GREENIE WATCH MIRROR The CRU graph. Note that it is calibrated in tenths of a degree Celsius and that even that tiny amount of warming started long before the late 20th century. The horizontal line is totally arbitrary, just a visual trick. The whole graph would be a horizontal line if it were calibrated in whole degrees -- thus showing ZERO warming

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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28 February, 2020  

Bikes are bad for economic growth

The article below is yet another instance of the wrong conclusions that non-economists routinely come to when they talk about economics.  Politicians routinely propose destructive policies (such as rent control and prohibitions on foreign ownership of land) that seem obviously right to them but are in fact counter-productive.

It's hubris.  What seems obvious can still be wrong and economically destructive.  What the galoot below has obviously never heard of is Jevons paradox.  Jevons formulated it in 1865 so there is no excuse for being unaware of it if you want to pontificate on economic questions.

The basic point of the paradox is that reductions in consumption of a particular thing will lead not to an overall reduction in consumption but to a switch to consumption of other things.  If somebody saves money on something, he might just put that money in the bank but he is much more likely to spend it on something else that he had always wanted.

So if we all saved money by switching from cars to bicycles we would spend the saved money on something else -- better accommodation, for instance. 

The idea of a demand deficit was a product of the shallow thinking of John Maynard Keynes but he was another theoretician who knew little about the details of how the world works.  His ideas were politically convenient but usually resulted in inflation whenever resorted to


Simon Kuper

Like many other Europeans, I’ve begun commuting by bike in the past few months, too recently even to show up in official stats.

I bought an excellent new bike, two locks and a helmet for about €300 total. That’s about 1 per cent of the average price of a new car in Europe, and I’ll never need petrol.

Bicycle repairs rarely cost much, and if my bike isn’t stolen, nobody will earn another cent out of my urban transport for another decade or so. That’s wonderful — but the difficulty of making money out of cycling could hamper its growth.

Bikes are green, clean, healthy and take up less space than cars, but without a big industry behind them, they may be too cheap to thrive.

And if cycling does manage to grow, it will (certainly initially) decimate jobs and reduce gross domestic product. In short, the story of the bicycle is the myth of “green growth” in one device.

Europe’s dense cities were built for horses, so they proved perfectly adapted for bikes. In 1949, cycling accounted for more than 14bn vehicle miles travelled in the UK. But in the next 25 years, as driving spread, that figure shrank by about four-fifths.

Now, though, the automobile era is waning in Europe, and not only in cities. New ebikes — which can go up to 25kph — will make cycling practical for most suburbanites too.

Kevin Mayne of Cycling Industries Europe says: “Historically, we talked about cycling as a 5km solution. Now we’re talking about it as a 15km solution. That is transformational.”

For all the hype around electric cars, so far the more significant innovation is the ebike. About 3.3 million pedal-assisted ebikes were sold in the EU last year, or nearly six times the number of plug-in electric car sales, estimates the Confederation of the European Bicycle Industry (Conebi). And ebikes managed this without company-car subsidies and other tax breaks that prop up carmakers.

In many European cities, bikes are now popping up everywhere the way cars did a century ago, albeit from a similarly tiny base. Walk (or cycle) around London, Paris or Barcelona and you’ll see bike lanes in places where you’d never imagined them before.

Next month, there’ll be more. Lisbon just announced it is banning most cars from the city centre. In Seville, cycling has increased elevenfold in recent years, says Manuel Marsilio of Conebi. Biking keeps getting safer: Oslo (which aims to be carbon neutral by 2030) and Helsinki each recorded zero cyclist deaths last year.

Europe’s mighty car lobby isn’t trying to undermine urban cycling, say Mayne and Marsilio. It is too busy fighting bigger battles, notably surrounding the European Commission’s demand for more electric vehicles. The fiercest opponents of bikes in cities are motorists and small-business owners battling for their parking spaces.

But the car lobby will always outpunch the bike lobby, mostly because cars cost more. Germany’s cycling industry in 2018 had revenues of a bit more than €6bn; the country’s car industry was 70 times bigger. (The figures for both sectors include makers of components.) Even a decent ebike costs only about €1,500, just 5 per cent of the price of a car.

“The problem with a bike is that it’s just too good,” says Ross Douglas, founder of the Parisian urban mobility summit Autonomy. “The technology does not change much, and they last for ever. The car was amazing at creating jobs, as you use about two tonnes of mass and a motor of up to 350hp to move an 80kg occupant.”

Ominously for cycling and other green modes of transport, activities that can be monetised tend to get encouraged. There’s a cigarette industry and a gambling industry, but there isn’t a walking industry.

There’s also scarcely an escooter industry. Partly as a consequence, cities aren’t now building scooter lanes, leaving scooters to annoy pedestrians on pavements.

Carmakers employ millions of mostly blue-collar men, so governments care about them. In the UK, the fate of Nissan’s plant in Sunderland has become a central plot line of Brexit.

Conversely, the absence of serious Dutch and Danish car industries freed Amsterdam and Copenhagen to adopt mass cycling early, says Douglas.

The other danger of the rise of cycling: it may exacerbate the urban-rural divide that is already the bane of our politics.

While bikes proliferate in cities and inner suburbs, they’re fading from the countryside, even in Denmark, notes Mayne, as older people move to villages and bring their cars with them.

In other words, the town mouse and the country mouse are each acquiring their own mode of transport. That could leave carmakers with a rural, ageing and generally poorer customer base.

In the short term at least, we probably won’t see “green growth”. Instead, if we shift from cars to bikes, and buy less stuff, and carry around reusable shopping bags, going green will mean less growth.

SOURCE 






"Water towers" are crucial to 1.9 billion people but are at risk

Groan! Another instance of the Green/Left ignoring basic physics.  Global warming would deliver MORE rain and snow so the danger would be floods, not water shortage

Global warming is putting supplies of fresh water to almost a quarter of the world’s population in grave danger.

Around 1.9 billion people on four continents depend on fresh water that originates in the planet’s “water towers” - the mountains where snow and ice melt after winter becomes a steady supply of water to communities downstream.

High mountains contain about half of all the fresh water humans use.

These water towers - in the Himalayas, the Alps, the Rockies and the Andes - act like giant storage tanks with valves.

It works like this: Snow falls, filling the tank, then that ice and snow melts out slowly over days, weeks, months, or years, running into streams then rivers that supply water to millions - for day to day use, irrigation, power generation, and storage for times of drought.

Now, research published in Nature identifies the most important and vulnerable water towers in the world, and ranks their vulnerability to disruption, chiefly from global warming and political upheaval.

The scientists identified 78 water towers, with the Indus basin - fed by the Himalayan, Karakoram, Hindu-Kush, and Ladakh mountain ranges - identified as the most important storage unit on the planet, and its most vulnerable.

The number of people directly dependent on the water it supplies is set to substantially increase from approximately 235 million by 2050. At the same time, regional temperatures are projected to rise by 1.9 degrees, dramatically increasing instability in weather patterns and increasing the risk of drought.

High mountains are warming faster than the world’s average, with temperatures in the high Himalaya having increased 1.5 degrees from pre-industrial levels, similar to increases seen in the Arctic and Antarctic Peninsula.

Last year was the second warmest in recorded history. Fears are things will become even hotter.

And that spells danger for fragile ecosystems, and usually-reliable water supplies.

Disrupted rainfall in water tower areas, coupled with increased glacier melt, creates myriad risks.

The researchers noted that worldwide, the vast majority of glaciers are losing mass, snow melt dynamics are being altered, and rainfall and snow patterns are shifting, all leading to future changes in the timing and magnitude of mountain water availability.

But it’s not only water supply changes that are a hazard. Climate change also increases the risk of natural disasters such as avalanches and floods.

But the changes in climate and water supply could have a knock-on effect on geopolitical issues in many vulnerable water tower regions.

Increasing demand for diminishing water supplies is just one.

“If, basically, the demand is higher but the supply decreases, then we really have a problem,” said research team-member Dr Tobias Bolch from the University of St Andrews, UK.

“And this is, I think, one of the major strengths of our study - that we have looked closely at both sides, so the supply index and the demand index.” he told the BBC.

In many of the water tower regions, different governments - sometimes hostile to each other - control different parts of the catchment and downstream areas.

The researchers cited the Indus basin as the most important, and most vulnerable, water tower area.

Four nations - Pakistan, India, China and Afghanistan - share the area. The population of approximately 235 million people is projected to increase by 50 per cent by 2050. Annual GDP is projected to increase. The area is getting warmer. Rainfall less certain.

With a growing population, demand for water will increase dramatically.

The researchers then give a stark warning: “Combined with increased climate change pressure on the Indus headwaters, an already high baseline water stress and limited government effectiveness, it is uncertain whether the basin can fulfil its water tower role within its environmental boundaries. It is unlikely that the Indus WTU can sustain this pressure.”

SOURCE 






Lights Go Out at Massively Taxpayer-Subsidized Solar Power Tower

Solar thermal sounds a great idea and many plants have been built over the years.  They have all had big problems, however.  Basically, working with very high temperatures is difficult.  Amusingly, some of them CONSUME fossil fuels rather than replacing them

Tonopah, Nevada, is home to one of the most ambitious alternative energy projects ever subsidized by the U.S. government. Due to its unique clean-energy technology, the Crescent Dunes Solar Energy Project was designed to produce up to 1 megawatt of electricity generate power even when the sun isn’t shining.

The solar plant had 10,347 mirrored panels, called heliostats, each about 1,245 square feet in size (or about 35 feet square), spread over a two-mile-wide circular area in the Nevada desert. Each panel was aimed at the top of a 640-feet tall tower, where reflected light and heat from the sun would be concentrated to generate temperatures high enough to melt 70 million pounds of salt. The molten salt would then then be circulated in the tower to produce steam, which was supposed to generate up to 110 megawatts of electricity at full capacity, enough to furnish power to 75,000 homes during peak periods.

Unfortunately, the plant never came anywhere close to that level of power output during its years of operation, from November 2015 to April 2019, before it was shut down following the catastrophic failure of its molten salt containment technology. It was expected to generate an average of more than 40,000 megawatt-hours of energy each month, but never achieved that level of power output during its operating life.

Worse, because the Crescent Dunes Solar Energy Project benefited from $737 million in loan guarantees provided by the Department of Energy, it represents one of the largest failures of a government energy program, surpassing even the Solyndra fiasco. The project’s powerful political backers, it’s worth noting, managed to secure approval for the power plant just one week before the Obama administration’s green energy federal loan program expired in September 2011.

The Crescent Dunes Solar Energy Project was also an environmental menace. During its operation, the mirrors generated enough heat to cause birds attracted to the glow of the power generating tower to burst into flames while in flight.

While it operated, the plant was phenomenally expensive. According to the non-profit Institute for Energy Research, the cost to generate power at the facility exceeded $132 per megawatt-hour, nearly four times the cost of electricity from an average fossil fuel power plant.

No wonder then that NV Energy, the primary utility customer for power generated by the plant, threw in the towel in October 2019 and terminated its contract with the project because it had “failed to produce the requisite energy levels required.”

Bloomberg Businessweek describes the current state of the project, which is now mired in litigation:

Almost no one associated with Crescent Dunes will talk about it anymore. That includes the once-friendly politicians and regulators, the financiers, and the executives who’ve been in place during its failure. (SolarReserve didn’t respond to repeated requests for comment for this story, and a lawyer representing the company said he wasn’t authorized to comment.)

One exception is Bill Gould, a SolarReserve co-founder who retired as its chief technology officer last year. He blames the contractor. “It was a tragedy of mismanagement,” he says. Spanish company ACS Cobra, he says, delayed necessary work on Crescent Dunes and designed a salt tank that leaked, crippling the plant. SolarReserve similarly blamed ACS Cobra in its Delaware suit but doesn’t appear to have filed any legal claims against the contractor. Grupo Cobra, ACS Cobra’s parent company, didn’t respond to requests for comment....

A buyer might try to bring Crescent Dunes back on line, or its owner could sell it for parts. For now, the plant is mostly a punchline in a part of Nevada that’s seen its share of booms and busts. The nearest town, Tonopah, was the site of a silver rush in the early 1900s. It’s now home to 2,400 people, a motley collection of saloons and casinos, a mining museum, and the Clown Motel, which calls itself “America’s scariest motel” because it’s close to a cemetery and filled with creepy red-nosed tchotchkes.

The solar plant’s workers don’t boost business like they used to, says Linda Taylor, the motel’s manager. “It took our money,” she says of the giant mirror matrix up the road. “It’s dead. But real pretty, though. You can see it for miles.”

For their $737 million contribution, shouldn’t U.S. taxpayers have something more than a useless public art display in the middle of the Nevada desert?

SOURCE 





Oregon Republicans blocking cap and trade bill

A day after the Senate Republicans denied quorum over Oregon's cap-and-trade bill and vacated Salem on Tuesday. House Republicans followed suit. In addition, Senate Republican Leader Herman Baertschiger, Jr. (R-Grants Pass) held a conference call to update reporters.

House Minority Leader Christine Drazan (R-Canby) made this statement in announcing that House Republicans would also deny quorum, halting business completely in Salem:

From the first day of this short session it has been clear that Governor Brown and the majority party have not had an interest in respecting the legislative process and have repeatedly refused to compromise. Each and every amendment we offered on Cap and Trade in committee has been rejected. I had remained optimistic up until yesterday that a compromise could be reached. Unfortunately, our attempts to achieve a bipartisan consensus that would take into account the views of all Oregonians were denied. Oregon House Republicans are taking a stand, with working families, in opposing Cap and Trade and this rigged process. We will continue to keep all lines of communication open.I call on Governor Brown and the majority party to refer Cap and Trade to the people.

Later the same day, Baertschiger held a fiery press conference in which he expressed anger at the governor and legislative leadership for what he described as the Democrats playing politics with the lives of flood victims in Eastern Oregon. Legislation is pending to provide state relief after a major flood in Pendleton and Umatilla earlier this year.

I sent President Courtney a letter early on in the session to get all that work done. They decided to play politics. They knew that this cap and trade would come to a head, but yet they did not bring all this legislation forward earlier so that we could get it all passed before we had a meltdown. This is all planned by them. And what really saddens me is the Governor using flood victims for leverage for cap and trade. She right now has discretionary funds that she could fund those people that lost their houses. Yet the Governor of Oregon is playing politics with people that don't have a place to sleep tonight. I think that is disgusting, and that is not being a governor.
Baertschiger also pointed out that Senate President Peter Courtney was forced to manipulate rules just to get the bill out of the Ways and Means Committee, saying,

We secured enough no votes in the Ways and Means committee to kill it there. We thought it would die there. I think it doesn't meet the intent of the senate rules. It's a way of rigging the vote. I think Oregonians are seeing that.
In the press conference, Baertschiger reported that all but one Republican senator has left the state, but they are prepared to return to the capitol to finish the legislative session if Democratic leadership allows the cap-and-trade bill to be referred to a vote of the people on the November ballot. So far, Governor Kate Brown (D-Portland) and Democratic leadership have signaled no desire to allow that to happen.

Of course, Kate Brown led a similar walkout in 2001 over a disagreement about redistricting when she served in the House of Representatives:

Senate Democratic Leader Kate Brown, D-Portland, called the House Democrats’ actions “very appropriate under the circumstances.”

“Under certain circumstances, it’s fair to say we would use all tools available to us, and stage a similar boycott,” she said.

A day into the denial of quorum walkout, tensions have risen, and there appears no end in sight.

SOURCE 






Zero net emissions: Look no further than New Zealand for economic impacts

In some respects, the Labor Party is as Australian as the Magic Pudding, both revel in fantasy. According to past Labor leaders, high public spending won’t raise taxes and, in any case, high taxes won’t damage economic growth. Now we have Labor’s greatest magic pudding yet, we can cut our carbon emissions to zero and no coal miner will lose their job.

The Labor Party refuses to produce numbers to explain this remarkable outcome, but fortunately others have. Last year, New Zealand passed into law a net zero emissions target and in doing so they commissioned actual economic modelling on its impact.

The analysis, by the New Zealand Institute of Economic Research, evaluates a number of different assumed scenarios. All of these incorporate optimistic assumptions on future technologies, including for example a methane vaccine (which stops sheep from “emitting”). And, in another leap of faith, 50 per cent of trucks go electric by 2050.

Even with these assumptions, the negative impact of net zero emissions on the New Zealand economy is massive. The policy would reduce the size of the New Zealand economy by 10 to 20 per cent. In Australian terms that would amount to a $200 billion to $400 billion annual impact. Employment would fall by 2 to 4 per cent. If that happened in Australia 200,000 to 400,000 people would lose their jobs.

New Zealand’s main industry of agriculture would be smashed. Its dairy industry would reduce by more than half and that leads to a much poorer nation. Depending on technological assumptions, wages reduce by 8 to 28 per cent. In Australian terms, that would mean a $7000 to $24,000 annual hit to an average worker.

Of course, the economic impact on Australia would be bigger given that we have large coal and gas industries, as well as agriculture.

As it turned out, the New Zealand Government ended up exempting agriculture from its net zero emissions target. Agriculture makes up half of the country’s carbon dioxide emissions. New Zealand’s “brave” target that was welcomed by environmental activist groups is literally an example of doing things by half.

Here in Australia, however, the Labor party has not ruled out imposing a net zero target on our farmers. A net zero target is a double hit to the agricultural industry. They pay the direct cost of having to pay more for fuel, for feed and for vehicles. They also pay the cost of having productive farmland turned to trees (so we can sequester more carbon) and the loss of future growth opportunities because more land can not be developed.

This is where the “net” part of net zero kicks in. Under “net zero”, rich people can still fly to Davos to lecture others about carbon dioxide emissions. To do so, some pay an “indulgence” to have farming land locked up. Productive farm areas, in effect, would be turned into National Parks to house more weeds and fuel for bushfires.

Net zero emissions means net zero development, net zero jobs but far from net zero hypocrisy.

Labor has been keen to quote the CSIRO’s latest National Outlook report to conclude that net zero emissions is achievable but the CSIRO report does not do what Labor is saying it does. The CSIRO concludes that agricultural production levels “experience a substantial decline once the rising carbon price improves the relative profitability of other land uses such as forestry”. Up to 24 per cent of our agricultural land would be converted plantings on the CSIRO’s analysis.

Nor does the CSIRO measure the net impact of net zero emissions. It measures the economic outcomes of two scenarios, one dominated by a protectionist world with high barriers to trade and the other a world of free trade, global cooperation on climate and magically high productivity. Surprise, surprise, free trade and high productivity lead to higher economic growth. The unique and separate impact of net zero emissions remains unmeasured by the CSIRO’s analysis.

Also, to get to net zero, the CSIRO estimates that a global carbon price of $273 a tonne is required. Once again Labor shows their addiction to a carbon tax.

In The Magic Pudding, the possum and the wombat create a fire to distract Bunyip Bluegum while they steal the pudding. A similar distraction seems to have afflicted the modern Labor Party, where this summer’s fires have distracted them away from their founding mission of defending and protecting workers. Labor once again has not seemed to learn the lesson that you can’t have your cake and eat it too.

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 February, 2020  

German teenage climate change skeptic, 19, known as the 'anti-Greta' will speak at Republican CPAC convention this week to promote 'climate realism'

A teenager who has been dubbed the 'anti-Greta' is to speak at a Republican convention is Washington D.C. later this week.

German citizen and climate change skeptic, Naomi Seibt, 19, will appear at the Conservative Political Action Conference known as CPAC in the biggest annual Republican convention of its type running from Wednesday until Saturday of this week.

The event will feature Republican lawmakers, officials from the White House and Trump's re-election campaign, members of the conservative media and even a speech from the President himself.  

Seibt has been dubbed as the 'anti-Greta' because of her views on climate change are the polar opposite to those of Swedish environmental campaigner 17-year-old Greta Thunberg.

Seibt's influence is likely to be significantly smaller given that she only has 5,000 Twitter followers compared to Thunberg's 4 million, however being given the seal of approval by CPAC will surely help to bolster her prospects.

A YouTube video created by the Heartland Institute, a think tank which firmly rejects climate change, pitches Seibt against Thunberg.

'I have good news for you. The world is not ending because of climate change,' Seibt says in the video for the lobbying group.

'People are being force-fed a very dystopian agenda of climate alarmism that tells us that we as humans are destroying the planet and that we, the young people especially, have no future.'

In another video entitled 'Naomi Seibt vs. Greta Thunberg: whom should we trust?', footage is seen of both teens as they make their opposing cases.

Greta was named Time magazine's 'Person of the Year' in 2019 after making a speech at the United Nations where she demanded action be taken against climate change by the gathered world's leaders.

'Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money, and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!,' Thunberg bellowed.

Seibt called Thunberg's a proponent of 'climate alarmism.

'I used to be a climate change alarmist myself because, obviously, as a young girl I grew up around the climate change hysteria in the media, in my school books.

'I was an innocent young girl and I thought by hugging the trees I could save the planet, which quite frankly turned out not to be true,' she says in one YouTube video.

Seibt says the current thinking on climate change is an 'insult to science, and the complexity of nature, and freedom of speech' adding 'it is important we keep questioning the narrative that is out there.'

'Climate change alarmism at its very core is a despicably anti-human ideology. We are told to look down on our achievements with guilt, shame, disgust and not even to take into account the many major benefits we have from using fossil fuels as our main energy source.

'Look around. We are living in such an amazing era of fast progress and innovation. We are not allowed to be proud of that at all? Instead debates are being shut down and real scientists lose their jobs.'

Seibt doesn't totally rule out mankind's influence in the planet's climate but believes that it has been overstated.  'Are man-made CO2 emissions having that much impact on the climate? I think that's ridiculous to believe,' she said in the Washington Post.

The Heartland Institute said that Seibt was a 'fantastic voice for free markets and for climate realism.'

'It is important that we keep questioning the narrative that's out there instead of promoting it,' Seibt said. 'These days, climate change science really isn't a science at all.'

SOURCE 






USDA announcement on 30 percent biofuel mandate will make U.S. fuel consumption less efficient

Big corn has the ear of a lot of Republicans

Rick Manning today issued the following statement blasting the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s proposal to raise the national biofuel mandate to 30 percent:

“The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s announcement that they are setting a bio-fuels goal of 30 percent of U.S. transportation fuels demonstrates an almost pathological commitment to expanding the least efficient fuel into our nation’s vehicles.

“Increasing ethanol in our fuel will lower vehicle mileage as it burns much less efficiently than non-corn infused gasoline.  What’s more, ethanol is destructive to vehicle engines creating other consumer vehicle costs.  Yet, someone in President Trump’s USDA thinks that creating a threshold that not even the Obama administration was willing to set is a great idea.

“America is awash in oil and natural gas, but the insidious power of major corn producers to influence policy in Congress as well as at the USDA is truly impressive.  If only they would use their power for good.”

SOURCE 





Natural Gas Is Crushing Wind and Solar Power

The U.S. Energy Information Administration just announced some spectacular news that should be banner headlines across the country: The price of natural gas has fallen to its lowest February level in 20 years.

The data shows that natural gas prices fell to $1.77 per million British thermal units. In inflation-adjusted terms, the price of gas has plunged by some 80% since its high of $13.60 12 years ago. The price is down 90% since 2005, when prices hit nearly $20. (Quick: Can you think of anything else that now costs one-tenth of what it did 15 years ago?)

The Energy Information Administration also reports that U.S. natural gas production has hit an all-time high this year.

The shale oil and gas revolution keeps rolling on -- but no one is talking about it. This boom in production has affected the economy of every state, from Ohio and Pennsylvania to Texas, Oklahoma, Colorado and the Dakotas. By the way, oil prices have also fallen considerably, bringing gas prices at the pump to nearly $2 a gallon in some states. Prices are so low now that the drillers aren't making any money and are starting to shut down wells. They are victims of their own success.

Today's bargain-basement prices are partly due to moderate temperatures on the East Coast this winter, but this has been a long-term trend of cheaper and cheaper energy. America is now the Saudi Arabia of natural gas, and we are exporting more throughout the world than at any previous time in our history. It's hard to believe that a decade ago, we were importing natural gas. Thanks to fracking and horizontal drilling technologies that keep getting more and more efficient, we now have hundreds of years of supply of this fuel.

This spectacular tumble in natural gas prices has been a multibillion-dollar godsend to consumers, homeowners, manufacturers and other businesses. Just last week, a major Texas utility announced it would be sending homeowners cash-back checks because electricity and home heating costs are falling so rapidly. Expect more to do the same in the coming months.

Meanwhile, the United States continues to reduce its carbon emissions into the atmosphere at a faster pace than virtually any other country in the world. This is because natural gas is not just cheap. It is one of the cleanest ways to produce scalable and dependable electric power for a nation of 329 million people. We don't need brownouts in America as we saw in California, and natural gas is an excellent way to make sure the lights don't go out.

It would be hard to find anything NOT to like about this great American success story. We've achieved energy independence; reliable and inexhaustible supply; low prices; reduced power of the Middle East, Russia and other OPEC nations; and cleaner air than at any other time in at least a century.

Yet liberal environmentalists are grousing about this good news. A recent Bloomberg news story exclaims in its headline: "Cheap Gas Imperils Climate Fight by Undercutting Wind and Solar."

"Gas is such a bargain that it's being viewed less as a bridge fossil fuel, driving the world away from dirtier coal toward a clean-energy future," the story tells us, "and more as a hurdle that could slow the trip down.

Some forecasters are predicting prices will stay low for years, making it tough for states, cities and utilities to achieve their goals of being zero-carbon in power production by 2050 or earlier." Ravina Advani, head of renewable energy at BNP Paribas, complained: "The fact that there's an abundance of it makes the move to complete decarbonization much harder ... (Gas is) reliable, and it's cheap."

And that is bad news, why, exactly? It's like saying a cure for the coronavirus is bad for hospitals and doctors.

Maybe it is high time we admit we have found, for now, the great energy source of the next few decades and celebrate that America is endowed with a vital resource that is abundant and affordable -- just like our best-in-the-world farmland. The left talks about eradicating "poverty," but "energy poverty" is a primary source of deprivation around the world. Now, there is an obvious solution: Natural gas could easily be the primary source of power production for the world as a whole, slashing costs for the poor everywhere on the planet, from sub-Saharan Africa to Bangladesh.

Instead, politicians and government bureaucrats around the world are trying to force-feed the world expensive, unreliable and unscalable wind and solar power. The African Development Bank, for example, is only financing "green energy" projects, not coal or natural gas. It is substituting a cheap form of clean energy for a costly "green" alternative. Why?

In the U.S., this foolishness is happening every day as the federal government, in addition to state governments, is massively subsidizing wind and solar power -- even though they are, in most places, only niche sources of fuel. With more than $100 billion spent already, less than 10% of our energy comes from the wind and the sun, with most of the other 90% coming from good old-fashioned fossil fuels.

For all the talk about the falling costs of solar and wind power -- and yes, they are falling -- without billions of dollars of cash subsidies and tax breaks for the "renewable" energy sector, along with mandates requiring utilities to buy the power at any cost, wind and solar energy would be hopelessly expensive in most areas of the country. As a result, they would quickly surrender market share to natural gas and clean coal. (Don't look now, but coal prices are falling, too.)

It's time to get smart about energy and climate change and throw asunder taxpayer subsidies doled out to all forms of energy production. Let the market, not politicians and environmental groups, choose the safest, cheapest and most reliable energy source. Everyone is making a big bet on battery-operated cars and trucks. But who's to say that trucks and buses fueled by natural gas won't be the wave of the future? No one knows what makes the most sense or where the future will lead us. Nuclear power has great promise. But for now, the markets are shouting out for natural gas on a grander scale.

Fifteen years ago, no one would have thought we would have a superabundance of this wonder-fuel today. But we do. No one is more surprised than politicians. Why do we let them keep betting the farm on the wrong horse?

SOURCE 





Taxpayers beware: Republicans have their own green dreams

In an era of trillion-dollar deficits and onerous federal mandates, no political party has a monopoly on bad ideas. For example, we all know about the Democrats’ love for funneling taxpayer dollars into wind and solar energy boondoggles.

Republicans are now responding in kind with handouts to their own preferred “clean” projects. On Feb. 12, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, a California Republican, announced Republican bills that would launch a “trillion trees” gimmick and expand payouts to the already bloated carbon capture and sequestration industry. Leaders from both parties must take a stand against this endless corporate welfare and let taxpayers off the hook from costly “green” energy endeavors.

At the very least, most lawmakers on the right side of the aisle seem to recognize the many follies of subsidizing solar and wind technologies. Most “green” projects on the market rely on the hazardous extraction of rare earth minerals from developing nations, create power-intermittency issues, and are all but impossible to recycle.

But some of the alternatives proposed by the GOP are little more than science fiction. Carbon capture and sequestration technology is frequently touted by members of both parties as a “solution” to (already declining) carbon emissions, despite the findings of a 2019 study published in Energy and Environmental Science that say “it reduces only a small fraction of carbon emissions, and it usually increases air pollution.”

A gas-fired power station has to burn 16% more gas than it otherwise would to capture its own carbon. This is hardly a model of energy efficiency, but the technology’s supporters won’t let evidence or common sense thwart recently introduced legislation that would make permanent the tax credit for capture and sequestration projects and increase payouts by 25%. Even if this wacky technology could somehow save the planet (spoiler alert: it won’t), backers such as Republican Reps. David Schweikert of Arizona and Brad Wenstrup of Ohio can’t seem to explain why the beefed-up tax credit will make the approach viable after more than $1 billion in direct government financing from the Department of Energy failed to do so.

Other members of Congress pine for a prettier approach to combat climate change, proposing the planting of a trillion trees. Introduced by Rep. Bruce Westerman, an Arkansas Republican, the “Trillion Trees Act” would condition foreign aid on reforestation and create a National Reforestation Task Force that would create decadal planting targets.

This policy is irresponsible enough applied just to the United States, where an overconcentration of trees has led to devastating wildfires. In recent years, the government has made it far too difficult for harvesters to get anywhere near forests, leading to lax lumber liquidation in America’s lush forests. The results, according to Texas Public Policy Foundation Vice President Chuck DeVore, are predictable: “As timber harvesting permit fees went up and environmental challenges multiplied, the people who earned a living felling and planting trees looked for other lines of work. The combustible fuel load in the forest predictably soared.”

But at least the U.S. doesn’t need to make life-altering trade-offs between preserving forests and feeding its citizenry. Because farmers in less-developed countries such as Mozambique must clear some of the country’s vast forests to grow crops and feed their families, foreign aid policies to incentivize reforestation could lead to tough choices and devastating consequences. Africa is a graveyard of failed, idealistic foreign aid programs, yet policymakers seemingly never learn their lesson in trying to “heal the planet.” Lawmakers must decide if they want a photo-op next to a handful of replanted trees or genuine solutions that prioritize both economy and ecology.

Market-friendly policies and strong property rights protections safeguard the planet, leading to historic prosperity and, yes, carbon emission reductions. Taxpayers need sensible, free market policies, not crony handouts and “woke” posturing by both parties.

SOURCE 





Exploration under the gas pump in Victoria, Australia

Green/Left ban on gas exploration is costing Victorians

As gas emerges as the politically palatable alternative to coal, pressure is building from within the Andrews government to end the five-year moratorium on onshore conventional gas exploration in Victoria. The shift by Labor figures follows mounting pressure from unions, industry and consumers.

It comes after Scott Morrison issued a passionate plea for gas supplies in NSW and Victoria to be unlocked, declaring there is “no credible energy transition plan for an economy like Australia which does not involve greater use of gas as an important transition fuel”.

Australian Competition and Consumer Commission chair Rod Sims has repeatedly called on NSW and Victoria to lift their bans, declaring in August: “If we really want permanently lower prices in the south we need more gas in the south.” Santos’s Narrabri project, with potential to fill half of NSW’s domestic supply, has been a particular bone of contention, with approvals continually delayed by the state.

The federal government is pushing for a national gas reservation policy to improve supplies for manufacturers and heavy industry, along with a price measure to the gas export trigger to ensure the national market is operating efficiently. The Australian Energy Market Operator predicts that offshore gas supplies in Bass Strait are unlikely to meet Victoria’s needs ­beyond the next five years. AEMO estimated late last year that coal would contribute less than a third of power supply in the grid by 2040 as demand for gas and other ­renewables surges.

The Morrison government has struck a $2bn deal with the NSW government to pay for carbon abatement and energy projects in return for increased production of natural gas. It says it will not fund a similar deal with Victoria unless the ban on onshore gas exploration is lifted.

With the results of a geological survey of the state’s onshore ­conventional gas resources expected next month, ahead of the expiration of the moratorium on June 30, energy experts say the Victorian government faces a stark choice: it can either cease being the only state with a ban on conventional gas exploration or import more expensive, less environmentally friendly gas from ­interstate.

Far from banning conventional gas exploration, Queensland allows all forms of unconventional gas exploration, including fracking, and is home to almost 90 per cent of Australia’s 2P (proven and probable) gas reserves, and about 63 per cent of Australia’s 2C (best estimate of contingent) reserves. NSW permits conventional and unconventional exploration but the Berejiklian government frequently declares it has the “toughest” regulations in Australia, particularly in relation to fracking of coal-seam gas.

In 2014, the then O’Farrell government froze new CSG exploration licences and introduced exclusion zones, making residential areas in 152 local government areas of the state, including Sydney, “off limits”. While the freeze has since been lifted, no new licences have been granted.

The West Australian, South Australian and Northern Territory governments have all recently lifted their moratoriums on fracking, except in the southeast of South Australia where it is still prohibited. Tasmania maintains a fracking moratorium but allows conventional and unconventional gas exploration.

While Victorian state Labor MPs remain publicly tight-lipped about which way they are leaning on the conventional gas moratorium, internal sources say there is significant support within the right of the party for its overturning, including from Treasurer Tim Pallas, Resources Minister Jaclyn Symes and key factional powerbroker Adem Somyurek.

Energy and Environment Minister Lily D’Ambrosio — of the Socialist Left faction — has previously supported the moratorium but declined a request from The Australian to clarify her present position.

One source said they would “bet London to a brick” D’Ambrosio would continue to support the moratorium but others said they believed she could be persuaded to support its overturning should more senior members of her faction, including Premier Daniel Andrews, do so. The decision sits within Symes’s resources portfolio.

Australian Workers Union Victorian secretary Ben Davis is one ALP member who has been publicly critical of the moratorium since its inception, saying it is ­costing jobs. “It sends a terrible ­investment signal to gas companies and manufacturers alike,” Davis says. “I look forward to the review of the moratorium, and we’ll be campaigning and agitating to get it lifted.”

NSW-based federal opposition resources spokesman Joel Fitz­gibbon is another within the Labor camp who does not mince words in calling for the Andrews government to not only lift the moratorium on onshore conventional gas but also overturn its ban on ­unconventional gas exploration. “Every project, whether it involves fracking or not, should stand on its merits,” Fitzgibbon says. “Blanket bans make no sense.”

While all forms of gas mining involve the extraction of methane from kilometres below the earth’s surface, conventional gas extraction involves releasing gas trapped in sandstone, under solid rock, with minimal impact on the surrounding geology.

Unconventional gas is trapped in a coal seam or shale and is more difficult to extract, often but not ­always requiring fracking, or fracture stimulation, which involves pumping fluid down the gas well at high pressure to produce small cracks in the target rock reservoir.

Victoria’s moratorium on conventional onshore gas exploration dates back to May 2014, when Napthine government energy minister Russell Northe opted to suspend decisions on all onshore gas exploration in the state until after the November state election, which was won by Labor.

At the time the Coalition feared punishment at the ballot box if it approved a controversial application from Lakes Oil to drill for gas 1500m below Seaspray, in then Nationals leader Peter Ryan’s South Gippsland electorate. Far from lifting the suspension post-election, the new Andrews government maintained it, intro­ducing legislation in 2017 that placed a moratorium on all conventional onshore gas exploration and production until June 30 this year, and permanently banning all unconventional gas mining and exploration, including fracking.

Ahead of the 2018 state election, Andrews went a step further, making a yet-to-be-delivered promise to enshrine a ban on fracking in the state’s constitution. The state Coalition continues to oppose all unconventional gas ­exploration but this week renewed its calls to lift the moratorium on conventional onshore gas.

Federal Energy Minister Angus Taylor says the “great irony” of Victoria importing ­increasing amounts of gas from Queensland is that 20 per cent to 40 per cent of Queensland gas is from coal seams.

“That’s exactly what they’re objecting to with their ban on unconventional gas — which they’re not even considering lifting — and yet they’re OK with importing coal-seam gas,” Taylor says.

Anti-fossil fuels groups are ramping up their campaigns ahead of the moratorium expiring. Friends of the Earth campaigns co-ordinator Cam Walker says he is “very concerned” about the possibility of the ban being lifted. “The greatest concern is the climate change implications of the methane that comes from fugitive emissions,” he says. “Looking to mainstream science, it’s clear that we need to stop producing new ­reserves of fossil fuels if we want to have the hope of keeping temperature rises under 1.5C globally.”

Grattan Institute energy program director Tony Wood says that unless one takes the Friends of The Earth approach of opposing all fossil fuel extraction, there is “no scientific justification” for banning conventional or even all unconventional gas exploration. He concedes lifting the ban on fracking is “too politically sensitive”.

As the June 30 sunset clause on the moratorium approaches, Victorian Lead Scientist Amanda ­Caples, a stakeholder advisory panel and a team of scientists have been commissioned by the Andrews government to complete a three-year, $40m inquiry into ­onshore conventional gas as part of the Victorian Gas Program.

One of the key questions they are addressing — which gas companies say they would have ­answered at no cost to the taxpayer had the moratorium not been imposed — is how much ­unconventional gas there actually is under Victoria, and therefore what impact it might be able to have in terms of keeping a lid on prices, creating regional jobs and saving manufacturing jobs.

As part of the gas program, scientists from the Victorian Geological Survey are developing comprehensive 3D geological models of the Otway and Gippsland basins, where most of Victoria’s onshore gas is believed to be located. The results of that investigation are expected to be made known next month.

Recent discoveries in the South Australian section of the Otway Basin, near Penola, have encouraged companies with acreages in western Victoria, including Beach Energy, Cooper Energy and Vintage Energy, to hold out hope of finding more gas on the eastern side of the state border.

While the decision on whether to lift the moratorium will be made by the politicians, and not the scientists, The Australian understands the Geological Survey team is working to compile “pre-competitive data” on prospective locations for gas wells.

Should the moratorium be lifted, this would allow the industry some minimal compensation for five years of lost work, in the form of being able to restart ahead of where it was when the moratorium was imposed.

‘Plenty of gas’

The gas program stakeholder advisory panel includes representatives from a wide range of interest groups, including the manufacturing industry, AWU, Victorian Farmers Federation, gas company Beach Energy, the Australian ­Industry Group, the Great South Coast Group (which represents councils in the Otway Basin, some of which have publicly voiced their support for lifting the moratorium), as well as green groups ­including Frack Free Moriac and Environment Victoria.

State Resources Minister Jac­lyn Symes says the gas program work will “inform decisions about potential onshore gas exploration”. Symes maintains that Australia “has plenty of gas”, blaming escalating prices on an ­increase in gas exports over the past five years and calling on the federal government to activate its domestic gas security mech­anism to put Australian consumers first.

But as AEMO forecasts a 34 per cent decrease in Victorian winter gas production by 2023 because of dwindling supplies in Bass Strait, it is clear the Andrews government is under pressure to increase supply, with new offshore exploration and production licences recently approved at state and commonwealth levels.

The state government, which has jurisdiction to three nautical miles (5.56km) from the coast, ­recently gave the go-ahead to two onshore-to-offshore wells being drilled by Beach Energy in the Otway Basin.

The wells are permitted under the moratorium, despite beginning on clifftops before extending 1.5km out to sea, kilometres under the earth’s surface.

While Victoria does import some gas via pipelines that connect it to the rest of the east coast gas market, it is a net exporter, with about two-thirds of the gas processed locally being used in the state, and the rest sent to neighbouring states.

If the state cannot produce enough of its own gas in coming years — or refuses to do so by maintaining the moratorium — it will need to import gas, predominantly via a pipeline from southwest Queensland, which AEMO has found would need to be seriously upgraded to carry larger volumes to Victoria.

As the ACCC has highlighted, Queensland gas already costs $2-$4 a gigajoule more than Victorian gas — or up to 50 per cent more.

Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association chief executive Andrew McConville says the industry remains hopeful that the Andrews government will “see sense” and lift the moratorium, given Victoria’s longstanding requirement for more natural gas, with 80 per cent of the state’s homes connected to more than 31,000km of gas mains distribution pipelines.

“The Victorian government’s renewable energy target (of 50 per cent by 2030) will also see the ­demand for natural gas increase,” McConville says.

“Modelling undertaken for the Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning in 2017 assumes that as other sources of baseload power (coal) no longer become viable they are replaced by natural gas generation capacity.

“Under every scenario modelled for the department, natural gas has a bigger role to play in ­delivering energy stability to Victoria out to 2050.

“Unless new gas resources in Victoria are developed, families and businesses in the state will pay more than those in states continuing to develop new supply.”

SOURCE  

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26 February, 2020  

Warren: Green New Deal Doesn't Go 'Far Enough'

The Green New Deal promised a “massive transformation of our society,” with goals that include eliminating air travel, cars, fossil fuels, and nuclear energy, as well as retrofitting every building in America to be energy efficient. While most sane people understood the plan was a fantasy, albeit a dangerous one, Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren said Thursday she doesn’t believe the $93 trillion proposal goes far enough.

“What I want to see us do is get off an oil economy, and not only for ourselves, but for the rest of the world,” Warren said during a CNN town hall event.

“I want to see us move entirely to green, and let me say on this, I not only support a Green New Deal, I don’t think it goes far enough,” she added. “I also have a blue new deal cause we have got to be thinking about our oceans as well that we need to protect.”

Warren may claim she has lofty goals to save the planet, but her decision to fly around the country on a private jet shows just how committed she is.

Earlier this month the Massachusetts Democrat was caught traveling on a private plane to New Hampshire after the Iowa caucuses. When she saw she was being filmed, she quickly stepped behind her staffer to hide.

SOURCE 





The Truth Behind Rising Sea Levels and Global Warming

On January 3, 2020, 13 states in the U.S. joined Rhode Island in a lawsuit against oil companies for contributing to climate change and the dangers it poses.

The reason: They believe sea-level rise from climate change threatens their low-lying coastal regions.

An alarmist news site in Honolulu claims, “Warmer air temperatures are causing our oceans to thermally expand and glaciers around the world to melt. This combination leads to global sea level rise.”

However, the real-world situation differs dramatically from these hyped-up, sensationalist claims.

Manmade Global Warming: Not the Primary Driver of Sea-Level Rise

Doomsday proponents suggest that glacial melt induced by global warming can contribute significantly to the rise in sea levels. But a growing number of scientific studies (like this one in 2018) find that manmade global warming is not a primary driver of global sea-level rise.

The reason? Contrary to the media narrative, more factors than glacial melt drive sea-level rise.

Three major sets of natural factors control the rise and fall of sea levels: water temperature and salinity changes (steric), cryosphere/glacial changes (glacio-eustatic), and geological changes in continents and ocean basins (isostatic).

Despite multiple influences on sea levels, some alarmist narratives focus exclusively on glacial melt. Why? To make people panic about melting glaciers in the Arctic and Antarctic.

Moreover, sea-level doomsday reports seldom address sea-level rise in previous centuries and millennia. Avoiding that supports the alarmist narrative, as it portrays the current rise as new and unprecedented.

Sea-Level Rise: Higher and Faster in the Past

A 2014 scientific study did a comprehensive analysis of sea-level measurements from 1,277 tide gauge records since 1807 to estimate trends and acceleration in sea-level rise. In the 20th century, global sea-level rise displayed a linear trend of 1.9 ± 0.3 millimeters (mm) per year.

Sea levels have been much higher in the past and varies regionally.

Whoever has been feeding you false information on unprecedented sea-level rise needs to be redirected to research that documents not only higher sea levels in the past but also more rapid sea-level rise.

Long-term historical analysis of sea-level rise (from around 14,000 BC to the present) in Europe, Australia, Russia, Canada, Eurasia, China, India, Thailand, the Caribbean Islands, Bolivia, and various other places indicates that sea levels were much higher in the past than today.

During the early Holocene (11,719 to 7069 calibrated years before 2019) the sea level rose by 55 to 60 meters and the rate of sea-level rise was 11 to 12 mm/year. In Tahiti, the largest French Polynesian Island in the South Pacific, the sea-level rise was “11.7 mm/year for the period 8950-11,650 before 1950.”

Besides, scientific publications published in the 1980s, before the advent of the global-warming craze, reveal that “many parts of the world provide evidence of higher than present strand lines dating from the late Holocene.”

Is Future Sea-Level Rise a Threat to Islands?

In contrast to the early Holocene period, the global sea-level rise since 1958 has been just around 1.3 to 1.5 mm per year, much lower than the 20th-century average.

We cannot blindly assume that islands will get submerged by future sea-level rise of around 2 mm per year or 0.2 meters (m) per century.

Because even if sea levels around islands or along coastlines go up, the coastal regions may still remain unsubmerged, and might even grow in some cases, due to accretion, i.e., geological changes that increase elevation and extension of landmass by accumulation of sediments, growth of coral, or uplift of the landmass itself.

In order to evaluate the same, scientists conducted studies to analyze the impact of sea-level rise on the Pacific islands — like Tuvalu, Tokelau, and Kiribati — which are often projected by climate alarmists as the first victims of rising sea levels.

The study found out that even with a 0.5 meter and 1 meter rise in the sea level (much higher than the 0.2 meters observed during the entire 20th century), the islands remained unaffected.

The scientists attribute this adaptability to “physical changes in island structure, including both vertical adjustments that influenced island topography and planform movement.” The study concluded that the “islands have the capability to morphodynamically respond to rising sea level through island accretion.”

The impact of relative sea-level rise on any coast can only be discerned after considering the vertical crustal motion, and the accretion of sediments, in the coastal region. The assertions of these scientific studies can also be observed in some islands.

For example, in the Grande Glorieuse Islands, the landmass grew by 7.5 ha (1989–2003) despite an absolute sea-level rise around the island and a 28% erosion of shoreline.

So, it is evident from scientific literature that sea levels have not risen dramatically in the recent past; they have been much higher in the past; and the ongoing rise (and potentially faster ones) poses no problem to the islands and other landmass.

Sadly, the mainstream media and climate activists pay no attention to these peer-reviewed and universally accepted scientific facts about sea levels.

SOURCE 







Nations seek biodiversity accord to stave off mass extinction

Just another attempted power grab

Nature experts and government delegates gather this week in Rome to thrash out an international deal for endangered species, trying to avoid a mass extinction event caused by human activity.

Having been hastily relocated from Kunming in China following the coronavirus outbreak, negotiators from more than 140 countries have until February 29 to study a draft text.

The 12-page document, which focuses on goals to be met by mid-century and envisages a stock-take in 2030, should be adopted at the COP15 summit on biodiversity in October.

The United Nations biodiversity panel IPBES last year warned that up to one million species face the risk of extinction as a result of humanity's insatiable desire for land and materials.

"I cannot underscore enough the importance of making progress at this meeting," said Elizabeth Maruma Mrema, acting executive secretary for the UN's Convention on Biological Diversity.

"The world is eagerly waiting out there for demonstrable progress towards a clear, actionable and transformative global framework on biodiversity."

While the 2015 Paris agreement saw nations commit to cutting greenhouse gas emissions to stave off the worst threats of climate change, there is no equivalent accord for the world's endangered species.

The IPBES report highlighted the threats posed to nature from human activity, saying that three-quarters of all land and two-thirds of oceans have already been severely affected by mankind.

The report also demonstrated how the depletion of nature will in turn harm humanity.

"This degradation of nature is unprecedented in the history of mankind," said IPBES executive secretary Anne Larigauderie.

2020 is a crucial year for nature, with the global congress of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature set for Marseille in June and the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow in November.

Negotiators in Rome are focusing on ways to reduce threats to biodiversity, including officially protecting at least 30 percent of land and marine areas and a 50 percent cut in pollution from fertilisers.

It also calls for stricter regulation on plastic pollution and acknowledges the role that the preservation of nature can play in the battle against climate change.

While Louisa Carron, who works for Greenpeace, told AFP the draft was a "good first step", Lin Li of WWF International said she had "mixed feelings".

"The zero draft has not address the drivers of biodiversity at all, for example the consumption/production that really causes causing the loss of nature," said Lin.

Li Shuo, who works on biodiversity issues for Greenpeace, was guarded about the prospects of success in Rome.

"Simply having a 'vision' does not guarantee its fulfilment," he told AFP.

Experts fear progress could be stalled if the plan is to phase out damaging environmental practices on a nation-by-nation basis in roughly the same was as the emissions cuts in the Paris accord.

With the COP15 still set to take place in Kunming, the Rome talks are likely to play a large role in how effective a global deal on biodiversity will be. "We do not expect a failure," said Mrema.

SOURCE 






Keeping Africa on the brink of starvation

UN and EU government agencies – and tax-exempt NGOs – have brought a plague of locusts

Paul Driessen

Billions of desert locusts have descended again on East Africa. Crawling first, then sprouting wings and flying in hungry hoards of 40-150 million or more, they are devastating crops and threatening tens of millions of people with lost livelihoods and starvation. This latest locust plague, says the United Nations, is the worst in 70 years for Kenya, the worst in 25 years for Ethiopia, Eritrea, Djibouti and Somalia.

Locust swarms can blanket scores or hundreds of square miles at a time, travel 80 miles a day, and consume more than 400 million pounds of vegetation daily, Africa Fighting Malaria cofounder Richard Tren notes. The insects increase their numbers logarithmically, meaning numbers can be 500 times higher in six months. In Ethiopia, on January 9, a massive swarm nearly brought down a Boeing 737 jetliner.

Many fear the voracious insects could soon reach croplands in South Sudan, Uganda, and even Asia.

Despite past history, UN Food and Agricultural Organization officials say this is an “unprecedented threat” to food security, one “of international dimensions.” It’s “a far more serious emergency than we had earlier anticipated,” an African official said. “Please do not wait to act,” FAO Deputy-Director-General Helena Semedo pleaded at a February 7 gathering of “international experts” and African leaders.

Desperate Africans are responding with “time-tested” methods: whistling and shouting loudly, banging on metal buckets, waving blankets and sticks, crushing the bugs – perhaps even roasting and eating them, under UN-approved nutrition programs. In Eritrea, they are using “more advanced” methods: hand-held and truck-mounted sprayers. In Kenya, police are firing machine guns and tear gas into the swarms!

Fenitrothion is a highly effective pesticide against locust swarms. But only in Ethiopia, it seems, are they spraying pesticides from small airplanes. Fenitrothion supplies are extremely limited – and aerial spraying is too expensive for cash-strapped countries, too dangerous in areas wracked by radical Muslim insurgencies, and minimally effective against such massive swarms with so few available aircraft. And it takes days for pesticide-phobic farmers to move cattle and goats out of areas that could be sprayed.

In this era of incredible modern agricultural and insect control technologies, when American farmers get 3-5 times more crop yields per acre than 50 years ago­­ – how is it possible that Africa remains perpetually on the brink of starvation? That Africa faces yet another locust plague of biblical pharaoh proportions? That Africans must rely on absurd “time-tested,” almost totally ineffective locust control methods?

Incredibly, this looming catastrophe is due to policies and programs that have been officially adopted and deliberately implemented by the very UN agencies that are now crying loudest about the horrific situation.

For years now, the FAO, UN Development Programme and UN Environment Programme (UNEP) have been working in cahoots with some of the most radical environmentalist pressure groups on Earth to devise and impose “agroecology” – a perverse combination of socialism, pseudo-ecology and primitive, anti-technology agriculture. The program is financed and advanced by the UN, by European governments via their development agencies and funding of environmentalist NGOs – and even by US taxpayers, who provide 22% of UN funding and underwrite grants to and tax-exempt status for environmentalist groups.

Agroecology is above all political. It rejects virtually everything that has enabled modern agriculture to feed billions more people from less acreage. It rabidly opposes monoculture farming, hybrid seeds, synthetic/non-organic insecticides and fertilizers, biotechnology ... and even mechanized equipment like tractors! It claims Dr. Norman Borlaug’s Green Revolution, which saved a billion people from starvation, did little more than put global food production “under the control of a few transnational corporations.”

Acceptance of agroecology tenets and restrictions has become a condition for poor farmers getting seeds, and their countries and local communities getting development loans and food aid. Mid-level bureaucrats get cushy jobs overseeing and propagandizing agroecology campaigns, while ruling elites get more opportunities to siphon off additional millions in international aid money. They still erect roadblocks to Golden Rice, which could save 2 million parents and children a year from blindness and death.

AgroEcology advocates extol “food sovereignty” and the “right to subsistence farming.” They promote “indigenous agricultural knowledge and practices,” to the exclusion of knowledge, practices, technologies and equipment that have been developed in recent decades – and could help end Africa’s perpetual poverty, malnutrition, disease, joblessness and early death. They sow fear about pesticides and GM food.

Instead of transforming and modernizing African agriculture, the UN, FAO, UNEP, and radical groups like Food First, La Via Campesina, Greenpeace and IFOAM Organics International demand “culturally appropriate” food produced through “ecologically sound and sustainable methods,” as only they can twist those terms to serve their sick determination to negate and roll back human progress.

FAO Steering Committee member Miguel Altieri insists that all this will promote “resiliency” in African food production. The locust plague and imminent starvation underscore just how “resilient” agroecology has made East Africa. There’s barely enough food for good times, much less days of droughts and locusts. Modern agriculture could turn much of Africa into a bread basket – but the lunatics won’t allow it.

In 2012, Kenya banned biotech (GM or GMO) food, even as highly successful pilot projects were doubling and tripling crop yields for Kenyan and South African farmers, and ending plant diseases that had devastated papaya and cassava crops. Now, even as locusts wipe out staple food crops, rabid NGOs are pressuring Kenya’s Parliament to ban over 200 pesticides that have been approved as safe for crops, wildlife and people by Kenyan authorities and by regulators in the USA, Canada and other nations.

Meanwhile, well-fed Uhura Kenyatta, president of Kenya since 2013, resorts to the typical cop-out: the locust plague is the result of climate change. And Kenya’s Ministry of Health says, even if there is a severe famine and a threat to loss of life, “every effort” will be made to “source [imported] food from non-GMO sources, failing which emergency GM food may be allowed in.” Shades of Zambia 2002!

Adding to the insanity, in late January the United Nations claimed it needed “more than $70 million from donors” to address the locust crisis. For 2020, the UN budget is $3.1 billion; the FAO’s is $1 billion; the UNEP’s $790 million; and the Green Climate Fund has some $2 billion, plus pledges of some $6 billion.

Surely, these outfits can find a measly $70 million in these bloated treasuries to address a genuine humanitarian crisis – even if they have to claw it away from agroecology and similarly useless programs.

And what about the rights of African farmers who don’t want to practice agroecology, who want to use modern seeds, fertilizers, pesticides and machinery? Do the FAO and UN Human Rights Commission support those rights of self-determination? Why isn’t the HRC blasting the NGOs, EU countries and UN agencies for these human rights violations and the misery, malnutrition, disease and death they cause?

Agroecology burdens African farmers “with systems that my grandfather gave up on 125 years ago,” Indiana farmer and US Ambassador to the FAO and other Rome-based UN agencies Kip Tom told people attending the February 20 USDA Agricultural Outlook Forum dinner. Whereas previous FAO Director-General José Graziano da Silva was deeply involved in the agroecology movement, thankfully his replacement (Qu Dongyu of China) is a scientist who seems “willing to work with” American farmers and the Trump Administration “to feed a growing and hungry world,” Ambassador Tom added.

Agroecology represents eco-imperialism at its worst. Under any fair and balanced application of their own beliefs and standards, today’s “woke” environmental, campus and progressive activists would charge the organizations imposing agroecology on Africa with eco-manslaughter. But that will never happen.

President Trump, the Agriculture Department and Congress should loudly and publicly stigmatize the FAO, UN and EU and their NGOs – and terminate any funding and tax exemptions that support agroecology. US agencies should devote their resources to rooting out this perverse system and helping Africa bring modern agriculture, disease control, health and living standards to its mistreated families.

Via email






Great Australian Bight: Equinor abandons plans to drill for oil

Norwegian oil company announces it has scrapped its $200m plan to deepwater drill in Great Australian Bight Marine Park

After extensive Greenie harassment

Norwegian oil giant Equinor has abandoned plans to drill for oil in the Great Australian Bight, declaring the controversial project did not make commercial sense.

The company said on Tuesday it had told federal, South Australian and local authorities it had decided to scrap the $200m project to deepwater drill in the Great Australian Bight Marine Park.

It is the third major oil company to abandon plans to drill in the bight, following BP and Chevron.

“Following a holistic review of its exploration portfolio, Equinor has concluded that the project’s potential is not commercially competitive compared with other exploration opportunities in the company,’’ the company’s country manager for Australia, Jone Stangeland, said in a statement.

The decision is a significant win for environment groups and other opponents of the project, including Indigenous elders and local councils. The proposal sparked protests supported by tens of thousands of people opposed to fossil fuel extraction in a marine wilderness area.

Equinor’s announcement comes shortly after the proposed Stromlo-1 well site, in water more than 2.2km deep and nearly 400km off the South Australian coast, was granted environmental approval by the federal offshore petroleum regulator. The Wilderness Society launched legal action challenging the decision last month, arguing opponents had not been properly consulted.

Peter Owen, the Wilderness Society’s South Australian director, welcomed Equinor’s decision to “responsibly withdraw” from the project.

“It’s been a while coming, but the right decision is the right decision, and we have no doubt that the hundreds of thousands of people that have supported the campaign to fight for the Bight will be both delighted and relieved to hear this news,” he said.

Owen called on the Morrison government to “listen to the people and permanently protect the unique waters of the Great Australian Bight from drilling for good”.

The federal minister for resources, Keith Pitt, said the government was disappointed about Equinor’s decision, but pleased the company had made clear it would still be part of the oil and gas industry in Australia. It said the decision would be “particularly hard for South Australia”.

He said the government remained committed to “encouraging the safe development of Australia’s offshore petroleum resources. “The Bight basin remains one of Australia’s frontier basins and any proposals for new oil and gas fields in this area will be assessed fairly and independently,” he said.

Equinor was granted a petroleum title over areas in the Bight in 2011. In December, it cleared the second of four regulatory hurdles it needed to pass before it could start drilling, when the National Offshore Petroleum Safety and Environmental Management Authority, known as Nopsema, granted its environmental approval.

The company described the decision as an important milestone that followed more than 400 meetings with community and other organisations. Environmentalists, local councils and elders of the traditional owners of the Bight, the Mirning people, denied they had been properly consulted and vowed to continue to fight the project.

Industry body the Australian Petroleum and Production and Exploration Association said the company’s decision to drop the project was disappointing for South Australians, who would have benefited economically, and for the “wider Australian community”, which needed new energy supplies.

Matthew Doman, the association’s chief executive, said: “The proposed exploration activity had been subject to an extreme campaign of false and exaggerated claims that deliberately overstated the risks and ignored the potential benefits.”

Greenpeace Australia Pacific’s chief executive, David Ritter, said the decision was an “incredible win for people power and nature”. He said it followed years of relentless campaigning by coastal communities, Indigenous traditional owners, surfers, the seafood industry, tourism operators and local businesses.

“Never doubt the power and determination of the Australian people,” Ritter said.

Sarah Hanson Young, the Greens environment spokeswoman and a South Australian senator, called on other parties to back Greens’ legislation that would put the Bight forward for world heritage protection.

“Opening a new fossil fuel basin in the middle of our ocean was always madness,” she said. Moving to net zero emissions by 2050 means we must reduce pollution now, not give the green light to new polluting projects.”

Noah Schultz-Byard, South Australian director of the Australia Institute, said polling suggested an overwhelming majority of people would support world heritage listing for the Bight.

Stangeland said Equinor said it still held an offshore exploration permit in Western Australia and would maintain “other ongoing interests and activities in Australia”.

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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25 February, 2020  

Are plastic bag bans helping the environment? A look at results

Bans on single-use plastic bags -- one of the most pervasive sources of pollution -- are taking effect in cities and states across the U.S. as efforts to combat global plastic production pick up.

But while the moves are being lauded by environmentalists and the local governments that support them, some are questioning whether the move will be effective, primarily because of the unintended environmental consequences associated with replacement materials such as paper, thick plastic and reusable bags.

What the skeptics say

The shift from plastic to reusable and paper bags has been met with skepticism by some consumers, manufacturers and industry experts, who fear banning plastic will result in additional environmental problems and hurt consumers.

A 2017 study conducted by Recyc-Québec, a government recycling agency in Canada, looked at the life cycles of different disposable bags used within the province.

Results indicate that though conventional plastic bags tend to have higher environmental impacts when released into the environment, when compared to alternatives (such as compostable bioplastic, paper, thick plastic, and oxo-degradable plastic bags), they appear to have the least overall environmental impact (except as litter).

“Because of its thinness and lightness, being designed for a single use, its life cycle requires little material and energy,” the report says. “In addition, it avoids the production of garbage bags since it is commonly used for this function as well.”

The study, which looks at human health, quality of ecosystems, use of fossil fuels and abandonment in the environment, indicates that paper was the lowest-performing type of single-use bag with potential environmental impacts ranging 4 to 28 times that of a standard plastic grocery bag.

Also, reusables made from cotton, woven and non-woven polypropylene bags require tens to thousands of uses before they become more environmentally efficient than single-use plastic bags, the study says.

From Recyc-Quebec to the United Kingdom's Environment Agency other studies highlight the necessity of prolonged use when using reusable bags in order for their environmental benefits to exceed that of single-use plastic bags.

Research conducted by Oregon's Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) suggests compostable materials can often result in greater environmental costs than non-compostable alternatives because of the impacts associated with extracting, processing, and manufacturing raw materials during onset production.

David Allaway, a senior policy analyst at DEQ’s Materials Management Program, said that in the case of 90% of manufactured items, most impact occurs when producing the product rather than when it goes to the landfill or gets recycled.

“The public believes materials come to us free of impact, and all we have to think about is compositing versus landfilling or recycling. In reality, it’s not quite true. By the time we buy this stuff most of the environmental impact has been done.”

Allaway points to the importance of assessing materials based on their intended purpose.

"I don’t think that a clear case can be made that either recycled paper or virgin plastic grocery bags are universally “better” or “worse” for the environment. Most life cycle assessments generally point to plastic grocery bags having fewer impacts than paper, but that isn’t always the case. Depending on which environmental issue you prioritize - litter, climate change, air toxins, marine debris, water consumption, etc. - you might favor one material over the other. There is no consistent or universal winner."

For Sarah Nichols, sustainable Maine project director at the Natural Resources Council of Maine, the decision to ban single-use plastic bags was one she struggled with for the past six years.

Virgin plastic, she explained, is ultimately a byproduct of the fossil fuel industry and is kept a low-cost material, allowing it to be made abundantly. As fossil fuels are major contributors to climate change, Nicholas says she has come to believe banning plastic bags altogether is the right thing to do. Similar to California and Oregon's bans, she believes people in Maine will not only adhere to the restriction, but reap its benefits.

“Every independent life cycle assessment that has looked at various bagging options has found that the common plastic grocery bag, when disposed of properly, has the least environmental impact," Matt Seaholm, executive director of the American Recyclable Plastic Bag Alliance said. "Paper has its purposes and should be an option that consumers can choose from, but there is no doubt that it takes more material, energy and water to manufacture than plastic, and its weight and bulkiness necessitate seven trucks to transport the same number of bags that can be hauled in just one truck of plastic.”

And Adrian Hong, president of Island Plastic Bags, Inc. in Hawaii, believes grocery bags should be available for a fee rather than ultimately banned because of the impact on manufacturers.

“I don’t think replacing plastic with other materials makes the planet better off,” he said, “You have to look at the life-cycle of the materials to see what’s best.”

SOURCE 






Waste problems from wind and solar? Yes, it’s why we need proper decommissioning

This week Bloomberg Energy issued an attention-grabbing report on a serious waste problem with wind turbines: retired turbine blades are clogging up landfills.

This problem is only going to get worse, as Bloomberg reports, because right now the blades at the end of their lifespan are from wind power built over a decade ago. There’s been a fivefold increase in installing wind turbines since, powered in large part by federal and state incentives and mandates. What are we going to do when all those turbine blades reach their end?

This problem isn’t news to John Locke Foundation readers. We discussed the huge problem of turbine blade disposal in January. In December research intern Nick Wilkinson wrote about wind power’s noise pollution, visual pollution, disruptions of aircraft and military radar, and turbine blade waste. We’ve also recently discussed two Harvard studies that found transitioning to wind and solar would require so much land that it would actually contribute to global warming.

JLF readers have also read about studies showing that transitioning away from nuclear energy costs lives, that transitioning into more expensive energy costs lives, and that because of intermittency issues, wind and solar are actually the most costly ways of reducing emissions. We have also discussed the problem of wind power “takings.” That’s the euphemism used by the Obama-era U.S. Fish and Wildlife Division to refer to eagles slaughtered by wind turbines, as the division approved permits for such slaughter for 30 years, up from five.

What makes disposing of wind turbine blades so bad for landfills and the environment? All these things:

They’re huge, from 100 feet long to the length of a football field

They can’t be hauled away without being cut into pieces right there on site

Cutting them requires very expensive, specialized equipment
It takes a tractor-trailer to haul off a blade once it’s been cut into pieces. It takes one tractor-trailer per blade

So much trucking contributes to emissions

Over the next four year, the U.S. will be removing 8,000 blades per year

Future years will see much greater number of blade retirements, as five times as many turbines are being installed now than before

The European Union requires blades to be burned in kilns or power plants. Burning them contributes to emissions

They can’t be recycled. They’re made of resin and fiberglass and currently can’t be repurposed

They’re made to withstand hurricane-force winds — so they can’t be crushed for efficient landfill storage

Landfills don’t really have the space for them. Obtaining permitting for new landfills is also very expensive

In the next 20 years, the U.S. will have over 720,000 tons of waste blade material

Studies project increased global warming from wind power’s land-use requirements

Those studies don’t account for the additional land that would be needed for landfills for wind turbine blade disposal

Wind turbine blades are “forever waste”

In short, disposing of wind turbines is a significant problem, with negative impacts on communities and the environment.

It is reminiscent of the negative community and environmental impacts of solar panel disposal. Carolina Journal has reported for years about chemical waste components from used solar panels, including such things as gallium arsenide, tellurium, silver, crystalline silicon, lead, and also GenX and related compounds in solar panel components.

Dangerous waste underscores the need for decommissioning and financial assurance

It is for these reasons that JLF has written for years about the prudent and reasonable policy of decommissioning and reclamation bonds for solar and wind facilities. It is something that was added to House Bill 589 in 2017, a significant electricity reform and compromise bill, but the solar lobby succeeded in having that section removed.

Decommission and reclamation are standard environmental protection for other land uses. It’s so noncontroversial, in fact, that the Bureau of Land Management under President Barack Obama required full reclamation bonding for solar and wind energy projects on public lands.

Fortunately, last year the General Assembly passed decommissioning for solar and wind facilities. HB 329 requires the Environmental Management Commission (EMC) to come up with rules for the decommissioning of solar and wind power plants by January 1, 2022. The law requires EMC to consider many factors in determining the rules for decommissioning, including such considerations as:

Do solar panels, batteries, or materials used in solar and wind facilities exhibit characteristics of hazardous waste?

Can they be reused, refurbished, recycled, safely deposited in landfills, or safely disposed as hazardous waste?

How much of the state’s landfill capacity will be taken up by solar cells, wind turbines, and batteries?

How do other states and the federal government regulate these issues, including decommissioning and financial assurance?

How much financial assurance should be required to ensure proper decommissioning?

Watch out that special interests don’t capture the process

The key to EMC drawing up proper regulations governing decommissioning and reclamation of wind and solar facilities, however, is to make sure that the renewable energy lobby, solar and wind companies, and solar and wind advocates don’t capture this regulatory process.

The bill requires EMC to “establish a stakeholder process for development of the regulatory program.” The problem there is, in practice the reliance on “stakeholders” is an invitation to regulatory capture.

The term “stakeholder” is misleading. If you have a business interest is in the regulated industry, you’re considered a stakeholder. If you’re an ordinary person going about your daily business living and breathing the air and drinking the water and paying taxes and utility bills, you’re not:

Politically speaking, the citizens themselves — though they have the most at stake — aren’t thought of as stakeholders. In Lincoln’s memorable description, the American system is “Government of the people, by the people, for the people.” On the other hand, stakeholders tend to be of the lobbies, by the politicians, for the special interests.

Even if there is a consumer advocate involved, their single voice is given equal weight to the chorus of all the many other, lesser stakeholders involved. If democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what’s for lunch, then regulation via “stakeholders” is a wolf, a coyote, a lion, a jackal, and a lamb choosing whose constituency bears which costs of providing dinner.

Last year, for example, Gov. Roy Cooper’s Department of Environmental Quality identified 164 “stakeholders” in Cooper’s “Clean Energy Plan.” These were “experts and key stakeholders with a vested interest in clean energy.” It took two pages to list them all.

Despite all that, only 7 percent of those lesser stakeholders considered Affordability in electricity a “value to prioritize.” C’mon. You can bet that ordinary people have a radically different opinion on the need for affordable electricity than those “key stakeholders”!

Legislators need to be wary of what ideas come from this stakeholder process. The cronies and special interests have a vested interest in trying to avoid — or barring that, downplay — standard environmental cleanup and restoration of land used for industrial purposes. They’ve beat back decommissioning and reclamation before. The elected representatives of the people will have to keep their focus on which stakeholders they represent.

SOURCE 






Pressure Campaign: House Dems Tell Banks Not To Finance Arctic Drilling

A swath of House Democrats wants bank CEOs to follow the lead of Goldman Sachs in pledging to stop funding new drilling and oil explorations in the Arctic.

Thirty-three House Democrats on Thursday sent a letter to five bank leaders asking that their companies back off spending on oil drilling in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

“You have an opportunity to be more expansive: to reject not just this specific oil drilling program but to prevent the financing of gas exploration, other drilling infrastructure, and to wind down the industry’s participation in the ongoing operations of existing oil and gas projects in the region,” said the letter, spearheaded by Rep. Jared Huffman, a California Democrat.

“Roads, pipelines, gravel mines, airstrips, and other facilities that would be developed to support exploration and development on the coastal plain would fragment habitat, displace wildlife, and undermine the wilderness character of the Refuge,” said the letter.

“Millions of gallons of freshwater needed to support drilling activities could be drained from fragile Arctic rivers. And oil spills, which already occur on the North Slope, would harm fish and wildlife.”

But that approach didn’t sit well with Rep. Don Young, an Alaska Republican.

“Frankly, it’s sad that House Democrats continue to not only get involved in the business of the Alaska Natives who actually live near ANWR’s coastal plain, but they’re now trying to further involve themselves in the economy too,” Young told the Washington Examiner in an email statement.

“Alaskans can be trusted to responsibly develop energy on our lands, and using scare tactics against private companies won’t change that fact.”

Senate Democrats made a similar demand of the financial institutions earlier this month, prompting criticism by Sen. Dan. Sullivan, another Alaska Republican.

“I’m going to be a little partisan here because it’s always coming from the Democrats [who] seem to always want to tell me and my state how to manage Alaska’s environment,” Sullivan said during a Feb. 6 committee hearing.

“And then, you take the train [up the East Coast corridor], and you’re like, ‘Holy crap! You’re telling me how to manage my environment? Look at this environmental wasteland.’”

ANWR has been in the middle of a political tug of war between Republicans and Democrats for 40 years, pitting energy development advocates against environmentalists.

The 19.6-million-acre Arctic refuge was the focus of a measure within the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act that authorized energy development on 2,000 federal acres of ANWR.

House Democrats now aim to reverse plans to drill oil in the Arctic and passed a bill largely along party lines last September banning oil exploration in ANWR. The bill, however, was not picked up by the Republican-led Senate.

SOURCE 






Study: Carbon Sinks Won’t Cause A Massive Methane Bomb

glacier ice cores antarcticaPermafrost in the soil and methane hydrates deep in the ocean are large reservoirs of ancient carbon.

As soil and ocean temperatures rise, the reservoirs have the potential to break down, releasing enormous quantities of the potent greenhouse gas methane. But would this methane actually make it to the atmosphere?

Researchers at the University of Rochester—including Michael Dyonisius, a graduate student in the lab of Vasilii Petrenko, professor of earth and environmental sciences—and their collaborators studied methane emissions from a period in Earth’s history partly analogous to the warming of Earth today.

Their research, published in Science, indicates that even if methane is released from these large natural stores in response to warming, very little actually reaches the atmosphere.

“One of our take-home points is that we need to be more concerned about the anthropogenic emissions—those originating from human activities—than the natural feedbacks,” Dyonisius says.

What are methane hydrates and permafrost?

When plants die, they decompose into carbon-based organic matter in the soil. In extremely cold conditions, the carbon in the organic matter freezes and becomes trapped instead of being emitted into the atmosphere.

This forms permafrost, soil that has been continuously frozen—even during the summer—for more than one year. Permafrost is mostly found on land, mainly in Siberia, Alaska, and Northern Canada.

Along with organic carbon, there is also an abundance of water ice in permafrost. When the permafrost thaws in rising temperatures, the ice melts, and the underlying soil becomes waterlogged, helping to create low-oxygen conditions—the perfect environment for microbes in the soil to consume the carbon and produce methane.

Methane hydrates, on the other hand, are mostly found in ocean sediments along the continental margins. In methane hydrates, cages of water molecules trap methane molecules inside.

Methane hydrates can only form under high pressures and low temperatures, so they are mainly found deep in the ocean.

If ocean temperatures rise, so will the temperature of the ocean sediments where the methane hydrates are located. The hydrates will then destabilize, fall apart, and release the methane gas.

“If even a fraction of that destabilizes rapidly and that methane is transferred to the atmosphere, we would have a huge greenhouse impact because methane is such a potent greenhouse gas,” Petrenko says. “The concern really has to do with releasing a truly massive amount of carbon from these stocks into the atmosphere as the climate continues to warm.”

Gathering data from ice cores

In order to determine how much methane from ancient carbon deposits might be released to the atmosphere in warming conditions, Dyonisius and his colleagues turned to patterns in Earth’s past.

They drilled and collected ice cores from Taylor Glacier in Antarctica. The ice core samples act like time capsules: they contain tiny air bubbles with small quantities of ancient air trapped inside.

The researchers use a melting chamber to extract the ancient air from the bubbles and then study its chemical composition.

Dyonisius’s research focused on measuring the composition of air from the time of Earth’s last deglaciation, 8,000-15,000 years ago.

“The time period is a partial analog to today, when Earth went from a cold state to a warmer state,” Dyonisius says. “But during the last deglaciation, the change was natural. Now the change is driven by human activity, and we’re going from a warm state to an even warmer state.”

Analyzing the carbon-14 isotope of methane in the samples, the group found that methane emissions from the ancient carbon reservoirs were small. Thus, Dyonisius concludes, “the likelihood of these old carbon reservoirs destabilizing and creating a large positive warming feedback in the present day is also low.”

Dyonisius and his collaborators also concluded that the methane released doesn’t reach the atmosphere in large quantities. The researchers believe this is due to several natural “buffers.”

Buffers protect against release to the atmosphere

In the case of methane hydrates, if the methane is released in the deep ocean, most of it is dissolved and oxidized by ocean microbes before it ever reaches the atmosphere.

If the methane in permafrost forms deep enough in the soil, it may be oxidized by bacteria that eat the methane, or the carbon in the permafrost may never turn into methane and may instead be released as carbon dioxide.

“It seems like whatever natural buffers are in place are ensuring there’s not much methane that gets released,” Petrenko says.

SOURCE 






Frogs be dammed … Australia needs more water

It is no surprise that with a continent as dry as Australia our most precious resource would be water.

If that is a given, how is it that it is well nigh impossible to build a dam in this country? We had a brilliant start with the Snowy River Scheme, but it is almost as if we completed that and decided to rest on our laurels.

Those laurels are getting pretty parched now. It is a forlorn task to find a site for a new dam that the Greens might support. Greens opposition to new dams is implacable and, when combined with the understandable hysteria of those who will be displaced because their properties lie within the area to be flooded to create the new dam, you have the perfect confluence of forces to create the big media campaigns that can terrify governments and send them weak at the knees. Too many pollies run at the first whiff of grapeshot and opportunities are lost.

Michael McCormack, the leader of the Nationals, and Barnaby Joyce, the man who wants to be leader of the Nationals, and Matt Canavan, the man who should be leader of the Nationals, are the only politicians who seem to have any interest in building more dams. The Greens can always find an endangered frog that should be saved at the expense of human ­beings’ need for clean water, so there are guaranteed to be plenty of citizens death-riding any plans to construct a dam.

I hope we find someone in power somewhere prepared to tell the nay-sayers where to get off. It would be wonderful if Scott Morrison could find the courage to build a dam as well as finance a new coal-fired power station on the east coast of Australia. If he showed that kind of courage, Anthony Albanese would be flat out ever beating him.

Any pollie with the ticker to defy the noisy frontline of demonstrators that opposes building almost anything and go ahead with real nation-building infrastructure projects will experience a surge in support. The punters love action but they don’t get much of it. Australians are getting to the point, after a period of stable economic growth, to look for a leader prepared to drag us back up towards the top of the developed world’s list of countries that make things happen.

Gladys Berejiklian has shown us the way on infrastructure and that is why she is winning. Whether it’s road or rail, her government has plans in place that, once implemented, will keep NSW ahead of the game in the decades to come. The big plays do matter and she gets it that every parent has an eye on the kind of future being built for their children.

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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24 February, 2020  

Greenpeace Co-Founder Dr. Patrick Moore: ‘Fossil fuels are 100% organic & were produced with solar energy

Prager University video:

"Global Warming activists will tell you that CO2 is bad and dangerous. The EPA has even classified it as a pollutant. But is it? Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore provides some surprising facts about the benefits of CO2 that you won’t hear in the current debate.

Partial transcript:

 “All life is carbon-based. And the carbon for all that life originates from carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. All of the carbon in the fossil fuels we are burning for energy today was once in the atmosphere as carbon dioxide before it was consumed by plankton in the sea and plants on the land.

Coal, oil and natural gas are the remains of those plankton and plants that have been transformed by heat and pressure deep in the earth’s crust. In other words, fossil fuels are 100% organic and were produced with solar energy. Sounds positively green.”

“It has become common to refer to the emissions from burning fossil fuels for energy as ‘carbon’ emissions. That is entirely misleading. Carbon dioxide is not carbon. Carbon dioxide is a colorless, odorless, tasteless gas which is an indispensable food for all living things.

From a big picture perspective, we are actually living in a low carbon dioxide era…

The optimum level of co2 for plant growth, for example, is 4- 5 times what is currently found in our atmosphere…

We are already seeing the positive effects of increased CO2 now. Satellite measurements have noted the greening of the earth as crops and forests grow due to our higher levels of co2. It turns out that carbon dioxide are not dirty words after all. We should celebrate co2 as the giver of life that it is.”

SOURCE 






The mad rush to electric vehicles

Will this be another disaster for consumers?

Duggan Flanakin

Tesla’s stock market value is already bigger than Ford and General Motors combined, says a report in Forbes magazine. Elon Musk’s company had already received nearly $5 billion in federal subsidies by 2015, helping him amass a net worth of $31 billion. Who says government cannot make anyone rich?

But hold on. An ascendant Bernie Sanders has called for a massive expansion of government-run electricity production. He claims to be no friend of billionaires and is running against multiple billionaires, including two Democrat candidates and 23 contributors to Mayor Pete’s campaign.

But he sure is helping the rich. Sanders and many other politicos have championed a multi-state effort to end the sale of vehicles with internal combustion (IC) engines. So have several European nations. Related goals include phasing out coal, oil and natural gas for heating, electric power generation and other uses.

As Politico reports, a major part of Sanders’ $16 trillion Greener New Deal  allocates massive new funding for the four existing “power marketing administrations” that are overseen by the Department of Energy, Tennessee Valley Authority and a new federal agency. The money would go to vastly expand their solar, wind and even geothermal power production.

Matt Palumbo, writing in the Bongino Report, says the Sanders plan will need $2 trillion just for infrastructure, dwarfing the cost of the interstate highway system, to add 800 gigawatts of intermittent, weather-dependent wind and solar energy. Right now Sanders insists that he is not “nationalizing” energy production, but merely providing wholesale energy to public and private local suppliers. However, these subsidized government-run facilities will surely control the energy market. That looks like nationalization in all but official nomenclature.

Private companies that now rely on coal or natural gas will be further squeezed by mandated deep cuts in CO2 emissions. Meanwhile, energy demand for a mandated and growing fleet of electric vehicles will soar, requiring still more wind turbines, solar panels, backup batteries, transmission lines, and (as I note in a recent article about electric buses) metals, minerals and mining demands on unprecedented scales – coupled with rampant environmental destruction, child labor, and horrific increases in cancer and other diseases from the absence of workplace safety and pollution control standards.

Americans have expressed great displeasure over subsidizing EVs for the wealthy, a recent American Energy Alliance poll found. Only one in five voters would trust the federal government to make decisions about what kinds of cars should be subsidized – or mandated. Many do not even like, or cannot afford, the innovations already introduced for internal combustion vehicles, as evidenced by data showing that the average age of the U.S. vehicle fleet has increased in recent years.

Who can blame them for being angry? Wealthy EV buyers can get $7500 federal and up to $2500 state tax credits (not just deductions), free or low-cost charging at stations installed at taxpayer and electricity consumer cost, and access to HOV lanes even with no passengers. EV drivers pay no gasoline tax, and thus pay nothing for road construction, repair and maintenance. And as states “go green” and eliminate fossil fuel and nuclear power, average Americans will have to endure the eyesores, noise, habitat destruction and wildlife losses that will come with millions more wind turbines and solar panels.

Nevertheless, despite public qualms, most automakers have joined the EV movement. Like gossip in a small town, proposals and promises to ban or end production of IC engines have spread like wildfire. The Chinese-owned Swedish automaker Volvo announced in 2017 it would stop designing new IC engines. German giant Daimler (Mercedes Benz) followed suit last year. And in the United States, General Motors in 2018 announced plans to offer only battery-powered or hydrogen-powered vehicles in the near future.

These automakers are perhaps just responding to the political climate in Europe. The United Kingdom just moved up its cutoff date for banning sales of new IC vehicles to 2035. The UK ban would even include hybrids! France and other countries are holding to a 2040 date for mandating all-electric fleets, while Norway has set a goal (not a mandate) to eliminate most IC engines (but not hybrids) by 2025. But amazingly California lawmakers actually killed a 2018 effort to ban IC engines by 2040.

Meanwhile, European automakers have moved to profit from EV charging stations. IONITY (created in 2017 as a joint venture between the BMW Group, Mercedes-Benz AG, the Ford Motor Company, and the Volkswagen Group with Audi and Porcshe) has already built over 200 facilities with over 860 charging points. It plans to expand to 400 facilities in 24 countries by yearend 2020. And IONITY is not alone.

Europe today still has over 100,000 petrol and diesel fueling stations, certain to shrink as IC engines are now pariahs. But how do Europeans plan to charge all the electric cars, trucks and buses, if they must rely entirely on intermittent, unreliable, weather-dependent, super expensive wind and solar electricity?

Before February 2020, IONITY was charging a flat, fixed rate of eight Euros (about $8.87) for a fast charging session. That was less than 15 cents per kilowatt-hour for a 60-kW charge that might be good for 210 miles – on a continent where electricity prices are already 25 to 45 cents per kWh. With EU gasoline prices ranging from 1.77 euros/liter ($7.35 per gallon) in the Netherlands to $4.41/gallon in Romania, drivers would need about $31 in Romania or $51 in the Netherlands to drive the same distance (assuming 30 mpg), even at these incredible (and unsustainable) bargain basement electricity prices.

But as of February 1, IONITY switched to unit pricing at a rate of 0.79 euro/kWh (88 cents/kWh), or about $52.80 for a 60-kW charge. That’s a 500% increase in the cost of charging your car, just to travel a couple hundred miles. Suddenly, an EV charge is a whole lot more expensive than a fill-up.

So IONITY is offering discounts that customers can purchase from IONITY partner companies. At home chargers in the EU cost about $18 per 60-kW charge, plus about $1,000 for installation. That’s at the average EU residential rate of 30 cents/kWh (twice the current U.S. average). And that’s before the mad rush to electric cars, trucks and buses – and the mad rush to expensive “renewable” energy.

How will poor and working classes afford this, especially people who must drive to work or must use trucks in their small businesses? Who will subsidize their soaring costs – the EU’s increasingly stretched and impoverished middle class? Its millionaires and billionaires?

Here’s the rub for Americans. If Sanders gets his way, the federal government will control the price and availability of electricity in the USA. California, which wants to mandate EVs only, has already faced multi-day electricity blackouts due to fire concerns, and if there’s no power there’s no charging. Many other countries also lack reliable electric power – and increasing electricity scarcity (almost certain in a fossil fuel-free environment) drives up prices even in government-controlled marketplaces.

After the 1970s oil embargo, the United States opted for a broad-based energy sector, so that shortages in one fuel would not cripple the national economy. But today, many cities have already moved to ban oil, coal and natural gas, nuclear is still taboo, and wind and solar are intermittent. The push toward an all-electric society – plus heavy and rising burdens on the power grid from intermittent power generations and charging all-electric vehicles – looks like a recipe for disaster, at least for the average consumer.

The well-connected always do well enough in controlled economies – at least until government policies send energy prices soaring, and send angry poor and working class protesters into the streets, to rage and rampage, as has happened in Iran, France and Chile.

But what can a We the Governed do but submit to the will of the all-powerful state envisioned by Sanders and his fellow Democrat presidential wannabes? They’re all insulated by their wealth and positions from the impacts of their policies. But what about the rest of us? State and federal ruling classes might be surprised at how liberty and opportunity-loving Americans respond.

Via email





Green Agenda: Nationalize Energy

In addition to universal healthcare, Bernie Sanders wants to nationalize energy, do away with nuclear, and compete with private industry at the taxpayers’ expense.

The privileged political class have some great societies regressing; while in economically freer countries, you see immense progress.

Nationalization has never carried a great connotation. Nationalism is a pretty cultish concept. National Socialists… well we all know how that turned out.

I’d mentioned Elizabeth Warren’s plan to nationalize corporations.

There’s been a lot of talk about nationalized healthcare.

Net neutrality made a strong appearance for making internet services a public utility.

Here’s the thing: these are all major power grabs and these are all part of a pattern akin to failed socialist models.

Now Bernie Sanders is looking to nationalize energy as part of a larger Green Agenda. He wants to get the US off fossil fuels, so he will simply subsidize the energy providers HE thinks should win:

“A Sanders administration would pour funding into the four existing “power marketing administrations” that are overseen by the Energy Department, as well as the Tennessee Valley Authority and one newly created entity, to vastly expand their solar, wind and geothermal power production. Those organizations currently provide power from hydroelectric dams to 33 states, and would be able to sell the increased green energy to local utilities nationwide — creating a sort of “public option” that would compete with the coal, natural gas and nuclear plants owned by privately owned power generators.”

The goal is to be on 100% renewable energy PLUS get off nuclear by around 2030. Currently, sixty nuclear power plants are responsible for over 50% of carbon free energy, yet Sanders is saying that he would not renew nuclears’ operating licenses, but rather allow them to expire.

This all stems from the belief (not fact) that the free market isn’t moving fast enough to save the planet from certain doom. But the free market moves as fast as the consumer base can bear.

A closer examination of environmental policies indicates that many of them are not as “green” as they’d have to believe. The amount of land required to harness enough wind and solar alone is hardly environmentally sound. That wind turbines are not recyclable poses a major issue. The fact that electric cars still rely on coal based electricity and their batteries are the size of half the car is certainly a concern.

I know we are not supposed to look at the price tag — because who can put a price on saving the world — but, $2 trillion dollars is a 50% increase from our current spending. Americans who are already fed up with the reckless waste and spending in Congress now, couldn’t possibly be persuaded to sign on to another $2 trillion in green agenda spending.

When asked about universal healthcare, people loved it… up until they were presented the cost. The support quickly shrunk. This is true on a state level and on a national level.

The same is true for environmentalism. Do people generally support good stewardship of the earth? Sure! Are they willing to pay the taxes associated with this $2 trillion agenda? Unlikely.

Energy analysts, however, caution that Sanders’s 2030 plan would require a federal infrastructure investment not seen since the construction of the interstate highway system. To get close to Sanders’ 100 percent clean energy goal by 2030, researchers estimate the U.S. would need to add about 800 GW of wind and solar resources — about 25 times the amount the federal government expects to be built this year — along with ample amounts of battery storage and transmission. The Sanders camp forecasts that would cost about $2 trillion.

Sanders makes a distinction with his plan in that he is not necessarily “taking over” private energy companies, he’s starting new ones meant to “compete” with the private sector.

The private sector relies on voluntary patronization. They can only charge actual users of their services. The federal government doesn’t answer to any of that. They can just give away energy and undercut the private sector at the taxpayer’s expense.

Here’s the worst part: the private industry players will be forced to pay taxes and basically FUND their competition.

All this nationalization talk should make people take pause. Nationalization is a common practice among developing countries, while privatization is typical of developed countries. When I think about federal control over corporations, banking, energy, healthcare, and food, I can’t help but look at the failed examples around the world.

Venezuela nationalized its railway, oil production, cement industry, steel, rice processing and packaging, six supermarkets, glass manufacturing, and is looking to nationalize food production as well.

Never mind all the nationalized industries around the world. Even in the US, there’s the good ole TSA: nationalization of airport security. Puerto Rico has its commonwealth run utility company, PREPA, which is in horrible disrepair.

Why are so many US politicians trying to emulate the failed policies of undeveloped nations?

Businesses are there to serve and get paid. If people are dissatisfied, then they will show it. One simple example is with the proliferation of more plant-based foods, gluten free foods, and keto/paleo friendly foods. Businesses are absolutely listening and paying attention to demand.

Businesses should not have to please the government with the rate in which they are innovating. If the private sector couldn’t find a way to make sustainable energy profitable, the government volunteering for that undertaking guarantees an operational loss.

If people who KNOW the industry can’t get there from here efficiently, why do politicians think ignorant bureaucrats will do any better?

I’m concerned for the US. These politicians are coming for major sectors of the economy. If you’re in the US, it might be time to look at other options.

SOURCE 





Big Green, Inc: The Bloomberg Family Foundation and the Future of American Energy

Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is running for President of the United States, but that’s not all he’s up to.

He’s also working to upend our energy-spurred prosperity. The Bloomberg Family Foundation, a $7 billion organization of which he is the benefactor has made obstruction of our energy economy its raison d’etre. Bloomberg himself also presides over the board the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group, an international alliance of cities whose mayors back his climate and energy approach. Bloomberg is also the chairman emeritus of the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) and the chairman of the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD).

These organizations claim to be nonpartisan arbiters of the climate risk that businesses face, but in reality, they’re controlled almost entirely by the network of hyper-partisan foundations that fuel the environmental left, and their recommendations reflect this. Unfortunately, the disclosure standards established by the SASB have an air of legitimacy that makes them insidious. They are starting to creep into legislation, and if a bill currently in the environmental resources subcommittee were to pass, the recommendations would be used in place of the decisions of the government regulatory agencies whose rightful purview this is.

This interference is just the tip of Michael Bloomberg’s green influence iceberg. Delving into his foundation’s grantmaking paints the full picture. The Bloomberg Family Foundation is a major cog in influence enterprise we call Big Green, Inc.

Last month, the Institute for Energy Research released the latest update to the Big Green, Inc. database, a project that seeks to shine a light on the whopping sums of money quietly fueling the national environmental lobby and its efforts to restrict affordable, reliable energy.

This update covers 1,583 grants originating from the Heinz Endowments, the Kresge Foundation, and the focus of this article, the Bloomberg Family Foundation.

Grantmaking Basics

The Bloomberg Family Foundation supports mainly large national environmental organizations, and does so primarily through million and multi-million dollar grants. From 2012 to 2016 the foundation gave more than $132 million to groups working in the energy and environment space.

These grants were given to groups like the Sierra Club and the Environmental Defense Fund for a variety of broad energy-hampering goals. Many of the organizations that Bloomberg funds are advocates for the total abandonment of reliable mineral energy in the near term. These organizations fail to understand the real state of American energy, and do not acknowledge the incredible burden that a significant decrease in energy availability would have on everyday life. Because of the intermittency problem, wind and solar can never truly replace coal, nuclear, and natural gas. Reliable generating capabilities are necessary for the maintenance of our energy economy, not just when the sun shines or the wind blows, but when the energy is needed.

From 2015 to 2016, the Bloomberg Family Foundation (BFF) gave $4,800,000 to the Energy Foundation, “[t]o support the coordination and expansion of the beyond coal campaign”.The Beyond Coal Campaign, a project of the Sierra Club with partnerships throughout the environmental movement, seeks to close all U.S. coal plants. Its self-described main objective is to, “replace dirty coal with clean energy by mobilizing grassroots activists in local communities to advocate for the retirement of old and outdated coal plants and to prevent new coal plants from being built.” Brazen objectives notwithstanding, the reality is that the reliable baseload power provided by coal cannot be interchanged seamlessly with the intermittent generation of wind and solar.

Natural Resources Defense Council

BFF has also supported the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) with a $1.5 million grant “to reduce carbon pollution”. But what do NRDC efforts to limit carbon pollution look like? According to NRDC, its team of lawyers, scientists, economists, engineers, and activists, is seeking to extend government control of our energy use at all levels of governance: state, local, federal, and international.

NRDC’s advocacy “for deep cuts to carbon pollution by ending our dependence on dangerous, climate-warming fossil fuels” tends to involve a heavy dose of both lobbying and litigation. They claim to “win court cases that allow the federal government to limit carbon pollution from cars and power plants.” What NRDC really means is that they facilitate the reduction of people’s energy choices. The upshot is Bloomberg Family Foundation money is funding NRDC’s full-court press on affordable, reliable energy. Curtailing energy freedom has real impacts on people’s lives that organizations like NRDC tend to intentionally gloss over.

World Resources Institute

BFF also gave $2,950,000 to the World Resources Institute (WRI) in 2015 to “[t]o help governments, businesses and society make better-informed decisions on economic development and climate change”. Unsuprisingly, this organization’s view of climate change mitigation is fundamental economic and lifestyle shifts, so although climate concern may sound moderate and reasonable, in this case it is anything but. Their view is that: “[a]ddressing climate change requires dramatic changes to how we power our homes and factories and build our cities to how we feed our families and move around. Yet countries, businesses, states and cities have yet to make the deep structural economic and societal shifts that are required.” These “shifts” that they talk about are toward more government control of the economy and restriction personal autonomy; they mean less driving, less electricity, less trade, and less freedom. This goal is more about giving the government power over our lives than it is about good stewardship of the resources.

Environmental Defense Fund

The Bloomberg Family Foundation has also given significant amounts of money to the Environmental Defense Fund. One such donation was $100,000 in support of the 2015 Climate Leadership Summit, one of the key gatherings for the big organizations at which outrageous, economically disastrous ideas are generated and circulated. BFF also gave the Environmental Defense Fund $1,509,000 for anti-natural gas initiatives. This includes their state and federal level fights for methane standards, as well as attempts to increase government regulation of air and water. To their credit though, the EDF does acknowledge the role of natural gas in reducing overall U.S. air pollution, and at least does not seek an outright ban on natural gas production.

Conclusion

Without the affordable, readily available energy we now have, much of the modern lifestyle would be deleteriously impacted. Driving, keeping our homes warm, and easily accessing consumer products would all be in jeopardy.

Michael Bloomberg’s and the Bloomberg Family Foundation’s attempts to reinvent our energy mix ignore this reality; to go fully renewable is to go without. Renewables accounted for only 11 percent of U.S. energy consumption in 2018. If that other 89 percent is banned in the next 10, 15, or 20 years, the difference won’t be made up in time to prevent catastrophic negative impacts. Imagine electricity prices that are 10 times their current levels, or possibly much more than that, with widespread reliability issues and serious rationing. That is the reality of 100 percent renewables in the near term, the reality that the Bloomberg Family Foundation is funding.

In his run for president, Michael Bloomberg has echoed the positions of the foundations he funds. His plan for the electricity sector includes plans to “(a)chieve a complete transition from gas to clean energy”, as well as to “embed environmental justice into how the government conducts its work”. “Environmental justice” is all too often a shibboleth for plans to redistribute resources and institute government control. Bloomberg is repeating in his presidential platform the exact same extreme ideas that his foundation has long funded.

Nowhere is this more clear than in his plan for electricity, “Mike will completely phase out emissions in the electricity sector. By 2028, 80% of electricity generation in the U.S. will come from clean sources – moving toward 100% as soon as possible thereafter.” His platform, just like the platforms of the organizations his foundation funds, is attempting to convince the public that a near term renewable energy transition is feasible, despite the economic and technical realities.

SOURCE 









Pumped hydro project in  South Australia dies

Pumped hydro is a great Greenie dream but is very costly.  To be viable you have to find two big holes in the ground that are near to one another but at different levels.  Such sites are rare -- with big mines being the only likely source.

AGL had planned a 250MW pumped hydro storage for a SA copper mine site

The mining company had been due to hand part of its Kanmantoo mine over to energy company AGL, but changed its mind after discovering more copper ore nearby.

The ore could only be accessed via tunnels from the bottom of the mine's giant pit, which would become impossible when AGL filled the pit with water for its hydro-electric project.

AGL planned to store water in a dam at the mine site, allow it to flow down into the pit to generate electricity when power prices are high, then pump it back up when prices are low.

The facility would perform the same function as a battery: providing extra power to stabilise the energy network at short notice.


In April 2019, Hillgrove announced it had entered into binding agreements with AGL Energy Limited (AGL), to sell the right to develop, own and operate the Pumped Hydro Energy Storage (PHES) project at the Kanmantoo mine site.

The sale was subject to the satisfaction of a number of conditions which needed to be satisfied within specified timeframes. Several of those conditions remain unsatisfied.

After a period of extensive negotiations, Hillgrove and AGL have mutually agreed to terminate the PHES Project Agreement and associated project documents and effect a clean break without any further obligations on either party.

Since signing the Project Agreement, Hillgrove has conducted work on an underground mining project below the Giant Pit. As announced 30 October 2019, Hillgrove undertook a limited drilling programme, which resulted in the preparation of a new Mineral Resource Estimate (MRE) for the Central and East Kavanagh underground area in accordance with the JORC Code 2012 Edition.

The resource estimate is constrained by the extent of the drilling and not by the geology, in both the along strike and down dip directions.

As announced 31 January 2020, Hillgrove received the regulatory approval to commence underground mining. The approval includes expanded capacity of the tailings storage facility, providing optionality for future mining within haulage distance to the Kanmantoo processing and tailings complex.

However, Hillgrove and AGL could not reach agreement on a way forward that enabled Hillgrove to commence underground mining and AGL to progress development of the PHES simultaneously.

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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23 February, 2020  

Shocking satellite images reveal that 20 per cent of snow cover on an Antarctic island MELTED in just 10 days during record-breaking temperatures of more than 68°F earlier this month

Once again, notice the dog that didn't bark:  No mention of climate change.  And there is a good reason for that. The Antarctic peninsula is full of volcanoes so is often warm because of volcanic activity (among  other things). Global warming is irrelevant 

Shocking satellite images reveal that 20 per cent of snow cover on an Antarctic island MELTED in just 10 days, during record-breaking temperatures.

The shots of the ice cap on Eagle Island — captured by the 'Operational Land Imager' on the Landsat 8 satellite on February 4 and 13, 2020 — show melt ponds appearing.

The warm spell began on February 5 and ran through to February 13, peaking on February 6, with temperatures on the Antarctic Peninsula reaching 64.9°F (18.3°C).

This figure — the hottest on record for Antarctica — was the around the same temperature as in Los Angeles, California, on the exact same day.

'I haven’t seen melt ponds develop this quickly in Antarctica,' said glaciologist Mauri Pelto of Nichols College in Massachusetts. 'You see these kinds of melt events in Alaska and Greenland, but not usually in Antarctica.'

According to Professor Pelto, the warming event caused 0.9 square miles (1.5 square kilometres) of the snowpack on Eagle Island to become saturated with meltwater — a phenomena that shows up as blue patches in the satellite images.

Climate models suggest that Eagle Island experienced the most melt on February 6 — when temperatures peaked — losing around 1 inch (3 cm) of the snowpack.

In fact, 4 inches (10.6 centimetres) of the island's snowcap melted in the period from February 6–11 — the equivalent of 20 per cent of the seasonal snow accumulation.

Professor Pelto also used satellite images to identify widespread surface melting take place on the nearby Boydell Glacier.

Enduring warm spells have become a common phenomena in Antarctica in recent years, experts say.

The recent warm spell was triggered by a combination of different meteorological events, experts said.

These included a ridge of high pressure building up over Cape Horn, Chile, at the beginning of February, which allowed warm temperatures to build up.

The Antarctic peninsula is usually shielded from warm air masses by strong winds known as the Southern Hemisphere westerlies that circle the continent.

However, the westerlies were in a weakened state at the time of the warm spell , allowing extra tropical warm air to reach the ice sheet from across the Southern Ocean.

Sea surface temperatures were also elevated during this warm period, by around 3.6–5.4°F (2–3°C).

In addition, so-called 'foehn winds' — strong, dry gusts that travel down the sides of mountains — helped to bring warm air down onto the snowpacks.

These were caused in February by westerly winds running into the mountain chain that lies along the Antarctic Peninsula, causing the air to cool and condense out clouds — a process which releases heat into the surrounding air.

This warm, dry air then travels down the other side of the mountains, both heating up the region directly as well as indirectly by leading to fewer clouds and more direct sunlight bearing down on the ice.

'Two things that can make a foehn-induced melt event stronger are stronger winds and higher temperatures,' explained atmospheric researcher Rajashree Tri Datta of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

The warm atmospheric and oceanic conditions this month would therefore have been conducive for foehn winds.

The recent heatwave has been the third major melting episode of the current Antarctic summer, following warm spells in November 2019 and January 2020.

'If you think about this one event in February, it isn’t that significant,' noted Professor Pelto. He added: 'It’s more significant that these events are coming more frequently.'

SOURCE 






10 Plagues That Are Hitting Our Planet Simultaneously

The Pharaoh had a similar problem around 3,000 years ago.  You can read all about it in the Book of Exodus

All of a sudden, really crazy things are starting to happen all over the world.  Giant swarms of locusts are absolutely devastating entire regions, extremely unusual storms are confounding meteorologists, earthquake and volcanic activity are both on the rise, and five very dangerous diseases are sweeping across the globe.  So far in 2020, it has just been one thing after another, and many are speculating about what could be ahead if events continue to escalate.  The other day my wife mentioned that one of her friends suggested that I should put together a list of all the weird stuff that has been taking place, and so that is what I have decided to do.  The following is a list of 10 plagues that are hitting our planet simultaneously…

#1 Armies Of Locusts – As I detailed the other day, swarms of locusts the size of major cities have been devouring entire farms in Africa in as little as 30 seconds.  These swarms have also been spreading throughout the Middle East, and now we have learned that they have even reached China…

A gigantic swarm of locusts that belong to a plague that has ravaged millions of acres of crops across east Africa has been spotted reaching the Chinese border.

Billions of the insects have destroyed food supplies across Kenya, Somalia and Ethiopia in what has been described as the worst plague for decades.

#2 Extremely Bizarre Weather Patterns – It is almost as if virtually all of the old rules have suddenly been thrown out the window.  An all-time record 209 mph wind gust just hit Calfiornia, and absolutely crazy storms are happening all over the planet.  For example, just check out what just took place in Australia…

Sydney has been thrown into chaos by a devastating storm that saw two months of rainfall in just two days – forcing mass evacuations, leaving 150,000 homes without power, and prompted warnings not to drive to work. The storm dumped 400mm of rain on the city over the weekend, causing mayhem for commuters on Monday morning with roads blocked, ferries canceled and trains suffering major delays across the network.

#3 Unprecedented Flooding – We are seeing unusual flooding all over the world right now, and the flooding that is devastating the southern U.S. at this moment is being called “unprecedented”…

In Jackson, Mississippi, hundreds of residents either watched their homes flood over the weekend or worried their residence would soon be drenched as the Pearl River crested Monday at 36.8 feet, its third-highest level ever recorded – behind only 1979 and 1983.

Calling the Jackson floods “historic” and “unprecedented,” Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves said in a Sunday press conference that “we do not anticipate this situation to end anytime soon. It will be days before we are out of the woods and the waters recede.”

#4 Major Earthquakes – Really big earthquakes are happening with such frequency now that it is very difficult for me to write about them all.  For example, a magnitude 7.7 quake recently struck off of the coast of Jamaica, but I have been so busy writing about other disasters that I have not even mentioned it until now…

A magnitude 7.7 earthquake struck Tuesday about 80 miles from Jamaica, shaking people in the Caribbean and as far away as Miami.

A tsunami of 0.4 feet was recorded in the Cayman Islands at George Town, but no tsunami was observed at Port Royal, Jamaica, or Puerto Plata, Dominican Republic.

#5 Unusual Volcanic Eruptions – Seismic activity has been rising all over the globe, and over the past couple of months we have seen volcanoes all over the world pop off like firecrackers.  One of the most notable eruptions that we have seen in recent days was the most powerful eruption of Mount Merapi in 90 years…

One of Indonesia’s most active volcanoes, Mount Merapi just experienced its most powerful eruption since 1930! The eruption reportedly took place on Thursday and was caught on video displaying a powerful and terrifying eruption showing the moment the crater exploded and launched lava and ash an estimated 2,000 meters into the air forcing local residents to stay outside of the designated no-go zone 3km (1.8 miles) from the crater.

#6 The Coronavirus – Needless to say, the coronavirus outbreak in China has been getting more headlines than anything else on this list.  The numbers continue to rise, and many are speculating that this could potentially become the worst global pandemic since the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918.  In a desperate attempt to keep the truth from getting out, the World Health Organization is asking the major social media companies to censor their users…

The World Health Organization has held talks with tech giants to stop the spread of coronavirus “misinformation,” despite the fact that some things once labeled “misinformation” have since turned out to be true.

The meeting was organized by the WHO but hosted by Facebook at its Menlo Park campus in California. Attendees included representatives from Amazon, Twilio, Dropbox, Google, Verizon, Salesforce, Twitter, YouTube, Airbnb, Kinsa and Mapbox.

SOURCE 






Climate activists have a target: Harvard’s endowment

Good show!  Cheap shares for climate skeptics

Climate change activists delayed the storied Harvard-Yale football game by rushing onto the field in protest last fall. This month, Harvard’s largest faculty group overwhelmingly urged the university to divest its massive endowment from fossil fuel companies. And earlier this week, five pro-divestment candidates captured spots on the ballot for election to Harvard’s powerful board of overseers.

Environmentalists have been encouraging Harvard for years to divest from fossil fuels. But the campaign has intensified in recent months, and the university is being hammered on multiple fronts to pull its endowment — with $41 billion in assets at last count — out of investments in oil, gas, and coal companies and those that drill and extract fossil fuels.

The Ivy League university is far from the only campus feeling the pressure, but as the owner of the world’s largest education endowment, it has also become the biggest target for activists.

“Because of the brand name…. the type of message it sends is really, really loud,” said Nathán Goldberg, a 2018 Harvard graduate and an organizer for the Harvard Forward campaign. Harvard Forward is trying to get alumni who back climate change-specific policies onto the board of overseers, one of two governing boards.

If Harvard divested, “It would be one of the bigger dominoes to fall,” Goldberg said.

Harvard officials have thus far resisted calls to divest from fossil fuels, and its leaders have long been reluctant to use the endowment to make a political statement. But Harvard president Lawrence Bacow said this month that he will present the faculty vote on climate change and divestment to the Harvard Corporation, which would ultimately make such a decision.

“I am confident that the Corporation will give it the thought and consideration it deserves,” Bacow said in a statement.

How much of Harvard’s endowment is invested in fossil fuels is publicly unknown. Only a fraction of its $41 billion is invested directly in public energy companies, but the university likely holds funds that include oil and gas companies, and many of them are potentially tied in complex contracts that could take years to get out of, environmentalists and financial experts agree.

But considering the attention that divesting college endowments from fossil fuels is gaining across the country, it would be surprising if Harvard officials aren’t reviewing their funds to determine exactly how much they hold and what it would take to truly divest, said Charles Skorina, a San Francisco executive recruiter who closely tracks Harvard’s investments and other large endowments.

“This is not going away,” Skorina said.

Last September, the University of California system announced that its $13.4 billion endowment was fossil-fuel free and that its $70 billion pension fund would soon follow. The California university system said it sold about $150 million in fossil fuel assets, including exposures to coal and oil sands, four years ago, because they were too risky. Returns on energy stocks have slumped in recent years, likely making it easier for some endowments to pull out of the sector.

“We believe hanging onto fossil fuel assets is a financial risk,” Jagdeep Singh Bachher, the system’s chief investment officer, co-wrote in an opinion piece for the Los Angeles Times in September. “Some might see our action as born of political pressure, or as green movement idealism or perhaps political correctness run amok. … The reason we sold some $150 million in fossil fuel assets from our endowment was the reason we sell other assets: They posed a long-term risk.”

This month, Georgetown University announced that it will withdraw its money from public securities in fossil fuel companies in the next five years and divest private investments in those companies over the next decade. The Catholic university also pledged to use those freed up funds to invest more in renewable energy.

Between 2011 and 2018, 35 American universities and colleges pulled their endowments, either partially or completely, from fossil-fuel holdings, including the University of Massachusetts system, Boston University, Stanford University, Syracuse University, and Middlebury College, according to a study published last year that explored the impact of divestment. The study also said universities generally hold only a small share of fossil fuel-related stocks, but by divesting they can stigmatize these funds and change how companies do business.

But swaying Harvard may be more difficult. In a few high profile cases, the university has divested from funds to make a political statement, but usually only after considerable pressure.

This week a group of Harvard students ratcheted up their prison divestment campaign with plans to file a lawsuit in Massachusetts state court to block the university from spending endowment funds on companies tied to the prison industry.

It took years of criticism and lobbying, before Harvard partially divested from companies that did business in apartheid South Africa in the mid-1980s.

Harvard also divested from tobacco companies in 1990, and in 2005, in response to the genocide in Darfur, the university sold off stocks in companies that did business in Sudan and were linked to the human rights crisis. But in the Sudan case, Harvard still held shares in those companies when they were part of larger mutual funds.

Divesting from fossil fuels could be just as challenging for Harvard, because it could have financial interests not just directly in these energy companies, but through third parties, Skorina said.

And there’s disagreement even among advocates about what level of divestment is appropriate — should Harvard just sell its interest in oil giants, or should it consider pipeline companies too, Skorina said.

Furthermore, it’s unclear whether divesting is an effective strategy to combat climate change. If Harvard sells its shares, another investor is likely to pick them up quickly, he said.

“Asset managers and chief investment officers, they’re in a difficult position,” Skorina said. “Social media has created a wave of outrage, but hasn’t supplied a clear path forward.”

Harvard officials have argued that divesting would be hypocritical given that the university still relies on fossil fuels to power the campus. The university has instead argued that a better path forward is to invest in research to combat climate change and innovations in renewable energy. The university points to its goal of making the campus fossil-fuel free by 2050.

“I, like my predecessors, believe that engaging with industry to confront the challenge of climate change is ultimately a sounder and more effective approach for our university,” Bacow wrote in a column last fall in the university’s internal magazine.

But climate change activists hope the momentum they’ve gained will push administration officials to change their minds.

Danielle Strasburger, a 2018 graduate and the campaign manager for Harvard Forward, said she is prepared for a long battle. But she is optimistic — in the past few months, the group successfully collected more than 4,500 signatures from alumni around the world and got pro-divestment candidates on the ballot for the board of overseers this spring.

“The tide is turning,” Strasburger said. “There are a lot of moving parts. Somewhere, eventually, something is going to give.”

SOURCE 





New breakthroughs help pluck water from thin desert air

Getting water out of desert air is an old idea that has been used on a small scale for many years.  But more efficient ways of doing it are of course welcome

As everyone knows, deserts lack water. Or do they?

While it may be true water is scant on their dry grounds, deserts actually do have significant amounts of water lingering in the air. It is for this reason a number of scientists are looking for creative ways to capture it and provide new sources of nourishment for those living in arid regions.

Among those engaged in the challenge include researchers from the University of Connecticut. They have devised a so-called “trap” that uses birnessite, a type of manganese dioxide. To capture water, these scientists riddle the birnessite with small holes that allows air to pass and H20 to collect. A key advantage of their contraption is that birnessite is found commonly in nature and cheap to create. More conventional water traps in use today, on the other hand, rely upon zirconium that is both rare and very expensive.

Another research team, this one from the University of California, Berkeley, has also weighed into the effort. They propose replacing the pricy zirconium with “aluminium.” Aluminium, like birnessite, is cheaper than zirconium, and it is also better at binding to and then releasing water, making this particular trap’s operation also smoother.

But do they actually work in the field? The results, thus far, are promising. As reported in the Economist:

“Both proposals work. Tested in desert-like conditions in a laboratory … they absorb and regurgitate reasonable fractions of their weight of water every day. They are nothing like as productive as desalination plants, and so would have to be built at large scale to generate water in commercially useful quantities. But one thing deserts do have is lots of cheap land. If either or both of these inventions can be manufactured at scale, then the deserts may bloom—if not with plants, at least with water-collection farms.”

SOURCE 


 



New wave of coral bleaching raises concerns for Australia's Great Barrier Reef

Given the Greenie lies about the last bleaching  -- Peter Ridd won a court case over his criticisms of them --  this report is fit only to be ignored

Perhaps the most amusing part of the previous scare was when the Federal minister visited the reef to see for herself how bad it was.  She found it looked fine.  We read:  "The Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority has supported Environment Minister Sussan Ley's appraisal that the reef is "good" and has "a vibrant future"."

They completely walked back their cries of doom.  I guess not all Greenies are crooks but most of them seem to be


Another wave of coral bleaching is hitting the Great Barrier Reef as temperature levels surge above average.

The federal government’s lead reef protection agency on Wednesday discovered significant bleaching on three reefs in the far north of the world’s largest coral reef ecosystem.

“That is the first time we’ve seen significant bleaching so far this summer,” said David Wachenfeld, chief scientist with the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority.

“It is a confirmation of our growing concern about what is happening out on the reef at the moment.” Heat stress that has built up on the far northern, central and southern parts of the reef over the summer has intensified over the last week. “These levels of heat stress are definitely capable of causing coral bleaching and we are now at a heightened level of alertness for what is happening out there in the park,” Dr Wachenfeld said.

A bleaching warning has been issued for large parts of the Torres Strait and far northern management areas of the marine park, where significant bleaching across multiple hot spots is likely.

Most of the area covered by the marine park was 0.5 to 1.5C above average as of February 11, with some central and southern parts being 2 to 3C warmer. “February is the hottest month of the year on the reef so these anomalies are really very concerning,” Dr Wachenfeld said.

The reef authority has been told of bleaching in other areas and is sending staff to survey the damage.

Further heat stress is expected over the next few weeks as temperatures remain 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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21 February, 2020

Methane is harmless to the climate

The projected doubling of methane levels over the next 180 years would have a barely measurable effect on global temperature  -- says new paper abstracted below. The minimal effect of methane emissions is summarized by numbers and figures in the paper.

Methane and Climate

By W. A. van Wijngaarden and W. Happer

Abstract

Atmospheric methane (CH4) contributes to the radiative forcing of Earth’s atmosphere. Radiative forcing is the difference in the net upward thermal radiation from the Earth through a transparent atmosphere and radiation through an otherwise identical atmosphere with greenhouse gases. Radiative forcing, normally specified in units of W m-2, depends on latitude, longitude and altitude, but it is often quoted for a representative temperate latitude, and for the altitude of the tropopause, or for the top of the atmosphere.

For current concentrations of greenhouse gases, the radiative forcing at the tropopause, per added CH4 molecule, is about 30 times larger than the forcing per added carbon-dioxide (CO2) molecule. This is due to the heavy saturation of the absorption band of the abundant greenhouse gas, CO2. But the rate of increase of CO2 molecules, about 2.3 ppm/year (ppm = part per million by mole), is about 300 times larger than the rate of increase of CH4 molecules, which has been around 0.0076 ppm/year since the year 2008.

So the contribution of methane to the annual increase in forcing is one tenth (30/300) that of carbon dioxide. The net forcing increase from CH4 and CO2 increases is about 0.05 W m-2 year . Other things being equal, this will cause a temperature increase of about 0.012 C year. Proposals to place harsh restrictions on methane emissions because of warming fears are not justified by facts.

SOURCE 





More Flagrant Sea Level Fraud

The amount of fraud in this article is off scale.



Even the Washington Post knows that the Gulf Coast is sinking.



MORE here





Buttigieg Supports a Carbon Tax, With Proceeds Going to Low- and Middle-Income People

South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg, now running for the Democrat presidential nomination, supports legislation imposing a tax on carbon pollution.

The way he explained it at Tuesday night's CNN town hall, such a tax would combine a bit of wealth redistribution with green energy goals:

"Would you support a specific legislative proposal for a carbon tax and rebate?" a voter asked Buttigieg.

"I will," the candidate said.

Because I believe it would play a very important role in making sure that our economy and the prices in our economy accurately reflect the true cost of business as usual. Remember, the most costly thing we could possibly do is to stay on the path that we're on, and that's not just a moral cost, that's a dollars and cents cost, because the catastrophic effects of climate change, which we're already beginning to see, are only going to increase.

So the idea of a carbon tax and rebate, or a carbon fee and dividend, whatever you want to call it, is that we assess a fee on the price of carbon. But at least in my plan, we would rebate that right back out to the American people, and I do it on a progressive basis, so that most low- and middle-income people would be made more than whole.

This is not about taking money out of the economy. This is about making sure the economy accurately reflects the cost of carbon pollution and climate change. And that's part, but only part, of how we're going to meet these needs.

Now, you're right, there's been a lot of partisan resistance to doing the right thing, whether it's climate, whether it's protections for federal lands, for air and for water. But here's another example... where actually, there's a lot more agreement among the American people than there is on the floor in Congress. Right now, most Americans, including in conservative states, believe in protecting public lands, believe in making sure we have clean air and water.

Now there are some who have been made to feel like they’re part of the problem, if you're working in certain kinds of industry, for example. Ironically, those are some of the very people whose skills we will need to recruit in the next generation of those industries that have to be carbon-free. There's no question there will be a transition, and I'm proposing that we invest over $200 billion in supporting workers through that transition.

But we also estimate that we will create at least 3 million net new jobs by taking the action that we must as a country to mobilize and fight climate change. And some of these jobs are -- might sound a little new-fangled, high-tech green jobs. A lot of them are jobs that are perfectly easy to understand right now.

I'm talking about building trades, I'm talking about union carpenters and electrical workers and insulators and glaziers, (that) we're going to need just to get our buildings to where they will have to be retrofitted for us to stay ahead of the climate challenge. So we've got to break this idea that we're choosing between doing the right thing for our climate and doing the right thing for our economy.

The only way forward for our economy, for our future, for our children and for our climate is to step up, come together, deal with carbon pollution and lead the world in doing something about it.

SOURCE 






Green New Dealers not ready to practice what they preach

In case you missed the Bronx Legends episode of the Showtime series Desus and Mero with guest Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, you should watch the opening here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vrvr89Z6fEw

As the trio emerges from the subway at Parkchester Station, co-host Desus Nice says, “We are going to start our day as every Bronxite does with a bodega sandwich.”  He then asks AOC, “What kind of bodega sandwich do you like to eat?”

“I’m a bacon, egg and cheese,” replies AOC.

Yep, the favorite sandwich of the author of the Green New Deal (GND) is a triple-threat carbon bomb!

Not really, of course, but from the GND perspective, going for a three-way protein stack in one single sandwich with “factory farm” products was a surprising choice.

We also learn that the Congresswoman prefers cheddar, but will settle for American if she has to – presumably made from milk from non-farting cows.

Ironically, it was on the premier of the same show a year earlier that AOC expounded on cow flatulence highlighted in the GND.

As The Hill newspaper reported on 22 February 2019, “In the deal, what we talk about is … that we need to take a look at factory farming, period. It’s wild,” she told Desus Nice and The Kid Mero.

“And so, it’s not to say you get rid of agriculture. It’s not to say we’re going to force everybody to go vegan or anything crazy like that. But it’s to say, listen, we’ve got to address factory farming. Maybe we shouldn’t be eating a hamburger for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Like, let’s keep it real,” she continued.

Presumably, later in the day, off camera, AOC opted for a carbon neutral non-meat dinner option because just as the show’s segment opened with lots of animal protein consumption, it closed with the Congresswoman tucking into a ginormous beefy burrito for lunch, giving her two strikes against her own climate agenda in just two meals.

Oh, and by the way, her big complaint about living in DC?  That it is “impossible” to get a good bacon, egg and cheese sandwich.  Of course, if she keeps up her climate agenda, DC won’t be the only place where it is impossible to get affordable, nutritious and delicious meat, eggs and cheese.

SOURCE 





Australia: State government to block new coal-fired power station?

The Greenies are happy.  See below. But Qld. Premier Palaszczuk is facing an election in October and blocking the Collinsville proposal would lose her the whole of the North.  She would be out on her ear. So she won't do it.  Coal mining is popular in the North -- which is why Scott Morrison won federally

Premier Anastascia Palaszczuk is absolutely right to question the impacts of a coal fired power station on the Great Barrier Reef says the Australian Marine Conservation Society (AMCS).

The Premier echoed the sentiment of Labor Federal leader Anthony Albanese when she said she was open to blocking a planned coal-fired power station at Collinsville.

AMCS Great Barrier Reef spokesperson Shani Tager said: “The Premier is right to highlight the impact that coal-fired power stations have on our Reef. The single greatest threat to our beautiful Reef is climate change and coal fired power stations are a big part of the problem.

“Our Reef supports 64,000 jobs and is home to thousands of incredible animals, let’s not throw them down the drain for an uneconomic, unwanted and polluting coal fired power station when we could be building clean, renewable energy.

“It would be absolutely irresponsible to build a new coal fired power station at a time when we need to be moving beyond coal to give our Reef a fighting chance.

"Our Reef is still a dynamic, vibrant, awesome place but it’s in deep trouble and it’s time for politicians of all stripes to be standing up and taking steps to protect our Reef.”

Email.  Contact: Jo Manning 0405 567 228 / jomanning@amcs.org.au

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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 February, 2020  

Study: CO2 Climate Impact is ‘Effectively Unmeasurable’

A new study (Stallinga, 2020) assesses the climate sensitivity to rising CO2 concentrations is just 0.0014°C per ppm. Dr. Peter Stallinga has published a comprehensive analysis of the Earth’s ‘greenhouse effect.’ He finds an inconsequential role for CO2.

Doubling CO2 from 350 to 700 ppm yields warming of less than 0.5°C (500 mK). Feedbacks to warming are likely negative, as adding CO2 may only serve to speed up natural return-to-equilibrium processes.

As for absorption-reemission perturbation from CO2, “there is nothing CO2 would add to the current heat balance in the atmosphere.”



Larger image here

A portion of Dr. Stallinga’s paper worth highlighting – which he mentions only in passing – refers to the early history of the Earth’s greenhouse effect paradigm.

K. Ångström receives little attention as a pioneer of the conceptualization that warming and cooling result from radiative imbalances within a planetary ‘greenhouse effect.’

About 120 years ago, Ångström (1900) contradicted the oft-cited Arrhenius (1896) – the atmospheric physicist referred to by proponents of anthropogenic global warming.

Ångström suggested Earth’s greenhouse effect is already saturated in its current (1900) state, and therefore increasing CO2 will have “no effect whatsoever” on climate (Stallinga, 2020).

Ångström’s conclusions were largely ignored.

SOURCE 






Who needs Paris when we have capitalism? US had largest CO2 decline on a country basis in 2019

Two years after President Trump withdrew the United States from the Paris climate agreement, the U.S. saw the greatest decline in carbon dioxide emissions on a country basis, according to the International Energy Agency's report on global greenhouse gas emissions in 2019. Thanks to an exceptional decrease in emissions in advanced economies, global emissions finally flatlined after three years of increasing.

Spearheading that charge was the U.S., which decreased carbon dioxide emissions by a staggering 140 million tons, or 2.9%, thanks to vast increases of natural gas generation. Since our peak in 2000, the IEA reports that emissions are down 1 gigaton, "the largest absolute decline by any country over that period."

Thanks to its nonlegally binding emissions standards, the Paris agreement was a prime piece of virtue signaling, but it never was going to affect emissions standards. Yet, technological innovation and markets did so instead.

"Economic growth in advanced economies averaged 1.7% in 2019, but total energy-related CO2 emissions fell by 3.2%," the IEA writes. "Generation from coal-fired plants in advanced economies declined by nearly 15% as a result of continued growth of renewables, coal-to-gas fuel switching, a rise in nuclear power and weaker electricity demand."

Of course, this makes sense. Nuclear is the single-most efficient, long-term source of carbon-neutral energy, and natural gas and renewables excel in the short term, especially as research and development make the latter cheaper. On some level, regulations and market-oriented approaches such as carbon taxes in Europe must have helped, but fundamentally, market forces are spearheading our fight against climate change.

Proponents of the Green New Deal may claim that nuclear and market-oriented solutions don't work, but the evidence is conclusive. Capitalism may very well save the world.

SOURCE 






Delingpole: Why Is Boris Johnson Allowing Eco-Fascists to Run Riot in Britain?

Extinction Rebellion vandals are digging up the lawns outside Cambridge’s grandest college Trinity and have blocked one of the roundabouts near the city centre.

Why aren’t the police arresting them? Why should taxpayers have to pay for the damage done? And what does this say about the future of Britain under a green tyranny where hardcore environmental activists and the Boris Johnson administration appear to have formed an alliance in opposition to the British people?

Here are the scenes in Cambridge today, dodgy anarchists wearing the fashionable Extinction Rebellion hat, digging up Cambridge’s manicured lawns under the rainbow flag.

Shockingly, almost unbelievably, instead of clearing away Extinction Rebellion’s makeshift roadblock, the local police have actually chosen to formalise the protest by using their own ’emergency police powers’ to close roads officially. Buses have been diverted. ‘Pedestrians and cyclists will not be affected’, the Cambridge Police Twitter account tells us primly and with, perhaps, a hint of relish at being able to participate in this orgy of environmental virtue-signalling.

We are using emergency police powers to close two city centre roads. Extinction Rebellion activists begin week-long occupation of Cambridge city centre junction

The climate campaigners, led by their youth wing, brought traffic to a halt on Sunday morning.

None of this should have been allowed to happen. You may say – not unreasonably – that this is God’s punishment against Cambridge for being such a stronghold of entrenched Social Justice Warrior stupidity; you may argue — again quite correctly — that because lots of people in Cambridge share Extinction Rebellion’s environmental concerns and support a lot of its aims this is simply a case of poetic justice, the biter bit; you may say that having appointed a talentless, thick, failed Civil Service apparatchik such as Dame Sally Davies as its next Master, Trinity lost all claim to being a serious academic institution so frankly who cares what happens to its poxy swards?

But the wider and more important issue here surely is that Britain’s energy, environmental – and now, policing – policies have been devolved to the eco-fascist extreme.

Extinction Rebellion is a ‘destabilising and extremist’ organisation; its objective is ‘system change’, which means bringing down Britain’s existing democratic system. If achieved, this would cause ‘rapid economic disaster’.

These are the words of a report, co-written last year by Richard Walton, formerly head of the Metropolitan Police’s Counter-Terrorism Command.

How can it be possible that a government committed to restoring law and order to broken Britain can let be allowing such destabilising extremists to be causing such mayhem with such impunity?

Earlier this year, the government had a brief chance to outlaw Extinction Rebellion, initially by publicly acknowledging it for the menace it is.

It had the perfect chance when Extinction Rebellion (XR) was included by counter-terrorism police on a list of extremist ideologies that should be reported to the government’s anti-terrorism Prevent programme.

But when leftist activists including the Guardian kicked up a massive stink about this supposed injustice, Boris Johnson’s virtue-signalling ministers seized the chance to express outrage that a ‘peaceful’ protest group could be bracketed with terrorists.

Never mind that Extinction Rebellion causes more economic damage to Britain than all its more violent terrorist equivalents put together — policing it in London alone cost more than £37 million last year, more than twice the budget for its Violent Crime Taskforce: we are effectively being asked to accept that because Extinction Rebellion hasn’t tried to kill anyone and because a few upper-middle-class airheads and brainwashed government ministers think their aims are kind of fluffy and cute, they can, therefore, close down the public highway and dig up ancient lawns and generally make a nuisance of themselves at their leisure.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson himself — always and ever keener to be liked more than he is to take a moral stand on any issue – has helped sow the seeds of future ruin by failing to confront Extinction Rebellion. Instead, he has given them carte blanche with idiot declarations like the one he made last year when he said:

“I deplore their tactics but I basically think that they are right to rebel against the extinctions that are taking place.”

First, what extinctions is he talking about? There have been none recently — certainly none ever caused by ‘climate change’.

Second, what kind of message does it send out to these extremists to tell them that essentially the moral justice of their cause has the endorsement of the Prime Minister?

Boris Johnson’s administration is heading towards green ruination – and it has only itself to blame. These protests in Cambridge are merely a taste of the disruption to come. No one, especially not in the working-class communities of the North and the Midlands, voted Conservative at the last election in order to have their streets blocked, their council tax increased, and their cities defiled by patchouli smelling trustafarians called Cressida and Rupert.

On this issue, as on so many others — from the Huawei deal currently souring Anglo-American relations to the HS2 behemoth about to cut a very, very expensive swathe through some of England’s most beautiful countryside — the urgent question needs to be asked: what do Boris Johnson’s ‘Conservatives’ think they are playing at?

SOURCE 








Bezos Bows To Worker Demands, Creates $10 Billion Climate Plan

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos announced Monday a $10-billion plan to tackle what he says is the most important threat facing human beings: man-made global warming.

Bezos is pressing forward with what he dubbed the Bezos Earth Fund, an initiative he hopes will spur investments to find climate solutions.

His statement came as Amazon workers continue to threaten a mass walkout over the company’s supposed lack of climate action.

“Climate change is the biggest threat to our planet,” the billionaire wrote in a statement. “We can save Earth. It’s going to take collective action from big companies, small companies, nation-states, global organizations, and individuals.”

Bezos noted that he is providing a $10-billion infusion of cash to kick off the initiative.

“Earth is the one thing we all have in common — let’s protect it together,” he added.

Amazon employees created a group called Employees for Climate Justice, which published a statement in January updating its plans to allow company employees to speak to the press in September.

More than 1,000 employees walked off their jobs in September 2019 in support of a national march calling on Bezos to do more on global warming.

“Now is a time when we need to have communications policies that let us speak honestly about our company’s role in the climate crisis,” Karen Costa, a user experience principal designer at Amazon, said in a statement in January.

Bezos’s worth fell to $111.4 billion in 2019 after he divorced his wife in April of that year, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. He lost more money than any other human on the planet that year. He was worth roughly $150 billion before the split.

SOURCE 





UN, WHO, Lancet report says every Australian child under threat from climate, poor diet

This is just more Green/Left propaganda from the usual suspects.  It's an enchiridion of Green/Left moans.  "The Lancet" is highly political. It criticized the Iraq war and is very "Green". And the less said about the UN the better.

If Australia is such an unhealthy environment, how come it has  one of the world's longest life-expectancies?  That's the bottom line

Australia has been singled out for scathing criticism by the World Health Organisation for threatening the future of its children through disproportionately high carbon emissions, undermining positive scores in child health, socio-economic equity and education.

A major joint report by the WHO, UNICEF and the scientific journal The Lancet concludes the future of children around the world, including Australia, is being threatened by ecological degradation, climate change and predatory marketing practices that drive obesity.

Australia’s children were ranked 20th in the world on a ‘flourishing’ index, which takes into account poverty, health, education and protection from violence, but Australia’s performance on an index of sustainability was dire, with a rank of 174 out of 180 countries.

The poor sustainability rank was driven by high CO2 emissions per head of population, with the WHO estimating that Australia’s emissions would be 524 per cent above a global target by 2030.

It’s the first time the WHO has included a country’s sustainability score as a measure of the future wellbeing of children. The report says if global warming exceeds 4 degrees Celsius by the year 2100 in line with current projections, “it would lead to devastating health consequences for children, due to rising ocean levels, heatwaves, proliferation of diseases like malaria and dengue, and malnutrition.”

The nations ranked top in the world on the score of child flourishing were Norway, South Korea and the Netherlands. The flourishing index measures the mortality of children younger than five years old, access to child and maternal health services, basic hygiene and sanitation, growth and nutrition, prevalence of extreme poverty and educational achievement.

However, the report – compiled by a Commission of 40 child and adolescent health experts from around the world – found that no single country is adequately protecting children’s health, their environment and their futures.

Co-chair of the Commission, former New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark, said children were facing future “existential threats”.

“Despite improvements in child and adolescent health over the past 20 years, progress has stalled, and is set to reverse,” Ms Clark said. “Every child worldwide now faces existential threats from climate change and commercial pressures.

“Countries need to overhaul their approach to child and adolescent health, to ensure that we not only look after our children today but protect the world they will inherit in the future.”

Australian academic Peter Sly, Director of the Children’s Health and Environment Program from the University of Queensland, was a local author of the report. He singled out excessive exposure of Australian children to fast food and gambling advertisements for particular criticism.

The report found children’s exposure to predatory commercial marketing of junk food and sugary beverages is associated with purchase of unhealthy foods and overweight and obesity. The number of obese children and adolescents increased from 11 million in 1975 to 124 million in 2016 – an 11-fold increase, with dire individual and societal costs. An estimated 28 per cent of Australian children are overweight or obese.

“The various governments and regulators responsible need to impose restrictions that truly protect children,” Professor Sly said. “Self-regulation is not working and did not work with the tobacco industry. A complete ban on advertising for all forms of alcohol and all forms of gaming during any program, including all sporting events likely to be watched by children, broadcast before 8:30 pm will be required to protect children. We did it for tobacco, so why not alcohol and gambling?”

The Director-General of the WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said the landmark report was a “wake-up call”.

“This report shows that the world’s decision makers are failing today’s children and youth: failing to protect their health, failing to protect their rights, and failing to protect their planet,” Dr Tedros said. “This must be a wakeup call for countries to invest in child health and development, ensure their voices are heard, protect their rights, and build a future that is fit for children.”

Local academics responded to the report by saying Australia had been “disgraced” on the world stage.

Anthony Okely, a researcher in child health and education at the University of Wollongong, said the report should concern Australian politicians.

“While we like to believe we are putting our children first and meeting their needs, our ranking on the Sustainability Index shows that our actions are not meeting our words,” Professor Okely said.” Australia’s very low score on this index is eroding many of the advances we have made in ensuring our children are flourishing.

“Our children are growing up in environments that are not supporting their right to an active, healthy life. The high levels of child obesity testify to this. Children are living more sedentary lifestyles, spending large amounts of time using electronic media for entertainment. This exposes them to marketing of unhealthy foods, displaces time they could spend being physically active, and compromises healthy sleep patterns.”

Liz Hanna, an academic at the Australian National University who also chairs the Environmental Health Working Group at the World Federation of Public Health Associations, said it was no wonder young people around the world were organising mass protests.

“This rigorous study married the voices of children with global metrics,” Dr Hanna said. “It further explains why the world’s children are uprising, demanding governments protect their future.

“Australia’s poor ranking provides powerful evidence that Australia has lost its way. Ranking 174th out of 180 countries on the Sustainability Index is as shameful as it is stupid.

“Decades of wilful neglect of the environment and the erosion of compassion have transformed the lucky country to an international laggard that is failing its children. By taking our natural advantages for granted, Australia is squandering its opportunities to secure a safe and healthy future for our children.

“Pandering to the sugar industry, and refusing a sugar tax, needlessly renders children at high risk of obesity, diabetes and a life plagued by chronic disease and disability.

“Similarly, steadfastly clinging to fossil fuel industries, against solid scientific evidence, unfolding climatic crises and environmental degradation knowingly accelerates climate change and robs children of their future.”

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

*****************************************





19 February, 2020  

Can Solar Power Compete With Coal? In India, It’s Gaining Ground

The headline above is ridiculous.  As we read through the article we hear that the big demand for power in India is at night -- when the sun does not shine.  So where does that leave solar power?  Not very competitive, is it?

A true costing of solar power would include the cost of backup facilities -- such as gas generators -- to be used when the sun does not shine.  You have to double your capital costs! What a joke!


BHADLA, India—In a dusty northwest India desert dotted with cows and the occasional camel, a solar-power plant is producing some of the world’s cheapest energy.

Built in 2018 by India’s Acme Solar Holdings Ltd., it can generate 200 megawatts of electricity, enough to power all the homes in a middle-size U.S. town. Acme sells the electricity to distributors for 2.44 rupees (3.4 cents) a kilowatt-hour, a record low for solar power in India, a country that data trackers say has the world’s cheapest solar energy.

More remarkable, the power costs less to generate in India than the cheapest competing fossil fuel—coal—even with subsidies removed and the cost of construction and financing figured in, according to the Indian government and industry trackers.

Price-conscious Indian utilities are eager to snap up that power. “We are infamous for low cost,” says Sandeep Kashyap, Acme’s president.

Solar power has entered a new global era. The industry was long dependent on subsidies and regulatory promotions. Now, technological innovation and falling solar-panel prices have made solar power inexpensive enough to compete on its own with other fuel sources in some regions, when it comes to newly built plants. That could turbocharge growth of renewables in the global energy industry, especially in fast-growing Asian markets where much of the world’s energy infrastructure expansion will take place.

Asia Boost

Solar's biggest growth is expected to come in Asia, where two-thirds of the world's energy-demand growth will be.
Solar capacity growth by country and region

Governments in many solar markets—including China, the biggest—are phasing out or reducing supports. Solar-plant development is going mainstream, with finance provided by global investors like Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Singaporean sovereign-wealth fund GIC and huge Western pension and private-equity funds.

So far, the renewable-energy push hasn’t halted the growth of global energy emissions. But the success of countries like India in feeding their rising power demands with clean energy will still be key to blunting the growth of global challenges like pollution and climate change.

The price declines in solar panels and the power they produce are jolting the industry. In the past decade, solar has grown from less than 1% of the world’s electric-power capacity to an estimated 9% by the end of this year, according to the International Energy Agency, an intergovernmental organization focused on energy policy. By 2040, the IEA expects that to grow to 24%, which would make solar the largest single energy source.

India is at the forefront of the trend, with a cost of building solar capacity that has dropped 84% in eight years, according to the International Renewable Energy Agency, an intergovernmental organization focused on renewable energy. Other countries are close behind, with costs falling fast in Australia and China.

India has increased the amount of solar power it has installed 10-fold in the past five years, to 32 gigawatts, and the government is hoping to triple that in the next few years—one of the fastest paces of growth anywhere. India’s prime minister last year said he wants 450 gigawatts of renewable energy including solar installed by 2030.

If India manages that, which many analysts say is a real stretch, it would account for nearly all the additional electric capacity the country’s Central Electricity Authority has projected it would add by then, and more than the country’s total from all power sources now. India has pledged as a climate goal that 40% of its electric capacity will come from non-fossil fuels by 2030; the latest renewable targets would likely put that percentage at over half.

Cheaper than coal

In 2018, India’s “levelized” cost of solar-power generation—an analysis removing the impact of direct subsidies and figuring in the costs of construction and financing for a new plant—fell to 14% below that of coal, the first time anywhere in the world that generating solar was cheaper than coal on that basis, according to international energy consulting firm Wood Mackenzie.

India’s national energy plan doesn’t anticipate construction of new coal power plants for at least several years. Even state-controlled Coal India, one of the world’s largest coal-producing companies, in November said it planned a pilot solar project as it navigated a future with less coal.

Across Asia, a region expected to account for two-thirds of the world’s new power demand during the next two decades, price declines will make wind and solar combined 17% cheaper than coal by 2030 on a levelized basis, says Wood Mackenzie. In India, solar generation will be almost 50% cheaper, it projects.

“This is a revolution in power generation costs,” says Wood Mackenzie analyst Alex Whitmore. “What it means is there will be a lot more solar investment in India, and in countries like India.”

Balance of Power

The cost of building a solar plant has fallen dramatically—especially in India, where solar is now the cheapest source of power.

Solar’s big problem: It generates power only when the sun shines. Wind power, similarly, works only with wind. So displacing fossil fuels could require cheaper ways to store energy. And the more renewables in the power-transmission grid, the more the grid will need to be rebuilt to accommodate those special characteristics.

That inefficiency is why the IEA forecasts the amount of power solar generates to rise to only 11% of the world’s total by 2040, around half that of coal or natural gas.

In India, which has some of the world’s best conditions for generating solar power, the mismatch is pronounced because demand for electricity swells after people go home and switch on air conditioners in the evening, when solar plants aren’t working.

Meanwhile, countries like India have made massive investments in coal-fired plants they can’t afford to simply scrap. Coal still provides two-thirds of India’s power. Coal shipments also underpin profits at the nation’s biggest employer, the railways.

As Indian solar developers push prices down, the thin margins for many are being pummeled by challenges ranging from an economic slowdown and tighter domestic financing conditions to power distributors that aren’t paying bills and squatters refusing to move off land slated for development.

During the past two years, the pace of solar development in India slowed. Although installations are expected to pick back up this year, many analysts and industry leaders now expect India won’t hit its aggressive solar goals.

‘Low-hanging fruit’

Challenges will likely multiply when solar power in India’s grid rises from the current 9% to around 20% or 30%—a level at which it may start replacing conventional power plants, say experts like Rahul Tongia, a fellow at the India arm of think tank Brookings Institution.

India’s solar push started in 2010, when its government outlined plans for a modest boost in capacity during the next decade. Solar was a good fit for India’s growing energy needs. Plants are easy to build—essentially solar panels lined up in racks—and labor is inexpensive. India has big stretches of sparsely populated land and intense sun, good for vast spreads cranking out power.

In 2015, Prime Minister Narendra Modi quintupled the country’s solar target, aiming to install 100 gigawatts of capacity by 2022—roughly half of the world’s 2015 total. At the time, India had less than 3 gigawatts of solar power installed and the plan seemed crazy.

“It was a leap of faith,” says Anand Kumar, a top official in India’s Ministry of New and Renewable Energy. “We got very lucky that the price of solar panels fell.”

China had been cranking out solar panels in massive numbers in a government-subsidized effort to dominate the industry globally. Panel prices, which can account for around half the cost of a solar plant in India, plummeted. Globally, solar-panel prices fell more than 90% during the past decade, according to the International Renewable Energy Agency.

The Indian government’s system of auctioning out solar projects to developers that offered the cheapest electricity reduced prices there further. Aggressive entrepreneurs elbowed in, figuring the government’s eagerness to boost solar capacity coupled with ever-cheaper panels offered a profit opportunity.

Japan’s SoftBank Group Corp., whose chief executive, Masayoshi Son, is a solar proponent, set up an energy unit in Delhi around the same time Mr. Modi announced his ambitious goals. SoftBank snagged its first solar project in half a year. Acme switched its focus to solar from telecom equipment, figuring the industry was poised to repeat telecom’s rapid growth. ReNew Power Ltd., founded in 2011, enlisted a roster of blue-chip investors including Goldman, the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board and the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority.

As the government tendered hundreds of megawatts of solar capacity, the price at which solar developers were offering to sell their electricity roughly halved between 2015 and this year, according to Bridge to India, a data tracker.

Developers pushed to squeeze all the profit they could from projects. In the Bhadla solar park, where the Acme plant producing the cheap electricity is located, one problem is dust. The plant has 927,180 panels stretched over desert where sandstorms are common and temperatures can swing from over 120 degrees Fahrenheit in summer to nearly freezing in winter. If panels aren’t cleaned regularly, dust collects and electricity production declines.

Acme had used sprinklers on tractors driven by contractors to wash down the panels, a method letting them clean all panels three times a month. Last year, it rolled out robots that brush the panels down, doubling the monthly cleaning and boosting the maximum amount of energy the plant could produce.

Bottlenecks

As solar prices sank, some projects were delayed by a lack of transmission lines to ship the electricity. Others fell behind because of tussles between villagers, developers and local governments over land—issues dogging development in other countries as well.

Acme and other developers have been hamstrung by a delay in tax and tariff refunds they had counted on. “A lot of equity got stuck, which was planned for new projects,” says Mr. Kashyap, Acme’s president.

ReNew and other companies have been hit by payment delays from India’s struggling power distributors, mainly state-owned companies that buy electricity from producers and sell it to households. India’s Central Electricity Authority estimated that as of Nov. 30, renewable-energy companies were owed some $1.3 billion in overdue bills.

At any one time, distributors in roughly a quarter of the eight or nine states that ReNew Power operates in are behind on payments, says CEO Sumant Sinha. Although ReNew and other developers factor such payment delays into electricity prices they offer when bidding for projects, a miscalculation could hit profits. “Everyone sees delays in payments,” he says.

Some Indian state agencies, hoping solar prices fall lower, have canceled solar auctions when they thought developers were offering to sell power at too high a pric

SOURCE 






The Misguided Green Virtue-Signaling of Solar Panel Mandates

In a 2014 essay, scholars Ed Glaeser and Cass Sunstein wrote of the need to run all regulations through periodic cost-benefit analyses.

“This kind of analysis is intrinsically neither anti- nor pro-regulation,” they wrote in National Affairs. “It is simply a tool that helps policymakers produce good regulations and prevent bad ones from being made law.”

The idea is that regulations should serve an actual purpose while avoiding costs that could become onerous or regressive.

Environmental regs could particularly use this cost-benefit model. They often appeal to people’s airy notions of “sustainability,” but don’t really solve environmental problems.

The latest example is California’s solar panel mandate, which took effect this year. It requires all new homes under four stories to come with a rooftop photovoltaic solar panel. The state’s energy commission estimates that this requirement will add $9,500 to construction costs, which is significant in a state with an extreme affordable-housing shortage. The National Association of Home Builders estimates that each marginal $1,000 price increase will cut 10,000 Californians out of the home buying market, meaning the mandate will block an estimated 95,000 residents from homeownership, while also burdening renters.

So what is the “benefit”? That’s unclear for several reasons.

Inefficiency

The first problem is that providing solar energy through panels on home rooftops is less efficient than through large installations. Installing solar arrays and sending their energy to the power grid is capital-intensive, and better done in bulk than through a piecemeal, home-by-home process. In fact, rooftop solar power generates electricity at double or more the cost of off-site renewable energy farms.

In California, the mandate is also duplicative.

“The state already has enough solar that during midday, it can drive wholesale energy prices to zero or below. Solar often must be exported or curtailed,” writes David Taylor for Vox. “It’s possible that by mandating all this new rooftop solar — which must be paid retail rates under the state’s net metering policy, no matter the locational or time-specific value of its power — CEC will not increase the net amount of solar in the state much, or at all.”

Vox noted this paradox by posting the following Twitter exchange between Varun Sivaram, a board member of Stanford Energy, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor at Princeton University School of Engineering and Applied Science.

Indirect

Solar panel mandates also produce benefits that are indirect and therefore very poorly targeted. It’s not that solar-generated energy isn’t good unto itself. But why should California homeowners be disproportionately charged with solving a problem of which they are neither the sole causes nor the main victims?

Here’s what I mean: many territories generate carbon emissions. The United States is responsible for 16 percent of emissions, while major emitters from the remaining 84 percent include China, India, and Russia. California’s lawmakers may want to set an example for global stewardship, but their laws have little effect if they can’t control emissions from the other 49 U.S. states. Nor could the country – if it ever adopted California-style policies nationwide – mandate that other countries adopt similar emission reductions.

Nor would everyone in or out of California share equally in any benefit from carbon restrictions. The biggest negative externality often envisioned by climate scientists – a rise in sea levels – is the flooding of coastal urban areas. Such flooding, which by some accounts has already begun, may get worse along the East Coast due to El Nino weather cycles.

The problem of disparate environmental impacts has a “tragedy of the commons” aspect. Even if some jurisdictions curb CO2 emissions, others continue as usual. And those emissions might disproportionately hurt East Coast cities. A solution rooted in sound economics and cost-benefit analysis would start upstream, addressing the top causes of the problem.

California’s solar panel mandate, by contrast, is a highly indirect approach. It will punish one random group (the state’s new homeowners), to create an energy solution that is of dubious value anyway, but that will theoretically reduce carbon emissions and supposedly reduce sea-level rise that is expected to hurt other parts of the world. To put it bluntly: California wants homeowners in Riverside to generate solar energy, under the odd premise that this will prevent flood damages in Miami.

Which is to say: California’s solar panel mandate doesn’t pass the cost-benefit smell test. It is merely empty symbolism.

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How Academic ‘Blacklists’ Impede Serious Work On Climate Science

Roger Pielke

A climate advocacy group called Skeptical Science hosts a list of academics that it has labeled “climate misinformers.” The list includes 17 academics and is intended as a blacklist. We know of this intent because one of the principals of Skeptical Science, a blogger named Dana Nuccitelli, said so last Friday, writing of one academic on their list, “if you look at the statements we cataloged and debunked on her [Skeptical Science] page, it should make her unhirable in academia.”

That so-called “unhirable” academic is Professor Judy Curry, formerly the chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech, and a Fellow of both the American Geophysical Union and American Meteorological Society. By any conventional academic metric, Curry has compiled an impressive record over many decades. The idea that she would be unhirable would seem laughable.

But there is nothing funny about Skeptical Science. Today, Curry should be a senior statesperson in the atmospheric sciences community. Instead, she is out of academia. She attributes that, at least in part, to being placed on the Skeptical Science blacklist and its use, as expressed by Nuccitelli, to make her “unhirable.”

I asked Professor Curry about this situation. She explained, “In 2012 I was informed by my Dean that the administration wanted me to step down as Chair. While there were several reasons for this, one obvious reason was extreme displeasure by several activist climate scientists who had a very direct pipeline to the Dean.”

So Curry stepped down and started looking for administrative positions at other universities, “At the time, I was getting numerous inquiries from academic headhunters encouraging me to apply for major administration positions, ranging from Dean to Vice Chancellor for Research. I applied for several of these, and actually interviewed for two of them. I did not make it to the final short list.”

The headhunter gave Curry the following feedback from the universities: “They thought I was an outstanding candidate, looked excellent on paper, articulated a strong vision, and interviewed very well in person. The show stopper was my public profile in the climate debate, as evidenced by a simple Google search.”

Indeed, in my own Google search of “Judy Curry,” and confirmed by others on my Twitter timeline, the Skeptical Science blacklist page for her appears on the first page of Google results, and for me it was the top listing.

How can it be that a website, founded by an Australian cartoonist named John Cook and run mainly by volunteer non-academics and amateur scientists, can rise to the position of not just claiming to arbitrate who is and who is not an appropriate hire for universities, but actually fulfilling that role?

Skeptical Science emerged in 2007, the peak of the climate blogging era. It was also a time when the pursuit of “climate skeptics” (or “deniers”) really took off. The website soon found a large audience and was promoted as an ally in the battle against climate skeptics and deniers. For instance, according to Wikipedia, “The Washington Post has praised it as the "most prominent and detailed" website to counter arguments by global warming deniers.”

But the main legitimizing factor in the rise of Skeptical Science as a powerful climate advocacy group was its endorsement by prominent scientists, such as by widely-known climate scientists Michael Mann of Penn State University and Katherine Hayhoe, of Texas Tech. Like Skeptical Science, Mann and Hayhoe focus much of their advocacy efforts on identifying and denigrating so-called climate skeptics or deniers.

The American Geophysical Union (AGU), a leading scientific association that includes many climate scientists, has routinely endorsed Skeptical Science. The AGU has even invoked the Skeptical Science blacklist, as recently as last December, when one of its writers dismissed an Australian academic by observing simply that he “has his own page on John Cook’s Skeptical Science site.” The mere fact of being listed on the Skeptical Science blacklist appears to be sufficient to be dismissed on the official website of the AGU, where Curry was elected a Fellow.

But what has happened to Curry is just the tip of the iceberg.

Upon discussing on Twitter the Skeptical Science claim that their “debunking” of Curry should make her “unhirable in academia,” a follower of mine pointed to a trove of hacked internal discussions among the Skeptical Science team. In those discussions from around 2010-2012, my father, Roger Pielke, Sr. — also a prominent atmospheric scientist — was mentioned some 3,700 times. Correspondingly, my father is also listed on the Skeptical Science blacklist.

I have read those internal discussions and what I saw is incredibly disturbing, for academic freedom and for simple human decency.

Let me take a step back and explain why I believe that it is appropriate to discuss the content of these hacked discussions. (Note: These hacked discussions are different than the Photoshopped imagery found in 2013 on an unprotected Skeptical Science website showing several Skeptical Science team members with their faces super imposed upon Nazi soldiers, with John Cook as Heinrich Himmler. According to Rob Honeycutt of Skeptical Science, those images were prepared as an in-group joke to make fun of a climate skeptic who appears on another of their lists, and were not intended for the public.) 

The discussions in the hacked conversations – like those in the Wikileaks releases, those of President Emanuel Macron’s hacked conversations, or even the Climategate emails – are legitimately in the public interest.

There are at least three reasons for this. One, the hacked forum reveals that Skeptical Science – a foreign advocacy group — in collaboration with the Center for American Progress (a DC-based progressive advocacy group), improperly obtained Congressional testimony in advance from several U.S. scientists and were engaged to help Democrats in the House to impeach the testimony of these scientists. Second, the leaked discussions reveal a coordinated effort to lobby U.S. elected officials by a foreign-based entity. While such coordination may or may not meet the legal definition of “lobbying,” the appropriateness of such foreign influence efforts in U.S. politics is certainly fair to question. Third, Skeptical Science has positioned itself as a public arbiter of truth, including rendering judgments as to who is or who is not employable by universities. Their claims to service in the public interest mean that evidence contrary to such claims is also in the public interest.

For these reasons I have made the judgment that discussing the leaked discussions relevant to their stated public interest mission – and which have been in the public domain for many years – is not only fair, it is important. As the editor of the Times of London wrote in 1852, “We are bound to tell the truth as we find it, without fear of consequences.”

Knowing full well the considerable power and influence wielded by Skeptical Science and their allies, I am fearful indeed, but truth matters more. And the truth here is ugly.

The internal discussions among the Skeptical Science team, with the 3,700 mentions of Pielke Sr., reveal a years-long campaign to destroy his reputation, and to elevate their stature at his expense. The effort was coordinated and brutal.

In one representative exchange, they said, “We are HUNTING Pielke” and in another, “We are trying to bring him down,” and still another, “My vote is to take the bastard down!” Across 3,700 mentions in the dataset, there is no shortage of such expressed intent to damage, if not end, my father’s distinguished career.

Their strategy was sinister. They sought to define Pielke Sr. as a “climate denier,” and to use his prominent status in the field as the basis for elevating their own by then taking him down. Often they commented on how pleased they were to be able to use the stature of Pielke Sr. to elevate their own profile in the climate debate, “"The fact that Pielke even acknowledges SkS is a good thing."

At times the Skeptical Science team was confused at why Pielke Sr. was engaging with them: “Why does a scientist of Dr. Pielke's stature choose to spend so much of his time and enrgy posting on SkS? Doesn't he have more important things to do?”

What they did not understand is that Pielke Sr. is a science nerd and is willing to talk atmospheric science with anyone – alarmist, skeptic, expert, non-expert – 24/7/365. They took advantage of this openness to discussion, and perhaps his naivete as to their motives, to seek to destroy him. They went so far as to strategically have one team member contact him by email on multiple occasions to appear friendly and engage in a side discussion to see if they could gather further information via a good cop/bad cop routine.

Some of the discussions of Pielke Sr. veered into the paranoid, with Skeptical Science team members on several occasions fantasizing that Pielke Sr. was perhaps the point man in a global climate denier conspiracy. If only they could somehow access his university emails, one mused, “Look, if the deniers' emails are exposed I have no doubt that what we see will be unbelieveable, mind blowing, maybe even criminal. Why none has tried legitimitely (i.e., through FOIA) to access their emails is beyond me.”

The idea that Pielke Sr. is a climate denier is laughable. Skeptical Science consistently interpreted Pielke Sr.’s willingness to engage with their mortal enemies (such as Anthony Watts of the skeptical blog WattsUpWithThat) not as a sign of a magnanimous senior statesman willing to help anyone bring their ideas to the peer-reviewed literature, but as evidence of some sort of deep and irreparable moral turpitude. The hacked discussions are infused with such Manichean paranoia.

As time went by the Skeptical Science team’s attitude toward Pielke Sr. became increasingly unhinged and personal. John Cook, the founder of Skeptical Science, wrote, “"I'm finding myself very annoyed when I think about Pielke, having trouble thinking purely rationally and strategically when I think about him.” One team member expressed some concern about their attacks, “It looks like a great lion being mobbed by snarling jackals. I don't like it.”

But in the end, the political aims of Skeptical Science meant that Pielke Sr. needed to be destroyed: “he lends the camouflage of scientific respectability to what is likely to be a very dangerous policy of fossil-fuel appeasement. I don't care how Pielke is behaving: I'm playing to win."

And win they have.

Even given my obvious biases, Pielke Sr. is undoubtedly a giant in the atmospheric sciences. It is hard to find any scientist of his generation with a stronger record of achievement. He was an early pioneer of computer modeling of weather, contributing to demonstrably better weather forecasts. He was also a leader in recognizing the role of land surface processes in regional and global climate. A full recounting of his achievements would span many columns here. At a time when he should be receiving lifetime achievement awards and celebrated for his contributions to science, he is instead ostracized and is still being denigrated by Skeptical Science and their followers.

My bias is not simply familial. You see, I am also on the Skeptical Science blacklist. Rarely does a day go by that this is not used on social media or, at times, in personal interactions to illustrate my lack of fitness to participate in scientific discussions, to damage my career and reputation.

Like Curry and Pielke Sr., I have seen firsthand the consequences of a public and behind-the-scenes campaign by Skeptical Science against me. Despite the widespread aversion of professor blacklisting, in climate science at least, such blacklisting is allowed and even encouraged by the community, and as a result, it works.

I have been locked out from Twitter for sharing some of the information from the hacked Skeptical Science discussions. Several Skeptical Science team members have contacted me by email in the past hours with vaguely sinister but eminently deniable threats. I expect they will come after this column next. And if you hear that I have left academia, like Curry, you’ll know why.

Even so, everything here is true, and truth matters more than fear.

SOURCE 






Renewable Power Theatre of the Absurd

Along with many other states, California, Arizona and Nevada all have “renewable portfolio laws.” California requires that 60% of its electric power be from renewable sources by 2030. Nevada requires 50% by 2030. Arizona requires 15% by 2025. Renewable power is defined by law in each state, but usually it amounts to wind or solar.

One might think that having a quota for renewable power means that the power has to be generated by wind or solar and consumed within the state. There is a loophole. The “renewable attribute” can be legally separated from the actual power. So, the power can be consumed in one place, but a different place gets credit as if it had actually consumed the renewable power. For example, a wind farm in Colorado can generate a megawatt hour of electricity. The power is actually sold and consumed in Colorado, but California gets credit for a megawatt hour of renewable power.

The Colorado wind farm in the normal course of events can sell the abstract credit, known as an RPC or Renewable Power Certificate to California. California needs credits to meet it renewable power quota, so it is willing to pay, for what is a piece of paper. The wind farm can also sell the real electric power separately to someone who is willing to buy electricity that comes without the renewable power attribute, because the renewable power attribute has been sold to California. This is a legal way to convert power from fossil fuels into renewable power, or to meet a renewable power quota without actual renewable power.

California Energy Commission

Sometimes the certificate may be more valuable than the power. In fact, sometimes the power may literally be worth less than nothing. At certain times California has too much solar power that it can’t use because it would destabilize the grid. When the power is worth less than nothing, the producer will have to pay someone to use the power. Someone has to use the power or there can’t be a certificate. That would be a counterfeit certificate. You can’t just throw the power away. That would negate the whole rationale. You might think that any state would be happy to accept free power, but it may be inconvenient for technical or economic reasons, or it may just be that only one party is available that can take the power and they can exercise monopoly power and make the party trying to get rid of the power pay for the privilege.

A similar situation exists in the spring with wind power in the Pacific Northwest. Wind power receives a 2.4 cents per kilowatt hour subsidy from the federal government. But in the spring, there is a surplus of hydroelectric power due to plentiful rainfall. The wind power suppliers pay power consumers to take their power so they can get the federal subsidy. The hydroelectric suppliers have no motive to do the same because they don’t get a subsidy. So, the hydroelectric suppliers spill the excess water and some electricity users get paid rather than billed for their power. This is known as a market distortion caused by the government.

Often with solar power there is too much during the middle of the day and not enough later in the day. In the evening there isn’t any solar power. In California the major problem with excess solar power is in the spring, when the sunshine is kicking in, but the big consumption for air conditioning hasn’t yet kicked in. California could simply tell the solar power generating stations to cut back, but then they would lose credit toward their renewable power quota. Some contracts may even make them pay for the power that they would have received without the cutback. So, they try to get utilities in adjacent states to take the power, keeping the certificates for themselves. This was all revealed in a Los Angeles Times article. Apparently, California is paying as much as $15 a megawatt hour to unload the unusable solar power.

To see why this makes sense for California it is necessary to look at the economics of solar power. To generate solar power if there weren’t various subsidies would cost about $80 per megawatt hour. With the federal and state subsidies the cost might be reduced to $25 per megawatt hour. In contrast, the marginal cost of generating power with natural gas is $15 to $20 a megawatt hour. But the $25 renewable power runs out when the California grid can’t accept any more solar in the middle of the day. If they pay Nevada $15 to accept the excess solar, they now have a route to get renewable credits for $40 per megawatt hour, $25 for the solar power and $15 to get Nevada to accept the unusable power. Essentially by a legal strategy they are converting natural gas electricity, delivered in the evening, into renewable electricity. Nevada, on the other hand is getting electricity that is not legally renewable, even though it really does come from solar. Nevada may not want more non-renewable electricity unless they are paid for it, because Nevada has a quota for renewable power too.

The situation is more than a little strange. Propaganda from the sellers of wind and solar power makes people think that wind and solar are actually useful. Huge subsidies make wind and solar seem cheaper than they really are. The idea that introducing wind and solar in U.S. states will make a significant difference in world CO2 emissions is wrong. The real emissions problem, if it is a problem, is in Asia. People that really believe in global warming should face up to the fact that nuclear is the only route to stopping the increase of CO2 in the atmosphere. Some of the most important advocates of global warming catastrophe make that clear.

The most salient fact conc erning wind and solar is that they are intermittent and erratic sourcesof power. They always have to be backed up with fossil fuel plants that take over when the sun sets or the wind stops. They never replace fossil fuel plants.

A pathetic attempt to correct the inherent problems of wind and solar is to add batteries to store power. That costs a fortune, a very high price to pay to help in meeting renewable power quotas..

The utilities know the facts. But the utilities have no incentive to stop the waste because they have figured out how to make money by promoting dubious renewable power. Apparently, the politicians on state public utility commissions and in state legislatures don’t have the knowledge or the courage to represent the interests of the people, rather than the interests of the manufacturers of wind and solar stations and the interests of the environmental organizations that are profiting from an artificial fear of traditional energy. People send money to environmental organizations because they have been convinced that catastrophes are looming.

SOURCE 





Australian government may use government contracts to crack down on environment protests

The Coalition is considering using federal government building contracts to pressure companies not to engage in or to cave in to environmental boycotts.

In a sign the government is looking for innovative ways to implement Scott Morrison’s threat to crack down on environmental protests, the attorney general, Christian Porter, has sought views on whether the federal building code could be used to “prevent multiple secondary/environmental boycott demands and behaviour”.

The question is contained in an industrial relations discussion paper on the code, released on Tuesday.

The code, last updated in 2016, governs the federal government’s engagement with construction companies and is usually used to influence industrial conditions and the role of unions, rather than environmental groups.

It has been used to ban union flags on worksites, to force employers to reject clauses allowing unions access to worksites for inductions, and to ban clauses limiting the use of contractors.

The paper notes the code already requires companies to report “actual or threatened industrial action and secondary boycott demands as soon as practicable, but no later than 24 hours”.

Although the code directly applies only to companies bidding for government work, those companies must adopt preferred work practices in all their private sector agreements and impose the same conditions on subcontractors in order to comply.

If the code were used to prevent secondary or environmental boycotts, the government could potentially put pressure on a company to build a rail line to Adani’s Carmichael coalmine or lose all its government work, for example.

Asked about the proposal at a press conference in Melbourne, Porter incorrectly claimed the word “environmental” did not appear in the paper, before conceding the government is interested in how to combat “secondary boycotts which would include any number of different reasons” for boycotts.

“We have come across a range of instances where businesses have been damaged by behaviour that could be described as secondary boycotts,” he said.

“In the context of the Commonwealth as a purchaser of construction services … we’re interested in hearing from all of the parties if there is a role for the code to ensure businesses don’t get damaged by unfair secondary boycott behaviour.”

Porter agreed that companies losing work for engaging in or caving in to a secondary boycott were “all possible options”.

A wide range of businesses have been targeted for Adani-related boycotts including banks, such as Westpac, and many other companies outside the construction sector.

In January Greyhound ruled out any extension of work on the controversial Adani coal project after it was targeted for providing transport to workers for the construction company BMD, which is building the railway to take the coal to Adani’s Abbot Point port.

In November Morrison branded environmental protesters “anarchists” and threatened a radical crackdown on the right to protest in a speech to the Queensland Resources Council, claiming progressives were seeking to “deny the liberties of Australians”.

Porter explained that a crackdown could include moves to limit access to litigation funding and environmental litigation and to prevent secondary boycotts by groups such as Market Forces.

He accused the group of attempting to “impose their political will on companies across the country through widespread, coordinated harassment and threats of boycotts”.

The Competition and Consumer Act already contains civil penalties for secondary boycotts, which target one business in order to prevent provision of goods or services to another, including if they cause “substantial loss or damage” or substantially lessen competition.

However, secondary boycotts for the “dominant purpose” of environmental protection or consumer protection are permitted.

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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18 February, 2020  

The IPCC goal of 1.5C degrees of warming may be more easily reached than we think

There is constant talk about the difficulty of reaching the "Paris" goal of 1.5C warming over pre-industrial levels. Great efforts are said to be needed if we are to reach that goal.

But notice something:  We are already about one degree above pre-industrial levels.  So all the Angst is about just half of one degree.  That hardly seems worth getting excited about.  The IPCC report on 1.5 degrees lists a number of things that would happen with such a temperature rise but none seem dramatic except for the expected sea level rise of about half a meter.  And a good thing from 1.5 degrees is also listed -- that we would have more rain and less drought.

But the changes in sea level so far are heavily contested, with some scientists calling into question whether we have had any sea level rise at all in the last half century or so. So any concern there must  be taken with a grain of salt.

There does seem to have been a small, slow and erratic increase in global temperatures over the last 150 years or so but even Warmists don't attribute all of that to man's activity.  So in that context, a change of half a degree from present levels would seem likely to come about naturally over the current century.  And if it did, would we notice such a small change?  I can't see it. A temperature change of 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial level would seem perfectly comfortable and unlikely to bother us.  We have much greater temperature changes during every day.

So what are the Warmists going on about?  They think that much larger temperature rises will happen and we will struggle to keep to .5 of a degree over what we presently have.

But that is a pure prophecy and speculation.  Looking at the temperature changes so far, rises are not going to be regular nor are they likely to be great.  Warmists rely on their dinky models to support prophecies of big climate change. The temperature record so far, however,  suggests only slight change.  There have been several extensive periods of no temperature changes at all  -- e.g 1945 to 1975.

So I think  the modest rise of half a degree will come about perfectly naturally, with no effort and no concern on our part at all  -- JR.






TRIGGERED! Donald Trump Saves the Planet, Leads World in Lowering CO2 Emissions

A new report by the International Energy Agency (IEA) that tracks carbon emissions worldwide dropped great news for the United States under the leadership of Donald Trump on Tuesday. "The United States saw the largest decline in energy-related CO2 emissions in 2019 on a country basis – a fall of 140 Mt, or 2.9%, to 4.8 Gt. US emissions are now down almost 1 Gt from their peak in the year 2000, the largest absolute decline by any country over that period."

Not only is Trump leading the world in economic success but he's also doing exactly what the climate scolds all claim they want, which is leading the world in energy saving. Carbon emission reduction isn't the only win for Trump's policies, the IEA also reported that natural gas is on the rise and coal-powered energy declined by 15% in America. "A 15% reduction in the use of coal for power generation underpinned the decline in overall US emissions in 2019. Coal-fired power plants faced even stronger competition from natural gas-fired generation, with benchmark gas prices an average of 45% lower than 2018 levels. As a result, gas increased its share in electricity generation to a record high of 37%."

Is there anything this president can't do? The air is cleaner, the stock market is booming, now, if we could only get him to tear down all the unsightly and ineffective wind farms that do next to nothing he'd be elected president forever. Do not look to the Democrats to give Trump any credit for the energy reductions and number one status in the whole darn world for "green" policies. They will continue to claim he wants to kill the planet and rape the earth of its bounties.

In 2019, The Guardian put out a list of all the terrible climate policies of Trump's including "departing from the Paris climate agreement summit," which, of course, we all now see was not at all necessary in order to reduce emissions since the US is leading all of them.

The New York Times gave us this handy chart of the climate rollbacks under Trump, showing that useless and stupid programs can be done away with while still cleaning up the environment. "President Trump has made eliminating federal regulations a priority. His administration, with help from Republicans in Congress, has often targeted environmental rules it sees as burdensome to the fossil fuel industry and other big businesses." Isn't it amazing that you can get rid of stupid regulations and still have cleaner air and water?

But according to the NYT, just last December, all these rollbacks would result in dirtier air and more emissions. "All told, the Trump administration’s environmental rollbacks could significantly increase greenhouse gas emissions and lead to thousands of extra deaths from poor air quality every year, according to a report prepared by New York University Law School's State Energy and Environmental Impact Center."

Well, suck it, NYU Law School's State Energy and Environmental Impact Center! The results are in and Trump is winning again. None of the dire predictions came true and Trump has shown that federal regulations don't equal good environmental outcomes.

SOURCE 






Will the West cede nuclear energy dominance to Russia?

When she and Sen. Ed Markey introduced the “Green New Deal” a year ago, newly elected Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez did not mention nuclear energy as part of the future. Later, Ocasio-Cortez admitted she still had “an open mind” on evolving nuclear energy technologies while insisting that older plants be shuttered.

But since then she has endorsed Sen. Bernie Sanders, whose platform includes a moratorium on nuclear power plant license renewals – and who states “we must stop building new nuclear power plants, and find a real solution to our existing nuclear waste problem.”

Truth is, while the U.S. even today leads the world with nearly a hundred operational nuclear facilities, nuclear remains controversial. Should a Sanders-led U.S. follow Germany’s lead in decommissioning existing nuclear plants and not building new ones, a new world nuclear energy leader might emerge quickly.

China, while known for building myriads of coal-fired power plants, has also been busy. A 2017 article noted the Chinese had 38 nuclear plants in operation and another 19 under construction, and was thus “the fastest expanding nuclear power generator in the world.”

But it is Russia that is making the most noise about nuclear energy of late. Last July, Russian President Vladimir Putin went on the offensive against the anti-growth technocrats and others who champion wind and solar as the energy future, insisting that “It is impossible and pointless to try to stop human progress.”

Speaking at the 2nd Global Manufacturing and Industrialization Summit in Yekaterinburg, Russia, Putin instead proclaimed, “Super-efficient scientific, engineering, and manufacturing solutions will help us establish a balance between the biosphere (the realm of nature) and the technosphere (the realm of creative reason). Fusion energy which in fact is similar to how heat and light are produced in our star, the sun, is an example of such nature-like technologies.”

Putin spoke glowingly of the work of Russia’s Kurchatov Institute, which has already begun a project on a fission-fusion hybrid reactors expected to be operational later this year, and its role in driving the advanced science as a creative force for the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) program in France, which is scheduled to go online with its first plasma by 2025.

As explained by Caroline Delbert, the Russian fission-fusion hybrid reactor runs on thorium, which is far less reactive and much more plentiful than uranium. Its “down to earth” design, Delbert acknowledges, makes for a shorter time to startup.

Russia’s nuclear power initiatives extend well beyond that country’s borders. On February 8, India’s Ambassador to Russia, Venkatesh Varma, announced that Russia will design 20 more nuclear power plants to be built in India over the next two decades, building on 18 years of nuclear cooperation between the two countries.

Russia and India are also helping Bangladesh construct its first nuclear power plant and may expand their collaborations. Varma noted, “Russia already has agreements in this field with a number of African countries. Ethiopia is one of them, and there are some countries in the Middle East. It will be Russian projects but with Indian cooperation.”

Meanwhile, the U.S., much of Western Europe, and post-Fukushima Japan are at best conflicted over nuclear’s role in providing reliable, affordable energy in the face of burgeoning demand. Some EU states are strongly anti-nuclear and have structured their electricity markets in response to populist support for wind and solar. The next decade will likely see a decline in nuclear generating capacity, and only Finland, France, and Slovakia are building new nuclear facilities.

Still, there are some hopeful signs that the West may be on the verge of a new era in nuclear energy.

TerraPower announced a collaboration with GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy to pursue a public-private partnership to design and construct the Versatile Test Reactor for the U.S. Department of Energy.

The Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory announced plans to rebuild the National Spherical Torus Experiment (NSTX) tokamak reactor, renew its commitment to ITER< and build a smaller, cheaper prototype power plant.

A Rolls-Royce led consortium plans to build 17 “revolutionary mini nuclear power stations” to replace Britain’s eight aging large-scale nuclear power plants. Mass production at new factories should lead to shorter construction times and lower costs.

Will the West again match Russia’s apparent zeal for new-design nuclear power plants? Maybe not. Canadian journalist Matthew Ehret argues that the West has for fifty years been dominated by a new “science of limits” that sees mankind’s biggest threat as mankind itself.”

Moreover, as Open Europe’s Pieter Cleppe bemoans, “While many proponents of renewables and battery technology point at how future technological development will sort out their many shortcomings, very few assume technological progress is possible for nuclear technology. On the contrary, innovations are routinely dismissed out of hand and painted as dangerous.”

Westerners should listen to Bangladeshi businessman and nuclear energy advocate Kazi Zahin Hasan. In his view “Modern cities need continuous power; solar and wind cannot provide this without expensive battery storage, which no city or utility has been willing to buy. That’s why after billions of dollars of investment in solar and wind power, there is not a single major city which is powered exclusively by solar or wind.”

SOURCE 






Joaquin, Osher, Greta and Jane show ignorance can be blissfully rewarding

By Chris Kenny, writing from Australia

First they came for the coal, then they wanted our milk. While the demonisation of coal ignores how this mineral has probably done more for human prosperity and progress than any other, we at least can comprehend why climate activists have turned on coal — even if their plans are reckless and impractical.

Extinction Rebellion protesters are so committed to shutting down the coal industry that they lie on polystyrene foam mats made from fossil fuels while they use acrylic resins made from fossil fuels to super-glue themselves to the road with chains and pipes manufactured with coal-fired energy. Soon they’ll be doing the same in dairies.

Because now the woke are turning on milk. They want to make us guilty for feeding milk to our kids.

“We feel entitled to artificially inseminate a cow and steal her baby, even though her cries of ­anguish are unmistakeable,” Holly­wood actor Joaquin Phoenix said accepting his Oscar on Monday. “Then we take her milk that’s intended for her calf and we put it in our coffee and our cereal.” Perhaps he was trying to distract from how he makes millions eliciting cries of anguish from filmgoers as he glorifies a fictional serial killer.

While Scott Morrison is pilloried for waving a lump of coal around in parliament, heaven help the next leader caught supping on a glass of pasteurised full-cream. Apparently we are heartless, arrogant bigots against other species, we are speciesists who steal milk from cows, and we need to be told.

Remember when fashionable political stances could be summarised as a resistance to instruction, a push for freedom? There was a libertarian approach, embraced especially by the young and focused on the rights of individuals — they railed against young men being conscripted to serve in Vietnam, disrupted social norms and demanded equal rights for women and indigenous Australians.

Activists defied and challenged edicts handed down by moralising church leaders, conservative institutions or paternalistic governments. There was a healthy disdain for anyone telling others how to live their lives.

But now the fashion goes with the zeitgeist, advocates for groupthink and shames individuals into conforming. Now the woke are the preachy ones.

Who are we to decide how to run our lives when there are Hollywood A-listers prepared to set an example by wearing the same designer tuxedo to more than one awards dinner? Why should we enjoy breakfast when an actor equates the rights of people, countries, races and genders with the rights of individual ­species?

“We’re talking about the fight against the belief that one nation, one people, one race, one gender, one species, has the right to dominate, use and control another with impunity,” said Phoenix. Presumably he will boycott next year’s Academy Awards because in all their history they have not so much as nominated a single other species; it’s been a Homo sapiens clean sweep.

And once Phoenix succeeds in his equal pay battle for the full cast of Doctor Dolittle, perhaps he could head to the Serengeti to campaign against lions imposing their will on wildebeest, a clear-cut case of speciesist exploitation if ever I saw one.

“We go into the natural world and we plunder it for its resources,” the actor said. “We fear the idea of personal change because we think we need to sacrifice something, to give something up.”

He ought to know. After all, the poor bloke was wearing the same suit he had worn a week or so ­earlier. Jane Fonda too made a virtue of wearing a dress she had worn six years earlier. As if that weren’t hardship enough, after she was glammed up by her spartan team of just three stylists (hair, dress and make-up), Fonda posted on social media that she was wearing ­“Pomellato jewellery because it only uses respon­sible, ethically harvested gold and sus­tainable ­diamonds”.

Ah, sustainable diamonds, the thinking woman’s carbon sink. Mother Teresa has nothing on these people. This year’s Nobel Peace Prize will be hard to pick.

We get much of the same closer to home, of course. On the ABC’s Q&A this week, one of their panellists was reality television host Osher Gunsberg (he fronts The Bachelor) who was chosen, wouldn’t you know, because he proselytises for climate action and claims to practise what he ­preaches.

“I wouldn’t call it sacrifice at all,” Gunsberg said of his vegan, non-internal combustion and ­carbon-conscious lifestyle. “The benefits that I get in my life for the choices that I make around my impact on the world are extraordinary … I’ve been driving electric cars since 2011, and they’re an extraordinarily exciting … they’re really fun to drive. I have an electric bike as well, a moped that I get around on. It’s super fun.”

This is nirvana, all the fun of the carnival and saving the planet at the same time. I don’t know Gunsberg’s travel habits so can’t say whether he is a globetrotting climate hypocrite like Prince Harry, Leonardo DiCaprio, Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore and so many others, but I did find some articles featuring him with his pet dog — now this is a carbon extravagance. Studies show pet dogs can have the annual carbon footprint of a car, so surely any climate radical with a pet is a fraud.

Naturally enough I reckon Gunsberg is free to live his life as he likes, and back any cause he chooses. But it is the preaching that grates, and exposes him, along with the way the media (in this case the ABC) then presents him as an authority.

He suggested to the Q&A audience that Australia’s export coal market would soon collapse, which is just not true.

International Energy Agency figures show our coal exports have reached record levels and are set to plateau or ­increase slightly into the future.

Just in our two largest markets there are more than 100 new coal-fired power stations under construction in China and more than a dozen in Japan. I look forward to The Bachelor episode where they explain how these generators will function without coal.

Preaching is everywhere. This week Greta Thunberg admonished the entire global population when she tweeted about record carbon dioxide levels and said, “no one understands the full meaning” because this is the “crisis that’s never been treated as a crisis”.

The 17-year-old, who has yet to finish her schooling, also tweeted that “Indigenous rights = climate justice”.

Then, right on cue, the BBC announced it would be producing a TV science series with Thunberg. Again, this teenager should feel free to spruik her views wherever she likes but the worry is how her silly hectoring is ­embraced and amplified by adults, politicians and public broadcasters. It will be amusing when she loses one sandal and they all adopt that as a sign.

Australia’s Chief Medical Officer, Brendan Murphy, admonished the nation for xenophobia and racism this week, referencing unspecified incidents directed against Chinese-Australians, apparently triggered by coronavirus panic. When I pressed for details Murphy referred to incidents “reflected widely on social media” and noted that “individual in­stances have not been recorded”.

Labor MP Andrew Giles called for a national anti-racism campaign suggesting the coronavirus was being used as an “excuse” for racism. Just like those who created an “I’ll ride with you” campaign based on a fabricated incident after the Lindt cafe siege, Giles was quick to think the worst of mainstream Australians — he wanted a publicly funded national lecturing campaign.

Like brainwashed cult members, the new woke left loves to receive instructions and be lectured. And, in turn, it likes to lecture us.

Fortunately, mainstream people in a host of Western democracies who are sick of sanctimony on climate change, energy, border protection, Brexit and, yes, even veganism have been able to express their will through the ballot box. Just because the so-called elites are enraptured by the sound of their own exhortations, it doesn’t mean they’re resonating.

SOURCE 




Australian Greenie leader has the Australian Left in an awkward corner

Would Richard Marles welcome a New Australian coal-fired power station? The ABC’s David Speers asked the question of Labor’s deputy leader at least a dozen times last week before giving up and answering himself.

“So that’s a maybe?” he suggested. Marles voiced no dissent.

The place called “maybe” is dangerous terrain for an opposition, particularly on an issue on which passions run high. Just ask Jeremy Corbyn whose maybe/maybe not policy on leaving the EU is the principal reason the British Labour Party is looking for a new leader.

It is a while until our next federal election but we can already predict that climate policy will be one of Labor’s principal sources of grief, just as it has been at every election since 2010, when Julia Gillard received a mandate not to ­introduce the carbon tax she promptly did.

In last year’s election campaign, inviting Bill Shorten to share the costings on his 45 per cent emissions target was the surest way to make him lose his rag. His unsteady performance on the issue was one reason voters considered him shifty or worse.

His climate platform has been repudiated by his successor, leaving a great dollop of jelly where Labor’s policy ought to be.

Today Labor faces its own divisions while the Coalition, at least around the cabinet table, is united on climate and energy, probably for the first time since John Howard was in government.

Labor has spawned a ginger group that brands itself the friends of coal. They meet at Otis (the restaurant, not the elevator) in an ­attempt to move Labor back to the sensible centre.

That is the point on the spectrum where every Labor politician who aspires to win the next election wants to be, armed with a policy that unites the Collinsville miners and the knitting nannas of Marrickville in one happy family.

A cool, damp summer might have given Labor some breathing space. Instead, the climate debate has been charged with a new ferocity. Anthony Albanese is being challenged from within his party to hitch his wagon to the climate emergency.

He has wisely resisted, knowing that the moral argument is not one Labor can easily win.

Labor’s discomfort

Adam Bandt’s elevation as the Greens leader has increased Labor’s discomfort. Bandt is taking the Greens further towards the extreme as he shapes a clearer divide between the parties of the left.

“Ultimately Labor’s got to ­decide where it stands,” Bandt told Michelle Grattan recently. “If Labor thinks it can continue to walk both sides of the fence, they’re going to stay in opposition for a very long time. The script that we saw playing out at the last election will just play itself out at the next election.”

Last week, after the existence of the Otis Group was revealed by the media, Albanese retreated further into maybe land. His claim that the party “is united in our position that climate change is real, that we need to act on lowering our emissions” these days counts as a motherhood statement. It puts him on a unity ticket with both the Coalition and the Greens while being slightly less convincing than either.

His rhetoric on coal, that it will continue to play a part in Australia’s economy for decades to come, is almost identical to Tony ­Abbott’s, as Bandt delights in pointing out. Brand differentiation is all but impossible.

The Coalition is offering Labor few favours by charting a steadier course on energy policy.

Malcolm Turnbull’s departure relieved much of the tension in the Liberals’ partyroom, while Scott Morrison’s anointing of Angus Taylor as the minister for bringing down ­energy prices gave a practical sense of direction to the policy challenge that has been lacking for more than decade.

A vocal group in the partyroom wishes the Prime Minister was driven less by the Paris target. Another vocal section urges him to do more. Yet the party has seldom been more comfortable in its own skin on climate policy, having re­framed the question in economic rather than scientific terms.

Crucially, the energy policy challenge has evolved in the past three years since the closure of coal-fired power stations in South Australia and Victoria brought home the vulnerabilities of wind and solar.

The gap in the market is now supply that backs up renewables, rather than baseload, reducing the reliance on coal and putting the focus on the supply of gas. Labor shows no signs of coming to terms with this development.

The government is at last starting to parade its achievements, dispelling the myth that it has been sitting on its hands.

Labor had expected to contain emissions at 635 million tonnes by now by imposing a carbon tax. The Coali­tion has managed to reduce emissions to 532 million tonnes without one. Wholesale electricity prices are down 35 per cent year on year. The retail price has fallen for four consecutive quarters. The carbon footprint of the average Australian is well on its way to being half as big as it was in 2005.

It makes it almost impossible for Labor to take a position sufficiently different from the Coali­tion to make a fight of it. Entering a bidding war with the Greens, as it tried to do last time, would put blue-collar seats in danger.

It is little wonder that a growing group in Labor is urging Albanese to sue for peace by adopting policies close to those of the ­government and seeking a bipartisan solution.

A couple of years ago the Coali­tion would have jumped at the chance to neutralise climate as an election issue. Its elevation as a party-political issue in the first place puts Australia at odds with most other Western democracies.

Right now, however, there is little enthusiasm in the Coalition for extending an olive branch. Much better to watch the opposition squirm.

SOURCE  

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17 February, 2020  

Do ‘green’ buses pass the performance test?

Do they even pass basic energy, environmental, economic and human rights tests?

Duggan Flanakin

Should Americans follow China in a massive commitment to supposedly eco-friendly battery-electric buses (BEBs)?  California has mandated a “carbon-free” bus system by 2040 and will buy only battery or fuel cell-powered buses after 2029.  Other states and cities are following suit.

Vehicle decisions are typically based on cost and performance. Cost includes selling price plus maintenance, while performance now includes perceived environmental impacts – which for some is the only issue that matters. But that perception ignores some huge ecological (and human rights) issues.

China today has 420,000 BEBs on the road, with plans to reach 600,000 by 2025.  The rest of the world has maybe 5,000 of these expensive, short-range buses. However, the Chinese still get 70% of their energy from coal, so are their BEBs really that green? Are they safe? And are they really ethical?

Battery costs are the main reason BEBs today are much more expensive than buses that run on diesel or compressed natural gas. But bus makers say electric buses require less maintenance, and climate activists say the lower net “carbon footprint” (carbon dioxide emissions) justifies paying a little more.

China gets around the up-front cost problem by establishing national mandates, heavily subsidizing bus (and battery) manufacturers, and rewarding cities that replace entire bus fleets at one time. This ensures that their factories benefit from economies of scale – and that the transition will be swift and complete.

Beijing simply dodges the environmental costs by ignoring the fossil fuels, horrific pollution and human illnesses involved in mining, ore processing and manufacturing processes associated with building the buses. California and other “renewable” energy advocates do likewise. In fact, those costs will skyrocket as China, California and the world emphasize electric vehicle, wind, solar and battery technologies.

Meanwhile, the USA and EU nations focus on subsidizing passenger cars. Thus, there are far more zero-emission passenger cars on the road today in the U.S. and Europe than public transit vehicles. No wonder Westerners still view electric vehicles as subsidized luxuries for the “woke wealthy,” who boast about lowering their carbon footprint, despite also often needing fossil fuel electricity to charge batteries.

The huge costs for fast-charging stations across Europe, let alone the vast United States, pose more huge challenges for future expansion of the electric vehicle market. But transit vehicles, even school buses, run regular routes, and if the routes are short enough, the bus can be recharged overnight in the garages.

Tax credits, free HOV lane access, free charging stations and other subsidies for the rich are seen by most as terrible policies. Yet another, says University of California–Davis researcher Hanjiro Ambrose, is the Federal Transit Administration funding formulas that favor short-term cost-efficiency over long-term innovation. “Those funding mechanisms haven’t been aligned with trying to stimulate policy change,” Ambrose says. “The cheapest technology available isn’t usually the newest technology available.”

To work around high upfront battery costs, innovative capitalists are creating new financial products that allow fleet owners to finance battery purchases. Treating battery costs the same way as fuel costs – as ongoing expenses – meets federal guidelines. Matt Horton, chief commercial officer for U.S. BEB maker Proterra, says, “The importance of the private capital coming into this market cannot be understated.”

Green advocates admit the primary reason people choose EVs is their belief that electric cars and buses, even with electricity generated from fossil fuels, are good for the environment. The Union of Concerned Scientists claims BEBs are 2.5 times cleaner in terms of lifespan emissions than diesel buses. That is highly questionable. Moreover, BEBs with today’s strongest batteries can take a full load no more than 150 miles in good weather. That’s fine for airport shuttles, maybe even for short public transit routes.

However, electric battery life is shorter than the 12-year vehicle life that many transit and school bus systems rely upon in their budgets. Battery replacement for BEBs is very expensive and unpredictable.

And then there are the horror stories. Los Angeles Metro purchased BEBs from Chinese-owned BYD Ltd. but yanked the first five off the road within a few months. Agency staff called the buses “unsuitable,” poorly made, and unreliable for more than 100 miles. Albuquerque returned seven out of its 16 BYD buses, citing cracks, leaking fluid, axle problems and inability to hold charges.

French journalist Alon Levy reported that BEB sales teams in Vancouver admitted their buses could not run for an entire day without recharging during layovers. Worse, in Minneapolis, bus performance suffers tremendously in cold weather: at 20o F buses cannot last all day; on Super Bowl Sunday, at 5o F, a battery bus lasted only 40 minutes and traveled barely 16 miles. Imagine being in a BEB in a blizzard.

In largely rural Maine, lawmakers proposed converting all school buses to BEBs. But Maine Heritage Policy Center policy analyst Adam Crepeau found that BEBs can travel no more than 135 miles per charge (in good weather), while diesel buses go up to 400 miles and can be refilled quickly almost anywhere. “This,” he said, “will severely impact the ability of schools to use them for longer trips, for sporting events, field trips and other experiences for students.” Or in bitterly cold Maine winters.

The economic and practical bottom line is simple. Activists and sales teams are pressing American cities, school boards and other public entities to follow China and convert their fleets to BEBs, calling them “the wave of the future.” Even in California, where lengthy power outages have become routine, this climate and anti-fossil ideology dominates. Given the growing vulnerability of our electric grid, among other concerns, cost and performance may not be the only considerations in making such an irreversible choice.

The environmental and ethical bottom line is equally simple – but routinely gets shunted aside.

Electric vehicles require about three times more copper than internal combustion equivalents – plus lithium, cobalt and other metals for their batteries. Wind turbines need some 200 times more steel, copper, plastics, rare earths, concrete and other materials per megawatt than combined-cycle gas turbines. Photovoltaic solar panels have similar materials requirements. 100% “renewable, sustainable” Green New Deal electricity systems on US or Chinese scales would require millions of turbines, billions of solar panels and billions of half-ton Tesla-style battery packs for cars, buses and backup electricity storage.

Those technologies, on those scales, would require mining at levels unprecedented in world history! And the environmental and human rights record we’ve seen for those high-tech metals is terrifying.

Lithium comes mostly from Tibet and the Argentina-Bolivia-Chile “lithium triangle,” where contaminated lands and waters are poisoning fish, livestock, wildlife and people. Most cobalt is mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where 40,000 children and their parents slave in open pits and dark, narrow tunnels – and get exposed constantly to filthy, toxic, radioactive mud, dust, water and air. Broken bones, suffocation, blood and respiratory diseases, birth defects, cancer and paralysis are commonplace.

Nearly all the world’s rare earth elements come from Inner Mongolia. Mining the ores involves pumping acid into the ground and processing them with more acids and chemicals. Black sludge from the operations is piped to a huge foul-smelling “lake” that is surrounded by formerly productive farmlands that are now so toxic that nothing can grow on them, and people and wildlife have just moved away. Here too, severe skin and respiratory diseases, cancers and other terrible illnesses have become commonplace.

In many of these cases, the mining and processing operations are run by Chinese companies, under minimal to nonexistent pollution control, workplace safety, fair wage, child labor or other basic standards that American, Canadian, Australian and European companies are expected to follow.

And this is just for today’s “renewable, sustainable, ethical, Earth-friendly, green” technologies. Just imagine what we are likely to see if China, California, New York, Europe and countless other places start mandating a fossil-fuel-free future – and then shut down nuclear power, to boot. Where will we get all the raw materials? Where will we put all the wind turbines, solar panels, batteries and transmission lines?

The prospect is horrifying. And it’s all justified by exaggerated fears of a climate apocalypse. Crazy!

Via email. Duggan Flanakin is director of policy research for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT)






Bernie’s Green New Deal to go 100 percent renewable in 10 years would destroy America

By Robert Romano

Are the American people about to vote to destroy the way of life?

If socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-Vt.) is elected, his utopian promise to implement a 10-year Soviet-style Gosplan to end oil and gas consumption —the Green New Deal—will radically transform the U.S. economy, and possibly leave America in the dark and cold.

The plan, according to Sanders’ website, calls for “[r]eaching 100 percent renewable energy for electricity and transportation by no later than 2030 and complete decarbonization of the economy by 2050 at latest – consistent with the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change goals – by expanding the existing federal Power Marketing Administrations to build new solar, wind, and geothermal energy sources.”

All sources of non-renewable energy accounting for 62 percent of the electricity grid would need to be replaced. No more coal, natural gas or petroleum based electricity generation. Those aren’t renewable.

In addition, 19 percent of the grid via nuclear power would come to an end, too, even though it doesn’t emit carbon. New nuclear plant construction would cease under the Sanders plan.

Every building including 129 million households would all have to be upgraded to no longer emit any carbon.

Home heating and hot water heaters via natural gas and oil would all have to be replaced. So would all of your stoves if they run on fire. Are you ready for winter yet?

Every car and truck—more than 250 million—that runs on gasoline and diesel would have to be replaced.

Convenient air travel would have to be banned.

The oil, coal and gas industries will be eliminated.

To get across the country, you’d probably have to take a train. Overseas? Hope you got your sea legs.

This is a dagger pointed at the heart of Middle America. Do you commute to work in a car? Do you live in a single family home? Can you afford tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars of upgrades for your home? How about a new electric car? Does that fit in your budget?

Work in the energy industry? Drive trucks for a living? Not any more. It’s job retraining camp for you.

The Green New Deal would change everything, compelling millions of Americans to probably move to warmer areas to survive as the federal government unilaterally ends the industrial revolution — the reason we’re such a prosperous species — with a radical revolution of its own.

The U.S. emits about 5.1 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide every year as of 2017, according to the U.S. Energy Information Agency: 45 percent from petroleum, 29 percent from natural gas and 26 percent from coal.

Of the portion of emissions devoted to natural gas, 1.47 billion metric tons a year, only 506 million is from electricity generation. The rest is from heating homes in the winter, making hot water, cooking food and the like

And then there’s the rest of the world — another 30 billion metric tons a year or so — which of course the plan fails to specify how much of that the U.S. will have to subsidize, too, in order to reach the goal of cutting emissions in half globally by 2030 outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change at the United Nations.

That’s right. To get it done, we have to work out a cooperative plan with China, Russia, Europe and the rest of the world to halve carbon-based production that they need to keep their billions of peoples fed and warm in the winter.

How do we intend to persuade the world to commit economic suicide? Even if some sort of agreement could somehow be made, it would surely be a tyrannical scheme to arrest economic development, sacrificing an entire generation of opportunity and innovation on the altar of radical environmentalism.

This would set back economic progress for decades or longer and crash the global economy and dislodge hundreds of millions of careers.

There are also opportunity costs to be considered. What technological innovations, say in the fields of carbon capture, might have been achieved if the economy had kept growing the way it was before we willingly turned the lights out? What improvements to our lives will be foregone in the pursuit of a utopia?

In 2020, Americans will have a choice to make about which future they want to raise their children in. One where the government dictates allowances and rations resources, forces you to rebuild your homes and every other building in the country under Bernie Sanders, or one where Americans keep their liberty and the freedom to harness the gifts God gave humans to keep the economy growing.

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Facing the challenges of climate change at the bedside

Warm weather can be bad for you in some ways but attributing it to global warming is tendentious.  Cold weather is also bad for you but is agreed to be natural. How do we know the warming is not also natural?  It's just a sermon for true believers below.  One hopes that most doctors ignore it

About three years ago, Dr. Aaron Bernstein, a pediatric hospitalist at Boston Children’s Hospital, ordered intravenous fluids for an infant who had become dehydrated. He was shocked to receive an alert that IV fluids — a common, life-saving treatment — were being rationed. The reason: Hurricane Maria had shut down the Puerto Rican plant that makes them.

Last summer, the wife of an elderly man living near the top of a low-income high-rise called 911 because he seemed confused. When EMTs opened the door to the dwelling, they were met by a heat blast they likened to the Sahara Desert. Taken to the Massachusetts General Hospital emergency department, the man was found to have a temperature of 106 degrees. He was diagnosed with heat stroke.

In disparate parts of the city, in patients young and old, medical professionals are seeing the effects of climate change in their own practices. And for the first time, some 150 gathered Thursday to start planning a response.

Sponsored by the New England Journal of Medicine, Harvard Medical School, and all of Boston’s teaching hospitals, the Climate Crisis and Clinical Practice Symposium aimed “to bring the issue of climate change directly to the bedside,” said Bernstein, interim chief of the Center for Climate, Health, and the Global Environment at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and one of the event’s organizers.

The issue is especially salient in Boston because air and water temperatures and sea levels in the Northeast are rising faster than elsewhere.

“The climate crisis has created an unprecedented future that looks nothing like what we have experienced,” said Dr. Renee N. Salas, an emergency medicine doctor at Mass. General. “We are the ones that are experiencing this first and need to work collectively with the rest of the country.”

Thursday’s gathering at a conference center in the Longwood medical area was the first of eight similar efforts to galvanize health care systems to face the reality of climate change. Six additional symposiums are scheduled over the next year and a half in United States and one in Australia, as medical professionals grapple with the myriad ways that climate change affects health — especially for the most vulnerable, including children, the elderly, and poor and marginalized people.

Responding to climate change involves more than contending with more severe storms and disruptions of supply chains and power grids — although those will be big challenges to the health care system.

Global warming affects both health and health care. Heat stress can lead to heart attacks, kidney stones, and preterm birth. Cholera, dengue, Lyme disease and valley fever are all increasing in incidence and also expanding their range. With warmer springs and later winters, the pollen season is getting longer and also more severe, because carbon dioxide prompts plants to release more pollen. That increases asthma attacks, as does air pollution.

The heat also affects the way medications work. Drugs for depression, heart disease, and kidney failure can be less safe in hot weather. People taking beta blockers for high blood pressure are more likely to faint in hot weather. EpiPens and albuterol can be rendered ineffective by extreme heat if left inside cars.

Dr. Gaurab Basu, a primary care physician at the Cambridge Health Alliance, told the group about a 27-year-old patient who developed end-stage kidney disease caused by chronic exposure to heat. The man, an immigrant, had worked on sugar farms in El Salvador.

But his case got Basu thinking about the many people doing physical labor outside, especially in urban “heat islands” where asphalt and concrete can make the temperature 10 or 15 degrees higher than elsewhere. They could be injuring their kidneys day after day without knowing it.

Salas, the doctor who took care of the man with heat stroke, noted that he came to the hospital with a diagnosis of fever. The EMTs’ account of the heat in his apartment tipped off doctors to the true problem. But doctors, she said, need to “add a climate lens” to their diagnostics.

The man survived, but Salas doesn’t know whether he suffered long-term harm. And she wonders about his wife, who was “left in the same conditions that nearly killed her husband.”

At Thursday’s symposium Salas recalled other cases where the “climate lens” was needed. The 4-year-old who came in with her third asthma attack in a week, apparently the result of high pollen levels triggered by carbon dioxide in the environment. The woman who came from Puerto Rico after Maria with a plastic bag filled with empty medicine containers, begging for refills. “We think about climate refugees happening in other places, but she was internally displaced,” Salas said.

Equally as serious as the physical threats are the dangers that climate change poses to mental health. Trauma among people displaced from their homes by storms will do lasting damage. But even before any storm hits, heat is known to boost aggression and violence.

Extreme heat "makes all mental illnesses worse,” said Dr. Gary Belkin, a psychiatrist and visiting scientist at the Harvard climate group. Emergency room visits for mental crises and psychiatric hospitalizations go up during heat waves.

More broadly, many otherwise healthy people are suffering psychologically, with impaired concentration, loss of sleep, and inability to enjoy things resulting from the ceaseless background anxiety over climate change.

One the best ways to deal with those fears is take action, speakers said. The symposium’s organizers are urging doctors, in particular, to step up in public and private ways.

“We need to start talking about this in general, both to other providers and our patients,” said Dr. Lucy Marcil, a Boston Medical Center pediatrician. “Because if people aren’t aware of it, they can’t act on it.”

Dr. Caren Solomon, deputy editor of the New England Journal of Medicine and a physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, urges doctors to educate their patients about climate change when it comes up naturally in the exam room. For example, a doctor could mention that pollution caused a patient’s worsening asthma or that warming winters contributed to their greater risk of Lyme disease.

As one of the most trusted professions, Solomon said, physicians should also speak out publicly about the climate’s effect on health, contacting legislators, pressing for divestment in fossil fuel companies, and participating in public protests.

And they need to talk to one another. Dr. Mary Rice, a pulmonary and critical care doctor at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, said it has often been difficult to discuss climate change with her colleagues.

“Climate change for many decades was treated as a fringe issue even though the science has been so strong for so long,” Rice said. “One of the things we have to do as clinicians is get over that stigma and be confident that the science is strong.”

SOURCE 






Save gas – sack this ignoramus

THE Sunday Telegraph reports that climate change minister Lord Duncan of Springbank is contemplating banning gas central heating to ensure that the UK meets its 2050 zero carbon target. This ill-considered announcement is utter drivel, which is becoming a characteristic of both BoJo’s government and the climate change/zero carbon debate.

First, some facts from the 2018 government Digest of UK Energy Statistics (DUKES):

Of the 1,700 Terawatt hours (TWh) of energy consumed by the UK, 600 TWh was provided by natural gas for heating. That’s both domestic and industrial. (Another 273 TWh of gas was used to generate electricity, but that’s not relevant here.)

By comparison the total amount of electricity produced in the UK in 2018 was 330 TWh, of which half came from fossil fuels. Which raises the questions of where the additional electricity needed if gas is central heating is banned is to come from, and how it is to get from the power station (or wind/solar farm) to the user.

It can really come from only one of three sources: nuclear, solar or wind. The latter two are climate-dependent. As one of the effects of global warming is increasingly active weather (more cloud, more storms and stronger winds) it seems bizarre to choose to rely on them. As I have previously written, we would also need an awful lot of wind turbines (250,000, twenty times the number installed) and solar parks (some 10 per cent of the UK’s agricultural acres in the South). Or about 50 Hinkley Point-sized nuclear power stations.

That’s trivial compared with the problems of storing and distributing electricity. Batteries are expensive, require much energy to make and have a limited life. Getting the electricity to the user is the tough bit. There are 22million houses on mains gas, some 80 per cent of UK homes. If their gas is to be replaced by electricity it may well involve upgrading the entire low voltage distribution for the street – more so if electric battery cars become the norm.

Delivering that by 2050 means converting 730,000 houses per year, which is 3,000 per working day or 375 per working hour for the next 30 years. As yet there is simply not the capacity to deliver that. And it doesn’t sound cheap – it’s an additional cost to producing the electricity.

Nor is it necessary. The problem is not the gas infrastructure, it’s the gas. If we switched from methane to hydrogen we could reuse the infrastructure as most of the grid is hydrogen ready, and the rest is being converted. Those who are concerned about hydrogen should remember that until the late 1990s we used ‘coal gas’ which was about 50 per cent hydrogen. Producing pure hydrogen can be done by electrolysis directly from electricity, with an efficiency of about 60 per cent including compression and distribution. Hydrogen can be stored in the existing gas network, so supplies can be built up in the warm months to cover the cold.

As the minister (or his advisers) should know.

Lord Duncan has a doctorate in palaeontology and a degree in geology. He then became a EU policy wonk and ultimately an MEP. He stood for Parliament in 2017 and lost by 21 votes. His qualification for his current position escapes me. Sorting out zero carbon is not a political thing, it’s a technical and engineering challenge. Just an idea, but maybe it’s time for the Prime Minister to ennoble and appoint some industrial and engineering experts rather than failed political hacks.

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This fire season, areas of Australia have burnt that used to be too wet to burn

Australia is a land of natural climate extremes.  Always has been. And we had one of our periodic extremes recently. A combination of severe drought and unusually high temperatures  amplified our usual summer bushfires.

A historical perspective is missing in most commentary on it.  Claims that the 2019/20 fires were unprecedented simply show how short memories are. The area burnt, for instance, was much greater in 1974/75.  And who remembers that in the Sydney of 1790 (Yes. 1790, not 1970) bats and birds were falling out of the trees from heat exhaustion?

But weather is highly variable from place to place and time to time so some areas were drier than usual. Some areas had dried out that usually remained damp -- resulting in the events described below

I have deleted below all the claims that the fires were influenced by global warming.  The floods that have immediately followed the fires and put them out are also a great extreme.  Were they caused by global warming too?  Even Warmists have seen the incongruity of claiming that global warming could cause both drought and floods in quick succession so have generally gone silent about climate change.  But if climate change did not cause the floods, how can we know that it caused the drought? We cannot.

There is absolutely no way we can prove that climate change had any influence on the fires.  Claims that climate change did have an influence are mere assertion, mere opinion, mere propaganda.  There are well-established methods in science for establishing causes. None of them were applicable to the recent extreme events.  So there is no reason to believe that the recent events were anything more than normal variations


Binna Burra Lodge in the Gold Coast hinterland was 81-year-old Tony Groom’s life. His father founded the mountain hiking retreat in the 1930s, Tony ran it in the 60s and 70s, and his daughter, Lisa, 52, grew up there.

The lodge’s wooden cabins, bordered by rainforest on one side and eucalypts on the other, were a touchstone for people’s lives: for weddings, wakes and walks around the ancient world heritage forests of Lamington national park.

Next door, Tony and his late wife, Connie, lived for almost 40 years in Alcheringa, a stone-walled house with a deck where Lisa and her brother would dangle their feet out over the Coomera Valley

On the morning of 8 September 2019 the lodge, the heritage-listed cabins and the Grooms’ family homestead were razed to the ground by a bushfire. About 450 hectares of rainforest burned around Binna Burra that day – the kind of lush forest that doesn’t usually burn.

Firefighters use the forest fire danger index to tell them how bad conditions are. The index combines the key ingredients that influence a bushfire – temperature, wind speed, humidity and the dryness of the “fuel”, including grasses and fallen wood from trees.

The trends show not only that conditions are becoming more dangerous, but that the fire season is starting earlier.

The number of severe bushfire danger days has increased in spring for large parts of Australia

Australia’s spring months are September, October and November. The spring of 2019 was the worst year on record for high-risk bushfire weather in south-east Queensland, and for the entire country.

The conditions that helped a fire take hold at Sarabah, north-west of Binna Burra, had been building since the beginning of the year.

Rainfall was well below average, the ground was unusually dry and, in the days before the fire struck, daytime maximum temperatures were at near-record levels after months of hotter-than-average weather.

Then came the winds.

Australia’s devastating fire season of 2019 and 2020 has so far burned through more than 7.7 million hectares in the south-eastern states, claiming 33 lives and almost 3,000 homes. Firefighters have never experienced anything like it.

Neither has Australia. 2019 was the hottest and driest year on record.

The kind of conditions that have delivered devastating and deadly major bushfires in the recent past are going to increase, according to Dr Richard Thornton, the chief executive of the Bushfire and Natural Hazards Cooperative Research Centre.

“People tend to base their risk perception on what they’ve experienced before – a bushfire every 50 or 100 years,” Thornton says. “Their risk perception is based on history. But history is not a good predictor of the future.

As for the home at Alcheringa, and Binna Burra Lodge, there are plans to rebuild in a way that will minimise damage from future fires. But they know the future will be different.

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 February, 2020  

Patrick Moore: I was banned from speaking in Regina over this alternative CO2 point of view

"There is no doubt in my mind that on balance our CO2 emissions are 100 per cent positive for the continuation of life on Earth"

Commercial greenhouse growers around the world inject CO2 into their greenhouses to double and triple the concentration compared to present atmospheric levels.

Late last Friday I was deplatformed for the first time in my 45 years of giving keynote speeches at conferences around the world. The City of Regina, which through my speaker’s bureau had signed a contract with me to kick off their Reimagine Regina Conference in May, caved to local activists and told me I should stay home.

In its announcement regarding my banishment, the city said it did not want “to spark a debate on climate change.” It said the stated goal of the conference is “to make the city’s facilities and operations 100 per cent renewable by 2050.” In other words, municipal officials wanted me to say what they wanted me to say and not what I wanted to say to them. That’s just not how I operate.

Regina is one of at least 54 cities and towns in Canada that have declared a state of “climate emergency.” This is political virtue-signalling at its disingenuous best: the only people fleeing any emergency from these cities are doing so to escape the frigid winter by flying to a warmer country further south. Not a lot of Canadians from our southern regions are heading to Yellowknife or Inuvik, N.W.T, to escape global warming. The climate emergency is at best a bad joke. It might even be amusing were it not threatening to ban the primary energy sources — natural gas, oil and coal — that provide 85 per cent of global energy and make our civilization possible.

Of the 195 countries recognized by the United Nations, Canada is the coldest, with an annual average temperature of -5.35 C. (Russia is number 2 only because it doesn’t have islands situated near the North Pole.) It strikes me as odd that the world’s coldest country worries more about warming than the people of India, Brazil or Saudi Arabia, where it really is warm. These countries don’t have carbon taxes that punish farmers for fuelling their tractors or policies that are aimed at destroying much of their country’s natural resource sector.

Why do I believe CO2 emissions from using fossil fuels to power modern societies are not “pollution” that will bring about the apocalypse? Let me count the ways.

First and foremost, CO2 is the most important food for all life on earth. On both land and in the sea all the carbon for carbon-based life, which is all life, comes from CO2. All green plants on land and all plants in the sea, phytoplankton and kelps, combine CO2 with H2O and by photosynthesis produce the sugars that provide the energy source for all life, including ours. The increase in CO2 due to our emissions has resulted in a greening of the planet and an expansion of forests. This is not contested.

Second, during the hundreds of millions of years since modern life evolved from primitive, single-celled life in the sea, CO2 in the atmosphere and oceans has steadily declined. This is primarily due to the advent of calcifying marine species that use CO2 and calcium dissolved in the sea to make protective shells of calcium carbonate (limestone) for themselves (corals, clams, mussels, shrimp and many planktonic species, etc.). As a result, CO2 in the atmosphere fell from at least 0.6 per cent to 0.018 per cent only 20,000 years ago at the last glacial maximum.

Third, both cement production and our use of fossil fuels are putting CO2 back into the atmosphere and the oceans. Both its very long-term depletion and the return of CO2 to the atmosphere by our burning of fossil fuels and production of cement were inadvertent. There is no credit or blame, just pure scientific facts.

There is no doubt in my mind that on balance our CO2 emissions are 100 per cent positive for the continuation of life on Earth. Commercial greenhouse growers around the world inject CO2 into their greenhouses to double and triple the concentration compared to present atmospheric levels. By doing so they increase the growth and yield of their crops by 20 to 60 per cent. This, too, is uncontested.

I realize this is a hypothesis that not many people have heard about, thanks to the wall of “denial” that has been created by the climate emergency crowd. But I know that this analysis of CO2 history will eventually win the day, as it is a provable fact. I could have presented my ideas to the Regina audience — after all, science is about continual discovery — but they turned me away rather than listen to an alternative point of view.

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U.S. Leads World in Decreasing CO2 Emissions

When President Donald Trump withdrew the U.S. from the dubious Paris Agreement in June 2017, climate activists, world leaders, and the Democrat Media Complex immediately protested, declaring that the Trump administration was signaling its intention to increase CO2 emissions. Fast-forward to Tuesday's report from the International Energy Agency (IEA) evaluating CO2 emissions around the globe. Lo and behold, the U.S. led the world in 2019 for "the largest decline in energy-related CO2 emissions." The IEA's report further noted that "US emissions are now down almost 1 Gt [gross tonnage] from their peak in the year 2000, the largest absolute decline by any country over that period." As Sen. Ted Cruz observed, that's a "fact you will never see on the 6 o'clock news."

In fact, far from the dire predictions since Trump's withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, the U.S. has not only continued its trend of decreasing CO2 emissions but increased the rate of the decrease. The primary cause for this precipitous decline is not due to more government regulation; rather it has everything to do with the government getting out of the way of innovation brought on by capitalistic enterprise. "Coal-fired power plants faced even stronger competition from natural gas-fired generation, with benchmark gas prices an average of 45% lower than 2018 levels," the report notes. This move to more natural-gas-fired power plants is thanks in large measure to increased fracking lowering the cost of natural gas — "as a result, gas increased its share in electricity generation to a record high of 37%."

Furthermore, the dubious Paris Agreement seems to have had little effect on reining in the world's largest CO2-emitting country, China, which remains a signatory. As The Daily Wire observes, "The IEA noted that 80% of the increase in CO2 emissions came from Asia and that China and India both contributed significantly to the increase."

Meanwhile, climate alarmists like Democrat presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are calling for a national ban on fracking — the very thing responsible for reducing emissions. On Wednesday, AOC announced her legislation, the Fracking Ban Act. "Fracking is destroying our land and our water," she asserted in her announcement. "It is wreaking havoc on our communities' health. We must do our job to protect our future from the harms caused by the fracking industry."

There is little evidence supporting AOC's dubious claims of harm, but there is solid scientific evidence of the benefits fracking has afforded the U.S. As National Review reports, "The fracking boom is widely credited with turning the U.S. into a net energy exporter and reducing the country's reliance on oil imports. While environmentalists have voiced concerns over the drilling method, fracking proponents have pointed to the economic benefit it brings to the U.S. and the industry's increased attention to environmental concerns."

In reality, should Warren and AOC's fracking ban occur, it would not only end America's energy independence but reverse the country's decreasing rate of CO2 emissions. Finally, if Warren and AOC were truly concerned with cutting the nation's emissions, they would be the biggest advocates for increasing the use of nuclear power. Instead, they have called for that to be banned as well. As Warren stated last September, "In my administration, we won't be building new nuclear plants. We will start weaning ourselves off nuclear and replace it with renewables."

It's clear the leftist agenda has little to do with addressing the challenges of climate change and everything to do with pushing socialism.

SOURCE 





Ocasio-Cortez Is Sponsoring a Bill to Ban Fracking Across US

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez introduced a nationwide fracking ban Wednesday.

The Democratic New York congresswoman’s bill is a companion to Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ legislation seeking to ban fracking across the country by 2025. If passed, the laws would prohibit natural gas production within 2,500 feet of homes and schools by 2021 and help transition energy workers away from the industry.

“Fracking is destroying our land and our water,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote Wednesday on Twitter. “It is wreaking havoc on our communities’ health. We must do our job to protect our future from the harms caused by the fracking industry.” Sanders announced his bill in February.

“If we want to transition from fossil fuel emissions as we work towards building a 100% clean economy, pulling back from fracking is a critical first step,” he said in a statement. “Failure to act will only make the crisis at hand even more detrimental for future generations of Americans.”

Ocasio-Cortez and Soto’s bill comes less than a year after Ocasio-Cortez introduced the so-called Green New Deal, which, among other things, calls for “10-year national mobilizations” toward addressing climate change.

The Green New Deal would reportedly phase out fossil fuels within 12 years, but could cost trillions of dollars, reports show. Americans could be forced to pay up to $93 trillion to implement the proposal over 10 years, conservative-leaning American Action Forum noted in a study in February 2019.

Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren signed on as Senate co-sponsor of the proposal before it met its demise in the Senate in March 2019.

SOURCE 






UK: There’s nothing democratic about this climate assembly. This is a cynical attempt to lend a democratic gloss to eco-austerity

BEN PILE

The first two meetings of Climate Assembly UK, dubbed a ‘citizens’ assembly’ on climate change, have taken place in Birmingham over the course of a couple of weekends in January and February.

The climate assembly has brought together 110 randomly selected members of the public to discuss a range of climate issues and policies with a range of experts, including David Attenborough. The task of the assembly, which will meet over two more weekends this spring, is to decide on a set of recommendations for how the government can best meet its pledge to achieve Net Zero carbon emissions by 2050.

The reason for establishing the climate assembly is clear enough. It is an attempt to exorcise the democratic deficit that haunts political environmentalism. And it seeks to do this by involving a tiny, but supposedly representative, sample of citizens in the policymaking process. But can it really achieve its aim, given it excludes approximately 45million other members of the electorate from its decision-making?

In short, no. Watching the proceedings of the first assembly, it became clear very quickly that the process is rigged in favour of the environmentalist agenda. Expert after expert, each echoing the same message, made his or her presentation to the assembly. This was followed by a rapid question-and-answer session in which the assembled were told what’s what by said experts. It didn’t look much like a democratic debate. It looked like instruction.

These shortcomings should not be a surprise, however, given the climate assembly’s origins. Initially advocated by Extinction Rebellion, the climate assembly was eventually set up last year by six House of Commons select committees, in partnership with several third-sector organisations. None of these organisations has a democratic mandate. But they do all have a commitment to promoting the green agenda.

Take, for instance, the participation of Involve, the Sortition Foundation, and mySociety. These three organisations claim to want to encourage democratic engagement, and to reformulate the democratic process. All noble aims. But their role in the climate assembly is less to encourage democratic engagement than to limit and set the parameters of debate. Hence, the climate assembly will not hear from anyone remotely critical of climate science, environmental ideology or emissions-reduction policies.

Dig deeper and you discover that the majority of the assembly’s funding comes from the the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation (EFF) (which also funds Involve and mySociety), and the European Climate Foundation (ECF). These are not neutral organisations. Both the EFF and the ECF are explicitly committed to promoting an environmentalist agenda. As the ECF puts it on its website: ‘[We call for] the transformation of our systems and markets and the creation of a Net Zero society.’

The ECF is also the major funding partner of the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU), which provides communication support for the assembly. Indeed, the ECF is one of the largest funders of climate-change campaigns throughout Europe.

The ECF itself is part-funded by the US-based organisation it best resembles: the ClimateWorks Foundation. According to its website, the ClimateWorks Foundation acts as a ‘strategist to a wide range of foundations, helping them evaluate the global landscape of greenhouse-gas-reductions opportunities, develop philanthropic strategies, and coordinate and evaluate their investments’. Or, in other words, it acts as an environmentalist coordinator, distributing millions upon millions of dollars to numerous climate campaigns, using the funds of a few foundations.

The ECF does something similar in Europe. It distributes funding to myriad campaigning organisations. These organisations, like the ECIU, are intended to appear as autonomous ‘grassroots’ groups. But they all act under the umbrella of the ECF. Such organisations make much of the virtue of ‘transparency’ in public life. But when I approached the ECF for details of which organisations it funds, and who it is funded by, its representative refused to tell me.

Through its various organisational money-go-rounds, the ECF is not so much fostering civil-society participation as it is trying to enforce groupthink. Just look at the climate assembly in action. It is a choreographed exercise, in which the participants are directed towards the ‘correct’ conclusions.

For instance, during one question-and-answer session, Joanna Haigh, a former co-director of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment at Imperial College London, was asked about other countries’ commitments to reducing CO2 emissions – the implication being that if other countries are committed to reducing CO2 emissions, then the UK ought to be, too. Haigh said that other nations were indeed set on reducing CO2 emissions. She even told the assembly that China, one of the world’s largest CO2 emitters, has decided it is not going to build any more coal-fired power stations.

But this is not true. In the period up to 2050, during which the UK has pledged to reduce CO2 emissions to Net Zero, China has committed to increase its use of coal. And not just domestically. It is also financing coal-infrastructure projects across Asia and Africa.

Haigh is not some undergraduate fudging an answer to an exam. She is an ‘expert’. Her role in the climate assembly is to provide the participants with the facts on which they are to base their decisions. But she didn’t provide a fact. She provided a fiction that suited the environmentalist agenda of the climate assembly.

Perhaps Haigh was simply mistaken. Either way, she was not challenged within the climate assembly. And that is the key problem with this setup. It doesn’t allow for the robust, open debate one might expect of the public sphere proper. Instead it elevates its chosen experts to positions of authority – positions, that is, above scrutiny. As a result, mistakes and falsehoods can proliferate unchallenged.

Of course, a few of the 110 assembly members might spot the errors. They might rise to the challenge and take on the experts. But it is far more likely that they will be hectored into submission by the endless ‘expert-led’ repetition of one side of the argument.

If, as seems to be the intention, the government uses the recommendations of the climate assembly to formulate future climate policy, it will not be a victory for democracy. The only true democratic test of the government’s carbon-cutting policies is a free and open debate, in which all views can be heard, not just those of 110 ‘jurors’ and their hand-picked ‘expert’ witnesses.

SOURCE 






Finkel: Coal could be sidelined by a push for gas to serve as a transition fuel, and a move toward renewably produced hydrogen

I watched most of Finkel's speech on TV. It was politely received: No eruptions from critics in either direction.  His logic about the interim use of natural gas was basically irrefutable.

Where he went off the rails was in his advocacy of hydrogen as the ultimate fuel. That idea has been around for many years but stumbles on questions of cost and safety.  Basically you take a fuel that is usable in its own right and use its energy to produce a new fuel.  That is very inefficient and inevitably more costly than just using the fuel you already have to do other things

Finkel saw hydrogen as particularly good for powering motor vehicles.  That is again pie in the sky. You need a heavy pressure vessel to store hydrogen and that is both more costly, more tricky to deal with and more dangerous than the simple sheet metal tank that normal motor fuels require

Not gonna happen


Australia’s chief scientist, Alan Finkel, has come out in support of the government’s strategy of using gas as a transition fuel to generate electricity while the sector moves away from coal toward clean energy sources.

“We cannot abruptly cease our use of energy,” he told the National Press Club this week. “Make no mistake, this will be the biggest engineering challenge ever undertaken. The energy system is huge, and even with an internationally committed and focused effort, the transition will take many decades.”

“Ultimately, we will need to complement solar and wind with a range of other technologies such as high levels of storage, long-distance transmission, and much better efficiency in the way we use energy.”

“But while these technologies are being scaled up, we need an energy companion today that can react rapidly to changes in solar and wind output. An energy companion that is itself relatively low in emissions, and that only operates when needed. In the short-term, as the prime minister and Minister Angus Taylor have previously stated, natural gas will play that critical role.”

The strategy was first flagged in 2015 by the then-Minister for Environment and Energy Josh Frydenberg but was picked up by Prime Minster Scott Morrison just last month, amid devastating bushfires, which climate scientists and bushfire experts have linked to Australia’s love affair with coal and other fossil fuels.

Since the Morrison government has shown a renewed interest in gas, some coalition MPs, most notably from the National Party and from areas that have for many years relied on exporting coal, have stepped up their defense of it and have begun petitioning for government subsidies for coal-fired power.

Australia’s incoming resources minister, Keith Pitt, hasn’t turned away from coal either, telling The Sydney Morning Herald that he will push for more exports. But Pitt also threw his support behind a plan to extract gas from an area in northern New South Wales following a landmark energy deal between the state and federal government, which would see an investment of $2 billion into the east coast market.

Gas is still a fossil fuel, but not all fossil fuels are created equal. Burning natural gas, for example, produces less than half as much carbon dioxide per unit of electricity compared to coal and reduces emissions by 33 percent when producing heat.

While natural gas produces less carbon dioxide during burning, it is around 30 times better at holding in the atmosphere, meaning that if enough methane leaks during production, it could be as detrimental to the environment as burning coal, if not worse.

In the northern New South Wales region of Narrabri, the proposed big gas project has been met by both stiff resistance and support from locals. Some argue that the environmental effect will be disastrous for the region’s farmers, while others claim that it is essential to create jobs and boost the economy.

The federal government’s backing revived hopes for the plan, which involves ambitions to extract gas from coal seams lying deep beneath the Pilliga Forest.

In return, the federal government asks that the state government set a target of delivering 70 petajoules a year of new gas into the market. Coincidentally, that’s precisely the estimated output of the Narrabri project.

The project is yet to secure the final state and environmental approvals, but gas giant Santos has already invested around $1.5 billion into it, and now with federal backing, it’s likely to pass all checks unabated.

Morrison has ruled out making any similar energy deal with the state of Victoria to help reduce its carbon emissions and lower power costs unless the state government ditches its longstanding ban on onshore gas exploration.

Siding with the federal government, and also seeing gas as a transition fuel, business groups such as the Victorian Chamber of Commerce and the Energy Users Association have urged the state government to expand conventional onshore gas extraction and lift the ban.

The deal would likely also include guarantees against “premature closures” of coal-powered fire stations in Victoria, which provide around 70 percent of the state’s energy. In return, federal investment would likely include power from the Snowy Hydro 2.0 scheme delivered to Melbourne, Ballarat, Shepparton, and other urban centers across the state.

Finkel, who helped prepare and release the National Hydrogen Strategy late last year, stressed that coal was not an option and tipped hydrogen as the way forward during his speech at the National Press Club. “Enter the hero, hydrogen,” he said, after discussing the perils of climate change.

Hydrogen carries more energy than natural gas and is carbon-free, so the burning of it does not contribute to climate change. Hydrogen can, however, be produced in two ways, through the process of electrolysis, using solar and wind, or through chemical process, using combusting fossil fuels like coal and gas.

For now, the hydrogen strategy has recognized the need to reduce emissions to combat climate change and is only considering options using fossil fuels if they come with carbon capture and storage, which involves pumping carbon emissions into underground cavities. According to the Australian Institute, carbon capture and storage projects have a poor track record of delivering on their promises, and now the industry is using the same “unsuccessful technology” to promote hydrogen.

Fears also remain that hydrogen is being used as a lifeline for coal. Prior to discussing the terms of the strategy with Finkel and state energy ministers, Angus Taylor, the federal minister for energy, suggested that hydrogen production should be “technology neutral,” indicating it could be done using coal.

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

*****************************************





14 February, 2020  

Giant iceberg three times the size of PARIS calves off one of Antarctica's fastest-shrinking glaciers

Nothing to see here.  West Antarctica is well-known for subsurface vulcanism.  Volcanoes put out a LOT of heat

A shocking video reveals how a huge chunk of ice more than three times the size of Paris has broken off one of Earth's most critical ice shelves, Pine Island Glacier (PIG).

This enormous frozen river, along with its famed neighbour Thwaites, connects the ocean to mainland Antarctica and is rapidly retreating.

Warmer temperatures are taking their toll on the vulnerable glacier which, if it was to collapse, would trigger a global sea level rise of around four feet.

The huge chunk of calved ice swiftly broke up into smaller icebergs, dubbed 'piglets'. 

Scientists at Copernicus have, in partnership with ESA, been monitoring the remote glacier for several years via satellites

A total of 57 independent images taken over 12 months were blended into a short video by ESA.

It reveals how a 120square mile (312 sq km) chunk of ice broke off from the glacier's main body.

This is approximately the size of the island Malta, and three times the size of France's capital city, Paris.

A series of rifts have been monitored since early 2019 and as the satellites passed over the region it caught the moment they finally fell away.

This large piece of ice them fractured into several smaller ones, with one large one iceberg being labelled as B-49.

Mark Drinkwater, senior scientist and cryosphere specialist at ESA said: 'The Copernicus twin Sentinel-1 all-weather satellites have established a porthole through which the public can watch events like this unfold in remote regions around the world.

'What is unsettling is that the daily data stream reveals the dramatic pace at which climate is redefining the face of Antarctica.'

Pine Island is Antarctica's most vulnerable glacier and is the single largest contributor to sea level rise of any ice stream in the world.

Since 2012, the glacier has been shedding 58 billion tons of ice a year.

Pine Island has been tracked for around 30 years and over this time it has seen its shape and position dramatically alter.

Calving events such as this one have been seen in 1992, 1995, 2001, 2007, 2013, 2015, 2017, 2018, and now 2020.

With each passing calving, the buttressing force of the glacier weakens and threatens to break, increasing the flow of ice from the land to the ocean.

SOURCE 






The rush to electric vehicles: A disaster for consumers?

According to a recent report in Forbes, Tesla’s stock market value is already bigger than Ford and General Motors combined, and Elon Musk, whose company as of 2015 had already received nearly $5 billion in federal subsidies, now has a net worth of about $31 billion. Whoever said government cannot make anyone rich?

But hold on. An ascendant Bernie Sanders, who claims to be no friend of billionaires,* has called for a massive expansion of government-run electricity production. [*Sanders is, after all, running against a multiple billionaires, including 23 contributors to Mayor Pete’s campaign.]

Sanders and many other politicos have championed a multi-state effort to end the sale of vehicles with internal combustion (IC) engines, as have many European nations. Other related goals are phasing out the use of coal, oil, and natural gas for both heating and electric power generation.

As Politico reports, a major part of Sanders’ $16 trillion Greener New Deal allocates massive new funding for the four existing “power marketing administrations” that are overseen by the Department of Energy, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and a new federal agency. The money would go to vastly expand their solar, wind, and even geothermal power production.

Matt Palumbo, writing in the Bongino Report, says the Sanders plan will need $2 trillion for infrastructure, dwarfing the cost of the interstate highway system, to add 800 gigawatts of wind and solar energy. While Sanders asserts today he is not “nationalizing” energy production but providing wholesale energy to public and private local suppliers, these subsidized government-run facilities will surely control the energy market. Private companies that now rely on coal or natural gas will be further squeezed by mandated deep cuts in carbon emissions. Meanwhile, energy demand for a mandated growing fleet of electric vehicles will soar.

Americans in a recent American Energy Alliance poll expressed great displeasure over subsidizing EVs for the wealthy. Only one in five voters would trust the federal government to make decisions about what kinds of cars should be subsidized – or mandated. Many do not even like, or cannot afford, the innovations already introduced, as evidenced by data showing the average age of the U.S. vehicle fleet has increased in recent years.

Despite public qualms, most automakers have joined the EV movement. Like gossip in a small town, proposals and promises to ban or end production of IC engines have spread like wildfire. The Chinese-owned Swedish automaker Volvo announced in 2017 it would stop designing new IC engines. German giant Daimler (Mercedes Benz) followed suit last year. And in the United States, General Motors in 2018 announced plans to offer only battery-powered or hydrogen-powered vehicles in the near future.

These automakers are perhaps just responding to the political climate in Europe. The United Kingdom just moved up its cutoff date for banning sales of new IC vehicles (including hybrids) to 2035. France and others are holding to a 2040 date for mandating all-electric fleets, while Norway has set a goal (not a mandate) to eliminate most IC engines (but not hybrids) by 2025. But in California, lawmakers killed a 2018 effort to ban IC engines as of 2040.

Meanwhile, European automakers have moved to profit from EV charging stations. IONITY, created in 2017 as a joint venture between the BMW Group, Mercedes-Benz AG, the Ford Motor Company, and the Volkswagen Group with Audi and Porcshe, has already built over 200 facilities with over 860 charging points, with plans to expand to 400 stations in 24 countries by yearend 2020. And IONITY is not alone. [Europe today still has over 100,000 petrol and diesel fueling stations, certain to shrink as IC engines are now pariahs.]

Until February, IONITY was charging a flat, fixed rate of eight Euros (about $8.87) for a fast charging session — under 15 cents/kWh for a 60-kW charge that might be good for 210 miles. With EU gasoline prices ranging from 1.77 euros/liter ($7.35 per gallon) in the Netherlands to to $4.41/gallon in Romania, drivers would need about $31 in Romania or $51 in the Netherlands to drive the same distance (assuming 30 mpg).

But as of February 1, IONITY switched to unit pricing at a rate of 0.79 euro/kWh (88 cents/kWh), or about $52.80 for a 60-kW charge – a 500 percent increase that makes an EV charge more expensive than a fillup. But IONITY is offering discounts that customers can purchase from IONITY partner companies. At home chargers in the EU, where residential rates average 30 cents/kWh, cost about $18 per 60-kW charge – plus about $1,000 for installation.

But here’s the rub. If Sanders gets his way, the federal government will control the price and availability of electricity in the U.S. California, which wants to mandate EVs only, has already faced multi-day electricity blackouts due to fire concerns, and if there is no power there is no charging. Many other countries also lack reliable electric power – and scarcity (almost certain in a fossil fuel free environment) drives up prices even in a government-controlled marketplace.

After the 1970s oil embargo, the United States opted for a broad-based energy sector so that shortages in one fuel would not cripple the national economy. But today, many cities have already moved to ban natural gas, nuclear is still taboo, and wind and solar are intermittent. The push toward an all-electric society plus the heavy burden on the power grid from charging an all-electric vehicle fleet – seems to be a recipe for disaster, at least for the average consumer.

The well connected always do well enough in a controlled economy – that is, until (as happened recently in Iran) the government price for energy angers the peasants. But what can a broken public do but submit to the will of the all-powerful state? Hmmm……

SOURCE 






Americans reluctant to join the EV train

We’re constantly being bombarded with the EV movement, but Americans must have a multitude of subconscious reasons for not buying into one of the major movements to save the world from itself as they are showing their lack of enthusiasm by avoiding the dealerships.

In a recent Los Angeles Times article, citing Edmunds data, the number of battery-electric models available more than doubled from 2018 to 2019, but EV sales budged in the wrong direction. In response to the major efforts by manufacturers, the horrific EV sales data shows that only 325,000 electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles were sold in the U.S. in 2019, down from 349,000 in 2018.

Those dismal numbers represent an embarrassing dismal 2% of the 17 million vehicles of all types sold in the United States in 2019. Are EV carmakers driving off a cliff?”

California remains the primary buyer of EV’s while the rest of America has shown little interest in the incentives and the increasing choices of models.

Let’s look at several of the factors that may be contributing to this lack of enthusiasm, that may be in the subconscious of the prospective EV buyers:

Agreed, there would be no fuel costs and no gas taxes to be paid with an EV owner, BUT, and that’s a big BUT. Beware of the “free” gift! Once fossil fuel cars are off the road, the only ones on the roads will be EV’s. You can easily surmise that it’s going to be the EV owners picking up the costs to maintain the highway infrastructures, probably through some form of vehicle mileage tax (VMT), to let the “users” pay for the roads.

EV’s are hyped as being pollution free. Well, not necessarily so. Its true EV’s have no tailpipes, but the tailpipes are located at the power plants generating the electricity to charge the cars batteries, and at the refineries that provide all the derivatives from petroleum that make all the parts of the EV’s.

Range and charging anxieties remain a constant sub thought for that next trip. To fully charge an EV, even at fast-charging stations, it takes anywhere from 30 minutes to 8 hours depending on how much of a charge (empty to full or topping off) your vehicle needs.

Hybrid and electric car owners are a scholarly bunch; over 70 percent of respondents have a four-year college or post-graduate degree, which may explain that the average household income of electric vehicle (EV) purchasers is upwards of $200,000. If you’re not in that higher educated echelon and the high-income range of society, there may not be an appetite for an EV.

The lack of mining standards and environmental regulations to extract the exotic metals used in EV batteries exposes local ecosystems to destruction when the wastewater and other unusable ores are let loose onto the environments. The workers have no choice but to live in horrific conditions because their wages are so infinitesimally small, it causes me the take a step back and examine my moral obligations to humanity. Green technology cannot thrive off human rights abuses.

There are numerous documentaries about the atrocities the workers are put through in the cobalt mines, i.e. actually digging the mines by hand along with the horrendous living conditions. Amnesty International has documented children and adults mining cobalt in narrow man-made tunnels along with the exposure to the dangerous gases emitted during the procurement of these rare minerals.

Governments and manufacturers are “blowing off” the transparency of the child labor atrocities and mining irregularities of where and how those exotic metals are being mined in Africa, China, Argentina, Bolivia and Chile to support the EV battery supply chain. The first transparency law was in California, the largest buyer of EV’s in the country, starting with The California Transparency in Supply Chains Act SB657 and followed by the U.S. with H.R.4842 – Business Supply Chain Transparency on Trafficking and Slavery Act of 2014.

The richest most powerful companies in the world, and now the Governor of California are still making excuses for not investigating the supply chains and continue to power manufactured EV’s with “dirty batteries”. Can this be a blatant example of hypocrisy?

With Tesla batteries weighing about 1,000 pounds, slightly more than the C-batteries in your flashlights, proper disposal of the EV batteries will be needed to be addressed in infinite detail by somebody. Another area of concern that keeps coming up in consumer surveys regards an electric car’s battery life. To be sure, replacing an electric vehicle’s battery will be an expensive proposition along with the environmental challenges to dispose of them safely.

Despite the fears, concerns, and environmental questions being evaluated by the public and the potential EV buyers, governments are wishing to counteract the slower than expected transition to EV’s. Governments are starting to make giant steps to accelerate the move away from petroleum vehicles.

Britain announced that they will ban new petrol and hybrid cars from 2035. France is preparing to ban the sale of fossil fuel-powered cars by 2040. The mayors of Paris, Madrid, Mexico City and Athens have said they plan to ban diesel vehicles from city centers by 2025. The ban on fossil fueled vehicles is gaining momentum internationally!

Government involvement in our daily lives recalls the most terrifying nine words in the English language:” I’M FROM THE GOVERNMENT AND I’M HERE TO HELP.”

SOURCE 






Are Ocean Currents Speeding Up…Or Down? Nobody Knows

“Global warming is speeding up Earth’s massive ocean currents,” said one headline.

“Global ocean circulation is accelerating from the surface to the abyss,” said another.”

But this is another of those climate stories in which the top line is not backed up by the qualifications raised by oceanic researchers when looking at the results of this fascinating paper.

Published in Science Advances, it suggests that for almost 25 years, ocean currents have been rapidly speeding up, partly due to global warming, according to a new study.

It contradicts previous studies that suggested that global warming will weaken ocean circulation, especially in tropical waters. This new study suggests the acceleration in ocean currents will be especially strong in tropical waters!

A key point is that there is no sustained direct measurement of the ocean’s currents, so it has to be inferred using other means.

When this is done the numerous gaps in the data are filled in with results from computer models and anyone can see the caution this method should raise.

Based on observations and models, study authors claim that from 1990 to 2013, the energy of the world’s currents increased by some 15% per decade.

The researchers put this down to strengthening winds driving ocean currents. Ocean winds have increased over the past 30 years. The increase is about 2% per decade and is itself part of a longer-term trend.

The main evidence for this change comes from six years of Argo data whose floating and diving buoys have been operating since 2005 and have produced the most coherent database on ocean parameters we have.

They do not directly measure ocean currents, but a good inference can be obtained from their movements and indications where winds are piling up regions of the ocean.

Hu Shijian of the Chinese Academy of Science’s Institute of Oceanography is the lead author of the study. He points out that that this new paper is different from previous studies that looked for an ocean circulation increase.

Indeed, given varying regional responses to global warming, it has not been possible to deduce how and whether global ocean circulation has been altered.

“So far observations haven’t shown a trend,” Shijian said. So, he set about the reanalysis route to see if he could find one.

A review article in Science noted that as yet natural fluctuations cannot be ruled out and that it will take another decade at least to see if the trend is real and possibly associated with global warming.

Quoted in Science, Susan Wijffels, of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution said, “It’s going to stimulate a lot of other work.”

SOURCE 





Australia: Blind spot in BoM’s seasonal forecast

They couldn't get the weather right a few months in advance but they still claim that they can predict how hot it will be in 80 years time



When the start of potentially drought-breaking rains finally came this month they were not predicted by the experts — but they should not have been a total ­surprise.

The bushfires that blazed across the landscape from November last year may well come to be seen in retrospect as the final act in a set of weather conditions that parched the continent and scorched the earth.

After years of below-average rainfall, the end of last year saw two systems wring the last gasp from a bone-dry land.

To the west, the Indian Ocean Dipole was in extreme territory. The IOD is the difference in ocean temperatures between the west and east tropical Indian Ocean. In a positive phase the IOD can shift moisture towards or away from Australia towards Africa. A positive IOD in 1982 coupled with an El Nino weather system in the ­Pacific produced southeast Australia’s driest year on record.

Alongside the extreme IOD system were record warm temperatures above Antarctica.

Apart from warming the ­Antarctic region, the higher temperatures shifted the Southern Ocean westerly winds towards the equator.

For subtropical Australia, which largely sits north of the main belt of westerlies, the shift results in reduced rainfall, clearer skies and warmer temperatures.

The strongest effects were felt in NSW and southern Queensland, where springtime temperatures increased, rainfall decreased, and heatwaves and fire risk rose.

When the two weather systems finally broke down at the end of last year they were replaced by a new set of conditions that, though shorter lived, have swamped the east coast of the nation.

Monsoon rains finally moved south and a low-pressure system along the east coast brought rough seas and heavy falls.

The breakdown of the IOD and Antarctic systems was noted by the Bureau of Meteorology in its forecasts for the first quarter of the new year.

However, the BoM did not foresee in its seasonal forecasts the extent of what was to follow.

Soaking rains have drenched the east of the continent from Queensland to south of Sydney with downpours of hundreds of millimetres recorded, mainly along the coastline.

Big waves have again played havoc with beachfront areas.

And for the first time in years, farmers have had something to celebrate. Several major rivers feeding the Murray-Darling Basin have started to flow, including the Condamine and Balonne in Queensland and the Namoi and Barwon in NSW.

Much of that water ultimately enters the Darling, which has not flowed solidly for years.

The Murray-Darling Basin Authority says, among other revivals, the Moonie River in Queensland is flowing for the first time since April 2018. Parts of the Weir, Macintyre and Dumaresq rivers of the Queensland-NSW Border Rivers region also are flowing, while in NSW water is passing through large sections of the Gwydir, Castlereagh and Macquarie catchments.

Already there is controversy, with conservation groups outraged at the NSW government’s decision to allow big irrigators to take millions of litres of flood water from the Barwon-Darling river system.

The heaviest falls have been on the eastern side of the Great Dividing Range and will flow into the Pacific rather than inland.

And with a cyclone still brewing off the coast of Queensland the dramatic weather conditions are far from over.

Whether the drought has broken is an open question. Much will depend on follow-up rains.

In a letter to Simon Birmingham, the minister responsible for the BoM at the time, scientist Jennifer Marohasy said: “This, of course, provides an enormous range of actual outcomes where any given forecast can be regarded as ‘correct’ or successful from the perspective of the bureau.”

On the BoM’s more recent performance, Marohasy says it “could not bring itself to apologise for the wrong and totally misleading recent forecast” and this is “a reflection of the very sad state of affairs”.

“There needs to be some accountability. Australians deserve to know if the bureau has any capacity to provide skilful season rainfall forecasts or not,” she says.

SOURCE  

***************************************

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

*****************************************




13 February, 2020  

Lloyds register has joined forces with the enemies of civilisation

An open letter to Tristan Chapman from Micharel Darby - mrmichaeldarby@hotmail.com

You have invited me to attend, on Wednesday 4 March at the Chester Hotel Aberdeen, a breakfast panel session - 'Driving towards a sustainable energy mix'. You have not appointed me to the panel.

From 1760 onward Lloyd’s Register made a significant contribution to human progress. Lloyds Register  contributing emphatically to Britain’s leadership of the Industrial Revolution, which doubled lifespans, banned slavery, and made possible public health, modern medicine, universal education, safe and efficient transport, electronic communication, democratic institutions and the liberation of women from servitude.  Coal and subsequently oil and gas have been absolutely fundamental to those and many other gigantic beneficial reforms. But for coal, the forests of Britain would have disappeared by the early twentieth century.  But for oil, every species of whale would have been extinct by 1930.

Now, as a smug spokesman for an institution whose values have been subverted and reversed, you have the impertinence and ignorance to write:

How can the balance be struck between exploration, production, decarbonisation and renewable energy sources?  Integrating the UK offshore energy sector and leveraging existing oil and gas infrastructure and capabilities can help reduce carbon emissions from oil and gas production and actively support the delivery of the UK’s net zero target.

Decarbonisation means de-industrialisation.  You and your privileged colleagues callously ignore the consequences of de-industrialisation for the indigent and disadvantaged. You should be ashamed.

There is no scientific reason for reducing carbon dioxide emissions (wrongly described by you as carbon emissions), neither from oil and gas production nor from any other activity. Nor can there be any environmental benefit from contriving a reduction in atmospheric carbon dioxide. The gargantuan cost of such contrivance is already threatening the world with misery and poverty.

You should either resign your sinecure as SVP Clean Energy and Innovation, or insist that Lloyds Register campaign for the immediate abolition of all subsidies to unreliable energy.

You have named your intended mutual admiration society meeting: “Driving towards a sustainable energy mix.”  There is only one sustainable energy mix: one hundred percent reliable energy on the grid.

This communication will be posted on Facebook in the hope that you and the once honourable Lloyds Register will have a Road to Damascus experience, cease persecuting the poor and oppressed for the financial benefit of subsidy profiteers, and return to the worthy goal of promoting prosperity, freedom and happiness.

I am available for telephone discussion with any decision maker at Lloyd’s Register, and for interview by any British news organisation, even including the BBC which shares the ABC’s status as an official propaganda arm of the Global Warming Cult.

In a spirt of willingness to forgive, Yours sincerely, Michael Darby





The Misguided Green Virtue-Signaling of Solar Panel Mandates

In a 2014 essay, scholars Ed Glaeser and Cass Sunstein wrote of the need to run all regulations through periodic cost-benefit analyses.

“This kind of analysis is intrinsically neither anti- nor pro-regulation,” they wrote in National Affairs. “It is simply a tool that helps policymakers produce good regulations and prevent bad ones from being made law.”

The idea is that regulations should serve an actual purpose while avoiding costs that could become onerous or regressive.

Environmental regs could particularly use this cost-benefit model. They often appeal to people’s airy notions of “sustainability,” but don’t really solve environmental problems.

The latest example is California’s solar panel mandate, which took effect this year. It requires all new homes under four stories to come with a rooftop photovoltaic solar panel. The state’s energy commission estimates that this requirement will add $9,500 to construction costs, which is significant in a state with an extreme affordable-housing shortage. The National Association of Home Builders estimates that each marginal $1,000 price increase will cut 10,000 Californians out of the home buying market, meaning the mandate will block an estimated 95,000 residents from homeownership, while also burdening renters.

So what is the “benefit”? That’s unclear for several reasons.

Inefficiency

The first problem is that providing solar energy through panels on home rooftops is less efficient than through large installations. Installing solar arrays and sending their energy to the power grid is capital-intensive, and better done in bulk than through a piecemeal, home-by-home process. In fact, rooftop solar power generates electricity at double or more the cost of off-site renewable energy farms.

In California, the mandate is also duplicative.

“The state already has enough solar that during midday, it can drive wholesale energy prices to zero or below. Solar often must be exported or curtailed,” writes David Taylor for Vox. “It’s possible that by mandating all this new rooftop solar — which must be paid retail rates under the state’s net metering policy, no matter the locational or time-specific value of its power — CEC will not increase the net amount of solar in the state much, or at all.”

Vox noted this paradox by posting the following Twitter exchange between Varun Sivaram, a board member of Stanford Energy, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor at Princeton University School of Engineering and Applied Science.

Indirect

Solar panel mandates also produce benefits that are indirect and therefore very poorly targeted. It’s not that solar-generated energy isn’t good unto itself. But why should California homeowners be disproportionately charged with solving a problem of which they are neither the sole causes nor the main victims?

Here’s what I mean: many territories generate carbon emissions. The United States is responsible for 16 percent of emissions, while major emitters from the remaining 84 percent include China, India, and Russia. California’s lawmakers may want to set an example for global stewardship, but their laws have little effect if they can’t control emissions from the other 49 U.S. states. Nor could the country – if it ever adopted California-style policies nationwide – mandate that other countries adopt similar emission reductions.

Nor would everyone in or out of California share equally in any benefit from carbon restrictions. The biggest negative externality often envisioned by climate scientists – a rise in sea levels – is the flooding of coastal urban areas. Such flooding, which by some accounts has already begun, may get worse along the East Coast due to El Nino weather cycles.

The problem of disparate environmental impacts has a “tragedy of the commons” aspect. Even if some jurisdictions curb CO2 emissions, others continue as usual. And those emissions might disproportionately hurt East Coast cities. A solution rooted in sound economics and cost-benefit analysis would start upstream, addressing the top causes of the problem.

California’s solar panel mandate, by contrast, is a highly indirect approach. It will punish one random group (the state’s new homeowners), to create an energy solution that is of dubious value anyway, but that will theoretically reduce carbon emissions and supposedly reduce sea-level rise that is expected to hurt other parts of the world. To put it bluntly: California wants homeowners in Riverside to generate solar energy, under the odd premise that this will prevent flood damages in Miami.

Which is to say: California’s solar panel mandate doesn’t pass the cost-benefit smell test. It is merely empty symbolism.

SOURCE 






Speeding up environmental reviews is good for the economy and the environment

In 2011, President Obama issued a presidential memorandum urging federal agencies to “take steps to expedite permitting and review,” including “setting clear schedules for completing steps in the environmental review and permitting process.” Such bureaucratic delays, Obama explained, interfered with the “engine of job creation and economic growth[.]”

In recognizing the significant costs that excess bureaucracy imposes, Obama was in good company. Presidents of both political parties long have sought to make the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) — a federal statute that requires agencies to produce reports on the environmental effects on their actions — work for the American people.

In 1981, for example, President Reagan’s Council on Environmental Quality, a White House agency charged with implementing the statute, issued guidance encouraging agencies to complete these reviews within 12 months. In 1997, President Clinton’s Council on Environmental Quality reported that agencies were producing overly long environmental reports, at great expense and delay, in an unsuccessful attempt to “litigation-proof” their decisions without any apparent improvement in quality (or reduction in litigation).

Despite these bipartisan efforts, NEPA’s problems keep worsening. Agencies do not systematically track the costs and expense of complying with NEPA (a common problem in environmental statutes). Still, the available data reveal a process that is somehow even more bloated and bureaucratic than when Clinton’s Council on Environmental Quality criticized it.

According to a report by the Federalist Society’s Regulatory Transparency Project, the average time required to complete a NEPA review has steadily risen from 2.9 years in 1998 to 3.8 in 2006, to 4.2 in 2010, and 5.1 in 2016. The reports produced through this process have grown increasingly unwieldy, from a median length of 650 pages in the 1990s to 1,600 in the 2010s. The government-wide cost to produce all this paperwork is likely between $1 billion and $5 billion per year.

And all this effort has not slowed disruptive litigation. Federal agencies have been sued under NEPA at least 4,000 times, in part because of federal laws incentivizing lawsuits through generous attorneys’ fee awards. And these lawsuits reflect a clear bias. Courts decline to review NEPA challenges to certain regulatory decisions, such as the designation of private property as “critical habitat” under the Endangered Species Act. Attorneys’ fees are disproportionately awarded to a small number of environmental litigation groups.

This would be concerning even if it affected only a small number of traditional public projects. But as federal agencies’ power over our everyday lives has grown and grown, so too have the consequences of bureaucratic processes such as NEPA for individual liberty and private property rights.

This month, President Trump’s Council on Environmental Quality proposed the most comprehensive reworking of NEPA regulations in four decades, intending to finally solve some of these problems. Among the changes outlined are a formal goal of completing environmental reviews within two years, establishing a presumptive page limit of 300 pages, and clarifying how agencies should decide what environmental effects to focus on.

Critics of the proposal charge that this undermines public participation and informed decision-making. The first objection can be answered easily. Most people reading this never have seen — much less attempted to read — a draft environmental impact statement, and the few who tried to review one likely got discouraged well before they reached page 1,000 of the document. A complicated, years-long process favors litigious special-interest groups at the expense of participation by ordinary people.

Informed, reasoned decision-making is a goal that few oppose. But in NEPA’s case, agencies extensively analyzing every minor or speculative impact can have a significant cost and one that likely exceeds any benefit. Nor is this simply an economic development versus the environment issue. The delays and expense associated with an overly bureaucratic process also pose real environmental costs. Most directly, they deplete funds that agencies otherwise might spend advancing their missions.

More significant, if less obvious, is that NEPA’s delays and expenses can undermine innovation. Erecting substantial obstacles to new facilities creates a competitive advantage for existing competitors, even if those existing facilities have more significant adverse environmental impacts.

Finally, doing nothing risks wholesale exemptions from environmental review for politically salient projects. Congress has authorized the president to waive a host of environmental regulations to build border infrastructure and has considered similar exemptions for other infrastructure projects. A more efficient NEPA process likely would reduce political pressure for such exemptions.

The reforms are at the proposal stage and open for public comment. That process is almost certain to reveal shortcomings of the proposal, which is the point of soliciting public comments, as well as opportunities to streamline the environmental review process further so that it can serve even better the needs of people and the environment. But don’t be misled by claims that there’s no problem to solve. There is, and it’s a problem that affects both the economy and the environment.

SOURCE 






The Folly Of Global Climate Forecasting

It was particularly warm in Northeast Georgia this past week — no doubt thrilling the Earth-worshipping faithful. We’ve also been very wet. After the latest round of rain, temperatures returned to a more winterlike feel.

On this past Friday, there were a few murmurings of small amounts of snow on Saturday morning. Of course, any amount of snow in Georgia is news, but as late as Friday evening…most forecasts were making little of the potential snowy event.

According to the Friday forecasts, most of north Georgia was only going to get one-half inch to one inch of snow, and temperatures were going to warm into the mid-to-upper forties by Saturday afternoon.

Thus, any snow that fell was supposed to melt quickly. We were paying special attention to these forecasts because we were traveling several miles for a karate tournament on Saturday morning.

Even on Saturday morning, forecasters were still saying the snow was going to be minimal and not much of a concern. We left our northeast Georgia house headed southwest about 9:30 a.m. Saturday morning. The snow was just starting to fall.

The storm was moving southwest to northeast, so we were heading right into it. As we traveled, the snowfall was getting heavier. The precipitation on radar looked impressive. We were barely thirty minutes down the road, and we started getting nervous.

The snow was quickly piling up and the traffic was slowing down. It was as if we were headed to a global warming conference and Al Gore’s plane had just landed!

As we continued on our way we saw several cars on the sides of the road, unable to navigate the snow-covered asphalt. What’s more, as we communicated with friends already at the tournament, we were getting reports of road closures.

We arrived safely at the tournament, but the parking lot was perhaps the most dangerous asphalt that we encountered. We were beginning to wonder if we were going to end up sleeping on the floor of a high school gym.

After the tournament, we made it home safely, but it was a mess! Contrary to the forecasts that were only hours old, much of north Georgia saw five to six inches of snow, and the temperatures never rose past the mid-thirties. Roads all across the area were closed.

Again, I don’t mind an inaccurate forecast. I’m very used to them, especially in the winter in the southeastern United States. I’m sure it happens all over the U.S. and the world every day. Even with all of our advanced technology, weather forecasting is a very tricky business.

However, the missed forecast with this recent weather event highlights the kind of folly that is behind all of the doom and gloom predictions coming from Al Gore’s disciples.

Even people who know what they are talking about have a difficult time predicting accurately the local weather just days, and sometimes even hours, in advance — yet the climate-change “faithful” (“fools” is more appropriate) would have us drastically change our energy policy and enact crippling emission controls — which would do virtually nothing to change the climate — based on their dire predictions about the global climate that are decades and sometimes centuries in advance.

To be accurate in weather — or climate — forecasting, it helps when one’s forecasts are based on sound science.

Yet, as John Nolte noted just a few months ago, climate “experts” are zero for forty-one (now 0 for 43!) in their doomsday predictions.

Thus, why would anyone think that so-called climate “science” is in any way reliable? These climate frauds have long relied on the deceptive use of data to push their big-government agenda.

Daily, it seems, we are subjected to “another global warming fraud.” Everybody needs an Apocalypse, I suppose.

Climate science has become such a joke that the “faithful” are now being led by a child. As Josef Joffe recently put it,

Greta Thunberg, the teenager from Stockholm, is the prophet of a new religion sweeping the West. Call it Climatism. Like any religion worthy of the name, it comes with its own catechism (what to believe) and eschatology (how the world will end).

Thunberg’s bible is the latest report of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which gives us 12 years to save civilization as we know it.

We have prayed to the false gods of fossil-fired growth, runs Thunberg’s indictment. Guilty are the adults who have “lied to us” and given us “false hope.” But her children’s crusade — no-school “Fridays for Future” — will show the path to redemption.

Climate science has become such a joke that the “faithful” are now “confessing their sins” to plants. As Tyler O’Neil noted last year,

Union Theological Seminary hosted a chapel service in which self-identified Christians confessed their climate sins to plants. No, this is not satire from the Babylon Bee — this really happened, and the seminary is defending it without shame…

“In worship, our community confessed the harm we’ve done to plants, speaking directly in repentance. This is a beautiful ritual,” the seminary announced on Twitter.

“We are in the throes of a climate emergency, a crisis created by humanity’s arrogance, our disregard for Creation. Far too often, we see the natural world only as resources to be extracted for our use, not divinely created in their own right — worthy of honor, thanks and care.”

It is becoming increasingly clear that anthropogenic climate change is nothing more than, as Australia’s Ian Plimer put it years ago, “the new religion of First World urban elites.”

With the mounting evidence against it and the continued crumbling of its “holy” documents, it’s developing into a rather poor religion at that.

Thus, when it comes to the “experts” and predicting the future — especially the future global climate — as Jeff Jacoby noted last winter, your guess is as good as theirs.

It seems this is also often the case with your local weather forecasts. Remember all of this the next time you encounter someone telling you what the global climate is going to be decades down the road.

SOURCE 






On cue — After droughts and fires, then come the floods

All the wise-heads said that Australia's drought was caused by global warming.  Where has that warming gone now that Australia has huge floods?  Has the warming ceased?

By Joanne Nova

So much for the “hotter drier” Australian future they were warning us about 3 weeks ago.

As predicted, droughts in Australia often end in floods. It is the way it has always been. Today people are already being rescued from the rising water and possibly another 200 -300mm of rain may fall before Sunday warns the BOM. Many fires have been extinguished.

Climate change has made no difference to the drought trends in Australia in the last 178 years and climate models are totally skilless at rainfall. When will the climate modelers admit that these are natural cycles?

Forecasters become increasingly concerned that even more rain could fall even faster than expected as five people have been rescued from floods.

The NSW State Emergency Service issued a flood warning for Sydney’s metropolitan areas, saying forecast weather conditions were “likely to cause widespread flooding”.

Flooding has already occurred in Roseville in Sydney’s Upper North Shore and the north-western suburb of Putney, where commuters are advised to allow extra travel time.

Meteorologists have said they are increasingly worried about the unfolding weather events in New South Wales and have “great concerns” that “intense bursts” of rain could see hundreds more millimetres fall far quicker than originally expected.

The NSW Rural Fire Service said the heavy rain was welcome in bushfire-ravaged parts of the state.

“We were over the moon to see rain arrive across many parts of NSW, with decent falls in the state’s north,” the RFS said on Thursday night.

When will our climate experts and the ABC “Science ” team mention that the solar cycles and ocean currents are linked to rainfall all over the world, and their models contradict each other, show no skill and are useless at rainfall.

Five years after rain returns, climate modelers redo models and “predict” more, less, some, different or same rain

Australian – Asian rainfall linked to solar activity for last 6000 years

Sun controls half of the groundwater recharge rate in China for last 700 years

Solar effects seem to shift wind and rainfall patterns over last 3000 years in Chile

Climate Models: 100% right except for rain, drought, storms, humidity and everything else

Delighted to hear it’s raining. Hoping everyone stays safe and its “well spread”.

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 February, 2020  

Greenpeace abandons science and attacks Golden Rice

Join me in a story that traveled two decades from 1999 to early this year, when efforts to reduce premature death and childhood blindness in the developing world may finally reach fruition. This can occur through the use of a special grain called Golden Rice. It’s daffodil like color occurs from the presence of beta-carotene, a precursor to vitamin A in the human body.

It was developed by Professor Ingo Potrykus of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, where Albert Einstein had studied and taught, and his colleague Peter Beyer of the University of Freiburg. They began their effort in 1990 to develop a genetic pathway to move the beta-carotene from the leaves of the most popular rice plant in the third world, Oryza-sativa, into the plant’s edible kernels. They achieved this result in 1999 after a decade of intense effort.

Sadly, the use of this Golden Rice has not been allowed now for 20 years as a result of the anti-genetic modifications movement led by Greenpeace. This January the government of the Philippines, after years of study, has approved its use. But Greenpeace is not finished. They are attempting one last gasp effort to prevent the use of this boon to human health by throwing it back into the Philippine courts. They are claiming that the internationally recognized Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety’s principal 15, otherwise known as the “precautionary principle” has not been adequately observed. The protocol is an agreement aimed at ensuring safe handling , transport and use of living modified organisms resulting from biotechnology. There has been two decades of successful research on the safety of Golden Rice including its toxicity and allergenicity along with human studies on American adults and Chinese children.

At every turn, for two decades, Greenpeace has led the opposition from many anti-GMO groups, to keep it from the diets of impoverished children in the third world. They have resorted to illegally destroying test crops, and mounting a global disinformation campaign.

Vitamin A deficiency (VAD) is practically unknown in the Western world where people take multivitamins, and get sufficient micronutrients from ordinary foods, and fortified cereals. But in the third world lack of vitamin A is responsible for over a million deaths annually, most of them children, plus at least 500,000 cases of blindness in Bangladesh, China, and elsewhere in Asia. In these areas, many children subsist on only a bowl of rice a day and little else. For these children a daily supply of Golden Rice could bring the gift of life and sight.

Remarkably there is no commercial aspect to this terrible story. Potrykus and Beyer gave away the rights to their invention for anyone to use. It is available at no extra cost for any grain company to make available. Growers of Golden rice can even keep their own seeds from year to year without having to pay for the use of the technology as is often the case for other genetically modified grains.

I sat down one day years ago with the late Norman Borlaug, the Nobel Prize winner in Agriculture in 1970. Dr. Borlaug had won the award for his development of semi-dwarf wheat which dramatically increased grain yields, saving millions from starvation around the world in the 1950s and 1960s. I asked him why he thought Golden Rice had raised such objections, when he had not faced such opposition for his work on wheat, originally in Mexico. He told me that biotechnology had not yet gotten a big enough foothold to scare the folks who are intent on reducing the world’s population, rather than improving human health. He told me that these anti-GMO people want to see the world population decline. They desire to play God in choosing the ones who were to leave the planet which most assuredly would not include them

Greenpeace, once a fine organization co-founded by Patrick Moore to Save The Whales was taken over by anti-human, greedy people gaining fame and fortune by defeating human progress at every turn.

Surely the time has come when Anti-GMO activists and the green parties should stand down in their unwarranted opposition to Golden Rice. They should join the many groups working to improve human nutrition and embrace this humanitarian innovation. The public needs to know that not a single human being has been sickened or has died from the ingestion of a genetically modified grain, and the scientific evidence that they are safe is overwhelming.

Given the scale of human suffering, that Golden Rice will address, there may be no better example of a purely philanthropic project in the whole of human history. Yet some misguided environmental activists still oppose Golden Rice to this day. Perhaps it is time to recognize that these people are not misguided but are in fact are the personification of EVIL.

SOURCE 





Tesla’s German plant sets off water debate

Environmental stewardship is much more than merely low-emissions power, as Tesla is finding out in Germany. German environmentalists assert a proposed Tesla assembly plant outside Berlin would put unacceptable strains on German water supplies and require the leveling of ecologically valuable forest land. Tesla, which rides environmental messaging as a primary marketing tool, is responding by claiming water availability and forest conservation are overblown environmental concerns.

As reported by Reuters (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tesla-gigafactory-germany-protests/youre-stealing-our-water-germans-protest-against-tesla-gigafactory-idUSKBN1ZH0KM), approximately 250 people protested outside Berlin after a Brandenburg water association warned construction and operation of the plant would cause “extensive and serious problems with the drinking water supply and wastewater disposal.”

“I am not against Tesla … But it’s about the site; in a forest area that is a protected wildlife zone. Is this necessary?” environmentalist Anne Bach told Reuters.

Deforestation has long been a problem in Germany and throughout Europe. Conservationists warn that clearing ecologically crucial forest land for the Tesla plant is destructive, unnecessary, and sets a bad precedent.

Musk responded by tweeting, “this is not a natural forest — it was planted for use as cardboard.”

A recently published study by CFACT senior policy advisor Paul Driessen, “Protecting the Environment from the Green New Deal,” (https://www.heartland.org/_template-assets/documents/publications/EnviHarmsPB.pdf) documents how wind power, solar power and other climate activist priorities frequently cause more environmental harm than they solve.

Leveling scarce German forest land and harming German water quality and quantity appear to be just such an example.

SOURCE 






Chemophobia: Nearly 40% Of Europeans Want A Chemical-Free World

A new study reveals that nearly 40% of Europeans want to "live in a world where chemical substances don't exist." Another 82% didn't know that table salt is table salt, whether it is extracted from the ocean or made synthetically.

It's not a secret that the average person is scientifically illiterate. The question is, "Just how scientifically illiterate?" The answer is appalling.

Researchers Michael Siegrist and Angela Bearth report in the journal Nature Chemistry on a survey they conducted to gauge Europeans' attitudes toward chemicals. They had about 700 respondents from each of eight countries: Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Sweden, Switzerland and United Kingdom, for a total of 5,631 participants.

The first series of questions was designed to measure chemophobia, the irrational fear of chemicals. As shown below, 30% of Europeans report being "scared" of chemicals, and about 40% try to "avoid contact with chemical substances" and want to "live in a world where chemical substances don't exist." Obviously, this is impossible. Everything -- water, food, your smartphone -- is a chemical or a combination of chemicals.

The second series of questions was designed to assess basic chemistry and toxicology knowledge. The results were far worse: 82% of respondents didn't know that table salt is table salt, whether it is extracted from the ocean or made synthetically. Another 91% didn't know that "the dose makes the poison" is true, even for synthetic chemicals.

How can people be so uneducated in a society that has access to all knowledge ever produced by humanity? The authors offer a quite plausible explanation.

They note that the public is far removed from the processes required to produce the materials that we use on a daily basis. People simply don't understand how food safely arrives on their plate or a smartphone lands in their pocket. Because of this, people rely on mental shortcuts (simple heuristics) to make decisions. The decisions are usually wrong because the heuristics are logical fallacies.

For instance, the authors cite the common "natural is better" fallacy, in which people erroneously conclude that things found in nature are safer than synthetic versions. Another is the "contagion" heuristic, in which it is believed that even the tiniest amount of a toxic substance is harmful and "contaminates" everything with which it comes into contact. Under this strange light, a single molecule of a toxin is just as dangerous as a metric ton.

Yet another is the "trust" heuristic, which is essentially a fallacious appeal to authority. People trust others who share their values, not experts. So, if a popular celebrity says that you should put coffee in your butt, by golly, some people are going to do it.

My only gripe with the paper is that the authors seem to back away from the most obvious conclusion:

"It is not our intention to propagate a naïve deficit model postulating that a lack of knowledge is the only reason for negative perceptions of synthetic chemicals."

Why not? That's the correct answer.

SOURCE 






Philosophy as an antidote to the global warming craze

The need to counter  ‘global warming’ indoctrination becomes ever more urgent. I suggest taking just one element of the agenda and aiming to create doubt in the minds of those taken in by it.

Chipping away at the brain washing seems to be more effective than launching broadsides. So enraging is the entire issue that this is often easier said than done, but, by following my own advice, I recently had a letter published in the magazine ‘Philosophy Now’.

Here is my letter:

Dear Editor:

I wish to express my consternation that a professor of philosophy, Wendy Lynne Lee, should support the value-laden term  ‘climate change denier’  (‘Dewey & Climate Denial’ in Issue 135).  She does not define this concept, but a ‘climate change denier’ would appear to be anyone who questions the assumptions that (a) the planet is heating up unusually, and (b) that this is caused primarily by CO2 emitted by the burning of fossil fuels. These are matters of scientific observation which may or may not be true. However, if a person may not question them without condemnation, what becomes of Karl Popper’s principle of falsifiability ?

Worst of all, perhaps, the word ‘denier’ is habitually associated with ‘holocaust denier’. The application of the term is to imply an appalling moral deficit.  Those who wish to live in a peaceful, reasonable and rational world should decry the use of the term ‘denier’.

Rosie Langridge

Here’s the story:

Philosophy Now is a well-established magazine  based in London.

Wendy Lynn Lee is professor of philosophy at Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania but nonetheless her article is such a terrible muddle that it was hard to know where to begin a letter in response. I picked out what I see as the critical issue here, the attempt from many directions to close down any discussion of the ‘global warming’ agenda, be that by claiming/assuming that the science is ‘settled’, or by branding those who question as ‘deniers’. By contrast, philosophers should be the last people who cease to question.

As I was writing to a magazine dedicated to philosophy, I decided not to challenge the data, the science, the assumptions of warming, or even the twists and turns of her ‘reasoning’; instead I homed in on the philosophical arguments and was delighted to be published by the magazine in the following issue.

SOURCE 





Australian PM reinforces coal commitment

Scott Morrison has used question time to firmly back coal jobs, as Labor attacked the government on the proposed Collinsville power plant and the divisions in the Coalition over climate change.

The Prime Minister sustained multiple attacks from the Opposition on his handling of the economy and climate divisions.

When asked if he would give the Collinsville plant indemnity against climate risk if it ever goes ahead, Mr Morrison said that he would back any jobs that come out of a coal-fired power station.

“I know where Collinsville is, you mightn’t. I know where the jobs are in Collinsville also,” he told the House. “They are the jobs you want to take away.

“Our government believes in jobs. We believe in jobs in North Queensland. We believe in jobs in northern Tasmania. We believe in jobs in Western Australia.

“And I can tell the House that we are united on the need to ensure that we meet our emissions reduction targets, not by increasing taxes on people, not by putting up people’s electricity prices, and not by walking away from the jobs of Australians in rural and regional areas.”

Labor spent most of question time hitting the government on sluggish economic growth and Opposition treasury spokesman Jim Chalmers questioned its stance that coronavirus and the bushfires were behind the deterioration in the economy.

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

*****************************************





11 February, 2020  

Deceptive rhetoric at Davos could bring disaster

There is nothing ‘cohesive’ or ‘sustainable’ about ‘solutions’ demanded by WEF ‘stakeholders’

Paul Driessen

The World Economic Forum conference in Davos, Switzerland is billed as the globe’s most prestigious annual gathering of movers and shakers. Its mission is to “improve the state of the world by engaging business, political, academic and other leaders of society to shape global, regional and industry agendas.”

This year’s theme was “Stakeholders for a Cohesive and Sustainable World.” Unfortunately, the lofty rhetoric belies the misleading, potentially disastrous realities of agendas supported by many participants.

A primary basis for this year’s theme is the repeated assertion that the world faces a climate cataclysm. European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen thus wants to tax carbon-based energy imports into the EU and end humanity’s practice of “taking resources from the environment and generating waste and pollution in the process.” She (and others) insist that “green energy” would do no such thing.

Climate crisis claims in turn are based on computer models that are only as good as the assumptions built into them – and on attempts to blame temperature changes, extreme weather events and future crises on fossil fuel emissions, because the assumptions and models say it’s a cause-effect relationship.

The most cited model is (naturally) the most extreme: RCP8.5, which predicts temperatures way above what we are actually measuring and all manner of future calamities. But it is based on the assumptions that: methane and plant-fertilizing carbon dioxide (a tiny 0.0402% of Earth’s atmosphere) are vastly more important than the sun in driving climate change; our planet will have 12 billion people by 2100; there will be no energy innovations over the next 80 years; and therefore coal use will increase tenfold by the end of the century. On that we’re supposed to base restrictive energy policies, and Davos meeting themes.

Who are the stakeholders that Davos attendees will consult? Greta Thunberg was invited, to present her patented tirade that fossil fuels are destroying her future. But no climate realists (alarmism skeptics) were given the podium, nor were representatives of EU or US factory workers or the world’s poorest citizens.

The good news is that several bankers made assurances that they were not going to stop lending funds to fossil fuel companies or “major polluters.” (Will that latter category include the mining companies that will have to provide voluminous raw materials for a US and global “green new deal,” as discussed below?) The bad news is that Davos bankers and politicians allow themselves to be pressured constantly primarily by far-left “stakeholders,” who hold the stakes that they and global ruling elites want to drive through the hearts of developed nation living standards and poor country aspirations for better lives.

Indeed, contrary to its assurances at Davos, despite consultation with indigenous peoples supposedly being a core company business principle, and without consulting with Alaska Native stakeholders who want to drill carefully and ecologically for oil and gas on their own lands, to improve their people’s living standards, Goldman Sachs has decided it will no longer fund such development in the Arctic.

With “mainstream” outlets and social media increasingly controlling news and opinion, and siding with climate alarmists and anti-fossil activists, that pressure will continue to build – to our great detriment.

Will Davos themes, agendas and policies usher in a more “cohesive” world? The opposite is infinitely more likely. Deprive people of abundant, reliable, affordable fossil fuel (and nuclear) energy, as eco-activists seek to do – and you deprive them of jobs, living standards, food, health and life. People die in droves (itself a goal of more rabid environmentalists panicked about an over-populated world). Implement “green new deal” policies, and the results will be anything but cohesion. The policies will bring rage, protests, violence and anarchy – as France and Chile vividly demonstrated over the past two years.

Turn African, Asian and Latin American countries into vassal states, with enormous mines serving “ecologically responsible, climate-focused” nations that don’t tolerate mining within their own borders – and any cohesion will rapidly disappear. Tell American, European and other families they must accept massive wind and solar installations in their backyards or off their coasts, and the results will be similar.

A “sustainable” world? Yes, fossil fuels are ultimately finite resources – hundreds of years from now, after we run out of huge coal deposits, oil and gas from fracking, methane hydrates and other supplies, assuming policy makers don’t lock them up and “keep them in the ground.” But long before that happens, human innovation will create far better alternatives than wind turbines, if we let creativity flourish.

Meanwhile, just remember: Wind and sunshine are sustainable. But lands and raw materials required for the technologies to harness this intermittent, widely disbursed energy absolutely are not.

Sustainability is a useful concept for assessing hidden costs, risks and fiduciary responsibilities – such as those associated with climate change, as we are constantly reminded. But we must apply those same considerations to wind, solar, battery and biofuel operations; and to impacts on habitats and wildlife, air and water quality, human health and wellbeing in green new deal mining and manufacturing regions, and human welfare in an energy-deprived world of increasing hunger, death, anger, riots and chaos.

As my new Heartland Institute reports and previous articles note, fossil fuels and nuclear currently provide over 8 billion megawatt-hours (MWh) of electricity and electricity-equivalent power annually, to meet America’s industrial, commercial, residential and transportation needs. Using solar to generate all that power – and charge batteries for a week of sunless days – would require 19 billion state-of-the-art sun-tracking photovoltaic panels, completely blanketing an area equal to all of New York and Vermont.

But that assumes the panels are all located where the sun shines with summertime Arizona intensity 24/7/365, which will never happen. So we’d probably have to double (perhaps even triple) the number of panels and affected acreage. The impacts on habitats and wildlife would be significant.

Using 1.8-MW wind turbines instead of solar panels would require more than 4 million turbines on farm, wildlife habitat and scenic lands equal to Arizona, Nevada, California, Oregon and part of Washington State combined. But the more we install, the more we have to put turbines in poor wind locations. We’d probably have to double (or even triple) the number of turbines, and acreage impacted. Their rapidly turning blades (200 mph at their tips) would slaughter millions of eagles, falcons, other birds and bats.

Going offshore instead would require hundreds of thousands of 650-foot-tall 10-MW turbines. Their impact on birds, bats, marine mammals, vistas, and ship and aircraft navigation would be intolerable.

Each 1.8-MW turbine requires some 1,200 tons of steel, copper, aluminum, rare earth elements, zinc, molybdenum, petroleum-based composites, reinforced concrete and other materials. Each ton of materials requires removing thousands of tons of rock and ore – and processing ores with fossil fuels. In fact, wind turbines need some 200 times more material per megawatt than a modern combined-cycle gas turbine!

Storing a week of electricity for windless and sunless periods would require some 2 billion half-ton Tesla car lithium-cobalt battery packs – and more materials; more mining. Connecting wind, solar and battery facilities to distant cities would require thousands of miles of new transmission lines, and more mining.

This doesn’t include materials to replace existing cars, trucks, heating systems and other technologies.

And that’s just for the United States. Imagine how many turbines, panels, batteries, transmission lines, raw materials, mines, processing plants and factories we’d need for a global transformation!

But green new deal advocates detest mining, at least by western mining companies in western countries. So it’s mostly done in faraway places that have virtually no environmental, health, safety, wage or child labor rules. Places like Inner Mongolia, where rare earth operations have fouled the air, created a huge toxic lake, and poisoned thousands of people. And Africa’s Congo, where 40,000 children labor in mines just for the cobalt needed in today’s cell phones, laptops and electric cars; not for any green new deal.

This eco-imperialism and false sustainability must end. As to all those self-styled stakeholders, You first. Lead by example. Slash your energy use and living standards. Then you can (nicely) ask the rest of us to do likewise. That means you, Greta, Leo DiCaprio, Al Gore, Emma Thompson and all the other climate scolds. (But of course they won’t. So why should we? And why should the world’s poor?)

Via email





With Straight Face, Yale Says Fracking Causes Sexually-Transmitted Infections

Researchers from the Yale School of Public Health published one of the dumbest papers we've ever seen. They claim that some areas in which fracking takes place (Texas only) have more sexually transmitted diseases. Embarrassingly funny and, yes, "fracking" stupid.

It is difficult to describe how badly I wanted to include the terms "Fracking" and "F#####" in that title. But I had a momentary lapse in poor taste, so I went with a tamer choice. Researchers at the Yale School of Public Health did not. They risked ridicule by putting out one of the dumbest papers I've ever seen:

"A Multi-Region Analysis of Shale Drilling Activity and Rates of Sexually Transmitted Infections in the United States" N. Deziel, et. al., Sexually Transmitted Diseases, January 9, 2020 doi: 10.1097/OLQ.0000000000001

And, ridicule they shall have. Not my fault. They practically begged for it.

A. The claim

Here's the premise: The rates of two sexually transmitted infections, gonorrhea, and chlamydia, were found to be 10% and 15%, respectively, higher in Texas counties where fracking took place compared to other counties where fracking wasn't being done.

Is there anything to this? Let's take a look (Hint: Other than a good laugh, no).

The five most common sexually transmitted infections (STIs) in the US are:

HPV (Human Papillomavirus)
Chlamydia
Gonorrhea
Syphilis
Herpes

But the paper links only #s 2 and 3 to fracking. What about 1,4, and 5? This discrepancy can be explained in one of two ways:

Fracking protects people from HPV, syphilis, and herpes.
The results are a bunch of nonsense.

I vote for #2.

B. What's wrong here?

Plenty.

"In Texas, county-years with high drilling activity had 10% increased rates of chlamydia (RR=1.10; 95% CI=1.04-1.17) and 15% increased rates of gonorrhea (RR=1.15; 95% CI = 1.04-1.28), compared to county-years with no drilling."

How did this ever get published? This paper is pure data dredging. And it's not even good data dredging. In retrospective studies, which are essentially useless on a good day, the minimum relative risk (RR) that is even worth paying any attention to is 2.0. In other words, if the people in fracking areas had double (RR 2.0) the risk of those in non-fracking areas it might be worth paying some attention to the paper. When RRs are 1.1 and 1.15 the study is a joke.

"No statistically significant associations were reported for syphilis..."

There ya go. The authors at least admit but do not explain, that one of the other three STIs had nothing to do with whether people lived in fracking counties, non-fracking counties, or on Neptune. This is another red flag - biological plausibility. There isn't any. If there is really an increase in STIs in fracking areas it would be across the board - not just two infections.

By massaging the data the authors were able to come up with an imaginary correlation between fracking and some STDs but not others. But even this supernaturally low bar was still too high to find a "statistically significant" association with syphilis (or anything else)...

C. It gets worse.

"No statistically significant associations were reported for... STIs in Colorado or North Dakota."

As if this weren't a big enough mess it would seem that we may have to consider another ICD-10 diagnosis code...

A56.8-BS - Sexually transmitted chlamydial infection in states with large numbers of electoral votes.

OK, so if I've got this right, there are 21 states that do fracking. The authors chose three of them and found a delusional "association" in one of these states, but for only two of the most common STDs and no association in the other two states. Sounds reasonable, no?

No.

D. This "study" is an anti-fracking screed. And nothing else.

"Associations between shale drilling and chlamydia and gonorrhea in Texas may reflect increased risk in areas with higher drilling activity and a greater number of major metropolitan areas. Inter-state differences highlight the need for local epidemiology to prioritize community health policies."

Please.

SOURCE 






Fishy Science: The Environmentally Dangerous Fish Stick?

Fish sticks, for many a dinnertime staple, cast an environmental shadow. Fisheries contribute 4% of agriculture's 10-to-32% contribution to Green House Gases. And given those ranges, it should be no surprise that the “environmental performance” varies between the fisheries under discussion. How bad is a fish stick? It depends on what you count, and over what time horizon.

The studies of GHG created from fishing have focused primarily on fuel usage by ships while fishing, resulting in a “focus on a narrow group of pollutants (e.g., well-mixed GHGs including CO2, CH4, and N2O)…”. Moreover, the use of an extended timeframe, 100 years, does not account for the short-term impacts of other gases, which have short atmospheric lifetimes and can have strong warming or cooling effects. Black carbon is one such pollutant that can result in short term warming while SO2 results in cooling. Finally, in calculating a “sea to table” scenario, one must also consider downstream environmental costs of processing and delivery to the consumer.

The Fishy Study

The researchers followed the sea to table life of this guy, the Alaska Walleye Pollock, whose fishery is the eastern Bering Sea. They are widely distributed for consumption as fillets and surimi. I know that last one threw me too. Surimi is frappe of Pollock used in much the same way as the nugget of the Chicken is used in chicken products. You may have walked by surimi in the dairy case as imitation Crab sticks. And while the fillets and surimi have collective harvesting experience, and share equally in markets, making a fillet has different downstream environmental costs than creating a frappe or an imitation crab part.

"The primary processing phase of the seafood supply chain includes on-board production of intermediary products and storage of the product at a wholesaler."

Here we are talking about fuel, electrical costs including refrigeration, materials, and environmental costs associated with materials and refrigerants. There are so many variables and difficulties in calculating numbers with a large fleet of varying weight, capacity, and catch. As the authors write, "Carbon footprints come with large uncertainty in data and methods.” Since all of the calculations are 1st-order estimations, I did not put a lot of stock in the numbers, instead considering the ratios and interactions as a good initial approximation.

The secondary processing is what happens to those blocks of frozen fillet and surimi - all the environmental impacts in creating that final product in your home. There are transportation costs for sea and land crafts with differing fuel needs and supplies, as well as the costs of refrigeration and coolants. At this point, the researchers made use of cost information about a different white fish that is similarly transformed into battered and breaded fillets. Not the worry, the crab flavored sticks, our friend surimi, was retained for comparison, but again with different costs for processing, packaging, and storage. Finally, there were the costs of retail activity, again those refrigeration units and storage costs.

The Fishy Results

The study considered two different products, sent into five different markets [1], over a “short-term horizon on 20 years and a long-term horizon of 100 years.

For both products, the downstream costs of processing doubled the environmental costs of fishing. Those costs varied by both market and time horizon ranging from 0.55 to 0.66 kg CO2 for each kg of the finished product.

In processing, the majority of environmental impact came from product ingredients and electrical consumption. Slightly over half of the environmental impact comes from product ingredients. And once again, what was being made altered the ratios, ingredient costs were higher for battered fish, while electrical spending was less.

While CO2 is the primary environmental “warming component,” other materials, specifically black carbon (soot), followed by methane, play significant roles. The percentage contribution by black carbon and methane flipped when considering only greenhouse gases versus all the possible air pollutants involved; their share of warming was decreased when considering a long time horizon and varied with markets.

NOx is the primary environmental “cooling component,” followed by SOx. Their contributions too varied with the markets, and time horizon.

Counter-intuitively, the exportation of these products reduced their environmental impact over domestic use – this was due to transoceanic shipping, where the fuel resulted in “higher amounts of cooling species than the domestic products.”

40% of transoceanic shipping occurred in areas where fuel composition was regulated to twenty-four fold lower levels of sulfur. Sulfur, which acts as a cooling agent in the atmosphere, therefore, had less of a positive environmental impact in these regulated areas.

When considering only greenhouse gases, the estimated environmental burden was 1.6 to 2.6 times greater than when all pollutants, including those that cool the atmosphere were considered. And that multiplier was greater over 100 years than 20 years

The numbers should be taken lightly. Look at how many variables could be involved in creating a model for the production of battered fish and imitation crab sticks. And I am only mentioning some of the more pertinent variables. [2] And other, often uncounted variables, produced more variation.

In performing their sensitivity analysis, researchers found that the environmental costs were affected by whether products were shipped on sea or land (differences in fuel composition), as well as storage costs, which varied by a country’s electrical grid. The authors also acknowledge other environmental variables not measured; for example, the relative abundance of pollack and water temperature had an impact on where and how long fishing takes.

Models

All models are simplifications, and all models are wrong. But iterative models can take into account more and more of the factors and their interplay. Not including the content and effect of atmospheric cooling pollutants like NOx and SOx alter conclusions. Not considering the entire range of source to table inputs changes findings, after all, nearly 70% of the environmental effects in this study were from processing, not fishing.

For me, the paper is a cautionary tale about science and policy. Unfortunately, many of our regulators and legislators are not equipped to consider the nuance of studies, and they are rarely presented to them as other than our “best possible” science.

SOURCE 






BPA Alarmists Are Beating A Dead Monomer - Enough Already

Bisphenol A – a long-used component of polycarbonate plastics, is one of the most studied chemicals in the world. Even the ultra-cautious FDA has declared it safe for people as used. But some scientists have built a career by screaming about how dangerous it is, so we have another paper. Enough already.

BPA has been studied to death. The FDA says it's safe. Some obsessed academics can't seem to accept this.
One would think that the FDA's issuance of the CLARITY-BPA Core Study, a two-year exhaustive examination of the effects of the plastic component bisphenol-A (BPA) on rats might have finally put an end to the hysteria surrounding a chemical that has been used since the 1950s.

One area that has been of significant consumer interest is the use of Bisphenol A (BPA) in food packaging. BPA is authorized for use in polycarbonate plastics and epoxy resins in certain food and beverage can linings. Given this interest, the FDA has routinely considered and evaluated the scientific evidence surrounding the use of BPA and continues to conclude that BPA is safe for the currently authorized uses in food containers and packaging.

U.S. Food and Drug Administration  Feb 23, 2018

One would be wrong.

In a paper entitled "BPA: have flawed analytical techniques compromised risk assessments?" which was published in the December 5th issue of The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology, three authors from Washington State University, one of them being Frederick vom Saal (1), try yet another approach to convince us all that BPA, which is primarily used as a sealer/liner in canned food (it keeps you from getting botulism poisoning, etc.) is putting life on earth at risk by "disrupting" our endocrine systems.

The premise of the paper is that BPA has traditionally been measured by an "indirect" assay in which BPA sulfate, and BPA glucuronide, the two major metabolites found in urine, are enzymatically broken down (hydrolyzed) to give free BPA, which is then measured. The authors question the efficiency of the hydrolysis process, saying that this leads to artificially low concentrations.

Instead, the Washington State researches report an analytical method that directly measures both major metabolites in urine without having to go through the enzymatic hydrolysis. The "direct" measurements found that total BPA in urine was 19-44 times higher than measured using older methods. Therefore:

Importantly, because estimates of human exposure have been based almost exclusively on data from indirect methods, these findings provide compelling evidence that human exposure to BPA is far higher than has been assumed previously

Sorry, I don't buy it.

If anything, in my opinion, the paper may actually reinforce the safety of the chemical. This is because both the indirect and direct techniques are measuring BPA in the urine. Because that's how our bodies work. Our livers are exquisitely designed to convert chemicals and drugs to water-soluble metabolites, which are eliminated in the urine. This process is especially efficient with BPA (2).  The authors say just this:

However, rapid metabolism of orally ingested BPA means accurate assessment in humans requires not only measurement of BPA but also of its major conjugated metabolites

So, I would argue that it makes little or no difference whether standard analytical techniques have underestimated. This is because:

Whatever harm BPA is alleged to cause will not occur when its metabolites, BPA sulfate, and BPA glucuronide, are sitting in your bladder waiting to be eliminated. To screw up your endocrine system the chemical needs to be in blood and body tissues. The rapid metabolism ensures that the chemical does not stay in the body for long.
Let's accept that standard analytical methods have indeed been underestimating the concentration of BPA metabolites in urine. So what? This does not mean that we are suddenly ingesting 19-44 times more BPA. No, the exposure hasn't risen. It's just being measured differently. This is conceptually identical to groups like EWG and NRDC reporting the presence of trace amounts of chemicals in the environment or humans and implying that this is something new and dangerous. This is disingenuous and wrong. The chemicals have been there all along. They are now being detected because of the power of modern instrumentation, which can measure chemicals in concentrations that were unimaginable in the past.
The argument that we are somehow at more risk because measurements now show that we have been exposed to more than previously believed is like arguing that if two home runs are awarded every time a batter hits the ball into the seats that hitters are now hitting twice as many home runs as before. If anything, this study says that BPA is 19-44 times safer than we thought. Sound silly?

You bet.

NOTES:

(1) Frederick vom Saal has spent something like seven centuries trying to prove that BPA is a dangerous chemical. Do a Google search of "BPA" and vom Saal and 1940 (!) hits show up. Obsessed much?

(2) Phenols (benzene rings containing a hydroxyl (OH) group) are notoriously poor drug candidates. They are the bane of medicinal chemists doing drug discovery. Why? Because the damn things get turned into glucuronide and sulfates and all your work gets peed away. As the name implies, bisphenol A contains two hydroxyl groups so it is (more or less) twice as bad a drug.

SOURCE 







Prominent Australian conservative lets fly during heated debate over coal and bushfires as climate expert tells him Australia faces 'unimaginable' blaze seasons

Michael Mann is a pseudo-scientist.  He is so nervous about the quality of the data underlying his research reports that he opted to lose a court case rather than reveal his data.  Such a breach of basic scientific principles makes all his words unproven nasturtiums

Barnaby is perfectly correct to say that adopting stricter CO2 polcies would do nothing to extinguish the fires.  The fires will burn as long as the fuel to burn is there and dry.  No fuel no fire.  Lots of dry fuel, lots of fire.  That's the essence of it and nothing else much matters.  Control the fuel buildup and you control the fires.  Laws of any kind passed in parliament are irrelevant to that


Barnaby Joyce has gone up against a climatologist in a heated debate about coal, bushfires and Australia's climate change policies.

During a 60 Minutes panel discussion between the Nationals MP and former fire chiefs, renowned US climate expert Professor Michael Mann said the country's bushfires will continue to worsen if the Coalition doesn't step up.

But Joyce hit back, saying that despite recognising the climate is changing, 'we're not going to [put out fires] by having this incredible debate in Canberra'. 

Joyce said he believes Prime Minister Scott Morrison thinks Australia 'has got to do its part and is doing its part' to combat climate change and the growing fire threat.

Prof Mann shot down the outspoken MP's views, saying: 'In all fairness Barnaby, Scott Morrison and his government have played a destructive role in global negotiations to act on climate.

'[The Coalition] have literally dismissed the connection between climate change and these unprecedented bushfires that we're experiencing. 'The scientific community has spoken authoritatively on this matter.'

But when asked if he accepted that the fires have been driven by global warming, Joyce admitted climate change had played a role.

'I can absolutely accept that we've had a massive change in the climate. That is not my argument. My argument is one of immediate efficacy,' he said.

'We're going to put back into our fire breaks, we're going to make sure we build central watering points so that no [fire] truck has to travel more than 20km. 'These are the things that I want to concentrate on.'

Prof Mann fired back, saying politicians 'can't solve the problem if they refuse to accept the cause of the problem'. 

Mr Joyce argued Australia has complied with international agreements.

'No that's not true,' Prof Mann responded. 

Mr Joyce then went on to spruik the importance of exporting coal, and noted it's one of Australia's biggest exports next to iron ore.

'Therefore the money that comes from that - whether you like it or not - supports our hospitals, our schools, our defence force,' he said. '[We aren't going to] say to the Australian people "we're going to get rid of that income stream and you've got to accept that this money is not going to turn up".

'And I'll tell you what happens in politics if you do that - you lose the election.'

60 Minutes host Tara Brown asked Mr Joyce if he was overstating the wealth of coal to Australia, and reminded him the coal industry is just 2.2 per cent of the GDP and only employs 0.4 per cent of the population.

Prof Munn then doubled down on his views: 'How about the hundreds of millions of dollars being lost in tourism, the damage that's been done in these unprecedented bushfires?. 'The cost of climate inaction far outweighs the modest cost of taking action.'

But again, Joyce hit back. 'Are you saying that if Australia changes its domestic policies then the climate will change?.  'This idea that Australia unilaterally will make a decision that is going to change the climate is absurd.'

Prof Mann said there are a number of politicians around the world who are 'basically sabotaging climate action for the entire planet'.

'You can count [these countries] on the fingers of your hand. It's Saudi Arabia, it's Russia, it's the United States and Brazil. Does Australia want to be part of that family?'

But Joyce said Australians will lose their 'dignity' if Australia's economy becomes weakened if it stops exporting coal. 'If you want to sell this program, you have to say to [the Australian people] how you're going to make their lives more affordable and put dignity back into their lives,' he said.

His remarks angered retired Army General Major General Peter Dunn, who then went toe-to-toe with the former deputy prime minister. 'But what dignity have you got, Barnaby, when you are standing in the middle of rubble and saying "how on earth did this fire happen?",' he said.

He said the 'head of the serpent' fuelling bushfires is climate change. 'This country wants politicians to step up. It is the existential issue that the public have raised,' he said.

'It defeats me as to why you won't step up to it. All [scientists'] predictions have, damn it, turned out to be right.'

Prof Mann said the effects of climate change are 'actually worse than we predicted'.  'Here in Australia we are seeing an unimaginable crisis take place,' he said.

'We're not seeing the sort of action we need to be seeing here in Australia and around the world to avert truly catastrophic climate change.'

Former Victorian Fire Commissioner Craig Lapsley advised climate change deniers to 'go to the science'. 

Prof Mann, who works at Pennsylvania State University, claimed Australia's future bushfire seasons will be even worse than what the country endured this summer. '(Fires) will become more intense, they become faster spreading, they become more extensive,' he said.

'When you turn the entire continent or large parts of it into a tinderbox, there's really no amount of fire suppression or backburning that's going to get you out of the problem.

'People ask me, is this a new normal for Australia? It's worse than that.'

Maj Gen Dunn, who lives in bushfire-ravaged Conjola on the NSW south coast, echoed Prof Munn's sentiments. 'What happened here? It was like a nuclear explosion. It was terrifying. It's a monster,' he said.

'We've really got to think about these sorts of things; how we manage bushfire fighting. The traditional approach has been well and truly proven to be ineffective.'

So far, 33 people have died in the horror infernos and millions of hectares of land has been destroyed.

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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10 February, 2020  

A nursery story

When one expresses the global warming theory as a nursery story, it becomes obvious how absurd the story is.  Here's how it goes:

We all live at the bottom of a great ocean of gases that we call the atmosphere.  The atmosphere is mostly nitrogen, followed by oxygen.  The atmosphere helps to keep the world warm

But there are also some other gases there in very small amounts.  One of them is called carbon dioxide -- or CO2 for short.  There is only a tiny, tiny amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.

CO2 is the stuff we all breathe out every time we breathe.  Plants love CO2.  It is food to them. So they gobble it up. 

But the plants don't get it all.  Some CO2 escapes them and stays in the atmosphere.  So the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is gradually increasing.

But even after the extra CO2 has been added to the CO2 already in the atmosphere, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is still a tiny, tiny amount.

Some scientists believe that the extra CO2 in the atmosphere will make the world warmer.  Other scientists believe that the tiny, tiny amount of CO2 in the atmosphere will make the extra warmth tiny, tiny too -- so tiny that we will not be able notice it.

The scientists who believe that we can notice it are very nasty to the scientists who believe that we cannot notice it

JR





The Green Oscars: A high-fashion nightmare!

Living high-flying lives of hypocrisy, while telling the rest of us how we should live

Duggan Flanakin

The Green Oscars are coming! The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awards show – the Academy Awards – has become a platform for virtue signaling on “climate change.”  Big Hollywood stars often fly in on private jets, arrive in gas-guzzling limos and, when they win, use their platform to lecture us on how we must behave.

It’s funny how Hollywood also ignores a decade-old University of California study that found filmmaking in the Los Angeles area was making a larger contribution to air pollution than any major industry other than fuel refining, relative to size of the endeavor. That study noted that emissions from the movie industry do not end even after the cameras stop rolling – especially for big-budget productions where journalists, stars and publicists fly around the world as part of promotion.

Movies were more environmentally toxic than aerospace manufacturing, the hotel industry, and even fashion (clothing) – for which the movie industry, and especially its awards shows, is a major promoter.

As Apparel Search reports, the Oscars are one of the fashion industry’s biggest events of the year. Yet fashion is now deemed a dirty business and, even at the gaudiest of Hollywood hustles, the Grinches are running rampant.

“Certainly,” Apparel Search declares, “we have interest in learning who will win the awards. However, our hearts are beating faster because we are anxious to see what the stars will be wearing.” The self-proclaimed “portal to the world of style” admits that, “Yes, the event is intended for movie stars and Hollywood hot shots. But, in our opinion, FASHION is the name of the game.”

There’s just one problem. As Alden Wicker bemoaned back in 2017, “The global fashion industry is the second most polluting industry in the world.” In short, superstar support for climate change and other Green causes and the high-polluting, sweatshop-dependent fashion industry would seem to blend together as well as oil and water.

Wicker was quoting clothing industry magnate Eileen Fisher, who while accepting an award in 2015 from Riverkeeper for her commitment to environmental causes, had admitted: “The clothing industry is the second largest polluter in the world ... second only to oil. It’s a really nasty business ... it's a mess.”

This year’s Oscars will feature male superstars Joaquin Phoenix, Leonardo Di Caprio, Antonio Banderas, Jonathan Pryce and Brad Pitt, among others – and female divas including Scarlett Johansson, Charlize Theron and Laura Dern – all of whom profess to be champions of the environment as well as “fashion plates.” (Lesser known nominees get little Green attention.)

Variety reported recently that Banderas and Phoenix were among the actors who signed on to join forces with the United Nations Environment Programme’s “The World Is in Our Hands” campaign.  The stars pledged to deliver messages describing how they personally plan to address the “climate crisis” and reduce their carbon (and carbon dioxide) footprints – whether it’s traveling more sustainably, saving energy, or eating less meat – which often is only a ruse.  Just ask Harrison Ford.

Phoenix, of course, was recently arrested at Jane Fonda’s Fire Drill Friday climate change protest in Washington, DC. And Pitt recently warned us, “There IS no future!” in a “comedy” sketch about President Trump’s decision to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris agreement on climate change.

Johansson, who along with Theron is noted for her high-fashion photos, way back in 2010 signed an open letter as an Oxfam Global Ambassador to “call on international negotiators to protect the world’s poor from climate catastrophe.” Theron has expressed her fears that a bleak future awaits the planet unless global warming is addressed.  Typical Hollywood – protect the poor from mostly exaggerated, if not outright fabricated, climate changes but do nothing to end the energy poverty that keeps them impoverished, diseased, malnourished, jobless and likely to die very young.

Di Caprio, perhaps the head honcho of the celebrity climate change crowd, was lauded at the time by environmental groups for flying occasionally on commercial airlines rather than by the private jets he so much prefers. But more recently, despite co-producing and acting in the climate change documentary Before the Flood, Di Caprio has been properly condemned for his frequent use of those private jets.

Best Supporting Actor nominee Jonathan Pryce was one of over 100 celebrities who signed Extinction Rebellion’s open letter to the media, which included the ominous statement that, “If we don’t take action, the collapse of our civilisations and the extinction of much of the natural world is on the horizon.”

While unable to confirm Fisher’s assertion that only the oil industry is a worse polluter than fashion, Glynis Sweeny did tell Ecowatch in 2015 that “what is certain is that the fashion carbon footprint is tremendous.” Sweeny listed the pesticides used in cotton farming, toxic dyes used in manufacturing, the massive waste from discarded clothing, and especially “the extravagant amount of natural resources used in extraction, farming, harvesting, processing, manufacturing and shipping.”

It takes 5,000 gallons of water, Sweeny noted, to grow enough organic cotton to manufacture a single T-shirt or pair of jeans. Worse, globalization means that shirts and jeans likely traveled halfway around the world in a container ship fueled by “the dirtiest of fossil fuels.” Even worse, organic farmers have been found to use toxic pesticides on a regular basis.

And don’t forget: oil and gas are the feed stocks for synthetic fibers – while coal and natural gas (and nuclear power, which most Hollywood stars also detest) generate most of the electricity that makes clothing factories, movie studios and fashion shows possible.

All the hullabaloo about fashion as evil has impacted Hollywood’s fanciest.  Fashion writer Faran Krentcil wrote last February of a fashion phobia that started in 2014, when the social media campaign #askhermore (created by the wife of current California Governor Gavin Newsom) virtue-shamed the very idea that actresses should celebrate their expensive gowns.

According to one red-carpet reporter, Krentcil shared, “We’re nervous if we bring up clothes.” Networks, she asserted, were shying away from style questions in favor of asking the stars about their activism. 

But fashion, Krentcil argued, “isn’t a shameful or stupid topic. In fact, it creates art – and jobs – for millions of Americans.” The style sector, she concluded, is one of the biggest employers in America, putting over $250 billion back into our economy. And the Oscars’ red carpet is itself a million-dollar enterprise. So are the movies that have made these superstars super rich.

Perhaps the overemphasis on activism and the downplaying of fashion can be blamed for declining Oscars viewership, which Fortune reported reached an all-time low in 2018. The Nielsen ratings that year were down 20% from 2017 alone (but were up slightly in 2019).

Not all Oscar nominees this year are hypocritical political ideologues. One-time Best Actor winner Anthony Hopkins, nominated at 81 as Best Supporting Actor for his role in “The Two Popes,” admits he keeps his political opinions to himself.  He once told activist actor Brad Pitt, “I don’t have any opinions. Actors are pretty stupid. My opinion is not worth anything.”

And that’s the way most of us regular folks like it.

Via email






This ban on petrol and diesel cars makes no sense

Vast amounts of money and effort will be expended for very little benefit.

I like electric cars. They are easier to drive, because there is no clutch and no gear stick. They are much quieter than cars with petrol and diesel engines. They don’t emit noxious substances, because they’re not burning anything, making cities and busy roads a bit more pleasant. By and large, they accelerate fast, too.

But I won’t be buying one any time soon. This is mainly to do with the fact that I have never had enough money to buy a new car. The current set of wheels sitting outside Chez Lyons is a 13-year-old, hand-me-down Audi estate with over 100,000 miles on the clock. I’m sure I’m not alone. But what we drive could change dramatically in a few years’ time.

This week, the UK government announced that sales of new petrol- and diesel-fuelled cars and light vans will be banned from 2035 – five years earlier than planned. With parliament having already decided to reach ‘Net Zero’ emissions by 2050, it follows that we need to switch to low-emissions alternatives as soon as possible.

But little thought seems to have been given to how we are going to replace all those vehicles once their sale is banned. In 2019, there were 31.7million cars registered to drive on British roads. In that year, 2.3million new cars were registered. At that rate, replacing all of the existing stock of cars would take roughly 14 years. (Of course, some cars are replaced more quickly, while others – like my old Audi – will take rather longer.) Let’s assume that, from 2035, we’ll be adding 2.3million new electric cars to the roads each year instead of petrol and diesel cars. What are the practical difficulties with doing that?

First, at present, electric vehicles cost a lot more than those with internal-combustion engines. For example, one car-buying advice website notes that the Peugeot e-208 is as much as £6,200 more than the standard 208 model. There are government subsidies to help with the cost of electric cars (currently £3,500), but can this be sustained if we all switch? It has already been cut from £4,500 in 2018.

That said, while the purchase price of an electric car may be higher, charging is a lot cheaper than fuelling a regular car. Electric vehicles cost between £4 to £6 per 100 miles to charge at home and £8 to £10 using public charge points, while petrol and diesel cars cost £13 to £16 per 100 miles in fuel (although 60 per cent of the fuel cost is tax).

In theory, maintenance should be cheaper, too, given that electric motors have fewer moving parts than petrol or diesel engines. But to further complicate matters, batteries gradually lose their capacity to hold charge over time. They have to be replaced at the cost of thousands of pounds every few years. (The warranties covering battery replacement vary by manufacturer: Tesla, for instance, offers an eight-year warranty, but the Renault Zoe is covered for just three years.)

Electric cars may be cheaper to own overall, but this is largely down to subsidies and tax breaks, including lower vehicle duties and not having to pay charges in low-emission zones. Still, with the entire car industry throwing its efforts into making electric cars cheaper and increasing battery capacity, costs may well come down somewhat, reducing the need for such breaks. Fingers crossed.

While we are on the subject of taxation, it is worth noting that motoring taxation is a big source of revenue for the Treasury. According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, motoring brings in £40 billion per year (around five per cent of all government revenue), mostly in fuel taxes. If that taxation disappears, what will replace it?

Another practical issue is charging. Current electric vehicles have a claimed range of around 250 miles. Real-world experience suggests that this is rather optimistic. This is no problem for most journeys, which are relatively short. But, for longer journeys, we need fast-charging stations – and even then, a full recharge could take 30 minutes or more, depending on the vehicle and the charging station. So ‘range anxiety’ is still a factor putting people off buying electric. At the very least, we need a lot more charging points.

Most people will charge their cars at home overnight. But that means forking out on special charging kits that cost hundreds of pounds, even with more subsidies. Plus this all assumes that you have a drive or reliable parking space you can charge at. For those who live in flats and have to park on the street, for example, that’s a non-starter.

This brings us to perhaps the biggest problem: where will the power come from and how will it reach us? Eventually shifting all the energy for cars from oil to electricity means producing much more electricity. Greens are pleased that electricity use is currently decreasing, and a greater proportion of electricity is coming from renewable sources. But the arrival of electric cars en masse would demand a whole lot more electricity, mostly to be used at night.

Unless we want to coat the landscape in wind turbines, which are unreliable in any event, we’ll need other sources of power. More nuclear? Fine by me. But will eco-warriors stand for that? Even if we can produce the juice, having lots of cars charging in the same area may overwhelm the local electricity networks. Who is going to pay for the upgrade?

When all of these factors are considered we have to ask if all this effort will really reduce greenhouse-gas emissions anyway. Digging up the resources required to create all those batteries will be hugely carbon-intensive. Perhaps the most likely outcome of banning sales of new petrol and diesel vehicles is that demand for second-hand vehicles will go up. We could end up like Cubans, nursing venerable old cars for years, way beyond their intended lifespans.

All this to satisfy just one element of the drive to get to Net Zero. (Never mind replacing all gas boilers and all the other policies already mooted.) It will take a Herculean effort to transform transport and energy supply like this by 2050, especially with an important crunch point in just 15 years.

Enormous sums of money will be spent, along with all that organisational and intellectual effort, just to make our lives about the same as they are now, just low-carbon. Ministers can’t even put a figure on how much this will all cost or if it is feasible. No wonder the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders called the policy ‘a date without a plan’.

And all this from a government that still can’t implement something as comparatively easy as Universal Credit – the Tories’ flagship welfare policy that was supposed to be rolled out by 2017. HS2 and the third Heathrow runway are also struggling to get off the ground. Why should we trust that the same people can revolutionise the transport network? I will always be the first to celebrate ambitious new infrastructure and technological optimism. But the ban on petrol and diesel cars seems quixotic and pointless.

When electric vehicles are finally better than petrol or diesel – as hopefully they will be soon – drivers will vote with their feet and switch. When people are ready to pay for charging points, there will be money to invest in new infrastructure. Until then, this is a horribly expensive and needless policy.

SOURCE 






"Renewable" energy for Massachusetts hits problems

As Governor Charlie Baker rattled off his successes before the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce on Tuesday, he reflected on his administration’s climate accomplishments: two major offshore wind farms in the works, plus a power line through Maine to bring cheap hydroelectricity here from Canada.

In his speech, Baker mentioned how these three clean-energy projects, when complete, together would represent about 30 percent of Massachusetts’ electricity needs. It sure sounded impressive. Missing from the governor’s speech: the bad news.

CommonWealth magazine had just confirmed, in an interview with Baker’s top energy official, an unhappy rumor: Federal permitting for Vineyard Wind, the first major offshore wind farm in the US, will be delayed yet again — likely until the end of the year, after the elections. Vineyard Wind was close to the end zone last summer, before the Trump administration’s Interior Department called a timeout.

Also, on Monday opponents of the nearly $1 billion Central Maine Power transmission line said they had filed more than 75,000 signatures to stop the project in a statewide referendum — well over the amount they needed. Incumbent power plant owners in Maine have made it clear they won’t stand idly by while a Massachusetts-orchestrated super-highway gets built for low cost juice from the north.

Together, these developments could spell trouble for two of the Baker administration’s signature energy initiatives. Made possible by an energy bill passed by the state Legislature in 2016, the utility contracts that would finance Vineyard Wind and the Central Maine Power line, known as New England Clean Energy Connect, have been championed by the Baker administration at every turn.

Both projects share a common investor: CMP parent Avangrid, a Connecticut company controlled by Spanish conglomerate Iberdrola.

Let’s take the brouhaha in Maine first. The nearly 150-mile CMP proposal was actually a runner-up, behind the much-maligned Northern Pass power line that Eversource wanted to build through New Hampshire. But state permitting issues quickly doomed Northern Pass, and Massachusetts pivoted to Maine.

Governor Janet Mills is on board, as is the Conservation Law Foundation. But plenty of residents don’t want this giant extension cord to Massachusetts through their backyard. The critics have deep-pocketed allies: incumbent fossil fuel generators, including Calpine and Vistra. Two state permits are stuck in the appeals process. And now, a referendum likely looms.

Avangrid seems undeterred by the threat of a ballot question, and there’s some question about whether it can withstand a legal challenge. A spokeswoman said the company still expects to start construction on the Maine power line by the end of June, as long as the remaining permits come through.

Avangrid CEO Jim Torgerson also has a headache at the other end of New England, south of Martha’s Vineyard. That’s where Avangrid and Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners want to build Vineyard Wind, a massive offshore wind farm that could power more than 400,000 homes.

The project depends financially on federal tax credits that expired at the end of last year; Torgerson has said he hopes to persuade the IRS to allow the tax credits to remain intact because the delays are out of his company’s power to control.

The Department of Interior halted the Vineyard Wind review at the eleventh hour last August, to embark on a more systemic review of all the wind farms planned for waters up and down the East Coast and their collective impact. (A second Massachusetts wind farm, to be developed by a Shell-EDP joint venture known as Mayflower Wind, is much further behind Vineyard Wind in the permitting.) Many hoped for a resolution by mid-2020. So much for that idea.

Federal regulators say they’re just doing their job, partly in light of concerns raised by commercial fishermen worried about the navigation hazards these projects could pose. But supporters see politics at work. The latest example: a letter this week from most of the Massachusetts congressional delegation, Democrats all, accusing the Republican administration of applying a double standard: whisking through fossil-fuel proposals while slow-walking renewable energy projects. Fueling those theories: President Trump’s public expressions of distaste for offshore wind.

The troubles that Vineyard Wind face have unsurprisingly raised concerns in the rest of the offshore wind industry. Former Interior secretary Ryan Zinke seemed like a fan. Current Interior boss David Bernhardt, maybe not so much.

Governor Baker, also a Republican, wants Massachusetts to play a leadership role in curbing greenhouse gases that contribute to a warming planet. These two signature clean-energy projects are a key part of that vision. But their future might be out of his hands.

SOURCE 






We won’t block new coal projects: Australian Labor Party

A future Labor government will not stand in the way of a new coal-fired power station or coal mine if it meets “normal environmental approvals”, deputy leader Richard Marles has conceded.

But Mr Marles, who once said the collapse of the global thermal coal market was a “good thing”, refused to say whether he had a personal objection to new coal mines.

“This is a matter for the market,” Mr Marles told the ABC on Sunday. “The normal environmental approvals should apply.”

The Morrison government on Saturday announced it had signed off on up to $4m to support Shine Energy’s feasibility study for a high-efficiency, low emissions coal plant at Collinsville in Queensland.

Mr Marles said it was obvious government should not be subsidising coal and instead leaving it to the market to decide if projects were possible.

If the industry chose to build a coal-fired power station, it would have to meet government environmental approvals before being given the green light.

“A Labor government will have the normal environmental approvals for power stations,” Mr Marles said.

“A Labor government is not going to put a cent into subsidising coal-fired power. And that is the practical question as to whether or not it happens.”

Labor’s equivocation on the Adani coal mine in the Galilee Basin and ambitious climate change policies were considered critical to its 2019 election loss, which led to a disastrous result in Queensland and big swings against the part in coal mining seats.

Mr Marles acknowledged on Sunday coal miners played a “very significant” economic role and the industry would continue “for decades to come”.

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

*****************************************






9 February, 2020  

Apocalypse now: Combined impacts of rising temperatures, dwindling food supplies and biodiversity loss could trigger 'global systemic collapse', scientists warn

There is not an ounce of sense in this.  A warmer planet would produce MORE food.  A warmer planet would make vast new areas of Northern Canada and Siberia available to grow crops.  And crops everywhere would grow better with more CO2 in the atmosphere

And warm climates have MORE biodiversity. Life just leaps out at you in the tropics.  Warmth is the last thing that would be bad for biodiversity

And there would be MORE rain, not "dwindling sources of fresh water". The earth's surface is two thirds water and warmer oceans would evaporate off more water vapour -- which is where rain comes fro.

It is so tedious that I have to keep repeating the obvious. These people are just con-men who are ignoring the most basic physics


Overlapping environmental crises could tip the planet into a ‘global systemic collapse’, more than 200 global scientists have warned.

Climate change, biodiversity loss, dwindling sources of fresh water and food, and extreme weather events from hurricanes to heatwaves will provide a monumental challenge to humanity in the 21st century.

Out of 30 global-scale risks, these five topped the list both in terms of likelihood and impact, according to scientists surveyed by Future Earth, an international research organisation.

The report, published on Thursday, called on the world’s academics, business leaders and policymakers to ‘pay urgent attention’ to the five risks and consider them as interlinked. 

In combination, they ‘have the potential to impact and amplify one another in ways that might cascade to create global systemic collapse,' a team led by Maria Ivanova, a professor at the Center for Governance and Sustainability at the University of Massachusetts, said in a 50-page report.

‘Humanity is at a critical stage in the transition to a more sustainable planet and society,’ said Amy Luers, executive director of Future Earth.

‘Our actions in the next decade will determine our collective future on Earth.

Of the five main issues, extreme heat waves are speeding global warming by releasing planet-warming gases from natural sources.

While Europe had its third-warmest and Asia its fourth warmest October on record, dry and warm conditions in Australia caused intense bushires this season that killed an estimated 1 billion animals in the country.

Australia's bushfires and fires in the Amazon region in 2019 were partly caused by climate change, the report says, as warmer air pulls moisture out of vegetation, creating drier fuel and feeding wind to fan flames.

In the Arctic region, meanwhile, the last five years have been the warmest on record, melting sea ice and affecting wildlife, fisheries and local communities.

But the greater the warming, the greater the anticipated impacts of heatwaves in cities as well, mainly in places of high urbanisation rates, poverty and marginalisation in South East Asia and Latin America.

‘A warmer world has higher risks of flooding, landslides, fire and infectious and parasitic disease,' the report says.

Biodiversity loss, meanwhile, weakens the capacity of natural and agricultural systems to cope with climate extremes, also putting food supplies at risk.

Elsewhere in the report, the authors highlight the undernourishment in impoverished parts of the world compared with the obesity crisis in developed countries.

‘The amount of food produced per person on the planet has gone up by more than 40 per cent since the 1960s,’ it says.

Yet the prevalence of undernourishment has started to go up again – the total number of people undernourished in 2018 stood at more than 820 million people, up from a record low of 785 million in 2015.

At the same time, some 1.9 billion people are overweight and 650 million are obese – highlighting a discrepancy in food security.

The world needs to feed an estimated 9 billion people on a planet with diminished natural resources.

But strains on food production are expected to increase caused by changing climate and environments, the report says – once again highlighting how the top five global-scale risks are closely related.

SOURCE 






Harvard study finds wind turbines WARM the U.S.

We at CFACT prioritize responding to asserted climate scares immediately after they are asserted. Nevertheless, some topics are so consequential that they warrant us circling back and reminding people about the issue several months later. A 2018 study by Harvard University scientists documenting how wind turbines increase U.S. temperatures is one of those topics that deserve another look.

The Harvard scientists, while emphasizing they believe people need to take urgent action to mitigate global warming, observed that the interaction of wind turbines and the atmosphere slow down the wind as wind energy is extracted by turbines. This has a warming effect on temperatures. Moreover, they found that many of the best locations for wind turbines are already utilized. This means future wind power installations will utilize lower-quality locations requiring many more turbines and much more land development to produce as the same amount of wind power. As a result, the study determined that current government and industry estimates of wind power production per turbine are significantly inflated.

“This research suggests that not only will wind farms require more land to hit the proposed renewable energy targets but also, at such a large scale, would become an active player in the climate system,” states a Harvard press release announcing the study (https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2018/10/large-scale-wind-power-has-its-down-side/).

“Harvard University researchers find that the transition to wind or solar power in the U.S. would require five to 20 times more land than previously thought, and, if such large-scale wind farms were built, would warm average surface temperatures over the continental U.S. by 0.24 degrees Celsius,” through at least the year 2100, the press release observed.

The scientists studied 411 wind farms and 1,150 solar facilities to determine their results.

“For wind, we found that the average power density — meaning the rate of energy generation divided by the encompassing area of the wind plant — was up to 100 times lower than estimates by some leading energy experts,” one of the scientists explained in the press release.

“For solar energy, the average power density (measured in watts per meter squared) is 10 times higher than wind power, but also much lower than estimates by leading energy experts,” the press release noted.

According to the press release, “This research suggests that not only will wind farms require more land to hit the proposed renewable energy targets but also, at such a large scale, would become an active player in the climate system.”

To meet present-day U.S. electricity demand, the scientists determined wind turbine projects would need to cover one-third of the continental United States. Transforming transportation vehicles to electric batteries would require even more.

“The direct climate impacts of wind power are instant, while the benefits of reduced emissions accumulate slowly,” noted one of the scientists in the press release.

SOURCE 





Fewer recessions thanks to the shale revolution

The United States economy currently enjoys the longest period of expansion in history. The economy has been growing for more than ten and a half years, since the end of the Great Recession of 2007-2009. Behind the current expansion is the rise of the US to become the world’s leading energy producer.

The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) defines a recession as “a significant decline in economic activity spread across the economy, lasting more than a few months, normally visible in real gross domestic product (GDP), real income, employment, industrial production, and wholesale-retail sales.” US recessionary periods trigger business failures, changes in political leadership, and impact the daily lives of US citizens.

According to NBER, there have been seven US recessions during the last 50 years. The recession of 1969-1970 coincided with attempts to close budget deficits from the Vietnam war and the raising of interest rates by the Federal Reserve.

In 1973, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) quadrupled oil prices, triggering the 1973-1975 recession, which at the time was the most severe recession since World War II. Rising gasoline prices hammered consumers and unemployment reached 9%. Fewer recessions thanks to the shale revolution 2The federal government mandated a 55-mph speed limit and established the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. This was the first of recent recessions caused by high oil prices.

The next decade brought a short recession in 1980, followed by a deeper recession in 1981-1982. The Iranian Revolution of 1979 caused oil prices to rise to over $120 per barrel, causing a world energy crisis. To counter rising inflation from the 1970’s, the Federal Reserve tightened monetary policy, boosting home mortgage rates to double digit levels. Unemployment soared to 10.8%.

Fewer recessions thanks to the shale revolution

The recession of 1990-1991 was caused by a combination of the 1987 stock market crash, and the collapse of the US savings & loan industry. Soaring oil prices from Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in the summer of 1990 also contributed to the slowdown.

The economic slump of 2001 was one of the few recent recessions where oil prices were not involved. This recession was caused by a combination of the collapse of the speculative dot-com bubble, the stock market pull-back in 2001, and the September 11, 2001 attacks. This recession ended the decade-long period of growth in the 1990s.

The Great Recession of 2007-2009 was 18 months long, the longest since the Great Depression of 1929. The subprime mortgage crisis caused the recession, leading to the collapse of a US housing bubble and the failure of several financial institutions. World crude oil prices spiked to $164 per barrel in June of 2008, adding to the crisis.

Of the seven US recessions since 1969, high world oil prices were the primary cause of three of the slumps and a contributing factor in two other recessions. Oil price shocks played a major role in both US and global economic instability over the last 50 years.

But during the last three decades, US geologists and petroleum engineers learned to extract oil and natural gas from shale rock formations by using the technological breakthroughs of hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling. This US shale revolution now appears to have removed oil shock as a factor in economic instability.

Prior to the shale revolution, US crude oil production fell from 9.6 million barrels per day in 1970 to 5 million barrels per day in 2008. US oil production, an annual $200-billion industry, was in long-term decline. Industry experts proclaimed that we had reached “peak oil” and that world oil output would soon fall.

Fewer recessions thanks to the shale revolution 1

Yet because of breakthroughs in shale oil technology, US crude production soared beginning in 2008, reaching 12 million barrels per day last year, more than double the 2008 output. Production of natural gas also more than doubled from 2008 to 2019.

In 2011, the US surpassed Russia as the world’s largest producer of natural gas. In 2018, the US became the world’s largest producer of crude oil, passing Saudi Arabia. Oil prices are now largely determined by US production, rather than OPEC or Russia output.

Back in 2005, 60 percent of US consumption of petroleum products was provided by imports. This year will be the first year in more than 70 years that the US is a net exporter of petroleum products, thanks to the shale revolution.

On September 14 of last year, 25 drones and missiles exploded at two oil processing facilities of Saudi Arabia. More than 5.7 million barrels of Saudi production capacity was taken offline, more than half of Saudi output. But oil prices hardly budged.

On January 8 of this year, Iran fired more than a dozen missiles at two Iraq facilities housing US military personnel. Yet, world oil prices today remain at low levels, just above $50 per barrel. The missile attacks on Saudi Arabia and Iraq in previous decades would likely have triggered large oil price spikes.

The shale revolution and ramping US oil production brings a new level of stability to US and world economic systems. There will still be recessions, but US recessions will be less frequent and less severe since oil dependency and price shock are no longer significant factors.

SOURCE 






Models vs. reality

Climate computer simulations have run hotter than reality since their inception.

As they say in computer programming, “GIGO,” garbage in, garbage out.

Dr. David Wojick explains at CFACT.org:

The CLINTEL “There is no Climate Emergency” Manifesto puts it this way: “Stop with the Misleading Computer Models” and I agree completely. It is clear by now that these models predict temperatures that appear much too high. No policies should be based on them and the ones that are should be revoked…

Tests clearly show that the models are running dramatically hotter than reality. This exaggeration has led to the description of a future full of doom and gloom. If climate researchers would have followed genuine validation tests, the models would have now been falsified and updated…

As the CLINTEL Manifesto says — “Mass application of poorly validated climate models on a global scale may be the biggest mistake of mankind in its recent history.”

The divorce between computer models and observational science is the kind of thing climate pressure groups are trying to prevent Dr. Patrick Moore from explaining in the keynote address he is scheduled to deliver to the “Reimagine Conference 2020” which will take place May 20-21 in Regina, the capitol of Saskatchewan, Canada.

CFACT asked you to take action by contacting Regina’s Mayor Michael Fougere and asking him not to prevent Patrick Moore from being heard. Thank you to everyone who heeded the call.  A local radio station reports that 327 have contacted the Mayor asking him to let Moore speak, while 93 sought to censor him.

If you’ve not yet had a chance to contact Mayor Fougere, or if you’d like to as they say in Congress, “revise and extend your remarks,” please click here and let the Mayor know you support sound science and free speech and don’t want Patrick Moore silenced.

Computer models are useful tools, but once reality disproves them, they must be adjusted or discarded.

SOURCE 





Australia: Bushfire politicking latest trick in Green New Squeal

Climate politics in this country are so wacky that informed adults ought to scoff at them and move on. But with Labor, the Greens, much of the media and some Liberal moderates caught up in this nuttiness, Scott Morrison is confronted by a serious challenge.

The climate election should have settled all this but, alas, the climate saga is alive again. The Prime Minister should accept this long-running policy schism as a useful opportunity that can give shape to his agenda and put the government on a positive footing — he should relish the climate wars.

To get a sense of how ludicrous this debate has become, consider this: Inexperienced, soc­ialist US Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez proposes a radical climate and redistributive agenda dubbed the Green New Deal. It sets the practically impossible and economically destructive goal of having the US reach zero net emissions in a decade.

It will never happen, of course, but the revolutionary agenda and catchy phrase have been adopted by the new leader of the Australian Greens, Adam Bandt.

While Bandt and Ocasio-Cortez are the sort of politicians who are one soy latte away from gluing themselves to the road, there is another prominent political figure who has adopted this slogan. Writing in Guardian Australia, former Liberal prime minister Malcolm Turnbull said this country should have its “own green new deal” to deliver zero net emissions.

And before we dismiss him as an embittered former leader exacting revenge on his former colleagues — true as that might be — it is worth reminding ourselves that many of his supporters are still in the Liberal partyroom and acted up this week demanding more climate action.

Never mind that cautious climate policies got them into government and allowed them to stay in power; never mind the Coalition is committed to the Paris climate targets; never mind that Australia’s emissions effort is incapable of having any impact because global emissions are rising; and never mind that we just had an election on these issues, these opportunists are spooked by the bushfire politics and want to go closer to matching Labor and Greens climate gestures. At this rate there will be Liberal MPs supergluing themselves to the partyroom carpet.

Driven by the public broadcasters and woke elements of the Canberra press gallery, the media is relentlessly alarmist. There is a McCarthyist zeal to their gotcha questions that distil a vast array of complex scientific modelling, observations and possible policy responses into a banal binary: Do you believe in human-induced climate change?

Aside from the ridiculous conscription of belief into science, the point about this question is that nothing turns on it — except perhaps political humiliation for anyone who considers the wrong answer. What matters is not what our politicians believe but what they do, their policy responses.

In this emotive climate there is widespread reluctance or refusal to discuss practical policy options and their costs and benefits. The hysterical, ugly and deceptive pointscoring over our horrific summer bushfires had Greens, Labor and media activists linking the Coalition’s emissions reduction policies to the fire conditions.

As I argued from November last year, when former NSW fire commissioner Greg Mullins and other climate activists positioned themselves to make political points out of inevitable bushfire challenges, the linking of Australian emissions reduction policies to global climate trends is a science-denying absurdity.

We know this country will always experience catastrophic fire conditions and if they have or will become more prevalent because of global warming, then the role of our emissions, one way or the other, is nil or infinitesimal.

Even Chief Scientist Alan Finkel publicly declared that if we took all of Australia’s annual emissions out of the atmosphere it would do “virtually nothing” to the climate. Yet still the vicious and absurd attempts to blame the terrible fire season on the Coalition continue.

While relevant facts are deliberately ignored by the public broadcasters, social media and a largely progressive journalistic groupthink, none of this changes the facts. As Winston Churchill said of the truth, “Malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is.”

This week Labor MP Matt Thistlethwaite joined me on television and sought to make the now familiar political attack against the Morrison government over the bushfire season. This raised the question about what climate policies could possibly have done to make things less severe, so I asked Thistlethwaite whether Labor would be taking climate policies to the next election that would ameliorate the bushfire threat in Australia.

It is nonsense, obviously, that any national emissions reduction policy could influence our fire weather. Thistlethwaite could do no more than dodge a direct answer. So I asked him if it was possible for national climate policies to reduce our bushfire threat. Again, a non-answer.

I persisted, asking whether Australia’s emissions reduction policies could lower our bushfire risk. Despite being implored to give a yes or no answer, he continued to talk around the issue.

The only truthful answer to these questions is no.

But if Labor, the Greens, activists and campaigning journalists were to answer this question honestly they would effectively be admitting that their entire political pile-on against the Coalition was baseless.

Members of the green-left often point to “the science” but they are not interested in science-based, factual analysis of policy costs and benefits. They demand climate gestures as a political ploy or as a form of virtue signalling but have nothing to say on practical outcomes or costs.

Imagine if we tried to assess the practical and economic costs of Australia shifting to zero emissions within a decade and compared them with the environmental benefits. Clearly, the costs would be too immense and complex to quantify accurately, and the benefits would be too small to identify.

This is not my argument for doing nothing — although that is a perfectly rational position — but it is my case for doing our bit under Paris and not a tonne of emissions more until we see more concerted global action and firmer scientific cost-benefit analysis.

Morrison needs to embrace this debate and avoid offering head nods to the activist left by pretending our policies will improve the climate, even while global emissions rise.

Members of the left don’t thank him for Paris, they just up the ante. They don’t thank Don­ald Trump for lowering US fixed-energy emissions or promising to plant a trillion trees.

The climate evangelists cannot be reasoned with and they must be defeated in a blunt and factual debate.

Even within his own party the Prime Minister faces weathervane moderates who think they can trade deeper emissions for holding leafy Liberal seats. Such pathetic politicking should have no place in a serious policy debate that presumes to encompass the future of our national economy and the planet itself.

There is nothing about the climate debate in Australia that is normal. The level of misinformation is disturbing and deliberate. The amplification of the issue’s significance in this country by environmental, media and political activists is inversely proportional to the nation’s global role in the solution.

A moderately important policy issue has been elevated to an existential threat and almost two decades of partisan polarisation, drowning out much more pressing policy debates. From this, surely, springs Morrison’s main opportunity.

He deftly charted a centrist course on climate in the lead-up to the election and beyond, sticking with the Paris emissions reduction commitments. But now he must fight against the alarmists and demolish arguments to inflict further economic pain.

Former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis wrote last week that “climate change is capitalism’s Waterloo”. He said we could not achieve “restabilisation of the climate” and maintain “capitalism’s main pillars”.

His piece was highlighted on Twitter by the ABC’s Jonathan Green, who commented: “The great truth we are circling.” This is an argument the left and its allies will continue to pursue relentlessly, for all kinds of reasons — and it must be defeated.

Green’s tweet demonstrates the institutional jaundice the Coalition and the Prime Minister are up against.

This is not a minor battle. It is a crucial social, environmental and economic debate that demands a rational, ideological and political campaign.

Morrison must fight back against the climate madness. The country needs it, the economy needs it, and the contest will give shape to a Coalition agenda that looks a little anaemic.

SOURCE  

***************************************

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

*****************************************





7 February, 2020  

Appeasement backfires as climate campaigners attack planting trees

The Greenie love of trees was just a convenient fiction

Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy is championing a proposal to show the GOP is serious about climate change, but climate activists are already trashing the proposal as weak and misguided. McCarthy’s proposal illustrates the trap awaiting Republican policymakers who believe they should assert there is a climate crisis while proposing alternate, watered-down solutions to the Green New Deal and other Democrat-supported proposals.

As reported by Fox News (https://www.foxnews.com/politics/gop-looks-to-counter-green-new-deal-with-climate-change-proposals), McCarthy’s plan focuses on three prongs. The first prong entails planting trees throughout the country. This is in accordance with the global Trillion Trees Initiative launched last month at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

The second prong calls for doubling “investment” in “clean” air research and providing tax credits for companies that export low-emissions technologies.

The third prong focuses on conservation and sending American tax dollars to countries responsible for plastic pollution.

Regarding the first prong, The Verge website is already attacking the tree-planting plan as ineffective and counterproductive (https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/31/21115862/davos-1-trillion-trees-controversy-world-economic-forum-campaign). According to a January 31 article by The Verge, “[D]ozens of scientists have warned that planting all those trees could potentially cause more harm than good. Others point to another solution with a more proven track record and that might be more deserving of global support — empowering the people who live in and safeguard forests already.”

“Tree-planting started really trending in 2019, when a study published in the journal Science caused a commotion,” the article asserted. “It claimed that planting a trillion trees could capture more than a third of all the greenhouse gases humans have released since the industrial revolution. After the initial media blitz rallied excitement for the seemingly simple climate solution, a group of 46 scientists, including [Forrest Fleischman, who teaches natural resources policy at the University of Minnesota], responded to the study with their critique.”

The article continued, “‘Headlines around the world declared tree planting to be the best solution to climate change,’ lead author of the critique Joseph Veldman said in a statement at the time. ‘We now know those headlines were wrong.’ Veldman argued that planting trees where they don’t belong can harm ecosystems, make wildfires worse, and even exacerbate global warming. His critique made the case that the amount of carbon the study said 1 trillion trees could sequester was about five times too large. The study also considered planting trees on savannas and grasslands, where planting non-native trees could cause problems for local species. Planting trees on snowy terrain that once reflected the sun could even turn those places into dark patches that actually absorb heat.”

Other websites allied with the Environmental Left have also been critical of climate plans focused on planting trees. A Vice article is titled, “Planting ‘Billions of Trees’ Isn’t Going to Stop Climate Change” (https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/7xgymg/planting-billions-of-trees-isnt-going-to-stop-climate-change). “Trying to Plant a Trillion Trees Won’t Solve Anything,” claims a Wired headline (https://www.wired.com/story/trees-regenerative-agriculture-climate-change/). “Republicans’ Climate Change Plan Is Big Oil’s Climate Change Plan,” claims a New Republic headline (https://newrepublic.com/article/156269/republicans-climate-change-plan-big-oils-climate-change-plan).

GOP climate appeasers put themselves in a political box with no escape route. After publicly supporting speculative, dubious assertions of a climate crisis, they are accused by the Climate Establishment of proposing half-baked measures that do little to mitigate rising temperatures. And once they have stated that climate change is a serious problem – indeed a crisisj – they will be boxed into supporting virtually anything the Environmental Left proposes. After all, if the GOP joins alarmists asserting climate change is an existential crisis that is the greatest-ever threat to human civilization, the public will demand the most immediate and far-reaching responses. There is no proposal too far-reaching if we are facing a climate apocalypse, and Republicans will be politically destroyed for proposing anything less.

Ultimately, Republicans should stand true to the science, which provides overwhelming evidence that we are not facing a climate crisis.

It is also worth noting how McCarthy’s other two areas of focus completely sell out conservative principles and the Republican Party base.

Regarding McCarthy’s second prong, the federal government already gives more source-specific taxpayer subsidies to wind power than all conventional energy sources combined (see Table 3 and 4 at https://www.eia.gov/analysis/requests/subsidy/pdf/subsidy.pdf). The federal government does the same for solar power. How is raising taxes to double subsidies to already heavily subsidized wind and solar power a conservative idea?

Regarding McCarthy’s third prong, China is the country most responsible for plastic pollution, especially in the world’s oceans (https://www.plasticethics.com/home/2019/3/17/the-countries-polluting-the-oceans-the-most-with-plastic-waste). So the GOP’s climate change solution is to raise taxes again to send billions and billions of dollars to China to reward them for their plastic pollution? And how does cleaning up China’s plastic pollution have any impact on global temperatures?

Republican policymakers be warned: playing the Green New Deal-Lite game is a political game you cannot win.

SOURCE 








Green racism: Environmentalists’ loathing of the masses is most destructive in the developing world

Ugandan climate activist Vanessa Nakate has accused the media of racism after she was cropped out of a photograph circulated by the AP news agency.

The original photo shows Nakate alongside other young climate activists, including Greta Thunberg, at the World Economic Forum in Davos. The cropped version leaves only the white activists in frame. ‘You didn’t just erase a photo. You erased a continent’, tweeted Nakate, alongside a comparison of the two photos.

The AP has removed the cropped version from its wire service, though it insists there was no ‘ill intent’ behind its edit. Nevertheless, the incident provides a fitting metaphor for the environmental movement which really does ‘erase’ the developing world and the people in it – often in the nastiest ways imaginable.

A handful of environmentalists have started to notice that the climate movement, despite claiming to speak on behalf of the global South (apparently most at risk from the ‘climate emergency’), is overwhelmingly white and middle class. In 2015, Craig Bennett, the then head of Friends of the Earth, told the Independent on Sunday that the green movement had to escape its ‘white, middle-class ghetto’.

More recently, some Guardian pieces have drawn attention to Extinction Rebellion’s ‘race problem’ and lack of diversity. But critiques largely raise questions about tactics and image. Some reactionary tendencies within the green movement are identified but these critiques from sympathisers fail to acknowledge the broader context of green misanthropy.

Environmentalists fundamentally do not like human beings. The most charitable defence you could make of environmentalists is that they are ‘equal opportunities’ misanthropes. When David Attenborough, arguably the world’s most famous environmentalist, says that humanity is a ‘plague on the earth’ because of our large carbon footprint, he is expressing that misanthropy. It is a view embedded in nearly all global-facing Western institutions, from the UN and the World Economic Forum to foreign-aid agencies and NGOs.

Last week, the primatologist and official UN ‘Mesenger of Peace’ Jane Goodall told the global super-rich at Davos that all the environmental issues we talk about ‘wouldn’t be a problem if there was the size of the population that there was 500 years ago’. The global population was estimated to be around 500million in the 1500s. Today, there are around 7.8 billion people on earth – several billion too many, according to the Goodall view.

If people are perceived as an inherent ‘problem’ merely because they have been born, it is unsurprising that environmentalists’ attention then turns to the global South where population is expanding most rapidly.

Both Goodall and Attenborough have fronted campaigns to discourage Africans from giving birth. Both are also patrons of Population Matters, formerly the Optimum Population Trust. At one point, between 2013 and 2014, the charity took such a hard line on population growth that it said that not only was the planet too full, but Britain was full, too – or our population levels were ‘unsustainable’, to use the eco-euphemism. It called for a ‘net zero’ immigration policy and for all Syrian refugees to be banned from coming to Britain. (All references to immigration have since been deleted from its website.)

Another anti-natalist project is Thriving Together, a UN-backed campaign involving over 150 NGOs. The organisers say that family planning is necessary, not to promote women’s choice, as is the case in the West, but to ‘respond to conservation challenges’. ‘Reducing population growth’ can ‘arrest the huge losses of biodiversity’, apparently. Thriving Together’s efforts target specifically ‘poor rural communities in developing nations’. As Ella Whelan put it on spiked, this was essentially ‘prioritising beetles over black people’.

At last year’s Davos, in an interview with Prince William, Attenborough complained that Africa was no longer the ‘Garden of Eden’ it used to be when he first visited in the 1970s. ‘The human population was only a third of the size it was today’, he added, seemingly lamenting the destructive presence of African people in Africa.

And it’s not just Africa. Attenborough has also expressed qualified support for China’s infamously brutal one-child policy. Yes, state-enforced sterilisation produced many ‘personal tragedies’, he admitted, but without it ‘there would be several million more mouths in the world than there are now’.

In 2012, it was revealed that British foreign aid was being used to fund forced sterilisations in India. Documents from the Department for International Development argued that forced population control could help in the fight against climate change, even if it raised ‘complex human rights and ethical issues’. You don’t say. Because doctors and officials were given bonuses for each operation they performed, they would frequently operate on unsuspecting people under false pretences. Pregnant women were forced to miscarry and many people died from botched operations.

In the environmental mindset, human beings are reduced to their most base, animalistic behaviours: feeding and fucking. In fact, the comparison with animals is unfair. Animal lives are valued by environmentalists in a way human lives are not.

In order to conserve wildlife, some animal-conservation charities have effectively decided to cull humans instead. Last year, a Buzzfeed investigation uncovered the links between the World Wildlife Fund and paramilitary forces. The WWF provided paramilitaries with weapons. Locals ‘have been whipped with belts, attacked with machetes, beaten unconscious with bamboo sticks, sexually assaulted, shot, and murdered by WWF-supported anti-poaching units’ across the world, according to documents seen by Buzzfeed. WWF field workers signed off on proposals to kill trespassers in the Kaziranga nature park in India. Dozens were killed in the name of saving the rhino. Many of the victims of these paramilitaries are not even poachers. One was a 12-year-old girl, killed alongside two other indigenous women as they gathered tree bark in Bardiya National Park, Nepal.

Worse still, the integrity of plants seems to take precedence over human life. Environmental NGOs like Greenpeace have long been campaigning against genetically modified foods. Their campaigning and lobbying have been successful in preventing GMOs from reaching the developing world where they are most needed.

Golden Rice, for instance, was developed more than 20 years ago to counter blindness and other diseases caused by Vitamin A deficiency, which is common in developing countries. According to science writer Ed Regis, had Golden Rice been allowed to grow, ‘millions of lives would not have been lost to malnutrition, and millions of children would not have gone blind’. Greenpeace’s opposition was ‘especially persistent, vocal, and extreme’, writes Regis, ‘perhaps because Golden Rice was a GM crop that had so much going for it’. Greenpeace insists the wonder food is ‘environmentally irresponsible’. Even under pressure from over 100 Nobel laureates, Greenpeace continues to oppose Golden Rice.

The environmentalist elevation of the ‘planet’ and nature goes hand-in-hand with an ugly, debased view of the human. When environmental ideology is dominant among global institutions, capitalist elites and Western NGOs, the needs, aspirations and even lives of the people in the developing world barely get a look in.

SOURCE 







10 Big Schools Pressured To Ditch Fossil Fuels Over Climate Change

fossil fuel protestersAt an annual conference, student body presidents from each of the Big 10 schools unanimously agreed to a resolution calling on those institutions to divest from fossil fuels.

According to the Climate Action Movement, a student, faculty, and alumni group at the University of Michigan calling on the university to work toward carbon neutrality, the student government leaders agreed to the resolution on January 26.


“This Resolution marks the first instance in which students of a collegiate conference have collectively demanded fossil fuel divestment from their member institutions,” the group noted, acknowledging that the Big 10 schools have a combined 520,000 currently-enrolled students and another 5.7 million alumni who are still alive.

It noted similar actions by the University of California system, as well as Harvard and Yale students.

The University of Michigan student government led the effort in passing the resolution, in which the “Big 10 Student Body Presidents collectively acknowledge the severity of climate change” and “will hereby advocate that their respective institutions commit to ceasing all further investments in the fossil fuel industry…in FY2020” and “call on the leadership of their respective institutions to commit to research and action towards future divestment from the fossil fuel industry in FY2020.”

It’s unclear whether any of the Big 10 schools will actually divest from fossil fuels.

UMich President Mark Schlissel, in a statement to the Michigan Daily, said, “the fact that both CSG and then collectively the equivalent bodies all across the Big Ten made a statement about this, I think is important. I think we have to, you know, hear the student voice and you know, respect it and try to understand it.”

SOURCE 





Sadiq Khan’s delusions of greenness

His pledge to make London carbon-neutral ignores the issues that really matter to Londoners.

In his latest effort to pander to the woke brigade, London mayor Sadiq Khan has pledged, if re-elected later this year, to make London carbon-neutral by 2030.

In the eyes of many a Londoner, Khan’s tenure as mayor has been an abject failure. His entire leadership has been focused on PR, and the image of London as a brand, rather than addressing the everyday problems the city faces. His latest campaign commitment to make London carbon-neutral by 2030 follows that very same path.

It is difficult to fathom who this policy will actually benefit. Khan’s introduction of the ultra-low emission zone (ULEZ) charge has already sparked a backlash, with a consortium of minicab drivers taking City Hall to court over this emissions tax. The ULEZ is estimated to line city coffers with a cool £1.4million a week in revenue from PCO drivers alone.

Making London carbon-neutral would have a catastrophic impact on workers and businesses operating in the city. After all, there are 120,000 PCO drivers, 21,000 black-cab drivers and tens of thousands of van drivers who support the day-to-day running of London businesses. The vast majority of these drivers use diesel or petrol-powered vehicles. Questions have to be raised as to how they would work in a carbon-neutral city.

The ramifications of this clearly rushed policy wouldn’t only stop there. How would it work in relation to the diesel-powered trains that ferry commuters into Euston, King’s Cross St Pancras and Waterloo on a daily basis? It is estimated that the daytime population of London balloons by 300,000 people (excluding tourists), many of whom go on to work in the capital’s financial-services sector.

Our financial-services sector was built on one thing – deregulation. London is a city of opportunity and Khan’s environmental policy will only lead to the bureaucratic suppression of the very entrepreneurialism that makes London what it is today.

Let’s be clear: there is an issue with a changing climate, and concerns have been raised about the quality of air in central London. Both problems can be addressed with sensible policy. But Khan’s kneejerk policy, with an arbitrary 10-year lead time, would require a drastic overhaul of London’s transport infrastructure. It would cost the taxpayer hundreds of millions of pounds to achieve and, let’s face it, the jury is still out over the extent to which there actually is a ‘climate emergency’.

This is patently another PR stunt by Khan to gain votes. But can Khan be trusted?

Under his tenure as mayor, crime in London has surged across the board. During 2019, there was a 52 per cent rise in knife crime, and a 59 per cent rise in robbery. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the murder rate in the capital reached a 10-year high, with 149 homicides recorded in 2019. Khan blamed government cuts to the police for the rise in crime, despite rejecting the proposed budget amendment from the Conservative group in the London Assembly, which would have reduced Khan’s ever-growing staff budget, and enabled the recruitment of an extra 1,378 police officers.

His track record on the environment is even more laughable. During his 2015 election campaign, he pledged to plant two million trees in London by 2020. Figures show the Greater London Authority has planted just 175,000 trees so far.

If Khan can’t fulfill the simplest of campaign promises, why should Londoners believe he has the ability to oversee a seismic shift to a carbon-neutral city by 2030?

Khan has had his shot with London. And he’s missed. London needs a safe pair of hands. Someone who will focus on sensible policy that will tackle violent crime, build genuinely affordable housing, and be on the side of workers and small businesses alike.

Sadiq Khan is not that man.

SOURCE 






‘Heaviest rain in years’ hitting Australia’s east coast

If the drought proved global warming, what does this prove?  Global cooling?

All it proves is that Australian rainfall is mostly very inconvenient. We get a lot of it but it doesn't fall at nicely spaced intervals.  Except in a few areas, it is highly unpredictable.  At the beginning of the bushfire season, the BOM, for instance, predicted that there would be no substantial rain until April or May. 

So that must be just a light mist we are having.  Perhaps I am imagining the gutters outside my house running like rivers

As Australian poet Dorothea MacKellar wrote in 1908:


“I love a sunburnt country,

A land of sweeping plains

Of ragged mountain ranges

Of droughts and flooding rains”


She knew the Australian pattern.  It is a pattern that makes Australia heavily reliant on dams

All we have been seeing lately is typical Australian weather. Global warming has got nothing to do with it



A major rain event is expected to move from southeast Queensland into northeast New South Wales in coming days. Meteorologists predict the rainfall to extinguish the bushfires...

A 2000km stretch of heavy rain has flooded Brisbane and southeast Queensland, causing chaos on the roads, and it’s sweeping down the east coast of Australia.

Flood warnings have been issued for New South Wales and Queensland, with experts fearing an incredible 500mm of rain could be dumped on some areas over eight straight days.

There’s already chaos on the roads in Brisbane — where emergency services are currently responding to two crashes south of the city and a red alert being issued due to flash flooding.

The Department of Transport and Main Roads issued the alert saying, “due to water over the road on Vulture Street, East Brisbane, traffic has been diverted onto Grey Street.

“All approaches from the eastern suburbs experiencing long delays”

Parts of Queensland are forecast to receive 500mm of rain after totals of almost 350mm in less than 24 hours.

The Wide Bay region was hardest hit, with Mount Elliott recorded 342mm between 6pm Tuesday and 1am today.

Meanwhile, the massive wet front is dumping rain on parts of drought-ravaged NSW with authorities concerned heavier downpours in the north of the state could lead to flash flooding.

Collarenebri in NSW’s northwest recorded 45 millimetres in the 24 hours to 9am on Thursday which was the highest total over the past day.

Sky News Weather Chief Meteorologist Tom Saunders said the “heaviest rain in years” is starting to fall across many parts of the NSW coast this morning after lashing southeast Queensland over the past 24 hours.

“This major weather event will continue into the weekend,” he said. “Moisture from this system has been spreading south over the last 24 hours, even reaching the Victorian border.”

Queensland was the first to cop a hammering overnight. Tin Can Bay, in the Gympie Region for example, has already had 300mm of rain.

He said the rain is being caused by a very humid north-easterly air stream that’s “pumping” moisture to inland areas and even providing some “major drought relief” from some stricken towns.

For today and tomorrow, that means the north coast of NSW will be hit with possible flash and river flooding with up to 500mm tipped to hit.

The system is then forecast to veer south and spread over the length of the NSW coast.

Mr Saunders said it should be the wettest week for Sydney since March last year.

The downpour could also mark the heaviest February 24-hour rainfall in Sydney since 2002 – when 130mm of rain was recorded on February 5.

“There’s going to be a huge amount of rain,” he said. “It’s enough to extinguish some of the larger bushfires but not hard enough to fill up the dams, considering how dry the catchment has been.”

As of 11pm last night, there were still 62 fires burning across NSW. The RFS warned the fire season is not over, despite the widespread rain.

In Queensland, the wet weather will persist for the next eight days, with the southeast being the worst hit.

Many areas, particularly the coast, will see well over 100mm of rain over the next seven days.

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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6 February, 2020  

Ozone-depleting gases might have driven extreme Arctic warming

"Might have".  Since we are just speculating let me mention something much less speculative:  All those subsurface volcanoes in the Arctic.  Having a volcano underneath you has got to be toasty.  Sure beats CO2 up in the air

Most of the Arctic is water covered and there are huge volcanoes under that water -- along the Gakkel ridge and elsewhere.  So the heat emitted under the water would readily travel to the surface and affect the land-based bits of the Arctic as well


The far north is heating up twice as fast as the global average.

Gases that deplete the ozone layer could be responsible for up to half of the effects of climate change observed in the Arctic from 1955 to 2005.

The finding could help to explain the disproportionate toll of climate change on the region, which has long puzzled scientists. The Arctic is warming at more than twice the average rate of the rest of the globe — a phenomenon known as Arctic amplification — and it is losing sea ice at a staggering pace.

Ozone-depleting substances, including chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), are known to warm the atmosphere thousands of times more efficiently than carbon dioxide. But most of the research on these chemicals has focused on their effects on the planet’s protective ozone layer — especially over the Southern Hemisphere, where they are responsible for the formation of the Antarctic ozone hole, says Mark England, a climate scientist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California. He co-authored the study, published on 20 January in Nature Climate Change1, which he says is “really reframing a lot of the discussion on a more global basis”.

England and his colleagues compared climate simulations both with and without the mass emission of CFCs that began in the 1950s. Without CFCs, the simulations showed an average Arctic warming of 0.82 °C. When the presence of ozone-depleting compounds was factored in, that number jumped to 1.59 °C. The researchers saw similarly dramatic changes in sea-ice coverage between the two sets of model simulations. By running the models with fixed CFC concentrations while varying the thickness of the ozone layer, the team was able to attribute the warming directly to the chemicals — rather than changes these substances caused in the ozone layer.

England’s team has “done a careful study in a single model”, says Marika Holland, a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. “I think that it makes a lot of sense.” She says that the warming effect of ozone-depleting substances in the atmosphere is a well-documented phenomenon. However, she notes, the complexities of climate models make it hard to say for certain what the exact magnitude of the effect on the Arctic is.

Susan Strahan, an atmospheric scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, says that the work is “interesting and provocative”, but she is not yet convinced of its conclusions. A stronger argument could be made, she continues, if the team had been able to provide a clear physical explanation for the modelled amplification.

Both Strahan and Cecilia Bitz, a climate scientist at the University of Washington in Seattle, say that replicating these results in multiple climate models will be crucial for improving estimates of just how much responsibility CFCs bear for heating the Arctic.

Global CFC concentrations have been on the decline since the turn of the millennium, following the 1989 adoption of the Montreal Protocol, which called for a phase-out of the substances. Although many other factors contribute to Arctic amplification, the result suggests that Arctic warming and sea-ice melt might be tempered in the future as ozone-depleting substances continue to leave the atmosphere, Bitz says. “It’s a very important paper because it has a little shred of optimism.”

SOURCE 







Iowa cardiologist shares health concerns over wind turbinesnoise from wind turbines

While continuing the conversation over a public outcry southwest of Des Moines, KCCI's Tommie Clark speaks to people who believe wind turbines are hurting their health and others who don't agree with that claim.

"You get up every day. You go to work with it every day. I mean the silence is gone, and it's forever gone. Yeah, it's gone," said Tanya and Mike Lamb, of Greenfield. The Lambs live 500 feet down from a wind turbine and can't forget the seven surrounding their property. "It's so loud and it hurts my ears that I mean we can't sit outside," Tanya Lamb said.  Inside their Greenfield home a grassroots effort is growing. Community members have come together to search for a solution.

"People will pay dearly for what's happening," said Dr. W. Ben Johnson, a cardiologist. Johnson hears Tanya Lamb's concern. He's coming at the issue from a landowner and medical professional perspective. "My concern has been around environmental noise and how it can adversely affect health," Johnson said. "Wind is another form of environmental noise."

Iowa State University graduate professor James McCalley, an expert in wind energy, said the wind turbines do not affect health. "Not with sufficient setback," McCalley said. "I don't see that wind turbines pose a significant health impact in any way, as long as noise and shadow flicker are addressed."

Johnson said while the issue is obvious to him, others may not understand. "We just need to have an epiphany of understanding what the dimensions are. What don't people get? They don't see it as a real threat because they aren't burned out villages and piles of bodies," Johnson said.

"There are people who are quietly saying, 'I can't handle this,' so they pack up and leave. They sell their farm at a loss."The Lambs said there simply needs to be more regulations and dialogue between those putting up the turbines and the people living underneath them.

"Nobody knows until they live around them," Tanya and Mike Lamb said. "You don't know. You might think you know. You might think it's good and it may be good around certain places, but not around somebody's home.

SOURCE 





The climate case for childlessness

I love articles like this.  I jst hope that all greenies read it and act on  it

It brings a smirk to the lips that Thomas Malthus was one of eight children and had a further three. Unremarkable numbers in Georgian England, true, but if you are going to argue that population growth beggars the species, people will hold you to it. The sense that reproductive restraint was for thee, not he, nor his class, is one reason for the economist’s ongoing infamy. That, and his empirical wrongness.

Until, perhaps, now. Climate change is graciously according Malthus a second life. It is hard to do anything kinder for the environment than have fewer children. Even if an infant grows to become a Prius-driving vegan who forswears air travel and line-dries the laundry, he or she will still contribute to the problem. A human cannot inhabit real time and space in a post-agrarian economy without generating carbon.

When the scholars Seth Wynes and Kimberley Nicholas calculated the most effective green steps a person can take, “have one fewer child” was first by such a margin as to make the second scarcely worth naming. When they then tracked the number of high school textbooks that offered this as guidance, the answer was zero. “Live car-free” and “conserve energy” were common.

Some sugar-coating of things is excusable for the young. But there are adults who are just as deluded that innovation will neutralise the climate costs of children. “There is no limit to human ingenuity” is a fun thing to say (and Nikola Tesla did), but it is also credulous Enlightenment hokum. Even those who know this, who know that electric cars and Impossible Burgers are not enough, who are open to less growth, not just green growth, tend not to pursue the thought to the question of family size. I have noticed this in newspapers, even fetchingly salmon-coloured ones.

At some point, societies will have to treat childlessness, or at least small families, as a kind of public good. “What do you want,” readers will say, “a medal?” As a start, yes. Stalin used to pin an Order of Maternal Glory on Soviet women who bore seven or more children. France still has its Médaille de la Famille Française. The state is not above the use of symbols and exhortation to encourage desirable behaviours. It now has to do it for the act opposite to the one it has traditionally heroised.

Material incentives would not go amiss, either, I can report: the inverse of Nordic pro-natalism. Only after that are we are into the realms of coercion, and if democracy cannot sustain air fares that internalise the environmental costs, it will not wear that.

Nor should it. For it can end up in a dark place, this anti-natalism — in the misanthropy of Schopenhauer and his “burden of existence”. But a soft version is amazingly difficult to propose too, even now, even among people who demand a “serious conversation” and “honest debate” about climate change.

I can understand why. This issue forces people to contemplate that which is most hateful: the non-existence of their own children. Then there is the collective action problem. Even if it is in the planet’s interest to have fewer people, it is not always in the interest of any one nation. Had its birth rate not declined in the 19th century, France would have entered the subsequent one as a larger country than Germany. The world wars might not have played out as they did. The persistence of the Médaille in such an advanced culture seems rational enough once put in due context.

Nor do I mean to paint a green veneer on my or anyone else’s life choices. Friends and I who decided against family life did so for reasons as self-serving as often billed: a taste for leisure, a dread of sexual monotony. We did not hate to “bring a child into this world” — that smarmy anguish — so much as into our diaries.

It is just that the motive for an action matters less than its practical effect. And the effect here is of existential value to the planet. (Don’t mention it.) Societies might have to make it easier for others to do the same, at least until human ingenuity really does decouple population growth from its carbon impact. The alternative is worse than the sound of Malthus cackling his vindication from the deep beyond.

SOURCE 






Meeting at Rockefeller Mansion Shed Light on Climate Politics

Newly obtained public records — including handwritten notes, a “Black Swan” event in the freedom of information world — open a window onto conversations between high-ranking government officials and environmentalist activists.

These notes and emails reflect often amusing candor, in which a prurient interest is understandable. What is most important, however, is the distinction between the officials’ public stances and their private confessions, among friends, about the shared “climate change” policy agenda.

The transparency group Energy Policy Advocates obtained these records chronicling a two-day, July 2019 meeting hosted by the Rockefeller Brothers Foundation (RBF) at the Rockefeller mansion at Pocantico, NY.

Host and RBF President Michael Northrop emailed one state official that the Rockefellers’ air conditioning encourages long sleeves in July. There is some irony here given the agenda of making energy less abundant and more expensive.

The event was titled “Accelerating State Action on Climate Change.” It brought together twenty senior political appointees from fifteen states, from Hawaii, the West Coast, across the southwest and mountain states, then from Maine down through Maryland.

Participating staff held titles including governor’s Chief of Staff, Senior Policy Advisor and Cabinet Secretary, and Chair, Director, Commissioner, and Secretary of regulatory agencies.

RBF flew them in, passing the costs through the Georgetown Climate Center — a Georgetown Law School vehicle that runs climate campaigns for donors and which, for purposes of taxes and other legal matters, is simply the non-profit Georgetown University.

Also participating were two environmentalist activist groups that RBF finances. An official from billionaire Tom Steyer’s Energy Foundation helpfully typed up and circulated her notes.

The handwritten notes, taken by Carla Frisch of RBF-beneficiary and meeting sherpa Rocky Mountain Institute, are particularly clarifying.

The Chief Policy Advisor to New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy, is credited with joining Massachusetts’ Secretary of Energy & Environmental Affairs in complaining that “enviros want moratorium on fossil infrastructure,” but this causes problems with labor, because the coach in reality is “gas + jobs vs. no jobs + climate” (agenda).

Proponents of the “Green New Deal” and otherwise the “climate” agenda must explain away this confession of net economic pain and job loss (which “substantial job losses,” related records show, they also privately admit to).

The tension is further exposed in New Mexico’s Cabinet Secretary for Energy, Minerals, & Natural Resources Department, diagnosing the “problem,” which is the state’s booming oil & gas production.

Per the notes, Sarah Cottrell Propst bemoans the “problem is oil production in Permian [is] 1.5b/month in commerce, 400% ? in production.” That seems to be a rather odd position for an Energy Secretary to take, privately or not.

The notes indicate that former Obama Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz is not being helpful, saying mildly favorable things about natural gas: “Ernie Moniz saying gas is a bridge fuel.”

Meaning, gas as a replacement for coal while renewable energy continues its struggle to become reliable and economic. Climate activist politicians attempt this straddle with some regularity. But it simply is not acceptable to many environmentalists.

Ms. Frisch’s notes attribute the diagnosis of how this apostasy came about to California Air Resources Board Chair, and former Obama EPA official, Mary Nichols: “Moniz has not been well-managed.”

One state official from the Mountain West voiced the obvious concern among his team “to be careful about keeping” members of his political party in office.

That is not always easy given friends like theirs. According to New Mexico’s Propst, the climate activist officials’ green group NGO allies — called NGOs, for non-governmental organizations — are “having [a] hard time pivoting from enemy approach to friend approach.”

Steyer’s delegate’s typed notes characterize the sentiment slightly differently: “NGOS have a hard time pivoting from enemy admin to friendly admin.”

Emails between RBF and one of its partners in advocacy, the Center for a New Energy Economy at Colorado State University, reveal concern that these public records would find their way to the American public.

For example, RBF’s Northrop raised the prospect of mailing the notes instead of email, having been tipped off to one of Energy Policy Advocates’ records requests by the same New Mexico Energy Secretary.

Another correspondent gently suggested to Northrop that “Snail mail is probably subject to open records too, no?” Yes. Yes, it is.

The notes contain much more information offering a window into this movement’s actual beliefs and intentions, and assertions of political and legal realities. These will be released in the near future. The public should know when their government officials’ private statements contradict what they tell the public.

SOURCE 






Conservative Australian radio jock accuses public broadcaster of being 'out of touch' and 'biased' after conservative senator  was heckled during a climate change debate

Jim Molan is a retired general.  He is not an expert on science.  Putting him up against a top Warmist was bound to make him look bad

Broadcaster Alan Jones has labelled Q&A 'out of touch' and 'clearly biased' after a fiery episode discussing climate change and the bushfire crisis on Monday night.

Liberal senator Jim Molan was laughed at and heckled by the show's audience as he admitted he was not convinced humans were causing climate change.

Q&A host Hamish Macdonald also pressed Mr Molan for evidence changes in the climate was not human-induced, to which the latter responded 'I'm not relying on evidence.'

But Jones hit out at Macdonald's line of questioning in his debut show, saying the senator was a politician and should not be expected to have detailed evidence.

'Jim Molan is not a climate scientist so why would he be expected to have detailed scientific knowledge of the "evidence" relied on by climate scientists who dispute anthropogenic climate change?' Jones wrote on his Facebook page on Tuesday.

Molan's response that he was not relying on evidence had prompted laughter and looks of disbelief from the studio audience.

Jones added Macdonald had not lived up to the 'even-handed approach' Q&A executive producer Erin Vincent had paid tribute to in the days before the episode aired.

'Why conservatives agree to appear on this clearly biased program I have no idea,' Jones wrote. 'Last night guest senator Jim Molan was set up as the clay pigeon for the studio audience and panel to target.'

Macdonald had to twice step in to quieten the audience so Mr Molan, a 69-year-old former general, could be heard.

Following the exchanges of the night before, Jones on Tuesday morning said it was time for the ABC to stop pretending it was impartial and admit to being biased.

'Q&A and its unrepresentative studio audiences remain profoundly out of touch with mainstream Australia,' the 2GB host wrote as he concluded his post.

Jones' comments followed a testing first episode of the year for the new host, which was filmed in Queanbeyan.

In a section on climate change, American panellist Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University, said: 'Climate change is real and human caused.' 'It's already leading to disastrous impacts here in Australia and around the rest of the world. And it will get much worse if we don't act.'

Hamish MacDonald then asked Senator Molan if he agreed with the scientists.

The senator replied: 'I accept the climate is changing. It has changed and it will change… and what it's producing is hotter and drier weather and a hotter and drier country.'

Macdonald pressed him, saying: 'What's causing that?'

Senator Molan continued: 'As to whether it is human-induced climate change is...'

At that point he was cut off by frustrated jeers and boos from the crowd.

Mr Molan hushed to crowd by saying: 'Thank you, thank you' before Macdonald helped him by shushing the audience.

He went on to say he respected 'scientific opinion' but 'every day across my desk comes enough information for me to say that there are other opinions.'

Macdonald asked him to outline exactly what opinions he was referring to but Mr Molan repeatedly dodged the question.

Macdonald pressed him again, saying: 'You haven't answered the question. You said you get information across your desk every day which leads you to doubt or be open-minded about the science.'

Mr Molan replied: 'I am open minded' before Macdonald said: 'What is that information?'

'It's a range of information which goes,' Mr Molan said before he was cut off by heckling.

Macdonald tried to tame the crowd, saying: 'Sorry. Could we just respectfully listen to this question.

He then asked the senator once more to explain his position: 'What is the evidence that you are relying on?'

Mr Molan replied: 'I'm not relying on evidence, Hamish,' prompting laughter from the crowd.

As the crowd laughed, Dr Mann said: 'You said it. You said it.'

Dr Mann then put on an Australian accent and said: 'Come on now, mate.'

Prompting a huge laugh from the audience, he added: 'You should keep an open mind but not so open that your brain falls out.'

Later, the scientist said: 'When it comes to human caused climate change, it is literally the consensus of the world's scientists that it's human caused... natural factors would be pushing us in the opposite direction.'

It is literally the consensus of the world's scientists that climate change is human caused

Molan was mocked online for being unable to explain why he doubted climate change was human caused.

Even Tasmania senator Jacqui Lambie piled in, writing: 'Oh dear @JimMolan it's gone from a car crash to a train wreck #qanda #ClimateEmergency.'

SOURCE  

***************************************

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

*****************************************





5 February, 2020  

How the Trump administration's policies have unleashed American energy production

Every president since Richard Nixon has promised energy independence to Americans as a measure of national security. Promises and pledges have come and gone from the White House since the 1970s — but now, the United States of America is an exporter of crude oil as well as natural gas and, yes, Americans can be declared energy independent.

According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (USEIA), “In November 2019, the United States became a net exporter of all oil products, including both refined petroleum products and crude oil.”

For the very reasons eight presidents prior to Donald Trump promised this energy autonomy, it’s now evidenced with the stability of oil prices that no longer wildly fluctuate with every world event.

Middle East policy has become more shaped by those drilling in Pennsylvania, North Dakota, and Texas. Yet leftists still declare, “We just can’t drill our way out of the problem.” Well, that’s exactly what happened.

Despite, not because of, the policies of the Obama administration, exploration, drilling, and fracking for natural gas and oil expanded with no appearance of turning back as the Trump administration approved last week the Keystone Pipeline right of way for a crucial 46-mile stretch controlled by the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Keystone was first proposed in 2008, but faced repeated rejections during the Obama years. This approval permits the $8 billion construction project expected to move up to 35 million gallons of crude oil every day from western Canada to terminals on the U.S. Gulf Coast.

What does this mean to average Americans?

According to economist Stephen Moore, “At least $1 trillion of U.S. economic output is related to the shale revolution,” with more than 1.5 million Americans working in the industry. A separate study by the American Petroleum Institute cites at least four million jobs connected to the shale oil and gas energy transformation that include work in construction, engineering, pipe fitting, steel production, trucking, and sales jobs.

Specifically, Michigan and Ohio together have more than 400,000 workers tied to the shale industry, with Pennsylvania home to an additional 320,000 alone. Colorado and Florida each have more than 200,000 oil and gas workers. It’s obvious that these states hold not only precious natural resources but critical voters that serve as the fuel for the engine of 2020 politics.

While these states are the heart of the shale industry, Texas has more than two million employees of gas and oil companies. Add to that the coal workers who showed up in 2016 from Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Ohio supporting Trump. He embraces an all-of-the-above approach to energy that includes fossil fuels, nuclear, solar, and renewables, but without the subsidies propping up the green industry.

It’s obvious that fossil fuels and nuclear energy are not welcomed in the Democrat Party, as evidenced by the lineup of presidential candidates whose policies would stall the American economic engine, killing millions of jobs while massively increasing prices.

As Salena Zito and Brad Todd wrote in their book, The Great Revolt: Inside the Populist Coalition Reshaping American Politics, those who are red-blooded and blue-collared are now the GOP — yes, it’s a Growing Opportunity Party. As the elections inch closer, expect effective reminders that Democrats view those who cling to their God and guns as “deplorable,” as well as disdain all who see the value in America being first in energy exploration and production. That might be called #Winning for conservatives.

SOURCE 






Faulty Assumptions Lead to Fake News About Climate Change

Climate change soon will constitute “a global catastrophe costing millions of lives in wars and natural disasters,” one government study predicted.

By 2020, according to a report on the study in The Guardian, “abrupt climate change could bring the planet to the edge of anarchy as countries develop a nuclear threat to defend and secure dwindling food, water and energy supplies.”

That was 16 years ago. Now that the year 2020 is upon us, are any of these “doom and gloom” scenarios actually occurring? Far from it.

Indeed, the planet has experienced a bit of lukewarming. However, claims of increases in extreme weather are vastly overstated.

If anything, societies have been able to grow wealthier over time, and, as a result, have been more capable of weathering the extreme events that have come their way.

In fact, here at home, the economy is thriving. Unemployment remains at historical lows. And by achieving energy independence, we have transformed the global energy landscape.

So where did all this alarmist rhetoric come from? Well, faulty computer modeling is a big part of the explanation. Computer models are sometimes based on assumptions that have been beefed up to satisfy a particular regulatory agenda.

This is part of a new study I published in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Economics and Policy Studies with Ross McKitrick of the University of Guelph, Ontario, and Pat Michaels of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a free-market think tank.

The study examined some of the assumptions made in one model used to estimate the economic effects of climate change. Called the FUND model, it is used to estimate a construct known as the social cost of carbon, which refers to the economic damages associated with carbon dioxide emissions over a particular time horizon.  

Unlike other models the government has used before, however, the FUND model actually incorporates benefits of carbon dioxide emissions into its modeling.

All of these computer models are based on assumptions. In this study, we focused on assumptions regarding climate sensitivity as well as agricultural benefits. 

Although it long has been understood that carbon dioxide emissions affect temperatures, the question is to what degree (pun intended). We found that updating these assumptions in line with more recent research can have a significant effect on the social cost of carbon. 

In fact, under some realistic scenarios of moderate warming, we found that the social cost of carbon is essentially zero and might even be negative. That’s right: The benefits associated with a moderate amount of warming may outweigh the costs. Typically, such benefits result from longer growing seasons and increased agricultural output. 

Bottom line: The FUND model, under very reasonable assumptions, indicates that a moderate amount of warming has practically no negative impact and might even be a good thing.

This study is just one of many in a stream of research on the social cost of carbon published by The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Data Analysis. My prior research with colleagues demonstrated that the computer models used to estimate the economic impact of climate change are extremely sensitive to reasonable changes in other assumptions as well.

These assumptions include foolish attempts to make projections 300 years into the future and ignorance of recommendations by the Office of Management and Budget regarding cost-benefit analysis.

In our research, we varied these assumptions by altering the model’s projections in a more reasonable manner, incorporating the OMB’s recommendations for this type of analysis and updating assumptions regarding climate sensitivity.  We found that tweaking these assumptions can reduce the social cost of carbon by as much as 80% or more compared to estimates made by the Obama administration. 

Our conclusion: The Obama administration deliberately beefed up estimates of the social cost of carbon to justify its policy agenda. Ever since, Heritage has advocated that these computer models are so prone to user manipulation that it is not only naïve but dangerous to put them in the hands of lawmakers, regulators, and bureaucrats:

—Heritage’s analysis of the DICE model, also used to estimate the social cost of carbon.

—Heritage’s analysis of the FUND model.

—Heritage’s other peer-reviewed analysis of these computer models.

This work has been recognized by Congress as well as both the Obama and Trump administrations.

Yes, statistical models can be useful for understanding real-world phenomena.

Any model, however, is only as a good as the assumptions from which it is composed. Improperly specified models can deceive the public, misguide policymakers, and result in big costs for ordinary Americans.

SOURCE 






Mad as the sea and wind: Wind power in France: a lie and a swindle?

Bernard Durand

The public’s disenchantment with wind power is growing rapidly: its supporters have become a minority. More and more French people are concerned about the environmental and health damage and the blots on their country’s famous landscapes as a result of its massive development. They are also exasperated by the cavalier methods used to impose it, and the corruption of elected officials that too often accompanies it.

But the French still do not realize, due to the intense campaigns of disinformation on these subjects, how much wind generated electricity will actually cost them, without contributing to combating global warming, or doing away with nuclear reactors. It will destroy more jobs than it creates. This work explains why. It also dismantles the structures of lies and financial scams that allow wind energy promoters to make money from it without worrying about its real efficiency or the human and environmental damage, just for their own financial or electoral benefit.

Wind power spoils the countryside and coastlines, impoverishes the French people, and is of no use to them. It is a weapon of mass destruction on their environment and economy. It compromises their energy security. It must be stopped as a matter of urgency and the money wasted on it must be used to reduce CO2 emissions from housing and transport, which emit considerably more CO2 and are therefore more harmful to the climate than our electricity.

Interview

* Bernard Durand, how can you be both a co-founder of an environmental association and write a book entitled “Un vent de folie: L’éolien en France : mensonge et arnaque?” [ Mad as the sea and wind: Wind power in France: a lie and a swindle?]

It is perfectly compatible, and this book demonstrates the fact: wind power in France is in fact a weapon of massive environmental destruction for rural areas. It will soon be equally the case for the marine environment, if offshore wind power is installed in force as our government wants it to be. What would be incompatible for an ecologist, and therefore profoundly hypocritical, would be to promote wind power on the grounds of a defence of the environment and the climate, as do the well-established NGOs that claim to be “environmental”, such as Greenpeace, World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and France Nature Environnement (FNE), among others.

* You claim that disenchantment with wind power is growing amongst public opinion and that its supporters have become a minority. No doubt this is due to the numerous critical works published in recent years. However, your book sets out an original critique, that is still unknown to the general public.

The works you are talking about are in fact mainly concerned with denouncing the effects of wind turbines on the environment and human health, the corruption of elected officials that is far too often part of the process of taking the industry forward, and the absurdity of this development from an economic point of view. They have indeed contributed to a growing public disenchantment, springing from the increased perception by local residents – of whom there are more and more – of the harmful effects of wind power on their immediate environment and their health.

This is currently the only work intended for the general public which demonstrates, with the help of basic physics, that wind power cannot in any way achieve the aims used to justify promoting it.  In particular, it can only increase the price of electricity, and now of fuel, for French households, and as a result increase the energy insecurity of low income households, while it can do nothing to reduce our CO2 emissions and combat climate change. It will do nothing towards the closure of our nuclear reactors. Is it sensible to wreck our environment for something that costs a lot of money and is useless?

Public opinion has not in fact genuinely grasped this, because disinformation on these subjects by the media, under pressure from a large part of the political and financial world but also unfortunately from so-called “environmental” NGOs such as those mentioned above, has provided intense blanket coverage for quite some time.  Fortunately this is changing now.  Hopefully not too late!

* You talk a great deal about the German example, about non-dispatchable electricity provision, about CO2 production remaining high, and about the dramatic rise in electricity prices. What lessons can we learn from this?

The most important lesson to be learned is that we should not follow the example of Germany, which has, impulsively and thoughtlessly, run headlong into an ecological and economic dead end and a lasting dependence on fossil fuels by wanting to develop wind and solar photovoltaics at all costs; apparently quite literally, because the expenditure on this programme is already running into hundreds of billions of euros, for a very poor result.  Due to the intermittency, i.e. the uncontrollable (non-dispatchable) variability of the electrical power generated by their wind power, Germany was forced to retain all its energy from coal-fired dispatchable plants. It had to replace the nuclear reactors it had shut down with gas-fired power plants. It now imports large quantities of coal from the United States, and will soon be importing large quantities of Russian gas to supply its gas-fired power plants via the Northstream 1 and 2 gas pipelines that have just been installed in the Baltic Sea to supply these plants.  As a result Germany is, and will be for a very long time, the main polluter of the European atmosphere, with the climate-lethal CO2 emitted by its power stations, but also with the fumes from these power stations which are harmful to health. The planned replacement of its coal-fired power plants with gas-fired power plants by 2038 will come too late, and while it will reduce its CO2 emissions it will also increase its emissions of methane (CH4), the main component of natural gas, which is much more harmful to the climate than CO2.

* The current government seems to want to put an end to nuclear power generation, as with the Fessenheim power station, and replace it with wind power. Is this desirable for the consumer? Or the climate?

The example of Germany shows just what will happen if we close down our nuclear power plants. Like Germany we would be obliged to replace our lost power with equivalent power from coal and/or gas-fired power stations and, again like Germany, to have considerable CO2  emissions from our electricity production. This would mean reneging to a huge extent on the commitments we made at COP 21 in Paris in 2015. The closure of Fessenheim, which emits practically no CO2, is already an extraordinary aberration!

Of course, we may imagine that one day it will be possible to replace coal and gas-fired power stations with massive wind and solar power storage. But at this point engineers do not even know what this kind of storage would constitute, and so actually building it, if that is ever even possible, will not be happening any time soon.  But the climate will not wait. In addition, their cost is likely to be higher than the plants they would replace. In any case, Germany is obviously not counting on this, since it will be supplying its future gas-fired power stations with Russian gas.

Now if it did one day become possible, our country would be covered with giant wind turbines. And, of course, we would also have to accept a very sharp increase in the price of electricity and fuel for households.

* You talk about a disinformation mechanism and use some very strong expressions such as “lies” and “financial swindles”. How has it come to this?

Yes, I’ve used strong words. Because the disinformation on these subjects is quite extraordinary and must be denounced in the strongest possible terms.  This is due to a convergence of powerful political and financial interests that use modern advertising and marketing techniques to shape public opinion, and most of the media goes along with it.

So, it has become virtually impossible to debate these issues calmly on a scientific basis, and this represents a great danger to our democracy.

I hope that my book will stimulate this kind of debate amongst the public.

SOURCE 






Top Solar Executives Plead Guilty to Participating in a Billion Dollar Ponzi Scheme—the Biggest Criminal Fraud Scheme in the History of the Eastern District of California

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — The owners of DC Solar, a Benicia-based company, pleaded guilty today to charges related to a billion dollar Ponzi scheme— the biggest criminal fraud scheme in the history of the Eastern District of California. The government’s investigation has resulted in the largest criminal forfeiture in the history of the District with over $120 million in assets forfeited that will go to victims, and has returned $500 million to the United States Treasury, with more to come, U.S. Attorney McGregor W. Scott announced.

Jeff Carpoff, 49, of Martinez, pleaded guilty today to conspiracy to commit wire fraud and money laundering. His wife, Paulette Carpoff, 46, pleaded guilty today to conspiracy to commit an offense against the United States and money laundering. According to court documents, between 2011 and 2018, DC Solar manufactured mobile solar generator units (MSG), solar generators that were mounted on trailers that were promoted as able to provide emergency power to cellphone towers and lighting at sporting events. A significant incentive for investors were generous federal tax credits due to the solar nature of the MSGs.

The conspirators pulled off their scheme by selling solar generators that did not exist to investors, making it appear that solar generators existed in locations that they did not, creating false financial statements, and obtaining false lease contracts, among other efforts to conceal the fraud. In reality, at least half of the approximately 17,000 solar generators claimed to have been manufactured by DC Solar did not exist.

U.S. Attorney Scott stated: “This billion dollar Ponzi scheme hurt investors and took money from the United States Treasury. This case represents not only the largest criminal fraud scheme in the history of the District, it also represents the largest criminal forfeiture in the history of the District with over $120 million in assets forfeited. All of this money will be returned to the victims. This scheme also targeted the United States Treasury, and we have returned $500 million to the Treasury to date. Agents, investigators and attorneys from various federal agencies are still working to continue to return money to victims and the United States Treasury. Today’s guilty pleas sends a strong message that fraudsters will get caught and will pay for their crimes. You can run, but you cannot hide.”

The forfeiture included seizing and auctioning 148 of the Carpoffs’ luxury and collector vehicles, including the 1978 Firebird previously owned by actor Burt Reynolds. This historical auction resulted in recouping approximately $8.233 million for victims. In addition to their collection of luxury and collector vehicles, Jeff and Paulette Carpoff used money from the scheme to pay for a minor-league professional baseball team and a NASCAR racecar sponsorship; to purchase luxury real estate in California, Nevada, the Caribbean, Mexico, and elsewhere; a subscription private jet service; a suite at a professional football stadium; and jewelry.

“The Carpoffs and their co-conspirators wove a web of lies and deceit in a massive fraud scheme. Meticulous review and analysis of millions of documents revealed the operation and true intention of the scheme,” said Special Agent in Charge Sean Ragan. “The FBI is committed to our partnerships with the Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigation, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation Office of Inspector General, and U.S. Marshals Service. Together, we seek to uncover fraud that exploits investors and taxpayers, ensuring criminals face justice.”

“By all outer appearances this was a legitimate and successful company,” said Kareem Carter, Special Agent in Charge IRS Criminal Investigation. “But in reality it was all just smoke and mirrors — a Ponzi scheme touting tax benefits to the tune of over $900 million. IRS CI is committed to investigating those who take advantage and impact the financial well-being of others for their own personal gain.”

 “The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, Office of Inspector General (FDIC-OIG) is pleased to join our law enforcement colleagues in announcing these guilty pleas,” stated Special Agent in Charge Wade Walters for the FDIC OIG San Francisco Regional Office. “The defendants conspired with others to create a fraudulent business venture that duped unsuspecting entities, including banks, to invest approximately $1 billion, which the two later used to support a lavish lifestyle. They also knowingly engaged in a money laundering transaction involving criminally derived property. The FDIC-OIG is committed to ensuring that those who use our Nation’s banks to undermine the integrity of the financial system will be held accountable.”

Four defendants have previously pleaded guilty to federal criminal charges related to the fraud scheme since October. Joseph W. Bayliss, 44, of Martinez, and Ronald J. Roach, of Walnut Creek, each pleaded guilty to related charges on Oct. 22, 2019. Robert A. Karmann, 53, of Clayton, pleaded guilty to related charges on Dec. 17, 2019. Ryan Guidry, 53, of Pleasant Hill, pleaded guilty to related charges on Jan. 14, 2020. A seventh co-conspirator is scheduled to plead guilty on Feb. 11. The investigation into the fraud remains ongoing.

This case is the product of an investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, IRS?Criminal Investigation, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation Office of Inspector General. Assistant U.S. Attorneys André M. Espinosa and Kevin C. Khasigian are prosecuting the case.

Jeff and Paulette Carpoff are scheduled to be sentenced by U.S. District Judge John A. Mendez on May 19. Jeff Carpoff faces a maximum statutory penalty of 30 years in prison. Paulette Carpoff faces a maximum statutory penalty of 15 years in prison. The actual sentences, however, will be determined at the discretion of the court after consideration of any applicable statutory factors and the Federal Sentencing Guidelines, which take into account a number of variables.

SOURCE 






Big business ‘killing people’: New Greens leader Adam Bandt’s slams action on climate change

Bandt is a former Trotskyite. He joined the Greens out of convenience.  Trotskyites think even Communists are too Right-wing.  Note that big business is still his chief bugbear

Hours after being elected unopposed, the new leader of the Australian Greens has accused big business of “killing people and endangering people’s safety” and claimed Scott Morrison’s action on climate change will lead to “three times as many deaths” as the 2019-20 bushfire crisis in which 33 people lost their lives.

Declaring he wanted to “turf this government out”, Adam Bandt said Australia under the Prime Minister’s leadership was on track to warm by three degrees and the biggest barrier to climate action was coal.

“Big business that makes its money by killing people and endangering people’s safety should be worried. Anyone who makes a profit by putting people’s lives at risk should be worried because their days are gone,” Mr Bandt said in his first press conference as leader.

“Our message is also there is a role in a manufacturing renaissance in this country for businesses to sell the rest of the world things that are powered by the sun and the wind.

Business model ‘threatens human life’

“If you’re a coal company or a gas company or an oil company then our message to you is very simple – your business model is unsustainable. Your business model is predicated on threatening human life and they have to go. They have to go in a way that looks after workers and that looks after communities but they have to go.”

Mr Bandt, who said he was not unhappy with the description of himself as a “Greens social democrat”, said the country needed a “carbon price plus” to reduce emissions and tackle global warming.

“Scott Morrison has got us on track for three degrees of global warming and that is a catastrophe and you can’t have it both ways, you can’t say you accept the science of climate change but then refuse to accept what the science is that you need to do,” he said.

“These catastrophic bushfires have happened at one degree, Scott Morrison’s plan is for at least three times as much pain, three times as much suffering and three times as many deaths at least because that is what is in store for us if we keep on going the way the government has us going.

“If the government says ‘oh look, we don’t want a price on carbon but we’re prepared to look at a staged, orderly exit of coal-fired power stations’, then of course we’ll look at that but in fact they’re doing the opposite.

They’re saying how can we use public money to prop up coal-fired power stations? They’re doing a feasibility study about a new coal-fired power station.”

The Greens have a plan to phase out thermal coal exports and domestic use by 2030.

Mr Bandt was elected Greens leader at a partyroom meeting on Tuesday unopposed alongside co-deputy leader and Queensland senator Larissa Waters, who will also be Senate leader.

Mr Bandt will be the first Greens leader in the party’s history not to sit in the upper house. He will succeed retiring Victorian senator Richard Di Natale.

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

*****************************************





4 February, 2020  

How To Slay The Climate Change Dragon

In our time, as truth corrodes, myths become necessary. As people drift away from truth, they readily agree to intrusive governments – and such invasive governments give consent to supranational entities and conglomerates who then use myths to manufacture political, social and economic consent.

The sales-force that sells these fictive narratives is the vast media-education-entertainment complex which employs, for such purposes, the punditry of experts, the professoriate, globe-trotting zealots, and sanctimonious thespians. Any dissent from these fables is decried, ridiculed, and suppressed.

One such myth is CO2 in the role of the arch-enemy, Hades-bent on heating up the planet, until life becomes impossible; and it is treacherous human activity that has set free this culprit into the hapless atmosphere to work havoc. After much struggle with vile traitors who greedily serve the villain CO2, and their henchmen, the climate change deniers, a few wise politicians and selfless NGOs will finally hurl CO2 into the netherworld of Zero Emissions, from which it will never rise again. Thus, the planet was saved and is now inhabited by fewer but better humans.

People love stories. The more far-fetched the better. The greater the lies, the more believable it is.

The reality is that the monster, the villain is not CO2 and the Greenhouse Effect. The monster is the myth itself, whereby human life – and the very future of humanity – is being asked to conform to the dictates of the lie that is “catastrophic climate change.” An entire complex of anti-human strategies are now justified by way of this lie – carbon taxes, deindustrialization, veganism, fossil fuel divestment,a green economy, population reduction, Gaia worship, green ethics – a brave new world.

It is precisely this global warming, catastrophic climate change myth that The Sky Dragon Slayers. Victory Lap sets out to slay. This book is a follow-up to the earlier work, Slaying the Sky Dragon. Death of the Greenhouse Gas Theory, which was published in 2011, and which, as the title suggests, did destroy the pretense to “science” that revilers of CO2 leaned upon.

But in the ensuing decade, the myth of global warming has become more deeply entrenched – a lie that must not be questioned. Why this has happened is an important question, and it points to the success of the mythographers, who have a very clever trick up their sleeve – namely, the denial of truth.

Thus, we are supposed to be living in a “post-truth” world, in which “truth” is nothing more than a social construct, where there is only “your truth” and “my truth.” Such “truth” is personal preference, personal taste. In this way, both purpose and meaning are called into question, which brings about cynicism and gullibility; and, thus, people are the more easily led by “thought-leaders,” who serve many masters.

In such a hollowed-out world, climate change is packaged as piety. As Tim Ball observes in his Foreword to the book, “It is hard to believe that such false information as that created and perpetuated by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) continues to exist. Worse, it goes almost unquestioned and is the prevailing view.”

Ken Coffman in his Publisher’s Note succinctly captures the dynamics of this piety: “We have to give credit to the manipulators – they achieved a lot based on nearly nothing. The human-caused global warming was destructive, wrong and stupid, but masterful use of hyperbole and fear-mongering.”

Earlier, Coffman had noted, “There is no limit to the ways a bad theory can be false.” It soon becomes obvious that the climate change myth is not about science – but about power – and to those who manage the levers of power, truth will always be inconvenient and dangerous, and must, therefore, be suppressed. Truth is the greatest foe of ideology.

The Sky Dragon Slayers. Victory Lap offers this truth which is dangerous to those who sell the climate change myth. Thus, in Chapter 1, the entire premise of climate alarmism, of irreversible, catastrophic natural changes, brought about by human activity, is systematically dismantled and then destroyed.

The weapon which slays this mythic beast is the precise definition of what science really is and what it is not. The first Chapter carefully differentiates between the traditional scientific method and “post-normalism.” The former is empirical, rational, and cumulative, where predictions become laws when they can be repeated and always yield the same results. These results become evidence which leads to conclusions, or laws, about reality.

Here, Karl Popper’s famous paradigm serves as a guiding principle: “In so far as a scientific statement speaks about reality, it must be falsifiable; and in so far as it not falsifiable, it does not speak about reality.” In other words, truth is first known by evidence and then truth is known by how it is lied about. In our era, post-truth is the lie about truth.

We have to bear in mind that those in power have persuaded many that biological reality of the two sexes is a lie, while the lie of gender-fluidity, that a person can choose his/her own sex – is the truth. This is precisely what Popper meant by falsifiability. We can know truth, when others feel an urgent need to lie about it.

This lying is post-normalism, which stems from norm criticism and intersectionality; both are now de rigueur in all of academia. This means that, by and large, to be educated nowadays means to believe in and promote lies. In such a topsy-turvy world, post-normalist science serves power, not truth, since “facts are uncertain, values in dispute, stakes high and decisions urgent,” as per Silvio Funtowicz and Jerome Ravetz.

Such flapdoodle, always uttered with a very serious face, is about managing and controlling the “stakes” and the “decisions,” in which science must be nothing more than another rhetorical device to brainwash people.

This is made rather plain, in case of any doubt, by the academic Mike Hulme: “Self-evidently dangerous climate change will not emerge from a normal scientific process of truth seeking, although evidence will gain some insights into the question if it recognizes the socially contingent dimensions of a post-normal science. But to proffer such insights, scientists – and politicians – must trade (normal) truth for influence.” Post-normal “science” is politics by other means.

Thus, climate change is not about the climate – it is not about the environment. Instead, it is an absurd attempt to play God – to change how life exists on the planet. And this existence is to benefit the few, rather than the many, via the Fourth and the Fifth Industrial Revolutions – the point being to cull humanity, so it can pollute less. The shade of Malthus once again raises its head. We are in a death-struggle between two opposing views of humanity. One sees human beings as a harmful virus in the body of noble Gaia, which must be controlled, if not eradicated – and the other which sees great value in human life. It is an epic battle between good and evil.

After Chapter 1, which is the longest of the book, the remaining chapters serve as mop-up operations, in which the various limbs of the dragon that is catastrophic climate change are lopped off and destroyed.

Thus, Chapter 2 tosses the famous Hockey Stick Graph into the dustbin of history. As is well known, this graph, the fabrication of Michael Mann, was the show-piece of the IPCC, and made famous by Al Gore – and it remains to this day the most iconic image of climate alarmists. It purported to “prove” that CO2 trapped heat like a blanket and thus heated up the planet, until life would eventually become impossible.

Things came to a head for Mann when he filed a multi-million-dollar lawsuit against Dr. Tim Ball, who had quipped that Mann was from Penn State but more properly belonged in the state pen, given his many falsifications of data.

Throughout this ordeal, Dr. Ball insisted that he wanted Mann to show his “secret science,” or the R2 Regression Numbers, in court, which Mann claimed he had used to fashion his Hockey Stick Chart, aka the Hokey Schtick. The Supreme Court of British Columbia dismissed Mann’s lawsuit and awarded the defendant Ball full legal costs. Such is the cunning of reason – Mann was undone by the very mechanism he had devised to destroy Dr. Ball. God indeed works in mysterious ways!

Chapter 3 guts the myth of the Greenhouse Effect, which is still taught as monolithic truth throughout the education system because it is post-normal science. According to the IPCC (whose usefulness would vanish in a trice if it had to rely on truth rather than post-normal science) the Greenhouse Effect is to be described in this way:

The Earth’s surface is warmed by both the Sun and the energy coming back from the atmosphere.
The Earth’s surface in turn radiates all the energy, which is wholly absorbed by the atmosphere.
The atmosphere then radiates half of that energy into space and the other half back to the Earth’s surface.
The result of this continual process is that the Earth’s surface becomes warmer than it would be if it were only warmed by the Sun.

In this model, CO2 becomes a heat-trapping blanket enwrapping the planet. The solution, therefore, is a straightforward one – get rid of the blanket! Hence, all those calls to reduce the “carbon footprint,” to stop using dirty fuels, to save the planet from reaching a “tipping-point,” from which there will be no return. And so forth.

Although this fuels climate alarmism very efficiently, this myth, of course, has nothing to do with scientific facts. The atmosphere is colder than the earth’s surface, so heat cannot bounce back from above, because “colder cannot heat hotter.” Energy is not wholly absorbed by the atmosphere. Some of it escapes into space, the rest is stored in the earth and the oceans and is used to evaporate water.

Any energy that returns to the earth from the atmosphere is always colder, never hotter than the earth’s surface. Therefore, energy returning from the atmosphere can never heat up the planet. All the four points promoted by the IPCC are in fact lies – or, rather, they are post-normal science. It is the sun which heats the planet, while excess heat is radiated out into space.

MORE here






Sanders introduces bill to ban fracking

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) this week introduced a bill that aims to ban hydraulic fracking.

The bill was introduced on Tuesday and is titled "a bill to ban the practice of hydraulic fracturing, and for other purposes," according to the Library of Congress, though the text of the legislation was not available on the site.

Sanders has called for a ban on fracking while campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination, as has Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.).

Sanders tweeted about the bill, which he said was also worked on by Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) and Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Darren Soto (D-Fla.) on Thursday. Merkley was listed as a co-sponsor.

The tweet included a video of actor Mark Ruffalo talking about a potential federal ban fracking.

"Mark Ruffalo just spoiled Bernie and AOC's bill to ban fracking," the video said.

However, the announcement of the bill drew criticism from those in the oil industry.

“Banning a safe, successful method of developing energy would erase a generation of American energy progress and in the process destroy millions of U.S. jobs, spike household energy costs and hurt farmers and manufacturers," said Bethany Aronhalt, American Petroleum Institute spokeswoman.

SOURCE 






Enviros Rally Around A Podcast Designed To Out Supposed Big Oil Propagandists

A popular podcast purporting to reveal the supposed propaganda propping up the oil industry is part of a journalism project designed to prod major media outlets into painting climate change as a crisis.

“Drilled” is depicted in the media as a podcast pursuing objective journalism that seeks to unmask what its host Amy Westervelt calls the public relations ploy driving big oil. But the podcast is also part of Covering Climate Now (CCN), a project some media outlets believe lacks objectivity.

Westervelt announced Drilled News in January, a reporting project run by her podcast network, Critical Frequency. Drilled News’s about page discloses the site’s participation in CCN while noting that the website brings together reporters who make their work available to news outlets.

The former environmental reporter has contributed work with The Guardian and The Washington Post, among other national newspapers, according to a Jan. 27 report from E&E News. The “Drilled” podcast itself is plowing through its third season, the report notes.

The third season looks “at how the fossil fuels industry leans on two levers to delay action on climate change,” Westervelt told E&E News, referring to what she believes is the oil industry’s layers of propaganda. “The first lever is pro-fossil fuel propaganda, and the second is climate science denial.”

Westervelt said the fossil fuel industry is fine-tuning its “propaganda machine.” Her group’s role in CCN comes as journalists consider making climate advocacy part of their mission.

CCN’s founders kicked off the project in April 2019 and announced in May of that year that they would ask partners to devote a week to climate-related news, starting in September 2019. The project was organized in part by Columbia Journalism Review (CJR), a nonprofit representing professional journalists.

The effort’s target was the lead-up to, and coverage of, the U.N. “Climate Action Summit,” held Sept. 15-23.

The Nation environmental correspondent Mark Hertsgaard co-founded the project under the assumption that modern media were not only underreporting what activists call the climate crisis but are also giving too much air time to the fossil fuel industry.

Most legacy media are unwilling to break away from the idea that journalism should not advocate for a position, according to Hertsgaard.

“The New York Times is not on there, The Wall Street Journal is not on there, The Washington Post is not on there,” Hertsgaard said in a September 2019 podcast with Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR. Hertsgaard was referring to the major outlets that did not contribute content to CCN.

“This has an aroma — in their minds — of activism,” Hertsgaard continued, explaining why the big three legacy outlets preferred not to join. He and Pope noted Covering Climate Now intends on breaking up that perception by wrapping climate coverage in the blanket of science rather than politics.

SOURCE 





GREENIE ROUNDUP FROM AUSTRALIA

The big fires seem to have energized them.  Four current stories below

Scientists sign open letter to Australian Government urging action on climate change

We learnt from the replication crisis that up to 60% of scientists are crooked so this tells us nothing.  If they had told us just one of the facts that the government is ignoring that might have been interesting. But they mention no climate facts at all -- just unverifiable speculation about recent weather events

And 270 scientists is insignificant. It is not even the full staff of one of Australia's many universities.  Most academics are Leftists so they could have done a lot better if their letter was seen as important by all its potential signatories


More than 270 scientists have signed an open letter to Australia's leaders calling on them to abandon partisan politics and take action on climate change.

The scientists, who have expertise in climate, fire and meteorology, are calling for urgent action to reduce Australia's greenhouse gas emissions and for Canberra to engage constructively in international agreements.

"The thick, choking smoke haze of this summer is nothing compared to the policy smokescreen that continues in Australia," University of NSW climate scientist Katrin Meissner said in a statement on Monday.

"We need a clear, non-partisan path to reduce Australia's total greenhouse gas emissions in line with what the scientific evidence demands, and the commitment from our leaders to push for meaningful global action to combat climate change."

The scientists warned an increase in bushfires was just one part of a deadly equation that suggested the impacts of climate change were coming faster, stronger and more regularly.

Heatwaves on land and in the oceans were longer, hotter and more frequent, they said.

Australian National University climate scientist Nerilie Abram said the letter was the product of scientists' despair as they witnessed the deadly fire season unfold.

"Scientists have been warning policymakers for decades that climate change would worsen Australia's fire risk and yet these warnings have been ignored," Professor Abram said.

Separately, Oxfam said the Government must demonstrate it had fully grasped the lessons of this "horrific" bushfire season.

"In spite of the scientific evidence and the extreme weather we're living through — bushfires, hailstorms and drought — the Government still hasn't joined the dots and taken action to tackle the root causes of the crisis," Oxfam chief executive Lyn Morgain said in a statement.

She said Australia must dramatically strengthen emissions reduction targets and move beyond fossil fuels.

"The Government's narrow-minded focus on adaptation and resilience simply does not go far enough," she said.

She said Australia could wield great authority and leverage globally if it changed its policies.

"If we led by example and immediately strengthened our own emissions reduction commitments, and if we linked our own crisis with those escalating around the world, we could be a great catalyst for stronger international action," she said.

SOURCE  


We don’t have money to burn on green mania

Bjorn Lomborg

Scenes of devastation from Australia’s fires have been heartbreaking. How do we stop this suffering? For many campaigners and politicians, the answer is clear-cut: drastic climate policies. When we examine the evidence, this simple answer falls short.

Australia is the world’s most fire-prone continent. In 1900, 11 per cent of its surface burned annually. These days, 5 per cent of the country burns every year. By the end of the century, if we do not stop climate change, higher temperatures and an increase in aridity will likely mean a 0.7 percentage point increase in burnt area, an increase from 5.3 per cent of Australia to 6 per cent.

This increase is not trivial and it is an argument for effective climate change action. By far the most practical policy, with the most impact, is a dramatic increase in investment in low and zero-carbon energy innovation.

That’s because, for decades to come, solar and wind energy will be neither cheap enough nor effective enough to replace fossil fuels. Today, they make up only 1.1 per cent of global energy use and the International Energy Agency estimates that even after we spend $US3 trillion ($4.47 trillion) more on subsidies, they will not even reach 5 per cent by 2040. Innovation is needed to bring down the price of green energy. We need to find breakthroughs for batteries, nuclear, carbon capture and a plethora of other promising technologies. Innovation can solve our climate challenge.

Unfortunately, many reports on Australia’s fires have exploited the carnage to push a specific agenda, resting on three ideas: that bushfires are worse than ever, that this is caused by global warming, and that the only solution is for political leaders to make even bigger carbon-cut promises.

Globally, bushfires burn less land than it used to. Since 1900, global burnt area has reduced by more than one-third because of agriculture, fire suppression and forest management. In the satellite era, NASA and other groups document significant decreases.

Surprisingly, this decrease is even true for Australia. Satellites show that from 1997 to 2018 the burnt area declined by one-third. Australia’s current fire season has seen less area burned than in previous years. Up to January 26, bushfires burned 19.4 million hectares in Australia — about half the average burn over the similar timeframe of 37 million hectares in the satellite record. (Actually the satellites show 46 million hectares burnt, but 9 million hectares are likely from prescribed burns.)

When the media suggests Australia’s fires are “unprecedented in scale”, it is wrong. Australia’s burnt area declined by more than a third from 1900 to 2000, and has declined across the satellite period. This fire season, at the time of writing, 2.5 per cent of Australia’s area has burned compared with the past 10 years’ 4.8 per cent average by this point.

What is different this year is that fires have been mostly in NSW and Victoria. These are important states with a little more than half the country’s population — and many of its media outlets.

But suggesting fires are caused by global warming rests on cherrypicking these two regions with more fire and ignoring the remaining 87 per cent of Australia’s landmass, where burned area has declined.

Peer-reviewed estimates of the future of Australia’s fire threat see a long-term increase in burnt area because of global warming. But these estimates show the effect of climate change does not increase Australia’s burnt area until the 2030s or 2040s.

A new review of available data suggests it’s not actually possible to detect a link between global warming and fire for Australia today. An increase will become detectable only in the 2040s. The images coming from Australia are shocking, but images should not trump science. Along with many other campaigners, the Australian Greens argue that preventing fires is about “rapidly transitioning to a renewable energy economy”. Carbon-cutting promises from politicians are not going to do a thing.

Across the Tasman Sea, New Zealand is aiming to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050. The government’s own commissioned report shows this will cost 16 per cent of the nation’s annual economy, or $US5 trillion across the century. It will reduce temperatures by only four-thousandths of a degree by 2100.

Replicate those costs across Australian states and around the world; taxpayers are just not going to withstand that kind of pain, regardless of the intention.

The world’s poor countries are never going to be able to afford to follow through. The costs alone make this “solution” to climate change wishful thinking.

Moreover, even if Australia were dramatically to change its climate policy overnight, the impact on fires would be effectively zero. If Australia had completely ended its fossil fuel use way back in 2012, the UN standard climate model shows the impact on fires this year would be literally immeasurable.

Even if Australia could somehow be entirely fossil fuel-free for the entire century, burnt area in 2100 would be 5.997 per cent instead of 6 per cent.

This feeble, flawed response is pathetic. We need to spend far more resources on green energy research and development to develop medium-term solutions to climate change. And we also should focus on the many straightforward measures that would help now.

Bushfire scientists have consistently told us forest fuel levels keep increasing, making extreme bushfires much more likely. Controlled burns cheaply and effectively reduce high-intensity wildfires. Other sensible policies include better building codes, mechanical thinning, safer powerlines, reducing the potential for spread of lightning-caused bushfires, campaigns to reduce deliberate ignitions, and fuel reduction around the perimeter of human settlements.

The compassionate, effective response to Australia’s tragedy is to focus on the policies that could actually help.

SOURCE  


It's time to step on the gas'

SHUTTING down Australia's coal mines will not reduce emissions or global demand for the resource, Prime Minister Scott Morrison said in a speech pitched at regional Australia — and his backbench. He defended his Government's approach to climate change, saying gas reserves would be necessary to any transition to a clean economy, while investing in technology was key to meeting emissions reduction targets.

But Labor took aim at him for failing to take action on "the summer of damage" climate change was causing. Mr Morrison indicated Australia's emissions reductions targets would not be shifting, despite comments earlier this month his Government's climate policies would be evolving.

He said "taxes and increased global bureaucracy" would not lower emissions, but practical change driven by technology would. "You will also not reduce the number of coal-fired stations in the world today by forcing the shutdown of Australian coal mines and Australian jobs that go with them," Mr Morrison said.

"Other countries will just buy the coal from somewhere else, often poorer quality with greater environmental and climate impacts." He said a transition to lower emissions could be done "with-out sending jobs offshore".

In good news for Queensland's $1 billion petroleum and
coal seam gas industry, Mr Morrison said gas reserves would be key to any transition to more renewable energy in the electricity market. "Gas can help us bridge the gap while our investments in batteries, hydrogen and pumped hydro energy storage bring these technologies to economic parity with traditional energy sources. So right now, we've got to get the gas," Mr Morrison said.

"There are plenty of other medium or long-term fuel arrangements and prospects, but they will not be commercially scalable or available for at least a decade is our advice."

As well as taking "practical steps" in lowering emissions, Mr Morrison said adaptation would be necessary to deal with "the new norm" of longer, hotter and drier summers.

From the Brisbane "Courier Mail" of 30 January, 2020

Greenies hate rock climbers

Parks Victoria has vastly overstated the impact of cultural and environmental damage at national park sites amid fresh doubts about the campaign against Australia’s rock climbers.

For months men and women with clipboards, hard hats and hi-vis jackets have been quietly deliberating among the cliffs in the back blocks of the Grampians National Park, low-key participants in what has become Australia’s seminal public land access dispute.

With specialist surveying tools, the groups have been examining the environmental and cultural heritage impacts of well over a century of white Australian influence in a grand bush setting known to Aboriginal tribes for 22,000 years.

It is widely accepted that Parks Victoria and its predecessors have dropped the environmental ball in recent decades in the outer areas of the park, allowing the Grampians to be degraded by vandalism and at times cavalier behaviour that has alarmed indigenous and green groups.

However, just who committed much of the harm is wide open to debate, given the cross-section of people who visit the park every year from local towns, cities and overseas, arriving on foot, motorbikes, four-wheel drives and even from the air.

At the same time, Parks Victoria has picked an unprecedented fight with the Australian rock climbing fraternity, which has broad implications for recreational access to national and state parks across the country.

The impact, while not as symbolically significant as the end of climbing at Uluru, has the potential to snowball across Australia’s parks, ski fields, mountain biking tracks and climbing theatres as greater power is handed to indigenous co-managers.

With workers in the final stages of surveying large tracts of the Grampians land, Parks Victoria and the traditional owners are planning what sort of access climbers and others will have to the area, potentially maintaining or even widening the effective climbing ban on 500sq km of the park.

Within the current ban areas lie some of the world’s best rock climbing sites. Local businesses such as Mount Zero Log Cabins in the northern Grampians are ­reporting dramatic cuts in revenue, in the order of 25 per cent.

“I’ve got to tell you, I was a bit pissed off about the way Parks Victoria went about it,’’ businessman Neil Heaney tells The Weekend Australian. “They are picking on the wrong people … They (the climbers) are deeply respectful people.’’

There is broad acceptance in the climbing community that there is capacity for its members to overhaul some practices and a willingness to help address core ­issues such as the undermining of vegetation and the need to remove chalk remnants in key areas.

‘Smear campaign’

But there is also growing concern that the Parks Victoria narrative has been bolstered by a series of ­legally unverifiable, anti-climbing claims that included the false ­assertion that a climbing bolt had been put through art. In fact, it was past government workers who desecrated the site.

Valid questions are being asked about whether Environment Minister Lily D’Ambrosio has been ­accurately briefed about who is ­responsible for the most serious harm and whether or not climbers are victims of an excessive spin campaign.

Simon Carter, a climbing photographer with a global following, believes climbers are victims of a sophisticated campaign of vilification. “I believe climbers have been scapegoated to distract from far, far more serious impacts that are occurring to the cultural and environmental values of the park, appalling mismanagement and a sneaky move towards the commercialisation and commodification of our national parks,’’ he says.

“The legal determination ­behind it (the climbing bans) is based on observations and research undertaken at other locations, not based on anything that has actually occurred in the Grampians.

“Rock climbers have been wrongly vilified by parks staff or consultants in what I can only ­describe as a smear campaign based on absolute falsehoods.

“For example, rock climbers were accused of placing safety bolts into Aboriginal rock art. Climbers had done no such thing, not even close, but then Parks published a ‘bolt-in-rock-art’ photo on its website as some ‘evidence’ of climbers’ impacts. But the bolt had been placed by land managers, not climbers. It was a fabrication.

“And photos sent by Parks Victoria in briefing papers to the Minister for the Environment show chain-sawing of trees, fireplaces and other impacts that almost certainly had nothing to do with rock climbers.’’

Evidence doubts

Last March D’Ambrosio was sent a series of photographs from Parks Victoria chief executive Matthew Jackson purporting to show evidence of climber damage, except many of the photos Jackson sent to his minister failed to meet any serious legal test. Instead, what D’Ambrosio received was a series of pictures in which environmental harm had occurred, but with no actual proof of who committed the harm.

Yet this was crucial timing, ­occurring when the government had doubled down on the climbing community.

While different scenarios, the incident is similar to the photographs released by the Howard government in 2001 during the children overboard crisis. In this, there were photos showing that something had happened, but no serious evidence that supported the government’s narrative.

Of the eight images sent to D’Ambrosio, only one shows verifiable harm by climbers; this is of persistent use of chalk at one ­location to help people negotiate a climbing route.

No one would doubt this as climber damage; the rest show a fireplace with nobody around it, a log that had been cut with a chainsaw by an unknown person and some stone stacks created by someone who is not in the picture.

Several other images are of damage to vegetation at Venus Baths, near Hall’s Gap, which has become a popular site for the climbing discipline called bouldering.

What should have been articulated to the minister is that Venus Baths also happens to be one of the most visited tourism hot spots in the Grampians, three hours’ drive west of Melbourne. It is an easy walk for parents with young families, who have trampled through the area for many decades because it is in close proximity to the main town in the park.

Without addressing specific questions on the accuracy of the photographs showing climbing damage, Jackson said in an email: “Information and updates are regularly provided to the Minister for Environment as per standard briefing processes.’’

On the question of who is ­responsible for the damage, he said: “Parks Victoria has continually provided updates on direct recreational impacts in the Grampians to members of the rock climbing roundtable, including updates from independent experts of the impacts of rock climbing at sensitive rock art sites.

“Parks Victoria has specifically informed members of the rock climbing roundtable that not all recreational impacts are caused by rock climbers.”

Assault on art

Parks Victoria has been savaged by climbers and some local businesses for the unilateral bans, which were imposed without any meaningful warning, partly on the basis that the Grampians contain as much as 90 per cent of the indigenous rock art in southeastern Australia.

The Grampians’ Mount Arapiles — Australia’s rock climbing mecca — has just had a major outcrop declared out of bounds ­because of unspecified cultural heritage discoveries. Taylor’s Rock is one of the cradles of rock climbing education in Australia and is a key part of the adventure sport economy that underpins the nearby Natimuk community, 330km northwest of Melbourne.

Ben Gunn, an archaeologist and rock art specialist who recently wrote a paper on the effects of climbing in the Grampians, says he has no doubt who causes the most damage in the park. He also acknowledges that much of the ­indigenous art can’t even be seen with the naked eye and damage may be inadvertent.

“With the explosion of rock climbers in recent years, it is they who currently pose the greatest human threat to cultural heritage sites within the Grampians National Park and surrounding sandstone ranges and potentially to other national and state parks elsewhere in Australia,’’ he wrote with several authors including Jake Goodes, brother of football great Adam Goodes.

Gunn has outraged climbers by claiming that some in their midst were behind graffiti in parts of the wider park; again, climbers want to see the proof of this to a legal standard.

“Much of the graffiti in the Greater Gariwerd (Grampians) has not been produced by rock climbers,’’ Gunn wrote.

“In other instances, particularly at Lil-Lil, it is all too apparent that rock climbers are at fault. At Lil-Lil, some graffiti has been deliberately placed over rock art and the damage is permanent.

“Others have been racially offensive or, through the production of pseudo rock art, deprecating to Aboriginal people and the majority of non-Aboriginal Australians.’’

Chalking, he wrote, was classed as damage comparable to graffiti. Whether this claim about chalking as graffiti passes the legal test is questionable, particularly if people do not know there is art where they are climbing.

Australian Climbing Association Victoria president Mike Tomkins is open to overhauling some climbing practices to protect indigenous art, but says accusations of climbers writing over art and carving words into rock walls are false and unverifiable. “You can’t prove it. You cannot pin that on climbers. All the locations have been visited before there were even climbers,’’ Tomkins says.

While the climbing community has been divided about how to deal with the crisis, there is deep angst about the way the pursuit has been characterised. Climbers have congregated for decades at the Grampians and Mount Arapiles has traditionally been strongly green and sympathetic to the indigenous plight.

Others are highly sceptical, also, about figures used by Parks to suggest an unprecedented rise in climber numbers in recent years, arguing that while there is an uplift in interest, Parks Victoria has greatly exaggerated the number of extra climbers by misreading the statistics.

Uncle Ron Marks, a Wotjobaluk elder with close ties to Mount Arapiles and the Grampians, has worked in cultural education for decades, teaching about indigenous history. He wants a pragmatic approach that protects heritage, but enables people to go about their business in the knowledge that at Mount Arapiles, for example, the indigenous connection is long-running.

He warns the “kerfuffle’’ affecting climbing at both locations is having a clear impact. “You look at it from a business point of view, people are suffering,’’ he tells The Weekend Australian.

Meanwhile, climbers are locked in a form of political purgatory, with no clear line of sight to when the ascension to higher ground will be guaranteed.

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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3 February, 2020  

Climate delusion: Washington Post claims more plant growth is bad



Is it better or worse to have a global climate that benefits plant growth? The obvious answer would be, better. However, now that it is has been shown that global warming benefits plant growth, climate activists and their media allies want us to believe more plant growth is bad.

The Washington Post is the latest to assert that more plant growth is bad, consistent with other ridiculous claims seeking to advance the alarmist Climate Delusion. In a January 25 article, titled, “We can’t recall the planet if we mess up: Climate change is risky business,” the article’s first asserted example of an ongoing climate crisis is, “The [National Climate Assessment] says there is at least a two-thirds chance that your asthma or hay fever will get worse because of climate change.” (https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2020/01/25/we-cant-recall-planet-if-we-mess-up-climate-change-is-risky-business/)

Each spring, as plants emerge from winter dormancy and spring to life, the alarmist media publishes articles about how global warming makes allergies worse. For all the benefits of plant life, more plant life means more pollen in the air, so people who suffer through allergies tend to experience more symptoms in the spring. This is a Climate Delusion opportunity the media won’t miss.

While pollen and its effects on people with allergies is unfortunate, few rational people would argue that a more difficult climate for plant life is a good thing. A greening of the Earth is a thing to celebrate. So, too, is more bountiful crop yields. Yet the establishment media ignore these benefits and talk only about allergies, making the argument that when the Earth’s climate benefits plant life, that is a bad thing.

And that is yet another example of the twisted logic of the ongoing Climate Delusion.

SOURCE 






Alarmist scientists urge dialing back scares

Two prominent climate scientists who adhere to United Nations climate assessments are scolding the media and alarmist scientists for claiming worst-case scenarios are the most likely climate outcome. In a January 29 commentary (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00177-3) published in the peer-reviewed science journal Nature, Zeke Hausfather of Berkeley Earth and Glen Peters of the Center for International Climate Research explained that worst-case scenarios, typically presented as the default likely future climate, are extremely unlikely.

“Happily — and that’s a word we climatologists rarely get to use — the world imagined in RCP8.5 [the “business as usual” scenario of substantially increasing emissions and negative impacts] is one that, in our view, becomes increasingly implausible with every passing year,” the scientists wrote.

“A sizeable portion of the literature on climate impacts refers to RCP8.5 as business as usual, implying that it is probable in the absence of stringent climate mitigation,” the scientists explained. “The media then often amplifies this message, sometimes without communicating the nuances. This results in further confusion regarding probable emissions outcomes, because many climate researchers are not familiar with the details of these scenarios in the energy-modelling literature.”

The scientists emphasized that the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) scenarios of weak or modest emissions mitigation – rather than no emissions mitigation or strong mitigation – are most likely. The scientists noted the weak or modest mitigation scenarios project a temperature increase of 2.5-to-3.0 degrees above pre-industrial levels in 2100, versus the worst-case 5.0-degree increase frequently presented by activists and the media.

“We must all — from physical scientists and climate-impact modelers to communicators and policymakers — stop presenting the worst-case scenario as the most likely one,” the scientists wrote. “Overstating the likelihood of extreme climate impacts can make mitigation seem harder than it actually is.”

With a general belief existing that temperatures are currently about 1 degree Celsius warmer than was the case during the depths of the Little Ice Age prior to the Industrial Revolution, the two scientists believe the Earth is on pace for approximately 1.5 to 2.0 degrees Celsius warming during the next 80 years. Temperature measurements from NASA satellites (http://www.drroyspencer.com/latest-global-temperatures/) show warming of merely at a pace of 0.13 degrees Celsius per decade during the past 40 years, suggesting that unless something changes, we can expect merely 1.0 degrees warming as the most likely scenario during the next 80 years.

Interestingly, Scientific American published an article about the two scientists’ findings and titled it, “The Worst Climate Scenarios May No Longer Be the Most Likely.” As if the worst climate scenario ever was the most likely….

SOURCE 






Eco-extremists attack crucial pesticides, punish the poorest in Kenya

One has to wonder why Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) that are funded by Left-wing financiers attempt to thwart the poorest in our world from achieving an adequate diet and sufficient income to climb above poverty. Yet, without a convincing positive reason for their actions, they do it around the world. We frequently see villages in Africa, for example, deprived of conventional power from coal and natural gas in favor of expensive and undependable wind and solar power favored by the anti-fossil fuel community.

Now in Kenya a story is shaping up that takes an even more ugly turn. There some ill-informed and deceitful Green groups are asking the Kenyan government to outlaw the use of important chemical pesticides that protect its crops from the ravages of pest infestations. The numbers are difficult to assimilate.

Two of these NGOs — the Biodiversity and Biosafety Association of Kenya and the Kenya Organic Agriculture Network — tip off their goals in their titles. The third is too vague and obtuse to bother naming. They have collectively asked that 262 useful pesticides be outlawed by the Kenyan Parliament. For the moment the Parliament is not in session, so there may be time to educate them about the lies and innuendos being spread against pesticide use by the environmental extremists.

Many of the targeted pesticides by these activist groups have been tested and approved by foreign governments, and others have not been because they aren’t useful against the native pests in other countries. Of greatest concern to Kenyan agriculture would be the end of the use of effective chemicals that kill the locusts ravaging Kenya on a regular basis.

Every successful killing of a locust swarm, which is how they attack, saves gigantic quantities of food for a nation like Kenya without abundance. At the risk of causing your eyes to glaze over, I will define “gigantic” with the use of some simple arithmetic. Stay with me and you will well understand why I often use the word evil for those who finance such radical environmental fearmongering.

Locusts swarm at densities of 40 to 60 million thick over an acre of crop land. Obviously, it is impossible to spray the entire agricultural acreage of Kenya, but let’s see what we could accomplish if we spray half a square mile of farmland or 320 acres. I will give you the simple cumulative numbers, and if you wish you too can do all the arithmetic to be sure I am not exaggerating.

From birth to full maturity a locus will lay an average of 80 eggs. Each locus eats about 2.5 grams a day for a life span averaging 4 months which is 300 grams per locust. Then their 80 progeny eat about 150 grams while alive during the last two months of the mother’s life, and half of them have laid 60 eggs by the end of that time. Without a calculator you can figure out that every locust will account for 744 kilograms, or about three quarters of a ton, of food per month by a single locust and its offspring over 4 months of its life cycle. In four months the total is 3 tons of food. Now assume an average of 50 million locusts per acre and you will find spraying 320 acres saves, wait for it, 480,000 tons of food! That feeds a lot of folks and earns a lot of money.

The NGOs lobbying the Kenyan government hope to eliminate the opportunities to grow this food by allowing the locusts to run free and unhindered by the pesticides that can eliminate them. They have thrown up a smoke screen of complaints on chemicals not substantiated by research investigations. It is quite easy to scare the public by listing strange sounding chemicals of which the people have no understanding. They do this all over the world, but due to Kenya’s severe problem with locusts the damage that can occur as a result of their despicable actions, this could have a catastrophic impact on that nation’s food supply and economy.

SOURCE 







Students demanded divestment from fossil fuels, a professor offered to turn off the gas heating

Professor Andrew Parker of St John’s College at Oxford University is my new favorite person. The Times of London reports that a group of students wrote to Professor Parker to discuss demands being made by student protesters about fossil fuel divestment. His response wasn’t what they were expecting:

Two students at St John’s College wrote to Andrew Parker, the principal bursar, this week requesting a meeting to discuss the protesters’ demands, which are that the college “declares a climate emergency and immediately divests from fossil fuels”. They say that the college, the richest in Oxford, has £8 million of its £551 million endowment fund invested in BP and Shell.

Professor Parker responded with a provocative offer. “I am not able to arrange any divestment at short notice,” he wrote. “But I can arrange for the gas central heating in college to be switched off with immediate effect. Please let me know if you support this proposal.”

One of the students wrote back and said he would present the proposal but he didn’t think Parker was being appropriately serious. Professor Parker responded to that note saying, “You are right that I am being provocative but I am provoking some clear thinking, I hope. It is all too easy to request others to do things that carry no personal cost to yourself. The question is whether you and others are prepared to make personal sacrifices to achieve the goals of environmental improvement (which I support as a goal).” The best part of the story is the response from the organizer of the protest:

Fergus Green, the organiser of the wider protest, who is studying for a master’s degree in physics and philosophy at Balliol College, said: “This is an inappropriate and flippant response by the bursar to what we were hoping would be a mature discussion. It’s January and it would be borderline dangerous to switch off the central heating.”

Yes, it would be rash and “borderline dangerous” to do something like that.

Now step back and take notice how closely this small debate at one college is a microcosm of the larger debate taking place around the globe. The teenage face of the anti-fossil fuel movement, Greta Thunberg, recently demanded “real zero” emissions starting right now. Following her advice would be the equivalent of cutting off the gas that heats the campus in the middle of winter. It wouldn’t just be “borderline dangerous” it would almost certainly be catastrophic for millions of people. Despite this, I bet protest organizer Fergus Green thinks she’s part of a “mature discussion.” In any case, a lot of people like him seem to think so.

Professor Parker’s response focuses the mind on the fact that this isn’t a game. There are significant costs to real people associated with eliminating fossil fuels. Natural gas, for instance, isn’t something we can simply cease using overnight or even in ten years. If we’re not careful about how we proceed, a lot of people could get hurt. So a fair response to people demanding an end to the use of fossil fuels is the one the professor put to these protesters: You first.

SOURCE 






Melbourne will RUN OUT of fresh water by 2050 if nothing is done about global warming

Another prime example of how a total lack of thinking on the part of Greenies gets things backwards  Global warming would HELP Melbourne's water supply. 

I don't know how much longer I will have the heart to repeat it but we have known at least since the ancient Greeks that warming water gives off water vapour (steam). And two thirds of the "planet" (to use the Greenie term) is covered by water. So global warming would warm that water and increase its tendency to give off water vapour.  And what happens to that water once it is evaporated off?  It comes down again.  We call it "rain".  So a warmer world would be a rainier world.

Why do Warmists keep ignoring something they should have known since Grade school?  It shows that they are not thinking at all.  They just pump out propaganda according to a simple recipe: "Warming bad".  They are not honest debaters


Melbourne will be at risk of running dry by 2050 if no measures are taken to slow global warming and improve water security, a study has found.

The city ranked fifth in a list of global cities that will be most affected by climate change in 30 years' time. The list - which measures sea-level rising, water shortages and weather changes - was compiled by accommodation website Nestpick based on existing climate data.

Perth ranked 56th and Sydney was 66th but no other Australian cities were in the top 100.

Melbourne was ranked so high because its demand for water is predicted to vastly outweigh current supply as its population soars.

In 2018, the Australian Bureau of Statistics predicted that Melbourne will become the largest city in Australia by 2031 - and will have a population of 12.2million by 2066. 

Jono La Nauze, CEO of Environment Victoria, said Nestpick's results are roughly accurate - but that drought in Melbourne can be avoided by sensible policies.

'It certainly stacks up with what the climate science is showing will happen, if you don't do anything about it,' he told radio 3AW on Thursday.

'But the key messages is that these are risks we can manage - both in terms of stopping the planet getting any hotter but also by making sure we have secure drinking water supplies whatever happens.'

Melbourne's water is supplied from ten reservoirs which are topped up by rain and a desalination plant that removes salt from seawater.

The Victorian Desalination Plant at Dalyston on the Bass Coast in southern Victoria opened in 2012 after the Millennium Drought and now supplies one third of the city's water.

For the 2019-20 financial year, the Minister for Water ordered 125 billion litres from the Desalination Plant, the largest order that has been made to date.

At the moment, Melbourne is not in danger of drought.

The city's total storage capacity is at 62.6 per cent and its largest reservoir, the Thomson Dam which can hold 1,069 megalitres of water, is 55.8 per cent full. 

But experts are generally agreed that the city will need to shore up its water security as its population expands.

There are three main ways to do this: by building more dams, creating more desalination plants, and by recycling water for drinking purposes.

Recycling water for drinking is already done in Namibia, South Africa and the US but the only Australian city that currently follows suit is Perth. Melbourne has two recycling plants but the recycled water is not used for drinking.

State ministers could follow Brisbane's lead after the city in 2010 designed the Western Corridor Recycled Water Scheme to recycle almost all of its water.

The scheme has not been needed but if stores drop below 40 per cent it could be recommissioned.

In September federal Water Resources Minister David Littleproud said more dams should be built - but Victorian ministers rejected the idea.

He said the federal government has offered $1.3bn for new infrastructure projects but state governments are too reluctant to build dams due to cost and environmental issues.

'They're just not keeping up with their growing populations,' he told The Australian.

But Victorian Water Minister Lisa Neville hit back, saying there was no point building new dams because there is very rarely enough rain to fill them.

'The dams we have already are in the best places to collect a high yield of water - any new dams would be unlikely to capture enough water to be worth it,' she told the newspaper.

'For Minister Littleproud to suggest otherwise demonstrates a complete lack of understanding when it comes to water and climate change, especially in Victoria.'

Ms Neville pointed out that Victoria's Thomson Dam has only filled three times since it was built in 1984, most recently in 1996.

She said a better alternative is to expand the state's desalination plant even though this would increase water bills by at least $10 per household because desalination uses lots of electricity.

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 February, 2020  

Climate change is causing the Arctic to become GREENER as warmer temperatures cause trees and plants to flourish in the frozen world

Most of the Arctic is water, with ice floating on top of it.  So this article is referring to peripheral regions of the Arctic, which vary greatly in climate.

The largest land mass is Greenland, which is known to have substantial subsurface vulcanism.  And even the oceanic parts of Arctica have extensive vulcanism -- along the Gakkel ridge, for instance.  So Arctica commonly warms out of synchrony with the rest of the globe. It warms and cools in response to fluctuations in volcanic activity.   Its temperature is determined only partly by global influences. A lot of its warming is due to the greater volcanic activity at the poles. 

The earth is not a perfect globe.  It is flattened at the poles.  So that is where volcanic activity is most likely to break through.  And it does, at both poles

So the findings below are attributed to global warming in defiance of the fact that Arctic warming is NOT synchronous with global warming.

And the greening observed is easily explained not by temperatures but by CO2 levels -- which have undoubtedly risen.  Higher CO encourages plant growth and enables plants to survive with less water. Terrestrial Arctica is essentially a desert so that latter fact is crucial.  In the results below we may simply be seeing the normal fertilizing effect of increased CO2.


Ecologists are on 'red alert' as warmer temperatures caused by climate change causes the Arctic to become greener. The Arctic is normally a vast and barren expanse of frozen land but higher temperatures are now allowing foliage to thrive.

Trees and plants are being found in areas that were once perennially frozen, according to a new study.

The worrying phenomenon - branded 'Arctic greening' - is being studied by researchers using drones and satellites.

A group of 40 scientists from 36 institutions, led by two National Geographic Explorers, are behind the huge project.

As Arctic summer temperatures warm, snow is melting earlier and plants are coming into leaf sooner in spring.

Tundra vegetation is spreading into new areas and in the areas where plants have always survived, they are now flourishing. 

Study lead author Dr Isla Myers-Smith, of the University of Edinburgh's School of GeoSciences, said: 'New technologies including sensors on drones, planes and satellites, are enabling scientists to track emerging patterns of greening found within satellite pixels that cover the size of football fields.'

Changes in vegetation alter how carbon is captured and released into the atmosphere.

Small changes to this balance could significantly impact efforts to keep warming below 1.5°C – a key target of the Paris Agreement.

But researchers in Europe and North America also found Arctic greening, which can be seen from space, is caused by various factors.

Ground warming is important, researchers found, but so are changes to the timing of snow melt and the wetness of landscapes.

The new study was published in the journal Nature Climate Change.

The team behind it say it is vital for understanding global climate change because tundra plants act as a barrier between the warming atmosphere and huge stocks of carbon stored in frozen ground.

Co-lead author Dr Jeffrey Kerby, who was a Neukom Fellow at Dartmouth College while conducting the research, said: 'Besides collecting new imagery, advances in how we process and analyse these data - even imagery that is decades old - are revolutionising how we understand the past, present, and future of the Arctic.'

Alex Moen, Vice President of Explorer Programmes at the National Geographic Society, added: 'We look forward to the impact that this work will have on our collective understanding of the Arctic for generations to come.'

SOURCE 






Groundbreaking footage of Antarctica's large Thwaites glacier captured by an underwater robot shows warm water under the glacier

Notice the dog that didn't bark?  They do not mention global warming. As with all Green/Left writing, you are given only half the story.  They COULD NOT attribute the warming observed to global warming because  the warming was UNDER the glacier whereas atmospheric warming would affect the SURFACE of the glacier!

And note that the Thwaites glacier is in the middle of West Antarctica, which is well known for it extensive vulcanism.  The warming observed could only have come from volcanic activity, making this just another confirmation of West Antarctic vulcanism

Given the sporadic nature of volcanic activity, it is puerile to extrapolate the observations below into the distant future


First ever footage of the underside of the 'doomsday' Thwaites glacier has been sent back by a robotic yellow submarine dubbed Icefin.

Glaciologists have likened the groundbreaking images and video to the first steps on the moon taken by Neil Armstrong in 1969.

Early analysis reveals that turbulent warm waters underneath the ice sheet, which is the same size as Britain, are causing an 'unstoppable retreat'.

Experts have previously predicted that if Thwaites was to melt completely, it would lead to a significant increase in worldwide sea levels of around two feet (65cm).

Preliminary data from Icefin was analysed by a team of researchers at New York University and found, for the first time, the presence of warm water underneath the glacier at its grounding line — where the glacier rests on the ocean bed.

David Holland, director of New York University's Environmental Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, said: 'If these waters are causing glacier melt in Antarctica, resulting changes in sea level would be felt in more inhabited parts of the world.'

'The fact that such warm water was just now recorded by our team along a section of Thwaites grounding zone where we have known the glacier is melting suggests that it may be undergoing an unstoppable retreat that has huge implications for global sea level rise,' notes Holland, a professor at NYU's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences.

Icefin was deployed five times and covered a distance of more than nine miles (15km) after being released through a borehole 2,000ft (600-meter) deep and 12 inches (35cm) wide earlier this month.

Two of the missions involved travelling as close as possible to the grounding line. 

It was recently announced that in mid-January scientists conducted the first fieldwork on Thwaites. 

One of the projects from a vast UK-US joint task force involved drilling holes through the glacier near its grounding line. 

Some experts call it a grounding line, and some call it a grounding zone, as its exact shape is unknown and  the glacier's base may come into contact with the seabed at various locations.

At this grounding zone, the ice shelf is 1,900 feet (580m) thick.

The submersible yellow submarine-like robot Icefin is capable of navigating the sub-zero waters and was fed through one borehole to study how the glacier is melting.

Icefin is designed to take several measurements, including tracking the turbulence of the water as well as its temperature.

Turbulence causes fresh meltwater from the glacier to mix with salty water from the ocean.

Icefin swam more nine miles (15 km) during five missions, including two to the grounding site — where most melting is thought to be occurring. 

Dr Britney Schmidt, a glaciologist at the Georgia Institute of Technology, said: 'We saw amazing ice interactions driven by sediments at the [grounding] line and from the rapid melting from warm ocean water.'

Icefin measured, imaged and mapped the process causing melting at this critical part of the glacier.

The icy 'ceiling' seen in the video is the bottom of the glacier's ice shelf. This section floats in the water as opposed to being nestled on the seafloor.

The observations made by Icefin capture sediment that was on the sea floor just hours previously, as the glacier drifts constantly, exposing new sections of the ice.

Britney Schmidt, a glaciologist at the Georgia Institute of Technology, told The Athletic: 'We can definitely see it melting.

'There are a few places where you can see streams of particles coming off the glaciers, textures and particles that tell us it's melting pretty quickly and irregularly.'

Melting of Thwaites is cause for global concern as its sheer enormity means that it contains enough ice that, if it was to melt, there would be worldwide implications.

Sea level rise would be drastic, up to around 25 inches (63.5cm), and the reach of the ripple-effect would be vast. 

SOURCE 






Doctor Who and the Deadly Wokeness Peril

On 12 January 2020 the BBC aired Episode 3 of their latest season of Doctor Who, starring Jodie Whittaker as the eponymous Doctor. The episode was called Orphan 55, it was about climate change and was, it seems, not generally well-received by the viewers.

The story starts with the Doctor and her companions being teleported to a mysterious holiday resort. Various mishaps occur and it turns out that this luxury resort exists in a kind of bubble, outside of which lies a barren, toxic wasteland inhabited by vicious (and rather rubbery) monsters called “dregs”. We find out eventually that the planet is in fact a future Earth which has been ruined by catastrophic man-made climate change, and the unfriendly “dregs” are the CO2-breathing descendants of humans who have adapted to the horrible conditions on Earth by becoming pretty horrible themselves.

Much has been said by various reviewers about the lame story, sub-par costumes, leaden script and uninspired acting, But what stood out for me was the fact that there wasn’t really much in the way of science fiction at all in this episode, despite all the SF trappings. It basically amounted to being a sermon about the evils of man-made climate change.

“How did Earth end up like this?” asks one character.

“You had warnings, from every scientist alive”, says the Doctor. “The food chain collapses – mass migration and war.”

And a sermon is what Jodie Whittaker actually delivers at the end, with all the subtlety of a ball peen hammer to the head.

“You want me to tell you that Earth’s going to be okay. ‘Cos I can’t. In your time, humanity is busy arguing over the washing up, while the house burns down. Unless people face facts and change, catastrophe is coming. But it’s not decided. You know that. The future is not fixed, it depends on billions of decisions and actions, and people stepping up. Humans… I think you forget how powerful you are. Lives change worlds. People can save planets or wreck them – that’s the choice. Be the best of humanity, or…” [scene cuts to a roaring “dreg”.]

Well, some people liked it. Rotten Tomatoes currently gives this episode a score of 50%, with an average rating of 5.8/10. And on IMDb there are a handful of 10-star reviews. However, Season 12 as a whole currently gets an audience score of only 14% on Rotten Tomatoes. And the majority of reviews of Orphan 55 on IMDb fall into the 1-3 star bracket and are somewhat scathing!

1. Amongst the negative reviewers there were some who were fine with the climate change message but nevertheless hated the unsubtle and preachy way that it was delivered at the expense of the story. And this goes to the heart of the matter, really. People watch Doctor Who to be entertained, rather than be hit over the head with a sandwich board.

2. An environmental message can be woven into a story without this kind of preachy overkill. When Jon Pertwee was the Doctor in 1973 there was an adventure called The Green Death – it featured industrial pollution, a sinister mega-corporation and toxic green slime that infected and slowly killed anyone who touched it. The environmental message was definitely there – but it did not get in the way of what was an enjoyable, thoughtful and very creepy tale from Doctor Who’s heyday.

3. The show’s ratings now seem to be falling steeply – and the previous season’s ratings were on the bumpy side, too. Back in 2018, my impression was that viewers were already being turned off by the tedious and excessive wokeness, once the wow factor of having a female Doctor began to wear off. The BBC had a chance then to step back and reflect on why their customers were voting with their feet (or their remote controls, rather) and going elsewhere for their entertainment. Maybe lay off a bit on the sermonising and focus on creating some great stories? They managed it in 1973, why not now?

But no. And that’s what ties this in with the “culture war” being played out elsewhere in 2020. The BBC (and the establishment in general) still don’t seem to get it, that outside their bubble, there are a lot of people – voters, customers, viewers, ordinary folk – who are beginning to get tired of being preached at and told that they are bad people for having opinions that deviate even slightly from the approved, progressive, bien-pensant vision of the world. Even people who consider themselves to be basically on-message are getting tired of it.

How will all of this end? I don’t know. But (unlike Doctor Who, in its current form) whatever happens next should at least be interesting to watch.


SOURCE 





GREENIE ROUNDUP FROM AUSTRALIA

Three current articles below

Gas investment will drive more extreme weather

So says the self-appointed Climate Council below.  Natural gas gives off much less CO2 when burnt than coal does so you would think the climate council would welcome it.  But like all Greenies, they know no compromise. They want it all now.

Their claim that renewables are cheaper is misleading.  It is cheap in some ways only because it receives large subsidies.  It is tax powered.

And the claim that CO2 drives extreme weather is just an assertion.  The U.N., among others, says there is no proof of that

The bushfires are the result of negligent forest management, nothing more


SCOTT MORRISON, just days after addressing the nation with ‘climate action now’, has today announced a significant investment in new fossil fuels, with the New South Wales Government.

“Fossil fuels are the problem. Burning coal, oil, and gas is driving climate change, which is making Australia’s extremes, more extreme,” said the Climate Council’s CEO, Amanda McKenzie. “Every dollar toward fossil fuel projects is a dollar toward making heatwaves worse and fires more damaging. It is just crazy, given everything we have lost this summer to even suggest opening new fossil fuel reserves,” said McKenzie.

“More gas isn’t a climate policy it is a pollution policy. While fires are still threatening lives and properties - why is the Government investing in making the problem worse,” she said.

“You don’t reduce emissions by increasing investment in fossil fuels,” said Climate Councillor and energy expert, Greg Bourne. “The idea that gas will reduce prices is nonsensical. Gas is the reason power prices are so high along the east coast of Australia. Renewables are the cheapest form of new generation. Cheaper than coal, oil and gas,” said Climate Councillor and energy expert, Greg Bourne.

“Investing in gas will ensure power prices keep rising, and Australia spews out even more greenhouse gas emissions, contributing to pushing climate change to new and terrifying extremes,” said Bourne.

 “We have just witnessed an unprecedented bushfire crisis. Lives, homes, wildlife and millions of hectares of Australia simply burnt and gone. The Prime Ministers’ job is to protect Australians but he's making the problem worse,” said McKenzie.

Via email. Contact Communications Advisor, Brianna Hudson on 0455 238 875.


Struggling public hospital REFUSES to accept a $15M donation - because it was made by a coal mining company

Destructive Greenie fanaticism again

A struggling hospital has been accused of 'ideological grandstanding' after turning down a $15million cash injection - because it came from a coal mining company. 

Wyong Hospital, on the New South Wales Central Coast, has been dogged by complaints over low nurse numbers and emergency wait times - and last October sent a one-year-old home with a fractured neck without staff ordering scans. 

But the hospital board has refused Wallarah 2 Coal Project's offer to donate $14.8million over the mine's 28-year life span because of 'community sentiment' and 'public health effects'.

The project, due to begin in 2022, has been approved by the state ­government and the ­independent planning commission, which takes into consideration pollution and health impacts. 

Wyong Coal Wallarah 2 general manager Peter ­Allonby and site manager Kenny Barry claimed a board member said hospital board members compared the handout to 'taking money from a tobacco company', The Daily Telegraph reported.

Central Coast Local Health District boss Andrew Montague released a statement this week stating the offer was not appropriate 'to accept at this stage'.

'[This is] due to current community sentiment and potential public health effects, particularly in relation to air quality and noise pollution,' he said.

It is common for mining companies to pour money into local community infrastructure, and the state government alone rakes in $2billion from industry royalties annually.

The contribution would be an average of $528,000 a year - or the wages of at least six nurses.

According to the Department of Planning and Environment, the $800million mine is expected to create more than 1,700 direct and indirect jobs. 

The hospital board's decision to reject the funds has been criticised by officials, but many within the community have launched online petition to stop the mine.

Deputy Premier John Barilaro said the decision would impact the Wyong community.

'For them to reject what is a very generous donation from a company wanting to be a good corporate citizen is a slap in the face for that community,' he said.

The father of the one-year-old sent home with a fractured neck last year also described the refusal to accept the offer as a 'slap in the face'.

SOURCE  


Federal Government chooses Kimba farm on the Eyre Peninsula for nuclear dump

The Federal Government has selected a farm on South Australia's Eyre Peninsula as the site of a controversial nuclear waste dump.

The decision to use the 160-hectare area for what the Government calls a "disposal and storage facility" was made after four years of consultation.

Nearly 62 per cent of people voted in favour of the site being used in November, while a site near Hawker in the Flinders Ranges was opposed by Aboriginal traditional owners and residents.

The Federal Government said the $200 million facility would boost the region's economy and create about 45 jobs during construction.

It comes with a $31 million community development package to give local businesses and workers skills to build and run the dump. "I am satisfied a facility at Napandee will safely and securely manage radioactive waste and that the local community has shown broad community support for the project and economic benefits it will bring," Resources Minister Matt Canavan said.

Dump to consolidate nuclear waste

Local federal Liberal MP Rowan Ramsey said waste would come in from more than 100 sites around Australia, such as hospitals and universities, and the Lucas Heights nuclear reactor in Sydney.

Processed medium-level nuclear fuel rods from Lucas Heights will be temporarily stored at Kimba while a permanent site is found for them, he said.

Mr Ramsey, who tried to nominate his own property near Kimba for the dump but was barred as a federal MP, said there would be no fly-in, fly-out workers at the facility. "All of those things should provide a long-term economic benefit to the community," 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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IN BRIEF


Home (Index page)


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 books

The 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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