The Case For Electric Cars
You Need To Get Out And Around To Understand
Over the past several months, I have been driving all over the country. Me and my Ram pickup. Probably the only one with a Chicago Booth sticker on it but I digress.
You get to see a lot of stuff and run into a lot of people when you drive as much as I have. I have been across the country from Las Vegas to almost Canada three times since Jun 12. In the past two days, I drove to California and back.
You also get to think about a lot of stuff.
When I was driving to California, I could see the pollution haze in the air against the sky and mountains. That got me thinking about electric vehicles.
There are a lot of negatives to electric cars. I won’t dwell on them. It’s easy to make fun of electric cars and this is especially true in a state that has a crappy power grid, to begin with. At the same time, new cutting-edge technology takes time to develop and we are in that position with electric cars. They will only get better and if the government quits subsidizing them, cheaper.
However, I thought of it in terms of centralization vs decentralization. To be clear, I generally favor decentralized solutions because that empowers individual choice. Empowering individual choice is a core tenet of free markets, and I am a free markets guy.
One strong case for electric cars is this. You can centralize the pollution created when you generate the power to charge electric cars. That makes it easier to treat and clean.
Another strong case is in urban or suburban areas where your trips are generally short, electric cars don’t pollute the air so we should have cleaner air. Obviously, in rural areas, electric cars will continue to be a challenge for quite some time. Electric pickups are probably a bad idea but propane or natty gas over-the-road haulers are not.
What practical cases can you make for electric cars?
My trash company uses trucks that are powered by nat gas and so does the bus service. I have to say it's economical and since they aren't going on a long trip, it's economical to use the garbage haulers and buses for short trips.
Disclosure I am (a) a climate skeptic and (b) a skeptic's skeptic. YouTube has dozens of videos from blissfully happy EV owners, especially when paired with home solar. If you are one of the five per cent that regularly travels long distances, your situation does not apply to us one-hour-a-day commuters. For reasons I'm sure you are all familiar with, I don't support solar on the national grid. Home solar makes eminent sense. If you own an EV, home solar renders you immune to gasoline supply-side shocks in price and availability. If you live in a state where the price of grid energy increases faster than CPI inflation, the payback period of your home solar just keeps getting shorter and shorter. So yeah, EVs make good practical sense. Oh yes and the heavier car argument is a red herring.