“Successful demonstration of the [Ovonic NiMH] battery’s capabilities have resulted in numerous commercial developments: … General Motors has entered into a joint venture with Ovonic…. Honda and Toyota have announced that their new electric vehicles will be introduced with NiMH batteries….”
– Business Council for Sustainable Energy (1996)
The new US/global reality of supply-over-demand oil economics spells big trouble for electric vehicles, which were not economic at formerly high gasoline and diesel prices at the pump. The latest setback will, once again, reveal government subsides and related crony business as an economic fail.
Batteries are a big problem, just as they were in a few years ago when competing petro prices were higher — and back in Thomas Edison’s day despite the best efforts of Henry Ford.
I recently ran across this study from November 1996 from the Business Council for Sustainable Energy, “Changing Tide: Tomorrow’s Clean Energy–Today.”…
Previous posts at MasterResource have documented the lack of open intellectual inquiry at Resources for the Future (RFF) regarding the physical science of climate change and the case for government-led transformation of energy sources.
A third post yesterday documented RFF’s buy-in to resource pessimism and gapism (more government intervention in place of price and allocation decontrol) in the pivotal 1970s.
Trends can change. They should change. RFF as a scholarly organization should:
…1. Recognize the physical science of climate change as highly unsettled and thus open to contrary public policy positions.
Implication: Consider ‘global lukewarming” as a base case for economic analysis.
2. Recognize the benefits, the positive externalities, associated with the anthropogenic influence on climate.
Implication: Open a research program on the benefits of carbon dioxide emissions/concentrations, not only costs, as has been the case with RFF’s analytics to date.
“A review of energy developments in 1976, published in RFF’s Resources magazine (Jan–March 1977, p. 3) reached a Hotelling-like conclusion: ‘Nonrenewable and exhaustible fuels supply most of our needs now,’ the staff article stated, ‘but they will be increasingly expensive to obtain and use, until, around some distant corner, they will be replaced’.”
In its first half century, RFF’s central message has gone from energy optimism to energy pessimism, complete with an embrace of major government intervention in energy markets. The transformation began in the 1970s with a fixity/depletion view of mineral resources, which spawned conservationism (less energy usage for its own sake, with a government role).
And when the energy-short 1970s turned into the energy surplus of the 1980s, RFF’s angst shifted to issues surrounding a human influence on global climate, primarily from carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from the burning of coal, oil, and natural gas.…