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
30 June, 2023
How misfiring environmentalism risks harming the world’s poor
This is a useful warning about burdening poor countries with green goals but its starting premise is obtuse: Crope in a warmer world will THRIVE, not fail. Crops do better in warm conditions, they do MUCH beter in high CO2 conditions and a warmer world would be more rainy, which is hugely good for crops. If ever significant global warming does happen, it will create a world of food abundance. Global warming would be a vast worldwide fertiliser application
THANK GOODNESS for the enthusiasts and the obsessives. If everyone always took a balanced view of everything, nothing would ever get done. But when campaigners’ worldview seeps into the staid apparatus of policymaking and global forums, bad decisions tend to follow. That, unfortunately, is especially true in the world of climate change.
One example is the effect of global warming on the world’s poorest people. As the planet heats up, extreme events such as droughts, floods and storms are becoming more common and more severe. Many places are becoming less habitable. Over the coming decades many vulnerable farmers, from Mali to the Mekong Delta, will find their crops failing more frequently. And as resources grow scarcer, more fighting will break out.
This pattern is no longer just a warning by activists. It is accepted by the mainstream to the point where fears of a surge in climate migration are fodder for the nativist right. Because people are understandably troubled by the idea of climate change forcing poor farmers to leave behind their ancestral lands, an important goal of adaptation spending is to help them stay.
Yet the truth is more complex. The vast majority of displaced people will not cross international borders but move within their own country. By 2050, 50m-216m people could be on the move internally. And many will be rural folk moving to cities, where their lives are likely to become better. Urbanisation usually aids development, bringing people closer to schools, health care and well-paying jobs, as well as more liberal social norms, particularly for women. This is not an argument in favour of climate change. But it suggests that one cost-effective and beneficial form of climate-adaptation spending would be helping people move, rather than preserving small farms in ever-harsher conditions.
There is another, more profound, example of the danger of climate groupthink. From the panels of Davos to the pages of newspapers, it is increasingly argued that no trade-off exists between the economic development of low- and middle-income countries and reducing their greenhouse-gas emissions. This is partly because much of the rich world has successfully made some cuts in emissions while continuing to grow, and its leaders want more of the same. But more crucially, it is because governments and development banks with limited budgets struggle to admit that not all their goals can be reconciled, and that they must therefore choose between them.
Yet choose they must, because the trade-off is in plain sight. Growth is the best way to lift people out of poverty and improve average living standards. But in the developing world, more growth still leads to more emissions. Researchers at the IMF have found that in 72 developing countries since 1990, a 1% rise in annual GDP was on average associated with a 0.7% rise in emissions. By 2030, fast-growing India and Indonesia alone will have increased their annual emissions by the equivalent of over 800m tonnes of carbon dioxide—an extra Germany’s-worth of greenhouse-gas belching. In other big emerging markets such as Brazil, Egypt and the Philippines, emissions are rising, too.
Many rich-world leaders say they can square the circle by funding green development projects which, in theory, cut emissions and boost growth at the same time. That is true to a degree. But, without adequate carbon pricing and cross-border emissions trading to encourage the private sector to invest on its own initiative, it is an enormously expensive and fiendishly complex task. On June 23rd, at the conclusion of a summit in Paris, rich countries again pledged to meet a target of providing $100bn a year in “climate finance” to fund such projects. Yet that is only a fraction of the $2.8trn annual investment thought to be needed by 2030 to put the developing world on a green growth path, at least $1trn of which probably needs to come from rich countries.
The reality of limited resources worsens the trade-off. The need to spend money decarbonising big developing economies that already offer citizens reasonable services threatens aid budgets which help pay for things like vaccines and schooling in the poorest parts of Africa. Unlike Brazil or India, say, such nations are unlikely ever to contribute significantly to global emissions.
They lose out, however, when foreign aid and loans come with green strings attached. As well as facing stingier health-care and education budgets, they might find scant funding for expanding a gas-powered electricity grid, even though nobody stands ready to pay for the far greater costs of converting it to a green one. African governments rightly resent being told to cut emissions rather than help people in desperate need—especially given that Westerners continue to belch carbon.
As a result, while leaders offer bromides about sustainable growth, an epic fight for resources rages behind the scenes between those who favour development as practised in decades past and those who want the world’s foreign-aid apparatus to turn wholeheartedly towards decarbonisation. It is a battle over what is worse: a poorer today or a hotter tomorrow.
The virtue of hard choices
That is an excruciating choice, given the moral force of the argument that the rich world should pay the developing world’s climate bills. Global temperatures depend on the stock of carbon in the atmosphere, not the current flow of emissions. On a per-person basis, the rich world has been disproportionately responsible for rising global temperatures and has more capacity to respond to them. Poor countries lack the resources to invest to cut emissions or adapt to climate change themselves. Yet relative to the size of their economies, they face the biggest costs.
As with the decision between forestalling or accommodating climate-induced migration, pretending that this choice does not exist helps no one. Politics mean that neither an adequate carbon price nor sufficient Western money are likely. Limited resources make it essential to squeeze as much value as possible out of what is available. Squeamishness about weighing costs and benefits—stemming from a well-meaning desire to avoid every injustice—gets in the way. And the consequences of that evasion fall most heavily on those in the greatest need.
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Hybrid cars are not as green as you think as they produce much more greenhouse gases than claimed by manufacturers, report reveals
Hybrid cars produce much more greenhouse gases than claimed by manufacturers, a report reveals today.
The Climate Change Committee says plug-in hybrids – which can run either on electric or on petrol/diesel – have performed up to five times worse than expected.
The findings come in a progress report from the CCC on how well the Government is doing on cutting emissions.
Chief executive Chris Stark said progress to reaching net zero was 'worryingly slow', and that the Government is relying on technological breakthroughs such as carbon capture rather than asking people to 'reduce their high-carbon activities'.
Mr Stark said transport's share of the country's overall emissions – the so-called 'carbon budget' – is now much higher than had been expected.
He said: 'The Government is now expecting surface transport emissions to be higher than it was in the net zero-strategy by the mid 2030s.'
He added that the Government's latest figures show carbon savings from plug-in hybrid cars 'are between three to five times lower' than previously assumed.
The sale of new hybrid vehicles will be banned in the UK by 2035, five years earlier than petrol and diesel vehicles.
Tory MP Philip Dunne, chairman of the environmental audit committee, said the Government 'risks the unravelling of the last few years of climate leadership'.
Industry experts have warned the UK's 900,000 electric cars could be exacerbating the pothole crisis after new research revealed they cause twice as much damage to roads as their petrol and diesel equivalents.
Analysis by the University of Leeds shows the average electric car – which is heavier due to its larger battery – puts 2.24 times more stress on surfaces than its petrol equivalent, and 1.95 times more than diesel.
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Climate cult weakening
Politically, ‘net zero’ is increasingly on the nose in many European countries. This week, the Swedish parliament officially abandoned its 100 per cent renewable energy target to meet net zero by 2045, replacing it with a ‘technology-neutral’ target. Many green-tinged Europeans were dismayed, but as Finance Minister Elisabeth Svantesson told the Swedish parliament, ‘We need more electricity production… we need a stable energy system.’
Of course, for the Swedes, blessed with huge mountains and deep lakes but little abundant sun, hydro plays a key part in their renewable energy supply: 98 per cent of their electricity already comes from hydro, wind or nuclear power, so they can afford to eschew fossil fuels. The new ‘non-renewable’ target simply means they can get more nuclear power into the grid, and essentially admits that the Nordic utopian fantasy about wind and solar being our salvation is now done and dusted.
Meanwhile, in Germany during the last winter, one town was forced to tear down the local wind farm and dig it up to get to the precious coal beneath. A more entertaining and apt metaphor is hard to find.
In an article headlined, ‘The perils of net zero coercion’, the UK Telegraph this week reported that, ‘Sweeping bans to cut greenhouse emissions in Europe is leading to widespread public backlash,’ and that, ‘Climate coercion is a very bad way to cut greenhouse gas emissions in Western democracies’.
A day earlier, the Telegraph had also warned that, ‘Germany is headed for a political meltdown. Olaf Scholz faces a reckoning as Germans resist his “Green dictatorship” of mandatory heat pumps and unaffordable technologies.’
This week, even the BBC had to admit that Britain is not capable of meeting its own net-zero targets. According to the latest report by the bed-wetting Climate Change Committee, there is a ‘worrying tendency’ of UK government ministers to avoid embracing the next stage of net zero. What a surprise! ‘The UK has lost its clear global leadership position on climate action,’ the report’s authors lament. ‘We are no longer COP President; no longer a member of the EU negotiating bloc…. We have backtracked on fossil fuel commitments.… And we have been slow to react to the US Inflation Reduction Act and the EU’s proposed Green Deal Industrial Plan, which are now a strong pull for green investment away from the UK.’
Last week Britain also abandoned its proposed ‘green hydrogen levy’ on households, which, according to the Guardian, ‘[signals] a possible U-turn as households struggle with high inflation and this week’s shock interest rate rise’.
Craig Mackinlay MP, chairman of the parliamentary Net Zero Scrutiny Group, said: ‘The cancellation of the proposed £118 Hydrogen Tax on household energy bills is hugely welcome and I hope is the start of a common sense journey for the government on energy policy…. When the laudable ambition of net zero hits the reality of cost and significant changes to the way we live, the public are understandably turned off.’ Meanwhile, we also learn that EVs are looking increasingly dubious. That same UK Climate Change Committee report says that ‘plug-in hybrids have performed up to five times worse than expected’. China, too, is reportedly ‘discarding fields of EVs, leaving them to rot’.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/07/climate-cringe/
***********************************************Thanks to New Climate Change Program, Washington State Now Has the Most Expensive Gas in the Country
Washington state has unseated California as the state with the most expensive gasoline in the country, and analysts have a simple explanation for the dubious distinction — a new carbon cap-and-trade program instituted by the state in an effort to combat climate change.
An analysis of gas prices by the Seattle Times found that the average price of a gallon of fuel in the state reached $4.91 cents this week. In King County, which includes Seattle, the average price is well above $5. Oil industry officials and analysts are telling drivers in Washington, “We warned you.”
This year, a new law went into effect in Washington that requires oil companies and other fossil fuel producers to pay the state for the greenhouse gasses their products emit, also known as a cap-and-trade program. At the first two auctions for emissions allowances this year, companies had to pay more than $850 million to offset their emissions.
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Australia: Queensland's insanely expensive pumped hydro plans
With desperately underfunded hospitals, police, schools and roads, this is gross
The Queensland government surprised many when it announced last year that the state would construct two new pumped hydro schemes, dwarfing the troubled Snowy Hydro 2.0 project in NSW.
At the core of the Energy and Jobs Plan, announced in September 2022 by Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk, is a commitment to turn off coal-fired power stations by 2035.
By the same year, Queensland would be running on 80 per cent renewable energy thanks to dozens of new solar and wind farms that would traverse the state.
To meet that target, the state needs a ready supply of stored power to draw upon when the sun is not shining and the wind is not blowing — enough to power the state for hours at a time.
That is where pumped hydro comes in as a large-scale storage option.
What is pumped hydro?
Pumped hydro works similarly to big batteries, filling in supply gaps when the grid needs a top-up of electricity.
The design involves two dams built at differing elevations, connected by a tunnel, with transmission lines then connecting it to the grid.
When there is plenty of sun and wind to power the grid, energy is in high supply, so water is pumped to the upper reservoir using surplus electricity.
When the sun goes down or there is no wind, water is released to the lower dam through the tunnel, generating electricity as it passes through a turbine.
That electricity is then injected into the grid via high-voltage transmission lines.
The debate
The criticism is broadly two-fold: firstly, that pumped hydro comes at a monumental cost and is being outpaced by other technologies (namely batteries), and secondly, that Australia simply does not have the workforce needed to construct such huge pieces of infrastructure by 2035.
The Energy and Jobs Plan proposed a 2-gigawatt pumped hydro scheme at Borumba Dam — west of Gympie — and another much larger plant called Pioneer-Burdekin, approximately 1,000 kilometres north of Brisbane, west of Mackay, offering an unprecedented 5 gigawatts.
The government has promised that the 2GW Borumba project would store enough energy to power 2 million homes continuously for 24 hours.
If constructed, the 5GW Pioneer-Burdekin project would be the largest energy storage (PHES) in the world.
Currently, the largest PHES schemes are in China and the United States, with plants of around 3 gigawatts each.
Pumped hydro is also expensive. The cost and delivery time frame for the Snowy Hydro 2.0 scheme bears little resemblance to what was originally announced by Malcolm Turnbull in 2017.
It was estimated to cost around $2 billion, not including power lines, and to be completed by 2021. Now, it is expected by December 2029 at a total estimated cost of $10 billion.
New transmission lines
The sheer amount of energy that will be stored in each of Queensland's pumped hydro centres means that new high-voltage transmission lines need to be built, replacing the current mostly 275kV lines that connect the grid.
Powerlink, the state-owned company that constructs and manages the transmission lines, estimates the new 500kV lines will cost $6-8 million per kilometre and will become the backbone of a new "super grid" that will connect the state's renewable energy network.
The company announced a compensation scheme for those that will be impacted by the new transmission lines surrounding Borumba at meetings and via letters earlier this year.
Powerlink CEO Paul Simshauser said the route had been designed to run through as much state-owned land as possible, but that some impacts on landholders were unavoidable.
"We've come up with what we think is the lowest-cost solution for Queenslanders," he said.
But the former CEO of Powerlink, Simon Bartlett, warned that the current plans would come at an exorbitant cost because Pioneer-Burdekin was so far away from the main population centre of South-East Queensland.
"A basic rule of planning is: build your generation, if you can, as close as you can to the load centre. That reduces what you spend on transmission, and it reduces the risk of long-distance transmission," Professor Bartlett said.
"But the plan doesn't do that, the plan wants to build it 1,000 kilometres from the main load centre [Brisbane] – it just makes no logic to me, I'm afraid."
Professor Bartlett also says it is high risk for Powerlink to connect the pumped storage schemes by only one new line of 500kV towers that carry a double circuit, due to the risk of fires or vandals bringing down towers.
"What they're proposing is just a single transmission line, that's a major flaw in the design because that can come down, and every half a kilometre there's a tower, and all the wires are on the one tower. So that can come down and totally blackout a large part of the state," he said.
Mr Simshauser refuted that, arguing two lines of towers were not needed.
"We believe at this point in time anyway, [it] will be a cost that we won't need. We believe we can manage it in other ways," Mr Simshauser said.
"There are always risks in running a transmission network, any of our system plans will always take into account the most probable and credible contingencies that we can envisage and make sure that the balance of the network is, you know, available to deal with those contingencies."
What about batteries?
Queensland's Energy Minister Mick de Brenni said he considered the state's plan to be "the best path possible" to transition to renewables.
Professor Bartlett is urging the government to re-think the scale of the two schemes, in favour of emerging grid-scale batteries.
"They say it's the world's largest scheme. As soon as someone says that: watch out. There's a reason that others haven't gone that big," Professor Bartlett said.
"There are other ways of getting storage besides pumped storage, and there's been incredible developments in chemical batteries, the costs have just come down dramatically.
"[Australian Energy Market Operator] AEMO's own report shows that 8-hour batteries are about half the cost of an 8-hour pump storage scheme.
"Pumped storage is expensive because of the civil engineering, the concrete, the steel, the labour … and while pumped storage has getting dearer, batteries are getting cheaper."
However, Powerlink CEO Paul Simshauser said that it needed to make decisions based on current market conditions.
"At this point in time, the only serious battery proposals that we've got on our book are lithium-ion batteries, and all of them have congested around a 2-hour storage time, which tells us that that's what the market deems as economic at this point," he said.
"In terms of long-duration storage, really the only long-duration storage project proponents we've seen are pumped hydro," he said.
Similarly, Mr de Brenni said the government had closely considered the alternatives.
"We've worked for a number of years considering all of these options, and pumped hydro energy storage is the proven technology that will enable us to reach our renewable energy targets," he said.
Who is going to build it?
The construction industry is sounding the alarm that there are too many projects in the infrastructure pipeline, and Australia simply does not have the workers to complete them.
Engineers Australia CEO Romilly Madew said governments around the country were not learning from major infrastructure delays on other big projects.
"When you take into account the infrastructure pipeline that's already in place, you've got the Queensland Olympics coming up in 2032.
"You also have AUKUS now been added into the mix from the federal government. And then you add in energy transition. The capacity isn't there," Ms Madew said.
"If we say it's going to take 10 years, let's say it's going to be 15. There are so many unknowns at the moment and we really need to make sure we have contingencies on these projects,"
"We must remember it's taxpayer money — so are we reporting transparently on the time frames, on the delivery and on our commitments, and being really realistic about those?"
Mr de Brenni agreed there were workforce issues but was not concerned the state would not be able to attract workers.
"Whilst there are challenges in the infrastructure market, today, we're confident that we'll be able to attract the very best workers so that it's delivered, and it will be a quality outcome for our state for generations," he said.
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29 June, 2023
Trump Sounds Off on How Biden's Environmental Extremism Will Wreck Michigan's Auto Industry
Former President Trump blasted President Biden’s push to rapidly transition the U.S. auto market to electric vehicles, saying his environmental extremism is “killing Michigan.”
“Biden is a catastrophe for Michigan and his environmental extremism is heartless and disloyal and horrible for the American worker and you’re starting to see it,” Trump told Oakland County Republicans on Sunday.
“Driven by his ridiculous regulations, electric cars will kill more than half of U.S. auto jobs and decimate the suppliers that they decimated already — decimate the suppliers and it’s going to decimate your jobs and it’s going to decimate more than anybody else, the state of Michigan,” he continued. “It’s going to be decimation, it’s going to be at a level that the people can’t even imagine.”
In April, the Biden administration's Environmental Protection Agency released draft federal emission standards that would aim for about 67 percent of new U.S. passenger vehicle sales to be electric vehicles by 2032.
“These actions will accelerate the ongoing transition to a clean-vehicle future, tackle the climate crisis and improve our air quality for communities across the country,” EPA administrator Michael Regan said during a press conference in April.
Trump said the country that stands to gain the most from such a rapid transformation of the U.S. auto industry is China.
“The push for all electric cars, it’s killing the United States, it’s killing Michigan and it’s a total vote for China,” Trump said during his hour-long address.
He also took a shot at Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s approval of more than $700 million in economic development incentives for a battery plant near Big Rapids.
“The governor of your state is now giving away hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of billions of Michigan taxpayer dollars to Chinese companies and one in particular, Gotion, to build batteries in Michigan,” Trump said. “That sounds good, but the money’s going to Chinese companies, and then they’re gonna leave, they’re planning to take our money and then they say ‘bye bye, you stupid fools.’”
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Even Environmentalists Furious About Biden's Intrusive New Green Initiative: 'Do It Where You Live'
Americans’ general frustrations with President Joe Biden continue to mount — and now the incumbent president seeking re-election is facing heat from some of the very same groups he so often champions.
Biden and his beleaguered administration have long pushed “green” initiatives no matter how polarizing those policies may be.
This time, however, it seems that polarization is hitting groups of environmentalists who are typically all aboard all things “green.”
The policy in question this time, per The Washington Post, is the method of “carbon capturing.”
“Carbon capturing” is exactly what it sounds like — taking those carbon emissions from various high-emission sources, “capturing” them and then storing them underground.
The entire process is a direct response to carbon dioxide being pumped into the air.
The problem: If these carbon emissions are as dangerous as they are being touted, is storing them right below people’s feet a better answer?
Many environmentalists are arguing, “No.”
The Post reported that “environmental justice advocates” in Louisiana are opposing carbon capture techniques there because of the close proximity of these emissions to black communities as well as the already higher-than-normal cancer rates found in the region — earning one stretch of the state the nickname of “Cancer Alley.”
Additionally, others fear that carbon capturing will embolden the very same fossil fuel titans they want to kneecap.
If your emissions can just be stored underground, what’s to stop you from maximizing those emissions?
There are also those with more pragmatic concerns — namely, how these underground gas bunkers will affect any planned infrastructure renovations or plans.
“What they’re trying to do to Louisiana now is I think the worst of anything we’ve been exposed to, because of all the uncertainty,” Beverly Wright, the executive director of the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice and member of the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council, told the Post.
Wright didn’t mince words about what she thought of carbon capturing: “In the real world, this is an experiment.”
Chad Ross, who lives in the Donaldsonville area, told the Post he doesn’t trust any of what is being peddled.
“It is called Cancer Alley, and that’s part of the reason we don’t trust them,” Ross said. “It’s still not so good to have all these plants, so many of them, all around us. Anything could happen.”
According to the Post, the “world’s largest ammonia and nitrogen plant” is just south of Donaldsonville.
Ashley Gaignard, a part-time secretary for the city council, offered a counter-solution to the Biden administration.
“Don’t do it in my neighborhood. Do it where you live,” Gaignard said. “Right about now it’s politics over people. And I don’t think they give a damn about people.”
Of particular concern for the president is the fact she voted for him in the 2020 general election and seems positively nonplussed by this.
Biden can seldom afford to lose support from anyone. A recent CNN poll had his favorability at 32 percent — the lowest of his presidency — heading into the 2024 presidential campaign.
And yet, as the drive toward “green” initiatives plows forward, it seems as though it will only get more divisive and polarizing — even among those who consider themselves environmental activists.
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UK: It’s becoming ever clearer that climate change is a class issue
Julie Burchill
It’s not news that we live in a New Medieval age of Magical Thinking, when the Enlightenment is seen as the start of hate-speech, feelings must always overrule facts and ‘transubstantiation’ has taken on a whole new meaning.
Men can become women simply by wishing it so, the BBC instructs its staff that there are 150 genders and teachers call students ‘despicable’ and ‘homophobic’ when they understandably ask a fellow classmate ‘How can you identify as a cat, when you are a girl?’
Deranged posh girls who would have happily been curtseying to a cake a few generations back now throw excrement and soup around in order to get attention
Those who identify as young while having one foot in the grave have not yet benefitted from this strange new belief system – but give it time. We may look back with incomprehension that in 2018 the Dutchman Emile Ratelband had his attempt to make himself legally younger by 20 years quashed, even though his plea was easily as sensible as that of navvies who call themselves Nina and thus must use the female restrooms: ‘When I’m 69 – I am limited. If I’m 49, then I can buy a new house, I can take up more work. When I’m on Tinder and it says I’m 69, I don’t get an answer’.
That doesn’t stop the great and the good from attempting to bathe in the funky fountain of youth, though – grumpy old woke bros such as Alexei Sayle, Billy Bragg and their pin-up Jeremy ‘The Absolute Boy’ Corbyn are forever standing alongside blue-haired students and telling old feminists not to horde rights. (As Victoria Smith points out in her brilliant book Hags, identifying as young will bring women only mutton/lamb mockery.)
The then 68-years-young Ian McEwan spluttered at an anti-Brexit rally in 2017: ‘A gang of angry old men… are shaping the future of the country against the inclinations of its youth… By 2019 the country could be in a receptive mood: 2.5million over-18-year-olds, freshly franchised and mostly Remainers; 1.5 million oldsters, mostly Brexiters, freshly in their graves’. I had a social-media scrap with a Remoaner who told me that my generation was done and his was about to take over; when I checked his age, he was two years older than me.
But even more than Remnants, if any group likes to identify as young, it’s the climate-change hysterics. Deranged posh girls who would have happily been curtseying to a cake a few generations back now throw excrement and soup around in order to get attention. More than any other issue this one has been seen to divide the generations, symbolised by Extinction Rebellion choosing the witless schoolgirl Greta Thunberg as their leader when she was only 15. But now some actual young people appear to have had enough of these giant toddlers who to have nothing to do with their time apart from obstruct those who have places to be and livings to earn.
This week in Stratford, East London, schoolchildren were seen remonstrating with the overgrown tantrum-havers of Just Stop Oil – staging a ‘slow march’ during rush-hour – for making them late to lessons, in some cases ripping their banners from their hands. A refuse collector nearby summed it up nicely – ‘Get to work, you lazy ****s’.
It’s becoming ever more evident that climate change is a class issue. These East End schoolkids understand – where adults have tried to skate around the issue, not wanting to be seen as Enemies of the Earth – that the climate change mob were born into privilege and thus are able to treat learning lightly. No matter how they waste their days, they’ll never be forced to choose between heating and eating.
It was telling that the children who tackled them were a multi-racial group – like the East London workers who in 2019 pulled an XR protester from the roof of a rush-hour tube train, leading a spokesperson to admit that the move had been a ‘huge own goal’. A subsequent hastily deleted tweet comparing themselves to Rosa Parks probably wasn’t the cleverest move, considering that climate-change protestors are – as an ex-director-general of the BBC once put it of his own corporation – ‘hideously white’.
I’d like Jon Snow – who said of a Brexit rally that he’d ‘never seen so many white people in one place’ – to cover the next climate protest. They’re so white they make the Lib Dem conference look like the Notting Hill Carnival.
They’re white because they’re posh. Even their monikers give the game away; the first tranche of XR leaders gloried in such names as Robin Ellis-Cockcroft and Robin Boardman-Pattison (more hyphens than Debrett’s) the latter of whom opined ‘Air travel should only be used in emergencies’ – despite having been on a number of recent skiing trips. Another comrade, Zoe Jones, was shown on social media enjoying safari holidays in Uganda, boozing on the beach in New Zealand and bungee jumping over the Nile; that’s not a simple carbon footprint – that’s a carbon clown-shoe footprint.
It’s not that the climate change mob are against flying per se – they’re very much in favour of ‘travel’ for themselves and their mates from ‘uni’ – they just don’t like it when the great unwashed follow the herd down to Greece on holiday. Like the Dowager Countess in Downton Abbey asking ‘What is a weekend?’ it’s hard for people who do what they enjoy (or do nothing) to understand what holidays mean to those who do essential jobs, or jobs they don’t particularly enjoy, just to make a living.
But there’s a shining light at the end of the dimly lit eco-bulb tunnel. Kids of the kind who told Just Stop Oil to get a move on aren’t an exception, but a sign of brighter times ahead. A 2021 survey in the USA inspired the journalist Daniel Roman to write a piece called ‘Has the woke wave peaked? Shock poll reveals Generation Z rejects cancel culture.’ The findings were very encouraging. Overall, no one admitted caring much for cancel culture; the only group in which more respondents viewed it positively or neutrally than negatively were the notoriously miserable Millennials. More members of Gen X (1965-1980) and Boomers (1946-64) viewed it negatively (46 per cent for Gen X, 50 per cent for Boomers) than positively or neutrally (29 per cent for Gen X, 27 per cent for Boomers). But the real shock came from those born between 1997 and 2008, only 8 per cent of whom viewed cancel culture favourably, while 55 per cent had a negative view – higher than Gen X or Boomers.
I’ve never felt comfortable disapproving of youngsters, so I’m happy to discover that it was just the wrong sort of young people that I disapproved of all along; the mouthy posh ones who always push their way to the front. These East End schoolkids are far more the ticket – and politicians should take notice. The thing about pandering to the youth vote is that young people who have anything about them don’t identify as young, but as what they’d like their adult lives to be like. And I’d bet they’re no keener on living in a censorious, narrow-minded cancel-culture than we old folk. It’s time for those who identify as young to grow up – and learn from the mouths of babes what actually matters to everyday people of all generations.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/06/its-becoming-ever-clearer-that-climate-change-is-a-class-issue
************************************************Dirty little secrets of Australia’s dangerous EV rollout
The electric vehicle take-up among Australian consumers may provide a warm and fuzzy feeling for the environmentally conscious, but as machines, EVs are significantly heavier than the traditional motor car and a challenge more likely to weigh on Australian roads.
According to data provided by the Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries, electric vehicles accounted for 6.8 per cent (17,396) of light vehicle sales (257,094) in the 12 months to March this year.
It is important to note there are more than 20 million registered cars nationally.
Electric vehicles such as the Tesla 3 which dot the more fashionable areas of Australia are also very heavy, due primarily to the weight of the battery required to power such vehicles.
A Tesla Model 3 weighs 1844kg (1.84 tonnes) at the higher end while the fuel-efficient Mazda 3, for example, tips the scales at 1.4 tonnes.
Considering the popularity of sports utility vehicles, the weight difference would be even greater than the 400kg gap between the Tesla Model 3 and the Mazda sedan.
If hydrogen-powered or battery-powered trucks ever make the leap from concept vehicle to commercial reality, then Australia’s road network would require far greater levels of maintenance and construction than exist currently.
In the United States, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety reported earlier this year that the safety aspect around collisions (a heavier vehicle tends to keep going when it collides with a lighter vehicle) as well as braking performance were increasingly major areas of concern.
It appears that environmental posturing requires a reality check.
While EVs are popular, the question of whether such vehicles should be subsidised is debatable.
To be exact, more than 85 per cent of the driving public through their registration fees have enabled the Queensland government to provide a $3000 rebate for zero-emission vehicles, (this of course does not consider the dirty offshore refining practices to acquire the specific minerals for these cars).
For fans of the George Orwell novel Animal Farm, the idea that “all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others” rings true as the 85 per cent represent the horse.
With a market share of 6.8 per cent and growing, electrical vehicle owners should be coming under the purview of policy makers in terms of a timeline to legislate a road usage fee as opposed to being given a $3000 kicker.
As it stands, most car owners subsidise would-be Tesla owners the equivalent of a year’s fuel as the batteries EVs use are included, meaning those same EV drivers pay nothing in fuel excise which, of course, helps fund the nation’s roads.
Fuel excise receipts from petrol is expected to hit $60bn over the next four years according to federal budget papers, although is likely to decline given the incentives to the more
well-heeled to buy an EV.
Well-paid politicians such as Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young, an electrical vehicle evangelist, in a YouTube video where she test-drove a Tesla told her adoring fans afterwards, “Wow, I’m hooked!” If only the good senator took an interest in the minerals used for such cars, the emission intensity of the mining effort to create that same vehicle and the industrial resources required to upgrade the transport network so it can cope with the extra load.
While noting Tesla’s desire to be free of cobalt, the mineral mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo is the raw material that powers the rechargeable batteries used in modern-day computers, phones, and electric vehicles as well as being a standout in human rights abuses.
Children as young as seven, according to Human Rights Watch, are working in cobalt mines, all in the name of the great green leap forward.
While foodies are proud of the “paddock to plate” mantra around its clean supply chain practices, the same cannot be said for the “resources to road” moniker for Australia’s electric vehicle enthusiasts where questions around a sustainable transport future remain murky.
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27 June, 2023
Sweden Dumps Climate Agenda, Scraps Green Energy Targets
Sweden has just dealt a severe blow to the globalist climate agenda by scraping its green energy targets.
In a statement announcing the new policy in the Swedish Parliament, Finance Minister Elisabeth Svantesson warned that the Scandinavian nation needs “a stable energy system.”
Svantesson asserted that wind and solar power are too “unstable” to meet the nation’s energy requirements.
Instead, the Swedish Government is shifting back to nuclear power and has ditched its targets for a “100% renewable energy” supply.
The move is a major blow to unreliable and inefficient technology.
Countries are being pushed toward “renewable energy” to meet the goals of the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) green agenda.
The WEF’s green agenda is being heavily pushed by the United Nations, the World Health Organization (WHO), Paris Climate Agreement, World Bank, and Democrat President Joe Biden’s administration.
Announcing Sweden’s new policy, Svantesson said: “This creates the conditions for nuclear power. “We need more electricity production, we need clean electricity and we need a stable energy system.”
Environmental campaign group Net Zero Watch has welcomed the move. The group argues that the Swedish decision is “an important step in the right direction, implicitly acknowledging the low quality of unstable wind and solar, and is part of a general collapse of confidence in the renewable energy agenda pioneered in the Nordic countries and in Germany.”
Under its new direction, Sweden now views nuclear power as being critical to the nation’s “100% fossil-free” energy future. Sweden can “afford to reject fossil fuels, relying on nuclear and hydro and biomass,” Net Zero Watch suggests.
Svantesson also sent a warning to other Western nations who are blindly pushing to meet the energy requirements of the WEF’s green agenda.
In “substantial industrialized economies… only a gas to the nuclear pathway is viable to remain industrialized and competitive,” Svantesson noted.
Experts have argued that lowering carbon dioxide emissions is not really a worthwhile goal for an individual country or globally. The potential harms of the gas are uncertain and exaggerated while the benefits are overlooked.
Dr. John Constable, Net Zero Watch’s Energy Director, said that “living close to Russia focuses the mind.”
The Swedish people wish to “ground their economy in an energy source, nuclear, that is physically sound and secure, unlike renewables which are neither,” he explains.
Other world governments are continuing “to live in a fantasy” about meeting the green agenda goals, Constable added. “But we are coming to the end of the green dream.
https://slaynews.com/news/sweden-dumps-climate-agenda-scraps-green-energy-targets/ ?
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NYC rules crack down on coal, wood-fired pizzerias — must cut carbon emissions up to 75%
Historic Big Apple pizza joints could be forced to dish out mounds of dough under a proposed city edict targeting pollutant-spewing coal-and-wood-fired ovens, The Post has learned.
The New York City Department of Environmental Protection has drafted new rules that would order eateries using the decades-old baking method to slice carbon emissions by up to 75%.
“All New Yorkers deserve to breathe healthy air and wood and coal-fired stoves are among the largest contributors of harmful pollutants in neighborhoods with poor air quality,” DEP spokesman Ted Timbers said in a statement Sunday. “This common-sense rule, developed with restaurant and environmental justice groups, requires a professional review of whether installing emission controls is feasible.”
The rule could require pizzerias with such ovens installed prior to May 2016 to buy pricey emission-control devices — with the owner of one Brooklyn joint saying he’s already tossed $20,000 on an air filter system in anticipation of the new mandate.
“Oh yeah, it’s a big expense!” said Paul Giannone, the owner of Paulie Gee’s in Greenpoint. “It’s not just the expense of having it installed, it’s the maintenance. I got to pay somebody to do it, to go up there every couple of weeks and hose it down and you know do the maintenance.”
Giannone added that while the air filter is “expensive and it’s a huge hassle,” it also has some upsides. “My neighbors are much happier. I had a guy coming in for years complaining that the smoke was, you know, going right into his apartment and I haven’t seen him since I got the scrubber installed.”
Other iconic pizza joints facing the heat include Lombardi’s in Little Italy, Arturo’s in Soho, John’s of Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village, Patsy’s in Turtle Bay and the Upper West Side and Grimaldi’s near the Brooklyn Bridge — that pride themselves on having their pies baked in coal-and-wood-fired ovens.
A city official said that under 100 restaurants total would be impacted.
One pizza restaurateur, who requested anonymity, told The Post that sensitive negotiations are currently taking place with DEP officials on whether to grandfather in or exempt the dozens of coal-and-wood-oven-fired pizza joints from the mandate.
He said politicians and bureaucrats should stop messing with their crust. “This is an unfunded mandate and it’s going to cost us a fortune not to mention ruining the taste of the pizza totally destroying the product,” the restaurateur, who has a coal-fired oven, fumed.
“If you f—k around with the temperature in the oven you change the taste. That pipe, that chimney, it’s that size to create the perfect updraft, keeps the temp perfect, it’s an art as much as a science. You take away the char, the thing that makes the pizza taste great, you kill it,” he claimed.
“And for what? You really think that you’re changing the environment with these eight or nine pizza ovens?!” the restaurateur added.
Some crusty customers also told city officials not to tamper with their slice. “I’m all for responsible environmental practice but tell Al Gore to take one less private jet or something. Give me a break!” said Brooklyn Heights resident Saavi Sharma, 32, a financier who brought her parents and cousin visiting from India for their first slice at Grimaldi’s, referring to the former vice president and climate change activist.
“I’ve been bragging about this pizza to my family for like five years,” Sharma said Sunday. Don’t mess with this!”
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The UK still needs fossil fuels, whether activists like it or not
The Supreme Court is hearing a case today that, if successful, could mean the end of new fossil fuel projects in the UK on climate grounds.
The justices will decide whether to reverse approval for oil extraction at Horse Hill based on downstream emissions from the use of the oil. Whatever the outcome, this case is a damning indictment of the UK’s absurd climate laws.
This is a long-running affair. Horse Hill was first test drilled in 2012 and permitted by Surrey County Council to expand to a commercial scale in 2019. This is the teeth of opposition from local campaigners, including the Weald Action Group, Friends of the Earth, and the litigant Sarah Finch.
The activists want to stop all domestic fossil fuel production, regardless of the harm this would do to our energy security and bills. To achieve this goal, they have been using judicial review, rooted in their interpretation of the Climate Act and a raft of complex planning, permitting and environmental protection laws, to delay and obstruct developments. They have been appealing and escalating at every turn. Consequently, four years into what should be a simple planning matter – to allow a legal business to expand – the case reaches the Supreme Court. No wonder the UK’s economic growth is anaemic.
The central legal point is whether Surrey County Council should have required the developer to report consumption (or Scope 3) emissions and test them against a retained EU Directive and the UK’s climate commitments. But this outcome would be absurd. Holding a producer to account for the downstream climate impact makes no sense.
In the first instance, an oil producer cannot accurately predict the future emissions profile of their product, which could be used anywhere in the world. It is highly dependent on ever-changing use cases and the pace of technological development (e.g. an oil producer 30 years ago would have failed to predict how much more fuel-efficient cars are today). These estimates may be of interest to climate nerds; but they are not relevant considerations for development, at least not in a country serious about its energy security.
In practice, we either drill here or rely on imports from allies like the USA, dodgy Opec regimes, or even Russian exports
More importantly, there is a large substitution effect. If we don’t get oil from Horse Hill, it will simply come from somewhere else and at a higher cost for consumers and the environment. Stopping Horse Hill would prove nothing more than a pyrrhic victory.
The UK is still 75 to 80 per cent dependent on fossil fuels for our power, heating, transport and industrial needs. Whatever happens to the pace of our future energy transition, we will remain dependent on oil and gas at least to some extent for at least 20 to 30 more years, and likely longer. Furthermore, cheap energy remains an essential feature of a thriving economy and, as we have discovered over the past year, a lack of energy has dire consequences for households and businesses.
In practice, we either drill here or rely on imports from allies like the USA, dodgy Opec regimes, or even Russian exports (filtered through third parties like China and India). These imports will be more expensive and environmentally damaging. For example, Liquid Natural Gas, which requires condensing, shipping and expanding, is 2 to 3 times riskier to the climate than home extraction.
It is self-evident that oil not drilled in Horse Hill will increase imports, with the near certainty of a higher emissions profile. It might feel nice for activists to export our emissions, but it does little good.
Blame for this mess lies less with the campaigners – bar their failure to understand trade-offs – than with the politicians creating laws that enable them to cripple the country’s energy supply. The creation of a legal target means subverting pragmatism to ideological purity. It hands the power to disruptive activists to delay genuine projects and ultimately to judges to make complex trade-offs. This reduces democratic accountability. Even when nakedly political cases fail, the risk of expensive and lengthy disputes creates a chilling effect on investment.
It may already be too late for oil and gas in the UK. The Conservatives and Labour are competing to introduce new obstacles to ‘dirty development’; from fracking bans onshore to development moratoriums offshore and random windfall taxes. They both talk about reforming planning rules to enable renewables, an unreliable alternative. But even here the pace is glacial and the detail scant, while the logic of general planning reform to get everything built faster escapes them.
If the campaigners win, however, the collapse of investment will be faster. The developers only won by a 2 to 1 margin at the earlier Court of Appeals stage. If your business can be shut down by activist judges, or neutral ones struggling to cope with laws so complex there is no clarity, there will be no business. The onus then falls on the politicians to understand and fix the mess that they have created. The alternative is more emissions, higher costs and greater risks of blackouts, freezeouts and queues at the pumps.
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The Tough Case for Electric Trucks
Elon Musk’s trick with Tesla was not making a good electric car. That isn’t enough. What made Tesla so successful is that he built a car that was better than any of its competitors, and happened to be electric. He pulled this off with the Model S premium sedan; then repeated it with the smaller Model 3; and repeated it again with crossover Model Y, which became the best-selling new car in quarter one 2023.
In 2019, Mr. Musk promised to pull off the same trick for the pickup market, with his futuristic, polygonal Cybertruck. The thesis was simple. An electric powertrain is more space efficient than a diesel engine yet mechanically simpler, far more powerful, with instant torque, and low running costs. It made business sense too.
The Ford F-150 remains America’s best-selling vehicle, and potential customers aren’t concerned by the added weight and loss of driving dynamics that comes with batteries. Though the Cybertruck is still yet to release, Ford, GM, and Rivian all bought in, and have brought electric trucks to the market.
But the reality of pickup is not that simple, and flaws of electric power become unignorable when faced with the loads, tows, and rough roads of trucking. Put simply, if you need a pickup for work, your old Ram will still outshine the brightest new EV option.
To the layman, an electric truck makes a lot of sense. A pickup consists of two long rails, with wheels and suspension bolted to the bottom of them, a cabin and engine to the front, and a bed at the rear. That’s strikingly reminiscent of the ‘skateboard’ model that underlies most electric cars — motors on the corners, a bed of batteries in the floor, with a body on top. Simply fill those rails with a bed of batteries, replace the engine with electric motors, and voila.
But three chief problems remain. Electric trucks are more expensive to buy, far more extensive to repair, and have worse, less reliable range.
For the first: a combustion F-150 starts at $33,695 but an electric F-150 Lightning will set you back, minimum by more than $59,564, if you wait until next year. And it only gets worse when looking at competitors.
Rivian announced their R1T would start at $67,500, but when production started, this had soared to almost $80,000. Though GM and Ford both promise to make sub-$50,000 versions of their EV trucks, they’re not there yet. General Motors’ debut EV pickup was the $112,596 Hummer EV ‘Edition 1.’ And none of this accounts for dealer markups.
And what do you get for this EV premium? More technology, which need not be EV exclusive, and more problems, which are.
You don’t need a Tesla for semi-autonomous driving, given that Cadillac pairs their Super Cruise system with their gas devouring Escalade, and large touch screens are coming to all cars — sadly.
However, though electric vehicles are theoretically easier to repair than their combustion engine equivalents, the reality is that batteries age, particularly with heavy use. Battery exchange systems — like swapping out a barbecue’s gas cylinder — have yet to take off, so electric cars are ticking down to an eventual, inevitable multi-thousand dollar battery replacement bill, or a premature relocation to the scrapheap.
This is concerning for commuter cars, but the average driver changes cars roughly every seven years, upgrading to something newer, fancier, or more accommodating to their current lifestyle. By contrast, you may use the same truck for twenty years; and as the battery weakens, the range will too.
More than either the price or the eventual repair bill, the range issue is the biggest problem; and the most impermeable. On paper, an F-150 Lightning may go further on a full charge than a competitor with a full tank, but electric range is far more sensitive to circumstances.
Lightning owners report their range sometimes halving when the temperature drops, and heavy payloads and towing noticeably eat into it too. As a Ford representative reportedly told Neal Pollack in the Observer, “The 300-mile range is assuming you’re floating on marshmallows while tugged along by a unicorn.”
Given that towing and hauling are the main functions of a working truck, and unicorns and marshmallow floats are in short supply, the risk of running out of charge is often a dealbreaker. Fast charging stations are almost as rare as the aforementioned unicorn, and if you find one, it’s usually accompanied by a long queue or an “Out of Order” sign. And even so, it’s still a lot faster to stop at a gas station
Will it always be the case that electric pickups are far inferior to their combustion powered cousins? No.
Battery technology continues to improve at a rapid pace, the price of EVs will fall with further adoption, and charging networks continue to grow. Even without incoming bans on new combustion-powered cars, there’s a lot of inherent promise in pairing EV systems with utility vehicles.
Without a large engine to account for, the newly announced Telo MT1 has its cabin shifted right to the front, allowing for a full-size bed in a pickup the size of a Mini Cooper. That’s great, but it’s just a computer render with a pre-order page, and who knows if it ever releases.
Nikola Motors and Lordstown Motors were once the next big EV start-ups, promising to bring electric trucks to market with better technology and lower prices than the big players. Last month, both companies faced NASDAQ delisting, after their share prices fell beneath a dollar. In October, Nikola’s founder, Trevor Milton, was found guilty on three federal charges of wire and security fraud.
It’s only a matter of time before electric trucks work as well as they do on paper. But it will take time. Put simply, if you’re happy with your F-150, don’t trade it in for an electric version.
At least not yet.
https://www.nysun.com/article/the-tough-case-for-electric-trucks
***************************************26 June, 2023
Now NHS tells Scottish mums: Please DON'T use gas and air in childbirth … it's bad for the planet
No compassion for women in pain? Warmists are clearly all heart
The NHS is to warn pregnant women that they shouldn't use gas and air – because it's harmful to the environment.
The health service has launched a crackdown on harmful greenhouse gas emissions from the most popular method of pain relief for women during labour.
The Scottish Government has written to all health boards with an NHS plan which suggests women should be encouraged not to use Entonox for the good of the planet.
It proposes expectant mothers play their part in 'a collaborative mitigation approach' to cutting the impact of Entonox.
It warns: 'Future recommendations may require that education and training on the environmental impact of different analgesic techniques for labour should be made available to expectant mothers and care givers by antenatal services and delivery suite teams.'
Entonox, or gas and air, is popular with mums-to-be because it has no harmful side-effects for them or the baby. However, along with oxygen, it contains nitrous oxide – a powerful greenhouse gas.
Campaigners fear that the move could put women under pressure to shun Entonox for more invasive analgesics.
Milli Hill, author of the Positive Birth Book, said: 'I worry that if women are told the choice of gas and air could potentially be damaging for the environment, but not offered any alternative, then this could just put more pressure on women to make compromises and sacrifices at an individual level, when we know that there are many more impactful ways in which both the NHS and the government could address climate change at a national and global level.
'Birth in the UK is becoming increasingly medicalised, and any threat to the option of gas and air could exacerbate this, as women will probably turn to more invasive forms of pain relief.'
Studies show nitrous oxide is almost 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide when it comes to global warming.
In a letter to boards, the Scottish Government described it as a 'pollutant with a long atmospheric life' and 'an ozone depleting substance'. Attached to the letter was the NHS Scotland Nitrous Oxide Mitigation Implementation Plan which says the health service aims for zero nitrous oxide emissions by 2027.
Some hospitals have tried 'cracking' technology, which breaks Entonox down into harmless nitrogen and oxygen. However, the plan said that required 'excellent technique by patients and staff to correctly use a mask system'.
It then suggested mothers-to-be receive training on the environmental effect of different pain relief options, saying: 'The programme lead is keen to develop a collaborative mitigation approach working with expectant mothers, delivery suites teams and antenatal services to explore and articulate a full suite non-pharmacological and pharmacological options.
'Future recommendations may require that education and training on the environmental impact of different analgesic techniques for labour should be made available to expectant mothers and care givers by antenatal services and delivery suite teams.'
A spokesman for the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists said it is 'vital' that all women 'have access to safe and effective pain relief'.
Jaki Lambert, director for Scotland at the Royal College of Midwives, said it 'supports a move to a more sustainable and environmentally friendly NHS, but at the same time we would not want to see the pain relief options available to women reduced, until more sustainable ones are developed and available'.
Last night the Scottish Government said that although there are environmental concerns about Entonox, it would continue to be made available. A spokesman said: 'Women will continue to have the same access to pain relief they always have, with staff to support them in making the best choices about their birth plan.
'Any suggestion that nitrous oxide will be withdrawn or not be available for patients is simply false.'
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Greta Thunberg gets lambasted for deleting prediction of climate genocide after the date arrives
Social media users mocked and ridiculed climate-change activist Greta Thunberg after the date of a climate-genocide prediction came and went.
In 2018, Thunberg tweeted a quote from a scientist warning that humanity would become extinct unless drastic action against global warming was undertaken within five years.
"A top climate scientist is warning that climate change will wipe out humanity unless we stop using fossil fuels over the next five years," she quoted from the article.
After she began being criticized over the tweet five years later, she deleted it in 2023.
Critics piled on even more after the 20-year-old deleted her doomsday missive and reposted a screenshot of the prediction.
"I have a busy day planned. Can someone please ask Greta Thunberg what time climate change is going to wipe out humanity today," replied one user.
"Seriously though, how did the world get so dumb? We were never always this stupid, right?" read another tweet.
"According to Greta Thunberg, the world will officially end today. Good luck, everyone!" responded Ryan Fournier.
"Greta Thunberg has confirmed that all of humanity has been wiped out today, and she warns that it will happen again in another five years unless she is allowed to continue crying on national television," joked another user.
Defenders of Thunberg pointed out that the scientist she was quoting was not predicting all of humanity would be wiped out in five years but that humanity only had five years to address the issue before the effects of climate change would eventually lead to the extinction of humanity.
Snopes marked the ridicule as partly true because Thunberg did delete the tweet. It also reported not being able to obtain a comment about the controversy from Thunberg.
Thunberg was busy being arrested at an environmental protest in Malmo, Sweden.
https://www.theblaze.com/news/greta-thunberg-doomsday-prediction-mocked
**********************************************Earth is already at net zero
The climate cult will cost us all dearly
Ian Plimer
The greenhouse gas in the air that has the greatest effect on atmospheric temperature is water vapour. Why have governments tried to ban carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide emissions and not water vapour?
Carbon dioxide is plant food. This is the first science that children should learn at school. Plants use carbon dioxide from the atmosphere with water and nutrients from the soil to grow plant tissue.
The Earth’s first atmosphere contained hydrogen, helium, ammonia, carbon monoxide, rotten egg gas and methane. It derived from planetary degassing and didn’t last long.
The second atmosphere lasted for billions of years and contained up to 20 per cent carbon dioxide, again from planetary degassing. Much of the carbon dioxide from the second atmosphere dissolved in ocean water, was precipitated as the rock dolomite in warm shallow marine conditions and there it remains naturally sequestered.
During the times of very high carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the planet enjoyed a number very intense ice ages when kilometres of ice formed at sea level at the equator. We are told by climate activists that a few parts per million increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide resulting from human activities will lead to unstoppable global warming and a climate crisis. The past shows this is false.
The current oxygen-rich atmosphere formed some 550 million years ago. The oxygen came from life which is why there is a search for oxygen and ozone on exoplanets to determine if there is life somewhere out there. The planet does not degas oxygen gas. All oxygen in the atmosphere derives from photosynthesis. At times, the atmospheric oxygen content rose to 35 per cent and there were massive global forest fires. At other times during mass extinction events, the oxygen content fell to less than 5 per cent.
We hear that the Amazonian rainforests are the lungs of the Earth. This tree-hugging ideology is wrong. The lungs of the Earth are the floating phytoplankton in the oceans that have been around for billions of years and use carbon dioxide as plant food and excrete oxygen as a waste product. It’s very hard to get emotional about green slime being the lungs of the Earth.
For the last 550 million years there has been a decrease in atmospheric carbon dioxide from 0.8 per cent to 0.04 per cent. Because of an explosion of animal predation, carbon dioxide was used to make protective shells, most of which are locked away as fossils in ancient rocks. If oceans were acid during past times of high atmospheric carbon dioxide shells would have dissolved and would not be preserved as fossils. Shells removed dissolved carbon dioxide from seawater. Limestone reefs, limey muds and black carbon-rich muds removed even more carbon dioxide from seawater. Ancient carbon dioxide is now locked up in rocks.
Land plants appeared 470 million years ago and removed massive amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. They still do. Massive accumulations of plants in cool climate wetlands led to huge volumes of plant material that were later compressed to thick coal seams. There were no plant-decomposing bacteria then and plant material accumulated into very thick piles. The carbon in coal came from the atmosphere. By burning coal, this carbon as carbon dioxide is put back into the atmosphere where it originally came from.
In a forest-rich large underpopulated country like Canada, there are 318 billion trees that use 7.6 billion tons of carbon dioxide as food each year. Canadians release 545 million tons of carbon dioxide each year from fossil-fuel burning, smelting and cement manufacture. Canada is already at net zero. Canadians pay tax for the carbon dioxide they release.
In the USA, there are 228 billion trees that each year photosynthesise 5.47 billion tons of carbon dioxide as plant food. Americans release 5 billion tons of carbon dioxide from fossil-fuel burning, smelting and cement manufacture each year. This is 14 per cent of global emissions. The US is already at net zero.
In Australia, the grasslands, rangelands, forests, crop lands and continental shelf waters each year photosynthesise ten times the amount of carbon dioxide that is released by Australian industry and individuals. Australia is already at net zero and releases only 1.2 per cent of global emissions. Australians pay tax for the carbon dioxide they emit for plants to use as food.
On planet Earth, there are 3 trillion trees that suck up 72 billion tons of carbon dioxide as plant food each year. Humans emit 37 billion tons of carbon dioxide each year. The planet is already at net zero, despite China’s massive emissions. Why even bother about net zero? Unless, of course, there is a quid to be made with energy used as a weapon for unelected elites to take away freedoms and control people.
And here is the problem. If the whole world is at net zero, where does the extra carbon dioxide come from? Obviously, it’s natural and it comes from a slight warming of the oceans. Some 97 per cent of annual emissions are from ocean degassing with minor amounts from volcanoes and animals. Carbon dioxide has an inverse solubility in water, as all beer and champagne drinkers know. The lower the temperature of water, the more carbon dioxide can dissolve in water.
Analysis of the chemical fingerprints in ice cores drilled in Greenland and Antarctica show that whenever there has been a natural warming event, the atmospheric carbon dioxide content rises hundreds to thousands of years later. If the oceans warm, they release carbon dioxide. Maybe the rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide is due to solar-driven warming of oceans after the 1300 to 1850 AD Little Ice Age?
The conventional view is that the oceans warm up by increased solar radiation because Earth is closer to the Sun or because the Sun releases more energy. What has never been considered is that the planet has been releasing heat for 4,567 million years and still is. At present, 70 per cent of the heat released by the planet ends up in the oceans. There are thousands of submarine eruptions each year with basalt melts at 1100°C solidifying by transferring heat to 2°C ocean bottom waters. Submarine basalt melts contain up to 13.5% by weight of dissolved carbon dioxide, most of which is released into the oceans as the melt rises towards the ocean floor.
Although there is a paucity of data, there are hints that the El Niño-La Niña cycle may be related to submarine volcanic activity. There is stronger evidence that plate tectonics is a fundamental driver of climate change. This has never been considered in climate models.
Maybe the rise in oceanic temperature resulting in the increased emissions of carbon dioxide from the oceans is due to planetary cooling expressed as increased submarine volcanicity? These are fundamental scientific questions but, because they do not fit the government ideology, such research will never be funded because 97% of scientists funded by the government agree with those who fund them.
The natural world is far more exciting than a woke world that frightens folk with a dogma claiming that small amounts of a trace gas drive a major planetary process.We’ve been fed a pup. It will cost us dearly. `
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/06/earth-is-already-at-net-zero/
*********************************************************Stop blaming everything on climate change!
One of the educational pages about climate change on the BBC’s website for children laid out the negative impacts of future global warming. But it also pointed out that warmer temperatures could mean healthier outdoor lifestyles, open up shipping routes in the Arctic through the melting ice and allow easier access to oil in Alaska and Siberia.
Cue outrage from climate scientists and climate pressure groups. In response, the BBC removed mention of such ‘benefits’. Children were only to learn of the negative impacts of climate change.
This was a telling example of how the prevailing ideology of ‘climatism’ insists on a single narrative from which there can be no deviation.
For climate change is cited as the sole explanation for everything going wrong in the world. Drought, famine, flooding, wars, racism – you name it. And if it’s bad, it’s down to global warming caused by humans.
Group-think has taken over as climatism demands total allegiance. It has become an unchallengeable doctrine guiding individuals, institutions, cultures and social movements.
In the words of environment journalist George Monbiot: ‘Curtailing climate change must become the project we put before all others. If we fail in this task, we fail in everything else.’
To this supreme political challenge of our time, everything else becomes subservient.
Climatism offers a seeming explanation for nearly everything – from the loss of sleep and rising divorce rates to the decline of insect populations. An academic study has even suggested that the occurrence and acceptance of racist content online could increase in the future as the climate gets warmer.
The doctrine was summed up by a climate convention in Germany in 2022 which declared: ‘Climate change threatens the foundations of life on our planet. The fossil era must come to an end. This will lead to profound changes in our ways of producing goods, our means of transportation and, ultimately, the way in which we live. We are at the beginning of a great transformation.’
This dangerously myopic view simply reduces the present and future state of our complex world to just the fate of global temperature or to the concentration of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere.
Yet, there is no single story that can encompass or do justice to the complexities, paradoxes and dilemmas of a changing climate. It makes no sense to reduce politics to the pursuit of a single over-arching goal: to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by a given date.
But by making other political goals subservient to this one is to create a short-sighted view of political, social and ecological wellbeing. The problems facing the world – Putin’s war in Ukraine, migration, the triumph of the Taliban, wildfire management – become ‘climatised’.
Don’t get me wrong – limiting the rate of climate change is a desirable long-term policy goal. But climate change isn’t the only thing that matters. Indeed, it might even be a distraction from doing the things that really do make a difference. Racism, for example, is unlikely to be tackled by doubling-down on carbon dioxide emissions.
The spread of climatism has become an increasingly alarmist discourse of apocalypse just round the corner. In New York’s Union Square, there is a massive clock that counts down ‘the critical time-window remaining for humanity to act to save its only home from the ravages of climate chaos’.
I disagree with the doom-mongers. Climate change is not like a comet approaching Earth. There is no good scientific or historical evidence that it will lead to human extinction or the collapse of human civilisation.
True, climate kills and climate change is real. The risks are serious. Efforts to mitigate these risks and to adapt to them are important. But climate change will not wipe out human life, let alone all life on planet Earth. Also, it is questionable whether annual deaths from climate change will ever exceed those from heart or lung failure, dementia or stroke.
Climate change is a risk that needs to be attended to, but this must be done in the context of other risks, such as nuclear war, pandemics, preventable childhood mortality, failed states and so on.
Unfortunately, the climate science world seems to have lost that vital perspective, instead declaring a perpetual climate emergency.
This is dangerous talk that can lead to hurried decisions and misguided, one-eyed solutions.
By ‘doing whatever it takes’, without wider considerations of the consequences, will not only lead to short-term thinking but also panic, fear and disengagement among people as ‘the end’ is imagined to be approaching and we supposedly run out of options.
That same loss of perspective also ignores the fact that climate is not, and never has been, static.
It is a changing condition to which all life continually adapts as a natural response. Corals evolve to cope with ocean warming and acidification. Human societies continually adapt – finding new materials to keep buildings cool or through new land-use, for example.
But instead of recognising nature’s power to adapt, climate ideologues consider all meteorological events as man-made. Hurricanes and heatwaves are seen as manifestations of the behaviour of fossil-fuel companies, colonialism, capitalism, Amazonian loggers, rich meat-eaters or frequent flyers. It is forgotten that hurricanes and heatwaves are a natural feature of the world’s climates. Climate’s ‘naturalness’ gets lost.
Certainly, human actions have caused changes in climatic patterns, and will continue to do so. The evidence is crystal clear. Nor am I suggesting that efforts to mitigate climate change and to adapt to its effects are worthless or should be stopped. But climatism, with its narrow view, is not the solution. We need to take a more sensitive, diverse and pragmatic approach. And we need to distinguish politics from science.
The fact is that there is an anti-democratic impulse within climatism that brooks no public dissent.
This is most explicit in Extinction Rebellion, Just Stop Oil and the new ‘climate Left’ – for whom climate change is all that matters. But it has also crept into a range of businesses, charities, professions and institutions, such as Amazon, Oxfam, the BBC and the World Bank.
But I question whether the ideology of climatism is supported by science. Since the mid-1980s, plotting global temperature has became a fetish. And yet, global temperature is a flawed index for capturing the full range of complex relationships between climate and human welfare and ecological integrity.
Many scenarios that inform these analyses also overestimate the likely magnitude of future climate change. They are based on the worst possible outcome in which fossil-fuel burning, especially coal, continues unabated.
Some 7,000 scientific papers produced on climate change between January 2020 and June 2021 took this as their baseline assumption. But it is clear this is now the least likely scenario, given the massive reduction in the growth of coal use.
This methodological flaw might not matter much if such scenario analysis was presented in neutral terms. But it becomes misleading when it is taken literally, when it is believed by the public and by policymakers to be describing a real future. Risks are exaggerated and climate is elevated to be a more dominant factor shaping the future than is warranted.
As a result, the World Health Organisation predicts 250,000 additional deaths from malnutrition, malaria, diarrhoea and heat stress as a result of climate change – despite other factors, such as wealth distribution, lifestyle choices and public health infrastructure, having a larger impact.
It implies that if future changes in climate can be arrested over the next years, 250,000 lives will be saved. This simply isn’t true.
Rather than being motivated by a disinterested ‘search for truth’, the scientific enterprise is in danger of being perceived as pushing its own interests, whether securing research funds or furthering individual scientists’ prestige and access to power.
I am certainly not claiming that climate science is necessarily biased, misleading, untrustworthy and worthless.
Rather, I am drawing attention to the fact that scientific research is always conducted within a specific social and political context and it cannot escape the influence of the society which funds it.
Remember, too, that many are beneficiaries of climatism, such as politicians who use climate change for ‘things going wrong’ to mask their own deficiencies, negligence or bad management.
Others find that flashing their climate change credentials gains them access to specific financial and political resources.
Ultimately, the rush to take political action without properly thinking through the consequences can backfire spectacularly. For example, Germany pursued an aggressive, unbalanced and rapid energy decarbonisation to meet climate mitigation targets – and then became hostage to Putin in order to keep the country supplied with gas.
The EU biofuels directive is another example.
Rather than using oil from the ground, it gave priority to palm oil as a source of energy, without considering the impact. The result? Once-rich rainforests in Sumatra have been stripped to make way for palm plantations, meaning that indigenous people have been squeezed from their homelands.
The consequences have been devastating for some of the world’s poorest communities and their quest for food security and livelihood sustainability.
A policy designed to reduce the impact of climate change 50 years from now has undermined the livelihoods of people and the habitats of species living today.
But that’s the price you pay if your sole aim is stopping climate change. Debate is closed down in favour of ‘there is no alternative’. And from that it is a short step to ‘the end justifies the means’, the motto of all totalitarian projects. Other important political values, such as liberty, equality and self-determination, are sidelined.
Politically, climatism endangers fundamental democracy by suppressing any public challenge to the dominant position. Even those with legitimate doubts are damned as ‘deniers’ and silenced.
Yet, democracies require dissent if they are to remain democracies.
How, then, do we counteract the dangers of narrow-minded climatism? First, we must challenge the hubristic certainty displayed by many climate scientists and replace it with a humbler approach that recognises the limits of human knowledge and foresight.
That means acknowledging the unforeseen contingencies of the future: pandemics, military or cyber-wars between states, global economic recessions and failed states.
As American author Ted Nordhaus wisely put it, we have to accept that ‘the present is a muddle, and the future is an even bigger muddle whose basic co-ordinates we cannot predict, let alone control’.
Second, we must defuse deadline-ism and the tyranny it imposes, along with the emotions of failure, cynicism, apathy or fear that result.
In Britain, we live neither in the best of climate, nor in the worst. In England and Wales, around 800 excess deaths are caused annually due to heat – a number vastly outweighed by the excess deaths caused by cold.
Yes, climate fatalities are large. Droughts in China and South Asia in the 20th Century killed millions, but fatalities from such climatic disasters have been greatly reduced since through better forecasting and early warning, improved infrastructure and more efficient management.
Climate fatalities can be reduced further by better land-use planning and more adaptative infrastructures. We should move beyond the doomism and adopt the language of possibility and emancipation.
Above all, we must change the message to teenagers and young adults that their generation is doomed and has no future.
Instead, we should offer the hope their lives can be better than those of their parents and grandparents.
Yes, we, as their grandparents and parents, have set in motion this ongoing change in the climate. But human ingenuity and effort can limit the extent of future warming and can develop new technologies and strategies to adapt to the changes.
Rather than repeating messages of failure and endings, the alternative to climatism should motivate young people to contribute to a future that can be so much better.
Once people recognise that what is at stake is not human extinction, nor the collapse of civilisation, nor billions of unnecessary deaths, it ought to be possible to see that there are legitimate human values and political trade-offs that must be navigated when designing our responses to it.
The present isn’t all about climate change, and the future must not be reduced to climate. Stopping climate change isn’t the only thing that matters.
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22 June, 2023
Recycling releases harmful micro-plastics
A new note from the Global Warming Policy Foundation warns that recycling plastic, mandated in law across Europe, is causing immense environmental harms.
It highlights a series of recent scientific studies revealing that plants that process plastic waste are releasing astonishing quantities of microplastic particles into the environment.
The author, Dr Mikko Paunio, explains that there is growing scientific concern that recycling plastic is a mistake that is causing significant environmental pollution. “Even Greenpeace can see that it must stop”, he says.
Paunio argues that incineration is the most environmentally friendly approach to plastic waste, pointing to its success in his native Finland, but he says that bureaucracy and green campaigners are preventing its more widespread use.
Dr Paunio also warns that we are about to take another wrong turn:
“Green campaigners now want to ban plastic outright, and the forthcoming plastic treaty looks worrying in this regard. If they manage to get a plastic ban put in place, the result will probably be to damage public health, just as they damaged the environment by getting us all to recycle in the first place”
The report is entitled Microplastics: The Harms of the Circular Economy (pdf)
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Britain Turns to Coal Because It’s Too Hot for Solar Panels
The Conservative Party government is far down the road—and much out of pocket —with its plan to remove coal from Britain’s energy mix. But weather conditions earlier this week meant providers had no choice but to start burning coal again, for the first time in a month and a half.
Simply put, there wasn’t enough wind to allow for a good turbine output and it was too hot for solar panels to work efficiently. Some gas power plants were also shut down for maintenance. As a result, the National Grid had little choice but to ask a coal-fired power station in Nottingham to start producing electricity. This was due to be closed last September, but its owners reached a deal to push back the deadline by a year, citing the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
As part of its drive towards carbon ‘net zero,’ the Tory government announced in 2021 that Britain is moving towards producing no electricity using coal after October 2024. This was a year sooner than the original 2025 deadline, and begs the question: where will providers turn when it’s too hot and not windy enough in the future?
The push—by the party which prides itself on being “sensible” and “pragmatic”—has been met with many vocal critics, but the government appears not to have been fazed. Businessman and former Brexit party MEP Ben Habib said turning our backs on fossil fuels “before adequate alternative sources of ‘sustainable’ renewable energy are available” sounds “daft” because “it is.”
Reviewing some of the latest decisions on energy policy, Mr. Habib told The European Conservative:
In the pursuit of a net zero country, His Majesty’s Government decided many years ago to cut back on filthy coal. Then in 2021, it began shutting down North Sea oil and gas under the North Sea Transition Deal—part of the then Prime Minister’s drive to “Build Back Better.” Under that deal, the off-shore extraction of fossil fuels was to be replaced by off-shore wind energy; wells closed, and jobs moved into green energy. Rough, our biggest natural gas storage facility, was also more or less shut down and now cannot easily be re-commissioned. To make matters worse, not a single nuclear power plant has been built in the UK since the mid-1990s. By 2030, 14 of 15 nuclear power plants are scheduled to have closed with only one replacement, Hinkley Point C, to be commissioned in 2027.
This is not an energy policy, it is energy hari kari.
Such a short-term approach to energy policy is not exclusive to the Tory party. Former Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg provided an insight into the minds of our leading political lights when in 2010 he said nuclear is “just not even an answer” because “by the most optimistic scenarios from the government itself, there’s no way they are going to have new nuclear come on stream until 2021, 2022.” Even after these dates, Britain’s energy system will still be unable to operate fully without at least some backup from coal.
Mr. Habib described the recent burning of coal as “rub[bing] salt into the wounds of HMG’s [His Majesty’s Government] idiocy.” The “energy gods,” he added, “have a poor sense of humour!”
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COP28 faces another flop as UN divisions deepen over climate $$$billions
This was supposed to be the United Arab Emirates’ chance to prove its critics wrong.
The host of this year’s COP28 climate summit was under pressure to set out a clear vision at preparatory talks held at the United Nations HQ in Bonn amid growing unease over the petrostate's fossil fuel interests.
But by the time negotiators departed the former West German capital on Thursday, concerns about the UAE’s handling of the global climate talks had only deepened.
“Bridges are not being built,” said one EU diplomat, who was granted anonymity to candidly discuss the negotiations. “I’m worried that at COP28, half of the countries will want to talk about funding and half about reducing emissions, as happened here.”
The 10-day Bonn talks were consumed by a power struggle over the conference agenda, which remained unadopted until Wednesday night.
The EU — backed by other Western countries as well as several Latin American nations and the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) — added an agenda item on the “mitigation work program,” aimed at scaling up emissions cuts worldwide.
That prompted the group of Like-Minded Developing Countries (LMDCs) — dominated by emerging economy emitters like China, India and Saudi Arabia — to block the agenda unless rich countries also accepted a new agenda item about climate finance.
“That was a point of principle,” the EU diplomat said. “They want no outside pressure on reducing emissions. China doesn’t want us to be the guiding force.”
Others accused Western countries of wanting to avoid a climate finance debate, in particular one — as demanded by the LMDCs — focused on what rich nations owe the Global South.
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Offshore wind turbines halted to help migrating birds
Wind turbines in offshore wind farms near Borssele and Egmond aan Zee were turned off for four hours last Saturday to allow migrating birds to leave the area safely, energy minister Rob Jetten has confirmed.
It is the first time anywhere in the world that wind turbines have been halted to allow birds safe passage, Jetten said. “We want to keep the impact of wind farms on nature as small as possible and this is one measure to do this,” he said.
Experts estimate that the turbine blades kill some 50,000 birds every year as offshore wind farms proliferate on their migratory routes.
Wind farm owners will use predictions showing when large numbers of birds are about to move to decide when to turn off their turbines. These are based on forecasts by bird migration experts and a model devised by a PdD student at the University of Amsterdam using weather data and bird radar systems.
“In spring and in autumn, millions of birds move over the North Sea some nights,” said Tim van Oijen from bird protection group Vogelbescherming Nederland.
“It is crucial that North Sea wind farm development is done in a responsible way. Turning off the turbines during migration will help achieve that.”
The turbines are not completely halted, but their revolution is reduced to a maximum of two per minute.
Last Saturday’s stoppage is part of a series of trials taking place this spring to assess if turbines can be halted without damage to the network. The system will be officially enforced from the autumn.
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21 June, 2023
“Peak Green” in the West: What it means for the Rest
Recent political events on both the EU and the US signal “peak green”.
Unlike “peak oil” whose time never seems to come despite many earlier confident predictions, peak green seems to be happening now, in real time. What precisely is peak green? The beginning of the end of a period of ever-expanding and costly climate change regulations on businesses and households is as good a definition as any. There has been a succession of setbacks to the green cause on both sides of the Atlantic.
To policy makers in the developing countries of the East, representing some 7 of the world’s 8 billion people, these policy challenges faced by Western governments committed to the radical climate agenda present a unique opportunity. Developing countries now have a chance to help establish a new world order more amenable to their legitimate ambitions for rapid economic development and better living standards for their citizens.
Is the Green Movement Peaking in Europe?
A short list of key political events that suggest “peak green”, in no order of importance, would include the following. In early March, to the great consternation of the EV lobby, the EU decided to allow the sale of internal combustion engine cars using hydrogen-derived “e-fuels” technology (itself unproven at scale and highly expensive) beyond 2035 despite earlier plans for a complete eurozone ban. This followed strong objections by the German and Italian governments who were responding to their powerful automotive industry interests.
In mid-March, Dutch voters went to polls and put the populist Farmer-Citizen Movement (BBB) into the lead, ahead of the governing party, in the Senate, redefining the country’s political landscape. It put on hold, for the present at least, the government’s plans to decimate the Dutch agricultural industry, the world’s 2nd largest exporter, in pursuit of yet another environmental hobgoblin. This time, it is the nitrogen fertilizers which emit nitrous oxide (N2O), a greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere.
But nothing could be more clearly indicative of a “peak green” mood among moderate European politicians than Macron’s call last month for a “pause” on more climate regulations. In a speech to those assembled at an aluminium factory in Dunkirk, he said:
“I prefer factories that respect our European standards, which are the best, rather than those who still want to add standards and always more – but without having any more factories…we have already passed a lot of regulations at the European level, more than our neighbours…Now we have to execute not make new rule changes, because otherwise we will lose all the players.”
Unsurprisingly, Macron’s speech triggered outrage among European Greens and leftist politicians. One French MEP remarked: “Macron now takes up the same speech, word for word, as the European Right and far-Right, who want to kill the implementation of the rest of the European climate package.” Even Ursula von der Leyen — president of the European Commission and champion of Europe’s Green Deal objectives of “climate neutrality” by 2050 — conceded in response to Macron’s call that lawmakers needed to consider the “absorptive capacity” of states across the EU faced with reams of new climate regulations issued by Brussels.
Where It All Started
In December 1985, Joschka Fischer, without a tie and wearing sneakers, was sworn in as minister of energy and environment in Germany’s state of Hesse. A radical from the left-wing student generation of ’68, Fischer served as the foreign minister and as the vice-chancellor of Germany in the cabinet of Gerhard Schröder from 1998 to 2005. Fischer was a leading figure in the German Greens party since the 1970s and the party grew from strength to strength. The party attained its zenith as part of the current Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s ruling coalition. Economy Minister and Green party leader Robert Habeck seemed unstoppable, leading in popularity polls through the spring and summer of 2022. Habeck had made no secret of his ambition to lead his Green party to victory in the 2025 general election and become Germany's next leader.
But much has changed in recent weeks. The latest release from the DeutschlandTrend monthly survey, conducted on June 2nd, measured voter support for Alternative for Germany (Alternative für Deutschland, AfD) at 18%, putting it on a par with Chancellor Olaf Scholz's Social Democrats. Norbert Roettgen, a senior lawmaker for the main opposition Christian Democrats, described the poll as "a disaster" and "an alarm signal for all parties in the centre”. Under Germany’s coalition politics and system of proportional representation, the AfD’s popularity casts doubt on the ruling alliance’s mandate.
A YouGov poll published one week later (June 9th) found that 20% of German voters would give their vote to the AfD, making it the second-strongest party behind the centre-right CDU (28%) and ahead of Scholz’s SPD (19%). The resurgence of AfD, a party inevitably dubbed “far right” by the mainstream media, has been primarily at the expense of the Greens which have been sent into free fall with political scandals and increasingly burdensome climate change policies. While the latter have been a fixture in Germany’s policy landscape over the past two decades, the furore over recently announced plans by the Greens to ban new gas heating devices beginning next year in favour of expensive heat pumps has proven to be the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back.
On May 25th, Lord Frost gave the annual GWPF lecture on Europe “getting dark”, referring to the EU sinking into “miserabilism, degrowth, and economic decline” at the altar of the proclaimed “climate emergency.” On the same day, it was reported that the German economy had entered into recession (defined as two quarters of negative growth). On June 8th, Eurostat reported that the EU as a whole was also in recession. With Europe reaping the boomeranging effects of sanctions on imports of Russian energy, leading to surging energy and electricity prices, inflation and recession, the Green movement in Europe is now in eclipse. Parties opposed to the unconstrained green climate agenda are now in governing coalitions in Finland, Sweden and Italy.
And in the USA
Across the Atlantic, there are few signs that the “whole of government” push by the Biden administration for net zero emission targets by 2050 is being seriously challenged. In August, it passed the euphemistically named Inflation Reduction Act, allocating a tsunami of subsidies and tax credits for pet green projects including EVs, renewable energy and battery technologies. Hailed by some as the “most important climate action in US history”, the Congressional Budget Office forecasts the costs of the IRA at some $390 billion over the decade 2022-31. The US Congress’ Ways and Means Committee however suggests that the real costs is likely to be triple the CBO forecast, at $1.2 trillion, given the uncapped tax credits and loose credit conditions in the legislation.
At the local level, there is an ongoing backlash in rural America against the encroachment of large wind and solar projects. Robert Bryce has been reporting on rural opposition to renewable projects in rural USA for over a decade and has maintained the Renewable Rejection Database since 2015. These rejections by local communities are at odds against the hope that the $127 billion appropriated for renewable power under the IRA will lead to a massive surge of new solar and wind projects. Land-use conflicts have hindered the growth of land-intensive renewable energy projects — both in the U.S. and Europe — for years. And as more projects get proposed, more rural communities are objecting.
But the more frontal challenge to the juggernaut of the climate industrial complex in the US has been the move by the attorneys-general in Republican states against the adoption of environmental, social, and governance (“ESG”) investment strategies by the corporate sector. In January, twenty-one state attorneys-general released a letter to the two largest proxy advisory firms, Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS) and Glass, Lewis & Company, which dominate the US proxy advisory market in the US. They hold great leverage over how institutional shareholders vote on company resolutions across the country. In the letter, the attorneys-general warned of possible violations of both fiduciary duty and anti-trust laws. Proxy advisors could have violated their legal and contractual duties to their clients by discriminating against fossil fuels and by colluding with each other in this sector-wise discrimination.
In the face of potential litigation on fiduciary duty and anti-trust grounds, powerful ESG-pushers forcing behavioural change in the corporate sector such as BlackRock’sBLK -1.2% CEO Larry Fink have now mellowed out. As the self-styled prophet of the business world, he had implicitly warned in his letter to CEOs in 2020 of his vote against corporate directors and management executives who didn’t diligently report on “plans to achieve net zero by 2050”. Running the world’s largest investment fund with $8.5 trillion assets under management, he now modestly admits that “it is for governments to make policy and enact legislation, and not for companies including asset managers to be the environmental police”.
After the ESG backlash in the U.S., at least seven members (including five of the eight founding signatories) of the Net-Zero Insurance Alliance setup by U.N. climate envoy Mark Carney have now left the group. Europe’s largest insurers such as AXA, Allianz, Swiss Re, Munich Re, Zurich Insurance and Hannover left the group under threat of anti-trust litigation. In September, major Wall Street banks threatened to leave the net zero financial alliance, also founded by Mr. Carney, over legal risks. Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan and Bank of America are among the leading banks “weighing an exit as they fear being sued over the alliance's stringent decarbonisation commitments”. The green movement in the US shows signs of peaking at least with respect to the momentum achieved by its ESG Trojan horse.
Developing Countries: Where Do They Stand?
From the earliest UN negotiations starting in 1992 at the Rio de Janeiro “Earth Summit” under the Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), leading developing countries such as China, India, Brazil and South Africa adopted the ‘Third World’ position. Developing countries carried "common but differentiated responsibilities". This meant that the developed countries (primarily the West, but also its allies including industrialized Japan and South Korea) adopted binding commitments to reduce carbon emissions by specified amounts over a specified period (allegedly dictated by “the science”). The developing countries not only did not have any binding policy commitments but were expected to receive considerable support in “climate finance” to assist mitigating and adapting to climate change.
Preparatory talks concluding this week in Bonn for this year’s COP28 climate summit to be held in the United Arab Emirates was “consumed by a power struggle” according to a Politico report. In veiled comments critical of the UAE, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said on Thursday that countries must start phasing out oil, coal and gas. He demanded that fossil fuel companies "cease and desist" measures that aim to hobble progress on the issue. The UAE, it should be noted, is the world’s 7th largest oil producer and has ambitious expansion plans for its oil and gas sector. As host to COP28, it will try to balance the overheated rhetoric of the Western climate zealots with the bottom line: the world, whatever the West and its allies desire, will be using fossil fuels for decades to come.
Africa’s top energy official, Amani Abou-Zeid, the African Union Commissioner for Infrastructure and Energy, said at last year’s COP27 summit held at Sharm El Sheikh in Egypt that African countries advocate “a common energy position that sees fossil fuels as necessary to expanding economies and electricity access”. African countries, like their counterparts in Asia and Latin America, will not be thwarted in their climb up the very same energy ladder from wood and coal to refined oil and natural gas that the West used in its ascent to human betterment.
Carbon imperialism, the corollary of the climate alarmist Net Zero movements that have reigned in Western capitals over the past three decades, has long been challenged by the developing countries. But now, citizens of the Western metropoles are increasingly aligning with their counterparts in the East, united against Green ideology and its pernicious effects on human flourishing.
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Climate crisis shock: No change in average U.K. temperatures for more than two decades
It was a tad on the warm side last year in the United Kingdom. There was, for instance, a new turbo-charged 60-second high temperature record declared on July 19th, halfway down the runway at the jet fighter base of RAF Coningsby. Climate journalists were in full Thermogeddon reporting mode. It is almost a shame to bring facts and statistics to the party, although the poopers might note that there has been no change in average U.K. temperatures for more than two decades, following the short rise during the 1980s and 90s.
Furthermore, the 10°C average temperature last year was only a rounding error higher than 2014. No change in the decades-long average temperature is indicated by the fact that the current 10-year running average in the U.K. is still no higher than it was between 1998 and 2007 at 9.4°C.
Annual temperatures last year were well within the bounds of natural variability, being 0.82°C above the 30-year average. By comparison, 2010 was 0.92°C below, whilst several other years have had bigger anomalies than 2022.
As we have seen in past Daily Sceptic articles. the key misunderstanding in much climate discourse is between weather events, often described as ‘extreme’, and climate trends. Overall global warming has been running out of steam for two decades. Homewood could have noted that the 2010s in the U.K. were actually cooler than the 2000s. But headlines and click-bait science papers designed to promote the collectivist Net Zero project dumb down on weather stories, even attempting to attribute individual events to long-term climatic changes. Perhaps this is not surprising, since many take their lead from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that holds the implausible view that all changes in the climate since 1900 have been caused by humans. This of course is the same IPCC that was set up in 1988 to look into the “scientific basis” of the risk of human-induced climate change.
In a separate note for the GWPF, the former BBC science editor Dr. David Whitehouse recently noted that most environmental journalists habitually report verbatim the ‘weather is climate‘ scam. “If financial organisations or Treasury officials played around with predictions like this they would almost certainly come in for a dose of criticism and further probing from proper journalists,” he observed. Giving a recent example, he noted an unquestioning attitude towards the World Meteorological Organisation that observed natural variability in any coming El Niño warming, but also said the rise would show “global warming is accelerating”.
In his excellent review, Homewood is using the Met Office’s own recordings. But again as we have seen, legitimate scientific questions can be asked about the accuracy of these temperature measurements. The Met Office frequently promotes temperature ‘records’ at airports like Coningsby, Heathrow and Northolt, but these areas are filled with concrete, tarmac, machinery and jet exhaust. It is difficult to think of a worst place to take readings designed to provide an accurate record of U.K. and global trends. Furthermore, the heat distortions caused by growing urbanisation have undoubtedly corrupted both local and global datasets. On a global level, the Met Office has retrospectively adding over 30% heating to the record over the last 20 years, while removing similar amounts of heating from the period 1850-1900 to produce a century long heating trend.
The key to last year’s warm year was the prevalence of sunny weather throughout the spring and summer. In fact, sunshine hours were the seventh highest for the period since records began in 1919. But Homewood reports that there is no evident long-term trend in sunshine hours that would suggest this is part of a pattern of climate change. The Central England record is the longest continuous temperature collection going back to 1660. Last summer tied in fourth place, while 1976 was warmer by 0.4°C. Higher average temperatures were also recorded in 1826 and 2018.
On the rainfall front, annual precipitation in England and Wales has been gradually trending upwards since the 1990s, “but the long-term average is lower than during the 1870s and similar to the 1920s”. Rainfall increased substantially in Scotland between the 1970s and 1990s, but there has been little long-term change since then. In Northern Ireland, there has been little change for almost 100 years. Storms have been named in the U.K. since 2015 and the increased media attention is said to have led to the misapprehension that they are becoming more common. In reality, reports Homewood, wind storm have been declining in both frequency and intensity since the 1990s.
The Met Office notes that the U.K. climate continues to change and weather is becoming more extreme. But Homewood provides hard facts that show the U.K. climate has changed very little and long-term trends are dwarfed by the natural variability of weather. There is no evidence that weather has become more extreme or will do so in the future.
In conclusion, Homewood states that the U.K. climate remains “absolutely benign”. The changes we have seen have been small and mostly thoroughly welcome. GWPF director Dr. Benny Peiser added that it was extraordinary that we are impoverishing our economy and households in a utopian attempt to achieve Net Zero at any cost. This at a time when the U.K.’s long-term climate trends “have remained relatively stable and pleasant”.
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Poll shows clueless MPs have NO idea of the pain policies like Net Zero inflict on ordinary British families
A massive 62 per cent told a YouGov poll for The Sun that getting prices down is more important than achieving carbon neutral status by midway through this century.
Almost two thirds of those surveyed said ministers should prioritise keeping prices down over reaching Net Zero.
Ministers have set the ambitious 2050 target — but it means upfront pain by 2035 for anyone replacing their boiler, and expensive electric cars by the end of this decade.
On the back of our poll results, MPs and peers last night called for a slowdown, warning Net Zero risks making lives “less free, more costly and more miserable”.
Households face paying out at least £10,000 for new central heating systems such as heat pumps and an average £50,000 for a green car.
A whopping 85 per cent of Brits polled say politicians setting these rules have no grasp of the financial pressures faced by the people.
More than half of the voters that gave the Government their massive majority in 2019 do not believe Net Zero can be hit without making life harder for the cash-strapped public.
The poll found 65 per cent of people back the idea of Net Zero — with just one in five not supporting the policy in any form.
But while there is support for the green initiative, people have little sympathy for eco campaigners such as Just Stop Oil.
Almost 70 per cent of voters say there is zero justification for their go-slow road protest tactics and blocking workers from commuting.
Forty-five per cent believe Just Stop Oil protesters are treated too leniently by the cops.
And just 17 per cent of the public think eco group have been treated too harshly — although that doubles to 35 per cent among Labour voters.
Our survey also shows:
HALF of Brits say NO to the 2030 ban on sales of new petrol and diesel vehicles that will force drivers to switch to electric cars;
FORTY-SEVEN per cent are opposed to the ban on new gas boilers due in 2035;
TWO-THIRDS say Just Stop Oil has no justification for ruining workers’ lives by closing roads — with nearly half wanting even tougher treatment;
FORTY-FIVE per cent disagree with Ultra Low Emission Zone schemes that punish drivers entering towns and cities — while 40 per cent back the expensive tolls;
FORTY-ONE per cent to 33 per cent oppose hiking energy bills for green schemes like hydrogen.
The UK was the first country to legislate to go carbon neutral by 2050, but that means painful targets in the coming years.
The policy was dreamt up in the dying days of Theresa May’s Premiership in 2019 and rushed through the Commons.
The ex-PM insisted it “should be at the top of the Government’s agenda”.
But hitting the Net Zero target scores way down the list of the biggest issues facing Brits today.
The cost of living crisis and soaring prices tops their concerns, followed by rising NHS backlogs and sluggish economic growth.
Crime rates, the state of Britain’s schools and the largest tax burden faced by workers since the war also beat going green among worries.
However, the public is more divided on whether to ban new drilling for gas and oil in the North Sea — with 39 per cent both approving and disapproving.
And the wider public is split over whether any of the Net Zero targets can be achieved without making people poorer.
More than a quarter of voters do not know what will happen.
But 2019 Tory voters are more sceptical — with 53 per cent warning life will be made tougher by the Government’s policy.
And more than 76 per cent of them want politicians to put tackling prices before those goals.
Last night, MP Craig Mckinley, who heads up the Net Zero Watch group, demanded a “pause” on such policies until value for money for taxpayers was assured.
He said: “Each and every measure — from banning petrol and diesel cars to the extreme activities of environmental campaigners — is rejected by the public.
“Cost is a key concern, especially as most countries around the world and especially the big emitters are not following us down this costly path of being pushed into new technologies that don’t work.”
He said elections could be won or lost on scrapping Net Zero, warning: “There are new votes available to us Conservatives by listening to the public and pausing unwelcome and unworkable Net Zero plans that will make life less free, more costly and miserable.”
Lord Frost, who quit Boris Johnson’s government in 2021 in part over Net Zero, also called for a “slow down”.
He told The Sun: “This polling shows clearly that voters don’t want to pay more in pursuit of abstract green goals.”
But ministers are pushing ahead with a mixture of bans and tax rises to hit the Net Zero goals.
Last week, The Sun revealed Energy Department officials told industry they needed to hike the prices of boilers before the deadline to ban new ones to get people to switch to green alternatives.
That means households face paying £300 more than they should for a new gas boiler.
Manufacturers fear they will have to increase prices to cover fines for missing heat pump sales targets.
A gas boiler is typically £2,500 while heat pumps can cost £13,000.
Businesses will get a £5,000 hit for each they don’t sell below a target.
Last night, Energy Security Secretary Grant Shapps said: “It’s clear the public want us to focus on driving down their bills, and not Labour’s Energy Surrender plan, written by Just Stop Oil, to ban British oil and gas.”
https://www.thesun.co.uk/author/alexander-colethesun-co-uk/?mc_cid=3cbd42925d&mc_eid=cc88839e92
*************************************************Australia: Renewable energy rollout too slow, warns AEMO boss
Australia is not building renewable energy developments quickly enough to compensate for the loss of coal-fired power generation, the head of the country’s energy market operator warns, as major projects continue to be beset by problems.
The slow progress could intensify pressure on prices and stoke concern about energy security, Daniel Westerman – the head of the Australian Energy Market Operator – will say in a speech on Tuesday.
Australia has set an aggressive target of having renewable energy account for more than 80 per cent of the country’s electricity generation by the end of the decade, a target that has intensified pressure on existing coal-fired power stations, which already face social, economic and reliability questions, he says.
Senior Australian energy executives have warned the build- out of renewable energy developments is too slow, a view Mr Westerman shares.
He joins a chorus of industry executives expressing concern that the massive renewable energy pipeline is currently failing to materialise.
Ian Learmonth, the head of Clean Energy Financial Corporation – the country’s green bank – in May said Australia was not on course to meet its target of having renewable energy account for more than 80 per cent of the electricity generation by the end of the decade.
Energy executives have said the lack of transmission – high voltage wires and poles – is discouraging new developments.
About 10,000km of new lines must be built before 2030, but their development has been hampered by funding constraints and community opposition.
A growing number of Australia’s most influential figures, including Origin Energy CEO Frank Calabria, have warned of the risk of not making progress in building the high-voltage wires and poles needed for renewable energy developers to push ahead with new projects.
The importance of new projects materialising is growing as several major projects currently in development suffer delays.
CleanCo, a Queensland state-owned entity, on Monday said it had cancelled plans to build a wind farm in what would have been Australia’s biggest wind energy precinct due to delays over connection agreements and rising costs.
CleanCo had planned to build the 103 megawatt Karara wind farm in the MacIntyre precinct, which had been earmarked for projects producing more than a gigawatt of power.
But CleanCo said it had pulled the pin on the project.
“As a result of significant delays to the connection process for the Karara Wind Farm, and subsequent impact to costs, CleanCo is pausing the development of the project,” a CleanCo spokesperson said.
States and territories are increasingly aware of the transmission roadblock.
Victoria and NSW have offered landowners affected by new transmission lines $200,000 for every kilometre of their land crossed by a major infrastructure project.
Queensland has gone even further.
The Queensland state government in May said it would offer landowners who agreed to allow high-voltage transmission cables across their properties an average $300,000 per kilometre.
Still, progress remains slow, and authorities are increasingly alarmed.
AEMO has called for faster work on five projects worth nearly $13bn, but Australia has a long history of transmission project delays.
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20 June, 2023
No more natural disasters?
Lionel Shriver
I was in New York while the smoke from Canadian wildfires filtered over the city for three days last week, and I took a guilty pleasure in the aesthetic thrill. Midday, the light assumed the roseate hue of sunset. A cloudless sky appeared overcast, and the ghostly sun was so occluded one could look straight at it. Honestly, the atmosphere of anomaly was electrifying. New Yorkers advertised their sense of snow-day exceptionalism by driving even more atrociously than usual. Despite hysterical health warnings to batten ourselves in our homes with closed windows, I played three daily hours of tennis throughout the respiratory emergency – though it was nice to have a ready excuse when I botched another cross-court forehand.
Justin Trudeau must have felt similarly grateful for a ready excuse for those raging wildfires, although we couldn’t call his get-out-of-responsibility-free card creative: climate change, the same all-purpose culprit New York Times columnist Gail Collins lazily blamed for our doomy skies. Anyone care about the truth? The fires and Gotham’s eerie haze were due to wind-fanned lightning strikes in Quebec and a rare high/low pressure system across North America called an ‘omega block’ (don’t ask).
Ironically, the real problem may be that Canada hasn’t been lighting enough fires. Government regulations regarding controlled burns have gnarled into a thicket. By the time the paperwork is completed, the narrow window of cool, windless weather ideal for safely incinerating highly flammable dead branches and dry brush has often passed. Fewer controlled burns mean more uncontrolled burns. Add to that: the country has no national firefighting service; provincial wildfire prevention budgets have been cut, and tend to be spent on protecting villages and towns; over the past 25 years, Canadian Forest Service staffing levels have plunged from 2,200 to 700.
But never mind those pesky details. Call it ‘climate change’, and all is forgiven. For politicians, climate has become the catch-all homework-eating dog. If President Erdogan neglected to blame this spring’s earthquake fatalities in Turkey on fossil fuel emissions – rather than the shoddy construction and corruption his administration has fostered – he was missing a trick.
Given the ceaselessness of this mantra, perhaps we’ve finally discovered that scientific holy grail, a ‘theory of everything’ – a single formula that explains why anything happens anywhere (‘Because climate change!’). Yet for my entire life I have heard tell of hurricanes, typhoons, cyclones, earthquakes, floods, mudslides, tornadoes, volcanoes, tsunamis, hailstorms, droughts and, yes, wildfires ruining other people’s lives somewhere. We used to call these humbling outbreaks of arbitrary havoc ‘natural disasters’, but the expression is out of fashion now that every fit the planet throws is all our fault.
So long as the wrath of God has not rained down on me personally or on anyone I care about and the cataclysm has occurred safely far away, I confess that as a news consumer I’ve always been a tiny bit bored by these stories. Oh, sometimes the pics are riveting (especially of the mud slides). I’m abstractly sympathetic, and if given a button to press to make these calamities unhappen, I would press it. Still, there used to be no implicit moral or political content to these impersonal meteorological or geological convulsions, which were simply a terrible shame. After weeks of coverage, I might sheepishly fast-forward through the suffering of strangers, because it didn’t mean anything other than that life was unfair, and I knew that already.
Well, now we’ve loaded the erstwhile ‘natural disaster’ with moral and political content galore. Without fail, news presenters explain every unfortunate weather occurrence as due to anthropogenic ‘climate change’. A while back, the media were obliged to dredge up some well-funded activist ‘expert’ to justify this claim, but not any more. The attribution of every rained-off picnic to human-induced ‘climate change’ is mindlessly appended to mainstream broadcasts as if the whole industry has the hiccoughs. Newscasters are safe in their surety that no one will ever demand evidence of a causal link between a drought in the western US and petrol-fuelled Land Rovers in Sussex. They’re safe in their surety that no one will ever object that, sorry, Bangladesh has suffered huge floods throughout its history, from which fewer people are dying than ever before. As we do not have an Earth control group – a second identical planet on which all humanity still gets around in donkey carts – they’re safe in their surety that blaming every cataclysm under the sun on fossil-fuel-driven ‘climate change’ is unfalsifiable.
A proposal: let’s bring back the distinction between climate and weather. Climate regards patterns across hundreds if not thousands of years. Check out the graph of global mean temperatures for the last 500,000 years, which resembles an ECG. With a periodicity of approximately 100,000 years, the planet’s mean temperature has steadily dropped to about 5?C, then swooped up to between 10?C and 12?C, rising on virtually identical gradients each time (without the help of a single coal-fired power plant). We’re now atop another 20,000-year upward swoop – thankfully, since my forehand would be really crap if I had to chase the ball on a glacier. Industrialised modernity since 1880 takes up so little space on this graph that it’s indiscernible. That is ‘climate’. Accordingly, I even dismiss climate sceptics’ observation that, according to satellite readings, warming has nearly flatlined for the past 20 years, because in climate terms 20 years is meaningless.
The media’s knee-jerk ‘Because climate change!’ is numbing in its repetition and suspicious in its constancy. As it smacks of propaganda, on a popular level the incantation backfires. I’d have more faith in the reliability of these incessant attributions if newscasters occasionally tacked on to, say, a report on a deluge, ‘This event had no connection with climate change. It happened to rain a shedload in one place, but that’s occurred for ever. While locals might take councils to task for allowing rampant house-building on a flood plain, otherwise this story has no moral or political content and mostly amounts to bad luck.’ But I’m not holding my breath.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/06/bring-back-weather/
************************************************Farmers Band Together Against CO2 Pipeline Project in South Dakota
On their way to attend their niece’s wedding in July 2021, fourth-generation farmer Ed Fischbach of Mellette, South Dakota, and his wife made a quick stop to check the mailbox.
His wife reached inside, pulling out a handful of letters. Within the small pile was an envelope from a company she had never heard of—Summit Carbon Solutions.
She opened the letter and began reading it.
“Dear landowner,” the letter began innocently enough. But as she continued reading, her jaw nearly dropped.
“Listen to this,” she told her husband.
The Iowa-based company described plans to build a massive carbon capture pipeline across five midwestern states in the letter.
The 1,400-mile pipeline would transport carbon dioxide under high pressure, produced by ethanol and biofuel refineries, for burial in North Dakota. The goal would be to reduce the region’s carbon footprint to protect the environment.
The Fischbachs then learned that the pipeline would travel through some of the most productive areas of the 1,400-acre property that has been in their family for decades.
“The proposed pipeline route for the project is depicted on the enclosed map,” the letter continued, “and public records indicate that you are the record taxpayer of all or certain portions of the property.”
The notice further advised that Summit Carbon, through its consultant, TRC Companies, would perform preliminary surveys in the weeks ahead.
But first, the company needed permission to go on the property. Ed Fischbach said he never filled out or returned the enclosed approval form.
Instead, he made phone calls and soon realized other landowners in Spink County had received the same letter, including his nephew Brad, who raises beef cattle for a living.
“Who is this outfit? Nobody heard about it,” Fischbach said. “I decided I’m not going to stand for this. Somebody had to do something about it. I took the lead.”
In August 2021, Fischbach called a meeting at the local community center, expecting a dozen people to attend.
Without advertising, 74 landowners turned out. None of them supported the project in South Dakota, he said.
“I said to myself. I’m onto something here. This is real. We have to pursue this,” Fischbach told The Epoch Times.
Opposition Builds
Fischbach said that soon afterward, Summit Carbon held a catered public meeting to unveil the project.
About 300 people showed up for the event, Fischbach recalled. Summit officials spoke and held a slide show on the project’s economic and environmental benefits.
There were questions asked and answered, as well as comments from the public. Fischbach said he was the first to take the microphone.
“My first question to them was, ‘Would you commit today not to use eminent domain on those of us that don’t want your project?'”
After repeated attempts, Summit Carbon officials would not answer “yes” or “no”, Fischbach said. Finally, a company official said, “No, I cannot do that,” he said.
“It just set off a chain reaction. Nobody wanted this thing. They ended the meeting,” said Fischbach, leader of the South Dakota Easement Team opposed to the company’s attempts to acquire right-of-way easements by eminent domain to build the pipeline.
Since the July 2021 letter, Summit Carbon has filed more than 81 eminent domain lawsuits in 10 South Dakota counties against farmers who refuse to voluntarily sign easement agreements with the company.
“They’re trying to intimidate people,” Fischbach said. “They’re doing this with no permit. That’s what’s upsetting.”
“We have a trespass law in this state. It doesn’t mean anything because they’re out surveying people. The company has armed security guards on your property to keep you away from the surveyors. We’ve got pictures of them. They’re bringing this in without authorization.”
Summit Carbon is suing one McPherson County couple to take, acquire, or appropriate property to allow a temporary or permanent easement, “which has been authorized by statute for public use,” according to the petition.
The couple had 30 days to respond to the petition or face a jury to “ascertain the just compensation for the property proposed to be taken or damaged.”
In a statement to Forum News Service, Jesse Harris, the director of public affairs for Summit Carbon, said the lawsuits are the next step when “negotiating in good faith” fails to produce results.
“We look forward to continuing to work with regulators, policymakers, landowners, and more to advance this critical investment in our economy,” Harris told the news service.
South Dakota Rep. Karla Lems, a Republican, said the pipeline project takes advantage of legal loopholes in the state’s eminent domain law (SDL 49-7-11) which states, “Any pipeline companies owning a pipeline which is a common carrier as defined by 49-7-11 may exercise the right of eminent domain in acquiring right-of-way as prescribed by statute.”
Summit Carbon filed a project permit with South Dakota’s Public Utilities Commission, which will decide in September whether to allow the pipeline to move forward or not. Four other states considering the pipeline include Iowa, Nebraska, Minnesota, and North Dakota.
Summit Carbon Responds
Summit Carbon spokeswoman Courtney Ryan countered claims of widespread opposition to the pipeline, citing an “overwhelming majority” of landowners along the proposed route that have signed easement agreements to support and advance the project.
“To date, 2,800 landowners have signed 4,520 easement agreements accounting for 1,410 miles of our proposed pipeline route and 135,000 acres of our proposed sequestration site,” Ryan told The Epoch Times.
“For an easy comparison, the Dakota Access pipeline [the most recent major pipeline project in the Midwest] is 1,172 total miles. In other words, the number of easement agreements we’ve already secured exceeds the mileage of that project.”
Ryan said the “short answer” is that CO2 has been utilized for years as a commodity and Summit Carbon Solutions is a common carrier.
Approximately 230 million metric tons of CO2 are used every year with fertilizer serving as the largest consumer, she said.
“Other uses include other commercial and industrial applications, which include food and beverage production, metal fabrication, cooling, fire suppression, and stimulating plant growth in greenhouses. Emerging uses include construction materials, industrial gas and fluids, fuel, polymers, chemicals, and more.
“In every South Dakota county where our project is located, the company will invest $45 million on average to help generate economic growth. In those same counties, Summit will pay an average of $650,000 in new property taxes,” Ryan said.
Ryan added there are 3.3 million miles of pipeline in operation in the United States, including 12,000 in South Dakota alone.
The Summit Carbon system includes carbon capture, transportation, and storage, utilizing long-standing technology that is “safe, reliable, and proven to be safe for landowners and community,” Ryan said.
In addition, the company will maintain an operations center round the clock in Ames, South Dakota, that will monitor for leaks and any changes in the system.
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Time and tithe: the Climate Cult’s expensive virtue
The oldest fragments of human civilisation contain tributes left for the gods in a futile attempt to court their good graces. We believed that through material sacrifice – be it in riches or blood – the forces of nature could be coerced in our favour.
Tlazolteotl, an ancient Aztec goddess, was honoured by murdering a person in a field with arrows so that their blood might fertilise the dirt. Half a millennia ago, the people of Chimú in northern Peru killed hundreds of children between 5-14 years old and buried them beneath the bodies of llamas in history’s largest known sacrificial event. There is evidence they were brutalised first, including the removal of their hearts. The Inca weren’t much better, killing children atop volcanoes in Pichu Pichu and Ampato where it is believed they were tied to stone slabs and left to be struck by lightning.
Our ancestors killed their children to change the weather.
The sacrificial mindset is a desire created by existential fear and the unwanted knowledge that our world tortures life indiscriminately. To regain control, humans reason that a virtuous society is surely entitled to salvation, whether earned or purchased. In this moment we transfer human emotion onto a chunk of rock and attempt to make a bargain.
For thousands of years, ‘the gods’ have remained indifferent to human virtue – rewarding the undeserving while throwing flood and fire at peaceful societies. The Greeks and Romans made sense of this through their Pantheon of tempestuous and irresponsible gods, the Vikings embraced existentialism, while other religions around the world indulged natural violence and worshipped the horror. Though most of these civilisations have long since collapsed, the human belief in the bargain of virtue endures in modern religious movements.
Progressive environmentalists usually recoil at the accusation of faith, protesting that they are ‘atheists’. They are not. At their least religious they are spiritualists that embrace mysticism and superstition. Others are devout in a variety of nature cults that have not yet coalesced into a coherent faith – but they will. This new religion has borrowed heavily from the Abrahamic faiths, no doubt because it is the only point of spiritual worship Western practitioners have to reference.
In 1095, Pope Urban II appealed to the sinful masses of Europe with a promise of heavenly forgiveness if they joined the First Crusade. These were sinful times and there were plenty of takers. This evolved into a system of indulgences within the medieval Church and the ‘treasury of heavenly merit’. Before long, there was a thriving trade of virtue that carried the same level of credibility as a rainbow background on a corporate logo.
Monetary absolution is a theme favoured by the cult of Climate Change. Radicalised teachers, media personalities, ‘scientists’, and politicians fill the national soul with apocalyptic guilt – laying the blame on hot and heavy until the demoralised public drag their wallets to the ATO and empty them in prayer.
Tax the poor. Save the planet.
Children, in particular, are traumatised into believing they are sinful by birth – that their existence is a carbon burden on the planet and a selfish act by their parents. To atone for being born, they are brainwashed into upholding the faith of global apocalypse and supporting political leaders – as a moral duty – who legislate profitable Net Zero ventures.
It is a political scam wrapped up in religious guilt and terror that we have allowed to permeate a civilisation that used to credit itself with the Enlightenment. How fitting that the West’s fall will involve a very real blackout as our energy grids flicker into death.
Until then, entire generations believe that they can escape the hellfire of a climate apocalypse (or is that a Biblical flood?) if they pay a carbon surcharge on their coffee or incorporate powdered cockroaches into their ‘bread and circuses’. Logic and reality are irrelevant concepts when in discussion about the emotional panic of sin and fear of punishment. Just as the priests of old draped themselves in silk and jewels while peasants tossed coins at the fire, today’s citizens see no hypocrisy in the spiritual leaders of the Climate Cult boarding private jets and super yachts or living in palaces by the sea.
Climate cultists don’t want to see the proof of their sacrifice, all they want is an expert to pat them on the back and say, ‘You are saved…’
For a political movement that claims to hate religion as a backward fiction designed to control the population, the practitioners of Climate Change certainly copy-pasted a few ideas. Not only do they adhere to the Eden-esque view of the world pre-humanity, they’re quite fond of the concept of original sin.
The Catholic Church talks about the treasury of the Church as a creation of ‘infinite value’ with the power to set the whole of mankind ‘free from sin’ if only a believer takes part in prayers, good works, and monetary tributes. In the same way, the constant repetition of Climate Change slogans, attendance at rallies, and the Net Zero taxation scam are all designed to enforce adherence to the ‘Faith’ even among the non-believers who are donating to a Church whose Pope resides in a Swiss Alps ski resort.
God’s treasury is described as limitless, but the Climate Change vaults are truly astonishing with trillions of dollars sliding through the backrooms of power. It’s the kind of money that makes the riches of the Vatican look like a dodgy yard sale.
When the naive ask, ‘Why would anyone lie about The Science?’ The answer is, for the same complex reasons people followed false Covid laws.
It’s obvious why the big end of town converted to the Climate Change Cult, but why do ordinary people wish to buy their way out of a sin they never committed to avoid a punishment that isn’t real?
Has a green religious delusion swept over the population and filled the void left behind by recently slain gods?
Perhaps. When trying to determine why people adhere to a scam, the explanation is usually a mixture of laziness and an irrational emotional attachment. In this case, they are in love with the idea of virtue and many have a saviour complex that, if it were to be dismantled, would rob them of purpose. Who are Millennials, Gen Z, and the Teals if not planet-saving climate warriors? Heartless idiots that advocated for taxing the poor to appease mining companies? Morons gluing themselves to the road in peak hour so a CEO can add an extra zero to their profit margin? It’s a bit of a reality shock.
When dealing with the Climate Change Cult, political commentators would be wise to stop treating this as a political discussion and instead view it as a deconversion from a toxic faith. You cannot simply tell people that their god is a lie – those at the top of power have to be exposed and ridiculed. The Faith will collapse on its own after that.
The Climate Cult has extended its greed for public cash well beyond donations for indulgences, and is now in a tithe-like situation where a percentage of personal and corporate earnings are siphoned off by government decree. Everyone is funding the Climate Change Cult. Everyone is contributing to the apocalyptic scam that has attached its jaws to the neck of Western Civilisation and drinks like a parasite, gorging itself while politicians stroke it like a pet.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/06/time-and-tithe-the-climate-cults-expensive-virtue
***********************************************************The gas stove mania hits Australia
State and territory governments face a new energy battleground this decade, following a new demand to rip out gas appliances and ban new connections to homes and small businesses so Australia can achieve net zero emissions by 2050.
The plan from the Grattan Institute think-tank would trigger a deadline for the sale of gas appliances, a ban on new residential and small commercial gas connections and the need for instant asset write-offs for landlords installing electrical appliances as part of moves to get gas out of Australian homes.
Removing gas from the nation’s energy supplies may also cause a fresh political headache for governments, which are already under pressure to deliver an ambitious green transformation, shifting the electricity network from fossil fuels to renewables.
The Albanese government wants to wean about five million homes off gas, investing $1.6bn to help low-income households and businesses adopt energy-efficiency measures such as solar panels and electric appliances as part of a sweeping electrification package in the budget.
An ACT plan to ban gas for new homes and businesses has been criticised, with plumbers saying the move will trigger job losses, energy price spikes and the premature shutdown of billions of dollars worth of gas assets.
The bill for phasing out gas has been forecast as exceeding $6bn. While the Grattan Institute says those costs are now lower, the costs of upgrading electricity networks are likely to be dwarfed by the cost to households – exacerbated by supply chain constraints, skilled labour shortages and the sheer scale of the work required.
“In Victoria you would need to convert 200 households every day for the next 25 years. In some ways, it’s more of a logistical problem than a cost problem,” Grattan energy director Tony Wood said. The electrification of Australia’s energy system is already slated to lift demand for electricians across the country, with 2021 estimates from the federal government forecasting the need for another 14,000 trained workers by 2026, to about 157,000.
Another 12,500 skilled workers will be needed for large-scale renewable energy projects, according to AEMO projections.
And the electrification of households will add even more pressure to that skilled labour shortage, the Grattan report says.
“There are 11 million gas appliances in homes across Australia. At a minimum, there are 11 million hours of labour involved in replacing these with electric appliances. Spread over the 27 years to 2050, this amounts to 1400 hours of labour per day – 175 electricians working full time. This is significant added demand for an already stretched workforce,” the report says.
This will come as Australia competes for labour and equipment with other countries, including Britain, the US and Europe, which run similar programs.
The use of gas in homes and commercial buildings accounts for less than 5 per cent of Australia’s annual carbon emissions, but the new report, “Getting off gas: why, how, and who should pay?” highlights the extraordinary logistical challenges facing even that small portion of Australia’s total emissions.
The report argues that, although electric heaters and cookers are ultimately more efficient and cheaper to run, the effort required to replace the estimated five million gas stoves installed in Australian homes – alongside 4.5 million gas water heaters and 2.7 million heating systems that use gas from the mains – means governments need to tighten policy settings immediately to force gas out of Australian homes.
The electrification of Australia’s energy system is already slated to lift demand for electricians across the country.
The electrification of Australia’s energy system is already slated to lift demand for electricians across the country.
“In all sectors, emissions patterns change very slowly. Assets that use gas tend to be replaced only when they reach the end of their useful life. A gas water heater installed today will still be burning gas in 2035. An industrial furnace installed today could still be burning gas in 2063,” the report says.
“To reach net zero, governments need to start changing asset-replacement patterns now.”
Mr Wood told The Australian that the problem, particularly for Victorian households, was not even necessarily dependent on carbon reduction targets – the looming gas shortfall caused by the end of the Bass Strait fields owned by Woodside and ExxonMobil would require the same transition.
Mr Wood said the work to transition Australian households and small businesses away from gas would take decades – but governments needed to set a deadline in order to run the long public advocacy campaigns needed to get the public on board.
The report likens the effort required to that of switching Australia’s broadcast TV stations from analog to digital.
“The decision to move Australian television networks from analog to digital was made in 1998. The switchover itself began in 2010, and was rolled out over three years. Online information for households was available from 2001, and a widespread communications campaign began in 2008,” the report says.
But the cost of conversion remains a major barrier, the report says.
Induction cookers cost, on average, about $400 more than gas equivalents. Heat pumps cost about $1500 more than instantaneous gas hot water systems and – while split system reverse cycle airconditioning units are now broadly equivalent in price to gas heaters paired with an air conditioner for summer use – ducted units suitable for larger buildings cost about $1800 more than gas heating.
Some state governments are already offering rebates and incentives for replacing gas appliances with electric equivalents. The ACT government offers up to $5000 for a range of electric appliances, and the Victorian government offers $1000 towards the cost of installing heat pumps for hot water systems and reverse cycle airconditioning units.
But that will not be enough to help low-income households transition, and additional incentives will also be needed to convince landlords to convert rental properties.
“Rebates can be very costly to the government. Subsidising $5000 per household with gas would cost $25bn. Subsidies also often require households to have money upfront. A rebate that requires the recipient to spend the money installing an electric appliance to replace a gas one, and then wait for their rebate claim to be assessed and paid, is of no use to someone who doesn’t have the money in the first place,” the report says.
Instead other governments should look to the examples set by the ACT government’s sustainable household scheme, which offers up to $15,000 in zero-interest loans, and to add to the recently announced Albanese government scheme that will offer up to $1bn in low-interest loans for energy-efficient household upgrades.
Additional measures will be needed to f to encourage landlords to upgrade the homes of the 31 per cent of Australian households that live in rental properties.
“When landlords are asked why they do not carry out energy retrofits, the most common factor cited is financial constraints. These can include lack of access to capital, but also the landlords’ expectations of net profits from their rental properties, and their perceptions of retrofit costs,” the report says.
“The simplest way to provide private landlords with a financial incentive to move to all-electric appliances is to provide an instant asset write-off for new electric appliances that replace gas ones.”
Mr Wood told The Australian the sheer amount of work involved needs the same kind of careful planning required to electrify the national grid, despite the relatively small amount of carbon emissions generated by household gas use.
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19 June, 2023
More PFAS excitement
Ever since Erin Brokovich dramatized it, there has been much heartburn about a common class of chemicals known as PFAS that are widespread in the environment. It is widely used in industry and most Americans as a result have some of it in their blood. And is bad for rats if you give it to them. So it must be bad for people? Sadly for the drama-queens, it isn't. Over many studies PFAS have been found to be harmless to people in the doses normally encountered.
The latest study is one done in Australia and everybody seems very tense about it. You can read below a claim that the government tried to nobble it. In the washup, however, they had no need to. The researchers once again found no conclusive evidence of harm from PFAS. It was a rather pathetic study but I will bypass that for the moment and simply reproduce the actual findings from the study -- below:
For most of these health outcomes, we estimated the differences between the towns and comparison areas to be relatively small. For others, the differences were of modest size, but our estimates were imprecise, meaning the likely size of each difference could be anywhere between quite small to quite large. Even though our studies included almost everyone who had ever lived in the towns in the years we had available data (in some cases dating back to 1983), some of the conditions studied are uncommon and we observed only a few cases. For these outcomes, we could not precisely estimate the differences between the towns and comparison areas, and there is very little we can say about whether a difference really exists.
Due to the nature of our studies, there were certain design limitations. We were unable to fully account for certain risk factors (e.g. smoking) that could have led to observed differences in rates (or lack of them) between the towns and comparison areas (‘confounding’). In particular, we were not able to account for socioeconomic factors as well as we would have liked. This is important, as socioeconomic conditions are strongly linked to health. In addition, some findings could have arisen just by chance alone and not because an association truly exists.
In light of the above, while there were higher rates of some adverse outcomes in individual towns, the evidence suggesting that this was due to living in these areas was limited. We did not have direct measurements of PFAS exposure and we cannot rule out that the higher rates were due to chance or confounding. Further, there was low consistency in our observations across the three towns (something we would not expect if PFAS caused an outcome), and there is limited evidence from other studies observing similar results or explaining how potential biological processes can result in PFAS causing these effects in humans. Overall, our findings are consistent with previous studies, which have not conclusively identified causative links between PFAS and these health outcomes
https://nceph.anu.edu.au/files/PFAS%20Health%20Study%20Data%20Linkage%20Study%20Report_7Dec2021.pdf
People living in areas with high PFAS concentrations sometimes blame their illnesses on it but that is an unproven and unlikely claimHealth officials asked university researchers to remove references about potential community concern over elevated rates of cancer found in towns contaminated with “forever chemicals”, even as the federal government was defending multimillion-dollar litigation over the pollution.
Emails obtained by the Herald and The Age under freedom of information laws reveal federal health bureaucrats expressed concern to Australian National University researchers about how they reported “very high” rates of certain types of cancer they uncovered in an independent study of residents exposed to per- and poly-fluoroalkyl chemicals (PFAS) leaching off Defence sites.
Samantha Kelly with her son William, 7, in the garden of their new home after they fled contaminated Williamtown. Kelly fears her son’s health issues could be linked to exposure to “forever chemicals” after he was born with high levels in his blood.
The emails reveal the Department of Health circulated the draft version of the study to other Commonwealth departments “for their review of any red-line issues” in October 2021, while Defence was in court defending a $155 million class action over property devaluation caused by the toxins.
In anonymised emails released to the Herald, a bureaucrat told the researchers it was “counterproductive” to mention throughout their report that residents may be concerned about elevated rates of adverse health outcomes in their communities.
The department suggested researchers “highlight the significance of ‘null findings’” and say their study found “no consistent links between PFAS contamination and the health outcomes observed”.
The researchers declined to add the suggested line. “The research team is independent and did not make changes to any parts of the reports where we disagreed,” said Professor Martyn Kirk, who led the ANU research team.
“The research team did not agree to follow any departmental advice to emphasise null findings.
“We didn’t include anything in the report that we weren’t happy saying, particularly as it relates to causes of disease.”
A large number of the changes the department requested were not made by the researchers, a review of the documents by this masthead confirms.
A spokeswoman for the Department of Health said it did not seek to change the study’s findings but rather to “highlight the findings as presented and draw out the context”.
The spokeswoman rejected suggestions the department tried to “downplay” the findings of elevated rates of certain adverse outcomes in the towns.
“In reviewing the draft reports from the study the minor suggestions made by the department focused on increasing clarity and consistency within the reports,” she said.
“It was a matter for the ANU study team as to how they considered and incorporated any feedback provided.”
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Ford Electric Truck Earns 'RangeLiar' Nickname After Road Trip Disaster: 'Asking for My Money Back'
If you’re buying an electric vehicle that’s approaching the $100,000 mark, you’d expect it to at least tell you the truth about how far it could travel.
Unfortunately, for the popular — if apparently somewhat glitchy — Ford F-150 Lightning, that was a bit tricky for the vehicle. The problem was so bad that the staff of automotive outlet MotorTrend nicknamed its long-term test vehicle the “RangeLiar.”
It’s not that MotorTrend doesn’t like the F-150 Lightning, which has been arguably the most heavily hyped of a gaggle of high-end electric trucks that have come to market in the last few years. The outlet gave the F-150 Lightning Lariat, the high-end version of the vehicle, its award for Truck of the Year in 2022.
Of course, the magazine has made some mistakes with the award before. For instance, the ugly (and not terribly reliable) Chrysler PT Cruiser won the 2001 Car of the Year. So did the Chevrolet Vega in 1971; it was a Ford Pinto rival that somehow racked up a worse quality record, so bad the cars would often begin rusting before they left the dealer lot and the engine would, if the car could be driven long enough to not collapse in a pile of ferrous oxide, begin to melt due to a cylinder distortion problem. (Source: Um, MotorTrend. At least they owned it.)
While there were no melting parts on the F-150 Lightning and it wasn’t a rust-bucket, in a Tuesday report, MotorTrend reporter Frank Markus said the staff was “already off to a starkly different experience with our new Michigan-based Lightning,” and not in a good way.
Markus said that the pickup’s first task — which should have been an easy one — ended problematically.
“This F-150 Lightning awaited us at the airport on a late March evening following a winter vacation in the tropics, but it warmed us quickly. The next morning, battery topped off at home with the cabin preconditioned, the range meter predicted 315 miles — way more than enough for a 130-mile drive north to retrieve our pooch from Grandma’s house,” he wrote.
“We drove with traffic at the prevailing Michigan speed (10 mph over the 70-mph limit) and arrived with less than 120 miles of range remaining — nowhere near enough to get home. Grandma’s house lacks a charger, and her town of Midland boasts just four — all of them 6.5-kW Level 2 chargers.”
Level 2 chargers are the kind often installed in the homes of EV owners, not the type you would normally see at a Tesla Supercharger station, which are classified as Level 3 and charge much faster.
“We talked ourselves into a perch dinner in nearby Bay City to avail ourselves of an Electrify America station boasting four 350-kW chargers, one of which got us from 31 to 67 percent charge (199 miles) in 24 minutes at a peak charging rate of 155 kW (though we’ve observed as high as 182 kW in our SoCal truck),” Markus continued.
“Surely that’s plenty? Nope. Driving 10 over the 75-mph limit on US-10 for the 15 miles back to grandma’s consumed 49 miles of indicated range. Our attempt to creep home at 70 mph, traffic streaking by on the left, failed, forcing a stop at a 125-kW ChargePoint station curiously located inside the short-term parking lot at the Flint airport.”
Markus said the charger “haltingly dispensed 20 miles of range in 10 minutes before faulting out, forcing us to complete the 58-mile run at 65 mph, arriving on electronic ‘fumes.'”
“Had I just purchased this $85,779 truck, I’d be asking for my money back,” he wrote.
Add that to the fact that a gas-powered F-150 would have easily completed the trip on just one tank of gas, according to federal government fuel economy average numbers, and it’s yet another sign that EVs might not be ready for prime time in America.
Furthermore, this wasn’t just an outlier. Markus said that each trip logged in the F-150 Lightning “consumed more miles of estimated range than miles traveled.”
“Remember when you screwed up as a kid, deflected blame, and your parents told you, ‘It’s not what you did, it’s lying about it that disappointed us’? I’m that parent here, and in this age of machine learning and artificial intelligence, I’m disappointed that Ford is either unable or unwilling to give me the bad news about how far this truck will actually travel on a charge — especially when destinations are entered into the native navigation system,” Markus wrote.
“And yes, it was late winter, and we were running some heat. But we’re also operating 20 miles from Ford’s engineering headquarters, so this climate should be no surprise to the truck’s computers.”
Part of the problem is that, unlike competitors designed to be EV-only from the start, the Ford F-150 Lightning is just what it sounds like: the Ford F-150’s body paired with an electric drivetrain.
Thus, compared with competitors such as the Rivian R1T — which was designed from the ground up to be electric-only — the F-150 is, to use Markus’ description, like “shoving a big barn door through the air.” The drag coefficient is 0.44 for the F-150 Lighting, compared with 0.30 to the R1T.
(An EV sedan, the Lucid Air, had a drag coefficient of 0.21, for comparison.)
“Drag force varies with the square of the speed and the added horsepower required to overcome that drag varies with the cube of speed, so while the difference in drag between 70 and 80 mph is 31 percent for any vehicle, the change in actual drag force and horsepower as speeds rise is dramatically higher for the Lightning than in other long-term EVs our Michigan staff has experienced,” Markus wrote.
Now, naturally, the folks in the auto industry aren’t just making internal-combustion vehicles like “a big barn door” because their disregard for the environment is such that they spend their evenings lighting cigars with hundred-dollar bills and then tossing them into industrial vats of oil just to cause mass pollution.
Bigger vehicles are safer and roomier, both passenger- and cargo-wise. They’re also a great deal lighter, considering the batteries add a hefty weight penalty to every vehicle.
Nor is this a phenomenon that was just noted by MotorTrend.
A reviewer for the Detroit News reported last year that he only got about 170 miles of range from the vehicle, far from the advertised 280 from Ford.
Earlier this year, a YouTube influencer found that his Rivian R1T could only get about 100 miles of range while towing another vehicle in cold weather.
And another YouTuber, Tyler Hoover, sold his F-150 Lightning after finding its “winter battery performance was a disaster,” noting in a video that mileage could sometimes dip by almost 50 percent in cold weather
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Save the planet … sacrifice a child?!
Augusto Zimmermann
In my previous article, I expressed the view that modern environmentalism resembles a pantheistic religion in that it contains a vision of sin and repentance, damnation and salvation. Indeed, many activists are Gaia theorists who worship ‘Mother Earth’ as a living entity and believe that the world has a cancer, and that cancer is called the human race. Their view of the ‘environment’ is intrinsically anti-human and backed by social Darwinist doctrines linked to nature-worship, elitism, and neo-paganism. Such environmental activists often attack our Judeo-Christian tradition for emphasising ‘the supremacy of a male God’, in contrast to ‘Mother Earth’ in which one must ‘acknowledge the animistic traditions of our ancestors’.
The Christian view of the environment is remarkably different from the one advocated by the Gaia worshippers within the environmental movement, and perhaps best articulated by St Francis Assisi. He is known as the patron saint for ecologists because he had a love of nature and animals. Instead of seeing humans as diabolical creatures who are raping ‘Mother Earth’, St Francis called Earth our sister and viewed humans and nature as united creations under God the Father. This view, of course, confers infinitely more dignity to the human race because it communicates that we should care about our planet and about human life.
Naturally, a reasonable concern to avoid pollution and our natural resources in a responsible manner is a commendable ethical position. We should take care of the earth but also help humanity, at the same time. However, the ‘environmentalist’ efforts of governments to cut carbon emissions make energy less affordable and accessible, which drives up the costs of consumer products, stifles economic growth, costs jobs, and imposes especially harmful effects on the Earth’s poorest people. Arguably, allocating monetary resources to help build sewage treatment plants, enhance sanitation, and provide clean water for poor people would have a greater immediate impact on their plight than would the battle over alleged ‘global warming’.
By contrast, one of the hallmarks of the modern environmentalist movement is its apparent indifference towards human life.
To give an example, on April 25, 2021 a British Vogue article with the title, Is Having A Baby in 2021 Pure Environmental Vandalism? ponders whether having children is an ‘act of environmental vandalism’. The author asks whether it is ‘possible to live an ecologically responsible life while adding another person to our [sic] overstretched planet’.
‘There are few questions more troubling when looking the current climate emergency than that of having a baby. Whether your body throbs to reproduce, you passively believe that it is on the cards for you one day, or you actively seek remain child-free, the declining health of the planet cannot help but factor in your thinking.’
Concerns about population growth are not new. In 1968, ecologist Paul Ehrlich echoed 18th century economist Thomas Malthus when he predicted worldwide famine due to overpopulation and advocated immediate action to limit population growth. Ehrlich was an entomologist at Stanford University and his book, The Population Bomb, became one of the most influential books of the 20th century. This book not only debated population control, but some argue that it also ‘gave a jolt nascent environmental movement and fuelled an anti-population-growth crusade that led to human rights abuses around the world’. According to British writer and journalist Melanie Phillips:
‘The obsession with population control has long been central to the environmental movement even though – ever since Thomas Malthus started this hare running in the 19th century – the dire predictions of catastrophic overpopulation have proved false over and over again.’
Ehrlich’s ideas are a natural extension of Malthusian thought. Malthus argued that the world’s human population would increase faster than the food supply unless checked by restraints such as war, famine, or disease. He also thought that ‘most people should die without reproducing’.
‘Sometime in the next 15 years, the end will come,’ Ehrlich told CBS News following the publication of his book more than 50 years ago. Needless to say, such bizarre predictions never came true. In spite of all the worry, access to food and resources increased as the global population rose. And yet, this has not stopped many environmental activists from continuing to make similarly bizarre statements about the future of our planet.
The late Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, in 1988 commented: ‘In the event that I am reincarnated, I would like to return as a deadly virus, in order to contribute something to solve overpopulation.’ Clearly, he felt so strongly about this matter that he subsequently stated the following:
‘I just wonder what it would be like to be reincarnated in an animal whose species had been so reduced in numbers that it was in danger of extinction. What would be its feelings toward the human species whose population explosion had denied it somewhere to exist … I must confess that I am tempted to ask for reincarnation as a particularly deadly virus.’
Prince Philip’s neo-pagan predilections for reincarnation could be dismissed as another example of the notorious eccentricities of the British royal family. King Charles III, another committed environmental activist, is reported to talk to his plants and even to blame Syria’s horrific civil war on … climate change!
Unfortunately, the late Prince is not alone in comparing the human race to an ‘infectious disease’. Others have said that our species is a ‘super-malignancy on the face of the planet’ and ‘the AIDS of the earth’. The founder of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Foundation, once stated the following:
‘Humans are presently acting upon this body [the Earth’s ecosystem] in the same manner as an invasive virus with the result that we are eroding the ecological immune system. A virus kills its host and that is exactly what we are doing with our planet’s life support system. We are killing our host the planet Earth. I was once severely criticised for describing human beings as being the “AIDS of the Earth”. I make no apologies for that statement. Our viral like behaviour can be terminal both to the present biosphere and ourselves.’
It is the view that humans are in conflict with nature and thus there must be a winner. Granted, he expressed an extreme position. In 2023, there is a growing number of environmental activists that have succumbed to the notion that there is nothing special about human life.
Their comments include: ‘When it comes to feelings, a rat is a pig is a dog is a boy’, and ‘the millions who died in the Nazi holocaust were equivalent to broiler chickens dying in slaughterhouses’. Yet while animals deserve our protection, people apparently do not. ‘I don’t believe that human beings have the right to life … This ‘right to human life’ I believe is another perversion.’
It is hard to imagine anything more terrifying than living in a culture where human life is made to appear so entirely relative to lesser values.
We have seen discussions arise where a new human life is seen as a threat to the environment, where some candidly contend that new babies represent an undesirable source of greenhouse emissions and consumer of natural resources. This type of thinking is leading conversations about the Western democracies adopting population control measures similar to the communist China one-child policy.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/06/save-the-planet-sacrifice-a-child/
******************************************************Britain backtracks on coal exit, blaming Putin for Net Zero U-turn
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has squeezed gas supplies to Europe, forcing countries including the UK to look to coal as a potential back-up option for generating electricity in the event of shortages.
The engineering crews and cranes have already arrived at the Drax power station in Yorkshire to dismantle two of the last remaining coal plants in the country.
Over the past decade, four of the facility’s six coal-fired units have been converted to run on wood chips with only two left that can burn coal.
Yet the end of coal combustion in Selby may now be delayed for the second year in a row, as the National Grid seeks to ensure that Britain’s lights stay on this winter.
On Thursday the Grid confirmed it is in talks with Drax about keeping the coal units going until April 2024, to provide an extra source of backup power for the country once again.
It is the latest example of how Vladimir Putin’s energy war continues to frustrate the UK’s attempts to ditch “King Coal”.
The “dirty” fuel was lambasted by Boris Johnson just two years ago at the Cop26 climate conference, with the Government vowing to phase it out completely by the end of 2024.
The promise has proved easier said than done, with the reality of the war in Ukraine colliding with best intentions.
In the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Moscow has squeezed gas supplies to Europe, forcing countries including the UK to look to coal as a potential back-up option for generating electricity in the event of shortages.
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18 June, 2023
A nasty two tenths of a degree
The usual trivia from Warmists
A steady and remarkable rise in average global ocean temperatures this year is now outpacing anything seen in four decades of satellite observations, causing many scientists to suddenly blare alarm over the risks and realities of climate change. But even those typically aligned on climate science can’t agree on what, exactly, triggered such rapid warming and how alarmed they should be.
They say there is so far no evidence that the planet has passed some climatic tipping point — though it is also too soon to rule that out.
“It’s a possibility, however small,” said Tianle Yuan, a senior research scientist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He explained that the record warmth could instead merely reflect a temporary fluctuation on top of the long-term warming trend spurred by human-caused climate change.
Regardless of what is behind the spike in ocean temperatures, scientists are on edge about it. On Twitter, viral posts sounding alarm bells have triggered heated debates about the potential causes and whether the rise is reason to panic.
Some climate researchers suspect that a drastic reduction in air pollution from ships has allowed more sunlight to radiate into oceans, a conclusion others vigorously criticize. Meteorologists also say a weakening of Atlantic winds may be encouraging warming; normally these winds help cool waters and carry sun-blocking plumes of Saharan dust.
Scientists nonetheless agree on this: Conditions are ever ripening for extreme heat waves, droughts, floods and storms, all of which have proven links to ocean warming.
Whether air pollution and windblown sand have anything to do with the oceans’ rapid warming, it is occurring after years of gradual and accelerating heating, and just at the onset of the El Niño pattern, which is known to supercharge global warming and extreme weather.
That means more record-breaking conditions and events are to be expected, said Michael Mann, a climatologist at the University of Pennsylvania. That inevitability “underscores reasons for concern and the urgency of climate action,” he said.
Unprecedented warmth developed quickly
The trend has developed over just the past few months, with its duration and intensity elevating scientists’ concern in recent days.
The first signs of unusual ocean warming appeared in March, raising eyebrows among climate scientists. At the time, forecasts suggested El Niño might soon develop, bringing its own warming influence, but it wasn’t until last week that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration declared that the ocean-atmosphere pattern had actually come to fruition.
By that time, temperatures averaged across Earth’s oceans, excluding polar regions, had surged two-tenths of a degree Celsius above observations at the same point last year — and nearly a full degree above the average from 1982 to 2011.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2023/06/14/record-warm-ocean-temperatures/
**************************************************Beware doctors who prioritize ‘sustainability’ over patient welfare
A recent article in Politico’s “Climatology” section is intensely disturbing, especially when taken to its logical conclusions. While the title on its own, “Can Hospitals Turn into Climate Change Fighting Machines?” might not be alarming at first glance, the content has sinister undertones that seem to be more common from those journalists most concerned with climate change.
It may be a good idea, as the article explains, for hospitals in the American Southwest to have more water-conserving landscaping, or patch up or replace nitrous oxide pipelines. However, I don’t want hospital staff who are devoted to “sustainability” foremost, and patient care second, treating me.
A San Diego hospital “medical director of sustainability” brags about stopping the use of one anesthetic gas, desflurane, because when it escapes into the atmosphere, it stays there for “a decade or more.”
Indeed, the “sustainability” crowd in medicine seems extremely concerned with our use of anesthetic gasses, the American Society of Anesthesiologists say that they are responsible for “0.01-0.10% of the total global carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) emissions contributing to global warming.”
That’s right – 1/100 to 1/10 of one percent of carbon dioxide “equivalent” emissions.
The document I’m citing recommends that hospital staff mitigate this alleged danger, primarily by using less anesthesia, or opting for the use of less effective topical or more dangerous intravenous methods because “they have less of a negative environmental impact.”
A quick Google search of the phrase “reduce anesthesia for climate change” will find you dozens of articles touting the environmental virtues of reducing the flow of anesthesia to patients.
For you patients out there let me remind you, doctors don’t use anesthesia for fun, they do it to reduce pain during medical procedures. These misanthropic M.D.s are advocating nothing more nor less than allowing people to suffer in the name of sustainability. It seems the Hippocratic Oath of “do no harm” is being misapplied, from people, who can feel pain, to the Earth, which is not a living being and thus can’t be harmed by anesthesia use.
Some western doctors, hospitals, and medical schools are also pushing to “decarbonize” the hospital system, because as the Politico writer says:
The health sector is responsible for 8.5 percent of U.S. emissions of greenhouse gases including carbon dioxide, methane and ozone – an outsized impact compared to the rest of the world. (Globally, health care systems contribute roughly 4.6 percent of total greenhouse gas emissions.) Without huge new efforts, the U.S. will have trouble reaching its ambitious emissions reduction goals.
If these stories sound warm and fuzzy because it’s allegedly responsible, and you don’t get a cold chill, consider this: why does the health sector in the United States make up a larger percentage of our overall emissions, compared to the world as a whole?
It’s because we have the best health care services in the world (regardless of what the socialists say); we dominate in biomedical research, we have the highest cancer survival rate in the world. Currently, if extreme weather hits a city, the hospitals are able to keep working thanks to backup diesel generators. The United States and the western world at large are able to leverage energy use into high quality medical care, which translates to high survival rates of disease and injury, while applying proper care for child birth and other procedures 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Fossil fuels have made that possible. Unless a patient has no other choice, he or she does not want to wind up at a hospital or critical care center that relies solely on wind or solar power for its electric power supply. After all, you want top notch care when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining.
What does the “sustainable” “net zero” option look like?
For that answer, you can look at the countries that have the least access to electricity, and thus have the lowest emissions, like Liberia, which use mostly wood and dung for energy. There are few, if any, modern neonatal intensive care units in those countries.
How far do the Malthusians in our medical system want to go to reach sustainability?
No amount of green roofs, micromanaging time spent washing hands, composting, or forcing vegan food down patients’ throats are going to stop the earth from its very modest warming trend. Nothing will ever stop bad weather from happening, much less giving up reliable energy.
I’m sure that the old bottle of whiskey and a leather strap to bite down on is probably sustainable, except I guess that the leather would have to be vegan, but not made with petroleum byproducts, somehow.
And I suppose that whiskey, made from corn or rye, might be harder to come by because large-scale agriculture isn’t what they call sustainable.
We have protocols in place to limit medical tests on human subjects without their consent. Hospitals should be devoted to healing patients, not experimenting in loony sustainability projects on captive subjects.
https://www.thecentersquare.com/opinion/article_8c46b53c-0b90-11ee-960f-cb72e63a4fa4.html ?
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Wildfires aren’t getting worse because of climate change
More than 100 wildfires are sweeping their way across the Canadian provinces of Quebec and Ontario, sending waves of smoke into major cities in the northeastern United States, including New York and Philadelphia.
Predictably, the Biden administration and his alarmist allies in Congress are wasting no time in using the wildfires to call attention to climate change and for sweeping changes to the U.S. energy system.
For example, on June 7, Biden tweeted, "We’ve deployed more than 600 U.S. firefighters, support personnel and equipment to support Canada as they respond to record wildfires – events that are intensifying because of the climate crisis."
Also on June 7, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., tweeted, "Extreme weather. Drought. Massive wildfires that destroy our air quality. Evidence of a climate crisis is all around us and Northeasterners can look no further than out their own windows to find it."
However, despite countless statements from liberals and climate activists over the past two decades about the dangers of wildfires and extreme weather events caused by climate change, the available evidence overwhelmingly shows that no such connection exists. Wildfires are not becoming more frequent or burning more acreage. In fact, just the opposite is true.
The U.S. National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC), which has been tracking wildfires for decades, reports that the number of fires in 2022 was 68,988, and the amount of acreage burned was 7.57 million acres.
Democrats seize on wildfires to push green agendaVideo
That might sound like a lot of fires, but the NIFC data show that these figures are well within the historical norm. In 2017, for example, 71,499 fires were reported and more than 10 million acres were burned. One decade earlier, in 2007, there were 85,705 fires that burned 9.32 million acres.
How, then, do climate alarmists and Democratic politicians so often get away with asserting that wildfires are worsening? It’s all due to cherry-picked data.
In 2021, Biden’s first year as president, the NIFC, a group operated by several different federal agencies, altered its available wildfire data, eliminating data collected prior to 1983 from its website.
Since 1983, the average annual number of wildfires and acres burned has increased, albeit relatively modestly, giving some the impression that wildfires are becoming a bigger problem than ever before. But if you look at the NIFC data collected prior to 1983, you see that there is nothing disturbing about the current trend.
Prior to 2021, the NIFC provided wildfire data going back to 1926, and from 1926 to the early 1950s, the number of acres burned per year was significantly higher than what we’re seeing today. In many years, it was three or even four times larger.
Even if wildfires were worsening, though, it wouldn’t necessarily indicate that climate change is the cause. Many different factors can contribute to the frequency and severity of wildfires. America’s growing population, especially in Western states, is an important consideration. Even more vital is forest management practices.
The Center for Biological Diversity, a left-leaning environmental group, acknowledges that, "The vast majority of western dry forests are at risk of large, high-intensity fire because of the effects of poor forest management over the past century. The primary factors that lead to current forest conditions include logging large trees, fire suppression and livestock grazing. Since the beginning of the 20th century, all three of these factors have been present in western forests, and they continue to play a role today."
And who, you might be wondering, is the biggest manager of U.S. forests? The very same federal government that is now blaming the problem of wildfires on climate change. Thirty-one percent of all forest land in America is owned by federal agencies, about 238 million acres. And most of those forests are located west of the Mississippi River, where climates tend to be more arid and susceptible to wildfires.
There is no evidence that the number or severity of wildfires like those currently raging in Canada are increasing because of climate change. It’s pure propaganda designed to trick Americans into supporting additional Green New Deal-like policies and to deflect blame from the federal government, which is responsible for managing huge swaths of U.S. forests.
Policymakers should be debating ways to improve forest management, not spending their time spewing fairytales about global warming. Americans deserve better.
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Australia: Coal is a four-letter word
Coal is a four-letter word for Labor/Green governments in Australia where it can’t be used in polite company. Thank goodness it can still be exported and its royalties used to fill the Treasury coffers of our governments.
Queensland is the latest state to benefit from soaring global demand and sky-high prices for our high-quality thermal and metallurgical coal. The coal industry is the goose that is laying the golden egg but Queensland Treasurer Cameron Dick is doing his best to strangle the poor fowl, just like his fellow Queenslander Jim Chalmers running the federal Treasury.
Last year Mr Dick imposed a new coal royalty rate regime which is the highest in the world. Yes, it yielded a bumper return this year, but as surely as night follows day, it will deter new investment. As Mrs Gina Rinehart observed in The Speccie last month, despite very high commodity prices, the investment in mining is much less than in the last mining boom a decade ago. High royalties, high taxes, sovereign risk, and red and green tape as far as the eye can see explain why companies are far more hesitant to invest in Australia these days.
Mr Dick is happy to crow about delivering the largest surplus of any Australian state government in the history of this country. Revenue from coal royalties more than doubled, soaring from $7.2 billion last year to $15.3 billion this -financial year.
Like Mr Chalmers, Mr Dick will use some of that revenue to cut the cost of electricity bills with government rebates. This is a testimony to the cloud-cuckoo land in which they live. Electricity prices wouldn’t be soaring if Australia wasn’t engaged in a reckless race to shut down its coal-fired power stations as soon as possible.
Federal Minister for Energy and Climate Change Chris Bowen never tires of telling anyone who will listen that wind and solar provide the cheapest energy. We should have guessed that Mr Bowen puts climate ahead of energy. He needs to take a trip to Denmark where around 50 per cent of electricity is supplied by wind and solar power and ponder why Denmark has some of the most expensive electricity in the EU. Here’s a hint. Wind and solar energy isn’t cheap once you include the cost of the subsidy provided by the sale of renewable energy certificates, and the costs of backing up intermittent power with dispatchable power to balance the grid when intermittent energy vanishes. And it isn’t cheap when you include the cost of transmissions lines.
It’s a sad day when Chinese communist dictator for life, Xi Jinping talks more sense on energy than Australian ministers. In 2020, Xi Jinping vowed to make China carbon-neutral by 2060, a decade later than Australia’s quixotic commitment. Then in 2021, China suffered huge power outages because its central government, like Australia’s, capped power prices. When costs rose power plants did the logical thing and cut supply rather than operate at a loss.
But unlike in Australia, the Chinese government did a radical reality check. China relies on coal for more than half of its energy. Heeding a report from the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air which advised that technologies for storing clean energy are simply not yet mature enough to be deployed at the scale necessary to expand the use of renewable energy, Xi said that coal would remain a mainstay of China’s energy mix that would be hard to change in the short term.
So while Australia hurries to close down its coal-fired power stations, local governments in China approved more new coal-fired power stations in the first three months of 2023 than in the whole of 2021, with more than 20 gigawatts of new plants approved.
To put that in context, Eraring, the largest coal-fired power plant in Australia, provides less than 3 gigawatts of power and authorities are rushing to shut it down in 2025, seven years earlier than planned.
Whatever the imagined benefit might be to the environment, it will be drowned in the increased emissions in China. But the scarcity of baseload power in Australia will drive up prices and provide a profit bonanza for energy generators, many of whom are foreign-owned. Australian power bills will go up, imposing pain on consumers and driving businesses broke or offshore. What we no longer produce we will have to import from countries like China and India. It makes no sense but it seems our governments are determined that we learn this lesson the hard way.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/06/coal-is-a-four-letter-word/
***************************************16 June, 2023
‘Green’ policies spark wildfires -- and a climate emergency
The Canadian fires “spilling smoke all the way down the East Coast highlight how backward policies delay or even prevent forest restoration work that would cut wildfire risk,” points out Tate Watkins at Reason. “Pollution standards and excessive red tape” plus “potential litigation from environmental groups” discourage proven ways to prevent forest fires, such as “controlled burning and mechanical thinning” that “make forests resilient by removing fuel in methodical, deliberate ways before it goes up in smoke in much more intense wildfires.” So now “fire-prone areas can be left at risk for years.” And smoke from wildfires is exempt from EPA emissions standards, but not smoke from controlled burns. Yet “the EPA is considering tightening its restrictions — despite warnings it “would further stifle the controlled burning needed to slash wildfire risk.”
Eye on DC: Just Say No to Climate ‘Emergency’
“Progressive lawmakers are once again calling on President Joe Biden to declare a climate emergency,” notes Merrill Matthews at The Hill, grabbing “sweeping new executive powers” to (for example) “block crude oil exports.” Yet this “isn’t really about Canada’s wildfires,” as claimed, but bypassing “the Republican House of Representatives and perhaps a few reluctant Democratic senators” on climate. It’s a pattern “we’ve seen on several occasions,” like Biden using “the national health emergency over COVID-19” to justify loan and rent moratoria. Yet “these same progressives” shout “that democracy is on the verge of collapse.” No: the real threat to democracy is “the effort to create a much more powerful executive who can ignore the duly elected representatives of the people.”
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More om Canada's Fires
If you are living in eastern Canada or the northeast of the United States, you are experiencing quite smoky/hazy skies, the result of fires in Canada.
The fires have spread from northern Alberta eastward into other provinces, including Quebec, generating alarming press coverage. A headline from the Washington Post claimed "‘Unprecedented’ Canadian fires intensified by record heat, climate change."
Fires in the northern latitudes of Canada are quite different from fires in other parts of the world, including the western United States. The lower latitude fires are often the result of grass and brush that grows lushly in the spring and early summer and then dry in the heat and aridity of late summer and early fall.
Northern fires peak in the spring. For example, May is the peak month in Alberta. That is because in the high latitudes, after long, cold winters, there is plenty of dead fuel from the previous year that dries out in the several weeks between the melting of winter snow and the beginning of spring rains and new growth.
According to Canada’s Department of Natural Resources, fires have been occurring for thousands of years in the boreal forests of eastern Canada - not exactly unprecedented. In addition, they call fire a primary change agent that is as crucial to forest renewal as the sun and rain -perhaps not a calamity either.
It appears that 2023 is on pace to be a year with unusually high numbers of fires. Yet the previous year was one of historically low numbers. The Canadian National Fire Database (2023) provides facts to dispute the idea of climate change-driven increases in fires in Canadian fires. According the CNFD, there has been a significant and continuing decline in the number of fires and no discernible trend in the area burned.
https://myemail.constantcontact.com/Canada-s-Fires.html?soid=1101509381788&aid=HhQf2uVErkM
*************************************************Bank of England's credibility and UK economy at risk from Net Zero radicalism
Net Zero Watch has called on MPs to reject Megan Greene from joining the Bank of England’s rate-setting Monetary Policy Committee and warned that her green activism risks undermining the credibility of the Bank's neutrality in setting interest rates.
According to media reports, Ms Greene has called for the bank to create “preferential” interest rates to help speed up the push for Net Zero, despite acknowledging that such a move could threaten its independence.
In an article published before her nomination, Megan Greene warned that central banks needed to “go further” to help combat climate change and to “give banks preferential (negative) rates if they direct the funds toward green investments”.
Any private bank or investment company that deliberately conspired to put capital in jeopardy would be in breach of its fiduciary duties. If it goes down that route the Bank of England would be in breach of that very duty.
Lord Frost, the former Cabinet minister told the Sunday Telegraph that the UK would be “deranged” to adopt Ms Greene’s idea, adding: “It is deeply troubling that a prospective member of the Monetary Policy Committee should have advocated such a collectivist and socialist approach.”
In 2021, Rishi Sunak gave the Bank a new mandate to fight climate change and help to achieve the Govt’s Net Zero policy, a move that has since been widely criticised for distracting it from and failing in its key role of combating inflation.
Former Chancellor George Osborne and his old sparring partner, Ed Balls, Labour's former Shadow Chancellor, have both called for the mandate to be cancelled so that the Bank can focus on its core mission.
The House of Commons Treasury Committee will hold a hearing this morning during which MPs will assess whether Megan Greene has the required personal independence and appropriate professional competence for the role.
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Poland to take 2035 fossil fuel car ban to top EU court, minister says
Photo of cars driving with Polish flags on National Independence Day in Warsaw.
Poland will appeal against European Union rules to end the sale of fossil fuel cars across the bloc from 2035 to the top EU court within days, the country's climate minister Anna Moskwa said on Monday.
A package of EU regulations approved earlier this year aims at launching a new carbon market to rein in emissions from buildings and transport, cutting carbon emissions from passenger cars and vans to zero from 2035.
Poland has been the only country consistently opposing the proposal and voted against the rules, arguing they lacked a proper analysis of market and social consequences of the ban.
"We don't agree with this and other documents from the Fit for 55 package and we're bringing this to the European Court of Justice. I hope other countries will join," Moskwa told Radio Zet on Monday.
"We will file the motion in the coming days."
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15 June, 2023
The monolith of climate smear-mongering
Ben Pile
Established thinking has it that ‘oil money’ explains the existence of climate scepticism. According to this view, ‘Big Oil’ funds all manner of outfits and individuals, such as yours truly, to shed doubt on otherwise established ‘consensus science', to protect their profits. This in turn explains the failure of politicians, so far, to save the planet with climate policies.
Take, for example, these delightful messages left under our recent film, Why there is no climate crisis (and why people believe that there is):
These are angry and ignorant whinges that I hear daily. Many of a green bent seem utterly confused by the existence of opinions that run counter to their convictions about the world — articles of faith — even though the facts I, and many others offer are easily checked.
But if these furious commenters are right that the evidence of a climate crisis happening is ‘overwhelming’, it would surely be easier and more effective to counter the arguments made against it with the evidence than to posit such a conspiracy theory that manifestly lacks it. Better it seems, on the green view, to make an accusation of irredeemable bad faith — being ‘funded’ by ‘oil money’ — that can not be disproven, pour encourager les autres.
It is as if fact is subordinate to financial interests — the truth of a claim can be established by understanding who it most benefits, or perhaps by the virtue of the person who makes the claim. Is this green metaphysics?
After all, how could anyone possibly disagree with a planet-saving climate warrior in good faith? And so climate change scepticism must be bad faith. And so the idea of an entire industry of climate denial servicing the interests of big oil companies has become the most respectable conspiracy theory at all levels of society — the online troll is as comfortable reproducing the the smear as the chair of the internationally-renowned scientific organisation.
But as I shall demonstrate, there remains very little evidence of this conspiracy in fact. This is a very, very long article. It starts with what I believe is a simpler explanation of why greens fail to persuade people intellectually. Then it examines the evidence pertaining to the idea that oil interests fund misinformation. Then it attempts an objective analysis of competing interests in the climate debate. And then it draws some conclusions about the nature of climate politics from what can be established as facts.
Changing minds through reason or harassment?
A major part of the ‘Big Oil’ conspiracy theory is that climate sceptics have carefully-crafted ‘tools’ and ‘playbooks’ by which to brainwash people into receiving their ‘messages’, many developed from the tobacco wars. But how plausible is this notion? It is useful, I believe, to take it back to first principles, and to attempt to understand how and why people either make up their mind or even change it in debates that require them to take a position. The idea that people are brainwashed or easily ‘misled’ is, I believe, deeply condescending and wholly inaccurate.
I am either a convert (to climate scepticism) or an apostate (from environmentalism), depending on your perspective on the climate wars. And I was as much moved to this position by another convert-apostate as by his angry inquisitor. In the early 2000s, Bjorn Lomborg gave a book reading at the Oxford branch of Borders bookshop, and was accosted by environmental activist, Mark Lynas, then styled as ‘Pie Man’, with a custard pie. ‘That’s for everything you say about the environment which is complete bullshit’, said Lynas to Lomborg.
This had a profound impact on my thinking. I was at the time (as I have explained elsewhere) quite young, and of a particularly green persuasion myself, although doubts were setting in.
What answer to a book is a custard pie?
Lomborg had set out to confront the work of the late Julian Simon — an economist who had argued, among other things, that the world was in a much better state than environmentalists, especially neomalthusians, had claimed, contradicting the green narrative of worsening ecological problems. But as Lomborg and his students gathered the data for their analyses, they began to agree with Simon. The result was Lomborg’s The Skeptical Environmentalist.
Having learned of the climate activist having nothing to say to the statistician’s book (other than a custard pie) I jumped on my bike to go and buy it, from the very scene of the assault. And just as Lomborg had changed his mind, I found his work compelling enough for me to begin to change mine.
Moreover, I found Lynas’s actions, which was even by then a dominant characteristic of the green movement, a demonstration of its, as well as his own, intellectual vacuity. ‘Direct action’, they called it. I think it was just a dick move. And nobody can claim that the character of the environmental movement has improved in the two decades since. There is no evidence of environmentalism nurturing in its adherents any intellectual depth or commitment to reason, much less debate and democracy. And in that time, an entire generation of new obstructive activists has been raised from birth on its bleak narcissistic nihilism.
So rather than being ‘Big Oil’, might the real obstacle to environmentalism be the fact that so many environmentalists are simply utter pricks, and proud of it? Might it be the case that environmentalism, in its broadest sense, is not as much premised on scientific consensus as it is an infantile rejection of reason, debate and democracy? I can only speak for myself. And I can only claim that I am yet to receive even as much as a single penny from ‘Big Oil’. But it seems to me very obvious that the fact of the dominance of the conspiracy theory, and its lack of evidence, among other things, mark the green movement as the one most obviously characterised by bad faith. It is perhaps entirely and exclusive driven by bad faith — the most monstrous act of bad faith in history.
https://benpile.substack.com/p/the-monolith-of-climate-smear-mongering
************************************************I’ve been radicalised by Just Stop Oil
Toby Young
Last month I went to Lord Frost’s superb lecture for the Global Warming Policy Foundation about the harm net zero will do to the British economy. He pointed out that the government is completely unrealistic about the economic cost of the policy, which former energy minister Chris Skidmore claimed last year could boost GDP by up to 2 per cent, thanks in part to cheaper household energy bills. (As Frost said: ‘Good luck with that.’) This is even more Pollyannaish than Labour’s energy review in 2003, which at least acknowledged that achieving a 60 per cent reduction in carbon emissions by 2050 would cost 2 per cent of GDP. When ministers are pressed on how the economy will cope with problems such as the intermittency of wind and solar power and the mind-boggling expense of creating adequate battery storage, they are reduced to muttering that ‘something will turn up’.
The fact that our political masters have embarked on such a ruinous course would have seen them turfed out of office in decades gone by, Frost said. But the problem today is that the intellectual climate is highly collectivist. Vast swaths of the electorate believe the purpose of policy-making is to tame markets, not liberate them, and are convinced that the 2008 crash was caused by the free enterprise system rather than bad regulation and poor central bank decision–making. In the mainstream media, anyone expressing scepticism about the impact of anthropogenic global warming is viewed with intense suspicion.
During the Q&A that followed the lecture, I asked Lord Frost if we should take a leaf out of our opponents’ book and set up a militant anti-green-activist group. The eco-protestors say their reason for disrupting major sporting events and holding up traffic is to stop people ignoring the ‘climate emergency’, a rationale I’ve always found baffling, since the professional-managerial class talk about nothing else and the public is bombarded with environmentalist propaganda 24/7.
But net-zero sceptics like me genuinely are a beleaguered minority, unable to get a hearing in the public square. In fact, we are exactly who the eco-protestors imagine themselves to be – concerned citizens desperately trying to draw attention to an impending disaster, but dismissed as ‘alarmists’ by policy-makers. So while the antisocial behaviour of Extinction Rebellion and Insulate Britain makes little sense – they’re like pro-communist protestors in Soviet Russia – similar antics by climate contrarians could make an impact. If I unfurl a giant banner outside the Green party’s Brighton headquarters saying ‘Just Stop Snake Oil’, people might sit up and take notice. At the very least, it would draw attention to the fact that there is another side to this debate.
Not surprisingly, Lord Frost wasn’t convinced. It was bad enough having to contend with the eco-loons wreaking havoc on our roads and bridges, he said, without the provisional wing of the Global Warming Policy Foundation adding to the chaos. In any event, he didn’t think that trying to disrupt the Derby did the other side’s cause much good. Wouldn’t it be better to let them continue to lose friends and alienate people? By all means ridicule them, he said. But for God’s sake don’t imitate them.
I’m not so sure. Judging from the reluctance of juries to convict eco-protestors, the public seems pretty sympathetic. Yes, commuters may be unimpressed by someone lying in the road when they’re late for work, but many admire the activists’ courage and commitment. According to an Omnisis poll published last year, two-thirds of people support taking non-violent direct action to protect Britain’s environment and 75 per cent are in favour of installing solar panels on farmland. More recently, Ipsos found that 84 per cent of Britons are concerned about climate change and more than half think we should aim to achieve net zero sooner than 2050. It looks to me as if the tactics of the pink-haired militants are succeeding.
So who’s with me? We could start by daubing red paint on the Belgravia homes of the billionaire backers of these ‘anti-capitalists’ protestors. Then rush the stage at Coldplay’s next concert – their tour is called ‘Sustainability: Music of the Spheres’ – and rip open some packets of green powder. And to conclude our first campaign, next time there’s some international green boondoggle in London I will lead a group of sceptics on to the main runway at Farnborough so we can lie down and prevent all the leading advocates of net zero landing in their private jets. ‘How dare you?’ Greta Thunberg will ask. To which I’ll reply: ‘Who dares wins.’
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/06/just-stop-snake-oil/
******************************************Illusion in Progress - 2023 UN Climate Change Conference
Even the greatest magicians usually limit themselves to performing one illusion at a time. In a show starting on November 30th and running for two weeks, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) will create a double illusion and have the entire world as its audience. In hosting the annual Conference of the Parties (COP) 28 of the United Nations Climate Change Conference, the UAE will present itself as a champion for green energy and a modern society.
Like all magic shows, there will be a lot of smoke and mirrors, and a façade to direct attention away from reality. For COP28, hidden from public view will be UAE’s determination to remain a major exporter of oil and its record of human rights violations.
Then come the side shows. The swarm of 600 fossil-fuel lobbyists that blanketed last year’s COP27 in Egypt is expected to be dwarfed in volume by this year’s descent onto Dubai. Outside the conference rooms and meetings halls will be displays and presentation areas that can be best described as an upscale information bazaar. Their displays will be professionally designed to conceal the contradictions of the corporations and countries they represent.
UAE is off to a bad start in trying to present itself as part of the solution to climate change. As host country, it picked UAE’s Minister of Industry and Technology Dr. Sultan al Jaber as COP28’s president. Here begins the first façade. Dr. al Jaber is also the head of the state-owned Abu Dhabi National Oil Company. Appointing the head of one of the world’s major exporters of oil as the COP28 president reduces the credibility of the event and allows al Jaber to be the ringmaster at the circus.
This is especially true considering that al Jaber's $26 billion international deals for oil production involve Italy’s ENI and America’s Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and Company, which in turn includes a $4 billion pipeline investment. Bottom line is al Jaber’s mission from the UAE will be to control the narrative at COP 28.
Recognizing the problem with al Jaber hosting the conference, 110 European Parliamentarians and members of the US Congress have sent a joint letter to President Joe Biden expressing concerns with this conflict of interest. More specifically, the elected representatives have asked President Biden to “…engage in diplomatic efforts to secure the withdrawal of the president-designate of COP 28.”
Meanwhile, twenty-seven Democrat members of US Congress have formally engaged Presidential Special Envoy John Kerry to urge UAE to appoint someone other than al Jaber to head the conference. Considering his record as Secretary of State in dealing with Iran’s Khamenei, Iraq’s Maliki, and Egypt’s Morsi while all three were leading genocide campaigns against their own people, Kerry is not going to do anything. Just the opposite of the Congressional wishes, Kerry has already blessed al Jaber’s appointment.
Then comes the human rights façade. Political opposition parties are outlawed in the UAE. Media sources are under an iron grip. Online and on-street digital surveillance by the UAE is continual. Women’s rights are all but non-existent. Anyone within the country’s borders expressing dissent is subject to immediate arrest, imprisonment, conviction, and the possibility of a trial (in that order).
Even those who have completed their sentences are subject to remaining in confinement without visits from or communication with their families. Ninety-four human rights advocates, intellectuals, and lawyers convicted and sentenced in 2013 remain in prison. Known as the UAE 94, many of their sentences expired in 2019.
As documented by law, crimes in the UAE include opposing the system of government, association with opposition groups, damaging national unity, and undermining interests of the state. UAE justification for keeping prisoners in custody includes "rehabilitation needs" and "counter-terrorism measures." One of the most blatant examples of UAE injustice is the case of Ahmed Mansoor, a recipient of The Martin Ennals Award for Human Rights Defenders. In 2017 he was sentenced to ten years in prison for “insulting the prestige" of the UAE.
As bad as citizens of UAE have it, migrant workers and foreign nationals within the borders have it worse. They can be arrested and imprisoned for all the same reasons. They are also subjected to arbitrary detention and deportation without cause. Their efforts from years of building a future and living in a secure environment can disappear in a minute.
UAE has brilliantly hijacked the annual UN Climate Conference by presenting itself a concerned nation, appointed the head of its state-owned oil company to preside over the conference and control the narrative, received blessing of that appointment from a former US Secretary of State and Presidential candidate, and is doing it in a country that blatantly violates human rights and the rules of law. It is among the most oppressive countries in the world.
In a two-week run, starting late this fall, the main event and all its side shows will create the illusion of a climate conference in a progressive country. When all the smoke, mirrors, and façades go away, the world might come to realize nothing was real and no good was achieved.
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Net Zero Watch welcomes British Government U-turn on Net Zero heating levy
Net Zero Watch has welcomed the Government’s apparent U-turn on plans for a new levy on household bills.
The levy, introduced as part of the drive to “Net Zero”, was designed to fund the development of hydrogen as an alternative to gas heating. However, it would have hit households with a bill estimated at £120 per year.
According to press reports, the Energy Secretary has now admitted hydrogen will never replace gas boilers, and it appears that the levy will now be dropped.
For months, Net Zero Watch has been informing ministers and MPs about the radical shift in public opinion in much of Europe in response to the cost of energy and cost of living crises.
Governments around Europe are beginning to water down and abandon Net Zero policies. There can be little doubt that the Net Zero U-turns by both Labour and the Conservatives are a clear indication that the cost of living and the costs of Net Zero crisis will become one of the key election issues.
Craig Mackinlay MP, chairman of the parliamentary Net Zero Scrutiny Group, said:
"The cancellation of the proposed £118 Hydrogen Tax on household energy bills is hugely welcome and I hope is the start of a common sense journey for the government on energy policy. When the laudable ambition of Net Zero hits the reality of cost and significant changes to the way we live, the public are understandably turned off as they look at low uptake of the ‘plan’ globally and their ongoing growth on the back of cheap traditional energy.
History is littered with failed and costly government projects. I forecast that many of the wasteful Net Zero plans based on unreliable, fringe technologies will be historically judged in the same way.”
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13 June, 2023
No Ambrose, curtailed power is not free
Curtailed power is power that is produced but not needed
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, writing in the Telegraph, has been looking at what the future grid might do to stay afloat when the wind isn’t blowing. This is certainly an important question, and one that you might have hoped would no longer be the subject of speculation now that we are twenty years into the renewables ‘revolution’. Unfortunately, the Green lobby has conned the country into ploughing on before finding the answers, but I suppose we should be relieved that the issues are finally getting an airing.
AEP’s first suggestion is to use Allam-cycle gas turbines, and this is only a partially daft idea. Allam cycle looks a promising technology, and is said to be able to deliver power for about the same cost as unabated CCGTs, although presumably the storage bit is extra. You can believe the hype or not, as you prefer. Either way, it looks likely it is going to be lower cost than renewables, and without causing the same problems for the system as a whole. That being the case, it’s hard to see why you wouldn’t just dump all the windfarms and use Allam cycle on its own.
AEP’s other suggestion is, of course, hydrogen, and here he betrays the lack of economic understanding that is so prevalent in the media. Here’s what he says:
"The second default option is to use free electricity from excess renewable power that would otherwise have to be curtailed – at night, at weekends, etc – to produce green hydrogen via electrolysis."
If I had a penny for every time some wild-eyed hack in Fleet Street punted the idea of “free” curtailed electricity I would long since have retired to the sun. Let me explain why this is so wrong.
Imagine a windfarm (let’s call her “Anna”), which each year produces 2 million megawatt hours of electricity per year at a cost of £100 each. That’s a total cost of £200 million, representing part of Anna’s build cost and all of her operating costs for the year. Note the word “cost”: it’s what has been paid out to produce the energy, as distinct from the “price”, which is what someone is willing to hand over to get their hands on it.
Then imagine that the following year another windfarm (“Betty”) comes on stream in the vicinity, and that at times throughout the year, there is not enough transmission capacity to get both windfarms’ output to market. Let’s say 10% of Anna’s output has to be curtailed. Her unit cost therefore goes up (to £200m/180m = £111/MWh).
In year 3, someone sees an opportunity and builds a hydrogen plant (“Horace”) next door to Anna. They will take the curtailed power off her hands for nothing (in reality, for a low price, but let’s not quibble). Anna’s output is therefore back up to 2 million MWh, and her unit costs back down to £100. But the 200,000 MWh of electricity that pass from Anna to Horace have still cost £100 each to make! The price may be low, but the cost is still high! Selling this power for nothing to Horace therefore creates a big loss in Anna’s books, which cancels out the “profit” that Horace has effectively made by getting hold of electricity worth £100 for free.
Another way to think about the transaction is to consider the picture if Anna’s owners had built their own hydrogen plant and administered it as part of the same operating company as the windfarm. Feeding power from the windfarm to the hydrogen plant would then just be a change of location. No profit, illusory or otherwise, would be seen. In AEP’s model of the world, creating the hydrogen plant as a separate entity magically creates “free” electricity. It’s daft!
So in system terms, the “free electricity” is an illusion. It’s only free to the hydrogen plant because a loss has been sustained elsewhere.
Fortunately for Anna, things are pretty comfortable whatever happens. Firstly, if she is curtailed, she gets a constraint payment from the grid for her trouble, and can then get that topped up to her CfD strike price. Both these sums are ultimate funded by consumers. And if she can unconstrain herself, by building a direct wire between her and Horace (in other words, if she doesn’t have to deliver power via the transmission grid), she can get the constraint payment, the strike price top up and whatever Horace is willing to pay her for the power. Quids in!
This is the antithesis of “free”.
https://www.netzerowatch.com/no-ambrose-curtailed-power-is-not-free/
**********************************************Germany cools on gas boiler ban as Net Zero begins to fall apart
German politicians are increasingly having second thoughts about government policies to phase out gas boilers starting next year as the pro-business FDP united with opposition groups—the CDU and the AfD—to lobby against the new measures.
German lawmakers rushed to pass anti-boiler legislation in the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, in March 2022, mandating that all new heaters comply with a regulation to be 65% renewable as of 2024.
Effectively banning most current models of gas boilers, this dovetails with an overarching 2029 EU gas boiler ban. Authorities want to wean German consumers off gas-guzzling boilers in favour of electric-powered heat pumps as the country’s supply of gas from Russia looks increasingly in doubt due to sanctions.
According to government statistics, however, uptake in electric pumps has so far been poor with only 236,000 installed last year compared to 600,000 gas boilers. The Guardian reported on a concerted lobbying campaign by the European gas industry and other special interest groups to stall or water down the gas boiler ban, while Germany is accused of allowing green dogma to drive their economy off a cliff.
The German Ministry of Economics expressed their opinion, earlier this week, that the ban may be a step too far, given that the initiative was mainly the handiwork of Green Party Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck, who is currently in the hot seat for his links to a worsening nepotism scandal involving members of his family and Germany’s powerful green think tanks.
Berlin’s ruling traffic light coalition has been at odds over the pace of the green transition despite attempts to secure amendments to the legislation that would give some wriggle room to synthetic fuel powered boilers. Some media outlets, based on numbers from the German Statistics Office, announced last month that the German economy had entered a recession (read here why it may not actually be in recession). Many industry insiders are now saying that Green Party involvement in government was a major reason for the German economy losing its shine.
The boiler dispute parallels similar efforts by Germany to partially resist a ban on the sale of new fossil-fuel-powered combustion engines. Earlier this year, Berlin successfully pushed for the inclusion of synthetic fuel amendments to soften the blow on its auto industry. The past few months have seen a weakening of the EU green consensus, as German FDP politicians have joined with the national governments of Italy and Eastern European states in calling for a slowdown if not a complete cessation of the green transition.
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Canada's green extremism is leading to disaster for its economy and political elites
A new paper from Net Zero Watch warns Canadian politicians that the economic and social pain they are causing through sweeping decarbonisation policies will soon become critical, and that the public will soon turn on them.
Author Robert Lyman says:
"Ottawa is obsessed with transitioning us away from energy sources that we hold in abundance, to new sources of supply that are more expensive, less reliable, and less secure. This can only end badly."
Lyman points out that most of Canada's political classes and bureaucracies are signed up to a radical green agenda, and it is therefore necessary for the public to seize control of policies that are threatening their very living standards.
He sets out a plan for the country to develop a new policy framework that better balances environmental, economic and social considerations as essential for national unity.
Lyman says:
"We can focus on real environmental harms, we can focus on technologies that work, and we can focus on the things that matter to people alive today rather than hypothesising about what might happens far in the future. But we must move on from the impractical and dangerous decarbonisation path that is leading us towards disaster."
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Climate Action Shouldn’t Mean Sacrificing Life, No Matter Whose It Is
The Irish government is considering a “dairy cow massacre” to reduce emissions and meet climate targets. If that sounds insane, it’s because it is. Even conservative influencer Ashley St. Clair and entrepreneur Elon Musk agreed on Twitter, which sparked much discussion – and outrage – across Europe and the United States.
This isn’t the first time climate alarmists have lost the plot and resorted to extreme “solutions.” In recent years, environmentalists have urged people to not have children, give up their pets, stay away from houseplants, and now, slaughter farm animals.
Being anti-life – whether it be animal or human – is no way to fight climate change. As an environmentalist, I want to preserve the health of our planet so that life can be abundant, not nonexistent.
For too long, we’ve operated under the assumption humans and our society are a disease on the earth that needs to be cured. Nothing could be further from the truth. Yes, human society has contributed to environmental challenges, like climate change, but we’ve also made incredible advances and discoveries. Whether it be in art, science, or agriculture, it’s clear humans are not the disease; we’re the cure.
There are many diverse solutions to the climate challenges we face, but I can assure you ending the lives of 200,000 dairy cows prematurely is not one of them. Sacrificing life – any life – for emissions reductions is a poor precedent to set, and it frankly won’t be effective. In the United States, for instance, dairy cows account for 1.3% of all greenhouse gas emissions. Surely, we could be spending our efforts elsewhere instead of terrorizing the agricultural sector.
Moreover, there are often more elegant and innovative ways to mitigate the effects of climate change than the extreme measures proposed. For instance, regenerative agriculture techniques such as the usage of cover crops for grazing to improve soil quality are already in use all around the world. Allowing cattle to roam and graze naturally, rather than overgrazing pastures, has proven an effective way for both the animals and the ecosystem to thrive. Those in agriculture have also discovered simply switching out dairy cows’ feed can greatly reduce methane emissions associated with their herds.
These solutions are not only more humane than the options Ireland is considering, but they’re also more forward-looking. Reducing the size of dairy cow herds in one fell swoop would be a short-term emissions reduction, sure, but in the long term, there would be no progress in making the industry more sustainable overall. We know logically we cannot, as a society, survive without a robust agricultural sector, so we should strive to incrementally reduce its environmental impact, not exterminate it.
Protecting our planet should also mean protecting the life on it. We shouldn’t sacrifice life for the planet, or the planet for life. Instead, we should take an approach – such as regenerative agriculture for this instance – that allows constructive collaboration between nature and society. The alternative is pursuing medicine worse than the disease.
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12 June, 2023
Hydrocarbons in space
"Fossil" fuels are alleged to be created by decaying plant matter. Chemically they are hydrocarbons. How come they are found in space? Fossils in space? Could it be that such fuels are primordial, not the product of ANY terrestrial process? This finding is yet more evidence in favour of the abiotic theory of "fossil" fuel origin
Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope discovered evidence of complex organic molecules in a galaxy 12.3 billion light-years away — the furthest and oldest ever detected.
Scientists using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have spotted a cloud of complicated organic molecules in a galaxy 12.3 billion light-years away — the farthest from Earth that molecules of this kind have ever been detected. The discovery, which was published on June 5 in the journal Nature, might help astronomers piece together a clearer picture of how galaxies develop.
"We didn't expect this," Joaquin Vieira, an astronomer at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and co-author of the new study, said in a press release. "Detecting these complex organic molecules at such a vast distance is game-changing."
The complex molecules in question are called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). On Earth, PAHs are commonly found in wildfire smoke and car exhaust. In space, they might play a crucial role in star formation. Scientists suspect that they help regulate the temperature of gas clouds in stellar nurseries, thereby managing when and where stars develop, Nature reported.
Researchers first detected the galaxy, dubbed SPT0418-47, in 2020 using the National Science Foundation's ground-based South Pole Telescope. The distant mass of stars was only visible thanks to a trick of physics known as gravitational lensing. This effect occurs when light from a faraway object bends around a massive, nearby object, due to the closer object's gravity. In the process, the faraway light is distorted and magnified; in SPT0418-47's case, it appeared 30 times brighter.
The team studied this light, and their initial analysis indicated that SPT0418-47 was rich in heavy elements. But the scientists couldn't get a good look at its organic, carbon-containing components using the South Pole Telescope, which doesn't pick up the right wavelength of light.
A schematic showing a telescope looking past a nearby galaxy to see a far distant one
An illustration showing how astronomers use gravitational lensing to view distant galaxies that should be far beyond our sight. (Image credit: S. Doyle / J. Spilker)
JWST, however, can peer into exactly the right infrared range to detect PAHs. Sure enough, when the team trained the space-based telescope on the galaxy last August, a mess of complex organic molecules stood out.
"Everywhere we see the molecules there are stars forming," Justin Spilker, an astronomer at Texas A&M University and co-author of the study, told Nature. This supports the hypothesis that organic molecules help to birth stars.
But weirdly, there were also patches of the galaxy that lacked PAH clouds — and the team observed stars forming in those spots as well. "That’s the part we don’t understand yet," Spilker said. Understanding why and how stars form in these regions, and how they interact with organic molecules, will require further study.
"This work is just the first step," Vieira said. "We are very excited to see how this plays out."
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General newsbeef company CEO fights back: “the climate change argument against cows is garbage and we will not comply”
The push to replace real beef with other forms of protein has been ramping up in recent weeks. The powers-that-be want us to stop eating steaks and instead eat cricket burgers or lab-grown meat replacements as our protein. Ireland is even considering culling 200,000 cows to meet their climate change virtue signaling goals.
But their climate change argument is patently false. Recent studies have shown growing meat in a lab is actually as much as 25-times worse for the environment than producing the same amount of real beef. Corporate media is barely reporting on it, but they’ve been forced to mention it over the past couple of weeks thanks to the persistence of those championing the truth.
One such champion is Dr. Joseph Mercola who recently noted:
While the fake meat industry is being touted as an environmentally friendly and sustainable way to feed the world, the true intent is to recreate the kind of global control that Monsanto and others achieved through patented GMO seed development. In the end, lab-created meats are worse for the environment than livestock and will undoubtedly deteriorate human health to boot, just like GMO grains have.
Dr. Mercola also said, “Each kilo of cultured meat produces anywhere from 542 pounds (246 kilos) to 3,325 pounds (1,508 kg) of carbon dioxide emissions, making the climate impact of cultured meat four to 25 times greater than that of conventional beef.”
Jason Nelson, CEO of freeze-dried food company USA Beef Boxes, has focused his team on producing as much shelf-stable all-American beef as they can have slaughtered. It is his belief that beef cattle will be systematically removed from the American food supply in the coming years and even months with attacks from multiple angles (plus, ordering through this link and the links below benefits The Liberty Daily). The climate change argument is only one of them.
“They prey on the ignorance of the average mainstream media watcher who nods along as they’re being told cow farts will kill them,” Nelson said. “It’s patently ludicrous but they need something shocking in order to get people to comply when they try to outlaw real meat. And they will. They’re already trying to do it.”
“The day will come when they’ll ask my company to replace our real beef from all-American cows with their version of bovine protein,” Nelson continued. “I’ve already told everyone who works for me that we’ll shut it down before we freeze dry a single sliver of lab-grown fake meat.”
As Dr. Mercola and Nelson have said, the climate change reasoning for going after cows is just an excuse for the powers-that-be to exercise control over the people. As Henry Kissinger famously said, “Who controls the food supply controls the people.”
Beef has been readily available and relatively inexpensive for decades. Villainizing cows as culprits in their climate change hoax is diabolical, but it’s also effective. Cities across the nation, invariably run by Democrats, are looking into limiting the amount of beef that can be sold, bought, and consumed.
“This isn’t just some ideological crusade,” Nelson said. “We launched this company last year because we saw the writing on the wall and knew they’d try to make Americans eat bugs or pseudo-meat or something worse. I didn’t serve this nation to then watch it implode over bald-faced lies.”
Nelson, a former member of both the U.S. Army and U.S. Marines, resigned in 2021 due to the Covid-19 vaccine mandate. He then ran for Congress against RINO Pete Sessions in 2022, losing in the primaries.
“We’re proud of our product,” he said. “As far as we know we’re the only company in America that offers freeze dried Ribeye, NY Strip, Tenderloin, and Sirloin that’s shelf-stable for over a decade. Other prepper food companies sell ‘beef crumbles’ and cow scraps they buy for cheap that barely passes as food. I’d almost rather eat bugs. Almost.”
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If It’s Not Open Warfare, It’s Collusive Lawfare
The Biden Administration continues waging war on fossil fuels, aided by environmentalists, politicians, and corporations chasing subsidies, competitive advantages, power and profits. They want to “fundamentally transform” America’s energy and economic systems, prevent “climate cataclysms,” and ensure “environmental justice” for some (by inflicting injustices on others).
Their weapons include withdrawing huge areas from economic activities; banning leasing, drilling and pipelines; and imposing regulatory standards so costly or technologically impossible that coal-fired power plants, internal-combustion vehicles, and gas stoves, furnaces and water heaters must be abandoned.
This open warfare is augmented and amplified by more clandestine “lawfare.”
Environmentalists have long employed lawsuits to impose by court decree what they cannot achieve via ballot boxes or legislation. The litigation often redefines sloppily or deliberately vague statutory language, to impose more onerous standards that can block or bankrupt oil, gas and mining projects – and then ignored for land- and resource-intensive wind and solar projects.
An especially pernicious strategy is “sue-and-settle” lawsuits, wherein environmentalists collude with friendly federal agencies to create a “disagreement” over a policy or regulation, and sue in friendly courts. The parties then agree to a settlement that’s been negotiated behind closed doors, leaving the public and impacted third parties with no opportunity to address the case’s legal or evidentiary merits.
Now ultra-progressive states and cities are charging onto this battlefield with more destructive lawsuits.
Delaware and Rhode Island have joined Baltimore, Honolulu, New York City, San Francisco, and other jurisdictions in filing climate change lawsuits against oil and gas producers, refiners and sellers in state courts – where they believe they will face more sympathetic judges and juries than in federal courtrooms.
The arguments for transferring the cases to federal jurisdiction are compelling – and were presented persuasively by John Yoo, C. Boyden Gray and other experts who reviewed the differing Courts of Appeals decisions, and the policy and legal questions surrounding them:
Fossil fuel “greenhouse gas” emissions alleged to cause climate change cross state lines and must therefore be governed by federal agencies. Sea level rise, flooding and other damages allegedly caused by those emissions must likewise be attributed to multiple sources in multiple states, and thus must also be the purview of federal laws and agencies.
No state, much less any city, should be permitted to set or manipulate national energy, climate or environmental policies and hold other jurisdictions to their agendas. Different legal opinions among various federal courts require Supreme Court intervention.
BP America, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Suncor Energy and other oil company defendants made these and additional arguments in asking the US Supreme Court to reaffirm that cases addressing climate change claims are inherently governed by federal law and should be transferred from state to federal courts.
However, the Supremes inexplicably opted not to review the cases at this time. That means these and other cities and states will continue suing energy companies – perhaps securing verdicts and multi-billion-dollar damage awards.
The litigation will create a legal, constitutional, scientific and public policy nightmare for the nation, businesses, consumers, courts and states, especially after verdicts have been rendered and bills tendered to scapegoat companies for payment. An already confusing and impenetrable judicial and permitting jungle will become even more perilous.
However, these complex pollution issues are made vastly more complicated by the basic question of whether carbon dioxide (which humans and animals exhale and plants require to grow, “green” our planet and help ensure record crop yields) should ever be labeled a “dangerous pollutant.” Even more so by the impossibility of separating “greenhouse gas” emissions from a few US petroleum companies from:
all other American oil and gas, coal, agricultural, industrial, transportation and other emissions;
human activities worldwide, including thousands of coal-fired power plants in China, India and dozens of other countries that have no obligation or intention of reducing their fossil fuel use anytime soon, thus increasing carbon dioxide levels (deliberately and misleadingly called “carbon pollution”) in Earth’s global atmosphere for decades to come;
greenhouse gas emissions (and toxic air pollution) from mining, minerals processing and manufacturing to make the wind turbines, solar panels, electric vehicles, grid-scale backup batteries, transformers and transmission lines required for a “clean, green, renewable, sustainable” energy future;
and climate changes caused by natural forces throughout Earth past history, now and in the future.
As litigant cities and states pursue billions in penalties and damages from these companies – supposedly to cover the costs of building levees and stormwater impoundments, raising roads and bridges, and otherwise protecting communities from “increasing sea level rise” and “more frequent and intense storms” – they will also have to address other inconvenient truths.
For example, seas have risen naturally 400 feet since the last ice age ended 12,000 years ago. They are now rising at an easily manageable 7-12 inches per century – and much of the perceived sea level rise is actually due to land subsidence in coastal cities worldwide, not rising seas.
The litigants and courts will also encounter the bitter reality that the “fundamental transformation” they so earnestly seek means covering the planet with wind turbines, solar panels, transmission lines ... and the quarries and mines to build them. America already lacks sufficient EV charging stations and step-up and step-down transformers for new homes and a functional grid. Millions more will be needed in short order to reach Net Zero – which means thousands of new mines, quarries, processing plants and factories.
Toyota Motor Corp. calculates that “more than 300 new lithium, cobalt, nickel and graphite mines are needed to meet the expected battery demand by 2035.” That’s essentially just for new EVs, and getting them approved and developed would likely take decades. A US energy transformation – to say nothing of a global transformation – would require thousands of mines, and thousands of processing facilities.
The process of converting cobalt, lithium, aluminum, iron, rare earths, manganese, nickel and other ores into high-end metals is fossil-fuel-intensive, greenhouse-gas-emitting and dirty. “Reaching the nickel means cutting down swaths of rainforest,” the Wall Street Journal notes. “Refining it ... involves extreme heat and high pressure, producing waste slurry that’s hard to dispose of.” Using little children to mine cobalt and processing rare earth elements involve legendary ecological and human rights abuses.
Worse, all this is only the beginning of the planetary desecration. We’re talking millions of wind turbines, billions of solar panels, hundreds of thousands of miles of new transmission lines, billions of half-ton battery modules – and all that goes into making them. We’ll have to replace fertilizers for crops and feed stocks for thousands of products, by planting millions more acres in food and fuel crops, destroying more wildlife habitats. Turbine blades will chop millions of birds and bats from the sky every year.
Then we’ll have to bury the broken, worn-out and obsolete panels, turbine blades and other equipment. The world has already installed some 100,000 wind turbines and 2.5 billion solar panels. In whose backyards will the landfills go for all this trash – and the massive lakes for the waste slurries?
The Supreme Court – and courts, regulators and legislators everywhere – have a lot of work to do.
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"We can't afford to shut big power station": Australian mayor warns
NSW cannot afford to lose Eraring Power Station any time soon based on the current pace of the state's renewable energy infrastructure rollout, Mid-Western Council's mayor believes.
The Central-West Orana Renewable Energy Zone is the first of five clean energy generation hubs that are due to be built across the state as part of a plan to deliver at least 12 gigawatts of renewable generation and 2 gigawatts of long-duration storage by 2030.
The zone's "energisation date" was recently pushed back from 2025 to 2027-28 due to an increase in proposed project size from 3 gigawatts to 4.5 gigawatts.
Similarly, the New England zone, which abuts the Hunter Region, will now start in 2029 compared with an initial 2027 goal. The Hunter-Central Coast zone will follow.
Despite the ambitions for the Central-West Orana REZ, Mid-Western Council Brad Cam said there was very little progress to show to date.
"Nothing has been built yet. Based on the number of solar panels that are due to be installed in the Central-West Orana REZ, you would need a shipping container full of panels arriving in the Port of Newcastle every day for the next 365 days," he said.
"Ninety per cent of the world's solar panels come from China and they can't keep up with demand. So tell me where we are going to get the panels we need for this project in the next 12 months."
"The bottom line is we simply can't afford to shut Eraring in 2025. If they do the state will be stuffed."
The lack of firmed baseload power is among the factors contributing to escalating power prices.
Energy Consumers Australia data shows the proportion of households and small businesses concerned about being able to pay their electricity bills has risen above 50 per cent.
In addition to the lack of skilled workers needed to build the Central-West Orana REZ, Mr Cam said there were major concerns about the lack of infrastructure and community services, including health, police and water, in place to support the project.
"They are talking about putting in a 1000-bed camp for the workers who will be installing the high voltage infrastructure. But who's going to service it," Mr Cam said.
"We (the council) need 12 months to prepare and build up a sewer treatment plant and a water filtration plant. Then there's the issue of where are they going to get the construction water from?"
"I think they (the government) are sick of listening to me. "I'm just trying to be practical to help them understand there needs to be better planning and better organisation for this to roll forward," he said.
"In simple terms, we understand the NSW Energy Roadmap relies on green energy being generated in these zones to be accessible to the Hunter via new transmission lines proposed to be built," he said.
"Not only is this intended to underwrite supply for existing demand in Sydney and the Hunter, but also being counted on to be the source of green electrons for new industry that will simply not eventuate without renewable energy being available and affordable.
"We're aware of issues in relation to the provision of labour force and road transportation of materials to supply large-scale renewable projects and if kinks along this pathway become prevalent, its only going to add to the concerns currently being expressed in the Central West."
An EnergyCo spokesman said supply chain cost increases due to global efforts to decarbonise and a significant but necessary transmission route design change to avoid negative impacts on the Merriwa-Cassilis communities and prime agricultural land had impacted the Central West-Orana REZ timeline.
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11 June, 2023
‘Absolutely stunned’: Sperm counts are falling faster than ever
This scare article on an old topic is just another way of promoting a whole host of irrational Greenie fears about "chemicals" in the environment. Big problem: As far as we can tell, overall sperm counts are NOT declining. See
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/are-sperm-counts-really-declining/
And the emphasis on sperm counts is outdated anyway. We now know that sperm motility is the crucial factor. Sperm count is a correlate of motility but is not itself the problem. I have always had a low sperm count but had good sperm motility, so had no trouble fertilizing the egg that became my robust sonChemicals in tin can linings, cosmetics, nail polish, teflon pans and flame retardants on cushions have been linked to a steep decline in sperm counts and a potential “crisis in human reproduction”, Australian fertility specialists have been warned.
Sperm counts have fallen 52 per cent in the past five decades – and the decline appears to be speeding up – experts at the 2023 Fertility Society of Australia and New Zealand conference were told this week.
Leading environmental and reproductive epidemiologist Dr Shanna Swan has studied the effects of chemicals now common in everyday life and the environment on male fetus development. She was “absolutely stunned” to discover a key reason for falling sperm production was chemicals that can interfere with the body’s hormones.
Chemicals known as phthalates, found in personal care products, fragrances, plastics and even dust, were among those affecting development of baby boys, via the mother’s exposure in early pregnancy, Swan said. Chemicals known as BPAs, found in plastics, were also to blame.
An exposed boy’s future offspring would also likely be affected, said Swan, a professor of environmental medicine and public health at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York.
An updated meta-analysis of studies from around the world found sperm counts were declining worldwide “at an even faster rate than we thought”.
“It was about 1 per cent per year since 1972, and from 2000 on, it was 2.64 per cent, which says sperm count is declining at an accelerated rate,” she said.
Swan predicts that by the middle of the century, many more people will rely on reproductive technologies.
Swan said her latest research had accounted for differences in the measurement of sperm.
“[The effects] don’t stop with the pregnant woman, or the pregnant woman’s offspring. The child, in the next generation will be impaired similarly,” she said.
“We have a multigenerational impact, and probably impacts on life expectancy and morbidity [illness] are also going to be there for those children.”
Professor Roger Hart, lead clinician for the Western Australian public fertility service, is part of the world’s oldest longitudinal study of development from pre-birth through to adulthood, the federally funded Raine Study.
He said its findings supported Swan’s.
The University of Western Australia professor and sub-specialist in endocrinology and infertility said just 14.4 per cent of boys born during the study – which began in 1989 with a cohort of almost 3000 women – had sperm counts that met the minimum standard.
One Raine finding was that sperm concentration and motility in the offspring were significantly linked to BPAs in the mother’s blood.
“We found if the boy’s exposure to phthalates was higher in utero, [then] when they were 21 their testicles were significantly smaller. According to how much exposure you had, testicular volume was reduced,” Hart said.
“It is very much in line with Shanna’s [work]; she’s reporting that sperm counts have dropped by half in 50 years ... Obviously, we need to study further to see what the causes [of sperm decline] are – but this is pretty amazing stuff.”
But associate professor Tim Moss, of the not-for-profit men’s health organisation Healthy Male, urged caution in drawing a link between chemical exposure and men’s infertility.
Moss, a former president of the Perinatal Society of Australia and New Zealand, said he believed the studies examined by Swan’s group were limited.
Hart’s work showed effects of BPAs and phthalate exposure were “borderline, if anything; but this does not mean that there is not an effect”, he said.
Moss argued three years ago in The Conversation that the “doomsday scenario” for sperm production suggested in Swan’s original metanalysis had not been adequately proven.
“It’s reasonable to expect chemicals that affect hormone function in our bodies ... could affect reproduction in males and females, given available evidence. But we don’t have irrefutable proof,” he wrote.
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Choking on Canada’s ‘Climate Change’ Smoke
Listen closely, and you can practically hear him say it: You never want a serious Canadian wildfire crisis to go to waste.
No, Rahm Emanuel isn’t whispering into Joe Biden’s ear these days, but those on the Left know well what Barack Obama’s former chief of staff said in the days just after the 2008 election, and they certainly know “an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before” when they see one.
Take Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, for example, who told her 13 million Twitter followers yesterday: “Between NYC in wildfire smoke and this [heat wave] in [Puerto Rico], it bears repeating how unprepared we are for the climate crisis. We must adapt our food systems, energy grids, infrastructure, healthcare, etc ASAP to prepare for what’s to come and catch up to what is already here.”
And in case anyone failed to pick up the “opportunity” she’s driving at, AOC affixed the “GreenNewDeal” hashtag to the end of her message.
At this point, the smoke from at least 233 active Canadian wildfires and 9.4 million charred acres is wreaking havoc on the American air being breathed by 100 million of our fellow citizens. Most of the fires are in western Canada, but some are in Quebec, above New York, and the wind patterns yesterday made New York City’s air the worst of any major city in the world — which is quite a feat, as anyone who’s spent any time in a major Chinese city will tell you.
But that’s not all. According to air quality specialist IQAir, following closely behind the Big Apple are other northeastern cities such as Boston, Buffalo, and Pittsburgh, but the smoke isn’t stopping there. Columbus, Baltimore, Norfolk, Raleigh, Asheville, and even Myrtle Beach are also seeing and feeling the effects. These include air travel delays and cancellations, as well as cancellation of outdoor and even some indoor activities in the affected cities.
But the question remains: Are all these wildfires due to “climate change,” as AOC and her ilk would have us believe?
And the answer already appears to be: No. As the Toronto Sun reports: “Quebec police are investigating the possibility that the smoke creating poor air quality in southern Ontario and making downtown skylines disappear may have been the result of arson. ‘There is an investigation because the cause is suspect,’ said Surtee de Quebec media officer Hugues Beaulieu.”
Most reports blame dry conditions and lightning strikes. In any case, even under the most progressive definition imaginable, arson isn’t climate change.
Sadly, we’ve been down this shamefully politicized road before. In fact, it feels like Groundhog Day. As our Thomas Gallatin wrote back in 2020: “According to Democrats and the mainstream media, the primary culprit for the massive wildfires currently consuming vast swaths of the Pacific Northwest is climate change. However, according to the scientific data accumulated over years of observation, the real reason has little to do with the changing climate and more to do with changes to forestry-management practices instigated by politicians unduly influenced by flawed environmentalist ideology.”
Gallatin went on to identify the real culprit: forest mismanagement, both here in the U.S. and in the vast Canadian wilderness:
Analysis of the historical records show that wildfires regularly burned millions of acres annually in the U.S. up until the late 1950s. Beginning in the 1930s, the U.S. Forest Service, along with state agencies, began efforts to better control and limit the amount of acreage burned annually. Ironically, these efforts to suppress and prevent fires has contributed to the massive fires America is seeing today. The reason is simple: By not being control-burned, these forests have accumulated vast amounts of fuel (overgrowth) and have become literal tinderboxes primed for igniting, whether by lightning or, in many cases, arson.
So, if you’re in one of these smoke-plagued regions, set aside the politics and do four things: Stay inside, to the extent possible; use an air filter if you have one; wear a mask — because smoke particulate is a lot more filterable than a coronavirus; and monitor the air quality in your area.
Oh, and don’t listen to Sandy Cortez and her leftist ilk. They’re just trying to do things they couldn’t do without a convenient crisis
https://patriotpost.us/articles/97929
*****************************************************New York to pass ‘green’ law that could slash jobs — and actually harm the environment
New York is on the brink of a big mistake by banning a class of pesticides critical for farmers.
Legislators, misled by environmental activists, are preparing to pass this week the inaptly named Birds and Bees Protection Act, which would prevent growers from accessing neonicotinoids — some of the safest pesticides, thanks in part to their innovative mode of application through seed coatings rather than spraying.
To make the bill less toxic, legislators amended it to allow neonic sales on a product-by-product basis if the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation provides a written justification for emergency use each year.
But this “solution” will end in disaster for New York’s growers and the food system. How can I predict that? For five years, an identical scenario has been playing out in Europe.
Spoiler alert: This saga ended badly for growers, birds, bees, consumers and the environment — and the same would be true in New York.
Just as the state’s activist-influenced politicians are trying to do, the European Commission in 2018 banned neonicotinoids except for emergency-authorized uses (aka “derogations”).
Anti-pesticide activists spread bee-pocalypse fears among the public, and Green Party members worked in concert to usher in anti-pesticide legislation.
These pesticide derogations were a lifeline for many growers, as there were no other options to stop some pests.
Sugar-beet growers were among those most devastated by the neonic ban.
By 2020, farmers across 10 European Union countries clamored for — and received — 21 derogations to protect their sugar-beet crops from aphids spreading beet yellows virus, a pest that decimated up to 80% of crop yields.
But Europe’s anti-pesticide activists were not satisfied, just as New York’s won’t be. After the first derogations went through — and without any regard for the consequences — they filed lawsuits to annul them.
The European Union Court of Justice, the EU’s highest court, ruled this year in favor of the activists and made neonic derogations illegal.
Predictably, Europe’s sugar industry is in serious trouble. Beet weevils are the pest du jour that only neonics can stop. Thus far, they’ve destroyed 40,000 acres and 60,000 tons of sugar in Austria alone. Some growers simply quit growing sugar beets altogether.
Sugar giant Tereos hammered another nail in the coffin by announcing it will close its sugar-refinery operations in France, slashing jobs.
A warning to New York’s agriculture industry: Your crops and livelihoods will also be threatened when the derogations end.
Ironically, bees don’t pollinate sugar-beet plants. They are pollinated by wind, like many of New York’s major crops, including corn, wheat and potatoes.
Other major state vegetable crops, like tomatoes and peppers, are self-pollinated.
Thus the Birds and Bees Protection Act will “protect” bees from pesticide exposure on crops they don’t even care to visit.
Growers in Europe who did have alternatives simply sprayed more pesticides — usually older and less environmentally friendly chemicals.
After the neonic ban, they sprayed pesticides 1.145 million more times per season on bees, birds and the rest of the environment. The same will happen in New York.
Instead of coating seeds with tiny amounts of pesticide and burying them in the ground where birds and bees can’t touch them, farmers will be forced to spray more pesticides indiscriminately aboveground.
These are complicated scientific issues. We need regulatory agencies like the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation to make pesticide decisions, not politicians or the activists pressuring them.
The DEC has the scientific expertise; and so far, it — along with the US Environmental Protection Agency and many other regulatory agencies throughout the world — has determined neonics are safe for farmers to use.
Neonicotinoids are not a major cause of bee death. Experts agree that varroa mites, and the many diseases they spread in the hive, are the primary threat to bees.
Since neonicotinoids were first used in the mid-1990s, honeybee populations have grown by 51,000 colonies in America, and there are nearly 21 million more beehives in the world now than in 2000.
Let’s let this sordid and costly drama stay in Europe. New York politicians should let the state’s qualified environmental regulators make the decisions.
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Gov. Youngkin Puts Virginians First with RGGI Withdrawal
On Wednesday, the Virginia State Air Pollution Board voted 4-3 to remove Virginia from the controversial Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) carbon market.
Governor Glenn Youngkin (R-VA) - who often equated it to a carbon tax - garnered a vital victory here.
“Today’s common sense decision by the Air Board to repeal RGGI protects Virginians from the failed program that is not only a regressive tax on families and businesses across the Commonwealth but also does nothing to reduce pollution,” Youngkin said in a news release. “The Office of the Attorney General has confirmed the State Air Pollution Control Board has the legal authority to take action on the regulatory proposal using the full regulatory process – and today, the Board voted to do just that – furthering Virginians access to a reliable, affordable, clean and growing supply of power.”
Unsurprisingly, Virginia Democrats tried – but failed– to draw a connection between RGGI withdrawal and smoke from Canadian wildfires currently blanketing Virginia.
Their Twitter account tweeted, “BREAKING: Per Gov Youngkin’s directive, the State Air Pollution Control Board withdrew Virginia from the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI). Sickly ironic news on a day when the Richmond skyline is blotted out by thick smoke from wildfires.”
Let’s clear the air: After taking office in January 2022, Governor Youngkin issued Executive Order 9 to remove the Commonwealth from this controversial 11-state compact. Virginia entered RGGI following the passage of the Virginia Clean Energy and Flood Preparedness Act of 2020. The law tasked Virginia’s Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) director to create a carbon market-based trading program.
Former Governor Ralph Northam (D-VA) lauded the move at the time, remarking, “This initiative provides a unique opportunity to meet the urgency of the environmental threats facing our planet while positioning Virginia as a center of economic activity in the transition to renewable energy.”
Why did the Youngkin administration prioritize RGGI withdrawal?
First, RGGI is a flawed entity that delivers few to no environmental returns. As I noted in The Virginian Pilot in January 2022, RGGI doesn’t reduce carbon emissions much. The impact is negligible.
I wrote, “The most notable problem with RGGI is its overall negligible impact on carbon emissions. In 2019, the Congressional Research Service observed that nine partner states “account for approximately 7% of U.S. CO2 emissions and 16% of U.S. gross domestic product” and called carbon emissions reductions “arguably negligible” at best.”
It sounds eerily similar to Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) investing–strategies often delivering a poor return on investment (ROI).
Second, participation in RGGI meant higher utility bills for residences and businesses. A March 2022 Virginia DEQ report found RGGI’s environmental compliance cost would result in a $2.39 monthly increase for residential customers and a $1,554 monthly increase for industrial customers, respectively. Had Virginia remained in the interstate compact, it would cost ratepayers “between $1 billion and $1.2 billion over the next four years.”
Third, RGGI is a carbon tax imposed on producers that ultimately get passed to consumers.
I also discussed this reality in Virginian Pilot, arguing, “Virginians would see diminished purchasing power because they already pay a premium on electricity and gas. Worse, carbon taxes would disproportionately hurt lower-income Virginia households since they rely and depend on carbon-intensive goods and energy sources for sustenance. Electricity costs would skyrocket in more economically depressed regions of the Commonwealth, including southwestern Virginia.”
Virginia can innovate and produce clean energy without subscribing to obtuse decarbonization goals pushed by Democrats and even some Republicans.
Governor Youngkin understood this “carbon market” doesn’t benefit Virginians. On the other hand, his Virginia Energy Plan is an excellent alternative to power the Commonwealth. It does so, minds you, without admonishing coal, oil, gas, or nuclear. Win-win.
The first-term Governor undeniably promised to get Virginia to quit RGGI. Not only does it boost him, but it’s also a good deal for both Virginia consumers and ratepayers. This is an excellent first step, but his energy policy work isn’t done yet.
Next, the Governor should tackle the horrible Virginia Clean Economy Act (VCEA) – or Virginia’s Green New Deal – forced on us by the prior Northam administration and Virginia Democrats. Without question, it absolutely must be repealed. That, however, will require a cooperative General Assembly in Richmond. Should Virginia Republicans flip the State Senate and keep the House of Delegates in November, this could happen.
Until then, kudos to Governor Youngkin for rejecting destructive policies like RGGI wrought by preservationist environmentalism
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8 June, 2023
‘Science’ Tells Us Energy and Cement Companies Cause Wildfires
The Union of Concerned Scientists is just a club of extreme Leftists
According to a new study from the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), we can now blame forest fires on energy corporations: “Coal, oil, and gas companies are now directly linked to worsening forest fires across the western United States.”
The study, titled “The Fossil Fuels Behind Forest Fires: Quantifying the Contribution of Major Carbon Producers to Increasing Wildfire Risk,” claims that nearly 20 million acres of burned forest “can be attributed to heat-trapping emissions traced to the world’s 88 largest fossil fuel producers and cement manufacturers.” The study “offers policymakers, elected officials, and legal experts a scientific basis for holding fossil fuel companies accountable for the impacts of their products and their decades-long deception efforts.”
The conclusion sounds similar: “While countries and consumers have some responsibility for climate change and its impacts, fossil fuel companies can and should be held accountable for climate harms.” For those who drive trucks and cars and work with cement, that may sound more like advocacy than science.
The UCS authors came to this conclusion by using computer climate models to make an estimate on assumptions about changes in vapor pressure deficits. In his review of the study, Edward Ring of the California Policy Center cites deficits in the UCS research. As he notes, the recent heat waves in western forests are not unique.
California’s hottest recorded temperature was 10 years ago in 2013, a full 134 degrees in Death Valley. During the 1930s, “temperatures rivaled ... those we experience today,” and the recent drought was reportedly the “worst in 1,200 years.” According to Ring, “this raises the obvious question ... about that even bigger drought that occurred 1,200 years ago,” long before those energy and cement companies geared up. Trees are another concern.
Ring explains that the number of “California’s mid-elevation Ponderosa pine and mixed conifer forests” has swelled from 60 trees per acre to 170 trees per acre. “Unlike the subjectively defined algorithms” of climate models, Ring writes, “excessive tree density is an objective fact.”
The density issue came up during the epidemic of California wildfires in 2020. President Donald Trump contended that “forest management” was key to combating wildfires. California Gov. Gavin Newsom argued that “climate change is real and that is exacerbating this.” Newsom’s natural resources secretary, Wade Crowfoot, talked up “the science” but did not spell it out in any detail.
As it turns out, Crowfoot’s degree from the University of Wisconsin is in political—not climate—science, and he once served as West Coast director for the Environmental Defense Fund. In similar style, the UCS study’s co-author Alicia Race holds degrees in political science from the University of Illinois and Northern Kentucky University. Before joining UCS, she worked with the San Diego Climate Action Campaign.
The UCS study is peer-reviewed, but the authors give no mention of replication. In this process, authors give their data to independent scientists to see if they arrive at the same conclusion. Without replication, and with reliance on climate models, Ring finds the authors guilty of “scientific malpractice.” Politicians and bureaucrats also share the blame for destructive wildfires that threaten life and property, especially in California.
“Cal Fire [The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection] and other state and federal agencies [are] at fault for allowing fuel conditions to persist that enabled so many wildfires to reach epic proportions,” contend the authors of “California Wildfires: Key Recommendations to Prevent Future Disasters.”
The study recommends “proactive forest management,” “forest restoration,” and “more prescribed or controlled burns.” Additionally, “private-property owners” must be allowed “to more easily remove trees ... through forest thinning and the creation of breaks [in vegetation], especially near communities.”
“Only you can prevent wildfires,” says Smokey Bear, who calls for campfire safety, proper maintenance of equipment, and home protection. Such practical advice is better than blowing smoke on climate change, blaming energy companies, and allowing politicians and bureaucrats to escape accountability.
https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=14536&omhide=true&trk=title
****************************************************Socialism vs. nature
"Greed of the fossil fuel industry" is "destroying our planet," says Sen. Bernie Sanders. Young people agree. Their solution? Socialism.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says socialism creates "an environment that provides for all people, not just the privileged few."
"Nonsense," says Tom Palmer of the Atlas Network in my new video. Palmer, unlike Ocasio-Cortez and most of us, spent lots of time in socialist countries. He once smuggled books into the Soviet Union.
What he's seen convinces him that environmental-movement socialists are wrong about what's "green."
"We tried socialism," says Palmer. "We ran the experiment. It was a catastrophe. Worst environmental record on the planet."
In China, when socialist leaders noticed that sparrows ate valuable grain, they encouraged people to kill sparrows.
"Billions of birds were killed," says Palmer.
Government officials shot birds. People without guns banged pans and blew horns, scaring sparrows into staying aloft for longer than they could tolerate.
"These poor exhausted birds fell from the skies," says Palmer. "It was insanity."
I pointed out that, watching video of people killing sparrows, it looked like they were happy to do it.
"If you failed to show enthusiasm for the socialist goals of the party," Palmer responds, "you were going to be in trouble."
The Party's campaign succeeded. They killed nearly every sparrow.
But "all it takes is two minutes of thinking to figure, 'Wait. Who's going to eat all the bugs?'" says Palmer.
Without sparrows, insects multiplied. Bugs destroyed more crops than the sparrows had.
"People starved as a consequence," says Palmer. "People confuse socialism with ... a 'nice government' or a 'government that's sweet' or 'made up of my friends.'"
Socialism means central planning. That ends badly.
"What AOC wants to do is basically give the Pentagon, or similar agencies, control over the entire society. She thinks that's going to turn out well," says Palmer. "It's a joke."
China's central planners keep making mistakes.
Many Chinese lakes and rivers are bright green. Fertilizer runoff created algae blooms that kill all fish. A Lancet study says Chinese air pollution kills a million people per year.
Wherever socialism is tried, it creates nasty pollution.
In the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin wanted cotton for his army. His central planners decided it should be grown near the Aral Sea. They drained so much water that the sea, once the fourth biggest inland lake in the world, shrank to less than half its size.
"Soviet planners caused catastrophic environmental costs to the whole population," says Palmer.
I push back. "That was then. Now the rules would be different. Now the rule would be: 'green.'"
"All the time we hear socialists say, 'Next time, we'll get it right.' How many next times do you get?" asks Palmer.
Yet American media still sometimes say socialists protect the environment. A New York Times op-ed claims "Lenin's eco warriors" created "the world's largest system of most protected nature reserves."
"These are not nature preserves," Palmer responds. "They use it as a dumping ground for heavy metals, for radioactive waste — in what sense is it a nature preserve?"
Capitalists destroy nature, too. Free societies do need government rules to protect the environment.
But free markets with property rights often protect nature better than bureaucrats can.
Private farmers, explains Palmer, are "concerned about the ability of the farm to grow food next year, year after year, (even) after that farmer is gone. Why? Because the farm has a capital value. That's the 'capital' in capitalism. They want to maximize that."
Capitalism also protects the environment because it creates wealth. When people aren't worried about starving or freezing, they get interested in protecting nature. That's why capitalist countries have cleaner air.
Also, capitalists can afford to pay for wild animal preserves.
"When no one has property rights and people are poor, tigers and elephants are considered a burden ... They kill them," says Palmer. "When you're wealthier ... you care about the environment."
Socialists say they care, but the real world shows: to protect the environment, capitalism works better
https://patriotpost.us/opinion/97892-socialism-versus-nature-2023-06-07 ?
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Biden Admin's New Regulations: A Threat to Consumer Freedom and Affordable Energy
The Biden administration is regulating natural gas in appliances a break-neck speed. First they went after gas stoves. Now they are set to impose stringent regulations on home gas-powered furnaces. This move has raised eyebrows and concerns over a potential narrowing of consumer options and an inevitable rise in expenses.
In a remarkable display of bureaucratic intervention, the Department of Energy (DOE), under the leadership of the Biden administration, proposed these restrictive regulations in June 2022.
They will adversely impact more than half of American households who rely on residential gas furnaces for their heating requirements. The regulations are imminent and will compromise affordability with meager impact on greenhouse gas emissions.
Ben Lieberman, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, shared his thoughts with Fox News Digital, “This is a classic example of one size not fitting all. Every home is different, every homeowner is different and people are best off having a wide range of choices. They can work with their contractor to make the best decision for their home and their circumstances.”
According to Lieberman, the “efficiency standard would effectively outlaw non-condensing furnaces and condensing alternatives would be the only ones available. Those are more efficient, but they cost more. And installation costs could be a big problem for some houses that are not compatible with condensing furnaces.”
If these proposed rules come into play, the DOE would demand furnaces to reach an annual fuel utilization efficiency (AFUE) of 95% by 2029. This condition means that manufacturers can only market furnaces that convert at least 95% of fuel into heat within the next six years, a considerable jump from the current market standard AFUE of 80% for a residential furnace.
As a result of this overreach, non-condensing gas furnaces, although less efficient but notably cheaper, would be virtually removed from the market.
This move creates a financial burden for consumers, who will have to bear hefty installation costs when replacing their non-condensing furnace with a condensing one post-implementation of the rule.
Richard Meyer, the vice president of energy markets, analysis, and standards at the American Gas Association (AGA), raised serious questions. “There are some really technical reasons why this is such a concerning rule. It has to do with the ability for consumers to be in compliance with this new efficiency standard.”
He noted that these proposed regulations would demand homeowners install new equipment to exhaust gas out of their homes, an expensive ordeal for many.
“These higher efficiency units, or so-called condensing units — a lot of consumers have them in their home, but a lot of consumers don’t. So, this rule would require additional retrofits for a lot of consumers,” he said. “And those retrofits can be extremely cost prohibitive.”
The AGA, providing natural gas to over 74 million customers nationwide, firmly opposed the furnace rules in comments submitted to the DOE. The group advocates for a free market approach to naturally increase product efficiency, a measure that would genuinely serve consumers’ interests.
The alarming reality is that between 40-60% of the existing residential furnaces on the market will face prohibition under these proposed regulations.
Meyer added, “What we’re seeing across the U.S. federal government and reflected, of course, in many states right now is an active policy push intended to address climate change. But the outcome is to restrict the options and availability of the direct use of natural gas for consumers.”
He further emphasized AGA’s primary concerns: “One, removing that option, that choice, from consumers. Two, in many cases, natural gas remains the lowest cost and even lowest-emissions resource for many consumers. A lot of the policies we’re seeing that are designed to restrict natural gas may end up having a counterproductive result and could increase costs to consumers and could increase the emissions associated with the energy use by those consumers.”
The DOE announced last year that the efficiency standards could potentially save the average family about $100 per annum. It also boasted that these rules would cut carbon emissions by 373 million metric tons and methane emissions by 5.1 million tons. But, one might wonder, at what cost to the individual consumer?
Francis Dietz, a spokesperson for the Air-Conditioning, Heating, and Refrigeration Institute which represents heating equipment manufacturers, pointed out that his organization’s members seek regulations that are reasonable.
“Our main goal in this is to have a rule that is reasonable enough so that there are still higher efficiency choices for consumers,” he shared. “So, you know, you would have one at a level low enough where it would be more affordable for consumers and others who felt they needed even more efficiency would still have some choices there. That’s really our main goal.”
Sadly, these rules appear amidst a flood of DOE rulemaking that targets appliance efficiency standards. Recently, the DOE rolled out new standards for various appliances including gas stoves, ovens, clothes washers, refrigerators, air conditioners, and dishwashers.
In December, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm proudly declared the administration had made 110 actions on energy efficiency standards in 2022 alone. She further lauded these regulations for boosting U.S. leadership in “the race towards a clean energy future.”
The current federal Unified Agenda reveals the Biden administration’s plan to advance rules impacting even more appliances, including pool pumps, battery chargers, ceiling fans, and dehumidifiers.
The DOE’s mission statement has energy efficiency and conservation as one of its five pillars. However, Democrats and environmentalists’ insistence that electrification, banning natural gas hookups, and implementing rigorous energy efficiency standards will expedite emissions reductions may not take into account the resulting burden on the average American.
The question remains: Do these regulations genuinely serve the people they purport to protect, or do they instead infringe upon their freedoms, choices, and financial stability? The true impact of such sweeping regulations on our day-to-day lives will be enormous and expensive.
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Our honeymoon with electric vehicles is over so, for now, my advice is to hang on to your old petrol motor
By ROWAN ATKINSON
Electric motoring is, in theory, a subject about which I should know something. My first university degree was in electrical and electronic engineering, with a subsequent master’s in control systems.
Combine this, perhaps surprising, academic pathway with a lifelong passion for the motorcar, and you can see why I was drawn into an early adoption of electric vehicles.
I bought my first electric hybrid 18 years ago and my first pure electric car nine years ago and (notwithstanding our poor electric charging infrastructure) have enjoyed my time with both very much.
Electric vehicles may be a bit soulless, but they’re wonderful mechanisms: fast, quiet and, until recently, very cheap to run. But increasingly, I feel a little duped. When you start to drill into the facts, electric motoring doesn’t seem to be quite the environmental panacea it is claimed to be.
As you may know, the Government has proposed a ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars from 2030. The problem with the initiative is that it seems to be largely based on conclusions drawn from only one part of a car’s operating life: what comes out of the exhaust pipe.
Electric cars, of course, have zero exhaust emissions, which is a welcome development, particularly in respect of the air quality in city centres. But if you zoom out a bit and look at a bigger picture that includes the car’s manufacture, the situation is very different.
In advance of the Cop26 climate conference in Glasgow in 2021, Volvo released figures claiming that greenhouse gas emissions during production of an electric car are nearly 70 per cent higher than when manufacturing a petrol one.
How so? The problem lies with the lithium-ion batteries fitted currently to nearly all electric vehicles: they’re absurdly heavy, huge amounts of energy are required to make them, and they are estimated to last only upwards of ten years.
It seems a perverse choice of hardware with which to lead the automobile’s fight against the climate crisis.
Unsurprisingly, a lot of effort is going into finding something better.
New, so-called solid-state batteries are being developed that should charge more quickly and could be about a third of the weight of the current ones — but they are years away from being on sale, by which time, of course, we will have made millions of overweight electric cars with rapidly obsolescing batteries.
Hydrogen is emerging as an interesting alternative fuel, even though we are slow in developing a truly ‘green’ way of manufacturing it. It can be used in one of two ways. It can power a hydrogen fuel cell (essentially, a kind of battery); the car manufacturer Toyota has poured a lot of money into the development of these.
Such a system weighs half of an equivalent lithium-ion battery and a car can be refuelled with hydrogen at a filling station as fast as with petrol.
If the lithium-ion battery is an imperfect device for electric cars, concerns have been raised over their use in heavy trucks for long distance haulage because of the weight; an alternative is to inject hydrogen into a new kind of piston engine.
JCB, the company that makes yellow diggers, has made huge strides with hydrogen engines and hopes to put them into production in the next couple of years.
If hydrogen wins the race to power trucks — and as a result every filling station stocks it — it could be a popular and accessible choice for cars.
But let’s zoom out even further and consider the whole life cycle of an automobile.
The biggest problem we need to address in society’s relationship with the car is the ‘fast fashion’ sales culture that has been the commercial template of the car industry for decades.
Currently, on average we keep our new cars for only three years before selling them on, driven mainly by the ubiquitous three-year leasing model.
This seems an outrageously profligate use of the world’s natural resources when you consider what great condition a three-year-old car is in.
When I was a child, any car that was five years old was a bucket of rust and halfway through the gate of the scrapyard. Not any longer. You can now make a car for £15,000 that, with tender loving care, will last for 30 years.
It’s sobering to think that if the first owners of new cars just kept them for five years, on average, instead of the current three, then car production and the CO2 emissions associated with it, would be vastly reduced.
Yet we’d be enjoying the same mobility, just driving slightly older cars.
We need also to acknowledge what a great asset we have in the cars that currently exist (there are nearly 1.5 billion of them worldwide).
In terms of manufacture, these cars have paid their environmental dues and, although it is sensible to reduce our reliance on them, it would seem right to look carefully at ways of retaining them while lowering their polluting effect. Fairly obviously, we could use them less.
As an environmentalist once said to me, if you really need a car, buy an old one and use it as little as possible.
A sensible thing to do would be to speed up the development of synthetic fuel, which is already being used in motor racing; it’s a product based on two simple notions: one, the environmental problem with a petrol engine is the petrol, not the engine and, two, there’s nothing in a barrel of oil that can’t be replicated by other means.
Formula One is going to use synthetic fuel from 2026. There are many interpretations of the idea but the German car company Porsche is developing a fuel in Chile using wind to power a process whose main ingredients are water and carbon dioxide.
Longevity
With more development, it should be usable in all petrol-engine cars, rendering their use virtually CO2-neutral.
Increasingly, I’m feeling that our honeymoon with electric cars is coming to an end, and that’s no bad thing: we’re realising that a wider range of options need to be explored if we’re going to properly address the very serious environmental problems that our use of the motor car has created.
We should keep developing hydrogen, as well as synthetic fuels to save the scrapping of older cars which still have so much to give, while simultaneously promoting a quite different business model for the car industry, in which we keep our new vehicles for longer, acknowledging their amazing but overlooked longevity.
Friends with an environmental conscience often ask me, as a car person, whether they should buy an electric car. I tend to say that if their car is an old diesel and they do a lot of city centre motoring, they should consider a change.
But otherwise, hold fire for now. Electric propulsion will be of real, global environmental benefit one day, but that day has yet to dawn.
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7 June, 2023
The Arctic could have an ice free summer as soon as the 2030s – a decade earlier than previously thought
The usual modelling nonsense from the usual people. One wonders how their prophecy fits with the recent finding showing that the Antarctic ice area has GROWN by 5305 km2 from 2009-2019.
No wonder that Warmists like the Arctic and ignore the Antarctic. That the two might balance one-snother out is just too unthinkable for them. Someone should tell then that both are part of the globe. Link to the Antarctic study below:
https://tc.copernicus.org/articles/17/2059/2023/
Arctic sea ice grows and shrinks according to the time of the year, but a study published in Nature Communications on Wednesday reveals the overall area has been declining during recent decades, with the trend accelerating since 2000.
The sixth assessment report of the IPCC (International Panel on Climate Change) claimed the Arctic would be “practically ice-free” in September (the end of the Arctic summer) by around 2050, but the new modelling produced by South Korean and German scientists shows this could now occur as early as the 2030s.
Of particular concern, the researchers found this would happen even under the IPCC’s second-most optimistic emissions scenario, called SSP1-2.6, in which the entire world gets to net zero some time after 2050, and global temperature increases stop at 1.8°C by the end of the century.
Temperatures have already risen 1.1°C above the pre-industrial average, and are all but guaranteed to rise higher, given emissions of the greenhouse gases which cause global warming are still increasing.
“These results emphasise the profound impacts of greenhouse gas emissions on the Arctic, and demonstrate the importance of planning for and adapting to a seasonally ice-free Arctic in the near future,” the authors stated in their report.
Emeritus Professor David Karoly from the University of Melbourne, an internationally recognised expert on climate change and climate variability, said the loss of Arctic sea ice would itself further accelerate global warming.
“The sea ice in the Arctic region is critically important for reflecting sunlight back out to space. When it disappears, there’s no longer as much reflection … which means more sunlight is absorbed into the ocean waters in spring and summer … and that means faster warming,” he said.
While that was a massive concern, some countries would perceive benefits from an ice-free Arctic, Prof Karoly said.
“Shipping from the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic Ocean and vice versa is much shorter and much cheaper if it goes through an ice free Arctic than if it has to go through the Panama Canal or the Suez Canal,” he said. “That is very relevant to some countries like Russia and China.”
Another possible “positive” from the melting of Arctic sea ice was that it might lead to a weakening of the so-called “polar vortexes” which occasionally smash the US, Europe and China, Prof Karoly said.
While Antarctica had traditionally not experienced the same scale of ice loss as the Arctic, Prof Karoly said, over the past five years the southern continent had also experienced “large declines” in its sea ice.
Last month researchers from the University of NSW showed the melting of Antarctic ice had already slowed deep ocean currents by 30 per cent.
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Thank the green-energy cult for major blackouts this summer
Summer’s coming. That means sunshine, swimming, cookouts — and blackouts. That’s the warning from the North American Electric Reliability Corporation.
According to NERC, at least two-thirds of the country is at risk for major power outages this summer. This extends to most everyone west of the Mississippi except for Texas.
Texas and much of the Midwest will be fine, the report says, so long as we don’t experience hot, windless summer days.
Well, that’s a relief. When do we ever get hot, windless summer days in Texas and the Midwest?
Part of the problem is the steady removal of fossil-fuel plants from the grid.
These plants are supposed to be replaced by renewables — wind and solar — but wind doesn’t work on windless days, and solar doesn’t keep your air conditioning running on steamy nights.
The Wall Street Journal reports the Environmental Protection Agency has made things worse with new nitrogen-oxides rules from its recently finalized “Good Neighbor Plan, which requires fossil-fuel power plants in 22 states to reduce NOx emissions. NERC predicts power plants will comply by limiting hours of operation but warns they may need regulatory waivers in the event of a power crunch.”
The Journal notes, “The EPA claimed the rule wouldn’t jeopardize grid reliability, but then why would power plants need waivers to prevent blackouts?”
Why indeed?
There are other technical problems, too: Faulty solar inverters are in widespread use, and these can fail and make grid problems worse.
The Journal’s advice: Buy an emergency generator while stores still have them; don’t wait until later this summer when everyone will want one. (Done!)
We had a warm-up (chill-down?) for this crisis last winter, when many places experienced rolling blackouts due to inadequate power supplies in the face of cold temperatures that were not, in fact, unusually cold.
My own area in Knoxville, Tenn., saw temperatures in the single digits, which are not that unusual but which power-company hacks called “unprecedented.”
Knoxville’s lowest temperature was 24 below, back in 1985, and they managed to keep the lights on for that. But that was before the Tennessee Valley Authority started shutting down coal, nuclear and gas plants.
What used to be one of the nation’s best areas for cheap abundant power — that’s why much of the Manhattan Project was located nearby — now faces rolling blackouts because the weather is chilly.
But it wasn’t just TVA. Duke Energy apologized to its customers for rolling blackouts, too.
It was a problem across a wide area amid temperatures that, while chilly, were really nothing so bad as to justify widespread shutdowns.
New York is not looking great, as state regulations are forcing gas and oil “peaker” plants — quick-start power plants that can help meet peak demand in a crisis — offline.
Utilities that can’t meet peak demand have to engage in “load-shedding” via rolling blackouts or face total collapse. That just got harder.
Why is all this happening now?
The short answer is the people running things care more about green politics than they care about the quality of life of the people they’re supposed to be serving.
A sensible regulatory system would put grid reliability at the top of the priority list.
When power goes out, people’s lives are disrupted, the old and sick are put at risk (in the heat and especially in the cold), businesses have to shut down and lose money, workers forgo pay, and the entire atmosphere shifts closer to that of a decrepit Third World nation.
If you cared about both the planet and the people, you wouldn’t take power plants offline until you’d put enough new capacity online to replace them and meet projected additional demand.
And you wouldn’t make unreliable technologies like wind and solar, which tend to fail when they’re most needed, the mainstay of your generating scheme.
To its credit, TVA, at least, is working to build more nuclear plants, which are both carbon-free and highly reliable, to bolster its capacity.
But I doubt we’ll see that in New York or California any time soon — though many European nations recognize nuclear as a greenhouse-friendly source of power. (And one we’ll need even more if the government’s plan to replace most vehicles with electrics goes forward.)
But we’re not seeing sensible, people-friendly energy policies in very many places across America. That’s because we don’t have sensible, people-friendly leadership.
In fact, if the people running things wanted to make ordinary Americans’ lives worse, what would they be doing differently?
As you ponder that question, consider buying a generator. I did.
https://nypost.com/2023/06/05/thank-the-green-energy-cult-for-major-blackouts-this-summer/
******************************************Unions lambast British Labour party over ‘naive’ green energy plan
Two of Labour’s biggest union backers have criticised a central pillar of Sir Keir Starmer’s green strategy.
Gary Smith, general secretary of the GMB, joined Unite’s Sharon Graham yesterday in criticising the pledge to ban new licences for oil and gas extraction in the North Sea. He said the proposals were naive and displayed a “lack of intellectual rigour and thinking”.
Smith told Sky’s Sophy Ridge on Sunday: “Their policies are going to create a cliff-edge with oil and gas extraction from the North Sea.”
He said he thought that workers in the petrochemical industry “are going to be very worried about what Labour are saying and I think it is time for Labour to focus on the right thing rather than what they think is the popular thing”.
While vowing to ban new drilling, Starmer has said that Labour would allow existing North Sea projects to continue until 2050.
Last week Graham, general secretary of Unite, warned that “Labour must now be very clear that they will not let workers pay the price for the transition to renewable energy”.
She said: “We cannot have a repeat of the devastation wrought on workers and their communities by the closure of the coalmines. It is reckless in the extreme to talk about halting this industry without offering a coherent, fully funded plan for jobs.”
Last year the GMB and Unite each gave Labour about £1.2 million.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/unions-lambast-labour-over-naive-green-energy-plan-rtxmrzvcp
************************************************The totalitarian roots of the anti-human environmentalist cult
The modern environmentalist movement is often compared to a pantheistic religion. It certainly contains a vision of sin and repentance – damnation and salvation.
At the Copenhagen climate change summit in December 2009, then Prince Charles, now King Charles III, warned that the survival of mankind itself was in peril and a mere seven years remained ‘before we lose the levers of control’ over the climate.
We should always take care of the environment, be responsible with its protection, and, at the same time, help the poor. And yet if the demands of radical environmentalists were to be met, they would have a deleterious effect on world standards of living, particularly among poorer nations.
For example, efforts to convince world governments to cut carbon emissions has made energy less affordable and accessible, which drives up the costs of consumer products, stifles economic growth, and imposes especially harmful effects on the poor. Arguably, ‘allocating monetary resources to help build sewage treatment plants, enhance sanitation, and provide clean water for poor people would have a greater immediate impact on their plight than would the battle over global warming’. (D. James Kennedy PhD and Jerry Newcombe, How Would Jesus Vote? A Christian Perspective on the Issues (WaterBrook Press, 2008) 144.)
We are constantly told that the temperature is increasing, the seas are rising, the ice is shrinking, and the polar bears are vanishing. These claims are not supported by conclusive evidence; indeed the opposite appears to be the case considering predictions always fail. However, the belief that carbon dioxide emissions are heating up the Earth’s atmosphere to a catastrophic degree has been afforded the status of incontestable faith. Australia has even created a government Minister for ‘Climate Change’, suggesting absurdly that politicians can influence the weather! It should come as no surprise that the Australian government has embraced the idea that global warming is happening, humans are to blame, and that doing something drastic about it is in Australia’s best interest.
Global warming theory rests on the belief that rising CO2 levels drive up the temperature of the atmosphere. Despite this degree of terrifying environmental alarmism and crippling government spending to curb ‘carbon emissions’, historically, temperature increases have often preceded high CO2 levels, destroying this theory of cause and effect. Our world has always warmed and cooled. The theory of anthropomorphic global warming contradicts what we know historically to be the case.
‘The public shaming and bullying of any scientist who differs from climate change orthodoxy is eerily reminiscent of a latter-day Salem Witch-trial or Spanish Inquisition, with public floggings meted out – metaphorically speaking – for their thought crimes. Indeed, “dissenters”, as they have also been labelled, suffer ritual humiliation at the hands of their colleagues and the media, with their every motivation questioned and views pilloried.’ (James Paterson, ‘Tim Flannery: Climate Prophet’, IPA Review, June 2011, 9.)
Curiously, just as cancel culture and historical revisionism has roots in Maoism, elements of modern environmentalism are beginning to bear more resemblance to a certain totalitarian movement than a scientific community.
During the interwar period, there was particular association between environmentalists and German nationalists, among whom a number subsequently became Nazis. ‘Environmentalists and conservationists in Germany welcomed the rise of the Nazi regime with open arms and hoped that it would bring about legal and institutional changes.’ According to Kaitlin Smith, a Boston-based scholar and naturalist educator:
‘Nazi leadership ardently championed renewable energy and institutionalised organic farming and land use planning on a level unmatched by any nation past or present. These environmental policies might seem like a welcome departure from the rest of Nazi propaganda, but their environmentalism was actually grounded in the same racist worldview that shaped the Holocaust.’
Historians generally agree that Alfred Seifert ‘spoke the language of the emerging ecological movement’. He was a ‘charismatic leader of a coterie of like-minded people’ who has been characterised as ‘the most prominent environmentalist in the Third Reich’. Seifert went on to become ‘a key figure in the postwar environmental movement in Germany’. From 1934 onward, he headed a group of Nazi officials whose role was to oversee the ecological impact of public works projects sponsored by Hitler’s regime. His positions became official in 1935 and continued to be so in the war years, emphasizing that ‘previous generations had disrupted the “balance” of the natural world and failed to take a “holistic view” of the environment’. But this destructive approach, which was ‘alien to nature’, Seifert believed that it finally ‘had been overcome thanks to the leadership of the Third Reich’.
Seifert promoted an environmentalist worldview that shared fundamental points of contact with the ‘blood and soil’ principles of National Socialism. In October 1934, he was portrayed as the paragon of a ‘truly National Socialist’ approach to environmental issues. Seifert, in turn, published a vast number of articles in Nazi periodicals ‘outlining his amalgam of environmentalism and National Socialism’. After repeated requests from environmentalist advocates who expressed confidence in his work and its importance to Germany’s future, Seifert was promoted to the civilian equivalent of general in 1944. He was a frequent visitor to the Dachau extermination camp, and ‘cooperated closely with its head gardener, SS officer Franz Lippert, who was responsible for maintaining biodynamic standards’. Active in the Nazi regime during the second world war, ‘Seifert’s collaboration on the Dachau project continued until shortly before the liberation of the camp in 1945’.
Above all, many Nazi leaders embraced a naturalist worldview and animal welfare was a significant issue in the Nazi regime. Hermann Göring, one of the most powerful figures in the Nazi dictatorship, was a professed animal lover who, on instructions of Hitler, committed those who violated Nazi animal welfare laws to concentration camps. Heinrich Himmler, the Reichsführer of the Schutzstaffel (SS), was a vegetarian and certified animal rights activist who aggressively promoted the idea of ‘natural healing’ who, As Anna Bramwell observes, ‘SS training included respect for animal life of near Buddhist proportions’.
The Nazis did not show such a respect, of course, for human beings. In hindsight, it may not be difficult to reconcile such Nazi views with an environment orientation. In the eyes of Nazi environmentalists, ‘the privations of war encouraged a renewed emphasis on self-sufficiency and sustainability, allowing Germans to find their way back to the soil and its living forces’.
‘For some green-leaning Nazis … the war and destruction were necessary evils since they would bring about a new order that would finally allow the establishment of a better and greener Germany.’ (Marc Cioc Franz-Josef Brueggemeier and Thoams Zeller, How Green Were the Nazis? Nature, Environment, and Nation ain the Third Reich (Ohio University Press, 2005) 14.)
Hitler himself was a vegetarian who wanted to turn the entire nation vegetarian. In his diaries, Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels reports numerous private conversations with Hitler, including a December 19, 1939, talk in which the Nazi leader contends that humans ‘are not removed from other animals’. After trying to convince Goebbels on the virtues of vegetarianism, he argued that the human species had evolved from reptiles through mammals, and that he did ‘not think much of Homo Sapiens’. Peter Staudenmaier, a history professor at Marquette University, comments:
‘Hitler and Himmler were both strict vegetarians and animal lovers, attracted to nature mysticism and homeopathic cures, and staunchly opposed to vivisection and cruelty to animals. Himmler even established experimental organic farms to grow herbs for SS medicinal purposes. And Hitler, at times, could sound like a veritable Green Utopian, discussing authoritatively and in details various renewable sources (including environmentally appropriate hydropower and producing natural gas from sludge) as alternatives to coal, and declaring “water, winds and tides” the energy path of the future.’
In his youth, Hitler studied yoga, astrology, and various forms of Eastern occultism. The Nazi leader believed that, in the long run, Nazism and Christianity would ‘no longer be able to exist together’. For him, once the Nazis finally prevailed in the war, Germany would be able to restore ‘their paganism of antiquity’ and the Germans embrace a new form of ‘Mother-Earth’ worship as a substitute for the ‘Jewish bondage of law’. According to Nazi philosopher Ernst Bergmann of Leipzig University, the Germans needed to embrace a new spirituality whereby everyone should live in complete harmony with nature. Influenced by ‘forces of nature’, Bermann stated, the Germans would be ‘re-born in the womb of Mother Earth’ and rediscover ‘the God that is in us’.
Arguably, the idea of cooperation with the natural world appears to be incompatible with the genocidal policies of the Nazi dictatorship. ‘How could people who spoused ‘a new appreciation for the environment’ and ‘ecological balance’ and ‘the harmony with nature’ have anything to do with Hitler’s war of conquest, racial resettlement, and concentration camps?’ asks Staudenmaier rhetorically. According to him:
‘The seemingly uncanny convergence between blood and soil ideology and modern ecological concepts makes more historical sense when seen in the context of early environmental talk. In the first decades of the twentieth century, in Germany as elsewhere, racial beliefs and environmental sentiments often went hand in hand. A stance that combined landscape aesthetics, ecological concern, and racial pride was not an anomaly, but shared by most conservationists.’
The legacy of Nazi environmentalism poses a dilemma for modern environmentalists. If modern environmentalism was to take off, it has to shed its unhappy links with fascism, anti-humanism, and authoritarian-style implementation. As Professor Staudenmaier points out:
‘The necessary project of creating emancipatory ecological politics demands an acute awareness and understanding of the legacy of classical ecofascism and its conceptual continuities with present-day environmental discourse … the record of fascist ecology shows that under the right conditions such an orientation can quickly lead to barbarism.’
Some of the Nazis’ essentially irrationalist anti-humanism remains intrinsic to environmentalist thinking. Accordingly, modern environmentalism generally demonstrates the same disregard regard for the human life. Within the modern environmentalist movement, there are those that continue to refer to human beings as an invasive virus, a plague, and a problem that the world would be better without.
A growing number of environmentalists have succumbed to the highly dangerous notion that there is nothing special about human life.
It is hard to imagine anything more terrifying than living in a culture where human life is made relative to lesser values. Instead of seeing humans as precious creatures conceived in the image of God, many environmentalists presently see their fellow humans as the cause of all the earth’s problems, especially global warming.
We have come to the point that even new human life is seen as a threat to the environment, where some argue that they represent a source of green house gases and a consumer of natural resources. This thinking is leading conversations about the West adopting population control measures similar to the Communist China one-child policy.
Tragically, not only are the younger generations being convinced not to have children due to fear of endangering the planet, they are also terminating their healthy pregnancy with some going so far as to openly claim that it was done in service of climate goals. Children, in this context, are increasingly seen as being a selfish act.
It is deeply disturbing to see a woman describe motherhood as something entirely negative, and to believe that having children is morally wrong. Forgoing children is being promoted as environmentally friendly while childless women are doing their bit to reduce the carbon footprint of civilisation.
Unfortunately, much of today’s environmental movement contains an anti-humanism that promotes the elimination of people. It is built on the alarmist narrative that if nothing is done, human life will bring the destruction of the global ecosystem therefore the active decline of society, even at the expense of children, is a worthy cause.
This sort of attitude betrays a desire to bring death and destruction at a large scale. Although such sentiments are deeply disturbing, what links this to some other environmentalists is their shared desire to exterminate a great proportion of the world’s population in search of some Utopian small number of sustainable survivors.
The point is that evil can be and often is perpetrated under the guise of doing good and the fanatical environmentalists err morally by believing that their vision of ‘saving the planet’ should be imposed regardless of the present human cost. Accordingly, contemporary environmentalist ideas that were central to fascist movements – about the organic harmony of the earth, the elevation of animal rights, and the denigration of human as enemies of nature – are today vividly presented as the acme of environmentalist thinking. As such, of course, environmentalism’s fundamental opposition to progress and modernity propels it straight into the arms of neofascism.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/06/the-totalitarian-roots-of-the-anti-human-environmentalist-cult
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The Social Cost of Carbon game
[Canadian] Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault recently announced that the Social Cost of Carbon (SCC), or the dollar value of supposed damages associated with each tonne of carbon dioxide emissions, is about $247, nearly five times higher than the old estimate of $54. He made it sound like a discovery, as if a bunch of experts had finally been able to measure something they previously only guessed at. Like when scientists were finally able to measure the mass of an electron or the age of the Earth, now finally we can measure the SCC.
But in reality there has been no breakthrough in economics comparable to those physics breakthroughs. Countless SCC estimates already exist ranging from small negative amounts (i.e. carbon dioxide emissions are beneficial) to many thousands of dollars per tonne. Every such estimate is like a complex “if-then” statement: if the following assumptions hold, then the SCC is $X. Yale economist William Nordhaus won the 2018 Nobel Memorial Prize in economics for developing some of the first methods for combining all the “if” statements into systems called Integrated Assessment Models or IAMs. And using conventional economic and climate modelling methods, he tended to get pretty low SCC values over the years, which has long been a sore point among climate activists and the politicians who share their agenda.
But economists are on the case. The $247 figure referenced by Guilbeault comes from a new report from the Biden administration that tossed out all the previous models, including Nordhaus’s, and instead cobbled together a set of new models that when run together yield much higher SCC values.
In many ways the new models are just like the old ones. For example they persist in using an Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity of 3 degrees C. This refers to the warming expected from doubling the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. The authors cite the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as the basis for this decision, apparently unaware that that estimate has already been shown in the climate literature to be flawed. Using the IPCC’s own method on updated data yields a sensitivity estimate of about 2.2 C or less, and as I have shown in a recent publication this is enough to cause the SCC estimate in a standard model to drop to nearly zero.
The biggest boosts to the new SCC figure hailed by Guilbeault come from revisions to agricultural productivity impacts and mortality costs from climate warming. The evidence for large negative agricultural impacts comes from a 2017 article by Frances Moore and co-authors that looked at the combined effects of CO2 fertilization and warming, concluding the net effect would harm global agriculture. Oddly, they used the same data as a 2014 study by Andrew Challinor and co-authors who had found the opposite: the combination of increased CO2 and warming would have much more benign, and in some cases even beneficial, results.
How did Moore et al. get different results from the same data? They used a different statistical model but unfortunately didn’t provide evidence showing it is better than the one Challinor used, so it’s unclear whose results are stronger. But we know whose are more popular. The Biden administration team referred only to the Moore study and left out any mention of the Challinor one, and it is a safe assumption that the reviewers didn’t notice the omission. See how the game is played?
https://financialpost.com/opinion/junk-science-week-social-cost-of-carbon-game
**************************************************Lloyd’s of London latest in long list of net zero alliance quitters
Lloyd's of London has become the latest insurer to quit the United Nation’s Net Zero Insurance Alliance (NZIA), as US political pressure and fears of antitrust lawsuits grow.
“Lloyd’s has decided to withdraw from the NZIA with immediate effect,” the company said on Friday.
“We continue to support the UN’s principles for sustainable insurance and sustainable development goals, and remain committed to delivering our sustainability strategy including supporting the global economy’s transition.”
Lloyd’s has joined the likes of AXA, Allianz and QBE in fleeing from the alliance in recent weeks, as membership of the group fell to just 17 firms as of Tuesday, from 30 in March.
Members of the NZIA, which was set up under GFANZ in 2021 by ex-Bank of England governor Mark Carney, have faced scrutiny from US Republican politicians over climate commitments, alongside fears of competition lawsuits such as collusion.
“As the Net-Zero Insurance Alliance disintegrates before our eyes, we must ask why these huge companies with their hordes of lawyers did not see antitrust issues [before],” Reclaim Finance analyst Patrick McCully commented on the departures last week.
“We must wonder whether their ditching of the alliance has more to do with fears of losing business in the US than real legal jeopardy.”
The United Nations had stressed the need for collaboration in cutting emissions, though the calls were not enough to prevent the wave of exiting firms from growing.
Aviva PLC (LSE:AV.) and Beazley PLC (LSE:BEZ) were among the alliance’s remaining members on Monday afternoon.
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The great heat pump hype is almost dead
Has a product ever looked and sounded so boring yet excited such passions as the domestic air source heat pump? It might be a dumpy white box with a fan, but for some people it is the device which is going to save human civilisation by decarbonising one of the big sources of emissions: home heating. For many others it looks like a con – an expensive and substandard piece of kit which the Government is forcing down our throats as it panics about trying to fulfil its foolish, self-imposed target of hitting net zero by 2050.
For those in the former camp, a new report by the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) does not make comfortable reading. The CMA looked at the marketing of heat pumps and other products and concluded that some buyers are at risk of being misled. It looked at claims made by a sample of businesses on websites and other advertising and found that in only a fifth of cases were claims backed up by evidence. Among them, for example, was a claim that “you can save up to £1335 with an air source heat pump”. It also warned that claims about the environmental and cost-saving benefits of these products are not always based on “real world” conditions, such as the weather or the size of homes.
The truth is that whether you will save money running a heat pump depends on what you are replacing it with, and on the relative price of electricity versus the fuel you are currently using. Even the Government’s energy quango, the Energy Savings Trust, doesn’t hold out the prospect of great savings. Replace a new A-rated gas boiler with an air source heat pump and you might save £115 a year, it claimed. Replace a new A-rated oil boiler with a heat pump, it said, and it could cost you an extra £130 a year. It is only if you are replacing a 30 year old boiler or storage heaters that you can expect to save hundreds of pounds a year on running costs.
But all that depends on the heat pump being installed properly – something which some aggrieved customers are finding has not been done in their case. One Telegraph reader last week complained of spending £20,000 installing an air source heat pump, supposedly with a seven-year year manufacture guarantee and a two-year guarantee through the company that had installed it. When it broke down, it turned out the installer had gone bust.
There, encapsulated in one case study, is the problem with heat pumps. They are horrendously expensive to install, and as a nation we seem not to have the plumbing skills to install them properly at anything like the rate the Government is trying to get us to – it is seemingly aiming for 600,000 a year by the end of the decade.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/06/01/the-heat-pump-hype-is-finally-dying/ ?
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The poor are being priced out of air travel
Nothing better illuminates the elitism of the green lobby than its loathing of cheap flights. The eco-aware have sleepless nights thinking about plebs jetting off for two weeks in Magaluf. ‘All that pollution for a holiday that involves little more than getting pissed by the pool?’, they snottily wonder. Green MP Caroline Lucas once wrung her hands over ‘cheap stag nights in Riga’ that puke yet more ‘emissions’ into the air. Commentators tut-tut over ‘violent, boozed-up Brits’ who enjoy ‘debauched weekends’ overseas thanks to cheap flying. Plane Stupid – the 2010s anti-flying movement run by plummy greens – condemned the ‘binge-flying’ of people who choose destinations ‘not for their architecture or culture’ but because you can ‘fly there for 99p and get loaded for a tenner’.
Class disdain drips from every word. The rabble-bashing of flyingphobes echoes the priestly handwringing that greeted the birth of mass tourism in the late 1800s. A ‘swarm of intrusive insects’ was how one Victorian moralist described the masses who traipsed to Bognor Regis or Land’s End for a few days’ sweet relief from work. Modern greens are far too PC to call anyone an insect (though an academic journal did say that cheap-flight tourism ‘uncannily resembles an auto-immune disease’, leaving ‘ruin and destruction’ in its wake, which isn’t much better). But they share with their Victorian forebears an urge to wash away the unsightly masses, whether from beauty spots like Land’s End or from the poor, stained skies that can take no more of man’s toxins. And they might finally get their way. Cheap flights are in trouble. The poor might have to content themselves with Bognor again.
News outlets are publishing obituaries for cheap flying. ‘Are cheap flights a thing of the past?’, asked Euro News this month. ‘Airfares are soaring in Europe and beyond’, it reported. They’ve leapt by 23.6 per cent in France, 18 per cent in the UK. Bloomberg put it more definitively. ‘No more cheap flights is the new reality for air travel’, it said last month. ‘Jetting off to the Mediterranean’ is going to get a whole lot harder, it reported. Not for everyone, though. People of means will still go to Spain, Italy, Greece. It’s the minimum-wage classes who will find the door to the world being slammed in their faces. As Bloomberg coyly said, better-off people will be ‘able to swallow the extra costs’. A story as old as time.
Why are cheap flights facing so much turbulence? There are various reasons. There’s still a pent-up demand to fly following the Covid lockdowns, which is increasing competition for flights, and thus increasing prices. There’s inflation. And there’s the hike in fuel costs following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. There is something else, too. There’s an ideology, a borderline religious belief, that has helped to bring about the expulsion of the poor from the sky. It’s called Net Zero. The pressure on airlines to be ‘greener’ is burdening them with extraordinary costs, and they’re passing those costs on to passengers.
Airlines are being instructed to ‘decarbonise’ in order that the Western world might meet its climate-change targets. New, strict climate-compliance laws are being introduced across Europe, forcing airlines to invest billions in the development of ‘sustainable’ fuel and eco-friendlier aircraft. The European airline sector has signed up to a plan called Destination 2050. That’s the Net Zero cult’s Armageddon year – the year by which we must have paid sufficient penance for our sins of industrial hubris if we want to stave off Mother Nature’s cruellest punishments. Airlines promise to radically reduce emissions by then. And who will pay? You and me. The International Council on Clean Transportation estimates that flight decarbonisation will cost around $1 trillion, causing ticket prices to bloat by 22 per cent by 2050.
So it is climate-change fanaticism that is pricing the poor out of the sky. Our eco-elites have decided that the freedom of the less well-off to see the world – a freedom only recently won – should be sacrificed to their feverish urge to offset every smidgen of carbon our species emits. The Net Zero drive is regressive taxation dolled up as ‘saving the planet’. Whether it’s London mayor Sadiq Khan’s green toll on diesel drivers, or EU carbon-cutting initiatives that make working life harder for farmers and truckers, or the eco-slaying of cheap flights, Net Zero is a backward, punishing ideology that hits working people hardest. Your right to work, to drive, to engage in the great, glorious pastime of travel – all are being laid lifeless at the altar of Net Zero.
Punitive eco-policies have one aim – to re-engineer the masses. As one eco-travel publication puts it, ‘Only an increase in airfare costs will significantly change our behaviour’. ‘Our’ – who are they kidding? They mean your behaviour. Note the contempt with which they say the word ‘cheap’. To them, ‘cheap travel’ is not only economically cheap – it’s morally cheap, too. It is without moral value. They sneer at stag nights in Eastern Europe, as if young men bonding before one of their number commits his entire life to another person is not an important, beautiful part of life. They mock pool holidays in Spain, unaware of how special those weeks are for people who work hard for a living. And they snobbishly assume that every cheap-flight patron is uninterested in ‘architecture or culture’, which is plainly false. I know people who’ve seen the art treasures of Florence and the cathedrals of Italy largely thanks to the opening up of air travel to working people and even the poor.
This is why they think it’s fine for them to keep on flying: because their travel is virtuous. Luvvie Emma Thompson will keep jetting across the Atlantic to attend Extinction Rebellion protests. Climate tsar John Kerry will still be on his private jet. Leonardo DiCaprio will carry on flitting between delivering eco-sermons and flying thousands of miles on luxury aircraft. Harry and Meghan will still fly to hang with Elton John even as they tell the rest of us to offset our dirty travel. Because where we are ‘cheap’ – not just our flights but our lives – they are righteous. ‘I am more important than you’ – that’s what the eco-elites are saying, without saying it, like every elite before them.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/06/01/the-poor-are-being-priced-out-of-the-sky/ ?
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5 June, 2023
If agglomeration economies require urban densification why are Houston, Paris and Atlanta so successful?
The Greenie idea of "smart growth" is based on a false theory
Agglomeration theory has always bugged me. Ever since I first encountered it doing my masters degree, the idea that economic and technical advancement is determined, in large part, by the density of urban environments has seemed like the urbanist version of the labour theory of value - superficially appealing but in the end not even close to the whole story.
There’s a very good essay written by John Myers, Ben Southwood and Sam Bowman called ‘The Housing Theory of Everything’ which posits that the failure to build enough housing exacerbates all the other malaises of western economies:
“Try listing every problem the Western world has at the moment. Along with Covid, you might include slow growth, climate change, poor health, financial instability, economic inequality, and falling fertility. These longer-term trends contribute to a sense of malaise that many of us feel about our societies. They may seem loosely related, but there is one big thing that makes them all worse. That thing is a shortage of housing: too few homes being built where people want to live.”
As readers will know, I have a load of sympathy with the idea that many of the economic and social problems facing western societies would be mitigated if not eliminated by having genuinely affordable housing (without the need for price fixing or public subsidy). But I don’t see overpriced housing being, in and of itself, the cause of a parallel problem, poor productivity. And it is productivity that is the principle (perhaps the only) gain from urban agglomeration - we get from proximity what are called agglomeration economies. These come from three sources usually called pooling, matching and learning: labour and supply is pooled, that labour and supply is better matched to opportunity, and the concentration of people results in organised and serendipitous learning. Some add a fourth source of agglomeration economy - greater amenity (or the ‘consumer city’ as we might call it).
All of this makes sense until we spot that outcomes are not consistent with this theory since the economic performance of places does not map simply onto levels of urban density. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York commissioned some research looking at the extent to which productivity is linked to the density of human capital - one of the fundamental assumptions of agglomeration theory. The research found that there was no correlation between density and productivity, at least in aggregate.
When they dug down into the data, it became clear that, while for lots of industries there were no obvious agglomeration economies, for some the gains were very large. And these industries - finance, arts & entertainment, professional services and information - are the industries we most associate with successful dense urban places.
Agglomeration, it seems, isn’t quite the silver bullet that city boosters argue, indeed there’s a school of thought which says the only thing that matters is the gross size of the metropolitan area rather than the intensity of human capital within that urban area:
“The shape of the city in space, including for example its residential density, matter much less than (and are mostly accounted for by) population size in predicting indicators of urban performance. Said more explicitly, whether a city looks more like New York or Boston or instead like Los Angeles or Atlanta has a vanishing effect in predicting its socio-economic performance.”
We know that places that have allowed cities to expand (Houston, Paris, Atlanta) have lower housing costs than places where expansion has been constrained by public policy (Sydney, London, San Francisco). We also know that there is no obvious connection between encouraging density through policy - densification has, in effect, been UK government policy since 1997 - and improvements in productivity. Indeed, the use of policy to densify human capital results instead in an increased competition between potential land uses within the city with the effect of driving up not only residential rents but also rents for commercial, industrial and leisure uses.
Given that urban density in and of itself isn’t the main reason for agglomeration economies and the associated evidence that constraining land use at the urban margin results in higher housing costs, we should be cautious in seeing policy ideas such as street votes as any sort of panacea for unaffordable housing. Nor should we focus more on new public transport infrastructure than we do on roads and active travel. For cities with an established and scaled mass transit system (London, New York, Tokyo) further intensification of public transport makes sense, but for large cities without these legacy systems the construction of new fixed rail introduces a measure of inflexibility and is extremely expensive. Moreover the nature of large urban areas without legacy metro networks is very polycentric.
A large urban metropolis like Los Angeles, developed largely during the age of the car and, therefore, focused on freeways and personal vehicles, has evolved with a multitude of urban centres. One study of LA concluded that:
“The interplay of agglomeration at different geographic levels suggests a highly complex and connected space economy. Large metropolitan areas have the advantage of scale, offering a highly diverse and specialized labor force, dense networks of intermediate suppliers, and extensive transport and communication systems. The presence of multiple centers likely lowers the land, wage, and congestion costs of agglomeration by geographically spreading economic activity while still preserving agglomeration benefits.”
When we look at the strategies followed by the UK’s metropolitan mayors, we see plans that take the polycentric urban areas of the West Midlands, Greater Manchester and West Yorkshire and seek to impose a single centre model, the complete opposite of the successful model evolving in more productive places such as Los Angeles, Atlanta and Houston. Instead groups like Centre for Cities select very dense European cities like Milan or Barcelona as models resulting in a focus on very expensive public transport systems rather than less expensive private road travel.
The reasoning behind this rejection of car-permissive urban strategies relates to the idea that private transport is inefficient and polluting whereas public transport (or active travel options such as cycling) is efficient and clean. The problem here is that the motor car is such a dominant part of our transport system that no substitute has the capacity to replace the car. We can (and should) encourage alternatives, especially in denser urban areas, and ideas like 15-minute cities have merit as a design principle rather than as an urban management strategy. Where there is no fixed rail mass transit system, installing one is disruptive, expensive and, if Manchester is a guide, not especially effective. Such systems seem more a badge of urban success than a creator of that urban success in the first place. Lots of French cities have trams but this isn’t necessarily a reason for those cities’ success (or indeed, as a place like Roubaix shows, lack of economic success).
Returning to familiar themes, Sam Bowman in his latest essay argues (rightly) that Britain needs to ends the vetocracy that is preventing economic growth and development - everything from too few homes in London through the inability to build a bridge over the Thames estuary to the chronic and crippling lack of laboratory space in and around Cambridge. I worry, however, that the focus on agglomeration leads to misplaced urban strategy:
“The big four, as I see them, are housing, childcare, transport and energy. The first three of these relate to “agglomeration” – the aggregate increases in productivity and innovation we get from letting people live and work near each other. That’s the root principle behind the “housing theory of everything” – a city is greater than the sum of its residents, because being close together lets them specialize and collaborate more deeply, and generate more useful ideas together, than if they were working in smaller towns, or alone.”
It isn’t the agglomeration economies per se but rather the assumption, as we see in Bowman’s essay, that the way to realise these economies is accelerated urban densification. This is despite Bowman telling us about Paris:
“Housing supply there is freer: the overall geographic extent of Paris’s metropolitan area roughly tripled between 1945 and today, whereas London’s has grown only a few percent”
The success of Paris, at least up to recent times, has been in its physical expansion - it is far more like Houston or Atlanta than London or San Francisco. And, while Britain is geographically smaller than France or Texas, this doesn’t mean our only option to meet housing needs and address declining productivity is to increase levels of urban density.
Bowman is right that the best way to deal with NIMBYs is to buy them off but, for all that I support its introduction, I don’t see the street votes idea working at scale. I do see a neighbourhood plan model working where, as Pierre Poilievre, Canada’s opposition leader proposes, national government funding for any community is predicated on the delivery of new housing. Communities can stop housing if they want but they lose government grants for their communities as a result. Just as important, this approach takes away the ‘no loss’ benefit from anti-housing campaigners. Somebody might get elected opposing new housing but in doing so they are also going to stop funding for the new sports centre, health facility, road link or bus station.
Urban agglomeration theory, especially the Jane Jacobs version where random encounters in the street or at a coffee shop create economic growth, is not a function of densification but a function of urban scale and the ability of residents to move freely around that metropolis. Transport and housing policies should focus on this ability to move from home to work, leisure and education rather than get trapped in prescriptive models based on assumptions about the impact of densification. We should, I feel, think more about enabling development rather than about controlling, managing or directing development. The fastest growing US cities, in economic terms as well as in terms of population, are not the dense urban legacy cities like San Francisco and New York but rather the sprawling new places in the Sun Belt and Texas. Maybe, instead of looking at Milan, Barcelona or Tokyo, UK economic planners should turn their eyes to Houston, Nashville and Atlanta?
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The non-existent subsidies for "fossil" fuels
A popular talking point among green energy evangelists is that gas, oil, and coal are, in large part, successful because they are highly subsidized. Wind and solar, so the argument goes, would win in a fair fight, but, alas, the playing field is far from fair. But the supposed data they are drawing on to come to such a conclusion is misleading and geared more toward generating headlines than good policy.
A primary source used to back this claim up is a working paper presented by a group of International Monetary Fund authors titled “Still Not Getting Energy Prices Right: A Global and Country Update of Fossil Fuel Subsidies.”
The paper claims that hydrocarbon-based fuels—like gas, oil, and coal—enjoy $5.9 trillion in subsidies annually. Though often presented in the media as an IMF paper, it is specifically not an official publication of the organization but rather a working paper that is meant to, according to the IMF, “elicit comments and to encourage debate.”
Well, here is your debate, IMF.
As is often the case with so-called academic studies, the top-line number here makes for a much better headline than it does a basis for public policy. Indeed, even a cursory look into how the study came to its fanciful conclusions shows how misleading it ultimately is in general and how trivial it is for the United States.
There are three basic problems with the study.
First, it so broadly defines “subsidy” as to be completely meaningless. In fact, the study states that only 8% of its reported costs reflect actual, direct subsidies. The rest predominantly comes from the amorphous “undercharging for environmental costs” that supposedly occur from the extraction, refining, transportation, and use of fossil fuels. Such environmental costs include “underpricing for local air pollution” (42%) and “global warming costs” (29%). What’s left goes to the equally tenuous congestion and road accidents costs (15%) and forgone tax revenues (6%).
Though characterizing any of these so-called indirect subsidies as a pro-hydrocarbon bias is problematic, we will focus on the undercharging environmental costs, which are divided between global warming and local air pollution, because they represent the preponderance of their calculations.
The problems with the global warming number are many. For example, there is virtually no evidence that man-made global warming is having any costly impact on today’s world. The real costs, if one buys into global warming alarmism, come in the future—thus the study relies on the extremely tenuous and theoretical social cost of carbon calculations.
As my Heritage Foundation colleague Kevin Dayaratna has pointed out, the use of the social cost of carbon is so unreliable that it is virtually useless as a basis for public policy.
Second, the study presents its overall findings in global terms when the numbers only have meaning at local and regional levels. For example, the largest contributor to its bottom-line number is local air pollution. Putting aside the fact, as my colleague Travis Fisher points out, how easy it is to cook the books and exaggerate the assumed costs of things like small particulate matter in the air, the other problem is that regional variances for local air pollution are so immense that any broad policy conclusion, such as “tighten local air pollution standards,” would be irrelevant.
It would make no sense to apply the same policy response in the U.S.—where local air pollution levels are very low and getting lower—that you would apply to countries in the East Asia and Pacific region, where, according to the study, local air pollution levels are high. The study undermines its own credibility by presenting a cumulative, global number that serves no purpose other than to inflate its bottom line.
And third, the study provides no accounting for the massive contribution to human flourishing that has resulted directly from the use of hydrocarbons. This is perhaps the biggest problem with this study specifically, and the modern environmental movement more broadly.
The truth is that human well-being has skyrocketed in terms of wealth, health, and life expectancy since the Industrial Revolution, which was fueled by hydrocarbons. No statistic demonstrates this more clearly than the fact that climate-related deaths are down a staggering 92% since the 1920s, when the statistic was first recorded.
Nonetheless, the IMF authors took the time to give us their number on the alleged subsidy costs associated with gas, oil, and coal; so, in the spirit of fairness, a look at the benefits associated with fossil fuels seems appropriate.
Let’s break it down, and for the sake of consistency, all numbers will be adjusted to 2019 dollars. Prior to 1700, per capita gross domestic product (the sum value of all goods and services produced within a nation’s borders) in the West stagnated at around $955 per year. Today, the average North American can expect a per capita GDP of around $66,935.
While historians and economists may debate at the margins, most can agree that two things were key to this astronomical rise in economic production. First was the spread of free enterprise (thank you, Adam Smith), and second was the broad availability of affordable, scalable, and efficient energy (thank you, hydrocarbons).
For hundreds of years, people in Western nations made around $955. Then they started using coal, then oil, and then natural gas. Now, Americans make around $66,935. So, the average income, one could argue, has increased nearly $66,0000 as a direct and indirect result of hydrocarbons (using the same rationale as the study authors). That’s a big number, for sure.
Of course, the study authors took their localized numbers and globalized them. For the sake of comparing apples to apples, let’s do that for the United States.
There are approximately 331,900,000 Americans today. Had we stayed on the same GDP trajectory that we had been on for hundreds of years prior to the use of hydrocarbons, we would have a GDP today of around $316,964,500,000. Subtract that from 2022’s GDP of approximately $22.24 trillion and you get $21,926,692,686,448! That’s nearly $22 trillion in a single year in increased economic output and wealth due to free enterprise and the use of hydrocarbons.
Now, to be fair, let’s subtract the $5.9 trillion ($5.5 trillion in 2019 dollars) in alleged direct and indirect government subsidies for so-called fossil fuels that the working paper cites, which, remember, is a global number; it’s not just limited to the United States. When you subtract those alleged subsidies from the increased economic output, you still get over $16 trillion in direct and indirect benefits from hydrocarbon use. And that’s just for the United States—globally, the benefits would be immensely more!
Oh, and by the way, the environment—despite what the authors suggest—is getting better and better all the time, even with those pesky local pollutants that they pin 42% of their costs on. While some regions of the world do have work to do, the United States shows that gas, oil, and coal use and economic growth do not dictate poor air and environmental quality; and, indeed, Americans have enjoyed ever increasingly clean air for decades.
On its face, my benefits of hydrocarbons calculation could look like a version of the same screwy math used by the IMF working paper. That would be a fair critique. The point is, however, any broad assessment of the alleged costs of using coal, oil, and gas must also be paired with the immense benefits those fuels have brought all of society. When that is done, the only logical conclusion is that these fuels have made the world a better place for all of us, and any contention otherwise is about as valuable as a solar panel at midnight.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/05/31/debunking-another-misleading-green-energy-study
**************************************************Ireland considering killing 200,000 cows to fight climate change
There were multiple reports this week that the Irish government was contemplating a plan to cull 200,000 cows within three years to fight climate change.
The possible plan was detailed in an internal Department of Agriculture document that was unearthed in a freedom of information request.
The Irish Creamery Milk Suppliers Association immediately railed against the reported plan to kill 200,000 cows.
Pat McCormack – the president of the Irish Creamery Milk Suppliers Association – declared, "If there is to be a scheme, it needs to be a voluntary scheme. That’s absolutely critical because there’s no point in culling numbers from an individual who has borrowed on the back of a huge financial commitment on the back of achieving a certain target that’s taken from under him."
"We should be investing in an infrastructure that can deliver from a scientific perspective. And we know low emissions are better and we should be continuing to invest in further science and research because that’s absolutely critical as we move forward," McCormack said, according to the Irish Times.
McCormack claimed that Ireland's current dairy herd is at the same level that it was 30 years ago. The Irish Mirror reported, "Dairy cows rose 1.4 percent (22,800 head) to 1.6 million in 2022 but over the past decade have increased by around 40 percent."
After the report of the government contemplating the slaughter of tens of thousands of cows surfaced, the country's agriculture department issued a statement.
A spokesperson for the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine said, "The paper referred to was part of a deliberative process – it is one of a number of modeling documents considered by the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine and is not a final policy decision. As part of the normal work of Government Departments, various options for policy implementation are regularly considered."
Ireland's Environmental Protection Agency claimed that agriculture was responsible for 38% of greenhouse gas emissions in Ireland in 2021, far outpacing transportation at nearly 18%.
The Food Vision Dairy Group published a report last October calling for an "urgent need to address the negative environmental impacts associated with dairy expansion."
Shortly after the release of the report, Ireland's Minister for Agriculture ,Charlie McConalogue, publicly proposed that farmers reduce the number of dairy cows.
Experts say proposals to significantly reduce the levels of livestock present food security issues.
Brett Moline, spokesperson for the Wyoming Farm Bureau, told Cowboy State Daily, "It's going to make food expensive, and we still have a large part of the population that is food-insecure."
Moline warned that if the U.S. and U.K shut down food production then it will move to countries with questionable environmental regulations.
https://www.theblaze.com/news/ireland-cull-cows-climate-change
*********************************************After nuclear power shut-down, Germany will need more brown coal power next winter
Germany will likely need several lignite power units that had been brought back online from reserve during the energy crisis last year also for the coming winter, economy minister Robert Habeck said at a press conference.
In view of the gas supply situation and the difficulties surrounding the installation of new LNG import infrastructure on the island of Rügen, the country will need additional capacities in winter, such as the eastern German lignite units, the Green Party minister said. “I expect that we will use them again in winter [2023/2024].”
During the energy crisis, Germany had decided to temporarily allow lignite power plants that had already been in a reserve to re-enter the market and produce electricity. The rules are currently scheduled to expire by the end of June, but could be extended by ministerial decree, Habeck said.
Habeck visited the lignite mining state of Brandenburg for talks with state premier Dietmar Woidke about the coal exit in mining region Lusatia. Germany’s ruling coalition of SPD, Green Party and FDP had decided to pull forward the country’s coal exit “ideally” to 2030 from the current target of 2038.
However, especially the eastern German states have opposed the plans, and Habeck refrained from demanding the target be reached. “The question is whether we stay at ‘38, whether we can bring it forward a bit and whether we reach 2030. I am patient,” he said, but added that the federal government would create the necessary conditions. “I don't think we'll be so far apart in the end,” he said. Analysts and energy politicians have long argued that, due to increased prices in the European CO2 trading system, an earlier coal exit is very likely because the majority of coal power plants will not be profitable after 2030.
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4 June, 2023
New study reveals Antarctic ice area has GROWN by 5305 km2 from 2009-2019
A new study by a team of climate scientists and published by the European Geosciences Union reveals that the Antarctic ice shelf area has grown by 5305 km2 from 2009-2019, gaining 661 Gt of ice mass over the past decade.
The new observations confirm the findings of eminent meteorologist Professor J. Ray Bates whose research has shown that trends in polar sea-ice levels give little cause for alarm.
In a paper published just over a year ago by the Global Warming Policy Foundation, Professor Bates contrasted climate model simulations - which predict significantly decreasing sea ice levels in both hemispheres - with empirical data and observed trends in Arctic and Antarctic sea ice.
Professor Bates said:
"In 2007, Al Gore told us that Arctic sea ice levels were ‘falling off a cliff’. It’s clear now that he was completely wrong. In fact, the trends in sea-ice are an antidote to climate alarm.”
Professor Bates also says that little reliance should be placed on model simulations of future sea-ice decline:
"Climate models failed to predict the growth in Antarctic sea ice, and they missed the recent marked slowdown of sea-ice decline in the Arctic. It would be unwarranted to think they are going to get things right over the next 30 years.”
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Ice Around Antarctica’s Thwaites ‘Doomsday’ Glacier Was Eight Times Thinner Around 8,000 Years Ago
Sensational new scientific findings at a site on the West Antarctica ice sheet near the Thwaites ’Doomsday’ Glacier indicate that current ice levels are up to eight times thicker than they were around 8,000 years ago. A group of 13 scientists led by Greg Balco of the Berkeley Geochronology Centre carried out extensive field work in the Amundsen Sea Embayment between the Thwaites and Pope glaciers and found current thickness levels of 40 metres compared with measurements in the recent past ranging from 2-7m. The work is of major importance since it casts new light on the cycles of ice production and loss that have always occurred in an area riddled with buried volcanoes.
The scientists noted that “subglacial bedrock exposure” analysis gives “direct, unambiguous evidence for ice thinning and subsequent thickening of at least 35m during the past several thousand years”. Furthermore, the work shows that ice thinning is a natural process that is reversible. It is noted that this is an important finding given the concerns that ice sheet thinning at the nearby glaciers including Thwaites may lead to significant deglaciation across the West Antarctica ice sheet, and subsequent sea level rise.
The scientists also refer to evidence from other field work that shows rapid early and middle Holocene ice thinning up to around 7,000 years ago throughout the Amundsen sea area. In addition, they found that there was no evidence to suggest that the ice has been thicker than its present levels for over 4,000 years. Record recent highs no less – hold the front page, or maybe not!
It is almost certain that these findings will be ignored in the mainstream media where the political requirements of ‘settled’ science have led to an effective ban on the discussion of natural geological influences on the climate. Antarctica is a difficult area to drum up climate alarm about since warming has been “nearly non-existent” over the last seven decades of recorded history. Changes around the massive Thwaites glacier are one of the key poster stories designed to spread global climate fear, and promote the solution of the collectivist Net Zero project.
The recent Singh and Polvani paper shows recent warming only in the west of the continent. Of course, it begs the question for those who attribute all climate change to humans burning fossil fuel – why would a well-mixed atmospheric gas like carbon dioxide produce just one warming spot in Antarctica, and have no effect over the rest of the ice-covered continent? A more plausible explanation for the localised warming is the presence of volcanoes, particularly in the light of the recent discovery of an additional 91 of them in the region. In total, there are 138 identified volcanoes in the West Antarctica Rift System, with heights ranging from 300 to 12,600 ft.
The No Tricks Zone science site adds to the discussion by noting that while the Earth’s crust has an average thickness of 40 km, the Thwaites-Pine Island-Pope glacier region has a thinner covering between 10-18 kms, exposing the base of the ice to 580C tectonic trenches. NTZ references work in Dziadek et al (2021) that the “elevated geothermal heat flow band” is exerting a “profound influence on the flow dynamics of the Western Antarctica Ice Sheet”.
Thwaite has been tagged the ‘Doomsday Glacier’ since perceived instabilities can be whipped up to promote fear about massive potential sea level rises. When the BBC green activist-in-chief Justin Rowlatt flew to the area, he witnessed an “epic vision of shattered ice”. To him, the Antarctic is the “frontline of climate change”. He went on to note that it was a place “where the equilibrium that has held our world in balance for tens of thousands of years is beginning to slip and crash”. The National Maritime Museum in Greenwich recently posted a film on YouTube saying, “Within decades the massive Thwaites glacier in West Antarctica could collapse.” The Guardian was recently worried that “cracks and fissures” made breakup more likely.
NTZ notes there are many scientifically established natural causes of ice melt in the region. The new Balco study is said to categorically undermine claims that the ice melt occurring is “unusual, unprecedented, or unnatural”. Interestingly, the Balco-led scientists suggest that possible stability during the past thinning/thickening phases was provided by a “glacioisostatic rebound feedback”. This means that the Earth’s surface naturally rises from underlying layers as huge weights of ice are removed. This effect is common across the planet, where some land mass is rising as a result of the lifting of the recent period of glaciation.
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Americans Rebelling Against Biden’s Green New Deal Policies
“Drill, baby, drill”: When Donald Trump blurted this during the recent CNN Town Hall, the crowd went wild. Remember?
American energy independence and energy dominance were key successes of Mr. Trump’s first term. There was virtually no inflation, interest rates were low, and, along with tax cuts and deregulation, the moribund Obama economy came to life. That was then, this is now.
President Biden has waged war on fossil fuels for two and a half years, doing everything he can to shut the spigots. So, inflation re-emerged, rising 15 percent, with energy up 33 percent and grocery prices up nearly 20 percent.
Energy is not the only inflationary source, but Mr. Trump has the overall story basically right. Last night, appearing with Sean Hannity on Fox News, the former president repeated his attack on Mr. Biden.
“So we were energy independent,” he said. “Think of it, three years ago, and what people don’t know is that we have, I call it liquid gold, because it’s gold. It’s better than gold. We have liquid gold under our feet more than any other nation, more than Saudi Arabia, more than Russia. We’re energy independent.
“Within six months we would have been energy dominant and we were going to sell energy to Europe and lots of other places. And we’re going to make so much money doing it because it’s such a big world, you know, it’s such a big business. It’s all encompassing. And that’s what started the inflation. I mean, the energy we stopped drilling and all of a sudden gasoline’s going up to $5 or $6 a gallon in a car.”
Now here’s the good news: Americans are rebelling against Mr. Biden’s radical left, green new deal policies that have inflicted pain on the economy, jacked up inflation, and caused real take home pay for middle-class, blue-collar working families to decline for more than two years straight.
A recent poll sponsored by the Committee to Unleash Prosperity shows that 79 percent agree we shouldn’t make energy more expensive. Only 19 percent disagree. The same poll shows that 77 percent of respondents don’t want to be forced into electric vehicles. Only 23 percent want an EV mandate.
Finally, when asked how much they would personally be willing to pay each year to address global warming, the median response was $20. Mr. Biden, of course, is spending trillions of dollars. Pollster Mike McKenna notes that all these responses are moving away from the Biden war against fossil fuels.
There’s even some more good news: The scourge of ESG may be coming to an end. ESG is short for environmental, social, and corporate governance. It is a left-wing rallying cry embodying radical climate change as well as far-left investment and even cultural issues.
At two recent shareholder meetings, for ExxonMobil and Chevron, ESG supporters got whupped. Shareholders defeated a bunch of proposals to cut greenhouse gas emissions, put out new reports on climate benchmarks, and disclose oil spill risks. Last year, those proposals were very popular.
Incidentally, similar climate proposals were defeated at the annual meetings for BP and Shell. Big investment companies like Vanguard and Blackrock have pulled back. SEC regulatory proposals that would practically dictate that companies run on the basis of climate are in disfavor.
A leading Federal Reserve governor just gave a hard-hitting speech saying the Fed’s job is monetary and financial stability, not policing climate change.
As the Russian war in Ukraine continues to rage, Europe is now changing its tune on fossil fuels, making natural gas a legitimate and acceptable clean-burning fuel. Let’s hope that the tide is in fact turning.
Because if it does, and common sense policies are restored, America will be more prosperous, with far less inflation.
https://www.nysun.com/article/americans-rebelling-against-bidens-green-new-deal-policies ?
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Gas heating ban could topple Germany’s government
Ah Germany, land of economic resilience, political consensus, low debt, social compliance, manufacturing prowess, beer gardens and lederhosen. But for how much longer?
Alone among G7 advanced economies, Germany has recently slipped into recession, and hard though it may be to believe, the Government is in some danger of being toppled by, of all things, a mass revolt against heat pumps.
Germany has long had a problem with energy policy; so utterly destructive has its machinations become that it makes our own failings in this department – which are myriad – look like a paragon of common sense by comparison.
Boilergeddon, or what Germans have labelled the “heat hammer”, is just the latest, farcical example of the destructive chaos that the unthinking and unmitigated pursuit of environmental goals has unleashed on the German economy.
To reach its climate change targets, Germany’s coalition government had been planning to bring in a new law that would ban the installation of new gas and oil fired boilers from the beginning of next year onwards.
The upshot is not just a mad dash among households to install traditional gas fired boilers while they still can, but a collapse in the Government’s poll ratings and an increasingly acrimonious standoff between two of the coalition partners – the Greens and the more enterprise friendly Free Democrats.
Energy policy is not the only issue on which they are at loggerheads. Far from it, with the very foundations of Germany’s postwar economic success and affluence seemingly collapsing beneath their feet. But it is the most high profile.
As a foretaste of what may be to come in the UK, which is planning a similar ban for new-build houses the year after next, and is considering a blanket prohibition on all properties from 2035 onwards, the German experience in attempting to impose heat pumps on an ever more reluctant population makes for particularly alarming reading.
Generally ineffective and often fiendishly expensive both to install and to run, heat pumps have been widely branded an unacceptable obligation among German voters, who are up in arms at the idea of being compelled to buy them.
Such has been the ferocity of public reaction to Germany’s “heat hammer” that a grovelling climbdown now looks likely.
The debacle has piled on the agony and self doubt in an economy whose heavy reliance on the internal combustion engine has left it stranded as the world rushes at breakneck speed towards electrified forms of transport.
“We’ve been naïve as a society because everything seems fine,” Martin Brudermüller, chief executive of BASF, recently told Bloomberg. “These problems we have in Germany are accumulating. We have a period of change ahead of us; I don’t know if everyone realises this.”
Pride of place in the catalogue of errors that increasingly defines public policy in Germany goes to energy strategy, which is a mass of contradictions and misjudgments.
As if determined to keep shooting itself in the foot, Germany last month closed the last three of its remaining nuclear power plants, thereby fulfilling an election pledge by the Greens, who hold the energy portfolio, and for whom the abolition of nuclear power is a long standing obsession verging on a religiously held belief.
While others are desperately trying to crank up their nuclear generation to meet net zero targets, Germany has gone haring off in the other direction and closed down some of the most efficient nuclear power plants in Europe.
This final act of stupidity comes hard on the heels of the shock of having to wean the nation off Russian gas supplies, addiction to which counts as another piece of genius in German energy policy, this one engineered by the Putin-loving former Chancellor, Gerhard Schröder.
There was at least one mistake which I suppose the Germans didn’t make. Unlike Britain, they didn’t dynamite their remaining coal fired power stations, so that there is at least some generating capacity to fill the gap left by Putin.
Yet to be closing down near zero-emitting nuclear plants while simultaneously reopening CO2 spewing coal plants? This can hardly be called environmentalism.
Mind you, Britain hardly looks a great deal better on that front.
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2 June, 2023
Green Omertà
There is a conspiracy of silence about wind power costs
I know, I do tend to be a bit repetitive about the cost of wind power. How many times have I explained that the data is completely clear: that it’s expensive; and that if it’s getting any cheaper, it’s only doing so very slowly. In fact, for onshore wind the trend is clearly upwards.
My determination on the subject is prompted by the refusal of anyone in official circles to accept the facts. To a man (and woman) they are absolutely resolute in their insistence that wind is staggeringly cheap because windfarms have agreed staggeringly low-priced “strike prices” for power. And because industry bodies and Whitehall says it is.
The fact that nobody has ever delivered power at such a price cuts no mustard with these people. Nor does the observation that windfarm developers are all saying that new construction will not go ahead without further handouts. And of course, if you point to the hard data in windfarm financial accounts, they really, really do not want to know at all.
Consider, Jonathan Pocklington, the Permanent Secretary at the energy department. He recently told the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee that wind was super cheap, signally failing to mention the accounts data. Are we really expected to believe that he and his generously funded staff know nothing about it? Really? Of course, the committee, under its chairman, Meg Hillier, knows all about the hard data, because I sent my own submission of evidence, setting out all the unfortunate details. However, let’s just say that I have yet to receive an invitation to give oral evidence on the subject. Should we be surprised that Ms Hillier is not interested?
Another recent example of this absolute refusal to address the data comes in the shape of a new report from the UK Energy Research Centre, which repeats the claim that wind power is super-cheap. On Twitter, I pointed out to members of the author team that nobody is delivering power under these low strike prices, and that the data contradicts claims of low costs. However, most of them ignored me. Imagine that – researchers not wanting to discuss their research! That said, one team member (by his own admission, a minor one) did post a reply, observing that loopholes on delivering power at agreed strike prices were being tightened up. However, when I pressed him on the accounts evidence, he went strangely quiet.
Then consider Emma Pinchbeck, the boss of Energy UK, who proclaimed the other day that she was happy to engage with people who wanted to discuss data in a respectful way. My Twitter thread, deferentially setting out details of the cost data for wind power, was completely ignored.
Finally, take Sir Christopher Llewellyn-Smith, the physicist who is running the Royal Society’s ongoing study on energy storage. In a podcast interview a few weeks back, he revealed that his team’s report will be using those low CfD strike prices as their assumed cost for electricity input to storage facilities. Through the good offices of a colleague, I was able to get in touch, and draw his attention to the data. I got a response, pointing to cost claims published by officials in Whitehall and the the usual suspects in the Green Blob, but when I pointed out that the data refuted these claims, I was again greeted by a stony silence.
It’s clear that there is a conspiracy of silence about wind power costs. Only strike prices and unverifiable industry claims can be mentioned. The fairy tale of cheap renewables is so central to the Establishment’s direction of travel towards decarbonisation that the facts simply cannot be acknowledged.
It’s all very reminiscent of the way the Westminster machine has dealt its disastrous handling of the Covid pandemic: refuse to engage on facts and data, and carry right on as if nothing has happened.
Looking down the list of those who are engaging in this green omertà, it’s hard to avoid the impression that they are all passengers on a very plush gravy train. If they even mention the inconvenient facts, they will be effectively be pulling the emergency brake, and the whole thing would grind to a halt. Let’s just say they will not be popular for doing so. To purloin a quote from Lord Frost’s recent GWPF lecture, you can wake a man who’s asleep, but you can’t wake a man who’s pretending to be asleep.
https://www.netzerowatch.com/green-omerta/
*******************************************Effects Of Deliberately Exaggerating the Risks of Climate Change
The effects of deliberately exaggerating the risks of climate change can do tremendous harm. This can lead to the destruction of people’s mental health and trust in science – or, better put, trust in what science used to be.
In March of last year, The Washington Post reported on the increased risks of flight turbulence due to climate change. More recently, the World Economic Forum reiterated this concern in a blog, highlighting that “erratic” clear air turbulence is projected to rise by two or three times in the next few decades.
Climate change affected by flights?
It is believed that flights are becoming more turbulent due to climate change. However, it is important to note that despite this, there has been no significant increase in accidents or injuries caused by turbulence over the past 30 years. In fact, the number of passengers has quadrupled during this time, resulting in a decrease in harmful turbulence activity relative to the increase in passengers, according to the International Civil Aviation Organization.
Have you ever wondered where the exaggerated and alarming information originates from? Well, it seems that both of the stories are based on the research of Professor Paul Williams from Reading University.
According to his findings, there have been noticeable changes in atmospheric dynamics since the late 1970s, which were first observed through satellite data.
Based on climate models and utilizing the RCP8.5 scenarios, it has been projected that there will be a significant surge in clear air turbulence. It’s worth noting that RCP8.5 is considered the most extreme climate scenario outlined by the IPCC, along with its later variant, SSP5-8.5. This scenario is based on high greenhouse gas emissions, which may lead to a temperature increase of 4-5C within the next 80 years.
Many scientists do not find these climate pathways to be believable, and even the IPCC describes them as having a “low likelihood.” However, politicians and the press who are trusted by the IPCC do not share these reservations.
Yet it seems these implausible scenarios are so addictive for climate alarmists that about half the impact mentions in both the IPCC reports and across the wider scientific community still incorporate them.
It’s evident that this mindset influences much of the sensationalist content churned out by mainstream media, as they peddle the “established” scientific beliefs required to stir up panic and advance the collective Net Zero political program. I suggest that you check out the latest details about all of this in the original article posted by Daily Sceptic.
It’s worth noting that excessive worrying about the impact of climate change might be adding to the mental health struggles faced by young individuals. As per a recent global survey, 45% of young people stated that thinking about climate change had a detrimental effect on their day-to-day existence, and 40% expressed apprehension about having children.
The effects of all these exaggerations do enormous harm to people’s minds and the trust they used to have in science.
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The Social Cost of Carbon game
Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault recently announced that the Social Cost of Carbon (SCC), or the dollar value of supposed damages associated with each tonne of carbon dioxide emissions, is about $247, nearly five times higher than the old estimate of $54. He made it sound like a discovery, as if a bunch of experts had finally been able to measure something they previously only guessed at. Like when scientists were finally able to measure the mass of an electron or the age of the Earth, now finally we can measure the SCC.
But in reality there has been no breakthrough in economics comparable to those physics breakthroughs. Countless SCC estimates already exist ranging from small negative amounts (i.e. carbon dioxide emissions are beneficial) to many thousands of dollars per tonne. Every such estimate is like a complex “if-then” statement: if the following assumptions hold, then the SCC is $X. Yale economist William Nordhaus won the 2018 Nobel Memorial Prize in economics for developing some of the first methods for combining all the “if” statements into systems called Integrated Assessment Models or IAMs. And using conventional economic and climate modelling methods, he tended to get pretty low SCC values over the years, which has long been a sore point among climate activists and the politicians who share their agenda.
But economists are on the case. The $247 figure referenced by Guilbeault comes from a new report from the Biden administration that tossed out all the previous models, including Nordhaus’s, and instead cobbled together a set of new models that when run together yield much higher SCC values.
In many ways the new models are just like the old ones. For example they persist in using an Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity of 3 degrees C. This refers to the warming expected from doubling the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. The authors cite the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as the basis for this decision, apparently unaware that that estimate has already been shown in the climate literature to be flawed. Using the IPCC’s own method on updated data yields a sensitivity estimate of about 2.2 C or less, and as I have shown in a recent publication this is enough to cause the SCC estimate in a standard model to drop to nearly zero.
The biggest boosts to the new SCC figure hailed by Guilbeault come from revisions to agricultural productivity impacts and mortality costs from climate warming. The evidence for large negative agricultural impacts comes from a 2017 article by Frances Moore and co-authors that looked at the combined effects of CO2 fertilization and warming, concluding the net effect would harm global agriculture. Oddly, they used the same data as a 2014 study by Andrew Challinor and co-authors who had found the opposite: the combination of increased CO2 and warming would have much more benign, and in some cases even beneficial, results.
How did Moore et al. get different results from the same data? They used a different statistical model but unfortunately didn’t provide evidence showing it is better than the one Challinor used, so it’s unclear whose results are stronger. But we know whose are more popular. The Biden administration team referred only to the Moore study and left out any mention of the Challinor one, and it is a safe assumption that the reviewers didn’t notice the omission. See how the game is played?
Regarding the mortality effect, the report relies on evidence in a new study that apparently shows that warming will mean fewer deaths from cold and more from heat, and the combined effect globally is a much larger overall death toll than previously thought. The study is by an impressive team led by economist Tamma Carleton and 15 co-authors. In their preface they thank 17 research assistants, four project managers, 13 reviewers and seminar participants at 20 prestigious academic institutions around the world. It’s a high-quality piece of work, but like tens of thousands of other splashy climate impacts studies it relies for its headline conclusions on the discredited RCP8.5 emissions scenario. How did all those prestigious researchers and reviewers miss this flaw?
The authors compiled mortality data from selected countries around the world and matched them to temperature records, then built a statistical model to extrapolate over the entire world. They used some clever economic modelling to estimate the beneficial effects of adaptive behaviour (like installing air conditioning) as well as the costs. Then they estimated a “mortality function” that spits out the number of additional deaths between now and the year 2300 attributable to each additional tonne of emissions, both from warming itself and the costs of adaptation. To compute this number the authors needed emissions and income projections out to 2300.
For this they used two scenarios: the extreme, coal-blackened Dickensian fiction called RCP8.5, and a mid-range emissions projection called RCP4.5. In my 2020 JSW column I discussed the efforts of climate analysts to convince their colleagues to stop using the RCP8.5 scenario because of its unrealistic assumptions. Interestingly the Biden administration report moves away from both RCP scenarios and focuses on a new one from Resources for the Future (RFF) which, through most of the rest of this century, projects emissions even below RCP4.5.
https://financialpost.com/opinion/junk-science-week-social-cost-of-carbon-game
*************************************************Australia: Slap on the wrists for Climate activists who halted coal train
CLIMATE activists who brought a coal train to a grinding halt in Newcastle have been slapped with fines ranging from $750 to $450 in court.
At least 30 of the Rising Tide protesters who faced court on Thursday pleaded guilty to entering enclosed lands and assisting in the obstruction of a rail locomotive.
One member, Jack Ruben Thieme, pleaded guilty to a further charge of property damage after a fence was cut to allow members of the group onto the rail corridor.
He was fined a total of $750.
Magistrate Stephen Olischlager warned the group that the right to protest isn't absolute.
"Arguments are never won through either the use of force or disregard for the rights of others, at the end of the day, support for worthy causes is won by changing minds, exposing truths and respectful communication of arguments," he said.
More than 50 members had their matters heard in court, represented by defence solicitor Olivia Freeman who argued her clients acted the way they did out of desperation in the face of "climate inaction".
"The science is now at a point where there can be no dispute that there are a number of members of our community with sincere and strongly held beliefs that to address the climate crisis and a rise of 1.5 degrees that we can't keep burning fossil fuels," she said.
She pointed out there was a common thread across the reference letters handed into the court in support of the offenders.
"Every person before the court today is a person with the utmost integrity, compassion, concern and passion about the environment," she said.
"These are all strongly community-minded individuals that give back in various ways to the community in which they all live and are described as caring and generous."
Ms Freeman pushed for good behaviour bonds and non-convictions for those of her clients without a criminal history, but Mr Olischlager said there was a need to deter the public from similar action.
Police prosecutor Harry Hall was unsuccessful in his attempt to have each of the offenders banned from any coal storage or loading facility across the state and rail corridors except for when travelling.
"The NSW Police accepts that all individuals have the right to protest, but it must be done in a lawful and safe manner," he said.
"There are always methods individuals can use rather than this unlawful example."
He argued the protesters put police and emergency services at risk and dragged resources away from people in need, potentially endangering lives.
More than 10 of the activists had their matters adjourned to July 10. Some live interstate and will appear via audio visual link on the next occasion
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1 June, 2023
Hidden Impact of Massive Solar Farms: Residents and Wildlife Affected, Aquifers Threatened
California’s deserts are transforming into a sea of solar panels, as the state seeks to reach ambitious renewable energy goals. But a growing group of residents and environmentalists say the move is coming at a significant price to wildlife, nearby residents’ health, native lands, and even property values.
With 776 solar power plants producing approximately 17 percent of the state’s electricity, the Golden State is awash with bright silver and blue panels dotting hundreds of thousands of acres.
Millions of panels have been installed east of Los Angeles in the Mojave Desert over the last five years, changing the look of the landscape in the process, and bringing with it a new set of challenges for nearby residents, according to experts.
Dustin Mulvaney, a professor of environmental studies at San Jose State University said he is concerned about their impact on public land, including damage to ecosystems and soil and high water demand.
“There is potential concern for groundwater depletion,” Mulvaney told The Epoch Times.
A California law passed in 2014 regulates groundwater usage and is designed to preserve water supplies, but it does not apply to public lands.
Such are managed by the Bureau of Land Management, a federal agency that oversees 245 million acres of land—15 million of which are located in California.
The bureau has prioritized 870,000 acres nationally for solar development, with more than 200,000 acres already sporting solar panels in California, according to its website.
But concerns about the impacts on wildlife have some advocacy groups calling for a halt in such expansion until guidelines can be implemented, as animals are being displaced and migratory patterns altered due to the increasing quantity of such solar farms.
Birds have been observed mistaking the shiny blue solar panels for water, and the mistake is costly, as the extreme heat from the reflective material can instantly incinerate them, according to experts.
Desert tortoises are being killed and displaced, and bighorn sheep and deer are restricted from accessing some areas by six-foot barbed wire fencing surrounding such solar farms, leading to a loss of grazing habitat and restricting some creatures from navigating trails and accessing water sources, according to environmentalists.
And corridors designed to allow movement for wildlife are inviting predators—as the wily carnivores are learning to wait for prey emerging from the narrow strips of grass—into communities, with an increase in coyote and mountain lion sightings since the fences were installed, according to residents.
Health Problems Driving Some Residents Away
Residents of Lake Tamarisk Desert Resort located halfway between Phoenix and Los Angeles in Desert Center, California, say the construction of such solar farms is causing considerable nuisance, with some reporting health problems because of increased dust in the area.
Patti Cockcroft said she has been seeking medical attention since she started experiencing a deep bronchial cough in March after spending two months in her desert home impacted by high winds and dust from a nearby solar field.
Tests are currently underway to determine whether she has valley fever—a serious illness associated with severe health complications and potential fatality—and doctors have told her the extreme conditions could have triggered a severe asthma attack.
“It’s not very enticing to think of going back to the desert,” Cockcroft said in an email sent to The Epoch Times.
Experts agree that issues related to construction-related soil removal and the resulting human exposure to dust particles are alarming.
“The real public health issue is valley fever,” Mulvaney, of San Jose State, told The Epoch Times.
Investigations conducted in 2018 by the Centers for Disease Control uncovered an increased incidence of valley fever in solar farm construction employees resulting from working in dusty conditions where fungal spores in the soil become airborne.
After receiving reports of workplace injuries associated with valley fever, investigators discovered that solar farm workers in California were 4.4 to 210.6 times more likely to suffer from the illness than others working and living in the same counties.
Dusty conditions can also lead to lung disease silicosis, which is of particular concern for miners manufacturing solar panels and for workers and nearby residents during the installation process, according to experts.
Compounding Problems Affecting Communities
A vehicle pileup near Los Angeles in 2013 was partially blamed on a solar development project after six were injured when a massive dust cloud forced the closure of the Antelope Valley Freeway.
Efforts to mitigate dust by solar companies are compounding problems for some local communities, according to Teresa Pierce, another Lake Tamarisk resident.
According to Pierce, such companies drive diesel-powered water trucks, creating noise and dust pollution while draining aquifers not refilled regularly by nature.
“Their water trucks are going round and round our pumping station,” Pierce told The Epoch Times. “It’s been a dust bowl with constant construction noise.”
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India plans to challenge EU carbon tax at WTO
Indian plans to file a complaint to the World Trade Organisation over the European Union’s proposal to impose 20% to 35% tariffs on imports of high-carbon goods like steel, iron ore and cement from India, top government and industry sources said.
This is part of New Delhi’s strategy to combat the EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) designed to push local industries to invest in new technologies to bring down carbon emissions, while also raising the issue in bilateral talks.
Piyush Goyal, India’s trade minister, is on a visit to Brussels to meet EU leaders to address bilateral issues and promote trade. “I’m sure the intention is not to create a barrier to trade,” he told a news conference after his meetings on Tuesday (16 May).
“We remain engaged, we are discussing the issue and we have a long time ahead of us in which we will be working together to find the right solutions to this.”
EU trade chief Valdis Dombrovskis said the European Commission had designed CBAM carefully so that it was compatible with WTO rules, applying the same carbon price on imported goods as on domestic EU producers.
Last month, the European Union approved the world’s first plan to impose a levy on high-carbon goods imports from 2026, targeting imports of steel, cement, aluminium, fertilisers, electricity, and hydrogen, aiming to become a net zero emitter of greenhouse gases by 2050, ahead of India’s target of 2070.
“In the name of environment protection, EU is introducing a trade barrier that would hit not only Indian exports but also of many other developing countries,” said a top government official with direct knowledge of the matter.
The government was planning to file a complaint to the WTO against the EU’s unilateral decision and would seek relief for exporters, particularly small companies, the official said without disclosing further details.
India sees the proposed levy as discriminatory and a trade barrier, and would question its legality while citing that New Delhi was already following the protocols pledged in the U.N. Paris climate agreement, said another government official involved in the team dealing with WTO matters.
Three industry sources who attended a meeting last week called by the government to discuss the issue confirmed the plans to raise the issue at the WTO.
Officials declined to be named as they were not authorised to speak to the media. The commerce ministry and steel companies did not comment.
The European Parliament on Tuesday approved sweeping reforms to make EU climate change policies more ambitious, including an upgrade of the bloc’s carbon market that is set to hike the cost of polluting in Europe.
Policymakers are examining proposals from the steel industry that has sought a “level-playing field” through safeguard measures against imports as a reciprocal measure.
“Sectors like steel and small manufacturers need more time to meet EU guidelines,” said Ajay Sahai, director general, Federation of Indian Export Organisations, adding they would ultimately need to cut emissions to remain globally competitive.
The exporters’ body warned the EU plan could make India’s free trade agreements with other countries and a proposed pact with the EU “redundant” as the prices of many exporters’ goods would rise by nearly one-fifth after the carbon tax and other trade partners hurt by the tax may dump goods in India.
Initially, nearly $8 billion of exports mainly steel, iron ore and aluminium would face tariffs, Sahai said, but by 2034, it will cover all goods exported to the EU.
The carbon border adjustment is likely to be followed by other advanced countries including the UK, Canada, Japan and the United States as they push to cut carbon emissions, he said.
A ministerial panel is looking into the impact of EU plans and steps to deal with it including mutual recognition of energy audit and carbon trading certificates, Santosh Kumar Sarangi, director general foreign trade, said on Monday.
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Restore sanity to the green debate
Eighty years ago, with the dawn of nuclear weapons, children were forced to confront the possibility that the world could end suddenly. In the 1950s, American school pupils were even shown the cartoon Duck and Cover to teach them how to shield themselves in the event of a Third World War breaking out. Now, children are being taught that climate change represents a similarly apocalyptic threat. Inevitably, as we report today, many are desperately worried.
Those responsible for promoting such alarmism are deeply irresponsible. If the majority of teenagers think that the world will end in their lifetime due to climate change then they are clearly not receiving a balanced education. Scientists and economists are divided on the pace of temperature rises, their impact and the correct response. The consequences of such misinformation on children are far more certain: many suffer mental health problems; others vow not to have babies to prevent “over-population”. This despite already crashing birthrates in the developed world.
Such millenarian despair is also irrational, breeding a sense of futility when there is ample evidence that humanity’s unique capacity for innovation is more than capable of driving change while actually improving living standards.
Sadly, this has not been the approach adopted by politicians pursuing the hubristic goal of net zero by 2050. It is true that the cost of renewables has slumped in recent years, but far too little effort has been put into ensuring that there is sufficient power from alternative sources for when the sun is not shining and the wind does not blow. Much of the supposed progress in this area has also only been achieved thanks to lavish subsidies that have made energy prices even more expensive than they otherwise would have been.
One of the biggest problems with British environmental policy, however, concerns the imposition of unrealistic targets for the abolition of petrol cars and domestic gas boilers. It may well be that alternative technologies will, some time in the near future, be able to replace them without any inconvenience or additional cost to consumers. At present, however, they are not ready.
Indeed, the push to require households to install heat pumps is fast becoming a fiasco. Not only are they exorbitantly priced and unsuited for swathes of the British housing stock, the Government is launching an investigation after concerns about the noise they produce. Voters quite understandably do not want to spend thousands of pounds on heating systems that are worse than what they have replaced.
Rightly, society has made and is making great strides with regard to the environment. From the potential of nuclear fusion to a technological revolution in agriculture, there is much more to come. Children should be taught to regard their future with awe and excitement, to embrace its possibilities, not fear them or feel that a life of want and poverty is the only responsible option. Campaigners who have mistaken the classroom for a bully pulpit exclusively to spread prophecies of doom among impressionable teenagers should be rooted out.
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Going green will roil world politics
When Winston Churchill was First Lord of the Admiralty from 1911 to 1915, he ordered two technical changes to ensure the British fleet stayed more powerful than the expanding German navy.
One adjustment was to develop a 15-inch battleship gun that could fire bigger shells. The other, in 1913, was to convert the British fleet from coal to oil to boost battleship speed. The biggest gamble of the switch from coal to oil was that the UK was ditching a fuel found in abundance at home for an imported energy source. To ensure oil supplies, London took control of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, the first business to extract oil from Iran, where it was discovered in 1908.
The UK navy’s shift to oil and the ensuing pre-war tussle with Germany to gain influence in the Middle East is just one of countless episodes whereby the scarcity of oil fields has sculpted history.
The shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy will do something similar. The move makes more vital minerals such as cobalt, copper, graphite, lithium, manganese, nickel, palladium and rare earths (that are abundant but hard to gather and costly and polluting to refine). The scramble for green inputs will transform global politics in at least nine ways.
One is that petrostates will lose relevance longer term. But there are complexities. In the short term, petrostates will enjoy the muscle conferred by higher prices, as uncertainty about oil’s long-term future reduces production before demand drops. When oil prices fall enough to ruin high-cost producers, the better-placed petrostates could gain enough market share to preserve global relevance.
Coal and natural gas are on the same trajectory but it’s milder because they are found in too many places to have the rarity value of oil fields. Of the two, natural gas will have more influence. As Europe has learnt, natural gas is important regionally and its delivery infrastructure slows switching suppliers.
A second change from the shift to renewables is that countries that possess, or can secure, deposits of clean minerals will become powerful ‘electrostates’, while those countries lacking these endowments (Western Europe) will be vulnerable. Australia, Chile and Russia have 21st-century minerals. China lacks them so it’s buying mines in Argentina, Bolivia and Chile (the ‘Lithium Triangle’) that has 56 per cent of known lithium reserves.
Some poorer countries with critical minerals might become mini-Saudi Arabias in wealth and status. Their challenge is not to become exploited and unstable states like the minerals-rich Congo, and thus stay weak powers.
In the short term, countries that can process green minerals and manufacture components for green technologies will enjoy diplomatic might. China is well placed due to its loose pollution safeguards, cheaper workforce and strategic smarts. In 2019, 60 per cent of the global rare earths supply came from China. The country dominates global battery, solar and wind turbine production.
Going green’s third global impact is the shift could backfire on countries whose emissions-reduction targets are so aggressive they are performing ‘unilateral economic disarmament’. These countries overestimate the capability of renewables to match the reliability and base-load abilities of discontinued fossil fuels. Think Germany before the Ukraine war (and Australia in coming years).
The fourth effect is that going renewable is triggering a rush for critical minerals in international waters. China’s spread across the Pacific is partly about securing minerals found in the seabed. The Arctic and Antarctic could one day host scrambles for minerals.
A fifth change is the countries that pioneer the renewables drive will pressure others to follow. Laggards could be subject to ‘green tariffs’, boycotts and other sanctions. Such actions are likely to cause trade frictions, if not trade wars.
A sixth global outcome of going renewable is that the quest splits advanced and developing countries. Poorer nations see that countries that grew rich on coal, gas and oil are being hypocritical when they demand emerging countries forgo the opportunity to industrialise using cheap fossil fuels to repair the damage done by rich powers.
Seventh, climate-change policies require government intervention in energy markets and international cooperation. The more governments subsidise local green industries, the more they will anger other countries. International agreements require cajoling among countries. The more there are pacts, the greater power global bodies gain over countries, the more bickering among countries to secure signatures, and the more fallout if countries fail to meet targets or threaten to, or do, withdraw from accords.
An eighth effect of going green is that securing energy supplies could alter allian-ces. India, if it can’t secure Australian coal, warns it will turn to Russia (see Gina Rinehart opposite). Where would that leave the ability of the ‘Quad’ of Australia, Japan, India and the US to push back on China?
Ninth, greenhouse-gas emitters will use their cooperation on climate as a bargaining chip. China, which spews out 27 per cent of global emissions compared with 11 per cent for the US, has stated its cooperation on climate change depends on countries relaxing stances on Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tibet and Xinjiang, where Uighurs are persecuted.
The switch to renewable energy is thus poised to rejig the global order. In time, the effects are likely to be as big as were oil’s but with one difference. The global political consequences of oil tended to spur greater efforts to find oil. The international effects of going renewable, however, will trigger challenges that retard the green drive, even to the extent of helping the case for nuclear.
To be sure, global politics shapes energy policies too, as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine shows. Discoveries, technological advances and greater nuclear uptake could reduce the need for renewable power and many of its global consequences might never eventuate. It’s not all rival versus rival. Countries are cooperating on climate change. The shift to green could lead to fewer tussles about energy because renewables make countries more energy self-sufficient.
But no energy switch is without political complications. Just study the history of oil. In time, the tale of the switch to renewables will probably be as fraught but less successful.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/05/going-green-will-roil-world-politics/
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