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Mar 04
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Yamaha Motor First to Use Green Aluminum in Japanese Motorcycles

By General Posts

Will gradually adopt low-carbon aluminum in the drive toward carbon-neutral materials

Yamaha Motor announced today that it has reached an agreement with an aluminum ingot supplier for the procurement of green aluminum, and began using it as a raw material for parts in Yamaha motorcycles in February 2023. This is the first time for green aluminum to be used in Japanese motorcycles and Yamaha Motor plans to gradually expand its usage in models going forward.

“Green aluminum” is aluminum that is refined using renewable energy sources to emit around 60% less CO2 in its manufacture compared to traditionally refined aluminum. Of course, the percentage of less emission by renewable energy depends per manufacturer. Aluminum parts account for 12% to 31%. of the total vehicle weight of a motorcycle, so adopting green aluminum is one effective approach for reducing CO2 emissions from the raw material manufacturing part of a product’s life cycle (falls under Scope 3 Category 1 emissions for supply chains).

Through the development of its engineering and production technologies and expertise, Yamaha Motor has actively pushed the use of recycled aluminum, which now comprises some 80% of Yamaha Motor’s aluminum usage. This introduction of green aluminum is meant to complement this and will be employed for parts that still cannot be manufactured with recycled materials. As a first step, Yamaha Motor will utilize green aluminum for certain parts in its large-displacement and off-road competition motorcycles, and Yamaha Motor plans to expand the number of models using the material in the future as available supply volumes allow.

In line with the Yamaha Motor Group Environmental Plan 2050, the company is aiming to achieve carbon neutrality throughout all of its business activities—including its entire supply chain—by 2050. To realize this, Yamaha Motor has set a goal of switching to 100% sustainable materials by 2050, such as adopting more plant-derived resin materials, developing recyclable polypropylene, and adopting green materials and other recycled materials for its motorcycles manufactured in Japan and overseas.

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Mar 17
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Different Types of Fire Extinguishers for your Workshop

By General Posts

Different types of Fire? Yes !
Know the Class Category for Fire Extinguishers

by Keith Dooley and Roger Tunsley from ehow.com

Auto garages are full of electrical equipment, gasoline, oil and chemicals, any of which can cause or make a fire worse.

For this reason, it is best that your workshop is equipped with relevant type/s of fire extinguishers to deal with different types of fire.

Fires are classified by the type of material that’s burning.

There’s a broad international agreement on fire classifications in Australia, Asia and Europe.

But the American classifications differ.

CLICK HERE To Read this key Tip for your DIY Workshop or full-fledged Garage business.

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Jan 02
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Try the Climate Quiz by CO2 Coalition

By General Posts

The Great Climate Change Debate is one of the “hottest” issues before the public and policy makers today.

How much do you know about the subject?

Or possibly, the real question is one attributed to American humorist Will Rogers: “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble, it’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”

Find out your Climate IQ by taking our Climate Quiz: the answers may surprise you.

CLICK HERE To Take the Climate Quiz Now

The CO2 Coalition was established in 2015 as a 501(c)(3) for the purpose of educating thought leaders, policy makers, and the public about the important contribution made by carbon dioxide to our lives and the economy.

Dec 20
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Climate Dogma Killed Biden’s “Build Back Better”

By General Posts

by Michael Shellenberger

A half trillion dollars to subsidize renewables would have raised energy prices, worsened inflation, and undermined decarbonization. But what do we do now?

The centerpiece of President Joe Biden’s legislative agenda is dead. Senator Joe Manchin today announced that he could not support Biden’s “Build Back Better” legislation which consisted of $1.7 trillion in new spending and would have added $158 billion to the national debt over the next decade, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. The largest component of spending, $570 billion, was for renewables, electric cars, and other climate change investments.

Progressives, environmentalists, and Democrats are furious with Sen. Manchin, but it was their own climate and renewables dogmatism that doomed the legislation. Democratic Senators could have written legislation that expanded nuclear energy and natural gas, the two main drivers of decarbonization, which are strongly supported by Manchin, and Republicans, but instead investments went overwhelmingly to solar panels, wind turbines, and electric cars.

It’s true that there were good things in Build Back Better, and that one of the worst climate provisions, the Clean Energy Performance Program, was already removed. Build Back Better included a tax credit for existing nuclear power plants, funding for advanced nuclear fuels, funding for fusion R&D, and financial support for communities hurt by the transition to renewables.

But the money for nuclear would not have made much if any difference to the operating of nuclear plans. Nuclear plants in California, Massachusetts and New York are being shut down, despite already being profitable, for ideological reasons. Legislatures in less anti-nuclear states like Illinois, New Jersey, and Connecticult step in to save their plants when they need to. And higher electricity prices due to natural gas shortages are making nuclear plants in other states even more profitable.

Of Build Back Better’s $550 billion for climate and energy, the vast majority of it was for weather-dependent renewables and their enabling infrastructure, including $29 billion for a “green bank” program to finance renewables and $10 billion for rural electric cooperatives to switch to renewables. Such subsidies were being offered despite years of false claims by many of the legislation’s sponsors and advocates that solar and wind were already cheaper than grid electricity.

Most dangerously, Build Back Better would have undermined electricity reliability, raised energy prices, and made the U.S. more dependent on foreign energy imports. Over-reliance on weather-dependent renewables in Texas and California, and under-investment in reliable, weather-independent nuclear and natural gas plants, led directly to deadly blackouts in those states.

I testified as much to this problem to Manchin’s Senate Commitee on Energy and Natural Resources, and Sen. Manchin made clear today that the role of renewables in making electricity expensive and unreliable was one of his top concerns. “The main thing that we need is dependability and reliability,” he said this morning. “If not, you’ll have what happened in Texas and California.” In his statement, Manchin said, “If enacted, the bill will also risk the reliability of our electric grid and increase our dependence on foreign supply chains.”

Adding weather-dependent energy sources can only make grids more resilient if significantly more money is spent maintaining reliable power sources to make up for their lost revenue and lost operation hours. That’s what Germany has done, deciding to burn more coal rather than continue operating its nuclear plants, which it’s shutting down, or rely too heavily on imported natural gas.

Manchin is also right that Build Back Better would increase dependence on energy imports. Over 80% of the world’s solar panels are made in China by incarcerated Uighyr Muslims living in concentration camps and against whom the Chinese government is committing “genocide,” according to the U.S. State Department.

Build Back Better contained incentives for the return of solar manufacturing to the U.S., but they were far too small to compete with solar panels made by incarcerated people in China’s already-built and heavily-subsidized mega-factories. Nor did they deal with the coming solar panel waste crisis.

“We have been energy independent for the first time for the first time in 60, 70 years or more,” noted Manchin, “and we should not have to depend on other parts of the world to give us the energy, or be able to hold us hostage for the energy, or the foreign supply chains that we need for the products we need every day.”

Everywhere in the world that solar and wind are deployed at scale they increase electricity prices dramatically. California increased its electricity prices seven times more than the rest of the U.S. over the last decade. Germany has the highest electricity prices in Europe, and is breaking new records with the energy shortage caused by lack of adequate natural gas supplies globally.

And now the entire world is paying the price of climate alarmism and renewables dogmatism. Climate shareholder activism and the ESG “sustainable” investment movement caused governments and private sector actors to underinvest in oil and gas production and over-invest in weather-dependent renewables. The result is historic shortages of natural gas and oil.

For the last several weeks Europen and Asian nations have been breaking records for the cost of electricity, due to shortages of natural gas supplies. Oil prices are set to rise to $125 per barrel next year and $150 in 2023, and U.S. winter natural gas prices will be 30% higher this year. Even nuclear-heavy France, which became over-invested in renewables and natural gas, and under-invested in nuclear, is seeing record electricity prices.

But what then, does it mean for climate change? And what should be done to safeguard American energy supplies going forward?

Dec 12
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Energy Poverty Kills

By General Posts

From Center for Industrial Progress by Alex Epstein

Last week we looked at the need for a process of producing energy that is cheap, plentiful, and reliable—and we saw that solar and wind cannot produce cheap, reliable energy.

How Germany embraced solar and wind and ended up in energy poverty

Let’s take a look at this in practice. Germany is considered by some to be the best success story in the world of effective solar and wind use, and you’ll often hear that they get a large percentage of their energy from solar and wind.

You can see here on this chart how this claim was made and why it’s not accurate.

First of all, this is just a chart of electricity. Solar and wind are only producing electricity and half of Germany’s energy needs also include fuel and heating. So solar and wind never contribute half as much to Germany’s energy needs as this chart would imply.

But that’s not the biggest problem. What you notice here is that there’s certain days and times where there are large spikes, but there are also periods where there’s relatively little. What that means is that you can’t rely on solar and wind ever. You always have to have an infrastructure that can produce all of your electricity independent of the solar and wind because you can always go a long period with very little solar and wind.

So then why are the solar and wind necessary? Well, you could argue that they’re not and that adding them onto the grid will impose a lot of costs.

In Germany, electricity prices have more than doubled since 2000 when solar and wind started receiving massive subsidies and favorable regulations, and their electricity prices are three to four times what we would pay in the U.S. (Because of its low reliability, solar, and wind energy options require an alternative backup—one that’s cheap, plentiful, and reliable—to make it work, thus creating a more expensive and inefficient process.)

Nuclear and hydro

Fossil fuels are not the only reliable sources. There are two others that don’t generate CO2 that are significant and are more limited, but still significant contributors. Those are hydroelectric energy and nuclear energy.

Hydroelectric energy can be quite affordable over time, but it’s limited to locations where you have the right physical situation to produce hydroelectric power.

Nuclear is more interesting because nuclear doesn’t have the problems of hydro but it’s been very restricted throughout history so today in the vast majority of cases it’s considerably more expensive than say electricity from natural gas. This may change in the future and one thing we’ll discuss under policy is how we need to have the right policies so that all energy technologies can grow and flourish, if indeed the creators of those technologies can do it.

The reality of energy poverty: a story

To illustrate just how important it is to have cheap, plentiful, and reliable energy, I want to share a story I came across while doing research for my book, The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels. This is a story about a baby born in the very poor country of Gambia.

The baby was born underweight and premature, but not in such a way that would be a big problem in say, the United States. In the United States, the solution would have been obvious: incubation. This technology would almost certainly bring this baby up to be completely healthy, and if you met the baby later in life you would never know that there had ever been a problem.

Unfortunately, in the Gambia, in this particular hospital, they needed something that billions of people in the world do not have, and that is reliable electricity.

Without reliable electricity, the hospital didn’t even contemplate owning an incubator, the one thing this baby desperately needed to survive.

Without access to this technology, the baby could not survive on her own, and sadly, she died. I think this story reminds us of what it means to have access to cheap, plentiful, and reliable energy, and how having more energy gives us the ability to improve our lives.

To summarize what we discussed, if you can’t afford energy you don’t have energy, and if energy is scarce or unreliable, then you don’t have energy when you need it. It’s not just enough to have energy, the energy and the process to create it has to be cheap, plentiful, and reliable.