Category: Eco-Crap

Good News / Bad News

Business, Eco-Crap, Watermelons

Good news for us wot loves those internal combustion engines in our cars, bad news for EVs and their watermelon supporters:

Rivian Lays Off 10% Of Workforce As Lucid Production Underwhelms

EV startup stocks Rivian (RIVN) and Lucid (LCID) sank Thursday after both companies reported fourth-quarter earnings and revenue late Wednesday, and announced they are not ramping up production in 2024.

Rivian reported Wednesday a loss of $1.36 per share in Q4 with sales doubling to $1.31 billion. Wall Street expected a loss of $1.35 and revenue totaling $1.28 billion. Looking to 2024, Rivian said it expects production of 57,000 vehicles, remaining flat compared with 2023.

The company also announced that it predicts vehicle deliveries in Q1 2024 to be about 10%-15% lower than in Q4 2023 and that it is laying off 10% of its salaried workers.

Along with Rivian, Lucid reported Wednesday a Q4 loss of 29 cents per share with revenue falling 39% to $157 million. Analysts predicted a loss of 30 cents and sales hitting $180 million. Lucid produced 8,428 vehicles in 2023 and delivered 6,001.

For 2024, the company forecasts producing 9,000 vehicles, well below Wall Street’s expectations of more than 14,000.

Yeah, nobody wants to buy them now (even at subsidy-lowered prices), and still fewer will buy them when said subsidies disappear and the costs of these boutique vehicles assume a trajectory opposite to Rivian/Lucid’s share prices.

And the children will laugh and play, in the playgrounds to which they were driven in their mommies’ gasoline-powered SUVs:

And the oil rigs will pump again, their oil being carried along the completed XL pipeline, filling up cars will no longer require a letter of credit from the banks, natural gas will flow into people’s houses in greater amounts and at lowered prices, windmills and solar panel farms will rust away and fall over, and nuclear power generators will become a feature of every town in the land.

And the watermelon socialists who supported the whole Global Warming Climate Cooling Change© pack of lies will dangle limply from lamp poles in many streets, those that did escape the Air Pinochet helicopter flights, said choppers fueled with the cheaper avgas and therefore able to fly many missions…

Hey, a man can dream, can’t he?  So mote it be.

Bowing To The Inevitable

Drive Time, Eco-Crap

I had a quick chuckle at this one:

Instead of essentially requiring automakers to rapidly ramp up sales of electric vehicles over the next few years, the administration would give car manufacturers more time, with a sharp increase in sales not required until after 2030, these people said. They asked to remain anonymous because the regulation has not been finalized. The administration plans to publish the final rule by early spring.

The change comes as President Biden faces intense crosswinds as he runs for re-election while trying to confront climate change. He is aiming to cut carbon dioxide emissions from gasoline-powered vehicles, which make up the largest single source of greenhouse gases emitted by the United States.

At the same time, Mr. Biden needs cooperation from the auto industry and political support from the unionized auto workers who backed him in 2020 but now worry that an abrupt transition to electric vehicles would cost jobs.

Yeah, not to mention the impossibility of getting a huge number of Americans to give up their beloved and reliable cars, trucks and SUVs for impractical and unreliable Duracell runarounds.

The decision was taken mainly because consumer demand for EVs has been lower than expected, and various major car manufacturers announced disappointing results in their recent annual reports.

“Lower than expected”, and shrinking as people who aren’t interested in virtue-signaling decide that, well, fuckem.

There are, of course, a variety of reasons for the drastic underperformance of EVs, but perhaps the greatest issue is that they are still working out as more expensive than traditional gas-powered cars. There is also an increasing body of evidence that they are not so environmentally friendly as their proponents would like us to think.

Not to mention that there are only a tiny number of charging points across the vast expanse of the U.S.A., and not much chance of their number growing at a rate which would make everyone’s life easier.

But we all know that,  Here’s the part which made me really chuckle:

It is not all doom and gloom for the EV industry, though, as Elon Musk’s Tesla continues to go from strength to strength. Yet Musk’s recent embrace of the anti-Biden agenda has unfortunately made him persona non grata within the White House. Given the petty and vindictive nature of the Democratic establishment, don’t be surprised if Tesla’s famously generous government subsidies soon vanish into thin air.

Yeah, just wait till prospective buyers of EVs discover that the true price of a sub-compact Tesla is really north of $100,000.  The “thin air” will also contain buyer demand.

Wrongly Blamed

Drive Time, Eco-Crap

Oh, this is rich:

Rowan Atkinson has been blamed by the House of Lords for the plunge in sales of electric cars.  The Mr Bean actor, 69, described the green machines as ‘a bit soulless’ in a comment piece he penned in June last year. 
The Lord’s environment and climate change committee has since been told the actor was partly to blame for ‘damaging’ public opinions on electric vehicles (EVs).

Not that the opinions of the House of Lords should be taken seriously — on just about any topic — but it’s ridiculous to blame Atkinson for a sales slump of cars that are manifestly not fit for purpose (in so many ways).

“Soulless” is the least of the reasons why not to buy a fucking Duracell car, and most certainly so when one recalls Mr. Bean’s habitual choice of vehicle:

And lest we forget, he was also an “early adopter” of the EV type:

…and by the way, it was to this thing he was referring.

No man should.  Not even Mr. Bean.

Overshooting

Eco-Crap

No, that’s not when you shoot off all your ammo at the range and have to drive home with an empty gun (yeah, we’ve all done it, nothing to be ashamed about).  What I’m talking about here is a series of predictive models which are not only wrong, but hopelessly wrong.

We all know (I think, except maybe for “climatologists”) that the way to test your model is to take all the history available except the most recent set, and feed that back data into your model to measure its prediction against the most recent data.  (Back when I used to do this stuff for a living, we used to call it “using history to predict yesterday”).

So here are the conclusions of a whole bunch of predictive models used to predict future temperature change / increase for a specific area:

Looks kinda alarming, doesn’t it?  (Okay. what’s alarming to me is the variation in predicted output between the models, but leave that alone for the moment.)

Now let’s drop the actual recorded data for the period and area into the graph, to see where it falls (same graph, plus actual):

Ummmm yes.  The only model which came even close to reality (Observations) was “INH-CMS-0”, and even that one overstated actual temperature increase by a factor of almost 40%.  Oops.

And by the way?  A change of 1.6 degrees over an average decade over four decades (80 40 years) is what we model builders used to call “noise” — i.e. insignificant.  Never mind a large area like the U.S. Corn Belt;  an increase of 1.6 degrees in air temperature is insignificant in your house.

Here’s the whole analysis, which is long and kinda involved, even for me.  The executive summary is what I’ve reproduced above.

And Robert Spencer gives us the summary of the executive summary, which is:

…or as we statisticians used to call it informally:

And John Hinderaker pointed out something else which should make everyone suspicious (it did me when I first looked at the chart):

Someone pointed out with respect to these data – I would credit him, but I can’t now find the reference – that if it were simply a matter of mathematical errors or inconsistencies, one would expect some models to err on the “hot side” and others on the “cold side” of actual observations. But that isn’t the case: all of the models run hot. That suggests that global warming alarmism is a political, not a scientific, movement.

Yup.  Let’s worry about something else;  this horse (Global Warming Climate Cooling Change©) is dead, and cannot be revived by MOAR HYSTERIA or STILL MOAR WHIPPING.

“More” EU?

Eco-Crap, Economics, Mocking Furriners

Well now, looks like that Zero Emissions or whatever is getting a little pushback in, of all places, Europe:

Farmers across Europe are rising up against the EU, with angry agricultural workers in Spain being the latest who are set to join the growing tractor protest movement.

By using their heavy machinery to block roads in and around major capitals on the continent, farmers in Germany, France and other EU nations have expressed their anger over rising costs, EU environmental policies and cheap food imports which they say are leading to a deterioration in working and living conditions.

…as Jeremy Clarkson discovered on the TV show about his farm in Britishland (which, by the way, has inspired his European counterparts).  Then this:

But as farmers in France, Belgium and Italy staged protests on Monday and Tuesday, and as Spain’s three main agriculture unions said they would soon join them, French president Emmanuel Macron risked inciting further fury by brazenly telling the disgruntled growers: ‘You need more Europe, not less.’

Just another globalist woke asshole who needs to be tossed out on his ear (cf. Fidel Trudeau, FJ Biden, etc.).

In the meantime, I’m watching the whole thing unfold…

Snake In The Astroturf

Eco-Crap, Watermelons

Here’s a face not known by my Murkin Readers, but probably familiar to those in Britishland:  ITV’s weather reporter on Good Morning Britain, the elfin Laura Tobin.

“Okay Kim,” y’all might say.  “That’s a right purdy lil’ thang, thanks for the pics.”

Unfortunately, this totty is one of those rabid climate change advocates/alarmists, whose slanted opinions on the topic, and frequent injections of said propaganda into her weather reports has even some Brits perturbed.

Just so you know.