By Jo Nova

Labor wants the poor to subsidize the rich EV car buyers

Good news: The conservative opposition has promised to reduce the fines to zero for car manufacturers who sell “too many” diesel and petrol cars. This effectively negates the New Vehicle Emissions Standards (NVES), even though the Coalition says they will keep the standards (whatever that means).

As standards were racheted up the fines could be as much as $25,000 on the largest utes and 4WDs.

For a nation of petrol-heads, it’s amazing this diabolical policy hasn’t sparked outrage, probably only because it was buried in complexity.  An honest government would have added a fee or a tax directly onto the kinds of cars they didn’t want sold — they could call it a pollution tax to cover the cost of the damage. The reason the Labor Government didn’t do that is because the unwashed masses would be revolting in the streets. So they make a rule that manufacturers have to sell a certain percentage of “good cars” that make future weather nicer (in theory),  and then they can tell abject lies to the public saying “it’s up to the car companies” and “manufacturers don’t have to pass the costs on” — as if any profit making entity can absorb fines of millions without raising prices.

The sole point of the NVES was to punish petrol and diesel car buyers and subsidize EV manufacturers, and pretend the government was not doing the taxing and subsidizing because the money didn’t pass through any bureaucrats hands, even though the sole cause of the money flow was indeed the government.

By Greg  Brown, Sarah Elks, and Joanne Panagopoulis, The Australian

The Coalition will abolish fines for car companies who breach targets under Australia’s first ­vehicle emissions standards scheme, in a major election commitment aimed at taking down the Albanese government’s claim that the price of petrol cars will not increase under Labor’s policy.

The Australian can reveal the Coalition will retain the New Vehicle Emissions Standards, but will not punish companies financially that do not meet the tough carbon goals. Coalition ­sources said the policy, to be announced during the campaign, has the backing of the sector.

Companies that miss the yearly target need to pay heavy fines or buy credits from suppliers that overperform, with industry modelling predicting car suppliers will be on the hook for $2.7bn of fines by the end of the decade.

The effect of the pseudo car tax would be to limit sales of petrol and diesel cars by raising their prices, while reducing EV car prices — a policy that takes money from the poor in the outer suburbs and country areas in order to subsidize cars bought by inner city rich people.

Peter Dutton needs to find short one-liner ways to sell this policy because it’s a vote winner.

The neutered NVES is barely an aspirational fantasy goal without the fines. Presumably the opposition decided to keep it so the Labor Party couldn’t hit them so easily with one-liners that “Liberals don’t care about pollution”. Even though the NVES is purely about CO2 emissions, which are an asset to a dry agricultural nation. The Coalition should axe the NVES entirely. Petrol and diesel drivers help feed the poor.

In the UK, the same sort of rules were already in place, and due to the awful consequences on the car industry, even the untouchable Keir Starmer Government, years away from the next election, is already cutting fines by 20% and exempting British manufacturers like McLaren, Aston Martin and Bentley. Fines in the UK were as high as £15,000 per car, and set to get worse. The UK government has also added in all kinds of what they call “flexibilities” to keep the illusion that they are not back-tracking, while finding excuses to reduce the penalties. But of course, flexibilities are Soviet style complexities that means everyone needs more lawyers and accountants and more bureaucrats. It still feeds The Blob. It’s not the free market that brought the mass production of cheap cars to the unwashed masses in mere decades.

Complexity helps the rich and punishes the poor, it just hides it better. The opposition should wage a war against these deceptive schemes. All the same outcomes could be achieved through honest simpler tax plans. Only liars and cheats want to dupe the voters with hidden subsidies that help the rich.

In its April 7, 2025 article titled Heavier rain is becoming more common in Atlanta, Axios Atlanta claims that “climate change is causing heavier downpours in Atlanta” citing data supplied by Climate Central (CC). This attribution is false. Evidence shows that localized urban factors—not global CO₂ levels—are responsible for the modest increases in rainfall intensity in cities like Atlanta.

In their Axios article, writers Kristal Dixon and Alex Fitzpatrick parrot flawed conclusions previously debunked in a March 2025 analysis from Climate Realism, titled Climate Central’s Misleading Urban Rainfall Claims Are All Wet. Good reporters would have examined the evidence independently, rather than simply uncritically echoing CC’s claims. As shown in that post, CC failed to examine long-term historical context and rested their claims on cherry-picked data for the trends they identify. When a more comprehensive data set is examined, such as that compiled at Climate at a Glance, national U.S. precipitation patterns do not support the idea of a climate-driven rainfall crisis. The U.S. Precipitation page makes clear: while some regional variability exists, no alarming or unprecedented surge in rainfall frequency or intensity is attributable to climate change.

The most glaring flaw that Axios inherits from CC is the complete omission of the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect—a basic and long-documented phenomenon in which urban areas retain more heat than surrounding rural regions due to asphalt, concrete, and reduced vegetation. This localized warming creates increased upward convection providing the potential for increased storms in particular locations. Cities like Atlanta are textbook examples of UHI impact as seen in the side-by-side images below.

These paired satellite images, taken in 2000, illustrate the UHI in Atlanta, Georgia. The image on the left is essentially a photo, in which green areas are covered by vegetation, grey areas by built surfaces (pavement and buildings) and brownish areas by bare soil. The image on the right shows land surface temperatures (with a scale). You can see that urban development increases surface temperatures. Source: NASA Earth Observatory

Attributing localized effects to supposed human caused global climate change, while ignoring the critical role urbanization plays seems less of an oversight and more like deliberate misdirection in support of the “climate change causes everything bad” narrative.

Urban areas don’t just heat up differently—they also pollute differently. Cities like Atlanta produce higher levels of particulate matter from vehicles, industrial activity, and heating systems. These particles serve as condensation nuclei, which facilitate cloud formation and rainfall. A 2004 study published in Nature, “Enhanced precipitation due to aerosol effects”, documents this effect, showing how increased aerosols intensify rainfall in heavily polluted areas. These findings have been corroborated in urban studies published by the American Meteorological Society, such as “Urban Influences on Cloud and Precipitation”, which demonstrate how cities create their own microclimates capable of amplifying rainfall—entirely independent of CO₂-driven global climate change.

The rainfall trend that CC and Axios are attributing to “climate change” is more accurately explained by localized human impacts — not emissions from a coal plant in China or a car in Kansas, but heat-retaining surfaces and pollution within the very cities under discussion.

It’s disappointing, but sadly unsurprising, to see Axios uncritically report CC’s dubious climate change attribution for Atlanta’s recent rainfall trends as if it were a proven fact.

Climate Central continues to push a simplistic narrative that ignores fundamental atmospheric physics, misuses regional data, and omits well-established meteorological processes like UHI and aerosol-induced rainfall. Until outlets like Axios start exercising at least a minimal amount of journalistic investigative curiosity, and scrutinize claims made by climate activists that humans are causing changes to the weather, they’re complicit in spreading misinformation, misleading the public concerning the causes and consequences of climate change. This isn’t science, it is narrative engineering in service to a socio-political agenda.

Anthony Watts

Anthony Watts is a senior fellow for environment and climate at The Heartland Institute. Watts has been in the weather business both in front of, and behind the camera as an on-air television meteorologist since 1978, and currently does daily radio forecasts. He has created weather graphics presentation systems for television, specialized weather instrumentation, as well as co-authored peer-reviewed papers on climate issues. He operates the most viewed website in the world on climate, the award-winning website wattsupwiththat.com.

Originally posted at ClimateREALISM