Monday, October 7, 2013

The $600 Hammer and the $2,857 Ton of CO2





The $600 hammer was a myth but the $2,857 Ton of CO2 is a reality.  When Al Gore was vice president he instituted the “hammer award” that was given to government waste cutters. 


Wow now Al could get the Screw Driver award for hoodwinking the government with his Bloom Box and Fisker Car.  But alas I will not give Al Jazeera Gore this award.  The first recipient of this award goes to Dr. Moniz, the secretary of energy who looks like the hippie version of what me worry. 

Moniz gets the award for paying $2,857 for a short ton of avoided CO2 when the true value is only around $6 bucks.   I was just in an Ace Hardware store to buy a small and inexpensive hammer and I paid $5.99.  There is no way I would pay $2,857 for the hammer but that is what we paid Via Motors to avoid a ton of CO2 emissions.  Yeah Dr. Moniz you get the screwdriver award for screwing us.  Note the red white and blue screwdriver.

After last week’s blog about Bob Lutz and Via Motors I created a spread sheet to calculate the actual amount of CO2 avoided by Via converting a truck to a Volt type vehicle.  In the spreadsheet calculation I used the assumption that the vehicle would travel 15,000 miles each year for ten years and 70% of those miles will be powered by electricity from the 24.4 kwh battery pack.  I calculated the primary energy to fabricate the battery pack as well as the charging energy and I compared the US grid average emissions to the emissions from a straight up otherwise identical gasoline only truck.  The CO2 avoided over the life of the vehicle is a paltry 14 tons. 

Moniz and his DOE will give Via customers like Verizon a $40,000 gift to buy the $80,000 Via vehicle.  Dividing the 14 tons of avoided CO2 into $40,000 implies a carbon tax to all of us who made the gift from the working stiffs to the gangrene Verizon of $2,857 per ton of CO2.  Note I have not allocated any overhead or time value of money.  I simply divided the $40,000 gift by the amount of avoided CO2.  The $600 hammer story had a bunch of allocated overhead and that is why it was deemed to be a myth.  The screw driver story is no myth!!!

Ladies and Gentlemen the $2,857 ton of CO2 is no myth it is 100% real.  It is a sign of the times that government is totally corrupted by the complex.  Forget hammers it is all about greenhouse gasses and how to screw the poor rather than hammer a nail.  In 1963 Trini Lopez popularized the song “if I had a hammer”.   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1AvULw1mfJA

50 years later we need a pop artist to release a song “if I had a screwdriver”.  One of the lines of the song will be “it’s the screw of injustice”.    Truthfully this crap science by crooked politicians is so pervasive that very few except the Green Machine and his readers actually know the story of the $2,857 ton of CO2.  But hold on this is not about only one $2,857 screwdriver.  The DOE will spend $20 million to “buy” 7,000 $2,857 screwdrivers.  Al Jazeera Gore gave a few prizes for the one mythological hammer, I should give prizes every minute for the 7,000 real screwdrivers. In honor of Al some of those drivers may well be lithium ion battery powered.  

I did post the following on Dr. Moniz’s public Facebook page

“Dr. Moniz and the DOE are wasting your money on Via Vans. The DOE will pay half of the $80,000 cost of a Via Electrified GM panel van. Verizon is getting a fleet of these government gifted vans. I have a spreadsheet I made that shows that the Via Van will save 14 tons of CO2 in total over a 10 year lifetime (15,000 miles a year). Divide the $40,000 gift from Dr. Moniz to Verizon by 14 tons we have a carbon tax to the working stiffs of $2,857 per short ton of CO2. Dr. Moniz could have bought a carbon credit in Europe for $6 per short ton and only given $84 of your money to Verizon for the Via E Van. The USDA pays 20.3 cents per pound for sugar and sells it for 4.1 cents a pound. The DOE pays $2,857 for a ton of CO2. How long can this corruption continue??????”

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