Month: December 2018

The Weekly Roundup of Climate and Energy News for the week ending December 21, 2018 follows.  Please forward the URL to anyone you think might be interested.

I’ll be taking a break for the next two weeks.  The next Roundup will cover the week ending Jan. 11, 2019.

Policy and Politics

The UN climate conference in Katowice, Poland ended on Saturday after an all-night session.  The major accomplishment was the adoption of rules to implement the three-year-old Paris Climate Agreement.  Carbon Brief summarized the key outcomes from the meeting.  The weakness of the accomplishments in Poland caused Larry Elliott, the economics editor at The Guardian to write in an opinion piece “Katowice was the real Munich and the feeble UN accord the equivalent of the piece of paper Chamberlain brought back home with him from his meeting with Hitler.  Appeasement doesn’t work and merely delays necessary policy action.  That was true in the late 30s and it is true again today.”  In addition, Jonathan Watts, global environment editor at The Guardian wrote: “… [T]he next two years will be among the most fraught and crucial in the history of humanity.  Investment decisions on power stations and infrastructure taken during this period will determine whether carbon emissions can be cut by the 45% needed by 2030 to give the 1.5°C target a chance.”  Many NGOs said national leaders at the summit had failed to address the urgency of climate change and have pledged growing international protests to drive more rapid action on global warming.

Interior Department Secretary Ryan Zinke submitted his resignation to the White House on Saturday.  Deputy Interior Secretary David Bernhardt, a former lobbyist for the oil, gas and water industries that rely on Interior’s decisions, is poised to become acting secretary.  Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) and Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) introduced a carbon pricing bill Wednesday that aims to help cut climate change-causing emissions.  The bill is a companion to legislation introduced in the House in November.  Dino Grandoni explained the “Green New Deal” in his “Energy 202” column at The Washington Post.  A recent poll suggests bipartisan support, but you’ll have to read about the poll here because the findings are too nuanced to be summarized.  Democratic leaders on Thursday tapped Rep. Kathy Castor (D-FL) to head a revived U.S. House panel on climate change, ending a monthlong effort to establish a select committee on the Green New Deal.  Nine Northeast and Mid-Atlantic states and the District of Columbia have banded together to develop the Transportation and Climate Initiative, similar to RGGI, to cap transportation emissions and invest proceeds from the program into cleaner infrastructure that could help incentivize the adoption of electric vehicles.  New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy (D) announced Monday that the state will rejoin RGGI and a petition filed last month in Pennsylvania could give that state an opening to join.  Elizabeth McGowen interviewed Lee Francis, deputy director of The Virginia League of Conservation Voters, about the potential benefits of Virginia joining RGGI.  In direct contradiction to the recent National Climate Assessment, the Congressional Budget Office last week said that climate change poses little economic risk to the U.S.

The Trump administration rolled out a proposal Thursday that could open up oil and gas drilling in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) as early as next summer.  The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has quietly folded its Climate and Health Program into a branch that studies asthma and expunged the word climate from the name of the newly consolidated office.  City lawmakers in the District of Columbia voted unanimously Tuesday to pass the Clean Energy D.C. Omnibus Act of 2018, which mandates 100% renewable electricity in the capital by 2032.

According to a new study published in the journal Nature Climate Change, placing carbon footprint labels on food packaging effectively drives people to buy less carbon-intense ingredients.

Megan Mayhew Bergman is a writer who grew up in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, but now lives in Vermont.  She is a columnist at The Guardian and has started a column in which she will report on her travels throughout the South to speak candidly with people about how their lives are being transformed by climate change.  I found her first two columns to be quite interesting: First and Second.  David Wallace-Wells reflected on what the future may hold for his daughter at the Intelligencer.  Science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson considered the future and said that to thrive in the climate change era we need to rethink the rules and assumptions of corporate capitalism.  Amazon has a new cli-fi collection of novellas called Warmer.  Amy Brady interviewed Edan Lepucki, best-selling author of one of the stories, at Yale Climate Connections.  Yale Climate Connections also had an interesting article entitled “How to sort out good-faith questions about climate change.”  You may remember that 10 years ago this week a 27-year old University of Utah student named Tim DeChristopher disrupted a BLM auction of oil and gas leases near Arches National Park in Utah.  He ultimately spent two years in prison for his action.  Brian Maffly interviewed him for The Salt Lake Tribune.

Climate

The Galápagos Islands sit at the intersection of three ocean currents, putting them in the cross hairs of one of the world’s most destructive weather patterns, El Niño, which causes rapid, extreme ocean heating across the Eastern Pacific tropics.  This makes the Galápagos Islands one of the places most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change.  Once the final official global annual surface temperature is published, 2018 will be the hottest La Niña year on record, by a wide margin.  UK Met Office scientists have predicted that the average global temperature next year will be around 1.1°C above pre-industrial levels, bringing it close to the record-breaking heat seen in 2016 when temperatures peaked at 1.15°C above those levels.  As part of its Weather 2050 project, Vox examined how average winter low temperatures are projected to shift in the 1,000 largest U.S. cities by 2050 if nothing is done to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.  They found that in 67 cities, the average winter low temperature could increase to more than 32°F, the freezing point of water.

A paper in the journal Botany reported that 55 varieties of potato plants grown at high temperatures grew larger, but tuber production fell by an average of 93%.

Last Thursday at the AGU meeting, a team of climate scientists argued that the American West may currently be experiencing its first mega-drought in more than 500 years.  A record-breaking period of aridity set in around the year 2000 and continues to this day, they said.  Climate change seems to be driving a good portion of the problem.  On the other hand, the continental U.S. as a whole is on pace to have the fifth wettest year on record and eight states are on track to have their wettest year on record.

Two new research papers in the journal Environmental Research Letters have concluded that there is “no statistical evidence” for the much-discussed slowdown in global average surface temperature rise in the early 21st century – often called the “hiatus”.  In other words, it didn’t happen.  Writing at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Dana Nuccitelli debunked the popular climate change denier meme that Earth is entering a Little Ice Age.

A new paper in the journal Science warns that Policymakers have severely underestimated the risks of ecological tipping points.  According to the study, 45% of all potential environmental collapses are interrelated and could amplify one another.  With respect to climate- and weather-related disasters, Rob Moore, a policy analyst with the Natural Resources Defense Council said “The federal government isn’t going to be able to put out the kind of resources it did in 2017 every single year or even every other year.  At some point we have to start thinking seriously about a new paradigm, about how we prepare for the impacts of climate change, cope with what the future has in store, as well as recover from these disasters as they occur.”

Energy

Dominion Energy, has partnered with Orsted, a Danish company that purchased Rhode Island-based Deepwater Wind in October, to build two test turbines 27 miles off the coast of Virginia Beach.  Orsted recently selected Siemens Gamesa to supply the turbine blades.  The project is scheduled to be operating by December 2020 on 2,135 marine acres leased by Virginia.

The International Energy Agency’s Coal 2018 report found that global coal demand grew by 1% in 2017 after two years of decline. The rise was chiefly driven by global economic growth.  Despite recent growth, demand is still below “peak” levels seen in 2014 and is expected to hold steady until 2023.  In 2018, renewable energy in Germany probably matched or beat coal power generation for the first time, aided by favorable weather that boosted wind and solar capacity.  Israel said on Monday it would stop the use of coal by 2030.  According to new research, published in the journal International Labour Review, accelerating the transition to clean energy could add 24 million jobs globally by 2030.

Ministers from EU countries agreed on Thursday to reduce CO₂ emissions from trucks and buses by 30% by 2030, with the potential to review this in 2022.  Unlike other countries, such as the U.S., China, Japan, and Canada, the EU currently has no limits on emissions from heavy-duty vehicles.  The California Air Resources Board voted to require that all new buses be carbon-free by 2029.  Environmental advocates project that the last greenhouse-gas-emitting buses will phase out by 2040.  Negotiators from the European Parliament and the Council agreed on Monday to a 15% reduction in CO₂ emissions from cars and vans by 2025 and a 37.5% cut for cars by 2030.  The 2030 target for vans is 31%.

Exxon Mobil Corp sent a letter to the EPA in support of methane gas emission rules put in place under the Obama administration.

Work is underway on an energy storage project in South Australia that will use biogas to generate power to be stored in modules of molten silicon, from startup 1414 Degrees.

A consortium in Oslo, Norway, made up of architects, engineers, environmentalists, and designers is creating energy-positive buildings in a country with some of the coldest and darkest winters on Earth.

The Weekly Roundup of Climate and Energy News for the week ending December 14, 2018 follows.  Please forward the URL to anyone you think might be interested.

Policy and Politics

President Trump’s top White House adviser on energy and climate stood before a crowd of some 200 people on Monday at the climate conference in Poland and said “We strongly believe that no country should have to sacrifice economic prosperity or energy security in pursuit of environmental sustainability.”  Mocking laughter echoed through the conference room.  In addition, the U.S. joined Saudi Arabia, Russia, and Australia in weakening a reference to the recent IPCC report on holding warming to 1.5°C.  All of this left a void in leadership that other countries were reluctant or unable to fill.  Nevertheless, on Wednesday, the EU, Canada, and New Zealand, along with scores of developing countries pledged to toughen their existing commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to enable the world to stay within a 1.5°C rise in global warming.  On Monday in Poland, green groups released a report calling for a “climate damages tax” on the extraction of fossil fuels to help pay for the growing costs of harsher storms, wildfires, floods, and rising seas, while providing a stronger incentive to wean the world off carbon-heavy energy.  The French government ignored a key point about a carbon tax – it must protect the poor from its impacts – and consequently the tax failed.  The BBC examined this issue.  In the U.S., greens are moving away from a carbon tax, partly because of the defeat of a tax in the state of Washington and partly because many think any tax that is politically palatable will be too little, too late.  However, The Hill reported that new and recently reelected Democratic governors plan a series of aggressive steps to address climate change and bolster renewable energy industries in their states.

President Trump has stated his intention to pull the U.S. out of the Paris Climate Agreement, but he can’t do so for three years and then must wait an additional year for the exit to take effect.  Chris Mooney examined the significance of this timeline in The Washington Post.  The endangerment finding is the legal underpinning for all of the actions on climate change taken by President Barack Obama’s EPA.  Scientific understanding of the risks greenhouse gases pose to public health and welfare has strengthened since that “finding,” according to a new review article published Thursday in the journal Science.  On Wednesday the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development said it will stop financing coal projects, and nearly all oil projects, as part of a global effort by government-owned development banks to address climate change.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) released the list of ranking members for the next Congress and Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) will become the ranking member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.  A coalition of environmental groups is suing the Trump administration for granting “incidental take” permits to seismic-mapping companies that will produce deafening sounds under the Atlantic Ocean while searching for oil and gas deposits.  A New York Times investigation has found that Marathon Petroleum, the country’s largest oil refiner, worked with powerful oil-industry groups and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) to run a stealth campaign to roll back automobile fuel efficiency standards.

A group of more than 400 investors managing $32 trillion in assets warned governments to take more aggressive steps to address climate change or risk a financial crash several times worse than the 2008 global recession.  Businesses also need to act.  A new study published Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change reported that businesses might be massively underestimating the effect of climate change on their work.  The Economist had an interesting article examining the underlying moral assumptions embedded in economic models applied to climate change; how much should we value a future life?

The Economist had an interesting article examining the underlying moral assumptions embedded in economic models applied to climate change; how much should we value a future life?  Yale Climate Connections reminded us all that in 2014 The New Yorker presented the climate change Christmas carols.  The Chronicle of Higher Education published an interview with climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe.  At Yale Climate Connections Sara Peach looked at how heat can hurt our health.

Climate

The annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) occurred in Washington D.C. this week.  Among the events was NASA’s release on Monday of new maps of ice velocity and surface height elevation of Antarctic glaciers, revealing that a group of four glaciers to the west of Totten Glacier in East Antarctica, plus a handful of smaller glaciers further east, are losing ice.  Meanwhile, in West Antarctica, Thwaites Glacier continues to be the big one that ice scientists are most concerned about.  Author Jon Gertner visited with scientists participating in a large study of the glacier and wrote an interesting report about their concerns.  Back at the AGU meeting, NOAA’s release of its Arctic Report for 2018 occurred on Tuesday.  The big news is that although the mass of sea ice present has increased since 2012, the percent of old sea ice has continued to decline, bringing us closer to the time when sea ice will be absent during the summer.  This is of particular concern because the open ocean absorbs about twice as much sunlight as floating sea ice.  Researchers also reported at the AGU meeting that the length of time snow is on the ground in the California mountains is continually “being squeezed” into a shorter time period by climate change.  Researchers from the University of Alaska, Fairbanks reported that they have successfully used radar measurements taken by Japan’s Advanced Land Observing Satellite to estimate methane emissions from lakes formed by melting permafrost.

According to in-depth studies published this week in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 15 extreme weather events in 2017 were made more likely by human-caused climate change.  One would have been “virtually impossible” without human influence.  A new study published Wednesday in the journal Nature reported that as the climate warms, El Niños will become stronger and more frequent, causing “more extreme events” in the U.S. and around the world.

Australian scientists reported in the journal Royal Society Biology Letters that deep water seagrass meadows are as capable of storing carbon as shallow water meadows and that both can remove and sequester significant amounts of atmospheric CO₂.

According to a new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, if we continue with “business-as-usual” CO₂ emissions, Earth’s climate in 2030 will most closely resemble the overall climate of the mid-Pliocene period, about 3 million years ago.

Earlier Roundups have linked to articles about plants having less protein, zinc, and iron when grown in the presence of CO₂ concentrations expected by mid-century if we continue with business-as-usual CO₂ emissions.  Now, Elena Suglia of the University of California, Davis has put those findings into perspective with respect to their impacts on human nutrition in the future.

Energy

The wind industry is expected to add more than 680 GW of capacity worldwide in the next decade, according to two reports from Wood Mackenzie Power & Renewables.  Peter Sinclair has a new video explaining how energy storage can help stabilize the grid as more wind and solar are added.  I should have caught this one last week, but I missed it, so I’m including it this week.  We don’t often think about it, but one benefit of wind and solar energy is that they require no water, which is really important in some parts of the U.S.

The EU failed on Tuesday to reach a compromise over how sharply to curb CO₂ emissions from cars and vans as car-producing countries and more environmentally conscious lawmakers could not find a compromise.  Daimler will buy battery cells worth more than $23 billion by 2030 as it plans to launch 130 electric and hybrid vehicles by 2022, in addition to making electric vans, buses, and trucks.  VW says that by the end of 2019 mass production of its new electric car will begin at Zwickau in eastern Germany where an entire factory is being transformed at a cost of about €1.2 billion.  The aim is to eventually manufacture up to 330,000 electric models a year at the plant.

A new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, released on Thursday, calls for a complete rejuvenation of the U.S. fusion energy program.  Among the recommendations is that the U.S. should prepare to build its own fusion power plant.

On Tuesday, Carbon Brief published a guest post containing charts that showed how 25 countries have progressed (or not) on ten indicators of clean energy use.  Ireland’s performance on climate action in response to global warming has been ranked as the worst in the EU and among the worst in the world in a major international assessment by the Climate Change Performance Index.  Part of the reason is the burning of peat for electricity, which emits more CO₂ than coal.  In 2016, peat generated nearly 8% of Ireland’s electricity, but was responsible for 20% of that sector’s carbon emissions.

A recent report from the Rocky Mountain Institute showed that net-zero energy houses can make financial sense in much of the Midwest. The initial extra costs of making a new home net-zero pay for themselves through energy savings in less than a decade in both Detroit and Columbus, Ohio, and in less than 14 years in most of the 50 largest U.S. cities.

The Weekly Roundup of Climate and Energy News for the week ending December 7, 2018 follows.  Please forward the URL to anyone you think might be interested.

Policy and Politics

In a comment in the journal Nature, two climate scientists and a policy expert explained why global warming will happen much faster than expected over the next 30 years and laid out steps the scientific and policy communities should take to allow a more rapid response to the crisis.  On the same theme, in a recent piece in The Washington Post, reporter Steven Mufson quoted Nobel Laureate William Nordhaus as saying “I never use the word ‘pessimism’; I always use the word ‘realism,’ but I’d say it’s a kind of dark realism today.”  Mufson’s article laid out clearly the seriousness of the climate problem we face today as a result of our collective procrastination.  In a follow-up article, Mufson and James McAuley (in Paris) examined the backlash in France against a carbon tax, the type of action most favored by economists to slow CO₂ emissions.  The French government abandoned the proposed tax on Wednesday.

On Monday night Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) hosted a town hall meeting on Capitol Hill that addressed the proposed “Green New Deal” being pushed by Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY).  Coincidentally, economist Dean Baker and anthropologist Jason Hickel are in the middle of an interchange on the subject of whether it is feasible to reduce our emissions and resource use in line with planetary boundaries while at the same time continuing to pursue exponential GDP growth.  The Institute for New Economic Thinking released two working papers from prominent economists backing up the increasingly dire warnings from climate scientists and examining the question of economic growth in an age of climate change.  Writing at The Intercept, Kate Aronoff summarized and analyzed the papers.

For the first time in a decade, a bipartisan climate bill has been introduced in Congress.  The “Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act” would institute a national carbon tax.  As the name implies, the money collected would be returned to American households as a “dividend.”  White House chief economic adviser Larry Kudlow said on Monday the Trump administration will seek to end subsidies for electric cars and renewable energy sources.  It’s unclear how the administration plans to cut the tax credits, since Congress enacted them and would have to act to end them.  The administration seems hell-bent on finding and burning every last drop of oil under the U.S. in spite of the climate impacts, as evidenced by their insistence on conducting seismic surveys along the East Coast that could harm dolphins, whales, and other marine animals.  In addition, on Thursday, EPA’s acting administrator, Andrew Wheeler, announced a proposal to allow new coal-fired power plants to emit up to 1,900 pounds of CO₂ per MW-hr of electricity generated, up from 1,400 pounds allowed now.  However, the administration doesn’t expect any to be built.  According to a study published in the journal Science, the Trump administration’s proposal to roll back automotive fuel economy standards relied on an error-ridden and misleading analysis that overestimates the costs and understates the benefits of tighter regulation.  It further describes the cost-benefit analysis as marred by mistakes and miscalculations, based on cherry-picked data and faulty assumptions, and skewed in its conclusions.

Fighting climate change is one of the best ways to improve health around the world, and the benefits of fewer deaths and hospitalizations would far outweigh the costs of not acting, the World Health Organization said on Wednesday.  Diplomats and policy makers began meeting in Poland this week to hammer out a set of rules for tracking how well countries are meeting their commitments under the Paris Climate Agreement.  The effectiveness of the Agreement moving forward is very dependent on the outcome of these talks.  As occurred last year at COP 23, the Trump administration plans to host a side event touting the use of fossil fuels.

Every two years The Roddenberry Foundation, launched by the family of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, provides $1 million to organizations that help tackle climate change.  This year’s winners were inspired by Project Drawdown and the associated book Drawdown, which focuses on the many overlooked ways in which climate change can be addressed.  Using Matthieu Auzanneau’s new book, Oil, Power, and War: A Dark History as a starting point, petroleum geologist Jean Laherrère wrote about the impact of fracking on world oil production and speculated what is likely to happen in the future.  On the off-chance you were considering giving a book on climate change to someone for Christmas, Michael Svoboda at Yale Climate Connections has compiled a list of 12 books that came out this year you can choose from.

Climate

According to studies published on Wednesday by the Global Carbon Project in two scientific journals (Environmental Research Letters and Earth System Science Data), global CO₂ emissions rose by 1.6% in 2017 and are on course to rise by 2.7% this year, dashing any hopes of their leveling off any time soon.  The Washington Post and The New York Times also had the story.

A new paper in the journal Nature found that the rate of melting of the Greenland ice sheet in recent decades is “exceptional over at least the last 350 years.”  The authors concluded that “Continued atmospheric warming will lead to rapid increases in Greenland ice sheet runoff and sea-level contributions.”  In another part of the Arctic, the Siberian city of Yakutsk is the largest city in the world built entirely on permafrost.  As the Arctic warms, Yakutsk is experiencing permafrost melting, which threatens the structural integrity of some of its buildings.  Since it became possible to measure sea ice extent via satellite in the late 1970s, Arctic sea ice has declined in a manner consistent with a warming Earth.  Antarctic sea ice, on the other hand, increased until 2016 when it began declining precipitously.  Now, a new paper in the journal Nature Climate Change has offered an explanation for the anomalous behavior of the Antarctic sea ice.

Prof Peter Stott of the UK Met Office Hadley Center announced at the UN Climate talks in Poland that the sweltering heat that hit the UK this summer was made 30 times more likely by human-caused climate change.  New research, published this week in the journal Science, has revealed that rapid global warming caused the largest extinction event in the Earth’s history, which wiped out 96% of marine species and more than 67% of terrestrial animals on the planet during the “great dying” 252 million years ago.

Earth’s situation at the start of COP 24 in Poland prompted Robin McKie and others to publish a “Portrait of a planet on the verge of climate catastrophe” in Sunday’s Guardian.  Residents of coastal towns, such as Del Mar, CA, face some difficult decisions as they consider the impacts of sea level rise.  Seth Borenstein of the AP wrote about “The less talked about climate impacts.”

People in rich nations will have to make big cuts to the amount of beef and lamb they eat if the world is to be able to feed 10 billion people, according to a new report by the World Resources Institute.  These cuts and a series of other measures are also needed to prevent catastrophic climate change, it says.  The BBC summarized where we stand in 2018 by using seven interesting charts.  They also provided a guide to what you can do.  The U.S. ranks fourth in mitigating climate change, behind Denmark, the U.K, and Canada, among 25 countries analyzed in a report commissioned by utility Drax Group Plc and compiled by academics at Imperial College London.

Energy

A report by the U.S. Energy Information Administration projected Tuesday that 2018 would see the lowest U.S. coal consumption since 1979, as well as the second-greatest number on record of coal-fired power plants shutting down.  Xcel Energy, a utility serving 3.6 million electricity customers in eight states said Tuesday it will try to eliminate all its carbon emissions from electrical generation by 2050.  In addition, a new global analysis of 6,685 coal-fired power plants by Carbon Tracker found that it is now cheaper to build new renewable generation than to run 35% of them worldwide.  By 2030, that percentage will increase dramatically, with renewables beating out 96% of today’s existing and planned coal-fired generation.  Still, coal is not dead yet.  Riverview Energy Corporation is seeking an air permit for its “clean coal” diesel plant in Spencer County, Indiana, that would turn the state’s abundant coal reserves into diesel fuel while emitting extensive amounts of CO₂.

Katherine Spector of Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy provided perspective on the recent price action in the global oil market.  The Permian Basin’s Wolfcamp and Bone Spring formations in West Texas and New Mexico hold the most potential oil and gas resources ever assessed, the U.S. Interior Department said Thursday.  On Sunday, Alberta’s premier, Rachel Notley, announced that her government would temporarily curtail the province’s oil production, chiefly from the tar sands, because there isn’t enough pipeline capacity to ship the crude to market.

Researchers have found a way to convert CO₂ into plastics, fabrics, and other useful products more efficiently and cheaply than possible before.  The new method, described in the journal Energy and Environmental Science, is a form of artificial photosynthesis.  Likewise, Solidia Technologies has developed a way to produce cement that substantially lowers the carbon footprint associated with the production of concrete products.

A new report from the Natural Resources Defense Council shows the extent to which clean energy is contributing jobs to the rural economies of 12 Midwestern states. It also reflects what the rural Midwest stands to lose from Trump administration actions that harm clean energy.  A question under discussion about North Dakota is equally applicable to the Shenandoah Valley: Do rural Americans have a say in what they see outside their dining-room windows, even if that view extends miles beyond their property lines?  Closer to home, a recent example in northern Virginia is proof that solar companies can navigate aesthetic and other concerns that often arise around projects, particularly in areas new to larger-scale solar projects.

Volkswagen announced on Wednesday that it is scouting a location in North America for a new production factory to build electric vehicles.  It plans to introduce a $30,000 to $40,000 electric vehicle in 2020.