivated by “anti-capitalism. They hated the oil companies and seized on the climate change issue to move their policies along.”

She pointed to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which was set up “to look for dangerous human-caused climate change” and “not focus on any benefits of warming.”

Curry discussed how science journals aided in promoting one side of the narrative. She pointed to an instance of an editor of the journal “Science” who once wrote, “The time for debate has ended” in a political rant.

“What kind of message does that give?” she asked. Then said it promotes “the alarming papers! Don’t even send the other ones out for review. If you wanted to advance in your career, like be at a prestigious university and get a big salary, have big laboratory space, get lots of grant funding, be director of an institute, there was clearly one path to go.”

Curry was highly promoted after she published a study that showed an increase in hurricane intensity. She said, “We found that the percent of Category 4 and 5 hurricanes had doubled.”

“This was picked up by the media, alarmists said ‘Oh, here is the way to do it.’ Tie extreme weather events to global warming!” she added.

Curry said after that she was “treated like a rockstar.” She added that she was “Flown all over the place to meet with politicians.”

However, it was after seeing critics of her work point to other periods with lower levels of hurricanes that she went back to investigate. She said it turns out “Part of it was bad data. Part of it is natural climate variability.”

The man-made climate change narrative has shifted public policy on a global level. The Biden administration has a goal to reduce greenhouse admissions by 50 percent by 2030. A goal that has cost taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars to meet it. The administration gave the Environmental protection agency $576 billion in the 2022 omnibus spending bill.

Climate czar John Kerry recently claimed that their climate policies were not rooted in ideology but “math, mathematics, and science, about physics.” In June, Multnomah County in Oregon filed a lawsuit against oil companies, alleging that they caused a heat wave in 2021.

There’s too much money in geoengineering for “climate change” not to turn into a business. The Biden administration is already studying blocking the sunlight. Now Ocean Alkalinity Enhancement joins Solar Radiation Modification.
-Richard Fernandez

Meta’s former CTO has a new $50 million project: ocean-based carbon removal

A nonprofit formed by Mike Schroepfer, Meta’s former chief technology officer, has spun out a new organization dedicated to accelerating research into ocean alkalinity enhancement—one potential means of using the seas to suck up and store away even more carbon dioxide.

Additional Ventures, cofounded by Schroepfer, and a group of other foundations have committed $50 million over five years to the nonprofit research program, dubbed the Carbon to Sea Initiative. The goals of the effort include evaluating potential approaches; eventually conducting small-scale field trials in the ocean; advancing policies that could streamline permitting for those experiments and provide more public funding for research; and developing the technology necessary to carry out and assess these interventions if they prove to work well and safely.

The seas already act as a powerful buffer against the worst dangers of climate change, drawing down about a quarter of human-driven carbon dioxide emissions and absorbing the vast majority of global warming. Carbon dioxide dissolves naturally into seawater where the air and ocean meet.

But scientists and startups are exploring whether these global commons can do even more to ease climate change, as a growing body of research finds that nations now need to both slash emissions and pull vast amounts of additional greenhouse gas out of the atmosphere to keep warming in check.

Ocean alkalinity enhancement (OAE) refers to various ways of adding alkaline substances, like olivine, basalt, or lime, into seawater. These basic materials bind with dissolved inorganic carbon dioxide in the water to form bicarbonates and carbonates, ions that can persist for tens of thousands of years in the ocean. As those CO2-depleted waters reach the surface, they can pull down additional carbon dioxide from the air to return to a state of equilibrium.

The ground-up materials could be added directly to ocean waters from vessels, placed along the coastline, or used in onshore devices that help trigger reactions with seawater.

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Biden Admin Blasted As Nationwide Lightbulb Ban Begins: ‘Impossible For Democrats To Leave Us Alone.’

It seems like only yesterday that Democrats were openly mocking Americans for worrying that the Joe Biden administration was coming for their gas stoves.

“Nobody is taking away your gas stove,” Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) scoffed.

Since then, it’s been proven that the CPSC (Consumer Product Safety Commission) has said that a potential ban “is on the table amid rising concern about harmful indoor air pollutants emitted by the appliances.”

Like any conspiracy theory Democrats deny, it eventually came true.

And likewise, anything liberals can get their grubby little paws on, they will.

Enter a nationwide lightbulb ban set to begin Tuesday. The ban, which General Electric warned consumers about last year as being “inconvenient,” will prohibit manufacturers from making, and retailers from selling, incandescent and similar halogen light bulbs.

 

Lightbulb Ban Blasted

Several lawmakers lashed out at the Biden administration’s pending nationwide ban on lightbulbs, with Representative Bob Good (R-VA) leading the way by conveying a succinct yet important point.

“It’s impossible for Democrats to leave us alone,” he tweeted. “States must fight back.”

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When the toxic media push enough hysteria, vulnerable individuals will be affected.

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Refutations of this narrative are easily found, if you know where to look. Not, however, in the pages of the New Yorker. Read Drs. Richard Lindzen and Judith Curry. Read Alex Epstein or Bjorn Lomborg. Read other serious energy experts at (mostly conservative) think tanks and organizations.

That will expose the real rationale for all of this: the desire by some to control resources for all. Those invested in the “green economy” of wind turbines and solar panels and electric vehicles want to justify banning their competitors for long-term profits. Rational answers also expose their cynicism. And they have the added advantage of being true.

Welcome to the ‘Climate’ Nut House.

Like everyone, we at The Pipeline have our moods. So when we stumbled across the recent “Therapy Issue” of New Yorker Magazine we were intrigued enough to see what they had to say about things. After all, given the unhappy realities of America’s elite, liberal culture, and the depression, anxiety, and isolation that has been so widely reported since the Covid lockdowns, maybe they knew something we don’t.

And, indeed, in one particular article we learned that there is a whole new category of mental illness stalking young people in particular, leading to despair, loneliness, and a sense of impending mortality. Its title: “What To Do With Climate Emotions?: “If the goal is to insure [sic] that the planet remains habitable, what is the right degree of panic, and how do you bear it?” It turns out, according to author Jia Tolentino, that the highly ideological “climate change” narrative has taken a serious toll on them, plunging them into a deep depression over the putative impending death of our planet.

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I think we need to end the bossy class instead.

Climate Expert: Gas Car Cancellation Is Intended to End Private Transport.

Soon after a World Economic Forum partner was caught calling for an “end” to private car ownership, a climate expert is warning that the push to cancel gas-powered cars is just a ploy to end private transport. The climate crisis is a hoax, but it’s such a darn useful hoax for authoritarian globalists.

Climate Depot’s Marc Morano went on Fox Business Thursday and discussed how the Democrat and globalist push to replace gas cars with electric vehicles (EVs) isn’t about helping the environment but restricting Americans’ freedom of movement. “This really isn’t about them driving an electric car,” Morano said, highlighting how this is a top-down decision not based on popular demand. “This literally is — the banning of gas-powered cars — is being done just like a COVID lockdown without a vote,” he added. From California to the Biden Environmental Protection Agency to Australia, leftists are trying to force ordinary citizens into a corner with their gas car restrictions.

Indeed, Pew Research Center published the results of its new survey on June 28, which found that “Less than half of the [U.S.] public (40%) favors phasing out the production of gas-powered cars and trucks.” It’s also significant that EV batteries actually generate lots of toxic waste, so they’re not better for the environment.

“The intent is not to necessarily force people into an electric vehicle,” Morano went on. “The intent is to collapse our plentiful freedom of movement and force us to use mass transit. They want us on the subway.” It’s a global collusion. “They want us on buses. That is what this is about,” Morano insisted. “[Former UK PM] Boris Johnson’s transportation secretary said owning a car was outdated ’20th-century thinking’. They are rationing vehicle use. It’s very simple. You can look at Cuba to see how that turned out; you are going to have a lot of used cars.”

Morano also called out the hypocrisy and deception of U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry, who just testified to Congress and denied owning a private jet (though his family owned a private jet for years):

Now, keep in mind when John Kerry was confronted publicly last time was in Iceland. He flew on a private jet to Iceland to pick up an environmental award, and he gave the original defense, the equivalent of ‘Do you know who I am? I am so important I have to fly a private jet. I am trying to save the climate.’ But he doesn’t have time to be with the masses on a commercial airplane.

What he said today was, ‘I don’t own a private jet’, and ‘We don’t own one,’ meaning his wife owned one — until last year. And now he says he has been on only one flight and that goes against a lot of contradictory evidence. There is evidence that shows that since the Biden administration started, he has been on several dozen private jet flights.

Bill Gates was asked the same thing, and he said he gives to carbon offset funds when he flies a private jet.  Al Gore actually had the same exact line about 20 years ago, he said he didn’t own a private jet without addressing whether he flew in them. This is Bill Clinton-level parsing.

Climate alarmists have been wrong for 50 years, and they’re not right now. But many of the top-level climate propagandists don’t believe their own lies (which is why they fly private jets). As Morano emphasized, climate hysteria is a political tool to end private transport and thus give governments ever more control over people’s lives.

Well This is Ominous: Waiting to Declare the Climate Emergency

From the “Oh, they’d never do that” department we see a couple of emails produced the other night in Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) litigation by Energy Policy Advocates.

There’s nothing quite like preparing well in advance to declare a (checks notes) “climate emergency”. Hey, one can never be too prepared!  Even more amusing — in a rather dark, very 2020s way — is the idea of a proposal for a “Climate Emergency Initiative.” And apparently a really good one at that. Odd this didn’t come up in Mr. Goffman’s prolonged, still-inchoate confirmation process…

GAO can only wonder what it’s being held for. What new paper, claim, film release, loss in court, UN Conference of the Parties/political need will necessitate the discovery of a “climate emergency” for which, fear not, we just happened to have an Initiative prepared…

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One final point: imagine how much further along the world would be today if the $4.1 trillion spent on wind and solar over the past 18 years had, instead, been spent on developing and deploying the next generation of nuclear power plants. That would be an energy transition worth writing about.

The Energy Transition Isn’t.

We are inundated with claims about the “energy transition.”

In February, E&E News, reporting on the State of the Union speech said,  “President Joe Biden laid out his vision for the energy transition Tuesday night.” In March, a reporter for Politico declared “The U.S. energy transition is well underway.”

Also in March, during a speech at the CERAWeek conference in Houston, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said that “As this transition progresses, our energy mix will change.” Or consider the March 9 press release from the White House, which said “The Administration is continuing to implement the Inflation Reduction Act, which is already galvanizing our clean energy transition and making clean and energy efficient technologies more affordable for American families.”

I could list many more examples like the ones above. But the hard truth is this: the energy transition isn’t. The numbers from the just-released Statistical Review of World Energy show, once again, that despite rapid growth in wind and solar, those two forms of energy are not even keeping pace with the growth in hydrocarbons. That’s true both globally and in the U.S.

And here’s the key point: hydrocarbons are prevailing despite staggering amounts of spending on wind and solar. According to a January report by Bloomberg New Energy Finance, some $6.7 trillion was spent on alt-energy globally between 2004 and 2022, with the vast majority of that, some $4.8 trillion spent on renewables. And the vast majority of that $4.8 trillion — about $4.1 trillion — was spent on wind and solar.

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Democrat Donor Arrested for Starting Massive Fire Democrats Blamed on Climate Change.

What happened: Authorities busted a Democratic donor for allegedly starting a “ginormous inferno” in Yosemite National Park. Democratic politicians had insisted climate change was to blame for the blaze, which destroyed more than 100 homes and injured several firefighters in July 2022.

• Edward Fredrick Wackerman (his actual name) of Mariposa, Calif., faces a number of charges including aggravated arson following his arrest on Friday.

By the numbers: The arson suspect has donated $1,775 to Democratic candidates and committees since 2020, government records show, including a $1,000 donation to Tim Ryan’s failed U.S. Senate campaign in 2022 and $400 to the Lincoln Project, a disgraced liberal super PAC.

• The so-called Oak Fire destroyed 127 homes and 66 outbuildings. Roughly 6,000 people were forced to evacuate as the inferno torched 30 square miles of land and smoke from the fire drifted more than 200 miles into parts of Nevada and the San Francisco Bay Area.

What they’re saying: “Ed Wackerman is facing several felony charges, including aggravated arson. These charges carry serious legal consequences and the District Attorney is committed to ensuring a fair trial and upholding justice,” Mariposa County District Attorney Walter Wall said in a statement. Authorities did not say how Wackerman is believed to have started the fire.

What they said: “Thank you to all the firefighters and first responders working tirelessly under difficult conditions to combat the #OakFire,” Sen. Alex Padilla (D., Calif.) wrote on Twitter on July 25, 2022. “Worsening drought and severe weather will only continue to put lives and property at risk from wildfire if we don’t take climate action NOW.”

• “More people will be killed and the survival of our civilization is at stake,” former Vice President Al Gore said on July 24, 2022, citing climate change as the reason “droughts and fires are hitting us so hard.”

Crucial context: Several days before Wackerman’s arrest, authorities busted Democratic donor Themis Matsoukas for allegedly performing sexual acts with his dog at Rothrock State Forest in Pennsylvania. “I do it to blow off steam,” the Elizabeth Warren supporter told investigators.

• Matsoukas is 64 years old; Wackerman is 71.

Bottom line: We need a total and complete shutdown of liberal Baby Boomers entering state and national parks until we can figure out what the hell is going on.

Heisenberg’s Revenge

In honor of the widening fronts in the war against “climate change,” the-Pipeline.org takes pride to announce that the remainder of this month will be devoted to further analysis and refutation of this malicious hoax, which feeds off irrational fear in order to impose severe lifestyle restrictions on the people of the West — who, after all, created the technology that has made our current prosperity possible. Such prosperity, however, is intolerable to the philosophical and lineal descendants of the Frankfurt School, who have made it their mission since the end of World War II to dismantle the Greco-Roman/Judeo-Christian first world and force the rest of the planet to return to to ignorance, superstition, and savagery.

Having failed to destroy us with the Covid Hoax (even the loathsome Facebook nazis have given up on it), the Left has now moved “climate change” front and center as the international left’s preferred soul-sapping means of destruction.

Based on the small (in the cosmic scheme of things), 140-year-old sample of randomly gathered temperature data, jealous and vengeful cultural Marxists have decided to extrapolate from cherry-picked, manipulated, and massaged data to convince a gullible and trusting public that the world is coming to an end any day now, unless we act now. Like sleazy used-care salesman, they employ scare and pressure tactics in order to get you to work against your own best, self-preservative instincts and willingly destroy infrastructure, cripple food production, kill sea life, and incinerate forests.

The key to their successful sowing of confusion can be found in the Heisenberg Principle, which states: “we cannot know both the position and speed of a particle, such as a photon or electron, with perfect accuracy; the more we nail down the particle’s position, the less we know about its speed and vice versa.” In popular understanding, this terms of physics is expressed thus: the act of observing a thing changes its behavior and the closer it is observe, the more its nature becomes unclear. Or, if you stare at the word “cat” long enough, you can convince yourself that “cat” is misspelled.

The same is true of the “science” of “climate change.” No one from the ancient Greeks to the mid-Victorians would have seriously entertained the notion of “man-made climate change” were it not for the relatively recent invention of rudimentary means of measuring temperature and forecasting the weather. Armed with this little bit of knowledge, we have now created — in our own minds — the dangerous thing called “climate change.” Take that, Aristotle!

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