Environment

Wildfires burn millions of acres in Canada, send oil prices higher

Published

2 years ago

May 17, 2023

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A smoke column rises from wildfire EWF031 near Lodgepole, Alberta, Canada May 4, 2023.

Alberta Wildfire | Reuters

Wildfires burning across western Canada have forced thousands of people to evacuate their homes and have prompted some oil and gas companies to curb production as blazes approach pipelines.

The fires have burned about 478,000 hectares, or 1,800 square miles, across Alberta, British Columbia and Saskatchewan as of Monday — 10 times the average area burned for this time of year, according to the NASA Earth Observatory.

There were nearly 90 fires burning in the province of Alberta, a quarter of which are expected to get larger, according to the Canadian Wildland Fire Information System. More than 20,000 people have had to evacuate their homes.

The fires have had a notable impact on the region’s oil industry, as some drillers were forced to halt a small percentage of production in a precautionary measure due to shifting fire conditions. This week, benchmark Canadian heavy crude prices tightened to multi-month highs over concerns about the blazes.

Nearly 2.7 million barrels of daily oil sands production in Alberta is in “very high” or “extreme” wildfire danger zones, according to Rystad Energy, an energy consulting firm.

A smoke column rises from wildfire EWF-035 near Shining Bank, Alberta, Canada May 5, 2023.

Alberta Wildfire | Reuters

As of Monday, outage volumes stood at about 240,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day. However, the ultimate damage to production will likely exceed that number, Thomas Liles, vice president of Rystad Energy’s upstream research, wrote in a market update.

The smoke also has caused poor air quality and hazy skies in parts of southern Canada, as well as in North Dakota, Minnesota and several other states. The spread of the smoke, which contains particles called aerosols, has prompted concerns over the impact of poor air quality on respiratory and cardiovascular health.

The air quality levels in several cities in Alberta this week have been ranked as “very high risk” by Canada’s Air Quality Health Index, the highest-ranking category determining health risk. Wildfire smoke is forecast to linger and potentially increase over the coming week.

Property owner Adam Norris surveys the damage at his home in Drayton Valley, Alberta, Canada, on May 8, 2023.

Walter Tychnowicz | AFP | Getty Images

The BC Wildfire Service said the arrival of sustained winds from the north has caused “aggressive fire behavior on all wildfires” in Canada’s Peace Region, which is located in the northeast of British Columbia between the Rocky Mountain Foothills and the Alberta Plains.

“We are in unprecedented drought conditions,” said Scott Rennick, the incident commander at the North Peace Complex, who noted that aggressive fire behavior is occurring amid higher-than-average temperatures.

Climate change is increasing the frequency and intensity of wildfires in western Canada and prompting longer seasons. Rising temperatures, prolonged periods of drought and shifts in precipitation patterns make the region more vulnerable to fires that ignite and spread quickly.

The Canadian military and firefighters from Canada and the U.S. are working to combat the blazes, but changes in wind direction that switch the path of the blazes could create problems for responders.

Wildfire smoke is typically common during late summer and early fall around the peak of the annual wildfire season, which runs from March 1 to Oct. 31. But this month has seen seasonal heat records in several parts of Alberta, according to Environment and Climate Change Canada.

This image, from the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite 18 (GOES-18), shows smoke from the fires sweeping over southern Canada as well as North Dakota, Minnesota, and several other states on May 15, 2023.

Environment

I found this cheap Chinese e-cargo trike that hauls more than your car!

Published

2 hours ago

July 5, 2025

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I found this cheap Chinese e-cargo trike that hauls more than your car!

If you’ve ever wondered what happens when you combine a fruit cart, a cargo bike, and a Piaggio Ape all in one vehicle, now you’ve got your answer. I submit, for your approval, this week’s feature for the Awesomely Weird Alibaba Electric Vehicle of the Week column – and it’s a beautiful doozie.

Feast your eyes on this salad slinging, coleslaw cruising, tuber taxiing produce chariot!

I think this electric vegetable trike might finally scratch the itch long felt by many of my readers. It seems every time I cover an electric trike, even the really cool ones, I always get commenters poo-poo-ing it for having two wheels in the rear instead of two wheels in the front. Well, here you go, folks!

Designed with two front wheels for maximum stability, this trike keeps your cucumbers in check through every corner. Because trust me, you don’t want to hit a pothole and suddenly be juggling peaches like you’re in Cirque du Soleil: Farmers Market Edition.

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To avoid the extra cost of designing a linked steering system for a pair of front wheels, the engineers who brought this salad shuttle to life simply side-stepped that complexity altogether by steering the entire fixed front end. I’ve got articulating electric tractors that steer like this, and so if it works for a several-ton work machine, it should work for a couple hundred pounds of cargo bike.

Featuring a giant cargo bed up front with four cascading fruit baskets set up for roadside sales, this cargo bike is something of a blank slate. Sure, you could monetize grandma’s vegetable garden, or you could fill it with your own ideas and concoctions. Our exceedingly talented graphics wizard sees it as the perfect coffee and pastry e-bike for my new startup, The Handlebarista, and I’m not one to argue. Basically, the sky is the limit with a blank slate bike like this!

Sure, the quality doesn’t quite match something like a fancy Tern cargo bike. The rim brakes aren’t exactly confidence-inspiring, but at least there are three of them. And if they should all give out, or just not quite slow you down enough to avoid that quickly approaching brick wall, then at least you’ve got a couple hundred pounds of tomatoes as a tasty crumple zone.

The electrical system does seem a bit underpowered. With a 36V battery and a 250W motor, I don’t know if one-third of a horsepower is enough to haul a full load to the local farmer’s market. But I guess if the weight is a bit much for the little motor, you could always do some snacking along the way. On the other hand, all the pictures seem to show a non-electric version. So if this cart is presumably mobile on pedal power alone, then that extra motor assist, however small, is going to feel like a very welcome guest.

The $950 price is presumably for the electric version, since that’s what’s in the title of the listing, though I wouldn’t get too excited just yet. I’ve bought a LOT of stuff on Alibaba, including many electric vehicles, and the too-good-to-be-true price is always exactly that. In my experience, you can multiply the Alibaba price by 3-4x to get the actual landed price for things like these. Even so, $3,000-$4,000 wouldn’t be a terrible price, considering a lot of electric trikes stateside already cost that much and don’t even come with a quad-set of vegetable baskets on board!

I should also put my normal caveat in here about not actually buying one of these. Please, please don’t try to buy one of these awesome cargo e-trikes. This is a silly, tongue-in-cheek weekend column where I scour the ever-entertaining underbelly of China’s massive e-commerce site Alibaba in search of fun, quirky, and just plain awesomely weird electric vehicles. While I’ve successfully bought several fun things on the platform, I’ve also gotten scammed more than once, so this is not for the timid or the tight-budgeted among us.

That isn’t to say that some of my more stubborn readers haven’t followed in my footsteps before, ignoring my advice and setting out on their own wild journey. But please don’t be the one who risks it all and gets nothing in return. Don’t say I didn’t warn you; this is the warning.

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Environment

OPEC+ members agree to larger-than-expected oil production hike in August

Published

3 hours ago

July 5, 2025

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OPEC+ members agree to larger-than-expected oil production hike in August

The OPEC logo is displayed on a mobile phone screen in front of a computer screen displaying OPEC icons in Ankara, Turkey, on June 25, 2024.

Anadolu | Anadolu | Getty Images

Eight oil-producing nations of the OPEC+ alliance agreed on Saturday to increase their collective crude production by 548,000 barrels per day, as they continue to unwind a set of voluntary supply cuts.

This subset of the alliance — comprising heavyweight producers Russia and Saudi Arabia, alongside Algeria, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Oman and the United Arab Emirates — met digitally earlier in the day. They had been expected to increase their output by a smaller 411,000 barrels per day.

In a statement, the OPEC Secretariat attributed the countries’ decision to raise August daily output by 548,000 barrels to “a steady global economic outlook and current healthy market fundamentals, as reflected in the low oil inventories.”

The eight producers have been implementing two sets of voluntary production cuts outside of the broader OPEC+ coalition’s formal policy.

One, totaling 1.66 million barrels per day, stays in effect until the end of next year.

Under the second strategy, the countries reduced their production by an additional 2.2 million barrels per day until the end of the first quarter.

They initially set out to boost their production by 137,000 barrels per day every month until September 2026, but only sustained that pace in April. The group then tripled the hike to 411,000 barrels per day in each of May, June, and July — and is further accelerating the pace of their increases in August.

Oil prices were briefly boosted in recent weeks by the seasonal summer spike in demand and the 12-day war between Israel and Iran, which threatened both Tehran’s supplies and raised concerns over potential disruptions of supplies transported through the key Strait of Hormuz.

At the end of the Friday session, oil futures settled at $68.30 per barrel for the September-expiration Ice Brent contract and at $66.50 per barrel for front month-August Nymex U.S. West Texas Intermediate crude.

Environment

Podcast: Trump/GOP go after EV/solar, Tesla, Ford, GM EV sales, Electrek Formula Sun, and more

Published

18 hours ago

July 4, 2025

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Podcast: Trump/GOP go after EV/solar, Tesla, Ford, GM EV sales, Electrek Formula Sun, and more

In the Electrek Podcast, we discuss the most popular news in the world of sustainable transport and energy. In this week’s episode, we discuss Trump’s Big Beautiful bill becoming law and going after EVs and solar, Tesla, Ford, and GM EV sales, Electrek Formula Sun, and more

Today’s episode is brought to you by Bosch Mobility Aftermarket—A global leader and trusted provider of automotive aftermarket parts. To celebrate Amazon Prime Day July 8th through 11th, Bosch Mobility is offering exclusive savings on must-have auto parts and tools. Learn more here.

The show is live every Friday at 4 p.m. ET on Electrek’s YouTube channel.

As a reminder, we’ll have an accompanying post, like this one, on the site with an embedded link to the live stream. Head to the YouTube channel to get your questions and comments in.

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After the show ends at around 5 p.m. ET, the video will be archived on YouTube and the audio on all your favorite podcast apps:

We now have a Patreon if you want to help us avoid more ads and invest more in our content. We have some awesome gifts for our Patreons and more coming.

Here are a few of the articles that we will discuss during the podcast: