Biden’s crazy electric car plan means grid collapse, probably this decade – Telegraph

EV charging station [image credit: InsideEVs]

The numbers just don’t add up. Net zero-style mandates from climate obsessives don’t take reality seriously. Firstly, the ageing electricity grid can’t take the strain. Secondly, new transmission lines take many years to approve, let alone build. Thirdly, a shortage of transformers – which take a long time to make and can’t be mass-produced – also precludes rapid progress. That’s without even discussing the unpredictable intermittency of renewables.
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Policies enacted by the Biden administration and the previous, Democrat-controlled Congress are set to plunge the USA into a serious energy crisis in the coming years, says The Telegraph.

It all has to do with the Biden government’s decision to try to force mass adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) before either the market or the power grid can adjust to meet the whopping new demand for power generation or to supply the critical minerals needed to make the batteries that power the cars.

Democrat members of Congress and Biden’s appointed officials are coordinating an effort to force EV adoption on reluctant consumers via a classic carrot and stick approach.

Germany’s cheap public transport ticket an ‘ineffective climate tool’

German hydrogen train [image credit: Euractiv]

No surprise there. What are these delusional climate worriers even talking about? If ‘the climate’ was human it wouldn’t give a hoot how Germans get around, but might be bemused to find itself corroding the minds of their leaders with their irrational obsession over ‘carbon emissions’ to the exclusion of all else.
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Germany’s new monthly €49 offer for all regional public transport will have little impact on the transport sector’s carbon emissions so the country will continue to fail its climate targets for transport and beyond, according to an expert council advising the government.

As the German transport sector has so far failed to meet its emissions targets, in June the government presented a bundle of measures that should help to put the country on track to reduce overall emissions by 65% by 2030, compared to 1990, says Euractiv.

One of the key measures touted by Transport Minister Volker Wissing (FDP/Renew Europe), is the new “Deutschlandticket” introduced in May, a subscription offer that enables users to use regional trains and buses, trams, metros, as well as some ferries across the country for €49 per month.

Road to nowhere: San Francisco driverless cars cause street blockage chaos ‘due to nearby music festival’

Image credit: Chris Wensel / BBC

H/T LBC’s World of Woke

This wasn’t an isolated incident. The city’s fire department is not amused by errant no-go electric cars: ‘not ready for prime time’.
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A controversial driverless car firm was blasted after around 10 of its autonomous vehicles broke down and blocked a San Francisco street, reports the Daily Mail.

Just a day after securing the green light to flood the streets of the crime-ridden city with even more of its Chevy Bolts, ten of Cruise’s cars suffered WiFi failures which brought a street in the North Beach district to a stand-still.

The firm thinks a nearby music festival may have overloaded telecommunications networks.

A woman who filmed the drama could be heard claiming 10 of the hatchbacks had stopped.

End of the line: first adopter of hydrogen trains last year opts for all-electric future

German hydrogen train [image credit: Euractiv]

Being known as the misery line didn’t help the case for hydrogen trains, with a third of the train drivers resigning amid various operational difficulties. One German state estimated hydrogen trains would be 80% more expensive to run than electric over a 30-year period.
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The state-owned public transport company responsible for introducing the world’s first hydrogen-only railway line last year has effectively ruled out using any more H2 trains, saying that battery-electric models “are cheaper to operate”, reports Hydrogen Insight.

LNVG, which is owned by the government of Lower Saxony, had invested more than €93m ($85m) in 14 hydrogen fuel-cell trains, which began operating in August 2022.

The federal government also contributed a further €8.4m — €4.3m of which was spent on the world’s first H2 train refuelling station, built by Linde in the town of Bremervörde.

The biggest myth about fossil fuels and dinosaurs, debunked by science

Credit: fuelfix.com

In case you weren’t quite sure…
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Is your car really powered by dinosaurs? – asks BBC Science Focus.

Most oil reserves were formed between 65 and 252 million years ago. While this does overlap with the ‘dinosaur times’, oil is a marine sediment made of the remains of algae and plankton.

Skeletons of prehistoric reptiles such as plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs (neither of which count as dinosaurs) have been found in the same geological layers as oil and they may have contaminated the oil deposit.

More hydrogen hype as new British truck unveiled

Credit: Scottish Power

‘Could a truck that’s powered by hydrogen and only emits water help in the climate change fight?’ – asks Sky News. Two problems there – ‘only emits water’ doesn’t tell the whole story as unwelcome nitrogen oxide comes into play, and ‘climate change fight’ belongs to mythology. Another difficulty (quote): ‘hydrogen still has problems as a power source. Making it from green electricity is currently expensive and far less energy efficient than plugging a battery into a charging point.’ Also (quote): ‘a switch to hydrogen would need 35.6GW of electricity to make it’ – over three times more than needed for comparable battery charging, according to the report.
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Summary: The vehicle can be fuelled up with hydrogen in just 15 minutes and gives drivers 600 miles of range, the company behind it says, with the gas being stored in high pressure tanks designed to withstand impact.
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British trials have started of a heavyweight truck powered by a gas that’s lighter than air – and emits nothing but water.

Sky News was given exclusive access to the first British designed and built heavy goods vehicle (HGV) to be fuelled by hydrogen as it was driven around the Horiba Mira test track in Warwickshire.

The Scottish manufacturers, HVS, say the truck could help decarbonise the road freight industry, which produces more than 21 million tonnes of carbon dioxide each year in the UK alone.

Don’t listen to the Climate Change Committee on car bans, ministers are warned

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Some light reading for the Climate Change Committee — Why Electric Cars Are An Expensive Scam.

NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

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UK off course for net zero, its advisers moan

Well, yawn. Who exactly is ‘on course’ with this futile carbon dioxide witch-hunt, and what does the phrase even mean – if anything?
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The UK has lost its position as a global leader on climate action and is not doing enough to meet its mid-century net zero target, the country’s climate advisers said today.

Britain in 2019 became the first member of the Group of Seven wealthy nations to set a target to achieve net zero emissions by 2050, requiring major changes in the way Britons travel, eat and use electricity, says Climate Home News.

But strategies in place are unlikely to deliver the required emission cuts and last year’s announcements on new fossil fuel projects have tarnished Britain’s reputation as a climate leader, an annual progress report by the Climate Change Committee (CCC) said on Wednesday.

Pothole damage from electric cars is double that of petrol, Telegraph data show

Electric SUV [image credit: electrichunter.com]

Britain’s residential roads are not designed to cope with large numbers of such heavy vehicles. But they’re coming anyway.
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Electric cars damage roads twice as much as their petrol equivalents, analysis has shown, as the pothole crisis grows on Britain’s roads, says the Daily Telegraph.

Analysis by The Telegraph has found that the average electric car more than doubles the wear on road surfaces, which in turn could increase the number of potholes.

The country is suffering from a pothole crisis, with half as many filled last year compared to a decade ago amid an estimated £12 billion price tag to fill them all.

Funding appeal: Mike McCulloch needs your help to make interstellar travel possible.

Dr Mike McCulloch has been making truly remarkable discoveries about some of the mysteries of the cosmos over the last two decades. He has answers to fundamental questions such as ‘what causes the force that resists the change in speed and direction of any mass?’, ‘why do observations indicate that the inertial force varies with acceleration in the outer reaches of galaxies?’ and ‘how can we tap into the implicated energy fields to generate propellant-less thrust, and potentially generate electrical energy to power our homes, industries and vehicles?’. His published papers cover the first two of these questions, and touch on the third, although there’s plenty more to be teased out of the implications of his Quantised Inertia theory. The third question is the acid test.

Mike believes science has to have practical, applicable results, and for the last few years, he has been successfully generating those at his lab in Plymouth University, funded by DARPA. He has been getting measurable thrust from purely electrical input. Other collaborating labs have similar results. Exciting times indeed.

But like many scientists who threaten the established and accepted theory in their field, his work has been largely ignored because it falsifies mainstream ‘dark matter’ theory, or dismissed because it ‘must be impossible’. Although he has got measurable results, DARPA funding is ending, and he has no more teaching work to return to at Plymouth University. Mike wants, as far as possible, to keep the ongoing developments of QI publicly accessible, by crowdfunding. He needs our help to fund and equip a new lab, and set up a ‘Horizon Institute’, online initially, to enable the collaboration of academics and citizen scientists. Please read his message below, and then I’ll let you know how you can help.

Grounded – France bans short-haul flights to cut ‘carbon’ emissions

CO2 is not pollution

France is scared of the vital trace gas carbon dioxide, or so its government leads us to believe.
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France has banned domestic short-haul flights where train alternatives exist, in a bid to cut carbon emissions, reports BBC News.

The law came into force two years after lawmakers had voted to end routes where the same journey could be made by train in under two-and-a-half hours.

The ban all but rules out air travel between Paris and cities including Nantes, Lyon and Bordeaux, while connecting flights are unaffected.

Critics have described the latest measures as “symbolic bans”.

Death Of The EV Dream, Er, Nightmare

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American fuels vs. Chinese batteries. Place bets now!

PA Pundits International

By Duggan Flanakin ~

Now that the American Dream has been turned into a nightmare in part by overspending that has led to the highest interest rates in the 21^st Century, it is high time to admit that, as Melanie Mcdonagh writes in The Telegraph, the electric vehicle dream, too, “has turned into a nightmare.”

Mcdonagh, who admits she does not drive, points out many problems, among them the horrific impact when a heavy, quiet-running electric vehicle hits an unsuspecting pedestrian or a cyclist. She also notes that some of these “vehicles” are collecting data on route history and road speed that governments (and corporations) can use for remote surveillance (and marketing gimmickry). Another problem is that the much heavier EVs could collapse bridges and force lengthy detours.

Mcdonagh, however, has barely scratched the surface of the mess created by the hipster culture that believes everything sacred…

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Sheer weight of electric vehicles could sink our bridges

One estimate reckons 1 in every 20 UK bridges is ‘substandard’. Road surfaces and tyre wear must also be affected. More unintended consequences of climate obsessions and so-called green policies.
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Councils should check the weight limits on bridges to ensure they don’t collapse with heavier electric cars travelling across them, ministers have suggested.

The news comes after concerns were raised that multi-storey car parks might collapse if too many electric vehicles (EVs), which can weigh as much as 33 per cent more than traditional petrol cars, are parked on them, says The Telegraph.

Tory MP Greg Knight asked in the Commons whether Transport Secretary Mark Harper or other Cabinet colleagues might assess the “adequacy of the strength of multi-storey car parks and bridges at safely bearing the additional weight of electric vehicles”.

South Western Railway disruption after biofuel clogs engines

For how much longer?
[image credit: thecostaricanews.com]

Derailed by climate obsession? According to The Telegraph the problem is that ‘algae produced by green fuels blocks engines’, if they’re left unused for a certain period of time. Potential implications for other motorised transport here.
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A train operator has reduced services after diesel engines were clogged with biofuel, reports BBC News.

South Western Railway (SWR) said a fault was discovered on Wednesday in much of its diesel fleet at depots in Exeter and Salisbury.

It said the issue would disrupt services in the Romsey area and west of Salisbury until further notice.

BBC South transport correspondent Paul Clifton said SWR would run a fraction of normal services on the routes.

He said the issue would affect the West of England line for the next week.

Full report here.

Iveco CEO says Euro 7 vehicle emissions regulation is ‘plain stupid’

European Commission HQ, Brussels [image credit: Em_Dee @ Wikipedia]

The motor industry gets sandwiched between climate obsession and clean air fanaticism.
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The CEO of Italian truck and bus maker Iveco has condemned as “plain stupid” the Euro 7 standards which tighten vehicle emission limits for pollutants including nitrogen oxides and carbon monoxide in the European Union from 2025, reports Euractiv.

Iveco Group’s Gerrit Marx said the regulation as currently drafted by the EU required cuts in emissions of nitrogen oxides and particulates which are “technically unfeasible”.

“The effort to get there is huge. And there is no real payback,” he said.

EU countries and lawmakers are due to negotiate the proposed legislation, which is designed to apply to cars and vans from July 1, 2025 and to buses and trucks two years later, this year.

CNN’s ‘chief climate’ reporter flies more than 6,000 miles to warn about melting ice, climate change

Antarctic sea ice [image credit: BBC]

Apart from spouting dodgy climate theories and proposing absurd ‘solutions’, he seems to have a problem telling the difference between land and sea ice. Antarctica is land surrounded by churning seas and high winds, making its summer sea ice seasons inherently variable.
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CNN’s chief climate correspondent purportedly flew more than 6,000 miles to report on climate change, says The Blaze.

On Wednesday, CNN correspondent Bill Weir appeared on “CNN This Morning,” reporting from the Tierra de Fuego region of Argentina, the southern tip of South America. In his report, Weir bemoaned the shrinking Antarctic ice cap.

“But while we’re here we got this news out of the National Snow and Ice Center in Colorado that for the second year in a row the South Pole is shrinking. The ice down here is shrinking,” Weir reported. “What is troubling about this is the speed that it has declined. Just to give you some perspective, in the early 2000s, it looked like Antarctica was growing even as the Arctic was shrinking in alarming ways, and scientists weren’t sure why.

“In 2014, the sea ice around Antarctica: 7 million square miles. Now, less than a decade later, it’s under 700,000 square miles – so that’s a 90% drop,” he explained.

Show anchor Don Lemon followed up by asking Weir what, if anything, can be done to slow down the melting.

The answer? According to Weir, humanity must stop spewing carbon into the atmosphere.

“It’s the same answer has been for generations. The faster we can move away from fuels that burn, in the speediest and most equitable way possible, the less horrible this gets,” Weir told Lemon.

“That’s the only way right now. And not only stopping it at the source but pulling carbon out of the sea and sky,” he continued. “Carbon removal is going to be the biggest industry you’ve never heard of as people come to grips with the enormity of this.”

If not burning fuels or putting more carbon into the atmosphere is the anecdote to melting ice caps, Weir did not do his part to help.

Full article here.
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Update, 2nd March 2023:
NetZeroWatch — Antarctic Sea Ice: ‘The beginning of the end!’ – again
Quote: ‘When it’s put into context one sees a different picture.’

Crash landing for dream of ‘guilt-free flying’? Scientists find no clear green alternative to jet fuel

London’s Heathrow airport

The four leading alternatives, from biomass to hydrogen, are expensive and/or would require huge imports or swathes of farmland, we’re told. Another fail for climate obsessives it seems. Is Plan B – choking off demand – on the fanatics’ drawing board yet?
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The quest for guilt-free flying may have been knocked off course by a broad study that has concluded there is “no clear or single net zero alternative to jet fuel”, reports Sky News.

The four most viable alternatives “offer some carbon savings but are not ideal”, according to the review by the Royal Society academy of scientists.

Replacing jet fuel with biomass, for example, would require half the UK’s farmland just to sustain current passenger levels.

But the government is planning for levels to soar by 70% by 2050, representing an additional 200 million passengers.

I can’t feel fingertips after rowing in Antarctic seas

Scotia Sea, Antarctica [image credit: Antarctic96]

Midsummer in the Antarctic – no picnic.
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Adventurer Jamie Douglas-Hamilton says his latest rowing challenge in the world’s most treacherous waters has left him in the worst pain he has ever felt, reports BBC News.

“I still can’t feel my fingertips and can’t wiggle my toes,” he says.

“I couldn’t even walk to the bathroom from my bed without hanging on to things along the way.”

Jamie was part of a crew of six who battled 30ft (10m) waves, crippling seasickness, icy cold winds and constant terror in Antarctica’s Southern Ocean and Scotia Sea.

Electric Cars: Square Peg, Round Hole

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Who wants to pay a lot more for a less useful product that loses its value much faster than what it’s supposed to be replacing – in order to achieve what?

PA Pundits International

By Duggan Flanakin ~

The big story of 2023 just might be the clash between those who have imposed electric vehicle mandates and those for whom an electric vehicle is not on their shopping list.

The federal government, many state governments, and much of the automobile industry – and their counterparts worldwide – have decreed that the world abandon the internal combustion engine in favor of the (often-coal-fired) electric vehicle.

Mandates for banning new sales of conventional vehicles are as plentiful as schemes to disallow further production of “evil” fossil fuels that brought a total transformation of the world economy in little more than a century. Moreover, most automakers have pledged to end production of conventional vehicles within the next few years.

While sales of EVs “boomed” last year, the 6 million EVs still comprise less than half a percent of the world’s 1.4 billion vehicles. Yet Bloomberg…

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Italy’s Transport Minister Asks EU To Stop ICE Vehicle Ban

Political climate obsession has gone way too far with EV ‘mandates’, as the Italian minister implies. Today’s EVs are too expensive and impractical to be a suitable future for private transport.
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Italy’s Transport Minister Matteo Salvini has asked the EU Commission’s Transport Commissioner and his French and German counterparts to review the ban on ICE vehicle sales that is set to go into effect in 2035, reports OilPrice.com.

Salvini told Italian news outlet Ultimore that the proposed ban on the sale of fossil fuel-burning vehicles “makes no economic, environmental or social sense.”

Salvini’s stance on the ICE vehicle sales ban echoes that of carmakers and the European car industry association, ACEA, in the summer of 2021.