EV's, Reliable Power, et al

[Herman]

Just another reason why electric cars are never going to be good for the masses.  A minor fender bender turns into a $42,000 repair bill.  Also remember batteries need to be replaced every 8-10 years and cost $25,000-$35,000.



https://www.thedrive.com/news/rivian-r1t-fender-bender-turns-into-42000-repair-bill">https://www.thedrive.com/news/rivian-r1 ... epair-bill">https://www.thedrive.com/news/rivian-r1t-fender-bender-turns-into-42000-repair-bill

They will always be a rich man's virtue signalling toy. The masses aint going to be driving them. But, that is the point. Prog money does not want working folks having mobility freedom.

[Oerdin]

So true.

[Herman]

Electric cars are forcing up the price of all cars in Canada.



https://financialpost.com/transportation/autos/why-cars-so-expensive-canada-today?fbclid=IwAR27-HyiG6Tc084YzJ1x9nHKKfY6PUPJhnnlpvLk3q9va5_SCHFYdZ1JWd0">https://financialpost.com/transportatio ... HFYdZ1JWd0">https://financialpost.com/transportation/autos/why-cars-so-expensive-canada-today?fbclid=IwAR27-HyiG6Tc084YzJ1x9nHKKfY6PUPJhnnlpvLk3q9va5_SCHFYdZ1JWd0

How expensive are cars in Canada today? In the first quarter of 2023, a new vehicle cost $61,000 on average and a used vehicle cost $39,000 on average.



That's up from about $45,000 and $26,000, respectively, in the first quarter of 2021.



This week on Down to Business, Charles Bernard, lead economist for the Canadian Automobile Dealers Association in Ottawa, a trade and lobbying organization for dealerships, spoke about the forces causing vehicle prices to rise.



Discussions about price inflation often begin with a conversation about how the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted global supply chains and Bernard said the auto industry has certainly been affected by mismatched supply and demand and lately a shortage of semiconductor chips.



But electric vehicle transition is also having inflationary impacts, which is acutely affecting dealerships. As always the interview is edited for clarity and brevity.

[Odinson]

A hybrid lit up like a torch again... On the road.



These things are death-traps.

[Shen Li]

A hybrid lit up like a torch again... On the road.



These things are death-traps.

They're saving the planet. ac_toofunny  ac_lmfao  

[Oerdin]

A hybrid lit up like a torch again... On the road.



These things are death-traps.

ADV China had an episode about how common it is for Chinese brand E.V.s to burst into flames 2hich no one can put out.

[Oerdin]

[Oerdin]

https://twitter.com/TheBabylonBee/status/1660003717754634240">https://twitter.com/TheBabylonBee/statu ... 7754634240">https://twitter.com/TheBabylonBee/status/1660003717754634240

[DKG]

Even climate alarmist think tanks acknowledge Trudeau's climate obsession will cost Canadians a lot more than what he says it will.



Net zero will cost a lot more than $100 billion

If sensible public policies are to be implemented to address climate-related issues, Canadians need realistic and credible information



A new study done by the Public Policy Forum in conjunction with Navius Research compares the costs of different approaches to net-zero emissions. The discussion surrounding this study has emphasized the "$100-billion difference," which makes it seem as if attaining net zero will cost Canada $100 billion in lost GDP in 2050, with $60 billion of that, the study says, occurring in Alberta. A "$100-billion difference" in the context of what will be a $3.5 trillion-dollar economy by 2050 probably implied to some people that the cost is too small to worry about.



Unfortunately, this gives a misleading indication of what the PPF/Navius analysis actually found. What the study in fact did was to estimate the difference in costs among three different net-zero scenarios, with costs measured in reduced GDP in 2050. But it did not estimate "the cost of net zero." Hardly anyone does!



In the first scenario examined, emissions reductions are achieved on the basis of "announced policy," that is, the federal government's 2022 Emissions Reduction Plan (ERP), which even Ottawa acknowledges will not fully attain net zero without additional measures. In the second, "accelerated scenario," emissions reductions are achieved on the basis of the ERP, plus an economy-wide cap on net-zero emissions in 2050. Finally, the third scenario adds an explicit phase-out of oil and gas production starting in 2035 and reaching a 95 per cent reduction from 2015 levels by 2050. This third option was proposed by the International Institute for Sustainable Development, Environmental Defence Canada and the Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance.



In summary, the three cases studied were: option one, the policy status quo; option two, the status quo plus a 2050 economy-wide net-zero cap; and option three, the status quo, plus the 2050 net-zero cap plus a phase-out of oil and gas starting in 2035.[size=150] There was no option zero, however — no examination of Canada not pursuing net zero.

[/size]

The report concluded that option two (the status quo plus the net-zero cap) would reduce Canada's GDP by $200 billion in 2050 compared to just the policy status quo, while option three, adding in the complete phase-out of Canada's oil and gas production, would increase the loss in 2050 to $300 billion.



The $100-billion figure you may have heard about thus refers to the difference in costs between options two and three. The PPF report concluded that this extra $100 billion was not justified by the in fact rather small additional emissions reductions from phasing out oil and gas production.



And that's true even though their estimate of the incremental cost of phasing out oil and gas production is almost certainly too low. According to a statistical overview by the Ivey Business School, in 2019 Canada's oil and gas industry alone accounted for almost $150 billion in GDP, or 7.5 per cent of Canada's total. Wiping it out all but entirely should produce a loss at least in that range, as well as further costs all across the Canadian economy. That [size=150]even the Public Policy Forum, which has been an active advocate for net zero, thinks wiping out oil and gas would be a mistake should be an important source of moderation in Ottawa's clampdown on the industry.[/size]



But what's also important to realize is that the PPF/Navius report did not present an estimate of the policy status quo compared to rejecting non zero as a policy objective. So its numbers are in no way an estimate of "the cost of net zero." They are estimates of different variants of a policy aimed at achieving net zero.



Another shortcoming of the report is that it focused on the reduction in GDP in 2050 and did not report the accumulated reduction in Canadian incomes from today through 2050. Nor did it include any analysis of the costs of the technologies that would be required for Canada to reach the proposed net-zero target.



In 2021, Navius did publish a report "Achieving net zero emissions by 2050 in Canada." But it gave no consideration to a scenario in which Canada abandoned the net-zero objective. In other words, it did not assess the full costs of net zero to Canada. The Royal Bank of Canada, in a 2021 report, did project that [size=150]attaining net zero by 2050 would cost Canada $2 trillion[/size], though there are reasons to think that estimate is too low.



If sensible public policies are to be implemented to address climate-related and other environment-economy issues, Canadians need realistic and credible information. So far they haven't been given it.

https://financialpost.com/opinion/net-zero-cost-alot-more-than-100-billion?fbclid=IwAR32TfuvRiLAylYphDRVqnBB9vLcjJPQyFKP2AS14Yg-GYkvrRsbMVwY0pY">https://financialpost.com/opinion/net-z ... RsbMVwY0pY">https://financialpost.com/opinion/net-zero-cost-alot-more-than-100-billion?fbclid=IwAR32TfuvRiLAylYphDRVqnBB9vLcjJPQyFKP2AS14Yg-GYkvrRsbMVwY0pY

[Oerdin]

Chinese EVs are unsafe as hell.  Air bags that don't work, batteries that blow up and can't be put out, self driving which crashes, and, of course, everything is poorly put together and breaks in no time.

[DKG]

Chinese EVs are unsafe as hell.  Air bags that don't work, batteries that blow up and can't be put out, self driving which crashes, and, of course, everything is poorly put together and breaks in no time.

[Oerdin]

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/electric-trucks-are-worse-than-diesel-trucks/">https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/e ... el-trucks/">https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/electric-trucks-are-worse-than-diesel-trucks/



It turns out electric trucks suck and are worse than Diesel.  Basically physics is against them and they are less energy efficient because of their size and the weights being moved.  This is a fundamental weakness which will not be solved with any current technology.

[Adolf Oliver Bush]

Check it out - diesel powered windfarms!

[Herman]

Check it out - diesel powered windfarms!

[DKG]

Sreven Guilbeault is neither a scientist or an economist. The more pain he inflicts the better. Canadians are the sacrificial lambs in his pointless climate crusade.



The Social Cost of Carbon game

Estimates of the SCC championed by Guilbeault are not science



Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault recently announced that the Social Cost of Carbon (SCC), or the dollar value of supposed damages associated with each tonne of carbon dioxide emissions, is about $247, nearly five times higher than the old estimate of $54. He made it sound like a discovery, as if a bunch of experts had finally been able to measure something they previously only guessed at. Like when scientists were finally able to measure the mass of an electron or the age of the Earth, now finally we can measure the SCC.



But in reality there has been no breakthrough in economics comparable to those physics breakthroughs. Countless SCC estimates already exist ranging from small negative amounts (i.e. carbon dioxide emissions are beneficial) to many thousands of dollars per tonne. Every such estimate is like a complex "if-then" statement: if the following assumptions hold, then the SCC is $X. Yale economist William Nordhaus won the 2018 Nobel Memorial Prize in economics for developing some of the first methods for combining all the "if" statements into systems called Integrated Assessment Models or IAMs. And using conventional economic and climate modelling methods, he tended to get pretty low SCC values over the years, which has long been a sore point among climate activists and the politicians who share their agenda.



But economists are on the case. The $247 figure referenced by Guilbeault comes from a new report from the Biden administration that tossed out all the previous models, including Nordhaus's, and instead cobbled together a set of new models that when run together yield much higher SCC values.



In many ways the new models are just like the old ones. For example they persist in using an Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity of 3 degrees C. This refers to the warming expected from doubling the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. The authors cite the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as the basis for this decision, apparently unaware that that estimate has already been shown in the climate literature to be flawed. Using the IPCC's own method on updated data yields a sensitivity estimate of about 2.2 C or less, and as I have shown in a recent publication this is enough to cause the SCC estimate in a standard model to drop to nearly zero.



The biggest boosts to the new SCC figure hailed by Guilbeault come from revisions to agricultural productivity impacts and mortality costs from climate warming. The evidence for large negative agricultural impacts comes from a 2017 article by Frances Moore and co-authors that looked at the combined effects of CO2 fertilization and warming, concluding the net effect would harm global agriculture. Oddly, they used the same data as a 2014 study by Andrew Challinor and co-authors who had found the opposite: the combination of increased CO2 and warming would have much more benign, and in some cases even beneficial, results.



How did Moore et al. get different results from the same data? They used a different statistical model but unfortunately didn't provide evidence showing it is better than the one Challinor used, so it's unclear whose results are stronger. But we know whose are more popular. The Biden administration team referred only to the Moore study and left out any mention of the Challinor one, and it is a safe assumption that the reviewers didn't notice the omission. See how the game is played?



Regarding the mortality effect, the report relies on evidence in a new study that apparently shows that warming will mean fewer deaths from cold and more from heat, and the combined effect globally is a much larger overall death toll than previously thought. The study is by an impressive team led by economist Tamma Carleton and 15 co-authors. In their preface they thank 17 research assistants, four project managers, 13 reviewers and seminar participants at 20 prestigious academic institutions around the world. It's a high-quality piece of work, but like tens of thousands of other splashy climate impacts studies it relies for its headline conclusions on the discredited RCP8.5 emissions scenario. How did all those prestigious researchers and reviewers miss this flaw?



The authors compiled mortality data from selected countries around the world and matched them to temperature records, then built a statistical model to extrapolate over the entire world. They used some clever economic modelling to estimate the beneficial effects of adaptive behaviour (like installing air conditioning) as well as the costs. Then they estimated a "mortality function" that spits out the number of additional deaths between now and the year 2300 attributable to each additional tonne of emissions, both from warming itself and the costs of adaptation. To compute this number the authors needed emissions and income projections out to 2300.



For this they used two scenarios: the extreme, coal-blackened Dickensian fiction called RCP8.5, and a mid-range emissions projection called RCP4.5. In my 2020 JSW column I discussed the efforts of climate analysts to convince their colleagues to stop using the RCP8.5 scenario because of its unrealistic assumptions. Interestingly the Biden administration report moves away from both RCP scenarios and focuses on a new one from Resources for the Future (RFF) which, through most of the rest of this century, projects emissions even below RCP4.5.

https://financialpost.com/opinion/junk-science-week-social-cost-of-carbon-game?fbclid=IwAR3t0VXvTpZcU0MieH0BcBh4No_XOmkd5g0v1U9Q7z_mQ0VzLhMLkwJ5e7k">https://financialpost.com/opinion/junk- ... hMLkwJ5e7k">https://financialpost.com/opinion/junk-science-week-social-cost-of-carbon-game?fbclid=IwAR3t0VXvTpZcU0MieH0BcBh4No_XOmkd5g0v1U9Q7z_mQ0VzLhMLkwJ5e7k