That little map above is from a new project called the 15-minute city and it’s being implemented in Oxford, England.

The idea is that “filters” will be applied to certain roads, in the form of cameras that can take pictures of car number plates. You’ll be able to drive around for free in your own neighbourhood but you’ll have to apply for a permit to drive through the filters.

I thought this quote from Duncan Enright, Oxfordshire County Council’s cabinet member for travel and development strategy, in explaining the strategy, was perfect as he discussed the upcoming vote back in November:

“It’s going to happen definitely.”

Of course it is. Elections are merely temporary roadblocks for the bureaucrats and technocrats who now rule our societies, and TPTB learn from each controlling effort they make in different areas of our lives. As this writer observed, the Chinese Lung Rot lockdowns in 2020 caused a reduction of 7% in CO2 emissions so you know what that means:

From Oxfordshire’s “15-minute city” (a climate lockdown by another name) to the direct calls for curtailing travel and restricting movement, limiting business opportunities, subsidizing transitional activities and various other facets of the great schemes are all more like the COVID response than they are different. The COVID response and its resultant decline in CO2 emissions is rapidly becoming the proposed model.

Again, of course it is. Many critics of the C-19 lockdowns have predicted this. But the thing is that the negative fallout from the C-19 lockdowns are only now starting to be recognised, even though they were long understood and predicted by public health authorities, especially epidemiologists, which is why they weren’t recommended in any public health plans, including the WHO.

It will be the same with climate lockdowns, where such things won’t matter to autistic fanatics who look only at one measure of success. Anything is justifiable:

According to Bob Barr, a former federal prosecutor and congressman from Georgia, the infrastructure bill the president signed a little more than a year ago includes “​​​​a little-noticed ‘safety’ measure that will take effect in five years.” It “amounts to a ‘vehicle kill switch,’” Barr wrote in the Daily Caller, and every car built after 2026 has to have one.

Supposedly this is to stop drunk drivers, but once every car has one you can guarantee that future governments will be tempted to use it for other purposes. After all, besides the Oxford traffic filtering you’ve already got other plans “Car-free Sundays in cities” and “Alternate private car access to roads in large cities,” as well as fossil fuel suppression schemes, limits on automobile ownership, and even a “Paleo road diet. So why not a kill switch when your number plate is recognised as being in the wrong place by the traffic computer system?

And don’t think you’ll get away from all this just because you drive an electric car:

Specifically, the paper says: “The private use of electric cars is only permitted for absolutely necessary journeys (e.g. professional practice, shopping, visiting the doctor, attending religious events, attending court appointments).” 
…
Most of the electricity in Switzerland comes from hydropower. However, the country also imports electricity from Germany and France . If there are bottlenecks there, electricity could also become scarce in Switzerland. 

That last is one of the Achilles Heels of EV’s. Unlike the Greek hero they have several, including rising battery prices caused by the technology of lithium-ion being outpaced by the rapidly rising costs of cobalt, nickel and lithium. There is new tech on the way, with a rising use of lower-cost lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries. But whatever resource is used it has to be mined and in a world where the market operated freely such rising costs would drive more mining to increase supply. But of course many of the same people who love electric cars are opposed to mining stuff like lithium. Actually they may have a point.

You can read about this horror story in more detail at “There is no such thing as clean cobalt.” and ironically the worst of it seems to be in the Congo, the setting for Conrad’s famous book about a previous period of exploitation, Heart of Darkness:

Seventy percent of the world’s cobalt comes from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. And with global demand estimated to jump 585 percent by 2050, Kara sets out to investigate the continuities of this ballooning industry with the rubber industry that preceded it. One of the central themes of Cobalt Red is the extensive use of child labor in the supply chain.

There’s something called the Global Battery Alliance that has about 120 companies signed up including Tesla, Volkswagen, and BMW, that’s supposedly going to deal the child labour problem. But even if they do there’s that 585% increase in 25 years to deal with.As physicist Mark Mills pointed out in the Wall Street Journal:

“The [International Energy Agency] finds that with a global energy transition like the one Biden envisions, demand for key minerals such as lithium, graphite, nickel and rare-earth metals would explode, rising by 4,200%, 2,500%, 1,900% and 700%, respectively, by 2040.”

Once again the idea of controlling all this via governments screwing with marketplaces develops contradictory problems that a central command and control system cannot resolve:

  • More mining of metals to make batteries and EV’s >< More EV’s to reduce CO2 emissions.
  • Increased utility-scale renewable energy projects >< Less reliable energy supplies

Even The Grundian has noticed the problem is wider than just Switzerland:

Soaring energy costs are threatening the future of the electric car, industry bosses in Germany have warned… According to the automobile economist Stefan Bratzel, the development is an immediate threat to the industry: “The electricity price explosion could end up being an acute danger for vehicle transition,”

That article notes the massive increase in the cost of electricity in Germany although without running the calculations for EV’s. But this guy in Britain did:

A Kia e-Niro with a 64.8kWh battery, for example, will cost £27.37 to charge to the recommended 80pc capacity under the new cap, according to the RAC. Its petrol equivalent, the Kia Niro with a 54L tank, would cost £76.62 to fill under today’s average petrol price of £1.70 per litre.

A Kia Niro has a range of 583 miles on a full tank, whereas an e-Niro driver would have to spend £86.73, an extra £10.11, to cover the same distance, according to analysis by Telegraph Money. This is because the e-Niro manages 184 miles on an 80pc charge, according to comparison site EV Database.

Same in the USA:

A recent report from the Anderson Economic Group (AEG) found that fueling costs from mid-priced ICE-powered vehicles are lower than similarly priced electric vehicles. Combustion drivers pay about $11.29 per 100 miles on the road. EV drivers who charge up at home spend about $11.60 per 100 miles. The price difference is more dramatic for those who mainly recharge at stations. Frequent charging station users pay $14.40 per 100 miles.

😅😅😅😅😅😅😅😅😅😅😅😅😅😅😅😅😅😅😅😅😅

It gets even worse when you realise how much of this electricity is going to have to be produced by fossil-fuel power stations. What, you thought you could drive your EV past miles of wind and solar farms? Why do you think electricity prices have climbed the most in places that have pushed renewable unreliable energy the hardest?:

The event [of Dunkelflaute, or “dark doldrums,”] is relatively common in northern and western Europe during the winter months—hence the German name—and just last month it led to a devastating spike in [natural] gas prices in the U.K. while forcing Germany to supply nearly half its electricity needs from coal… Klaus Müller, the president of the German Federal Network Agency [the bureaucracy regulating gas and electricity], warned that the growing number of private electric car charging stations and electric-powered pumps could overload the power grid in Germany. 
…
In a day-by-day analysis of Colorado’s generation of electricity, Fogleman noted that between December 30, 2022, and January 2, 2023, “Colorado’s wind fleet (with its roughly 4,500 MW of installed capacity) went from producing 2,000 MW of electricity down to the negatives on multiple occasions,” while solar generation, “similarly flatlined on January 2, when overcast skies arrived in the state.”

Just wait until you add a vast EV fleet to that load. That article notes a 2021 scientific analysis that reveals that thousands of ordinary local transformers would be burned out by a few hundred EV’s turning up in their area, and that the US grid is not even close to being ready for the 2050 Net Zero deadlines.

And the CO2 emissions from the fossil-fueled backup of Ye Olde Unreliables is just one such emission problem with EV’s. To put it bluntly they’re not Zero Emission machines:

More greenhouse gases are emitted in the manufacture of EVs than by the drilling, refining, smelting, and assembly for gas-powered cars, which means it can take several years of driving an EV before there is any benefit to the climate… The majority of lithium-ion batteries are produced in China, where most electricity comes from coal-burning power plants…the production of an EV battery, which requires energy-intensive mining and processing, and generates twice as much carbon emissions as the manufacture of an internal combustion engine. This means that the EV starts off with a bigger carbon footprint than a gasoline-powered car when it rolls off the assembly line and takes time to catch up to a gasoline-powered car. 

And the assumptions around all these factors, plus the number of EVs on the road and how electricity is generated, mean that GHG forecasts swing wildly. And don’t forget that ICE cars are becoming cleaner and more efficient all the time. Even Volvo, while boasting about going all electric had to admit this:

Volvo admits that the carbon footprint for the manufacturing of its C40 Recharge electric car is 70 percent higher than its comparable internal combustion version of the car (the XC40). But not to worry, says Volvo: you’ll make up the higher manufacturing emissions when you drive the emission-free EV far enough.

How far? Kudos to Volvo for calculating that: at the world’s average electricity sourcing today, a C40 driver would need to drive his car 68,000 miles to reach a break-even carbon footprint with a gasoline-powered model. The average American drives about 14,000 miles a year, and thus would need to drive his Volvo EV almost five years before reaching a lower carbon footprint. What if we had a grid that was 100 percent wind- or solar-powered? Volvo calculates that an EV driver would still need to drive 30,000 miles before reaching a carbon-footprint breakeven point with a gasoline car.

And as a result you get facts like this:

If every country achieved its stated ambitious electric-vehicle targets by 2030, the world would save 231 million tons of CO2 emissions. Plugging these savings into the standard United Nations Climate Panel model, that comes to a reduction of 0.0002 degree Fahrenheit by the end of the century.

Thus, although I’m not sure I would go as far as this author does in summarising the situation, It’s Time To Admit It: EVs Are EVIL, that sort of language being thrown back in the face of the Climate Change/ Renewable Energy/ EV fanatics is justified as a counter to the emotional claptrap they fling about in place of rational thought.

One heartening aspect of this is that despite all the hype and the subsidies it seems that the public aren’t buying into EV’s:

Despite massive subsidies, together with efforts by many governments to force consumers to buy electric vehicles, consumers aren’t buying. Much as wind and solar energy have failed to satisfy more than a tiny fraction of America’s energy needs, electric vehicles remain a footnote:

The U.S. Energy Information Administration estimates that barring new legislation only about 17% of all new U.S. cars will be electric by 2050, which translates to 13% of the total American car stock.

Which is why you get results like this:

Volkswagen’s US sales collapsed in 2022 after it announced that it aspires primarily to be an EV company by 2030, even here in the states. Overall VW sales in the US fell by approximately 75,000 units in 2022 compared to 2021, while its EV sales increased by a whopping 3,769 units year over year.

And this:

The price of used Teslas has fallen significantly in recent months as buyers shy away from second-hand electric cars. Experts say [Tesla’s] over-saturation of the market could be to blame as three of its models were among the five EVs with the worst depreciation over the last 12 months.

Which is why Telsa was slashing new car prices in late 2022: hit the link to see the details. And it’s not just Tesla, Audi, but Ford, which has bet its future on EV’s:

The Detroit automaker said Monday it will lower pricing of the Mach-E, which is comparable to Tesla’s Model Y, by an average of about $4,500, depending on the model.…the price cuts will mean not all Mach-E models, based on the trim, will be profitable on a per-unit basis, according to Marin Gjaja, Chief Customer Officer of Ford’s electric vehicle business. He said Mach-E production is expected to increase from 78,000 vehicles to 130,000 units annually.
…
for the full year, Ford brought in $158.1 billion in revenue. That’s a 16% increase compared with 2021’s full year revenue number of $136.3 billion. As noted, the company lost $2 billion for the full year, unlike the prior year where it reported net income of $17.9 billion.

Their EV’s are also piling up in the showrooms after the initial burst of buying enthusiasm from the fringe of EV fans, not helped by stories like this about their much-hyped Ford Lightning EV Pickup (basically an EV version of their classic Ford F150/250 trucks), complete with very funny video:

“If a truck towing 3,500 pounds can’t even go 100 miles … that is ridiculously stupid. This truck can’t do normal truck things,” Hoover says. “You would be stopping every hour to recharge, which would take about 45 minutes a pop, and that is absolutely not practical.”

And yet Ford is terminating valuable engineers and other personnel involved in traditional ICE car manufacturing, all in an effort to free up money for its cash-sucking EV boondoggle, which comprised a whopping 3.3% of total sales of the 1.64 million vehicles Ford sold in 2022.

In more news of personal woe, this time from England:

As I watch my family strike out on foot across the fields into driving rain and gathering darkness, my wife holding each child’s hand, our new year plans in ruins, while I do what I can to make our dead car safe before abandoning it a mile short of home, full of luggage on a country lane, it occurs to me not for the first time that if we are going to save the planet we will have to find another way. Because electric cars are not the answer.

Yes, it’s the Jaguar again. My doomed bloody £65,000 iPace that has done nothing but fail at everything it was supposed to do for more than two years now, completely dead this time, its lifeless corpse blocking the single-track road.

What a surprise then that the head of none other than Toyota should say this:

President Akio Toyoda said he is among the auto industry’s silent majority in questioning whether electric vehicles should be pursued exclusively, comments that reflect a growing uneasiness about how quickly car companies can transition.
…
“Because the right answer is still unclear, we shouldn’t limit ourselves to just one option,” Mr. Toyoda said. Over the past few years, Mr. Toyoda said, he has tried to convey this point to industry stakeholders, including government officials—an effort he described as tiring at times.

Don’t worry pal, falling sales and huge financial losses will make the best argument of all against EV’s.