Juggling Dynamite

Oil, pipelines and ICE engines are on their way out, while electric cars and renewable energy are entering a global boom period. What old tech is taking away from our economy, new tech can give back, but Canada needs to shift gears quickly.  See, Out of juice: Canada’s electric car problem:

The global shift to electric cars is now well underway and accelerating, bringing with it big changes for drivers, companies, industries and governments around the world.

But as other nations accelerate, Canada is coasting — on both EV policy and per-capita sales.

It’s not for lack of interest: Canadians must wait months to get their hands on new EVs when they hit the market. Worse still, we’re missing out on opportunities to innovate, to make our economy cleaner and more competitive, to reduce pollution — and its public health and climate change impacts — and to export our metals and minerals to a growing global marketplace.

As usual, the game-changer likely will be China, which has signaled it intends to ban internal combustion vehicle sales, similar to bans planned in Norway, the Netherlands, Scotland, France and the U.K.

What Canada needs to do asap:

• Define success and commit to a set of clear, ambitious national EV adoption targets that increase over time, backed by a policy framework to achieve them.

• Make it easier for Canadians to choose electric by requiring auto manufacturers to ensure that a minimum and growing percentage of all passenger cars sold in Canada will be zero-emissions vehicles — an approach pioneered in California and recently adopted in Quebec. This could be supported by a federal point-of-sale rebate, a proven approach.

• Make it easier for Canadians to plug in by developing an EV-charging-infrastructure plan, informed by EV sales targets, to ensure drivers can charge up where they live, work and shop, as well as between major centres.

• Maximize clean-growth potential by updating and expanding the Electric Vehicle Technology Roadmap for Canada, identifying the emerging opportunities in manufacturing, software and innovation, such as autonomous vehicles.

The president has held fast to his pledge even as top executives’ comments have run counter to it for months. Instead of hiring more workers or raising their pay, many companies say they’ll first increase dividends or buy back their own shares.  See Trump’s tax promises undercut by CEO’s plans to reward shareholders.

The last thing the economy or social stability needs at this point is more debt and more share buybacks.

With all the convenience and self-determination of human driven automobiles, it may be tempting to overlook that they have also been the most deadly weapon ever created. The internal combustion engine (ICE) motor car, driven by inherently erratic humans, has killed more people (not to mention injures and environmental damage) than both the nuclear bomb and the AK-47 assault riffle together. Fortunately EV driver-less autos are en route to alleviate the carnage. See Driverless cars may kill off the world’s deadliest invention:

About 1.25m people are killed in road traffic accidents a year, accounting for 2.2 per cent of all deaths globally, according to the World Health Organization. Accurate data on how many people in total have been killed by cars in the past century are hard to find. But 50m seems a fair guess. That compares with the 123m in all wars in the 20th century.

If that level of carnage were not bad enough, cars have also contributed massively to environmental pollution and adverse climate change. As an additional malus, the car’s thirst for oil has handed billions of dollars in revenues to some of the world’s most regressive regimes: Saudi Arabia, Russia and Venezuela.

Fortunately, the end of the human-driven, petrol-fuelled car may be in sight…

Last week, Philip Hammond, the British chancellor, said he wanted the UK to be one of the first countries to allow “genuine driverless cars” on its roads by 2021.