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What Do Electric Vehicles and Eating Insects Have in Common?
Channeling his inner Marie Antoinette and demonstrating an example of the Biden Administration’s unparalleled tone-deafness a few weeks ago, US Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg has simple advice for combatting higher gasoline prices: Buy an electric car.
At least he hasn’t advised us to eat more insects yet. But it may be only a matter of time. The same interests and climate cultists pushing EVs also encourage you to eat bugs. Behind all this is a punitive and bizarre economic and cultural agenda. More sustainable for the planet, they claim, as they move us towards a “net zero emissions economy” by 2050. If not sooner. More about that later.
While I like the electric cars I’ve ridden (Tesla, Nissan Leaf) and find them pretty cool, it’s not because I’m part of a climate cult. I’m also not running out to buy an EV because I want to lower my carbon footprint or “save the planet.” It’s effortless for elitists like Buttigieg to tell people to buy an electric car when the average price of a new one, $66,000, is about 30 percent higher than the average price for a new “conventional” fuel vehicle. Do you know how long it may take to make up for the difference in fuel costs? The life of the car, if you’re fortunate. In fairness, you can buy a smaller new EV (if you can find one, given a severe shortage of computer chips) for about $40,000 before taxes and other stuff until the batteries wear out.
And then there’s the issue of keeping your EV charged. I live in a condo community of over 4,000 homes in northern Virginia, one of the hotter EV markets in the US. We have precisely two charging stations near our management office. And while you’re helping subsidize both charging stations and the cost to purchase these vehicles, thanks to infrastructure legislation and tax credits, that’s not much consolation for people in more rural areas where EVs are impractical. You rely more on vehicles than your mass-transit accessible suburban and urban neighbors, especially if your truck is essential for your job. And EVs pay no gasoline taxes to help upkeep roads everyone uses.
But EV proponents aren’t telling you the vast carbon footprint cost of building one. They don’t precisely comport with our allegedly “carbon-free future,” despite the lack of emissions from an EV – especially if the electricity generated to charge that EV comes from a coal-fired plant. Or all the mining methods and sources needed to extract nickel, cobalt, and lithium for your batteries.
The reality is that while EVs comprise about 5 percent of vehicle sales today (compared to 10 and 20 percent in Europe and China, respectively), parts of our grid are already proving incapable of handling the burden. You already know if you own an EV in Texas or California. From the website Electrek:
Tesla is trying to help Texas’s electric grid again amid another heat wave with its electric cars until it can with Powerwalls as it lobbies for some rule changes.
Texas has a notoriously fragile grid that is having issues supporting increasing peak electricity demand.
The issues have mostly come in the winter amid cold fronts, but the state’s electric grid has had issues this year with early heat waves.
The first one hit as soon as May, and it tripped six power plants in the state.
At the time, Tesla introduced a new way to try to help out with a new in-car alert to Tesla owners in the state encouraging them not to charge between 3 p.m. and 8 p.m. if they can avoid it:
A heat wave is expected to impact the grid in Texas over the next few days. The grid operator recommends to avoid charging during peak hours between 3pm and 8pm, if possible, to help statewide efforts to manage demand.
Texas is now being hit by another heat wave, and Tesla has brought back the alert yesterday, and it is expected to be active for the next few days since the temperature is well over 100F (38C).
Enjoy your brownouts and blackouts in 100-degree weather while your wealthier Tesla-driving neighbor keeps their EV charged.
But as the US government is shoveling around $1 billion in tax subsidies for wealthy EV buyers on top of $5 billion in infrastructure funding to build EV power stations, Canada may be looking to the next trend: subsidizing cricket farms for food. Human and pet food. From PetFoodProcessing.net:
Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada revealed June 27 an $8.5 million investment to Aspire, an insect agricultural company, to build a new production facility in Canada. The facility will process cricket-based protein, helping to advance the use of insect proteins in human and pet food products.
According to Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, food-grade processing of insects is relatively new in Canada, however insect-based proteins create an opportunity for the country’s agri-food industry to develop more sustainable products.
“The strength of Canadian agriculture has always been its openness to new ideas and new approaches,” said Peter Fragiskatos, parliamentary secretary to the Minister of National Revenue and member of Parliament for London North Center. “Aspire is helping to re-shape how we think about agriculture and opening the door to new product and market opportunities.”
Founded in 2013, Aspire strives to tackle worldwide food scarcity with a focus on edible insect production, therefore developing highly nutritious foods and lowering its environmental impact. Currently, the company has production facilities in London, Ontario, and Austin, Texas. In 2020, Aspire purchased 12 acres of land in Ontario to construct what it expects to be the largest automated, food-grade cricket processing facility in the world.
The US Department of Agriculture can’t be far behind. You and Fido can both share the same “sustainable” high-protein meal.
American food makers have long been bombarded by companies looking to sell them high-protein cricket powder. But you don’t have to wait for them. You can go right to Amazon and order your own. And if you’re sure what bugs you can eat or how to prepare them, Amazon has books for that, too.
It seems the same mindset that pushes EVs to help “save the planet” (not from cobalt strip mines) or a “more sustainable” world is also encouraging you to eat bugs. And they’re happy to appropriate your tax money to subsidize both. It’s just their latest gambits.
And they’re also fomenting revolts, if not an actual revolution, in their cause to save the planet. Ask farmers in the Netherlands, a small country that trails only the United States in exporting agriculture products worldwide. Or maybe ask the now-deposed former President of Sri Lanka, whose decision to ban the import of chemical fertilizers decimated the nation’s agriculture industry and began the foment. 
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Coal-burning cars and bugs. Yeeha!
Why do the people who always talk about the future insist on government control?
Because they think they’re smarter than you. And you cannot be trusted with your future.
The most expensive Tesla is really fast. That appeals to me. But, as much as I like to read, bringing a book to “gas up” is a non-starter.
As are bugs. We need to realize that the anti-beef crowd of today never much frequented classic steakhouses or enjoyed grilling a rib-eye in the backyard. It’s not a big sacrifice. Pretty soon we’ll all be getting the Kavanaugh treatment at Morton’s.
Because that’s the only way they see themselves enjoying the future.
Having lost my job last year for declining the vaccine that doesn’t work, I’m stretched a bit thin just now. I’m going to run my diesel sedan on bald tires until the snow flies. Buying an electric car isn’t in the picture.
What does this even mean? Do we not view today’s humankind to be the most highly developed living form on the Earth today?
Have the advocates of these measures delivered a comprehensive plan that demonstrates potential results that will sustain and add to the advances that humans have seen in their lives since the introduction of hydrocarbon based energy sources?
We need sustainability for future humans.
don’t want to get within 10 yards of either one.
It’s that or nothing for those in densely populated urban areas if they get their way. The fight we are in is to save the rest of the planet from being mandated to do the same. Choices.
which is why I want to move to Colorado. Figure the coytoes, cats and dogs can handle them critters. Although if I stay in San Fran maybe our homeless will do the job. On the bugs. They don’t drive cars.
I have these same questions.
Kelly, any alternative we heard about many years ago? Remember the Oklahoma rattlesnake hunts in the late spring? Where were those? K something. Heard they were high in protein. Would eat before a damn grasshopper. As long as something else kills them.
Ah, it seems like it was just two or three years ago that “Pothole Pete” was screwing up a city of 102,000. Now he’s fixing to screw up the lives of everyone in this country…
Their advocates are absolutely sure of their cause and moral superiority…
And absolutely wrong about everything.
So Kelly, one old Okie to another. Ever taste the rattler? Never did. Had some alligator in New Orleans years ago. Not as good as chicken.
NextEra Energy is advertising not “net zero” emissions, but “actual zero” emissions. I guess that means they will have to kill all their employees, who go around exhaling carbon dioxide all day.
If they’ve discovered how to build windmills and batteries and stuff with zero emissions, the whole world would love to know the secret.
While the truth is, they have been educated into imbecility.
Electric vehicles have to be charged off of an electric grid.
The electric grid was, in 2015, powered with coal (33%), natural gas (33%), nukes (19%), hydropower (6%), wind (5%) and solar, geothermal, biomass (4%).http://needtoknow.nas.edu/energy/energy-sources/electricity/
At every juncture from one level to another, energy is lost; no system is 100% efficient.
Thus, charging an electric vehicle will use more energy than powering it with coal or natural gas would.
Electric vehicles are a net LOSS for the cause of energy conservation.
Having spent hours sitting in line to charge a rented Tesla while visiting SoCal last year, I have seen enough of that future.
Electric cars are a net loss for us but a strong positive for China, who is pushing them. It’s amazing how insanity pushed by single minded well financed folks can have so much influence, how top down in a giant unfathomable place can be so consistently and destructively wrong.
He won’t. That’s the FDA’s job . . .
They’ve manufactured a food shortage that everyone will soon feel the effects of. This is conditioning for that day when the meat coolers are empty and all you can get is fake, GMO food that’s full of the garbage they want you to eat. This is by design.
Crickets?
Sure until some invertebrate friendly commie eco group launches a national outcry on the deplorable inhumane conditions that industrial cricket production rely on to be profitable.
I don’t have any problem at all with putting bugs in pet food, if the animals will still eat it and it provides the requisite nutrition.
But for humans? No thanks.
Actually, it will be USDA’s job. Just wait.
Yes, I have had rattlesnake. It was a popular menu item at a now-closed but once famous French restaurant in downtown Washington (I believe it was Dominque’s). Rates right up there with eating Kangaroo steaks in Australia (gamey and uninteresting).
The big problem with the left: they see energy production as an issue of morality rather than physics.
In their faith, windmills can slice up birds and solar panels can use devastating strip mining by slave labor — but it’s Moral, Good, and Right.
Nuclear can emit only water vapor and nat-gas can be two times cleaner than coal — but it’s Immoral, Bad, and Wrong.
Tradeoffs are never considered; not even a “trolley problem” contemplated. There is Good or Bad and nothing in between.
Even if I did like crickets, and ate them like popcorn, the variety of foods is a spice of life. Even manna got tiresome. And plain rice may keep body and soul together but it’s only good as a diet to prevent starvation. Give me not just meats, but different meats. And the, oh, the leaks, the onions, and the garlic.
Numbers 11:5 NKJV — We remember the fish which we ate freely in Egypt, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic.
How To Make Creamed Leeks (With Garlic)
June 7, 2022 – Leeks are part of the onion and garlic family allegedly have antibiotic, anti-fungal, and antiviral properties. Full of niacin, folic acid, riboflavin, pyridoxine, Vitamin A, C, E, and K, iron, potassium, zinc, and magnesium. Leeks also contain the flavenoid kaempferol, which has been shown to help maintain blood vessels.
Leeks have high levels of polyphenols which protect blood vessels from oxidative damage.
Sure, people eat rattlesnakes (the rattlesnake hunts, I think, no longer happen in Oklahoma), squirrels (a favorite in parts of West Virginia, and rabbits (taste like chicken), and probably all kinds of varmints. But bugs? I’m taking a pass.