What 90 Active Rigs In North Dakota Looks Like -- April 22, 2015; Re-Thinking Re-Cycling; Re-Thinking EVs

Link here.

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Rethinking Recycling

The Wall Street Journal reports that recycling glass is getting too expensive. Likewise, recycling plastic is not all that it's cracked up to be. 

The report is posted on Earth Day.

My wife religiously recycles. We use more water cleaning plastic and glass containers for recycling than we use for watering the lawn. But that's because we have no lawn to water.

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Rethinking EVs

Daily Caller is reporting:

President Barack Obama promised to put a million more hybrid and electric cars on the road during his tenure, but new research shows drivers are trading them in to buy sports utility vehicles (SUVs).

The auto-research group Edmunds.com found that “22 percent of people who have traded in their hybrids and [electric vehicles] in 2015 bought a new SUV.”

This number is higher than the 18.8 percent that did the same last year, but it’s double the number that traded in their electric car for an SUV just three years ago.

Only “45 percent of this year’s hybrid and EV trade-ins have gone toward the purchase of another alternative fuel vehicle, down from just over 60 percent in 2012.”

“Never before have loyalty rates for alt-fuel vehicles fallen below 50 percent."

Several story lines:

• EVs may not be as "loved" as owners say
• flipping EVs for the tax credit
• getting rid of an EV before the battery gets any older
• some argue that Saudi Arabia cut price of oil to $50 to stop the EV movement; if so, it's working
• not enough charging stations
• cargo space taken up by battery
• early adopters bought the EVs; mainstream was to follow; never happened ... for whatever reason 

The most surprising thing: I thought folks loved their EVs so much, they would be "replacing" them with newer EV models; not trading them in for SUVs. So we go from EVs to perhaps the poster child for all that is bad for the environment: gas-guzzling SUVs.

My wife suggests that this only makes sense: the wealthy (or "better-off") were the ones who were best able to afford an EV (expensive; third or fourth car); they are the ones most able to afford an SUV. 

Regardless, TSLA is up almost 6%, up almost $12.

Whatever.