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Toyota Warns We’re Nowhere Near Ready To Jettison
Gas-Powered Vehicles
It is one of the world’s two largest auto and truck manufacturers
— twice the size of General Motors (GM), our biggest.
Climate Change Dispatch
Toyota warns the world is far from ready to jettison gasoline and diesel engines and require batteries to run our replacements.
For Toyota, it is not just about finding enough critical battery material such as lithium, cobalt, and nickel. It is about having enough electricity in our power grid to recharge them.
Specifically, Toyota not only worries about our grid capacity today but in the future, when at least 30 times more electricity-powered cars and trucks are projected to be on the road.
Robert Wimmer, Toyota’s head of energy and environmental research, testified last spring before the U.S. Senate warning of electricity supply problems.
“If we are to make dramatic progress in electrification, it will require overcoming tremendous challenges, including refueling infrastructure, battery availability, consumer acceptance, and affordability,” PJMedia.com’s Bryan Preston reported.
Wimmer’s remarks came on the heels of GM’s announcement that it will phase out all gas internal combustion engines by 2035. Other manufacturers, including Mini, have followed suit with similar announcements.
Based on a 2017 U.S. government study, Toyota calculates electricity supply and infrastructure are woefully inadequate. It found the need for 8,500 strategically-placed charging stations to support a fleet of seven million electric cars (EVs).
That’s about six times the current number of electric cars. But no one is talking about supporting just seven million cars, Wimmer added. “We should be talking about powering about 300 million within the next 20 years.”
Toyota isn’t alone in serving up the reality check. Tesla’s Elon Musk, who built his empire on EVs, agrees.
In December, Washington Gov. Jay Inslee released his latest climate proposal calling for a carbon-neutral electrical grid by 2030 and one to be powered by 100 percent clean electricity by 2045.
It augments his building codes, which include a phase-out of natural gas for space and water heating by forbidding the use of fossil fuels for heating and hot water in new buildings by 2030.
The codes add pressure on the electric grid to replace natural gas.
Rep. Mary Dye (R-Pomeroy) adds Inslee’s natural gas ban is significant:
“It’s a big industry because it provides warmth for about 1.2 million residences, there’s 107,000 commercial buildings and 3,500 industrial buildings that are working under clean, efficient, reliable natural gas. Plus, it fires about 11 percent of our electricity grid.”
Washington may be in a better position than most places to increase electricity supplies because of our plentiful hydropower system, which provides two-thirds of our electricity.
Today, our state has an adequate electricity supply, but if proposals banning natural gas in new homes and buildings and demands for EV recharging skyrocket, our state could face the same brownouts as California and China.
China currently has the most EVs on the road while California leads the U.S. China and California, which have large wind and solar farms, have grid overload and increasingly, people are losing electricity. It is likely to be far worse in the future.
China, by far the largest greenhouse gas emitter, claims it will be at least 2060 before it may be carbon neutral. Meanwhile, rather than replacing fossil fuel electrical generation, it is adding grid capacity to meet the projected load.
They have even opened several new coal mines last month to support the post-covid growth.
Toyota’s alarm is a good thing. Addressing the electricity shortfalls now, before our backs are against the wall, is even better.
Read more at Seattle Weekly
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2021 was Earth's 5th-hottest year on record,
according to European Union scientists
As greenhouse gas emissions change the planet's climate,
the long-term warming trend has continued
Thomson Reuters ·
Posted: Jan 10, 2022 12:04 PM ET
The European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) said in a report Monday that the last seven years were the world's warmest 'by a clear margin,' and the average global temperature in 2021 was 1.1-1.2 C above 1850–1900 levels. (Shutterstock/Edmund O'Connor)
Last year was the world's fifth hottest on record, while levels of planet-warming carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere hit new highs in 2021, European Union scientists said.
The EU's Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) said in a report on Monday that the last seven years were the world's warmest "by a clear margin" in records dating back to 1850, and the average global temperature in 2021 was 1.1-1.2 C above 1850-1900 levels.
The hottest years on record were 2020 and 2016.
Under the 2015 Paris Agreement, countries committed to try to limit global temperature rise to 1.5 C, the level scientists say would avoid the worst impacts of climate change. That would require emissions to roughly halve by 2030, but so far they have charged higher.
There are many assumptions in this statement, none of which have been proven. There is little doubt that humans contribute to global warming, but to blame it all on anthropogenic causes is absurd. Global warming is extremely complex and there are many other things at play than human factors. There is a lot politics behind the global warming hysteria, more politics than science.
As greenhouse gas emissions change the planet's climate, the long-term warming trend has continued. Climate change exacerbated many of the extreme weather events sweeping the world in 2021, from floods in Europe, China and South Sudan, to wildfires in Siberia and the United States.
"These events are a stark reminder of the need to change our ways, take decisive and effective steps toward a sustainable society and work toward reducing net carbon emissions," C3S director Carlo Buontempo said.
Global levels of CO2 and methane, the main greenhouse gases, continued to climb, and both hit record highs in 2021. Levels of CO2 in the atmosphere reached 414.3 parts per million (ppm) in 2021, up by around 2.4 ppm from 2020, the scientists said.
C3S said levels of methane, a particularly potent greenhouse gas, have jumped in the last two years, but the reasons why are not fully understood. Emissions of methane range from oil and gas production and farming, to natural sources like wetlands.
After a temporary dip in 2020 at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, provisional data suggest global CO2 emissions rebounded by 4.9 per cent in 2021.
This is hard to understand considering the dramatic reduction in travel - by air, sea, and land. One would expect a significant reduction.
Records and disasters
Last summer was Europe's hottest on record, CS3 said, following a warm March and unusually cold April that had decimated fruit crops in countries including France and Hungary.
In July and August, a Mediterranean heat wave stoked intense wildfires in countries including Turkey and Greece. Sicily set a new European temperature high of 48.8 C, a record awaiting official confirmation.
In July, more than 200 people died when torrential rain triggered deadly flooding in western Europe. Scientists concluded that climate change had made the floods at least 20 per cent more likely.
Also that month, floods in China's Henan province killed more than 300 people. In California, a record-smashing heat wave was followed by the second-biggest wildfire in the state's history, decimating land and belching out air pollution.
In Canada, the town of Lytton, B.C., was wiped out that month after a wildfire engulfed it. Parts of the province also shattered heat records last summer during an intense and persistent heat wave.
NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) will release their climate findings on Wednesday.
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Scientists want global ban on ‘sun-dimming’
Researchers rally against solar geoengineering as a method of fighting climate change
An international group of scientists and experts wants all nations to sign a pact banning public funding and deployment of solar geoengineering, as well as outdoor experiments revolving around ways to ‘dim the sun.’
“Solar geoengineering at planetary scale is not governable in a globally inclusive and just manner within the current international political system,” the researchers wrote in an open letter published in the Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change journal this week.
The concept of solar geoengineering aims to lower temperatures on Earth by using modern technology to reduce the incoming sunlight. The proposals include the spraying of aerosols into the stratosphere to stop (reduce) the spread of solar energy. Some see this as a potential response to global warming.
But the authors of the letter warned about “uncertainties” surrounding the effects of such technologies on weather, agriculture, and the supply of food and water.
We should be concerned anytime we attempt to improve upon God.
The letter argued that the world’s poorest nations will be left highly vulnerable unless powerful countries place the technology of such planetary scale under international control.
Is this another movement toward One World Government?
The current world order seems unfit to reach such far-reaching agreements on fair and effective political control over solar geoengineering deployment.
Proposals to study solar geoengineering were most recently floated by the media amid COP26, a major UN climate change summit in Scotland in November of last year.
In March, the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) released a report recommending an investment of $100-$200 million in solar geoengineering research over five years as part of crafting “a robust portfolio of climate mitigation and adaptation policies.” NASEM argued that outdoor experiments that involve releasing substances into the atmosphere must be limited and subjected to strict regulation.
NASEM emphasized that solar geoengineering should not be a substitute for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
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