Why solar and wind power aren't winning - "We are constantly being told that solar and wind are now the cheapest forms of electricity. Yet governments around the world felt they had to spend US$1.8 trillion on the green transition last year. Wind and solar only produce power when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing. When they are not, electricity from these sources is infinitely expensive and back-ups are needed. This is why fossil fuels still account for two-thirds of global electricity and why, on current trends, we are a century away from eliminating their use in electricity generation. Imagine if a solar-driven car were launched tomorrow, running cheaper than a gas vehicle. It sounds great, until you realize it won’t run at night or when it’s overcast. So if you did buy a solar car, you would still need a gas car as back-up. You would have to pay for two cars. Modern societies need power 24/7. Solar and wind power’s unreliable and intermittent operation involve large, often hidden costs. This is a smaller problem for wealthy countries that already have fossil-power plants and can simply use more of them as backup. But even in wealthy countries it makes electricity more expensive. In the world’s poorest, electricity-starved countries, however, there is little fossil fuel energy infrastructure to begin with. Hypocritically, wealthy countries refuse to fund sorely needed fossil fuel energy in the developing world. Instead, they insist the world’s poor cope with unreliable green energy supplies that can’t power the pumps or agricultural machinery needed to lift populations out of poverty. It Is often reported that emerging industrial powers like China, India, Indonesia and Bangladesh are getting more power from solar and wind. But these countries get much more additional power from coal. Last year, China got more additional power from coal than it did from solar and wind. India got three times more electricity from coal than from green energy sources, Bangladesh 13 times more and Indonesia an astonishing 90 times more. If solar and wind really were cheaper, why would these countries not use them? Because reliability matters. The usual way of measuring the cost of solar simply ignores its unreliability and tells us the price when the sun is shining. The same is true for wind energy. That does indeed make them slightly cheaper than other electricity sources: 3.6 US¢ per kWh for solar, just ahead of natural gas at 3.8 US¢, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. But if you account for reliability, their real costs explode: in 2022, one peer-reviewed study showed an increase of 11-42 times, making solar by far the most expensive electricity source, followed by wind. The enormous additional cost is for storage. We need electricity whether or not the sun is shining or the wind blowing. But our battery capacity is woefully inadequate. Research shows that every winter, when solar is contributing very little, Germany has a “wind drought” of five days on average when wind turbines also deliver almost nothing. That suggests batteries will be needed for a minimum of 120 hours — although the actual need will be much longer, since droughts sometimes last much longer and recur before storage can be filled. A new study shows that to achieve 100 per cent solar or wind electricity with sufficient backup, the U.S. would need to be able to store almost three months’ worth of electricity every year. It currently has seven minutes of battery storage. The required batteries would cost the U.S. five times its current GDP. And it would have to replace them all when they expired after just 15 years. Globally, the cost just to have sufficient batteries would run to 10 times global GDP, with a new bill every 15 years. Current estimates of the cost of solar and wind also ignore the cost of recycling spent wind turbine blades and exhausted solar panels. Already, one small town in Texas is overflowing with thousands of enormous blades that cannot be recycled. In poor countries across Africa, solar panels and their batteries are being dumped, leaking toxic chemicals into the soil and water supplies. Because of pressure from the climate lobby for an enormous ramp-up in use, this will only get worse. One study shows that on its own this trash cost doubles the true cost of solar. If solar and wind really were cheaper, they would replace fossil fuels without need for a grand push from politicians and the renewables industry. The claim they are cheap is repeated incessantly, not because it is true, but because it is convenient"
Since everyone Knows that solar and wind are the cheapest forms of electricity, the much higher cost of renewable energy must be due to greedy and evil companies
Levelized Full System Costs of Electricity - "Intermittency of generation makes the cost comparison between different generation technologies much more difficult. While being a good measure to evaluate the cost to generate electricity, the most popular cost measure, the Levelized Costs of Electricity, fails to include the costs associated with meeting the demand and providing usable electricity... Using the radical but straightforward assumption that each source of generation has to meet the demand over a given year (with the help of storage), the Levelized Full System Costs of Electricity introduced in this paper are the first cost measure to condense the cost of providing electricity to one number per market and technology. With LFSCOE being much higher than the LCOE for wind and solar, it becomes evident that LCOE are far from being an accurate measure to include the cost of intermittency. Analyzing different sources of generation sources shows that the LFSCOE are much higher for wind and solar than for conventional and dispatchable fuels, which stems from the large require- ment for storage to overcome wind and solar’s intermittency. However, even if these storage costs drop by 90%, renewables are still not competitive on an LFSCOE basis. Introducing the LFSCOE-95, which assume that up to 5% of the annual demand can be supplied by a very inexpensive dispatchable source of electricity, we show that reducing the responsibility of intermittent renewables to supply only 95% of the demand will cut the system costs in half. This observation is supported by existing literature criticizing any 100% emission-free approaches by pointing out the enormous costs of supplying the last 5%.
Climate change hystericists want to ban fossil fuels and nuclear energy due to their crypto-religious purity obsession, so good luck even getting them to accept LFSCOE-95. Then again, being forced to endure blackouts might be a feature, not a bug, with them
CSIRO survey finds most Australians want moderately paced energy transition and are unwilling to pay more - "A majority of Australians want the transition towards renewable energy to happen at a "moderate" pace and most are unwilling to accept higher bills to pay for it, according to a major survey by the country's top scientific organisation... affordability was the top priority for most Australians in the energy transition. About 82 per cent of respondents ranked affordability in their top three priorities, according to the CSIRO, and it was the top priority for 41 per cent of respondents... most people are unwilling to pay more or risk blackouts to accelerate the move away from fossil fuels, which are still used to meet almost two-thirds of the power in Australia's main electricity grid... the least support was for high-voltage power lines. Almost a quarter of respondents said they would reject a transmission line within 10km of their house. Generally, opposition to renewable energy projects was highest in rural areas, where about a third of those surveyed said they would reject green projects. "This makes sense because people living out of town are more likely to be living near current or proposed developments," Dr Walton said."
If they realised that they were already paying more, maybe they would revolt
Clearly, people around the world must be forced by left wing elites to destroy their economies and blow up their power bills in order to virtue signal while not affecting the climate since China and India are too smart to fall for climate change lunacy
Arla, Morrisons, Tesco and Aldi announce trial of methane-reducing feed additives
I do not consent on X - "When I saw this this morning, I though it was just another 'crazy conspiracy theory'. So like all good conspiracy theorists, I decided to fact check it before spreading more 'disinformation' and was shocked by the results. Firstly, it is absolutely true that Arla, who supply Tesco, Morrisons and Aldi, are trialling Bovaer on their dairy cattle https://news.arlafoods.co.uk/news/major-retailers-join-forces-with-uk-dairy-farmers-to-trial-methane-reducing-feed-additives So I went on. Bill Gates' Bovaer is so dangerous that it should not be handled without wearing full PPE as it is harmful if inhaled and a skin irritant. It's side effects include: Eye and skin irritation. Breathing difficulties And as always with any of Bill Gates' products - Male infertility. https://fda.gov/media/178913/download Worse still, Bovaer's genotoxicity (damage to DNA that could lead to such side effects as cancers and birth defects) is not known! https://efsa.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.2903/j.efsa.2021.6905 Milk, butter, cheese etc, will all immediately be effected, but further, it is not clear whether crops grown in ground where manure has been used as a fertiliser will be effected. When they say trial, they really do mean trial as not much is known about the long terms effects of Bovaer, particularly if it were to enter the food chain. And we are, as usual, its unwitting participants. I guess we can't stop it from happening but we can choose where we buy our products and I for one will be boycotting Arla! #BoycottArla"
Raquel Dancho on X - "$100 billion and no results. According to the Auditor General, Canada is the worst performing G7 nation on climate change since the Paris Climate Accord. Success is measured by outcomes, not by how much taxpayer money you spend. The Liberals like to pose as environmentalists, "but their record shows otherwise."
Clearly, they didn't spend enough money and need to spend even more
Project Veritas on X - "BREAKING: @EPA Advisor Admits ‘Insurance Policy’ Against Trump is Funneling Billions to Climate Organizations, “We’re Throwing Gold Bars off the Titanic” “It was an insurance policy against Trump winning.” “Get the money out as fast as possible before they [Trump Administration] come in ... it’s like we’re on the Titanic and we’re throwing gold bars off the edge.”"
Trudeau government’s latest climate change targets a fantasy - "We’ve reached the point where everything the Trudeau government says about Canada reaching its greenhouse gas emission reduction targets should be discounted. First, because the targets are unachievable and the fact that no Canadian government – Liberal or Conservative – has ever achieved an emission reduction target it set for itself starting in 1988. Second, because the chances of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the Liberals being around to have to account for their missed targets are between slim and none. Third, because given that reality, what the Trudeau Liberals appear to be doing is creating increasingly unrealistic emission targets so they can blame the Conservatives for not achieving them, once they’re in power and the Liberals are in opposition. Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault announced last week that Canada’s new target for reducing Canada’s emissions is to cut them by 45% to 50% compared to 2005 levels by 2035. Ostensibly, this updates the government’s current target of reducing emissions to 40% to 45% below 2005 levels by 2030. But what it actually means is that the Trudeau government has given itself five more years to achieve a 45% reduction by 2035, instead of 2030. That’s why the government’s new target was criticized by environmental activists, who noted its own net zero advisory panel recommended that Canada’s 2035 target should have been to cut emissions by 50% to 55% below 2005 levels. The problem is that all of these targets are unachievable because, as of 2022, the latest year for which government data are available, Canada’s emissions were just 7.1% below 2005 levels. That means the Trudeau government has achieved 17.8% of its minimum target of reducing Canada’s emissions to 40% below 2005 levels by 2030 since being elected nine years ago and now has just six years to achieve the remaining 82.2%. In fact, Canada’s emissions in 2022, at 708 million tonnes, went up from 698 million tonnes in 2021 – a 1.3% increase – meaning the government is moving further away from its targets rather than closer to them... If, as widely expected, Pierre Poilievre and the Conservatives win a majority government in that election, the Liberals will then claim, in opposition, that they had a plan to meet Canada’s emission targets which the Conservatives abandoned by scrapping Trudeau’s carbon tax, as Poilievre has promised to do. This argument will be nonsense, because the Liberals have never had a realistic plan to achieve their unrealistic emission targets. That is the shell game the Liberals have been playing with Canadians on emissions since they were elected in 2015, all of it to justify Trudeau’s carbon tax which, on April 1, will increase by 19% to $95 per tonne of emissions, up from its current $80 per tonne, on its way to $170 per tonne in 2030. A report released last month by federal environment commissioner Jerry DeMarco that audited the Liberals’ Canadian Net-Zero Emissions Accountability Act concluded the government’s lack of transparency in implementing this legislation made it impossible for the average citizen to understand, much less believe, the Trudeau government’s emission targets. For example, when DeMarco’s auditors examined 20 of the government’s 149 measures to reduce emissions, it found only nine were on track to achieve their goals, while nine others were faced with challenges and two had encountered significant barriers, such as delays in setting and meeting targets. It also found examples where two different government programs were funding the same projects and reporting the same expected emission reductions, raising the possibility of double counting actual reductions. In addition, “recent decreases to projected 2030 emissions were not due to climate action taken by governments, but were instead because of revisions to the data used in modelling.” DeMarco also noted that the modelling used to estimate the emission reductions of various government programs wasn’t updated in 2023 compared to 2022 and that some of the initial calculations were overly optimistic."
Blackout ‘a green power warning’ - "The mayor of Broken Hill has warned federal and state governments to learn from the experience of his town beset by blackouts as residents were told to switch off their solar panels, with nearby renewables proving unable to aid its energy crisis... Mayor Tom Kennedy said state and federal governments “needed to learn” from the experience, and how wind and solar energy are “almost useless” in a crisis without baseload power. “(Wind and solar) are worse than useless (in a crisis like this), because it’s detrimental to having a consistent power supply,” he said. “I’d hate to see what happens in the capital cities in a similar crisis.” Essential Energy on Friday was urging customers in Broken Hill to switch off their solar supply main switch to protect the 40-year-old backup gas-turbine generator providing power to the town and surrounds... Former Broken Hill resident and mining executive Robert Williamson, who was in the town on Friday, said “a lot of people knew that this would happen one day”. “Now that it’s happened, it’s had to happen to prove to the government and others that it was configured wrong from the start,” he said. “At the moment Broken Hill is without power for 32 hours the other day, the mines aren’t working, everybody’s food is spoilt.”"
Even with a price tag, our renewables future is already broken - "The Silverton Wind Farm and Broken Hill Solar plant were supposed to produce enough electricity to power 117,000 homes. They’re supported by AGL’s 50MWh battery facility at Pinnacles Place, one of the largest in Australia. Yet Broken Hill, population 19,000, has been in a semi-permanent state of blackout since a storm brought down the transmission line connecting the town to the east coast grid. Broken Hill’s plight exposes the gap between the promise of renewable energy and what it actually delivers. AGL claimed its battery would ensure a reliable electricity supply to the town if the transmission lines went down. The combination of wind, solar and storage would allow Broken Hill to operate on a renewable microgrid until its connection to the outside world was restored. Yet the battery wasn’t switched on until Friday. Diesel generators are being used to recharge it because the wind and solar generators are disconnected from the rest of the grid. Rooftop solar is affecting the grid’s stability. Essential Energy, which supplies power to Broken Hill, has asked customers to turn off their solar supply main switch to prevent the 40-year-old backup gas turbine generator from tripping. Energy Minister Chris Bowen contends that renewable energy is the cheapest and most reliable source of carbon-free electricity. He acts on the assumption that wind and solar, supported by batteries, can substitute for coal. Yet Broken Hill’s experience shows how crucial baseload generation is to the grid’s stability. Without it, balancing supply and demand becomes impossible. Some $650m worth of renewable energy investment within a 25km radius of Broken Hill has proved to be dysfunctional. The technical challenges of operating a grid on renewable energy alone appear insurmountable using the current technology... Bowen’s claims about the cost of renewable energy were called into question last week when senior executives from the Australian Electricity Market Operator gave evidence under oath to a Senate select committee. AEMO’s assertion that its blueprint for the transition to renewables was “the lowest-cost pathway” is misleading. AEMO chief executive Daniel Westerman told the committee its modelling only considered the wholesale cost of electricity. AEMO did not model network costs, transmission and distribution costs or retailer margins. “A home electricity bill will need to consider all of those factors,” he said. Senator Matt Canavan asked: “You’re saying you cannot guarantee that the current government policy settings you model will deliver lower power prices?” Westerman replied: “I can’t guarantee that. No.” He said AEMO “explicitly doesn’t consider other parts of the consumer energy bill”. Westerman was asked if AEMO had costed other policy options before concluding that the cheapest path was renewable energy backed by storage and gas. No, said Westerman. “It is the role of policymakers to identify alternatives and make those public policy decisions. “If policymakers wanted to ask AEMO for advice, we would be pleased to provide it. But it’s not really our role to judge on whether it’s a good policy or not.” Canavan asked: “So there’s no analysis of whether that’s a good idea or not?” “No. Sorry. We don’t analyse that,” replied Merryn York, AEMO’s executive general manager for system design. In summary, AEMO’s “least-cost pathway” turns out to be the wholesale cost of a transition to renewable energy on the accelerated timetable stipulated by the government. The destination of this plan is not cheaper electricity or cleaner energy. Instead, AEMO’s lowest-cost pathway aims to meet Labor’s political target of 82 per cent carbon-free electricity by 2030 and 100 per cent renewable power by 2050, using mostly wind, solar and some gas. AEMO’s model excludes any consideration of nuclear energy. It’s alarming that AEMO has not even attempted to model the retail cost of electricity. AEMO’s Integrated Systems Plan is the blueprint for the government’s energy transition. It sets the deadline for phasing out coal generation by 2038, a fourfold increase in rooftop solar, a sixfold increase in grid-scale wind and solar, and a 13-fold increase in battery storage. Yet AEMO doesn’t consider it part of its brief to estimate how much this will cost. Nor does AEMO attempt to vouch for the technical feasibility of its plan. Engineering, like economic modelling, is not part of its job."
Wind and Solar Can’t Support the Grid – Key Insights - " In October of 2024, the isolated small city of Broken Hill in New South Wales, Australia with a 36 MW load (including the large nearby mines) could not be reliably served by 200 MW of wind, a 53 MW solar array, significant residential solar, and a large 50 MW battery all supplemented by diesel generators. Many people falsely believe that wind, solar and batteries have been demonstrated to provide grid support and deliver energy independently in large real word applications. Few people realize that we are a long way away from having wind, solar and batteries support a large power system without significant amounts of conventional spinning generation (nuclear, gas, coal, hydro, geothermal) on-line to support the grid... Broken Hill became renewable energy industry’s Potemkin Village... In October of 2024 this area was separated from the larger grid when the interconnecting transmission towers went down in a bad storm. Loads in Broken Hill are limited to about 20 MW of mining load and 17 MW that serve the local town for a combined load of 36 MW. The over 300 MWs of renewable energy from wind, solar and battery storage, along with a diesel generator were not able to provide reliable power to support the town alone... In theory the area could be served, but in reality as noted by Jo Nova , “The fridges in the pharmacies failed, so all medications had to be destroyed and emergency replacements sent in. Schools have been closed. Freezers of meat are long gone… Emergency trucks are bringing in food finally “ It is common to see articles describing how wind and solar served all or nearly all of areas load during some time period. These descriptions are all misleading. They may accurately describe how many kWhs of energy wind and solar produce as well as how many kWhs of load were served, but they do not provide information on all the conventional rotating machinery that was also deployed to support the grid with needed essential reliability services. They imply (or sometimes falsely state) that just “renewables” served the load, but in fact benefits from conventional rotating machinery connected on-line where needed in order to support the grid and maintain stability. Broken Hill produced much more “renewable” energy then it used and exported large amounts. But despite the huge green resources, Broken Hill has remained dependent on the interconnected grid to support its own small load. It means nothing to talk about how much wind and solar has contributed if you don’t also share how much rotating machinery was also interconnected on-line. So, the question remains, “has anyone demonstrated that wind, solar and batteries alone can effectively supply reliable service to a general load of any significance?” I’ve never come across anything like that, perhaps because what’s been done so far is nothing to brag about. Partial and misleading information makes for better press. As described here, academics and advocates don’t usually get around to the crucial question as to whether the grid can survive without rotating machines. The first question Academics address is “can wind and solar provide the needed kWh?” If their studies suggest this is nominally possible, they jump to the conclusion that such resources can replace conventional generation... Academics sometimes go a little deeper sometimes and address a second question which is the intermittency of energy production associated with wind and solar. Looking at when energy is needed and when it is produced, the claim is that batteries paired with these resources can support the grid by providing energy when it was needed. In Broken Hill, the problem does not seem to be intermittency. Wind and solar energy were available in abundance during the blackouts. The energy just could not be reliably integrated with the grid. Having enough kWhs at the right time and place is not enough to reliably serve loads. The real problem is that wind, solar and batteries do not readily provide essential reliability services... The question of essential reliability services is the sticking point for integrating large amounts of wind, solar and batteries. It is common to see cost comparisons between “renewables” and conventional generation, invariably suggesting that wind and solar may be cheaper. But when you add in the large overbuild needed to deal with intermittency, add in the costs of batteries to deal with intermittency and also the significant amounts of rotating generation needed for grid reliably, the costs of “inverter based renewable” generation greatly exceed the competition... Grid supporting inverters and the capabilities of emulation today are far from what is needed. Hopes for the future may be admirable, but here is a huge gap between what might one day be, and what is practical and proven to be workable today... Australia has been much hyped recently as a pioneer in renewables, but the cracks are showing. There are many other stories of emerging problems that could be shared. Germany was the leader before. All that hype has crumbled, showing the Energiewende as a pipe dream with a poison pill. There is a simple point that is being widely ignored: wind, solar and batteries do not support the grid much. There are many tricks employed to help proponents and policy makers overlook this simple fact but eventually reality will hammer the point home."
Meme - "I'm mad about climate change"
"Here's a solution *nuclear power*"
*Burning solution* "I don't want a solution. I want to throw soup at paintings."
Why Everything They Say About California Fires — Including That Climate Matters Most — Is Wrong - "In 2018, a fire ripped through the town of Paradise, California, killing 85 people. It was the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in the state’s history. Liabilities from wildfires started by its powerlines bankrupted Pacific Gas & Electric, which cut off power to nearly one million homes and businesses last month to prevent wind from triggering and fanning fires. Many blame climate change.“The reason these wildfires have worsened is because of climate change,” said Leonardo DiCaprio.“This is what climate change looks like,” said Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. On Sunday, after President Donald Trump tweeted, “The Governor of California, @GavinNewsom, has done a terrible job of forest management,” Newsom tweeted back, “You don’t believe in climate change. You are excused from this conversation.” But can the increase in fires in California really be blamed on climate change? I asked Dr. Jon Keeley, a US Geological Survey scientist who has researched the topic for 40 years, if he thought the 2018 Paradise fire could be attributed to climate change. “It’s almost certainly not climate change,” he said. “We’ve looked at the history of climate and fire throughout the whole state, and through much of the state, particularly the western half of the state, we don’t see any relationship between past climates and the amount of area burned in any given year.” Much else in the media’s coverage of the issue has been misleading if not outright wrong, including the suggestion that 2019 is comparable to 2017 and 2018... All of the scientists I interviewed expressed frustration that journalists have failed to distinguish between two distinct types of fires. “The media haven’t gotten the idea that we have two very different fire problems,” Keeley said. “And so the politicians haven’t been reading about the two very different problems.”... Mountain ecosystems have the opposite problem from coastal ones... In 2006, scientists predicted climate change would increase the east-to-west blowing winds, worsening these coastal fires, but in 2011 and again in 2019 scientists predicted they would decrease. “Some will argue that it’s climate change but there is no evidence that it is,” said Keeley. “It’s the fact that somebody ignites a fire during an extreme [wind] event.”... Keeley published a paper last year that found that all ignition sources of fires had declined except for powerlines. “Since the year 2000 there’ve been a half-million acres burned due to powerline-ignited fires, which is five times more than we saw in the previous 20 years,” he said. “Some people would say, ‘Well, that’s associated with climate change.’ But there’s no relationship between climate and these big fire events.” What then is driving the increase in fires? “If you recognize that 100% of these [shrubland] fires are started by people, and you add 6 million people [since 2000], that’s a good explanation for why we’re getting more and more of these fires,” said Keeley... “Fuel is one of the confounding factors. It’s the problem in some of the reports done by climatologists who understand climate but don’t necessarily understand the subtleties related to fires.”... What’s true of California fires appears true for fires in the rest of the US. In 2017, Keeley and a team of scientists modeled 37 different regions across the US and found “humans may not only influence fire regimes but their presence can actually override, or swamp out, the effects of climate.” Of the 10 variables, the scientists explored, “none were as significantly significant… as the anthropogenic variables.” I asked Keeley if the media’s focus on climate change frustrated him. “Oh, yes, very much,” he said, laughing. “Climate captures attention. I can even see it in the scientific literature. Some of our most high-profile journals will publish papers that I think are marginal. But because they find climate to be an important driver of some change, they give preference to them. It captures attention.”"
Just Stop Oil protesters spray-paint '1.5 is dead' on Charles Darwin’s grave : r/unitedkingdom - "These guys must be funded by Oil companies just to piss everyone off."
"I've never forgotten when Extinction Rebellion, or Insulate Britain, or Just Stop Oil, or whichever group it was, were gluing themselves to public transport! Those of us who actually care about the environment want people to be using public transport - if they really believe what they claim to, they're doing friendly fire."
EV transition runs into more trouble as federal rebates end - "The electric vehicle transition in Canada is hitting another speed bump, as major incentive programs that shave thousands of dollars off the price tag of a new EV are being curtailed and cut short. Transport Canada on Monday said it “paused” its financial incentive program over the weekend, which provided up to $5,000 to consumers, and Quebec said it plans to temporarily suspend its program, which had provided as much as $7,000 back, in February. Analysts have described such consumer rebates as a pillar that underpins EV sales, which accounted for 16.5 per cent of all new sales in the third quarter of 2024, their highest level to date. The looming end to rebate programs has angered many in the auto sector who say it will make it challenging for automakers to meet federal and provincial EV sales mandates. “This decision is particularly frustrating for dealers,” Charles Bernard, lead economist at the Canadian Automobile Dealers Association, said via email. “There is obvious hypocrisy in imposing ambitious (zero-emissions vehicle) targets and affiliated penalties on the industry and consumers when the government is showing a clear lack of motivation and support to meet these goals.”... Her report estimated that fully battery-electric vehicles are on average 31 per cent more expensive and plug-in hybrids are 23 per cent more expensive than their comparable internal combustion engine models."
Trudeau’s big bet on electric vehicles goes bust - "To add insult to injury, parliamentary budget officer Yves Giroux reported last year that EV prices need to drop by 31% to achieve the interim target of 60% sales in 2030, at the same time as their costs will go up because of the ending of subsidies. It’s another example of how the Liberals’ illogical climate change policies — a house of cards built on sand with the tide coming in — are imploding and working against one another, much like the Liberal government itself in its final days... These subsidies have been in place since 2019, costing taxpayers almost $3 billion to date. The good news is that the majority of Canadians who can’t afford EVs will no longer be subsidizing those who do. But the bad news is the $3 billion in subsidies is chump change compared to the $52.5 billion federal and provincial governments have showered on Canada’s fledgling EV industry in capital investments on 13 major projects, according to Giroux, $6.4 billion more than the $46.1 billion the EV industry is spending on itself. The absurdity of this was predicted in a report by the fiscally conservative Fraser Institute in 2023 which calculated that the $5,000 federal subsidy to purchasers of EV vehicles cost $355 to reduce one tonne of Canada’s industrial greenhouse gas emissions. That’s more than four times the current federal carbon price of $80 per tonne, rising to $95 per tonne on April 1, on its way to $170 per tonne on April 1, 2030. Toss in additional subsidies to EV buyers offered by provincial governments— many of which are now drying up because of their enormous costs — and the price to reduce one tonne of emissions soared to as high as $857, according to the study. “By essentially paying people to buy electric vehicles, governments across Canada are spending a lot of money despite questionable benefits,” noted Jock Finlayson, co-author of the study, “A Review of Electric Vehicle Consumer Subsidies in Canada.” Studies by the Macdonald-Laurier Institute in 2022 and the Montreal Economic Institute in 2017 came to similar conclusions. “If the governments absolutely want to get to their (emissions) goals faster, the worst way of doing that is a subsidy to electric cars,” said Germain Belzile, a co-author of the MEI report. “It’s just a waste.”"