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.
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 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.
A classic Candid Camera episode is where a car without a motor makes a downhill stop at a service station for a checkup. The attendants are stunned to find the car is engineless.
By Kennedy Maize
Ed. Note: A classic Candid Camera episode is where a car without a motor makes a downhill stop at a service station for a checkup. The attendants are stunned to find the car is engineless. Fiction and funnies turned into fact with Trevor Milton, whose hydrogen/fuel cell/electric truck company, Nikola Corp., pulled this stunt with a rolling truck in a promotional video. Kenneth Maize has the story in “Trevor Milton, E-truck Nikola Corp. Founder, Headed to Prison?“
“It was mostly smoke and mirrors. The company had acquired “gliders,” truck platforms without engines. In one notorious case highlighted by Hindenburg, Nikola in 2018 posted a YouTube video of a battery-powered Nikola cab and trailer … moving rapidly along a desert highway. Hindenburg said the truck wasn’t moving under its own power. Nikola had towed the engineless truck to the top of a hill, and it was rolling because of gravity.”
U.S. District Judge Edgardo Ramos in Manhattan Monday (Dec. 18) sentenced Trevor Milton, founder and former CEO of e-truck company Nikola Corp. (NKLA:NASDAQ) to four years in prison for defrauding investors. Prosecutors had sought a sentence of 11-years in the slammer. He will be out on bail pending an appeal.
Ramos also ordered Milton to pay a $1 million fine and forfeit a Utah property. Nikola is currently based in Phoenix, Ariz.
A federal jury in October 2022 found Milton guilty of one count of securities fraud and three counts of wire fraud.
Nikola founder Trevor Milton
Milton, a former door-to-door salesman and college dropout, founded the company from his Utah basement in 2015 and took it public through a Special Purpose Acquisition Company (SPAC) in 2020, raising over $3 billion. The SPAC was run by run by former General Motors vice-chairman Stephen Girsky. Girsky, who became chairman of the Nikola Board, was named Nikola CEO in August, succeeding Michael Lohscheller, who succeeded Milton.
Nikola was temporarily worth $13 billion, making it more valuable than Ford Motor Co. The company’s shares, which opened at $65.90/share not long after it went public, closed at 87 cents on Monday.
On September 8, 2020, the company announced a deal where General Motors would acquire 11% of Nikola and a seat on the board, a deal worth about $2 billion at the time. Nikola had earlier announced it would produce a fuel cell pickup named Badger, which did not exist even as a prototype,
Nikola’s shares began a precipitous decline after Hindenburg Research, an activist short selling firm, on September 10, 2020, released a devastating report on the company. Hindenburg said that “we believe Nikola is an intricate fraud built on dozens of lies over the course of its Founder and Executive Chairman Trevor Milton’s career.
We have gathered extensive evidence—including recorded phone calls, text messages, private emails and behind-the-scenes photographs—detailing dozens of false statements by Nikola Founder Trevor Milton. We have never seen this level of deception at a public company, especially of this size.” It later became known that Hindenburg had the aid of a Nikola whistleblower.
The Securities and Exchange Commission and the Department of Justice launched a criminal investigation of Nikola that month. Milton resigned on Sept. 20, 2020.
Several analysts have suggested that the company is headed toward bankruptcy, possibly liquidation. The Motley Fool stock analysis web site commented, “There’s little sign that Nikola’s business will succeed over the long term, and those who buy the stock could still wind up suffering big losses even though it has already fallen so dramatically.”
During the trial, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York Damian Williams said, “Trevor Milton lied to Nikola’s investors—over and over and over again. That’s fraud, plain and simple, and this office has no patience for it.” The Wall Street Journal reported, “Witnesses testified that he lied to ordinary investors about nearly every aspect of Nikola.”
Nikola (it’s not coincidental that the chosen company name is also the first name of legendary electric pioneer Nikola Tesla) over the years claimed it had lined up orders for a variety of electric-powered heavy trucks, including battery-powered models and the latest, hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. The initial offer was for a semi that would use natural gas to turn a turbine, generating electricity for an electric motor. That was followed by claims for a battery-electric truck and a hydrogen fuel cell electric power system.
It was mostly smoke and mirrors. The company had acquired “gliders,” truck platforms without engines. In one notorious case highlighted by Hindenburg, Nikola in 2018 posted a YouTube video of a battery-powered Nikola cab and trailer, “Nikola One Electric Semi Truck in Motion,” in 2016 moving rapidly along a desert highway.
Hindenburg said the truck wasn’t moving under its own power. Nikola had towed the engineless truck to the top of a hill, and it was rolling because of gravity.
In a lengthy and convoluted press release, Nikola admitted that the truck was not powered in 2016, nor 13 months later when it posted the video. Bloomberg commented, “The story of Milton’s stage-prop truck is, by this point, legendary in certain corners of the retail investing internet.”
UPDATE: Read more about the Trevor Milton verdict here. Judge Ramos stated: “The law does not grant a pass for good intentions. It is decidedly the obligation of business executives who are seeking to have the public purchase their stock to speak the truth.”
UNITED STATES – AUGUST 15: Manhattan skyline is dark as the sun comes up on the morning after a massive power failure caused the largest power outage in the nation’s history, affecting 50 million people in parts of seven states and Canada. (Photo by Mike Albans/NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images)
A recent post, New York City Goes Pedal to the Metal on Electric Vehicles, at Watts Up with That described new legislation that will require vehicles procured by the City to be zero emissions. The author of the article, Charles Rotter, included a note at the top: “I can’t wait for Francis Menton or Roger Caiazza to weigh in on this.” It is a rainy Saturday and I don’t have anything else to do so I will take a shot at it.
Benefits
I try to look at environmental policy pragmatically balancing benefits and costs. The benefits used to rationalize the law are weak. Rotter quoted the Statements made by two of the politicians responsible for the legislation that make benefits claims:
“New York City continues to set the standard for sustainability by becoming the largest city in the nation to require its fleet to be entirely made up of zero emission vehicles,” said Speaker Adrienne Adams. “The Council is proud to champion legislative efforts to address the environmental and health impacts of vehicle pollution, reduce our carbon footprint, and prepare our workforce for the repair and maintenance of electric vehicles. I thank Majority Leader Keith Powers for his leadership on this critical legislation, my Council colleagues for supporting policies that transition us to a more sustainable future, and Mayor Adams for signing the bill into law.”
“New York City continues to lead the country in creating a greener, more sustainable world,” said Majority Leader Keith Powers. “Today’s signing of Intro. 279 enacts a historic piece of legislation that will drive down our city’s carbon footprint and advance environmental justice. Starting in just two years, our city’s fleet of over 30,000 vehicles will lead the way towards a zero-emissions future. I am proud to have worked with numerous partners to have made today a reality.”
The majority of New York City and State politicians cater to the climate advocate constituency and these statements reflect that. Adams ticks all the boxes in the narrative that reducing GHG emissions also reduces pollutants that will have environmental and health benefits, the existential threat of climate change will be reduced, and the transition will create jobs. Even a cursory review shows how shallow those claims are. The shift to “zero-emissions” ignores the reality that all energy production creates emissions somewhere. In this case there may not be emissions in New York City, but the mining, processing, and manufacturing of the needed batteries necessary certainly creates emissions. Jobs created by the “green” technologies are always mentioned but the jobs lost are rarely mentioned.
Another characteristic of these politicians is innumeracy. The city fleet has 30,000 vehicles. I calculate that those vehicles are responsible for about 400,000 tons of CO2 emissions per year. Driving down the “city’s carbon footprint” needs to be considered in the context of global emissions. The Global Energy Monitor mission is “to develop and share information in support of the worldwide movement for clean energy”. As part of their mission, they have prepared a spreadsheet with data on all coal-fired power plants in the world. Table 1 is based on that data. It lists capacity and projected annual CO2 emissions for three categories of power plants: operating, permitted but not yet under construction, and under construction. Every hour the operating coal-fired power plants emit 1,245,158 tons of CO2. That means that the CO2 reductions due converting the New York City owned fleet of vehicles will be subsumed by coal fired emissions elsewhere on the globe in 0.3 hours or 19 minutes. This law will not have any discernable effect on global warming.
Costs
My concerns with New York State and New York City (NYC) “zero-emission” transition costs are related to reliability and affordability. Noodling around on the NYC fleet management site I found this description:
New York City operates over 30,000 owned and leased vehicles, the largest municipal fleet in the United States. NYC maintains fleet units at 37 main repair locations and has over 400 in-house fueling and 400 separate electric charging locations. More than 2,000 staff work full-time in fleet repair and garage operations across over 50 fleet operating agencies and offices. In total, nearly $1 billion is spent annually on fleet repair, fueling, and procurement.
I found a page that includes a table that describes the fleet daily service report which lists the number of vehicles for each agency and what they are used for to give an idea of the importance of reliability. The NYC fleet includes the police department and fire department vehicles which must provide reliable service. I suspect that relying on electric-only fire equipment will be very risky because of the high energy demands needed to operate those trucks. The last thing in the world you want to have happen is for a pumper truck to lose power when fighting a fire. The vehicle fleet includes sanitation trucks which are also used to plow snow. However, there is an issue: “city officials have declared they have yet to find an electric garbage truck powerful enough to plow snow. The sanitation department already tested electric trucks, and they couldn’t plow snow for more than four hours, as they ran out of battery. “
Digging deeper into the fleet management site, there is a sustainability page that claims that “New York City’s fleet is the greenest in the nation”. They already have some electric vehicles:
The City of New York operates over 2,260 on-road electric vehicles (EVs) and plug-in hybrids. Full EVs include over 250 Nissan Leafs and over 300 Chevy Bolts, among others. The City has over 600 additional off-road EV and solar units. Please see our presentation Let’s Talk about EVs to learn how to charge an EV and the differences between an EV and the conventional fuel vehicles you may be used to driving.
The sustainability page also notes:
DCAS is rapidly expanding its base of electric chargers to support its electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles. We have installed over 1,600 charging ports across over 1,025 charging stations, including over 180 fast-charging stations, at City garages and parking locations around the city. We have deployed over 80 solar carports that allow EVs to be completely independent from the electrical grid and fossil fuel energy. We have partnered with City schools to provide both solar chargers and EVs to support education programs and adopted other solar powered city equipment.
It appears to me that the vehicle fleet service has been given the charge to look at a transition to lower emission vehicles and are proceeding on that path.
This bill would require that all light- and medium-duty vehicles procured by the City after July 1, 2025 be zero emission vehicles such that all light- and medium-duty vehicles in the City’s fleet are zero emission vehicles by July 1, 2035. This bill would also require that all heavy-duty vehicles procured by the City after July 1, 2028 be zero emission vehicles, such that all heavy-duty vehicles in the City’s fleet are zero emission vehicles by July 1, 2038. Further, this bill would require that all motorcycles in the City’s fleet are zero emission vehicles by July 1, 2035. The requirements to procure zero emission vehicles are subject to certain exceptions, such as cost, availability, and lack of charging infrastructure.
The last sentence is a welcome reality slap – the procurement requirements are conditional upon costs among other things. I thought the Fiscal Impact Statement would provide information about costs relative to this condition. The following excerpt from that statement is a head scratcher:
I guess the current fiscal impact statement is a placeholder. Presumably sometime before Fiscal Year 2029 the expenditures and source of funds will be determined. Then the cost exception requirements to procure zero emission vehicles will be considered.
Conclusion
The New York City Department of Citywide Administrative Services fleet management department has a sustainability program in place that tests options for lower emissions and zero emissions vehicles. Some of their tests are working and others are not. The key point is that these are the folks responsible for keeping the vehicles necessary to protect the city and provide services and they are working on it. Mind you I think trying to convert the NYC vehicle fleet to zero-emissions is a waste of time and effort that will likely do more harm than good.
Enter the politicians. The legislation does include conditions upon deployment but it appears that the issue is already being addressed. I would bet a lot of money that the fleet staff reacted to the bragging by the politicians who supported this legislation with exasperated sighs and eye-rolling. As far as I can tell this legislation only provides street cred for politician target constituencies and does nothing but get in the way of the people who are trying to get things done.
Roger Caiazza blogs on New York energy and environmental issues at Pragmatic Environmentalist of New York. This represents his opinion and not the opinion of any of his previous employers or any other company with which he has been associated.
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