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31 December, 2020
Egg on Their Faces: 10 Climate Alarmist Predictions for 2020 That Went Horribly Wrong
Long before Beto O’Rourke claimed the world only had 10 years left for humans to act against climate change, alarmists had spent decades predicting one doomsday scenario after another, each of which stubbornly failed to materialize. It seems climate armageddon has taken a permanent sabbatical.
Many of those doomsday predictions specifically mentioned the annus horribilus of 2020. Those predictions also failed, some rather spectacularly.
Steve Milloy, a former Trump/Pence EPA transition team member and founder of JunkScience.com, compiled ten climate predictions for 2020 that fell far off the mark.
1. Average global temperature up 3 degrees Celsius
In 1987, the Star-Phoenix in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada, quoted James Hansen of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York. His model predicted an average temperature increase of “between one-half and one degree Celsius by the end of the ’90s.”
“And within 15 to 20 years of this, the earth will be warmer than it has been in the past 100,000 years,” Hansen said. According to the Star-Phoenix, his model predicted that “by the year 2020 we will experience an average temperature increase of around three degrees [Celsius], with even greater extremes.”
Milloy cited former NASA climatologist Roy Spencer, whose data suggest global temperatures have risen 0.64 degrees Celsius since 1987. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) shows an increase of about 0.5 degrees Celsius from 1987.
Best Decade Yet: Humanity Grew Richer and More Sustainable in the 2010s
2. Global emissions
In 1978, The Vancouver Sun cited a paper in the journal Science. University of Washington researcher Minze Stuiver predicted that the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere will have doubled by 2020. “We learn that if present trends continue, with economics the only limit on the exploitation of fossil fuels, the CO2 concentration will have doubled by 2020. Forty to 80 years after fuel burning peaks — that will come mid-century — the CO2 concentration will be five to 10 times its present level.”
Yet the CO2 in the atmosphere hasn’t come close to doubling since 1978. According to NOAA, in March 1978 when the Sun published this article, there were 335 parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere. In February 2020, NOAA reported 413 parts per million in the atmosphere. That represents an increase of 23 percent, a far cry from doubling the concentration (which would be 670 parts per million).
3. Emissions from India and China
In December 2009, The Springfield News-Leader reported that India and China had pledged to cut emissions by 2020. “The developing world, for the first time, is offering its own actions — not straight reductions, but clean-energy projects and other steps to slow the growth of their emissions.”
“China says it will, by 2020, reduce gases by 40 to 45 percent below ‘business as usual,’ that is, judged against 2005 figures, for energy used versus economic input. India offers a 20 to 25 percent slowdown in emissions growth.”
While these projections were more promises than predictions, they fell wide of the mark. India and China increased their carbon emissions since 2005. According to the World Bank, India emitted 1.2 million kilotons of CO2 in 2005 and 2.4 million kilotons of CO2 in 2018, the last year data is available, a 200 percent increase. China, meanwhile, emitted 5.9 million kilotons in 2005 and 9.9 million kilotons in 2016, a 168 percent increase.
Egg on Their Faces: The Maldives Still Above the Waves 30 Years After Environmentalist Prediction
4. No snow on Mount Kilimanjaro
In 2001, The Vancouver Sun reported, “Snows of Kilimanjaro to vanish by 2020.”
“‘At this rate, all of the ice will be gone between 2010 and 2020,’ said Lonnie Thompson, a geologist at Ohio State University. ‘And that is probably a conservative estimate.”
Al Gore’s 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth also predicted that there would be no snow on Kilimanjaro in 2020.
Yet in February 2020, The Times of London reported that the “Staying power of Kilimanjaro snow defies Al Gore’s gloomy forecast.”
“The snow has certainly got my clients talking,” Methley Swai, owner of the Just-Kilimanjaro trekking company, told The Times. “Many people have made Kilimanjaro a bucket list priority because of the Al Gore deadline but when they get here they are pleasantly surprised to find lots of snow.”
5. Rising sea levels in the Sunshine State
Miami Herald report predicting sea-level rise of 2 feet in Florida by 2020.
In 1986, the Environmental Protection Agency’s Jim Titus predicted that the sea level around Florida would rise two feet by 2020, The Miami Herald reported.
According to NOAA, the sea level at Virginia Key has risen by about 9 centimeters, which works out to 3.54 inches.
6. People will become unfamiliar with snow
In March 2000, David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit of the University of East Anglia in England, predicted that winter snowfall will become “a very rare and exciting event,” The Independent reported. “Children just aren’t going to know what snow is,” Viner said.
Heavy snow will return occasionally, Viner predicted, but the Brits would not be prepared for it when it does. “We’re really going to get caught out. Snow will probably cause chaos in 20 years time,” he said.
About that. Snow is still very much a thing in the United Kingdom, and Scotland’s snowplows — called “gritters” — have been very much up to the task. Scotland had gotten about 10 centimeters of snow in some places by early December 2020, the Daily Record reported. “Traffic Scotland says that its current winter fleet consists of 213 vehicles that are available for ploughing and spreading salt.”
7. Pacific islands economies devastated
In October 2000, a Greenpeace report predicted that global warming “could cause a massive economic decline across at least 13 tiny Pacific nations in the next 20 years,” the Australian newspaper The Age reported. Global warming would devastate most of the Pacific’s coral reefs, devastating the tourism and fishing industries of tiny Pacific nations.
“Under the worst-case scenario examined, by 2020 some Melanesian nations would lose from 15 to 20 per cent of their gross domestic product, valued at about $1.9 billion [in American dollars] to $2.3 billion, while other mainly Polynesian nations are even more vulnerable and could lose between $4 billion and $5 billion due to climate change,” the report warned.
“The study shows that the most vulnerable Pacific nations are Tuvalu and Kiribati, the host of this year’s Pacific Islands Forum, followed by Cook Islands, Palau, Tonga and French Polynesia,” The Age reported.
Yet according to the government of Tuvalu’s Ministry of Finance, “Revenues collected from fisheries access increased from approximately $10 million [Australian dollars] in 2012 to $13.6 million in 2014 to the current situation in which annual revenue is more than $30 million.”
“The 2019 budget reports that Tuvalu has enjoyed an unprecedented six consecutive years of economic growth ‘on the back of increasing revenues from fishing licenses and back-to-back infrastructure projects that were-funded and administered by development partners,'” the ministry reported.
Kiribati has also enjoyed healthy GDP growth in the past five years. As with so many predictions of climate armageddon, the great demise of Pacific economies has failed to materialize.
8. Global conflict and nuclear war
In 2004, The Guardian reported on a Department of Defense report predicting that climate change could be America’s greatest national security threat. Among other things, the report predicted nuclear war, endemic conflict over resources, and European cities underwater by 2020.
The Pentagon report claimed that peace occurs when resources increase or when populations die off. “But such peaceful periods are short-lived because population quickly rises to once again push against carrying capacity, and warfare resumes.” In modern times, the casualties have decreased, but “all of that progressive behavior could collapse if carrying capacities everywhere were suddenly lowered drastically by abrupt climate change.”
As endemic warfare resumes, it will escalate to nuclear war, the report predicted. “In this world of warring states, nuclear arms proliferation is inevitable.”
Not only has nuclear war failed to materialize, but the world has become more peaceful in the past 30 years. Mathematicians at the University of York created an algorithm to measure battlefield deaths and discovered an “abrupt shift towards a greater level of peace in the early 1990s.”
9. The end of Arctic ice
In April 2013, the Lancaster Eagle-Gazette reported that NOAA scientists predicted “ranges for an ice-free Arctic from 2020 to after 2040.”
“It is reasonable to conclude Arctic ice loss is very likely to occur in the first rather than the second half of the 21st century, with a possibility of loss within a decade or two,” the paper claimed.
According to the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) at the University of Colorado-Boulder, there were 3.9 million square kilometers of sea ice in the Arctic Sea at its annual minimum in September 2020.
10. Glaciers gone at Glacier National Park
In March 2009, U.S. Geological Survey ecologist Daniel Fagre predicted that the glaciers in Montana’s Glacier National Park would disappear by 2020.
“Fagre’s current research reveals that temperatures in Glacier National Park have risen higher than was predicted in 1992. The Montana glaciers are now expected to be gone by 2020,” The Los Angeles Times reported.
By 2010, Glacier National Park erected signs warning that its signature glaciers would be gone by 2020. This year, the park rushed to change the signs as the glaciers still existed. In truth, the U.S. Geological Survey warned the park back in 2017 that the forecast model no longer predicted a glacier-less 2020, but a park spokeswoman told CNN that the park didn’t have enough money to change the signs.
The park altered the most prominent placards in 2019, but it was still waiting for budget authorization to update signs at two other locations.
The new signs will say, “When they will completely disappear depends on how and when we act. One thing is consistent: the glaciers in the park are shrinking.”
Climate alarmists have been forecasting doom for more than 50 years, and their predictions fail again and again. In 2018, the tiny Maldives Islands were scheduled to sink beneath the waves due to climate change — yet the islands have actually grown in recent years!
The truth of the matter is, climate is an extremely complicated science that remains far less than fully understood. While it stands to reason that carbon emissions may have an impact on the global climate, there is little concrete evidence to prove it — and nearly every prediction made on this hypothesis has proven false.
My New Year’s climate resolution
Andrew L. Urban
My New Year’s resolution for 2021 is to go full bore whacko religious on climate change.
No more Mr Science Guy. No more using reason and real science when debunking climate alarmist voodoo. No more articles appealing to reason, facts and no more debunking of a fake consensus. That means, instead, ridiculing the warped gospel of the Church of Climate Change.
Q: What’s the difference between the Church of Scientology and the Church of Climate Change?
A: It’s not rationally measurable.
Both belief systems claim a superior, infallible moral authority. Both impose severe penalties on apostates. In the case of Climatism, the penalties include public vilification and career damage, whether in science, academe, politics, most of the media and in many corporations who have signed up to it. In the case of Scientology dissent provokes intense long term harassment.
Both try to enforce their belief system aggressively in any society that allows them to thrive. Both of them threaten their critics with derogatory excess. Neither of them tolerate satire and generally lack a sense of humour.
Q: What’s the difference between L Ron Hubbard, the High Priest of Scientology and Al Gore, the High Priest of Climatism?
A: Hubbard is dead.
Q: How to challenge those scientists who claim that anthropogenic warming is not proven?
A: Invite an angry 16-year-old girl to address the Pope, the World Economic Forum, the European Parliament and the UN General Assembly to prophesy the warming apocalypse (8 – 12 years to go) …”I want you to panic”
Q: How does government forecast negative climate effects in the future?
A: Appoint a climate prophet (such as wombat expert Tim Flannery).
Q: How to sell climate change as dangerous?
A: Show archival photos and videos of raging bushfires, drought-stricken land and overlay text or commentary, blaming it all on climate change.
Q: How to appear politically pro-active on climate change?
A: Provide massive subsidies for renewables, enabling rent-seekers to make fortunes.
Q: If renewables don’t deliver energy when required, what’s to blame for the shortfall?
A: Climate.
Q: Why have all global warming models been so badly wrong?
A: The Church of Climate Change has full confidence in ‘the science‘. Its science.
Q: If research data conflicts with the ruling orthodoxy on global warming, what’s the most effective course of action?
A: Adjust the data.
Q: How to respond to arguments that question the basis of climate alarmism?
A: Ignore the arguments, silence the ‘deniers’, demonise scientists who challenge the ruling orthodoxy, preferably have them sacked.
Q: Even if governments believe that carbon dioxide emissions cause global warming, why do they impose massive disruption on Australia’s economy and energy prices when our emissions total some 1.3% of the world’s total?
A: The Church of Climate Change is guided by ‘the science’. Its science.
Q: How do climate ‘sceptics‘ characterise alarmists?
A: Brainwashed fools.
Q: How do climate alarmists characterise ‘deniers’?
A: Evil bastards.
https://spectator.com.au/2020/12/my-new-years-resolution-no-more-mr-science-guy/
China recolonizes AfricaWestern policies damage Africa and the planet, kill millions, and open doors to China
Duggan Flanakin
Joe Biden has pledged that one of his first acts as President will be rejoining the Paris Climate Treaty – which gives China a complete pass on reducing emissions until at least 2030. Even Biden’s designated “climate envoy,” former Secretary of State John Kerry, says the existing treaty “has to be stronger,” but then claims China will somehow become an active partner, instead of the competitor and adversary it clearly is. His rationale: “Climate is imperative, it's as imperative for China as it is for us.”
As to China employing more Green technology and abiding by (much less strengthening) the Paris agreement, the evidence is at best spotty, at worst completely the opposite. President Trump pulled the United States out of Paris, but between January 2017 and May 2019 the US had shuttered 50 coal-fired power plants, with 51 more shutdowns announced, bringing the total shutdowns to 289 (330 once announced shutdowns also take place) since 2010, soon leaving under 200 still operating.
Meanwhile, as of 2019, China had 2,363 active coal-fired power plants and was building another 1,171 in the Middle Kingdom – plus hundreds more in Africa, Asia and elsewhere. A CO2 Coalition white paper by Kathleen Hartnett White and Caleb Rossiter reveals that China now has modern pollutant-scrubbing technology on over 80% of its coal-fired power plants, but no scrubbers at any Chinese-built coal-fired power plants in Africa (or likely anywhere else) – and none anywhere that remove carbon dioxide.
Harvard University China specialist Edward Cunningham says China is building, planning or financing more than 300 coal plants, in places as widespread as Turkey, Egypt, Vietnam, Indonesia, Bangladesh and the Philippines. India, South Korea, Japan, South Africa and even Germany [From%09Subject%09Received%09Size%09Categories]are also building hundreds of coal-fired power plants. No matter how many the USA closes down, it won’t make any global difference.
Boston University data indicate that China has invested over $50 billion in building new coal plants overseas in recent years, and over a quarter of new coal plants outside the Middle Kingdom have some commitment or offer of funds from Chinese financial institutions.
“Why is China placing a global bet on coal?” NPR wonders. That’s a 40 or even 50-year commitment, the life span of coal-fired units. The NPR authors even quote the Stinson Center think tank’s Southeast Asia analyst, who says “it’s not clear when you look at the actual projects China is funding that they are truly Green.” They’re obviously not green, and more is obviously going on than their poor eyesight can perceive.
China knows it and the world will need oil, natural gas and coal for decades to come. It sees “green” as the color of money and is happy to extend credit under terms very favorable to China. Communist Party leaders seek global military and economic power – and global control of electricity generation, raw materials extraction, and manufacturing of wind turbines, solar panels and battery modules they will sell to address the West’s obsession with the “manmade climate crisis” and “renewable, sustainable” energy.
Party leaders also know its production of “green” technologies is a good smokescreen for all this coal power – and few Western governments will dare to criticize China sharply over this or Covid.
A recent Global Warming Policy Foundation report lambasts environmentalists (like John Kerry) as “useful idiots” who “praise the scale of Chinese ambition on climate change, while paying lip service in criticizing China’s massive coal expansion.” It notes that China rarely honors its international agreements and has no intention of reducing fossil fuel consumption.
But what are Africa and other developing nations to do? The West will not fund even clean coal projects that would eliminate pollution from dung and wood fires, while providing reliable, affordable electricity for lights, refrigerators, schools, shops, hospitals, factories and much more. China will – and despite the heavy price, their demand for energy requires that they get electricity by any means necessary.
With 1.1 billion people, Sub-Saharan Africa remains the world’s poorest region, despite massive mineral resources and a young, energetic population with an affinity for entrepreneurship. Dutch economist Wim Naudé says Africa must industrialize, which means it must have affordable, reliable electricity, if it is to overcome poverty and disease, create jobs and discourage terrorism.
Unfortunately, outrageously, US, EU, UN and World Bank policies have stymied African energy resource development. As White and Rossiter note, US policies since the Obama era oppose Africans using the continent’s abundant coal and gas to fuel power plants, on the ground that carbon dioxide from fossil fuels might exacerbate climate change.
African Energy Chamber executive chairman NJ Ayuk recently reported that the United Kingdom has also decided it will stop funding new oil, gas and coal projects as of November 4, 2021, the fifth anniversary of the Paris treaty. The decision kowtows to Green opposition to UK Export Finance support for a Mozambique terminal to export low-CO2 emissions liquefied natural gas.
Ayuk had been touting natural gas as an increasing option for African power plants, boasting that Africa is home to four of the world’s top 20 crude oil producers (Nigeria, Angola, Algeria and Libya); Algeria and Nigeria are among the top 20 natural gas producers; and Mozambique also has huge gas reserves.
“It is troubling,” Ayuk said, “that an aggressive foreign-funded anti-African energy campaign continues to undermine the potential of making Mozambique an oasis for gas monetization and meeting our increasing energy demands.” Despite this setback, he continued, “we must continue to be unwavering in our commitment to stand up for Africa’s energy sector, its workers, reducing energy poverty, and those free-market values that will make our continent attractive to committed energy investors.”
In much of Africa, electricity demand far outstrips supply. “In factories, businesses, government buildings and wealthy neighborhoods in every African country,” White and Rossiter observe, a cacophonous symphony of soot-spewing backup diesel engines erupts when the grid goes down, which is usually every day.” In fact, says the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation, many African countries spend more on dirty backup power than on electricity for the grid itself; in West Africa, backup kilowatts equal 40% of total grid kilowatts.
In Sudan, which gets 30% of its energy from dams on the Nile River, diesel-based pumps run constantly to lift river water for irrigation, even at the confluence of the Blue and White Niles. In Nigeria, hotels ban guests from jogging because of health dangers from breathing soot from their diesel backup generators, which kick in repeatedly as neighborhoods go dark. In Southern Africa, construction sites simply run generators all day, filling nearby streets with noxious clouds. Universities rely on diesels to run old, inefficient air conditioning units.
White and Rossiter note that American clean coal technology, exemplified by the Turk power plant in Arkansas, virtually eliminates health hazards from sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides and particulates. They urge the U.S. to support proposals by African governments to import this technology, noting that electricity is “the central nervous system of a modern economy and modern life expectancy. Africa’s electricity deficit translates directly into its life-expectancy deficit of 15 years per person.”
Millions die needlessly every year, from countless diseases of energy and economic poverty.
But under a Biden-Harris Administration, with John Kerry at the forefront, there is little hope that these African and other pleas will be heard. With European allies in myopic puritanical lockstep, China will continue to get a total pass on complying with Green demands – and will have free rein to turn sub-Saharan Africa into a giant Chinese colony, despite the environmental damage, monstrous debt, slave and child labor under horrific workplace conditions, and likely modest benefits to Africans.
It is eco-imperialism and eco-manslaughter at its worst. Where are the vaunted guardians of climate and environmental justice?
Via email
The revolutionary green technology using old car tyres to make steel that could spell the end of Australia's coal exports
This is a big laugh. The cost problem is acknowledged but there are many other difficulties.
Biggest of all is that electric arc furnaces are big users of electricity and that current has to be delivered in a stable way. So where will they get all that electricity? From coal-fired power stations, almost certainly. So they are still using coal to make steel but in a more complicated way!
Also amusing is that the newspaper's copy reader does not know the difference between an ark and an arc. Noah's arc would be amusing
The heating up of old car tyres to make steel could one day spell the end of coal - threatening one of Australia's key exports to China.
University of New South Wales engineering and science professor Veena Sahajwalla has pioneered world-first 'green steel' technology where hydrogen and solid carbon are extracted from waste rubber to make metal.
The former judge on the ABC's New Inventors show told Daily Mail Australia her innovation, also known as Polymer Injection Technology, had the potential to one day make metallurgical coal redundant.
'Oh, absolutely. Absolutely,' she said. 'We are certainly looking at a future where the dependency on coal for steel making is completely eliminated.
What is green steel technology?
Green steel technology involves extracting hydrogen and carbon from waste tyres to make metal
This method, also known as Polymer Injection Technology, relies on an electric ark furnace instead of a traditional blast furnace powered by coking coal
'So the goal very much is to say that we want to get to zero coal and coke in the process of making steel.'
China, Australia's biggest trading partner, last year bought $10billion worth of Australia's metallurgical coal exports and it still relies on old-fashioned blast furnaces that are heavily dependent on this fossil fuel.
'It's basically asking the question: "Where will the tipping point be for many countries like China and others?",' Professor Sahajwalla said.
Most of the world's existing steel production involves heating coking coal in a blast furnace at 1,000C, but green steel technology is about phasing this out and replacing it with a new method of making liquid steel.
'A traditional blast furnace will always have coke not just from a heat point of view but coke also provides a structure - it is a solid product that sits inside a furnace,' Professor Sahajwalla said.
'The traditional coke that is used as a source in a furnace, we're talking about replacing that coke with, of course, waste tyres.
'The science shows that it works.'
A smaller proportion of steel production involves electric ark furnace which uses high-current electric arcs to melt scrap steel and convert it into liquid steel.
Green steel production relies on this method to turn rubber tyres into metal.
Newcastle mining materials supplier Molycop, a former division of Arrium, uses green steel technology to make replacement metal wheels for Waratah trains servicing Sydney, Newcastle, the Central Coast, the Blue Mountains, and Wollongong.
Michael Parker, the company's president, said its manufacturing, combining coking coal and oil with crumbed tyre rubber and the use of renewable solar energy - to power an electric ark furnace - produced 80 per cent less carbon emissions than traditional steel making.
The green steel method, for now, has significantly reduced the need for coal in steel production but is has not completely eliminated it.
'This polymer injection technology allows us to substitute probably about half of that with crumbed rubber,' Mr Parker told Daily Mail Australia.
'Use the carbon and hydrogen out of waste tyres to replace virgin, raw materials.'
As part of the green steel production, tyres are put into a high-temperature electric ark furnace to extract hydrogen so iron oxide can be turned into iron as part of a chemical transformation. 'It's the rubber that contains all these other elements,' Professor Sahajwalla said.
'It's the tyres that give you these other molecules like hydrogen which then participates in the reaction and that's what allows us to convert the iron oxide into iron which is what becomes steel.'
The finished product sold to customers depends on added alloys and additives.
Though rubber tyres can replace the need for coking coal, a lot of the success of green steel will also rely on recycling existing scrap metal.
Mr Parker said waste metal was unexpectedly in short supply. 'There's not enough scrap steel in the world to replace the demand for new steel,' he said.
British billionaire Sanjeev Gupta hopes to use renewable energy and scrap metal recycling to turn the old Whyalla steelworks in South Australia into a major supplier of new green steel.
He has a long-term plan to phase out old-fashioned blast furnaces and replace them with electric ark furnaces.
His GFG Alliance bought Arrium, which previously owned Molycop, before American private equity group American Industrial Partners rescued it in 2017.
Professor Sahajwalla said green steel was slowly replacing coking coal. 'Ultimately, the goal is full replacement,' she said. 'Are we already on that journey? The short answer's yes.'
Unlike coking coal, tyres can also produce hydrogen, which can be turned into gas or a liquid.
Nonetheless, Mr Parker conceded green steel production, involving an electric ark furnace instead of a traditional blast furnace, was still a costlier method of making steel than coal or iron ore-derived methods.
'The issue is the cost of producing hydrogen through electrolysis is very high so there's got to be some breakthrough technically to get it down to a cost where you can afford to use hydrogen to make or produce iron ore to go into something like an electric ark furnace,' he said.
Making steel out of old tyres at least solves the problem of landfill. 'It's about being clever, let's use it in a way that maximises value from this waste,' Professor Sahajwalla said.
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29 December, 2020
Bill Gates Has an Insane Idea to Save the Human Race From Global Warming
Bill Gates, the computer nerd-turned-billionaire-turned left-wing activist wants to save humanity.
He wants to dim the sun.
That’s right, the founder of Microsoft apparently thinks that the sun is the Blue Screen of Death in the sky and is funding research at Harvard University into dimming the sun to cool the earth. The solar geoengineering project, called Stratospheric Controlled Perturbation Experiment (SCoPEx), will be flying a test balloon above Sweden next year as part of this research. The plan is to eventually release 2 kg of calcium carbonate dust into the atmosphere in a year or two to study how what impact it may have.
You read that correctly. They want to put chalk dust in the atmosphere. Are you old enough to have ever cleaned blackboard erasers for your teacher? That nasty cloud of chalk dust you inhaled during that process is what they want to put into the atmosphere.
What could possibly go wrong?
Who would have thought that the answer to “man-made climate change” would be more man-made climate change?
That said, environmentalists aren’t entirely on board. “There is no merit in this test except to enable the next step. You can’t test the trigger of a bomb and say ‘This can’t possibly do any harm’,” said Nicklas Hällström, director of the Swedish green think-tank WhatNext?
Of course, Hällström’s biggest issue with this concept is that he thinks that it will create the impression that we can still use fossil fuels.
There are several problems with this whole thing.
For starters, radical environmentalists can’t seem to decide whether man-made climate change is causing the earth to warm or cool. That’s why what was once referred to as “global warming” is now called by the more vague term “climate change.”
Second, even if you ascribe to the idea that climate change is man-made and not part of a natural cycle, even the most radical of predictions refer to its impact of fractions of a degree over many, many decades. Dimming the sun would likely have a more dramatic impact on global temperatures. It is widely believed that the reason why dinosaurs were wiped out was an asteroid impact that released particles into the atmosphere, blocking the sun and causing a dramatic drop in global temperatures. Is this really something we want to try ourselves?
Third, how would adding particles in the air contribute to the greenhouse effect? Do we really want to find out?
New York can’t buy its way out of blackouts
Battery nonsense
New York City will soon be home to the world’s biggest utility-scale battery system, designed to back up its growing reliance on intermittent renewables. At 400 MWh this batch of batteries will be more than triple the 129 MWh world leader in Australia.
The City of New York’s director of sustainability (I am not making this title up), Mark Chambers, is ecstatic, bragging: “Expanding battery storage is a critical part of how we advance momentum to confront the climate emergency while meeting the energy needs of all New Yorkers. Today’s announcement demonstrates how we can deliver this need at significant scale.”
In reality the scale here is incredibly insignificant.
In the same nonsensical way, Tim Cawley, the president of Con Edison, New York’s power utility, gushes thus: “Utility scale battery storage will play a vital role in New York’s clean energy future, especially in New York City where it will help to maximize the benefit of the wind power being developed offshore.”
This puts the Con in Con Edison.
Here is the reality when it comes to the scale needed to reliably back up intermittent renewables. For simplicity let us suppose New York City is 100% wind powered. Including solar in the generating mix makes it more complicated but does not change the unhappy outcome very much.
NYC presently peaks at around 32,000 MW needed to keep the lights on. If Mr. Biden makes all the cars and trucks electric it might be closer to 50,000 MW but let’s stick to reality.
This peak occurs during summer heat waves which are caused by stagnant high pressure systems called Bermuda highs. These highs often last for a week and because they are stagnant there is no wind power generation. Wind turbines require something like sustained winds of 10 mph to move the blades and more like a whistling 30 mph to generate full power. During a Bermuda high folks are happy to get the occasional 5 mph breeze. These huge highs cover many states so it is not like we can get the juice from next door.
So for reliability we need, say, seven days of backup, which is 168 hours. Here’s the math:
32,000 MW x 168 hours = 5,376,000 MWh of stored juice needed to just make it. Mind you for normal reliability we usually add 20% or so. Did I mention electric cars?
It is easy to see that a trivial 400 MWh is not “significant scale.” It is infinitesimal scale. Nothing. Nada. Might as well not exist.
More specifically, 5,376,000 divided by 400 = 13,440 so only 13,439 more to go.
On the other hand, this measly 400 MWh battery array may well cost half a billion dollars, which is significant, especially to the New Yorkers who will pay for it. No cost figures are given because the system is privately owned, but EIA reports that the average utility scale battery system runs around $1.5 million a MWh of storage capacity. That works out to $600 million for this insignificant toy.
So what would it cost to reliably back up wind power, at this MWh cost and NYC’s scale? Just over $8,000,000,000,000 or EIGHT TRILLION DOLLARS. I have not seen this stupendous sum mentioned in the media. Perhaps Con Ed has not mentioned it.
Then too, New York State has the same problem. Only much bigger if New York City is included, which it often is.
But hey, maybe the cost will come down a few trillion. Not if we create a seller’s market by rushing into intermittent renewables, which is certainly where we are headed. After all, this is just New York City. Imagine what backing up America with batteries might cost. Don’t bother because it is impossible.
I should also add that we have no idea how to make 5 million MWh of batteries work together. The tiny 400 will be a challenge. It may not be possible.
Maybe fracked geothermal, the reliable renewable, is the answer. Or how about coal, oil, gas and nuclear power? Too bad they are all out of fashion.
All of this battery backup hype is a scam, and not just in New York either. The papers are full of this con, from coast to coast. The utilities know perfectly well that these loudly touted battery buys are a hoax, but they are getting rich building the wind and solar systems the politicians are calling for.
The voters are oblivious to these impossible numbers, since they are told that intermittent wind and solar are cheaper than reliable coal, gas and nuclear. Only when the sun shines bright and the wind blows hard, which is not all that often.
Reality is just sitting there, waiting. It can’t work so it won’t work. At this point it is just a question of how and when we find out the hard way
https://www.cfact.org/2020/12/24/new-york-cant-buy-its-way-out-of-blackouts/
Joe Biden Is Building A Secret EPAWe already have an Environmental Protection Agency, and we don’t need another one pulling strings for radical climate activists behind closed doors.
This week, President-elect Joe Biden announced a slate of nominations and selections for a variety of environmental positions within his administration. Unsurprisingly, these announcements were met with open arms by the media. But, if Biden is so proud of his upcoming environmental actions, why is he building a new environmental office within the White House? The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) exists for a reason – and it’s not to operate in secret from the White House.
In appointing Gina McCarthy to lead the newly created Office of Domestic Climate Policy, Joe Biden is placing his controversial environmental agenda out of view from the American people. McCarthy is set to join former Sen. John Kerry in a questionable environmental role which doesn’t require Senate confirmation, meaning less congressional oversight. However, when you look at McCarthy’s previous experience, you might understand why Biden doesn’t want her in front of any congressional committee.
McCarthy would join the Biden White House after leading the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), an environmental organization that faced scrutiny for their relationship to Chinese entities. Of course, the “solutions” for which the NRDC routinely pushes just so happen to have the potential to destroy American energy independence in favor of Chinese-made solar panels, but I’m sure that’s just a coincidence.
Less than three months ago, and while McCarty was leading the NRDC, members of Congress called for an investigation into the ties between foreign actors on environmental non-profits in the United States. Specifically, they called for an examination of the “Sea Change Foundation,” which has given millions to the NRDC.
To anyone paying attention, it’s clear Joe Biden is trying to play us for fools … again.
After spending the last six months trying to convince us that he doesn’t support extreme ideas like a full ban on fracking and the Green New Deal, Biden is creating bureaucratic positions for leaders that are fully behind those disastrous proposals. His awkward inability to appear as an environmental moderate while still appeasing the radical eco-left like Aleaxandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders led to more than few embarrassing moments during his campaign.
Now that he looks to govern, how will Biden strike the balance between the eco-left’s insane demands and the moderate image he needs to project? His solution is simple, yet misleading — he’ll have the EPA attempt to pacify the public, and his secret environmental office do the bidding of radical environmentalists. Again, if Joe Biden is so proud of what he’s going to implement, he shouldn’t shy away from Congress and the public.
The terrible reality is that Gina McCarthy will help form a direct line between her former questionable employer and the White House, leaving America’s energy workers without a voice.
There is too much at stake for our country to allow Joe Biden to create a secret EPA that will operate behind closed doors.
https://dailycaller.com/2020/12/18/behrens-joe-biden-is-building-a-secret-epa/
No, Weather Channel, 2020 Did Not Bring Unprecedented Climate DisastersAn article published by the Weather Channel tries to link climate change to a variety of environmental “disasters,” that struck around the world in 2020. The article cites limited evidence for any link. In reality, none of the asserted disasters are tied to supposed human-caused climate change.
In the Weather Channel article titled, “2020’s Worst Environmental Disasters, and How Climate Change Played a Role,” the author writes, “In a year of unprecedented disasters, much of the damage done to our planet in 2020 was self-inflicted.”
Historical records and data show none of the disasters discussed in the article are, in fact, unprecedented.
Among the environmental tribulations the Weather Channel discusses are oil spills, dams breaking, and wildfires.
Regarding oil spills, humans have indeed caused some oil spills, but these have occurred either through human error or poor equipment maintenance. Climate change plays no role in oil spills, regardless of the Weather Channel’s unsubstantiated speculation.
Regarding dam failures, floods from unexpectedly heavy rainfall can undoubtedly combine with poor maintenance or poor government decision-making to result in dams failing, but there is no scientific link to climate change. As pointed out in Climate At A Glance: Floods, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) acknowledges having “low confidence” in any climate change impact regarding the frequency or severity of floods. This includes “low confidence” in even the “sign” of any changes—meaning, it is just as likely that climate change is making floods less frequent and less severe.
In addition, a study on the climate impact on flooding for the USA and Europe, published in the Journal of Hydrology, Volume 552, September 2017, Pages 704-717, found: “The number of significant trends was about the number expected due to chance alone. Changes in the frequency of major floods are dominated by multidecadal variability.”
Regarding wildfires, the IPCC has found across the mid-latitudes (including the U.S.) there has been a modest but measurable increase in moisture, which mitigates wildfires.
The Weather Channel points to Australia’s tragic 2019-2020 wildfire season as proof of warming-induced wildfire expansion. The Weather Channel failed to note that before the 2019-2020 wildfire season, the continent had for nearly a decade experienced above-average rainfall. At the same time, Australia’s government had decided not to manage its brush and trees, the fuel load for wildfires. These two factors combined to create tinder box conditions which exploded when Australia’s normal drought cycle reoccurred.
In California, the situation is much the same, with the article admitting, “Particularly in California … decisions on forest management and fire suppression, and expansion of homes and businesses into less-developed areas have combined to make the 2020 fire season one of the most destructive in recorded history.” The Weather Channel blamed a “human caused global warming,” as well, but the best available data indicate no such link exists. The article says, “[v]egetation left dry by climate change is fueling unprecedentedly large wildfires,” yet vegetation is not being left dry by climate change.
Indeed, As reported in Climate at a Glance: Drought, the IPCC reports with “high confidence” that precipitation has increased over mid-latitude land areas of the Northern Hemisphere (including the United States) during the past 70 years.
Moreover, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reports America is currently is undergoing its longest period in recorded history with less than 40 percent of the country experiencing “very dry” conditions. Also, the United States in 2017 – and then again in 2019 – registered its smallest percentage of land area experiencing drought.
As reported in Climate at a Glance: Wildfires, long-term data from the U.S. National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC) show wildfires have dramatically declined in number and severity in recent decades. Reporting data on U.S. wildfires from as far back as 1926, NIFC documents that the number of acres annually burned recently is only1/4th to 1/5th of the annual acres burned in the 1930s.
The wildfires burning in the U.S. West in the past few years are more appropriately labeled, “Greenie Fires, Not Climate Fires,” as James Taylor wrote in a recent Climate Realism article discussing the issue.
As Taylor notes, “The reason why wildfires in the U.S. West, and especially in Pacific Coast states, are becoming more severe in recent years is because federal, state, and local governments have followed environmental extremists’ demands that we no longer actively manage our forests. Proactive forest management requires thinning of forests, prescriptive burns, thinning of underbrush, and removal of dead trees that serve as super-fuel for forest fires. Environmental extremists have largely blocked these activities during the past 30 in the U.S. West, leading to explosive wildfire conditions that defy global trends.”
2020 was undoubtedly a bad year for environmental disasters, but contrary to the Weather Channel’s assertions, assertions made without citing supporting evidence, there is limited if any proof that climate change contributed to the problems.
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC) Saturdays only
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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26 December, 2020
Hit the rich, say Greenies
World leaders should aggressively reduce the carbon footprint of the wealthiest to curb the effects of climate change, experts have said.
It comes after a UN report found that the wealthiest 1 per cent pump more than twice times as much carbon into the atmosphere as the bottom 50 per cent.
It is hardly the first time that wealthy figures have been accused of driving climate change with their lavish lifestyle choices.
Orlando Bloom, Katy Perry and Leonardo DiCpario were among a slew of well-heeled celebrities criticsed for attending a Google climate summit in Italy last year - arriving on private jets and yachts that left an estimated 800-tonne carbon footprint.
DiCaprio, a UN climate ambassador, has previously been criticised for speaking out on the issue despite frequently flying on private jets, renting a yacht from an oil baron, and owning four houses.
Oxfam's Confronting Carbon Inequality report singled out SUVs and frequent flying as two of the biggest drivers of the '1 per cent' carbon footprint, with many billionaires known to own private jets.
Like the UN report, published this week, it found the top 1 per cent contribute significantly more to climate change than the bottom 50 per cent.
Jeff Bezos, the world's richest man, is known to get around on a $65 million Gulfstream jet and in October 2018 was pictured taking an SUV to the airport with then-mistress Lauren Sanchez before hopping on board the aircraft.
Billioanaire Mark Cuban owns three jets - a Gulfstream that he uses as private transport and two Boeing business jets, one that he rents out as a charter and another that he uses to fly his basketball team around, Business Insider reported.
And despite producing eco-friendly electric cars via Tesla, Elon Musk's love of private jets has previously made headlines after he flew 150,000 miles using a Gulfstream jet in 2018.
Other billionaires to own polluting vehicles are Russian oligarchs Roman Abramovich and Alisher Usmanov, owners of two of the world's largest private yachts.
According to the UN, the richest will need to shrink their CO2 footprints significantly to avoid dangerous levels of global warming this century.
The annual study, carried out by the UN Environment Programme (Unep), highlights the gap between the levels emissions should be at to keep temperatures down and current real-life levels.
It found that the world's top 10% of earners devour about 45% of all energy consumed for land transport worldwide and 75% of that used for aviation.
The world's poorest 50% of households, meanwhile, consume just 10% and 5% respectively.
'This elite will need to reduce their footprint by a factor of 30 to stay in line with the Paris Agreement targets,' Unep executive director Inger Anderson wrote in a foreword to the report.
Better batteries for electric cars from Toyota
Cost?
The Japanese giant was due to unveil a working prototype of its new electric-car tech at the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games, which was cancelled due to the pandemic. But according to Asian business publication, the Nikkei, this is now due some next year.
A solid state battery is a huge advancement over the current lithium-ion batteries used in electric cars.
In simple terms, a solid-state battery is smaller, faster to charge, more energy dense and less likely to catch fire than current batteries. The main reason is because the battery uses a solid electrolyte instead of a liquid or gel.
Estimates put range at more than 800km and up to 1000km, with the ability to charge in under 10 minutes.
These advancements would enable electric cars to be more practical than most petrol- or diesel-powered cars.
The batteries provide other benefits such as a roomier cabin and greater efficiency due to a lower vehicle weight.
Toyota is aiming for its next-generation batteries to hold about 90 per cent of their charge for up to 30 years, much longer than lithium-ion examples.
Reports in the Nikkei say Japanese manufacturers are gearing up to start producing the battery tech in greater numbers. The Japanese government has set up a special decarbonising fund worth about $25.5b to help develop the new batteries.
The first working prototype vehicles fitted with a solid state battery are expected to break cover in 2021, although full production isn’t expected for several years at least.
Toyota isn’t the only brand working on the groundbreaking tech.
American electric car start-up Fisker has previously said it has been investing heavily in solid state battery tech. It is looking to fit the new tech to its low-volume EMotion luxury electric sedan.
Volkswagen and Nissan are two other conventional car makers working on developing the new electric car fuel cell, but both are behind Toyota.
Time to Finally End Solar and Wind Subsidies
Famed Chicago School economist and Nobel Prize winner Milton Friedman often said, “There is nothing so permanent as a temporary government program.” Each year, when it comes time to pass an omnibus spending bill, taxpayers get a firsthand view of just how prophetic Friedman’s words were. This year is no different as Congress negotiates end-of-year spending and a potential COVID relief package. Programs and subsidies that should have gone by the wayside years ago once again find themselves squarely on the table.
Such is the case with the production tax credit (PTC) and investment tax credit (ITC) for both the wind and solar industries. The American taxpayer has been burdened enough by the rampant spending of the past year combatting the coronavirus and the deleterious effects of the associated lockdowns. Both the PTCs and ITCs for these industries – that have long since become mature enough to stand on their own – are sad testaments to government waste.
Another troubling provision would potentially mandate 100 percent renewable power. According to the American Energy Alliance, “The word on the street is that there are negotiations taking place to try and jam a pre-negotiated energy bill into the year-end spending bonanza. AEA obtained a page from the discussion draft that appears to include a provision from the House Green New Deal lite version of energy legislation, H.R. 4447, making is a ‘Sense of Congress’ that calls for 100% of power demand to come from ‘clean, renewable, or zero-emission’ energy sources.” This type of mandate would open the floodgates of taxpayer subsidies and raise energy costs.
Wind and solar subsidies are already estimated to cost American taxpayers a shade over $60 billion in just this decade alone. Extending these wasteful tax credits would add another $13 to $19 billion to that tally. Given that the United States is facing debt and deficit numbers never before seen in the nation’s history, the refusal of Congress to reject these extensions outright is patently absurd.
Not only is Congress’s profligate spending absurd, it is also thoroughly unnecessary in this case. These subsidies have been in place since 1992. Since 2010, the cost of onshore wind has dropped 40 percent and solar has dropped a staggering 80 percent. If, at this point, neither industry can stand on its own two feet without the ITC and PTC given to them by the federal government – and thus the American taxpayer – perhaps it’s time to re-evaluate them as viable energy sources moving forward.
Congress initially intended for the ITC and PTC to expire in 1999, a mere seven years after their debut. However, they have since been extended on 12 separate occasions. This year’s omnibus would mark the 13th such extension if allowed to go forward. This present extension would be particularly unnecessary given that even the industries involved have admitted to some extent that they no longer need these tax credits.
Last year, the Vice President of Federal Affairs for the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) announced he would no longer be advocating for “wind-specific incentives” in the year-end package. Sadly, he changed his tune and decided to renew his call for wind tax credits ostensibly to compete with the solar industry. Ironically enough, the solar tax credits were not extended that year.
The solar industry continues to thrive without the tax credits, for the time being. In 2019, it became “the number one source of new electric generating capacity installed in the United States, representing 40% of all new capacity installed. Over the last 10 years, solar deployment has grown an average of 48% every year.” The same holds true for the wind industry. It has tripled in size and is expected to continue to grow even if the tax credits are phased out.
To be clear, the emergence of alternatives to traditional energy sources should be applauded. All honest lovers of the free market enjoy healthy competition for services. If wind and solar can finally stand on their own two feet, it will make the market for electricity and energy a far more vibrant one. However, free marketeers also know that no marketplace can be truly free if the government constantly has its thumbs on the proverbial scales.
Taxpayers should also be concerned with proposed language seeking to mandate the use of wind and solar. The decades of Congress reapproving PTCs and ITCs for these technologies have proven that our elected officials are bad at predicting the future. Boxing ourselves into a corner with mandates for today’s technology serves to only limit our options in terms of reducing emissions going forward.
These tax credits no longer represent a key lifeline for emerging alternative sources of energy. Instead, they have become just another form of government cronyism and – like most other forms of cronyism – crawl out into the limelight to get mindlessly shepherded through the halls of Congress without anyone second guessing the necessity of it. Let 2020 finally be the year that these programs are allowed to expire as they should have over 20 years ago.
The Green/Left nightmare
Below is what the World Economic Forum has in mind for us
As Brexit and Donald Trump’s victory show, predicting even the immediate future is no easy feat. When it comes to what our world will look like in the medium-term – how we will organise our cities, where we will get our power from, what we will eat, what it will mean to be a refugee – it gets even trickier. But imagining the societies of tomorrow can give us a fresh perspective on the challenges and opportunities of today.
We asked experts from our Global Future Councils for their take on the world in 2030, and these are the results, from the death of shopping to the resurgence of the nation state.
1. All products will have become services. “I don't own anything. I don't own a car. I don't own a house. I don't own any appliances or any clothes,” writes Danish MP Ida Auken. Shopping is a distant memory in the city of 2030, whose inhabitants have cracked clean energy and borrow what they need on demand. It sounds utopian, until she mentions that her every move is tracked and outside the city live swathes of discontents, the ultimate depiction of a society split in two.
2. There is a global price on carbon. China took the lead in 2017 with a market for trading the right to emit a tonne of CO2, setting the world on a path towards a single carbon price and a powerful incentive to ditch fossil fuels, predicts Jane Burston, Head of Climate and Environment at the UK’s National Physical Laboratory. Europe, meanwhile, found itself at the centre of the trade in cheap, efficient solar panels, as prices for renewables fell sharply.
3. US dominance is over. We have a handful of global powers. Nation states will have staged a comeback, writes Robert Muggah, Research Director at the Igarapé Institute. Instead of a single force, a handful of countries – the U.S., Russia, China, Germany, India and Japan chief among them – show semi-imperial tendencies. However, at the same time, the role of the state is threatened by trends including the rise of cities and the spread of online identities,
4. Farewell hospital, hello home-spital. Technology will have further disrupted disease, writes Melanie Walker, a medical doctor and World Bank advisor. The hospital as we know it will be on its way out, with fewer accidents thanks to self-driving cars and great strides in preventive and personalised medicine. Scalpels and organ donors are out, tiny robotic tubes and bio-printed organs are in.
5. We are eating much less meat. Rather like our grandparents, we will treat meat as a treat rather than a staple, writes Tim Benton, Professor of Population Ecology at the University of Leeds, UK. It won’t be big agriculture or little artisan producers that win, but rather a combination of the two, with convenience food redesigned to be healthier and less harmful to the environment.
6. Today’s Syrian refugees, 2030’s CEOs. Highly educated Syrian refugees will have come of age by 2030, making the case for the economic integration of those who have been forced to flee conflict. The world needs to be better prepared for populations on the move, writes Lorna Solis, Founder and CEO of the NGO Blue Rose Compass, as climate change will have displaced 1 billion people.
7. The values that built the West will have been tested to breaking point. We forget the checks and balances that bolster our democracies at our peril, writes Kenneth Roth, Executive Director of Human Rights Watch.
8. “By the 2030s, we'll be ready to move humans toward the Red Planet.” What’s more, once we get there, we’ll probably discover evidence of alien life, writes Ellen Stofan, Chief Scientist at NASA. Big science will help us to answer big questions about life on earth, as well as opening up practical applications for space technology.
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/11/8-predictions-for-the-world-in-2030
***************************************My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC) Saturdays only
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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24 December, 2020
No more guilt trips? Revolutionary process converts carbon dioxide into jet fuel using cheap catalysts for emissions-free flights
Ya gotta laugh! Adding a hydrogen atom to CO2 to make a hydrocarbon seems obvious chemistry but it is not so easy in practice. So the scientists below deserve some credit for their achievement.
But where does the hydrogen atom come from? The usual source of hydrogen is natural gas, which is a "FOSSIL FUEL". So those dreaded fossil fuels are still being used to create the new "non-fossil" fuel. The non-fossil fuel comes from fossil fuel. Follow that? Clarity of thought is not to be expected from Greenies
Creating jet fuel for planes out of carbon dioxide – which could make flying guilt free – could soon be a reality.
The process from a team at Oxford University uses cheap iron catalysts to capture CO2 from the air and converts it into fuel for aeroplanes.
The academics have labelled their innovation a 'significant social advance' in how the abundant greenhouse gas is converted and its potential to make flying more environmentally acceptable.
The chemical reaction takes CO2 out of the air, and converts it into jet fuel, which is then emitted by the plane in flight.
As there is no need to extract oil from the ground, the process is carbon neutral.
Aviation is a large and growing contributor to the greenhouse effect – with its gases labelled by Boris Johnson as creating a 'toxic teacosy' around the earth.
It contributes around 10 per cent of the UK's greenhouse gas emissions, and is growing as air traffic rises here and abroad.
Flying has as a result become an environmental and political battleground – with environmentalists opposing expansion of air travel – for increasing CO2 emissions.
Teenage activist Greta Thunberg sailed across the Atlantic to the USA to avoid getting in a plane, and celebrities such as Emma Thompson and Harry Potter actress Emma Watson have been lambasted for lecturing the public on the evils of global warming, while regularly jetting round the world.
But the UK is legally bound get to 'net zero' carbon emissions by 2050, so to do this a new form of carbon neutral fuel must be found.
The issue for aviation is that its fuel breaks down and spews out CO2 and water, and both of these products are emitted into the atmosphere.
However, the new technique would capture the gas already in the atmosphere and create fuel, negating the need to fill up with new fuel extracted from the ground.
CO2 is highly stable, but the researchers led by Peter Edwards of Oxford University managed to convert it back into fuel by using a chemical reaction powered by an iron-based catalyst – at low temperatures – and adding hydrogen.
Speaking to the Daily Mail, Professor Peter Edwards said the breakthrough could put Britain at the forefront of a revolutionary new green industry.
He said: 'This is a really exciting, potentially revolutionary advance, the most important advance in my four decade career.'
Professor Edwards said he expected it could scale up in two to three years to create jet fuel in large quantities.
He added: 'Our vision is that the world can see that captured CO2 can be used as energy carrier to enable sustainable aviation.
He added that the team are in advanced discussions with UK industries to set up a pilot plant demonstration.
'With government support this would provide the stimulus to grow a new UK synthetic aviation fuel manufacturing industry .
'This advance offers post – Brexit Britain a chance to lead the world in climate change , boost our science base and enhance our reputation.
'These scientific advances must now lead to break-through technology and innovation. We mustn't miss this opportunity.'
Writing in the respected journal Nature Communications, the authors said that their discovery could 'mitigate carbon dioxide emissions but also to produce renewable and sustainable jet fuel'.
Protect low-income and senior households by protecting natural gas
With such uncertainty in our lives today, the cost of energy should not be another problem people have to worry about. While the COVID-19 pandemic and the ensuing economic fallout has stricken people throughout the country, it is unfortunate that access to affordable energy is often overlooked. This is an especially troubling dynamic as cold winter weather looms, and the public faces an unprecedented $24 billion in electric and gas debt.
Environmental activists often ignore the human cost of energy inequity in our society as they advocate for bans on the use of natural gas in the home. They also fail to acknowledge the pivotal role that natural gas plays in providing reliable, affordable energy to seniors and low-income communities. Unfortunately, this has led to some communities forcing consumers to convert from natural gas. These mandates to ban gas in favor of an all-electric infrastructure will lead to higher energy costs and increase the financial burden for consumers nationwide without accomplishing their intended goals for the environment.
Policy-driven bans on natural gas will increase the average household energy bill by between $750 and $910 per year. But high energy costs and the lack of energy affordability already affect families across the country. Californians, for example, face some of the highest energy bills in the nation — which is notable, as the majority of natural gas bans have been proposed or enacted in the state. California residents are already required to pay tens of billions of dollars in extra costs related to renewable-energy mandates and transmission-system upgrades before even considering the costs associated with poorly conceived natural gas bans.
Before cities in California fast-track electrification policies, they must consider the economic ramifications of these hastily implemented natural gas bans on low-income families and communities. Not every Californian can afford the cost of these bans when compared to their speculated benefit. The median household income for Californians in places that have banned or restricted natural gas use is 78% higher than the national average and 45% higher than the California median.
Unfortunately, a one-size-fits-all approach to energy plans that ban consumer choice often affect low-income communities the hardest. What’s more, as the California Energy Commission explains, low-income renters are often unable to convert away from natural gas due to upfront costs or a lack of homeownership. While the policies in higher-income areas may not have as large an effect on low-income Californians now, they can be a slippery slope to an energy future that leaves the most vulnerable citizens unable to foot the bill.
Moreover, senior citizens, who often live on fixed incomes and face difficult financial decisions each month, are also vulnerable to the burden of high energy costs — and with close to 6 million seniors, the state of California is projected to age faster than the rest of the nation. While only 10.5% of California’s seniors currently live below the federal poverty line, as the senior population continues to grow, so too will the number of seniors who face financial strain. Compounded with increasing energy bills from natural gas bans, seniors could struggle to make ends meet each month.
Unfortunately, the issue of blindly banning natural gas isn’t confined to California. Similar natural gas bans are taking shape in New York, Massachusetts, and Oregon. We must ensure policymakers at every level of government are aware of the burden anti-natural gas policies place on their constituents, particularly those living on a low- or fixed-income, working families, and seniors.
Our energy future is more complex than wholesale bans. Utilities and environmental groups can work together toward a cleaner energy future that doesn’t disproportionately affect communities based on wealth. Gas utilities place a high priority on benefiting the environment and helping those who are most vulnerable. These priorities are an important part of our mission, especially the mission of public gas utilities nationwide.
Those advocating for natural gas bans also disregard the role natural gas can play in achieving climate-change goals. Gas utilities have led the nation in reducing greenhouse gas emissions for decades, adding 30 million new residential customers since 1970 with virtually no increase in emissions. Natural gas plays a valuable role in addressing climate change, all while remaining affordable.
The nation’s energy infrastructure shouldn’t create barriers and financial burdens for hardworking families, especially when it comes to how they heat their homes, cook their food, and fuel their appliances. As the nation braces for winter weather and continues to deal with the economic fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic, energy affordability must be a priority. To make progress on climate goals while offering families a fair price on their energy bill, policymakers should protect consumers’ ability to choose affordable, efficient, and reliable natural gas.
How Subsidized Wind and Solar Power Threatens our National Grid
New book, "The Looming Energy Crisis: Are Blackouts Inevitable?"
(From the Introduction)
There is an ideology that threatens the grid. This book will examine how federal regulators, state governments, utility companies, and the operators of the grid themselves are imposing their beliefs about climate change on all Americans and placing the grid in great jeopardy. Unelected bureaucrats and self-imposed intelligentsia are making decisions that place all Americans in danger.
It can be argued that the actions these people are taking are making electricity more costly and less reliable and placing Americans at risk for little or no reason. The Looming Energy Crisis will show you why we must continue to use fossil fuels and why we must protect the grid from the actions of those who are imposing their personal beliefs on the rest of us. Our objective should be low-cost reliable electricity available for everyone. Reliability is a national security issue.
(From Chapter 1: The Grid)
The basic components of the grid consist of the equipment that generates the electricity, the equipment that carries the electricity across the country, and the distribution of electricity to the homeowner or business...
Traditional methods of generating electricity, other than hydro, are built to operate 24/7, year round, and are referred to as baseload power. Attempting to have these plants follow load, with load increasing and decreasing, has negative effects of a varying nature.
Nuclear plants can't be cycled up or down when demand varies. Coal-fired plants are damaged by the expansion and contraction of component parts when they try to follow load, due to the varying temperatures created with increasing and decreasing steam flows. Natural Gas Combined Cycle (NGCC) plants are more flexible and can adjust output more readily. Natural gas peaking units can ramp up and down rapidly. Their purpose is to provide electricity during peak periods of demand. Wind and solar PV, on the other hand, only operate when the wind is blowing or the sun is shining and can't be relied on to generate electricity when needed...
Storage has become an issue as attempts are made to use more wind and PV solar on the grid. Lithium-ion batteries have become the battery of choice. Lithium-ion batteries have to be replaced ever ten years or so, which adds to the cost of storage...
Capacity factor (CF) is an important measurement for evaluating different types of generation. CFs for the various methods of generating electricity are: Nuclear: 91 percent; Natural gas combined cycle: 87 percent; Coal-fired plants: 85 percent; Onshore wind: around 34 percent; PV solar: 12-25 percent, usually based on location...
(From Chapter 2: Framework for Mandates)
It's been demonstrated that capturing CO2 from a coal-fired power plant results in derating the plant by around one-third. In other words, a plant rated at 300 megawatts becomes a plant rated at 200 megawatts. Derating is the result of using about one-third of the power plant's output to run the equipment requires to capture and compress the CO2 so it can be transported and sequestered underground...
In pursuit of clean energy, many states have established renewable portfolio standard (RPS) that utilities must follow...The RPS usually begins with a small requirement, say 5 percent, and then increases until it reaches a fairly large requirement by 2050.
(From Chapter 3: Clean Electricity Mandates)
These twelve states listed in Table 1, plus any others that adopt 100 percent clean electricity goals, have unwittingly mandated three outcomes:
Substantially higher costs for electricity for every resident;
Less reliable service with more frequent interruptions;
Increased risk for extended blackouts.
While it's not easy to estimate the cost for a state or city, the cost for the entire country to replace fossil fuels is nearly $20 trillion, about equal to our national debt. Plus, most of this cost is repeated every ten years as batteries and equipment wear out and have to be replaced.
The increased cost of electricity will be substantial. Germans already pay four times more than the average American, and they have only cut their CO2 emissions by 31 percent. Imagine how much more they will pay when they start to add more than token amounts of storage...
(From Chapter 8:Market Structure)
At the direction of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in 1999, regional transmission organizations (RTOs) and independent system operators (ISOs) were established covering two-thirds of the population of the United States...We will establish that the integrity and reliability of the grid as well as the low-cost objective have been jeopardized by politicians at both the state and federal levels who have been pursuing policies based on political agendas. The fear of climate change, with the objective of cutting GHG emissions, is central to these political agendas. In essence RTO/ISOs have rigged the market to ensure that wind and solar replace fossil fuels.
(From Chapter 10: Rigged Auctions)
Real-time auctions (Note: in which RTO/ISOs buy power from power plants) operate in a similar manner to day-ahead auctions. Both have three immediate consequences.
First, they result in nuclear and coal-fired power plants being retired, which reduces the availability of baseload power...
Second, they encourage the building of unnecessary power plants. Wind and solar plants are built because they get subsidies and can always win these auctions, even though there may not be a need for the electricity they produce other than to meet renewable portfolio standards required by some states. Utilities and independent power producers are building these wind installations to take advantage of the tax credits.
Third, the levelized cost of electricity from wind and solar is higher than from NGCC, coal-fired, and nuclear power plants...
Wind and solar have a competitive advantage because they can bid zero and still have their costs covered by an out-of-market payment - a payment hidden in the bidding process.
This is skewing the bidding so that wind and solar can always win any bid they enter.
(From Chapter 12: Supply Must Meet Demand)
To protect against the collapse of the grid when wind or solar fail to produce electricity (there must be) gas turbines standing by in spinning reserve, ready to come online at a moment's notice.
This may not be possible during the winter in northern states where the supply of natural gas is unavailable to NGCC power plants because natural gas must go to homeowners for heating purposes before it can be used to generate electricity.
There are some areas, such as in New York and New England, where state government have prohibited the construction of pipelines, preventing the availability of sufficient supplies of natural gas in those areas.
This problem is migrating to other areas of the country as state governments prevent the construction of pipelines to meet the growing demand for natural gas. Protesters are preventing the construction of pipelines by using the courts to block construction for a variety of reasons. Many of these pipelines are essential if there is to be a guaranteed supply of electricity in certain areas of the country.
(From Chapter 20: Recent Trends)
In 2020 Professor Judith Curry drew three main conclusions from her latest paper, "Plausible scenarios for climate change: 2020-2050."
We are starting to narrow the uncertainty in the amount of warming from emissions that we can expect out to 2050.
All three modes of natural variability - solar, volcanoes, and internal variability - are expected to trend cool over the next three decades.
Depending on the relative magnitude of emissions driven warming versus natural variability, decades with no warming, or even cooling, are more or less plausible." (Net warmest scenario: +.7 degrees Celsius; Net moderate scenario: +.11 C; Net coldest scenario: -.5 C.)
The latest science has established we have nothing to fear from increases in atmospheric levels of CO2 and methane...
There is every reason to believe that we are not facing an existential threat, and that actions to curtail CO2 and methane will cause severe harm to Americans.
Email from The CO2 Coalition: info@co2coalition.org
Virtue signalling and the hatred of coal
Comment from Australia
There has been more than one virus attacking the fibre of our society over the past 12 months as virtue signalling has leapt from business to business and executives have scrambled to join the race to be “woke.”
We are all now expected to conform to whatever shallow, vacuous position is currently in vogue and embrace every demand made by the chattering class lest we be condemned on social media.
Mackay small business man David Hartigan is the latest casualty of this crusade by the corporate world to beat its collective chest and show the world it has a social conscience.
His company provides engineering advice to mining companies. “Good on you, mate,” you might say, for creating jobs and doing your bit to help grow the national economy.
Not so in the world of the woke with his insurance company telling him that he cannot make more than 40 per cent of his income from thermal coal mining clients if he wants coverage.
This, of course, is so the insurance company can proclaim to the world that it cares about climate change
The large number of financial institutions now too frightened to cover mining businesses has lessened competition and allowed those still in the business to ramp up their premiums, Mr Hartigan’s increasing by 300 per cent over the past four years.
Can someone please explain to me how screwing a small businessman in regional Queensland is going to save the planet.
It is stupidity writ large and goes hand-in-hand with the insistence by the woke warriors that no one is building coal fired power plants anymore, thus ignoring the inconvenient truth that Germany commissioned one this year, Japan will build 20 over the next five years and the Chinese are building them faster than you can count.
The truth? They can’t handle the truth, preferring to project an image of heartfelt care confected by a marketing consultant while damaging the economy.
Whatever happened to that once treasured Australian trait of declaring in a loud voice that if it looks like bull…t and smells like bull…t, the chances are it’s bull…t? Have we lost the ability to mock poseurs and impostors who wear their false virtue like a robe?
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC) Saturdays only
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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22 December, 2020
Tesla to become the most valuable company EVER to join the S&P 500 when it debuts Monday after its stock hit an all-time high in Friday trading
This is a classic stockmarket bubble. When enough people realize that electric cars are no good in Northern winters, the stock could collapse to just a few dollars. Anybody who buys in now is in for a big loss
Tesla shares hit a lifetime high in anticipation of its addition to the S&P 500 next week closing up six percent at $695 on Friday.
The electric car maker will on Monday become the most valuable company to be ever added to Wall Street's main benchmark, accounting for 1.52 percent of the index.
The electric car maker's shares had already surged about 60 percent since mid-November, when its debut in the S&P 500 was announced.
California-based Tesla's stock has skyrocketed almost 700 percent year-to-date, putting its stock market value at over $650 billion.
It makes it the sixth most valuable publicly listed U.S. company, with many investors viewing it as wildly overvalued.
Its grand entrance was expected to be preceded by a huge trade, with an unprecedented $80 billion of the electric car maker's stock predicted to change hands by the end of the session on Friday so their portfolios correctly reflect the index.
It would be the largest rebalancing in the history of that index.
Those funds would simultaneously have to sell other S&P 500 constituents' shares worth the same amount to accomodate Tesla's entry.
'Index managers will need to sell a large position across the other S&P 500 constituents in order to fund the addition of TSLA, which could lead to substantial impact across the entire index,' Virtu ITG Canada's head of index research, Ivan Cajic, wrote in a report this week.
In addition, Friday was also quadruple witching day, Wall Street-speak for the quarterly expiration of stock options and futures contracts, which forces traders to tie up loose ends in contracts they hold, leading to particularly heavy trading volume.
'This is an unusual day because we have Tesla entering the S&P and it´s quadruple witching day,' said Andrew Slimmon, portfolio manager at Morgan Stanley Investment Management.
Actively managed funds that benchmark their performance against the S&P 500, many of which until now have avoided investing in one of Wall Street's most controversial stocks, were forced this week to decide whether to own Tesla.
While some investors view Musk as a visionary entrepreneur, others worry about missed production targets and corporate governance risk after Musk was forced to step down as chairman to settle fraud charges in 2018.
Tesla's meteoric rise has made it the most valuable auto company in the world despite production that is a fraction of rivals such as Toyota Motor, Volkswagen and General Motors.
Its stocks have surged roughly 14,000 percent since it went public a decade ago, the New York Times reports.
According to Forbes, some analysts believe Tesla's shares could rise as high as $780.
Tesla is by far the most traded stock by value on Wall Street, with $18 billion worth of its shares exchanged on average in each session over the past 12 months, easily beating Apple, in second place with average daily trades of $14 billion, according to Refinitiv.
Apple is currently the largest holding in the S&P 500 with a weight of about 6.5 percent.
Tesla still stands well in front of Ford with 0.12 percent of the index and General Motors with a weight of 0.17 percent.
A blockbuster quarterly report in July - where the company banked $566 million - cleared a major hurdle related to profitability that had prevented Tesla's inclusion in the S&P 500.
The company has posted four straight quarters of profits despite the pandemic, the main requirement needed in order to be included in the S&P.
It was aided by its sales of regulatory credits to other automakers how don't yet hit the government requirements for annual production of EV cars.
About a fifth of Tesla's shares are closely held by Musk, the chief executive, and other insiders.
His wealth has already swelled since the S&P announcement making him the second richest person in the world worth $149billion.
The 49-year-old began the year worth $26.6billion.
Since the S&P 500 is weighted by the amount of companies' shares actually available on the stock market, Tesla's influence within the benchmark will be slightly diminished compared to its overall value.
The stock is now trading at over 170 times the average analyst estimate for Tesla's adjusted net income over the next 12 months, among the highest valuations on Wall Street.
Thirty-five analysts cover Tesla, on average rating it 'hold'. Their median price target is $424.50, which is 35 percent below Tesla's price of $655.90 on Thursday.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9066585/Wall-Street-braces-Teslas-S-P-500-debut.html
Nuking the anti-nuke crowdExperts agree the tide has turned in nuclear power’s favor, but obstacles remain
Duggan Flanakin
How has the Trump Administration fared in meeting the multiple challenges that have slowed the growth of nuclear energy in the U.S. to a near-halt? And what are the prospects for nuclear energy in a Biden-Harris Administration? It’s time to nuke the anti-nuke crowd, and it seems to be happening.
It is now seventy-five years since the U.S. ended the war against Japan by dropping nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (both currently thriving). Eight years later, President Eisenhower, in his world-famous “Atoms for Peace” speech before the United Nations, invited citizens to the debate over using nuclear science and technology for power generation.
President Kennedy switched the nation’s attention from nuclear to the space program but, beginning in the Nixon Administration and augmented following the 1973 oil embargo through the Three Mile Island incident in 1979, the U.S. authorized most of the 61 plants and 99 nuclear reactors still operating in 2017. As President Trump took office, the Aspen Institute issued a report stating, “Nuclear power in the U.S. is at a moment of existential crisis. If the present challenges are not addressed, the future of nuclear energy may be far less promising and superior U.S. nuclear expertise diminished.”
President Obama’s Clean Energy Plan provided funding for nuclear energy, including creating the Gateway for Accelerated Innovation in Nuclear (GAIN). In 2012, despite objections by the chairman, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) authorized Southern Company to build and operate two new reactors at its Vogtle nuclear power plant in Georgia, the first in the USA since 1979.
The Aspen report boldly asserted that the U.S. needs a strong domestic nuclear program to maintain its exceptional competence to address safety, threat reduction, and nonproliferation issues. They courted the environmental community by noting that nuclear is a necessary component in the war against climate change, if we are to also maintain an adequate supply of affordable electricity. “A world without nuclear power,” the authors concluded, “would require an incredible – and likely unrealistic – amount of renewables to meet climate targets.”
The Aspen authors observed that Americans are generally supportive of nuclear power but concerned about nuclear waste. Worse, far too many nuclear power plants in development have broken budgets and fallen behind schedule. Given the lack of political will or a national energy crisis at the time, the authors placed their hopes on advanced reactors that use new types of coolants, operate at different pressures and temperatures, or are smaller and more modular.
Many now view nuclear waste as an overhyped, unscientific issue. In a 2019 paper, Aspen Institute trustee Bill Budinger argued that the fear of nuclear waste is largely unfounded – an issue “hugely exaggerated when we were trying to scare people away from nuclear.” The total amount of nuclear waste accumulated over the past 60 years from all U.S. nuclear power plants would fit inside a two-story building covering one city block. Unfounded fear applies to power plant radiation, as well.
Cost overruns and delays are largely the product of anti-nuclear attitudes that have driven regulation to extremes that are inappropriate for newer reactor designs.
In April 2020 President Trump unveiled his Strategy to Restore American Nuclear Energy Leadership and competitive nuclear advantage. The first step outlined in the plan is to revive and strengthen America’s uranium mining industry, support uranium conversion services, end reliance on foreign uranium enrichment, and sustain the current fleet of nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and submarines.
Other objectives include creating a Uranium Reserve, streamlining regulatory reform and land access for uranium extraction (cutting red tape), supporting the National Reactor Innovation Center and Versatile Test Reactor, demonstrating the use of Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) and micro-reactors to power federal facilities, and adding protections to prevent future uranium dumping into the U.S. market.
In November, the Associated Press reported that the Idaho National Laboratory was the Energy Department’s first choice for constructing and operating the Versatile Test Reactor (VTR). This first new test reactor built in the U.S. in decades would give the nation a dedicated “fast-neutron-spectrum” testing capability. Energy Secretary Dan Brouillette explained that the VTR “continues to be a high-priority project for DOE to ensure nuclear energy plays a role in our country’s energy portfolio.”
Meanwhile, Llewellyn King reports that an active community of entrepreneurs is promoting reactors of various designs (including molten salt modular reactors), using seed money for SMRs provided through the Obama-era GAIN program. The increase in private investment in nuclear technology and development is a strong sign that nuclear may have finally overcome the media-induced stigma resulting from Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima.
In reality, the Chernobyl accident happened largely because a test procedure started going wrong when senior technicians were off duty and less experienced technicians made wrong decisions that rapidly compounded the disaster, nuclear physicist Kelvin Kemm explains. Environmentalist Michael Shellenberger notes that radiation from Chernobyl “will kill at most 200 people, while the radiation from Fukushima and Three Mile will kill zero people.” Moreover, despite the fact that hundreds of thousands of women aborted their babies after the Chernobyl incident, UCLA researchers found that children born near Chernobyl had no detectable abnormalities.
Further advancing President Trump’s efforts to establish a U.S. national strategic uranium reserve, the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee recently approved a bipartisan bill, the American Nuclear Infrastructure Act (ANIA). Uranium Energy Corp CEO Amir Adnani called it “broad-reaching legislation, important for supporting the U.S. nuclear fuel industry, national security, and clean energy.”
Under ANIA, the Department of Energy may only buy uranium recovered from facilities licensed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission or equivalent agreement state agencies; uranium from companies owned by, controlled by or subject to the jurisdiction of Russia or China would be excluded.
According to several prognosticators, the presumed Biden Administration will carry on or even accelerate Obama and Trump efforts to revitalize and prioritize U.S. nuclear energy programs. The primary difference between Trump and Biden nuclear policies, says progressive policy analyst James Conca, is that Biden’s is part of a climate change agenda, while Trump’s focus was on national security concerns.
“Leading climate scientists” say we cannot address climate change without significant nuclear power, Conca contends. So supporting nuclear power – or not – is a clear signal about how serious candidates are about manmade climate change and “how serious they are about supporting science over mere activism.” He added, “if Democrats want any clean energy plan to succeed at all, it better include nuclear.”
Washington Examiner energy reporter Josh Siegel says “Biden’s support for nuclear power … promises to be one of the rare instances of energy policy continuity between the incoming and outgoing administrations.” Democrats, he believes, finally realize that wind and solar alone are insufficient to decarbonize the power grid and are starting to give up their longstanding opposition to nuclear energy.
Of course, all this will also require a new reality-based public attitude about the risks of radiation, be it from nuclear power plants, nuclear waste storage or other sources, says energy journalist Robert Bryce.
There is one more huge caveat. Should Kamala Harris for any reason replace Biden as Commander-in-Chief, her support for nuclear power is far less assured. Asked during the 2020 Presidential campaign whether she supported nuclear energy, she replied on multiple occasions: “Yes, temporarily, while we increase investment into cleaner renewable alternatives.”
That’s not exactly a ringing endorsement, nor even an acknowledgment of the growing bipartisan energy reality. And it certainly doesn’t explain how millions of wind turbines, billions of solar panels, billions of battery modules – and massive increases in mining, metals processing and manufacturing, to build those technologies – are “clean, green, renewable or sustainable” alternatives to fossil fuels.
Via email
President-elect Biden announces climate change team
See this video:
https://www.skynews.com.au/details/_6217344832001
Some comments from a readerIt is Biden boasting about putting an American Indian and more "people of colour" and women on his Biden- Harris cabinet, going to combat climate change, fires, hurricanes, droughts, floods, air pollution, build back better, creating unionized jobs, reduce electricity consumption, make more electric vehicles, re-join the Paris Agreement, have a "carbon pollution" free electricity sector by 2035
It all sounds a bit daft to me. At the end he says: "The Obama-Biden administration reduced the auto industry, shh, blu, should say rescued the auto industry"
So he will suck up to the UN, and I expect he will have union troubles, China may try to bully him like it is trying to bully Australia; General Kim will probably test him too; and I won't be surprised if America's left will resent him even more than they did Trump.
I wonder if the middle East agreements with Israel that Trump helped achieve will last?
Windfarm operators blamed for the big blackouts of 2016
Allegedly, the operators should have had in place cut-out switches etc that would have prevented the disaster, even though the storm was an exceptional event.
The real problem was the state's heavy reliance on wind after scrapping its coal-fired generators. It was the Greenie government that had no backup against rare events
A South Australian wind farm operator has been fined $1 million for contravening national electricity rules in the three years leading up to the 2016 statewide blackout.
The Australian Energy Regulator (AER) launched legal action against Snowtown Wind Farms last year and was accused of supplying power to the grid when the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) had not approved it to do so.
The Federal Court today ordered the company — which has 90 wind turbines in the SA's mid north — to implement a compliance program and provide a written report to the court after six months, to ensure there is not a repeat.
Justice Richard White also ordered Snowtown Wind Farms to pay the regulator's court costs of $100,000.
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC) Saturdays only
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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20 December, 2020
EPA Administrator Wheeler Touts President Trump’s Pro-Environment Record
How did our environment fare under the Trump administration these last four years?
Was the impact “disastrous” as critics prophesied? Did President Donald Trump’s policies accelerate global warming? Were his policies a “joke” or bad for the environment as the media and environmental groups claimed? Did Trump’s administration actively undermine our clean air and clear water standards?
According to Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Andrew Wheeler, these characterizations are simply hot air.
Administrator Wheeler recently chatted with me about the agency’s accomplishments across its 50-year history, what the media got wrong about Trump’s environmental record, and more.
The agency’s 15th administrator continued former EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt’s “Back-to-Basics” agenda—constantly drawing the ire of critics hellbent on discrediting their efforts.
Previously deputy EPA administrator, he was confirmed by the U.S. Senate in February 2019 to fill the role vacated by his boss Pruitt (who resigned in July 2018).
“So many environmental reporters, so-called environmental reporters, are actually activists. They’re not practicing journalistic standards,” Wheeler lamented. “They have a habit of only reporting bad news. They don’t want to report any good news.”
With respect to the deregulation doctrine ascribed to President Trump, Wheeler claimed legacy media distorted EPA’s alignment with Executive Order 13771 to reduce regulation and control regulatory costs.
“We have deregulated,” Wheeler admitted. “We saved [the] American taxpayer 100 billion dollars. But in many cases when we deregulate, we replace the regulations with a new regulation that updates the science— updates the standards.”
He expressed his frustration with past agency heads who piled regulation on top of regulation or “guidance document on top of guidance document.”
“What we’re doing is doing away with two or three old regulations and replacing it with one. It’s sort of cleaning house,” he added.
Did his efforts to rein in the agency lead to rampant environmental destruction across the U.S.? The evidence clearly suggests otherwise.
The EPA recently published findings showing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are currently at historical lows, despite our exit from the unenforceable—and equally disastrous—Paris Climate Accords. Per a recent EPA report, emissions were down five percent between 2018-2019. This year alone, emissions are down an impressive nine percent compared to last year.
As for Superfund cleanups of toxic sites, Wheeler proudly touted his work on this front. “We’ve cleaned up enormous numbers of [Superfund] sites across the country, and it’s really an achievement,” Wheeler said.
And one unlikely source, POLITICO, agreed with the sentiment and aptly concluded, “The EPA under Trump has showed what it can look like when an administration gets serious about cleaning up long-neglected sites... Some have seen their backyards and communities finally cleaned up because of the Trump administration’s EPA.”
The media, he added, also downplayed America’s foray into energy independence, ushered in pre-coronavirus by natural gas exploration and hydraulic fracking.
Wheeler explained, “We produce our natural gas here in the most environmentally-conscious manner of anywhere in the world. Our natural gas is producing the cleanest. I’m using the best regulations and the cleanest standards of anywhere.”
Past EPA policies, Administrator Wheeler argued, had “a perverse outcome in communities.”
As a result, the avid hiker said his goal was to prioritize transparency in the rulemaking process. Most recently, the EPA announced a new cost-benefit analysis report relating to the Clean Air Act—a template, he hopes, future agency heads will emulate in the years ahead.
“All our cost-benefit rule does is require the agency to put in the preamble of future rulemakings what are the costs and what are the benefits—to follow a standardized method of identifying these costs and these benefits,” he added.
Conclusion
Since EPA’s inception 50 years ago, our nation has emerged as a global environmental leader.
Has the agency always had our best interests in mind? Not always. (See the Obama administration’s EPA and revisit its innumerable scandals.) But under President Trump, it promoted the notion that a healthy environment can happily coexist with a healthy business climate.
Will history judge this EPA kinder than critics currently allow? It remains to be seen.
Donald Trump gets his way on making showers more powerful with relaxed environmental regulations to allow dual high-pressure showerheads
The government took a step to rectify one of President Donald Trump's pet peeves just days before he leaves office by finalizing a showerhead rule after the president complained about water merely 'dripping out.
The U.S. Energy Department on Tuesday finalized two rules easing energy standards on consumer fixtures and appliances – about a year after the president went on an extended rant about plumbing fixtures during a public event at the White House.
The rule rolled back a regulation dating to the Bush administration to allow showerheads with multiple showerhead fixtures to provide more robust water-flow. But the regulation – to take effect just five days before inauguration – will do nothing to meet Trump's complaints about sinks where 'you don't get any water' and toilets that people are flushing 'ten times, fifteen times' due to environmental regulations.
The government acted after Trump complained some showers don't adequately rinse his hair.
The rules are part of Trump's last-minute efforts to roll back rules that limit production or consumption of oil, gas and coal as part of his "energy dominance" policy.
The department also finalized a rule to exempt some clothes washers and dryers from standards allowing them to use more energy and water.
Trump had complained in July at a White House event that water does not flow strongly enough from showers to his liking. "So what do you do? You just stand there longer or you take a shower longer? Because my hair - I don´t know about you - but it has to be perfect," he said at the event.
But it wasn't his only concern. He complained about sinks and toilets as well.
'You turn the faucet on in areas where there’s tremendous amounts of water where the water rushes out to sea because you could never handle it. And you don’t get any water,' said Trump – who was a real estate developer before he took office.
'You turn on the faucet and you don’t get any water. You take a shower and the water comes dripping out. Just dripping out very quietly dripping out. People are flushing toilets ten times, 15 times, as opposed to once. They end up using more water.'
'You can’t wash your hands practically so little water comes out of the faucet. It takes you much longer to wash your hands,' he claimed.
Trump said the Environmental Protection Agency 'is looking at that very strongly at my suggestion,' although it was the Energy Department that issued the rule.
But environmentalists said easing standards will boost utility bills and waste. The rules "allow for products that needlessly waste energy and water are ridiculous and out of step with the climate crisis," said Andrew deLaski, head of the Appliance Standards Awareness Project nonprofit group.
LinkedIn Shuts Out Climate Skeptic Views
Gregory Wrightstone
If you think that the Microsoft-owned social media platform LinkedIn is just about professional and business connections with no politics, you would be wrong. The online service appears now to be emulating its bigger social media rivals at Facebook, Google and Twitter in censoring views with which it disagrees.
My second run-in with LinkedIn censors in as many months occurred recently, when they removed a post linking to a new CO2 Coalition paper on global temperatures. According to LinkedIn, the post was removed because it “goes against our Professional Community Policies.”
Although LinkedIn did not identify the broken rules, the only possible “violation” of their terms and conditions was an admonition to “not share false or misleading content.”
The censored paper, The Global Mean Temperature Anomaly Record, may interest only climate geeks like myself, but it was completely factual, fully sourced, and written by two of the top climate scientists in the world, Richard Lindzen and John Christy.
These are no lightweight scientists. Dr. Lindzen of MIT is an award recipient of the American Meteorological Society and the American Geophysical Union. He is also a member of the National Academy of Science and was a lead author of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC’s) third assessment report’s scientific volume.
Professor Christy is the director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and has been Alabama’s State Climatologist since 2000. Along with Dr. Roy Spencer, he has maintained one of the key global temperature data sets relied on by scientists and government bodies. For this achievement, they were awarded NASA’s Medal for Exceptional Scientific Achievement.
The main thrust of the paper was to put the modest 1.2-degree rise in temperature since 1900 in its proper perspective. When compared to the wide swings in temperature experienced on a daily and yearly basis, that slight rise in global temperature over the last 120 years does not appear as alarming as portrayed by the purveyors of climate doom. Like so many other scholarly works that don’t support the notion of catastrophic man-made warming, the paper risked being censored by the intellectual elite — or those who identify as such. And it was.
The CO2 Coalition was the publisher of the now censored Lindzen/Christy paper and is no stranger to social media censorship squads. The coalition’s leadership and members are a who’s who of leading scientists studying carbon dioxide and climate change. They include atmospheric physicists, climatologists, ecologists, statisticians, and energy experts, some of whom have faced down attempts by well-known climate avengers to silence them.
First, a letter—signed by Stacey Abrams, Tom Steyer, and 13 leaders of groups working to ban fossil fuels—was sent to Facebook demanding that it shut down the Facebook page of the CO2 Coalition and to censor posts of its members’ studies and articles on other users' pages.
Soon thereafter, four senators, including Massachusetts' Elizabeth Warren and Rhode Island’s Sheldon Whitehouse, sent an open letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to censor the CO2 Coalition because “climate change is an existential crisis” and publicizing any view contrary to that claim “puts action on climate change at risk.”
The attempts at censorship extended to the Coalition chairman, Patrick Moore, a co-founder of Greenpeace. His PragerU video, What They Haven't Told You About Climate Change, which has more than 3.6 million views, was “fact-checked” by Climate Feedback as “misleading.” Moore’s supposedly misleading statement was: “Of course the climate is changing. It always has. It always will.”
The censorship at LinkedIn is not widely known. However, it has been extended to others daring to post factual data on climate change and on COVID-19. The latter was the subject involved in the de-platforming of blogger David Ramsden-Wood who posted a link to a Stanford University antibody study.
The social media giants are currently protected by a key legal shield known as Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Future Congressional hearings on this protection should include testimony from LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky alongside his compadres Mark Zuckerberg of FaceBook, Jack Dorsey of Twitter and Sundar Pichai of Google.
Australia: Greenies do something positive
Ecological “arks” will be created in the Great Barrier Reef under a new Federal Government funded program that for the first time links island health as critical to saving the coral.
Environment Minister Sussan Ley will today announce $5.5 million for a new island restoration program, starting with Morris Island off Cape York.
She said Lady Elliot Island on the reef’s southern border was the first regeneration project ever attempted at scale and its success could be replicated elsewhere.
“There are 1050 islands along the reef ranging from the pristine to former mine sites, disused tourism destinations and those that have been damaged by introduced pest species,” she said.
“As part of the Reef Islands initiative, Dr Kathy Townsend of Sunshine Coast University is leading new ‘leaf to reef’ research that follows the nutrient trail between islands and its importance to corals and marine life, as well as researching the importance of Lady Elliot’s reefs as a biodiversity ark in the region.”
Reef manager for the marine park authority Mark Read said overseas views particularly under-appreciated the complexity of the issue.
“For context the world heritage area is 348,000 square kilometres; it’s bigger than Italy, bigger than Japan and can sit Victoria and Tasmania within its boundaries. It stretches over 2000km and at its widest point is 250km, it’s 1050 islands, 3000 reefs – so trying to categorise that whole system within a single category, ultimately it fails and doesn’t do the system justice,” he said.
Lady Elliot Island is a genesis of what the Federal Government yesterday branded an “ecological ark” carrying the essential ingredients to rehabilitate the in-crisis reef, critically affected by natural and man-made climate change.
Gash and a dedicated team of scientists, backed by a string of Federal Government funded initiatives, are in part driven by a sketch discovered in archives drawn from a sailor aboard HMS Fly in 1843 of what the island sanctuary looked like then and could again.
“So many people say ‘oh but it’s hopeless, there is nothing we can do and it’s all going to die’ and I hate hearing that, it’s never hopeless,” Island custodian Gash said as he looks out over the turquoise waters on the southern point of the reef, 80km from the Queensland mainland.
In 1973 Lady Elliot Island was a dead 42-hectare coral atoll that after almost a century of mining for guano fertiliser was left barren, with no bird or sea life.
Now it boasts more than 1200 species of marine life including turtles and manta rays, whole forests of native Pisonia trees and grasses and the second highest diversity of breeding birds of any feature in the Great Barrier Reef after Raine Island on the reef’s northernmost tip.
Environment Minister Sussan Ley visited Lady Elliot this week to see first-hand the spectacular restoration result which she now hoped will be replicated elsewhere along the reef island chain starting with Morris Island, under a new $5.5 million investment.
Great Barrier Reef Foundation managing director Anna Marsden said without a doubt there were “dark days” ahead for the climate but Lady Elliot was a shining light in what could be achieved within our life times.
“The idea is these arks, these climate refuges, will carry the reef forward,” she said. “The habitat will be able to be the ones to go, before the dark days, then when the world gets its act together and the balance restores these are the places that will reopen the doors and repopulate.”
World renowned marine biologist Dr Kathy Townsend said the correlation between land life and reef marine life was now only being understood.
“The connection between coral cays and the island has been undervalued,” she said.
“The current dogma is where these coral cays are getting their nutrients but new research is showing these coral cays are creating nutrients for the reef in a balanced way. It’s not a dump but a pumping action … it’s like growing an island. Without healthy islands you wouldn’t have the same level of growth and biodiversity you see around the reef.”
She said there had been a 125 per cent increase in turtle habitat and they again were the primary herbivore about Lady Elliot which was keeping coral killing grasses down.
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC) Saturdays only
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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17 December, 2020
What if net-zero isn’t enough? Inside the push to ‘restore’ the climate
Now we are being led by a 17-year-old. When I was 17 years old, I thought that Armageddon was imminent. So maybe I can be indulgent to this young false prophet
Disagreements about how to tackle the climate crisis abound, but in 2020, it seemed much of the world finally reached consensus about at least one thing: getting to net-zero by 2050, or sooner. Net-zero is a state where greenhouse gases are no longer accumulating in the atmosphere — any emissions must be counterbalanced by sucking some carbon out of the air — and this year, a tidal wave of governments, businesses, and financial institutions pledged to reach it.
But for a new movement of young activists, the net-zero rhetoric is worrisome. “Hitting net-zero is not enough,” they wrote in a letter published in the Guardian last month. Instead, the group behind the letter, a youth-led organization called Worldward, urges the world to rally around a different goal, one they call “climate restoration.” The letter was co-signed by prominent climate scientists James Hansen and Michael Mann, in addition to writers, artists, and other activists.
“The climate today is not safe,” said Gideon Futerman, the 17-year-old founder and president of Worldward, who lives in a suburb north of London. “Millions of people are suffering and millions more will.” By the time net-zero is achieved, he said, the climate will be considerably more dangerous.
He’s right. A new comprehensive report on climate change and health published last week in the medical journal the Lancet found that there has already been a 50 percent increase in heat-related deaths in the past 20 years. It warned that up to half a billion people could yet be displaced by sea-level rise, and that wildfire risks and threats to food security will grow. “Restoration is about removing the CO2, which is causing these problems, and starting to reverse those issues,” said Futerman.
Climate restoration, as Futerman defines it, has three components: reducing greenhouse gas emissions, actively removing carbon from the atmosphere to offset any remaining emissions, and then continuing to draw it down, so that the concentration in the atmosphere begins to decline, “restoring” an earlier version of the climate. In other words, Worldward — a portmanteau of “world” and “forward” or “onward” —wants to get to net-zero, and then keep going.
The group does not advocate for a specific temperature goal or atmospheric concentration of carbon — Futerman said that’s a societal decision — but roughly, they want society to aim for somewhere close to pre-industrial levels.
After a soft launch this spring, Worldward now has nearly 100 volunteers from all over the world, including Mexico, India, and Zimbabwe, according to Futerman. On Monday, December 14, they are planning a more public launch of their campaign to pressure governments, companies, and other organizations to take “meaningful action toward restoration.”
https://grist.org/climate/can-we-restore-the-climate-these-young-activists-want-us-to-try/
In legal first, coroner finds Ella's death was caused by air pollutionPurely a matter of opinion. No proof. How come there are not many such deaths among the thousands who live in that area?
London: For more than seven years now, Rosamund Kissi-Debrah has been searching for the truth about why her nine-year-old daughter Ella died so young and in such pain.
"I do not think that I can grieve properly about the loss of Ella until I get to the bottom of this," Kissi-Debrah told a coronial inquest in London earlier this month.
On Wednesday she was given an answer: Ella – an exuberant girl who loved swimming, dancing and football and whose favourite hymn was I Vow To Thee My Country – was killed in part by pollution.
Ella lived just 25 metres from South Circular Road in south-east London – one of the capital's busiest roads – and would often walk to and from school along the congested thoroughfare.
The landmark finding made Ella the first person in the United Kingdom to have air pollution listed as a cause of death. Lawyers say it might also be a world-first, with major implications for government policy.
Ella died in the early hours of February 15, 2013 after a massive asthma attack triggered cardiac arrest. In the three years prior she had suffered seizures and was admitted to hospital 27 times.
A 2014 inquest found her death was the result of acute respiratory failure, but the High Court overturned that ruling last year once new evidence emerged about air pollution in London.
Deputy Coroner Philip Barlow presided over a new two-week inquest and on Wednesday ruled Ella's death was caused by acute respiratory failure, severe asthma and air pollution exposure.
"Air pollution was a significant contributory factor to both the induction and exacerbations of her asthma," Barlow said.
"During the course of her illness between 2010 and 2013 she was exposed to levels of nitrogen dioxide and particulate matter in excess of World Health Organisation guidelines. The principal source of her exposure was traffic emissions."
Barlow said there was a "recognised failure" to reduce pollution within European and domestic law which "possibly contributed to her death". He also said Ella's mother was never given information about the health risks of air pollution and its potential to exacerbate her daughter's asthma.
"If she had been given this information she would have taken steps which might have prevented Ella's death."
London is a world leader in nitrogen dioxide (NO2) - levels are far higher than they are in the US - because of its reliance on diesel-powered vehicles.
Air pollution is estimated to cause up to seven million deaths around the globe each year but Ella will be the first victim in Britain to have it listed on a death certificate. Legal experts believe the case will put pressure on governments and councils to do more or risk lawsuits.
Respiratory disease professor Sir Stephen Holgate told the inquest Ella was a "canary in a coalmine" and governments had failed to fix what they have long known was a major problem.
A report he authored in 2018 found levels of pollution at a monitoring station 1.6 kilometres from Ella's Lewisham home had consistently breached lawful limits in the years before the young girl's death.
London mayor Sadiq Khan said the ruling "must be a turning point" in clean air policy.
"This is a landmark moment and is thanks to the years of tireless campaigning by Ella's mother Rosamund, who has shown an extraordinary amount of courage," he said.
"Toxic air pollution is a public health crisis, especially for our children, and the inquest underlined yet again the importance of pushing ahead with bold policies such as expanding the ultra-low emissions zone to inner London."
Sarah Woolnough, the chief executive of Asthma UK and the British Lung Foundation, called on the government to craft an urgent plan to protect citizens: "Today's verdict sets the precedent for a seismic shift in the pace and extent to which the government, local authorities and clinicians must now work together to tackle the country's air pollution health crisis."
Rosamund Kissi-Debrah thanked the coroner for his findings: "Seven million people around the world die every year courtesy of air pollution. Yes this was about my daughter getting air pollution on the death certificate, which we finally have and we've got the justice for her which she so deserved.
"But this is also about other children still who are walking around our city with high levels of pollution. And I hope you heard what the coroner said – that there are still illegal levels of pollution now as we speak. So this matter is far from over."
Leftists are now complaining that disposable masks are polluting the oceans
Conservationists have warned that the coronavirus pandemic could spark a surge in ocean pollution – adding to a glut of plastic waste that already threatens marine life – after finding disposable masks floating like jellyfish and waterlogged latex gloves scattered across seabeds.
The French non-profit Opération Mer Propre, whose activities include regularly picking up litter along the Côte d’Azur, began sounding the alarm late last month.
Divers had found what Joffrey Peltier of the organisation described as “Covid waste” – dozens of gloves, masks and bottles of hand sanitiser beneath the waves of the Mediterranean, mixed in with the usual litter of disposable cups and aluminium cans.
The quantities of masks and gloves found were far from enormous, said Peltier. But he worried that the discovery hinted at a new kind of pollution, one set to become ubiquitous after millions around the world turned to single-use plastics to combat the coronavirus. “It’s the promise of pollution to come if nothing is done,” said Peltier.
In France alone, authorities have ordered two billion disposable masks, said Laurent Lombard of Opération Mer Propre. “Knowing that … soon we’ll run the risk of having more masks than jellyfish in the Mediterranean,” he wrote on social media alongside video of a dive showing algae-entangled masks and soiled gloves in the sea near Antibes.
The group hopes the images will prompt people to embrace reusable masks and swap latex gloves for more frequent handwashing. “With all the alternatives, plastic isn’t the solution to protect us from Covid. That’s the message,” said Peltier.
In the years leading up to the pandemic, environmentalists had warned of the threat posed to oceans and marine life by skyrocketing plastic pollution. As much as 13 million tonnes of plastic goes into oceans each year, according to a 2018 estimate by UN Environment. The Mediterranean sees 570,000 tonnes of plastic flow into it annually – an amount the WWF has described as equal to dumping 33,800 plastic bottles every minute into the sea.
These figures risk growing substantially as countries around the world confront the coronavirus pandemic. Masks often contain plastics such as polypropylene, said Éric Pauget, a French politician whose region includes the Côte d’Azur.
“With a lifespan of 450 years, these masks are an ecological timebomb given their lasting environmental consequences for our planet,” he wrote last month in a letter to Emmanuel Macron, calling on the French president to do more to address the environmental consequences of disposable masks.
Earlier this year the Hong Kong-based OceansAsia began voicing similar concerns, after a survey of marine debris in the city’s uninhabited Soko Islands turned up dozens of disposable masks.
“On a beach about 100 metres long, we found about 70,” said Gary Stokes of OceansAsia. One week later, another 30 masks had washed up. “And that’s on an uninhabited island in the middle of nowhere.”
Curious to see how far the masks had travelled, he began checking other nearby beaches. “We’re finding them everywhere,” he said. “Ever since society started wearing masks, the cause and effects are being seen on the beaches.”
While some of the debris could be attributed to carelessness, he speculated that the lightweight masks were at times also being carried from land, boats and landfills by the wind.
“It’s just another item of marine debris,” he said, likening the masks to plastic bags or straws that often wash up on the city’s more remote shorelines. “It’s no better, no worse, just another item we’re leaving as a legacy to the next generation.”
Still, given the likelihood that porpoises and dolphins in the region could mistake a mask for food, he was bracing himself for a grim find. “We’re constantly getting them washing up dead and we’re just waiting for a necropsy when we find a mask inside,” he said. “I think it’s inevitable.”
Australia: Greenie exhibitionists let off lightly
Two Extinction Rebellion protesters who held up inner-city Brisbane traffic for more than two hours earlier this month have been fined hundreds of dollars each.
However, serial protester Eric Serge Herbert, 21, and Wenzel Auch, 28, will not have to pay $917 restitution to the State fire service and their convictions have not been recorded.
The pair blocked traffic at the intersection of Edward and Queen Sts on December 7, from 7.15am to 9.25am, while protesting on top of a truck, Brisbane Magistrates Court heard.
Police, including the Special Emergency Response Team, Queensland Fire and Rescue Service and Queensland Ambulance Service, were called to the scene.
Herbert has just spent seven days in Arthur Gorrie Correctional Centre, after he refused to sign a bail condition agreeing not to participate in any illegal protests while on bail.
Wenzel Auch, 28, who also refused to sign the bail condition, spent four days in custody, before being released on Friday.
The court heard the protesters appeared to have their arms locked in a metal pipe “sleeping dragon’’ device, while they stood on the truck during the protest.
However, after fire officers brought them to the ground and sawed through the pipe, it was revealed the pair were only held together with bulldog clips.
Herbert pleaded guilty to obstructing the path of a driver, contravening a police direction to move off the road, obstructing a police officer and refusing to state his full and correct name.
Police prosecutors asked for each man to be ordered to pay $917 restitution to QFRS.
Herbert objected, saying it should only be ordered if there was damage to property or injury to people.
“My conscience dictates that it is my duty to follow our ancestors and do peaceful civil disobedience when our lives are threatened by the government or its laws,’’ he said.
Magistrate Mark Nolan said he took into account Herbert’s early pleas of guilty and that he had voluntarily spent several days in custody.
Mr Nolan said everyone had the right to protest and make statements about their beliefs, but the law required everyone to abide by it.
He fined Herbert $600, and did not record a conviction. Mr Nolan refused to order restitution to QFRS, saying the paperwork was insufficient.
Auch pleaded guilty to causing an obstruction to drivers, contravening a police direction and obstructing police and was fined $500, with no conviction recorded.
When Auch told Magistrate Terry Quinn that he had not enjoyed making people angry by disrupting traffic, Mr Quinn said: “I disagree.’’ Mr Quinn said he had seen Auch looking around the court, looking very happy with himself. “I have formed the opinion you are enjoying the limelight,’’ the magistrate told him.
Auch, who recently graduated with an environmental science degree, said he felt such a protest was a small impact on people’s lives compared to a catastrophic climate emergency.
Mr Quinn told Auch his protest could have prevented people, including pregnant women or doctors, from going to hospital.
While Herbert and Auch were in custody Extinction Rebellion staged a city protest on Thursday, which resulted in several arrests.
Auch said outside court he was released from prison at 1am the following day.
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC) Saturdays only
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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15 December, 2020
"Unalarmed" Coalition of Climate Scientists Presents its New Leadership
Statistician and Ecologist Step Down, Geologist and Physicist Step Up
December 14, Arlington VA - The CO2 Coalition, a research center made up of 60 leading climate scientists, energy engineers, and economists, is changing its leadership as the Biden administration prepares to take office.
The Coalition informs the general public and policy-makers about the positive impact of fossil fuels and their carbon dioxide emissions on the environment, the economy, and public health, and the negative impact of mandates for expensive and unreliable wind and solar power.
Executive director Caleb Stewart Rossiter and chair Patrick Moore have completed two-year terms and will be replaced in January by Gregory Wrightstone and Will Happer. Dr. Rossiter is a former professor of climate statistics and mathematical modeling; Dr. Moore was a founder of Greenpeace and one of the first scientists to earn a Ph.D. in the field of ecology. Both testified before Congress in 2019, contesting UN claims of future climate catastrophe based on computer models. They cited, instead, current UN climate data showing no increases in rates of extreme weather, sea-level rise, or extinctions of species.
Incoming executive director Gregory Wrightstone is a geologist with experience in fracking in Pennsylvania, and is also the author of a best-selling book exposing climate alarm, Inconvenient Facts.
New chair Will Happer, one of America's leading physicists, served as President Trump's top climate adviser on the National Security Council. Dr. Happer is an emeritus professor of physics at Princeton and is the inventor of the sodium guide star that is widely used in astronomy. He also led the Department of Energy's research office under President George H. W. Bush. Dr. Happer recently published a White Paper debunking the methane scare. He and his coauthor, W.A. van Wijngaarden, a distinguished laser scientist at York University in Canada, showed why methane emissions have only one-tenth of the warming potential of the already minimal forcing from carbon dioxide emissions.
Dr. Rossiter and Dr. Moore, the outgoing executive director and chair, issued this statement:
"We are proud of the CO2 Coalition's record of bringing science and economics to bear in the fight against energy policies that damage grid reliability and raise prices. Science shows that there is no climate crisis being driven by emissions of CO2, a mild warming gas and powerful plant food. As one of our members, Rupert Darwall, reveals in his history of environmental scares, today's call for deindustrialization based on a climate crisis is identical to many earlier calls for deindustrialization based on fears that were eventually disproven. Under the leadership of Gregory and Will, the Coalition will continue to inform the American people about the threat to the environment and the economy posed by the Green New Deal."
Visit us at www.co2coalition.org
Email from The CO2 Coalition: info@co2coalition.org
The geothermal energy revolution
There is a revolution coming in geothermal energy. How big it will be and how fast it can grow remains to be seen, but the revolutionary technology is here now.
We already know about the new technology by name fracking. But that is fracking for oil and gas, the energy revolution we are already living on, that the greens hate. The geothermal revolution is fracking for heat.
Here is the technical bit. The Earth’s crust we live on is just a thin film wrapped around an 8,000 mile diameter molten ball. In some places under the deep ocean this crust is estimated to be just 3 miles or so thick. It is somewhat thicker under the continents but the point remains; it gets hot fast as you drill down into the crust. That heat is geothermal energy.
We have used geothermal energy to make electricity for a long time, but only in tiny amounts. California does the most in the US and its entire generating capacity is about the size of a single large coal fired power plant, about 3000 MW. The whole world is said to just have a minuscule 15,000 MW.
The obstacle to doing more has been that useful energy sources are hard to find. You need a confined reservoir of hot water in fractured crust rock. The reservoir size, location and temperature of the water are all determined by nature. Suitable sites have been very few.
Now all of this has suddenly changed. With hydraulic fracturing (or fracking) we can make these geothermal reservoirs where we want them, the size we want them, and where the heat is the temperature we want, especially very hot. This includes the so-called “supercritical” water at 400 degrees C, which is now used in the most advanced power-plants.
It is like the difference between living on wild edibles, if and when you find them, and farming. Fracking for heat is literally a whole new world. Of course there are still pesky things like cost, feasibility and regulation, but the principal is clear; the technology of revolutionary thermal energy has arrived.
The greens are in a bit of a bind here. Geothermal juice looks like the ideal renewable. Unlike wind and solar, geothermal electricity is constantly available and it is not a land hog. But the greens despise fracking and have labeled it evil. Some States and even whole Countries have banned fracking for oil and gas. Whether this applies to fracking for heat remains to be seen, since the fracturing processes are rather different.
How this dichotomy will play out is anybody’s guess. As they say here in the mountains: “What goes around, comes around.” That is, don't start trouble lest it bite you someplace soft. The greens desperately need geothermal fracking, they just don't know it yet.
The US Energy Department has a Geothermal Technologies Office and they are understandably optimistic. They project something like 60,000 MW of advanced geothermal juice capacity by 2050. Mind you this is still small, given that our present generating capacity is around a million MW.
The amount of geothermal generating capacity installed by 2050 could be much larger, for one simple reason. It is probably the only way to make wind and solar work. A number of analysts, including me, have pointed out that electricity storage on the scale needed to power America with intermittent renewables is impossible. But many States have mandated a high level of renewables, even 100% in extreme cases.
This makes geothermal the perfect renewable, because its power can be available whenever the intermittent generators cannot provide the power we need. The more power we want from renewables, the more geothermal capacity we will need. It is that simple. We could be talking about many hundreds of thousands of MW. If the technology works cost wise it might actually be better than unreliable, land grabbing renewables.
Happily there is a massive frenzy of geothermal research going on, much of it aimed at reducing the obvious obstacles. Searching the engineering and scientific literature for the last five years on the word combination “geothermal” and “research” yields over 100,000 technical articles. That is a lot of research.
So there it is. Geothermal energy is potentially the second fracking revolution. No question the heat is there, thanks to the big molten ball we call Earth. And now we suddenly have the technology to create the infrastructure needed to tap into it. How practical it is, and how acceptable, still remains to be seen. Interesting times lie ahead.
https://www.cfact.org/2020/12/14/the-geothermal-energy-revolution/
For once, I agree with Greenpeace: carbon offsets are a global con jobBy Rob Lyons
Corporations spend millions on ‘preserving’ forests so as to carry on polluting and pretend they’re green & carbon-neutral. The reality is the only thing being 'offset' is facing up to the awful realities of a Net Zero agenda
For those who want to make themselves feel better about the greenhouse gas emissions they create, carbon offsets have long been the easy option. If you're flying off on holiday, just tick a box and all that guilt is assuaged for a small fee. The money will go to planting some trees, protecting a forest or saving carbon-absorbing peatlands.
If you’re a big corporation spewing out emissions on, well, an industrial scale, chuck a few million to environmental groups who conserve trees, and on you go on the pollution merry-go-round.
If this all seems too good to be true, you’re right: it is. This ‘offsetting’ is far easier than facing up to the reality of emissions cutting: doing less, going without, investing in more energy-efficient means of production. The rich can simply buy their way out of it in the corporate equivalent of the Catholic confessional, a pay-to-sin system. Big companies get to virtue signal while carrying on as before, and little, if anything, is actually offset.
A new article by Ben Elgin for Bloomberg Green sets out this deviousness very well. He notes how big businesses like JP Morgan Chase, Disney and BlackRock are spending millions of dollars on preserving forests in the US. The trouble is, as Elgin notes:
“JPMorgan, Disney, and BlackRock tout these projects as an important mechanism for slashing their own large carbon footprints. By funding the preservation of carbon-absorbing forests, the companies say, they’re offsetting the carbon-producing impact of their global operations. But in all of those cases, the land was never threatened; the trees were already part of well-preserved forests.”
That's not to say that the vast majority of carbon offsets are actually fraudulent, although some of them fly pretty close to the wind. As far back as 2002, the UK Advertising Standards Authority ruled against a company, Future Forests, for misleading customers that they were paying for new trees to be planted rather than simply claiming ownership of carbon being absorbed by existing trees.
Other projects fail because expected emissions’ savings failed to appear. One group in South Africa was handing out free, low-energy light bulbs to township residents only to find that the local energy company was doing that anyway. Others bought up EU emissions permits with the idea of 'retiring' them so that companies wouldn't be able to emit those greenhouse gases - only to find the EU issued far too many, allowing companies to carry on regardless.
Schemes that involved planting trees would often claim the credit for the emissions absorbed over the entire lifetime of the trees as if this would happen straight away. But it should be obvious that a newly planted sapling will have little capacity to absorb CO2 in any significant way for some years.
What offsets have become is a lucrative way of environmental organisations making cash, either by creating schemes that can be sold as absorbing carbon or by certificating schemes run by others. Meanwhile, big businesses burnish their right-on eco-credentials by pointing to the offsets as proof that they are working to protect the environment.
In his article, Elgin gives attention to one environmental organisation in particular:
“Few have jumped into this growing market with as much zeal as the Nature Conservancy, which was founded 69 years ago by a small group of ecologists seeking to preserve the last unspoiled lands in the U.S. In the seven decades since, the nonprofit in Arlington, Va., has grown into an environmental juggernaut, protecting more than 125 million acres. Last year, its revenue was $932 million, which eclipsed the combined budgets of the country’s next three largest environmental nonprofits.”
Elgin argues that Nature Conservancy has sold offsets to corporations like JP Morgan Chase on the basis of the emissions saved if the forests concerned are protected from being felled by aggressive logging. But, to give one example, in Hawk Mountain, a wild bird sanctuary in Pennsylvania, the forests were already protected and there was never any prospect of them being cut down.
There have long been such criticisms of offsets, particularly from other green groups. As one article for Greenpeace notes:
“The big problem with offsets isn’t that what they offer is bad – tree planting or renewable energy and efficiency for poor communities are all good things – but rather that they don’t do what they say on the tin. They don’t actually cancel out – er, offset – the emissions to which they are linked.”
The fundamental problem is this: companies and individuals want to carry on enjoying the benefits of an industrialised society built on fossil fuels. With our existing technology, trying to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions rapidly is either very inconvenient (if you're rich) or immiserating (for the rest of us).
Yet governments and corporations, desperate for a great cause to distract from their lamentable failures to improve our living standards, have fallen in with the Net Zero agenda and have proclaimed that they will slash emissions to “save the planet.” Given the huge cost and near-impossibility of doing this – other than by simply giving up the benefits of modern life – the easy way out is to offset those emissions for a trivial fee or to export the production of goods to developing countries that haven’t made such stupid promises. Which – again – doesn’t offset or cut the world’s greenhouse gas emissions.
This is bad faith because it has been obvious for a long time that emissions have just kept on rising and offsets really don't do what they claim. Worse, it's bad for democracy because the elites are claiming that emissions cuts will be painless when they will, in fact, be very costly to society.
It would be far better if we were presented with the true costs of the wealthy West's climate-change policies. Then, instead of the quixotic race to eliminate emissions, we could eliminate the political careers of those who promote such nonsense.
https://www.rt.com/op-ed/509291-greenpeace-carbon-offsets-con-job/
Green power needs to account for all its costsThe Germans have a word for it: dunkelflaute. It means a period in winter when the wind does not blow and the sun does not shine.
We have always had them, but they were never a big deal: just another windless and chilly spell in a largely gloomy season. At least that was before we started depending on the weather for an increasing chunk of our electricity. Now, with ever more power coming from wind and solar, it matters greatly if these plants can’t function, or can produce only a fraction of what they normally pump out.
In January 2017, Belgium faced the prospect of blackouts when it experienced a whopping nine-day calm and dull spell. Despite having just 9 per cent of its capacity from renewable sources, the country’s network had to scramble to supply sufficient electricity to avoid disruption.
Even without the dunkelflaute — generally a European phenomenon — other renewables-heavy systems have had problems. California recently imposed rolling blackouts on its citizens after a baking hot spell led to power shortages.
How to manage intermittency is one of the challenges of weather-dependent low-carbon electricity. It is not simply about paying for back-up for when nature refuses to play ball. Sometimes blazing sun and gusting winds can cause the opposite problem: too much electricity. Then plants must be paid to shut or turn output down to stop them overloading the network.
However, there is one melancholy constant in all this balancing and back-up activity: it generates additional so-called system costs.
A recent report by the UK’s business and energy department, Beis, shows how, when these are factored in, they can change the relative economics of different low-carbon energy sources.
Much of the recent story has been about the plunging cost of renewables. For instance, in 2013 the UK government estimated that an offshore wind farm opening in 2025 would generate electricity for £140 per megawatt hour (MWh). It now forecasts that could be achieved for just £54/MWh.
The report sees this trend continuing. By 2035, it estimates an offshore wind farm might on average produce power for as little as £41/MWh; and large-scale solar just £33. However, these figures exclude those system costs, mainly because the solar or wind developer does not have to meet them. At present, these are simply spread across the network as a whole.
When you add them in, as the Beis report does, attributing them to the generating source that caused them, the picture changes. Take the 2035 figure of £41/MWh for offshore wind. With estimated system costs on top, Beis believes the all-in price is closer to £59 to £79 (43-92 per cent higher). For solar, £33/MWh becomes £45-£61. In each case, the range depends on how widespread the use of these renewables is, although does not set out the precise assumptions it is using.
Essentially, the marginal cost of each extra renewable on the system keeps going up as their use increases. Not only does this erode their advantage over other alternatives such as nuclear and as-yet unproven carbon capture and storage (CCS). It suggests that getting to 100 per cent renewables could be expensive.
Could these costs be shrunk? Some argue that it could be possible by expedients such as building more interconnectors with other countries to bring in power when it is needed, or using electric vehicles for distributed battery storage. The idea being that when you plug your car in at night, the charge can be reversed at times of need to feed power back into the grid. While technically possible, it would require infrastructure and a far larger fleet of EVs.
But all of these innovations will still cost money to fix the issue of intermittency. Unless that expense is priced into each solar, wind, or CCS project, there is a risk we could end up with a more expensive decarbonised system than we need.
One simple suggestion made by the economist Dieter Helm is to make all operators meet the system costs for which they are responsible. Rather than giving renewables operators a free option to sell whatever power they produce, as at present, they would bid to deliver specific quantities of power at certain times of day, with penalties either way if they over or under deliver. That would put them on a more level footing with other generators.
Such reform might reveal something closer to the true cost of renewable megawatt hours, while giving wind and solar farms incentives not to generate additional system expenses. So when the next dunkelflaute comes, we are less likely to be left in the dark.
https://www.newscabal.co.uk/green-power-needs-to-account-for-all-its-costs/
***************************************My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC) Saturdays only
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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14 December, 2020
New solar-powered electric vehicle, Aptera, that 'never needs charging' provides 1,000 miles of range which is more than twice of Tesla's Model S - and the $26,000 car sold out
It's a very lightweight tricycle that generates enough power off its in-built solar panels to drive 40 miles. But you have a battery pack for when you are not driving it under the relentless California sunlight
The price is good for an electric vehicle and it can take a passenger so it might make a useful commuter vehicle. It does its tricks by being very lightweight however so it could not be used as any sort of load-carrying vehicle. It is not clear how far it goes with and without a passenger
California-based Aptera recently opened pre-orders for its solar electric vehicle that 'never needs charging' and within less than 24 hours, according to the firm, the $26,000 car sold out
The futuristic-styled structure is designed with lightweight materials, providing low-drag aerodynamics and cooling.
Aptera's Never Charge technology is comprised of an integrate solar package that provides more than 40 miles of ‘free’ driving per day ‘making it the first vehicle that won’t need to fuel up for most daily driving.’
The vehicle is also equipped with a battery pack that provides 1,000 miles of range, which greatly surpasses the Tesla Model S’s 370 miles of range.
Co-Founder Chris Anthony said: ‘With Aptera’s Never Charge technology, you are driven by the power of the sun. ‘Our built-in solar array keeps your battery pack topped off and anywhere you want to go, you just go.’
Aptera was available for pre-orders on December 4, with pricing starting at $25,900 up to $46,900 for four-wheel drive.
The vehicle is designed liquid-cooled electric motors that allow the vehicle to go from zero to 60 miles per hour (mph) in just 3.5 seconds, with a top speed of 110 mph.
And if you do need power, the vehicle can be charged by a standard 110-volt outlet.
Aptero co-founder Steve Fambro, told the Independent: ‘40 miles doesn’t sound like a lot but it’s the equivalent of parking your car and having it magically fill up with two gallons of gas overnight.’
‘So the fact that you can park it at work or wherever and go back to it with more energy in the tank than when you left it – have it charge itself without having to pay a dime to drive it every day.’
13 December, 2020
UK to stop funding overseas fossil fuel projects in climate summit vow
Note that this concerns government expenditure only. Private funding (The City) is not ruled out. Government funding was slight anyway
British taxpayers will stop subsidising overseas fossil fuel projects under a pledge by Prime Minister Boris Johnson which opens a new front in the push for more urgent international action on climate change.
Johnson will announce the "world-leading policy" while opening a virtual climate summit on Sunday morning Australian-time from which Prime Minister Scott Morrison has been blocked from speaking at.
The plan is yet to be finalised and a start date has not been settled but Johnson will tell world leaders he will stop the government's export credit agency from providing finance or other support for the extraction, production, transportation and refining of crude oil, natural gas or thermal coal overseas.
"Climate change is one of the great global challenges of our age, and it is already costing lives and livelihoods the world over," Johnson will tell world leaders.
"Our actions as leaders must be driven not by timidity or caution but by ambition on a truly grand scale."
Green groups have accused the British government of "rank hypocrisy" for talking tough on climate change while still directing billions of pounds towards polluting projects abroad.
In June, it promised nearly £900 million ($1.58 billion) in loans and bank guarantees to help build a huge liquefied natural gas project in Mozambique which will open up the country's vast gas reserves. Environmental campaigners are challenging the deal in court on the basis it is incompatible with the United Kingdom's Paris climate accord commitments.
A third runway at London's Heathrow Airport was blocked by the courts in February because the mega infrastructure project did not take the UK's climate obligations into account.
UN secretary-general António Guterres is pushing for all development finance institutions to halt fossil fuel financing ahead of a crucial international climate summit in Glasgow next November. Prince Charles has also called for the urgent reversal of "perverse subsidies" enjoyed by the fossil fuel industry,
Downing Street said Johnson's overseas finance ban will apply to its aid budget, export financing and trade promotion activities.
It has left wiggle room for some "very limited exceptions" in the policy for gas-fired power plants but did not provide further details.
A committee of MPs recently found the UK's support for fossil fuel energy projects was "unacceptably high" and the export finance agency's activities the "elephant in the room undermining the UK's international climate and development targets".
The committee revealed UK Export Finance gave £2.6 billion ($4.56 billion) in support to the energy sector between 2013 and 2018 - 96 per cent of which went to fossil fuel projects.
Johnson has not put a date on when the policy would come into force but said it would be before the COP26 in Glasgow in November 2021.
His pledge at the opening of this weekend's climate summit on Sunday morning Australian-time will put pressure on other countries to do the same ahead of the Glasgow summit.
The nearly 80 world leaders listed to speak this weekend were only granted a slot on the condition they came to the summit with significant new announcements.
Morrison had planned to say Australia would no longer use Kyoto carryover credits to meet its 2030 targets but was blocked from speaking at the summit by Britain and its co-hosts France and the UN because the announcement was deemed not ambitious enough.
Johnson last week announced the UK's new goal to cut 1990-level emissions by 68 per cent by 2030, up from the existing target of 57 per cent. Some experts in Britain believe even that is not enough to put the UK on course to achieve its stated aim of carbon neutrality by 2050.
Johnson's new policy will not apply to domestic subsidies for fossil fuels.
Lobby group Oil Change International said Johnson's commitment was a "powerful signal that the era of governments propping up deadly fossil fuels with public money is coming to an end".
"But the devil is in the detail and it is too early to say if the UK's end to fossil fuel finance will set a gold standard for other countries to follow," said senior campaigner Laurie van der Burg.
"That would require an immediate end to all new finance for oil, gas and coal and an end to domestic fossil fuel subsidies estimated at over $US14 billion per year."
Johnson's announcement in January that Britain would not financially support any foreign coal plants or mines was questioned after it was later revealed UK Export Finance had not funded any coal projects since 2002.
A recent European Commission report found domestic and international fossil fuel subsidies in the EU totalled €50 billion ($80 billion) in 2018 after peaking at €53 billion in 2018.
"Fossil fuel subsidies did not decrease substantially in the past decade; in some instances they
even increased," the report said.
Healthy Polar Bears and Thriving Tigers: The Common Climate Tale
Last year, the world applauded Greta Thunberg’s emotional “How Dare You!” speech at the UN summit in New York. The teenager famously said, “Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction.”
The mainstream media’s narrative is similar. Ecosystems are dying. Animals are going extinct. Our evil desire to consume fossil fuels is to blame!
What do you think? Are species going extinct because of manmade global warming? Christians, who honor God as Creator, should care about these matters. But caring by itself isn’t enough. We also need truth, for there is a way that seems right, though its end brings death (Proverbs 14:12).
Take two key species as examples. Polar bears have been climate alarmists’ mascots for years. Tigers are an important species in South Asian jungles.
To the dismay of climate doomsayers, tiger populations are on the rise!
Tigers are a keystone species. The integrity of their ecosystems is crucial to their welfare. Thriving tiger populations are evidence of healthy ecosystems.
So, what do you suppose is up with tigers?
India’s tiger numbers have doubled since 2006. That’s despite the country’s ever-expanding cities, industries, and mines. India counted 2967 tigers in its latest census. That is more than double the number in 2006.
Celebrating International Tiger Day, Indian Environment Minister Prakash Javadekar noted that “the country today has 70 percent of the world’s tiger population.”
Two-thirds of these tigers live in forest zones categorized as tiger reserves. The remaining third is a testament to the safe habitations outside highly protected zones.
Recent surveys affirm the healthy state of Indian forests on which tigers depend. Total forest and tree cover in India increased by 5,188 square km from 2017 to 2019. I witnessed the health of these ecosystems as a field ecologist in the buffer zones of a tiger reserve in the heart of India.
The primary concern of tiger conservationists in India is unlawful encroachment, not climate change. Climate change in the past decade has impacted tiger populations positively.
Tropical forest ecosystems in India are not dying. They remain healthy and are expanding. Tiger numbers benefit.
Polar Bear Population Growth: Unmasked
Polar bears are the mainstream media’s climate doomsday mascot. They used a widely projected image of a starving polar bear to generate sympathy in 2019.
The image first appeared in a video viewed by an estimated 2.5 billion people. It got the most views of any video ever on the National Geographic website.
Scientists accused National Geographic of “being loose with the facts.” Videographer Cristina Mittermeier admitted that there was no evidence that the bear’s condition was due to climate change.
“Perhaps we made a mistake in not telling the full story,” she said, “—that we were looking for a picture that foretold the future and that we didn’t know what had happened to this particular polar bear.”
People get sick, grow weak, and die. So do polar bears.
Still, climate alarmists use polar bears to win public empathy. But if you think polar bear populations are declining, you’ve been misled.
Global polar bear numbers have risen spectacularly in the last sixty years. From around 5,000 in the 1950s, they rose to 8,000–10,000 in the 1970s, 20,000–25,000 by 2005, and an estimated 22,000–31,000 by 2015.
You might think environmentalists would cheer. Think again. They and the mainstream media have remained largely silent.
The polar bear problem in the Nunavut province of Canada is a testament to their growing population. Recently the Nunavut people pressured the Canadian government to allow increased culling. Why? Because their growing numbers threatened Nunavut communities.
In a 2018 report, leading polar bear biologist Susan Crockford wrote:
The people of Nunavut are not seeing starving, desperate bears—quite the opposite. Yet polar bear specialists are saying these bears are causing problems because they don’t have enough sea ice to feed properly. The facts on the ground make their claims look silly, including the abundance of fat bears. Residents are pushing their government for a management policy that makes protection of human life the priority.
It’s a Myth—Don’t Fall for It
Polar bears and tigers are many thousands of miles apart. But they share the same common myth: that climate change is destroying their habitats, and their numbers are dwindling. In reality, their habitats are improving, and their numbers are rising.
It is easy for celebrity climate activists to make sensational claims about species extinction and ecosystem collapse. The mainstream media project their speeches as authoritative. Instead, they are merely activist scare stories.
Climate Change and the U.S. Military — Misguided Priorities Will Harm America
Climate change is an urgent national security threat? Here we go again.
Leaving aside the debate over the causes of climate change — and the pace of that change — promoters of the argument that changes in the global climate are a “security threat” to the U.S. muddle our understanding of the term and jeopardize our ability to confront real security threats to the country.
All sorts of things vie for our attention as they affect our country’s economic, security, moral, and human interests. But lumping everything we think is important into the basket of “national security” dilutes the term, makes it harder to prioritize limited resources (money, time, attention), and distracts the U.S. military.
Directing the Department of Defense to account for the threat of climate change in all planning sets up contradictions wrapped in hypocrisy. We saw this during the Obama administration when funding for the military fell irresponsibly short of the things the military was required to do.
Our military was expected to sustain operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere while simultaneously being warned that they would be derelict in their duties if they did not account for the severe effects of climate change. And yet they were starved of the resources to do both.
According to the Obama administration, and presumably a Biden one too, the implications of climate change include more intense weather events that will be “more frequent and more severe...inflict more damage, heighten humanitarian needs, undermine development investments, adversely impact public health, contribute to ecological, social, and political instability, compromise diplomatic goals, and undermine national security interests.”
Setting attribution aside, this heady list of challenges would seemingly require the military to be more capable of responding to humanitarian crises and various climate-induced conflicts around the world.
Given this backdrop, it would be immoral not to increase defense spending so as to prepare the military to deal with a world riven by more — not fewer — crises. And this in addition to being prepared to prevail in war.
Yet in spite of orders to be prepared for potential conflict with major competitors and to prioritize adapting to the increased security implications of global climate change, there are increasingly strident calls from the political Left to reduce spending on defense by 10 percent or more. What? Do more with less funding and fewer resources?
At present, the U.S. military is too small, too old, and insufficiently ready to handle more than one major conflict in spite of the emphasis placed on a return to great power competition. It is facing extraordinary bills to modernize after 30 years of neglect: $80 billion to replace 50-year old Minuteman III ICBMs, another $80 billion to replace 30-year old strategic bombers, $100 billion to replace aging ballistic missile submarines, mounting costs to replace tanks, amphibious vehicles, artillery systems, and basic support equipment acquired in the 1980s and 1990s.
The U.S. Navy’s fleet of 296 ships average over 20 years old. Meanwhile China, alone, already fields 350 ships and is growing at a rate equivalent to the size of the entire navies of other countries every two years or so. Iran has assembled an arsenal of 3,000 ballistic missiles, and North Korea continues its efforts to expand its inventory of nuclear weapon delivery capabilities.
The U.S. Army and Marine Corps are both trying to solve the challenges of operating against major opponents with substantial military power rather than terrorist groups with little ability to prevent the U.S. from doing what it wants.
In addition, this says nothing about the fact that the cost of ships, tanks, and aircraft needed to survive in modern combat, much less prevail, has grown five times or more above the rate of inflation.
Simply put, the U.S. military cannot do what is being demanded of it without a corresponding increase in funding or a dramatic and dangerous reorientation from its real job: defending the country from military threats. Ordering it to defend the country and take on climate change as a national security threat without giving it the resources to do both does a disservice to the men and women who have dedicated themselves to serve the country in uniform and to the American people who expect their military to do what only it can do.
Let’s get real about “climate change” and how we view it through the lens of national security. No matter the driver, if climate change is a threat, then provide the funding needed to upgrade century-old bases, replace half-century-old aircraft, expand the force beyond the bare minimum needed to defend against a single threat, and ensure our forces can train enough to be competent in their jobs.
Anything less is hypocritical and an insult to the force we supposedly need, value, and respect.
We cannot ignore the hard facts when it comes to renewable energy
Comment from Peta Credlin in Australia
Why are people in authority allowed to get away with obvious untruths about climate change, despite all the factual evidence to the contrary, asks Peta Credlin.
Not only do all the renewable energy advocates claim that wind and solar will produce cheaper power than coal and gas, but they then invariably assert that “all the research” proves it.
Yet everywhere that transitions from fossil fuels to widespread use of wind turbines and solar panels experiences big price hikes and the risk of blackouts.
It’s no coincidence that South Australia, with the highest use of intermittent power sources, has had the highest electricity prices in Australia; and that power prices generally have roughly doubled over the past decade as renewables went from almost none to nearly 30 per cent of total generation.
How it could ever be cheaper to replace 24/7 power with power that’s only on when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing is hard to fathom.
I’m a reluctant conspiracy-detector, but it’s hard not to see one in all the “researchers” eager to “prove” what’s utterly implausible just because that’s what the green-establishment wants people to think.
Now, the lie about renewables being cheaper has yet again been exposed.
Back in 2017, the Northern Territory’s power generator reported to the government that reaching a 50 per cent renewable energy target would push up system costs by up to 30 per cent and that “capital costs will replace fuel costs as the key driver of electricity prices”. When challenged on this leaked report, the NT government said this week that it was “outdated” and didn’t reflect new developments.
Yet when this report was given to the government, the Chief Minister had claimed: “We very much see this as about substitution rather than additional costs … The advice we’re getting … is that an investment in renewables will actually put downward pressure on household prices.”
Despite the Chief Minister’s assurances, the NT’s renewable energy target hasn’t stopped further price rises.
Why are people in authority allowed to get away with obvious untruths on everything to do with climate change? It’s a classic case of wanting the lie to be true so insisting that it is despite all the factual evidence to the contrary.
Expect to hear even louder and more frequent assertions that renewables are cheaper in the run-up to next year’s Glasgow climate conference — but this debate has to include all the facts and science, not just the version that the zealots want to push.
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC) Saturdays only
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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11 December, 2020
Biden’s EPA Frontrunner Worked to Ban Gas-Powered Cars
President-elect Joe Biden may tap a California bureaucrat who worked to ban gas-powered cars to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, fueling opposition from some activists.
Mary Nichols has been touted as a leading candidate to head the EPA thanks to her record as chairwoman of the California Air Resources Board. In 2019, Nichols threatened to ban gasoline-powered vehicles in the state after President Trump rolled back vehicle emissions standards. In September, Nichols made headlines for her plan to transition to zero-emission vehicles in California by 2035, weaning the state off of gas-powered vehicles. As of 2018, electric-powered cars comprised only 1 percent of all vehicles.
Some activists said Biden should avoid a radical environmentalist agenda that ignores social and economic costs when addressing climate change. Robert Dillon, an adviser to the free-market environmentalist organization ConservAmerica, told the Washington Free Beacon that Nichols's record should draw bipartisan concern.
"Nichols may very likely fall into that category of exceptions, where you're going to see the majority stand together to oppose them," Dillon said. "What's your priority: virtue signaling or accomplishing sustainable policy to address climate change, even if it's incremental."
The Biden transition team did not respond to a request for comment.
Nichols has already attracted bipartisan opposition to her actions in California, particularly during the coronavirus pandemic. In March, she went forward with emissions requirements on the trucking industry despite dire economic straits brought on by shutdowns. Nichols also used George Floyd's death to push her environmental agenda. In a now-deleted tweet posted the week following Floyd's death, Nichols called for climate action in supposed solidarity with protests over law enforcement.
"‘I can't breathe' speaks to police violence, but it also applies to the struggle for clean air," Nichols wrote. "Environmental racism is just one form of racism. It's all toxic. Government needs to clean it up in word and deed."
California Democratic assemblyman Jim Cooper, who is black, called Nichols, who is white, shameless for attempting to exploit Floyd's death to advance "crooked enviro policies."
Steve Milloy, who served as a Trump transition team member for the EPA, said the episode is indicative of Nichols's approach to pushing an unpopular agenda.
"She knows how to use the environment as a political weapon to advance the environmental agenda, and she will say or do anything to do that," Milloy told the Free Beacon. "If you're looking for someone to execute that left-wing agenda, Mary Nichols is a good person to do that."
Milloy said that Nichols's political instincts are not as alarming as her past interactions with China. In 2013 and 2017, Nichols met with officials from the city of Shenzhen and several Chinese state-owned auto enterprises to work together on climate change initiatives. While Nichols has hampered American industries with increasingly onerous and costly environmental regulations, China remains the largest emitter of greenhouse gases. China could use that to its advantage, according to Milloy.
"The Chinese and Russians are going to try to use our fixation on climate to their advantage," Milloy said. "If they can trick us into harming our economy by reducing emissions and giving up fracking, they are happy to go along with that and promise to be emissions-free 100 years from now."
https://freebeacon.com/democrats/bidens-epa-frontrunner-worked-to-ban-gas-powered-cars/
Electric Vehicle Shock TreatmentJoe Biden, his fellow Democrats, and apparently big U.S. automakers, have joined the rush to transform America’s transportation to 100 percent electric vehicles (EV) whether We the People want it or not. During an October town hall, Biden asserted that his plan would save “billions of gallons of oil” and help create a million auto industry jobs, in part bybanningthe sale or manufacture of new internal combustion (IC) engine vehicles by 2030. How this will happen in the Real World, he didn’t say.
Biden’s California-inspired vision excludes hybrid vehicles, includes installing 500,000 EV charging stations, and provides “cash for clunkers” style rebates for new EV buyers. But as of 2018, nearly half of EV registrations (256,800 out of 543,600) were in California, with Hawaii, Washington and Oregon not far behind. Yet as of 2018, EVs comprised less than 2% of California’s 15 million total vehicles – despite huge tax credits, free charging stations, free access to HOV lanes, and other subsidies and incentives.
Only 727,000 electric vehicles were sold in the USA in 2019, and nearly half were plug-in hybrids.Hybrid sales peaked in 2013, but by 2019 had fallen to 2.3% (about 400,000 vehicles) of all light-duty vehicle sales, largely due to shunning by EV purists. Compare those numbers with the 6.3 million total vehicles sold in 2016, or to the 273,600,000 passenger cars, motorcycles, trucks, buses and other vehicles on U.S. roads in 2018.
Following China’s lead, U.S. automakers – not just Tesla – are all aboard for this big switchover. As IC vehicles are replaced and gasoline stations are transformed into EV charging stations, the pressure will rise to ditch remaining IC vehicles and buy more EVs.China-friendlyGeneral Motors plans to spend $20 billion on EV and self-driving vehicle technology through 2025, including 23 different EVs by 2023. Ford Motor Company has pledged to invest $11 billion by 2022 on EV development.
Biden is following in the footsteps of British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, whose new climate plan includes banning sales of gasoline-powered vehicles by 2030, and hybrids by 2035. But, as economist and Global Britain think tank director Ewen Stewart argued, this is “frankly one of the most illiberal and economically destructive policies ever to come from Whitehall. It risks hundreds of thousands of livelihoods and much-needed exports for the most marginal benefit.”
“The implications of this ban [in a country with only 1 percent EVs] are immense in terms of manufacture, supply chains, investment, sunk capital, employment, infrastructure, consumer choice, value of existing stock, and so much more,” Stewart explained.“Never before has a government dared to close down an entire and critical industry almost overnight, by diktat.”
It is delusional, he continued, to believe that destroying a successful British industry by banning IC engines – rather than letting consumer choice determine the market – will be good for the economy. Today’s British automotive sector comprises a fifth of the nation’s manufacturing base, with over 80 percent of the 1.3 million cars it manufactures being exported. That’s 13 percent of the UK’s entire export market.
The UK automotive industry employs over 180,000 Britons directly and many hundreds of thousands more indirectly. But the United Kingdom cannot compete with China for the global EV market, because UK labor costs are far higher, and its energy is increasingly far more expensive and unreliable.
Worse, Stewart pointed out, this virtue signaling will have at best a miniscule benefits for the UK and global environment, but will be devastating for automobile owners. The British government already vastly diminished the value of the nation’s 12 million diesel vehicles with surcharges that cost owners of pre-2015 diesel vehicles up to $67 per week just to drive in “ultra-low-emission zones.” Other costs included doubling parking permit rates and higher taxes for diesel vehicles.
The new initiatives will do the same to gasoline-powered vehicles. They will phase out gasoline pumps, cause resale value to plummet, and devastate the nation’s export market.
Andrew Montford, deputy director of the Global Warming Policy Forum, says the misguided British plan could cost motorists £700 billion (US$938 billion). Several aspects of EVs, Montford contended, make them more costly than petrol cars: replacing expensive batteries, installing home charging stations (often requiring upgrading household wiring), time and inconvenience during battery recharges, and more.
Montford estimated that by 2050 the average household might have spent an extra £19,000 (US$25,460) –if they can still afford to own a vehicle. Moreover, with other government mandates driving up the cost of electricity, the cost of motoring could double, driving working classes entirely off the roads.
The absurdity of this British assault on its own existing auto industry is made even more ridiculous by the fact that wide-scale electrification doesn’t change current mobility patterns – and only manages to reduce transportation greenhouse gas emissions 15 percent by 2050, Spanish systems engineering expertMargarita Mediaville explained. To call EVs “green” or “sustainable” is patently absurd.
Ms. Mediaville’s company also found that manufacturing all those new EV batteries would deplete proven global reserves of copper, lithium, nickel and manganese, unless mining and/or recycling rates grow enormously by 2050. But opening new mines, mostly in other countries, as the European Union proposes, would have “devastating repercussions on water, biodiversity and the human rights of local communities.”
Mining and processing ores, and manufacturing batteries, would also require enormous amounts of fossil fuels, involve hundreds or thousands of tons of ore and overburden for every ton of finished metals, and result in prodigious emissions of pollutants and carbon dioxide. Indeed, a new report by Competitive Enterprise Institute analyst Ben Lieberman concludes that replacing gasoline with electricity as the energy source for vehicles does not eliminate those emissions, but only changes where they are emitted.
Yet another downside of vastly increasing the number of EVs is that the metals and minerals increasingly come from countries like China, Chile and Congo – where fair wage, child labor, workplace safety and environmental standards are far below anything the US or EU would tolerate. EV batteries also require more energy to manufacture than batteries and engines for IC vehicles. Recycling them is likewise complicated, expensive, and fraught with pollution and public health risks.
The financial firm UBS found that replacing global sales of conventional IC vehicles with electric versions would require a 2,898 percent increase in lithium production; a 1,928 percent increase in cobalt; a 524 percent increase in graphite; a 105 percent increase in nickel; a 655 percent increase in rare-earth minerals; and at least a tripling of copper production. Coal, diesel and gasoline burning would also skyrocket, to fuel the work.
A separate report from Securing America’s Future Energy indicates China controls nearly 70 percent of electric vehicle battery manufacturing capacity, compared to just 10 percent by the USA. The report projects that 107 of the 142 EV battery manufacturing projects scheduled by 2021 will be in China, with only nine in the U.S. Moving toward mandatory EVs will clearly enrich China at America’s expense.
Before taking any steps toward converting America to EVs and non-fossil fuel electricity generation, U.S. policymakers must carefully examine the human and environmental costs – in precise numbers, including rising lung disease, cancer, injury and death rates in foreign mines, processing plants and factories.
They must also consider the impact on American workers and communities from outsourcing battery manufacturing to Chinese companies. The Chinese, with assistance from a President Biden, will happily take most of those manufacturing jobs back to the Middle Kingdom, while saddling American families with soaring costs for unreliable electricity, short-range driving and collapsing industries. Incredibly, our dependence on China for minerals and component parts for high-tech military equipment will also soar!
All these issues demand the attention of our legislators and regulators, environmentalists and journalists. Unless of course they’re just engaging in cheap virtue-signaling, and actually don’t give a hoot about American workers and energy consumers, the U.S. and global environment, or global adult and child workers who will put their health and lives at risk providing EV and other technologies.
https://townhall.com/columnists/dugganflanakin/2020/12/10/electric-vehicle-shock-treatment-n2581313
***************************************My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC) Saturdays only
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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10 December, 2020
Archaeologists find remnants of a vast network of roads and villages in the Amazon
Warmists always picture the Amazon region as an untouched pristine forest that is only now being "raped" by man, thus destroying the "lungs of the planet?".
That is far from the truth, The reality is that the Amazon region was much like the Inca and Aztec regions -- it had a flourishing native population with a city-based civilization. Specialists have long known that but it has never penetrated the popular awareness.
The jungle cover over the Amazon, far from being pristine, dates back only to about 400 years ago -- when the Amazonians, like the Incas and Aztecs, were overwhelmed by gold-seeking Spanish explorers and conquistadores.
The Meso-American populations of what is now the Southern USA were almost entirely wiped out by the European diseases brought by conquerors such as DeSoto, leaving only a few Hopi, Navajo and other people surviving. Something similar seems to have happened in the Anazon, with the few survivors driven back to a primitive lifestyle by the collapse of their civilizations
But the archaeologists noted below have found many remains of the civilization that was. So far from being a destruction of a primitive forest by man, present economic developments in the Amazon are not at all unprecedented. They simply represent mankind returning to one of its old stamping grounds
I have written at greater length on this previously
Billions of lasers shot from a helicopter flying over the Brazilian Amazon Rainforest have detected a vast network of long-abandoned circular and rectangular-shaped villages dating from 1300 to 1700, a new study finds.
The round villages all had remarkably similar layouts, with elongated mounds circling a central plaza, like marks on a clock.
"These latter elongated mounds, when seen from above, look like the rays of the sun, which gives them the common name of 'So?is,'" the Portuguese word for "suns," the researchers wrote in the study.
The discovery is part of a new archaeological focus on the pre-Columbian Amazon. Within the past 20 years, researchers have learned that the rainforest's southern rim was home to a great diversity of soil-sculpting cultures that engineered the landscape before the Europeans arrived. Within the past decade, scientists have uncovered the remnants of so-called "mound villages," which are shaped as circles or rectangles, and connected by road networks.
Archaeologists, however, had yet to look for mound villages in the Brazilian state of Acre, so an international group of researchers teamed up to survey the area with lidar — or light detection and ranging. With this technique, billions of lasers shot from overhead (in this case, from a helicopter) penetrate the rainforest's canopy and map the landscape below.
The lidar survey, combined with satellite data, revealed a remarkable 25 circular mound villages and 11 rectangular mound villages, the researchers said. Another 15 mound villages were so poorly preserved, they could not be categorized as either circular or rectangular, the team added.
The circular mound villages had an average diameter of 282 feet (86 meters), while the rectangular villages tended to be smaller, with an average length of 148 feet (45 m). Further analysis of the "sun" villages revealed they had carefully planned roads; each circular mound village had two "principal roads" that were wide and deep (up to 20 feet, or 6 m, across) with high banks, and smaller "minor roads" that led to nearby streams.
Most of the villages were close to each other — just about 3 miles (4.4 km) apart, the researchers found. The principal roads often connected one village to another, creating a vast community network in the rainforest, the researchers said.
The distinctive and consistent way Indigenous people arranged these villages suggests that they had specific social models for the way they organized their communities, the researchers said. It's even possible that this configuration was meant to represent the cosmos, they noted.
The intricate road system, however, "is hardly a surprise for Amazonian archaeologists," the researchers wrote in the study. "Early historical accounts attest to the ubiquity of road networks across the Amazon. They are mentioned since the 16th-century account of [the Spanish Dominican missionary] Friar Gaspar de Carvajal, who observed wide roads leading from the riverine villages to the interior." Later, in the 18th century, Col. Antonio Pires de Campos, "described a vast population inhabiting the region, with villages connected by straight, wide roads that were constantly kept clean," the researchers added.
Little is known about the culture practiced by the people in these mound villages. But preliminary research suggests that this culture's ceramics were "cruder" than those of the culture that preceded them, known as the Geoglyphs, who lived in that region from about 400 B.C. to A.D. 950.
The study was published in April in the Journal of Computer Applications in Archaeology, and was just featured on Channel 4's "Jungle Mystery: Lost Kingdoms of the Amazon," in the U.K., which also featured other ancient findings from the Amazon, including a sprawling, 8-mile-long 'canvas' of rock art in Colombia dating to the last ice age.
https://www.livescience.com/clock-face-shaped-villages-amazon-rainforest.html
9 December, 2020The Global Mean Temperature Anomaly Record. How it works and why it is misleading
The CO2 Coalition is honored to present The Global Mean Temperature Anomaly Record - How it works and why it is misleading, a new Climate Issues in Depth paper by two of America's most respected and prolific atmospheric physicists, MIT professor emeritus Richard Lindzen, who is a longtime member of the Coalition, and University of Alabama in Huntsville professor John Christy.
Professor Lindzen has published over 200 scientific articles and books over a five-decade career. He has held professorships at the University of Chicago, Harvard University and MIT. He is a fellow and award recipient of the American Meteorological Society and the American Geophysical Union. He is also a member of the National Academy of Science and was a lead author of the UN IPCC's third assessment report's scientific volume. His research has highlighted the scientific uncertainties about the impact of carbon dioxide emissions on temperature and climate more generally.
Professor Christy, the director of the Earth System Science Center at The University of Alabama in Huntsville, began studying global climate issues in 1987. He has been Alabama's State Climatologist since 2000 and a fellow of the American Meteorological Society since 2002. He and CO2 Coalition member Dr. Roy W. Spencer developed and have maintained one of the key global temperature data sets relied on by scientists and government bodies, using microwave data observed in the troposphere from satellites since 1979. For this achievement, they were awarded NASA's Medal for Exceptional Scientific Achievement.
The purpose of this paper is to explain how the data set that is referred to by policy-makers and the media as the global surface temperature record is actually obtained, and where it fits into the popular narrative associated with climate alarm.
Executive Summary
At the center of most discussions of global warming is the record of the global mean surface temperature anomaly-often somewhat misleadingly referred to as the global mean temperature record. This paper addresses two aspects of this record. First, we note that this record is only one link in a fairly long chain of inference leading to the claimed need for worldwide reduction in CO2 emissions. Second, we explore the implications of the way the record is constructed and presented, and show why the record is misleading.
This is because the record is often treated as a kind of single, direct instrumental measurement. However, as the late Stan Grotch of the Laurence Livermore Laboratory pointed out 30 years ago, it is really the average of widely scattered station data, where the actual data points are almost evenly spread between large positive and negative values.
The average is simply the small difference of these positive and negative excursions, with the usual problem associated with small differences of large numbers: at least thus far, the one degree Celsius increase in the global mean since 1900 is swamped by the normal variations at individual stations, and so bears little relation to what is actually going on at a particular one.
The changes at the stations are distributed around the one-degree global average increase. Even if a single station had recorded this increase itself, this would take a typical annual range of temperature there, for example, from -10 to 40 degrees in 1900, and replace it with a range today from -9 to 41. People, crops, and weather at that station would find it hard to tell this difference.
However, the increase looks significant on the charts used in almost all presentations, because they omit the range of the original data points and expand the scale in order to make the mean change look large.
The record does display certain consistent trends, but it is also quite noisy, and fluctuations of a tenth or two of a degree are unlikely to be significant. In the public discourse, little attention is paid to magnitudes; the focus is rather on whether this anomaly is increasing or decreasing. Given the noise and sampling errors, it is rather easy to "adjust" such averaging, and even change the sign of a trend from positive to negative.
The common presentations often suppress the noise by using running averages over periods from 5 to 11 years. However, such processing can also suppress meaningful features such as the wide variations that are always being experienced at individual stations. Finally, we show the large natural temperature changes that Americans in 14 major cities must cope with every year. For example, the average difference between the coldest and warmest moments each year ranges from about 25 degrees Celsius in Miami (a 45 degree Fahrenheit change) to 55 degrees in Denver (a 99 degree Fahrenheit change). We contrast this with the easily manageable 1.2 degree Celsius increase in the global mean temperature anomaly in the past 120 years, which has caused so much alarm in the media and in policy circles.
Download the paper at this link: The Global MeanTemperature Anomaly Record - How it works and why it is misleading
Email from info@co2coalition.org
Are Temperatures and Ocean Levels Rising Dangerously? Not Really
There are two widely held climate-change beliefs that are simply not accurate. The first is that there has been a statistically significant warming trend in the U.S. over the last 20 years. The second is that average ocean levels are rising alarmingly due to man-made global warming. Neither of these perspectives is true; yet both remain important, nonetheless, since both are loaded with very expensive public policy implications.
To refute the first view, we turn to data generated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) for the relevant years under discussion. The table below reports the average mean temperature in the continental U.S. for the years 1998 through 2019*:
1998 54.6 degrees
1999 54.5 degrees
2000 54.0 degrees
2001 54.3 degrees
2002 53.9 degrees
2003 53.7 degrees
2004 53.5 degrees
2005 54 degrees
2006 54.9 degrees
2007 54.2 degrees
2008 53.0 degrees
2009 53.1 degrees
2010 53.8 degrees
2011 53.8 degrees
2012 55.3 degrees
2013 52.4 degrees
2014 52.6 degrees
2015 54.4 degrees
2016 54.9 degrees
2017 54.6 degrees
2018 53.5 degrees
2019 52.7 degrees
*National Climate Report – Annual 2019
It is apparent from the data that there has been no consistent warming trend in the U.S. over the last 2 decades; average mean temperatures (daytime and nighttime) have been slightly higher in some years and slightly lower in other years. On balance–and contrary to mountains of uninformed social and political commentary—annual temperatures on average in the U.S. were no higher in 2019 than they were in 1998.
The second widely accepted climate view—based on wild speculations from some op/ed writers and partisan politicians–is that average sea levels are increasing dangerously and rationalize an immediate governmental response. But as we shall demonstrate below, this perspective is simply not accurate.
There is a wide scientific consensus (based on satellite laser altimeter readings since 1993) that the rate of increase in overall sea levels has been approximately .12 inches per year.
To put that increase in perspective, the average sea level nine years from now (in 2029) is likely to be approximately one inch higher than it is now (2020). One inch is roughly the distance from the tip of your finger to the first knuckle. Even by the turn of the next century (in 2100), average ocean levels (at that rate of increase) should be only a foot or so higher than they are at present.
None of this sounds particularly alarming for the general society and little of it can justify any draconian regulations or costly infrastructure investments. The exception might be for very low- lying ocean communities or for properties (nuclear power plants) that, if flooded, would present a wide-ranging risk to the general population. But even here there is no reason for immediate panic. Since ocean levels are rising in small, discrete marginal increments, private and public decision makers would have reasonable amounts of time to prepare, adjust and invest (in flood abatement measures, etc.) if required.
But are sea levels actually rising at all? Empirical evidence of any substantial increases taken from land-based measurements has been ambiguous. This suggests to some scientists that laser and tidal-based measurements of ocean levels over time have not been particularly accurate.
For example, Professor Niles-Axel Morner (Stockholm University) is infamous in climate circles for arguing–based on his actual study of sea levels in the Fiji Islands–that “there are no traces of any present rise in sea levels; on the contrary, full stability.” And while Morner’s views are controversial, he has at least supplied peer reviewed empirical evidence to substantiate his nihilist position on the sea-level increase hypothesis.
The world has many important societal problems and only a limited amount of resources to address them. What we don’t need are overly dramatic climate-change claims that are unsubstantiated and arrive attached to expensive public policies that, if enacted, would fundamentally alter the foundations of the U.S. economic system.
https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=13333&omhide=true
Biden’s ‘Climate Czar’ Says under Biden, Great Reset ‘Will Happen’ and with ‘Greater Intensity’ Than People ThinkJoe Biden has officially announced that John Kerry, a failed presidential candidate and longtime DC swamp creature, will be his “climate czar,” assuming President Trump’s legal challenges fail to overturn the 2020 election.
Just a reminder: Kerry, who constantly lectures the hoi polloi about the “existential threat of climate change,” was an abysmal failure as President Obama’s second secretary of state. (This is the man who brought us the ill-fated Paris Climate Accords and the hapless Iran nuclear deal.)
It’s also worth noting Kerry is one of the biggest hypocrites in the world when it comes to climate change. If Kerry were so worried about the dire threats of climate change, including rising sea levels, why did he purchase an $11.75 million waterfront estate on the coast of Martha’s Vineyard in 2017? Moreover, why does Kerry continually globetrot aboard on carbon-dioxide-spewing private jets and yachts?
Oh, right, like most global warming fearmongers, including his buddy Al Gore, the rules don’t apply for them–only for those of us regular folks, people like you and me.
If Kerry’s hypocrisy weren’t bad enough, consider that Kerry is one of the foremost advocates of the radical, globalist sham known as the “Great Reset.”
Kerry, while speaking at Great Reset virtual event hosted by the World Economic Forum, said, “We can’t push a button and go back to the way things were. … We are a long way off from being able to go back to any kind of normal. … And the normal was a crisis. The normal itself was not working. What has happened is COVID has accelerated everything, so all the forces and pressures that were pushing into crisis over the social contract are now exacerbated and exacerbated at a time when the world is in many ways coming apart. ”
He added, “I can’t think of a moment where it has been more critical for governments that have leadership that brings and convenes people, government isn’t going to make all the decisions that we have to make. But government is the great convener.”
With Kerry at the helm, the Paris Climate Agreement, which the United States left under President Trump, is the just the beginning.
Kerry elaborated on his grand plans, “This is a big moment, and the World Economic Forum, the CEO capacity of the World Economic Forum is going to have to really play a front and center role in defining the reset in a way nobody misinterprets as just taking us back to the way things were. But in having to prepare us for dealing with global climate change, with this massive inequity from globalization, through the failure of this contract to protect disenfranchised people, all of which is being laid bare as a consequence of COVID. And in addition, in our country as a consequence of some police actions that lit a fuse in the younger generation and I think will produce massive social change in our country.”
While speaking on another WEF panel, Kerry again expressed his support for the Great Reset and even acknowledged that Joe Biden would also help to make it happen.
After being asked by the panel host whether Great Reseters expect too much from Joe Biden, Kerry said, “It [the Great Reset] will happen. And I think it will happen with greater speed and with greater intensity than a lot of people might imagine.”
He then elaborated, “In effect, the citizens of the United States have just done a Great Reset. We’ve done a Great Reset. And it was a record level of voting.”
Kerry later added, “Government just has to find a way to move faster, and to address more of the real concerns of its citizens. Or there will be an increasing backlash. What I think we’ve won is a reprieve. And I think, therefore, that the notion of a ‘reset’ is more important than ever before. I personally believe, Borge, that we’re at the dawn of an extremely exciting time.”
This is scary stuff. The Great Reset would upend capitalism and install socialistic policies on a worldwide level, as well as put the ruling class in charge of most economic activity.
Under the guise of fighting against climate change and COVID-19, the Great Reset, which is gaining increasingly more traction every day, would usher in a new world, one focused on wealth redistribution and giving massive amounts of power to the global ruling class. We must do everything in our power to stop it. If we fail, America might never be the same.
https://stoppingsocialism.com/2020/12/great-reset-will-happen-john-kerry-joe-biden/
***************************************My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
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http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC) Saturdays only
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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December 08, 2020
Send the Paris Climate Treaty to the Senate
The most far-reaching international agreement ever must get Senate advice, consent and vote
Paul Driessen
Article II, Section 2 of the US Constitution is simple and direct: “The President ... shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two-thirds of the Senators present concur.” It served America well for 225 years.
Then, in 2015, the UN’s “international community” of climate activists gathered in Paris to hammer out language requiring that developed nations slash their fossil fuel use, tighten greenhouse gas emission targets every five years, and become “carbon neutral” within a few decades – to prevent a manmade climate chaos forecast by computer models but not supported by Earth history or real-world evidence.
Developing countries would be under no such obligations. Most incredibly, economic, military and tech powerhouse China was included among the developing countries, and thus is under no such obligations.
In short, the Paris accords would force the United States to engage in a massive, painful transformation of its entire economy – electricity generation, transportation, manufacturing, agriculture and much more – under the aegis of the United Nations and UN and foreign country activists, politicians and bureaucrats.
Aside from ending major wars, what was concocted in Paris is probably the most far-reaching, impactful agreement this country was ever asked to sign. It is the very embodiment of what our Founding Fathers had in mind when they wrote the language requiring Senate debate, advice and consent for all treaties.
However, President Obama unilaterally decreed that Paris was not a “treaty,” but merely an agreement, an accord – some lesser document that he could personally sign, committing the US to it, making an end-run around our constitutional and democratic process, and giving Congress and America no opportunity to examine, discuss and agree to or reject this intrusive, destructive treaty. In so doing, Mr. Obama set the stage for coordinated efforts by liberal politicians, activists, bureaucrats, state attorneys general, forum-shopped judges and corporate CEOs to make the Paris language binding on every American.
President Trump recognized how unfair and disastrous the Paris Climate Treaty would be. In 2017, he announced that the United States was withdrawing; the withdrawal became effective November 4, 2020.
Joe Biden has made it clear that he will recommit our nation to the Paris not-a-treaty, possibly within hours of being sworn in as president, if lingering vote issues are resolved in his favor. Fortunately, President Trump can easily prevent this disaster. As Paris Treaty experts have suggested,
Mr. Trump could and should submit the treaty to the Senate for its advice and consent – and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell should quickly schedule a debate and vote. Every Senator will have an opportunity to go on record: for or against a treaty that would make the United States, and every individual state and family, subjects of unelected, unaccountable UN and foreign powers.
President Trump should do this posthaste – thereby preventing another unilateral executive action and what Government Accountability & Oversight lawyer Chris Horner has described as a well-coordinated “climate litigation industry” plan to commandeer our courts in an endless series of lawsuits to make every Paris Climate Treaty provision legally binding on every US state, industry, business and family.
For example, Massachusetts AG Maura Healey promised Michael Bloomberg’s State Energy & Environmental Impact Center that, if its deep coffers provided her office with privately hired lawyers whom she could utilize as “Special Assistant Attorneys General,” she would put them to work “ensuring that Massachusetts and neighboring states meet the long-term commitments set forth ... in the Paris Agreement” – whatever those might be or could be creatively interpreted to be. She’s already doing it.
Another scheme involves reviving the reviled Obama era practice of sue-and-settle lawsuits, under which environmentalist groups sue government agencies to implement and impose rules that the litigators and regulators both want but aren’t clearly supported by law or would face strong public opposition if they went through a normal rulemaking process. The parties select a usually cooperative court and, instead of fighting the lawsuit, the government agency caves in, agrees to settle the case, and consents to whatever demands were made by the agency’s handpicked pseudo-adversary. The citizenry and parties impacted by the new rules never get their day in court, and rarely find out about the rule until it is imposed on them.
The schemes are audacious, outrageous, an abuse of law and authority, and in many minds treasonous. Activists will employ them and the Paris Climate Treaty as weapons of mass destruction against America’s energy, economy, living standards and freedoms.
Horner also notes that rejoining the Paris Treaty would subject America’s energy and economic policy to a UN climate “conciliation commission” that could allow “antagonistic” nations and parties to file complaints about alleged US non-compliance with Paris, block infrastructure development, and impose carbon taxes. He and Competitive Enterprise Institute senior fellow Marlo Lewis also point out that:
* allowing the Obama “climate coup” to stand would allow future presidents to adopt any treaties they and foreign elites want, without Senate review and ratification, simply by deeming them “not a treaty.”
* the Paris Treaty would imperil American self-government – by empowering administrations to make long-term commitments without congressional authorization, and by making US energy and economic policies beholden to the demands of foreign leaders, UN bureaucrats and international pressure groups.
If We the People ultimately decide we do want to transform our energy and economic system, reduce our living standard, curtail our liberties, and subject ourselves to international governance, we can do so through proper nationwide debates and legislative processes. We should not have these decisions imposed on us via collusion, corruption, chicanery and unconstitutional power grabs.
Too many of our ruling elites disdain business, industry and working classes; rarely if ever did serious manual work; and most often belong to a Democrat Party that once stood up for workers, but now has turned its back on working men and women. These elites would help ensure that same families pummeled hardest and longest by Covid lockdowns will be punished in perpetuity by Paris Climate Treaty edicts.
All that red on county-by-county 2020 voting maps is where jobs, economies and living standards will hammered hardest. Many of these counties have manufacturing jobs ... farmlands, forests, scenic and open spaces, habitats where birds, bats and wildlife flourish ... and the best wind and solar sites.
This is where land will be blanketed with millions of wind turbines, solar panels, battery complexes and transmission lines, to “replace” billions of megawatt-hours of reliable electricity with intermittent power – decimating many rare, threatened, endangered and just plain magnificent species.
It’s where new dust bowls will arise, as biofuel crops replace today’s grasslands. It’s where factories will close, because the Paris Treaty will make electricity intermittent and expensive, and petrochemical raw materials too costly or simply unavailable.
Will President Trump and Senator McConnell let a Biden-Harris Administration – in league with squads of America-denigrating politicians and Deep State activists – do this to our country?
Or will they preserve the Constitution, the Trump energy, economic, employment and military legacy – the livelihoods, living standards and liberties, not only of MAGA Trump voters, but of all Americans?
This may be their last opportunity to do so. I therefore urge them – and I’m certain I’m joined by tens of millions of my fellow Americans in urging the President and Senate Majority Leader:
Present this defective, destructive Paris Climate Treaty to the Senate. Let the assembled Senators debate it, vote on it – and send it to history’s dustbin, where it belongs.
Via email
6 December, 2020
Biden’s Socialism Will Be Green, Not Red
‘Red’ socialism may have been vanquished at the ballot box, but Americans need to be aware that its green successor is just as much of a threat to their freedoms.
One of the most interesting results of our recent elections was that Americans rejected socialism — or at least its close American equivalent — despite its seemingly growing popularity. Successfully labeling their opponents as socialists propelled many Republican candidates to victories in down-ballot races, particularly in areas with immigrants who had fled avowedly socialist regimes. Socialist-style policies were also defeated in ballot-measure votes, even in progressive states such as California.
Many commentators have noted that Joe Biden’s record of moderation in the Senate made it difficult to paint him as socialist. That does not mean, however, that socialism in all its variations has been defeated outright. As we are seeing in other parts of the world, what we once would have called socialism has evolved: Its future is green, not red.
This is most apparent in Europe. Across the western half of the continent, old-style socialist and social-democratic parties have seen their vote shares plunge in recent years. Green parties have risen in their place. Indeed, the Guardian characterized their successes in the 2019 European Parliament elections as a “quiet revolution.”
Yet the Greens are no less radical than their red predecessors. As the Guardian put it, “they have consolidated a manifesto that puts social justice and human rights at the heart of the fight for the planet, drawing in voters disillusioned with mainstream centre-left parties.”
We can discuss what the Greens mean by “human rights” on another occasion.
Meanwhile, the British Green Party is touting not just a Green New Deal for energy, but ones for housing (building 100,000 new state-owned homes) and income (introducing a universal basic income of $120 per week), among many others.
Climate change is at the heart of this radicalism. It represents the perfect excuse for socialist central planning. Industry and individual choices such as automobile driving, the argument goes, are wrecking the planet, and therefore must be centrally controlled and regulated so that emissions are reduced to a level that constrains climate change.
The regulations to achieve this end must be introduced now on an emergency basis and exist in perpetuity. According to the climate warriors, there is virtually no aspect of American economic life that does not have some effect on climate. It’s misbegotten, of course, but to be expected: If climate is at the heart of your policy, you will need to control all the myriad human actions and interactions that might affect it.
Since the early days of the Biden campaign, climate activists have happily proclaimed that his climate agenda is “a Green New Deal in all but name.” The Biden-Sanders Unity Task Force document on environmental policy, coauthored by the newly named special envoy for climate, John Kerry, is entitled “Combating the Climate Crisis and Pursuing Environmental Justice.”
The transition team’s summary memo on how to approach climate aspects of the transition includes policies not just for the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Atmospheric and Oceanic Administration, and the Departments of the Interior, Energy, and Transportation, but for the Departments of Agriculture, State, Justice, and Treasury, as well as the Office of Management and Budget. Personnel is policy, goes the saying in Washington, and, evidently, the Biden transition team’s plan to staff all these departments with climate activists.
The memo envisages “new authorities that allow for structural and systemic changes.” Without control of the Senate, the new administration will find it difficult to set these up. However, thanks to excessive delegations of power from Congress to the executive over the years, President Biden will be able to do a lot through regulation via executive order — with the power of the “pen and phone,” as President Obama put it.
We can expect significant restrictions on the use of fossil fuels and machines that use them. Massive amounts of public funds will be spent on promoting “green jobs” — and the administration will use its powers under labor law to ensure that these are union jobs. Non-union jobs such as independent contracting will come under increased fire, with emissions-heavy delivery services probably in the crosshairs once the COVID crisis eases. Trade tariffs will be raised on the basis of emission levels in the trading partner’s country — which will hit the developing world hard.
Even financial regulation will likely play a role in this bout of central planning. Regulators can use an array of supervisory powers to intimidate bankers into not lending — or denying other banking services — to fossil fuel-related businesses. This was the model the Obama administration used to try to drive the payday loan industry out of business, in something called Operation Choke Point. We can expect the new administration to try again, with a wider array of targets this time.
The tech industry is likely to be another target. We have already seen how tech companies have used the power of moderation to target sources of “disinformation” regarding the election and the pandemic. The threat of antitrust action by the new administration is likely to make them take more action against climate-change skeptics. The chances of an article like this being shared over social media will diminish.
“Red” socialism may have been vanquished at the ballot box, but Americans need to be aware that its green successor is just as much of a threat to their freedoms.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/12/bidens-socialism-will-be-green-not-red/
Get ready for NATION- wide blackouts under BidenCalifornia’s climate and energy policies will bring thousands of blackouts to entire country
Dr. Jay Lehr and Tom Harris
The power disaster unfolding in California will soon occur across the country, if Joe Biden gets his way. The Golden State has been sweeping away the forms of energy that have provided reliable electricity for decades, under the same agenda the former Vice-President is planning for America as a whole.
Power outages are now commonplace in California. Last summer, the state suffered its first rolling blackouts in nearly 20 years. Imagine if this happened in Chicago in the middle of winter.
California’s trouble is explained by officials who now openly admit to an over-reliance on wind and solar power. The governor said there was not enough wind to keep the turbines going, while cloud cover and nightfall restricted solar power. The Los Angeles Times recognized the root of the problem:
“… gas-burning power plants that can fire up when the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing have been shutting down in recent years, and California has largely failed to replace them …”
Consequently, the state has fallen thousands of megawatts behind its needs. Governor Gavin Newsom admitted, “we failed to predict and plan for these shortages” and took (nominal) responsibility for the rolling blackouts. Now he wants everyone to conserve power, while the state looks for new sources of energy, most likely fossil fuel-generated power from neighboring states.
All this is happening while California continues its intention to transition to 60% renewable energy by 2030 and 100% “climate-friendly energy” by 2045, as required by state law.
Indeed, in their October 6 open letter to Newsom, the heads of the California’s Energy Commission, Independent System Operator and Public Utilities Commission wrote: “We are unwavering in our commitment to meeting California’s clean energy and climate goals.”
Team Biden plans to go even further, committing to making the entire nation 100% renewable within 15 years. The United States would fall tens of millions of megawatts behind on its electricity needs.
Like the California government, the incoming Biden-Harris administration is acting entirely under the unfounded belief that climate change is a manmade calamity that can be stopped by eliminating fossil fuel use. They are clearly unaware of the Climate Change Reconsidered series of reports of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC).
These documents summarize thousands of studies from peer-reviewed scientific journals that either refute or cast serious doubt on the climate scare. They conclude that we are not causing a climate crisis.
Yet, in their October 6 report, Preliminary Root Cause Analysis – Mid-August 2020 Heat Storm, the same heads of California’s Energy Commission, Independent System Operator and Public Utilities Commission highlighted the “climate change-induced extreme heat storm across the western United States” as the first cause of the blackout.
In their view, apparently, shutting down coal, gas and nuclear power plants in California and in states from which California imports electricity played only minor roles.
California’s determination to shift to so-called “green” energy – which is actually anything but clean, green, renewable and sustainable – is being echoed by politicians across the nation. The result, especially in states that don’t enjoy California’s mostly benign weather, is going to be that those in the poorest neighborhoods and those on fixed incomes may be forced to choose between heating and eating.
It also means people trying to run their homes, offices, factories, hospitals and schools on intermittent, weather-dependent, much more expensive wind and solar power will have to get used to never knowing when or for how long their electricity will be on or off. Now in California; soon in the entire USA.
Coherent energy systems are designed with the understanding that portions of the system will be offline from time to time. Power companies compensate for this with reserve power at the ready. However, California has closed its margin for error in response to anti-nuclear and anti-fossil fuel sentiments and climate change concerns. Team Biden intends to do this for the entire United States.
Power outages cannot always be avoided and are more common than one may think. For example, between 2008 and 2017, Illinois had 871 outages, the tenth most by state. Texas had nearly twice as many, giving it the dubious distinction of ranking number two in the list.
But these pale in comparison to California which has the least reliable electrical power system in the nation. It leads in power outages every year. Between 2008 and 2017, it had 4,297 power outages!
The origin of the problem is partly California’s Senate Bill 1368, which in 2006 established the state’s emission standards to reduce greenhouse gases from power plants. Following that year, eleven coal-fired power plants were closed and three were converted to biomass. Only one coal-fired plant remains.
The state also reduced its normal reliance on energy from out of state coal plants.
Yielding to anti-nuclear activists, the state also closed all but one nuclear plant, Diablo Canyon. That plant generates about 18,000 Gigawatt-hours of reliable electricity every year, fully 8.6% of California’s total generation.
But Diablo Canyon will soon be closed too. Not surprisingly, during its construction and operation, anti-nuclear protests were common; nearly two thousand people were arrested for civil disobedience during a two-week period in 1981. In response, in 2016, the California Public Utilities Commission approved a Pacific Gas & Electric Joint Proposal to phase out the state’s remaining nuclear power. That means the operating licenses for Diablo Canyon’s two units will not be renewed when they expire in 2024 and 2025.
Ironically, the Commission did not approve Pacific Gas & Electric’s proposal for resources to replace the station’s output. It does not appear to matter that nuclear reactors produce no greenhouse gas emissions during operation. They are hated by the enviro-radicals who drive California’s energy policy and are steadily putting the state even further behind the 8-ball.
It gets worse. California now requires that all new homes be nearly entirely electric. It wants citizens to switch their natural gas stoves to electric, as part of their global warming initiatives. More than 30 cities have already enacted bans on gas appliances, including San Francisco. The state also hopes to eliminate all gasoline and diesel cars in favor of plug-in electric automobiles.
This means demand for reliable, affordable electricity will rise by leaps and bounds, just as supplies are steadily reduced, and partially replaced by expensive, intermittent, weather-dependent power.
Just as Mr. Biden promises for the nation as a whole, California is sacrificing reliable electrical power as part of its impossible crusade to “stop climate change.” Of course, this will have no impact on our planet’s climate, because (a) climate change is mostly natural and not driven by carbon dioxide, and (b) all those wind turbines, solar panels and backup batteries will be manufactured overseas, mostly in China, using fossil fuels and simply moving the source of ever-increasing greenhouse gas emissions.
However, it will certainly spur sales of candles, flashlights, propane heaters, and natural gas, gasoline and diesel generators.
Via email
Stunning satellite photos show Pacific Islands that are GROWING despite sea level rises
They rise and fall naturally
An island in the Pacific Ocean has grown dramatically in size despite rising sea levels, which has been blamed for sinking many others over the last four years.
New Zealand and Canadian researchers have been studying a chain of volcanic islands, known as the Marshall Islands, located between Hawaii and the Philippines, over the last 70 years.
Satellite images, aerial photographs and radio carbon dating have shown an island that sits on top of Ailinglaplap Atoll? has grown by a staggering 13 per cent.
The island measured just 2.02 square kilometres in 1943, and is now 2.26 square kilometres in size.
The discovery comes despite rising sea levels around the world which has caused a number of islands to disappear in the Pacific region since 2016.
Sea level rises have been linked to thermal expansion caused by warming of the ocean and increased melting of land-based ice.
In the South Pacific, the sea has risen almost three times the global average, rising around seven to 10 millimetres every year since 1993.
Five reef islands in the Solomon Islands disappeared in 2016 while another three islands in the central Pacific vanished in 2019.
Despite their disappearances researchers have discovered some islands are still continuing to grow.
The New Zealand and Canadian scientists have provided a simple explanation for the growth at the Ailinglaplap Atoll?.
An atoll is a ring shaped coral reef that produces sediment, like sand and gravel, to help build the island on top of it.
As the reef flourishes, more sediment is produced, increasing the build-up and size of the island.
The Ailinglaplap Atoll? began as two separate islands, but they merged because of sediment build-up over the decades.
A spit at the western end of the island has also been gathering more sediment, growing bigger in size.
University of Auckland senior lecturer Dr Murray Ford told Stuff radiocarbon dating showed the sediment had been building up since as early as 1950.
'The big picture with this is the modern day coral reef can build an island even though the sea level is rising,' he said.
'The nice thing about these islands is everything that builds the island comes from the reef.'
Professor Ford said it was important coral reefs remained healthy so islands could continue to grow.
'It's all about the reef health, being able to produce sand and gravel to help make these islands and maintain them.'
At the moment, many coral reefs are at threat of ocean acidification, reef bleaching and pollution.
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC) Saturdays only
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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December 04, 2020
Autocrats Coming After Autos
Self-anointed saviors of the planet are bringing tyranny to your driveway.
In his third autobiography, former President Barack Obama took Americans to task for liking “cheap gas and big cars” more than “the environment.” That a man with an 8,000-square-foot home in Washington, DC, and a nearly 7,000-square-foot mansion on 29 acres in Martha’s Vineyard would criticize ordinary Americans for the size of their “carbon footprints” epitomizes the gargantuan disconnect between increasingly arrogant American oligarchs and the “bitter clingers” they clearly disdain. It is that arrogance that drives their plans to eliminate personal transportation as American have come to know it — even if it means suspending reality to do so.
Thus, we have imperious fops like UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson and California Governor Gavin Newsom promising to phase out gasoline- and diesel-powered cars in the next 10 to 15 years as part of the “green revolution” they wish to impose on their respective “subjects,” whether they like it or not. “Our green industrial revolution will be powered by the wind turbines of Scotland and the North East, propelled by the electric vehicles made in the Midlands and advanced by the latest technologies developed in Wales, so we can look ahead to a more prosperous, greener future,” opined Johnson. Newsom declared, “We just want to fundamentally reconcile the fact we’re no longer living in 19th century, and we don’t need to drill things or extract things in order to advance our economic goals and advance our mobility needs.”
That neither man is remotely acquainted with reality should surprise no one. Of all the zealots who wish to impose their worldview on the benighted masses, none are quite as fervent as the eco-warriors who insist technological advances can simply be willed into existence within an arbitrary timeframe.
Unfortunately for them, reality intrudes. Last year, Professor Richard Herrington of the Natural History Museum in London sent a letter to the British government after he and his colleagues analyzed what it would take to convert that nation’s cars to electric vehicles (EVs) by 2050, not 2035. They concluded that such a conversion would require, based on 2018 mining levels, the entire world’s production of neodymium, three-quarters of its lithium production, and at least half of its copper production to produce the required number of EVs — just for the UK.
America? “The U.S. has about 276 million registered motor vehicles, or roughly nine times as many vehicles as the U.K.,” explains columnist Robert Bryce. “Thus, if Herrington’s numbers are right, electrifying all U.S. motor vehicles would require roughly 18 times the world’s current cobalt production, about nine times global neodymium output, nearly seven times global lithium production, and about four times world copper production.”
Professor Herrington is hardly an outlier. A 2015 study by the Union of Concerned Scientists revealed that manufacturing a midsize EV would produce about 15% more emissions than the process of building an internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicle. For larger EVs with larger batteries, that gap could grow to 68% or more.
Besides, does anyone with even a modicum of common sense consider mining to be a “green” activity? Moreover, as Bryce also points out, internal combustion engines are more efficient than batteries in terms of “gravimetric energy density,” or the amount of energy contained per kilogram; the engines themselves are getting more efficient; and ICE vehicles are far easier to refuel — as in the five minutes it takes to fill a gas tank compared with hours it takes to recharge an EV.
Yet Bryce is also somewhat naive, noting that “EVs are still too expensive for low- and middle-income consumers.” For the self-anointed power-mongers and their totalitarian ambitions, vehicles priced beyond the reach of ordinary citizens is a feature, not a bug, in a brave new world where they promise “you’ll own nothing, and you’ll be happy.”
Automotive expert Eric Peters sees the proverbial writing on the wall, noting that “by 2030 not much else that isn’t electric will be built,” and the few cars that aren’t “will have been driven off the roads entirely by regulatory fiat and extortionate/punitive gas and registration fees” by 2040.
In short, he sees a world where government-imposed “polluter taxes” raise gas prices to $10 per gallon, and/or ICE vehicle registration fees to $5,000 per year, making such a vehicle unaffordable for the vast majority of car owners.
Yet that extortionist agenda of government-mandated ICE vehicle obsolescence is only part of the equation. Because consumers will be trapped between the artificially inflated expenses of an ICE vehicle and an equally unaffordable EV, the economic “solution” will be the elimination of car ownership itself. It will be replaced, Peters warns, by a rental system producing “serial debt in exchange for access to transportation as defined, delimited and controlled by the owner thereof, which probably won’t be you.”
An added “bonus”? Because an EV is “electronic as well as electric,” it can be controlled by someone “other-than-the-owner,” he adds.
Virtue-signaling auto manufacturers are more than happy to accommodate the oligarchs. Volkswagen, Honda, GM, Ford, Daimler, Toyota, and Tesla are all jumping on the EV bandwagon in a big way.
Coordinated subterfuge is also part of the mix. The move to EVs is being framed as an effort to prevent China from dominating the market. “In a future driven by electric vehicles, China is poised to dominate if the U.S. does not transform its automobile industry in coming years,” asserts CNBC columnist Evelyn Cheng.
In the coming years? As Americans discovered during the pandemic, the same “citizens of the world” who made our nation beholden to medical supply chains controlled by communist thugs are facing the same reality with regard to EVs. Two Chinese companies, Contemporary Amperex Technology (CATL) and BYD, account for a third of the market in the electric batteries that power EVs, and all six of the major battery manufacturers are Asian companies.
It gets worse. According to a report titled “The Commanding Heights of Global Transportation” released in September by Washington, DC-based advocacy group Securing America’s Future Energy (SAFE), there are 142 lithium-ion battery megafactories under construction globally. Of those, 107 are being built for China — versus just nine for the U.S.
Do any of our elites remember how government-subsidized Chinese steel devastated our domestic steel industry? Do they care that the same thing could happen to the EV market?
The answer is no. Our elitist class has made it clear that patriotism and national security take a back seat to self-enrichment and oligarchic control. Self-enrichment and control they self-aggrandizingly frame as “saving the planet.”
“Transportation control [is] one of the cogs in their new world construct,” columnist Peter Skurkiss explains. “The end game of EVs, the Green New Deal, the Paris Climate Accord, facial recognition AI, and possibly things like vaccination permits for travel is more control and power for the elite and less freedom for the rest of us. This highway to the future is leading us straight back to serfdom.”
Highway to the future? Highway to hell is more like it.
https://patriotpost.us/articles/76169-autocrats-coming-after-autos-2020-12-03
2 December, 2020Sheldon Whitehouse’s Climate Inquisition continues
Senator Torquemada wants to jail those who dissent from his alarmist views on climate
Paul Driessen
Five years ago, I said Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) behaves like Torquemada, using Inquisition-like tactics to harass “manmade climate crisis” skeptics, and threatening to prosecute them for racketeering. Tomas de Torquemada was the Grand Inquisitor of the Spanish Inquisition that interrogated, tortured, imprisoned and executed thousands for religious heresy.
The senator took great umbrage, and denounced me in Senate chambers where I once worked. But he didn’t change his ways. If anything, he has become more intolerant and vindictive.
He recently said Democrat control of the Senate would enable him and his colleagues to launch investigations, haul climate realists before committees (for star-chamber show trials), and even employ grand juries and criminal prosecutions – to intimidate, silence and punish climate crisis nonbelievers.
People could certainly conclude that the thin-skinned senator would feel right at home in Inquisition Spain, Stalinist Russia, Red Guard and Xi Jinping China, or book-burning pre-Holocaust fascist Europe. Their history of silencing dissenters, erasing them from history, and sending them off to gulags and salt mines (or worse) is legendary. Their economic and governing ideology is classic fascism:
an extreme, intolerant system, under which an authoritarian government does not own businesses and industries outright, but does dictate what they can make, do, sell and say – while controlling citizens’ thoughts, speech and choices – through intimidation, silencing, arrest, prosecution, and fear of being fined, jailed, fired, sent to penal or reeducation colonies, and being beaten or executed.
These tactics are reprehensible and dictatorial. They are un-American and anti-science. Indeed, science achieves no progress without dissent, discussion and debate. It requires not just hypotheses, theories and computer models, but solid, empirical evidence to confirm or disprove hypotheses, models and predictions.
Discussion, debate, dissent and evidence are especially vital in addressing the assertion that humanity faces an unprecedented manmade climate crisis. That assertion is being used to justify demands that the United States, Europe and developed world eliminate the fossil fuels that provide over 80% of our energy, petrochemical and pharmaceutical raw materials, fertilizers and countless other benefits.
It is being used to justify demands that we replace this reliable, affordable energy and raw material base with wind, solar, battery and biofuel power. Not only are these alternatives intermittent, weather-dependent and far more expensive. They involve extensive mining, land use, wildlife, pollution and other environmental impacts. They are not renewable, sustainable, environment-friendly or climate-safe.
In the United States alone, we would have to replace some 7.5 billion megawatt-hours of electricity and electricity-equivalent fossil fuel use per year; replace enormous amounts of oil and natural gas raw materials; and overhaul our transportation, home heating and other systems. That would require millions of wind turbines, billions of solar panels, billions of 1000-pound battery modules, tens of millions of acres of corn, canola, soybean and other biofuel crops – and tens of trillions of dollars.
Democrat urban population and voter centers will likely oppose those industrial-scale installations in their backyards. They would have little objection to locating them in what many ruling, media and Hollywood elites imperiously and derisively refer to “flyover country” – western, Midwestern and southern states.
This “transformation” – under the Paris climate treaty, a Green New Deal or a Biden-Harris regulatory program – would massively disrupt America’s economy, jobs, living standards, health and wellbeing, especially for poor, minority, blue-collar, fixed-income and flyover country families and communities.
Climate alarmists insist that any lost jobs would be replaced with “green” jobs. But those would be mostly minimum-wage positions: hauling, installing, maintaining, dismantling, removing and landfilling turbines, panels and batteries. Moreover, most of those green technologies would be manufactured overseas, especially in China, because environmentalists battle any mining in the USA, and a climate-focused energy system would provide insufficient reliable, affordable power for factories.
Those huge and unprecedented amounts of mining and manufacturing would require fossil fuels. So the only thing that would change is where the fossil fuel use and emissions occur.
It would be mostly in Asia and Africa, in countries that are not obligated under the Paris climate treaty to reduce their fossil fuel use or greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions; countries that will build as many hundreds or thousands of coal and gas-fired power plants as needed to lift their people out of poverty ... and make “green energy” technologies they will happily sell to America, Australia, Canada and Europe.
That means, even if the US went cold-turkey on fossil fuels, it would make no difference to global GHG emissions or global atmospheric concentrations. And that means, even if carbon dioxide is the primary factor in climate change, destroying US and other modern economies would bring no climate benefits.
The EU’s and UK’s unwavering belief in human-caused climate cataclysms is already hammering its industries, workers and families, as numerous articles attest: here, here, here and here, for instance.
Thankfully, however, it is becoming increasingly clear that assertions of Climate Armageddon have been miscalculated, exaggerated or fabricated. Average global temperatures are rising far less rapidly than predicted by climate models: by at least a half-degree F.
Violent (F4-F5) US tornadoes have actually declined in number the past 35 years (1985-2020) versus the previous 35 years (1950-1984); and in 2018 not one F5 tornado touched down in the United States. For a record twelve years, from Wilma in 2005 until Harvey and Irma in 2017, no Category 3 to 5 hurricane struck the US mainland. Overall, there is little or no trend in tropical cyclone activity or intensity.
All that is not surprising in light of new research by Drs. William Happer and Willem van Wijngaarden that strongly indicates even doubling carbon dioxide (and other greenhouse gases) in Earth’s atmosphere would have minuscule effects on global temperatures and climate (but would benefit plant growth).
Indeed, it is impossible to distinguish human influences from natural factors, fluctuations and cycles regarding temperatures, polar ice, storms and droughts. Some scientists certainly claim otherwise – and generally just blame humans. But they have little or no actual, empirical evidence to support their claims, predictions and models. They simply say the science is settled, and we must ban fossil fuels, so shut up.
With so much at stake for America and the world, this is completely intolerable. At the very least, those claiming we face a climate calamity must be required to present solid empirical evidence to support their assertions – and engage in in robust, transparent debates with manmade climate change skeptics.
That is precisely what Senator Torquemada seems determined to prevent and punish, while transforming “the world’s greatest deliberative body” into a Russian Politburo or Chinese National People’s Congress – and an integral part of the $multi-trillion-per-year Climate Industrial Complex.
In that quest he would certainly be aided by the Big Media and Big Tech moguls who share his views on climate change, silencing scientists and evidence that contradicts climate cataclysm catechism, and blacklisting “climate heretics” in government, academic and corporate circles.
People have been conditioned to kowtow to government lockdown edicts, to save humanity from Covid. Climate alarmists assume we will now be sufficiently compliant about banning fossil fuels to “save the planet,” when we’re trying to recover from Covid. Or their Torquemadas will make us compliant.
It’s time to reject politicized junk science, demand debate, and resist green climate and energy edicts. Perhaps most of all, the US Senate must assert its Advice and Consent responsibilities on the Paris climate treaty, the most far-reaching international agreement Americans were ever asked to ratify.
Via email
This green fantasy will bankrupt us
It’s 2050. You wake in your cosy, insulated house, turn on the windfarm-powered lights, cook up a breakfast coffee on the hydrogen stove before jumping into your electric car. You whizz silently along roads with air as fresh as a mountain stream past happy e-bikers and carbon-neutral schools to your heat-pump powered office.
So, viewed from Britain in 2020, can you spot the odd one out? Here’s a clue: the e-bikers get no subsidy. Everything else on this list loses money, and needs state support on a massive scale to get even halfway to the nirvana glimpsed by the prime minister this week. Today’s subsidy, of course, is tomorrow’s tax rise.
Home insulation? £2bn is barely enough to get some sort of programme started. The disruption from insulating your home will be enough to discourage us from taking up this offer, almost regardless of the accompanying bribe. As we saw with double glazing and solar panels, the cowboy installers and fraudsters will be the principal beneficiaries.
WIndfarms? The easier sites are already filled up, driving development further offshore to have any chance of quadrupling today’s contribution. The bulk of new contracts are going to overseas manufacturers, while evidence of catastrophic damage to seabirds is growing, and nobody knows the long-term cost of maintaining this hi-tech engineering in a hostile environment.
Hydrogen home cooking? Hydrogen is much harder to handle than natural gas, and a compulsory conversion programme – the only practical way to exploit the existing pipework – would meet stiff resistance. Besides, like electricity, hydrogen is not a fuel but an energy transmission mechanism. Making it from actual fuel is like trying to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps.
Heat pumps? The capital cost typically runs into tens of thousands of pounds per dwelling, even where your garden is big enough to take one. They are also likely to be rather more expensive to maintain than your ‘fridge.
As for the electric car, despite subsidies of thousands of pounds per vehicle, with promises to spend billions more on sockets to charge them, motorists remain suspicious. After all, it is only a few short years since we were being urged to buy a diesel car, to make each barrel of oil go further. Now diesel is officially an evil producer of particulates that kill children.
Reconfiguring the electricity grid for electric vehicles will cost much more than the £2.5bn allocated in the government’s plan. Then there is the £40bn a year raised from fuel duties which will disappear if electricity takes over. It is almost a rounding error in the context of the hundreds of billions which the UK is going to waste with this week’s fashionable projects. They may indeed create thousands of jobs, but then so would digging large holes and filling them in again. Jobs that destroy wealth rather than creating it make us all poorer.
The government’s cheerleaders may argue that no price is too high to pay for “saving the planet”, but this week’s programme, if it is really implemented, will be ruinously expensive. After a year when the UK economy has shrunk by a tenth, we cannot afford more government repression, even cloaked in greenery. A smaller economy makes paying for the NHS, for example, much harder. Worse still, Britain’s self-harm makes almost no difference to global CO2 emissions, when China makes meaningless pledges of good behaviour while building two coal-fired power stations a week. How they must be laughing at us.
This is what a bear market looks like
The chart from commercial estate agents CBRE looks reassuring. Its Property Values Index has recovered splendidly from the depths of March and is almost unchanged on the year. Industrials have forged ahead, and even retail is only marginally down.
Does anyone seriously believe this can be right? The idea that a bog-standard office block is worth 99 per cent of what it was in January is laughable. City centres are struggling, shops everywhere are closing, and the upwards-only rent review is being destroyed under the hammer-blows of the Creditors Voluntary Arrangement. Nobody seriously expects that work and spending patterns in 2022 will look anything like those in 2019.
The pandemic has exposed the cosy relationship between property businesses and those paid to value the assets. It has been most acute in the £12bn of open-ended property funds, most of which were forced to close in March to prevent a rush of investors to the exit. The standard excuse was the difficulty of valuing things during the first Covid wave, although the real reason was that the prices offered would be just too horrible to contemplate.
Most funds have now re-opened, although the values often seem to owe more to estate agents’ relentless optimism than to real life. Units in Legal & General UK Property, one of the biggest, are only 3.2 per cent cheaper today than on 18 March, when the doors were closed.
Last week Land Securities, the UK’s biggest listed property company, reported a 9.5 per cent fall in net asset value, to £10.79 a share. The shares stand at a 35 per cent discount to that new valuation. There are significant differences between a fund and a share, but the most important is that share prices look forward, while fund prices look back.
Land’s shares started falling in mid-February, when Covid seemed like someone else’s problem far, far away. In today’s changed world, the share prices of commercial property companies are signalling the start of a long and disruptive bear market for offices, shopping malls and non-food shops, as rents fall and yields rise. Those with capital in property funds should take note.
The popularity of these funds is an enduring mystery, probably owing more to the commissions they generate for intermediaries than to any fondness for office blocks. For supposedly liquid investments, property funds could hardly be less well suited. If you really want to double down on property after buying your house, buy the shares, not the funds.
https://neilcollinsxxx.wordpress.com/2020/11/20/this-green-fantasy-will-bankrupt-us/
Business groups clash over EU’s 2030 climate goalEurope’s largest employer’s association, BusinessEurope, has questioned “the value and credibility” of the economic analysis underpinning the EU’s proposed climate target plan for 2030, triggering an immediate backlash from pro-climate corporate groups.
The European Commission was over-optimistic when analysing the costs and benefits of raising the EU’s 2030 climate goals, BusinessEurope argues in a document criticising the EU executive’s climate policy.
The document questions Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s assertion that tougher climate policies are the bloc’s new “growth strategy”, saying there are too many uncertainties in the Commission’s own impact assessment to make such a claim.
“Every core scenario” in the cost-benefit analysis accompanying the Commission’s 2030 climate target plan, “is conducted with pre-COVID-19 data and does not take (the pandemic’s) economic impacts into account,” the group argues.
“The sensitivity analysis is based on the assumption of a quick recovery, but what if the expected economic recovery takes longer than anticipated?” BusinessEurope asks. It points to the International Energy Agency’s latest world energy outlook, which explores the scenario of delayed recovery, finding that by 2030, the global economy is nearly 10% smaller than in a fast recovery scenario.
Moreover, models used in the analysis “have not been developed or discussed in any detail” and were not open for public scrutiny, BusinessEurope points out, saying this “weakens the value and credibility of the presented results for an informed decision making.”
“In our view, there needs to be a broader approach when implementing Europe’s recovery plan and to focus much more on how to turn the Green Deal into a real growth driver.”
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced plans on Wednesday (16 September) to target a 55% cut in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 as part of a broader European Green Deal programme aimed at reaching “climate neutrality” by mid-century.
BusinessEurope’s comments triggered immediate reactions from pro-climate corporations, which stepped forward in defence of the European Green Deal and denounced an attack on the EU’s climate policies.
In a statement, the CEO of Unilever, Alan Jope, said: “One of the most dangerous mindsets in the world is to set up a false dichotomy between sustainability and economic growth. The low carbon revolution will be a booming space for jobs. We strongly support the EU 2030 target – good for the environment, good for livelihoods, good for growth.”
The European Corporate Leaders Group, a pro-climate business lobby managed by the University of Cambridge, led the charge against BusinessEurope, saying: “There is a groundswell of opinion crossing business sectors and EU member states that identifies the Green Deal as Europe’s growth strategy and wants to see it implemented swiftly and effectively”.
“The evidence is clear that taking an ambitious approach to the climate transition and unlocking green investments can lead to better outcomes in terms of economic growth and jobs while managing the huge risks associated with climate change,” said Eliot Whittington, Europe director at CLG Europe.
The clash between rival corporate factions highlights divisions in the business community about the urgency to act on climate change.
Two years ago, a leaked internal memo from BusinessEurope revealed the association’s plans to “oppose” any increase in the EU’s climate ambition for 2030, by “using the usual arguments” that Europe cannot take action on its own. The European Corporate Leaders Group reacted by denouncing an “extreme lowest common denominator” that does not represent their views.
Leaked memo exposes business rift on climate change
BusinessEurope, the EU employer organisation, was urged to reconsider its stance on climate change after a leaked internal memo exposed what others in the business community have now rebuked as an “extreme lowest common denominator” that does not represent their view.
Yet, BusinessEurope is far more influential and representative. Through its member trade associations in 35 European countries, it represents 20 million companies. The European Corporate Leaders Group, by contrast, has only 16 full members.
Still, Lucie Mattera from climate think tank E3G said there was growing support from business groups for ambitious climate action, pointing to a letter from more than 170 European CEOs calling for a “clearly defined target to reduce domestic greenhouse gas emissions by at least 55% by 2030”.
“It seems that BusinessEurope is trying to poke holes in the impact assessment because they do not have a robust case against the inevitability of the overall direction of travel,” Mattera said, urging businesses to look at the big picture instead.
“The big picture is that Europe needs a strategy to transform its economy to deal with the existential threat of climate change, turn that transformation into an opportunity, and design the right set of tools and policies to make it socially fair. We can argue about digits after the comma, but is it what is at stake?”
“It would be more constructive if Business Europe engaged on what’s needed to shape and manage the green transition,” Mattera said.
Business leaders back EU’s draft 55% carbon target for 2030
More than 150 business leaders and investors have urged EU countries to set higher climate goals for 2030, backing a draft European Commission plan to aim for a 55% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by the end of the decade.
Ecopreneur.eu, the European Sustainable Business Federation representing 3000 companies (mostly SMEs) in the EU committed to sustainability, supports the Commission’s initiative to raise the EU’s emissions reduction target for 2030.
We therefore strongly disagree with this attack from BusinessEurope on the Commission’s target of 55% emission reduction in 2030. It does not at all reflect the opinion of sustainable frontrunners. Our members confirm that the importance of issues of climate and sustainability have only increased since Covid-19. And as Vice President Timmermans has repeatedly stated, the costs of inaction outweigh the costs of climate action by far. We hope that the Council will finally reach a decision on the target in December 2020.
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC) Saturdays only
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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1 December, 2020
The angry Belgian writes again
Morano offered a mild reply to the abuse levelled at him by Jean-Luc Mélice [jlmelice@hotmail.fr]. Morano wrote:
"Haha. You once called me fat but I lost a lot of weight. Now you call me bald and I can get hair transplant or do a comb over, so you're probably wrong about that too"
He got a rejoinder from Mélice as follows:
Too funny, Morano the Moron has a thin skin. The Moron reacts sooo quickly!!!
The origin of your name comes from Calabria in Italy...lots of mafiosi over there!!!
Morano in Spanish means north African nigger. I now understand your complex of inferiority, and your ugly face. Indeed, you are not of WASP origin.
So you are now a weight watcher...how ridiculous. And you need a hair transplant, exactly like Donnie the con, the orange agent who lost the election, and will be in an orange suit in prison soon. And you are still licking his ugly fat ass... disgusting!
Note that I was living in the USA during the Kennedy time. I remember very well the 3 dark days after he was shot by a fucking moron as yourself. At that time, I was in an american high school and the Americans were not anti-science as they are now.
Besides a South African nationality, I have also an US passport.
Please also that I have worked as a diplomat, besides being a super top scientist.
I would love to be in front of you during a Fox News interview. I would destroy you in a few seconds...
Remember, we are following you, and are very keen to smash your ugly mafiosi obese face with a baseball bat.
Just fokoff ... as we say in afrikaans...
He sounds very lonely and frustrated. A recent picture of him:
He looks rather African
His anger has even led him to use the the N-word. He rather hilariously descibes himself as a "super top scientist" above yet there is no rational debate or reference to any climate facts in his email above. I would think he was deranged except that his level of anger is common on the Left -- JR
Illinois Regulators Approve Dakota Access Pipeline Oil Capacity Expansion
Illinois Regulators Approve Dakota Access Pipeline Oil Capacity Expansion
The Illinois Commerce Commission (ICC), the agency charged with regulating utilities in the state, approved a proposal to double the capacity of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAP), from 570,000 bpd to 1.1 million barrels per day (bpd). ICC’s October 14 decision made it the last of the four states DAP passes through to approve the expansion.
Expansion to Begin
The ICC determined the equipment and pumping stations it approved were justified, because the additional oil DAP’s expanded capacity could deliver would benefit the public by securing a steady, relatively inexpensive, supply of oil.
Energy Transfer Partners, DAP’s operator, is in the middle of an ongoing legal battle over an approximately one mile-long stretch of the 1,127-mile pipeline beneath South Dakota’s Lake Oahe that could result in the pipeline’s closure. In addition, the industry faces low oil prices, resulting from a drop in demand for oil during the coronavirus pandemic. Despite these complications, Reuters reports Energy Transfer Partners said in an email it looks forward to beginning work on DAP’s capacity right away.
“We are pleased with the decision by the ICC … this now allows us to proceed with the optimization of the pipeline and allows our labor union partners to go to work,” Lisa Coleman, senior public relations and communications specialist with Energy Transfer Partners, said in an email.
Pipeline expansion will benefit consumers, said Chris Ventura, Midwest director of the Consumer Energy Alliance in a statement praising the decision.
“This vital project will bring an additional half a million barrels a day of domestic energy from North Dakota that will be used to fuel our farms, communities and lives in Illinois, and across the Midwest,” Ventura said. “It’s critical we continue to support and expand our nation’s pipeline infrastructure like DAPL to help family budgets and keep our economy moving – especially in this time of recovery from COVID-19.”
EU’s “Farm to Fork” initiative: A disaster in the making
The European Commission has introduced a “Farm to Fork” initiative for its member states to follow. Though the initiative sounds like something that might help the Europeans access healthy food and help farmers make profit, it is anything but that. A closer look at the tenets of the initiative indicate that it is potentially dangerous to the agricultural sector in Europe.
According the European commission, the initiative’s objective is to assure Europeans access to healthy, affordable and sustainable food, ensure a fair economic return in the supply chain, protect the environment, and preserve biodiversity.
Those are good objectives. But the strategies laid out in the Farm to Fork initiative act antithetical to its objectives. The following are the key strategies recommended to achieve the objectives of the initiative:
Develop Organic farming and help the EU’s organic farming sector to grow, with the goal of 25 % of total farmland being used for organic farming by 2030;
Reduce fertilizer use by at least 20%;
Reduce the use of chemical and more hazardous pesticides by 50%.
Here’s why these strategies antithetical to their praiseworthy objectives.
Organic Farming Means Destruction of More Trees and Loss of Biodiversity
Contrary to popular opinion, Organic farming is not necessarily an environment-friendly practice. When it comes to large scale agriculture where mass produce is needed for the billions of people on this world, Organic farming is not the future.
Growing organic plants for an average person’s organic diet requires 40% more land than that is required to grow plants and raise animals that are part of a conventional diet.
A study based on organic yield data collected from over 10,000 organic farmers representing nearly 800,000 hectares of organic farmland, organic yield averaged 67% of conventional yield. It found out that organic farms produce one-third less of wheat and soybean than conventional method and up to 62% lower Potato production.
That is not good news. Going organic would mean utilization of more land, eventually resulting in clearance of more habitat for agriculture and a possible loss of biodiversity.
Reducing Pesticide and Fertilizer Use will Usher in Farmer Loss and Food Poverty
Traditionally, the use of pesticides, including insecticides, fungicides, herbicides, rodenticides, and others helped famers to protect crops from pests. It significantly reduced the losses and improved the yield of common crops such as corn, maize, potatoes, cotton, and various types of vegetables. It also protected livestocks from diseases and ticks, and humans from vector borne diseases like malaria.
The drawback and the potential harm from pesticide and fertilizer use is only when there is an excessive use, as is the case in some of the developing countries where their use is unregulated and there is an absence of quality monitoring.
When used in an appropriate quantity both pesticides and fertilizers will assure farmers a guaranteed income and keep the demand-supply gap in check in the EU.
According to the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) of the United Nation—which is globally recognized as a forerunner in helping countries with their agricultural sector and food security—the use of Fertilizer is extremely critical in ensuring productivity from the crops. And where fertilizer use is not so prominent, there is a very stark difference in crop productivity.
The FAO says that the lack of Fertilizer use has been one of the foremost reasons why Africa is still behind in crop productivity: “FAO data reveal that the use of productivity enhancing agricultural inputs in Africa in general, and in some sub-regions such as Eastern Africa, in particular, tend to be lower compared to other regions of the world. This extremely low fertilizer use per hectare is one of the most important limiting factors to increase crop productivity and production. In this regard, recent figures show that farmers do not significantly vary fertilizer application rates according to perceived soil fertility.”
Even in regions of the world which have gone 100% organic, farmers are struggling to offset this yield ratio. One such place is the remote Indian state of Sikkim, where farmers have experienced heavy loss due to their transition to organic farming. “When chemicals were allowed, I could grow 280 to 300 kg of pulses and now, after 4 years, I barely manage to grow 80 to 85 kg”, a farmer notes, blaming the low productivity and pest attacks for his monumental loss in yield.
Research has also showed that organic farming results in the depletion of nutrients in the soil. The study showed that besides causing a decrease in crop yield and efficiency, organic farming also caused a decrease in organic matter-related soil quality. Contrary to public perception, organic farming is actually bad for the soil.
One of the other key objectives mentioned in the initiative is to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. However, using organic farming to do so is counterproductive. Climate alarmists argue that organic farming results in a 21% increase in emissions as compared to growing conventional farm products.
Even scientists who view organic products as superior varieties have reservations about the increasing use of organic farming. One such person is Alexander Ruane, a research physical scientist at NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who says, “the goal of organic farming in developed countries currently is about meeting the needs of those who can afford the luxury to buy the highest quality food. If the needs of this luxury interfere with the need to feed the entire population, then you have the potential for conflicts.”
It is simply impossible to produce organic crops at a mass scale for the population. Even if we do manage to produce, it won’t be possible without a widespread destruction of forests and a destabilizing impact on our agricultural sector, farmer revenues and affordability at markets.
The European Commission’s proposal to reduce pesticide and fertilizer use will usher in a new era of European farmer poverty and imperil the food security of its member countries. It does no good to the soil or to the environment. It is time for Europeans to request their respective governments to resist the Farm to Fork initiative.
https://www.cfact.org/2020/11/23/eus-farm-to-fork-initiative-a-farming-disaster-in-the-making/
Australia: Renewables-loving NSW energy minister takes an extraordinary swipe at mining 'barons' despite 80% of power during 40C heatwave coming from coalNew South Wales energy minister Matt Kean took a swipe at 'coal barons' on Sunday after passing new laws to tackle climate change - even though coal still provides most of the state's power.
Mr Kean boasted that his plan to encourage $32billion of private investment in renewable energy projects by 2030 was a slap in the face for 'vested interests.'
In a tweet on Sunday morning, he wrote: 'Those powerful vested interests - the big energy money, the coal barons, that have decided energy policy in this country for generations - now will have to face policy settings that favour the community not their own self interest.'
Suggesting that coal power has no future, the Liberal energy minster said coal magnates complaining about his plan were like 'Blockbuster complaining about Netflix'.
Just 24 hours earlier coal was providing 80 per cent of the state's electricity as residents fired up their air-conditioning units to tackle sweltering 40C temperatures, reported the Daily Telegraph.
Mr Kean's comments were met with criticism from opponents who say his new laws, supported by Labor and the Greens, may push up power prices.
NSW One Nation leader told Daily Mail Australia that far from being a blow to vested interests, the energy bill which passed on Friday was a huge win for the major players in the renewables sector.
'It certainly represents guaranteed income for renewable energy companies and their lobbyists, paid for by electricity consumers,' he said.
The state government wants wind, pumped hydro and solar projects to replace four coal-fired power stations which are due to shut over the next 15 years.
Mr Kean says the plan - which will create Renewable Energy Zones in Dubbo and the south west - will cut household bills by $130 and small business bills by $430 a year between 2023 and 2040.
The plan will support 12 gigawatts of renewable energy and two gigawatts of storage, such as pumped hydro, and reduce carbon emissions by 90 million tonnes to 2030.
Landholders are expected to pocket $1.5 billion in rent by 2042 for hosting new infrastructure.
More than 10,000 construction and ongoing jobs will be created by 2026, with an estimated 2800 ongoing jobs in 2030, the government says.
Coal-fired power made up 77 per cent of NSW's total electricity generation in 2019 - higher than the national average of 56 per cent - but four of the state's five plants will stop by 2035.
Renewables made up 19 per cent.
The Australian Energy Council warned the government's intervention may encourage too many energy assets to be built in places where they may not be needed.
'This would ultimately mean higher costs for households,' it said in statement.
Tony Wood, energy director at the Grattan Institute, said the plan takes risk away from investors and transfers them to consumers who would potentially foot larger bills.
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