If you thought that poor Chinese people that are dying like flies because of air pollution are so far away that we should not really bother, I have a bad news for you. The great deception of "Clean Diesel" financed by German and other European auto-makers and Oil industry is taking its toll on all citizens in all major Capitals of Europe. German auto-makers were playing "Green Hydrogen" ideas at the turn of the century and after total fiasco to produce any commercially viable cars moved to "Clean Diesel" technology. Priced below Petrol cars Diesel model versions have been taking market by the storm. Now we are finally allowed to know the price we are all paying for it. I will repeat it one more time, it is not about just China - it is all over the world: to let people die of Air Pollution is a Mass Murder. We have the technology to address it.
Elon Musk: Tesla And SolarCity To Keep Earth Alive And SpaceX To Colonise Mars.
Elon Musk alone has made for our survival more than all politicians combined. While some journalists paid by oil companies are still searching for more polluting electric cars than ICE ones, he is making the impossible. His Tesla Motors has demonstrated the potential of lithium technology and now Tesla Model X and Model 3 will make it into the mass market for electric cars. Solar City and Tesla Energy will address another looming energy crisis and will make Solar work 24/7. The news from China that every day 4,000 people are dying because of air pollution sounds like mass murder in our time, the same is happening in the West as well. We have the technology to address these problems, we just need more Elon Musks.
Electric Cars To The Rescue: Air Pollution Kills 4,000 People Every Day In China.
Electric cars are not just about style and incredible performance - only they can keep us the right to personal mobility without killing everything around. It is not about money or new advance economy any more - it is about survival. U.S is moving very slowly in that direction, but I just read that 16 states are trying to block Obama's Clean Power Plan. Dollar can still open a lot of doors and dirty politicians hearts (if they have any). China is not a blessing in a lot of issues, but at least "they get it" - you cannot built the new economy with Q by Q performance. You need long term plan in place. They have one: electric cars are the strategic industry now. Under the radar screens the best technology is brought into the country, the best lithium deposits are acquired and the best lithium facilities are being built. Now China controls 75% of Hydroxide Lithium, which goes in the EVs batteries.
International Lithium is working with Ganfeng Lithium, which supplies Panasonic for its cells for Tesla Motors lithium batteries and companies like BYD, Boston Power and LG Chem. It is very tough now in junior mining space, but I am very proud that our Team has managed not only to save our projects, but is rapidly developing them. Financing and technology from Ganfeng Lithium makes all the difference for us. We are making world the better place. Enjoy your electric ride powered by Lithium and watch your kids grow to enjoy the blue sky.
Lithium Race: Tesla Model S Surges To #1 In Worldwide Electric Car Sales For June 2015.
Lithium Boom: Warren Buffett's BYD Qin Made To The World's Top Three Best Selling Electric Cars In June.
International Lithium Corp. Reports on Continuing Work in Argentina and Ireland With Ganfeng Lithium.
Mr. Kirill Klip, President, International Lithium Corp. comments, "Our projects are advancing in tandem with rising lithium prices. The lithium supply chain is being stressed even before the commissioning of the Tesla Gigafactory and other megafactories from BYD, Foxconn, Boston Power and LG Chem. Our joint ventures with Ganfeng Lithium demonstrate that cooperation between companies with varying expertise in the raw materials supply chain can work to secure a supply of strategic commodities. In this case, lithium which is necessary for the clean energy initiatives announced by the U.S. and China. These two countries alone will provide mass markets for electric cars and home energy storage units increasing the demand for lithium batteries."
The Sunday Times:
The great diesel car deception speeding us to a toxic death
Drivers and pedestrians have been misled by EU tests aimed at cutting lethal air pollution, writes Jonathan Leake
WHEN Victoria Kelly sets off around her home city of Manchester she finds the fastest roads — and then goes out of her way to avoid them.
Instead she plots a route that will take her around the clouds of diesel air pollution found along those busier roads, sticking to the leafiest and smallest streets she can find.
It means simple journeys can double in length, but for Kelly, 23, the detours are vital to avoid the airborne toxins that have twice put her into intensive care with asthma attacks like those that have killed two of her friends.
“An attack is like breathing out through a straw into a bucket of sand with an elephant sitting on your chest,” she said. “Air pollution is one of the most likely things to set it off — so I do all I can to avoid it.”
Kelly is one of 5.4m people in Britain diagnosed with asthma. The condition kills three people a day — and traffic pollution, mainly from diesel vehicles, is a key cause. A fifth of those are children — such as Will Cort, a 13-year-old whose childhood in central London has been blighted by asthma. “I normally get attacks at night and wake up because I can’t breathe. It can go on for days,” he says.
Asthma can be triggered by many factors but it is no coincidence that whenever air pollution levels rise, Britain’s hospitals and GPs see a surge of patients with asthma. Last month Public Health England published research showing that thousands of people suffered attacks when smog laden with tiny “particulate” particles and nitrogen dioxide (NO2) gas typical of diesel emissions hit Britain last spring.
Other studies show similar surges in heart attacks, strokes and lung diseases. Overall, scientists estimate, air pollution kills 50,000 people prematurely every year — about 8% of all deaths, making it perhaps Britain’s biggest public health threat after smoking.
None of this should be happening. More than 20 years ago, scientists warned that the growing popularity of diesel vehicles could turn them into one of Europe’s greatest health threats. The EU responded by introducing new regulations designed to impose progressively tighter limits on emissions so cities such as Manchester, London and Glasgow should have some of the world’s cleanest urban air.
In fact the opposite happened. Those cities now have some of the highest NO2 levels in Europe, while London’s Oxford Street has recorded the highest in the world. Britain’s air pollution is now so bad, breaching limits for NO2 in 38 out of 43 air quality monitoring zones, that the European Commission is taking legal action against the government.
The irony is, however, that Britain’s air pollution problems are only partly our government’s fault. The real failures go back to the European Commission in Brussels, to the boardrooms of Europe’s motor manufacturers and, perhaps unexpectedly, to the UN.
Asthma sufferer Victoria Kelly rarely ventures into city centres (Paul Cooper) The first question is, where is all that pollution coming from?
In theory it should not be from modern diesel engines. The European emission standards brought in by the EU in 1993 imposed tight limits on new “light” vehicles. The latest version, Euro 6, says new diesel cars should be emitting, on average, no more than 0.08g of nitrogen oxides (NOx) per kilometre (0.128g per mile). New models are sold on the basis that they have met this standard in laboratory tests — but can we rely on them?
The Sunday Times asked a company called Emissions Analytics to test several new Euro 6 diesel cars in “real-world” conditions by driving on residential back streets and the motorway.
Emissions Analytics works by fitting cars with pipes that feed exhaust gases past sensors, giving a second-by second read-out of pollutant emissions, especially NOx, whose key component, nitrogen dioxide, is a powerful toxin and lung irritant.
Our first car was a Mazda6 2.2-litre turbo-charged SkyActiv-D saloon — and right from the start in Kew, southwest London, it was clear we were producing well over the Euro 6 upper limit. Wending our way through Richmond Park, popular with cyclists and joggers, then Richmond and Sheen high streets, where traffic queues took us through throngs of shoppers, the car produced more than four times the Euro 6 maximum.
That, however, was just the average, smoothed out over 10-plus miles. What was really startling was how NOx emissions surged with every acceleration, no matter how small. So, every time we slowed to pass a cyclist in Richmond Park and then accelerated away again, the analyser showed we were sending a puff of invisible toxins towards them.
Similarly, as we accelerated and braked our way through shopping areas, the pedestrians walking on nearby pavements were getting multiple surges of NOx — with a new one delivered each time we and, presumably, every other car around us, pressed the throttle.
Peak pollution, however, came later, when we headed into the leafy residential streets of upmarket Wimbledon — where emissions began surging rhythmically up and down. The cause? Speed bumps were forcing us to slow down and then accelerate again — each time generating another small burst of toxic gases.
The worst area was around the All England Lawn Tennis Club, where a combination of long gentle hills plus dozens of speed bumps, sent NOx emissions to 12.6 times the Euro 6 limit on average.
“These are among the most expensive roads in London, with homes costing millions,” said Nick Molden, chief executive of Emissions Analytics. “What they can’t see is that every passing diesel car is leaving a trail of toxic gases.”
It would, however, be unfair on Mazda to suggest its car was worse than most others. Emissions Analytics has tested 29 new diesel cars certified as meeting Euro 6 — and most produced far more NOx on the road than in the test.
One of the worst was Vauxhall’s turbocharged Zafira 1.6-litre Tourer, whose “EcoFlex” engine churned out 9.5 times more than the Euro 6 limit. Similarly, the 2-litre turbodiesel in BMW’s X3 “sports activity” four-wheel drive produced 9.9 times more NOx than allowed in the Euro 6 test.
Such results might suggest that size of car is a key factor — but not so. Citroën’s C4 Picasso 2-litre BlueHDi, a family car, produced five times the Euro 6 level, while a diesel Volkswagen Polo was six times above the limit.
“It’s not about size. It’s about the quality of engineering and especially of the system used to remove NO2. Diesel engines can be made to run clean, but only at a cost,” said Molden.
The Sunday Times confirmed this in a detailed test on a Mercedes-Benz C 220 saloon driven around the same roads as the Mazda and other cars. For the first 15 minutes or so its cold engine produced 8.3 times more than the Euro 6 limit. Once it was warm, however, emissions dropped significantly, staying below the limit even at motorway speed.
Other cars also proved it is possible to meet Euro 6. Molden found some BMW two-wheel drives did well, while the best was VW’s 2-litre Golf diesel, which undercut the Euro limit by 30%. Overall, however, the 29 diesels tested by Emissions Analytics averaged 4.4 times more NOx per kilometre than allowed under Euro 6.
For Molden, such results show that consumers should never take car makers’ claims at face value. He began his business supplying fuel economy data to car magazines — showing that the mpg claims made by manufacturers were about 24% higher than cars achieved in reality. “Now we are seeing the same misleading figures for NOx emissions.”
What this suggests is that the tests imposed by the EU to protect car buyers from being misled and the rest of us from toxic pollution, do not work. Britain’s road vehicles now burn 22m tons of diesel a year, against 13m tons of petrol — and every gallon burnt is generating toxic emissions that are several times more than the test results say they should. How did we get such a mismatch?
One man who should know is Martin Williams, professor of air quality research at King’s College London since 2010, who spent the previous 17 years as head of the government’s air quality science unit.
“The reason we have a problem with air pollution now is that UK policy has been focused on climate change, and reducing CO2 emissions, to the exclusion of much else, for most of the last two decades. Diesel was seen as a good thing because it produces less CO2, so we gave people incentives to buy diesel cars,” he said.
One result is that since 2001 diesel cars have consistently benefited from lower vehicle tax than petrol cars.
It worked. Since 1994 the number of diesel cars has risen from 1.6m to 12m — but diesels run at much higher temperatures than petrol cars — so hot that they “burn” the nitrogen in the air, creating NOx, especially NO2, and particulates.
This problem was entirely predictable but, said Williams, the car makers promised that a combination of good engineering and rigorous testing would be able to deal with it.
“What happened was that the tests were simply not stringent enough. They were devised by a UN committee based in Geneva called the World Forum for Harmonisation of Vehicle Regulations, which was dominated by people from the car industry. The tests involve putting a car on a rolling road in a laboratory and measuring its emissions — but this can never replicate driving on a real road. “What’s more, it was easy for some manufacturers to calibrate cars’ computers to spot when the car was being tested and reduce emissions until the test was over.”The implication is that many of the 12m diesel cars on our roads are there under false pretences — potentially along with 4m vans, 600,000 trucks and 88,000 buses — many churning out far more pollutants than indicated by whichever Euro standard was in force when they were registered.
Simon Birkett, founder of Clean Air in London, one of Britain’s leading air pollution campaigners, believes the only short-term solution is to slash the number of diesels entering urban areas by charging them depending on the pollution gernerated. “Car owners have been misled by the last three governments into buying diesels, believing they were greener than petrol. The fairest long-term responses would be a scrappage scheme funded by car makers and taxpayers,” he said.
Car makers say they accept there is a problem. Mike Hawes, chief executive of the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders, said: “Cars have to undergo a standard emissions test under EU law. Manufacturers have to publish the figures so consumers can compare cars.
“The figures were never intended to represent ‘real-world’ driving, which is subject to infinite variations in weather, road types, load and driving style. But the test is outdated and does the industry no favours, so we are pressing for a new robust system, more representative of on-road conditions.”
Last week saw the first steps to making that happen when the EU agreed a new test in which the cars we buy are driven and tested on real roads. That milestone was, however, reached only after years of talks — and the car makers want the allowed emissions to be nearly three times higher than the Euro 6 limits. What is more, there is no date for implementation.
For those hoping for our urban air to be cleaned up, the best advice is: do not hold your breath.
Join our campaign for
■ Better monitoring of air pollution
■ Easier access to information about pollution levels
■ More action to curb pollution
■ Easier access to information about pollution levels
■ More action to curb pollution
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