Westministenders: Canada Plus and the Transition Phase

[RedToothBrush]

As we approach the 31st January, we slowly tick towards exit and transition.

Things are not yet signed off though the No Deal planning has quietly been stood down with no press release and the government have said they won't talk about trade deals post 31st Jan because the public are bored of them and don't understand.

The new EU president has said that the UK doesn't have time to make a full deal with the EU before 31st December with a deadline which isn't flexible.

We still have no idea what the government plans are. We still have many EU citizens feeling very vulnerable.

Perhaps we should start talking about this rather than Royals for a couple of weeks...

Needs to be a new tax structure on electric for cars to replace that charged on fossil fuels or we pay more vat/income tax?

For a replaceable battery pack they would need to a universal standard and weight would need to plummet, ruling out ALL the cars currently on the market or design stage.

I also do not feel we have the power generating capability for too many electric cars, lorries etc. let alone the fast charge infrastructure.

I see the EU has announced some strict climate change rules recently, made all the easier now we aren't part of it anymore..

What happened to running cars on chip fat ? or did the low carb revolution do away with that idea ?

I suppose we could make ethanol from potatoes and power hydrogen cars that way, if its now frowned on to eat them

Just spotted this on CNBC - announcement today:

"The Hyundai Motor Company and Kia Motors Corporation have made a 100 million euro ($111.65 million) investment in Arrival, a little-known U.K. based start-up specializing in electric vehicles."

"According to Arrival, the investment values the company, which was established in 2015, at a staggering 3 billion euros. J.P. Morgan led the firm’s funding round and valuation."

"In an announcement Thursday, it was explained that the new partnership would allow for the “co-development of eco-friendly vans and other products for logistics, on-demand ride-hailing, and shuttle service companies.”

"Hyundai will invest 80 million euros, with Kia contributing 20 million."

www.cnbc.com/2020/01/16/uk-electric-vehicle-start-up-arrival-values-itself-at-3point3-billion.html

Also on CNBC -
"BERLIN, Jan 13 (Reuters) - The shift to electric vehicles could cost 410,000 jobs in Germany by 2030, daily Handelsblatt reported on Monday, citing government advisers."

"In engines and transmissions’ production alone, around 88,000 jobs will be at risk, the newspaper said, citing a report by the National Platform for the Future of Mobility (NPM), an advisory council for the government."

www.cnbc.com/2020/01/13/reuters-america-more-than-400000-german-jobs-at-risk-in-switch-to-electric-cars--handelsblatt.html

13 JAN Opel (PSA Group)Targets German Plants to Cut 4,100 Jobs and Revamp Business;

www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-01-13/opel-prepares-cuts-of-up-to-4-100-jobs-as-carmakers-retrench

Sorry I get most of my science these days from the infinite monkey cage podcast and my humour from the front line of the NHS

Wow those vehicles leaving Germany must be coming to the UK.

Oops no

In my social circle, people are telling me about how they belong to schemes to hire electric vehicles or electric bicycles as needed for a day / week / month ...

We are talking about going to one car instead of two. DH cycles a lot and the cost of hiring a car for a weekend starts to make this look attractive.

I'm surprised we have not started to put in lanes for multiple occupicy into UK cities like in LA and San Francisco tbh.

I'd hate the idea, but realistically its starting to get harder to argue against.

I'm surprised we have not started to put in lanes for multiple occupicy into UK cities

We have some in my city, on a couple of major routes. But we need more.

If you live in a terrace house with no parking, how do you charge your car?

The whole idea of charging your car seems very much based on the middle class idea that you will have a private parking space right outside your house.

The idea works much better in the US. Not so much in Europe as a whole.

If we go down that route we should have made it a planning requirement for all new builds to have an electric car charging point as part of builders obligations, in the same way you'd expect other services. We all know this is never going to happen just as much as we know all employers aren't going to provide electric charge points at work in the car parks they don't have.

Straight away you have electric car inequality and thus those who can get to work via car and those who can't.

Never mind all the other ins and out of the technology unless it's supported far more heavily by government in a way that addresses these basics you are going to have a lot of other issues springing up from this.

Of course we could just invest in good old fashioned bus routes, but that'd be daft wouldn't it?

I an genuinely enjoying the electric car discussion, especially @DGRossetti's suggestion of ethanol. It would give country moonshine quite a different meaning...

From a personal viewpoint, I gave up my car when I started to work from home and DH cycles to his workplace. We can walk everywhere we need to go on a weekly basis, with the exception of the swimming pool. The only reason we still have DH's climate-killing people-carrier is to visit his parents in Cornwall and for camping. The minute electric tech takes off to the point we can do a 300-mile trip I will sign up.

Realistically, we are going to end up with two or three solutions in the UK, because there is such a big disparity between areas of the country. Rural areas such as Cornwall have missed out on infrastructure over the past 50 years and barring a titanic shift in politics, that's going to continue. If AI driving takes off, we may see the resumption of some bus/tram services down that way but privately-owned hybrid cars will probably be favoured.

In the city and the suburbs, the opposite will occur. I happily lived in London without a car for years and I can see this being replicated in larger cities across the UK, especially if you can have an AI taxi on-demand and easy public transport. Coventry is developing a Very Light Railway system (which reminds me of London's DLR), so that could have an impact on the West Midlands, at least.

Reducing car-ownership in the cities would be wonderful if it's done right. Few parked cars on the pavements, fewer traffic jams, lower air pollution, etc. The flip side is keeping it accessible for people with disabilities.

@RedToothBrush, to be fair, the terraced conundrum is already being puzzled over. Options include on-street charge points sited in street lamps and other architecture. Having said that, the whole point of terraced housing was to have a handy workforce close to their employment. It's arse-about-backwards that driving became so essential in dense population areas.

Buses would help tremendously. Such a pity they got privatised and fucked up before the trains did.

||www.citymetric.com/transport/why-are-britain-s-buses-crisis-falling-passenger-numbers-4130||

The following paragraph sums up the bus problem beautifully:

"Over the last 25 years, bus usage per person has increased by 52 per cent in London, while falling by 40 per cent in England’s other metropolitan areas. More than half of all bus trips in England now happen in London. London has, to some extent, managed to buck the long-term downward trend, because unlike in the rest of England, the bus market there was not deregulated."

In 2017, Combined Authority Mayors were given the same powers as London over their buses. If (big if) this takes off you basically have a two-tier transport policy across the UK with your location affecting your life choices as much (if not more) than class.

If the fusion power we were promised 50 years ago could come through sometime in the next 5 years, it would be awfully ing handy

It was mentioned in the Queen's Speech. Boris is going to sort it out.

Can fusion be delivered utilising any of the root vegetables this country is so good at growing ?

The cost of the bus outside London, might have some influence on those figures...

I'm sure if the fare was £1.50 there would be more passengers on many routes, and potentially could make more routes financially viable and even profitable.

It's not true everywhere, but if you are paying three times that for a single journey, it's going to massively affect you decision making.

At £1.50 I'd be tempted more often to use the bus. At £4.50, I can't justify as it makes no sense either for the extra time or the money.

Can fusion be delivered utilising any of the root vegetables this country is so good at growing

I thought we couldn't pick all our veg now since our farm labour had fucked off?

Hear hear RTB

A return bus from here to the next town is £7 per person
it takes 13 minutes to drive and uses just over a litre of fuel to carry up to 5 of us plus our bags on the way home
and parking is free
strangely enough I NEVER take the bus.

To go into the centre of my town is £4 return per person
but as none of the companies honour each others' tickets, it can be an hours wait for a bus
so I drive in winter and cycle in summer

Fusion cuisine is a big thing nowadays, so fusion power can’t be far off, by the powers of association/sympathetic magic/Brexity thinking. Or of course the hot air produced by the current Government could power the country for the duration of this Parliament.

News today was saying ‘thanks to brexit Boris is going to revolutionise farming by paying farmers for other things besides food. This was not possible while we were members of the EU’

I assume this is BS?

News today was saying ‘thanks to brexit Boris is going to revolutionise farming by paying farmers for other things besides food. This was not possible while we were members of the EU

Sounds like a sure fire way to encourage fraud?

Pillar 2 of the CAP was always available for environmental reasons...

"Pillar 2 requires co-financing from member state governments. The EU describes the purposes of this as:

fostering the competitiveness of agriculture
ensuring the sustainable management of natural resources
combating climate change
achieving a balanced territorial development of rural economies and communities including the creation and maintenance of employment"

Other countries found a better more sustainable way of farming whilst in the EU, i think the Govt is just lying, just as they are now saying they'll eliminate farrowing crates - they could have banned their use decades ago.

Bringing in electric vehicles worsens the problem of over-capacity in car production across Europe

For several years, auto manufacturers have been merging, then "rationalising" and cutting jobs, shutting down some sites, to reduce capacity

Electric vehicles will add to this, because vehicle manufacturers will require fewer model variants,
e.g. petrol / diesel choice, or engine capacity

This won't just be across Europe, but in all regions of the world which move away from petrol and diesel vehicles.

With Brexit, the UK is even more vulnerable than our neighbours

I expect some production and investment will continue in the Uk for the domestic market,
but that export capacity will be sharply cut over the next few years.

I’m not sure if it wasn’t possible to reward farmers for “good works” while in the EU. What about the Countryside Stewardship scheme?
www.gov.uk/government/collections/countryside-stewardship-get-paid-for-environmental-land-management
What I do know is that the process for claiming payment under the Basic Payment Scheme (which I think is the main EU scheme) was made very difficult for many farmers because of the incompetence of the Rural Payment Agency and its unfit for purpose software. I believe some farmers were waiting more than a year for payment. Who knows how badly any new scheme can be mismanaged? Wait and see.
Disclaimer: I only know a bit about this stuff because I listen to Farming Today while doing my exercises in the morning. Happy to be contradicted by any real farmers.

I remember watching Martin Fleishmann presenting his Cold Fusion experiment to a packed lecture theatre.
He was talking hogwash then and its hogwash now
Hot fusion will not be economic for a while yet

KISS : Reduce, reuse, recycle

As stated, the problem is safe and portable storage. See the Hindenburg.

Not really. You can already ride a city centre fuel cell bus not far from where I live, with onboard hydrogen tanks.

Hydrogen supply is a good question - but this is a very niche market atm. You can use industrial by-product hydrogen and there are interesting projects looking at how you might make hydrogen for example by using "stranded" wind power to make hydrogen via electrolysis (the hydrogen in this case would act as a means of storing surplus power, a bit like using surplus electricity to pump water uphill to use in hydroelectric generation).

We have limited parking in our grotty terraced estate. It'll kick off if they install charging points in the parking bays.

I hope to be out of this house and somewhere with a driveway in 15 years.