From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
By Paul Homewood
London, 27 March – Net Zero Watch has welcomed yesterday’s EU agreement not to ban the sale of cars with internal combustion engines (ICE) after 2035.
Net Zero Watch is calling on Rishi Sunak to follow suit and abandon its 2030 ban of the sale of ICE cars.
According to the agreement conventional cars can continue to be sold and registered after 2035 if they only use fuels that are CO2-neutral. This will allow car makers to continue producing and selling conventional models indefinitely.
“Now that the European ban of the sale of combustion engine cars has been overturned, the government will come under growing pressure to follow suit if it wants to avoid destroying the British car industry for good,” said Dr Benny Peiser, director of Net Zero Watch.
The EU agreed in February to set the 2035 date for ending the sale of ICE cars, but Germany and a coalition of seven EU countries lodged last-minute objections and called for the use of e-fuelled ICE cars beyond 2035.
As a result, the EU has come to what appears to be a sensible decision to allow the sale and use of conventional cars that are fulled by synthetic and other CO2-neutral fuels.
For millions of Britons electric vehicles will not be a viable solution as they are much more expensive than cars with combustion engines. And electric cars will probably still be more expensive than conventional cars in seven years.
The decision to allow combustion engines that burn “e-fuels” is a total head fake. Industry gets to keep on building ICE for the forseeable future. When the day of reconing comes and e-fuels are so expensive that they make electric cars look cheap, the government will kick the can down the road again and allow fossil fuels until 2045.
This will be announced in 2035 because by then we’ll only have 10 years left to fix the climate.
Another 10 years….
That metric has been done to death
No, no: there’s still life in the old dog yet!
The legislation should be written that ICE vehicles will be banned when nuclear fusion reactors become economically viable.
That way both events will ALWAYS be 10 years in the future!
And therein lies the rub, e-fuels are very expensive and new cars will be required to be equipped with sensors so that they can refuse to start on regular fuel. This battle for the ICE is far from over, this might just be a pyrrhic win.
It’s certainly a worry, but at least it would allow car-makers to continue with standard ICEs and gives time for reversal of the insistence on use of CO2-neutral fuels.
“and gives time for reversal of the insistence on use of CO2-neutral fuels.”
If they reverse enough policies, we might be in good shape again! 🙂
Sensors can be removed or bypassed quite easily. Just need to feed the right signal to the appropriate input to make the program happy.
Yup, route around damage, speed bumps, and other either unwelcome or unnecessary obstacles … and often as easily as hex editing “=” to be “!=” to provide that route? A bit harder to achieve with unnecessary bureaucracy where killing it with fire before it lays eggs is probably the most assured fix though, aye? 🤔
And electric cars will probably still be more expensive than conventional cars in seven years.
Kind of like the IRA will reduce consumer prices. The automobile might be less expensive, depending on the fees and taxes add-on but the synthetic fuel operating expenses make make the total package unaffordable to any but the select few.
Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way….
If only Roger Waters would keep his desperation quiet.
I wouldn’t be shouting “victory” quite so quickly guys… this is the EU we’re talking here.
Don’t think there is much chance of the UK backing off. There is no political party that is prepared to say no. And its progressing inexorably. Here is from the Telegraph a few days ago:
Car manufacturers will be required to produce a set proportion of electric vehicles from January 2024 under a new “mandate” to be announced this week.
On Thursday ministers will confirm the Zero Emissions Vehicle (ZEV) mandate as part of a package of green policies designed to help the UK reach its target of net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.
The mandate will require car and van manufacturers to produce a specific proportion of electric vehicles in a push to help the industry reach a government goal of no new petrol and diesel cars in the next seven years.
Under the policy, electric vehicle sales will be converted into “certificates”.
Manufacturers will be required to hold a certain number of certificates at the end of each year, either by selling electric vehicles or buying certificates from other manufacturers.
The idea has been subject to a series of consultations since it was first floated in the Net Zero strategy in October 2021, including a policy design consultation last April.
From 2030 no more sales of pure ICE cars, but hybrids still allowed till 2035, at which point its EV only. Though whether in view of the 2035 deadline anyone will still be making hybrids from 2030-35, and at what sales prices, is a real question.
I don’t think the UK Climate Change Committee has done any analysis of the social and economic consequences of this, or of the risks in it. Or indeed on its non-existent effects on UK emissions or global emissions.
In other UK news, also from the Telegraph today, we have hydrogen mania:
The Energy Bill, which is set to appear in the House of Lords on Tuesday, grants gas distribution networks (GDNs) the same powers of entry used to force-fit prepayment meters.
The proposed installation of hydrogen boilers is set take place as part of trials in several villages.
Under the new legislation, GDNs will have the right to enter anyone’s home for any reason connected to the installation.
Critics say that for the trials to be safe, every home in the area would need to be switched to hydrogen, or disconnected from the gas grid, meaning GDN’s could forcibly install boilers if required.
The Telegraph understands that the vote is likely to be extremely close with several peers ready to vote against the hydrogen proposal.
As the piece makes clear, the problem with hydrogen installs is that you have to do a whole area at once, in the case of the trials a whole village. This means if you are in that village and say no you will be disconnected from the gas grid. And doing it for the village involves replacing all the internal pipework and appliances in the houses.
Again, where is the benefit and risk analysis? Where is the account of what this will take in the cities? How many houses will have to be converted at once when implementing the scheme? What effect is this going to have on UK CO2 emissions and consequentially on global emissions and (theoretically) global temperatures?
There is none. Its a sort of collective insanity, urged on by an unaccountable intellectual class consisting of Guardian reading engineering illiterates.
And at the end of the day, there is still no source of hydrogen except natural gas, and still no grid capable of delivering it to wherever its made to the houses.
Michel, objective cost-benefit analysis and risk analysis are oh-so-twentieth-century. In 2009, the UK government took steps specifically to block any proper cost-benefit analysis being done on anything involving CO2 emissions. They abandoned risk analysis even earlier, when the Interdepartmental Liaison Group for Risk Analysis re-wrote the precautionary principle in 2002 to say, in essence, “if in doubt, government must act.”
Our enemies seem to have a vision of an economy that runs on pixie farts (of which hydrogen is just one kind!) Alternatively, if I put on my cynic hat, they simply want to run the economy into the ground. Whichever way, you are quite right that they are suffering from a collective insanity.
There does seem to be a possibility that the Reform UK party (of which I am still a member) may decide to back off on this issue. But at the moment, they’re being very slow about making a decision.
Liberals are convinced that they are so superior, that it is impossible for them to make a mistake. If they believe it is safe and cost effective, it is. Any double checking is just a waste of time and resources so can be gotten rid of.
“I don’t think the UK Climate Change Committee has done any analysis”
…
“We cannot allow debt to keep rising’, the Chancellor said to Parliament last week, repeatedly emphasising the need to ‘level’ with the public about the size of the national debt.
Strange then that just days later it was revealed that ministers have been doing the opposite when it comes to the costs of the fashionable cause of ‘Net Zero’. Instead government officials deliberately hid ‘more realistic’ estimates which showed Net Zero would cost billions more than publicised, while agreeing amongst themselves that the predicted costs were ‘highly uncertain’.
These revelations came about after the Treasury was finally defeated in a two-year battle to prevent me seeing documents I’d requested under the Freedom of Information Act. I’d asked for the calculations behind their claim that the cost of decarbonising the UK economy was going to be around £1 trillion.
In the event, after two years, they eventually handed over what was essentially a short memo, discussing two competing estimates of the cost, one from the Department for Business Enterprise and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) and the other from the Committee on Climate Change (CCC).
The amateurishness of the Treasury analysis is extraordinary: a few figures are jotted down, as if on the back of an envelope, and a crude graph is sketched out, after which a picture to present to the public is decided on.
But more importantly, the memo appears to show that the Treasury set out to deceive the public.”
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-hidden-cost-of-net-zero/
You have to believe.
Not long after Sunak became chancellor he demonstrated in an interview that he (and by extension the government) didn’t have a clue what the cost of net-zero would be. No-one had a clue when MPs from all parties overwhelmingly voted for the Climate Change Act back in 2009, and no-one has a clue now. Net-zero, as you say, is driven by belief, reality doesn’t enter into it. Eventually, reality will win the day, but most of the politicos will be relaxing on their generous pensions by then and the profiteers on their profits. The rest of us will have to pick up the tab.
“Eventually, reality will win the day.”
Exactly. They will change, simply because they must. It doesn’t matter who the politician is, or how stupid they are, reality will have its way.
The problem is the damage that is being done before reality turns up to the party.
Over 22m of the 28m homes in the UK are connected to the gas network. A mixture of 20% hydrogen and 80% natural gas is compatible with most of the current gas distribution network. Any higher proportion of hydrogen will need to replace the existing high strength steel pipes because of the danger of embrittlement. In areas where polythene pipes are already used for distribution they may possibly be usable with less work needed.
The proposed trials in Whitby(Ellesmere Port, Cheshire) and Redcar (North East) which have been decided upon by the powers that be with no local consultation are deeply unpopular with the people who live in those places. But if they go ahead they may need totally new infrastructure in the distribution network as well as in the houses and hydrogen specific appliances. There are around 2000 homes in each of the chosen sites.
I would worry about safety risks if the country really does try and move to 20% hydrogen. Is there a pilot someplace where that has been done on this scale? Are we really sure that there will not be embrittlement anywhere at that level?
If you look at the feeders into terraced houses in central London, you will find lots old iron coming in from the street, which then joins to copper inside the building. Has anyone tested these fixtures for 20% hydrogen over a long enough period?
Is the decades old copper pipework in the buildings really safe for 20% hydrogen?
Its one thing to do a series of pilots where you can control everything, redo the whole network of pipes right into the appliances, you have a whole crew on site observing. Its quite another to change the gas supply for whole areas of cities in a way that may or may not be totally safe.
The other thing that strikes one, thinking about this, with the total hydrogen program, is that if they really want to save on emissions, why not just take the money and invest it in insulation? The costs of all the digging and relaying will be huge, the effects of the program, if it works at all, will be to keep the same poorly insulated and draughty housing, to keep burning or rather wasting fuel to try and keep it warm.
When given a proper insulation program it seems that the risks would be far lower, and the returns in terms of energy and emission savings far greater.
But those old iron pipes were OK with town gas, which was mostly CO and H2.
They did a trial in the small village of Winlaton (668 homes) in NE England (funny how all these trials are being done well away from the South East and London!). It began in Aug 2021 and the plan was to gradually increase the hydrogen content until they got to 20% if there were no problems. Ended June 2022 – apparently successful.
Search ‘Hydeploy winlaton’ for more info.
Banning ICE cars is absolute insanity. I have yet to see any scientific, social or economic reasons to support a ban. From where will the electricity to fuel the EVs come? What happens to the used batteries? etc etc.
Unfortunately, nobody has a vote for the “EU” Brussels elite!
It is the madness of the power elite.
I guess some people are set up to make a lot of money on the “green revolution” while we the people get shafted.
“”…the government will come under growing pressure…””
“[The trade secretary] Kemi Badenoch dismisses the Inflation Reduction Act as ‘protectionist’. Our current energy secretary Grant Shapps calls it ‘dangerous’. The chancellor dismisses it too.
“I profoundly disagree with this approach. As the US and Europe speed off into the distance in the global race for green industry, we are sitting back in the changing rooms moaning about the rules. Sore loser syndrome won’t win any jobs for Britain.” – Ed Miliband
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/mar/28/labour-urges-ministers-to-show-ambition-as-it-recasts-green-growth-plan
We’re on the road to nowhere
The only thing “green growth” advances is POVERTY.
Ah, Ed Miliband, promoter of the dumbest piece of legislation ever to come out of Parliament. Only the Guardian could still take him seriously.
Don’t celebrate too soon. CO2 neutral fuel is neither CO2 neutral nor cheap. Porsche Audi VW are playing at synthesizing a gasoline-equivalent from methane, in-turn produced from “captured” CO2 and electrolized hydrogen. No energy input figures have been released, but it can only be a fraud, with processing requiring orders of magnitude more energy to synthesize the many stages than is rendered as product. Small, pre-market samples released are exorbitantly expensive.
IMO Audi is still doing penance for the decades-old deisel con, and this move is government acknowledgement of that politicking.
To be somewhat fair, a CO2 neutral engine will run just fine on petroleum-based fuel. But if these vehicles are price or quantity controlled to make battery electric cars competitive (levelized cost of luxury transportation?) expect the price of either to be much higher than affordable by most drivers.
I have been using a synthetic diesel, called GTL diesel om my sailboat since it became available. Ok, it’s not completely synthetic because it’s made from natural gas. However, I do have a lot of faith in our chemists and engineers to make fully synthetic fuels, and mass adoption will make these fuels a lot cheaper! This problem seems that is easier to solve than the current battery situation. It’s not that hard to trust a combination of proper science and the market.
The energy inputs to “synthesize” these fuels will come from where?
More tail chasing to “save” us – from nothing!
Wind and solar, obviously 😀
Isn’t natural gas a fossil fuel? So, how are they going to make the synthetic fuel once they’ve banned its source?
magic faerie dust
Lab produced methane from CO2 and electrolyzed hydrogen — in theory. Sufficient quantities have yet to be produced this way, so for the magic trick they produce now from methane, of course this is only temporary.
FWIW, Yooper, references for my wild claims, above.
A Porsche development of fuel in a lab using electrolyzed hydrogen and CO2:
Feb 23, 2021 https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a35577611/porsche-synthetic-efuel-clean-emissions-testing/
An older article marking a AUDI demonstration of the use of biomass as feedstock and PV as process energy supply.
May 22, 2015 https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a15355097/audi-makes-synthetic-gasoline-using-zero-petroleum/
So instead of being 30 times more expensive, it’s only 3 times more expensive.
What a deal.
Notice how the left simply believes that what they want is possible. No need to talk to actual engineers and chemists.
Part of the con, of course, is to supply synthetic fuel from conventional methane or methanol.
Volkswagen was started nearly a century ago with just this sort of public-private con, a bait-and-switch, showing wonderful pictures and a prototype or two, but never delivering a people’s car until long after the violent deaths of most of the marks (an ironic name in this context) and the violent end of the polity.
But anyone still around in 1948 had a helluva lot better chance in seeing a VW Beetle than anyone after 2030 will have of seeing a thousand liters of affordable, CO2 neutral petrol.
It is very, always good that you’ve faith, because economics, science and engineering are against you.
To be classed as CO2 neutral, these fuels must be synthesized using renewable energy. Electrical energy is the primary input, not labor or any other physical resource other than air and water.
Regardless of your religion on renewable energy, it has been vastly over committed as a cure for the world’s needs. If overbuilding is part of the plan for the future, it will simply be a very long time before there is enough to go around so that you may have some for your boat.
What you have now in the runup is a demonstration product made from natural gas, produced at a small fraction of the cost of the CO2 newutral sort.
Faith and belief are wonderful things, and while put to the good should never be discouraged. But to convert fully and completely, sell the boat and all your earthly possessions, give away all your money, and live by begging alms — then you shall be where everyone else will be if the net zero nulls have their way.
They’ve switched from shooting them selves in the head to shooting them selves in the foot. Maybe they should start shooting the Bolsheviks pushing this crap.
Yes electric cars are cr4p and will be for a long time in the future, even more cr4p until a source for all the leccy they’re gonna use is found
But this story is not: Good News
Because ever more ingenious, contrived and thermodynamically insane ways to burn Biomass are going to found/used in the creation of these e-fuels.
In the virtual world of money and laundering of sameIn the real world = acceleration the ongoing mass extinction (soil bacteria)
And when those bugs die, as they have done on many notable occasions throughout human history, we die.
No: The climate did not change in order to kill them
How could it: They created the climate.
We killed them: And climate went to pot as a consequence.
And ‘we’, as is seen nowadays, went to pot (insane, mad, deranged, demented) first. Because those bugs also create, feed & fertilise, grow and ultimately digest our food.
And we repaid them with relentless burning.
Like that wasn’t bad enough, we invented Nitrogen (haha) fertiliser & Glyphosate and are throwing those around as though our lives depended upon it.
Many think they do and those things will be critical in the creation/production of e-fuels.
Nothing Could Be More Wrong
Biofuels such as biodiesel and alcohol run about 4 x the cost of gasoline and diesel fuel. At the present time subsidies to electric cars, and lack of a “road use and construction” component to electricity cost, plus the very real possibility of sacrificing food for fuel is a hindrance to biofuel development and therefore continued ICE use. Large scale biofuel use has been done several times in the past due to “war emergency” status. Also, elite minded folks are never in favour of farmers being in control of the means of production…makes them feel unimportant…
Yep. Nitrogen is a pollutant OK. Whole nations have been eradicated because of it.
Anyone remember Pol Pot? He used Nitrogen to murder a third of Cambodia. Mind you, he didn’t depend on Nitrogen alone (he made them breath it in so it was a bit slow). He had death camps and things as well. But it just shows how dangerous Nitrogen can be, especially when it’s mixed at 4 parts with 1 part Oxygen.
I know this is so, because Greta Thunberg came to me in a dream last night. She said: ‘Awake o climate traitor. Still breathing? How dare you!’
To construct the battery of an e-car creates nearly 20 years worth of pollution from an internal combustion car …come on folks.
What’s the betting, our virtuous politicians will not budge from their 2030 deadline.
Signalling to the rest of the world, what a bunch of pratts they are.
They will just tax or fine producers and those costs will be passed on to customers, while the money will be passed to government for their spending dreams. Why would they be against such a beneficial (for them) plan ? Only the sight of a guillotine makes politicians rethink methods of filling the treasury.
I guess they saw the further decline of industry as a problem in the EU. The Brits have little to lose at this point.
I suggest that the way to drive cost estimates and justification is to make the public sector go first – make all the city own vehicles go electric which forces the installation of charging stations. Put the city busses on electric. Same approach for public owned buildings – make them all convert to electric for heating and hot water and cooking.
Norway legislated that all new Public Authority procurement of cars from 2022 and buses from 2025 had to be EVs.
It’s wasteful, but Norway can afford to pay several times as much for their government cars and buses. All they need to do to increase their revenue is pump more petroleum from under the North Sea.
Have they realized yet that if too much of the world does the same as them, that oil won’t be selling?
It’s all a SCAM, but in a good way. Trust me….this is how it is going to play-out…and it will be similar to the ethanol fiasco we have to deal with in the USA. A percentage of eFuel will be blended with regular gasoline and probably some “carbon offset” indulgences and presto chango you have new and improved Green Fuel. Everyone is happy; the refineries make money, the car companies don’t go broke, the greens have a “win” and regular people can continue to drive ICE cars.
I posted this the other day.
“When I read about this Porsche invented process, I did a little research. The have a plant in Chile where the “strip” the O from water and combine it with carbon dioxide using wind energy and there they magically produce C8H18. Which is…..wait for it……gasoline. Now the long term plan is to upscale production in Saudi Arabia…lots of solar energy. I am sure the eFuel plants will be conveniently located next to existing refineries….duel use of of existing resources is so environmentally friendly. Unfortunately, somehow I don’t think they will be able to differentiate between the good eFuel and the bad gasoline when it goes to market….so they will just slap an eFuel sticker on everything…yeah we saved the planet…. Isn’t progress wonderful.”
Mark Twain once said that “History never repeats itself, but it does often rhyme.”
“As a result, the EU has come to what appears to be a sensible decision to allow the sale and use of conventional cars that are fulled by synthetic and other CO2-neutral fuels.”
Why is that sensible?
may as well make them run on unicorn blood … about as real as e-fuels …
Synthetic and other “CO2 neutral” fuels are going to be very expensive and in limited quantities.
They are not and will never be viable substitutes.
This “solution” means the rich will still be able to afford real cars, but everyone else is limited to electrics.
This change is no improvement.
I’d love to build a black box factory/refinery (i.e. no visitors or visibility into the processes …)
I’d VERY publicly buy a bunch of nat gas and a bunch or solar/wind electricity and produce e-gasoline for Europe at a 25-50% premium
(and under the table I’d buy a bunch of normal gasoline and sell off my nat gas and electricity)
“CO2 neutral”? Does that mean wood chips? Producing fuels like ethanol creates MORE emissions than making and burning gasoline, when you look at the WHOLE process. (Besides putting even more of those hated fertilizers into the soil.)
A sensible decisions would not make reference to CO2-neutral fuels.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-65105129
The EU was the first to abandon common sense. Someone wisely said eons ago that if something won’t work, it will stop. I once thought this a silly self-evident remark. I now realize it’s a brilliant one. I had no idea at the time that there could be people out there that thought that something could be made to be if they had good feelings about it. I now know that wokies likely always existed. But who would have thought they would multiply so rapidly and take over running world affairs?
Meanwhile…
story tip
Lucid to cut 1,300 workers amid signs of flagging demand for its EVs (cnbc.com)
‘And electric cars will probably still be more expensive than conventional cars in seven years.’
And will be going boldly on impulse p̶o̶w̶e̶r, er, decisions ad infinitum.
Can I close an EV plant, the many cobalt coper and mines needed to supply it, then convert the non consumption of petrol to a carbon certificate, drill baby drill while waving it, and supply kosher petrol as an alternative to e-whatever?
No such stuff, unless they mean nuclear fuel.
If you are insulated from economic reality, it is possible to synthesize fuel from CO2, H20, and electricity. Lots of electricity. I expect the fuel produced would have only 10 to 30% of the energy input from electric power. If you got serious about mass-producing nuclear power plants, maybe we could have that much electricity. The fuel would still be very expensive, like Nazi Germany’s fuel synthesized from coal, but like Nazi Germany when most of the oil imports were cut off, it could keep a small portion of the ICE vehicles running. Just the ones the government needs most…