THIRD OF HOUSEHOLDS TO OWN ELECTRIC CARS
NOISE REDUCTION AND IMPROVED AIR QUALITY IN OUR CITY
Manningham Council had planned to develop and implement a green electric car program on Doncaster Hill to achieve 15% adoption of green electric vehicles – with the aim to have 1 in 3 households owning an electric car by 2025. It will be our most efficient way of reducing emissions while improving air quality and reducing traffic noise. But we are a long way from being prepared for the wave of electric cars that will soon arrive in Australia because we simply don’t have the infrastructure to support them.
Electricity from Renewables Click to enlarge
More than one million electric vehicles were sold globally in 2017, mainly due to their cheap running costs and low impact on the environment. The greatest challenge, apart from creating the facilities, is to make them affordable. Currently there are 16 different electric vehicle models currently available for purchase in Australia and most of them are priced upwards of $60,000 — making them out of reach for the average driver.
Automobiles contribute about 30% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. Electricity production generates
the second largest share of greenhouse gas emissions, with Australia obtaining 84% of its power generation from the burning of fossil fuels, mostly coal and natural gas.
Tail Pipe Pollution Click to enlarge
Producing the electricity to power electric vehicles will further generate emissions but those emissions levels are far lower than the pollution emitted by conventional vehicles, and could be even lower as the electric power sector itself cleans up its act over the next few decades by phasing out the use of fossil fuels. Electric cars don’t have exhaust systems and don’t need oil changes, maintenance costs are reduced. To maintain an electric car, just rotate your tires and keep properly inflated.
Though electric cars charged by coal-fired power stations may be cheaper to run — 30c a litre equivalent rather than $1.60 —they are more expensive to buy and will arguably result in only marginal benefit.
The manufacture of batteries have a heavy CO2 emissions footprint, which is decreasing. There are also significant waste and recycling issues to be resolved in the rush to a lithium-ion battery-powered world. This is insignificant compared to the CO2 emissions used in manufacture of petrol driven vehicles, which also have batteries, that spew dangerous gases that are undermining the health of city folk not to mention the noise from heavy traffic.
Health researchers say that long-term exposure to two common pollutants, nitrogen dioxide and fine particulate matter, from exhaust emissions are associated with dementia.
Melbourne Traffic Click to enlarge
Other scientists have also linked air pollution and traffic noise to reduced brain matter and lower cognition, but this is the first study to investigate the connection between living near heavy traffic and the onset of major neurodegenerative diseases. The increase in population growth and urbanisation has placed many people close to heavy traffic, with widespread exposure to traffic noise, even a modest effect, can pose a large public health issues.
More research to understand this link is needed, particularly into the effects of different aspects of traffic, such as air pollutants and noise. Professor Michael Woodward, director of aged care research at Austin Health and a chief medical advisor to Alzheimer’s Australia, said dementia was already linked to lower socio-economic status, chronic stress and insomnia – factors that might be more common among people living near main roads.
17 Comments
India, Pakistan and China must be laughing because they don’t have to do anything. Yet we are destroying our economy and way of life with this climate madness. Most of the electricity we need to charge these vehicles will have to come from coal fired power stations but we have to close them down while we export record amounts of coal for these countries…how stupid is that.
The charging of electric cars will be drawing a lot of power from the grid which at the moment comes mainly from fossil fuels. One way of taking pressure off the grid would be to restrict recharging of batteries to evenings.
Wind turbines at peak efficiency convert about 45% of the wind into electricity then you have the issue if the wind isn’t blowing. The maximum conversion rate of quality solar panel is around 20% of available energy into electrical power. Most solar panels on people’s houses, for example, are fairly inefficient. Less than 14% of the energy that reaches them will be converted to electricity when the sun shines.
By comparison coal fired power stations operate at around 85% of full capacity.
The most obvious solution to the the problem is to introduce clean nuclear power like the 450 plants already operating throughout the world….and it is much cheaper!
In addition to the 460 plants there are another 60 under construction. It is the memory of Chernobyl that puts people at odds with the nuclear power industry but that was a long time ago and even the Japan plant that was hit by a tsunami did not result in the loss of life of any of its workers from radiation.
Nuclear power plus electric cars would mean zero emissions, the end of man made global warming scare and result in the derailing of the climate change gravy train.
The world’s burgeoning population growth is a subject that alarmists don’t want to talk about. If we are to ban coal fired power and have no control over the world’s population then nuclear power is the only option we have. That is assuming that the IPCC members would want all the world to have the same standard of living that they themselves enjoy.
Can you imagine no more yobbos with noisy exhausts and no foul air around our busy roads. The sooner we get underway with a switch to electric cars the better off our health will be which should have been enough to have hastened their introduction years ago instead of now based on the dubious CO2 theory. How are we going to dispose of the millions of petrol driven vehicles in the meantime. It will be long and drawn out process and a very costly one for the transport industry.
Good point! I would have thought there were far more compelling reasons for adopting electric vehicles than the fear that the world could heat up by 1.5 degrees Celsius, of which they estimate man’s activities could contributed to half, by 2050.
Yet we have had to breathe these toxic fumes from petrol and diesel driven cars that have hung above our cities, in the form of smog, for so many decades.
We get so angry to think that people could be so stupid as to believe in this global warming scam when there is absolutely no evidence to support it. The IPCC’s biggest problem is that U S, the country whose economy they wanted to destroy, have not bought the theory and have pulled out.
The elephant in the room is the world overpopulation but there were no recommendations on how to fix the problem in their recent reports, it was not even on the agenda at the Paris conference. Instead they want us to slaughter our cattle because of their methane emissions…try welling that to India where the cow is sacred.
Fudging the data to make it appear more credible….Check for yourself!
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
The Climate of 1997
Annual Global Temperature Index
NOAA Logo
Please note: the estimate for the baseline global temperature used in this study differed, and was warmer than, the baseline estimate (Jones et al., 1999) used currently. This report has been superseded by subsequent analyses. However, as with all climate monitoring reports, it is left online as it was written at the time.
The global average temperature of 62.45 degrees Fahrenheit for 1997 was the warmest year on record, surpassing the previous record set in 1995 by 0.15 degrees Fahrenheit. The chart reflects variations from the 30-year average (1961-1990) of the combined land and sea surface temperatures.
Led by the Center’s Senior Scientist Tom Karl, the team analyzed temperatures from around the globe during the years 1900 to 1997 and back to 1880 for land areas. For 1997, land and ocean temperatures averaged three quarters of a degree Fahrenheit (F) (0.42 degrees Celsius (C)) above normal. (Normal is defined by the mean temperature, 61.5 degrees F (16.5 degrees C), for the 30 years 1961-90). The 1997 figure exceeds the previous warm year, 1990, by 0.15 degrees F (0.08 degrees C
NOAA were using a base line mean temperature of 16.5 C prior to 1997 instead of the twentieth century average the 13.90 C used in all subsequent reports which might explain why previous years were not included.
In the UPDATED list of the ten warmest years contained in the 2016 REPORT they have increased the anomalies (over and above the twentieth century average of 13.90 C), six had been adjusted upwards. (The anomalies were increased as further data came to hand!)
2014 by 0.05 C, 2013 by 0.05 C, 2012 by 0.05 C, 2010 by 0.08 C, 2009 by 0.10 C and 2005 by 0.08 C.
These alterations were the needed to make the upward trend to 2016 appear more credible
NOAA temperature readings are used by the IPCC in preparing their assessment reports. There have been mistakes but allowance must be made for the topsy-turvy nature of our planet’s weather system.
“In climate research and modelling, we should recognize that we are dealing with a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore that the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible. The most we can expect to achieve is the prediction of the probability distribution of the system’s future possible states by the generation of ensembles of model solutions”……IPCC.
It is extremely complex. NOAA recognize this and have been quite open about their mistakes and are correcting them as more sophisticated methods becomes available. If it was NOAA’s intention to fudge temperature readings to demonstrate global warming they would not have published the cooler year of 2017, which was 0.10 C below the El Nino driven years of 2015 and 2016. Climate temperature Data for 2018, not available till about March next year, is expected to be even cooler, similar to 2013.
If global temperatures drop over the next few years, as they may well, it will still be climate change, even into a mini ice age, they can’t go wrong because they stopped calling it global warming during the pause in increasing temperatures. They will continue to receive all the grants no matter what the temperature and developed countries will be expected to continuing open their borders to “climate refugees”. Ian Wheeler
https://youtu.be/pjlPvwRP-fM
Above link is all you want to know about temperature gatekeeping
If man contributes 3% of the atmosphere’s CO2, what percentage of that is warming the planet? Does the other 97% have any effect on the earth’s temperature? If we stop all human induced release of CO2 into atmosphere completely, will the earth’s temperature stop rising/changing?
Also alarmists cannot produce any practical scientific proof that anthropogenic CO2 results in catastrophic greenhouse warming. What they have produced however is a series of cataclysmic predictions and models which have been virtually wrong about everything eg:
* Droughts are the new norm in Australia – Flannery and Wong 2005.
* Perth will be Australia’s first ghost metropolis – Flannery 2005.
* Within a few years snowfall will be a rare and exciting event – Dr David Viner 2000.
* The Arctic will be ice free in summer 2013 – Prof Wieslaw Maslowski, Al Gore 2007.
* 50 million climate refugees will flee low lying islands by 2010 – UNEP 2005.
* We have only a 10 year window to avert climate catastrophe – James Hansen NASA 2006.
Etc, etc, etc, etc. etc.
But even discounting all other calamitous hypotheses, perhaps the most telling statement of all that Mr Turnbull could have highlighted was made by Australia’s Chief Scientist Dr Alan Finkel in 2017 who told the Senate that Australia’s less than 1.3% of global emissions have zero effect on the world’s climate.
The lock step cause effect relationship (CO2 and Global Warming) upon examination lies shattered under the lens of scientific observation and reason . Comments by Patrick Moore ex-Green Peace.
It is baffling that alarmist climate scientists are so certain that additional carbon dioxide will produce a climate disaster even though there is little empirical evidence to support this view, and much evidence against it, including decades of non-warming after 1940 when carbon dioxide emissions had more than doubled
Where will we get the power to recharge electric vehicles? We would probably need at least double the electricity we are using today so how can we justify closing coal fired power stations when solar and wind power can’t even cope with existing demand.