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By Jo Nova
It’s like a light has switched on in UK politics
Who would have guessed that voters like their gas guzzling cars? Well everyone would, of course. Which is why it defies explanation that both sides of politics ignored this for so long. But a phase change is underway…
After the Uxbridge by-election surprise, Rishi Sunak suddenly talked about being pragmatic on the road to Net Zero and said he would “Max Out” the North Sea Oil reserves. He vowed to review the “low traffic neighborhoods” (the bossy bollard program) and said he was on the side of the motorists. Since then he’s apparently leapt from -2.7 in net satisfaction polls among Tory members to +20.7, a leap of 23%.
Thanks to NetZeroWatch for keeping us informed:
Rishi Sunak’s popularity surges as he toughens net zero stance
Jack Maidment, The Telegraph
Last month, Mr Sunak’s popularity among the Tory grassroots sunk to its lowest level since he took over at No 10. He received a net satisfaction rating of -2.7 – …But the premier has bounced back in the latest survey of party members, with a score of 20.7 …
A separate […]
Late night road protestor pouring concrete in a former bollard-hole | Youtube
By Jo Nova
Build Back Worse suffers a set-back
It’s hard to believe someone thought that adding artificial blockages to roads would free people from their vehicle-addiction. As if making car trips artificially long, circuitous and inconvenient would teach people to love walking?
It’s part of the 15 minute city plan, where everything was supposed to be within a heavenly short walk from home, so we could give up cars, save the planet, change the atmosphere and get fit too. But the Deplorables didn’t like it.
The idea of a Low Traffic Network (LTN) sounded so apple-pie. Everyone wants fewer cars on the road. So when pollsters asked deliberately ambiguous questions, people would say “yes” they liked the idea. But living with LTN’s wasn’t much fun when it turned out it was their car the overlords wanted to get rid of. And so the protests and petitions began. Under the cover of darkness, people set bollards on fire, attacked them with chainsaws, and even poured concrete in the anchor holes so it was harder to replace them.
But what really seems to have got the attention […]
By Jo Nova
It’s a cult. Believers in the climate religion can’t persuade the rest of the population through polite conversation, so a few are resorting to vandalism-for-the-planet because they know more than you do about atmospheric physics, right? After a spate last year, the call has gone out for activists to sneak around again after dark, being the deceptive cowards they are, and let down the tyres of SUVs to punish owners for not joining their pagan religion. Judging by their twitter thread, it doesn’t seem like a mass movement.
Philosophically, it’s just bully-badger-and-harass people for the climate kind of thing. According to “Tyre Extinguishers“you too can change the weather 100 years from now by dressing like a bank robber, and prancing around in the dark making other people’s lives more difficult. “Bravo” eh?
The same evangelists don’t seem to be concerned with even heavier EV’s made with child labor, the solar panels made by slaves, or the landfill toxic waste, destruction of forest, birds and bats by renewables. It’s just a tribal performance art to impress their friends and fill the spiritual vacuum in their lives.
When will the grown-ups in the environmental movement condemn vandalism? It’s time […]
By Jo Nova
The 15 Minute City is a UN and WEF plan, because they care about you want you to drive less.
A cartoon from the WEF just for you good girls and boys:
In the WEF’s own words — this rearrangement of cities is absolutely about climate change:
As climate change and global conflict cause shocks and stresses at faster intervals and increasing severity, the 15-minute city will become even more critical.
And the solution was the pandemic (they really say that):
The obvious, yet incomplete, answer is the pandemic…. with COVID-19 and its variants keeping everyone home (or closer to home than usual), the 15-minute city went from a “nice-to-have” to a rallying cry. Meeting all of one’s needs within a walking, biking or transit distance was suddenly a matter of life and death.
And then the dark hand of the totalitarian managers appears, as James Woudhuysen, warned in Spiked in late October:
The madness of the ‘15-minute city’
The green agenda is taking inspiration from the illiberal days of lockdown.
To this end, Oxfordshire County Council, which is run by Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Green […]
Tyre Extinguishers are vandals who skulk around at night and poke lentils in tyre valves to flatten tyres of evil SUV’s. It’s a new fashion in “climate activism” and it makes sense in a narcissistic pagan-religion kind of way. Those who do it are convinced they are smarter than everyone else, and their latest “plan” is to show you what nice, caring people they are by wasting your time and generally being thoughtless badgering bullies.
Naturally the cowards are anonymous, though they have a twitter account @T_Extinguishers.
Imagine the stress on the disabled, the sick, the missed medical appointments, children late for critical final year exams, and doctors who can’t get to work. Then there’s the damaged tyres that need replacing.
‘We will make it impossible to own an SUV in the world’s urban areas’
Eco-nuts used lentils to let down the tyres of Chelsea tractors because ‘air pollution is RACIST’
Tom Rawstorne for the DailyMail
And so it was that on Monday night a new front on the eco-war opened as a group calling themselves the Tyre Extinguishers launched a co-ordinated effort to deflate the tyres of as many SUVs […]
The new (old) recipe for goodliness, and to save Ukraine now, is just like the climate change rules.
Thanks to The Putin Excuse, the IEA suggests we cut oil use, so we need to drive 10km per hour slower, go “car free” on Sundays, catch the bus, work from home, avoid business travel and share our car with strangers.
We’ll start right after you — Dr Fatih Birol — Executive Director of the IEA. We’re keen to hear how the 7th Annual Global Conference on Energy Efficiency in Denmark will become a Zoom call instead. Do send pics of your bus trips and ride-shares!
The IEA have already whipped out a handy Report called A 10 Point Plan to Cut Oil Use also known as, Let Them Eat Cake.
The report goes so far as to suggest that car driving be rationed so only odd or even number plates could drive each day.
As Marc Morano says: “Let’s simplify this: The proposed ‘solutions’ to climate change, COVID, and now the Russian war are all exactly the same — hammer the poor and middle class with more restrictions on travel, less freedom, and even more surrendering of power to unelected government […]
Transport accounts for 15% of human emissions of CO2, or practically nothing.
Despite the lip service everyone pays to “climate change” when Leonardo asks them to buy a smaller car, they nod and buy an SUV. They are voting with their wallets.
SUV growth, graph. 2020
Rise of SUV’s Complicates efforts to rein in Auto Emissions
Scott Carpenter, Forbes
…SUVs are conquering the world. ….For the first time ever in the U.S. last year, sport-utility vehicles (SUVs) likely accounted for half or just over half of all vehicles sold, according to recent data from IHS Markit, a data and analytics firm. Others are rapidly catching up. Between 2010 and 2019, the share of SUVs in overall car sales in China jumped from 14% to 44%. In Europe the SUV share climbed from 10% to 36%.
Seas are rising, storms are coming, and heat waves are wiping out crops and ski seasons, but half of all new car buyers are buying SUV’s in the USA.
h/t GWPF
9.9 out of 10 based on 65 ratings […]
Who wants to wait for charging? Instead, just dump the flat batteries, pick up a new set. (See the youtube below).
Having a nation full of electric cars is fine as long as you don’t want to drive them.
Wind Farms would need to “cover whole of Scotland” to power Britain’s electric vehicles
By Paula Murray
Jack Ponton, emeritus professor of engineering at Edinburgh University, said another 16,000 turbines would be required in order to replace petrol and diesel cars with electric vehicles.
“If you want to do this with wind turbines, you are talking about 16,000 more wind turbines, four times as many as we have at the moment, and I’ve estimated that would occupy some 90,000 square kilometres, which is approximately the size of Scotland.”
The academic – a member of Scientific Alliance Scotland, a group which promotes open-minded debate on issues such as climate change – believes the plan is “unworkable”…
The UK plans to phase out combustion engines by 2032. What happens when surges of holiday tourists arrive in a town without enough charging points? “Charge-rage” and long queues. Lets spend our holidays waiting for […]
Australian cars just as bad — one hybrid car puts out 400% more CO2 than “advertised”
The AAA tested 30 cars under Australian real on-road conditions and found that like VW and so many others, the cars pass pollution tests in the lab, but fail in the real world:
— Sydney Morning Herald
The report by the Australian Automobile Association, members of which include the NRMA and RACV and RACQ, says real-world testing reveals some new cars are using up to 59 per cent more fuel than advertised. Almost six in 10 exceeded the regulated limit for one or more pollutant in cold-start tests.
The report found that, on average, real-world fuel consumption was 23 per cent higher than laboratory results, including one diesel vehicle that used 59 per cent more fuel than lab tests indicated.
One fully charged plug-in hybrid electric car consumed 166 per cent more fuel than official figures suggest – or 337 per cent more when tested from a low charge. It also emitted four times more carbon dioxide than advertised.
Of 12 diesel vehicles tested, 11 exceeded the laboratory limit for nitrogen oxides emissions….
Environmentalists […]
You have to hand it to The Australian – they will publish both sides. Take this (please, take it): “Our energy policy still stuck in coal country”. This is Alan Kohler, bless him, who doesn’t get it and dreams of a nation of motor-heads “going electric”. But, wow, ouch, watch how he reasons it out… not with numbers and graphs (he’s the numbers man on the nightly finance report) but with pop psychology?
The idea of an Australian government banning petrol and diesel cars to promote public health seems especially remote right now: we can’t keep the lights on as it is, having closed a few fossil fuel power stations.
But you can bet that the Coalition government and its media supporters will argue that the electrification of transport makes it even more necessary for there to be more “baseload power” from coal-fired power stations — how could we possibly charge millions of cars, and run millions of airconditioners and fridges if we let Liddell close in 2022?
And you can fix that Mr Kohler, how?
Wait for it…
This is the underlying reality of Australia’s energy debate: a majority of the government does […]
News is out that diesel cars which don’t comply with pollution standards will be banned from some roads in Germany on “high pollution” days. Depending on how often those bad news for diesel industry and owners. How useless is a car that you can’t drive when you need it? Stuttgart is being called the “Beijing” of Germany for air pollution. Residents are suing the Mayor for “bodily harm”. The same thing happened in Oslo — governments told people to buy diesel to reduce carbon pollution, but they are now banning diesel cars on some roads on some days too.
This may apply to as many as 90% of diesels on German roads. Sales of diesels fell by 10% last month. The pain level in this depends on how often those high-pollution days are. See the current Stuttgart air-quality monitoring — it’s OK today, but if I read this air pollution road map from 2008 correctly, it suggests some roads are over the safe limit 60, 80, even 180 days a year. In 2014 fine particulate matter exceeded safe limits on 64 days a year.
Corruption always has a price but in this case the owners of diesels are paying for […]
Carbon markets = corruption
Fake markets are easy to scam, because no one really wants or cares about “the product”. Fake markets are dangerous tools. Judging by the way people act, the point of carbon markets is to feed bureaucrats and bankers, not to change the weather. If that’s true, it’s entirely predictable that yet another scandal has run for years, and no one “noticed” or acted to stop it. Not only were diesel cars scamming the lab tests for pollution, but other cars were built to exploit loopholes (that may be legal) in the lab tests for fuel economy as well. The audacity is remarkable — real car CO2 emissions are often a gobsmacking 40- 50% higher than reported, even in top brand, expensive cars.*
As much as two-thirds of CO2 cuts since 2008 may have been imaginary and made by cars that were only fuel efficient in the lab. CO2 “pollution” doesn’t hurt anyone, but misleading fuel economy figures may have cost owners €450 a year more in fuel to run. The companies known to get suspiciously good results on fuel economy (so far) are BMW, Mercedes, Renault and Peugeot. Companies using software to get around other pollution […]
Scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have looked at drag-reducing devices on semi-trucks, and say they can conserve billions of gallons of fuel plus tens of billions of dollars. This not exactly rocket science.
Boat-tailed bullet (left)
The researchers estimate that trailer-skirts and boat-tails (see the pic below) could reduce drag on trucks by as much as 25%, which means they would save about 13% on their fuel bill. Apparently only a few percent of US trucks use these devices at the moment, and the researchers claim they can make up to a 19% improvement in fuel economy.
If these work that well (and are not too expensive or painful on carrying capacity), the free market will take care of this pretty quickly.
Boat tails means a tapered shape at the back of the vehicle. They are already used on bullets (and boats, obviously). There are pics of “boat-tails” on trucks below, but my favourite shot is this boat-tail on a car. A DIY masterpiece. It’s a “Pontiac Firefly (Canadian Geo Metro). The maker Darin Cosgrove says “the Firefly squeezed out 64 miles per gallon during testing.” I can’t see mums rushing to go food shopping in it though. […]
A Greenpeace Bio-diesel Campaign, November 2000
Golly — who would have thought that policies based on a logical fallacy and a pseudo-religion would be a bad idea? It’s not just bad, it’s deadly. For the last ten years environmentalists and greens told Europeans to buy diesel cars, not petrol, because they produce less CO2. So British people, and a lot of Europe too, did exactly that — lured by generous tax breaks, pushed by the guilt trip if they were thinking of buying a petrol car. The car fleet of the EU was transformed. Back in the early nineties, hardly anyone owned a diesel, but now, as many as half of all new cars in the UK are diesel, and some extra 45 million diesel cars have been bought across Europe. But clean energy turned out to be dirty fuel, with diesels producing tons of small dangerous particulates, black carbon, and other real pollutants.
It’s so bad, the UK is not meeting air pollution standards, and more importantly, by at least one estimate, some 7,000 deaths a year can be attributed to diesel pollution from cars.
Diesel pollution is becoming such an issue in London that Boris Johnson is […]
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JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
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