Not so fast, says The Economist in a leader:

Highly charged motoring
Electric cars, though a welcome development, are neither as useful nor as green as their proponents claim

…the big car firms are pushing all-electric cars for the mass market. At the Paris Motor Show this week they unveiled electric vehicles of all shapes and sizes. Some go on sale in the next few months.

This represents a huge leap forward for the industry, but the showroom patter will be misleading, for two reasons. First, although electric cars are nippy, stylish and as easy to drive as conventional vehicles, electric motoring has some distinct disadvantages. Second, they are not really as green as their promoters claim.

The idea of recharging an electric car at home for only a few dollars and never again having to visit a filling station is enticing. For most journeys, the limitations of battery capacity are irrelevant. As salesmen will be quick to point out, 99% of the time people do only short runs—the daily commute, trips to the shops and to pick up the children—all of which are well within the range of most electric cars.

But that final 1% of journeys presumably includes the summer holiday when people pile into the car and head off for the coast. Hopping on the train laden with suitcases and children may not be an attractive alternative. And even the relatively short ranges that salesmen advertise may be optimistic. On a cold, wet night when lots of electrical systems are running and the vehicle is laden with passengers and luggage, a car may lose around a third of its supposed range [emphasis added--Canada, eh?].

…what of electric cars’ environmental credentials? Electric cars are being hugely subsidised by taxpayers—£5,000 ($7,940) in Britain and up to $7,500 in America—on the ground that they are zero-emission vehicles. Makers of electric cars claim that this is an efficient way to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. Road transport accounts for a tenth of such emissions worldwide; the sorts of biofuels currently in use are not much greener than petrol [The Economist is including diesel, which fuels some 50% of cars in Europe]; and next-generation biofuels are proving slow to come to the market.

Although electric cars may not themselves produce greenhouse gases, generating the electricity they use does. How green they are depends on the fuel mix at the power plants in the country in which they are driven. An electric car in Britain today, for instance, produces around 20% less in CO2 emissions than a car with a petrol engine. Even if the generating mix gets greener, electric vehicles are so expensive to produce, that they will still be a relatively costly way of abating CO2 emissions. Sceptics therefore doubt that the subsidy is a good use of public money. According to Richard Pike, chief executive of the Royal Society of Chemistry, replacing all of Britain’s cars with subsidised electric cars would cost the taxpayer £150 billion and, with Britain’s current fuel mix, cut CO2 emissions from cars by about 2%. For the same money, Britain could replace its entire power-generation stock with solar cells and cut its emissions by a third…

This is their news story in the same issue:

A sparky new motor
The first mass-market electric cars are arriving in showrooms. They represent a big gamble for carmakers

As for, er, Leafs…

Earlier:

Cars and electric fairyland: Not much jolt from the Volt

Mark
Ottawa

Anne Applebaum lays it out in the Washington Post:

China’s quiet power grab

…Why on earth should China shout, bully and push its neighbors around? Over the past decade, China has kept silent, lain low and behaved more like a multinational company than a global superpower — and garnered enormous political influence as a result.

The fruits of this success are everywhere. Look at Afghanistan, for example, where American troops have been fighting for nearly a decade, where billions of dollars of American aid money has been spent — and where a Chinese company has won the rights to exploit one of the world’s largest copper deposits. Though American troops don’t protect the miners directly, Afghan troops, trained and armed by Americans, do. And though the mine is still in its early phases, the Chinese businessmen and engineers — wearing civilian clothes, offering jobs — are already more popular with the locals than the U.S. troops, who carry guns and talk security. The Chinese paid a high price for their copper mining rights and took a huge risk. But if it pays off, our war against the Taliban might someday be remembered as the war that paved the way for Chinese domination of Afghanistan.

America fights, in other words, while China does business, and not only in Afghanistan. In Iraq, where American troops brought down a dictator and are still fighting an insurgency, Chinese oil companies have acquired bigger stakes in the oil business than their American counterparts. In Pakistan, where billions in American military aid helps the government keep the Taliban at bay, China has set up a free-trade area and is investing heavily in energy and ports.

…Americans are pouring vast amounts of public and private money into solar energy and wind power, hoping to wean themselves off fossil fuels and prevent climate change. China, by contrast, builds a new coal-fired plant every 10 days or so. While thus producing ever more greenhouse gases in the East, China makes clever use of those government subsidies in the West: Three Chinese companies now rank among the top 10 producers of wind turbines in the world.

…Why on earth are the Chinese playing military games with Japan, threatening Southeast Asia or entering politics at all? When they stay silent, we ignore them. When they threaten boycotts or use nationalist language, we get scared and react. We still haven’t realized that the scariest thing about China is not the size of its navy or the arrogance of its diplomats. The scariest thing is the power China has already accumulated without ever deploying its military or its diplomats at all.

Earlier:

Japan feels the Dragon’s fiery breath

Predate: China may also need more Canada:

Sinochem Said to Be Likeliest Rival to BHP Potash Bid

Mark
Ottawa

Second in the line–for now–of succession to head of state if…Talk about kow-towing to the Yankees:

Flex U.S. muscle on oilsands, groups tell Pelosi

About a dozen protesters gathered on Parliament Hill Wedneday to demonstrate against the oil sands. Nancy Pelosi, one of the most powerful lawmakers in the United States, was in Ottawa to discuss the oilsands with premiers and federal officials and met with environmentalists.
Adrian Wyld/THE CANADIAN PRESS…

Imagine the uproar and outrage if prominent Canadians were groveling to a senior Republican in the Congress thinking of acting against our national interest. But Democratic environmental neo-colonialism is quite tolerable apparently.

Earlier:

Aussies get Nancy Pelosi

Update: Meanwhile the Democrat with the royalest jelly should be further disappointing his Canadian acolytes; but will they even notice as this acute observer does?

Obama stiffs Maher Arar

Mark
Ottawa

Hah!

What the Chinese really think of ‘Man Made Global Warming’

Low-income coal miners rest before starting their shift in a privately run coal mine close to You Fang Liang, Ningxia Province, north eastern China (Photo: EPA)

One of the great lies told us by our political leaders in order to persuade us to accept their swingeing and pointless green taxes and their economically suicidal, environmentally vandalistic wind-farm building programmes is that if we don’t do it China will. Apparently, just waiting to be grabbed out there are these glittering, golden prizes marked “Green jobs” and “Green technologies” – and if only we can get there before those scary, mysterious Chinese do, well, maybe the West will enjoy just a few more years of economic hegemony before the BRICs nations thwack us into the long grass.

This is, of course, utter nonsense. The Chinese do not remotely believe in the myth of Man-Made Global Warming nor in the efficacy of “alternative energy”. Why should they? It’s not as if there is any evidence for it. The only reason the Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming myth has penetrated so deeply into Western culture is… No. I’m going to save that stuff for my fairly imminent (Nov?) book on the subject which I hope you’re all going to buy.

What do the Chinese think about CAGW? Well, until now it was largely a question of educated guesswork, based on inferences like the fact that it was the Chinese who derailed the Copenhagen negotiations [more--at The Guardian!]. But thanks to a new book called Low Carbon Plot by Gou Hongyang we know exactly what the official view is…

Via Arts & Letters Daily.  Meanwhile, the Ottawa Citizen’s John Robson despairs of Dauntless Dalton’s plans for the greening of Ontario–and of the electorate:

The latest inept and expensive flip-flop from the Ontario government, on overpriced rural solar power, has me scratching my head till my scalp hurts on a key question of political economy: Is it in fact possible to be a cunning dunce?

In case you missed it, the McGuinty Liberals just proposed a massive bounty for rural solar power and apparently (I am not making this up) didn’t realize people would come for it … in which case why offer it? Their “microFIT” program offered nearly 20 times the market price for solar-generated electricity, 80.2 cents per kilowatt hour (kW·h) rather than 4.02, to try to get people to put a few panels on their roof. To the government’s astonishment, a gold rush ensued instead.

By July 2, with almost 19,000 people lined up for the free money, the province said it would only pay 58.8 cents per kWh, provoking a wave of rural anger that Wednesday’s Citizen described as “so strong that it reportedly threatened the re-election chances of nearly two dozen Liberal MPPs.” So the government flapped the flip of its flop and will now pay 80.2 cents per kWh for every project registered before July 2 but only 60.4 afterward…

…they [Canadian politicians] think of the mass of humanity as reliably grateful for state benefits precisely because we are too inept to manage our own affairs rationally. Thus we respond to one incentive and one incentive only.

To paraphrase Orwell, it is precisely the sort of stupid thing only an intelligent person could believe. It is also insulting. But as long as we keep electing them, we are looking in the right place for cunning when we scrutinize our politicians, but in the wrong place for the dunces.

More from Mr Robson on our politicians buying our votes:

Pneus ABC Tires Inc: Your tax dollars at work…

Mark
Ottawa

According to the Globe and Mail, three provinces are working independently to introduce a greenhouse gas cap-and-trade system that would price carbon. Along with Ontario and Quebec, the province of British Columbia will join California and New Mexico as part of the “Western Climate Initiative”.

The most frustrating part of learning about this is that British Columbia already has a carbon tax, which currently sets a price on carbon at around $20 per tonne of CO2 emissions. That price is set to rise to $25 per tonne in 2011, and $30 per tonne by 2012.

According to the BC government website, the carbon tax will top out at 7.24 cents a litre for gasoline at the pump by 2012. But although some people living outside of the province might think the tax only applies to gasoline, the list is much larger and more comprehensive than that.

Diesel will be 8.27 cents per litre, along with light fuel oil. Heavy fuel oil will rise to 9.33 cents per litre; aviation gasoline to 7.34 cents; jet fuel to 7.87 cents; kerosene to 7.68 cents. But it doesn’t stop there.

Home owners pay $1.49.64 per Gigajoule on natural gas heating, widely touted as a “clean energy”. We also pay taxes if we buy propane for our barbecues, butane, ethane, pentane, and oven gas. Hell, the province will charge $62.40 in taxes for each tonne of whole rubber tires.

The carbon tax has already pushed Vancouver to the distinction of having the highest gasoline prices in the country. Not that it’s managed to magically remove cars from the road, as the B.C. government had predicted. If anything, the roads have never been more congested.

The problem with energy consumption taxes is that Canada is heavily dependent on non-renewable energies, and the government isn’t really offering us any alternatives. So the carbon tax has the effect of increasing our overall tax burden, without having any positive environmental effects whatsoever. In fact, in 2008, B.C. was the only province to increase emissions in Canada.

Energy taxes are responsible for inflation in the province, as the costs to business are passed on to consumers. The transportation costs of delivering food aren’t swallowed by the food industry. They distribute that increased cost in each item that arrives in the supermarket. So when you wonder why your B.C. grocery bill is $250 a week, a part of that cost must be factored into the carbon equation.

A carbon market would likely act in very much the same way, but with much worse potential pitfalls. Carbon trading manipulation can lead to people “playing the market” in order to earn millions of dollars, and would pave the way for “green lobbyists” trying to get the government to subsidize their industries. None of that will do anything toward reducing greenhouse gas emissions. It’s just moving a fictitious commodity price around.

It’s particularly disturbing that the federal Conservatives are entirely on board with this scheme. They must realize how poorly the European carbon market has fared, and how much it will affect the common taxpaying mule. Yet we still have Jim Prentice representing the Conservative Party’s continued policy of pandering to pie-in-the-sky ideas that have absolutely nothing to do with stopping global warming, whether that be real or fictitious.

…and what the Gray Lady did.  Sort of.  Some acute observing at Spector Vision:
All the climate change news fit to print?

…

Flipping to the New York Times, I read about a report issued this week by the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency — which comes as news to me. In the on-line version of the New York Times, a link is provided to the actual report, which went largely unreported in our media.

Like the British investigation, it appears that the Dutch environmental agency “found no errors that would undermine the main conclusions in the 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on possible future regional impacts of climate change.” However, the Dutch agency also concluded:

“the summaries in the IPCC Working Group II Report put an emphasis on projections of the more serious, negative impacts of climate change. This selection was an obvious choice, and also had been approved by the governments that constitute the IPCC. However, this meant that the less severe impacts and any positive effects did not make it into the summaries for policymakers, which made the overall tenor of the summaries more negative than that of the underlying chapters. For example, the possibly positive consequences for forestry in North Asia are named in one of the chapters, but they are not named in the summaries.

In addition, the investigated 32 summary conclusions on regional impacts do not mention other factors that play an important role, such as the influence of population growth on water shortages. The PBL recommends to present a broader representation of projected developments in the summaries for policy makers in the Fifth Assessment Reports in 2013 and 2014.”

The climate-gate e-mails had only a marginal influence at the Copenhagen conference: of the participating governments, only Saudi Arabia sought to give the ‘scandal’ any credence. The report of the Dutch agency, on the other hand, is something that all governments will have to mull over as they consider their next steps on the issue of climate change.

Earlier in the Great White North:

Guzzling, not sipping

And only two of the top ten selling vehicles down south are, er, smallish:

…
Truck sales dominated the list of the bestselling vehicles for the first half of 2010. Ford’s F-series truck was the top seller, according to Standard & Poor’s. Chevrolet’s Silverado was second.

The next five top sellers were compact and midsize sedans from the big Japanese manufacturers, including Toyota’s Camry, the Honda Accord, Toyota’s Corolla, the Honda Civic and Nissan’s Altima. The Ford Fusion and Chevrolet Malibu sedans followed and the Ford Escape SUV was tenth.

Up here there’s a rather different picture in terms of cars:

…
Year-to-date to the end of May, the top ten (cars only) were the Honda Civic, Mazda3, Toyota Corolla, Hyundai Elantra, Hyundai Accent, Toyota Matrix, Chevrolet Cobalt, Ford Focus, Ford Fusion and Volkswagen Golf….

All small but for the Fusion. Proof if you want that Canadians are poorer than Americans. But if we have the money we love to go large, see first link again–plus the headline for the above quote:

Honda Civic, Ford F-Series top May sales

Mark
Ottawa

Earlier:

What do Canadians really think about their carbon, er, tireprints?

Now the Globe and Mail’s auto industry person notices the awful facts:

Green fades in vehicle purchase choices
Canadians buying more gas guzzlers and fewer fuel-sipping subcompacts amid stable gas prices

One must note that humongous rebates have helped push the pickups off the lots.

Mark
Ottawa

Little known fact: they just keep on truckin’:

Pickups drive Ford to record Automaker leads for past two quarters

Ford dealers in Canda are selling more and more pickups this year, such as the F-150.
Photograph by: Image courtesy, Graeme Fletcher
…
Last month, Ford sold more than 23,500 trucks in Canada, an increase of 13 per cent over the same month last year. That spike was the main contributor to a 16-per-cent bump in total vehicle sales, giving Ford its highest monthly sales volume since May 2000.

And for the first time in more than 50 years, Ford was the top-selling automaker in Canada for two consecutive quarters.

Credit truck sales with somewhat of a reversal of fortunes for the Detroit Three, which have been gaining ground on Japanese automakers in recent months, said George Magliano, an auto analyst with IHS Global Insight in New York.

“If the pickup truck market is reviving, that’s Detroit. That’s their stronghold,” Magliano said.

A surge of truck sales also produced a solid month for Chrysler Canada, with Dodge Ram [just Ram now, ma'am]  pickup sales almost doubling over 2009…

Those 23,500 trucks are a rather stunning some 75% of Ford’s total June vehicles sales of 31,700.  And look at these numbers:

Truck sales roar ahead of compacts

Relatively high gas prices and global warming don’t appear to be dissuading Canadians from purchasing large vehicles.

According to statistics compiled by DesRosiers Automotive Reports, sales of small cars are struggling this year while demand for light trucks is soaring.

Sales of subcompact cars fell 25.3 per cent in May compared to the same period last year, while year-to-date sales decreased 21.2 per cent. Compact cars were down 9.9 per cent for May and 0.1 per cent year to date…

Sales of light trucks were up 13.4 per cent in May, while year-to-date sales grew 19 per cent…

Going green my…

Mark
Ottawa

…pushing back the envelope.  The jet set ain’t wot it used ter be:

Britain Curbing Airport Growth to Aid Climate

In a bold if lonely environmental stand, Britain’s coalition government has set out to curb the growth of what has been called “binge flying” by refusing to build new runways around London to accommodate more planes…

The government decided that enabling more flying was incompatible with Britain’s oft-stated goal of curbing emissions. Britons have become accustomed to easy, frequent flying — jetting off to weekend homes in Spain and bachelor parties in Prague — as England has become a hub for low-cost airlines [you won't see prices like this over here]…

Can’t let the proles keep enjoying those cheap flights provided by captitalist competition, what?  One  face of English Tories (just about the only kind left in the UK).

It’s noteworthy that that competition is one, er, concrete benefit of EU policy–cabotage, AKA “open skies” (see the Sixth Freeedom on).  Those raving Eurocapitalists.

Mark
Ottawa