Resolved: Electric cars should be a priority in plans to fight global warming

I hope Pro and any readers are enjoying the debate. I think the discussion is worthwhile.What does"giving a priority" mean?I asked Pro what he meant by "giving a priority" to electric cars, how much it would cost, and what result would be achieved. So far, he has said nothing about what "giving a priority" means. Does it mean subsidies or mandates? He doesn't say. I also want to know what he claims will be accomplished in terms of lowering the warming of the earth. He hasn't said anything about that either. Electric cars only move the CO2 to power plantsElectric cars are very expensive. Pro's sources admit that. All that electric cars do is transfer the CO2 produced by automobiles to CO2 produced by power plants. For power plants to produce less CO2, they must be converted to something other than fossil fuels, and that's an extremely expensive proposition. Even if we did that, it would have almost no effect on global warming, because the US currently produces only 18% of the CO2, and that percentage is dropping rapidly as the developing world consumes more energy. To combat global warming, the priority should be put on methods of climate engineering that not only can solve the problem, but at reasonable cost.Pro claims that moving energy production from vehicles to power plants substantially reduces CO2. Pro relies on the Union of Concerned Scientists web site that asserts. "BEVs are recharged with electricity from power plants that use fossil fuels, they are up to 99 percent cleaner than conventional vehicles and can cut global warming emissions by as much as 70 percent."The site gives no references for the assertions. It has no credibility beyond that of an unsupported blog post. The Union of concerned Scientists has few scientists as members. It is composed of political activists http://www.sullivan-county.com... who get scientists to sign petitions outside of their specialties, like physicists willing to go on record with claims about engineering. The first statement is that power plants are "up to 99% cleaner" than automobiles. "Cleaner" means lower in production of sulphates and other pollutants. That's not the subject of our debate. However, 8% of electricity is from hydroelectric plants and 23% from nuclear. Neither produces any emissions, so they are 100% cleaner. The key is the "up to" part. That means that it is possible if you happen to be charging the vehicle from one of those sources. However, most of the power comes from coal and natural gas, and that's not going to change without the many trillions of dollars of expense in building new plants. Incidentally, Kilauea, the volcano in Hawaii, emits more pollution than all the cars of the world combined. The second part of the statement uses the same trick. CO2 emissions may be reduced "up to 70%." If the car is charged from a hydroelectric or nuclear source, the reduction is 100%, so they can make any claim they please "up to" 100%. How warming would be prevented by electric cars?Pro claim by numbers of $25 trillion for 0.026 degree reduction in global warming are false, but he gives no reason why. I thought my claim might prompt him to find some numbers, but not so.The temperature reduction I gave is an upper bound, assuming that somehow the US could reduce its CO2 output by 50% by converting all the cars and power plants. It would reduce U CO2 contribution for 18% to 9% of the world total. The rise in global temperature is proportional to the logarithm of CO2 concentration in the atmosphere. http://motls.blogspot.com... So if the total CO2 produces a one degree rise in fifty years, a reduction by half the US total would reduce the temperature by 0.026 degree, That comes from the math of logarithms.There are 250 million passenger cars in the US. Going to $40K electric cars would cost $10 trillion. All the cars would ordinarily be replaced eventually, in about 20 years. Advancing that to replace them faster costs an amount proportional to the total. When the capital, backup, distribution costs are counted, wind power costs about five times as much as conventional power and solar power about seven times as much. Hence the green upgrade is the cost to replace 70% of the power plants in the country, times about six. The US needs about 900,000 megawatt. http://www.eia.gov... A new 300 megawatt coal plant is roughly $1 billion. http://www.jsonline.com... A green energy upgrade would be about $12.6 trillion. The total for just the cars and power plants is $22.6 trillion, to which we must add the new infrastructure for charging stations and new plants to accommodate the 250 million electric vehicles. The current grid will not accommodate that many electric vehicles. How much CO2 is from cars? Pro cites, "The production and use of gas and diesel in cars, trucks, and buses also account for 27 percent of U.S. global warming pollution." No one claims that heavy long haul trucks can be converted to electricity, and each long haul truck uses as much fuel as forty cars. http://online.wsj.com... There are 2 million heavy trucks, http://www.truckinfo.net... which therefore consume as much fuel as 80 million cars. That means that converting all the cars to electric can at most reduce 20% of the country's CO2 emissions. Going back to the previous calculation, if reducing US CO2 emissions by half saves 0.026 degree of warming, the 20% reduction can obtain at most 0.01 degree. Actually, it's less, because warming is proportional to the logarithm of CO2 concentration. Summary Around $25 trillion spent on electric cars and green power plants in the US will save about 0.01 degree of global warming. That's not worth any priority. Instead, we should put priority on climate engineering, where less than $1 trillion can get a degree or more of cooling.