Well, non-polluting passenger vehicles are happening, and here in Canada by 2035 all passenger vehicles sold will (at a minimum) need to be PHEVs that can travel up to 80km on a single battery charge.
Unless of course idiot voters bring in a Conservative government, and they remove the certainty the Liberal government has given automakers around EV sales in Canada.
You can’t have public transportation that takes everyone everywhere they need (or want) to be. Ever order food delivery? You can’t do that by bus or train. Would you expect the Presidential motorcade to switch to getting on a subway? Do you expect every plumber, electrician, landscaper, and handyman who needs a van or truck to haul their equipment from home to home to do repairs just bring 10 guys on the bus with them?
We’ll still need passenger vehicles, full stop. Should we design cities and transit so that we need less of them? Sure — but it’s impossible to replace all of them, as public-option transport just can’t do everything we use passenger vehicles for today. Public transit is only about moving people, but sometimes those people need to drag equipment around with them, or need additional security, or have need to go somewhere where dedicated transit options aren’t financially viable — and for those cases, we still need non-polluting passenger vehicles.
It’s not an either-or situation; we’ll always need a mix of transit capabilities.
Besides which, transit has many of the same issues, and benefits from the same technologies. We need to remove diesel and gas busses, trams, and trains from the roads as well, often using much the same technologies the anti-EV crowd puts down passenger EVs for.
Everything I stated for why EVs are better for the environment goes for electric driven public transit too.
There is an environmental cost to nearly everything — but the cost for virtually everything related to EVs is significantly less than those of ICE vehicles, especially in a country like Canada where over 80% of our electricity is from hydroelectric sources, and over 90% of it is from non-carbon-emitting sources.
Yes, the batteries (today) need lithium. That’s not likely to be true moving into the future — China is already releasing an 2024 model based on a sulphur battery. However, what many people (and this article) conveniently ignore is that ICE vehicles use rare-earth metals as well. For example, very ICE vehicle uses palladium (one of the rarest metals on earth) for the catalytic converter — a rare earth metal not required in EV production. And Russia produces 40% of the global supply of palladium.
And oil refining uses cobalt as part of the de-sulphuring process. A lot of cobalt. Over its lifetime the average ICE vehicle will use more cobalt than any EV being manufactured today.
EV batteries are recyclable — up to 95% recyclable. But even before disposal is needed, used EV batteries can be repurposed — Nissan in Japan already resells Leaf batteries with >80% capacity as home backup and camping power packs, and elsewhere in the world used EV batteries are finding a new life as solar power generation storage. Sourcing lithium from used EV batteries cells is vastly more economical than mining for new lithium, so we’ll likely hit a steady-state where only minimal mining is required for new EVs. EV battery recycling is somewhat nascent right now as the oldest EVs are barely 12 years old, and many of those are still on the road.
The worries about the environmental cost of EVs is vastly overstated — especially when you set them side-by-side with ICE vehicles. Anyone who unabashedly drives an ICE vehicle but then complains about how polluting EVs are is being completely disingenuous.
And? I’ve never seen anyone anywhere argue otherwise. Even the original CBC article pointed that out pretty clearly.
(Although I’ll point out the Piapot First Nation has recently come out to say her name isn’t on their membership role, so apparently the claims there are highly tenuous).
The problem isn’t that Ms. St.-Marie claims to be native because she was adopted as an adult not a native community — it’s that she has claimed for decades that she was a 60s scoop survivor, born on a Canadian reservation and adopted by white parents — none of which is true. She’s changed her story about her heritage multiple times, at times claiming she knew and visited her indigenous birth mother regularly, and other ties (like now) claiming she doesn’t know who her indigenous birth mother is. She’s claimed to have been from multiple tribes — all before being adopted as an adult into the Piapot First Nation family.
If I had been adopted as an adult by a black family, that wouldn’t give me the right to go around claiming I was a runaway slave from the pre-Civil War southern US, who came to Canada via the Underground Railroad. Ms. St.-Marie doesn’t (and shouldn’t) get a pass for her lies.
She isn’t native by heritage — and that is what she’s been lying about for decades, and that is what people have a problem with. If she “feels” native by adult adoption she just had to say so, and not lie about her actual heritage for the last 50+ years.
McDonald’s for years really stepped up their coffee game.
McDonalds found themselves in a weird place in the 90’s. Drive-throughs were tremendously successful, to the point where they had massive amounts of real estate that was primarily empty inside. People weren’t eating in as much, and so the dining rooms were empty.
Hence refurbishments and the introduction of McCafe — the whole point of which was to encourage more people to come in and use the dining rooms (and by sticking around, maybe buy more stuff than they would if they just came through the drive through). It’s why they introduced baked goods and mini doughnuts — back in the 80’s the only “baked goods” you’d get were apple pies and boxes of prepackaged mini cookies. Coffee and baked goods were the driver to get people to sit inside the restaurants more often — and if you go to any McDonalds in Canada in an area with a decent number of retirees, I’d say it seems to have worked.
Likely nobody had any real need to dig, and had little reason to doubt her assertions that she was adopted out and her birth certificate had been destroyed. These had sufficient “truthiness” about them to pass a basic sniff test.
I do have to wonder if the Advisory Council of the Order of Canada will consider rescinding her membership over this.
I think the fact this is coming out now and is being discussed so much means that a lot of people really care about full/mostly-full blooded native individuals, and that they feel this sort of misrepresentation of heritage is wrong and harmful.
The fact it’s taken 60 years to get to this point says something sad about how much people cared about this in the past — but I’d like to think the attention this story is getting means this is changing for the better, and that most settler Canadians don’t agree that people should be allowed to misrepresent their heritage to the ultimate detriment of the First Nations people of this country.
There is a big gulf between “belonging to a tribe” and claiming to be a Sixty’s Scoop survivor born at a hospital that never existed.
I don’t think anyone (certainly not the CBC) is claiming that the Cree Nation and the Piapot family weren’t allowed to adopt her, and that she isn’t a member of that nation. But the evidence points, beyond the shadow of doubt, that she was born to a white Italian American family in Boston. And that she has a long history of lying about her original heritage (often changing the story when it’s convenient for her), and threatening her own family if they outed her.
So she’s perfectly allowed to be “tribal” — that seems to not be in contention. But she shouldn’t be lying about being a Sixty’s Scoop baby who never knew her birth mother (which is odd, considering she would have been a teenager when the Scoop started in the 50’s), or about being born in Canada and adopted (both her birth certificate and her own family refute this), or about her birth certificate having been destroyed in a fire in a facility that never existed, or about her changing tribal heritage (first Mi’kmaq, then Algonquin, then Cree), or about whether her mother was dead or alive…
The lies are the problem, along with the benefits she’s obtained from those lies. If the relevant Cree Nation wants to keep her, and the Piapot family claims her as one of their own — that’s perfectly fine and within their right. But that doesn’t give Ms. St-Marie the right to rewrite her own personal history. There is a big difference between “citizenship”, “family bonds”, and “heritage” — and it’s the latter of which she appears to have lied about for a very, very, very long time.
We’ve known about this problem for over 20 years now. Alberta has done the bare minimum to reduce its dependence on fossil fuels for electrical generation.
And Alberta still has 12 years to bring new capacity online. That will have been 32 years in which they sat with their hands against their ears and did little but yell OIL OIL OIL!
If the Albertans government was so concerned for those in the north of the Province, they would have got to work decades ago. Global warming isn’t a new phenomenon they’ve only known about for the least 2 years. Other Provinces have successfully shut down their CO2 emitting power plants during this time — Alberta absolutely should not get a pass on this as a reward for doing close to squat for the least 2 decades.
The certainty the Federal Government recently gave automakers concerning Canada’s EV future has massively helped this sort of deal to be possible.
It should certainly make it more difficult for a Conservative government to come in and remove the EV rules — although history does show we shouldn’t rule out the possibility that they’ll be happy to scrap deal like this and the battery plants to fit ideological goals in Alberta (burn baby burn).