Global warming, climate change, all these things are just a dream come true for politicians. I deal with evidence and not with frightening computer models because the seeker after truth does not put his faith in any consensus. The road to the truth is long and hard, but this is the road we must follow. People who describe the unprecedented comfort and ease of modern life as a climate disaster, in my opinion have no idea what a real problem is.
C WorldWide are a global asset management company, so it’s a pretty good bet they know what they are talking about.
From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
By Paul Homewood
h/t Hugh Sharman
C WorldWide are a global asset management company, so it’s a pretty good bet they know what they are talking about.
They have published this White Paper no Net Zero by Morten Springborg, their Global Thematic Specialist
The key findings rather say it all:
This paragraph is telling:
It also addresses the intensive demand for raw materials required for renewables:
Here are the conclusions:
Ford lost billions of dollars on its electric vehicle (EV) product lines last year, according to corporate documents.
From The Daily Caller
CONTRIBUTOR
Ford lost billions of dollars on its electric vehicle (EV) product lines last year, according to corporate documents.
The company lost $4.7 billion on EVs in 2023, a greater loss than the $4.5 billion the company expected it would lose in 2023 at mid-year, according to a summary of the company’s annual earnings. The company pointed to “an extremely competitive pricing environment” as a key reason for the losses.
Ford sold 72,608 EVs in 2023, meaning that the company lost nearly $65,000 on each EV that it sold. The company is expecting to lose between $5 billion and $5.5 billion on its EV products in 2024, according to the earnings document. (RELATED: Morgan Stanley Throws Cold Water On Biden’s Lofty EV Targets)
“The customer insights we’re getting by being an early mover in electric pickups, SUVs and commercial vehicles are invaluable – especially as we’re developing next generation EVs that are going to surprise customers and be profitable within a year of launch,” John Lawler, Ford’s CFO, said of the company’s 2023 results and its outlook for the future. “EVs are here to stay, customer adoption is growing,” added Lawler, who also commended the “long-term upside” of the products.
In January, the company announced that it is cutting production of its F-150 Lightning EV pickup truck amid slower-than-anticipated growth in EV demand. President Joe Biden took a F-150 Lightning for a test drive during a visit to Michigan in May 2021 to promote his administration’s EV agenda, which aims to have EVs constitute 50% of all new car sales by 2030.
General Motors(GM), one of Ford’s main competitors, lost about $1.7 billion on its EV product lines in the fourth quarter of 2023 alone. The company announced in October 2023 that it has dropped a goal to produce 400,000 EVs by the middle of 2024, citing profitability and demand concerns.
The Biden administration is using large government subsidies and aggressive market regulation to push EVs on Americans. Despite these efforts, the industry as a whole finds itself in a tenuous position to start 2024: Ford and several of its competitors are losing vast sums of money on their EV product lines while executives are backing away from short-term production targets.
“We said yesterday that we will launch our second-generation EVs when they can be profitable and deliver the kind of returns we want, and we will build a stand-alone profitable EV business,” a Ford spokesperson told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “Meantime, we’re improving the contribution margin of our first-generation EVs.”
All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.
It’s laughable for eco zealots to blame Rowan Atkinson for low take-up. It’s just not rational for most to buy one.
It’s laughable for eco zealots to blame Rowan Atkinson for low take-up. It’s just not rational for most to buy one.
The great electric car revolution is stalling, and the net-zero panjandrums are desperate to find somebody to blame. It must be the fault of fake news, they intimate, or disinformation campaigns, or of nit-picking journalists and their gullible readers, or because Elon Musk has embraced Right-wing ideas: what other possible reasons could there be for consumers refusing to do their duty?
Electric vehicles’ (EVs) share of the UK market has remained stuck at 16 per cent for two years, and 10 out of 11 private buyers are still opting for combustion engines. But instead of seeking to understand the real reasons why even the environmentally conscious continue to patronise petrol-powered cars, green activists are resorting to deranged conspiracy theories. The Telegraph has the story.
Some – speaking to a House of Lords committee – even singled out a nuanced article by Rowan Atkinson for having harmed their cause: the actor disclosed that he felt “duped” by electric vehicles, and questioned the claims made by advocates. There is nothing zealots loath more than an apostate.
I wish it were true that a single opinion article could alter the purchasing decisions of millions, but the reality is more prosaic. Consumers are rational, and they aren’t buying electric cars because it doesn’t yet make sense. EVs are prohibitively expensive, their range too short and there aren’t enough charging points: newspaper reports and personal finance desks have done the public a great service by pointing all of this out in great detail.
he blunt truth is that EVs, for now, remain a niche product aimed at affluent consumers with narrow requirements, and are not yet ready for mass adoption. To claim otherwise is a monstrous deception, an attempt at hoodwinking and impoverishing many middle-class motorists.
Top-down attempts by elitist Tory and Labour politicians to deny this reality and to phase out the combustion engine too quickly will cause intolerable hardship, collapse the grid and trigger a political revolution. Even Sunak’s 80 per cent EV target for new cars by 2030 is too strict, and Labour’s 100 per cent ban on pure petrol cars in five years and 10 months’ time is unfathomably stupid.
None of this makes me an opponent of EVs. I am a fan of private cars, and of mass private mobility. I want to build more roads, not fewer; I want car ownership to rise, not drop. In practice, in the UK and most of Europe at least, the only way this will be possible – and the anti-car fanatics and Left-wing urbanists who hold such sway over both parties defeated – is if the environmental cost of motoring can be significantly reduced.
Like Atkinson, I find EVs to be “wonderful mechanisms”, and I’m more optimistic than he is about the environmental benefits of the latest models and battery technology. I strongly suspect that the carbon footprint of construction and disposal will fall further over time. I like EVs’ modern interfaces, the lack of noise, the astonishing acceleration, the absence of stinky exhaust fumes, the decentralised charging and even the feeling of sitting in a giant iPhone.
But while zero-emission vehicles are the future – including possibly those powered by hydrogen – we are very much still in the present, and it makes no financial sense for most people to buy one today. The cheapest petrol-powered Kia costs £13,600, is small but drives well; entry-level electric cars cost some £26,000 and have terrible range. You need to spend at least £30,000 to get a decent electric car, and Teslas start at £40,000.
Read the full story here.
The PNAS reasoning was that a few Pacific Hurricanes (aka tropical cyclones) have exceeded SF level 5. True, sort of. All 5 cited by PNAS only temporarily exceeded Cat 5. For example, quoting from the new paper, “The most intense of these hypothetical Cat 6 storms, Patricia, hit landfall in Jalisco, Mexico as a cat 4.” OOPS.
From Watts Up With That?
Rud Istvan
This simple guest post was prompted by an alarming WaPo report ‘today’ of a new PNAS study seriously proposing an expansion of the Saffir-Simpson hurricane scale to a ‘level 6’, (beyond the current peak of 5) because of intensified tropical cyclones caused by climate change.
The PNAS reasoning was that a few Pacific Hurricanes (aka tropical cyclones) have exceeded SF level 5. True, sort of. All 5 cited by PNAS only temporarily exceeded Cat 5. For example, quoting from the new paper, “The most intense of these hypothetical Cat 6 storms, Patricia, hit landfall in Jalisco, Mexico as a cat 4.” OOPS.
The PNAS paper reached its new and alarming future ‘Cat 6’ conclusion by applying ‘bias corrections’ to CMIP5. Although it then states, “None of these high resolution climate model projection should be taken too literally.” Especially after PNAS ‘bias corrections’. But IPCC said CMIP5 was then the best and brightest.
There are two basic skeptical problems with this newly alarming ‘climate science’—albeit ‘not to be taken too literally’.
First, almost all the recent ‘worst satellite wind speed’ Florida hurricane alarms were not ground truthed by observations near eye wall ground wind speeds—by a lot.
Ian was an exception to this, unfortunately as bad as predicted. So the satellite and hurricane hunter CatX estimates are generally high compared to ground truth. That is probably OK when NHC warnings a threatened Florida populace to evacuate—but not for ‘climate science’ in PNAS.
Second, Ryan Maui’s ACE shows no such ‘Cat 6’ strengthening over time.
So PNAS published an alarming model speculation based on “corrections to climate model biases’, then failed to publish the observed facts.
Feynman is surely rolling over in his true science grave.
It is rapidly starting to feel like our globalist elites might find it useful to plan a funeral for their dream of a forced, heavily-subsidized “energy transition” from fossil fuels to their preferred rent-seeking clients in the wind, solar and electric vehicle (EV) industries.
From The Daily Caller
It is rapidly starting to feel like our globalist elites might find it useful to plan a funeral for their dream of a forced, heavily-subsidized “energy transition” from fossil fuels to their preferred rent-seeking clients in the wind, solar and electric vehicle (EV) industries.
As nations the world over become increasingly overwhelmed with mountains of unsustainable debt, the signs of a looming transition trainwreck are swirling all around us. (RELATED: DAVID BLACKMON: The Biden Admin And Its Buddies Are Waging Foolish War Against Abundant Clean Energy)
The wind industry is approaching collapse as big developers like Orsted, BP and Equinor cancel or delay offshore projects, taking massive write-downs in the process. Delivery contracts negotiated just a few years ago are cancelled as a matter of course now, with demands for much higher renegotiated rates that will drive up already outrageous utility bills to new levels, even as wind industry propagandists continue parroting their false notion that wind is somehow a cheap energy source.
Obviously, it isn’t cheap at all, which helps explain why USA Today reported recently that fully 15% of U.S. county governments have moved to ban wind, solar, or both forms of development in their jurisdictions. USA Today further notes that the percentage of counties now blocking solar development are roughly equal to the percentage allowing it to happen.
I’ve written several stories here in recent weeks chronicling the growing array of challenges now negatively impacting the domestic EV industry. As is the case with the wind industry, EVs have so consistently failed to live up to their lofty boasts that public opinion is turning against them.
Ford Motor Company is so concerned about flattening demand for its electric models that it recently announced it was cutting production of its much-hyped F-150 Lightning pickup model by half from 2023 levels.
Now comes news that even the Biden administration’s efforts to destroy America’s once vibrant coal industry aren’t working out as planned. U.S. exporters of coal took in more than $5 billion during 2023 due in large part to rising demand for American coal by India and other importing countries with expanding economies, Reuters reported Feb. 1.
It was the second-highest earnings year for U.S. exporters since 2017, behind only the $5.7 billion the sector earned during President Joe Biden’s second year in office, 2022. Again, this aspect of the Biden plan just isn’t working out as the industry proves more resilient and nimble than the bureaucrats and policymakers had anticipated.
The U.S. and gas industry also continues setting new production records despite an active rig count that fell by 23% during 2023 and seems to have now leveled off. Writing at Substack, I detailed how remarkable — indeed, unprecedented in recent times — this trend truly is.
The Baker Hughes weekly U.S. count came in last Friday at 499 for the second straight week. Historically, that is a number that in the past meant the industry was in the middle of a bust. But last month, the U.S. also set a new oil production record, and record natural gas production, too.
Only three times since 1975 has the domestic rig count seen levels as low as today. In April, 1999, the count hit 496 in the midst of a major price bust caused falling global demand in the midst of a slowing economy. In June, 2016, it dropped to 416 in the midst of a price bust caused by OPEC’s flooding of the market with crude.
In August, 2020, the count fell to a record low of 275 amid the all-time record bust caused by the COVID pandemic and the government’s somewhat insane response to it.
But today, for the first time in modern history, the rig count stands below 500 for the second straight week amid comparatively high prices and record global and domestic production and consumption of both oil and natural gas. It’s an unprecedented sign of industry health even amid the Biden administration’s best efforts to punish and marginalize it.
So, we see that, even as the favored industries of the globalist left struggle to maintain momentum and even simple viability, the industries under assault continue to find ways to prosper.
Perhaps Biden and his fellow transition-subsidizing globalist elites should consider raising the white flag and rethinking their ill-considered war on fossil fuels.
David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.
A team of climate scientists want to launch enormous umbrellas into space to reduce the Earth’s exposure to the sun and fight climate change, The New York Times reported Friday.
From The Daily Caller
CONTRIBUTOR
A team of climate scientists want to launch enormous umbrellas into space to reduce the Earth’s exposure to the sun and fight climate change, The New York Times reported Friday.
The underlying idea is that large parasols could be positioned in space such that they marginally reduce the intensity of sunlight the Earth receives and thereby mitigate some global warming, the Times reported. In order to block out enough radiation, a single sunshade would need to be approximately the size of Argentina — nearly one million square miles — and would weigh about 2.5 million tons, so scientists are looking to prove the idea could work by first producing a 100-square foot prototype with the help of $10 to $20 million of funding. (RELATED: Scientist Admits Omitting ‘Full Truth’ From Climate Study To Get It Published)
Dr. Yoram Rozen, a physics professor and the Asher Space Research Institute’s director at Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, is leading the team of scientists pushing the idea, according to the Times. Because the Argentina-sized umbrella would be too large to feasibly launch into space, his team is hoping to build a set of smaller shades that would diffuse the intensity of the radiation reaching the planet.
“We can show the world, look, there is a working solution, take it, increase it to the necessary size,” Rozen told the Times.
Rozen and his team are still designing the prototype, but they anticipate that they could build it within about three years once they get the required funds, according to the Times. A full-sized product would cost trillions of dollars, and that expense would likely have to be picked up by many countries, Rozen told the Times.
“We at the Technion are not going to save the planet,” Rozen told the Times. “But we’re going to show that it can be done.”
Supporters of the ambitious sunshade idea posit that, if implemented successfully, the world would still need to stop using fossil fuels to power the global economy, according to the Times.
“I’m not saying this will be the solution, but I think everybody has to work toward every possible solution,” Istvan Szapudi, an astronomer at the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaii who recently published a paper examining a similar idea, told the Times.
All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.
Arctic sea ice continued its stonking recovery last month, recording its 24th highest level in the 45-year modern satellite record. As reported previously in the Daily Sceptic, the ice climbed to a 21-year high on January 8th. Good news, of course, for ice fans and polar bears, but frankly a bit of a disaster if you are forecasting future summer swimming galas at the North Pole to promote a collectivist Net Zero agenda.
From The Daily Sceptic
Arctic sea ice continued its stonking recovery last month, recording its 24th highest level in the 45-year modern satellite record. As reported previously in the Daily Sceptic, the ice climbed to a 21-year high on January 8th. Good news, of course, for ice fans and polar bears, but frankly a bit of a disaster if you are forecasting future summer swimming galas at the North Pole to promote a collectivist Net Zero agenda. Live by the sword, die by the sword – if you cherry-pick the scientific record to state the climate is collapsing, it might be thought you have some explaining to do when the trend reverts to the norm. Just ask coral alarmists about two years of record growth on the Great Barrier Reef. Sadly, explanations there are none, just a deafening, stunned silence.
Arctic sea ice has long been a poster scare for climate Armageddon. But science tells us that it is cyclical and is heavily influenced by ocean currents and atmospheric heat exchanges. It would appear that these chaotic changes are beyond the ability of any computer to process, although a large, well-funded model industry begs to differ. The recovery in Arctic sea ice has been steady if slow and this has enabled the alarums to hang on in the mainstream headlines. Of course it could go into reverse, nobody really knows, least of all Sir David Attenborough who told BBC viewers in 2022 that the summer ice could all be gone by 2035. He relied, needless to say, on a computer model.
Most mainstream climate journalists just print what they are told without looking too closely at the source of the information. The U.S.-based National Snow and Ice Data Centre (NSIDC) is a source of interpretation for trends in polar ice, but care needs to be taken when reading its often gloomy monthly summaries. According to the NSIDC, January sea ice growth was “lower than average” throughout most of the month. It headlined its report: ‘Nothing swift about January sea ice.’ Other interpretations are available. Consider the graph below tracking the ice extent for January over the satellite record.
Statisticians can argue over when the sea ice started to recover but there has not been much decline going back to around 2007. In this case January shows a similar trend to that seen in September, the month with the lowest sea ice extent. A moving average line from around the middle of the last decade would show an obvious increase. But the NSIDC reproduces this graph for every individual month and year with a downward linear trend from 1979, a noted high point for recent sea ice. The graph is widely used on social media to counter any suggestion that the ice is recovering.
Note also that the NSIDC claims the January growth extent was “below average”. Well it depends on what average you are using. The NSIDC uses a comparative average from 1981-2010, despite a more recent decade of data being available. It is not hard to see why it prefers 1981-2010 since it includes the higher levels of the 1980s and excludes the lower levels of the 2010s. Taking a 1991-2020 average would likely lead to many more ‘above average’ observations. Data before 1979 is not as accurate, but levels going back to the 1950s suggest much lower sea ice extents. Perish the thought that comparisons should be made with these data or observations made about an obvious cyclical trend seen here and in the historical record going back to the early 1800s.
The NSIDC can spin its figures as much as it likes knowing that in the era of ‘settled’ climate science it is unlikely to be widely challenged. On a more serious note, this unwillingness to question perceived authority and engage in the scientific process gave us Michael E. Mann’s infamous 1998 ‘hockey stick’ graph. This purported to show declining temperatures for 1,000 years followed by a sharp recent uptick caused by human-caused burning of hydrocarbons. The unquestioning acceptance in mainstream media, science and politics can be said to have removed the concept of natural climate variability for a generation and put many Western countries on the road to Net Zero insanity. Now the hockey stick is centre stage in a Washington D.C. libel trial brought by Mann complaining that the journalist Mark Steyn branded his work a fraud. By some accounts, the hockey stick does not seem to be having a great time in the dock.
Professor Abraham Wyner is a distinguished statistician at Mann’s own University of Pennsylvania. Asked on the court stand whether Mann’s hockey stick used manipulative techniques, he replied “yes”. He suggested it was possible that if you knew where you wanted to get to, you can lead yourself into a conclusion different from someone who walked down a different set of paths.
In earlier court documents, Mann claimed wrongly that he was a Nobel laureate, a fact noted during the trial. His hockey stick abolished the Medieval Warming Period, while subsequent leaked Climategate emails referred to “Mike Nature Trick”. This was a practice of using the most convenient proxy or temperature measurements to fit the desired narrative.
In the course of his testimony, Dr. Wyner made comments that strike at the heart of so much that is wrong with the ‘settled’ science pronouncements that seemingly cannot be disputed or even discussed.
And so what happens is, and what is happening today in statistical analysis… we’re in a crisis. A crisis of trust and replication because so many results that were thought to be true turned out not to be true and correct have now gone back and looked at or attempted to be replicated and they didn’t work. Lots of things we thought were true turned out not to be true. It’s a crisis. A problem [my colleague] has identified is due to really bad statistical sets of methods that allow you to get away with choices that would produce a very different result if you did it differently.
What the last two decades or so have shown us is that activists will use any weather outlier or natural disaster to claim the climate is collapsing, or the Earth is “boiling” in the odd universe occupied by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. Statistics are bent to fit the desired narrative whether it be natural waxing and waning of ice levels or typhoon jets landing near a measuring device showing a 60-second 40.3°C temperature blip ‘record’ at RAF Coningsby. Net Zero is starting to unravel thread by thread, and it is time the spotlight was amped up to maximum to shine a light on all the dodgy science used to promote this horrendous reset of human society.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
However this is nothing, compared to the people who hope to profit from the fantasy of Global Warming.
From Watts Up With That
Caleb Shaw
Pacific storms have been crashing into the west coast, and another his drenching them this evening (February 4, 2024.)
This will likely cause some mudslides, but is nothing like the terrible floods of 1862 which shut down Sacramento.
Amazing floods struck California back then,
The people in charge of maintaining California’s infrastructure have to take the possibility of such a storm into account, when planning, at the same time as tax-payers don’t want to pay for the levees and dams and culverts and spillways necessary to handle what was, after all, a “once every 1,000 year event.” The attitude seems to be, “We still have 838 years to go before it happens again. Let those future taxpayers deal with it.” However the people in charge know weather doesn’t obey man’s logic. In 1969 I saw two “once every hundred year” storms hit New England in February, and in 1978 it happened again. In any case, the people in charge (who will bear the blame if things go wrong) in California call the worst-case scenario of a repeat of 1862, “The ARcStorm”, and confess that, despite all the technical advancements of modern science, they can not prevent major flooding from occurring.
I suspect that there are some who hope to profit from increasing the public’s awareness of the possibility of an ARcStorm. For example, the man who sells really big culverts.
However this is nothing, compared to the people who hope to profit from the fantasy of Global Warming. When trillions of dollars are involved, some people behave in a very foolish manner. These people seemingly like to misinform the public, behaving as if a perfectly ordinary rainstorm was the ARcStorm, and that furthermore the disaster is all your fault for not buying an electric car.
We need to remind these foolish people that only a year ago they were predicting a mega-drought, and stating it was all our fault for not purchasing an electric car. Where is that drought now?
There is almost no drought to be seen in California. What happened?Did the entire population rush out and buy electric cars?
No. California weather just did what California weather is notorious for doing, which is to fluctuate between floods and droughts. No big deal. It is something people learn to live with. It is something described by Steinbeck in “Grapes of Wrath” and “To a God Unknown”. It is old news. Yet, if you bring up this old news, the politically correct get offended that you are daring to defy their new news. But their new news is balderdash.
Where is this mega-drought they were so crazed with worry about, a year ago?
According to the Old Testament, once a prophet is proven to be false, they are to be taken to the edge of town and stoned to death. This seems a bit extreme to me. However, as I have faced the outrage of the politically correct, and been “shadow banned” and have experienced other unpleasant aspects of “cancel culture”, I do think “turnabout is fair play”. Maybe it is their turn to feel what it is like to be “cancelled”.
This is not to say California doesn’t need to think hard about how it uses water. Roughly a billion gallons of water each day is slurped from the Colorado River to feed the thirst of San Diego and Los Angeles. If the population of California is roughly 40 million, that means each person guzzles 25 gallons each day. Something to think about. How much goes to stupid lawns which people never even use? How much goes to growing food that feeds 49 other states?
P.S. The level of Lake Mead is rising.
What is interesting is how little is being sucked out of Lake Mead (“outflow”) to water Southern California’s crops, because the rains are blessing California’s fields.
It is important to count our blessings. I remember to thank California (and our Creator) every time I enjoy an almond.
Electric cars cannot be advertised as completely “zero emission” because of the carbon dioxide that is generated when they are made and charged, the advertising watchdog has declared.
Electric cars cannot be advertised as completely “zero emission” because of the carbon dioxide that is generated when they are made and charged, the advertising watchdog has declared.
In a ruling that will change how electric vehicles (EVs) are promoted, the Advertising Standards Authority has banned carmakers from referring to them as zero emission unless they make clear this is only while driving.
The Telegraph has the story.
The decision emerged as the regulator criticised BMW for describing its range of EVs as “zero emission cars” in Google searches.
In the ruling, the ASA said: “We understood that when electric vehicles were driven no emissions were produced, unlike a car with a petrol or diesel engine where emissions came from the tailpipe.
“However, in other circumstances, such as the manufacture or charging of an electric vehicle using electricity from the national grid, emissions were generated.
“For that reason an ad that featured a “zero emissions” claim, that did not make explicitly clear that it was related to the reaction of the vehicle while it was being driven was likely to mislead.”
It is understood to be the first time the ASA has issued such a ruling on cars and comes amid a crackdown by the regulator on so-called greenwashing, where companies over-promote their eco credentials.
However, the ASA’s stance appears at odds with that of the Government, which is calling battery-powered EVs “zero emission vehicles” for the purposes of the newly introduced ZEV mandate.
The mandate requires carmakers to make EVs an ever-bigger proportion of their sales, rising steadily from 22pc this year to 80pc by 2030.
With manufacturers under pressure to sell ever-high numbers of EVs, the ASA’s ruling will be a fresh headache.
While a typical battery EV creates no emissions at the tailpipe while driving, carbon dioxide (CO2) is generated if they are charged from Britain’s power grid because of its heavy reliance on gas.
Meanwhile around eight tonnes of CO2 equivalent is generated when an EV is manufactured, according to the International Energy Agency.
That includes 1.4 tonnes related to the battery’s critical minerals, 1.2 tonnes during the battery’s assembly and then another 5.4 tonnes when the full vehicle is manufactured.
Read the full story here.
If EVs were so wonderful, we would not need all of these subsidies and tax exemptions, would we Melanie?
From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
By Paul Homewood
h/t Robin Guenier
The government must do more to counter “misinformation” on electric vehicles published in parts of the UK press, a Lords enquiry has said.
Despite the UK passing the milestone on Monday of 1m electric cars registered, growth of the sector has flatlined.
The Lords Climate Change Committee urged the government to build consumer confidence and push back against what it called mistruths on range and cost.
The government did not comment on this but said £2bn was committed to EVs.
Nearly a quarter of the UK’s carbon emissions – responsible for climate change – are produced by road transport, according to the latest figures. Switching to electric vehicles could help to significantly reduce these emissions, but despite government and industry efforts only about 3% of cars are powered by electricity.
Baroness Parminter, chair of the committee, told the BBC that both government officials and other witnesses to the enquiry had reported reading disinformation on the subject in national newspapers.
“We have seen a concerted effort to scare people… we have seen articles saying that cars are catching fire – but had evidence that the fire risk is absolutely the same as [petrol and diesel] cars,” she said.
The Lords committee did not single out any newspaper in particular.
Testifying before the committee, Richard Bruce, Director of Transport Decarbonisation at the Department for Transport, conceded there was a problem.
He said: “I do think there has been an impact from a concerted campaign of misinformation over the last 14 months or so that has been pushing consistent myths about EVs that people absorb and which is reflected in their appetite [for purchasing EVs].
“There is an anti-EV story in the papers almost every day. Sometimes there are many stories, almost all of which are based on misconceptions and mistruths, unfortunately.”
Baroness Parminter said the government needed to step in and provide reliable information to consumers.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-68130432
Now I wonder what all this information might be?
The fact that EVs cost £10k more than an equivalent petrol?
EV manufacturers own data which says you only get a fraction of the mileage that their blurb claims?
The fact that it costs more per mile than a petrol car if you have to use a public charger, even after paying fuel duty?
The fact the second hand prices for EVs have fallen through the floor, making buying a new EV even less attractive?
The fact that, regardless of the number of public chargers installed, drivers without offstreet parking will face the prospect of queuing to use a charger?
Are these all facts that the good Baroness would like to suppress?
One EV zealot rather gives the game away, demanding that EVs remain exempt from vehicle and road taxes paid by the rest of us:
If EVs were so wonderful, we would not need all of these subsidies and tax exemptions, would we Melanie?
As for increasing taxes on “heavy vehicles”, does not this silly woman know that EVs weigh an awful lot more than a proper car?
It probably won’t come as any great surprise to learn the Baroness Parminter has zero experience in transport, industrial or economic matters. The Deputy Leader of the Liberal Democrats in the Lords has spent most of her useful life campaigning for animal rights and conservation charities.
You must be logged in to post a comment.