8 April 2024

From the director

Dear Samizdat Subscribers and Net Zero Watch supporters

The big story of the last few days has been the news from the motor manufacturing sector, all of which looks very bad for the Net Zero drive, and therefore very good news for those of us who live and work outside the Green Blob.

First there was the news that Tesla’s sales growth has stalled. Then came Ford’s delay to its EV programme, closely followed by Apple’s announcement of layoffs from its EV division. Finally came the news form the UK motor industry that it had seen a contraction in demand for electric vehicles.

It seems that there is a limit to the number of people who are willing to fork out thousands of pounds to virtue signal to their neighbours (and to inconvenience themselves).

We’re winning, but the costs of the Net Zero madness continue to mount, and the damage being done to the country and the economy is ongoing. There are battles still to be won.

Thank you for your support.

Andrew

As always, please don’t reply to this email, which comes from an unmonitored mail box.

The headlines

Net zero Britain is already hopelessly hooked on China
Daily Telegraph, 6 April 2024

Apple Axes 600 Staff In First Layoffs Since Pandemic
Silicon, 5 April 2024

Ford delaying rollout of new electric pickup truck, SUV
The Hill, 4 April 2024

Demand for electric cars slows sharply as customers revert to petrol

Daily Telegraph, 4 April 2024

Time for MPs to come clean about the Green Blob

Daily Sceptic, 5 April 2024

Renewable energy jobs are being subsidised by £250,000 each, every year
Daily Sceptic, 3 April 2024

Nobody is buying into the net zero madness

Daily Telegraph, 3 April 2024

The detail

Net zero Britain is already hopelessly hooked on China

Daily Telegraph, 6 April 2024

Cheap as chips, and almost as plentiful as cell phones. The glut of solar panels piling up at ports and in warehouses is such that farmers in Germany and the Netherlands are reported to be using them for fencing.

We may be struggling to meet net zero ambitions for offshore wind but there should surely be no such problem with solar, where the price of the panels has halved over the past year and there is so much supply that we’ve seemingly run out of places to put them.

All good, then. Except in one regard: overwhelmingly, the panels come from China. Either that or the South East Asian offshoots of Chinese producers.

We talk blithely about the need to “de-risk” the economy from overreliance on Chinese supply chains, and yet here we are with accelerated plans to increase solar capacity five-fold to 70 gigawatts (GW) by 2035, or even sooner if Labour gets its way. This cannot realistically be done without Chinese suppliers.

It’s even worse on the Continent, where the EU plans to install 320GW of new solar capacity by the end of 2025, and almost 600GW by 2030, with around 9bn cubic metres of natural gas consumption displaced by 2027.

Today’s solar technology originated largely in the US and Germany but, as with much else, they quickly lost the plot. Today, Chinese based producers have a chokehold on supply, with around 90pc of the global market. European and US manufacturers struggle to maintain even their current marginal position.

Apple axes 600 staff in first layoffs since pandemic

Silicon, 5 April 2024

Hundreds of Apple staff are to be handed their marching orders, reportedly centred on cancelled self-driving EV project

Apple has followed other big name tech firms and is to axe hundreds of its staff in California, in its first tranche of layoffs since the Covid-19 pandemic.

Apple, according to a WARN (Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification) notice posted in California, officially informed 614 staff of the cuts on 28 March and the changes are effective 27 May.

The tech industry has being shedding tens of thousands of jobs in the past 14 months, following the Covid-19 pandemic. Apple, until now, had been one of the few exceptions and has even been hiring. Indeed back in May 2023 CEO Tim Cook told CNBC that external that layoffs would be a “last resort”.

But now Apple is to axe 614 staff in California from its approximate 160,000 strong global workforce – a much smaller number compared to other tech firms, that have axed tens of thousands of staff.

The staff are to be cut from eight offices in Santa Clara, according to the WARN filings, and not the Cupertino headquarters.

It has been reported that these smaller, satellite offices in California are more likely to house secretive projects.

Apple has not revealed which departments or projects the axed employees are involved in.

However Bloomberg reported that the majority of the cuts come from the site address which was working on the recently abandoned self-driving car project in California.

The San Francisco Chronicle also reported that the positions that have been lost include machine shop managers, hardware engineers and product design engineers.

Full story

Ford delaying rollout of new electric pickup truck, SUV

The Hill, 4 April 2024

Ford is delaying the rollout of its new electric pickup truck and electric SUV as the demand for EVs decelerates industry-wide.

The Dearborn, Mich., auto giant said on Thursday it had delayed the launches of its electric pickup truck built in Tennessee and the three-row SUV manufactured in Ontario, Canada. 

Despite the delay, the auto-manufacturing company said it will expand its hybrid electric vehicle offerings, hoping to have “hybrid powertrains” across its lineup of gas-powered cars by the end of this decade. 

Ford said it postponing the production of the SUV at the Canada plant from 2025 to 2027. The pickup will be pushed back from 2025 to 2026. 

The delay of the rollout comes as the company previously cut down on the production of the electric pickup F-150 Lightning in January, pointing to lighter demand. 

“As the No. 2 EV brand in the U.S. for the past two years, we are committed to scaling a profitable EV business, using capital wisely and bringing to market the right gas, hybrid and fully electric vehicles at the right time,” Jim Farley, Ford’s president and CEO, said. 

“Our breakthrough, next-generation EVs will be new from the ground up and fully software enabled, with ever-improving digital experiences and a multitude of potential services.”

Ford said it is still focused on EVs at its newer factories such as the “BlueOval City” campus in Tennessee. 

Demand for electric cars slows sharply as customers revert to petrol

Daily Telegraph, 4 April 2024

Electric car demand has slowed sharply in a sign that drivers are turning back to petrol.

The market share of battery electric vehicles (EVs) declined last month, the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT) said.

EV registrations rose only 3.8pc from a year earlier, compared with a 10pc advance in the overall car market. Hybrid and petrol-powered cars showed the strongest growth.

Petrol-engine sales rose 9.2pc and accounted for more than half of the total, while plug-in hybrids saw a 37pc increase.

What gains EVs did achieve in March were driven entirely by fleet and business purchases, with sales to ordinary drivers dropping, the SMMT said.

The figures add to evidence that the immediate market for battery-powered cars is a limited one. Early adopters desperate to drive a zero-emissions vehicle have already made the switch but the mass market is proving more reluctant.

EVs cost significantly more than a similar diesel or petrol model, which is a major deterrent. Concerns about the UK’s sparsely spread charging infrastructure also continue to stoke so-called range anxiety.

Full story

Time for MPs to come clean about the Green Blob

Daily Sceptic, 5 April 2024

In the wake of Boris Johnson’s exit from Number 10, Tory MPs, including former ministers, have created a sea change in the public conversation about U.K. climate policy. For years, perhaps decades, the cross-party Westminster consensus on climate change has been a suffocating orthodoxy that limited debate about energy and other policy agendas, leaving Britain under-resourced and facing the consequences of energy prices that are out of control. But then, just a year and a bit after the U.K.’s hosting of the COP26 meeting in Glasgow, and following energy price spikes caused by lockdowns the world over, a small number of MPs began to question green dogma. This new energy and climate realism is a long overdue and welcome development. But if politicians want realistic policies, they are going to have to go much further.

The number of critics of the U.K.’s green agenda in Parliament has until now been very small. In the final Commons vote on the Climate Change Bill in October 2008, just five MPs, including the two Tellers, voted No. Outside, snow lay on the streets of Westminster for the first time in October in 74 years, in an ironic gesture from Nature herself that brought chaos to travel and power networks. The Bill, now an Act, would lock criticism of green ideology out of British politics for the next 12 years because what MPs had agreed to was in effect to hand what decision-making power they had not already transferred to the EU to the Committee on Climate Change that the Act created. In 2019, the Climate Change Act’s 80% emissions reduction by 2050 target was upped to ‘Net Zero’. But our democratic representatives had yet to find their feet. It wasn’t until the beginning of 2022 that a formal presence of the Nez Zero Scrutiny Group (NZSG) took the form of open letters to the Prime Minister and other briefings to the press.

Full story

Renewable energy jobs are being subsidised by £250,000 each, every year

Daily Sceptic, 3 April 2024

Recently, Shadow Energy Secretary Ed Miliband has been promoting his party’s ‘Green Prosperity Plan’ again, promising more jobs, more investment and lower bills. However, these claims do not stand up to scrutiny. Currently each job in the wind and solar power sectors is being subsidised by the taxpayer to the tune of over £250,000 per job, every year. This is the path to penury, not prosperity.

Full story

Nobody is buying into the net zero madness

Daily Telegraph, 3 April 2024

Are consumers really ready for the magnitude of changes necessary for a green transition? Already, the vast ambition of net zero envisages most people switching their gas central heating to electricity and their petrol cars to bicycles and electric cars.

The ultimate challenge will be the wholesale conversion of electricity from coal, oil and gas to renewables – all without a satisfying answer to the question of what to do when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow.

So far, governments have concentrated on doing what should be the easier areas of transition. They have considerable influence and control over energy markets, and have increased their interventions in them. We’ve seen more subsidies, tax breaks, windfall taxes, regulations, managed prices and bans than ever in the quest to tip electricity generation towards wind and solar power away from fossil fuels. The energy industry has consented, or at least acquiesced, to these changes.

The transition has not been without buffers. The electricity industry, which actively promotes renewable power, has been rolling out smart meters to an increasingly sceptical group of consumers who have so far resisted them. Still, they have charted plans for many more wind farms and solar arrays.

More renewables means more grid space to handle the variability of output characteristic of wind and solar power, as well as to transfer power from offshore sources to the south of the country where most customers live. But the industry is well behind on increasing grid capacity, slowed by planning opposition to new pylons.

Not all technological revolutions are popular. Take the digital boom, which succeeded because consumers loved the products and services associated with it. We have seen a near universal adoption of mobile phones. The majority of us have signed up readily to the internet and regularly post on social media, even allowing our personal data to be temporarily held by private companies like Amazon. Leading US tech firms have swept the globe with their products without the need for government subsidies, tax breaks, or exhortations.

The green revolution has not fired the same enthusiasm. Battery electric cars are still a hard sell. Heat pumps with a £7500 subsidy do not fly off the shelves. Whilst many people do say global warming is a problem and something should be done about it, few think it sufficient of a problem that they need to to change their travel, heating and diet: a seven-country YouGov poll recently found that major government interventions of this kind were far more unpopular than small voluntary changes.

Full story

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