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GREENIE WATCH MIRROR
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There is an "ascetic instinct" (or perhaps a "survivalist instinct") in many people that causes them to delight in going without material comforts. Monasteries and nunneries were once full of such people -- with the Byzantine stylites perhaps the most striking example. Many Greenies (other than Al Gore and his Hollywood pals) have that instinct too but in the absence of strong orthodox religious committments they have to convince themselves that the world NEEDS them to live in an ascetic way. So their personal emotional needs lead them to press on us all a delusional belief that the planet needs "saving".
This document is part of an archive of postings on Greenie Watch, a blog hosted by Blogspot who are in turn owned by Google. The index to the archive is available here or here. Indexes to my other blogs can be located here or here. Archives do accompany my original postings but, given the animus towards conservative writing on Google and other internet institutions, their permanence is uncertain. These alternative archives help ensure a more permanent record of what I have written. My Home Page. My Recipes. My alternative Wikipedia. My Blogroll. Email me (John Ray) here. NOTE: The short comments that I have in the side column of the primary site for this blog are now given at the foot of this document.
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30 August, 2019
Has a grid-scale battery been invented?
The intermittency of wind and solar power is its great weakness. Matching supply and demand is little more than luck. Only if "renewable" energy could be stored would it be much more than a curiosity. But devising a big enough storage battery has stumped everyone so far.
But there is a technology that could in theory do the job and some keen beans have been working on it for 13 years now. See the video below. And it has been ready for use "soon" for a while. They even have a demonstration plant running so could it all happen soon?
We will see I guess, but the technology looks like being tricky stuff. It uses liquid air and temperatures have to be close to zero degrees Kelvin for air to liquefy. But liquid nitrogen is already used widely for a variety of purposes so where's the problem?
The problem seems to be managing the temperatures used. The liquid seems to "go off" rather rapidly when you do things with it. So your stored air loses a lot of its usability after 24 hours. It is only a short-term battery. It steadily goes "flat" without recharging. So that is a large limitation. It's not a lot better than windmills and solar panels
So the Holy Grail of hi-tech energy storage has still to be reached.
But does it really matter? The LORD has given us something that will store all the energy you want for as long as you want it -- using no technology at all: a lump of coal.
30 August, 2019
The most dangerous thing about the Amazon fires is the apocalyptic rhetoric
Matt Ridley
Cristiano Ronaldo is a Portuguese expert on forests who also plays football, so when he shared a picture online of a recent forest fire in the Amazon, it went viral. Perhaps he was in a rush that day to get out of the laboratory to football training, because it later transpired that the photograph was actually taken in 2013, not this year, and in southern Brazil, nowhere near the Amazon.
But at least his picture was only six years old. Emmanuel Macron, another forest ecologist who moonlights as president of France, claimed that ‘the Amazon rainforest — the lungs which produce 20 per cent of our planet’s oxygen — is on fire!’ alongside a picture that was 20 years old. A third bioscientist, who goes under the name of Madonna and sings, capped both their achievements by sharing a 30-year-old picture.
Now imagine if some celebrity — Donald Trump, say, or Nigel Lawson — had shared a picture of a pristine tropical forest with the caption ‘Amazon rainforest’s doing fine!’ and it had turned out to be decades old or from the wrong area. The BBC’s ‘fact-checkers’ would have been all over it, seizing the opportunity to mock, censor and ostracise.
In fact, ‘Amazon rainforest’s doing fine’ is a lot closer to the truth than ‘Amazon rainforest — the lungs which produce 20 per cent of our planet’s oxygen — is on fire!’. The forest is not on fire. The vast majority of this year’s fires are on farmland or already cleared areas, and the claim that the Amazon forest produces 20 per cent of the oxygen in the air is either nonsensical or wrong depending on how you interpret it (in any case, lungs don’t produce oxygen). The Amazon, like every ecosystem, consumes about as much oxygen through respiration as it produces through photosynthesis so there is no net contribution; and even on a gross basis, the Amazon comprises less than 6 per cent of oxygen production, most of which happens in the ocean.
But it is the outdated nature of the pictures shared by celebs that is most revealing, because the number of fires in Brazil this year is more than last year, but about the same as in 2016 and less than in 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2010 and 2012. For most of those years, Brazil’s president was a socialist, not a right-wing populist, so in BBC-world those fires did not count. More significantly, the rate of deforestation in the Amazon basin is down by 70 per cent since 2004.
It is probably true that President Jair Bolsonaro’s rhetoric has encouraged those who want to resume logging and clearing forest and contributed to this year’s uptick in fires in the country. But was it really necessary to claim global catastrophe to make this point, and was it counterproductive? ‘Macron’s tweet had the same impact on Bolsonaro’s base as Hillary calling Trump’s base deplorable,’ says one Brazilian commentator.
I sometimes wonder if the line wrongly attributed to Mark Twain, ‘a lie is halfway round the world before the truth has got its boots on’, is now taken as an instruction by environmental pressure groups. They operate in a viciously competitive market for media attention and donations, and those who scream loudest do best, even if it later turns out they were telling fibs.
Around the world, wild fires are generally declining, according to Nasa. Deforestation, too, is happening less and less. The United Nations’ ‘state of the world’s forests’report concluded last year that ‘the net loss of forest area continues to slow, from 0.18 per cent [a year] in the 1990s to 0.08 per cent over the last five-year period’. A study in Nature last year by scientists from the University of Maryland concluded that even this is too pessimistic: ‘We show that — contrary to the prevailing view that forest area has declined globally — tree cover has increased by 2.24 million km2 (+7.1 per cent relative to the 1982 level).’
This net increase is driven by rapid reforestation in cool, rich countries outweighing slower net deforestation in warm, poor countries. But more and more nations are now reaching the sort of income levels at which they stop deforesting and start reforesting. Bangladesh, for example, has been increasing its forest cover for several years. Costa Rica has doubled its tree cover in 40 years. Brazil is poised to join the reforesters soon.
Possibly the biggest driver of this encouraging trend is the rising productivity of agriculture. The more yields increase, the less land we need to steal from nature to feed ourselves. Jesse Ausubel of Rockefeller University has calculated that the world needs only 35 per cent as much land to produce a given quantity of food as 50 years ago. That has spared wild land on a massive scale.
Likewise, getting people on to fossil fuels and away from burning wood for fuel spares trees. It is in the poorest countries, mainly in Africa, that men and women still gather firewood for cooking and bushmeat for food, instead of using electricity or gas and farmed meat.
The trouble with the apocalyptic rhetoric is that it can seem to justify drastic but dangerous solutions. The obsession with climate change has slowed the decline of deforestation. An estimated 700,000 hectares of forest has been felled in South-East Asia to grow palm oil to add to supposedly green ‘bio-diesel’ fuel in Europe, while the world is feeding 5 per cent of its grain crop to motor cars rather than people, which means 5 per cent of cultivated land that could be released for forest. Britain imports timber from wild forests in the Americas to burn for electricity at Drax in North Yorkshire, depriving beetles and woodpeckers of their lunch.
The temptation to moralise on social media is so strong among footballers, actors and politicians alike that it is actually doing harm. Get the economic incentives right and the world will save its forests. Preach and preen and prevaricate, and you’ll probably end up inadvertently depriving more toucans and tapirs of their rainforest habitat.
SOURCE
State or climate — an easy choice
Looking at remote sensing data from NASA’s satellites across the past two decades, the Earth has increased its green leaf area by a total of 5 per cent, roughly 5.5 million square kilometres — equivalent to the size of the entire Amazon rainforest.
Who knew?
Certainly not French President Emmanuel Macron. In an alarmist tweet featuring a photo of an Amazon fire said to have been taken 30 years ago, he told the G7 leaders conference: “Our house is burning. Literally. The Amazon rainforest — the lung which produces 20 per cent of our planet’s oxygen — is on fire.” Well, not really. Atmospheric scientists claim that even though plant photosynthesis is ultimately responsible for breathable oxygen, only a fraction of that plant growth actually adds to the store of oxygen in the air. Even if all organic matter on Earth were burned at once, less than 1 per cent of the world’s oxygen would be consumed.
No doubt the Amazon fires are worrying. However, an analysis of NASA satellite data indicates that total fire activity across the entire Amazon Basin this year seems relatively unexceptional. Indeed, NASA observed on August 21: “It is not unusual to see fires in Brazil at this time of year due to high temperatures and low humidity. Time will tell if this year is record-breaking or just within normal limits.”
Nevertheless, with the next UN Climate Summit due on September 23, it’s time to ring the alarm bells. Before each UN climate action conference the media rhetoric ramps up and new evidence of an existential threat is provided. A blazing Amazon rainforest is perfect propaganda material. But then, as British scientist Philip Stott observes: “In essence, the Earth has been given a 10-year survival warning regularly for the last 50 or so years.”
Still, CNN obediently turns NASA’s cautious observation into a catastrophe, declaring: “Amazon rainforest is burning at an unprecedented rate.” NBC News despairs: “Amazon wildfires could be game over for climate-change fight.” And, predictably, The New York Times fails to mention that while today’s fires are significantly worse than last year’s, they appear close to the average of the past 15 years.
For Macron, the Amazon fires give him ammunition to attack someone he dislikes, right-wing Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro. Bolsonaro’s unfiltered style has seen him dubbed the “Trump of the Tropics” and, like the US President, he attracts condemnation for his attitude, especially on climate change.
It’s true, since coming to office in January, Bolsonaro has moved Brazil further away from climate action and Brazil’s commitments under the Paris Agreement. Critics argue his government has weakened the institutional and legal framework that helps fight deforestation and lessened the participation of pro-environment groups. Indeed, before Bolsonaro coming to office, Amazon deforestation had declined almost 80 per cent in a little more than a decade. Now the Brazilian President is opening up previously protected areas to private ownership. He believes forests and forest protection are impediments to Brazil’s economic growth and that his critics are leading a “disinformation campaign built against our nation’s sovereignty”.
Indeed, Brazilian farmers believe they have a right to burn. They see fires as a natural part of life. Most fires are agricultural in nature; smallholders burning stubble after harvest or clearing forest for crop land. For this, Donald Trump is also blamed. Toby Gardner, director of non-government organisation Trase, reckons the huge growth in Brazil’s farms is because of Trump’s trade war that “sent China, the top buyer of US soybeans, shopping in South America”.
But while international condemnation is directed at Brazil, what largely goes unreported is that the worst fires are in Bolivia. But then Bolivian President Evo Morales is of the hard left and seeking a fourth term in office. Unlike Bolsonaro, Morales talks the global warming talk. In 2010 he hosted a summit to tackle “the threats of capitalism against life, climate change and the culture of life”. Having politically correct credentials gives him a free pass. He can approve oil exploration and fracking in indigenous territories. All 11 of the nation’s protected areas have been opened for oil and gas exploration. But still Morales is spared criticism.
Of course, Bolsonaro’s threat to withdraw from the Paris Agreement and his abandonment of Brazil’s offer to host a key Latin America and Caribbean climate week on the grounds “the event only serves as a platform for NGOs … which has nothing to do with climate change” did nothing for his global standing.
Nor with Macron, whose relationship with the Brazilian is now toxic. A proud Bolsonaro accuses Macron of having a “colonialist mentality”, while the Frenchman calls him a liar over a broken pledge to fight global warming. Macron says he will block efforts to seal a major trade deal with Brazil. Now the relationship has completely broken apart after a Brazilian supporter posted an insulting comment about Macron’s wife that Bolsonaro re-tweeted.
Such are the politics of climate change. Like the US, Brazil believes its national interest lies outside the Paris Agreement. It is not alone. Countries such as Bolivia, Poland and others, including Australia, find it increasingly difficult to balance domestic priorities with the economically crippling demands of their Paris commitments.
Something will have to give. Environmental awareness is one thing but outsourcing sovereignty is something else. Amazon fires have exposed what has long been suspected. Despite international agreements and peer group coercion, in the end nations will pursue their self-interest. With the passing of each survival deadline that decision becomes easier.
SOURCE
What My Friends on the Left Need to Know About the Green New Deal
“Nowhere has our public discourse failed us more egregiously than on the environment and climate change,” I wrote last year while reviewing the first sketches of a proposed Green New Deal. It’s since become a buzzword, but until now it remained only vaguely defined.
Now Senator and Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has significantly upped the ante. Sanders’ Green New Deal proposal is very specific, earmarking $16 trillion over 10 years to initiatives from “reaching 100 percent renewable energy for electricity and transportation by 2030” to reauthorizing the New Deal-era Civilian Conservation Corps to “coming together in a truly inclusive movement that prioritizes young people, workers, indigenous peoples, communities of color, and other historically marginalized groups.”
The opening to the Sanders campaign’s new page on the Green New Deal encapsulates the candidate’s view of the issue:
The climate crisis is not only the single greatest challenge facing our country; it is also our single greatest opportunity to build a more just and equitable future, but we must act immediately.
Sanders and I wouldn’t disagree that his plan represents a sea change in the way our government, society, and economy interact. The plan is gigantic. I want to fill page after page with factoids about how big it is, but just a few will suffice:
The proposal’s total cost is $16 trillion, over 20 times the cost of the New Deal (in today’s dollars, just under $700 billion).
If the proposal succeeded in creating 20 million jobs, it would raise the percentage of the workforce employed by the government to around a third, double what it is now.
Remember that goal of 100 percent renewables by 2030? We’re only at 15 percent now, meaning almost the entire U.S. energy system would be overhauled.
I rarely post my articles on my personal Facebook page. I’d say most of my friends are somewhere on the left, and I haven’t yet learned how to not get sucked into multi-day social media debates. This one goes out to them, because setting aside all the proxy wars fought about climate change, Bernie Sanders’ proposed Green New Deal is a really, really bad idea.
The Four Fallacies
I approach climate change from the presumption that it is real, that a significant portion is caused by humankind, and that it’s potentially a very big problem. I don’t doubt the intentions of Senator Sanders or especially supporters of his proposal. And I’m not funded by anyone with a net worth even a penny over $1 billion. I’m just an economist living in the woods.
So, in the harsh, occasionally scathing criticism that follows, I want everyone to remember it’s not because of any of the things above. But then how do I reach conclusions so different than Sanders? I think Sanders’ view of the problem is based on four major fallacies, incorrect assumptions so hardwired that he doesn’t even know he’s making them.
What are the four fallacies?
Climate change is a binary (0/1) variable.
Climate change is primarily the fault of a few people rather than a complex, emergent phenomenon.
Planning from the top down is a good way to solve climate change.
Planning from the top down is the only means to solve climate change.
A plan like Sanders’ Green New Deal will not successfully achieve the goals it lays out, and is likely to cause significant damage to the economy. I’m not so naive as to think this article will change minds, but if it gets a few people to stop and question their assumptions in the midst of a public debate with more bad blood than ever, I’ll take it.
Fallacy 1: Climate change is a binary (0/1) variable
In his proposal Sanders writes:
The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a report last year issued a dire warning to the world: we have no time left to come together as a global force and aggressively reduce our carbon pollution emissions. It also made a strong case for limiting warming at or below 1.5 degrees Celsius if we hope to continue to have a habitable planet.
The October 2018 report Sanders references is a massive document, but even a quick read of the boldface statements in the Summary for Policymakers is eye-opening. For example:
Climate-related risks for natural and human systems are higher for global warming of 1.5°C than at present, but lower than at 2°C (high confidence). These risks depend on the magnitude and rate of warming, geographic location, levels of development and vulnerability, and on the choices and implementation of adaptation and mitigation options (high confidence).
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change scientists frame climate change as a deeply complex issue nested in the way we live in which more efforts at mitigation now will reduce the incidence and risk of a host of adverse weather and environmental events.
Sanders mischaracterizes the scientists’ findings, framing the issue as a choice between massively overhauling society and doing nothing, with the latter posing a serious risk of human extinction (“habitable planet” leaves a bit more wiggle room than extinction, but I don’t know another way to read it).
This sword-of-Damocles view of climate change, common in today’s discussions, will not get us anywhere. In addition to not being true, it takes people who are open to taking significant action and forces them to choose sides. It helps fuel the denialist movement and has likely prevented many smaller actions, both government and individual, that would have left us in a better spot than where we find ourselves.
Fallacy 2: Climate change is the fault of a few people
Climate change is an emergent phenomenon, not one caused by a small group of people.
Sanders sees climate change as a problem primarily caused by a small group of people. Their motivation is greed and a Sanders presidency will be different because he will fight those people.
Or, as stated in Sanders’ Green New Deal proposal:
We cannot accomplish any of these goals without taking on the fossil fuel billionaires whose greed lies at the very heart of the climate crisis. These executives have spent hundreds of millions of dollars protecting their profits at the expense of our future, and they will do whatever it takes to squeeze every last penny out of the Earth.
Billionaires and corporate executives do bad things. Sometimes they have bad intentions. But climate change is an emergent phenomenon, primarily the product of billions if not trillions of decisions made every day by everyone in an increasingly complex global network. From Americans’ decisions about what kind of car to buy to urbanization in the developing world, causes of climate change are all around us and frequently not separable.
Sanders proposes a top-down solution to what he envisions as a top-down problem. His analogy to the Second World War speaks volumes:
The scope of the challenge ahead of us shares similarities with the crisis faced by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1940s. Battling a world war on two fronts — both in the East and the West — the United States came together, and within three short years restructured the entire economy in order to win the war and defeat fascism.
The challenge posed by climate change is nothing like winning a war, which is about focusing a nation’s efforts into one or a few points of conflict. Instead, one has to focus on thousands or millions of “fronts” in addressing climate change, and as I’ll argue below federal governments just aren’t good at that, especially in an increasingly networked and technological society.
A far more apt comparison for Sanders’ formulation of climate change is to the U.S. government’s War on Drugs. Drugs are another emergent phenomenon, embedded in poverty, mental health, and global politics. And large-scale government action has proven futile if not counterproductive.
Fallacy 3:We Can Control the Environment and Economy From The Top Down
Attempting to control a complex system from the top down is not effective and is likely to do considerable economic damage.
Why can’t we solve climate change from the top down?
I want to think about your self-awareness — the volume of information you’ve learned about yourself, what products you like, what you consider fulfilling, how you might perform or react in different situations. Now imagine going out and trying to find a job, or a good investment, without the use of that self-awareness or similar awareness of the person with whom you’re doing business.
Supporters of Sanders’ proposals might say they have no intention for this model to take over the economy but in one fell swoop are seizing control of 8 percent of GDP and about 16 percent of the U.S. workforce.
The analogy is not to suggest that Sanders is after socializing the entire labor market, but rather how easy good or decent outcomes collapse under the weight of information. You couldn’t possibly even write down most of your intuition about yourself to pass up the chain of command to an economic planner.
When economic decisions are centrally made, as they ultimately are in the Green New Deal, planners must throw out an incalculably large store of information. That’s why we’re usually better off letting people make their own decisions. It’s why we need markets and why socialist economies are known for odd and vexing shortages of goods.
Sanders’ proposal takes a considerable chunk of society’s resources out of people’s hands and leaves them at the White House door. When Sanders writes, “We will spend $1.52 trillion on renewable energy and $852 billion to build energy storage capacity,” how on earth does he know how to spend it?
That brings us to one more shortcoming of top-down responses to bottom-up problems. They rely on several smart people in a room whose intelligence may be formidable but is put to shame by the most creative force we know, evolution. We need thousands of small private firms, informed or incentivized by the price mechanism, to develop technology to both mitigate and address the impacts of climate change.
Fallacy 4: Nation-states are our only hope to address climate change
This may leave you saying, “Okay, Gulker, then what are we supposed to do?” I’m not going to pretend that’s an easy question, and I wish there were more people focused on it. A climate policy that relies more heavily on the evolution inherent in markets as a bottom-up force for change can’t really be presented as a “plan” like what we’ve gotten from Sanders.
To get there, though, we must free ourselves from the flawed idea that only nation-states are big, powerful, and well-informed enough to have a meaningful impact on global issues. Virtually everyone on any side of the climate issue makes this final mistake. Take the money and time spent lobbying, campaigning, and waiting for the government to catch up to one’s view on climate change. Invest in a prominent technology with a GoFundMe instead.
A plan like Sanders’ proposal may actually suck some of that creative energy out of the market by making massive, centrally planned investments in technologies picked by the best and brightest to win.
Sounds like a drop in the bucket, but think about if hundreds of millions of people did that. Nobody would oppose or care enough to stop someone’s volunteerism, and economic and cultural change would happen if more people were simply demanding firms they do business with follow certain rules.
More than any other takeaway, we do not face a choice between the Sanders’ proposal reshuffling our economic deck (I’ve argued for the worse), and certain doom. It might not give environmentalists everything they want, but think if we’d deployed this decentralized strategy 20 years ago, how much better a spot we’d be in.
Climate change is but one example of how our society and technology have evolved faster than our governance institutions. And that is something we ignore at our own peril.
SOURCE
Forests Make a Comeback
In the last week, there have been many reports about the fires in the Amazonian forests. Many of these reports led news shows or were on the front pages of leading newspapers. The Amazon forest, which produces about 20% of earth's oxygen and is the world’s largest rainforest, is often referred to as "the planet's lungs." The nickname strikes the imagination and it is frequently used in campaigns regarding the perils of deforestation. As such, the news reports about the fire strike a fear that one of the last great forests is disappearing.
That’s completely untrue. Forests are making a comeback! More precisely, the tree cover of the planet is increasing. To be sure, it is nowhere near what it was at the beginning of the 19th century when the world’s population was below 1 billion individuals (most of whom were abjectly poor). Indeed, many forests on the planet were destroyed and cleared as population grew in number and wealth. However, globally speaking, the tree cover has begun to recover. Since 1982, a recent peer-reviewed paper in Nature suggests, the planet’s tree cover increased by 2.24 million km2 (an increase of roughly 7%).
The transition also differs by region as some countries saw a recovery of forest much earlier. Many European countries saw the beginning of this recovery in the early decades of the twentieth century (and some began the transition much earlier). For the United States, there are some studies placing the beginning of the recovery in the 1930s but many states (especially in New England and the Middle Atlantic states) saw their forest recoveries begin as early as 1907. To be sure, some regions on Earth are experiencing falls in forest cover. This is the case for Brazil and many other Latin American countries (not all as Chile and Uruguay have already seen their forest recoveries begin). Nevertheless, the global picture is one of optimism.
And there is cause for being optimistic that the trend will continue.
Geographer Pierre Desrochers and economist Hiroko Shimizu noted that nine-tenths of all the deforestation caused by humans took place before 1950. The main reason for this was that forest-clearing was one of the easiest channels by which to increase the food supply while also providing energy.
However, as we are now vastly more productive in our agriculture, we require less land to feed the same population. The effects of productivity growth in agriculture are so strong that some agricultural scientists are speaking of “peak farmland” – the idea that we will need less and less land to feed a growing population.
Moreover, as transports and communication technologies have also improved, we have been able to concentrate production in the most productive areas of the planet in ways that explain a sizable share of total gains in productivity. As we grow more productive in farming, mankind can now leave some acres to return to nature to be reforested. With the prospect of new advances in bio-engineering, meat printing, sky-farms and other innovations, this is a force for reforestation that will only strengthen.
There have also been considerable improvements in the ability to transform wood into products. Consider simply the role of saws. A few decades ago, most saws were quite thick. This meant that large portions of trees became saw dust which could not be reused. Today, most saws are razor-thin. This minimizes the waste which, anyways, we now reuse as plywood.
While this may appear like a trivial example to use, but this was the margin to play on a few decades ago to improve productivity. Today, considerable resources are invested in the scientific management of forests and bioengineering better trees. This ability to derive more value from tree incentivizes reforestation.
These sources of reforestation are also the channels that improve the well-being of mankind: greater productivity makes us richer. This is why some researchers have noted that improvements in human well-being (using both narrow and broad measures such as GDP and the Human Development Index) and forest expansion seem to go hand in hand.
Other researchers have noted the same, in a more indirect fashion, when they pointed out that the institutions that generate improvements in living standards may also hasten forest recoveries. As living standards are globally on the rise, this only reinforces the case for optimism with the fate of forests.
To be sure, none of this suggests that the fires in the Amazonian ought to be ignored. However, it does suggest that one should not focus exclusively on those fires to infer anything about the state of forests worldwide.
SOURCE
Climate crisis canceled: Where did all the drought go?
A record low amount of drought occurred in the United States in 2017, but that didn’t stop climate alarmists from blaming 2018 California wildfires on global warming. Yes, even though California state officials determined Pacific Gas & Electric power lines were to blame. So if global warming was a major factor in the 2018 wildfires, is global warming due praise for the record lack of drought in 2017? And what is the state of drought in California and the United States today?
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reports good news for Americans and bad news for climate alarmists. As the late summer/early autumn drought season kicks in, the entire state of California is free of drought. A couple small areas of southern California are experiencing minor dry conditions that do not rise to the level of drought. The rest of the state is experiencing normal or wetter than normal conditions. Did global warming suddenly stop?
It’s not just California, by the way. NOAA also reports the United States just experienced its most abundant rainfall in any recorded 12-month period. And examining extreme drought versus merely regularly drought, this spring marked the smallest portion of the country experiencing drought in nearly two decades. So 2017 brought the smallest amount of drought ever recorded, and mid-2018 through mid-2019 brought the most abundant rainfall on record. But when faulty PG&E power lines sparked wildfires during the middle of this abundant rainfall, alarmists say global warming is causing drought which causes or exacerbates wildfires.
It is for reasons like this that alarmists lack credibility with the American people….
SOURCE
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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here.
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29 August, 2019
What would the Gloria Steinem Chair in Media, Culture and Feminist Studies at Rutgers University have to say about the Amazon fires?
Quite a lot, sort of. The person comfortably ensconced in that chair is Naomi Klein, negative Naomi for short. Bad happenings are meat and drink to her. Her headline reads: "The Amazon is on fire — indigenous rights can help put it out". A strange claim indeed. So we read on hoping to find what the mechanism for that might be. Despite her headline, however, she says almost nothing about the fires. It is all about Mr Bolsonaro and Western civilization generally -- plus a plea for more locking up of land occupied by indigenous people.
Why does native land matter? Only in her last paragraph do we get a clue. She says: "colonialism is setting the world on fire. Taking leadership from the people who have been resisting its violence for centuries, while protecting non-extractive ways of life, is our best hope of putting out the flames."
So "colonialism" has started the fires and fires don't burn native lands? So at the very end we get the actual proposition underlying her article: Fires don't burn native lands. That is simply not true. The fact, of course, is that fire does not ask permission for where it goes so native land is burning too. It always has. Much of the land that is NOT burning is that part taken over by the "colonialists" -- who have cleared the forest and planted crops. Reality is the reverse of Naomi's fairy-tale world.
I can't call Naomi a liar. Her claim is too patently absurd for that. As usual, her article is a spray of hate and nothing more.
Put simply, a great deal of the coal, oil, and gas that we must leave in the ground if we want a habitable climate lies under land to which indigenous people have an ancestral and legal claim. The willingness by governments around the globe to violate those international protected rights with impunity is a central reason why our planet is in a climate emergency.
This is not just about Bolsonaro. Recall that one of Trump’s first acts as president was to sign executive orders pushing through the Dakota Access and Keystone XL pipelines, two fossil fuel projects fiercely opposed by indigenous people in their path. And now there’s Trump’s new obsession with purchasing Greenland, an indigenous-controlled territory alluring to his administration mainly because melting ice linked to climate breakdown is freeing up trade routes and newly accessible stores of fossil fuels. From within his own colonial mindset, Trump feels it’s his right grab the island, much like everything else he feels entitled to grab.
The violation of indigenous rights, in other words, is central to the violation of our collective right to a liveable planet. The flip side of this is that a revolution in respect for indigenous rights and knowledge could be the key to ushering in a new age of ecological equilibrium. Not only would it mean that huge amounts of dangerous carbon would be kept in the ground, it would also vastly increase our chances of drawing down carbon from the atmosphere and storing it in well cared-for forests, wetlands, and other dense vegetation.
There is a growing body of scientific research showing that lands under indigenous control are far better protected (and therefore better at storing carbon) than those managed by settler governments and corporations. Of course, indigenous leaders have been telling us about this link between their rights and the planet’s health for centuries, including the late Secwepemc intellectual and organizer Arthur Manuel (particularly in his posthumously published book, “The Reconciliation Manifesto”). Now we are hearing this message directly from the people who make their home in our planet’s burning lungs. “We feel the climate changing and the world needs the forest,” Handerch Wakana Mura, an Amazonian tribal leader, told a reporter.
Earlier this year, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate change issued a Special Report on Climate Change and Land, which stressed the importance of strengthening indigenous and community land rights as a key climate change solution. A broad coalition of indigenous organizations greeted the findings with a statement that began, “Finally, the world’s top scientists recognize what we have always known . . . We have cared for our lands and forests — and the biodiversity they contain — for generations. With the right support we can continue to do so for generations to come.”
As the various candidates vying to lead the Democratic Party prepare for CNN’s climate crisis town hall on Sept. 4 — a first in any presidential electoral cycle — we are sure to hear about the need for a rebooted Civilian Conservation Corps to expand forested land and rehabilitate wetlands. It will be interesting to hear whether any of the candidates highlight the central role of indigenous rights in the success of that vast undertaking.
Because colonialism is setting the world on fire. Taking leadership from the people who have been resisting its violence for centuries, while protecting non-extractive ways of life, is our best hope of putting out the flames.
SOURCE
Climate Crazies Now Want You to Feel Guilty About Your Vacation
The scolds who buy into the notion that we're all killing dear old Mother Earth have a seemingly endless list of joys they want to remove from our lives, and have now set their sights on one of the greatest: your annual vacation.
The New York Times has an opinion piece this weekend titled "How Guilty Should You Feel About Your Vacation?" The article was written by a travel writer named Seth Kugel.
In a half-hearted attempt to seek absolution, Kugel immediately dons his journalistic hair shirt:
I’ve often wondered how it would feel to work in an industry blamed for its outsize impact on global warming — say, oil drilling or cattle ranching. But it recently struck me that the question is not hypothetical. I’m a travel writer.
Yes, I’ve long known that jet fuel emits a ghastly amount of greenhouse gases, but I pinned that on the fossil fuel and aviation industries. Now the flight shaming movement, which emerged recently in Sweden and spread into Europe, has attempted to shift blame onto travelers.
The "flight shaming movement" mentioned has been championed by that teenage brat who got a week's worth of publicity by refusing to meet with President Trump, even though no such meeting was ever discussed.
Those of us not members of the climate hysteria cult have long marveled at the disconnect exhibited by those who are as they wag their fingers at us from private jets and commercial airliners. It's nice to see that they are at least beginning to realize that they are full of it.
The problem, of course, is that they want everyone to feel bad about it. As I have written on many occasions, leftists are inherently miserable, and their mission is to make sure everyone joins in that misery.
I have been self-employed almost my entire adult life, so I barely know what a vacation is. I have, however, had the great fortune to fly all over the world doing stand-up, which wouldn't have been possible without those glorious, greenhouse gas-belching jet engines getting me there.
No guilt here.
I have seen the vision of the future that the climate crazies have for us, and it mostly involves abandoning almost every modern convenience you love.
In 2010, Americans for Prosperity (ZOMG, THE KOCH BROTHERS!!!) sent me -- via massive jet -- to the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Cancún, Mexico. I was there for five days mostly to tweet, mock, and hang out in the hotel bar on the beach.
We toured the conference's expo one day and saw many examples of a low carbon footprint "future," like doing your laundry by hand and using what is basically a low-water camping toilet as one's home bathroom.
On it went. To be a guilt-free, climate-conscious person in the 21st century, they were suggesting we start living like poor people from 1870.
Yeah...no.
Their sales pitch is weak, to say the least. If the only way I can save the planet is to be miserable, I'm not really being sold on the effort.
They love their misery over on the left, though, and probably can't fathom why others wouldn't want a slice of it. I'm going to let them keep wondering.
SOURCE
Electric vehicles have ‘higher carbon emissions’
When you count how their electricity is generated
Electric vehicles in Australia’s eastern states are responsible for more carbon dioxide emissions than regular petrol vehicles, according to an expert report that warns Labor’s green cars policy would require up to $7 billion in upgrades and installation of recharging infrastructure across the nation.
A pre-election briefing obtained by The Australian, which was prepared by engineering firm ABMARC, concedes the immediate benefit of electric vehicles in Australia “is not guaranteed”. It also states Bill Shorten’s electric vehicle target of 50 per cent of new car sales by 2030 would need between $5bn and $7bn in recharging infrastructure and additional investment in “switchboards, transformers and poles and wires”.
“Installing this level of charging infrastructure would require a significant increase in the rate of investment in recharging infrastructure,” the report says.
The report, released to stakeholders in May, also provides a breakdown comparing average CO2 emissions of hybrid, petrol, diesel and electric vehicles in Australia.
ABMARC, which is used by government departments, motoring firms and major energy companies, reveals “CO2 emissions from electric vehicles in Victoria are particularly high, similar to the average diesel CO2 emissions”.
On average, in NSW, Victoria, ACT and Queensland, petrol vehicles “provide less CO2 than electric vehicles”, with ABMARC linking the emissions disparity with “Australia’s continued reliance on coal-fired power stations”. The consultancy firm also notes that the Australian Average Diesel emissions data was “heavily skewed by light commercial vehicles (utes) and larger SUVs”.
The report says hybrid vehicles “provide greater environmental benefits in nearly all states and territories” than electric vehicles with the exception of Tasmania, which primarily uses hydro-electricity.
The ABMARC analysis also unravels the argument for Australia to replicate Norway’s electric car market, which imposes heavy taxes on passenger vehicles and provides generous incentives for EVs.
Pro-electric-vehicle groups and the Greens, who want 100 per cent of new car sales to be electric by 2030, use Norway, Denmark, Ireland and The Netherlands as models for supporting electric vehicle uptake.
As a result of Norway’s pro-EV policies, the ABMARC report shows the cost of a Hyundai i30 in the Scandinavian country is $54,204 compared with $18,498 in Australia.
In addition to reducing taxes on EVs, Norway provided incentives to boost electric car uptake, including free parking, excluding or limiting conventional vehicles from parking in some locations, reducing registration fees for EVs, exempting them from road tolls, free charging on public charging points and access to fast lanes.
In April, Mr Shorten unveiled a $100 million commitment towards the rollout of 200 fast-charging stations across the nation, a 50 per cent electric vehicle target for government vehicle purchases and new tax incentives for fleet buyers to purchase green cars instead of conventional combustion engine vehicles.
On May 7, in response to Coalition “scare campaigns”, Anthony Albanese declared “the whole world is moving towards electric vehicles”. “When we announced our policy you’d think that the world was going to end with nonsense like we’re coming for people’s utes and all this sort of rubbish,” Mr Albanese said.
ABMARC notes that a 50 per cent target by 2030 would be “extremely challenging and not possible without very significant policy changes and incentives”.
“Incentives similar to those in Norway are likely to be required and it is not clear how these could be readily achieved as Australia does not currently have Norway’s policy mechanisms at its disposal”.
Scott Morrison’s criticism of Labor’s electric vehicle policy — in tandem with the Coalition’s attacks on Labor’s big tax-and-spend agenda and climate change costings — was viewed by some inside the ALP as a weak point for the opposition in some electorates.
Along with Labor’s major policies put forward at the May 18 election, the electric vehicle target is now subject to an ALP review, due to be finalised by October.
Following Mr Shorten’s electric vehicle policy announcement, Tesla boss Elon Musk suggested EV sales could hit 50 per cent of new cars sooner than 2030. Musk cited the Norwegian experience, which through generous subsidies and benefits has increased its EV uptake.
“Norway has already proven it could be done last month. No question Australia could do this in far fewer than 11 years,” he tweeted. Electricity prices in Norway are among the lowest in first- world nations.
SOURCE
Yes, We Have No Bananas. We Have No Bananas Today!
By Rich Kozlovich
On August 19, 2019 Steve Savage published an article on entitled, Viewpoint: Our favorite Cavendish banana may be heading towards extinction—Scientists say only a biotech solution, blocked by anti-GMO activists, can save it. Originally this article appeared at Forbes entitled, It’s Time To Build A Better Banana. Both titles are profound and provocative, but I like my choice better, which was inspired by the author as he mentioned it in the article as the title of a song popular in the early 1920's.
As I read this very excellent article by Steve Savage it reminded me of a 2014 series I published regarding claims about GMO's. Bananas was part of that ten part series rebutting claims by Mike Adams, who publishes Natural News and styles himself as the Health Ranger. On July 27 2014 he published this piece of scare mongering junk science entitled, The Agricultural Holocaust explained: the 10 worst ways GMOs threaten humanity and our natural world.
That month I started posting my rebuttals to Adams ten complaints against Genetically Modified Organisms in a ten part series. I later condensed all ten and republished them in this one article, GMO’s: Scare Mongering at Its Worst! Today, I will be updating Part VII from that article dealing with his seventh false claim about “GMOs collapse biodiversity”.
He claims:
"In an effort to monopolize the global seed supply, GMO companies are buying up smaller seed companies and shutting them down, collapsing their seed supplies. The following chart shows some of the seed consolidation activity that's concentrating ownership over seeds into the hands of a very small number of powerful, unethical corporations:"
He provides a chart (Editor’s Note: The link provided no longer works so I removed it. RK) however, there was no citation, or link, as to the chart’s origin. I can’t confirm anything the chart shows, except there seem to be an awful lot of seed companies - and based on everything else he’s said in this article – I have to wonder if he doesn’t want anyone to know its origin.
He goes on to claim:
"This consolidation of seed companies has caused an alarming collapse in seed diversity over the last decade, placing humanity at increased risk for catastrophic crop failures due to a loss of genetic diversity."
"That's the problem with genetic conformity: it makes the crops far more susceptible to systemic diseases that can cause catastrophic crop failures. Precisely this scenario is happening right now with banana crops, as most commercial banana trees are genetically identical clones."
"That's the problem with genetic conformity: it makes the crops far more susceptible to systemic diseases that can cause catastrophic crop failures. Precisely this scenario is happening right now with banana crops, as most commercial banana trees are genetically identical clones."
"As a result, a fungus has attacked banana crops and is causing devastating destruction across the banana industry. The industry is responding by -- guess what? -- foolishly turning to genetically engineered bananas, which will suffer from the exact same weakness of genetic conformity, practically guaranteeing a future disease epidemic.”
Before I go on, let me state from the outset that the worst lies start with the truth. But once the truthful statements have been twisted with lies of omission and logical fallacies it’s perverted to generate erroneous conclusions. It’s a lot like snake oil salesmen and a fast hustle. It’s true that genetic diversity is important to continued health in seeds, but everything he says after that is seriously flawed.
Let’s start with this business of loss of genetic diversity he claims is being caused by “unethical” companies deliberately causing a “collapse” (what does that mean?) in the seed market. That’s a load of horsepucky! When I first read his claims I have to admit it took me by surprise because not once could I remember seeing any commentaries about a claim such as this, and there was nothing in my files, so I sent out a request for information to my net hoping someone out there could provide some information on this. People started responding back about what he portrays as a deliberate and nefarious effort to destroy biodiversity.
We have to understand that, just as in any industry, there are natural ebbs and flows. There is a constant ebb and flow regarding seed stock involving GMO’s, non-GMO’s, hybrids, self pollinators, and cross-pollinating plants. Just as there is in any business. Recently there’s a resurgence in non-GMO breeding efforts because it appears we’re in a growers market. This makes sense as ASTA (American Seed Trade Association) states on its web site:
“everything starts with the seed”.
One of my correspondents, who works for a large international trade association involved in Agriculture, stated the entire seed industry is very “robust….big and small companies alike”. All these so-called consolidations have actually strengthened the mid-sized and small companies because they’re more agile than the larger companies and can move more quickly into profitable situations.
As for these companies deliberately trying to “collapse” the seed market – I keep asking - what does that mean? Does he imply these companies are buying up smaller seed companies and destroying their seed stock? It seems to me that’s what he’s trying to convey – but he won’t dare say it because he knows it’s a lie. No company would deliberately destroy seed stock because these large science based companies know better than anyone how science is constantly moving forward and tomorrow they may suddenly discover a new tool to unlock some “genetic assets in a seed line”. “Self-interest alone would compel companies to preserve genetic resources.”
Is he trying to say these large companies are buying up all the small companies and hiding seed stock? Well, that’s loony. They’re buying seed stock to utilize it in some fashion, and they’re not ever going to eliminate the small and mid-size companies, and I doubt if they want to. It wouldn’t be worth the cost and it wouldn't prevent new companies from forming. GMO companies are not causing a loss in genetic diversity, they’re preserving genetic diversity and enhancing the genetic diversity that already exists.
About thirty years ago Waste Management Incorporated decided the pest control industry was a good fit for their corporation because they felt they had corporate expertise in the legislative and regulatory arena that was compatible with the pest control and lawn care industries. So, they went around the country and bought up a large number of quality regional pest control companies. Overnight they became the number three company in the nation.
A lot of prominent people in the pest control industry started covering themselves in sackcloth and ashes, wringing their hands, believing this was the end of the small pest control companies – the conglomerates were taking over – “it’s the end of the pest control industry as we know it!” A few old hands just chuckled, shook their heads and said, “that will never happen”; they were right, and the conglomerate “consolidation” scare ended.
Are bigger companies still buying smaller companies? Of course! That’s the nature of business! Are small companies still coming into existence? Of course! That’s the nature of business! Everything else is horsepucky!
There’s one more thing about his claim that large companies are deliberately “collapsing the seed market" that bothered me from the start. First of all, exactly what does “collapsing the seed market" mean?
He provides not one piece of evidence other than a chart without a source.
Not one link to a commentary explaining the information on the chart.
Not one commentary from anyone in the seed market, including any small companies warning us of these alleged abuses
Not one quote from an honest broker of information and
Not one news story!
Why?
He then asks us to take a leap of faith and believe that GMO’s are destroying the banana crops in the world. He now issues another really big lie of omission, claiming:
“This consolidation of seed companies has caused an alarming collapse in seed diversity. As a result, a fungus has attacked banana crops and is causing devastating destruction across the banana industry. The industry is responding by -- guess what? -- foolishly turning to genetically engineered bananas which will suffer from the exact same weakness of genetic conformity, practically guaranteeing a future disease epidemic.”
There’s a real problem with this Jeremiad he fails to include in his statement. The lack of bio-diversity is common in bananas because bananas are self pollinating. Bananas are not suffering from a lack of diversity due to GMO’s. There are wild species that are pollinated by bats, but those used in food production aren’t. I don’t know about anyone else, but somehow, I think that’s an important piece of information. Don’t you?
Currently the banana we’re most familiar with the a variety called the Cavendish, and it is under attack from something called the Black Sigatoka fungus, which is becoming resistant to fungicides. Did any kind of genetic engineering have anything to do with this. NO!
The variety that preceded the Cavendish was called the Gros Michal, also a self fertilizing banana. It became commercially “unviable” in the 1950’s due to the Panama Disease, which is caused by a fungus to which the Cavendish is immune. However, the Gros Michel isn’t extinct and can be used where the Panama disease isn’t found. But let’s understand this. The Gros Michel variety became commercially interesting in the 1820’s and it took about 130 years before this naturally occurring problem struck. All that happened long before GMO's.
Within the next 10 to 20 years it seems likely the Cavendish, which like almost all bananas lacks genetic diversity, will suffer attacks that can’t be thwarted with fungicides. This will have a serious impact on large commercial and small farm agriculture. However there are a very large number of varieties of bananas out there we’re not familiar with which could produce one or more replacements, although they would be substantially different that what we’re used to. But no matter what direction agriculture goes in this matter we must come to realize that this problem is a naturally occurring one that can’t be blamed on GMO’s.
In fact it seems rational that GMO’s will be the answer!
Scientists have made announcements about the complete sequencing of the banana genome, and by utilizing genes from wild species that reproduce via seeds they could potentially develop a non-seed variety that would be immune to fungi and even pathogens. Resistant genes from onions and dahlias were introduced into plantains –a member of the banana family used in cooking - which are demonstrating resistance to a greenhouse fungus.
Will they make it in the real world?
The only rational answer is yes - eventually!
Will this lead to high tasty high yield bananas at some point? The only rational answer must be a resounding YES, eventually!
But only if we abandon all this scare mongering about GMO’s. GMO’s will save commercial banana production and will end the need to make so many applications of fungicides, which is a very real financial burden for small farmers. That's why American Farmers Just Love Their GMOs and You Should Too.
The advances made by scientists in this arena over the last five years has been amazing, and we need to stop listening to these "all natural" misfit activists. "All natural" has become big business, and they're gong to do everything in their power to protect that business.
We really do need to get that!
SOURCE
Australia: Super giant to impose 100pc carbon reduction targets
This is just virtue signalling puffery that can achieve nothing. What will happen if the power stations fail to comply? Nothing. They could sell the power stations at a huge loss but what good would that do them?
Australia’s biggest energy network will face an unprecedented emissions reduction target as its owner — industry superannuation giant IFM Investors — launches an ambitious project to cut carbon across its vast asset holdings.
Emissions reductions targets of up to 100 per cent by 2030 will be slapped on a broad range of infrastructure assets across the nation, including the Ausgrid electricity network, Melbourne and Brisbane airports, and NSW ports.
The move risks stoking a conflict with the Morrison government, which has sought to clamp down on social and environmental activism by industry super funds.
The $140 billion IFM Investors, chaired by former ACTU head Greg Combet and co-owned by 27 of the biggest industry super funds, including AustralianSuper, Hostplus and Cbus, also controls or has large stakes in assets such as the Port of Brisbane, Southern Cross Station in Melbourne and Northern Territory Airports.
IFM Investors will announce today a move to strip 200,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide annually from the assets by 2030 — equal to removing almost 70,000 cars from the road.
According to its Paris Agreement target, Australia will reduce emissions to 26-28 per cent on 2005 levels by 2030.
Following the collapse of the Coalition’s national energy guarantee last year, IFM Investors will apply an emissions reduction target of between 8 and 25 per cent on infrastructure projects by 2024, and of 38 to 100 per cent by 2030.
Ausgrid, which was half-privatised by the NSW Liberal government for $16bn in 2016, is the largest energy network in the country, supplying more than 1.6 million homes and businesses across Sydney, the NSW central coast and the Hunter region.
It will now attempt to reduce its emissions by 8 per cent over the next five years, and by 17 per cent by 2030. To achieve this, IFM will invest in a range of solar energy projects, launch efficiency upgrades on its buildings, install thousands of energy-efficient lights and use low-emission vehicles. NT Airports, meanwhile, is hoping to achieve a 100 per cent emissions reduction by 2030.
The emissions reduction program comes after the government’s $10bn Clean Energy Finance Corporation, established by the Gillard government in 2012, invested $150 million last year into IFM to help lower emissions across the country’s largest infrastructure assets.
IFM head of Australian infrastructure Michael Hanna said it made “perfect business sense” to cut emissions by “reducing costs, mitigating future business risks and contributing to outcomes that our customers value”.
“This exciting initiative represents a genuine commitment and start to aligning our assets to the Paris Agreement,” Mr Hanna said.
Clean Energy Finance Corporation boss Ian Learmonth said the reductions had “the potential to make a material impact” on Australia’s carbon footprint. “This … sets an important example for other major infrastructure owners and managers,” he said.
Deep divisions between union-backed funds and big business surfaced this year when Josh Frydenberg asked the prudential regulator whether it had the power to ensure union-appointed super trustees did not pursue political objectives at the expense of members’ interests.
The Treasurer’s intervention came after the ACTU backed a Maritime Union of Australia campaign for industry funds to pressure BHP and BlueScope Steel into reversing a decision to forgo the renewal of a legacy contract for two Australian-crewed vessels — the last servicing the iron-ore industry.
AustralianSuper, the nation’s largest fund — where ACTU president Michele O’Neil is an alternate board director — also joined a throng of major institutional investors to pressure global commodity group Glencore to cap its coal production.
Industry funds have an equal-representation board model, meaning they appoint directors from unions and employer groups. Together, they have $677bn of assets under management — more financial power than the bank-run retail fund sector ($623bn), or public sector funds ($475bn).
Last week, the US Business Roundtable overturned 57 years of corporate orthodoxy holding that the only purpose of a corporation was to generate profit for shareholders by publishing a new “statement on the purpose of a corporation”. The statement sought to elevate the concerns of customers, employees and communities. It was signed by 181 chief executives, including Lachlan Murdoch, the chairman and chief executive of Fox Corporation and co-chairman of News Corp, ultimate publisher of The Australian.
Ausgrid, which owns the NSW energy distribution network, triggers the majority of its emissions through electrical line losses by transmitting power over long distances. While these particular costs would be too “prohibitive” to clamp down on, IFM said it would tackle inefficient street lights, which account for 11 per cent of emissions, and convert more than 250,000 to energy-efficient bulbs.
The company will also install more than 11,500 rooftop solar panels across its work sites. Excluding the emissions for line losses, the program will cut Ausgrid’s emissions by 44 per cent by the end of 2024.
IFM and AustralianSuper jointly own 50.4 per cent of Ausgrid for a 99-year lease. IFM owns 25 per cent of Australia Pacific Airports Corporation, which owns Melbourne Airport under a 50-year lease.
It also owns 20 per cent of Brisbane Airport Corporation, which controls the airport under a 49-year lease. IFM owns 45 per cent of NSW Ports, which manages Port Botany and Port Kembla, the Enfield Intermodal Logistics Centre and Cooks River Intermodal Terminal.
SOURCE
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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here.
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28 August, 2019
Why shouldn’t Brazilians burn down trees?
The talk about Amazon oxygen is wrong. A mature forest consumes most of the oxygen it creates when tree and plant litter decay. Oxidization is part of the decay
The Western hysteria over the rainforest fires is riddled with colonial arrogance.
Every now and then the environmentalist mask slips. And we get a glimpse of the elitist and authoritarian movement that lurks beneath the hippyish green facade. The hysteria over the rainforest fires in Brazil is one of those moments. As well-off, privileged Westerners rage against Brazil for having the temerity to use its resources as it sees fit, and as they even flirt with the idea of sending outside forces to take charge of the Amazon, we can see the borderline imperialist mindset that motors so much green thinking. In the space of a few days, greens have gone from saying ‘We care about the planet!’ to ‘How dare these spics defy our diktats?’. And it is a truly clarifying moment.
You don’t have to be a fan of Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, and spiked certainly isn’t, to feel deeply uncomfortable with the Western outrage over his policy on the rainforest. Observers claim the Amazon is experiencing its highest number of fires since records began. That those records only began in 2013 should give the Western hysterics pause for thought – this isn’t the historically unprecedented End of Days event they claim it is. There are always fires in the Amazon, some started by nature, others by human beings logging or clearing land for farming. Some of the current fires were started by people who need wood or land – how dare they! – while others are just part of the natural cycle.
More tellingly, NASA has attempted to counter the hysteria. Its data suggests that, while the number of fires might be larger than in the past few years, ‘overall fire activity’ in the Amazon is ‘slightly below average this year’. How striking that the people who wave around NASA reports when making their case that mankind has had a terrible impact on the planet are ignoring NASA’s reports that there is less fire in the Amazon this year in comparison with the past 15 years.
The Brazil-bashers will not be convinced by reason. To them, the fact that there have been 74,000 fires in the Amazon between January and August is proof that human beings – well, stupid Brazilians – are plunging the planet into a fiery doom that will make Revelations look like a fairy story in comparison. The earth is ‘being killed’, greens wail. ‘Our house is burning. Literally’, says French president Emmanuel Macron, committing the grammar crime of saying ‘literally’ when he surely means ‘virtually’. Unless the Elysée Palace really is on fire?
Leonardo DiCaprio says ‘if the Amazon goes, we the humans will go’. So Brazil is killing us all. Bolsonaro, by giving a green light to development in the rainforest, is holding a gun to mankind’s head, apparently. No wonder Macron has suggested holding an international conference on how to save the rainforest, while some greens have said we need to intervene. Westerners going overseas to rescue natural resources from the ignorant natives? Yes, that went so well in the past.
The discussion about the rainforest is not only unhinged, using Biblical language to describe fairly routine events. It is also riddled with a colonialist view in which people in the developing world are presented as irresponsible and destructive, while Westerners, like the leader of France, are held up as the saviours of nature and mankind. This expresses one of the key ideas in the environmentalist movement – that the developing world cannot possibly industrialise and modernise as much as the West has, because if it does the planet will die. Hence eco-Westerners’ fury with ‘filthy’ China, their loathing of Modi’s promises of modernity in India, and now their rage against Bolsonaro for elevating economic development over natural conservation. They cannot believe these idiot foreigners are defying green ideology and seeking the kind of progress we Westerners already enjoy.
Indeed, the current fuming over Bolsonaro and the rainforest fires has been a long time coming. When he spoke at Davos in January, one headline summed up the response: ‘Bolsonaro alarms climate activists with pro-business speech.’ Environmentalists were horrified, the Guardian reported, that Bolsonaro ‘stressed that protecting his country’s unique ecosystem has to be consistent with growing the economy’. That is, Bolsonaro had the gall to suggest that the eco-sanctification of the entire rainforest ran counter to Brazil’s own need to develop – via agriculture, logging, urban expansion, and so on – and therefore a better balance would have to be struck between protecting ecosystems and achieving economic growth.
During the presidential campaign last year, Bolsonaro often argued that Brazil’s economic development was being stymied by ‘the world’s affection for the Amazon’. He said that companies interested in clearing parts of the rainforest would be allowed to do so. That he won the presidency suggests many Brazilians share his view that the Amazon has been sanctified at the expense of Brazilian growth and Brazilian sovereignty. And on this they are right, and the rich Western greens telling them to stop being so dumb and irrational are wrong.
For years, green-leaning NGOs have been swarming Latin America and using their clout to demonise and even try to reverse economic development. And Latin Americans rightly experience this as an assault on their sovereignty and aspirations. As early as 1972, UNESCO and WWF were writing to the Brazilian president, Emílio Garrastazu Médici, and warning him to halt economic activities in the rainforest. In the 1980s, there was an intensification of efforts by NGOs and outside forces to keep the rainforest as sacred ground that Brazilians shouldn’t interfere with. French president Francois Mitterrand even suggested Brazil should accept relative sovereignty, where a significant part of its territory – the rainforest areas – would be subject to international oversight. As one account describes it, many in Brazil came to see NGOs and others as ‘collaborating with foreign powers against Brazilian economic interests’. And it wasn’t only Brazil. Ecuador and Peru have both expelled foreign-funded NGOs over their agitation against development in forest areas and other natural areas.
Brazil is either a sovereign nation or it isn’t. If it is a sovereign nation, then it has every right to pursue economic growth as it sees fit. The rainforest belongs to Brazilians. A Brazilian approach that boosts economic development while keeping a close eye on the natural environment sounds like a good one. But it horrifies Western greens who are allergic to any kind of meaningful economic development. Under the guise of environmentalism they are pursuing the ugly old colonial goal of subjugating non-Western nations to their rules and diktats. And that’s far more horrifying than a few fires in the Amazon.
SOURCE
BBC climate lies now invading music programs
When buying tickets for a classical music concert based on the lost words of nature, parents may have expected a simple, poetic celebration of bluebells, conkers and otters.
Families who attended the BBC Proms this weekend were instead confronted with catastrophic warnings from climate change campaigners.
BBC Proms, a celebration of classical music intended to be non-political, opened its 49th Prom of the season with a new composition based on the words of Greta Thunberg warning: “We are in the midst of the sixth mass extinction.”
Intended as a “unique event for all the family” and including painting, poetry, dancing and birdsong, the concert was based on illustrated book The Lost Words, which aims to revive little-used or disappearing words that describe the natural world.
A spokesman for the BBC said the Proms team believed music should "amplify discussion", saying it should “react to the times in which we live”, so that it is “not divorced from reality”.
Ivan Hewett, Telegraph reviewer, said the concert was instead a “statement of the most extreme form of eco-catastrophism, designed to terrify and intimidate the mostly young audience, who clearly lacked the maturity to challenge it”.
“It’s unfortunate that the supposedly impartial BBC turned a promising event into an opportunity for eco-propaganda,” he said, in a two-star review, accusing the BBC of the “blatant politicising of an event aimed at children”.
The concert opened with the voice of Miss Thunberg, who has become the face of youth climate change activism, on a loop with excerpts from her speech to the EU Parliament in Strasbourg declaring: “You need to listen to us, we who cannot vote. What we are doing now can soon no longer be undone.”
Robert Macfarlane, author of The Lost Words, said he was “so thrilled” when he heard Miss Thunberg’s words would be used in the Prom, praising her “voice ringing with force and need and urgency but also breaking” and calling her a “figurehead” for the young.
The concert was said to have received a rapturous response from some members of the audience, a handful of whom tweeted to say they had been moved to tears.
A spokesman for the BBC said this year’s Proms were celebrating 50 years of the moon landings, the earth and the influence nature has had on composers past and present.
“It’s important for art to reflect topical debate and to bring this so the attention of the audience,” it said.
“The three major new works focussing on our planet this year (Hans Zimmer’s world premiere ‘Earth’ at the CBeebies Prom, the Lost Words Prom and John Luther Adam’s ‘In the Name of the Earth’) are specifically aimed at families.
“It’s important to reflect that music reacts to the times in which we live, and is not divorced from reality, but can amplify discussion.”
In July, the Guardian described how this year's Proms is "sounding the alarm for a planet in peril”, interviewing director David Pickard about what it called “this year’s theme, nature, and our part in destroying it”.
Pickard said: “When you ask someone to write about nature now, they are not necessarily writing about it in a romantic way, in the way Beethoven did. They’re writing about the danger of loss."
Jocelyn Pook, the composer of the piece which set Thunberg’s words to music, told the newspaper: “Her voice, a lone teenager, making such a difference is very heartening."
The Proms have faced increasing criticism about becoming politicised in recent years, with an ongoing battle between those waving EU flags and Union flags on the Last Night.
Conductors have used their platform to speak on issues including women’s rights, music education and European unity, with Daniel Barenboim using a 2017 appearance to warn about the dangers of nationalism after the Brexit vote.
SOURCE
‘Green’ Cities: Higher Costs, Lower Electricity Reliability
A number of Texas cities have jumped on the bandwagon of renewable energy initiatives in recent years leading to higher costs and reduced the reliability for their residents.
Among the many places jumping on the bandwagon of renewable energy initiatives in recent years are the Texas cities of Austin, Georgetown, and now San Antonio, each of which maintains a monopolistic, municipally owned electricity provider from which residents are forced to purchase electricity.
All these cities have pursued highly publicized “green” initiatives to increase the amount of renewable energy they provide to their captive electric power customers.
These initiatives have led to higher costs for consumers and poor investment decisions on the cities’ part, costing residents millions of dollars and reducing the reliability of the electric grid.
Behind these initiatives are government subsidies, such as the federal Production Tax Credit (PTC), that have allowed renewable energy producers to charge an extremely low price for their energy—sometimes even selling power at a loss.
Although this may seem like a good deal for energy consumers, these residents are also paying huge amounts in taxes to fund the incentives. Cost estimates of taxpayer subsidies for renewables in Texas show the cost to be as high as $36 billion from 2006 through 2029, when the PTC is currently scheduled to expire.
Green Energy Burns Budgets
Residents are also footing the bill in other ways for poor investment decisions made by cities in efforts to “go green.”
The city of Georgetown, home to a mere 71,000 residents, went $32.7 million over budget for renewable energy production from 2016 through 2018, and in 2018 Georgetown spent a whopping $53.6 million on electricity—22 percent above the $44 million the city budgeted for.
Not to be outdone by its neighbor, Austin built a biomass production plant to provide renewable energy to the city. And it did—for two whole months, before the city closed it down. This green experiment cost Austin residents $838 million, including a $460 million buyout of the 20-year contract originally worth $2.3 billion.
Renewable-Induced Energy Shortages
In addition to this costly malinvestment of tax dollars, Texas residents also face heightened threats of energy shortages as the use of renewables increases.
This is because of another fundamental problem with renewables: Wind and solar generation are inherently intermittent. The wind does not always blow, and the sun does not always shine. Also, the energy from renewable sources cannot be effectively stored for use at times of peak demand. Therefore, much of the energy generated—when these plants are actually generating power—is wasted, and unavailable when it is needed most.
In addition, renewable generation plants are typically located in less-populated areas away from the greatest demand, so the electricity must be transmitted over vast distances to reach the market. Power is lost in transmission, meaning additional power must be delivered from other sources to meet demand.
Texans have also borne $14 billion in costs for the transmission lines running from unpopulated west Texas, which doesn’t need the additional electricity, to populated cities like Austin and Dallas, which do, for these renewable power schemes.
Distorting the System
Finally, the extremely low prices for renewable energy, as a direct result of subsidies, are resulting in significantly less investment in reliable and affordable generation powered by natural gas and coal, placing a huge strain on the grid.
Coal and natural gas are more efficient and reliable than their renewable counterparts. However, during periods of high wind and sunlight unhampered by clouds, electricity prices can become so low that coal and natural gas plants must sell power at a loss. As money-losing plants are closed, the reserve margin shrinks, which threatens the entire grid because providers don’t have enough “spare” generating capacity to satisfy peak demand when renewables fail to deliver. The difference between the supply and demand of electricity may be as low as 7.4 percent this summer, a record low threatening to result in intermittent power shortages across the state at the peak periods.
The Texas Legislature can and should ameliorate these problems by eliminating the preferential treatment Texas affords renewables. In addition to doing this at the state level through the Public Utility Commission, it can also take away the power of cities to impose costly, inefficient initiatives simply to support the latest environmental fads.
These steps would allow the market to provide more affordable and reliable energy for all Texans, and they would work in other states as well.
SOURCE
More fake five-alarm crises from the IPCC
“Mainstream” news outlets dutifully feature climate cataclysm claims that have no basis in reality
Paul Driessen
Efforts to stampede the USA and world into forsaking fossil fuels and modern farming continue apace.
UN and other scientists recently sent out news releases claiming July 2019 was the “hottest month ever recorded on Earth” – nearly about 1.2 degrees C (2.2 degrees F) “above pre-industrial levels.” That era happens to coincide with the world’s emergence from the 500-year Little Ice Age. And “ever recorded” simply means measured; it does not include multiple earlier eras when Earth was much warmer than now.
Indeed, it is simply baseless to suppose that another few tenths of a degree (to 1.5 C above post-Little Ice Age levels) would somehow bring catastrophe to people, wildlife, agriculture and planet. It is equally ridiculous to assume all recent warming has been human-caused, with none of it natural or cyclical.
Moreover, as University of Alabama-Huntsville climate scientist Dr. Roy Spencer has noted, this past July was most likely not the warmest. The claim, he notes, is based on “a limited and error-prone array of thermometers which were never intended to measure global temperature trends.”
The measurements come primarily from airports and urban areas that are artificially warmed by cars, jets, asphalt, air conditioning exhausts and other human heat sources that warm the measuring sites as much as ten degrees F above temperatures in rural areas just 10 to 25 miles away. They do not reflect satellite data or “global reanalysis estimates” that would give a much more accurate picture.
The “hottest month” assertions also ignore major changes in measurement technologies, especially for ocean data, over the past 100-150 years. Perhaps most important, they ignore the paucity or absence of data for millions of square miles of oceanic, Siberian, Arctic and other regions, many of which have much cooler temperatures that would drive “average planetary temperature” figures downward. (And let’s not forget the record cold temperatures recorded for February 2019 in many parts of the world.)
The news media, however, dutifully repeated the spurious hottest-ever assertion as fact – and made no effort to seek out or quote skeptical experts like Spencer. Far worse, most of the experts who developed and propagated the “overheated planet” claims know all of this. But they have a narrative, an agenda, and are not going to let inconvenient facts get in the way. The “mainstream media” behaves similarly.
Then, a few days later, the same doom-saying “experts” issued dire warnings that global agriculture is on the brink of disaster. A “landmark report” by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said our dangerously warming planet is continuing to damage lands and forests, imperiling mankind’s ability to produce food. Climate change has become a growing danger to global food supplies, it intoned.
Prolonged rains well into the 2019 Midwestern US spring season certainly delayed planting and could affect 2019 corn and other harvests. However, bumper crops elsewhere in the world cast serious doubt on this latest round of IPCC and media fear-mongering.
India’s rabi (winter) wheat crop weighed in at an official record of 101.2 million tons. Near-record corn (maize) exports and sunflower seed harvests were forecast for Ukraine. In Argentina, wheat farmers expect a record harvest. In Crimea too. The Canadian National Railway logged all-time grain movement records. The USDA’s October 2018 Crop Report showed record northern USA canola production.
Better hybrid seeds, biotech seeds, and modern fertilizers, pesticides, tractors and farming practices all played a role, as did weather that cooperated with farmers, if not with climate alarmists. However, another major factor is more carbon dioxide (CO2) in Earth’s atmosphere – which helps crop, forest and grassland plants grow faster and better, and also withstand droughts better. In fact, Dr. Craig Idso has estimated, rising CO2 levels generated some $3.2 trillion in cumulative extra global crop yields between 1961 and 2011, and another $9.8 trillion in predicted CO2-enhanced global crop harvests by 2050.
And now, in a bout of schizophrenia, the IPCC has further muddled its climate chaos message. Now it claims modern agriculture is not just a “victim of climate change.” It also causes climate chaos and must thus be part of “the solution.” Agriculture is responsible for over a quarter of total global greenhouse gas emissions (carbon dioxide and methane), and therefore must change its practices “to save the world.”
Plant-fertilizing carbon dioxide is 0.04% of the atmosphere, and methane represents 0.00017% – of which one-third is from natural sources (termites, swamps and bogs) and two-thirds from human activities: 39% of that from fossil fuels, 16% from landfills, 9% from waste management and 27% from farms.
In other words, agricultural methane could possibly be 27% of two-thirds of 0.00017% of atmospheric methane (CH4) – and that barely detectable 0.00003% (30¢ out of $1-million) of the atmosphere is supposedly driving dangerous manmade climate change. And based on that, we must change our farming and eating habits.
Instead of beef, humans must switch to “nutritious and environmentally sound” alternatives like green pepper, soy, asparagus and squash, says the IPCC. Instead of the full package of beef, pork and poultry, we should eat buckwheat, soy, pears and kidney beans – or other “globally optimal plant replacements.” Of course, locusts, grasshoppers, grubs and other insects are also excellent protein sources, it notes.
The 20,000-some activists, bureaucrats and politicians heading to Salt Lake City for the August 26-28 UN climate change and sustainability conference will no doubt be following that sage advice. (Perhaps they’ll share their menu and Bugs Not Beef recipes.) They could also have had a global teleconference, instead of flying and driving halfway around the world – instead of spending millions of dollars, consuming millions of gallons of aviation and vehicle fuel, and emitting prodigious quantities of CO2 and CH4.
But they’re much more comfortable lecturing the hoi polloi of humanity on how we must travel, eat, and heat and cool our homes (no cooler than a comfortable 82 F in summer, say EPA-Energy Star experts) in more sustainable and climate friendly ways. UN elites much prefer to tell the poorest people on the planet how much they will be “permitted” to develop and improve their living standards.
Dangerous manmade climate change “deniers” like me were of course not invited to participate in this taxpayer-financed UN event. We never are. So the Heartland Institute organized a separate August 26 program nearby, at which alternative evidence and perspectives will be presented and live-streamed.
Heartland speakers will explain why climate change is some 97% natural, not manmade (contrary to that phony 97% consensus that says otherwise); and why real-world evidence does not support IPCC claims about dangerously rising seas, increasingly violent storms or worsening droughts. My talk will focus on why biofuel, wind, solar and battery technologies are not clean, green, renewable or sustainable.
I will point out for example that replacing 100% of US gasoline with ethanol would require some 360 million acres of corn – seven times the land area of Utah. Replacing the more than 25 billion megawatt-hours of electricity the world consumed in 2018 would require some 100 million 400-foot-tall 1.8-MW bird and bat-butchering wind turbines that would actually generate electricity only about 20% of the time.
Assuming just 15 acres apiece, those monster turbines would require some 1.5 billion acres – nearly 80% of the entire Lower 48 United States! And those wind turbines would need some 200 times more raw materials per megawatt than combined-cycle gas turbine power plants. Building and installing them would require massive increases in mining and quarrying all across the globe.
The UN and IPCC delegations and Green New Dealers absolutely do not want to talk about any of this – much less about slave and child labor for cobalt, rare earth and other metals that are the foundation for their make-believe “renewable, sustainable, no-fossil-fuel” future. No wonder they don’t invite us.
These are vitally important issues. They demand robust, evidence-based debates – with all interested and affected parties participating – including the world’s poor and manmade climate chaos skeptics.
Via email
“Planting Trees” Disrupts the Carbon Tax Narrative
It's possible to plant enough trees to get atmospheric CO2 levels down
A recent article in The Guardian trumpeted the findings of a new study published in Science that found massive tree planting would be—by far—the cheapest and most effective approach to mitigating climate change. Ironically, the new thinking shows the pitfalls of political approaches to combating so-called “negative externalities.” The good news about tree planting disrupts the familiar narrative about carbon taxes that even professional economists have been feeding the public for years. The whole episode is an example of what Ronald Coase warned about, in his classic 1960 article showing the danger in the traditional approach of using taxes to fix alleged market failures.
Ronald Coase vs. A. C. Pigou on “Externalities”
Coase’s “The Problem of Social Cost” is one of the most frequently cited economics articles of all time, but it can be difficult for a newcomer to absorb its lessons. In this revolutionary piece, Coase challenged the standard approach to externalities that had been developed by economist A. C. Pigou.
According to Pigou, the market economy works fine in allocating resources efficiently under most circumstances. However, when third parties experience benefits or harms because of particular market transactions, the Invisible Hand fails. For example, if a factory dumps waste into a river as a by-product of making TVs, then the factory owner is making “too many” TVs because the owner isn’t taking into account the harm his business is imposing on the people living downstream. The profit-and-loss system presumes that consumers and firms are receiving feedback from the impact of their actions, and so (Pigou argued) a case of pollution leads to inefficiency.
Pigou suggested that in a case like this, the government should impose a tax on the TV factory, corresponding to the harm that additional output causes to the people living downstream. The tax would then lead the owner of the factory to scale back production, to the point at which the “marginal” TV produced would bestow roughly equal benefits and costs to society, taking everything into account. (Without the Pigovian tax, the factory owner would produce additional TV sets for which their marginal cost to society exceeded their marginal benefit, meaning society would be worse off because of these additional units.)
For the purpose of this IER post, I’ll have to be brief, but here is the quick and dirty version of how Ronald Coase came along and completely upended this traditional Pigovian analysis: First, Coase told his readers to stop thinking of these situations in terms of the good guys and bad guys. In my hypothetical TV factory case—which is my example, not Coase’s—we shouldn’t view the factory owner as someone violating the downstream homeowners. Rather, Coase urged his readers to consider, what he called, the “reciprocal nature” of the problem.
Specifically, Coase would say in our example that the real problem is one of scarcity and competing uses for the river water. The factory owner would like to use the river as a place to dump his waste after producing TVs, while the homeowners would like to use the river for their kids to play in or to wash their clothes. The two uses are incompatible, and the issue is: To which party should the use of the river be allocated? Coase warns us that if the government installs a TV tax on the factory, the politicians are simply assuming that the most efficient solution to the conflict is for the factory to scale back TV production.
But we can imagine better outcomes, depending on the specifics. Suppose, for example, that there are only a few households who live downstream from the factory, and are harmed by its waste products. In this situation, rather than the owner greatly scaling back TV production—and depriving consumers around the country of having cheap TVs—maybe the least-cost solution is for the factory owner to buy the properties from the few families and pay them to move somewhere else. Note that we are talking about voluntary exchanges here; the people aren’t being evicted by the sheriff. Rather, just suppose for the sake of argument that for (say) $2 million, the factory owner could buy out the families living downstream, and everybody would be much happier than the outcome that would result under a TV tax.
Now that we’ve worked through this hypothetical example to illustrate the out-of-the-box thinking Coase developed in his 1960 paper, I’ll demonstrate its relevance to the new study about trees and climate change.
Tree Option Might Greatly Reduce the “Social Cost of Carbon”
As The Guardian piece explains, the new study is far more optimistic about the scale of tree planting available on Earth than had been earlier believed. This is why the scientists involved in the study think a massive campaign of planting trees is now the single best approach to mitigating climate change. Here are some key excerpts from The Guardian article:
Planting billions of trees across the world is by far the biggest and cheapest way to tackle the climate crisis, according to scientists, who have made the first calculation of how many more trees could be planted without encroaching on crop land or urban areas.
"As trees grow, they absorb and store the carbon dioxide emissions that are driving global heating. New research estimates that a worldwide planting programme could remove two-thirds of all the emissions that have been pumped into the atmosphere by human activities, a figure the scientists describe as “mind-blowing”.
...
“This new quantitative evaluation shows [forest] restoration isn’t just one of our climate change solutions, it is overwhelmingly the top one,” said Prof Tom Crowther at the Swiss university ETH Zurich, who led the research. “What blows my mind is the scale. I thought restoration would be in the top 10, but it is overwhelmingly more powerful than all of the other climate change solutions proposed.”
Citing a figure that planting a new tree costs roughly 30 cents, Prof. Crowther remarked that we could plant the target of 1 trillion trees by spending about $300 billion. Sure, that’s a big number, but its nowhere close to the economic cost of imposing a worldwide carbon tax, the “solution” that many economists have been promoting for years as a no-brainer. (William Nordhaus’ model in its 2007 calibration estimated that even his modest carbon tax would cause several trillion dollars [in today’s dollars] in economic compliance costs, while the more aggressive proposals would cause more than $20 trillion in economic costs.)
This episode is a specific example of the type of problem Ronald Coase warned about. Specifically, the carbon tax logic assumed that the problem was, “People are emitting too much carbon dioxide and we need to coerce them into scaling back.” But what if instead the problem was, “People aren’t planting enough trees, and we need to coax them into planting more”?
To give some quick numbers: By some estimates, a single healthy tree can sequester up to a ton of carbon dioxide by the time it reaches 40 years old, and we also read that a silver maple tree will absorb 400 pounds of carbon dioxide by the time it reaches 25 years old.
So consider a coal-fired power plant that is going to emit a ton of carbon dioxide in order to produce some additional electricity. If the pro-tax economists had gotten their way, there would be a $42 tax levied on the power plant, since the Obama EPA estimated that that was the “social cost of carbon” for the year 2020.
Yet if there is room on Earth for more trees—given the plans of everybody else—that Obama-era estimate greatly overstates the harm of the emission. Rather than imposing $42 in damages as the EPA calculations suggested, the power plant owner could spend a mere $3 to plant 10 trees, meaning that over the next two decades the trees would have absorbed more than the additional emissions, and would in fact continue reducing CO2 in the atmosphere for decades beyond.
As this simple example illustrates, a carbon tax of $42 would have been a gross overkill. It would have led power plants and other firms to scale back their emissions in very costly ways that stifled economic growth, when—apparently—there was a much cheaper solution available. And notice throughout all of this discussion, I am stipulating the basic externality framework for the sake of argument, and am merely showing the problems that Ronald Coase demonstrated with this one-size-fits-all way of thinking.
A Theater Analogy
Consider a movie theater. It’s a problem that people sometimes drop popcorn and other litter on the floor. Now there are two ways the theater could respond: (1) It could install cameras and personnel to monitor the customers and heavily fine anybody caught dropping stuff on the floor. This would be a huge inconvenience and make movie-going far less pleasant. Or (2) the theater could hire personnel to clean up the floor after a show. And notice that even if some combination were used—maybe the theater calls the police on somebody who just runs up and down the aisles dumping soda on the floor—there is no reason that the “fine” imposed on litterers should be used to pay the salary of the employees who pick up popcorn with a broom. Those are two totally different considerations.
When it comes to carbon taxes, the conventional logic has simply assumed that penalizing emissions is the appropriate solution to the ostensible problem of harmful climate change. But maybe that is totally wrong. Perhaps it would make far more sense to pay people to plant trees.
And while it’s true that some carbon tax proposals contain (mild) provisions for reforestation, there is no reason at all for those programs to be linked. In general, taxing carbon is a very inefficient way to raise government revenue. If tree planting is truly superior, then it would make more economic sense to use general tax funds for the subsidies. There is no reason at all to earmark carbon tax revenues for reforestation; this would be as silly as insisting that movie theaters only pay the clean-up employees out of their “litter tax” rather than the general revenues from ticket sales.
Conclusion
New developments in the scientific literature show that tree-planting might be the single best way to reduce the human contribution to carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The whole episode shows the folly of top-down political solutions to social challenges. Even if we stipulate the standard framework of “market failure,” it does not follow that a carbon tax set to the “social cost of carbon” is the way to restore efficiency. The case for a carbon tax is much weaker than the so-called experts have been assuring us.
SOURCE
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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here.
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27 August, 2019
Plastic Bans Are Symbolism Over Substance
Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau recently proposed a federal ban on certain single-use plastics, arguing, “We have a responsibility to work with our partners to reduce plastic pollution, protect the environment, and create jobs and grow our economy.” As with similar measures in California, Hawaii, and New York, the proposed Canadian ban on plastics will harm consumers while providing very little benefit, even on Trudeau’s own terms.
The biggest problem for the plastic banners is that their measures (so far) apply to jurisdictions that have little to do with the ostensible problem. The biggest contributors to plastic in the ocean are China and Indonesia; a 2015 article in Science concluded that OECD countries contribute less than 5 percent of the plastic waste from land sources.
Another problem is that government bans come with unintended consequences. For example, research from earlier this year studied California’s ban on plastic bags and reported that “the elimination of 40 million pounds of plastic carryout bags [was] offset by a 12 million pound increase in trash bag purchases.” Because pet owners (for example) had been using their plastic bags from the grocery store to pick up after their animals, the ban simply forced them to buy plastic bags the old-fashioned way. Ironically, the California legislation led these people to stop recycling and reusing!
These naïve “direct assaults” on one environmental concern can also impede progress on other fronts. For example, if a store switches back to paper bags then this will mean more carbon dioxide emissions. Indeed, a 2011 UK government study found a consumer would need to use an allegedly “environmentally responsible” cotton tote bag 131 times in order for it to cause less environmental damage than the plastic bags it would replace.
Prime Minister Trudeau’s homage to “job creation” is also nonsensical. The rationale of work is that it makes people better off in exchange for our toil. If jobs are being “created” merely to comply with a largely arbitrary government edict, then they are pointless “busy work” of the type assigned in grade school by bored teachers. In a relatively free-market economy with flexible wages, everybody who wants a productive job can get one, especially in the long run. Government bans on plastic, or limitations on greenhouse gas emissions, induce artificial scarcity and “create jobs” in the same way that a ban on power tools would “create work”—and make humanity much poorer in the process.
Now if the benefits from plastic bans are largely illusory, the costs are quite real. For example, restricting single-use plastics such as forks and knives will increase the spread of disease, as people begin reusing metalware for their office lunches etc., rather than throwing out their plastic utensils after each meal. Likewise, if shoppers continue to use the same tote bag for their groceries, eventually they could be transporting their food in rich bacteria colonies, rather than the much more sanitary single-use plastic bags that are promptly discarded.
Yet besides these utilitarian concerns, there is the basic fact that plastic bags are very convenient, and so banning their use will make consumers worse off. After all, there is a reason grocery stores switched away from using paper bags and made plastic bags so ubiquitous. For those with long memories, we can appreciate the extra irony: The stores now switching back to paper bags are using thinner versions than when we were younger. While a strong adult with plastic bags could have carried an entire grocery run into the house in one trip, now with the weak paper bags, several trips are required—and that gallon of milk might rip the bag, so watch out.
The Canadian proposal to ban single-use plastics is yet another triumph of symbolism over substance: The measure will do virtually nothing to reduce plastic waste in the ocean and it won’t “help the economy.” However, what it will do, if enacted, is increase greenhouse gas emissions, increase the spread of disease, and greatly inconvenience consumers.
SOURCE
Solar Energy: Good For Virtue Signaling And Not Much Else
There’s a great future in solar, the fossil-fuel haters have been telling us for some time. They might be right. One day. But they’ve been saying that for quite a while, and the future continues to be out there … somewhere.
Not so long ago, the French even thought paving their highways with solar panels was a good idea. But “Three Years Later,” says a Popular Mechanics headline from late last week, “the French Solar Road Is a Total Flop.”
How can this be? Solar, we’ve long been told, will save us all.
“It’s too noisy, falling apart, and doesn’t even collect enough solar energy,” says PM.
France’s Sun Road, known locally as the Wattway — what, nobody thought of Voltabahn or Wattastrada? — was an “experiment that seemed ingenious in its simplicity: fill a road with photovoltaic panels and let them passively soak up the rays as cars drive harmlessly above.”
However, its “most optimistic supporters have deemed” it a “failure,” says PM. It couldn’t handle the weight of heavy trucks, the surface made so much racket that the speed limit had to be lowered to 43 mph, and it’s failed to deliver the power that had been promised.
Flaws include poor location (“Normandy is not historically known as a sunny area,” says Popular Mechanics, to which we add, no area is sunny at night); storms (the climate alarmists will blame global warming for their existence); and questionable design (solar panels work when best directed toward the sun, not arranged flat on the ground as a road bed).
Critics, according to PM, say the group that built the road “pursued the project too quickly before fully investigating its cost effectiveness.” That can happen when virtue signaling is given priority over sound investment.
France’s Sun Road is not an isolated bitter experience in dabbling in solar and other renewable energy sources. There have been, and will be, others:
Germany. Chancellor Angela Merkel announced in 2011 that the country was shutting down its nuclear power plants — the only genuinely green power source on Earth — and replacing the lost energy with renewables. A few months ago, Der Spiegel reported that since the announcement, “progress has been limited” and “Berlin has wasted billions of euros and resistance is mounting.”
McKinsey & Company analysts have noticed that under renewables, Germany “is far from meeting the targets it set for itself.” Then last December, an energy engineer, a petroleum engineer, and a physicist who is also a university researcher wrote that Germany took on the challenge “to show the world how to build a society based entirely on ‘green, renewable’ energy,” then “hit a brick wall.”
“Despite huge investments in wind, solar and biofuel energy production capacity, Germany has not reduced CO2 emissions over the last 10 years. However, during the same period, its electricity prices have risen dramatically, significantly impacting factories, employment and poor families.”
Nevada. If voters ultimately approve a constitutional amendment — Question 6 — that would require wind and solar to provide 50% of the state’s energy by 2030, “the consequences of this could be tragic for” the state, says Hoover Institution scholar Richard Epstein.
Epstein also included this gem in his Las Vegas Review-Journal op-ed: “Supporters of Question 6 presume that the world may well burn to a crisp if immediate and prompt steps are not taken to deal with rising carbon dioxide levels, rising temperatures and rising seas. But this causal chain is broken at every link.”
Ivanpah. The titanic solar thermal plant eats up 3,500 acres in the California desert nearer Las Vegas than Los Angeles. On average, says Forbes energy writer Michael Shellenberger, “solar farms take 450 times more land than nuclear plants.” Ivanpah is also an ecological menace. The mirrors that reflect sunlight toward the plants’s towers create such extreme heat above them that they have killed thousands of birds.
Australia. A solar project in South Australia similar to the Ivanpah avian skillet will not be moving forward because “the company behind it failed to secure commercial finance for the project.” Private investors tend to stay away from projects and developments that are likely to fail.
Solyndra. A signature government solar panel initiative stoked by politics failed and left taxpayers with a $500 million bill. Why did the company flop? Cato Institute Executive Vice President David Boaz has compiled a handy list of reasons:
Officials spent other people’s money with little incentive to spend it prudently.
There was political pressure to make decisions without proper vetting.
Political judgment was substituted for the judgments of millions of investors.
The enthusiastic embrace of fads like “green energy.”
Political officials ignoring warnings from civil servants,
Close connections between politicians and the companies that benefit from government allocation of capital.
The appearance — at least — of favors for political supporters.
Shellenberger says “one big reason” solar panels, as well as wind turbines, “appear to be making electricity so expensive” is “their inherently unreliable nature, which requires expensive additions to the electrical grid in the form of natural gas plants, hydro-electric dams, batteries, or some other form of standby power.”
The fossil-fuel haters, which include the agenda-driven media, will point out that solar has become cheaper since he wrote that a little more than a year ago. But as Shellenberger asked this year, “if solar and wind are so cheap, why are they making electricity so expensive?”
“Between 2009 and 2017, the price of solar panels per watt declined by 75% while the price of wind turbines per watt declined by 50%,” he wrote in Forbes in March. “And yet — during the same period — the price of electricity in places that deployed significant quantities of renewables increased dramatically.”
This has happened, says Shellenberger, because the value of wind and solar has declined “significantly” as they have become “a larger part of electricity supply.” They still have a “fundamentally unreliable nature.”
One day solar and wind just might be the cheapest and most reliable energy sources. But the innovation has to advance on its own. No amount of hoping, legislating, subsidizing, lecturing, and eco-exhibitionism will accelerate the process.
SOURCE
Stop left-wing groups from fleecing taxpayers with the Endangered Species Act
By Richard McCarty
The Endangered Species Act (ESA) has been stretched far beyond the intentions of Congressional representatives, and it is badly in need of reform. For example, loopholes in the law allow left-wing environmental groups to collect taxpayers’ money for keeping federal employees from doing their job, which is to help endangered species recover. This money is sometimes awarded on top of taxpayer-funded contracts and grants given to these same groups.
Representative Don Young (R-Alaska), the last remaining member of Congress who voted for the ESA has said, “The Endangered Species Act (ESA) has been weaponized and misused by environmental groups for too long.” The law passed overwhelmingly, but according to Young, “You have to understand when we had this act before us … we were told it was to save leopards and other species, it was never for grass … and flies, and snails, and turtles…”
How are radicals exploiting the Endangered Species Act? Under the current law, left-wing groups are able to overwhelm the Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service with petitions to list many species as endangered and then sue when the government is unable to respond to the petitions before the arbitrary deadlines enshrined in the ESA. Radical environmental groups, such as the Center for Biological Diversity, WildEarth Guardians, the Sierra Club, and the Natural Resources Defense Council, have been gaming the system in this fashion for decades. The most litigious o these groups have sued the government hundreds of times. Even more infuriatingly, some environmental groups, such as WildEarth Guardians, the Natural Resource Defense Council, and Defenders of Wildlife, have been taking federal grants and then suing the government for more money.
The abuses of the Endangered Species Act have been so egregious that Congress should take bold action. First of all, the law should be changed to require Congressional approval for any further listings. The authority to declare a species is endangered — which could kill thousands of jobs, destroy the property values of thousands of homeowners, and ruin whole towns – is just too great to be wielded by unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats.
Secondly, the law should be changed to no longer allow environmentalists to sue the government for not responding to a petition to add a species to the endangered list. Of course, taking away the ability of environmental groups to sue over petitions would remove their ability to collect excessive attorney’s fees. We want the government to thoroughly research each species and consult with local and state officials before deciding whether to list that species as endangered or threatened. If the government is racing to meet a deadline to respond to a petition, its research is likely to be of lower quality.
Finally, those who receive taxpayer-funded grants and contracts should be barred from suing the government under the ESA. If radical groups wish to sue the government, they should be expected to find their own funding sources. Taxpayers should not be forced to fund both the plaintiffs and the defendants in these suits.
On the need for Congressional action to reform the Endangered Species Act, Americans for Limited Government President Rick Manning stated the following:
“Outrageously, left-wing environmental groups are allowed to submit piles of frivolous petitions for endangered species status — tying the federal bureaucracy up in knots — and then sue when the government is unable to respond promptly to these petitions. These groups, such as WildEarth Guardians and the Center for Biological Diversity, are often able to collect exorbitant attorney’s fees for these cases. What’s further galling is that some of these same groups suing the government receive federal contracts and grants. Simply put, left-wing groups should not be paid to keep federal employees from doing their jobs. Congress must step in, reform the Endangered Species Act, and end this insanity.”
With these few reforms, Congress could hamper the ability of the Left to abuse the Endangered Species Act while enabling Fish and Wildlife Service and National Marine Fisheries Service employees to get back to their important work of helping endangered species recover rather than wasting time on frivolous litigation. However, until Congress does act, we should expect left-wing groups will continue to use the law as a wrecking ball to damage our economy and as a means of picking the pockets of taxpayers.
SOURCE
All Gain for Criminals, All Pain for Motorists: California’s Prop 47 Prompts Catalytic Converter Thefts
California’s 2014 Proposition 47 brought about some positive criminal justice reforms, but in the summer of 2018 the measure still managed to win the California Golden Fleece Award. As Lawrence McQuillan explains, the law “sparked a surge in automobile break-ins and shopliftings throughout the state.” Under Proposition 47, property worth $950 or less is reduced from a potential felony to a misdemeanor, and the measure “de-prioritizes justice for California residents and businesses, who now are increasingly victims of vandals and thieves operating with near impunity.” The latest surge targets the catalytic converters of automobiles.
As Lauren Keene of the Davis Enterprise reported this summer, the Davis police department received 45 reports of catalytic converter thefts in recent months, and nine in one week. A full 38 of the thefts were from Toyota Priuses, whose converters contains precious metals such as platinum, palladium and rhodium, “a popular target in the Sacramento region and beyond for thieves looking to make a quick buck.”
In April, Michael McGough of the Sacramento Bee noted “a spike in catalytic converter thefts in the South Natomas area since the start of 2019,” with 18 of the thefts targeting the Toyota Prius. Similar reports chart catalytic converter theft in the Santa Barbara region and Los Angeles County.
According to The Impact of Proposition 47 on Crime and Recidivism, a June 2018 study from the Public Policy Institute of California, “Prop 47 may have contributed to a rise in larceny thefts, especially thefts from motor vehicles.” Starting in December, 2014, such thefts jumped from 16,000-17000 to 19,000-20,000. The increase of 35,300 thefts from motor vehicles accounts for “almost two-thirds of the 54,700 increase in the number of property crimes in California.”
In a June, 2018, Bob Egelko of the San Francisco Chronicle noted that in San Francisco, “auto break-ins soared, by 24 percent last year to a total of 31,222.” On the other hand, arrests for auto break-ins were down because “state law prohibits officers from arresting people for misdemeanor crimes that an officer did not personally observe.”
Reports of arrests for catalytic converter theft are rare, and in Davis thieves targeted one couple three times in four months. As this writer can attest, absent a converter, a four-cylinder Toyota will roar like a Harley Davidson. Replacement of the converters can easily run more than $1,000. All pain for motorists, all gain for criminals. That’s the reality of Proposition 47.
SOURCE
Australian sunshine could soon be farmed to power an Asian nation
Setting one thing aside, this is one Greenie scheme that could work. Australia is mostly desert so uninterrupted sunshine will happen most of the time. So Singapore could get cheap daytime power from Australia and turn on its gas-fired generators at night. And if there was any interruption to the Australian power supply they could just turn on their gas generators during the day as well. Perfect. Cheap uninterruptible power. The Holy Grail,
So where is the African person in the woodpile? Cost. Particularly with the undersea cable, there would be a huge capital cost before startup, a cost borne by banks who will want their usual 4% pa on funds invested. Generating the power may not cost much but paying the huge bills needed to get the generating going will be another matter. Just about all big projects cost at least twice the initial estimate so to pay the banks the operators will have to charge big for what they supply. Will it be so big that the Singaporeans will simply say "No thanks"? Could be.
And let me mention another nettle: Solar farms actually require a lot of maintenance and with so many panels that will be a big cost too.
If the project goes ahead it is my prophecy that all investors, including the banks, will lose their shirts. And in a capitalist society destruction of capital is a big issue. It means that money which could have been used productively was in fact wasted
An Australian entrepreneur wants the Northern Territory desert to become home to the world’s biggest solar farm, with the electricity generated sent along undersea cables to Singapore.
David Griffin is an entrepreneur and leader in the development of Australia's renewable energy industry and his ambitious new plan to power Singapore from a 15,000-hectare solar farm in the Northern Territory has investors taking interest worldwide.
“It is first and foremost the largest solar farm under development in the world,” the Sun Cable CEO told SBS's Small Business Secrets from Singapore.
The Sun Cable project will be the first of its kind to try and export clean energy internationally.
A former GM Development at Infigen Energy, David has been developing solar and wind farms in Australia and South Africa for nearly 20 years.
His Sun Cable project would send electricity to Darwin, then along a 3,800-kilometre undersea cable to Singapore.
“It’s an extremely complex problem that we are solving. There are risks associated with that [undersea cable] and that’s why it’ll take a long time to go through the entire design process,” he said.
“It is the longest proposed project on the table at the moment but it’s certainly not the deepest.”
The solar farm would sprawl over 15,000 kilometres, backed by a 10-gigawatt plant.
The Northern Territory Government recently granted ‘major project’ status with construction expected to start in 2023. Environmental approvals are pending.
“If we look at Asia, no-one wants to see forests cleared,” Mr Griffin said.
“In order to truly see an electrification of global economy and to see it done in a way that doesn’t lead to climate catastrophe, we need to be able to move huge volumes of renewable electricity over vast distances and this is the technology that’ll allow it to happen.”
SOURCE
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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here.
Preserving the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here
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26 August, 2019
Journal “Nature Communications” climate blacklist
People with the temerity to correct the record on climate change must be silenced. That’s the outrageous point of a new study published in the journal Nature Communication.
“The time has arrived for professional journalists and editors to ameliorate the disproportionate attention given to (climate change contrarians) by focusing instead on career experts and relevant calls to action,” the authors said.
While the study’s goal is severely off base, it nonetheless produced two mathematical rankings CFACT is more than a little tickled by.
According to a ranking of how often “contrarians,” as the study labels us, are cited in the media, CFACT’s Marc Morano is far and away the world’s most effective climate communicator.
Marc is number one, with 4,171 media references, nearly double Senator James Inhofe’s 2,628 and Secretary Rick Perry’s 1,903. Marc appeared in many multiples of media references compared to anyone else as you proceed down the rankings.
Steven Hayward of the Powerline Blog wrote, “Morano is truly the Pete Rose and Hank Aaron of climate contrarians.”
The study also ranks our website, CFACT.org, on its list of the top 100 “most prolific media sources” for articles skeptical of the global warming narrative and ranks Climate Depot number 1! See, figure 2b.
The list of 386 people on the climate blacklist reads like an honor roll. Here’s a sample:
Apollo Astronaut Harrison Schmitt – the only scientist to walk on the moon;
Apollo Astronaut Walt Cunningham – from the first crew to ride the Saturn V rocket;
Freeman Dyson – The eminent Princeton physicist who postulated the Dyson sphere;
Ross McKitrick and Steven McIntyre – the Canadian researchers whose meticulous mathematical audit debunked Michael Mann’s infamous hockey stick graph;
Anthony Watts – The prominent meteorologist and creator of Watts Up With That;
Rick Perry – The U.S. Secretary of Energy;
Judith Curry – A climate scientist with over 130 peer-reviewed papers;
Roy Spencer and John Christy – Scientists who manage temperature satellites and developed the first successful satellite temperature record;
Fred Singer – The genius scientist who established the weather satellite network;
Roger Pielke, Jr. – The professor who showed that extreme weather hasn’t worsened and disaster costs declined;
Richard Lindzen – The MIT scientist known for his brilliant work on atmospheric physics and author of over 200 papers;
Will Happer – The Princeton atomic physicist and pioneer in optics;
Rudy Giuliani – America’s Mayor;
Mike Pence – Merely the Vice President of the United States (V.P. Gore’s OK?)
While the rankings appear to be genuine in terms of the amount of media individuals garnered, the study’s black and white, unnuanced choice of whom to include on its contrarian list is bush league. It actually used DeSmog Blog as a major source! Its mathematical comparison showing that people who debate climate policy in the public policy arena have greater media exposure than researchers who are cited in academic journals is an apples and oranges comparison, lacking scientific validity, that yields a no-brainer. Their decision to not rank the amount of media garnered by warming campaigners, which would have yielded a useful comparison, reveals this for a bogus and offensive propaganda hit piece.
We are each exposed to a mountain of media every day. Peruse the headlines and media coverage of climate for yourself. Do you need a mathematical analysis to determine which way the coverage is skewed? Wouldn’t you love to see those hard numbers?
Shame on study authors, Alexander Michael Petersen, Emmanuel M. Vincent, and Anthony LeRoy Westerling.
But, thank you to all our friends and supporters who helped CFACT become the most effective climate communicators in the world. Facts matter!
SOURCE
Al Gore Moves To Profit Big From Anti-Meat Drive
Well, wouldn’t you know it! There he is again – behind another multi-million-dollar money-making scheme.
Al Gore is standing to rake in millions from a World Resources Institute meat consumption reduction report, one that will certainly help boost profits for the meat substitute manufacturers – in which Gore just happens to be a big stakeholder!
Al Gore has ties to meat consumption reduction report while holding huge stake in substitute meat company. Image: cropped here M4GW.
CNN recently reported here on the just published report from the global research nonprofit World Resources Institute. The 568-page report dubbed “Creating a Sustainable Food Future” recommends, among other actions, eating far less beef in order to rescue the planet.
But according to S___ at a thread at Twitter (see below), the WRI’s Co-Chair is David Blood. “David Blood is former Goldman Sachs’ Asset Management head who founded Generation Investment Management with Al Gore, yes that Al Gore,” S___writes under point no. 3.
Americans will need to cut their beef consumption by about 40% and Europeans by 22% for the world to continue to feed everyone in the next 30 years, according to a new report
So the report is now looking more and more like a junk-science-based instrument designed to boost the plant-based substitute meat industry, which include major companies such as Beyond Meat.
Generation Investment Management is connected to Kleiner Perkins, where former Vice President Al Gore is one of its partners and advisors.
Who’s Kleiner Perkins? It turns out they are Beyond Meat’s biggest investor, according to bizjournals.com here. Beyond Meat is a Los Angeles-based producer of plant-based meat substitutes founded in 2009 by Ethan Brown. The company went public in May and just weeks later the more than quadrupled in their value.
Yes, Al Gore, partner and advisor to Kleiner Perkins, Beyond Meat’s big investor, stands to haul in millions, should governments move to restrict real meat consumption and force citizens to swallow the dubious substitutes and fakes.
If taken seriously, the World Research Institute Report, backed by Gore hacks, will help move the transition over to substitute meats far more quickly.
All these “We need to cut beef consumption to save the planet” stories originate from the World Resources Institute whose co-chair is a partner in the firm that collaborates w/ the main investor in @BeyondMeat and his co-founder is a partner in the main investor.”
Another dubious money making scheme that reeks of ethics violations and that needs to be investigated.
SOURCE
British mother arrested and taken to police cell after putting out wrong colour bin bags
A mother was arrested and taken to a police cell after being accused of putting her rubbish out in the wrong colour bin bags. Lyndsey Webb was detained by two officers at her home after “falling foul” of new recycling rules in Ipswich, Suffolk.
A court heard that the 34-year-old was caught dumping household waste in black bags near her home after Ipswich Borough Council allegedly failed to send her new orange-coloured ones. After giving evidence via video link from her cell, she was eventually given a conditional discharge and ordered to pay £50 compensation.
Last night Ms Webb said householders were "totally in the dark" about how to recycle properly and accused the council of putting her family through "a total nightmare".
It comes after The Telegraph launched a Zero Waste campaign calling on the government, local councils and private companies to do more to boost the country’s recycling rates and make the process simpler.
Earlier this year The Telegraph revealed that just a fifth of councils provides a complete recycling service, leaving householders left in a postcode lottery of waste disposal, and confused as to what they should be putting in their bins.
The bewildering system means Britain will not meet targets to recycle 50 per cent of household waste by 2020.
Suffolk magistrates court in Ipswich heard that Ms Webb was among a small number of residents in the town who were allowed to put black bin bags containing waste outside their homes if they did not have space for wheelie bins.
But magistrates were told that the system changed when residents were issued with two types of bags - orange and clear – to encourage recycling.
Ms Webb claimed that Ipswich Borough Council gave her permission to put out black bags after she was not issued with orange and clear ones in time.
But prosecutors alleged that Ms Webb of St Helen’s Street, Ipswich, was caught dumping the black bags late at night by CCTV cameras on three occasions. She was summonsed to Suffolk magistrates court by the council to face four offences of fly tipping household waste. A warrant was issued after she failed to attend court and she was arrested and taken into police custody.
After the hearing Ms Webb told the Telegraph that the system was “totally broken”. “All I did was get the colour of my rubbish bags wrong and I’ve suddenly got two police officers at my door arresting me in front of my kids,” she said.
“It’s ridiculous. They didn’t even send me the orange ones on time. They take so long to collect the rubbish anyway nowadays - I’ve had rats crawling around.
"We're all totally in the dark. These people have put me and my family through a total nightmare."
Webb was given a conditional discharge for six months and ordered to pay £50 compensation for the cost of the removal of the bags.
An Ipswich Borough Council spokesman said: “She was dumping a large quantity of bags outside a shop in an alleyway around the corner. “She was originally sent a warning letter, but her offending continued. She was sent a summons and missed two court appearances.
“She was arrested under warrant because of her failure to attend court.”
SOURCE
For Most Things, Recycling Harms the Environment
In 2008 I was invited to a conference called Australia Recycles! in Fremantle. I flew coach for 30 hours (we had to divert, at one point, to Auckland instead of Sydney because huge headwinds used up more fuel than expected) and landed in Perth and then was driven to Freo by one of the conference organizers. (If you are keeping score at home, that’s 2.78 metric tons of carbon for the flight from Raleigh-Durham to Perth and back.)
It became clear that I was the “tethered goat,” brought in for entertainment and to spice things up a bit. Apparently, someone had listened to my April 2007 conversation with Russ Roberts; that’s pretty impressive, because this was just over a year after EconTalk started, before EconTalk was a “thing” and before Russ started ignoring my emails and not returning my phone calls.
I had a day before my plenary address, and walked around the conference hall. Everyone there, everyone, represented either a municipal or provincial government, or a nonprofit recycling advocacy group, or a company that manufactured and sold complicated and expensive recycling equipment.
And what a wealth of machinery and equipment it was. Recycling requires substantial infrastructure for pickup, transportation, sorting, cleaning, and processing. I have sometimes suggested a test for whether something is garbage or a valuable commodity. Hold it in your hand, or hold a cup of it, or tank, or however you can handle it. Consider: Will someone pay me for this? If the answer is yes, it’s a commodity, a valuable resource. If the answer is no, meaning you have to pay them to take it, then it’s garbage.
It’s useful to pause for a moment and consider some definitions.
Is Recycling Useful, or Is It Garbage?
The problem with recycling is that people can’t decide which of two things is really going on.
One possibility is that recycling transforms garbage into a commodity. If that’s true, then the price of pickup, transport, sorting, cleaning, and processing can be paid out of the proceeds, with something left over. That’s how it is with real commodities, such as wheat or pork bellies, after all. It’s expensive and complicated to produce wheat or pork bellies, and then deliver them to the market in a form that they can be used. But people will pay you for the wheat or pork bellies. In fact, the “profit test” shows that people will pay you enough to cover all those costs and still have something left over.
The other possibility, and it’s a completely different possibility, is that recycling isn’t a commodity at all. But it is a cheaper or more environmentally friendly way to dispose of garbage. After all, if you bury something in a landfill, it’s gone. And you still had to collect it, transport it, and process it into the landfill. Recycling might cost money, but if you can sell the stuff for any price you are getting some of those costs back. Further, recycling keeps things out of landfills, and we systematically underprice landfill space. The reason is that we don’t want people dumping garbage in vacant lots or by the side of the road. But that means that recycling may be cheaper, all things considered, than using the space in the landfill. The problem is that “all things considered.” You really do have to add up all the costs — resources, money, convenience, environmental damage — of landfilling, and recycling, and then compare them.
These arguments are often muddled and mixed together, by both proponents and critics. And “recycling” is, after all, not just one homogeneous activity, but a whole collection of possible streams of waste or resources, each of which has to be evaluated separately. Should we recycle aluminum cans? Probably, because the price of recycling aluminum compares very favorably to using virgin materials, the mining and smelting of which are expensive in terms of energy and harmful to the environment.......
Remember, this was a conference for recycling advocates and manufacturers of recycling equipment, from around the Pacific Rim. There were hundreds of recycling “Baptists,” or true believers and zealots, and dozens of large corporate “bootleggers,” or profit-seeking firms that green folks would normally never have consorted with. (If you don’t recognize the “Baptists and bootleggers” formulation, you may be interested in Bruce Yandle’s original statement of it.)
I was going to argue that there were economic reasons, technical but clear, why glass recycling was not only prohibitively expensive but also harmful to the environment. It made me wonder why I had been invited, but I surmised that they wanted to have at least one tethered goat for target practice, to keep sharp in being able to advocate their position.
My slot was after the main conference luncheon, a plenary speech, meaning that no other events were scheduled. That is a place of honor, at a conference, and I had been treated with extreme courtesy at every point. Still, I expected the worst in reaction to the actual content of my talk (the essence of which I have already summarized, above).
I gave the talk, and… Nothing. Some polite applause, a few desultory questions. And then people just drifted off. I tried to strike up a conversation with some people who were still in the hall, and I asked them why there was no controversy.
One fellow was perfectly forthcoming: “Oh, we all know it makes no sense to recycle glass. The economic case is easy. But people should still recycle, because it’s simply the right thing to do. It’s not about the actual environment. It’s about enlisting people to care about the symbol of the environment. Overall, recycling is still worth doing, regardless of its effects.”
A young woman piped up: “It’s okay to say that sort of thing here, because we are insiders. But it’s better not to talk about the economics of things to the general public. We need to help train them to care about the environment, and recycling is one of the best ways to do that.”
I had heard something like this before, as I discussed in the 2007 article that likely got me the conference invite in the first place. An earnest young woman, the public spokesperson for the waste and recycling agency of a medium-sized town in the northeastern U.S. had told me breezily, “Oh, you have to understand: recycling is always cheaper, no matter how much it costs.” Oh, my.
The message I had worried about, and expected to be controversial, was old hat to the industry folks. But it was beside the point, because recycling was for them a moral imperative. Once you begin to think of recycling as a symbol of religious devotion rather than a pragmatic solution to environmental problems, the whole thing makes more sense.
As in any religious ceremony, the whole point is sacrifice: Abraham was ready to slay Isaac; Catholics give up meat during Lent; Muslims fast all day during Ramadan. And a young woman in Chile with two two-liter bottles sits in her car in line, knowing she is publicly visible and that her green moral virtue is apparent to everyone.
More HERE
GREENIE ROUNDUP FROM AUSTRALIA
Three recent articles below
Climate failures cost us: ALP election review
Bill Shorten’s Labor Party failed a basic test of politics by not articulating to voters who would pay for its climate change policies, how much they would cost and the impact on the economy.
A confidential submission to the party’s post-election review from the Labor Environment Action Network, obtained by The Australian, expresses “anger and disappointment”, and also “grief”, over the party’s failure to win what was expected to be an unlosable election. The submission is brutal about policy, political and leadership failures.
“Labor was unable to put a price on its climate change action plan,” a LEAN member says in the submission. “It couldn’t say how much it would cost, where the money was coming from or what economic dividend it would deliver or save. It is basic Australian politics — how much, who pays, what does it save. We had no answers.”
The submission reflects poorly on Mark Butler, Labor’s spokesman on climate change and energy. While LEAN members thought Mr Shorten was an “excellent leader” they concede voters “did not like or trust” him. This damaged Labor’s ability to sell a sweeping policy agenda.
LEAN has called for Labor to reconsider its “specific climate change policies” and how they are communicated, but warns “the party cannot ignore and must address the issue of expanding fossil fuel export industries”.
Labor’s franking credits policy, its wishy-washy stance over the Adani coalmine and its failure to “listen to the workers” are identified as additional reasons for its loss.
While LEAN members said they were “proud” of Labor’s bold policy agenda, the party failed to connect with voters and persuade them with a compelling message.
“LEAN members … felt we had many, many good and great policies but our narrative around them was problematic,” says the submission drafted by co-conveners David Tierney and Felicity Wade.
“Creating a narrative that connects with voters was identified as most important to win an election.”
A failure to balance mitigating climate change with the need for “economic opportunities” for workers, industries and rural communities is also recognised. LEAN argues Labor must rebuild its credibility with workers in areas such as the Hunter Valley, which swung against Labor.
“Addressing climate change has to be about the economic possibilities and prosperity, not the moral argument,” LEAN argues. “The new jobs need to be led and initiated by clever government policy and investment.”
LEAN urges Labor to stand by a bold emissions reduction target — currently 45 per cent by 2030 on 2000 levels — recommended by the Climate Change Authority and to also support a new federal environment act and the creation of an independent Environment Protection Agency.
However, it argues that Labor must recognise many voters do not trust market mechanisms and there is a worldwide backlash against globalisation, neoliberalism and deregulation. Many voters saw specific policy measures as a cost rather than an opportunity to deal with climate change.
“Labor’s policies were generally well received by the climate change, environment and renewables ‘industries’,” the submission notes.
“This support, however, didn’t translate to the voting public. While we have walked away from the policy purity of a carbon price across the economy, our policies are still in the technocratic and market mechanism sphere.
“They are supported by Treasury officials, corporations and the political class. It is hardly surprising many … people are suspect.”
LEAN urges Labor to build better links internally with members and externally with other environmental groups to help develop practical and pragmatic policies so they can help communicate and campaign for them.
The blistering submission to Labor’s post-election review comes as Labor, now led by Anthony Albanese, is yet to officially dump many policies some in the party regard as electorally toxic.
SOURCE
Sydney Lord Mayor backs climate change strike, in virtue-signalling madness
When your employer encourages you to go on strike, is it still a strike? And what about the people who pay your wages, should they get a say?
These and other imponderables are the latest questions thrown up by the ongoing spectacle of climate activist madness. While the stunts become increasingly silly, indulged by complicit politicians and media, it is taxpayers who are being taken for a ride.
Just two months after becoming one of the first virtue-signalling local governments to declare a “climate emergency”, Sydney City Council has voted to support the Global Strike for Climate Change.
The strikes in the past have been led by schoolchildren bludging a day out of the classroom, but now they are urging “workers across the world” to join them.
And, incredibly, so is Sydney’s Town Hall. A council motion backs the strike, calls on councillors to attend and even orders its administration to support council staff who want time off to get involved.
Lord Mayor Clover Moore and six councillors supported the motion last night, while three others voted against it. So, on Friday September 20th, when dewy-eyed school students and socialist activists rally in the streets of Sydney to ban this nation’s largest export industry, among other things, Town Hall will be cheering them on.
The council wants its own staff to be part of the strike and the protests; which could get kind of messy if the council needs to block off streets, provide security, issue permits or clean up the rubbish.
The campaign wants to ban all new coal or gas projects, demand all energy be renewable and insist that money, sucked from somewhere, is used to retrain workers from the axed industries so they can take up other unspecified jobs in other unspecified places at another unspecified time.
It sounds like a foolproof economic plan — next, they should demand the installation of a fountain of youth.
Sydney ratepayers, of course, are not left out. They are free to attend the strike and its rally — so long as they don’t mind the risk to their own jobs or the costs to their own businesses. September 20 should be a great day in Sydney; perhaps the rubbish bins will go uncollected, planning applications will sit unassessed, parks and gardens will be left untended and the libraries will be a free for all.
Presumably no parking tickets will be issued on that day. And all ratepayers, no doubt, can look forward to having an amount of their annual rate notice rebated to compensate for the day the council decided its service obligations didn’t really matter.
Strike me pink. If they shut down Sydney City Council, wouldn’t it have a non-existent carbon footprint? And what would be the downside?
SOURCE
Adani refuses to bow to climate activists
A climate activist has locked himself to machinery at Adani's Queensland mine site in defiance of the state government's move to outlaw lock-on protest devices.
The man locked himself to a drill rig at the Carmichael mine site on Wednesday morning, a day after the government announced it would push for an increase in penalties for protesters using the devices. Protesters will face up to two years' jail under the new laws.
Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk denied the crackdown was to silence protesters of the controversial central Queensland mine, which was finally given the green light earlier this year. "Absolutely this is not the case ... It's just this small element that are going to extreme lengths " the premier told the Today Show on Wednesday.
The government's move to outlaw the devices follows the arrest of dozens of Extinction Rebellion climate protesters who have brought major Brisbane thoroughfares to a halt in recent weeks.
They say stopping traffic gets people's attention, and want communities to collectively find solutions that would lead to zero carbon emissions by 2025.
The government claims protesters are filling the devices with broken glass and explosive gas to injure anyone who tries to cut them free.
Protesters say these claims are baseless. "The climate crisis impacts us all. Increasing penalties will not stop good people standing up for the environment and one another," Frontline Action on Coal spokesperson Kim Croxford said.
Adani is this week facing another hurdle in getting the mine off the ground, with engineering firm Aurecon's announcement it has severed its 20-year relationship with the company. Aurecon has been the target of recent protests by climate activists over its link to the project.
An Adani spokesperson said in a statement that company was surprised by the decision and was already in talks to replace Aurecon to ensure the mine went ahead.
"There has been a concerted campaign by extremists against our Carmichael Project and businesses that partner with us," the statement read. "It has not succeeded and construction of the Carmichael Project is well and truly underway."
SOURCE
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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here.
Preserving the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here
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20 August, 2019
America's Big Issue With the Environment
Is a Red-Meat Tax on the Menu?
A European consulting firm is floating the idea of a sin tax targeting red meat.
This can’t be good news to Americans in the midst of grilling season, with a plethora of family picnics, tailgates, and other gatherings still to come: A European consulting firm is floating the idea of a sin tax targeting red meat.
It was an offhand remark, to be sure, and one not getting a lot of media play. But as a report from Fitch Solutions Macro Research tells us, “The global rise of sugar taxes makes it easy to envisage a similar wave of regulatory measures targeting the meat industry.”
Those who’ve taken the ball and run with it naturally point to the generally ineffective and underperforming taxes on sugary drinks, a pairing Fitch Solutions called “a policy sibling” because “over-consumption is a public health issue.” However, freelance journalist James Murphy connected some additional dots to reveal a more rancid motive: “The climate hysterics and animal-rights activists … want the price to be so high for meat that consumers will seek out other protein options.” As Murphy adds, “They want to social-engineer eating meat out of existence.”
In his piece, Murphy refers to a recent report by the dubious and discredited United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, contending that it “calls for humanity to vastly decrease the amount of meat we eat in order to help forestall the ginned-up menace of anthropogenic climate change.”
Murphy, who is definitely a skeptic on the subject, may be overstating the case, but he has a point. When we consider other consumer products — like alcohol and tobacco — whose consumption governments at all levels have tried to regulate, it’s not a big stretch to imagine significant taxes on red meat. And since we can’t pin the more obvious effects of drunk driving or secondhand smoke on the guy who likes his T-bone steak medium rare, a handy straw man for that argument is “climate change,” which has become a catch-all excuse for government to reach deeper into our pockets and regulate our lives further.
While the Fitch Solutions report also noted the unlikelihood of such a tax being implemented anytime soon in the U.S., it’s worth stating that less than five years have elapsed since the first sugary-drink tax was introduced in Berkeley, California, and these taxes have already spread to several of our largest jurisdictions, including Chicago, Philadelphia, and San Francisco. Given all this, can a tax on meat really be far behind?
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UK is one step away from a banana republic
I once said that only two things kept us from qualifying as a banana republic – the fact that we don’t have regular power cuts, and the fact that we don’t grow bananas.
It now emerges that the recent collapse of our electricity grid was not, as claimed, a fluke. There had been three ‘near misses’ in three months. These may well be connected with unwise reliance on wind.
I am not in the last bit surprised, and I have been predicting it for ages, warning that our dogma-driven closures of perfectly good coal-fired power stations were worthless even on their own terms.
I suspect that it is highly significant that the recent cuts came minutes after power companies were boasting that they were on the verge of achieving 50 per cent wind power for the first time. Did a dash to achieve this futile propaganda target blow the nation’s fuses? If so, don’t expect an official confirmation from our warmist establishment, where green dogma affects everyone right up to the First Girlfriend, Carrie Symonds. But I think a lot of people will be buying ungreen petrol-driven generators in the next few years, as power becomes less reliable.
And what is it all for? Green campaigners Coalswarm reported last year that China then had a giant 993 gigawatts of coal power capacity, but approved new coal plants would increase this by 25 per cent. These vast, innumerable, soot factories overwhelmingly cancel out any effect from our own daft closures of coal stations, microscopic compared to China’s huge CO2 output.
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Huge organic food scam
Amusing that nobody could tell the difference
A judge on Friday sentenced the mastermind of the largest known organic food fraud scheme in U.S. history to 10 years in prison, saying he cheated thousands of customers into buying products they didn’t want.
U.S. District Judge C.J. Williams said Randy Constant orchestrated a massive fraud that did “extreme and incalculable damage” to consumers and shook public confidence in the nation’s organic food industry.
Williams said that, between 2010 and 2017, consumers nationwide were fooled into paying extra to buy products ranging from eggs to steak that they believed were better for the environment and their own health.
Instead, they unwittingly purchased food that relied on farming practices, including the use of chemical pesticides to grow crops, that they opposed.
“Thousands upon thousands of consumers paid for products they did not get and paid for products they did not want,” Williams said. “This has caused incalculable damage to the confidence the American public has in organic products.”
Williams said the scam harmed other organic farmers who were playing by the rules but could not compete with the low prices offered by Constant’s Iowa-based grain brokerage, and middlemen who unknowingly purchased and marketed tainted organic grain.
Williams ordered Constant, a 60-year-old farmer and former school board president from Chillicothe, Missouri, to serve 122 months in federal prison, as his wife and other relatives sobbed.
Earlier in the day, Williams gave shorter prison terms to three Overton, Nebraska, farmers whom Constant recruited to join the scheme.
Williams described the three as largely law-abiding citizens, including one “legitimate war hero,” who succumbed to greed when Constant gave them the opportunity.
Michael Potter, 41, was ordered to serve 24 months behind bars; James Brennan, 41, was sentenced to 20 months; and his father, 71-year-old Tom Brennan, was given a three-month sentence. Williams said the shorter sentence for the elder Brennan reflected his heroism as a decorated platoon leader in the Vietnam War.
All four farmers sentenced Friday had pleaded guilty to wire fraud charges and cooperated with a two-year investigation that isn’t over.
A fifth farmer has also pleaded guilty in the case and is awaiting sentencing.
The farmers grew traditional corn and soybeans, mixed them with a small amount of certified organic grains, and falsely marketed them all as certified organic by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Most of the grains were sold as animal feed to companies that marketed organic meat and meat products.
The farmers reaped more than $120 million in proceeds from sales of the tainted grain.
The scheme may have involved up to 7 percent of organic corn grown in the U.S. in 2016 and 8 percent of the organic soybeans, prosecutors said.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Jacob Schunk said that end consumers conservatively paid at least $250 million for fraudulent organic products — and perhaps $1 billion or more.
He said that Constant for years exploited an organic certification system that relies on the honesty of farmers and private certifiers. “He saw the weakness in the system and he exploited it over and over again,” Schunk said.
He noted that Constant had admitted in a court filing to spending some of the money on vacations and repeated trips to Las Vegas.
Constant, whose wife of 39 years was in the courtroom Friday, acknowledged in the filing that he spent $2 million supporting three women there with whom he developed relationships.
Constant said that he took full responsibility for his crime and he apologized to his family and the grain merchants, farmers, ranchers and consumers whom he ripped off. “The organic industry in this country is built in trust and I violated that trust,” he said.
Constant’s lawyer, Mark Weinhardt, described his client as a pillar of the community in Chillicothe, where Constant was known as generous with his money and time.
But Williams said that Constant was similar to the grain that he marketed. “He is not what is advertised,” the judge said. “Below the surface, he was lying and cheating.”
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How recycling is a massive con job and an environmental disaster in the making - and why everyday Australians are wasting their time sorting rubbish
Australians think they are doing the right thing when they throw their empty milk bottles, beer cans, and junk mail into their yellow bin.
They roll the bin out to the kerb every week and assume they have helped the environment by having their waste recycled with 90 per cent saying it's very important.
But millions of tonnes is instead shipped to Southeast Asian countries where much of it is burned, buried, or just dumped in landfill.
Millions more is piling up in huge storage facilities of Australian councils and their contractors - or sent to the tip - because they can't sell it.
Only 12 per cent of the 103kg of plastic waste generated per person in Australia each year is recycled, mostly overseas, according to research cited by Prime Minister Scott Morrison.
He pointed out last week that there was an 'implied promise' that when people put their recycling out it would actually be turned into something else. 'People think [plastic] is going to be recycled but only about 12 per cent of it is,' he said.
Australia used to ship enormous amounts of waste to China, sell it for up to $150 a tonne, and then wash its hands of it. Much of it was recycled to fuel the country's boom, but the industry was largely unregulated and dozens of dodgy operators burned or dumped it. Then in January 2018 the Chinese Government decided enough was enough and banned the importing of 99 per cent of recycling.
Australia's worst waste was usually palmed off to China, much of it too contaminated or low quality to be worth anything.
Now only a 0.5 per cent contamination rate is tolerated and the vast majority of Australian sorting facilities just can't meet that.
India, Malaysia, and the Philippines followed suit over the past year so Australia turned to Indonesia, Bangladesh, and Vietnam.
They each receive tens of thousands of tonnes of supposed recycling - Bangladesh alone took 51,400 in May, up 270 per cent from last year's average. Indonesia is about the same.
However, these countries don't have anything like the capacity China did, and aren't any more scrupulous about what they do with it.
Around Indonesia, the streets and rice fields of villages are now used to harvest piles of rubbish as they are laid out to dry in the sun by locals.
The waste is then sorted and sold to tofu factories where it is burned in their furnaces as a cheap alternative to wood.
Australian companies are slowly waking up to the reality that this state of affairs is not sustainable.
An Environment and Energy Department report painted a dire picture of Australia's predicament should more Asian countries close their doors.
'Australia would need to find substitute domestic or export markets for approximately 1.29 million tonnes (or $530 million) of waste a year, based on 2017-18 export amounts,' the report said.
So easy was it to palm off Australia's waste on the developing world that the domestic industry is now in full-blown crisis.
The situation was made even more dire when one of the biggest companies, SKM, collapsed last month and is now in liquidation.
Then on Monday, Phoenix Environmental Group was banned by the Environmental Protection Agency from accepting more waste as its stockpiles were already dangerously high.
Councils, particularly in Victoria where those two companies are based, are at a total loss as to what to do with tens of thousands of tonnes of recycling.
The City of Melbourne is dumping about 45 tonnes of recyclables into landfill every day, along with about 30 other councils.
Other councils are stockpiling recycling in storage units in desperate hope of finding a buyer - as the stock degrades in value and is attacked by scavenging vermin.
This can have disastrous consequences, such as when stockpiled recycling bales at an SKM facility caught fire.
Australian companies are also accused of rorting the system themselves - trucking building site waste to recycling facilities where it is picked up and dumped in landfill.
Numerous companies allegedly do this to tick the boxes required to avoid waste levies - as high as $138 a tonne in NSW and $66 in Victoria.
Such practices, and the overstocking crisis, is only going to get worse as China's new policy has obliterated the price of many recyclables.
Almost overnight, mixed paper scrap crashed from $124 a tonne to next to nothing, and low-grade plastic is also effectively worthless.
The costs of recycling the scrap plastic in particular are now so high that it is basically not worth it and in many places no longer considered recyclable.
The airport in Memphis, Tennessee, has abandoned recycling altogether and only keeps its recycling bins to keep the 'culture' of recycling going - everything in them goes straight to landfill.
Manufacturers are also giving up on buying recycled materials because it is now much cheaper to make its from virgin components.
The recycling industry, which claims to employ more than 50,000 Australians and generate up to $15 billion in value, has tried to downplay the crisis. It pointed to the government's National Waste Report 2018 claim that 37 million tonnes of Australia's 67 million tonnes of waste was recycled in 2018. The report found just 4 million tonnes was exported, half of it metal.
Ten to 15 per cent of kerbside recycling cannot be recycled because it is contaminated with nappies, soft plastics, garden hoses, bricks and batteries.
'We encourage householders to continue to separate and sort their recycling correctly to reduce contamination and realise the environmental and economic benefits of recycling,' National Waste and Recycling Industry Council chief executive Rose Read said.
The Federal Government has belatedly decided to try propping up the Australian recycling industry with $20 million worth of grants to domestic operators.
'We are committed to protecting our nation's environment while also building our capacity to turn recycling into products that people want and need,' Mr Morrison said on Tuesday.
'By engaging industry and researchers we can make sure we're seeing these changes introduced in a way that cuts costs for businesses and ultimately even creates jobs.'
Mr Morrison said the funding was an effort to get the local industry into a position where shipping recycling overseas could be banned.
'This stuff won't change until we set a date where you can't put this stuff on a boat any longer,' he said.
The industry wants a labelling scheme, similar to the country of origin stamps, that shows how much of a product and its packaging came from recycled materials.
Analysts and recycling industry figures also said there needed to be incentives or quotas for businesses to use recycled material, and councils and government needed to lead the way.
'Recycling only works when people, corporates and government buy products made with recycled content,' Plastic Forests boss David Hodge said.
'As we know, the options to send our waste or a misallocated resource overseas will come to an end.'
The Australian Council of Recycling recycling advocacy group Boomerang Alliance proposed five priority actions for the federal government.
They included a Plastic Pollution Reduction Strategy and a $150 million investment in a national industry development fund.
'With Asian markets for recyclable materials from Australia closing down and local governments confronted with potentially sending their kerbside recycling to landfill, it's time to recognise that the system Australians value is greatly under threat,' the ACOR said.
'The National Waste Policy, recently agreed upon with all states, tries to set out an agenda for the future, but its aims cannot be achieved without investment and policy support.'
Boomerang Alliance director Jeff Angel added: 'Without concerted and effective action, Australia is set to go back 50 years to the days when waste was dumped or burned and the only things recycled were the bottles collected for a refund.
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19 August, 2019
UK: Surge in electric car sales could crash the National Grid by 2040, energy expert warns
This is only the latest problem for mass use of electric cars. People all seem to be closing their eyes to the limited practicality of electric cars in general. Something nobody is mentioning is what happens if you arrive at a charging station and all the charging points already have other electric vehicles plugged into them? You might have to wait hours until one of them is charged enough to be unplugged.
So you will not only have to wait for your own car to charge up but also wait until someone else's car is charged up. That could be a very long wait during which you would just be twiddling your thumbs
And you thought that having to line up for 5 minutes at a petrol/gasoline station during busy periods was a drag! Clearly, electric cars will never be practical for anything but commuter round trips. They will only be practical if you can do all your charging at home.
And what about winter? Heating is a huge drain on batteries so if you heat your car in severe weather you can kiss most of your range goodbye! So electric cars will only be practical for short trips in summer -- and almost never in Canada! Conventional vehicles will always be in big demand. How Greenies manage to blind so many people to these huge problems is a mystery
A spike in demand for electricity to power the growing network of plug-in cars could cripple the National Grid by 2040, an energy expert has warned today.
Mark Sait, chief executive of SaveMoneyCutCarbon believes that if UK electric car sales rise at the same rate as they have across the rest of Europe, it could result in blackouts and the grid crashing due to insufficient power supplies, similar to those experienced last week.
He warned: 'A rapid upsurge in hybrid and full electric vehicles could create real concerns.'
The uptake of electric cars in Britain is currently way behind other markets across the EU, the energy expert pointed out.
This is down to a number of factors, though the most significant centre around more enticing financial subsidies for the purchase of electric cars and a better charging infrastructure than what's on offer in the UK.
A report from the European Automobile Manufacturers' Association shows the sale of hybrid and full electric vehicles in Britain in the first quarter of 2019 increased by a modest 2.9 per cent in the last year. This compared to the EU average of 40 per cent.
Sait describes Britain as being at 'the starting blocks' of battery vehicle uptake, while in countries like Norway - which is one of the leading nations for electric car adoption - almost half of new models registered in 2018 were plug-in models.
But he warned that if Britain caught up with the rest of Europe in terms of electric car adoption, the National Grid would not be able to cope by 2040.
'The spike in demand from EVs could very well cause blackouts in certain areas of the UK, with there not being enough power generated, or particularly if the technology generating that power had not been upgraded,' he explained.
The National Grid has come under scrutiny in the last week following power cuts that caused travel chaos and left more than a million homes without electricity on Friday evening.
Operators blamed issues with two generators for the blackouts, with Ofgem demanding a full investigation for the cause of the power cuts.
Previous reports from the National Grid have said it would require an additional 20 per cent energy capacity by 2050 in preparation for an increased number of vehicles plugging into the mains.
However, Sait said these estimations were made without factoring in a significant rise in potential EV uptake in the UK similar to the rest of the EU.
The chances of more drivers being convinced to make the switch to electric vehicles is a real possibility in the coming years.
Models like the Volkswagen I.D. range are due to hit the market soon, offering genuine alternatives to combustion-engine models thanks to longer ranges, more performance, shorter charging times and - hopefully - more affordable prices.
Higher taxes on diesel cars in particular, restrictions from Ultra Low Emission Zones and Clean Air Zones and the impending ban on the sale of new vehicles with traditional engines will also see appetite for plug-in motors increase.
But Sait warned that the cost to improve the nation's electrical grid to cope with such increases in demand would be 'significant'.
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Greta Thunberg's two-week trip across Atlantic in 'zero-carbon yacht' may generate more emissions than it saves as two of the crew have to FLY to New York to bring the boat back to Europe
On Wednesday, the Swedish eco-campaigner left Plymouth on the Malizia II
Greta Thunberg's trans-Atlantic voyage in a 'zero-carbon yacht' has been rocked by revelations that crew will fly to New York in a gas-guzzling plane to bring the boat back to Europe.
It is claimed that this would generate more emissions than the yacht saves and threatens to leave the 16-year-old's plans to chart an environmentally friendly route to the United States in tatters.
On Wednesday, the Swedish eco-campaigner left Plymouth on the Malizia II for a two-week journey to the United Nations headquarters where she will address a climate change meeting.
But last night, it was confirmed that two crew will have to fly to the US east coast city to man the 60ft yacht on its return.
'We added the trip to New York City at very short notice, and as a result two people will need to fly over to the US in order to bring the boat back,' a Team Malizia spokeswoman told the Times.
She added: 'The world has not yet found a way to make it possible to cross an ocean without a carbon footprint.'
And a further two sailors who are currently on board the Malizia II with Greta may use air travel to get back to Europe.
Greta, who is taking a sabbatical year from school, will be joining large-scale climate demonstrations and speaking at the UN Climate Action Summit hosted by secretary-general Antonio Guterres in New York in September.
She is also planning to visit Canada and Mexico before travelling to this year's UN climate conference, which is taking place in Santiago, Chile, in December, making her journeys by train and bus.
The two-week sailing trip means she can attend the summits without using planes or cruise ships which cause greenhouse gas emissions.
She said her adventure would have challenges including seasickness but said many people in the world were suffering a lot more than that.
To keep herself occupied during the journey she has books, board games and a rabbit teddy bear, which was a gift from a friend.
The journey takes about two weeks - the yacht can travel at speeds of around 43mph but will be heading into the wind for much of the time so will be slower, and the captain wants a smooth ride.
Before setting sail, Herrmann said: 'The objective is to arrive safe and sound in New York.'
The yacht is made for racing, with foils, or wings, that lift it out of the water for a faster and smoother ride.
Inside it is sparse, fitted with high-tech navigation equipment, an on-board ocean laboratory to monitor CO2 levels in the water, and four bunks - Herrmann and Casiraghi will share one, sleeping in turns.
The toilet is a blue plastic bucket, complete with a biodegradable bag that can be thrown overboard, and meals will be freeze-dried packets of vegan food mixed with water heated on a tiny gas stove.
But state-of-the-art solar panels adorn the yacht's deck and sides while there are two hydro-generators, which together provide all the electricity they need on board.
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How far can Tesla's Model 3 really go? On-road measurements reveal the 'affordable' electric car falls short of its claimed range by 90 MILES
Tesla's Model 3 is arguably the most hotly anticipated electric car yet.
Not just because some customers have had to wait (and in many cases are still waiting) more than two years after originally placing their deposits, but also due to the promises that it most usable than any modestly-priced battery-powered rival on sale.
However, new real-world measurements have revealed that the £36,500-plus car doesn't match the driving distances being claimed.
In fact, the most expensive variant it sells in the UK was found to fall 90 miles short of its 'official' range.
Consumer car title What Car? has ran two versions of the most affordable model in the American firm's fleet through its own controlled Real Range test.
These measurements are used to determine what the actual ranges of electric cars are in normal driving scenarios, rather than customers having to rely on the claimed figures from laboratory tests that tend not to be achievable in the real world.
The first of the two models tested was the Standard Range Plus. This is the entry-spec version that can go from zero to 60mph in 5.3 seconds, has a top speed of 140mph and costs £36,490. And its 'official' range is quoted as 254 miles.
Official ranges are the figures achieved during Worldwide Harmonised Light Vehicle Test Procedure (WLTP) cycles, which is the measure used for all official miles per gallon stats in conventional vehicles and ranges of electric-powered cars.
However, the What Car? test found that the real-world range of a much lower 196 miles.
That's 58 miles shy of the claimed distance between charges - almost a quarter (23 per cent) less than the Tesla sales brochure will lead you to believe.
And the difference between claimed and real-world driving distance is even greater in the most expensive variant.
The Model 3 Performance, which is the priciest sold to UK customers costing £49,140, is the quickest of Tesla's small saloon. It can hit 60mph from a standstill in just 3.2 seconds and 162mph flat out.
The range is longer than any other example in the line-up, too, according to WLTP figures.
It's advertised to be able to go for 329 miles on a full charge - which is the equivalent of travelling from London to Carlisle without having to stop to replenish the batteries.
However, What Car?'s measurement found the real range was just 239 miles. That's 90 miles short of the claimed figure and 27 per cent less than what official stats suggests.
If you are planning a trip from London to Carlisle in one, it means you will have to stop shortly after passing Wigan to plug the vehicle in, or else be stranded somewhere on the side of the M6.
While these figures are fairly disappointing - especially for the handful of Britons who have already taken delivery of their Model 3 - it isn't an anomaly when you compare it to the rest of the electric-car market.
When What Car? has tested battery-electric vehicles from other manufacturers in the past, the range tends to fall well short of claims.
For instance, the VW e-Golf in the real world is 69 miles short of the official figure. However, with a claimed range of just 186 miles, it means it is 37 per cent away from the advertised distance quoted for a full battery charge.
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The junk science behind the anti-birth movement
Harry and Meghan’s two-child pledge is based on some seriously dodgy assumptions.
Prince Harry and Meghan Markle have committed to having a maximum of two children because of the damage that having too many children apparently causes the planet. The couple is not alone. Climate activists in the BirthStrike movement have vowed to have no children at all until governments get a handle on climate change. In fact, for a long time now, neo-Malthusians and eco-puritans have opposed childbirth on environmental grounds.
Their argument against childbirth goes like this: climate change is caused by man-made CO2. People consume things over their lifetimes, and, in the process, create more CO2. More people means more CO2, therefore more people can only be a bad thing. The broadminded among us might think that society contains more than just individual consumers. But once environmentalists accepted this kind of kindergarten logic, it was only a matter of time before they began to calculate just how much CO2 each new child is to blame for.
At Oregon State University, statistician Paul Murtaugh and oceanographer Michael Schlax produced one of the most widely cited and influential papers on the link between childbirth and climate change. It estimates the extra emissions created by the average individual when they have children. Importantly, it factors in not just the CO2 associated with each new child’s birth, but also the CO2 associated with that child’s descendants. The basic premise is that ‘a person is responsible for the carbon emissions of his descendants’. The authors qualify this by weighting each descendant by their relatedness to that person. According to the researchers’ methodology, ‘a mother and father are each responsible for half of the emissions of their offspring, and a quarter of the emissions of their grandchildren’. The inevitable conclusion is that, ‘The summed emissions of a person’s descendants… may far exceed the lifetime emissions produced by the original parent’.
The study looks as far forward as the year 2400. It factors in current and future fertility rates, rates of mortality, and CO2 per head – as estimated by the US Environmental Protection Agency’s Personal Emissions Calculator. It concludes that while right-on, environmental changes to lifestyle ‘must propagate through future generations in order to be fully effective’, an American woman could, by adopting such changes, only save 486 US tons of CO2 emissions in her lifetime. By contrast, were she to have two children, she would add more than 18,000 tons of CO2 to the atmosphere after her death.
The problems with this approach are clear. First, the potential development of carbon-capture technologies or carbon-neutral energy is completely overlooked – even by 2400, four centuries from now, the study expects us to be using the same production methods. Secondly, the methodology is a form of double-counting: parents are not only held ‘responsible’ for their own emissions, but also for the emissions of each of their children and their children’s descendants. And finally, how useful is it to calculate average emissions when we live in a society where some take the Clapham Omnibus while the likes of Prince Harry and his offspring will fly by private jet?
In 2017, an anti-natalist paper from the Centre for Sustainability Studies in Lund, Sweden also made headlines. Researchers Seth Wynes and Kimberly Nicholas repeat the flawed Oregon methodology. Their main concern is with educating adolescents, who ‘can act as a catalyst to change their household’s behaviour’. They complain that current textbooks ‘overwhelmingly focus on moderate or low-impact actions’.
Again, the researchers’ framework is entirely personal. Technological solutions or inequality don’t feature. They conclude that when it comes to lowering our personal emissions of CO2, having one fewer child beats, by a country mile, even drastic actions like giving up all car travel (including in electric vehicles) and meat. According to their calculations, as an average per year, in developed countries, having one fewer child saves 58.6 metric tons of greenhouse gases; eschewing cars, just 2.4 tons; avoiding a return transatlantic flight,1.6 tons; and eating a plant-based diet, 0.8 tons. The researchers call for the Western world to ‘improve existing educational and communication structures’ to match this reality – in other words, to indoctrinate teenagers at school to have as few children as possible in later life.
These two widely cited papers make up much of the pseudoscience behind today’s neo-Malthusian movements. They discount the possibility of technological solutions, ignore economic inequalities and the fact that there is more to the economy than just consumption. Indeed, they echo Margaret Thatcher’s famous statement that there is ‘no such thing’ as society: that there is only ‘the acts of individuals and families’. And like Thatcher, they are anti-human and reactionary. Instead of arguing for technological progress, the researchers would prefer to indoctrinate the young – who, ideally, can also be co-opted to tell their parents how to behave.
In fact, there is even something of the Old Testament about this movement. In terms of CO2 emissions, they indict the ‘iniquity of fathers’ (and mothers). If these neo-Malthusians have their way, every child, ‘to the third and fourth generation’ and beyond, will grow up regretting their parents’ decision to have them.
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Reports of the Great Barrier Reef’s doom are exaggerated
Master reef guide Natalie Lobartolo has a first-hand window into what the world thinks about the Great Barrier Reef. She says the most common comment from tourists after they experience the reef and waters around Lady Musgrave Island where she works is: “I thought the reef was dead but it’s amazing.”
Federal Environment Minister Sussan Ley had a similar experience last week when she snorkelled over two reefs off Cairns.
On her first official visit to the Great Barrier Reef, Ley said she found it difficult to reconcile what she saw in the water with what had been said around the world. “The reef is not dead,” was her appraisal. “It is not dying. I would not even say it is on life support.
“Tourism operators want a very clear message that the reef is definitely not dead, that it is amazing and one of the true wonders of the world and it is worth visiting.
“Having seen it for myself I can certainly endorse that. That is a really clear message that I want people to hear.”
The results of first-hand observations from two snorkels may not meet the test of scientific rigour. But along the Queensland coast there is a pushback that challenges the now familiar message of the reef’s doom.
A lecture tour by controversial marine scientist Peter Ridd has attracted hundreds of people and is only half way through a program that stretches throughout the sugar cane centres from Bundaberg to Cairns.
The tour has been promoted by the sugar cane and other agriculture industries that face the prospect of strict new regulations under a reef water quality bill before state parliament. Liberal National Party MPs at state and federal level have embraced Ridd’s call for greater quality assurance of the science. But conservation groups are alarmed Ridd is getting a platform to express his views.
Ridd was sacked by James Cook University after being disciplined for not being collegiate. That sacking was ruled unlawful by the Federal Court but its finding is being appealed by JCU.
Like it or not, science groups have been forced to engage with Ridd’s message that the findings of key reef research should be checked.
Ridd’s message on his lecture tour is that coral cover has not changed and that there is still excellent coral cover on all 3000 reefs across the Great Barrier Reef system. He also says there is almost no land sediment on the reef from run-off from agricultural processes.
Ridd’s findings have struck a chord with canegrowers, who are being asked to change their practices to satisfy UNESCO requirements that Australia is respecting its obligations to retain World Heritage status for the reef.
A suite of measures by the Abbott government, including a ban on dredge spoils from new port developments being dumped in reef waters, was enough to remove the threat of an “in-danger” listing for the reef.
Since then there have been two bleaching events and damaging cyclones that have had a big impact on coral cover, which is now recovering.
The Great Barrier Reef is again due to be considered by the World Heritage Committee next year and the proposed Queensland water quality regulations are seen as part of a broader campaign to keep the reef off the in-danger watch list.
Environment groups are pushing for more regulation and most likely would welcome intervention by UNESCO. But the bruising campaign last time damaged the global reputation of the reef among potential tourists and left the tourism industry crying foul.
Ridd says this is a prime reason to get the science right. He says reef science is affecting every major industry in north Queensland: mining, agriculture and tourism.
The legislation before state parliament will hurt agriculture badly, he says. It sets nutrient and sediment pollution load limits for each of the six reef catchments and limits fertiliser use for crops and grain production, covering agricultural activities in all Great Barrier Reef catchments.
The message Ridd wants people to take home from his talks is that there has been a massive exaggeration of threats to the Great Barrier Reef. He accuses the reef institutions of producing untrustworthy results because of inadequate quality assurance systems and says that must be corrected before any new legislation is introduced.
And he says there is an urgent need for an independent body to run through the Auditor-General’s office and examine the science used for public policy.
Bundaberg Canegrowers manager Dale Holliss says Ridd has allowed many to articulate concerns they may have already had. “Peter Ridd basically when he talks says … it is the only science we have, so we do need a process where we actually check it,” Holliss says. However, environment groups say Ridd’s tour has been “simply spreading misinformation”.
The Australian Coral Reef Society says several of Ridd’s claims are not true, while others could be characterised as straw-man arguments that ignore much greater challenges faced by the Great Barrier Reef.
“As the reef is facing fundamental challenges from rapidly warming oceans, it is important that governments take action to support a rapid reduction in greenhouse gas emissions while taking all available steps to reduce the amount of sediments, nutrients and pesticides that reach the reef lagoon,” the society argues.
Ley says she is “not downplaying the seriousness of climate change” but acknowledges that some people are understandably confused. “Tourism operators are saying they want somewhere to go to say that is the truth,” she says. “My answer is they can go to the Australian Institute of Marine Science.”
So what does AIMS say about water quality and the issues raised by Ridd? In a statement to Inquirer, AIMS chief executive Paul Hardisty says there is a natural improvement in water quality from inshore to offshore reefs because inshore reefs are exposed to increased sediment from wind and rough seas.
Mid-shelf and offshore reefs typically have better water quality as these regions are flushed more frequently with waters from the Coral Sea. As such, material delivered into the inshore region via rivers remains close to the coast for extended periods.
When it comes to water quality on the Great Barrier Reef, researchers agree it is uncommon for sediment plumes to regularly reach outer-shelf reefs. During flood events, most sediments are deposited relatively close to river mouths.
Hardisty says enhanced sediment loads from farmed catchments increase the amount (and duration) of sediment that is resuspended locally around river mouths, on inshore reefs close to rivers and along the inner shelf.
He says analysis of 11 years of satellite imagery for the whole Great Barrier Reef shows water clarity is significantly reduced for up to six months after every big flood from the central and southern rivers, but not so much from the far northern rivers.
Several studies have shown fine particles of nutrient-enriched and organic-rich sediments can settle on inshore and mid-shelf reefs during calm periods and have the potential to kill young corals within 48 hours and adult corals in three to seven days, depending on the species.
Hardisty agrees there are many conditions that increase nutrient concentrations, including oceanographic processes and upwelling, liberation of nutrients contained in sediments, and inputs from riverine systems that may be enhanced above natural levels by residual nutrients from agricultural or industrial activities.
The AIMS says long-term monitoring of cycles of ecosystem decline and recovery tells us that the Great Barrier Reef is under stress. Its latest condition report, published last month, found average hard coral cover had continued to decline in the central and southern Great Barrier Reef while stabilising in the northern region this year.
This decline is because of numerous and successive disturbances including outbreaks of the crown-of-thorns starfish, tropical cyclones and coral bleaching. The central region’s highest recorded average coral cover was 22 per cent in 2016 compared with 12 per cent this year, and the southern region had 43 per cent coral cover in 1988 compared with 24 per cent this year. Hard coral cover in the northern region increased slightly from 11 per cent in 2017 to 14 per cent this year but was down from 30 per cent in 1988.
Hardisty says disturbances such as bleaching, cyclones and crown-of-thorns outbreaks are occurring more often, are longer-lasting and more severe.
This means coral reefs have less time to recover. Right now, however, there is still plenty to see.
SOURCE
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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here.
Preserving the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here
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18 August, 2019
Trump Says He Wants to Buy Greenland. Here's Why
President Donald Trump has expressed an interest in buying Greenland, an autonomous Danish territory, according to a report published yesterday (Aug. 15) by The Wall Street Journal.
Why does Trump want the United States to buy the world's biggest island? The reason, in large part, is likely that Greenland is rich in natural resources, including iron ore, lead, zinc, diamonds, gold, rare-earth elements, uranium and oil, according to the Brookings Institution, a nonprofit public-policy organization in Washington, D.C.
Extracting Greenland's natural resources, however, isn't a straightforward enterprise. Much of the mining and drilling depends on global supply and demand, not to mention navigating Greenland's severe climate and terrain. For instance, oil production probably won't take place for at least another decade, according to the Brookings Institution's 2014 report, because "the conditions in Greenland are very harsh and technically demanding and the costs of extraction high."
Mining projects show more promise. The Greenland government has endeavored to create environmental and regulatory safeguards while, at the same time, attracting investors, according to the report. The Canadian company AEX Gold is already mining the precious metal in the Nanortalik Gold Belt in southern Greenland, according to Mining Global, a mining news outlet. And New York-based Greenland Ruby A/S opened its ruby and pink-sapphire mining operation in Aappaluttoq, in southwest Greenland, in 2017.
But buying Greenland itself would also come with a hefty cost. The territory, home to more than 57,000 people as of 2018, relies on Denmark for two-thirds of its budget revenue, and it also has high rates of suicide, alcoholism and unemployment, according to the BBC. Such problems would benefit from investments from social and government service programs.
What's more, politicians in Greenland and Denmark don't seem eager to sell. In a tweet posted this morning (Aug. 16), Greenland's Ministry of Foreign Affairs said, "#Greenland is rich in valuable resources such as minerals, the purest water and ice, fish stocks, seafood, renewable energy and is a new frontier for adventure tourism. We're open for business, not for sale."
This isn't the first time the United States has expressed an interest in purchasing Greenland. The territory is located in a strategic spot, just below the Arctic Ocean, between Canada and Europe. President Andrew Jackson's administration (1829-1837) floated the idea of buying the island, as did an 1867 report by the U.S. State Department, the BBC said. President Harry Truman even offered Denmark $100 million for Greenland in 1946, though nothing came of the proposal.
SOURCE
https://www.livescience.com/why-trump-wants-to-buy-greenland.html
‘Global Temperature’ — Why Should We Trust A Statistic That Might Not Even Exist?
The United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is quite certain Earth will be in trouble if the global temperature exceeds pre-industrial levels by 1.5 degrees Celsius or more. But how can anyone know? According to university research, “global temperature” is a meaningless concept.
“Discussions on global warming often refer to ‘global temperature.’ Yet the concept is thermodynamically as well as mathematically an impossibility,” says Science Daily, paraphrasing Bjarne Andresen, a professor at the University of Copenhagen’s Niels Bohr Institute, one of three authors of a paper questioning the “validity of a ‘global temperature.'”
Science Daily explains how the “global temperature” is determined.
“The temperature obtained by collecting measurements of air temperatures at a large number of measuring stations around the globe, weighing them according to the area they represent, and then calculating the yearly average according to the usual method of adding all values and dividing by the number of points.”
But a “temperature can be defined only for a homogeneous system,” says Andresen. The climate is not regulated by a single temperature. Instead, “differences of temperatures drive the processes and create the storms, sea currents, thunder, etc. which make up the climate”.
While it’s “possible to treat temperature statistically locally,” says Science Daily, “it is meaningless to talk about a global temperature for Earth. The globe consists of a huge number of components which one cannot just add up and average. That would correspond to calculating the average phone number in the phone book. That is meaningless.”
There are two ways to measure temperature: geometrically and mathematically. They can produce a large enough difference to show a four-degree gap, which is sufficient to drive “all the thermodynamic processes which create storms, thunder, sea currents, etc.,” according to Science Daily.
So if global temperature is unknowable, how can the IPCC and the entire industry of alarmists and activists be so sure there exists a threshold we cannot pass? Of course the IPCC says it knows the unknowable. In its latest report, released this month, it yet again maintained that the global temperature must “kept to well below 2ºC, if not 1.5oC” above pre-industrial levels to avoid disaster.
A few years after the University of Copenhagen report was published, University of Guelph economist Ross McKitrick, one of the report’s authors, noted in another paper that “number of weather stations providing data . . . plunged in 1990 and again in 2005. The sample size has fallen by over 75% from its peak in the early 1970s, and is now smaller than at any time since 1919.”
“There are serious quality problems in the surface temperature data sets that call into question whether the global temperature history, especially over land, can be considered both continuous and precise. Users should be aware of these limitations, especially in policy-sensitive applications.”
The global warming alarmists, who have seized and now control the narrative — because, like a child who won’t stop crying for a toy he can’t have, they refuse give up — have a credibility problem. Actually, they have several. The public will eventually forget about them all, though, just as it has overlooked the mistakes by those who predicted other catastrophes that never arrived, such as Y2K, the new Ice Age, acid rain, mass human starvation, overpopulation, peak oil, and the Silent Spring.
After all, humans have been watching Doomsday prophets fail throughout history. They’ve been so common we hardly notice them.
SOURCE
My beef with Goldsmiths’ burger ban
Universities are turning from centres of free thought into factories of conformism.
BEN PILE
There has been a lot of climate news this silly season. Amid the stories of Greta in a boat, Greta in a suit and, soon, Greta walking on water, this week we learned that Goldsmiths, University of London is banning the sale of beef from its campus. Goldsmiths’ other eco-initiatives include a 10p charge on single-use plastics, such as bottles and cups, a greater emphasis on climate change in the college’s teaching, and the campus will be entirely powered by green energy.
Professor Frances Corner, the college’s new warden, said ‘it is immediately obvious that our staff and students care passionately about the future of our environment and that they are determined to help deliver the step change we need to cut our carbon footprint drastically and as quickly as possible’. But if it really were true that Goldsmiths staff and students ‘care passionately’ about the causes being espoused, there would be no need to ban beef or introduce a levy on plastics. Customers at the college’s cafes would not be buying them, and before long they would have been withdrawn from sale due to lack of demand. Defenders of Goldsmiths’ petty green authoritarianism argue that it will create no hardship. Perhaps not. Beef-eating students can simply buy food from somewhere else in the area.
What the beef ban and these other edicts really signify is the tendency of institutions of all kinds to use ‘the environment’ as the pivot around which their roles and their relationships to the rest of us are transformed. Universities were once premised on the idea of a free exchange of ideas and independent research. But Goldsmiths’ new policies signal an expectation of both ideological and lifestyle conformity. This will run through the college’s administrative policies, the syllabus and the habits of its staff and students.
It is a weak-minded student that needs a ban to enforce what he or she already ‘cares passionately’ about. And it is a weak-minded student or professor that fails to interrogate the claim that the zealous observance of green fatwas will make any difference to the world. Weak-minded academics will diligently search for a casus belli for the war on meat, starting with the battle against beef. But they will be steered away from ever interrogating green ideology at work at Goldsmiths and across almost all of Britain’s public institutions. Universities have effectively become vegan sausage factories.
Those that can’t teach, preach. Worse, those that fear independence of mind, police. Environmentalism of the kind epitomised by Goldsmiths is only superficially about the environment. At issue is not the future of the planet, but the obedience of both students and the broader population to ecological diktats.
Academia has a new function. Its role in society has regressed – degenerated – to that once occupied by the clergy, when places of learning were centres of religious orthodoxy. Eschewing the Enlightenment, the environment (and other woke causes) now preoccupy researchers’ passions, allowing them to pontificate on the petty regulation of lifestyle rather than understanding the world and finding solutions to its problems.
In the green worldview and in green institutions, there is no problem that cannot be solved by obedience. Freedom is off the menu.
SOURCE
The Nazi Roots Of The Global Warming Scare
Generally speaking, the first person in a debate who compares their opponent to Hitler or the Nazis at that moment loses the argument. When the Third Reich is invoked, it's usually clear evidence that that person's position is so weak that they have had to resort to a gross misrepresentation of the other's position.
There are exceptions, of course, because sometimes the Nazi label fittingly applies. Sometimes the lineage of a movement, institution or political figure can traced right back to the German fascist regime.
This is the case with today's environmentalism, according to a one-time British investment banker.
"If you look at what the Nazis were doing in the 1930s, in their environmental policies, virtually every theme you see in the modern environmental movement, the Nazis were doing," said Rupert Darwall, author of "Green Tyranny," in a recent interview with Encounter Books.
"I think actually the most extraordinary thing that I came across was this quote from Adolf Hitler where he told an aide once, 'I'm not interested in politics. I'm interested in changing people's lifestyles.' Well, that could be ... that's extraordinarily contemporary. That is what the modern environmental movement is all about. It's about changing people's lifestyles," said Darwall, who is no crackpot on the fringe and whose background includes duties as a special advisor to the United Kingdom's Chancellor of the Exchequer.
The Fuhrer's interest in "changing people's lifestyles" is, not at all shockingly, similar to the goals of today's climate fanatics who want to destroy capitalism and replace it with an economic system — run by them, naturally — that would certainly change lifestyles in the West.
Darwall further notes in the interview that "the Nazis were the first political party in the world to have a wind power program," and were also opposed to eating meat, a delightful and nutritious activity that the warming alarmists consider a sin.
When interviewer Ben Weingarten asks Darwall about the "link between Nazism and Communism, and the trajectory from that (initial) union to today's climate movement," the author provides a brief history lesson that is inconvenient for the alarmist community.
The union fits perfectly, of course, with the watermelon analogy that explains today's environmentalist excesses — green on the outside, red on the inside.
It also reminds us of the validated-many-times-over aphorism that when a socialist or communist is thrown out of the window of polite society, he returns through the front door as an environmentalist.
Darwall, who seems uninterested in sugarcoating his observations, also discusses "the 'shock troops' of the climate industrial complex," which he identifies as nongovernmental organizations such as "Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth," and other "large foundations," as well as "the Bill McKibbens of this world."
Other Nazi parallels with climate alarmists and radical environmentalists include their efforts "to delegitimize dissent" and bully "people into silence," and suppressing arguments "not by having an argument but just making sure you don't have an argument," Darwall says.
In other words, brand skeptics as "deniers" and "anti-science" rubes so they'll shut up.
Accusing its political opponents of being Nazis is an exhausted trick of the left. Think of how many times that President Trump has been called Hitler of late. It doesn't tax the imagination greatly, though, to presume that this could be done to cover the left's own kinship with fascism.
SOURCE
Australian PM firm on climate change, in shades of Donald Trump
Scott Morrison has mirrored Donald Trump’s tough stand with G20 leaders in his negotiations with the Pacific Island Forum over climate change and coal — and emerged stronger as a result.
Australia refused to accept a communique that might satisfy the emotional needs of some regional leaders but would jeopardise Australia’s economic and regional security interests.
The red lines set by Australia were met and the final communique did not overstep progress made by the UN conference regarding the IPCC’s report on 1.5C warming.
The communique pulled back from mentioning coal or what actions member countries should take. Instead, leaders reaffirmed climate change as the single greatest threat to the livelihoods, security and wellbeing of the peoples of the Pacific and their commitment to the implementation of the Paris Agreement.
Leaders acknowledged the challenge for the forum would be maintaining regional solidarity in the face of more intense political engagement, which may serve to divide the forum collective.
Along with other nations, Australia is being called upon to lift its ambition on climate change action before an already agreed timetable set for next year.
Mr Morrison’s challenge is not to allow Australia’s position to be misrepresented by vested interests. Australia has a story to tell on climate change action that is at stark odds with how it is often portrayed. Last year, Australia was among the world’s top investors in renewable energy in absolute terms and the biggest on a per capita basis.
Billions of dollars have been set aside for land-based programs, which are a big new focus for the IPCC.
A telling point before the backdown of demands at the Pacific Island Forum was that leaders asked for Australia to provide details on what it actually was doing.
The understanding of some leaders had to that point been informed by media reports.
The lack of support shown by New Zealand leader Jacinda Ardern for Australia will no doubt be remembered, but is of little real consequence.
In terms of regional politics, the bigger concern is the disconnect between demands being made of Australia on fossil fuels and those of its strategic competitor, China. Australia is reducing coal use and providing cleaner alternatives for regional neighbours. But there is no meaningful demand that China cut its fossil fuel use or begin to reduce emissions until 2030.
Between January and June, China’s energy regulator has given the go-ahead to build 141 million tonnes of new annual coal production.
Chinese coal output rose 2.6 per cent in the first half of this year to 1.76 billion tonnes, and the China State Grid Corporation last month forecast that total coal-fired capacity was to grow by 25 per cent.
Given the rising stakes in the “Blue Pacific”, Mr Morrison would have been foolish to accept any invitation to accelerate Australia’s self-harm.
SOURCE
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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here.
Preserving the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here
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16 August, 2019
How Climate Change is Damaging our Roadways
Bad weather certainly can damage roads but whether such weather is now more frequent has been widely disputed
The growing number of flooding and wildfire events, coupled with increasing temperatures, is causing concern for the lifecycle of our highways and bridges
Since 1950, the number of record high temperature events in the United States has been increasing, while the number of record low temperature events has been decreasing. The U.S. has also witnessed increasing numbers of intense rainfall events along with disastrous wildfires, both of which are causing scientists concern for our nation's roads and bridges.
Infrastructure networks are the backbone of cities. Ensuring their resilience has become a vital aspect of governing and managing an economically viable and liveable city, but climate change is having a large impact on them. Today's roads and bridges have largely been designed and operated for historical climate conditions that are regularly exceeded and these extreme weather events are only making matters worse.
Flooding
Flooding is the most common and costly natural disaster in the United States, causing more than $830 billion in estimated losses since 2000. In addition to private property damage, deluges from hurricanes and other storms have washed out roads and bridges and flooded schools, hospitals and utilities. Events like the flooding of Interstate 10 in Phoenix in 2014, the Riverside County I-10 bridge washout in 2015 and Hurricanes Harvey and Maria in 2017 have revealed how vulnerable our transportation system can be to extreme flooding events.
Damages to roads and bridges caused by recent storms and flooding over the first half of 2019 are among the costliest in recent memory. Since January, FHWA officials directed $54.9 million in quick release funds to help states repair roads and bridges nationwide -- roughly three times higher than the $19.8 million awarded during the same period last year.
Climatic and extreme weather conditions affect the roadway infrastructure in a variety of ways and may increase exposure of roads, bridges and rails to environmental factors beyond original design considerations.
Storm Damage to Infrastructure Already Exceeds $1B in First Half of 2019
Wildfires
Recently, the California Department of Transportation (CALTRANS) has released new reports on the negative effects of climate change on the state’s highway system and infrastructure.
The reports, known as Climate Change Vulnerability Assessments, highlighted areas in Northern California and the Central Valley heavily impacted by extreme temperatures and frequent wildfires in recent years. The reports say extreme weather events association with climate change are already disrupting and damaging the state’s roadway infrastructure and has potential for more severe impacts in the future.
A previous vulnerability report conducted for the San Francisco Bay Area highlighted areas vulnerable to wildfire – combined with the resulting land erosion and flooding from storms – along with higher precipitation, sea level rise and storm surges.
That report showed that the 2016-2017 storm season caused severe flooding, landslides and coastal erosion totaling over $1.2 billion in highway damages statewide. Nearly $390 million of those damages occurred in the Bay Area.
Freeze/Thaw Cycles
A freeze thaw cycle occurs many times a year in northern climates and roadways are typically designed to withstand those changes. These cycles happen when moisture falls through the cracks in the road during the winter and moisture is frozen in place. When water is frozen, it expands and that causes the cracks in the pavement to grow larger. This cycle continues to repeat throughout winter, with the water being re-thawed sinking further under the road, then re-freezing and causing the cracks to expand even further.
However, as temperatures fluctuate to extremes due to climate change, the impact on our roadways becomes more severe. This calls for a paradigm shift in the approach generally followed for designing pavements.
How Changing Climate is Impacting the Construction Industry
In the highway environment, the factors of climate, soil, water, pavement structure and traffic are known to interact in freezing and thawing situations to the detriment of pavements. The exact nature of the physical processes that take place and the pavement response to freezing action are not well understood and more research is needed to combat these impacts to our infrastructure.
Solution: Resilient Infrastructure Planning
The recently introduced America’s Transportation Infrastructure Act authorizes $287 billion over five years from the Highway Trust Fund to maintain and repair road and bridge infrastructure across the country. It also includes language and the funding means to address the impacts of climate change and extreme weather events on our roads.
What really our future really needs is resilience. According to World Bank, there is a significant economic opportunity from investing in resilient infrastructure: the overall net benefit of doing so in developing countries would be $4.2 trillion over the lifetime of new infrastructure.
The U.S. continues to spend slightly more than one trillion dollars of buildings and infrastructure a year (according 2017 statistics) designed based on codes and standards that do not explicitly account for a changing climate. The impact of which could be felt for decades.
US Infrastructure Unprepared to Face the Storms
Congress must require that infrastructure investments consider future risks for all aspects of climate change.
By implementing stronger flood safeguards across the federal government, states can limit damage, reduce the need to rebuild after floods and potentially save billions of dollars in the face of these increasing costly storms. That coupled with designing roadways that can better withstand extreme heat and cold will deliver opportunities to extend the life cycle of these expensive assets.
SOURCE
Expensive climate change programs hurt the poor most
A new study confirms what conservatives have long suspected: Expensive climate change programs, such as the Green New Deal, would hurt the poor the most.
Researchers from the Euro-Mediterranean Center for Climate Change estimate that if every country participating in the Paris climate accord actually fulfilled its greenhouse gas emission reduction pledges, more than 3 million people will be pushed into poverty. That’s on top of the 1 billion people around the world who still don’t have electricity or any of the benefits that come with it — like clean running water, refrigeration, modern medical care, and home heating.
Reliable, affordable energy has the power to lift people from poverty. Making that energy less accessible is a disservice to both the less fortunate and to the environment.
History has shown that economic prosperity and environmental quality go hand in hand. Though the environmentalist Left loves to hate fossil fuels, our air and water are cleaner than ever because of them. The EPA’s six key airborne pollutants, including lead and ozone, are down 74% since 1970 — the cleanest on record. Scientific advancements, fueled by affordable energy and a thriving free market, have made our businesses more efficient and improved environmental technology.
Meanwhile, the green groups’ claims that fighting climate change equals fighting economic inequality doesn’t hold weight.
Though it’s impossible to truly quantify the cost of a proposal as expansive and vague as the Green New Deal, one new report estimates that implementing Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s pièce de résistance will cost up to $100,000 per household in the first year alone. That $100,000 isn’t the government’s money; it comes from the taxpayers who will also feel the strain on their wallets from higher electricity and fuel costs.
No country, state, or city has ever achieved 100% renewable energy, or even close, and costs have invariably gone up under programs attempting to force a switch to wind and solar. Paying more for energy doesn’t just mean a higher utility bill — those costs also balloon the price of essentially every transaction we could ever make. Living a safe, healthy, and comfortable life requires electricity, as does running a business.
When polled about climate change, Americans consistently say they aren’t willing to pay more to stave off the supposed watery doomsday on the horizon. An AP poll found that well over two-thirds of Americans wouldn’t consider paying just $10 more a month on their electricity bills. An even more damning poll in San Antonio, one of over 400 cities pledging to implement their own versions of the Paris accords, revealed more than half aren’t willing to pay a single penny.
It’s not that Americans don’t care about the environment; despite this poll data, climate change consistently ranks as a major policy concern. They recognize the costs simply aren’t worth strangling our economy and our quality of life.
The global reductions in greenhouse gas emissions proposed by the Paris Climate Accord, however unrealistic, are projected to reduce the temperature in 2100 by at most 0.17°. If we stop the temperature from rising two tenths of a degree but subject millions more people to poverty, will it have been worth it?
Protecting and preserving our natural environment should be a priority. But raging against climate change at the expense of human lives is no more than a pyrrhic victory.
The widespread adoption of fossil fuels coincides with the most rapid improvements in quality of life in recorded history, including life expectancy, hunger, education, infant mortality, child labor, economic freedom, gross domestic product, and more. The best path forward is to allow America to continue embracing our abundant, reliable, affordable energy to lift people here and abroad from poverty.
Politicians who claim their expensive environmental programs will solve economic injustice should take another look at the numbers.
SOURCE
3 Ways Trump’s New Regulations Will Better Protect Endangered Species
The Trump administration has just taken an important step in the effort to protect threatened and endangered species.
On Monday, the administration published final regulations that will improve implementation of the Endangered Species Act.
This law simply hasn’t worked. Over the law’s more than 45 years, only about 3% of the species listed as threatened or endangered have been removed from the list due to recovery.
To their credit, the Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service decided to take action. They recognized that a significant part of the problem is connected to how they have implemented the law.
Here are three of their important changes.
1. No longer treating threatened species as if they were endangered.
The Endangered Species Act applies its most significant protections to species classified as “endangered,” including very stringent prohibitions against activities that would harm species or their habitats. This includes severe restrictions on how private property owners can use their land.
But for threatened species, the Endangered Species Act’s general rule is that these stringent prohibitions don’t apply.
Unfortunately, the Fish and Wildlife Service has implemented the law in the exact opposite fashion: The general rule is that these prohibitions do apply to threatened species.
This misguided approach hurts conservation efforts by diverting time and resources away from where they are most needed. It also removes important incentives for private property owners. For example, if the stringent prohibitions didn’t apply to threatened species, private property owners would have the incentive to protect these species from becoming endangered in order to avoid these stringent prohibitions.
Fortunately, the final regulations would require the Fish and Wildlife Service to properly follow the law and treat endangered and threatened species differently from each other. This would be consistent with what Congress intended and follows what the National Marine Fisheries Service has been doing successfully for years.
This change would have no impact on threatened species that have already been listed. This only applies to future listed species.
2. Promoting much-needed transparency.
The Endangered Species Act requires that science alone should determine whether to list a species. The costs of protecting a species has nothing to do with whether it is endangered or threatened.
However, the federal government has used this science-only requirement as an excuse to prohibit the identification of the benefits and costs of listing a species.
Based on the final regulations, the federal government would still make listing decisions without considering costs, but would start to identify and communicate the impacts of these listing decisions.
There is nothing novel about informing the public about cost data that isn’t used in agency decision-making. This is exactly what the Environmental Protection Agency does when designating the National Ambient Air Quality Standards.
When legislators and the public know what the actual costs and benefits are for conserving species, they can better understand the Endangered Species Act and how existing law might be changed to achieve desired policy outcomes.
3. Stopping critical habitat designations that don’t help to conserve species.
Under the Endangered Species Act, the federal government designates critical habitat for listed species, which may include areas that are not occupied by the species. These unoccupied areas, however, must be essential to the conservation of the species.
The new final regulations would help to ensure any unoccupied areas are truly essential, and therefore help to prevent extreme situations, such as what happened in Louisiana.
In that case, the Fish and Wildlife Service determined that 1,544 acres of land in Louisiana was “critical habitat” for an endangered species known as the dusky gopher frog. This was despite the fact the dusky gopher frog has not been seen in Louisiana in over 50 years and couldn’t even survive on the property.
As the Pacific Legal Foundation’s Mark Miller, who represented the property owners in the case, recently stated, “The feds may as well have labeled this Louisiana property critical habitat for a polar bear. It would have done just as much good.”
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The administration’s new final regulations are designed to better protect species. They may pose a problem for those who are more interested in blocking development than the welfare of threatened and endangered species. For those though who want to improve recovery efforts, these regulations are an important step forward.
SOURCE
EPA right to grant waivers to refiners under Renewable Fuel Standard
Americans for Limited Government President Rick Manning today issued the following statement praising the EPA for granting waivers to distressed oil refiners under the Renewable Fuel Standard:
“The Environmental Protection Agency is right to grant waivers to a limited number of distressed small U.S. oil refiners from the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS.) The RFS requires all refiners to blend biofuels like ethanol into gasoline or purchase credits from others that do in order to remain in business. While these waivers might disappoint the corn lobby which would rather bankrupt small refiners through the cost of credits than give an inch in their demand for fealty to ethanol, the EPA’s waiver decision balances the mistaken federal government policy to promote burning corn in our automobile engines with the financial needs of refiners who foot the cost of adding corn to superior performing oil in making gasoline.”
SOURCE
CLIMATE POLICY DISAGREEMENT BETWEEN AUSTRALIA AND NEW ZEALAND: A ROUNDUP
Three current articles below
Australian radio jock blasts 'clown' New Zealand PM Jacinda Ardern for lecturing Australia's PM on climate change
During the Pacific Islands Forum in Tuvalu - an independent island nation in the South Pacific - Ardern warned that the Morrison Government 'will have to answer to the Pacific' on global warming.
Morrison is under pressure from the 18 members of the forum to sign a statement which calls for the world to quickly stop using coal to fight global warming.
But the 2GB radio host urged Mr Morrison to fire back at New Zealand's leader, branding her a 'complete clown' after she pledged her nation would have a carbon neutral economy by 2015.
'She is a joke this woman, an absolute and utter light-weight. These people are an absolute joke and Jacinda Ardern is the biggest joke.'
This morning, Jones said of Ardern: 'Here she is preaching on global warming and saying that we've got to do something about climate change.
'If you want to talk about the figures… the fact is New Zealand's carbon dioxide has grown by 10.8 per cent per capita since 1990. Ours has grown by 1.8 per cent.'
Many of Jones's listeners on Facebook were on board with his comments called Ms Ardern a 'lightweight'.
One fan said: 'Couldn’t agree more with Alan Jones. Tell it like it is. NZ must DUMP Ardern ASAP before the country loses all credibility.'
Jones doubled down on his position on climate change on Facebook, going on to accuse Ms Ardern of excluding agriculture and methane from her calculations, because they 'contribute half of New Zealand's greenhouse gas emissions.'
'When it comes to fossil fuel power generation, coal, oil, gas, biomass - which is dirtier than Australian black coal - New Zealand gets 67.2 per cent; we get 84.8,' Jones said.
'But when it comes to wind and solar which she's in love with, we get 12.1 per cent, New Zealand 0.93 per cent.'
Jones claimed neither Australia or New Zealand slashing emissions would stop climate change.
'The point is, no matter what either of us does, there will be no impact,' he said.
Ardern said New Zealand was committed to helping ensure the global temperature increase was kept to 1.5 degrees.
In Tuvalu on Wednesday, Morrison vouched that Australia would be a 'champion' for the environment in the Pacific.
However, reports have claimed the country's negotiators are working to water down an official communique about climate change.
SOURCE
NZ Foreign Minister walks back Jacinda Ardern’s carbon challenge
Ardern depends on the support of Peters to stay in office so she will have to listen to his realistic comments and tone down her virtue signalling
NZ Foreign Minister Winston Peters has walked back his prime minister’s challenge to Scott Morrison to explain Australia’s position on climate change, saying Pacific nations need to look at the “big picture”, including China’s massive coal-fired economy.
The NZ deputy PM told ABC radio this morning that calls for Australia to “step-up” on climate change were a “bit of a paradox” as many Pacific countries were seeking cheap loans from China “on the back of coal-fired everything”.
Mr Peters’ comments came after PM Jacinda Ardern said every nation needed to “do its bit” to fight climate change, and “Australia has to answer to the Pacific” for its own emissions policies.
“There’s a big picture we have to contemplate where we have to ensure that when we act in this big picture, we act with consistency and integrity,” Mr Peters said.
The Foreign Minister acknowledged that the island nations were desperately concerned about their long-term longevity, but said China’s emissions also needed to be factored into the discussion.
“You need to look at everybody, not just Australia, but also who is getting that coal and what things they are doing with it.”
He encouraged Pacific Islands Forum leaders meeting in Tuvalu to “look at all the details”, and downplayed concerns Mr Morrison was out of step with his counterparts.
In conciliatory comments after Ms Ardern said Australia would be held accountable by the Pacific for its emissions policies, Mr Peters said he was “slightly worried” there was an outward perception Mr Morrison was “somehow acting incorrectly” when that wasn’t the “real picture at all.”
PIF leaders this morning went into a retreat to negotiate the final wording of the Fanufuti Declaration, which small island states want to include a strong statement about transitioning away from coal, limiting temperatures to 1.5 degrees, and replenishing the UN’s Green Climate Fund.
Mr Morrison, who is pushing back against all three demands while simultaneously defending his “Pacific step-up”, told counterparts the nation’s “coal dependency has been falling”, and “record renewables investments” was underway across Australia.
It’s understood he will contrast China’s environmental performance, including its massive reliance on coal-fired power, to that of Australia.
China has 981,000MW of installed coal generation capacity, compared to Australia’s 25,150MW.
Mr Morrison has committed an extra $500 million this week to Pacific climate change resilience projects, on top of $300 million announced by the Turnbull government.
Ms Ardern today announced she would set aside $150m of New Zealand’s $300m global climate change development assistance to the Pacific, but did not provide additional funding.
When asked whether Australia was at risk of alienating Pacific nations because of its climate change stance, Mr Peters said the island countries should remember Australia has been a “great neighbour” to the Pacific. “They should remember who has been their long term and short term friends,” he said.
SOURCE
Easy for NZ PM to point the finger at Australian climate policy
Demanding Australia abandon its coal production and exports for the good of the climate in the Pacific is akin to asking New Zealand to give up its love affair with sheep.
New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern is naive if she believes such moves would be economically feasible or in the best interests of regional stability.
New Zealand under Ardern may be a poster child at this week’s Pacific Islands Forum for setting a 2050 ambition for her country’s carbon neutrality.
But it has only been possible because less than 20 per cent of New Zealand’s electricity comes from fossil fuels and its biggest source of emissions, agriculture, has been given a free pass.
Most New Zealand power comes from hydro, geothermal and, increasingly, wind.
In terms of historic performance, New Zealand just scraped through the first Kyoto round of emissions cuts and failed to sign up to a legally binding target for the second. New Zealand parted company with Europe and Australia and instead joined Japan, Canada and Russia in a non-binding commitment for 2020.
In 2015, after barely securing a surplus in credits for Kyoto’s first period, New Zealand said it would apply the 123.7 million unit excess to its non-binding 2020 emissions reduction target — something it now criticises Australia for wanting to do with the Paris Agreement. Greenhouse gas emissions figures are notoriously difficult to compare because of different treatments of land-use contributions. But without taking these into account it is clear that Australia’s challenge is 10 times bigger than that of New Zealand.
Figures compiled by the European Commission show Australia’s emissions without land use rose to 402 million tonnes in 2017, up from 275 million in 1990. New Zealand’s comparative emissions were 36.8 million tonnes in 2017, up from 24 million tonnes in 1990.
For perspective, China’s emissions were 10.9 billion tonnes.
The UN Green Climate Fund is another case in point. Australia gave the body $200 million between 2015 and last year but has pulled out after a meltdown in governance and confidence.
Climate groups are asking Australia to up its contribution to $400m a year. But Scott Morrison has made clear he would prefer to direct spending through the Pacific region.
New Zealand’s contribution to the Green Climate Fund was a tiny $3m by comparison, but Australia’s $500m contribution to regional projects, through a partial rebadging of foreign aid, did not win it any points.
The hard fact for Australia is that Pacific neighbours represent a potent force in the geopolitics of global climate change negotiations and enjoy a close alliance with non-government groups.
WWF said Australia’s $500m in Pacific funding must be accompanied by a plan to reach net zero emissions by 2050. This means reducing domestic emissions by 45 per cent on 2005 levels by 2030 and phasing out thermal coal exports by the same year.
Including a ban on coal exports, the nation’s biggest export earner, would make the challenge all the more difficult for Australia. As a result, Australia’s strategic ambitions in the Pacific region more broadly have been caught up in other concerns.
SOURCE
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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here.
Preserving the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here
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15 August, 2019
Shocking Nasa images reveal how enormous Iceland glacier Okjokull has VANISHED in three decades thanks to soaring temperatures in the Arctic
Note the dog that didn't bark. And it didn't bark for a good reason. Iceland has huge amounts of volcanic heat that periodically bursts through to the surface. So that is why the people below did not claim that the glacial melting decribed was due to global warming. It was most probably a result of Iceland's huge subterranean heat warming the land surface
Leftist writing routinely leaves pertinent information out so I hear another dog that didn't bark in the report below: Any attempt at giving temperature statistics. From what I often see about the Arctic, the temperature changes there are often greatly at variance with global temperatures, indicating that Arctic and sub-Arctic temperatures are under substantial local rather than global influences. So did the temperatures that melted the subject glacier have anything in common with global temperatures? Probably not
Shocking images released by NASA show how soaring temperatures in the Arctic have caused an enormous glacier in Iceland to melt - in just three decades.
The Okjökull glacier, which once measured six square miles (16 km²) and is known as Ok, has now completely vanished.
Images taken in 1986 show the glacier covering a huge mountainside in the west of Iceland but, in the latest photo, a tiny patch of ice is all that remains.
Icelanders call their nation the 'Land of Fire and Ice' for its other-worldly landscape of volcanoes and glaciers but warming global temperatures threaten the existence of the latter. OK disappeared in 2014
SOURCE
The hidden costs of unreliable electricity
By Bill Gates
Think back to the last time you experienced a power outage. It probably wasn’t a great memory. Maybe it involved spending the evening in the dark without anything to do or spending a hot day without air conditioning. If the power was out for a long time, maybe even the food in your fridge began to spoil.
Your power probably came back within a couple minutes or hours. But for the nearly 1 billion people around the world who don’t have access to electricity—or whose access is so unreliable that they can never count on having power—an outage can go on for days or even weeks. And these outages are more than just an inconvenience. They can be deadly.
Many people without reliable access to electricity live in rural villages where even health clinics can’t count on having power. After an outage, doctors sometimes have no way of telling whether the life-saving vaccines in their refrigerators have spoiled. It can be even more stressful if a power outage occurs at night. Sometimes health workers have no choice but to treat patients by candlelight, or by the light of a mobile phone.
Even recharging a mobile phone is tricky when there isn’t electricity at home. It requires walking to a local store and paying 25 cents or more to plug the phone into a solar-powered outlet. That cost adds up fast. It’s actually hundreds of times more expensive to use charging stations than it is to charge a phone at home. But those without electricity don’t have an alternative. Mobile phones enable families to access services and business opportunities that improve their lives, so many pay whatever they have to in order to use their phones.
These hidden expenses are a daily reality for the nearly 1 billion people who live in energy poverty. That’s one reason why increasing access to electricity is critical to lifting the world’s poor out of poverty. The good news is that, since 2016, the number of people living without reliable electricity has dropped by more than 200 million. That’s two hundred million more people who can now study after sundown, use electronic appliances, and charge their phones at home.
At the same time, increased energy consumption means increased greenhouse gas emissions. Methods of generating electricity like coal and natural gas generate carbon dioxide, so unless we decarbonize the way we produce energy, emissions will continue to increase—and climate change will get worse—as energy consumption goes up.
The problem is that many of today’s low carbon energy technologies aren’t a viable alternative yet. While deploying wind and solar in many places around the world is going to be hugely important for tackling climate change, we need innovation in things like storage to make them realistic solutions for the world’s poorest. Plus, many people experiencing energy poverty live in areas without access to the kind of grids that are needed to make those technologies cheap and reliable enough to replace fossil fuels.
It’s important to remember that, even with an uptick in energy usage, people living in level 1 and 2 countries are responsible for a pretty modest share of the world’s emissions. If we’re going to stop climate change, the biggest changes will need to come from level 3 and 4 countries. But I believe we can tackle energy poverty and climate change at the same time by developing ways to make clean energy cheaper to produce, store, and transport. I recently wrote about several promising new solutions.
We want everyone—including the world’s poorest—to have access to cheap, reliable energy. I’m hopeful that innovations in energy technology will help us achieve that while paving the way to a zero-carbon future.
SOURCE
Trump ESA reforms emphasize species recovery over endless red tape
For decades, the 1973 Endangered Species Act (ESA) has hovered like a giant Sword of Damocles over broad swaths of rural America. If some unfortunate farmer, rancher, fruit grower, or any other landowner was found to be harboring a threatened or endangered species on his or her property, all bureaucratic and litigation hell could break loose – and usually did.
Once bureaucrats at the Interior Department’s National Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) or the Commerce Department’s National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) determined that an endangered critter or plant was on farmer Brown’s land, that land was subject to strict regulation that frequently meant financial ruin for the property owner.
Over time, a statute originally intended to save bison, condors, bald eagles, and the like morphed into a powerful legal instrument that environmentalists adroitly used to shut down any activity – farming, ranching, logging, mining, energy extraction – they didn’t like. Rural communities in the West bore the brunt of the assault. Even worse, the ESA provided no incentives for landowners to cooperate with government officials in helping species to recover.
Now, the Trump administration has rolled out long-overdue reforms to both ease the burdens on landowners and actually aid in the recovery of species. The new regulations will affect future listings and will have no effect on species already listed.
The administration’s actions target two sections of the ESA, 4 and 7, that have been at the center of the abuse. In section 4, the administration now stipulates that the criteria used in determining whether a species should be removed (delisted) from the endangered species list or reclassified from endangered to threatened or vice versa are the same as those used in adding a species to the list. This will keep officials at FWS and NMFS from arbitrarily adding criteria that keep species on the ESA list long after they have recovered.
Critical Habitat
Another crucial area of ESA section 4 undergoing much-needed clarification concerns critical habitat. The Trump regulations reinstate the requirement that areas where threatened or endangered species are present at the time of listing be evaluated first before unoccupied areas are considered. This reduces the potential regulatory burdens that results from designations where species are not present in an area.
In addition, the regulations impose a heightened standard for unoccupied areas to be designated as critical habitat. On top of the existing standard that the unoccupied habitat is essential to the conservation of the species, it must also, at the time of designation, contain one or more of the physical or biological features essential to the species’ conservation.
Climate change would still be considered in future listing decisions. But the role of notoriously unreliable climate models that forecast temperatures far into the future will be reduced. From now on, officials must make such determinations only into what is vaguely referred to as “the foreseeable future.”
The major regulatory change to section 7 of the ESA does away with a unilateral decision made by FWS several years ago that essentially treated threatened and endangered species the same way. The FWS policy, known as the “blanket rule,” was contrary to the original intent of the ESA, which clearly differentiated between threatened and endangered species. The NMFS never adopted the FWS policy. Now the Trump administration has put the two agencies’ policies in alignment by reinstating the different regulatory treatment of threatened and endangered species.
By any reasonable measure, the ESA has been an abject failure. Of the 1,661 species listed as threatened or endangered since 1973, only 3% have been recovered. Endless litigation has tied up resources that could have gone toward species recovery.
And speaking of litigation, more is on the way. The attorneys general of California and Massachusetts, along with a host of environmental groups, have already announced they will take the administration to court over its revisions to the ESA.
SOURCE
Plastic Bans Are Symbolism Over Substance
Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau recently proposed a federal ban on certain single-use plastics, arguing, “We have a responsibility to work with our partners to reduce plastic pollution, protect the environment, and create jobs and grow our economy.” As with similar measures in California, Hawaii, and New York, the proposed Canadian ban on plastics will harm consumers while providing very little benefit, even on Trudeau’s own terms.
The biggest problem for the plastic banners is that their measures (so far) apply to jurisdictions that have little to do with the ostensible problem. The biggest contributors to plastic in the ocean are China and Indonesia; a 2015 article in Science concluded that OECD countries contribute less than 5 percent of the plastic waste from land sources.
Another problem is that government bans come with unintended consequences. For example, research from earlier this year studied California’s ban on plastic bags and reported that “the elimination of 40 million pounds of plastic carryout bags [was] offset by a 12 million pound increase in trash bag purchases.” Because pet owners (for example) had been using their plastic bags from the grocery store to pick up after their animals, the ban simply forced them to buy plastic bags the old-fashioned way. Ironically, the California legislation led these people to stop recycling and reusing!
These naïve “direct assaults” on one environmental concern can also impede progress on other fronts. For example, if a store switches back to paper bags then this will mean more carbon dioxide emissions. Indeed, a 2011 UK government study found a consumer would need to use an allegedly “environmentally responsible” cotton tote bag 131 times in order for it to cause less environmental damage than the plastic bags it would replace.
Prime Minister Trudeau’s homage to “job creation” is also nonsensical. The rationale of work is that it makes people better off in exchange for our toil. If jobs are being “created” merely to comply with a largely arbitrary government edict, then they are pointless “busy work” of the type assigned in grade school by bored teachers. In a relatively free-market economy with flexible wages, everybody who wants a productive job can get one, especially in the long run. Government bans on plastic, or limitations on greenhouse gas emissions, induce artificial scarcity and “create jobs” in the same way that a ban on power tools would “create work”—and make humanity much poorer in the process.
Now if the benefits from plastic bans are largely illusory, the costs are quite real. For example, restricting single-use plastics such as forks and knives will increase the spread of disease, as people begin reusing metalware for their office lunches etc., rather than throwing out their plastic utensils after each meal. Likewise, if shoppers continue to use the same tote bag for their groceries, eventually they could be transporting their food in rich bacteria colonies, rather than the much more sanitary single-use plastic bags that are promptly discarded.
Yet besides these utilitarian concerns, there is the basic fact that plastic bags are very convenient, and so banning their use will make consumers worse off. After all, there is a reason grocery stores switched away from using paper bags and made plastic bags so ubiquitous. For those with long memories, we can appreciate the extra irony: The stores now switching back to paper bags are using thinner versions than when we were younger. While a strong adult with plastic bags could have carried an entire grocery run into the house in one trip, now with the weak paper bags, several trips are required—and that gallon of milk might rip the bag, so watch out.
The Canadian proposal to ban single-use plastics is yet another triumph of symbolism over substance: The measure will do virtually nothing to reduce plastic waste in the ocean and it won’t “help the economy.” However, what it will do, if enacted, is increase greenhouse gas emissions, increase the spread of disease, and greatly inconvenience consumers.
SOURCE
Climate protesters storm Garzweiler coalmine in Germany
Police in western Germany are removing climate change protesters from an open-cast coalmine after hundreds of them stormed the site. Activists broke through a police cordon on Saturday to get into the Garzweiler mine, in a campaign against fossil fuel use.
Many protesters are resisting attempts by police to clear the huge site.
Police have warned that the mine is not safe, and said some officers were hurt as they tried to hold back protesters.
Germany has vowed to go carbon neutral by 2050 but activists say this is not soon enough.
Recent surveys have shown that climate change tops a list of concerns in Germany, with the Green party polling alongside the governing Christian Democrats.
Police used pepper spray to try to stop activists from reaching the site. Each side accused the other of using unnecessary force.
Earlier, protesters temporarily blocked a railway line used to transport coal.
Some of the activists were among between 20,000 and 40,000 protesters who joined a demonstration on Friday in the city of Aachen in support of the school strike movement launched by Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg.
SOURCE
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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here.
Preserving the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here
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14 August, 2019
British University chief bans all beef from campus in fight against 'climate change emergency'
Prof. Corner is an expert in fashion
They were once regarded as staples of the students’ canteen. But now burgers, lasagne, chilli and tacos have been taken off the menu at a London university which has banned beef as part of its efforts to fight climate change.
From next month, Goldsmiths, University of London has said it will remove all beef product from its campus shops and cafes. Students will also face a 10p levy on bottles of water and single-use plastic cups when the academic year starts to discourage use of the products.
It is part of a new drive by the university to become carbon neutral by 2025, which involves building more solar panels and switching to a “clean” energy supplier.
Academic courses will also be reviewed to give students more opportunities to study climate change as part of their degree.
Professor Frances Corner, the new Warden of Goldsmiths said that "declaring a climate emergency cannot be empty words".
The beef ban is the first announcement she has made since taking over as the head of the university earlier this month.
Prof Corner, who used to be head of the London College of Fashion, has championed ethical designs and describes herself as a “fashion activist”.
She has previously warned of the dangers of wearing fake fur, arguing that it makes wearing real fur “culturally acceptable”.
Prof Corner said: “The growing global call for organisations to take seriously their responsibilities for halting climate change is impossible to ignore.
“Though I have only just arrived at Goldsmiths, it is immediately obvious that our staff and students care passionately about the future of our environment and that they are determined to help deliver the step change we need to cut our carbon footprint drastically and as quickly as possible.”
The beef ban was praised by climate change activists but elsewhere it was criticised as an "an overly simplistic approach".
Stuart Roberts, vice president of the National Farmers' Union, said there was a "lack of understanding or recognition between British beef and beef produced elsewhere". He said that the union has been encouraging public institutions such as schools and universities to back British farming and source locally-produced food.
"Tackling climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our time but singling out one food product is clearly an overly simplistic approach," he said. "Our standards of beef production in the UK are among the most efficient in the world, with British livestock grazing in extensive, grass-based systems - meaning a greenhouse gas footprint 2.5 times smaller than the global average.
"Anyone wanting to play their part in helping our planet amid the current climate change challenge we're all facing should buy British, locally produced beef reared to some of the highest and environmentally sustainable standards in the world.”
Goldsmiths is the latest university to alter its menu in an attempt to cut its carbon footprint. Cambridge University’s catering services has not served any beef or lamb since 2016 is instead “promoting the consumption of more vegetarian and vegan foods”.
Meanwhile, Ulster University, the University of East Anglia and a number of colleges at Oxford and Cambridge have introduced “meat free Mondays”.
Dave Gorman, director of sustainability at Edinburgh University, said that currently 40 per cent of the menu options in campus cafes are vegetarian or vegan and they aim to increase this to 50 per cent.
Westminster University has a “part time carnivore loyalty card”, whereby students who have purchased four vegetarian meals in the canteen get a free vegetarian meal.
Earlier this year, an Oxford college president demanded that octopus is removed from the menu as part of a drive to make disadvantaged students feel more “comfortable”.
Baroness Jan Royall, head of Somerville, said she wants to “change the culture” of the college to make sure it is “welcoming for all”.
SOURCE
UK National Grid experienced three blackout 'near-misses' in past few months
They've closed so many coal-fired power stations that they have very little reserve capacity
National Grid had experienced three blackout “near-misses” in the last few months before Friday's outage left almost a million homes in the dark and forced trains to a standstill around the UK, it has emerged.
The system operator, which is already under investigation by the energy watchdog, has been accused of not doing enough to protect against the risk of blackouts.
Industry sources have now claimed that National Grid has been aware of the growing risk of a wide-scale blackout 'for years', and has suffered a spate of near-misses in recent times, according to The Guardian.
The grid's frequency - a measure of energy intensity- normally sits around 50Hz. However, the paper said that in recent months the grid’s frequency has fallen below 49.6Hz on three different occasions, the deepest falls seen on the UK grid since 2015. On Friday the blackout was triggered when the frequency slumped to 48.88Hz.
In June, the frequency of the grid plummeted to within a whisker of National Grid’s legal limit of 49.5Hz after all three units of EDF Energy’s West Burton gas-fired power plant in Nottinghamshire tripped offline without warning.
In addition, the grid’s frequency fell to 49.55Hz on 9 May, and 49.58Hz of 11 July.
A spokesman for National Grid said these events were “independent”. He added that there was “no trend or prediction of more frequency excursions”.
“Over the past four years frequency has regularly fluctuated between the agreed limits, as part of the normal day-to-day operation of the electricity system,” he added.
They will now face an investigation into its handling of the energy system after the first blackout in more than a decade following the shutdown of a gas-fired power plant in Bedfordshire and the Hornsea windfarm in the North Sea at about 5pm of Friday.
Steve Shine, chairman of Anesco, a battery company, said: “It would be easy for National Grid to write this incident off as a fluke event, but they have actually been aware of this potential issue for many years.”
SOURCE
Enforce rules against false and misleading organic claims
FDA must no longer let organic food growers, manufacturers and sellers get away with lies
Paul Driessen
A couple years ago, the US Food and Drug Administration sent a “Warning Letter” to Nashoba Brook Bakery, advising its owners that listing “love” as an ingredient in their granola violated the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act. The product was “misbranded,” because “love” is “not a common or usual name of an ingredient,” FDA said. Such deceptive labeling practices could mislead consumers and are not allowed.
FDA has also warned and cited companies that make “unfounded,” “unproven” or “unsubstantiated” claims about their products. FDA is committed to “protecting the public health by taking action as needed against companies that deceive consumers.” It will not let companies say cannabidiol “has been linked to the effective treatment of Alzheimer’s disease,” if they don’t have solid evidence to back the claim up.
Claiming your product is better or more effective than a competitor’s is also “misleading” if there is “no evidence” to support the claim. Labels and advertising must be “truthful and not misleading” – or else.
FDA policies are equally clear in the arena of organic, conventional and biotech (genetically modified or engineered, GMO or GE) seeds, ingredients, products, manufacturing, distribution and sales. The agency’s published guidance states that “false or misleading” food labeling includes “the statement ‘none of the ingredients in this food is genetically engineered’ on a food where some of the ingredients are incapable of being produced through genetic engineering (e.g., salt).”
“GMO-free” claims, FDA says, can also be “false and misleading” if they imply that a certain food “is safer, more nutritious, or otherwise has different attributes than other comparable foods because the food was not genetically engineered.” Claiming a food is healthier or better tasting, because it’s organic, would fall under this guideline of “different attributes ... because it was not genetically engineered.”
However, in stark contrast to the way it polices other food, drug, cosmetic and medical device industries, the FDA has let the $52.5-billion organic food industry and pro-organic, anti-conventional farming, anti-biotechnology interests routinely and flagrantly ignore agency rules. Their ads, websites and campaigns deliberately mislead consumers and denigrate competitors with multiple falsehoods.
1. No dangerous chemicals. The Whole Foods website falsely claims: “All organic foods begin as crops grown without toxic persistent pesticides which can end up in soil and water, as well as in your food.”
Copper sulfate has multiple pesticide and fungicide applications in organic farming; it persists in soil, is the most common chemical residue in organic foods, and can damage human brains, livers, kidneys and stomach linings. The EU found it can cause cancer but didn’t ban it because organic farmers have “no viable alternatives.” Natural and synthetic pyrethrin pesticides are powerful neurotoxins, highly toxic to bees, cats and fish, and linked to leukemia and other health problems in humans. Rotenone is a highly toxic pesticide that can enhance the onset of Parkinson’s disease. There are many more examples.
Moreover, GMO crops use 37% fewer chemical insecticides and herbicides than conventional versions of the same crops (because biotech crops have systemic or internal biological protections against insects). Indian farmers who plant GMO cotton have doubled their cotton production, dramatically reduced insecticide use and prevented over two million pesticide poisoning cases a year.
2. Biotech foods threaten human health. Organic interests consistently claim that GE foods cause higher incidences of everything from cancer and autism to diabetes and obesity.
Scientific and regulatory bodies worldwide have found that biotech foods are as safe and healthy as foods produced by conventional breeding, including: the World Health Organization, European Food Safety Authority, British Royal Society, American Medical Association, and US National Academy of Sciences, Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Agriculture and Food and Drug Administration.
More than 100 Nobel Laureates in chemistry, medicine and biotechnology have likewise said crops and foods improved through biotechnology are “as safe as, if not safer than those derived from any other method of production.” Worldwide and with over four trillion US servings of foods containing at least one biotech ingredient, “there has never been a single confirmed case of a negative health outcome for humans or animals from their consumption.”
3. Organic is more sustainable. Organic interests claim their methods increase soil health and organic matter, enhance natural fertility and ensure long-term sustainability.
In reality, organic crops require more land, water, hand weeding, chemicals and expense to generate the same amount of food. Expanding organic farming would cause further wildlife habitat loss and reduced biodiversity, when we are trying to protect natural habitats and feed Earth’s seven billion people.
Biotech crops allow farmers to produce more food, from less land, using less water and fewer pesticides, and with greater resistance to droughts, floods and climate change, than is case with conventional crops – and certainly with organic crops. GE crops achieve much higher food yields per acre – whereas organic farms require 40% more land to as much as 70% more land to produce the same amount of food as their conventional or biotech counterparts.
Biotechnology also enables farmers to grow Golden Rice, which prevents malnutrition, blindness and death in African and Asian children. Greenpeace commits eco-manslaughter by battling this crop.
4. Organic foods are tastier and more nutritious. This assertion is likewise unsupportable.
Stanford University and other studies have repeatedly found that organic foods are no healthier or more nutritious than conventional or GE alternatives, while taste tests in Germany discovered that “discerning” foodies could not tell the difference between organic food and McDonald’s chicken nuggets!
But despite these facts, the endless campaigns of false, misleading, unsubstantiated claims, full-frontal attacks on biotech and conventional farming, and outright lies are clearly working. Thousands of companies pay the Non-GMO Project big bucks to get “GMO-Free” butterfly emblems on over 55,000 products – including salt, orange juice, tomatoes and other items that have no biotech counterparts.
US and EU consumers actually think organic food is better, tastier and more nutritious than conventional or biotech food – and are willing to pay up to 50% more for “organic” milk, bread, fruits and vegetables. Less than 40% of American adults believe genetically modified foods are safe to eat.
Many of the most outrageous activist campaigns are funded directly or indirectly by organic and natural food companies and allied foundations. They’re often conducted along or in coordination with lawsuits against glyphosate (Roundup) and campaigns against neonicotinoid pesticides and biotechnology, to expand organic industry market share and profits, and drive entire companies and industries out of business. Non-GMO Project director Megan Westgate proudly proclaims her goal is “to shrink the market for existing GMO ingredients and prevent new commercial biotech crops” from ever being introduced.
The FDA says trying to enforce its rules would force it to go after every container and company that make false, misleading, deceptive, pejorative organic claims. That’s nonsense. It would only have to go after a few of the biggest, worst, most prominent violators. Others would fall in line pretty quickly.
A few Warning Letters could tell organic farmers, manufacturers and retailers to cease making these claims or marketing their products until they provide replicable, convincing, peer-reviewed evidence that organic foods are chemical-free, safer, more nutritious, more eco-friendly than conventional or GMO varieties – and that GE crops have harmed people or the environment in demonstrable ways.
Organic producers and retailers could also be required to test their foods for residues of toxic organic chemicals. Give them six months to comply – and follow up with legal actions, major fines, and requirements that every miscreant issue front-page and top-of-their-website admissions and apologies.
The FDA, EPA, Agriculture Department and Federal Trade Commission have shown little tolerance for other industry violations. Big Organic should no longer be exempt from truth in advertising rules.
Via email
Net Zero Natural Gas Plant -- The Game Changer
An actual game changing technology is being demonstrated as we sit in our air-conditioned abodes reading this. And it is being demonstrated by North Carolina–based Net Power at a new plant in La Porte, Texas.
The process involves burning fossil fuel with oxygen instead of air to generate electricity without emitting any carbon dioxide (CO2). Not using air also avoids generating NOx, the main atmospheric and health contaminant emitted from gas plants.
Included in a group of technologies known as carbon capture and sequestration (CCS), zero-emission fossil fuel plants have been a dream never realized in practice, as it always seems to cost a lot, adding between 5¢ and 10¢ per kWh. This is probably because most attempts just add on another step after the traditional electricity generation steps, almost as an afterthought.
Some fossil fuel plants have tried, and failed, the most famous one recently being the $7.5 billion coal power plant in Kemper, Mississippi.
But this new technology completely changes the steps and the approach from the ground up. It is based on the Allam-Fetvedt Cycle, Allam Cycle for short. This is a new, high-pressure, oxy-fuel, supercritical CO2 cycle that generates low-cost electricity from fossil fuels while producing near-zero air emissions.
All CO2 that is generated by the cycle is produced as a high-pressure, pipeline-ready by-product for use in enhanced oil recovery and industrial processes, or that can be sequestered underground in tight geologic formations where it will not get out to the atmosphere for millions of years.
The Allam Cycle also means the power plant is a lot smaller and can be sited in more areas than older plants can.
This 50 MW Texas plant is demonstrating that the technology works, especially to investors. So the project has some heavy hitters as partners - Exelon Generation will operate the plant, the infrastructure firm McDermott International (formerly CB&I) will provide engineering and construction, 8 Rivers Capital, the inventor of the NET Power technology, will provide continuing technology development, and Oxy Low Carbon Ventures, a subsidiary of Occidental Petroleum, joined NET Power as an investor late last year.
Toshiba developed the combustor and the CO2-turbine and continues additional development.
Most power plants rely on thermal power cycles for energy production. These systems create heat by burning fossil fuel using the oxygen in air. In coal plants, this takes place in a large boiler, where coal is burned and water is boiled to create high pressure steam. This high-pressure steam then expands through a steam turbine, creating power.
In combined cycle gas turbine power plants, natural gas or coal syngas is burned in a combustor with compressed air. The heated gases then expand and drive a gas turbine. The turbine exhaust is extremely hot, so it is subsequently used to boil water to create high pressure steam and drive a steam turbine, thereby combining cycles. In both systems, aqueous steam is essential to the process as a working fluid.
Not so in an Allam Cycle plant like NET Power’s. At their Texas demonstration plant, the natural gas is burned with a mixture of hot CO2 and oxygen, known as oxy-combustion. The plant uses a standard cryogenic air separation unit to generate oxygen, integrating the heat of that unit.
The parasitic load of oxygen production is included in their efficiency numbers, and because of the Allam Cycle’s high inherent efficiency, it doesn’t change the economics much.
The resulting working fluid is a mix of high-pressure CO2 and water, which is subsequently expanded through a turbine and then cooled in a heat exchanger (a recuperator).
This is key. The turbine is not turned with steam, but with CO2.
The water then condenses and is separated out, leaving a pure vapor-phase CO2 stream. That stream is compressed and pumped back up to high pressure for re-use, but the excess CO2 is sent to a pipeline, ready for export.
The remaining fluid stream is reheated in the recuperator and makes its way back to the combustor, where the hot, high-pressure CO2 helps the combustor achieve a final inlet temperature of about 1,150°C as it combusts with fresh natural gas and oxygen, the high temperature raising the efficiency significantly.
The plant can also be air-cooled, at the cost of a little efficiency, to avoid water use in arid regions and to actually produce water from the methane and oxygen.
By using a CO2 working fluid at very high pressures as opposed to steam, NET Power avoids the phase changes that cause steam cycles to be so inefficient. Instead of driving a steam cycle and losing heat energy up a stack, NET Power keeps heat within the system, meaning less fuel is needed for the turbine to reach the required operating temperature.
And they don’t even have a stack.
Federal tax credits for carbon-capture projects are helping get this demonstration off the ground, providing a $50 tax credit for every ton of carbon sequestered. The NET Power plant captures all of its CO2 as part of its process, recycles some and diverts some for sale.
Adam Goff, Policy Director for NET Power, discussed how this technology will really make a difference to global warming – in developing countries. These countries desperately need energy and are planning to install thousands of traditional coal plants, representing the largest potential increase in carbon emissions over the next several decades.
Said Goff, "…most projects aren’t going to be in the U.S. They’re going to be in your developing countries in Asia and in Africa, so you’re going to see China, India, Indonesia. To do that you have to be really cheap. You have to be at cost parity if not better than cost parity with conventional generation."
The CO2 angle is very unique. NET Power’s plant produces a high-pressure, high-quality CO2 byproduct that is pipeline-ready. This CO2 can be sequestered or used in industrial processes, such as enhanced oil recovery. EOR is a decades-old process that uses CO2 to extract significantly more oil from old oilfields while permanently storing CO2 underground. In the United States alone, 85 billion barrels of oil are recoverable using EOR.
Most industrial CO2 capture technologies cannot produce cost-effective, EOR-ready CO2, despite the fact that the industry is tremendously CO2-starved. NET Power will have both the capacity and economics to enable the EOR industry to unlock this vast resource while simultaneously sequestering CO2 from thousands of power plants below ground.
And it is the geologic sequestering of CO2 that may be tough. Yes, we can use CO2 now, but if we go to these net zero plants in a big way, we don't have enough industrial need for all the CO2 from generating trillions of kWhs every year.
So it will have to be injected underground, and sometimes there are side-effects, like earthquakes. But that is a geoengineering need we can address. Norway has stored over 20 million tons of CO2 with little problem, and Archer Daniels Midland is sequestering CO2 in Illinois with no big issues.
The cost of electricity generated by Net Power is even more interesting. The plant doesn’t just sell power like most plants, it also sells the CO2 and other cycle by-products including nitrogen and argon.
These sales bring the cost of electricity from NET Power's plant down to 1.9¢ per kilowatt hour, Goff said, compared to 4.2¢ for a traditional combined cycle natural gas plant, making this the cheapest source of electricity, and with no carbon emissions.
If the plant in La Porte performs as expected, and as it has so far, this is a real game changer for natural gas. Since the United States is sitting on more natural gas than any country in the world, and it’s getting cheaper to get it out of the ground, this is no small game to change.
SOURCE
Australia: You can bin the assumptions — recycling is expensive
I am old enough to remember milk being delivered each morning in glass bottles. We would eagerly drink it and mum would wash the bottles, ready to be collected the next day and replaced with full ones.
On the rare occasions we had soft drink, my sister and I would race down to the local milk bar to receive the small deposit (was it threepence?) that was attached to the purchase of that bottle of Tarax lemonade.
I recount those days to make the contrast with today’s debate about recycling and the mess in which we find ourselves. Then we were talking about re-use — not recycling. It was small-scale and it was local.
Bottles weren’t smashed to be recycled. They were thoroughly washed and re-used. For various reasons, the re-use option has largely disappeared. What we are debating today is quite different.
The critical issues in the recycling debate are its high cost (collection, sorting, energy) and the absence of profitable markets for most recycled products. The combination of these factors, plus the effective refusal of China and other Asian countries to take waste, means there are no easy solutions to what is fast becoming a disaster.
For example, in 2016-17, almost 13 million tonnes of waste was generated in Victoria. At least one-third went to landfill. The rest was recovered or collected for recycling. No one can be sure what happened to this portion because the government agency, Sustainability Victoria, has dropped the ball on reliable data collection.
In a recent report by the Victorian Auditor-General, Recovering and Reprocessing Resources from Waste, a damning picture emerges of government agencies failing to meet their core objectives while ignoring the implications of the creeping ban around Asia on the import of waste since 2013.
It is increasingly common for waste to be sent to landfill or stockpiled. These stockpiles pose serious safety and environmental risks. There was a fire at a recycling plant in Coolaroo operated by recycling firm SKM, which is now in liquidation.
There are more than 700 shipping containers of recycled material hanging around the Port of Melbourne that can no longer be shipped overseas. The company that ordered the transportation of the material was none other than SKM. Needless to say, the transport company has not been paid.
Scott Morrison’s achieved agreement at last week’s Council of Australian Governments meeting that the nation would no longer export its waste was essentially for show. The receiving countries had made it clear that previous practices will no longer apply, effectively forcing this outcome on every state and territory.
The dilemma is how state and territory governments deal with this without imposing undue costs and burdens on their citizens. There is a tremendous amount of fuzzy thinking and sloganeering, including the development of a so-called circular economy.
In Victoria, there are self-interested calls for the introduction of a container deposit scheme along the lines of other states. Environment Minister Lily D’Ambrosio made the first sensible decision of her ministerial career by declaring that such a scheme was not the “answer to kerbside recycling”.
Not only has the Productivity Commission assessed the costs of these schemes to outweigh their benefits, but the experience of NSW points to very significant implementation problems that are costly to rectify.
Moreover, the diversion of used aluminium cans, the only recycled product that produces a serious economic return, away from kerbside recycling will further undermine the latter.
Mind you, D’Ambrosio has been sitting on a Sustainability Fund of more than $500 million amassed through landfill levies. It would seem the Victorian Treasurer would rather retain this fund on the asset side of the state’s balance sheet than see it used for the purposes it was collected. These include “fostering environmentally sustainable use of resources and best practices in waste management”.
Scepticism should be applied when assessing the contributions of many in this industry. They will always make big environmental claims while seeking the assistance of taxpayers and ratepayers.
Consider this quote from one consultant: “Industry is very supportive of a positive procurement policy where government and businesses preferentially purchase recycled content. Part of the solution is positive procurement and part of the solution is infrastructure, but industry can’t and won’t invest in new technologies unless there’s an economic return. At the moment, they are outcompeted by cheap landfill.” What he is really saying is that the industry requires regulatory assistance along with government subsidies.
Another suggestion is to force households to further sort and wash their recycled material, including separating soft and hard plastic. This will involve extra containers, despite many people living in very small premises that would rule out this option. More waste management education is on the cards, including exhortations to minimise waste creation.
One sensible policy option in Victoria that was raised only briefly, then rejected, was the burning of waste material in purpose-built incinerators with scrubbers installed. This option would also generate electricity that could provide valuable back-up power to renewable energy sources.
This is common in Sweden and Japan. Indeed, Sweden imports waste for this purpose. Burning waste generates carbon dioxide but then landfills generate methane, a more toxic greenhouse gas. That said, best-practice landfills will also be part of the solution.
The bottom line is that recycling is imposed people-management, with the message being that we are all contributing to saving the planet by diligently sorting our rubbish. The reality has always been markedly different from this message and it is getting worse.
Waste for recycling must be collected, sorted and sent on for recovery or reprocessing. The entire cycle is itself costly and energy-intensive, something that must be taken into account when considering policy options. With the rising price of electricity and the withdrawal of those previously helpful receiving countries, there are no easy solutions to this serious public policy problem.
SOURCE
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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here.
Preserving the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here
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13 August, 2019
No Evidence Heatwaves More Common From ‘Climate Change’
A story came to my attention recently that merited comment.
It appeared in London’s The Telegraph and was headlined, “Give heatwaves names so people take them more seriously, say experts, as Britain braces for hottest day.”
The story’s leaping-off point was a press release from the London School of Economics (LSE), which noted:
“A failure by the media to convey the severity of the health risks from heatwaves, which are becoming more frequent due to climate change, could undermine efforts to save lives this week as temperatures climb to dangerous levels.”
It added: “So how can the media be persuaded to take the risks of heatwaves more seriously? Perhaps it is time … to give heatwaves names [as is done] for winter storms.”
We disagree with some of the points being made.
First, and most importantly, we warn people all the time in plain language on our apps and on AccuWeather.com about the dangers of extreme heat, as well as all hazards.
Furthermore, that is the reason we developed and patented the AccuWeather RealFeel® Temperature and our recently expanded AccuWeather RealFeel® Temperature Guide, to help people maximize their health, safety and comfort when outdoors and prepare and protect themselves from weather extremes.
The AccuWeather RealFeel Temperature Guide is the only tool that properly takes into account all atmospheric conditions and translates them into actionable behavior choices for people.
Second, although average temperatures have been higher in recent years, there is no evidence so far that extreme heatwaves are becoming more common because of climate change, especially when you consider how many heatwaves occurred historically compared to recent history.
New York City has not had a daily high temperature above 100 degrees since 2012, and it has had only five such days since 2002.
However, in a previous 18-year span from 1984 through 2001, New York City had nine days at 100 degrees or higher.
When the power went out in New York City earlier this month, the temperature didn’t even get to 100 degrees – it was 95, which is not extreme. For comparison, there were 12 days at 95 degrees or higher in 1999 alone.
Kansas City, Missouri, for example, experienced an average of 18.7 days a year at 100 degrees or higher during the 1930s, compared to just 5.5 a year over the last 10 years.
And over the last 30 years, Kansas City has averaged only 4.8 days a year at 100 degrees or higher, which is only one-quarter of the frequency of days at 100 degrees or higher in the 1930s.
Here is a fact rarely, if ever, mentioned: 26 of the 50 states set their all-time high-temperature records during the 1930s that still stand (some have since been tied).
And an additional 11 state all-time high-temperature records were set before 1930 and only two states have all-time record high temperatures that were set in the 21st century (South Dakota and South Carolina).
So 37 of the 50 states have an all-time high-temperature record not exceeded for more than 75 years.
Given these numbers and the decreased frequency of days of 100 degrees or higher, it cannot be said that either the frequency or magnitude of heatwaves is more common today.
Finally, there is the question of whether heatwaves should be named. That’s an easy one: I oppose naming heat waves.
If such warnings existed, what would be the cutoff point or the boundary line? A heatwave in one state is not in another?
In other words, if you say the criteria is where the AccuWeather RealFeel Temperature is above some number, what happens in a nearby location that is one degree below the cutoff number?
Of course, some people still may be at risk because there is a variability of risk. An AccuWeather RealFeel Temperature of 95 may be a risk to infants and the elderly but minimal risk to others.
And if the cutoff is set too low, the naming of heatwaves would become so frequent it would be meaningless and ultimately will undermine the credibility of meteorologists.
What else are these people going to suggest we name? Hurricanes and tropical storms already get names and they have since the 1940s, and the names are selected by international agreement.
Yet, even for them, the criteria of whether and when to name a particular storm or not has left some leeway to the judgment of forecasters at the National Hurricane Center.
If we were to name heatwaves, should we also name cold waves, high-wind events, pollution events? What about whiteouts due to blowing snow?
All that would do is cause more confusion. AccuWeather believes in clearly warning of all extreme weather and explaining what the impact will be on people.
Heat-related deaths are one of the deadliest extreme-weather health outcomes in the United States, according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which notes that many heat-related deaths and illnesses are preventable. We agree.
AccuWeather’s core mission is to save lives, protect property and help people and businesses prosper, a directive we take to heart 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
That’s one of the reasons why we developed the AccuWeather RealFeel Temperature and the guide that explains specifically what each number means, which can be found on our website.
It’s also why AccuWeather meteorologists carefully consider the words we use in our forecasts so our users understand the risk of extreme weather to themselves and their families.
SOURCE
How Google discriminates against conservatives and skeptics
Several months ago Google quietly released a 32 page white paper titled “How Google Fights Disinformation.” This sound good. The problem is that Google is a decidedly left wing outfit. They consider things like skepticism of climate alarmism, and conservative views generally, to be disinformation, as liberals often claim.
The white paper goes into some detail as to how Google’s search and news algorithms operate, in order to suppress what Google considers disinformation. It is clear that these algorithms will favor liberal content when displaying search results.
Generally speaking the algorithms rank and present search results based on the use of so-called “authoritative sources.” The problem is that these sources are mostly mainstream media, which are almost entirely liberal.
Google’s algorithmic definition of authoritative makes the liberals the voice of authority. Bigger is better and the liberals have the biggest news outlets. The algorithms are very complex but the basic idea is that the more other websites link to you, the greater your authority.
It is like saying that a newspaper with more subscribers is more trustworthy than one with somewhat fewer subscribers. This actually makes no sense but that is how it works. It is also true in domains other than news. Popularity is not authority but that is how the algorithm sees it.
This explains why the first page of search results for breaking news almost always consist of links to liberal outlets. There is absolutely no balance with conservative news sources. Given that roughly half of Americans are conservatives, Google’s liberal news bias is truly reprehensible.
When it comes to skepticism of climate alarmism, I documented an extreme case of this bias some time ago. My CFACT article was titled “Google’s global warming search bias.”
In this case I did individual searches on prominent skeptics of alarmism. Google’s authoritative source turned out to be an obscure alarmist website called DeSmogBlog. Their claim to fame was having nasty negative dossiers on a lot of skeptics. I am proud to say they have one on me.
In each search two things happened in the first page of results. First was a link to that skeptic’s dossier, even though it was almost a decade old. Sometimes this was the first entry in the search results. Second, roughly half of the results were negative attacks. This may not now be surprising since the liberal press often attacks us skeptics.
Searching on comparable prominent alarmists yielded nothing but praise. Again not surprising, since Google’s liberal authoritative sources love alarmists.
The bias against skeptics in this algorithm is breathtaking. This bias also extends to the climate change debate itself. Search results on climate issues are dominated by alarmist content.
In fact climate change may well get special algorithmic attention. Goggle has a category of webpages hyperbolically called “Your Money or Your Life.” These require even greater authoritative control in searches.
Pages addressing government policy issue fall under this category and climate change is arguable the world’s biggest policy issue today. Google says that for these pages they downgrade those containing “demonstrably inaccurate content or debunked conspiracy theories.” This is just how alarmists describe skepticism. They do not explain how the algorithm makes these intrinsically subjective determinations.
Google’s authority based search algorithm is rigged to favor liberal content. This will be true for virtually all conservative content. It may be especially true for the climate change debate. This deep liberal bias is fundamentally wrong, given Google’s central role in American life.
SOURCE
Ice-Free Alaskan Waters No Problem For Polar Bears & Walruses
Written by Susan J Crockford PhD
One of two alarming headlines that caught my eye this week was the ‘news’ on Monday that the waters off Alaska were now ice-free because of climate change, courtesy a story in the online media outlet Mashable that was later picked up by The Weather Channel and the UK mainstream paper The Independent.
In addition, a large number of mainstream news outlets, including the New York Times and Newsweek, have reported that walruses came ashore this year at Point Lay, Alaska, two weeks earlier than any year since 2007.
No one claimed this late July onshore movement of walruses was the beginning of the end of walruses but it was still blamed on human-caused climate change because it was associated with the aforementioned ice loss in Alaska.
Neither event was really ‘news.’ Moreover, neither an ice-free Alaska in early August or walruses onshore two weeks earlier than 2017 will have any negative impact on local polar bear or walrus populations, whether due to human-caused climate change or natural variation.
Well-fed polar bears everywhere are quite capable of going 4-5 months without food in the summer and a few thousand walruses at Point Lay will feed happily from this shore-based haul-out for a few days to a few weeks as they have done many summers since 2007 before moving on to other Chukchi Sea beach locations – although the ‘leaving’ events never seem to get any media attention.
Walruses will haul-out on beaches in Alaska and Russia until the ice returns in October.
Here is the map that Mashable story on an ice-free Alaska included, which indeed shows a vast area of open water off Alaska [note theirs is dated two days earlier, on 4 Aug.]:
However, what the Mashable story didn’t show is the related chart that shows the age of the remaining pack (see below), which is very thick multiyear ice. Such thick ice might thin out a bit by September but it is in no danger of disappearing:
In 2016, the Alaska coast was virtually ice-free by 12 August but by 12 November the sea ice had returned.
Any bear that had chosen to spend the summer on an Alaskan beach in 2016 would have spent 3-4 months ashore – something that bears in Hudson Bay, Davis Strait, and the Baffin Bay have done on a regular basis for as long as they have been studied and more recently, they have spent almost five months ashore without serious problems.
Despite the large expanses of open water this year in the Beaufort Sea, there have been no media reports of unusual numbers of problem bears or bear attacks along the coast of Alaska.
As for the walrus story, the Associated Press account authored by Don Joling points out that the US Fish and Wildlife Service determined in 2017 that Pacific walrus are not threatened with extinction because of recent declines in Arctic sea ice (MacCracken et al. 2017).
USFWS also determined that future sea ice decline would not threaten walrus survival and we know that walruses have come ashore in the Chukchi Sea during the ice-free season in summer and/or fall for more than 100 years (Crockford 2014; Fischbach et al. 2016).
It all adds up to a non-story although it might work as click-bait for those few readers who eagerly seek out any event blamed on climate change.
More HERE (See the original for links, graphics etc.)
An establishment rebellion
Why the elite loves the eco-warriors.
London’s Victoria and Albert Museum has acquired a number of artefacts associated with Extinction Rebellion (XR), the protest group campaigning to reduce Britain’s carbon emissions to ‘net zero’ by 2025. Apparently, just nine months since Extinction Rebellion’s first public stunt, its paraphernalia deserves to be housed alongside some of the world’s best art and design works of the past 5,000 years.
It is hard to think of any supposedly radical protest movement in history that has been so readily embraced by the establishment as Extinction Rebellion. And the love-bombing isn’t just coming from the usual luvvies like Dame Emma Thompson and activist celebs like Lily Cole and Charlotte Church. Recently, XR attracted the attention of wealthy philanthropists. Last month, three wealthy Americans (one of whose family wealth comes from the oil industry) donated nearly £500,000 to XR and vowed to raise millions more. Other wealthy backers include a hedge-fund manager, who remains anonymous.
Then, there is the literary establishment – from heavyweight authors like Margaret Atwood and Phillip Pullman to big-name publishers like Penguin, it has thrown its weight behind Extinction Rebellion, too. This Is Not A Drill, XR’s protest handbook, was recently rushed out for release by Penguin. Penguin’s editor breathlessly declared that climate change was so pressing that XR’s book needed to be published several months before its initial release date: ‘This is an emergency, and we have to react like it’s an emergency.’ The book even features a contribution from Rowan Williams, former archbishop of Canterbury – the former head of the established church.
The reason for this establishment love-in is that Extinction Rebellion represents no rebellion at all. It has the appearance of a rebellion, certainly – protesters glue their hands to buildings, block roads and get themselves arrested. But the message is one that affirms and flatters establishment opinion rather than challenging it.
Parliament, for instance, was quick to heed XR’s demand to declare a ‘climate emergency’. More significantly, the group’s main aim of reducing UK emissions to ‘net zero’ is one that is shared not only by the Conservative government, but also by MPs of all stripes. The ‘net zero’ target for 2050 was nodded through parliament with just an hour and a half of debate and without a single vote needing to be cast. XR is only more impatient in its demand, calling for a 2025 deadline.
Many have tried to compare Extinction Rebellion’s climate crusade with past movements for progressive change. Justifying the V&A’s decision to acquire Extinction Rebellion artefacts, senior curator Corinna Gardner compared their punchy colour palette to that of the Suffragettes. Similarly, XR leader Roger Hallam claims his protesting is in the ‘tradition of Gandhi and Martin Luther King’.
These comparisons are delusional, pretentious and insulting. But they unwittingly highlight something important. Whether it was the Chartists, the Suffragettes, the civil-rights movement, or the gay-rights movement, these genuinely progressive campaigns were all despised by the elite at the time. These were campaigns that sought to expand human freedom, to wrest rights and resources from the establishment. By contrast, environmentalist campaigns like Extinction Rebellion are, by their very nature, against freedom. They seek to place new limits on human activity: on industry, on economic growth, on our travel, on our diets, and on childbirth.
For many years, the great and the good have been in broad agreement that something must be done about climate change. But they also seem to agree that the bulk of the costs should not be shouldered by them. Only last week, celebrities, business leaders and politicians descended on Sicily for the 7th annual Google Camp, which this year was dedicated to tackling climate change. After arriving in their private jets, mega yachts and sports cars, delegates were treated to a lecture on climate change by Prince Harry, who delivered it in his bare feet. Earlier this year, 1,500 individual private jets flew to Davos. The highlight of the summit was a conversation between Prince William and Sir David Attenborough… on climate change.
The establishment only seems to care about ‘pollution’ when it is ordinary people doing the polluting. It is always cheap flights, cheap food and cheap fashion which cause the most consternation among environmentalists. In turn, climate change presents the establishment with an opportunity to manage the little people’s habits, tastes and aspirations.
Extinction Rebellion merely provides a faux-radical gloss to this depressing and stultifying prospect.
SOURCE
'We don't want there to be no air travel': Qantas boss warns climate change panic could devastate the industry and take the world 'back to the 1920s'
Qantas CEO Alan Joyce has warned that global warming panic could bring the aviation industry to a halt, saying additional airline taxes could take the world back to the 1920s.
Speaking at the Centre for Aviation summit in Sydney this week, Mr Joyce hit back at climate change hysteria and 'flight shaming'.
Mr Joyce referenced an increase in the amount of global warming rallies being held globally and a rise in activists criticising travellers who fly, The Australian reported.
'We don't want to go back to the 1920s and not have air travel. We need to make sure that we keep the baby, because it is important for the world economy to have connections,' he said.
He pointed out that the airline industry had made a difference to the world in terms of economic trade and job creation.
'We know there's an environmental impact, but the things we're doing as an industry are fantastic. We have targets by 2050 to reduce our CO2 emissions to half the levels of 2005,' he said.
Just last month, the French government announced an 'eco-tax' on all flights out of airports in France, which would rack up $300 million per year.
Passengers in The Netherlands have are now being slugged a levy of $11.60, amid calls for the European Union to enforce taxes across the whole continent.
Mr Joyce said the aim of the new tariffs is to limit commercial flights by slugging customers and airlines more.
The amount of passengers flying the prominent flight routes between Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane have remained stagnant, according to the Bureau of Infrastructure, Transport and Regional Economics.
Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg has launched a staunch against airlines and their customers, and has even vowed to travel to the US by boat to spread her message.
As well as ruling out flying on a plane on the trip, Thunberg also refuses to travel aboard a cruise ship as they're notoriously big polluters. Meanwhile, sailors rarely brave the Atlantic in August because of hurricane risks.
SOURCE
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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here.
Preserving the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here
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12 August, 2019
The psychology of Warmism
A group of Jonathan Haidt's disciples have made an attempt to see if there is something distinctive psychologically about Warmists. Sadly, it was a good attempt but no cigar. They looked in what I regard as the wrong places. So all they found was that Warmists were just regular-grade Leftists who claimed beliefs in compassion and fairness. If I had been designing the study, I would have looked at paranoia, gullibility, superstition and mental rigidity
Which Moral Foundations Predict Willingness to Make Lifestyle Changes to Avert Climate Change in the USA?
Janis L. Dickinson et al.
Abstract
Jonathan Haidt’s Moral Foundations Theory identifies five moral axes that can influence human motivation to take action on vital problems like climate change. The theory focuses on five moral foundations, including compassion, fairness, purity, authority, and ingroup loyalty; these have been found to differ between liberals and conservatives as well as Democrats and Republicans. Here we show, based on the Cornell National Social Survey (USA), that valuations of compassion and fairness were strong, positive predictors of willingness to act on climate change, whereas purity had a non-significant tendency in the positive direction (p = 0.07). Ingroup loyalty and authority were not supported as important predictor variables using model selection (). Compassion and fairness were more highly valued by liberals, whereas purity, authority, and in-group loyalty were more highly valued by conservatives. As in previous studies, participants who were younger, more liberal, and reported greater belief in climate change, also showed increased willingness to act on climate change. Our research supports the potential importance of moral foundations as drivers of intentions with respect to climate change action, and suggests that compassion, fairness, and to a lesser extent, purity, are potential moral pathways for personal action on climate change in the USA.
SOURCE
El Paso shooting was a vile act of eco-terrorism
The killer’s manifesto was riddled with environmentalist anti-humanism
Is Extinction Rebellion to blame for the El Paso massacre? Maybe Greta Thunberg is? Or any one of the commentators who spends their every waking hour bemoaning mankind’s ‘carbon footprint’ and insisting we need to rein in people’s rapacious consumerist behaviour.
After all, these misanthropic ideas, this green miserabilism, this anti-modern guff about humanity being a plague on poor Mother Earth, is a central feature of the El Paso killer’s manifesto. And if Trump can be held responsible for the shootings on the basis that the manifesto echoes his Mexican-bashing, why shouldn’t greens, who pollute public debate with the kind of anti-humanist ideology that clearly moved and enraged the El Paso murderer, shoulder some responsibility, too?
Of course, to those of us who believe in free will and holding individuals morally responsible for what they choose to do, only one person is to blame for the barbaric attack in a Walmart in El Paso – the man who did it. But it is striking that the people cynically rushing to blame this mass murder on Trump and his anti-immigrant rhetoric have next to nothing to say about the killer’s green thinking. This attack is being branded ‘white-nationalist terror’ – why isn’t it being called environmentalist terror? It was motored in part by a loathing for humanity based on the tragically mainstream, pseudo-leftish idea that we are a planet-polluting force.
In his alleged manifesto, the killer, alongside his racist rants about Hispanic people and the ‘replacement’ of whites, attacks modern society for being eco-unfriendly. Westerners’ lifestyles are ‘destroying the environment’ and ‘creating a massive burden for future generations’, he says. He seems obsessed with the core element of green thinking – the idea that mankind is overusing limited natural resources. We are ‘shamelessly overharvesting resources’, apparently.
As with green ideology in general, there is a strong streak of anti-humanism in his eco-obsessions. He attacks ‘urban sprawl’ – also known as human habitation – and the way it ‘destroys millions of acres of land’. As for ‘consumer culture’ with its production of ‘thousands of tonnes of unnecessary plastic waste and electronic waste’ – he slams that as another part of humankind’s ‘decimation of our environment’. The solution? Surprise, surprise: population control. Echoing the numerous eco-Malthusians who have spent decades calling for a restrictions on human natality in order to save the planet, he says we need to ‘decrease the number of people in America using resources’.
His targeting of a Walmart makes more sense in the context of his eco-Malthusianism. Alongside clearly setting out to kill Latinos, whom he claims are ‘invading’ the US, perhaps he also wanted to attack supermarket-users, Walmart automatons, slaves to cheap consumer products – the kind of people who are so often criticised by elitist greens for their immoral shopping and eating habits.
And if his ideas sound familiar, that’s because the same kind of thing was published in the manifesto of the anti-Muslim bigot who attacked two mosques in Christchurch last year. That mass murderer also raged against ‘a society based on ever-increasing industrialisation, urbanisation, industrial output and population increase’. He criticised people’s ‘ignorance of environmental health’ and called for the creation of ‘an environmentally conscious and moral society’. The Christchurch killer explicitly said he is not a Nazi but an ‘eco-fascist’.
These vile anti-human manifestos, and the racist murders that sprung from them, are a chilling reminder that eco-extremism has historically been closely associated with far-right causes. And yet somehow in recent years, this backward, anti-modern obsession with cleansing nature of foul mankind’s uncaring, destructive behaviour has morphed into a supposedly progressive, leftish outlook. And it is now utterly mainstream, being promoted by virtually every public and political institution. That it is an outlook – an ideology, in fact – that can grab the attention of extremist misanthropes like the El Paso and Christchurch killers should surely give green ideologues pause for thought.
No green-leaning writer or activist bears even the remotest responsibility for the horrific acts of eco-fascism in Christchurch and El Paso. However, what is clear is that, in their search for ideological justifications for their loathing of their fellow human beings, both of these killers landed very firmly upon the environmentalist ideology. They clearly spied in it a moral-sounding, pretend-scientific justification for their belief that human beings are scum, a plague, who deserve to be punished. When your belief system so readily lends itself to violent misanthropy, it is time, surely, to rethink that belief system. The fashionable misanthropy of green thinking is in dire need of public questioning and public challenge.
SOURCE
Bring back the plastic straws
McDonald’s new paper straws are rubbish. And they don’t even help the environment
If you’ve been to McDonald’s in the past few months, you will have noticed a change. Along with seemingly every bar, restaurant, and café in central London, it has replaced its plastic drinks straws with paper ones, in a bid to be more environmentally friendly.
McDonald’s had been spurred into straw-changing action by a combination of the fuss generated by the BBC’s Blue Planet II, in which David Attenborough showcased the impact of single-use plastics on our oceans, and the UK government’s decision to ban plastic straws, stirrers and cotton buds from April 2020.
But there’s a big problem. As reported by the Sun, the 1.8million paper straws used every day in McDonald’s restaurants are not recyclable, while the now-scrapped plastic versions were recyclable. In fact, the paper versions – which customers have complained dissolve in soft drinks, are difficult to use in milkshakes, and even change the taste of some beverages – are going straight in the bin and then into the incinerator.
This is a perfect example of bad policymaking, driven by companies and politicians who care more about chasing headlines than looking at the evidence and making informed decisions. In a bid to appear environmentally friendly, McDonald’s has actually increased its carbon footprint and has forced an inferior product on millions of customers.
Such kneejerk and ill-thought-out decision-making is common when it comes to the climate-change debate.
Take Prince Harry’s decision last week to urge the world to have fewer children. He seems to be oblivious to the fact that many Western countries actually face the problem of an ageing population, meaning there are too few working-age taxpayers to support those living longer in retirement and needing expensive healthcare. As public finances come under increasing pressure, we need more, not fewer, babies.
Yes, people are rightly concerned about plastic pollution in the world’s oceans, but we risk exacerbating existing problems through kneejerk decision making. Plastic straws account for 0.03 per cent of plastic in our seas. Fishing nets make up almost half. By making changes that make us feel good – or make businesses look good – without considering whether the policy has the impact it is supposed to have, we often end up doing more harm than good.
In order to make a lasting impact on pollution and climate change we need to have an honest conversation about what consumers want and what effect certain materials have on the environment. Plastic is a very modern bogeyman, but until affordable and effective alternatives are available, companies and governments would do well to call time on the plastic bans.
SOURCE
Politically Toxic: Germans Rebel Against Tax On Meat
Through human history, the basic standard of well-being has been the ability to afford an adequate diet, especially one that includes animal protein.
But, in classic first-world style, some German politicians have decided that Germans eat “too much” meat. Hence a campaign to raise taxes on meat: “Green tax on sausages a step too far for Germans.”
Germany has raised the prospect of imposing a hefty tax on meat to encourage carnivores to cut down on their consumption.
This week MPs from the ruling parties flirted with abolishing meat’s special status in the tax system and nearly trebling the levy on each product to 19 per cent. A 19 percent tax on meat!
Alongside staples such as bread, milk and coffee, Germany levies only a 7 per cent VAT rate on meat products, while charging 19 per cent VAT on baby food, restaurant meals and mineral water.
Earlier this week MPs floated the idea of moving meat into the more expensive category, in effect indicating that it is more of a luxury than an indispensable foodstuff.
I think most of us would agree that meat is indispensable. Most Germans apparently agree:
The meat tax was abandoned yesterday as the leaders of the mainstream parties fretted that it could become politically toxic and difficult to administer in Germany’s highly devolved federal structure.
The fundamental question, of course, is: what right do politicians and bureaucrats have to tell the rest of us we are eating “too much” meat so that the price should be inflated via taxation?
SOURCE
Could cooler years be coming?
There is an 11 year cycle, during which the sun becomes cooler and then warms again. The lowest energy point, which usually lasts one or more years, is called a solar minimum.
The term “solar minimum” comes from there being a minimum of sunspots (massive explosions on the surface of the sun), which is an indication that the thermal output of the sun is lessened.
When the solar minimums are longer the cooling of the sun is more significant and an “ice age” can occur on the earth. The most recent ice age occurred between 1300 and 1800. It was called the Little Ice Age. Unfortunately during that time the arrangement of our planetary system from 1645 to 1715 was in what is known as the Maunder Minimum (1645 to 1715) which further lessened the heat reaching that Earth from the sun. This produced catastrophic results in terms of crop loss, sickness, starvation and unemployment which led to a general collapse of European society.
The best solar science specialists and their mathematical model simulations are projecting a major Solar Minimum within the next 20 years. While all the talk today concerns a fear that the Earth may warm a couple degrees within a hundred years, we may be wiser to consider mitigating a cooler period within the next few decades.
Unlike the unwise desire to eliminate fossil fuels so as to reduce carbon emissions which some believe control the Earth’s thermostat, preparation for colder weather is far less costly and dramatic.
The areas in which effective mitigation can occur, provided there is sufficient time and resources include but are not limited to:
Food Production
Transportation
Water Systems
Power (Electrical) Systems
A new book on this subject ICE AGE 2025 covers these subjects in detail.
As for food production, just as we have taken advantage of genetic engineering to make crops more stable in hot and dry conditions we will advance our knowledge to grow crops in colder conditions.
Regarding transportation, the present US urban methods of keeping roads open in winter are inadequate for the coming cold weather, but can readily be improved and advanced. Similarly most of the urban US water systems are ill equipped to deal with freezing temperatures over a long period of time but can be upgraded at reasonable expense with existing technology already in use in northern climates.
Power and energy will not be a problem as long as the calls to end use of our abundant oil and natural gas are ignored.
We are now in a solar minimum. It may be the first step toward a cooler Earth for a period of time. Different models project different dates for it, but most solar specialists believe it is not far away.
Society during the past Little Ice age was agrarian and the industrial revolution had not yet occurred. For the high technology urbanized societies today, the effects of solar minimums which could lead to “little” ice ages may be more difficult to deal with the climatic effects. Transportation, electricity, and food systems are more complex today but are managed with great advances in technology.
During the Little Ice Age, and particularly the Maunder Solar Minimum, it was not only cooler temperatures which brought chaos to society and agricultural life, some extreme weather occurred as well.
Some food crops did manage to survive the cooler temperatures and shorter growing seasons, were destroyed by storms of snow and ice or frost. Weather prediction today offers far advanced warnings of advancing weather, making mitigation protocols far more effective.
One interesting effect of potential cooling is the prevalence of noctilucent clouds over large parts of the Northern US.
As a result of the present solar minimum, much of the northern part of the US, can see astonishing blue clouds at sunset. Usually reserved for arctic areas, they are now at our door step if we are in the northern part of the US.
Could cooler years be coming? Not only are these noctilucent clouds a different color, they have a different structure. Looking at these clouds, it’s not a very large jump to assume we can find other changes here on earth, and plant growth cycles are among them.
The most advanced solar model developed yet does project a major Solar Minimum.
Valentina Zharkova, a mathematics professor from Northumbria University (UK), presented a model that can predict what solar cycles will look like far more accurately than was previously possible.
Her model has been accurate with short term projections and she believes Earth is heading for a Super Grand Solar Minimum (that could be really cold) in approximately fifteen years.
That we are heading for cooler temperatures on earth, something quite opposite of the Global Warming movement mantra, seem much clearer than the evidence for a warming trend
The results of deep solar minimums are far more complex than simply cooler temperatures, and combined, these effects present a formidable challenge to prepare for. Taking a dispassionate focused look at the potential problems provides an opportunity to harden infrastructure against future challenges.
SOURCE
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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here.
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11 August, 2019
Climate change threatens the world’s food supply, United Nations warns
Hang on! Aren't we always told that eating our food is bad for the planet? Don't we need to cut back our food consumption to save the planet? There have been many Warmist articles to that effect. But now we hear that we are running out of food and that is bad. I would have thought that running low on food would save the planet! Shouldn't Greenies be cheering about the "news" below?
Sounds like the Warmists are having their cake and eating it too. Or is that not having their cake?
Realistically, however, the guff below is typical Leftist tunnel vision stuff. They see only the things they want to see -- not the full picture. What they ignore is that global warming would open up vast areas of Northern Canada and Southern Siberia to farming and food production.
The climate there would not only be warmer but it would also be wetter. And with high levels of atmospheric CO2, the crops would need less water anyway. Canadian farmers would love to get their combines onto another million acres of wheatland. Most grains are already in chronic glut and global warming would worsen it. A downpour of food, not a shortage, would follow global warming
The world’s land and water resources are being exploited at “unprecedented rates,” a new United Nations report warns, which combined with climate change is putting dire pressure on the ability of humanity to feed itself.
The report, prepared by more than 100 experts from 52 countries and released in summary form in Geneva on Thursday, found that the window to address the threat is closing rapidly. A half-billion people already live in places turning into desert, and soil is being lost between 10 and 100 times faster than it is forming, according to the report.
Climate change will make those threats even worse, as floods, drought, storms, and other types of extreme weather threaten to disrupt, and over time shrink, the global food supply. Already, more than 10 percent of the world’s population remains undernourished, and some authors of the report warned in interviews that food shortages could lead to an increase in cross-border migration.
A particular danger is that food crises could develop on several continents at once, said Cynthia Rosenzweig, a senior research scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and one of the lead authors of the report. “The potential risk of multi-breadbasket failure is increasing,” she said. “All of these things are happening at the same time.”
The report also offered a measure of hope, laying out pathways to addressing the looming food crisis, though they would require a major reevaluation of land use and agriculture worldwide as well as consumer behavior. Proposals include increasing the productivity of land, wasting less food, and persuading more people to shift their diets away from cattle and other types of meat.
“One of the important findings of our work is that there are a lot of actions that we can take now. They’re available to us,” Rosenzweig said. “But what some of these solutions do require is attention, financial support, enabling environments.”
The summary was released Thursday by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an international group of scientists convened by the United Nations that pulls together a wide range of existing research to help governments understand climate change and make policy decisions. The IPCC is writing a series of climate reports, including one last year on the disastrous consequences if the planet’s temperature rises just 1.5 degrees Celsius above its preindustrial levels, as well as an upcoming report on the state of the world’s oceans.
Some authors also suggested that food shortages are likely to affect poorer parts of the world far more than richer ones. That could increase a flow of immigration that is already redefining politics in North America, Europe and other parts of the world.
“People’s lives will be affected by a massive pressure for migration,” said Pete Smith, a professor of plant and soil science at the University of Aberdeen and one of the report’s lead authors. “People don’t stay and die where they are. People migrate.”
Between 2010 and 2015 the number of migrants from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras showing up at the United States’ border with Mexico increased fivefold, coinciding with a dry period that left many with not enough food and was so unusual that scientists suggested it bears the signal of climate change.
Barring action on a sweeping scale, the report said, climate change will accelerate the danger of severe food shortages. As a warming atmosphere intensifies the world’s droughts, flooding, heat waves, wildfires, and other weather patterns, it is speeding up the rate of soil loss and land degradation, the report concludes.
Higher concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere — a greenhouse gas put there mainly by the burning of fossil fuels — will also reduce food’s nutritional quality, even as rising temperatures cut crop yields and harm livestock.
Those changes threaten to exceed the ability of the agriculture industry to adapt.
In some cases, the report says, a changing climate is boosting food production because, for example, warmer temperatures will mean greater yields of some crops at higher latitudes. But on the whole, the report finds that climate change is already hurting the availability of food because of decreased yields and lost land from erosion, desertification and rising seas, among other things.
Overall, if emissions of greenhouse gases continue to rise, so will food costs, according to the report, affecting people around the world.
More HERE
Past, present and future progress requires mining
Metal and mineral needs are constant, constantly evolving, requiring new mines
John M. Clema
Civilization’s progress has always been heavily dependent on farming and mining. The Stone Age didn’t end because mankind ran out of stones.
Instead, the discovery, mining and processing of metals like copper, bronze and iron, followed by the development of steel, led to progressively sharper, more effective tools, improved construction techniques, and other engineering and technological achievements. Nonmetallic minerals have also been and remain vital to civilization and progress.
Minerals – or their scarcity – have precipitated wars, but more often have led to certain countries becoming dominant in manufacturing vital products such as computer chips.
Factors that first influence mining feasibility include the grade of the ore, its location and access to the deposit. Low grades that may have made mining initially less feasible may become feasible over time as prices for those particular minerals increase.
Until the last few decades, mining in the United States was not only considered necessary, but was supported as an honorable effort by hardworking men and women who risked their lives to extract the ores. As attitudes about mining and miners changed, potential mineralized areas were increasingly made off limits to mining – even before any effort was made to evaluate mineral prospects.
Refusing to assess an area’s mineral potential and alternate uses is foolish and contrary to sound public policy. It makes valuable resources inaccessible to industries and societies that need them for vitally important technologies, job creation, government tax and royalty revenues, national security and modern living standards. Shunning our mineral wealth forces America to import minerals from countries that pay far less attention to environmental safeguards and worker safety standards than we do.
For example, to protect forests from exaggerated mining risks, Montana has failed to commission a reasonably sized mine for over 30 years. During the same period, its ideology-based land management practices resulted in tens of millions of acres of timberland and wildlife habitats burning, scarce topsoil washing away, and many rivers, streams and lakes being polluted. While millions of acres of Montana forest burn every year, America purchases timber and lumber from Canada.
The defunding and closure of the US Bureau of Mines, increasing restrictions on patenting mining claims, and unnecessarily burdensome regulations on already patented claims have crippled the nation’s hardrock mining industry. Meanwhile, other government agencies (such as the US Forest Service) acquired broad environmental mandates and hired personnel who oppose mining and have blocked new exploration and mining permits.
Many experts believe we are in an economic war with China, and various activist groups, legislators, regulators and judges support this for their own individual reasons. Requirements for rare earth and other critical metals are likely one of the significant factors leading to American companies like Apple moving their manufacturing to China.
Today the United States produces only about 40% of the copper and other metals that our industries require. Scarce and rare metals are generally found in smaller deposits that require underground operations that are of little interest to large mining companies but could be profitably mined in America, especially Alaska and our western states.
For instance, the Chinese currently control 80% of global tungsten mining and marketing. The USA has no active mines for this essential metal, which has the highest melting point and tensile strength of any metal. It is used in high-speed cutting tools, wear-resistant super-alloy coatings, cell phones, amour-piercing bullets, metallic skins on hypersonic weapons, and many other applications.
A mining consortium that I was involved with made a major tungsten discovery back in the 1970s in Montana. Data from drilling cores was excellent but was lost when the company closed. For more than eight years we have been trying to get a permit to redrill this site – but constantly changing rules and decisions have prevented us from moving forward. For example:
1) Federal Land is administered by different agencies operating under conflicting rules that are interpreted by officials who have no mining experience or interest in exploration and mining projects that would enable the United States to compete better with countries like China.
Reconstituting a Bureau of Mines with uniform rules that apply throughout the country, overseen by people with knowledge of the mining industry, would help overcome these problems.
2) Mining claims currently require yearly fees, while awaiting a Permit for Land Disturbance from government agencies. The process can drag on for years.
A time limit should be set for the government to grant a permit. While mine development is progressing, yearly fees should be abated unless progress is halted or other unforeseen developments occur. Mine development should generate yearly reports to the Bureau that should be stored as part of the information on the particular site. Once a discovery has been established, the claim should be patented to establish firm ownership and royalties based on production.
3) If a mining project is abandoned, vital mine and ore body data are frequently lost, and getting mining underway again by a new operator can be stymied for years.
In such cases, previous rights to the claim should be forfeited; regulations should require that data generated by the mining project be turned over to the US Geological Survey and/or new Bureau of Mines, so that it is not lost and is stored for potential future projects; and new permits should be issued in a timely manner under guidelines just suggested.
4) Federal and state government agencies have largely prevented the discovery and development of rare earth and other critical minerals resources, by limiting access to potential sites.
Instead, efforts to find, mine and process vital minerals should be supported and encouraged by people who have adequate knowledge and backgrounds to understand the importance of such deposits and how companies today can conduct all needed operations in ways that protect wildlife habitats and air and water quality. Establishing a new Bureau of Mines with a staff that includes miners and engineers would be an important first step.
Only by making these changes can lawmakers and regulators help ensure the independence and future success of the United States, its defense and high-technology industries, and its security – in the face of growing dependence on foreign sources for the vast majority of its critical minerals. With increasingly powerful countries like Russia and China supplying many of those minerals, and forming strategic alliances, American mineral independence is more vital now than ever.
Via email
Sweden’s Biggest Cities Face Power Shortage After Fuel-Tax Hike
Sweden’s introduction on Thursday of a tax aimed at phasing out the nation’s last remaining coal and gas plants to curb global warming comes with an unintended consequence for some of its biggest cities.
Hiking threefold a levy on fossil fuels used at local power plants will make such facilities unprofitable and utilities from Stockholm Exergi AB to EON SE have said they will halt or cut power production.
The move means that grids in the capital and Malmo won’t be able to hook up new facilities including homes, transport links and factories. While Sweden doesn’t have a shortage of power, there’s not enough cables to ship it to the biggest cities.
“We don’t have a problem with generating enough power in Sweden, we have a problem with getting it to where its needed,” Magnus Hall, chief executive officer of state-owned utility Vattenfall AB, said in an interview. “This law was added with short notice and I am not sure a proper analysis of it was made.”
The tax was introduced in January in a budget deal between the Center Party, Liberals, Social Democrats and the Greens after record long 18 weeks of negotiations. As only one of 73 points hashed out between the political fractions to reach a compromise, time for thorough analysis was probably slim.
The tax, aimed at spurring the shift to renewable energy, comes on top of carbon-emission pollution rights that tripled last year and have gained another 18% this year to their highest level since 2006.
Power output from Stockholm Exergi’s Vartaverket, EON’s Heleneholmverket and Goteborg Energi AB’s Ryaverket will stop or be heavily cut as soon as the law is introduced, although operators said they will still be used for district heating.
Sweden gets most of its electricity from hydro, nuclear and wind power and exported 11% of the output last year. About 10% is still generated in combined heat and power plants that mostly uses biofuels, but some older facilities still burns coal or gas.
Because of the urbanization, demand for electricity in many Swedish cities is starting to outgrow capacity and some have already been forced to refuse new connections to avoid black outs.
“Combined heat and power plants must carry their own cost to the environment, even if they have an important role to play for the supply of energy,” Anders Ygeman, minister for energy and digitalization, said in an emailed statement. “The tax will contribute to the ongoing away shift from fossil fuels.”
Ygeman said it is still too early to say what impact the new tax will have, but there are already examples of its impact. Some new daycare centers have to wait for months to be connected to the grid in Stockholm. A bread factory in Malmo was denied a license to expand because it would consume too much power.
Ulf Kristersson, the moderate party opposition leader, said the capacity crisis fazing Swedish cities is enough reason to renegotiate a current five-party energy agreement to slow down the phaseout of nuclear and local plants burning fossil fuels. Without a solution, both Moderate and Christian Democrats are threatening to abandon the pact agreed in 2016.
“We need a new agreement that solves the situation we have now,” Ulf kristersson said in an interview at the end of June. “I think when we approach autumn that issue needs to come to some kind of conclusion.”
SOURCE
U.S. natural gas is the new, global, soft power weapon
United States (U.S.) carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from the power sector, and broader economy have declined 61 percent between 2006-2014; mainly from “switching from coal-to-gas-powered generation,” according to the U.S. Department of Energy’s Second Installment of the Quadrennial Energy Review, January 2017. These environmentally sound numbers from higher use of natural gas can also be translated globally to help with pollution in countries such as China, India, and the entire continent of Africa.
The U.S. now uses natural gas converted to liquid natural gas (LNG) from shale deposits in states such as Texas, North Dakota, and Pennsylvania to transform geopolitics. Lower LNG prices stymie terrorist-financing budgets in Tehran and lower the ability for Putin’s Russia to weaponize their energy assets for geopolitical adventures in Ukraine, Crimea, Syria, Central Asian and the Middle East.
How this new soft power of energy transforms the world economically and positively towards western-aligned institutions is through increasing LNG exports, which “hit a new record high at 4.7 billion cubic feet per day in May 2019.” The U.S. is approximately the world’s third largest LNG exporter. Illustrating this power has seen the U.S. add four new LNG trains “with a combined capacity of 2.4Bcf/d come online since November 2018.”
Countries with heavy LNG deposits can transform their national fate and redirect their foreign policy and national security initiatives without deploying their militaries. Energy economics overtakes military significance, because everyone needs the power generation and electricity that clean burning, LNG exports provide.
Positively, it means the U.S. no longer has to rely on Middle Eastern authoritarians to power its economy, and the world order that has depended on the U.S. for global security since the end of World War II (WWII). Negatively, since the U.S. no longer needs Saudi oil or Qatari LNG then the debate over protecting the Strait of Hormuz, where “90 percent of oil exported from the Gulf, (and) about 20 percent of the world’s supply passed through,” would be a non-starter.
Europe, led by Germany, is where the LNG’s soft power persuasiveness is changing continent-wide dynamics. In the first half of 2019 according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA): “Roughly 40 percent of U.S. LNG exports went to Europe, and in January, Europe surpassed Asia as a buyer of U.S. LNG for the first time.” This is a direct, soft power approach to countering Germany moving forward with the Russian-backed Nord Stream 2 pipeline that the U.S. and other European countries have deeply opposed.
Additionally, this newfound purchasing of U.S. LNG in Europe is another poker chip without military forces against Turkey leaning away from NATO over the purchase of the Russian S-400 anti-aircraft weapon system, and through continued encroachment by Turkish vessels off Cyprus’ coast illegally drilling for oil and natural gas. This puts the entire Mediterranean security profile at risk, says, “Athens’ newly elected government.”
But coercion, and diplomatic solutions, without shots being fired, or crippling sanctions, are the opportunities the soft power of LNG provide large and small nation-states. With the U.S. since 2017 being the world’s top producer of petroleum and natural gas hydrocarbons this offers opportunities never dreamed of during the Cold War when it was the U.S. and the west versus Russia for global supremacy.
Beating Russia at weaponization of oil and natural gas can be traced to 2009 when “U.S. natural gas production surpassed that of Russia.” Russian firms heavily influenced or owned by the Kremlin – Rosneft and Gazprom – took a serious blow, which meant they no longer had free reign to manipulate prices in Central Asia, Eastern and Western Europe whenever it suited Moscow’s needs.
As an example, the first cargo delivery of LNG arrived in Poland earlier this summer from PGNiG (a Polish firm), and U.S. LNG provider Cheniere Energy at President Lech Kaczy?ski LNG Terminal in ?winouj?cie. The long-term contract, which was signed in November of 2018, will total approximately 39 bcm of natural gas over the 24 year period of the agreement.
Piotr Wo?niak, President of PGNiG Management Board said:
“Our portfolio of contracts with U.S. suppliers covers over 9 billion cubic meters of natural gas after regasification annually – that is more than we import from Russia. Such a volume strengthens Poland’s energy security, but also gives us the opportunity to actively participate in LNG trading on the global market.”
This bolsters “energy relations” between Poland and the U.S. without involving military friction that normally precipitates NATO movements against Russia. Instead, U.S. LNG blocks Russian energy from interfering in Polish internal affairs or economic development.
Global security and European Union foreign policy against Russian LNG will also speed ahead in the coming years and decades ahead. New oil and natural gas project spending is expected to jump five-fold in 2019, according to Wood Mackenzie. Even smaller, geopolitical players like Mexico are seeking ways to boost their natural gas production 50% through government-owned, oil firm, Petroleo Mexicanos (PEMEX).
Fossil fuel – particularly, natural gas and/or LNG – will be at the forefront when it relates to soft power, national security, and robust economic growth for mature and emerging markets. Natural gas markets are dominated by U.S. energy decisions translated into policy more than ever before, “as Washington prosecutes a trade war with China and takes a hard line on Iran.”
The dominance takes place, because U.S. gross imports of crude and natural gas have steadied or declined whereas “rising LNG exports provide another point of US entry into world energy markets.” This balances world LNG markets, provides stability, and moves international energy trade forward in a soft power direction and platform over the weaponization of energy assets seen from Russia, China and Iran.
There is an LNG, soft power drama playing out on the world stage to to engage international relations. LNG keeps major wars from erupting, and that is a positive economic and human longevity aspect of energy that few people, companies and governments seem to understand these days.
SOURCE
Great Barrier Reef run-off rules rile farmers
This is all about another unproven Greenie theory. There is no good evidence that farm runoff damages the reef. There is in fact good evidence that it does not. There is practically no agriculture bordering the reef in the top half of the Eastern Cape York peninsula yet there has been a lot of reef damage there. Farmers are being burdened by restrictions and bureaucracy for no proven benefit
Contentious moves to put added restrictions on farmers and development have emotions running high along this stretch of the central Queensland coast. The state Labor government is planning new legislation that will provide for much greater supervision of agricultural practices.
“Onshore activity will always have an impact,” Dunlop says. “The question is where the intervention point should be. Nutrient loads are coming out of the Fitzroy River and from developments from population growth along the coast. There is discharge from inadequate sewage treatment works and manure from household pets from all these coastal suburbs.”
The duty of care, Dunlop says, should be bigger than beating up on farmers.
Great Barrier Reef protection regulations already apply to the environmentally relevant activities of all commercial sugar cane cultivation and grazing on properties of more than 2000ha in the Wet Tropics, Burdekin and Mackay Whitsunday catchment areas. Canegrowers and graziers are required to comply with farming practices that include applying fertilisers and chemicals using prescribed methodologies and keeping associated records. But until now there have been no restrictions in the Fitzroy and Burnett-Mary reef catchments.
The new legislation, which could be voted on as early as this month, will set nutrient and sediment pollution load limits for each of the six reef catchments and will limit fertiliser use for sugar cane, grazing, bananas, other horticulture crops and grains production and to agricultural activities in all Great Barrier Reef catchments.
Advisers will be required to keep records of farms they work with and provide them to governments on request. Requests could also be made for agricultural data that may assist in determining where over-application of fertiliser is occurring. Measures will also be introduced to address extra nutrient and sediment loads from new cropping to achieve no net decline in reef water quality from new developments.
A parliamentary committee has said it is satisfied there is sufficient evidence that links agricultural land use with adverse effects to water quality, and that this affects the Great Barrier Reef.
It has not accepted arguments that there is insufficient evidence to make this connection. The committee notes the difficulties in capturing the data specific to individual properties and says “scientific modelling is an adequate and reliable way of providing and assessing data”.
The new laws will require data from the agricultural sector that may assist in determining where over-application of fertiliser, and therefore high rates of nutrient run-off, may be occurring.
It is intended that the new laws will begin later this year, with implementation staged across three years. There will be heavy fines for non-compliance. Controversially, the limits set in legislation can be changed in future by the director-general without having to go back to parliament.
Bundaberg Canegrowers is leading the charge against the new laws. “They are assuming we are dumb as dogs and we are farming like grandad used to with horses,” Bundaberg Canegrowers chief executive Dale Holliss says.
His group is questioning the rationale for extending laws to a region with a vastly different climate and rainfall. Holliss fears that once introduced, the targets set for improved water quality simply cannot be met. Canegrowers see the regulations as part of a broader political push that is loaded with unintended consequences for the rural sector.
“It hasn’t been thought through,” Holliss says. “Everyone cares but why are you imposing more regulation on our struggling economy? Vegetables from this region are sold to major supermarkets right around the nation.
“The Bundaberg region supplies 80 per cent of Australia’s sweet potatoes, 42 per cent of avocado and 40 per cent of macadamia. It supplies the largest field-grown tomatoes in the country.”
Together with grazing, all will be captured by the new laws.
Holliss says he believes sugar cane has been singled out because there are not many votes in it and the industry is visible.
“Cane is not king here but it is a cornerstone tenant,” he says. “The irrigation system here that makes everything possible is as a result of cane. The port is as a result of cane. The foundry is as a result of cane.”
Analysis by canegrowers shows that for every dollar earned by cane there is a $6.20 return to the Queensland economy.
For Holliss, it smacks of politics. “A lot of this comes back to people in southeast Queensland trying to shore up votes and selling the bush out of it,” he says.
Research by farm groups claims that if all cane were removed from the system, it would still not be sufficient to meet the targets. Most sediment comes from natural processes.
However, Capricorn Conservation Council spokeswoman Sherie Bruce says the regulations are needed to maintain the Great Barrier Reef’s World Heritage status.
“To keep UNESCO World Heritage status they have to comply with outcomes, so the science is showing we are not going to meet those outcomes on water quality,” Bruce says.
She says self-regulation is favoured by the industry but it has failed. “The LNP allowed that to happen for a long time and then you can see only 3 per cent undertook self-regulation and the rest didn’t want to do it.
“To get the outcome they want for water quality to protect the reef, the state government committee recommended that regulation was the way to go,” she says.
“The Queensland government has an obligation under UNESCO to introduce that.” Bruce says she can understand that farmers are saying they have an issue with the data, but “I don’t have a problem”, she says. “It is peer-reviewed.”
Conservation groups cite a recent paper in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution, which found corals in the central and southern sections of the reef would need improvements in water quality of between 6 per cent and 17 per cent to keep their recovery rates in line with projected increases in coral bleaching.
Australian Marine Conservation Society director Imogen Zethoven says the canegrowers’ campaign is “disappointing” when the reef needs all the help it can get. “Getting the water cleaned up was a key promise that Australia made to the World Heritage committee when it was considering putting the reef on the ‘in danger’ list in 2015,” Zethoven says.
She says the science showing that the reef’s corals are being hit hard by climate change and poor water quality is overwhelming.
A 2017 scientific consensus statement says improving the quality of the water flowing from the land to the reef is critical for the Great Barrier Reef’s long-term health and resilience to the effects of climate change. The statement says sediments, nutrients and pesticides flowing into reef waters affect the health of coral and seagrass habitats, making the reef less able to withstand or recover from events such as the coral bleaching in 2016 and 2017.
Holliss isn’t completely buying it. “My personal view is I think there is that much money around associated with reef science and lots of people find reasons to investigate things so they can get that rich succulent funding stream into their area.”
But Zethoven says “the fact that the canegrowers group is also now trying to attack the science, while claiming they are doing the right thing to protect it, is deeply disappointing”.
When it conducted its inquiry into the new legislation, the parliamentary committee received submissions from around the world including the US, Canada, Germany, Italy and The Netherlands, as well as conservation groups and farmers.
The Environmental Defenders Office told the committee that a failure to act appropriately would result in Queensland and Australia not meeting their commitments as a state and a nation to improve our management of the reef.
“We will be shamed in the face of the international community, let alone have the prospect of a dead reef in the decade to come,” the EDO said.
Several submissions were received from individuals and businesses who identified as working in the agricultural industry in a reef catchment area.
“The majority of these submitters did not support the bill,” the committee report says. But it has recommended the bill be passed.
Tourism operator and reef guardian Peter Gash has sympathies for all sides.
“Down here the southern reef has the geographical advantage that it is further off the coast and any run-off that happens generally doesn’t reach it,” says Gash. “In my time I have only seen run-off get to Lady Elliot (island) once from a big flood on the Burnett.
“I come from the farm. I can see both sides. The first thing we need to do is stop overreacting. We all need to work together as partners. Certainly there is no doubt that some run-offs can do some damage to the reefs, but how much and where is it worse than others and how can we work with our farming practices to improve that?”
Gash says farmers have every right to be concerned. “Farmers are long-term thinkers,” he says. “I don’t think there is any doubt that there have been some things done that farmers look back on now and go, ‘I wish grandpa didn’t do that.’
“But it’s not just farming. It applies to industrial and residential developments as well.”
SOURCE
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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here.
Preserving the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here
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9 August, 2019
Climate change made Europe’s 2019 record heatwave up to ‘100 times more likely’
Attribution bullshit. You cannot prove cause without control groups so this is just unscientific speculation. Even Hume's constant conjunction is missing
The run of unprecedented temperatures in July – which sent records tumbling in the UK, the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany – would have been “extremely unlikely” without climate change, according to a new quick-fire analysis.
The hot weather seen in the Netherlands and France was made up to “100 times more likely” by climate change, the study finds.
And the heat in Cambridge in the UK – which saw a new country-wide record of 38.7C in July – was made around “20 times more likely” by human-caused warming.
The findings come from the latest analysis from the World Weather Attribution network. “Attribution” refers to a fast-growing field of science that aims to quantify the “fingerprint” of climate change on extreme-weather events.
Across Europe, the July heatwave was “much more extreme than any other heatwave we’ve looked at over the *last few years*” [what about earlier than that?], a scientist from the network tells Carbon Brief.
SOURCE
Greenies are wusses
The study below found that many pro-environmental behaviours are generally seen as feminine and may be avoided by men because of that.
There was however the interesting case of some environmental activities that were seen as masculine -- e.g. caulking windows. Nobody liked women who did those things
Gender Bending and Gender Conformity: The Social Consequences of Engaging in Feminine and Masculine Pro-Environmental Behaviors
Janet K. Swim
Abstract
Although pro-environmental behaviors (PEBs) have been characterized as feminine, some PEBs are masculine suggesting that gender bending (e.g., engaging in pro-environmental behaviors inconsistent with one’s own gender) and gender conformity (e.g., engaging in pro-environmental behaviors consistent with one’s own gender) are possible for both women and men.
Social consequences for gender bending versus conformity with PEBs were assessed in three studies. Gender bending created uncertainty about an actor’s heterosexual identity (Studies 1 and 2). Consistent with stigma-by-association, actors’ gender bending influenced judgments about an actor’s friend’s sexual identity (Study 2).
However, gender bending had limited effects on ascription of gendered traits: More feminine than masculine traits were ascribed to PEB actors, even actors of masculine PEBs (Studies 1 and 2).
Consistent with social ostracism, Study 3 illustrated that men were most likely to socially distance themselves from female gender benders, likely as a result of prejudice against gender-bending women. In contrast, women preferred to socially interact with gender-conforming women, likely resulting from a combination of their greater interest in feminine than masculine PEBs and preferring to interact with women more so than with men. Social repercussions are discussed in terms of stigmatizing engagement in PEBs.
SOURCE
Dear Congress, stop subsidizing wind like it’s 1999 and let the tax credit expire
By Richard McCarty
Congress created the production tax credit for wind energy in 1992. In other words, wind turbine owners receive a tax credit for each kilowatt hour of electricity their turbines create, whether the electricity is needed or not. The production tax credit was supposed to have expired in 1999; but, instead, Congress has repeatedly extended it. After nearly three decades of propping up the wind industry, it is past time to let the tax credit expire in 2020.
All Congress needs to do is nothing.
Addressing the issue of wind production tax credits, Americans for Limited Government President Rick Manning stated, “Wind energy development is no longer a nascent industry, having grown from 0.7 percent of the grid in 2007 to 6.6 percent in 2018 at 275 billion kWh. The rationale behind the wind production tax credit has always been that it is necessary to attract investors.”
Manning added, “wind energy development has matured to the point where government subsidization of billionaires like Warren Buffett cannot be justified, neither from an energy production standpoint nor a fiscal one. Americans for Limited Government strongly urges Congress to end the Wind Production Tax Credit. The best part is, they only need to do nothing as it expires at the end of the year.”
There are plenty of reasons for ending the tax credit. Here are some of them:
Wind energy is unreliable. Wind turbines require winds of six to nine miles per hour to produce electricity; when winds speeds reach approximately 55 miles per hour, turbines shut down to prevent damage to the equipment. Wind turbines also shut down in extremely cold weather.
Due to this unreliability, relatively large amounts of backup power capacity must be kept available.
Wind energy often requires the construction of costly, new high-voltage transmission lines. This is because some of the best places to generate wind energy are in remote locations far from population centers or offshore.
Generating electricity from wind requires much more land than does coal, natural gas, nuclear, or even solar power. According to a 2017 study, generating one megawatt of electricity from coal, natural gas, or nuclear power requires about 12 acres; producing one megawatt of electricity from solar energy requires 43.5 acres; and harnessing wind energy to generate one megawatt of electricity requires 70.6 acres.
Wind turbines have a much shorter life span than other energy sources. According to the Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory, the useful life of a wind turbine is 20 years while coal, natural gas, nuclear, and hydroelectric power plants can remain in service for more than 50 years.
Wind power’s inefficiencies lead to higher rates for customers.
Higher electricity rates can have a chilling effect on the local economy. Increasing electricity rates for businesses makes them less competitive and can result in job losses or reduced investments in businesses.
Increasing rates on poor consumers can have an even more negative impact sometimes forcing them to go without heat in the winter or air conditioning in the summer.
Wind turbines are a threat to aviators. Wind turbines are a particular concern for crop dusters, who must fly close to the ground to spray crops. Earlier this summer, a crop dusting plane clipped a wind turbine tower and crashed.
Wind turbines are deadly for birds and bats, which help control the pest population. Even if bats are not struck by the rotors, some evidence suggests that they may be injured or killed by the sudden drop in air pressure around wind turbines.
Large wind turbines endanger lives, the economy, and the environment. Even after decades of heavy subsidies, the wind industry has failed to solve these problems. For these and other reasons, Congress should finally allow the wind production tax credit to expire.
SOURCE
Biden's plan to eliminate fossil fuels is bad for our national security, worse for our economy
For two nights last week, the Democratic candidates for president treated the American public to round two of their socialist proposals to bankrupt our nation, kill good-paying jobs, and drastically alter the fabric of our economy.
While many ideas discussed by the nearly two dozen Democratic hopefuls for the White House would spell disaster for the future of an America that is now realizing unprecedented prosperity, Joe Biden’s call to eliminate fossil fuels is particularly egregious.
When pressed whether he would get rid of coal and “fracking” -- the predominant process by which natural gas is extracted from the ground -- Biden pledged to get rid of both. By selling out to the far-left extreme of his party, the former vice president told hundreds of thousands of hardworking Americans that he is coming for their jobs and prepared to jack up their energy costs.
While socialists in Congress and most of those seeking the Democratic presidential nomination continue to push for the Green New Deal, a recent study showed that it would cost Pennsylvania taxpayers $70,000 per person in the first year alone.
However, the complete elimination of fossil fuels spells more pain than just massive tax increases for working families.
It means weakening our national security by eliminating our ability to be energy independent, killing a thriving energy economy and the hundreds of thousands of jobs it supports, and stopping investment in rural America.
The success of the natural gas industry in Pennsylvania and across the United States has completely shifted long-term thinking about American energy policy and our role in the global energy marketplace.
Thanks in large part to our nation’s robust supply of natural gas, the United States is no longer energy dependent, relying on foreign adversaries to meet our energy needs.
For the first time in six decades, the United States is a net natural gas exporter.
We can now use our energy exports as leverage in our foreign policy, giving our allies flexibility, while diminishing the influence of unfriendly nations.
One way to marginalize countries that do not like the United States is to bankrupt them.
The less we are forced to buy the energy exports from our foreign adversaries, the worse their economy becomes, and the less they are able to exert influence over us.
For example, last year, Massachusetts was forced to import natural gas from Russia due to New York’s refusal to put in place pipeline infrastructure that can get natural gas to markets where it is needed.
Those concerned about Russian interference need to be concerned with Russia’s ability to influence our country when Americans are forced to buy natural gas from Russian gas companies and when countries like Russia have leverage to increase the price of natural gas in the winter time and turn the lights off for millions of Americans.
That absurdity is exponentially increased in a world where fossil fuels are completely eliminated to fulfill a campaign pledge made to satiate the unsound political interests of our country’s far-left base.
The elimination of fossil fuels would also severely harm the economy in states like Pennsylvania and affect rural investment in places like my home district.
I know this first-hand. On any given day in my congressional district, natural gas companies produce between one-tenth and one-twentieth of the entire nation’s natural gas supply. The district is also home to two of the largest natural gas producing counties in the country.
In Pennsylvania, the natural gas industry supports more than 300,000 jobs, contributes $45 billion to the commonwealth’s economy, and saves the average household $1,100 every year in energy costs.
This means more financial security for families, making day-to-day life more affordable.
The natural gas industry has created good-paying jobs and injected new life into our local economies as energy companies continue to partner with local communities to invest in schools and higher education, improve our infrastructure, and grow down-stream jobs.
The loss of this economic engine under Joe Biden’s plan to completely eliminate fossil fuels would set my district—and the rest of energy-producing America—back decades.
Natural gas as a fossil fuel has dramatically improved the quality of life and the economy in areas like my congressional district and across America. Our ability to become energy independent is making our nation stronger.
As a member of Congress, I will not let radical proposals to eliminate fossil fuels set America back, make us weaker, and hinder our growing economy.
SOURCE
South Australian blackout blows wind farms into court
No precautions taken against interruption of supply. They just accepted the delusory Greenie belief that "renewables" were adequate
The Australian Energy Regulator will take four South Australian wind farm operators to court accusing them of failing to perform properly during SA's statewide blackout in 2016.
The action in the Federal Court will allege AGL Energy Ltd, Neoen SA, Pacific Hydro Ltd and Tilt Renewables all breached the National Electricity Rules.
"The AER has brought these proceedings to send a strong signal to all energy businesses about the importance of compliance with performance standards to promote system security and reliability" chair Paula Conboy said.
"These alleged failures contributed to the black system event, and meant that Australian Energy Market Operator was not fully informed when responding to system-wide failure."
The allegations relate to the performance of wind farms during the severe weather event that swept across SA in September 2016 and which ultimately triggered the statewide power outage.
The storms damaged more than 20 towers in the state's mid-north, bringing down major transmission lines and causing a knock-on effect across the state's energy grid.
About 850,000 customers lost power, with some in the state's north and on the Eyre Peninsula left without electricity for several days.
A report from AEMO released about a month later found nine of 13 wind farms online at the time of the blackout switched off when the transmission lines came down.
It found the inability of the wind farms to ride through those disturbances was the result of safety settings that forced them to disconnect or reduce output.
The blackout also sparked a war of words between supporters of renewable power and those who blamed SA's high reliance on wind and solar generation as a contributing factor.
That included an infamous confrontation between former Premier Jay Weatherill and then Federal Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg at a media conference in Adelaide, with Mr Weatherill lashing the coalition's "anti-South Australian stance" as a disgrace.
Current Energy Minister Angus Taylor said it was important for the regulator to enforce market rules. "We need to have reliable power in this country ... and that means all generators need to perform," he said.
In its action, the AER alleges each of the wind farm operators failed to ensure that their plant and associated facilities complied with their generator performance standard requirement to ride-through certain disturbances.
It also alleges that the wind farm operators failed to provide automatic protection systems to enable them to ride-through voltage disturbances to ensure continuity of supply, in contravention of the National Electricity Rules.
The AER is seeking declarations, penalties, compliance program orders and costs.
The action against AGL relates to the Hallett 1, Hallett 2 Hallett 4 and Hallett 5 wind farms.
In relates to Neoen SA's Hornsdale Wind Farm, Pacific Hydro's Clements Gap Wind Farm and Tilt Renewables' Snowtown 2 Wind Farm.
In a statement, AGL said it had previously considered that it had complied with its legal obligations in relation to the 2016 events.
But it said it would review the allegations made by the AER and consider its position.
Tilt Renewables said it believed it had acted in good faith and in accordance with the applicable National Electricity Rules in relation to the SA blackout. "The company will continue to engage with the AER in an endeavour to resolve this matter," it said.
Pacific Hydro said as legal proceedings had just commenced, it would not be making comment at this stage.
SOURCE
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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here.
Preserving the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here
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8 August, 2019
We must change food production to save the world, says leaked report
This hectoring towards getting us to become vegans or vegetarians comes at us from all sides. The health effects of such a diet are very uneven however, to put it mildly, so global warming has to be rushed out to fill the gap. An unexaminable hypothesis is a pretty weak reed to lean on however
Attempts to solve the climate crisis by cutting carbon emissions from only cars, factories and power plants are doomed to failure, scientists will warn this week.
A leaked draft of a report on climate change and land use, which is now being debated in Geneva by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), states that it will be impossible to keep global temperatures at safe levels unless there is also a transformation in the way the world produces food and manages land.
Humans now exploit 72% of the planet’s ice-free surface to feed, clothe and support Earth’s growing population, the report warns. At the same time, agriculture, forestry and other land use produces almost a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions.
In addition, about half of all emissions of methane, one of the most potent greenhouse gases, come from cattle and rice fields, while deforestation and the removal of peat lands cause further significant levels of carbon emissions. The impact of intensive agriculture – which has helped the world’s population soar from 1.9 billion a century ago to 7.7 billion – has also increased soil erosion and reduced amounts of organic material in the ground.
In future these problems are likely to get worse. “Climate change exacerbates land degradation through increases in rainfall intensity, flooding, drought frequency and severity, heat stress, wind, sea-level rise and wave action,” the report states.
It is a bleak analysis of the dangers ahead and comes when rising greenhouse gas emissions have made news after triggering a range of severe meteorological events. These include news that:
* Arctic sea-ice coverage reached near record lows for July;
* The heatwaves that hit Europe last month were between 1.5C and 3C higher because of climate change;
* Global temperatures for July were 1.2C above pre-industrial levels for the month.
This last figure is particularly alarming, as the IPCC has warned that rises greater than 1.5C risk triggering climatic destabilisation while those higher than 2C make such events even more likely. “We are now getting very close to some dangerous tipping points in the behaviour of the climate – but as this latest leaked report of the IPCC’s work reveals, it is going to be very difficult to achieve the cuts we need to make to prevent that happening,” said Bob Ward, policy director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment.
The new IPCC report emphasises that land will have to be managed more sustainably so that it releases much less carbon than at present. Peat lands will need to be restored by halting drainage schemes; meat consumption will have to be cut to reduce methane production; while food waste will have to be reduced.
Among the measures put forward by the report is the proposal of a major shift towards vegetarian and vegan diets. “The consumption of healthy and sustainable diets, such as those based on coarse grains, pulses and vegetables, and nuts and seeds … presents major opportunities for reducing greenhouse gas emissions,” the report states.
There also needs to be a big change in how land is used, it adds. Policies need to include “improved access to markets, empowering women farmers, expanding access to agricultural services and strengthening land tenure security”, it states. “Early warning systems for weather, crop yields, and seasonal climate events are also critical.”
The chances of politicians and scientists achieving these goals are uncertain, however. Nations are scheduled to meet in late 2020, probably in the UK, at a key conference where delegates will plant how to achieve effective zero-carbon emission policies over the next few decades.
The US, the second largest emitter of greenhouse gases, will have just had its presidential elections. A new Democrat incumbent would likely be sympathetic to moves to control global heating. Re-election of Donald Trump, who has called climate change “a hoax”, would put a very different, far gloomier perspective on hopes of achieving a consensus.
SOURCE
Hockey Stick Groundhog Day
Some ancient history
Fifteen to twenty years ago, Michael Mann and colleagues wrote a few papers claiming that current warming was unprecedented over the last 600 to 2000 years. Other climate scientists described Mann’s work variously as crap, pathetic, sloppy, and crap. These papers caught the interest of Stephen McIntyre and this led to the creation of his Climate Audit blog and the publication of papers pointing out the flaws in these hockey stick reconstructions. In particular, Mcintyre and his co-author Ross McKitrick showed that the method used by Mann and colleagues shifted the data in such a way that any data sets that showed an upward trend in the 20th century would receive a stronger weighting in the final reconstruction. With this method, generation of a hockey-stick shape in the temperature reconstruction was virtually guaranteed, which M&M demonstrated by feeding in random numbers to the method.
As climate scientist Rob Wilson put it in an email,
The whole Macintyre [sic] issue got me thinking about over-fitting and the potential bias of screening against the target climate parameter… I first generated 1000 random time-series in Excel… The reconstructions clearly show a ‘hockey-stick’ trend. I guess this is precisely the phenomenon that Macintyre has been going on about.
But the climate science community admitted nothing in public. One climate scientist wrote one of the most revealing emails:
-How should we deal with flaws inside the climate community? I think, that “our” reaction on the errors found in Mike Mann’s work were not especially honest.
Ouch.
This is all ancient history, and the issue is discussed in detail in Andrew Montford’s book, The Hockey Stick Illusion.
Two new papers
So, I felt a strange sense of deja vu or Groundhog Day when I heard from the BBC that ‘new’ research had found that current warming was unparalleled in 2,000 years. The two papers are written by the PAGES2k team, headed by Raphael Neukom. They are Consistent multidecadal variability in global temperature reconstructions and simulations over the Common Era and No evidence for globally coherent warm and cold periods over the preindustrial Common Era (both paywalled). They use data from a 2017 paper by themselves, A global multiproxy database for temperature reconstructions of the Common Era.
The PAGES2k data has come in for a lot of criticism at Climate Audit. There are numerous problems, such as inconvenient data being deleted or used upside-down, or the use of ‘stripbark’ data, against the recommendation of an NAS panel.
The new papers are quite open about screening for ‘temperature-sensitive’ proxies. From the “Consistent” paper:
For the reconstructions presented in the main text, we use the subset of records selected on the basis of regional temperature screening and to account for false discovery rates (R-FDR subset). This screening reduces the total number of records from 692 to 257, but increases the GMST reconstruction skill for most methods and skill metrics.
(GMST is global mean surface temperature). That’s a fairly drastic reduction in the number of proxy records. Tucked away in Fig 17 of the Supplementary Information are graphs using the “full unscreened PAGES 2k proxy matrix”, which have a less sticky shape than those in the main paper.
But as is often the case in climate science, it’s worse than we thought. The so-called “unscreened” PAGES2k proxies were in fact already screened, with a substantial culling of tree-ring data! This is from the 2017 “Global multiproxy” paper:
So two rounds of proxy screening have been carried out. Furthermore, in one of the methods they use, the proxies are “weighted by their non-detrended correlation with the GMST reconstruction target over the calibration period”, a further technique that helps to ensure that a hockey-stick will be produced.
Steve McIntyre is on the case, see this twitter thread. The first tweet refers to this weighting issue, and number 4 in the sequence mentions the “superscreening” point. The last (at time of writing), number 23, shows how drastic the screening out of North American tree-ring proxies is in the latest papers.
There is also some decline-hiding going on: in one of the Canadian datasets used, when the time series showed the ‘divergence problem’ (heading downwards when temperature goes upwards), the divergent parts of the series were just deleted. See this blog post by Shub with the relevant parts of the paper highlighted. Again, if you do this, when you combine all the data to get an overall picture, you will get a stronger hockey stick effect.
More HERE (See the original for links, graphics etc.)
Time Magazine: Arctic Nearing ‘Point Of No Return’
Again: No mention of geothermal activity in Greenland or the chain of sporadically active volcanoes along the Gakkel ridge. Telling only half the story is the Green/Left modus operandi
Climate alarmists continue to seek new vocabulary to express the apocalyptic urgency of their cause, with Time magazine now declaring that the Arctic is nearing a “point of no return,” thanks to global warming.
The latest omens of Earth’s demise have taken the form of “extreme weather events” experienced over the past two months in the globe’s far northern regions.
“Plumes of smoke have been picked up by satellites from wildfires across Alaska and Siberia and Greenland has experienced rapid ice loss as usually frigid regions have experienced heatwaves and record temperatures,” Time‘s Jasmine Aguilera laments.
Aguilera takes for granted that these extreme weather events are “caused by climate change,” since Time-readers apparently believe that there were no floods, forest fires, hurricanes, droughts, tornadoes, tidal waves, or monsoons prior to the Industrial Revolution.
Not only is anthropogenic climate change to blame for all our weather woes, Aguilera notes, but once it warms, the Arctic can never cool again (despite the fact that the Earth has already experienced five or six major Ice Ages in the past with no help from ‘fossil fuels’).
“The basic chemistry and the basic physics of how the atmosphere absorbs heat — there’s no path where you can imagine that the Arctic is going to start to cool off again,” said Brian Brettschneider, a climatologist at the International Arctic Research Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
“Cold air has to come from somewhere, cold air doesn’t just magically appear, and that somewhere has to be accounted for in the entire energy balance of the Earth. Right now, the whole Earth has just warmed up,” Brettschneider said. “It would take a dramatic reversal of the chemical composition of the atmosphere.”
Brettschneider is not the only one to suggest that the Arctic may soon be unsalvageable. Meteorologist Eric Holthaus agrees that the Arctic is nearing a point of no return, Aguilera writes, “as the global temperature increases closer to 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial era levels.”
“We haven’t crossed any major irreversible tipping points yet, but for each tenth of a degree that we get closer to 1.5 [degrees Celsius], it’s sort of like time’s running out,” Holthaus said. “We’re already there in some places where the ice just doesn’t exist in the times and places that it used to. That’s a permanent change effectively to those parts of the Arctic.”
“What’s special about the Arctic is that there really is an on and off switch,” Holthaus said. “Once the ice is gone, it really changes things dramatically, and that’s the process that we’re starting to see play out.”
SOURCE
The weepy Inslee claims to have witnessed climate change: But where?
Democratic presidential candidate Jay Inslee claims in a July 31 CNN editorial, “I’ve witnessed the devastation that climate change can cause.” The question is, in what alternate reality or foreign country did Inslee see this devastation?
The U.S. Climate Reference Network, a network of more than 100 impeccably maintained temperature stations throughout the United States, reports no warming temperatures since the network became operational in 2005.
In fact, 2019 has been colder than the initial year of the Climate Reference Network – 2005. As noted by meteorologist Anthony Watts, “The data, taken directly from NOAA’s national climate data page, shows not only that much of 2019 was below average, but that the US Temperature average is actually cooler now for 2019 than we were in 2005, when the dataset started.”
Feebly attempting to support his point, Inslee said that he recently visited a Detroit neighborhood that he claims has the nation’s most polluted air. Would no neighborhood have polluted air without global warming? He then mentioned floods in Davenport, Iowa and wildfires in California, as if the Mississippi River floodplain was created during the past decade or there was never a Smokey the Bear created way back in 1944.
Regardless, if there has been no warming in our nation since at least 2005, how can Inslee claim to have “witnessed the devastation that climate change can cause”? Is he running in the 2004 presidential election or the 2020 presidential election?
SOURCE
How Australian families are being slugged with higher power bills to fund a $276million project to save koalas and 'increase climate change awareness'
Families will be slugged with higher electricity bills to a fund multi-million dollar climate change project.
The project, introduced by the NSW government, will help save koalas, 'increase public awareness of climate change' and offer pensioners cheap televisions.
Electricity providers Ausgrid, Endeavour Energy and Essential Energy, as well as Sydney Water will have to fork out $276million to contribute to the fund.
This would allow the companies to force their customers to foot 25 per cent of the cost by increasing their electricity bill.
More than $3.25billion has been contributed to the fund by electricity companies and their customers since 2007, The Daily Telegraph reported.
The move comes after the Federal Government's Renewable Energy target scheme added about $68.50 more to the average electricity bill in 2018.
Ausgrid, Endeavour Energy, Essential Energy and Sydney Water have been ordered to contribute $134million, $86million, $56million and $740,000 respectively.
A whopping $37.5million will go towards a 'Five Million Trees' initiative and $33.6million will fund coastal and floodplain management to prepare for floods.
The fund will give $6.3million to improve five habitats of koalas, while $3.9million will go towards rebates on energy efficient TVs and fridges for pensioners.
The project will also fund bushfire hazard reduction, rooftop solar systems and more efficient street lighting.
An Ausgrid spokeswoman told the publication they don't directly charge customers more for their bill, but that it does contribute to the fund through the company's price changes.
About nine per cent of bills paid by Endeavour Energy customers contributed to the fund.
An Essential Energy spokeswoman said the company collects 'no more or no less' than what is required by law.
A Sydney Water spokesman said the company has not made their customers contribute to the project in 2019-20.
The environment department regulates how companies will help customers recover the charges for the fund.
But NSW Energy and Environment Minister Matt Kean did not explain how the department will ensure the charges are actively monitored.
'Over the period of 2017 to 2022, the Climate Change Fund will have an average cost of around $22 per annum for householders, outweighed by savings of around $60 per annum on energy bills,' Mr Kean said.
SOURCE
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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here.
Preserving the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here
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7 August, 2019
Trump EPA overturns Obama’s veto of Alaska’s Pebble Mine
This is a big defeat for the Greenies so they will fight it all the way
In a move that returns the rule of law to the administrative regulatory process, the Environmental Protection Agency has invalidated an Obama-era attempt to circumvent longstanding legal precedent in its zeal to torpedo a proposed mining project in Alaska.
Debate and litigation surrounding the proposed Pebble Mine in southeastern Alaska near Bristol Bay has been going on for well over a decade. The site that would be mined is said to be rich in gold and rare earths. Rare earths are minerals with unique properties that are essential components in used in high-tech gadgetry for both industrial and military purposes. China is far and away the world’s leader in rare earths, accounting for over 90% of global production, and the proposed Pebble Mine would be one way for the U.S. to close the gap.
The mine would also be located near valuable salmon fisheries, and the project’s opponents – primarily environmentalists, local tribes, and Obama administration officials — cited the potential threat to wildlife as a reason to reject the project.
Obama Administration’s Extra-Legal “Determination”
Despite this opposition, the mine’s developers sought permits from both the state and the federal government, a process they knew would take years. In 2014, Obama political appointees at EPA short-circuited the permitting process by issuing a “determination,” based largely on unproven and unrealistic assumption, that the proposed mine would do irreparable environmental harm. That unprecedented move, a de facto veto, put the project on ice.
On July 30, the Trump EPA officially withdrew the Obama-era determination, which official said was “issued prematurely and is now outdated,” returning the decision on the future of the mine to the traditional permitting process.
“After today’s action, EPA will focus on the permit review process for the Pebble Mine project,” EPA Region 10 Administrator Chris Hladick said in a statement. Working with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which shares regulatory jurisdiction with the agency on matters relating to bodies of water, EPA officials said they have expanded the public record on the mine. That record now contains information that was not available in 2014, they emphasized.
Rule of Law
Trump officials didn’t hesitate to take a swipe at the previous administration for they way in which handled the project.
“Today’s decision is a step towards good government decision making, which we owe under the law to both the public and project proponents,” EPA General Counsel Mathew Leopold said in a statement.
EPA’s action does not mean the mine will be approved. The matter will be tied up in litigation and bureaucracy for several more years. But it does signify that the decision-making process is back where it belongs, after it was hijacked by Obama political appointees intent on the deindustrilization of the United States.
SOURCE
Global warming fairy tale of the week debunked: Dying American Soldiers
The leftist Mother Jones website is promoting a new, false, global warming fairy tale this week – that global warming is killing American soldiers. Citing a “joint investigation between Inside Climate News and NBC News,” Mother Jones reports 17 American soldiers died from heat-related illnesses in the 11 years between 2008 and 2018.
According to the Mother Jones headline for its story, “Climate Change Is Killing US Soldiers.” But is this true?
As an initial flaw, the Mother Jones assertion assumes that no American soldiers died from heat-related causes prior to SUVs and coal-fired power plants. That assertion is ridiculous. Heat stroke, heat exhaustion, and related heat-related causes have always been a mortality factor among U.S. servicemen, particularly during times of military conflict.
Claiming that “climate change” is suddenly responsible for all heat-related deaths requires a degree of evidentiary proof that is completely lacking from the Mother Jones/NBC News/Inside Climate News analysis. The alarmists merely cite a few heat-related deaths and then assert, without any evidentiary support, that the 1-degree increase in global temperatures during the past century is to blame for all of them. Really?
In the hot-climate Middle East, U.S. forces remain deployed in Iraq, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, and Oman. American military personnel also have been recently stationed in Syria, Afghanistan, and other hot-climate nations. Quite frankly, it is probably a pleasant surprise that less than two soldiers per year die from heat-related ailments given this distribution.
Just as importantly, American mortality data show more than twice as many people die from cold-related causes than heat-related causes. The same modest global warming that alarmists blame for every heat-related death should also be given credit for reducing the number and severity of cold days that kill far more people than heat-related deaths. Yet Mother Jones/NBC News/ Inside Climate News ignore that obvious counterbalance.
A recent global study in the prestigious peer-reviewed medical journal The Lancet found cold temperatures are responsible for approximately 4 million deaths per year, which is 20 times more people than die due to warm or hot temperatures. Unless there is some reason that this global ratio does not apply to American soldiers, we can reasonably calculate that for every U.S. soldier who dies due to heat-related reasons, 20 more U.S. soldiers die due to cold-related reasons. Warming temperatures will accordingly save far more American soldiers than it will kill. Again, Mother Jones/NBC News/ Inside Climate News ignore this.
Consider this another alarmist climate scare debunked.
SOURCE
Is Governor Newsom offering up the keys to California’s energy castle?
Subsequent to his July 24th visit to the Central Valley it seems California Governor Newsom wants to hand over the keys to the Golden State to Vladimir Putin and his Russian cronies to run, in spite of the national security risk that it may create.
There are scary similarities between Newsom’s goals for California and Putin’s objectives. Both support California being more dependent on imported foreign oil, and both support anti-fracking in California as a successful fracking enterprise would lessen the states’ dependency on that foreign oil.
Historically the state’s solution has been to increase crude oil imports from foreign countries from 5% in 1992 to a shocking 57% in 2018, at a cost of more than $60 million dollars a day—and increasing each year.
By driving the oil and gas industry out of the state and into the dust bin of modern economics, the governor’s recent moves to lessen the power of one of the most successful industries in world economics will play right into the hands of Russia’s plan to control oil and natural gas exploration and distribution in the western world.
Putin loves the concept that the Governor is looking into putting a moratorium on fracking for oil in the largest oil reserves in America, located in California. The Governor’s right in line with Putin’s desire to encourage the “leaders” of the 184 ratifying countries of the Paris Agreement, and California, to delay and eventually stop any further exploration of deep earth minerals by diverting those countries’ efforts toward intermittent renewables of wind and solar for electricity.
The governor’s plan of moving forth at such an abrupt pace to end the states’ dependence on fossil fuels and convert to 100% renewable electricity (folks, it’s not renewable energy, it’s only intermittent electricity) will break the back of the oil industry in the state and severely damage the California economy like the green movements have done in Germany and Australia.
During his visit the governor said he has set aside $1.5 million to study ways to reduce petroleum demand and production in the state. Don’t make me laugh. That is barely enough to get research started. As government research goes most of that will get lost in the bureaucracy leaving barely enough to pay the salaries of the professionals hired to compile and analyze data in the first six months of a multi-years long project.
The Governor seems oblivious to the fact that 100 percent of the 17 infrastructures reported on recently by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) in the 2019 Infrastructure Report Card for California use deep earth minerals/fuels to “move things and make thousands of products” to support the state and economies around the world, and those infrastructures are increasing their demand and usage each year of those energy sources from deep earth minerals/fuels.
The Governors ‘aggressive efforts to curtail the use of fossil fuels and seek a long-term strategy to reduce oil production is totally contradictory to the ASCE Infrastructure Report and their recommendations to improve our infrastructures.
All of the infrastructures that will need to shrink their operations without access to the energy they need to continue at current and future levels will impact millions of well-paid Californians in favor of the minimum wage level jobs that will be created by new green technology replacing the oil industry jobs. These new jobs will not generate enough economy to support any town and may even create a new era of ghost towns prevalent during the end of the silver and gold eras at the turn of the 20th century.
The charge into green will require retraining of a huge displaced workforce used to a certain lifestyle. A minimum wage earner is not afforded the time nor the resources to enjoy leisure activities. Their mainstay in life is to make ends meet. Most times that requires two and three such jobs and maybe even both heads of household working two of those low wage jobs to break even financially. How does the Governor plan to feed the families of displaced workers when he shuts down their means of survival? By default, his actions will increase the welfare numbers.
Adding insult to injury Sacramento Democrats are seriously considering Assembly Bill AB-345 (Muratsuchi) “Oil and gas: operations: location restrictions” which would require all new oil and gas development that is not on federal land, to be located at least 2,500 feet from a residence, school, childcare facility, playground, hospital, or health clinic.
The effect of this “2,500” clear space around production wells would virtually destroy California’s in-state oil production by half. That will result in California sending another $16 Billion, on top of the current $32 Billion every year (again, Yes, that’s a “B”), to those oil rich foreign countries that have the audacity to not even send California a thank you note.
The Governor should know from data provided by the California Energy Commission that California is the only state in the union that currently imports most of its crude oil energy from foreign countries. In fact, since the state operates what is, in effect, the world’s fifth-largest economy, its ever-increasing dependency on foreign countries for its crude oil needs not only causes inflationary challenges for its citizens and businesses but has the potential to put our national security at risk.
This not an indictment of the esteemed Governor. This is an examination of the facts and exposing the similarities and possibilities. Russia, but not the 184 countries that have ratified the Paris Climate Agreement is well aware that electricity alone, especially intermittent electricity from renewables, has not, and will not, run the economies in the world; electricity alone is unable to support the energy demands of the military, airlines, medical industry, cruise ships, supertankers, container shipping, and trucking infrastructures.
Moreover, it is no secret Putin understands whoever controls the sale and distribution of deep earth minerals and fuels controls the world.
Putin’s Russia would love to see America’s economy go to waste while we struggle to employ a hundred thousand people who used to keep their money in banks and spend their wages in local stores and take their children to local schools and enjoy the leisure times provided by local industries that are attracted to the areas where people have the money and the time to spend on them.
SOURCE
Commission: Raise food prices to stop global warming
Higher food prices and a radical transformation in human diets away from meats and toward vegetables like lentils, beans, and peas are necessary to address global warming, A UK government-sanctioned commission claims in a new report. The report calls for “radically shifting the whole system” away from consumer-driven freedom of consumer food choices and toward a “strong and escalating regulatory baseline” that will make it “increasingly difficult (or expensive) to do the wrong things,” like eating meat.
According to the report – “Our Future in the Land,” by the RSA Food, Farming and Countryside Commission – “Decades of policy to produce ever cheaper food has created perverse and detrimental consequences.”
“Whilst food in the supermarkets is getting cheaper, the true cost of that policy is simply passed off elsewhere in society,” the report claims.
The UK Guardian summarized the report this way, “True cost of cheap food is health and climate crises, says commission.”
“The commission criticized decades of government policy aimed at making food cheaper,” the Guardian noted.
“The climate emergency makes urgent, radical action on the environment essential,” Ian Cheshire, chair of the RSA commission and a UK government advisor, told the Guardian.
The report not only criticizes inexpensive food and the consumption of meat, it also criticizes farmers for not decarbonizing agricultural processes.
“This monumental report is a powerful and profound account of the ecological transformation of our food and farming system that we urgently need,” said British Member of Parliament Caroline Lucas in the Guardian.
Coal power plants and SUVs may be the first targets of climate activists, but affordable food prices and meat in your diets are next to be eliminated.
SOURCE
Australia: Almost 60 arrested as climate activists shut down Brisbane CBD
Cops have hauled away almost 60 climate activists as hundreds continue to shut down Brisbane’s CBD as part of a “rebellion day”.
Almost 60 climate change protesters have been arrested as activists shut down Brisbane’s CBD today.
A spokeswoman for Queensland Police told news.com.au that a number of protesters have been arrested at the scene for blocking traffic — and pictures show activists being dragged away.
Although she couldn’t confirm a number, local reports state that up to 56 people have been detained by police so far.
Carrying gazebos, chairs, blankets and a barbecue dozens activists from the Extinction Rebellion group have gathered in the city’s CBD, according to reports on social media.
The group expects hundreds of protesters will join them outside 1 William Street, the state government’s HQ, and carry out “mass civil disobedience”. The disruption is understood to continue for seven hours.
Queensland Police is advising those travelling to the CBD today to use public transport — saying the group is expected to cause “significant disruption to traffic in the Central Business District and South Brisbane” between 7am to 9pm.
Translink advises there are currently 25 to 30-minute bus delays in the Brisbane CBD as a result of the protest.
The Courier Mail reports that the activists are encouraging families to involve their children in the protests by giving them chalk to graffiti Brisbane’s roads and footpaths with climate change messages.
“I’ve bought a whole pile of chalk and definitely the main encouragement from the main group was they would love to have the kids chalking, and then it’s still on the street the next day,’’ an organiser said in a hook-up yesterday.
Extinction Rebellion is a socio-political movement with the stated aim of using civil disobedience and nonviolent resistance to protest against climate breakdown, biodiversity loss, and the risk of social and ecological collapse.
Begun by a group of British academics in 2018 in response to the IPCC report that found we have just 12 years to stop catastrophic climate change, the movement has held hundreds of street blockades and occupations, mainly in the UK, but also other cities around the world. The group has held several street blockades in Brisbane this year.
“Business as usual is killing us,” the group wrote in a statement. “There is no more time to waste. Government has failed to protect us, so ordinary people have to act now.”
Nurse Daniel Young, who is one of 48 people already arrested in the lead up to Rebellion Day, condemns the way the government is treating climate policy.
“If the climate was one of my patients — and I was ignoring all the warning signs and just waiting for them to deteriorate — I would be charged with criminal negligence,” he said.
Superintendent Chris Stream said police acknowledge the right to lawful and peaceful protest. “Police and partner agencies are working closely to manage the protest and minimise as much as possible disruptions to transportation networks,” Superintendent Stream said.
“We continue to urge protest leaders to engage with police so that we can map out a solution for lawful and peaceful protest activity.”
However, the official Extinction Rebellion SEQ Facebook account appeared critical of police. A spokesman posted: “Queensland police uphold a colonial system of exploitation. “They hold children in watchhouses for weeks, they protect officers who give the addresses of DV victims to their abusers.
“They target indigenous people and people of colour for stop and search checks because of the racial profiling culture in the force. “Stay peaceful, stay non violent. Ignore them as much as you can. “It f***s with their power trip.”
SOURCE
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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here.
Preserving the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here
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6 August, 2019
Fraud and corruption bring big payoffs in weedkiller case
California judges provide stage for kangaroo court justice over Roundup weedkiller
Paul Driessen
San Francisco area juries have awarded cancer patients some $80 million each, based on claims that the active ingredient in Roundup weedkiller, caused their cancer – and that Bayer-Monsanto negligently or deliberately failed to warn consumers that the glyphosate it manufactures is carcinogenic. (It’s not.) Judges reduced the original truly outrageous awards of $289 million and even $1 billion per plaintiff!
Meanwhile, ubiquitous ads are still trolling for new clients, saying anyone who ever used Roundup and now has Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma or other cancer could be the next jackpot justice winner. Mass tort plaintiff law firms have lined up 18,500 additional “corporate victims” for glyphosate litigation alone.
Introduced in 1974, glyphosate is licensed in 130 countries. Millions of farmers, homeowners and gardeners have made it the world’s most widely used herbicide – and one of the most intensely studied chemicals in history. Four decades and 3,300 studies by respected agencies and organizations worldwide have concluded that glyphosate is safe and non-carcinogenic, based on assessments of actual risk.
Reviewers include the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, European Food Safety Authority, European Chemicals Agency, UN Food and Agriculture Organization, Germany’s Institute for Risk Assessment, and Australia’s Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority. Another reviewer, Health Canada, noted that “no pesticide regulatory authority in the world considers glyphosate to be a cancer risk to humans at the levels at which humans are currently exposed.” Therefore no need to warn anyone.
The National Cancer Institute’s ongoing Agricultural Health Study evaluated 54,000 farmers and commercial pesticide applicators for over two decades – and likewise found no glyphosate-cancer link.
Only the France-based International Agency for Cancer Research (IARC), says otherwise – and it based its conclusions on just eight studies. Even worse, IARC manipulated at least some of these studies to get the results it wanted. Subsequent reviews by epidemiologist Dr. Geoffrey Kabat, National Cancer Institute statistician Dr. Robert Tarone, investigative journalist Kate Kelland, “RiskMonger” Dr. David Zaruk and other investigators have demonstrated that the IARC process was tainted beyond repair.
The IARC results should never have been allowed in court. But the judges in the first three cases let the tort lawyers bombard the jury with IARC cancer claims, and went even further. In the Hardeman case, Judge Vincent Chhabria blocked the introduction of EPA analyses that concluded “glyphosate is not likely to be carcinogenic in humans,” based on its careful review of many of the studies just mentioned.
He said he wanted “to avoid wasting time or misleading the jury, because the primary inquiry is what the scientific studies show, not what the EPA concluded they show.” However, IARC didn’t do any original studies either. It just concluded that glyphosate is “probably carcinogenic,” meaning studies it reviewed found limited evidence of carcinogenicity in humans, plus sufficient evidence of carcinogenicity in lab animals that had been exposed to very high doses or lower doses for prolonged periods of time. In other words, under conditions that no animal or human would ever be exposed to in the real world.
It is also instructive to look at the three San Francisco area courtroom proceedings from another angle – an additional line of questioning that would have put glyphosate and Roundup in a very different light, and might have changed the outcome of these trials. Defense attorneys could have asked:
Can you describe your family cancer history ... your eating, exercise and sleeping habits ... how much you eat high-fat foods ... how often you eat fruits and vegetables ... and your other lifestyle choices that doctors and other experts now know play significant roles in whether or not people get cancer?
How many times in your life [Johnson is 47 years old; Hardeman 70; Alva Pilliod 77; Alberta Pilliod 75] do you estimate you were exposed to substances on IARC’s list of Group 1 definite human carcinogens – including sunlight, acetaldehyde in alcoholic beverages, aflatoxin in peanuts, asbestos, cadmium in batteries, lindane ... or any of the 125 other substances and activities in Group 1? Have you ever smoked? How often have you been exposed to secondhand smoke? How often have you eaten bacon, sausage or other processed meats – which are also in Group 1?
How many times have you been exposed to any of IARC’s Group 2A probable human carcinogens – not just glyphosate ... but also anabolic steroids, creosote, diazinon, dieldrin, malathion, emissions from high-temperature food frying, shift work ... or any of the 75 other substances and activities in Group 2A? How often have you consumed beef or very hot beverages – likewise in Group 2A?
How many times have you been exposed to any of IARC’s Group 2B possible human carcinogens – including bracken ferns, chlordane, diesel fuel, fumonisin, inorganic lead, low frequency magnetic fields, malathion, parathion, titanium oxide in white paint, pickled vegetables, caffeic acid in coffee, tea, apples, broccoli, kale, and other fruits and vegetables ... ... or any of the 200 other substances and activities in Group 2B?
Pyrethrin pesticides used by organic farmers are powerful neurotoxins that are very toxic to bees, cats and fish – and have been linked by EPA and other experts to leukemia and other cancers and other health problems. How often have you eaten organic foods and perhaps been exposed to pyrethrins?
Large quantities of glyphosate have been manufactured for years in China and other countries. How do you know the glyphosate you were exposed to was manufactured by Bayer, and not one of them?
In view of all these exposures, please explain how you, your doctors, your lawyers and the experts you consulted concluded that none of your family history ... none of your lifestyle choices ... none of your exposures to dozens or even hundreds of other substances on IARC’s lists of carcinogens ... caused or contributed to your cancer – and that your cancer is due solely to your exposure to glyphosate.
Put another way, please explain exactly how you and your experts separated and quantified all these various exposures and lifestyle decisions – and concluded that Roundup from Bayer-Monsanto was the sole reason you got cancer – and all these other factors played no role whatsoever.
News accounts do not reveal whether Bayer-Monsanto lawyers asked these questions – or whether they tried to ask them, but the judges disallowed the questions. In any event, the bottom line is this:
It is bad enough that the IARC studies at the center of these jackpot justice lawsuits are the product of rampant collusion, misconduct and even fraud in the way IARC concluded glyphosate is a “probable human carcinogen.” It is worse that these cancer trials have been driven by plaintiff lawyers’ emotional appeals to jurors’ largely misplaced fears of chemicals and minimal knowledge of chemicals, chemical risks, medicine and cancer – resulting in outrageous awards of $80 million or more.
Worst of all, our Federal District Courts have let misconduct by plaintiff lawyers drive these lawsuits; prevented defense attorneys from effectively countering IARC cancer claims and discussing the agency’s gross misconduct; and barred defense attorneys from presenting the extensive evidence that glyphosate is not carcinogenic to humans. The trials have been textbook cases of kangaroo court justice.
The cases are heading to appeal, ultimately to the U.S. Supreme Court. We can only hope appellate judges will return sanity, fairness and justice to the nation’s litigation process. Otherwise our legal system will be irretrievably corrupted; products, technologies, companies and industries will likely be driven out of existence; and fraud, emotion and anarchy will reign.
Jackpot-justice law firms and their anti-chemical activist allies are already targeting cereals that have “detectable” levels of glyphosate: a few parts per billion or trillion, where 1 ppt is equivalent to 1 second in 32,000 years. Talc and benzene – foundations for numerous consumer products – are already under attack. Advanced technology neonicotinoid pesticides could be next.
It’s all part of a coordinated, well-funded attack on America, free enterprise and technology, using social media, litigation, intimidation and confrontation. Our legislatures and courts need to rein it in.
Via email
Our world has serious problems. Having more babies can help solve them
I am a bit reluctant in posting this. I LIKE the idea of Greenies refusing to have babies. Getting them out of the gene pool would be a plus for rationality
by Jeff Jacoby
If he's lucky, Archie Mountbatten-Windsor may get a sibling. But he's not getting more than one.
That's according to his father, Britain's Prince Harry, who avowed in an interview with the legendary primatologist Jane Goodall for the new issue of British Vogue that he and Meghan Markle plan to have no more than two children. That isn't because they've always craved a cozy family of four. It's because they think that having more in an era of climate change would be environmentally greedy and irresponsible.
"Two, maximum!" Harry replied when Goodall remarked that the couple should have "not too many" kids.
"We are the one species on this planet that seems to think that this place belongs to us, and only us," said the prince, quickly noting that he doesn't think so: "I've always thought this place is borrowed. And, surely, being as intelligent as we all are ... we should be able to leave something better behind for the next generation."
As several observers promptly noted, If Harry really wanted to reduce his carbon footprint, he could start with his current lifestyle.
"To make any difference to planet Earth," wrote John Vidal in the Guardian, Harry and his family "really must stop taking those private jets to Jamaica, the luxury safaris in Botswana, the weddings in Montego Bay, the impromptu winter getaways in Tromsø, the 'babymoons' in Australia and New York, the downtime on Mediterranean islands, and the quick flights to Fiji."
But not having (more) children? That's no way to save the world.
One of the saddest phenomena of our time is the way childlessness is being promoted as a virtue.
In an Instagram video in February, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said that climate change makes it "legitimate" and "moral" for young people to question whether it is "still OK to have children." On HBO's Real Time, Bill Maher extolled millennials "for doing something right" — having fewer children. "I can't think of a better gift to our planet than pumping out fewer humans to destroy it," he said to cheers and applause.
Just last month, entertainer Miley Cyrus ranted in a foul-mouthed interview with Elle magazine that the earth is "exhausted" and "can't produce" and has become a "piece-of-shit planet" not worth bequeathing to children. "Until I feel like my kid would live on an earth with fish in the water," she declared, "I'm not bringing in another person to deal with that." Hundreds of women have joined Birthstrike, a group for those who have decided "not to bear children due to the severity of the ecological crisis." Those are just a few examples of the trend; there is no shortage of others.
I acknowledge the anxiety and alarm that many people feel about the environment. But if they want to make the world better, the way to do so is not by depriving it of more children.
It is an inescapable fact of life that to be born is to suffer, to struggle, and to stumble. There has never been an age in which that wasn't true, and people in most ages have contended with far more daunting fates than a warmer climate: war, famine, slavery, poverty, plague. Not having children may spare theoretical offspring from inheriting a world with terrible problems. But it also denies the world the ultimate resource for fixing those problems — human intelligence, imagination, and grit.
The Talmud records that when the enslavement of the Hebrews in ancient Egypt grew unbearable, their leaders advised couples to stop having babies — why raise more children to face a life of slavery? Eventually one of those leaders was persuaded he was wrong, and that childrearing should go on even in the teeth of murderous oppression. So he and his wife had another baby. That baby, named Moses, became the liberator who led his people to freedom.
Every time parents bring children into a world where things have gone badly wrong, they improve the odds that there will someone to help set things right. In addition to all the other reasons to have children, there is this soaring utilitarian reality: More people make the world a better place.
The number of human beings has nearly quadrupled over the past century, and mankind is flourishing as never before. People live longer, healthier, and more comfortable lives. They are better fed, better housed, and better clothed. Age-old evils — slavery, genocide, child mortality, illiteracy, world wars, deaths from natural disasters, and absolute poverty — have been dramatically curbed, if not yet vanquished altogether. Thanks to advances made possible by human innovation, insight, and effort, fearful threats have been quelled and deadly diseases cured. From agriculture to air travel to the abundance of consumer goods, the lot of ordinary men, women, and children has improved beyond anything even the most utopian optimist could have forecast in 1920.
Parenthood isn't for everyone. But the human race needs more people, just as it always has. If you're alarmed by the state of the world, bring more children into it. There's no telling how humanity may be blessed tomorrow from the babies you raise today.
SOURCE
Study Shows The Electric Scooter Trend Isn't That Great For the Environment
If you've been in a city recently, you've probably seen people whizzing by on all kinds of electric scooters. These vehicles are strewn across sidewalks, parked outside office spaces, and seem to be the hottest form of transportation. Typically riders rent the scooters via apps from companies like Bird, Lyft, and Uber. Many who take them do so out of convenience but also believe they are more environmentally friendly versus a car a city or bus. However, a new report shows that these scooters are actually not that great for the planet.
But, Axios reports that "Electric scooters are often worse for climate change when compared to the transportation methods they’re displacing, according to what is likely the first-ever peer-reviewed study on the new trend."
Specifically, "results show that dockless e-scooters consistently result in higher life cycle global warming impacts relative to the use of a bus with high ridership, an electric bicycle, or a bicycle per passenger-mile traveled. However, choosing an e-scooter over driving a personal automobile with a fuel efficiency of 26 miles per gallon results in a near-universal decrease in global warming impacts."
The same report finds that about half the riders say they would have walked if the scooter was not there. This means that "e-scooters are the less climate-friendly option about two-thirds of the time."
"While e-scooters may be an effective solution to urban congestion and last-mile problem, they do not necessarily reduce environmental impacts from the transportation system," the report notes. This is because the scooters are picked up individuals via cars who then charge the scooters overnight.
On average, they found scooters cause 202 grams of climate pollution per mile. Because early models tended to last less than a year, their production made up half of their life-cycle impact. Daily collection for charging and redistribution with mostly gasoline-powered vehicles made up another 43%.
“While the scooters themselves don’t have tailpipes,” one researcher said, “the cars that were picking them up largely did.”
The report says that while the scooters may be changing the way we think about transportation, the new devices still have a long way to go before they are friendly for the environment.
SOURCE
Conservatives Propose Roll Back of Obama's Job-Killing Waters Rule
Sens. Joni Ernst (R-IA) and Mike Braun (R-IN) proposed legislation Thursday that would roll back former President Barack Obama’s Waters of the United States (WOTUS) regulation. WOTUS was a hallmark regulation of Obama’s climate change agenda.
Sens. Braun and Ernst have introduced the Define WOTUS Act to reassert congressional authority and rein in Obama’s WOTUS regulation.
The Obama Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) EPA and the United States Army Corps of Engineers created the WOTUS regulation that loosely defined federally regulated “navigable waters,” which would allow the EPA and other authorities to greatly regulate many waterways across the country and harm American agriculture and manufacturing. Many experts and conservatives charge that the Obama WOTUS rule would allow federal government to regulate every creek and pond in America. WOTUS gave the federal government authority to regulate water use on 247 million acres of federal farmland.
The WOTUS rule served as part of Obama’s climate agenda, which included the Clean Power Plan, and the Paris climate treaty.
Sen. Braun said in a press release Thursday that Congress needs to take action to roll back the WOTUS rule and help Hoosier farmers impacted by “job-killing regulations” such as WOTUS.
The Hoosier Republican said:
“President Trump and his Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) are working hard to fix this atrocious Obama-era rule. But as the Administration has repeatedly noted, it’s Congress job to write laws. the Define WOTUS Act will solidify and amplify the Administration’s work on WOTUS. I am proud to join with President Trump who is doing a tremendous job deregulating these job-killing regulations that hurt Hoosier farmers and those who reside in the Heartland of America.
Many farmers have suffered under the WOTUS rule. In 2017, one California farmer was fined $2.8 million by federal and state regulators for plowing his own field.
Although President Donald Trump’s EPA has moved to repeal the WOTUS rule, it remains possible that a future Democrat administration could move to reenact the law.
Sens. Ernst and Braun’s legislation would set a far less onerous definition of federally regulated “navigable waters,” preventing future Democrats from expanding the definition and thereby overregulating American farmlands.
Sen. Ernst said the Obama WOTUS rule threatened small businesses across Iowa and that the bill will provide certainty for farmers and manufacturers across the country. The Iowa conservative said:
The Obama-era WOTUS rule threatened Iowa’s farmers, manufacturers, and small businesses by giving the federal government authority to regulate water on 97 percent of land in our state. President Trump and his administration have taken tremendous steps to roll back this far-reaching regulation and provide for more certainty with a new, clearer definition of WOTUS.
Although some Americans may remain concerned that the senators’ legislation may lead to increased pollution, the bill would allow states to better regulate local waterways. The Clean Water Act only determines what federal bureaucrats can regulate; whereas, Congress has long meant for states to have broader authority over water regulation, which explains why Congress did not include federal control of groundwater in the Clean Water Act.
The legislation would allow states to better manage waterways in a manner that better helps their state. For instance, snowpack melt may not impact Indiana as much as Utah or Colorado, and wetlands are not common in the Dakotas but are common in Indiana.
Sen. Ernst said that the legislation would help Iowans by creating a fairer definition of the Obama WOTUS rule.
The Iowa senator said “it’s the job of Congress to make a new, reasonable definition permanent, and that’s what this bill does—it ensures more predictability and workability for Iowans for years to come.”
SOURCE
Joe Biden Pledges to Destroy the Coal Industry
The Trump campaign reacted with a mixture of disgust and glee Wednesday night when former Vice President Joseph R. Biden pledged to get rid of the coal and natural-gas fracking industries.
Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale tweeted, “Bye bye coal, Democrats & @JoeBiden just said they are done with you. How do you feel about that Pennsylvania?”
During the debate in Detroit, Mr. Biden was asked if he would eliminate coal and fracking if elected president.
“We would make sure it’s eliminated and no more subsidies for either one of those,” Mr. Biden declared with a wave of his hand.
Team Trump’s reaction showed that the president’s campaign believes Mr. Biden made the kind of blunder that would haunt him if he wins the Democratic nomination.
The Trump War Room tweeted a video clip of Mr. Biden’s answer, with the message, “Joe Biden promises to kill the job of every American who works with fossil fuels.”
American Conservative Union President Matt Schlapp wrote on Twitter, “Say goodbye to MI PA WV OH and IN Democrats. No fossils fuels no coal no fracking means these states are screwed.”
SOURCE
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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here.
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5 August, 2019
Censored! Climate skepticism "violates community standards", says Facebook
How do I know? I found out when I tried to put up the post immediately below on my Facebook page. In the post I originally gave a link to a previous post of mine on Greenie Watch seven years ago. That was when I was instantly told that the post violated community standards. It was only when I deleted the link to Greenie Watch that I was allowed to put up the post.
As it happened, it didn't hold me up for long. I had the same post up on another site. So I just used the link to the second site in the post below. If you open the link you will see that site. The "banned" link is here
This should be concerning to all climate skeptics. Can we be heard?
The terrible truth of climate change
The author excerpted below, Joëlle Gergis, is a r*tbag. Only that colloquial Australian expression about rodents serves to describe her adequately. She trusts models rather than the facts. So she is of course highly regarded and highly awarded. She is in the elite of Australian climate scientists. She is a High Priest among them.
The hysterical rave below is entirely based on the output of models, models with no known predictive skill. And if you want to see how she deals with facts, see here
The only fact she mentions below is the CO2 concentration. She assumes that CO2 levels are a proxy for temperature when they clearly are not The two very rarely track one another, so an assumption that they will do so this time is heroic, to put it politely
As one of the dozen or so Australian lead authors on the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) sixth assessment report, currently underway, I have a deep appreciation of the speed and severity of climate change unfolding across the planet. Last year I was also appointed as one of the scientific advisers to the Climate Council, Australia’s leading independent body providing expert advice to the public on climate science and policy. In short, I am in the confronting position of being one of the few Australians who sees the terrifying reality of the climate crisis.
One common metric used to investigate the effects of global warming is known as “equilibrium climate sensitivity”, defined as the full amount of global surface warming that will eventually occur in response to a doubling of atmospheric CO2 concentrations compared to pre-industrial times. It’s sometimes referred to as the holy grail of climate science because it helps quantify the specific risks posed to human society as the planet continues to warm.
We know that CO2 concentrations have risen from pre-industrial levels of 280 parts per million (ppm) to approximately 410 ppm today, the highest recorded in at least three million years. Without major mitigation efforts, we are likely to reach 560 ppm by around 2060.
When the IPCC’s fifth assessment report was published in 2013, it estimated that such a doubling of CO2 was likely to produce warming within the range of 1.5 to 4.5°C as the Earth reaches a new equilibrium. However, preliminary estimates calculated from the latest global climate models (being used in the current IPCC assessment, due out in 2021) are far higher than with the previous generation of models. Early reports are predicting that a doubling of CO2 may in fact produce between 2.8 and 5.8°C of warming. Incredibly, at least eight of the latest models produced by leading research centres in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and France are showing climate sensitivity of 5°C or warmer.
The model runs aren’t all available yet, but when many of the most advanced models in the world are independently reproducing the same disturbing results, it’s hard not to worry.
To restrict warming to 2°C above pre-industrial levels, the world needs to triple its current emission reduction pledges. If that’s not bad enough, to restrict global warming to 1.5°C, global ambition needs to increase fivefold.
But these days my grief is rapidly being superseded by rage. Volcanically explosive rage. Because in the very same IPCC report that outlines the details of the impending apocalypse, the climate science community clearly stated that limiting warming to 1.5°C is geophysically possible.
Although the very foundation of human civilisation is at stake, the world is on track to seriously overshoot our UN targets. Worse still, global carbon emissions are still rising. In response, scientists are prioritising research on how the planet has responded during other warm periods in the Earth’s history.
SOURCE
Watermelons Use Green New Deal, Paris Treaty to Impose Socialism
Many of my friends have long referred to environmentalists as “watermelons” — green on the outside, red on the inside. The idea being, because communism and socialism (interchangeable political/economic systems in practice) have failed everywhere they’ve been imposed, doctrinaire socialist zealots have embraced environmental causes as a Trojan horse. Their goal is simple: use environmental policies as a backdoor way to implement socialist policies in the Western democracies. After all, who doesn’t care about the environment?
A recent admission by Saikat Chakrabarti, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (D-NY) chief of staff, about the much-hyped Green New Deal (GND) reinforces the view socialists are using the environment to replace private property and free exchange in the market with state control of the economy.
In a meeting with Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, Chakrabarti said addressing climate change was not Ocasio-Cortez’s reason for proposing the GND, according to a report by The Washington Post.
“The interesting thing about the Green New Deal, is it wasn’t originally a climate thing at all,” Chakrabarti told Inslee’s climate director, Sam Ricketts, The Post reported. “Do you guys think of it as a climate thing? Because we really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing.”
This admission did not surprise me much. Far too many youths have embraced socialism — showing no understanding of how capitalism has improved their lives. What would they do, for example, without their smartphones, laptops, instant messenger and social media services, and the wi-fi enabled coffee shops on every corner, all courtesy of capitalism?
For instance, at a press conference in Brussels in early February 2015, in the run-up to negotiations culminating in the Paris climate agreement, Christiana Figueres, then executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, stated the global warming scaremongering going on for more than 25 years at the UN was about controlling peoples’ lives by controlling the economy, not fighting climate change.
“This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution,” Figueres said. “This is probably the most difficult task we have ever given ourselves, which is to intentionally transform the economic development model, for the first time in human history,” she continued.
Others who have highlighted the anti-capitalist agenda motivating climate alarmism include professors Joshua Goldstein and Steven Pinker, who, in an article in The Boston Globe, said progressives were using the climate change fight to push big government action on a laundry list of “longstanding social ills such as inequality, corporate greed, racism, and political corruption. … Naomi Klein’s campaign to ‘change everything’ casts global warming as an opportunity for the left to step up its various crusades.”
To be clear, GND would constitute a complete socialist makeover of the U.S. economy — the culmination of years of effort by watermelons. GND’s package of government handouts combined with a government-directed industrial policy is straight out of the old Soviet playbook. It would include, among other things, a huge government jobs program and “free” health care and college. It also would require a complete makeover of America’s housing stock, its transportation system, and its entire energy system, all by 2030.
Perhaps the more than 100 Democratic members of the U.S. House and Senate who rushed to sponsor or publicly embrace GND — including Sens. Cory Booker (D-NJ), Kamala Harris (D-CA), and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) — are finally being honest about their fealty to socialism. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has always proudly proclaimed himself a socialist. Hence, his support for GND should surprise no one.
Socialism is a scourge. From the former Soviet Union to Cuba, from North Korea to Venezuela, everywhere socialism has been tried it has robbed people of freedom and their property, produced economic stagnation and misallocation of resources, and directly or indirectly resulted in millions of deaths. The socialist policies promoted in the GND under the guise of saving the planet are no less deadly than previous utopian socialist schemes.
Both the human race and the environment will benefit when we permanently consign all such delusional national or international socialist plans where they rightfully belong, into the dustbin of history.
SOURCE
Electric cars are a threat to clean air, claims cycling hero
Electric cars are one of the biggest threats to solving congestion, pollution and obesity caused by reliance on private vehicles, according to the cycling champion Chris Boardman.
He said that although switching to an electric car made people feel they were reducing their environmental impact problems remained.
Boardman, a gold medallist at the 1992 Olympics, and now the walking and cycling commissioner for Greater Manchester, was speaking at a Times+ event last week
Asked if he believed that a rapid switch to electric cars was the answer to poor air quality in cities, he said: “They are one of our biggest threats because it makes people feel like they have changed without actually having to make any changes. About 75 per cent of the pollution is still there.”
Boardman, who is seeking to create a 1,000-mile cycling and walking network around Manchester, said that electric cars did not reduce congestion or address low levels of exercise.
“All the other problems that we have got and pay for are all still there. It’s perhaps slightly better [to drive an electric car than a petrol or diesel model] but my main worry is it’s a reason to not change,” he said. “We need to give people viable and attractive options to get out of the car, not a different type of car.” He added that he himself drove an electric Nissan Leaf.
The government’s air quality expert group said this month that particles from tyres, brakes and road surfaces made up about two thirds of all particulate matter from road transport and would continue to increase even as more cars were run on electric power.
Imperial College London, which was commissioned by ministers to examine the impact of the government’s clean air strategy, said in a report last week: “A greater proportion of electric vehicles in London may help NOx [nitrogen oxide pollution mainly from diesel vehicles], but will be less effective in reducing non-exhaust emissions except where helped by regenerative braking.”
Heidi Alexander, deputy mayor of London who is responsible for transport, told the event that she had “some sympathy” with Boardman’s view but that electric cars “could be an important stepping stone to enable us to create a cleaner, greener environment”.
She said that Sadiq Khan, the London mayor, had set a target of cutting car journeys by three million a day by 2041 and increasing the proportion of journeys by walking, cycling, or public transport from 64 per cent to 80 per cent. But some people would still own cars and she would prefer them to drive electric models. “I don’t think we should let the perfect be the enemy of the good,” she said.
The AA said it agreed with Boardman on the need for feasible and attractive options to get people out of the car but added that “too often they don’t exist”. A spokesman said: “The vast majority of travel — 61 per cent of trips, 78 per cent of distance — are done in the car, because of convenience, flexibility, distance and time-saving.
“The electric car ultimately switches the millions of car users from fossil fuels that generate CO2 and urban-level emissions from the exhaust to a form of propulsion that doesn’t. Electricity generation needs to be adapted to come from greener and more sustainable sources, but that is down to politicians.
“Cambridge has shown what can be done with a system of park and ride that converts more than four million car journeys a year into bus trips.”
SOURCE
Washington D.C. Conference Exposes ‘Climate Delusion’
The new president of The Heartland Institute, Frank Lasee, was not exaggerating when he described the 13th International Conference on Climate Change (ICCC13) as “the most important climate change and energy event of the year.”
Speaking about the July 25 conference held at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., Lasee explained, “ICCC13 demonstrated that the Climate Delusion is not based on sound science or economics. It is wasting trillions of dollars and threatening our way of life, while propping up the drive for world socialism.”
This was a common theme throughout ICCC13. The Climate Delusion, relying on bad science and misguided economics, is damaging America and threatening the world.
The conference sold out with over 300 attendees, launched with a translated video address by Dominik Kolorz, a Polish trade union activist and the chairman of the ?l?sko-D?browski Solidarity, the largest regional union structure in Poland. Kolorz could not be at the conference because he had to support union workers in a protest against the closing of furnaces in one of the largest employers in ?l?sko, a major steel plant, due to misguided European Union climate policy. “You can see that the effects of climate policy, already noticeable, can be very dramatic in a social context,” said Kolorz. “We do not deny that we are in a period of global warming. But … there is no scientific consensus, in our opinion, about human responsibility for climate change…”
Kolorz expressed strong concern about the long-term consequences of UN climate policy, stating, “what the European Union proposes to us in the frame of climate policy is…a liquidation of industry operating in Poland. It’s not just about banning the coal. It’s not only the elimination of conventional energy, but it is really about the decarbonizing of the industry in Poland but also in Europe, we would deal with the liquidation of the metallurgical, steel and cement industries…What can happen in Poland if we stick to the dogma of the climate policy—we will lose about half a million jobs in the next 20 years.
“I can declare that we in Poland are ready, under the auspicious of Solidarity, to actually lead to an economic, social, scientific conference on which different types of views will collide—those who say that man is responsible for climate change and the skeptical ones,” said Kolorz.
He told the audience, “Now, Solidarity with you can expose the lie that conducted climate policy is good for humans. Let us lead a policy that is really good for the citizens of the world but let us not lead the policy that is stuffed with lies and which would really lead to the fact that the rich will be even richer and the poor will be even poorer.”
This was followed by the presentation of the “Dauntless Purveyor of Climate Truth Award” to the junior author of this article, Dr. Jay Lehr, for his many years of fearless communication of climate science realities to the public. In his acceptance speech, Lehr focused on the real drivers of the climate scare—attempts by the left to impose world socialism and put society under ever more government control. Lehr demonstrated the Climate Delusion by listing twelve variables that, while crucially important to any calculation of projected Earth temperatures, are not well understood.
ICCC13 Panel One concerned “Scientific Observations,” in particular, the science presented in Climate Change Reconsidered II: Fossil Fuels, the latest volume of peer-reviewed research by the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC). The panel also focused on climate modeling vs. observed temperature data, and the Sun’s dominant influence on climate change. Dr. Nir J. Shaviv of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem explained that “There are no arguments proving that warming is mostly human.” Shaviv maintained that future warming will be benign, supporting his position with convincing data.
After tracing the history of the IPCC and the NIPCC, Dr. David Legates of the University of Delaware proposed that NIPCC reports be encapsulated in an online format that would be quick and easy for students and others to access.
Dr. Roy W. Spencer of the University of Alabama in Huntsville described how poorly computer models correlate with real climate change and concluded that there is no climate crisis or climate emergency. “Even if observed warming is due to increasing CO2 (carbon dioxide), it’s too weak to notice in your lifetime,” he said. Spencer also explained that “damaging tornadoes are down 50% since we started monitoring them in the 1950s. You wouldn’t know that from listening to the media every time a tornado hits a town.”
Panel 2 on Energy and Climate Economics was outstanding in making the real costs of the Climate Delusion clear and irrefutable. Kevin Dayaratna of the Heritage Foundation offered a simple explanation of the various mathematical models used to determine the costs to society of eliminating fossil fuels. No matter how he sliced it, the results are draconian. Dr. Ben Zycher, resident scholar of the American Enterprise Institute, and Dr. Roger Bezdek described the absurdity of attempting to shift away from fossil fuels to unstable so-called renewable energy.
Considering what goes into developing a wind turbine or a solar farm, it is clear that they are not really green and never economical without the government paying most of the bill. Zycher emphasized that "'Clean' power is not clean." It requires huge land use and creates “heavy-metal pollution, noise, flicker effects, solar panel waste, wildlife destruction,” among other negative impacts of alternative energy sources. He also focused on the “anti-human core” and the “authoritarian implications” of the Green New Deal proposed by the Democrats.
In his luncheon keynote speech, Representative Tom McClintock (R-Calif., ranking member of the House Natural Resources Committee) asserted that future generations “will remember with gratitude and admiration that there were organizations like Heartland…to lead us out of the darkness of fear and hysteria and into the light of the bright future that our advancing technology and freedom can and surely will deliver, if we let them.”
Christopher Monckton, the Viscount Monckton of Brenchley (UK), followed up with a highly technical talk in which he demonstrated that “Global warming will be small, slow, harmless and net beneficial. There is no case, rational, scientific, political, economic, social, moral or other for any mitigation of global warming. It’s over!”
At the lunch event, James Taylor, Heartland senior fellow, Environment and Energy Policy, introduced an open letter to President Donald Trump that he wrote and co-signed with nine other climate realists. The letter, which was included in the material given to all conference attendees, thanked the president for “speaking out against the fake climate crisis,” and asked for his help:
By appointing the Commission on Climate Security proposed by National Security Council scientist Dr. Will Happer. “It is a winning political argument to point out that you are supporting more scientific investigation and inquiry, rather than less,” the letter explained.
“We ask that you tweet frequently about the Climate Delusion to break through the media blackout that has kept much of the public from learning about the Climate Realist position.”
The letter explained Trump’s important role in ending the Climate Delusion: “Without your help, it is likely the current media blackout imposed on the truth about the very minor role of CO2 in temperature forcing and the net benefits of a warmer climate will continue unabated.”
Attached to the open letter were 10 pages of supporting documentation demonstrating many of the mistakes in the Climate Delusion.
Dr. Craig Idso, Dr. Patrick Michaels, and Anthony Watts pulled the curtain away from the doctored data promoted by NASA and NOAA in Panel 3. They all showed that when the initial data did not support the Climate Delusion, alarmists found ways to convince people that the data needed to be adjusted. Idso focused on the data that does indeed prove that CO2 is the lifeblood of all vegetation, with plant growth always increasing with increasing levels of the gas.
This panel flipped the politically-correct argument on its head by proving with data and diagrams that increasing CO2 is not damaging the planet and its inhabitants, but instead is yielding huge benefits for life on Earth. They collectively emphasized that at the time of World War II, CO2 levels [about 300 parts per million (ppm)] were too close to plant starvation, which occurs with less than 150 ppm of CO2. Satellite photographs showed major greening of nearly every continent in the past 40 years. Particular increases are now seen in the rain forests along the equator.
The real-world benefits of increasing CO2 fly in the face of the propaganda produced by the United Nations and associated organizations that benefit by trying to increase the size of government in response to fraudulent fears.
The first speaker in Panel 4, “Winning Public Policy Options,” was Douglas Pollock from the University of Chile. His efforts to warn institutions about the unnecessary harm that fighting climate change is causing resulted in his views being banned in Chile and throughout Latin America. Pollock explained what has been happening in Chile as a cautionary tale about what can happen in North America if we follow their disastrous devotion to green energy. Pollock said that the impact on global temperature of Chile’s plans would be 0.0000115 deg C per decade. The wind and solar sources Chile has brought online recently “have meant an average cost at least nine times higher than those of traditional sources,” concluded Pollock.
James Taylor next explained the futility of conservatives trying to appeal to the left and influence the center by supporting the climate scare. He said, “Scientifically, economically, politically, if you are a Republican and you are pushing for these types of programs [lesser versions of the Green New Deal], you are a loser.” As the senior author of this article (Tom Harris) and moderator of Panel 4 commented after Taylor’s talk, “I wish you’d been an advisor to our previous prime minister Stephen Harper because he was elected as a climate skeptic and, in an attempt to appease the left and attract the middle vote, he moved over the become a climate alarmist. And the media still massacred him and he lost the last election.”
Finally, Myron Ebell, director of the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Center for Energy and Environment, explained the debate that has gone on inside the Trump administration concerning the delayed Happer climate change commission. He also described two petitions launched by CEI. The first was for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to re-open the CO2 Endangerment Finding. Because of a new OMB (Office of Management and Budget) memorandum, the EPA has 120 days to answer the petition. The second petition was asking NASA to withdraw the misguided statements on their web site about 97% of scientists agreeing with the so-called global warming consensus.
“Let’s push back against the deep state that still has its tentacles around the White House,” concluded Ebell. No wonder the Business Insider commented, “Myron Ebell may be enemy #1 to the current climate change community.”
Panel 5, Advancing from Theory to Practice, discussed how fossil fuels are still very much a key part of the future of the world, and how America is leading the way. This panel made it clear that converting the world from coal, natural gas, oil and nuclear power can never happen in practice. But the effort to even attempt it will greatly damage the entire world population with the poorest suffering the most as energy costs skyrocket and brownouts and blackouts become the order of the day.
During panel 5, Dr. Benny Peiser, Director of the London, England-based Global Warming Policy Forum, gave an eye-opening talk about the negative impacts that installation of wind and solar energy projects were causing all over Europe. Germany’s poor judgment in this area, Peiser said, was destroying its leadership in all areas of high-tech manufacturing as a result of the tripling of their energy costs. For every kilowatt they produce with wind or sun, they must have a fossil fuel plant at the ready to take over when the wind and solar power are not adequate.
Lord Monckton gave a stirring speech in Panel 5 in which he demonstrated the “unit abatement cost of abating 1 degree C of anthropogenic global warming by policies equivalent to Britain’s zero-emissions plan was $273 trillion per degree C abated.” That is over one-quarter of a quadrillion dollars. “It is ten times more expensive, on these optimistic assumptions, to try to mitigate global warming than to let it happen and adapt to it,” Monckton concluded.
Also speaking in Panel 5 was Jennifer Fielder, CEO of the American Lands Council and a Montana state senator. She explained why nationally-controlled lands managed by distant, unaccountable bureaucrats in Washington, combined with the influence of far-left extremists in the environmental movement, have resulted in dirty air, polluted water, decimated wildlife, blocked access and economically devastated, depressed and unsafe communities. The solution, said Fielder, was to entrust the land to people who live close to the land in the states.
During the evening meeting at the closing session, awards were given to three of the world’s most expert climate scientists:
Dr. Tim Ball received the “Lifetime Achievement in Climate Science Award.” In his acceptance speech, Dr. Ball explained how wealthy Canadian businessman, the late Maurice Strong, engineered much of the climate scare through the United Nations.
Dr. Patrick Michaels received the “Courage in Defense of Science Award.” In his acceptance address, he summarized the high points of his efforts to stop the fraudulent alarmist movement’s promotion of the Climate Delusion.
Dr. Richard Lindzen received the “Frederick Seitz Memorial Award.” In his acceptance speech, he cited many of the great scientists who came before him who seriously questioned the climate scare.
The conference came to a close with prominent meteorologist Joe Bastardi regaling the audience with his childhood love of weather, storms, and hurricanes. Now in his 60s, Joe showed amazing childhood enthusiasm for his work. He took the audience on a tour of the greatest hurricanes to hit the East coast of the United States over the last 100 years.
While everyone was transfixed by his narrative, Joe’s phone rang. He paused and answered it, putting the caller on speakerphone. Out of the phone came the voice of "President Trump" complimenting Heartland for great work on climate change. "Trump" said, “One thing on climate: it’s just like the fake news story on Russia, which was a complete hoax, by the way, a complete hoax; there is no collusion between CO2 and temperature, no collusion whatsoever.” We may never know for sure whether or not it was indeed President Trump. We certainly would like to think so.
ICCC13 was one of the best of all of Heartland’s climate realist events yet. It will go a long way to helping end the Climate Delusion.
SOURCE
'I want pressure off electricity prices': Australian PM pushes for an end to state government bans on fracking
Prime Minister Scott Morrison says Australians can 'watch this space' when it comes to ending states' bans on gas explorations.
Mr Morrison said he was frustrated with the refusal by states to end their bans as his government works to keep its promise to reduce the nation's power bills. 'I want to see those bans go, I want to see that gas come out from under people's feet because when it does that means it takes the pressure off electricity prices,' he told the Nine Network on Thursday.
Victoria has permanently banned fracking, while Tasmania has a moratorium and NSW has certain restrictions on the practice.
A moratorium on gas fracking in parts of Western Australia is expected to be officially lifted in August, while South Australia last year passed laws to enshrine a 10-year ban on fracking in the southeast of the state.
The Northern Territory in 2018 lifted a temporary fracking ban while Queensland allows the practice.
The prime minister gave a cryptic answer when questioned over whether there were any signs of states ending their bans 'soon'.
'Watch this space,' he said.
SOURCE
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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here.
Preserving the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here
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4 August, 2019
One climate crisis disaster happening every week, UN warns
No control group! More junk science from the Greenies. How do we know this is unusual?
Climate crisis disasters are happening at the rate of one a week, though most draw little international attention and work is urgently needed to prepare developing countries for the profound impacts, the UN has warned.
Catastrophes such as cyclones Idai and Kenneth in Mozambique and the drought afflicting India make headlines around the world. But large numbers of “lower impact events” that are causing death, displacement and suffering are occurring much faster than predicted, said Mami Mizutori, the UN secretary-general’s special representative on disaster risk reduction. “This is not about the future, this is about today.”
This means that adapting to the climate crisis could no longer be seen as a long-term problem, but one that needed investment now, she said. “People need to talk more about adaptation and resilience.”
Estimates put the cost of climate-related disasters at $520bn a year, while the additional cost of building infrastructure that is resistant to the effects of global heating is only about 3%, or $2.7tn in total over the next 20 years.
Mizutori said: “This is not a lot of money [in the context of infrastructure spending], but investors have not been doing enough. Resilience needs to become a commodity that people will pay for.” That would mean normalising the standards for new infrastructure, such as housing, road and rail networks, factories, power and water supply networks, so that they were less vulnerable to the effects of floods, droughts, storms and extreme weather.
Until now, most of the focus of work on the climate crisis has been on “mitigation” – jargon for cutting greenhouse gas emissions, and not to be confused with mitigating the effects of the climate crisis. The question of adapting to its effects has taken a distant second place, in part because activists and scientists were concerned for years that people would gain a false complacency that we need not cut emissions as we could adapt to the effects instead, and also because while cutting emissions could be clearly measured, the question of adapting or increasing resilience was harder to pin down.
Mizutori said the time for such arguments had ran out. “We talk about a climate emergency and a climate crisis, but if we cannot confront this [issue of adapting to the effects] we will not survive,” she told the Guardian. “We need to look at the risks of not investing in resilience.”
Many of the lower-impact disasters would be preventable if people had early warnings of severe weather, better infrastructure such as flood defences or access to water in case of drought, and governments had more awareness of which areas were most vulnerable.
Nor is this a problem confined to the developing world, she said, as the recent forest fires in the US and Europe’s latest heatwave had shown. Rich countries also face a challenge to adapt their infrastructure and ways of protecting people from disaster.
“Nature-based solutions”, such as mangrove swamps, forests and wetlands which could form natural barriers to flooding should be a priority, said Mizutori. A further key problem is how to protect people in informal settlements, or slums, which are more vulnerable than planned cities. The most vulnerable people are the poor, women, children, the elderly, the disabled and displaced, and many of these people live in informal settlements without access to basic amenities.
Regulations on building standards must also be updated for the climate crisis and properly enforced, she said. One of the governance issues cited by Mizutori was that while responsibility for the climate crisis and greenhouse gas emissions was usually held in one ministry, such as the economics, environment or energy department, responsibility for infrastructure and people’s protection was held elsewhere in government.
“We need to take a more holistic view of the risks,” she said.
SOURCE
Greenland Lost 217 Billion Tons of Ice Last Month
How surprising that they do not mention the extensive geothermal activity in Greenland below
A staggering 217 billion tons (197 billion metric tons) of meltwater flowed off of Greenland's ice sheet into the Atlantic Ocean this July. The worst day of melting was July 31, when 11 billion tons (10 billion metric tons) of melted ice poured into the ocean.
This massive thaw represents some of the worst melting since 2012, according to The Washington Post. That year, 97% of the Greenland ice sheet experienced melting. This year, so far, 56% of the ice sheet has melted, but temperatures — 15 to 20 degrees Fahrenheit above average — have been higher than during the 2012 heat wave. All told, this July's melt alone was enough to raise global average sea levels by 0.02 inches (0.5 millimeters), according to the Post.
"This might seem inconsequential, but every increment of sea-level rise provides a higher launchpad for storms to more easily flood coastal infrastructure, such as New York's subway system, parts of which flooded during Hurricane Sandy in 2012," Andrew Freedman and Jason Samenow reported in the Post. "Think of a basketball game being played on a court whose floor is gradually rising, making it easier for even shorter players to dunk the ball." [8 Ways Global Warming Is Already Changing the World]
That melting occurred after a heat wave that had swept across Europe in July, setting temperature records in France, settled over Greenland. And June was the hottest June ever recorded the world over. This massive global warming coincides with a drastic increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, to amounts not seen in the last 800,000 years. At the same time, part of Greenland is on fire.
In the long term, climate change is expected to cause even more-rapid melting — melting that is even more extreme than predicted by even the worst-case models just a few years ago. That will mean worsening storms, swamped coastlines and millions of climate refugees. At the same time, the heat that's melting all that ice is expected to make vast regions of the world uninhabitable for parts of the year, as temperatures climb beyond what the human body can handle.
Meanwhile, in Greenland, the heat wave is still going on.
SOURCE
How Faulty Assumptions in Climate Predictions Could Mean Big Costs for Americans
Family incomes will take a severe hit and household electricity prices will jump rapidly if policymakers use the “social cost of carbon” to justify new environmental regulations, a Heritage Foundation statistician warned during a climate change conference in Washington.
Since computer climate models are grounded in assumptions about the impact of carbon dioxide emissions, the results “can be all over the map,” Kevin Dayaratna said at the Heartland Institute’s conference.
These results then can be “rigged by policymakers” to achieve their desired results, Dayaratna said during his presentation.
The Heartland Institute is a libertarian, free-market think tank based in Illinois. Its 13th International Conference on Climate Change was held July 25 at the Trump International Hotel in Washington.
Dayaratna, a senior statistician and research programmer at The Heritage Foundation, a leading conservative think tank, was part of a panel discussion on “Energy and Climate Economics” that probed the costs of the Green New Deal and the benefits of fossil fuels.
The statistical models used by the Obama administration to set regulatory policy are flawed because they are highly prone to user manipulation, Dayaratna told conferees.
In fact, only one of the three models in use during the Obama years considered potential benefits, but did so with “outdated assumptions,” he said.
President Barack Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency defined the social cost of carbon as the “economic damages per metric ton of carbon dioxide emissions.”
Climate models seek to measure the long-term impact of carbon dioxide emissions. Dayaratna and his team at Heritage’s Center for Data Analysis adapted and tested two of the three models.
After making “very reasonable changes to the assumptions in the social cost of carbon,” Dayaratna said, they found that costs could drop dramatically anywhere from 40% to 200%. And under reasonable assumptions, he said, costs could become negative and thus net benefits to society.
“The sheer fact that these models can be manipulated to get any result you want speaks volumes to their uselessness in regulatory policy and the danger of putting them into the hands of policymakers,” Dayaratna said.
The left’s proposed Green New Deal is the latest in a series of proposals aimed at restricting, and even eliminating, fossil fuel use to combat climate change.
On Feb. 7, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., introduced House Resolution 109 while Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., introduced Senate Resolution 59. Both call for a “10-year national mobilization effort” to completely end the use of fossil fuels in the U.S. and transition the nation’s economy to so-called renewable energy sources.
But like other proposals before it, the Green New Deal is predicated on assumptions about the social cost of carbon that do not hold up under rigorous testing, Dayaratna said.
A Devastating Impact
Estimating the costs and benefits of the Green New Deal is challenging, Dayaratna said, because proponents have stated only “what their goals are” without outlining “any meaningful steps to achieve these goals.”
But in a recently published research paper assessing costs and benefits, Dayaratna and Heritage economist Nicolas Loris seize upon a carbon tax as one possible mechanism to achieve the Green New Deal’s policy goals. That’s partly because Ocasio-Cortez identifies the carbon tax as a possible option on her website.
The Heritage Energy Model used by Dayaratna and Loris in their study, which is based on U.S. Energy Information’s National Energy Model, also accounts for potential regulations imposed on the manufacturing industry.
What they found in their simulations of a “phased in” carbon tax is that by the time a $300-per-ton tax on carbon dioxide is reached, emissions would be reduced by only 58%.
The researchers found that a carbon tax, “coupled with government regulations and mandates,” would have a devastating impact on the American economy. By 2040, the Green New Deal would lead to an annual shortfall of 1.2 million jobs, “with a peak of more than 5.3 million jobs lost in 2023,” according to the paper.
Dayaratna and Loris also found that the typical family of four would lose an average of $8,000 in income every year, or more than $165,000 through 2040.
And, they concluded, the Green New Deal would make household electricity costs “skyrocket,” estimating these costs “would rapidly increase by well over 30%.”
In his presentation, Dayaratna stressed that the Green New Deal would not have any significant impact on the climate. Heritage’s models found that the planet would be only 0.2 degree Celsius cooler by the year 2100, and sea-level rise would slow by less than 2 centimeters.
‘Best President’ on Related Issues
Jim Lakely, communications director for the Heartland Institute, told The Daily Signal in an interview that the focus of this year’s conference was “a bit different” with Donald Trump in the White House:
The environmental left is unified in a way that it wasn’t before the election of Trump, because you now have issues on the table they didn’t expect to have on the table going back to October 2016. At that time, they felt like they had the wind at their back.
So, on our side, we felt we needed to be just as unified in our messaging and our goals. Trump is probably the best president we have had on our issues.
Other conference speakers included Myron Ebell, director of the Center for Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a libertarian think tank in Washington. Ebell was part of a panel discussion called “Winning Public Policy Options.”
“For us, the Green New Deal is a winning public policy option, and it is going to be the gift that keeps on giving,” Ebell said.
But he also voiced concern that the Green New Deal is spurring some Republican lawmakers to proceed with their own version of “light green” proposals, so they can appear “moderate and reasonable.”
Republicans who may be inclined to support a carbon tax should pay heed to recent election results from across the globe that suggest they would pay a steep political price, Ebell told the audience.
Government figures in Australia and parts of Canada who have advanced their own version of a carbon tax have been voted out of office, he said. And in Washington state, which he described as “a rather green state,” voters defeated a carbon tax proposal.
Trump’s Success on Energy Front
“There is an alternative to the Green New Deal and it’s called the Trump deregulatory agenda, and it’s working,” Ebell said.
Thanks to Trump’s deregulatory policies and tax cuts, the U.S. economy is growing at a robust clip, he said.
Those parts of the country that “stagnated and declined” under the Bush and Obama administrations, including “heartland states,” are now the faster growing parts of the nation’s growing economy, Ebell said.
Ebell credited Trump for helping to unleash America’s oil and gas resources.
“President Trump has had success on the energy front,” he said. As a result of the shale, oil, and gas revolution and letting it loose, we are now the world’s largest producer of oil and gas.”
Ebell’s full talk may be viewed here.
The Competitive Enterprise Institute just released its own study in partnership with Power the Future, a nonprofit that advocates American energy jobs. It shows that the Green New Deal would cost households in Alaska, Florida, New Hampshire, New Mexico, and Pennsylvania tens of thousands of dollars in higher costs for energy, housing, transportation, and shipping.
Dayaratna, the Heritage statistician, suggested that too many political figures lack a sufficient appreciation for what sensible energy policy means for average Americans.
“Energy is literally the fundamental building block of civilization,” Dayaratna said. “From enabling you to light up your home, from enabling you to drive your car, to enabling this very conference to operate. Energy has literally become the basis of anything and everything we do.”
“Unfortunately,” he said, “many people, particularly lawmakers, take the concept of energy for granted.”
SOURCE
Climate Change’s Fair-Weathered Friends
They may be driving hybrid cars and outlawing straws — but for all the anti-pollution celebrities, there seem to be even more environmental hypocrites. At this week’s “Google Camp,” a who’s who guest list is all converging on Sicily to talk about fighting climate change — completely ignoring the damage they did to the environment just to get there!
When Barack Obama, Prince Harry, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Katy Perry hopped on a plane, you can bet it wasn’t commercial. According to the Post, the celebrities “were expected to show up in 114 private jets,” spewing, one estimate said, 784,000 kilograms of CO2 in the air. Those who didn’t fly, the reports announced, sailed — on their gigantic personal yachts. “Haven’t these people heard of tele-conferencing?” PJ Media’s Jim Treacher jabbed. “How much carbon do they need to spew into the atmosphere, just to lecture the rest of us peons about leaving the phone charger plugged in?”
And of course, this was just hours after the Democratic candidates ate up minute after minute on the debate stage insisting that in 12 years the earth will be toast. But if liberals actually believed that, do you think any of them would be living the kind of double-standard existence they are? Of course not. Here they are, asking to be put in power so they can pass laws that take away your pick-up truck, raise your utility rates, and ship off our cows, and all the while, they’re continuing their jet-setting ways.
If what they’re proposing was actually good for America and supportive of true freedom, why haven’t they already adopted what they want to impose on everyone else? Because climate change — like a lot of the liberal agenda — is about power. The Left can make all kinds of claims about America saving the planet and changing the weather patterns. But do you really think any government is capable of that? Sure, we can have either a positive or negative impact on the environment, air quality, or water quality — and we should keep moving toward those positive environmental advancements. But when it comes to climate change, you could give liberals all the power they are asking for — and maybe more — and we’ll still never be able to measure the effects of their policies.
And they want it that way! It means they make all of these promises, and no one will be able to verify if their actions ever actually led to any positive outcome. And if they’re challenged, they’ll just say they need more authority to restrict the freedoms of others.
If climate change were the existential threat the Left scares people into thinking that it is, then the tech gurus of Google could’ve easily saved the planet lots of carbon by doing their confab online. Be leery of those who want to adopt policies that they themselves are not currently willing to live by. If something is good for America, then the people who are advocating should be practicing it now.
SOURCE
Nuclear power to be examined in Australia for the first time in ten years
Australia could lift its ban on nuclear energy after the government’s Federal Energy Minister asked the Environment and Energy Committee to look into the use of nuclear power in Australia.
Nuclear is banned as a source of power and while Federal Energy Minister Angus Taylor has confirmed Australia’s embargo on nuclear energy will remain, a parliamentary inquiry will revisit the issue and investigate “any future government’s consideration” into the topic.
According to the ABC, a 2006 report on nuclear power claimed Australia “could have up to 25 reactors providing over a third of the country’s electricity by 2050”.
“This will be the first inquiry into the use of nuclear power in Australia in more than a decade and is designed to consider the economic, environmental and safety implications of nuclear power,” Mr Taylor said in a letter to Environment and Energy Committee and Queensland LNP member Ted O’Brien on Friday.
“I am confident that your committee — involving all sides of politics — is the best way to consider this issue in a sensible way.”
The ABC reports “several Coalition backbenchers” supported the idea of nuclear energy, including Barnaby Joyce who suggested residents living near reactors could be offered free power.
“Clearly there are very passionate views on either side of this debate,” Mr O’Brien said.
“There are new and emerging forms of nuclear energy technology that are very different from the old smokestack reactors people tend to picture when they think nuclear energy and it’s on these newer technologies that we’ll focus.”
“Our job will be to determine the circumstances under which future Coalition or Labor governments might consider nuclear energy generation.”
Last month Queensland Nationals MP Keith Pitt and his Senate colleague James McGrath were reportedly behind the push, The Sunday Telegraph reports.
“I am not saying that there is a nuclear reactor coming to a shopping centre near you but we have to be able to investigate all options,” Mr Pitt told the newspaper.
“All I am calling for is an inquiry as to whether it’s a feasible option to ensure we are up to date with the latest information.”
During the federal election campaign Prime Minister Scott Morrison said he had no plans to reverse the ban on nuclear energy, after earlier saying he’d be open to it if the sector paid its own way.
The inquiry is due to be completed by the end of the year.
SOURCE
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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here.
Preserving the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here
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2 August, 2019
100% Renewable Is 100% Unachievable, Even If You’re An Optimist
100% renewable energy isn’t going to happen in the foreseeable future. The science doesn’t exist, the cost would be astronomical and the politics impossible.
There are several studies that indicate it would cost the United States trillions of dollars to transition to an electric system that is 100% renewable. Costs range from $4.5 trillion by 2030 or even 2040 to $5.7 trillion in 2030—about a quarter of the U.S. debt. The lower estimate results in a cost per household of almost $2,000 per year through 2040.
The $4.5 trillion cost does not include the stranded cost of the oil, natural gas, and coal technologies that would be disrupted. Costs can be greatly reduced by allowing nuclear as part of the non-carbon emitting mix and allowing natural gas to generate 20 percent of the electricity. Allowing existing nuclear plants to operate would save about $500 billion. Also, moving the goal to 2045 or 2050 would help to reduce costs by allowing advanced technologies to be developed and commercialized.
A spokesperson for Wood Mackenzie, who was in charge of one of the studies indicates, “In areas of the country that have a decent mix of wind and solar potential, those places can probably get to 50% renewables without struggling. Above 50%, the challenge of ensuring reliable grid operations starts to take off.” No large and complex power system in the world operates with an average annual wind and solar generation level greater than 30 percent. Another issue is that installers of wind turbines will be faced with NIMBY (not-in-my-back-yard) challenges.
Wood Mackenzie Study
The critical factor in 100% renewable energy with no nuclear power depends on the future of utility-scale battery storage. The firm estimated that 1,600 gigawatts of new wind and solar capacity would be required to replace all U.S. fossil fuel generation and 900 gigawatts of battery storage backup would be needed. There are only 5.5 gigawatts of battery storage world-wide in operation or under construction. If wind or solar replaced a 2-gigawatt nuclear power plant, and batteries provided the only backup, 6 to 8 gigawatts of battery storage would be required.
The U.S. power grid has about 1,060 gigawatts of total capacity, of which about 130 gigawatts is wind and solar capacity. One hundred-percent renewables by 2030 would require adding more wind and solar power in the next 11 years than the total capacity of these two sources installed in the past 20 years. The costs of new wind and solar units needed for a 100% renewables standard would be about $1.5 trillion.
Adding the required battery storage would raise the cost to about $4 trillion and adding new transmission lines would increase the cost to $4.5 trillion. The United States currently has about 200,000 miles of high-voltage transmission. The report estimates that achieving 100 percent renewables would require doubling the transmission lines, which would add $700 billion to the total price. The cost estimate does not include additional supply chain costs that could result from the increased demand for steel, construction equipment, or other supplies.
An 80 percent carbon-free target with natural gas generation providing the other 20 percent would reduce new battery storage costs by 60 percent. Natural gas provides an important back-up fuel for solar and wind power, which are intermittent technologies and are not available when the sun is not shining and the wind is not blowing. Natural gas can be ramped up or down quickly, is abundant and low cost. As such, it has helped the U.S. generating sector reduce carbon dioxide emissions, which declined by 27 percent between 2005 and 2018.
American Action Forum Analysis
According to an analysis by the American Action Forum, the proposal to transition 100 percent of U.S. electricity production to renewable sources by 2030 would require at least $5.7 trillion of investment in renewable energy and storage. This is a ballpark estimate and not an in-depth projection, and may not include all the contingencies necessary to make the system work. The group also notes that it is likely to be a significant underestimation, as it reflects the lowest possible cost.
Assumptions of the analysis include:
* the United States would use solar power during the day, and wind power during the night;
* for the hours in the day where neither solar nor wind produce their stated capacity, a mixture of hydroelectricity and storage would be used;
* the United States would build the entirety of all potential hydroelectricity resources (a controversial issue with environmentalists and an objective that could not be completed by 2030);
* storage costs associated with batteries would be their average operation and maintenance cost, rather than the significantly higher costs of batteries that can discharge electricity quickly and repeatedly throughout the day;
* electricity demand will be roughly flat (rather than demand spiking during afternoon hours); and,
* there will be no increase in the price of wind, solar, hydroelectricity, or storage, despite the fact that demand for all of these sources would skyrocket due to such policy.
Conclusion
As these two studies indicate, a 100% renewable electricity system is not realistic by 2030 as the Green New Deal requires and certainly not at a reasonable cost. Wind and solar technologies are intermittent, as they depend on the weather and have low capacity factors, meaning that much more capacity would be required than the natural gas capacity that they would be replacing. Further, battery storage is currently not a viable option as the technology is expensive and still developing.
SOURCE
Burning corn so we can drive 1/3 less miles to the gallon
Biofuels, primarily ethanol in gasoline, provides 5% of our current energy use. Wrongheaded environmental zealots believe it represents an ideal short term solution for replacing fossil fuels for transportation and on site energy generation. They argue that because biofuels come from plants, they are natural, green and non polluting. They claim that in contrast to fossil fuels, biofuels are renewable and sustainable because they can be regrown every year.
Once one wakes up to reality, however, there arguments all fall apart. The major losers in this current trend controlled by government regulation, which obviously benefits farmers who are indeed suffering very low grain prices, is the public at large. Bio fuels both raise the price of transportation and concurrently our food.
Here are some of the reasons why biofuels are not the answer to what some see as our energy problems.
Numerous studies have proved that biofuels consume more energy than they produce;
Biofuel production is extremely land intensive;
Biofuels cost more than gasoline;
Most cars and trucks can’t function using pure ethanol as fuel;
Biofuels ruin small engines;
Biofuel production competes with food production.
David Pimental and Cornell University documented long ago that the biofuels, primarily ethanol, consume more energy in their production than they produce. Pimental and others estimated that corn from an acre of land produces between 330 and 450 gallons of ethanol. As a gallon of ethanol only has 63% of the energy content of gasoline, 400 gallons of ethanol per acre is equivalent to 250 gallons of gasoline. Additionally it is estimated that the farm equipment used to plant, tend and harvest the corn consumes 140 gallons of fossil fuels. After harvesting, processing. steps which include fermentation and distillation also require fossil fuels. The arithmetic shown in the original research articles calculates that 100,000 BTU are required to produce a gallon of ethanol which in turn will provide only 77,000 BTU of of energy. Clearly it makes no economic sense.
It takes a huge amount of our land to produce ethanol. We have about 320 million farmable acres in the conterminous 48 states. While it varies from year to year we tend to use about 90 million of those acres to produce corn, and 40% of that corn goes to produce ethanol. That works out to about 10% of our farm land to produce an uneconomical fuel.
Replacing all currently used gasoline, 140 billion gallons, and diesel fuel,143 billion gallons, would require 20 times the amount of ethanol that is being produced today. We would need 720 million acres of land to achieve this.
During the Obama Administration the President had decreed that military transportation take advantage of biofuels in ships and airplanes. The early implementation of this order proved an economic as well as practical disaster.
Most cars and trucks can’t function using pure ethanol as a fuel. Currently 10% of ethanol is placed in gasoline without difficulty to improve performance, but efforts to increase that amount to 15% is being greeted with great resistance from the Automobile Association of America which states that such a level will seriously overheat engines and damage many engine components, such as fuel pumps.
Biofuel production competes with food production. Every acre of land now used for biofuel production was formerly used for food production, mainly as feed for livestock and poultry. Over 40% of US corn production has made the switch from food to fuel since 2005. Other crops including oats, barley, sorghum, wheat and hay have seen their acreage decrease as well in order to produce biofuel. This increases the prices of all these grains. Farmers are only responding to the fact that large government subsidies promote ethanol and you the public pays those subsidies.
We should all love our farmers for providing us with the most inexpensive and healthiest food available on our planet. The vagaries of weather and world grain production provide them with a roller coaster of good and bad years. We should all want to see them provided with a safety net to keep them going under the worst circumstances. But having said that, a safety net involving a nonsensical plan to make fuel from corn is clearly counterproductive
SOURCE
Guardian discovers skeptical climate videos, urges censorship
The left wing Guardian has published an article on a study that found something I pointed out two years ago, that YouTube is full of videos skeptical of climate alarmism. There are at least a thousand skeptical videos. I have begun collecting them at my Climate Change Debate Education website and have about 300 listed at this point.
The Guardian title is accurate: ” Most YouTube climate change videos ‘oppose the consensus view'”.
Mind you “Consensus view” should be capitalized because it is the name of a specific political position, disguised as a statistical description. When it comes to climate change there is no scientific consensus on the role that humans might or might not be playing.
The subtitle however is threatening: ” Scientist behind study urges platform to tweak algorithms to ‘prioritise factual information.’”
This is clearly a call for algorithmic censorship of skeptics. We are already seeing this bias on Google searches, which I have also documented.
Of course the Guardian thinks that climate alarmism is “factual information.” They just instructed their writers to use the terms “climate emergency” and “climate crisis”, neither of which exist. The article leads with a picture of Bill Nye setting the globe on fire, which is simply ridiculous. Here is how the Guardian puts it:
“The majority of YouTube videos about the climate crisis oppose the scientific consensus and “hijack” technical terms to make them appear credible, a new study has found. Researchers have warned that users searching the video site to learn about climate science may be exposed to content that goes against mainstream scientific belief.”
The study in question uses the UN IPCC as the standard of scientific truth, which is absurd. What the IPCC claims is questionable and the focus of the scientific debate. There is no “mainstream scientific belief” at this time. There is just scientific debate.
At this point my collections include numerous videos from William Happer, Patrick Michaels, Roy Spencer, Richard Lindzen, Judith Curry and CFACT’s Marc Morano. These are legitimate skeptics, not “hijackers.” Videos range in length from one minute to over an hour so there are hundreds of hours of detailed scientific content.
The study in question is either really bad or deliberately bad, it is hard to say which. They even found a spurious correlation between skeptics of climate alarmism and the bogus chemtrails conspiracy theory. No such correlation exists.
The 300 or so scientific videos on my http://ccdedu.blogspot.com website never mention chemtrails because that is not what the climate change debate is about.
However “chemtrails” was one of the study’s top search terms. So it looks like they jiggered the study by looking at the false issue of chemtrails changing climate, which is trivial compared to the overall climate change debate.
Having studied the YouTube for skeptical content I cannot figure out how these folks got these goofy results, unless they designed them. YouTube is full of well argued skeptical science. The problem seems to be that the alarmists simply do not understand the debate.
SOURCE
Dems' Energy Ideas Confused, Disastrous
Great news! Chicken Little’s sky never descended, and the big bad climate wolf has never responded to the boy’s repeatedly overheated warning calls.
But you aren’t likely to have gotten this impression from last year’s much-ballyhooed news coverage of the National Climate Assessment report produced by Obama administration hold-overs based upon hysterically extreme worst-case modeling predictions of a 10 to 15 degree Fahrenheit temperature rise by the year 2100.
No mainstream network has bothered to mentioned that only one out of more than two dozen climate models that the report relied on was even able to accurately simulate ("hindcast") past climate changes.
That uniquely successful model developed by the Institute of Numerical Mathematics in Moscow also forecast the least warming — about 3.4 degrees Fahrenheit — under realistic CO2 emission assumptions.
Radically irrational Democrat/Socialist energy proposals based upon unfounded climate alarm ignore fundamental realities.
First, let’s understand that replacing any significant share of total current U.S. fossil-fueled energy (80 percent) with intermittent and unreliable wind and solar (slightly more than 2% combined) is disastrously implausible.
Second, given that the U.S. accounts for less than 15 percent of all global CO2 emissions, our control over the planet’s thermostat would be extremely limited at any cost.
Nevertheless, putting all scientific, economic and broader common sense logic aside, is there sufficient climate guilt and fear virtue-signaling value in anti-fossil variations of the "Green New Deal" to advance a 2020 presidential victory as all leading liberal candidates obviously believe?
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., promises on her first day in office to impose a moratorium on all new offshore drilling leases, take a significant percentage of oil and gas production offline, eliminate tens of thousands of jobs, and forego many billions in federal, state and local tax and business revenues.
Other candidates have joined with Warren in calls for "net zero" emissions with the same social and economic impacts. Consequences would dramatically reverse recent progress in drilling, refining, liquid-natural gas terminals, pipeline installation, and manufacturing —along with myriad service industries and businesses that support these areas.
Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., would not only ban all offshore drilling, but nuclear energy (8.6% of U.S. energy) as well. And whereas Joe Biden has vowed to push for a "full electric vehicle future" by 2030, he at least cracks the door open for adding nuclear to help power his proposed half-million new charging stations.
Since 2013, a green "shut-them-down" nuclear movement has helped to force plants in Wisconsin, Vermont, Florida, Nebraska, and California into retirement, with Three Mile Island scheduled to close by September 30 of this year.
Very belatedly, pro-nuclear green advocacy appears likely to be emerging from a realization that anemic wind and solar installations won’t be nearly adequate. In addition, their intermittency demands an immediately available backup amount of fossil-fueled natural gas turbine capacity to keep power grids constantly balanced.
Stupefyingly late, even the long-time militantly anti-nuclear Union of Concerned Scientists now advocates reversing planned shutdowns of embattled plants in Illinois, Connecticut, New Jersey, and upstate New York, where three plants along the shores of Lake Ontario had been under threat of closure.
Meanwhile, as the U.S. presently has only one new nuclear plant under construction, and just a handful in planning stages, other countries — including India, Russia, and China - are moving rapidly forward to expand and upgrade this non-fossil energy source.
The same naïve mantra that has precluded green activist acceptance of hydropower (which provides more U.S. energy than wind) as a "renewable" energy classification, also famously weaponized the Obama administration’s all-out, take-no-prisoner assaults on coal.
"Progressive" 2020 campaigners might be reminded to take a lesson from Hillary’s book which devotes an entire chapter about her regret about bragging at a March 2016 Ohio town hall event that her administration was "going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business."
A former candidate, Barack Obama, made the same pledge in 2008, when he vowed to "bankrupt" the coal industry. By the time Mrs. Clinton came along, those industry workers who had suffered years of crushing climate regulations certainly weren’t favorably impressed.
Encouragingly, voters in states which include Hawaii, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington, continue wisely to reject ballot initiatives for carbon taxes.
Meanwhile, there is also no reason to believe that other countries will wean themselves off of fossil fuels at great expense to their economic and social survival.
"Quiet Australians" have recently rebuked climate alarmists by reelecting conservative Prime Minister Scott Morrison. Even France, home of the Paris Climate Agreement, continues to wrestle with "yellow vests" who are protesting rising fuel costs and taxes.
Climate alarm-premised assaults upon fossil energy constitute direct attacks upon the roaring American business economy: our businesses, prosperity, and social stability for all.
We’re a lot smarter than that. Right?
SOURCE
Nevada's Rep. Susie Lee Fearmongers Over Yucca Mountain
Last month, I wrote an op-ed for USA Today about Yucca Mountain.
The argument I made, in a nutshell, is that the nuclear waste storage facility that has already been built is safe and should be opened for business. However, because Nevadans are (improperly) worried about the safety of the Yucca facility, I suggested that the federal government offer to pay each of the state's citizens $500 each year (for 10 years) as "rent." This provides financial compensation for the risk of hosting the site, even though the risk is exceedingly small.
The usual counterargument is, "F*** you."
Admittedly, I don't have a good response to that.
Nevada Congresswoman Susie Lee also weighed in. While her counterargument is at least civil, it spreads disinformation about geology and public health. Let's fact-check her statement.
"NV is the 3rd most active seismic state in the country"
True but irrelevant. Nevada is a big state. What matters isn't if it's seismically active but if earthquakes would damage the nuclear waste storage facility. The answer is "no."
In 2009, Scientific American addressed this concern. According to the article, the Department of Energy says that "frequent, if low-level, seismic activity does not pose a threat to potential safe nuclear storage some five miles (eight kilometers) under Yucca Mountain." The article concludes, "[T]he proposed Yucca Mountain repository could withstand whatever earthquakes Mother Nature might muster."
"shortsighted proposal"
False, this isn't a short-sighted proposal. It's a long-term solution. Yucca Mountain will be able to safely store nuclear waste for thousands of years. What is short-sighted is what we are doing now, i.e., storing waste on site at 80 different nuclear facilities in 35 states. As I explained in my USA Today piece, soon the Department of Energy will be required to pay billions of dollars in "damages" to nuclear power utilities because of the Department's failure to collect the waste.
"The health of our children & our community is worth more than $500."
Oh yes, the children. I didn't think of that.
An absolutely excellent, must-read article by physicist Dr. Richard Muller explains the science behind nuclear waste disposal. We routinely say that nuclear waste needs to be secure for about 10,000 years. That's because, by then, most of the radioactivity has decayed away. But in reality, after merely 300 years, the level of radioactivity has declined by roughly 90%. So, the question isn't, "Can we guarantee that Yucca is eternally secure forever and ever amen?" but "Can we ensure that Yucca is safe for about 300 years?" And that answer is yes.
Dr. Muller really slams the door shut by comparing the risk posed by a leak at Yucca Mountain to the risk posed by uranium found naturally in the soil:
"Colorado, where much of the uranium is obtained, is a geologically active region, full of faults and fissures and mountains rising out of the prairie, and its surface rock contains about a billion tons of uranium. The radioactivity in this uranium is 20 times greater than the legal limit for Yucca Mountain, and it will take more than 13 billion years—not just a few hundred—for the radioactivity to drop by a factor of 10. Yet water that runs through, around, and over this radioactive rock is the source of the Colorado River, which is used for drinking water in much of the West, including Los Angeles and San Diego. And unlike the glass pellets that store the waste in Yucca Mountain, most of the uranium in the Colorado ground is water-soluble. Here is the absurd-sounding conclusion: if the Yucca Mountain facility were at full capacity and all the waste leaked out of its glass containment immediately and managed to reach groundwater, the danger would still be 20 times less than that currently posed by natural uranium leaching into the Colorado River. [Emphasis added]
The science is utterly conclusive: Yucca Mountain is not a threat to Nevadans' health. Grandstanding and fearmongering by politicians is why America has a completely backward energy policy. The good news is that a smart energy policy is really easy. We just have to elect politicians who care more about physics than feelings.
SOURCE
Why the Carbon Tax Would Backfire on America
Leftists once initiated a carbon tax in Australia. A little while later the Leftists were thrown out of goverbnment and the tax abolished
Several members of Congress have floated different carbon tax bills in recent days, some of which have both Democratic and Republican sponsorship.
But marginal bipartisan support for enacting a new tax on American families and businesses doesn’t make it good policy.
Different models and prices have been proposed, but they all tax activities that emit carbon dioxide on the premise that emissions are responsible for global warming, a cost to society which otherwise isn’t accounted for. They propose to address this “market failure” with a policy that could well lead to economic failure.
Families would pay more at the meter and the pump. Approximately 80% of America’s energy needs are met by natural gas, oil, and coal, which means the costs would be economy-wide. It would cost more to manufacture, which would drive up the price of manufactured goods. And it would cost more to farm, which would drive up the costs of food.
Analysts at The Heritage Foundation used the U.S. Energy Administration Information’s energy model to estimate the effects of a carbon tax to reduce carbon dioxide emissions as aggressively as possible between now and 2040. According to the model’s results, a carbon tax would cause:
A peak employment shortfall of more than 1.4 million jobs.
A total income loss of more than $40,000 for a family of four.
An aggregate gross domestic product loss of more than $3.9 trillion.
Increases in household electricity expenditures of 12% to 124%.
Even worse, the burden would be heaviest on low-income families who spend a higher portion of their budget on energy costs. Some carbon tax proposals acknowledge this and offer rebates from the tax revenue collected.
But even if a rebate check compensates low-income families for their higher energy bills, it won’t undo the damage they’ll incur from paying more for groceries, clothes, health care, and everything else they buy because of the increased cost of energy for all those providers.
Some supporters talk of returning the tax revenue to the people in various ways, but not without taking some kind of cut for their own special interests, whether for green energy projects or new infrastructure.
Then there’s the bureaucratic nightmare of implementing a new tax. Acknowledging that a carbon tax would harm American businesses and U.S. competitiveness, carbon tax proponents suggest enacting a border adjustment tax for imported goods from countries where no carbon pricing exists. Others propose to eliminate environmental regulations in exchange for a carbon tax.
Administering border taxes on goods imported from countries without carbon taxes “would be enormously complex, requiring an estimate of the tax-equivalent value of the given policies under examination,” said resident American Enterprise Institute scholar Benjamin Zycher. And the administrative state would be empowered to make decisions micromanaging the economy via tax policy.
Supporters argue a carbon tax is worth it despite the costs, but it’s not clear it would do much to benefit the climate.
No doubt, carbon dioxide emissions would decline—if you tax something, you’ll get less of it. But the impact on global temperatures would be negligible by the end of the century, even if you assume the most catastrophic scenario.
It’s also highly unlikely a carbon tax would be faithfully applied to everyone, Zycher pointed out, because various interest groups will influence which businesses are subject to the tax and other countries are likely to implement alternative policies that subsidize solar and wind energy instead of taxing carbon.
Carbon taxes are a cure worse than the alleged disease: They have a minimal impact on emissions and will do next to nothing to affect climate change. In the end, they hurt the very citizens they are intended to help.
SOURCE
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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here.
Preserving the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here
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1 August, 2019
Another U.S. Temperature Record Gets Broken—For Cold
The state of Minnesota this morning just shattered another temperature record.
Like so many locations this year in the United States and Europe, temperature records are being “broken,” at least as far as the last century-plus when such records began to be cataloged.
The difference this week: Minnesota had the coldest recorded temperature in International Falls, on the border with Canada, coming in at 37 degrees Fahrenheit on the morning of Tuesday, July 30, 2019.
That breaks by one degree the coldest temperature on this day, at 38 degrees, last felt in 1898, even after the “Little Ice Age” had ended earlier in the 19th century.
In other words, just when “global warming” took hold in the mid-19th century, Minnesota confounded the trend and set a cold record by century’s end.
Now, 121 years later, when most of the news media, Hollywood actors, and left-of-center politicians are certain the planet faces an “existential threat” from “climate change” (aka, global warming), Minnesota – the Gopher State and land of 10,000 lakes – has to spoil the narrative again!
Certainly, much of Europe and the United States has undergone a heatwave, with triple-digit, record-breaking temperatures this month.
But, some perspective is in order; for starters – it’s July. It’s summertime. July is the hottest month of the year in the northern hemisphere.
The vicissitudes of weather always make for interesting conversation, at the office water cooler or at the start of a big meeting to, pardon the expression, “break the ice.”
And, while July’s heatwaves make the news, this calendar year many places in the United States and Europe also established record cold temperatures and snowfall.
In northern Europe, for example, the month of July has brought record cold, according to the Finnish Meteorological Institute.
In Germany, several locations experienced the coldest July temperatures in decades, with Rotenburg, in Lower Saxony, setting a record for the all-time coldest July temperature of 37 degrees, breaking the mark set in 1946.
Last May, numerous locales in the state of California experienced record, or near record lows in temperature. In El Cajon, outside of San Diego, it was 48 degrees on May 28th, record cold for that day.
Only two days in May did the temperature in Los Angeles reach 75 degrees or higher. Since 1878, only six times did the city of angels have fewer such days for that month.
Then there is the state of Illinois, in March, which experienced record cold temperatures in several locations, according to the National Weather Service.
On March 4th it was 12 degrees in Chicago, which shattered the previous record by five degrees way back in 1890 when it hit 17 (again, after the Little Ice Age ended).
That same day in Rockford it was 10 degrees, which broke the previous record of 14 in 2002 (following supposed “global warming” of the 1990s).
I could go on, but you get the point. This is not about making the case for global cooling just because many locales shattered cold records for a given day, any more than others should spout evidence of global warming for record heat.
The point of this is that “unseasonably” hot or cold weather is newsworthy at the moment, but is otherwise evidence of nothing on a trend basis, including evidence man-made global warming.
The late geologist Bob Carter, a long-time professor at James Cook University in Australia, said it well:
“The fact that the temperature was warmer at the end of the 20th century than it was in the preceding hundred years, is such a piece of kindergarten science. It’s true, and it is completely meaningless in telling you anything about climate change.”
That doesn’t prevent actors (who act for a living), news people (who pretend for a living), and politicians (who lie for a living), from dramatizing the moment to further their self-importance and their climate change narrative.
Democratic candidates running for president, for example, are tripping over each other to ring up estimates for their version of a Green New Deal to “address” climate change.
Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York just released a $10 trillion plan, which surpassed Washington Governor Jay Inslee’s $9 trillion plan.
I guess that makes Gillibrand even “greener”? (Aside: if you’ve never heard of either presidential candidate, you’re not alone; both are basically at zero in the polls.)
The reality is that unusual weather makes for momentarily interesting conversation. It does not make for any pattern, or “evidence” of a decades-long climate trend by 2030, 2040, or eight decades into the future, which is commonly claimed by so many that comprise the climate change cottage industry.
Indeed, the climate has always changed and it always will. So, relax. You can enjoy the summers in Europe, Minnesota, and most everywhere else in the northern half of the globe. Just don’t pack your coats away in the attic.
SOURCE
Trump and Newsom Think Alike on Deadly Wildfires
On June 12 the Trump administration proposed easing environmental regulations for forest-thinning on federal land to speed up wildfire prevention. Before accusing President Trump of clearcutting California, it’s important to note that Gov. Gavin Newsom is quietly taking similar actions, an admission that environmental mandates are fueling catastrophic wildfires.
Cal Fire has begun work on 35 fast-tracked community projects across California to eliminate excess fuels through thinning, prescribed burns, and creation of fire breaks. But these projects have proceeded only because the governor issued an “emergency proclamation” granting special waivers of state environmental regulations, such as the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), which requires impact reviews.
That an executive proclamation was required to allow these community projects to proceed is an indictment of California’s environmental interest groups and the red tape their favorite regulations have created. The projects are a drop in the bucket, however, compared to the thousands that still need completing across the state.
A century of tightening government control over wildland management has resulted in a tedious, bureaucratic, top-down system captured by “nature first” zealots. As a result, the U.S. Forest Service, Cal Fire, and other government agencies impose regulatory roadblocks to sensible fire-prevention activities in order to “preserve forestland in its natural state.”
Stanford University economist Terry Anderson notes that scientific forest management is “continuously thwarted by environmental activists who want to let nature take her course.” A 2015 study by the University of Montana found that in recent years activist appeals and litigation have encumbered 40 to 50 percent of the planned timber harvests and treatment acres in a region hit hard by wildfires.
Activists favor a reactive posture—fire suppression—rather than a proactive stance—fire prevention and active management. This has created a California tinder box with record fuel loads.
In the 1800s, California forests averaged less than 50 trees per acre; today the average is upwards of 500 trees per acre. This extreme density weakens all trees in the forests as they compete for sunlight and water, making them more susceptible to drought and disease, and producing more flammable dead and dying trees. California has nearly 150 million dead trees.
John Laird, former secretary of the California Natural Resources Agency, has recommended that 500,000 acres of forest each year be thinned of undergrowth, small trees, and dead trees; yet in 2017 the state treated only 250,000 acres. Thinning public and private land has been held back by regulations, especially by CEQA.
Prescribed burns have also been held back by government authorities who refuse to issue burn permits or by local air-quality management districts that suspend permits, even though prescribed burns produce far fewer emissions than wildfires. In contrast, Georgia regulators aim to issue private landowners burn permits within five minutes of their phone calls.
The rising toll of horrific megafires and Newsom’s admission point to urgently needed changes. First, state and federal governments should abolish regulations that prevent healthy land management and imperil the lives of Californians.
Second, expanding private stewardship over land would properly align incentives with fire prevention. Realistically, no landowner wants their asset or investment to go up in flames. About 60 percent of California’s 33 million acres of forestland, however, is “owned” by the federal and state governments, which have proven to be poor stewards.
Third, private landowners and local communities should be allowed to make independent decisions about land management and take immediate action. Before the government takeover, private parties owned the land, maintained access roads in forests, and quickly removed overgrowth at their own expense. Today communities wait for government officials to muster the political will, votes, funds, and regulatory rollbacks to tackle the problem. These delays allow life-threatening fuels to build.
California needs permanent decentralization and independent action. Without it, excess fuels will spark new megafires that destroy more homes and kill more Californians. Much of this destruction will have been preventable.
SOURCE
What's the Deal With the Green New Deal?
There's been a lot of talk about The Green New Deal. Beyond the headlines, what is it really?
We face an existential threat. Life as we know it is on the line. We have 12 short years to change everything or it’s game over.
This is the terrifying scenario that’s used by many leading politicians to justify a “Green New Deal”: an unprecedented increase in government power focused on the energy industry.
The core idea of a Green New Deal is that government should rapidly prohibit the use of fossil fuel energy and impose “100% renewable energy,” mostly solar and wind.
This may sound appealing, but consider what it would entail.
Today, 80% of the energy Americans use to heat their homes, farm their land, run their factories, and drive their cars comes from fossil fuels: coal, oil, and natural gas. Only 3.4% comes from solar and wind—despite decades of government subsidies and mandates to encourage their use.
The reason we don’t use much sunlight and wind as energy is that they are unreliable fuels that only work when the sun shines and the wind blows. That’s why no town, city, or country has ever come close to 100%—or even 50%—solar and wind.
And yet, Green New Deal proponents say they can do the impossible—if only we give the government control of the energy industry and control of major users of energy, such as the transportation industry, manufacturing, and agriculture.
All of this is justified by the need to “do something” about the “existential threat” of rising CO2 levels. We’re told on a daily basis that prestigious organizations like the United Nations have predicted mass destruction and death if we don’t get off fossil fuels. What we’re not told is that such predictions have a decades-long track record of getting it wrong—and by wrong, I mean completely-missing-the-dart-board wrong.
For example, in 1989, the Associated Press reported a United Nations prediction that “entire nations could be wiped off the face of the earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000.” We’re now two decades past 2000, we’re not missing any nations, and human beings are living longer, healthier, and wealthier lives than ever before.
But aren’t things bound to get worse? Haven’t scientists established that CO2 is a greenhouse gas with a warming influence on the planet? Yes—but that’s only a small part of the big picture.
Although CO2 causes some warming, it’s much less significant than we’ve been told. Since we started using significant amounts of fossil fuels in the middle of the 19th century, we’ve increased the percentage of CO2 in the atmosphere from .03% to .04%, which correlates with an average temperature increase of about 2 degrees Fahrenheit. It also correlates with significant global greening—because CO2 is plant food.
All of this is far from unprecedented territory for our planet, which has existed with at least 10 times today’s CO2 levels and a 25-degree warmer average temperature.
What is truly unprecedented, though, is how safe we are from climate. The International Disaster Database, a nonpartisan organization that tracks deaths from climate-related causes—such as extreme heat, floods, storms, and drought—shows that such deaths have been plummeting as CO2 emissions have been rising.
How is this possible? Because of the fossil fuel energy that emitted the CO2, which has empowered us to climate-proof our environment with heating, air-conditioning, sturdy buildings, mass irrigation, and weather warning systems.
Fossil fuel energy has not taken a naturally safe climate and made it unnaturally dangerous; it’s taken our naturally dangerous climate and made it unnaturally safe. Fossil fuels are not an existential threat. They are an existential resource because they increase something much more important than the level of CO2 in the atmosphere: the level of human empowerment. Increased life expectancy, income, health, leisure time, and education are all tightly linked to increased access to fossil fuels.
Does this mean that we shouldn’t look for lower carbon energy alternatives? Of course not. But the alternatives should lead us toward more abundant, more reliable power, not less.
The most promising form of alternative energy is not unreliable solar and wind, but reliable, carbon-free nuclear energy. Sweden gets 40% of its electricity from nuclear. France, over 70%. While nuclear energy is smeared as unsafe, it has actually been demonstrated by study after study to be the safest form of energy ever created.
And yet, Green New Deal proponents, who say that we have 12 years to save the planet from rising CO2 levels, vigorously oppose nuclear—in addition to all fossil—fuel use.
By opposing every affordable, abundant, reliable form of energy, the Green New Deal won’t protect us from an existential threat; it is an existential threat.
SOURCE
In Iowa, Democrats Do The Ethanol Tango, Ignore Green New Deal Pledge
There is no greater champion of the corn-based ethanol industry on the campaign trail than Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.).
Unless she happens to be in Washington, D.C., where she supports a “Green New Deal” that would outlaw all fuel-driven cars in 10 years.
Nothing illustrates the delicate political dance that most Democratic presidential hopefuls must perform when their radical political agenda comes smack up against midwestern common sense and political realities.
Subsidies for ethanol and other biofuels may be wasteful and expensive for the American consumer, but no presidential candidate has ever been successful when threatening to end them.
This is a battle between the activist base of the Democratic Party who don’t care much about rural America and ordinary voters who look at many climate change proposals with a skeptical eye.
Reuters:
“There’s a disconnect between where we have seen leading Democratic contenders be in terms of support their corn ethanol and soy biodiesel and what we believe is the right thing to do for climate policy,” said Rose Garr, a campaign director at Mighty Earth, an environmental group headed by former Democratic California congressman Henry Waxman.
The group has been running an aggressive field campaign in Iowa. Activists are confronting candidates in front of video cameras, trying to convince them to abandon support for ethanol — a longtime litmus test for winning the battleground state of Iowa, which holds the first presidential nominating contest.
You can be sure those confrontations are mighty uncomfortable for the likes of Warren and Sanders, who is another aggressive campaigner for climate change.
But there are also candidates who have resorted to shameless pandering to farmers and the biofuels industry — at least in Iowa.
The president’s trade war with China eliminated a key buyer of U.S. ethanol, and the administration has handed oil refineries a record number of exemptions to the nation’s biofuel laws.
This could provide an opening for Democrats. Senators Sanders and Kirsten Gillibrand, once foes of the biofuel mandate, have converted to ethanol boosters as they campaign in a field of more than 20 candidates for the 2020 nomination.
Like fellow senators Warren, Cory Booker and Amy Klobuchar, who all have publicly supported ethanol, they also are sponsors of the Green New Deal. Former Vice President Joe Biden has supported ethanol but also has an environmental plan that calls for phasing out of fuel-powered cars.
Donald Trump took the very popular, unapologetic position of fully supporting ethanol mandates, which helped him immensely in the Midwest.
But those Democratic candidates who voice support for biofuels are being watched closely by the greenies:
But Scott Farber, a vice president at the Environmental Working Group, a Washington-based research and advocacy organization, said Democratic candidates cannot simultaneously support the Green New Deal and the U.S. Renewable Fuel Standard, the 2005 federal law that requires ethanol and other biofuels to be blended the nation’s fuel pool.
Ethanol is largely produced from corn. Environmental activists say it is not as clean a fuel as they once thought because blending it with gasoline continues U.S. reliance on fossil fuels and burning it still produces carbon dioxide.
“We can no longer afford to be burning fossil fuels or corn ethanol when there are far more environmentally transformational alternatives that address the climate crisis,” Farber said.
I can’t wait for wind turbines sitting atop teeny, tiny cars to appear on the nation’s highways. That would be “transformational” indeed.
Iowans are used to this song and dance from politicians. Republicans who fought the federal mandates in Congress suddenly converted to ethanol boosters after they announced for president in 2016.
But for Democrats in 2020, they need the environmental vote as much as they need the rural, white, working-class vote. That’s why they will soft-pedal support for ethanol — except when they’re crisscrossing Iowa.
SOURCE
Australia: Wind and solar turn up pressure on electricity supply in South Australia and Queensland
A complicated balancing act from coal and gas is needed to keep the lights on
Daily price ramp on Australia’s wholesale electricity markets is quite strong in most states right now, and particularly in South Australia and Queensland. The evening peak price ramp is about $100/MWh difference between low and high price, but the duration of low and high price is short.
Despite exports to NSW, coal in Qld is ramping up and down about 1000 MW twice a day. However, it’s the gas-driven QLD early evening peak that really moves prices. In South Australia in July, there were mostly exports even in the early evening peak. Those exports to Victoria required more high price marginal gas to enter the system.
Even in winter the aggregate influence of rooftop and utility solar is very noticeable and a vast transformation from a few years ago. In South Australia at the moment wind and solar are well over 50% of generation driving prices on average below Victoria.
Victoria’s average price for July is about $11/MWh higher than either South Australia or NSW and $20 MWh above Qld, basically because its midday price in July was around $70 MWh, compared to say $40 MWh in the solar richer States.
The five year total average in the NEM in front of the meter is around 193 TWh as measured by metered demand using NEM Review as a source. Although it looks like 2019 is soft in Autumn and Winter, due to the hot start to the year , the 2019 year to date average is right in line with the five year number.
The annualized level of the last 30 days is around 193 TWh which is in line with the full year average. So when we look at what’s happening to price we are in effect seeing price at the average level of demand. Following so far?
Solar output is depressed in Winter (it’s about 5% of total demand including behind the meter now, versus a peak in the March quarter of over 8%).
Despite all that we are seeing some strong price ramps up and down in the daily average numbers. Two interesting cases are solar-strong Qld and wind-strong South Australia.
It seems self evident the spike in QLD when the Sun goes down and demand goes up and also the depressed price at lunch time. Looking at the supply and demand side what we see is that when the solar comes into action QLD exports and turns down its gas and coal. In the evening peak this is reversed although on average there are still some exports.
What’s most interesting to me is that even in Winter we are seeing coal ramping up and down 1000 MW pretty much twice a day in QLD. Coal has always had to be flexible because demand is itself volatile, but the ramping is already becoming stronger.
I don’t know how efficient it is to have the coal generators doing that morning ramp for just 2-3 hours but clearly they can still outcompete gas in that time frame.
I expect, based on the new Mt Emerald wind farm, that as the Coopers Creek wind farm gets into action it may start to eat into that morning peak. Note demand includes behind the meter and solar is combined utility and behind the meter.
Also it’s interesting to look at the daily average wind pattern in Qld from Mt Emerald. Unlike the other charts this is a 9 month average and there may well be seasonal factors I haven’t looked at. Assuming its representative of Qld in total though its quite encouraging.
The wind output drops off in the middle of the day and picks up again when the Sun goes down. Wind won’t quite pick up the early Qld peak but it will assist with the latter part. Again we look for more data over time and more wind farms to see if these early results can be replicated.
Enthusiasts might recall that one of the several far sighted principles underlying the German Energiewende that kicked off the whole globabl energy transformation was that wind and solar were complementary to each other.
This is also supportive of the hybrid wind and solar farm pioneered by Windlab for Qld and now proposed by for instance by Goldwind at the Clarke Creek wind and solar farm and shortlisted by Cleanco in the recent tender for 400MW.
South Australia
In wind heavy South Australia price is softest early in the morning and the solar induced middle of the day reaction is less, probably because thermal supply in Victoria is constrained.
As with Queensland, South Australia is exporting most of the time right now. In this case though its exporting wind to Victoria, just not enough to reduce Victorian prices down to the level of other States.
Wind is 50% of supply in July 2019. On average wind has a remarkably steady hourly output in South Australia during the seasonally windy July. Most of the gas ramp is driven by solar.
It looks like peak prices in the South Australian evening would be lower except for the export opportunity. The extra 250 MW of gas in the evening peak over the the morning peak requires a higher price but mostly wouldn’t be needed save for exports.
Both QLD and South Australia exhibit about $100 MWh afternoon ramp move low to high but the duration of the low price and the high price is small suggesting it wouldn’t take much to arbitrage out both the low and the high.
SOURCE
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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here.
Preserving the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here
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IN BRIEF
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Calibrated in whole degrees. Larger graph here. It shows that we actually live in an era of remarkable temperature stability.
Climate scientist Lennart Bengtsson said. “The warming we have had the last 100 years is so small that if we didn’t have meteorologists and climatologists to measure it we wouldn’t have noticed it at all.”
Context for the minute average temperature change recorded: At any given time surface air temperatures around the world range over about 100°C. Even in the same place they can vary by nearly that much seasonally and as much as 30°C or more in a day. A minute rise in average temperature in that context is trivial if it is not meaningless altogether. Scientists are Warmists for the money it brings in, not because of the facts
This site is in favour of things that ARE good for the environment. That the usual Greenie causes are good for the environment is however disputed. Greenie policies can in fact be actively bad for the environment -- as with biofuels, for instance
This Blog by John Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.), writing from Brisbane, Australia.
I am the most complete atheist you can imagine. I don't believe in Karl Marx, Jesus Christ or global warming. And I also don't believe in the unhealthiness of salt, sugar and fat. How skeptical can you get? If sugar is bad we are all dead
And when it comes to "climate change", I know where the skeletons are buried
There are no forbidden questions in science, no matters too sensitive or delicate to be challenged, no sacred truths.
"Thinking" molecules?? Terrestrial temperatures have gone up by less than one degree over the last 150 years and CO2 has gone up long term too. But that proves nothing. It is not a proven causal relationship. One of the first things you learn in statistics is that correlation is not causation. And there is none of the smooth relationship that you would expect of a causal relationship. Both temperatures and CO2 went up in fits and starts but they were not the same fits and starts. The precise effects on temperature that CO2 levels are supposed to produce were not produced. CO2 molecules don't have a little brain in them that says "I will stop reflecting heat down for a few years and then start up again". Their action (if any) is entirely passive. Theoretically, the effect of added CO2 in the atmosphere should be instant. It allegedly works by bouncing electromagnetic radiation around and electromagnetic radiation moves at the speed of light. But there has been no instant effect. Temperature can stay plateaued for many years (e.g. 1945 to 1975) while CO2 levels climb. So there is clearly no causal link between the two. One could argue that there are one or two things -- mainly volcanoes and the Ninos -- that upset the relationship but there are not exceptions ALL the time. Most of the time a precise 1 to 1 connection should be visible. It isn't, far from it. You should be able to read one from the other. You can't.
Antarctica is GAINING mass
Warmists depend heavily on ice cores for their figures about the atmosphere of the past. But measuring the deep past through ice cores is a very shaky enterprise, which almost certainly takes insufficient account of compression effects. The apparently stable CO2 level of 280ppm during the Holocene could in fact be entirely an artifact of compression at the deeper levels of the ice cores. . Perhaps the gas content of an ice layer approaches a low asymptote under pressure. Dr Zbigniew Jaworowski's criticisms of the assumed reliability of ice core measurements are of course well known. And he studied them for over 30 years.
The world's first "Green" party was the Nazi party -- and Greenies are just as Fascist today in their endeavours to dictate to us all and in their attempts to suppress dissent from their claims.
Was Pope Urban VIII the first Warmist? Below we see him refusing to look through Galileo's telescope. People tend to refuse to consider evidence— if what they might discover contradicts what they believe.
Warmism is a powerful religion that aims to control most of our lives. It is nearly as powerful as the Catholic Church once was
Believing in global warming has become a sign of virtue. Strange in a skeptical era. There is clearly a need for faith
Climate change is the religion of people who think they're too smart for religion
Some advice from the Buddha that the Green/Left would do well to think about: "Three things cannot be long hidden: The Sun, The Moon and The Truth"
Leftists have faith that warming will come back some day. And they mock Christians for believing in the second coming of Christ! They obviously need religion
Global warming has in fact been a religious doctrine for over a century. Even Charles Taze Russell, the founder of Jehovah's Witnesses, believed in it
A rosary for the church of global warming (Formerly the Catholic church): "Hail warming, full of grace, blessed art thou among climates and blessed is the fruit of thy womb panic"
Pope Francis is to the Catholic church what Obama is to America -- a mistake, a fool and a wrecker
Global warming is the predominant Leftist lie of the 21st century. No other lie is so influential. The runner up lie is: "Islam is a religion of peace". Both are rankly absurd.
"When it comes to alarmism, we’re all deniers; when it comes to climate change, none of us are" -- Dick Lindzen
The EPA does everything it can get away with to shaft America and Americans
Cromwell's famous plea: "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken" was ignored by those to whom it was addressed -- to their great woe. Warmists too will not consider that they may be wrong ..... "Bowels" was a metaphor for compassion in those days
The plight of the bumblebee -- an egregious example of crooked "science"
Inorganic Origin of Petroleum: "The theory of Inorganic Origin of Petroleum (synonyms: abiogenic, abiotic, abyssal, endogenous, juvenile, mineral, primordial) states that petroleum and natural gas was formed by non-biological processes deep in the Earth, crust and mantle. This contradicts the traditional view that the oil would be a "fossil fuel" produced by remnants of ancient organisms. Oil is a hydrocarbon mixture in which a major constituent is methane CH4 (a molecule composed of one carbon atom bonded to four hydrogen atoms). Occurrence of methane is common in Earth's interior and in space. The inorganic theory contrasts with the ideas that posit exhaustion of oil (Peak Oil), which assumes that the oil would be formed from biological processes and thus would occur only in small quantities and sets, tending to exhaust. Some oil drilling now goes 7 miles down, miles below any fossil layers
As the Italian chemist Primo Levi reflected in Auschwitz, carbon is ‘the only element that can bind itself in long stable chains without a great expense of energy, and for life on Earth (the only one we know so far) precisely long chains are required. Therefore carbon is the key element of living substance.’ The chemistry of carbon (2) gives it a unique versatility, not just in the artificial world, but also, and above all, in the animal, vegetable and – speak it loud! – human kingdoms.
David Archibald: "The more carbon dioxide we can put into the atmosphere, the better life on Earth will be for human beings and all other living things."
Fossil fuels are 100% organic, are made with solar energy, and when burned produce mostly CO2 and H2O, the 2 most important foods for life.
Warmists claim that the "hiatus" in global warming that began around 1998 was caused by the oceans suddenly gobbling up all the heat coming from above. Changes in the heat content of the oceans are barely measurable but the ARGO bathythermographs seem to show the oceans warming not from above but from below
WISDOM:
“I would rather have questions that can’t be answered, than answers that can’t be questioned.” — Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman, Physicist
“It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong.” — Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman
"Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts" – Richard Feynman
UNRELIABLE SCIENCE:
(1). “The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness… “The apparent endemicity of bad research behaviour is alarming. In their quest for telling a compelling story, scientists too often sculpt data to fit their preferred theory of the world. Or they retrofit hypotheses to fit their data. Journal editors deserve their fair share of criticism too. We aid and abet the worst behaviours. Our acquiescence to the impact factor fuels an unhealthy competition to win a place in a select few journals. Our love of ‘significance’ pollutes the literature with many a statistical fairy-tale…Journals are not the only miscreants. Universities are in a perpetual struggle for money and talent…” (Dr. Richard Horton, editor-in-chief, The Lancet, in The Lancet, 11 April, 2015, Vol 385, “Offline: What is medicine’s 5 sigma?”)
(2). “It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine.” (Dr. Marcia Angell, NY Review of Books, January 15, 2009, “Drug Companies & Doctors: A Story of Corruption)
Consensus: As Ralph Waldo Emerson said: 'A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.'
Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough - Michael Crichton
Bertrand Russell knew about consensus: "The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible.”
"The growth of knowledge depends entirely on disagreement" -- Karl Popper
"I always think it's a sign of victory when they move on to the ad hominem -- Christopher Hitchens
"The desire to save humanity is always a false front for the urge to rule it" -- H L Mencken
'Nothing is more terrible than ignorance in action' -- Goethe
“Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.” -- Voltaire
Lord Salisbury: "No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome; if you believe theologians, nothing is innocent; if you believe soldiers, nothing is safe."
Calvin Coolidge said, "If you see 10 troubles coming down the road, you can be sure that nine will run into the ditch before they reach you." He could have been talking about Warmists.
Some advice from long ago for Warmists: "If ifs and ans were pots and pans,there'd be no room for tinkers". It's a nursery rhyme harking back to Middle English times when "an" could mean "if". Tinkers were semi-skilled itinerant workers who fixed holes and handles in pots and pans -- which were valuable household items for most of our history. Warmists are very big on "ifs", mays", "might" etc. But all sorts of things "may" happen, including global cooling
There goes another beautiful theory about to be murdered by a brutal gang of facts. - Duc de La Rochefoucauld, French writer and moralist (1613-1680)
"Pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate" -- William of Occam
Was Paracelsus a 16th century libertarian? His motto was: "Alterius non sit qui suus esse potest" which means "Let no man belong to another who can belong to himself." He was certainly a rebel in his rejection of authority and his reliance on observable facts and is as such one of the founders of modern medicine
"In science, refuting an accepted belief is celebrated as an advance in knowledge; in religion it is condemned as heresy". (Bob Parks, Physics, U of Maryland). No prizes for guessing how global warming skepticism is normally responded to.
"Almost all professors of the arts and sciences are egregiously conceited, and derive their happiness from their conceit" -- Erasmus
"The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, scepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin." -- Thomas H. Huxley
Time was, people warning the world "Repent - the end is nigh!" were snickered at as fruitcakes. Now they own the media and run the schools.
"One of the sources of the Fascist movement is the desire to avoid a too-rational and too-comfortable world" -- George Orwell, 1943 in Can Socialists Be Happy?
The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts -- Bertrand Russell
“Affordable energy in ample quantities is the lifeblood of the industrial societies and a prerequisite for the economic development of the others.” -- John P. Holdren, Science Adviser to President Obama. Published in Science 9 February 2001
The closer science looks at the real world processes involved in climate regulation the more absurd the IPCC's computer driven fairy tale appears. Instead of blithely modeling climate based on hunches and suppositions, climate scientists would be better off abandoning their ivory towers and actually measuring what happens in the real world.' -- Doug L Hoffman
Something no Warmist could take on board: "Knuth once warned a correspondent, "Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it." -- Prof. Donald Knuth, whom some regard as the world's smartest man
"To be green is to be irrational, misanthropic and morally defective. They are the barbarians at the gate we have to stand against" -- Rich Kozlovich
“We’ve got to ride this global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic and environmental policy.“ – Timothy Wirth, President of the UN Foundation
“Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?” – Maurice Strong, founder of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP)
Leftists generally and Warmists in particular very commonly ascribe disagreement with their ideas to their opponent being "in the pay" of someone else, usually "Big Oil", without troubling themselves to provide any proof of that assertion. They are so certain that they are right that that seems to be the only reasonable explanation for opposition to them. They thus reveal themselves as the ultimate bigots -- people with fixed and rigid ideas.
ABOUT:
This is one of TWO skeptical blogs that I update daily. During my research career as a social scientist, I was appalled at how much writing in my field was scientifically lacking -- and I often said so in detail in the many academic journal articles I had published in that field. I eventually gave up social science research, however, because no data ever seemed to change the views of its practitioners. I hoped that such obtuseness was confined to the social scientists but now that I have shifted my attention to health related science and climate related science, I find the same impermeability to facts and logic. Hence this blog and my FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC blog. I may add that I did not come to either health or environmental research entirely without credentials. I had several academic papers published in both fields during my social science research career
Update: After 8 years of confronting the frankly childish standard of reasoning that pervades the medical journals, I have given up. I have put the blog into hibernation. In extreme cases I may put up here some of the more egregious examples of medical "wisdom" that I encounter. Greenies and food freaks seem to be largely coterminous. My regular bacon & egg breakfasts would certainly offend both -- if only because of the resultant methane output
Since my academic background is in the social sciences, it is reasonable to ask what a social scientist is doing talking about global warming. My view is that my expertise is the most relevant of all. It seems clear to me from what you will see on this blog that belief in global warming is very poorly explained by history, chemistry, physics or statistics.
Warmism is prophecy, not science. Science cannot foretell the future. Science can make very accurate predictions based on known regularities in nature (e.g. predicting the orbits of the inner planets) but Warmism is the exact opposite of that. It predicts a DEPARTURE from the known regularities of nature. If we go by the regularities of nature, we are on the brink of an ice age.
And from a philosophy of science viewpoint, far from being "the science", Warmism is not even an attempt at a factual statement, let alone being science. It is not a meaningful statement about the world. Why? Because it is unfalsifiable -- making it a religious, not a scientific statement. To be a scientific statement, there would have to be some conceivable event that disproved it -- but there appears to be none. ANY event is hailed by Warmists as proving their contentions. Only if Warmists were able to specify some fact or event that would disprove their theory would it have any claim to being a scientific statement. So the explanation for Warmist beliefs has to be primarily a psychological and political one -- which makes it my field
And, after all, Al Gore's academic qualifications are in social science also -- albeit very pissant qualifications.
A "geriatric" revolt: The scientists who reject Warmism tend to be OLD! Your present blogger is one of those. There are tremendous pressures to conformity in academe and the generally Leftist orientation of academe tends to pressure everyone within it to agree to ideas that suit the Left. And Warmism is certainly one of those ideas. So old guys are the only ones who can AFFORD to declare the Warmists to be unclothed. They either have their careers well-established (with tenure) or have reached financial independence (retirement) and so can afford to call it like they see it. In general, seniors in society today are not remotely as helpful to younger people as they once were. But their opposition to the Warmist hysteria will one day show that seniors are not completely irrelevant after all. Experience does count (we have seen many such hysterias in the past and we have a broader base of knowledge to call on) and our independence is certainly an enormous strength. Some of us are already dead. (Reid Bryson and John Daly are particularly mourned) and some of us are very senior indeed (e.g. Bill Gray and Vince Gray) but the revolt we have fostered is ever growing so we have not labored in vain.
A Warmist backs down: "No one knows exactly how far rising carbon concentrations affect temperatures" -- Stefan Rahmstorf, a scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.
Jimmy Carter Classic Quote from 1977: "Because we are now running out of gas and oil, we must prepare quickly for a third change, to strict conservation and to the use of coal and permanent renewable energy sources, like solar power.
SOME POINTS TO PONDER:
Today’s environmental movement is the current manifestation of the totalitarian impulse. It is ironic that the same people who condemn the black or brown shirts of the pre WW2 period are blind to the current manifestation simply because the shirts are green.
Climate is just the sum of weather. So if you cannot forecast the weather a month in advance, you will not be able to forecast the climate 50 years in advance. And official meteorologists such as Britain's Met Office and Australia's BOM, are very poor forecasters of weather. The Met office has in fact given up on making seasonal forecasts because they have so often got such forecasts embarrassingly wrong. Their global-warming-powered "models" just did not deliver
The frequency of hurricanes has markedly DECLINED in recent years
Here's how that "97% consensus" figure was arrived at
97% of scientists want to get another research grant
Another 97%: Following the death of an older brother in a car crash in 1994, Bashar Al Assad became heir apparent; and after his father died in June 2000, he took office as President of Syria with a startling 97 per cent of the vote.
Hearing a Government Funded Scientist say let me tell you the truth, is like hearing a Used Car Salesman saying let me tell you the truth.
A strange Green/Left conceit: They seem to think (e.g. here) that no-one should spend money opposing them and that conservative donors must not support the election campaigns of Congressmen they agree with
David Brower, founder Sierra Club: “Childbearing should be a punishable crime against society, unless the parents hold a government license"
To Greenies, Genghis Khan was a good guy, believe it or not. They love that he killed so many people.
Greenie antisemitism
After three exceptionally cold winters in the Northern hemisphere, the Warmists are chanting: "Warming causes cold". Even if we give that a pass for logic, it still inspires the question: "Well, what are we worried about"? Cold is not going to melt the icecaps is it?"
It's a central (but unproven) assumption of the Warmist "models" that clouds cause warming. Odd that it seems to cool the temperature down when clouds appear overhead!
To make out that the essentially trivial warming of the last 150 years poses some sort of threat, Warmists postulate positive feedbacks that might cut in to make the warming accelerate in the near future. Amid their theories about feedbacks, however, they ignore the one feedback that is no theory: The reaction of plants to CO2. Plants gobble up CO2 and the more CO2 there is the more plants will flourish and hence gobble up yet more CO2. And the increasing crop yields of recent years show that plantlife is already flourishing more. The recent rise in CO2 will therefore soon be gobbled up and will no longer be around to bother anyone. Plants provide a huge NEGATIVE feedback in response to increases in atmospheric CO2
Every green plant around us is made out of carbon dioxide that the plant has grabbed out of the atmosphere. That the plant can get its carbon from such a trace gas is one of the miracles of life. It admittedly uses the huge power of the sun to accomplish such a vast filtrative task but the fact that a dumb plant can harness the power of the sun so effectively is also a wonder. We live on a rather improbable planet. If a science fiction writer elsewhere in the universe described a world like ours he might well be ridiculed for making up such an implausible tale.
Greenies are the sand in the gears of modern civilization -- and they intend to be.
The Greenie message is entirely emotional and devoid of all logic. They say that polar ice will melt and cause a big sea-level rise. Yet 91% of the world's glacial ice is in Antarctica, where the average temperature is around minus 40 degrees Celsius. The melting point of ice is zero degrees. So for the ice to melt on any scale the Antarctic temperature would need to rise by around 40 degrees, which NOBODY is predicting. The median Greenie prediction is about 4 degrees. So where is the huge sea level rise going to come from? Mars? And the North polar area is mostly sea ice and melting sea ice does not raise the sea level at all. Yet Warmists constantly hail any sign of Arctic melting. That the melting of floating ice does not raise the water level is known as Archimedes' principle. Archimedes demonstrated it around 2,500 years ago. That Warmists have not yet caught up with that must be just about the most inspissated ignorance imaginable. The whole Warmist scare defies the most basic physics. Yet at the opening of 2011 we find the following unashamed lying by James Hansen: "We will lose all the ice in the polar ice cap in a couple of decades". Sadly, what the Vulgate says in John 1:5 is still only very partially true: "Lux in tenebris lucet". There is still much darkness in the minds of men.
The repeated refusal of Warmist "scientists" to make their raw data available to critics is such a breach of scientific protocol that it amounts to a confession in itself. Note, for instance Phil Jones' Feb 21, 2005 response to Warwick Hughes' request for his raw climate data: "We have 25 years or so invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?" Looking for things that might be wrong with a given conclusion is of course central to science. But Warmism cannot survive such scrutiny. So even after "Climategate", the secrecy goes on.
Most Greenie causes are at best distractions from real environmental concerns (such as land degradation) and are more motivated by a hatred of people than by any care for the environment
Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists
‘Global warming’ has become the grand political narrative of the age, replacing Marxism as a dominant force for controlling liberty and human choices. -- Prof. P. Stott
Comparing climate alarmist Hansen to Cassandra is WRONG. Cassandra's (Greek mythology) dire prophecies were never believed but were always right. Hansen's dire prophecies are usually believed but are always wrong (Prof. Laurence Gould, U of Hartford, CT)
The modern environmental movement arose out of the wreckage of the New Left. They call themselves Green because they're too yellow to admit they're really Reds. So Lenin's birthday was chosen to be the date of Earth Day. Even a moderate politician like Al Gore has been clear as to what is needed. In "Earth in the Balance", he wrote that saving the planet would require a "wrenching transformation of society".
For centuries there was a scientific consensus which said that fire was explained by the release of an invisible element called phlogiston. That theory is universally ridiculed today. Global warming is the new phlogiston. Though, now that we know how deliberate the hoax has been, it might be more accurate to call global warming the New Piltdown Man. The Piltdown hoax took 40 years to unwind. I wonder....
Motives: Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is generally to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.
Policies: The only underlying theme that makes sense of all Greenie policies is hatred of people. Hatred of other people has been a Greenie theme from way back. In a report titled "The First Global Revolution" (1991, p. 104) published by the "Club of Rome", a Greenie panic outfit, we find the following statement: "In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill.... All these dangers are caused by human intervention... The real enemy, then, is humanity itself." See here for many more examples of prominent Greenies saying how much and how furiously they hate you.
After fighting a 70 year war to destroy red communism we face another life-or-death struggle in the 21st century against green communism.
The conventional wisdom of the day is often spectacularly wrong. The most popular and successful opera of all time is undoubtedly "Carmen" by Georges Bizet. Yet it was much criticized when first performed and the unfortunate Bizet died believing that it was a flop. Similarly, when the most iconic piece of 20th century music was first performed in 1913-- Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" -- half the audience walked out. Those of us who defy the conventional wisdom about climate are actually better off than that. Unlike Bizet and Stravinsky in 1913, we KNOW that we will eventually be vindicated -- because all that supports Warmism is a crumbling edifice of guesswork ("models").
Al Gore won a political prize for an alleged work of science. That rather speaks for itself, doesn't it?
Jim Hansen and his twin
Getting rich and famous through alarmism: Al Gore is well-known but note also James Hansen. He has for decades been a senior, presumably well-paid, employee at NASA. In 2001 he was the recipient of a $250,000 Heinz Award. In 2007 Time magazine designated him a Hero of the Environment. That same year he pocketed one-third of a $1 million Dan David Prize. In 2008, the American Association for the Advancement of Science presented him with its Scientific Freedom and Responsibility Award. In 2010 he landed a $100,000 Sophie Prize. He pulled in a total of $1.2 million in 2010. Not bad for a government bureaucrat.
See the original global Warmist in action here: "The icecaps are melting and all world is drowning to wash away the sin"
I am not a global warming skeptic nor am I a global warming denier. I am a global warming atheist. I don't believe one bit of it. That the earth's climate changes is undeniable. Only ignoramuses believe that climate stability is normal. But I see NO evidence to say that mankind has had anything to do with any of the changes observed -- and much evidence against that claim.
Seeing that we are all made of carbon, the time will come when people will look back on the carbon phobia of the early 21st century as too incredible to be believed
Meanwhile, however, let me venture a tentative prophecy. Prophecies are almost always wrong but here goes: Given the common hatred of carbon (Warmists) and salt (Food freaks) and given the fact that we are all made of carbon, salt, water and calcium (with a few additives), I am going to prophecy that at some time in the future a hatred of nitrogen will emerge. Why? Because most of the air that we breathe is nitrogen. We live at the bottom of a nitrogen sea. Logical to hate nitrogen? NO. But probable: Maybe. The Green/Left is mad enough. After all, nitrogen is a CHEMICAL -- and we can't have that!
UPDATE to the above: It seems that I am a true prophet
The intellectual Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius (AD 121-180) must have foreseen Global Warmism. He said: "The object in life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane."
The Holy Grail for most scientists is not truth but research grants. And the global warming scare has produced a huge downpour of money for research. Any mystery why so many scientists claim some belief in global warming?
For many people, global warming seems to have taken the place of "The Jews" -- a convenient but false explanation for any disliked event. Prof. Brignell has some examples.
Global warming skeptics are real party-poopers. It's so wonderful to believe that you have a mission to save the world.
There is an "ascetic instinct" (or perhaps a "survivalist instinct") in many people that causes them to delight in going without material comforts. Monasteries and nunneries were once full of such people -- with the Byzantine stylites perhaps the most striking example. Many Greenies (other than Al Gore and his Hollywood pals) have that instinct too but in the absence of strong orthodox religious committments they have to convince themselves that the world NEEDS them to live in an ascetic way. So their personal emotional needs lead them to press on us all a delusional belief that the planet needs "saving".
The claim that oil is a fossil fuel is another great myth and folly of the age. They are now finding oil at around seven MILES beneath the sea bed -- which is incomparably further down than any known fossil. The abiotic oil theory is not as yet well enough developed to generate useful predictions but that is also true of fossil fuel theory
Help keep the planet Green! Maximize your CO2 and CH4 output!
Global Warming=More Life; Global Cooling=More Death.
The inconvenient truth about biological effects of "Ocean Acidification"
Medieval Warm Period: Recent climatological data assembled from around the world using different proxies attest to the presence of both the MWP and the LIA in the following locations: the Sargasso Sea, West Africa, Kenya, Peru, Japan, Tasmania, South Africa, Idaho, Argentina, and California. These events were clearly world-wide and in most locations the peak temperatures during the MWP were higher than current temperatures.
Both radioactive and stable carbon isotopes show that the real atmospheric CO2 residence time (lifetime) is only about 5 years, and that the amount of fossil-fuel CO2 in the atmosphere is maximum 4%.
Cook the crook who cooks the booksThe great and fraudulent scare about lead
How 'GREEN' is the FOOTPRINT of a WIND TURBINE? 45 tons of rebar and 630 cubic yards of concrete
Green/Left denial of the facts explained: "Rejection lies in this, that when the light came into the world men preferred darkness to light; preferred it, because their doings were evil. Anyone who acts shamefully hates the light, will not come into the light, for fear that his doings will be found out. Whereas the man whose life is true comes to the light" John 3:19-21 (Knox)
Against the long history of huge temperature variation in the earth's climate (ice ages etc.), the .6 of one degree average rise reported by the U.N. "experts" for the entire 20th century (a rise so small that you would not be able to detect such a difference personally without instruments) shows, if anything, that the 20th century was a time of exceptional temperature stability.
Recent NASA figures tell us that there was NO warming trend in the USA during the 20th century. If global warming is occurring, how come it forgot the USA?
Warmists say that the revised NASA figures do not matter because they cover only the USA -- and the rest of the world is warming nicely. But it is not. There has NEVER been any evidence that the Southern hemisphere is warming. See here. So the warming pattern sure is looking moth-eaten.
The latest scare is the possible effect of extra CO2 on the world’s oceans, because more CO2 lowers the pH of seawater. While it is claimed that this makes the water more acidic, this is misleading. Since seawater has a pH around 8.1, it will take an awful lot of CO2 it to even make the water neutral (pH=7), let alone acidic (pH less than 7).
In fact, ocean acidification is a scientific impossibility. Henry's Law mandates that warming oceans will outgas CO2 to the atmosphere (as the UN's own documents predict it will), making the oceans less acid. Also, more CO2 would increase calcification rates. No comprehensive, reliable measurement of worldwide oceanic acid/base balance has ever been carried out: therefore, there is no observational basis for the computer models' guess that acidification of 0.1 pH units has occurred in recent decades.
The chaos theory people have told us for years that the air movement from a single butterfly's wing in Brazil can cause an unforeseen change in our weather here. Now we are told that climate experts can "model" the input of zillions of such incalculable variables over periods of decades to accurately forecast global warming 50 years hence. Give us all a break!
If you doubt the arrogance [of the global warming crowd, you haven't seen that Newsweek cover story that declared the global warming debate over. Consider: If Newton's laws of motion could, after 200 years of unfailing experimental and experiential confirmation, be overthrown, it requires religious fervor to believe that global warming -- infinitely more untested, complex and speculative -- is a closed issue
Scientists have politics too -- sometimes extreme politics. Read this: "This crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism... I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals. In such an economy, the means of production are owned by society itself and are utilized in a planned fashion. A planned economy, which adjusts production to the needs of the community, would distribute the work to be done among all those able to work and would guarantee a livelihood to every man, woman, and child." -- Albert Einstein
The "precautionary principle" is a favourite Greenie idea -- but isn't that what George Bush was doing when he invaded Iraq? Wasn't that a precaution against Saddam getting or having any WMDs? So Greenies all agree with the Iraq intervention? If not, why not?
A classic example of how the sensationalist media distort science to create climate panic is here.
There is a very readable summary of the "Hockey Stick" fraud here
The Lockwood & Froehlich paper was designed to rebut Durkin's "Great Global Warming Swindle" film. It is a rather confused paper -- acknowledging yet failing to account fully for the damping effect of the oceans, for instance -- but it is nonetheless valuable to climate atheists. The concession from a Greenie source that fluctuations in the output of the sun have driven climate change for all but the last 20 years (See the first sentence of the paper) really is invaluable. And the basic fact presented in the paper -- that solar output has in general been on the downturn in recent years -- is also amusing to see. Surely even a crazed Greenie mind must see that the sun's influence has not stopped and that reduced solar output will soon start COOLING the earth! Unprecedented July 2007 cold weather throughout the Southern hemisphere might even have been the first sign that the cooling is happening. And the fact that warming plateaued in 1998 is also a good sign that we are moving into a cooling phase. As is so often the case, the Greenies have got the danger exactly backwards. See my post of 7.14.07 and very detailed critiques here and here and here for more on the Lockwood paper and its weaknesses.
As the Greenies are now learning, even strong statistical correlations may disappear if a longer time series is used. A remarkable example from Sociology: "The modern literature on hate crimes began with a remarkable 1933 book by Arthur Raper titled The Tragedy of Lynching. Raper assembled data on the number of lynchings each year in the South and on the price of an acre’s yield of cotton. He calculated the correlation coefficient between the two series at –0.532. In other words, when the economy was doing well, the number of lynchings was lower.... In 2001, Donald Green, Laurence McFalls, and Jennifer Smith published a paper that demolished the alleged connection between economic conditions and lynchings in Raper’s data. Raper had the misfortune of stopping his analysis in 1929. After the Great Depression hit, the price of cotton plummeted and economic conditions deteriorated, yet lynchings continued to fall. The correlation disappeared altogether when more years of data were added." So we must be sure to base our conclusions on ALL the data. In the Greenie case, the correlation between CO2 rise and global temperature rise stopped in 1998 -- but that could have been foreseen if measurements taken in the first half of the 20th century had been considered.
Relying on the popular wisdom can even hurt you personally: "The scientific consensus of a quarter-century ago turned into the arthritic nightmare of today."
Greenie-approved sources of electricity (windmills and solar cells) require heavy government subsidies to be competitive with normal electricity generators so a Dutch word for Greenie power seems graphic to me: "subsidieslurpers" (subsidy gobblers)
Many newspaper articles are reproduced in full on this blog despite copyright claims attached to them. I believe that such reproductions here are protected by the "fair use" provisions of copyright law. Fair use is a legal doctrine that recognises that the monopoly rights protected by copyright laws are not absolute. The doctrine holds that, when someone uses a creative work in way that does not hurt the market for the original work and advances a public purpose - such as education or scholarship - it might be considered "fair" and not infringing.
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