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
June 30, 2024
Some Scientists Admit Clouds Are Main Controller Of Climate
Modeling the main factors driving climate is riddled with and precluded by observational error. Some scientists now acknowledge this
Clouds are a main factor – even the most important factor – controlling changes in the Earth’s radiation budget, or climate (Sfîc? et al., 2021, Lenaerts et al., 2020), published by the International Journal of Climatology as shown below:
But as scientists acknowledge in a new study (Ademakinwa et al., 2024), substantial errors in calculating cloud effects on climate are inevitable because three-dimensional (3D, vertical and horizontal) cloud affects are reality, and current calculations only consider one-dimensional cloud properties (1D, vertical).
“Failed retrievals” in radiative property simulations of cloud effects occur over 40 percent of the time. This leads to biases, errors amounting to ±36 W/m².
Considering this error margin of 72 W/m² is 360 times larger than the (alleged – Ed) total forcing from CO2 over the span of 10 years (0.2 W/m²) for an imaginary clear-sky-only (cloudless) Earth (Feldman et al., 2015), it is not possible to detect the real-world effect of CO2 forcing in any radiative transfer calculation.
Summary:
“Since clouds in reality have three-dimensional (3D) structures, the simulation of radiative transfer (RT) in clouds should ideally consider the transport of radiation in both vertical and horizontal directions (referred to as ‘3D RT’).”
However, “operational bispectral cloud retrievals are almost exclusively based on the one-dimensional (1D) RT theory that considers only the vertical and ignores the net horizontal transport of radiation.”
Consequently, “the radiative properties of clouds under 3D RT are substantially different from those under 1D RT.”
https://principia-scientific.com/some-scientists-admit-clouds-are-main-controller-of-climate/
*******************************************Environmental Groups Seek to Shut Down Trans-Alaska Pipeline
Environmental activists have filed a legal petition with the federal government in hopes of shutting down the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System, which at its peak transported 25 percent of the oil produced in America.
The Trans-Alaska Pipeline “is approaching the end of its useful life due to mounting climate change-driven damages to both the aging pipeline infrastructure and the entire Arctic ecosystem, as well as the imperative for the United States to rapidly transition away from fossil fuel-based energy,” the petition states.
The coalition filing the petition includes the Center for Biological Diversity, Pacific Environment, Sovereign Iñupiat for a Living Arctic, Alaska Community Action on Toxics, Fairbanks Climate Action Coalition, and Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility. The petition was filed with Debra Haaland, Secretary of the U.S. Department of the Interior.
Stretching for 800 miles with a diameter of 48 inches, the Trans-Alaska Pipeline is among the world’s largest pipelines, delivering oil extracted in Alaska’s North Slope to Valdez, the northernmost ice-free port in North America. It was proposed after massive deposits of oil were discovered at Prudhoe Bay in 1968, and was completed in 1977 at a cost of $8 billion.
Today, the Trans-Alaska Pipeline is owned by a consortium of companies including BP, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, Unocal Pipeline Company, and Koch Alaska Pipeline Company.
Because of its size, the pipeline needed approval from the federal government granting it “right of way” through federal lands, which it received under the Trans-Alaska Pipeline Authorization Act, signed into law by President Richard Nixon in 1973.
The coalition of environmental groups now say the environmental analysis under which the pipeline was originally approved neither takes climate change issues into account nor does it “properly examine pipeline operations’ harm to caribou, polar bears, and other vulnerable wildlife and subsistence resources in Alaska,” Pacific Environment stated in a press release.
The group requested “the immediate initiation and completion of a new supplemental environmental impact statement” for the pipeline, adding that “because the only rational conclusion of that analysis will be a managed phasedown of the pipeline, drafting an updated Dismantlement, Removal, and Restoration plan should also promptly commence.”
Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy responded by calling the groups “anarchists” in a post on X, while saying their argument contains “glaring logical fallacies.”
Dan Kish, senior vice president of policy at the Institute for Energy Research and former chief of staff for the House of Representatives Resources Committee, said he expects the petition will be rejected by the Bureau of Land Management, the relevant authority within the Interior Department.
“There is a huge amount at stake, because if the pipeline gets closed, all of the energy on the North Slope of Alaska, and there’s enormous quantities of oil, gas, and coal, basically get cut off,” Mr. Kish told The Epoch Times.
But, he predicts the environmental coalition will take further action.
“When [the Bureau of Land Management] does reject it, they immediately go to court, and then they just go venue shopping for a federal judge. And there are plenty of them who would gladly shut this down,” he said.
‘Sue and Settle’
The efforts to shut down the Trans-Alaska Pipeline may proceed to a phase known as “sue and settle,” he said, in which plaintiffs bring suit against the federal government and the government reaches a settlement with plaintiffs, giving in to their demands.
“It’s one of the biggest loopholes around the Constitution that’s out there, where the government can have some friends sue them and then settle and give them what they wanted,” Mr. Kish said.
The Epoch Times reached out to the Department of Interior for a response to the petition, but the department declined to comment.
According to Alaska’s Department of Natural Resources, “Northern Alaska is a world-class petroleum province that includes some of the most prospective onshore regions remaining in North America. Despite this potential, the North Slope remains underexplored.”
While the pipeline at its peak moved more than 2 million barrels of oil per day in 1988, throughput fell to fewer than 500,000 barrels per day as of April 2024.
The U.S. Energy Information Administration reports that Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge likely holds 10.4 billion barrels of crude oil. In January 2021, however, the Biden administration issued an executive order to place a temporary moratorium on federal oil and natural gas leasing in the wildlife refuge.
According to Trans-Alaska Pipeline System owners, the pipeline spends $60 million annually and has dedicated 300 professionals to prevent oil spills through the the Ship Escort Response Vessel System, which escorts oil tankers through the Prince William Sound to the Gulf of Alaska. This includes response vessels if a tanker becomes distressed and pre-stationed oil spill-response equipment for rapid response, as well as personnel and equipment stationed along the pipeline to respond to issues.
In addition to the oil pipeline, there are also efforts to build a natural gas pipeline to transport trillions of cubic feet of natural gas from Alaska’s North Slope, and these efforts may also cease if the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System were to be shut down.
The Alaska Gasline Development Corp., a public corporation of the State of Alaska that seeks to develop Alaska’s infrastructure for natural gas distribution, estimates that the North Slope contains about 35 trillion cubic feet of proven natural gas reserves, but could contain more than 200 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, making it one of the largest natural gas reserves in the world.
************************************************
UK: Green candidate advocates ‘Climate Nuremberg’
The Greens like to portray themselves as the party of hope and change. But what exactly does that entail? An enlightening answer perhaps comes from Joe Taylor, the Green candidate for Battersea. In his zeal to save the planet, he advocates using legal action against those whom he holds responsible for climate change. But not just any ordinary legal action – Taylor has previously argued that ‘Conservative politicians’ have ‘already cast their die and booked their places at the climate Nuremberg.’ Quite the incendiary claim, given that the Nuremberg trials obviously concerned the atrocities committed by the Nazi regime before and during the Second World War…
Having previously tweeted about a ‘climate Nuremberg’, Taylor then allegedly made a similar claim at a hustings on Sunday night. When Mr S got in touch with Taylor to confirm that this was correct, he responded on Twitter/X with a 17-long tweet thread on the subject. He argued that ‘there are several groups who are using international criminal law to seek the prosecution of those who cause mass death, mass suffering and annihilation of low-lying states through climate destruction’ and that ‘It must surely be only a matter of time before some of them are successful.’ ‘What I said at the hustings,’ he added ‘is that we could also be talking about newspapers and magazines who have consistently lied about climate science.’
Cheery stuff – and, er, crucially not a denial of the claim that he specifically referenced Nuremberg at the aforementioned hustings. The Green party press office declined to tell Steerpike whether they supported Taylor’s comments but confirmed that they were investigating the matter. Is this the ‘real hope, real change’ that the party is promising on 4 July?
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/06/green-candidate-advocates-climate-nuremberg/
*******************************************************Gas plant building boom to fuel renewable revolution, says energy grid chief
Craziness: Greenies don't like coal because it is a fossil fuel. But natural gas is a fossil fuel too! It's a theology that's beyond me. I don't agree that either are "fossil" fuels but that's what Greenies call hydrocarbons
The east coast of Australia will need 13 gigawatts of new gas fired electricity generation - the equivalent of building 26 new gas plants - within the next 25 years to back up the rollout of renewables.
The Australian Energy Market Operator’s (AEMO) finding that an extra 13 gigawatts would be needed was contained in its latest energy grid road map, released last week. It also warns that eastern Australia’s gas supply is running so low that emergency diesel fuel supplies would need to be built next to each new gas plant.
AEMO’s warning is a high stakes challenge to the Albanese government and Peter Dutton’s opposition given just one gas plant was completed in the past 10 years, with one more in development at Kurri Kurri in NSW.
With 10 months before the election, neither major party has detailed their plans to build crucial energy infrastructure or boost gas supplies.
AEMO said new gas powered capacity must be constructed between now and 2050 so the fuel source can continue to produce 5 per cent of the total energy mix in the grid. These plants will be needed in addition to a huge boost in batteries and pumped hydro.
The figure of 26 gas plants is extrapolated from AEMO’s report. Assuming that each plant can generate about 0.5 gigawatts, a total of 26 plants is needed to deliver 13 gigawatts of capacity – a tenfold increase on the current rate of construction given only gas plant to be built in the past decade.
The number of gas plants is a conservative figure, given the only plant built in the past 10 years, EnergyAustralia’s Tallawarra B gas plant, was 0.3 gigawatts.
AEMO’s Integrated System Plan found the “optimal development pathway” for the lowest-cost energy grid would be powered almost completely by renewables and backed with gas, batteries and pumped hydro.
The road map said gas would continue to play a small but crucial role. It will back up the vast bulk of renewable electricity under the Albanese government’s ambitious target to more than double the proportion of renewable electricity in the grid to 82 per cent by 2030.
Gas peaking plants can respond almost instantly when needed during periods of extreme demand or periods of low renewable generation, especially in winter when low wind and sunshine coincide with cold weather, and households switch their heaters on all at once.
However, AEMO is warning supplies of the fuel are running out – driven by dwindling reserves from Bass Strait fields, which have been the mainstay of the east coast gas market for decades.
AEMO said in March that the entire east coast gas market would be in annual deficit by 2028 unless new supplies are tapped, forecasting the supply gap to increase over time.
That is why AEMO said new gas plants should be built with onsite storage for extra diesel or hydrogen fuel to keep the turbines running if gas runs out – although it noted that hydrogen was likely to be too expensive in the coming decades.
“A typical gas generator may generate just 5 per cent of its annual potential, but will be critical when it runs. Most of that will be needed to support some winter days of low renewable energy output,” AEMO said.
A spokesperson for the Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen said the government was aiming to boost gas supply under its future gas strategy and that gas power would play a small but significant role in an energy grid dominated by renewables.
“AEMO estimates just 1.4 per cent of our 2050 demand will be met through flexible gas or hydrogen generation to support the transformation to reliable renewables that’s underway,” they said.
Former prime minister Scott Morrison’s “gas-fired recovery” policy vowed to open up new gas fields, including the Beetaloo Basin in the Northern Territory, but no new gas field was developed during that term of government.
Dutton must convince industry and voters he can reverse the record of the Morrison government, when four gigawatts of generation capacity left the grid and only one gigawatt was added.
Opposition energy spokesman Ted O’Brien has promised to release a gas policy before the election. He was contacted for comment.
Not everyone agrees that more gas is needed. Renewable and climate advocates argue that pumped hydro dams coupled with batteries can provide the storage needed to back up renewables, coupled with policies to reduce energy demand with increased energy efficiency.
“A national support program for home batteries will ease the power bill shocks in people’s homes, further stabilise the grid, and cut pollution,” the Smart Energy Council said last week.
‘No shortage’: Producers reject minister’s gas supply claim
Grattan Institute energy and climate policy expert Tony Wood said the government’s policy to encourage more renewables, known as the Capacity Investment Scheme, risked leaving the grid in a mess because gas was excluded.
Wood warned the opposition’s nuclear policy, a plan announced earlier this month to use public funds to build reactors on seven sites across the country, could leave the taxpayer on the hook for inefficient technology that private investors wouldn’t back.
“What we should be saying is we want to design a market with a reliable, low emissions mix and leave it to the market to solve the problem,” he said.
“But we seem to have got ourselves in a situation where the Labor government is arguing more for the private sector and the Coalition is arguing for the public sector investment. How weird is that?
“If the government’s going to decide what the mixture of technology is then we’re in a really bad place.”
The Albanese government approved last week Senex Energy’s long-delayed $1 billion Atlas project in Queensland’s Surat Basin gained federal environmental approval and is set to supply 60 petajoules a year from the end of 2025.
Renewables are driving coal plants out of business at a rapid rate with 90 per cent of the grid’s coal plants expected to be gone by 2035 and all of them shut by 2040. These plants currently supply 60 per cent of electricity.
***************************************
June 27, 2024
The ‘greenlash’ is coming – just look at Europe
A “greenlash” is coming, as voters throughout the developed world realise how duped they’ve been by years of unscientific, uneconomic nonsense spouted by much of the media and the so-called “experts”.
The marketing genius of referring to wind and solar power as “renewable”, when the associated infrastructure needs to be replaced more often than for nuclear or fossil fuel power stations, is wearing off.
The recent European parliament elections should be a wake-up call for radical climate change evangelists. In France, support for local Green parties more than halved to 5.5 per cent. In Germany, it collapsed almost 50 per cent to 12 per cent.
Among voters under 25, the German Greens did worse than the so-called “hard right” Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, as veteran US political analyst Ruy Teixeira pointed out last week.
“There’s no doubt concerns about immigration were key to the right populist surge in these elections, but the role of backlash against green policies should not be underestimated,” he said.
In 2019, just five years ago, the Greens did seven times better than the AfD. That’s a political earthquake if there ever was one.
“Voters really don’t want to be forced, directly or indirectly, to get an electric vehicle when they’re perfectly happy with their internal combustion car,” Teixeira added. “Rather than fighting climate change, voter’s strong preference is for cheap, reliable, abundant energy.”
In the US, support for nuclear energy for domestic power surged from 43 per cent in 2020 to 57 per cent in 2023 after flatlining for years, according to Pew Research, published in August last year.
The prospect of even higher energy prices at a time when prices in general have risen at least 20 per cent and house prices even more – all directly as a result of rampant money printing and stimulus during the Covid-19 pandemic – is proving politically toxic.
The number of nuclear reactors in the US, which provide around 20 per cent of the country’s electricity, declined from a peak of 111 in the late 1980s to 93. But as the anti-nuclear hysteria wears off, more reactors are being proposed. Now the Biden administration has embraced nuclear power as the only realistic way to provide reliable zero-carbon dioxide energy.
France, which has safely produced the bulk of its electricity via nuclear fission for years, has announced it is building at least six and up to 14 new nuclear power stations in coming years. India is building at least 18 by the early 2030s, and China is planning at least 100 new reactors by 2035.
Yes, new nuclear power stations will be expensive until the tempo of production increased and local industry climbed the learning curve. In any case, the cost argument is laughable given state and federal governments just sprayed around $400bn of borrowed money against the wall during Covid-19 for a cumulative excess deaths outcome that was scarcely different from Sweden’s, a country that spent barely anything by comparison.
As for safety, far more people tragically died at a South Korean electric battery manufacturing plant last week, at least 22, than have died from nuclear power related accidents since the poorly run and designed Chernobyl plant broke down in the 1980s.
As eminent Canadian scientist Vaclav Smil pointed out in a recent essay, it hasn’t even started – despite all the trillions spent. “Since the world began to focus on the need to end the combustion of fossil fuels we have not made the slightest progress in the goal of absolute global decarbonisation,” he points out.
Since 1997, fossil fuel consumption in absolute terms has increased 55 per cent. Its share of the total has declined from 86 per cent to 82 per cent. “All we have managed to do halfway through the intended grand global energy transition is a small relative decline,” Smil writes.
For affluent nations to achieve the net-zero carbon goals outlined in the international treaties they have signed, they would have to commit to annual expenditure of at least 20 per cent of GDP, for decades. To put it in perspective this is even more than the Soviet Union spent for a few years in its existential struggle to defeat Germany in World War II.
*******************************************************
No, Canada’s Not On Fire!
Environment Canada has pumped out a Xeet with the summer temperature forecast map of Canada covered in flaming orange red almost from coast to coast to coast, with a thin band of blue/grey down the West Coast.
They also promise that within a week of an extreme hot temperature event, Environment Canada will be able to provide attribution to human-causation.
As Dr. Madhav Khandekar has shown in public presentations, extreme weather events are integral to climate; they are not evidence per se of climate change.
Climate change is measured in periods of 30, 50, 100 and millennial time-scales. Thus, when we look historically at the Holocene Epoch (the last 10,000 years) there is a clear change in climate during the Medieval Optimum, a warm period of stable weather and abundant crop growth, from 900-1300 AD.
By the early 1300’s, weather patterns changed dramatically. Year-long periods of heavy rain hit Britain and northern Europe.
Temperatures cooled, crops failed, and chaotic weather conditions set in. Things got much worse from 1560-1630, a period said to be marked by volcanic activity, only restabilizing about 1860 until today.
Weather extremes were so frequent and bizarre, that thousands of (mostly) women were burned at the stake for the alleged crime of ‘Weather Cooking’ with the help of satan, as reported by historians Wolfgang Behringer and Jacek Wijaczka.
As astrophysicist Dr. Sallie Baliunas said in her presentation on the subject, the witch-burning was “…an example of fear and ignorance of extreme weather events in the Little Ice Age.”
Witch burning is an example of attribution of climate change to human-causation, and today’s Environment Canada initiative is on the scale of such superstition.
Only now the witch-burning will occur in corporations, largely due to them being required to make formal climate-risk disclosures to investors and securities authorities.
What do I mean?
Canada is about to implement the Canadian Sustainability Standards Board (CSSB) requirements on Climate-related Risk Disclosure (aka “The Mother of All Sustainability Reporting Standards”).
This will require corporations to count every carbon dioxide/equivalent greenhouse gas molecule related to their operational use, emissions on site, and emissions downstream at the user level. By doing so, they will be providing the extreme weather event ‘attribution’ hunters with perfect grist for the lawfare mill.
As CBC’s “What on Earth?” reported on June 13, 2024, “This scientist helps link climate change to disasters. That’s helping victims sue.”
By reporting a corporation’s GHG emissions in such detail as required by the CSSB, the weather-attribution hunters will be handed their so-called ‘evidence’ on a platter; in fact, a corporation’s own good faith.
Soon-to-be mandatory public reporting will be used to draw and quarter any company every time some individual or community is victimized by a flood, wildfire, heavy snowfall, tornado, severe thunderstorm, damaging hail, killing frost, or blazing heat dome.
Long-time climate policy analyst Roger Pielke, Jr. and colleagues have done yeoman’s work exposing the misuse of implausible climate scenarios as if ‘business-as-usual.’ He doesn’t stand for nonsensical attributions of wildfires or extreme weather events as human-caused.
Roger Pielke, Jr. explained in a recent post, “…for those who believe that climate policy can be used to detectably affect the weather that you or I experience.
That is simply a fantasy borne from today’s overheated claims of attribution and the fanciful idea that emissions are a disaster control knob.
In the lifetimes of everyone reading this and our children’s lifetimes, the attribution of changes in extreme weather to climate policy at high levels of confidence is not expected to be possible. Don’t take it from me, that’s straight from the IPCC.”
“But…but… muh killer heat dome!” climate activists will cry.
Caused by a Mobile Polar Anticyclone. Aka Mother Nature.
“But…but… high winds and May wildfires in 2023!” cry the climate activists.
An Omega block – also due to a Mobile Polar Anticyclone. Aka Mother Nature.
“But…but… Calgary’s 2013 catastrophic flood,” cry the climate activists.
A rare but known meteorological event, my friends.
“But…but… Guterres said it’s global boiling!” cry the climate activists.
Not human-caused, but Hunga Tonga. Expect at least 5 more years of warming or strange weather due to Hunga Tonga volcanic eruption pumping 146 metric megatons of water into the stratosphere like a geyser, based on a new study published in Nature Climate Change.
Canadians have been paying huge carbon taxes on the promise by the federal government that this will somehow stop extreme weather events. Now we know it was all just expensive witchcraft.
https://principia-scientific.com/stirling-no-canadas-not-on-fire/
*****************************************************School Bus Mechanic Warns of ‘Economic Disaster’ in Deploying Electric Buses Nationwide
In the rush to replace diesel school buses with electric ones, the U.S. educational system is financially endangering future generations, says a school bus mechanic in Colorado.
“Electric is just going to be an economic disaster for the entire country,” said Nick de Haan, who has inspected, repaired and maintained school buses since 2005. He requested the school district he works for to remain unnamed.
“I’m not against doing my part for the environment, but I think we’re being pushed into this before it’s financially feasible.”
De Haan called for a closer look at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) clean school bus program, which recently awarded $900 million to 530 school districts in an effort to replace 3,400 diesel buses with electric ones.
“Politicians are pushing to upgrade, but they don’t really think about the back end that needs to be done,” he told The Lion.
‘Double-edged sword’
De Haan joins a growing list of journalists and school officials raising maintenance and safety concerns over these buses. Perhaps the most important issue involves the electric batteries, which require substantial monitoring.
As de Haan lives in a high-elevation area at 8,000 feet above sea level, he says such conditions have repercussions for any type of battery.
“The colder it gets, the less amperage you have available,” de Haan said. “And so, the batteries actually have to be heated, or climate-controlled.”
As a result, all electric buses come with a diesel heater provided by Webasto, an automotive supplier de Haan says often equips school buses.
“These Webasto diesel-fired heaters literally heat the cooling system with the sole purpose of heating up the batteries and maintaining them at a specific temperature, whatever the engineers have designated,” he said, adding a typical temperature is around 50 degrees.
“If they’re stored outside and you’re in single digits overnight, that heater’s running all night to keep those batteries at the optimal temperature.”
Regions with warmer temperatures such as Arizona face the opposite problem – electric batteries need to be cooled before they are usable, de Haan explains. “They have a higher chance of failure rate. It’s a double-edged sword unless you have indoor parking for these buses, which is financially irresponsible.”
Strains on the electrical grid
In addition to parking challenges, other important utility upgrades involve boosting the current electrical grid.
Utility companies in de Haan’s school district have agreed to upgrade their facilities to handle additional requirements for e-buses. However, they added a stipulation to pull electricity from the buses during high-demand times for power.
Such demand times during the day could leave bus drivers stranded if they haven’t finished charging batteries for their afternoon drive.
“If the utility companies pull power during the day and those batteries are not at 100% when they get ready to leave in the afternoon, they’re kind of up the creek essentially,” de Haan told The Lion.
As 67% of the EPA’s funding will go to school districts in low-income, tribal and rural communities, these districts often have the least-developed infrastructure to handle e-buses.
“In order for the bus to be viable, it would need a fast charger,” de Haan argues. “And from what I understand, the charging requirements require a lot of amperage. For keeping five buses or more, you’re talking about a major upgrade to the infrastructure at your location. The utility company is not going to do that for free. And so, the districts would be responsible for that.”
De Haan cited one school district in the Denver metro area that ordered about 12 e-buses, which sat in the school’s parking lot for two years until enough infrastructure developed to support them.
A similar incident occurred in Philadelphia, where 25 e-buses that debuted during the 2019 Democratic National Convention remain unused “due to breakdowns and lack of parts,” according to GovTech.com.
https://heartlanddailynews.com/2024/06/school-bus-mechanic-warns-economic-disaster-electric-buses/
***************************************Windless nights make net zero impossible
It is very simple. The cost of storing electricity is so huge it makes getting through a single windless night under a net zero wind, solar, and storage plan economically impossible.
This is especially true of cold nights where blackouts can be deadly. I recently made a legislative proposal to Pennsylvania along these lines so let’s use them as our example, keeping in mind that this is true everywhere.
Pennsylvania peaks at around 30,000 MW so let’s consider a windless night with a constant need of just 20,000 MW. There should be lots of these, especially in winter. Cold snaps are typically due to windless high pressure systems of arctic air with lots of overnight radiative cooling.
In the world of solar, “nights” are 16 hours or more long since solar systems just generate a lot of energy for 8 hours a day. It is likely less in a Pennsylvania winter where it is dark at 4 pm.
So, to get through the night we need to have stored at least 20,000 MW times 16 hours or 320,000 MWh of juice. For simplicity, we ignore all sorts of technical details that would make this number larger, like input-output losses.
The present capital cost of grid scale batteries is around $600,000 per MWh. Again this ignores all sorts of technical factors that make that number larger, like buildings, transmission, etc.
Simple arithmetic says this works out to an incredible $192 billion dollars just for the batteries. Clearly this is economically impossible. In round numbers two hundred billion dollars just to get through the night! Wind and solar plus batteries simply does not work. Even if the cost magically dropped 90% it would still be an impossible $20 billion just to buy the batteries.
This is so simple one wonders why none of the utilities, public utility commissions, independent system operators, and reliability agencies ever thought of it. Or maybe they did and decided not to mention it.
Moreover, on really cold nights the need for electricity can easily get to peak demand, which would require more like $300 billion in batteries. Then, too, there might be a cloudy or even snowy day pushing the need to 16 + 8 + 16 = 40 hours. Or several cloudy windless days at which point we are talking about a trillion dollars or more.
Clearly these simple numbers make net zero power based on wind, solar and batteries impossibly expensive. Other forms of storage are likely no cheaper. The reality is we are talking about storing an enormous amount of energy which simply cannot be done. The obvious solution is to have lots of reliable generation.
Which brings me to my legislative proposal which is also very simple. It merely requires the utilities to figure out how to meet the need for electricity on brutally cold windless nights that are likely to occur.
You can read it here. The title is “Avoiding deadly blackouts” because in severe cold, a blackout can kill people. In the horrible Texas blackout estimates run to over 700 deaths. Cold kills.
In fact, this is a requirement for today, not just some distant net zero fantasy. We are already to the point where a lot of States could not keep the heat on if they got a severe cold snap like they have already had in the past.
In “Avoiding deadly blackouts” I point out that Pennsylvania and the rest of PJM narrowly avoided blacking out in winter storm Elliot. On paper, they had a 30% margin of safety which was wiped out by the cold. But Elliot was actually mild compared to several earlier severe cold spells. We must prepare for these extreme events.
We use a tremendous amount of electricity which net zero cannot possibly provide on windless nights. But we are already under severe threat. The States must act now to prevent deadly blackouts. Storage is not the answer. We need reliable generation, much of which will be fossil fueled.
https://www.cfact.org/2024/06/10/windless-nights-make-net-zero-impossible/
*****************************************June 26, 2024
Overlooked Impact Of Geothermal Heat On Thwaites Glacier
I have been pointing to geothermal issues in Western Antarctica for at least 10 years now so it is good to see someone else taking it up -- JR
Written by Dr. Matthew Wielicki
Heat flow in the geologic sense refers to the movement of thermal energy from the interior of the Earth to its surface
This heat originates from two primary sources: the residual heat from the planet’s formation and the heat produced by the radioactive decay of isotopes within the Earth’s mantle and crust.
When Earth formed approximately 4.5 billion years ago, it was a hot, molten sphere.
Over time, the planet began to cool and solidify, but a significant amount of this primordial heat is still retained within the Earth’s interior.
This residual heat continues to flow outward from the core towards the surface, contributing to the overall geothermal gradient.
Within the Earth’s mantle and crust, certain isotopes undergo radioactive decay, a process that releases thermal energy. Key isotopes contributing to this process include uranium-238, thorium-232, and potassium-40.
As these isotopes decay, they release heat, which is a significant source of the Earth’s internal thermal energy. This radioactive decay is ongoing, providing a continuous supply of heat that helps drive various geological processes such as mantle convection, plate tectonics, and volcanic activity.
On average, the heat flow from the Earth’s interior is around 70 milliwatts per square meter (mW/m²) across the continents and about 105 mW/m² across the ocean basins. However, these average values mask significant variations influenced by geological features and tectonic activity.
In areas with high tectonic activity, such as mid-ocean ridges and volcanic regions, heat flow can be considerably higher. For example, mid-ocean ridges, where tectonic plates are diverging, allow hot mantle material to rise closer to the Earth’s surface, resulting in heat flow values that can exceed 200 mW/m².
Similarly, volcanic regions exhibit elevated heat flow due to the presence of magma near the surface.
Conversely, older and more stable regions, such as continental cratons, tend to have lower heat flow values. Cratons are ancient and stable parts of the continental lithosphere that have cooled significantly over geological time.
In these regions, heat flow values can be as low as 30-40 mW/m² due to the thick, insulating lithospheric mantle that limits the upward movement of heat.
Geological structures such as sedimentary basins, mountain ranges, and fault zones also contribute to the variability in heat flow. Sedimentary basins, which often contain thick sequences of insulating sediments, can have lower heat flow compared to surrounding areas.
In contrast, mountain ranges, formed by tectonic compression and uplift, can have higher heat flow due to the presence of radioactive minerals and the relatively thin lithosphere.
This variability in heat flow is crucial for understanding the thermal structure of the Earth’s crust and mantle, as well as for applications such as geothermal energy exploration, tectonic studies, and the assessment of thermal regimes in different geological settings.
With the recent discovery of many more volcanoes under Western Antarctica surely studies examining the melting of the so-called ‘Doomsday’ Glacier would consider heat flow.
One recent study published in Nature Communications presents findings that challenge the common narrative that ‘GHG’s are responsible for melting in Western Antarctica, particularly under the Thwaites Glacier.
The study reports heat flux values exceeding 110 mW/m² beneath the glacier, which is significantly higher than the global averages for continents. This high heat flux is likely contributing to the melting of the Thwaites Glacier, an aspect often overlooked in discussions focusing solely on atmospheric warming.
The figure below from the Nature Communications study illustrates the spatial variability in geothermal heat flux under the Thwaites Glacier, showing values well over 110 mW/m² in some regions.
This high geothermal heat flux is a critical factor in the observed melting patterns and dynamics of the glacier. However, this aspect is often ignored or downplayed in broader climate narratives.
However, another article published in Nature focuses on subglacial waters beneath Thwaites and their contributions to ice melt, yet it does not mention the impact of geothermal heat flux.
Instead, it attributes the melting primarily to oceanic and atmospheric conditions. This discrepancy highlights the importance of considering all relevant factors in glacial melt dynamics, including geothermal heat flux, to understand and predict the behavior of ice sheets accurately.
The mainstream climate narrative, often driven by the “climate industrial complex,” tends to focus almost exclusively on ‘GHG’ emissions as the primary driver of global warming. This perspective is frequently echoed in alarmist headlines that sensationalize the impact of ‘GHG’s while ignoring other significant factors like geothermal heat.
The findings from the Nature Communications study on the Thwaites Glacier provide a compelling case for the importance of considering geothermal heat flux in discussions about glacial melt.
Ignoring such significant contributions can lead to incomplete or misleading conclusions about the causes and future trends of glacial melting.
Will the heat flux beneath Thwaites Glacier be affected by changes in atmospheric CO2 levels?
It is crucial to maintain a balanced perspective that includes all relevant factors, including much more relevant ones like geothermal heat. By doing so, we can make better-informed policy decisions.
The tendency of the climate industrial complex to focus narrowly on ‘GHG’s at the expense of other factors undermines the complexity of climate science.
It is leading to public skepticism and mistrust in climate research. For a more comprehensive understanding of the climate system, it is essential to integrate data on geothermal heat flux and other natural processes alongside ‘human-induced changes’.
https://principia-scientific.com/overlooked-impact-of-geothermal-heat-on-thwaites-glacier/
*******************************************Urgent recall for luxury Mercedes-Benz EQE and EQS electric vehicle models over worrying loss of power issue
Mercedes-Benz is recalling over 1,400 of its luxury electric vehicles after discovering a serious battery fault that can cause a sudden loss of power while driving.
The recall issued on Tuesday affects 1,465 Mercedes-Benz EQE and EQS electric vehicle models sold in Australia, which can cost more than $200,000.
A similar battery fault was discovered in the same vehicles in China and the United States and it can cause an abrupt halt of propulsion.
'A software issue in the battery management system may cause deactivation of the high-voltage battery,' the recall notice said.
'A loss of propulsion whilst driving could increase the risk of an accident causing injury or death to vehicle occupants.'
The recall comes only three months after a recall of 1,983 Mercedes-Benz vehicles in Australia, including EQE and EQS models, over a manufacturing fault in their fuse boxes.
Affected vehicle owners are encouraged to contact their nearest Mercedes-Benz dealership who will rectify the fault without charge.
*************************************************
Greenwashing Kamala Harris: How the Veep Casts Herself as an Environmental Justice Crusader
Vice President Kamala Harris has long cast herself as a fearless pioneer of efforts to fight for social and environmental justice.
“When I was elected DA of San Francisco,” Harris told a gathering at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta last year, “I started the first environmental justice unit of any DA’s office in the country.”
In her telling, the San Francisco District Attorney formed the special environmental justice unit in the early 2000s especially to protect the long-neglected community of Bayview Hunters Point, a predominantly African American and impoverished part of the city, which had become “a dumping ground for people from other places.”
In dozens of speeches and interviews in recent years, Harris has bragged that she went “after polluters” and protected minority communities in San Francisco in novel ways as a local prosecutor.
The narrative has become a bedrock of Harris’ political identity. She featured her DA environmental justice crimes unit in her first statewide television advertisement and she rarely missed an opportunity to tout the history during her presidential bid, during which she promised similar initiatives if elected.
But records from the San Francisco District Attorney’s office and interviews with local environmental advocates point to a different, far less ambitious record.
“We’re unaware of any major or semi-major environmental justice work done by Harris in Bayview Hunters Point, including on the Hunters Point Shipyard Superfund site,” said Bradley Angel, executive director of Greenaction for Health and Environmental Justice, a progressive watchdog group that seeks to “to promote environmental, social, economic and climate justice.”
Steve Castleman, an attorney with UC Berkeley’s Environmental Law Clinic, who has worked on urban pollution issues in the Bay Area, also noted that he did not know of any significant Harris environmental justice action as DA.
Far from targeting powerful corporate interests, Harris’ environmental justice unit appears to have filed only a few lawsuits, all against small-time defendants. The targets included a young man who conducted illegal smog checks at a small auto body shop in the city and a left-leaning community newspaper accused of illegally dumping leftover ink in an abandoned lot. Another defendant charged by the unit was a small construction company accused of using adulterated concrete. The major industrial polluters of San Francisco were left untouched under Harris’ watch during her two terms that ended in 2010.
************************************************
Australia: Feds approve gas expansion plans
Senex Energy, owned by Australian billionaire Gina Rinehart and South Korean steel maker Posco International, has been given the go-ahead for its $1 billion plan to expand its gas fields near Wandoan, about 400 kilometres north-west of Brisbane.
The company had put the project on hold in December 2022 in response to the federal government's intervention in the gas market.
However, it said the development would proceed after receiving all the major approvals needed.
"We now have the necessary investment confidence and regulatory approvals to proceed with our expansion and deliver sorely needed natural gas supply to the east coast market," said Senex Energy CEO Ian Davies.
"This announcement is especially timely given the current pressures that the east coast energy system is experiencing, particularly in southern states."
The expansion is set to produce enough electricity to power more than 2.7 million homes each year, equivalent to more than 10 per cent of the east coast's annual domestic gas requirements.
It comes after a warning from the Australian Energy Market Operator about a gas shortage across southern states.
The federal government said the decision to approve the project was lawful.
"This project will primarily contribute domestic gas supply to households and Australian manufacturing – including for glass, bricks, cement and food packaging," a spokesperson for Ms Plibersek said.
"Under Labor, we've already seen a 25 per cent increase in renewable energy in our grid. We are ticking off renewable energy projects at record rates, outstripping coal and gas projects seven to one."
Mr Davies said the expansion would begin delivering 60 petajoules of gas to the market by the end of 2025 and would create more than 900 jobs over the project's lifetime.
"The expansion will drive a significant boost in natural gas supply for Australia, demonstrating Queensland is continuing to do the heavy lifting for the east coast," he said.
The project was approved with 75 conditions, including a prohibition on the discharge of coal seam gas-produced water to surface water and a ban on clearing any koala foraging and breeding habitat.
The company has also been ordered to implement a water monitoring and management plan to watch for issues such as subsidence where land sinks.
Environmental lobby group Lock the Gate said it was concerned the project could lead to further subsidence across the region.
"The more the gas fields spread, the more problems of subsidence and groundwater loss and depletion we're going to see," said member Georgina Woods.
Ms Woods said the project's approval showed Australia continued to put off the hard decisions on transitioning the economy away from fossil fuels.
"If fossil fuels continue to expand, Australia has lost its way in its climate change action," she said.
"The job (of transitioning the economy) is very difficult, but it has to done because the consequences for Queensland from global warning will be catastrophic."
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-06-26/senex-gas-plans-approved/104022936
***************************************June 25, 2024
Net Zero Will Prevent Almost Zero Warming, Say Three Top Atmospheric Scientists
Recent calculations by the distinguished atmospheric scientists Richard Lindzen, William Happer and William van Wijngaarden suggest that if the entire world eliminated net carbon dioxide emissions by 2050 it would avert warming of an almost unmeasurable 0.07°C.
Even assuming the climate modelled feedbacks and temperature opinions of the politicised Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the rise would be only 0.28°C.
Year Zero would have been achieved along with the destruction of economic and social life for eight billion people on Planet Earth.
“It would be hard to find a better example of a policy of all pain and no gain,” note the scientists.
In the U.K., the current General Election is almost certain to be won by a party that is committed to outright warfare on hydrocarbons.
The Labour party will attempt to ‘decarbonise’ the electricity grid by the end of the decade without any realistic instant backup for unreliable wind and solar except oil and gas. Britain is sitting on huge reserves of hydrocarbons but new exploration is to be banned.
It is hard to think of a more ruinous energy policy, but the Conservative governing party is little better. Led by the hapless May, a woman over-promoted since her time running the education committee on Merton Council, through to Buffo Boris and Washed-Out Rishi.
Its leaders have drunk the eco Kool-Aid fed to them by the likes of Roger Hallam, Extinction Rebellion and the Swedish Doom Goblin. Adding to the mix in the new Parliament will be a likely 200 new ‘Labour’ recruits with university degrees in buggerallology and CVs full of parasitical non-jobs in the public sector.
Hardly any science knowledge between them, they even believe that they can spend billions of other people’s money to capture CO2 – perfectly good plant fertiliser – and bury it in the ground.
As a privileged, largely middle class group, they have net zero understanding of how a modern industrial society works, feeds itself and creates the wealth that pays their unnecessary wages.
All will be vying to save the planet and stop a temperature rise that is barely a rounding error on any long-term view.
They plan to cull the farting cows, sow wild flowers where food once grew, take away efficient gas boilers and internal combustion cars and stop granny visiting her grandchildren in the United States.
On a wider front, banning hydrocarbons will remove almost everything from a modern society including many medicines, building materials, fertilisers, plastics and cleaning products. It might be shorter and easier to list essential items where hydrocarbons are absent than produce one where they are present.
Anyone who dissents from their absurd views is said to be in league with fossil fuel interests, a risible suggestion given that they themselves are dependent on hydrocarbon producers to sustain their enviable lifestyles.
Unlike politicians the world over who rant about fire and brimstone, Messrs Lindzen, Happer and van Wijngaarden pay close attention to actual climate observations and analyses of the data.
Since it is impossible to determine how much of the gentle warming of the last two centuries is natural or caused by higher levels of CO2, they assume a ‘climate sensitivity’ – rise in temperature when CO2 doubles in the atmosphere – of 0.8°C.
This is about four times less than IPCC estimates, which lacks any proof. Understandably the IPCC does not make a big issue of this lack of crucial proof at the heart of the so-called 97% anthropogenic ‘consensus’.
The 0.8°C estimate is based on the idea that greenhouse gases like CO2 ‘saturate’ at certain levels and their warming effect falls off a logarithmic cliff. This idea has the advantage of explaining climate records that stretch back 600 million years since CO2 levels have been up to 10-15 times higher in the past compared with the extremely low levels observed today.
There is little if any long term causal link between temperature and CO2 over time. In the immediate past record there is evidence that CO2 rises after natural increases in temperature as the gas is released from warmer oceans.
Any argument that the Earth has a ‘boiling’ problem caused by the small CO2 contribution that humans make by using hydrocarbons is ‘settled’ by an invented political crisis, but is backed by no reliable observational data.
Most of the fear-mongering is little more than a circular exercise using computer models with improbable opinions fed in, and improbable opinions fed out.
The three scientists use a simple formula using base-two logarithms to assess the CO2 influence on the atmosphere based on decades of laboratory experiments and atmospheric data collection.
They demonstrate how trivial the effect on global temperature will be if humanity stops using hydrocarbons. After years wasted listening to Greta Thunberg, the message is starting to penetrate the political arena.
In the United States, the Net Zero project is dead in the water if Trump wins the Presidential election. In Europe, the ruling political elites, both national and supranational, are retreating on their Net Zero commitments.
Reality is starting to dawn and alternative political groupings emerge to challenge the comfortable insanity of Net Zero virtue signalling. In New Zealand, the nightmare of the Ardern years is being expunged with a roll back of Net Zero policies ahead of possible electricity black outs.
Only in Britain it seems are citizens prepared to elect a Government obsessed with self-inflicted poverty and deindustrialisation.
The only major political grouping committed to scrapping Net Zero is the Nigel Farage-led Reform party and although it could beat the ruling Conservatives into second place in the popular vote.
It is unlikely to secure many Parliamentary seats under the U.K.’s first-past-the-post electoral system. Only a few years ago the Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer, who thinks some women have penises, and his imbecilic Deputy Leader Angela Rayner, were bending the knee to an organisation that wanted to cut funding for the police and fling open the borders.
The new British Parliament will have plenty of people who still support Net Zero and assorted woke woo woo, and the great tragedy is that they will still be found across most of the represented political parties.
************************************************
UK: Net Zero Watch welcomes British Leftist Net Zero retreat
Net Zero Watch has welcomed Labour’s decision to abandon the Conservative 2035 deadline for banning installation of gas boilers in new build homes. But the campaign group warned that Ed Miliband’s pledge to focus on incentives instead of targets still means higher heating bills.
Net Zero Watch director Andrew Montford said:
Ed Miliband’s incentives could be getting gas boiler owners to subsidise heat pump purchases for other people, or getting them to pay for the billions of pounds of windfarm subsidies. It probably means both. This is unavoidable under Net Zero. Any party pledged to decarbonise is going to give you higher heating bills.
Mr Miliband’s decision is Labour’s second u-turn on Net Zero. In February, it abandoned a pledge to spend £28 billion per year on Net Zero measures:
Mr Montford said:
Net Zero is becoming a poisonous concept in the minds of the public. Expect the u-turns to come thick and fast in future.
https://www.netzerowatch.com/campaigns/view-email/cHs6rNmBDFhrRWxn4vKSRmproR3WpBpTIU0wz_9glpe2qnqU0fJ85kk6ysBEs5AxYxD9N9UtH2unXQGiv0uqK_txZrVvMq0x7V1gPbaKCbHC_87fz8V253bjuXZqInNgtPfQGTv_K5dwl4oRa2-FAhka-laRiYjCcFyWng== ?
*********************************************
EU drafts plan to exempt long-haul flights from new emissions rules
The European Commission has drafted plans to exempt long-haul flights from rules on monitoring their non-CO2 emissions, after international carriers lobbied for an opt-out, documents seen by Reuters showed.
The EU is developing plans to require airlines to track and report their contribution to climate change from January 2025 – not only from carbon dioxide, but also soot, nitrogen oxides and water vapour.
Airlines’ non-CO2 emissions have at least as important an impact on global warming as their CO2 output, according to the EU’s aviation safety authority.
A draft Commission proposal for the new rules, seen by Reuters, would exclude international flights – defined by the EU as those departing or landing in Europe from non-European destinations – from the emissions disclosure rules for two years, limiting them until 2027 to only flights within Europe.
“Such reporting shall only be required in respect of routes involving two aerodromes located in the European Economic Area,” it said, adding that flights from the EEA to Switzerland or Britain would also be covered.
It did not give a rationale for the exclusion. The exemption mirrors current EU rules that require airlines to disclose and pay fees for their CO2 emissions produced on flights only inside Europe, although those rules are due to be reassessed in 2026.
The proposed new rules have split the industry, with lobby group the International Air Transport Association seeking an exemption for long-haul flights, while low-cost European carriers Ryanair and Easyjet say all flights – including long-haul international trips – should be included.
IATA has said it is not currently possible to accurately monitor a flight’s non-CO2 emissions, and that the EU’s emissions monitoring requirements should be voluntary and exempt international flights.
“Any intention of expanding the scope to extra-EU international flights would raise legal concerns,” IATA director general Willie Walsh said in a letter to the European Commission in April, seen by Reuters.
************************************************
The ‘Climate Crisis’ Fades Out
The 2015 Paris Agreement aspired to “reduce the risks and impacts of climate change” by eliminating greenhouse-gas emissions in the latter half of this century. The centerpiece of the strategy was a global transition to low-emission energy systems.
After nearly a decade, it’s timely to ask how that energy transition is progressing and how it might fare in the future. A useful framework for that assessment is the “issue attention cycle” described in 1972 by Brookings Institution economist Anthony Downs. The five phases of that cycle mark the rise, peak, and decline in public salience of major environmental (and other) problems. It’s spooky to see how closely the energy transition has so far followed Downs’s description.
During Phase I, the issue of “global warming” bubbled among climate scientists through the 1980s with little public attention. Phase II began about 35 years ago when the issue—eventually rebranded “climate change”—burst into public consciousness, with global media coverage growing tenfold over the past two decades. Those years were marked by a fervor for doing something to “solve” the problem.
But the significant global emissions reductions envisioned in Paris are now a fantasy. Emissions grew to an all-time high in 2023, with consumption of coal, oil and natural gas each near record levels, driven in large part by the energy needs of the developing world. Despite global renewable-energy investment of almost $12 trillion in the nine years ending in 2023, fossil fuels continue to provide about 80% of the world’s energy. The latest United Nations emissions report projects that emissions in 2030 will be almost twice as high as a level compatible with the Paris aspiration.
The challenges in reducing emissions have long been evident to the few who cared to understand demographics, economics and energy technologies. As more people have come to appreciate those factors, there are signs that the “climate crisis” has entered Downs’s Phase III, when ambitious goals collide with techno-economic realities.
In Europe, consumers are rebelling against measures to reduce emissions (fiascoes of home heating requirements had electoral consequences in the U.K., Germany, and the Netherlands), and industry is decamping in search of cheaper energy. Despite generous subsidies, U.S. deployment of low-emission technologies can’t meet near-term goals, let alone the projected surge in electricity demand owing to data centers, artificial intelligence and electric vehicles. “Green” investments aren’t yielding competitive financial returns, and the annual cost of a 30-year decarbonization effort, estimated to be upward of 5% of the global economy, weighs on national budgets. Simultaneously, the scientific rationale for the transition is weakening as expectations of future warming are moderating.
What could revive this flagging transition? Perhaps connections between human influences on climate and the disastrous effects of more frequent severe weather. But despite claims to the contrary, the U.N. finds such connections haven’t emerged for most types of weather extremes. The complexity of climate science makes it unlikely that will happen anytime soon. The transition could also be reinvigorated by the development and deployment of reliable, cost-competitive low-emission energy systems. But there are fundamental reasons why energy systems change slowly.
The energy transition’s purported climate benefits are distant, vague and uncertain while the costs and disruption of rapid decarbonization are immediate and substantial. The world has many more urgent needs, including the provision of reliable and affordable energy to all. It’s therefore likely that Downs’s Phase IV will begin as “climate fatigue” sets in, “climate action” fades into the background, and public attention shifts to a different perceived threat (such as artificial intelligence). This would be followed by the long twilight of Phase V, when the issue of decarbonization flares sporadically, but the associated regulations and institutions endure, such as carbon pricing, border adjustments, and clean power standards.
U.S. and European governments are trying to induce an energy transition by building or expanding organizations and programs favoring particular “clean” technologies, including wind and solar generation, carbon capture, hydrogen production and vehicle electrification. Promoting technological innovation is a worthy endeavor, but such efforts face serious challenges as costs and disruptions grow without tangible progress in reducing local, let alone global, emissions. Retreats from aggressive goals are already under way in Europe, with clear signs of mandate fatigue. The climbdown will be slower in the U.S., where subsidies create constituencies that make it more difficult to reverse course.
We should welcome, not bemoan, the energy transition’s passage through the issue-attention cycle. It means that today’s ineffective, inefficient, and ill-considered climate-mitigation strategies will be abandoned, making room for a more thoughtful and informed approach to responsibly providing for the world’s energy needs.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-climate-crisis-fades-out-5944bd44
***************************************June 24, 2024
CNN Goes ‘Mann Overboard’ on Eastern U.S. Heatwave
From Chris Martz
CNN’s Brianna Keilar interviewed their number one climate czar, Dr. Michael Mann from UPenn, yesterday, to discuss how this week’s “brutal” and “unprecedented” heatwave is being fueled by global warming and is a taste of our future.
“???????? ???? ?? ?????????????? ???? ?????? ???????? ???????? ?????? ???????????? ???????? ???????? ????????, ?????? ???? ???????? ???? ???????? ???????? ?????????? ?? ?????? ?????????? ???????? ????????. ???? ???????? ?????? ???????? ???????????????????? ?????? ???????????? ?????? ????????????-?????????????? ?????????????????? ???? ?????? ???????????? ???? ???? ???????????????? ???? ???????? ???? ?????? ????????????.”
Mann then goes off on an activist sales pitch, demonizing affordable and reliable energy consumption, which he himself benefits from:
“??????, ???? ?????? ???? ???????? ???????? ?????????? ???? ???? ???????????????? ?????????????? ???????????? ?????????????????? ???????? ?????? ???????????????????? ?????? ?????????????? ???? ?????? ????????????. ????????’?? ?????? ?????? ????????. ?????? ???????? ???????? ???? ???? ?????? ?????????? ???? ?????????????????? ?????????? ????; ???? ???????? ???? ???????? ???????????? ?????? ?????????????? ?????????? ???? ?????????????? ?????? ???????????? ??????????.”
Someone should tell these people that this is what a glimpse of SUMMER looks like. There is nothing unprecedented or all that unusual about this heatwave. Not by summer standards nor by June standards.
Let’s look at the NWS forecast through Sunday for the same cities CNN plotted on their WSI graphic (seen above) at the 12-second mark in the video:
Atlanta, Georgia:
• Tue 6/18: 89° / record: 101° (1944)
• Wed 6/19: 89° / record: 99° (1933)
• Thu 6/20: 90° / record: 98° (1933)
• Fri 6/21: 93° / 98° (1933)
• Sat 6/22: 97° / 98° (1964 and 2022)
• Sun 6/23: 97° / 99° (1930 and 1944)
• Mon: 6/25: 95° / 99° (1930 and 1988)
Chicago, Illinois:
• Tue 6/18: 93° / record: 98° (1954)
• Wed 6/19: 95° / record: 102° (1953)
• Thu 6/20: 89° / record: 104° (1988)
• Fri 6/21: 92° / record: 101° (1988)
• Sat 6/22: 96° / record: 97° (1988)
• Sun 6/23: 86° / record: 97° (1930)
• Mon 6/24: 85° / record: 97° (1937 and 1953)
New York City, NY:
• Tue 6/18: 89° / record: 95° (1929)
• Wed 6/19: 91° / record: 98° (1994)
• Thu 6/20: 94° / record: 98° (1923)
• Fri 6/21: 94° / record: 97° (1953 and 1988)
• Sat 6/22: 88° / record: 98° (1988)
• Sun 6/23: 89° / record: 96° (1888)
• Mon 6/24: 87° / record: 96° (1888)
Oklahoma City, OK:
• Tue 6/18: 87° / record: 104° (2011)
• Wed 6/19: 89° / record: 101° (1918, 1953 and 2011)
• Thu 6/20: 86° / record: 104° (1918 and 1953)
• Fri 6/21: 91° / record: 104° (1936 and 1988) • Sat 6/22: 95° / record: 107° (1936) • Sun 6/23: 97° / record: 101° (1925, 1933 and 1934)
• Mon 6/24: 98° / record: 104° (1911)
St. Louis, MO:
• Tue 6/18: 91° / 101° (2021)
• Wed 6/19: 95° / 105° (1936)
• Thu 6/20: 96° / 103° (1953)
• Fri 6/21: 98° / 99° (1988) • Sat 6/22: 99° / 102° (1930)
• Sun 6/23: 94° / 101° (1930)
• Mon 6/24: 95° / 102° (1988)
Washington, D.C.:
• Tue 6/18: 92° / 97° (1944)
• Wed 6/19: 89° / 99° (1994)
• Thu 6/20: 92° / 99° (1931)
• Fri 6/21: 96° / 99° (2012)
• Sat 6/22: 97° / 101° (1988)
• Sun 6/23: 97° / 98° (1988)
• Mon 6/24: 93° / 100° (2010)
No daily records are in [the] forecast for any of those locations. This week’s heatwave does not compare to those of June 1936, 1944, 1953 or 1988.
Completely and totally ignorant of our weather history. Clowns.
https://climaterealism.com/2024/06/cnn-goes-mann-overboard-on-eastern-u-s-heatwave/
*********************************************New York Lawmakers Threaten To Ban Insurance for Fossil Fuel Projects
A new proposal in the New York Legislature would prohibit insurance companies from doing business in the state if they insure businesses that make over 10 percent of their money from fossil fuels. The bill, however, could backfire, encouraging insurers to vacate New York entirely rather than leave the lucrative industry.
"Within five years of the effective date of this article," the bill mandates, the "superintendent shall require any insurer doing business in the state to certify that they have divested" from "any company that derives ten percent or more of revenue from exploration, extraction, processing, exporting, transporting, and any other significant action with respect to oil, natural gas, coal, or any byproduct thereof."
Additionally, the law would force insurers to divest from any projects that are "intended to facilitate or expand" any "significant action with respect to oil, natural gas, coal, or any byproduct thereof."
New York is not the only state currently attempting to implement backdoor restrictions against fossil fuels by warding off insurers. Since last year, the Connecticut Legislature has debated a proposal to enact a fee against insurance companies for covering fossil fuel projects.
These pieces of legislation aim to kneecap fossil fuel companies by undercutting their funding. The New York bill threatens would-be insurers of fossil fuel projects—for instance, pipeline construction and natural gas power plant production—with economic exclusion from the state.
"There's no real magic bullet to stopping the oil and gas beast," Pete Sikora, a climate director at New York Communities for Change, told New York Focus, "but to the extent that there is, it could be insurance….No insurance, no projects."
"Insurance is a very powerful cudgel," added state Sen. Brad Hoylman-Sigal (D–Manhattan), one of the proposal's legislative sponsors.
New York's 2024 legislative session concluded on June 6, meaning the bill cannot be passed before the next legislative session begins in January 2025. But New Yorkers and beyond should hope that it never sees the light of day.
If the bill succeeds, it would increase insurance costs for energy production and potentially cause projects to proceed without insurance.
"Making insurance scarce or impossible to obtain for fossil fuel-related projects will not stop these projects from moving forward; it will only stop them from proceeding with the crucial protections provided by insurance," says Dave Snyder, the Vice President of the American Property Casualty Insurance Association (APCIA), in a comment to Reason.
Given the prevalence and profitability of fossil fuels, New York's "Insuring Our Future Act" could also backfire completely. It presents insurance companies with a choice: Leave the fossil fuel industry or leave the state. And many companies would likely pick the latter.
While New York lawmakers may think of fossil fuels as a thing of the past—perhaps belonging to some less happy time when gas stoves were still legal—they are here to stay, at least for the time being. Fossil fuels account for over 80 percent of total energy in the United States and 60 percent of our electricity. According to some estimates, oil and natural gas will comprise 60 percent of total energy consumption in the U.S. through 2040.
That makes fossil fuels a lucrative business for insurance companies. Northwestern Mutual, New York Life Insurance, State Farm, and six other companies each invested over $10 billion in fossil fuels in 2019, according to data compiled by the California Department of Insurance. Combined, insurance companies invest over $500 billion per year in the industry, and they raked in, according to one estimate, over $21 billion in revenue from the industry in 2022.
Many companies might decide that staying in the fossil fuel business is more important than staying in the Empire State, and if they do, then it will be New York businesses—not fossil fuel companies—that feel the brunt of the law's impact.
But all of this assumes that the proposal's sponsors actually intend to get the bill through the Legislature and are not simply trying to signal their willingness to go the extra mile on climate change by making a political statement.
"I cannot imagine this passing even in the fairly 'woke' atmosphere in the Assembly in Albany," John C. Coffee, a professor at Columbia Law School, tells Reason about the bill. "If it did, it still might face a veto from the Governor."
Hoylman-Sigal and state Rep. Phara Souffrant Forrest (D–Brooklyn), the bill's two legislative sponsors, did not immediately respond to Reason's request for comment.
https://reason.com/2024/06/20/new-york-lawmakers-threaten-to-ban-insurance-for-fossil-fuel-projects/
************************************************************UK More green elitism
Brendan O'Neill below rightly calls them narcissists
So now we know: nowhere is safe from the entitled fury of the Just Stop Oil mob. Not even Stonehenge. That prehistoric wonder, one of the oldest monuments of humankind, has been showered with orange powder paint by JSO’s loons. They say they want to ‘raise awareness’ of the climate crisis. All they’ve really raised awareness of is what conceited, heartless narcissists they are.
These people really do believe they are saving the planet, don’t they?
This was cultural desecration. It was savagery masquerading as protest. To attack a 5,000-year-old monument, this stone echo of the earliest stirrings of human civilisation, is to show horrific disregard for the history and people of this nation. I don’t want to hear a word about how they used powder paint and it will wash off in the rain, yada yada. The fact is they reduced a millennia-old structure to a soapbox for showy moral preening, and that is unforgivable.
Their smugness was almost as offensive as their vandalism. They strode towards the slabs with all the cockiness and zealotry of every apocalyptic cult in history and sprayed the paint all over them. Then they sat down, for photos, naturally, looking heartily satisfied with themselves. These people really do believe they are saving the planet, don’t they? They really think they are the final line of defence against the manmade heat death of Earth. It would be funny if it wasn’t so deranged.
It is precisely this delusion, this religious conviction that they are the enlightened few who might yet save mankind from the fires of climate change, that underpins their anti-social, anti-democratic behaviour.
When you think of yourself as the saviour of the dumb hordes from a world-ending smog of their own making, anything can be justified. Blocking highways, gluing yourself to art, laying siege to Stonehenge – nothing is off-limits to the upper-middle-class brat with a Messiah complex.
There is always a hectoring tone to JSO stunts. These double-barrelled donuts, many of whom hail from the well-to-do, love nothing more than to terrify the plebs with tales of our coming doom. Hence they target the snooker, and football matches, and daytime traffic that consists mostly of working people trying to get to their jobs. It’s an aristocratic finger-wag dolled up as progressive activism, a sermon from the old landed classes to us Aldi-shopping, Skoda-driving, Ryanair-flying commoners. ‘Can’t you see how disgusting you are?!’, is the subtext of every single stunt carried out by these silver-spoon cultists.
And it’s the subtext of their assault on Stonehenge yesterday. Their vile defilement of this ancient wonder is yet another elitist attempt to stupefy the stupid, to rouse the ignorant from their consumerist haze in order that they might finally change their behaviour. It feels like the country is being held hostage by the neuroses of the bored bourgeoisie. There is no telling where they will turn up next with their orange paint and End is Nigh lunacy and that turbo-smug look on their faces.
Action needs to be taken against these hysterics and irritants. If you see them in the road, drag them off it. If you see them in an art gallery about to pounce on a Van Gogh, stop them. As to the callous vandals at Stonehenge – a long prison sentence, please. We often hear about the usefulness of prison as a deterrent to the petty crimes of the poor – how about prison as a deterrent to the self-regarding crimes of the rich?
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/06/just-stop-oils-stonehenge-attack-is-unforgivable/
*******************************************Australia: Conservative activists launch pre-election attack on the Greens
The conservative activist group that torpedoed Anthony Albanese’s voice referendum will pump millions of dollars into a sole election campaign vehicle designed to drag down the Greens’ vote and expose the party’s radical policies.
The Australian can reveal that Advance, backed by 306,000 supporters and 32,000 donors, will spend $5m on phase one of a national election campaign titled “Greens Truth”, aiming to inflict “significant damage” to the left-wing party’s brand.
Armed with a post-voice war chest and new research showing voters remain disillusioned by the major political parties, Advance is launching its pre-election campaign to disrupt and halt the expanding electoral success of the Greens.
Amid rising speculation of an early election, and Peter Dutton’s Coalition making ground on the Albanese government, there is growing probability the Prime Minister could be forced into striking a deal with Adam Bandt to form minority government in a hung parliament.
With Greens preferences helping Mr Albanese claim victory after Labor secured a paltry 32.6 per cent primary vote at the 2022 election, Advance is warning voters of “catastrophic” outcomes for families if the left-wing party’s agenda is implemented.
The Greens, who have come under fire over accusations they are fanning anti-Semitism, push a range of extreme economic, defence, health, education and social policies that the major parties warn would wreck Australia’s economy and undermine national security.
Advance, initially established as a rival to left-wing activist group GetUp, has raised just over $900,000 from more than 5000 donations since soft-launching the Greens Truth campaign with supporters in May.
New donations data obtained by The Australian shows Advance continues to attract grassroots backing following its influential role in the Indigenous voice referendum campaign.
In the past 12 months, 18,492 out of 22,485 donations up to $499, were received, 3652 of $500-$4999, 329 of $5000-$24,999, 71 of $25,000-$99,999, and 31 of $100,000-$999,000.
A key driver of the anti-Greens campaign, which has been in the works since January, is the dramatic shift away from major parties and rise in protest voting.
Almost 32 per cent of Australians voted for a minor party or did not vote at the 2022 election, representing the biggest drift from the major parties in a century. Highlighting the protest vote trend, almost 258,000 people voted for the Greens in 2022 but preferenced the Liberal Party higher than Labor.
Research by Advance reveals 52 per cent of voters still believe the Greens look after the environment, water and wildlife, 26 per cent think they take action on climate, 20 per cent feel they stand for nothing, 8 per cent believe they look after the disadvantaged and 6 per cent categorise them as left-leaning, progressive and socialist.
Advance executive director Matthew Sheahan said the Greens Truth campaign would be an “all-out assault on the party that is a toxic and extreme influence on Australian politics”.
The campaign is targeted at erasing House of Representatives and Senate electoral gains made by the Greens over eight years and shining a light on extreme policies and culture, with Advance warning voters the party founded by Bob Brown is “not who they used to be”.
“Australian voters need to know that every election sees the Greens with more influence and closer to implementing their full agenda, which would be catastrophic for mums and dads, and their kids,” Mr Sheahan told The Australian.
“The Greens are not who they used to be, and there is no greater threat to Australia’s freedom, security or prosperity. This election day no reasonable Australian mum or dad should be voting Green.”
The campaign will publicise darker sides of the party, including “the lie that the Greens are a party of transparency and integrity (and the) litany of cover-ups of toxic and sexist behaviour”.
Mr Sheahan said this includes “the cover-up of assaults, accusations of bullying, claims of rape, and even MPs resigning over sex scandals”.
“The Greens have a track record of being a disgraceful and dysfunctional party that has failed its female supporters, volunteers and candidates time after time,” he said.
Advance said the Greens, who have won major concessions from the Albanese government in return for their votes, have been left unchecked for more than 40 years.
With the Greens eyeing off government seats Macnamara and Richmond at the next election, after winning Griffith off Labor and Brisbane and Ryan from the Liberals in 2022, Mr Sheahan said the left-wing party’s free ride “ends today”.
A campaign priority is exposing the Greens’ “fraudulent brand positioning as a party that is only concerned with the environment”. Advance research shows when voters think of the Greens, “they think of who they used to be – an environmental movement who fought against the Franklin Dam in the 1980s, who stood in front of old-growth forests”.
“Forty years later, this is obviously untrue and, when tested, voters start looking for an exit.”
Mr Sheahan said Advance research shows “Australians are not across some of the Greens’ more extreme policies including defunding non-government schools, implementing an inheritance tax and decriminalising hard drugs including ice and heroin”.
“Australian families have every reason to fear this agenda and its impact on not only cost of living, but the future and safety of their children.”
He said another major line of attack focused on debunking the Greens’ “outsider reputation”.
“The Greens like to perpetuate the idea that they are a protest party with no influence. The reality is much different. The Greens are already deciding what legislation passes or at least having a major say in parliaments across the country.
“Their policies are already being implemented as they hold Labor governments to ransom with their preferences all over the electoral map.”
***************************************
23 June, 2024
Biden’s Hypocrisy on Climate Change Is Painfully Obvious
President Joe Biden has repeatedly called climate change an “existential threat,” worse than nuclear weapons.
Yet, Biden’s green energy mandates result in a greater U.S. demand for wind turbines, solar panels and electric batteries from China, made by coal-fired power plants, increasing the emissions Biden criticizes at home.
The United Nations Environment Programme estimates that in the absence of reductions in carbon emissions, temperatures will rise by about 3 degrees Celsius by the end of the century. The idea that such a temperature change is worse than deaths from nuclear weapons is ludicrous. Over 200,000 people died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki after America dropped atomic bombs.
Temperatures have varied for centuries. Climate models are not reliable and accurate enough to attribute global warming to human activities. The observed rate of global warming over the past 50 years has been weaker than that predicted by almost all computerized climate models.
Thirty-six computer models overpredicted surface air temperatures during the summer growing season. The models all showed warming well above what happened in reality, with the most extreme model producing seven times too much warming.
Increases in hurricane frequency are erroneously cited as an effect of warming. Although carbon dioxide emissions and temperature—both in America and globally—have increased over the latter parts of the 20th Century, no meaningful increase in frequency and intensity of hurricanes has been observed.
Hurricane damage has increased over time, but this outcome is largely due to increased incomes and wealth, and therefore infrastructure creation, rather than more violent hurricanes. For example, homes in Florida have risen by a factor of 12 since 1975, according to the St Louis Federal Reserve Bank. The same hurricane that in 1975 destroyed a house worth $100,000 would now destroy a house worth $1.2 million.
Although some say that increased CO2 levels are detrimental to human health and welfare, deaths are more likely to result from medical events triggered by the cold than by the heat.
A 2020 study by Dr. Whanhee Lee and others in Lancet showed that cold-related morbidity and mortality—strokes, heart attacks, blood clots, and other problems—result directly from the influence of cold temperatures on the body, where the body is unable to maintain sufficient core temperature to guarantee survival.
In addition, Environmental Protection Agency data shows that death rates are about 10 percent higher in winter, and January is the deadliest month of the year in the Northern Hemisphere.
If Biden truly thought that climate change was an existential threat, he would try to lower global emissions through greater U.S. exports of natural gas. This would enable other countries to reduce emissions by substituting natural gas for coal, just as America has reduced carbon emissions by 1,000 million metric tons over the past 16 years.
In addition, Biden would try to expand emissions-free nuclear power if he thought climate change was a threat. He would make uranium mining easier, because uranium is a critical ingredient for nuclear power. Yet he has taken swaths of land off the table for uranium development and made no attempt to solve the problem of nuclear waste.
Instead, Biden blocks a new liquid natural gas export terminal in Louisiana, which results in greater worldwide use of coal, increasing global carbon dioxide emissions. Europe has already been turning to coal to deal with energy shortages in the aftermath of Russia’s cutoff of natural gas.
New regulations at the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Office of the Controller of the Currency discourage companies from investing in natural gas, and banks from lending money to fund natural gas. Regulations from the Department of Energy raise the cost of natural gas stoves, water heaters, and boilers.
Over the past 20 years, U.S. emissions of CO2 have declined by a billion metric tons as natural gas has been increasingly substituted for coal use in the generation of electricity. Over the same period, CO2 emissions in China have risen by 8.7 billion metric tons.
Biden’s repetition that climate change is an existential threat gives him an excuse to impose more regulations and sign into law subsidies for favored donors.
“Never let a good crisis go to waste,” said Amb. Rahm Emanuel when he was President Bill Clinton’s chief of staff. Biden is inventing the crisis and the waste is following.
https://www.heritage.org/climate/commentary/bidens-hypocrisy-climate-change-painfully-obvious
**************************************************John Kerry's Climate Office Coordinated With Left-Wing Nonprofits Working To Shut Down Coal
The State Department's lead climate office discussed shutting down coal power worldwide with environmental groups, namely the California-based Sierra Club among others, ahead of its decision to join an international anti-coal coalition, according to emails reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon.
The internal agency emails—obtained this month via information request by watchdog group Protect the Public's Trust (PPT)—are the latest evidence that the State Department's Office of the Special Presidential Envoy for Climate (SPEC), led by John Kerry until he departed early this year, discussed key policy issues, including actions related to coal power, with nonprofit interest groups.
And the emails come amid a sweeping congressional probe into the SPEC office's coordination with eco groups. That probe is being spearheaded by House Oversight Committee chairman James Comer (R., Ky.), who told the Free Beacon that his panel continues to review separate documents showing the Biden administration "caved to pressure by leftist climate groups" seeking to end construction of new coal plants and phase out all coal worldwide by 2040.
"Evidence continues to mount showing a sophisticated, targeted approach by radical environmental groups to influence the Biden Administration's domestic and foreign policy," said Comer.
"The Oversight Committee will continue to press the Biden Administration for information related to Envoy Kerry’s position and his office’s ability to bind the United States to agreements at the detriment of American consumers and businesses," he continued.
According to the emails obtained by PPT and shared with the Free Beacon, on April 15, 2021, Steve Herz, a senior attorney and international climate policy adviser at the Sierra Club, contacted then-SPEC adviser Jesse Young, inviting Kerry and other administration officials to attend the June 2021 "grassroots leadership climate summit" hosted by the Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth.
Herz said the summit would focus on issues "the U.S. government needs to address internationally" including "shutting down coal."
Sierra Club senior attorney emails SPEC adviser Jesse Young an invitation for John Kerry to attend a private discussion with environmental groups.Sierra Club senior attorney Steve Herz emails SPEC adviser Jesse Young an invitation for John Kerry to attend a private discussion with environmental groups.
Young, who is now the SPEC office's chief of staff, responded to Herz, saying that he "would love" if Kerry could attend the summit. Then, in a May 2021 email, Young asked other State Department officials to confirm whether Kerry could attend the event, noting the invite was brought up during a recent "NGO call" and adding that it "seems like a good idea to me."
Kerry and then-senior SPEC adviser Lauren Sanchez, who has since been hired as a climate adviser for Gov. Gavin Newsom (D., Calif.), ultimately attended the Sierra Club-Friends of the Earth summit, joining a session on June 3, 2021. While much of the event was broadcast online, that session was private.
"This private session of the Global Grassroots Leaders Climate Summit will provide an opportunity for participating grassroots leaders to have a dialogue with Special Envoy for Climate, John Kerry and his team," a description of the session online states. "They will discuss ways the Biden administration can be constructive partners in global climate efforts and specific ways the administration can benefit their campaigns."
That description failed to detail the session's covered topics that were listed in Herz's original email to Young two months earlier.
In a separate email exchange from July 2021, Herz requested a meeting with SPEC officials to discuss "opportunities of limiting international coal finance." The top Sierra Club official sent the request to a group of SPEC officials whose names were redacted in the documents produced via FOIA request.
"limiting international coal finance."
Sue Biniaz, who serves as the principal deputy special envoy for climate, said in an email to other officials that it "couldn’t hurt to hear their thoughts." An unnamed official then responded, suggesting that they loop the White House National Security Council into the conversation.
The SPEC office, Sierra Club, and Friends of the Earth did not respond to requests for comment.
"Government of, by, and for the people demands transparency and accountability," PPT director Michael Chamberlain told the Free Beacon. "The actions of John Kerry’s secretive climate office are anathema to those qualities."
"And every new revelation seems to add to the body of evidence that Kerry’s office has been outsourcing its policymaking—policies that have a significant impact on our ability keep the lights on and the machines running in our homes, hospitals, schools, and businesses—to powerful but unaccountable special interest organizations," added Chamberlain.
In January, the House Oversight Committee released emails that, like the batch obtained this month by PPT, highlight the extensive coordination between the SPEC office and environmental nonprofit organizations.
Those emails showed that, on March 2, 2021, the State Department solicited and received guidance from the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) on the so-called Powering Past Coal Alliance, an international effort to reduce coal reliance. And they also revealed that, on April 7, 2021, the NRDC, along with the Sierra Club and three other eco groups, sent SPEC officials a memo outlining a "global coal phase-out agenda for the Biden administration."
NRDC's memo, obtained by the Free Beacon, made a series of recommendations to the SPEC office, including joining the Powering Past Coal Alliance, prioritizing coal phase-out policies in diplomatic engagements with China, Japan, and South Korea, and increasing financial incentives for other countries to transition away from coal by "greening" COVID-19 recovery plans.
"The Biden administration should make a global coal phase-out a top-tier foreign policy priority, and a critical issue in bilateral relations with all key countries funding and using coal," the memo stated.
**************************************************
The week the UK took another step on the road to being ruled by unelected judges
I'm beginning to wonder if it really matters who we vote for on July 4 when we are now a country in which power has been steadily seeping from elected politicians to unelected judges.
Take energy policy, a pivotal issue at a time of high fuel prices and fears about security of supply.
The Tories want to grant lots more licences to drill for oil and gas in the North Sea, to increase supply (to steady prices) and make us less dependent on unreliable foreign imports.
Labour would cease any further development in the North Sea after existing licences expire, preferring to give greater priority to reducing our carbon emissions and getting to net zero sooner rather than later.
So a clear choice for us to make. Exactly how a democracy should work. Except that judges have already taken the decision for us.
On Thursday, the Supreme Court ruled that Surrey County Council had been wrong to allow the expansion of a tiny oilfield known as the Gatwick Gusher (for its proximity to the airport) because it had only taken into account the emissions generated by developing the field, not those emitted when the oil was eventually burnt.
Thus, with one ruling, has the highest court in the land brought the further development of our oil and gas reserves to a grinding halt.
It has done more for Just Stop Oil's campaign than any amount of Stonehenge-style performative attacks could ever hope to achieve.
The Surrey field is small in the grand scheme of things but the Supreme Court ruling will now be applied to far bigger ventures just getting off the ground, such as the massive Rosebank oil field 80 miles west of the Shetlands and the Whitehaven coal mine in Cumbria.
The massed ranks of climate activists are already being mustered. Armed with their high-powered (and highly paid) lawyers and the Supreme Court ruling, they will challenge every nascent fossil fuel development in the land.
And there is every chance they will bring them to a grinding halt, just as they have the Gatwick Gusher.
It is yet another significant step on the road from democracy to kritocracy (rule by judges).
We are moving from rule by elected politicians —who consult experts in and out of government before rolling out the policies on which they were voted in — to rule by unelected judges who know nothing of the matters on which they opine but are still able to impose their own narrow but highly consequential interpretation of the law.
None of the three Supreme Court judges who took Thursday's decision would seem to have any expertise in energy policy or climate change.
One of them, Lord Leggat, is big on diversity and inclusion, as those — like him —educated at Eton, Cambridge and Harvard often think they should be seen to be. But not energy policy.
Another, Lady Rose, a product of Oxford and Cambridge, doesn't seem to have any private sector experience, never mind energy sector expertise, since she's spent most of her working life as a career legal officer in government.
The third, Lord Kitchin, also Cambridge, is a specialist in intellectual property. Not oil and gas.
The activists determined to stop the Surrey development had already lost in the High Court and the Court of Appeal. But thanks to these three judges from the same university, they won a narrow victory (three to two) in the highest court.
The local council and the oil company have run out of legal road. That sound you hear is the noise of oil and gas firms running for the door. Why hang around in a country that doesn't want you?
A country in which an incoming Labour government was going to freeze further licences anyway; in which the governing SNP in Scotland is no friend either; and in which supposedly temporary windfall taxes, taking the corporate tax rate to a penal 75 per cent, look like becoming permanent.
A country in which every planning application takes for ever (even the minor development in Surrey spent five years in the courts); in which you face the relentless hostility of activists and polite society treats you as a pariah (while, of course, avidly consuming your products).
And in which you never know when you, your family or your offices will be sprayed in orange paint by eco-zealots and loons.
There are far friendlier climes that want your investment — and they're probably more profitable, too. So don't for a second think the departure of the oil and gas industry from our shores is any kind of victory for net zero.
They will just move to exploit fossil fuels in other territories, often with less rigorous environmental standards than our own, while our world-class oil and gas sector, which generates £30 billion in revenues, £9 billion in tax and 220,000 direct and indirect well-paid jobs, enters terminal decline.
Not for much longer will Aberdeen be the oil capital of Europe. It risks the same fate as Glasgow, whose once proud boast to be the shipbuilding capital of the world is now but a distant memory.
Lord Leggat opined that oil from the Surrey field would 'inevitably' be 'burned' and the planning application had failed to account for that in terms of the carbon emissions generated.
Exactly how you would calculate that he did not say. After all, not all oil is burned. It's used for petrochemicals (the clue is in the name, your lordship) and in a variety of products from plastics to tyres to bitumin to pharmaceuticals. So the figure he wants is well nigh impossible to calculate.
But the most ludicrous aspect of the judgment — described by one energy expert as 'utter lunacy' — is the implication that banning new licences in the UK will reduce our consumption of fossil fuels.
If that were the case, there would be some logic to the ruling. But it's not. We are destined, on all reputable forecasts, to need oil, gas and even some coal for the foreseeable future.
But now we'll import even more of it, at even greater cost in terms of price and emissions. The UK Supreme Court will be the toast of Qatar and Saudi Arabia this weekend. No doubt the Kremlin is smiling too, as it also looks at ways of sneaking its oil to us, perhaps via India.
Our loss is the dictators' gain. And not just the dictators. A friend from Texas thanked me yesterday for the Supreme Court ruling, saying his state looked forward to sending us even more natural gas.
The Tories have only themselves to blame. They have long pandered to the net zero cause, hoping to scoop up some of the 'green' vote (naturally, they've failed).
This culminated, during the last, miserable days of Theresa May's premiership, in the House of Commons nodding through, without proper debate or scrutiny, a legally binding target for Britain to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2050.
May regarded this as her lasting legacy. It's turned out to be more of a time-bomb because it's the legally binding aspect of the target which has given the Supreme Court such a grip on energy policy.
The net zero target only covers emissions generated within our borders. So the fact we will have to import more oil and gas as a result of its ruling, even though that means higher emissions, doesn't concern the Court. It has no legal remit over imported energy.
Nor can it have anything to say about energy security since the Government hasn't set a legally binding target for that.
Thus, almost by accident, has net zero become the be-all and end-all of judge-determined energy policy, whose impact will be to make us all poorer.
*********************************************
Congratulations to Australian conservative leader on climate change retreat
Opposition leader, Peter Dutton, deserves an elephant stamp for calling out the impossibility of Australia reaching its 2030 emissions target set by the Labor government. The Coalition has now effectively disowned the target.
Recall here that the Coalition had been shooting for an emissions-reduction cut of between 26 and 28 per cent by 2030 from a base of 2005. The then prime minister, Scott Morrison, declared that this would be achieved in a canter. He wasn’t wrong on that score, because by the end of 2023, a cut of 29 per cent had been achieved.
But as they say, the last mile is always the hardest and so the 43 per cent emissions reduction set by the Albanese government is looking like a tough climb to the top of Everest in unfavourable weather conditions.
But this fact never deterred Albo and the hapless B1, Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen, from racing the new higher target into legislation and formally advising the UN climate bureaucrats in charge of the Paris Agreement racket of this more ambitious goal.
Mind you, the fact that the target is legislated doesn’t really make much difference nor does our refreshed statement of intent made to the UN – let’s not forget here that the Paris climate agreement is not legally binding.
Most signatories to Paris haven’t bothered to legislate their targets and have no intention of doing so. The UK, much to its shame, is different in that regard. Theresa May, a true climate believer if there ever was, insisted on this as well as committing the Tories to net zero.
She even conferred ridiculous powers on the Climate Change Committee, appointing extremist chairs who bully the Poms to change their evil climate ways – don’t eat meat, install expensive and ineffective heat pumps, use ‘active transport’ (walk, cycle or scooter) rather than drive the car, don’t even think about getting on a plane, etc, etc. Is it really any surprise that the Tories are about to get a drubbing, Boris and Rishi having never walked away from this rubbish?
But I digress. Let me get back to Australia. Dutts’ decision to decline the 43 per cent target is a mixture of informed realism and courageous politics. Needless to say, the progressive press is aghast, claiming that the announcement puts paid to the Liberals’ chances of winning back the Teal seats, although we shall see.
The rent-seeking business community with interests in green things is complaining bitterly. Evidently, they need certainty which is simply code for more subsidies. A lower target or no target at all will undermine their case for even more moolah from taxpayers and long-suffering consumers.
One of the advantages that Dutts has over Albo is that Dutts can count. Albo’s strong suit is wishful thinking and dreaming up rhyming cliches. The fact is that a 43 per cent target requires losing around 100 million tonnes of CO2-equivalent in six years in the context of a rapidly rising population. It boils down to the maths: where will those tonnes come from?
Sadly – OK, not that sadly – for B1, the renewable energy experiment has not been going entirely to plan, like Japan’s second world war effort. Of course, if you throw subsidies at something, you will get more of it. But there have been some significant impediments to renewable energy (RE)investment in recent times – escalating costs, worker shortages, local resistance to RE developments (God bless our country cousins) and inadequate transmission.
As a consequence, the amount of RE added to the grid has been a fraction of what is required to meet another B1 target – 82 per cent RE in the grid by 2030. It’s only around 40 per cent now. There is a long way to go.
Going by the polls, voter opinion is on the side of the Coalition on this issue. A rising majority think that affordable and reliable electricity is the most important consideration with a small and declining proportion taking the view that hitting the emissions target should prevail. Even those on board with the green energy idea either don’t want to pay anything extra or $100 more per year at most. It looks as though peak climate has been reached and we are now on the sunlit downhill.
Albo and B1 could easily be tempted to look beyond the electricity grid to achieve the unachievable target. Laughably, there was a view at some stage that 90 per cent of all car sales by 2030 would be EVs. Given recent developments in the EV market here and overseas, it would seem extremely optimistic to predict that half of all car sales in Australia will be EVs by the end of the decade.
Let’s face it, the wheels are really falling off the EV market in the US – pardon the pun. General Motors, which was given great licks of taxpayer money to convert to EV production and ditch its highly profitable and popular lines of internal combustion vehicles, is walking back at an incredible pace. The company built an EV truck expecting to sell 150,000 in the first year; it sold 27,000.
There are so many hairs on EVs as convenient family or work vehicles, including the incredibly high cost of insurance and the absence of a second-hand market. Add in the difficulty of accessing fast charging and range anxiety, and the real surprise is that so many EVs have been sold.
But note here that most EVs are sold to companies attracted by the substantial tax concessions, not to private buyers. The only ones surprised by these developments are the true-believing green activists – and B1.
The Albanese government might have a crack at pushing for the closure of some of the big emitters – aluminium smelters, alumina refineries, steel works – but the politics of this are not great. Attacking the farming community also has its downsides – just take a look at what has been happening in Europe with farmers revolting.
The bottom line is that Australia’s current emissions target already looks like a bust and most people who follow these things know this.
As Speccie readers appreciate, a political leader who stands for nothing is never well-placed to roll an incumbent government. Claims of superior managerial competence simply do not cut it if the proposed platforms are essentially the same as the government’s. (Take note, David Crisafulli, hapless opposition leader of the LNP in Queensland. It was a Bill Shorten moment – ‘I don’t know what’s in Labor’s budget but we will support it.’)
I say hats off to Dutts: he has taken a stand on the 2030 target. Next stop: ditch the folly of net zero by 2050.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/06/hats-off-to-dutton/
***************************************20 June, 2024
Biden EPA Rules Will Cause Blackouts for Millions of Americans, Study Warns
President Joe Biden’s aggressive climate regulations targeting fossil-fuel-fired power plants will create widespread electric grid instability and lead to mass blackouts impacting millions of Americans, according to a recent study commissioned by North Dakota’s state government.
The research, conducted in May by the firm Always On Energy Research, concluded that the Environmental Protection Agency’s recently finalized regulations are not technologically feasible and will foreseeably lead to the retirement of coal power generation units. Intermittent and weather-dependent green energy sources, such as wind and solar, will replace such retired generators, leading to unreliable conditions, the study found.
The study largely echoes concerns that have been voiced by the U.S. grid watchdog, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation; regional grid operators; and power utility companies. Four regional grid operators that oversee the infrastructure supplying power for 154 million Americans warned after the EPA regulations were first proposed last year that grid reliability would “dwindle to concerning levels” under the regulations. The Edison Electric Institute, the lead industry group representing U.S. electric companies, in late May joined a lawsuit that challenged the EPA’s finalized regulations.
“Biden’s Green Agenda is shutting down baseload power and is rapidly destabilizing our electrical grid. Electricity costs are up 30% under Biden already,” North Dakota governor Doug Burgum (R.) told the Washington Free Beacon in a statement. “Prices will continue to skyrocket if he’s re-elected as real power demand increases dramatically for the first time in decades—for chip manufacturing and new foundational industries like AI.”
Burgum, a member of the North Dakota Industrial Commission, which commissioned the study, added that Biden’s regulatory regime will reduce power supplies, leading to “higher prices AND less reliability.”
In April, the EPA finalized the first part of a multi-pronged effort to curb greenhouse gas emissions produced by the nation’s power sector. The regulations require existing coal plants to slash their carbon footprint 90 percent by 2032, which could force the vast majority of such plants across the country to shutter over the next two decades. They further require significant emissions reductions for new natural-gas-fired power plants that operate more than 20 percent of the time.
The finalized regulations are poised to have a particularly acute impact in Midwestern states such as North Dakota, where coal-fired power plants produce more than half of all electricity generated and where the four largest power plants are all coal-fired. North Dakota is also the sixth-largest coal-producing state in the country.
According to Always On Energy Research, the rules’ economic consequences include increasing the cost of compliance for coal plant operators, reducing competitiveness with alternative power sources, expediting the rate of coal retirements, resulting in higher electricity prices, and causing supply chain issues for industries reliant on coal.
“The Finalized Rule will increase costs, which, compounded with inflation, will negatively impact the affordability of electric and gas services, resulting in a disproportionate effect on low-income citizens,” the study stated. “Given the high rural populations in North Dakota, pricing low-income citizens out of a reliable energy source creates an economic and social justice issue with devasting [sic] impacts on North Dakotans’ lives.”
In addition, under EPA’s plans, coal plants—considered dispatchable power, or power that can quickly be turned on in times of high electricity demand—will largely be replaced by new solar and wind power generators, which are highly dependent on proper wind conditions.
Solar panels, for example, produce just 25 percent and wind turbines produce 34 percent of their listed capacity, according to the Energy Information Administration. Coal and natural gas plants, meanwhile, respectively produce 49 percent and 54 percent of their listed capacity.
Factoring in that disparity, Always On Energy Research concluded the grid across the majority of the Midwest would experience nearly 9 million megawatt hours of unserved load, leading to blackouts costing tens of billions of dollars.
“The EPA power plant rule is exactly the wrong thing to be doing for grid reliability right now,” Paige Lambermont, a research fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, told the Free Beacon. “To be intentionally closing and, essentially, banning the facilities that are keeping the grid functioning while, at the same time, in other ways, encouraging the penetration on the grid of things like wind and solar that are making the grid less reliable is going to have incredibly poor aftereffects.”
Nationwide, natural gas plants generated roughly 43 percent of total electricity produced in 2023 while coal plants generated another 16 percent, according to additional Energy Information Administration data. By comparison, wind power generated 10 percent of total electricity in the United States, and solar produced less than 6 percent.
The EPA is expected to finalize a second batch of regulations cracking down on existing natural gas power plants in the coming months.
Democrats and climate advocates have long targeted the power sector as part of their effort to reduce pollution and fight global warming. According to EPA data, electric power generation in the United States is responsible for 25 percent of total nationwide emissions, only behind the transportation sector, which produces roughly 28 percent of total emissions.
EPA spokeswoman Angela Hackel told the Free Beacon that “over decades EPA regulations like the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards and Good Neighbor Rule have achieved important reductions in pollution from electricity generation while supporting reliability.”
“This rule will do the same,” Hackel said. She added that the EPA is reviewing the North Dakota study.
**********************************************************
Wrong, BBC, the Popular Kenyan Farmer Is Right, There Is No Climate Emergency, Africa Does Need Fossil Fuels
The BBC recently published a hit piece posing as an article attacking a Kenyan farmer who has developed a modest following on X, for his skeptical view of climate alarm claims, and his experienced based understanding that Africans need and deserve to develop fossil fuels. The farmer, Jusper Machogu, is right. In reality, it is the BBC’s “climate change misinformation” reporter who is misleading readers. Not only is the target of the hit piece correct that fossil fuels would be good for Africa, but the BBC reporter’s assertion that Africa is uniquely battered by climate change is false.
The BBC’s Marco Silva wrote the article, “How a Kenyan farmer became a champion of climate change denial,” covering the social media activity on X of a young Kenyan farmer and agricultural engineer, Jusper Machogu, who strongly supports and frequently posts that apocalyptic climate change claims are false and about fossil fuel development for Africa.
Machogu’s post history mostly involves him advocating for the mechanization and modernization of farming in Africa, enthusiastically praising synthetic fertilizers, tractors, and other production-boosting technologies that are made possible by fossil fuels and their derivatives. He has extensive knowledge about agriculture, including why “green” methods of farming and fertilizer production are nowhere near as effective as the processes involving fossil fuels.
The fact that African agriculture has benefitted from the use of fossil fuels has been covered at Climate Realism extensively.
Silva warns ominously that Machogu is a “flagbearer for fossil fuels in Africa, but there is more to his campaign than meets the eye,” accusing him of being motivated exclusively by financial gain to post “debunked theories about climate change[.]” Silva’s evidence of this is that Machogu got a whopping $9,000 over the course of two years in donations, “some of which came from individuals in Western countries linked to fossil-fuel interests.” This is just scummy on the part of Silva, an ad hominem attack on Machogu’s character and possible motivations rather than the content of his posts.
Silva doesn’t attempt to engage with Machogu’s claims that “there is no climate crisis,” except to cite specific experts who disagree. Machogu has written that his research has led him to believe that climate change is mostly natural, posting on X ““Climate change is mostly natural. A warmer climate is good for life,” to which Silva blithely responds that Machogu, “wrongly claimed in a tweet posted in February, along with the hashtag #ClimateScam (which he has used hundreds of times).” Silva cites no evidence for his claim that Machogu’s claims about climate change being natural and a warmer world being good for life are wrong — where’s his proof? That, of course, would have been to engage in facts rather than deploying smarmy rhetoric.
The problem for Silva is, as Climate Realism has shown in hundreds of articles, there is no evidence whatsoever that climate change is making the world worse for humanity. In fact, people are living longer, more food is being produced, the earth is greening, and fewer people are dying from extreme weather and non-optimum temperatures than ever in history. In short, data strongly suggests that it is the poor farmer rather than the educated journalist who is right about climate change, a warmer climate is good for life. Once again, rather than disputing Mochogu’s claims with data, Silva then parrots a talking point that Africa is particularly vulnerable to climate change and its alleged effects “including more intense and frequent heatwaves, prolonged droughts, and devastating floods.” He provides no proof for these claims, either, because there is none.
Computer model projections may predict that Africa might someday suffer ill effects from climate change, and propagandist journalists may promote the idea every time some part of the continent is suffering from extreme weather, but real world data debunk such claims. The bulk of evidence show that Africa is not suffering from worse or more prolonged heatwaves, drought, or flooding, as covered in several posts by Climate Realism.
Machogu is also correct that greater fossil fuel development and use would benefit poor African nations, so long as they get to reap the benefits of having the products and energy security that fossil fuels provide, instead of having African fossil fuels exploited by corrupt governments or shipped off to energy-hungry Western nations. Silva attempts to head off this obvious point by quoting a Ugandan climate activist, writing that “fossil fuel exploration has not always been a synonym for growth and development in Africa.”
But this does not address the point at all. Just because some development has been exploitative doesn’t mean that Machogu is wrong.
Trying to stop Africans from using cheap, plentiful energy from fossil fuels makes it more difficult, if not impossible, to adapt to natural weather disasters. Similarly, as Machogu, who actually lives in a region where so-called “sustainable” farming practices dominate, points out, organic and non-mechanized farming are all fun and games when your life does not depend on it, but give lower yields and increase the threat of famine, as it did in Sri Lanka.
Modern synthetic fertilizers and fossil-fuel powered equipment have already helped African nations’ food production increase over time, reducing hunger and malnutrition, regardless of extreme weather events, as discussed here, here, and here. For a specific example, see African cereal yield data from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization since just the 1990s. (See figure below)
Over the same period which has seen the most climate alarmism amid modest warming:
Cereal production rose 131 percent;
Yield rose 48 percent;
New all-time production records have been 7 times between 2011 to 2021.
To get an idea even further of the kind of dishonesty and underhanded tactics employed by Silva in his thread, take a look at this quote:
“When we spoke, Jusper told me his beliefs are shared by many people in Africa, but I found that most users engaging with his X account are actually based in the US, the UK, and Canada,” Silva wrote.
This is an obvious bait and switch that anyone with a functioning brain can see. Jusper Machogu has lived experience, every single day, with African sustenance farming communities outside of social media. There are far more Westerners with daily internet access than there are Africans that do; ironically, the former being yet another result of the Western world’s fossil fuel-based infrastructure.
****************************************************
Climate Alarmists Disrupt Congressional Baseball Game
Several arrests were made at the Congressional Baseball Game for Charity Wednesday night after people wearing ‘END FOSSIL FUELS’ teeshirts stormed the field at Nationals Park in Washington, D.C.
The game, which raises money for local charities in the D.C. area, features Democrats and Republicans from the House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate.
Climate protesters chanted while holding signs that said “Stop playing games with our future,” and they wore shirts that said “End Fossil Fuels” before entering the field.
A group known as Climate Defiance took credit for the display in a tweet on X.
“Update: Eight of us have been arrested for shutting down the Congressional Baseball Game. They are behind bars now. Make no mistake: It’s the Members of Congress who should be locked up.”
The group also bragged on social media about its mission and delaying the game.
“We have taken the field at the Congressional Baseball Game + play has FROZEN! Congress sends billions of public $$ to subsidize deadly fossil fuels — but the police are tackling us instead. This Chevron-sponsored game cannot continue. This is unconscionable,” the group wrote.
The U.S. Capitol Police (USCP) promptly arrived and escorted the demonstrators out, and the game resumed. The USCP confirmed eight people were arrested.
“We are proud of our officers who are working to keep everyone safe during tonight’s Congressional Baseball Game for Charity. When eight people tried to protest on the field, our officers quickly stopped them and arrested them. The eight people are being charged with federal charges — Interference with a Member of the U.S. Capitol Police,” Capitol Police wrote in a statement on X.
A small group of anti-Israel protesters were also spotted in the crowd. The group unfurled a “Free Palestine” and Palestinian flag in the right field section near the foul post. The group’s message was met with boos from others in the stands.
It was not the first time the annual charity game has involved controversy.
Over the last several years, the event has drawn more attention after a gunman opened fire on Republicans at a ballpark for practice in 2017.
https://principia-scientific.com/climate-alarmists-disrupt-congressional-baseball-game/
********************************************************Clash of the Climateers
BY TONY THOMAS
When Greenies fall out... One side is actually fairly realistic. The other side are off with the fairies
It’s the slugfest of the century — Australia’s top climate alarmist Dr Joelle Gergis duking it out with Anna-Maria Arabia, CEO of the Australian Academy of Science.
The green-Left Academy wants any challenge to its global warming panics to be censored by the federal apparatus – see Shut Them Up, Argues the Academy of Science. Hence I predict Ms Arabia will triumph by getting the impertinent Gergis cancelled as a climate denier.
At issue is “CCS” or carbon capture and storage. This means plucking CO2 out of industry and the atmosphere to achieve otherwise-unattainable net zero. The captured CO2, a plant food which the CSIRO admits has been lavishly greening the planet, has to be safely stored in repositories by the billion and even tens of billion tonnes a year. These CO2 jails must be locked up for thousands or even millions of years, say the Academy’s experts.[1]
But CCS is so much trillion-dollar bunk, as Joelle sets out to demonstrate. She’s playing Samson’s dangerous game — destabilising the Temple of Climate. This temple is already tottering in Europe as Germany et al recognise the havoc the Greens have caused their economies. Renewables are bunk too, not that Joelle would admit that. The climate models causing people to imagine “global boiling” and “highways to hell” are also bunk. As 2022 Nobel Prize winner in physics John Clauser puts it, “There is no correlation between temperature change and carbon dioxide – it is all a crock of crap.”[2]
In what the ABC would describe as “handbags at six paces”[3], the Arabia-Gergis stoush involves:
* For the Academy, its Roundtable Report of March 2023 on ” Greenhouse gas removal in Australia” and its submission to the feds last July espousing mind-blowing CCS targets. That submission is so silly I’ve banished it to this footnote [4], and will focus instead on the Roundtable.
* For Joelle, there’s her vast piece in June’s Quarterly Essay, which makes my wordy Quadrant effusions look like haikus. (Gergis occupies 88 pages of the 122-page issue). She took a break from climate catastrophism to study creative writing, and another break from her ANU senior lectureship to sit in the dark-green Australia Institute for months as writer-in-residence to pen her essay.[5] The Institute is a Siamese twin of the Greens Party[6] . Joelle has now emerged to title her handiwork “Highway to Hell: Climate Change and Australia’s Future.”[7]
In her essay Joelle for once takes a view I agree with, that CCS is a stupid scam with not even the chance of an ice-cream in hell of getting us to the broad sunlit uplands of net zero. More on her CCS demolition down the track.
The Academy, however, trusts CCS as the magic bullet to save the planet from computer-modelled fiery damnation in 2100. In general, the Academy wants Labor’s anti-emissions targets to be made something like twice as fierce. Instead of one giant 7MW windmill being built per day to 2030 (Albo’s scheme), the Academy logically wants two a day. And instead of 22,000 made-in-China solar panels installed per day, it wants circa 40,000 a day. Climate Minister Chris Bowen’s wind farms and power lines are flattening forests and blighting landscapes. The Academy’s brought-forward emissions targets would at least double the damage.
In trying to square the circle on net zero, the Academy’s experts have come up with what I’d call the “Kittylitter Leapthrough”. It involves methane, CO2’s greenhouse pal, (formula CH4, according to Mr Walter House, my despairing chemistry teacher in 1956). At the roundtable, experts suggested that zeolite, kittylitter’s cheap ingredient ($US140 per tonne), might be engineered on a planetary scale to mop excess methane (p15).
The Roundtable was run by Academy President Chennupati Jagadish AC , who thought the Academy’s “independence and convening power made us an ideal host for a roundtable on novel negative emissions approaches for Australia.” He foresaw Australia as a CCS research – or maybe kittylitter — superpower.[8]
A list on page 28 shows that every one of the 18 round-tablers, by invitation, were drawn from the university/CSIRO/govt sectors (12 professors among them). There was not one person from industry. They dreamed of breakthroughs unimpeded by costs or commercial technology. Their suggestions include, with my comments below
1/ Trains that capture CO2 while travelling between mine sites, to be stored subsequently at mine sites.
Does anyone remember that 268-waggon BHP train in the Pilbara that lost its driver five years ago and travelled 100km at up to 160kph before its $300-million pile-up? Imagine such a runaway train dragging captured CO2. Would Gina Hancock, who thinks climate doomism is propaganda, convert her Roy Hill trains to CO2 courier duties?.
2/ Ocean alkalinity enhancement – Addition of alkalinity-enhancing substance generated from mine tailings and other waste.
I’m not sure that whales, sardines, octopi and clown fish cavorting in the Great Barrier Reef would welcome a gazillion tonnes of mine tailings. The roundtablers’ stream of consciousness continued,
4/ Ocean farming (e.g., kelp, seagrass) for CO2 capture…
Ocean storage: – Biomass in the ocean , e.g., seaweed that sinks to the deep ocean, Blue carbon[9], Deep ocean storage.
5/ Injecting in the atmosphere “iron-salt aerosols – iron-containing particles that enhance natural methane sinks by mimicking natural reactions caused by mineral dust particles.
Not content with re-jigging the oceans, the tax-funded boffins also contemplate rehashing our atmosphere. I guess the ivory-tower crowd likes to think big!
6/ Integrating carbon capture into current structural materials and systems, e.g., building materials can perform a dual role as carbon capture surfaces or retrofitting HVAC [heating, ventilation and air cooling] systems to provide capture function.
My villa unit has its Hitachi split-system HVAC motor in the front garden. Its concrete pad is tilting in the mud and the box has quite a lean. Could someone from the Roundtable please drop by, convert my HVAC to airborne CO2 capture, and straighten the lean while they’re at it?.
7/ DAC [direct air capture] used to accelerate biomass production (e.g., bamboo) with a view to use in cross laminated timber as a large-scale replacement/augmentation for steel structures in buildings.
I foresee the CFMEU’s John Setka enforcing a “bamboo site allowance” of $20 an hour on Melbourne’s high-rise jobs. As I write, I hum a tune from my teens which, as I recall, goes
On the windier days, Seems an orchestra plays
On a musical breeze for you;
Like a merry salute From a heavenly flute
To the tower of singing bamboo.
TIME now,as promised, for Joelle’s hatchet job on the delusions of the Academy and its September 2022 Roundtable.[10]
Her Quarterly Essay dubs CCS “a fool’s errand that will only lead to delay and failure (p81)…a disastrous gamble (p12)…the fantasy get-out-of-jail-free card that threatens to ruin us (p50). If we buy into these delusions, we will be in very deep trouble.” (p51) Here’s why, she explains (p56-61):
* In the past 30 years 80 per cent of all CCS pilot projects have flopped.
* “To achieve global targets, approximately 1 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide need to be stored each year by 2030, growing to 10 billion tonnes per annum by 2050.”
* The 41 operational CCS projects in 2023 store less than 10m tonnes of CO2 a year (according to UNEP) or 49m tonnes (according to CCS industry-group figures – Joelle suggests the latter mob are lying, which is normal for green lobbies). Joelle herself is on the Climate Council. She’s mentored there by council chief Tim Flannery, who’s still waiting for his 2004 prediction to bear fruit about my birthplace Perth becoming a waterless ghost town.
* Given total human-caused emissions last year alone were 41 billion tonnes, CCS would need to be boosted by 1000 times to do any climate-solving.
* “Offshore CCS has added dangers of acidifying marine environments, contaminating groundwater, inducing earthquakes and the displacement of toxic brine deposits. The true risks of the hazards of the offshore CCS industry are yet to be fully scientifically and technically assessed, let alone comprehensively regulated… embarking on such a risky path for such little gain is spectacularly illogical.”
* To achieve net zero by 2050, the CCS industry would need to suck up investment worth $US655b to $US1.3 trillion ($A2 trillion or $2,000,000,000,000). Even with that, a commercial CCS plant takes ten years to build so don’t expect wonders by 2050.
A cynic might say that with CCS advocacy, the Academy is pushing a no-lose position for its 700 Fellows. If it works, they save (we hope) the planet. If it doesn’t, well the basic research costing eight or even nine-figure amounts won’t have been wasted in enhancing the Fellows’ lifestyles. There would be lavishly-staffed Centres of CCS Excellence, university promotions and job security, multi-million lab gear approvals, King’s Birthday honours and all that, plus jetting to prestigious conferences.
Also, CCS is not just a job-ticket for boffins who can do maths and engineering — there would likely be near-unlimited CCS funding for artsy hangers-on like Jungians researching the psyches of Joelle and other CCS-deniers; CCS angles re LGBTQI+s, feminists and Aboriginal main-chancers[11]; and CCS strategies expressed in gouache and dance (enjoy!). All this stuff is already affixed like sucker-fish to the mainstream “climate science” shark.
I’d better add that Joelle’s anti-CCS crusade is to stop Albanese from pussy-footing around on emissions, and harden up the progressives’ ruinous anti-fossil-fuel fatwas. Nothing but an immediate crackdown on fossil-fuel use and any new petroleum/coal projects will satisfy Joelle.
I do worry that exposing these schisms among the climate-crazy set could set back my good relations with Academy President Jagadish. He’s already cross with, I believe, other journos for disrespecting the Academy’s wisdom. He wrote to his Fellows last August that “undermining science undermines us all”. Those rogue journos “seek to twist the truth to suit their agenda”, he complained, continuing
We have witnessed the seeding and dissemination of uncertainty throughout the years—to postpone the regulation of tobacco consumption, to continue the use of lead in petrol, to obstruct vaccination during the ongoing pandemic, or to prevent action on climate change to list a few.
His next paragraph had me scratching my head. He seemed to suggest that blaming a Wuhan lab-leak for the global Covid disaster was a “deliberate undermining of public trust in science [and] conspiracy and fearmongering.” [12] I thought Xi Jin-Ping’s incendiary reaction and billion-dollar trade bans over PM Morrison’s mild call for a Covid-origins inquiry were a clue. And indeed, evidence for the lab-leak origin is compounding every day. US intelligence agencies with their vast resources are split or uncertain about the Wuhan lab-leak theory: at least one of these agencies, judging by Jagadish’s comment, must be conspiring and fear-mongering. What on earth’s going on at the Academy?
https://cliscep.com/2024/06/19/clash-of-the-climateers/
***************************************19 June, 2024
Floating Wind Madness in Maine
Good God!
The Government of Maine has really big plans for floating wind, a floating net zero fantasy, in fact. Since floating wind power is the next big green thing, it is worth taking a close look at this ruinous vision.
Floating wind is a fad, not an established technology. It has yet to be built at utility scale or tested in a hurricane. The world’s biggest grid-connected system is a tiny 50 MW and just came online off Scotland.
The cost of floating wind is necessarily much greater than fixed wind. A fixed wind tower sits on a simple monopile, while a floating tower sits on a huge complex structure called a floater. We are talking about massive 500-foot towers with 500-ton turbines on top and 300-foot blades catching the wind.
The floater has to be large enough to keep this monster tower from blowing over. Then, it has to be even bigger to contain enough air to be buoyant. It also has to be anchored to the ocean floor in ways that require a lot of different mooring lines.
The small existing floating generator systems cost around three times what fixed wind costs per MW, but the big and hurricane-proof generators might cost even more. Over a hundred designs have been proposed, which shows just how immature Floating wind technology is.
Which brings us to Maine’s floating green dream, a costly nightmare for its people. When it comes to electricity use, Maine is a small state with average generation of just around 1,500 MW. But in an act of madness, they passed a law saying they will buy 3,000 MW of floating wind. Fixed wind is not an option because the Gulf of Maine is too deep.
How do they justify buying so much floating wind? Simple, it is a net zero fantasy. They have a 115-page “Maine Offshore Wind Roadmap” that explains it.
For a start, they shut down all their existing combustion generators, mostly burning either gas or wood. Maine is 90% forest, so there is a lot of wood. Then, they electrify all the other forms of combustion. For example, 60% of homes are heated with fuel oil, so they switch to heat pumps or something that works in really cold weather. Of course, all the cars and trucks are electric.
The projected cost of the 3,000 MW of floating wind is huge. Using the reported three times fixed wind figure, I get a rough estimate of $50 billion for construction and an equal amount for financing and profit, giving a total cost of around $100 billion. It could be a lot more once large-scale and hurricane-proof technology is developed if it ever is.
Apparently, the astronomical cost is no object because it is never mentioned. Not in the law, roadmap, or various technical support documents. Jobs are frequently mentioned, but they are part of the cost. But then, too, there is the much larger cost of the energy transition, without which the floating wind is simply not usable.
Clearly, the floating wind development may never occur, which brings us back to the present day, where things get really crazy. The State of Maine has started the process to build a huge new port specifically to handle this floating wind fantasy. I am not making this up.
With fixed wind, the shore facility is merely a marshaling yard where the pieces are held until barged out to the offshore site for assembly. There are just four big pieces: the monopile, tower, turbine, and blade set.
Floating wind is completely different because the huge floater is built at the port. The tower, turbines, and blade set are mounted on the floater there as well. Then, the whole assembly is towed to the site and anchored to the sea floor using eight or more mooring lines.
So this is really a highly specialized shipyard, a floater factory, not a port. There will have to be one or more dry docks to build the huge floaters in, plus a great deal of specialized equipment, especially cranes. Reportedly, steel floaters for a 15 MW turbine could typically weigh 3500 to 4500 tons, while concrete floaters would be in the range of 17,000 to 22,000 tons.
The final configuration is completely unknown until the floater design is finalized. Note, too, that this shipyard might only be in operation for the few years it takes to build 3,000 MW of floating wind generators.
The presently estimated cost of this shipyard/port is a bit under a billion dollars but it could easily be more depending on the complexity of the design. The cost of a unique new system tends to go way up when the engineering is actually done.
Starting this billion-dollar port project now is just foolish. It is highly likely that the required energy transition will not occur. The electricity will be very expensive, perhaps four to five times the present cost. Plus, we have no idea what the technology will look like, assuming it can be made to work in the tempestuous waters off Maine.
The people of Maine are unlikely to accept these onerous conditions, nor should they. This whole nutty project needs to be reconsidered.
https://heartland.org/opinion/floating-wind-madness-in-maine/
********************************************BBC Hails Green Election Letter From “408 Climate Scientists” Signed By Psychologists, Accountants And Landscape Designers
An open letter to all political leaders currently fighting a General Election in the U.K. calling for an “ambitious” programme of green policies has been signed by 408 climate activists.
The BBC refers to “the most distinguished of the country’s” climate scientists; Bob Ward, who organised the petition through the billionaire-funded Grantham operation, tweeted, “be ambitious on climate, scientists urge parties”, while James ‘the climate clock is ticking’ Murray from Business Green stepped up a gear by referring to “top scientists“.
Scientists, you say? The first ‘scientist’ in the alphabetical list is an Associate Professor of Accounting, the second is a geographer specialising in “disaster risk reduction”, while the third is an archaeologist.
The green Grantham stunt is of course the latest in a long line of attempts to suggest that most ‘scientists’ believe humans control the climate. The letter refers to “growing damage to lives and livelihoods” in the U.K. caused by increases in the frequency and intensity of many extreme weather events.
This evidence-lite but ubiquitous assertion is not even backed up by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which finds there has been no human involvement in most natural events such as floods, droughts, wildfires and cyclones to date. Nor is human involvement detected in forecasts stretching to 2100.
There are some academics who have signed the letter who can be fairly described as scientists, but the vast majority would struggle to justify such a title. The list is littered with lawyers, psychologists, philosophers, landscape designers, engineers and computer modellers.
One interesting take from the letter is to note how many ways a university Geography Department can be renamed to capitalise on the climate zeitgeist. A similar ‘scientists’ stunt was pulled last month by Damian Carrington in the Guardian, who polled 400 so-called scientists and in an ocean of emotional guff concluded the world is heading towards a “semi dystopian” future.
Signed up for both agitprop operations is Professor Lorraine Whitmarsh, who is described as the Director for U.K. Centre for Climate Change and Social Transformation. A more enlightening CV might note that she is an “environmental psychologist” whose first degree was in theology and religious studies with French.
Perhaps Marco Silva, the BBC Verify climate ‘disinformation’ specialist, could cast a critical eye over the Ward letter when he returns at the end of the month from his six-month re-education sabbatical at the billionaire-funded Oxford Climate Journalism Network (OCJN).
One or two signing names might be familiar to him, including Saffron O’Neill, described as a Professor of “Climate and Society”.
She is a past speaker at the OCJN and is noted for speculating on the need for “fines and imprisonment” for expressing scepticism about “well supported” science.
Would any scientist seriously sign up for such a policy knowing that it would destroy the ongoing scientific process?
A process, it might be noted, that has served humanity so well, certainly since the time Pope Urban VIII played the ‘well supported’ argument and cut up rough with Galileo and his heretical view that the Earth orbited the Sun.
The Ward letter is a Grantham operation and is ultimately funded by the green billionaire investor Jeremy Grantham. Two Grantham Institutes are funded at the London School of Economics and Imperial, where a computer model ‘attribution’ operation is used to garner headlines with implausible claims that humans have caused individual weather events.
Investigate science journalist Ben Pile has tracked some of the major contributions made by Grantham up to 2021.
As well as significant sums paid to LSE and Imperial, there are major contributions dispersed to other green foundations that crop up all the time when there are global Net Zero collectivisation narratives to be spun in the media, politics and academia.
Jeremy Grantham has a long track record of preaching about the coming apocalypse, asking a 2019 meeting in Copenhagen, “what should I do, you say?” He met his rhetorical question by advising:
You should lobby your Government officials – invest in an election and buy some politicians. I am happy to say we do quite a bit of that at the Grantham Foundation… any candidate as long as they are green.
Ward is employed by Grantham at LSE to “communicate” climate science, notes journalist Matt Ridley. For years he complained to the newspaper industry’s self-regulator IPSO about climate articles that took a sceptical line.
It was part of a campaign of “sustained and deliberate” pressure put on editors to toe the alarmist line, states Ridley. Ward tied journalists down in a time-consuming process in the hope it deterred them and their editors from writing and commissioning work.
It worked, observed Ridley, noting, “he has frightened away some journalists and editors from the vital topic of climate change, leaving the catastrophists with a clear field to scare children to their heart’s content”.
**************************************************
Home insulation is the latest net zero farce
Zoe Godrich of Swansea might best be described as collateral damage in Britain’s glorious march towards net zero. Three years ago, she had her three-bedroom home fitted with cavity-wall insulation – which the government is out to encourage through its Great British Insulation Scheme. Sadly for her, it has not worked out quite as intended.
With Labour now promising billions more to retrofit homes with this kind of stuff, what could possibly go wrong?
Within weeks of having it fitted, Godrich says her walls started to run with water, and black mould started to form on her walls. She can no longer use two of her bedrooms, and she and her children now have to slum it on mattresses in the one remaining habitable room. The company which installed the insulation also went bust and the guarantee for the work turned out to be useless. Her only option seemed to be having the insulation sucked out of the wall – for which she had to borrow £7,000 to have done. That work turned out to be botched, too.
Godrich’s experience, it turns out, seems to be becoming commonplace. Twenty miles away in Rhondda Cynon Taff, 280 homes had to have cavity-wall insulation removed after it made their walls damp. The BBC is reporting that Ofgem has told it that ‘hundreds of thousands’ of homes which have been fitted with cavity-wall insulation have been left with problems due to it being badly fitted. There are an estimated 15 million homes in Britain which have such insulation fitted – many of them courtesy of subsidy schemes launched by the present government and the last Labour government.
But if there is a lesson here, it is one that our leaders seem determined not to learn. While the present government has launched its Great British Insulation Scheme, which aims to insulate 300,000 households in a three-year period from last March at a cost of £1 billion, Labour is promising to go much further. Under its Warm Homes Plan, every home in Britain would be brought up to the standard of a ‘C’ on an Energy Performance Certificate over the next decade – using loft insulation, cavity-wall insulation and solid-wall insulation. A Treasury analysis suggests that it would cost taxpayers between £12 billion and £15 billion a year for the next 10 years. According to Labour, it will save households £500 a year on bills – unless, presumably, they have the same experience as Zoe Godrich and many others, in which case they may find themselves having to take out emergency loans to put right botched work.
It is possible to retrofit old houses properly to bring them closer to the energy performance standards of new homes, but it is also possible to damage them through such work. This is as true of solid-wall insulation as it is of cavity-wall insulation. Linda Griffiths of Carmarthenshire found that out the hard way, when she spend £30,000 fitting it to her home, partly with the aid of a £10,000 grant from another government scheme, the Energy Company Obligation. She, too, ended up with damp – and was left complaining that her home had been devalued by £100,000.
With Labour now promising billions more to retrofit homes with this kind of stuff, what could possibly go wrong? As with so much to do with net zero, reason seems to go out of the window as governments seek to meet their rashly-set targets.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/home-insulation-is-the-latest-net-zero-farce/
*******************************************************Origin Energy warns costs and public support are inhibitors to nuclear power in Australia
Needless controversy from Dutton
The Coalition’s nuclear strategy will have to overcome high costs and community acceptance if it is to play a part of the country’s future National Electricity Market, Origin Energy chief executive Frank Calabria has warned.
The comments underscore the significant challenges that the Coalition will need to overcome if it to implement its signature energy policy, which is says will reduce the toll of the transition net zero by 2050 on households and businesses.
Mr Calabria said the industry is agnostic to technologies underpinning the country’s electricity market, but said nuclear has some sizeable hurdles, and it does not offer an immediate solution.
“There’s obviously also the public debate that’s going to go on about the acceptance of nuclear, and we would have to watch that as well. We’re not in control of that,” said Mr Calabria.
“The experience today around the world if you’re building a new one, it’s very expensive, but there are now new modular technology around the technologies that are being certainly development and research and that’s going to be something that continues, and we all look at that with interest.”
Opposition leader Peter Dutton has flagged seven potential sites, including AGL Energy’s Liddell Power Station in NSW and Loy Yang in Victoria and EnergyAustralia’s Mount Piper Power Station in NSW. The Coalition has also earmarked Western Australia’s Collie Power Station and South Australia’s Northern facility and Callide and Tarong in Queensland.
Australia’s energy industry has been careful to comment on the proposal amid concern of alienating a potential future government, but AGL Energy has rebuked the suggestion.
The most directly impacted companies did not immediately respond to the proposal, but AGL’s chief executive Damien Nicks In March said nuclear was not viable.
“There is no viable schedule for the regulation or development of nuclear energy in Australia, and the cost, build time and public opinion are all prohibitive,” Mr Nicks said.
“AGL’s ambition to add 12GW of new renewable and firming generation by 2035 does not include nuclear energy. Policy certainty is important for companies like AGL and ongoing debate on the matter runs the risk of unnecessarily complicating the long-term investment decisions necessary for the energy transition.”
While AGL has vowed to push ahead with its renewable energy strategy, Australia faces a looming shortfall.
The Australian Energy Market Operator estimates that the country’s coal power station fleet is likely to have been retired within 15 years, a fact acknowledged by Mr Calabria.
“We’ve got coal plants that are coming to very long into their lives, so we can talk about years, but they’re not going to be there,” Mr Calabria said.
“For decades, we are going to have a coal transition, but that’s all around timing. And so therefore, what we’re doing is, therefore having to make the investments and navigate that as a country to achieve what’s the best blend of technologies that does that?”
While Australia’s energy industry has been considered, Treasurer Jim Chalmers slammed the Opposition’s energy policy as the “dumbest policy ever put forward by a major political party” and accused the Coalition of “ideological stupidity”.
He said the Albanese government’s policy “couldn’t be more different to the economic madness, which is being peddled by our opponents today”.
“We are expecting to hear a bit more about the Coalition’s nuclear road to nowhere.
“With Australia’s advantages and opportunities, nothing could be more economically irrational, or fiscally irresponsible. Nuclear takes longer. It costs more, and it would waste Australia’s unique combination of geological, geographical, geopolitical and media illogical advantages.
“It might be the dumbest policy ever put forward by a major political party. It is the worst combination of economic and ideological stupidity.”
Energy now shapes as a defining theme of the election due by May 2025, with a diametrically opposed strategies threatening to create more policy uncertainty.
Mr Calabria said there was “certainly more” certainty today than five years ago as to the government’s position on renewable energy but said clarity was needed on the federal Labor’s centrepiece Capacity Investment Scheme.
“There’s certainly more in terms of where they want those renewable zones to be constructed and where they will be built,” he said. “And there’s more certainty in our role now … as you approach timing, and we’ve just committed for a gigawatt of batteries to be installed on our existing sites, and we see those have matured as being part of a solution.
“I think there are still some things that need to happen in terms of timing on transmission, timing on when those builds will occur. And probably the capacity investment scheme is the key one where they’ve announced that scheme, but we’re just waiting. More details need to be developed.”
***************************************
18 June, 2024
The renewable green energy disaster off the northeastern US is getting worse Less than one per cent of the way to the Biden 2030 target
A slow-motion collapse in the offshore wind industry continues to grow as sticky inflation and supply chain challenges force developers to delay or cancel major projects. In particular, progress towards the Biden administration’s goal of building large amounts of floating wind off the northeastern US coast is just about stalled.
Shell, which invested in a series of offshore wind projects in recent years, including offshore the northeastern United States, announced last week it would lay off much of its offshore wind business staff as the oil giant advances its program of refocusing on its core oil and gas business.
“We are concentrating on select markets and segments to deliver the most value for our investors and customers,” a Shell spokesperson told Bloomberg. “Shell is looking at how it can continue to compete for offshore wind projects in priority markets while maintaining our focus on performance, discipline and simplification.”
Wind turbine maker Siemens Gamesa announced even bigger layoffs, saying it would cut 15 per cent of its global staff to adjust to a slowing market. The announcement comes after the company reported a €4.6 billion loss for 2023, a losing trend that has continued over the first half of 2024.
“Our current situation demands adjustments that go beyond organizational changes. We have to adapt to lower business volumes, reduced activity in non-core markets, and a streamlined portfolio,” said outgoing CEO Jochen Eickholt in a letter to staff.
On May 29 came survey results compiled by London-based energy consultancy Westwood indicating the global floating offshore wind industry is likely to deliver less than 3 gigawatts (GW) of new floating generation capacity by 2030, and a total of roughly 10 GW by 2040. Westwood cites lack of standardization of floating technology (55 per cent), manufacturing capability and capacity (51 per cent) and port infrastructure (50 per cent) as the primary impediments.
In light of the industry’s gloomy outlook, Westwood notes that “calls are ringing out for governments to provide more specific policy and regulatory support for technology development in addition to cost reduction and investment in port infrastructure to accelerate adoption.”
This is completely predictable, since the voracious rent-seeking wind business invariably calls for more government largesse in response to any challenge that arises. Unfortunately, the call is too often answered by policymakers who have made big political bets on being able to show off arrays of mammoth windmills floating atop various oceans and seas, intermittently producing some electricity – generally 25-30 per cent of nominal plant capacity over time.
This latest bad news for offshore wind could become especially troublesome for US President Joe Biden’s re-election campaign, since he has invested so much of his personal political capital in pushing a major buildout of floating offshore wind in the Atlantic northeast. A 2023 Department of Energy fact sheet sets the administration’s goal of installing 30 GW of offshore wind capacity by 2030 for the US alone, exceeding Westwood’s just estimated potential for global new capacity by that year by a factor of 10 times over.
To date, regulators under Biden have approved permits for 6 major offshore projects, several of which have already been delayed or cancelled by developers in response to tougher economic factors. In late 2023, major Danish wind developer Orsted cancelled two projects off the Atlantic coast, and Shell divested its 50 per cent stake in another in March of this year. Equinor and BP announced in January they were cancelling plans for their Empire Wind 2 project, citing similar economic concerns.
One US offshore project, Vineyard Wind 1, was able to begin delivering its intermittent 25-30 per cent of 68 megawatts (MW) to Massachusetts residents in January with the activation of 5 offshore turbines. The South Fork Wind Project was also able to commence first deliveries into New York in March, with 12 turbines capable of generating some proportion of 130 MW.
But this is less than one per cent of the Biden goal of 30 GW, with just five and a half years remaining until 2030. Given the wind industry’s insatiable appetite for ever-increasing subsidies and constantly rising utility charges, it’s an open question how many more billions of dollars the federal government will be allowed to print to keep projects alive before the voters start to rebel at the cost.
It’s a rebellion that could commence as soon as this coming November.
https://stephenheins.substack.com/p/the-renewable-green-energy-disaster
***********************************************As Climate Lawsuits Increase Against Oil and Gas, So Could Energy Costs
As U.S. oil, gas, and coal companies struggle under an array of regulations and permitting roadblocks, they also face new challenges from climate activists in the form of lawsuits, fines, taxes, and shareholder activism from blue-state pension funds.
Meanwhile, U.S. states increasingly are set against each other, with liberal states leading the charge against fossil fuel companies, while red states attempt to defend them.
Starting in 2018, states including New York, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Delaware, Connecticut, and California, as well as the District of Columbia, began filing lawsuits against energy giants ExxonMobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Sunoco, BP, and others.
Oil companies also face legal action from dozens of cities, including Honolulu; Chicago; Baltimore; New York City; Charleston, South Carolina; San Francisco; Oakland, California; and Boulder, Colorado.
Analysts say there are multiple goals driving these suits.
“It’s partly ideological, trying to drive these companies out of business,” Kenny Stein, policy vice president at the Institute for Energy Research, told The Epoch Times. He also said he believes it has to do with consumers’ use of fossil fuels.
“These governments are trying to mandate that people use less oil and less natural gas, but people want to heat their homes as much as they want, they want to drive as far as they want,” Mr. Stein said. “If the state banned the sale of oil, the population would revolt, so this is their backdoor way of trying to impose their will.”
Many of the climate lawsuits assert that pollution caused by oil companies creates a “public nuisance” and the companies intentionally deceived the public about the harmful effects when they caused global temperatures to rise.
The activist organization Climate Analytics tried to calculate the alleged damages.
“Between 1985 and 2018, we estimate partial damages of the combined CO2 emissions from 25 companies—oil and gas carbon majors—of about $20 trillion USD,” Climate Analytics states.
Meanwhile, on May 30, Vermont became the first state to pass a law that forces oil companies to pay for damage caused by “extreme weather events,” such as floods. According to this law, Vermont will tally the cost to residents of extreme weather events over the past 30 years; any company that has released more than 1 billion metric tons of CO2 from 1995 to 2024 will be forced to pay its share of that cost into a state climate superfund.
But it’s not just about money.
“This is simply a strategy for the left to accomplish what they’ve been unable to do in Congress through the ballot box, and that is to implement a nationwide climate policy that’s consistent with their green agenda,” Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall told The Epoch Times.
Mr. Marshall and 18 other attorneys general—all from red states—appealed to the Supreme Court on May 22, asking the justices to rule on whether individual states and cities can “assert the power to dictate the future of the American energy industry.
“Their actions imperil access to affordable energy everywhere and inculpate every State and indeed every person on the planet,” the attorneys general wrote. “Consequently, [they] threaten not only our system of federalism and equal sovereignty among States, but our basic way of life.”
States are not just suing oil and gas companies; they are also lodging climate-related lawsuits against food companies.
In February, New York Attorney General Letitia James sued JBS USA Food Co., a U.S. subsidiary of the Brazil-based JBS Group, the world’s largest meat processor, alleging that the firm misled the public about its environmental impact and that “beef production emits the most greenhouse gasses of any major food commodity.”
The Climate Litigation Industry
The potential for enormous payouts from these lawsuits has attracted not only a seemingly endless supply of plaintiffs, but also numerous law firms and even wealthy investors who are placing bets that the lawsuits will succeed.
The plan to potentially wrest trillions of dollars out of energy companies has been developing for more than a decade. A 2012 workshop hosted by the Climate Accountability Institute sought to draw on prior successes that states had in suing tobacco companies.
A post-conference recap of the workshop stated that the group had fostered “an exploratory, open-ended dialogue“ about whether it might ”use the lessons from tobacco-related education, laws, and litigation to address climate change.”
***********************************************
Global Pushback Against the Greens
United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres has proclaimed fossil-fuel companies “godfathers of climate chaos,” but many Europeans, Africans, and Americans clearly disagree. They’ve shown recently what they think of the green agenda of costly renewables and instead support politicians who will let them keep their cars.
In elections for the European Parliament, a good number of Europeans joined the pushback that has already begun in the U.S and South Africa against the green-energy movement. Right-wing parties in Italy, Germany, and France, all with platforms opposing the green agenda, fared strikingly well.
French President Emmanuel Macron called national elections after Marine Le Pen’s National Rally Party, which supports fossil fuels, gained 12 seats and won 31% of the vote: a plurality, and about twice the total achieved by Macron’s Renaissance Party.
Major losers in the European parliamentary elections included Renew Europe, the party that boasts “it has played a leading role in raising the European Union’s ambitions to reach climate neutrality by 2050,” and the European Greens Party, which seeks a green deal and wants the union to be powered 100% by renewable energy by 2040.
On June 5, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, indefinitely postponed New York City’s planned “congestion charge,” or tax, which was originally set to go in effect June 30. Had it been implemented, drivers would have been required to pay $15 per day to enter Manhattan’s central business district below 60th Street.
New York expected to raise $1 billion a year from drivers to fund public transit, although one congressional report commissioned by Rep. Josh Gottheimer, D-N.J., forecast revenues of over $3.4 billion.
Proponents said that the tax would improve air quality, reduce congestion, and fund public transit, but it would have disproportionately hurt small businesses, poor residents, and others who rely on personal transportation.
The tax would also have been harsh on older and handicapped people, many of whom can’t take public transit. And at a time when working from home has been hitting the economy of downtown Manhattan, it would have been an additional reason for office workers to forsake the city.
The Big Apple is fortunate to have escaped this outcome. There was vast resistance to the new tax, and Hochul was wise to cancel it. People don’t like to be without their cars, and she listened.
Virginia residents escaped a similar outcome recently, as Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares and Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin decided not to abide by California’s new Advanced Clean Cars II standards. Passed in 2022, the standards require 35% of new passenger vehicles sold in the Golden State to be electric or hydrogen-fueled by 2026 and 100% to be electric or hydrogen-fueled by 2035. Virginia will comply with federal law rather than California law.
Virginia’s prior governor, Ralph Northam, a Democrat, had required that the commonwealth embrace the 2021 automobile standards of the California Air Resources Board, which would have mandated that a certain share of auto dealers’ sales in 2025 be battery-powered cars. The 2022 standards are stricter but were passed after Virginia (and 15 other states) had signed on to California’s 2021 standards.
Virginia is the first state to walk away from California’s 2022 standards, and it will encourage others to do the same. People need affordable, reliable transportation for personal and business use. Electric tractors can’t substitute for diesel-powered ones. Small businesses rely on gasoline-powered pickup trucks that can tow equipment without having to stop for an hour or two to recharge during long trips. Construction workers need inexpensive cars to get to work. And this is a global reality.
In the South African general elections last month, the African National Congress won only 40% of the popular vote, failing to secure a majority for the first time since the party’s 1994 founding. Although South Africa has vast supplies of coal and gas, blackouts have damaged the economy and contributed to the ANC government’s unpopularity.
Unplanned outages rose from 176,000 in 2007 to almost 20 million in 2023. Between 2012 and 2022, South Africa’s gross domestic product per capita declined by 17%, from $8,174 to $6,766, and manufacturing output decreased by almost a third. The latest official unemployment rate is 32.9%.
South Africa’s new government will need to ensure a reliable energy supply to revive the country’s manufacturing sector and reduce unemployment.
Fossil fuels are demonized by the secretary-general of the United Nations, but they enable people to heat and cool their homes, operate their vehicles, and use electrical appliances reliably. And resilient sources of fuel are essential to many countries’ manufacturing sectors.
Voters know this, and they are making themselves heard all over the world.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/06/17/global-pushback-against-the-greens/
*******************************************Australia: A price to pay for climate change fantasy
Peter Dutton and Ted O’Brien haven’t reignited the climate wars, as Anthony Albanese and Chris Bowen claim. The climate wars never went away and they are being waged all over the world. It’s just that almost everything you hear about climate policy in the official and semi-official discussion in Australia is basically misleading, if not outright wrong.
Let’s take a step back and look at the big picture.
The Kyoto Protocol was adopted, in the serene and beguiling Japanese city of that name, in 1997, 27 years ago. Kyoto itself built on the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. So for more than three decades the world has been decarbonising, right?
We’ve had many solemn moments and announcements, especially the 2015 Paris Agreement. Dutton says he would abandon Australia’s 2030 target to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 43 per cent, but he’s committed to honouring the Paris pledge to reach net-zero emissions by 2050. He wants to do it in part by building nuclear energy.
In truth Australia, whether led by Albanese or Dutton, is a very, very minor player in all this, being responsible for a tick over 1 per cent of global emissions. Every Labor leader since Kyoto, and quite a few Liberal leaders, has told us the world is decarbonising. Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles, early in the life of the Albanese government, caused a ripple of concern by rejoicing in the fact that coal was being phased out globally.
So after three decades of decarbonising, how is the world going in phasing out fossil fuels, to wit, gas, oil and coal?
Let’s start with gas. Everyone except the Greens understands that gas is, at the very least, a critical transition technology.
Much of the reduction in the carbon intensity of economies – that is, the amount of greenhouse gases emitted per unit of production – has come from substituting gas for coal and oil.
Nonetheless, after 30 years of relentless decarbonisation, you’d expect a pretty severe drop in gas use. Actually, according to the International Energy Agency, consumption of natural gas is at or just near its record high. The rate of growth of demand has slowed but demand is still growing.
Well, that’s a bit of a surprise. What about oil, that must be well down, with fuel efficiency standards, the global campaign for electric vehicles, the decline of oil in power generation?
Guess what. Last year, according to the US government’s Energy Information Administration, world use of oil was at a record high, higher than the peak before the Covid pandemic, at more than 100 million barrels a day. Not only that, the US under pro-green Joe Biden produced more crude oil, more than 13 million barrels a day, than any country has ever done.
Oil production dipped in the global financial crisis of 2008 and again during Covid. But it’s now roaring ahead, stronger than ever.
But surely the US constantly lectures everyone else about climate change, the dangers of fossil fuels etc. How is that consistent with record crude oil production? Bear that thought in mind, for it’s a clue to the wider reality.
OK, so we’ve struck out in looking for global reductions in gas and oil, but obviously coal use must be well down. I have myself caused something near pandemonium by suggesting on the ABC’s Q+A and on Insiders that coal has a future as well as a past. It was as though a leading atheist had infiltrated the Spanish Inquisition. So now I must face the truth about coal. Surely its use has declined?
But what do you know? According to the IEA: “Global coal consumption reached an all-time high in 2022, and the world is heading towards a new record in 2023.”
Advanced economies such as the US and the EU are using less coal but, says the IEA, “the growth in China and India, as well as Indonesia, Vietnam and The Philippines, will more than offset these decreases on a global level”. And the price of coal, at $US140 a tonne, is very healthy.
That’s a good thing because our top three export earners are coal, iron ore and gas. We couldn’t afford any fancy green measures, or Medicare, or the National Disability Insurance Scheme, or anything else, without the minerals industry.
According to the IEA, fossil fuels make up about 80 per cent of global energy, just a tick under their level 10 years ago.
So how has the world been reducing its greenhouse gas emissions for so long, with these fossil fuels all reaching record production and consumption levels? Well, actually, the world hasn’t been reducing its greenhouse gas emissions.
Oops again. Another surprise. According to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, greenhouse gas levels are rising again, and reached record levels last year. The IEA’s own figures, and studies from Stanford and other universities, confirm this.
None of the foregoing bears on the question of what should be happening. But our debates ought to start with reality. What is happening in the world is more or less the opposite of what the government and the climate change propaganda agencies tell us is happening.
How often have you heard any of the facts above in the Australian climate debate? The debate is overwhelmingly dominated by people who are so committed to the idea of Australia taking radical action that they insist on pretending radical action is being taken globally.
The developed countries are reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but the developed countries are no longer the big story. China is the biggest greenhouse gas emitter by far. It accounts for more than 29 per cent of global emissions, more than the US and EU put together. The top 10 emitters are: China, the US, India, Russia, Brazil, Indonesia, Japan, Iran, Mexico and Saudi Arabia. Of those only two, the US and Japan, are rich, developed countries. Almost none of the others has binding targets or any commitment to when their emissions will even peak.
Indonesia is a fascinating case. Like China, it has a goal of net zero by 2060. It has nearly 280 million people and is still a poor country. It has more than 250 operational coal-fired power plants. It has an international deal to retire some of them early. Well, that seems to be progress, you might argue.
Except that it also has an out clause that says plants that have already been approved, or “captive” plants that don’t feed directly into the grid but only power an industrial park or a specific project, or are concerned with National Strategic Projects, can go ahead. There are 40 plants under construction and more in pre-approval.
Recently, Indonesia has had huge success expanding its nickel production. In 2020, Jakarta banned the export of unrefined nickel. Like Australia, it has a lot of nickel. It didn’t want to dig it up and ship it overseas. It wanted refining and processing to take place within Indonesia.
This move defied every tenet of orthodox economics and was almost universally criticised by international commentators (including me). Yet as so often, reality doesn’t conform to the textbook.
Indonesia’s move worked. It attracted Chinese partners who also bought the product. Low-grade nickel is used to make steel. High-class nickel is used for very sexy products like lithium-ion batteries. A bit like Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady, low-class nickel can be transformed into high-class nickel with enough money. There are industrial processes that will do the trick but they require enormous amounts of power. So Indonesia’s Chinese collaborators built a swag of coal-fired power stations to provide the power to work the magic on the nickel.
In 2017, Indonesia produced 385,000 tonnes of nickel. Last year it produced 1.8 million tonnes. It’s murdering the Australian competition. The Albanese government talks a lot about Australia’s position with rare earths, of which we have a lot in the ground, and how we’re going to become a renewable energy superpower.
By the way, almost every country in the world plans to be a renewable energy superpower (surely now one of the iconic cliches of our time), suggesting many, many of them will be sorely disappointed.
The Indonesian policy has succeeded magnificently from its point of view. Indonesia’s President, Joko Widodo, has genuine environmental ambitions. But he’s also determined to develop his nation. Similarly, anyone with even the vaguest familiarity with Indonesian politics will know just how entrenched and powerful are coalmining and energy interests. Indonesia pays its population fuel subsidies – the exact opposite of a carbon tax – and has typically subsidised coal energy.
But the deeper pattern and perversity of the industrial politics of renewable energy revealed in the Indonesian nickel example occurs more broadly across Asia, especially in China. The production and sale of wind turbines is dominated by China. To make them so cheaply, China typically uses cheap coal-fired power. Coal power is still mostly the cheapest power in the world despite what the Albanese government tells you (more on that below).
So the true carbon cost of even renewable energy ought to take into account the role of coal-fired power in making the renewable energy products. In any event, here’s the paradox of energy politics: to become a renewable energy superpower, you need lots and lots of cheap coal-fired power.
China, India, Indonesia, Vietnam, The Philippines and in due course the poorer nations of Asia, and beyond that lots of African nations, are extremely unlikely to compromise their national development by embracing vastly more expensive and unreliable renewable energy over coal, gas and the like.
Two factors allow some modern, wealthy, industrial nations to run low emissions levels. One is a natural topography that lends itself to hydro-electric power. Hydro power is the only genuinely cost-competitive renewable energy and still the most important renewable energy. The other is already having a lot nuclear power.
None of this, as I say, is to argue what Australian policy should be. But the realities sketched here almost never figure in the Australian debate. How come?
Let me nominate one international factor and one specifically Australian factor.
Accompanying this article is a graph from the IEA showing the rise of the use of gas, oil and coal, measured in exajoules (one joule, a measure of energy, to the power of 18; that is to say, lots of joules, one joule being the equivalent of 107 ergs). The left side of the graph’s curve, up to the peak in 2022, which has been maintained in 2023, describes things that have already happened. That part of the graph is indisputable fact.
The right side of the graph shows a steep decline in the use of coal, oil and gas. But that’s purely speculative. That’s more or less taking an end point of declared policy, the Paris targets, and plotting a line that gets there. But that’s the future, and government predictions of the future have never been reliable. Indeed the Climate Tracker website describes Argentina, South Korea, Russia, Turkey, Canada, Mexico and Indonesia as “critically insufficient” in meeting their greenhouse gas reduction targets, and Australia, China, Brazil, the EU and Britain as “highly insufficient”.
The point about the graph is that huge amounts of climate literature are presented this way. The average reporter, the average citizen, tends to see such graphs as one entity and unconsciously gives the authority of the left-hand side of the graph, which represents factual history, to the right-hand side of the graph, which represents Nostradamus-like prophecy.
Within Australia, governments do this kind of thing very deliberately and with shockingly good effect. I’ve been following the national defence budget pretty closely for some decades. I’ve never seen a defence budget projection, or capability projection, actually come true if it concerns any period of the future longer than about six months. And defence is an area where the Australian government entirely controls what it spends. Australian governments can’t even predict what they themselves are going to do more than five minutes hence.
Yet somehow we are supposed to believe government agencies can forecast exactly what’s going to happen in energy and climate years and years, even decades, ahead. Gimme a break.
Thus the Albanese government has got great mileage from a Climate Change and Energy Department projection that Australia will reach a 42 per cent reduction in greenhouse emissions by 2030, just 1 per cent shy of our target of 43 per cent. Apparently the government now can predict the course of the Ukraine war, the effects of a possible Donald Trump victory in America, greenhouse gas emissions caused perhaps by a sudden spike in migration to Australia, and all the other manifold variables. You think?
Predicting we’ll be just 1 per cent short is a sweet touch. Just try a little harder, Australia! Yet a UN committee examining the issue doesn’t think even one G20 country will meet its target. The government is miles behind in the rollout of renewables. Electric vehicle sales are a small fraction of the forecast sales. But still we are, according to the magic forecast, just 1 per cent off target.
This is the problem, though. Almost every piece of information in this area is designed to produce a political effect. Disinterested information is at a premium.
When like is genuinely compared with like, coal is cheaper than renewables. Because with renewables you have to take account of the fact that most of the time they don’t operate so you need vast extra capacity, sometimes there are wind droughts and long cloudy periods so you need vast back-up systems of gas or coal or something else, the transmission infrastructure is enormous and the costs huge, and after 25 years or so you’ve got to throw away all the renewable stuff and replace it.
Almost everywhere that introduces vast renewable energy, apart from hydro, sees big electricity price rises. It might be that we still want to make the change because of our commitment to lowering our greenhouse gas emissions. But we need to recognise the cost, otherwise there will certainly be a backlash and the policy may well be reversed in time.
On the other hand, perhaps we should have some other conversations as well. Almost everyone wants to make some contribution to reducing our greenhouse gas emissions. But given that whatever we do will have no discernible impact on the global environment, we should think pretty carefully about the cost. Especially given that it’s not happening globally.
Switching to renewables will make us poorer. They say the key policy dilemma for China is: will it grow rich before it grows poor?
For us the question is: do we want to grow richer before we grow poorer? And how poor do we really want to be?
***************************************
17 June, 2024
Study: An estimated 135 million premature deaths linked to fine particulate matter pollution between 1980 and 2020
Excuse me while I laugh! See both a popular summary and the originating journal article at the links below:
https://phys.org/news/2024-06-million-premature-deaths-linked-fine.html
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160412024001739
The study was published in a rubbishy "pay to publish" journal. You get charged over $3,000 to get your article published there. I had over 200 academic journal articles published without once paying for it.And the study is appropriately silly. What they were looking at was the correlation beteween pollution and disease. But, I quote:
"It is noted that only regions with correlation coefficients larger than 0.15 or smaller than – 0.15 and the corresponding p-values < 0.05 were selected in this study"
In other words they deleted from their study all cases that diagreed with their hypothesis. You couldn't make it up.
And don't suppose that I need to add that it was yet another "geography" study, looking at correlations between areas, not correlations between people -- with NO control for demographic confounders as far as I can see
It would have had no hope of getting into a "real" academic journal. The journal claims to be refereed but the referees must have just nodded it through on the basis of its congenial conclusions, if they read it at all. Serious referees would at a minimum have insisted on demographic comtrols. Some articles of this type do have such controls. It can be done.
**************************************************
EU climate knaves and follies
The results of the European Parliamentary election this week have been a de facto referendum on Germany, and Europe’s, energy policies.
The Social Democratic party (SPD) of German Chancellor Olaf Scholz suffered an ignominious defeat winning less than 14 per cent of the vote, down from almost 16 per cent, its worst result in a national poll since 1949. Humiliatingly, it only came third in the overall tally behind the main opposition party, the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) which won almost 24 per cent of the vote, up more than one percentage point, and behind the much demonised Alternative for Germany (AfD) which increased its vote by almost 5 per cent compared with the last election. As SPD leader Lars Klingbeil put it, ‘There is no way to sugarcoat it. I think it is crystal clear that things have to change.’
But if the European parliamentary elections were devastating for Germany’s SPD, roughly the equivalent of the Australian Labor party, they were even worse for its ‘traffic light’ coalition partner, the Greens, which was incontestably the biggest loser, falling almost 9 percentage points to less than 12 per cent. This will no doubt come as a shock to Mr Bowen but it’s hardly surprising when you look at the appalling policies that the Greens tried to implement. Their Building Energy Act sought to mandate that all new heating systems use at least 65 per cent renewable energy which amounted to it effectively forcing people to install heat pumps that would have inflicted punishingly high costs on owners of older buildings. The law is deeply unpopular as is the plan to ban CO2-emitting cars.
One of the most damning aspects of the Green nightmare in Germany is that having campaigned to lower the voting age to 16, their vote crashed to only 10 per cent with those aged 16 to 24 years old, and their partner, the SPD, got a paltry 9 per cent. Instead, 17 per cent of these youths voted for the conservative Christian Democrats/Christian Social Union and another 17 per cent voted for the Alternative for Germany.
As the most populous country in the EU, the results in Germany had a big impact on the overall outcome in the European Parliament but in any event the same trend could be seen in France, Italy and Belgium.
In France, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally got more than 31 per cent of the vote, the first French party to do so since 1984. Macron’s Renaissance party got just over 15 per cent of the vote down from 22 per cent in 2019. The French Greens – the Ecologists – got a tad over 5 per cent, a steep fall from over 13 per cent in 2019 and more than 16 per cent in 2009.
Overall in the European Parliament it looks like the Greens will be pushed from fourth place into sixth place with only 53 seats out of 720. The only green shoot, so to speak, was Denmark where the Greens gained one seat and in the Netherlands where a Green-Left party is the largest Dutch party in the EU parliament with eight seats but where Geert Wilders Freedom Party went from one seat to six and the Farmer-Citizen party also got two seats.
What explains this collapse in the vote for Green parties and for climate-loving left-liberals is that Europe is suffering what it calls a greenlash to its Green New Deal. For months, farmers have been protesting EU climate policies that are driving them out of business. Yet the least palatable proposals of the EU’s delusional 2030 goal of cutting greenhouse gases by 55 per cent from 1990 levels look highly unlikely to be implemented. A carbon market for heating and transport fuels that is meant to be launched in 2027 would further exacerbate the cost-of-living crisis, and all new cars are meant to be emissions-free by 2035. But even that is not enough for the climate commissars who earlier this year called for a more ambitious goal for 2040 of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 90 per cent relative to emission levels in 1990. That would require almost doubling the level of investment from the 863 billion euros per annum spent in the decade to 2020 to 1.5 trillion euros per annum. Good luck with raising the capital to splurge on such profoundly unproductive investments.
You know that climate policies have lost their appeal when even the most ardent of activists, such as Greta Thunberg, was wrapping herself in a keffiyeh last Friday to protest the war in Gaza in Berlin rather than ‘climate injustice’ per se. Bizarrely, the protesters managed to conflate Israel’s war against Hamas with a ‘Kick Big Polluters Out’ rally that called for oil and gas companies to be held accountable for enabling genocide in Gaza, systemic violence, and fuelling the climate crisis. In a strange way that they didn’t intend their protest almost made sense. After all, who is a bigger exporter of gas than Qatar, which bankrolls Hamas, the terrorists that are calling for a Jewish genocide? As William Blake wrote in his Proverbs of Hell, ‘If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise’, although perhaps more apposite when considering the EU’s climate policies is Blake’s proverb that ‘Folly is the cloke of knavery’. What does Mr Bowen make of all this? Very little it seems. Under Labor, Australia is set to follow in Europe’s foolish footsteps while the knaves laugh all the way to the bank.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/06/eu-climate-knaves-and-follies/
************************************Canadian skulduggery
The latest embarrassment for Canada’s Liberal administration is that they were caught deliberately suppressing information about their carbon tax.
And also caught in massive ethics violations in grant-making to insiders by Sustainable Development Technology Canada. Or was it the same pattern government-wide with regard to McKinsey?
No, we remember: it’s that they were caught suppressing information about subversion within the hallowed walls of our Parliament and when the news broke they refused even to apologize let alone mend their ways.
So much for “openness by default”. But we’re going after the carbon tax scandal here because it’s a classic illustration of how zealotry so often looks like deceit when it’s actually a terrible form of sincerity.
It is a curious feature of public affairs, and not just in Canada, that the people who aspire to govern spend very little time studying government.
It’s partly because whereas to gain entry to and promotion in almost any normal trade like, say, plumber or graphic designer, you show competence at plumbing or graphic design, whereas to flourish in government you have to be good at politics, quite a different business.
But it’s also because so many people hold the naïve view that good intentions translate smoothly into good results especially in the public sector, so they worry obsessively about motives (their own pure ones and their adversaries’ wretched ones) and neglect methods.
This habit leads them to assume that whatever they want to happen, really want, will happen and have the results they seek. They do not study the law of unintended consequences, and the related massive issue of the importance of incentives.
And particularly they do not ponder the importance of incentives in the public as in the private sector, and the enormous risk that those inside will learn to “game” the system in ways that range from job security to bonuses to hiding awkward information to steering contracts to outfits known to hire retired bureaucrats and politicians on generous terms.
As a result, when dreams do not transition seamlessly into reality, they assume they are being foiled by malevolent foes, that the apparent failure is just misinformation and everything’s secretly fine, or both. And then they become dismissive of criticism and frivolous in responses.
We mention this problem here particularly because the administration’s response to the mess in Sustainable Development Canada, which included the abrupt resignation of both CEO and chair under clouds last November, was to… fold it into another equally risk-prone entity.
A press release from something called the Council of Canadian Innovators, inexplicably not available on this innovative “internet” thing, said:
“Today in Ottawa, Canada’s Auditor General published a report into Sustainable Development Technology Canada, identifying significant governance lapses and procedural failures when dispersing government funds.
Following its release, Innovation, Science and Industry Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne immediately announced that SDTC will no longer exist as an arm’s length entity and will be folded into the National Research Council going forward.”
So pretty much shoot, shovel and shut up. And thus the other key point is that they aren’t hiding this information because they know it proves them wrong.
They’re hiding it because they’re so sure they’re right that even their own research, when it says otherwise, is misleading and must be suppressed lest it cause confusion.
Humans are stubborn creatures, and rarely more so than when defending a cause. And we’re all for tenacity. But at a certain point firmness turns into idiocy.
And the suppression of carbon-tax information was so far past that point, and so brazen, that even the normally fairly cautious Parliamentary Budget Officer (PBO) could stand it no longer. As the National Post reported:
“The federal government has a secret economic analysis of the impact of the carbon tax that confirms the parliamentary budget officer’s prior findings, and the budget watchdog said he believes that his office has been under a gag order to not talk about it.”
Strong words. But also a paraphrase so perhaps the press are dressing it up? Not at all. As the Post added, PBO Yves Giroux testified bluntly before the House of Commons finance committee that he and his staff had seen an in-house assessment but “we’ve been told explicitly not to disclose it and reference it.” And when:
“Conservative MP Marty Morantz asked Giroux if the government ‘put a gag’ on the PBO to not talk about their economic analysis. ‘That is my understanding,’ said Giroux.”
It’s no small matter, because the carbon tax and its true impact have been a matter of vigorous, even brutal partisan quarreling. The position of the administration is that the “price on pollution” actually gives most people more money than it takes from them; the Prime Minister has flatly accused the leader of the Official Opposition of wanting to take money from people by abolishing a tax.
Indeed, in response to this latest scandal, instead of expressing contrition and pledging to get back to that promised openness, Justin Trudeau robotically insisted that “We will continue to put money in people’s pockets and fight climate change,” although the only possible rational defence of a price on carbon is that it imposes behavioural changes on people by increasing the cost of actions you want to discourage.
If it actually gives back more than it takes, people won’t buy less gas or natural gas; they might even buy more. (For those who understand economics, unlike our Prime Minister, a crucial point is that these fuels are highly price-inelastic because there are very limited available substitutes.)
Since everything in Canadian governments appears to be broken, the PBO was obliged to concede that the analysis by his office also included the impact of industrial as well as consumer carbon pricing. And as Giroux told the committee, the stuff the government wants to keep hidden proves them wrong:
“[It] confirms the report that we have published essentially, so that’s why I’m comfortable with what we have already published with the understanding that it provides the impact of the carbon tax and the OBPS.”
(OBPS, for those wishing to get down into the weeds, stands for Output-Based Pricing System aka the industrial carbon tax).
So the state broadcaster CBC naturally ran a piece defending the administration using the “Conservatives pounce” angle:
“In the middle of some haggling over his report on Monday at the House of Commons finance committee, Giroux said the government has its own analysis of the impact of carbon pricing but he doesn’t have permission to release the report himself. That led the Conservatives to allege that the government is hiding a ‘secret carbon tax report’ and that the PBO is under some kind of ‘gag’ order.”
That Giroux himself said as much somehow didn’t make it into their copy. What did, however, was an insistence that unless you factor in the hideous cost of climate change you can’t really measure just how great the tax really is:
“‘The PBO compares costs relative to a world in which Canada simply ignores its emissions – and faces no consequences,’ experts with the Canadian Climate Institute wrote last year.”
No prize for guessing who funds these independent “experts”. It’s the same people who fund the CBC and created the tax in question.
https://principia-scientific.com/you-dont-need-to-see-that-information/
***********************************************Australia's Greens are Nazis in sheep’s clothing
FRANCIS GALBALLY
In my opinion there appears to be alarming similarities between Adam Bandt’s Greens and Hitler’s National Socialist Workers’ Party of the 1920s and 1930s. Both leaders are ideologues and demagogues. They are anti-Semitic in their rhetoric and this encourages in many a belief that the Jews are the cause of things wrong with society.
Bandt encourages the chant “from the river to the sea”. What does that mean other than the annihilation of the Jewish state and its people? But not just that, he seems through his rhetoric to want more. He encourages and attends pro-Palestinian demonstrations that are anti-Semitic and aimed at intimidating Australia’s Jews as they at least try to go about their ordinary lives whether as university students, workers or business people. Bandt supports gatherings that seem to me frighteningly similar to those pre-Nuremberg rallies in Munich in the 1920s. His rhetoric and actions appear to encourage the anti-Semitic demonstrations at parliament and on our city streets. This was Hitler at his most effective, and Bandt seems to have borrowed his playbook.
Bandt’s rant a few days ago has all the hallmarks of a Nazi rally. He accuses the major parties of “slandering this movement”. He calls on the Israeli ambassador to be expelled. He calls on sanctions against Israeli. He says “enough of the hand-wringing tweets, enough of the words that always come with conditions attached … they are being ignored by an extreme war cabinet that is hellbent on continuing this invasion”. And, like 1930s Munich, police had to move in to quell the violent protesters and use pepper spray (in Munich it was batons).
Bandt doesn’t mention how the Gaza war started, and appears to have no empathy for the abducted Israelis and the rape and killing of women and children. Bandt is a frightening demagogue; he distorts the truth, which suits a political agenda.
Bandt’s support of activists locking politicians out of their electoral offices bears the hallmarks of a potential dictator slowly cutting away at democracy.
Like Hitler, Bandt uses propaganda, discontent and fearmongering to gain support. He finds support among anti-Semites and uses climate action and anti-capitalist rhetoric to feed his supporters. Bandt would massively raise taxes and drive business from Australia. His rhetoric on tax and anti-business plays to his supporter base, much as Hitler did. And, like Hitler, he gets support from some individuals and businesses.
I do not criticise those who truly support the original Greens’ stand: protection of the environment and action to mitigate climate change.
But the Greens are now a party controlled by a rabblerouser who could destroy our way of life.
***************************************
16 June, 2024
Is protection from climate change a human right?
The European Court of Human Rights says it is but it is a body of fragile auhority, often criticized in Britain.
It is grotesque that a cluster of ill-qualified judges, several of them drawn from the most corrupt and ill-governed nations in Europe, should abuse their powers to lay down law, quite literally, to the Government of Britain.
The judges are political appointees from most member states of the EU. They incliude includes Linos-Alexandre Sicilianos from Greece, Dragoljub Popovic from Serbia, Nona Tsotoria from Georgia and Nebojsa Vucinic from Montenegro
The Swiss government has disregarded the ruling
In Case of Verein Klimatseniorinnen Schweiz and Others v. Switzerland deliveredon 9 April 2024, the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights, subject to the panic about climate change which for our elites justifies all things, has pushed the anti-democratic potential of human rights law to what might prove to be a limit. Four women, in their seventies or eighties when these proceedings were begun in Switzerland, complained that they had health problems caused by heatwaves that in turn had been caused by climate change. These women and a political association, Verein Klimatseniorinnen Schweiz, of which they were members, did not argue that the Swiss government lacked a commitment to mitigate climate change. No, incredibly they asked the judges to descend into the political theatre by arguing the government’s response was inadequate – so inadequate that it violated the Right to Life under Article 2 of the European Convention and the Right to Respect for Privacy and Family Life under Article 8. Staggeringly, the association succeeded under Article 8, these judges now opting to gainsay political choices around energy and environmental policies based on the above right. Whatever that is it ain’t democracy.
Legal recognition of human rights requires limits to be placed on the occasions when such recognition may prevent the discharge of public functions. If not interpreted in terms of the ‘negative liberty’ of protection against authoritarian governments that would do violence to their opponents, a Right to Life has enormous, perhaps universal, potential scope as a ‘positive right’ against harm. A Right to Private and Family Life interpreted so as to decouple ‘life’ from ‘private’ and indeed from ‘family’ has a similar if smaller potential. That national policies might be challenged because four elderly women, distressed by the weather, attributed their distress to global atmospheric changes caused by industrial civilisation might once have served as a cautionary, if satirical, hypothetical. The Articles 2 and 8 rights are therefore qualified by countervailing public interest considerations. Restrictive conditions also must be met for an Article 2 application even to be ‘admissible’, with similar if less strict conditions applying to Article 8.
To be admissible, the individual applications of the four women had to establish that the women were ‘victims’, and the Court found their arguments too vaguely remote. But the Court then regarded this as the very ground for allowing a political association to make those same arguments in a more general manner, thereby finding that the association was itself a ‘victim’! Of course, if the Swiss government suppressed the organisation, there would have been a legal issue. But this was far from the case, and the effect of the ECtHR judgment is to allow the association to enforce its policy preferences through legal proceedings. The Court did not require the association to meet the stricter Article 2 admissibility conditions but allowed it to proceed under Article 8. It then quite blatantly treated the issues as ones of a positive right to life. Of course, if one is dead, one doesn’t have a family life, but this shouldn’t mean one can make anyway tenuous Article 2 arguments under Article 8!
Climate change mitigation involves huge costs. The attempted pace of mitigation therefore must be determined by balances struck across the entire economy. The ECtHR evaluated the balances the Swiss government had struck and said in the most general terms ‘speed up’. Mitigation is an enormously complex technical matter itself beyond any court, but much more importantly it is a political matter of giving effect to the electorate’s choices about how fast it wants to go. The ECtHR allowed an Article 8 application to proceed in order to, under cover of law, politically accelerate the democratically chosen pace.
In doing all this, the Court went against important themes of Convention jurisprudence, and one of the 17 Grand Chamber Judges strongly dissented. But, albeit that they themselves were clearly hot and bothered by climate change, the majority was in line with a modern Convention jurisprudence which sees no limit whatsoever to judicial supremacy – save what is politically possible to get away with.
The separation of powers can work productively only in a constitutional ‘spirit’ of ‘comity’. Checks upon excesses must be balanced by respect for each branch of state’s proper powers. Whether the constitution is one of ‘judicial supremacy’ or of ‘parliamentary sovereignty’ has important consequences for the way balances are struck. That choice of ‘starting position’ is open to rational debate, though this writer thinks democratic decision-making is clearly preferable to rule by judges. But, whatever the starting position, comity is essential.
The meretriciousness and authoritarianism of this ECtHR judgment therefore is of grave concern. It substitutes unworthy ingenuity of professedly legal argument in pursuit of a political objective for a wise concern with comity. This disregard of the proper spirit of constitutional argument may well take the subjection of democracy to politicised human rights jurisdiction to a crisis point.The problems inherent in enforcing all ECtHR decisions will be greatly magnified in this instance. But if this decision is given effect, it will have a most damaging effect in the countries under the Court’s jurisdiction. And because it has led the world in mitigation of climate change, these effects would first be manifested in the UK.
The mitigation efforts the UK has already made have incurred enormous costs, but so far UK citizens have largely experienced these as waste funded by stealth taxation and as lost opportunities for growth. Any determined pursuit of net zero from now on will cause undeniable hardship through absolute reductions of wealth and amenity. A majority of the electorate seeking to avoid hardship by bringing democratic pressures for change will find that such change is deemed by unelected judges to be a human rights violation. There will be no constitutional mechanism for the release of these pressures. The majority will be faced with a choice between resignation to hardship or disobedience.
This writer hopes and believes that as it muddles through, the UK will withdraw from the European Convention and make corollary changes to its domestic laws. He finds it incredible to now have to write that. Yet such is the hegemony of left-wing authoritarian rule in the UK, of which anti-democratic human rights law is a central pillar, that he has little hope or belief that the UK will in fact withdraw from the Convention, with its concomitant juristocracy and rule by unelected elites. And he is very concerned about the pressures that will build.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/06/big-trouble-with-human-rights/
***************************************************Much nitpicking at a country that defies global warming panic
Days after being sworn in as president of the Maldives in November, Mohamed Muizzu declared that his citizens would not run from rising seas.
"I can categorically say that we definitely don't need to buy land or even lease land from any country," Mr Muizzu told reporters, dispelling warnings by experts and former leaders that hundreds of thousands of Maldivians could become climate refugees.
"If we need to increase the area for living or other economic activity, we can do that. We are self-sufficient to look after ourselves."
Area for living is in short supply in the Maldives, a country whose 90,000-square-kilometre territory is 99 per cent ocean.
Almost half the population resides in the capital, Malé, one of the world's most densely populated cities, which occupies an island that can be circumnavigated on foot in 90 minutes.
The average household has 4.7 people – almost twice that of Australia.
Projections indicate that the nation's 1,200 islands, which have an average altitude of just 1.5 metres, could in a worst-case climate scenario be completely submerged by the year 2100.
Maldivian governments have long responded to this problem with a seemingly straightforward solution: building more land.
Over the past 40 years, the country has expanded its landmass by about 10 per cent (30 square kilometres), dredging sand from the sea floor and dumping it in shallow lagoons.
This approach has been a point of national pride for leaders and government officials in the Maldives.
In an opinion piece published by The Guardian last month, Mr Muizzu extolled so-called land reclamation projects as "true climate adaptation if ever I saw it", and called for more international funding to help the Maldives shore up its defences against climate impacts.
Those on the ground, however, tell a different story — describing a devastating trend that is riding roughshod over environmental law, destroying the Maldives' natural landscape and damaging local communities to prop up a luxury tourism industry.
Aishath Azfa, a graduate researcher at the University of Melbourne who grew up in Malé and has more than 15 years experience working in the Maldives' development planning sector, described land scarcity as an "ongoing chronic issue that all governments are struggling to find a solution to".
"In the Maldives, because the land is so scarce, there's really not enough land for people to live decently and have access to housing," Ms Azfa told the ABC.
"When there's no land you create land – but when you create land you are taking loans."
Within the past six months, both the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have warned that rising public debt could place the country under severe economic strain.
Ms Azfa pointed out that such economic difficulties are likely to further inflame the Maldives' climate vulnerability, which is so often cited by leaders like Mr Muizzu as a way to unlock funding in the first place.
"Climate change is used as a selling point to access these finances," she said.
"But climate change is just the front they put [up] to make a compelling argument that, 'We are very vulnerable, please give us this money so that we can create a safe island.'
"Are people really benefiting from it? Is it equally distributed? Who are the winners and who are the losers?"
Ms Azfa said "the everyday person is losing".
The winners, according to her and several other Maldivians that the ABC spoke to, are politicians, the social elite, and the contractors and resort developers connected to them.
"We have more tourism resorts than local inhabited islands now," Abdulla Adam, an environmental advocate from the Maldives, told the ABC.
Mr Adam is from Kulhudhuffushi, an island in the country's far north where, between 2017 and 2018, the Maldivian government overrode environmental regulators and buried huge swaths of mangroves to build an airport.
Following the destruction of the mangroves, which act as a natural buffer against waves, tides and erosion, flooding on Kulhudhuffushi became more frequent, according to residents.
As Mr Adam put it: "We haven't seen this intensity in the past."
Elsewhere across the country, reclamation projects are having a range of impacts on the natural landscape, damaging lagoons, fishing grounds and sensitive coral reef ecosystems.
"The environmental cost of these projects is well documented," Patricia Gossman, an associate director for Human Rights Watch's (HRW) Asia division who has worked on the Maldives since 2018, told the ABC.
"It's not that communities don't want some development … but if [these projects are] carried out in a way that ends up harming the fishing communities or other businesses that people depend on, then they're not really to the benefit of the communities."
Some development projects have proven more beneficial than others.
In 2004, the government inaugurated Hulhumalé, a 4-square-kilometre artificial island built just north of Malé to relieve acute housing pressures and provide haven from rising seas.
Over the past two decades the project, nicknamed the "City of Hope", has served as an effective catchment area for the growing number of people spilling over from the capital.
According to the latest census data in 2022, it has a population of more than 65,700 people.
It is for this reason that, despite some environmental impact, experts and international bodies have lauded Hulhumalé, with the Global Centre on Adaptation describing it as a "monumental climate adaptation effort [that] raises hope in a threatened paradise".
Many believe most other reclamation projects, however, only threaten that paradise further.
Mr Adam explained that previously land reclamation was only done to create residential opportunities, as with the Hulhumalé project.
Things changed, he said, under president Abdulla Yameen, a close ally of President Muizzu who was jailed in 2019 after it was found he accepted bribes to grant a lease on an islet for tourism development.
Mr Yameen had his jail sentence overturned this year and was released in April.
It was during Mr Yameen's presidency, between 2013 and 2018, that the government started creating new artificial islands for the primary purpose of tourism, Mr Adam said — "not for the local inhabitants to live on, but rather for development of new tourist resorts".
It's an approach that has attracted controversy — not least from the Maldives environmental watchdog, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
Ibrahim Naeem, the group's director general, told the Maldives Parliament in 2019 that "reclamation is not something we should ever do".
Mr Naeem clarified that he was not talking about the expansion of inhabited islands where land is scarce, but rather the reclaiming of land to build airports or tourist resorts which he said causes "severe" and "irreversible" environmental damage.
Yet despite ongoing calls for change, sand is still being dredged and islands built for purposes of tourism.
***********************************************
We Can and Must Adjust to Climate Change – and Not Kill Billions
Paul Driessen
Earth’s climate has changed many times over four billion years, and 99.999% of those changes occurred before humans were on this planet. During that short time, humans adjusted their housing, clothing and agriculture in response to climate changes. Can we now control the climate?
Except for decades-long droughts or massive volcanic explosions that ended some civilizations, humanity generally adjusted successfully – through a Pleistocene Ice Age, a Little Ice Age, a Dust Bowl and other natural crises. Numerous state high temperature records were set in Dust Bowl years.
After putting our current “microsecond” on Earth into its proper perspective, we might therefore ask:
* With today’s vastly superior technologies, why would humanity possibly be unable to adjust to even a few-degrees temperature increase, especially with more atmospheric carbon dioxide helping plants grow faster and better, providing more food for animals and people?
* How dare the political, bureaucratic, academic and media ruling elites – who propagate GIGO computer predictions, calculated myths and outright disinformation – tell us we must implement their “green” policies immediately and universally ... or humanity won’t survive manmade climate influences that are minuscule compared to the planetary, solar and galactic forces that really control Earth’s climate?
* How dare those elites tell Earth’s poorest people and nations they have no right to seek energy, health and living standards akin to what developed countries already enjoy?
Scientists, geophysicists and engineers have yet to explain or prove what caused the slight change in global temperatures we are experiencing today – much less the huge fluctuations that brought five successive mile-high continental glaciers, and sea levels that plunged 400 feet each time (because seawater was turned to ice), interspersed with warm interglacial periods like the one we’re in now.
Moreover, none of the dire predictions of cataclysmic temperature increases, sea level rise, and more frequent and intense storms have actually occurred, despite decades of climate chaos fearmongering.
Earth continues to experience climate changes, from natural forces and/or human activity. However, adjusting to small temperature, sea level and precipitation changes would inflict far less harm on our planet’s eight billion people than would ridding the world of fossil fuels that provide 80% of our energy and myriad products that helped to nearly double human life expectancy over the past 200 years.
Today, with fuels, products, housing and infrastructures that didn’t even exist one or two centuries ago, we can adjust to almost anything.
When it’s cold, we heat insulated homes and wear appropriate winter clothing; when it’s hot, we use air conditioning and wear lighter clothing. When it rains, we remain dry inside or with umbrellas; when it snows, we stay warm indoors or ski, bobsled and build snowmen.
Climate changes may impact us in many ways. But eliminating coal, oil and natural gas – with no 24/7/365 substitutes to replace them – would be immoral and evil. It would bring extreme shortages of reliable, affordable, essential energy, and of over 6,000 essential products derived from fossil fuels.
It would inflict billions of needless deaths from diseases, malnutrition, extreme heat and cold, and wild weather – on a planet where the human population has grown from 1 billion to 8 billion since Col. Edwin Drake drilled the first oilwell in 1859.
* Weather-related fatalities have virtually disappeared, thanks to accurate forecasting, storm warnings, modern buildings, and medicines and other petroleum-based products that weren’t available even 100 years ago.
* Fossil fuels for huge long-range jets and merchant ships move people, products, food and medications to support global trade, mobility, health and lifestyle choices. Indeed, more than 50,000 merchant ships, 20,000 commercial aircraft and 50,000 military aircraft use fuels manufactured from crude oil.
* Food to feed Americans and humanity would be far less abundant and affordable without the fertilizers, insecticides, herbicides, and tractor and transportation fuels that come from oil and natural gas.
* Everything powered by electricity utilizes petroleum-based derivatives: wind turbine blades and nacelle covers, wire insulation, iPhone and computer housings, defibrillators, myriad EV components and more.
Petroleum industry history demonstrates that crude oil was virtually useless until it could be transformed in refineries and chemical plants into derivatives that are the foundation for plastics, solvents, medications and other products that support industries, health and living standards. The same is true for everything else that comes out of holes in the ground.
Plants and rocks, metals and minerals have no inherent value unless we learn how to cook them, extract metals from them, bend and shape them, or otherwise convert them into something we can use.
Similarly, the futures of poor developing countries hinge on their ability to harness foundational elements: fuels, electricity, minerals and feed stocks made from fossil fuels and other materials that are the basis for all buildings, infrastructures and other technologies in industrialized countries.
For the 80% of humanity in Africa, Asia and Latin America who still live on less than $10 a day – and the billions who still have little to no access to electricity – life is severely complicated and compromised by the hypocritical “green” agendas of wealthy country elites who have benefited so tremendously from fossil fuels since the modern industrial era began around 1850. Before that:
* Life spans were around 40 years, and people seldom travelled more than 100 miles from their birthplaces.
* There was no electricity, since generating, transmitting and utilizing this amazing energy resource requires technologies made from oil and natural gas derivatives.
* That meant the world had no modern transportation, hospitals, medicines and medical equipment, kitchen and laundry appliances, radio and other electronics, cell phones and other telecommunications, air and space travel, central heating and air conditioning, or year-round shipping and preservation of meats, fruits and vegetables, to name just a few things most of us just take for granted.
There are no silver-bullet solutions to save people from natural or manmade climate changes. However, adjusting to those fluctuations is the only solution that minimizes fatalities which would be caused by the callous or unthinking elimination of the petroleum fuels and building blocks that truly make life possible and enjoyable, instead of nasty, brutish and short. The late Steven Lyazi explained it perfectly in his own column for Townhall from 2017, "Solar Ovens and Sustained Poverty for Africa."
*****************************************************
Fracturing Thwaites Ice-Shelf--Just a Normal Function of Nature
In case you’ve lost sleep worrying about the latest reports of melting ice in Antarctica, go back to bed and enjoy a good snooze. There’s nothing to the story. Here’s why.
University of California, Davis professor Eric Rignot just published more data he asserts support the notion that the Thwaites ice shelf is in imminent danger of self-destruction. He further asserts "warm" ocean currents (that are not warm or even tepid by ordinary standards) have undercut the massive ice shelf that extends into the Amundsen Sea along the western margin of Antarctica.
This is what glaciers do. They creep downslope from higher elevation into lower geographic regions where latent heat finally causes them to melt, or, as in the example of an active ice shelf, they calve into a free-floating iceberg to drift with ocean currents carrying them equator-ward.
Dr. Rignot expects the media, along with lay readership, will readily accept his brand of climate alarmism.
I and others addressed this canard several years ago, but the principals, Rignot and allies, persist in efforts to persuade any who will pay attention and particularly those who issue grants to fund their research projects.
The West Antarctic ice sheet and its subsidiary Thwaites glacier overlie an active volcanic region of the Earth's crust. Volcanoes are observed, from seismic observations, to be venting beneath the surface of the glacial ice. This fact is conveniently ignored by the authors.
Independent studies have implicated, not so much the impinging sea currents, but geothermal heat rising upward through the crust from the mantle below as the likely cause of the observed melting of the ice shelf and anticipated calving of another large block of ice. Once freed from grounding and afloat, it will be referred to as an “ice berg.”
But the process of melting at the terminus of a glacier, whether it be on land or at the edge of the ocean needs to be properly understood. Glacial ice flows (very slowly) down gradient under the influence of gravity (it behaves somewhat akin to a viscous fluid). In the instance of glaciers in Antarctica and Greenland, they continue their downhill courses until meeting the ocean where melting and calving of icebergs occur.
On arrival at the shoreline, the outward flow of ice, urged oceanward by additional glacial ice arriving behind it, forms an ice shelf often extending some distance out over the adjoining sea. The glacier behind continues to push outward until a portion of the shelf finally weakens and develops a crack. The crack deepens and a block of ice, if not securely grounded to land, breaks free and floats away as an iceberg. The 'berg then melts in warmer water as it is carried along toward the Equator by ocean currents. One such iceberg, after breaking free from Greenland in the North Atlantic, brought down the Titanic in April 1912.
The mass of ice (water) lost by calving is continuously being made up by sparse snowfall that falls across the broad expanse of highlands in the interior of the continent.
In fact, if the polar climate were to warm somewhat, the relative humidity would increase, inducing a higher precipitation rate over the interior. During past warmer periods (speaking relatively for Antarctica) increased snowfall is documented from the ice-core samples taken at the interior Vostok station operated by Russian scientists.
Counter intuitively, a warming climate over Antarctica (keeping in mind that most of its frigid interior never reaches a temperature above freezing) would result in the formation of more, not less snow falling on the affected polar ice cap, sufficient to make up for calving losses and helping to maintain a stable sea level.
Rignot points out correctly that if the entire West Antarctic ice shelf were to melt (irrespective of the primary cause), sea level would rise by an estimated two feet. That eventuality would cause disruption for human populations living in certain low-lying lands at a number of locations around the globe. But the overwhelming portion of Antarctica's landed ice is currently (and permanently) resident on the main continent that accounts for some 90% of all landed ice on the planet. Only the melting of landed ice would contribute to sea-level rise.
The Vostok corings also show that at no time during the past 600,000 years has Antarctica been ice free despite several prolonged interglacial periods when temperatures around the globe exceeded those experienced during the previous 10,000 years of the Holocene up to the present.
It is highly unlikely that any temperature rise that can be reasonably anticipated during the next century or two would be sufficient to cause significant melting of the main body of ice now covering Antarctica. The UN/IPCC climate models are shown to be not up to the task of making reliably accurate predictions and should be discounted.
In fact, it is believed by geologists that Antarctica has had a permanent ice cap for more than three million years, subsequent to the closing off of the Panamanian Strait that once separated North America and South America. The tectonic closing effected the termination of a prior free circulation of warmer equatorial water about the southern polar continent.
It is a futile and patently nonsensical effort to attempt to restrain climate change by enforcing draconian restrictions on usage of fossil fuels in order to lower CO2 emissions to the proposed net zero level being promoted by the UN/IPCC and the US government.
If every significant source of CO2 being emitted to the atmosphere were somehow to be eliminated (an impossible dream), the Thwaites ice shelf would quite possibly continue to melt because of the uncontrollable volcanism in progress beneath the ice.
We need less of the brand of climate fear-mongering that originates from academic centers in California and in many institutions elsewhere.
Will "Doomsday" arrive tomorrow for the Thwaites ice shelf or the entire West Antarctic ice cap for that matter? Not likely.
***************************************
13 June, 2024
The Cost of EPA's Senseless CO? Capture Rules
In April 24, 2024, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency passed a new rule that would require coal power plants that plan to continue operating after January 1, 2039, and new natural gas power plants that plan to begin operation on or after 2035 to capture at least 90% of their CO? emissions.
How much would this cost? And is it worth it?
Well, as they say, we ran the numbers. Thankfully, researchers from the National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) have provided the cost and performance estimates for retrofitting an existing coal power plant with Shell’s CANSOLV CO? capture system.
For the performance and cost estimates, I will use the NETL estimates for 90% carbon capture. (Here, I am using the term “carbon capture,” rather than “CO? capture,” because NETL uses the mass of carbon, rather than the mass of CO?, in its calculations.)
Before the retrofit, NETL’s baseline coal power plant had a net output of 650 megawatts (MW). But after retrofitting it with the CO? capture system, the power output was reduced by 24% to 495 MW. In terms of money, the retrofit cost is about $988 million, or about $2 million/MW of net power output.
What do these numbers mean for the United States?
Based on the U.S. Energy Information Administration, as of March 2024, the United States has 148 coal power plants in operation in the electric utility sector, with an average capacity of about 139,000 MW. Of these, 36 plants plan to retire completely on or before December 2040 and 8 plants plan to retire at least one steam turbine on or before December 2034, but not entirely. Taking the difference of 148 and 36, there are 112 coal power plants in the United States without any planned retirement year, having a total average capacity of about 96,000 MW.
Using the NETL estimates, if we were to retrofit these 112 coal power plants to enable 90% carbon capture, the 24% net power output reduction would bring electricity production down to about 73,000 MW. Applying the retrofit cost of about $2 million/MW of net power output to the plants’ reduced power output, we arrive at a projected cost of about $146 billion.
Keep in mind, these estimates are only for coal power plants. We haven’t even gotten to retrofitting natural gas power plants, nor have we addressed the cost of replacing the tens of thousands of megawatts lost in the 24% production decrease of converted plants.
And what about constructing brand new natural gas power plants? How much would that cost?
Again, we turn to NETL for the estimates.
Using NETL’s baseline natural gas combined cycle (NGCC) power plant, the numbers provided by NETL include a cost of about $1.05 billion to construct a new 992 MW plant without CO? capture and a cost of about $1.87 billion to construct a new 883 MW plant with 90% carbon capture. In other words, the 78% plant cost increase comes with an 11% net power output reduction.
So, we clearly are talking about a lot of money to remove most of the carbon dioxide from our American power plants fueled by fossil fuels. But is spending the extra money to capture CO? worth it?
Based on the analysis performed using the Model for the Assessment of Greenhouse Gas Induced Climate Change (MAGICC), theoretically, if the United States ceased all CO? emissions in 2010, the amount of warming averted would be only about 0.07 °F by 2050 and 0.19 °F by 2100. Such a temperature difference is negligible and can hardly be felt or measured.
Furthermore, in the United States in 2022, the CO? emissions from coal and natural gas amounted to about 0.93 and 1.74 billion metric tons, respectively, for a total of 2.67 billion metric tons. However, the total CO? emissions from fossil fuels and industrial processes amounted to 5.06 billion metric tons. This means that the CO? emissions from coal and natural gas contributed to only about 53% of the total emissions. Therefore, the temperature rise averted by stopping all CO? emissions from burning coal and natural gas becomes even smaller compared to the above estimates from MAGICC.
Finally, besides being expensive and futile, keep in mind: Plants need CO?, along with sunlight, water, and nutrients from the soil to produce oxygen and food, both of which are essential for all living beings.
In fact, higher concentrations of CO? have enabled an increase in the growth, food production, water-use efficiency and drought resistance of plants, as well as the greening of Earth, as confirmed by NASA. According to NASA, 70% of this greening is attributed to “fertilization” by CO?.
Given the critical role CO? plays in driving plant and crop growth, is spending over a hundred billion dollars to remove it from the air sensible? We think not.
https://www.newsmax.com/finance/streettalk/carbon-capture-coal/2024/05/06/id/1163654/
*************************************************Windless Nights Make Net Zero Impossible
It is very simple. The cost of storing electricity is so huge it makes getting through a single windless night under a net zero wind, solar, and storage plan economically impossible.
This is especially true of cold nights where blackouts can be deadly. I recently made a legislative proposal to Pennsylvania along these lines so let’s use them as our example, keeping in mind that this is true everywhere.
Pennsylvania peaks at around 30,000 MW so let’s consider a windless night with a constant need of just 20,000 MW. There should be lots of these, especially in winter. Cold snaps are typically due to windless high pressure systems of arctic air with lots of overnight radiative cooling.
In the world of solar, “nights” are 16 hours or more long since solar systems just generate a lot of energy for 8 hours a day. It is likely less in a Pennsylvania winter where it is dark at 4 pm.
So, to get through the night we need to have stored at least 20,000 MW times 16 hours or 320,000 MWh of juice. For simplicity, we ignore all sorts of technical details that would make this number larger, like input-output losses.
The present capital cost of grid scale batteries is around $600,000 per MWh. Again this ignores all sorts of technical factors that make that number larger, like buildings, transmission, etc.
Simple arithmetic says this works out to an incredible $192 billion dollars just for the batteries. Clearly this is economically impossible. In round numbers two hundred billion dollars just to get through the night! Wind and solar plus batteries simply does not work. Even if the cost magically dropped 90% it would still be an impossible $20 billion just to buy the batteries.
This is so simple one wonders why none of the utilities, public utility commissions, independent system operators, and reliability agencies ever thought of it. Or maybe they did and decided not to mention it.
Moreover, on really cold nights the need for electricity can easily get to peak demand, which would require more like $300 billion in batteries. Then, too, there might be a cloudy or even snowy day pushing the need to 16 + 8 + 16 = 40 hours. Or several cloudy windless days at which point we are talking about a trillion dollars or more.
Clearly these simple numbers make net zero power based on wind, solar and batteries impossibly expensive. Other forms of storage are likely no cheaper. The reality is we are talking about storing an enormous amount of energy which simply cannot be done. The obvious solution is to have lots of reliable generation.
Which brings me to my legislative proposal which is also very simple. It merely requires the utilities to figure out how to meet the need for electricity on brutally cold windless nights that are likely to occur.
You can read it here. The title is “Avoiding deadly blackouts” because in severe cold, a blackout can kill people. In the horrible Texas blackout estimates run to over 700 deaths. Cold kills.
In fact, this is a requirement for today, not just some distant net zero fantasy. We are already to the point where a lot of States could not keep the heat on if they got a severe cold snap like they have already had in the past.
In “Avoiding deadly blackouts” I point out that Pennsylvania and the rest of PJM narrowly avoided blacking out in winter storm Elliot. On paper, they had a 30% margin of safety which was wiped out by the cold. But Elliot was actually mild compared to several earlier severe cold spells. We must prepare for these extreme events.
We use a tremendous amount of electricity which net zero cannot possibly provide on windless nights. But we are already under severe threat. The States must act now to prevent deadly blackouts. Storage is not the answer. We need reliable generation, much of which will be fossil fueled.
https://principia-scientific.com/windless-nights-make-net-zero-impossible/
**************************************************Climate Alarmism, Not Climate Change, Is an Existential Threat to Humanity
While in France observing the 80th anniversary of D-Day and honoring the thousands of brave soldiers who gave their lives fighting the existential threat that was Nazi Germany, President Joe Biden could not help himself from descending into crass political talking points by comparing the most destructive and deadly war in human history to climate change.
“The only existential threat to humanity, including nuclear weapons, is if we do nothing on climate change,” Biden declared. Due to the “existential threat of climate change, which is just growing greater, we’re working together to accelerate the global transition to net-zero. It is the existential threat to humanity,” Biden reiterated.
In reality, climate change is nowhere near an existential threat. In fact, in many ways, the slight warming that has occurred over the past half century or so has made life better for humanity. For instance, NASA satellite data show a significant rise in global plant growth in recent decades— what some call global greening. A slightly warmer planet is also beneficial because it produces greater crop yields.
However, one can make a compelling argument that climate alarmism, and the policies that climate alarmists support, actually comprise an existential threat to humanity.
First and foremost, climate alarmists are hellbent on ending the use of affordable and reliable energy in the form of fossil fuels. This alone is a horrendous stance that puts millions of lives at risk.
Like it or not, the advent of fossil fuels, namely oil, coal, and natural gas, has been the biggest boon for humanity in all of history. The harnessing of these resources to supply virtually unlimited energy in cost-effective terms has raised billions of people from abject poverty.
Without ample access to fossil fuels, our modern way of life would literally cease to exist. Not only do fossil fuels provide abundant and affordable energy. As the U.S. Department of Energy notes, “Petrochemicals derived from oil and natural gas make the manufacturing of over 6,000 everyday products and high-tech devices possible.”
Second, climate alarmists demand that the world immediately transitions to so-called renewable energy and achieve net-zero carbon dioxide emissions. The problem is that renewable energy from solar panels and wind farms is too expensive, unreliable, and not nearly scalable. If the world were to shun fossil fuels in favor of wind and solar, the amount of energy available to use would plummet. This would result in devastation across many fronts.
Third, climate alarmists constantly call for degrowth, both in terms of the economy and in terms of population. Somehow, the climate alarmists have convinced themselves that the solution to the non-existent problem of a slightly warming planet is for humanity to cull its population growth. This is extremely short-sighted and fails to consider that many developed countries are currently experiencing a stark population decline. If this is not reversed, and soon, many of these once-thriving nations will experience severe demographic problems.
Likewise, calls for economic degrowth, which has been a cause célèbre among climate alarmists for many years now, would wreak havoc and would instantly result in decreased living standards for billions of people. This is especially true for several developing countries, which are banking on economic growth and increased prosperity to lift billions from poverty.
Fourth and finally, climate alarmists, whether they realize it or not, are akin to modern-day Luddites because they excoriate innovations and technological breakthroughs. In many ways, climate alarmists are the opposite of progressives because they seek to regress humanity back to a time when creature comforts and access to the latest and greatest technologies were limited to a select few rather than accessible to the masses. Even worse, by hindering the development of new technologies that could solve some of the world’s most vexing problems simply because it does not align with their world view, climate alarmists are essentially preventing the betterment of the human experience.
Fortunately, it seems like the climate alarmists are losing ground. Polls show that more and more people are skeptical of the constant fearmongering and are becoming aware of the failed doomsday predictions. This is great news; however, it is just the start. Unless and until there is a general consensus that climate alarmism is the problem and that the misguided policies supported by climate alarmists are outright rejected by an overwhelming majority, climate alarmism will remain a grave threat to the future humanity.
*********************************************
Peter Dutton puts carbon emissions target on ruling Leftists' back
Peter Dutton will go to the next election opposing Labor’s 43 per cent carbon emissions reduction target by 2030 but keeping to zero emissions by 2050, opting for a radically different energy policy to Anthony Albanese that prioritises more gas in the short term and nuclear in the long term.
The Opposition Leader declared there was “no sense in signing up to targets you don’t have any prospect of achieving” and promised the Coalition in government would not “destroy” agriculture, manufacturing and investment nor create sovereign risk with trading partners by agreeing to unachievable climate change targets.
Mr Dutton said he would take a different gas policy from Labor to the next election to ensure a successful shorter-term transition to renewable power and clarified that nuclear power, which would not be delivered until the 2040s, would be aimed at achieving the net-zero target by mid-century.
In an interview with The Weekend Australian to mark his second year as leader of the Liberal Party, Mr Dutton said: “They (Labor) just have no hope of achieving the targets and there’s no sense signing up to targets you don’t have any prospect of achieving.
“We’re not going to destroy agriculture. We’re not going to stifle investment. We’re already seeing investment being withdrawn. We’re not going to create sovereign risk with our export partners, as Labor is doing with Japan and Korea.”
Mr Dutton said there had “never been any doubt in my mind that gas is absolutely essential”.
“And without it, there’ll be catastrophic failure in the energy market over the next decade,” he said. “You can’t have the Prime Minister saying we aren’t going to have coal, we aren’t going to have gas and were not going to have nuclear power and we are going to keep the lights on – that’s just fantasy. We now have a debate about energy which I think we can win.”
Mr Dutton said the next election, due by May next year, would come down to basic issues of economic management, national security and law and order.
He said the Prime Minister had failed to lead by example and come out more strongly against those promoting hate and anti-Semitism in society.
If a firmer stand had been taken “we would have seen arrests and we would have seen the ability for people to protest peacefully, but not with the incitement and the rage that we’ve seen in the university campus demonstrations”, he said.
“Nobody’s been arrested for hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of damage to the offices of members of parliament,” Mr Dutton said.
“I think the (police) commissioners take their lead from the premiers and from the police ministers and from the Prime Minister.
“I think there has been an approach of just keeping the peace, not taking sides because this is just another Middle East thing. Whereas I think the approach should have been to enforce the rule of law without fear or favour.”
On taxation, Mr Dutton indicated that the Coalition’s policy, which would not alter Labor’s tax cuts schedule that comes in on July 1, would be limited by funds available in the budget.
But he elevated economic reform across the federation as a longer-term aspiration that he would champion as prime minister, saying it was critical to reduce red tape and drive down costs for businesses.
“I think there’s a very compelling argument for the federation debate to be re-enlivened,” Mr Dutton said.
“I think we should be talking more about how we can eliminate efficiencies and waste within a three layers of government model.
“That is a debate that we would willingly join if the Prime Minister were to have any appetite.
“And in government it’s a debate that I want to start. Because we are over-governed (and) over-regulated.”
Mr Dutton said he believed the Coalition’s “superior ability to manage the economy, given that cost of living is so relevant and important to Australians” would appeal to all voters, including those living in more affluent seats held by the seven teal independents – once blue-ribbon Liberal electorates – as well as outer-suburban areas.
He said his two years as Opposition Leader, including his part in the defeat of the Indigenous voice referendum last October, had given people the chance to “reconsider” him as a leader and not accept the way Labor had painted him as an angry and negative person.
“My judgment is that people want a leader with strength and with a positive outlook and vision for our country, which we’re in the process of outlining,” Mr Dutton said.
The Prime Minister will ramp up his attack on the Coalition's nuclear energy plan, calling it a wasteful "rabbit… hole". Albanese will be using his speech at the Sky News- Australian Economic Outlook lunch on Friday to continue to prosecute the case against the Coalition’s nuclear energy push. He will More
“People have allowed themselves to reconsider who they thought me to be or who Labor had framed me as.
“I think what Labor says is at odds with who people see me to after being able to watch me in a different role for the last two years and dealing with the breadth of issues starting with the voice and other economic and security issues.”
On immigration, Mr Dutton reaffirmed his commitment to cutting the record intake and encouraging skilled workers.
***************************************
12 June, 2024
The High Costs And Deadly Downsides Of Ending ‘Fossil Fuels’
Written by Bjorn Lomborg
We constantly hear that because ‘climate change’ is real we should ‘follow the science’ and end ‘fossil fuel’ use
We hear it both from politicians who favor swift carbon cuts and from natural scientists themselves, as when the editor-in-chief of Nature insists “The science is clear — fossil fuels must go.”
The assertion is convenient for politicians because it allows them to avoid responsibility for the many costs and downsides of climate policy, painting these as inevitable results of diligently following the scientific evidence.
But it is false. It confounds climate science with climate policy.
Careful climate science is clearly needed to shape thoughtful climate policy. It tells us what the physical impact will be of emitting more or less CO2.
But climate policy, like any policy, should be the democratic outcome of a weighing of benefits and costs. Climate science tells us about some of the benefits of cutting emissions but it tells us nothing of the costs, which instead come from the much less hyped field of climate economics.
The story told by activist politicians and climate campaigners suggests there is nothing but benefit to ending ‘fossil fuels’ — and a hellscape if nothing is done.
But the reality is that life has improved dramatically in recent centuries largely because of the immense increase in available energy that has come mostly from ‘fossil fuels’.
Lifespans have more than doubled, hunger has dramatically declined and incomes have increased ten-fold.
We constantly hear about extreme weather such as droughts, storms, floods, and fires —although even the UN IPCC finds that, for most of these things, evidence of their worsening cannot yet be documented.
But much more importantly, a richer world is much more resilient and hence much less affected by extreme weather.
The data shows that climate-related deaths from droughts, storms, floods, and fires have declined by more than 97 percent over the last century — from nearly 500,000 a year 100 years ago to fewer than 15,000 in the 2020s.
At the same time, the costs of the climate campaigners’ calls to “just stop” oil, gas, and coal are massively downplayed.
The world currently gets almost four-fifths of all its energy from ‘fossil fuels’.
If we quickly ended our use of them, billions of people would die.
Four billion people — half the world’s population — depend on food grown with synthetic fertilizer produced almost entirely by natural gas. If we ended ‘fossil fuels’ quickly, we would have no way to feed these people.
Add the billions who depend on ‘fossil fuels’ for wintertime heating and steel, cement, plastics, and transport, it is little wonder that one recent estimate shows that abruptly ending ‘fossil fuels’ would lead to six billion people dying in less than a year.
These vast downsides are not considered within climate science, which understandably focuses on carbon emissions and climate models. But they need to be an integral part of the debate about climate policy.
Most politicians advocate a slightly less rushed end to ‘fossil fuels’, phasing them out by 2050. The short-term death toll would be much lower but the downsides are still immense.
The latest peer-reviewed climate-economic research shows that efficiently reaching ‘net-zero’ emissions by 2050 will cost a staggering US$27 trillion per year on average over this century.
That is one-quarter of the world’s current GDP — per year.
The same research shows that the benefits will be just a small fraction of that cost: the policy is prohibitively expensive and brings little benefit.
A good analogy is to consider the more than one million global traffic deaths annually. Like ‘climate change’, traffic is a man-made problem. Like ‘climate change’, it is something we could entirely solve.
If scientists were to look only at how to avoid the million traffic deaths, one solution would be to reduce speed limits everywhere to three miles per hour and enforce that strictly.
This would almost eliminate traffic deaths. Of course, it would also almost eliminate our economies and our productive lives.
We would laugh if politicians said we should “follow the science” and stop traffic deaths by reducing road speeds to three mph. We should take the same sensible approach to climate policy that we take to traffic policy.
We should focus on short-term adaptation to build resilience and long-term investment in R&D to develop ‘green’ energy. Innovation must drive the price of reliable ‘green’ energy down below that of ‘fossil fuels’, eventually making sure everyone can switch to low-‘carbon’ alternatives.
When politicians tell us they are “following the science,” they use the claim to shut down open discussion of the enormous costs of their policies.
“The science” informs us about the problem but is not the arbiter of solutions. Democracies are.
Sudden, dramatic cuts in ‘fossil fuel’ consumption will have huge downsides their backers would rather ignore.
https://principia-scientific.com/the-high-costs-and-deadly-downsides-of-ending-fossil-fuels/
*****************************************************CEI Leads Coalition Letter Supporting CRA Resolution of Disapproval on EPA Power Plant Rule
The Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) recently finalized powerplant rule will kill America’s existing supply of baseload generation from coal. At the same time, the rule will deter investment in new baseload generation from natural gas. That means the rule will drive up consumer energy costs, impair grid reliability, and chill economic growth. The rule is also an unlawful power grab that defies the Supreme Court’s decision in West Virginia v. EPA.
Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV) and Rep. Troy Balderson (R-OH) are expected to introduce Congressional Review Act resolutions of disapproval to overturn the EPA’s rule. We, the undersigned organizations, urge you to support those resolutions.
The EPA’s rule sets various requirements that will quickly drive coal generation out of the nation’s electricity fuel mix. If a coal powerplant intends to produce power after 2039, it must, by January 1, 2032, install equipment capable of capturing 90-percent of its carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. Carbon capture is an energy- and water-intensive system that adds significantly to power generation costs. Moreover, carbon capture powerplants do not reduce emissions unless connected to networks of CO2 pipelines and storage facilities that may never be built.
Unsurprisingly, despite decades of R&D and billions of dollars in ratepayer and taxpayer subsidies, only two carbon capture powerplants currently operate in North America—Petra Nova in Texas, and Boundary Dam in Saskatchewan. Both were built with hefty subsidies and plagued with technical difficulties. Note, too, that central to the business model of each project is a partnership whereby the powerplant sells its captured CO2 to companies engaged in enhanced oil recovery (EOR). Thirty-eight states (more than three-quarters) do not have EOR operations.
PJM Interconnection, the regional transmission organization that coordinates wholesale electricity and manages grid reliability in all or parts of 13 states and the District of Columbia, observes in its statement on the rule: “There is very little evidence, other than some limited CCS [carbon capture and storage] projects, that this technology and associated transportation infrastructure would be widely available throughout the country in time to meet the compliance deadlines under the Rule.”
The bottom line is that, for coal powerplants, 90-percent carbon capture is not an “adequately demonstrated” “best system of emission reduction” (BSER), taking “cost” and “energy requirements” into account, and thus is not a lawful basis for setting emission standards under Section 111 of the Clean Air Act (CAA).
The EPA’s rule provides two alternative compliance options. A coal powerplant can avoid the expense of installing a carbon capture system if it (a) commits to shut down by January 1, 2032, or (b) commits to shut down by December 31, 2039, and repowers with 40 percent natural gas by January 1, 2030. PJM Interconnection cautions:
The present gas pipeline system is largely fully subscribed. Moreover, given local opposition, it has proven extremely difficult to site new pipelines just to meet today’s needs, let alone a significantly increased need for natural gas in the future. The Final Rule, which is premised, in part, on the availability of natural gas for co-firing or full conversion, does not sufficiently take into account these limitations on the development of new pipeline infrastructure.
It could not be clearer that the rule aims to drive coal generation out of U.S. electricity markets. Indeed, the EPA itself estimates that, by 2045, coal generation will decline by 94 percent compared to the prior policy baseline (Regulatory Impact Analysis, Table D-10).
As in the Clean Power Plan, the EPA is promulgating “emission performance standards” that are, in fact, non-performance mandates. ‘Perform less or not at all’ is not a valid performance standard under CAA Section 111.
The EPA’s new rule also establishes a 90-percent carbon capture requirement for new baseload natural gas powerplants. Far from being “adequately demonstrated,” no utility scale natural gas CCS plant exists today. Only one small-scale facility was ever built—Florida Power & Light’s 40 MW CCS gas plant in Bellingham, Massachusetts. It closed in 2005. That is nowhere near an adequate technological basis on which to predicate an industry-wide 90 percent carbon capture requirement.
The EPA could not have picked a worse time to attack affordable, reliable, coal- and gas-fired generation. Electricity demand is projected to grow substantially due to the proliferation of data centers, expansion of Artificial Intelligence, onshoring of chip production, and the EPA’s and California’s policies to forcibly electrify U.S. motor vehicle fleets.
PJM Interconnection warns: “The future demand for electricity cannot be met simply through renewables given their intermittent nature. Yet in the very years when we are projecting significant increases in the demand for electricity, the Final Rule may work to drive premature retirement of coal units that provide essential reliability services and dissuade new gas resources from coming online.”
In West Virginia v. EPA, the Supreme Court made it clear that CAA Section 111 does not authorize the EPA to act as the nation’s grid manager or resolve the national debate on climate policy with respect to a fundamental industrial sector. If Congress wanted the agency to possess such authority, it would have said so in clear terms. Congress has not done so, yet the EPA is still trying to assert an expansive transformation of its regulatory power. As in the CPP, the EPA ignores the separation of powers that is vital to the nation’s republican form of government.
For those reasons, our organizations urge legislators to overturn this rule.
*******************************************************
New Zealand scraps ‘burp tax’ on livestock after backlash from farmers
New Zealand has scrapped plans for a so-called "burp tax" aimed at lowering greenhouse gas emissions from sheep and cattle.
The country’s centre-right coalition government said on Tuesday it would exclude agriculture from the country’s emissions trading scheme in favour of exploring other ways to reduce methane.
The move, which fulfils a pre-election pledge by former businessman Christopher Luxon’s National Party, comes after the plans to tax agricultural emissions from 2025 led to nationwide protests by farmers worried about the effect on their livelihoods.
“It doesn’t make sense to send jobs and production overseas, while less carbon-efficient countries produce the food the world needs,” Agriculture Minister Todd McClay said in a statement.
“That is why we are focused on finding practical tools and technology for our farmers to reduce their emissions in a way that won’t reduce production or exports.”
The coalition, which also includes the pro-business ACT New Zealand and populist New Zealand First, said it would invest 400 million New Zealand dollars ($245m) in the commercialisation of emissions-reduction technology and increase funding for the New Zealand Agricultural Greenhouse Gas Research Centre by 50.5 million New Zealand dollars ($31m).
The previous Labour Party government announced the “world first” levy in 2022 as part of Wellington’s efforts to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.
Nearly half of New Zealand’s greenhouse gas emissions come from the country’s estimated 10 million cows and 26 million sheep.
Then-Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern argued that the tax was necessary to slow global warming and farmers would be able to recoup the costs by charging more for climate-friendly meat.
The Greens, the third largest party in parliament, said on Tuesday that the government had once again “kicked the climate action can down the road”.
“From pouring oil, coal and gas on the climate crisis fire, the Government has now put half of our emissions which come from agriculture into the industry-led too-hard basket,” Greens co-leader Chloe Swarbrick said in a statement
********************************************************
Australia: NSW coal jobs hit new record high, export volumes also up
The Hunter's coal industry employed 14,750 people in March.
Coal mining jobs in NSW reached record numbers in March 2024, breaking the 25,000 barrier for only the second time since coal job numbers were first recorded.
The new record number of 25,505 to March is the highest number of coal jobs ever recorded by Coal Services Pty Ltd since it began tracking the number of people working in coal mining in NSW in 1998.
The figure is more than double the number first recorded in the last quarter of 1998, when there was a workforce of 10,898 coal mining workers across the state.
The latest data shows that in the Hunter - NSW's largest coal mining region - there were 14,750 coal mining jobs in March 2024.
In the Gunnedah region, the data shows that coal mining jobs remained at near-record levels, with 3116 coal mining jobs in March 2024, only a slight drop from the all-time record number of jobs set in April 2023 of 3253.
In the Western region of NSW, coal mining jobs reached an all time high with 3585 workers in coal mining compared to just over 1400 when job numbers were first recorded.
In the Southern region of NSW the number of coal mining jobs improved over the last 12 months with 3344 local coal mining workers, over a hundred more than the same time last year.
NSW Minerals Council chief executive Stephen Galilee said the increase in coal mining jobs in NSW was a sign of the ongoing importance and resilience of the coal sector.
"The record number of people working in the NSW coal mining sector shows that over the last 25 years, coal mining has become increasingly critical to regional communities and the state economy. These job numbers also highlight the need to support mining communities," he said.
"A mark of the importance of the coal mining sector to NSW is the strong ongoing demand for our high quality coal."
Coal Services figures show that coal exports to the state's major trade partners are up almost 16 per cent with thermal coal exports used in energy production up over 19 per cent.
"NSW coal mining is playing a critical role in the budget repair task being undertaken by the state government. In particular, the decision to increase coal mining royalty rates from 1 July 2024 was the single biggest revenue decision taken by the NSW government," Mr Galilee said.
"Metals mining jobs are also at near record levels with nearly 8,000 people working in the NSW metals mining sector based on the latest annual NSW Mining Industry Expenditure Survey."
***************************************
11 June, 2024
Refusal to index is also a form of censorship
As far as I can tell, none of my blogs is indexed by Google. If you do a Google seach for something that I have written on one of my blogs, you will not find it. Bing.com indexes some of my blogs but even they will not touch "Greenie Watch"
The surprising thing is that the files for all Blogspot blogs are held on Google's servers. They have my writings in their files but refuse to mention them in response to a search. I am "search blocked"
In the circumstances, it is a bit of a surprise that on some occasions they go to the trouble to wipe some of my posts off their servers completely. Even if you come to one of my blogs as a regular reader rather than via a search you will still not see what I have written. They are clearly very motivated to suppress conservative ideas. It's ironical that a very succesful private enterprise is so protective of government
Fortunately a search on duckduckgo.com or yahoo.com does find my writings
Addtionally, I gather that anybody trying to link to "Greenie Warch" gets a warning that it is "unsafe"
I would not be surprised if all my Blogspot blogs vanished into thin air one day. I long ago took precautons against that by keeping two backups of everything I write. You can access that via jonjayray.com or johnjayray.com
You can't keep a good skeptic down!
-- JR
************************************************
Eastern Antarctica’s Ice Growth: The Story You Haven’t Heard
This is another example of the mainstream media (MSM) skewing scientific reporting to serve the interests of the climate-industrial complex.
This bias often manifests in selective coverage, where sensationalist narratives about climate change are given prominence, while contradictory or nuanced findings are ignored… If it bleeds, it leads. Check out my 7-part series examining the most newsworthy climate papers in the last decade and if any of the predictions have come true… Spoiler alert, not many.
A prime example is the recent study highlighting significant ice growth in Eastern Antarctica, which has received little to no media attention compared to the constant alarmist coverage of the Thwaites Glacier and Western Antarctica.
A recent study published in Nature Communications reveals substantial ice growth in Eastern Antarctica.
The researchers found that contrary to popular belief and media portrayal, parts of Eastern Antarctica have been gaining ice mass. This finding challenges the dominant narrative that Antarctic ice is melting due to global warming from rising anthropogenic GHG concentrations.
The study utilized satellite altimetry data from the European Space Agency’s CryoSat-2 mission and laser altimetry data from NASA’s ICESat-2 mission to measure changes in ice thickness.
The study uses robust historical data combined with modern satellite measurements, providing a detailed and accurate picture of glacier dynamics in Eastern Antarctica.
These findings are crucial for a balanced understanding of Antarctic ice behavior, emphasizing the need to consider regional variations rather than adopting a one-size-fits-all narrative driven by the climate-industrial complex.
The study states…
“Our results demonstrate that the stability and growth in ice elevations observed in terrestrial basins over the past few decades are part of a trend spanning at least a century, and highlight the importance of understanding long-term changes when interpreting current dynamics.”
However, this study has been largely ignored by mainstream media outlets, which prefer to focus on more sensationalist stories of melting ice and rising sea levels.
In stark contrast, the Thwaites Glacier in Western Antarctica has been the subject of extensive media coverage. Dubbed the “Doomsday Glacier,” it is often portrayed as a ticking time bomb that could lead to catastrophic sea level rise.
While the potential instability of the Thwaites Glacier is indeed concerning, recent research challenges the sensationalized portrayal of Thwaites Glacier in media outlets.
A recent search in Google for news articles, over the last month, reveals a stark contrast in media coverage between the ice growth in Eastern Antarctica and the Thwaites Glacier in Western Antarctica. The study published in Nature Communications highlighting significant ice growth in Eastern Antarctica has received virtually no media attention.
In contrast, a simple search for “Thwaites Glacier” yields many alarmist articles, emphasizing its potential to cause catastrophic sea level rise. Titles such as “New research on Antarctica’s Thwaites Glacier could reshape sea-level rise predictions” and “Warm ocean water is rushing beneath Antarctica’s ‘Doomsday Glacier,’ making its collapse more likely” dominate the headlines, perpetuating a narrative of imminent disaster.
https://principia-scientific.com/eastern-antarcticas-ice-growth-the-story-you-havent-heard/
***********************************************The Western world seems destined to founder in its mad rush to offset climate change ‘driven by CO2 emissions’
The fact that climate always changes, and it’s mainly driven by natural cyclical forces beyond our control, is overlooked by political leaders pushing the green dream of ‘renewable energy’ focused on the unreliable intermittent sources of solar and wind power.
Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris ‘Blackout’ Bowen and Prime Minister Anthony ‘Each Way’ Albanese would like to see an EV, electric scooter, or bike in every Australian garage which would certainly keep our firefighters busy, but it won’t change the weather.
As former chief scientist Alan Finkel admitted to a Senate hearing several years ago, if Australia cut all its CO2 emissions immediately, its impact on world climate would be negligible.
But in the unlikely event that EV sales do surge way beyond the current rate of just 8 per cent of total vehicle sales, it would place increasing demands on a power system already at risk of major blackouts. In its latest 10-year forecast, the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) warned that millions of Australians faced the risk of electricity blackouts without the ‘urgent’ delivery of greater energy and transmission infrastructure.
Well, that alone might not tip us into the dystopian Mad Max future, but combined with a seemingly insatiable power demand created by a villain masked as mankind’s new hero, it just might. I’m referring to Artificial Intelligence or AI – the charmless i-bot that answers almost all government and major business phone calls, the source behind our internet searches and algorithms, the brain behind the helpful tools that do a student’s assignments or write a novel (badly) or create nude images of anybody from a normal photograph … get the picture?
And now massive data centres are pouring AI chips into the mix as fast as manufacturing plants can build them. As one researcher notes, adding AI to Google ‘search’ boosts the energy use per search tenfold. And that’s only the first, perhaps the least, significant of the many possible applications for AI.
An article in City Journal claims that the huge energy demand will make the type of energy transition our hapless leaders are trying to foist on us impossible.
It claims that Nvidia, a leading AI chip manufacturer, has shipped about 5 million high-power chips over the past three years and each chip uses roughly as much electricity each year as three electric vehicles. And while the market appetite for electric vehicles is sagging and ultimately limited, the appetite for AI chips is ‘explosive and essentially unlimited’.
‘To see what the future holds, we must take a deep dive into the arcana of today’s ‘cloud,’ the loosely defined term denoting the constellation of data centres, hardware, and communications systems.
‘Each data centre – and tens of thousands of them exist – has an energy appetite often greater than skyscrapers the size of the Empire State Building. And the nearly 1,000 so-called hyperscale data centres each consume more energy than a steel mill (and this is before counting the impacts of piling on AI chips)…’
I find that both scary and mind-boggling, to the extent that new mathematical measurement terminology has been developed to try to keep pace with the burgeoning energy demand all this is creating. Forget billions, trillions, or zillions, that’s old hat and doesn’t go anywhere near the AI power horizon:
‘…one way to guess the future magnitude of data traffic – and derivatively the energy implications – is in the names of the numbers we’ve had to create to describe quantities of data. We count food and mineral production in millions of tons; people and their devices in billions of units; airway and highway usage in trillions of air- or road miles; electricity and natural gas in trillions of kilowatt-hours or cubic feet; and our economies in trillions of dollars. But, at a rate of a trillion per year of anything, it takes a billion years to total one ‘zetta’ – i.e., the name of the number that describes the scale of today’s digital traffic.
‘The numerical prefixes created to describe huge quantities track the progress of society’s technologies and needs. The ‘kilo’ prefix dates back to 1795. The ‘mega’ prefix was coined in 1873, to name 1,000 kilos. The ‘giga’ prefix for 1 billion (1,000 million) and ‘tera’ (a trillion, or 1,000 billion) were both adopted in 1960. In 1975, we saw the official creation of the prefixes ‘peta’ (1,000 giga) and ‘exa’ (1,000 peta), and then the ‘zetta’ (1,000 exa) in 1991. Today’s cloud traffic is estimated to be roughly 50 zettabytes a year.
‘It’s impossible to visualise such a number without context. A zetta-stack of dollar bills would reach from the earth to the sun (93 million miles away) and back – 700,000 times…’
What the…? Are you grasping any of this, Albo and Bowen? Do you really think covering an area bigger than Tasmania including productive farmland and natural forests with limited-life solar and wind farms and 28,000 km of new transmission lines, all backed by billions in subsidies, will solve our energy needs into the future?
You will need to do a lot more to prevent the dystopian future referred to in the Mad Max movies unless AI becomes intelligent enough to realise it is rapidly progressing towards its own demise. It needs to convince closed minds like yours that the only way to try to keep pace is to embrace clean, long-lasting, safe, modern nuclear energy as promoted by enterprising young Brisbane teenager Will Shackel, the founder of Nuclear for Australia, and Opposition leader Peter Dutton.
It’s a no-brainer, and many overseas states and nations are already on-board. Civilisation could depend on it.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/06/beyond-mad-max-with-dystopian-ai/
****************************************************The renewable green energy disaster off the northeastern US is getting worse Less than one per cent of the way to the Biden 2030 target
A slow-motion collapse in the offshore wind industry continues to grow as sticky inflation and supply chain challenges force developers to delay or cancel major projects. In particular, progress towards the Biden administration’s goal of building large amounts of floating wind off the northeastern US coast is just about stalled.
Shell, which invested in a series of offshore wind projects in recent years, including offshore the northeastern United States, announced last week it would lay off much of its offshore wind business staff as the oil giant advances its program of refocusing on its core oil and gas business.
“We are concentrating on select markets and segments to deliver the most value for our investors and customers,” a Shell spokesperson told Bloomberg. “Shell is looking at how it can continue to compete for offshore wind projects in priority markets while maintaining our focus on performance, discipline and simplification.”
Wind turbine maker Siemens Gamesa announced even bigger layoffs, saying it would cut 15 per cent of its global staff to adjust to a slowing market. The announcement comes after the company reported a €4.6 billion loss for 2023, a losing trend that has continued over the first half of 2024.
“Our current situation demands adjustments that go beyond organizational changes. We have to adapt to lower business volumes, reduced activity in non-core markets, and a streamlined portfolio,” said outgoing CEO Jochen Eickholt in a letter to staff.
On May 29 came survey results compiled by London-based energy consultancy Westwood indicating the global floating offshore wind industry is likely to deliver less than 3 gigawatts (GW) of new floating generation capacity by 2030, and a total of roughly 10 GW by 2040. Westwood cites lack of standardization of floating technology (55 per cent), manufacturing capability and capacity (51 per cent) and port infrastructure (50 per cent) as the primary impediments.
In light of the industry’s gloomy outlook, Westwood notes that “calls are ringing out for governments to provide more specific policy and regulatory support for technology development in addition to cost reduction and investment in port infrastructure to accelerate adoption.”
This is completely predictable, since the voracious rent-seeking wind business invariably calls for more government largesse in response to any challenge that arises. Unfortunately, the call is too often answered by policymakers who have made big political bets on being able to show off arrays of mammoth windmills floating atop various oceans and seas, intermittently producing some electricity – generally 25-30 per cent of nominal plant capacity over time.
This latest bad news for offshore wind could become especially troublesome for US President Joe Biden’s re-election campaign, since he has invested so much of his personal political capital in pushing a major buildout of floating offshore wind in the Atlantic northeast. A 2023 Department of Energy fact sheet sets the administration’s goal of installing 30 GW of offshore wind capacity by 2030 for the US alone, exceeding Westwood’s just estimated potential for global new capacity by that year by a factor of 10 times over.
To date, regulators under Biden have approved permits for 6 major offshore projects, several of which have already been delayed or cancelled by developers in response to tougher economic factors. In late 2023, major Danish wind developer Orsted cancelled two projects off the Atlantic coast, and Shell divested its 50 per cent stake in another in March of this year. Equinor and BP announced in January they were cancelling plans for their Empire Wind 2 project, citing similar economic concerns.
One US offshore project, Vineyard Wind 1, was able to begin delivering its intermittent 25-30 per cent of 68 megawatts (MW) to Massachusetts residents in January with the activation of 5 offshore turbines. The South Fork Wind Project was also able to commence first deliveries into New York in March, with 12 turbines capable of generating some proportion of 130 MW.
But this is less than one per cent of the Biden goal of 30 GW, with just five and a half years remaining until 2030. Given the wind industry’s insatiable appetite for ever-increasing subsidies and constantly rising utility charges, it’s an open question how many more billions of dollars the federal government will be allowed to print to keep projects alive before the voters start to rebel at the cost.
It’s a rebellion that could commence as soon as this coming November.
https://stephenheins.substack.com/p/the-renewable-green-energy-disaster
**********************************************Travellers reluctant to pay for greener flights despite desire for sustainability
Travellers are proving reluctant passengers of the airline industry’s sustainability drive with those opting to offset flights actually falling in recent years.
After exceeding 10 per cent pre Covid, Qantas was now seeing around 6 or 7 per cent of guests choosing to offset, while Webjet had noticed that customers “talk the talk” but don’t necessarily “walk the walk”.
“When we originally looked at a program around sustainability for our travellers we surveyed our quite significant database of 2 million people and circa 30 to 40 per cent said they would regularly use the offset,” said Webjet managing director John Guscic.
“But in practical application, it’s less than 10 per cent ticking the box.”
Inflationary pressures were considered a factor in the drop off recorded by Qantas according to chief sustainability officer Andrew Parker who said there was still much passion for the decarbonisation journey.
“In terms of consumers there is still a lot to do,” Mr Parker told the Australian on the sidelines of the International Air Transport Association in Dubai.
“We can’t just be asking for customers to pay for sustainable aviation fuel, pay for offsets, we want to look at a model where you have a range of options.”
Despite the cool response from customers to date, airlines remained convinced that sustainability was extremely important to travellers.
International Air Transport Association director general Willie Walsh said the idea people want to fly in an “unsustainable fashion” was simply not correct.
“All the research that we do says that people want the airline industry to address its environmental footprint and we have to,” Mr Walsh said.
“And anybody who thinks you can transition to net zero in any industry without cost is misguided or misleading people. There’s going to be a cost and there’s going to be a consumer cost.”
It has been estimated that cost could push up airfares significantly, particularly in the early stages due to low levels of sustainable aviation fuel production.
Considered the only realistic path for airlines towards net zero at this stage, SAF (Sustainable aviation fuel) production in 2024 will amount to a mere 0.53 per cent of the industry’s fuel needs, or 1.9 billion litres.
To help drive production in Australia — which was rich in feedstock but yet to make any SAF — Qantas was investing in a north Queensland-based refinery using alcohol-to-jet technology.
Mr Parker said it was unusual for airlines to become investors in the production of fuel but they felt they had to.
“We need big fuel companies producing (SAF) albeit at a price that is digestible but we want small to medium-sized producers as well so we’ve got a competitive industry,” he said.
“We think Australia can produce SAF and a lot of it, which is one of the reasons Qantas has set a target of 10 per cent SAF usage by 2030.”
At the same time, Qantas was firmly in favour of the federal government imposing a mandate of 5 per cent SAF for airlines operating within and into Australia.
Virgin Australia recognised the potential role a SAF mandate could play but warned of economic consequences, particularly for “value carriers” like themselves.
“Increases in fuel prices would likely result in airlines having to raise airfares, with value carriers being less effective at doing so due to the price sensitivity of their customer base,” said Virgin Australia’s submission to the aviation green paper.
“This has the potential to reduce or limit competition.”
In the meantime it was indisputable that the cost of air travel would climb as more countries imposed SAF mandates on airlines as high as 10 per cent by 2030.
“Some consumers felt this could be done at no cost but there is a cost associated in the same way as when oil prices go up, ticket prices go up,” said Mr Walsh.
“The idea the airlines can absorb that additional cost given the net margins of 3 per cent in the industry, it’s just not going to be possible.”
Mr Parker said it was the only way forward for an industry that was so critical to Australia.
“We don’t have a train to Singapore, so you have to maximise the opportunity to protect aviation and give it a strong future,” he said.
“You don’t want the European flight shaming to impact aviation in our part of the world so that means SAF is the majority of the answer.”
***************************************
10 June, 2024
Thanks To Wind And Solar, Texas’ Power Grid Risks Blackouts Again This Summer
No spare capacity
A power grid system serving nearly 30 million Americans could again approach failure this summer, a local utility executive told the San Antonio Express-News. [emphasis, links added]
Rudy Garza, CEO of the San Antonio-owned utility company CPS Energy, anticipates that Texans will elevate power demand on the state’s grid system above and beyond last year’s record numbers, according to the Express-News.
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), the state’s power system manager, had to issue several energy rationing alerts last summer as the state’s grid nearly faltered, and those conservation appeals are likely to be made again throughout this summer.
“I have learned in this business that it’s hard to make guarantees on anything,” Garza told the outlet. “If we lose a big nuclear unit, for instance, in the middle of a peak season, that could be enough to throw the grid off into some level of emergency. All we can do is prepare and keep our plants going.”
Garza predicts that Texans will exceed 100,000 megawatts of demand this summer, a level of power use that would be more than 15,000 megawatts greater than last summer’s record-setting demand, according to the Express-News.
Major factors driving demand in Texas include a growing population, a hot economy, cryptocurrency mining operations, and new power-hungry data centers.
“We’re building houses in every direction,” Garza told the Express-News. “We’ve seen an influx of some really large users coming into Texas, but they’re not driving the entirety of it. The state just continues to grow.”
Texas produces the most energy from wind and solar of any state in the country, according to Texas Monthly.
This leaves the ERCOT grid vulnerable to supply shortfalls in specific circumstances, especially the late afternoon and early evening hours of hot summer days with little or no wind blowing, according to the Express-News.
In those circumstances, power generation tails off right when Texans are driving up demand by cranking up their air conditioners and other appliances to stay cool in their homes, according to the Express-News.
To compensate for lost wind capacity in those situations, operators turn to older coal- and natural-gas-fired generation facilities to avoid blackouts.
A similar situation played out in the summer of 2023 when a prolonged heat wave pushed the grid to the brink and prompted ERCOT — which oversees the flow of power to approximately 27 million customers — to briefly issue an emergency notice on Sept. 6, according to the Express-News.
ERCOT put out a record [total] of 11 conservation appeals last summer, and the North American Energy Reliability Corporation (NERC) — an organization that monitors grid conditions in the U.S. — flagged ERCOT in a recently published outlook report for facing “elevated” blackout risks this summer if weather conditions are stronger than normal.
*******************************************
Virginia Gov. Youngkin Announces California EV Mandate to End in the Commonwealth
On June 5, Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) revealed that the state would cease to adhere to vehicle emission standards set by the California Air Resources Board (CARB) and will revert to less strict federal standards beginning in 2025.
Legislation previously signed into law by Gov. Ralph Northam (D) in 2021, required Virginia to adopt CARB’s then-existing standards, Advanced Clean Cars (ACC) I, which had been adopted by 13 other states and the District of Columbia. Subsequently, CARB released new standards, ACC II, requiring all new cars sold in California to be electric by model year 2035.
Youngkin requested an opinion from state Attorney General Jason Miyares as to whether Virginia was bound to comply with ACCII. Miyares issued an official opinion on June 4 confirming that state law does not require Virginia to follow the updated standards.
‘Virginia Is Declaring Independence’
With the AG’s opinion in hand, Youngkin announced that Virginians will once again have the freedom to choose their own vehicles based on their families’ and businesses’ needs, in a press release.
“Once again, Virginia is declaring independence—this time from a misguided electric vehicle mandate imposed by unelected leaders nearly 3,000 miles away from the Commonwealth,” said Youngkin. “The idea that government should tell people what kind of car they can or can’t purchase is fundamentally wrong.”
The federal Clean Air Act includes a waiver for emissions standards adopted by CARB, which other states can choose to follow in lieu of the national standards.
‘EV Mandates Are … Unworkable’
The Virginia Air Pollution Control Board (Board) implemented Virginia’s law adopting the CARB standards with regulations permitting the governor to order them, but it did not require the state to adopt any updated standards, Miyares’ opinion states.
“Although the Board chose to adopt ACC I’s model year standards, which are now set to expire at the end of 2024, it has not chosen to adopt ACC II’s,” Miyares wrote.
The ACC II standards require 35 percent of cars sold beginning in model year 2026, less than two years away, to be electric. Youngkin’s press release pointed out that in 2023 only 9 percent of vehicles sold in Virginia were electric. That means the state would have to more than triple current EV sales in two years to remain in compliance with CARB’s new rules.
These kinds of mandates are wishful thinking and are about control more than they are reasonable, said Miyares in the press release.
“EV mandates like California’s are unworkable and out of touch with reality, and thankfully the law does not bind us to their regulations,” Miyares said. “California does not control which cars Virginians buy and any thoughts that automobile manufacturers should face millions of dollars in civil penalties rather than allowing our citizens to choose their own vehicles is completely absurd.”
Were ACC II followed in Virginia, auto manufacturers that sold a noncompliant vehicle past the 2035 deadline could be forced to pay fines of more than $20,000 per vehicle, which could be devastating for car dealers and consumers.
Legal Challenges and the Road Ahead
Miyares’ opinion states that the Board could choose to adopt ACC II’s standards, in which case compliance would be mandatory; however, the board is not required to do so.
The first set of standards should never have been mandated in the first place, says H. Sterling Burnett, Ph.D., director of the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy at The Heartland Institute.
“Let’s hope this decision sticks and holds up in court and in the face of legislative challenges I expect to come,” Burnett said. “The previous democratic administration never should have forced California’s emission standards/EV mandates down the throats of VA residents and drivers.”
Other states that adopted California’s standards include most of New England, with the exception of Vermont, in addition to Colorado, Minnesota, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, and Washington. Now that Virginia is exiting the plan, one hopes others will follow, says Burnett.
“It’s good that the VA government is getting out of the business of dictating people’s vehicle choices; consumers alone should choose what they want to drive based on the characteristics they care about,” Burnett said. “Let’s hope other states follow suit and that sometime in the future California’s waiver will be withdrawn so it can no longer dictate to the nation its car fleet.”
********************************************
On Extreme Weather, the More We Learn, the More We Know How Little We Knew Before (and Still Don’t Know)
In contrast to many climate scientists and writers with the mainstream media covering climate change, who in their hubris claim the science is settled, Albert Einstein expressed modesty with regard to his knowledge, reportedly saying, “The more I learn, the more I realize how much I don’t know.”
Eistein, a genius by any measure, was not the first to express such wisdom. Socrates, nearly 2,400 years ago, reputedly stated, “The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing,” and Aristotle expressed a similar sentiment, saying, “The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.” Would that contemporary climate researchers displayed such a cautious, honest assessment of the state of knowledge in their field about the causes and consequences of contemporary climate change—but they rarely do.
Still, research comes out daily suggesting that far more remains unknown about climate change and the extent to which it drives extreme weather than is known by climate scientists and their journalist sycophants, and is assumed, and built into, climate models. Two recent studies provide examples showing this.
One recent study, published in the peer-reviewed journal Geophysical Research Letters, examines the correlations of tropical cyclone (TC) activity in the Atlantic and Pacific hurricane basins to multi-decadal variations in sea-surface temperatures tied to shifts in Atlantic Multidecadal Variability (AMV). In analyzing two sets of climate model simulations, adding and subtracting AMV anomalies, researchers found the Atlantic and Pacific respond differently to warm AMV phases, which produce warmer temperatures:
Relative to cold or negative AMV anomalies, a warm AMV:
produces much more frequent TCs (including those making landfalls) over the North Atlantic. This is because AMV+ offers favorable conditions for TC development, including warmer SSTs, higher relative humidity, increased relative vorticity, and weaker vertical wind shear.
By contrast, AMV+ causes less frequent TCs across the western North Pacific and South Pacific due to unfavorable conditions for TC occurrence (stronger vertical wind shear and less moist air). The contrasts in TC environment are due to increased zonal flow between the Atlantic and Pacific basins with AMV+.
What they didn’t find to be a factor in hurricane strength or formation was long-term global climate change. Rather, climate models suggest shifts in the Atlantic Ocean current oscillations are the forcing factor for tropical cyclones, or their absence. This study lends credence to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) most recent AR6 physical science report, which confirms that there is no detection or attribution of any trend for either the number or strength of tropical cyclones tied to climate change.
The IPCC’s assessment suggested that even under the most extreme emission scenarios, it could find no evidence climate change had or would affect tropical cyclones through 2100.
Despite the IPCC’s clear statements and the findings in this new research, I’d bet money that this year when tropical storms and hurricanes form, especially when one or the other makes landfall and causes damage, mainstream media outlets will publish stories claiming climate change is to blame, citing “studies” from bogus climate science outfits like World Weather Attribution as evidence supporting their claim.
And, of course, hurricanes are only one type of extreme weather event we are only beginning to understand, and, as a result, show how little we know about their formation and cause. Tornados are another such type of event.
Every year, some scientists and reporters in the mainstream media try to tie climate change to the frequency or strength of tornados. Climate Realism has debunked such claims on dozens of occasions, citing research demonstrating there is no trend in increasing numbers or strength of hurricanes. Now the UPI is reporting the same fact.
One recent article published by UPI noted that no EF5 tornado, “one of the most catastrophic weather events on Earth … [which can] grow to be more than a mile wide and pack winds over 200 mph—stronger than any Category 5 hurricane on record across the Atlantic basin,” has struck the United States in more than 11 years—the longest such EF5 drought since consistent records have been maintained. And this is despite billions of additional tons of carbon dioxide being emitted into the atmosphere over that 13-year period. Commenting on this blessed severe tornado drought, UPI writes:
On May 20, 2013, an extremely powerful tornado destroyed a huge part of Moore, Okla. Eleven years later, it remains the most recent tornado to be rated EF5, the strongest possible rating on the Enhanced Fujita Scale. The 11-year gap is the longest since official U.S. records began in 1950.
Before the Moore tornado, the blockbuster tornado season in 2011 led to the confirmation of five EF5 twisters, including the Joplin, Missouri, EF5 that killed 161 people. A total of 50 tornadoes have been rated F5/EF5 since records began in the United States in 1950.
Meteorologist Bob Henson said in 2023 that the current EF5 “drought” is hard to explain since damage estimates can be subjective. Damage to a “well-constructed building” is the most common factor that helps the National Weather Service (NWS) confirm an EF5, yet many homes in the U.S. do not meet that criteria.
During this busy tornado season, think back to how many stories you’ve already seen that mentioned climate change as a factor—modifying their timing, number, behavior, and power. Then, remember mainstream media column inches and broadcast air-time to the contrary, there is no evidence whatsoever that climate change has, will, or can, even in climate models, impact tornados.
********************************************
The anti-windfarm 'odd couple' joining forces to fight the renewable energy projects Australia's already failing to build
Deep in coal country, a lifelong environmentalist and one-time Greens candidate is feeling the applause.
It's Thursday night at a Gladstone pub and Steven Nowakowski has won over sceptical locals.
His message is a simple one; he believes a wave of new windfarm developments threatens to smash hilltops and turn koala habitat into "industrial zones".
The green movement, he says, are in "la-la land" over windfarms, a comment that draws nods and knowing smiles from the audience.
Nowakowski won over much of the crowd at the Central Queensland community meeting.(Four Corners: Nick Wiggins)
But its only when one local suggests building a new coal-fired power station does the crowd erupt in spontaneous applause.
This is the front line of Australia's latest climate war.
Nowakowski, a nature lover who says he's been arrested fighting for forests, shares the stage with ultra-conservative federal MP Colin Boyce, a man who claims burning fossil fuels creates "plant food".
"We're an odd couple," Nowakowski admits. "I shake my head in disbelief. I cannot believe that I'm in this situation."
It's an alliance at the more extreme end of the political spectrum. But it's being replicated right across the country as vocal groups mobilise to frustrate Australia's already slow rollout of renewables.
It's estimated Australia needs to build one new wind turbine every day for the next six years to reach its 2030 emissions target. But it's a target that's proving difficult, and the next leg towards net zero by 2050 is even more challenging.
"Wind's a really important source of new electricity generation," says Simon Corbell, who's just stepped down as CEO of the Clean Energy Investor Group.
Wind, he says, is not only one of the cheapest forms of new electricity generation, but it complements solar as the wind often picks up as the sun goes down.
It's a fact that appears to hold little sway with the growing number of community groups opposed to windfarms.
At Gladstone's Grand Hotel, Nowakowski enlists a few more opponents.
He argues Queensland's streamlined approvals process will further erode koala habitat, bird sanctuaries and the states' last remaining wild places.
"We're going down the wrong path," he says. "We can't destroy biodiversity to save the planet."
But as his presentation wraps up and the acclamation grows, Nowakowski shuffles awkwardly and looks towards the carpet.
There's a hint that his anti-windfarm pitch may be providing cover for those wishing to halt action on climate change.
An audience member urges Steven to look into whether there really is a link between carbon dioxide and changes in the climate.
"I'm just saying we could be on this whole train to nowhere for no reason at all," the man says.
Nowakowski allows the comment to remain unchallenged, saying he's "not going to talk about climate change", but does later concede it is a concern.
"I've got to grapple with this every day," he says.
***************************************
9 June, 2024
California’s energy policies are using its population as sacrificial lambs
California is obsessed with the concept that JUST electricity from wind turbines and solar panels can replace fossil fuels. All the policymakers of the State are oblivious to the reality that wind and solar can ONLY generate “electricity”, as they CANNOT make any products for society.
Energy literacy starts with the knowledge that crude oil is the basis of our materialistic society. Conversations are needed to discuss the difference between just “ELECTRICITY” from renewables, and the “PRODUCTS” that are the basis of society’s materialistic world. All the parts for wind turbines and solar panels are themselves MADE from oil derivatives, and only generate occasional electricity from favorable weather conditions but manufacture NOTHING for society.
California remains intent on following Germany’s “green” Energiewende” plan that has German consumers paying the highest electricity prices in the world. The California population of 39 million represents only about 0.5% of the world’s population of 8 billion. The other 99.5% are mostly in poorer developing countries with miniscule environmental policies to limit their emissions.
Germans have been forced to come to grips with the sober electricity of its Green Revolution that has made their electricity prices among the world’s highest, so it’s no wonder that the country’s economy is hemorrhaging economically, and companies are shutting down and moving out.
Since all hospitals, airports, communication systems, militaries, planes, trains, and vehicles are based on the products that did not exist before the 1800’s, that are now made from fossil fuels, Governor Newsom will not discuss his plan to support a supply chain of the products and fuels demanded by today’s materialistic society and economy, as America reduces its dependency on crude oil.
Governor Newsom will never discuss how to maintain the supply chain of cost-effective PRODUCTS that are essential to the materialistic demands for human flourishing.
California policymakers pursuing net-zero emissions are oblivious to the reality that wind turbines and solar panels do different things than crude oil, thus Mandatory Emissions To Achieve Net-Zero Is A Fool’s Game.
Latinos make up about half of Californians living in poverty, despite being less than 40% of the population. By comparison, about 10% of white Californians live in poverty.
For the growing poverty of the State of California, a State that only represents 0.5% of the world’s population, California continues to demand that its residence continue to “pay” for green policies to set an example for the 99.5% of the world’s 8 billion that do NOT live in California.
Affordable and reliable electricity is of major importance to the poor, because they spend the largest percentage of their income on electricity and fuels and are harmed the most by high energy prices.
Green policies are the primary cause for the escalating California electricity and fuel prices.
The San Onfre Nuclear Generating Station closed I 2013, that was also providing continuous uninterruptible electricity.
Today, California imports more electricity than any other US state, more than twice the amount of Virginia, the second largest importer of electricity. California typically receives between one-fifth and one-third of its electricity supply from outside of the state.
Electricity prices have increased more than 98% over the last 15 years.
The Diablo Canyon Power Plant, the state’s last nuclear plant, that also provides continuous uninterruptible electricity has been scheduled for closure.
Newsom, by continually decreasing in-state oil production, continues to force California, the 4th largest economy in the world, to be the only state in contiguous America that imports most of its crude oil feedstock to refineries from foreign countries.
That dependence, via maritime transportation from foreign nations for the state’s crude oil energy demands, has increased imported crude oil from 5 percent in 1992 to almost 60 percent today of total consumption.
NATURAL GAS:
Prices are high because the state has long discouraged local production (like the States’ success at discouraging oil production), importing more than 90% of its natural gas from other states. There is also a shortage of natural gas storage facilities.
With the average debt in this country greater than $100,000 per person (across credit cards, mortgages, auto loans and student loans), and with more than half of Americans living paycheck to paycheck, society is facing an unsustainable problem where those “financially challenged” will never pay off their continuously increasing debt.
Many have no retirement savings, as a graying America is worrying more and more about how to make ends meet. Everyday expenses and housing costs, including rent and mortgage payments, are the biggest reasons why people are unable to save for retirement. Thus, with the loss of just one paycheck, there are many millions of people on the verge of joining the growing homeless population.
California is already home to more than 180,000 homeless people. With the average person in heavy debt and unable to save for retirement, California leaders refuse to forecast how fast the States’ homeless population is expected to GROW and its impact on businesses and the economy.
When we look outside California and the few wealthy countries, we see that at least 80 percent of humanity, or more than six billion in this world are living on less than $10 a day, and billions living with little to no access to electricity, politicians are pursuing the most expensive ways to generate intermittent electricity. Energy poverty is among the most crippling but least talked-about crises of the 21st century. We should not take energy for granted. The financially stable folks within the wealthy countries may be able to bear expensive electricity and fuels, but not by those that can least afford living in “energy poverty.”
California, desperately need dependable, affordable electricity AND THE PRODUCTS AND FUELS MANUFACTURED FROM FOSSIL FUELS to create jobs, lift families out of poverty, modernize homes, schools, and hospitals, provide clean water, and replace wood and animal dung for cooking and heating.
Even today, millions of parents and children in poorer developing countries die from respiratory and intestinal diseases that are unheard of in wealthy countries, because they don’t have electricity nor any of the 6,000 products made from oil derivatives manufactured from crude oil.
Like Germany, the “Greener” California gets, the bloodier its economy becomes as the “green” polices are the primary cause for the escalating cost of electricity and the escalating cost for the products and fuels from crude oil. Costly California looms as an example of poor energy policy with the states’ population being used like sacrificial lambs to set an example for the 99.5% of the world’s 8 billion that do NOT live in California
**************************************************
New study confirms GWPF reports on declining climate disasters
A new scientific study has confirmed what GWPF reports and statements have emphasised for some time: Natural and climate-related disasters have been declining rather than increasing during the 21st century.
For years, international agencies such as the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR), the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the International Red Cross (IFRC) have been issuing reports claiming that climate-related disasters are currently escalating (Weather, climate disasters surge fivefold in 50 years, says UN report).
For years, the GWPF has been pointing out that such claims are wrong and contradicted by empirical data. The UN agencies’ misleading claims arise from a failure to account for the major increase in disaster reporting engendered by the arrival of new technologies since the 1970s.
Not only has the annual number of climate-related disasters trended downwards over the last 20+ years.
The number of people killed by natural and climate-related disasters has also been falling steadily over the past 120 years.
Source: Alimonti & Mariani (2024)
In a new study, analysing temporal trends in the number of natural disasters reported since 1900, two Italian scientists confirm that the 21st century has seen “a decreasing trend to 2022” which is “characterized by a significant decline in number of [disaster] events…"
Source: Alimonti & Mariani (2024)
"The statement that we are facing an increasing trend of natural disasters, as claimed in the three official reports by UNDRR and FAO on the basis of the same EM-DAT dataset […] are not supported by data” (Gianluca Alimonti & Luigi Mariani (2024) Environmental Hazards, 23:2, 186-202).
The authors emphasise that the empirical data “sits in marked contradiction to earlier analyses by two UN bodies (FAO and UNDRR), which predicts an increasing number of natural disasters and impacts in concert with global warming. Our analyses strongly refute this assertion as well as extrapolations published by UNDRR based on this claim.”
In their conclusion, the scientists emphasise that they “are concerned about the misrepresentation of the natural disaster trend because such claims have been uncritically broadcast by many different media and by FAO itself, thereby deforming the perception of the public on the risk of natural disasters…
Misinterpreting the trend of natural disasters is a very serious matter because exposes the world population to the risk of inconsistent policies at both a national and an international level, thereby wasting resources or diverting them from the resolution of much more concrete problems.”
Dr Ralph Alexander who has authored a series of critiques of erroneous climate disaster claims said:
“The new study by Alimonti and Mariani vindicates what we said in a GWPF report three years ago – climate-related disasters are not on the rise, despite global warming. Claims to the contrary have been made for years by several international agencies. Yet, these agencies failed to recognise that the apparent increase in natural disasters since the 1970s simply reflects a major increase in disaster reporting due to new technology.”
GWPF director Dr Benny Peiser said:
“There is a famous saying that sums up the GWPF’s efforts to set the record straight on disaster trends and climate disasters: ‘First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then they join you
***************************************************
The big renewable energy lie
Always be suspicious of an expert report that appears to serve a crude ideological purpose. Always be on the lookout for the big lie dressed up in the language of science.
On May 22, the CSIRO’s latest GenCost report was released. It claimed that large-scale wind and solar are the lowest-cost electricity generation technologies, significantly under-cutting nuclear power alternatives. Chris Bowen was quick to seize on this: ‘Our reliable renewables plan is backed by experts to deliver the lowest cost energy,’ he said, on the day of its release.
Debate on the GenCost report has focused on its treatment of nuclear power. But commentators have missed a fatal flaw in the report’s methodology. Its reliance on a cost metric (the so-called Levelised Cost of Electricity or LCOE) that, by its authors’ own admission, is no ‘substitute’ for ‘more realistic’ ways to analyse electricity generation costs, including cash flow analysis.
Buried on page 64 of the report, this gives the game away. LCOE is an accounting metric, not an economic one. It measures the total unit costs a generator must recover to meet all expenses – plant, equipment, land, raw materials, and labour – including a return on investment. It says nothing about the revenue side of the commercial equation: What prices can the generator earn on the wholesale market and, given their costs, what profits can be earned?
For economists, nothing sensible can be said about a service’s economic value, and therefore economic cost, without this additional information.
Think about it. An unreliable car that costs far less to make than a reliable one could not be said to be ‘cheaper’ than the latter if it has no value for consumers. If, as is almost certain, it could not be sold at a profit, society would be in fact worse (not better) off for devoting capital, land and labour to its production. It is value-subtracting from an economic point of view, not value-adding (unless any external benefits it brings outweigh them).
By the same logic, an inherently unreliable source of power, like solar or wind, cannot be said to be cheaper in an economic sense than a reliable source of power, regardless of how much it costs to supply when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing, which as we know is only 20 to 40 per cent of the time.
To make the same point in a different way. For the 60 to 80 per cent of the time when intermittent power cannot be supplied at any price, its economic cost can be said to be infinite.
As the eminent MIT economist Paul Joskow has pointed out, the LCOE metric ignores the decisive commercial advantage dispatchable power, in whatever form, enjoys over wind and solar generation.
An operator of a coal, gas, and indeed nuclear power facility can gear their operation to meet expected consumer demand as reflected in wholesale market prices. In contrast, for intermittent wind and solar, consumer demand can only ever be satisfied – and profits earned, leaving subsidies to one side – by accident. Literally as a quirk of prevailing weather conditions.
In this respect, wind and solar are more akin to agriculture than manufacturing, liable to suffer from gluts (when it is sunny and all solar capacity is operating), droughts (on cloudy or windless days), and mismatches (when it is windy at times when power demand is minimal). Intermittent revenues, absent guaranteed returns, are inherently unreliable.
When combined with the very high fixed capital costs of renewable projects, this fact explains why wind and solar developers need huge subsidies despite their very low marginal costs. Why, in the absence of this taxpayer support, large-scale wind and solar operators would go out of business.
The GenCost LCOE measure blinds us to this inconvenient truth. It asserts that wind and solar are cheap, but cannot explain the subsidies they need. On this ground alone, it should be rejected. From the public’s perspective – from the point of view of consumers – it obscures and indeed misleads rather than enlightens. A private business using this marketing trick would never get away with it, yet government ministers go uncriticised.
When the Australian economy was collapsing under the economic weight of protectionism in the late 20th Century, the Productivity Commission’s predecessor agencies courageously publicised the economic costs of this policy. At first these reports were ignored, as both the Coalition and Labor politicians proudly boasted of being protectionist (the term didn’t become a pejorative one until the 1970s), but eventually they were taken notice of and influenced policy.
Today, the same critical spotlight should be applied to the costs of wind and solar power, which include: 1. the direct cost of subsidies for them; 2. the system-wide costs – including transmission, storage and back-up dispatchable power – they impose (this would include the cost of subsidies to keep coal-fired power stations operating); 3. the uncompensated economic, social and environmental losses wind, solar, and new transmission lines are inflicting farmers and others living in regional communities (an unprecedented expropriation of property rights); and 4. the welfare costs of a more volatile and less reliable grid (given that additional storage, with current technologies, cannot smooth things over if the renewable share continues to rise).
This renewable energy audit should be embraced by all in the community, regardless of their views on climate change, Net Zero and the merits of nuclear energy. It should be demanded by not only the opposition, but all Labor people who worry about the mounting economic pain being caused by the government’s renewable-only crusade.
Of course, the renewable industrial complex – which reaches deep into the bureaucracy, corporate world, the media and our academic institutions – can be relied on to bitterly oppose such an exercise.
For them at least, this form of sunlight would not be the best form of disinfectant. Rather, it would lay bare the billions of dollars of rents a select few are extracting from the rest of the community, possibly the biggest deliberate transfer of wealth from low to high-income Australians we have ever seen.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/06/the-big-renewable-energy-lie/
*************************************************Australian "Greens" becoming hard Left antisemites
Hard antisemitism always comes from the Left. Marx despised Jews even though he was one and Hitler was an extreme socialist
Over the past decade, Daniel Coleman tried to address what he and other members of the Greens had identified as a growing problem: antisemitism within the party. He helped found the Jewish Greens Working Group in Victoria and along with the late David Zyngier, a local government councillor and respected party figure, worked to develop policies and educate party members about the ancient hatred.
In the days and weeks after Hamas’ atrocities in southern Israel, the muted response from the party’s elected officials convinced him the project had failed. The Greens had not adopted a policy on antisemitism proposed by the working group and, more distressingly, he says the party appeared to give little thought to the Jews murdered, raped and taken hostage by terrorists.
“It was brought home to me after October 7 that Jewish lives were just not a concern to the Australian Greens party,” Coleman says from his Melbourne home. “It really became untenable for me to continue as a member.
“I believe that had it been any community other than a Jewish community subject to that sort of attack, the Greens would have spoken out.”
When Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Opposition Leader Peter Dutton rose this week in federal parliament, one after the other, to condemn the Greens for seeking to exploit for political ends social divisions created by the war in Gaza, there were party politics in play. But what Albanese and Dutton said went beyond electoral calculus. The raw anger in the PM’s voice sliced through the usual cant and theatrics of question time.
Greens leader Adam Bandt described the politicians’ attacks as outrageous, saying his party had drawn a clear line between peaceful protests and any actions which escalate into violence or destruction of property. He reiterated what has become his party’s three-point mantra. “The Greens condemn antisemitism. The Greens condemn Islamophobia. And the Greens condemn the invasion of Gaza.”
Coleman believes it is an empty slogan.
The Greens’ abhorrence of the catastrophic loss of life in Gaza, eight months into a conflict that continues to frustrate the diplomatic efforts of neighbouring Arab states and the Biden administration to broker a ceasefire, is genuine and heartfelt. So far, more than 36,000 Palestinians are estimated to have been killed in Gaza and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is accused of using starvation as a war tactic.
Less than a month after October 7, Coleman was dismayed when Bandt posted promotional material for a “stand with Gaza” rally in Melbourne. In the accompanying image, Israel is wiped from the map and replaced by a “Free Palestine” taking in all of Gaza, Israel and the West Bank.
Coleman says this is contrary to Greens’ policy, which supports a two-state solution.
“They have done nothing to combat antisemitism or to acknowledge it within the party or to call out and oppose the terrorism of Hamas,” Coleman says.
“It is really all about winning elections. They are looking for votes and they want to shore up the far left as their base. If you like Hamas, your party of choice is going to be the Greens.”
The influence of this shift in the Greens is evidenced by the party’s embrace of a pro-Palestinian protest movement that, in the eight months since October 7, has progressively adopted slogans, chants, dress and symbols favoured by Hamas and other militant Palestinian organisations.
A graphic example was left outside the electoral office of Labor MP and former ACTU president Ged Kearney last Friday by keffiyeh-wrapped members of Darebin4Palestine, a protest group centred in Melbourne’s deep-Green local government area.
Amid Palestinian flags, an invitation for Kearney to “resign, genocide” and “F--- the ALP” graffiti on the walls of her office, a placard made a play on the well-known Palestinian liberation chant: “From the River to the Sea, Death to the ALP.” The placard also carried an upside down red triangle; iconography used by the Al-Qassam Brigades, the militant wing of Hamas which carried out the 7 October attacks.
The vandalism outside Kearney’s office was part of a “Day of Action Against the ALP” co-ordinated between pro-Palestinian groups and promoted by one of the Greens Victorian State MPs, Gabrielle de Vietri, to her Instagram followers.
Khalil says every citizen has the right to protest government policy but the Greens, in their determination to harvest votes from a tragic conflict and loss of innocent life in Gaza, were putting something else at risk.
“I am really concerned and this goes beyond politics. As elected representatives, we have a responsibility to unite Australians and protect our democracy and ensure community safety and cohesion. You have got a political party that has representatives in parliament who are fanning the flames of hatred and division and grievance and tearing asunder the social fabric for short-term political gain. It is not the party of Bob Brown any more. That’s for sure.”
RedBridge pollster Kos Samaras said the Greens strategy was working among young voters, with his latest survey showing that 28 per cent of voters between the age of 18 and 34 say they will vote Green at the next federal election. The flipside, he says, is that the party is losing support among older voters.
***************************************
6 June, 2024
Freedom Advocates Are the Right Whale’s Best Hope
Some whales do need saving
Who would have guessed that we would be the saviors of the desperately endangered North Atlantic Right Whales? If it can be saved from extinction, which remains to be seen. But when the green left goes uselessly industrial in the name of better weather, it starts to make sense. This seeming paradox is briefly explained below.
The North Atlantic Right Whale Consortium (NARWC) has long been the leading advocate for their namesake whales. They do lots of research and have promoted both reduced ship speeds and so-called “ropeless” fishing as ways to save the endangered North Atlantic Right Whale. Sadly. when it come to offshore wind they look to have abandoned the whales in favor of green nirvana.
The tip-off came with the email announcement of their annual meeting in October. It included a number of so-called news links, two being about offshore wind, and neither was good news for the whales.
The most important was a direct attack on us for daring to try to protect the right whales. This hit-piece is from Science Friday, a radio show I used to like. It labels us as “anti-wind”, which is true enough, but they are clearly pro-wind, hence anti-whale. They say the whales are a pawns in the game, so to push the chess metaphor, it is a pawn we are trying to protect.
It is the usual Bidenesque stuff claiming there is no evidence or even reason to believe offshore wind development harms Right Whales. No mention of the thousands of federally authorized harassment takings and their potentially deadly consequences, or the strong statistical evidence, etc.
There is one interesting bit, however, namely a link to a map of some of the alleged Right Whale protection groups and people put together by students at Brown University. In addition to many friends, there are folks on there that I was not aware of and hope to contact. But it is incomplete as I am not on it.
The extreme rhetoric that comes with the map is itself revealing. They really do not like us and here is an example: “As public relations and obstruction specialists actively engage local groups to block offshore wind projects, the climate and environmental justice consequences are dire. Offshore wind projects may struggle to get off the ground, locking us into catastrophic climate consequences experienced disproportionately by Black, Indigenous, Latino, and low-income communities.”
Anyone who believes this nonsense is likely willing to sacrifice a whale species or two. This is the fanaticism we are fighting.
The second so-called news link from the Right Whale Consortium is also revealing. It is an article from NRDC about the newly announced offshore wind lease areas in the Gulf of Maine.
They say the entire Gulf is designated as critical habitat for the Right Whales under the Endangered Species Act (ESA), but we should be happy because the lease areas avoid the most sensitive parts. NRDC is another pro-wind green group that used to be environmentalists.
We are talking about a huge projected 15,000 MW of development, so I am not comforted by this news. How does ESA allow this massive development within the critical habitat of a desperately endangered critter like the North American Right Whale? I doubt it does.
Ironically, the Consortium website says these are necessary actions:
“Eliminate human-caused mortality to right whales in critical habitats and migration corridors
Assess patterns of known critical habitat use by right whales and humans and eliminate conflict.”
Apparently, they do not regard building and operating a thousand gigantic 15 MW wind turbines within designated critical habitat as a conflict.
The Consortium itself looks like a secret society. There is no information about the organization, no staff listing, no way to join. There is a list of “Partners”, including several Biden Federal agencies, but no explanation of what that means or how to become one. The only contact information is to an unnamed person at the New England Aquarium. I doubt they would have me or CFACT as members.
So there it is. The North Atlantic Right Whale Consortium has abandoned the North Atlantic Right Whale to offshore wind. Only we who value freedom are left to defend the whale. We are its best hope for survival.
https://heartland.org/opinion/freedom-advocates-are-the-right-whales-best-hope/
*****************************************************UN Chief Calls For Governments To Censor Fossil Fuel Advertisements
United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres called for governments to ban fossil fuel advertising during a Wednesday speech at the Museum of Natural History in New York City.
Guterres, who has served as Secretary-General of the UN since 2017, compared the fossil fuel industry to Big Tobacco and claimed a ban on advertising for fossil fuel companies is necessary to curb climate change and end corporate “greenwashing” during his remarks. Guterres also called for “windfall” taxes on energy producers worldwide during his Wednesday comments.
“We must directly confront those in the fossil fuel industry who have shown relentless zeal for obstructing progress,” Guterres said. “I urge every country to ban advertising from fossil fuel companies.” (RELATED: Wagyu Burgers, Asian-French Fusion And More: Here’s What’s On The Menu At The UN Climate Confab)
“Fossil fuels are not only poisoning our planet — they’re toxic for your brand,” Guterres added. “Your sector is full of creative minds who are already mobilizing around this cause. They are gravitating towards companies that are fighting for our planet — not trashing it.”
Beyond concerns about climate change, Guterres’s comments referenced “greenwashing,” a term that describes instances when corporations embellish their work on climate or the environmental benefits of their products, services and operations, according to the UN’s definition.
Guterres has repeatedly railed against the fossil fuel industry in his capacity as the UN’s top official, describing them as “godfathers of climate chaos” during his Wednesday talk after overseeing the commitment reached at De
https://dailycaller.com/2024/06/05/un-chief-calls-governments-censor-fossil-fuel-advertisements/
************************************************Major Questions Raised by EPA’s EV Mandates
In hopes of shoring up its aggressive anti-fossil-fuel agenda against a possible electoral loss this November, the Biden Administration is rushing to finalize as many regulatory mandates as it can before the start of the Congressional Review Act’s “lookback window”—the critical period near the end of an administration when newly issued agency rules become subject to special legislative procedures that allow them to be more readily overturned by the next Congress and a new President.
In this floodtide of final rules, perhaps the most egregious and far reaching are the two tailpipe emissions regulations recently issued by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)—also known as EPA’s electric vehicle, or EV, mandates.
With these mandates, EPA claims virtually unconstrained power to dictate the extent and pace of electrification of the Nation’s automotive sector, without any regard for the constitutional structures and democratic processes that are supposed to govern policymaking on matters of such vast economic and political significance.
This usurpation of power comes at the expense of America’s families, U.S. prosperity, and our Nation’s security.
The first of the tailpipe rules covers all model year 2027 and later light- and medium-duty cars and trucks in the United States, including passenger cars, light trucks (pickups, SUVs, crossovers, minivans), and medium-duty trucks (such as larger pickups and panel vans). The second rule covers new heavy-duty commercial work trucks and buses.
Together, these rules are designed to choke off the U.S. market for gasoline and diesel fuels by coercing automakers and truck manufacturers to convert more and more of their production from internal-combustion-engine (ICE) vehicles to battery-powered cars and trucks and to do so at a far faster rate than customer demand could ever support.
How do the rules do this?
First, they ratchet down the tailpipe emissions limits for carbon dioxide and for the traditional criteria and other pollutants associated with smog to levels so stringent that gas- and diesel-powered vehicles can’t possibly meet them.
EPA then applies the emissions limits to manufacturers on a fleetwide average basis and reduces these averages each model year at a rate carefully manipulated (surprise, surprise) to achieve the Biden Administration’s desired overall percentage mix of EVs in the U.S. car and truck fleets.
EPA projects that under these regulations, by model year 2032, 63 percent of new passenger cars sold in the U.S. will be EVs and another 10 percent will be plug-in hybrids; 52 percent of new light- and medium-duty trucks will be EVs and 14 percent plug-in hybrids; and from 14 to 67 percent of new heavy-duty trucks (depending on size, function, and configuration) will be zero emission.
For comparison, those percentages today are all in the single digits.
Thus, EPA is out to engineer nothing less than a seismic transformation of America’s entire automotive sector.
The Clean Air Act has never been interpreted to authorize such a transformation and hasn’t previously been applied this way.
This arrogant scheme is very similar to the Clean Power Plan struck down by the Supreme Court under “major questions doctrine” analysis in West Virginia v. EPA.
There, EPA was trying to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by forcing a shift in the Nation’s electricity production from coal plants to wind and solar. The Court held that no part of the Clean Air Act gave EPA license to “restructure” the entire electricity market through “transformative” regulations. In the absence of a clear and specific delegation of authority by statute, the Court assumes that Congress has reserved the power to decide the “consequential tradeoffs” involved in such “vital considerations of national policy.”
The same goes for the EV mandates, the consequences of which for the American people will be staggering.
The price of all new vehicles will rise dramatically because of EPA’s rules, and America’s families will lose many of their favorite options at the dealership. Lower-income and rural Americans will be stuck driving older and older used vehicles, kept on the road with parts scrounged from the junkyard. In other words, we will see the gradual Cubanization of the American automobile in many communities.
And that’s a terrible thing. Statistics confirm that older cars are far less safe in accidents than newer models, so highway deaths and injuries will definitely climb under EPA’s rules.
Countless jobs will be lost in the U.S. auto industry, too, while employment will continue to surge in China, as the U.S. becomes desperately dependent on China for the production of critical minerals and other inputs needed for EVs—an unacceptable strategic vulnerability for America.
Further, any rapid nationwide transition to electric cars and trucks will put a tremendous strain on our fragile grid and require a huge increase in electricity production, just as EPA is attempting to shut down fossil-fuel power plants. Electricity prices, caught in this squeeze, will inevitably spike for all Americans.
And there’s no doubt the U.S. trucking industry will be clobbered. One industry study estimates that around $1 trillion in infrastructure investment will be needed to support the electrification of commercial trucking in America. As for the trucks themselves, zero-emission big rigs are more than twice as expensive as new diesel rigs to purchase and have much greater operating costs. Inevitably, many trucking companies will be forced out of business, and the price of shipping for all goods will rise sharply throughout the U.S. economy.
At the same time, EPA’s grand scheme will have no meaningful effect on global climate or temperatures. That’s because, among other things, China’s production of energy from coal and its annual carbon dioxide emissions will just keep climbing higher and higher.
Indeed, the absence of real climate benefits from these hyper-aggressive tailpipe rules only confirms that the driving purpose behind them is not so much to save the planet as to cripple the fossil-fuel industry and stifle America’s love affair with the automobile.
Of course, it is the American people who will ultimately bear the pain of these punitive policy choices.
The issues raised by the EV mandates involve matters of life, liberty, and prosperity—issues that are fundamentally political in nature. Under our constitutional republic, it is for Congress, and Congress alone, to weigh the competing interests at stake in these matters and to make the monumental decisions that EPA now presumes to take upon itself.
A version of this piece originally appeared in The Federalist Societ
https://www.heritage.org/government-regulation/commentary/major-questions-raised-epas-ev-mandates
****************************************************UK: The Met Office is Gaslighting Us With its Claim that Our Damp and Chilly May Was “Warmest on Record”
Weatherwise, it has been a rubbish May. And it has been an abysmal spring. It has been cold and wet. And everyone knows it. But according to the Meteorological Office, the U.K. has just experienced its hottest ever May, and its hottest ever spring. As news reports and the Met Office’s own press release have correctly indicated, this “may come as a surprise” to many people who actually live here (rather than on the planet that the Met Office’s scientists inhabit).
To those people, many of whom had their heating on for a good part of the month, the Met Office’s statement, as well as the “akshully…” news reports that claim to shed light on the difference between perception and reality, look like actual gaslighting. Even if the claim is true, which remains to be seen, what it reveals is the inadequacy of temperature as a metric on which U.K. climate and energy policy rests.
The Met Office’s charts for May and Spring show mean U.K. temperatures far in excess of what most people would expect. The mean temperature for May was a full degree warmer than the next warmest May in 2017. ‘Mean temperature’ is the average of the minimum and maximum temperatures recorded on one day. And the two extremes is obtained by averaging the highest and lowest temperatures of all stations in the MO’s network of weather stations. But as the following chart shows, while the max temperature is equal highest with 2018, it is the average minimum temperature which really makes May 2024 an outlier at 9°C, which is 1.2°C warmer than the next warmest average minimum, which was in May 2022.
The obvious point to make about this is understated by the Met Office, which explains: “This warmth was especially influenced by high overnight temperatures.” But this speaks to the inadequacy of temperature measurements of this kind to sustain climate change narratives. Whereas fears about global warming are driven by stories of relentless heat driving extreme weather such as heatwaves, wildfires and floods, a slight rise in minimum temperatures is the opposite of extreme: it is mildness. A 9°C average minimum temperature is not going to boil the planet, set the world on fire, or tear civilisation from its foundations.
But alarmists might point to the average maximum for May 2024, which is tied with 2018 as the warmest at 17.2°C. The problem, however, is that this says very little about what people are actually experiencing. Spring and May 2018 were notable for their record-breaking heatwaves. In April 2018, the hottest April temperatures for 70 years were recorded at 29.1°C, according to the Standard, caused by a huge plume of hot air from Portugal. The following month was the “sunniest and warmest on record in U.K.”, according to the Guardian, which began with a heatwave in which temperatures of 28.7°C made it “the hottest early May bank holiday weekend on record”.
Neither Spring nor May 2024 have had any weather events to compare with 2018. Yet max average temperatures do compare, and May 2024 min average temperatures exceed 2018’s. How can temperature therefore be a useful guide to what’s happening to our climate if it can seemingly underpin both extremely hot weather and extremely disappointing weather?
The problem is perhaps caused by these metrics being produced by cascades of averages. Data from weather stations across a nation that spans nearly 600 miles north to south and 300 miles west to east are mashed together as though a single metric of ‘climate’ for such a landmass was meaningful. Twenty four-hour minimum temperatures from all these stations are averaged. Then their maximum temperatures are averaged. And then these averages are averaged again to produce the ‘mean’. But anyone who has spent any time in the northwest of Scotland and the southeast of England know that these are radically different climes – as different in latitude as the south coast of Spain and its central region.
But perhaps the problem is even more radical than that. If the Met Office’s method of working out ‘average temperatures’ makes a dreary May like the one we’ve just had ‘hotter’ than one with a historic heatwave, eg May 2018, why should slight increases in ‘average temperatures’, as per the MO’s definition, concern us at all? The increased average temperature in May was, after all, likely driven by merely milder not extreme weather in a month that most people experienced as colder than average. Average temperature is supposed to be the most important metric of our time. Yet the same metric can mean anything between nearly 30°C heatwaves in April, and people wearing coats, hats and scarves in the week before summer. And a metric that can mean anything means nothing. It is a junk statistic.
None of this would matter if the Met Office and Britain’s news media were not so manifestly intent on gaslighting us into political obedience. But they want us to believe that our lives are deeply affected by such metrics, and use the weather forecast and news items about the weather to sustain the climate change narrative. Constant reminders of ‘danger to life’ herald something more than a breeze, a balmy evening or a scattered shower.
I wanted to see for myself how the raw data had been turned into this kind of zombie climate stat. It has been a long time since I bothered doing a deep dive into meteorological data, because it turns out that you do not need any kind of weather statistics to know, for absolute sure, that there is no ‘climate crisis’, so I haven’t felt the need. However, I was surprised to discover that data from the weather stations that are used in the Met Office’s analysis are not available to the public at higher than monthly resolution.
That’s a problem because in order to build an estimate of how useful minimum and maximum temperature data are, even in one location, never mind across an entire country, it would need to be compared to hourly data at a minimum. But not even daily data are available.
You might have thought that scientists and institutions that are so keen to tell us that their metric is so significant would be just as keen to make all of that data available to us. But you would be mistaken. The data is jealously guarded. It’s not for public consumption. We are supposed to take the good faith of institutional science for granted and are neither welcome nor even permitted to check for ourselves. ‘Follow the science’, means ‘obey’, not ‘try to understand’. And that’s what makes me – and, I hope, you – a sceptic.
****************************************************
Costing the Green Grid
This paper presents a new model of the 2050 grid. In contrast to many other studies in the fields it:
encapsulates four decades of weather, and, uniquely, considers the effects on both supply and demand
considers the costs and efficiencies that pertain today, as well as speculations about those that might pertain in the future.
The results are compared and contrasted with those of the recent Royal Society study on large-scale electricity storage, which concluded that electricity in 2050 would be cheaper than today, and not much more expensive than it has been in the past. The Royal Society findings are criticised for:
using an incorrect demand curve
failing to model weather effects on demand
using highly optimistic assumptions about technology in 2050, and failing to highlight the extent to which these drove its key findings.
The paper finds that with current technology, the cost of the grid would be as high as £250 billion per year, or £8000 per household. That level of expenditure would need to be maintained indefinitely.
It concludes by calling for the withdrawal of the Royal Society paper.
https://www.netzerowatch.com/all-papers/costing-the-green-grid
***************************************5 June, 2024
Media Blames ‘Climate Change’ For Loss Of Venezuelan Glacier
Did you know that Venezuela’s last glacier was just demoted to an icefield? Or that this tropical, nearly equatorial, nation even had glaciers?
Well, it was and it did.
A reader asked us how to answer an alarmist claim that the demotion proves there’s a man-made ‘global heating crisis’, which of course is being bleated in unison by the herd of ‘independent’ media minds around the world.
None of whom of course hitherto knew or cared that said glacier even existed until it afforded this week’s opportunity to bang the climate apocalypse drum.
To which we said, as we usually do, check how long it’s been melting, because as a rule, the shrinking of glaciers demonstrates not that man is warming the planet but that the planet is warming man.
Then, and yes in true scientific fashion, we checked it ourselves to see if our hypothesis was sound. Si señor. It most certainly is.
The thing’s been melting since before World War I, most of the melting happened before World War II, and whenever the man-made ‘climate breakdown’ thingy hit, surely it wasn’t 1938.
The ex-glacier in question is the Humboldt Glacier, “struggling for survival in the Sierra Nevada National Park” according to the Times of India. Brave glacier! (And not to be confused with Greenland’s “Humboldt Glacier“.)
Mind you the South American one is not going to make it, given that Venezuela is not merely tropical but very nearly touches the equator, and is not a major mountaineering destination because its highest one, Pico Bolívar (not to be confused with Colombia’s Pico Simón Bolívar, a massive 5,730 meters high) tops out at just under 5,000 meters above sea level (4,978) and the ice field in question is on Pico Humboldt (please give now to alleviate the name shortage) at 4,925 meters.
Not where you’d store your ice if you cared about it.
Euronews.green complains that:
“Venezuela has lost its last glacier, making it the first nation in modern history to hold this unenviable record.
At least five other glaciers have disappeared in the South American country within the last century as climate change drives up temperatures in the Andes.
The country lost 98 per cent of its glacial area between 1952 and 2019, research shows.”
Note again that climate change is some weird mystical thing that surrounds us and penetrates us and causes temperatures to rise. It is not a description of them doing so. And of course when “research shows” mere citizens fall silent.
Despite this we did go and look at the actual research and, persevering down to Figure 5, found this map proving we were completely right all along and these journalists don’t know how to fact-check:
It’s a nice piece of work graphically speaking, with bright colors easy to follow, based on a reconstruction of the various glaciers going back to 1910, and the key here is that all the purple stuff is what melted between 1910 and 1952.
Big splotches, aren’t they? And look at the other two areas: they were half gone by 1952 and dwindled to specks or vanished by 1998, a full 26 years ago (the blue stuff being what vanished between 1952 and 1998).
Showing crucially that major melting started over a century ago, at a minimum.
We don’t know what happened before 1910 because ice doesn’t leave much in the way of a fossil record.
The pattern of Venezuelan glaciers is not anomalous. Rather, all glaciers have been retreating for centuries, with most of the melting predating the recent past.
Where we know in more detail, most of it happened before the 19th century. For instance, look at the map of Alaska’s famed glaciers published by W.S. Cooper in 1923 (below) and compare the ice extent in Alaska’s Muir Inlet as of 1880, compared to 1916.
Or the Reid and Torr inlets from 1879 to 1916:
Or, for a prettier version, look at this 2013 brochure given to one of us when we visited:
Look at the ice in 1750 and 1880, and then from 1880 to today. There was some mighty ‘climate change’ back in George Washington’s day, that’s for sure.
But not by us and our horse-drawn buggies. As is also true of the Franz Josef Glacier in New Zealand, in case anyone tries to tell you the Little Ice Age was regional.
All of this does not prove that something weird started in 1958, 1988, or 2000, or whatever the alarmists currently claim. On the contrary, it proves the exact opposite.
We are in a long-term warming trend that is overwhelmingly natural unless you believe that human CO2 not only causes artificial heating but shuts off the natural kind through some hitherto unknown process incompatible with the laws of physics and chemistry as we know them.
People get it wrong all the time because they’re so dogmatically certain that they do not check either facts or reasoning.
As we noted back in 2020, claims that the shrinking of France’s largest glacier was “irrefutable proof of global warming” were dead wrong.
It was the opposite.
The glacier had grown dramatically in the 18th century, peaked around 1850, and then shrank dramatically.
Glacier disappearance goes back much farther than 1800, too. As one paper safely published back in 1992 put it, concerning Hannibal’s apparently eccentric decision to bring elephants through the Alps:
“By the 3rd century BC the Alpine glaciers were in a backward position compared with their position in 900-350 BC.
This fact and the mildness of the climate, inferred from tree-ring analyses, suggest that ice conditions were not severe in the Alps in 218 BC.”
And the two main primary sources, Livy and Polybius, stress the appalling geography of whichever pass or passes he used but do not mention ice or glaciers. So possibly some countries that now have at least residual glaciers did not then.
Which again rather proves our point.
Nowadays everybody’s so sure of the opposite that they find it whether it’s there or not.
The research that says claims that:
“Glacier retreat in mountainous regions has accelerated worldwide within the last fifty years, triggering efforts to document what will soon become legacy landscapes (Barry 2006; Zemp et al. 2015; Huss et al. 2017).
In the tropical Andes, the rate of glacier retreat after 1950 is above the world’s average, with a notable increase after 1970 (Rabatel et al. 2013; Veettil and Kamp 2017).”
And nobody saw it coming that the place they were studying would be going up in flames faster than the average. But the rest of the statement is also nonsense.
They have no idea what the rate of retreat of the glaciers in this region was before 1900 so they can’t compare it to the present.
Besides what “rate” are they talking about? Distance? Volume? Percentage? If the latter it’s a cheat, because of course as it gets smaller, the rate of percentage decrease will accelerate.
But as we’ve shown before, only an insane person would maintain that the rate of glacier retreat in Alaska’s Glacier Bay National Park was slower 200 years ago than recently, or that it doesn’t have mountains.
Wikipedia predictably claims that:
“Most of New Zealand’s large glaciers shrank significantly towards the end of the 20th century, a consequence of global warming.”
But after that ritual genuflection, it blurts out that:
“Franz Josef Glacier advanced rapidly during the Little Ice Age, reaching a maximum in the early 18th century.
When Haast became the first European to see the glacier it was still much longer than today, and the ice surface was 300 m higher.
Between its first official mapping in 1893 and a century later in 1983, Franz Josef Glacier retreated 3 km up the valley.”
Note the “still”. That mapping was in 1893 and it had already retreated an enormous distance.
Like the Humboldt, it responded to natural warming long ago, and the fact that it still is doesn’t mean the warming suddenly started recently or changed its nature and cause.
It means it’s a continuation of a long, natural, cyclical rebound from the Little Ice Age.
https://principia-scientific.com/media-blames-climate-change-for-loss-of-venezuelan-glacier/
**************************************************Guardian Removes Article Claiming Renewables are Cheap
Regular readers of my Substack might recall that back in April, I wrote an article rebutting a blatant piece of propaganda that appeared in an advertorial in the Guardian, paid for by the National Grid.
I complained to both the Guardian and the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) and there is both good news and bad news to report.
The good news is the ASA appear to have taken a dim view of the article. Its response noted that the article has now been removed from the Guardian’s website and it said:
We have decided to resolve your complaint through the provision of advice to the advertiser. Therefore, we have explained the concerns raised to the advertiser and provided it with guidance on how to ensure that its advertising complies with the Codes both now and in future.
It is not clear whether the withdrawal of the article is related to the “advice” it gave or whether it is merely a coincidence. However, it is becoming increasingly clear that renewables are an expensive source of power and false claims can no longer be made in the press.
I think we should chalk this up as some sort of victory.
*********************************************
New Survey Reveals Just How Unmotivated Americans Are To Purchase EVs
The Biden administration is aggressively pushing electric vehicles (EVs) on Americans, but consumers do not seem to be especially enthused about buying them, according to a new poll.
While 46% of respondents indicated that they are unlikely or very unlikely to purchase an EV, 21% said that they are “very” or “extremely” likely to purchase an EV for their next vehicle, and 21% said they are “somewhat” likely to buy an EV, according to the results of a new poll conducted by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and the University of Chicago’s Energy Policy Institute. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) finalized a rule in March that will require EVs to make up 56% of all new car sales on top of 13% for plug-in hybrids or partially electric models come 2032.
Respondents who are not inclined to purchase an EV identified several issues motivating their skepticism, according to the results of the AP’s poll. About half of adults point to concerns about EVs’ range as a major reason for not buying one, while approximately 40% identify charging time or uncertainty about nearby charging stations as problems. (RELATED: Biden Says That Americans Can Buy Any Car They Want. His Admin Is Forcing EVs To Be Huge Share Of Sales By 2032)
The Biden administration is spending $7.5 billion to help build out a national network of EV charging infrastructure, but those funds have only produced a handful of operational charging stations to date. The nation’s charging systems remain concentrated mostly in densely-populated coastal regions, according to the Department of Energy (DOE).
New EVs cost $52,314 on average as of February, according to the AP, while the average gas-powered compact crossover sets buyers back approximately $35,722, according to Edmunds. Nearly 60% of adults also cite the cost of EVs as a major reason not to get one.
Interest in EVs also varies by age, with more than half of respondents under the age of 45 indicating that they are at least “somewhat” likely to think about buying an EV compared to about 32% of respondents over the age of 45, according to the poll’s results.
The poll sampled 6,265 adults between March 26 and April 1o using a combination of interviews and online panels, according to the AP. The poll’s margin of error was 1.7%.
https://dailycaller.com/2024/06/04/biden-electric-vehicles-american-consumers-poll/
************************************************UK: Labour’s energy claims are ‘divorced from reality’
The Labour Party is saying that its energy policies – a rapid decarbonisation of the electricity system – will save consumers money. The claim is apparently based on an October 2023 report by Ember,[1] which says that a decarbonised electricity system can reduce bills by £300 per household.
However, the report also says[2] that the authors are assuming that windfarms in the future will secure ‘the same price as [Contracts for Difference] auction round 4’. The prices achieved in Round 4 (£37.50) are around half the price (£73/MWh) currently on offer to offshore windfarms in Round 6 [3]. And industry insiders are suggesting that even the latter figure may be inadequate.[4]
In other words, Labour’s savings rely on assuming that wind power costs half of what it actually does.
A second problem Labour’s putative savings figure is that Ember’s report compares bills in their hypothetical decarbonised electricity system against bills in the third quarter of 2023, which were still inflated by the Ukraine war.
Net Zero Watch director Andrew Montford said:
Labour’s claim of a reduction in household bills is based on figures that are entirely divorced from today’s reality.
And Mr Montford continued by calling for a new reality-based debate on Net Zero.
When it comes to energy policy, the political establishment is operating in a fact-free void. For the sake of the country, they need to start asking very hard questions about what they are being told by civil servants and environmental activists like Ember.
https://www.netzerowatch.com/all-news/labour-divorced-from-reality
***************************************4 June, 2024
US Public Schools Continuing To Push Climate Indoctrination
Paul Tice, senior fellow for the National Center for Energy Analytics, took the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal to criticize the ‘climate change’ curriculum in New Jersey public schools
The educational materials, Tice explained, are not just found in sections of science courses, but in all school subjects.
Districts are encouraged to insert lessons on ‘climate change’ into English language, arts and mathematics.
In foreign language classes, students discuss the impacts of ‘climate change’ “on the target language of the world.”
In the state’s Visual and Performing Arts standards, students are required to “research global issues, including climate change, using multiple research methods to inform original dances expressed through multiple genres, styles, and varied cultural perspectives.”
To support the state’s climate curriculum, the New Jersey Department of Education points educators toward resources that provide only positive views of the potential of wind and solar to replace ‘fossil fuels’.
“New Jersey’s climate curriculum is pure indoctrination,” Trice wrote in the Journal column.
Dr. Sterling Burnett, Director of the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy at the Heartland Institute, told Just the News that this type of climate ‘education’ is common across the country, and it’s been going on for years.
“It’s all got climate alarm built into it. It doesn’t question the idea that humans are causing catastrophic climate change, despite the fact [it’s] not supported by the data or the evidence,” Burnett said.
Some states have attempted to include in the curriculum taught in public schools different perspectives on ‘climate change’.
Last year, Florida’s Board of Education approved the use of videos produced by the conservative Prager University Foundation in the state’s public schools.
Legacy media outlets were critical of the decision. The Guardian reported that kids would be exposed to educational materials that “portray solar and wind energy as environmentally ruinous,” even though there are many reasons to be concerned about the environmental impacts of wind and solar energy.
The Guardian also quoted ‘experts’ worried that kids in Florida would be exposed to “messages of support for fossil fuels and doubts for renewable energy resources.”
Politico quoted PragerU CEO Marissa Streit stating that the “climate is always changing,” to which the reporter was compelled to refer to the statement as “repeating a climate-denial motto.”
Streit’s statement is scientifically accurate.
Among other points, the PragerU videos challenge the belief that ‘climate change’ poses a risk to the survivability of the human race, and that wind and solar are a good idea for developing countries.
Other attempts to provide kids with different perspectives on ‘climate change’ and energy have also been rebuked.
In April 2023, the CO2 Coalition, whose members include a Nobel laureate, purchased a booth at the National Science Teaching Association’s annual convention in Atlanta.
The group distributed “Simon The Solar-Powered Cat,” a comic book that explains the process of photosynthesis, which benefits from carbon dioxide. The purpose of the lesson is to dispute the demonization of the ‘greenhouse gas’ as inherently destructive and dangerous.
The association found the materials so offensive that they kicked the CO2 Coalition out of the convention.
The Heartland Institute last year launched an initiative to provide educational materials that challenge the idea that humans are causing catastrophic climate change.
“Climate at a Glance” uses government sources to provide perspectives disputing the “climate crisis” on a range of topics from extreme weather to polar bears. They also created a downloadable app for the lessons.
Burnett, who helped author the materials, said the Heartland mailed out 7,000 free copies of the printed version.
He said that while not all the educators who received the copies reacted positively to the materials, Heartland received a lot of “good feedback” on it from teachers.
“The thing we’ve been pushing all along is that science is not teaching what to think. When you’re getting your science education, especially your basic education in the early grades, it’s teaching how to conduct science. It’s teaching how to think, not what to think,” Burnett said.
He said all the climate education in public schools teaches that the ‘climate crisis’ is ‘settled science’ and that there’s no legitimate dispute about it.
Burnett said the whole idea of “consensus science” is problematic.
“There was a consensus at one time that the universe revolved around the Earth. That was wrong. There was a consensus that the Earth was flat. That was wrong. There was consensus that diseases were caused by humors in the body, and you just need to balance the humors. It was wrong,” Burnett said.
While most states are keeping educational materials in schools uniformly in support of a climate crisis perspective, polls are showing that young people are becoming less inclined to accept it.
A recent Monmouth University poll found in the last few years a 17 percentage point drop in the number of people ages 18 to 34 who believe that ‘climate change’ is a very serious issue.
Many of those polled would have recently graduated from high school.
https://principia-scientific.com/us-public-schools-continuing-to-pushing-climate-indoctrination/
****************************************************Thanks for Publishing the Truth, New York Post, Climate Activists Don’t Care If People Die
They rather welcome it in fact: "Too many people"
The New York Post published an article by noted researcher Bjorn Lomborg, Ph.D., in which he argues climate activists not only don’t care about people’s well-being, they, in fact, support policies that result in unnecessary deaths. Lomborg is right. Poverty, in part due to lack of access to reliable energy, and the modern health and agricultural innovations they make possible, is the world’s number one killer. Because most climate policies promote ending or sharply curtailing the use of fossil fuels in the short-term, they leave the poorest populations in poverty and vulnerable to extreme weather events, resulting in unnecessary deaths.
In the New York Post article, “Green activists don’t care how many people will die from zero fossil fuel use,” Bjorn Lomborg provides an array of data demonstrating that fewer people are dying from extreme weather and temperatures now than ever before as the planet has modestly warmed. His research indicates, however, that even fewer deaths would occur from these causes were it not for climate policies prematurely restricting fossil fuel development and use. Lomborg writes:
We endlessly hear the flawed assertion that because climate change is real, we should “follow the science” and end fossil fuel use.
…
The assertion is convenient for politicians, because it allows them to avoid responsibility for the many costs and downsides of climate policy, painting these as inevitable results of diligently following the scientific evidence.
But it is false because it conflates climate science with climate policy.
The story told by activist politicians and climate campaigners suggests that there is nothing but benefits to ending fossil fuels, versus a hellscape if nothing is done.
But the reality is that the world over the past centuries has improved dramatically — largely because of the immense increase in available energy that has come mostly from fossil fuels.
Life spans have more than doubled, hunger has dramatically declined, and incomes have increased ten-fold.
Lomborg goes on to discuss the fact that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has found limited, or no evidence climate change is impacting most extreme weather events and that deaths attributable to extreme weather have declined by 97 percent over the past century even as the Earth warmed slightly, in large part due to the energy, materials, and products fossil fuels make possible.
Climate realism has made these same points across the course of hundreds of articles debunking false claims that extreme weather is getting worse and dozens of articles discussing the decline in premature mortality due to extreme weather, weather related diseased, and non-optimal temperatures.
In addition, Climate Realism has discussed the tremendous benefit modestly warmer temperatures, fossil fuels, and rising CO2 has produced for food production, saving millions from starvation. Lomborg makes this point as well.
“Four billion people — half the world’s population — entirely depend on food grown with synthetic fertilizer produced almost entirely by natural gas,” Lomborg says. “If we ended fossil fuels quickly, we would physically have no way to feed four billion people.”
Lomborg is right, net zero by 2025 is not just costly, $27 trillion per year on average, equal to a quarter of the worlds current GDP, over the century in a vain effort to control the weather, it is, in fact, nothing more than a road to economic decline and increased deaths. Lomborg concludes:
When politicians tell us they are “following the science,” they use the claim to shut down open discussion of the enormous costs of their policies.
“The science” informs us about the problem, but is not the arbiter of solutions.
Democracies are.
Sudden, dramatic cuts in fossil fuel consumption will have huge downsides — which their backers would rather ignore.
Climate change is a problem, but a civilization-endangering cure can be far worse than the illness.
The vast majority of Climate Realism posts debunk and deconstruct false claims of climate alarm being hyped by the mainstream media, but every so often we’ve got to give a media outlet kudos for allowing important truths about climate change to be told. This article by the New York Post is one such instance. Thanks, New York Post for boldly presenting truths that are inconvenient to the popular climate crisis narrative and unpopular with the woke media and politicians kowtowing to it, and to misanthropic climate activists funding the media narrative and, all too often, the politicians themselves.
*************************************************
UK: Met Office Should Put 2.5°C ‘Uncertainties’ Warning on All Future Temperature Claims
It is “abundantly clear” that the Met Office cannot scientifically claim to know the current average temperature of the U.K. to a hundredth of a degree centigrade, given that it is using data that has a margin of error of up to 2.5°C, notes the climate journalist Paul Homewood.
His comments follow recent disclosures in the Daily Sceptic that nearly eight out of ten of the Met’s 380 measuring stations come with official ‘uncertainties’ of between 2-5°C. In addition, given the poor siting of the stations now and possibly in the past, the Met Office has no means of knowing whether it is comparing like with like when it publishes temperature trends going back to 1884.
There are five classes of measuring stations identified by the World Meteorological Office (WMO). Classes 4 and 5 come with uncertainties of 2°C and 5°C respectively and account for an astonishing 77% of the Met Office station total. Class 3 has an uncertainty rating of 1°C and accounts for another 8.4% of the total. The Class ratings identify potential corruptions in recordings caused by both human and natural involvement. Homewood calculates that the average uncertainty across the entire database is 2.5°C. In the graph below, he then calculates the range of annual U.K. temperatures going back to 2010 incorporating the margins of error.
The blue blocks show the annual temperature announced by the Met Office, while the red bars take account of the WMO uncertainties. It is highly unlikely that the red bars show the more accurate temperature, and there is much evidence to suggest temperatures are nearer the blue trend. But the point of the exercise is to note that the Met Office, in the interests of scientific exactitude, should disclose what could be large measurement inaccuracies. This is particularly important when it is making highly politicised statements using rising temperatures to promote the Net Zero fantasy. As Homewood observes, the Met Office “cannot say with any degree of scientific certainty that the last two years were the warmest on record, nor quantify how much, if any, the climate has warmed since 1884”.
The U.K. figures are of course an important component of the Met Office’s global temperature dataset known as HadCRUT. As we noted recently, there is ongoing concern about the accuracy of HadCRUT with large retrospective adjustments of warming in recent times and cooling further back in the record. In fact, this concern has been ongoing for some time. The late Christopher Booker was a great champion of climate scepticism and in February 2015 he suggested that the “fiddling” with temperature data “is the biggest science scandal ever”. Writing in the Telegraph, he noted: “When future generations look back on the global warming scare of the past 30 years, nothing will shock them more than the extent to which official temperatures records – on which the entire panic rested – were systematically ‘adjusted’ to show the Earth as having warmed more than the actual data justified.”
***********************************************
Great Barrier Reef Doomsday Claims Should Be Audited: Scientist
Australian geo-physicist Peter Ridd says an additional $5 million (US$3.3 million) allocated to the Great Barrier Reef in this week’s budget would be better spent on “genuine environmental problems.”
The funding was handed down as part of Labor’s 2024 federal budget on May 14.
In a statement released last month, the Great Barrier Reef Foundation said the reef had suffered through the “worst summer” on record, with cyclones, severe flooding, starfish outbreaks and mass bleaching.
The funds will help the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority to engage tourism operators undertaking reef monitoring, protection, and stewardship.
The Great Barrier Reef Foundation says the full extent of mass bleaching is not known, but claims aerial surveys over 1,000 reefs showed a rate of 73 percent bleaching within the area, plus another 6 percent in the Torres Strait.
“The Reef Summer Snapshot shows the highest levels of coral bleaching were found across the southern region, where temperatures are typically cooler, and parts of the central and northern regions, where in some areas corals were exposed to record levels of heat stress,” the Foundation said in a report online.
Yet Dr. Ridd, a researcher into the Reef, believes its poor health has been greatly exaggerated.
“It is telling that in the latest doom-news about the Great Barrier Reef bleaching, they failed to mention that the Great Barrier Reef had record amounts of coral in 2022/23 despite having suffered four ‘catastrophic’ bleaching events in 2016, 17, 20, and 22,” he told The Epoch Times in an email.
“We ended up with twice as much coral than in 2012 when a couple of cyclones genuinely destroyed a lot of coral.
“How did we end up with so much coral if those last four bleaching event were so catastrophic—even the fast-growing coral takes five to 10 years to regrow.”
The coral that bounced back, he says, is the type most susceptible to water bleaching.
“That proves the last four bleaching events were exaggerated in terms of the coral death, and there is no reason to expect this latest event to be much different,” he said.
***************************************
3 June, 2024
Electric Bus limitations
Aircraft chocks are small wedges triangular in shape placed in front of and behind the aircraft's wheels lightly in contact with the tyre to prevent an aircraft from moving when parked.
The wheel chocks are commonly used to prevent an aircraft from accidentally rolling and colliding with other aircraft and damaging its parts, protecting the ground crew from harm during handling operations and protecting nearby infrastructure.
Never did I relate it to school buses, though, but I am learning that it's a thing in many states. Buses are heavy, so it does make sense. Some state regs are just for inspections or some if the bus is parked on a grade or out of the bus yard with the driver gone.
Even parking a school bus, particularly an expensive green electric one, is no longer as simple as "park," parking brake, and turning off the key.
Apparently, if you forget to throw chocks around the wheels, these buggers will roll on you. And that's just for starters.
Maine’s Democratic Congresswoman Chellie Pingree (CD-01) on Wednesday applauded the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for announcing a $7.7 million round of grants for Maine schools to purchase electric school buses.
...However, the electric school buses in Maine that have already been purchased under this program have been plagued with mechanical failures and dangerous malfunctions, leading to several of the “zero-emission” buses being pulled off the road.
In December, Winthrop Public Schools reported that they were struggling to keep their fleet of four electric school buses on the road due to water leak issues and heating system failures — just weeks after they were purchased.
Leaky windshields letting water pour into an all-electric vehicle - sounds like a manufacturing issue.
The state police unit that does safety inspections had themselves quite a time writing up violations on the new buses.
...Last summer, the Maine State Police Vehicle Inspection Unit noted a number of problems with the electric buses, from loose body rivets and an inoperative driver’s auxiliary fan to a power steering hose that rubbed on a bracket and a malfunctioning rear emergency door check.
Vinalhaven’s electric school buses have also been identified as having side body damage in the form of broken rivets and a lack of wheel chocks, which are blocks that prevent the bus from rolling when parked.
A "lack of wheel chocks."
Now, like I said, I quickly dug through several states' school bus manuals and I see chocks mentioned when the bus is undergoing an inspection - which makes perfect sense. Also the "parked on a grade" thing. New Hampshire is school bus chock happy, which is probably prudent.
When you consider electric buses are weighing in at almost two tons more than your average 72-passenger diesel school bus?
Chocks might be pretty damn important.
A lot of those considerations came into play when New York Governor Kathy Daffy Hochul announced she was dumping $100M into electric school buses for her state. The practical side of the upstate people was triggered.
...The Empire Center For Public Policy estimates the cost shift to an all-electric school bus fleet between $8 billion and $15.25 billion. Meanwhile, 2025 budget projections already predict a state deficit.
...Then there’s the cost of new infrastructure, like charging stations.
Electric vehicle are heavier — a typical 72-passenger diesel school bus weighs 24,300 pounds and a 72-passenger electric bus weighs 36,000 pounds. That means more wear and tear on municipal and state roads, Weber said.
Electric vehicle ranges are also shorter. Sanchez said the district wasn't sure if the buses would last entire routes under the current system the district uses.
And electric vehicles are less efficient in cold weather like upstate New York experiences in winter, critics say.
But never mind that, say the cultists. Who cares if the windshields leak, the brakes seize, or the kindergarten bus runs out of charge when it's -15°F? Hell, those buses didn't have heat most of the time anyway. Tell those kids to toughen up!
Last year, Vermont seemed to have some real range issues with its modern electric marvels.
I don't know that I'd be all hep to have my kid on one in the winter. I mean, they can't carry a 60 lb backpack full of books and a ruck of survival gear just in case the bus Schlitzes the bed on a frosty mountain road.
New electric school buses lose up to 80% range in winter
New electric school buses cost roughly double their diesel-powered counterparts upfront and they lose up to 80% of their range in cold temperatures, the Vermont Electric School and Transit Bus Pilot Program Report indicates.
...Some brands – especially the Blue Bird model – seemed to have more serious issues than others with performance in cold temperatures. All of them had issues with charging equipment.
It states, “Some brands performed well in winter, and some failed to perform at all. Among the buses that were in-service in the winter, some buses performed better than others. Charging equipment performance remained a persistent issue for all sites year-round.”
...“As temperatures dropped, vehicle range reduced in a relatively linear manner. At zero degrees Fahrenheit, the Lion bus ranges had dropped off by 30-40% of the nominal range advertised by the manufacturer. For Blue Bird buses, the range loss at zero degrees was closer to 80%,” it states.
...Nonetheless, the report by the Vermont Energy Investment Corporation (VEIC) indicates that there is serious consideration to move forward.
“It is feasible to operate electric school and transit buses in Vermont even in cold weather and varied terrain,” the report claims.
****************************************************
Is America Ready for ‘Degrowth Communism’?
Green/Left destructivess writ large
Kohei saito knows he sounds like a madman. That’s kind of the point, the Japanese philosopher told me during a recent visit to New York City. “Maybe, then, people get shocked,” he said. “What’s this crazy guy saying?”
The crazy idea is “degrowth communism,” a combination of two concepts that are contentious on their own. Degrowth holds that there will always be a correlation between economic output and carbon emissions, so the best way to fight climate change is for wealthy nations to cut back on consumption and reduce the “material throughput” that creates demand for energy and drives GDP.
The degrowth movement has swelled in recent years, particularly in Europe and in academic circles. The theory has dramatic implications. Instead of finding carbon-neutral ways to power our luxurious modern lifestyles, degrowth would require us to surrender some material comforts. One leading proponent suggests imposing a hard cap on total national energy use, which would ratchet down every year. Energy-intensive activities might be banned outright or taxed to near oblivion. (Say goodbye, perhaps, to hamburgers, SUVs, and your annual cross-country flight home for the holidays.) You’d probably be prohibited from setting the thermostat too cold in summer or too warm in winter. To keep frivolous spending down, the government might decide which products are “wasteful” and ban advertising for them. Slower growth would require less labor, so the government would shorten the workweek and guarantee a job for every person.
Saito did not invent degrowth, but he has put his own spin on it by adding the C word.
As for what kind of “communism” we’re talking about, Saito tends to emphasize workers’ cooperatives and generous social-welfare policies rather than top-down Leninist state control of the economy. He says he wants democratic change rather than revolution—though he’s fuzzy on how exactly you get people to vote for shrinkage.
This message has found an enthusiastic audience. Saito’s 2020 book, Capital in the Anthropocene, sold half a million copies. He took a job at the prestigious University of Tokyo and became a regular commentator on Japanese TV—one of the few far-left talking heads in that country’s conservative media sphere. When we met up in April, he was touring the northeastern U.S. to promote the new English translation of the book, titled Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto, and planning to appear on a series of panels at Georgetown University to discuss his ideas. One day during his New York stint, we visited the pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University, where a young protester named Tianle Zhang spotted him and waved him over, telling Saito he’s the reason he’s applying to graduate school. They took a selfie together, and Saito posted it on X.
Saito’s haters are just as passionate as his admirers. The right-wing podcaster James Lindsay recently dedicated a three-hour episode to what he called Saito’s “death cult.” Liberals who favor renewable energy and other technologies say Saito’s ideas would lead to stagnation. On the pro-labor left, Jacobin magazine published multiple articles criticizing degrowth in general and Saito in particular, calling his vision a “political disaster” that would hurt the working class. And don’t get the Marxist textualists started; they accuse Saito of distorting the great man’s words in order to portray Marx as the OG degrowth communist.
It’s understandable that Saito provokes so much ire: He rejects the mainstream political consensus that the best way to fight climate change is through innovation, which requires growth. But no matter how many times opponents swat it down, the idea of degrowth refuses to die. Perhaps it survives these detailed, technical refutations because its very implausibility is central to its appeal.
Economic growth, the French economist Daniel Cohen has written, is the religion of the modern world. Growth is the closest thing to an unalloyed good that exists in politics or economics. It’s good for the rich, and it’s good for the poor. It’s good if you believe inequality is too high, and if you think inequality doesn’t matter. Deciding how to distribute wealth is complicated, but in theory it gets easier when there’s more wealth to distribute. Growth is the source of legitimacy for governments across the political spectrum: Keep us in power, and we’ll make your life better.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/05/kohei-saito-degrowth-communism/678481/
**************************************************UK: Green Election Candidate Claims Islamic State Is Run by Mossad
Just another Green loony
A Green Party election candidate is caught up in an antisemitism storm over social media posts slamming “Jew lovers” and alleging that the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad is behind the Islamic State. The Mail has the story.
Joe Belcher, who is standing in the Aldridge-Brownhills seat in the West Midlands, also denied a controversial mural showing “hooked-nosed Jewish bankers” playing monopoly off the backs of the poor was “antisemitic”.
Mr. Belcher, the treasurer of the local party branch in Walsall, shared a link to an article by “the real Syrian Free Press” – a pro-Assad website – suggesting ISIS was run by “Simon Elliott, a Mossad agent”.
He also posted other links to pages about “Rothschild bankers” and shared a link to a video by controversialist David Icke, suggesting Jeremy Corbyn might be a “savior [who is] going to turn the country around to a more fair and just society” before he became leader of the Labour Party.
The Green Party told MailOnline that “allegations of antisemitism will always be carefully considered using our robust internal disciplinary procedures”.
But a spokesman declined to say whether Mr. Belcher was facing disciplinary proceedings after we presented him with our dossier. …
He is the latest party candidate to express extreme views. …
Last week, a controversial Green Party councillor who shouted “Allahu Akbar” after being elected to a city council repeated the declaration of faith, boasting it had made him “infamous”.
Mothin Ali, who has previously claimed Hamas “had a right to fight back” against Israel, claimed he was being made a “scapegoat” to distract from “war crimes” being committed in Gaza. …
Amid fears of a rise in sectarian politics fuelled by the crisis in the Middle East, former Labour Cabinet minister Lord Mandelson accused the Greens of becoming a “dustbin” for “disgruntled hard-leftists”.
https://dailysceptic.org/2024/05/29/green-election-candidate-claims-islamic-state-is-run-by-mossad/
**********************************************Australia: What is the ‘energy transition’?
For Labor, it is a transition to renewables. For the Liberals, it is a transition to nuclear power and renewables.
As part of the transition, Labor wants nothing to with nuclear power; the Liberals support it. Labor dislikes coal; it is not clear what the Liberals think about coal.
Both aim to reach Net Zero greenhouse-gas emissions by 2050.
There is a much simpler and more effective transition at hand – a transition to coal, nuclear power, and natural gas, with little place for renewables and no place for Net Zero.
Underlying this approach are the following considerations:
coal, nuclear energy and natural gas are the only ways of providing baseload electricity in Australia – meaning in practice, reliable, around-the-clock, low-cost electricity
wind and solar energy cannot provide such electricity
The proposed coal-nuclear-gas transition is the centrepiece of a campaign planned by a group in the Latrobe Valley, provisionally called the Coal-Nuclear-Gas Alliance.
The alliance will focus on three key actions.
The first action is the development of a new coal plant in the Valley and the refurbishment of the Loy Yang A and B coal plants, using high-efficiency-low-emissions (HELE) technology.
Such technology is not only more efficient than current technology, but also results in a lowering of greenhouse-gas emissions from coal plants of up to 30 per cent.
Further coal capacity in Australia is vital.
It will take until at least the 2050s for nuclear power to become a significant component of overall electricity generation in Australia.
And coal will not be replaced quickly by natural gas, which is in short supply in the eastern states and, in any case, has historically been more expensive than coal or baseload electricity.
The second action is to offer the Valley as the location for Australia’s first nuclear power plant.
Should this be supported in the Valley, the political task of introducing nuclear power in Australia will be greatly facilitated.
The third action is the promotion of natural-gas development in the Valley.
This requires the reversal of the state government’s effective banning of gas exploration and production in Victoria and of the federal government’s recent interventions in the eastern states’ gas market, including the price caps introduced in late 2022.
The Latrobe Valley is probably better placed than any other region in Australia in successfully addressing Australia’s energy future.
It has enough coal for over 500 years of electricity generation.
It can offer sites for a nuclear plant close to transmission lines and with a workforce to operate such a plant. One possible site is Yallourn (the coal resource currently being mined at Yallourn will be exhausted by the mid-2030s).
In addition, Gippsland has significant untapped natural-gas resources. In the words of journalist, Robert Gottliebsen, it is one of ‘three major fields that will end the shortage of gas for domestic market’ in Australia (the other two being Narrabri in NSW and the Surat Basin in Queensland).
Tapping these resources opens the possibility of gas becoming price competitive with coal for baseload electricity and, even if this is not the case, of making a major contribution to gas use outside the electricity sector.
What are the arguments against wind and solar power?
The first is their intermittency. Theoretically, it may be possible to overcome this with battery support. However, such support would be impossibly expensive if applied to the grid as a whole, taking account of the need to allow for wind and solar droughts and the enormous battery stock required (over 5,000 times the current stock).
Second, wind and solar farms are proving to be high-cost.
For example, wind and solar farms are typically distant from the grid and thus often require substantial new transmission infrastructure. This is expensive.
In addition, they entail significant over-building – to illustrate, if a coal-fired power plant of, say, 1,000 megawatts is to be replaced by wind and solar farms, the capacity of these farms will need to be well over 3,000 megawatts because they only produce electricity for around 30 per cent of the time.
Furthermore, electrical engineers refer to costs associated with frequency control when wind and solar power are fed into the grid.
Up to the early 2000s, Australia had among the lowest electricity prices in the world, with coal being responsible for over 80 per cent of our electricity production.
Since then, the role of coal has steadily declined and retail electricity prices have increased nearly twice as fast as overall consumer prices. Australia no longer has cheap electricity by world standards.
Third, the expansion of wind and solar farms requires radical changes to Australia’s countryside. In the words of former chief scientist, Alan Finkel (who supports renewables), ‘think forests of windfarms carpeting hills and cliffs from sea to sky; think endless arrays of solar panels disappearing like a mirage into the desert’.
Protest movements are spreading around the country strongly opposing such outcomes.
For those critical of the idea of supporting coal, nuclear power, and gas, a simple question can be asked: How else do you ensure that Australia has access to reliable, low-cost electricity, a critical component of any modern economy?
The coal-nuclear-gas campaign emerging from the Latrobe Valley is at an early planning stage. To succeed, it will need to be well financed and to develop a detailed plan for mobilising support, including grass-roots support in the Valley and other parts of Victoria and political support in Melbourne and Canberra.
Last year’s referendum on The Voice exposed a large gap between grass-roots views on the issues involved and the views of those seen as opinion leaders – political parties, major corporations, universities, the media and environmental organisations.
Does a similar gap exist in the case of energy policy? And will it increase if (as is feared) electricity supplies become less stable, electricity prices keep rising and regional protests against wind the solar farms become more widespread?
If so, a shake-up in energy policy lies ahead, with the Latrobe Valley well placed to lead the way. If it can do so, other regions are likely to follow (e.g. Hunter Valley in NSW, Surat Basin in Queensland)
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/05/a-new-energy-transition-coal-nuclear-and-natural-gas/
***************************************2 June, 2024
‘Termination shock’: cut in ship pollution sparked global heating spurt
There's no such thing as a happy Greenie
Regulations at the start of 2020 slashed the sulphur content of fuels used in shipping by more than 80%. Photograph: Shaun Cunningham/Alamy
The slashing of pollution from shipping in 2020 led to a big “termination shock” that is estimated have pushed the rate of global heating to double the long-term average, according to research.
Until 2020, global shipping used dirty, high-sulphur fuels that produced air pollution. The pollution particles blocked sunlight and helped form more clouds, thereby curbing global heating. But new regulations at the start of 2020 slashed the sulphur content of fuels by more than 80%.
The new analysis calculates that the subsequent drop in pollution particles has significantly increased the amount of heat being trapped at the Earth’s surface that drives the climate crisis. The researchers said the sharp ending of decades of shipping pollution was an inadvertent geoengineering experiment, revealing new information about its effectiveness and risks.
High ocean surface temperatures smashed records in 2023, alarming experts who have struggled to explain the huge rises. But scientists have mixed views on the role played by the cut in shipping pollution.
Those behind the new study say it could be a “pretty substantial” factor. Others say it is only a small factor, and that the reasons for the extraordinary rises in sea and global temperatures remain an alarming mystery.
Dr Tianle Yuan, at the University of Maryland, US, who led the study, said the estimated 0.2 watts per sq metre of additional heat trapped over the oceans after the pollution cut was “a big number, and it happened in one year, so it’s a big shock to the system”.
“We will experience about double the warming rate compared to the long-term average” since 1880 as a result, he said. The heating effect of the pollution cut is expected to last about seven years.
The research, published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment, combined satellite observations of sulphur pollution and computer modelling to calculate the impact of the cut. It found the short-term shock was equivalent to 80% of the total extra heating the planet has seen since 2020 from longer-term factors such as rising fossil-fuel emissions.
The scientists used relatively simple climate models to estimate how much this would drive up average global temperatures at the surface of the Earth, finding a rise of about 0.16C over seven years. This is a large rise and the same margin by which 2023 beat the temperature record compared with the previous hottest year.
However, other scientists think the temperature impact of the pollution cut will be significantly lower due to feedbacks in the climate system, which are included in the most sophisticated climate models. The results of this type of analysis are expected later in 2024.
“[Pollution particles] are one of the largest uncertainties in the climate system, and pretty hard to measure,” said Dr Zeke Hausfather, at analysts Carbon Brief. He said the new analysis did a good job of using satellite data to estimate the change in trapped heat after the pollution cut, but he disagreed on how that translated into a temperature rise. Hausfather’s estimate of the temperature rise due to the pollution cut was 0.05C over 30 years.
“The [pollution cut] is certainly a contributing factor to the recent warmth, but it only goes a small way toward explaining the 0.3C, 0.4C, and 0.5C margins of monthly records set in the second half of 2023,” he said.
Dr Gavin Schmidt, at Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said the new research was “definitely a positive contribution, but it’s not using a fully coupled climate model, so there is still more work to be done. We’ll see how this all gets reconciled over the coming months.”
In March, Schmidt warned: “We need answers for why 2023 turned out to be the warmest year in possibly the past 100,000 years. And we need them quickly.” He said the recent El Niño event and a rise in solar activity were not sufficient explanations.
Deliberately pumping aerosols into the air over the oceans to stimulate more cloud cover has been proposed as a way of cooling the Earth. Yuan said years of shipping pollution followed by a sharp cut was an accidental large-scale experiment: “We did inadvertent geoengineering for 50 or 100 years over the ocean.”
The new analysis indicates that this type of geoengineering would reduce temperatures, but would also bring serious risks. These include the sharp temperature rise when the pumping of aerosols stopped – the termination shock – and also potential changes to global precipitation patterns, which could disrupt the monsoon rains that billions of people depend on.
“We should definitely do research on this, because it’s a tool for situations where we really want to cool down the Earth temporarily,” like an emergency brake, he said. “But this is not going to be a long-term solution, because it doesn’t address the root cause of global warming,” which is emissions from fossil fuel burning.
*****************************************************
Logic leaves ‘The Science’ of climate in the dust
It is the gag order of the pseudo eco-scholar: “The Science is settled.” This is not science as we once understood it. In that discipline something could be proved false through observation and experiment. No, this is “The Science”: science as deity.
In the 20th century Karl Popper transformed the philosophy of science around the idea of falsifiability, saying: “It must be possible for an empirical scientific system to be refuted by experience.”
The first rule in Popper’s The Logic of Scientific Discovery is: “The game of science is, in principle, without end. He who decides one day that scientific statements do not call for any further test, and that they can be regarded as finally verified, retires from the game.”
So, you can spend a lifetime counting white swans, but find one black one and the thesis that all swans are white is destroyed. The black swan event happened when Europeans first encountered the impossible animal in Australia.
Prove one assumption wrong and a whole set of conclusions collapses. The Science is not real science. It is a set of beliefs, a faith. Those who demand we agree it’s settled are no different from a Catholic bishop declaring: “Roma locuta est; causa finita est” – Rome has spoken; the cause is finished.
The zealots who invoke The Science as a gag order have never read the research or wilfully ignore its infuriating uncertainty. This uncountably large group includes battalions of politicians, academics, activists, journalists and a few dozen billionaire energy-hobbyist carpetbaggers.
Take the deeply entrenched belief that global warming is causing more extreme weather. This is so ubiquitous as to be unquestioned. It is an article of faith and there is almost no weather event nowadays that does not come with a blizzard of declarations it is proof of climate change.
Among myriad examples, let’s pick Tropical Cyclone Jasper, which hit far north Queensland in December. It dumped a massive amount of rain and none of what follows denies the fact it caused great damage and suffering. In its wake the Red Cross released an Instagram video declaring “Disasters like Ex-Tropical Cyclone Jasper in Far North Queensland are happening more often due to climate change”. Greenpeace called it a “frightening portent of what’s to come under climate change”. The Climate Council warned “climate change is making (tropical cyclones) more destructive”.
None of this is true.
If The Science of global warming has a bible then surely it must be the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis. It is the latest accumulation of all the best research and it runs to a mind-numbing 2391 pages.
On page 1586 it says: “(Tropical cyclone) landfall frequency over Australia shows a decreasing trend in Eastern Australia since the 1800s, as well as in other parts of Australia since 1982. A paleoclimate proxy reconstruction shows that recent levels of (tropical cyclone) interactions along parts of the Australian coastline are the lowest in the past 550-1500 years.”
Pause on that. Not only does observation show there are fewer cyclones since the industrial revolution began belching extra carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, there is evidence to suggest cyclone activity in Australia is at its lowest ebb since the days of the Tang dynasty and the decline of the Western Roman Empire.
The CSIRO echoes that finding in its State of the Climate Report 2022 and adds: “The trend in cyclone intensity in the Australian region is harder to quantify than cyclone frequency, due to uncertainties in estimating the intensity of individual cyclones and the relatively small number of intense cyclones.”
What of droughts? The IPCC finds southwestern Australia has been drying out since the 1950s and there is evidence that the length of droughts in southeastern Australia has “increased significantly”. But it says “the Millennium drought in eastern Australia was not unusual in the context of natural variability reconstructed over the past millennium” and concludes “there is currently low confidence that recent droughts in eastern Australia can be clearly attributed to human influence” (p1089).
In summary, on page 1663, it says there is low confidence in observed trends, or projected changes, to droughts in central and eastern Australia as the climate warms. In northern Australia there is medium confidence of a “decrease in the frequency and intensity of meteorological droughts”. So, more rain for the Top End then.
The report notes the major drivers of drought in Australia as well-known natural climate events: “During the last millennium, the combined effect of a positive (Indian Ocean Dipole) and El Nino conditions have caused severe droughts over Australia” (p1104).
What of bushfires? “Extreme conditions, like the 2019 Australian bushfires and African flooding, have been associated with strong positive (Indian Ocean Dipole) conditions” (p1104).
And, in case you were wondering, “There is no evidence of a trend in the Indian Ocean Dipole mode and associated anthropogenic forcing” and “The amplitude of the El Nino–Southern Oscillation variability has increased since 1950 but there is no clear evidence of human influence” (p1104).
Let’s be clear. There is plenty of evidence in the IPCC report demonstrating the climate is changing, that the world and Australia are getting warmer, and that industrial activity has played a part in forcing some of it. We should take that seriously. In response Australia should do its proportionate share in cutting greenhouse gas emissions without destroying our local ecology or impoverishing the nation.
But here is the good news: we are not facing a climate Armageddon. Again, this is not just my view but one shared by British professor Jim Skea, who was appointed chairman of the IPCC last year.
“The world won’t end if it warms by more than 1.5 degrees,” Skea told German weekly magazine Der Spiegel last year. “It will however be a more dangerous world. Countries will struggle with many problems, there will be social tensions.
“And yet this is not an existential threat to humanity. Even with 1.5 degrees of warming, we will not die out.”
Skea worries the zealots are doing their cause a grave disservice. “If you constantly communicate the message that we are all doomed to extinction, then that paralyses people and prevents them from taking the necessary steps to get a grip on climate change,” he said.
What it is also designed to do is scare people out of questioning absurd statements and bad policies.
Here there is another assault on reason by ideologues. In this game of witch burning, questioning a policy response to global warming is evidence of the crime of climate change denial. Their argument can be expressed as a syllogism.
Premise 1: Climate change is real.
Premise 2: Renewable energy combats climate change.
Conclusion: Therefore, to question renewable energy is to deny climate change.
This is the logical fallacy of a false dichotomy; it ignores the possibility of neutrality or nuance. But logic, like science, has long since departed in this debate. This is all about faith.
************************************************
Senate Democrats Who Back Biden’s Crackdown on Fossil Fuels Suddenly Worried About High Gas Prices
Numerous Democrats who have helped the Biden administration restrict fossil fuel development and production are now concerned about high gas prices as the 2024 elections loom.
A group of 23 Senate Democrats—including Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York, and Sens. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Bob Casey of Pennsylvania—signed a Thursday letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland asking him to have the Department of Justice investigate major energy companies for allegedly colluding to raise gas prices for Americans and fatten their bottom lines.
The suggestion that oil companies are illegally collaborating to rip off American consumers is not new to Democrats, who have revived the narrative as prices at the pump tick up ahead of the 2024 elections.
“The federal government must use every tool to prevent and prosecute collusion and price fixing that may have increased gasoline, diesel fuel, heating oil, and jet fuel costs in a way that has materially harmed virtually every American household and business,” the letter states. “We therefore urge the Department of Justice to investigate the oil industry, to hold accountable any liable actors, and to end any illegal activities.”
The letter references ExxonMobil’s recent acquisition of Pioneer Natural Resources and amplifies the Federal Trade Commission’s allegation that Chris Sheffield, the founder and ex-CEO of Pioneer, tried to organize collusion between American and OPEC energy producers to artificially inflate profits.
Sheffield, however, has strongly contested that allegation, saying in a statement that the “FTC is wrong to imply that [he] ever engaged in, promoted or even suggested any form of anti-competitive behavior.”
Beyond Warren, Schumer, and Casey, other signatories include Democratic Sens. Chris Murphy of Connecticut, Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, Ed Markey of Massachusetts, Sherrod Brown of Ohio, and Bernie Sanders of Vermont, a nominal independent who caucuses with Democrats. Each senator who signed the letter also voted for the Inflation Reduction Act, President Joe Biden’s flagship climate bill, and have also supported many other facets of the Biden administration’s efforts to move the U.S. away from fossil fuels.
Warren’s voting record has earned her a 95% lifetime approval score from the League of Conservation Voters, one of the country’s largest and most influential environmental groups that openly rejects fossil fuels, and a 100% score for 2023. Last year, Warren voted against an attempt to rein in the government’s push to regulate a wide array of consumer appliances, a bill promoting the Mountain Valley Pipeline, and to protect a Labor Department rule pushing asset managers to incorporate climate risks in their investment decisions.
Casey voted in favor of the Mountain Valley Pipeline, but joined Warren on the other two votes. He also voted against a 2022 effort to increase the number of government-issued oil lease sales and opposed another 2022 move that would have prevented federal permitting or regulatory actions from hindering fossil fuel development.
Schumer also voted to support the Mountain Valley Pipeline in 2023, but he has voted in line with what the League of Conservation Voters advised in every other instance since Biden took office in January 2021, with one exception. He has opposed four legislatives proposals that would have made it easier or less expensive to produce oil and gas throughout Biden’s term.
Murphy voted against the Mountain Valley Pipeline, and also opposed legislation that would have increased offshore and onshore oil and gas development.
Whitehouse voted against the Mountain Valley Pipeline, as well as numerous legislative efforts to enhance oil and gas leasing activity. Markey, meanwhile, has consistently voted against legislation intended to make it easier to produce oil and gas for his entire career.
Brown voted to support the Mountain Valley Pipeline, but he has opposed four initiatives meant to boost oil drilling through Biden’s term. Sanders, one of the most left-wing lawmakers in Washington, also voted against the four same legislative efforts and has consistently opposed bills designed to make drilling easier throughout his career.
Gas prices are increasing as the pivotal 2024 elections approach on the calendar. In January, the national average per-gallon price of all formulations of gasoline was approximately $3.08, a figure that has since increased to $3.60 as of May, according to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
The administration is moving to release about 1 million barrels of gasoline from the Northeast Gasoline Supply Reserve to try to bring down prices this summer. The administration also released 180 million barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve ahead of the 2022 midterms, selling several million barrels to Chinese companies and leaving the reserve at its lowest levels in decades.
Numerous economists and analysts, and even the CEO of Chevron, have attributed the price increases in part to the Biden administration’s $1 trillion-plus climate agenda.
The administration has made many decisions that restrict domestic oil and gas production, pushed aggressive environmental regulations affecting energy producers, and established massive subsidy programs to favor sources of green energy, such as wind and solar. These choices have the combined effect of driving up prices that consumers pay at the pump and elsewhere over time, according to the American Energy Alliance, a right-leaning energy advocacy group.
In January 2020, just before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Americans paid an average of $2.55 per gallon for all types of gas, according to the Energy Information Administration. Those figures have risen considerably since November 2020, the month that Biden won the presidential election. The average price sat at $3.61 per gallon in April 2024 after peaking at $4.92 in June 2022.
Democrats pushed similar messaging about major energy companies and collusion in 2022, when gas prices were causing political headaches for Biden and fellow Democrats ahead of the 2022 midterm elections. However, analysts from the Dallas branch of the Federal Reserve argued at the time that corporate collusion was not one of the factors driving up retail gasoline costs, pointing out that energy producers actually have almost zero control over the prices set by gas station operators.
***************************************
Red States Ask Supreme Court to Stop Blue States from Forcing Climate Agenda on Rest of Country
Nineteen Republican state attorneys general hit five Democrat-controlled states with a legal challenge alleging that the blue states are illegally attempting to impose aggressive climate policies on the rest of the country.
The coalition of red states filed the challenge with the Supreme Court on Wednesday, alleging that the five blue states — California, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Jersey and Minnesota — are trying to advance an anti-fossil fuel agenda for the entire country via tools like climate nuisance lawsuits against oil companies. The coalition of red states requested that the Supreme Court step in to determine whether these Democrat-controlled states can effectively interfere in other states’ energy policy.
“Plaintiff States and their citizens rely on traditional energy products every day,” the complaint says. “The assertion that Defendant States can regulate, tax, and enjoin the promotion, production, and use of such products beyond their borders—but outside the purview of federal law—threatens profound injury.”
The coalition of plaintiffs asked the Supreme Court to examine the complaint in the context of the Commerce Clause, which gives the federal government the ability to address matters of interstate commerce that are beyond the jurisdiction of one state or another. The states that filed the complaint include Alabama, Alaska, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Kansas, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Utah, West Virginia and Wyoming.
“In essence, Defendant States want a global carbon tax on the traditional energy industry,” the complaint states. “Citing fears of a climate catastrophe, they seek massive penalties, disgorgement, and injunctive relief against energy producers based on out-of-state conduct with out-of-state effects.”
The complaint references climate nuisance lawsuits that have been pursued by Minnesota and the other defendant states as evidence that the five blue states are trying to alter the national energy landscape by seeking to extract large settlements from traditional energy companies. In many instances, the third-party law firms that are helping prosecutors bring these tort cases stand to reap large paydays if the energy companies being sued decide to settle.
“Defendant States assert the power to dictate the future of the American energy industry,” states the complaint. “They hope to do so not by influencing federal legislation or by petitioning federal agencies, but by imposing ruinous liability and coercive remedies on energy companies through state tort actions governed by state law in state court.”
Democratic New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Platkin expressed confidence that the Supreme Court will not side against him and described the red states’ complaint as politically-motivated.
“We are proud to stand up for New Jersey residents and consumers in combating the deception the largest oil and gas companies engaged in for decades. It’s a shame that other states are trying to hamstring our efforts to protect New Jerseyans under New Jersey law,” Platkin said in a statement shared with the Daily Caller News Foundation. “But we are confident the Supreme Court will see this for the desperate stunt that it is, and deny their motion. In any event, our important work continues.”
Democratic Connecticut Attorney General Chris Tong issued a statement on Wednesday deriding the complaint filed against his state.
“This must be a fake lawsuit filed in the Land of Make Believe. I live and work in the real world, where I am focused on actual threats — like the climate crisis — to the health and safety of the people of Connecticut,” Tong said. “This is pure partisan political theater, and it will not distract or deter us from fighting for Connecticut consumers, families and our environment.”
The offices of Democratic Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, Democratic Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha and Democratic California Attorney General Rob Bonta did not respond immediately to requests for comment.
***************************************
My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
https://awesternheart.blogspot.com (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
*****************************************