Electrical automotive business in emergency mode; Greenpeace is utilizing the hearth brigade in opposition to them and they aren’t completely satisfied – Watts Up With That?
From the BOE REPORT
Terry Etam
The summer was thankfully pretty quiet, but it's time for a jolt to get back into the swing of things. There's nothing like being yelled at, so today we're talking about a surefire recipe – electric vehicles. Those who love electric vehicles really love them, and badmouthing them in front of fans is like asking questions about the size of your children's ears.
Electric vehicles play a strangely outsized role in the current cultural and economic landscape. They are seen as the best hope for reducing the overall rate of consumer emissions. Governments have championed them to an astonishing degree, legislating them at an unprecedented (and, it turns out, insane) pace.
What makes electric vehicles such a flashpoint is that they connect with a number of things that people care about. For some, owning an electric vehicle feels like a major personal contribution to the global emissions problem, when owning one entails a significant personal commitment. For many, electric vehicles make perfect sense if they are just driving around town, or if they are rich enough to have one in the garage between Astons and Ferraris so they can make an eco-label when they need it. Some love them for their simplicity, with few moving parts and lower maintenance (lower, but not zero). Still others love them because they can fill up at home, at night. And then there is the cohort that feels their anger at oil companies cathartically sated every time they drive past a gas station, those who believe that hydrocarbons bring nothing but death, regardless of the fact that up to this point in their lives they have brought them everything within their grasp, including all the things that keep them alive. Have pity on these people, the neutron-level boxing matches that take place between their ears are something no one would wish on anyone.
The flip side of the equation that puts this development in the news is the public's general attitude toward them, the 80 percent who make up the non-extreme middle. In reasonable times, that's not a problem; big changes in such expensive things happen gradually, and most feel that certain segments of the economy are great for electric vehicles – delivery trucks, forklifts, city taxis, etc. Many would gravitate toward electric vehicles as battery technology improves, range increases, and prices fall. But such a shift would be a multi-generational thing, especially given the infrastructure changes required.
Most consumers realize that the total and rapid dominance of electric vehicles is not a particularly smart vision, even if governments have declared that it must happen in their dog's lifetime.
Consumers know a good idea when they see one, as evidenced by the explosion in popularity of hybrid vehicles—that is, vehicles with internal combustion engines supplemented by modest batteries and electric motors that allow for a certain emission-free range before switching to gasoline power.
There's a reason for this growing popularity—it makes sense on many levels. A hybrid eliminates some of the main reasons people are hesitant to switch to full battery electric vehicles (BEVs)—range anxiety, cold-weather performance, etc.—and, as Toyota wisely noted, hybrids are generally even better for the environment than mass-purchase EVs.
How can that be, you might ask. Here's Toyota's calculation, called the 1:6:90 rule. An excellent paper on this can be found here, and the core idea is: Due to the immense challenges of finding, developing, extracting and processing critical metals and minerals (hundreds of new mines are needed worldwide, with each new mine having weaker grades than before, and many jurisdictions becoming more hostile to new mines), it makes more sense to use the mineral requirements of a given BEV to build 90 hybrids instead.
Since many trips are very short, a hybrid can do most of them on electric power, so spreading those minerals across many vehicles makes sense for emissions reduction. Toyota has calculated that if the metals/minerals used to build a single electric vehicle were instead used to build 90 hybrid vehicles, the total carbon reduction of those hybrids over their lifetime would be 37 times that of a single electric vehicle (and with that sentence, I put on my helmet to avoid the incoming cries of “Fossil Fuel Shill” – the aforementioned rant).
Customers are flocking to hybrids. According to an article by Car Dealership Guy (an excellent car news site from a dealer's perspective), 48 percent of Toyota sales in August were hybrids, Hyundai saw an 81 percent increase in hybrids (albeit a relatively smaller number than Toyota), and Ford saw a 50 percent increase in hybrid sales.
Volvo, a company that had promised to switch entirely to electric vehicles by 2030, thereby banishing the smell of gasoline from customers' noses forever, recently backed away from that promise and announced that hybrids will remain part of the equation indefinitely. “Two, three, four, five years ago, everyone made a lot of assumptions, and that has changed,” said Volvo's CEO.
And then there's the Chinese onslaught of affordable, high-quality electric vehicles that policy planners somehow didn't see coming. Western countries announced they would ban internal combustion engines and use all-electric vehicles instead by the next decade, and lo and behold: China controls most elements of what makes up an electric vehicle and took full advantage of its supply chain dominance (as well as massive government support) to undercut virtually every Western electric vehicle manufacturer. “Hey, you can't do that,” said the US, Canadian and EU governments, slapping heavy tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles because we want to protect the environment, but not that much (extremely cheap electric vehicles are one of the few catalysts that would accelerate widespread and rapid mainstream adoption of electric vehicles).
I'm not sure how this plays out. Consumers have spoken, automakers are responding, and the underdogs are governments, still paralyzed in 2019 as euphoric and nonsensical “environmental policies” danced on the supposed grave of last century's fuel. How they get out of this is anyone's guess, although there are signs, like this headline: “Italy Leads Revolt Against Europe's Transition to Electric Vehicles.” If I recall Italian traffic, they seem to be OK with virtually any kind of vehicular madness, so an automotive revolt in this country is a pretty big deal.
As with so many aspects of the energy transition, if the whole process had not been hijacked by zealots, we would have come further. We would have consumers on our side. Whole industries would be functioning properly, instead of the fiascos we are seeing in the car industry, for example. And we would most likely have far fewer emissions.
Greenpeace USA in a tight spot29dk2902lhttps://boereport.com/29dk2902l.html
In the grand scheme of things, it would be disheartening if something with the words “green” and “peace” in its name failed; no reasonable person is against the environment or peace. But put those two words together and you get something completely different.
In the US, Greenpeace is, for once, holding the mean side of the flag they are used to beating against anything they disagree with. US energy pipeline giant Energy Transfer is seeking $300 million in damages for Greenpeace's role in delaying the Dakota Access Pipeline. An ET victory would and should send shockwaves through the massively funded protest industry, which has so far used every tactic imaginable to achieve victory (and by “victory” we generally mean “obstruction” or “revenge” as opposed to any kind of constructive advancement). The major ENGOs spend hundreds of millions on staff and lawyers who literally have nothing else to do but bend society to their will without having to go through the tedious hassle of a democratic process. Robert Bryce's excellent Substack column tracks the staggering sums US ENGOs are pushing through; Greenpeace US is tiny ($33 million annual exaggeration) compared to the staggering $548 million of the locust-advocacy Natural Resources Defense Council. With all that money, these groups build nothing.)
It is surprising that more such lawsuits have not been filed by failed companies and hydrocarbon producers who have been dragged to court for providing the fuel that keeps us all alive. It is really not a difficult argument; the world as we know it will collapse without hydrocarbon production, so shouldn't preventing that production for sometimes very flimsy reasons count for something? Shouldn't denying access to fuel to consumers who desperately need it (countless pipeline battles) count for something?
Greenpeace's defense is pretty comical: suddenly they're irrelevant, claiming they only played a supporting role in the protests, and the lawsuit is – and this is the funniest part – an “attack on free speech.” Chaining yourself to a bulldozer on a construction site (or worse, sending a naive follower to chain you) is apparently “free speech,” as are litigation and endless slanderous comments about the people and companies that provide them with the fuel that keeps their unhappy lives running.
Maybe the resurrected body, whose appearance is sure to appear when this one is bankrupt, should start with a little self-reflection. Maybe peace means everyone working together for a common goal, not dramatizing a villain to motivate the troops. Maybe “green” should mean caring about the habitat, caring about air pollution, caring about smarter use of resources, caring about the most logical global approach to progress, rather than a single war against the foundation of our society, without which we clearly cannot and will not live.
What the world desperately needs – clarity on energy. And a few laughs. Get The End of Fossil Fuel Insanity, available at Amazon.ca, Indigo.ca or Amazon.com.
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