Automakers Wake Up to Reality on Electric Vehicles
Driving through rural Georgia, I have yet to see an electric vehicle or a charging station. After promising the Biden administration that they would eliminate most of the cars Americans want to buy from dealer lots by 2035, GM and Ford are now waking up to reality. They are cutting back on projections of EV sales and lowering production targets for the cars and batteries.
Ford Chief Financial Officer John Lawler said Thursday on a media call, “Given the dynamic EV environment, we are being judicious about our production and adjusting future capacity to better match market demand.” He announced that Ford is postponing $12 billion of spending and investment on EVs, including a Kentucky battery plant, after it halted its $3.5 billion Michigan-China battery partnership in September.
This follows an announcement by General Motors on Oct. 17 that it is pausing expansion of electric pickups “due to evolving EV demand.”
About 6% of new vehicle sales were electric in 2022, and President Joe Biden wants to bring this share up to 60% in 2030 and 66% in 2032 through regulations from the Department of Transportation and the Environmental Protection Agency. These regulations would penalize automakers for selling gasoline-powered cars. California is going further, requiring all new vehicle sales to be electric after 2035.
But there are four reasons that most Americans prefer to buy cars with internal combustion engines: cost, convenience, climate, and China.
Cost
New electric vehicles cost more than gasoline-powered vehicles. As I drive around the Clayton area (median household income $47,000), I see two-door and four-door pickup trucks, some battered and some shiny.
The electric version of the base version of the Ford F-150 pickup truck, the best-selling vehicle in America, costs an additional $26,000. And Tesla’s base prices start at about $40,000 for a Model 3 and go up to almost $100,000 for a Model X. Few Americans can afford these vehicles.
Convenience
Many people who love their EVs recharge them at home, overnight. But not everyone has a garage at home. Some live in apartments and homes without garages. Many of these people have to rely on charging stations for their EVs if they can’t run extension cords from their residences to the parking lot.
At the local Walmart in nearby Tiger, Georgia, and in local gas stations, I didn’t see any charging stations. A lack of charging stations is a major problem in rural areas. Plus, gasoline-powered cars can be refueled in five or 10 minutes at a gas station. Recharging an electric vehicle can take 45 minutes—or much longer if you want a full charge. If someone is in front of you at the charging station, the wait can double. Most people don’t want to let their EV battery go below 20%, and the charging rate goes down when it is charged over 80%.
Climate
Batteries lose range in cold weather. Many of us have awakened on a cold winter morning to find our car batteries dead and in need of a jump start or a replacement. The American Automobile Association has a fleet of small vehicles whose sole purpose is to rescue troubled motorists in chilly situations.
A study by truck manufacturer Autocar shows that electric vehicles lose, on average, a third of their range in the winter, which reduces the typical 240-mile range to 160 miles. If a heat pump is added to the car, the loss is less, but still, the 240-mile range would shrink to 180.
In cold climates, batteries lose 20% to 40% of their range. That’s one reason only 380 North Dakota residents chose EVs in 2021 and Alaska had just 1,300.
Temperatures got down to 13 degrees in Georgia last Christmas, and it gets hot in the summer. Batteries lose range in weather above 85 degrees, too, according to a study by the electric battery company Recurrent. Additionally, car air conditioning uses electricity, and so the range is lower when the air conditioning is running—something people prefer in hot weather.
China
The forced push to EVs is making America weaker and China stronger, because almost 80% of batteries are made in China.
America is energy independent due to vast resources of oil and natural gas that have been discovered and produced through innovative technology. However, should Biden’s EV goal come to pass, America would become less energy independent and more dependent on China for electric batteries and associated components. One major reason is because China is buying up many of the world’s mines where rare earth minerals used in batteries are found.
As the world has seen from Russia’s cutoff of natural gas supplies to Europe, it is not prudent to rely on an unfriendly country for a vital resource such as energy, because restrictions can raise energy prices and carry disastrous economic and social consequences.
Moreover, the Biden administration’s push for EVs is to supposedly reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But in order to produce supplies of batteries for EVs and other components, China is increasing its construction of coal-fired power plants. America has 225 coal-fired power plants (which the Biden administration is trying to put out of business), and China has 1,118 (half of all the coal-fired plants in the world).
Research by Kevin Dayaratna, chief statistician and senior research fellow at The Heritage Foundation, has shown that even completely eliminating all fossil fuels from the United States would result in less than 0.2 degrees Celsius in temperature mitigation by 2100. (The Daily Signal is Heritage’s news and commentary outlet.)
Biden says that EVs will reduce greenhouse gas emissions and that regulations on tailpipe and power plant emissions reduce global warming. But this is a fantasy. Emissions will not be reduced until the biggest producers of so-called greenhouse gases—China, India, and Russia—reduce their emissions, which they show no signs of doing.
Ford and GM are finally realizing that Americans are smarter than their government and are not buying the EV fantasy. If Georgia is any guide, the automakers’ “pause” on EV investment might end up as a permanent stop.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/10/27/automakers-wake-up-reality-electric-vehicles
******************************************************NOAA Rejects Misguided Gulf of Mexico Vessel Speed Rule
The Biden administration has killed a proposed vessel speed rule in the Gulf of Mexico billed as a measure to protect endangered Rice’s whale.
On October 27th, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Fisheries- housed under the Commerce Department helmed by Secretary Gina Raimondo - announced it was denying this petition filed by radical environmental groups Earthjustice, Natural Resources Defense Council, Center for Biological Diversity, and Defenders of Wildlife.
“NOAA Fisheries denied a petition from several non-government organizations to establish a mandatory 10-knot speed limit and other vessel-related mitigation measures to protect endangered Rice’s whales in the Gulf of Mexico and will not proceed with rulemaking at this time,” the NOAA website fact sheet read. “We have concluded that fundamental conservation tasks, including finalizing the critical habitat designation, drafting a species recovery plan, and conducting a quantitative vessel risk assessment, are all needed before we consider vessel regulations.”
The aforementioned groups filed a petition entitled “Endangered and Threatened Species; Petition To Establish a Vessel Speed Restriction and Other Vessel-Related Measures To Protect Rice's Whales” in May 2021 that blamed commercial and recreational anglers, along with boaters - without citing any concrete evidence - for harming this rare yet recently discovered whale. These groups, unsurprisingly, ignored NOAA Fisheries Marine Recreational Information Program trip data and vessel registration data that determined the likelihood of a recreational vessel striking an endangered whale is “less than one in a million.” Clearly, this draft petition wasn’t following the science.
Had the rule gone into effect, a year-round 11 mph slow-down zone stretching from “Pensacola, Fla. to south of Tampa '' would have been enforced to the detriment of law-abiding anglers and boaters. As I noted here at Townhall in July, this draft rule would have deliberately conflated commercial vessels with recreational ones and would impose unenforceable conditions on recreationists. I wrote, “The rule, if adopted, will bar recreational vessels from hosting overnight offshore trips, mandate observers on all trips in the proposed speed zone, and embolden radical environmentalists to report on “non-compliant” recreational vessels, for instance.``
More concerning, this petition undermined actual conservation work involving anglers and boaters - the true conservationists, unlike the aforementioned environmental groups - to bolster diminishing whale numbers. This is typical of powerful, litigious ambulance chasers masquerading as conservationists.
During the summer, recreational fishing and boating groups expressed their dismay with NOAA over considering this rule. They said adopting such a strident rule would disincentivize stakeholders from assisting with whale conservation efforts.
“As more is learned about the recently-discovered Rice’s whale, it is critical that NOAA focus from the outset on collaborating with stakeholders instead of leaping to drastic restrictions,” said American Sportfishing Association president Glenn Hughes “As an industry that cares deeply about conservation of the marine environment, the recreational fishing and boating industry is ready, willing and able to help develop solutions to support whale conservation. Relying on massive speed restrictions that effectively shut down boating and fishing is not a viable path forward for the Rice’s whale or the economy.”
“This would be a huge detriment to the Western panhandle of Florida and they would really be severely impacted in the number of vessels transiting that area would just be incredible,” said Captain Dyland Hubbard of Hubbard’s Marina in St. Petersburg, Florida. “NOAA Fisheries doesn't have the logistics to be able to handle those phone calls. This would be a huge detriment to NOAA Fisheries and an already strenuous environment where they're underfunded and their budget is maxed out. It would cripple NOAA Fisheries to be able to handle that volume of calls so that's totally impossible. Vessel Safety is a huge concern with this.”
The federal government, unsurprisingly, is aiding and abetting the plight of the Rice’s whale in the Gulf and endangered North Atlantic right whale in the Atlantic Ocean.
Instead of greenlighting questionable offshore wind turbines or regulating vessel speeds, the Biden administration should enhance whale monitoring capabilities instead of exploiting their plight.
Both Fiscal Year 2023 appropriations funds and the Green New Deal lite “Inflation Reduction Act '' gave NOAA Fisheries $82 million to expand whale monitoring programs. Has that program started? Has the money actually been used or not? I’m not confident this administration properly stewards these funds since they prioritize DEI and wokeism above all else.
Some legislative remedies exist to resolve this issue, especially concerning the North Atlantic right whale, without displacing this multibillion-dollar industry.
The Protecting Whales, Human Safety, and the Economy Act of 2023 - co-sponsored by Senators Joe Manchin (D-WV) and John Boozman (R-AR) - would prohibit NOAA from issuing rules “that modifies or replaces the North Atlantic Right Whale vessel strike reduction regulation” until technological solutions are deployed.
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The actual 'climate change' agenda
The latest edition of the State of the Climate Report, published this week in the journal BioScience, begins rather ominously: “Life on planet Earth is under siege. We are now in an uncharted territory.” These sentences are meant to instill abject fear and evoke a sense of doom in the general public. However, they are patently absurd and ought to be disregarded outright.
Like almost every climate change report I’ve come across, the 2023 State of the Climate Report is full of red herrings and bombastic assertions that are intended to alarm the public into believing that climate change is an existential threat that must be stopped at all costs, regardless of the collateral damage and unintended consequences that their so-called solutions would inevitably bring to bear.
But what I find most alarming about this particular report, which 15,000 scientists signed, is the anti-human and anti-progress message that lies at the heart of it.
These messages are most prevalent in the part of the report titled “Scientists’ warning recommendations,” which includes “coordinated efforts” intended to “support a broader agenda focused on holistic and equitable climate policy.”
The authors erroneously claim that “economic growth” is the driver of the climate crisis and that it prevents them from achieving their “social, climate, and biodiversity goals.” Unsurprisingly, they lay the blame on the world’s most prosperous nations, particularly those located in the “global north,” which they argue are preventing the need for “decoupling economic growth from harmful environmental impacts.” As such, they suggest we “change our economy to a system that supports meeting basic needs for all people instead of excessive consumption by the wealthy.” As it turns out, this type of economic system has been implemented many times over, most notably in the Soviet Union. The results, in every single case, were downright dreadful.
In other words, these scientists dismiss the fact that economic growth under a free-market capitalist system, which has produced myriad technological advancements and innovations that have significantly improved the human experience in recent centuries, is a net positive. Casting economic growth and free enterprise in a mostly negative light is ludicrous. Thanks to economic growth over the past few decades alone, humans are living longer than ever before, in less poverty than ever before, are able to communicate across the world in the blink of an eye, and live more comfortably than ever before.
In their misguided worldview, economic growth is a net harm because it does not automatically allocate resources in an equitable manner. Spoiler alert: neither does socialism. Apparently, these scientists are unaware that as President John F. Kennedy famously put it, “a rising tide lifts all boats.”
Aside from their anti-economic growth stance, the authors also recommend “eliminating” “fossil fuels” and “transitioning away from coal” while calling for “funding to build out renewable energy capacity.” Based on statements like these, I wonder if the scientists who produce these types of reports are delusional. If we were to eliminate fossil fuels and stop using coal as a fuel source, the entire global economy would grind to a halt, billions of people would suffer, and millions would die.
But maybe that is the point, or at least a part of it. One of the last recommendations the scientists make is downright chilling: “gradually decrease the human population.”
Make no mistake, for decades, climate-change zealots have been calling for degrowth and depopulation. From Paul Ehrlich to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), the list is too long to catalogue. For some strange reason, this call for depopulation and degrowth is resonating across academia and the illiberal Left. Even worse, it seems to be in vogue among today’s youth.
Across the West or “global north,” birth rates have been declining precipitously. In many countries, including the United States, the birth rate has dropped below the level of replacement.
Sadly, the climate change-industrial complex, a multi-trillion-dollar money machine, has irrevocably corrupted the once-hallowed scientific community. As most scientists know, though are probably less-than-willing to go on record for fear of cancelation and loss of grants and such, climate change is not an existential threat. However, if we unflinchingly take their recommendations as gospel, and plow forward with their idiotic degrowth and depopulation agenda, you better believe humanity will face an existential crisis like none before: the possible extinction of the human species.
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/10/the_actual_climate_change_agenda.html
***************************************************1.5°C Target is ‘Currently Out the Window’ as Global Carbon Budget Shrinks
The world’s available carbon budget is running out faster than scientists expected, meaning that average global warming could routinely exceed 1.5°C by 2029 rather than the mid-2030s, warns a new study published yesterday in the journal Nature Climate Change.
“The window to avoid 1.5°C of warming is shrinking, because we continue to emit and because of our improved understanding of atmospheric physics,” lead author Dr. Robin Lamboll of Imperial College London told the BBC. “We now estimate that we can only afford to release about six years’ worth of current emissions before we are likely to exceed this key Paris agreement reference point.”
Holding average global warming to no more than 1.5°C was the signature goal in the 2015 Paris deal. In its latest assessment report earlier this year, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said countries would have to cut their emissions 43% from 2019 levels by 2030, 60% by 2035, 69% by 2040, and 84% by 2050 for even a 50-50 chance of hitting that target.
But the IPCC’s assessment was limited to scientific papers published through 2020. This week’s study adjusted the carbon budget estimate to include record carbon dioxide emissions over the last three years, along with the impact of other pollutants in the atmosphere.
“One of the most critical are sooty particles called aerosols, which mainly arise from the burning of fossil fuels,” the BBC explains. “They contribute heavily to air pollution but have an unexpected benefit for the climate because they help cool the atmosphere by reflecting sunlight back into space.”
It turns out that cooling impact has been far greater than scientists previously believed, the new paper concludes.
The difference is enough to remove 100 billion tonnes of carbon from a global budget that the IPCC estimated at 500 billion tonnes, the news story states. Add that to the last three years of emissions, and the remaining budget adds up to just 250 billion tonnes—at a moment when human activity is still generating about 40 billion tonnes of CO2 or equivalent per year. To avoid overshooting the 1.5°C target, the paper says, humanity would have to bring emissions to net-zero by 2034—16 years ahead of the 2050 deadline that has been at the core climate policy and action for years.
“There are no socio-technical scenarios globally available in the scientific literature that would support that that is actually possible, or even describe how that would be possible,” study co-author Joeri Rogelj of Imperial College London told the BBC. “So that really shows that having a 50% or higher likelihood that we limit warming to 1.5°C, irrespective of how much political action and policy action there is, is currently out of the window.”
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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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