Toyota Warns (Again) About Electrifying All Autos. Is Anyone Listening?

By Bryan Preston.
Depending on how and when you count, Japan’s Toyota is the world’s largest automaker. According to Wheels, Toyota and Volkswagen vie for the title of the world’s largest, with each taking the crown from the other as the market moves. That’s including Volkswagen’s inherent advantage of sporting 12 brands versus Toyota’s four. Audi, Lamborghini, Porsche, Bugatti, and Bentley are included in the Volkswagen brand family.

GM, America’s largest automaker, is about half Toyota’s size thanks to its 2009 bankruptcy and restructuring. Toyota is actually a major car manufacturer in the United States; in 2016 it made about 81% of the cars it sold in the U.S. right here in its nearly half a dozen American plants. If you’re driving a Tundra, RAV4, Camry, or Corolla it was probably American-made in a red state. Toyota was among the first to introduce gas-electric hybrid cars into the market, with the Prius twenty years ago. It hasn’t been afraid to change the car game.

All of this is to point out that Toyota understands both the car market and the infrastructure that supports it perhaps better than any other manufacturer on the planet. It hasn’t grown its footprint through acquisitions, as Volkswagen has, and it hasn’t undergone bankruptcy and bailout as GM has. Toyota has grown by building reliable cars for decades.

When Toyota offers an opinion on the car market, it’s probably worth listening to. This week, Toyota reiterated an opinion it has offered before. That opinion is straightforward: The world is not yet ready to support a fully electric auto fleet.

Toyota’s head of energy and environmental research Robert Wimmer testified before the Senate this week, and said: “If we are to make dramatic progress in electrification, it will require overcoming tremendous challenges, including refueling infrastructure, battery availability, consumer acceptance, and affordability.”

Continue reading “Toyota Warns (Again) About Electrifying All Autos. Is Anyone Listening?”

It’s Time to Unplug the Hype Over Electric Vehicles

By Robert Bryce.

For more than a century, the promise of electric vehicles (EVs) has been parked just beyond the nearest traffic light. In 1901, the Los Angeles Times declared “The electric automobile will quickly and easily take precedence over all other” types of motor vehicles. “If the claims which Mr. Edison makes for his new battery be not overstated, there is not much doubt that it will make a fortune for somebody.”

In 1911, The New York Times declared that the EV “has long been recognized as the ideal solution” because it “is cleaner and quieter” and “much more economical.” And yet today, 110 years after EVs were dubbed the Next Big Thing, they account for just 2% of new car sales in the U.S. Continue reading “It’s Time to Unplug the Hype Over Electric Vehicles”

Use Foresters to Save the Forests

By Viv Forbes

Green extremists plan to convert Australia into “tree heaven”. They will bully this through, no matter what the cost.

Huge areas of forest are already converted to “locked-up-land” – national parks, world heritage areas, Kyoto protected trees, remnant vegetation, aboriginal reserves, wildlife habitat and corridors etc. Many lock-ups are so large and so poorly managed that they have become extreme bushfire hazards and a refuge for wild dogs, cats, goats, camels, pigs, lantana, groundsel and other weeds and pests. Continue reading “Use Foresters to Save the Forests”

Raising a Generation of Junior Jackbooters

By Tony Thomas.

Australian schoolkids get multiple forms of green/Left indoctrination (for a partial list click here). Conservative state and federal governments do nothing about this and even promote it. But how well are kids actually absorbing the green/Left narrative? Very well indeed, is my guess. Judging from copious material I’ve been sifting, schools are training a generation of horrid little eco-tyrants hot to embark on the mightiest state planning and control makeover since Stalin destroyed private agriculture and re-introduced mass slavery. Continue reading “Raising a Generation of Junior Jackbooters”

Hydrogen Hype and Hurdles

By Viv Forbes.

Green Hydrogen is the latest “energy” fad from the global warming warriors. It is mainly hot air.

Hydrogen will NEVER be a source of energy. Unlike coal, oil or natural gas, hydrogen rarely occurs naturally – it must be manufactured, and that process consumes far more energy than the hydrogen “fuel” can recover. And the heat content of natural gas is over three times that of hydrogen.

“Hydro-gen” means “born of water”, but the first commercial fuel containing hydrogen was born of coal. Maybe it should be called “Carbo-gen”? Continue reading “Hydrogen Hype and Hurdles”

Green Mania Hits the Wall of Nothingness

By David Wojick
From: https://www.cfact.org/2021/06/23/green-mania-hits-the-wall-of-nothingness/

It is now clear that none of Biden’s radical green promises are going to be kept. More broadly the wild green fantasies are going nowhere. There will be some action, but nothing much.

None, nowhere, nothing much — welcome to the wall of nothingness. I for one am celebrating it, at least for now. The fight is not over by any means, but it is going pretty well.

The Green New Deal is dead in the water, maybe even sunk out of sight. Its $10 trillion a year is a glaring fantasy. There is no prospect of a gruesome Great Reset, nor for the incredibly stupid Building Back Better. These draconian slogans are trash, for the next few years anyway. The called for Wrenching Social Reconstruction is not in the offing. We can all breath a little easier. Continue reading “Green Mania Hits the Wall of Nothingness”

A Dark Day in Dubai

By Alistair Pope. From https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2015/07-08/powerless-dubai/

This short memoir is about the reality of life without electricity, that dream of the Dark Greens, which I lived in Dubai during the power outage of June 2005. The reports that followed made light of the reality as just a minor inconvenience. That is not what I experienced.

By 2005 Dubai had undergone a decade-long building frenzy and such an expansion of the population that they had outstripped the infrastructure’s electricity-generating capacity—but nobody stopped the developers.

I had been in Dubai for ten days and was due to fly out on a 2 a.m. flight for London. As I had a lazy day to kill, I woke at about 9 a.m. I had woken up, not because it was time to get up but because my hotel room was uncomfortably hot. My sweat was soaking the bed sheets. (I usually sleep with the air-conditioning set to “Igloo”—13°C—as I find that snuggling under a doona in the cold air leads to a better and deeper sleep, but that’s just me.) Clearly we had a problem, so I called reception and was told that the air-conditioner was off due to an electrical fault, but it should be OK in an hour or so. Continue reading “A Dark Day in Dubai”

The Blackout Agenda

By Viv Forbes

Solar power fails every day from sunset to sunrise as well as during rain, hail, snow or dust storms. No matter how much land we smother in subsidised solar panels, they will still fail.

Wind power fails often and unpredictably, sometimes for days, especially in quiet cold winter weather. It also shuts down during cyclones, heavy winds or icy conditions. No matter how many hills we uglify with their subsidised roads, transmission lines and bird-slicers, they will still fail.

No one notices when green energy fails (as it often does) because coal, gas and hydro keep our lights and heaters on, trains running, petrol pumping, batteries charging and dairies, abattoirs and hospitals operating. Continue reading “The Blackout Agenda”

Richard Lindzen on Climate Change

What historians will definitely wonder about in future centuries is how deeply flawed logic, obscured by shrewd and unrelenting propaganda, actually enabled a coalition of powerful special interests to convince nearly everyone in the world that CO2 from human industry was a dangerous, planet-destroying toxin. It will be remembered as the greatest mass delusion in the history of the world – that CO2, the life of plants, was considered for a time to be a deadly poison.

Future generations will wonder in bemused amazement that the early 21st century’s developed world went into hysterical panic over a globally averaged temperature increase of a few tenths of a degree, and, on the basis of gross exaggerations of highly uncertain computer projections combined into implausible chains of inference, proceeded to contemplate a roll-back of the industrial age.

~ Richard Lindzen

Time for Employees and Shareholders of Resource Companies to “FIGHT BACK”

The oil, gas and resource industry in Australia has shown itself to be pathetic in the face of criticism. Board room responses to virtuous criticism are ridiculous self-destructive woke company policies, even though the employees work hard to produce essential goods. They run advertisements showing wind turbines or solar panels which could never provide the power required for their operations but, apparently, reality doesn’t matter. The electrical power generation industry is different in that it’s focus is to co-opt politicians to force consumers to subsidise uneconomic inefficient intermittent unreliable renewable energy schemes.

Politicians, but for a very small number, lack a backbone and are readily captured by nonsense rather than stick up for Australia and the community at large. Perhaps I’m wrong and they actually believe all the “global warming/climate change” and “green energy” nonsense and think it’s worth destroying the economy to get their own warm inner glow. Parties.

Every now and then someone actually stands up to the nonsense. Northface an outdoor clothing manufacturer, in a virtue signalling exercise, criticized the oil and gas industry, going so far as implement a product boycott on one company. Here is a response from Chris Wright CEO of Liberty Oilfield Services.

If only we had more company CEOs with a spine, and more politicians who acted in the best interests of Australia.

Andrew Chapman
Victoria, Australia

Additional information: https://www.bizjournals.com/denver/news/2021/03/22/colorado-oil-gas-north-face-sustainability-flap.html