By Paul Homewood
Excellent speech from Lord Frost.
The only surprise is that somebody had to stand up and say the obvious!
via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
November 15, 2024 at 03:56AM
Although we are often told from surveys that the majority of people believe that increased CO2 is causing a ‘climate emergency’, their willingness to pay to do something about it is a totally different thing. Of course if someone else is paying the bill they are quite willing to let them.
What is happening at the latest climate conference (COP29) is that a lot of poor countries are demanding payments of large sums of money from the wealthier countries to help them to cope with the so-called emergency. The sums being asked for are so big that they have no hope of reaching them, but, no doubt this is simply to get a lesser sum, which they hope we will think is a ‘good deal’ in comparison. Here is a good video exposing the unfolding disaster
via climate science
November 15, 2024 at 01:45AM
One of Donald Trump’s main campaign themes was ending the federal electric vehicle mandate, which he calls a China-first policy that taxes the electric grid, subsidizes forced labor, and destroys American jobs. This means rescinding Biden Administration subsidies and mandates – but what else will he be able to do?
The worldwide revolt against the one-engine-fits-all strategy long favored by the European Union began in Italy, just two months after the EU struck a provisional deal on a new vehicle emissions law that would have banned the sale of internal combustion engines by 2035.
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s government raised objections to the scheme, as the march toward an EV-only vehicle fleet had already hit the Italian auto industry with job cuts. Transport Minister Matteo Salvini argued that ICE vehicles were already running on carbon-neutral synthetic fuels.
German Finance Minister Christian Lindner then demanded an exception in the EU mandate for hydrogen-derived, carbon-neutral synthetic e-fuels, on which Porsche had already invested $75 million. Germany Transport Minister Volker Wissing, insisting that anyone serious about climate-neutral mobility must rely on all available options, did not understand why anyone would want to “ban some technologies.”
Auto industry veteran Andrew Graves suggested that e-fuels could be the answer for keeping older model ICE vehicles on the road. He also cited the significant risk that there could not be enough EV charging stations or battery manufacturing plants to satisfy demand by 2035.
European automakers found themselves in a losing battle against cheap (subsidized by President Xi’s government) Chinese imports and a declining interest by consumers in battery-electric vehicles. Unherd reported in July that Porsche was scaling back its sales targets for EVs due to a 25% drop-off in sales, admitting that “the transition to electric vehicles will take longer than we assumed.”
In the U.S., a Gallup survey found that the number of Americans not considering an EV had risen while the number considering such a purchase had fallen. President Trump has vowed to make it difficult for the Chinese to sell their EVs in the United States, and European governments also imposed tariffs to try to protect their automakers from total collapse.
General Motors delayed the development of new EV models and postponed the opening of an electric truck factory, while Ford shut down production of its Lightning EV trucks after admitting to losing over $47,000 for each EV it sold.
While many automakers are still building EV passenger vehicles, there is a growing consensus that battery-electric is not the way to go for 18-wheelers and other heavy trucks or even for the pickup trucks that millions rely on to haul smaller loads.
Peter Rawlinson, whose Lucid Motors manufactures luxury EVs, told Axios that internal combustion engines – not battery-electric vehicles – are the only realistic option for pickup trucks. The EV pickup “is the wrong product, and so we’re seeing that companies are not making a viable product by trying to make an electric pickup truck.”
Even before Trump’s November victory, automakers were cutting back on EV production promises made to placate the Biden Administration (and presumably, states like California that have passed stringent EV mandates).
Toyota in early October announced it would delay production of its first U.S.-made electric vehicles at its plant in Georgetown, Kentucky, until 2026, even as it remained committed to an EV SUV plant in Princeton, Indiana, and a lithium-ion battery plant in North Carolina.
Hyundai as of October had started production of its Ioniq 5 electric crossover at a huge plant in Bryan County, Georgia, that will build six EVs for Hyundai, Kia, and Genesis, aided by a battery factory joint venture with LG Energy Solutions. The company anticipated building 300,000 EVs a year, with a maximum capacity of 500,000 a year depending on demand. The facility will also be able to build hybrids, which are much higher on the Trump Administration’s pecking order.
But what happens to the EV market if the subsidies and the mandates are gone? The Biden Administration apparently squandered billions in a purported campaign to build out an EV charging network, and the super-fast charger is largely a mirage as of today. Auto insurance rates for EVs have soared in the wake of spontaneous fires, and growing power outages even in EV-mandate states are another brake on consumer confidence.
During his campaign, President-Elect Trump railed against hydrogen vehicles, which he said were prone to tragic explosions, but automakers from Europe to Asia are already putting hydrogen-powered engines and other new technologies on the market or in heavy development.
While Jaguar Land Rover in the United Kingdom has demanded “more effort” to make buying and owning an electric car more appealing, the industry worldwide is seeing production and sales of EVs in decline – a decline likely to be exacerbated by a subsidy-killing Trump Administration.
The British government, though, remain as committed (if not more so) than the Biden Administration to forcing EVs upon an unwilling public. While short-lived Prime Minister Rishi Sunak extended the deadline from 2030 to 2035 for a total phaseout of ICE engines, the nation is still far from (at just 3.5%) of the 22% minimum EV sales by 2025 and 80% by 2030.
The deeper issue in trying to replace a 125-year-old technology onto a public that today operates 1 billion ICE vehicles is that EVs run on an entirely different platform that is not amenable to other technologies – one very different even from the hybrid engine that works quite well in ICE vehicles. So does hydrogen, and so do e-fuels. Yet some governments still believe that resistance is futile – that their mandates will prevail even against a tidal wave of dissent.
A recent article in Wired speculates that a President Trump will back away in part from his pledge to “end the electric vehicle mandate on day one,” if only to avoid alienating strong supporter and Tesla CEO Elon Musk. Will he go along with the Heritage Foundation’s call for ending EV tax credits and other subsidies and backing away from ever-more-stringent fuel economy standards to level the playing field for ICE vehicles?
Trump has said clearly that he believes there is a place for EVs in the U.S. auto mix while sharply criticizing the ICE-friendly hydrogen-powered vehicle market (even though Tesla now plans to introduce its first hydrogen vehicle in 2026).
What is certain is that Democrats, wedded to an EV-only future, will try to obstruct any effort by the Trump Administration to roll back the Biden mandates, and that some Republicans may join them. Moreover, some of the EV facilities are in states whose votes Trump needed to win in 2024 – and it is difficult for politicians to vote to end the flow of federal cash into their states.
Four principles will likely guide the Trump Administration’s actions on the auto industry in the next several months: (a) tariffs to protect domestic auto industry jobs, (b) fighting against mandates that tilt the playing field toward an EV technology that is both widely unpopular especially for load-carrying vehicles, (c) lowering the overall cost of owning reliable transportation for American consumers, and (d) consumer choice, not government mandates, must drive the auto and truck marketplace.
Duggan Flanakin is a senior policy analyst at the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow who writes on a wide variety of public policy issues.
This article was originally published by RealClearEnergy and made available via RealClearWire.
via Watts Up With That?
November 15, 2024 at 12:05AM
Another alarmist sea level rise/coastal flooding narrative collapses under the weight of observational evidence.
In 1989, the year the U.N. assembled what was to become the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a “senior U.N. environmental official” warned that world leaders, or politicians, needed to enact policies to “solve the greenhouse effect” by the year 2000. If governmental policies were not implemented to reverse the global warming trend within ten years, “entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels.”
Image Source: AP News
A concerning regional setting at the time was Bangladesh, a country with 90 million people residing near coastal areas. The warning specified that “one-sixth of Bangladesh could be flooded, displacing a fourth” of its coastal population (20-25 million people).
But the alarmist warnings were, of course, wildly wrong. The opposite has happened.
A new study, utilizing remote sensing and geographic information system data, finds the total land surface of Bangladesh has expanded from 134,382 km² in 1990 to 137,656 km² by 2022, a 3,274 km² net increase in land area.
The vast majority of this land area expansion has been the consequence of receding relative sea levels along the coasts and synchronous seaward coastal land growth.
In 1990, the Bangladesh coasts measured 17,653 km² along the Bay of Bengal. By 2022, the Bangladesh coasts had expanded to 20,330 km², a 2,677 km² (13.2%) seaward coastal expansion.
Not only have coastal populations not been displaced by rising sea levels, now thousands of more square kilometers of land is above sea level. Bangladesh’s population has swelled to 173 million (2023).
Image Source: Shahid et al., 2024
Coastal land area growth has been occurring not just in Bangladesh, but satellite data reveal that since the 1980s “the coasts are growing all over the world“.
A sample reef island in the Coral Triangle (between SW Sulawesi and the Strait of Makassar) shows “overall shoreline advance has led to a total island area of nearly 23 ha, indicating an increase of ~13% over the last 24 years” (Kappelmann et al., 2024).
A comparison of how relatively smaller the island was in 1897 vs. 2023 (lower right image) demonstrates how much more land area is above sea level today than 125 years ago in this region.
Image Source: Kappelmann et al., 2024
Deltaic regions are home to over 40% of the world’s mangroves. And now another new study indicates “80% of the mangroves’ shorelines are expanding seaward” from 1986 to 2020.
“We found that the total area of mangrove forests display a significant gain with average change rate of 80.8 ha/yr during 1986-2020.”
“Further, the mangrove forest shorelines present an expansion rate of 18.9 m/yr over the past 35 years.”
Image Source: Dai et al., 2024
The alarmist narrative claims global warming means “entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels” in the 21st century. Observations do not support this alarmist narrative.
via NoTricksZone
November 14, 2024 at 08:45PM
