IN THIS ISSUE:
- EV Owners Have Big Carbon Footprints
- Green Equipment Companies Are Poor Investments
- Most of the 10 Deadliest Hurricanes in U.S. History Happened More Than 80 years Ago
EV Owners Have Big Carbon Footprints
A recent report in the Daily Mail shows that while electric vehicle owners may virtue-signal by crowing about their green credentials, especially wealthy elites and celebrities, their carbon dioxide footprints are larger than those of most average folks who still drive vehicles that use gasoline and diesel for fuel. The Daily Mail reports:
Researchers from the University of Turku, Finland, found that on average EV drivers actually have a bigger carbon footprint than drivers who own petrol or diesel cars.
While their cars might cut down on emissions, the researchers say that EV owners’ glitzier lifestyles mean they contribute more to climate change overall.
The average EV owner churns out half a tonne more CO2 per year with owners of the sportiest models producing almost two tonnes more pollution.
The researchers surveyed almost 4,000 Finnish people about their car ownership, background and lifestyle.
The participants also provided answers about their housing, transport, and purchasing habits to estimate their carbon footprint.
Overall, someone who owned an internal combustion engine vehicle (ICEV) which runs on petrol or diesel created 8.05 tonnes of CO2 or equivalent greenhouse gases per year.
Considering that environmental concerns are a major reason for purchasing an electric vehicle you might expect EV owners’ emissions to be lower.
However, the average EV driver actually has a slightly larger carbon footprint than those who opt for cars powered by fossil fuels, producing 8.66 tonnes of emissions per year.
Owners of low-end EVs, smaller or less-expensive vehicles, who were less concerned about performance and reliability, had smaller carbon footprints than non-EV owners and EV owners concerned about those two factors. The owners of low-end EVs were also the smallest category of EV owners. Most EV owners are in the top income bracket. The average income of households with EVs in Europe was more than double the average income of households in the U.K.
According to the research, published in PLOS CLIMATE, the EV owners’ higher carbon footprint is a result of their lifestyle: multiple vehicles, including internal combustion engine vehicles, with the EV being a second or show vehicle; more travel; larger homes; multiple homes; more spending on nonessential goods, etc.
“Prior research has established that income is the strongest predictor of carbon footprint as higher income is associated with larger homes as well as more travel and consumption,” the researchers write. “’Since EV households tend to have a high income, their total carbon footprint is also above average.”
On this point the Daily Mail notes,
It’s no secret that the rich and famous who have most vocally championed electric vehicles are among some of the biggest individual polluters. This is especially true for those celebs who still enjoy flying around the world on their private planes. During a single four-hour flight, a single private jet can produce more than eight tonnes of CO2—more than the average person produces in an entire year.
Additionally, those who owned EVs typically owned more cars and reported driving significantly further than those who owned cars powered by petrol or diesel. On average, EV users drove 18,640 miles (30,000 km) which was more than double the 8,800 miles (14,200 km) covered by non-EV drivers.
Source: Daily Mail
Green Equipment Companies Are Poor Investments
Heartland Policy Advisor Steve Goreham conducted an analysis of the relative value of investments in companies that supply equipment of much-in-demand, heavily subsidized green technology. Goreham found that in general green equipment companies, despite being highly subsidized, are poor investments, both in absolute terms and when compared with other publicly traded companies. Goreham writes,
[R]enewable equipment firms suffer poor market returns, so investors should beware.
The Renewable Energy Industrial Index (RENIXX) is a global stock index of the 30 largest renewable energy industrial companies in the world by stock market capitalization. Current RENIXX companies include Enphase Energy, First Solar, Orsted, Plug Power, Tesla, and Vestas.
IWR of Germany established the RENIXX on May 1, 2006, with an initial value of 1,000 points. This month, the RENIXX stood at 1,013 points, essentially zero value growth over the last 18 years. In comparison, the S&P 500 Index more than quadrupled over the same period. The RENIXX is down three years in a row from 2021, losing about half its value.
The aggregate index is just a reflection of the economic difficulties faced by the vast majority of the individual companies that make it up. As Climate Change Weekly has noted previously, a number of large wind turbine manufacturers have reported massive losses, billions of dollars each, tied mostly to inflationary prices for the materials they use and unexpectedly high maintenance and repair costs.
Goreham notes that even as the stock market has grown dramatically, the stock of the world’s largest wind turbine supplier, Denmark-based Vestas Wind Systems, has risen only 7 percent since 2008, 16 years ago. More recently, its stock price has fallen dramatically, 58 percent since 2021.
“Other major wind suppliers have also been poor investments for shareholders,” Goreham writes. “The stock of Siemens Gamesa, the number two turbine maker, is down 65% since a peak in 2021 [and lost] €4.4 billion in 2023, … receiv[ing] a €7.5 billion bailout from the German government that same year.”
Other top global wind companies have reported consistent losses and/or stock declines since 2021 despite huge government support—GE, for example, which reported billions of dollars in losses by its wind division since 2021; Goldwind of China, whose stock fell 77 percent; and Nordex of Germany, with a 36 percent loss in value.
And it’s not just wind companies losing money. Goreham notes the stock prices of all seven top solar panel companies (six of which are based in China) have fallen by more than 50 percent since 2021. There is a glut in the market, with more panels being produced than buyers.
In the electric vehicle market, Tesla stands virtually alone in making a profit on its offerings, resulting in rising share prices. Of the 31 EV companies that entered U.S. stock exchanges since the beginning of 2020, only one, the Chinese firm Li Auto, saw its price rise since the initial public offering. The other 30 firms saw steep stock declines. For instance,
Fisker (-99%), Nikola (-94%), NIO (-50%), Lucid Group (-75%), and Rivian (-88%). Six others of the 31 companies went bankrupt. Tesla and Chinese firms BYD and Li Auto are the only EV firms profitable today. …
[And in] 2023, Ford lost $4.7 billion on sales of 116,000 electric vehicles, or over $40,000 per vehicle.
The losses for Ford may be much higher, according to some estimates.
Despite as much as $16 billion dollars in federal subsidies being given annually to green tech companies between 2010 and 2022, firms that produced EV charging stations and hydrogen fuel cell technologies have proven to be big money losers as well. ChargePoint, the world’s largest dedicated EV charger company, saw its stock value decline 76 percent since it launched in 2021, from $2.4 billion in 2021 to $585 million now, with losses of $458 million in the past fiscal year.
Plug Power, the 27-year-old company that has become the leading supplier of hydrogen energy systems, has never turned a profit. It has lost $1.45 billion in 2024 thus far, and its stock price dropped from an adjusted $160 per share in 2019 to less than $2 per share today.
The moral of the story is not just that that almost any green tech company one chooses to examine has proven to be a poor investment, long on hype but short on profits, but, as importantly, they wouldn’t exist at all without government mandates and subsidies premised on the purported need to fight climate change.
“Without the fear of human-caused climate change and a rising level of government subsidies and mandates, many of these green companies would not exist,” concludes Goreham. “It’s doubtful that carbon dioxide pipelines, heavy electric trucks, offshore wind systems, green hydrogen fuel equipment, and EV charging stations would be viable businesses in unsubsidized capital markets.”
Source: Real Clear Energy
Most of the 10 Deadliest Hurricanes in U.S. History Happened More Than 80 Years Ago
Despite the media hype, it turns out neither 2024’s Hurricane Helene nor Hurricane Milton was unprecedented or anywhere near as destructive and deadly as the 10 worst hurricanes recorded in modern U.S. history.
A story published by CBS News, citing data from the U.S. National Weather Service, shows five of the deadliest hurricanes to make landfall did so more than 120 years ago. Two others occurred between 80 and 90 years ago. In fact, eight of the deadliest hurricanes on record occurred more than 65 years of global warming ago, when global average temperatures were lower. Only two of the 10 deadliest hurricanes to strike the United States (including Puerto Rico) struck after 2000, during the decades decried by climate alarmists as the warmest on record.
The Last Island hurricane killed 400 people after slamming into the Louisiana coast in August 1856. The highest points of the island were left under five feet of water in the wake of the storm. According to NOAA, a resort hotel on the island and surrounding gambling establishments were destroyed, and the island was split in two and denuded of vegetation.
The Great Labor Day hurricane of 1935 ripped through Florida as the most intense ever to make landfall in the United States, causing 408 deaths.
The Category 3 Sea Islands hurricane was one of three deadly hurricanes that made landfall in the mainland United States in 1893. It struck Savannah, Georgia, in August 1893, with wind speeds topping 121 mph. It produced a 16-foot storm surge, resulting in 2,000 people killed by the storm and 30,000 left homeless.
Also in 1893, the Great October Storm wiped out the Chenière Caminada fishing village of Jefferson Parish, Louisiana. The National Hurricane Center reports that the Category 4 storm killed about 2,000 people and destroyed many fishing vessels, large portions of the town, and crops.
The Okeechobee hurricane of 1928 killed at least 2,500 people across Florida, Puerto Rico, and the Bahamas, doing the modern-day equivalent of approximately $1.5 billion in damage, about 0.14 percent of the nation’s GDP at the time.
The Great Galveston Hurricane of 1900 “decimated the island city on the Gulf Coast of Texas on Sept. 8, 1900,” writes CBS in describing the storm. “This hurricane is known as the deadliest weather disaster in United States history, killing at least 8,000 people, with some estimates as high as 12,000 people.” The hurricane left more than 10,000 people homeless, causing damage equivalent to 0.2 percent of the nation’s GDP.
CBS lists two hurricanes in the first 24 years of the twenty-first century, supposedly the warmest nearly two-and-half decades on record, as among the 10 worst: 2005’s Hurricane Katrina, a Category 4 Hurricane that caused approximately 1,200 reported deaths, and Hurricane Maria, a Category 4 hurricane that struck Puerto Rico on Sept. 20, 2017.
Despite the undeniable devastation Maria caused, I question its inclusion in the 10 deadliest list. Its initial death toll was 64 people killed directly from the storm. More than a year later, that number was revised upward to 2,975 dead. The 2018 number, however, was, as my colleague Linnea Lueken wrote recently, based on a counterfactual attribution study, the kind Climate Realism has debunked repeatedly, in which the authors looked at historical death patterns in and around the same time period when the hurricane struck, and attributed to the hurricane any allegedly excess deaths in 2017 for those days and months, to “estimate how many people would have died had Hurricane Maria not hit the island.” Had attribution studies been conducted for every hurricane on the list (and those not on it), it is likely their death tolls would have been much higher as well.
Hurricanes Helene and Milton were undoubtedly devastating, with Hurricane Helene possibly justified in making the U.S. 10 deadliest list, ahead of Maria, but neither was unusual in season, severity, or, arguably most importantly, in deadliness.
Sources: CBS News; Climate Realism | Photo of Destruction of Caribee Colony by 1935 Labor Day Hurricane: Florida Keys Public Libraries
H. Sterling Burnett, Ph.D., is the Director of the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy and the managing editor of Environment & Climate News.
