You're flatly claiming there is no conceivable way to grow food at scale without petrochemicals, and you expect to be taken seriously?

Since electric tractors already exist, I can only assume you're thinking of fertiliser production, and more specifically nitrogen fertilisers that often use natural gas for making ammonia. But NH4 does not require fossil carbon, the Haber-Bosch process only uses gas as an energy and hydrogen source, and green ammonia made electrochemically with water and renewable energy is already being produced.

The primary job of a candidate's running mate is to attract voters that might not otherwise vote for the candidate. Diversity is therefore of particular importance.

As Biden is an old white dude, of course he'd be looking for the most-qualified younger lady of colour he could find, specifically so that more voters from those demographics would feel represented. Diversity is that one weird trick that Republicans hate!

Rare earth magnets, yes. I agree they're not rare, but still at present somewhere north of 80% of global supply comes from China, which has demonstrated willingness to artificially restrict exports of these in the past, so that does strike me as a weakness in our supply chains.

I know efforts are underway to diversify sources here, and that not all motors need them, but like cobalt it's an area that we need to address.

And many electric motors, to be fair.

Oh, and a couple more points:

Synfuels are in-use today to some extent, and they can be carbon neutral (if you source the carbon from the atmosphere, which is a big, expensive, and inefficient "if"), but they suffer from nearly all the same disadvantages of petroleum fuels (pollution, distribution, 60% energy loss from heat-engine inefficiencies etc), and add a major new problem: cost.

You need lots of hydrogen (electrolysis is roughly 75% energy efficient) as well as a source of carbon, then you spend more energy to combine them into a synfuel - creating 250 gallons of synfuel takes over 10 MWh of energy, depending on your sources. Then you have to spend yet more energy to distribute it, only to throw away a further 60% of your energy as heat when combusting it. Synfuels might be viable for expensive niche needs (Formula 1 is interested), and possibly even some air travel, but the energy costs of manufacture put it well out of reach for most uses. It makes hydrogen fuel cells look great in comparison, though both pale next to BEVs' overall efficiency of 85%.

Not sure how you missed this, but hybrid cars have been a thing for decades now. They're very popular, though they still suffer from burning petroleum, and the extra complexity of two power trains doesn't help with reliability.

Well, there are LiFePO4 (lithium iron phosphate) batteries in use today, and in fact form the majority of the EV market (both Tesla and BYD produce most of their vehicles with LFP cells these days). They have the advantages of being longer-life, safer, and cheaper than nickel/cobalt chemistries, plus of course not requiring cobalt.

Nobody's suggested forcing anyone to buy anything. There have been EV sales targets discussed, and there will likely be both incentives and disincentives introduced over the following decade or so to encourage market shifts, not to mention EVs themselves will be considerably more mature - but flat ICE bans are highly unlikely (especially in the US).

I get that the average US citizen isn't wanting one yet, that's obvious from the 8% market share. But the point being made here once again is that this market share is growing steadily, and in fact accelerating. It will be less years than most people expect until EV improvements, model choice, dropping prices, and infrastructure support will have reached the point where average joes decide the many EV advantages now outweigh any remaining disadvantages.

It will go on until they learn how to make EVs more efficiently - or concede the market completely. Retooling factories is expensive, so it's entirely expected that their initial vehicles are costly, but this will be amortised eventually. Tesla has a pretty major head start here, but the (other) US car companies will work it out in time. They have a lot of incentive; they know they will eventually be forced out of the market if they don't, so they'll invest whatever they need to.

Outside the US, other car companies are doing just fine with EVs - Kia/Hyundai are selling well, for example, and most notably Chinese manufacturers, who started building EVs long before Ford and GM, are selling more battery cars than Tesla, and with more bang for your dollar too.

Ford's EVs are less than 7% of the US market. They could halt all sales of all models, if they were mad enough to abandon the entire future vehicle market, and it would barely move the overall needle. Tesla alone outsells them by 7-10x, and their sales are still increasing steadily YoY.

But this has been pointed out repeatedly, and you still seem uninterested in updating your views to match the real-world data.

Only if you buy an EV with NMC or NCA batteries. But most mass-market EVs like the Tesla RWD Model 3 and Y are now using LiFeP batteries, which do not use any cobalt at all.

On the contrary, pursuing fossil fuels that are well-documented to cause millions of deaths annually, not to mention contributing enormously to global political strife, would have to be vastly more irresponsible.

Didn't we have this exact same discussion already?

Your assumption is incorrect. As I pointed out then, the data clearly shows that EV sales in the US are now at record levels of 7.9%, and have been increasing YoY for years now. There's no sign whatsoever of any slowdown, if you look at the whole EV market instead of just Ford or GM.

That is clearly not the case, as my earlier post pointed out. EV sales in the US are not slowing at all, they're up 49% in Q3, year over year, and have increased every quarter. BEVs now have a record 7.9% market share of new sales.

I favour the idea of investment instead of labour. Perhaps those made redundant by automation could get their severance as a share of the productivity generated by their replacement.

You don't provide sources, and your examples are a little misleading. Germany has greatly reduced its carbon intensity in the last 20 years, despite a recent reversal triggered by the Ukraine war. And these figures for France show variations between 56 and (recently) 85 gCO2/kWh - are they also "going backwards"? They're not really improving.

We all agree, coal needs to go ASAP and gas soon after. Whether nuclear fills that gap or solar/wind/batteries or whatever is something that should be decided case by case. Nuclear is a fine choice for many sites but is also expensive and slow to build. I look forward to that changing with the advent of SMRs perhaps, but until it does, renewables are much faster and cheaper for many, even for the majority of demand.

You're absolutely right that many people cannot charge at home for those reasons. And if there's no superchargers or L2 plugs at shopping malls or whatever nearby, then they're not going to be early adopters.

But many people can simply charge at home, and they're kick-starting the market. The whole chicken-and-egg infrastructure problem is neatly avoided when home-charging buyers increase the "soft" demand for public chargers, without it being a pre-requisite for their purchase. More EVs on the streets encourages more public chargers to be built, which in turn widens the market to more renters/off-street parkers/etc.

The other nice thing is that most of the infrastructure is already there. We don't need to build vast networks of oil wells and refineries and supertankers and distribution trucking and gas stations on every corner; we already have all (or most) of the generation and wires that we'll need, and the final charging stations are relatively cheap and easy to install, compared to gas stations. You can even just hang them off power poles, so the build-out will be much faster than the petroleum distribution network.