EVs Cost 40 Percent Less to Maintain Than Conventional Cars, Energy Department Report Says

Stephan:  Everyone I know who has an EV is amazed at the reduced maintenance costs. The real hang-up is going to be getting charging stations built across America. What we need is the kind of single-minded focus Dwight Eisenhower created when he decided to make the internet highway system a reality. It created millions of jobs and changed the American economy in the United States.
EV charging

Maintenance costs for a light-duty, battery-powered car are around 40 percent less per mile than for a gas-powered car, according to a recent report from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory.

The Office Of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy highlighted the findings in a new post, which explains that electric vehicles lack timing belts, oxygen sensors, fuel filters, spark plugs, multi-speed transmissions and other parts than can prove costly to service in conventional cars. And, whereas gas-powered cars require regular oil changes, EVs have no need for motor oil.

The report finds that while gasoline-powered cars cost around 10 cents per mile on average to maintain, electric cars cost only around 6 cents per mile. Hybrid cars cost around 9 cents per mile to maintain, with savings on brake maintenance making them cheaper to service than conventional vehicles. The findings add to a growing body of work showing that, factoring in savings on maintenance and fuel, EVs are often cheaper to own than conventional cars, despite having higher upfront costs.

The difference in maintenance costs between gasoline-powered cars and electric […]

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Why does it cost so much to build things in America?

Stephan:  If you have ever travelled in Europe, Japan, or China you know how inferior the American infrastructure is. Our airports look like those of developing nations, our passenger rail system is a bad joke from the 1950s, our bridges are an aging catastrophe waiting to happen. And everything about our infrastructure is absurdly expensive. This article raises issues that you rarely hear discussed in the media, but which are, in my opinion,of great importance.

As Congress argues over the size of the infrastructure bill and how to pay for it, very little attention is being devoted to one of the most perplexing problems: Why does it cost so much more to build transportation networks in the US than in the rest of the world?

In an interview in early June, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg acknowledged the problem, but he offered no solutions except the need to study it further.

Biden’s original infrastructure proposal included $621 billion for roads, rail, and bridges. His plan is billed not only as an infrastructure plan but one that would help respond to the climate crisis. A big part of that is making it easier for more Americans to travel by mass transit. The Biden plan noted that “America lags its peers — including Canada, the U.K., and Australia — in the on-time and on-budget delivery of infrastructure,” but that understates the problem.

Not only are these projects inordinately expensive, states and localities are not even attempting to build particularly ambitious projects. The US is the sixth-most expensive country […]

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Here’s What Happens When You Eat From Plastic Containers

Stephan:  Stop using plastic wherever and whenever you can.

Drinking water is supposed to be good for you, but what happens when you diligently carry that disposable water bottle around all day, to remind yourself to take a sip? With that sip, you take in an undue amount of plastic, according to recent research. And that’s not all.

Takeout cartons, shelf-stable wrapping, those water bottles, even canned goods can be the culprit. And while no one likes the idea of consuming plastic, most of us still shrug and throw that container in the microwave.

4 Reasons Not to Eat or Drink From Plastic Containers:

1. The plastic transfers from the containers to your food.

Humans ingest at least 74,000 particles of microplastic a year, according to research in The Journal of Food Science. A lot of this comes from our takeout containers. In fact, we could be ingesting more than 200 particles a week, just from our plastic food storage units.

Microplastics from the containers themselves flake off into the food, accounting for 30 percent of the plastic intake from those foods, according to a […]

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The Supreme Court Abandons Voting Rights

Stephan:  Now you see why the Republicans blocked Garland's appointment to the court and why it has been so important for McConnell and Trump to get three MAGA justices on the court. This is another step in the dismantlement of the substance of American democracy, replacing it with A White supremacy pseudo-democracy. What I am hoping to see in 2022, is a massive turnout of people of color, young people, and Whites who aren't frightened by the country becoming a majority-minority nation. Such a large turnout that it overwhelms all these cowardly voter restriction laws. We are in a cold civil war, no less threatening to America's future than the hot war of the 1860s. If you don't get that, in my opinion, you don't understand what is going on in this country.
Nicholas Konrad/The New York Times

The 1965 Voting Rights Act was one of the most important pieces of legislation in American history. By outlawing racial discrimination in voting and imposing federal oversight in states with histories of discriminating, it finally enforced the 15th Amendment and marked the first time the nation could call itself a truly representative democracy. Until the last decade, the law occupied a sacred spot in the American legal system. In 2006, Congress reauthorized the law nearly unanimously.

Since then, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has been dismantling it, piece by piece.

The latest blow came Thursday, when all six conservative justices voted to uphold two Arizona voting laws despite lower federal courts finding clear evidence that the laws make voting harder for voters of color — whether Black, Latino or Native American. One law requires election officials to throw out ballots that were cast in the wrong precinct; the other bars most people and groups from collecting voters’ absentee ballots and dropping them off at polling places.

Under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, […]

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The Department of Yes.

Stephan:  More corruption from the Trump administration, but it is much more than that. Our laws have been structured by the Congress, and state legislatures, and interpreted by the Supreme Court in a way that favors the rich, both individuals and corporations. We have lost our way. Instead of using our democracy to create wellbeing, we have corrupted it, so that the only thing that matters is short-term profit. Here is the proof of what I am saying.

Lianne Sheppard was sitting in her office on a Friday afternoon when a colleague approached her with an old study on the safety of chlorpyrifos. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the Environmental Protection Agency had used the study to set a safety level for the exposure to the pesticide, which is widely used on fruits and vegetables. But when Sheppard, a professor and biostatistician at the University of Washington, looked at the original research that was the basis for the paper and the safety thresholds that were calculated from it, she realized that the underlying data didn’t support its conclusion.

“I tried to reproduce their analysis, and I couldn’t,” Sheppard said of the study, which was commissioned by Dow Chemical, the maker of chlorpyrifos, in the late 1960s. The research was conducted by an Albany Medical College professor named Frederick Coulston, who exposed 16 incarcerated men to the pesticide, dividing them into four groups — a low-, medium-, and high-dose group as well as a control — and recording their nervous system responses. The resulting paper, […]

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