The UK car industry has pleaded with the chancellor to help get the transition to electric vehicles (EVs) back on track when he delivers his budget next week, accusing the government of creating an own goal.
The Society for Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT) said it was clear that the decision to delay the ban on the sale of new cars powered by petrol and diesel to 2035, announced by Rishi Sunak in September last year, had backfired.
The industry had been targeting a 2030 deadline before the government’s U-turn, on cost grounds, and warned at the time that the move would damage investment and prove a backwards step in efforts to combat climate change.
The SMMT said on Friday that while the UK electric vehicle market remained the second-largest in Europe by volume, sales were lagging levels that had been expected before the government’s delay.
It reported that private EV uptake was 19% down year on year in 2023 after the end of consumer incentives.
A survey for the body showed that almost half of would-be EV buyers now planned to wait until after 2030 to switch – compared with one in 10 last year.
The up-front cost was the main barrier, the SMMT said.
What is the point of the SMMT? It clearly does not represent the interests of motor manufacturers or drivers. Instead it continually obsesses about Net Zero.
EVs are already heavily subsidised. The fact EV drivers don’t have to pay fuel duty already hands than a subsidy of £1000 or so. Other subsidies to business and fleet buyers cost taxpayers billions more. Why then should taxpayers fork out yet more?
It must surely be clear to a blind man that drivers simply don’t want useless electric cars. And the idea that delaying the ban until 2035 has discouraged people from buying them now shows just how out of touch with the real world the SMMT is.
It is time the SMMT woke up to the reality of the harm being done by EV mandates and ICE bans, and started campaigning for the right of drivers to buy the cars they want.
At stake in the European elections in June this year will be everything that defines the modern EU: a large volume of net zero legislation, a values-based foreign policy, and ever-more intrusive business regulation.
Polls suggest the centrist majority that has supported these policies is growing slimmer. [emphasis, links added]
Ursula von der Leyen [pictured above] has been the quintessential representative of that majority. Born in Brussels, German by nationality, proposed by France, she was the perfect candidate for European Commission president in late 2019.
Now she is seeking a second term. Whether she will succeed will depend to a large extent on whether the centrist four-party coalition that supported her in 2019 will hold.
The far right is part of that response, but the main political shift has been inside Von der Leyen’s own political group, the European People’s Party (EPP), of which the German CDU/CSU is the largest member.
This backlash follows one of the most hectic political phases in recent EU history. When Covid struck in early 2020, Von der Leyen was instrumental in setting up the EU’s recovery fund to help countries deal with the economic consequences of the pandemic.
Then came the Green Deal, a hefty tranche of legislation on renewable energy, land use, forestry, energy efficiency, emission standards for cars and trucks, and a directive on energy taxes.
There was also a tightening of standards on pesticides, air quality, water pollution, and wastewater.
Farmers are resisting this program because it affects their livelihoods. Industrialists, too, are unhappy. A big part of the Green Deal was its industrial policy; the flagship legislation was the Net Zero Industry Act.
The industry used to be the EU’s strongest supporter.
But with the new laws came new bureaucracy: now, all EU-funded investment must include a green component of at least 30 percent, while a carbon border adjustment mechanism, to take effect in 2026, will penalize imports that do not meet EU carbon-emission standards. Together, EU legislation in the last few years amounts to a near-total corporate regime change.
Compliance with some regulations is virtually impossible for companies without dedicated legal teams. It is going to get worse.
Under discussion right now is a supply-chain law that would make European companies responsible for human rights abuses in their supply chain– including the suppliers of their suppliers.
It is instructive to look at what happened to Green politics in Germany. The coalition of the center-left SPD, the Greens, and the liberal FDP started with great enthusiasm in 2021 but is now hopelessly divided.
They depict them as members of metropolitan elites forcing their urban values on rural communities. The language suggests parallels with Brexit. As the EU is associated with partisan policies of the center-left, opposition to those policies and opposition to the EU are starting to merge.
It was the sudden abolition of a diesel subsidy for agricultural vehicles that led farmers to protest in Germany. But their discontent goes deeper.
A consequence of this is that the centrist coalition is no longer viable. This is a healthy development. When centrist parties always form coalitions with one another, we should not be surprised to see parties emerge on the fringes.
The centrists’ reaction to the rise of the far right has been to erect firewalls – by simply refusing to engage with such parties.
This might work to begin with. But when the far right exceeds certain thresholds in support, as it has in Germany, such firewalls cannot withstand the electoral arithmetic.
In Brussels, the firewall is cracking. The EPP has already opened up to the European Conservatives and Reformists group, whose most influential member is Giorgia Meloni, the hard-right Italian prime minister, who has said she will support Von der Leyen.
Meloni’s big issue is immigration: I would not rule out the idea of Von der Leyen once again assembling a majority; what I struggle to imagine is a coalition that encompasses both the left and Meloni.
It is not clear whether Renew Europe, the liberal grouping in the European Parliament, will still support Von der Leyen. Support for liberal parties is weakening everywhere, including in France.
Mark Rutte’s Party for Freedom and Democracy lost last year’s election in the Netherlands. The German FDP is fighting for its political survival within the coalition in Berlin. Von der Leyen’s hyperactive green industrial agenda is the antithesis of what conservative-liberal parties such as the FDP are standing for.
And herein lies the ultimate irony. If Ursula von der Leyen were to win a second term, she would spend most of it undoing what she did in her first.
Another idea for slaying imaginary climate dragons runs into trouble, as new research finds ‘an intervention that cools the air would not be able to cool the deep ocean on the same timescale’. So for believers in a climate crisis the desired short-term effectiveness just isn’t there.
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Climate change is heating the oceans, altering currents and circulation patterns responsible for regulating climate on a global scale [Talkshop comment – empty assertions]. If temperatures dropped, some of that damage could theoretically [sic] be undone.
But employing “emergency” atmospheric geoengineering later this century in the face of continuous high carbon emissions would not be able to reverse changes to ocean currents, a new study finds.
This would critically curtail the intervention’s potential effectiveness on human-relevant timescales.
Oceans, especially the deep oceans, absorb and lose heat more slowly than the atmosphere, so an intervention that cools the air would not be able to cool the deep ocean on the same timescale, the authors found.
Stratospheric aerosol injection is a commonly discussed geoengineering concept based on the idea that adding particles to the stratosphere could help cool the surface of the planet by reflecting sunlight back into space.
This could help stabilize the planet if warming exceeds the 1.5 degree Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) cap set by the Paris Climate Agreement, which the planet is on track to exceed under current emission rates. (Global temperatures surpassed that threshold for several months in 2023 due to a combination of factors in addition to climate change, such as El Niño.)
But whether the injections would work is still heavily debated.
Previous research hints that a steady trickle of aerosol injections would help cool the surface of the planet. But the new study suggests that while an abrupt aerosol injection later this century could provide some ocean cooling, it wouldn’t be enough to nudge “stubborn” ocean patterns such as Atlantic meridional overturning circulation, which some research finds is already weakening.
In that case, preexisting problems resulting from a warmed deep ocean, such as altered weather patterns, regional sea level rise and weakened currents, would remain in place even as the atmosphere and surface ocean cooled.
“The big picture result is that we believe we can control the surface temperature of the Earth, but other components of the climate system will not be so fast to respond,” said Daniel Pflüger, a physical oceanographer at Utrecht University who led the study. “We need to bring down emissions as fast as possible. We’re only talking about geoengineering because the political will for emission mitigation is lacking.”
The study was published in Geophysical Research Letters, AGU’s journal for high-impact, short-format reports with immediate implications spanning all Earth and space sciences.
Warm planet, wild swings
Scientists know the surface of the planet can cool when large volumes of particles are added to the atmosphere because of events such as volcanic eruptions, which naturally emit gases and fine particles. For instance, in 1815, an eruption at Mt. Tambora in Indonesia launched so much material into the air that it cooled the planet the following year.
Aerosol injection is based on a similar principle whereby the atmosphere is made more reflective to send incoming solar radiation back into space, cooling the planet.
. . .
The extreme climate situations modeled here are neither desirable nor likely, Pflüger said. But they provide a good baseline for understanding how Earth systems react to aerosol injections. Ultimately, geoengineering can be useful — but it cannot be the whole solution, he said.
Relying on geoengineering is “in a way, madness,” Pflüger said. “But the situation is already quite mad.”
Full article here.
– – – Image: Oceanic conveyor belt [Source: Wikipedia]
Thermometer readings at rural Haverhill, Massachusetts show cooling, but NOAA tampers with the data to create a 4.3F/century warming trend. Older temperatures at Haverhill are cooled by 4.6F, and recent temperatures are warmed as much as 1.2F.
Iowa Climate Science Education 