I own a 2012 Nissan Leaf which my wife and I use it for local driving and have ICE car for longer distances. I have solar panels on the roof of my house which I pay set monthly lease fee and the billing from APS has remained low, so charging my Leaf cost next to nothing. I have an extended warranty so I won't be charged when I have the battery pack replaced. Here in Arizona is there is mostly solar, nuclear and hydroelectric. The Navajo Generating Station (coal-fired) supplies electricity for Flagstaff and very northern Az.

That is not actually accurate in English grammar. "We" can, in English, be either inclusive (We picked up the couch.) or exclusive (We are going to dinner - you are not invited.) It can also apply to groups. Here are some of the definitions of "we" from grammar sites on the Internet.

-Used by the speaker or writer to indicate the speaker or writer along with another or others as the subject: We made it to the lecture hall on time. We are planning a trip to Arizona this winter.
-Used to refer to people in general, including the speaker or writer: "How can we enter the professions and yet remain civilized human beings?” ( Virginia Woolf).
-The plural nominative case of the pronoun of the first person; the word with which a person in speaking or writing denotes a number or company of which he is one, as the subject of an action expressed by a verb.
-We is sometimes, like they, vaguely used for society, people in general, the world, etc.; but when the speaker or writer uses we he identifies himself more or less directly with the statement; when he uses they he implies no such identification.

Example: We drove through the valley. (Only one of us was driving the car, but the whole group was present.)
Example: We discovered how to make fire a million years ago. (That is, ‘we humans’; I was not personally present.)

Jan

'We' is correct any time one is part of the 'we', i.e., an actual I and others doing the activity with one of those batteries in electric vehicles. "We went to the moon", is valid only for those who actually went to the moon, not for every US citizen. "We developed the Saturn 5 rocket", is only valid for those who worked on the project, not for every US citizen. One might add tax payers to that 'we' if one's taxes went into the project.
"We then use the electric battery in an area where there is a large population stress". That is the way most would say it, if they include themselves in the activity. It is possible to write such activity where one is not included. I live in a small (1800) village and do not travel to large population areas, so I would have written that as, "The electric battery is then used in an area where there is a large population stress."
Sorry for being so pedantic, but I am tired of those who seem to get some unearned pleasure from including themselves in what the were not part of.

I read long ago that the carbon footprint of the batteries used in electric cars is far worse than convention cars. But, the main issue is just how are the electric cars, once millions are plugged in, going to be sustainable?Calif. barely can maintain electricity, some of which coems from AZ, for normal use now. How are millions and millions of cars agged to the power grid going to be a solution that works. Disposal is a nightmare with all those batteries. They are dangerous for resuce personne called in after crashes. This was a government funded additional hoax on the Us taxpayer. It all started with Gorbachev and his Green Religionn place in US schools post Reagan, with the UN, who wants all cars gone, just meke it impossible for them to be charged, or parked.Not the answer.

Thanks for that link. That the Russians invented the idea, is new to me and worth considering. Certainly, I have to revise my opinion of Thomas Gold.
As to the not biological origin of petroleum, I am still inclined to the conventional view and have just found this link which appears to be expert and impartial:
wattsupwiththat.com/2017/02/18/oil-wh...

Frightening statistics, Blarman...no wonder the cost of electricity went through the roof the past couple of years.

The plagiarism controversy between Gold and the Soviets is interesting. Gold, even though an astronomer and able to read Russian, claimed that he was unaware of the Russian publications on abiogenic petroleum when he published his idea. The Russians claim that he copied stuff from the literature, stealing the Russian scientists' ideas. Not very likely with his deep methane hypothesis of methane being produced deep in the mantle while the Russians claimed that methane could not exist at such pressures. Gold, after learning of the Russian papers, did credit them in future papers. Kind of reminds me of the Newton-Leibnitz fight about who created the calculus when both had created it without knowledge of the other's work. Here is the Russian view:

http://www.gasresources.net/plagiaris...

"We then use the electric battery in an area where there is a large population stress" I think that this is a valid use of the first person plural, as it does not denote that plurality was necessary for an achievement but does indicate that a single individual driving a single electric car would have no overall affect on a city like Los Angeles, but that 5 million people driving electric cars would alter the city's environment.

That being said, there are times when one must use 'we' in reference to an achievement. Wm and I founded a company: We founded a company. "We" can be simply a pronoun; its not always a political statement.

Jan, very much "I"

True story. I was on a flight one day and sat next to a gentleman. We engaged in conversation and I asked him his employ. he said he was a wind turbine mechanic. We were flying out of Montana and so I asked him his opinion on the wind farm industry - which was huge in Montana because of the nearly-constant, high-velocity winds. He laughed sarcastically and told me the that the typical wind turbine there only ran about 1/4 of the time because they were engineered in France. They weren't manufactured to deal with the huge temperature swings in Montana (which ranged from -40 F to 110 F.

I did a little research and calculation and found the following:
- The typical turbine cost about a half million to purchase, ship, and install. (Not counting maintenance).
- At the common price of electricity, that means that a turbine must be running 80%+ for 20 years to cover those costs.

In other words, it's a huge scam.

Another little-known fact about electric cars: the batteries wear out. And a battery replacement typically costs about $10,000 and has to happen about every 50,000 miles. I typically drive cars to well over 200,000 miles before I get rid of them. And that $10,000 means I would have to be paying $4.25/gallon on gas to make up that difference.

It's another scam.

Read his stuff too...makes one think...maybe something else is going on that science has failed to look at.

The often overlooked pollution cost is the fact that the vehicles are subsidized to make them affordable for the wealthy that purchase the vehicles means that someone had to go to work and produce carbon by breathing and driving and using electricity in order to subsidize the vehicle and thus adding to the carbon footprint of the "non-polluting" vehicle.

That's why I call them hydrocarbon fuels, avoiding the unproven fossil theory.

Seems what ever happens in China...stays in china.

Thomas Gold. Originator of the Abiogenic Petroleum idea etc. Well worth reading about.

What grave sites? Vroom! Vroom! Vroom!
Dat me dino's revving up a motor impression.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gei3g...

So you are resorting to dino talk? Are you not against the desecration of your dino ancestor's grave sites?

Good comment except for the collective 'we' because we do not do it, individual entrepreneurs might do it.

That takes numeracy to manage in a mind such considerations and since most people are innumerate, there is little possibility to understand any details of any energy economy.

The naturally created from non organic source of oil hypothesis also exists without the electric universe hypothesis. It might have been a Russian who hypothesized. that. Something about pressure induced chemical reactions of inorganic carbon compounds and sources of water?

Humans, rather than adapting to their environment, adapt their environment to suit them.In so doing, they may pollute it, but up until recently their numbers were too small to be significant to matter much. But now, as they pass the 7 billion milestone that situation is rapidly changing. We berate ourselves and try to do what we can to make Mama Earth liveable. But how do we convince the rest of the world to do so?

Logic and rational thinking escapes Utopian fans. The hydrogen economy is no better: costly to generate, huge losses from leakage through pipelines, short range due to low density, a mediocre way to store energy at a loss.

This is an excellent example of a study that is absolutely accurate but completely misleading. It is accurate in the amount of pollutants produced by the production of an electric vehicle, but it totally ignores that the crucial datum of 'how this effects the environment' is capable of being organized differently - to a different functional outcome.

Chernobyl has amply demonstrated that the greatest ecological pressure to a given area is the presence of a human population, not whether the environment itself is toxic. Wild foxes, bears, Przewalski horses - all of the wild animals have returned to the empty lands around Chernobyl, and are flourishing there.

One of the unremarked but integral characteristics of a gasoline engine is that it produces pollutants in the same region as where it is driven. Since the greatest concentration of gasoline engines occurs where there is the greatest concentration of people, there are two huge ecological pressures applied to the same area.

An electric engine has the capability of having its pollution phase separate from its use phase. We can put the production facility for electric batteries in a low-population area: we will be introducing a toxic environmental stress (a la Chernobyl) but it will be in the absence of a large population stress. We then use the electric battery in an area where there is a large population stress - but not a toxic stress. Both of these environments will be in, or nearer to, the normal elasticity for which the environment can compensate. We would have cleaner and less noisy cities and wilderness areas where the plants and animals 'only' have the toxic stressor of the production itself.

Of course, this line of reasoning is not acceptable to people who use the Green label. These people want to pretend that there is no toxic output from battery production; perhaps they think that if it takes place in China it 'does not count' or something.

Jan

Oh, poo, wid all dat. Lookee dino me so oo-wee PC to all my lib friends in my electric car. In all our electric cars.
In all our electric cars we so PC cool. In all our electric cars we are PC legion.
In all our electric cars we hold up our noses to enjoy being so much better than all you deplorable icky ugly caveman fossil fuel gas guzzlers. .
Ooo ooo fossil fuel. Fossil fuel so gag gag cough cough dirty. Fossil fuel so yuck blaugh ugly. And it's greasy too.
So do not bother we your betters wid how dey once diesel did det n' now do dat wid all doze dinky piddly widdly details.
Image is everything up here on Candy Mountain. .

Electric vehicles have been around for a LONG time, and I dare say without government rules and subsidies they will hang around the edges of society for another LONG time.

Not to say that inefficiently burning resources is the ultimate power source, but its much more convenient and cost effective right NOW.

Agreed! The cost from start to finish of these giant wind mills far outweigh the end energy they produce over their limited lifetime.