South Korea fines Tesla $2.2 million over EV range disclosures

Tesla has suffered another blow after a South Korea regulator said it would fine the company 2.85 billion won ($2.24 million) for failing to disclose the shorter ranges of its electric vehicles in low temperatures. The Korea Fair Trade Commission (KFTC) said that Tesla EV ranges drop by up to 50.5 percent in cold weather, compared with the ranges that the company stated online.

The antitrust agency claimed that Tesla exaggerated the ranges of its vehicles on a single charge, the performance of Superchargers and fuel cost effectiveness versus combustion engine vehicles, as Reuters reports. The KFTC said that Tesla did so on its South Korean website between August 2019 and recently.

Studies have shown that ranges for all EVs can drop significantly in colder weather, mainly because the battery that’s used to power those cars also heats the interior. Based on data from South Korea’s environment ministry, a local consumer group claimed in 2021 that the ranges of most EVs drop by up to 40 percent in cold weather. Tesla’s vehicles saw the biggest drop, according to Citizens United for Consumer Sovereignty. Tesla doesn’t have a communications department that can be reached for comment.

While the fine is a relatively small one, it’s more bad news for Tesla. The company said on Monday that it set a new quarterly record for EV deliveries in the last three months of 2022 with more than 405,000 (an increase of nearly 97,000 compared with a year earlier). However, analysts expected Tesla to deliver 418,000 EVs last quarter. By 10:30AM ET on Tuesday, Tesla’s stock had dropped by over 10 percent compared with Monday. The company’s share price has plummeted by 72 percent over the last 12 months.

Canada plans to enforce an ambitious zero-emission vehicle sales quota by 2026

The Canadian government has announced enforceable quotas for zero-emission vehicle sales. By 2026, a fifth of all new passenger cars, trucks and SUVs sold in the country will need to be zero-emission models, such as electric or hydrogen fuel cell vehic…

Almost 200 nations promise to protect 30 percent of the planet’s land and oceans

Nearly 200 countries have agreed to protect 30 percent of Earth’s lands and oceans by 2030. The deal was reached early this morning at the UN Biodiversity Conference (COP15) in Montreal following two weeks of negotiations. The only holdouts to the deal were the US and the Vatican, though the Biden administration has a domestic plan to conserve 30 percent of US land and water by 2030. 

With the agreement, each participating country agrees to hitting over 20 environmental targets by the end of the decade. A key condition is the so-called 30×30 plan to protect at least 30 percent of land, inland water and coastal areas by 2030. That forms the basis of an international agreement similar to the 2015 Paris climate accord. 

Along with the protection of habitats, nations have pledged to reduce pesticide risks by 50 percent, reduce nutrient runoff from farms and the rate at which invasive species are introduced to ecosystems.

Nations now have eight years to stop the loss of biodiversity being driven by humans due rainforest destruction, species exploitation, pollution and more. Previous agreements, like the biodiversity targets set at Aichi, Japan in 2010, saw nations fail to achieve the goals set. This time, though, there’s a monitoring framework to keep track of progress. 

In addition to protecting species, the draft COP15 agreement urges nations to recognize and respect “the rights of indigenous peoples and local communities, including over their traditional territories.” However, Amnesty International wrote that the deal was a “missed opportunity to protect indigenous peoples’ rights,” as it didn’t explicitly recognize their lands and territories as a separate category of conserved area.

Another point of disagreement was between wealthy and poor countries over funds. Nations in South America and Africa that house the world’s largest rainforests wanted assurances from rich countries that they’ll receive money to battle poaching, illegal deforestation and other issues, according to The Washington Post. 

At one point in negotiations, delegates from developing countries walked out of on talks over funding issues. The agreement must “align the resources and the ambitions,” said Columbia’s environmental minister Susana Muhamad. The Democratic Republic of Congo’s environment minister, Ève Bazaiba, added that “when it comes to fauna, we need to have the means to achieve this objective.” 

The COP15 agreement follows a breakthrough deal at the COP27 climate conference, approving a climate damage fund for developing nations. How well the plan will be implemented remains to be seen, though. “While agreements are great, if we’re going to save life on Earth, now we have to roll up our sleeves and do it,” the Center for Biological Diversity’s Tanya Sanerib wrote. “The planet faces an extinction crisis like none ever before witnessed by humankind, with 28 percent of species across the global facing extinction.”

California invests $2.6 billion to build 90,000 EV chargers

The California Energy Commission (CEC) will spend $2.9 billion to accelerate the state’s zero-emission transportation strategy. In an announcement spotted by Reuters, the agency detailed an investment plan it estimated would result in California buildi…

Extreme weather leads to more negative tweets, study finds

If it’s ever seemed like people are more crotchety on social media when there’s a heatwave or heavy rain, you’re probably not alone in having that perspective. Researchers analyzed more than 7.7 billion geotagged tweets from 190 countries that were posted between 2015 and 2021. They used a language analysis tool to measure the sentiment of tweets against daily weather data.

The researchers found that, compared with days of regular weather, “both local extreme heat and extreme precipitation events worsen online emotional states globally by elevating rates of posts with negative expressions and also reducing the rate of posts with positive words.” They also determined that people were more likely to tweet negatively during downpours and heatwaves than when daylight savings time kicks in and they forego an hour of sleep.

These outcomes might not seem incredibly surprising. However, the researchers suggested that because the findings were so consistent across tweets from more than 43,000 counties, they indicate that we’re finding it hard to adapt to climate change. They carried out the study in the first place to explore the links between climate change and mental health.

“As of right now, we see very little evidence of adaptation in the way that these new extreme events that are emerging globally are impacting human sentiment,” says Kelton Minor, a postdoctoral research scientist at Columbia University and co-author of the study, told The Verge. “Since climate change is shifting the extreme tails of most regional temperature and heavy precipitation distributions rightwards, the impact of more severe extremes on overt emotional states may far exceed those registered in the recent past, pending further adaptation,” the abstract of the study reads.

Minor and co-author Nick Obradovich, chief scientist at a nonprofit called Project Regeneration, found the biggest shift in sentiment during a record-breaking heatwave in the Pacific Northwest and southwest Canada in 2021. More than a thousand deaths were linked to that heatwave, while negative sentiment in tweets increased tenfold compared with the typical heatwave in the US, the researchers found. Minor and his colleagues plan to keep monitoring social media sentiment in the face of more extreme weather events, which studies suggest are likely to happen more often amid rising global temperatures.

South Carolina EV battery recycling plant could salvage parts for a million cars a year

The push to recycle electric vehicle batteries just gained some momentum. Redwood Materials has unveiled plans to build an EV battery recycling plant on the outskirts of Charleston, South Carolina. The roughly 600-acre facility (previewed in a render above) will break “end-of-life” batteries down to their raw metals and rebuild them as the anodes and cathodes that are crucial to EVs. The parts should support up to 1 million EVs per year. That could not only reduce waste, but reduce the costs and risks associated with importing those components from overseas.

The plant will reportedly amount to a $3.5 billion investment that includes 1,500 jobs. Like Redwood’s Nevada campus, the Charleston hub will rely solely on clean energy and all-electric operations. The company claims its approach lowers CO2 emissions for producing the battery components by about 80 percent compared to the output from the usual Asian supply chain.

Construction should start for the South Carolina plant in the first quarter of 2023. The first recycling process should be ready by the end of that year, Redwood says. The company plans to scale afterward.

The locale choice is strategic. Redwood says South Carolina is part of a growing “Battery Belt” where EV cell manufacturing will ramp up to “hundreds” of gigawatt-hours of production capacity by 2030. Its seaside port helps, too. The state further hosts factories for car manufacturers that include BMW and Redwood partner Volvo, so a brand could quickly repurpose spent batteries for vehicles rolling off the line.

More importantly, Redwood appears to have broader support from the auto industry. On top of Volvo, it has partners like Ford, Toyota and battery makers that include Panasonic and Envision AESC. Large-scale battery recycling facilities are still relatively rare in the US — Li-Cycle’s new Alabama plant can process batteries for about 20,000 EVs per year. This expansion could make recycling far more commonplace, and make a better case for electric cars as the environmentally conscious options.