American EVs reduced gasoline consumption by just 0.54% in 2021
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
> But it should be clear now that EVs on their own are not a panacea to our transport-related climate problems, and the future will require many more people to walk, cycle, or take the bus to get to where they're going.
I think this claim is true (and a good thing) but it's not really supported by the evidence presented, which mostly says "the US needs less ICE cars".
https://www.experian.com/blogs/insights/2021/10/ev-registrat...
Why do we have these silly discussions?
Six years ago Tesla was going out of business and the stock price was going to tank.
When that didn’t happen, we started having other silly conversations.
If everyone in LA and New York drove an electric car they’d sure have much cleaner air.
Not sure why the EV Bus Revolution hasn’t started in the United States.
https://chargedevs.com/newswire/the-vehicles/byd-delivers-ov...
But also sometimes transit agencies just do dumb things (see, Boston de-electrifying a few bus lines).
It's mostly because it takes 10-20 years to transition a transit agency to ZEBs. Many agencies in the US are in the process of doing this. The timeline is due to things like:
- FTA monies used to purchase existing ICEBs require vehicles to be retained for their "useful life", which is often 12 years/500k miles;
- Retrofits or rebuilds of bus garages take many years and hundreds of millions of dollars. The timeline is dependent on design + construction + utility requests (which alone can sometimes take 2-3 years);
- Budgets!
Along with that comes refactoring service, due to so many vehicle service blocks not being compatible with the ranges of current batter-electric bus technology.
New York City needs fewer cars, not more. Given the longevity of the modern ICE car (15-20 years) it's going to take a long time to replace existing ICE cars in NYC.
In rural places, replacing ICE with electric is surely a good thing. In cities, we need to scale down car use significantly, while scaling up walkability, bikeability, and public transit. Even if we switched every car and every gas station over to electric today, we'd still have to burn insane amounts of coal and natural gas to power those cars -- not to mention the microplastic pollution generated by tires and roads that is actually made worse by the increased weight of electric vehicles.
The solution is fewer cars, and those cars that can't be replaced by other modes of transit ought to be electrified.
I simply meant replace all gas cars with electric, and we’d have cleaner air
> If everyone in LA and New York drove an electric car they’d sure have much cleaner air.
Apologies if I misunderstood you. But surely you can understand how this statement sounds as if you're talking about every person in those cities, not just the current ICE drivers.
To pass the Turing test, a computer has to infer the missing context.
For example, “is this human really saying the solution is for every human being to buy an electric car ” or is he implying that people should trade in their gasoline cars for electric ones?
Statistically speaking, how often do people say everyone should buy an electric car, even if they don’t own or need a car?
Given projected growth rates of adoption and the average lifespan of ICE vehicles - this number is going to be quite impressive in 10 years - like the entire oil output of a big OPEC country [1].
i.e. ~10% of all cars on the road in the US will be EVs, and another ~8% will be PHEVs.
Combined with rates in China & the EU - the difference is going to literally change the entire geopolitics of the planet.
You're looking at ~10M barrels of oil per day - that's ~35% of OPEC...
By 20 years - you're looking at 100% of OPEC...
[1] https://www.eei.org/News/news/All/eei-projects-26-million-el...
I would be curious if there was an average miles driven per day/week/whatever for each of the different types of cars.
So I'd argue to not count Hybrids as "EV-equivalent". They are not saving fuel.
People would probably gladly do that if they could.
I'm from Europe, I spent some years in the US, I never had a car in Europe (I wouldn't have one even if you paid me to), I couldn't do most things without a vehicle in the US (except NYC)
Quadratics aren't quite exponentials, but they're still pretty fast for a society. US gasoline consumption grew only 5% from 2010 to 2019, so by 2023, EV sales will be offsetting all growth in gasoline demand. By 2024, gas demand will be less each year than before. By 2030, significant numbers of gas stations will be reducing/converting pump counts. That sounds like a pretty awesome arc for the 2020s compared to the 2010s.
And the linear sales growth constant seems decently high too: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1231872/battery-electric...
Gas consumption: https://www.statista.com/statistics/188448/total-us-domestic...
I don't understand how the 0.54% statistic has any bearing on this conclusion. Like if all miles were driven by EVs, then it would be a 100% reduction in gasoline (using the metric in the study). Would that make EVs a panacea?
There's also some cost to bear with the huge numbers of vehicle accidents and deaths each year from driving.
It wouldn't be quite 100%. Generators, mowers, ATVs, and some other things are also using gasoline. I don't see in the article if that was accounted for. I doubt it would be much more than a few percent at the most, though.
That wasn't clear to me from the article. I gathered (incorrectly) that the numbers were based off amount of gasoline sold. Thanks for the clarification.
They have these devices for AC units already, but it could be so much smarter.
I've heard some talk that some of the PG&E caused fires are due to the grids not getting enough time to cool and accelerating failures. Note that this doesn't excuse their lack of investment in infrastructure.
Basically, we need to hugely over provision the grid to handle 24/7 loading without the current failure modes. That will require a complete rethink on what constitutes the base load, how solar can help and how it can't, etc.
Source?
It seems plausible but I have nothing more than that.
Edit: I don't think the grid being hot would cause a fire, to be clear. I'm under the impression that it causes the lines to sag, increasing the occurrence of the primary mode of wildfire cause, vegetation contact. Further, running the transformers hotter shortens their life (as it does with most electrical equipment).
The transmission infrastructure needs cooling off time, not the generation.
Base load has to be completely changed if we consider charging EV's at a population level, which changes how we look at renewables that aren't around the clock (i.e. solar).
To be clear I'm 100% behind getting rid of ICE, coal, gas, etc. as soon as we can. That doesn't mean there aren't assumptions that won't have to be challenged.
As for my background and experience, I worked in Nuclear Power generation. I'm not a complete domain expert, but neither am I speaking from a place of no experience.
IIRC, the big concern with cooling off time was not simply due to high loads, but rather high loads combined with high ambient temperatures at night. I.e. it wasn't so much of a concern in places that dropped below 80F overnight.
In either case I don't see it as a big deal. Power companies exist to sell us power, they'll figure it out.
That implies the issue is far worse than you seem to think.
Also, a glib "they'll figure it out" is less than a step removed from sticking your head in the sand. You don't have to be a domain expert to learn and understand the first order principles at issue here.
https://insideevs.com/news/436665/24-million-evs-limit-curre...
2021 sales were less that 1% of that. At what point does the bottleneck kick in? I would imagine electric utilities have a huge incentive to make this work given that demand has been flat at ~4 trillion kWh for over a decade.
Your observation is correct - the grid as designed is indeed a bottleneck and this will become increasingly obvious in northern climates as more services switch to electric - heat and transportation are good examples. An excellent case in point is the trans canada highway which has failed to electrify large sections due to insufficient grid capacity. Before people point to a map from an auto maker, do those maps show instances where the power feeding EV chargers has overloaded a circuit causing multiple hours of no charging?
Cheaper electricity should indeed be a short term goal.
The limit is regulation, not technical. Often the law doesn't allow them to build the lines where they need to.
If every car in Germany would be an EV the battery capacity could power all of Germanys electric power needs for two days.
Things are more complex than they seem to be at first sight.
Your claim of batteries powering a gigawatt scale grid for two days does not pass the smell test. Something is off so it might help to show calculations or sources.
What smell test? What doesn't specifically sound right?
I might have miscalculated of course,
50M cars x 50kwh = 2500Gwh = 2.5Twh
Germany Electricty usage:
561,8 Twh/ year -> /365 = 1.54Twh / day
So two days ~3TwH, Battery capacity ~2.5Twh
I would be interested in any corrections, especially as you are a renewable energy researcher and I'm just a coder.
Wires themselves last longer, but the poles, insulation (a big problem underground), transformers, breakers, and all the other parts don't and get replaced all the time.
Most neighborhoods.are fine, with just smaller taps to bring more power in. They have years to fix this.
I don't know about the US, but in the UK electricity demand has dropped ~20% in the past 10 years. (10% in 7 years if you want to avoid covid etc) Adding in the fact that EVs are more likely to be charged off peak and I'd be surprised if it made any appreciable difference.
From a fueling standpoint, EVs are already far cheaper than gas. So much so that many people are already jumping to EVs despite having to make compromises when road tripping.
For compact cars comparable to cars that get better mileage, that's less.
I do agree that EVs have more coverage on the premium end of the market than in the low/mid tier. Though a Model 3 at about 40K is reasonably competitive in that segment.
And we're not even getting into the reduced range, availability of (fast) charging stations, availability of electric work vans, the cost of EVs, cost of repair/batteries, etc.
Right now for the vast majority of people, EVs are frankly, ridiculously unaffordable.
I cannot speak for Europe. But in the US, gasoline is $3.51/gallon, electricity is $0.166/kWh. The average car gets 24.2 mpg. The average EV goes 2.9 miles/kWh. The average miles per year driven is 14263. So the average EV driver will spend about $100 per month less on fueling.
But there's a lot of variability to that. You can buy a Chevy Bolt for $26.5K, it consumes 3.44 kWh/mi, and in Portland you can charge at night for $0.042/kWh. The lifetime fueling cost is less than one average new car payment.
A quick google search suggests gasoline is approximately twice as expensive in Europe, electricity three times as expensive, and miles driven about half. The fueling cost will be much closer, but the EV still comes out ahead.
Less gasoline is good unless the alternative is coal-fired electricity.
Why? Because converting gasoline to electricity in a large-scale plant is far more efficient than converting gasoline to motion in little engines scattered about in the environment. Once the power is available as electricity, the downstream losses are really quite small (10%? 5%?) compared to the downstream losses for gasoline - 85% just in the car itself, and that's not even including delivering the gasoline to the gas station or the energy required to pump it into the car etc.
Take a look at this map showing the carbon output of an EV in various districts measured in equivalent MPG. https://blog.ucsusa.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Microsoft...
Same place as the virtue signal yard signs with luxury shops everywhere.
I don't assume, in my experience I've seen that highfalutin self-advertising of progressive ideals is concentrated in wealthy areas. It's sanctimonious and always among people who are insulated enough from reality to pretend they actually believe in those ideals.
My new (medium class) ICE car has a bunch more than a small second-car EV I recently drove (Renault Twingo).
Car batteries meanwhile, are likely to be recycled as much as possible, as they are the priciest single component of the car.
Modulo the battery (which I mentioned separately), I don't think Model 3 has much more electronics than modern ICE cars in its class. A modern car isn't even a computer on wheels, it's network of many computers, on wheels.
> they are the priciest single component of the car.
What's the lifespan on that battery?
And you have to keep in mind that the carbon footprint of a traditional car is very well understood, and it is enormous. An efficient mid-size car will consume something like 12x its weight in gasoline, and harvesting that gasoline also has a carbon footprint.
The result is that there are not a lot of batteries that can be recycled yet. There are groups looking into how to do it on an industrial scale and there are some prototype programs out there to test out the processes, but this is not a problem that needs to be solved in the near term.
https://electrek.co/2022/10/14/us-increases-ev-battery-recyc...
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2022/07/volkswagen-partners-wit...
There are many reality-check baselines one can refer to in the case of the planetary-scale problem we are discussing. Here's one:
https://i.imgur.com/wbHptnf.png
A very simple chart that speaks loudly. Among other things, it says that electric cars do not matter. At all.
What?
OK. In case it isn't obvious, I'll walk you through it.
The argument presented is that a full conversion of the US into electric-powered ground transportation is crucial in the fight against climate change. Some say this can actually start to roll back atmospheric CO2 concentration levels. This, of course, is preposterous.
Let's take it a million times further than just converting the US to electric power:
Let's completely erase the US from this planet. We go from 300 million people to zero. All buildings, factories, vehicles, power plants, trains, planes, etc. evaporate overnight. Gone. Beamed into space by Captain Kirk.
What effect would that have on global atmospheric CO2 concentration and climate change?
Well, the simple answer (refer to the chart) is the planet would see a reduction in annual contributions of 14%.
This is NOT a reduction in atmospheric CO2 concentration. This is a reduction in annual inputs, that's all.
Instead of 32 giga-tons of CO2 per year contributed by humanity we would contribute 28 GT.
Which, in turn, means nothing whatsoever would change.
Atmospheric CO2 would continue to accumulate and increase at about the same rate.
Therefore, electric cars do not matter at all. Their potential impact is dwarfed by comparison to the absolute elimination of an entire nation from the planet. It is, at best, a rounding error.
I know people won't like this. Well, rather than being offended, how about explaining how electric cars would do any better than eliminating the entire US from this planet?
Here, I'll help with a fill in the blank exercise (using current White House estimate on impact of full ground transport electrification to be 1 GT per year):
Ten years from now if we change nothing:
32 GT * 10 = 320 GT more than we have today
If the US didn't exist at all:
28 GT * 10 = 280 GT more than we have today
Best case if we convert all cars in the US to electric power:
31 GT * 10 = 310 GT more than we have today
BTW, this also assumes all other nations will remain at their current emissions levels. That is unlikely. China and India are likely going up before they come down, if ever.
Comparing our ideas to reasonable baselines is of crucial importance. In this case we learn a very harsh reality.
Electric cars are great, yes. However, we really need to stop painting them as a "save the planet" technology. That's nothing less than laughable given the data.
Again, refute the data before being angered by an argument you do not like. After all, reality does not care about your emotions. Are you actually arguing that full-electrics will have a greater impact than erasing the US from the planet? If you can't do that, you really need to re-evaluate how you see this problem.
If you don’t think there is value in reducing CO2 in this are as well as other areas, then do you have any suggestions for reducing the impact of climate change, or should we all just have a big party and burn as much oil as we can?
It is. Nobody is proposing it is not.
Having the hubris to think we can actually control a planetary scale issue of this magnitude is the problem. We are wasting time, money and resources on nonsense.
> The point is to reduce the CO2 input to reduce the amount of change and to reduce the curve.
You cannot. This is wishful thinking.
Even if we convert ALL energy generation on the entire planet to the most optimal forms of renewable energy, not only will we not reverse atmospheric CO2 accumulation, it will continue to increase.
Among other things, keep in mind that we are going to add at least three billion people to this planet by the end of the century. That's the equivalent of two countries the size of China, ten equivalents of the US or about four clones of all of Europe.
This idea of reducing CO2 input at a global scale is a fantasy. The fact that we don't like this does not magically negate the raw math of matter.
Referring to the graph I posted in my prior comment:
https://i.imgur.com/wbHptnf.png
Adding the equivalent of ten times the population of the US or twice that of China means adding the equivalent in terms of annual atmospheric CO2 contributions.
If we go by US living standards, this would mean this additional population would contribute 47 giga-tons of CO2 per year.
If, instead, we take China's emissions, the added population would contribute about 20 giga-tons per year.
How are over three billion people going to live so that they contribute nothing whatsoever to the atmosphere? The answer is: They can't, that idea is a fantasy. Three billions additional people will have a significant and non-trivial impact on atmospheric CO2 contributions, no matter where and how they might live.
All of these discussions wave a magic wand to conclude a miracle occurs, we violate the laws of physics and everyone gets pink unicorns. As great as that might feel, it isn't reality. All of these so-called solutions ignore reality in a egregious way. They assume we turn on a magical vacuum cleaner (or some kind of a perpetual motion machine), no other variable changes and magic happens. Great. Yet, that's not how reality works.
> If you don’t think there is value in reducing CO2
I have never said that. Reducing CO2 emissions has value. We simply need to understand we cannot take it as far as reversing climate change or reducing atmospheric CO2 concentration.
That last part is one of the most important concepts to grasp. We know that, if humanity left the planet, a 100 ppm reduction in atmospheric CO2 requires about 100K years. Any solution short of us not existing on this planet is going to take longer or, more than likely, never result in a reduction at all.
> do you have any suggestions for reducing the impact of climate change, or should we all just have a big party and burn as much oil as we can?
There are no solutions. Thinking we can reverse climate change is as silly as thinking we can slow down the planet's rotation so we can have 48 hour days. The scale is massive beyond comprehension.
And then there's the question of impact. And it is a question. I don't have the answers any more than anyone else might. This is a very complex multivariate problem.
Here's one hypothetical. What if we have to, slowly, over a few centuries, move towards the poles? Why would that be a problem? Is it a silly question? I don't know.
Every time someone voices concern about CO2 concentration I suggest they go and buy a CO2 meter and measure concentration around where they live and work. It is eye opening. For example, here's a table in the office:
https://i.imgur.com/3jEru4d.png
Here it is on the grass, outside:
https://i.imgur.com/srjNIYE.png
In the car I got measurements in the 1100 to 1300 range.
If you do this, one of the revelations should be: We have been living in very high CO2 ppm environments for centuries and none of use have turned into blobs of meat-like jelly on the ground. Why are we being told we are going to cease to exist if we gain another 100 or 200 ppm? Is this fear-mongering or true scientifically supported facts? How do they explain people driving on the highway many hours per day, every day, in a 1100 to 1400 ppm environment and not dropping dead by the millions every day? Etc.
There are a lot of questions, the most fundamental of which being just how much of what we are being told is fantasy used for financial and political gain?
I don't have the answers. All I can do is point out a lack of alignment between the message and reality.
There are cars in places other than the US.
Mind blowing, isn't it? What will they think of next.
You excel at using insults in place of any form of logical argument. This has happened in other discussions. The bad news is reality does not care.
Have a great day.
If I see a bad faith argument worthy of contempt and ridicule where someone is trying to pass of "a big number is made of many small numbers added together" as some kind of fatalistic reason that the small numbers shouldn't be addressed, I'll call it out as such.
Road transport world wide is around 11% of emissions. Eliminating it will eliminate 11% of emissions.
Building heat and electricity is another 17%. Insulating, electrifying the heat (or using sunlight) and using low carbon sources for the electricity will eliminate 17%.
Steel smelting, ammonia and are another 5% at least. Hydrogen and electricity can replace fossil fuels here.
The technical problems for replacing all of these are solved simply by continuing to roll out existing solutions. That's over a third of the way there. Already figured out. Just have to keep doing that part by following the build out plan.
Comparing a subset of US emissions to US emissions as if it is profound is a ridiculous and transparent attempt at rhetoric and spreading doubt.
No! It will not! Electric vehicles do not result in 0% emissions. Not even close.
Want to do the math on electrification? Go figure out the emissions produced by the entire process. The fact that you believe it is 0% says a lot about just how little you understand about, well, everything.
At a minimum, in order to fully electrify our ground transportation system we need to DOUBLE our power generation and transportation (the grid) system. Setting aside the fact that we can't build infrastructure worth a shit these days, a buildout of this magnitude isn't zero emissions at all.
For a sense of proportion, if all of it was nuclear, we would need somewhere in the order of 1200 brand new 1 GW nuclear power plants. If it was solar, we would need at least ten times that much and more batteries than anyone could imagine. Good luck with any of that. We would have to rape the earth for resources just to do this in one country, much less every nation on the planet. I don't even want to think about additional CO2 contributions to the atmosphere.
> Building heat and electricity is another 17%. Insulating, electrifying the heat (or using sunlight) and using low carbon sources for the electricity will eliminate 17%.
Once again, you don't know what you are saying. You are not going to go from 17% (assuming your figures are correct) to 0%. You are saying "and then a miracle occurs" and we are at 0%, completely ignoring what it takes to implement these changes and the reality that they are NOT carbon neutral at all, not even close. Not going to happen. In a fantasy, sure, in real life things don't work that way. My guess is you'd be lucky if you get a 2% to 3% savings, if that.
> That's over a third of the way there.
The part you don't seem to want to grasp is that reducing world-wide emissions by 33% does absolutely nothing. This, if it were possible, it is likely to take a century or more, if ever. World population will continue to increase, which, in turn, will produce more CO2 due to our activities.
Reducing it by 66%, does nothing. Atmospheric CO2 will continue to increase.
Even worse, reducing it by 100% --which is patently impossible-- will, again, do nothing at all. Why? If this were possible (again, it is not) this might take 500 to 1000 years. By that point in time the earth might have twenty to thirty billion people (if we don't kill ourselves first). This means our activities will produce massively more CO2 no matter what we do. Food production. Homes. Travel. Clothing. Producing household, commercial and industrial goods. Etc. All of it pumps CO2 into the atmosphere.
Even if we could get to 0% CO2, at that point it would take a hundred thousand years for a mere 100 ppm drop. Nature is the only power on this planet that can affect this change. And it takes nature a very long time.
This is were getting a sense of proportion is important. People are talking about reducing CO2 by a few percent when, if you really look at the larger picture, none of it is significant. And, as you get to the more extreme claims, it is nothing less than fantasy.
You are free to believe that math and physics don't matter. I am not going to say anything here to convince you. Don't know how old you are. I hope you live long enough to eventually understand that, at some point, reality matters. I think these realities are going to start hitting people in the face pretty hard in another decade or two. You'll wake up one day and realize everyone has been lying to you for financial or political gains. We will be no closer to solving anything. We will have wasted decades selling (and voting for) nonsense. We will realize we could have been discussing the truth and acting on it. The problem will be that we will have wasted resources (financial and natural) to such an extent that it might just be impossible to do anything intelligent by the time that realization sinks in.
The tragedy of that moment will be that the well-to-do will have the means to adapt and plan for the future. The poor will not. That's the greater long-term tragedy of the cult climate change has become. The people supporting the narratives, the masses, are the the ones who will suffer the most. Just like the people who supported a $15/hr minimum wage only to wake up one day to the reality that their $15/hr "raise" has now devalued down to $5/hr, if they have a job at all.
Reality has a way to assert itself regardless of what we want to believe or not. That is, oddly enough, reality.
Frozen world fallacy again. The 11% is the point of use stuff, embodied emissions come under industrial heat, or chemical, or electricity or or mining or shipping. What processes produce those emissions? How does a steel smelter produce emissions if it is running on solar electrolysed hydrogen? How does a mine produce emissions if it is electrified, and the nitrates are sequestered and the hydrocarbons it uses come from the air? Mining basalt hosted formations becomes carbon negative at about 120g/kg of host rock if you spread out the silicates after.
> My guess is you'd be lucky if you get a 2% to 3% savings, if that.
Good thing reality doesn't conform to the vague gut feelings of someone who is trying to spread FUD then.
> For a sense of proportion, if all of it was nuclear, we would need somewhere in the order of 1200 brand new 1 GW nuclear power plants. If it was solar, we would need at least ten times that much and more batteries than anyone could imagine. Good luck with any of that. We would have to rape the earth for resources just to do this in one country, much less every nation on the planet. I don't even want to think about additional CO2 contributions to the atmosphere.
You don't need 1.2TW to provide well under 300GW. And you certainly don't need to store energy in a battery to store it in a battery. Just plug most cars in most of the time and they become 3-day dispatchable load that massively drops the storage required for electrification. Some PHES or hydrogen is needed for seasonal storage, but this is a few dozen TWh.
The part of first generation of PV and wind will produce around 20g/kWh. The rest will use PV and wind to produce the Al, ste, and polysilicon. Same with nuclear. This drops it to 5 or so. Electrifying a few other steps makes it negligible.
And your claims of it taking centuries are incoherent. It will happen within 50 years simply because of resource depletion even with no intervention.
You continue to say thing that reveal you have never bothered to do the math at all. I have done this. I have written reasonably detailed simulations in order to understand just how much power full electrification of ground transport would require. My answer was in a range between 900 GW and 1400 GW. Years later Elon Musk confirmed this. His estimate is pretty much exactly in the middle of the range I predicted.
What he said is that electricity demand will more than double when we shift all transport to electric. The US currently has a capacity of 1.2 TW. A doubling, then, means we need an additional 1.2 TW of power generation and, most importantly, the ability to deliver that power (today, we cannot).
https://www.publicpower.org/system/files/documents/Americas_...
The 1.2 TW number comes from page 2 of the report linked above.
It is also important to understand how we generate power. Page 2:
Natural gas 43.9%
Coal 18.5%
Wind 10.7%
Hydro 8.1%
Solar 5.3%
Geothermal 0.3%
Anyhow, you go ahead and believe what you believe.
Come back and check your notes against this discussion in ten years and see where your beliefs land you.
With negligible chemical or hydro storage (or even fossil fuel backup at insignificant usage) for the 4 days a year where demand spikes, all you need to do is make it so most EVs are available to charge most of the time to spread the load.
This can be achieved either by an extension cord, or if that is really too difficult for you to imagine, by taking a few days worth of EV battery (about 10-30%) and separating it from the car (either at point of charge, at the owner's house or on grid) most of the time so it can be charged whenever. Exclusively fast charging and peaking with nuclear is the stupidest possible way of achieving this. Please do share your simulation so it can become apparent what other unfounded assumptions you've made.
You've also just attempted to move the goal posts with your "prediction". Peak capacity isn't generation. Markets shift, and much more than just transport will be electrified. There will be several net terawatts of renewables dedicated to US energy needs in the coming decades, but it has nothing to do with your logic.
Finally appealing to authority using an ambiguous and off handed comment of a serial liar whose quantified predictions are consistently wrong is evidence against your case, not for it.