There’s a fine line between enthusiasm and lunacy. There’s a reason someone coined the term “fan” to describe over the top supporters of sports teams. Some percentage of people become untethered from reality over interest in a subject, like a sports team or even a whole sport. I’ve met college football fans in the South who will talk of nothing but college football.
I’ve always suspected that the same trait responsible for intense religiosity is responsible for intense enthusiasm or devotion to a narrow topic. I have no way of proving it, but that is my hunch. A lot of die hard Communists 100 years ago came from deeply religious families. It’s why Jews were over represented in Leftist causes. People immersed in hobbies often come from parents who were deeply committed to some cause or religion.
Those thoughts always come to mind when I run into electric car enthusiasts. They have the passion of a zealot for something that most people find uninteresting. 90% of people would be fine if a team of midgets were in the engine bay of their car, providing the propulsion. They just want to drive it where they need to go.
The electric car freaks and to a lesser extent the magic energy crowd, obsess over electric motors in the same way crazy old men in another era obsessed over steam engines. They lose themselves in minutiae and spend their free time re-reading details of the future electric car. They also write blog posts so other electric car fans can read and comment about their thoughts on electric cars.
One of the hallmarks of a cult is the adherents are convinced that the promised land is just over the next hill or around the next bend. The prophesies are inevitable and there’s nothing that will alter the future so they spend their time documenting the events leading to the ultimate event. Zero Hedge is a pretty good example. Greece did not blow up the world so they onto other “three key charts before the crash!!” postings.
From that post about electric cars:
Elon Musk has ushered in the age of the electric car, and whether or not it, too, was inevitable, it has certainly begun. The Tesla Model S has sold so well because, compared to old-fashioned gasoline cars:
I’ve omitted the list and want to focus on the highlighted words. I looked up the sales figured for the Tesla S. In 2015 they have sold 11,600, which sounds pretty good, until you look at the market sales data. So far in the US 5.3 million cars have been sold this year. Tesla has sold well, compared to previous attempts to market electric cars, but that’s hardly an accomplishment.
The Tesla Model S is a toy for a rich guy. It’s a $75,000 car that costs a lot to own, due to the infrastructure needed to charge it. If you live in Marin or Greenwich, it’s a cool status symbol and a fun toy for the weekend. When you blow $20K on a ski weekend, $75K for an electric car is just more grace on the cheap.
The rest of the post has that unhinged vibe that makes you wonder if it is not a put on. This item from his list of great benefits is hilarious to me: “It comes with an app that allows you to manage the car from your phone.” I’m pretty sure I’ve poked fun at people a few times using a line similar to that. “You can control your ice maker from your iPhone!”
The great hurdle for the electric car has been the same for 100 years. That is, how to quickly and safely store chemical energy in a small container that can be quickly converted to kinetic energy. Gasoline and Diesel are really good for this. Batteries are not very good for this. Right now, the Tesla figures say it takes about ten hours to fully charge their car if it has the twin charger option.
That’s not useful for most people. Driving to work and back is fine, but if you have to go more than 100 miles from home, you’re out of luck. Given that material science has hit a wall in terms of battery design for these things, you can’t assume those charge times will drop quickly. Massive investment has yielded little progress. So much so, Elon Musk has dropped the search for a breakthrough and has invested big in conventional battery production. He’s betting against the breakthrough.
But, there may be a future for electric bikes and scooters. There are firms offering scooters that are fine for tooling around a city or campus and they can be charged quickly. The battery is removable so you can plug it in at school or work. A motorcycle with a 500 mile range and a few hours of charge time is another option that is within the possible.
All of those limits to electric cars have been known for years. The same is true with solar power, by the way. The science moves forward at a snails pace, pushing the day we are free from hydrocarbons further into the future. But, that never stops the fanatics. They are sure that electric cars powered by sunshine are just around the corner. All they need is a few trillion more dollars from the taxpayers…
Late comment:
“All they need is a few trillion more dollars from the taxpayers…”
Which is the real point of it all. Tapping into that sweet, sweet government loot.
Electric cars use components that consume vast amounts of power to make, and disposing of them (as one day they must be disposed of) is costly and harmful. But don’t expect the enviroloons to know that. I mean, come on, you think they have actually thought about their obsession?
I am reminded of life here in the UK with the proliferation of ‘wind farms’ which blight the landscape, provide little power (they have to be turned off if it is too windy), are sited politically (at the junction of two motorways near me there are several, just to remind the travelling peasants these eyesores exist) and cost a fortune to make and erect with the added bonus of a relatively short productive life so they can never repay the cost involved. Still, it doesn’t matter: the cost is born by the energy user and taxpayer and the enviroloons don’t understand we (and they) are all paying for this lunacy many times over.
Oh, and they damage birdlife and kill bats. But not the bats who drool over wind farms, however.
A couple of fairly obvious points:
(1)The term ‘fan’ is a contraction of the word fanatic. And they are.
(2)Electric cars don’t function efficiently unless the user lives in an environment where they actually don’t need a car. Then they work out fine. They’re public transportation V1.01
“They are sure that electric cars powered by sunshine are…”
Yeah, that’s true, but right now, most of them are powered by coal or natural gas. Where do those moonbats think the electricity to charge them comes from?
“… trait responsible for intense religiosity…” and “… the promised land is just over the next hill or around the next bend.”
This is a recurring theme here. I think you are spot on. I’ve thought for a long time that its rooted in Christianity, and Islam too, and farther back in ancient Bronze age belief, this discarnate longing, the Daemonic in nature, an insatiable desire, also known as Don Juanism. The Religiously posited absolute other is nothing but an expression of Aristotelian geocentric cosmology. Perfection is “above”, “beyond” the ken of fallen man. The source of guilt is man’s station, below the perfection of the Heavens – his estrangement; the parsing of Truth from the whole of Being, Reality, and fixing it in the “Heavens”. Guilt is the source of fear, self-loathing, a “sickness unto death”. The infinite regress of dystopian dreams in which we are embedded is nothing but a fractalisation of that old Aristotle model of The Real. If nothing else we are eternally bound to this wheel whose spokes we hug and kiss, truly, a sickness unto death.