in-cite: real news for real people

Wednesday, August 2, 2017

Marshall Auerback recently introduced us to Jack Lifton, who has written extensively on natural resource issues of supply and demand, focusing on the underlying drivers of economics and human nature. As he puts it, “I am not a ‘peakist’ of supply or demand; I am a peakist on the amount of capital the human race is willing to commit to achieve a goal.”

Jack has a post coming soon on how China is managing the prospect of resource constraints, and in the meantime, sent a short and informative e-mail on the UK’s government’s plan to ban all diesel and petrol vehicles from the roads by 2040. An overview from the BBC:

New diesel and petrol cars and vans will be banned in the UK from 2040 in a bid to tackle air pollution, the government has announced.

Ministers have also unveiled a £255m fund to help councils tackle emissions, including the potential for charging zones for the dirtiest vehicles….

Other points include:

The funding pot will come from changes to tax on diesel vehicles and reprioritising departmental budgets – the exact details will be announced later in the year.

Councils could change road layouts, retrofit public transport, and encourage local people to leave their cars at home.

A Clean Air Fund would allow local authorities to bid for additional money to put in more air quality control measures.

A new Automated and Electric Vehicles Bill will allow the government to require the installation of charge points for electric vehicles at motorway service areas and large fuel retailers.

The Telegraph reports that upgrading the grid to handle the intended shift to electric and hybrid vehicles would be a “tall order” and the UK would wind up increasing its electricity imports from 10% to 30%.

But Jack highlights an even bigger impediment: cobalt production. Via e-mail:

The UK has less than 1% of the world’s population, so let’s assume that it has 1 fossil fuel powered motor vehicle of some kind for every 2 citizens (The ratio in the USA is 1:1). So there would today be 30 million fossil fuel powered privately owned vehicles in the U.K.

The 200+ mile on a single charge range of a Tesla using a 60-80 KWh battery requires 19kg of cobalt.

30 million such vehicles would therefore require 570,000 t of cobalt, which would be immobilized (taken out of the market) for 5-8 years (the currently projected lifetime of the Li/Co type of battery used in the Tesla.

This is nearly 5 times todays annual output of new cobalt production.. So the UK’s less than 1% of the globe’s people would require by 2040 around 20% of the world’s production of new cobalt at today’s production rate to completely eliminate fossil fuel powered cars and replace them with vehicles with a 200+ mile range.

China in the meantime has mandated 5,000,000 EVs to be on the road in their country by 2020! This would require 95,000 t of cobalt immobilized in Chinese batteries within 3 years. This WILL require about 30% of all global new cobalt production between now and the end of 2020.

China has mandated that 30% of its motor vehicle production by 2030 be of the EV type. At today’s level of production this would be 7.5 million vehicles using 142,500 tons of cobalt ANNUALLY from then on.

All of this of course is predicated upon all of the EVs being pure long range types.

But even if only half of them, or less, are of this type the IMMOBILIZATION of the world’s production of cobalt in operational EVs and the absolute limit of the new production of Cobalt, which is produced 95%+ ONLY as a byprodcut of the mining of base metals such as Copper and Nickel, will limit the production of new EVs to a maximum dictated by only what is produced new each year plus what is EVENTUALLY recycled.

The conversion of today’s fleet of 1 billion vehicles totally to pure long range EVs would take ALL of the world’s known resources of cobalt MOST of which are not today recoverable economically, and therefore could not occur in much less than 50-100 years and then ONLY if direct financial profit were not the motive but rather quality of life. This is against the neoliberal agenda.

Politicians simply do not have the intellectual resources to comprehend this problem.

I thought that only American politicians were that short sighted. I see that it is a larger problem.

Unfortunately, the way to achieve the biggest reduction in energy use quickly is conservation, and not new technologies, particularly since creating the new infrastructure has its own energy and resource costs. And contrary to popular opinion, there is a fair bit of low-hanging fruit on the “reduce use” front. But a good bit of that requires changing habits and systems, and people are remarkably resistant.

The World’s Shift to Electric Cars

July 28, 2017

https://consortiumnews.com/2017/07/28/the-worlds-shift-to-electric-cars/

Exclusive: Despite resistance from the oil industry and Team Trump, the transition to electric vehicles is accelerating, with key foreign countries and some U.S. states taking the lead, writes Jonathan Marshall.

By Jonathan Marshall

Even as the Trump administration scrubs federal web sites of data about climate science and clean energy and appoints coal industry lobbyists to senior policy positions, other nations are responding vigorously to the reality of global warming.

Great Britain and France have recently announced ambitious timetables for phasing out fossil-fueled cars by 2040. Even bolder are Norway, which expects all new cars sold by 2025 to be electric, up from 37 percent today, and India, which set 2030 as its target date for going all-electric.

Together with the rising domestic popularity of all-electric and hybrid electric vehicles, the potential political contagion from such foreign programs is spurring major U.S. fossil fuel producers into spending millions of dollars to kill clean transportation alternatives.

A shadowy outfit called Fueling U.S. Forward, devoted to promoting greater use of oil and natural gas, recently produced a misleading attack video called “Dirty Secrets of Electric Cars.” The New York Times exposed the group as “a public relations group for fossil fuels funded by Koch Industries, the oil and petrochemicals conglomerate led by the ultraconservative billionaire brothers David H. and Charles G. Koch.”

The stakes, both financial and environmental, are high. The U.S. transportation sector currently consumes 14 million barrels of petroleum products every day. Transitioning away from all that gasoline and diesel to cleaner electric transportation will be critical to lowering carbon emissions before global warming wreaks havoc on human civilization and natural ecosystems. It will also help alleviate vehicle air pollution that kills an estimated 50,000 people each year in the United States alone.

Unlike the power sector, where the renewable energy revolution is well underway across the nation, transportation remains largely stuck in the last century. In my car-friendly state of California, for example, thanks to a boom in solar and wind energy, electric power today accounts for only about 20 percent of statewide greenhouse gas emissions. Transportation, by contrast, contributes 36 percent, far more than any other sector.

When charged by clean solar, wind, hydro or nuclear power, electric cars and trucks contribute almost no greenhouse or toxic air emissions. Even in states with a high proportion of coal-fired generation, efficient electric vehicles (EVs) account for fewer emissions than the average new gas-powered car.

With coal-burning plants increasingly giving way to cleaner natural gas-fired plants and renewable generation of energy, more than 70 percent of Americans now live in areas where EVs cause fewer emissions even than the cleanest conventional cars, according to recent research by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS). On average, across the country, EVs create as little carbon pollution as gasoline-powered cars that get 73 mpg — if such cars even existed.

Critics, like the Koch-funded Fueling U.S. Forward, complain that it takes more energy to manufacture an electric car than a gas-powered car, mostly because of the need for big batteries. But those manufacturing emissions are more than offset by the reduced emissions from driving a mid-sized electric car after just 5,000 miles, the UCS report notes.

Electric Vehicles on a Roll

Electric vehicles today number only about 2 million, or just 0.2 percent of all light passenger vehicles in use globally today, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). The good news is that their numbers are growing about 60 percent per year. In the United States, customers bought 53,000 electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles in the first six months of 2017 — not counting Tesla sales — up from 33,000 in the same period a year ago.

Momentum is growing in the EV industry. Tesla briefly this year enjoyed the highest market cap of any U.S. automaker. In July, Volvo announced that it plans to produce only hybrid or all-electric vehicles by 2019. China, which now leads the world in EV sales, has tough incentives to increase them further. A multi-nation coalition called the Electric Vehicles Initiative — including Canada, China, Finland, France, Germany, India, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Norway, South Africa, Sweden, United Kingdom, and, for now, the United States — is encouraging the global deployment of 20 million EVs by 2020.

IEA cites estimates that the global stock of electric cars will range between 40 million and 70 million by 2025, if governments continue to support R&D, purchase incentives, and charging infrastructure. The transition to EVs may accelerate if, as some experts forecast, they become fully cost competitive with gasoline-powered cars within a decade.

Bloomberg New Energy Finance projects that “cars with a plug [will] account for a third of the global auto fleet by 2040 and displace about 8 million barrels a day of oil production — more than the 7 million barrels Saudi Arabia exports today.”

The Trump administration can be counted on to do what it can to slow this revolution, but 10 states have aggressive programs to promote the adoption of electric vehicles: California, Connecticut, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island and Vermont. Just as with renewable energy, their success may pave the way for similar programs in other states, even “red” ones.

Fiscal conservatives should applaud their efforts to jump-start the EV market. A study by the American Lung Association in California last year documented health costs of $24 billion a year — for lost work days, respiratory illnesses, and premature deaths — from vehicle emissions in just those 10 states. The report estimated an additional $13 billion in climate-related costs (agricultural losses, flooding, fires, etc.). Converting two-thirds of cars on the road to electric vehicles by 2050 would save those states about $21 billion a year, well worth the effort.

And if they succeed, proponents may also prove instrumental in helping U.S. automakers like Tesla, GM, and Ford remain world leaders in the fast-growing market for electric vehicles. The United States can’t afford to be stranded in the slow lane of adapting its economy to climate change while the rest of the world speeds ahead.

Jonathan Marshall is a regular contributor to Consortiumnews.com.

The only way to defeat Trump— and to redeem what is worth saving in liberal democracy—is to detach ourselves from liberal democracy’s corpse and establish a new Left.

Elements of the program for this new Left are easy to imagine.

Trump promises the cancellation of the big free trade agreements supported by Clinton, and the left alternative to both should be a project of new and different international agreements.

Such agreements would establish public control of the banks, ecological standards, workers rights, universal healthcare, protections of sexual and ethnic minorities, etc.

The big lesson of global capitalism is that nation states alone cannot do the job—only a new political international has a chance of bridling global capital.

Excerpt from:

“We Must Rise from the Ashes of Liberal Democracy”

BY Slavoj Žižek

http://inthesetimes.com/article/19918/slavoj-zizek-from-the-ashes-of-liberal-democracy