Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has declared a climate emergency and mandated that government departments buy only EVs for their fleet:
The Government will require all its agencies and ministries to exclusively buy electric vehicles and will mandate all public sector buildings to be up to a “green standard”.
This is part of the Government goal to make the entire public sector carbon neutral within the next five years.
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has made the commitments as she declares a climate emergency in New Zealand in the House today.
Speaking in the House afternoon, Ardern said this was a “declaration based on science”.
“We must act with urgency,” she told MPs, before challenging them to be on the “right side of history.
NZ Herald
Urgency? Why did she wait until now to declare the emergency? Why not last year, or the year before that? Given their past performance on climate change this is nothing other than an expensive virtue signalling attempt.
The Government’s electric vehicle mandate is a lofty goal – there are currently nearly 16,000 vehicles in the Government’s fleet.
Today’s announcement is the first major post-election commitment by the Government – Ardern said the commitments show the urgency of the situation.
The commitments mean Government agencies will be required to measure, verify and report emissions annually.
They will also need to set gross emissions reduction targets, as well as introducing a plan for how they will reduce emissions.
When it comes to vehicles, Government agencies will be required to “optimise their car fleet” by purchasing electric vehicles or hybrids where EVs are not appropriate for the required use.
That is unless their operational requirements or other circumstances require – such as military vehicles where there is no electric alternatives.
NZ Herald
You may be sure that the very last vehicles to be replaced if they are replaced at all will be the BMW ministerial limousines. And if you thought the howls of outrage Labour exhibited when National bought, then renewed the limo contract were loud and weapons-grade then I can hardly wait to hear the announcement on their replacements…the truckloads of cash to make such a change will be eye-watering.
But just as Jacinda Ardern made this announcement, the King of Smug Entitled People, Elon Musk cast a doom-laden pall over the virtue signalling by telling everyone that in order to have their smug powered vehicles then they are going to have to accept a whole lot more power station building in order to deliver the fuel for these power-hungry vehicles:
Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk said on Tuesday that electricity consumption will double if the world’s car fleets are electrified, increasing the need to expand nuclear, solar, geothermal and wind energy generating sources.
Increasing the availability of sustainable energy is a major challenge as cars move from combustion engines to battery-driven electric motors, a shift which will take two decades, Musk said in a talk hosted by Berlin-based publisher Axel Springer.
“It will take another 20 years for cars to be fully electric. It is like with phones, you cannot replace them all at once,” Musk said in a talk streamed on the Bild.de web site, adding that around 5% of vehicles are replaced every year.
Once electric cars become the norm, electricity from intermittent generating energy sources such as wind and solar will need to be stored, probably through battery technology, he said.
“Together with large battery packs, both things need to be combined, wind power with battery packs and solar energy,” Musk said.
Yahoo! Finance
I wonder what the Greens will say about the required surge in nuclear energy?
Our biggest power plant is currently coal fired, and there are no new power plants planned for New Zealand. Even if the government tells the aluminium smelter to bugger off that won’t help as all that power is trapped in the South Island with the Cook Strait cable at capacity.
That means the smug latte-sipping and chardonnay-swilling rich pricks of Auckland will be powering their electric smug mobiles on coal-fueled power from Huntly.
The Resource Management Act will stop any new power plants or dams for the foreseeable future.
When brown outs start occuring in the suburbs becuse the residential electricity reticulation hasn’t been upgraded to cope then the smug may very well become angry.
There’s no unicorn energy source or free lunch when it comes to renewable energy sources, which may not even be all that renewable. Wind and sun are free, but the means of generating power from them are not.
They require batteries, which requires extensive mining and the use of toxic chemicals. Lots of toxic chemicals. And mining, lots of dirty mining.
Weighing those trade-offs — between supporting mining in environmentally sensitive areas and sourcing metals needed to power renewables — is likely to become more common if countries continue generating more renewable energy. That’s according to a report out Wednesday from researchers at the Institute for Sustainable Futures at the University of Technology Sydney in Australia. The report, commissioned by the environmental organization Earthworks, finds that demand for metals such as copper, lithium and cobalt would skyrocket if countries around the world try to get their electric grids and transportation systems fully powered by renewable energy by 2050. Consequently, a rush to meet that demand could lead to more mining in countries with lax environmental and safety regulations and weak protections for workers.
“If not managed responsibly, this has the potential for new adverse environmental and social impacts,” the report says.
Grist
What will the Greens say about that? Or won’t black children’s livers matter in the pursuit of electric vehicles? Won’t enormous holes in the ground matter so long as they are in shithole countries, out of sight and out of mind as they rush head long into electric vehicles?
I suspect they really don’t care too much about all that so long as they can say they are “doing something”.
Having only managed 0.9% of their original target in three years just on government vehicle emissions, they now expect people to believe they are going to totally eliminate or offset all government emissions within five years.
I guess you can fool some of the people all of the time. Watch the key stats in this regard resemble the achievements of Kiwibuild.
