Nestle, Volvo Among 130 Companies Urging COP28 Agreement To Ditch Fossil Fuels (reuters.com) 75
Companies including Nestle, Unilever, Mahindra Group and Volvo Cars are urging political leaders to agree a timeline at the upcoming U.N. climate summit to phase out fossil fuels. From a report: The 131 companies, which have nearly $1 trillion in global annual revenues, wrote in a letter published on Monday that attendees at the COP28 summit must commit to reach 100% decarbonised power systems by 2035 for richer economies, and help developing countries financially so they can ditch fossil fuels by 2040 at the latest. "Our businesses are feeling the impacts and cost of increasing extreme weather events resulting from climate change," the companies wrote in the letter, which was coordinated by the non-profit We Mean Business Coalition, which is pushing for greater climate action globally.
"To decarbonise the global energy system, we need to ramp up clean energy as fast as we phase out the use and production of fossil fuels," they wrote. The letter's 131 signatories, which include Bayer, Heineken, IKEA and Iberdrola, span a range of sectors and include multinationals and small and medium-sized businesses. Companies are increasingly committing to their own timelines for reducing their emissions, but many acknowledge that their ability to slow planet-warming CO2 emissions is contingent on faster action from governments.
"To decarbonise the global energy system, we need to ramp up clean energy as fast as we phase out the use and production of fossil fuels," they wrote. The letter's 131 signatories, which include Bayer, Heineken, IKEA and Iberdrola, span a range of sectors and include multinationals and small and medium-sized businesses. Companies are increasingly committing to their own timelines for reducing their emissions, but many acknowledge that their ability to slow planet-warming CO2 emissions is contingent on faster action from governments.
Will Volvo reduce their prices? (Score:2)
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Nor are most people willing to accept a reduced lifestyle/movement restrictions caused by charging limitations, nor in any way are we prepared or on track to ever get rid of fossil fuel generation plants.
Like nearly all climate activism, this is merely virtue-signalling. Doing as suggested involves a lot of serious people doing serious and sober engineering work, and there are a few examples (personal transportation) where there isn't even a plausible theory for how you c
Re:Will Volvo reduce their prices? (Score:4, Interesting)
say, for example, getting an electric car charged for 400+ miles in 5 minutes.
The average commute in the USA is 41 miles per day. My partner's commute is higher than that average, at roughly 60 miles and so far his Bolt EUV has been working out great. It has an EPA rating of 247 miles of range. At least for the daily grind, range really isn't an issue.
Right now, the biggest pain in the ass about EV charging on a road trip is that there may not be restaurants/a bathroom/shops/coffee within walking distance of the charging station, so you'll end up just sitting in your car waiting for it to finish charging. I'll give you that it certainly isn't as convenient as quickly gassing up and getting back on the road, but I'd assume as more people get EVs there will eventually be money to be made in providing more facilities at charging stations.
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I probably count myself amoung the majority of people that aren't interested in a specialty/niche vehicle, especially at the current prices.
If I'm layin
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Personally I find the mild inconvenience of longer charging times on road trips (where we're usually doing other things at stops anyway) to be more than made up for by never having to stop for gas the rest of the time.
The most convenient refill is the one you do at home.
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But, that is not a given...
Many folks live :
1. ...without off street parking
2. ...in rental houses, requiring landlord approval to do potentially major re-wiring, etc to set up a charger and then, you'd have to leave it when you moved.
3. ...in a large apartment complex with large paved parking lots, no assigned spaces and no chargers installed....with precious little incentive for owners to tear it all up and redo it with 100's of individual chargers
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So I am just buying it for my "commute"? I am not buying a specialty car to go back and forth to work.
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Yeah, I'm not sure why so many governments are eager to jump on the "No new gas powered vehicles after 2035" bandwagon when nobody has figured out a way to build a long range electric vehicle that's price competitive to it's gasoline counterpart yet. Forget the charging infrastructure part of the problem, you need to convince people to switch earlier than 2035 to make the economies of scale work in electric's favor.
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New cars are just expensive in general lately. Even the least expensive ICE car is about $20k out the door, for something like a Nissan Versa.
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Sure there are: they're called "public transit", and railroads, and buses.
But that idea appals you, because you might have to see ethnics, or... you know, OTHER PEOPLE.
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Re: Will Volvo reduce their prices? (Score:2, Informative)
I am thinking people would jump on board knowing you can load a vehicle with enough energy for 500 miles of travel in 5 minutes flat and there is no preconditioning of the vehicle necessary. And that this charge will hold for a year or longer if stabilizers are added.
Also, just use heat from the engine coolant to heat the cabin, or use a belt driven AC compressor to cool it. And the whole vehicle has the ability to remain in service for 15-20 years without a $13k+ battery replacement.
Therefore, I believe th
Re: Will Volvo reduce their prices? (Score:4, Informative)
Therefore, I believe the reverse is true and that people would embrace it.
Are people trading their EVs back in for ICE vehicles though? Sure, it's anecdotal but everyone I know who has gone EV has no desire to return to ICE. For a commuter vehicle, it really is nice to not ever have to think about whether you'll need to stop for gas.
After driving my partner's EV, it seems so archaic when I get into my car, look at the gas gauge and think "Oh right, this car still has to specifically be driven somewhere for more fuel at whatever the current market prices are. That sucks."
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I think most folks would be on board if you could have EV's with the same range and refuel times as ICE...period.
Oh, and we need to have recharging stations out there in similar numbers to gas stations so that there's little to no wait to refuel.
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No one drives 500 miles without stops and no one cares about 10 extra minutes at stops they have to make anyway. Any inconvenience on road trips is more than made up for by never having to stop for gas around town and always waking up to a full battery.
Engines waste fuel on heat whether you want it or not. Most EVs use a heat pump to heat or cool the cabin, battery and motors which is much more efficient. There are already EVS with hundreds of thousands of miles that haven't had a battery replacement but th
CNGV (Re:Will Volvo reduce their prices?) (Score:2)
I'm trying to imagine how difficult it would be to sell people on the "convenience" of liquid-fueled cars if battery cars were the norm.
Electric cars are far from new. There's a YouTube video with Jay Leno showing off a 1909 Baker electric car. People that wanted an electric car could have got one somewhere for more than 100 years. They never really caught on because of limited range, long recharge times, and the initial purchase cost. You know, the same issues we still see today.
If the convenience of electric cars charging up at home catches on then I expect to see competition from compressed natural gas vehicles to come to market as c
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Cars were expensive in the past too.
Inconvenient is not impossible
Cheap methane will run out one way or another
PV can scale down almost arbitrarily in cost and seasonal storage needs to only be online for 100% net zero by 2055 (most likely hydrogen).
Not that it really matters, since global society will collapse due to demographics. Getting rid of fossil fuels is easy by comparison to fixing that.
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Ugh. I have been hearing about how we are DOOMED my whole life -- and the predictions never turn into reality. At the end of the day -- it always seems to be just another grift/power grab. For reference, look up the book "The Population Bomb" written by Paul Ehrlich, which was almost required reading for folks in college in the 70's/80's...
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The population bomb has hit pretty hard in Burundi, Rwanda, Haiti and Syria to point out some basket cases.
That's not the demographic problem I'm referring to though. It's the demographic collapse among the productive fractions keeping the global industrial supply chain going which is the problem. South Korea being the most obvious example. Sure, you can import Filipinos and Indians to try to fill up the less demanding jobs, but that causes problem in and of itself. Though not nearly as much problems as the
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You do bring up an interesting point, that being that the book diagrams how we (the world) would run out of food and resources due to exponential population growth. The current reality is that most of the civilized world is now dealing with a population implosion -- which will also deliver dire results -- but just for our national cultures...
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Sorry, but I am not buying into the cult of climate religion. It has been getting warmer where I live for the last 15,000 years, and I would know because at that time, the location of my house was covered in 1.5 miles of ice. Now I grant you that perhaps the caveman were prodigious users of fossil fuels, but I am of the opinion that it was a natural change in weather patterns which had no/minimal human input.
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They don't sell gas cars - they sell petrol cars.
its called petroleum - whats that short for - oh yes, petrol.
They sell hydrocarbon cars. We get our hydrocarbons from petroleum today but that doesn't have to be true for all time. We know how to synthesize carbon neutral hydrocarbon fuels right now. The problem is that the cost of production is double or triple that of petroleum fuels. The fix for that is rising costs of petroleum, lowering costs of synthesizing fuels, or more likely a bit of both.
I just shake my head at various governments around the world thinking they can ban the ICEV when we still haven't ye
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Yes. They intend to stop selling all fossil fuel vehicles entirely in the next few years.
Re: Will Volvo reduce their prices? (Score:2)
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That's nothing! The goal of Nestle is to make everybody pay them for drinking water. It's a main part of their long-term business plan. They have invested tons of money to get (sometimes exclusive) access to water sources.
See below link:
https://www.mckinsey.com/capab... [mckinsey.com]
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Pick a better article (Score:2)
Hacks at Reuters can't be bothered to link what they are talking about ...
https://sustainablefuturenews.... [sustainabl...renews.com]
two problems with this (Score:5, Insightful)
2. Nestle is basically China 2.0 and anything they say, believe the opposite. They would steal water from their own mothers and sell it back to them.
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Just google "nestle atrocities" to get started. Enough stuff from enough places to show the opinion isn't single source.
Re: two problems with this (Score:2, Insightful)
One problem with this. Ever since climate change was on the agenda, the U.S. has unilaterally blocked any and all progress wherever whenever they could. Cos much freedumbs, and corporate oily government.
Maybe it's time fossile fuel price started to reflect its actual cost to our future selves.
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I blame the Democrats for the problem. They've openly opposed nuclear power for 50 years, with some indications of realizing this being a mistake only in the last few years.
With the large reliance on coal for electricity, and electricity being responsible for about 1/3rd of the CO2 emissions, we have only three options for lowering CO2 emissions. Those options are natural gas, nuclear fission, or energy shortages. Nuclear power hasn't polled well with Democrats until very recently. Energy shortages neve
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These aren't very broad claims.
Why do people assume there's no well documented information available? We've seen what nestle does. We also have all the pollution and records for China, what kind statement is do you have evidence? A quick google search can give you direct facts, that aren't subjective about the pollution from China. Your political doesn't make burning coal less environmentally impacting.
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US good, China not so much - way too much (Score:1)
China should stick to safe nukes, made and operated by someone else.
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China is installing new wind capacity faster than the rest of the world combined. They are due to hit peak emissions in the next 2-3 years, and after that will be falling rapidly.
Their peak emissions will be about a third of the United States' peak, per capita. About half of where the US is today. You really can't use them as an excuse to do nothing, because they are doing a hell of a lot more than you already. That goes for Europeans as well.
Cui bono? (Score:3)
I am too old to believe their interest aligns with the common good. If it were, as some other poster pointed out - VOLVO electric cars would be cheaper - for example.
When will they get around to ditching slavery? (Score:3)
It's about time to ditch it right?
https://www.washingtonpost.com... [washingtonpost.com]
Fuck Nestle (Score:2)
Only reason they want this is because they're probably getting money out of it.
Nestle? (Score:2)
Wow. That's ballsy. Not exactly position on the moral high ground.
Not necessarily wrong.. but audacious.
Nothing but virtue signal and bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
This is tokenism and greenwashing.
There's no actual, sane PLAN here.
Just "We gotta..." *BUZZWORD!*
No plan.
No sanity.
NO BUY IN!
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They do have a plan, and it involves you paying higher taxes. That should fix it. Any questions?
I have a question, how long until election day so I can vote these tax hiking morons out of office?
Anyone serious about lowering CO2 emissions should realize that this is a problem than can only be solved by removing restrictions on the private development of new technology and infrastructure, that comes from lowering the burdens of government not raising them. We've been funding the US Department of Energy for nearly 50 years to develop what is needed to free us from fossil fuels, and what do we have to s
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Taxing TO INFINITY AND BEYOND!!!! isn't a "plan".
Again, it's just a diversion from the greenwashing and tokenism.
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Careful there buckaroo!
You're dangerously close to saying the quiet part out loud!
Hmm... I suspect greenwashing PR strategy (Score:2)
Primary Inputs (Score:3)
"There is a substantial potential to increase the recycling rate of copper. Although about 95% of used copper is “potentially recyclable,”22 26–82% of end-of-life copper scrap is recycled depending on the use category, location and period2327 with a 10-year average of 40% at the global level.25 Similarly, copper scrap constitutes around 20–50%2326,28 of the copper resource used in the production of new copper with a 10-year average of 32% at the global level."
Lead the Way! (Score:3)
Okay Nestle, how about putting your money where your mouth is and lead the way. I think they can start by banning all those environmentally unfriendly business practices. Then ensuring that their entire distribution network will only use green energy. Then, banning the use of all harmful plastics in their packaging, and finally by only producing carbon neutral products. But for some reason, I doubt that Nestle and others would be willing to do that. Big surprise... So, until then anything Nestle and other corporations say about climate change is nothing but virtue signaling bullshit.
Any mention of nuclear fission? (Score:1)
If there's a demand for lower CO2 emissions but no mention of nuclear fission as an alternative then I'm skeptical of just how serious the demand must be. We have decades of experience to show that nuclear fission can provide power safely, reliably, affordably, with low CO2 emissions, and low demands on land, labor, raw materials, and freshwater.
If there's any opposition to nuclear power as an alternative to fossil fuels then that puts nuclear power as a greater threat to human civilization than global war
Ghosts (Score:4, Interesting)
After seeing the Chinese "ghost cities" that have been built in the past 10 years--enough housing for 4 billion people, now abandoned and crumbling... Let's say I've lost any hope that we can do anything meaningful at this point. "Decarbonise" all you want, but if China's going to waste billions of tonnes of concrete and fuel to raze forests and build empty cities, driving an EV while eating a "carbon neutral" chocolate bar is not going to help anyone.
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Can you show your sources please?
The last I read about the ghost cities was that 10 years after their foundation they had hundreds of thousands of people living there. It's more an example of good planning than of environment waste/damage in my opinion.
How does that work. (Score:3)
Last I checked Volvo and Mahndra made cars, diesel trucks, and diesel tractors. While Volvo has some sort of electric car offering, they have nothing in the truck and tractor classes. I don't know that Mahindra has electric anything.
So, whats their plan for if fossil fuels are banned? How will the fields be plowed and the goods be shipped?
We have had electric trains, electric ships, even electric excavators for decades. But they all require a very large diesel generator or 6 in order to move.
What's the plan? How does one replace the energy density of fossil fuels?
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How does one replace the energy density of fossil fuels?
It could be replaced with synthesized hydrocarbon fuels.
Maybe the fuels don't have to be hydrocarbons, but if they aren't carbon neutral (or nearly so) then that kind of negates the point of using some alternative. There's been a shift from hydrogen to methane for rockets to space, perhaps switching to carbon neutral hydrogen is practical. I emphasize "carbon neutral" hydrogen because most hydrogen today is produced from natural gas. Ammonia could be an alternative for many applications outside of rocket
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To be honest, I knew that they were experimenting with some in-town trucks, but I did not know that they had this many.
But, I will point out that the Volvo VNR, from your link, has a range of 275 miles. While the diesel version of an equivalently sized Volvo semi-tractor has a range of ~1,400 miles.
So, I reiterate the question;
What's the plan? How does one replace the energy density of fossil fuels?
Need to stop additional FF power plants (Score:2)
EX30 (Score:1)
Build it in SC, USA so Uncle Joe puts $7500 on the hood, and people will forget about those silly Tesla cars.
Tough room! (Score:2)
I doubt the CEO of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company will be all that sympathetic to their proposal.
Return to office (Score:1)