It’s Too Darned Hot

As multiple cities worldwide record their highest temperatures ever, I find there are several points that should be made. We don’t know that the heatwave presently being experienced is a consequence of anthropogenic global warming. We also do not know that it isn’t. Arguendo let’s assume it is.

In his Wall Street Journal column Holman Jenkins makes a reasonable point:

If the goal were to reduce emissions, the world would impose a carbon tax. Then what kind of EVs would we get? Not Teslas but hybrids like Toyota’s Prius. “A wheelbarrow full of rare earths and lithium can power either one [battery-powered car] or over 90 hybrids, but, uh, that fact seems to be lost on policymakers,” a California dealer recently emailed me.

His numbers apparently originate with Toyota, setting off a small donnybrook in the green lobbying community. The same battery minerals in one Tesla can theoretically supply 37 times as much emissions reduction when distributed over a fleet of Priuses.

This is a shock only to those who weren’t paying attention. It certainly isn’t lost on government. Chris Atkinson, the Ohio State University sustainable transportation guru whose slogan I’ve cited before—“the best use of a battery is in a hybrid”—was a key official in the Obama Energy Department.

Our policies don’t exist to incentivize carbon reduction, they exist to lure affluent Americans to make space in their garages for oversized, luxurious EVs so Tesla can report a profit and so other automakers can rack up smaller losses on the “compliance” vehicles they create in obedience to government mandates.

Mining the required minerals produces emissions. Keeping the battery charged produces emissions. Only if a great deal of gasoline-based driving is displaced would there be net reduction in CO2. But who says any gasoline-based driving is being displaced? When government ladles out tax breaks for EVs, when wealthy consumers splurge on a car that burns electrons instead of gasoline, they simply leave more gasoline available for someone else to consume at a lower price.

IMO the point he makes that is correct is that hybrids should be preferred over EVs. I disagree with him on carbon taxes.

He might be correct if the taxes being proposed actually changed the incentives of those who produce the most emissions but they don’t. Carbon taxes are regressive. And producing carbon emissions increases geometrically with income. A carbon tax won’t dissuade Bill Gates from owning dozens of home, convince Jeff Bezos that his mega-yacht is unaffordable, or cause all of the very rich from flitting around the globe in private aircraft but all of those produce carbon emissions far beyond anything produced by you or I. They will cause the poor to choose among food, healthcare, and cooling their homes in the summer.

A final point that should be made is that Tucson, Phoenix, multiple cities in Texas and some of the other southern cities complaining that it’s too darned hot, shouldn’t exist at all, at least not in their present form. Their existence requires lots of water and air conditioning with the power to run it. I laughed out loud when I heard the mayor of Mesa, Arizona declaim that they planned to plant a million trees.

The rule of thumb is that an established tree needs about 10 gallons of water per inch of trunk diameter per day. Where do they plan to get the water? Mesa gets a lot of its water from the Colorado River. Arizona’s allotment from the river was just decreased—they won’t be getting millions of gallons more from it per day.

Trees do help, though. I recall a tour I was taking in Los Angeles years ago in which the tour guide observed that before the Spanish came the Los Angeles basin was hot and dry. When the Spanish came and planted orange, lemon, and olive trees, it became cooler and more humid. When the Americans came they tore out the oranges and olives, paved the areas where they had been, and it became hot and dry again.

To me the moral of the story is that there are some places that shouldn’t have large populations.

One last observation. I grew up in St. Louis without air conditioning. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone.