Farmers have forced Brussels to abandon its most demanding emissions targets, with the European Union retreating in the face of a revolt over climate goals and red tape.
In the past few weeks demonstrations have taken place across Europe, in France, Germany, Poland and on Monday in Italy where convoys of tractors were preparing for an “invasion” of Rome.
Arrival UK, an electric van start-up, has fallen into administration less than three years after a $13 billion float, in a fresh blow to Britain’s green energy ambitions.
EY has been appointed to explore options for the break-up and sale of the group’s operations. Arrival, based in Banbury, Oxfordshire, has two factories in the county. Its parent company, listed in America, employs about 400 people worldwide.
The problem with government mandates aimed at manipulating free markets is they are typically based in political expediency, not commercial reality.
As more potholes appear on the road to electric-vehicle nirvana, edicts by lawmakers in Canada and states such as California and New York to require all new-car sales be EVs by 2035 are proving the point: Politically motivated virtue signals rarely withstand pressure testing from real-world market forces.
Given that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s carbon tax is costing the average Canadian household hundreds of dollars annually when factoring in its negative impact on the economy, how much is it lowering Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions?
We are governed by very stupid high school kids.
LYON, France — We have met the enemy, and he is not us.
That was the defiant battle cry in southern France over the weekend, where Europe’s green politicians had gathered under a cloud of fury seemingly directed at them.
Farmers have taken to the streets in recent weeks to protest EU environmental regulations and cross-border competition while demanding better wages — issues that could easily be lumped under the Green Deal umbrella, a slate of climate-friendly policies that literally bear the European Green Party’s name.
Last Saturday I took my boys to the local museum of natural science, and although we live close enough to walk, it was pouring rain, so we drove. Without thinking I parked, but my oldest pointed out that the car next to us looked like an E.V. and suggested I find another spot, so I did—I may or may not have instilled in my kids a healthy and rational skepticism of the E.V. movement, and a concern that these cars are exceptional fire hazards (but definitely did).
When it comes to the green transition, let no one say the Trudeau government is unwilling to put other people’s money where its mouth is. Why, in just one sector, a sector of a sector really – making batteries for electric vehicles – the government has put $44-billion at risk: one of the “big bets” on Canada’s industrial future of which it likes to boast.
Farmers across Ireland —vowing to overturn new EU green edicts on nitrate emissions and mandatory rewilding—took to the streets yesterday in solidarity with their agrarian counterparts around Europe.
EU policies are suffocating European farmers with “Soviet-style administration of agriculture,” French MEP says
Protesting farmers were met by riot police with fire hoses just metres from the European Parliament on Thursday, as they tried to grab the attention of the European Council by expressing their collective outrage at EU green policies threatening their livelihood.
In an unusually rowdy protest, even by Brussels standards, tyre fires and tractor blockades greeted European leaders as a transnational coalition of farming groups took to the streets. They are angered by EU green policies—including decrees forcing active farmland to go fallow, restricting the use of fertiliser, and limiting permitted amount of livestock—as well as national edicts such as reduced subsidies on diesel fuel—that are direct results of the EU’s Net Zero commitments.
As the federal government’s popular Canada Greener Homes grant program comes to a close, the energy audit industry could crumble with businesses across the country warning of mass layoffs in the months ahead.
The federal government has signalled the end of the program, which provides up to $5,000 toward energy efficiency upgrades such as insulation, windows and heat pumps. New applications are expected to close by the end of March, but an official timeline is unknown.
In the meantime, business is temporarily booming for companies across the country who conduct the required home energy audits, as homeowners try to secure the grant funding before it dries up.
Rubber bullets and water cannons were deployed against hundreds of European farmers protesting outside the EU Parliament building in Brussels on Thursday. The farmers threw eggs, set off fireworks, and started fires near the building while demanding that European leaders stop punishing them with more taxes and rising costs imposed to finance a so-called ‘green agenda.’
Rubber bullets now being fired at farmers as the gestapo desperately tries to save the 4th reich HQ in Brussels…. pic.twitter.com/RStbl4SNKn
— Francesco (@Frances89805199) February 1, 2024
FARMERS V. BRUSSELS
The only sound from the EU is from their rubber bullets 🔥
— Persephone (@persephvoice) February 1, 2024
h/t XC
Biden’s Inflation Increase Act intends to spend $7.5 billion taxpayer money to build charging stations for electric car owners. Two years later, no EV chargers were built. And that’s good.
The modern sheen of the electric car is running into the medieval state of American cities.
Seattle began installing dozens of EV chargers only for thieves to show up and raid at least eight of the charging cables for copper requiring thousands of dollars worth of repairs.
OTTAWA — The federal government’s discussions around rebranding the rebate program for its carbon pricing system are aimed at ensuring Canadians are aware of what their rebates are for, Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson said Tuesday.
The first public acknowledgment of a potential rebrand of the government’s flagship climate policy comes as the Conservatives immediately dismissed the idea, and experts and political insiders raised questions on whether a rebrand would boost perceptions of the carbon price.
The Belgian port of Zeebrugge was blockaded on Tuesday, causing gridlock on surrounding roads as a wave of farmer protests spread across Europe.
Authorities at the North Sea port, one of the biggest in Europe, said all access roads were blocked by 5pm (1600 GMT) on Tuesday, in a demonstration that will hit commercial trade, including imports and exports of food to and from the UK, Ireland and Scandinavia.
“Every single road into and out of the port is blocked. No trucks can get in, cars are being let in and police and the harbour master are trying to find a safe way for these trucks to wait on the side of the road,” said a spokesperson for the port authority for Antwerp-Zeebrugge.
The Trudeau government is expected collect nearly a half-billion dollars in sales taxes on the carbon tax this year alone.
On January 23, the Budget Office acknowledged that a five percent federal Goods and Services Tax (GST) on the carbon tax will cost Canadians $486 million despite repeated claims by Liberals that the carbon tax is “revenue neutral.”
