watching the wheels fall off the green machine

dogtowner

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serves as a lovely metaphor of the folly of liberal thinking

dont forget that Fiskar decided to make these cars not here as originally sold but in Finland. didn't know AlGore was in on the scam too. learn something new everyday...


The body count continues to rise as the Green Jobs Revolution sputters its way to the end of a disastrous 2011. Few seemed to notice last week when the electric vehicle maker A123 Systems—poster child for successful clean tech investing—“temporarily” laid off 125 workers at its flagship manufacturing plants in Michigan on the eve of the Thanksgiving media break. It also reduced its earnings guidance for 2011 by $45 million, because its anchor customer, Fisker Automotive, “unexpectedly” delayed the production ramp-up for its Karma luxury electric car—again.

Could these be the same plants that Democratic congressional leaders hailed as the birth of a new era in American manufacturing? The same plants that received a $249 million U.S. Department of Energy grant from the same stimulus money bucket that funded Solyndra? The same plants for which Michigan shelled out $125 million in incentives to lure away from Massachusetts?

Environmentally correct planners put all this public money to work to relieve the technology bottleneck they believed held back our transition to electric cars. So they invested my money and yours into building the largest lithium ion automotive battery plant in North America—to supply a Finnish electric car manufacturer backed by Al Gore’s venture capital fund and which received $529 million in federal loan guarantees. That Finnish manufacturer was supposed to begin production in 2009, but to date has only shipped 40 cars into the U.S. Those cars were delivered to a handful of millionaires and billionaires like Leonardo DeCaprio and Ray Lane who received tax credits because they bought an electric car.

You can’t make this stuff up. Unless you are a central planner; then you can make up anything you want and get away with it as long as taxpayers keep writing checks, politicians keep spinning tales, and pundits keep giving them intellectual cover.

The coming glut of automotive lithium ion batteries will make for quite a fire sale. Forecasts made as recently as three months ago predicted that electric cars would become the leading application for lithium ion batteries by 2015, surpassing laptop PCs and other handheld devices. Who are they kidding? How many portable electronic devices do you own? How many electric cars have you ever even seen? By any rational standard the introduction of the Chevy Volt and Nissan Leaf, with fewer than 2,000 units sold between them last month, can only be described as disasters.

Investors who piled into the car battery market attracted by the flow of federal largesse had better put on their crash helmets. It’s going to get ugly when the reverse multiplier effect leverages hundreds of millions of public money into billions in private losses.

Watch this space for the post mortem when A123 is forced to declare bankruptcy just in time for the 2012 presidential election. Of course, this won’t happen until after the company blows through its next $134 million in scheduled DOE grants. Investigations to follow.

What is it that green planners don’t understand about the complexities of re-engineering an entire ecosystem? Do they think they’ll get an A for effort if they get a few pieces of the supply chain to work just as the rest come crashing down around them? Do they believe they can simply mothball the A123 plant while someone else figures out how to design and build an electric car that customers actually want?

Or maybe they believe all these problems can be fixed by forcing consumers to buy electric cars. After all, if we can be forced to buy health insurance, why not electric cars?

As silly as that sounds, this seems to be EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson’s plan. She recently overruled Congress by issuing regulations calling for America’s fleet of passenger vehicles to meet an average fuel economy of 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025.
more at link
 
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Volt no jolt: LG Chem employees idle

Factory has yet to ship out a single battery

Workers at LG Chem, a $300 million lithium-ion battery plant heavily funded by taxpayers, tell Target 8 that they have so little work to do that they spend hours playing cards and board games, reading magazines or watching movies.

They say it's been going on for months.

"There would be up to 40 of us that would just sit in there during the day," said former LG Chem employee Nicole Merryman, who said she quit in May.
 
Let me understand this- the fact that apathetic, sedated Americans are not embracing a potential solution to some huge problems we are facing (bad economy and imminent environmental ruin) because they are so addicted to their gas-guzzling SUV's is a good thing? And some kind of moral victory over an attempt to transition into a healthier economy based on something that makes sense? You're so right- we're better off polluting our air with more CO2 and depleting our oil reserves as we watch the price of oil go up. Why don't we base more of our economy on oil while we're at it and laugh at those silly green people who are actually trying to save our asses? They're so naive as to think we actually give a shit about things! Thank god we have a healthy Detroit Auto Industry to pin our economy on- you know, the one that went on welfare a couple of years ago? Clearly a better solution!
 
Let me understand this- the fact that apathetic, sedated Americans are not embracing a potential solution to some huge problems we are facing (bad economy and imminent environmental ruin) because they are so addicted to their gas-guzzling SUV's is a good thing? And some kind of moral victory over an attempt to transition into a healthier economy based on something that makes sense? You're so right- we're better off polluting our air with more CO2 and depleting our oil reserves as we watch the price of oil go up. Why don't we base more of our economy on oil while we're at it and laugh at those silly green people who are actually trying to save our asses? They're so naive as to think we actually give a shit about things! Thank god we have a healthy Detroit Auto Industry to pin our economy on- you know, the one that went on welfare a couple of years ago? Clearly a better solution!


so a car that delivers less at a far higher price is a good thing ?

I'm sure there is an alternative to oil but we don't have it yet and as long as we insist on pursuing the fruitless paths of batteries and "renewable" energy the longer it will be before we find it.
 
so a car that delivers less at a far higher price is a good thing ?

I'm sure there is an alternative to oil but we don't have it yet and as long as we insist on pursuing the fruitless paths of batteries and "renewable" energy the longer it will be before we find it.

What's good is that we're exploring smarter options. The first automobiles weren't exactly winners, either. I'm not sure why you think batteries are fruitless- people are constantly finding new ways to make them smaller and hold greater charges- that only happens with money for R&D. Electric cars today are a lot better than they were 10 years ago, and will continue to improve. I'm not sure where we went wrong and when some bizarre dividing line happened where Right = supporting oil and coal and Left = supporting alternatives to them. Any smart logical person can see that we need solutions, and that the internal combustion engine had it's day but we've long outlived its use when we consider the effect it is having in our air. Why you wouldn't want to support exploring alternative sources is bizarre- especially if you believe in free market capitalism. Why, this is one of the fields with the greatest potential for investment. It's a clear need, something that is becoming a bigger and bigger market every year, and will do so even more as gas prices rise. Any smart venture capitalist would jump on the chance to develop something now- and many are. But those that are stuck on this bizarre ideological trip will be left behind as they continue to turn this into a political, partisan issue. "Green" isn't Red or Blue- it's just Logical. It's pretty Black and White.
 
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What's good is that we're exploring smarter options. The first automobiles weren't exactly winners, either. I'm not sure why you think batteries are fruitless- people are constantly finding new ways to make them smaller and hold greater charges- that only happens with money for R&D. Electric cars today are a lot better than they were 10 years ago, and will continue to improve. I'm not sure where we went wrong and when some bizarre dividing line happened where Right = supporting oil and coal and Left = supporting alternatives to them. Any smart logical person can see that we need solutions, and that the internal combustion engine had it's day but we've long outlived its use when we consider the effect it is having in our air. Why you wouldn't want to support exploring alternative sources is bizarre- especially if you believe in free market capitalism. Why, this is one of the fields with the greatest potential for investment. It's a clear need, something that is becoming a bigger and bigger market every year, and will do so even more as gas prices rise. Any smart venture capitalist would jump on the chance to develop something now- and many are. But those that are stuck on this bizarre ideological trip will be left behind as they continue to turn this into a political, partisan issue. "Green" isn't Red or Blue- it's just Logical. It's pretty Black and White.


I do support finding an alternative as I pointed out above and if this market were allowed to be free (and free of the government per-determining winners) then it really could be "the next big thing" such as driven the US to the economic per-imminence it once enjoyed.

we've poured many billions into batteries and have little bang for the buck.

you may want small but that just doesn't work across the board.
 
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