Thoughts On A Sunday

This weekend saw a break in the hot, humid, and hazy weather this past week, with a series of showers coming through yesterday that signaled the break in the weather. Not that the hot and humid weather really bothered me. It is summer, after all. It happens every summer.

The funny thing is that it feels like summer has barely started considering how cool and wet it was in July. We had more than 10 inches of rain in July, not exactly a record here in New Hampshire, but it was in the top five wettest July’s on record. As I mentioned in an earlier post, that 10 inches of rain certainly helped end the drought we’ve been dealing with the past year and a half. (Not a severe drought by any means, just a rainfall/snowfall deficit that was taxing some wells and other ground water resources.)

We’re hoping an extended warm fall will help make up for the cool/wet July we experienced. That has been the pattern over the last few times we’ve had a cool and wet summer – September and October (and sometimes early November) are warmer than average – allowing us to experience the extended summer without dealing with the summerfolk. We have the lake to ourselves, and if the temps stay war enough, the lake temperature stays warm enough to keep swimming until mid-October. However, the seasonal restaurants we patronize usually close their doors after Labor Day weekend, so many of the summer treats of which we would also partake aren’t available. But we still have our grills so burgers, hot dogs, and steaks are still on our menus.

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One has to wonder just how stupid (or lazy) some political campaigns can be. The latest example is incumbent Democrat Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe’s campaign ad promoting building Virginia’s economy, generating more jobs, uses pictures of workers...in Florida.

Virginia’s Democratic gubernatorial nominee Terry McAuliffe released a new ad promoting his goal of “growing Virginia’s economy”—but the workers pictured in the ad are in Florida.

The new ad from McAuliffe, who is running for his second term as governor, includes stock footage sold by Getty Images of a diverse pair of workers in Florida, a Washington Free Beacon investigation found. The “workers walking through metal fabrication shop stock video” was shot in Florida in February 2019 and can be purchased for $170.

So McAuliffe’s plan for building up Virginia’s economy is to give workers in Florida more work posing for photos used in his campaign ads in Virginia?

Yeah. That’ll work...

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You know the Electric Vehicle hype is just that when even dedicated Warmists don’t want to use them. It comes to down to range and recharge times.

For “around town” travel EV range anxiety may not be such a big deal. But if you are traveling great distances, then range and recharge time becomes a huge factor.

People keep talking about how as electric cars become cheaper, more people will use them. But what they keep ignoring is that they are totally useless for long trips.

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...here in Nowherica, 250 miles is considered an easy morning’s commute … a map of Texas versus Europe shows why.

So I got to thinking … just how long a charging stop would that be to go another 250 miles? Me, I drive a 2016 Ram Ecodiesel pickup truck with about a 500 mile range, although the new ones have about a 1,000 mile range. And I can “recharge” it for another 500 miles in about five minutes at the pump.

--snip--

I can see why the UK Climate Spokesbabe doesn’t want to drive an EV. If you’re stopping to recharge your Audi e-tron for another 250 miles, instead of the five minutes it takes me to recharge my diesel pickup, it will take you twelve and a half hours to recharge.

That is such a non-starter. Half a day to recharge in order to complete a 500 mile trip that will now take two days make? Yet using a Gaia-killing vehicle that would take all of 5 minutes to refuel, assuming they couldn’t travel the entire 500 mile trip on a single tank of fuel. (The trusty RAM 1500 could certainly make it on a single tank as long as I kept my speed between 50 and 55mph, leaving a small reserve range. At 65 to 70mph I would have to stop about 50 miles from my destination to fill up.)

Until EVs can be recharged in a similar time as it takes to refill the tank on a regular vehicle, I doubt they will be seen as usable as fossil-fueled vehicles. As I have mentioned in previous posts, one technology that might meet that criteria is flow batteries which use a liquid ‘electrolyte’ that flows through the battery as it used. When it is refueled the depleted fluid is pumped out of the tank as fresh fluid is pumped in. It might take a little longer refill the flow battery tanks as it does to fill a gas tank, but you’re still talking minutes rather than hours. It doesn’t have quite the energy density of batteries, but since it can be quickly ‘recharged’ as compared to batteries, the energy density may not be as important as it might otherwise be.

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By way of GraniteGrok comes this quote from Thomas Sowell:

The endlessly repeated argument that most Americans are the descendants of immigrants ignores the fact that most Americans are NOT the descendants of ILLEGAL immigrants.

This is something that will be faithfully ignored by the Progressive Powers That Be because it doesn’t fit the narrative.

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And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the weather has cooled a bit, the sun is shining, and where I plan to get out on the lake later today after the weekenders have gone home.