I truly hope Prime Minister Carney doesn’t drop the mandate.

There are two very important parts of the enabling legislation that too many people just don’t seem to know, and it’s skewing the online discussions everywhere:

1. PHEV’s are still going to be allowed after 2035. So if you are so enamoured with giving your hard earned money to the oil and gas companies you’ll still be able to do so for decades to come;
2. The mandate doesn’t affect used vehicles at all;
3. Companies that miss the legislated targets can instead get credits by building out EVSE (charging) infrastructure. So for all those online pundits who think we should drop the mandate because we don’t have enough charging infrastructure, we get that infrastructure by keeping the mandates, and it gets paid for by the companies selling too many gas powered cars (and not taxpayers).

PM Carney needs to tell the automotive executives who say they can’t sell enough EVs/PHEVs to start building out infrastructure. It may be worthwhile to re-balance some of the timelines and how much the infrastructure credits are worth, but dumping them entirely is bad for Canada as a whole.

And nothing of value was lost.

Let’s be very clear here: HOUSING IS THE RESPONSIBILITY OF THE PROVINCES.

As well, PROPERTY TAX (TAX ON LAND) IS THE RESPONSIBILITY OF PROVINCES.

So if by “this government” you mean the Carney Liberals you’re right in the sense they won’t do anything about this — but the reason for that is they can’t. That’s not their Constitutional role, and the levers they can pull in this regard are minimal (and mostly revolve around either mortgage insurance, regulating the financial sector, and dolling money out to Provinces).

If you’re upset about housing, you should be upset at your Provincial Government, not the Feds.

The difference I would note is that in North America those 240V plugs aren’t likely going to be on a 10A circuit — usually they’re going to be more in the range of 30A to 50A, as they’re typically designated in homes for use by a dryer or a range (and if you’re lucky, in the garage for an EV).

That’s not to say you couldn’t run a lower amperage 240V circuit — there just aren’t a lot of practical uses for doing so (I believe some air conditioners only need 15A 240V circuits, but in my (limited) experience these are usually hard-wired, and aren’t plug-in devices).

They could be living wonderful lives in a tropical paradise, and they just dont want to share, you don't know."

Like Whitman, Price, and Hadad. You remember them‽

(1812 wasn't Canadians, it was the British)

This isn’t accurate in the slightest. Fencible and Militia units were formed in New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, and the Canadas (upper and lower) from local civilians, who fought in a variety of battles throughout 1812. These civilians were in fact called “Canadians” at the time as well.

And that’s to say nothing of all of the Native peoples of Upper and Lower Canada who aided in the fight.

Ultimately the British held command, but many, many Canadians participated and were involved as well.

The big problem here is that we’re eventually going to hit global peak oil use. Building out new infrastructure like this takes nearly a decade to complete, and paying it off usually takes multiple decades. If it’s going to take you 20 years at 100% capacity to pay off, and 10 years to build, and we reach peak oil earlier than 30 years from now (the IEA predicts 2030, however other international agencies push that out as far as 2050), then building extra capacity just doesn’t make sense.

If the IEA models are correct, then we wouldn’t even be finished expanding or building any new pipelines before global oil demand starts to drop. That risks a big drop in prices, which makes it more difficult to pay off any new pipelines once they come online as transit fees bottom out. And then taxpayers are stuck holding the bag.

Thanks for adding that — yes, you can do this with any electric motor; EV motors have simply been optimized for this purpose, and can generate power in the kW range. They have the necessary wiring for handling high voltage, along with built-in cooling tubing/conduits.

They’re as close to a drop-in-and-spin electrical generator as you can get. And unlike gas engines they don’t really ever wear out — so it wouldn’t be a surprise to see these become highly available and pretty inexpensive as EV uptake continues to increase, and as we finally start seeing huge numbers of current EVs being taken off the roads due to age in 15 years or so.

Used EV cells are already starting to find use in industry. In Japan, Nissan resells pairs of used Leaf batteries that pass their testing inside an inverter pack that can provide emergency power or as a generator replacement. On top of that, they have repurposed 16 Leaf EV batteries to provide backup for and smooth out fluctuations from a solar power array in Japan. And Canada’s own Moment Energy specializes in building grid-scale storage from used EV batteries.

(Here’s an example of a Canadian company that resells used EV batteries and motors for use in DIY projects).

Work in this area is admittedly low right now — but mostly because in the 15 years since the first readily available commercial EVs started shipping, the vast bulk of them are still on the road today. So EV battery supply is pretty low right now (I’d imagine mostly being from EVs that have been in accidents which haven’t affected the battery itself). But with EV adoption increasing that supply will also increase, albeit with a 15 - 20 year lag.

And the motors don’t really ever wear out. I have no doubt some company out there will start using them for small-ish wind turbines once a reliable second hand supply is available. I agree for now that’s most likely to be in the domain of hobbies to, but if it becomes easy to source hundreds of EV motors cheaply that I don’t see why they wouldn’t be used to create small, and relatively inexpensive power stations for remote communities.

The possibilities are pretty huge here. On top of that, once these second-life uses for EV batteries and motors have finally exhausted their usefulness, they’re 95+% recyclable into new battery packs and motors, allowing the cycle to begin anew. It’s pretty exciting stuff — which is why I’m hopeful long term that the Canadian governments investments into both mineral mining and battery production pay off — EVs are just the tip of that iceberg.

E-bikes are already cheaper than even the cheapest new car. If people want an e-bike instead of a car it’s already affordable. Having a Federal Rebate isn’t going to move any more e-bikes, and isn’t going to convince more than a handful of people to stop driving and cycle instead.

The end result will simply be that we would still have too many gas-guzzlers on the road spewing CO2 and other pollutants into the atmosphere (right next to bike lanes, where cyclists have to breathe that crap in). The CO2 reductions for the cost would be significantly less than incentivizing EV sales. The current incentives are supposed to help reduce the cost of EVs so they are comparable in price to the gas guzzlers; e-bikes don’t need an incentive as they’re already pretty cheap.

Governments would do better by investing in better cycling infrastructure than providing a rebate for something most people won’t use anyway.

The motors in EVs are designed to also provide regenerative services — the charge you put into the battery gets extended by having all “breaking” re-generate power in the battery. So if you’re in a situation where you’re driving down a mountain, you can wind up in a situation where you’re can have more charge when you get to the bottom as you had at the top.

(This is a problem EVs actually have to design around — they’ll turn off the regenerative breaking if your battery is at 100% so you don’t risk overcharging it driving down a long, steep decline).

When removed from the car, you can use the motors like this in a permanent installation. Anything that provides rotational power can then be used to generate electricity — a wind turbine, a water wheel, steam, 2 thousand hamsters — whatever you have on hand. Use that power to turn the motor, and you get electricity out the other end.

These systems aren’t passive, so an EV sitting in a parking lot isn’t going to generate electricity. You need movement from an external source to turn the motors to get power out.

Automotive pollution causes thousands of excess deaths every year. It is also linked to a number of negative health outcomes, and has a correlation to autism in children.

Used EV parts have the possibility of really transforming our society — EV batteries that are no longer suitable for transportation can still hold enough charge to power a home for a day or two; couple that with used EV motors which can generate electricity, and each EV that can no longer be driven is effectively a cheap and ready power plant that can power a home or office, or can help provide grid-scale storage on the cheap.

Everyone is going to benefit from a (near) fully EV world.

Apple recently removed the USB-A only SuperDrive, and replaced the Magic Mouse with a USB-C variant.

Other than perhaps old-stock, the only current Lightning device Apple is currently selling anywhere is the iPhone SE, which appears due for replacement soon.

Agreed — this is overall a really, really good thing for consumers. Now that my MacBook Pro, iPad Pro, and iPhone Pro all use USB-C it’s trivial to swap devices between them and generally they all just work. The USB-C Ethernet adaptor I have for my MBP work with my iPad Pro and iPhone Pro. As do Apple’s USB-A/USB-C/HDMI adaptors. And my USB-C external drives and USB sticks. And my PS5 DualSense controllers. And the 100W lithium battery pack with 60W USB-PD output. Heck, even the latest Apple TV remote is USB-C.

AFAIK, this is the first time ever that there is one single connector that works across their entire lineup of devices. Even if you go back to the original Apple 1 (when it was the only device they sold), it had several different connector types. Now we have one connector to rule them all, and while the standard has its issues, it’s quite a bit better than the old days when everything had a different connector.

I’m still of the opinion that Apple benefitted from this legislation, and that they know it. They never fought this decision particularly hard — and ultimately, it’s only going to help Apple move forward.

I’m more than old enough to remember the last time Apple tried changing connectors from the 30-pin connector to the Lightning connector. People (and the press) were apoplectic that Apple changed the connector. Everything from cables to external speakers to alarm clocks and other accessories became useless as soon as you upgraded your iPod/iPhone — the 30-pin connector had been the standard connector since the original iPod, and millions of devices used it. Apple took a ton of flak for changing it — even though Lightning was a pretty significant improvement.

That’s not happening this time, as Apple (and everyone else) can point to and blame the EU instead. If Apple had made this change on their own, they would likely have been pilloried in the press (again) for making so many devices and cables obsolete nearly overnight — but at least this way they can point at the EU and say “they’re the ones making us do this” and escape criticism.

The big question I’ve never really seen answered anywhere is how does CCS stand up to geologic timeframes?

The Earth isn’t static; we already know of natural methane pockets that have opened up and leaked into the atmosphere because of geologic changes to the earth. What will prevent this from happening in 200, 500, 1000, or 10000 years? Isn’t CCS just ultimately punting the problem to a future generation, and pretending like we’ve done something to fix our problems?

Even today amongst a certain segment of Americans they still revere the concept of “Manifest Destiny”, whereby the entirety of North America will eventually be under American (and traditionally, white Christian) rule.

This wasn’t always envisioned as being done via force; typically it was simply believed that the American system was so perfect and blessed by God that everyone in North America would eventually want to be part of it, and would simply join the US as an inevitable eventuality. To their minds, the entire concept of full American control of North America was ordained by God itself, and so couldn’t be wrong.

Of course, as with any pseudo-religious prophesies when the expectation doesn’t happen some will want to cause/force it to happen. When their Manifest Destiny doesn’t come to fruition, it’s not because of a fault in the concept (to their minds), but that the Canadians/Mexicans (and now Greenlanders?) are standing in the way of inevitability.

There are Americans who continue to believe they’ll eventually control all of North America. You can’t just ignore them and pretend they don’t exist.

That’s quite a straw man argument he’s setup there.

My main problem with this argument is that he’s misdefined “centrism”, and then decided to beat up on the wrong definition. I think we can all agree that his definition of “centrism” would be pretty weak and unpopular politically.

But what he’s defined here isn’t centrism. Steve’s definition here is that the centrist looks at a single policy, looks at how the left views it, looks at how the right views it, and then tries to craft some in between policy for each and every policy on the map.

Now that can happen with every party on certain policies — but more typically centrism picks some policies from the left, and some policies from the right. It’s led less by ideology than by science and a notion of “what’s best” — and sometimes what’s best is a leftist policy, and sometimes it’s a rightist policy.

And it’s not hard to see that this is true with the Trudeau Liberal Government. Marijuana legalization is very much a leftist policy. The National Child Care Plan is 100% a leftist policy. So is gun control. And on the flip side, Carbon Pricing was a 100% rightist policy, as it’s a minimalist market solution to the problem of climate change (one which people need to remember was originally proposed by right-wing think tanks. The leftist policy would have been heavy legislation against industry directly). Modifying the Safe Third Country Agreement also followed the Right’s playbook. As was joining the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans Pacific Partnership.

If you want to boil the three ideologies down to their cores, at the extreme right we have a purely free market system with minimalist government and few social services. At the extreme left side you have a system that heavily regulates and controls markets, but with strong social support systems and larger government bureaucracies. True centrism is effectively the notion that the free market is best in some situations, but government is better in others. For example, that the free market is best for making and selling smart phones (rightist), but government is better at providing health care (leftist).

That is centrism — and it’s not difficult to look at the bulk of Liberal Party of Canada policies and see that this is the general pattern they follow. Not some simplistic “let’s look at what the left wants and what the right wants on a specific policy and craft something down the middle”. Centrists pick some rightist policies, and some leftist policies. That is what makes them centrists.

Sure, but electrolysis is only around 30% efficient — so you need 3 units of energy to produce the hydrogen to drive a vehicle x distance, whereas a BEV would only need one unit to travel the same distance.

That is, you can use the electricity generated from that nuclear power plant to drive three times the distance with a fleet of BEVs than you’ll get out of a fleet of hydrogen powered vehicles.

Ask your dad if he knows why people steal catalytic converters from ICE vehicles.

For anyone not aware, it’s because they’re filled with Palladium — a precious rare earth metal. One where 40% of the world’s supply comes from Russia.

Palladium’s prevalence in the Earth’s crust is about 0.015 ppm. Lithium’s prevalence is 20 ppm — or around 1300 times more abundant than palladium. Which is why people steal catalytic converters in the first place.