As someone who works at a 501c3 whose raison d'etre is to facilitate grants to other 501c3s, I'd love to be connected with anyone who's concerned about holding them accountable. Aside from the dearth of good leadership among American elites generally, nonprofits also have at least 3 structural factors working against them (I'm sure someone can think of others):
1.The tendency to view profit-seeking organizations as inherently suspect and charities as warm and fuzzy, regardless of what they do outside of the public eye.
2. Generally, nonprofit bylaws stipulate that directors of the organization are to be appointed by the other current directors, rather than outside actors / shareholders / membership. An effect of this is that *no outsider can shake anything up unless the directors give their permission*, unlike in for-profit corporations where there's always a possibility (however remote) of a shareholder revolt or a hostile takeover. A second order effect is that businesses run by nonprofit organizations tend to be run less accountably than businesses run for profit.
3. Additionally, because there aren't shareholders, there's no pressure for a cash-flush nonprofit to pay out a dividend, and the leadership has an easier time paying themselves higher salaries, funding their pet projects, etc..
This might be partially an urban-rural divide, but the average person in rural America is not enthusiastic about electric cars at all, let alone green energy. Much like we saw with the switch from incandescent light bulbs first to CFLs then LEDs, part of the issue is outright lying about the performance of the replacement product. People who drive longer distances through lightly populated areas don't trust the promises being made about electric vehicles and certainly don't trust that green energy will reliably heat their homes in winter. Here's a good article from MotorTrend on how pathetic the driving range is with the Ford F-150 Lightning when towing a camper. How much is the cost of camping going to go up when campground owners are forced to put in a bunch of "rapid" charging stations for electric trucks that only go 100 miles on a full charge?
The market for this truck is small and not going to grow unless, like with the light bulbs, the original product is made illegal. If the regime wanted public buy in on this they would be transparent about the shortcomings and pressure developers to improve performance quickly. Instead they will continue to lie and try to punish dissenters and drive competitors out of business.
Yes, it's easy to observe "there’s no problem selling the public on electric cars", but how much of that "selling" is dishonest marketing, how much is concealing the various subsidies, how much hiding the downsides, especially grid capacity, in places as different as California and Switzerland, how much due to conflating the characteristics of hybrids vs pure EV's, etc?
Possible in some places, but there's a big rural homesteading movement of people who want to get off the grid. Tom Massie is a good example of a pro-tech, pro-green conservative rural guy.
Massie is an MIT grad who designed and maintains his own off grid system. The average person is not going to do that, paying someone to design, install and maintain is going to significantly increase the cost. Even at that, he is going to have a bigger environmental impact than if he simply stayed hooked up to the grid. Lithium mining is terrible for the environment and the solar panels he is using start to lose performance in 10 years and will end up in a landfill in less than 20.
I'm going to agree more with Aaron here. I live in a small city in the South, and I know some of these guys personally. I also know at least one good-ol-boy F-150 enthusiast in his 40s who is looking forward to the eventual possibilities of electric, even if it's not there yet. It probably also helps the cause that Elon has aligned himself more with the right, even if he's not exactly a deer hunter.
But yeah, towing heavy loads on long road trips seems like it would be the final frontier for electric vehicles, the most difficult application. Gas consumer vehicles will retain hobbyist applications for the foreseeable future, as long as they are permitted to exist and gasoline is easy enough to come by. But I also think those hobbies won't sway younger generations' vehicle decisions as much -- they struggle to compete with Netflix, social media, and video games.
The MotorTrend article makes a good point: a trailer doesn't even have to be a heavy load to kill the fuel / charge range.
In my personal experience, I've never towed a camper trailer but I once towed different sized U-Haul trailers on the same 240-mile highway drive. With the 6'x12', I had to refill after 200 miles; with the 5'x8', I barely made it the whole way. And this was in a V6 Saturn VUE, not a full-size pickup truck.
As someone who works at a 501c3 whose raison d'etre is to facilitate grants to other 501c3s, I'd love to be connected with anyone who's concerned about holding them accountable. Aside from the dearth of good leadership among American elites generally, nonprofits also have at least 3 structural factors working against them (I'm sure someone can think of others):
1.The tendency to view profit-seeking organizations as inherently suspect and charities as warm and fuzzy, regardless of what they do outside of the public eye.
2. Generally, nonprofit bylaws stipulate that directors of the organization are to be appointed by the other current directors, rather than outside actors / shareholders / membership. An effect of this is that *no outsider can shake anything up unless the directors give their permission*, unlike in for-profit corporations where there's always a possibility (however remote) of a shareholder revolt or a hostile takeover. A second order effect is that businesses run by nonprofit organizations tend to be run less accountably than businesses run for profit.
3. Additionally, because there aren't shareholders, there's no pressure for a cash-flush nonprofit to pay out a dividend, and the leadership has an easier time paying themselves higher salaries, funding their pet projects, etc..
This might be partially an urban-rural divide, but the average person in rural America is not enthusiastic about electric cars at all, let alone green energy. Much like we saw with the switch from incandescent light bulbs first to CFLs then LEDs, part of the issue is outright lying about the performance of the replacement product. People who drive longer distances through lightly populated areas don't trust the promises being made about electric vehicles and certainly don't trust that green energy will reliably heat their homes in winter. Here's a good article from MotorTrend on how pathetic the driving range is with the Ford F-150 Lightning when towing a camper. How much is the cost of camping going to go up when campground owners are forced to put in a bunch of "rapid" charging stations for electric trucks that only go 100 miles on a full charge?
The market for this truck is small and not going to grow unless, like with the light bulbs, the original product is made illegal. If the regime wanted public buy in on this they would be transparent about the shortcomings and pressure developers to improve performance quickly. Instead they will continue to lie and try to punish dissenters and drive competitors out of business.
https://www.motortrend.com/reviews/ford-f150-lightning-electric-truck-towing-test/
I'm with Barnard here.
Yes, it's easy to observe "there’s no problem selling the public on electric cars", but how much of that "selling" is dishonest marketing, how much is concealing the various subsidies, how much hiding the downsides, especially grid capacity, in places as different as California and Switzerland, how much due to conflating the characteristics of hybrids vs pure EV's, etc?
Possible in some places, but there's a big rural homesteading movement of people who want to get off the grid. Tom Massie is a good example of a pro-tech, pro-green conservative rural guy.
Massie is an MIT grad who designed and maintains his own off grid system. The average person is not going to do that, paying someone to design, install and maintain is going to significantly increase the cost. Even at that, he is going to have a bigger environmental impact than if he simply stayed hooked up to the grid. Lithium mining is terrible for the environment and the solar panels he is using start to lose performance in 10 years and will end up in a landfill in less than 20.
I'm going to agree more with Aaron here. I live in a small city in the South, and I know some of these guys personally. I also know at least one good-ol-boy F-150 enthusiast in his 40s who is looking forward to the eventual possibilities of electric, even if it's not there yet. It probably also helps the cause that Elon has aligned himself more with the right, even if he's not exactly a deer hunter.
But yeah, towing heavy loads on long road trips seems like it would be the final frontier for electric vehicles, the most difficult application. Gas consumer vehicles will retain hobbyist applications for the foreseeable future, as long as they are permitted to exist and gasoline is easy enough to come by. But I also think those hobbies won't sway younger generations' vehicle decisions as much -- they struggle to compete with Netflix, social media, and video games.
The MotorTrend article makes a good point: a trailer doesn't even have to be a heavy load to kill the fuel / charge range.
In my personal experience, I've never towed a camper trailer but I once towed different sized U-Haul trailers on the same 240-mile highway drive. With the 6'x12', I had to refill after 200 miles; with the 5'x8', I barely made it the whole way. And this was in a V6 Saturn VUE, not a full-size pickup truck.