Tag Archives: economic catastrophes

EV Fantasia hits multiple speed bumps

From JoNova

By Jo Nova

This week, newspapers in the UK appear to be full of Carmageddon headlines.

Thanks to NetZeroWatch and Ballyb, for the compilation of EV warning signs on the road to West Debacle.

The big advantage of an EV used to be the cheap fill but that’s all changed in the least year with the energy crisis. If the workers can’t afford to turn on the oven to cook a Sunday Roast, they can hardly afford to power up a car.

In a bit of a bombshell last week, Volkswagon admitted that people weren’t buying their electric cars, quaintly referring to this phenomenon as “strong consumer reluctance”. Sales were so bad though, 30% down on forecasts, that they have closed the factory at Emden, Germany for six weeks and are sacking 300 out of 1,500 staff.

Meanwhile, the UK is speeding towards the 2030 EV mandate five years faster than the rest of the world, and the backlash is growing. A Daily Mail poll finds only 1 in 4 people think it’s a good idea to ban sales of petrol and diesel cars by 2030. Fully 53% of people don’t like it. Is the UK a democracy or not? Manufacturing and industry leaders are using words like “ruinous” and talking of “the end of UK car production.” They’re warning that 800,000 UK jobs are at risk. Nothing about this makes sense. EV’s are a lousy way to change the weather. No one even knows if EV’s will reduce carbon dioxide.

At the moment in the UK 36 cars are fighting over every public charging site. Electricity demand is expected to double in the UK due to EV’s yet there is no plan to provide the extra capacity. Perhaps the real plan is to get half the country onto electric buses…?

The electric car ‘revolution’ is a disaster before it’s begun

Politicians are forcing electric cars on a public that doesn’t want them

Ben Marlow, The Telegraph

The electric car revolution is stalling, of that there can no longer be any doubt. It has left the big global carmakers floundering…

But it’s the setback at VW that stands out, raising serious questions about whether politicians are making the catastrophic mistake of forcing electric cars on a public that doesn’t want them.

Think about it for a second: an entire industry not only forced to abandon a product that the vast majority of people still want and use, but also bullied into channelling all its resources into making something on a colossal level that there simply isn’t the market for – at least not within the horrendously short timeframe that is being imposed on car manufacturers.

It’s industrial self-sabotage and a commercial, economic and social catastrophe in the making.

Mandating EVs is an “assault on the working class” says Joel Kotkin.

EV owners are wealthier, the cars are more expensive, and mandates will put owning a car out of reach of the unwashed masses…

This rush to electric cars is a colossal mistake

Spiked Online

Replacing the massive $3 trillion global car industry is an extremely high-risk economic gamble, particularly for the West.

In simple terms, the push for EVs represents an assault on the working class. Two-thirds of all EV owners have incomes in excess of $100,000.

EV mandates are also likely to force up the price of now restricted traditional cars. In the meantime, greens will demand higher fuel prices to reduce drivers’ consumption of the demon petrol. Ultimately, as even the Washington Post recently admitted, electric vehicles are hastening a return to conditions not seen since the early 20th century, when the automobile was a luxury item. ‘New cars, once part of the American Dream, [are] now out of reach for many’, it notes.

Just to repeat… None of this makes sense. Even if people have a religious fixation on climate change, this isn’t the path to salvation:

Economist Bjorn Lomborg calculates that a wholesale shift to EVs will lead to a reduction of global temperatures of no more than 0.0002 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100.

Kotkin asks “who benefits”:

So, who wins here? Certainly not middle- or working-class families for whom climate change barely registers as a primary concern.

…the biggest winner is China.

Today, China produces twice as many EVs as the US and the EU combined. Its leading EV maker, BYD, is now the world’s largest. Its electric-car exports are expected to almost double this year, helping it to overtake Japan as the biggest car exporter worldwide, according to the South China Morning Post.

China has control of much of the worlds rare metals. Giving up an industry with a century of expertise and mass public support for a new high risk industry that depends on foreign supply lines needs some explanation. No one believes we’re doing it to fix the weather.

——————-

Joel Kotkin is a spiked columnist, the presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University and executive director of the Urban Reform Institute. His latest book, The Coming of Neo-Feudalism, is out now. Follow him on Twitter: @joelkotkin

Image by OpenIcons from Pixabay  |  Das Logo der Marke Volkswagen Nutzfahrzeuge   | VW EV Photo by Vogler,

There was a young climate-change tzar,
Bought a brand new all E.V. car,
Found that very few joints,
Had quick charging points,
Means this car can’t venture too far.

–Ruairi

Fed Models Weather, Fails at Bank Stress Testing

From Science Matters

By Ron Clutz

Mish reports on the US Federal Reserve’s latest incompetence at his blog The Fed Models the Weather Although It Can’t Even Stress Test Treasuries.  Excerpt in italics with my bolds. H/T Tyler Durden

The Fed has conducted a “pilot climate scenario analysis exercise”.
Let’s take a peek inside this laughable event.

On January 10, Fed Chairman said the Fed ‘will not be a climate policymaker’. 

Under guise that it’s just a stress test model and not a policy setting model, the Fed announced details on its Pilot Climate Scenario Risk Analysis Program on January 17.

As described in the instruction document released today, the six largest U.S. banks will analyze the impact of scenarios for both physical and transition risks related to climate change on specific assets in their portfolios. To support the exercise’s goals of deepening understanding of climate risk-management practices and building capacity to identify, measure, monitor, and manage climate-related financial risks, the Board will gather qualitative and quantitative information over the course of the pilot, including details on governance and risk management practices, measurement methodologies, risk metrics, data challenges, and lessons learned.

“The Fed has narrow, but important, responsibilities regarding climate-related financial risks – to ensure that banks understand and manage their material risks, including the financial risks from climate change,” Vice Chair for Supervision Michael S. Barr said. “The exercise we are launching today will advance the ability of supervisors and banks to analyze and manage emerging climate-related financial risks.”

Climate Results Are In

Please consider the WSJ report The Fed’s Climate Studies Are Full of Hot Air by David Barker.

This year the Fed is forcing big banks to produce complex reports on their climate vulnerability in a “pilot project” that is sure to expand and might lead to lending restrictions. A query of the Fed’s listing of recent publications returns hundreds of research papers, press releases and policy statements related to climate change.

With all this effort, one might hope the Fed would produce high-quality research on climate change. But I took a close look at two Fed studies on the subject and found shockingly poor analysis. These studies on the effect of temperature on U.S. and world economic growth are cited without a hint of skepticism and widely lavished with media attention.

Recently I published a critique of a study from the Federal Reserve Board claiming that a year of above-normal temperatures in countries around the world makes economic contraction more likely. The original study used sophisticated statistical techniques but failed to report that its primary finding was statistically insignificant. My request to the study’s author for computer code to reproduce the paper’s results went unanswered.

I managed to write the code from scratch and exactly replicate the results, allowing me to run additional tests that the author didn’t report. The author’s primary result—that temperature has a bigger effect in bad than in good economic times—turned out to be statistically insignificant. Additional analysis showed that there is no reliable effect of temperature on growth at all.

There are two main reasons why the Fed study appeared at first to show a statistically significant effect of temperatures on economic growth. First, each country in the sample had equal weight in the analysis. China had the same weight as St. Vincent though China’s population is 13,000 times as large. Equal weighting means that some small countries with unusual histories of economic growth greatly influenced the results.

The paper’s results disappeared when countries like Rwanda and Equatorial Guinea—which had economic catastrophes and bonanzas unrelated to climate change—were omitted. Omitting similar countries representing less than 1% of world gross domestic product was enough to eliminate the paper’s result.

The only thing to learn from the Fed’s research is that climate propaganda is spreading fast, and when it comes to climate, academic economists are no more deserving of trust than are other supposed scientists and experts. The Fed’s time would be better spent on more urgent matters, like improving its botched regulation of the banking system.

The author, David Barker, has taught economics and finance at the University of Chicago and the University of Iowa and worked as an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. He has a doctorate in economics from the University of Chicago.

Hoot of the Day

♦  The Fed cannot even model US Treasuries. Its stress-free test would have failed to identify the imploded Silicon Valley Bank as a problem

♦  Yet, for political reasons, the Fed is now attempting to stress test the weather.

♦  To get the desired results, the Fed study gave St. Vincent, Rwanda, and Equatorial Guinea the same weight as China and the United States. 

♦  The Fed should throw this nonsense in the garbage and stress test commercial real estate, interest rates, accelerated QT, and things that it has clearly neglected. 

See Also Financial Systems Have Little Risk from Climate

Mish:  One of my readers accurately commented, that “Modeling the impact of bad climate policy would be more useful.”  Of course that presumes the Fed has any idea just how bad, and inflationary, our climate policy is.

Postscript on Cycle of Democracies: