My family and I were traveling when we were passed by a gasoline-powered truck pulling a sickeningly eco-green colored trailer with an EV truck on it. Why was this new super-duper environmentally friendly truck being towed by the environmentally “destroying” gasoline-powered vehicle? A little research revealed the answer. The driver was towing his super-duper truck because this is the tried-and-true way to get an electric vehicle from one location to another.
Comparing EV trucks to gasoline-powered trucks, the contrast is shocking. While the Ford F-150 Lightning EV truck’s claimed range is 320 miles, the range is actually closer to 270 miles. Thus, according to the Pickup Truck Talk website, the rig must “stop every 3.5 hours, find a charger, make sure the charger works, and then wait an inconsistent amount of time (chargers have different rates of charge) to get back on the road again.” Claimed charging time is 30-45 minutes. EV advocates allege this is the same amount of time to fill a gasoline-powered vehicle. Additionally, they say “nobody fully charges.” On trips, I always fill my gas tank in far less than 40 minutes.
Of course, everything changes during cold winter months. Lightning’s range drops 35% during freezing conditions due to heating the cabin, reducing the range to 175.5 miles. Conventional internal combustion engines use engine heat to warm the cabin.
Trucks are purchased to haul things. The Lightning driving range decreases 24.5% carrying 20 bags of concrete mix (~1,400 pounds), dropping the range to around 204 miles. During freezing weather, this range drops to 133 miles.
Then of course there is vacation season. A Lightning was compared to a GMC Sierra 1500 half-ton gas-powered 6.2-liter V-8 truck. Hitched to identical 6,000-pound campers, the Sierra’s driving range was 280 miles, while the Lightning’s driving range reduced immediately to 160 miles, but it “barely made it 88 miles before requiring a charge.” “Sucking down the electricity much faster than anticipated, the data offered on the screen in the EV truck didn’t show accurate range estimates.”
Traveling with electric trucks is termed “nerve-wracking and frustrating.” It was stated, “Imagine stopping every 100 miles or less with a nearly dead battery.”
Please note that “most charging stations aren’t set up for pull-through charging.” This means on your “vacation,” before your 30-45 minute wait to recharge every 88 miles, you will also “enjoy” unhitching your trailer to charge your EV. What fun!
In a Detroit to Denver drive, an EV driver paid ~$193 for charging, which took more than 5 hours. Fuel for the gasoline-powered vehicle cost about $300, but saved 5 hours. So, the gas-powered vehicle’s trip cost $107 dollars more, but the EV added over 5 additional hours to the trip. You have to decide which is more important, time or money.
However, according to the Anderson Economic Group, “In Q4 2022, typical mid-priced ICE [Internal Combustion Engine] car drivers paid about $11.29” for fuel for 100 miles of driving. This was “~$0.31 cheaper than the amount paid by mid-priced EV drivers charging mostly at home, and over $3 less than the cost borne by comparable EV drivers charging commercially.”
Concerning charging the EV, we have a new expression to add to our society, which is “the range of anxiety.” This is when your vehicle is saying, “I need a charge,” and you are trying desperately to find a charging station before you run out of juice. My understanding is that these charging stations can be hard to find and are often are in places you don’t want to be.
By the way, your EV truck will probably cost about $20,000 more than a comparable gas-powered truck. Also, EV batteries typically only last 100,000 miles. If you ever need to replace your battery, they cost $15,000-$23,000. Are EVs supposed to be considered disposable?
While all this seems bad for the future of EV trucks, it’s actually worse when you research personal testimonies. One Lightning owner said he bought his vehicle because that’s considered “responsible citizenship these days.” After purchasing his $80,000 EV truck, and paying over $10,000 for a home charger, he took his family for a 1,400-mile trip from Winnipeg, Canada to Chicago. His first recharging stop took 2 hours to recharge from 10% to 90%. At his second recharging stop, he found the charger was dysfunctional. So, he traveled to another station. It, too, was dysfunctional. Then he noted that his family was “really worried and stressed at this point.” With only 12 eco-friendly-miles left, he had to tow his EV to a Ford dealership where he rented a gasoline-powered vehicle to complete his “vacation.” He stated EVs are the “biggest scam of modern times.”
Even Ford’s CEO drove a Lightning truck on a trip and said it was a “reality check.” He further stated, “Charging has been pretty challenging.” Charging to 40% took 40 minutes, meaning a 90% charge would have taken an hour and a half.
Then there’s that other issue. Remember after Hurricane Ian where EVs were “exploding all over Florida” when salt water mixed with electricity? The extremely hot fires from these explosions are almost inextinguishable. It takes 3,000-8,000 gallons of water to extinguish an EV fire. Comparatively, it takes 1,000 gallons of water to extinguish a gas-powered car fire. What about water conservation?
Are these explosions just a rare salt-water induced problem? In New York there have been 108 lithium-ion battery fires reported this year, injuring “66 people and [killing] 13.” In 2022, over 200 fires from batteries on e-bikes, EVs and other devices have occurred. One fire killed four people and left two others in critical conditions. “In just three years, lithium-ion battery fires have surpassed those started by cooking and smoking as the most common causes of fatal fires in New York City.”
If you purchase one of these super-duper trucks, don’t forget to purchase your explosion suit and fire extinguisher. Also, don’t forget to purchase your EV’s sickeningly green trailer, so everyone will know how environmentally conscious you are, as you tow your electric truck with your gasoline-powered truck. Vroom vroom.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
