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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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Agree, and true of all progressive decisions, which take on, by definition, moral superiority. The same goes for food, perhaps more so (anti-GMO, Organic, etc.). And if you’re not willing to eat insects as billions of others around the world do, then you’re racist. Moral superiority leads to moral indignation at those who don’t agree. That makes them modern-day puritans.
As an aside, this guy is very funny on Twitter. If you hang around that sewer, give him a follow.
I’m allergic to crustaceans.
I have no intention to eat bugs, but the best way they can get the ball rolling is for The Butt Judge to eat a plate himself, on Pay-Per-View.
I feel that way about so many of the Left’s proposals — you first.
Are you sure we don’t want to do this to head them off at the pass?
I bet @drewinwisconsin could have fun with this idea.
It gives me moral indigestion.
Speaking of eating insects (fruit-eating insects to be more precise) I think that today we’ve identified the insects that have been buzzing our garden around this time of year the past few years. They’re Green June Bugs, Cotinus nitida. There’s a photo here.
Some clues had already led us to June Bugs, but it didn’t seem a match, because these are green and are not like the June Bugs that would fly into the screens on our windows at night on hot evenings in Nebraska when I was a kid. Those were brown, and these buzz around during the day, not at our windows and not at night.
When I spaded our vegetable garden this spring, I was surprised at the big grubs that were everywhere. And before I got our garden fence repaired, there was nothing to keep out animals, perhaps skunks, that seemed to be coming in at night to dig for the grubs, sometimes damaging young plants in the process.
We haven’t identified anything they’re eating in the garden. We do have an apple tree and pear tree a couple hundred feet away that are heavily loaded with fruit this year, and I haven’t seen any of the beetles out there, but that is supposedly what they like to eat.
Most of the information I can find about them is from the agricultural extension services of southern states. Maybe they’re moving north to check out the hot summers we’ve had the past few years.
I don’t know what they have to do with electric vehicles. I use a battery-powered mower to do a lot of our grass mowing, and I’m wondering if the resulting grass clippings that I use for mulch in the garden are creating a habitat they like for laying their eggs. I haven’t found anything that says that can happen, but other species of June bugs like to lay their eggs on lawns that have a thick thatch.
It makes me think that this fall I should try really hard to dig all that mulch into the soil to perhaps disrupt their life cycle a bit. The problem is that usually by the time I’m ready for that, we have colder weather and the soil doesn’t dry out enough to spade it up.
Pete believes he is leading the generational change towards a more moral future.
Any guess on his carbon footprint? He is often in three different states in the same day.
I guess free range crickets are the wave of the future. Perhaps they will train us to raise cockroaches at home. Empty pantries would make a good habitat.
I wouldn’t care to eat free-range cockroaches. Among other things I wouldn’t care to eat.
In Cambodia, we consume bugs like water beetles, grasshoppers, scorpions, and so on. But the practice of eating such things is a legacy of the Khmer Rouge. Fried bugs are now available for purchase all over the place, but they are not part of our diet. They are typically consumed as snacks by youngsters and tourists. In fact, international tourists are the ones who increase their popularity among young natives. You have to put a gun to my head before I eat any bugs.
If we go to the camps, they will feed us bugs. I will not be going to the camps.
But he’s Important!
I had snake in Hong Kong. Tasted like unagi eel in Sushi. Quite good.
Our cats will chase down and munch on any insects that make it inside the house. Just the other day, I came downstairs and found a cricket drumstick on the hardwood . . .
I had alligator twice in Louisiana (checked the spelling to be better than Dems). One appetizer was alligator sausage, the other fried alligator poppers. Yummy!
Now you’re making me hungry.
And he carries his bike in a huge SUV until he’s near his destination. That’s when he bikes to work . . .
And he has a motorcade taking him to the gym for “steps.”
I think it tastes a lot like turtle.
missed that one Kelly. 87th rattlesnake roundup in O’Keene (knew there was a K in there somewhere) was May 17-22 this year. Too late in the year for any more since the big guys will be awake by now.
Because that’s the only time frame that a government program works. Once it goes from theory to practice government programs fail.