‘Publicity Stunt’: House Republicans Open Probe into Energy Sec. Granholm’s EV Road Trip
Granholm also threw her team under the bus, when she testified about the road trip at a recent House Science and Technology Committee hearing.
My colleague Mary Chastain recently reported on Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm’s road trip to show off electric vehicles available for the public. The journey proved there is no way America can change to only electric vehicles anytime soon.
Now Republicans in the House of Representatives are investigating the trip and the expenses associated with it, as well as the mishaps that led her entourage to block charging stations from the public until her car arrived to use the unit.
House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) and House Subcommittee on Economic Growth, Energy Policy, and Regulatory Affairs Chairman Pat Fallon (R-Texas) sent a letter to Granholm on Tuesday, requesting records “to understand the purposes, costs, and consequences” of her EV excursion.
The House panel chairmen called the energy secretary’s four-day trip from Charlotte, NC, to Memphis, Tenn., in a Cadillac Lyriq a “publicity stunt” that demonstrated “how out of touch the Biden Administration is with the consequences of policies it has unleashed on everyday Americans.”
“Using an internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicle, your Department of Energy (DOE) staff blocked off an EV-only charging station so you could stay on a schedule which was ‘painstakingly mapped out ahead of time’ because of limited, slow, and nonworking EV chargers along your route,” they wrote.
Granholm also threw her team under the bus, when she testified about the road trip at a recent House Science and Technology Committee hearing.
While Granholm’s team planned the trip far in advance to prepare for charging stops, the Georgia stop underscored logistical issues that continue to face zero-emissions cars which Granholm, President Biden and Democratic-led states are aggressively pushing.
After she was pressed on the incident during a House Science and Technology Committee hearing on Sept. 14, Granholm explained the incident occurred as a result of “poor judgment on the part of the team,” sidestepping blame.
No word if the bus her staff was tossed under was EV or fossil fuel-powered.
DONATE
Donations tax deductible
to the full extent allowed by law.
Comments
We are not voting ourselves out of this
Republicans side with Democrats
Democrats running McCarthy, we’ll at least it’s out in the open now
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/09/breaking-us-government-shut-down-averted-house-passes/
Despicable. I hope someone votes to vacate the chair, now, and send McCarthy waddling back to his Cali district. What a complete POS. And this is the second time he’s done this.
McCarthy is a lowlife traitor who should not have any power beyond his one, lonely House vote. No leadership position, no committees, no nothing.
It’s like they clone these corrupt empty suits that meet equity standards and pretend to care about the public they serve when it’s apparent they are in it for person and party. Some are just more odious than others, and Granholm is prime example. A dirty public servant.
Leslie you should fix the ambiguous headline. It sounds more like you are calling the House probe a “publicity stunt” rather than Granholms trip.
It works either way.
Beat me by five minutes.
It seems the publicity stunt was as always on the left. We have been subjected to political marketing from that pack since they understood what marketing is.
With the home appliance aggression, she should be toast, we’ll see.
https://hotair.com/jazz-shaw/2023/09/30/yes-they-are-coming-for-your-gas-furnaces-too-n581442
Granholm, a truly stupid, ill-educated fraud, was accompanied by as many as 8 vehicles that actually worked. These were both an advance team and a staging team for her pretend trip. Disgusting.
Hey do we all remember how Booty Juice rode a black limo to just around the corner from his podium, then took his bike out of the trunk and pedaled the rest of the way?
Plus ça change, eh?
At least 4 of the vehicles in her little convoy appear to have been gasoline powered. The ones that did her advance work finding chargers were for certain as was the one they famously used to block a charger to ‘reserve’ it for her.
She studied long and hard at the Mayor Pete’s School of Publicity Stunts That Pretend to Prove Something, where she graduated with highest honors.
That was for her luggage.
Made with a low wattage toaster.
“Toast?” She should be “nuked.”
EV might make sense at present for low mileage urban driving or for a second vehicle in the suburbs for a stay at home Parent or a retiree. Outside those limitations? Not much utility for EV. That’s without the consideration of available electricity in urban areas many of which are also Blue States where they are closing Nuke, coal and natgas electric generation in the hope the magic grid scale windmills/Solar will somehow replace the lost current generation demand much less the added demand from charging EV and swapping gas appliances to electricity.
What fool gave the DOE any control over appliances and vehicles, much less the authority to ban them? This agency was initially tasked with developing energy and facilitating transmission, not strangling the nation by its cult belief in climate change and central planning.
Where is energy mentioned in the Constitution?
Right next to abortion.
‘What fool gave the DOE any control over appliances and vehicles’
Congress did, for example look at the obamacare law, if you read or attempt to read you will find he ‘to be determine’ or ‘the secretary will decide’ quite a few times in it, congress essentially gave the bureaucrats a blank check to do what they wanted, it doesn’t hurt the judiciary are co-conspirators, in other words they back what ever the bureaucrats do.
Spending millions to fund EV buses in India, but the GOP will inquire about a PR stunt.
How much graft did any politician, GOP or otherwise, make on the India deal? There’s your answer.
EVs will never replace ICE vehicles. As CommoChief said, the only reasonable application of EVs is for a commuter car if you live close enough to your jobsite to not have to recharge en-route, and possibly fleet vehicles like letter carriers that can run their full route on a single charge.
If the goal is to reduce CO2 emissions, from a thermodynamics standpoint, EVs are counterproductive unless we have a full-blown nuclear-powered electrical grid. The amount of fossil fuels required to generate enough electricity to push an EV 1 mile down the road is far greater than the amount of fossil fuel required to push an ICE vehicle 1 mile down the road.
Anyone who thinks that a fully laden electrically powered 18-wheeler is going to drive across the country is seriously confused.
Don’t even get me started on the thermodynamic stupidity of using electricity to power your water heater. It’s absurd, unless the electricity is generated by nuclear power.
Erronius
“Don’t even get me started on the thermodynamic stupidity of using electricity to power your water heater.”
Solar hot water is the only solar technology I consider clearly superior enough to depend on in my own home. Of course, I live in desert Arizona, where it’s a no-brainer. Every December I have to reset the hi-temp breaker on my water heater to turn the electric back on for the winter; it usually pops again around the end of March.
Individual homes that have solar installations are excepted. My point is that you cannot have an industrial-scale power grid based on solar or wind. Los Angeles has something like 10M residents. There is no way you can pipe in enough electricity from solar panels in the Mojave to heat all these people’s water, let alone all of the manufacturing plants that require a great deal of electricity.
The temperature of bath water is around 100 degrees F. To generate electricity, you need to boil water at 212 degrees F. Right there you are expending double the amount of energy to generate the steam to send it through a turbine. Then you have to pipe the electricity to substations, then to individual homes. This transfer of electricity causes a great deal of loss through electrical resistance.
The cost of heating water through electricity is at least 4x the energy cost of heating water through fossil fuels.
If you live off-grid, get your solar panels running. More power to you. I like Arizona (except in the summer). I personally do not subscribe to the notion that CO2 emissions are causing us harm. Drill baby drill. Burn baby burn. But the notion that you can heat water via electricity and save on CO2 emissions without a full nuclear electricity grid on an industrial scale is foolish.
Cheers
Erronius
Point of use solar makes far more sense. Especially in sun belt States as a supplement. Grid level commercial solar/wind as a replacement for nuke, coal, natgas generation…not so much due to lots of intermittent generation and the new transmission lines needed to move it. Our financial overlords are already talking up expanded use of eminent domain to set up vast new networks of transmission lines to move solar and wind from generating States to Cites in non generating States. Eff that.
One important thing that has stuck with me over the years from freshman engineering thermodynamics class is the inefficiency of electrical resistance heating vs heat pump (moving heat from large low temp reservoir to smaller high temp volume) or natural gas.
This incompetent fool needs to go…back to Canada.
Like many government-funded scams we have seen, this one will fail too. EV sales are faltering and some models are sitting on the dealer’s lots for over half of a year unsold. One large woke company in a northern city wanted to convert their truck fleet to EVs and asked the architect to design the facility to handle them. The answer came back that the electrical power to charge the fleet overnight was more than the city used. They dropped the project. This is typical of leftists’ dreams of no fossil fuel use. It simply is not possible to create enough electricity by renewable means to fulfill the needs of society. In this high inflation environment of today, there is no desire to waste hard-earned income of pipe dreams.