If you own an electric car in America, you paid a premium to do a good work; save the planet from CO2 emissions.
Except perhaps not. Unless you are a wealthy elite who can spend $60,000 on a car and $25,000 on solar panels (government subsidies funded by poor people aside) 80 percent of your electricity probably came from conventional energy, like natural gas, anyway.
If you fill up your car with gasoline, you do pretty well energy-wise. Outstanding energy density is why combustion is still around after 150 years, not the corporate conspiracies promoted by activists. With an electric car, it is just stored energy, and not all that efficient. Worse, the energy is derived by something like natural gas, which makes electricity, which is then run across transmission lines, losing the entire time, and then stored in a battery.(1)
During the last two years, the costs of everything has risen. Some of it due to the effects of the pandemic but most due to government belief that money is magic from another universe. The government had also told oil companies it was "their last chance to cooperate" and cut oil production - or else whatever implied threat House Oversight Committee Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney (D-NY 12th District) was making.(2)
A few months later, gasoline was really high. Not as high as Obama Energy Secretary Stephen Chu wanted, if he was going to make solar look affordable, but high enough that the same political party telling oil companies to cut production were calling oil companies unethical profiteers because they had cut production, which had decreased supply and increased cost.
High conventional energy costs means high electricity cost, because 80 percent of US electricity remains conventional despite all those solar subsidies, and while northeast elites who bought electric cars are fine, those "political Kardashians" really hurt the poor who follow them and bought electric cars they couldn't afford. Because they are paying more for electricity and don't like it.
A 12% drop in satisfaction has to be a worry. It is usually they case with early adapters that they have more zealotry and more wealth - if you bought a Rivian R1T you must gush about it or you look like an idiot - but new owners of mass market electric cars taking the survey for the first time may have actually believed they were going to save money. Yet unless they are wealthy they find they had to set an alarm to only plug in their car when electricity rates went down.
NOTE:
(1) Then there is the famous cold weather problem. Go ahead and make the joke about how someone should invent a diesel generator to put inside the electric school bus so a diesel generator should not have to do an emergency run to charge up a school bus, you won't even be in the first 5,000.
(2) This is the same Rep. who continually claimed vaccines cause autism, a staple of the Democratic party prior to 2021 but bad news in 2022, and once wore a burqua to support the Taliban. A few months after her threat, and after canceling the third meeting to tell oil companies to cut production or else, she lost in her primary race by 30 points. Manhattan people are rich so they want liberal, but not crazy.
