What Climate Zealots Don’t Understand About EVs and Winter
Here in Wisconsin, where fewer than one-tenth of 1% of vehicles are fully electric, it’s rare to see an EV outside the city.
That’s why the latest international climate conference, Conference of the Parties (COP28), which advocated widespread adoption of electric vehicles, should have Wisconsinites concerned.
When the temperature drops below 40 degrees, which occurs over 200 days per year in Eau Claire, electric vehicles experience a reduction in range and efficiency, with losses of up to 40% when the heating system is in use.
My visit to my local automotive shop to have the tires rotated on the family Ram truck was unaffected by the 13-degree Fahrenheit weather.
While the truck was up on the lift, Liz Fox, a service adviser at the shop, told me that while not many electric vehicles come in for repairs, when they do, repairs typically take longer and are more expensive than repairing internal-combustion engine vehicles.
“Switching to EVs is really costly, and it’s going to be really time-consuming.” Fox told me. She cited a recent case where nearly two months were spent troubleshooting and sourcing components on a broken EV, despite having a certified electric vehicle technician.
She’s not alone. A recent report shows that repair costs for EVs are 56% more expensive than traditional vehicles—and purchase costs are often 50% higher.
A new special report by The Heritage Foundation, “Powering Human Advancement,” shows how access to affordable, abundant energy is essential to living. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)
“Depriving people in any society of reliable and affordable energy denies them access to clean water, adequate medical care, affordable transportation, and economic opportunities, which will limit any human advancement, especially in the most vulnerable of countries,” the report states.
Governments and international organizations cannot force renewable energy and electric vehicles before people are ready. That’s a recipe for crisis.
Construction sites in Eau Claire feature battered pickup trucks and SUVs driven by construction workers, who can’t afford EVs. There is no subway in Eau Claire, bus service is limited, and people can’t rely on bicycles due to snowy weather and long distances.
Affordable transportation provides a means to a job, a ride to school, and to take weekend trips and vacations with the family.
In contrast, EVs are popular as second cars with upper-income individuals who have short commutes. Americans value the freedom to choose gasoline-only, hybrid, or electric vehicles, and for that freedom, it’s crucial to have alternative choices. But the organizers of COP28, supported by President Joe Biden, don’t want Americans or residents of other countries to choose which vehicles to buy.
This erosion of choice is not only detrimental to consumer freedom, but also to the livelihood of auto producers and car dealers. Look no further than last month’s letter to Biden signed by about 4,000 auto dealers, who were disturbed at the surging supply of unsold electric vehicles on their lots.
Even with subsidies to car manufacturers and tax credits for buyers, only 7% of new-vehicle sales are electric, well below Biden’s 2030 goal of 60%.
Codifying the recommendations of COP28 would require that America generate an additional costly 1.4 trillion kilowatt-hours of electricity, or 30% of current output, to support the charging needs of a full fleet of electric vehicles.
Over the past two decades, nearly $7 trillion has been spent globally on subsidies for wind and solar energy. Despite this substantial investment, these sources contribute only 2.3% to the global supply of energy. Pairing fully electric vehicles with costly and unreliable electricity is a recipe for disaster.
Wisconsinites appreciate the benefits of affordable energy and the mobility of gasoline-powered cars. As a cold Christmas approaches, they know that COP28 recommendations won’t fly here in the Badger State.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/12/18/winter-electric-vehicles-dont-mix-wisconsin/
*******************************************Time’s up for Net Zero
In Archimedes’ Fulcrum, Professor Gwythian Prins argues that, in the aftermath of the almost complete failure of the 28th COP climate conference, time is up for Net Zero. Instead, he says we need climate policy “as if the environment really mattered” and shows how small legislative changes could have a major impact on the UK’s prospects.
Professor Prins, a security and energy expert with decades of experience, says that in our increasingly unstable world ‘luxury beliefs’, chief among them Net Zero, must be jettisoned as a matter of urgency. “Its time is over” he says, as COP28 has made clear.
The paper strips everything back to first principles. It reviews the axiomatic flaws in the science of global warming, and explains how the climate change ‘disease’ has been misdiagnosed. It then goes on to consider the decarbonisation ‘medicine’ that has been prescribed and finds that a green energy transition is impossible, transgressing the laws of physics and engineering.
As a result, the medicine is going to be worse than the disease; policies advanced in good faith in a bid to protect Nature will have the opposite effect. As Professor Prins explains:
"The harder Net Zero is pushed, the more it fails. The more it fails, the more it damages the environment, social trust and harmony. It’s high time to supplant eco-religion with reason and evidence. What is to be done? At this geopolitically tense moment, fortune favours the bold. The simplest way is the safest way because it is the most decisive way. That is Archimedes’ Fulcrum – a way to deliver a thermodynamically competent energy transition as if the environment really mattered. Be prepared for some surprises."
https://mailchi.mp/310cd5e6954b/archimedes-fulcrum-times-up-for-net-zero-200092?e=cc88839e92
****************************************************UK Health Security Agency boss criticised for tropical disease claims
A leading expert in mosquito-borne diseases is fiercely critical of Professor Dame Jenny Harries, head of the UK Health Security Agency, calling her recent pronouncements on mosquito-transmitted diseases “entirely fictional” and “shameless”.
Professor Harries was quoted in the media as saying that rising temperatures will make such diseases common in the UK by 2040 because the Asian Tiger Mosquito – which can transmit dengue, chikungunya, zika, yellow fever and other viral diseases – will become established throughout Britain. Dengue will eventually become endemic in London, it is claimed.
But Professor Paul Reiter, retired professor of Insects and Infectious Diseases at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, and a leading specialist in this field, has ridiculed her claims:
“The natural range of the Tiger mosquito, an Asian species, extends from the tropics to regions where mean January temperatures are around minus ten degrees Celsius. Northern strains are able to survive because in late summer, as days grow shorter, the eggs they lay are dormant and remain unhatched until spring arrives”.
Since the late 1970s, there has been rapid global spread of the Tiger mosquito, to the United States, Latin America, Europe and several African countries, probably mainly via the global trade in used tyres. Professor Reiter says that it is beyond doubt that this has nothing to do with temperature.
Professor Reiter has also lambasted fearmongering about the return of malaria, noting that this was once a major cause of death in many parts of England, even during the period that climatologists call the Little Ice Age:
"Shakespeare mentions malaria – “the ague” – thirteen times, so it was clearly once common here. The disease began to decline – for a multitude of reasons – in the mid-nineteenth century, despite the upward trend in global temperatures."
Net Zero Watch director Andrew Montford said:
"This is not the first time we have seen the Civil Service misleading the public in this way. Science is being misused to generate fear and to “nudge” us in a desired direction. This kind of shameful disinformation brings the Civil Service into disrepute."
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Building wind power, canceling coal — it’s all drowning under borrowing costs
Plans to push South Africa and Indonesia off coal sputtered. So have offshore wind farms on the New Jersey and British coasts, and a green hydrogen project in an Italian port city.
Climate projects around the world are sinking because of high borrowing costs driven by interest rates — jeopardizing a major plank of the international effort to prevent the most catastrophic damage from warming temperatures.
Many of the nations gathered at this month’s COP28 climate summit in Dubai, including the United States, have set a goal of tripling global renewable energy capacity by the end of this decade. Such a pledge could be one of a handful of substantial climate actions coming out of the talks, which are embroiled in a standoff over whether governments should commit to phasing out fossil fuels.
But rising interest rates have imperiled these goals.
Interest rates were one reason developers gave for canceling major offshore wind projects in recent months, including two projects near New Jersey by the Danish company Ørsted and a Swedish business’ project in the North Sea. In September, no bidders turned out for a September offshore wind energy auction in the U.K., also related to the effects of higher borrowing costs.
“It’s a very under-appreciated fact how critically, how badly interest rates are impacting our global climate change efforts,” said Sumant Sinha, CEO of the Indian renewable energy developer ReNew. “It’s an innocent bystander in this whole managing the economy and controlling inflation, and people don’t realize that.”
Essentially, persistent rate spikes have scrambled economic fundamentals for large, capital-intensive projects with long repayment periods — the exact type of projects needed if the world wants to hit its goals of massively slashing carbon emissions by mid-century.
The economic climate is also making it harder to wean the world off fossil fuels. Rising rates have made it infeasible to do the debt-refinancing needed to decommission carbon-spewing coal plants, said Joseph Curtin, power and climate managing director at the Rockefeller Foundation. Already, he said, that reality has gummed up tens of billions of dollars that wealthy countries once offered to help nudge South Africa, Indonesia and Vietnam off coal.
The renewables collateral damage
Central banks like the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank have been hiking interest rates to cool inflation, trying to bring it back under control after the pandemic and Russia’s war in Ukraine.
But the moves have, predictably, had spillover effects. Notably for climate watchers, they have steered capital away from developing nations that will contribute a bulk of planet-heating gases in the coming decades.
Renewables investments have cooled steeply enough in the Middle East that consulting firm Wood Mackenzie is forecasting fewer new installations than it previously thought, said Chris Seiple, vice chair of its power and renewables group.
The same effect is slowing onshore wind projects in Asia, a region highly dependent on coal and imported oil and gas, said Mike Taylor, senior analyst with the Abu Dhabi-based International Renewable Energy Association, or IRENA.
Simultaneously, high rates have made costlier renewable projects difficult to finance even in rich countries.
Hydrogen, a source of optimism for blunting the climate impact of heavy industry, doesn’t make financial sense at current rates, Seiple said. Just 7 percent of European hydrogen projects have lined up financing for construction, according to research firm Bloomberg New Energy Finance. Italian energy company Enel abandoned its government-backed green hydrogen project in La Spezia last month.
Shaky financing for renewables is therefore delaying the aggressive clean energy deployment the scientists say is necessary to combat climate change. The rates are a key driver of that newfound instability.
That’s because clean-energy projects typically get most of their capital on the front end, then repay that debt over the years with revenue they get from power customers. The prices the developers can charge are often agreed upon before the financing is finalized, making it hard to withstand fluctuations in the rates.
“The renewable business is completely different than the traditional energy business,” Ramon Mendez, Uruguay’s former energy secretary, said at a news conference Wednesday. “Renewables is just the finance business.”
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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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