EV Battery Fires Increase by 46% in One Year! — ‘Sue and Settle’ Is How Government Does Back Door Banning — Who Is Funding These Nutty Professors? — It Turns Out the Biggest Enemy of Green Energy Is…Green Energy — and much more.
The UK experience with EVs is anything but positive:
Exploding with the force of a bomb blasting 2,000°C super-heated jets of flame into surrounding areas, melting and decomposing nearby structural materials including metal and concrete, and sending vast amounts of toxic fumes into any enclosed atmosphere. Thinking about putting the conflagration out – forget it – run (if you can) for your life. Welcome to a future where electric cars become common and are to be found packed like sardines into ferries and underground car parks beneath apartment buildings.
A recent freedom of information request from the insurer QBE found that electric vehicle battery fires in the U.K. jumped by 46% last year. Car and bus fires were up 33% and 22% respectively and it is noted that there are now three battery fires a day compared with two in 2022.
QBE provides the following data from 50 U.K. fire brigades, although some figures are incomplete. For instance, fires involving e-trucks, which quadrupled last year, were only provided by seven brigades.
It is a sobering thought that any one of the incidents catalogued above had the ability to turn into a major catastrophe with potential loss of life. For their part, insurance companies around the world are on an obvious high alert for the potential consequences of widespread adoption of EVs, whether voluntary or forced by state diktat.
Yes, this is a repeat of the COVID debacle where state diktats produce the exact opposite of that promised.
This is the how NGOs control government and us today:
Sue and settle occurs when a federal agency conspires with anti-fossil fuels NGOs to covertly agree to settle with the NGOs to give them the outcome they want after they file a lawsuit. A recent example is a sue and settle agreement between a federal agency and NGOs to stop or at least slow down drilling and hinder oil and gas production in the Gulf of Mexico to protect an endangered whale that may have been spotted in the Gulf.
This saga began in 2023 when two fishermen trolling for billfish 100 miles south of Galveston Island spotted a whale. They sent videos to NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, saying they thought it was a Rice’s whale, which usually lives in the northeastern Gulf off Florida, not in the southern Gulf. NOAA said that they were unable to confirm the whale’s species.
The sighting prompted a group of NGOs led by the Sierra Club to file a lawsuit to stop offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico to protect Rice’s whales. The Biden Administration agreed to settle the lawsuit by imposing “extra precautions in running ships to their offshore platforms.” This type of lawsuit and settlement agreement between federal agencies and NGOs is referred to as “sue and settle:”
…Under this sue and settle agreement, offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico will be severely restricted starting in early 2025:
In other words, the regulations to protect Rice’s whales in the Gulf of Mexico have the potential to stop or significantly reduce drilling and severely restrict oil and gas production by restricting boat traffic in a large swath of the Gulf.
When will we ever reform tax-exemption rules to turn the tables on NGOs and their undue influence?
The insanity of the extremist environmental community is hard to believe:
At this point, there is some consensus that even if "greenhouse gas emissions are sharply reduced" immediately, the Arctic would still be free of summer ice by the next decade, said The Guardian. Research published last year suggests 90% of the melting had been due to "human-caused global heating", the paper added, and now the world must prepare for the knock-on effects including rising sea levels and more extreme summer heat and winter cold, as well as loss of habitat for wildlife.
Stopping the thaw would take an effective global effort to reduce carbon emissions, but in the shorter term, scientists have proposed numerous innovative solutions to try and quell the impact.
The Arctic Ice Project has put forward the idea of "sprinkling parts of the Arctic with a thin layer of glass beads" which could "boost surface reflectivity and create more ice" and start a "cooling feedback loop", said The Guardian.
Other solutions include building "free-floating" underwater sea walls that "block the warm ocean currents from melting the glacier from below" and mimicking the cooling effect caused by some natural events like volcanic eruptions. The latter is perhaps the most controversial, as it involves "releasing calcium carbonate into the stratosphere" that can block solar radiation and could damage the ozone layer in the long term.
The solution gaining the most traction appears to be the "audacious" refreezing proposal which is hoped can make the ice "thicker and longer-lasting", said The Times.
The idea is that engineers will use pumps to spread seawater on top of the ice that will freeze over winter and last longer into the summer months.
Scientists from two enterprises, Real Ice and Arctic Reflections, have been testing the system, which involves sending an underwater drone to find thin ice and punch a hole through to the surface and "flood" seawater over the top of the ice. It is hoped that the extra water will speed up the "natural freezing process" and "create ice that is about a metre thicker" and therefore more durable in the warmer temperatures.
Though the system has been through numerous tests already, this year was the first time the pumps were powered by renewable energy, running on hydrogen.
Read the first and last paragraphs to understand the title:
Europe’s electrification has stagnated for the past ten years primarily due to decreased power demand driven by industrial slowdown, according to a new report from the electricity industry trade organisation Eurelectric.
The Power Barometer 2024 report highlights that the EU’s overall electrification rate has stagnated at 23% for the past decade, well below the bloc’s goal of 50% by 2040.
Meanwhile, China has surpassed the EU in electrifying its economy, having grown its overall rate by 7% since 2015.
According to the report, the lack of progression is closely tied to Europe’s decreasing electricity demand.
While the power cutback can partly be attributed to increased energy efficiency measures and milder weather conditions, Eurelectric identifies industrial slowdown driven by economic decline as the primary cause.
Rate of electrification in the EU and China. Credit: IEA via Eurelectric.
Between 2021 and 2023, electricity demand across the EU dropped by 7.5%. The report finds that more than half of this reduction was due to powerful industries either shutting down or relocating abroad in response to growing inflation, high capital costs and uncompetitive energy prices.
In addition, EU industry has struggled to electrify its processes. Today, only a third of the energy consumed by European industries is covered by electricity, while just 4% of process heating – responsible for 75% of total industrial emissions – is electrified.
“The missing piece between going green and staying competitive is electrifying. Industrial sectors hold a huge potential to electrify further based on available technologies,” said Eurelectric’s secretary-general Kristian Ruby.
Despite the challenges, the report notes that Europe has made significant strides in reducing emissions. In 2023, the bloc’s power sector managed to cut emissions by 50% compared with 2008, the largest reduction to date, while 68% of the EU's electricity was generated from clean energy sources – a figure that has increased to nearly 75% in the first half of 2024.
Yes, when you strangle industry with green energy mandates, there is deindustrialization and that which remains isn't about to march over the cliff with the lemmings who died. The failure of the author of the article to grasp the connection is stunning.
The greenies have beyond goofball into the seriously proving their mental illness and stupidity.