Fighting Inflation, Huh?

The Federal Reserve has caused massive effects on regular people by simply changing the prime interest rate.  For example, after being forced to sell my home in 1999, I had enough money in the bank to earn $1400 per month in interest, mostly on T-bills.  When the FED cut rates in 2001-2, that income stream vanished for me as it did for anyone else who had been old-fashioned enough to hold savings.

Now we are suffering inflation which, at the grocery store and most other necessities regular people must buy in order to survive, far exceeds the year-over-year ratios published by our central government; for regular people it is more like 100% and beyond than like 8.25%.  Of course the central government has a conflict of interest because the numbers it quotes trigger cost of living increases for 2.4 million or so federal civilian employees, for all of us who have paid into Social Security for most of our lives, and undoubtedly for others, creating budgetary problems if they actually keep their promises.  In addition, quoting small numbers allows politicians to pretend that this is no big deal (see Joe Biden "only an inch").

In addition, because this massive inflation is due, directly, to Federal, State and local policies ... policies that contravene the spirit if not the letter of the Constitution ... over the past 2.5 years in particular, the central government has a further interest in pretending that this is no big deal.  Forcing people not to work, then bribing them to postpone going back to work, printing literally trillions of dollars to be spent on boondoggles and given away for nothing or attempting to buy votes, running businesses into bankruptcy, destroying the profitability of the remaining taxpaying business ... these acts and their ilk are directly inflationary.

Now, the Federal Reserve "solves" this problem by jacking up the interest rates to nearly what they were back in the 1990s.  Smooth move; this gives more revenue to everyone who lends money (bankers and investors, mainly; regular people who lend their savings to banks still do not earn squat for interest.)  Among the beneficiaries are the likes of Communist China which holds a substantial hunk of our national debt.

However, for the regular people who have had to borrow money to pay their bills but have not yet earned enough to pay off those loans... or who are still borrowing money... this is no good at all; it simply accelerates their progress toward bankruptcy.

In addition, it will of course have a very significant effect on the central government, whose debt is now on the order of six times what it was in 1999.  Each one percent on sovereign debt of $30 trillion is $300 billion.  At merely 3.33 percent that is a trillion dollars per year of interest on the national debt.

Wherever will the central government find this extra trillion dollars per year?  Only two choices:  Print yet more money, further increasing the national debt and ensuring perpetually high inflation, or tax us all to death.  (Prosperity is not an option; it is in the process of being outlawed, see ESG and other destructive policies/programs.)

Neither alternative is good for the country.  Indeed, putting us in this position is a great way to degrade or destroy our nation.  Good going, globalists; yours is the only visible agenda such wanton destruction serves.

Where does the Electric Car Mandate lead?

Statists dislike allowing serfs the ability to move about of their own volition.  The light aircraft industry, and the ability of common folk to afford flight training and the purchase of aircraft allowing them to easily cross a thousand miles in a day under their own power and at their own volition were things essentially done away with by the end of the 1980s, through the connivance of trial lawyers and insurance companies (remember that lawyers are over-represented in politics.)  That was good news for totalitarians, but there was much left undone.

Recently, Klaus Schwab allowed that private transportation is wasteful and should be abolished (meaning your and my motorcycles, cars and trucks, not, of course, the private jet aircraft that congregate annually in Davos and at the WEF facilities in communist China and probably will into the indefinite future).  Consider the following in light of this statement.

One horsepower is on the order of 750 watts (745.7) at 100% conversion efficiency.  Simply overcoming drag at 60 mph requires on the order of 10 to 20 HP, with considerably more used dealing with necessary vertical and horizontal maneuvers.  Let us go with the lowest numbers, such as 7.5 kW, and with an estimate of 84 billion driving hours per year in the US.  This gives a low estimate of 630 TW-hr per year, roughly 1.72 TW-hr per day, 72 GW continuous.  At the end of 2021, total US generating capacity was on the order of 1.1 TW.  Superficially this would seem to require on the order of a 7% increase in total 24x7 generating capacity.

In reality 10 HP is a very low estimate for average load.  In addition, nothing is 100% efficient.  We are talking about BHP or equivalent watt-hours delivered to the road.  The electric motors are not 100% efficient; they get hot, as do the batteries (this is why Tesla S max available power is reduced by its control logic at speeds over 80 MPH or so), and that heat is produced by wasting the watt-hours stored in the battery.  If for no other reasons than generating heat, the batteries and electric motors are <100% efficient.  Then we have the power grid to deliver charge to places presumably within walking distance of everyone in the country's homes.  To fully charge a Tesla S requires delivery of 100 KWh.  Even if you believe the EPA number of 402 miles per charge in that vehicle, that charge will have to be replaced or topped off frequently.  My house uses on the order of 64 kWh/day.  Charging a Tesla S daily would increase my personal consumption of electric energy by a factor on the order of 3, while if I only traveled 133 EPA miles average per day that would be more like merely DOUBLING my consumption.  For people living in small apartments the increase ratio will be substantially greater.

The electric power distribution grid is not 100% efficient either, nor are batteries for storage of wind or solar-derived energy.  However, here are a few key points:  Firstly, it is obvious that the US must add well more than 10% to its gross delivery capacity, and pay a considerable amount of waste heat along the way to ultimate delivery.  Secondly, the grid and local delivery capacity must be substantially increased as well.  Thirdly, the parts of the country in which the availability of private transportation is most critical are those which are sparsely populated and hence those requiring long travel distances for services such as medicine and repairs, for shopping of all sorts, and for visiting friends and family.  These are the areas which will require the largest increases in energy delivery capacity per capita.

Further, the energy consumption for charging vehicles will not be smoothly distributed throughout the day.  There will be peak demands at the most common charging times, and if the charging stations are not where the vehicle is normally or conveniently parked, arranging for staggered charging schedules will not be straightforward nor convenient either.

Looked at from the point of view of a bureaucrat, this will be one more thing to control.  Right now there is not much a bureaucrat can do to control the travel of individuals.  Anyone can find a gas station and drive wherever he or she likes any time of day or night, refueling as necessary along the way.  Nothing is rationed.  No permission is required.  Look right now at California, for example, which is merely coping with normal demand and does not have its universal EV mandate yet.  However already rationing and prioritization of electric consumption are increasingly being imposed.

I propose that the "EV Revolution" will never be completed.  Long before the full, predictable results of this "transformation" have occurred (bear in mind that the above back-of-the-envelope calculations are intentionally very low), bureaucrats will reveal with great surprise that the necessary generation and distribution capacity will be infeasible to create without undue effect on "climate change", let alone inflation caused by creating all of this with non-market funding.  The price of a kWh will increase considerably, priorities will be set, rations allocated, permits created at probably an additional cost, and long before full national-scale private EV deployment will be feasible it will have been priced and regulated beyond the reach of an average citizen who now enjoys virtually unlimited private transportation subject only to his own personal financial resources.

At that time, politicians like Buttgieg will again point out that people can easily solve "their" problems by switching to "public" transportation, and one bureaucrat's dream will be within reach:  That of having direct control over how, where, when, and carrying what, common citizens may travel beyond walking distance even within their own cities, counties, and states.

Public transportation allows for inspection of baggage, checking of ID, recording of personal travel, and forbidding carriage of for example defensive weapons, simply as a beginning.  Once virtually all travel, even over short distances, becomes "public", such totalitarian arrangements may be tightened and restricted further.  The possibilities are seemingly endless.

Such developments would be dear to the heart of bureaucrats all over the world, and are in lockstep with the stated goals of the World Economic Forum whose trainees occupy tens of thousands of positions in politics and bureaucracy the world over.  So, without the intervention of a superior force, I believe the above to be the inevitable ... and therefore the intended ... result of the ongoing programs to mandate Electric Vehicles, something that I believe to be a disingenuous intermediate step toward forbidding the freedom we currently enjoy with private transportation.

=== Above written 18 Sep 2022.  Update on 20 Oct 2023:  The International Energy Agency issued a report this week saying that global implementation of "renewable energy" will require 49.7 million miles of transmission lines will have to be rebuilt or replaced, and estimates that the world needs to spend $600 billion annually on grid upgrades by 2030.  The revelation mentioned four paragraphs above appears to have begun.  I wonder how long it will be before the "climate change" effects of all this will be discovered?  - GB