“I’ve been around automotive for a long time, but I’ve NEVER seen incentives that represent 90% of new vehicle price. For a Toyota, 10% is the most I’ve seen. Yet, this is exactly what’s happening for the Toyota Mirai.” (James Carter, below)

EVs compete against hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles–at least in California where some one hundred hydrogen dispensing stations are. The range and fill-time of HFCVs is quite competitive with EVs. But it is downhill from there–and a major mess for sellers and buyers. The California Energy Commission (remember Methanol?) has failed again.

Consultant James Carter on LinkedIn summarized a recent article in Jalopnik, by Logan Carter, Toyota Offers $40,000 Discount On A Car Most People Can’t Fuel Up.” His autopsy (verbatim): 

• Toyota’s innovative Mirai might just be the best deal on the car market right now, but access to hydrogen fuel is getting harder.

“… there are plenty of climate science deniers here to vehemently argue for the defendants’ case [in Mann v. Steyn]…. It is profoundly saddening when you realize that the platform I am writing this on would most probably not remove these people’s posts in the form they were written had somebody reported them.” – Gunnar Schade

Readers at MasterResource already know about Andrew Dessler, chair professor in Texas A&M’s Department of Atmospheric Sciences, who morphs from scientist (his job) to biased, emotional advocacy. Lawyer-like, Dessler makes the best case for alarm rather than honestly considering other views and weaknesses in his argument. His emotional outbursts at his critics and utter distain at the general population (“assholes“) who reject his uber-Climate Alarmism marginalizes him outside of the Church of Climate.…

Energy is ubiquitous to modern industrial life. It is the fourth factor of production in addition to the textbook triad of land, labor, and capital. Julian Simon coined the term master resource to describe the resource of resources, energy.

Energy as been recognized as a unique driver of economic activity and human betterment for almost two centuries–about as long as carbon-based energies came to be recognized as a sea change from the inherently dilute, unreliable renewable energies of before. The Industrial Revolution was enabled by coal, the energy required by the new machinery, as W. S. Jevons so brilliantly saw in his day.

The quotations below, some classic, resonate as well or better today than ever before. They are as ‘right” as the peak-oil quotations (compiled here and here) have been wrong.…

“Today the evidence of an ecological Kristallnacht is as clear as the sound of glass shattering in Berlin. We are still reluctant to believe that our worst nightmares of a global ecological collapse could come true; much depends on how quickly we can recognize the danger. [- Al Gore, Earth in the Balance (1992)]

“Every night on the TV news is like taking a nature hike through the Book of Revelation,” Al Gore told the New York Times last year. The Times reporter noted: “The past few weeks have him even more worried than usual.” Really?

Gore’s rhetoric today is toned toward hope that new technology will save the day. “We know how to fix this,” Gore told the Times:

We can stop the temperatures going up worldwide with as little as a three-year time lag by reaching net zero.