137. Tarnishing the Tesla Brand; European Union Bans Combustion Vehicles

The Clean Energy Show

Twit Elon Musk may be tarnishing the Tesla Brand as we navigates his way through Twitter ownership. The European Union bans the sale of new combustion vehicles by 2035. Small modular nuclear reactors largely rely on highly enriched urnanium that only comes from Russia. So that's a problem since Russia invaded Ukraine.

A large bank is getting scolded for greenwashing during last year's COP climate conference. Turns out they're really into financing fossil fuels.

The IEA says carbon emissions will peak in 2025, sooner than previously thought. Why? Thanks to Russia invading Ukraine.

British PM Sunak may attend COP 27 afterall. King Charles would like to join him but the government won't let him.

Cruise ships are way worse than travelling by airliner for carbon emissions per person, per mile.

James gets angry at a Nissan ad starring Brie Larson telling people to buy a gas guzzler and not wait for 'furturistic' EVs.

Beyond Catastrophe A New Climate Reality Is Coming Into View By David Wallace-Wells

Here's a gift link to the article discussed in this week's episode (no paywall): https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/10/26/magazine/climate-change-warming-world.html?unlocked_article_code=00s0e3fyPujeR6ZZPUmwythO-8EhSgezVhODl8kPm8RXKmxbQukf9ee3Hcyz34OSNFIlx_wXLHnIAbMr3aG5ahMgZRr6zucMwAKyLgCGIuYs2KUa8oicAdA8QzdXJq-8Fs549_949iEdGZggYwjrJ8ZC_eCqz69i5w2sB6YaBtzpBxTBCvKtqDF_VXY0UX0wpOj3jgMywSImQs7H9N3Zgt4tHB0bvqWkQZEmhxvReOE0aeg5QH-soag4aQXaWlDLeE3eR2wi35ecfN3tClOHfo6s-_gGy8226ulDDtGrzdRXOLu6DSz6YiaavnDBPvYZsMNpYUzizeei992Es3rv1AUMLc_9dCsM57OnlSkd8R93De1uRcwl&smid=share-url

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Transcript

Hello, and welcome to episode 137 of the Clean Energy Show.

I'm Brian Stockton.

I'm James Whittingham.

This week, it's not just natural gas that comes from Russia.

So that's the specialized uranium used in small modular nuclear reactors.

Whoopsy.

The European Union has officially banned new combustion and cars in 2035.

Now.

If only they could ban the Eurovision song contest.

A large multinational bank is getting scolded for greenwashing.

Brian I'm old enough to remember what a multinational bank greenwashed.

It meant laundering money for criminals.

According to the IEA, carbon emissions will peak in 2025.

They also said our podcast peaked in 2020, which I thought was kind of me.

Why do they keep studying us? Anyway? All that and more on this edition of the Clean Energy Show.

And welcome, everyone, to our weekly podcast on climate and clean energy.

If you're new, be sure to subscribe to get all of our episodes delivered to you weekly.

More on the show.

Brian we have is Twitter owner Elon Musk damaging Tesla's brand? Answer is yes.

Will British PM Sunak attend Cop 27? And will King Charles be jealous? Answer is also yes.

Well, I'm spoiling everything.

SMRs have a geopolitical problem thanks to Russia invading Ukraine, poland bosched its nuclear ambitions and is now letting foreigners run the show.

And how Africa can benefit even more than the rest of the world by installing renewables.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg.

All kinds of stuff we're talking about this week.

So much stuff to do.

So one thing I wanted to catch up on, which I just sort of mentioned off the cuff last week, we somehow started talking about a transatlantic cruise.

Something I've always wanted to do is take a cruise across the Atlantic rather than airplane because it would be sort of old fashioned and fun and less stressful than plane travel.

I've always wanted to do it, but I've done some googling and it turns out, in terms of a carbon footprint, taking a ship across the Atlantic is worse than flying.

But, yeah, I just wanted to follow up because I didn't sort of cite any sources last week because I just kind of mentioned it off the cuff.

But if anyone wants to Google that, there's sort of a few articles here, but there's one from the Guardian that's way back from 2006, and it quotes Climate Care, which is a carbon offsetting company, and they calculated it at 00:40 3 passenger mile on a cruise ship and only .25 for a long haul flight.

So point 43 versus point 25 for airplane travel.

So, yeah, it does appear that taking a ship, one of those big cruise ships anyway, like, maybe you could still away on, like, a cargo ship that's going anyway.

I mean, that'd probably be well, they put swimming pools on those ships, multiple swimming pools, ads on my social media.

They've got a go kart track on the top of one of these cruise ships.

Really? Wow.

Jeez.

I'd like that.

Hopefully there's a barrier so you don't fly off into the ocean.

Yeah, cruise ship.

It's like you're moving basically a small city across the ocean.

So I guess we shouldn't be surprised that it's worse in terms of carbon emissions.

And then also possible, like, they sometimes do things like burn their waste because they've got so much waste on a ship and things like that are not good.

We should have done something on a sustainable Halloween because it was Halloween last night.

And what's your favorite Halloween candy? You're not known for your sweet tooth, I'll say that.

Yeah.

What did you steal from the kids, Brian? Come on, be honest.

Well, we had some, like, Swedish Berries that were pretty good.

Those are good, aren't they? They do really ring the bell in the old brain, don't they? They're nice.

There are a lot of things.

My least favorite is smarties.

I have a box right here.

Oh, I like smarties.

You're the guy who likes smarties.

Smarties.

I looked this up yesterday, is at the bottom of the preferred candy lists all over the Internet.

At the bottom.

Wow.

I like smarties.

You like smarties.

And I'm going to eat them right now out of not spite, but because I have to.

And also, I will point out, you know, the candy that we call rockets, a little sugar candy, in America, those are known as smarties.

What? Yeah.

They don't have smarties like we have smarties.

Really? Yes.

Smarties here in Canada are kind of vaguely like an eminent M.

It's a chocolate covered candy covered chocolate in different colors, but they're not very good, the M and Ms.

I will tell you, this is a knowledge that I have deep knowledge of candy have ground up peanuts in the shell, which is why you cannot, if you have a peanut allergy, eat M and M's chocolates.

These do not.

And I really noticed the flavor difference.

Like, they have a flavor to their shell in M and Ms.

But do you see M amp M very much? No.

We had a lot of help.

Do you have trick or feeders? Did you do that? Yeah, just maybe a couple of dozen.

Well, that's pretty good.

My son was texting me all night from his great uncle's house in town where he goes to university.

And his uncle, who's 83, and his twin lives in Regina, is very close to us, his sister, and he was giving out he didn't give out anything last year, so when my son was there so my son was kind of wondering what Uncle Gary gives out christmas oranges.

He gives out oranges.

Interesting.

And my son was very upset by this, but then it got worse because then Uncle Gary made him hand out the oranges and accept the wrath from the kids.

How embarrassing.

Apparently, there was a meme to give out potatoes, so people were giving up potatoes this year.

We did that as a joke.

We had some potatoes lying around and we said we should give those out.

The thing is, Brian, people are paranoid, even when we were kids about Halloween, catty rather, and those oranges are going to the landfill.

Yeah, probably.

Maybe one in 20 will be eaten.

I bet you most of them will be thrown out, especially when they're handed to a long haired teenager.

There are already reports of marijuana gummies getting into the Halloween supply in Winnipeg.

I'm sure it's possible, although they're kind of expensive.

That's kind of an expensive maybe you get high, you make mistakes, Brian.

I don't know.

The other thing I want to mention is I've got another Tesla appointment in Saskatoon on Friday.

I'm starting to have troubles with the heat again.

Something like that kind of happened last winter where it seemed like it was not blowing enough heat, but it never put up an error warning or anything, so I was never able to kind of get it fixed.

But now there's a little error warning, so I got to make the drive up to Saskatoon on Friday to see what's up with that.

Did you Google the error warning? Nope.

No, I didn't.

It just said, Climate keeper not available due to system fault.

So there's some kind of system fault and they're going to see me on Friday.

Well, we've had above normal weather, but it's going to cool down and good luck.

It's going to be very cold very soon.

It works for a little while, and then you're driving around and then suddenly it's blowing cold air.

That's going to be an unpleasant 5 hours of driving then potentially, yeah, the temperatures got to dropping a bit by Friday, so we'll see.

It kind of comes and goes.

So hopefully I'll just warm, I should say.

So let's see what's the Friday forecast here.

Checking the weather here and to see if Brian is going to be available for next show.

So this is a scheduling issue here that we're looking at.

Will Brian be dead Friday? Five plus five plus five.

Celsius and sunny.

So the sun really makes a difference.

Is the middle of the day you're going or I haven't decided if I'm going to go the day before or not.

Oh, because you're going to make a trip out of it.

Hit the restaurants, the museums, everything in your retirement is a tourist activity.

It's just totally even with your snowden, it's like, oh, this is great.

I got nowhere to be.

It must be good.

The big discussion topic this week is Elon Musk, because he is the head of Twitter, and he was the head is the head of Tesla.

Now, Tesla is an important company in the energy transition, and we've been following every eye glitch of Musk for 20 years, and now he's gone off the rails.

I think the discourse in America is about to get way worse, thanks to new Twitter CEO Elon Musk.

Musk took over the Twitter on Friday, and immediately there was an explosion of hate speech, including use of the N word on the platform, which jumped 500%, leading Twitter to change the landing page from what's happening to Me.

Because yesterday Musk replied to a tweet from Hillary Clinton about the attack on Paul Pelosi that condemned the violence and conspiracy theories with a link to a homophobic conspiracy theory blaming the victim of the violence.

That's not just awful, that is beyond the pale.

And so is Elon Musk bathing picture of Elon on the beach.

But anyway, very pissed.

My point is, as you can hear from the audience, he's becoming not a happy, popular guy anymore.

Used to be no one knew who he was, right? I bet when you bought your first Tesla stock, 99 out of 100 people wouldn't know who he was, practically.

Or maybe not that extreme, but a lot of people didn't know who he was, and now he's a villain.

It's almost like, Let Trump on Twitter so that Musk is not the biggest villain.

So my question to you is, as a loyal fan who has not broken down yet and has total faith in Elon, when's your faith going to crumble? What's it going to take? Is he going to have to invade Poland? What's going to happen? Say, I have faith in Elon.

I have faith in Tesla.

Like, the mission of the company is solidly on track.

They're doing great.

I don't know.

It's not like this is going to derail what Tesla is doing.

What happens if he starts doing crazy things? I know he mentioned in the last conference call for shareholders that he said something about, in case I go crazy.

This is like the backup.

Like, they can take over and do things.

So it's almost like he was seeing it coming, but he's getting kind of Kanye.

I'm just waiting for antisemitic tweets and then anticlimate tweets.

I've predicted this for a while.

I can see it coming.

And it was like five years ago, I saw an interview with him where he was interviewing okay.

An attractive woman was interviewing him for a network, and he started flirting with her.

And I thought, this is kind of unhinged, especially since he just ended one marriage.

He was about to get his next.

He said, you do know anyone I could date in the middle of an interview for a business channel? And it was just so bizarre that I started to lose faith in him and started to question.

It just makes me nervous.

It makes me nervous.

And now he's trying to make people with blue ticks on their Twitter account pay $20 a month to have your verified account.

Well, as we said many times, clean energy is going to win because it's better and it's cheaper.

So whether he charges people on Twitter, I don't really see how that affects Climate Change.

I see it as he's making stupid decisions.

And I'm worried that those stupid decisions could make it into Tesla.

And I asked myself, like I've said this before, what does it mean for Tesla to have a person, like, go off the rails? Who's running the company.

Are they stable enough now? Does it matter anymore? Is his ingenuity, the things that he's developed, like solving problems.

Like it costs too much.

So we'll make one giant piece out of one casting machine.

We'll build the machine that makes the machine.

If that goes away, is Tesla still I mean, if he's wrapped up in cellophane somewhere, talking to himself, can the clean revolution go ahead? That's my question to you.

And you say it's probably okay, but I worry about it.

Yeah, because clean energy is better and cheaper.

So, you know, all this just seems like a distraction.

And, you know, here's another thing, Brian, and this is going to be a tough one for you.

I have less of a desire to own a tesla than I did two weeks ago.

And I think that's true for a lot of people.

Yeah.

And I think that could continue and it could get worse, because he's gathering up all this storm of disdain for him that people could be ashamed to drive a Tesla one day instead of proud of it.

And that I worry about because of the company's bottom line is not good if it slows down.

The fact is, that's not going to be an issue for a long time because there's just so much demand, which we talk about every week on our show.

Now I'm blocking anyone who serves me an ad on Twitter because GM said that they were going to stop temporarily serving ads.

That didn't last long because I started getting GM ads again.

Really? Yeah.

So maybe it's a Canada US.

Thing.

Maybe they're still doing it in Canada.

Well, it's true.

I didn't get any ads at all when he took over Twitter for about two days, and then GM came back on, so I blocked them.

And that's the one thing I might actually buy, is a GM car.

Right.

So they know that.

And it's just kind of weird, because if everybody who has a blue check mark pay the $20 a month, it would be like $75 million, which is a drop in the bucket compared to the 5 billion in advertising.

Right.

So it doesn't matter.

So if you drive people like Stephen King off there was a funny joke, one of the late night shows that I think maybe it was Saturday Night Live.

The joke was.

Why is everyone so upset that Elon Musk could ruin Twitter? I honestly don't understand why people are so worried that Elon is going to ruin Twitter.

As if it's this beloved American institution.

It's not like he bought Disney World.

It's like he bought the rest of Orlando.

It's already bad.

It's a cesspool.

Who cares if you think it all it is now is slightly better than Facebook.

Like, that's all you can say about it? Well, I felt less guilty about it since I don't know.

I mean, I will give him the benefit of the doubt for a while and maybe he can clean it up.

But so far so far his steps are not indicating that that will happen.

But if he could get rid of Bots, that would be a good thing.

Bots drive the discourse, apparently.

Some people think.

Yeah, I don't know, I just think maybe you're getting sucked into the Clickbait news cycle.

Like, everything to do with this is fantastic.

Clickbait.

So whether it's positive or negative, this stuff just generates tons of publicity.

I mean, he's only been running it for like, three days.

Why do we all fired everybody? He's appointed himself king.

He's like there's a skyscraper by himself in his underwear doing God knows what, and it's still better than Face.

All you have to do is look at Mark Zuckerberg, who would win in a nude wrestley match? Zuckerberg musk.

I think Zuckerberg worked because he's studying martial arts.

But anyway, I'd like to see that.

A tan off.

They should do a tan off.

They should.

And see who burns the most.

Get outside of your basement, people.

I got mad.

I saw an ad the other day, which apparently was I researched it.

It's been around since June and I think that you've seen it before and I just didn't pay attention.

And it's a Nissan ad from the company that makes my EV that I love.

And it was the first EV mass produced, but they haven't made one until now.

OK, this is important.

Context.

They started in 2010 making the Nissan Leaf the first mass produced all electric vehicle.

And just now you can order not yet a Nissan area, which is a small SUV.

Right.

So then the guy who came up with that program, initially he's in jail and sought to be in jail.

I can't remember Carlos, so we'll see about that.

Yeah, Carlos going, I think he escaped.

I think he's fine.

So this is an ad, and I'm going to play right now with Brie Larson doing an ad that I don't care for.

In the future, we'll travel to incredible places with the help of magical technology.

But what about today? I want my magical future now I have places to go.

I can't wait for what? Tomorrow we'll bring.

But in the meantime, let's enjoy the ride, because you don't have any EVs to sell.

You more on Japanese company who are guest EVs.

So I can't see the pictures for that ad, but presumably it's an ad for combustion cars.

You don't need to see it.

You can hear the car going, Vroom.

And in the beginning there's flying cars, but that's fantasy electric future, that's going to be wonderful.

I can't wait for it.

But until then, well, the thing is, you and I and our listeners know that then is now.

Go and buy an electric car.

You can find one if you try hard enough.

And God knows people do try hard.

We retreated something from dawn the other day that a writer for, I believe, the Toronto Star or a photographer went to great lengths.

He went to James like lengths to get an electric car.

He went up to campus gasing a long way and there wasn't even a bus service.

He had to catch a ride to get to a small town to buy Chevrolet Bolt EV because they had one in stock.

So it was one of those crazy things, still a short supply.

If you only kind of want an EV, you're probably not going to get one because it's too much work.

The Financial Times says that Rishi Sunak has opened the door to a possible uturn over his decision not to attend next or this month's UN Cop 27 climate conference in Egypt.

This is growing criticism from Tory MPs about him not going.

He said he was pressing business and can't go.

And we have a story about fossil fuels paying him money as well later in the show.

So I just thought he pointed that out.

I also thought I'd throw out that Prince King Charles wanted to go and the government wouldn't let him.

It's like, wasn't a king get to do whatever he wants? Yes.

Isn't that the whole point of being a king? He says no, your first thing should be a big thing, like a trip to Canada.

Screw this.

Why? You live in Canada.

We don't want you here.

Go to the conference, make an impact.

He is going to host something, though.

I think we'll cover that later in the show, too.

And Brian, I wanted to talk about a big feature that I read and listened to in the New York Times from David Wallace Wells.

It was a feature in the New York Times Magazine on the weekend.

I don't know if you caught it or not, but it was about our climate future and how our climate future is coming into view.

We are starting to know what things will look like based on global warming and based on what we have to fight global warming.

So it says, just ahead of top 27, the climate future looks both better and worse than it did a few years ago.

Related action has made worst case scenarios much less likely, but delay has made best case outcomes impossible too.

So where are we headed? And this is a big, big article.

The audiobook highs it.

They hired an audiobook type reader to read it.

Wow.

Among energy nerds, the story is well known, but almost no one outside the insular world appreciates just how drastic and rapid the cost declines of renewable technologies have been.

That's us.

That's us and our listeners.

Yeah, we're the insular world.

We know what's going on, don't we? We should hire that guy to read our podcast.

That was great.

Since 2010, the cost of solar power and lithium battery technology has fallen by more than 85%, the cost of wind power by more than 55%.

The International Energy Agency recently predicted that solar power would become the cheapest source of electricity in history.

And a report by Carbon Tracker found that the global population lives in places where new renewable power would be cheaper than new dirty power.

The price of gas was under $3 per gallon in 2010, which means these decreases are the equivalent of seeing gas station signs today advertising prices of under fifty cents a gallon.

The markets have taken notice.

This year investment in green energy surpassed that in fossil fuels, despite the scramble for gas and the return to coal prompted by Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

After a decade of declines, supply chain issues have nudged up the cost of renewable manufacturing.

But overall, the trends are clear enough that you can read them without glasses.

Globally, there are enough solar panel factories being built to produce the necessary energy to limit warming to below two degrees.

And in the United States, planned solar farms now exceed today's total worldwide operating capacity.

Librike has taken to speculating about a renewable singularity beyond which the future of energy is utterly transformed.

So there you have a big long clip from there, and I recommend reading or listening to it on The New York Times.

And you know what I can do? I have a subscription.

So you know I'm cheap, my listeners know I'm cheap.

But I do have a subscription to The New York Times, and I tried to cancel it because I was saving up my money for other things and they said, well how about fifty cents a month? And I said okay.

So yeah, I got it down to month.

Not bad for a while.

A few years ago I subscribed to the physical copy of the Sunday New York Times.

You can actually get that delivered in our city in the middle of nowhere in Canada.

It wouldn't come until like Tuesday or Wednesday.

And I think you still can get the physical Sunday New York Times delivered to your house.

Well, that's pretty cool.

It must have been pretty big as well.

I had a magic.

Oh yeah, huge and thick.

It was super fun.

It's kind of expensive, so I only did it for a few months, but it was super fun.

Our newspaper here used to be big and then it got smaller and smaller.

Now it's like a leaflet that's just kind of a story for local news everywhere these days in the internet era.

Anyway, since I have a subscription, they let me put out ten gift links per month.

So I will put a gift link in our show notes, which as many people as possible or would like, can use it all tweeted out as well.

And if you don't go to the Times on a regular basis, I think we give you five articles a month, so won't even matter.

But anyway, I'll do that.

So let's get on with the show.

Okay, so the European Union has now officially banned combustion vehicles from the year 2035 onwards.

Wait, I have to get the oil band thing going.

Oil band? We don't get to use that every day.

Brian we should get it.

We always have that.

We got to use the oil.

Okay, so, yeah, 2035 onward, no more new combustion vehicles can be sold in the EU, which is great.

There's another oil band, but it makes me think of so I knew we were going to talk about Tony Siba later on in the show.

Prognosticator tony Siba, who has been predicting the end of fossil fuels for quite some time now, and he's got a couple of new videos out on his YouTube page, if you want to look for them.

Tony Seba but one of the stats that struck me was because of what's going to happen with transportation as a service, which is like robotaxis or even just electric cars, one of his charts on the new video, and he's had similar charts to this before, but he thinks by 2030, it's 90 or 95% of miles driven, will be electric just by 2030.

So, as I've often wondered, it's like, is 2035 even going to do anything? I mean, it may be essentially already banned by 2030 anyway, just because once electric cars exist, and especially if they're autonomous, you're just going to start driving more miles electric.

Just like in our house, we have a gas car and an electric car, while we use the electric car way more often, like once that option is available to people, you know, the use of combustion cars to get around is going to absolutely plummet by 2030.

There's an interesting stat that I saw in one of those videos that I hadn't seen before, and it was that with transportation as a service now, we should explain that maybe that's like Uber without a driver, and you might subscribe like you do to Spotify or to Netflix, you might pay $20 a month.

You might pay $100 a month at first, you might pay an annual fee, but you'll get access to that car service whenever you need it to get to the subway station, to get to work, to whatever you want to do.

And it should be roughly one 10th of the cost of owning a car.

And he pointed out that it would be less than just the price of gas to travel that distance without the car, without the payment on the car or the charging of the car.

All that is less than just the gas for the same car.

So, yeah, it's quite a disruption.

And I know that many listeners don't believe it, and it is hard to believe that it's coming, but it will come, and it's a question of when.

And you can argue about that all day.

But I have a story from China later.

On that talks about what they are doing, and they're kind of following what Tesla is doing, but with more sensors.

We'll get to that later.

It's very interesting.

And the idea is, I don't know what you pay for your car, but you pay, you have to pay.

Well, I'm not going to get into your personal life, but a lot of people go, and they would have a car payment, okay? And they would pay four, five, six, $700 a month, depending on what kind of a car you buy.

And then you put gas in it, and you buy insurance and you do maintenance and all that over the course of however you decide to own that, whether you lease it for three years or own it for ten, it is going to cost you X amount of money per month.

And that disruption is it's going to be a lot cheaper to just say, okay, forget it.

I'm in Canada.

It's -1000 out the car is going to pull up in 30 seconds or two minutes after I punch it in on my app.

And it's going to be warm.

I don't have to warm it up.

It takes me somewhere.

I'm not going to get into an accident because it's going to drive perfectly and I'm going to do work.

I'm going to surf the web and check out what Elon is doing on Twitter, because that's very important or whatever.

That's the way the future is, and it's bound to happen by 2030.

And I was reading today, people think that a lot of different companies will probably reach that threshold at the same time, and it would be a question of who can deploy it the quickest.

And Tesla may or may not have an advantage.

We'll see on how that works out.

You know what we should do, Brian, next spring, a year after we did our automation test in your car? It's easy for me to say now because I'm committing to something six months from now, we should do it again, same trip, and see how it does then.

Hopefully the construction is gone.

It's funny because the car almost if we didn't intervene, the car would have gone into a construction site with an open pit.

Well, somebody actually did that the other day in our city and went into a pit.

Yeah, it was very unpleasant for them.

They're okay, although not an autonomous not an autonomous car, but they might have been driving pretty stupidly autonomous from their mind, perhaps.

Possibly.

Texting SMR fuel is mostly coming from malaria.

I saw this on our local newspaper, speaking of our local newspaper or pamphlet, and that is because three provinces in Canada have invested millions, committed millions of federal governments, committed a lot of millions stupidly.

To small modular reactors, which don't exist except on paper for the most part.

And the thing about these that this pointed out is there's a lot of different reactors, okay? But some of them, most of them require specialized uranium that is high in content.

It says natural or uranium is about zero 7% uranium 235.

And hellyu is a lot of these reactors are way up at 20%.

So that's many times more.

And only Russia has that.

And guess what? Russia's at war with the world, essentially.

Yeah.

Well, what about us? We have uranium here in our province.

Not that kind of stuff.

No, it's no good.

It's common blue collar uranium.

It's not the good stuff.

Right.

But guess what? Our premier here in our jurisdiction said, hey, we want the reactor that uses our uranium.

So that's a different kind of reactor.

And the fact that there are all kinds of different kinds of reactors on paper using different fuels just prevents it from ever being close to cost competitive, which is what we argue on the show.

And it's just so sanctions against Russia's cut off the supply.

So that's delaying this.

And the thing about SMRs is that they're going to take a long time, and the carbon in the atmosphere filling up like water in a glass.

And we have to fight that drip as fast as possible and get it down as fast as possible.

So, Canadian uranium mines, we do mine uranium here, but we've never built an enrichment capacity because can do reactors the reactors in Canada used to build in the run on fuel that doesn't need enriching.

So that's why we don't have it.

But Russia does.

Anyway, I just want to point that out.

It's one more check against SMRs overall that would delay and possibly make them less cost competitive.

Well, and that leads us into the next story, which also involves Russia.

And this is from the Guardian and the International Energy Agency has released new statistics that say that 2025 will be the peak year for carbon emissions.

And basically what they say in the report is this is accelerated from what it was because of Russia's invasion of Ukraine that everybody has kind of accelerated in a good way.

You want to point out that this has moved up.

Yeah, that's right, because no one really wants Russia's dirty oil.

Everyone's plans to accelerate the clean energy.

It's all accelerated.

And so 2025 is looking like the peak in terms of emissions.

Every year when the climate conference comes, we get inundated with all these studies and reports and it all drops at once and we should hire more people next year.

That's all I'm saying.

It's just a lot of stuff to COVID anyway.

The UK's Advertising Standards Authority has banned two HSBC advertisements, advertisements for misleading the public about its efforts to tackle climate change.

This is a bank.

What is HSBC stand for? Well, it was the Hong kong bank or something, but I don't know, I think they changed their name.

Anyway, they're one of the major banks in the world.

And during the climate conference, cop 26 in the UK last year, they were advertising things.

I've got a picture of it here.

It says, Climate change doesn't do borders and we're great.

So they're misleading the public, is what they are accused of, about its efforts to tackle climate change, marking the first time this is the first time ever the regulator has taken action against a bank for green washing.

And banks, as you know, Brian, are very important in this, but they can't be green washing.

And basically, this was seen at a bus stop in London and Bristol and other places like that, and two ads presented as a force for climate good, while making no reference to the climate's ongoing commitment to underwriting fossil fuel projects.

That's the issue.

Yeah.

Well, that's great.

I mean, we got to hold people to account when they're just green washing.

It sucks.

It does.

And banks, people are putting pressure on banks, shareholders and customers, and corporations are putting pressure on banks to stop this.

And I hate to say it, but fossil fuels are just they're fighting a big fight against losing their power and they have to lose it, they have to go away as fast as possible.

And it's just so much of this is going on that I'm glad people are fighting back against it.

Yeah.

And of course, in the midst of all this, we sometimes talk about hydrogen, which is, of course, one of the potential fuels of the future, especially green hydrogen.

And we reported a few weeks ago on the first hydrogen trains that are now operating in Germany.

Anyway, I've come across a new website I've started to read only recently.

The website is called Hydrogen Insight and it's a news site to do with news about hydrogen, but I'm still kind of assessing it.

I'm a little confused by this website because I know a lot of the stories seem to be negative about hydrogen, really, so I'm not quite sure what's going on there, if anyone knows what Hydrogen Insight is all about.

And not to say that it's not like fake news or anything, like it's a hit piece kind of website or anything, but I just assumed that a website called Hydrogen Insight would be kind of promoting the hydrogen industry.

But anyway, the German government has kind of released a report about the cost of this and basically decided that they wouldn't do any more hydrogen powered trains because it's not cost effective.

So the different types of trains so they're saying €849,000,000 for a hydrogen version of a specific train, compared to only 506,000,000 for a battery hybrid, or only €588,000,000 for a conventional electric train.

And a lot of trains in Europe run with overhead wires electrically, and it turns out that's the cheapest way, which is, again, one of the things we've always kind of wondered about hydrogen.

It is a potential part of the solution, but is it cost effective? And it turns out, in terms of trains, it's not.

And like other new technologies that we may or may not need, it's going to take a while to become cost effective if it does, if it ever has even a chance to.

But right now what we have to do is replace bad hydrogen with green hydrogen and work on that for the next ten years and get green hydrogen to replace anywhere where we use regular hydrogen or fossil fuel generated hydrogen, such as cement plants and fertilizer production and stuff like that.

Yeah.

And presumably these costs will improve over time and the hydrogen will get cleaner over time.

But if you can just build an electric train, maybe just do that.

So Poland is looking elsewhere for nuclear plants.

This is from the German news agency DW.

After years of shelves plans to build a civil nuclear capacity in Poland from scratch, the energy crunch caused by the war in Ukraine and lower gas supplies from Russia and lack of intermediate immediate renewable substitutes have kicked the issue back up to the political agenda.

So Poland is likely to choose the United States engineering firm Westinghouse Electric to build its first nuclear power plant and provide 49% equity financing for the project.

Stateowned Korea hydro nuclear power may also be involved.

So Korea in the United States in a separate and parallel private nuclear project.

However, Brian Greenpeace has been speaking out against this and says the issue of costs piled on unrealistic expectations, on issues of financing, based on unrealistic expectations of market changes delivers, in the end, an unfinanceable project.

So they don't think that this will be financed without government paying for it.

That's kind of the issue of nuclear these days is private financing.

Private investment is not there for it, and then nobody wants to do it.

So it's incumbent upon governments to do it or you and I taxpayers.

And that's not, in our view, a good thing.

So Greenpeace goes on, but at a certain moment, it will hit a wall, and there is less than a 1% chance that nuclear power plants in Poland will be added to the grid before 2050.

Well, I mean, I'm not sure where they get that precise figure of 1%.

It's an opinion, but still.

You know what? It bothers me, though, if it was private companies doing it, that's one thing.

But it's always going to be governments.

I mean, here in Canada, these SMRs that may or may not from the fossil fuel conservative governments that are driven by hanging on to fossil fuels with their buddies are going to waste all of our money and bankrupt us if we let them keep doing this.

Anyway, aside for the tweet of the week.

So Tony Seba, as you mentioned, is active.

They've wakened him up and dusted him off.

He is sort of a guru to us.

He's that guy who has been doing it for ten years, twelve years even, and it's ridiculous.

His targets are still lining up, his predictions are still there.

And it's not hugely innovative stuff he's doing.

It's a cost curve.

If a new technology comes and you make enough of it, the cost of it goes down and the adoption of it goes up.

Yeah.

And I think the best statistic from all of his presentations, and he repeated this again in the ones that he just released on YouTube, is the transition from using the horse to using the car in North America in the early 20th century.

And the bulk of it, from something like 10% penetration to 80% penetration, happened in only ten years.

And that's in spite of the fact of there being basically no roads and no gas stations.

And you know what? They asked people? What do you want? Do you want a car? They said, no, I want a faster horse.

They didn't realize that a car was not only a faster horse.

It wasn't a one to one comparison.

It kept you dry and safe and warm, and it didn't poop on you and things like that.

Well, I had an AMC Gramline that did that, but that's another story.

So there's a thing in his presentation where he showed newspaper highlines headlines advocating for eating horse meat after the transition started because there was too many horses, which is exactly what happened.

Yeah, there was all these horses that we no longer needed because everyone was driving cars and literally people ate.

Oh, sounds stringy to me.

I apologize for the horses up there.

I know we have a few listing.

So Victor wrote to Tony on Tony Seba on Twitter.

He says, Will smaller economies in Far East or Africa benefit more with this phase of the transfer information to solar? And Tony says, absolutely.

When we convert to solar power and green the grid in Africa, they're basically leapfrogging from nothing right, to solar.

They don't have to build a bunch of power lines or a grid.

They're just going to have localized solar wind and battery and a superpower system without having to build an outdated grid.

And because they're in Africa and close to the equator, they're going to have the cheapest the more sun you have, the more lower the cost of the solar per unit of electricity.

So they'll have the cheapest electricity in the world in Africa, and with that, you can get investment.

You can get industry investment.

Where do you want to go where the cheapest electricity is if you're using electricity for your company or corporation or factory or whatever.

So just like many countries leaf frog to a cell phone infrastructure without having to build a landline telephony system.

So, yeah, there's a lot of places in Africa that don't have landlines.

They never did.

And they have cell phones now and they didn't need them and it was good to just leave frogs.

And he says also Sunnier countries will have much lower cost of energy and that does attract and improve the quality of life and solve many issues such as transportation, food and water.

So all that and desalination and the treatment of water will help those countries, even if they're poor and don't have access to a lot of water.

Hey everyone, we like to hear from you.

We like to hear from you all the time.

Contact us at our Gmail address cleanenergy [e-mail].

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That means it's time for the lightning round.

Brian a fastpaced look of the week in clean energy and climate news.

Beyond meat is getting into plant based steak.

What do you think? You could eat that? Well, I mean, you know, I'll try it.

Sure.

The new product, meant to mimic an expensive cut of beef, arrives in over 50 Kroger and Walmart locations across the United States soon and is also available at some Elderson's locations as well as other retailers.

Each ten ounce package contains seared plantbased steak tips in bitesized pieces and is priced at 799.

And the product is made of ingredients including fava beans and wheat gluten.

So if you've got a gluten problem, look elsewhere for your fake beef fake steaks.

I'm curious.

You are fake steak curious.

Officially.

Get that printed on the Tshirt someone some of the models emphasized in GM's EVs for Everyone ad campaign, which I keep seeing bryan everywhere.

Like the blazer.

EV.

The Equinox EV might not be widely available as soon as anticipated.

Even though they're advertising the hell out of them, they're pushing that back six months.

So already we have a delay and I'm not happy about that.

Yeah, it sounds like battery supply issues.

Brazil's election is a major victory in the fight against climate change, according to many under Bolasnaro Yup.

I don't even like saying his name.

It's like saying Satan.

Deforestation of the Amazon sword to a 15 year high, with scientists warning that the world's largest rainforest was nearing a tipping point beyond which there would be irreversible consequences to the entire planet.

So this is good.

It was a tight election.

He has not conceded yet.

Do you think you'll concede? Yeah, it doesn't sound good.

We'll see how that plays out as the future of other elections in 2024 happen.

GMC Hummer EVs are sold out for two years or more.

By the time you get one, they'll be old news.

It will be like oh that old thing? I mean, that's a long time.

It's true.

There's a certain cool factor for these things and cool factor doesn't last forever.

It's time for a cesfest fact a 2019 study found that oceans had sucked up 90% of the heat gained by the planet between 1971 and 2010.

Another found that has absorbed 20 sixtillion joules of heat in 2020.

And that is equivalent to two Hiroshima bombs per second.

That doesn't sound good.

It does not sound good.

Carbon tracker donors with fossil fuel links helped fund Rishi tunax race for PM.

Yay for them.

Brian.

Yeah.

So this is a new UK Prime Minister, super rich guy, as you pointed out last week.

And yeah, I mean, lots of politicians are funded by fossil fuels, so we probably shouldn't be too surprised.

Why didn't he fund his own damn thing so he's not beholden to anybody? You know, if you're that exactly King Charles to host a reception ahead of cop 27 despite not going himself because the government won't allow him.

It will bring together 200 international business leaders, decision makers and NGOs.

And Brian, we still have not been invited.

And I keep refreshing the inbox, but nothing.

I can't believe it.

From utility dive, texas solar and wind resources saved consumers nearly $28 billion over the last twelve years.

That means that the electricity consumed by Texans was $28 billion cheaper over twelve years because of renewables being in the grid.

And that is growing rapidly.

Yeah, Texas has more renewables, I think, than most people realize.

Clean technica Mercedes is going all in on electric in general.

The average lifespan for an automotive model is seven years.

A Mercedes EClass is due for an update next year.

But Brian, it's going to be its last.

Mercedes plans to put out only battery electric new vehicles on the road by 2030 and will introduce only new electric platforms.

Of course, you and I know that's too late.

You should cancel everything now.

But it is a signal to the investment world and to the world.

The Ram all electric pickup truck is going to debut at this year's Consumer Electronics Show.

I guess that's everyone except for Toyota, Brian, that's all the pickup trucks now are going electric.

And Toyota will be bankrupt by the time they make that announcement from BBC News.

Switching to renewable energy could save trillions, an Oxford University study says.

Our central conclusion is that we should go full speed ahead with the green transition because it's going to save us money.

And there's lots of studies on that coming out now and, you know, it's only going to get cheaper, so we're going to save even more money as we go along with the cost.

Prices are dropping rapidly.

Audio is cutting production of its flagship AA luxury sedan.

That's his main car.

They're cutting production because everyone's buying the electric Audi Etron battery electric vehicle, so they're increasing production of that one electric.

Gping Motors has announced its latest EV has received a permit for autonomous driving tests on public roads.

According to Chinese automaker, the G Nine is the first unmodified massproduced commercial vehicle to qualify for such tests.

So this is like Waymo doing tests in San Francisco and La.

But they've got a million dollars worth of equipment rotating and radar and things on the roof, and you can see them from a mile away coming.

Whereas the Japanese Motors G Nine is like a Tesla, an SUV for a small SUV.

It's got all the sensors built in, and yet they've got permission to do these robotaxi testing in streets of China, which I'm told are very hard to drive in at times.

And I saw a test kind of like an FSD autopilot version, did pretty well.

There were arguments in the comments about whether it was better or equal to Tesla, but it was kind of doing the same thing.

But they do have more sensors than Tesla does.

Yeah, that's exciting.

That is our show for this week.

We'd like to hear from you once again.

I'm going to throw my email address out.

There it is.

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Drop everything.

Write us a note.

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If you're new to So, remember to subscribe on your podcast app to get new episodes delivered every week.

And we leave you this week with the last paragraph of the New York Times Magazine article Beyond Catastrophe with a quote from renowned Canadian climate scientist Catherine Hage on the future.

We've come a long way and we've still got a long way to go, says Haijo, the Canadian scientist, comparing the world's progress to a long hike.

We're halfway there.

Look at the great view behind you.

We actually made it up halfway and it was a hard slog.

So take a breather.

Pat yourself on the back, but then look up.

That's where we have to go.

So let's keep on going.

I look forward to talking to you next week.

you.