The entire motivation for government subsidies and mandates to pursue an all-EV future is the claim that it will result in radical reductions in CO2 emissions. But known unknowns in EV supply chains show that all EV emission claims are ‘guesstimates’ based on averages, approximations, or aspirations. Pushing an all-EV world is likely to increase CO2 emissions.

• Electric Vehicles for Everyone? The Impossible Dream, Manhattan Institute Policy Paper, July 2023.

With a dozen states planning to ban the sale of new cars with internal combustion engines and massive subsidies for electric vehicles (EV) from production to infrastructures, it’s time to dig deep into whether the facts support claims about EV emissions reductions and operational superiority. We start with a review of the state of play.

Electric Vehicles for Everyone? The Impossible Dream, Manhattan Institute Policy Paper, July 2023.

We continue our conversation with philosopher Don Howard who has very practical ideas about, and projects engaged in advancing the principles of ethics in robotics and artificial intelligence. For dystopians, prof Howard provides hope that Silicon Valley’s rising innovators are embracing ethics.

One of Hollywood’s favorite SciFi themes, robo-wars, is in the real-world a serious topic with features and implications different from fevered movie scripts and clickbait. In this first of a two-part episode, we are joined by Don Howard, the brilliant Notre Dame professor of philosophy and ethics of technologies.

• “In Defense of (Virtuous) Autonomous Weapons.” Don Howard, Notre Dame Journal on Emerging Technologies, November 2022.

• In Defense of (Virtuous) Autonomous Systems, Don A. Howard, Dakota Digital Review, February 21, 2023

• Real Robots in Our Near Future: The Rise of Capable Industrial Automatons, Dakota Digital Review, Mark P. Mills, March 9, 2023

In part 2, we pick up the conversation with legendary tech analyst Mark Mahaney. “Institutional Investor magazine has ranked him as a top Internet analyst every year for the past 15 years, including five years as number one.” Mahaney and Mills dig deeper into the implications of AI and ChatGPT, and more.

It’s one thing to forecast the big picture for a technology future, the “macro,” and quite another to be a successful stock picker. In this first of a two-part episode, we’re joined by Evercore ISI’s legendary stock analyst, Mark Mahaney, to talk technology, ChatGPT, and AI and the implications for tech investing.

The idea that EVs are not only inevitable but have “zero emissions,” or at least radically reduce carbon dioxide emissions, is the central claim justifying governments banning — directly, or indirectly as EPA’s proposed rules would do — the sale of cars with internal combustion engines. But the data show that whatever emissions reductions might happen, they’ll be modest at best and at worst non-existent.

In the aftermath of the Silicon Valley Bank collapse, and the role played by the Fed hiking interest rates to cool the economy, we explore the nature of — in words used by Senator Elizabeth Warren in sparring with Federal Reserve Chairman Powell — the “other things” keeping inflation at a multi-decade high.

In this episode we’re responding to a curated collection of questions and objections we’ve received about ideas, facts and claims made in earlier podcasts, speeches, and articles about the challenges—the realities—of the “energy transition.”... Source

The observation that the world is not mining (nor planning to mine) enough minerals to build the scale of solar/wind/battery hardware needed for the goals of Energy Transitionists has inspired the response that such limits are only espoused by modern Malthusians. The claim is that the world has plenty of minerals and that innovation will solve the problem. This is both true and irrelevant. Source