Is James Shaw trolling me? It’s Thursday and he’s onto his second wacky idea for the week.
Tuesday, he was still banging on about that damn wealth tax despite the fact it, one, is not happening, and two, even if it was, it wasn’t solving the problem he was claiming it would solve, i.e. the price of houses and first home buyers trying to get into the market
Now its cars. Combustion engines to be precise, he wants them banned.
He’s not the first of course. Announcements have been made internationally, not least of which is in Britain where they are banning their import from 2030.
Why Boris Johnson did that given all he’s got on his plate I have no idea.
But James sees trouble in the fact that if we don’t ban them as well, they’ll dump their product on our market and to quote him, we’ll be stuffed.
Will we? Japan has dumped their product on our market for years and we love it. In fact, it’s not really been dumping we've gone out and made an industry of it.
James may not know this but if you wander the second hand yards of this country, they are full of imports from Japan, Singapore, Malaysia, Britain and South Africa and a few specialist products via America.
And guess what? We buy them; buy them willingly and with a certain passion.
Why? Because one, they’ve brought the price of cars down, and two, they offer a range of vehicles that might otherwise be unavailable to us.
What James fails to get is largely we are driven by price. The average car in this country is well over a decade old, and one must also never forget the car fleet is owned by some of the most passionate motorists anywhere in the world.
We love cars: old, new, fast, noisy, and rare, more cars per head than anywhere outside America.
No one wants James' world of cycles and buses and EVs. Obviously some do, but not many or else we would be on to it already and we are not.
A cheap new EV is $70,000, and the bus doesn’t come past your door at the time you need it.
Banning stuff is the policy of defeat, used by megalomaniacs who failed to take the people with them.
Come back to me in 2030 in nine years’ time and let’s see who’s right, shall we?
Mike Hosking is a New Zealand television and radio broadcaster. He currently hosts The Mike Hosking Breakfast show on NewstalkZB on weekday mornings.
4 comments:
There are certain other practicalities that also have to be taken into account when considering swapping out petrol/diesel cars with EV's, although cost is a major one. Range, time to recharge, places to recharge, battery life, huge cost of replacement batteries etc. All of the above are the real reasons why most people won't buy an EV.
Also, if we're being strictly "save the planet" here. Modern petrol cars have to do about 70,000km before their emissions match those in just manufacturing an electric car, principally the batteries. After that it takes about another 40,000km for the petrol car to actually produce more CO2 overall because the electric car is recharging using some fossil fuel generation.
But what James should be really concerned about are the batteries and their effect on the environment. Mining copper, nickel, cobalt and other heavy metals would see new mines opening up all over the world. Disposal of the batteries at the end of their relatively short life would create a massive environmental hazard.
If the world really tried to replace fossil fuel vehicles with EVs the cost to the environment would be huge. The amount of electricity countries would have to generate would also increase massively. And how would we generate all this extra power - unreliable and very costly wind and solar?? Yeah right!!
What the Greens (and Labour) don't get is there is no such thing as an environmental free lunch when it comes to generating power.
I agree - most people don't want a ban on internal combustion engine powered cars but people vote for it! What you seem to be saying (and I agree) is that people are too stupid (apparently) to see the connection between voting for these clowns and the results of voting for them. I think that many people don't actually make the connection between the Greens and their policies.....Weird is hardly the word for it. James Shaw when questioned seems to have almost no idea about the actual facts of so called 'Climate Change'- and this it typical of many of the alarmists.
Gerry Sanders wrights :-
There are so many good books available now which explain in scientific detail why the current obsession with 'ZERO CARBON' is the greatest hoax that has ever been perpetrated by, and on, mankind. The greatest fear now is not warming but cooling and neither one has anything to do with CO2 but entirely driven by the sun. The greatest greenhouse gas is water ( humidity , clouds etc. ) and the contribution from man made CO2 is negligible. My feeling is few people bother to read up the science, which is all written for the non-specialist, so are brainwashed by the drivel appearing on the TV and newspapers which, equally, don't bother to check anything. The only explanation is that Governments, UN , Davos types, the CCP and the EU etc. are all driven by the need for central control and ' who controls energy , controls the world ' .
Just read the comments of the previous, there is no way I could have said it better, confratulations to them, question how can we get these comments into mainstream media even as a reply to edotorial articles. I have tried and complainig have been tpld no.
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