Oil Demand is Dying Faster than Expected from Electric Cars and Buses

By the end of 2018, electric cars and buses will displace 279,000 barrels a day. At the end of 2018, there are about 5 million electric cars.

Germany had a drop in diesel demand of 9% so far in 2018.

China is calling for the production of 2 million electric vehicles (EVs) a year by 2020, and 7 million a year by 2025. By 2025, electric vehicles would be 20% of total new car production for China.

China adding London Bus Fleet in electric buses every 5 weeks

Every five weeks, 9,500 brand new electric buses are added in China. This is th entire London bus fleet, says a new report by Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

The world has around 3 million buses. Most run on diesel and compressed natural gas. The global fleet of electric buses now totals around 385,000 vehicles – and 99% of those are in China. Half of the world’s buses could be electric by 2025. If the electric bus rollout sped up then almost all of the world’s buses could be electric by 2025.

Having all electric buses and a large number of short-haul electric trucks could offset 2.5 million barrels per day of oil by 2025 to 2030.

121 thoughts on “Oil Demand is Dying Faster than Expected from Electric Cars and Buses”

  1. Except the circuitry to check and remove each cell is built into the pack, where for current florescent light fixtures, none is, and there is no equivalent cost to “getting out the tech or cherry picker”.

  2. The last ten years’ average growth is rather 1 Mbpd/year. And the 279,000 barrels was what the current 5 million EVs saved, and we’re still on an exponential growth path. If China reach 7 million EVs per year by 2025, they alone will offset some 390,000 bpd every year.

  3. In the US, the need has already started to be addressed through natgas powerplants, and that’s the go-to capitalist medium-term solution. Obviously a 50/50 gas-renewables combo is less carbon intense than 100% oil, but it’s very far from sustainable.

  4. OPEC has some major difficulties maintaining cohesion and agreeing on production quotas. All member states are in fairly desperate need of oil revenue with their increasing populations and risks of unrest and uprisings. Thus there’s a pressure on each of them to increase production and whenever they agree on a reduction to increase prices, they know they give up short-term market share to North American swing production and in the long-term increase the pace of electrification.

  5. There are vast numbers of “new” Li batteries for sale on places like Ali Baba or Ebay for prices only a fraction of what reputable battery brands sell for.

    People who buy these batteries report that if you examine them carefully, behaps taking the outer layer off, you find that the inside battery shows clear signs of having previously been welded into a big laptop or automotive battery pack.

    The “dead” large battery pack was taken somewhere with low wages, the individual cells taken out and tested (at least the voltage), and anything that wasn’t dead yet was repackaged and sold again.

    Yes, recycling individual cells is already a thriving business.

  6. Bend over, buy a new battery, and remember, amortized-over-the-miles-delivered, the cost is only 5¢ to 8¢ a mile. No annoying Gary Oblock strandings.

    Just saying,
    GoatGuy

  7. While what you say may be true, it serves to remember the “change the fluorescent tubes” policy of many a school district. And grocery store. And competent 9-to–5 office.

    When the fluorescent light tubes start going out, by a large margin, the policy is “replace them all”. The cost of getting the cherry-picker ladder out, the tech out and fixing “just the burned out ones” multiplies on itself to remove any economy-of-using-fluorescent pole tubes itself, of done on a bulb-by-bulb basis.

    Same goes for those defective cells. Removing is fairly easy (even tho’ there might be 10,000+ of the things in a big battery pack). But how do you certify the future-performance of the other 9,900 cells that “test good”?

    That, it turns out, is a time-consuming and high-error-prone situation.

    Better to treat the whole thing as lithium-stainless-copper-and-manganese ore, and send it to refining, recovery and raw-materials resourcing.

    Just saying,
    GoatGuy

  8. Think of them as concentrated lithium ore.
    Stainless-steel ore.
    Copper ore.
    Manganese ore.

    Think of truckloads of said ore.

    Betcha it has value.
    Top dollar, in fact.

    GoatGuy

  9. Um… I think you need to take a look at that Econ 101 book again.

    UNLIKE growing billions of banana plants (predicted to satisfy unknown-but-guessed demand 2 years out), the supply side of petroleum is quite elastic itself. No unwanted bananas to underprice should demand not turn up. Likewise, no Christmas “runs on bananas” either.

    The present-net-value of crude oil has been quite tightly “engineered” worldwide in a geopolitical sense to be just high enough so that the Great Oil Exporting countries net enough money to keep their mostly-parasitic governments in-the-chips and just low enough that the refined product stream is economical enough to not substantially undermine Gross Domestic Products of countries dependent on the stuff.

    Put it straight: even though WTI (West Texas Intermediate) is hovering what, at $50/bbl or so — being on a vacation here in that very state, I think it is rather amazing that petrol is only $2.05/gallon … which includes all state, local and Federal taxes. its cheap. A flipping hamburger at a fast-food chain costs more than a gallon of unleaded. Rich.

    Noting this almost-absurdly low price for motor fuel, it is no wonder (speaking to your economy-MPG vehicle conjecture) that the local H-E-B¹ parking lot is about 50% Big American Truck Frames. You know, Ford 150, 250, 350, Suburbans, SUV tanks, Hummers, the like. Gasoline is unaccountably economical. Double-income-families are pulling down $125,000 or more a year, and $2 gasoline is only an annoyance.

    Just saying,
    GoatGuy

  10. I think you’re right…

    There is an irrefutable economy-of-performance that electric vehicles bring, counterbalanced by the very real annoyance in their “tether to the electric outlet”. I — being “a Berkeley Bear” — and having a lot of Berkeley friends, can say that at least half of us have purchased or leased electric cars in the last 3 years.

    Every owner is unfailingly glowing in their initial social assessment of their e-car. Ebullient.

    Yet, after a few years, out come the grumbles. Forgetting to self-charge the vehicle is rare, but having the self-charger device “go on the fritz” and leave the driver semi-stranded is all too common. Especially with the “smart vampire tap” chargers that sit between the heavy appliance power socket and the electric dryer.

    Oh, sure, one can use a standard house-power extension cord, but you need to do that so many hours in advance of the Morning Commute.

    Then there is the annoyance — especially for the fleet of perky-Mom electric cars — that are made affordable by having only 70-to–140 miles (100-to–200 km) ranges in large metropolitan areas … where Life’s Complications bring a deeply unsettling Remaining Charge Anxiety to the owner on busy point-to-point travel days.

    These annoyances however are COMPLETELY ADDRESSABLE were we to want to attend to them, by having a far larger public power vending infrastructure.

    Predicting out to a possible future with perhaps ⅔ of the car-force, ⅓ of the short-haul trucking force, ⅕ of the long-haul trucking force, ¾ of the bus-and-trolly fleet, 100% of the municipal dump-truck, garbage scowl, 6-or–10 wheel delivery-trucks, yellow school busses, most inter-city ambulances, perhaps even some heavy-construction machines powered by standardized, uniform, potent batteries, clearly there will be a need for the power grid to “rise to the occasion”, and be bolstered, buttressed and bulwarked to handle the quite-predictable charging demand.

    Good enough.

    Blabby futurists (of the cynical sort) tend to rail about renewable or “green” power not having adequate medium-and-short term grid storage to significantly address this projected load.

    Just-as-blabby eternal optimists bristle and loudly redirect the conversation to cite recent magnificent developments in flow-batteries, compressed air storage, lifting massive weights up mountainsides, and reverse salt-water coastal dams. As solutions.

    Center-of-the-line pragmatists (my club) see both, and remembering history know that where there is good money-demand, will come well heeled capitalists hoping to Land a Whale, by addressing the need.

    Anyway… the future looks good.
    GoatGuy

  11. True … except we need to keep in mind that crude oil production and refining to downwind product streams is pretty market-adaptive.

    Its not like growing bananas and predicting how many billions of banana plants will be needed to satisfy the Christmas Surge 2 years out.

    The mere size of oil consumption — 80,000,000 barrels a day — and the nearly unbroken year-over-year demand growth for the last 125 years (and if you like, 50 ‘significant’ years) — combined with being able to predict future vehicular mile-demand with some confidence, means that “low oil prices” will remain manipulatable by the consortia and OPEC to a fairly significant degree, well out to 2030.

    Or so I think,
    GoatGuy

  12. Nah… municipal scale batteries are one solution, to be sure. But as others have cited, a mixed-production environment mostly “solves” the PV/Wind “storage crisis”. Especially when the electricity reservoirs are actually all those cars’n’busses themselves.

    Just saying,
    GoatGuy

  13. Yeah, it will take a couple of decades for electric car production to get large enough to really start reducing oil demand. There’s on the order of a billion passenger cars on Earth, and electric production this year is around 2 million worldwide. You need to get ICE production below retirements of old cars to start shrinking the fleet.

  14. I love hearing this. I own 3 VWs and in 2020, I plan to trade my VW Suv in on the VW Electric Microbus. I can’t wait. No more gas stations, no more oil changes and no more tune-ups. I’m still keeping my VW hardtop convertible, after all I need a beachmobile:)

  15. Doctorpat you are absolutely right 50/2000 = .025% not .002% but I think your CPD got in the way of your seeing the BIG picture. But then again I am used to some of the other people on the fringe here that ignore the hard uncontroversial facts based on what they believe is common sense.

  16. China’s renewable electricity production is accelerating. Even though its electricity production is rapidly increasing, it’s fossil fuel generated electricity production remains constant.

  17. I believe you can buy refurbished Volt batteries now. I looked into this as my 2011 Volt is still usable but eventually will need a new battery…

  18. LOL, cool! That means oil prices and gas prices will continue to drop.
    Hey, where do you think the electricity comes from? LP gas, oil, coal, water, solar, wind, nuclear
    power. Just because you take it from one source, just means you got to get it from another
    source, which means the generating capacity needs to go up to meet demand. And that can’t
    come from “green” sources. Say you have a peak demand in the evening. With coal, oil LP gas,
    nuclear, you just crank up the generators. With wind & solar, well, unless you have some really
    MASSIVE batteries that stored it, you just can’t crank it up.

  19. And unlike whip makers his products are probably less capable of being rebranded as “adult toys”.

    I assume. I mean I don’t get the attraction of the whip thing, so what do I know about that particular market?

  20. “And the error rate over a 2000 year study with a projection of 50 years = 50/2000 = 0.002% ”

    That’s how you know it’s garbage.
    1. You can’t project anything, with the exception of some astronomy I guess, over 2000 years with only 0.002% error.

    2. 50/2000 does not equal 0.002%. Not even close.

  21. “It cracks me up how people think they know something that industry experts somehow haven’t thought of.”

    It does happen. But very, very rarely. Just enough to keep alive the legend of the outsider who spots something all the insiders missed.

    I wouldn’t be surprised if more resources are wasted because people think they are the brilliant outsider, than are created by the very few people who pull it off.

  22. However, because of the fairly constant rates of both production and consumption, we find that a shift in the market of 2.5 mbpd causes significant changes in price.

  23. Cuz you can’t make errors in science…
    If this was one of your guys they’d never admit an error.

    Co-author Ralph Keeling, climate scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, took full blame and thanked Lewis for alerting him to the mistake.

    “When we were confronted with his insight it became immediately clear there was an issue there,” he said. “We’re grateful to have it be pointed out quickly so that we could correct it quickly.”

  24. Tom, please find something from someone doing actual climate science.
    I’m supposed to believe an ideologue without even a degree in climate science?

    Tony Heller:
    First, you should know that I’m pretty much a nobody in the climate debate. I’m laughed at by all climatologists. I’m not even taken seriously by true climate skeptics. I don’t have a degree in climatology. I haven’t written a single academic paper about climate change and I don’t have a job related to climatology or the weather. What I do have is a blog and a Twitter account. And as it turns out, that’s pretty much all you need to be a somebody in the climate debate.

  25. Here’s the deal with lithium car batteries. All the cells don’t lose capacity at the same rate. This means if you disassemble and test each cell you can find the problematic ones and replace them. This means it’s doable to refurbish them. Of course this can’t go on forever but at some point you end up with a battery that still can be used for things like large capacity emergency backup batteries. My point is they won’t become paperweights for a very long time.

  26. Right. They’ve been thinking about that for a long time. It cracks me up how people think they know something that industry experts somehow haven’t thought of.

  27. Michael, you are correct. Electric vehicles are making a difference but it’s still just a drop in the bucket. And the 2.5 million number is a hypothetical, it might not be achieved. OTOH, with Iran and Saudi problems, Venezuela in an economic free-fall, oil prices might go up, and then companies won’t be able to make enough EV’s.

  28. Providing a tiny URL because Vuukle removed the one I intended above.

    tinyurl com/ybluc3cu

    Also, the AGW fraudsters make the errors which show at best they have no idea what they are doing.

    tinyurl com/y9pwmrrd

  29. A quick google says global oil production is ~80 million barrels per day. If we’re talking about displacing 2.5 million in 7-12 years, it’s a little early to say demand is “dying”.

  30. I think he means that most of that is coming from coal. AFAIK China is starting to move away from coal, but it’ll take a while.

  31. We are adding about a 1.5 million barrels per day of oil every year, so displacing in 279,000 million barrels per day of oil in Ten years or so is hardly anything.

  32. It might not seem like much bu the price of oil is very elastic so a little change in demand can have a big difference in price. Also having high mpg cars keeps OPEC under control. After the Arab Oil Embargo OPEC was surprised how fast the West can adapt to the lack of oil.

  33. Really? How do you feel about Relativity, Quantum Mechanics? That’s about how much I care about what you think.

  34. I work for a company whose largest product is components of fuel rails. (You basically can’t assemble a fuel injection system without our parts.) It’s starting to impact our sales, we’ve got a big push on to diversify into other fields.

  35. At this point, the AGW fraudsters have already created 2.5 degrees of “warming” by dicking with the measurements after the fact. I’m sure they are up to another 2 degrees.

  36. On the one hand, it has always been a zero sum game — we have never produced much more energy than we consume.

    And on the other it does not matter where it comes from, it will come from somewhere–it is worth enough it will be made.

    There ain’t no such thing as a “Chinese” electron.
    You don’t get points for free, for meaningless blather.

  37. Before we start worshiping at the altar of the Chinese electron, keep in mind where the electricity to charge all those batteries is coming from. Throw in all the energy used and emissions expelled for the manufacture of Li-ion batteries worldwide, and we find ourselves not too far from a zero-sum game.

  38. True, but I think the point here is that it’s ramping faster than expected. What does that mean for 5, 10, or 15 years from now?

  39. I can send you one but it is pure research done by one of our very top scientists and verified by many others. But you will refuse to believe it, it is so incredible.
    Be sure to check out Ray Kurzweil’s biography. And the error rate over a 2000 year study with a projection of 50 years = 50/2000 = 0.002%

    You must add the usual at the begining
    ://theemergingfuture.com/speed-technological-advancement-charts.htm

  40. At this point there isn’t a single study claiming that we’re going to meet the required fossil fuel reductions to stave off 2 degrees C in warming.

  41. Boy…wouldn’t it be great for all of us if the US Congress would push for the kind of changeover that China is achieving?!

  42. I think the author is talking to the wind. Very few can truly comprehend how fast the world is changing. They are still hung up climate change and population growth, unable to see the advances technology is making NOW! And the problems that technology will solve.

  43. The last ten years’ average growth is rather 1 Mbpd/year. And the 279,000 barrels was what the current 5 million EVs saved, and we’re still on an exponential growth path. If China reach 7 million EVs per year by 2025, they alone will offset some 390,000 bpd every year.

  44. In the US, the need has already started to be addressed through natgas powerplants, and that’s the go-to capitalist medium-term solution. Obviously a 50/50 gas-renewables combo is less carbon intense than 100% oil, but it’s very far from sustainable.

  45. OPEC has some major difficulties maintaining cohesion and agreeing on production quotas. All member states are in fairly desperate need of oil revenue with their increasing populations and risks of unrest and uprisings. Thus there’s a pressure on each of them to increase production and whenever they agree on a reduction to increase prices, they know they give up short-term market share to North American swing production and in the long-term increase the pace of electrification.

  46. There are vast numbers of “new” Li batteries for sale on places like Ali Baba or Ebay for prices only a fraction of what reputable battery brands sell for.

    People who buy these batteries report that if you examine them carefully, behaps taking the outer layer off, you find that the inside battery shows clear signs of having previously been welded into a big laptop or automotive battery pack.

    The “dead” large battery pack was taken somewhere with low wages, the individual cells taken out and tested (at least the voltage), and anything that wasn’t dead yet was repackaged and sold again.

    Yes, recycling individual cells is already a thriving business.

  47. Bend over, buy a new battery, and remember, amortized-over-the-miles-delivered, the cost is only 5¢ to 8¢ a mile. No annoying Gary Oblock strandings.

    Just saying,
    GoatGuy

  48. While what you say may be true, it serves to remember the “change the fluorescent tubes” policy of many a school district. And grocery store. And competent 9-to–5 office.

    When the fluorescent light tubes start going out, by a large margin, the policy is “replace them all”. The cost of getting the cherry-picker ladder out, the tech out and fixing “just the burned out ones” multiplies on itself to remove any economy-of-using-fluorescent pole tubes itself, of done on a bulb-by-bulb basis.

    Same goes for those defective cells. Removing is fairly easy (even tho’ there might be 10,000+ of the things in a big battery pack). But how do you certify the future-performance of the other 9,900 cells that “test good”?

    That, it turns out, is a time-consuming and high-error-prone situation.

    Better to treat the whole thing as lithium-stainless-copper-and-manganese ore, and send it to refining, recovery and raw-materials resourcing.

    Just saying,
    GoatGuy

  49. Think of them as concentrated lithium ore.
    Stainless-steel ore.
    Copper ore.
    Manganese ore.

    Think of truckloads of said ore.

    Betcha it has value.
    Top dollar, in fact.

    GoatGuy

  50. Um… I think you need to take a look at that Econ 101 book again.

    UNLIKE growing billions of banana plants (predicted to satisfy unknown-but-guessed demand 2 years out), the supply side of petroleum is quite elastic itself. No unwanted bananas to underprice should demand not turn up. Likewise, no Christmas “runs on bananas” either.

    The present-net-value of crude oil has been quite tightly “engineered” worldwide in a geopolitical sense to be just high enough so that the Great Oil Exporting countries net enough money to keep their mostly-parasitic governments in-the-chips and just low enough that the refined product stream is economical enough to not substantially undermine Gross Domestic Products of countries dependent on the stuff.

    Put it straight: even though WTI (West Texas Intermediate) is hovering what, at $50/bbl or so — being on a vacation here in that very state, I think it is rather amazing that petrol is only $2.05/gallon … which includes all state, local and Federal taxes. its cheap. A flipping hamburger at a fast-food chain costs more than a gallon of unleaded. Rich.

    Noting this almost-absurdly low price for motor fuel, it is no wonder (speaking to your economy-MPG vehicle conjecture) that the local H-E-B¹ parking lot is about 50% Big American Truck Frames. You know, Ford 150, 250, 350, Suburbans, SUV tanks, Hummers, the like. Gasoline is unaccountably economical. Double-income-families are pulling down $125,000 or more a year, and $2 gasoline is only an annoyance.

    Just saying,
    GoatGuy

  51. I think you’re right…

    There is an irrefutable economy-of-performance that electric vehicles bring, counterbalanced by the very real annoyance in their “tether to the electric outlet”. I — being “a Berkeley Bear” — and having a lot of Berkeley friends, can say that at least half of us have purchased or leased electric cars in the last 3 years.

    Every owner is unfailingly glowing in their initial social assessment of their e-car. Ebullient.

    Yet, after a few years, out come the grumbles. Forgetting to self-charge the vehicle is rare, but having the self-charger device “go on the fritz” and leave the driver semi-stranded is all too common. Especially with the “smart vampire tap” chargers that sit between the heavy appliance power socket and the electric dryer.

    Oh, sure, one can use a standard house-power extension cord, but you need to do that so many hours in advance of the Morning Commute.

    Then there is the annoyance — especially for the fleet of perky-Mom electric cars — that are made affordable by having only 70-to–140 miles (100-to–200 km) ranges in large metropolitan areas … where Life’s Complications bring a deeply unsettling Remaining Charge Anxiety to the owner on busy point-to-point travel days.

    These annoyances however are COMPLETELY ADDRESSABLE were we to want to attend to them, by having a far larger public power vending infrastructure.

    Predicting out to a possible future with perhaps ⅔ of the car-force, ⅓ of the short-haul trucking force, ⅕ of the long-haul trucking force, ¾ of the bus-and-trolly fleet, 100% of the municipal dump-truck, garbage scowl, 6-or–10 wheel delivery-trucks, yellow school busses, most inter-city ambulances, perhaps even some heavy-construction machines powered by standardized, uniform, potent batteries, clearly there will be a need for the power grid to “rise to the occasion”, and be bolstered, buttressed and bulwarked to handle the quite-predictable charging demand.

    Good enough.

    Blabby futurists (of the cynical sort) tend to rail about renewable or “green” power not having adequate medium-and-short term grid storage to significantly address this projected load.

    Just-as-blabby eternal optimists bristle and loudly redirect the conversation to cite recent magnificent developments in flow-batteries, compressed air storage, lifting massive weights up mountainsides, and reverse salt-water coastal dams. As solutions.

    Center-of-the-line pragmatists (my club) see both, and remembering history know that where there is good money-demand, will come well heeled capitalists hoping to Land a Whale, by addressing the need.

    Anyway… the future looks good.
    GoatGuy

  52. True … except we need to keep in mind that crude oil production and refining to downwind product streams is pretty market-adaptive.

    Its not like growing bananas and predicting how many billions of banana plants will be needed to satisfy the Christmas Surge 2 years out.

    The mere size of oil consumption — 80,000,000 barrels a day — and the nearly unbroken year-over-year demand growth for the last 125 years (and if you like, 50 ‘significant’ years) — combined with being able to predict future vehicular mile-demand with some confidence, means that “low oil prices” will remain manipulatable by the consortia and OPEC to a fairly significant degree, well out to 2030.

    Or so I think,
    GoatGuy

  53. Nah… municipal scale batteries are one solution, to be sure. But as others have cited, a mixed-production environment mostly “solves” the PV/Wind “storage crisis”. Especially when the electricity reservoirs are actually all those cars’n’busses themselves.

    Just saying,
    GoatGuy

  54. Yeah, it will take a couple of decades for electric car production to get large enough to really start reducing oil demand. There’s on the order of a billion passenger cars on Earth, and electric production this year is around 2 million worldwide. You need to get ICE production below retirements of old cars to start shrinking the fleet.

  55. I love hearing this. I own 3 VWs and in 2020, I plan to trade my VW Suv in on the VW Electric Microbus. I can’t wait. No more gas stations, no more oil changes and no more tune-ups. I’m still keeping my VW hardtop convertible, after all I need a beachmobile:)

  56. Doctorpat you are absolutely right 50/2000 = .025% not .002% but I think your CPD got in the way of your seeing the BIG picture. But then again I am used to some of the other people on the fringe here that ignore the hard uncontroversial facts based on what they believe is common sense.

  57. China’s renewable electricity production is accelerating. Even though its electricity production is rapidly increasing, it’s fossil fuel generated electricity production remains constant.

  58. LOL, cool! That means oil prices and gas prices will continue to drop.
    Hey, where do you think the electricity comes from? LP gas, oil, coal, water, solar, wind, nuclear
    power. Just because you take it from one source, just means you got to get it from another
    source, which means the generating capacity needs to go up to meet demand. And that can’t
    come from “green” sources. Say you have a peak demand in the evening. With coal, oil LP gas,
    nuclear, you just crank up the generators. With wind & solar, well, unless you have some really
    MASSIVE batteries that stored it, you just can’t crank it up.

  59. And unlike whip makers his products are probably less capable of being rebranded as “adult toys”.

    I assume. I mean I don’t get the attraction of the whip thing, so what do I know about that particular market?

  60. “And the error rate over a 2000 year study with a projection of 50 years = 50/2000 = 0.002% ”

    That’s how you know it’s garbage.
    1. You can’t project anything, with the exception of some astronomy I guess, over 2000 years with only 0.002% error.

    2. 50/2000 does not equal 0.002%. Not even close.

  61. “It cracks me up how people think they know something that industry experts somehow haven’t thought of.”

    It does happen. But very, very rarely. Just enough to keep alive the legend of the outsider who spots something all the insiders missed.

    I wouldn’t be surprised if more resources are wasted because people think they are the brilliant outsider, than are created by the very few people who pull it off.

  62. However, because of the fairly constant rates of both production and consumption, we find that a shift in the market of 2.5 mbpd causes significant changes in price.

  63. Cuz you can’t make errors in science…
    If this was one of your guys they’d never admit an error.

    Co-author Ralph Keeling, climate scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, took full blame and thanked Lewis for alerting him to the mistake.

    “When we were confronted with his insight it became immediately clear there was an issue there,” he said. “We’re grateful to have it be pointed out quickly so that we could correct it quickly.”

  64. Tom, please find something from someone doing actual climate science.
    I’m supposed to believe an ideologue without even a degree in climate science?

    Tony Heller:
    First, you should know that I’m pretty much a nobody in the climate debate. I’m laughed at by all climatologists. I’m not even taken seriously by true climate skeptics. I don’t have a degree in climatology. I haven’t written a single academic paper about climate change and I don’t have a job related to climatology or the weather. What I do have is a blog and a Twitter account. And as it turns out, that’s pretty much all you need to be a somebody in the climate debate.

  65. Here’s the deal with lithium car batteries. All the cells don’t lose capacity at the same rate. This means if you disassemble and test each cell you can find the problematic ones and replace them. This means it’s doable to refurbish them. Of course this can’t go on forever but at some point you end up with a battery that still can be used for things like large capacity emergency backup batteries. My point is they won’t become paperweights for a very long time.

  66. Right. They’ve been thinking about that for a long time. It cracks me up how people think they know something that industry experts somehow haven’t thought of.

  67. Michael, you are correct. Electric vehicles are making a difference but it’s still just a drop in the bucket. And the 2.5 million number is a hypothetical, it might not be achieved. OTOH, with Iran and Saudi problems, Venezuela in an economic free-fall, oil prices might go up, and then companies won’t be able to make enough EV’s.

  68. Providing a tiny URL because Vuukle removed the one I intended above.

    tinyurl com/ybluc3cu

    Also, the AGW fraudsters make the errors which show at best they have no idea what they are doing.

    tinyurl com/y9pwmrrd

  69. A quick google says global oil production is ~80 million barrels per day. If we’re talking about displacing 2.5 million in 7-12 years, it’s a little early to say demand is “dying”.

  70. We are adding about a 1.5 million barrels per day of oil every year, so displacing in 279,000 million barrels per day of oil in Ten years or so is hardly anything.

  71. It might not seem like much bu the price of oil is very elastic so a little change in demand can have a big difference in price. Also having high mpg cars keeps OPEC under control. After the Arab Oil Embargo OPEC was surprised how fast the West can adapt to the lack of oil.

  72. I work for a company whose largest product is components of fuel rails. (You basically can’t assemble a fuel injection system without our parts.) It’s starting to impact our sales, we’ve got a big push on to diversify into other fields.

  73. At this point, the AGW fraudsters have already created 2.5 degrees of “warming” by dicking with the measurements after the fact. I’m sure they are up to another 2 degrees.

  74. On the one hand, it has always been a zero sum game — we have never produced much more energy than we consume.

    And on the other it does not matter where it comes from, it will come from somewhere–it is worth enough it will be made.

    There ain’t no such thing as a “Chinese” electron.
    You don’t get points for free, for meaningless blather.

  75. Before we start worshiping at the altar of the Chinese electron, keep in mind where the electricity to charge all those batteries is coming from. Throw in all the energy used and emissions expelled for the manufacture of Li-ion batteries worldwide, and we find ourselves not too far from a zero-sum game.

  76. I can send you one but it is pure research done by one of our very top scientists and verified by many others. But you will refuse to believe it, it is so incredible.
    Be sure to check out Ray Kurzweil’s biography. And the error rate over a 2000 year study with a projection of 50 years = 50/2000 = 0.002%

    You must add the usual at the begining
    ://theemergingfuture.com/speed-technological-advancement-charts.htm

  77. I think the author is talking to the wind. Very few can truly comprehend how fast the world is changing. They are still hung up climate change and population growth, unable to see the advances technology is making NOW! And the problems that technology will solve.

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