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
This is a backup copy of the original blog
28 February, 2021
As clean as electricity: Porsche to start making synthetic fuel next year that could slash petrol-engined cars' CO2 emissions by 85%
I get the idea. It is to build up a fuel from basic components rather than modifying an existing fuel. It would have to be very expensive
And I can't see how it would help. The fuel will still be a hydrocarbon and burning a hydrocarbon gives off CO2
The whole thing is very light on detail -- probably for good reasons
Porsche has outlined plans to begin trials in 2022 that could save its high-performance petrol cars from extinction.
The German sports car maker has been developing its own synthetic fuel - or eFuel - that it claims would cut CO2 emissions produced by internal combustion engines by as much as 85 per cent.
The fuel would not require any modifications to a car and be compatible with both current and older vehicles - and it could make existing motors as clean as electric cars, when you take into account the carbon footprint created during production and supply.
Porsche has been working in partnership with Siemens Energy and other international companies since last year to develop and implement a pilot project in Chile designed to yield the 'world's first integrated, commercial, industrial-scale plant for making synthetic climate-neutral fuels'.
Last week, the company's head of motorsport, Dr Frank Walliser, provided an update on the plans ahead of the unveiling of the new £123,100 Porsche 911 GT3.
With a 4.0-litre naturally-aspirated flat-six engine that can rev to a wailing 9,000rpm and produce a maximum 503bhp, it's no slouch - accelerating from 0-to-62mph in 3.4 seconds and to a top speed of 199mph.
But while it might be quick, it won't be particularly good for the planet when using traditional unleaded petrol. Porsche quotes CO2 emissions of 283 to 304g/km, depending on the car's specification.
With strict carbon targets set for manufacturers to meet and the impending ban on new petrol and diesel cars across various nations - it comes in from 2030 in the UK - it will spell an end to Porsche's internal combustion engine sports cars.
Porsche has already started its own transition to electric vehicles, with the launch of the impressive Taycan - priced from £70,690 in the UK - from 2019.
However, Walliser says the brand is set to begin trials of its own synthetic fuel next year that Porsche believes could make its high-performance petrol cars just as economical as an electric vehicle.
He explained that the company, working with partners in South America, will 'for sure' start trials in 2022, though they will be 'very small volume' initially.
'It's a long road with huge investment, but we are sure that this is an important part of our global effort to reduce the CO2 impact of the transportation sector,' he added.
In December, the company announced a new partnership with energy firms Siemens Energy, AME and Enel and the Chilean petroleum company ENAP.
The aim is to build a plant specifically for the commercial production of synthetic fuels in Chile, which will use the location's blustery environment to produce eFuels with the aid of wind power.
If operational in 2022, Porsche says it could be producing 55 million litres of greener synthetic fuel by 2024, and as much as ten times that amount two years later.
Commenting on the plans last year, Porsche CEO Oliver Blume reaffirmed that 'electromobility' remains the top priority at Porsche but eFuels for cars are a 'worthwhile complement to that' – as long as they’re produced in parts of the world where a 'surplus of sustainable energy is available'.
'They are an additional element on the road to decarbonisation,' Blume said in December. 'Their advantages lie in their ease of application: eFuels can be used in combustion engines and plug-in hybrids, and can make use of the existing network of filling stations.
'By using them, we can make a further contribution toward protecting the climate. As a maker of high-performance, efficient engines, we have broad technical expertise. We know exactly what fuel characteristics our engines need in order to operate with minimal impact on the climate. Our involvement in the world’s first commercial, integrated eFuels plant supports the development of the alternative fuels of the future.'
Speaking last week at the premier of the 911 GT3, Walliser added: 'The general idea behind these synthetic fuels is that there is no change to the engine necessary, unlike what we have seen with E10 and E20, so really, everybody can use it, and we are testing with the regular specs of pump fuel.'
'It has no impact on performance - some horses more, so it's going in the right direction - but emissions are way better; we see less particles, less NOx - so that's going in the right direction'.
Explaining how they work, Walliser detailed: 'Synthetic fuels have around eight to ten components, where today's fuels have between 30 and 40.
As it's an artificial, synthetic fuel, you have no by-products, so it's way cleaner - everything positive for the engine
'As it's an artificial, synthetic fuel, you have no by-products, so it's way cleaner - everything positive for the engine.'
He added: 'At full scale, we expect a reduction in the CO2 impact of around 85 per cent.
'If you consider well-to-wheel, where we have to transport fuel, we have a global supply chain, everything around that - you have efficiency across the whole process. In a well-to-wheel consideration, it is on the same level as an electric car.'
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Real Threats to Threatened Species
Paul Driessen
Many activists, politicians and regulators are convinced our Earth and its wild kingdoms are threatened by fossil fuels, conventional farming, modern living standards, and catastrophic climate change resulting from the aforementioned human activities. They promote these fears to gain ever-greater control over energy and economic systems, circumscribe personal freedoms, and silence questions and dissent.
Few of them could likely hunt, gather or grow sufficient food for their families, or be a lucky protagonist in an episode of the Weather Channel’s Could You Survive? series – much less endure Mary Draper Ingles’ harrowing 800-mile walk through the 1755 wilderness to escape captivity by Shawnee Indians.
They are strident in their opposition to synthetic herbicides, insecticides and fertilizers, and unbending in their mistaken belief that organic farmers don’t use pesticides – or at least none that aren’t perfectly safe for people and wildlife. They ignore the widespread use of “natural, organic” chemicals like copper sulfate, which is toxic to humans, deadly to fish, harmful to avian and mammalian reproductive systems, poisonous to sheep and chickens, and highly persistent and bioaccumulative in soil and water.
Their obsession with “dangerous man made climate change” ignores reality. Their computer models run hot, consistently predicting planetary temperatures significantly warmer than are actually measured. The warning they fuss over may have begun around the industrial age, but it also coincides with Earth’s emergence from the 500-year-long Little Ice Age – a completely natural phenomenon.
The extreme weather events they blame on fossil fuels and rising atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are not increasing in frequency or intensity. Above all, no credible science supports their claims that today’s weather and climate are entirely human-driven ... and unrelated to the natural processes and fluctuations that caused glacial epochs, warm periods, and extreme weather events and cycles throughout history.
Their gravest error by far, however, is their insistence that wildlife and their habitats would be saved by eliminating fossil fuel for electricity generation, transportation, heating and cooking. In reality, the biggest threats plants, animals and habitats face are not from climate change. They are from energy policies and programs implemented in the name of stabilizing Earth’s never-stable climate.
The current rush to employ executive orders, Green New Deals and infrastructure bills to shut down fossil fuel production and use – and get all of America’s energy from wind, solar and biofuel power – will result in millions of acres of scenic areas, wildlife habitats and croplands blanketed by huge industrial facilities, to provide the energy that makes America’s jobs, health and living standards possible.
Coal, oil and natural gas now generate over 2.7 billion megawatt-hours of electricity per year. Vehicles consume the equivalent of another 2 billion MWh annually, while natural gas provides an additional 2.7 billion MWh for home, business and factory heating, water heating, cooking and industrial processes.
That’s 7.5 billion MWh, just for the United States. It’s an enormous amount of power – and it doesn’t include oil and gas feed stocks for plastics, pharmaceuticals and countless other petrochemical products (which is where corn, soybeans and other biofuel crops enter the replace-fossil-fuels picture). It also doesn’t include power to charge backup batteries for sunless, windless hours, days and weeks.
“Renewable” energy advocates and lobbyists want us to believe we can do this with very few wind turbines and/or solar panels – on a relatively small swath of the USA. One calculated it would require just 1,939 square miles (1,240,000 acres; Delaware) of solar panels to meet existing US electricity needs; another said 10,000 square miles (Maryland); a third estimated 40,223 square miles (half of Ohio).
Another figured we could replace current electricity generation with just 1,260,000 wind turbines on only 470 square miles of land, assuming a quarter-acre per turbine and all generating power 40 percent of the year.
It’s unclear what pixie dust these folks were sprinkling, but these are not real-world numbers. You need space between panels for access and maintenance; you can’t jam them into one enormous array. And bear in mind, Dominion Energy alone is planning 490 square miles of panels just for Virginia, and just for a portion of its electricity market in the state.)
72,000 high-tech sun-tracking solar panels at Nevada’s Nellis Air Force Base cover 140 acres and generate only 32,000 MWh per year: 33 percent of rated capacity. Low-tech stationary panels get far less than that. The 355 turbines at Indiana’s Fowler Ridge industrial wind facility cover 50,000 acres (120 acres/turbine – nowhere near 1/4 acre) and generate electricity only 25 percent of the time.
I calculate it would take over 17 billion Nellis-style solar panels – on 53,000 square miles (34,000,000 acres or half of Nevada) to replace all 7.5 billion MWh of US fossil fuel energy and charge batteries for a week of sunless days, under the Team Biden Green New Deal. Using standard, stationary panels would double or triple the land area and number of panels.
Using Fowler Ridge as a guide, and assuming just 50 acres per turbine, it would take some 2 million 1.8-MW wind turbines, sprawling across 155,000 square miles of scenic, crop and habitat land. That’s all of California. And it assumes every turbine generates electricity 25 percent of the year. Go offshore, and we’d need over 300,000 monstrous 10-MW turbines along our Great Lakes and seacoasts.
We’d also need thousands of miles of new transmission lines to connect all these facilities and cities.
But the more wind turbines we install, the more we have to put them in sub-optimal areas, where they might work 15% of the year; and the more we install, the more they affect wind flow for the others. Land, habitat and wildlife impacts could easily double; millions of raptors, other birds and bats would be killed. The more solar panels we install, the more they must go in low-quality areas, and the more we need.
Energy analyst Willis Eschenbach has calculated what would be required to get the world to zero-emission electricity generation by 2050 – and ensure sufficient peak power for the hottest summer and coldest winter days. He uses solar or wind, in conjunction with nuclear power plants as backup/actual generating capacity, for sunless and windless days, and assumes 35% capacity/efficiency. Adjusting his numbers to account for only US needs, America would require:
* 350,000 square miles of solar panels (Nevada, Arizona and New Mexico combined) plus 1,760 new 3000-MW nuclear power plants. Adding space for access and maintenance would at least double this. Or
* 10.5 million 2-MW wind turbines, on 820,000 square miles of crop, scenic and wildlife habitat land – over one-fourth of the Continental USA, plus 1,760 new 3000-MW nuclear power plants. (Using 1.8-MW instead of 2.0-MW turbines, we’d need 11.6 million turbines on 30 percent of the Lower 48 states.)
Biofuel production to replace all those petrochemicals would require millions more acres.
All these turbines, panels, backup batteries, electric vehicles, biofuel processing plants, nuclear power plants and transmission lines would require millions of tons of metals, minerals, plastics and concrete – from billions of tons of overburden and ores. That will result in astronomical land, air, water, wildlife and human impacts from mining, processing and manufacturing. Most of this will be overseas, out of sight and out of mind, because Team Biden won’t allow these activities in the United States. So a lot of people won’t care and will happily focus on these new energy sources being zero-emission ... here in the USA.
These estimates are not etched in stone. But they underscore why we need full-blown, robust environmental analyses and impact statements on every GND concept, proposal and project – before we head down the primrose path to ecological and economic hell, paved with (presumably) good intentions.
There must be no expedited reviews, no shortcuts, no claiming the ecological impacts can be glossed over because they are “inadvertent” or less important than “saving the planet” from climate chaos.
https://townhall.com/columnists/pauldriessen/2021/02/27/real-threats-to-threatened-species-n2585426
**********************************Here are some issues that need to be included in the equation getting to Biden’s end-state of, “100% clean energy economy and net-zero emissions no later than 2050.”
Excerpt from "GLACIERS IN IOWA"
WIND: First of all, the green folks would have us all believe that wind and sunshine are free. Well, technically yes, but to harness them certainly is not.
There are about 240,000 operating wind turbines in the world, producing about 4% of the required electricity. When it comes to wind turbine construction, there are a lot of numbers out there. I believe this set fairly captures the story.
The American Wind Energy Association says it takes somewhere in the range of 200 to 230 tons of steel to make a single wind turbine. The steel tower is anchored in a platform of more than a thousand tons of concrete and steel rebar, 30 to 50 feet across and anywhere from 6 to 30 feet deep. Add to that 45 tons of nonrecyclable plastic blades and 2 tons of rare-earth elements. Then after a life-cycle of around 20 years, start over.
If we want wind to produce half the world’s electricity, we will need to build about 3 million more turbines. Three million turbines at 230 tons of steel each equals about 690 million tons of steel. To produce steel for one turbine requires about 150 tons of coking coal and about 300 tons of iron ore, all mined, transported and probably producing hydrocarbons.
More bad news. It should be pointed out that cement is the number one carbon contributor in the world. The production of one pound of cement also produces one pound of CO2. Then there are the emissions from all the trucks, trains, ships, bulldozers, cranes, and other equipment involved in turbine construction.
We are constantly being fed unattainable projections about power production from wind turbines. Wind proponents describe capability in terms of “capacity.” That is, if the turbine was fully active 24/7 it would produce X amount of power. The truth is that because of varying weather conditions, a turbine’s output averages barely a quarter of its “capacity.”
That fact brings us to another disturbing question; what do we do for power when the wind doesn’t blow? The most obvious answer is that we must maintain, at all times, a fully operational backup power source. Or do we just heat half the houses, run half the manufacturing plants, recharge half the cell phones? Because of the requirement for near 100% backup, some experts predict a wind farm’s power will actually cost around $25,000 for every home it powers.
Another downside to wind is that the turbines are so preposterously expensive that no one would dream of building one unless they were guaranteed a huge government subsidy, also known as tax dollars.
After we dig out of the earth millions of tons of raw materials, transport it, manufacture and construct the turbines all of which will likely cause huge carbon emissions, what is the net carbon reduction? Researchers believe the actual CO2 reduction is so insignificant that one large windfarm saves less in a year than is given off over the same period by a single jumbo jet flying daily between the U.S. and England.
CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS:
No matter how many wind turbines and solar panels we build for the world, there will always be the need for substantial on-call backup around the world for when the sun doesn’t shine and/or the wind doesn’t blow. Right now, battery backup would fall woefully short and may never be a feasible alternative. The U.S. is successfully converting coal-fired production to clean burning natural gas because we have the greatest supply of natural gas in the world which makes our backup doable, albeit very expensive. What do the nations that have zero natural gas do?
I am a proponent for wind, solar, electric vehicles and whatever science can come up with to produce power. What I am not for is false hope. I get frustrated with the “well, let’s get on with it and just hope for the best” crowd. Hope is not a process. False hope is demoralizing and destructive. Our environment and the future of this planet is too important to be toyed with by political sound bites and unfathomable green fantasies.
https://wethepeoplespeaking.com/2021/02/12/glaciers-in-iowa/
***********************************A record dry in Australia
Suggesting global cooling. Warming would produce MORE rain, not less
Overlooking the old family farmhouse on Gerard Walsh's farm is a hill covered in hundreds of dead ironbarks.
"Two years ago, they would have all been alive and flourishing. Basically every tree has died," Mr Walsh said.
Across all of 2019, his property at Greymare in southern Queensland recorded just 144 millimetres of rain — the driest in 100 years.
"Certainly the rainfall has changed, all for the lesser," Mr Walsh said.
For more than a century, the Walsh family have been recording rainfall on their farm Coolesha for the Bureau of Meteorology (BOM). "My mother Margaret Walsh, she would have done the weather for some 60 years, her parents before that," Mr Walsh said.
The long service was recently recognised with an award from the BOM.
The voluntary role has meant the Walsh family have been able to observe up close those effects of climate change on the Southern Downs region.
Rainfall at Coolesha has been below average for seven of the past 10 years, consistent with the BOM's most recent State of the Climate report.
"Income was more than halved during most of that period of time," Mr Walsh said.
Like many in the region, less rain has meant less feed for cattle and the Walshes have had to reduce cattle numbers.
Farmers in the Southern Downs are dealing with declining winter rainfall and the prospect of back-to-back droughts.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-02-28/queensland-family-100-years-of-bom-rain-records/13193442
***************************************My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC) Saturdays only
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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23 February, 2021
New York City/New Jersey subway PM2.5 levels 77 times greater than EPA standards; No bodies found
Huge pollution with no visible effect found
A new study reports on PM2.5 (soot/dust) levels in subway stations. The New York City and New Jersey PATH system had a mean level of 779 micrograms per cubic meter — 65 times higher than the EPA’s outdoor air standard of 12 micrograms per cubic meter.
The highest level measured (1,499 micrograms per cubic meter) is almost 50% higher than the worst air in any Chinese city that we know about. Onboard air quality PM2.5 measurements were lower but still on average 30 times higher than EPA standards.
In 2018, PATH carried 81.7 million passengers, about 280,000 per week day. Keeping in mind that the EPA says that any exposure to PM2.5 can kill you within hours, where are the bodies? Why aren’t governments calling for an immediate shutdown of subway service?
Recall that Harvard researchers just claimed this week that PM2.5 kills more than 8 million people per year and much lower outdoor air exposures. PM2.5 is the biggest demonstrable science fraud of our time.
The abstract:
PM2:5 Concentration and Composition in Subway Systems in the Northeastern United States
David G. Luglio
OBJECTIVES: The goals of this study were to assess the air quality in subway systems in the northeastern United States and estimate the health risks for transit workers and commuters.
METHODS: We report real-time and gravimetric PM2:5 concentrations and particle composition from area samples collected in the subways of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Boston, Massachusetts; New York City, New York/New Jersey (NYC/NJ); and Washington, District of Columbia. A total of 71 stations across 12 transit lines were monitored during morning and evening rush hours.
RESULTS: We observed variable and high PM2:5 concentrations for on-train and on-platform measurements during morning (from 0600 hours to 1000 hours) and evening (from 1500 hours to 1900 hours) rush hour across cities. Mean real-time PM2:5 concentrations in underground stations were 779 ? 249, 548 ? 207, 341 ? 147, 327 ? 136, and 112 ? 46:7 lg=m3 for the PATH-NYC/NJ; MTA-NYC; Washington, DC; Boston; and Philadelphia transit systems, respectively.
In contrast, the mean real-time ambient PM2:5 concentration taken above ground outside the subway stations of PATH-NYC/NJ; MTANYC; Washington, DC; Boston; and Philadelphia were 20:8?9:3, 24:1?9:3, 12:01 ? 7:8, 10:0?2:7, and 12:6 ? 12:6 lg=m3, respectively.
Stations serviced by the PATH-NYC/NJ system had the highest mean gravimetric PM2:5 concentration, 1,020 lg=m3, ever reported for a subway system, including two 1-h gravimetric PM2:5 values of approximately 1,700 lg=m3 during rush hour at one PATH-NYC/NJ subway station.
Iron and total carbon accounted for approximately 80% of the PM2:5 mass in a targeted subset of systems and stations.
DISCUSSION: Our results document that there is an elevation in the PM2:5 concentrations across subway systems in the major urban centers of Northeastern United States during rush hours. Concentrations in some subway stations suggest that transit workers and commuters may be at increased risk according to U.S. federal environmental and occupational guidelines, depending on duration of exposure.
This concern is highest for the PM2:5 concentrations encountered in the PATH-NYC/NJ transit system. Further research is urgently needed to identify the sources of PM2:5 and factors that contribute to high levels
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Study warns solar farms could unleash unintended consequences on the environment, including global warming
A new study finds there could be unintended consequences of constructing massive solar farms in deserts around the world. The eye-opening research claims that huge solar farms, such as in the Sahara, could usher in environmental crises, including altering the climate and causing global warming.
The study was carried out by Zhengyao Lu, a researcher in Physical Geography at Lund University, and Benjamin Smith, director of research at the Hawkesbury Institute for the Environment at Western Sydney University. The results of their research were published in a Feb. 11 article in The Conversation.
Solar panels are darker colors such as black and blue to attract and absorb more heat, but they are usually much darker than the ground around the solar panel. The post cites an article that claims most solar panels are between 15% and 20% efficient in converting sunlight into usable energy. The researchers assert that the rest of the sunlight is returned to the surrounding environment as heat, "affecting the climate."
The article notes that in order to replace fossil fuels, solar farms would need to be enormous — covering thousands of square miles, according to this article. Solar farms of this magnitude potentially present environmental consequences, not just locally but globally.
Authors of a 2018 study say that climate models show that installing ample numbers of wind turbines would double precipitation in the Sahara desert, and solar panels would increase precipitation by 50%. The researchers came to this conclusion by determining that the solar panels and wind turbines would decrease the albedo on the land surface. Albedo is the fraction of light that is reflected by a body or surface.
From The Conversation:
The model revealed that when the size of the solar farm reaches 20% of the total area of the Sahara, it triggers a feedback loop. Heat emitted by the darker solar panels (compared to the highly reflective desert soil) creates a steep temperature difference between the land and the surrounding oceans that ultimately lowers surface air pressure and causes moist air to rise and condense into raindrops. With more monsoon rainfall, plants grow and the desert reflects less of the sun's energy, since vegetation absorbs light better than sand and soil. With more plants present, more water is evaporated, creating a more humid environment that causes vegetation to spread.
Turning the Sahara desert into a lush, green oasis could have climate ramifications around the planet, including affecting the atmosphere, the ocean, the land, changing entire ecosystems, altering precipitation in Amazon's rainforests, inducing droughts, and potentially triggering more tropical cyclones.
The good-intentioned effort to lower the world's temperature could potentially do the opposite and increase the planet's temperature, according to the researchers.
Covering 20% of the Sahara with solar farms raises local temperatures in the desert by 1.5°C according to our model. At 50% coverage, the temperature increase is 2.5°C. This warming is eventually spread around the globe by atmosphere and ocean movement, raising the world's average temperature by 0.16°C for 20% coverage, and 0.39°C for 50% coverage. The global temperature shift is not uniform though – the polar regions would warm more than the tropics, increasing sea ice loss in the Arctic. This could further accelerate warming, as melting sea ice exposes dark water which absorbs much more solar energy.
The authors conclude their article by stating renewable energy solutions "may help society transition from fossil energy, but Earth system studies like ours underscore the importance of considering the numerous coupled responses of the atmosphere, oceans and land surface when examining their benefits and risks."
https://www.theblaze.com/news/solar-farms-global-warming-consequences-study
*****************************************Climate Change Keeps Changing
Winter storms…in WINTER?!?! Can you believe it? Next thing you’ll tell me is it gets hot in the summer. It’s clearly climate change, and because of it we need to sacrifice our liberties and economic future on the altar of what really amounts to another hidden space ship hidden in the tail of the Hale-Bopp comet. And Democrats are ready to do just that.
I know you’ve heard it before, but it’s worth repeating that in the last 50 years liberals have gone from warning about the coming ice age to global warming, before settling on the catch-all phrase “climate change.” Curiously, when the “problem” shifted 180 degrees from what they said it was, the “solutions” remained the same – new regulations, higher taxes, and more power to them. Normally, when you find out the problem you’ve been working on isn’t the problem but the exact opposite of the problem, the solution changes too. Not here.
The promise of future doom and gloom is merely a delivery device for policy changes liberals have wanted since the progressive movement started.
You’ve got to hand it to the left; they’re great at marketing – offer salvation from an un-disprovable collective future pain in exchange for some individual liberty today. It’s a bargain at twice the price.
Only, they’ve been wrong about everything. We’ve been through three, ten-year windows where the coasts were supposed to be flooded and all other manner of destruction rained down on us and it hasn’t happened.
That doesn’t stop the left from playing that card every chance they get. Nor has it prevented the media from declaring each new event to be the latest “proof” of a pattern only they get to choose what it’s constituted of, ignoring everything else to the contrary.
Winter weather in Texas is rare, not unique or new. Droughts happen. They always have. Tornadoes have always occurred in the same place, which is why it’s called “tornado alley” and not “a pleasant place where no bad weather ever happens.” Hurricanes have been battering the Caribbean for centuries before the first SUV was invented or the first gallon of gas burned.
In other words, the climate has always changed. Not just with the seasons, but anomalously throughout our history. Do yourself a favor and look up the “tiny ice age” or the “medieval warm period.” Both were curious swings of weather for extended periods of time long before fossil fuels could be blamed for them.
The left has done their best to wipe these events from memory, and they’re rarely, if ever, talked about in the media or academia. But you can find out about them, if you try, and you should.
Now everything is climate change, no matter how absurd. Heavy snow or the lack of it. Heavy rains or none. Some are grumbling that the outdoor hockey game between Colorado Avalanche and Las Vegas Golden Knights being delayed for hours because the ice was too soft is a sign of climate change. But that game was played in Lake Tahoe, right on the water. But the average temperature in Lake Tahoe in February is 45 degrees, and they dropped the puck in the middle of the day.
The level of stupid to which leftists will go to make their case knows no bounds. That so many believe it because so many parrot it is a testament not only to just how successfully the education system has been in transforming into an indoctrination factory but just how committed the left is to get their hands on that power.
Anyone who wants power that badly, who is willing to go to such great lengths to obtain it, should be denied it at all costs.
Until Republicans learn to recognize the scope of the indoctrination and how to counter it (because Republican politicians are horrible at messaging), expect even more naturally occurring events to be blamed on this boogeyman.
But you should also expect cold in winter, heat in summer, rain sometimes and not others. Hurricanes will happen, so will tornadoes. Playing hockey outside between California and Nevada at noon will remain unwise, regardless of the time of year. And you should always remember that our temperature has a lot more to do with that big ball of fire in the sky than it does anything else.
https://townhall.com/columnists/derekhunter/2021/02/22/climate-change-keeps-changing-n2585082
************************************Under Biden, Green Job Lies Flow Instead of Oil; Unemployment May Soon Be the Only Gusher
Even as they are putting people in coal, gas, and oil fields out of work, President Joe Biden and his climate policy team keep telling lies about how their policies will create enough good-paying green energy jobs for the newly unemployed.
For instance, at a Jan. 27 press conference held to announce multiple executive orders (EO) issued by the president to fight climate change, his climate envoy John Kerry said that coal, gas, and oil workers who are being forced out of their jobs because of the EOs should have made “better choices” concerning their field of work. Fortunately, Kerry went on to say that coal, natural gas, and oil workers can “go to work to make the solar panels.”
Kerry’s arrogant, politically tone-deaf statement falsely implies coal miners and oil and gas workers can smoothly transition to jobs in the fast-growing wind and solar power industries. Government reports show this is untrue.
While The Washington Post has been a reliably pro-Biden voice since before the election, even it is calling out Kerry’s green jobs claims. The newspaper gave Kerry’s statements two Pinocchios, a rating indicating that even if Kerry wasn’t outright lying, his statements represent “a great example of how some ‘facts’ can be misleading when taken out of context.”
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reports there won’t be nearly enough green jobs created by Biden’s policies to replace those of coal miners and oil and gas field workers made unemployed due to his inane effort to prevent climate change.
The wind and solar industry have grown at a rapid rate in recent years. However, BLS estimates by 2028, 10,400 new wind turbine technician and solar panel installer jobs will be created in total. During the same time period, Biden’s climate policies are expected to put more than 50,000 workers in the coal industry, and tens of thousands of more workers in the oil and gas industries, out of work. Biden’s Keystone XL pipeline shutdown and his prohibition on new oil and gas leases on public lands has already resulted in layoffs of more than 1,000 workers.
Nor would the switch from jobs in the coal, oil, and gas industries to wind and solar positions be instantaneous. BLS reports solar installers require “moderate-term on-the-job training,” and wind turbine technicians require “long-term on-the-job training.”
Also, wind and solar jobs don’t pay as well as jobs associated with fossil fuel production. The median wage for coal miners in 2019 was $59,000 annually. This is $8,000 above the average annual national private sector salary of $51,000. By comparison, BLS data show the median pay for solar installers in 2019 was approximately $45,000 ($6,000 below the national average), and the median wage for wind technicians was $53,000 annually.
The pay differential between solar and wind jobs and jobs in the oil and gas industry is even greater. The Department of Energy reports that oil and gas industry jobs pay $112,000 per year on average—more than double the average salary of a wind technician, 148 percent higher than that of a solar installer.
So much for jobs in the wind and solar industry representing “better choices” for workers.
This leads us to Biden’s other lies concerning all the new jobs his climate policies will create. Biden said one of his executive orders will “harness the purchasing power of the federal government to buy clean, zero-emission vehicles that are made and sourced by union workers right here in America. … This will mean one million new jobs in the American automobile industry. One million.” One million jobs is more than the total number of jobs manufacturing cars and trucks today!
The Associated Press, which is normally a reliable voice in support of climate alarmism, pointed out that Biden’s claim was false. AP reported that Biden’s electric vehicle job creation claims omit “important context and used fuzzy math” and, as a result, Biden’s policies “probably will mean fewer net auto-making jobs.”
Why? Because as U.S. automakers shift toward making more electric vehicles, they will be making fewer gasoline-powered cars and trucks. Thus, rather than creating new manufacturing jobs, workers will simply shift from assembling vehicles with internal combustion engines to cars and trucks with large battery packs.
However, it’s not a one-for-one job switch. As Kristin Dziczek, vice president at the Center for Automotive Research, explained to the AP, “[As] electric vehicles generally have 30 percent to 40 percent fewer parts and are simpler to build, fewer workers will be needed to assemble them.”
In addition, it’s easier to automate battery pack construction and installation, meaning robotic machinery will replace many workers on the shop floor. And the jobs remaining after Biden’s electric vehicle pipe dream comes to fruition will pay less. The AP discovered “automakers pay workers who assemble batteries less than they pay those who manufacture vehicles.”
To sum up, Biden’s forced shift to electric vehicles from gas-powered cars and trucks, which people evidently prefer based on the numbers purchased absent government coercion in the market place, will result in fewer well-paying jobs in the auto industry, not more.
Biden’s climate policies are a disaster for U.S. energy independence, which former President Donald Trump’s policies brought about, and for workers. Shame on Biden and Kerry for betraying American workers and the public and for lying to them about it.
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC) Saturdays only
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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21 February, 2021
Will blue gas kill Tesla? New emission-free hydrogen manufacturing process can fuel a car
"Blue" gas is just normal hydrogen. Hydrogen can be produced by cracking water or by cracking hydrocarbons such as methane (CH4). The latter is not new. Methane is a component of natural gas and cracking that gas is the normal commercial source of hydrogen
But when it is obtained by cracking methane it becomes "blue" apparently. Why not green?
But the drawbacks of hydrogen cars are well-known -- principally the massive pressure vessel needed to hold the gas. This is no challenge to Tesla
Note also that the energy used to produce hydrogen exceeds the energy that can be recovered from it
Tesla is poised to become a powerhouse in the automobile industry as the world ditches fossil-fuel powered vehicles for their electric counterparts.
However, a new technology comes with the potential to overthrow the Elon Musk-owned company and its battery-driven electric vehicles.
Dubbed blue gas — or blue hydrogen — this clean fuel is made by combining hydrogen production from natural gas (methane) with carbon capture and storage.
The resulting product can be used in electric vehicles with hydrogen fuel cells to produce power with no harmful emissions — only that of water vapour.
Blue gas can propel vehicles some 300 miles (483 km) on a full tank, while Tesla's power system only provides up to 250 miles (402 miles) on a full battery, on average.
This fuel does not need lithium or rare earth elements to use, takes less time to fuel up and lasts longer than battery-powered vehicles — making it a potential 'Tesla killer.'
Parts of the US and the globe are planning to eliminate gas-powered vehicles as early as 2023, in a bid to reduce emissions and combat climate change.
In the UK, for example, the government has announced a ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars which will come into effect from 2030 onwards.
The move is predicted to not only be of benefit to the environment, but also one that will prove a boon to electric car manufacturers like Tesla.
However, the ascendancy of Tesla predicted by industry experts could now be threatened by the headways being made around blue gas.
This is one of the names given to hydrogen gas which is manufactured in a carbon-neutral process — unlike conventional, or 'grey' hydrogen production, in which carbon by-product is released into the atmosphere.
It is produced by one of two processes — dubbed 'steam methane reforming' and 'autothermal reforming' — in which methane and water are converted into hydrogen and carbon monoxide.
The carbon-based product of this reaction is then captured and stored, rather than being dumped into the atmosphere to contribute to global warming.
Instead of giving off polluting exhaust like fossil fuel-powered vehicles, those that run on blue gas emit only water and heat, SpaceCoastDaily reports.
These vehicles possess fuel cells in which the hydrogen is combined with oxygen in a so-called electrochemical reaction.
This produces electricity which can be used to power an electric motor and/or recharge a battery, depending on the design of the car in question.
Blue gas seems like the fuel source the world has been waiting for, but the issues with the innovation is that we will have to wait for it. The fuel is still in its infancy and companies are learning how to move forward with it in a way its customers will want to buy in.
Along with only being in the early phases of development, hydrogen fuel stations are far from widely available at present.
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What America can learn from Texas’s green energy failure
The coal-fired generators are the only ones that kept right on working
As millions of Texans remain without power, many are wondering if renewable energy sources are to blame for the crisis that has killed at least 47 people. Not surprisingly, many on the Left and the main stream media are quick to defend green energy. But energy experts say renewable energy is fundamentally a less reliable source than traditional sources such as coal and natural gas and are blaming it for the massive power outages that have crippled the state.
Texas Lt. Gog. Dan Patrick told Fox News’ Laura Ingram last night he wants an investigation into what went wrong to ensure this never happens again.
“I’m angry, like people are angry, and they deserve to be angry. This should never have happened in Texas. We’re gonna’ find out what the hell went wrong, and we’re gonna’ fix it.”
The Wall Street Journal editorial board weighed in with this explanation of what went wrong in Texas:
The problem is Texas’s overreliance on wind power that has left the grid more vulnerable to bad weather. Half of wind turbines froze last week, causing wind’s share of electricity to plunge to 8% from 42%. Power prices in the wholesale market spiked, and grid regulators on Friday warned of rolling blackouts. Natural gas and coal generators ramped up to cover the supply gap but couldn’t meet the surging demand for electricity—which half of households rely on for heating—even as many families powered up their gas furnaces. Then some gas wells and pipelines froze.
In short, there wasn’t sufficient baseload power from coal and nuclear to support the grid. Baseload power is needed to stabilize grid frequency amid changes in demand and supply. When there’s not enough baseload power, the grid gets unbalanced and power sources can fail. The more the grid relies on intermittent renewables like wind and solar, the more baseload power is needed to back them up.
But politicians don’t care about grid reliability until the power goes out. And for three decades politicians from both parties have pushed subsidies for renewables that have made the grid less stable.
Start with the 1992 Energy Policy Act signed by George H.W. Bush, which created a production tax credit to boost the infant wind industry. Generators collect up to $25 per megawatt hour of power they produce regardless of market demand. The credit was supposed to expire in 1999, but nothing lasts longer than a temporary government program, as Ronald Reagan once quipped.
Dan Kish is a senior vice president for policy at the American Energy Alliance. He has more than 25 years of experience on congressional committees focused principally upon natural resource and energy policies. He says both political parties are responsible for the green energy policies that have failed Texas.
“[Texas] has gone from a relatively small amount of wind, to the nation’s largest producer where they produce 28% of the nation’s wind power,” explained Kish. “But wind is intermittent and you cannot count on it. What we’ve got here is the logical outcome of a stressed system,” Kish added. “Some parts of the system ended up producing a lot more energy to meet the demand, but the wind side of thing basically fell right off the cliff.”
Kish blames poor energy policies on what he calls “soft-headed Republicans” and Democrats who “bought into the idea that American energy production is bad.” He also points to “a slick campaign” by the green energy lobby that has swayed the opinions of many Americans in favor of green energy.
But he said this Texas disaster is a cautionary tale for the rest of the country, “Renewable sources sound good, but at the end of the day, they don’t work. They will drive prices up because you end up making really complicated systems to accommodate for the built in inherent weaknesses of intermittent sources like wind and solar, that only come on occasionally, and must be backed up with other sources.” He explained that because those backup sources are only used part time, the cost to operate and maintain them is more expensive.
In addition, Kish warned that America’s green energy industry is almost wholly reliant on China because it controls the supply chain for batteries, solar panels, and windmills. “It is a cautionary tale of a system that is being messed around with by politicians who I wouldn’t let screw in a light bulb in my house,” Kish concluded.
https://dailytorch.com/2021/02/what-america-can-learn-from-texass-green-energy-failure/
*****************************************Let's Review 50 Years Of Dire Climate Forecasts And What Actually Happened
Here are 21 headlines from various news sources regarding dire climate predictions over the last 50 years. Many of the predictions are outrageously funny.
Climate Forecast Headline Predictions
1967 Salt Lake Tribune: Dire Famine Forecast by 1975, Already Too Late
1969 NYT: "Unless we are extremely lucky, everyone will disappear in a cloud of blue steam in 20 years. The situation will get worse unless we change our behavior."
1970 Boston Globe: Scientist Predicts New Ice Age by 21st Century said James P. Lodge, a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research.
1971 Washington Post: Disastrous New Ice Age Coming says S.I. Rasool at NASA.
1972 Brown University Letter to President Nixon: Warning on Global Cooling
1974 The Guardian: Space Satellites Show Ice Age Coming Fast
1974 Time Magazine: Another Ice Age "Telling signs everywhere. Since the 1940s mean global temperatures have dropped 2.7 degrees F."
1974 "Ozone Depletion a Great Peril to Life" University of Michigan Scientist
1976 NYT The Cooling: University of Wisconsin climatologist Stephen Schneider laments about the "deaf ear his warnings received."
1988 Agence France Press: Maldives will be Completely Under Water in 30 Years.
1989 Associated Press: UN Official Says Rising Seas to 'Obliterate Nations' by 2000.
1989 Salon: New York City’s West Side Highway underwater by 2019 said Jim Hansen the scientist who lectured Congress in 1988 about the greenhouse effect.
2000 The Independent: "Snowfalls are a thing of the past. Our children will not know what snow is," says senior climate researcher.
2004 The Guardian: The Pentagon Tells Bush Climate Change Will Destroy Us. "Britain will be Siberian in less than 20 years," the Pentagon told Bush.
2008 Associate Press: NASA Scientist says "We're Toast. In 5-10 years the Arctic will be Ice Free"
2008 Al Gore: Al Gore warns of ice-free Arctic by 2013.
2009 The Independent: Prince Charles says Just 96 Months to Save the World. "The price of capitalism is too high."
2009 The Independent: Gordon Brown says "We have fewer than 50 days to save our planet from catastrophe."
2013 The Guardian: The Arctic will be Ice Free in Two Years. "The release of a 50 gigaton of methane pulse" will destabilize the planet.
2013 The Guardian: US Navy Predicts Ice Free Arctic by 2016. "The US Navy's department of Oceanography uses complex modeling to makes its forecast more accurate than others.
2014 John Kerry: "We have 500 days to Avoid Climate Chaos" discussed Sec of State John Kerry and French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabious at a joint meeting.
The above items are thanks to 50 Years of Failed Eco-pocalyptic Predictions.
The article has actual news clips and links to everyone of the above stories
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Biden’s Electric Vehicle Mandate Won’t Improve Environmental Outcomes – But Will Raise Energy Costs
Since taking office in January, President Biden has issued an unprecedented number of Executive Orders aimed at undoing President Trump’s signature deregulatory agenda, namely issuing a suite of climate related executive orders including re-entering the Paris Climate Accord, cancelling the Keystone XL Pipeline, freezing new oil and gas leases on federal lands, and directing the federal government to replace its nearly 600,000 vehicle fleet with electric vehicles (EVs).
Citing climate change as an existential threat, Congressional Democrats have their own green agenda to push electric vehicles, introducing legislation to extend major tax credits for EVs along with credits and subsidies for solar and wind energy. Democrats hope these policies will accelerate their planned transition from gas to electric and eventually, force consumers into electric vehicles. Already, several individual states including California have mandated that residents will only be able to purchase electric vehicles by 2035.
However, like many other environmental policies being advanced as necessary to address climate change, the true impact of policies to advance electrification isn’t being discussed. The truth of the matter is that EVs are not as “environmentally friendly” as their proponents would have you believe – and adoption of a fully electric vehicle fleet would mean higher energy costs and higher sticker prices in a market where new cars are already cost prohibitive for many middle-class families.
Electric vehicles are not “green” simply because they aren’t gas powered. EVs are charged from the electric grid in the respective state you live in. America’s electric grids still get the majority of their power from burning fossil fuels including coal and natural gas. Estimates from the U.S. Energy Information Administration indicate that more than 60% of total electricity is from fossil fuels, with coal being the second largest source. In addition, even with aggressive policies that push wind and solar, the EIA has estimated that fossil fuels will still be used as our main source of energy well into the future. For these reasons, Americans shouldn’t be misled into thinking that simply because an EV is not directly powered by gas that it is “carbon neutral.”
EVs also pollute the environment through the production of the batteries used to power them, which require mining for critical minerals like cobalt and lithium. Mining and processing of these minerals causes significant air pollution from dust and toxic water pollution. Because it is difficult to get the necessary permits to mine for critical minerals in the United States, much of the production for minerals necessary to make EV batteries happens overseas in countries like China and the DRC, with troubling human rights records where forced child labor is often used for mining.
For all the environmental and human costs of producing EV batteries and the greater strain on the electric grid that charging them creates, you’d think the reduction in emissions would be worth the trade off, right? Think again. One study from the Manhattan Institute estimated that the overall reduction in U.S. emissions from adoption of zero emission vehicles would be less than one percent of the total forecast energy-related CO2 emissions through 2050. In other words, mandating that consumers purchase EVs would have almost no impact on climate change.
Beyond the lackluster environmental impact of EVs, additional strain on the electric grid from charging electric vehicles would almost certainly make household energy costs more expensive. In California, where EVs will be mandated in the next ten years, electric rates are already higher than the rest of the nation. Furthermore, new electric vehicles are on average 45% more expensive to make than gas powered vehicles. If EV mandates pass, how will middle and working class families be able to afford a new car? Unfortunately, many will simply keep driving older cars, which are less efficient and more polluting than new cars on the market.
Finally, the Biden Administration completely fails to take note of the innovative new products like renewable diesel fuel which produce even fewer emissions overall than an electric vehicle. By arbitrarily promoting one path forward, the government is putting its thumb on the lever in a way that will discourage innovation and leave Americans with higher costs and fewer choices.
While reducing emissions and addressing climate change are laudable goals, when climate policies are completely untethered from a true cost-benefit analysis, American taxpayers are fooled about what the tradeoffs entail. Smart policymaking takes into account emissions reductions balanced against how many jobs will be killed, environmental pollution beyond just GHG emissions, how much energy prices will rise, and impacts on quality of life.
As the Biden Administration moves forward with its environmental agenda, it must keep in mind that no source of energy is completely without environmental impact. Policies that embrace a balanced energy mix and encourage innovation are the best way forward.
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC) Saturdays only
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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20 February, 2021
Bill Gates can't win
He wants to focus on improved technology to reduce atmospheric CO2. The Greenies (below) don't like that at all
You might think that the decision of Bill Gates to throw his resources, energy and intellect into the infernal problem of climate change would be universally welcomed by those who have been battling the issue for a generation.
This week’s publication of Gates’ new book, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, has revealed an intellectual and philosophical schism in the climate field, one most pronounced between those who have battled in the field for a generation, and newer entrants like Gates.
In his book Gates does an admirable job in breaking down the complex problem of climate change into understandable building blocks.
“When I started learning about climate change, I kept encountering facts that were hard to get my head around,” he writes. “For one thing, the numbers were so large they were hard to picture ... Another problem was that the data I was seeing often appeared devoid of any context.”
Gates provides the context, explaining that reaching net zero by 2050 to avoid the worst impacts of climate change means working out how to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 50 billion tonnes annually.
Gates breaks the figure down further, explaining that 31 per cent of the emissions are caused by making things such as steel, cement and plastic, electricity production causes another 27 per cent and agriculture 19 per cent. Transport and heating and cooling cause another 16 per cent and seven per cent respectively.
With the impact of climate change tangibly evident in recent record temperatures, in catastrophic fires in the American west and in Australia, no one would argue with Gates’ analysis, nor with his new sense of urgency.
“We have no time to lose,” he told Good Weekend.
However, Gates is being criticised by some of the world’s leading climate scientists and environmentalists for his view on how we should use what time we have left to act, and how best to direct resources.
Gates argues that American policymakers should dedicate their efforts to research and development of new technologies to drive down what he calls “the green premium”. This premium, he explains, is how much more it costs people to use a green alternative over an existing technology - the price difference between, say environmental fuel for his jet versus conventional jet fuel.
In a tetchy rejoinder in The New York Times this week the renowned climate author and journalist Bill McKibben begins, “First things first — much respect to Bill Gates for his membership in the select club of ultra-billionaires not actively attempting to flee Earth and colonise Mars.”
He goes on to argue that Gates makes the common mistake of underestimating the tools we already have to hand to reduce emissions. Solar power is the cheapest power in human history according to the International Energy Agency. As factories producing solar panels have become more efficient, their drop in price over the past decade has been, McKibben points out, 50 to 100 years ahead of what the IEA was forecasting in 2010.
According to McKibben, every time we double the number of panels installed, the price drops another 30 to 40 per cent. Batteries, he says, are following a similar price curve.
Underestimating the potential of existing renewable technology, he says, leads Gates to overestimate the significance of the green premium. He argues that the future tech Gates wants the world to focus on will be critical in future in mopping up the last few percentage points of greenhouse gasses, while renewables must do heavy lifting now.
At the heart of some of the criticism of the efforts of Gates - and other billionaires - in the climate field is their support for what is known as carbon dioxide removal, or CDR, technologies.
In theory if effective CDR machines could remove and store enough carbon, climate change could be solved by technical innovation.
CDR’s critics dismiss it as fantastical at best and dangerous at worst, as it provides an excuse for inaction.
Speaking with the Herald earlier this week the leading climate scientist Professor Michael Mann - whose book The New Climate War has also just been published - was blunt in his criticism of Gates’ approach.
“We don’t need new magic new technology, like Bill Gates says [we do], we don’t need a miracle. We have the tools necessary, with wind and solar, geothermal et cetera, to decarbonise our economy. It is a pretty clear path forward.”
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As nation freezes, fossil fuels are keeping the lights and heat on
Much of the Midwest and the Mountain States are seeing subzero temperatures and blizzard conditions sweep through. As far south as Dallas, a polar vortex has caused temperatures to dip into the 20s, with ice and snow. In parts of Minnesota, temperatures dipped to near their lowest levels in a century. There are now rolling blackouts in some parts of Texas because of power supply shortages at a time when the deep freeze causes peak demand.
Many states are at a dangerous point of running out of energy at any price to meet demand as the cold spell rolls on.
This story isn’t so much about the weather as it is about a grand failure of public policy. Because of the political left’s war on fossil fuels, and “renewable energy mandates” that require 20 percent to 30 percent of a state’s power supply to come from wind and solar power, the power grid is squeezed to the brink. Wind and solar don’t generate much power when temperatures plummet.
The Center of the American Experiment, a Minnesota-based think tank, reports: “Wind turbines are shut down when temperatures are below -22° F because it is too cold to operate them safely. This means it will be too cold for the wind turbines built by the power companies to generate any electricity.”
It’s worse than that, however. According to the Minnesota think tank, “Wind turbines will actually consume electricity at these temperatures because the turbines use electric heaters in their gearboxes to keep the oil in the housing from freezing. During the 2019 Polar Vortex, wind turbines were consuming 2 MW of electricity. Wind turbines are a liability on the grid when the power is needed most.”
Solar power is even less reliable in severe weather conditions. Snow and ice during frigid temperatures often disable the panels. And when temperatures drop way down at night — when the sun goes down — is when the energy for heat is in highest demand.
Meanwhile, natural gas has had supply problems too. Normally, natural gas is the most reliable of energy sources, but some pipelines are freezing at the very time demand is soaring. According to an analysis by ZeroHedge, the mid-continent gas spot price “exploded from $3.46 one week ago, to $9 on Wednesday, $60.28 on Thursday and an insane $377.13 on Friday, up 32,000 percent in a few days” — something that makes the rise in GameStop stock look like child’s play. As the ZeroHedge article explains, “there simply is nowhere near enough product to satisfy demand at any price, hence the explosive move.”
What we are experiencing is the “perfect storm” disrupting our energy supply and creating an extreme stress test for the power grid that is being pushed to the limits. Yet, there is one source of energy that is, thankfully, keeping us from mass power outages and keeping the lights and the heat on: coal.
Longtime energy expert Terry Jarrett, who has served on the board of the national utility commissioners, explains what is going on: “The Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO) — which oversees power transmission in 15 states … is reporting that coal is currently generating more than half of its overall electricity.”
Here are the daily numbers during the big freeze in the 15-state Midwestern region: Coal is producing roughly 41,000 megawatts of electricity; natural gas is providing 22,000 megawatts; wind and solar are roughly 3,000 — or about 4 percent of the power. This points to the foolishness of states requiring 30, 40 or even 50 percent of their power to come from wind and solar. Even with normal weather patterns, when wind and solar are working, coal-fired plants are almost always necessary as a back-up when the wind isn’t blowing or the sun not shining.
We should have learned our energy lessons from Germany. In the early 2000s, the Germans went all in on green energy and largely abandoned fossil fuels. It caused massive price spikes throughout the country, and manufacturing began to leave for nations with much lower power costs. Germany wisely ditched the all-in green energy movement. Now as a polar vortex has hit Europe, the German are getting much of their energy from ... coal.
But the environmental movement is succeeding in moving America in the opposite direction on energy. Imagine for a moment that we had in place today the Biden national goal of near-zero fossil fuel energy in America. Millions of Americans might be facing power outages — no heat, no lights — in the middle of blizzard conditions; power costs would soar.
What is happening today across much of the country should be a wake-up call that safe and reliable “all of the above energy” — including coal — isn’t just a convenience. It’s a matter of life and death.
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American K-12 science education gone bad
By David Wojick
I don’t often write an article about someone else’s article but Shepard Barbash’s deeply researched piece “Science betrayed” deserves a wide readership. His subtitle says it all: “The propaganda infecting K–12 science curricula, especially on the environment, won’t go away.”
Barbash first looks at the history, then where we are today. The entrenchment of the great green message really got going in the 60’s and 70’s, to the point where it is now just business as usual in teacher education and the textbooks. No wonder millions are marching.
But now it is getting systematically much worse. The so-called Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) govern over a third of America’s K-12 public school students, with more on the way. State science standards say what will be taught in each grade. The conventional state standards have been relatively neutral when it comes to green propaganda, while the NGSS are full of it. They also don’t care much for scientific knowledge.
The article is full of great quotes. On the history side here is a good one from 1983:
“For the moment at least, ecological doomsayers rule the cultural roost. Fire-and-brimstone logic is combined with fear-and-doomsday psychology in textbooks around the country. [The story] could be retold tens of thousands of times, about children in public and private schools, in high schools and at elementary levels, with conservative and with liberal teachers, in wealthy neighborhoods and in poor. A tidal wave of pessimism has swept across the country, leaving in its wake grief, despair, immobility, and paralysis. . . . Why should our students be misled?“
That “moment” has lasted for almost 30 years and the doomsaying just gets worse with the onset of climate change hysteria.
Here is Barbash’s succinct summary: “This fear has suffused curricula since the 1970s with an ever-growing list of alarms: pesticides, smog, water pollution, forest fires, species extinction, overpopulation, famine, rain forest destruction, natural resource scarcity, ozone depletion, acid rain, and the great absorbing panic of our time: global warming.
These premises inform everything about environmental education: the standards of learning that states impose on school districts; the position statements from the associations of science teachers; the course work and texts in education schools; the training that educators receive throughout their careers; and the textbooks, lesson plans, field trips, and homework assigned in all grades.”
The NGSS really pile on the climate change hysteria. Here is how Barbash explains it:
“The phrase “climate change” appears in the document as a “core idea” for middle and high school. The phenomenon is presented as fact, as are its supposed consequences—loss of biodiversity, species extinction, changing rainfall patterns, disruption of the global food supply, glacial ice loss, and mass migration due to rising sea levels. Nowhere do the standards say that both the nature of the phenomenon and its consequences are matters of pitched debate, or that rival theories to explain climate change exist—put forth not by flat-earthers or disbelieving parsons but by serious scientists.“
In most conventional state standards, climate change is a minor topic taught in the high school Earth Science class, which is an elective that many students do not take. The NGSS make the climate scare a required topic in middle school, when most students are too young to question it. To date 19 states have adopted the alarmist NGSS.
Barbash says the Feds are also very active in pushing green climate propaganda:
“At least 15 federal or federally funded websites offer free teaching materials about climate change and its dangers. The entities include the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, National Science Foundation, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, National Institutes of Health, U.S. Department of Energy, and U.S. Global Change Research Program. The sites offer thousands of resources, including lesson plans, games, and videos for all grades. No website funded by government or universities or K–12 education groups is devoted to teaching about the scientific debate.”
How the NGSS teaches science in general also gets a good look:
“The Next Generation Science Standards are so convoluted that it is hard to imagine how they would help anybody teach any science at all, much less a fast-changing, contested science like climatology. Many concepts are too generic. Here’s one for third through fifth grade: “People’s needs and wants change over time, as do their demands for new and improved technologies.” Many performance expectations are unclear. Here’s one for kindergartners: “Analyze data to determine if a design solution works as intended to change the speed or direction of an object with a push or a pull.” What kind of data will a five-year-old analyze? Other standards pack too much science into one statement, often without sufficient instruction from earlier grades. This one for high school would challenge a graduate student: “Analyze geoscience data and the results from global climate models to make an evidence-based forecast of the current rate of global or regional climate change and associated future impacts to Earth systems.”“
I too think the NGSS are a big step backward when it comes to teaching science. In many places they replace the detailed scientific knowledge called for in the state standards they replace with hopelessly vague concepts.
Even worse, these vague concepts are embedded in a 3-D matrix. In addition to substituting abstract concepts for scientific knowledge, the NGSS have a three dimensional structure. They do not realize that if each dimension has just 20 concepts there are 8,000 combinations. If 100 concepts each then 1,000,000 combos.
Thus the NGSS are a prescription for confusion. In fact I think they are having trouble with the testing. In the NGSS case there should be national or international test scores becoming available at the state level, so we can see how well or badly the teaching under these strange new standards is doing.
In short the green propaganda in K-12 science education has been a growing problem for decades. But now under the Next Generation Science Standards it is quickly getting a lot worse. There is much more on this green wave in Barbash’s article so I recommend it highly.
American science education is transitioning and not in a good way.
https://www.cfact.org/2021/02/16/american-k-12-science-education-gone-bad/
*********************************Australia: Liberal party frustrated as National party's energy revolt gains another backer
A Nationals revolt on climate change has gained support from the party’s Senate team in a challenge to Prime Minister Scott Morrison on whether to allow a new $1 billion fund to invest in coal and nuclear power.
Nationals Senate leader Bridget McKenzie is joining the push to amend the government bill to set up the fund, arguing the law should be “technology neutral” rather than limiting options.
The move throws support behind former party leader Barnaby Joyce, who infuriated the Liberals on Tuesday night by preparing an amendment in the lower house to allow the fund to invest in high-efficiency, low-emissions coal-fired power stations.
Senator McKenzie told Deputy Prime Minister Michael McCormack of her plans on Tuesday night and has support from upper house colleagues including former resources minister Matt Canavan.
The Nationals senators were preparing to make their move on Wednesday to test the government on whether to allow the changes to a bill that has been planned for months, but the divisions forced a delay in the debate.
The government withdrew the bill from debate and is considering whether to bring it to Parliament in weeks or months to come, with some backbenchers speculating it could be delayed until May.
Liberal MPs are privately fuming at the Nationals’ move, arguing federal funds should not be put into new coal-fired power stations, but are avoiding public comment on the grounds a stoush would hurt the government.
Senator McKenzie said the government amendment needed to be changed. “The amendment is too narrowly focused, backing only one energy source for emission reduction,” she said.
Mr Joyce opened the policy dispute by lodging a formal amendment in Parliament to use a $1 billion Grid Reliability Fund, administered by the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, to build a coal-fired power station.
Mr Joyce said his bill did not compel the CEFC to fund coal power but removed a restriction which prevented it from backing the energy source. “It’s not an obligation to do so, people can make a choice,” Mr Joyce said of his coal amendment. “But it shouldn’t be ruled out.“
Mr Joyce’s amendment would permit high-efficiency low-emissions coal plant projects to apply to the fund, which he said would boost greenhouse gas reductions. “Our largest sale as a nation is fossil fuels, like it or not, and I can’t see anything to change that,” he said. “The greatest thing we could do for emissions reduction is devise a technology for efficient use of coal.”
The bill the Nationals want to amend was brought to Parliament in August by Energy and Emissions Reduction Minister Angus Taylor.
It would enable the CEFC to administer a new Grid Reliability Fund, which he said was needed to develop new energy projects and support reliability in the electricity network.
Mr Taylor told Parliament the bill would “not divert the CEFC’s existing $10 billion allocation” but would create a “trusted counter-party to investments, allowing the CEFC to support private sector involvement” in energy generation.
The CEFC welcomed the proposed changes, saying “critical infrastructure could be funded through the fund to improve the energy grid’s generation capacity and reliability”, and noted gas investments “may be technically eligible for funding” even without changes to legislation.
Labor climate change and energy spokesman Chris Bowen said delaying the bill was a “humiliating backdown” for the Morrison government.
“This now means the government is divided over exactly how many fossil fuel technologies the Clean Energy Finance Corporation should support – just gas, as proposed by Taylor, or gas and coal,” he said.
“The government announced the Grid Reliability Fund 15 months ago. Now, let alone deliver reliable cheap energy for Australians, the government can’t deliver a debate on the fund in the Coalition-controlled House of Representatives.”
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC) Saturdays only
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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18 February, 2021
Sea level data confirms climate modeling projections were right
Ya gotta laugh. The journal article is "Reconciling global mean and regional sea level change in projections and observations" by Wang et al.
The key sentence in it is "The central values of the observed GMSL (1993–2018) and regional weighted mean (1970–2018) accelerations are larger than projections for RCP2.6 and lie between (or even above) those for RCP4.5 and RCP8.5 over 2007–2032, but are not yet statistically different from any scenario"
In other words the data is consistent with even extreme scenarios, implying that no specific scenario predicted it. ALL of the projections were "right". That's a remarkably loose definition of "right". As the showman said: "You pays your money and you takes your choice"
Projections of rising sea levels this century are on the money when tested against satellite and tide-gauge observations, scientists find.
Climate model projections of sea-level rises in the early 21st century are in good agreement with sea level data recorded in the corresponding period, a recent analysis has found.
And the scientists who crunched the numbers say the finding does not bode well for sea level impacts over coming decades if greenhouse gas emissions are not reined in.
In an article published recently in Nature Communications, the scientists from Chinese and Australian institutions including UNSW Sydney examined the global and regional sea level projections of two reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: the Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) and Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate (SROCC).
They compared the reports’ projections with the observed global and coastal sea level data gathered from satellites and a network of 177 tide-gauges from the start of the projections in 2007 up to to 2018. The scientists found that the trends of the AR5 and SROCC sea level projections under three different scenarios of greenhouse gas emissions “agree well with satellite and tide-gauge observations over the common period 2007–2018, within the 90 per cent confidence level”.
Study co-author and leading sea-level expert, Professor John Church, says while he thought the projections from modelling would be accurate at the global level, he was pleasantly surprised that they were as accurate at the regional and local level.
“Our analysis implies that the models are close to observations and builds confidence in the current projections for the next several decades,” says Prof. Church, who is part of UNSW’s Climate Change Research Centre.
But he adds a caveat that because the available comparison period is short, at just 11 years, he would be hesitant to extend the same degree of confidence over the longer term – from the end of this century and beyond – where acceleration of ice-sheet contribution to sea-level rise is less understood and could lead to larger rises.
“There remains a potential for larger sea level rises, particularly beyond 2100 for high emission scenarios. Therefore, it is urgent that we still try to meet the commitments of the Paris Agreement by significantly reducing emissions,” Prof. Church says.
The analysis looked at the three different emissions scenarios in the IPCC’s reports that corresponded to three different climate futures depending on what greenhouse gas mitigation strategies were adopted – known as Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) scenarios.
The lowest scenario (RCP2.6) examined is for strong mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions, about in line with 2oC of global warming by 2100 but still larger than what is required to meet the Paris Agreement of well below 2oC.
The middle scenario (RCP4.5) requires stabilisation of radiative forcing in the latter half of this century and results in warming well above the Paris Target.
And the highest scenario (RCP8.5) is for large greenhouse gas emissions resulting in ongoing rapid warming and implies a commitment to large sea level rises.
“The analysis of the recent sea level data indicate the world is tracking between RCP4.5 and the worst case scenario of RCP8.5,” Professor Church says.
“If we continue with large ongoing emissions as we are at present, we will commit the world to metres of sea level rise over coming centuries.”
Next the group will attempt to gain a greater understanding of the processes determining regional sea level rise.
Press release from Uni NSW. lachlan.gilbert@unsw.edu.au
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Winter Storm Causes Frozen Turbines, Massive Blackouts In Texas
So much for "sustainable" power from windmills. No power at all for many Texans. A coal-fired generator would have none of these problems
A large portion of wind turbines in Texas are frozen due to the historic winter storm conditions in the area.
The freezing wind and ice storms have rendered the turbines inoperable as a contributing source of energy, according to Dallas Morning News. This has led to peak record levels of demand for energy in the state.
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) has asked residents and businesses to conserve energy and limit their electricity use in order to help lower the stress on the compromised electrical grid.
“We are experiencing record-breaking electric demand due to the extreme cold temperatures that have gripped Texas,” said ERCOT President and CEO Bill Magness in the press release.
“At the same time, we are dealing with higher-than-normal generation outages due to frozen wind turbines and limited natural gas supplies available to generating units. We are asking Texans to take some simple, safe steps to lower their energy use during this time,” Magness continued.
President Biden issued a federal state of emergency for Texas on Sunday at the request of Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott. Most of the current weather warnings for Texas will stay in place until Tuesday at noon according to Weather.com.
The unusual winter storm has also left millions of Texans without power as of Sunday, with rotating blackouts still ongoing as of Monday morning.
In 2019, wind surpassed coal as an energy source in Texas, ranking just below natural gas, according to CNN. Wind power contributes to 22% of the state’s energy production. Texas continues to lead the nation as the top producer of wind power in the United States.
https://dailycaller.com/2021/02/15/winter-storm-causes-massive-blackouts-texas/
********************************Expert: Gas Prices Have Surged Since Election, Here's How Much Americans Could Pay Under Biden
Energy industry executives are sounding the alarm on President Joe Biden’s disastrous policies and warning that they will force Americans to pay higher prices for gas and other utilities.
Steven Kopits is a longtime oil industry executive who’s currently the managing director of Princeton Energy Advisors. He’s horrified that since Election Day, gas prices have soared 18 percent, while the price of oil has rocketed almost 50 percent, the Washington Examiner reported Thursday.
Kopits said Biden’s reckless embrace of expensive, ineffective “green-energy” initiatives will hurt all Americans financially and could also damage the president politically.
“Biden has substantial political risk heading in the 2022 midterms,” he told the Examiner.
“He would do well to articulate a more balanced energy package because we may well see gasoline prices above $4 a gallon, and Republicans will not hesitate to finger the moratorium on leasing as the cause,” Kopits said.
Dan Naatz is a senior vice president at the Petroleum Association of America. He said Biden has shown that he doesn’t care about American workers based on his destructive move to cancel the Keystone XL Pipeline, resulting in the loss of 11,000 jobs.
“The Biden administration’s plan to obliterate the jobs of American oil and gas explorers and producers has been on clear display with cancellation of the Keystone XL Pipeline, the initial announcement of a 60-day freeze on federal leasing and permitting,” Naatz told the Examiner.
Another industry expert who chose to remain anonymous said Biden’s epic incompetence has dramatically set the country back and made it less competitive on the world stage.
“In four years [under President Donald Trump], we had made the U.S. energy-independent and denied the bad guys the ability to control global oil prices,” he said. “The Democrats undo it in two weeks. Just incredible.”
Last month, Biden came under fire after he halted new drilling permits on federal lands on his second day in office.
In the lead-up to the election, the career politician had flip-flopped on fracking depending on which audience he addressed.
Biden opposed fracking when pandering to the far-left faction of the Democratic Party, which claims fracking is bad for the environment. However, he supported fracking when pandering to moderates.
Once he got installed as president, Biden blocked oil and gas drilling on public lands, freezing such leases for at least 60 days.
Energy experts have repeatedly warned that a ban on fracking would dramatically increase energy costs and decimate millions of jobs.
Last month, Marty Durbin of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Global Energy Institute issued a statement warning that Biden’s move to “impose an indefinite ban on new energy production on federal lands and waters is bad policy and counterproductive to the goals of supporting the economy and combatting climate change.”
Other GEI executives said banning fracking will erode America’s competitive edge, compromise national security and cause energy prices to soar.
“By 2022, 14.8 million jobs could be lost, gasoline prices and electricity prices could almost double, and each American family could see their cost of living increase by almost $4,000,” the Global Energy Institute warned.
Karen Harbert, a former GEI executive, is the CEO of the American Gas Association. She said a ban on fracking is a dangerous slippery slope on multiple fronts.
“It’s easy for politicians and activists to call for an end to hydraulic fracturing, but now we know what the consequences could be,” Harbert said.
“Without fracking, the U.S. would surrender our status as a global energy superpower. … Beyond that, banning fracking would make America much more reliant on foreign sources of energy, weakening our national security.”
Harbert warned: “Every American family could face higher prices for the energy they consume and the products and services they buy, and almost 15 million Americans could be out of work. These extreme and irresponsible proposals should not be considered.”
https://www.westernjournal.com/expert-gas-prices-surged-since-election-much-americans-pay-biden/
**********************************A new $20m hydrogen plant in Australia is part of an ambitious green agenda
We read: "LAVO™ is a solar sponge, using patented hydride to store hydrogen in metal alloy to enable the world’s first, long term capture, hydrogen battery within a secure vessel."
From what I can gather this is an extremely inefficient way to store low voltage DC current. Who would want that? It's a clever way to bypass the need for a massive pressure vessel but the "battery" is a massive object too and it would be hard to use the output
An Aussie firm that has pioneered one of the world’s first hydrogen energy storage systems plans to establish a foothold just outside Brisbane.
We learned on Monday that Sydney-based tech outfit LAVO expects to start production next year at a $20 million plant at Springfield.
Work on the facility, which will kick off later this year and create about 200 jobs, is just one part of a larger and highly ambitious green agenda promoted by Springfield City Group co-founder and boss Maha Sinnathamby.
Costing nearly $35,000, LAVO’s batteries are about the size of a big refrigerator, last up to 30 years and can be connected to solar panels, using the power to create hydrogen from water. The company also makes hydrogen-powered household goods.
They are part of a fast-growing global shift to renewable power, with the current $US150 billion a year spent on hydrogen expected to soar to $US2.5 trillion by 2050.
LAVO’s new outpost will be based at Springfield’s 40ha Vicinity business park and help the city achieve the lofty goal of producing more energy than it consumes by 2038.
“LAVO has the first and only commercial-ready hydrogen energy storage system in the world designed for everyday use by residential homes and businesses,’’ Sinnathamby said.
“We will work closely with LAVO to identify co-development opportunities, including the integration of LAVO technology into utility scale solar farms developed in Springfield City.”
Late last year Sinnathamby, in collaboration with French power group ENGIE, vowed to commit $3.1 billion to make Springfield “the world’s greenest city’’.
That means the current population of 46,000—which is expected to triple over the next 20 years—will all get their power from renewable sources and have access to electric vehicle charging stations.
Hydrogen-powered buses will provide public transport, solar panels are set to proliferate and at least a third of the city should remain as green space.
Meanwhile, Sinnathamby is also ramping up pressure on the federal government to help fund a range of initiatives that could create 20,000 jobs and help kickstart the post-COVID recovery.
He lobbied deputy PM Michael McCormack in person late last week for Commonwealth financial backing for at least a dozen shovel-ready projects in a planned new 120ha “knowledge and innovation district’’ expected to pump around $12 billion in to the economy by 2026.
McCormack, the Minister Infrastructure, Transport and Regional Development, toured Springfield for the first time and pored over a model of the city with Sinnathamby and his colleagues.
Accompanied by Senator Paul Scarr, he also met with a group of two dozen players in the health, education, defence and IT spaces across Queensland.
McCormack seemed pretty impressed with what he called the “national and internationally significant development going on in Greater Springfield’’.
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC) Saturdays only
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
14 February, 2021
The Renewable Energy Pipe Dream
"Green" energy produced by wind and solar simply cannot meet the power demands of the modern world.
The biggest problem with the renewable energy sources of wind and solar is the fact that they are severely limited by their inherent unreliability. The “green” energy produced by wind and solar is neither constant nor controllable enough to meet the ever-increasing energy demands of a modern world.
First of all, no matter how loudly ecofascists tout renewables as a “solution” to the ostensibly disastrous problem of climate change, that doesn’t negate the reality that wind and solar fail badly in being a viable alternative to fossil fuels or nuclear energy. The simple fact is that solar only works when the sun is shining and there is nothing obscuring the panels (approximately 18% of the time) and wind turbines only work when the wind is blowing (approximately 40% of the time). One of the most glaring factors that serves to demonstrate their inadequacy is the fact that all renewable energy systems are necessarily backed up by either fossil fuels or nuclear power — energy sources that are reliable, consistent, and controllable.
Further highlighting the severe limitations of wind and solar is the natural environment’s impact on this technology. For example, cold weather not only diminishes the energy output of wind turbines but often reverses it. When the temperature drops below zero these wind turbines are shut down and actually consume electricity in order to keep their components warm to prevent damage and malfunction, turning these already lackluster energy producers into energy consumers.
Of course the ecofascists answer to the innate unreliability conundrum of renewables is batteries. They claim that by storing all the excess energy produced during the peak operational periods of wind turbines or solar panels, the innate unreliability problem is “solved.”
However, the problem here is twofold. First, the battery storage capacity needed simply does not exist, nor is it likely to ever exist. As American Experiment’s Issac Orr observes, “A recent analysis by the consulting firm Wood Mackenzie estimates there will be about 741 gigawatt-hours of battery storage in 2030. This amount equates to 741,000 megawatt-hours (MWh). … In 2019, the state of Minnesota consumed 72 million megawatt-hours of electricity. This means the amount of battery storage expected to be in existence for the entire world would be the equivalent of just one percent of Minnesota’s annual energy consumption.”
Second, there’s the high cost of battery storage. Orr notes, “Current cost estimates for battery storage are about $250 per kilowatt-hour, which equates to a cost of $250,000 per megawatt-hour. This means the cost of all the expected battery storage in the world (741,000 MWh by 2030) would cost $185 billion to build, and this doesn’t even begin to include the cost of building the wind turbines and solar panels needed to charge the batteries!” And again, that would meet just 1% of Minnesota’s current annual energy consumption.
We’re really only scratching the surface here. There are certainly favorable aspects of renewable energy, and this isn’t a black-and-white calculation, no matter how much leftists tell us this is a “moral” choice. Not to put too fine a point on it, however, given the reality of the laws of physics, the day the world’s energy needs are fully met by wind and solar is the day pigs will fly.
https://patriotpost.us/articles/77681-the-renewable-energy-pipe-dream-2021-02-12
************************************Suspect Science Threatens US Farming – Again
Modern American agriculture has wrought miracles over the past 70 years. Conventional farm production per acre and overall nearly tripled, corn (maize) production increased 500% from 20% less land – and farmers used less water, less fuel, less fertilizer, and fewer pesticides and other chemicals for every bushel of food they harvested. They did all this using hybrid and genetically engineered seeds, tractors guided by GPS, equipment that can space seeds precisely to the inch and apply chemicals in amounts suited to soil characteristics that can change every few feet, and numerous other high-tech advances.
By using weed control chemicals, they avoid having to till and break up the soil, protecting soil organisms and dramatically reducing erosion, conserving soil moisture, sequestering carbon, saving time and tractor fuel, and allowing more land to be conserved as wildlife habitat instead of being planted in crops.
It’s thus surprising and troubling that environmentalist groups continue to attack the foundations of that success – especially GMO seeds and safe, effective, repeatedly tested, constantly monitored chemicals like glyphosate and neonicotinoid pesticides.
Another long-term target is atrazine, used to prevent the growth of broadleaf and grassy weeds among corn, sorghum, soybeans, and sugarcane, on golf courses and lawns, and along highways. It is the second most widely used herbicide, after glyphosate (Roundup) and controls glyphosate-resistant weeds. Over a dozen government studies since it was first introduced in 1958 have concluded it is safe for humans, animals and the environment.
The Center for Biological Diversity and other groups opposed to synthetic chemicals nevertheless sued the Environmental Protection Agency, claiming endangered species had not been properly considered during the pesticide review process. The courts gave EPA limited time to analyze possible effects on listed species and determine whether there is “moderate” or “strong” evidence that species and habitats on the Fish & Wildlife Service (FWS) “threatened or endangered” list (as well as candidates for listing) will likely be killed or otherwise adversely affected by commonly used herbicides and insecticides.
Once EPA finishes its “biological evaluation” of each chemical, it will pass the baton to the FWS for more in-depth, but still insufficient analyses of effects on each species – also under tight court deadlines.
Faced with a court-ordered deadline and lacking the data, funding, and personnel for adequate evaluations of each listed species, EPA resorted to satellite imagery, statewide crop and atrazine use data, computer models, algorithms, extrapolations, and best guesses – plus available toxicity studies of rats, hamsters, other lab animals, and plants tested for the pre-emergent weed control chemical’s effectiveness. Data were not available (or were not used) at the county level, and certainly not at the farm or habitat level.
It produced a document claiming that 1,013 species and 328 endangered or threatened habitats are “likely to be adversely affected” by somehow encountering atrazine if it is inadvertently sprayed on them, small amounts “drift” into their habitats, or animals wander into a sprayed yard, farmer’s field or golf course.
These numbers represent most of the endangered or threatened species and critical habitats in the continental United States. The numbers would have been higher, except that, as EPA notes, atrazine manufacturers “committed to limit use of atrazine products” to the continental USA.
Ultimately, the agencies must decide whether to let current rules stand – or restrict or ban atrazine nationwide, regionally or near some or all of the species’ habitats and occasional stomping grounds.
EPA’s list includes 36 amphibians, 207 aquatic invertebrates, 190 fish, 47 reptiles, 108 birds, 99 mammals, 160 insects and invertebrates, and 948 plants. At least 8 of the species are already extinct, and dozens more live in the mountaind, deserts, and other areas that will likely never be touched by atrazine.
It’s a commendable effort – may be the best possible under the circumstances. It’s just not good enough, not for decisions with such monumental, far-reaching implications for America’s agriculture, especially since these evaluations are likely to be grounds for many more lawsuits against other vital chemicals.
Agency findings are presented in complex equations, over 100 pages of explanations of data and methodologies, and mind-numbing, almost incomprehensible spreadsheets that can involve over 1,800 rows and 30 columns. They’ll probably impress citizens and courts, politicians and journalists with the expertise, precision, and detail they supposedly reflect. But in reality, in the end, it’s mostly GIGO: multiple uncertainties in, multiple black-box analyses conducted, multiple faulty conclusions out.
The EPA analysis begins with species whose actual populations and presence in specific parts of possible ranges and habitats are mostly unknown. It then utilizes statewide crop planting and atrazine use data, averaged out and applied to possible habitats and individual plants or animals – which as individuals or a species may react very differently to different amounts of atrazine, and may contact them as direct or drifting spray, diluted promptly or over weeks in soil or water, ingested or contacting the skin.
Other unknown factors include the number of sprays per year; by hand, tractor, or aircraft; wind speed and direction and ambient temperature at the time of spraying; distance to habitat or individual plant or critter; amounts actually making contact over time; and whether an individual or species reacts to some unknown amount of atrazine the same way a laboratory animal did, with lethal or sublethal effects.
Even assuming a wildly optimistic 90% confidence level for each of these 12-15 or more unknowns, calculating the ultimate “strongest” evidence of harmful impacts requires multiplying the 90% (0.9) confidence for each element – thus 0.9 x 0.9 twelve or more times. The best possible scenario ends up being 28% or less confidence that the agency conclusions are valid.
That is useless and unacceptable. Decisions affecting our farms produce and dinner tables must not be made so cavalierly, on the basis of such patently insufficient evidence and rank guesswork.
But suppose they do ban atrazine. What guarantees will we have that this will prolong the existence of species that are already marginal and threatened by countless other human and natural factors? None.
And what next for conventional farmers? There is no substitute for atrazine or other modern herbicides, which are more effective, less toxic, and more biodegradable than their predecessors. In their absence, corn yields would decline nearly 40% – and growers would have to control weeds by hand (by thousands of migrant workers and their children) and by regularly tilling their fields. Food prices would soar.
Tilling means tractor mileage and fuel would skyrocket, crops would need far more water and irrigation, soils would lose their integrity and many organisms, carbon sequestration would plummet, and millions of tons of farmland would erode annually. Millions more acres would have to be planted to get today’s corn and other yields – and much of that acreage would come from land that is now wildlife habitat.
It’s the “precautionary principle” at its very worst – always focusing on alleged risks of using chemicals – never on the risks of not using them; always highlighting risks a technology might cause, but ignoring often far greater risks it would reduce or prevent.
Finally, if environmentalists, courts, and regulators truly are concerned about chemical threats to these and other species, they would not look only at conventional, synthetic chemicals – but at organic chemicals.
Atrazine has an LD50 of 3090 for rats, meaning it takes 3,090 milligrams per kilogram of body weight to kill half of a test group of rats that ingest it orally. Copper sulfate used on thousands of organic farms is ten times more toxic: an LD50 of 300. It is deadly to fish, hugely harmful to avian reproductive systems, and highly toxic to humans. The LD50 for rotenone is 132; a little bit will kill every fish in your favorite woodland pond. Pyrethrin (LD50: 200-2,600 mg/kg) and neem oil (LD50: 3,540) positively slaughter bees! Yet they (and more such nasties) are approved for organic farming all over the US, EU, and world.
When will environmentalists sue to have dangerous organic pesticides banned? When will courts and federal agencies initiate studies of their effects on these 1,795 threatened and endangered species?
It’s time we all focused on how and where atrazine is actually used – and whether any endangered species would actually be exposed to it (and harmed by it) under conditions of actual use.
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UK: Why greens love lockdown
Greens now want harder, longer lockdowns to tackle climate change. Are they mad?
Over the past year, the response to the Covid-19 pandemic has caused untold damage to people’s lives. Discussing whether draconian policies are effective, or whether there may be other ways of managing the crisis, has been muted by angry ripostes – you will be branded a ‘denier’ or a ‘granny-killer’. To disagree is to have blood on your hands.
But surely, despite these tensions, most people want the whole thing to be over? It doesn’t seem so. One tendency seems to hope that lockdown is just the dawn of an age of confinement. Greens, after a year at home on full pay, believe this is the beginning of a bright new era of global environmental consciousness and good international governance, in which lockdown will be the norm.
The question at the centre of this bizarre, anti-human dystopianism is, ‘Will Covid help us save the planet?’. That was asked by last Sunday’s edition of the BBC’s Big Questions. spiked’s Fraser Myers, outnumbered by George Monbiot, Extinction Rebellion activists and neo-Malthusian population-obsessives, appeared on the show. He was interrupted every time he tried to counter the greens’ celebration of locking people in their homes. Such is the BBC’s absorption into the green and lockdown orthodoxies that it apparently could not find, in a population of 65million people, more than one dissenting voice.
For Monbiot, the logic of lockdown was simple enough. ‘What we’ve discovered with the pandemic is that when people are called upon to act, they’ll take far more extreme action than environmentalists have ever called for’, he said. In Monbiot’s view, all that was required to elicit the obedience of the population was for the government to make it ‘abundantly clear that we have to do this for the good of all’. But this is not true.
If it were true, there would not have been the need to pass emergency legislation, to force businesses to close, and to abolish gatherings, including protests, all under threat of fines of up to £10,000. Which is far in excess of what most people could afford without serious consequences, including the loss of their home.
Moreover, there are countless reports of local authorities and the police failing to understand the regulations they were enforcing and exceeding their authority. People have stayed at home because there was nowhere to go to, and nothing to do, and because they do not want to break the law, and because they have been terrified of the virus. A July survey of British people’s estimation of the deaths caused by Covid found that (excluding ‘don’t know’) they overestimated the number of fatalities by up to 10 times. A third overestimated by 10 to 100 times, and 15 per cent overestimated by over 100 times.
Rather than seeking to allay unfounded fear, and despite their putative emphasis on ‘The Science’, lockdown hawks capitalised on this overestimation of risk to fuel their cheap, utilitarian moral arithmetic. This may have been effective during this pandemic, in which threats are perceived as immediate, and the lockdown is presented as an extraordinary measure with an end in sight. But a climate lockdown would be forever. And in order to sustain it, the green misanthropes would need to take even greater liberties with the facts and stats.
According to Monbiot, ‘billions’ of people will soon suffer from climate change. But in reality, even the most dramatic projections suggest that for a long time – that is, centuries – climate change will be undetectable, except in meteorological statistics at the broadest, global level. Attempts to measure fatalities attributed to the consequences of climate change have been beset by radical, historically unprecedented improvements in society. If there is a link between climate change and fatalities, then it is only possible to conclude that climate change has saved countless millions of lives. In order to sustain the notion of climate change as a grave risk, researcher-advocates have had to invent counterfactual worlds, in which there is no global warming, to claim that risks in this, the real world, are indeed increasing, despite material evidence to the contrary: the fact that we are living longer, healthier, wealthier lives.
It is the ‘wealthier’ part that really bothers the greens. ‘There’s all this conversation that assumes that we can have whatever we want and make tiny little changes in our lifestyles and that will be enough’, said UCL population ethicist Karin Kuhlemann on The Big Questions. ‘I do not think people will change their relationships to the natural world. They won’t restrain consumption willingly. We need to dramatically reduce our impact on this planet.’ How? ‘People have to understand that just because you can do something because it’s available to you… doesn’t mean that you should do it.’ The ‘it’ in question, of course, is having children, which ‘creates lifetimes of consumption’ that are apparently not sustainable for the ‘planet’.
So, whereas Covid lockdowns are intended to contain a virus and prevent it from overwhelming the NHS, climate lockdowns are intended to constrain human reproduction and consumption, to prevent us from overwhelming the planet.
Some greens have been excited about how great lockdown is since last March. They wrote, from the comfort of their nice homes, on their full pay, about how fresh the air was, how clear the skies, and how prominent the birdsong. It was Kuhlemann’s colleague at UCL, Mariana Mazzucato, who in September really spelled it out: ‘Under a “climate lockdown”, governments would limit private-vehicle use, ban consumption of red meat and impose extreme energy-saving measures.’ In order to save ourselves from this fate, ‘we must overhaul our economic structures and do capitalism differently’, she claimed.
It is hard not to notice that academics’ demands for radical changes to society are invariably underpinned by threats. Like many greens, Mazzucato claims that ‘Covid-19 is itself a consequence of environmental degradation’, and that this makes the reorganisation of society an imperative on which many millions of lives depend. This is simply not true. According to Our World in Data, the global burden of communicable, maternal, neonatal and nutritional diseases fell from 471million DALYs (disability-adjusted life years) in 1990 to 288million in 2017. In 1990, 82,000 DALYs per 100,000 people were lost to diseases of all kinds in low-SDI (Socio-Demographic Index) countries, but this fell to 47,000 by 2017. The reason for this progress is made explicit by a plot of communicable disease burden against per capita GDP. Wealth is by far the greatest vaccine.
The obvious consequence of Covid and climate lockdowns, then, would be to reduce our ability to respond to actual emergencies, to spend on healthcare and public-health measures. It seems clear that green thinking is first and foremost driven by authoritarian impulses, which are subsequently given only a superficially plausible rationale. That is to say that the desire to reorganise society, which depends on hollow critiques of consumer and corporate capitalist society, exists prior to the facts, and yet are traded in the public sphere as obviously true, unimpeachable facts. No doubt, there are problems with the objects that animate greens’ and neo-Malthusians’ worldview: consumerism, ‘neoliberalism’, and the inauthenticity of (post)modern life. But the idea that they have driven us to the point of material crisis – from the weather, from diseases or from Gaia herself – is simply bullshit. Despite Covid and despite climate change, we have never been so safe, and the world has never before seen as much progress as it has since 1990.
Seen from this perspective, green demands for climate lockdown should be viewed as a greater risk to us than infectious diseases and extreme weather. The only way they can make their arguments for a ‘better world’ is to fantasise about saving us from imminent crises. They cannot actually offer anything positive at all.
Society has failed to grasp the extent to which green imperatives are ideological fantasies. Green claims are routinely taken at face value, rather than interrogated, to see what kind of world greens really want. One thing we can be sure of now, however, is that as soon as the climate lockdowners get what they want, they will simply move the goalposts. In December, the Guardian’s global environment editor, Jonathan Watts, claimed that, despite nearly a year of grounded flights, immobilised cars, a loss of 10 per cent or more of GDP, and a record plunge into further debt, lockdown had not done enough and was ‘too short to reverse years of destruction’. Now we know what lockdowns look like, it should sharpen our minds to the danger not from climate change, but from environmentalism.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/02/05/why-greens-love-lockdown/
***************************************John Kerry Is a Hypocrite and Should Not Be Taken Seriously on Climate Change
President Biden declared January 27 “Climate Day” at the White House, during which he unveiled his administration’s extensive plan to fight climate change. Along with signing several far-reaching executive orders that will undermine America’s recent energy independence and eliminate thousands of high-paying energy jobs, Biden introduced his Climate Czar, John Kerry.
According to Biden, “John has been deeply involved; the Secretary has been deeply involved in climate issues as a senator and one of the leaders, legislatively, as well. And I don’t think anybody knows more about the issue and the damage that’s been done by some of the executive orders of the previous administration.”
Kerry, a climate change ideologue on par with Al Gore, began his speech with the requisite fearmongering, “The stakes on climate change just simply couldn’t be any higher than they are right now. It is existential. We use that word too easily, and we throw it away,” said Kerry.
Of course, Kerry declined to give one iota of evidence to support his position that climate change is indeed an “existential” threat. That would be because climate change zealots like Kerry do not rely on science to inform them on matters such as climate change. He simply parrots talking points provided by radical environmentalists and globalists with “green” agendas.
If Kerry was actually interested in the science of climate change, he would be well aware that Earth’s climate has been shifting for millions of years, well before humans harnessed fossil fuels.
However, putting aside the global warming debate, Kerry’s lifestyle is not in-line whatsoever with his words about the existential threat posed by climate change. And actions speak louder than words when it comes to climate change, or so we have been told.
John Kerry, the Paul Revere of climate change, owns multiple lavish homes. His primary residence, a $12 mansion just off Martha’s Vineyard, shows us that he is not all that concerned about sea-level rise from climate change. Kerry’s home also emits far greater carbon dioxide than most Americans’ homes.
And John Kerry, who constantly reminds us that global warming is an “existential crisis” owns a private jet, which he uses to traverse the world. In fact, Kerry has owned his Gulfstream jet since 2005, meaning that for the past 16 years he has been trekking around the globe spewing untold amounts of carbon dioxide.
John Kerry also owns multiple cars and yachts, amid his vast array of gas-guzzling, carbon dioxide emitting vehicles.
In other words, the newly named Climate Envoy, who constantly lectures hardworking Americans that they need to reduce their carbon footprint and drastically change their way of life is an utter hypocrite when it comes to practicing what he preaches.
Like most global warming fanatics, including Al Gore, Kerry lives by the adage, “Do as I say, not as I do.”
However, his hypocritical lifestyle is only the tip of the iceberg. As Climate Czar, Kerry is on a mission to destroy the fossil fuel industry, and the millions of direct and indirect jobs the industry supports.
As Kerry put it, “Coal plants have been closing over the last 20 years. So what President Biden wants to do is make sure those folks have better choices, that they have alternatives, and they can be the people who go to work to make the solar panels.”
By “better choices” Kerry means choices that elites like him deem “better.” And his disregard of the thousands of hardworking Americans who he dismissively says can “make the solar panels” shows how out of touch this man is with the “folks.”
John Kerry is not a climate scientist, he is a lifelong politician. He is also a hypocrite who lectures the world about the dangers of greenhouse gases while he flies in private jets and lives like a king, spewing much more carbon dioxide in one month than most people will over their entire lifetimes.
When it comes to his harangues about climate change as an existential threat, Americans should simply ignore John Kerry.
***************************************
My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC) Saturdays only
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
*****************************************
13 February, 2021
Surge in ozone-depleting CFCs appears to have been reversed, ozone layer recovery back on track
Note the dog that didn't bark in the story below. No mention of what effect the CFC levels actually had on the ozone layer. It is implied that the ozone levels dropped as the CFC levels dropped but no actual ozone levels are given.
The fact is that the oxone levels do NOT follow the CFC levels. One would think that the diminishing levels of CFCs would lead to a steadily diminishing ozone hole. Nothing of the kind has happened. In terms of Dobson units, the ozone hole was at it smallest in 1994 and at its highest during this century in 2019: No progress at all and completely opposite of what the theory would lead us to expect
From the graph below one can see that the post 1994 picture is one of random fluctualions up and down with essentially no trend, though a RISING trend could possibly be fitted
NASA Ozone Watch
The global increase in ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbon-11 (CFC-11) emissions, which was first detected in 2013 and continued to rise in the following years, appears to have been halted.
Data from monitoring stations in South Korea (AGAGE station), Japan (NIES), and Hawaii (NOAA), showed that global CFC-11 emissions began dropping in 2019, after inexplicably surging between 2014-17, according to two research papers published in Nature today.
And preliminary data from late 2019 and early 2020 shows the atmospheric CFC-11 concentration decline during that period was "the fastest since measurements began".
"The increase [in atmospheric CFC-11] we noticed and announced in 2018 was the most surprising thing I'd seen in 30 years of my work here at NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration)," lead author of the first paper, Stephen Montzka from NOAA said.
"To tell the truth, these new results were a close second."
The rapid turnaround of a trend that could have seen further damage to the ozone layer is reassuring evidence that the Montreal Protocol is working as intended, said researcher Luke Western from the University of Bristol, the lead author of the second paper.
"It's pleasing to see that the mechanisms of the Montreal Protocol … enabled a rapid and effective response to its first major violation."
The Montreal Protocol was an international agreement made in 1987 to phase out the use of ozone-depleting substances (ODS), principally CFCs used as propellants in things like aerosol sprays, as refrigerants in fridges and freezers, and as blowing agents for foams.
Globally, CFCs including CFC-11 — the second most commonly used chlorofluorocarbon — were completely banned in 2010, after which point researchers expected to see rapid declines in atmospheric levels, according to Dr Montzka. "The Montreal Protocol phased out CFC production in developed countries in the '90s," he said.
"It was post-2010 where we expected it to drop off more rapidly and it didn't, which raised our suspicions."
By analysing the chemical signals from their monitoring stations and combining that with a knowledge of atmospheric circulation, researchers were able to pinpoint the source of around 60 per cent of the new CFC emissions to north-eastern mainland China.
It was suspected that the CFCs were mostly used illegally in the manufacture of closed-cell foams.
Using the leverage of the Montreal Protocol, combined with scientific knowledge and industry expertise, China was asked to crack down on the source of emissions, according to Dr Western.
"In 2018 and 2019, Chinese authorities discovered small quantities of manufactured CFCs and confirmed seizures of the chemicals and closure of factories," he said.
Those reported seizures amounted to tens of tonnes. While not enough in itself to explain the 26 per cent drop in emissions between 2018 and 2019, the message sent by China's crackdown may have had the desired effect on illegal manufacturing.
Although the manufacture of CFCs was banned in 2010, there is what is called a global "bank" of chlorofluorocarbons that will continue to produce emissions into the future, even if our use of new CFCs is zero.
The CFC bank refers to the CFCs already contained in products like refrigerants and foams and which will continue to leak into the atmosphere until their end of life, according to Paul Krummel from the CSIRO.
*********************************
The Biden Administration’s Attack On Oil And Gas Is Destroying Working-Class Lives
On his first day in office, President Joe Biden, the self-professed champion of unity in the United States, waged a war on the oil and gas industry, effectively destroying thousands of working-class Americans’ livelihoods.
Biden has long sought to destroy fossil fuels. On the campaign trail, the former vice president repeatedly stated his intentions to “transition” to greener solutions and move forward with a progressive approach to energy, completely cutting petroleum hubs out of the picture. At the top of Biden’s list was banning fracking, a promise he made at rallies all around the nation but later denied along with his Vice President Kamala Harris multiple times.
Despite his ever-shifting stance on abolishing oil and gas, Biden quickly moved forward with anti-fossil fuel policies just a few days into his presidential term, postponing new federal leasing of oil and gas resources for at least a year as well as halting the Keystone XL Pipeline project. According to the American Petroleum Institue, policies like these would “shift to foreign sources, cost nearly one million American jobs, increase CO2 emissions and reduce revenue that funds education and key conservation programs.”
Some of Biden’s anti-petroleum executive orders, such as ending the Keystone Pipeline, do nothing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and merely offer a leg-up to political rivals such as Russia, but Biden signed his name anyway, knowingly eliminating thousands of oilfield jobs staffed by American workers who were already struggling to recover from the government-mandated COVID-19 lockdowns and a pandemic oil bust.
Experts also warn that Biden’s directives will kill American revenue. “What we’re looking at is a huge hit to the economies of these states, massive hits to the tax revenue in Wyoming and New Mexico, because the federal royalty on oil and gas production on federal subsurface rights is shared evenly with the states,” said Myron Ebell, the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s director of the Center for Energy and Environment.
The Biden administration says it wants to prioritize working-class Americans, but all of a sudden, “moderate” Biden is taking steps such as carefully staffing the Department of the Interior and other federal agencies with radical, left-wing, anti-fossil fuel appointees, ensuring the oil and gas industry will be a target of his green energy agenda for years to come.
The Biden administration also doesn’t seem to care about the effect these policies are having on U.S. workers. In a recent press briefing, Biden’s climate ambassador John Kerry said oil and gas workers who lost their jobs due to the new administration’s sudden restrictions should simply make “better choices” and phase into greener industries that build solar panels.
“What President Biden wants to do is make sure that those folks have better choices, that they have alternatives, that they can be the people who go to work to make the solar panels,” Kerry said, ignoring the fact that jobs in wind and solar energy on average pay half of what jobs in the oil and gas industry do.
Ebell thinks Kerry’s suggestion is absurd. “The suggestion that these people will eventually be able to get jobs installing solar panels is outrageous,” Ebell said. “First of all, the jobs in the oil and gas industry and in the pipeline construction industry are high-paying jobs [and] they are high-skilled jobs. … Jobs in the solar industry are low-paying jobs, low-skilled jobs. The idea that somebody is going to take up a 70 percent pay cut so that he can be part of that — the move towards climate Nirvana is just outrageous.”
White House press secretary Jen Psaki also recently brushed off concerns about the massive job loss looming over those involved in fossil fuel industries, saying the president knows what he is doing and has a secret magical plan to grant green jobs to workers.
“There are people living paycheck to paycheck. There are now people out of jobs,” said Fox News’ Peter Doocy. “It’s been 12 days since Gina McCarthy and John Kerry were here. It’s been 19 days since that EO, so what do those people who need money now — when do they get their green jobs?”
“Well, the president and many Democrats and Republicans in Congress believe that investment in infrastructure, building infrastructure that’s in our national interests, and the boost the U.S. economy creates, good-paying union jobs here in America and advances our climate and clean energy goals are something that we can certainly work on doing together, and he has every plan to share more about his details of that plan in the weeks ahead,” Psaki said, shortly after snapping at Doocy for the question.
The Biden administration knows the effect these policies are having on communities around the United States, but even after multiple members of Congress, activists, experts, and others in oil-centric areas such as New Mexico, Texas’s Permian Basin, North Dakota, Colorado, Oklahoma, and Louisiana have spoken out about the more than a million jobs threatened by the aggressive green campaign, the executive branch led by the Democratic president continues to push a radical agenda on the American people in exchange for points with progressive politicians and firms.
************************************
Here Come the 'Climate Lockdowns'
Since there is no “climate emergency” at the moment, the radical greens have to create one. And the more dire and frightening they can make it, the more powerful they will become. AOC and her cohorts in Congress will do their best but it’s likely that the worst of the “Green New Deal” will never be enacted even with the declaration that climate change is a national emergency.
But suppose President Biden and other western leaders were to declare a “climate lockdown”? In a climate lockdown, “governments would limit private-vehicle use, ban the consumption of red meat, and impose extreme energy-saving measures, while fossil-fuel companies would have to stop drilling.”
As preposterous as that sounds it’s actually being seriously considered in some circles.
The Spectator:
Karl Lauterbach, an MP for the German Social Democratic party wrote in Die Welt last December that ‘we need measures to deal with climate change that are similar to the restrictions on personal freedom [imposed] to combat the pandemic.’ How long before this theory makes its way into news outlets and politicians’ speeches here?
Of course this idea will be explained away as simply ‘following the science’. The lockdowns which began in spring 2020 contributed to what scientists are calling the largest drop in CO2 emissions in years. The largest reason for this was a decrease of approximately 40 percent in automobile and airplane transport. The World Economic Forum praised this figure in a blog post titled ‘Emissions fell during lockdown. Let’s keep it that way.’
John Kerry is telling us that the conditions of the Paris agreement are ‘”inadequate.” This begs the question; what would be “adequate”?
As the global climate elite push eating bugs and staying home to save the Earth on the masses, it’s worth posing the question: what will be adequate? With the Global Economic Forum in Davos approaching in April, we’re going to start hearing terms such ‘Climate Equity’ and ‘Climate Reset’ (a play on the WEF’s Great Reset) more frequently. We’ll probably also start to hear calls for climate lockdowns.
In truth, the real agenda of the global elites in Davos and the ivory tower of academia is to destroy capitalism. This would happen not by government takeovers of industry, such as nationalizing rust belt companies like steel, auto, and rubber, but by simply making their products obsolete.
And the best way to do that is by locking down the economy. Presidents have used the national emergency declaration 70 times since the legislation was enacted in 1976 and the lockdowns due to the COVID crisis could very well be used to justify a climate lockdown.
“This was always the risk with the mass implementation of lockdowns. Once your leaders enforce one under the guise of public health, they will not simply set aside their power to do so again,” writes Stephen Miller in The Spectator.
I’d start stockpiling gasoline if I were you.
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2021/02/06/here-come-the-climate-lockdowns-n1423647
********************************Virginia will pay trillions for renewable power
Virginia’s 100% renewables mandate has been estimated to cost its people billions of dollars, but a more realistic estimate is trillions.
Dominion Energy, the big Virginia utility, must know this, but they are hiding it so they can build a lot of expensive wind and solar generating facilities. The more money Dominion spends under the mandate, the more it makes for its shareholders. The Legislature has no clue it is being conned.
The law in question is called the Virginia Clean Economy Act or VCEA. (Does Virginia now have a dirty economy?) It mandates 100% non-fossil fueled power statewide by 2045. Given the old age of their nuclear reactors this could well mean 100% renewables.
Here is a simple back of the envelope estimate of what the real cost might be. For simplicity we initially assume 100% wind power, because wind is the renewables workhorse. We will use big round numbers as they are easier to read and remember.
The huge issue that the public is in the dark about is the astronomical cost of batteries to supply power when the wind generators do not. As a benchmark we will look at the 7 day heat waves that Virginia gets every few years. These heat waves are due to massive stagnant high pressure systems called Bermuda highs.
With temperatures around 100 degrees these are periods of peak power usage. But they are also times of low wind, so low that there is no wind power. The standard wind turbine requires wind speeds of around 30 mph for full power and 10 mph for any. During a week long Bermuda high heat wave folks are lucky to get a 5 mph breeze.
So what might it cost for batteries to supply the desperately needed power to get through one of these awful heat waves?
Here comes the math:
A. Virginia consumes about 100,000,000 megawatt hours a year (rounded down from 118,435,380 MWh in 2019).
B. This works out to about 11,500 MWh an hour.
C. A week has 168 hours which gives roughly 2,000,000 MWh of no wind power.
D. The average cost of grid scale batteries is reported to be around $1,500,000 per MWh of storage capacity.
E. The 2 million MWh of storage required will cost a staggering $3,000,000,000,000
That is THREE TRILLION DOLLARS just for the batteries to get through a heat wave.
Nowhere is this stupendous sum mentioned. Neither the People of Virginia, or their Legislators who passed the VCEA, has heard about the horrendous cost of batteries. Dominion Energy’s plan for VCEA compliance does not mention it, but the numbers are so simple that they must know about them.
No doubt Dominion is happy to let this horror slide, while they build tens of billions of dollars worth of unreliable wind and solar power facilities. After all, the more they spend the greater their profits. Keeping Virginia in the dark is a trillion dollar con game.
The profound ignorance of the Legislature is demonstrated by the truly strange power storage requirements in the VCEA, which deems 2,700 megawatts (MW) of storage to be in the public interest.
To begin with, MW is not a measure of storage capacity. It is actually the discharge rate. It is how fast you can poor the juice, not how much is in the container. It is true that grid batteries come with a MW rating, but this is for when they are used to stabilize the erratic output of renewables generators. For stabilization you need a lot of power really fast so every MW counts. For storage it is the MWh that matter.
Stabilization is not storage so this 2,700 MW number tells us nothing about how batteries might supply a low wind heat wave. However, as a rule of thumb the MWh of battery storage capacity is typically from two to four times the MW of discharge capacity.
So the VCEA batteries might provide from 5,400 to 10,800 MWh of power storage. But we need 2,000,000 MWh to weather our heat wave. This makes the VCEA numbers so small as to be nonexistent. Clearly the Virginia Legislature did not know about this enormous storage requirement.
Also, batteries are sometimes listed by MW in order to make them look like generators, which in fact come in MW. This is a deceptive practice. A 100 MW generator running constantly for 7 days produces 16,800 MWh of juice. A 100 MW battery only produces as much as it holds, typically 200 to 400 MWh. Thus making the battery sound like the generator is extremely misleading. Perhaps the Virginia Legislature was misled.
As for the THREE TRILLION DOLLARS cost estimate, that might come down if grid scale batteries get cheaper. After all, electric vehicle batteries have come down in cost quite a bit. This is due to a combination of innovation, standardization and mass production.
But there are also big reasons why this staggering cost might actually be very low. Here are several looming drivers of higher cost:
1. Our estimate is based on average power usage, but these heat waves create peak power usage, which can easily be 30% greater or more. So we might need 30% or so more batteries.
2. There is also the goal of converting all cars and trucks to electric power. Nationally the energy content of all the gasoline and diesel we use is much greater than the electricity we use. Thus switching to electric vehicles might require more than double the present electric power output. So we might need 100% or so more batteries.
3. In the same way there is the goal of switching all house, building and water heating from natural gas and fuel oil to electric power. This too would greatly increase the need for power, and so also for batteries.
Taking all these power increases together we might need three times as much storage, or 6,000,000 MWh. In that case the cost decreases start from NINE TRILLION DOLLARS, not three trillion.
But there is even more, because once in a while these low wind heat waves last a lot longer than a week, perhaps even two weeks or more. They too have to be supplied and this would by itself double the required storage.
Solar power is not considered here but it too has large scale supply problems. To begin with it produces no power most of every day. Add to that a multi-day snowstorm dumping several paralyzing feet of covering snow with frigid temperatures and the storage numbers will again be enormous.
All of this is, as I said, back of the envelope stuff. What is clearly needed is careful modeling and realistic cost estimating. The one VCEA cost estimate I know of is $84 billion. The reality is likely between ten and a hundred times greater, or one to two orders of magnitude. That is between $800 billion and $8 trillion.
Of course these estimated costs are impossibly large, but that is the reality of the Virginia Clean Economy Act. It would destroy the Virginia economy. Clearly VCEA should be repealed.
https://www.cfact.org/2021/02/05/virginia-will-pay-trillions-for-renewable-power/
***************************************My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC) Saturdays only
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
*****************************************
12 February, 2021
Tesla irrationality
Tesla might have one of the most loyal fans of any car maker.
The electric car maker has topped customer satisfaction surveys despite also bottoming-out in reliability reports.
American organisation Consumer Reports – which is similar to Australia’s Choice – shows just how big a paradox Tesla owners are.
In the company’s recent customer satisfaction survey Tesla was head and shoulders above all other car brands.
Owners heaped praise on Tesla’s driving ability, interior comfort and in-car technology – but they did mark the EV maker down on value.
On the flip side Tesla has often ranked near the bottom in the reliability stakes.
In Consumer Reports’ most recent reliability survey the EV maker came in at 25 out of 26. The only model they recommended buying was the Model 3, and the Model S was named one of the least reliable models on sale.
Elon Musk admitted in the past week that reliability issues have dogged the brand for some time.
He even went as far as to recommend not to buy one of his vehicles during a new model’s production ramp up stage.
In the recent interview with engineering consultant Sandy Munro, Musk said: “Friends ask, ‘When should I buy a Tesla?’. Well, either buy it right at the beginning or when production reaches steady state. During that production ramp, it’s super hard to be in vertical climb mode and get everything right on the details.”
The company’s recent rapid expansion could explain the poor results in the Consumer Reports reliability survey and respected JD Power report.
In JD Power’s recent initial quality survey Tesla ranked well behind most established players with the survey funding 250 issues per 100 vehicles. A long way behind the first placed Kia with 136 issues.
But these reliability and quality issues seem to have little effect on current or future owners.
The Consumer Reports satisfaction survey said most owners would buy again.
A lot of this has to do with the brand’s image. Tesla has a cool edge, it makes cutting-edge and exciting vehicles, which has helped drive record sales in 2020.
Tesla recently updated its Model S sedan with a new Plaid+ version, which is one of the fastest vehicles on the planet – surpassing 100 years of petrol-powered vehicle development in about a decade.
Plaid+ pushes the Model S’s outputs to extremes with 1100 horsepower, or 820kW, of grunt produced from a combination of three electric motors.
Tesla claims this will help push the electric sedan from 0-100km/h in less than 2.1 seconds.
Musk also draws in hordes of young and tech savvy buyers with his new-age thinking.
Today the company purchased nearly $2b worth of Bitcoin, along with announcing his company would accept the cryptocurrency as payment for vehicles in the future.
Tesla is unlike any car company on the planet, and it appears its fans can’t get enough.
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The 'Clean Electric Vehicle' Fairy Tale
The pollution difference between electric- and gas-powered vehicles simply isn't what the environmental lobby would have you believe.
Are people who drive electric vehicles better people than those who do not? Or maybe a better way to frame the question is this: Are electric vehicles morally superior to gas-powered vehicles? The dominant popular narrative answer to both those questions would be in the affirmative. After all, “green energy is clean energy.” However, the dirty little secret is that the “green” associated with electric vehicles is far from clean or free of pollution.
This is not to discount the amazing technological developments that have come about in the electric vehicle industry. Rather, this criticism is aimed at dispelling the popular misnomer of green equating to clean. Electric vehicles are not morally superior to gas-powered cars. Each have advantages and disadvantages that any considerate consumer should weigh according to their own interests and concerns and not simply imbibe the propaganda of dubious activists or outright ecofascists.
There are at least three significant factors that compromise the popular image of electric vehicles being more environmentally “responsible.” First, there’s the highly toxic nature of lithium batteries, which are the essential component in making electric vehicles possible. Second is the disposal of spent batteries. Third is the means by which power is generated for those batteries.
The mining and extraction process to acquire the massive amounts of lithium needed to meet the ever-growing world demand has been causing quite the polluting mess. As Guillermo Gonzalez, a lithium battery expert from the University of Chile, stated in 2009, “Like any mining process, it is invasive, it scars the landscape, it destroys the water table and it pollutes the earth and the local wells. This isn’t a green solution — it’s not a solution at all.” And it’s not only the extraction of lithium that’s problematic, but also other essential and highly toxic products such as cobalt that are needed make these batteries. Much of this mineral extraction happens in countries that don’t share the same concern for protecting the local environment as espoused by those in the West.
Meanwhile, there’s the reality of the environmental impact of aging and disposed batteries. For the most part, the polluting days of gas-powered vehicles ends when the vehicle no longer runs, while the issue of dealing with spent lithium batteries must continue. No parking the old electric in a junk yard and letting it rust away with little concern.
Finally, there’s the issue of powering. While green energy fans love their renewables like wind and solar, the fact of the matter is that neither offer the amount or consistency to meet the energy needs of today’s world, let alone a world where more and more folks are driving around in electric vehicles.
An ironic video clip has recently resurfaced featuring Kristin Zimmerman, a prominent member of General Motor’s Chevy Volt design team, in which she admits that 95% of the electricity used to power the vehicle is generated by coal power. That video is years old, and the numbers have shifted some, but coal is still a major source. What would truly work to cut down on the pollution from electric vehicles would be to increase the number of nuclear power plants producing reliable energy. But environmental activists shun nuclear. Until then, the notion that electric vehicles are significantly more environmentally responsible than gas-powered autos will continue to remain a popular fairy tale.
https://patriotpost.us/articles/77596-the-clean-electric-vehicle-fairy-tale-2021-02-09
*****************************************There is no “climate emergency”, according to a study for the Global Warming Policy Foundation by independent scientist Dr Indur Goklany
Goklany concludes:
While climate may have changed for the warmer:
* Most extreme weather phenomena have not become more extreme, more deadly, or more destructive
* Empirical evidence directly contradicts claims that increased carbon dioxide has reduced human wellbeing. In fact, human wellbeing has never been higher
* Whatever detrimental effects warming and higher carbon dioxide may have had on terrestrial species and ecosystems, they have been swamped by the contribution of fossil fuels to increased biological productivity. This has halted, and turned around, reductions in habitat loss
The report will make hugely depressing reading for all the prominent environmental activists — from the Pope and Doom Goblin Greta Thunberg to the Great Reset’s Klaus Schwab — who have been pushing the “climate emergency” narrative. It is an article of faith for the globalist elite and their useful idiots in the media, in politics, in business, and the entertainment that the world is on course for climate disaster which only radical and costly international action can prevent.
But Goklany’s report — Impacts of Climate Change: Perception & Reality — claims there is little if any evidence to support the scare narrative.
At the end, Goklany provides a table, setting out all the scaremongering claims made by environmental groups — and then comparing them with observed reality. Only one of the claims stands up, according to the study — weather has been getting slightly warmer:
More hot days and fewer cold days — Yes
Cyclones/hurricanes more intense or frequent — No
Tornadoes increase and become more intense — No
Floods more frequent and more intense — No
Droughts more frequent and intense — No
Area burned by wildfire increasing — No (area peaked in mid-19th century)
Cereal yields decreasing — No (they have tripled since 1961)
Food supplies per capita decreasing — No (increased 31 per cent since 1961)
Land area and beaches shrinking, coral islands submerged — No. (Marginal expansion)
None of the doom-mongering claims made about a decline in human welfare stands up, either, according to the study.
Access to cleaner water has increased; mortality from ‘Extreme Weather Events’ has declined by 99 per cent since the 1920s; fewer people are dying from heat; death rates from climate-sensitive diseases like malaria and diarrhoea have decreased (since 1900 malaria death rates have declined 96 per cent); hunger rates have declined; poverty has declined (GDP per capita has quadrupled since 1950 even as CO2 levels have sextupled); life expectancy has more than doubled since the start of industrialisation; health adjusted life expectancy has increased; global inequality has decreased in terms of incomes, life expectancies and access to modern-day amenities; the earth is green and more productive; habitat lost to agriculture has peaked due to fossil fuel dependent technologies.
It will be hard for green activists to dismiss Goklany as a “denier”. His credentials as a climate expert are impeccable. He was a member of the U.S. delegation that established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and helped develop its First Assessment Report. He subsequently served as a U.S. delegate to the IPCC, and as an IPCC reviewer.
Goklany says:
Almost everywhere you look, climate change is having only small, and often benign, impacts. The impact of extreme weather events ? hurricanes, tornadoes, floods and droughts ? are, if anything, declining. Economic damages have declined as a fraction of global GDP. Death rates from such events have declined by 99% since the 1920s. Climate-related disease has collapsed. And more people die from cold than warm temperatures.
Even sea-level rise — predicted to be the most damaging impact of global warming — seems to be much less of a problem than thought, according to to the study’s findings.
Goklany says:
A recent study showed that the Earth has actually gained more land in coastal areas in the last 30 years than it has lost through sea-level rise. We now know for sure that coral atolls aren’t disappearing and even Bangladesh is gaining more land through siltation than it is losing through rising seas.
In his report, Goklany destroys many of the green movement’s shibboleths, including the notion that fossil fuels are bad for the planet. Not only, he suggests, has their CO2 contributed to “global greening” — “contrary to prevailing wisdom, tree cover globally has increased by over 2 million km2 between 1982 and 2016, an increase of 7 per cent” — but they provide the fertilisers and pesticides which simultaneously feed the planet and reduce the amount of land required for agriculture:
Thus, nitrogen fertilisers and carbon dioxide fertilisation have together increased global food production by 111 per cent. In other words, fossil fuels are responsible for more than half of global food production. Without them, food would be scarcer, and prices higher (assuming all else, including food demand, stays constant). To maintain the food supply, croplands would have to more than double, to at least 26 per cent of the world’s land area (ex-Antarctica). Adding in pastureland, the human footprint on the planet would increase to 51.2 per cent of the world. In other words, fossil fuels have saved 13.8 per cent of the non-frozen parts of the world from being converted to agriculture.
At the beginning, he quotes a number of climate doom-mongers, including the Pope. According to the Pope:
The effects of global inaction are startling…Around the world, we are seeing heat waves, droughts, forest fires, floods and other extreme meteorological events, rising sea levels, emergencies of diseases and further problems that are only premonition of things far worse, unless we act and act urgently.
Maybe it’s time the Pope looked at some actual evidence…
https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2021/02/07/delingpole-study-disputes-earth-climate-emergency/
*********************************Peter Ridd case to go to Australian High Court
He dared to say that Greenie scare stories about the barrier reef were not well founded in the facts
A former James Cook University professor fired over his comments about his colleagues’ climate change findings will have his case heard in The High Court.
Academic Dr Peter Ridd was speaking “hard truths” but should have been protected from being sacked by his contract, the High Court heard as it granted his case special leave to be heard.
Dr Ridd was fired from James Cook University in 2018 for making disrespectful comments about his colleagues when he claimed their findings on climate change could not be trusted as they were too “emotionally involved”, breaching the university’s code of conduct.
The case, which has become a flash point for freedom of speech and intellectual freedom, will be heard by the High Court later this year after it agreed on Thursday to hear the case.
Counsel for Dr Ridd, Stuart Wood QC, said his client’s enterprise agreement granted protection from the code of conduct’s requirement for respectful and courteous behaviour towards colleagues, as well as not bringing the university into disrepute.
“It’s freedom... for academics to go about their work which involves the robust exchange of ideas and to be... protected from the university,” he said.
“One of the provisions (of the code of conduct)... an academic must be respectful and courteous to other members of staff, that obligation cuts across section 14 (of the enterprise agreement).”
Mr Wood said as long as his client did not “harass, bully, vilify or intimidate” his colleagues, his intelligence and academic freedom was protected by the enterprise agreement.
He said it was agreed his client had breached the code of conduct by his “extremely disrespectful” comments about his colleagues, but that the enterprise agreement protected him from disciplinary action when he was speaking within his field of expertise.
“The purpose of the clause... is to allow academics to robustly exchange ideas without being censured. That purpose was ignored,” he said. “Section 14 (means) you can speak hard truths as long as you don’t harass, bully, vilify or intimidate.
“The court should be very troubled by the facts of this case. The commitment from the university to protect the academic freedom was resiled from and Dr Ridd was punished for doing what he should be doing.”
Dr Ridd said he was not surprised, but still relieved by the court’s decision. He said the case would determine the future of academic freedom in Australia. “If we go down... essentially academic freedom doesn’t effectively exist,” he said.
“Academics will always be wondering, actually, can I really say that. They will just zip up. “If universities are not there to have robust debate, then what the hell are they there for?”
Dr Ridd said there were times when intellectual freedom and respectful debate could not occur side-by-side because respect was a broad term. “It can mean from bare tolerance to almost adulation,” he said.
Acting for JCU, Brett Walker SC said the code of conduct and enterprise agreement should be read together, allowing intellectual freedom while treating colleagues with respect.
“It’s a long bow indeed that facts don’t support... that suggests behaving with respect for others is in incongruence to the exercise of intellectual freedom,” Mr Walker said.
“If you assume in your interpretation that intellectual freedom includes freedom from all modes of complying with norms of conduct, such as respect, courtesy, lack of abuse, we have a detraction in the code of conduct.”
Mr Walker said the code of conduct was not simply a tool of the university, but its existence was required by law, though the Public Sector Ethics Act.
He said there was no disagreement between the parties that Dr Ridd breached the code of conduct and if it was found the code and enterprise agreement could be read together then Dr Ridd had “no right of complaint”.
The case will be heard at a date to be set.
The Institute of Public Affairs welcomed the historic judgement.
“This will be the most significant test case for academic freedom in a generation to be settled by the highest court in the land,” IPA director of policy at the IPA Gideon Rozner said.
“Today’s decision continues the David vs Goliath battle on the fundamental issue of freedom of speech, against a university administration backed by millions of taxpayer dollars.”
A 2019 court decision found Dr Ridd had been unfairly dismissed and awarded him $1.2 million in compensation. However JCU won an appeal in the Federal Court last July.
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC) Saturdays only
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
*****************************************
10 February, 2021
You Knew It Was Coming: AOC, Bernie, and Earl Introduce Bill to Declare National Emergency on Climate
President Trump declared a national emergency over the novel coronavirus on March 13, 2020. As the crisis evolved throughout 2020, many governors took that football and ran it as far down the field as they could, implementing ever more severe restrictions on their states as they declared their own state emergencies. As COVID-19 lockdowns spread across the states, they began to take on an appearance of permanence, despite questionable results in slowing the pandemic’s spread. The populace, often scared into submission, mostly complied out of a fear of the unknown.
This gave those governors a taste of power heretofore resisted by the American public, and many of them found the sensation intoxicating. Even more intoxicating was the willingness to accept the new normal.
As more despotic governors declare more states of emergency without legislative approval or oversight, or even a light at the end of the tunnel, it seemed the light bulb went on for the far left. We could finally rid the United States of that pesky republican form of government once and for all and install direct democracy. This led me to believe that these permanent temporary lockdowns would soon become a dry run for national emergency after national emergency—like climate change—that would create fun new normals ad infinitum.
Schumer Urges Biden to Declare a ‘Climate Emergency’
Enter Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Sen. Bernie Sanders, and Rep. Earl Blumenauer.
(You may be forgiven for not having any idea who that third guy is. Blumenauer represents Portland, Ore., in Congress. He’s inhabited the swamp for a couple of decades and, like other Oregon representatives, has mastered the art of avoiding notice, which is why he hitched himself to AOC and The Squad in an effort to gain traction.)
AOC, Bernie, and Earl have introduced a bill directing the president to declare a national emergency on climate. CNN reports:
The National Climate Emergency Act, introduced by Democratic Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Earl Blumenauer of Oregon, along with Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, would direct Biden to declare a national emergency under the National Emergencies Act of 1976, allowing him to unlock sweeping presidential powers and be able to organize resources to mitigate climate change.
They had introduced a similar resolution in 2019 — but it had little hope of advancing in the Republican-led Senate and under former President Donald Trump. Now, the lawmakers have re-energized their efforts under a new administration committed to combating climate change with an ambitious plan to do so.
In the announcement on his website, Blumenauer states that he worked with climate activists to craft this resolution:
Scientists and experts are clear, this is a climate emergency and we need to take action. Last Congress, I worked with Oregon environmental activists to draft a climate emergency resolution that captured the urgency of this moment. President Biden has done an outstanding job of prioritizing climate in the first days of his administration, but after years of practiced ignorance from Trump and Congressional republicans, an even larger mobilization is needed. I am glad to work with Rep. Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Sanders again on this effort, which takes our original resolution even further. It’s past time that a climate emergency is declared, and this bill can finally get it done. [emphasis added]
AOC said:
We’ve made a lot of progress since we introduced this resolution two years ago, but now we have to meet the moment. We are out of time and excuses. Our country is in crisis and, to address it, we will have to mobilize our social and economic resources on a massive scale. If we want to want to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past – if we want to ensure that our nation has an equitable economic recovery and prevent yet another life-altering crisis – then we have to start by calling this moment what it is, a national emergency. [emphasis added]
Sez Bernie:
What we need now is Congressional leadership to stand up to the fossil fuel industry and tell them that their short-term profits are not more important than the future of the planet. Climate change is a national emergency, and I am proud to be introducing this legislation with my House and Senate colleagues. [emphasis added]
AOC, Bernie, and Earl describe their goals in the statement:
The National Climate Emergency Act builds on that resolution – which was based on input from Oregon environmental activists – by mandating a presidential declaration of a national emergency under the National Emergencies Act of 1976. The legislation also outlines steps that the president can take to address the climate emergency while centering environmental justice.
To ensure accountability to Congress and the American people, the National Climate Emergency Act requires that the president deliver a report within one year of the bill’s enactment (and then every year thereafter until the emergency sunsets) that details the specific actions taken by the executive branch to combat the climate emergency and restore the climate for future generations.
As detailed in the legislation, this should include, but is not limited to, investments in large scale mitigation and resiliency projects, upgrades to public infrastructure, modernization of millions of buildings to cut pollution, investments in public health, protections for public lands, regenerative agriculture investments that support local and regional food systems, and more.
They fully intend for the federal government to intervene, on a perpetuated emergency basis, into virtually every aspect of the American economy. Notice their reference to environmental justice just before launching into a laundry list of industries that require fundamental change.
Sure, the liberals have droned on for years about the climate emergency, and Americans have collectively yawned in response. 2021 is different, though. We have a populace that has endured 2020. We have citizens cowed into fear of living their lives in dubious attempts to mitigate the spread of a coronavirus. We have a new president who has signed dozens of executive orders, many of which advance radical environmental policies. And we have a House and Senate that could go either way (to put it charitably) in terms of expanding federal power.
It doesn’t appear that America will go back to pre-2020 normal, and it remains to be seen if we have the will to fight this.
Notably, the statement from Blumenauer’s office lists many of the radical environmental organizations I wrote about in my book as supporters of this legislation:
The legislation introduced today by Blumenauer, Ocasio-Cortez, and Sanders is supported by dozens of environmental groups including 350.org, Center for Biological Diversity, The Climate Mobilization, Food & Water Watch, Labor Network for Sustainability, Progressive Democrats of America, Public Citizen, Sunrise Movement, Justice Democrats, Greenpeace, New York Lawyers for the Public Interest, Align NY, Friends of Earth, and Climate Justice Alliance.
Will 2020 represent a mere precursor to more government by fiat? Will 2021 see even more states of emergency declared, with the intent to undermine our representative democracy and further cement an American Oligarchy?
Will you resist?
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What The Japanese Energy Crisis Should Teach Us
Generating capacity from closed nuclear plants has not been replaced
A cold snap is laying bare the flaws of the Japanese energy grid. The country, which relies on imports for the lion’s share of its energy, is struggling to meet demand for electricity and heating. As this cold snap overtook Europe and Asia in early January, natural gas prices soared and the price for super-cooled liquefied natural gas (LNG) reached record highs.
As Asia has experienced a comparatively robust recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic, its demand for natural gas in general, and demand for LNG in particular has rebounded quickly. And, as China switches more coal over to gas, it has added millions of households’ demand to the gas market.
This price spike is felt especially strongly in Japan because it is an island nation, and cannot receive natural gas by pipelines from neighboring countries as other nations do. It relies instead on imported LNG, and is the largest buyer in the world, accounting for 23.4% of the world’s LNG net imports. In 2019, it imported 77 million tons of LNG, at a cost of approximately $39.8 billion. A steep increase in the price of LNG means a concomitant increase in the price of Japanese electricity as well as gas heat.
At the same time, cold weather means more stress to the grid because customers will use more power than usual to keep their homes warm. The high demand will continue to raise the price, and in some parts of the country it may become difficult or impossible to meet demand. In some areas, utilization reached 99 percent of available capacity, leaving little slack to meet any increase in demand. Natural gas supply at some of the country’s biggest power plants is now running low enough that they are forced to run at lower rates. This energy crunch is the result of demand that follows normal market forces, over against a supply limited by government mandates aimed at limiting construction to meet decarbonization goals, and limited further by the continued closure of most of the country’s nuclear power plants. Often we view caution as being without cost, but being too cautious can often have the same deleterious effects as being overzealous. Blackouts cause avoidable deaths, as do rising electricity costs.
Why is the Japanese grid uniquely vulnerable?
A mixture of factors are at play. The shutting down of nuclear plants, the country’s physical isolation from other nations, and its lack of natural resources are all components of the problem. As it has very little in the way of natural energy resources, it relies heavily on imports to meet its energy demand.
Following the great Japanese earthquake and resultant Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident, the country shut down all of its 33 nuclear power plants, three of which have since reopened. Before the earthquake, 30 percent of Japanese electricity came from nuclear power, and that share was projected to grow to 40 percent by 2017. They are currently working to restart reactors, with 18 in the approval process to be restarted. The country aims for 20 percent of its power to come from nuclear by 2030. The earthquake dealt a serious blow to Japan’s ability to generate electricity.
With these plants offline, the country became less energy-independent since the earthquake. In 2010, the country’s net electricity imports were at 80 percent, in 2015 after the earthquake, that had risen to 93 percent. Questions of safety are of course essential to the discussion of how and if Japan should bring its nuclear reactors back online, but one consideration that is often forgotten is that both the cost and availability of electricity are relevant to mortality rates.
In 2019 the Institute for the Study of Labor found 1,280 cold deaths between 2011-2014 that could be attributed to higher electricity prices following the shutdown of the nation’s nuclear plants. Shortages and price increases on necessary resources are not only inconvenient, but they can also be life-threatening, especially for the poor who feel price increases first, and the elderly who are ill-equipped to survive cold temperatures. Although precaution is warranted in the wake of disaster, delaying the reopening of plants that could be safely brought back online has costs which are often forgotten in the name of precaution.
Hopefully, Japan can weather this cold snap without a major blackout, but the precarity of the present situation shows how important it is to add reliable capacity to the grid and bring existing capacity back online as soon as possible. In the coming years, we will likely see more events like this one, as more countries import their energy after limiting their own supply. Those countries that allow the market to decide where power comes from will be the best equipped to face future crises, whatever their source.
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NO FOSSIL FUEL HERE FOLKS
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Climate risk sees bank divest from Port of Newcastle, the largest thermal coal terminal in the world
The port is the largest thermal coal terminal in the world, last year exporting 160 million tonnes and accounting for 99.2 per cent of its exports by volume.
ANZ was previously a major lender to the port as part of its $950 million debt pile, but in November the port refinanced and ANZ took the opportunity to divest.
It is understood the bank deemed the port too risky an investment which could end up a stranded asset in a world that is quickly shifting away from coal.
Last year the bank also announced an ambitious net-zero emissions action plan which adopted the issue of climate change as a condition of lending.
Analyst from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, Tim Buckley, said ANZ's decision was not surprising and in the best interest of its shareholders. "It will absolutely end up a stranded asset if the world is able to deliver on the Paris Climate agreement, and my conviction that the world will deliver on the Paris agreement has never been stronger," Mr Buckley said.
"The world is moving 100 miles an hour to address this critical global issue of climate risk and ANZ is understandably working with all of its customers to transition."
The United States has committed to rejoining the Paris Agreement to drastically cut carbon emissions, while large coal consumers like Japan and Korea have set net zero emissions targets for 2050, and China 2060.
The National Australia Bank, among several others, have meanwhile stepped in to underwrite the Port of Newcastle as it plans to diversity into non-coal operations in the long term, particularly container cargo.
"We are working with responsible lenders who are interested in helping businesses like Port of Newcastle become more sustainable and diversify," it said in a statement. "This is crucial to a business that supports our local, regional, and national economies."
The Federal Minister for Trade Dan Tehan said he was disappointed by ANZ's decision and described the port as a viable and strong business.
"I'm very pleased that it looks like there's going to be alternative finance that will be secured because it's an incredibly important business. It supports 9,000 jobs and plays an important role in our export mix," he said.
"It's incredibly important to understand that our coal is the cleanest coal exported in the world and if we're not exporting our coal other countries will be, and that will add to emissions."
When asked, Mr Tehan did not acknowledge that there was any need for the port to diversify its activities in the long term as demand for coal declines.
The port itself has openly acknowledged the need to diversify, but its push to develop a container terminal for general cargo has so far been hampered by the NSW Government.
When selling Port Botany and Port Kembla, the state implemented laws that would restrict any container traffic through Newcastle for the next 50 years. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) deemed the move anti-competitive and illegal, and the matter is currently being dealt with in the Federal Court.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-02-09/climate-risk-sees-anz-divest-from-port-of-newcastle/13136462
***************************************My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC) Saturdays only
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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6 February, 2021
The Supreme arrogance of the Green Left
"People driving their cars and heating their homes? “WE HAVE TO BREAK THEIR WILL.”
Massachusetts Climate Tsar Caught Exposing The Plan
David Ismay, Undersecretary for Climate Change, Massachusetts Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs in a presentation to the Vermont Climate Council meeting held on 1-25-2021.
“So let me say that again, 60% of our emissions that need to be reduced come from you, the person across the street, the senior on fixed income, right… there is no bad guy left, at least in Massachusetts to point the finger at, to turn the screws on, and you know, to break their will, so they stop emitting. That’s you. We have to break your will. Right, I can’t even say that publicly….”
Climate modelers are simpletons
Alan Siddons
This just occurred to me, although it’s been in back of my mind a long time. The blackbody is defined as an object that absorbs all incident thermal radiation. Climate modelers take this LITERALLY, as an absolute fact. Thus they assume that a heated blackbody which raises the temperature of X will absorb X’s radiation as well and can thereby raise its own temperature — since it absorbs ALL incident thermal radiation.
This is confirmed by the Radiation Heat Transfer feature at Engineering Toolbox. Entering 1 for the emissivity, 3.68 for the hot object. -89.86 for the cold, and pressing Calculate yields the answer: a transfer of 269.
There shouldn’t be a need to explain yet it MUST be explained to these dangerous dimwits that the theoretical blackbody absorbs all incident radiation PROVIDED IT’S NOT RADIATING ANYTHING ITSELF.
The Effect does not exist. But the Theory of this Effect is now poised to destroy civilization.
Email from alan618034@earthlink.net
Court convicts French state for failure to address climate crisis
A Paris court has convicted the French state of failing to address the climate crisis and not keeping its promises to tackle greenhouse gas emissions.
In what has been hailed as a historic ruling, the court found the state guilty of “non-respect of its engagements” aimed at combating global warming.
Billed the “affair of the century”, the legal case was brought by four French environmental groups after a petition signed by 2.3 million people.
“This is an historic win for climate justice. The decision not only takes into consideration what scientists say and what people want from French public policies, but it should also inspire people all over the world to hold their governments accountable for climate change in their courts,” said Jean-François Julliard, the executive director of Greenpeace France, one of the plaintiffs.
He said the judgment would be used to push the French state to act against the climate emergency. “No more blah blah,” he added.
Cécilia Rinaudo, the director of Notre Affaire à Tous (It’s Everyone’s Business), another plaintiff, said it was an “immense victory” for climate activists around the world.
“It’s a victory for all the people who are already facing the devastating impact of the climate crisis that our leaders fail to tackle. The time has come for justice,” Rinaudo said.
“This legal action has brought millions of people together in a common fight: the fight for our future. The judge’s landmark decision proves that France’s climate inaction is no longer tolerable, it is illegal. But the fight is not over. Recognising the state’s inaction is only a first step towards the implementation of concrete and efficient measures to combat climate change.”
The court ruled that compensation for “ecological damage” was admissible, and declared the state “should be held liable for part of this damage if it had failed to meet its commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions”.
It did not uphold a claim for symbolic compensation, saying compensation should be made “in kind”, with damages awarded “only if the reparation measures were impossible or insufficient”.
However, the court ruled that the applicants were entitled to seek compensation in kind for the “ecological damage caused by France’s failure to comply with the targets it had set for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. It said this needed further investigation and gave the state two months to respond.
It awarded each organisation a symbolic €1 for “moral prejudice”, saying the state’s failure to honour its climate commitments was “detrimental to the collective interest”.
Wednesday’s judgment was hailed as “revolutionary” by the four NGOs – including Greenpeace France and Oxfam France – that lodged the formal complaint with the French prime minister’s office in December 2018. When they received what they considered an inadequate response, they filed a legal case in March 2019.
The Paris agreement signed five years ago aimed to limit global warming to less than 2C above pre-industrial levels. Donald Trump pulled the US out of the deal in 2017, though Joe Biden plans to rejoin. Environmental experts say governments, including the French administration, have failed to meet their commitments.
The French government has pledged to reduce the country’s greenhouse gas emissions by 40% by 2030 and reach carbon neutrality by 2050.
NGOs say the state is exceeding its carbon budgets and is not moving quickly enough to renovate buildings to make them energy efficient, or to develop renewable energy. They claim this is having a serious impact on the daily quality of life and health of people in France.
In a report last July, France’s High Council for the Climate severely criticised government policies. “Climate action is not up to the challenges and objectives,” it said.
France’s greenhouse gas emission dropped by 0.9% in 2018-19, when the annual drop needed to reach its targets is 1.5% until 2025 and 3.2% afterwards.
In a written defence, the French government rejected accusations of inaction and asked the court to throw out any claim for compensation. It argued that the state could not be held uniquely responsible for climate change when it was not responsible for all global emissions.
Prominent Australian Greenies lose Federal Court bid to end native forest logging in Tasmania
The Bob Brown Foundation took the Federal and Tasmanian Governments, along with Sustainable Timber Tasmania, to court in what environmentalists billed as "the great forest case".
It argued the state's Regional Forest Agreement (RFA) contradicted federal laws and was therefore invalid. It submitted Tasmania's RFA did not protect endangered species, particularly the swift parrot.
The foundation posted on social media saying the decision was "just a setback" and did not change its campaign to end native forest logging.
Bob Brown said "this will simply invigorate our campaign to protect Tasmania's forest and wildlife". "Tasmania's forests will be free of chainsaws before too long," Mr Brown said.
He said the foundation would now look at options to appeal to the High Court.
The foundation's case came after the Federal Court ruled last year that state-owned timber company VicForests breached environmental laws by logging sections of the Central Highlands inhabited by the critically endangered Leadbeater's possum.
The forest industry and government ministers said the decision was a "win" for forestry workers.
Assistant Minister for Forestry and Fisheries Jonno Duniam said Mr Brown must now accept the judgement. "This is a victory for every hard-working man and woman in forestry across the nation," Senator Duniam said in a statement.
"Bob Brown said himself that 'it's time for a big winner' when it comes to the native forestry industry, and today's decision confirms forestry is that winner."
Tasmanian Forest Products Association chief executive Nick Steel said the outcome was good news "for Tasmanian jobs, the environment, and the Tasmanian community".
"Regional Forest Agreements were set up to provide an appropriate balance between the environment and jobs and to provide certainty to all parties, and the public can now be reassured about this balance by today's decision," Mr Steel said.
Tasmania's forestry industry employees more than 5,000 people, both directly and indirectly.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-02-03/tasmania-bob-brown-landmark-forestry-decision/13116326
***************************************My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC) Saturdays only
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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5 February, 2021
Greenland is careening toward a critical tipping point for ice loss
More model-based prophecy. Worthless
Frozen Greenland is on track to become significantly less frozen before the 21st century is over. By 2055, winter snowfall on the Greenland Ice Sheet will no longer be enough to replenish the ice that Greenland loses each summer, new research finds.
Rising global temperatures are driving this dramatic change. If Earth continues to heat up at its present pace, average global temperatures should climb by nearly 5 degrees Fahrenheit (2.7 degrees Celsius) by 2055. Regional averages in Greenland become even hotter, rising by about 8 F (4.5 C), scientists reported in a new study.
Under those conditions, Greenland's annual ice loss could increase sea levels by up to 5 inches (13 centimeters) by 2100 — unless drastic steps are taken, starting now, to curb greenhouse gas emissions and slow global warming trends.
Ice sheets are any thick masses of ice that cover more than 20,000 square miles (50,000 square kilometers) of land, and they grow their icy layers from snow that builds up over thousands of years, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC). During the last ice age (around 115,000 to 11,700 years ago), ice sheets blanketed much of North America and Scandinavia. But today, only two ice sheets remain — in Greenland and in Antarctica — holding around 99% of Earth's freshwater reserves, NSIDC says.
Ice sheets aren't static — their own weight pushes them slowly toward the ocean, where they discharge ice and meltwater from ice shelves, streams and glaciers. An ice sheet can remain stable only so long as its lost ice is replenished seasonally by winter snowfall.
The Greenland Ice Sheet is roughly three times the size of Texas, measuring approximately 656,000 square miles (1.7 million square km), according to NSIDC. If all of Greenland's ice were to melt at once, sea levels would rise by about 20 feet (6 meters). While that catastrophic scenario is unlikely to happen anytime soon, Greenland has been steadily losing ice for decades, at a rate of about 500 gigatons per year since 1999, another study published in August 2020 found.
Those scientists said that Greenland was already losing more ice than it gained every winter. Their models factored in ice loss from iceberg calving, which can be substantial; a massive iceberg that separated and drifted alarmingly close to a Greenland village in 2018 was thought to weigh more than 12 million tons (11 million metric tons), Live Science previously reported.
However, the processes that drive icebergs to separate from the ice sheet are complex and unpredictable, said Brice Noël, lead author of the new study and a researcher with the Institute for Marine and Atmospheric research (IMAU) at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. For the new study, the researchers analyzed the Greenland Ice Sheet's surface to determine when melt would surpass snowfall, Noël told Live Science in an email.
"We explore the sensitivity of the Greenland Ice Sheet mass loss to atmospheric warming using a much higher resolution climate model — 1 km — compared to previous work (20 to 100 km)," Noël said. "Higher spatial resolution means that we can now better capture the high mass loss rates of small outlet glaciers;" this source of melt runoff was previously excluded from models, but contributes significantly to the total mass of ice lost, he explained.
"As a result, we can more accurately project the future evolution of the Greenland Ice Sheet mass loss and its contribution to sea-level rise," Noël said.
https://www.livescience.com/greenland-ice-loss-threshold-2055.html
Why a hydrogen economy doesn't make senseIn a recent study, fuel cell expert Ulf Bossel explains that a hydrogen economy is a wasteful economy. The large amount of energy required to isolate hydrogen from natural compounds (water, natural gas, biomass), package the light gas by compression or liquefaction, transfer the energy carrier to the user, plus the energy lost when it is converted to useful electricity with fuel cells, leaves around 25% for practical use — an unacceptable value to run an economy in a sustainable future. Only niche applications like submarines and spacecraft might use hydrogen.
“More energy is needed to isolate hydrogen from natural compounds than can ever be recovered from its use,” Bossel explains to PhysOrg.com. “Therefore, making the new chemical energy carrier form natural gas would not make sense, as it would increase the gas consumption and the emission of CO2. Instead, the dwindling fossil fuel reserves must be replaced by energy from renewable sources.”
While scientists from around the world have been piecing together the technology, Bossel has taken a broader look at how realistic the use of hydrogen for carrying energy would be. His overall energy analysis of a hydrogen economy demonstrates that high energy losses inevitably resulting from the laws of physics mean that a hydrogen economy will never make sense.
“The advantages of hydrogen praised by journalists (non-toxic, burns to water, abundance of hydrogen in the Universe, etc.) are misleading, because the production of hydrogen depends on the availability of energy and water, both of which are increasingly rare and may become political issues, as much as oil and natural gas are today,” says Bossel.
“There is a lot of money in the field now,” he continues. “I think that it was a mistake to start with a ‘Presidential Initiative’ rather with a thorough analysis like this one. Huge sums of money were committed too soon, and now even good scientists prostitute themselves to obtain research money for their students or laboratories—otherwise, they risk being fired. But the laws of physics are eternal and cannot be changed with additional research, venture capital or majority votes.”
Even though many scientists, including Bossel, predict that the technology to establish a hydrogen economy is within reach, its implementation will never make economic sense, Bossel argues.
“In the market place, hydrogen would have to compete with its own source of energy, i.e. with ("green") electricity from the grid,” he says. “For this reason, creating a new energy carrier is a no-win solution. We have to solve an energy problem not an energy carrier problem."
A wasteful process
In his study, Bossel analyzes a variety of methods for synthesizing, storing and delivering hydrogen, since no single method has yet proven superior. To start, hydrogen is not naturally occurring, but must be synthesized.
“Ultimately, hydrogen has to be made from renewable electricity by electrolysis of water in the beginning,” Bossel explains, “and then its energy content is converted back to electricity with fuel cells when it’s recombined with oxygen to water. Separating hydrogen from water by electrolysis requires massive amounts of electrical energy and substantial amounts of water.”
Also, hydrogen is not a source of energy, but only a carrier of energy. As a carrier, it plays a role similar to that of water in a hydraulic heating system or electrons in a copper wire. When delivering hydrogen, whether by truck or pipeline, the energy costs are several times that for established energy carriers like natural gas or gasoline. Even the most efficient fuel cells cannot recover these losses, Bossel found. For comparison, the "wind-to-wheel" efficiency is at least three times greater for electric cars than for hydrogen fuel cell vehicles.
Another headache is storage. When storing liquid hydrogen, some gas must be allowed to evaporate for safety reasons—meaning that after two weeks, a car would lose half of its fuel, even when not being driven. Also, Bossel found that the output-input efficiency cannot be much above 30%, while advanced batteries have a cycle efficiency of above 80%. In every situation, Bossel found, the energy input outweighs the energy delivered by a factor of three to four.
“About four renewable power plants have to be erected to deliver the output of one plant to stationary or mobile consumers via hydrogen and fuel cells,” he writes. “Three of these plants generate energy to cover the parasitic losses of the hydrogen economy while only one of them is producing useful energy.”
This fact, he shows, cannot be changed with improvements in technology. Rather, the one-quarter efficiency is based on necessary processes of a hydrogen economy and the properties of hydrogen itself, e.g. its low density and extremely low boiling point, which increase the energy cost of compression or liquefaction and the investment costs of storage.
https://phys.org/news/2006-12-hydrogen-economy-doesnt.html
Biden Wants to Kill 80 Percent of America's EnergyWhen giving speeches and talking to audiences, I've often been struck by how few Americans, even those who are highly educated, have any idea where the energy they use in their home or business comes from. I've asked college students where the electric power is generated, and they shrug and then point to the electric socket in the wall. The electric currents just come magically through that plug.
For millennials, supporting green energy is cool and even virtuous. It's a popular and costless way to save the planet -- until the power doesn't flow through the grid. Then the laptops, hairdryers, Netflix shows, computer games and iPhones run out of juice.
That may happen one of these days -- and in the not-too-distant future (just ask Californians about blackouts), when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing.
Which brings me to President Joe Biden's take-no-prisoners approach to energy. The goals: kill fossil fuels; stop the building of pipelines; enter international treaties that outlaw fossil fuel use; end drilling on federal lands; strangle the oil and gas industries with regulatory assaults. And then throw billions and perhaps trillions of tax dollars at wind and solar farms.
So, let's go back to the question I ask students: How much of our energy needs today are met with fossil fuels -- the so-called dirty energy?
The U.S. Energy Information Administration recently released a chart showing the latest official data on U.S. energy production sources from the Department of Energy. Some 80 percent of all our energy comes from oil, gas and coal. Less than 5 percent comes from wind and solar. Somehow, Biden is going to magically flip these percentages around in five or 10 years? Even the federal forecasters who support renewable energy think that is highly unlikely.
Even if Biden were able to quadruple American production of green energy over the next decade -- a huge undertaking -- we will be meeting about 25% of our power needs. Where will we get the other 75% of our electric power and transportation fuels? Battery-operated cars such as Teslas and Chevy Volts need electric power to recharge the massive batteries.
As we produce less oil and gas domestically, two bad things will happen. First, gas prices are going to rise rapidly -- perhaps to above $4 a gallon. Prices have already started to rise at the pump to more than $2.50 a gallon in many markets. Second, we will make up for the lost domestic energy production by importing more energy from Saudi Arabia, Russia and OPEC nations.
We will reverse the energy independence achieved under former President Donald Trump to dependency on OPEC nations under Biden. This certainly isn't good for the U.S. economy and jobs here at home. But it's great news for the Saudi oil sheiks, Russia's Vladimir Putin and the communists in Beijing -- all of whom are going to make out like bandits. They can't believe their good fortune.
Maybe so, my younger and more idealistic friends say. But at least we will be doing our part to save the planet. Alas, no. China and India are building more than 100 coal plants as we shut ours down. China and Russia just signed a multibillion-dollar deal to build a pipeline from oil-rich Siberia to the big cities of China. Would Beijing invest in that infrastructure if they had any intention to stop using fossil fuels? Trump was right when he said that we have the toughest environmental standards in the world. So, shifting energy production out of America only increases greenhouse gases.
Perhaps over the next several decades, wind and solar power will be cheap enough to meet most of our energy needs. But are we to starve ourselves of energy in the meantime? Are Americans willing to pay $4 or $5 a gallon to fill up the tank with Saudi oil or Russian gas?
Wouldn't it be smarter, safer and, yes, more virtuous to get the energy we need from Texas, Oklahoma, North Dakota or even Alberta, Canada, than from countries that hate us?
Australian government rules out subsidies in electric vehicle strategy
Australian businesses will be encouraged to invest in plug-in hybrid and electric car fleets in an attempt to increase private uptake by flooding the second-hand market with new vehicle technologies at lower prices.
The Morrison government has ruled out offering taxpayer subsidies for the private uptake of plug-in hybrids and battery electric cars, arguing in its long-awaited strategy that subsidies would not represent value for money in efforts to drive down carbon emissions.
Energy Minister Angus Taylor will argue a “fleet first” strategy for new technology passenger vehicles is the smartest way to help Australia’s “planned and managed” transition to low-emission cars, while ensuring charging infrastructure and the national energy grid can support a switch.
Low-emissions vehicles are a key plank in the government’s technology road map, which it will rely on if it is to meet both its Paris emission targets and a potential commitment to net zero by 2050.
Releasing a discussion paper informing the development of Australia’s Future Fuels Strategy, the federal government has identified five priority initiatives it says will make the most impact, including commercial fleets, essential infrastructure and improving information to motorists.
The strategy argues subsidising cars for private sales would cost taxpayers $195 to $747 per tonne of carbon dioxide equivalent, depending on the vehicle type and usage. It said that figure did not present value-for-money when compared to the Emissions Reduction Fund price of $16 per tonne of carbon emitted.
Mr Taylor said it was clear the future of road transport in Australia would be a mix of vehicle technologies and fuels and that Australians were already making the choice to switch to new vehicle technologies where it made economic sense.
“We are optimistic about how quickly the technology cost will reduce for other electric vehicles compared to traditional cars, making it an easier choice for consumers,” Mr Taylor said.
Hybrid sales almost doubled in Australia in the past year, increasing from 31,191 vehicles in 2019 to 60,417. Hybrids made up about 70 per cent of Toyota’s Camry and Rav4 sales, and about half of all Corolla sales in 2020.
Industry experts have criticised the federal government outlook for electric vehicle uptake over the next decade. They argue projections of 26 per cent in December’s Australian greenhouse gas emissions trends to 2030 were overly optimistic because it assumed numbers would spike despite a lack of policy and new state taxes slugging clean cars.
Several car manufacturers, including General Motors, have pledged to end production of petrol engine vehicles within the next decade while Britain has set a 2030 target to ban combustion engines.
The EV sector has also claimed the decisions by Victoria and South Australia to aim road-user taxes at drivers of electric vehicles would prevent the states from reaching their goal of net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.
The plan justifies a focus on fleets because business vehicles generally travel greater distances than private vehicles, delivering better value-for-money through fuel and maintenance savings from new technologies and offsetting the price premium of buying the new technology.
“Supporting commercial fleet investment in new vehicle technologies will also drive uptake from private users, as fleet vehicles are generally replaced more regularly than private vehicles,” it says.
“This benefits the second-hand market and provides private consumers with second-hand vehicles at lower prices.”
Mr Taylor said the strategy would be underpinned by “significant” government investment, including the $74.5 million Future Fuels Package to invest in charging infrastructure at workplaces and in regional “blackspots”.
A move to electrify Australia’s passenger vehicle fleet was a centrepiece of the 2019 federal election campaign as the Morrison government aggressively criticised Labor’s election pledge that half of all new cars sold in 2030 would be electric.
How is Australia travelling with the switch to electric cars?
Mr Taylor said the Coalition’s policy was focused on enabling consumer choice and supporting natural uptake, with government modelling showing Labor’s EV policy would have increased the price of cars by up to $4863 to “force people out of the cars they love and into EVs”.
The transport sector makes up 18 per cent of Australia’s carbon pollution with passenger vehicle emissions projected to drop 1.2 per cent every year to 2030 amid greater uptake of hybrid, electric and fuel-cell vehicles in the national fleet.
Electric Vehicle Council chief executive Behyad Jafari has described the federal government as out of step with other leading economies over its electric car future.
Following leaked details of the strategy in December, he said Australia was “miles behind” in the transition.
“In the US, drivers are offered a $10,000 tax rebate for buying an electric vehicle, and American consumers get access to much cheaper electric vehicle options because of their long-standing vehicle emission standards,” he said at the time.
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC) Saturdays only
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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4 February, 2021
Rising sea temperatures are SHRINKING our favourite fish, including cod, haddock and whiting, study finds
This is utter rot. They admit that overfishing is causing more juvenile catches but somehow rope in global warming as well. They have NO metrics that would support that allocation of responsibility. It is just guesses and assertion.
Extra warmth is good for most life-forms so any warming is more likely to INCREASE the size of the fish
Rising sea temperatures are shrinking our favourite commercial fish — including cod and haddock — in the North Sea and West of Scotland, researchers have found.
Experts from Aberdeen analysed 30 years of trawl survey data on cod, haddock, whiting and saith from the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea.
They found that while juvenile fish in the North Sea and the West of Scotland have been getting bigger faster, the size of adults has been decreasing.
Furthermore, these changes in size are correlated with the increases in bottom sea temperatures in both areas, the analysis concluded.
According to the researchers, the data predicts a reduction in commercial fishery yields in the short term — with the long-term forecast presently unclear.
Fisheries will need to factor temperature changes into their forecasts, the team added, as to mitigate the effects of global warming and maximise sustainable yields.
The fishing industry in the UK presently employs some 24,000 thousand people and is worth around £1.4 billion to the economy.
'Both the changes in juvenile and adult size coincided with increasing sea temperature,' said paper author and biologist Idongesit Ikpewe, of the University of Aberdeen.
'Importantly, we observed this pattern in both the North Sea, which has warmed rapidly, and the west of Scotland, which has only experienced moderate warming.'
'These findings suggest that even a moderate rise in sea temperature may have an impact on commercial fish species’ body sizes.'
Warming waters limit fish body size because it both contains less oxygen but also increases metabolic rates and, therefore the demand for oxygen.
This means that fish more quickly reach the size at which growing larger would prevent them acquiring enough oxygen to meet their metabolic demands.
Data used in the study was collected as part of the fisheries-independent Bottom Trawl Surveys, and covered the period from 1970–2017 for the North Sea and 1986–2016 for the West of Scotland.
'Our findings have crucial and immediate implications for the fisheries sector,' Mr Ikpewe added.
'The decrease in adult body size is likely to reduce commercial fisheries' yields.'
'However, in the long-term, the faster growing and larger juveniles may compensate, to some extent, for the latter yield loss, as although the increase in length (and, therefore, weight) per individual may be small, younger fish are far more numerous.'
'It is this trade-off that we now need to investigate,' he continued.
Alongside the impacts on the fishing industry, changes in the size of these species will also likely affect marine ecosystems, the researchers warned.
'Of the four species we looked at, three — cod, whiting and saithe — are fish eating predators towards the top end of the food chain and therefore have an important ecological role in the ecosystems they inhabit,' said Mr Ikpewe.
'Since predator size dictates what prey they can target, a change in the body size of these fish species may have implications or predator-prey relationships.'
This, he added, could have 'consequences [for] the structure of the food web.'
Although the findings do provide strong empirical evidence for changes in fish size and growth rates in warming seas, the team noted that the study had its limitations.
The team, for example, only considered so-called 'demersal' species — that is, those that live close to the seabed — and also did not examine some of the UK's other commercially important species, such herring and mackerel.
'The next stage of our work is to consider the management implications based on modelling these populations,' said Mr Ikpewe.
'The idea is to work out what the size changes we observed may mean for future fish productivity and yield under different scenarios of warming.'
The full findings of the study were published in the Journal of Applied Ecology.
Air pollution can damage your BRAIN: Exposure to smog in childhood can affect your cognitive skills up to 60 years later, study warns
I don't think I need to critique this study. Their own conclusions are pretty negative: "From this one study alone, we cannot link exposure to air pollution in childhood to any meaningful change between the ages of 11 and 70 years"
Being exposed to smog and air pollution while a child can damage your cognitive skills up to six decades after you were exposed, a new study has warned.
University of Edinburgh experts tested the general intelligence of over 500 people aged 70 using a test the same group completed when they were 11 years old.
They also examined where the group had lived throughout their life to estimate the levels of air pollution they were exposed to during their early childhood.
Those volunteers who had been exposed to air pollution as a child had suffered a small - but detectable - level of cognitive decline between the age of 11 and 70.
Researchers behind this study didn't examine why air pollution appears to cause reduced cognitive skill, but previous studies have found it may be due to metal-toting particles in the pollution reaching the brain and damaging neurons.
The study was designed to show it is possible to estimate historical air pollution - and then explore who this related to cognitive ability throughout life, the team say.
The Scottish researchers used statistical models to analyse the relationship between someone's exposure to air pollution and their thinking skills as they get older.
They also considered lifestyle factors, such as socio-economic status and smoking.
Kohlhaas said there was a growing body of evidence that air pollution can increase the risk of developing dementia - alongside a range of other external factors.
'Dementia isn’t an inevitable part of getting older, and factors including age, genetics and the environment affect the risk of developing the condition,' she said.
Dr Tom Russ, Director of the Alzheimer Scotland Dementia Research Centre at the University of Edinburgh, said the study shows the danger of air pollution.
'For the first time we have shown the effect that exposure to air pollution very early in life could have on the brain many decades later,' he explained.
'This is the first step towards understanding the harmful effects of air pollution on the brain and could help reduce the risk of dementia for future generations.'
Researchers say until now it has not been possible to explore the impact of early exposure to air pollution on thinking skills in later life because of a lack of data on air pollution levels before the 1990s when routine monitoring began.
For this study researchers used a model called the EMEP4UK atmospheric chemistry transport model to determine pollution levels. These are known as historical fine particulate matter (PM2.5) concentrations - for the years 1935, 1950, 1970, 1980, and 1990.
They combined these historical findings with contemporary modelled data from 2001 to estimate life course exposure in the 70-year-old volunteers.
They were part of the Lothian Birth Cohort 1936 study, a group of individuals who were born in 1936 and took part in the Scottish Mental Survey of 1947.
Since 1999, researchers have been working with the Lothian Birth Cohorts to chart how a person's thinking power changes over their lifetime.
The team say this was the first study to examine cognitive decline and how it is linked to air pollution by using a long-term cohort study.
They say future work should be done to look at the link between air pollution and cognitive decline throughout the average lifespan of a human group.
'The modelled historical air pollution data need to be refined and harmonised across different time points, and these data used to provide a robust estimate of life course exposure,' the authors wrote in their paper.
'But we believe that we have demonstrated the feasibility and value of this approach,' they added.
Dr Kohlhaas said that while the study didn't go into the effects of air pollution on developing dementia, it did look at the link between pollution and thinking.
'From this one study alone, we cannot link exposure to air pollution in childhood to any meaningful change between the ages of 11 and 70 years,' she said.
'However, this research does demonstrate that using historical data to study large scale affects like this in relation to brain health is feasible.'
'We must do all we can to help reduce the number of people who will go on to develop memory and thinking problems in future and that’s why Alzheimer’s Research UK has launched the Think Brain Health campaign as a first step.'
The study is published in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease and in the Handbook on Air Pollution.
This Legal Hurdle Could Trip Up Biden’s Cancellation of Keystone XL Pipeline
A lawsuit from across the northern U.S. border over the Biden administration’s halting of an oil pipeline could hang on a Supreme Court ruling against the Trump administration related to the southern border.
In his first day in office, President Joe Biden canceled construction of the Keystone XL oil pipeline, an action projected to wipe out 11,000 jobs, including 8,000 union jobs.
Biden’s move reversed President Donald Trump’s executive action in early 2017 clearing the way for construction of the 1,200-mile pipeline from Alberta, Canada, through Montana and South Dakota to Nebraska. The project already had begun in Canada.
Alberta Premier Jason Kenney threatened legal action against the Biden administration, calling cancellation of the project a “gut punch” and “insult” to Canada.
Alberta-based TC Energy Corp. did not respond to inquiries for this story from The Daily Signal, but said in a recent press release: “TC Energy will review the decision, assess its implications, and consider its options.”
A recent Supreme Court case that may provide guidance is Department of Homeland Security v. Regents of the University of California. In a 5-4 decision last June, the justices ruled that the Trump administration violated the Administrative Procedure Act by doing away with an Obama administration policy called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA.
The key similarity is the concept of “reliance interest,” GianCarlo Canaparo, a legal fellow with The Heritage Foundation, told The Daily Signal. The phrase is mentioned several times in the high court’s opinion in the DACA case.
President Barack Obama’s executive action, which allowed illegal immigrants brought to the United States as minors to stay legally under certain circumstances, created an expectation among people in the country. Thus, if the U.S. government wanted to scrap the DACA policy, it would have to go through an administrative procedure.
This created a “reliance interest” in the policy, the majority opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts said.
TC Energy and the Canadian government likely also would have a reliance interest, said Canaparo, who has been researching potential legal avenues for the pipeline case:
In DHS v. Regents, the court found that Trump couldn’t rescind DACA even though it was an executive action, because there was a reliance interest. That could be a stumbling block for Biden with regard to the Keystone pipeline. … The administration did not consider any reliance interest.
Just as Obama’s DACA stated that certain people could live and work in the United States, Trump’s go-ahead for Keystone XL instituted a right to build a pipeline across the Canadian-U.S. border, Canaparo said. Both policies, according to court precedent, “created rights” that require the government to go through a procedure to undo, he said.
“Those rights were snatched away and the Biden administration did not consider the reliance interests of TC Energy, the Canadian government, or Alberta,” Canaparo said. “The administration also did not provide a stated purpose for the decision. You could say it was to reduce carbon emissions. But the oil will still be transported by train or truck.”
The majority opinion in the Supreme Court’s ruling noted that some DACA recipients had enrolled in degree programs, started careers, opened businesses, and bought homes. This crossed from being an emotional appeal to being a legal argument, because those persons took such actions in reliance on government policy.
Similarly, TC Energy issued at least six contracts and was set to employ 11,000 for the $8 billion construction of the pipeline to carry 830,000 barrels of crude oil per day from oil sands in Alberta to Steele City, Nebraska. From there, the pipeline would connect with another Keystone pipeline that runs south to the Gulf Coast.
The Supreme Court kept DACA in place, for the interim, while stating that the Department of Homeland Security has the authority to rescind the amnesty policy.
The high court didn’t rule on the legality of Obama’s policy, only that the Trump administration violated the Administrative Procedure Act in ending it. The justices also said Trump’s DHS was “arbitrary and capricious” for not providing a compelling reason for the policy change.
Congress passed the Administrative Procedure Act in 1946, after World War II, to recognize that the executive branch might have to take emergency action without congressional approval. Congress, however, wanted guidelines in place.
In a 2009 case, FCC v. Fox Television Stations, the Supreme Court established detailed guidelines for judicial review of a change in a government standard, according to a Congressional Research Service report. Among these guidelines is that the change cannot be an “unexplained inconsistency.”
The high court’s 2009 ruling also said that an agency would be required to provide a “more detailed justification” for a change in policy in some instances, including when a previous policy has “engendered serious reliance interests that must be taken into account.” The court determined that it would be “arbitrary and capricious” to “ignore” or “disregard” such matters.
In its 2016 opinion in Encino Motorcars, LLC v. Navarro, the Supreme Court determined that “serious reliance interests are at stake” when the Labor Department altered its statutory interpretation of a rule without a “reasoned explanation.” The agency’s move came after decades of “industry reliance” on an existing policy, the court said.
In addition to suing the Biden administration in federal court, TC Energy could launch a case under a provision of the North American Free Trade Agreement. A NAFTA provision called Chapter 11 allows companies in the United States, Mexico, or Canada to challenge decisions by one of the three nations. The provision was grandfathered into the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, which replaced NAFTA, until 2023.
A complaint by TC Energy about the pipeline cancellation under Chapter 11 could provide more neutral ground, Mark Warner, an international trade lawyer at MAAW Law in Toronto, told the Financial Post.
“They could file a complaint under the old Chapter 11 and make a case that this was arbitrary and a denial of due process,” Warner told the Post.
The energy company was going to launch both a Chapter 11 complaint under NAFTA and a federal lawsuit in 2016, but dropped both after Trump approved the pipeline project, the Post reported.
Australia: Queensland Premier under pressure to approve New Acland coal mine
Pressure is mounting from both sides of politics on the Palaszczuk Government to step in and approve the long-delayed New Acland coal mine expansion with hundreds of jobs on the line.
There are calls urging the State Government create new laws protect and push forward with the mine’s expansion, as the Bligh Government did in 2007 with the Xstrata Wollombi mine.
It follows the High Court sending the controversial case back to the Land Court for reconsideration, despite the saga having lasted almost 14 years.
There are fears continued delays could scare off international companies looking to invest in resources projects in Queensland.
But the Oakey Coal Action Alliance, behind the court challenges, say they will continue to fight to “protect water and land … for future generations”.
There are 125 jobs on the line, with the existing operations nearing their end later this year, while the project’s proponents say $7 billion and 450 direct jobs will be created if it goes ahead.
New Hope, the company behind the mine, is seeking an urgent meeting with the Palaszczuk Government, with its CEO Reinhold Schmidt saying the departments had all the information they needed to make a decision.
“What we need from the Government is a road map for how we get the project up and running because more delays equates to more job losses,” he said.
Federal Labor MP Shayne Newman and Senator Anthony Chisholm renewed their consistent calls the state to act to sign off on the project. Senator Chisholm said a solution was urgently needed in the economic circumstances. “I have been consistent for years now urging for a solution to be found so that jobs aren’t lost,” he said.
Mr Neumann said urged the Palaszczuk Government to do everything it could to facilitate the expansion. “There’s billions of dollars and hundreds of jobs on the line here,” he said
Federal Resources Minister Keith Pitt said it was a classic example of activists using courts to delay projects, but there were options available to the State Government to resolve the issue.
“There is an opportunity for Annastacia Palaszczuk to follow the lead of her predecessor Anna Bligh who introduced legislation in 2007 to protect Xstrata’s Wollombi coal mine and the 190 jobs it provided,” he said.
LNP Senator Paul Scarr, who has a business background in developing mining projects overseas, said the ongoing case sent a terrible message to investors. “If this is the result of the Queensland mining approval process, then the system is broken,” he said.
Acting Premier Steven Miles said the government would be looking at the High Court decision closely and consult with the department. “We’ll abide by the court decision,” he said.
New Acland mine worker Andy Scouller said he feared there would be more redundancies coming. “There is life after mining but I guess the frustrating part is that we’re a viable business and employ a lot of people here who contribute to society, and that’s just all going to be wiped out basically with the stroke of a pen,” he said.
The High Court on Monday unanimously ruled that the future of the site’s stage three expansion go back to the Land Court for reconsideration, despite what one judge referred to as “the unfortunate history of this appeal”.
The initial hearing in the Land Court was held five years ago, with a new directions hearing set for February 11.
The first hearing lasted 100 sitting days spread over more than a year in what Justice James Edelman referred to in today’s judgment as “the longest hearing in the history of that court”.
The judgement was made on the basis that previous appeals had been impacted by the apprehension of bias from an earlier judgment.
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC) Saturdays only
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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3 February, 2021
Biden’s Attack on Climate Change Gives Surprise Reprieve to Coal
President Joe Biden enlisted the entire U.S. government in the fight against climate change on Wednesday, even telling the Central Intelligence Agency to consider global warming a national security threat.
Yet he left out coal -- the fossil fuel most widely blamed for global warming -- when he froze the sale of leases to extract oil and gas from federal land.
It was a conspicuous omission for a president who has vowed to make the electric grid carbon-free by 2035 and who has said the world’s “future rests in renewable energy.”
“This order should have included all fossil fuel extraction on public lands,” said Mitch Jones, policy director at the environmental group Food and Water Watch, who called the decision to leave out coal both “a disappointment” and “scientifically unsound.”
“For years we’ve been force fed the false idea that fracked gas -- fracked methane -- is cleaner than coal, but, now, coal gets a pass?” Jones said. “The fight against climate change demands that we remain vigilant against all fossil fuel extraction.”
White House national climate adviser Gina McCarthy said coal leasing will still get a review as part of a broad analysis of fossil-fuel leasing. But unlike oil and gas development on federal land, which Biden promised to target when running for president, a pause on selling coal rights “was not part of the commitments on the campaign.”
Administration officials had planned to include coal in the order but the decision was made to leave it off the list by Monday afternoon, according to three people familiar with the matter who asked not to be named describing internal deliberations.
One factor in the White House’s decision was how it would affect litigation over then-President Donald Trump’s reversal of an earlier Obama-era moratorium. Conservation groups and Native Americans last year filed a fresh challenge of the Trump administration’s coal leasing restart, arguing the government did not sufficiently evaluate the environmental harm of the move. That case is still pending before a federal district court in Montana.
It’s not clear that a coal directive from the White House would have interfered with the ongoing litigation. And while federal coal sales have waned along with demand for the fossil fuel, the government has continued issuing new and modified leases, said Earthjustice attorney Jenny Harbine.
“It’s really important that this administration stop issuing leases that allow for infrastructure commitments for the next 20 years on federal coal when it’s completely avoidable and completely unnecessary,” Harbine said.
Coal is politically treacherous terrain. Just ask former President Barack Obama, who for years was accused of leading a “war on coal” by advancing policies limiting mining techniques and power-plant pollution.
Trump used that claim on the campaign trail in 2016, highlighting miners in hardhats at his rallies and even pantomiming shoveling it out on stage. The appeal helped him notch big wins in the once reliably Democratic state of West Virginia.
Biden has largely avoided explicit talk about his plans for coal, though he’s repeatedly promised that a wave of clean energy investment can put people to work in high-paying, union jobs installing wind turbines and solar panels.
On Wednesday, Biden emphasized he would seek to “revitalize the economies of coal, oil and gas and power plant communities,” starting by creating jobs reclaiming old mines and revitalizing once-polluted sites.
Coal and its workforce have politically powerful champions, including Senator Joe Manchin, the Democrat from West Virginia, now leading the Energy and Natural Resources Committee.
Manchin said he expected Biden to keep his pledge to protect the jobs of workers displaced by the shift in energy sources.
“I intend to hold the administration to this while ensuring that the burden of any acceleration in already changing markets is not unduly placed on these communities that powered our nation to greatness,” Manchin said in an emailed statement.
Biden ordered the creation of an interagency working group focused on the coordinating investments and other efforts to assist communities tied to coal, oil and natural gas.
“We’re never going to forget the men and women who dug the coal and built the nation,” Biden vowed. “We’re going to do right by them -- make sure they have opportunities to keep building the nation and their own communities and getting paid well for it.”
A legal challenge to the UK government’s approval of a new gas-fired power plant has failed in the court of appeal
The challenge was brought after ministers overruled climate change objections from the planning authority. The plant is being developed by Drax in North Yorkshire and would be the biggest gas power station in Europe. It could account for 75% of the UK’s power sector emissions when fully operational, according to lawyers for ClientEarth, which brought the judicial review.
In 2019 the Planning Inspectorate recommended that ministers refuse permission for the 3.6GW gas plant on the grounds that it “would undermine the government’s commitment, as set out in the Climate Change Act 2008, to cut greenhouse emissions [by having] significant adverse effects.”
Andrea Leadsom, the secretary of state for business, energy and industrial strategy at the time of the planning application, rejected the advice and gave the project the go-ahead in October 2019. The high court rejected ClientEarth’s initial legal challenge last May.
The UK is under international scrutiny as it prepares to host a UN climate summit in November. The country has cut its carbon emissions by 41% since 1990 and in 2019 was the first major economy to put into law a commitment to reach net zero emissions by 2050. Boris Johnson produced a plan for a “green industrial revolution” in November.
But the government has been criticised for failing to stop a new coalmine in Cumbria, which it said was a local issue. This comment was derided by campaigners, and MPs warned it undermined the purpose of the Cop26 summit. Another, smaller gas plant is under construction by SSE in Lincolnshire.
The government has also been criticised for giving billions of pounds of financial support to fossil fuel projects overseas, including a gas project in Mozambique. Johnson said in December that this would end with “very limited exceptions”. A third runway at Heathrow, which campaigners say is incompatible with climate action, is still due to be built.
A Drax spokesperson said: “Drax power station plays a vital role in the UK’s energy system, generating reliable electricity for millions of homes and businesses.” He said the company aimed to be capturing more carbon dioxide than it emitted by 2030 by burning plants or wood in other power stations and burying the emissions.
He said the gas plant project was not certain to go ahead because it depended on Drax’s investment decisions and on securing a capacity market contract from the government.
“The climate and business case for large-scale gas power has only got worse since the Planning Inspectorate recommended Drax’s proposals be refused permission,” said ClientEarth’s lawyer Sam Hunter Jones. “The UK Climate Change Committee says that to get to net zero the UK needs a completely decarbonised power system by 2035 – that’s more than 15 years before the end of this project’s expected operating life.”
Hunter Jones said the ruling overturned the high court’s finding that major UK energy projects could not be rejected on climate grounds. “Decision-makers must now stop hiding behind planning policy to justify business-as-usual approvals of highly polluting projects,” he said. ClientEarth said it would not take the Drax case to the supreme court.
Doug Parr, the director of policy at Greenpeace UK, said: “This is yet another failure of climate leadership from the UK government ahead of a crucial UN climate summit. Ministers are behaving like someone trying to galvanise a pacifist rally by waving a machine gun.
“The government must U-turn and halt climate-wrecking projects, while the onus is also on Drax to do the right thing and take this project off the table.”
There have been a series of legal challenges in the last year against polluting infrastructure projects on climate grounds. The Good Law Project is pursuing legal action over decade-old energy policies it says the government was using to approve fossil fuel projects. A legal challenge by Transport Action Network aims to prevent billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money being spent on a huge road-building programme.
A spokesperson for the Department of Business, Enterprise and Industrial Strategy said: “We welcome the court of appeal’s ruling. As we transition to net zero emissions by 2050, our record levels of investment in renewables will meet a large part of the energy demand. However, natural gas will still provide a reliable source of energy while we develop and deploy low carbon alternatives.”
Don't be so green, Joe: Texas Governor Greg Abbott threatens to sue Biden for 'hostile' climate agenda he claims will 'kill jobs'
Texas is preparing to launch several legal battles against Joe Biden for his current and future climate initiatives, which Governor Greg Abbott claims are 'hostile' and 'job killers.'
The Republican governor signed an executive order Thursday directing Texas' state agencies to 'use all lawful powers and tools to challenge any federal action that threatened the continued strength and vitality of the emergency industry.'
'Each state agency should work to identify potential litigation, notice-and-comment opportunities, and any other means of preventing federal overreach within the law,' Abbott included in the announcement of his executive order.
The order from the Lone Star State's Republican leader came after Biden's climate czar John Kerry said blue collar energy workers were fed lies that environmental protections would come at a cost to their jobs and livelihoods.
'They've been fed the notion that somehow dealing with climate is coming at their expense,' Kerry said during a briefing at the White House Wednesday of energy workers. 'No, it's not. What's happening to them is happening because of other market forces already taking place.'
He said those working in energy and coal who would lose their jobs through the new administration's agenda would now 'have better choices' – like going 'to work to make the solar panels.'
'Coal plants have been closing over the last 20 years,' Kerry outlined. 'So what President Biden wants to do is make sure those folks have better choices, that they have alternatives, and they can be the people who go to work to make the solar panels.'
The comment was blasted by the right as extremely 'out of touch' and 'elitist.'
Texas Senator Ted Cruz tweeted in retaliation: 'Rich, out-of-touch Dems lecture the thousands of blue-collar union members whose jobs are being deliberately destroyed by the Biden admin: 'Make 'better choices'. While you're at it, don't forget 'let them eat cake!''
'Texas is going to protect the oil and gas industry from any type of hostile attack launched from Washington D.C.,' Abbott said on Thursday in his plans to launch litigation against Biden.
He called the president's recent executive orders and actions related to the energy industry 'regulatory overreach' that could 'damage the stability of the Texas economy.'
'On his very first day in office, President Joe Biden signaled extreme hostility toward the energy industry, and thus toward Texas, by rejoining the job-killing Paris Agreement and signing Executive Order 13990,' he continued.
The executive order Abbott is referencing revoked federal funding and therefore stopped construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, which was a means of transporting crude oil to refineries in the U.S.
'Texas is not going to stand idly by and watch the Biden administration kill jobs in Midland, in Odessa or any other place across the entire region,' Abbott asserted.
Biden signed a slew of executive orders related to the environment that will affect the energy sector – and he put Kerry, an Obama-era secretary of state, in charge of his climate initiatives.
Those orders revoked the permit for the massive pipeline project and put a stop to new oil and gas leases on federal lands. He also rejoined the Paris Climate Accord, which Donald Trump existed during his presidency over claims it was inherently unfair to the U.S.
Australia: Irrigators' Council calls for honest conversation as its research shows inflows to river systems have halved
It looks like basic science is too much for the irrigators. A warmer climate would produce more evaporation off the oceans, leading to MORE rain, not less. So whatever the reason may be for reduced rainfall, it is NOT due to global warming
Chief executive officer Claire Miller called for an open and honest conversation to be had about about general security water allocations and how much water was held back to safeguard the river in times of drought.
"What we've done is we've taken the inflow records since 1895 from Water NSW and we've had a look at what's happened in the last 20 years there," Ms Miller said.
While research found inflows halved right across the basin, it also predicted there was a long-term warming and drying trend.
"The same pattern has been happening across the basin over the past 20 years and if it it keeps up it does present some very confronting issues around allocations, water security and availability, and finding that right balance to keep irrigated agriculture going," Ms Miller said.
"This warming, drying trend is consistent with climate change predictions."
Ms Miller said it would invoke some honest conversations about risk appetite when it comes to drought reserves, and that some irrigators had copped successive policy decisions that hampered their operations.
"All of these come together, and you've just got like this death by 1,000 cuts to New South Wales general security allocations," she said.
The fact that irrigators are talking about climate change and about having open, honest and difficult conversations regarding water availability was welcomed by the Murray Darling Association.
Murray Darling Association chief executive officer Emma Bradbury said there was a new maturity in the negotiations over water. "To see NSW Irrigator's Council talking about water inflows, availability, management of allocations, climate change and changes to legislation is extremely encouraging," Ms Bradbury said.
"This is in the backdrop of supporting farmers, productive agriculture, communities and the environment and having those decisions based in science.
"With COVID we have used the science to make good decisions and I think we are ready to do the same with water to have a healthy and sustainable system."
Ms Miller also questioned why areas like the Murray Valley had its allocations slashed, while a high priority reserve of water permanently held in the Snowy Hydro, was now being stored away in the allocation framework for NSW.
"This reserve was was never there before, it was sort of a 'use it or lose it', and the water would go back into the the general pool for really allocation to everyone," she said.
"As well as that emerging over the last few years we've also got very large drought reserves that are held back in the Murray and Murrumbidgee storages."
General security irrigators in the NSW Murray Valley currently have an allocation of 46 per cent.
Storage dams which feed into the Murray system are currently at 62 per cent capacity for Dartmouth Dam; the Hume Dam is at 54 per cent; and Lake Victoria is 48 per cent full.
She recognised the drought reserves were a safeguard against a repeat of the Millennium drought and ensure rivers runs and town have a domestic supply of water at all times.
Ms Miller said the high priority reserve held in the Snowy Hydro needed to be more transparent. "We need to look at that risk appetite and ask whether we've got too much in drought reserves and too much of a belts and braces approach," she said.
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC) Saturdays only
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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2 February, 2021
Biden’s new climate chief John Kerry invokes Australian bushfires
Thus showing that he knows nothing about them. The recent bushfires were bad but not as bad as some others from way back
London: US President Joe Biden’s climate tsar has invoked last summer’s Australian bushfire crisis as evidence the world “can’t afford to lose any longer” and must urgently slash carbon emissions.
John Kerry, a former US secretary of state under Barack Obama, is rallying world leaders to bring more ambitious policies to a crunch summit in Glasgow later this year through his role as Biden’s international climate envoy.
The Biden administration made climate change its focus on Thursday AEDT, announcing a series of new executive orders designed to elevate climate “as an essential element of US foreign policy and national security”.
Biden will host a leaders’ climate summit on Earth Day, April 22, in a bid to create momentum before the Glasgow event in November.
“We’ve waited too long to deal with this climate crisis,” Biden said at a White House signing ceremony. “This is not a time for small measures. We need to be bold.”
Biden has also created a new office of domestic climate policy to co-ordinate climate policy across key government agencies.
In his first appearance at the White House briefing room, Kerry said: “The stakes on climate change just simply couldn’t be any higher than they are right now [...] This is an issue where failure, literally, is not an option.”
Speaking earlier at the World Economic Forum, Kerry said he had read an article over Christmas “that ought to stop every single one of us in our tracks”.
Headlined “Watching Earth Burn”, the story by New York Times writer Michael Benson pieced together satellite images of the Australian bushfire emergency.
“You could see huge plumes of smoke when you saw these pictures of Australia’s fires with, and I quote Michael, ‘flame vortexes spiralling 200 feet into the air’ passing New Zealand and stretching thousands of miles into the cobalt Pacific,” Kerry said.
He continued to quote details in Benson’s article, including the razing of an estimated 46 million acres, loss of dozens of lives, destruction of nearly 6000 buildings and potential extinction of some species.
“Benson summed it up,” Kerry said. “With shocking iconographic precision, that unfurling banner of smoke said: The war has started. We’re losing.”
Kerry estimated the world had to phase out coal five times faster than current rates, ramp up renewable energy six times faster and transition to electric vehicles 22 times faster.
Kerry also criticised China’s pledge to achieve carbon neutrality by 2060 when other countries have signed up to a 2050 target.
“China has said they’re gonna do something by 2060 but we don’t have a clue really, yet, about how they’re going to get there. I hope we can work with China. I hope we can get China to share a sense of how we get there sooner than 2060.”
Japan removes two last wind power turbines
The Japanese government has decided to remove the two remaining wind power turbines it installed off the Fukushima Prefecture due to the unprofitability of the project.
The 60 billion yen (US$580 million) project was widely seen as a symbol of the reconstruction of the northeastern prefecture following the 2011 earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disasters.
Kyodo News reports that the government's decision came despite Japan's goal of raising its offshore wind power generation up to 45 gigawatts in 2040 from the 20,000 kilowatts it currently produces.
Japan's alternative and renewable energy plans are part of efforts to fight climate change and Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga has pledged to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050.
At a meeting in Fukushima, industry ministry officials briefed fishermen and other participants about the plan to scrap the wind power turbines, with locals saying the government had wasted taxpayers' money and should conduct a thorough study of why the project had failed.
Of the three turbines installed 20km off the coast of Naraha town, the government removed one in June and it will remove the remaining two starting April next year.
The three turbines were constructed in stages in 2012, to support the local economy by creating a new industry based on renewable energy.
To commercialise wind power generation, the operational rate of a turbine must remain at 30 to 35 per cent or more, according to the ministry.
But the rates of the turbines off Fukushima were only around four to 36 per cent.
https://www.nst.com.my/amp/world/region/2020/12/650410/japan-removes-two-last-wind-power-turbines
American oil executives began a pushback against some of President Joe Biden’s climate policies by making the case that fossil fuels from U.S. shale have a lower carbon footprint than imports.Since taking office this month, the Biden administration has made swift moves to pause sales of oil and gas leases on federal land, cancel the Keystone XL pipeline and expand the government’s fleet of clean-energy vehicles. The U.S. oil industry, already under pressure from low prices and investor pessimism, is particularly concerned about limiting access to resources on federal acreage in New Mexico, Wyoming, Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico..
“We don’t think it’s good policy to be overly restrictive on federal land,” Chevron’s Chief Financial Officer Pierre Breber said in an interview with Bloomberg TV on Friday. “That will just move energy production to other countries. We know that we can develop energy in this country responsibly.”.
America is the world’s biggest consumer of crude and any restrictions of domestic production will mean more will have to be shipped in from other countries, which may produce higher-carbon oil and have less stringent environmental laws, the argument runs. U.S.-produced shale emits less carbon per barrel than the global average for both onshore and offshore, according to Rystad Energy..
“Reducing domestic production will not only raise costs at the pump, but will also ensure international producers, operating with fewer environmental regulations, will meet the global demand for petroleum products,” Pioneer Natural Resources Co.’s Chief Executive Officer Scott Sheffield said by email. “That scenario is inconsistent with the administration’s choice to rejoin the Paris Accord.”.
The Oil-Climate Index, a 2016 model funded by the Carnegie Endowment, shows that shale plays including the Eagle Ford in South Texas and the Bakken in North Dakota have some of the lowest emissions per barrel globally..
But key to shale’s climate impact is how operators manage natural gas that is produced alongside the crude and the industry has come under intense criticism for excessive flaring and venting of methane, an extremely harmful practice..
For example, while the Bakken ranked ahead of Saudi Arabia’s Ghawar resource in the Oil-Climate Index, parts of the shale field where flaring is prevalent fell behind the Middle Eastern field. The Permian Basin has become notorious for burning off gas and the index is currently being updated by some of the original researchers to include estimates for the deposit.
A Cornell University study published in 2019 said fracking was to blame for a decade-long global spike in methane levels..All the major shale players including Chevron and Pioneer say they support Biden’s plans to increase regulation of methane leaks, reversing former President Donald Trump’s policy.
But anxiety is rising in the fossil fuel industry that it may be in for a sustained period of government pressure..Given that operators tend to stockpile leases for months or even years before they plan to drill, it’s unlikely that Biden’s action will have any short-term impact on shale production.
In any case, operators are keen to show investors that they won’t grow production into an oversupplied market..It’s the Gulf of Mexico, where leases come up for sale infrequently and projects cost in the billions of dollars, where the largest impact of Biden’s policies may be felt, according to Chevron CEO Mike Wirth..
“The risks are probably greater in the Gulf of Mexico,” he said on a call with analysts. “If conditions in the U.S. become so onerous that it really disincentivizes investment we’ve got other places we can take those dollars
https://www.bloombergquint.com/markets/u-s-oil-pushes-clean-shale-as-biden-mounts-climate-attack
Secretary Bernhardt Touts Conservation Successes Under Trump AdministrationHunters, anglers, ranchers, and other outdoor recreationists who felt voiceless during the Obama years welcomed the conservation policies advanced by the Trump administration.
David Bernhardt, the 53rd Secretary of the Interior, believes he championed their interests well in a few short years.
Secretary Bernhardt first rose to prominence as Interior Deputy Secretary under Ryan Zinke. Following Secretary Zinke’s resignation in late 2018, President Donald J. Trump soon nominated Bernhardt as Zinke’s replacement. Given his past experience working in the department under President George W. Bush, he was a natural successor. The Senate confirmed him in April 2019.
Bernhardt then continued where his boss left off. He brought more sportsmen and women to the table. He and his staff championed shooting sports. They strived to improve stakeholder relations across the U.S. (especially out West).
After two roles spanning four years, January 20th marked Bernhardt’s last day at the department.
The former Trump Cabinet official recently spoke to me by phone about his time at Interior, his working relationship with President Trump, and what the future holds for him.
Former Secretary Bernhardt began our conversation by praising his boss and offered, “I think this President [Donald Trump] has had some incredible accomplishments...for recreation and for true conservationists.”
Bernhardt declared President Trump “single-handedly delivered the Great American Outdoors Act (GAOA)”— the most consequential conservation bill in 50 years. Trump signed the landmark bipartisan bill into law last summer.
He added, “That thing was dead without him stepping forward and saying, let's do it. And then, you know, driving Congress to introduce legislation and then pass it. I think that will be one of his biggest legacies—and certainly in the recreation space.”
The Rifle, Colorado, native also talked up his agency’s efforts opening 4 million acres to new fishing and hunting opportunities on U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) public lands and national fish hatcheries.
“I think we've now opened over...4 million acres to new opportunities or expanded opportunities,” he said. “We just are finalizing concession policies for fish that I think will lead to other—better—recreational opportunities in the future in parks.”
“The one thing I would say about the recreation and conservation work we've done, a lot of it has very significant bipartisan support,” the secretary added.
Bernhardt, however, is confident Trump’s agenda “set a positive position for stewardship, conservation, working with states, focusing on hunters and anglers and recreational activities.”
He also spoke about his work modernizing the Endangered Species Act (ESA) since a mere 2-3 percent of listed imperiled species have successfully recovered since 1973.
Over the last four years, he said 17 species successfully recovered and were delisted. He also was happy issuing directives giving states more oversight managing recovered populations like gray wolves and grizzly bears.
His Advice for Biden Interior Secretary Nominee Deb Haaland
Bernhardt is aware his likely successor, Congresswoman Deb Haaland (D-NM), pending Senate confirmation, will adhere to a different conservation philosophy than his.
I proceeded to ask him what advice he’d dispense to her about the role.
“I've worked for three different secretaries. And my takeaway from there, working for them, and with me...every Secretary does things a little differently,” Bernhardt said.
He said Interior Secretaries must be guided by three things: the law, the facts, and the policy views of the president they serve.
“My view is that as long as you run the facts and understand the law—and discretion space you have—then you make the best decision that you believe and you articulate that decision,” he added. “And that decision should be sustainable.”
A Glimpse Into His Post-Secretary Life
The outgoing Interior Secretary has returned to Colorado to begin life post-Trump administration.
What do his plans include? Training a new Labrador puppy and getting some hunting and fishing time in, he told me.
“I have a 12-year-old Lab that's been my great hunting companion. He's getting a little old,” he remarked. “After the election, that next weekend, my daughter and I and [my] wife drove out and got a second Lab. So I've been working that Lab pretty hard.”
When I asked Bernhardt about his future, he replied, “I haven't given it really any thought. I figure I'll have plenty of time to sit in a duck blind and figure out what I want to do when I grow up.”
“I've had one of the greatest jobs a person could have working with a president who enabled me to lean forward and get stuff done—who wanted to fix problems and wanted to do great things for conservation. And he [President Trump] gave me that opportunity to push forward.”
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My other blogs. Main ones below
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http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC) Saturdays only
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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For the notes appearing at the side of the original blog see HERE
Pictures put up on a blog sometimes do not last long. They stay up only as long as the original host keeps them up. I therefore keep archives of all the pictures that I use. The recent archives are online and are in two parts:
Archive of side pictures here
Most pictures that I use in the body of the blog should stay up throughout the year. But how long they stay up after that is uncertain. At the end of every year therefore I intend to put up a collection of all pictures used on the blog in that year. That should enable missing pictures to be replaced. The archive of last year's pictures on this blog is therefore now up. Note that the filename of the picture is clickable and reflects the date on which the picture was posted. See here
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