And what do you conclude from that statement? That there should be no electric buses? That nobody should praise electric buses?

Currently some electric buses are "fueled by fossil fuels" because there is a deficit of clean electricity. That doesn't make the buses bad, it make the generation bad.

So why rant against electric buses? Why even make the statement? Show us on the doll where the electric bus hurt you.

...parts of Sweden, Norway excepted, is generated by the combustion of dangerous fossil fuels.

On my grid, PJM, an electric car is worse than an internal combustion engine for climate impact if one includes the embodied energy, a point I made here: A paper addressing the idea that electric cars are "green."

The question of the thermodynamics of batteries - batteries are devices that waste primary energy, technically called exergy destruction, a point I made here: Pesky Thermodynamics: The Mathematics of Wasting Energy by Storage in Li Batteries. It's a little more complex in the case of batteries than with the hydrogen bullshit and depends on the conditions under which the batteries are charged and discharged, but the case is clear: A battery is a device that destroys exergy, i.e. wastes primary energy.

My opinion - to which I'm entitled - is that handwaving that consists largely of a three card Monty scheme where energy is a concern - is the reason that we are failing dramatically to address extreme global heating.

The issue is primary energy and the big lie, the one widely believed but scientifically beneath contempt, is that stored energy is clean energy. This is a nonsense statement, and is the reason we see numbers like this every Sunday morning:


Week beginning on May 25, 2025: 430.18 ppm
Weekly value from 1 year ago: 426.80 ppm
Weekly value from 10 years ago: 403.98 ppm
Last updated: June 01, 2025

Weekly average CO2 at Mauna Loa

Too many people treat energy issues in a purely religious fashion, chanting essentially.

Electricity, by its very nature, is thermodynamically degraded energy. Thermodynamics is the key and no amount of chanting will address that fact. The laws of thermodynamics will not be suspended by chanting; they are laws of physics; and no government whether a democracy, a dictatorship, or something in between can change them. Neither will they be changed by popular will nor by cult thinking.

We have electric buses in Princeton, run by Princeton University, a great University led by great scientists, who are nonetheless enamored - many of them - of magical thinking - they often bring the asshole Amory Lovins to speak there - but as one of the Democratic Candidates for Governor in the recent debate pointed out, some of the electricity on the PJM grid is produced by burning coal in West Virginia. That means the electric buses in Princeton are powered, with exergy destruction, by coal to an unacceptable extent.

Got it?

That's not the fault of electric busses. So why criticize the speaker for praising electric busses? Would you prefer no busses?

We get that you want only nuclear energy.
We get that you don't like increasing CO2 levels.

But here we are. The perfect is the enemy of the good. There will never be a perfect or instant transformation. So railing against electric busses is not a solution. Destroying all ICEs immediately is not an option or even an option to destroy them all by the end of the year. There is not going to be an instant changeover. We get that, but the way you rant, I'm not sure if you do.

...an internal combustion engine run on pure gasoline. (My post contains graphics from the paper.)

A hybrid car is slightly better than a pure gasoline car, but a hybrid car - the type of car I drive - is still a dirty machine.

The person in the video is Australian. His country features some of the dirtiest electricity on Earth. An electric bus in Australia will run on coal, although he isn't talking necessarily about Australia.

It isn't perfect against "good." It's bad against worse.

Not based on electricity production we will have in the future (presumably mostly nuclear).

If vehicles are condemned based on current electricity production, then there will be no transition and there will only be ICE and hybrids. You are condemning whole classes of vehicles based on current production.

It's a chicken and egg thing. You will not get a sudden switch to electric vehicles at the point where the electric grid crosses a particular threshold of fossil versus nuclear. The groundwork has to be laid so that there is charging infrastructure (for one thing) in place. That means electric vehicles NOW and in increasing numbers as that threshold is approached.

I support electric vehicles in France, I guess. (I'd rather do without cars, although I'm a hypocrite in so saying since I own and use one.)

I don't support them in New Jersey, because in New Jersey electricity is dirty, and electric cars are worse than gasoline. My car is slightly less noxious than either an electric car or a gasoline car, but "slightly better" is not the same as "good."

I really, really, really, really am sick of hearing about a putative "energy transition." To me, it's rather like thinking Jesus is concerned about my paycheck and my health and whether I can find a parking space in time to make my next appointment.

I don't believe in Jesus, and to believe that there is an "energy transition" is very close to believing in Jesus. We are burning more fossil fuels than ever. There is no "energy transition," other than from bad to worse.

Electric cars are subject to the same constraints as so called "renewable energy," They'll be a lecture tomorrow night on critical minerals at the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton. I'll attend to deepen my already fairly deep understanding of the issue.

No lanthanide mines, no cobalt mines, no nickel mines, no lithium mines, no electric cars.

The car CULTure is not sustainable in any form, and the sooner we face that the sooner we will be able to slow the acceleration of the collapse of the planetary atmosphere.

When that transition reaches some threshold point, electric vehicles will be "cleaner" than ICE or HEV. Where that transition point is exactly is hard to know, but is not the issue. Somewhere further down the road there will be enough clean energy to make BEV and PHEV clearly cleaner than ICE or HEV.

When there is enough clean energy, there is not going to be a sudden mass changeover to BEV/PHEV. There has to be the infrastructure for them. If people don't use increasingly more BEV/PHEV now, the infrastructure won't be there to get rid of ICE/HEV.

If the electric grid is 90% nuclear in the future you want (if not perhaps 100% nuclear), would you still want ICE/HEV? I think you would not want them, but maybe I'm wrong. You can't get from here to there without both an energy transition and a vehicle transition. Neither transition will be instant.

If you eliminate car culture, that means no taxis either.
If you eliminate cars and electric busses, that means only bicycles, trains, and planes continentally. That is not going to work.