I'll never give you the satisfaction

 By They Can Talk

The world's freest and least free countries

 From Visual Capitalist

Two comments:

• The top three freest countries are constitutional monarchies.  Out of the top 20 freest countries, 11 are monarchies.  Out of the bottom 20, only one, Eswatini (Swaziland as was) is a monarchy, and definitely not a constitutional one.  Yay for constitutional monarchy!
• The US is still freer than China, but is at the bottom end of developed countries, and fell sharply during 2025.  American exceptionalism indeed.

Two-thirds of China's car sales are plug-in

 From EMBER

67% of China's car sales in September 2026 were EVs (47.3%) or plug-in hybrids (19.7%).  In September 2016, just 0.86% were EVs or PHEVs.  I estimate that EV/PHEV sales will reach nearly 100% of total Chinese car sales by late 2028.  China is the world's largest car market and now also the world's largest car exporter.  The electric cars on Chinese roads are already removing nearly 1 million barrels a day of global oil demand.  Oil production is +-84 million barrels per day, so 1% of global oil demand has been taken away over the last few years.  This is one reason why the Iran war hasn't caused an even bigger jump in oil prices.  And it's a long way from being over — there are +-366 million cars on China's roads, and just 14% of them are electric.  Oil demand will ultimately fall by 6 million barrels per day as a result of the transition to EVs in China alone.

Diesel price changes

 From Gavin Mooney

Diesel prices have nearly doubled across much of the American heartland – and the impact of this extends far beyond the fuel pump.

The map compares February with September, showing particularly steep increases in states including Montana, Kentucky, Kansas, Missouri and Texas.

Diesel powers the trucks that are used to deliver goods, the tractors that grow food, as well as much of the machinery that builds roads and houses.

When diesel prices rise, businesses either absorb the extra cost or pass it on. Households feel the impact even if they don't own a diesel vehicle.

And the real sting? Producing oil at home doesn't insulate a country from globally traded fuel prices. (As we know all too well in Australia.)

And this is another reason to electrify freight and heavy machinery wherever practical. Reducing diesel dependence reduces exposure to the next fuel price shock.

 

School zone

  By Daniel Medina and at BlueSky

How fast is Earth warming?

 From Open Mind (Tamino)

[By 0.3 to 0.4 degrees C per decade]

Another paper has appeared showing an increase in the rate of global warming since about 2011, and using their new rate estimates to forecast when we will pass the 1.5°C and 2°C thresholds of global temperature warned about in the Paris agreement. Since there’s little doubt left that warming accelerated recently, the question becomes “By how much?” Different methods of analysis give different answers, and estimates from this latest research are very high indeed.

After scanning global temperature data sets, they settled on the year 2011 as a “changepoint” when the warming rate increased and estimated its value before and after that. They did so by fitting data from 1970 through 2010, and from 2011 through 2025, separately, using the Theil-Sen slope estimate. It is a robust, non-parametric method which, since it is applied separately to separate time spans, produces a fit which is discontinuous, i.e. at the changepoint time temperature shows a jump as well as a slope change.

Since the pertinent question is “What’s the warming rate since 2011?”, I’ll answer that with three methods. One is a least-squares regression to the data since 2011. Another is the Theil-Sen slope estimate over that same interval (as done in the new paper). Last, I’ll use a PLF (Piecewise Linear Fit) which allows for a slope change but does not allow a jump discontinuity, and it too can be fit by least squares regression. Thus I can use models with and without jump discontinuity at the changepoint time (which I call “L.Sq.” and “PLF”), and here’s what they look like when fit to the global temperature data from HadCRU (yearly averages as black dots, L.Sq. fit as blue line, PLF as red line):

Here’s a close-up on the time since 2011, showing yearly averages (from HadCRU) with both the L.Sq and PLF fits, as well as a dashed line showing the best-fit line estimated by the Theil-Sen method:

From this it’s clear that of the three methods, the PLF gives the lowest slope while the Theil-Sen estimate gives the highest. It’s also worthwhile looking at the uncertainty ranges for all three methods when applied to various data sets; here are the rates for each (blue x’s for L.Sq, black dots for Theil-Sen, red triangles for PLF) and their 95% confidence ranges:

It’s clear that for all four data sets, the highest warming rate estimate comes from the Theil-Sen analysis, the lowest from PLF. It’s also clear that the error bars for PLF cover a smaller range (i.e. the PLF rate estimates are more precise), because the PLF model requires the underlying trend to be continuous across a changepoint. None of which addresses any of the further uncertainties in the problem.

I would emphasize that whatever method is chosen, the uncertainties are sizeable. The global warming rate, even after the recent acceleration, might be merely 0.025°C/yr (0.25°C per decade) or as high as 0.06°C/yr (0.6°C per decade). The high end of that range is more than twice the low end, and if the planet heats up that much then by the year 2050 we’ll not only pass 1.5°C and 2°C, we’ll be well past 2.5°C. Even at the lower end of the range we’ll still cross 2°C by the year 2050.

This does not look good.

We're looking at a rise in global temperatures of somewhere between 0.3 and 0.4 degrees C per decade.  We might be lucky, and it's at the lower end at just 0.25 degrees per decade.  Or unlucky, and it's 0.6 degrees.  If we use the PLF estimate, which is the lowest, we're looking at 0.3 to 0.35 per decade.  We shouldn't assume we're going to get lucky.  Prudence suggests that we assume it'll be at the higher end, and accelerate the roll-out of renewables, EVs, and heat pumps.  And, as I've said before, you can at least cut your own emissions by giving up meat.  And if it isn't at the higher end, good.  Every 0.1 degrees C that global temperatures rise is worth being avoided.

World Central Bank discount rates keep on rising

Some went up sharply (Uganda's, by a swingeing 2.25%, because its currency is collapsing) while others fell almost as sharply (Zambia's, because of falling inflation).  But on average, they have continued to rise, with the US and the Euro area the biggies.  Since inflation, driven by the Iran war, hasn't yet peaked and looks unlikely to in the short term, expect Central Banks to keep on tightening, with obvious consequences for share markets and the global economy.  This is on top of the economy-crunching effect of a rapid rise in oil prices (see lower chart).

'83% of world' is the weighted average of countries making up 83% of world GDP.
'Median' is the middle of the range of DRs for all the countries I monitor for each day
'Unweighted average' is the simple average (mean) of all countries I monitor.

Oil prices are heading back towards their cyclical high for this cycle $118.  (Previous cyclical highs: March 2022, $129.49; July 2008, $143.57)