Michael Barnard

Programs which drive consumers to replace internal combustion cars with EVs and scrap the old cars make sense and should be expanded.

Trump's election will hurt America's economy but won't slow global climate action, as America hasn't been been a leader on it for eight years.

Michael Raynor, co-author of The Innovator's Solution among other books, and I discuss not only Scope 3 emissions, but hydrogen buses.

Until CUTRIC comes to grips with its governance problems, process failures and modeling incompetence, it should be ignored.

Globally, there are almost 700,000 battery electric buses in operation and perhaps 6,000 hydrogen buses. In Europe in 2023, about 6,400 new battery electric buses were registered vs. about 140 hydrogen buses. As I noted recently, there have are more hydrogen bus trials that have been abandoned than operational hydrogen bus fleets. And in recent years, it’s become clear that hydrogen leaks badly and has a much worse global warming impact than previously assumed.

Canadian government lobbied for gray hydrogen for buses, made CUTRIC only pathway to getting 50% of CAPEX. Fossil fuel and fuel cell firms took over CUTRIC.

British Columbia in Canada has a long history with hydrogen for transportation and its constant failures. Ballard Power, the fuel cell manufacturer that pivoted away from lithium ion batteries in 1989 to the losing technology, is based in the Vancouver area. Whistler, the famed ski and mountain biking area with its 1.6 kilometers of vertical and two mountains, trialed hydrogen buses for the 2010 Winter Olympics, and ditched them with relief in 2014.

Winnipeg is helping cripple transit manufacturer New Flyer, a major local employer. New Flyer needs tough love in order to survive, and Winnipeg is best positioned to provide it.

It’s been over three years since I bothered to publish an article on the dead end but glitzy space of urban air mobility with their origami electric vertical take-off and landing passenger aircraft. Instead, I focused my aviation related assessments on how aviation will actually decarbonize over the next few decades, starting with regional air mobility where conventional fixed-wing aircraft take off from boring old airstrips, but running on electricity. Oh, and heavy lift drones for crop spraying, tree planting, and solar panel installation, among many other use cases of high merit.

Strategy and innovation expert Michael Raynor and I discuss Canadian transit think tank CUTRIC's abysmally bad report for Brampton on hydrogen buses.