It was pure luck, but we couldn't have timed this last week any better. It started snowing in the mountains around Salt Lake City on Tuesday, and it felt like it didn't stop until Saturday. On Wednesday morning, which was peak powder, the main resorts were reporting anywhere between 23" and 30" of fresh now. It was the stuff of magical dreams.
But snowfall is, of course, highly variable. SLC is having a record year, whereas many resorts in Europe weren't able to open until mid-January because of a lack of snow. And from a macro perspective, things are generally getting worse. According to this report, for every one degree increase in the world's average temperature, global snow cover is reduced by about 8%.
What this mean is that, even in low emission scenarios, many of the places that previously hosted the Winter Olympics, may struggle to do so again in the future because of "non-reliable" snow cover. Freestyle ski and snowboard, for example, typically wants a minimum of 1 meter of snowpack as a base, and sometimes more if melting is expected.
Things do not look positive for Vancouver, Garmisch-Partenkirchen, and even Chamonix in the below chart. (And as a further blow, the authors of the report also don't know how to spell Vancouver.) Naturally, this is something that you might want to consider when looking at long-term investments that are dependent on fresh snow.

You can, however, ignore Sochi in the above chart. Because this was never a great place for the Winter Olympics and it's unclear to me why this place was ever chosen (other than for presumably nefarious reasons). It's like: "We are one of the largest and coldest countries in the world. We have a lot of snow in Russia. But for fun, let's choose one of the few places with a sub-tropical climate."
Excluding Sochi, though, this is an alarming chart.
The current electric vehicle plan in the US is to build a national network of 500,000 chargers and have EVs make up at least 50% of new car sales by 2030. (Here's where we are today with adoption.) To this end, a big announcement was made today that included lots of public funding, a Made-in-America agenda, and lots of other goodies. But perhaps the two most important points are that (1) Tesla has, for the first time, agreed to open a portion of its charging network to non-Tesla EVs (so that it can gain access to the new $7.5 billion EV charging initiative) and (2) there is a requirement for all of the station connectors to use the "combined charging system" (CCS). I'm not a connector expert but, in my mind, this is both exciting and directionally right. To fully transition to electric vehicles, we need universality.


This is the current state of global electric vehicle adoption:
Last year was the first year that global electric-vehicle sales reached 10% of all car sales -- the total was around 7.8 million cars (see above chart)
Fully-electric vehicles accounted for about 5.8% of all car sales in the US, 11% of all car sales in Europe, and about 19% of all car sales in China -- China is leading in this department
The US saw 807,180 fully-electric vehicle sales last year -- Tesla remains the biggest EV maker in the world
In Germany, electric vehicles accounted for about 25% of all new vehicles produced last year -- BMW reported a 5% decline in new-car sales, but saw its EV sales more than 2x
Similar story with Volkswagen: 7% decline in new-car sales; 26% increase in EV sales
This year, some are predicting that China will see EV sales increase to every third car, and that it will reach its tipping point sometime between 2025-2030
It is obvious where all of this is heading. It is simply a question of how fast, and who will be the leaders at the end of the day.
All data sourced from the WSJ
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