The EV subsidies going to brand-new Teslas alone total $80 million. Every dollar subsidising the world’s richest toddler, Bubba Musk, is a dollar that hasn’t been spent on, say, hiring more bus drivers and paying them well. Or buying a train track inspection.
Reporters this week established that the recipients of EV subsidies live almost exclusively in leafy suburbs. People who live in struggle street do not buy brand new $80,000 motors, or even relatively affordable brand new Toyotas.
And it is not just an $8000 handout to buy a new Tesla. They also get an ongoing $2000 a year top-up bonus of unpaid road user taxes. EVs still use the roads, don’t they?
Over 10 years, a Tesla owner is getting another $20,000 handout. Bludgers.
The International Energy Agency estimates that if the whole world achieves its electric vehicle targets by 2030, we will save an additional 235 million tons of carbon. Sounds good, but the world produces about 37 billion tonnes each year, so that is a 0.1 percent reduction in carbon emissions.
If I were more cynical, I would say that the people who have told us that taxing wealth is off the table also have an EV policy that looks like more middle-class capture than effective climate strategy.
Buses and trains that are more convenient to use than your car would be a bigger bang for buck, but New Zealanders have little experience of public transport that works properly.
Let us turn to the Climate Change Commission's latest ‘draft advice’ to the Government, delivered from Mt Sinai last week by Rod Carr, who somehow presents as the guru of a rigid new church.
The commission does a good job of setting carbon budgets and holding government to account on whether it’s reaching them.
Then we get to its menu of ideas for how to reduce emissions, which are a bit zany.
Its manifesto reads like it’s been put together by people who spend their mornings glueing themselves to motorways: Bans, subsidies, nothing measured to find the most efficient.
It instructs that ‘mindsets’ and the “values of businesses and consumers” must be ‘redefined’. I have been around the far left for much of my life, and I have previously seen the movie that tries to persuade us we are living in false consciousness. I won’t spoil the ending for you.
It wants to replace our ‘linear’ economy with a ‘circular one’. In case you think this sounds like recycling - who isn’t in favour of that? - the commission considers recycling “an option of last resort”. Apparently we should only have products that can be repurposed or ‘last forever’. Diamonds then.
The commission encourages us towards ‘active transport’, formerly known as ‘walking’. Not popular among voters who live 20 kilometres from work and do night shifts. They should buy new Teslas.
“An integrated planning system” is needed to build cities ‘upward’. I don't mind apartment blocks. Denser inner cities have many benefits, but growing up in the UK made me suspicious of utopian town planners. A post-war generation of idealistic architects, with their vision of ‘streets in the sky’, condemned friends of mine to childhoods in the urine-stinking stairwells of tower blocks.
These were a solution to rat-infested slums, but built too quickly and cheaply. Do we really want to rush this again? Even if we did, we are not going to close suburbs and rebuild cities in the next 25 years. We can’t even afford the water pipes.
Carbon News noted that people who buy carbon credits are not taking the commission seriously. If anyone was listening, the ETS price would be heading back to the highs of last year at $88.30 per tonne. Instead, the price dropped by about 10% and sits at $54 a tonne, two-thirds of the level needed to incentivise change.
Greenpeace suggests the Climate Change Commission should run the ETS. But the commission wants something more revolutionary than the ETS, and we prefer elections when deciding how to run our economy.
I would take its policy advice role away: It should stick to setting budgets and pronouncements on whether we are meeting them.
You will never get the majority of people to support a clean energy transition that makes them pay more for less. Better to spend the EV subsidy on working out how to make electric vehicles cheaper than petrol cars. Only then will most of us switch.
It is hard to have a debate about which climate policies work best without being called a ‘climate delayer’, as if doing the wrong thing quickly is better than doing the right thing more carefully. But let's at least have a debate about who pays......The full article is published HERE
The International Energy Agency estimates that if the whole world achieves its electric vehicle targets by 2030, we will save an additional 235 million tons of carbon. Sounds good, but the world produces about 37 billion tonnes each year, so that is a 0.1 percent reduction in carbon emissions.
If I were more cynical, I would say that the people who have told us that taxing wealth is off the table also have an EV policy that looks like more middle-class capture than effective climate strategy.
Buses and trains that are more convenient to use than your car would be a bigger bang for buck, but New Zealanders have little experience of public transport that works properly.
Let us turn to the Climate Change Commission's latest ‘draft advice’ to the Government, delivered from Mt Sinai last week by Rod Carr, who somehow presents as the guru of a rigid new church.
The commission does a good job of setting carbon budgets and holding government to account on whether it’s reaching them.
Then we get to its menu of ideas for how to reduce emissions, which are a bit zany.
Its manifesto reads like it’s been put together by people who spend their mornings glueing themselves to motorways: Bans, subsidies, nothing measured to find the most efficient.
It instructs that ‘mindsets’ and the “values of businesses and consumers” must be ‘redefined’. I have been around the far left for much of my life, and I have previously seen the movie that tries to persuade us we are living in false consciousness. I won’t spoil the ending for you.
It wants to replace our ‘linear’ economy with a ‘circular one’. In case you think this sounds like recycling - who isn’t in favour of that? - the commission considers recycling “an option of last resort”. Apparently we should only have products that can be repurposed or ‘last forever’. Diamonds then.
The commission encourages us towards ‘active transport’, formerly known as ‘walking’. Not popular among voters who live 20 kilometres from work and do night shifts. They should buy new Teslas.
“An integrated planning system” is needed to build cities ‘upward’. I don't mind apartment blocks. Denser inner cities have many benefits, but growing up in the UK made me suspicious of utopian town planners. A post-war generation of idealistic architects, with their vision of ‘streets in the sky’, condemned friends of mine to childhoods in the urine-stinking stairwells of tower blocks.
These were a solution to rat-infested slums, but built too quickly and cheaply. Do we really want to rush this again? Even if we did, we are not going to close suburbs and rebuild cities in the next 25 years. We can’t even afford the water pipes.
Carbon News noted that people who buy carbon credits are not taking the commission seriously. If anyone was listening, the ETS price would be heading back to the highs of last year at $88.30 per tonne. Instead, the price dropped by about 10% and sits at $54 a tonne, two-thirds of the level needed to incentivise change.
Greenpeace suggests the Climate Change Commission should run the ETS. But the commission wants something more revolutionary than the ETS, and we prefer elections when deciding how to run our economy.
I would take its policy advice role away: It should stick to setting budgets and pronouncements on whether we are meeting them.
You will never get the majority of people to support a clean energy transition that makes them pay more for less. Better to spend the EV subsidy on working out how to make electric vehicles cheaper than petrol cars. Only then will most of us switch.
It is hard to have a debate about which climate policies work best without being called a ‘climate delayer’, as if doing the wrong thing quickly is better than doing the right thing more carefully. But let's at least have a debate about who pays......The full article is published HERE
Josie Pagani is a commentator on current affairs and a regular contributor to Stuff. She works in geopolitics, aid and development, and governance.
2 comments:
"...as if doing the wrong thing quickly is better than doing the right thing more carefully."
That's an excellent line!
Discussions usually simply conflate climate change with 'greenhouse gas' emissions. The causal relationship is never properly established. Correlation is confused with cause. One can accept that the unusual speed of climate change compared with what we can make of geological history sufficiently proves that human population and activity are significantly responsible, but the next logical step to blame emissions is theoretical and the proof is not put forward. We have absolutely no evidence, only predictions, that reducing carbon and other emissions has ever reduced the planet's surface temperature or ever will; we are expected to take this on faith under an argument from authority base on theory. The question is begged regarding whether greenhouse gases actually cause global warming.
Have we yet restored the ozone layer to its past composition following the effects of human-made chemicals that never existed prior to our climate-change era? What of the massive additional solar energy by unfiltered wavelengths entering the earth's atmosphere? Wavelengths that damage life including human skin and surface sea algae, the planet's largest carbon sink. Weirdly, ozone is classed as a greenhouse gas by the adherents of that theory so following it might see us pump a lot more Freon and related gases into the atmosphere! Perhaps restoring the ozone layer would be a worthwhile priority instead, a lot easier than the 'greenhouse gas' claimed solution that will wreak destruction of economy, equality, health and lifestyle. Sure, let's keep reducing gaseous pollution into the air we must all breathe, but don't be surprised if doing so has little or no impact on climate.
The rationale behind all these complex and expensive measures is to counteract the "human caused climate" change that the IPCC tells us is threatening the planet with doom, soon.
Well:-
In summary here is the track record of the IPCC;s predictions for doom:-
1/ No 50 million climate refugees by 2010, as they forecast in 2005.
2/ No increase in rate of sea level rising.
3/ Artic Ice is still there, and not melting away
3/ Antarctic Ice is actually growing.
4/ Extreme weather events, world-wide are NOT increasing.
5/ Forest fires, world-wide, are not increasing.
6/ Yes - the planet is slowly warming, in fits and starts, as it emerges from the Little Ice Age of 300 years ago, when the river Thames and the English Channel almost froze over.
7/ The IPCC has recently admitted that it’s multiplying factor used in all their “computer models” is wrong. They were using the highest possible factor, and now admit that it was far too high, and all their predictions up till now have been highly exaggerated (i.e. wrong!)
In addition, human CO2 emissions are only 3% of total global CO2.
New Zealand's CO2 emissions are only 0.17% of human emissions.
So NZ's CO2 emissions are 3% x 0.17% = 0.005% !! i.e. effectively ZERO
These above comments are scientific facts - not "denial"
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