Daily Archives: 15. January 2021
Americans supposedly just voted for only electric vehicles
“The Big Switch will cost trillions and massively change America – not for the better”
– Duggan Flanakin
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“The incoming Biden-Harris Administration has promised a $2-trillion “climate change” plan that will include “rigorous new fuel economy standards” aimed at forcing dealerships to sell only zero emission vehicles, perhaps as soon as 2035,” Paul Driessen points out. “Once the sale of new gasoline engine vehicles is banned, the only question remaining is, How long before DRIVING such vehicles is also outlawed? VP-elect Harris has promised that we will have ONLY zero emission vehicles on our roads by 2045.”
“As Duggan Flanakin notes in this article, there are huge economic, environmental and other issues associated with this. But, he wonders, will We the People be able to raise and discuss them in public forums? Indeed, will Republican Members of Congress have any meaningful opportunities to do so during committee hearings or floor debates? Or will we all just be canceled, censored, silenced and browbeaten into submission in the newly progressive, intolerant and Divided States of America?
“Thank you for posting his article, quoting from it, and forwarding it to your friends and colleagues (even if no one is allowed to share it on Twitter, Face Book or even Parler J L ).”
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Americans supposedly just voted for only electric vehicles
The Big Switch will cost trillions and massively change America – not for the better
Duggan Flanakin
The election of Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and their ultra-progressive cabinet will hasten the death of the internal combustion engine in the United States, despite the nearly even party split in the House and Senate. They will just take their narrow victory as a license to implement all manner of decisions in the name of saving the planet. Or so we’re told. And maybe they’re right.
President-elect Biden has promised his $2-trillion “climate change” plan will include “rigorous new fuel economy standards aimed at ensuring that 100% of new sales for light- and medium-duty vehicles will be zero emission vehicles (ZEVs).” VP-elect Harris has called for beginning this ban by 2035, perhaps even sooner, if they can maintain their momentum for fundamentally transforming America.
Once the sale of new gasoline engine vehicles is banned, the only question remaining is, How long before driving such vehicles is also outlawed? Harris has promised that, under “my plan, by 2045 we will have basically zero emission vehicles only. 100% by 2045.”
Of course, that means zero emissions in the USA, assuming all electricity generation is also zero-emission for charging batteries – despite enormous emission increases in places where battery minerals are mined and processed, and batteries are manufactured (which likely won’t be in America).
To jumpstart the government-mandated transformation of the 99.5% of US vehicles that are not yet ZEVs, Biden ally Sen. Chuck Schumer plans to introduce legislation authorizing $454 billion “cash for clunkers” incentives or rebates, to help people replace gasoline-powered vehicles with super-expensive all-electric vehicles (EVs). Schumer’s plan also includes building a half million new EV battery charging stations, and replacing the entire US government vehicle fleet with EVs.
That’s almost one-quarter of Biden’s $2-trillion climate plan right there. The rest of the massive Green New Deal (GND) will likely cost at least Bernie Sanders’ $16-trillion scheme, if not far more.
Not since Henry Ford introduced the assembly line for his Model T in 1913 has America faced such a transportation transformation. The Big Switch to an all-EV fleet will bring equally massive changes to American society, create new winners and new losers, make owning any vehicle a near impossibility for poor and even middle class families, and shift the balance of world power away from countries that ensure “the free flow of oil at market prices” to those that mine GND minerals (mostly China and Russia).
The Big Switch has been in the works for years. As early as 2017, many countries had already announced dates for banning internal combustion engines (ICEs). Norway said its 2025 date was just a “suggestion,” but Germany, France and the United Kingdom set “firm” dates of 2040, while the Netherlands pushed the funeral to 2030. Austria, Denmark, Ireland, Japan, Portugal, South Korea and Spain also set dates, as did India – and several American states, such as (naturally) California.
Even after 50,000 miles on the road, the typical EV has effectively emitted some 76% as much carbon dioxide as a gasoline-powered vehicle
Major automakers also pledged to end ICE vehicle production soon, even though 2017 polls show that only 30% of millennials (and much lower percentages of older drivers) were willing to “invest” in an electric vehicle. That’s even before considering studies by economist Tilak Doshi and others that even after 50,000 miles on the road, the typical EV has effectively emitted some 76% as much carbon dioxide as a gasoline-powered vehicle.
That’s because, as economist Bjorn Lomborg explained, EV batteries are the product of emission-intensive mining, mineral processing and manufacturing operations, and because the electricity for recharging the batteries often involves additional CO2 emissions.
The term “zero emission vehicles” is obviously a deliberate misnomer, since emissions are just transferred from wealthy Western countries to other nations, where they go steadily upward.
Significant cost increases for petrochemicals, automobile and truck tires, roof shingles, plastics, pharmaceuticals and a host of other products
The Big Switch will create jobs in some sectors. But it will also cause major declines in jobs in the oil and gas industry, declining revenues for convenience stores that profit from gasoline sales, and significant manufacturing cost increases for petrochemicals, automobile and truck tires, roof shingles, plastics, pharmaceuticals and a host of other consumer products that rely on oil and gas for raw materials.
All that also means huge decreases in lease bonus, rent, royalty and tax revenues for fossil fuel states.
Electric vehicle mandates will also harm auto repair and insurance industries. An EV drivetrain has around 20 moving parts, compared with up to 2,000 for ICE vehicles. However, these parts tend to be more expensive and (at least in the near term) less readily available. This means EVs needing repairs or new parts will sit longer in garages and repair shops, and delays in parts availability will increase the overall cost of EV maintenance and ownership. Will insurers cover these added costs?
The Big Switch will also mandate major shifts in tax policy for local and state governments and the federal government, all of which rely heavily on gasoline taxes to pay for highway maintenance and repair. The 18.4-cents-per-gallon federal excise tax goes to the Highway Trust Fund that pays for much of this (with a separate small tax covering remediation of leaking underground fuel storage tanks).
As gasoline sales continue to decline, will Washington find a way to replace this lost revenue?
What will happen to family vacations in cars that require hours of charging for every half-hour of driving?
(Related questions: How will driverless vehicles handle all the proliferating, expanding and deepening potholes? And what will happen to family vacations in cars that require hours of charging for every half-hour of driving? to our tourism and hospitality industries and fundamental freedoms?)
Highways maintained by state and local gasoline taxes are already threatened by declining revenues, thanks to EVs, hybrids and higher-mileage ICE vehicles – and to the 2020 pandemic, which cut highway driving by 64% in April 2020 and significantly ever since. Some states are adding or increasing electric vehicle registration fees: Alabama’s is now $200 for EVs and $100 for plug-in hybrids (a quarter of which will fund EV charging stations), while California began imposing a $100 annual EV fee last July.
That’s not all. People today can purchase an older gasoline-powered vehicle that will pass inspection for well under $2,000. Batteries for these vehicles cost under $200, and many really older vehicles can be repaired by amateur mechanics. By contrast, replacing an EV battery can cost up to $6,000 (or much more), making even used electric vehicles unaffordable for tens of millions of Americans in a nation where half of all vehicles are over ten years old.
Meanwhile, China, India and dozens of other countries are building thousands of new coal and gas-fired electrical generating plants – and putting millions of new ICE vehicles on their roads. So there will be no reduction in global emissions, which means all this pain and disruption in the USA will bring absolutely no benefits, even if CO2 does drive climate change.
Moreover, as recently as 2017, industry experts said EVs will likely reach only 25% of all vehicles worldwide by 2050. People in other countries don’t want and cannot afford them, either.
Equally significant, the Biden-Harris plan also includes a total phaseout of fossil fuels for producing electricity – along with the major increase in electricity needed to keep EVs moving. Even if Biden, Harris, Democrats and Greens accept nuclear energy as a “renewable” (or at least zero-emission) fuel, building enough new nuclear power plants will take decades.
But then, when did Moscow or Beijing ever meet all, most or even some objectives of their Five-Year Plans? Does anyone really think centralized government planning will work better here? More critically:
Will We the People be able to raise and discuss these issues in public forums? Will Republican Members of Congress have any meaningful opportunities to do so during committee hearings or floor debates?
Or will we all just be canceled, censored, silenced and browbeaten into submission in the newly progressive, intolerant and Divided States of America, amid more phony calls for unity and comity?
Duggan Flanakin is Director of Policy Research at the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org)
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January 15, 2021 at 11:42AM
Supreme Court ruling could doom climate lawsuits
Attorneys for Big Oil and the city of Baltimore will square off next week in a Supreme Court battle that could change the trajectory of more than a dozen closely watched U.S. climate change lawsuits.
The nation’s highest bench will hear arguments Tuesday in BP PLC v. Mayor and City Council of Baltimore, a case that hinges on a hyper-technical question that has been raised in a number of challenges aiming to force oil companies to pay up for local climate impacts.
Experts say the outcome of the Supreme Court case could result in substantial delays to — or the derailment of — climate liability lawsuits filed by states, counties and cities across the country.
“They’re trying to get the court to get rid of all climate cases in this guise of deciding this very narrow technical issue concerning the reviewability of remand orders by appellate courts,” said Robert Percival, director of the University of Maryland’s Environmental Law Program.
At issue in the Supreme Court fight is whether federal appeals court judges can review the entire scope of U.S. district court orders that toss climate cases back to the state benches where they were originally filed. Usually, once a case is thrown back to state court, the decision can’t be appealed unless the dispute deals with a limited set of issues such as civil rights claims or federal officer involvement.
The question in front of the Supreme Court is narrow, but oil and gas companies have also asked the justices to save time and rule that lawsuits like Baltimore’s seeking compensation for climate change should automatically land in federal court (Climatewire, Nov. 17, 2020).
Embattled oil supermajors like BP, Royal Dutch Shell PLC and Chevron Corp. have been fighting for years to keep climate liability cases in federal venues, where the challenges may face a greater chance of failure.
Since 2017, lawsuits filed by local and state officials in California, Rhode Island and other places have been locked in jurisdictional battles over whether the cases should remain in state court.
Full story ($)
The post Supreme Court ruling could doom climate lawsuits appeared first on The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF).
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January 15, 2021 at 11:21AM
Siemens Energy in $146m bid to harvest hydrogen from offshore wind
Let’s keep pretending the climate will notice if a few hundred wind turbines are dotted around the seas. Better still, let’s make them even more expensive and unwieldy by adding some new technology that we can’t easily service as it’s miles offshore. It’s claimed that ‘brilliant minds’ will be working on this, but it doesn’t take a genius to see the flaws in the plan.
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Siemens Gamesa and Siemens Energy have today announced plans to invest €120m ($146m) in a five-year strategy to unlock the potential of harvesting green hydrogen from offshore windpower, reports Power Engineering International.
The companies are collaborating on a solution to integrate an electrolyzer into an offshore wind turbine as a single synchronized system to directly produce green hydrogen.
Over the next five years, Siemens Gamesa will invest €80m and Siemens Energy €40m in the initiative, with a view to unveiling a full-scale offshore demonstration by 2025/26.
Siemens Gamesa chief executive Andreas Nauen said the joint initiative “brings together brilliant minds and cutting-edge technologies to address the climate crisis”.
“Our wind turbines play a huge role in the decarbonization of the global energy system, and the potential of wind to hydrogen means that we can do this for hard-to-abate industries too.”
Siemens Energy chief executive Christian Bruch said that the two companies “are in a unique position to develop this game-changing solution”.
Full report here.
via Tallbloke’s Talkshop
January 15, 2021 at 11:09AM
Electricity Costs to Jump Ten-Fold
Do not be surprised when (not if) this happens.
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Electricity Costs to Jump Ten-Fold
Oz Steamer
Before the Socialist Greenies and the Great Global Warming Fraud, in Australia, we had electricity that was about (Australian) $5 per kilowatt-hour. This is about 1/3rd of what the US had in 2019.
Now, thanks to the Socialist Greenies and the Global Warmists, we have an electricity price between (Australian) $40 to $50 per kilowatt-hour, or around ten times the price we had before.
Our manufacturing is nearly dead, thanks to the prohibitive cost of energy (electricity being the main cost).
So do not be surprised when (not if), thanks to Joe Biden’s Green New Deal and the Paris Climate Discords, your electricity price ends up at around ten times of what it was in 2019. (Meaning that the US average electricity price will end up around US$150 per kilowatt-hour).
At that point, you will not have an economy.
Exactly as the Socialist Greens want.
Editor’s note:
I, Robert, will also not be surprised if gasoline prices increase ten-fold.
Inflation, anyone?
Depression anyone?
Can we have inflation and depression at the same time?
Man, I hate being so pessimistic, but that’s where I am right now.
The post Electricity Costs to Jump Ten-Fold appeared first on Ice Age Now.
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January 15, 2021 at 10:59AM
This Tuesday, Jan. 19: My Friends of Science Society Livestream Talk: ‘Why There Is No Climate Emergency’
On Tuesday evening, January 19, at 8 p.m. CST there will be a 30 minute livestream presentation where I cover the most important reasons why there is no climate emergency. I just reviewed the video and I am very satisfied with it.
In only 1/2 hour I cover what I consider to be the most important science issues, the disinformation campaign that spreads climate hysteria, some of the harm that will be caused by forcing expensive and unreliable renewable energy upon humanity, and the benefits of more CO2 in the atmosphere.
You can go to the FoS website for more information. The tickets are $15, and I will be doing a live Q&A after the event.
via Roy Spencer, PhD.
January 15, 2021 at 10:53AM
2020, climate statistics and all that
There has been no significant warming trend for 5 years.
Every year in the middle of January various organisations, The UK Met Office, NASA, NOAA, etc. release their estimates of the annual average global temperature of our planet.
This year the conclusion is that 2020 is statistically identical to 2016. Some have placed it the second whereas the Japanese Meteorological Agency has it as the third warmest of the modern era. The overall conclusion to be drawn however is the misunderstanding of statistics used to support a predetermined opinion.
To illustrate the point let’s just look at NOAA’s data. This has a temperature anomaly for 2020 of 0.98 +/- 0.15 °C compared to 1.00 +/- 0.15 °C for 2016 (which was the year with the strongest recorded El Nino). The difference is trivial, especially since the precision of the mean is reported to thousandths of a degree. Looking at NOAA’s data for previous years you can see that every year since 2015 falls within one standard deviation of the mean.
Such a simple and unbiased view of the data leads to a much more justifiable headline for the data: There has been no significant warming trend for 5 years.
This bar-chart, courtesy of NOAA, shows how the global temperature has not changed in the past five years.
Looking at the global heat map based on HadCRUT5 data from the UK Met Office published by the BBC it is quite apparent that of the warming that was recorded in 2020 was not global but regional, primarily in parts of the Arctic around Siberia.
This way of looking at the observational data provides a broader context for a few of the comments have been made.
“The exceptional heat of 2020 is despite a La Niña event, which has a temporary cooling effect,” said WMO Secretary-General, Prof Petteri Taalas.
“It is remarkable that temperatures in 2020 were virtually on a par with 2016, when we saw one of the strongest El Niño warming events on record. This is a clear indication that the global signal from human-induced climate change is now as powerful as the force of nature.”
Actually, it is the opposite, as I pointed out in a previous post. A number of months in early 2020 were affected by El Niño conditions, very different from what the WMO Secretary-General has claimed.
It is true that 2016 would have been cooler but for the El Nino and 2020 warmer but for the La Nina. However, as I pointed out in my previous post, the El Nino effect can be seen over several years making estimates for greenhouse gas forcing problematic.
That can been seen in a claim by Gavin Schmidt, director of the Nasa Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who told BBC News, “We’re still putting our foot on the accelerator of climate change.”
How does his acceleration claim square with the fact that the increase in atmospheric CO2 between 2015-2019 made no difference to global temperatures and neither has the 7% fall in global CO2 emissions observed in 2020?
The global annual average temperature dataset is a fascinating one. It can be interpreted in many ways, looking at short- and long-term trends to a better understanding of what seems to be a ever changing El Nino and La Nina phenomena.
Feedback: david.whitehouse@thegwpf.com
The post 2020, climate statistics and all that appeared first on The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF).
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January 15, 2021 at 09:42AM
As Snow Blankets Europe, EnBW Power Company Builds Giant Solar Panel Farm In Germany
Although Germany sees about as many hours of sunshine as Alaska, the country is pushing for ever larger solar farms.
Germany business daily Handelsblatt here reports that power company EnBW is currently building a 500 MW solar panel park in Brandenburg, 30 km east of Berlin. It reported that it will be able to provide power for 130,000 households.
400 hectares
It will consist of three separate parks, which combined, the Handelsblatt writes, “will cover an area of 400 hectares. This corresponds to around 550 soccer fields.
”Vast solar field claimed to provide as much energy as one large coal-fired power plant. Photo: EnBW
“In total, the energy company plans to invest about a quarter of a billion euros in the region.”
EnBW says that the project “will operate without any subsidies” when finished and that it demonstrates that projects of this scale make sense. According to EnBW manager Dirk Güsewell: “Solar energy has become economical.”
70 billion euros in subsidies
Formerly solar energy in Germany was driven by massive subsidies via the renewable energies feed-in act (EEG). So far German electricity consumers have had to pay over 70 billion euros for the expansion of solar energy. Now the industry says that solar modules have become so low-priced that parks can be constructed and operated without subsidies.
Since 2015 the price of 1 kilowatt-hour of solar power has fallen from 9 cents to just over 4 cents, according to the Handelsblatt. Market experts expect electricity prices to stabilize at around five cents per kilowatt hour over the long term.
Investors are also confident that there still remains still plenty of space to install large solar fields, especially in the eastern part of Germany.
According to the Handelsblatt: “For the energy group, formerly known for its nuclear power plants, solar energy is becoming an important pillar of the ‘EnBW 2025’ strategy, with which the southern German company is completely aligning itself with the transition to green energies. ‘Solar energy is to become our third major pillar in power generation alongside onshore and offshore wind energy,’ says Güsewell.”
Concerning where all the power will come from during windless, cloudy periods in the dead of winter, no details are given.Donate – choose an amount
via NoTricksZone
January 15, 2021 at 09:37AM
Earthquakes LIVE / World Weather / Disaster ALERTS
Japan Earthquake 2021: Magnitude 5.9 earthquake strikes near Toba, Japan | Today, January 15
