joelado’s Recent Comments

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  Thanks Doug

  I lost track of this post from Joe Romm and I knew that "people" or the paid for opposition would be putting up misinformation on this posting. Thank you for catching the bull stuff. On Is CARB up to its old tricks? posted 1 year, 7 months ago 17 Responses

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  What are you some kind of idiot?

  "We over here at the EV society get a good laugh whenever morons like Earl here continue the fantasy that California ever had the power in its hands to create a viable alternative to the gasoline car."

  What EV society do you belong to so I can remind myself not to join? California succeeded in getting thousands of cars on their streets (leased not sold), but then when ARB gutted the ZEV mandate in 2003 all the automakers took their electric cars back and crushed them. Signifying the biggest idiot move by ARB that they have ever done. Those cars, one of them being the EV1 by General Motors, traveled well over 100 miles on a charge. The EV1 having the distinction of being the best vehicle GM ever made. An electric vehicle designed to be so from the ground up, it could get 160 miles on a charge with its NiMH battery pack. The RAV4 EV, a conversion of the RAV4 gasoline car, made to comply with the ZEV mandate could get 130 miles to a charge on Panasonic NiMH batteries. Batteries that were in essence 1990s technology. Panasonic had announced in 2003, or there abouts, that it had made a 30% reduction in weight and increased the energy density of its NiMH batteries which would have given it something like 170 miles range, and if those batteries were to be used in the true EV the EV1, its range would have been somewhere around 208 miles per charge. I get around fine with an electric vehicle that gets 50 miles on a charge. I wonder where I would be able to go if I had 200 miles on a charge? The beach is only 150 miles from where I live.

  "Certainly their definition of "zero emissions" was totally bogus and really, really, raindead. I note that the other day two seperate studies indicated that electric cars can actualy increase pollution."

  Read the studies and not the biased stupid articles. They said if and only if all the electric cars were to charge up on old unsophisticated coal-burning power plants would they possibly pollute more. California's grid is much cleaner than most states, nearly all the electricity of Washington State and Oregon come from hydroelectric dams. The grid across the United States is less than 50% coal, so really, with a fair distribution of EVs across the country you would clearly see a strong net gain on lowering pollution. Need I remind you that EVs are the only vehicles today that can get their energy from completely clean wind, solar and hydro? No gasoline car or hybrid vehicle can do that. None.

  "They also had the enormously damaging effect of devaluing plug-in hybrids, the only technology that is approaching practicality as a method of electric propulsion. If mentally challenged folk like Earl here were to actually analyze the effect sof a 40 mile plug-in like GM's Chevy VOLT, they would see that the Volt is all that's needed to destroy any more need for gasoline : the liquid fuel requirements for a fleet of Volt-like vehicles would easily be satisfied by ethanol."

  Oh? I am sorry.  You really are an idiot. Must be tough on you? The air resources board is now considering plug-in hybrids for the first time. There wasn't anyone offering plug-in hybrids at the time of the first mandate. GM had put forth the prototype of the EV1 the Impact at the LA auto show and the then CEO of the company said that they were going to make a full production vehicle out of it. CARB saw the vehicle and realized that the major automakers could build a zero emissions vehicle and so it put in a mandate so that all the automakers would have to supply the market with some ZEVs if they were going to sell any vehicles in California. GM is putting forth the Volt, which is great, but GM executives have told Chelsea Sexton that if it hadn't been for the movie Who Killed the Electric Car? they would have never come back the idea of a range extended electric like the Volt. At some point in the future when battery technology makes it possible to have a 300 mile range vehicle, you will see the major automakers dump the internal combustion engine to save themselves buckets of money. Just you watch and see.

  "Earl can keep fantasizing about the magical properties of a zero emissions law and keep up the illusion that if you just get it right, it will produce millions of zero emissions vehicles. What's propelling the plug-in forward are battery technologies that arose, without the least bit of help or impetus from any silly zero emissions "law." "

  Similar to what was said in the movie Who Killed the Electric Car?, it was a law that got people to ware seat belts, it was a law that took lead out of gasoline, it was a law that required car manufacturers to install catalytic converters and it is going to be a law that will get EVs in the show rooms at dealerships. It may be a carbon tax, it may be tougher pollution standards, but you can bet it's going to be a law.

  What propelled plug-in technology was the ZEV mandate law, but more than that it was the frustration that we all felt with the gutting of the ZEV mandate. The plug-in idea was something that was talked about during the first oil embargo crisis of the 1970s. The Federal Government paid to create at that time what was in essence a Prius built into a Buick Skylark. We had the technology back in 1978 and by 1980 we had the battery to make it happen even better because Stanford Ovshinsky patented NiMH in 1980. So why did Toyota end up producing the Prius parallel hybrid rather than the United States car manufacturers who had the technology decades before the Japanese? Because the US automakers have their heads up their you know whats. Most of the technology that you see coming to the forefront today was born out of the ZEV mandate law, when experimenters and companies alike though that there would be a market for their research. What GM and possibly the oil companies and the like didn't plan on was that those researchers and companies would continue the work they had started during the ZEV mandate and try to make a market on their own. Something that might happen, but it was the ZEV mandate "law" that spurred on the research and investment. Not the goodness of the researchers and investors hearts.

  "Earl, you're embarassing all of us other humanoids. Zero emission laws suck and have always done so and have damaged progress towards electrical propulsion."

  Well, there your are wrong, and the only people who are embarrassed are us who have to listen to your drivel. As for me, I like what "Earl" has to say, so I am sticking with Earl.
  On Is CARB up to its old tricks? posted 1 year, 8 months ago 17 Responses

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  Post this on other Blog sites like the Daily Kos

   Ever since I learned about you from the movie Who Killed the Electric Car? I have been a fan. It really takes guts to stand up and tell it like it is Joe. I am a paying member of Plug-in America and I knew of them from even before their days protesting in front of the GM facility in Burbank, California. I have also been watching you. Since I first say the movie and am very happy that I am not the only one talking about the shortcomings of the hydrogen vehicle. The shortcomings being something I discovered when doing research on hydrogen for my master's thesis, which was on alternative fuel's entry into the marketplace.
  

  
  I have read what CARB has posted on their Web site. What had surprised me most was that in the draft they have struck out all notations that used to apply to time periods past 2008. I didn't want to comment on that because most other commentary seems to state that things are preserved into the future. Can you comment on that change and whether or not that striking out of future time periods is going to affectively kill the ZEV mandate beyond 2008?
  

  
  There are two big problems I see with the mandate. The first is the provision that allows automakers to take credit for ZEVs installed in other states for the mandate, which is supposed to be a California law. This, I believe is a poor provision with bad affect for Californians. How the provision would hurt California as it is currently written is this, if California gets let's say 100 ZEVs than the affect of having these vehicles concentrated in California would be 100% of the 100 vehicles. If those vehicles are distributed let's say to 10 states equally that have signed on to the ARB proceedings including California and the automakers are given credit for creating these vehicles for the California ARB ZEV law, then the beneficial affect of the law and the creation of the vehicles would be diluted to 10% in California. California is the state that has the poorest air quality in the nation and it doesn't benefit at all if 90% of the credit for creating ZEVs is actually working to benefit other states.  
  

  
  What I would like to do with your help is to submit comment to the California ARB that should adjust the language so that instead of referring to California in the law, refer to rather to "the state." Therefore California would get the full benefit of the mandate, the 100 vehicles, with out having it diluted to the other participating states, California only getting 10 vehicles but the manufacturers getting credit for 100 vehicles under the provision. This would benefit the other states as well because the other states would have the full benefit of the mandate as it was conceived in the first place.
  

  
  Another thing that I would like to have added to the comment for the March 27th meeting is that the CARB report actually states that it has reduced the requirements of the mandate because of the hardship it may cause the automakers. This to me is a violation of the fiduciary duty ARB members have to the public good. California has the highest number of deaths related to repertory illness, greater than the deaths reported by all other states combined and by 150%. Responsibility for the breathing health of the California citizenry is the expressed mission of the Air Resources Board. Why are they taking into consideration the economic affect it would have on the polluters? It seems, Joe that ARB is saying that maintaining a rate of 6,000 deaths a year is OK, because to reduce that number would be too great an economic burden on the auto makers. Who do our government officials think they represent? The auto makers or the citizens of California. I know that this now sounds a little radical, but I am not a radical, I am just a person who is getting increasingly incensed by these things as I become more and more aware of them. The automakers should not recant on their fiduciary duties to their stockholders either, but rather should figure away to produce the cars and remain profitable. The small numbers of vehicles that CARB has put forth as requirements to meet the mandate is one clear problem in this scenario. The numbers are too small for the automakers to put enough resources behind making ZEVs full production vehicles and therefore they remain experimental and loose money. At full production an EV takes literally a thousand fewer steps to manufacture then a comparatively simple internal combustion car. Batteries may cost more, but production costs are far less in a BEV. The "engine" of an electric car has three basic parts, a stator, a rotor and windings that compared to an internal combustion engine with thousands of parts. The savings in a BEV come form the cost of labor to put them together.
  

  
  Four years ago I bought an electric car off of Ebay. Thinking I just drove off a cliff, I worried about a bunch of things. Where would I go to get it repaired? Would its range be long enough to make the car useful? Would the cost of electricity be very high? After having driven the car on a daily basis for the 4 years and saving my self somewhere around 6 thousand dollars in fuel costs, and countless dollars in not having to lube, tune up, grease and filter the thing, I can honestly say that electric is the way to go. It is clean, quiet, simple to repair and the 50 mile range meets all of my daily use needs. I have two other regular cars that are now killing me at the gas pump. I wish like heck that I could have another electric car to replace one of those. The future is electric; it is just a matter of time and the effective placement of laws to push automakers to provide what the public wants.
  

  
  Thank you again for your post. Keep doing what you are doing, Joe, and I will remain a loyal fan.
  On Is CARB up to its old tricks? posted 1 year, 8 months ago 17 Responses