Should the United States promote electric vehicles

Thanks for a great debate flamebreath. ==Conclusion== I’ll refute what seem to be my opponent’s voting issues and then move on to my own. My opponent’s voting issues: 1. Promote = advertisements (from Round 3) The government doesn’t need to “advertise” electric cars – the respective companies do that. Imagine how unfair and wasteful this would be. Imagine the government ran advertisements for Coke, rather than Pepsi. That’s unfair favoritism; the same is true if the government runs ads for the Chevy Volt. Car companies pay for ads anyway – why waste government funds. The only way the government can legally promote something is through subsidy. Using government funds to advertise for a private company is illegal. My opponent is changing his advocacy – he was clearly arguing for subsidies, not advertisements, in round 2. Don’t let him do this. 2. Electric cars are dependable and reliable News report: electric car spontaneously lights itself on fire in San Francisco. [1] Electric cars spontaneously shut down when hitting potholes or speed-bumps. [2] Electric cars don’t operate well in cold weather, and may not survive prolonged rainy seasons. [3] According to a recent consumer report, electric cars are so new that very few mechanics know how to repair them yet. The consumer had to take his car to an electric golf cart repairman and hope for the best. My opponent drops the National Cancer Institute study that the large magnetic fields in electric car engines cause cell damage and cancer. Sorry, I got the battery replacement cost wrong before – the other number was for hybrids. According to U.S. News & World Report, fully electric car batteries cost between $10,000 and $15,000 to replace. [4] You’re essentially buying half a car, again, every 20,000 miles. They can’t go more than 100 miles on one charge. They need a 220 Volt outlet to charge, which most homes don’t have. A good 220 Volt charger will cost $2000 to install. [5] 3. Electric cars need no new power plants His study looked at hybrids, not fully electric vehicles, which require far more power. His study assumed that the cars would all be charged at night; currently, most coal and natural gas power plants shut down or operate at lower capacity at night. It’s illogical for my opponent to draw the conclusion that no new power would be needed. Electric cars need power – period – and that power can’t come from thin air. His study assumes that dirty power plants, that would not normally operate at night, would start operating at full capacity 24/7. This would increase both pollution and cost, even if no new power plants were built. 4. Cost effectiveness Electric vehicles have triple the up-front cost and similar per mile cost to gasoline-powered vehicles, based on my analysis from the previous round. Accounting for electricity price increases due to increased demand, charging an electric car costs the equivalent of buying gasoline at $4.50 per gallon (I actually made a math error the previous round). 5. Environment Burning coal is more harmful to human health than burning oil (Princeton study). Switching from gasoline-powered cars to mostly coal-powered electric cars seems like a bad idea. My opponent fails to even prove that human-caused global warming exists. Reasons to vote Con in today’s debate. 1. All Vehicles My opponent fails his burden of proof. He has agreed to my definition of vehicle the entire debate as meaning “all forms of transportation” - including airplanes, boats, and motorcycles. Because he doesn’t prove that fully electric vehicles, across all categories of transportation, even exist, he cannot prove that they should be promoted. 2. Public transportation Subsidizing cars makes it more difficult for companies that operate buses, trains, ferries, and light-rail to compete. Mass transportation systems (buses, trains) are extremely more energy efficient than cars. Expending lots of energy to power a massive and heavy machine in order to transport only one person is very wasteful and inefficient. Considering that the roadways are falling into disrepair and desperately need $1.6 trillion in repairs, the time to switch to more public transportation is now. Conclusion: no new subsidies for cars. 3. No government funds My opponent never answers the argument that we have reached the $14.2 trillion government debt ceiling and cannot spend any new money (on subsidies), without specifying where the cuts would come from (according to new House budgetary rules). My opponent never specifies where the cuts would come from, so he would not be allowed to spend any new money, by law. Remember that the typical electric car costs three times as much as the combustion engine-equivalent of that vehicle. The government subsidy to make electric vehicles cost competitive would have to be massive. This isn’t a smart way to spend government funds. A better solution to global warming would be to fund research on methods to cool the globe, such as by blocking sunlight. One such solution is explained in depth in Superfreakonomics. 4. Crowds out alternatives When the government subsidizes one type of product, it makes it difficult for competing products to survive, since the subsidized technology is artificially cheap. This is why, in the US, healthy foods have trouble competing with junk foods made from ridiculously cheap, massively subsidized corn. Flex fuel cars only cost $100 more to manufacture. Hydrogen fuel cell cars are showing a great deal of promise. Clean diesel technology has improved by leaps and bounds in recent years. Cellulosic ethanol is the wave of the future Switchgrass is currently grown on marginal farmland to improve soil quality and is currently considered an agricultural waste product. Farmers often throw it away. Using this essentially free fuel source, the U.S. could replace two thirds of our gasoline usage by 2050, for only a marginal cost, according to the National Commission on Energy Policy. Conclusion: allow the free market to decide the winner, which it will inevitably do based on which technology is most cost-effective. 5. Lithium Dependence Car batteries are utterly dependent on Lithium, which is an even more limited resource than petroleum. According to Meridian International Research, “Analysis shows that a world dependent on Lithium for its vehicles could soon face even tighter resource constraints than we face today with oil.” We’ll be at the mercy of lithium-rich countries like Chile if we subsidize electric cars and create an over-reliance on them in the market. Prices will skyrocket as lithium deposits run out. This will make not just cars, but laptop computers and anything else that uses batteries, vastly more expensive. Conclusion: Don’t make us utterly dependent on lithium through government subsidies. 6. Grid overload According to Scientific American, the transformers that line every street cannot handle the increased power-load from electric car owners charging their vehicles every night. Adoption of electric car subsidies, without upgrading the grid, will result in rolling blackouts across the United States, as transformers begin shorting out. If we do upgrade the grid, this will be ridiculously expensive. Conclusion: the government should not promote electric vehicles through subsidy. Thanks all for reading. Vote Con! Citations [1] http://tinyurl.com... [2] http://tinyurl.com... [3] Ibid [4] http://tinyurl.com... [5] http://tinyurl.com...