Elon Musk: Volkswagen Scandal Proves Fossil Fuels Are Kaput

Elon Musk, unsurprisingly, thinks diesel and gasoline have peaked.

At a Friday press conference in Brussels, the Tesla chief executive said that the fallout over Volkswagen's ongoing diesel emissions scandal proves that fossil fuels are on the decline.

"What Volkswagen is really showing is that we've reached the limit of what's possible with diesel and gasoline," Musk said, following a meeting with the government of Flanders, Belgium's Dutch-speaking region. "The time I think has come to move to a new generation of technology."

That technology, it just so happens, is what Musk's electric car company sells. Tesla revived the electric car by designing speedy, luxury vehicles powered by rechargeable lithium-ion batteries.

Sure, the electricity used to charge most Teslas is still likely sucked from a power grid that uses fossil fuels. But, as traditional automakers scramble to launch vehicles rivaling Tesla's Model S, Musk's vision for a low-carbon economy comes closer to fruition. 

Right now, Teslas are produced in a factory in Fremont, California, and the company is also building an enormous battery-making facility -- dubbed the Gigafactory -- in Nevada to drastically increase its manufacturing. By next year, Musk hopes to begin looking for places to erect another factory for producing Tesla vehicles in Europe. That would eliminate the need to ship cars across the globe from California.

In 2007, the shipping industry accounted for 2.7 percent of human-made carbon dioxide emissions, according to the International Maritime Organization, the U.N. agency that oversees the seas. That number is expected to more than double by 2050 if nothing is done to curb it.

"There's no question that we need to do local production in Europe, both of cars and battery packs," Musk said on Friday. "At some point, maybe sometime next year or so, we'll start investigating potential locations and certainly this region will be one of the places to look." 

After the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced earlier this month that it was investigating Volkswagen, the carmaker admitted 11 million of its diesel-powered vehicles around the world were fitted with software allowing them to sidestep emissions rules. The company has set aside about $7.3 billion to deal with the fallout from the scandal, but it may be facing billions more in fines. A number of countries have opened investigations of their own.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story mistakenly said that the conference took place in Flanders.

Shell To Cease Costly Alaska Arctic Exploration

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — Royal Dutch Shell will cease exploration in Arctic waters off Alaska's coast following disappointing results from an exploratory well it just completed.

Shell found indications of oil and gas in the well in the Chukchi Sea about 80 miles off Alaska's northwest coast, the company said Monday in a release from The Hague, Netherlands. However, the petroleum was not in quantities sufficient to warrant additional exploration in that portion of the basin, the company said.

"Shell continues to see important exploration potential in the basin, and the area is likely to ultimately be of strategic importance to Alaska and the U.S.," said Marvin Odum, president of Shell USA, in the announcement. "However, this is a clearly disappointing exploration outcome for this part of the basin."

Shell will end exploration off Alaska "for the foreseeable future," the company said.

The decision reflects the results of the exploratory well in the Burger J lease, the high costs associated with Alaska offshore drilling and the challenging and unpredictable federal regulatory environment in offshore Alaska, the company said.

Shell has spent upward of $7 billion on Arctic offshore development in the Chukchi and Beaufort seas.

Monday was Shell's final day to drill this year in petroleum-bearing rock under its federal permit. Regulators required Shell to stop a month before sea ice is expected to re-form in the lease area.

The company reached a depth of 6,800 feet with the exploratory well drilling in about 150 feet of water.

Environmental groups oppose Arctic offshore drilling and say industrial activity and more greenhouse gases will harm polar bears, walrus and ice seals.

Over the summer, protesters in kayaks unsuccessfully tried to block Arctic-bound Shell vessels in Seattle and Portland, Oregon.

 

Also on HuffPost:

 Oil Spills Since The Gulf Disaster of  

 Share  Tweet  ✖ Advertisement Share this ✖ close Current Slide

Elon Musk Says Climate Change Refugees Will Dwarf Current Crisis

Elon Musk, co-founder of electric carmaker Tesla Motors, warned on Thursday that climate change will spark a refugee crisis of catastrophic proportions if no action is taken.

In a speech in Berlin, the Tesla chief executive said Europe's current wave of people seeking asylum, prompted mostly by political violence, will be dwarfed as fresh water becomes scarce, food supplies become insecure and weather changes in the coming decades. 

"Today's refugee problem is perhaps a small indication of what the future will be like if we do not take action with respect to climate change," Musk told an audience at Germany's Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy. "Today, the challenge is in terms of millions of people, but in the future, based on what the scientific consensus is, the problem will be in the hundreds of millions and much more severe."

Volkswagen's ongoing scandal over cheating on nitrogen oxide emissions tests on its diesel vehicles is a troubling, Musk said, but it's a small issue compared with the problem of overall carbon dioxide emissions.

The billionaire has devoted much of his career to reducing the use of fossil fuels. Besides running an electric car company, he serves as the chairman of SolarCity, a solar panel manufacturer. Earlier this year, both missions merged, when Tesla announced a battery pack that would allow buildings to store excess solar energy generated throughout the day for use at night.

"I think it's very important that we take action today to recognize that we are making a very significant change to the chemical constituency of the atmosphere and oceans," Musk said. "One that is almost impossible to reverse."

Climate change remains a contentious issue in the United States as some lobby groups, often acting on behalf of companies that benefit from the carbon economy, sow doubt with the scientific consensus of humankind's role in warming the planet. But in Germany, a country Musk called "the best in the world when it comes to solar power," facts about the climate are much more widely accepted.

Still, Musk said even Germany has a long way to go. Despite the country's aggressive transition to renewable energy, a program called Energiewende, Germany remains dependent on vehicles fueled by gasoline and diesel. The scandal engulfing Volkswagen -- the world's largest automaker by sales and, until now, the pride of Germany manufacturing and exports -- only serves to highlight the problem. 

"If you go 20, 30, 50 years in the future, what do you say to your kids or your grandkids? It's almost, like, scientists have all said that these bad things are going to happen, it's, like 97 percent," Musk said. "So, to say to your kids or grandkids, like, 'Did nobody tell you?' No, everyone was telling us. 'So why didn't you do anything?' What's the answer? I think it's very important that we do something."

Watch the full speech below. Musk begins talking at 9:03:

BMW Says It Hasn't Manipulated Emissions Tests

BERLIN, Sept 24 (Reuters) - BMW said it has not manipulated emissions tests, denying a magazine report saying some of its diesel cars were found to exceed emissions standards.

"There is no difference in the treatment of exhaust emissions whether they are on (test) rollers or on the road," the German luxury-car maker said on Thursday.

German trade magazine Auto Bild said earlier on Thursday that BMW's X3 xDrive 20d model exceeded "Euro 6" emissions limits more than 11-fold in road tests by the International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT).

"No specific details of the test have yet been provided and therefore we cannot explain these results," BMW said. "We will contact the ICCT and ask for clarification of the test they carried out." (Reporting by Andreas Cremer; Editing by Kirsti Knolle)

The Unassuming Engineer Who Exposed Volkswagen

By David Morgan

MORGANTOWN, West Virginia, Sept 22 (Reuters) - Daniel Carder, an unassuming 45-year-old engineer with gray hair and blue jeans, appears an unlikely type to take down one of the world's most powerful companies.

But he and his small research team at West Virginia University may have done exactly that, with a $50,000 study which produced early evidence that Volkswagen AG was cheating on U.S. vehicle emissions tests, setting off a scandal that threatens the German automaker's leadership, reputation and finances.

"The testing we did kind of opened the can of worms," Carder says of his five-member engineering team and the research project that found much higher on-road diesel emission levels for VW vehicles than what U.S. regulators were seeing in tests.

The results of that study, which was paid for by the nonprofit International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT) in late 2013 and completed in May 2014, were later corroborated by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and California Air Resources Board (CARB).

Carder's team - a research professor, two graduate students, a faculty member and himself - performed road tests around Los Angeles and up the West Coast to Seattle that generated results so pronounced that they initially suspected a problem with their own research.

"The first thing you do is beat yourself up and say, 'Did we not do something right?' You always blame yourself," he told Reuters in an interview. "(We) saw huge discrepancies. There was one vehicle with 15 to 35 times the emissions levels and another vehicle with 10 to 20 times the emissions levels."

Despite the discrepancies, a fix shouldn't involve major changes. "It could be something very small," said Carder, who's the interim director of West Virginia University's Center for Alternative Fuels, Engines and Emissions in Morgantown, about 200 miles (320 km) west of Washington in the Appalachian foothills.

"It can simply be a change in the fuel injection strategy. What might be realized is a penalty in fuel economy in order to get these systems more active, to lower the emissions levels."

Carder said he's surprised to see such a hullabaloo now, because his team's findings were made public nearly a year and a half ago.

"We actually presented this data in a public forum and were actually questioned by Volkswagen," said Carder.

The ICCT's research contract to Carder's team was sparked by separate findings by the European Commission's Joint Research Centre, which showed a discrepancy between test results and real world performance in European diesel engines.

The diesel vehicles chosen for the West Virginia study were the VW Passat, the VW Jetta and the BMW X5. Unlike the VW vehicles, Carder said the BMW vehicle "performed very nicely - at, or below, the certification emission levels."

West Virginia University is not new to ground-breaking emissions research, having helped create the first technology to measure vehicle emissions on the road more than 15 years ago.

Carder belonged to a 15-member West Virginia University team that pioneered portable emissions testing as part of a 1998 settlement between the U.S. Justice Department and several heavy duty diesel engine makers including Caterpillar Inc and Cummins Engine Co.

The manufacturers agreed to pay $83.4 million in civil penalties after federal officials found evidence that they were selling heavy duty diesel engines equipped with "defeat devices" that allowed the engines to meet EPA emission standards during testing but disabled the emission control system during normal highway driving.

When the news about Volkswagen broke last Friday, Carder heard from some of the heavy diesel engine manufacturers that were part of the consent decree.

"They saw what had happened and called to say: 'Good job, you guys,'" Carder said. "Some folks said: 'How did they not learn from our mistakes 15 years ago?'"

Regarding his role in unearthing the current scandal, Carder said there was no particular sense of excitement when his team confirmed that the higher VW emission results were real and not a consequence of faulty measurements.

"There's no incentive for us to pass or fail," he said. "Obviously, we don't want to see something spewing emissions and polluting the environment. But we really have no horse in the race, as they say." (Editing by Soyoung Kim and John Pickering)

Fed Keeps Interest Rate Steady, Giving Leeway To Job Market

The Federal Reserve announced on Thursday that it is keeping its benchmark interest rate at or near zero, maintaining a policy that is likely to allow the job market to improve further

The Fed’s federal funds rate -- the interest rate the Fed charges for banks to lend to one another overnight -- will remain at target rate of 0.0-0.25 percent, where it has been since December 2008 at the height of the financial crisis. The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), the central bank body charged with adjusting key rates, will have its next chance to adjust the influential interest rate when it meets again on Oct. 27 and 28.

By leaving the key interest rate untouched, the Fed is deliberately maintaining economic demand by preserving the current low cost of credit for consumers and businesses. If the Fed had raised rates, it could lower demand for goods and services, which in turn would reduce demand for workers and slow job growth. Fewer available jobs means less competition for workers, limiting wage growth.

The FOMC did not base its decision primarily on concerns about the health of the job market, however.

Instead, it was clear from the FOMC statement and Fed Chair Janet Yellen's subsequent press conference that the Fed's primary concern is lower-than-expected inflation as a result of the drop in oil prices and recent volatility in world markets, rather than worries about the job market. 

“Recent global economic and financial developments may restrain economic activity somewhat and are likely to put further downward pressure on inflation in the near term,” the FOMC said.

Speaking at a press conference in Washington after the announcement, Yellen said the economic performance of China and other emerging market nations "bears close watching." Fears about the effects of a weakening Chinese economy on U.S. companies were a major factor in recent stock market declines. 

Yellen also cited the appreciation of the dollar against other currencies as a cause for lower-than-desirable inflation in the short-term. 

Even before the swings in the stock market in August, inflation had been way under the Fed’s 2 percent target. As of July, the Fed’s preferred inflation measure showed prices, excluding energy and food, had risen 1.2 percent in the previous 12 months. But Fed officials aim to pre-empt 2-percent inflation so that the central bank does not have to ratchet up rates too rapidly when inflation becomes an actual concern.

"I don't think it is good policy to then slam on the brakes" by raising rates dramatically, Yellen said, since that risks harming the economy.

Yellen said that the majority of FOMC members continue to believe that the factors depressing inflation will recede enough in the coming months to merit a rate hike before the end of 2015. And the Fed is confident in the health of the job market overall.

“The labor market continued to improve, with solid job gains and declining unemployment,” the FOMC statement said. But Yellen also noted that more jobs would "serve" the Fed's inflation goal by boosting prices.

The Fed chair added that in her view, the high rates of involuntary part-time employment and the number of people who have given up looking for work show that "the official unemployment rate understates the degree of slack" in the job market -- an economic term meaning that there are still too few available jobs for job seekers. 

The decision to postpone a rate hike was not unexpected. Some Fed officials have been indicating for weeks that fears about China and other emerging markets that spurred August’s stock market losses were giving them pause about a September rate hike. William Dudley, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, expressed those concerns in remarks he made on Aug. 26, calling a September rate hike “less compelling” than it had been in the weeks prior.

Diane Swonk of Mesirow Financial told HuffPost last month that she predicted that the Fed would wait until December at the earliest to monitor the economic performance of China and other emerging market nations. 

Swonk stood by her prediction on Thursday. “You do want market calm,” Swonk said. “We could easily have that by December,” but it may have to wait even later.

The news will likely reassure anxious investors and prompt stock prices to rise. It guarantees another month without more expensive credit and the dampening effect it would have on trading, however minimal. 

But no one was happier with the Fed's decision than the mostly liberal economists and activists who have been opposed to an interest rate hike long before recent stock market volatility. 

"We hope [Fed] officials continue their pragmatic, data-based approach and allow unemployment to keep moving lower, and only tighten after there is a significant and durable increase in inflation,” said Josh Bivens, research and policy director for the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, in a statement.

Bivens and others want the Fed to wait until the economy is producing enough jobs to generate wage growth of at least 3.5 percent.

Wages before inflation have gone up 2.2 percent in the past 12 months, despite the relatively low official unemployment rate of 5.1 percent. The official jobless figure does not account those who've given up looking or are involuntarily working part-time, which many economists believe explains why wage growth remains weak. When there are still more job-seeking workers than available jobs, there is less pressure on employers to compete for workers by raising wages.  

“This is a victory for the working families who stepped up with innovative organizing to send the Fed a clear message: Our voices belong in the debate about our economy,” said Ady Barkan, director of the Fed Up campaign, a coalition of progressive groups, in a statement. “With the recovery still far too weak in too many communities, it would have been economically devastating – and immoral – to slow the economy.”  Prior to Thursday's announcement, Fed Up joined with Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), Bivens and several dozen activists from across the country in a demonstration against the rate hike outside the downtown Washington offices where Yellen later held her press conference.

Yellen said at the press conference that she welcomed the demonstrators.

"We value hearing the opinions of many different groups and individuals with different perspectives," Yellen said. "But at the end of the day it is the committee's job to come together" to decide appropriate monetary policy.

Twitter Is The Latest Tech Company To Half-Heartedly Commit To Diversity

Twitter is the latest Silicon Valley company to proclaim it will start holding itself accountable for the highly skewed gender and racial makeup of its staff. 

The company said in a blog post Friday that it is "committing to a more diverse Twitter." Currently, Twitter's staff -- and particularly its tech and leadership teams -- are overwhelmingly white and male, not unlike most companies in Silicon Valley.  

The bad news is that Twitter doesn't seem to be committing to increasing its overall diversity much higher than current levels. However, the good news is that the company does seem to be committing to stronger growth in diversity on both its leadership and tech teams, where white men are the most entrenched.

The announcement sees Twitter following in the footsteps of Apple and Pinterest, both of which have measurable diversity goals.  

And here are the microblogging site's goals for 2016, as listed in its blog post, and the numbers the company listed in 2015 for comparison:

• Increase women overall to 35 percent (currently 34 percent)
• Increase women in tech roles to 16 percent (currently 13 percent)
• Increase women in leadership roles to 25 percent (currently 22 percent)
• Increase underrepresented minorities overall to 11 percent* (currently about 10 percent)
• Increase underrepresented minorities in tech roles to 9 percent* (currently about 7 percent)
• Increase underrepresented minorities in leadership roles to 6 percent* (currently zero)

*US only

Twitter has been improving on the diversity front in the past year. Between 2014 and 2015 it increased the percentage of women on its tech team to 13 percent from 10 percent, and increased the percentage of women overall to 34 percent, from 30 percent. The company's underrepresented minority percentages, however, didn't change much.

Here is a visual of the diversity data Twitter released in 2015:

 And here is 2014:

If Twitter ends up meeting the goals it has set for itself, the question becomes: Is this diversity sustainable? It's one thing to go on a diversity hiring spree. It's a totally different thing for a company to prove it has the sort of work environment that encourages diverse people to stick around. Will smart people who are not "brogrammers" feel comfortable and advance at the company?

That, ultimately, is the big question that nearly every Silicon Valley company needs to ask itself. 

Twitter did not immediately return a request for comment.