The planet owes a debt of gratitude to Jackson, Wyoming, for investing our money in electric buses. This is as likely as any other moonbat measure to stop the climate from fluctuating — even if none of them works:

The Southern Teton Area Rapid Transit (START) system, a joint operation between Jackson and Teton County, bought eight electric buses to complement its fleet of 31.

They have fallen back on their diesel buses, which work. Getting parts for the malfunctioning electric buses has proven impossible:

Last month, the electric bus manufacturer that supplied START, California-based Proterra, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

Electric vehicles are so economically insane that companies like Proterra can’t stay in business no matter how much of our money Democrats shovel at them.

Proterra … enjoyed financial support from federal taxpayers, as well as praise from President Joe Biden.

The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law provided more than $5.5 billion for low- and no-emission buses, each costing around $1 million each.

In 2021 Biden participated in a virtual tour of the company.

“The fact is, you’re making me look good,” the president said.

The only thing that could make Biden look good would be a prison uniform.

Biden went on to discuss a plan to build 50,000 charging stations with federal support.

If Democrats’ green spending spree continues, the entire country will join Proterra in bankruptcy.

The buses didn’t work well in the winter anyway, being EVs.

At least the bureauweenies learned their lesson, right? Wrong:

There are more electric buses heading to Teton County as START works to phase out as much of its diesel fleet as it can.

According to the News & Guide, the eight buses in its fleet cost $2.3 million, 80% of which was covered by a Federal Transit Administration (FTA) grant in 2019. Between 2020 and 2021, similar grants provided another $2.6 million, and START plans to spend $3.3 million for four more electric buses.

This will be financed from our savings, as Democrats continue to inflate the currency by printing more money.

On a tip from R F.

Not to worry. Even after Democrats have taken away our cars and have put landlords out of commission, you will still be able to travel and dwell inside the ultimate moonbatmobile:

On a tip from Wiggins.

A tale of woe serves as a warning to those considering a politically correct but economically and functionally wrong electric truck:

Dalbir Bala, who lives in the Winnipeg area, bought a Ford F-150 Lightning EV in January for $115,000 Canadian dollars (around $85,000 U.S. dollars), plus tax.

Bala needed the vehicle not only for work but for out of town recreational activities.

He also wanted an environmentally friendly vehicle as owning one is “responsible citizenship these days.”

That is to say, he was a sucker. But Bala is wiser now.

The vehicle compelled him to install two chargers – one at work and one at home – for $10,000. To accommodate the charger, he had to upgrade his home’s electric panel for $6,000. …

Not long after the purchase, Bala got into a minor accident which, he said, required “light assembly” on the front bumper. Bala took the vehicle to the body shop and did not get it back for six months. He said no one from Ford answered his email or phone calls for help.

Maybe they were all on the phone with the politicians who keep them in business by paying them to produce EVs.

Then Bala tried taking the truck on a family trip. Unable to find a working charging station, they ran out of juice.

Bala ultimately had the vehicle towed to a Ford dealership in Elk River and rented a regular gasoline-powered vehicle to complete the family’s trip to Chicago. The family picked up the F-150 Lightning on their way back to Winnipeg.

Laments Bala:

“I can only drive in city – biggest scam of modern times.”

Just as no amount of subsidies can make EVs make sense, no amount of liberal media hype can prevent consumers from learning that they are inferior to proper vehicles. That’s why Democrats have to make them mandatory, not just in California and New York but nationwide.

On tips from Lyle, ABC of the ANC, and Stormfax.

As the Democrats running California continue to wage the progressive War on Energy, the rolling blackouts associated with Gavin Newsom’s rule will become more frequent, because no amount of other people’s money will make wind and solar reliable. At least they have a backup plan. Too bad it is insane:

California’s largest electric utility PG&E wants to suck the batteries of electric-vehicle owners plugged into charging stations to stabilize the grid during unstable periods. The Ford F-150 already allows for bidirectional charging, but that was sold as a benefit to the owner as a kind of independent generator for households during blackouts. PG&E wants to use it to commandeer all EV batteries and use their power to prevent grid collapse.

Bidirectional charging functionality will add an estimated $3,700 to the already excessive cost of EVs, as well as shorten their lifespan. No worries; the government can just provide more subsidies.

This will not be voluntarily:

Lawmakers in Sacramento are helping to move things along. For example, Senate Bill 233 would make bi-directional charging mandatory for all new electric vehicles.

As with Biden’s attack on gas generators, the objective is to prevent independence. We need to be completely reliant on the grid; then they can not only deny us energy but confiscate the energy we have already acquired.

Our rulers want us driving unreliable, dangerous, and combustion-prone electric vehicles because they do not want us driving any vehicles. When it all hits the fan — and it will, if Democrats get any more entrenched — they will need to deprive us of transportation to prevent organized resistance.

Newsom has signed an executive order banning non-electric vehicles by 2035.

“It is easier to resist at the beginning than at the end,” said Leonardo da Vinci. We will soon be past the easy part.

On a tip from Jack Bauer.

Didn’t they learn anything from Solyndra and the other extravagantly expensive green energy boondoggles that went belly up during the Obama Administration? Sure they did. They learned that they can get away with flushing money down the toilet. So they keep doing it:

Biden frequently extolled an electric vehicle company — in which his energy secretary heavily invested — before it declared bankruptcy on Monday.

Bay Area-based electric bus and battery maker Proterra filed for Chapter 11, with CEO Gareth Joyce citing “various market and macroeconomic headwinds that have impacted our ability to efficiently scale.”

One headwind is that electric buses are prone to bursting into flames.

The EV firm, which sold more than 1,300 electric buses to public transit systems in the US and Canada, was valued at $1.6 billion when Biden, 80, took office in January 2021 — but closed with a market value of $362 million, according to Reuters.

Where does all the wealth disappear to? Democrat donors are most likely to know.

Meanwhile,

In 2021, the president pledged more than $10 billion from his $1.9 trillion bipartisan infrastructure plan toward zero-emission transit and school bus programs.

But no amount of other people’s money can make electric vehicles make sense. In the end, the market decides what is fit to exist, not liberal ideology.

On tips from Varla, Jack D, Occam’s Stubble, Wiggins, and Franco.

Wales epitomizes the government application of global warmism by using diesel generators to charge its new fleet of electric garbage trucks:

Cardiff Council started transitioning to electric vehicles for its waste collection in 2021 as part of its efforts to hit net zero by 2030.

But it was forced to admit that it was charging the vehicles using diesel generators after a local resident spotted the backup power.

Green energy boondoggles are great for chopping up or incinerating birds (and for laundering taxpayer money), but are of very limited usefulness for actually producing energy. Yet the extravagantly expensive, risibly asinine posturing continues.

No worries; the Biden Regime has settled on a solution for the need to fall back on generators when green energy inevitably fails: make them illegal.

On a tip from Steve T.

First, they tell us that we must drive costly, unreliable, dangerous, and inefficient electric cars because fossil fuels are offensive to the climate. Then they tell us that electric cars are offensive to the ocean because that’s where we will have to mine the massive materials requirements. Chides WaPo:

To manufacture electric vehicles, batteries and other key pieces of a low-carbon economy, we need a lot of metal. Countries and companies are increasingly looking to mine that copper, cobalt and other critical minerals from the seafloor.

A new analysis of the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, a vast mineral-rich area in the Pacific Ocean, estimates there are some 5,000 sea animals completely new to science there. The research published Thursday in the journal Current Biology is the latest sign that underwater extraction may come at a cost to a diverse array of life we are only beginning to understand.

They would let us ride mules, except animals offend the climate by farting. So it looks like we will have to walk.

On a tip from Lyle.

Lest you think there is any chance of the USA prevailing in the inevitable war with China under Democrat rule, consider that Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm is pushing for an all-EV military:

Granholm said that she supports electrifying the Department of Defense’s (DOD) non-tactical vehicle fleet by 2030, during an exchange with Republican Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa, at a Wednesday hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Under Democrat control, the Pentagon is not worried about defeating communists. Its objectives are to promote homosexuality and antiwhite race hate and to pretend to control the weather:

The U.S. Army is currently committed to electrifying its light-duty non-tactical vehicle fleet by 2027, with hybrids bridging the gap to full electrification by 2035, according to the Army’s 2022 Climate Strategy. The Army is also seeking to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 50% from 2005 levels by 2030, and hit net-zero emissions by 2050.

At last a use will be found for the vast numbers of EV charging stations Biden has inflated our currency to install. Currently they may serve largely as hangouts for bums, but after the ChiComs invade, our armed forces can use them to keep vehicles charged while retreating.

The outlandishly expensive, unreliable, far from durable, combustion-prone batteries that help make electric vehicles economically absurd depend heavily on materials from China:

China owns many of the rare minerals needed to produce EV batteries. Moving the United States armed services to an all-EV fleet is tantamount to making the military dependent on China. China occupies a bottleneck position when it comes to the minerals needed for EV batteries.

Let’s hope the ChiComs don’t think to cut off our supply after Biden et al. weakness-signal their way into WWIII.

On a tip from Franco. Graphic compliments of Chuck A.

The Democratic Party is an alliance between the liberal ruling class and the urban poor, which the former breeds for votes the way farmers breed chickens for eggs. The urban poor don’t care about cars. The rich can afford economically absurd electric vehicles. As for the rest of us, we are screwed:

The New York Times reported that the Biden administration will abuse EPA regulations to eliminate most real car sales by 2030.

The unelected bureaucracy — a.k.a. the Deep State — allows Democrats to inflict tyranny they could never get through Congress.

Even the cheapest electric cars, which are still far more expensive than their real car counterparts and are just one battery problem away from turning into mostly unusable junk, are out of the price range of the majority of Americans who need an income of $80,000 to make an EV auto loan work. That’s fine in Washington D.C. where the median income of $83,567 is the highest in the nation, but will entirely price much of the country out of the new car market.

Getting to work won’t be easy for those politically incorrect enough not to live in a city.

This isn’t class warfare: it’s class genocide. The Biden administration is moving to reserve car ownership privileges for the Tesla class while eliminating working class ownership and the social mobility and the economic possibilities that come with it under the guise of environmentalism.

Socialism means the people at the top pulling up the ladder so that others can’t join them. This has never been more obvious than under the current ruling class, with its demonic hatred of “deplorables” it wants to “exterminate.”

Steadily raising emissions standards has pushed the price of a new car toward $50,000.

But Democrats have only started.

By the 2030s, the plan is that the vast majority of America will not own cars, they will pay money to access them until they aren’t even allowed to do that. The electric cars will consume a growing portion of monthly earnings and will have very limited range. A younger generation may view a time when Americans owned their own cars the way we look back at the days when people could buy guns in hardware stores…

By then car ownership will be mostly pointless anyway. Some will try to keep used cars going, but insurance regulations and clean air standards will force them off the road. The Biden ‘infrastructure’ bill already has the government monitoring where you drive and included a measure to allow it to turn off your car. California’s failed experiment in solar and wind has led to brownouts and bans on charging cars.

Less mobility is less freedom. Does anyone still think this is about the weather?

On a tip from Blackjack.

The electric vehicles that our progressive overlords want us to drive do not make sense for either those who buy them or those who build them.

Regarding those who buy them:

For many electric vehicles, there is no way to repair or assess even slightly damaged battery packs after accidents, forcing insurance companies to write off cars with few miles – leading to higher premiums and undercutting gains from going electric.

What gains? There are generous government subsidies, but the price of costly EVs tends to rise by the same amount as the subsidies, leaving only the opportunity to virtue signal — i.e., to showcase gullibility.

And now those battery packs are piling up in scrapyards in some countries, a previously unreported and expensive gap in what was supposed to be a “circular economy.”

Maybe they can bury the dead batteries in giant landfills next to all the unrecyclable wind turbines.

Insurance premiums are expected to rise due to cars getting scrapped because minor collusions ruin the batteries that are not cost-efficient to replace.

It already costs more to insure most EVs than traditional cars.

According to online brokerage Policygenius, the average U.S. monthly EV insurance payment in 2023 is $206, 27% more than for a combustion-engine model.

As for those who build them:

Ford Motor expects its electric vehicle business unit to lose $3 billion this year …

Ford projects [electric vehicle] cumulative three-year loss from 2021-2023 at $6 billion, including a pro-forma loss last year of $2.1 billion.

Yet they plan to double down on producing still more of them, presumably in response to pressure from Big Government.

Why do Democrats want us to drive them?

We can’t take their greenly righteous rhetoric at face value, because EVs are environmentally harmful.

Maybe the point is to make us more reliant on our communist Chinese adversaries, who have our president on their payroll.

More likely, the objective is to progressively end individual transportation.

On tips from Anonymous, Wiggins, Chuck A, and Bluto.

Electric vehicles are actually good for something besides showcasing enviromoonbat piousness. They assist police when thieves try to use them as getaway vehicles.

From Georgia:

Gwinnett County North Precinct officers were responding to a dispatch call notifying them of a theft in the area.

When officers arrived at the scene, they were told that the suspects fled in a Tesla. …

The suspects were discovered a short ways from the scene of the crime charging the vehicle.

In addition to stolen goods, police uncovered 2 pounds of suspected marijuana, helping to explain the choice of getaway vehicle.

Even thieves need to read Moonbattery.com. If they had known about Xaviar and Alice Steavenson, who tried to drive a rented Tesla from Orlando to Wichita and found they had to charge it six times a day, they would have been forewarned.

On a tip from Mr. Freemarket.

Bad news and good from the Land of Fruits and Nuts. The bad news is that residents can be handed up to $27,000 to harm the environment by buying expensive, unreliable, dangerous, spontaneously igniting electric vehicles. The good news is that since the handouts are to be implemented by Big Government, few will be able to figure out how to claim them.

From Jalopnik:

The main program most residents may take advantage of is the federal tax credit. … But it can be confusing… Even more confusing are the rules and qualifications for what vehicles can and can’t qualify for the credit. …

One of the bigger state programs called Clean Cars 4 All which can offer up to $12,000 in incentives. But it’s only run by five air districts across the state. And to get the full $12,000, you have to be in a household that’s 225 percent of the federal poverty level; 300 percent of the poverty level, and you get $10,000.

To figure out where you stand regarding the poverty level…

…read a confusing income level chart and find out if you live in an eligible zip code.

There are also a variety of rebates available through the California Air Resources Board. … But the requirements for applying for a rebate are long: lots of documents are needed, and not every EV or ZEV is available for a rebate… And funds for the program may not even be available.

One proposed solution to the intricate chaos is “targeting specific communities.” It would all be much simpler — not to mention more politically correct — if you could get the loot just by identifying as not white.

Master the red tape and buy your subsidized moonbatmobiles while you can, Californians. Sooner or later, socialists always run out of other people’s money.

On a tip from R F.

In case social engineers really do manage to force us into unaffordable and unreliable electric cars, now would be a good time to invest in fire-retardant clothing. The clothing had better be water-resistant too:

A Tesla Model S “spontaneously” burst into flames Saturday afternoon in California while driving on a freeway, officials said. …

Fire officials said the vehicle was traveling “freeway speeds” when the sudden combustion occurred and that “nothing unusual” happened prior to the fire. …

Firefighters used about 6,000 gallons of water to extinguish the flames as the Tesla’s battery cells continued to combust.

Meanwhile, moonbats want us to eat seaweed because it will supposedly save a little water, which the world is running out of, according to their ideology.

It can take tens of thousands of gallons to put out the fire after EVs spontaneously ignite. The fires are hotter than normal engine fires and difficult to extinguish with traditional methods. Then they might spontaneously reignite a few days later, due to latent heat, like a trick birthday candle coming back to life after you blow it out.

EVs may cost a lot more than real cars, but at least you can make some of the money back because they are cheaper to fuel, right? Wrong:

“In Q4 2022, typical mid-priced ICE (Internal Combustion Engine) car drivers paid about $11.29 to fuel their vehicles for 100 miles of driving. That cost was around $0.31 cheaper than the amount paid by mid-priced EV drivers charging mostly at home, and over $3 less than the cost borne by comparable EV drivers charging commercially,” Anderson Economic Group (AEG) said in an analysis.

We are down to one reason to drive an electric vehicle: sheer moonbattery. If they made any sense, Big Government would not need to bribe people to buy them with other people’s money.

On tips from Anonymous, Steve T, Wiggins, Chuck A, and Chris Neilson.

The electric cars our rulers subsidize with our money and want to force us to drive are so dangerous that Chevrolet advised against parking a Bolt within 50 feet of another vehicle. They are so dangerous that a shipping company refuses to transport them:

Norway’s Havila Kystruten will no longer carry electric or hybrid cars on its ferries because of fire fears.

Chief executive Bent Martini said a risk analysis by Proactima had concluded that only blazes starting in conventional vehicles can be dealt with by crews.

Calling the ban a “pure safety assessment”, he added: “A possible fire in electric, hybrid or hydrogen cars will require external rescue efforts and can endanger people on board and the ships.”

Would you really sleep easy with one of these things in your garage? That Democrats want to impose them is reason enough to steer clear.

On a tip from R F. Hat tip: Gates of Vienna.