Good morning; here's what the Oilman has for you today:

• Electric Tanks? Why Not!

• Meet DC Solar: The Billion-Dollar Generator Scam That Tricked Buffett

• Tweet of the Day

Electric Tanks? Why Not!

The Biden administration is a huge fan of electricity, especially the kind that comes from sunlight and wind.

They are also fans of an all-electric army, whatever the drawbacks, with Energy Secretary Granholm seeing this happening in 2030.

Yes, including the tanks.

It’s all about climate change. Surprised?

In February this year, the Pentagon announced it was launching a climate strategy that would see its emissions fall by 50% by 2030 from 2005 levels.

You’re probably wondering since when are emissions at the top of the agenda for the military, and the answer may well be “Since February”.

As part of these plans, the army also said it would have:

• An "all-electric light-duty non-tactical vehicle fleet by 2027" and

• An "all-electric non-tactical vehicle fleet by 2035."

Okay, you could probably argue that non-tactical vehicles are not as important…so they can spend 8+ hours charging.

Yet the argument will likely fall flat because they are important.

An army can’t do without its trucks and van any more than it can do without tanks.

Tactical, non-tactical, what’s the difference?

None, if you ask Secretary Granholm.

Last month she said she was fully behind the army’s idea of electrifying its whole fleet.

Of course, this prompted an immediate pushback from critics who slammed her for putting emissions above national security.

And people who had joked about battery electric tanks in February got another laugh.

I mean, imagine a fleet of electric tanks on a battlefield: heavy, slow, and you never know when they will grind to a halt because the battery’s drained.

Yes, electrification will definitely change the way we do war.

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Meet DC Solar: The Billion-Dollar Generator Scam That Tricked Buffett

In 2018, the FBI raided the offices of DC Solar – a company making billions from the sales of solar generators.

This was the beginning of the end for a company that at one point ranked alongside Amazon and AT&T among President Obama’s partners in the fight against climate change.

From hair-brained invention to a Ponzi scheme

“Hair-brained” was how Jeff Carpoff, the founder of DC Solar, described his portable solar panel generator.

Yet investors, including Warren Buffett, disagreed. Money started pouring in as buyers for the solar generators multiplied.

They made Carpoff a billionaire…but not because they worked so well.

Listen to this: most of those generators were never even built!

What Carpoff was running was a literal Ponzi scheme, promising investors lots of money in renewable energy tax credits and a piece of the profit pie.

To pay the first wave of investors, he enlisted a second, then a third, and on it went until FBI smelled something fishy.

Welcome to the great tax credit game

"For example, on wind energy, we get a tax credit if we build a lot of wind farms. That's the only reason to build them. They don't make sense without the tax credit."

The author of the above is Warren Buffett, and it pretty much sums up the game that Carpoff played.

He offered buyers a small down payment on generators that would be 100% tax deductible because, duh, solar.

They fell for it. Of course they fell for it.

They often didn’t even see the generators they bought – those were supposed to be leased immediately to actual users while the buyers collected all the tax credit goodies.

Until the bubble burst.

But even after Carpoff went to prison, tax credits remain a lucrative business for a lot of companies:

• The credits cut the cost of new massive wind and solar farms

• The credits encourage more people to buy EVs

Sure, these companies offer real products, but these products only turn in a profit—if they ever do—because of the subsidies that go with them.

Now (you might wonder) is a business competitive if it has to rely 100% on subsidies to stay alive?

Good question.

Around the Global Patch

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