Good News / Bad News

Good news for us wot loves those internal combustion engines in our cars, bad news for EVs and their watermelon supporters:

Rivian Lays Off 10% Of Workforce As Lucid Production Underwhelms

EV startup stocks Rivian (RIVN) and Lucid (LCID) sank Thursday after both companies reported fourth-quarter earnings and revenue late Wednesday, and announced they are not ramping up production in 2024.

Rivian reported Wednesday a loss of $1.36 per share in Q4 with sales doubling to $1.31 billion. Wall Street expected a loss of $1.35 and revenue totaling $1.28 billion. Looking to 2024, Rivian said it expects production of 57,000 vehicles, remaining flat compared with 2023.

The company also announced that it predicts vehicle deliveries in Q1 2024 to be about 10%-15% lower than in Q4 2023 and that it is laying off 10% of its salaried workers.

Along with Rivian, Lucid reported Wednesday a Q4 loss of 29 cents per share with revenue falling 39% to $157 million. Analysts predicted a loss of 30 cents and sales hitting $180 million. Lucid produced 8,428 vehicles in 2023 and delivered 6,001.

For 2024, the company forecasts producing 9,000 vehicles, well below Wall Street’s expectations of more than 14,000.

Yeah, nobody wants to buy them now (even at subsidy-lowered prices), and still fewer will buy them when said subsidies disappear and the costs of these boutique vehicles assume a trajectory opposite to Rivian/Lucid’s share prices.

And the children will laugh and play, in the playgrounds to which they were driven in their mommies’ gasoline-powered SUVs:

And the oil rigs will pump again, their oil being carried along the completed XL pipeline, filling up cars will no longer require a letter of credit from the banks, natural gas will flow into people’s houses in greater amounts and at lowered prices, windmills and solar panel farms will rust away and fall over, and nuclear power generators will become a feature of every town in the land.

And the watermelon socialists who supported the whole Global Warming Climate Cooling Change© pack of lies will dangle limply from lamp poles in many streets, those that did escape the Air Pinochet helicopter flights, said choppers fueled with the cheaper avgas and therefore able to fly many missions…

Hey, a man can dream, can’t he?  So mote it be.

Snake In The Astroturf

Here’s a face not known by my Murkin Readers, but probably familiar to those in Britishland:  ITV’s weather reporter on Good Morning Britain, the elfin Laura Tobin.

“Okay Kim,” y’all might say.  “That’s a right purdy lil’ thang, thanks for the pics.”

Unfortunately, this totty is one of those rabid climate change advocates/alarmists, whose slanted opinions on the topic, and frequent injections of said propaganda into her weather reports has even some Brits perturbed.

Just so you know.

Not Just No

…but “fuck off and die” no.

I refer here, of course, to this push to make us all give up our regular gasoline-powered cars and replace them with fucking Duracell* vehicles.

Here’s one tale of woe.

And here’s the problematic infrastructure.

So fuck ’em.

Come to think of it, we could always switch to horses, except that those assholes at Peta will probably throw a hissy about that too.

I think I need to go to the range (he said, apropos of nothing).  Those guns aren’t going to shoot all by themselves, you know.


*And I mean no disrespect towards Duracell, who make excellent batteries.  I’m just not going to use them to power my car.

Reminder Of Earlier Predictions

Of course, this is about the Coming Ice Age Of 1970.

Then there’s this one, more trenchantly stated:

Five hundred years ago, no one was driving, flying, using plastic bags or gas stoves. Electric vehicles were not a thing yet. The only vehicle was a horse, possibly pulling a carriage. There was even less CO2 activity 5000 years ago or 5 million years ago. Yet the climate was changing back then. How does science explain that? Or are they making things up now?

I’ll take that last one for $400, Alex.

Fucking charlatans.

Quote Of The Day

Via Insty:

Global warming-obsessed climatologists and media told us back in 2020 that snow and frost would be rare – a thing of the past!

Now with the heavy, record snowfall, global warming astrologists are looking a bit foolish and embarrassed. Their predictions are wrong. Already in November snow arrived and record amounts have already fallen.

You had me at “global warming astrologists”…

Read the whole thing.

Ask Not For Whom The Bell Tolls Etc.

Stephen Moore has an excellent “story of the film so far” about the Net Zero / Green energy / no more cars with engines / unicorn fart-based energy initiative:

The Wall Street Journal reported last week that “clean energy” investment funds are tanking, with some down as much as 70% in recent months. Solar has been one of the worst-performing industry stocks this year.

This collapse is happening right when Exxon and Chevron have engineered a combined $110 billion blockbuster acquisitions to expand oil and gas drilling in the Permian Basin in Texas, one of the biggest oil fields in the world. This year, they both reported their largest profits ever.

They and their investors are looking at the real-world data, not green energy propaganda. In 2023, the world is guzzling oil and gas like never before. Global consumption of fossil fuels was higher in 2022 than at any time in human history, even as the developed countries spend hundreds of billions of dollars trying to stop oil, gas and coal.

As they say:  follow the money.  All the politicians’ wishful thinking won’t change the nature of the world (i.e. reality), as much as they’d like to think it can.