Today’s messaging is going to be a smorgasbord.  I am going to display for you a variety of items pertaining to several of the topics I cover.  Transportation, insurance, real estate (primarily housing), water shortages and biodiversity.  

Since the last few blogs have been about the auto industry let me start there.  If there is still any doubt in your mind as to where the manufacturers are racing (pun intended) just look at the headlines from just this week alone.  Links to the articles are included.  And while you may be thinking that this is primarily about the luxury market, in almost every case, trends in the auto market (and computers and cell phones and…) start at the top and work their way down as economies of scale develop.

 

Rolls to drop models as new plans emerge

The ultraluxury brand is ending its coupe and convertible models next year, and an EV is under development.

Maserati’s Lineup is Growing with More Electric Power

Next year will be a key one for the brand, with several new cars or variants on the way.

September 27, 2021

https://www.autonews.com/future-product/maserati-future-product-more-electric-power

Lamborghini Taps Sibling Brands to Electrify

The supercar brand won’t have a full electric vehicle until sometime in the second half of this decade.

McLaren Moves to All-Electrified by 2026

McLaren Automotive now finds itself idling at a crossroad.

DBX Success Fuels Aston Martin Product Rush

Aston intends to be an all-electric brand by 2030

Taycan Success Spurs Porsche on EVs

Porsche is looking to peel away from flat-six engine power toward electric powertrains

Well, you get the picture.  And more indicators about where the market is accelerating toward…

 

GM Building Giant Battery Development Lab in Detroit Suburb

BY | 10/06/2021

https://subscriber.politicopro.com/article/eenews/2021/10/06/gm-building-giant-battery-development-lab-in-detroit-suburb-281618

General Motors Co. says it’s building a huge new electric vehicle battery lab in Michigan where scientists will work on chemistry to cut costs 60 percent over current vehicles and allow people to travel 500 to 600 miles per charge.

 

From Bloomberg Hyperdrive 9/30/2021
Volkswagen CEO Herbert Diess took to Twitter to sketch out the car giant’s vision for a new government. His 10-point wish list includes calls to expand renewables, curb coal, raise the price of CO2 and scrap subsidies for gasoline and diesel fuel.
VW’s CEO openly trying to speed up the demise of the internal combustion engine would have been unthinkable only a few years ago. Diess’s posts represented a “key transitional shift in communication and lobbying,” Matthias Schmidt, an independent auto analyst in Berlin, told me this week.

 

Electric Vehicles: the Revolution is Finally Here

After years of talk from carmakers, the industry is rapidly being transformed as companies stake their future on EVs
Financial Times,  10/3/2021

https://www.ft.com/content/fb4d1d64-5d90-4e27-b77f-6e221bc02696?mc_cid=5186c243fc&mc_eid=8f4760cc57

 

This is a really cool article.

 

Urban transportation is central to the effort to slow climate change. It can’t be done by just switching to electric cars. Several cities are starting to electrify mass transit.
New York Times   10/3/2021

 

In a post from some time ago I mentioned that there was a new technology being developed that would eliminate the range anxiety hurdle to mass EV adaptation.  Michigan is now actually about to try it out.

 

Michigan Plans to Build the Country’s First Wireless EV Charging Road

Grist 10/9/2021

https://grist.org/transportation/michigan-plans-to-build-the-countrys-first-wireless-ev-charging-road/?mc_cid=c9b517e7dd&mc_eid=8f4760cc57

Governor Gretchen Whitmer announced last month that the state will construct the nation’s first wireless electric vehicle charging road — a one-mile stretch in the Metro Detroit area. 
A wireless EV road works like this: As a car drives over it, the vehicle’s battery is charged by pads or coils built under the surface of the street using magnetic induction.

Turning from Transportation this article is frightening and should wake you up to the dangers that we are creating.

 

 

New York Times  Sept. 30, 2021

the collapse of biodiversity, the sum of all things living on the planet.
As species disappear and the complex relationships between living things and systems become frayed and broken, the growing damage to the world’s biodiversity presents dire risks to human societies.
The extinction of plants and animals is accelerating, moving an estimated 1,000 times faster than natural rates before humans emerged. Bugs on our windshields are no longer a summer thing as insect populations plummet. Nearly three billion birds have been lost in North America since 1970, diminishing the pollination of food crops. In India, thousands of people are dying of rabies because the population of vultures that feed on garbage is cratering, resulting in a huge increase in feral dogs that eat these food scraps in the birds’ absence.
This is a future where zoonotic diseases are becoming increasingly common and the world’s food security is imperiled.

 

The last two weeks I’ve sent out several articles about flood insurance like this one.  It’s NOT just about people who live on coasts.

 

The Price of Living Near the Shore is Already High. It’s About to Go Through the Roof.

As FEMA prepares to remove subsidies from its flood insurance, a new assessment says 8 million homeowners in landlocked states are at risk of serious flooding because of climate change
The Washington Post   10/1/2021

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2021/10/01/price-living-near-shore-is-already-high-its-about-go-through-roof/?mc_cid=7c727b27f8&mc_eid=8f4760cc57

Climate change will affect people who weren’t threatened before. New technology that allows analysts to study the environs around each home led to a stunning find: 6 million homes in states such as Utah, Idaho, Vermont and Tennessee that didn’t require insurance because they were thought to be safe from flooding are actually at risk because of climate change.

 

And here are the real life consequences.

 

Flooded Tenn. Town Wrestles with How, Where to Rebuild

BY | 10/04/2021
the roughly 4,000 people who live there face a dilemma. With more than 500 homes and 50 businesses damaged, Waverly will likely see massive losses in property and sales tax revenue even as it prepares to spend millions on debris removal and infrastructure repairs. If those homes and businesses don’t return, the town could slowly die.
But if they build back along the creek, are they risking another disaster?
Janey Smith Camp, a Vanderbilt University engineering professor, said there are a number of options for communities that risk a repeat of devastating floods, including the need to “really think about whether or not it makes sense to rebuild in some areas.”
“I fully realize that we’re talking about people’s lives, their homes — and some of them may be multigenerational,” Camp said. “It’s a tough thing to swallow. But there’s a point that we need to start saying, ‘It’s not safe to live here anymore.’”
Camp said similar tough discussions are happening elsewhere, including in Nebraska, where an entire town is considering relocating to a higher elevation after 2019 floods. Over the past decade, weather-related storms, fires and floods have displaced about 23 million people a year globally, according to the World Meteorological Organization. After Waverly was ravaged, more than a dozen Tennessee mayors formed a group aimed at bolstering communities against flooding.

 

Let me leave you with this article.  As the planet warms more moisture is going to be accumulated in the atmosphere leading to greater amounts of rain in certain places (drought in others) that will come down in more intense storms dumping unprecedented amounts of water in very short time periods leading to overwhelming flooding.  And the world is not prepared for it.  

 

U.N. Report Warns of Global Water Crisis Amid Climate Change

BY | 10/06/2021

https://subscriber.politicopro.com/article/eenews/2021/10/06/un-report-warns-of-global-water-crisis-amid-climate-change-281649

Much of the world is unprepared for the floods, hurricanes and droughts expected to worsen with climate change and urgently needs better warning systems to avert water-related disasters, according to a report by the United Nations’ weather agency.
Global water management is “fragmented and inadequate,” the reportpublished yesterday found, with nearly 60 percent of 101 countries surveyed needing improved forecasting systems that can help prevent devastation from severe weather.
As populations grow, the number of people with inadequate access to water is also expected to rise to more than 5 billion by 2050, up from 3.6 billion in 2018, the report said.
Among the actions recommended by the report were better warning systems for flood- and drought-prone areas that can identify, for example, when a river is expected to swell. Better financing and coordination among countries on water management is also needed, according to the report by the U.N.’s World Meteorological Organization, development agencies and other groups.
“We need to wake up to the looming water crisis,”

 

If you’ve read this far you have seen the variety of articles relating to several different topics I cover.  Hopefully some of them piqued your interest and made you more aware of the enormity of the changes that are occurring in the world around us.  We are heading into unprecedented changes at a very high rate of speed.  I hope that some of this information will help you better understand the upheavals we face and make you better prepared to navigate them.

 

 

 

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