China car dilemma: Beijing wants electric, buyers want SUVs

via Tallbloke’s Talkshop
http://ift.tt/1WIzElD

China’s BYD F3DM plug-in hybrid [image credit: Mariordo]

Scare stories about man-made global warming or even city pollution cut little ice with Chinese car buyers. The high cost of battery power and/or fear of running out of it on their journeys – range anxiety – seem more of a concern.

Automakers face a dilemma in China’s huge but crowded market: Regulators are pushing them to sell electric cars, but buyers want gas-guzzling SUVs, says Phys.org.

The industry is rattled by Beijing’s proposal to require that electric cars make up 8 percent of every brand’s production as soon as next year. Consumers are steering the other way: First-quarter SUV sales soared 21 percent from a year earlier to 2.4 million, while electric vehicle purchases sank 4.4 percent to just 55,929.

“It’s tough for someone with an EV to come and take away market share from SUVs,” said Ben Cavender of China Market Research Group.

The Shanghai auto show, which opens to the public on Friday, will showcase work on electric models meant to appeal to Chinese drivers who are wary of the unfamiliar technology’s reliability and cost.

The pressure for electrification in China is an added headache for automakers at a time when sales growth is slowing and competition heating up in a market they are counting on to drive global revenue.

Sales growth fell to 1.7 percent in March from last year’s 15 percent. SUVs made up 40 percent of sales, while sedan purchases fell 4.9 percent.

At the Shanghai show, the industry’s biggest marketing event this year, almost every global and Chinese brand plans to display at least an electric concept car, if not a model ready for sale, alongside its latest SUVs and sedans.
. . .
Government planners see electric vehicles as a sector where China can lead, and a Cabinet technology development plan issued in 2013 calls for two of the top global brands in 2025 to be Chinese.

Hence the proposal, released in September, calling for electric or gasoline-electric hybrids to make up 8 percent of every automaker’s output next year. That would rise to 10 percent in 2019 and 12 percent in 2020.

Manufacturers failing to meet those targets could buy credits from companies that produce more electrics, helping to subsidize development.

People in the industry say manufacturers have warned Beijing those targets are too ambitious. News reports say regulators might have agreed to lower or delay them in an updated plan due out this year, but there has been no official confirmation.

Full report: China car dilemma: Beijing wants electric, buyers want SUVs | Phys.org

via Tallbloke’s Talkshop http://ift.tt/1WIzElD

April 16, 2017 at 08:39PM

Coal’s Colossal Comeback

via The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF)
http://www.thegwpf.com

President Trump is the king of coal.

Buried in an otherwise humdrum jobs report for March was the jaw-dropping pronouncement by the Labor Department that mining jobs in America were up by 11,000 in March. Since the low point in October 2016 and following years of painful layoffs in the mining industry, the mining sector has added 35,000 jobs.

What a turnaround. ‎It comes at a time when liberals have been saying that Donald Trump has been lying to the American people when he has said that he can bring coal jobs back. Well, so far he has brought them back.

There’s more good news for the coal industry. Earlier this month, Peabody Coal — America’s largest coal producer — moved out of bankruptcy, and its stock is actively trading again. Its market cap had sunk by almost 90 percent, during the Obama years. Arch Coal is also out of bankruptcy.

It turns out that elections do have consequences, after all. Regime change in Washington has brought King Coal back to life since late 2016 when coal production had fallen by almost half from its peak. The Obama administration and its allies like the Sierra Club tried to kill coal, because of their hyper-obsession with global warming. The Trump administration pledged to coal miners in small towns across America in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, West Virginia and Wyoming that he would be a friend to American coal and fossil fuels.

As promised, Trump has lifted the so-called Clean Power Plant regulations and several other EPA rules that were intentionally designed to kill coal jobs (and thousands more in related industries like trucking and steel) and shutter coal plants, which they accomplished with ruthless precision. Hillary had promised her green allies that she would finish off every last coal mining job in America.

The coal miners weren’t too happy about this, and her arrogant disregard for a leading American industry that hires tens of thousands of union workers contributed to her losses in almost all the coal states — many of which were once reliably ‎Democratic.

America was built on cheap and abundant coal. Fossil fuels powered the U.S. into the industrial age and replaced inefficient windmills and woodburning as the primary sources of electricity. America currently has access to 500 years’ worth of coal — far more than any other nation. Even despite the last decade’s war on coal during the Obama years, the U.S. still derives about one third of our power from coal — second only to natural gas.

Coal is indispensable today, even if renewable “green” energy starts to catch on, because wind and solar power are only viable with coal burning power plants as a backup for when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine. Without coal, green energy means rolling blackouts across America.

Liberals have argued that coal could never make a comeback because of cheap natural gas. Clearly, the shale gas revolution with prices falling from $10 to $3 per million cubic feet has hurt coal producers.

But economic necessity is the mother of invention, and coal companies like Peabody have figured out how to become far more efficient in their production. What’s more, clean coal is here. Emissions from coal plants of lead, sulfur, carbon monoxide, and other air pollutants have fallen by more than half and, in some cases, by 90 percent in recent decades.

The climate change industrial complex pontificates that the U.S. has to stop using coal to save the planet. But even if the U.S. cut our own coal production to zero, China and India are building hundreds of coal plants. ‎By not suspending American coal production, we are merely transferring jobs from the U.S. Do liberals care more about jobs in India and China than in America?

Renewable energy is at best one or two decades away from being a major energy source for the world, so until that happens, coal and natural gas will compete as low-priced and super-abundant, domestically produced energy sources for 21st century America. Nuclear power will hopefully continue to play an important role, too. Meanwhile, for all the talk of the increase in wind and solar industries, they still account for less than 5 percent of our energy. Almost 70 percent comes from natural gas and coal.

Coal isn’t dead in America. It is unleashed. As a Washington Times editorial put it very well recently, “The left gave up on the 100,000 coal workers in America more than a decade ago. Donald Trump has not.” Remember this the next time Elizabeth Warren or Nancy Pelosi lecture us about how much they care about the working class in America.

Full post

via The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF) http://www.thegwpf.com

April 16, 2017 at 08:34PM

Matt Ridley: Europe’s Age Of Unreason Harms Its Wildlife

via The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF)
http://www.thegwpf.com

The Commission’s blinkered approach to insecticides shows how basic science is losing out to lobbyists and bureaucrats

Is the European Commission determined to dim the Enlightenment? I ask this because its behaviour in one specific instance goes so utterly with dogma and against evidence as to suggest that there is no longer even a pretence of respect for reason left in Brussels. It concerns bees.

In 2013, you may recall, the European Union banned some uses of neonicotinoid insecticides to save bees. The verdict on this policy has now come in, from the commission’s own Joint Research Centre (JRC), whose job is to provide independent scientific advice to support EU policy. I have seen the commission’s internal report plus a PowerPoint summary that was shown privately to MEPs. Its conclusion is that the ban has been disastrously counterproductive, resulting in an increased use throughout the continent of more damaging pesticides, mainly pyrethroids, which are sprayed on rather than seed-treated (worse for non-pests) and are especially harmful to aquatic life. It finds the ban has had no benefit at all for bees.

In Britain, for example, the study finds that farmers have more than quadrupled the number of insecticide applications on oil-seed rape (from 0.7 to 3.4 per growing season), but pest pressure has increased. Meanwhile, recent studies have demonstrated that declines among wild bees are driven mostly by land use changes and have not increased since neonics were introduced in the 1990s. In fact, a 2015 study published in Nature Communications found that those wild bees most often found in agricultural areas — and probably most exposed to neonics — are “common” and “dominant”.

This makes sense because neonics are mostly used as seed dressings, absorbed into the plant from germination, rather than sprayed on a growing crop. This makes them more lethal to pests such as flea beetles that eat the crop but less dangerous to innocent bystanders, including bees that collect pollen and encounter lower doses. (To declare an interest, I own a farm, which does not grow oil-seed rape but does use neonics to protect wheat. My pride and joy is to have created a new 40-acre wildflower meadow, which is buzzing with bees all summer.)

What has the commission decided to do in response to the news that its policy has been bad for wildlife? Suppress the JRC report and double down, of course. It is refusing to release the report and has (I hear) told the JRC that the centre will have to publish it itself in a journal, which would take months and, crucially, delay publication until after an appeal against the ban at the European Court of Justice is concluded. The commission fears it will lose the case, so it has leaked to friendly reporters at The Guardian and Politico (via the activist Pesticide Action Network) that it intends to push forward with a full ban on neonics, except in greenhouses. The original 2013 ban was on seed treatments and other uses on bee-attractive crops. The leak suggests the full ban would be imposed in May — months before the final decision was to be made this autumn. It apparently wants to get the ban in place before the evidence that it is mistaken reaches the public. The leak was probably intended to keep pressure on the ECJ to rule in the commission’s favour. […]

David Zaruk, a Brussels-based academic, has been documenting the extent to which Europe has become a playground for American green NGOs. European policy is based on hazard, not risk; it measures whether something can cause harm no matter what the exposure. That, along with an extreme interpretation of the precautionary principle (to consider the hazard, but not the benefit, of any innovation), makes it much easier to get things banned in Europe than in America, where lawyers put up a fight. Hence the way US activists now start their campaigns in Europe. Zaruk says: “If you can ban your target substances (glyphosate and certain neonicotinoids are the flavours of the month) in the influence-rich but lawyer-weak left-leaning European Commission, you then take that feather in your cap back to DC and try to build regulatory momentum.”

Perhaps the European Food Safety Agency should drop the pretence that its regulatory decisions are based on science and admit that EU regulations on the environment and health are political determinations driven by whoever can create the most pressure on bureaucrats and politicians, which is almost always these days anti-science NGOs with their vast and subsidised budgets. For those who would prefer we do without insecticides altogether: great idea, but we missed that bus 20 years ago when we turned our back on genetically modified crops. Insect-resistant GM cotton and maize have boomed elsewhere, but work on European crops largely ceased at the behest of the environmentalists.

Full post

see also BeeGate: How Green Campaigners Subverted Science

via The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF) http://www.thegwpf.com

April 16, 2017 at 08:13PM

Victory in Vermont: Community Defenders Crush Wind Power Outfit’s Plan to Destroy Pristine Mountain Range

via STOP THESE THINGS
http://ift.tt/2kE7k62

*** STT has covered the fight by Vermonters to save their pristine Green Mountains from the scourge of industrial wind turbines, many times. In this post we share in their delight, as they celebrate their successful battle to save the Herrick Mountain range in Ira and Poultney, next to Birdseye Mountain from 60 of these […]

via STOP THESE THINGS http://ift.tt/2kE7k62

April 16, 2017 at 07:31PM