“Net-Zero Tyranny”

Canada’s electric-vehicle transition could cost more than $300 billion by 2040 as the installation of charging infrastructure expands, upgrades to the electrical grid are made and other changes take place, according to a report released by Natural Resources Canada.

The report, an update to a 2021 study that Natural Resources Canada also commissioned, forecasts that Canada needs to significantly accelerate the pace of installing charging infrastructure to add 40,000 public charging ports per year on average between now and 2040. That is a big increase given that there are currently around 32,000 public ports across the country, and roughly 11,000 public charging ports were installed in 2023.

The Ontario government is insisting that billions of dollars spent attracting electric vehicle manufacturers to Ontario have not been wasted after the Ford Motor Company announced it would produce a gas-powered truck at a plant originally meant for zero-emissions vehicles.

On Thursday, the American auto giant said it would produce F-Series Super Duty trucks at its Oakville Assembly Complex beginning in summer 2026, with an electric version to follow “later this decade.”

h/t DS

By election-time 2025, EV mandates in Canada, the United States, and Europe may well be gone, or at least watered down

The language of law must not be foreign to the ears of those who are to obey it

For those for whom the mere mention of anything legalese is cruel and unusual punishment, let me apologize. Profusely. Were it not for an extremely important, but much-ignored, missive from Reuters last week, I, too, would avoid all things constitutional as forcefully as warm beer and tight stockings. Delving into the language of lawyers, as it turns out, makes Bernoullian physics seem simple and straightforward in comparison.

“… For a city with 120,000 homes, which today may require about 2,000 transformers, the addition of 120,000 home-charged electric vehicles means adding 1,000 transformers, about $8 million. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg, because distributing 50 to 100% more household electricity requires generating 50 to 100% more electricity.

All this costs money that most Americans today do not have, especially at the generation end. Especially with the push to eliminate electric generation from coal and natural gas and even nuclear energy. It also requires massive construction of electric infrastructure, from transmission lines to transformers to in-home charging stations accompanied by larger electric fuse boxes.”

Blood diamonds, blood cobalt, and now blood nickel. Governments leading the global shift toward electric vehicles promise cleaner cities and a new era of sustainable energy and improved resource usage. But just as governments promote EVs on environmental grounds, manufacturers are forced to source nickel from a region enabling the wanton destruction of ecologically sensitive lands, reckless treatment of workers, and the fundamental deterioration of living conditions. There is only one solution to this problem: the world needs more Canadian nickel.

EV’s look bad from more angles than the general public is yet aware of. No one is going to give up their Blood Nickle, not easily.

The rise of electric vehicles helped bring environmentalists and the Canadian auto sector closer together. Now, the threat of Chinese-made electric vehicles is pushing them apart.

A schism between the two sides came into view last week after the federal Liberals announced a 30-day consultation on how to protect Canadian auto workers from what Deputy Prime Minister Chyrstia Freeland characterized as a potential flood of cheap EVs from China.

It’s not a healthy market period and likely to collapse without China’s help.

Northolt’s battery factory in Montreal could be delayed as EV market cools

Canadians have been standing at filling stations for decades, so they’re probably not thinking too much about the taxes they pay on their gas or where that money goes, but that may change as more electric vehicles are sold.

Alberta this past spring slipped EV owners a bill for $200 — due every year on top of the standard registration fees — to account for the wear and tear on roads their cars cause. In doing so, it joined Saskatchewan and a number of jurisdictions in the United States that have imposed additional fees on EV drivers to compensate for the fact that they’re not paying taxes on gasoline.