Burning E.V.s; Agenda 2030; & Let's Block Out the Sun!
Tom Finnerty wrote about how the mainstream media are starting to notice that E.V.s aren’t all sunshine and rainbows.
Bad News on E.V.s
Electric Vehicles have gotten some (well-deserved) negative publicity of late. Lets look at just a few of the stories rocking the industry. First, in what could be a bit of a metaphor for the whole E.V. enterprise, a Dutch freighter carrying more than 3,700 cars caught fire in the North Sea, leading to the 21-member crew to abandon ship. Fire-fighting ships and helicopters were deployed to beat back the blaze. Unfortunately for them, the ship was carrying nearly 500 Electric Vehicles, which, according to the Associated Press, made "fighting the flames more difficult."
Why? Because burning E.V.s are incredibly difficult to extinguish, due to the residual energy stored in their batteries, which, when damaged, have a tendency to become extremely hot and continually reignite. As we mentioned in a previous post, Tesla's only advice for putting them out is "use lots of water." And they do mean lots. One E.V. fire outside of Houston took eight firemen spraying 28,000 gallons of water over the course of seven hours to finally get under control. Imagine dealing with 500!
In the case of the Dutch freighter, it took them a solid week. Luckily the ship didn't sink — it was right in the local shipping-lanes, so that would have been a nightmare for the navigation — and it has since been towed into port for salvage. Unluckily, there was one fatality — a crewman who was attempting to put out the fire — while several other members of the crew were treated for "broken bones, burns, and breathing" issues. Of course, it is also a black eye for the industry, since it calls attention to the, ah, burning problem.
Now, an E.V. enthusiast might offer the counter that we've reached a point of such market saturation with E.V.s that a story like that isn't going to matter much. But the problem with that argument is that they aren't exactly flying out of the dealerships, as our rulers had hoped. Says Axios, "Unsold electric cars are piling up on dealer lots." Some brands are doing worse than others — they mention that the Korean luxury E.V. maker Genesis "sold only 18 of its nearly $82,000 Electrified G80 sedans in the 30 days leading up to June 29, and had 210 in stock nationwide — a 350-day supply." (For comparison, dealers tend to maintain between a 50 and 70 day supply of gas-and-diesel driven cars.)
How do we explain the mismatch between E.V. supply and demand? Another Axios article answers that: "The next roadblock for electric cars: The early adopter era is over." Many enthusiastic (and wealthy) environmentalists bought E.V.s just as they began to be mass produced, and those early sales numbers encouraged companies to invest heavily in increased production. But eventually those low-hanging fruits were exhausted, and the transition to "the more price-sensitive "early majority" — is proving to be more elusive." Consequently, they add:
The E.V. transition will likely be longer and bumpier than many experts predicted — which explains why some automakers are hedging their bets, cutting prices and recalibrating their strategies.
Elizabeth Nickson looked into the United Nations’ plan for overriding national sovereignty, and its consequences.
Beware the U.N.'s 'Agenda 2030'
This is Agenda 2030. Not one single outlet of the mainstream media has reported on its implications. Our entire life is being rejiggered by it. Everything good that you remember about your childhood will be taken, for example, and destroyed. Land over which you once thought your country held sovereignty no longer does. Chunk by chunk by chunk it is being taken. Your politicians signed treaties. You can find an examination with pages of sourcing, including some few of the many treaties, here and the road out of this mess, here.
But essentially since 1992 and the Rio conference, politicians and senior bureaucrats have signed treaty after treaty making these arrangements internationally legal and binding. The only way it can be fought is via returning to first principles, like the U.S. Constitution and in Canada, the British North America Acts. And those roads in court are arduous, expensive, and long. By the time you get a decision, you have lost another half million acres. The corporation shrugs and pays off the town residents, but the town remains broken.
The burden of Agenda 2030 falls most heavily upon the under-educated. It is their livelihood and opportunity that is vitiated. America’s fisherman are up in arms these days, planning a march on D.C., because off-shore wind farms are destroying fish stock. If you look hard at the patterning of this, which I intend to over the next few months, you can just about see that the food supply is beginning to be drawn down. Already in my region, which is a circus of fruit – our mild winters and hot summers up in the Interior and often enough, on my islands — mean cornucopia, abundance. Demeter descends and opens her fists, shakes her robes and apricots, peaches, crates upon crates of grapes, apples, pears, plums fall.
Richard Fernandez contributed a piece about a zany new idea from George Soros and Bill Gates.
Blocking the Sun to 'Save the Planet'
In the eyes of the Biden administration nothing is more dangerous than global warming. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken can't rank nuclear war as more dangerous than "climate change." Recently Blinken was asked: "What is the greater threat to humanity in your mind, war or climate change?" His answer: "Well, you can’t, I think, have a hierarchy."
Recently the U.N. admitted it is not going to make its "climate change" targets. The international community's currently stated goal is to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. The U.N. estimates that within roughly a decade, the target is liable to be breached. "The world won't end if it warms by more than 1.5 degrees," Jim Skea, the new head of the U.N.'s IPCC told Der Spiegel.
But politicians continue to act as if it will. Faced with defeat in the climate equivalent of nuclear war, the White House has started to study blocking sun’s rays to slow global warming "in response to a congressional requirement to provide a research plan for 'solar and other rapid climate interventions'." This was during the same week that European Union leaders opened the door to international discussions of solar radiation modification. There are significant risks associated with solar radiation modification; blocking sunlight could alter global weather patterns, disrupt food supplies, and lead to abrupt warming. But true to its logic the White House weighs those risks against the forecast dangers associated with a hotter planet.
From an institutional point of view, planetary geoengineering is already gaining serious traction. The conventional wisdom that anyone who believes geoengineering and weather modification is a tinfoil-hat conspiracy theorist is belied by a Time Magazine report that Bill Gates and George Soros are now "obsessed" with solar radiation management.
George Soros got onstage to talk about the existential risk that 'climate change' poses to human civilization... brightening the clouds over the Arctic to reflect the sun’s energy away from the melting ice caps... Bill Gates... backed a project by Harvard University scientists to test an idea to spray calcium carbonate into the atmosphere in the skies over northern Scandinavia in 2021... Jeff Bezos put Amazon’s supercomputer capabilities to modeling the effects of plans to inject huge amounts of sulfur dioxide (SO2) into the atmosphere... Dustin Moskovitz, a billionaire Facebook cofounder, plowed funding... to study the potential effects of solar geoengineering.
The government wheels are already turning. A supercomputer is analyzing the effects of solar geoengineering to help "climate scientists" decide whether to modify the sunlight. "The machine, named Derecho, began operating this month at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and will allow scientists to run more detailed weather models for research on solar geoengineering." The attraction of Solar Radiation Management (SRM) technology is that it is cheap as geoengineering goes, -- a piddling $18 billion. It would "only" involve hundreds of aircraft stationed around the world making thousands of flights a year over the next century, constantly spraying aerosols in the atmosphere.
But it's the false cheapness of an addictive drug. Solar reduction would entail side effects for the entire planet. Acid rain, destruction of the ozone layer and the alteration of precipitation patterns were but a few, and yet in theory were merely palliative. The dangers are so great that some scientists believe further research into this technology should be halted altogether.
David Cavena wrote about the illogical structure of our long term energy plans.
The Known Unknowns of 'Renewable' Energy
If we look across the various means of generating the electricity required for the modern world, and the costs of delivery through those various means, all of our recent decisions have been odd. That's because of our insistence on leaning in to the known unknowns. We never can know the cost of electricity from supposedly “sustainable” wind and solar methods of generation for the simple reason that we can’t know when the sun will shine or the wind will blow in the appropriate Goldilocks amounts: not too much, not too little, just right.
Will we install too many windmills? Too few solar panels? We can’t know. Planning an ever-more electric future on a strategy of unknowns is fanciful and naïve. And, really just not very smart for any first world country. Not knowing the costs means not knowing the price or the numbers of wind- and solar-farms required to deliver the affordable electricity required to make modernity sustainable.
And how about our long-term planning? Do we know where we will source balsa for blades once we’ve stripped our rain forests? Any thoughts on how we make the plastics required for so-called renewable energy once we've "transitioned" away from oil and gas? Do we know where our we will mine for lithium to make batteries once we’ve exhausted the current supply, or China locks us out of the market?
Moreover, the powers that be in our country reject systems and methods whose costs are knowable -- how much cost for how much electricity, from extraction to consumption and the costs of creating and disposing of the generators over time, whether from natural gas, oil, coal, or nuclear. So for the time being, and on our current trajectory, our energy bills will be a constant surprise with no fallback to known knowns. How does a modern manufacturer plan or make or deliver products when the input costs are unknown?
Tom Finnerty also contributed two blog posts. The first was about a group of regional electricity providers who are begging the Biden Administration to back-off of their war on traditional energy sources since so-called renewable resources can’t handle our electricity needs.
The Will to (Imaginary) Electric Power
The second was about Alberta premier Danielle Smith’s decision to hit back against the Trudeau government’s “Green” Energy mandates.
Alberta to Wind and Solar: Not Just Now, Thanks
That’s all for this week, but keep a look out for our upcoming articles at The Pipeline!