> I hear this thing about return of energy, etc. But this is nothing new, right? Check out the oil sands project in Canada. Do you think the market cares about how much energy is used to create something? No.. just the $.

Ok, please stop and listen.

Economics, Government, the Public... they are all wrong. They got used to not care about EROEI because at the begining of the Industrial Revolution it literally didn't matter. I don't know the numbers for coal, but back when the first oil wells were being digged, the EROEI of oil was ~100:1. It did not matter how much it did cost to extract the stuff, just that you had access to it and how fast you could come up with ways to turn that energy surplus into value added (ergo, $$$).

Now, according to the article we are approaching the 10:1 barrier. That's still pretty good, and you can still run an industrial civilization on top of it, but it has become far from irrelevant. The problem is that all the economic models in use today got created back when the stuff as much more abundant and easier to produce.

If is as if there was a perverse Law of Moore that would cut transistor density in half every 18 months. Everybody started with virtualization and scripting languages and garbage collection, then C and C++ just sneaked under everybody's radar. And now, you are here, bashing assembly hackers because everybody knows that what's more important is programmer's time, not code efficiency.

This is an article about EROI. Personally, I think that's mostly a pointless bit of numerology that's become popular with anti-renewable groups as it's easy to fake, and complicated enough that casual observers can't tell you've faked it. But, if that's what we're talking about, then renewable powered EVs are better than traditional ICE cars when you run the numbers.

On the money side of things, EVs are more expensive than ICE cars because of market externalities due to various kinds of pollution. They're on a rapid price decline due to some government action around the world helping to kick start production, but a carbon tax and a pollution tax based on health impact of particulates would probably reveal them to be a better investment even today.