Remember when Ford was just losing $38,000 on every EV? Those were the good days
The biggest star in the automotive world at the moment is a black hole, and it’s swallowing whole industrial giants. It’s hard to imagine a faster way to sabotage whole nations than to disguise your spies as academics and environmentalists. Then get them to convince the government to command a whole new market into existence in a highly technological field with the wave of a legislated wand.
By Chris Isodore, CNN: Ford’s electric vehicle unit reported that losses soared in the first quarter to $1.3 billion, or $132,000 for each of the 10,000 vehicles it sold in the first three months of the year, helping to drag down earnings for the company overall.
Ford, like most automakers, has announced plans to shift from traditional gas-powered vehicles to EVs in coming years. But it is the only traditional automaker to break out results of its retail EV sales.
We can only wonder what’s happening at other companies.
The EV unit at Ford sold 10,000 cars in the first quarter this year, which is 20% fewer cars than they did a year ago. It’s that bad. In fact it’s worse. Those cars were also discounted. So the revenue mostly went beyond the event horizon — and fell an astonishing 84%.
Ford is expecting losses in the order of $5 billion for the full year. Their aims now are so low, they just hope one day to sell the cars for enough to cover the cost of making them, perhaps. They can’t hope to cover the millions spent on R&D in the foreseeable future. Indeed, even covering the costs in a market with a price war is said to be “very difficult”.
Meanwhile, two days earlier the IEA chief said the EV revolution was rolling on just fine:
[CNN] Global electric vehicle sales are set to rise by more than a fifth to reach 17 million this year, powered by drivers in China, according to the International Energy Agency.
In a report Tuesday, the IEA projected that “surging demand” for EVs over the next decade was set “to remake the global auto industry and significantly reduce oil consumption for road transport.”
So the global EV market is being powered by “drivers in China”, like these drivers perhaps who left their brand new EV’s rotting in fields in China. That would be imaginary drivers?
Chinese EV’s rotting in a field
The propaganda never ends.
As Stephen Wilmot said in The Wall Street Journal last year, if Ford just canned the EV unit, its adjusted operating profit would be 50% higher. Surely that beckons…
MASHAN, CHINA – MAY 28 A graphite worker walks across the Jin Yang graphite factory in the town of Mashan, China on May 28, 2016. Workers have very little safety equipment at many of the graphite factories. The northeastern province of Heilongjiang is rich in graphite and there are numerous mines and factories in the region. Locals who live in proximity to the factories complain of contaminated air and water affecting their crops and health. The graphite, which is purchased by Samsung and LG Chem, is a key ingredient in lithium batteries for mobile phones and electric cars. (Michael Robinson Chavez/The Washington Post)
China has acquired dangerous monopoly power over battery production worldwide. CFACT has published my brief study report on this new threat — “CHINA’S GRAPHITE MONOPOLY.”
To begin with, here is the Executive Summary:
“China is positioned to adversely influence lithium-ion battery production worldwide. China has monopoly control over processed graphite, an essential component of almost all lithium-ion batteries. Virtually all processed graphite, natural and synthetic, is made in China then exported to the battery makers worldwide.
These batteries are used universally in electric and electronic devices, from cell phones and watches to EVs and huge grid-scale backup batteries; there are numerous essential military uses, as well.
China is just now beginning to implement an export control program for processed graphite. By controlling exports, China could, to a significant degree, adversely influence much lithium-ion battery production, such as by raising prices to selected producers or even blacklisting entire countries.
Thus, the potential adverse impact of Chinese monopoly power is enormous. What they will actually do remains to be seen, but the threat is very real.”
A lot has been written about China’s market power in other crucial materials like cobalt and rare earths. But, these cases are weak compared to its monopoly in processed graphite.
In both cases, China is a major player, coincidentally producing about 70% of processed cobalt and 70% of rare earths. Numbers like this are nothing like monopoly control, as there are a lot of other suppliers. In fact, China consumes most of its production because it makes a lot of lithium-ion batteries. It is actually a net importer of rare earths.
In contrast, the policy world seems oblivious to China’s far more dangerous processed graphite monopoly. The only place I have seen it mentioned is by start-ups looking for funding to build domestic production capacity.
There is no lack of raw graphite, as China only produces about 16% of the global total. So, there would be no problem supplying domestic producers with processed graphite. The problem is that the monopoly threat does not stimulate financing because nobody knows about it.
The destructive power of unconstrained monopoly is standard text, i.e., economics. We should be having a large, loud discussion of this threat.
To kick such a discussion off, here is the quick take from my report:
“While no individual Chinese graphite producing or exporting firm has monopoly power, the central permitting authority does have that power if it chooses to assume it. Whether it can or not depends on the internal authority structure and policies of the Chinese government.
Given the far-reaching, potential adverse consequences of such a monopoly, it is certainly worth considering this possibility. It would amount to central planning for strategic purposes.
How monopolies assert destructive power is well-known from both theory and experience. China can easily raise prices to individual battery makers, graphite brokers, or entire countries. In particular, this export-permitting program could become part of a trade war with America, making us a likely target.
Since China is a major battery maker, it could go after its competitors. In principle, China could wipe out a rival battery maker by simply not supplying the essential graphite or it could simply raise the price to that competitor over time, which would be much harder to detect.
Whole markets might be targeted; for example, China could affect the EV market where serious competitors have existed or recently arisen in various countries. Driving up the price of an EV’s battery increases the EV’s price, as well. Simply driving up the price of EV batteries increases electric vehicle prices, making them uncompetitive with cheaper Chinese models.
More broadly, China produces a lot of different lithium-ion batteries, as well as devices that use them. Any of the many competitor markets could be targeted for monopoly action.
There are even geopolitical possibilities. Reportedly, many countries are looking to get into the EV battery-making business. China could force such countries to cooperate in other ways as a condition of supplying them with graphite.
If the above measures seem far-fetched, keep in mind that a monopoly in essential supplies is a very powerful position, and thus a very tempting action to take, well short of open warfare, but still very effective.”
China’s battery graphite monopoly is a clear danger to America and the world. Policy people need to start thinking about this new threat.
The problem has been largely ignored, even by policy makers and military strategists
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
April 8, 2024
WASHINGTON, DC. China has virtually total monopoly control over the processing and availability of natural and synthetic graphite, an essential component of almost all lithium-ion batteries, including electric vehicle batteries, which are 40% graphite by weight.
A new Net Zero Reality Coalition (NZRC) report explains how this monopoly enables the Chinese Government to affect Li-ion battery production, pricing and availability worldwide. China could control markets for equipment required to transition from fossil fuels to renewables, harm or bankrupt competitors, and even force nations to acquiesce to its geopolitical initiatives over Taiwan, the Pacific Rim, the Paris climate agreement and other matters.
“President Biden wants to convert gasoline and diesel cars, light trucks, semi-trucks, buses, trains and even military vehicles to battery power,” notes report author David Wojick, PhD. “He wants to force us to switch from natural gas to electricity for furnaces, stoves and water heaters. “Getting all that electricity from wind and sunshine means we’d need hundreds of millions of vehicle battery modules, plus millions of huge grid-scale batteries to back up intermittent, weather dependent wind and solar power, to avoid frequent and widespread blackouts,” Wojick emphasizes. As graphite requirements skyrocket, China’s monopoly power will also surge.
Processing and purifying graphite requires large amounts of toxic, dangerous hydrofluoric acid, as well as enormous amounts of reliable, affordable energy, the report points out.
“Safety and environmental regulations would likely make it too complicated and expensive to build those facilities in the USA and other Western countries,” says NZRC advisor Paul Driessen. “But China has shown a willingness to ignore ecological and worker safety issues, to produce graphite, as well as cobalt, rare earth elements and other materials for carbon-free economies, at nearly rock-bottom costs, to protect its monopolies and control supply chains.”
As a result, America’s energy systems, economy and military are becoming increasingly reliant on monopolist and often adversarial China for these critical raw materials. However, the realities of this graphite monopoly have flown under the radar of the White House, Congress, news media, and even energy and manufacturing sectors. Wojick and the NZRC are the first experts to raise awareness about this monopoly.
NZRC members include the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), American Policy Center (APC), Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), Energy & Environment Legal
Institute (E&E Legal), Heartland Institute and International Climate Science Coalition (ICSC).
The United Nations established the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change in 1988 and in 1995 the first climate change Conference of Parties (COP1) was held in Berlin. There has been a COP meeting every year since then, apart from 2020 when covid intervened. Last year COP28 was held in the United Arab Emirates and was attended by 84,000 delegates who flew in from all around the world to lecture the rest of us about the importance of reducing our carbon footprint.
In the nearly 30 years since COP conferences began, the U.K. has halved its CO2 emissions so that we now account for a mere 1% of the global total. But in this same time interval the developing world has massively increased its CO2 emissions. For example, China’s CO2 emissions have quadrupled and now account for 29% of the global total. India’s have tripled and now account for 7% of the global total. Both countries are still increasing their CO2 emissions.
The problem is that ‘green’ technologies are not very good. Electric cars and renewable energy are more expensive and inferior in performance to their fossil fuel equivalents. So as the developing world industrialises it is using fossil fuel technology to keep its costs down. Is it right for the privileged people of the First World to tell the poorest people in the Third World that they now have to stop operating gas and coal-fired power stations and stop driving petrol cars because of worries that in 50 years time the planet will be warmer? Climate modelling is so complex and uncertain that we don’t know how much warmer and we don’t know the consequences of that warming. Quite understandably the priority for the leaders of the developing world is to improve the lives of people now rather than worry about what may or may not happen in 50 years time.
Despite the fact that we only produce 1% of global CO2 emissions, our Government has decided we must press on with being world leaders in Net Zero. Because our ‘carbon footprint’ is already so small, reducing it further will have no measurable impact on global temperatures, but it will further impoverish British people. For example, we are repeatedly told by the green lobby (which these days occupies influential positions in politics, the media, universities and business) that renewables are now the cheapest form of energy generation and we should build ever more wind farms and solar farms. Since the U.K. is already a world leader in offshore wind it follows that we should have some of the lowest electricity prices in the world. In fact the opposite is true, the U.K. has some of the highest electricity prices in the world. Typically people in this country pay more than twice as much for electricity as they do in the USA, where shale gas has transformed the energy market, and more than five times as much as in China, where they are still building coal-fired power stations. The reason the U.K.’s electricity prices are so high is because there is a massive hidden cost in renewables which its supporters gloss over or never mention, namely the need to have back-up energy generation for when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine.
The sales growth of electric vehicles in this country has stalled as people realise just what poor value they are. They are expensive to buy and inconvenient to drive because of the long charge times and the scarcity of public charging points. There is also the issue of how green electric vehicles actually are after taking into account the environmental impact of mining the rare earth metals and manufacturing the batteries. Yet our Government is blithely carrying on with its plan to ban petrol cars.
If the world is going to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, the best way forward is to encourage research and development so that we improve green technologies. Imagine for a moment a time in the future when ‘green’ technologies might be cheaper and better than their fossil fuel equivalents. If this were to happen then people would want to buy green technology and the world’s CO2 emissions would fall quickly and naturally. In the meantime we have the Conservative, Labour and Lib Dem parties all wanting to inflict more of this junk green technology on us. Only Reform offers any sanctuary for the Net Zero sceptic.
An influx of cheap Chinese solar panels is forcing local manufacturers out of the market.
Europe’s ambitious plans to expand green energy generation with “Made in EU” solar panels face a distinctly cloudy future as the continent faces a massive glut of the devices.
Millions of solar panels are piling up in warehouses across the Continent because of a manufacturing battle in China, where cut-throat competition has driven the world’s biggest panel-makers to expand production far faster than they can be installed. The Telegraph has the story.
The supply glut has caused solar panel prices to halve. This sounds like great news for the EU, which recently pledged to triple its solar power capacity to 672 gigawatts by 2030. That’s roughly equivalent to 200 large nuclear power stations.
In reality, though, it has caused a crisis. Under the EU’s “Green Deal Industrial Plan”, 40pc of the panels to be spread across European fields and roofs were meant to be made by European manufacturers.
However, the influx of cheap Chinese alternatives means that instead of tooling up, manufacturers are pulling out of the market or becoming insolvent. Last year 97pc of the solar panels installed across Europe came from China.
The European Solar Manufacturing Council (ESMC) has warned of a looming “wave of bankruptcies” including Dutch panel producer Exasun and Austrian module manufacturer Energetic.
ESMC secretary general Johan Lindahl has appealed for “urgent” measures to safeguard the sector, calling for the EU to buy up all those unwanted solar panels to keep his members in business.
The best estimates suggest that about 90 gigawatts worth of solar panels are stashed around Europe. That solar power capacity roughly equates to 25 large nuclear power stations the size of Hinkley Point C.
The crisis is extending back to China too, where Longi, the world’s largest solar panel manufacturer, is set to slash its workforce by almost a third as the industry struggles with oversupply.
The sheer scale of the problem was revealed in a recent report from the International Energy Agency (IEA).
It warned that although the world was installing at record rates of around 400 gigawatts a year, manufacturing capacity was growing far faster.
By the end of this year solar panel factories, mostly in China, will be capable of churning out 1,100 gigawatts a year – nearly three times more than the world is ready for. For comparison, that’s about 11 times the UK’s entire generating capacity.
For some solar power installers, it’s a dream come true. Sagar Adani is building solar farms across India’s deserts, with 54 in operation and another 12 being built.
Veiled by discussion of headline global trends in new renewables capacity investment is the fact that almost all the incremental progress is currently being made in one country: China. …
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While China surges ahead, the rest of the world remains stuck.
This raises a crucial question. What is different about the development of solar and wind resources in China from the rest of the world?
The main answer is that in China, such development is capitalist in only a very limited sense. Certainly, the entities centrally involved in building out new solar and wind farms in China are companies. But almost all are state-owned. Take wind. Nine of the country’s top 10 wind developers are owned by the government, and such state-owned players control in excess of 95 percent of the market.
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Add to this the fact that the banks financing all the new renewables development in China are generally also state-owned and directed, and a stark reality comes into focus. This is essentially central planning in action.
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Why are renewables returns so low? Numerous factors conspire to drive down profits, but one is particularly important: competition. … There is no OPEC-like cartel in renewable electricity.
One day soon Chinese people will realise most of their investment savings have been lost by incompetent and corrupt bank managers and government officials, or even worse, that their savings are still in the bank, but have lost all their value. There have already been minor bank runs and collapses, though so far the Chinese government has somehow contained the situation, my guess is by printing more money to rehydrate the failed banks.
China is not a model to copy. At least Professor Brett Christophers admitted renewables are unprofitable, but Chinese government officials directing banks to invest in unprofitable renewables is not helping China’s beleaguered banks to balance their books, and has almost certainly exacerbated the Chinese Communist economic crisis.
Professor Brett Christophers is right that the free market has not produced the climate outcomes he wants, but this is because the free market is driven by demand. People just don’t want expensive unreliable energy. The communist part of our economies, government subsidies for green energy and other boondoggles, is not something to be admired, it is something to be excised, like the political tumor it is.
Let us hope the 2024 election cycle delivers us the politicians we need, to set our societies right.
Update (EW): Anyone who is curious why China is building wind and solar AND coal, the answer is they are building wind turbines because Xi Jinping told them to build wind turbines.
In 2021, Xi wanted to pimp China’s emissions record in time for the next COP conference, so he issued strict district level energy quotas, demanded more wind turbines and solar, and ordered a transition to renewables.
The order for quotas was obeyed, but Xi forgot to tell everyone to reduce their energy use, to ensure the quotas lasted until the end of the year. As a result, China burned through their quotas and ran out of energy by July 2021, and much of the Chinese economy shut down for a few weeks while people waited for new orders from the Communist Central Committee.
The central committee did the only thing possible, but it took time for news of the crisis to filter through the communist bureaucracy and for a decision to be made – they relaxed the coal quotas.
This might seem a total absurdity, until you consider that commands from Xi Jinping and the Central Committee cannot be disobeyed, mid level officials can lose their life disobeying an order from a senior communist.
But the Chinese have had thousands of years practice at creative re-interpretation of the orders of the emperor.
So the commands to use green energy are being obeyed – but they firm the wind turbines and solar panels with coal, because this is the cheapest option for firming renewables, and nobody told them not to.
This isn’t the first time Xi Jinping’s communist regime has messed up the energy market. Shortly before the winter of 2017, Xi Jinping ordered coal plants be shuttered and everyone convert towns and cities to heat buildings with gas. The gas conversion was performed, but nobody checked whether the gas would be available – or more likely, people who were aware of the problem didn’t dare disobey the gas conversion order, even though they knew it would lead to disaster. As a result, in 2017 home and school heating failed throughout Northern China, and kids were forced to attend school in unheated classrooms, in the middle of a winter in which temperatures dipped well below 0F / -18C.
This is what I mean by Chinese Communist energy policy and economic incompetence. This is the incompetence and callous disregard for ordinary people’s priorities which Professor Brett Christophers appears to want the West to embrace.
Leave it to Joe Biden. When the 80-year-old plutocrat John Forbes Kerry steps down as Special Presidential Envoy for Climate (SPEC), he chose 75-year-old John David Podesta, Jr., to finish out the year. The two climate czars could not have come from more different beginnings.
For his self-important mission to “save the planet,” Kerry has been called a “climate clown” on social media and “the Forrest Gump of Climate” by Bloomberg Media. Ever the aloof Eurocentric diplomat, Kerry never lets anyone forget how important he is. Podesta, from much more humble roots, prefers to work behind the scenes, often in a supporting role.
It was clearly past time for Kerry to go. The day before he “retired,” Kerry spoke at a press conference and raised eyebrows and temperatures when he blurted out that people might “feel better” about the Russian government if Russia would just commit to fighting climate change as hard as he has done.
Kerry’s strange remarks came in response to a question from a Russian reporter as to whether the long-running U.S. campaign against Russian influence – one that has escalated into a major war that could soon become nuclear – was interfering with climate cooperation. The Russian Federation waited until 2019 – when Paris opponent Donald Trump was President — to adopt the Paris Agreement, overcoming strong opposition from Russian industry lobbyists.
At the time, Rusian Edelgeriev, President Putin’s climate advisor, said his country would become a “full-fledged participant in this international instrument.” He boasted that Russia had cut its carbon emissions nearly in half since 1990, the year of the collapse of the old Soviet Union.
But oil and gas provide about 20 percent of the Russian economy, and Europeans who had shunned fossil fuel production themselves were still heavily dependent on Russian fossil fuels to keep their own economies afloat. Russia today is developing coal resources in the Far East and wants to open more Arctic shipping lanes.
Imagine the grating of teeth in the Kremlin as Kerry droned on that even with its “illegal” war against Ukraine, “they ought to be able to find the effort to be responsible on the climate issue.” Maybe Kerry was saddest that, because of the war, he has not been able to fly back and forth to Moscow (or preferably, to a Crimean dacha?) to “negotiate”.
Missing from Kerry’s diatribe was the well-known fact that Russia only contributes 5 percent of global human-caused carbon dioxide emissions, less than half that of the U.S. (12.6 percent), and only a tiny fraction of China’s whopping 33 percent. But Kerry would not dare tell China it “ought to be more responsible on the climate issue.”
Instead, after lengthy negotiations in Beijing, Kerry insisted he was not disappointed that no new agreements came from his “work,” or that President Xi reaffirmed that China would pursue its climate goals at its own pace and in its own way. Kerry was just glad he got a few free meals.
In his first year as SPEC, Kerry took a reported 48 trips on his wife’s private jet, including meetings with authoritarian heads of state. He refused to publicly criticize China for building a new coal-fired power plant every week. But he did compare the fight against climate change to the Allies’ fight to defeat Nazi Germany.
Young Americans may remember that Kerry was the (losing) Democratic Party nominee for President in 2004. They may also know that, long before became the “climate guy,” Kerry was a spokesperson for Vietnam Veterans Against the War.
The Massachusetts brahmin, after a failed Congressional campaign and a short stint as Michael Dukakis’ lieutenant governor, parlayed his fame (or infamy) into a U.S. Senate seat in 1984. He stayed in the Senate until 2013, when he became President Obama’s Secretary of State, following the inestimable Hillary Clinton. His crowning moment there was signing the Paris Agreement on climate change. No wonder Biden chose him.
As SPEC, Kerry is best known for his defense of his widespread use of private jets. Kerry famously stated, “If you offset your carbon, it is the ONLY choice for somebody like me who is traveling the world to win this battle.”
Kerry’s messianic vision continued: “I have to fly to meet with people to get things done, but what I am doing almost full time is working to win the battle for climate change. And if I offset and contribute my life to do this I am not going to be put on the defensive.”
Kerry loves flying almost as much as mirrors. He even flew on a giant military transport to Antarctica as a lame duck just days after President Trump was elected in 2016 – ostensibly to meet with scientists about the impact of climate change on the frozen continent.
Kerry has always been “special.” His grandmother sent him to elite boarding schools in Europe as his father served in the State Department’s Bureau of United Nations Affairs, then as U.S. attorney for Berlin, and later at the U.S. Embassy in Oslo.
Young John was whisked back to the States to attend more elite boarding schools before matriculating at Yale University, where he distinguished himself as a debater and soccer player but not as a student. His GPA was “lackluster” (a 76 average), but it got him into Yale.
Before marrying the billionaire heiress to John Heinz’s huge fortune, Kerry was already the wealthiest person in the U.S. Senate (other than Heinz), as the beneficiary of at least four trusts inherited from Forbes family relatives. His own 2011 financial disclosure admits to personal assets ranging from $230 to $320 million (not including any Heinz money).
By contrast, 75-year-old John Podesta grew up on the streets of Chicago, the son of a Greek-American mother and an Italian-American father, a factory worker who never finished high school. His big break in life came when he met the young Bill Clinton in 1970 when both were working on a Senate campaign.
John and his older brother Tony built their lives around politics, with John serving as an attorney for various Democratic Party leaders and Tony working as a lobbyist. Together they formed the Podesta Group, a government relations and public affairs lobbying firm with close ties to the Democratic Party. Not bad for a couple of poor kids.
Politics has been good to the Podestas. John served as chief of staff for President Clinton and counselor to President Obama before joining the Biden Administration as senior advisor for clean energy innovation and implementation. There he has overseen the disbursement of $370 to $783 billion in clean energy tax credits and incentives under the (sic) Inflation Reduction Act.
Both Podestas have left their biggest public marks through the political nonprofits they created, Tony was a founding president of Norman Lear’s People for the American Way, while John is the founder and former president of the Center for American Progress, which helped to craft the Inflation Reduction Act, a cash cow for progressive interests.
In sum, while Kerry has often been compared to a strutting peacock, Podesta has long been one of the most effective operatives in Washington and a major architect of the Progressive agenda. Kerry may have gotten a lot of headlines, but Podesta has used the power of the purse to impact the business and diplomatic communities far more effectively.
China’s annual greenhouse gas emissions have soared over the past 20 years, dwarfing those of the U.S. But according to our progressive federal bureaucrats, America’s cumulative historical emissions are the problem and Beijing now deserves a free pass.
The federal government’s climate.gov site ostensibly provides “timely and authoritative scientific data and information about climate science, adaptation, and mitigation.” This mandate apparently includes trying to guilt Americans out of questioning progressive policies while the world’s second-largest economy emits at an unparalleled level. In a blog post, federal climate comrades say that America’s historical emissions, coupled with higher emissions on a per-capita basis, mean that “the United States bears a greater share of the responsibility for current conditions—on both a national and per-person level.”
According to our taxpayer-funded emissions arbitrators, China emitted less in the past, so its gargantuan emissions today—2.61 times larger than the U.S.—shouldn’t really be the focus. America’s cumulative emissions dating back to 1750, they argue, are the original sin for which we must now atone. Unlike China, America has apparently emitted more than its fair share, so “any future U.S. emissions will undermine progress to stop global warming.” In case the message isn’t clear, the climate commissars add for good measure that China’s emissions are actually the American people’s fault because American consumers buy Chinese-made goods.
Unsurprisingly, the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) propaganda mouthpieces agree. Xinhua, the CCP’s news agency, declared last year that the U.S. bears “major historical and global responsibility for climate change” and must, therefore, repay its “historical debts.” Not to be outdone, the state-run China Daily says that China’s per-capita emissions are lower than those of America, so the world’s largest emitter is actually doing the “hard yards on climate.”
This readiness of taxpayer-funded bureaucrats to cast off both the basic principles of justice and common sense should be a cause for concern. While socialist regimes have long embraced collective guilt and group punishment, individual responsibility is fundamental to the American tradition. This principle played a clear role in the fight for America’s freedom; colonial outrage ensued after Britain’s collective punishment of Massachusetts in the wake of the Boston Tea Party. With free will and personal accountability before the law, the American people today are not responsible for the actions of earlier generations. There is no criminal or climate “historical debt” to be socialized across generations.
Equally concerning is the willingness of our self-declared “authoritative” apparatchiks to distort emissions data to guilt Americans into conformity. China is far and away the single largest source of emissions today. While scientific knowledge should be perpetually debated and refined, portraying China’s emissions on a self-congratulatory per-capita basis is not an environmental breakthrough. The composition of the atmosphere is determined by absolute measurements, not on a per-capita basis, meaning that China’s actual emissions remain the same, regardless of how they are portrayed. In short, measuring per-capita emissions is as consequential as measuring the temperature in per-capita degrees Fahrenheit.
Rather than berating Americans for the actions of their ancestors, federal bureaucrats should turn their attention to America’s recent environmental track record as a potential model for reducing emissions. Recognizing America’s clean energy potential, the Trump Administration simultaneously prioritized domestic oil and gas production and the enforcement of well-calibrated environmental protection rules. The Trump Administration’s Environmental Protection Agency “assessed more in civil penalties, criminal fines, and restitution… than the agency collected in the first four years of the prior [Obama] administration.” This strategy doesn’t need warped justice or contorted data to justify its effectiveness; the economy grew, Americans got wealthier, air quality improved, and emissions fell. For progressive bureaucrats, however, these observations are inconvenient truths.
Oliver McPherson-Smith, Ph.D., is the Director of the Center for Energy & Environment at the America First Policy Institute and a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.
This article was originally published by RealClearEnergy and made available via RealClearWire.
Subsidised energy costs to make onshore production of key minerals more viable.
British battery metal refiners and electric car gigafactories are being handed cheap power deals by the Government as part of a battle to cut the West’s dependence on China.
Companies will get the energy relief from next month with the aim being to boost domestic production of key minerals needed for wind turbines, electric cars and defence technologies, officials and executives say.
With high electricity costs seen as a major barrier, however, insiders said the new measures are designed to make Britain more competitive internationally. Officials also want to deter so-called carbon leakage, where goods are made abroad using more polluting processes and then simply imported here.
It is understood that critical mineral refiners and battery factories are among those set to benefit from the relief, with the promise of the subsidies helping to seal significant investments.
One source familiar with the schemes said: “Helping to level the playing field on energy costs, and the added advantage of supplying green power for these new industries, really does start to shift the balance.”
One businessman behind two refinery operators in the North East said the subsidies had helped to ensure his development were viable.
Paul Atherley, chairman of Tees Valley Lithium and Pensana, which are building plants in Teesside and Humberside respectively, said the changes will cut the price his companies pay for energy from a quarterly average of 19 pence per kilowatt hour (kWh) to “single digits” in September.
Mr Atherley said: “The Government is keenly aware that they’re in competitive situations for locating these plants.
“The competition is coming from Europe, North America, Saudi Arabia – people are offering incentives – but the UK is doing a good job in trying to keep and attract businesses like ours.
“There are two big incentives: one is freeports for chemical parks at Humber and Teesside, and the second is these power deals.”
The battery factory planned by Jaguar Land Rover’s parent in Somerset is also likely to qualify for support, it is understood.
Yet another sequence of ruinously expensive technical miracles required.
“It still boggles my mind,” says Jeffrey Short, Vice President of the American Transport Research Institute.
Mr. Short was talking about the findings of a study conducted by ATRI recently, which quantifies how much additional power generation capacity would have to be added to America’s existing electric grid to convert the nation’s entire heavy truck fleet to battery electric vehicles. The Telegraph has the story.
“What we found were three very large challenges,” Short told the Capital Press, and ‘very large’ is quite an understatement of the magnitude of the real problem here. The numbers seem overwhelming.
First, ATRI finds that US nationwide power generation would need to increase 40 per cent over the coming years just to accommodate the additional load placed on the various regional grids to recharge all the new heavy truck batteries. Taken in a vacuum that may sound achievable to the layperson. But no such vacuum exists: The added load must be found in addition to massive new loads being demanded for low-emissions heating, passenger vehicle charging, population growth and economic expansion, server farms, and even AI, which OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently said will itself require a doubling of power generation.
Where will all the new power generation, and all the new supplies of critical minerals needed to make it reality, come from? ATRI estimates that converting the heavy truck fleet will require the US to somehow source a volume of lithium alone that equates to 35 years of current global production of that key mineral. Expanding the grid and making all the millions of heavy new truck batteries will also require massive new resources of copper, cobalt, graphite, antimony, and an array of rare earth minerals not currently in widespread production within US borders.
All this additional production will have to come available to the US market rapidly. But, as S&P Global Vice Chairman Daniel Yergin reminded me in a recent interview, “it currently takes 15 to 20 years to open a new mine” in the US, due to a vast array of permitting and litigation impediments. China controls the supply lines for most such minerals today, and the Xi government will satisfy its own needs and those of its allies before it would be willing to release massively higher volumes to the US and other western nations.
The cost of the trucks themselves must also be considered. Currently, a brand new diesel-powered 18-wheeler is priced at between $150,000 – $180,000, but ATRI says a new electric model goes for almost triple that, at between $400,00 – $500,000. Higher truck costs, higher power costs, and higher transport costs will inevitably lead to higher rates of inflation since most consumer goods are moved to market by 18-wheelers.
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.
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