Thursday, 21 September 2023

Expect More Of This

Image: Unsplash

Expect More Of This

Export more countries to make more moves like this. Politicians making grand calls about the ending of petrol and diesel cars are really just an advanced form of virtue signalling. The technological base is not really there yet to change the entire vehicle fleet from oil based to lithium based.

“Rishi Sunak has announced major changes to the UK’s key green policies.

The Prime Minister has confirmed he will be delaying a ban on the sales of new petrol and diesel cars and phasing out gas boilers until 2035.

He said in a speech at Westminster that the UK has ‘stumbled into a consensus about the future of our country that nobody seems to be happy with.’

He said he is ‘confident’ the UK can lead the world in green policies, and that there is no doubt that climate change is visible due to the high temperatures seen in the UK this summer.

The PM said he would put back a ban on new fossil fuel cars by five years in a major U-turn among a raft of measures.”[1]

The idea of “green energy” is a bit of a myth anyway. Lithium and other battery minerals have to be mined in large mines, just like coal and uranium. And they are very difficult to dispose of. Often these minerals are found in parts of the world that are underdeveloped or even hot war zones. They require the construction of a massive energy base load system that cannot rely on things like solar panels and wind farms, especially in a nation like Britain. Even in Australia such technology is not enough to run our entire electrical grid, plus the addition of every vehicle being converted or changed to battery based technology. 

For so long now so much of the media, politicians and academia have been just asserting that the future is devoid of fossil fuels, and just ignoring the reality of what it will take to move western nations over to such technology. Many of the problems are very well known, it is as if these groups just think that there will be people who have come up with solutions by 2030, or 2035. But as time moves on it is becoming clearer and clearer that the technology we currently have is far superior in many ways, and much more reliable, and therefore very difficult to replace.

Electric cars are likely here to stay, and are kind of cool in some ways, as long as you are nowhere near the things when they catch on fire in an underground carpark or apartment block carpark, of course. But getting rid of oil based cars is a pipe dream at our current technological levels. These dates are going to keep getting pushed back, politicians are going to keep hoping that someone invents something that solves the problems created by their false promises. In the meantime, countries like China, Russia, India and others are making use of the whole range of electrical grid and fossil fuel offerings to turn their once underdeveloped economies into some of the most advanced economies in the world. One day soon, the West is going to wake up to the fact that it kneecapped itself, technologically speaking, and the rest of the world has taken advantage of its arrogance and complacency to overtake it.

List of references.


[1] Liam Coleman 2023, https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/other/rishi-delays-ban-on-sale-of-petrol-and-diesel-by-five-years-in-net-zero-pledge/ar-AA1h0paS?ocid=msedgntp&cvid=a27716e0c6e84113b0150106da5f7ab8&ei=39


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