Craig Rucker is co-founder of the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, which seeks a balance between industry and environmental concerns. He says what is off balance is the mob-like demand that we give us daily comforts for a promise that we are healing Mother Earth.
“And we're finding that that's wrought with all sorts of complications,” he says.
One such “complication” is the eye-popping cost for a driver to replace a battery in their new electric vehicle. According to research (pictured at left) conducted by RecurrentAuto.com, which helps EV owners buy and sell batteries, that cost can range from $2,500 to $16,000 for the tiny BMW i3. It can also cost as much as $22,000 for a Tesla and $23,400 for the e-Golf hatchback made by Volkswagen.
A related complication has arisen in Kansas, where a new factory that will build electric vehicle batteries requires a jaw-dropping amount of electricity to operate daily. The anticipated energy consumption for Panasonic Energy, estimated to be as high as 250 megawatts, is so great it forced energy company Evergy to increase customers’ energy bills to pay for the infrastructure.
Worst of all, Evergy relies on a coal-burning plant to power the electricity to make the EV batteries and anticipates it will rely on coal for several years. That revelation sent the environmentalists into a tizzy.
"Evergy’s business decisions have squandered tens of millions of dollars on coal, causing an estimated 18 premature deaths annually, and disproportionately harming Black and LatinX communities," said a spokesman for the Sierra Club.
According to the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, green or renewable energy sources are much further away from consumers, such as wind farms out in the ocean, for example, or solar arrays out in the deserts. That means much longer and more expensive transmission lines, and more vulnerable infrastructure that can be wiped out by a natural disaster.
Rucker says the green energy push is all for nothing because planet Earth and its inhabitants will be fine.
“There are no severe weather trends, neither hurricanes or sea level rise, or other things that are not within natural norms,” he insists.
That statement makes Rucker a “climate change denier” according to climate change activists, who also believe such denials are dooming humanity and hence make Rucker and others a criminal. Rucker has his own description for them, too. Many of them are using people’s fears to make money.
“And then you have the ideologues, who look at the whole climate thing as a way to get political power,” he says.
