From Watts Up With That?
Essay by Eric Worrall
Aussie federal climate minister Chris Bowen plan is to force mainly US ICE manufacturers to buy carbon credits from mainly Chinese EV manufacturers.
Bowen goes full throttle on electric vehicles
The Climate Change and Energy Minister’s most intense battle – over fuel efficiency standards – is about to begin.
Jennifer Hewett Columnist
Mar 7, 2024 – 3.43pm…
Tesla’s Australian representative has just exited the board of the Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries (FCAI), one of the most vocal critics of the government’s preferred model, and will quit official membership on June 30.
That’s after FCAI chief executive Tony Weber’s loud warnings that the strictness of a 60 per cent-plus reduction in emissions over five years will add thousands of dollars to the cost of Australia’s most popular vehicles.
In its resignation letter, Tesla says such claims are “demonstrably false” and are likely to deceive or mislead consumers, accusing the association of “cherry-picking the most polluting variants”. It wants the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission to investigate.
…
From January 1, manufacturers will have to compensate for their higher-emitting vehicles by importing more fully electric cars, hybrids or other lower-emissions vehicles to meet a target that will reduce every year.
The alternative is to buy credits from manufacturers that easily meet the target – such as Tesla and other EV makers.
…Read more (paywalled): https://www.afr.com/policy/energy-and-climate/bowen-goes-full-throttle-on-electric-vehicles-20240307-p5famt
Federal climate minister Chris Bowen makes regular comedy appearances on WUWT. Bowen is the technological illiterate who told us in 2022 that we can store electricity like water.
Bowen’s latest brainstorm is as absurd as his previous efforts. Australia is not remotely EV ready.
The biggest problem, even if everything else lined up, our electric grids couldn’t cope with lots of EVs being charged. The following is a WUWT article discussing a report by the AEMO, Australia’s official electricity industry body, showing all of Australia’s East Coast electric grids except Tasmania are on track for serious systemic shortages. Bowen’s punitive regulatory attacks on fossil fuel dispatchable electricity, his blind faith in fantasy solutions such as grid scale battery backup, and Bowen’s ban on dispatchable zero carbon nuclear energy are not helping this situation.
Bowen’s latest brainstorm is as absurd as his previous efforts. Australia is not remotely EV ready.
Another big problem is the state of our roads. Drive even slightly outside the big cities or major highways, and even roads marked on maps as major connecting roads are pothole pitted disasters. If you ever plan a road trip around Australia and intend to visit the outback, make sure you purchase the comprehensive insurance plan.
Endurance is a big problem. Tradies, people who rely on their vehicle for work, frequent spend a significant part of their day driving between jobs. An EV would be hopeless for such a task, especially in adverse weather conditions. Hertz recently announced the selloff of 20,000 rental EVs due to lack of demand. People who rent vehicles generally like to be able to use them, and a vehicle which dies after a few hours driving, and needs hours of charging to recover, is of limited use to people who rent automobiles.
And there is availability of chargers.
Most towns in the Aussie outback we encountered were friendly, tidy, welcoming places, but there were exceptions. An exception was a town in Western New South Wales. We stopped for 5 minutes for a quick toilet break, after being on the road for hours.
During the stop I talked to a serviceman repairing a nearby public EV charger. He told me that charger needs frequent service, because of the local gangs.
While waiting for my wife and child to use the toilet, two drunk teenagers did a very obvious walk by of my vehicle, checking out our stuff. The EV repairman kept the back of his van locked while he was working, even though he was standing next to it.
It is difficult to imagine a worse place to stop and wait for hours for your vehicle to recharge, but if you are insane enough to take an EV into outback New South Wales, on the edge of the Australian desert, you don’t have a lot of options. In such a sparsely populated place, distances between towns are enormous, and you would have to take what you can get. Even fuel stops are few and far between in such places.
Personally I’m glad I was driving a heavy 4WD SUV with a bull bar, and not just for the endurance and rugged road handling. We hit multiple animals on that trip, including one terrifying encounter with a feral pig which dashed straight under my wheels at highway speed, and bumped the left side of my vehicle 20 degrees above level. Much higher and my vehicle might have tipped over. I shudder to think of what would have happened I had hit the pig while driving a Tesla, the armor plate on the bottom of my vehicle took a beating when I hit the pig, though thankfully it survived without needing repair.
How will Aussies react to this political attempt to crush the gasoline and diesel vehicle market? Personally I’m hoping Aussies will kick the bums out of office in next year’s election, but the mainstream green “conservative” opposition is so hopeless there is a chance they will cling to power.
How will the USA react to having Australia tax US automakers, then pay the collected cash to China? Australia is such an insignificant auto market US automakers might not care. But supporting US automakers has been a high profile issue in the USA lately, so an ally like Australia discriminating against US automakers in favour of Chinese manufacturers might attract some attention.
If the US government does decide to push back, they have a lot of levers to pull, from threatening retaliatory sanctions against Australian products, right up to re-opening discussions about Australia’s high profile deal to purchase US nuclear submarines.
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