Charging capacity and climate coniptions

The upcoming release of several consumer-market EVs is interesting, even though the prices are such that the Womerlippis won't be able to afford one for years to come.

This most recent NYT article on fast-charging stations is lucid and readable, and got me more or less up-to-date on a few trends.

Despite NYT's helpful boosterism, I'm not terribly optimistic about the pace of the EV roll-out without a carbon price, though. Even after the prices have come down so that EV's are more or less the same, pound for pound of future scrap metal, as regular gas cars, there'll probably still be a consumer bias towards traditional vehicles.

And what will ultimately reduce that bias won't be the charging opportunities per se, although I expect that will help a bit. It will be the price of gas.

I'd like to see us make this transition much faster, but I doubt that will happen. The recent recession has reduced demand for oil and prices are relatively cheap and look to remain that way for a while. While the advent of both the EVs and the so-called eco-chip engines will also reduce demand. The so called peak of Peak Oil might easily be a twenty year plateau at 80-90 mbd.

So we're back to Congress and the failure to pass a climate bill. It's in some ways unfortunate that we've just had a more or less manageably sweltering summer in the US, not a ridiculously unmanageable one. We're not Pakistan, with terrible, frightening monsoon floods, or Russia with choking forest fires and excess deaths in Moscow. If we were, our senators might just be beginning to see a little climate sense right about now.

Of course, this too shall pass, although I'm not looking forward to it. It's more or less inevitable that the current and static construction of climate and energy polity comes crashing down around our heads with some new outbreak of weather emergencies in the US. Congress will then run around like a headless chicken, and maybe, just maybe, get around to passing a bill.

When that new round of climate impacts happens, as it surely must, it seems that recent progress in renewable energy and in new technology, such as these charging stations, will mean that we have some decent cards to deal.

It's just a sorrowful, crying pity that we have to wait. Again.