Adele Ferguson

GLOBAL warming is one of those topics people, particularly politicians and academics, like to be on the right side of, i.e., man is the chief cause of it and must be restrained or the planet will be unlivable, but there are a lot of things we aren’t being told or don’t hear enough about.

Which is why I take the Wall Street Journal, the most liberal newspaper in the U.S., except for its editorial pages, God bless ‘em.

About all the average American knows about electric cars is that they are being promoted as the solution to what do we do when the oil runs out, that date not agreed upon by the pros and cons of man’s culpability for global warming. and the batteries required will be extremely expensive.

At the moment, writes Ron Adner, professor of strategy at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, the electric car is a plaything for the rich, with a lack of demand from the rest of us. So far, he says, the electric cars produced have been technological marvels, thanks to government largesse, but unless two neglected factors, battery depreciation and power grid management, are addressed, they will fail in the mass market.

THE MOST EXPENSIVE part of an electric car, one third of the cost, is the battery which also depreciates fastest. Its usable life span is related to its ability to hold a charge which degrades with use. That reduces the value of the car when it’s time to sell and on account of the big wad of money required to get one in the first place, resale value, says Adner, is crucial.

OK, I probably knew that I’ve read often of gasoline stations installing plug-in spots. As long as only a handful of drivers plug in each morning, says the professor, the current grid for power generation and distribution can support the traffic.

But here’s something I didn’t know or even think about. If 5% of cars in Los Angeles County, for example, were to plug in simultaneously, they could place a heavy load on California’a already strained grid, equal to the generating capacity of two mid-sized power plants.

Unless the power infrastructure addresses this possibility in advance, says Adner, the very success of the electric car will drive its failure. The success of the electric car hinges on resolving the ecosystem needed to keep them running.

Now here’s something else related to global warming that I didn’t know until I read about it in a Journal editorial.

WE’VE ALL HEARD about America’s shale natural gas boom but we haven’t heard about how one of the most powerful environmental lobbies, the Sierra Club, is mounting a major campaign to kill the industry. That’s right, kill the industry. The Sierra Club used to like natural gas as the good fossil fuel that produces much less carbon emission than coal. That was when it cost $8 or more per million BTUs and seemed to be in limited domestic supply.

BUT THE SHALE revolution has driven the price down to $2.50 and put the fear of God in the Sierra Club that it will stymie the Club’s Valhalla of wind, solar and biotech power to where they would not be competitive, says the Journal. The green left has decided it must do everything it can to reduce the supply of natural gas and keep its price as high as possible.

The real goal is to ban all fossil fuels regardless of economic cost. It’s hard to imagine, says the Journal, a campaign that poses a greater threat to the U.S. economy, energy security and American health.

(Adele Ferguson can be reached at P.O. Box 69, Hansville, Wa., 98349.)