10 June 1951

(Image from the 2006 movie “The Meltdown,” the second of the “Ice Ages” series. The plots were based on the breakdown of the ice dam that kept Lake Agassiz bonded inside the great glaciers of the Laurentide, in the North American continent. The dam broke 15,000 years ago and a giant flood changed Earth’s climate for more than a thousand years. Blue Sky Studios).

Vic had some good news this morning. He apparently got to change some numbers on the “age” number at the top of the ‘Vitals’ tabulation he takes when wheeled out to The Patio for the daily Socotra house Production Meeting. He was excited, since Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg had some adventures with other numbers to share as well.

The Administration chose him to bring out the good news last week about another solution to a major crises for which he can take full responsibility. You might remember it.

The Secretary is renowned for his performance as Mayor of South Bend in filling potholes when he was in office. Which is to say, some of them have deepened since then. To continue that sort of success, his department was apportioned $7.5 billion allocated in the famed Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (Public Law No: 117-58).

The good news is that in the nearly three years since passage in 2021, almost eight charging stations have been installed to serve the public. Vic checked. The Tesla Owners group claims that charging stations for their cars now cost about $43,000 dollars apiece, so the government may have a little overhead in their spending program. We know someone befitted.

That was not “8 million stations,” which would be a start at serving the existing 300 million vehicles in the U.S. If they were electric. We have to start somewhere, right? There are already 3.3 million electric cars on America’s roadways. Ford says they are only losing a hundred grand on each one sold, so we have already met well over one-percent of the existing needs.

The goal, according to the Secretary, is for 50% of all vehicles to meet some impressive new fuel standards to by 2031. We will do so by increasing mileage standards by about 2% per year. Automakers are directed to squeeze another 16 miles per gallon out of their cars to remain in business. At the same time, they have double the fuel efficiency of their trucks.

The EPA’s new regulations stipulate passenger cars will have to average 65 miles per gallon (MPG) by 2031, up from 48.7 miles today. Pickup trucks and sport utility vehicles will have to average 45 miles rather than the 35.1 miles today, while heavy-duty trucks and large vans will have to nearly double fuel efficiency from 18.8 to 35MPG.

It sounds aggressive because it is, and likely to produce the same dramatic results as the charging station program.

The Secretary estimates the regulations will save eight billion tons of trace carbon emissions by around 2050. There may be a few problems with compliance, but we have issued some tough tariffs on China which currently produces most Electric Vehicle (EV) and their batteries.

The Chinese were suitably chastened and outsourced their production to Mexico, which is not subject to the tariff burden.

So there we are. Well, not quite. There may be some issues with a program that doesn’t really exist to deliver 500,000 charging stations and serve 150 million non-existent EVs in eight years.

Don’t panic if that seems a little unrealistic. The EV mandates are necessary to solve the impending Climate Crisis.

Last year, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres demanded immediate and radical action on climate change, saying Earth has passed from a ‘warming phase’ into an “era of global boiling.”

We are opposed to boiling the oceans, which would require 212 degrees if it was fresh water like Lake Michigan. That is only 150 degrees warmer than that measured on The Patio this morning, so naturally we are a bit on edge.

We don’t know what studies the SecGen has been reading, but they might have been published by the John C. Wiley Publishing Corporation. They just announced retraction of over 10,000 scientific studies they published in the last two years. They did not specify which ones, and in their defense, many were apparently from an Egyptian company their recently purchased. It implies that there might be other factors at play in what we used to know as “Science,” or “Truth in Government.”

Secretary Guterres is from Portugal, so we are uncertain if any of the studies he based his claims for immediate sacrifice here were based on the ones from Cairo. Our progress in preventing Lake Michigan from boiling is already well underway. We hope that is where the eight charging stations are located.

We understand that 21,000 years ago, the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) covered North America by an ice sheet about 2.5 miles thick that covered 5 million square miles. We don’t know if John C. Wiley published those numbers, or who measured them, but clearly the cave people should have had better CAFÉ standards. If they had acted, we might still have decent ice coverage over Chicago.

So, don’t take all the numbers flying around too seriously. There is an election coming, and the Border and Electric Vehicles and everything else have had exciting new programs announced that will not even begin before election day in five months. They will accomplish great public good by outsourcing deadly pollution of a trace gas overseas where it will do no harm except devastating our economy and possibly bring back conditions more conducive to snow.

Secretary Buttigieg insists that “the EV revolution will happen with or without us.” We need to get started on the emergencies of the moment, which may be more electoral than ecologic.

We may have to walk to get there, but we are off to the races. We will walk back better, right?

Copyright 2024 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com