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Daily Caller Debunks Itself With EV Attack And Inconvenient Gas Car Facts (Gas Is Flammable!) [1]

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Date: 2023-08-16

Yesterday, the pay-to-play Daily Caller ran an op-ed by Stephen Moore that rips off the old Ralph Nader book "Unsafe at Any Speed" to attack electric vehicles. Why? Because of fires in lithium-ion batteries, which have unfortunately injured 66 people and killed 13 in New York City this year. Now, this figure includes basically any electronic device with a battery, not just electric vehicles, so Moore introduces his first deception in the first paragraph.

After giving an example of an e-bike shop fire, Moore does admit that "13 deaths in a city the size of New York with some 8 million people is hardly an epidemic. Regulations should always be based on a cost versus benefit calculation, or there would be no cars at all."

Given that Moore opposed measures to constrain a literal epidemic, comparing opposition to COVID policies to Rosa Parks’ activism against racial segregation, even if it were an epidemic, Moore still wouldn't care.

But does Moore undertake any such cost/benefit calculation? Of course not! Because obviously it would show that cars powered by gasoline, a highly flammable fuel that works specifically because it is combustible, are going to be more prone to explosions than battery-powered EVs. (To say nothing of the fact that fossil fueled air pollution is behind one in five deaths on Earth .)

"For the record," Moore concludes, "I'm not in favor of the government banning EVs or e-bikes or just about anything. I just believe that we should make policy decisions based on real and factual risk assessments, not false scares and sensationalism."

Well, okay! Let's do that! Let's embark on a lengthy intellectual journey to compare EVs and gas cars. Oh wait, we don't even have to leave the Daily Caller to see through Moore's lies.

In fact, his whole argument was debunked, on the Daily Caller, forty minutes before Moore's op-ed was even published there. Not on purpose of course, but because the Daily Caller chases whatever clicks it can and covered a tragedy in Russia.

" Explosion at Russian Gas Station Kills At Least 35 ," according to the headline and the body of the story, cribbed from the AP and CBS . The explosion injured 115 people in Makhachkala , capital of Dagestan, Russia, on the coast of the Caspian Sea.

Maybe Moore can help us out with the math here, and figure out which is more dangerous: 13 deaths out of 8 million people, spread out over months and multiple causes, of which EVs are just one? Or 35 deaths out of 623,000 people, in a single event, 100% attributable to fossil fuels?

And just in case it somehow came out as a tie, the CBS story ends by noting that "Across Russia, in western Siberia, another blast killed two people and wounded five more on Monday night. That explosion occurred at an oil mine in the Khanty-Mansiysk region late in the evening, local authorities said."

Of course, these are just a few cherry-picked examples. But the reality is that US government research shows that:

“The propensity and severity of fires and explosions from the accidental ignition of flammable electrolytic solvents used in Li-ion battery systems are anticipated to be somewhat comparable to or perhaps slightly less than those for gasoline or diesel vehicular fuels, with the overall consequences for Li-ion batteries also expected to be less because of the much lower amounts of flammable solvent released and burning.” (pg. 56)

“Real and factual risk assessments,” are readily available, but for some strange reason, the fossil fools never seem to be able to find them!

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/8/16/2187595/-Daily-Caller-Debunks-Itself-With-EV-Attack-And-Inconvenient-Gas-Car-Facts-Gas-Is-Flammable

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