Environment

Gun Buying Loses the Fear Factor Under Trump, Sparking Price War

Gun Buying Loses the Fear Factor Under Trump, Sparking Price War

by • Cars • Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

A bad dream for U.S. firearms producers has become reality: The fear-based motivation for gun purchases has evaporated and is being replaced by bargain hunting.

A price war has broken out across the gun industry with no end in sight. Sales and profits are dropping. American Outdoor Brands Corp., the maker of Smith & Wesson weapons, slashed its annual profit target by 45 percent.

“There was some fear-based buying that would take place from time to time. There is no fear-based buying right now,” James Debney, chief executive officer of American Outdoor, said in a conference call. Heavy discounting is “the primary driver for a consumer who wants to acquire a firearm.”

Blame the new business environment on Donald Trump, a self-avowed champion of gun owners and the right to bear arms. Weapons sales often spiked after mass shootings during President Barack Obama’s administration, as some customers fretted that lawmakers would respond with tougher gun-control measures.

Gunmakers aren’t reducing production enough to meet lower demand, and inventories at independent dealers is high, Debney said. He cited competitors offering rebates of $150 on sport rifles, a level of discounting he called unsustainable. 

“We have to defend our position and weather the storm — ultimately until there’s a better balance between those production rates and the consumer demand,” he said after the close of regular trading Thursday. It’s unclear how long the discounting will continue, he said.

Shares Tumble

American Outdoor plunged 12 percent to $13.15 at 12:54 p.m. in New York after falling to $12.46, its lowest intraday since April 2015. The stock dropped 29 percent this year through Thursday, while the S&P 500 Index climbed 18 percent. Rival Sturm Ruger & Co. declined as much as 7.8 percent Friday, the most intraday in four months.

American Outdoor slashed its earnings target for the fiscal year through April to a range of 57 cents to 67 cents a share from $1.04 to $1.24, citing the need for price cuts to maintain market share. The Springfield, Massachusetts-based maker of the M&P Shield 9 mm handgun cut its sales goal to $670 million to $675 million. It previously forecast $700 million to $740 million.

“We believe the industry environment will remain difficult for several more months, if not longer,” Chris Krueger, an analyst with Lake Street Capital Markets, said in a note.

A record number of background checks, a proxy for gun purchases, during Black Friday had sparked investor hopes that gun demand had hit bottom. But that holiday buying was merely a sign that consumers were waiting for steep bargains, Debney said. The National Instant Criminal Background Check system dropped 12 percent in November from a year earlier.

Tracking Demand

The industry eventually will match production with gun demand, and the large discounts will diminish, Debney said. Consumers are still driven to buy weapons on concerns over their personal safety, he said. The big unknown: What is the long-term level of demand under an administration that doesn’t spark concern over possible firearm regulation. 

“Where do we settle out in terms of the size of the market?” Debney said. “We just don’t know.”

    Read more: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-08/smith-wesson-maker-tumbles-as-gunmakers-battle-over-prices

    Elon Musk Channels Knight Rider With His Roadster-Semi Reveal

    Elon Musk Channels Knight Rider With His Roadster-Semi Reveal

    by • Cars • Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

    Tesla just unveiled the world’s fastest long-haul semi truck, which can go from 0 to 60 miles per hour in only 5 seconds while pulling a trailer. The much-anticipated reveal was the subject of speculation for weeks, with observers wondering whether it would be a freight industry curiosity—or a transformation. The initial take is that it might be the latter.

    And that wasn’t even the biggest surprise of the night. 

    What followed was a scene straight out of the 1980s sci-fi TV show Knight Rider. With the trucks dominating a stage inside an airport hangar and a raucous crowd gathered around, the trailer of one of Tesla’s Semis tilted up, a cloud of smoke swirled, and out came an all new Tesla Roadster, a reprise of the vehicle that first defined the company as a maker of ultra-fast electric cars. Before the Model 3, Model X, and Model S, there was the Roadster. But this was something very different from the original. 

    The new Roadster is the quickest production car ever made, by a good margin, clocking 0 to 60 in 1.9 seconds in the $200,000 base model version. Even crazier is the car’s unprecedented battery range: 620 miles on a single charge. At the invitation of Tesla Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk, the crowd of Tesla owners and enthusiasts at the Hawthorne, California, airport jumped the barriers and swarmed the vehicles. 

    There’s a Tesla Roadster beneath this mob.
    Photographer: Tom Randall/Bloomberg

    “Wow, that was cool!” Toni Sacconaghi, a Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. analyst, wrote in a report to clients after the event. “Tesla’s addressable market for Semi Trucks may be considerably larger than we had estimated.”

    Musk, 46, is known for being a showman, and Tesla is in the midst of a slower-than-promised rollout of the Model 3, the critical mass-production electric car that will make or break the automaker. The two new vehicles unveiled Thursday night could be seen as distractions at the very time when the company needs to be focused.

    As central as the Model 3 is to Tesla’s survival, though, the Semi and Roadster are formidable in their potential to generate revenue. Of the two, the most important for Tesla’s future, the future of transport electrification, and the environment in general is the Semi. 

    A matte black Semi and an even bigger trailer beside it. 
    Photographer: Tom Randall/Bloomberg

    The truck is a massive Class 8 Day Cab, capable of hauling a maximum vehicle weight of 80,000 pounds—pretty much the biggest long-haulers get—for a whopping 500 miles on a single charge, according to Musk. After the airport event, he sent potential fleet customers out in the Semis on endless breakneck loops along the runway. The trucks get to 60 mph just as quick as a Model 3.

    Beyond speed, the Semi’s range and charging time are significantly better than the expectations of six analysts surveyed by Bloomberg before the event. This means the market Tesla is chasing is wide open. In North America alone, the diesel freight trucks in the Tesla Semi’s class account for about $30 billion in sales annually, or more than 250,000 new trucks, according to industry data tracked by Bloomberg.

    A view from the cockpit.
    Source: Tesla

    The Semi’s specs mean that a driver could put in almost 900 miles a day, only stopping to charge during a 30-minute lunch break, and picking up 400 miles of battery range while eating his sandwich. That’s faster than any charger capability today—possibly by an order of magnitude. Moreover, that 900 mile-a-day capacity is actually more driving than U.S. laws allow.  The two prototype Semis on display Thursday were day cabs, but Tesla plans to build a version with a sleeper cabin, too. 

    Given the Semi’s potential for long-distance hauling, the one remaining hurdle for luring truckers to electric is cost.

    Unfortunately, that’s something Musk didn’t address—at least not completely. While he claimed the truck would offer customers more than $200,000 in fuel savings with an impressive 2-year payback compared with diesel, he didn’t disclose many of the assumptions behind those calculations, including the most basic: the upfront cost of the truck. A payback period of of 2 years is exactly what’s needed for Tesla to garner a big interest from the freight industry, according to the average of six analysts surveyed before the event. 

    Musk said Tesla will guarantee low electricity prices of 7 cents a kilowatt hour, significantly below average U.S. prices, which the company will ensure by deploying solar panels and massive batteries. The truck has a drag coefficient of 0.36, which is sleeker than a Bugatti Chiron supercar. The Semi’s wheels, trailer gaps, and undercarriage are sealed up to reduce  drag. 

    The Roadster.

    Tesla has begun taking reservations for the Semi, at $5,000 a piece for delivery in 2019. Bloomberg was first to confirm initial Semi orders, from a Michigan grocery store chain and then from Wal-Mart Stores Inc., Meijer Inc., and J.B. Hunt Transport Services Inc. People familiar with Tesla’s Semi program said more companies would be disclosing orders soon. Roadster deposits, meanwhile, start at $50,000 for the $200,000 base model for delivery in 2020.

    Both of the vehicles set new records for range and speed, and will become the targets to beat for companies going electric. 

    For more on Tesla, check out the   podcast:

     

      Read more: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-17/elon-musk-channels-knight-rider-with-his-roadster-semi-reveal

      Goodbye and good riddance to livestock farming | George Monbiot

      Goodbye and good riddance to livestock farming | George Monbiot

      by • Cars • Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

      As the artificial meat industry grows, the last argument for farming animals has now collapsed, writes Guardian columnist George Monbiot

      What will future generations, looking back on our age, see as its monstrosities? We think of slavery, the subjugation of women, judicial torture, the murder of heretics, imperial conquest and genocide, the first world war and the rise of fascism, and ask ourselves how people could have failed to see the horror of what they did. What madness of our times will revolt our descendants?

      There are plenty to choose from. But one of them, I believe, will be the mass incarceration of animals, to enable us to eat their flesh or eggs or drink their milk. While we call ourselves animal lovers, and lavish kindness on our dogs and cats, we inflict brutal deprivations on billions of animals that are just as capable of suffering. The hypocrisy is so rank that future generations will marvel at how we could have failed to see it.

      The shift will occur with the advent of cheap artificial meat. Technological change has often helped to catalyse ethical change. The $300m deal China signed last month to buy lab-grown meat marks the beginning of the end of livestock farming. But it wont happen quickly: the great suffering is likely to continue for many years.

      The answer, we are told by celebrity chefs and food writers, is to keep livestock outdoors: eat free-range beef or lamb, not battery pork. But all this does is to swap one disaster mass cruelty for another: mass destruction. Almost all forms of animal farming cause environmental damage, but none more so than keeping them outdoors. The reason is inefficiency. Grazing is not just slightly inefficient, it is stupendously wasteful. Roughly twice as much of the worlds surface is used for grazing as for growing crops, yet animals fed entirely on pasture produce just one gram out of the 81g of protein consumed per personper day.

      A paper in Science of the Total Environment reports that livestock production is the single largest driver of habitat loss. Grazing livestock are a fully automated system for ecological destruction: you need only release them on to the land and they do the rest, browsing out tree seedlings, simplifying complex ecosystems. Their keepers augment this assault by slaughtering large predators.

      Flock
      Sheep supply around 1% of our diet in terms of calories. Yet they occupy around 4m hectares of the uplands. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod for the Guardian

      In the UK, for example, sheep supply around 1% of our diet in terms of calories. Yet they occupy around 4m hectares of the uplands. This is more or less equivalent to all the land under crops in this country, and more than twice the area of the built environment (1.7m hectares). The rich mosaic of rainforest and other habitats that once covered our hills has been erased, the wildlife reduced to a handful of hardy species. The damage caused is out of all proportion to the meat produced.

      Replacing the meat in our diets with soya spectacularly reduces the land area required per kilo of protein: by 70% in the case of chicken, 89% in the case of pork and 97% in the case of beef. One study suggests that if we were all to switch to a plant-based diet, 15mhectares of land in Britain currently used for farming could be returned to nature. Alternatively, this country could feed 200 million people. An end to animal farming would be the salvation of the worlds wildlife, our natural wonders and magnificent habitats.

      Understandably, those who keep animals have pushed back against such facts, using an ingenious argument. Livestock grazing, they claim, can suck carbon out of the atmosphere and store it in the soil, reducing or even reversing global warming. In a TED talk watched by 4 million people, the rancher Allan Savory claims that his holistic grazing could absorb enough carbon to return the worlds atmosphere to pre-industrial levels. His inability, when I interviewed him, to substantiate his claims has done nothing to dent their popularity.

      Similar statements have been made by Graham Harvey, the agricultural story editor of the BBC Radio 4 serial The Archers he claims that the prairies in the US could absorb all the carbon thats gone into the atmosphere for the whole planet since we industrialised and amplified by the Campaign to Protect Rural England. Farmers organisations all over the world now noisily promote this view.

      A report this week by the Food Climate Research Network, called Grazed and Confused, seeks to resolve the question: can keeping livestock outdoors cause a net reduction in greenhouse gases? The authors spent two years investigating the issue. They cite 300 sources. Their answer is unequivocal. No.

      It is true, they find, that some grazing systems are better than others. Under some circumstances, plants growing on pastures will accumulate carbon under the ground, through the expansion of their root systems and the laying down of leaf litter. But the claims of people such as Savory and Harvey are dangerously misleading. The evidence supporting additional carbon storage through the special systems these livestock crusaders propose (variously described as holistic, regenerative, mob, or adaptive grazing) is weak and contradictory, and suggests that if theres an effect at all, it is small.

      The best that can be done is to remove between 20% and 60% of the greenhouse gas emissions grazing livestock produce. Even this might be an overestimate: a paper published this week in the journal Carbon Balance and Management suggests that the amount of methane (a potent greenhouse gas) farm animals produce has been understated. In either case, carbon storage in pastures cannot compensate for the animals own climate impacts, let alone those of industrial civilisation. I would like to see the TED team post a warning on Savorys video, before even more people are misled.

      As the final argument crumbles, we are left facing an uncomfortable fact: animal farming looks as incompatible with a sustained future for humans and other species as mining coal.

      That vast expanse of pastureland, from which we obtain so little at such great environmental cost, would be better used for rewilding: the mass restoration of nature. Not only would this help to reverse the catastrophic decline in habitats and the diversity and abundance of wildlife, but the returning forests, wetlands and savannahs are likely to absorb far more carbon than even the most sophisticated forms of grazing.

      The end of animal farming might be hard to swallow. But we are a resilient and adaptable species. We have undergone a series of astonishing changes: the adoption of sedentarism, of agriculture, of cities, of industry.

      Now it is time for a new revolution, almost as profound as those other great shifts: the switch to a plant-based diet. The technology is depending on how close an approximation to meat you demand (Quorn seems almost indistinguishable from chicken or mince to me) either here or just around the corner. The ethical switch is happening already: even today, there are half a million vegans in the land of roast beef. Its time to abandon the excuses, the fake facts and false comforts. It is time to see our moral choices as our descendants will.

      George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist

      Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/oct/04/livestock-farming-artificial-meat-industry-animals