Is Norway's Love For EVs Enough To Put A Dent In Fuel Demand?
I suspect that a large factor in the continuing high demand for gasoline is that buyers of electric cars have not ditched their old cars but have kept them for use on very cold days when EV range is eaten up by heating needs. Norway has a LOT of very cold days. A really cold day could HALVE the range of an EV
Road fuel demand in Norway has remained relatively stable even with soaring electric vehicle (EV) adoption, raising questions about whether EVs really have a material impact on diesel and gasoline sales. Rystad Energy research and modeling has, however, uncovered the truth behind the persistent sales – electrifying heavy-duty vehicles, especially trucks, is essential to lowering overall fuel consumption.
EVs are often positioned as the key to decarbonizing transportation, but the latest data from the Norwegian government suggests otherwise. Electric cars have accounted for at least 80% of all passenger vehicle sales for the past three years. EVs – including plug-in hybrid (PHEV) and battery electric vehicles (BEV) – accounted for about 90% of all new car sales in 2023. More than 50% of passenger cars on the road in Oslo are electric, a threshold that BEVs alone will pass 50% in the next two years.
Such an aggressive growth in EV sales should lead to a dramatic fall in fuel demand. But that is yet to materialize, and sales figures from Statistics Norway (SSB) show diesel and gasoline demand has declined only modestly since 2017. In the first half of 2023, road fuel sales hovered around 62,000 barrels per day (bpd), a 10% fall from the 70,000 bpd sold between 2017 and 2019, well after the EV boom started. Current consumption is relatively stable between 60,000 and 70,000 bpd, and a precipitous drop is not forecast in the near term.
Our research – which goes beyond the numbers reported by SSB – tells a different story. Our model considers the official fuel sales, annual average mileage by vehicle type and car sales as reported by SSB. It converts this raw data into estimated diesel and gasoline demand, factoring in the efficiency of individual vehicles as of 2022. The upshot of this is a crystal-clear image that road fuel demand from passenger cars has declined rapidly since 2016, falling more than 20%, in line with the BEV market penetration.
Meanwhile, fuel demand from buses and trucks – which run predominantly on diesel – has grown, rising from about 30,000 bpd between 2010 to 2015 to 32,000 in 2022. A structural decline in fuel demand is not likely in the short term until the recently initiated electrification of these sectors takes hold. As a frontrunner in the transport electrification process, these findings pose significant questions for other countries trying to follow Norway’s lead.
Electrifying the road transportation sector is a pillar of many countries’ energy transition strategy, with policymakers around the world offering incentives to those who switch to EVs. However, the situation seen in Norway could play out on a global scale as adoption ramps up. If efforts to lower emissions and reduce the carbon intensity of road transportation are to succeed, the focus should not be solely on passenger cars, but must also address heavy-duty vehicles that run on traditional fossil fuels.
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The GOP’s Climate Change Challenge
It pains us to say it, but Greta Thunberg is winning the climate change debate.
No, she doesn’t make good, sound, thoughtful, rational arguments, and she doesn’t communicate in a way that invites consensus and collaboration. Instead, she gives decent people a rash. She’s a petulant child being exploited by her parents and by the media and by the Left. But the issue of climate change is becoming harder and harder for Republicans to simply ignore or dismiss — at least from an electoral perspective.
Young Republicans, for example, are a lot more concerned about the climate than are older Republicans. So, of course, are the centrists and the independents who tend to decide elections. According to a September 2022 AP-NORC poll, 62% of Americans say the federal government is doing too little to reduce climate change. That number includes half of Republicans under age 45 but only 32% of older Republicans. The point here is that when nearly two-thirds of the electorate feel a certain way about a certain issue, it’s electorally suicidal to dismiss that issue as a hoax — or to allow the leftist press to say you’re dismissing it as a hoax.
So if the Republican Party is to fare well in the 2024 election — both for president and all down the ballot — the party will need to hone and communicate a coherent message that goes deeper than, “Climate change is a hoax.”
Perhaps the most riveting moment of last week’s GOP presidential debate came when 38-year-old upstart Vivek Ramaswamy took a shot at the rest of the candidates on climate change: “I’m the only person on the stage who isn’t bought and paid for,” he said, “so I can say this: The climate change agenda is a hoax, and we need to declare our independence from it.”
Right behind Ramaswamy’s feel-good zinger was the moment when Florida Governor Ron DeSantis shut down co-moderator Bret Baier’s effort to get a show of hands about whether they believe climate change is man-caused. “We’re not children here,” said DeSantis — and that was the end of Baier’s show-of-hands stunt.
Incidentally, notice how Ramaswamy said the climate change agenda is a hoax, but notice how the dishonest mainstream media reported otherwise. The Appropriated Associated Press and The Hill and plenty of others reported that he called climate change itself a hoax. That’s a lie. What he did was say that the Left’s claim that we need to enact the Green New Deal, and we need to declare war on fossil fuels, and we need more windmills and solar panels, and we need to phase out the internal combustion engine in order to save the planet — those things are a hoax.
If you’re like us, you smiled at the rhetorical force of Ramaswamy’s statement. But then, like it does after you’ve eaten a rich piece of chocolate, the endorphin rush subsides and we end up back where we were — in this case, wondering when the Republican Party will agree on a basic set of climate principles and when its candidates for president will begin communicating them. Because while “hoax” sounds great, while it sounds like a necessary thumb in the eye of Green New Dealers, it isn’t going to get it done at the ballot box — especially in the swing states, where razor-thin margins will determine who our next president is and whether our Supreme Court will retain its conservative majority for the next generation.
“We’re getting to a point where Republicans are losing winnable elections because they’re alienating people that care about climate change,” said Christopher Barnard, the Republican president of the American Conservation Coalition, the largest conservative environmental group in the nation. “You don’t have to be the biggest climate champion,” Barnard continued. “If you just say, ‘Climate change is real, and we’re going to have some sort of solution,’ that’s enough for most voters.”
That may or may not be enough, but at least it’s a start. We tend to think the Republican Party’s position on climate change should include an acknowledgement that the planet may indeed be warming slightly and that human activity might play a small role in that warming.
But beyond that, the real debate must be what to do about it. As climate thinkers like Bjorn Lomborg have long maintained, many of the elaborate and expensive actions that the Green Left proposes are both inefficient and deeply misguided. Why, for example, spend trillions of dollars in an effort to move global temperatures a fraction of a degree and ruining the global economy in the process when we can instead address issues with far greater benefit to humanity, such as fighting malaria and maintaining a safe and fresh water supply around the globe?
Furthermore, the war that Barack Obama and Joe Biden have been waging on American energy independence has been, as Ramaswamy rightly put it, “a wet blanket” on the American economy. And given that it’s still the economy, stupid, this is the sort of rational environmental territory that Republicans can win on.
In short, the word “hoax” has a nice ring to it, but it’s not going to win us any hotly contested elections.
https://patriotpost.us/articles/99983-the-gops-climate-change-challenge-2023-08-28
****************************************************ULEZ: A green con trick to fleece the motorist
When politicians claim to be 'on the right side of history' it invariably means they are on the wrong side of the present. So it is with London mayor Sadiq Khan, whose roundly hated Ulez extension comes into force today. It is a model of how to alienate the public against green initiatives.
The scheme has been imposed against overwhelming opposition, backed up by spurious (some would say deliberately exaggerated) statistics, and will affect the poorest most.
It is also profoundly undemocratic. Mr Khan's 2021 mayoral manifesto didn't mention the extension, and consultations have shown up to 70 per cent opposition in the affected areas.
Yet, like a despot drunk on his own power, the mayor closes his ears to all dissent, and ploughs on regardless. Most bizarrely, he claims that only climate change deniers, those with vested interests and far-Right conspiracists oppose him. Has he even read the results of his own consultations?
The Ultra Low Emission Zone, which drivers of non-compliant cars are charged £12.50 per day to enter, has been in force in central London since 2019.
It was intended to cut levels of two key air pollutants, nitrogen dioxide and fine particulates, which can cause or aggravate respiratory and cardio-vascular illnesses.
However, a study carried out by Imperial College London in the early weeks of Ulez, found it had had an 'insignificant' effect on particulates and cut NOx levels by just three per cent. Indeed, at several monitoring sites, pollution had risen.
This should have tempered Mr Khan's zeal. Instead, he doubled down, dismissing the study's findings and sticking to his own flawed statistics.
Let's look a little deeper into one of the scariest of these. Mr Khan states: 'Every year 4,000 Londoners die prematurely from air pollution.'
No one apart from him even tries to pretend this is literally true. The figure relies on modelling the reduction in overall life expectancy in London deemed to be the result of air pollution, then converting that calculation into 'equivalent deaths'.
The study claimed each Londoner could be losing up to 2.8 days of life expectancy and roughly equated that to between 3,600 and 4,100 deaths.
It is at best a vague estimate, at worst an educated guess. Yet Mr Khan quotes the 4,000 toll as hard fact. It is scaremongering of the most blatant kind.
Meanwhile, tens of thousands of families and businesses will suffer hardship because of the mayor's hubris.
The poor and elderly are most likely to have older, non-compliant vehicles and least likely to be able to afford a compliant replacement, so will be faced with paying £12.50 a day.
This applies not only to Londoners but also those living in areas bordering the capital – Kent, Surrey and the other Home Counties – who need to enter the zone for business, school runs or shopping.
And while the mayor will rake in £1 billion from this and his other road charging schemes, many pensioners will lose their freedom of movement and may also be cut off from visits.
There is already a furious and growing backlash, as the Uxbridge by-election proved. Everyone wants cleaner air, but this scheme fails to deliver it, serving only to make ordinary people poorer. For all Mr Khan's bluster, it's little more than a money-making racket.
Following the shock Uxbridge defeat, Sir Keir Starmer backtracked on a commitment to bring in clean air zones across the country (Yes, another U-turn).
But with so much money to be made, it's hard to believe he and his virtue-signalling colleagues could resist fleecing motorists even more if they were to win power.
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Net Zero is a revolutionary idea, but not all revolutions are a good idea
There is a saying that revolutionary ideas are first heretical, then they become interesting and controversial, until suddenly they are old hat. Or as Rowan Dean put it, ‘Today’s denounced conspiracy is tomorrow’s undisputed truth.’
So let’s get interesting and controversial about Net Zero.
Net Zero is not necessary, it’s not happening, and it’s not possible until nuclear power is in the mix. In the meantime, why don’t we burn our beautiful black and brown coal that generates the cheapest power in the world?
The push for Net Zero is driven by two propositions. The first is that the increase in global temperatures has to be kept below 1.5 or at most 2 degrees Celsius, and the second is that this warming is being driven by human activities that produce emissions of (mostly) CO2.
From there, everything follows down the chain of Net Zero policies to reduce the production of airborne plant food and a few other things, like animal farts.
What if we test the foundational assumptions? Among critical rationalists inspired by Karl Popper and Bill Bartley, this is called ‘the check on the problem’. Essentially, this check is undertaken to confirm the problem is real and alternative responses (including doing nothing) are on the table for cost-benefit analysis and due diligence.
We want to avoid the process that Roger James observed when the postwar British Labor government was building a New Jerusalem by central planning.
James coined the term ‘solutioneering’ for the process of jumping straight from a perceived problem, usually described as a crisis, to a solution before investigating the problem (if indeed there is one at all), and exploring a range of possible solutions.
Jumping to a solution before clearly formulating what the problem is (or indeed if there is one at all) or how success or failure are to be judged. Achievement of the solution then becomes the goal; and, when opposition develops, the problem becomes how to get the solution accepted, while the question of how best to solve the original problem, if there was one, never gets discussed at all. I call this mistake solutioneering
Anticipated benefits are over-estimated, the costs are under-estimated, everything is urgent, time is of the essence, it will cost more later on if it is delayed.
If all else fails, someone might decide to describe the costs as investments in a ‘glorious future’.
This process is now standard procedure for left-wing and conservative administrations, as though Key Performance Indicators are the number of new programs and the pages of legislation and regulations added to the books.
Running a check on the global warming problem and Net Zero solution reveals some concerning realities.
The first question we have to ask is, has the planet been warming?
If the answer is ‘no’, then go on with business as usual.
If ‘yes’, we require the follow up questions of how much has it warmed and is this a problem?
Some will say the planet has warmed by 1.3 degrees over the last 120 years and this has been a good thing. It may have stopped warming already and another degree or two more in the next century will most likely do more good than harm.
So again, if this is the case, the sensible thing for humanity would be to go on with business as usual, including genuine research in the field of climate science.
Others say that this warming period represents an existential threat and, because it’s our fault, the onus is on Australia to do everything we can to reduce our 1 per cent share of the world’s emissions. Never mind what China, India, and the developing nations are doing.
The next question is a no-brainer, knowing that our efforts will make no measurable difference to the climate of the world. (Alan Finkel told us as much when he was the Chief Scientist.)
Why would we spend a single dollar of public money, let alone a trillion, to press on boldly with decarbonisation?
Admittedly, we have produced a lot of remarkable achievements even at this early stage of the long march.
We have doubled, maybe tripled the cost of power with a lot more to come as we rewire the nation.
Billions of dollars of investment have gone offshore (think balance of payments, jobs, tax revenue, local skills development).
Would anyone dare to add up the cost of the new public entities in Canberra and elsewhere to mastermind and supervise and report on our Net Zero strategies? Would anyone count the new state and federal agencies, the special units in universities, or the grants handed out for new initiatives like carbon capture and pumped hydro? Not to mention hydrogen and green aviation fuel…
Look at the work big consultancies have picked up to advise firms across the nation to implement the data collection and reporting systems to satisfy the demands from every regulatory agency to consider ‘climate risks’ and ESG protocols.
All of the above add to the cost of doing business. They undermine the productivity of the private sector which is the goose that lays the golden tax eggs to pay the bills for government spending.
And there is more. We have seen the corruption of scientific research. The trashing of education from kindergarten to Year 12 and beyond. Then we have the travesty of reporting standards by stenographers and commentators in the mainstream media, especially in the public broadcaster. All this comes as the public starts to lose faith in the CSIRO and Bureau of Meteorology.
Is there any need to go on? All we can do is look forward to the time when everyone says ‘we were always climate and energy realists’.
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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