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
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28 March, 204
No more chardonnay or sauvignon blanc! Warming temperatures mean wine lovers will have to get used to less common plonk such as grenache and monastrell
I doubt that this is a real prospect but the best Sauvignon Blanc comes from New Zealand anyway. And I think very highly of Verdelho, which is a Portuguese grape well adapted to warmer climates. Verdelho is widely cultivated in Australia and I always have some of Tyrrells Verdelho on hand. So I doubt that there will be any shortage of pleasing wines anywhere
Wine lovers have been served disappointing news ahead of summer as they're warned they may have to say goodbye to chardonnay and sauvignon blanc and hello to less common plonk such as grenache and monastrell.
With global temperatures on the rise, wine drinkers will have to settle for rarer grape varieties that can cope with hotter and drier environments, according to experts.
Wine is naturally adapted to warm and dry climates because of its origins in the Mediterranean region, with the most popular grapes heavily reliant on irrigation - the practice of applying controlled amounts of water to land to help grow plants.
But the process faces its own challenges as climate change makes water scarcer.
Wine has already become more alcoholic and has a sweeter taste, with vineyards harvesting almost three weeks earlier than they did just four decades ago.
Hotter growing-season temperatures are making it harder for growers to achieve balance in the fruit—and, therefore, in the finished wine.
But global warming is set to generate severe droughts and heatwaves that could leave a staggering 70 per cent of wine-growing regions across the planet unsuitable - if global temperatures rise by more than 2C.
Shocking figures show that the world is currently heading towards an almost 3C rise.
Around nine out of 10 vineyards that produce the grapes that make up favourites such as Spanish merlots and Italian sauvignon blancs could soon be forced to shut up shop.
Vineyards located in and around coastal and low-lying areas of Spain, Italy, Greece and southern California could be rendered unsuitable for growing, according to research published in The Times.
And although this means wine drinkers may have to settle for a lesser-known, drought-resistant grapes, such monastrell and grenache, it means the booze will continue to flow.
Adaptations to which types of grapes are grown and the process of how they are cultivated are being discussed in vineyards across the planet in an effort to tackle the issue.
At its most extreme, 'which type of grapes are grown' can mean a complete change of grape variety.
'The market needs to accept drinking other varieties than they're used to,' said Cornelis van Leeuwen, of the viticulture college Bordeaux Sciences Agro.
'Most of the international varieties, like sauvignon blanc, chardonnay, merlot, they're really not adapted to a warmer, drier climate'.
Bordeaux sanctioned the use of six new varieties in its vineyards two years ago.
More than half of vineyards across the world are planted with 12 varieties of grape - but luckily for wine lovers, there are thousands more available.
Beyond grape varieties, growers can sometimes 'create coolness' by planting seeds on differently oriented slopes that get less or 'cooler' sun/more wind, or at higher altitudes.
Some growers also believe they can mitigate the effects of climate change by using different clones of their existing grape varieties—versions that ripen later or more reluctantly.
A study, published in the journal Nature Reviews Earth & Environment, explored just how climate change will impact wine-growing on a global scale.
It revealed that if temperatures are held to 2C, around 25 per cent of today's wine growing regions could benefit.
Another quarter would maintain their suitability.
But anything beyond 2C would lead to the catastrophic result of 70 per cent of the world's vineyards being unable to grow the most well-known and loved wine grapes.
Statistics from NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration show a world that is already more than 1°C warmer than before the industrial revolution.
Eight of the ten warmest years on record have occurred in the last decade.
In the last two years, there have been record temperatures from Canada to Sicily, wildfires in Australia, Portugal, Greece, and California, and floods in Australia and Germany.
New growing regions are also set to open in the UK, as the climate is becomes more suitable for growing.
Sussex and Kent are already leading the way with their vastly popular Rathfinny and Denbies estates that boast chalk soils and sloped landscapes, perfect for grape growing.
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Time of use price cap?
Net Zero Watch is warning that consumers are going to pay the price for the UK’s failing electricity system. The campaign group’s statement comes after Ofgem announced that it wanted to introduce a time-of-use price cap.
As renewables start to dominate the grid, prices need to rise dramatically when the wind isn’t blowing if supply and demand are to balance. But the current fixed price cap prevents this from happening, hence Ofgem’s announcement.
Net Zero Watch director Andrew Montford said:
This is energy rationing in all but name. It is not for the benefit of consumers, it’s papering over the cracks in the renewables-led grid.”
Since as far back as 2021, Mr Montford has been warning that smart meters would be used to ration electricity during wind lulls.
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Greenflation causes Indonesia and Vietnam to backtrack on renewables
Indonesia's recent lowering of its renewable energy targets highlights Southeast Asia's decarbonization challenges, with inflation and financing concerns growing across the region, from Malaysia to Vietnam.
Indonesia's National Energy Council in January revealed a plan to trim the target for renewables' portion in the country's primary energy mix to 17%-19% in 2025 and 19%-21% by 2030. The original target that was supposed to have kicked in next year was 23%. While setting a more ambitious goal of 70% renewables through 2060, council executives argued that the original target was simply out of reach. Currently, renewables account for only 13% of Indonesia's energy sources.
The council's revelation came not long after Indonesia's energy ministry said implementing a carbon tax would be further delayed to 2026; the tax was originally set to take effect in 2022.
The cuts indicate the government's "weak commitment" to energy transition and "rampant interest to preserve fossil fuels," the Institute for Essential Services Reform (IESR), an Indonesian think tank, said in a news release.
Behind the backtracking is a growing concern over the rising cost of going green.
"Transitioning toward green energy must be done super carefully," incoming Vice President Gibran Rakabuming, son of President Joko "Jokowi" Widodo, said during an election debate in January. "We should not burden the public, the poor people with expensive R&D and transition [costs]."
The comment raised concerns over "greenflation," which arises when fossil fuels are discarded in favor of more expensive low-carbon technologies.
Malaysia's energy transition efforts could also be hobbled by greenflation as they hinge on imported parts and components, which are being made more expensive by the stubbornly weak ringgit, Malaysian Deputy Prime Minister Fadillah Yusof told Nikkei Asia.
Malaysia has embarked on a rather ambitious approach to decarbonization, rolling out 10 flagship projects along a National Energy Transition Roadmap that is expected to generate an estimated investment of over 25 billion ringgit ($5.5 billion) by 2030. The construction of renewable energy zones is included in the NETR.
However, Fadillah, who also holds the energy transition portfolio, warns that financing green technologies could become more challenging as investors "may be wary of the risks associated with emerging technologies and the potential impact of greenflation."
Nik Nazmi, minister of environment and climate change, said Malaysia would need significant investments in clean energy, energy efficiency and sustainable infrastructure to reach its net-zero goal by 2050. However, "the ministry realizes that the weaker currency would make it more expensive to import technologies, equipment and expertise needed for large-scale decarbonization projects."
"Greenflation concerns in Southeast Asia are real," said Prakash Sharma, vice president of multi-commodity research at energy consultancy Wood Mackenzie, noting that the macro environment has changed significantly during the past three years. "Rising cost of capital, supply chain pressures, cost inflation has affected [the] cost of renewable technologies quite significantly," he told Nikkei Asia, adding that the situation makes delays in renewable uptakes "unavoidable."
Oxford Economics in a February report said Southeast Asia's major economies would suffer from a rise in energy costs in the initial phase of decarbonization as carbon taxes are levied on fossil fuels, coupled with higher metal and mineral prices as demand increases for electric vehicle production and other green investments.
"Our modeling suggests the shift to net zero will initially bring adverse economic impacts through higher energy costs, but benefits will accrue eventually from the positive spillovers from investment," the report says, adding that net energy exporters Indonesia and Malaysia are "likely to face the biggest upfront costs."
In Singapore, Oxford Economics said the initial cost of decarbonization will be limited. Still, the city-state's National Climate Change Secretariat has said Singapore faces constraints in looking for green energy sources, since the island nation's tiny footprint keeps it from tapping sources on a wider scale.
Also, the government last month announced a requirement for all flights departing the country to use sustainable aviation fuel starting in 2026, despite concerns of it being more expensive than traditional jet fuel, which could prompt airlines to pass on higher costs to flyers.
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New Report Explodes Myth That ‘Extreme Weather’ is Getting Worse
Rising media star ‘Jim’ Dale (real name Noel Roger Dale) from British Weather Services (limited company dissolved) with a 40-year old proficiency certificate in thermometer reading from the Royal Navy can be relied upon to turn almost every bad weather event into the harbinger of complete climate collapse. Whatever the data thrown at him disproving his barking claims, ‘Jim’ carries on regardless. It is a comic tour de force, not to be missed.
Unfortunately this ‘Daleification’ of climate change is common throughout mainstream media. A recent extreme weather report written by the physicist Dr. Ralph B. Alexander notes that much of the fault for the erroneous perception that such events are becoming worse can be attributed to the mainstream media, “eager to promote the latest climate scare”. He argues that the failure by climate reporters to put today’s extremes in a true historical perspective “is contributing to the belief that weather extremes are on the rise when they are not”.
Published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation, Dr. Alexander argues: “Constant repetition of a false belief can, over time, create the illusion of truth – a phenomenon well known to psychologists and one exploited by propogandists. The falsehood can even become a ‘noble lie’ when exploited for political purposes.”
Of course, as regular readers of the Daily Sceptic are aware, bad or ‘extreme’ weather events are the main propaganda tools used to nudge global populations to accept the collectivist Net Zero project. It has long been realised that global warming doesn’t inspire the required levels of instant fear with temperatures rising, falling and pausing in both the near, historical and paleoclimatic record, mostly out of line with whatever the trace gas carbon dioxide is doing. It is difficult to raise the required panic when there is little more to show for 40 years of gentle warming than slightly milder winters and a substantially greener planet.
Dr. Alexander brings a vital historical perspective to the subject. Drawing on newspaper archives, he gives multiple examples of past extremes that match or exceed anything experienced in the present day. Collective memories of extreme weather are “short-lived”, he notes.
For instance, heatwaves of the past few decades pale into insignificance to those of the 1930s. The record shows that the heat wave was not just confined to the U.S. ‘Dust Bowl’ but extended throughout much of North America, as well as France, India and Australia. Major floods today are observed to be no more common nor deadly or disruptive than any of the thousands of floods in the past. Hurricanes overall have shown a decreasing trend around the globe, and the frequency of their landfalling has not changed for at least 50 years. The deadliest U.S. hurricane in recorded history killed an estimated 8-12,000 people in Galveston in 1900. As a comparison, the death toll of the category five Hurricane Ian, which deluged much of Florida in 2022 with a storm surge as high as Galveston, was just 156.
The biggest problem that Carry-on ‘Jim’ and the rest of mainstream media face in using extreme weather to push a political agenda is that the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is lukewarm, or of “low confidence”, in attributing human involvement in a wide range of weather-related events.
The IPCC latest assessment report shows there is little or no evidence that the following have been, or will be out to 2100, affected by human-caused climate change: river floods, heavy rain and pluvial floods, landslides, drought (all types), fire ‘weather’, severe wind storms, tropical cyclones, sand and dust storms, heavy snowfall and ice storms, hail, snow avalanche, coastal flooding and erosion, and marine heatwaves.
As can be seen, this doesn’t leave much for the alarmists to get their teeth into, but ‘Daleification’ takes care of that by just ignoring all the findings.
Irritation with the caution of the IPCC has naturally led to a gap in the climate catastrophe market, and this explains the rise of so-called weather attribution studies. These use computer models to process imaginary atmospheres and come up with pseudoscientific findings claiming individual events are caused by humans. The best known, World Weather Attribution, is based at Imperial College, is funded by green billionaire Jeremy Grantham and is widely quoted in the popular prints. In Dr. Alexander’s view, the misconception that extreme events are on the rise is “further amplified” by these studies. “Such studies, while fashionable, use highly questionable methodology that has several shortcomings,” he observes.
In his excellent, well-researched report, Dr. Alexander goes back and quotes from many historical sources. The ‘noble lie’ is well covered in mainstream media, but, notes the author, “history tells a different story”.
https://dailysceptic.org/2024/03/24/new-report-explodes-myth-that-extreme-weather-is-getting-worse/
***************************************27 March, 204
Typical inconclusive air pollution study
It's a study of geography, not people
Research suggests men living in heavily polluted cities can find it harder to get erections.
They're also more likely to struggle with premature ejaculation, according to the same study.
And tests showed extroverted men with a normal BMI were worst affected.
Chinese experts tracked over 5,000 men, asking them about their general health and sexual function.
Average levels of six pollutants close to their homes were also assessed over the course of 12 months.
These included particles less than 2.5 micrometers in diameter (PM2.5), nitrogen dioxide (NO2), and sulfur dioxide (SO2).
All three have been linked to health woes such as heart disease and dementia.
The particles, emitted by car exhausts and wood-burning stoves can be so small they travel deep into the lungs and bloodstream.
Researchers at Anhui Medical University found men exposed to the highest average NO2 levels had the worst erectile function.
This was measured by a questionnaire that asks men about how often they get erect and whether they can maintain them. It gives them a score out of 25.
The highest NO2 levels in the study were recorded at 30 ?g/m3.
UK laws currently state hourly levels of toxic NO2 must not exceed the threshold of 40 µg/m3 more than 18 times a year.
However, air quality tracking tools shows that this limit is regularly breached in parts of London.
In comparison, levels of NO2 in New York can spike as high as 27 µg/m3 day to day.
Meanwhile, men exposed to the highest PM2.5 levels scored worse on a premature ejaculation questionnaire that asked them whether they ejaculate before they desire.
Sharing their results, the team speculated that pollutants may hamper men's sex lives by inducing an 'inflammatory response' which constricts blood vessels.
Researchers said the effect of pollution on sexual function was strongest among men with a normal BMI, who were extroverted and smoked or drank alcohol.
They wrote: 'Individuals with a normal BMI are likely to engage in more outdoor activities compared to overweight men.
'And previous research has indicated that people who spend more time outdoors have increased exposure to air pollutants.'
No exact scores were detailed in the study, published in the Journal of Hazardous Materials.
Results also relied on participants self-reporting their sexual function, which could lead to 'bias', experts admitted.
No statistically significant results were found between the other air pollutants and male sexual function. .
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Amid explosive demand, America is running out of power
Vast swaths of the United States are at risk of running short of power as electricity-hungry data centers and clean-technology factories proliferate around the country, leaving utilities and regulators grasping for credible plans to expand the nation’s creaking power grid.
In Georgia, demand for industrial power is surging to record highs, with the projection of new electricity use for the next decade now 17 times what it was only recently. Arizona Public Service, the largest utility in that state, is also struggling to keep up, projecting it will be out of transmission capacity before the end of the decade absent major upgrades.
Northern Virginia needs the equivalent of several large nuclear power plants to serve all the new data centers planned and under construction. Texas, where electricity shortages are already routine on hot summer days, faces the same dilemma.
The soaring demand is touching off a scramble to try to squeeze more juice out of an aging power grid while pushing commercial customers to go to extraordinary lengths to lock down energy sources, such as building their own power plants.
“When you look at the numbers, it is staggering,” said Jason Shaw, chairman of the Georgia Public Service Commission, which regulates electricity. “It makes you scratch your head and wonder how we ended up in this situation. How were the projections that far off? This has created a challenge like we have never seen before.”
A major factor behind the skyrocketing demand is the rapid innovation in artificial intelligence, which is driving the construction of large warehouses of computing infrastructure that require exponentially more power than traditional data centers. AI is also part of a huge scale-up of cloud computing. Tech firms like Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta and Microsoft are scouring the nation for sites for new data centers, and many lesser-known firms are also on the hunt.
The proliferation of crypto-mining, in which currencies like bitcoin are transacted and minted, is also driving data center growth. It is all putting new pressures on an overtaxed grid — the network of transmission lines and power stations that move electricity around the country. Bottlenecks are mounting, leaving both new generators of energy, particularly clean energy, and large consumers facing growing wait times for hookups.
The situation is sparking battles across the nation over who will pay for new power supplies, with regulators worrying that residential ratepayers could be stuck with the bill for costly upgrades. It also threatens to stifle the transition to cleaner energy, as utility executives lobby to delay the retirement of fossil fuel plants and bring more online. The power crunch imperils their ability to supply the energy that will be needed to charge the millions of electric cars and household appliances required to meet state and federal climate goals.
The nation’s 2,700 data centers sapped more than 4 percent of the country’s total electricity in 2022, according to the International Energy Agency. Its projections show that by 2026, they will consume 6 percent. Industry forecasts show the centers eating up a larger share of U.S. electricity in the years that follow, as demand from residential and smaller commercial facilities stays relatively flat thanks to steadily increasing efficiencies in appliances and heating and cooling systems.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/ar-BB1jtM69
********************************************French Council of State annuls wind turbine permits, major impact on energy future
In a landmark decision, the French Council of State has ruled that authorizations for onshore wind turbines and rules for the renewal of wind farms are illegal. The decision comes after a legal challenge brought by the Fédération Environnement Durable and 15 associations.
Scope of the cancellation:
The Council of State annulled all provisions concerning the three successive versions of the noise measurement protocol that was supposed to protect the health of local residents. The decision affects not only current authorizations and projects but could also call into question existing wind farms.
Consequences:
* Projects under review or authorized but not yet built: These projects must imperatively undergo a complete environmental assessment.
* Existing wind farms: All wind farms built on the basis of the now-illegal ministerial decrees should no longer be authorized to operate in their current state.
Reasons for the cancellation:
* Lack of environmental assessment: The Council of State found that the ministerial decrees on noise measurement did not undergo an environmental assessment, which is a violation of the law.
* Lack of public participation: The Council of State also highlighted that the decisions approving the noise protocol were not subject to public participation, violating the principles of participation and transparency.
Reactions:
* Environmental associations: Environmental associations welcome the decision of the Council of State, calling it a major victory for environmental protection, the health of local residents, and respect for the law. They point to the systematic disregard of these laws by the public authorities, whose sole objective was to impose the installation of wind turbines that are increasingly rejected by the population, especially in rural areas.
* State: The State has been ordered to pay compensation to the plaintiff associations.
Impact on the French energy future:
The decision of the Council of State will have a crucial impact on the future of French energy. The development of onshore wind energy is now being slowed down, pending the implementation of new authorizations and rules that comply with the law. This decision also raises questions about the viability of ongoing projects and the future of existing wind farms.
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Noise from wind farm is 'nuisance' to neighbours, Irish judge says in landmark ruling
A High Court judge has found that levels of noise generated at certain times of the day by a wind farm constitutes a nuisance to the occupants of neighbouring properties.
In a landmark decision, which is understood to have implications for the operation of electricity-generating wind turbines, Ms Justice Emily Egan held that noise levels from the two-turbine Ballyduff Windfarm at Kilcomb, near Enniscorthy, Co Wexford, amounted to "unreasonable interference".
The cases are the first private nuisance claim from wind turbine noise to run in either Ireland or the UK, the judge said.
The first action was taken by Margret Webster and her partner Keith Rollo whose home is close to the wind farm which has been operational since 2017.
A second action was taken by Ross Shorten and Joan Carty who had owned another property close to the turbines, but sold it after they commenced their proceedings in 2018.
Both couples had sued the wind farm operator Meenacloghspar (Wind) Limited seeking damages for nuisance.
The couples claimed they had been subjected to constant noise and nuisance from the wind farm that had damaged their lives, health and the value of the properties.
The claims were fully denied by the defendant, with a registered address at Stillorgan Road, Donnybrook, Dublin 4.
'Unreasonable interference'
In her ruling on the first part of the case, which dealt with liability only, Ms Justice Egan said the noise amounted to an "unreasonable interference" with the enjoyment of their property, and they were therefore entitled to damages.
The hearing of the first module lasted for 51 days, far longer than what had been originally estimated by the parties' lawyers, the judge noted.
The costs of the case to date have been estimated to be well over €1 million.
During the course of the hearing, the judge also physically visited the turbines and the properties.
Giving the court's decision, the judge said that there are frequent and sustained periods of noise "widely acknowledged to be associated with high levels of annoyance" and have "a characteristic known to lead to adverse reaction in the community".
The judge accepted that in this case such noise levels from the wind farm "occurs commonly and for sustained periods".
Noise levels that exhibit these characteristics on a regular and sustained basis were "unreasonable and exceptional," she said.
"I find that the plaintiffs’ complaints are objectively justified in that the noise interferes with the ordinary comfort and enjoyment of their homes. When it occurs, this interference is a substantial interference."
While the noise is liable to annoy during the working day, higher prevailing background noise levels and the fact that the occupants are not trying to relax, or sleep means that the noise did not in general substantially interfere with the plaintiffs’ enjoyment of their property, she said.
However, the noise "poses a nuisance to the plaintiffs in the evenings and at weekends, when one could reasonably expect to be enjoying recreation in the garden or peace in one’s dwelling".
"Demonstrably the noise also poses a nuisance at night and in the early morning when a quiet environment is at a premium," she said.
Damages
The amount of damages to be awarded to the plaintiffs, the issue of whether an injunction ought to be granted and, if so, the terms of such injunction will be assessed by the court following the second module of the claim.
The judge also found that the defendant had not breached the terms of turbine’s planning permission, as alleged.
The court said that while the court was not satisfied that wind farm complies with the noise condition of its permission, this had not been pleaded in the case.
The court also rejected claims that the defendant had been negligent towards the plaintiffs.
The court rejected the defendants' claim that Mr Shorten and Ms Carty were not entitled to seek damages for arising out of their disposal of their former property.
The judge said they were entitled to advance a claim to damages in nuisance for any unreasonable interference with amenity occasioned during the period of their ownership and potentially for diminution in the sale price.
The judge said the case was before the court when existing planning guidance regulating, the noise aspects of wind farm developments in Ireland, the Wind Energy Development Guidelines, 2006 are under review.
While draft revised Wind Energy Development Guidelines were published in 2019, these had been withdrawn, the judge said.
In the absence of clear policy guidance from the government on wind turbine noise, the assessment in an individual case "is a classic matter of degree on which the court must exercise judgment," the judge added.
After giving her decision, the judge directed the parties to re-engage in mediation in an attempt to identify appropriate and proportionate mitigation measures.
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26 March, 204
The Guardian Peddling Climate Doom Again
Last Tuesday, that bastion of accurate reporting; The Guardian, told us the planet has almost reached the ‘heating’ that will cause our own extinction
The article begins:
The world has never been closer to breaching the 1.5C (2.7F) global heating limit, even if only temporarily, the United Nations’ weather agency has warned.
The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) confirmed on Tuesday that 2023 was the hottest year on record by a clear margin.
It was if you continue to engage in data tampering to change the true figures by lowering past temperatures and raising recent ones.
In a report on the climate, it found that records were “once again broken, and in some cases smashed” for key indicators such as greenhouse gas pollution, surface temperatures, ocean heat and acidification, sea level rise, Antarctic sea ice cover and glacier retreat.
So-called ‘greenhouse gases’ are NOT pollution, and ‘ocean acidification’ is a myth. The oceans have a pH of between 7.9 and 8.3, making them an alkaline, NOT an acid. You cannot increase the acidity of something that is not an acid to start with.
The pH scale, like the Richter Scale, is logarithmic, meaning each division is ten times the previous number. Therefore ocean pH would have to reduce by a factor of over 11 to become even the mildest acid at 6.9.
There has been no increase in the rate of sea level rise for over a century. It continues at a global average of 3mm a year. Any claims to the contrary are false.
Antarctic sea ice gradually reducing is what we should expect from a modestly warming world, as is glacier retreat. This is in no way a cause for concern.
Andrea Celeste Saulo, secretary general of the WMO, said the organisation was now “sounding the red alert to the world”.
I would prefer more people to be sounding a red alert to the propaganda and outright lies of the UN and other globalist organisations.
The report found temperatures near the surface of the earth were 1.45C higher last year than they were in the late 1800s, when people began to destroy nature at an industrial scale and burn large amounts of coal, oil and gas.
The error margin of 0.12C in the temperature estimate is large enough that the earth may have already heated 1.5C.
But this would not mean world leaders have broken the promise they made in Paris in 2015 to halt global heating to that level by the end of the century, scientists warn, because they measure global heating using a 30-year average rather than counting a spike in a single year.
They got something right. Weather events have to continue without a break for a minimum of 30 years for it to be classed as a change in the climate.
Anything less than 30 years is weather not climate, but alarmists stubbornly refuse to acknowledge this.
The report documented violent weather extremes – particularly heat – on every inhabited continent. Some of the weather events were made stronger or more likely by climate change, rapid attribution studies have shown.
As Richard Lindzen and the late Dr Tim Ball have pointed out many times; in a warmer world you get LESS bad weather, not more.
Also, attribution is the weakest form of science, it proves nothing. I could attribute the fact that I have one cat to the fact my neighbour has one child, but does that mean one caused the other?
Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at Imperial College London who was not involved in the report, said: “If we do not stop burning fossil fuels, the climate will continue to warm, making life more dangerous, more unpredictable, and more expensive for billions of people on earth.”
Utter nonsense. All the flowerings of previous civilisations; the Medieval, Roman, Minoan and Holocene, have occurred precisely due to their respective warm periods. That’s why they are referred to as ‘climate optimas’.
Climate scientists are divided on whether extreme temperatures seen at the start of 2024 represent an unexpected acceleration of the climate crisis. Some indicators, such as sea surface temperatures, have been unexpectedly high – even accounting for the return of the ocean-warming weather pattern El Niño – while other weather events have reached rare extremes sooner that thought.
All the data shows the weather is becoming more benign as the Earth modestly warms. Claims of the opposite are false information.
Andreas Fink, a meteorologist at Karlsruhe Institute for Technology who was not involved in the report, said: “In terms of temperatures, it can be stated that a year like 2023, although extreme, is already possible in climate simulations of the current human-heated climate. But not all extreme weather events can be simulated with the current climate models.”
Climate models can be programmed to produce any desired result. They DO NOT reflect real-world observations.
The WMO found “a glimmer of hope” in the growth of renewable energy. The amount of renewable capacity added in 2023 was almost 50 percent greater than the year before, the report found, bringing it to the highest rate observed in the past two decades.
Ah yes, ‘renewable’ energy, that which on still cloudy days will leave much of the countries embracing it without electricity.
Simon Lewis, professor of global change science at University College London, said the state of the climate is an “accelerating crisis” for humanity. “This is, sadly, only the beginning of much worse impacts to come, given carbon emissions are still rising and there is continued massive new investment in extracting fossil fuels.”
The report found that marine heatwaves seared one third of the world’s ocean on an average day in 2023, harming vital ecosystems and food systems. By the end of the year, just 10 percent of the ocean had escaped heatwave conditions.
Climate change also worsened extreme weather events that left people hungry and forced them from their homes, even if it was not the main factor in their suffering.
No it has not. As noted above, ‘extreme weather’ events are becoming less frequent not more.
The UN Environment Program predicted in 2015 that there would be 50 million ‘climate refugees’ by 2020. When nothing happened, they revised their claim to 50 million by 2025.
How many climate refugees have there been so far? ZERO.
The number of people who are “acutely” food insecure has more than doubled since 2019 to 333 million people in 2023, the report found, concentrated in Africa and south Asia.
That has nothing to do with the climate, and everything to do with how many children they have.
The uneven impact of climate change is already making itself clearly felt, said Karsten Haustein, a climate scientist at the University of Leipzig who was not involved in the report. “The public debate, on the other hand, continues to pretend that the problems of the global south do not affect [the global north] – and that the consequences of climate change can somehow be overcome through technology.”
As long as the mainstream media continues to produce this garbage, the gullible will continue to believe it.
See the Guardian article here theguardian.com
See also this article about the UN claims from climatechangedispatch
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Shocking moment £47,000 electric Jaguar goes 'rogue' and reverses into a Porsche before shooting forwards and smashing into a Tesla and Mercedes in crash which caused £150,000 of damage
Business owner Andrew Key was powerless to act as his £47,000 Jaguar E-Pace suddenly reversed at speed into a Porsche Boxster parked behind him.
The Jaguar mounted the black sports car and ended up on its roof.
Mr Key, 60, said despite slamming on the brakes his car then shot forwards and smashed into a Tesla Model Y parked in front. The Tesla in turn shunted a Mercedes C-Class car.
Luckily, nobody was in the Porsche at the time but a woman who was sat in the Tesla was left in shock.
The dramatic incident, which caused over £150,000 damage to all four cars, was captured on the dashcam of the Jaguar and Tesla.
It happened in the drop-off zone outside a busy Bournemouth railway station last October. Mr Key, the managing director of a private health care company, said it was a miracle nobody was seriously hurt or killed.
To add insult to injury, he received a fixed penalty notice by Dorset police for a 'driving offence' following the incident.
Mr Key, who has passed an advanced driver course, is adamant he was not to blame for the collision and insists his Jaguar had 'become faulty'.
But he was livid when Jaguar examined his car and reported there was nothing wrong with it and the accident must have been down to driver error.
It is the third reported incident of a Jaguar electric car apparently going 'rogue'.
Craig Phillips, the first winner of Big Brother, claimed the brakes on his electric Jaguar I-Pace failed as he was driving with his young children near his home in Merseyside on New Year's Eve.
Earlier this month the driver of a Jaguar I-Pace claimed his vehicle accelerated at up to 100mph on the M62 and had to be brought to a stop by police. However, the driver has since been charged over the matter.
Mr Key said: 'They said it was my fault and that I hit the accelerator. I didn't. I'm a civilian advanced driver and I've had a really excellent safety record and I haven't done anything like this before.
'I even went to hospital later on just to be sure I've not had a brain episode or a stroke, but I'm fine.
'My contention is that Jaguar provided me with a defective and dangerous vehicle, which resulted in a dramatic crash in which, miraculously, no one was seriously hurt.
'Given that this occurred outside a busy train station, next to a large Asda and a busy coach and bus station at rush hour, someone could easily have been killed.
'It was an event in which significant energy was deployed. So why didn't the following systems deploy: collision avoidance, seatbelt warnings, SOS assistance, air bags.'
Mr Key, from Bournemouth, was given the 2022 Jaguar 18 months ago as a semi-retirement gift.
He had gone to Bournemouth station to pick up a friend when the incident happened. He said he put the automatic car in park mode, undid his seatbelt and was about to get out when it went into reverse.
He said: 'The engine was off and I was in park. I reached over to get my hat from the passenger seat and suddenly I was aware the car was moving backwards.
'I didn't know why, my feet were nowhere near the pedals. I hit the brake pedal thinking that would stop it but nothing happened. I hit it several times and there was just nothing. I couldn't understand how it was moving from a standing stop.
'It impacted a Porsche Boxster parked behind it. Not only did it impact it, but my car mounted it. I realised my car was on top of it and I just thought 'I really hope there is nobody in it'. Thankfully nobody was.
'My car then shot forward and I saw the Tesla in front and knew I was going to hit it and the Tesla then shunted a Mercedes.
'There was a lady in the Tesla and she was really upset. Then the Porsche owner appeared and she was very upset and was crying and distressed.
'All I could do was tell them it wasn't my fault and that the car moved on its own accord and that it wasn't my fault but they didn't believe me.'
Mr Key said he had experienced a previous faults with the electronics on his Jaguar when the collision avoidance system suddenly activated and brought the vehicle to a dead stop in the middle of the road.
He initially complained to Jaguar Hendy of Christchurch, where he bought the car, after the incident outside the train station but said they stopped responding to his emails.
He then went to Jaguar's head office in Coventry and made a complaint to them. They checked his car's telematics, the black box and send a report.
Mr Key said: 'They said I must have put my foot on the accelerator but I replied to sat 'no, that didn't happen.'
'It's an automatic and it's controlled by software and apps and stuff. There is a fault with these Jaguar models.
'I'm not interested in compensation, a new car or anything like that. There is something wrong with these cars and Jaguar needs to do something about it before someone is killed.'
Mr Key's Jaguar was written off following the incident and he has now replaced it with a Dacia Stepway.
It comes as the first-ever Big Brother winner revealed to MailOnline how he became trapped behind the wheel of his £76,000 Jaguar I-Pace while his wife and two young children were in the car after the brakes stopped working.
TV personality Craig Phillips, 52, is the latest electric vehicle driver to come forward with a horror story about being 'kidnapped' by a runaway car.
He revealed how within days of having his Jaguar returned from the manufacturer for a separate issue, he was unable to use his brakes as he approached a red light with two cars in front of him and traffic coming towards him in the opposite lane.
A Jaguar spokesperson, disputing Mr Key's claims, said: 'Following an investigation into this, it was found there had been no brake failure, nor any other issue with the vehicle.'
Police said that Mr Key received a fixed penalty notice for a driving offence following the incident at Bournemouth railway station.
A spokesman for Dorset Police said: 'At 5.28pm on October 18, 2023, Dorset Police received a report of a four-vehicle road traffic collision at Bournemouth railway station.
'Officers attended the scene.
'No injuries were reported and following enquiries by officers, no arrests were made. A 60-year-old man from Bournemouth received a fixed penalty notice for a driving offence.'
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Incredible moment Senator John Kennedy destroys Olympic skier Gus Schumacher after Democrats invited him to testify as 'expert witness' on climate change
Senate Democrats were left red-faced at a hearing on climate change as their 'expert witness' proved to be anything but when faced by veteran senator John Kennedy.
Budget Chairman Sheldon Whitehouse invited Olympic skier Gus Schumacher to give his perspective as the committee considered the impact of climate change on the recreation industry.
But it was all downhill for the 23-year-old as he struggled to answer basic questions and could not remember his tweets claiming the war on drugs was designed to jail black people, and calling for the police to be abolished.
The excruciating exchange continued with Schumacher insisting carbon dioxide is a 'huge part of our atmosphere', before Kennedy pointed out that it accounts for 0.04 percent.
'Well, okay. But, yeah. I don't know,' the skier admitted.
Introducing the hearing, Senator Whitehouse praised the quality of the 'highly credible witnesses' the committee had heard from.
'We have heard warnings from economists, scientists, medical professionals, insurance and investment executives, even a former Republican Senate Majority Leader. They warn of danger ahead.'
But there was danger ahead for Schumacher as he tried to fend off Kennedy's interrogation which began with a question about what carbon dioxide is.
'I went to high school, but carbon dioxide is a gas,' the skier told him. 'I'm not a professional to talk about carbon dioxide so much.
But Kennedy demanded an explanation about the gas's role in climate change.
'Carbon dioxide is, what I see it as, you know, a gas that exists in our atmosphere,' Schumacher explained.
'Is it a major part of our atmosphere?' Kennedy asked innocently.
'It's a huge part of our atmosphere,' the skier insisted.
'It's a very small part of our atmosphere,' the Senator pointed out.
'Well, okay. But, yeah. I don't know. What are you asking specifically?' Schumacher replied.
'You said we need to reduce carbon emissions,' Kennedy reminded him, 'I'd like to know first if you know what it is.'
Schumacher, who competed in the 2022 Winter Olympics, insisted he had seen 'climate change dramatically alter the conditions for winter sports,' during his decade or so on the slopes.
And Kennedy was keen to test his expertise on other issues he had weighed in on including a 2020 retweet claiming the 'war on drugs was intentionally created to incarcerate black people en masse'.
'Who intentionally created the 'war on drugs' to put black people in jail?' Kennedy demanded.
Schumacher said he did not remember the tweet, adding: 'I'm here as an athlete giving you my story of what I've seen in my field.'
The senator then asked about a tweet calling for the police to 'abolished' and replaced with a new service.
'You think we ought to abolish the police?' Kennedy asked. 'Should we do that before or after we get rid of fossil fuels?'
'I'm not going to address that,' the skier replied.
Footage of the head-clutching exchange left viewers baffled as to why he had been invited with some suggesting he should stick to what he knows.
'I just like play in the snow and I like noticed the snow wasn't so snowy anymore,' tweeted one.
'It's sad this fella went to the Senate to speak about Carbon dioxide and it's effect on the environment and he has no clue,' added another.
'He thought it would be fun to go advise the Senate on an important issue. That fun ended at Senator John Kennedy,' wrote a third.
Schumacher deleted the X account from which the senator quoted at Wednesday's hearing.
And though some compared him to the gormless surfer Jeff Spicoli from Fast Times at Ridgemount High, the young Alaskan did not seem fazed by his mauling at the hands of the Republican Senator, insisting it had been a 'huge honor'.
'I don't pretend to be an expert, but I'm using my platform to elevate the issue!' he wrote on Facebook.
'I hope that my testimony has made an impact on public officials making policy decisions.'
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Humans Are Not Primary Drivers Of CO2 Increases
“From modern instrumental carbon isotopic data of the last 40 years, no signs of human (fossil fuel) CO2 emissions can be discerned.” –Koutsoyiannis, 2024
It is routinely claimed that a telltale sign human emissions (fossil fuels) have irrevocably altered the atmospheric CO2 concentration is a declining trend in carbon isotope 13 (?13C), considered an interruption of natural carbon cycle processes.
But new research examining isotopic data from four observation sites (South Pole, Mauna Loa, Barrow, La Jolla – regarded as “global” in their coverage) indicates there is no isotopic pattern consistent with a human fingerprint.
“The standard metric ?13C is consistent with an input isotopic signature that is stable over the entire period of observations (>40 years), i.e., not affected by increases in human CO2 emissions.”
In fact, not only has the input isotopic CO2 signature not been declining as proposed by those who believe humans are fully responsible for the increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration, but, according to multiple detection techniques using both modern data and paleo-data extending to the Little Ice Age (16th to mid-19th century), ?13C [input] has been increasing.
This directionality is the exact opposite of what is supposed to happen if fossil fuels were driving atmospheric CO2 increases.
“…for the longer subperiod lengths, 20 and 30 years, the tendencies are clearly increasing, opposite to the hypothesis that they are caused by fossil fuel emissions”
“…the trends are small and always positive, again contradicting the fossil fuel origin of the phenomenon”
“…from period B to C [1899-1976 to 1977-1997], we note an increase in ?13C [input, from -13.9 to -12.9 percent], contradicting the fossil fuel origin of the phenomenon”
https://principia-scientific.com/humans-are-not-primary-drivers-of-co2-increases/
***************************************25 March, 204
A Re-Evaluation Of Earth’s CO2 History
The reliability of ice cores was of course also heavily questioned by the late Professor Zbigniew Jaworowski, who pointed to compression effects in their gases
Dr. Matthew Wielicki
The ongoing debate and investigation into the causes and impacts of global warming bring to the forefront the significance of understanding Earth’s climatic past to forecast its future
Central to this discourse is the theory of anthropogenic global warming, which posits that human activities, primarily through the emission of ‘greenhouse gases’ such as carbon dioxide, have significantly altered the Earth’s atmospheric composition, leading to global warming and ‘climate change’.
Let’s explore the essential crux of the anthropogenic global warming theory, examine the reliability of ice cores in recording atmospheric CO2 concentrations, and explore alternative methods such as plant stomata analysis to gain insights into historical CO2 levels.
The anthropogenic global warming theory is underpinned by the analysis of atmospheric CO2 concentrations over geological timescales. Scientific evidence suggests that for the past 800,000 years, atmospheric CO2 levels fluctuated between approximately 180 to 300 parts per million (ppm).
This range is considered to reflect natural variability, driven by Earth’s orbital cycles, volcanic activity, and interactions between the atmosphere, oceans, and biosphere.
However, the stark increase in CO2 levels to the current concentration of around 420 ppm is attributed to anthropogenic emissions, primarily from the burning of fossil fuels, deforestation, and industrial processes.
It is claimed that this significant departure from the historical range is a key indicator of human influence on the climate system.
Understanding the historical context of atmospheric CO2 levels is crucial, and ice cores have been an invaluable resource in this endeavor. Ice cores are cylindrical samples extracted from ice sheets and glaciers.
They contain trapped air bubbles that have been sealed off from the atmosphere, or at least that is the assumption, as the ice forms, preserving a record of past atmospheric conditions. By analyzing the gases within these bubbles, scientists can reconstruct atmospheric compositions, including CO2 concentrations, over hundreds of thousands of years.
However, the formation of glacial ice is a prolonged process that occurs over centuries to millennia. This slow encapsulation process means that ice cores may not effectively capture short-term fluctuations in atmospheric CO2 levels, which could last only a few years to decades.
The question then arises: How accurately do ice cores reflect short-term variations in CO2 concentrations?
This is where alternative methods, such as the analysis of plant stomata, come into play. Stomata are microscopic pores found on the surfaces of leaves and needles, facilitating gas exchange between the plant and the atmosphere.
The density of stomata on plant leaves is influenced by atmospheric CO2 levels; higher concentrations lead to fewer stomata, and vice versa. By examining fossilized leaves and comparing stomatal density across different periods, scientists can infer past CO2 levels with a higher resolution than ice cores, potentially capturing more significant, short-term changes.
The evidence from plant stomata analysis suggests that there have been many more large, short-term fluctuations in atmospheric CO2 levels than those recorded by ice cores. In fact, some studies suggest levels approaching 400 ppm in the 14th and 16th centuries, challenging the notion of stable CO2 prior to human emissions.
Furthermore, other studies have shown short-term increases of CO2 of about 200 ppm in two centuries, naturally, which are not observed in the ice cores.
These discrepancies raise important questions about our understanding of natural CO2 variability and the baseline levels of atmospheric CO2 in the absence of human activities.
In conclusion, while ice cores provide a critical long-term perspective on Earth’s atmospheric history, their limitations in capturing short-term fluctuations underscore the need for complementary methods like plant stomata analysis.
Together, these tools offer a more nuanced understanding of natural versus anthropogenic influences on the Earth’s climate.
As we continue to unravel the complex interplay between natural variability and human impact, it becomes increasingly clear that the rise in CO2 levels can not merely be assigned to anthropogenic means.
https://principia-scientific.com/a-re-evaluation-of-earths-co2-history/
*********************************************Bugs on the Menu? Biden’s Climate and ESG Policies Threaten Food Supply, Think-Tank Warns
A new report from the right-leaning think-tank The Buckeye Institute sounded the alarm on the Biden administration’s net-zero climate-control policies and that agenda items threaten U.S. food production.
The report, released on Feb.7, found that the climate policies and mandates guided by the environmental, social, and governance (ESG) agenda that is being pushed by the Biden administration carries a hefty price tag for American farmers and consumers.
“To better appreciate the true costs that American farms and households will likely pay for the Biden administration’s net-zero policies and objectives, The Buckeye Institute’s Economic Research Center developed a model corn farm that must play by the government’s new carbon emission rules,” wrote report authors Trevor W. Lewis and M. Ankith Reddy, who are both economic research analysts at the think-tank.
“The farm’s operational costs, as expected, all rose significantly,” they added.
Crunching the numbers, the researchers found that U.S. farmers will see their operational costs rise by an estimated 34 percent as a result of the Biden administration’s net-zero emissions policies.
Not only did the model predict that the government’s carbon pricing policies would raise farm operating costs, consumers also face a hit to their wallets.
The government’s net-zero policies that the Buckeye report took into account in its analysis include the implications of rejoining the Paris Climate Accords, which targets greenhouse gas emissions.
In order to achieve the climate pact’s objectives, the Biden administration committed to cutting America’s greenhouse gas emissions by 50–52 percent by 2030 and to reach economy-wide net-zero emissions by 2050.
“Achieving the administration’s desired decarbonized economy will require aggressive climate-emission reduction policies that drain and replace fossil fuels from every sector of the U.S. economy,” the report’s authors wrote.
The Biden administration has already started implementing stringent regulatory policies meant to cut carbon emissions from America’s energy industry, while a looming final rule on ESG reporting, due to enter into force in April 2024, threatens to push carbon compliance onto other industries.
Many of these policies have been tested in Europe, with the researchers concluding that the results there have been an “unmitigated failure.”
“Despite these resounding warnings from European counterparts, U.S. policymakers have recommitted American industry to the same net-zero emissions standards and have imposed the same kinds of costly mandates on farms and businesses that will ultimately reduce food and energy supplies without achieving their intended benefits,” they argued.
“The results of Buckeye’s modeling were predictable and unsurprising, but many U.S. policymakers seem unwilling to address or even acknowledge them. That has to change, or the United States will face dire economic consequences,” concludes the report’s executive summary.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment on the report’s findings.
Will Hild, executive director of Consumers’ Research, commented on the report in a post on X.
“Farmers and ranchers lay out huge sums for everything from fertilizer, seeds, and feed to heavy machinery and pesticides to produce the food we eat. Yet, the climate cult and ESG elites are causing these costs to skyrocket,” he wrote.
“That puts a heavier financial burden on agricultural producers and imposes higher food costs on hardworking Americans,” he continued.
“America’s farmers and ranchers’ livelihoods shouldn’t be at risk because of inflated operating costs or loss of access to capital from woke banks. Nor should the American people be victim to a crushing tax put on their groceries by climate extremists.”
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SEC faces avalanche of lawsuits from states, companies, and nonprofits over climate rule
More than half the states in the U.S. filed lawsuits this month against the Securities and Exchange Commission over the climate disclosure rules it finalized last week.
On top of state lawsuits, the SEC is facing legal challenges from companies, nonprofits and business advocacy groups.
A U.S. appeals court on Friday temporarily paused the new rules.
The New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals granted a request from Liberty Energy Inc. and Nomad Proppant Services LLC to put the rules on hold while it considers the oilfield companies' lawsuit challenging them.
The final rule didn’t include the stringent Scope 3 reporting requirements, which would have required companies registered with the SEC to disclose all emissions along the entire supply chain through the end use of products.
If it had been included, the average per-firm costs of producing climate disclosures would have been $864,864 across 7,400 companies, according to the National Review.
The final rules still require large and mid-sized companies to report Scope 1 and 2 emissions, and a deluge of lawsuits have raised a number of objections to what did end up in the final rule.
The day after the SEC voted 3 to 2 to adopt the final rules, West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey announced his state and Georgia were leading a coalition of 10 states in filing a petition to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals.
“Today, the Biden administration has once again got on the attack against America's energy industry. It actually may be one of the most egregious attempts yet,” Morrisey said in a press conference.
Morrisey said the SEC is exceeding the authority Congress granted it to be a financial regulator. The climate disclosure rules, he said, were an attempt by the SEC to be an environmental regulator.
“Congress only wanted the SEC to focus on the financial regulation. And that's all the SEC has the power to do. Certainly, the SEC has nothing to do with climate change or energy,” Morrisey said.
Materiality
The new rule, Morrisey said, twists the definition of materiality, which has been the basis for what information companies need to supply to investors. The SEC considers a matter "material" if there is a substantial likelihood that a reasonable person would consider it important.
Commissioner Hester Peirce had also raised this objection in explaining her dissenting vote on the final rule.
“While the commission has decorated the final rule with materiality ribbons, the rule embraces materiality in name only,” Peirce said.
Morrisey said the reporting requirements under the new rule will be onerous, and that it will make it virtually impossible for companies to calculate how their environmental impact is material.
“How is the company supposed to know if greenhouse gas emission will affect its finances? How many trucks are going to be too many? How much coal do you use versus natural gas or other forms of energy?” Morrisey said.
He also said there are First Amendment issues with the final rule as it may fall under compelled speech.
Steve Milloy, a senior legal fellow with the Energy and Environmental Legal Institute and publisher of JunkScience.com, told Just The News that the strongest legal argument against the rules is that the agency is exceeding its authority.
“Congress never authorized the SEC to participate in climate regulation — number one of two. The SEC can only require disclosure of material facts, and it cannot be shown that climate is in any way material to any investor decisions. So it fails on those two counts,” Milloy said.
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History of weather extremes reveals little has changed, new report shows
A new report published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation challenges the popular but mistaken belief that weather extremes - such as flooding, droughts, hurricanes, tornadoes and wildfires - are more common and more intense today because of climate change.
Drawing on newspaper archives and long-term observational data, the report, written by Dr Ralph Alexander, documents multiple examples of past extremes that matched or exceeded anything experienced in the present-day world.
Dr Ralph Alexander said:
“That so many people are unaware of past extremes shows that collective memories of extreme weather are short-lived.”
“The perception that extreme weather events are increasing in frequency and severity is primarily a consequence of new information technology – the Internet and smart phones – which have revolutionised communication and made us much more aware of such disasters in all corners of the world than we were 50 or 100 years ago.”
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24 March, 204
Greens are always warning that the Earth's overcrowded... In fact, the West's plunging birthrate will usher in a dystopia
I think the scenario pictured below is a tad alarmist but lower birthrates will undoubtedly cause adjustment problems. Overlooked is that birthrates may recover for various reasons. Straight-line projections are usually simplistic. After non-maternal women have weeded themseves out of the gene pool, The remaining more maternal women might produce a quite high birthrate
Picture the cities of the future. Do you imagine glittering skyscrapers, bullet trains whizzing past green parklands, flying taxis and limitless clean energy?
I’m afraid you may be disappointed. A century from now, swathes of the world’s cities are more likely to be abandoned, with small numbers of residents clinging to decaying houses set on empty, weed-strewn streets – like modern-day Detroit.
According to a new report from the Lancet medical journal, by the year 2100, just six countries could be having children at ‘replacement rate’ – that is, with enough births to keep their populations stable, let alone growing.
All six nations will be in sub-Saharan Africa. In Europe and across the West and Asia, the birth rate will have collapsed – and the total global population will be plummeting.
Eco-activists have long decried humans as a curse on the planet, greedily gobbling up resources and despoiling the natural world.
The reliably hysterical BBC presenter Chris Packham has claimed that ‘human population growth’ is ‘our greatest worry… There are just too many of us. Because if you run out of resources, it doesn’t matter how well you’re coping: if you’re starving and thirsty, you’ll die.’
Greens like Packham seem to think that if we could only reduce the overall population, the surviving rump of humanity could somehow live in closer harmony with nature. On the contrary, population collapse will presage a terrifying dystopia.
Fewer babies mean older populations – which in turn means fewer young people paying taxes to fund the pensions of the elderly. And that means that everyone has to work ever longer into old age, and in an atmosphere of declining public services and deteriorating quality of life.
So if you worry that it’s hard now to find carers to look after elderly relatives, this will be nothing compared to what your children or grandchildren will face when they are old.
In modern industrialised societies, it is generally accepted that the Total Fertility Rate (TFR) – the average number of children born to each woman during her lifetime – must be at least 2.1 to ensure a stable population. By 2021, the TFR had fallen below 2.1 in more than half the world’s countries.
In Britain, it now stands at 1.49. In Spain and Japan it is 1.26, in Italy 1.21 and in South Korea a desperate 0.82.
Even in India – which recently overtook China as the world’s most populous nation – the TFR is down to 1.91.
There are now just 94 countries in which the rate exceeds 2.1 – and 44 of them are in sub-Saharan Africa, which suffers far higher rates of infant mortality.
The dramatic fall in Britain’s birthrate has been disguised until now because we are importing hundreds of thousands of migrants per year to do badly paid jobs that the native population increasingly spurns.
In 2022, net migration here reached more than 700,000. The Office of National Statistics expects the UK population to reach 70million by 2026, almost 74 million by 2036 and almost 77 million by 2046 – largely fed by mass migration.
Unless migration remains high, the UK population is likely to start shrinking soon after that point – especially as the last ‘baby boomer’ (born between 1946 and 1964) reaches their 80th birthday in 2044. This mass importation of migrants to counteract a falling domestic birthrate spells huge consequences for our social fabric.
In years to come, Britain is set to face a pitiless battle with other advanced economies – many of them already much richer than we are – to import millions of overseas workers to staff our hospitals, care homes, factories and everything else.
And once the global population starts to fall in the final decades of this century, it will become ever harder to source such workers from abroad. At that point, we may find hospitals having to cut their services or even close.
So, though medical advancements will likely mean that people will be living even longer, we face a grim future in which elderly people will increasingly die of neglect, or be looked after by robots – an idea that has been trialled in Japan already.
How has this crisis crept up on us so stealthily? It wasn’t so long ago that the United Nations and others were voicing concern at overpopulation.
For decades, self-proclaimed experts have warned – in the manner of early 19th-century economist Thomas Malthus – that global supplies of food and water, as well as natural resources, would run out.
Graphs confidently showed the world’s population accelerating exponentially, with many claiming that humankind had no choice but to launch interplanetary civilisations as we inevitably outgrew our world.
They could not have been more wrong.
Amid all the Packham-esque hysteria about a ‘population explosion’, many failed to notice that birth rates had actually already started to collapse: first in a few developed countries, such as Italy and South Korea, and then elsewhere.
As societies grow wealthier and the middle classes boom, women start to put off childbearing. This means that they end up having fewer children overall. In Britain especially, there are the added costs of childcare and the often permanent loss of income that results from leaving the workforce, even temporarily.
The striking result of all this is that the number of babies being born around the world has, in fact, already peaked.
The year 2016 is likely to go down in history as the one in which more babies were born than any other: 142million of them. By 2021, the figure was 129million – a fall of more than 9 per cent in just five years.
To be clear, the global population is for the moment still rising because people are living longer thanks to better medical care. We are not dying as quickly as babies are being born.
According to the UN, the global population reached 8billion on November 15, 2022. It should carry on growing before peaking at 10.4 billion in the 2080s – although the world will be feeling the effects of the declining birth rate long before that.
On current trends, the world’s population will start to fall by the 2090s – the first time this will have happened since the Black Death swept Eurasia in the 14th century.
So what, if anything, can we do to stop ourselves hurtling towards this calamity?
For one thing, governments must work tirelessly to encourage people to have families. Generous tax incentives for marriage, lavish child benefit payments and better and cheaper childcare are all a must, so that mothers don’t have to stop their careers in order to start families.
Britain could, if it chose to, lead the way on this.
But that seems highly unlikely with the imminent prospect of a Labour government: the statist Left habitually loathes any measures that could be seen to benefit the nuclear family or that incentivise people to have more children.
Yet in truth, the scale of this problem is so vast – and the issue so widespread – that effectively counteracting it may be next to impossible.
Absent some extraordinary shift, the gradual impoverishment of an ageing and shrinking population seems the planet’s destiny. It is not an attractive thought.
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Even lefties now admit closing the Indian Point nuclear plant actually HARMED the planet
Daniel Turner
Those on the environmental left cheering the Biden administration’s electric-vehicle mandates or Gov. Hochul’s offshore wind farms would be wise to heed a painful and embarrassing lesson New York is learning from its not-so-distant past.
Not only do so-called “green” policies drive up consumer prices, decrease reliability and upend everyday life (say goodbye to wood-fired pizza ovens and gas-powered stoves), they often end up harming the environment they’re supposed to be saving.
Talk about a lose-lose.
Consider disgraced former Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s forcing the Indian Point nuclear plant to close in 2021.
Heralded by a who’s who of leftist extremists — socialist Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders had labeled Indian Point a “catastrophe waiting to happen” while Hamas sympathizer Mark Ruffalo praised the move as a “BIG deal” — there were immediate and obvious problems.
For starters, Indian Point provided nearly one-quarter of New York City’s power.
Unilaterally and arbitrarily taking it off the grid meant other forms of energy would take on a new importance.
It wasn’t as if Big Apple residents were suddenly going to cut their power consumption 25% overnight.
Cuomo was already setting New York on an ill-advised path of becoming 70% reliant on “renewable” energy like wind and solar by 2030.
Still basking in the media’s COVID-era adoration, Cuomo was seen as a man with White House ambitions.
His wandering hands and all-around creepiness that led to 11 claims of sexual harassment and a swift resignation ahead of an expected impeachment were still to come.
To compete nationally in today’s Democratic Party, one must be a full-fledged disciple of the green cult.
It’s the reason candidate Joe Biden pledged to “end fossil fuel” in 2020.
Cuomo saw the writing on the wall, and Indian Point was a small price to pay for his political ambitions.
To fill the sudden void created, New York did not turn to wind or solar.
It was fossil fuels to the rescue, just as it is every time the weather turns severe and citizens’ safety depends on the lights and heat staying on.
In the month after the plant’s closure, New York’s natural-gas generation increased from 35% to 39%.
Nearly four years after the Indian Point fiasco, New York emits more carbon per megawatt-hour than Texas — the nation’s leading oil producer — and outpaces America as a whole.
Another twist in this saga: The power Indian Point produced was carbon free.
In fact, nuclear is such a clean form of energy that France derives 70% of its electricity from it.
Naturally, the 1,000 jobs Indian Point provided also went away and never came back.
When even the fairly left-of-center British outlet The Guardian admits Indian Point’s closure turned out to be a bad decision, the eco-left is running out of friends and advocates.
As an unabashed and unapologetic advocate of fossil fuels, I’m not terribly interested in the debate over “carbon emissions.”
They’re an ever-shifting goalpost metric eco-lefties created, and I do not play the game by their rules.
No emissions number satiates them, so the fossil-fuel industry and individual fossil-fuel companies should stop trying to appease them.
America became the envy of the world because of — not in spite of — our abundant, affordable domestic energy.
John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie and the other titans who built our country didn’t do so with windmills or solar panels.
If fact, you can’t even build windmills and solar panels with windmills and solar panels.
They are all manufactured with fossil fuels in plants that run on fossil fuels.
Yes, the same eco-left playing the “net zero” shell game will tell you it’s bad to use fossil fuels to make electricity — but China polluting air, land and water to manufacture wind and solar that Biden buys with our tax dollars and are shipped across the ocean, burning millions of gallons of diesel, and installed on our beautiful landscapes, turning purple mountain majesty into wildlife killing fields while making the grid unstable and costing ratepayers more money is “green.”
What a racket.
The New York City I grew up in knows a con job when it sees one.
There’s a valuable lesson in Indian Point: Our energy situation is getting worse.
Like Cuomo before him, Biden has called for nationwide “net-zero emissions” by 2050.
Should that initiative come to pass, say goodbye to the reliable and affordable 60% of our electricity that came from fossil fuels in 2023.
The fate of the additional nearly 20% from nuclear is anyone’s guess.
So when you see Team Biden touting its “tailpipe emissions” rule to force us into electric cars or Gov. Hochul celebrating the completion of the South Fork Wind farm in Long Island Sound, remember they’re doubling down on proven failure.
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What do you think? Post a comment.
If Indian Point’s past is prologue, not only will life become more expensive, but the planet will likely get dirtier.
Yet they’ll still call it “green.”
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BBC Meteorologist Falsely Claims South Sudan is Experiencing “Extreme Heat” for March
South Sudan is experiencing “extreme heatwaves” and is shutting schools and cutting power, reports BBC meteorologist Matt Taylor. “It is exceptionally early for South Sudan to experience such heat – temperatures often exceed 43°C but only in the summer months, according to the World Bank’s Climate Change portal,” he states.
Hot days in the capital Juba – five degrees north of the equator – are for some a big ‘climate change’ story, but it is difficult to read into the World Bank data the interpretation that Taylor wants to publicise. In fact it is impossible, since the data clearly show that average South Sudan temperatures peak in March and then fall away through the wet monsoon ‘summer’ months.
Quite how Taylor can draw the conclusion from the above World Bank graph that it is “exceptionally early” for South Sudan to experience such heat, in a place where temperatures often exceed 45°C “but only in the summer months”, is not clear. Anybody else looking at the graph would draw the opposite conclusion. Perhaps Taylor is unclear on the difference between rainfall totals (the blue bars, which do peak in the “summer months”) and average temperatures. He also seems to be unaware that South Sudan is equatorial so does not have a “summer” and certainly not in June through August.
In fact the “heatwaves” in South Sudan drew headlines in other climate-crazed mainstream media. The New York Times reported on March 20th that: “Climate change already worsened floods and droughts in the young nation. Now soaring temperatures are forecast for two weeks.” Both the BBC and NYT write about temperatures soaring well past 40°C, but, as is often the case, we must count the spoons and consult the original sources when dealing with such unreliable propagandists.
According to the Time and Data website, in the five days up to March 21st the temperature in Juba only once went over 40°C at midday. Since a 42°C high last Sunday, the temperature has dropped up to 6°C. Hot, it would seem, but not exceptional at the equator.
But the BBC was in full disaster mode with Taylor reporting that South Sudan is the latest in a “long-line” of countries to experience blistering and, in many cases, record-breaking heat. “This heat is very serious, and it’s really affecting our work,” says Wadcom Saviour Lazarus, who is said to run an NGO. “Because of this heat we are not able to move from one place to another,” he adds. Juba resident Ayaa Winnie Eric is said to take “lots of water to keep me hydrated”. Light clothes are worn and walking in the hot sun is avoided.
How did people cope in the past living right next to the equator? Of course they didn’t have ‘climate change’ alarmism to cope with as another World Bank graph below demonstrates.
The graph plots the temperatures for South Sudan going back to 1901. On a five year smoothing average, the temperature in 2022 at 27.64°C was only 0.41°C higher than 121 years ago. Interestingly, since 2007 the average temperature has actually dropped a full degree centigrade from 28.64°C to 27.64°C. Looking at the cyclical nature of the graph, it is difficult to see a correlation with trace atmospheric carbon dioxide which has of course risen throughout the period.
The Taylor story is another crass example of the constant fearmongering undertaken in the mainstream media to nudge populations to accept the collectivist Net Zero project. In this case it can only be assumed that readers will take the hint over devasting human-caused climate change and not look at the underlying data.
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The grim cost of firming up solar and wind
Alan Moran
The ‘transition’ of the electricity supply industry has been forced by government subsidies to renewable energy generators with increased impositions on coal and gas with higher royalty charges and bans playing a secondary role. The first subsidies were introduced by John Howard in 2001 as the Mandatory Renewable Energy Target. He later described this as his worst political decision. It required electricity retailers gradually to include wind or solar to comprise 2 per cent of their additional energy. This was quantified as 9,500 megawatt hours.
These measures pandered to concerns about the global warming. They also responded to lobbyists, who wheeled out experts claiming that renewable energy technology would follow a variation of Moore’s Law, where computer chip performance doubles every two years. The application of this to electricity supply, it was argued, just needed a short-term leg-up.
Time has demonstrated this to have been spurious. The need wind and solar facilities have for subsidies, far from withering away, have escalated.
The initial measure provided a subsidy to renewables (and cost to consumers) growing to about $380 million per year. To his credit, John Howard resisted pressures to increase this but the Rudd/Gillard governments and state governments vastly expanded the support with new schemes for rooftop facilities and budgetary expenditures. The Turnbull and Morrison governments further expanded the subsidies, which at the outset of the present government’s tenure amounted to $9 billion per annum.
The Albanese government has introduced a number of additional measures. These include the Safeguard Mechanism, which requires the major carbon-emitting firms to reduce their emissions by 30 per cent by 2030 or buy the equivalents in carbon credits. The cost is conservatively estimated at $906 million per annum.
The government is also set to introduce the Capacity Investment Scheme involving power purchasing agreements designed to attract $68 billion of spending on additional wind, solar, and batteries. The best estimate of the cost to the taxpayer is $5,775 million per annum. In addition, the government is expediting the transmission roll-out.
Present subsidy levels are estimated at $15.6 billion per annum. The effects of subsidies have come in three phases.
The first was in the decade after 2003 when renewables progressively increased their market share as required by regulations. By 2014/15, wind and solar had grown to about 7 per cent of the electricity market. The subsidised supplies placed downward pressure on the market price as well as taking market share from coal. That outcome was intensified by new Queensland gas supplies coming on stream. Without access to export ports, that gas was redirected to domestic electricity generation and the share of gas supplies in the National Electricity Market increased from 8 per cent to 12 per cent. Gas now has more lucrative markets overseas and governments are exerting pressure on the producers to allocate more than is commercially sensible to the domestic market.
This first phase came to an abrupt end when low prices and higher supplies forced major coal generators, Northern Power in South Australia and Hazelwood in Victoria, out of the market.
Those market exits led to a second phase, whereby reduced coal capacity brought a trebling of wholesale market prices from their 2015 level of $40 per megawatt hour (MWh). Covid caused a temporary downward blip but the wholesale price is averaging $119 per megawatt hour in the March quarter, 2024.
These higher prices reflect the higher cost of wind and solar and will continue to prevail and, in fact, increase. Price increases may be concealed by governments entering into power purchasing agreements but this means subsidies financed by taxpayers rather than electricity users.
The subsidies to wind and solar have now resulted in their market share growing from zero 20 years ago to over 30 per cent. This is ushering in the third phase of the ‘transition’, which involves desperately seeking ways to firm up the intermittent and largely unpredictable electricity supply from wind and solar.
Gas, coal, and nuclear can operate pretty much continuously and without special storage facilities, but weather and nightfall limit solar to generating only 20 per cent of the time and wind to about 30 per cent. And electricity supply from wind and solar generators is highly variable.
With wind and solar at their current market share, coal and gas can fill their troughs in supply, albeit unprofitably. But the policy in all Australian government jurisdictions is to force coal and most gas out of the market. Moreover, coal (and, for that matter, nuclear) is technically ill-suited and costly to be used as a back-stop to variable wind and solar supplies. ‘Social licences’ aside, new coal or nuclear plants could not be commercially built except as near continuous baseload.
Other means of ‘firming’ wind and solar supplies are therefore increasingly required. One such is the conversion of Snowy Hydro into a pumped storage facility. Pumped hydro generates by releasing water when alternative supplies are short and uses electricity when it is in excess supply (and therefore cheap), to pump the water back uphill. Batteries supply and replenish on a similar basis.
Snowy 2 is planned to provide 376 megawatt hours of storage. The Capacity Investment Scheme is an attempt to augment this, though, notwithstanding its name, it earmarks 70 per cent of its intended power purchasing agreements simply for more wind and solar. These add nothing to replacing the dispatchable (controllable) power being lost from the forced retirement of coal plants. The Capacity Investment Scheme will add just 36 gigawatt hours of storage from the 9 GW of facilities planned to be contracted.
The Australian Market Operator’s (AEMO) Integrated Systems Plan for 2050 envisages a total storage capacity of 642 gigawatt hours for a system double the size of the present one and overwhelmingly powered by wind and solar. This is utterly inadequate for backing up intermittent power.
Francis Menton has assembled a wealth of evidence of how much storage a renewables system would require. He authored a major report for the Global Warming Policy Foundation as well as many other papers like this. Basically, his work shows that a wind and solar system, if it is to provide a secure and reliable electricity supply, requires some 26 days of storage. For Australia, this means 13,000 gigawatt hours of storage, which is 25 times what the AEMO Integrated Systems Plan envisages.
The highly regarded GlobalRoam consultancy estimated that the National Electricity Market (which excludes Western Australia), with perfect planning and no losses in storage or transmission, would require at least 9,000 gigawatt hours of storage. The costs of this, at $US 350 per kWh, would be three times Australia’s GDP for batteries that would need to be replaced every 12 years.
It might be argued that Germany, with little storage back-up, already has wind and solar providing 45 per cent of its electricity and, although it has some of the world’s highest prices, its supply is reliable. But Germany also has access to supplies from Polish coal and French nuclear power to firm up its wind and solar. Australia has a stand-alone system.
Our politicians are plunging us into a perilous future. Policies have already given us an electricity supply system with costs that cannot support energy-intensive industries. Those policies are now poised to bring about lower reliability than is compatible with a first-world economy.
Got something to add? Join the discussion and comm
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/03/the-grim-cost-of-firming-up-solar-and-wind/
***************************************21 March, 204
Bill Gates-founded energy company set to construct $3 billion nuclear power plant in Wyoming that could be operational by 2030
I don't want to be too negative about this but trying to pump around safely a mass of just about the most reactive substance known is very optmistic. The slightest leak could trigger a totally destructive explosion. It is apparently going to be built in a remote area in Wyoming so maybe the Greenies will let it pass
A power company co-founded by Microsoft's Bill Gates has announced plans to begin building a new type of nuclear power plant in the US this summer.
TerraPower revealed it plans to apply for the necessary permits this month to start construction on a next-generation nuclear reactor at the start of June in Kemmerer, Wyoming.
The Washington-based firm has received an estimated $1 billion in funding from private investors, which will be combined with a promised $2 billion from the US government.
The reactor is unique in the world of nuclear power, as it is cooled with liquid sodium rather than water - an efficient strategy, but one that has proven dangerous in some cases because of sodium's explosive reaction if it touches water.
TerraPower's announcement puts it in a nuclear energy race against Russia and China.
The two superpowers are working to develop and export cheaper reactors, and the Natrium one represents TerraPower's attempt to enter that market, the Financial Times reported.
In December, the company inked an agreement with Emirates Nuclear Energy Corporation.
That deal will see TerraPower exploring the use of its Natrium reactors to not only generate electricity in the United Arab Emirates, but also produce hydrogen - a notoriously energy-hungry process.
TerraPower CEO Chris Levesque told FT that they plan to apply this month for the necessary permits to begin construction in June, but whether or not the company has received approval yet, they will begin building then.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is in charge of approving construction of new nuclear powerplants.
The next-generation reactor, called 'Natrium,' can be built for half the cost of water-cooled ones, the standard nuclear power technology for decades, Levesque said.
Because of the design of the Natrium reactor, most of the initial phase of construction will not involve any reactor parts per se, but will rather focus on support structures.
According to the company's website: 'TerraPower was founded by Bill Gates and a group of like-minded visionaries that decided the private sector needed to take action in developing advanced nuclear energy to meet growing electricity needs, mitigate climate change and lift billions out of poverty.'
Nuclear power does not have the same issues with carbon emissions that other powerplants do, especially coal.
But it does present new problems, as spent nuclear waste is dangerously radioactive for thousands of years.
There has not been a sodium-cooled reactor in the US since several experimental reactors were attempted in the 1960s and 1970s.
After several failures, including a partial meltdown of the Fermi 1 in Michigan in 1966, all of these reactors were decommissioned, and most were replaced with conventional boiling water reactors.
In 1995 the Monju Nuclear Powerplant in Japan suffered a fire as a result of a sodium leak in its cooling system.
The ensuing coverup, involving falsified reports and edited video footage of the accident, was so disgraceful that government investigator Shigeo Nishimura took his own life after uncovering it.
'When you use liquid sodium as a coolant instead of water it's a game-changer,' Levesque told FT, noting that since it boils at almost 900C it can be operated much more cheaply than water-cooled reactors.
'Natrium plants will cost half of what light water reactor plants cost . . . and we are moving our project along pretty aggressively,' he said.
The reactor in Wyoming will be a demonstration project, but upon completion it will become a commercial power provider, TerraPower claimed.
The plant is scheduled to be operational by 2030.
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SNP retreat is ‘high water’ for Net Zero
Campaign group Net Zero Watch has welcomed the announcement by the Scottish Government that they are considering legislating to water down their Net Zero targets.[1] Net Zero Secretary Mairi McAllan told the Holyrood Parliament that, having set themselves a legally binding target of cutting carbon emissions by 75% by 2030, she and her officials were now considering a variety of options to address the impossibility of actually delivering, including legislation.
Welcoming the move, Net Zero Watch director Andrew Montford said:
Politicians across the world have set ruinous, utopian targets that are impossible to deliver. Ms McAllan is the first to publicly face up to reality, but she won’t be the last. We have reached the high water mark for Net Zero.
Under the Climate Change Act, governments can amend the decarbonisation target and the timetable for achieving it by regulation, as happened in 2020 [2]. It is also open to them to legislate.
Mr Montford said:
This is a purely political decision. Whatever course they take, the Scottish Government will face opposition from environmentalists, the Climate Change Committee and their Green coalition partners. But they have no option. You can’t negotiate with reality.
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World’s largest solar company cuts thousands of jobs
China’s Longi Green Energy Technology Co., the world’s largest solar manufacturer, is cutting almost one-third of its staff to slash costs in an industry struggling with overcapacity and fierce competition.
Longi plans to trim as much as 30% of its workforce, which last year totaled about 80,000 at its peak, according to several people familiar with the matter, including some briefed by senior management. The people asked not to be identified because the plans aren’t public.
The move signals an acceleration of job cuts that Longi began in November, when it started laying off thousands of people who were mostly management trainees and factory hires — a reversal after years of breakneck expansion across the global solar industry. It isn’t clear how many employees had been dismissed before this latest decision.
Longi rejected as false the suggestion that it would cut 30% of staff and said reductions would involve about 5% of total employees.
The solar sector is facing an “increasingly competitive environment,” the company said in a statement. “In order to adapt to market changes and improve organizational efficiency, Longi is optimizing our workforce.”
Xi’an-based Longi isn’t alone: China’s solar industry dominates global manufacturing but has suffered from layoffs and suspended investment plans in recent months. Manufacturers have been forced to sell at or below production costs after prices for solar panels fell to record lows last year. The result is that an industry seen as crucial to the global energy transition is struggling with excessive capacity, consolidation and the possibility of bankruptcies.
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Financial adviser's frightening warning about the latest tech-enabled cars
Yipes! This is pretty appalling. My car is an 18 year old Toyota Echo that never talks to me and has never let me down in any way in all those years. It sounds like I am lucky to have it. Someone who knows Toyotas has offered me "above market" money for it
Scott Pape, who wrote the best-selling financial advice book The Barefoot Investor in 2016, argued that new 'internet-enabled cars' in the US often share data about a driver's speeding, braking and swerving with insurance companies.
This data can then lead to an increase in their insurance premiums.
Mr Pape recently wrote about his joyless experience driving a 'Chinese-built Haval Jolion SUV' on his blog.
'It is hands down the worst car I’ve ever driven (and in my twenties I drove a Mitsubishi Magna that leaked more oil than Saddam Hussein),' Mr Pape wrote.
'The Haval makes me feel like I’m 17 years old, back on my L-plates, with my hyper-anxious mother in the passenger seat "guiding" me.'
Mr Pape said the car would 'ding' repeatedly to keep him in check, including when he did not wear his seatbelt, tried to overtake or even if he looked away from the windscreen.
He suggested something more 'sinister' might be at work.
'You see, in the US, internet-enabled cars are recording all those dings, swerves and sharp stops, and selling the data for millions to the insurance industry,' he wrote.
'The result? People are often pinged with higher insurance premiums.'
While he acknowledged that this is only a reality in the US for now, he warned that it could soon be widespread in Australia.
'The most powerful car companies on Earth have teams of lawyers who craft 12,000-word privacy terms and conditions that they know no one ever reads,' Mr Pape wrote.
'This then allows the companies to track and sell our every move, and the buyers of that data feed it into algorithms and use it against us.'
In October, Katherine Kemp, Associate Professor at the UNSW's Faculty of Law & Justice, warned that 'Australia's privacy laws need urgent reform'.
'Australia’s privacy laws aren’t up to the task of protecting the vast amount of personal information collected and shared by car companies,' Ms Kemp wrote.
'And since our privacy laws don’t demand the specific disclosures required by some US states, we have much less information about what car companies are doing with our data.'
Ms Kemp cited a US study by the non-profit Mozilla Foundation which found that cars with internet-connected features were 'the official worst category of products for privacy' they had ever reviewed, dubbing them a 'privacy nightmare on wheels'.
They tested all major car brands – Toyota, Ford, BMW, Volkswagen, Tesla, Hyundai – and found they all failed to meet minimum privacy standards.
Almost 85 per cent share or sell your data to third parties, while Nissan and Kia reportedly even allow the collection of data on a driver's sex life.
'They come right out and say they can collect and share your sexual activity, health diagnosis data, and genetic information and other sensitive personal information for targeted marketing purposes,' the report by the Mozilla Foundation states.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13220797/Barefoot-Investor-new-car-warning.html
***************************************20 March, 204
Climate change is 'off the charts': Damning report reveals how records were smashed for greenhouse gas emissions, global temperatures and sea level rise in 2023
Here we go again. The temperature changes they are talking about are tiny and their link to human activities is just a wobbly theory. There is no proof that human activities had any impact at all.
And note the chart. It is calibrated in TENTHS of one degree and has to go back to 1850 to show anything like a smooth rise. A more detailed chart would show long periods of stasis and falls, unlike CO emissions, which have been rising fairly steadily as industrial civilization has progressed. It is all just asssertion and even they admit that recent rises could be due to El Nino rather than CO2 emissions
And note that they show NO details of the CO2 changes which they allege to be at fault
Climate change is 'off the charts' and presents a 'defining challenge' to humanity, a damning new report warns today.
The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) says several climate records were broken and in some cases 'smashed' last year.
Greenhouse gas levels, surface temperatures, ocean heat and acidification, sea level rises, and Antarctic ice loss all escalating in 2023 due to fossil fuel emissions.
'Sirens are blaring across all major indicators,' said United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres. 'Some records aren't just chart-topping, they're chart-busting – and changes are speeding-up.'
The WMO's State of the Global Climate report, published today, confirms that the year 2023 broke 'every single climate indicator'.
WMO confirmd that 2023 was the warmest year on record, as already announced by the UN's Copernicus climate change programme in January.
The global average near-surface air temperature for the year was at 2.61°F (1.45°C) above the pre-industrial average (1850 to 1900).
Before 2023, the two previous warmest years were 2016 (2.32°F/1.29°C above the 1850–1900 average) and 2020 (2.28°F/1.27°F above the 1850–1900 average).
What's more, the past nine years – between 2015 and 2023 – were the nine warmest years on record.
But the experts admit that the shift to 'El Niño' conditions in the middle of 2023 contributed to a rapid rise in temperature from 2022 to 2023.
El Niño is natural climate phenomenon where there's warmer-than-average sea surface temperatures in the central and eastern Pacific Ocean near the equator.
Why are temperatures compared to 'pre-industrial' levels?
Pre-industrial levels act as a benchmark for how much the Earth's climate has changed.
The pre-industrial period is typically defined as the time before human activities - such as burning coal for heat - began to have a significant impact on the Earth's climate.
By comparing current temperatures to pre-industrial temperatures, experts can isolate the effects of human activity from natural climate variability.
Temperatures are largely fueled by greenhouse gas emissions, and these continued to climb in 2023.
WMO says data for concentrations of the three main greenhouse gases in the air (carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide) are not yet available for the whole of 2023, but in 2022 they reached 'new highs'.
Globally averaged concentrations were 417.9 parts per million (ppm) for carbon dioxide (CO2), 1,923 parts per billion (ppb) for methane (CH4), and 335.8 ppb for nitrous oxide (N2O).
Respectively, this marks an alarming rise of 150 per cent, 264 per cent and 124 per cent compared with greenhouse gas concentrations levels in the year 1750.
'For more than 250 years, the burning of oil, gas and coal has filled the atmosphere with greenhouse gasses,' said Dr Friederike Otto, climate lecturer at Imperial College London, who wasn't involved in the report.
'The result is the dire situation we are in today – a rapidly heating climate with dangerous weather, suffering ecosystems and rising sea-levels, as outlined by the WMO report.
'To stop things from getting worse, humans need to stop burning fossil fuels. It really is that simple.
'If we do not stop burning fossil fuels, the climate will continue to warm, making life more dangerous, more unpredictable, and more expensive for billions of people on earth.'
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The DOE Transformer Steel Rule and its Consequences
Last January, the Department of Energy (DOE) proposed a rule that would change the efficiency standards for the steel used in the cores of distribution transformers. The rule is now a final rule pending review at the Office of Management and Budget, with lawmakers looking to push back on the standards it would impose.
The new efficiency standards would effectively require the switch from grain oriented electrical steel (GOES) to amorphous steel in the cores of transformers on the electrical grid. The change would be required to be implemented within three years from the publication of the rule.
This is concerning because the new standards could jeopardize the transformer supply chain, with terrible consequences for the electrical grid and the provision of power to Americans.
Transformers are one of the many parts of the electrical grid that most people think of seldomly. They hum away in the background, and their importance is something that most of us rarely consider.
But, transformers serve an absolutely essential function on the grid. Transformers are necessary to change the voltage of electricity as it goes from long distance transmission, to local transmission, and then to residential and industrial consumption. Without these voltage changes, it’s impossible to move power between these stages.
Currently, GOES is the steel used in the cores of 95 percent of the transformers in the country. It’s produced by one firm in the US, Cleveland-Cliffs Inc. at two facilities in Butler, Pennsylvania and Zanesville, Ohio.
Amorphous steel for transformer applications is only manufactured by one firm, Metglas Inc, at just one facility, in Conway, South Carolina. This type of steel is used in the cores of the remaining five percent of transformers.
A major overhaul in the type of steel used in transformer cores will have significant implications for the supply chain of transformers.
Under the Energy Policy and Conservation Act (EPCA), the statute that DOE points to as authorizing these transformer steel standards “any new or amended energy conservation standard must be designed to achieve the maximum improvement in energy efficiency that DOE determines is technologically feasible and economically justified.”
DOE’s argument for putting forth these new standards hinges on the cost savings associated with the efficiency gains that the new rule would elicit, but it ignores the costs imposed on manufacturers throughout the supply chain, especially the steel producers and transformer manufacturers. It also ignores the burden that a major disruption to transformer manufacturing would create for the electrical grid, and the very real risks to reliability that such a disruption would pose.
Let’s take a look at it from the perspective of the amorphous metal supply.
During the comment period for the rule, Michael Howard, CEO of Howard Industries, one of the country’s largest transformer manufacturers which currently relies on GOES for their cores, discussed at a hearing the difficulty of meeting current transformer demand for core materials using amorphous steel:
There is not enough amorphous capacity in the world to handle the market today. I estimate the market in the distribution transformer business to be 450-million pounds. The total market for amorphous in the world, from my understanding, is around 400-million pounds, and that’s if you get 100-percent of all the steel supplying just the United States transformer market.
Just getting to the level of necessary amorphous steel production would be an incredibly heavy lift due to the limitations of the current manufacturing capacity.
Howard goes on to explain what this would mean for the companies that manufacture the transformers:
And then you’re talking about us — the transformer manufacturers — if we had to convert to amorphous or if we do some kind of hybrid of multiple, multiple lines and one-to-two-hundred-million-dollars, just for Howard Industries, I would estimate 500 to 800 million for the industry.
Multiple new production lines don’t come cheaply or quickly, and with three years to comply with the new standards, it would be incredibly difficult for transformer manufacturers to make the necessary changes to comply with the rule.
Legislators have also expressed major concerns over the DOE rule.
There is currently a bill, the Distribution Transformer Efficiency and Supply Chain Reliability Act of 2024, that would prevent the rule from going into effect and would prohibit any standards from being set that would remove GOES from the market.
https://catalyst.independent.org/2024/03/19/transformer-steel-rule/
************************************************The cheap renewable thrill of climate protests
On March 13, 2024, Greta Thunberg was dragged away from blocking the Swedish Parliament entrance for a second day. She was among 40 or so people protesting the ‘political inaction’ over climate change. (If only that were true, I sigh…) She’s been at it since even before her embarrassingly hammy How dare you! speech at the United Nations in 2019. Climate change is the magic pudding of protests.
In 2005, the Global Day of Action (aka Kyoto Climate March) established the magic pudding recipe for annual protests, intended to force all governments to take action to ‘combat climate change’. Yep, almost 20 years ago.
According to Treehugger.com:
‘One of the first globally recognised protests took place in Copenhagen in 2009. Halfway through the UN’s environmental summit on December 12, tens of thousands of climate activists lined the streets to demand effective environmental policy. This was part of the Campaign for Climate Action’s annual Global Day of Action, and it ended up being the largest of the events to take place – estimates range from 25,000 to 100,000 people. What captured significant media attention was the violence incited by a few at the protest, and the arrests that followed.’
So much pushy passion, so little intelligence…
Much of the signage at these protests reflects faux moral posturing. In the 2014 People’s Climate March (more about ‘People’ later), one large blue sign carried the panic prophesy, all in caps:
WHEN THE LAST TREE IS CUT DOWN THE LAST [fish image] EATEN AND THE LAST STREAM POISONED YOU WILL REALISE YOU CANNOT EAT MONEY
This sort of presumptive argument by assertion is par for the alarmist cause. You can also run images of bushfires and storms with the assertion that they are caused by climate change and nobody challenges you. That is why it is done over and over again. As for ‘People’s Climate March’, it’s worth noting that ‘people’ in this context is usually a political sleight of hand, as in The People’s Democratic Republic of (North) Korea, etc.
The ever-recurring protests against climate change (a nonsensical statement but you know what I mean) enjoy the benefits of the never-ending, ‘renewable’ source of angst for the alarmist cohort. Like climate change ministers, the protesters will not be around long enough to be embarrassed by their alarmism in 50 years. But perhaps this ever-renewable protest will still manifest. Greta will be over 70 – and no doubt still thundering, still protesting, still accusing the world of stealing her childhood dreams. (Of what?)
Global concern for climate change began in 1972 when multiple scientists at the UN Conference on Human Development in Stockholm presented on the development of the climate over the century. By 1979, climate conferences were held and led to the creation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) by the United Nations in 1988. The IPCC is now one of the leading organisations that provide countries with scientific data to create informed policies.
This was reported by Sharmon Lebby for her June 2021 article in treehugger.com. Sharmon is, as the website states, a ‘writer and sustainable fashion expert. She has written and spoken on panels about the ties between environmentalism, social justice, inclusivity, and fashion. She is the founder of Blessed Designs, an ethical fashion brand, and the President of the Ethical Network of San Antonio’. She cites her expertise as ‘Sustainable Fashion, Clean Beauty’. Good for her.
I am quoting from her treehugger.com article to stifle any knee-jerk criticism that I have selectively plucked material from a ‘denier’ source…
In September of 2014, around 400,000 demonstrators would gather in New York City for an event that would dramatically overtake Copenhagen’s protest numbers. This event was significant because even though the environmental movement gained real ground with the inception of Earth Day, polls would show that the United States ranked second to last in public knowledge about climate change. The Climate March would be known for its diverse attendees, all of whom gathered under the slogan “To Change Everything, It Takes Everyone”.
In other words, groupthink climate gullibility.
There have been many more climate change protests or climate strikes… The latter is a fun outing for school students prodded into action by the thought of saving the planet. All you needed to do was wag school.
In conclusion, Lebby wrote:
The number of climate change organisations appears to be growing. From government organisations to nonprofits, more and more leaders are beginning to see the urgency in working to heal the planet at its source. Many organisations such as Extinction Rebellion, Campaign Against Climate Action, and Fridays For Future were created for the sole purpose of using civil disobedience and peaceful marches to push for climate action. How effective these will be remains to be seen, but it does seem that these methods increase public support.
I’m not convinced about that, but my point is that the topic of climate change is a reliable source of renewable protesting, never running short of panic, angst and finger pointing at governments who ‘must do something’.
The terrible addiction of this topic is that no matter how much governments do something to satisfy their own alarmist craze (including our very own climate tsar Chris Bowen), there is nothing positive to show for it. Some people seem to expect instant and localised results but what would that look like? Even if you were to accept that fossil fuels cause warming, those economy-weakening policies would not have any effect for a long time. You can protest every day for 50 years! The signs and the paraphernalia are reusable – and universal.
Many governments have ‘done something’ (too much) already, eg Net Zero, chasing the elusive dream of renewable energy replacing coal and gas all while luxuriating in the financial contributions to the nation’s well-being by the same coal and gas. Sure, you can’t eat money, but you sure can’t eat without money, either.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/03/the-cheap-renewable-thrill-of-climate-protests/
****************************************************Getting to net zero without nuclear power condemns us to poverty
Our energy debate, here and globally, is one of the most consequential discussions in human history. That it is distorted by politicking, virtue signalling and delusion can be explained only by widespread ignorance about what is at stake.
It is pointless to contest the proposition that we need to transition away from a heavy reliance on fossil fuels. They are a finite resource and if our civilisation is to continue in anything approximating its current form this transition is unavoidable sometime.
The point of contestability is the urgency – probably overstated by many players. Still, let us put that argument aside and look at the overwhelming scale of the task. If we understand how energy has underpinned the development of our economies and societies, and how we rely on it, we could never be blase about transitioning from fossil fuels. We are talking about the reversal of the whole trajectory and achievement of our development across just a few decades.
We are being urged to up-end the relentless intensification of energy in favour of energy devolution or diffusion. This flips all we know about the core driver of our civilisation and, if it must be done, it needs to be done carefully with all possible technologies on the table.
Our journey from forager to influencer is all about the availability of increasingly intense sources of energy. The hunter-gather relied only on the energy of the human form, fuelled by the vegetable and animal matter of other organisms.
By controlling fire, domesticating animals and harnessing wind and water, we greatly leveraged our energy options. But none of this was enough to sustain cities or deliver widespread wealth.
Fossil fuels changed everything, driving transport and generating electricity. For thousands of years the global population grew very slowly and lived mostly in poverty. Across the past 250 years the population has increased tenfold, we have developed unfathomable wealth and technology, all the while more than doubling life expectancy and reducing poverty.
Energy was the driving force, and the consequences extend way beyond the economic.
In a new short film for Net Zero Watch, John Constable explains the impact: “That exponential increase in wealth from high-quality fuels led to a society that could withstand external shocks that would have been catastrophic for earlier populations. It was the beginnings of modernity.”
Constable is seen as a controversial figure in the climate debate, the sort derided as a denier by alarmists and renewables zealots. But his historical perspective is uncontrovertible.
Apart from transport, heating and cooling, industrialisation, appliances, entertainment and communications devices, consider what energy has done for humanity. In How the World Really Works, Vaclav Smil details how even in the early part of the 20th century most of the world faced poverty and food shortages. Rising food production – fuelled largely by fossil fuels and techniques dependent on them – led to a decline in global malnutrition from two in three people in 1950 to less than one in 10 now. And because this occurred while the global population more than tripled from 2.5 billion in 1950 to eight billion in the 2020s, it means we are feeding eight times as many people as we did 70 years ago.
We mess with this formula at our own peril. What has been fuelled by dense forms of energy can continue only if replacement energy is available, otherwise much more will have to change, and likely for the worse.
Constable talks about other knock-on effects, describing how Britain’s population became larger and richer and therefore more secure and innovative: “Wealth creates freedom, which creates more wealth, which creates yet more freedom and more wealth.”
He fails to offer a long-term solution, preferring to warn of potentially dire and chaotic consequences if we shun reliable and affordable energy: “Everything that humans value is in jeopardy.”
Labor, the Greens and their barrackers in public debate have their hands over their eyes, ears and mouths. For them, the world’s only reliable, baseload, zero-emissions fuel source is an evil whose role they refuse to see, hear or consider.
This is confounding when green-left politicians in Europe have long embraced nuclear and 22 leading economies at the COP28 conference in Dubai last December pledged to triple their nuclear energy output.
The green left in Australia shuns modernity for sham reasons; it cites only cost but this cannot be genuine given its lack of interest in the costs of renewables and clear evidence that many nations are reaping price benefits from nuclear. The costs of not developing a domestic nuclear industry need to be confronted. We would consign ourselves to a more sparse and vulnerable electricity grid that damages environments and landscapes. It also would face permanently high transmission and energy storage costs.
We would turn our backs on a hi-tech industry that plays a role in all modern economies and we would do this while attempting to run (and build) nuclear-propelled submarines. Madness. We also would surrender energy security, undermining economic fundamentals. Australia’s strategic rivals would encourage us to eschew nuclear and persist with our renewables plus storage experiment (especially if they buy our coal, gas and iron ore while selling us wind turbines and solar panels).
Former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull posted on X about the nuclear debate, asserting that nuclear could not “firm” renewable energy such as wind and solar. “To firm them we need flexible, dispatchable sources of zero emission energy such as pumped hydro, batteries or green hydrogen,” Turnbull said. “Nuclear reactors cannot turn on and off, ramp up and down like hydro or batteries can. Nuclear reactors generate continuously.”
And he said that like it is a bad thing. Nuclear would stabilise our grid with constant power and at times of low demand there might be little need for renewables. Perhaps that is why renewable investors, including in green hydrogen, are so antagonistic to nuclear. Excess power from a nuclear plant at times of low demand might be used to generate hydrogen or desalinate seawater. Next Turnbull will criticise drip irrigation because it invariably leads to moist soil.
Another film from Britain caught my attention this week. It was an old newsreel-style update on the 1956 commissioning of Britain’s (and the world’s) first commercial nuclear reactor at Calder Hall in Cumbria. Over wonderful black-and-white footage of workers toiling away on gargantuan cement and steel installations, there is a voice-over in well-modulated King’s English that has a hint of derring-do in the delivery.
“Far below, work started on the intricate task of creating the heart of the reactor furnace, to draw heat from the new fuel of the atomic age,” we are told. Yep, they were proud. Here was a damaged and straitened post-war nation justifiably taking pride in its industry and innovation – it built the reactor in less than three years. Compare that to our negativity and self-doubt.
The green left here argues all this technology is beyond us and that we should build wind farms and power lines across the country while we leave the rest of the world to modernise, and just hope for the best. It is a scientific cringe.
In an extraordinary interview on Tuesday Sarah Ferguson on the ABC’s 730 harangued opposition climate change and energy spokesman Ted O’Brien for daring to suggest this nation could deliver a nuclear plant inside 12 years and do it in a costly manner. Apparently, this can happen only overseas.
Yet the same host spoke with Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen last November and when he claimed to be turning Australia into a “renewable energy superpower” they both managed to keep straight faces.
Facts and science have lost relevance in favour of ideology and sanctimony.
Science tells us, as the International Energy Agency concludes, that current technologies cannot deliver net zero by 2050. Neither can net zero be delivered without nuclear energy. Yet the government’s pretence continues, and the Greens and the media cheer. Just this week Anthony Albanese hailed a company investing $44m in electric trucks – but taxpayers tipped in almost half ($20m) and no one mentioned none of this would be possible without coal-generated power.
Turnbull and Bowen complain about timelines and costs for nuclear while somewhere underneath the Snowy Mountains lies a bedevilled tunnelling machine called Florence that Turnbull set to work on what was supposed to be a $2bn, five-year project but that will cost $20bn across at least 10 years and will provide only some energy storage if we are lucky.
Around the country communities are objecting to renewable projects and the transmission lines to connect them – legal and political battles are enjoined. Little wonder renewable energy investment, despite being favoured by laws, subsidies and market rules, is starting to drop off.
Bowen is set to trump a long list of failed energy ministers. One of the key considerations on election timing will be energy – can Labor risk an election early next year if there is a threat of blackouts from December through to March?
We know what a zero-emissions environment looks like – South Australia lived it for a day during the 2016 statewide blackout that occurred only because of how vulnerable the renewables push had made them. We saw what a low-emissions world looks like too, during the pandemic – people staying home, empty shopping centres, empty CBDs, empty airports, empty streets and empty skies.
The challenge for the world is keeping businesses open and skies busy while getting emissions to zero. It is unclear whether this is even possible. But it is certainly not possible without nuclear energy.
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19 March, 204
EU takes the ax to green farming rules
The European Commission is finalizing a series of legislative proposals that would severely weaken environmental requirements for farmers — flying in the face of advice by its top scientists that agriculture must become more sustainable or it will be decimated by climate change.
The proposals, seen by POLITICO, would end a requirement to set aside land to promote biodiversity, making it and other measures — such as minimizing tillage to prevent soil erosion — voluntary. Taken together, they would enable farmers to get EU subsidies even if they don't meet the most basic environmental standards, known as conditionality.
The dramatic policy reversal by Ursula von der Leyen’s Commission comes at the urging of national governments desperate to quell protests by farmers who have taken to the streets around Europe, and in Brussels, to vent their fury at the environmental red tape they say is destroying their livelihoods.
But it also ignores a stark warning by the EU’s own scientists, in a first-of-its-kind report this week by the European Environment Agency, which singles out agriculture as a sector where urgent action is needed if the Continent is to avoid catastrophic floods, years-long droughts and scorching heatwaves.
Civil society groups and green lawmakers warn that the push would undo what little environmental reform has been added in recent years to the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), the EU farm subsidy program that eats up a third of the bloc’s budget, locking taxpayers' money into subsidizing farmers to maintain the status quo for years to come.
“Wiping out decades of incremental progress towards sustainable farming for short-term electoral concerns is a huge mistake, and all of society will pay a high price,” said Marco Contiero, Greenpeace EU's agriculture campaigner.
The policy reversal by Ursula von der Leyen’s Commission comes at the urging of national governments desperate to quell protests by farmers | Frederick Florin/AFP via Getty Images
“Farmers are experiencing serious hardship, but these proposals do little to address that and just strip away some of the last shreds of environmental protection in the EU’s farm policy.”
Conditionality
The CAP includes a set of “good agricultural and environmental conditions” — or GAECs — that farmers must meet to receive subsidies.
The EU executive will propose to remove obligations for four of them, and instead provide financial compensation to farmers who voluntarily implement them.
https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-takes-the-ax-to-green-farming-rules/
***********************************************UK: Net Zero is dead. Only the fanatics haven’t realised it
If building new gas plants is inconsistent with Net Zero, then Net Zero is inconsistent with a functioning power grid
Rishi Sunak has made the case for building new gas-fired power plants on the grounds that reliable sources of electricity generation are needed to back up the intermittency of wind and solar generation. This simple statement of reality has prompted hostile comments from the usual suspects, claiming that this is inconsistent with Net Zero commitments.
…
The response to Mr Sunak’s article illustrates that many advocates of Net Zero live in a fantasy world and are, apparently, content to sacrifice the future welfare of the UK’s population on the altar of arbitrary and artificial goals. In our world there is a simple choice to ensure reliable electricity supplies in 2035. Either we build a lot of new gas-fired generation capacity, or we extend the life of older inefficient plants. In neither case is a fully decarbonised electricity system possible, but the option of doing little or nothing is clearly worse than making the commitment to building new plants.
There are too many artificial deadlines in the climate change field, but this one is real. It takes between 3 and 5 years to build a new gas-fired power plant at an existing site under the UK’s current planning system. Another 1-2 years is required for contracts and project finance. These are minimum periods as 30 GW of plant capacity can’t be built at one time. A program of this scale must start in 2025 or 2026 to have any chance of meeting the UK’s needs in 2035. Unless we start now, we face blackouts within a decade.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/03/12/rishi-sunak-gas-power-station-net-zero-blackouts/
****************************************************Flawed Polling Study Claims That Climate Change Influences Elections
In a recent post by The Conversation, “Climate change matters to more and more people – and could be a deciding factor in the 2024 election,” one of the authors of a recent study looking at polling and Americans’ attitudes towards climate change claims that despite being low on most people’s list of concerns, it actually plays a potentially deciding role in elections. This is unsubstantiated, and not only can the results can be manipulated based on what polling you select, but the researchers appear to have -at best- some major blind spots when it comes to interpreting their data.
Matt Burgess, assistant professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, wrote the Conversation piece, and is also one of the authors on the study being referred to. Right away, he admits that American voters’ top priorities are economics, inflation, crime, health care, education, and immigration. This is consistently shown to be true, as Climate Realism has pointed out numerous times. Not only do Americans rank other issues higher than climate change, but it is actually ranked last or tied for last for the majority of people when compared to other issues, even other environmental issues.
Still, Burgess insists that actually climate change has influenced presidential elections, writing “[d]espite this, research that I conducted with my colleages suggests that concern about climate change has had a significant effect on voters’ choices in the past two presidential elections.”
The authors used 2016 and 2020 survey data from “Voter Study Group,” a subsidiary of “Democracy Fund” which is described as nonpartisan, although they seem to lean decidedly left. The study analyzed “relationships between thousands of voters’ presidential picks in the past two elections with their demographics and their opinions on 22 different issues, including climate change.”
The survey data they used was one where they asked voters to rate climate change as “unimportant,” “not very important,” “somewhat important” or “very important.” Unsurprisingly, they found that 67% of those polled rated climate change as “somewhat” or “very” important, which was an increase from previous polling from 2016. They also report that 77% of those rating climate change as important expressed support for Biden in 2020, and 69% of them supported Hillary Clinton in 2016. Burgess says this suggests “that climate change opinion has been providing the Democrats with a growing electoral advantage,” but this is obviously ignoring another fundamental criterion, which is candidate likeability.
Even among Democrats, Clinton was unpopular. Remembering, for example, that many Bernie Sanders supporters were miffed when Clinton was given the nomination, polling data from the time showed that 12% of Sanders supporters ended up voting for Trump in the general election.
This is a pretty egregious oversight on the part of Burgess, and in the Conversation article, he admits that “[o]ur analysis could not answer” the question of how climate change opinion may have “tipped” the 2020 presidential election, but he offers “educated guesses.”
First, that because recent elections have been very close, “climate change opinion would not need to have a very large effect on voting to change election outcomes.” Number two was that “candidates who deny that climate change is real or a problem might turn off some moderate swing voters,” and third was that “some voters may be starting to see the connections between climate change and the kitchen-table issues that they consider to be higher priorities than climate change.”
None of this is evidenced by the data, and outside research calls it into question. The Pew Research Center tried the same thing in 2020, as covered by Climate Realism at the time, claiming that “a majority of registered voters in the United States say climate change will be a very (42 percent) or somewhat (26 percent) important issue in making their decision about whom to vote for in the presidential election[.]” However, once again, the same poll found that out of 12 policy issues, it was at the bottom of the ranking. The question “How important, if at all, are each of the following issues in making your decision about who to vote for in the 2020 presidential election?” was asked of surveyed voters, and even in that line of questioning, the economy, health care, supreme court appointments, corona virus, economic inequality, foreign policy, gun policy, immigration, racial and ethnic inequality, and violent crime all ranked higher.
Burgess admits towards the end of the article that Democrats “risk losing voters when their policies impose economic costs, or when they are framed as anti-capitalist, racial, or overly pessimistic.” This is a death blow to the idea that climate change gives Democrats a significant benefit in elections, because climate policy is consistently economically costly, especially when discussing banning fossil fuels, and polls show that voters are unwilling to spend very much money at all on climate issues. Additionally, the climate narrative is completely pessimistic with constant alarmist claims of impending doom.
In the end, the article about Burgess’ study reads more like wishful thinking than science. It is transparently an effort to use polling in order to influence people into believing that the climate issue is more important in their peers’ minds, so that social pressure will make it a priority for them too. If past polling and the reporting on it are anything to go by, this attempt will likely not succeed either, especially as energy costs rise amid the application of climate policy.
**********************************************
Collapsing El Niño spells end to year-long bout of climate hysteria
Lawks-a-mercy, the oceans have stopped boiling. Cancel the slots on cable news for rising media stars and noted climate hysterics Jim Dale and Donnachadh McCarthy, and loosen the protective clothing for the unhinged UN Secretary-General Antonio ‘Boiling’ Guterres. To be serious, the current strong and natural El Niño event is starting to dramatically collapse with critical ocean temperatures in the central tropical Pacific ocean falling from 2.1°C above normal in late November to 1.3°C. The collapse in temperatures is even more dramatic at the sub-surface 300 metre level. In the western tropical Pacific, the temperature has plummeted by nearly 1.5°C, and the water is now cooler than normal.
Apart from damaging a few budding media careers, what does this mean? El Niño is a natural transfer of heat between the oceans and the atmosphere that starts in the Pacific regions. The effects of an El Niño are far from completely understood but they are essentially large heat transfers from the tropics to the northern hemisphere. We have experienced three strong El Niños in the last 25 years – 1998, 2016 and 2023 – and in each case they have disrupted weather patterns around the world. This leads to sudden spikes in ocean temperatures and unusual weather events. Over the last year, these events have been ruthlessly catastrophised by activist scientists, politicians and journalists seeking to nudge citizens to accept the collectivist Net Zero agenda.
One of the main indicators of the progress of El Niño, and its related La Niña oscillation, is the temperature of the water at the surface and near surface. The graph below shows the very rapid recent drop in the sub-surface temperatures for the western tropical Pacific down to much cooler levels.
Atmospheric scientist Professor Cliff Mass of Washington University observes that the entire character of the northern winter has been characterised by a strong El Niño. He notes that in America the impacts have included low snowpack over Washington State, huge snowpack and heavy rain over California and warm temperatures over the Upper Plains States. Of course, similar unusual weather patterns have been recorded over many parts of the planet, along with the ubiquitous pseudoscientific claim that the climate is collapsing and it is all the fault of humans and their wicked ways.
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18 March, 204
Great Barrier Reef undergoing mass bleaching event
Hoagy is back! Professor Hoegh-Guldberg is once again being an alarmist. He went silent for a few years when his own research showed the reef to be very resilient against damage. But he seems to like attention
Less excitable people below, however, give a more positive and much less alarming picture
The Great Barrier Reef has been hit by its fifth mass coral bleaching event in the past eight years. That event has led experts to ask whether Australia's environmental icon has reached a tipping point.
One of the world's leading coral authorities, Ove Hoegh-Guldberg from the University of Queensland, is worried it has.
"I know that's shocking … but that's the type of system we're working with at the moment," Professor Hoegh-Guldberg told 730.
The chief scientist for the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority (GBRMPA), Roger Beeden, believes such a call is premature.
"Right now, what we've got is a system is that is actually bouncing back from particular events," he said
But he does concede the repeated mass bleachings are taking a toll. "There is no doubt that these events are a clear alarm signal that we all need to be acting on climate change," he said.
The GBRMPA declared a mass bleaching event was underway in Australia last week but how it effects the reef remains to be seen.
"We won't know how significant that is until it plays out, and that's going to play out probably over the next six to eight weeks," Dr Beeden said.
The worst affected areas appear to be in the southern region of the reef.
And when 7.30 showed Professor Hoegh-Guldberg video and images taken recently by the media company, the Undertow, he was alarmed. "I think it's devastating," he said.
"This is an advanced bleaching event and I think a lot of coral is going to die.
"Not only are the branching corals bleaching, which are the sensitive ones, but the bommies, really large long-lived corals are also bleaching severely.
"And these bommies have been around for 200 years, so the fact that they're dying under these conditions should set off the alarm."
Not all bleached coral dies – some of the severely bleached coral from a 2016 event in the north of the reef has survived.
"For those areas that were affected by coral bleaching you can see some recovery in some places. Other places there's no recovery and you can see that full spectrum of things," Professor Hoegh-Guldberg said.
He says that while it's vital to ensure reefs remain resilient through programs such as improving water quality, repeated bleaching events make recovery harder each time.
"What we do know is that if you increase the events that damage coral and you don't give them enough time to recover, you end up losing coral," he said.
"We've seen bleaching come and go, and what we're seeing here in this 12 to 18 months is that we will see the tipping point exceeded and the system crash."
"As to what that means exactly in terms of species and how that will play out, the ebbs and flows, we don't fully know," Dr Beeden said.
"It's certainly clear from the global science that we're putting pressure on reefs."
But the GBRMPA chief scientist also says the Great Barrier Reef has shown remarkable resilience.
"Given enough time, and a lack of other pressures, coral reefs in the Great Barrier Reef are still able to bounce back from these kind of events."
A 2022 survey by the Australian Institute for Maritime Science showed coral cover across the Great Barrier Reef was at its highest level since it began records 37 years earlier.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-03-14/great-barrier-reef-mass-bleaching-coral-devastated/103588726
************************************************"Four Pillars of Civilization" Under Attack
Recently, Tucker Carlson did a video about the elite “anti-human death-cult” that’s using “climate change” to reverse the industrial revolution. Returning us to an age where abject poverty — even famine — was a daily reality, while freedom was a distant memory.
During the 15 minute interview, Michael Shellenberger said something that bears comment, that “The pillars of civilization are cheap energy, meritocracy, Law and Order, and free speech. And all four of those pillars are currently under attack.”
This strikes me as a solid list of some of the most important load-bearing walls of civilization that are currently under coordinated attack by the left. And if these pillars go the world we know will be gone.
So how exactly are these pillars holding us up?
The list breaks into two hunks: pillars that maintain prosperity — cheap energy, meritocracy. And pillars that are more fundamental, holding up both prosperity and freedom.
Of course, the two are related; historically, prosperous people demand and mobilize for freedom. Starving people do not.
Cheap Energy
Starting with the prosperity, cheap energy literally transformed mankind. The burning of coal in the 18th century enabled the industrial revolution. Which transformed the world from millennia of survival-level stagnation to a world where every generation has a hard time imagining what life was like for their parents, let alone their grandparents.
Indeed, if you teleported a Roman peasant into 16th century Italy, life would be familiar. The legal system, the property rights regime, how people spent their days. School, career, retirement would all be familiar.
In both eras, almost everybody lived on a farm. Some were artisans, a rare few became intellectuals, artists, or philosophers.
There were minor inventions here and there — better plows, new methods of drying fish. But progress was counted in decades — even centuries.
Now teleport that same 16th century Italian peasant to today and it’s almost unimaginable. According to a YouGov poll, the most popular careers in America right now are Youtuber, musician, artist, actress, and professional gamer.
Meritocracy
Meritocracy is an even more fundamental requirement than cheap energy. Because if we aren’t choosing by quality then institutions fail, and our modern prosperity is built on complex organizations. There are companies alone that employ millions, to say nothing of interconnected institutions like legal communities or the academia-science nexus.
These complex organizations enable complex machines. For example, a single Boeing 747 contains 6 million individual parts which all must function in perfect harmony. Those 6 million parts are produced by tens of millions of people in hundreds of thousands of companies all over the world.
All of this, too, must function in perfect harmony for the individual parts to work.
Now multiply that times everything we use — the refrigerated supply chains that keep food from spoiling on the way from the farm, the electricity or water systems that keep cholera out of the water supply. All of this must work perfectly, millions of parts and tens of millions of people.
Law and Order
Aside from the injustice of innocent men condemned and criminals running free to victimize the innocent, from an economic perspective losing law and order crushes prosperity even more thoroughly than losing meritocracy.
This is for two reasons: the obvious risk of government tyranny, and how a perverted or non-functional legal system crushes incentives to build and create.
After all, if a man doesn’t know what behavior will be punished, or whether his property and even freedom is secure, he won’t invest in the future. Why spend decades building if it can be snatched away. If losing meritocracy guts institutions, losing law and order prevents them existing at all.
We know this today because history is full of failed or corrupted legal systems. Indeed, there are failed countries even today, such as parts of Somalia or Congo. All live on the edge of starvation. Men live for today, grab what they can, devil take the hindmost.
Free Speech
Finally, the most important: Free Speech.
Economically, free speech serves two essential functions: diagnosis and repair. Together, it’s a form of insurance against policies that would collapse the rest of it.
After all, if we can’t communicate, we either can’t see problems coming, or we might blame the wrong thing. We might see there’s not enough food, but we don’t know why. The government might tell us its global warming, or greedy business, or the ever-popular saboteurs.
We become the frog in the boiling pot who’s fast asleep.
Worse, without free speech we have no way to organize and fix it. Historically, elites are small and their victims are many, but elites typically hold an organizational advantage — standing armies, back-room cabals. Without free speech the many cannot organize against a predatory few.
We become the frog who’s paralyzed.
What’s Coming Next
In the grand scheme of history, we’ve only just begun to unravel our civilization. I’d date the start to the Progressive era a century ago, when totalitarian socialism gained the upper hand by making a devil’s bargain with liberal democracy: give us control and we will let you sit on the throne.
Over that century, the totalitarians have advanced in fits and starts, each time pushed back as free speech rallied the victims. So it was after World War I, after the Depression, and in the 1960’s reaction against government authority. Each time the totalitarians broke it, and the masses rejected them.
I think we’re entering another major offensive from the totalitarians, which I’d date to 2016 when Brexit and Donald Trump convinced the totalitarians they’re losing. They reacted as they always do, by over-reaching for control. And, like past offenses, they are going for the pillars. The load-bearing walls holding up civilization.
These next couple years will be critical: Will they consolidate their gains and enter a new era of totalitarianism, perhaps as bad as 1300’s absolutism in Europe. Or, once again, will free speech allow us to diagnose and correct the threats in time. This time fortified by the internet — by the very fact you can still read this article.
https://cornwallalliance.org/2024/02/four-pillars-of-civilization-under-attack/
**********************************************U.S. Seeks to Boost Nuclear Power After Decades of InertiaAustralia: Battery Storage Plans Fan Community Bushfire Fears
A northeast Victorian community is fighting plans to build battery storage in an area of extreme bushfire risk, as the state government closes one avenue of appeal.
Mint Renewables and Trina Solar plan to build two battery energy storage systems (BESS) near the Dederang terminal station in the Kiewa Valley.
“It’s just ridiculous,” Dederang’s Sharon McEvoy, who owns farmland next to the proposed sites, told AAP.
“It’s north-facing, and backs right up next to the bush ... surrounded by bushfire management overlays.”
Ms. McEvoy led a community meeting, as more than 200 frustrated residents of Dederang and nearby communities filled the recreation reserve hall and spilled out onto the deck and foyer.
“We know the fire risk,” she told the crowd on March 14.
Battery fires can burn for several days and release toxic and flammable gasses, as seen in 2021’s four-day fire at the Tesla Big Battery site near Geelong, west of Melbourne.
“We care about the environment, the waterways, and the land where we live and work,” said Ms. McEvoy, while fighting back tears.
“The government is sacrificing the wellbeing of rural communities.”
The meeting came hours after the Victorian government announced plans to fast track new renewables projects, including stripping the ability of third parties to appeal planning decisions in the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal (VCAT).
“Once the reforms come into effect, new permit applications for batteries can be considered under this new accelerated pathway,” a spokeswoman for the department transport and planning told AAP.
“Our accelerated pathway for renewables projects will help deliver cheaper and cleaner energy to Victorian households sooner.”
The department has not yet received permit applications for either of the Dederang battery storage projects, and applications made from April 1 can be considered for fast tracking.
The state government maintained community voices would continue to be protected, despite the curtailing of VCAT access.
“Third party objections will still have a place in the approvals process, but this change prevents time-consuming and repeated delays that hold these projects back for years,” the Victorian government said on March 14.
Nationals senator Bridget McKenzie said the issue went far beyond a state planning issue.
“What is happening to your community is happening right across the country,” Senator McKenzie told the crowd.
“We’re all on the journey to net zero, but we need to share the burden.”
Both Chinese-owned Trina Solar and Mint, owned by Infratil and the Commonwealth Superannuation Corporation, opted not to attend the meeting.
“We are updating our design and developing mitigation measures to ensure the project is well-informed by local knowledge,” Mint said in a statement.
“We will continue to be open and responsive to questions and constructive feedback.”
Ovens Valley state MP Tim McCurdy said residents should direct their concerns to Victoria’s minister for planning, Sonya Kilkenny.
“We’re not anti-renewables, we just want communication,” Mr. McCurdy told the crowd.
“We want to know what’s going on.”
https://www.theepochtimes.com/world/battery-storage-plans-fan-community-bushfire-fears-5607927
***************************************17 March, 204
Little-known international NGO finalizing building code forcing US homes to be green
An international organization that develops model codes and standards for new construction is quietly preparing an energy conservation code that opponents argue is a backdoor climate initiative and will lead to higher home prices.
The International Code Council (ICC) — a Washington, D.C.-based group that regularly issues more than a dozen codes regulating new construction and impacting billions of people worldwide — is expected to finalize its 2024 International Energy Conservation Code (IECC) early next week. While previous IECCs received little opposition, the 2024 version has been widely criticized for prioritizing climate initiatives over energy efficiency.
"They're incentivizing electrification and discriminating against the natural gas industry by excluding it from being part of the code," Karen Harbert, the president and CEO of the American Gas Association (AGA), told Fox News Digital in an interview. "That really is anticompetitive behavior."
"If you are about energy efficiency, you should say, ‘We are about energy efficiency however you get there’ — being fuel neutral. But in this case, they are prescribing the way to get there, and it only includes electrification."
AGA, whose members provide natural gas service to 180 million customers nationwide, has argued in recent months that the ICC developed its 2024 energy efficiency code with "serious lapses in due process" by not involving them. It further said the code would harm consumers and lead to higher costs.
The leading gas industry group, other energy industry associations, housing groups and the ICC's own Northeast regional branch filed appeals in late December and early January asking for a revision to the 2024 IECC. However, the ICC's appeals board recommended this month that those appeals be rejected, leaving the group's board of directors with the final decision. That's expected to come Monday.
Among the provisions opposed, the draft IECC, which has been in development for years, requires new one- and two-family dwellings and townhouses to install electrical infrastructure for home electric vehicle chargers. It also mandates that new homes are equipped with the electrical wiring needed for a solar panel system and all-electric appliances.
According to the AGA, those measures and other provisions were largely included in the IECC as part of an omnibus package in September 2022 after rejection through the normal process.
"The activists that are supporting an all-electrification agenda tried to come in through the policy front door, which was to ban natural gas in cities, and that got overturned in the Ninth Circuit," Harbert told Fox News Digital. "They tried to ban gas at the state level, and that's now being challenged. And they have tried to do it through regulation and have been unsuccessful."
"So, you go to a process that is very much under the radar, very wonky, very technical, but with the same objectives," she continued, referencing the IECC process. "You come in the front door, you come in the side door, now you're coming in the back door."
In addition to AGA, the American Public Gas Association, the appliance manufacturer trade group Air Conditioning, Heating, and Refrigeration Institute, the Building Owners and Managers Association (BOMA) and the National Multifamily Housing Council (NMHC) also filed appeals to the 2024 IECC.
"As long-standing supporters of the ICC codes and standards, we are concerned that this version of the IECC misses the mark," Paula Cino, NMHC's vice president for construction, development, land use and counsel, told Fox News Digital in a written statement.
"Without action from the ICC Board to cabin provisions that exceed the bounds of the code, this IECC would threaten housing affordability and weigh renters down with costs for unwanted or unusable technologies," she added.
In its December appeal filed jointly with BOMA, NMHC particularly criticized the IECC's electric vehicle charging provision and another provision requiring new homes to have so-called demand responsive controls for water heating equipment, allowing a third party to reduce a home's energy consumption in times of high demand. NMHC and BOMA argued that the 2024 IECC would place additional costs on Americans, including low-income families.
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Some PA Democrats Are Pushing Back Against Eco-Fundamentalism
In a sign of how far left the Democratic Party has veered, once-avowed progressives are now hesitant to embrace eco-fundamentalism—the dogmatic ideology that vilifies affordable energy, oversells “green” initiatives and advances ruinous policies.
Consider Sens. Bob Casey (D-Pa.) and John Fetterman (D-Pa.). They’re both loyal, party-line Pennsylvania Democrats. But they’re also politicians who know which way the wind is blowing with the American people. So they broke ranks with President Biden on his liquid natural gas (LNG) export ban.
“If this decision puts Pennsylvania energy jobs at risk, we will push the Biden Administration to reverse this decision,” they said.
Fetterman and Casey were joined by fellow Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) in opposing the ban, but not all liberals are on board. Their party-mates in Washington, D.C. would be wise to follow their example and moderate on energy policy, or they will soon discover that as Pennsylvania goes, so goes the nation.
The warnings appear to be falling on deaf ears among Democratic leaders. Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro’s efforts to keep the state in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), along with Biden’s LNG ban, are among the most recent efforts to impose extremist energy policies.
When he was running for office, Shapiro declared that RGGI was not “real action” and added that it likely wouldn’t address climate change. But as governor, he has become its champion.
Biden and Shapiro are singing from the same eco-fundamentalist hymnal. Their siren song would cripple American energy production and independence. Though an easy pitch to blue states, these purported carbon-reduction schemes are harder to sell in energy-producing purple states such as Pennsylvania, as Shapiro knows perfectly well.
RGGI, like the LNG ban, is not popular in the Keystone state. This multi-state compact taxes carbon-emitting companies and doles out the extracted funds from successful energy businesses in corporate welfare to renewable energy businesses and conservation organizations.
A Commonwealth Court recently struck down Pennsylvania’s entry into RGGI, calling the carbon tax illegal. Much to the chagrin of the 71 percent of Pennsylvania voters who oppose the program, Shapiro appealed the decision and prolonged the RGGI’s unwelcomed presence in Pennsylvania, which will now come before the state’s Supreme Court.
Before RGGI, Pennsylvania had already significantly reduced carbon emissions through the introduction of natural gas. In fact, the state’s carbon-reduction efforts had already been exceeding RGGI member states. From 2007 to 2019, RGGI states cut emissions by 37 percent. Comparatively, Pennsylvania cut more, reducing emissions by 40 percent. Since 1970, Pennsylvania’s carbon dioxide emissions have dropped 30 percent, whereas national emissions have increased by 15 percent.
Increased production and extraction of natural gas, which emits half as much carbon dioxide as coal, drastically reduced emissions in Pennsylvania. The most precipitous drop in emissions occurred following the 2005 shale boom.
Pennsylvania did this all without RGGI.
Ultimately, RGGI doesn’t decrease emissions—it merely exports them. Comparing energy consumption of RGGI and non-RGGI-member states in the Eastern Interconnection, a 2021 study found decreased emissions in the RGGI states but increased emissions in non-RGGI states—a phenomenon experts refer to as “leakage.” By reducing consumption and production in member states, RGGI’s leakage incentivizes neighboring states to pick up the slack.
RGGI states rely heavily on importing their electricity. Based on total consumption, three of the top-five net-importing states—Massachusetts, Maryland, and Delaware—are RGGI states.
Pennsylvania, on the other hand, is an energy juggernaut, home to abundant natural gas reserves, a well-established history of coal production, and a robust nuclear industry. This full-bodied statewide production inspired one pundit to call the Keystone State “the Saudi Arabia of North American energy supply.”
Energy production is the lifeblood of Pennsylvania’s economy. Energy production supports more than 423,000 jobs and contributes more than $75 billion annually to the commonwealth’s economy. Cutting into Pennsylvania’s energy sector threatens the livelihoods of hard-working Pennsylvanians and the communities where energy extraction is the leading employer.
Moreover, increased energy costs translate into increased utility bills, placing an undue burden on consumers already struggling with the higher cost of living. Virginia, also now a purple state, is in the process of leaving RGGI due to increased rates caused by the program’s caps. Needing $370 million in allowances to offset its above-cap emissions, Dominion Energy, headquartered in Richmond, added a surcharge to its monthly billing to make up the difference, passing the cost of RGGI along to Virginia residents.
As Virginia exits RGGI, Pennsylvania and other states must follow suit. Senators Casey and Fetterman would do well to make their opposition to Biden’s LNG export ban consistent by opposing RGGI. Governor Shapiro should stop trying to have it both ways on RGGI, and should clarify his policy toward Pennsylvania’s energy sector by dropping his appeal of the Commonwealth Court’s decision.
As the second-largest energy-producing state and the eighth-highest net exporter, Pennsylvania is a microcosm of our country’s growing momentum toward energy independence. In 2019, American energy exports exceeded imports for the first time since 1952, providing diplomatic leverage to the U.S. and freeing our reliance on foreign despots and cartels. From Ukraine to the Middle East, the escalating specter of global conflict and intensifying chaos abroad make our need for energy independence more urgent than ever.
From RGGI to LNG bans, destructive “green” initiatives—and their quixotic quest for carbon neutrality—undermine our national momentum toward energy independence. Instead of one-size-fits-all carbon-reduction plans, state legislatures should embrace and strengthen our country’s position as an international leader in energy production.
This should not be a partisan issue—it is an American issue.
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Everything Reminds Me Of Tim: Biography Of Tim Ball
Since the inception of the climate scare a lot of us skeptics have been elderly and we are dying out. I am 80 so it may be my time soon. Tim lived to 84
John O'Sullivan
New biography of one of the world’s best skeptical climatologists, Dr Tim Ball, has just been released. Written by Tim’s widow, Marty, it provides unique personal insights into the life and work of a most accomplished critic of the junk science of man-made global warming.
Nobody has done as much – for as long and at such great cost – to expose the lies and misapprehensions over the most enduring and organised crime syndicate in modern history. Tim Ball obtained his PhD in the field of climatology in London in 1983 and had no qualms disavowing himself of nonsense scare stories being peddled by university colleagues over alleged ‘dangerous’ human CO2 emissions.
Over the subsequent 40 years the tenacious but avuncular Dr Ball produced countless scientific articles, lectures, seminars, books and radio and TV interviews in his mission to offer balance to the official doomsday narrative.
In early 2010 it was my honor and pleasure to count Tim as a dear friend and colleague when he joined our nascent international team of climate researchers who collaborated in writing the world’s first and only full-volume debunk of the science behind it all – ‘Slaying the Sky Dragon: Death of the Greenhouse Gas Theory‘ (2010).
Thanks to Tim’s input Father Time and the scientific method has vindicated our book despite the vitriol and ridicule flung at us. Our research and analyes is proven entirely accurate in revealing that not only is carbon dioxide not our climate’s control knob, but this trace atmospheric gas serves only to COOL, and not warm anything.
Such is the extent to which midwittery, group think and corruption has poisoned the intellectual well of academic thought that even now, countless famed scholars still dare not openly admit they had it wrong and CO2 is innocent.
Dr Ball was a humble, hard-working but inspirational thought leader whose mantra throughout the hard-fought and often bitter climate debate was to remain civil – ‘disagree, but without being disagreeable.’
https://principia-scientific.com/everything-reminds-me-of-tim-biography-of-tim-ball/
*******************************************Australian Alps snow cover to fare worst in the world under climate change, German study finds
And pigs might fly. Prophecies are worthless. The best snow in our general area is in New Zealand, anyway
A grim picture has been painted of the future of the Australian Alps, with research predicting snow cover days may fall by 78 per cent by the end of the century.
Worldwide, 13 per cent of ski areas are predicted to lose all natural snow cover by 2100.
Researchers from the University of Bayreuth in Germany have today published a study in the journal PLOS One, prompting calls from academics to reinforce an urgent need to address climate change.
The study puts Australia's rate of decline as the highest when compared to six other major skiing regions in the world, including New Zealand, Europe and Japan.
"I'm not surprised by the findings of this report, to be honest," Climatologist and Australian National University Professor Janette Lindesay said.
"There's no doubt that we're heading for an even warmer future."
The study found one in eight ski areas across the globe, or 13 per cent of winter ski slopes, were predicted to lose all natural snow cover this century under a high emissions scenario.
High emissions referred to one of three climate change scenarios based on the Shared Socio-economic Pathways model laid out in the study, alongside "low" and "very high".
Study co-author Dr Veronika Mitterwallner said her team focused on the "high emission" projection to summarise their findings because they considered it the most current and realistic scenario of the three.
Despite this, the study found annual snow cover days across all seven "major mountain areas with downhill skiing will significantly decrease worldwide" across all three scenarios.
Professor Lindesay said it reinforced a need to ramp up efforts to tackle climate change and lessen potential damage to alpine environments.
"The scenarios are effectively storylines … taking into account possible future carbon dioxide emissions, socio-economic circumstances, population growth and possible policy responses to global heating," she said.
"The best thing we can do is get emissions down to net zero as fast as we possibly can."
The study predicts snow resorts may need to move or expand into less populated mountain areas at higher elevations to combat the effects of climate change.
But University of Canberra based geomorphologist Phil Campbell said that would not necessarily work in Australia where ski resorts were at a lower altitude compared to other countries.
"One of the problems in Australia is that we're fairly low in our ski resorts, which are already at the very top of our mountains," he said.
"We're not going to have the same ability as many other countries do to be able to relocate our ski resorts.
"The same goes for endangered plant species as well, because there's nowhere for them to retreat to."
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14 March, 204
President Biden’s Climate Aspirations
Most of what the political class calls policies are really aspirations with no policy content. They are feel-good statements that promote goals most people would support, with no associated policies that would move toward those goals. The following is an example.
The White House’s web page for the National Climate Task Force (skip down to the section “President Biden’s Actions to Tackle the Climate Crisis”) lists emissions goals for 2030, 2035, and 2050, well after President Biden will have left office, even if he serves out a second term. These are aspirations and aspirations that would have to be met by his successors, letting the president off the accountability hook.
What prompted me to write about this subject was this article titled “Biden’s scaled-back power rule raises doubts over US climate target,” which reports on an actual policy. The Biden administration has decided to exclude natural gas power plants from upcoming emissions standards.
The key point in this example is that the president’s actual policy works against the president’s stated goals.
Further down, the website lists the Biden administration’s accomplishments toward fulfilling his climate aspirations. They include a record number of electric vehicles and charging stations, new solar and wind projects, and supporting domestic manufacturing of clean energy technologies.
Those may be good things, but they are things the private sector is doing. “Support” isn’t a policy; it’s an attempt to take political credit for private sector action. If these things count as accomplishments, they are private sector accomplishments, not Biden administration accomplishments.
The website also credits the Biden administration for finalizing the strongest vehicle emissions standards in American history and proposing more robust standards for greenhouse gas and air pollution emissions. Those are not policies; they are aspirations. Should those aspirations be realized, it will be because the private sector has figured out how to reduce its emissions.
As the political season ramps up this year, notice that the “policies” that politicians will propose are not really policies at all; they are aspirations. They say, “Here are some good things I would like to accomplish if I am elected,” but they don’t say how they intend to accomplish them. They amount to feel-good slogans rather than actual public policies.
Most people will be in favor of mitigating climate change, reducing crime, securing the border, and reducing the budget deficit. Those are feel-good aspirations. Fewer people will favor specific policies aimed at realizing those aspirations. That’s why politicians talk about aspirations rather than specific policies. That’s also why those aspirations often fail to be realized.
The aspirations are popular; the policies to accomplish them are less so. That’s why the Biden administration is enacting a policy that works against his own stated goals.
https://blog.independent.org/2024/03/05/president-bidens-climate-aspirations/
**************************************************UK: Net Zero an urgent threat to national security
A new paper from Net Zero Watch makes a comprehensive case that efforts to decarbonise the steel and electricity fundamentals of the economy now represent a real and present danger to national security.
In an important intervention, Sir Gerald Howarth, Minister for International Security Strategy under David Cameron, says in the paper’s foreword:
“Our adversaries are watching us like hawks, so let us leave them in no doubt: we are rearming and rebuilding, and Net Zero is firmly on hold.”
Professor Gwythian Prins, a defence expert and one of the paper’s authors, agrees that with the recent deterioration of the world's security situation, luxury beliefs such as Net Zero must be jettisoned as a matter of urgency:
“This is the moment when the music stops. The Port Talbot closure harshly exposes the costs of luxury ‘green’ beliefs. We cannot be dependent on imports for the full range of necessary steels to rebuild our arsenals – the Navy first and foremost – and, most ridiculously, we cannot depend for them on our global antagonists."
"Furthermore, our armed forces are wholly dependent on oil to keep them in the field, and our electricity grid will collapse without gas. Any attempt to abandon them will leave us entirely at the mercy of hostile powers."
The paper also includes contributions from Gautam Kalghatgi, a professor of combustion and energy engineering, who ridicules plans to decarbonise the armed forces through use of batteries and biofuels, and the historian Guy de la Bédoyère, who sets out the eternal historical lesson that technological laggards usually end up the victims of conquest by their more advanced neighbours.
Mr de la Bédoyère said:
“It is impossible to diminish the effectiveness of a nation’s armed forces without making it a sitting duck for a more ambitious rival’s greed. But that’s exactly what our leaders seem to want to do.”
Andrew Montford, director of Net Zero Watch said:
“The three contributors make it clear that Net Zero is leaving us at the mercy of hostile powers. A Net Zero army and a Net Zero economy could both be brought to their knees in a matter of days. In these dangerous times, our politicians must re-order their priorities.”
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Population is not being told the true cost of Net Zero, warns former World Bank economist
Squeezing domestic consumption, in other words making the already squeezed poor even poorer by removing all their remaining luxuries in life (older cars, cheap foreign holidays, meat), is the only realistic way to fund the enormous sums required for the Net Zero energy transition.
Bankrupt, blackout Britain where the ever-expanding ranks of the poor get clobbered, open borders place intolerable burdens on public spending and services, the rich spivs get richer backing heavily-subsidised energy white elephants – and those of a certain age look back to the good old days of the 1970s. That isn’t quite how Professor Gordon Hughes spells it out in his excellent new report that crunches the energy transition numbers of the collectivist Net Zero project, but it might be considered a fair summation of reading between the lines.
The insanity of Net Zero becomes clearer by the day. The idea that hydrocarbons – a natural resource whose use from medicines to reliable energy is ubiquitous in modern industrial society – can be removed within less than 30 years is ridiculous. In his report published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation, Professor Hughes concerns himself with the transition from hydrocarbons to ‘green’ technologies such as wind and solar. Forget all the politically-inspired low-ball figures of transition, he is suggesting. Looking at you, Climate Change Committee. It is likely that the amount of new investment needed for the transition will be a minimum of 5% of gross domestic product for the next 20 years, and might exceed 7.5%. Gordon Hughes is a former World Bank economist, and is Professor of Economics at the University of Edinburgh.
There is no chance of borrowing such an “astronomical” amount, notes Hughes, and the only viable way to raise the cash for new capital expenditure would be a two decades-long reduction in private consumption of up to 10%. “Such a shock has never occurred in the last century outside war, and even then never for more than a decade,” he notes.
Recent polling in the U.S. has shown that the desire of a majority of citizens to pay for Net Zero barely stretches to more than the ‘chump’ change in their back pockets. “Commitment to the energy transition is a classic ‘luxury belief’ held most strongly by those who are sufficiently well-off not to worry about the costs… Indeed at least some of those who promote the transition most strongly are among those who expect to gain from the business opportunities.” On this latter point, Hughes was possibly recalling the recent activities of rising media star Dale Vince (£110 million in wind subsidies to date, and counting).
Politicians sometimes blather about the pioneering role taken by European countries in Net Zero. Hughes points out that leaders in China and India are not fools. “Posturing about targets that are patently not achievable and might be economically ruinous is unlikely to convince anyone, although most will be too polite to point this out,” he observed.
Writing a foreword, Lord Frost identified a make-believe world inhabited by Net Zero proponents where it is claimed costs will magically come down, new technologies will somehow be invented and promised green growth will pay for everything. “But they never give any evidence for believing this – and, where we can check what they say, for example in the real costs of wind power, we can see that these cost reductions are simply not happening,” he said.
On the immigration front, Hughes notes a 1% increase in the British population every year. He notes that 4% of GDP must be invested every year in new (not replacement) capital per head. Of course nothing like this is being spent and capital per head is falling rapidly. “Just maintaining the amounts of capital per head will eat up an amount of investment equivalent to that required for the energy transition,” he states.
Squeezing domestic consumption, in other words making the already squeezed poor even poorer by removing all their remaining luxuries in life (older cars, cheap foreign holidays, meat), is the only realistic way to fund the enormous sums required for the Net Zero energy transition.
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Australian conservative opposition Confirms It Will Develop 6 Nuclear Power Sites
Opposition Leader Peter Dutton has confirmed the Coalition’s energy policy—expected to be released ahead of the federal budget in May—will probably include six nuclear plant sites.
While he has yet to name the exact locations, Tasmania has been ruled out as a potential host state. It’s considered likely that the reactors would be built on the sites of old coal stations to take advantage of existing transmission infrastructure.
This means the Labor-held seat of Hunter, the independent seat of Calare, and Coalition-held Flynn, Maranoa, O’Connor, and Gippsland may be all on the shortlist for nuclear power stations.
At the Australian Financial Review Business Summit in Sydney on March 12, Mr. Dutton said the Coalition would encourage nearby communities to accept the plants by offering them subsidised energy—a model he said was used in the United States. He told the audience that it would also provide an incentive for the industry to establish jobs.
“Nuclear is the only proven technology which emits zero emission and firms up renewables,” he said.
The opposition’s position comes as modelling on Australia’s net zero transition estimates the country will need to invest hundreds of billions, and even trillions, to fully reduce emissions.
The tremendous cost stems from the widescale investment in wind turbines, solar panels, batteries, and pumped hydro (where available), but also into transmission infrastructure, as well as electrification of public transport networks and private vehicles (buying EVs instead of regular cars).
Nuclear Detractors Also Point to Cost
Energy experts say it’s difficult to estimate the cost of transitioning to nuclear, given the technology is not currently commercially available.
But during the speech, Mr. Dutton dismissed what he described as “straw man arguments” against nuclear, including cost.
“Australia’s energy mix is about 21 percent gas, 47 per cent coal, and 32 percent renewables. Ontario province in Canada is about 5 percent gas, 35 percent renewables, and 60 percent nuclear. South Korea is about 30 percent gas, 30 percent coal, and 30 percent nuclear, with the balance mainly hydro … Australians pay almost double what Ontario and South Korean residents pay,” he said.
He said reactors produce a “small amount of waste” and said the government had already signed up to deal with nuclear waste via the AUKUS agreement.
The Australian Radioactive Waste Agency (ARWA) found there were 2,061 cubic metres of intermediate-level waste in 2021, compared to 1,771 cubic metres in 2018. It projects 4,377 cubic metres in the next 50 years, compared to 3,734 cubic metres projected in 2018.
Intermediate-level waste is produced in nuclear medicine—for example, imaging, scanning and radiotherapy.
Currently, the waste is stored in more than 100 places, but most of it is held at the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO) facilities in Lucas Heights, Sydney.
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13 March, 204
America’s Energy Scam! A deliberate exploitation of humanity that only increases emissions!
America is aggressively pursuing “green” electricity and actively phasing out crude oil to reduce emissions generated in America by deliberately increasing worldwide exploitations of humanity, environmental degradation, and increased emissions.
California Governor Gavin Newsom, President Joe Biden, and world leaders are not cognizant enough to know that wind turbines and solar panels only generate occasional electricity and cannot manufacture tires, cable insulation, asphalt, medicines, and the more than 6,000 products now made from the petrochemical derivatives manufactured from crude oil.
Without a replacement for the petrochemical derivatives manufactured from crude oil, phasing out oil would also phase out the medical, military, transportation, communications, and electrical power industries, none of which existed before the 1800s.
Climate change may impact millions, but without fossil fuels and the infrastructures and products we have today that did not exist before the 1800s, we may lose billions from diseases, malnutrition, and weather-related deaths.
Eradicating the world of crude oil usage would ground the 20,000 commercial aircraft, and more than 50,000 military aircraft worldwide, leave the 50,000 merchant ships tied up at docks, and discontinue the military and space programs! Without a backup plan to replace crude oil, the 8 billion on this planet will face the greatest threat to humanity without jets, merchant ships, and space programs.
America’s climate policies being introduced are particularly harmful to developing countries. America is probably the most environmentally controlled country in the world, but by deliberately relying on poorer developing countries for our fuels and products, we are “leaking” to other countries:
In the aftermath of the 1973 oil crisis in 1977, the Department of Energy was established to lessen our dependence on foreign oil, but today, with its 14,000 employees and a 48 billion dollar budget, the D.O.E. continues to remain dead silent and has allowed California, the fourth-largest economy in the world to increase imported crude oil from 5 percent in 1992 to almost 60 percent today of total consumption.
California is home to 9 International airports, 41 Military airports, and 3 of the largest shipping ports in America. California’s growing dependency on other nations is a serious national security risk for America!
China’s Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin are great war historians. As World War I and II historians, Russia, China, and OPEC know, the country that controls the minerals, crude oil, and natural gas controls the world! It’s shocking that of all the Generals who report to President Biden (Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force, Space Program), NONE have asked the President how we will run our military ships, planes, vehicles, and supply products to our troops WITHOUT oil?
It’s a no-brainer that an attack on the ports at San Francisco, Los Angeles, or Long Beach could paralyze the American economy, causing huge reductions in fuels for California’s in-state infrastructures and stagnating the supply chain of products for the entire country.
Meanwhile, California continues to constantly reduce its in-state refining capacity, which refines fuels and petrochemicals for society’s materialistic demands and continues to grow its dependency on foreign oil.
A few notes about ELECTRICITY:
Everything that needs electricity, such as the basic light bulb, computers, iPhones and iPads, televisions, washing machines, and X-ray equipment, is made with oil derivatives manufactured from crude oil.
Every method of generating electricity, such as wind turbines, solar panels, hydroelectric, nuclear, coal, and natural gas power plants, exists only because the parts and components of the generation system are made with crude oil derivatives.
Renewables, like wind turbines and solar panels, only generate occasional electricity from inconsistent breezes and sunshine but manufacture no products for society.
Fossil fuels, on the other hand, manufacture everything for the 8 billion living on this planet, i.e., products and transportation fuels.
Most importantly, today, there is a lost reality that the primary usage of crude oil is NOT for generating electricity but to manufacture derivatives and fuels, which are the ingredients of everything needed by economies and lifestyles to exist and prosper. Energy realism requires that the legislators, policymakers, and media that demonstrate pervasive ignorance about crude oil usage understand the staggering scale of the decarbonization movement.
The ruling class and powerful elite have yet to identify the replacement for the oil derivatives that are the basis of more than 6,000 products and all the fuels for the merchant ships, aircraft, military, and space programs that support the 8 billion living on this planet.
The American government provides incentives and tax deductions to transition society to EVs, but those incentives are financial incentives for the continuation of Child Labor and Ecological Destruction “Elsewhere.” Is it ethical and moral to provide financial support to developing countries that are mining for exotic minerals and metals to build EV batteries for Americans?
We’ve become a very materialistic society over the last 200 years, and the world has populated from 1 to 8 billion because of all the products and different fuels for planes, ships, trucks, cars, military, and the space program that did not exist before the 1800s. Until a crude oil replacement is identified, the world needs a backup plan that replaces crude oil that will support the manufacturing of the products of our materialistic society.
Today’s materialistic world cannot survive without crude oil! Conversations are needed to discuss the difference between just ELECTRICITY” from renewables and the “PRODUCTS” that are the basis of society’s materialistic world. Wind turbines and solar panels are themselves MADE from oil derivatives and only generate occasional electricity but manufacture NOTHING for society.
How dare the ruling class, powerful elite, and media avoid energy literacy conversations about the “Elephant in the Room.” The end of crude oil, which is manufactured into all the products and transportation fuels that built the world to eight billion people, would be the end of civilization, as “unreliable electricity” from breezes and sunshine cannot manufacture anything.
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Net Zero Watch welcomes British Government recognition of need for gas
Net Zero Watch has welcomed the announcement that the Government will support new gas-fired power stations.
The campaign group said that it was the latest sign of a shift towards more pragmatic energy policies. It said the new plants were vital for energy security, but noted that the need for subsidies, announced at the same time, was a reflection of a broken energy system.
Net Zero Watch’s head of policy, Harry Wilkinson, speaking to TalkTV’s Julia Hartley-Brewer said:
‘People can debate this decision if they like, but this was the inevitable result of the fact that the lights will go out if we do not build this firm, reliable capacity…It’s the right decision, but it has come very late. We have to remember that Britain has some of the most expensive electricity prices in the world, particularly for businesses, and that’s done an enormous amount of damage.’
The decision is likely to be opposed by the Labour Party, whose shadow Secretary of State, Ed Miliband, remains committed to full decarbonisation of the grid by 2030. Most analysts view this target as infeasible.
Because the new stations will only be used occasionally, they will have to be heavily subsidised. The need for such support generation is well known, but today’s announcement is an important recognition that gas will remain indispensable.
Dr John Constable, Net Zero Watch’s energy director, said:
‘Net Zero dies, not with a bang, but a whimper. Subsidising new gas power stations to prop up unreliable and uncontrollable wind and solar means that the failing Net Zero target can limp along for another five or ten years at huge consumer cost and vast economic damage. Looking on the bright side, these power stations will eventually be used as part of the desperate return to fossil fuels that is inevitable as reality bites home and wind and solar are abandoned. But with a little courage all of this absurd cost could have been avoided. What a mess.’
https://www.netzerowatch.com/all-news/recognition-need-for-gas
**********************************************Climate doomsday theory goes up in smoke
Decades of scientific speculation have painted super volcanic eruptions as potential extinction-level events. However, new research suggests that even the most monstrous of eruptions wouldn’t quite lead to such frigid scenarios.
Indonesia’s Toba volcano: An explosive past
Around 74,000 years ago, Indonesia’s Toba volcano unleashed a huge eruption that made modern volcanic events look like mere firecrackers. It was 1,000 times stronger than the 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption. The eruption sent a huge plume of ash and gas into the atmosphere, covering much of the globe in a thick layer of debris.
But how it impacted Earth’s climate afterward remains a lingering mystery. While experts agree on some cooling effects, just how severe the aftermath gets much murkier, with estimates ranging from a few degrees drop to a potential ice age.
New simulations by NASA and Columbia University scientists offer a more reassuring picture. Their study shows that even a super-eruption like Toba would likely cause a global temperature decline of only about 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees Celsius), far from a civilization-ending catastrophe. So why the tempered outcomes?
“The relatively modest temperature changes we found most compatible with the evidence could explain why no single super-eruption has produced firm evidence of global-scale catastrophe for humans or ecosystems,” said lead author Zachary McGraw, a researcher at NASA GISS and Columbia University. Here’s a video from Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell on a potential supervolcano blow-up.
Role of Sulfur particles
Previous models focused on the immense sulfur dioxide plume released by super-eruptions that condenses into tiny sunlight-blocking particles high in the atmosphere. Here’s the twist: scientists discovered that the size of these aerosol particles dictates just how chilly things get.
The tinier the particles, the greater their sunlight-blocking potential. Unfortunately, gleaning the size of particles from eruptions thousands of years old is extraordinarily difficult, leading to vastly differing estimates.
Luis Millán, an atmospheric scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, who was not part of the study, suggested that further research be conducted on the cooling mechanisms of super-eruptions. He believes that a comprehensive analysis of models, as well as additional laboratory and model studies on the factors that influence the size of volcanic aerosol particles, are necessary to move forward.
Millán stated that the ongoing uncertainties show that geoengineering via stratospheric aerosol injection is far from being a viable option.
Geoengineering lessons from natural disasters
Super-eruptions are very rare events, occurring once every 100,000 years or so. The last one happened more than 22,000 years ago in New Zealand. The most famous example may be the Yellowstone Crater eruption in Wyoming about 2 million years ago.
This finding could even influence the debate on geoengineering, wherein scientists propose artificially injecting particles into the atmosphere to slightly dim the sun and counter global warming. Understanding the intricate workings of these natural volcanic systems provides crucial insights into the potential (and unintended) consequences of such intentional climate control strategies.
While super-eruptions might not hold the doom-and-gloom capacity some predicted, the power of volcanoes to shape our planet remains uncontested. This research is a reminder of nature’s ever-churning forces and the delicate balance of our climate.
https://interestingengineering.com/science/supervolcanoes-wont-trigger-an-ice-age-new-research-finds
************************************************The Leftist Australian government is hiding many dark environmental secrets
The Albanese government is embracing some of the worst practices of dictator-driven governments to conceal controversial environmental measures. The secrecy may be necessary because the measures curb mining in Australia, hit many property developments, restrict solar farms and hurt farmers.
I emphasise this commentary is not about the detail of what is planned — I don’t know the detail. My contribution is to reveal the extraordinary third world practices being embraced by Anthony Albanese to conceal what is planned so it can be rushed through the parliament.
I fear the designers have no regard to the revenue implications of what they plan. Their title “The Nature Positive Plan” looks to be in the tradition of George Orwell’s Animal Farm.
The secrecy measures are nothing short of extraordinary and are equally dangerous as those used by former PM Scott Morrison to conceal the fact he was taking on extra ministries.
I set out below how the truth behind “The Nature Positive Plan” is being concealed.
Representatives from leading companies and other interested parties are invited to go into a room to look at parts — not all — of the draft legislation.
But before they are allowed to enter the room, they must sign a voluminous confidentiality agreement preventing them from discussing both their entry into the room and the contents of the draft legislation they are about to be shown. I do not know the exact penalties for breaching that agreement, but the fines will be heavy and jail a possibility.
Once the agreement is signed, those allowed to enter the room are told they must not photograph any of the draft legislation on the table and cannot take it away. They are given a fixed time to take notes using blank paper and a pen.
There is some discussion allowed about the draft, but I don’t know the details. The participants are allowed to take their notes away with them. Nothing else.
I don’t know the people who were invited but almost certainly some will be international companies who later (illegally) will report back to international boards, including those in the US (our defence partner), this is a country where very strange practices are taking place.
To overseas eyes used to third world countries, it must reek of corruption, but I don’t think money-based corruption is taking place. It's all about extreme left wing agendas.
As I understand it, there have been several of these bizarre events. Only a government with something very dangerous to conceal would embrace this sort of tactic.
It is publicly known the Albanese government is planning a new tranche of legislation to replace the current Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999.
The EPBC Act was a carefully prepared document. The states and federal governments set the framework and then industry groups, individual companies, environmental groups, scientists, conservationists, subject-matter experts, and the general community were consulted extensively.
The EPBC Act was developed over years before the federal government published a discussion paper, then an exposure draft, to get detailed feedback on the entire suite of changes.
The Albanese government thinks it can replace this substantial, 1,100-page legislation (plus hundreds of further pages of subsidiary legislation) in short time.
Australia as a nation spends its mining, agriculture and property revenue by providing very high levels of social services. Jim Chalmers, in recognition of this revenue source, has taken steps to make mining approvals smoother.
But, I suspect the treasurer does not know exactly what is being planned. You will remember he advocated pensioners use the gig economy to gain the extra income he was allowing them to earn without impacting pension entitlements.
He didn’t know the industrial relations legislation was going to hit the gig economy hard.
It is understandable an ALP government would seek to upgrade the environmental rules set down in the 1990s. But the right way to go about it is to bring the community together with wide consultation — just as was done in the 1990s.
I am told one version of the environmental secrecy technique was used before the industrial relations bill was put on the parliamentary table. The industrial relations blueprint was a total mess and will endanger our economy. And its “loopholes” title was also in the Orwell tradition.
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12 March, 204
Scientists Expose Major Problems With Climate Change Data
Temperature records used by climate scientists and governments to build models that then forecast dangerous manmade global warming repercussions have serious problems and even corruption in the data, multiple scientists who have published recent studies on the issue told The Epoch Times.
The Biden administration leans on its latest National Climate Assessment report as evidence that global warming is accelerating because of human activities. The document states that human emissions of “greenhouse gases” such as carbon dioxide are dangerously warming the Earth.
The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) holds the same view, and its leaders are pushing major global policy changes in response.
But scientific experts from around the world in a variety of fields are pushing back. In peer-reviewed studies, they cite a wide range of flaws with the global temperature data used to reach the dire conclusions; they say it’s time to reexamine the whole narrative.
Problems with temperature data include a lack of geographically and historically representative data, contamination of the records by heat from urban areas, and corruption of the data introduced by a process known as “homogenization.”
The flaws are so significant that they make the temperature data—and the models based on it—essentially useless or worse, three independent scientists with the Center for Environmental Research and Earth Sciences (CERES) explained.
The experts said that when data corruption is considered, the alleged “climate crisis” supposedly caused by human activities disappears.
Instead, natural climate variability offers a much better explanation for what is being observed, they said.
Some experts told The Epoch Times that deliberate fraud appeared to be at work, while others suggested more innocent explanations.
But regardless of why the problems exist, the implications of the findings are hard to overstate.
With no climate crisis, the justification for trillions of dollars in government spending and costly changes in public policy to restrict carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions collapses, the scientists explained in a series of interviews about their research.
“For the last 35 years, the words of the IPCC have been taken to be gospel,” according to astrophysicist and CERES founder Willie Soon. Until recently, he was a researcher working with the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard & Smithsonian.
“And indeed, climate activism has become the new religion of the 21st century—heretics are not welcome and not allowed to ask questions,” Mr. Soon told The Epoch Times.
“But good science demands that scientists are encouraged to question the IPCC’s dogma. The supposed purity of the global temperature record is one of the most sacred dogmas of the IPCC.”
The latest U.S. government National Climate Assessment report states: “Human activities are changing the climate.
“The evidence for warming across multiple aspects of the Earth system is incontrovertible, and the science is unequivocal that increases in atmospheric greenhouse gases are driving many observed trends and changes.”
In particular, according to the report, this is because of human activities such as burning fossil fuels for transportation, energy, and agriculture.
Looking at timescales highlights major problems with this narrative, Mr. Soon said.
“When people ask about global warming or climate change, it is essential to ask, ‘Since when?’ The data shows that it has warmed since the 1970s, but that this followed a period of cooling from the 1940s,” he said.
While it is “definitely warmer” now than in the 19th century, Mr. Soon said that temperature proxy data show the 19th century “was exceptionally cold.”
“It was the end of a period that’s known as the Little Ice Age,” he said.
Data taken from rural temperature stations, ocean measurements, weather balloons, satellite measurements, and temperature proxies such as tree rings, glaciers, and lake sediments, “show that the climate has always changed,” Mr. Soon said.
“They show that the current climate outside of cities is not unusual,” he said, adding that heat from urban areas is improperly affecting the data.
“If we exclude the urban temperature data that only represents 3 percent of the planet, then we get a very different picture of the climate.”
Homogenization
One issue that scientists say is corrupting the data stems from an obscure process known as “homogenization.”
According to climate scientists working with governments and the U.N., the algorithms used for homogenization are designed to correct, as much as possible, various biases that might exist in the raw temperature data.
These biases include, among others, the relocation of temperature monitoring stations, changes in technology used to gather the data, or changes in the environment surrounding a thermometer that might impact its readings.
For instance, if a temperature station was originally placed in an empty field but that field has since been paved over to become a parking lot, the record would appear to show much hotter temperatures. As such, it would make sense to try to correct the data collected.
Virtually nobody argues against the need for some homogenization to control for various factors that may contaminate temperature data.
But a closer examination of the process as it now occurs reveals major concerns, Ronan Connolly, an independent scientist at CERES, said.
“While the scientific community has become addicted to blindly using these computer programs to fix the data biases, until recently nobody has bothered to look under the hood to see if the programs work when applied to real temperature data,” he told The Epoch Times.
Since the early 2000s, various governmental and intergovernmental organizations creating global temperature records have relied on computer programs to automatically adjust the data.
Mr. Soon, Mr. Connolly, and a team of scientists around the world spent years looking at the programs to determine how they worked and whether they were reliable.
One of the scientists involved in the analysis, Peter O’Neill, has been tracking and downloading the data daily from the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and its Global Historical Climatology Network since 2011.
He found that each day, NOAA applies different adjustments to the data.
“They use the same homogenization computer program and re-run it roughly every 24 hours,” Mr. Connolly said. “But each day, the homogenization adjustments that they calculate for each temperature record are different.”
This is “very bizarre,” he said.
“If the adjustments for a given weather station have any basis in reality, then we would expect the computer program to calculate the same adjustments every time. What we found is this is not what’s happening,” Mr. Connolly said.
These concerns are what first sparked the international investigation into the issue by Mr. Soon and his colleagues.
More here:
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NZ Government Removes Climate Targets from Transport Plan
Climate targets are no longer a priority under the New Zealand government’s latest plan for the transport sector.
In its recently released draft policy statement (pdf) on land transport, the National-led coalition government outlined its investment strategy for the next decade with an estimated total spending of NZ$20 billion (US$12.3 billion).
Under the draft plan, while the government is committed to reducing carbon emissions by facilitating the electrification of New Zealand’s vehicle fleets, it does not consider climate targets a priority.
Instead, the government’s top priority is to support economic growth and productivity through investing in transport projects.
It also wants to raise maintenance levels and enhance the resilience of state highways and local and rural roads, as well as improve the transport network’s safety and value for money.
This marks a significant change compared to the previous Labour government, which identified climate change as a key issue of its transport policy.
The shift in focus also means that relevant government departments and agencies may not be subject to emission reduction requirements when making transport investment decisions.
The government stated that the new plan would help build and maintain a transport system that allowed people to travel quickly and safely.
Among the investments laid out in the report were $2.3 billion for public transport services and $2.1 billion for public transport infrastructure over the next three years.
The government also planned to spend another $3.1 billion to $4.8 billion to fix potholes on state highways and local roads.
“Over the next three years, our investment of around $7 billion per year prioritises economic growth and productivity, increased maintenance and resilience, safety, and value for money,” Transport Minister Simeon Brown said in a statement
“It balances the need for investing in new projects while ensuring our transport system is maintained to a high standard.”
Strong Criticism from Climate Change Advocates
Following the government’s announcement, All Aboard Aotearoa, a coalition of advocacy groups that supports a net zero transport system, lashed out at the draft plan, calling it a “disgrace.”
“This is a transport plan that wouldn’t have been out of place in 1955 in Los Angeles,” Paul Winton, a trustee of All Aboard Aotearoa, told Radio New Zealand.
“Back in the days, when they thought that building roads and suburbs as far as the eyes could see was something that would drive the economy and drive better lives for people. But 60 years later, we know that is not the case.”
Mr. Winton also warned that the government would face legal challenges from activists if it adopted the draft plan.
“The wires are running hot with the various legal activists at the moment looking at how they can curtail this destructive approach to transport planning,” he said.
Meanwhile, Ia Ara Aotearoa Transporting New Zealand, a road freight peak body, welcomed the government’s new policy.
“We’re pleased to see the government following through on their election commitments to re-start the road building pipeline, focus on the dangerous and potholed condition of our streets and highways, and avoid road user charges and fuel excise increases in their first term,” said Interim CEO Dom Kalasih.
“Over the past few years, our members were disappointed to see revenue from vehicle users diverted into unproductive investments in rail, coastal shipping, and walking and cycling, while the condition of the roads continued to decline. It’s great to see Minister Brown committing to turning this around, despite challenging fiscal constraints.”
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Swedish Electric Buses Charged By Diesel Generators
We are constantly being told that we should switch to electric vehicles to reduce climate emissions
In Sweden there is a company called X-trafik that operates busses in the cities of Gävle and Sandviken. They have bought in 52 electric busses from the Chinese company BYD in order to become “environmentally friendly”.
However, this ‘green’ shift has caused massive chaos with freezing busses in the ice cold Swedish winter and hundreds of cancellations.
Of course, all paid for by the Swedish tax payer.
Turns out that the electric busses didn’t have enough range and they couldn’t charge the busses fast enough, which led to up to 100 busses being cancelled every day, leaving people stranded in the cold Swedish winter.
In fact, there simply isn’t enough energy and infrastructure to go around in order to charge all these new electric busses.
The Solution?
They have now brought in massive diesel generators to be able to charge the electric busses – this of course at an extra cost.
Yes, you read that correctly. They cannot charge the new electric busses because there isn’t enough charging capacity to go around.
This reminds me of how they had to use diesel generators to keep wind turbines in Scotland warm during the winter.
It sounds very funny, until you think about the fact that YOU are paying for this madness.
So they had to bring in DIESEL generators in order to charge these new “environmentally friendly” busses.
You literally cannot make this up.
People are being told that it is good for the environment, but in reality they are getting scammed.
https://principia-scientific.com/swedens-electric-buses-charged-by-diesel-generators/
**************************************************Households pay after Highland wind farms earn £68 million for nothing
Static wind turbines in the Highlands cost consumers nearly £68 million in 2023.
They accounted for more than one-quarter of all Scottish wind farms receiving “constraint” payments for zero energy output, new figures show.
According to the Renewable Energy Foundation (REF), a lion’s share of such payments to UK wind energy suppliers found its way north of the border last year.
Of the £307.2m total for the whole of Britain, the National Grid Electricity System Operator (National Grid ESO) paid a record £275.3m to a total of 86 Scottish generators.
The Highlands led the pay-out league in terms of wind farm numbers, with 22 sites across the region getting payments totalling £67.8m.
Top of the constraint payments league table in the area is SSE Renewables’ 66-turbine Stronelairg wind farm, near Fort Augustus, which received nearly £11.6m.
But the two biggest earners in Scotland were both offshore.
Moray East wind farm, a 100-turbine development in the Cromarty Firth, received nearly £43m for machines delivering no energy.
And the 114-turbine Seagreen scheme off the coast of Angus earned constraint payments totalling nearly £40m.
An onshore wind farm, Clyde, near Abington in South Lanarkshire, comes in third at nearly £16.9m.
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11 March, 204
Polar Bears and Coral Reefs Are Doing Just Fine
We live on a beautiful planet, filled with a dizzying assortment of interesting creatures and living organisms. The vast majority of people want to see that life flourish, so it is no wonder that particularly attractive species like cute (usually) polar bears and colorful corals are often used to promote climate alarmism.
Corals and polar bears are two very different kinds of animals in all ways but one: climate alarmists love to claim they are particularly threatened by the modest warming that has occurred since the end of the Little Ice Age. Those claims are false.
For coral reefs, changes in ocean pH and temperature can cause bleaching, and sometimes death. Therefore, a change over time in both of those variables due to increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) supposedly will lead to mass elimination of corals around the world.
It is true that sudden changes in temperature and other water conditions can cause bleaching, which occurs when the symbiotic algae that gives coral structures their color is killed or jettisons itself. However, what is not true is that this phenomenon always or even usually leads to coral death. In reality, decades of research have shown that corals often bounce back from these events, including in cases where scientists had previously labeled the reef as a total loss.
Such was the case with Coral Castles reef, which was bleached by a 1998 El Niño event. When scientists returned to take another look in 2015, they were stunned to find it thriving. This occurred despite the fact that they had predicted the reef would take 100 years to recover. Later, the researchers stated in a press release that “[o]ur projections were completely wrong.”
Coral polyps, the anemone-like animals that actually build the reef structure, can struggle in “too much” heat. But corals typically thrive in warmer waters, not cold, and have survived for the past 60 million years through periods where temperatures and carbon dioxide levels were far higher (and lower) than they are today. The vast majority of corals exist in tropical or subtropical waters, near the equator, and rather than disappearing, have been expanding their range slightly towards the poles amid recent modest warming trends.
The Great Barrier Reef (GBR), subject of frequent climate alarmist propaganda, is also doing fine. Recent bleaching events, especially around 2012, in the GBR were hailed as the permanent end of the reef by climate doomsayers. However, the GBR had other plans. In 2022, the GBR saw the highest coral extent on record.
That’s the tropics; now we put on the long underwear and look to the far North, to probably the most famous animal poster child for the supposed threat of climate change: the polar bear.
Polar bears are threatened, we are told, because summer sea ice is melting, and soon the polar bears will not have access to their traditional hunting grounds and prey. This sounds like common sense, but even common sense is sometimes wrong, as with the polar bears.
Far from dying off from a little warming, polar bear numbers have substantially increased since the 1960s, when they were protected from overhunting. Recent estimates put their population somewhere around 32,000 individual bears, three times as many as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service counted in the 1960s. While some subpopulations have seen declines, new subpopulations are still being discovered. Polar bears have survived during periods of Earth’s history when summer sea ice was basically nonexistent, like during the much warmer Eemian period, about 125,000 years ago.
Photographs of starving, sickly bears circulated in the media are intentionally misleading. They are meant to paint a picture that is very different than reality. Data show that polar bears are carrying more fat into the winter months than they did in decades prior, and they have better rates of cub survival and more stable litter sizes. The overall outlook for polar bear welfare looks highly promising.
In short, real-world data show that both polar bears and coral reefs are doing far better than alarmists would have you believe is the case based on flawed climate models. Stick to the data, and you will find good news for animal and nature lovers everywhere.
https://heartland.org/opinion/polar-bears-and-coral-reefs-are-doing-just-fine/
*******************************************************Convincing Proof That NET ZERO Is An Utter Waste Of Resources
Peter J. Morgan writes: 21 February 2024
Let us never forget that the term Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) was deliberately morphed by its promoters to become “Climate Change”. This was a deliberate obfuscation, and now people, who should know better, use the term ‘climate change’ when they mean ‘the changing climate’ brought about by natural forces, not more atmospheric CO2.
Just over three and two years ago respectively, Physicists Prof. Emeritus Dieter Schildknecht and Coe et al. (David Coe, Dr Walter Fabinski and Dr Gerhard Wiegleb) independently calculated from fundamental physics and the HITRAN database of spectroscopic properties of gases, that the climate sensitivity of carbon dioxide is only 0.5 Celsius degrees, which is one-sixth of the IPCC’s ‘best estimate’ (read ‘best guess’). (The climate sensitivity of a greenhouse gas is defined as the increase in Earth’s mean temperature caused by every doubling of the atmospheric concentration of that gas.)
Further, Coe et al. calculated that the climate sensitivity of methane is 0.06 Celsius degrees, and that of nitrous oxide is 0.08 Celsius degrees. IMHO, all four physicists deserve to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics, for proving that carbon dioxide is insignificant as a greenhouse gas, and in Coe et al.’s case, that methane and nitrous oxide are, too. In truth, CO2 is essential to all life on Earth, and is not a pollutant, despite the fact that in their ignorance, greenies and the MSM ignorantly and persistently claim that it is. Far from being a major problem necessitating that mankind’s emissions of that gas be drastically curtailed, more of it would be beneficial in feeding an increasing global population, whilst simultaneously reducing the need for irrigation and pesticides.
Water vapour, which is ever-present naturally, and is absolutely out of the control of mankind, is the overwhelmingly dominant greenhouse gas. Earth’s water cycle is in truth the omnipresent grand air conditioner and atmosphere cleanser. The lead author of Coe et al., David Coe, has calculated that it will take about 250 years from now for the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide to double from today’s 420 ppm to 840 ppm, by which time Earth’s mean temperature will have increased by only 0.5 Celsius degrees above what it would have been had the atmospheric concentration of CO2 remained constant at 420 ppm.
That in no way means that earth’s mean temperature will have increased by 0.5 Celsius degrees over those 250 years – it may actually have decreased due to natural causes overwhelming the tiny warming effect of CO2. Nobody knows enough to make accurate predictions of it. Thus there is no climate crisis and there never will be.
Earth’s climates are forever changing due to natural causes that overwhelm the effect of increasing carbon dioxide. Thus NET ZERO is an utter waste of resources, for ZERO EFFECT.
Before anybody can legitimately claim that Physicists Schildknecht and Coe et al. are wrong, they must follow the long-established norms of physics and provide proper scientific refutations of both the Schildknecht and Coe et al. papers.
Note 1: Neither the Schildknecht paper nor the Coe et al. paper has ever been refuted.
Note 2: The Legal Profession regards what an expert says as being evidence, whereas the Engineering Profession regards that as being merely opinion (otherwise known as testimony). To the Engineering Profession, experts’ opinions are not evidence unless they are based on verifiable physical evidence. Many Court judgements have been flawed because of the failure of the Legal Profession, which includes the Judiciary, to grasp these important facts.
Note 3: Nobody has ever provided any verifiable physical evidence that carbon dioxide – let alone the tiny fraction of it produced by mankind – causes any significant global warming. Not the IPCC. Not the Royal Society. No state meteorological office. No climate scientist. All they have is the output of computer models based on false assumptions.
Note 4: The government of China, knowing all this, is building new coal-fired electricity generating capacity at a rate of more than 1000 MW (Huntly-size) every week. India also knows all this and is striving to outdo China’s build rate. More CO2 reduces plants’ need for water and is beneficial to plant growth. More CO2 is therefore helping to green our planet.
Note 5: Australasia (i.e., New Zealand and Australia) emits just under 1% of all the world’s GHGs. Cutting Australasia’s emissions to zero – if indeed that were possible, which it isn’t – would not make a measurable difference to global mean temperature. Instead.
https://principia-scientific.com/convincing-proof-that-net-zero-is-an-utter-waste-of-resources/
***************************************************Look to Germany to See America’s Future Under the Green Energy Agenda
Germany’s gross domestic product has been falling since the third quarter of 2022, causing fears of the first 2-yearlong recession since the early 2000s. German farmers are openly protesting new climate regulations that would raise the price of diesel fuel, vital for tractors and farm machinery. This discontent is mirrored by the general public, which is opposed to higher energy costs that drag down the economy. Recent polls show a significant shift in public opinion that’s increasingly opposed to the coalition government.
Unlike the U.S. House of Representatives or the Senate, where invariably one party secures a ruling majority, multiple German parties must form a coalition to reach the required 50%+1 majority threshold.
Currently, the Green Party, the Social Democratic Party, and the Free Democratic Party comprise this coalition. The latest polls show all these parties polling far below their 2021 election results while the more right-leaning parties, such as the Christian Democratic Union and the Alternative for Germany, are surging in popularity.
The recent economic slowdown has resulted in widespread political discontent, and the core of the slowdown has been disastrous energy policy.
Instead of the government focusing on making energy affordable, it has continued its commitment to the “Energiewende”—the “Energy Transition”—a government project aimed at radically shifting from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources such as solar and wind. One of the project’s stated goals is to increase the use of renewable energy sources to 80% by 2030 and 100% by 2035. The end goal is to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2045.
Germany’s closure of its nuclear plants in April 2023 has made achieving net-zero targets significantly more challenging, given that nuclear power is capable of generating substantial amounts of carbon emissions-free electricity. The economic effect of these decisions is palpable for ordinary people, who feel it each month when paying their energy bills.
According to the most recent data published by the German Federal Statistical Office, consumers have been paying an average of 46 cents per kilowatt-hour for electricity. For comparison, the average price of electricity in the United States during December was just under 13 cents per kWh.
Cost disparities can also be seen in the price of gasoline. At the fuel pump, German consumers pay an average price of $7.23 per gallon, compared to $3.33 in America.
These high energy costs are slowing other aspects of the economy, leading to dramatic losses in purchasing power for consumers and threatening to make production unprofitable for many companies. In addition, small businesses and farmers, which rely on electricity and fertilizers to operate, respectively, have been hit extremely hard by these recent price increases.
In addition, the slowdown in global trade is profoundly affecting Germany’s export-centric economy, exacerbating the overall economic decline. Unfortunately for Germans, recent economic forecasts do not offer much hope either. Economists predict the economy to grow only by around 0.2% in 2024.
Large German companies have already taken notice and acted accordingly. Around 67% of German companies have moved at least some operations abroad, citing high energy prices and inflation as their main reasons for leaving. This wide-scale deindustrialization is especially prevalent for the mechanical engineering, industrial goods, and automotive sectors—the backbone of the German economy.
The tipping point came in February, when the famous family-owned dishwasher manufacturer Miele announced that it would cut thousands of jobs and move production to Poland. Luxury car manufacturer Porsche initially planned on building a new car battery manufacturing plant domestically and then switched gears by announcing plans to open the proposed plant in America. Both the lack of future investment and deindustrialization create a snowball effect, worsening the situation.
Widespread dissatisfaction with Germany’s green policies should be a lesson for America. At the heart of the problem is Germany’s failure to allow for the energy industry to create affordable energy for its citizens. For years, the anti-business green energy agenda has decreased carbon emissions but increased the economic crisis. Germany’s experience shows that America needs a sound energy policy, not the arbitrary climate goals the current administration is pursuing.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/03/08/lesson-america-green-policies-crush-german-economy/
******************************************************Unachievable at any cost
Political blindness in Western Austraia
Two weeks ago, we got a taste of the brave new world of renewable energy. Victoria’s grid collapsed on a hot and windy afternoon. 530,000 homes were left without power, train lines were shut down, schools and businesses had to close their doors, phones couldn’t be used even for emergency calls, and hundreds of sets of traffic lights were out of order.
The same fate awaits Western Australia unless it reverses course on its ideological determination to pursue Net Zero.
In June 2022, the WA state government announced its plan to close all coal-fired power stations (Collie, Muja, and Bluewaters) in the state by 2030 as part of a commitment to an 80 per cent emissions reduction target by that year.
This will result in the removal of two-thirds of the WA network’s current electricity supply.
The justification for this policy was the ‘overwhelming uptake of rooftop solar’, adding that, ‘…an estimated $3.8 billion will be invested in new green power infrastructure in the South West Interconnected System (SWIS), including wind generation and storage, to ensure continued supply stability and affordability. This investment is expected to pay for itself by 2030-31 relative to the status quo of increasing electricity subsidies.’
A detailed analysis conducted for the IPA by Senior Research Fellow Kevin You, former General Manager of Generation at Western Power Mark Chatfield, and this correspondent, demonstrates that this plan is neither feasible nor achievable at any cost.
Our research shows that the cost to replace coal-fired power generation will be far more than the already huge sum of $3.8 billion – it will be far greater than even 10 times that amount.
WA’s vast size means that it is geographically isolated, not only from the rest of the country, but internally. Therefore, it cannot be connected to a national energy grid, as is the case with states on the eastern seaboard. It must – and does – produce and rely on its own energy. Therefore, the huge fluctuations that arise from taking out coal in the main network cannot be addressed by relying on other states.
In the southwest of the state, there has been an historical reliance on coal, but WA also has abundant energy in the form of gas.
Following the discovery of large gas reserves in the mid-1970s on the North West Shelf, the Dampier to Bunbury Natural Gas Pipeline (DBP) was constructed. It is one of Western Australia’s most critical pieces of energy infrastructure.
The pipeline was privatised under the Court government in 1998, however, the easement surrounding the pipeline was not privatised. In fact, it was enlarged to accommodate potential future expansions to the gas pipeline’s transmission capacity.
Until now, gas has been able to back up the increasing move to solar and wind. The state’s domestic gas reservation policy, which requires gas exporters to set aside 15 per cent of reserves for domestic use, has been considered a key to avoiding the energy shortages and price rises seen in the east.
However, the warning signs are already there that the WA government’s Net Zero energy policy will not provide the stable, affordable, reliable power its proponents claim.
The Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) in a recent report suggested WA could face electricity blackouts as soon as 2025 unless it fills a forecast shortfall in energy supply.
This report is the first time AEMO has given a forecast that takes into account WA’s commitment to transitioning off coal-fired energy by 2030, which it says would strip an estimated 1,366 MW of power generation out of the system.
Unfortunately, the WA public is not being told of the true costs of the WA government’s 2030 renewable energy feel-good dream. There is the real threat that Western Australians will not be able to keep the lights on or turn on the air conditioning when they need to.
A key finding of our analysis is that by phasing out coal by 2030 and without expansion of the DBP, even if:
wind capacity from today is trebled
battery capacity is increased nine-fold
the state’s solar capacity is doubled
Greater Perth and the Wheatbelt still risk blackouts close to four months in a year.
Our analysis shows further that, theoretically to maintain the network in the absence of coal and gas, there would have to be a massive overbuild of renewables, requiring approximately:
50 batteries, with a total capacity of 5000 MW, (currently one battery is in service)
8,000 MW of solar factories, currently at 180 MW
12,000 MW of wind factory capacity, currently at 1,040 MW
4,134 MW of rooftop domestic solar capacity, currently it is 2,406 MW
Once transmission easements, poles and wires are added in, we calculate the total cost to be – not $3.8 billion – but more than $52 billion, which is equivalent to over 130 per cent of budgeted general WA government spending for the financial year ending 2024.
This can only result in ever-increasing energy bills for ordinary Western Australians. As far as we can tell, no thorough cost-benefit analysis has been done of the government’s plan, especially in relation to battery production and storage.
Consider also the destruction of the environment – and much of the state’s available arable land – by plastering its landscape with solar panels and wind factories.
All in a reckless pursuit of emissions reduction. Let’s not forget that Australia is responsible for just over 1 per cent of the world’s emissions.
Less than one-fifth of that 1 per cent comes from WA, and about 6 per cent of that one-fifth of the 1 per cent comes from WA’s coal-fired power stations.
Therefore, shutting them down would contribute to reducing roughly 0.013 per cent of the world’s carbon emissions.
For $52 billion, the money would be better spent keeping coal-fired power stations open for the foreseeable future and in the meantime expanding the DBP and buying gas, which is the only way to avoid blackouts while sensibly reducing emissions.
If WA wants to avoid what happened in Victoria, its government must abandon its ideological fantasy of Net Zero, which, as our research shows, is unachievable at any cost.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/03/unachievable-at-any-cost/
***************************************10 March, 204
Microplastics have been found in human organs and blood, including the heart
The Green/Left have been getting hysterical about microplastics for some time but but this is the first substantial link among humans. So it cannot be accepted as a firm link until other studies have confirmed it
Microplastics have been linked to increased risk of death in a small but significant study that is one of the first to establish a correlation between plastic in the body and Australia’s biggest killer – heart disease.
More than half of people undergoing surgery for clogged arteries had blood vessels riddled with microplastics, the study found, and those patients had a far greater chance of heart attack, stroke and death compared to people whose arteries were free from plastic.
Italian scientists recruited 257 people with carotid artery disease, where fatty plaque deposits restrict blood flow to the brain. Microplastics lurked in the plaques of about 60 per cent of patients.
Three years after undergoing surgery, 20 per cent of the patients with microplastics in their arteries had died, or suffered a stroke or heart attack.
Only 7.5 per cent of patients free from microplastics suffered the same fate.
Once the scientists controlled for other risk factors, they put the people with microplastics in their arteries at four-and-a-half times greater risk of heart attack, stroke and death.
The study spurred influential US public health expert Dr Philip J Landrigan to call for single-use plastics to be ditched.
Finding microplastics in plaque was a breakthrough discovery in itself, which raised urgent questions, he said.
“The first step is to recognise that the low cost and convenience of plastics are deceptive and that, in fact, they mask great harms,” Landrigan wrote in a The New England Journal of Medicine editorial.
“Should exposure to microplastics and nanoplastics be considered a cardiovascular risk factor? What organs in addition to the heart may be at risk?”
Microplastics are less than 5 millimetres in size, while nanoplastics are smaller than a micrometre and capable of entering cells. The particles are shed by sources including plastic bottles, food containers, synthetic clothing and car tyres.
This small study is part of a developing line of inquiry into whether ingesting micro and nanoplastics increases risk of cardiovascular disease, which causes a quarter of all deaths in Australia.
Scientists have uncovered microplastics in our brains, lungs and placentas. Last year, they were discovered in the human heart for the first time. The fragments lace our blood, urine and breastmilk. But research into the damage microplastics wreak on health is nascent and contentious.
Much of what we do know is based on animal studies or analysis of cells, which are imperfect proxies of human bodies.
In zebrafish and mice, ingested microplastics quickly migrated to “blood-rich” organs including the heart, kidneys and arteries, a 2023 review reported. The plastics trigger inflammation, oxidative stress and cell death, resulting in abnormal heart rates and impairment of cardiac function within study animals.
More research across the board is urgently needed.
The scientists behind the Italian artery study pointed out their finding identifies a correlation rather than a causation between microplastics and increased risk of death.
It may be that the people with microplastics in their arteries had greater exposure to air pollution (which contains microplastic), which could be behind the increased risk of stroke and heart attack.
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No Significant Warming in One of the Most Climate-Sensitive Parts of the Planet, Ice Core Data Show
There has been no significant warming in one of the most climate-sensitive parts of the planet, analysis of Greenland ice core data shows, casting further doubt on the alarmist climate narrative.
We are all familiar with the climate change scare narrative. Red coloured maps of the globe, polar bears stranded on ever diminishing ice floes, extreme weather events etc. When you read a climate change related article or scientific paper it nearly always opens with a statement underlining the severity of the situation facing mankind. What is usually lacking is perspective.
I am not interested in ‘expert’ opinion unless it is supported by empirical data and perspective. Selected sources must be reliable and have ample past data to encompass solar cycle variation. Ideally these data need to come from a region of the planet that is sensitive to global warming. What data from the world of paleoclimatology fit that criteria?
When snow falls, it contains a mix of oxygen isotopes. During warm periods, more heavy oxygen isotopes are found in the snow, while cold periods have more light oxygen isotopes. By analysing these ratios in ice cores, scientists can learn about past temperatures and climate conditions. The ice is laid down in annual layers which can be dated accurately. Consequently, we can construct an accurate temperature record where sufficient ice accumulation exists, such as in polar regions.
If anthropogenic climate change is a real threat, due primarily to the burning of fossil fuels, then we are expecting to see a clear rise in temperature above and beyond the normal variation. This was attempted and published by Michael Mann et al. and is widely known as the hockey stick graph. The main problem with this graph is that it was constructed using 12 sets of proxy measurements which included three sets of ice core data. The ice core data went back only 500 years and the remaining extrapolation relied on tree ring data. There was considerable uncertainty of measurement which was highlighted in his original paper (Figure 1), and a period of 1,000 years provides us with limited perspective in relation to the impact of solar cycles.
Note the light grey area is an estimate of the uncertainty of measurement and extrapolation.
There seems to be a dearth of records that provide temperature proxies for recent times that are relevant to the sudden rise in carbon dioxide levels (1860 to current). However, I did locate data from two overlapping periods from Renland peninsula in Eastern Greenland. The two studies that reported the results from these ice core measurements had quite different themes. The first, which covered the period from 1960 to 10,000 BC, commented on the high temperatures in the Holocene period and the impact on the ice sheet. The second covering 1801 to 2014 examined local site variability. The creation of these datasets was a gargantuan effort. It remains a mystery why these papers did not comment on the temperature trends or indeed try and link the two datasets. Below is a graph combining these two isotope ratio data sets (Figure 2). The black line (far right) is the key as it is a 20 year rolling average of the more recent dataset (brown dots). The first dataset (blue dots) has data points every 20 years, so this rolling average enables a more valid comparison.
These data tell us we’re in one of the coldest spells in the approximately last 9,000 years. Was the only way up? Virtually all global records indicate a steady warming in recent times. I have added green lines to help visualise the ‘normal’ variation in the last 9,000 years. Clearly recent warming is within this normal variation.
I have added another graph (Figure 3) with linear trend lines to each of the datasets to demonstrate how important perspective is in assessing climate change. If we take the trend from 1801 to 2014 (purple dashed) and compare it with that from the last 10,000 years (green line) it seems alarming. But from the longer trend the reader can see that variation in both sets of data is quite normal.
There is also a serious lack of agreement between the Mann hockey stick graph (Figure 1) and these data. It should be borne in mind when making this comparison that the Mann graph attempted to reconstruct temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere whereas the data I have cited here are from a specific area of Eastern Greenland.
The next graph (Figure 4), focusing on the overlap period (1800 to 2014), provides the degree of validity of aligning these two datasets. There appears to be excellent correlation when comparing the black and red lines, implying the data are good proxies for temperature.
In summary, these data indicate there is no significant global warming signal coming from one of the most sensitive parts of the planet. Any warming may be latent, but this seems to be a bit of a stretch.
This absence of a signal could be explained by the fact that the relationship of carbon dioxide to global temperature is logarithmic and above a certain concentration there is minimal direct impact relative to solar cycles.
There are many climate scientists who have devoted their lives to saving mankind but unless these data are invalid, they need to return from the chill winds of the polar regions. Is it game over for the climate change scare narrative?
See original for graphics
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Climate dieting: Eating our way to a brave green world
It had to happen eventually I suppose. An expert group (advising the National Health and Medical Research Council) has decreed that Australia’s official nutritional guidelines must detail the carbon dioxide footprint of each food group they cover. The implication is clear. When we reflect on our dietary habits, we need to consider not only our own health and wellbeing, but the impact of what we consume on the earth’s atmosphere and weather patterns.
Man, it appears, is no longer an end in himself. For the religious, that divinely ordained creature made in the image of God. And for humanists, the starting point and destination of all ethical value and merit. He is not even Hamlet’s ‘quintessence of dust’, ultimately signifying nothing. No, he is a pest and nuisance, a blight on the otherwise pristine environment. If, for understandable electoral reasons, he can’t be eradicated entirely, his malign footprint must at least be made smaller, according to these experts. The sooner this can be done, the better.
You might think this is peak folly for climate change madness. A veritable ‘jump the shark’ moment. But if insanity, as G.K. Chesterton once observed, is following an idea to its outermost logical consequence, it may only be the beginning.
No doubt, our food packaging will soon have to detail the contents’ carbon footprint, perhaps also the menus in our restaurants and cafes. Perhaps the nutrition experts will come up with a ‘net zero’ sustainability deduction to apply to our recommended daily calorie intake. If we all lose a little too much weight and muscle mass in the process, perhaps to the point of shortening our life spans, that’s an added bonus.
Of course, our carbon dioxide footprint is not limited to what we consume. With every exhalation, after all, we deposit this ‘pollutant’ into the atmosphere. (I will draw a veil over the specific category of human emissions which accompany indigestion.) Vigorous exercise must therefore be frowned upon. And perhaps too any kind of activity, including love-making, which increases our respiration rate.
Indeed, if human life is the problem, perhaps we need to revise our euthanasia guidelines accordingly. As a civilised community, we might still set a high bar for people wanting to take this irreversible step, but if the purely medical arguments in any particular case are finely balanced, climate experts may well argue, why not allow sustainability concerns to decide the matter? Not only would the terminally afflicted be put out of their misery, they would have the consolation, as they take their final climate-damaging breath, of knowing they were saving the planet.
While it may clothe its arguments in morality and appeal to (some confected distortion of) science, the climate change movement is ultimately concerned with power. The power of the few over the many, which Lenin famously identified as the basic question of politics. The more honest climate advocates admit this openly, arguing that no part of our lives must remain untouched in the fight against global warming. All policy and regulatory levers must be deployed in this campaign.
Just think about what this means. In the pursuit of arbitrary, ideologically-informed and utterly pointless emission reduction targets, our traditional policy and regulatory goals are being sacrificed. So too, the integrity of our traditional regulatory regimes.
Our new nutritional guidelines, we are told, will no longer be purely about our health. If this sounds shocking, it is nothing new. Our energy sector regulations long ago abandoned the objective of cheap and reliable power. Indeed, by embracing intermittent wind and solar, they are working against it. Planning and environmental regulatory regimes have been similarly corrupted, giving intermittent energy developers free rein to do their worst in the face of local protests. Even financial and corporate regulation is in play: the quaint idea of a level investment playing field for capital has given way to political incentives to plough money into green activities. History tells us that crony capitalism always ends in tears and a huge taxpayer bill, but apparently this can be disregarded.
As we rush headlong in pursuit of our brave green world, the electorates of other Western countries are starting to have doubts, including in the UK, the US and many continental European countries. And of course, China and India, who account for almost all the planet’s carbon dioxide emissions growth, never joined the crusade in the first place. Why this blindness in Australia? Why this folly?
In 1984, Barbara Tuchman wrote a book, The March of Folly, identifying the worst examples of government folly in history. Her starting point? The Trojans accepting, against all good sense, a wooden horse from their Greek enemy. Governments are guilty of folly, she explains, when they adopt policies which can only end in disaster for their people. The major cause of folly, Tuchman points out, is ‘wooden-headedness’, an insistence on ‘assessing a situation in terms of preconceived fixed notions while ignoring or rejecting any contrary signs’.
The ‘surpassing wooden-head of all sovereigns’, in Tuchman’s view, was Philip II of Spain who believed he could conquer England with his Armada in 1588. For Philip, according to an unnamed historian, ‘no experience of the failure of his policy could shake his belief in its essential excellence’. Far from a character flaw, this would seem to be an essential prerequisite for a climate change minister.
The single greatest instance of government folly in my lifetime, and there has been a great deal of competition, was our catastrophic bipartisan response to the Covid pandemic. Our health bureaucrats, both state and federal, were at the very heart of this. You would hope that they have been chastened by the experience, even if they have never (to date) been properly held to account. The experts wanting to hijack our nutritional guidelines appear to have learnt nothing however.
I always try to end my columns with a constructive suggestion. I direct this at all those in government working on climate change interventions. When announced, these should indeed include accurate information on the negative footprint they will leave. Not on the earth’s atmosphere, but on our freedoms, standard of living and quality of life.
Now that would be a public service.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/03/climate-dieting/
**********************************************7 March, 204
Our Obsession With Control over nature
Paul Abela below seems to think it is self-evident that mankind has no right to control nature. He bolsters that view by saying that changes in the natural world could be disastrous to us and implies the non-sequitur that therefore we should not make changes to the natural world. So he thinks there is both a moral and a utilitarian case for us to meddle as little as possible with nature.
The utilitarian case is easy to refute: Civilization exists BECAUSE we have modified nature extensively. Modifying nature has been very GOOD for us and there is no reason to think that the control over nature that we have is suddenly going to harm us. It could conceivably do so but we are more than ever able to foresee problems coming our way and are more able to prevent those problems from actually arriving or to adapting to them in various ways if they do arrive
The moral case is simply a bald assertion with no supporting argumentation. It runs up against the old philosophical conundrum of how do we find out what is right and wrong? Most analytical philosophers claim that there is no objective instance of right or wrong. It exists in the mind of men but different minds have different ideas of what it is. Is killing babies wrong? The ancient Greeks did not think so and they were highly civilized. So we cannot doubt Paul Abela's enthusiasm for nature but we are perfectly entitled not to share that enthusiasm. Mankind DOES have dominion over nature and there are no philosophical or utilitarian reasons to overturn or limit that
It will cost you anywhere between $32,000 and $200,000. If you can afford it, you’re knowingly signing up for something that has a high risk of death. If you overcome any lingering fears you’ll see plenty of the 322 victims entombed in ice as you struggle slowly towards your destination. Climbing Mount Everest, the highest mountain in the world, is not for the faint-hearted. But that doesn’t stop 800 people attempting to summit the mountain each year, with plenty of others waiting in line. It’s a dream for thousands, but it’s a bit of a head-scratcher as to why.
The desire to summit Everest is a product of an obsession that has come to define our relationship with nature. We are addicted to overcoming its boundaries. To tame it. To defeat it. To beat it. The world constantly pits ‘man vs nature’. We compete against it and are obsessed with ‘beating’ it — even though it has no idea it’s competing. And in ‘defeating’ it, we believe we have somehow overcome it.
This obsession with control is deep-rooted in the human psyche. It stems from the idea that nature exists in service of humanity, a belief that has its roots in religion. In Genesis 1:28, God commanded the human race to have dominion over every living thing. A belief shared by the ancient Greeks and best exemplified by Aristotle, who argued, “plants are evidently for the sake of animals, and animals for the sake of Man; thus Nature, which does nothing in vain, has made all things for the sake of Man.”
Little has changed in our attitude to living animals in the last 2000 years. There is a definitive hierarchy of which man is at the pinnacle. Wild animals, which are now remarkably few in number, are slaughtered by poachers to sell their ivory, fur coats, or other body parts. If wild animals aren’t slaughtered, they are placed in zoos for us to gawk at.
Unbelievably, as late as 1969, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) defined conservation as the “rational use of the environment to achieve the highest quality of living for mankind.”
Driven by ego
Our ambivalence to nature and the attitude that it exists in service of man has led to an exploitative relationship developing. Man is driven by ego, we are separate from nature and behave as if it exists for us to do as we please.
Take our framing of the climate crisis as an existential risk that could destroy Earth. It will do nothing of the sort. The climate crisis is a crisis because it will destroy the conditions humanity needs to thrive on Earth. If those conditions change it will remain a haven to life, but that life will take a different form. One that is conducive to thriving in the new environmental conditions that are set to prevail.
It’s humanity that has a problem. Not Earth. Yet, our ego-driven, human-centric view of the Earth means the idea Earth could exist without humanity is incomprehensible.
We have formed a relationship with nature based on being some arrogant controller. How different things would be if humanity had an ‘eco’ perspective, and we used our intelligence and ability to work in symbiosis with nature for the common good. If we felt responsible and duty-bound to look after the Earth and act as its guardian.
Forget about all of that. The benefits to us are all that matters — any negatives to the environment are dismissed as inconsequential — externalities that don’t exist when money and profits, the things that are prized above all else, are there to be made.
The idea that nature may have some intrinsic value is nonsense. Its only role is to create value for humans if and when we choose to use it. That’s why 100 million sharks are killed each year for their meat and to make delicacies such as shark fin soup. It’s why over the last 50 years 17 percent of the Amazon Rainforest has been deforested. It’s why the African Elephant is mercilessly poached so we can slice off their tusks and use the ivory to make jewellery. The tragic ongoing ‘elephant holocaust’ means the African elephant faces extinction.
Our obsession with control needs to be placed into context. Throughout human history, arguably up to the beginning of the twentieth century, we’ve had anything but control. Most people lived on the edge of existence, one failed crop away from famine and starvation. The natural world was dangerous, inauspicious, and brutal. There was little understanding of the processes and rules governing nature.
The image of mother nature being some kind of nurturing force is a product of modern society. As the political scientist Robert Inglehart puts it in The Silent Revolution, for our ancestors, “one’s life expectancy is approximately thirty years. A woman spends most of her adult life in pregnancy and child-bearing, burying most of her offspring before they have grown out of childhood.” To sum it up, life was brutal and full of suffering.
Our ancestors may have believed God gave us dominion over the natural world, but it is only in modern society that we have truly begun to control nature. This ability is the result of the powerful combination of science and technology.
Knowledge is power
Scientific breakthroughs best exemplify the axiom that knowledge is power. Science helps to understand the natural world; technology is the application of this understanding. The combination released humanity from the limits set on pre-industrial societies and led to vast improvements in human well-being. One of the most profound is the eradication of viruses that plagued humanity.
Smallpox, the deadliest disease in human history, is estimated to have killed three hundred million people in the twentieth century alone. Having launched a vaccination campaign against the virus in 1967, the World Health Organization declared its successful eradication in 1977. This triumph is a marvel of modern science.
The ultimate visual expression of our control over nature is the city. These human ecosystems have become enormous in scale. Greater Tokyo, home to 38 million people stretches to 22,000 km². There are 34 megacities with populations of over ten million people.
When you look at a city, you look at a cityscape, not a landscape. The human ecosystem exists outside of nature and separates man from it. It is the ultimate expression of how we have tamed nature and moulded it to suit our needs.
The problem we have now is that technology provides us with too much control. Technology has made us so powerful we’re changing the environmental conditions we need to sustain civilization. This fact would have been incomprehensible to those living a few generations ago. It’s still a little incomprehensible now.
We’ve always existed in a technological age so we take our reality and the high living standards it provides for granted. If the outcomes of our technological age weren’t so apocalyptic, this ability to control the world would be astonishingly impressive.
The way we interact with the environment has transformed beyond recognition and yet we still maintain a deep-rooted desire for control. If we have any chance of overcoming the ecological crisis our relationship with the natural world must transform.
As awareness of our impacts on the Earth has increased, environmentalism has flourished. There have never been more people who not only have an appreciation for the wonders of the natural world, but are seeking to restore it and live in harmony with it.
Environmentalists call for a shift to an eco perspective. This call stems from a place of humility and is grounded in an awareness that nature doesn’t need us to survive, but we depend on it for every conceivable thing.
If the environment changes, we risk suffering social collapse. There must be some kind of acknowledgement that this isn’t a mutual relationship. Earth isn’t benevolent, it doesn’t exist to serve humanity.
The thing is, you can't just wipe the slate clean and reimagine our relationship with nature. While the numbers of environmentalists swell, the human relationship with nature remains dominated by the arrogant controller. As long as it is, we will continue to disregard our influence on the natural world and hurtle towards a future of profound suffering. Seeing how deeply rooted our relationship with nature is, maybe that’s precisely what’s needed to create an epiphany. To shed the shell of the egotistical controller and embrace the humble eco guardian.
https://medium.com/the-new-climate/our-obsession-with-control-0416fb7b0d68
***************************************************CFACT Says Offshore Wind Violates Clean Air and Clean Water Acts
In formal comments, CFACT has asked EPA to assess the adverse impact of the giant Virginia offshore wind project on air and water quality. The issue is far-reaching because all big offshore wind facilities could have these adverse effects.
CFACT points to three specific impacts, two of which come from what are called the “wake effects” of operational offshore wind facilities. Both effects have been observed and modeled in large European offshore operations. I discuss these wake effects in my article HERE.
The first effect CFACT calls the reduced energy air plume. They explain it this way:
“The wake effect is the well-established fact that the air flow downwind of an operating wind turbine has significantly less energy than the air flow upwind. This is because the turbine’s job is to remove energy from the air flow, converting it into electricity. By some estimates, 50% of the energy is removed.”
The Virginia offshore wind facility is removing energy from a 150-square-mile area, thus creating a massive reduced energy plume. The adverse impact is that this plume could increase the ozone levels in nearby urban areas. Ozone flourishes in low energy air.
Immediately onshore from the Virginia wind facility lies the city of Virginia Beach. This sounds like a little tourist town, but it is, in fact, Virginia’s biggest city. It is half again bigger than Pittsburgh.
Virginia Beach is presently in compliance with the EPA ozone standard, but not by much, so the adverse impact of the offshore wind-reduced energy plume is a serious concern. This will be a concern for other coastal urban areas that are onshore of big wind facilities. EPA should be required to take a hard look at this potential impact of reduced energy air on ozone compliance.
The second wake effect is, in a way, the opposite in that there is too much energy. Each wind tower causes turbulence in both the air flow and the water currents as they pass by. This turbulent energy disturbs the sea floor so much that it creates a suspended sediments plume that flows with the current.
Here again, we are talking about a 150-square-mile plume generator, so the result could be massive. There is a large body of scientific literature on the potential adverse impact of these sediment plumes on marine life.
CFACT points out that EPA appears to be ignoring this serious impact in violation of the Clean Water Act. An impact of this magnitude should require a permit under the CWA, but no such permit has been made public.
Perhaps it has not occurred to EPA to apply the CWA to offshore wind facilities. But it should. The law applies to the “navigable waters” of the US. The Virginia facility is certainly in navigable waters, as several shipping lanes have to be rerouted around it. All the offshore wind facilities presently in development had better be in US waters as the Feds are collecting billions in lease payments for them.
At this point CFACT is merely raising the question, why isn’t the Clean Water Act employed in offshore wind industrialization?
The third issue CFACT raises is technological. EPA is considering issuing an air quality permit for the construction and operation of the Virginia facility. Their primary concern is the exhaust emissions from the huge number of boat trips involved.
CFACT points out that other countries are starting to use electric boats in order to avoid these emissions. In fact, there are service boats specifically designed to be charged directly from the wind facility’s output.
The Clean Air Act requires EPA to call for the best available control technology. Electric boats would seem to fit this requirement, and the firms employed in carrying out this construction should be required to deploy them.
Given these facts, it appears the EPA has not been doing a proper job of offshore wind impact assessment and permitting under both the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts.
https://heartland.org/opinion/cfact-says-offshore-wind-violates-clean-air-and-clean-water-acts/
***********************************************************The Guardian Should Know That One Mild Winter Is Not Climate Change, Nor Is It Alarming
A recent article in The Guardian, “Vanishing ice and snow: record warm winter wreaks havoc across US Midwest,” describes the very mild winter much of the American Midwest has experienced this year, claiming that it is due to climate change. While a declining trend towards less-severe winters may in part reflect modest warming, the intensity of this winter’s warmth is more likely explained by El Niño.
The Guardian asserts that ice cover across the Great Lakes has been declining since the early 1970s, writing that while the historic average for mid-February is around 40%, “this year it was about 4%.” Grand Forks, North Dakota; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; and Minneapolis-St Paul, Minnesota, are listed as having recorded their warmest winter, and the Guardian links to evidence in the form of an article from weather.com. Interestingly, directly beneath the states listed in the weather.com post referenced in the article is this statement, “[t]he Twin Cities’ warmest winter, by the way, was 146 years ago in 1877-78, when Rutherford B. Hayes was president.” The Guardian neglected to mention that.
Climate change is the culprit, claims The Guardian, but their own weather.com source lists two natural causes for this year’s mildness, including El Niño and a lack of “persistent blocking patterns – such as the Greenland block – that pull cold air from Canada and lock it into the U.S. for longer than a few days.”
Regarding El Niño, weather.com says “[w]armer winters are typical across the northern tier of states during a strong El Niño.”
Continuing, weather.com reports:
Despite a few recent storms, this season’s winter storm pace across the country is the slowest in 10 years. That’s left just 14% of the Lower 48 covered by snow as of Feb. 26. The warmth also left Great Lakes ice cover at a 51-year low for mid-February, including an ice-free Lake Erie and just a few small bays of Lake Superior with any ice.
In case you missed the point, the ice was this low 51 years of global warming ago, when the Earth was not only cooler, but it was in a cooling trend. A recent post at Climate Realism covers this specific subject in more detail, with H. Sterling Burnett writing “the last time the Great Lakes ice coverage was this low in January was in the early 1970s, a time when global average temperatures were cooling, which many scientists claimed at the time could be a sign of a coming ice age.”
In fact, ice coverage data for the Great Lakes show that coverage is highly variable from year to year. Plotted annual maximum data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory show as much. (See figure below)
The data across all the Great Lakes do indicate that recent years have seen more below-average years, but high years are still found, and it depends on the individual lake. On Lake Superior, Erie, and Huron, for example, most winters touch the 90% ice coverage range. On Lake Michigan, which has lower ice coverage averages, the record ice coverage is tied between two years; 1977 and 2014. Lake Ontario likewise traditionally has less coverage, and has its record high in 1979, and second-highest ice coverage in 2015.
The Guardian also says that a “report published in January found that the number of -35F (-37.2C) readings in northern Minnesota have fallen by up to 90%,” they point out that low temperatures play a role in weed and pest control, which is true enough, however they neglect to mention that extreme cold kills human beings as well, and at much higher rates than extreme heat does. They also fail to mention that longer, colder winters result in fewer crop rotations and production.
In Climate at a Glance: Temperature Related Deaths, multiple studies back up the fact that cold is deadlier than heat all around the world. One study, published in the Lancet in 2021, found that while 600,000 people die globally from heat, over 6 million die from cold. (see the figure, below) Further, cold related deaths have declined at more than double the rate that heat related deaths have increased.
The number of severely cold winters may be modestly trending downwards around the Great Lakes and across portions of the American Midwest, but almost everyone would agree that fewer -35? days is a blessing not a curse. This year’s winter is particularly mild not because of climate change but because of natural weather patterns, and a long-term trend in declining extreme cold is actually better for human survival. Contrary to The Guardian’s reporting, climate doomsaying is not an appropriate response to the available data.
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Environmentalism: from concern about clean air to throwing soup at the Mona Lisa
Garrett Hardin was a professor of biology and environmental studies at UC Santa Barbara. His “commons” was a metaphor drawn from the traditional English practice of shared grazing and agricultural land to which all members of a community had access. Commons were inherently prone to abuse, Hardin argued, because every user of the commons will exploit it to maximize personal benefit without regard to the other users, leading ultimately to the collapse of the commons as a useful resource.
Hardin extended the metaphor of the commons to include all natural resources, including the air, water, other species, even the entire Earth. The tragedy of Hardin’s expansive commons was the inexorable march to environmental doom, driven by the folly of human freedom. “No technical solution” could halt its march, no ingenious tinkering could fix the problem. Rather, Hardin asserted that the juggernaut could only be arrested through “mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon.” To save ourselves, we would have to give up many freedoms we take for granted, specifically “relinquishing the freedom to breed.”
Hardin’s “Tragedy of the Commons” is perhaps the most influential paper ever to come out of the field of ecology. Within its six pages were sown the seeds that have grown into the vast industry that is modern environmentalism. If you’ve ever wondered how environmentalism got from simple concern for clean air and water and preservation of wilderness and its wonderful creatures, to Greta Thunberg, Extinction Rebellion and throwing soup at the Mona Lisa, it was Garrett Hardin who drew the map.
Hardin’s path to the tragedy of the commons was itself mapped out by the English economist and cleric, Thomas Malthus. When Thomas Carlyle famously cast economics as the “dismal science” — a “dreary, desolate… quite abject and distressing science” — it was Thomas Malthus he had in mind. Malthus’s economic philosophy was one of finitude and futility. Human populations always grew faster than could the food supply, he asserted, leading inexorably to famine, disease, perpetual poverty and war: the “Malthusian catastrophe.” Malthus’s economics stands in marked contrast to that of his near-contemporary Adam Smith’s more hopeful economics of free trade, free markets and the inscrutable “invisible hand” that would guide societies to prosperity and liberty. The history of economics has been a long contention between these two competing ideas.
Malthusian economics considered people to be aimless particles pushed this way and that by powerful and indifferent forces. People are considered to have no agency whatsoever, or whatever agency they might have, encompass no other sentiment but selfishness. The only way out of the Malthusian catastrophe would be restraint of human nature, through “mutual coercion mutually agreed upon,” as Garrett Hardin put it. Tyranny
A big part of Malthus’s appeal at the time was his mathematical argument, which imparted a faux certainty to his claims. Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace both were inspired by Malthus’s mathematics, for example, however, Malthus’s mathematics were simplistic and naïve and failed to account for the fact that humans do, in fact, have individual agency — and that the range of moral sentiments was far wider than mere selfishness.
Nevertheless, Malthusianism continues to find devoted acolytes wherever simplistic and naive mathematical presumptions reign. Presently, it is climate change that fits that bill, and it is climate change where the Malthusian tragedy of the commons is again rearing its head — no, having its head propped up, Weekend at Bernie’s style — by a group of twenty-three scholars (they always seem to come in packs) in the prestigious pages of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. There, they call for a “new paradigm” (that buzzword) to stave off the tragedy of the Anthropocene “planetary commons.”
Their new paradigm goes beyond mere governments managing common resources, like sea-floor mineral prospecting. Rather, they are advocating a more ambitious program to take control of the “biophysical systems” that impart resiliency to the Earth’s function. These systems include the atmosphere, hydrosphere (oceans, lakes, rivers and aquifers), the biosphere (encompassing all of the Earth’s biota), the lithosphere (all terrestrial ecosystems, and the cryosphere — ice and snow). Exerting such control, they say, will require “mobilization of efforts at an unprecedented scale, including future research” (read spending), which can only be done through a “nested Earth system governance approach.” This will mean “[adjusting] notions of state sovereignty and self-determination,” taking on “obligations and reciprocal support and compensation schemes … comprehensive stewardship obligations and mandates,” all with the aim to protect “Earth-regulating systems in a just and inclusive way.” You get the idea: “following the science” means a world government that subordinates those pesky notions of self-government and national sovereignty.
Doomsday scenarios are nothing new in the genre of “climate action.” Usually, such contributions bristle with weasel words such as “may,” “possibly,” “perhaps” and the ilk (e.g. the impending extinction of insects). Not so the planetary commons paper, which bristles with alarmist certitude. We are driving the Earth toward dangerous instability, rapidly pushing us past “tipping points” where the Earth will be plummeted irreversibly into disaster, making the Earth inhospitable to life itself. We are sinners in the hands of an angry goddess.
The whole thing is a house of cards, which a little digging will expose. Let’s begin with that word in the title: “Anthropocene.” What does it mean? It sounds science-y, but in fact “Anthropocene” is a neologism proposed in 2000 that demarcates the past 250 years from the Holocene, the geological epoch that began around 11,000 years ago, and which encompasses the rise of modern humans. It is no accident that the Holocene-Anthropocene boundary is set at 250 years before the present: it coincides with the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.
The Anthropocene is the stand-in for the eschatological End Times. Like the End-Times, it is defined by a basket of horrors and portents:
An order-of-magnitude increase in erosion and sediment transport associated with urbanization and agriculture; marked and abrupt anthropogenic perturbations of the cycles of elements such as carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus and various metals together with new chemical compounds; environmental changes generated by these perturbations, including global warming, sea-level rise, ocean acidification and spreading oceanic “dead zones”; rapid changes in the biosphere both on land and in the sea, as a result of habitat loss, predation, explosion of domestic animal populations and species invasions; and the proliferation and global dispersion of many new “minerals” and “rocks” including concrete, fly ash and plastics, and the myriad “technofossils” produced from these and other materials.
No mention is made, of course, of the dramatic reductions of poverty, extensions of life spans, improved agricultural productivity, cleaner air and water, safer environments that also mark the Industrial Revolution. Those are Hardin’s “technical solutions,” to be dismissed as the false consciousness that merely delays the springing of the Malthusian trap. We best be wary.
The Anthropocene is not a scientific term: it is an entirely political construction. Being able to sell it as scientific has long been a coveted tool to advance the climate change agenda. This has meant a long march through the institutions that govern geological nomenclature. That effort came to fruition in 2019, at a meeting of the International Union of Geological Sciences in Cape Town, where a vote was taken to formally recognize the Anthropocene as a geological epoch. It passed by a supermajority of 88 percent in favor, which by the rules of the Society, closed off the matter from further debate. What was the actual vote? Thirty-three individuals voted to recognize the Anthropocene, and four dissented. Was this scientific consensus? Technically it was, but we keep in mind the deceptive power of percentages: the 2022 membership of the Geological Society of America totaled 18,096. Remember these figures the next time we hear about a scientific “consensus.”
With the Anthropocene established as a formal geological epoch, the door was opened for climate activists to advance a political agenda masquerading as “science.” The planetary commons paper, for example, asserts that we have already passed six of nine “tipping points,” putting us THIS CLOSE to catastrophe. That sounds dire, to be sure. But just what determines a tipping point, and how do we know we’re past it? One of the references cited in support of this claim is a paper (with many of the same authors as the planetary commons paper) which defines the “safe operating space” for the nine variables. What determines the limits of the “safe operating space”? Why, it’s the presumed conditions prior to the Anthropocene! The circle is thereby closed: the politically-defined Anthropocene is used to set the politically defined “safe operating space” for the Earth, which sets the course for “navigating” through the perilous Anthropocene. Follow the science! The agenda is clear: reverse the Industrial Revolution and return civilization to the illusory halcyon of the Holocene. This is the climate change echo chamber at work: a collection of mutually-reinforcing arbitrary presumptions dressed up in a science-y costume.
It would be amusing were it not for the costume being flashy enough to take in the mid-wit rubes that constitute our present-day ruling class. Danger lurks there, which was expressed eloquently 264 years ago by Adam Smith in his 1759 Theory of Moral Sentiments:
The man of system, on the contrary, is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamored with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it… He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might choose to impress upon it. If those two principles coincide and act in the same direction, the game of human society will go on easily and harmoniously, and is very likely to be happy and successful. If they are opposite or different, the game will go on miserably, and the society must be at all times in the highest degree of disorder.
Garrett Hardin was, in his time, also a “man of system,” and it’s worth remembering that our last flirtation with the tragedy of the commons did not end well, especially not for Garrett Hardin himself, who now seems to be somewhat of an embarrassment to our present-day presumptive “persons of system.” We seem to have learned nothing since 1968, or for that matter, since 1759.
Will history repeat, this time as farce? Or will it be tragedy?
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6 March, 204
EPA regulations on outboard motors send firm broke
In 1907 Ole Evinrude, born Ole Andreassen Aaslundeie, an immigrant from Gjovik, Norway invented the first gasoline powered internal combustion two-stroke outboard engine practical enough for commercial production, and two years later, an icon was born. Evinrude Outboard Motors produced boat engines continuously for over 11 decades in their factory in Sturtevant, Wisconsin, just outside of Milwaukee, becoming a favorite of fishermen and watersports enthusiasts across North America and beyond. In 1935, Evinrude merged with competitor Johnson Outboards to form Outboard Marine Corporation (OMC.) OMC became a multi-billion dollar publicly traded fortune 500 company and dominated the outboard market for the better part of the 20th century. When OMC filed for bankruptcy in 2000, they still maintained one third of the outboard market despite the rise of the American giant Mercury Marine and foreign brands like Yamaha, Honda, and Tohatsu. In 2001, OMC’s Evinrude and Johnson brands were purchased by the Canadian company Bombardier Recreational Products (BRP.)
New EPA regulations on emissions in the 90s and early 2000s nearly ended the production of two-stroke outboard motors entirely. Evinrude and Johnson attempted to modify existing technology in order to comply with the new regulations leading to mechanical problems and ultimately contributing to OMC’s demise, however despite BRP discontinuing the Johnson brand in 2007, Evinrude endured. New four-stroke outboards built by Evinrude’s competitors, while heavier and slightly less powerful, were very reliable and produced fewer emissions than the older two-stroke technology. However, in 2004, the engineers at Evinrude created their new E-TEC outboards that were much cleaner, even becoming the first outboard technology to win the EPA’s U.S. Clean Air Excellence Awards, which recognizes low emission levels. E-TEC engines typically emit 30-50% less carbon monoxide than comparable four-stroke outboards.
Evinrude and their two-stroke engines continued to cede market share to their four-stroke competitors over the following years, although the E-TECs, and Evinrude’s new E-TEC G2 motors maintained a loyal customer base until the spring of 2020 when parent company BRP was forced to pull the plug for good. “Our outboard engines business has been greatly impacted by COVID-19, obliging us to discontinue production of our outboard motors immediately. This business segment had already been facing some challenges and the impact from the current context has forced our hand,” said José Boisjoli, President and CEO of BRP. “We will concentrate our efforts on new and innovative technologies and on the development of our boat companies, where we continue to see a lot of potential to transform the on-water experience for consumers.”
Just like that 300 workers at Evinrude’s Wisconsin factory were out of a job and a company that had survived The Great Depression, two world wars, and bankruptcy was gone. Governor Tom Evers (D-WI), the man who deemed Evinrude’s workers “non-essential” won re-election in 2022 and Governor Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI) who made it illegal to use a boat with an outboard motor when she locked down her state, won re-election in a landslide. Even former President Trump has refused to accept any blame for the destruction caused by the lockdowns and his empowerment of Dr. Anthony Fauci, and will almost certainly be the GOP’s nominee for president again this year.
Innovators at Evinrude, starting with Ole Evinrude himself, created the first marketable outboard, made them lighter and more practical, and 100 years later created engines that were more fuel efficient and environmentally friendly than their four-stroke competitors. There is no telling what potential innovations across the American economy, not only by this one company, are now impossible, or at the very least delayed, due to the calamitous economic conditions created artificially by the state.
Voters seem more than willing to forget what their governments did to them in the spring of 2020 and beyond. As Herman Melville said “then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago,” our oceans, lakes, and rivers will surely forget old Ol Evinrude and his trusty outboards, but American boaters and anglers will remember all of the times Evinrudes got our families back to the boat launch in one piece, and something tells me those old engines will continue to do so for decades to come.
https://catalyst.independent.org/2024/02/27/covid-casualty/?omhide=true
***********************************************Former World Bank economist warns of energy transition’s fiscal risks
London, 5 March – In the run-up to Budget Day (6 March), a new paper by a former World Bank economist and published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation warns that the UK’s current decarbonisation timeframe is unrealistic and threatens to be economically and socially unsustainable.
Professor Gordon Hughes’s paper comes two weeks after the “European Climate Investment Deficit report” warned that EU member states would have to fill an annual investment gap of €406 billion if its 2030 climate goals are to be met.
In his paper, Hughes reveals that a realistic estimate of Britain’s planned energy transition also has an astronomical price tag. Large investments in capital-intensive technologies for producing and consuming non-carbon energy is estimated to be a minimum of 5% of GDP for the next two decades and might easily exceed 7.5% of GDP.
Prof Hughes said:
“There is no chance of borrowing an additional 5% or more of GDP annually for two decades to finance the energy transition. The only viable way of financing the UK’s energy transition is a drastic reduction in consumption to free up resources for the huge level of new capital investment required. Realistically the reduction in private consumption would have to be 8% to 10% for 20 years. Such a shock has never occurred in the last century outside war periods and even then never for more than a decade.”
He added:
“Ignoring the macroeconomic and fiscal constraints will almost certainly lead to yet another long-running policy fiasco like HS2 with results that achieve little in concrete terms. Rather than pretence and muddle, it would be better to extend the period and pace of the energy transition to match the resources that can realistically be afforded.”
Lord Frost welcomed Prof Hughes’s economic realism and said:
“The message in this briefing note could hardly be more urgent. Either we must be honest with the public and be clear that they are going to have to pay at a currently unanticipated level. Or we must extend the time period for the transition - that is, delay the net zero 2050 target, perhaps out till 2070 or 2075.
Failure to do either - sadly, perhaps the most likely outcome - will mean that we simply muddle on, pretending we are making progress, spending at high levels, but achieving little. Meanwhile the rest of the world outside the West will look on, incredulous at this unprecedented act of economic self harm.”
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CO2 Coalition Takes the Science to Wyoming
Wyoming has vast resources of coal, oil and natural gas. With 40% of the nation’s coal resources, the state has been the United States’ top producer since 1986, primarily from the Powder River Basin located in the northeastern part of the state. It is also a national leader in the production of oil and natural gas, ranking in the top 10 in production of both products.
Yet, even though the Wyoming economy is heavily dependent on the mining and extraction of fossil fuels, its governor, Mark Gordon, has adopted a strong “decarbonization” policy. The science tells us that this is not a winning strategy for the people of Wyoming.
The CO2 Coalition believes that public policy on such matters should be driven by scientific review and analysis, not political agendas. To provide such an analysis, we have produced this report, Wyoming and Climate Change: CO2 Should Be Celebrated, Not Captured.
We also sent a team of climate experts from the CO2 Coalition,
including Dr. William Happer, Dr. Byron Soepyan and Gregory Wrightstone to Wyoming to provide the facts concerning the huge benefits of carbon dioxide. This team presented the science at a hearing of the Wyoming Senate Agriculture Committee (pictured above.)
The team also presented accurate science regarding Wyoming's climate to students at Gillette College, Laramie County Community College, and at the University of Wyoming.
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Unusable solar farms in Australia
Northern Territory Chief Minister Eva Lawler says government-owned Power and Water Corporation could purchase four privately owned solar farms across the Top End in a bid to finally bring them online.
The handful of solar farms were built near Katherine and in Darwin's rural area. However, they have been sitting disconnected from the Top End grid for at least four years.
Power and Water has long held concerns about bringing the facilities online, fearing their power generation could be volatile and destabilise the Darwin-Katherine grid.
When asked whether the solar farms could be purchased by the NT government, Ms Lawler said: "That's a possible option."
"We need to be able to control the energy that comes from those, so it is an option," she said.
Ms Lawler said the solar farms the government was interested in buying were currently owned by energy company ENI, but she refused to provide an estimated cost.
The comments sparked criticism from opposition shadow treasurer Bill Yan, who questioned whether such a purchase would be the best use of taxpayer dollars. "The more important point is, can we afford to buy these things," he said.
He also criticised the NT government's renewable energy rollout, saying the construction of these solar farms before infrastructure could handle them was "putting the cart before the horse".
"Territory Labor led all these contracts to companies to build all these giant solar farms across the Top End," he said.
"All of a sudden, the territory government found out they couldn't hook them up. The grid wasn't stable enough."
The architect of the NT's "Roadmap to Renewables", Alan Langworthy, last year criticised the government's handling of the transition to 50 per cent renewables by 2030, saying "unrealistic" regulation was stymieing the commissioning of solar projects.
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5 March, 204
Sea levels around NYC could surge up to 13 inches in 2030s due to climate change: state study
This was first predicted as imminent in the '80s by Jim Hansen, one of the early prophets of global warming, but there is still no sign of it happening
Sea levels surrounding New York City are expected to rise at least 6 to 9 inches in the 2030s and potentially up to 13 inches in some areas due to climate change, according to state projections.
The assessment done by the state Department of Environmental Conservations also claims that sea levels in the lower Hudson River could swell by 23 inches in the 2050s and up to 45 inches in the 2080s.
“Sea level rise is one of the most direct and observable effects of climate change in New York and DEC is required by law to develop science-based sea level rise projections to guide decision making and permitting in the areas most at risk,” the DEC said in a statement.
By the year 2100, downstate sea levels could surge by 25 inches to 65 inches. A worst-case scenario could see a staggering 114-inch rise by the end of the century under rapid ice melt projections.
Such a dramatic rise in sea levels could decimate low-lying residential areas in the Big Apple that were pummeled during Hurricane Sandy in 2012.
The DEC posted its projections of sea levels in the New York State Register, based on studies of global climate models. The agency is required to periodically post sea-level projections under the Community Risk and Resiliency Act.
“New York is leading the nation to address the impacts of climate change, which include heatwaves, floods, more frequent storms, and sea level rise,” the DEC said.
The sea level projections do not create any edicts or compliance obligations on local governments — though they are intended as a guide to assist state and local planners and regulators in making decisions to address more storm-related floods.
Ultimately, both the rate of sea level rise and the level of rise over time will be determined by the severity of global greenhouse gas emissions, officials said.
Continued high emission rates will lock in continued rapid warming of the ocean and lead to higher rates and levels of sea level rise, DEC said.
Addressing climate change without hurting businesses and consumers is easier said than done.
Gov. Kathy Hochul has faced criticism this year over a green push targeting a key chemical used in refrigerators and air conditioners that critics say could force business owners to shell out hundreds of thousands of dollars in new equipment.
Small business owners warned the aggressive timetable to phase out hydrofluorocarbons, or HFCs, starting next year, could cripple businesses, icing out jobs and triggering price hikes on food items and other consumer products, as they attempt to comply with the costly mandate.
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The American revolt against green energy has begun
In a story filled with all the standard climate alarmist narratives, USA Today recently reported on the rising movement by local governments in the United States to refuse to permit unwanted wind and solar industrial sites in their jurisdictions.
After setting the stage by parroting the Biden administration goals of “100 per cent clean energy by 2035, a goal that depends on the building of large-scale solar and wind,” USA Today points to the reality that such big, intrusive, ugly, and destructive industrial sites have been rejected by twice as many county governments as approved them. The writers complain that the rejections come about by some combination of “outright bans, moratoriums, construction impediments and other conditions that make green energy difficult to build,” but don’t go on to describe why the rejections are taking place.
Simply put, these huge industrial sites – we simply must stop using the friendly-sounding term “farms” to describe them – create all manner of negative consequences for local communities. Consequences like loud noise from wind turbines, hundreds of dead birds and bats sprinkled across the countryside, thousands of acres of productive farm or ranchlands taken out of production for many years if not permanently, spoiled views, enormous “graveyards” filled with 150-foot blades and solar panels popping up all over the place, and impacts to local wind and weather patterns that are only now beginning to be understood.
Those consequences and more have become increasingly clear as time has progressed, and that is making it harder for developers to gain acceptance from the communities that would serve as hosts. Such pushback is likely to grow more strident in the coming years as it becomes clear to citizens that their state governments have failed to enact effective regulatory structures requiring timely and full retirement and remediation of these industrial sites when their useful life has expired. By that time, these sites will most likely have been sold off by the big developers who built them to smaller companies that will be unlikely to be able to bear the enormous costs involved in full removal and remediation.
But by then, it will be too late for the communities to protect their rights. The only real way to protect a city or county from these myriad impacts is to refuse to allow them to be built.
Fortunately, the US legal system has been built in a way that protects the rights of all stakeholders to any industrial development. Those stakeholders include local citizens, their businesses, their local infrastructure, their archeological sites, and their government entities – those are givens. But US society has seen fit over the decades to extend similar protections to animals, plants, the water, and the air as well.
Whenever we hear developers of energy or any other industrial projects complain of lengthy and complex permitting processes with which they must comply, we must remember that almost all the hurdles they must overcome to obtain their permits relate to regulations designed to protect these stakeholder rights. In the US, those regulations relate to major environmental statutes like the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, and others, like the Antiquities Act. The term “streamlining permitting” is in fact code for scaling back on those stakeholder protections.
This is the clear trade-off with which the US and other western democracies must grapple if they are to achieve their climate goals. We must recognize that essentially every “solution” that has been advanced by the climate alarmist community and the globalist elites pushing their agenda requires the implementation of authoritarian policies designed to scale back stakeholder rights, pick winners and losers in the marketplace, and force reluctant consumers to pay the price.
These kinds of forced solutions are in fact incompatible with the maintenance of a free society that protects the rights of all stakeholders. That reality is the central conundrum of this forced, heavily subsidized energy transition – which is not, in fact, a transition at all – and it is the reason why so many local governments are rejecting these proposed industrial sites. The climate alarmists understand this, which is why their rhetoric has grown more shrill and heated over time.
In democracies, we decide major issues like this through elections. So long as we ensure those elections are conducted freely and fairly, it seems unlikely voters will be willing to surrender their rights in favor of achieving nebulous climate goals.
https://news.yahoo.com/news/american-revolt-against-green-energy-162426016.html
**********************************************Electric cars release more toxic emissions than petrol-powered vehicles and are worse for the environment
Electric vehicles may release more pollution than petrol-powered vehicles, according to a report that has recently resurfaced.
The study, which was published in 2022 but has begun circulating again after being cited in a WSJ op-ed, found that brakes and tyres release 1,850 times more particulate matter compared to modern exhaust pipes which have filters that reduce emissions.
It found that EVs are 30 percent heavier on average than petrol-powered vehicles, which causes the brakes and tyre treads to wear out faster than standard cars and releases tiny, often toxic particles into the atmosphere.
Hesham Rakha, a professor at Virginia Tech told Dailymail.com that the study is only 'partially correct' because even though EVs are heavier, their tyres will emit more microplastics into the air, but this could also be true for sedans versus SUVs.
Rakha said it is very challenging to determine the difference between the amount of microplastics emitted from EV tyre treads and petrol-powered vehicles because you have to separate the microplastics that are already in the air from other sources with what's coming off the tyres.
Rakha and his team at Virginia Tech are in the process of conducting field tests to determine how much microplastics are emitting from EV and petrol cars by using traffic simulators that will mimic an urban setting.
He added that he doesn't expect there to be a major difference between the EV and petrol-powered vehicles, saying that they haven't measured it yet, but expect the difference to be about 20 percent.
This doesn't mean that people should gravitate away from electric cars because they 'are more efficient depending zero emission,' Rakha said, but added the caveat that 'it also generates a lot of CO2 when charging your vehicle.'
EV batteries weigh about 453kg, and can result in tire emissions that are nearly 400 times more than exhaust pipe emissions.
Particle pollution can increase health problems including heart disease, asthma, lung disease and in extreme cases, can lead to hospitalisation, cancer, and premature death.
New petrol-powered cars are created to be 'cleaner,' by updating the trims of their internal combustion engines to include particulate filters that reduce emissions.
The EVs increased weight due to their lithium-ion batteries cause the tyre treads to wear faster, ultimately producing more emissions.
The study, conducted by the firm Emissions Analytics, said the main difference between exhaust pipe and tyre emissions is that the majority of particulate emissions released from the tyre go directly into the soil and water, while exhaust negatively affects the air quality.
The effects of tire composition come down to the materials the tyre is made from, the study reported.
Light-duty tyres are typically made from synthetic rubber which is developed using crude oil natural rubber adds fillers and additives, some of which are recognised carcinogens.
Emissions Analytics tested the tire wear on both EV and gas-powered vehicles after driving them at least 1,600km.
The researchers used a sampling system to collect particles immediately behind each tire and then measured the size of the particles emitted from the tread.
It found that the greater the vehicle's mass and weight, the more rapidly the tyre particulate emissions would be released due to the increased torque between the tires and the road.
A separate 2020 report by the Emissions Analytics firm said that tyres are likely to be a major concern in the coming years as ‘consumers switch to bigger and heavier cars.’
‘Research shows they contribute to microplastic marine pollution, as well as air pollution from finer particles,’ the report continued.
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A reality check for climate alarmists: net zero is impossible
A stable energy supply sourced from wind and sunshine was obviously impossible from the beginning but the Left have always had big problems with the obvious
One of Australia’s richest mining magnates, Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest, says you can already feel climate change, it has caused “deaths, devastation and hardship” all around the world already, Australia has “run out of time” and he knows how to fix it.
Forrest’s prescription promises “economic growth over generations” along with “full employment” and a “pristine environment” with “cheap energy being produced everywhere in our country”. Too easy; the only resource lacking, he says, is the “courage to get on with it”.
To deliver this energy and environmental nirvana he wants the coal, oil and gas industries to be “taxed out of existence”. Strangely, he does not include his own iron ore industry, which relies on fossil fuels for extraction, transport and blast-furnacing into iron and steel.
This simplistic combination of rampant alarmism and magic pudding economics is not rare. It is omnipresent in the rantings of Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg, Greens leader Adam Bandt, Extinction Rebellion and the teals, but it is unusual coming from a titan of industry, albeit one in receipt of substantial government subsidies here and abroad for “green hydrogen” projects.
We were warned by the weather bureau and climate alarmists last spring that this summer would be extraordinarily hot and dry. Given that all turned out to be a damp squib, they are turning their forecasts a little further afield with the Nine Entertainment newspapers (in cahoots with the Climate Council) offering an online tool this week to show us how many days over 35C we can expect in our suburbs in 2050 and 2090.
It is as if these people have become so bored by the lack of public debate about their Chicken Little claims that they have opted for self-parody to amuse themselves. Not only do they seek to raise the fear of Gaia over these long-range predictions, they implore us to “take action” to make sure our particular postcode can keep the mercury below 35C for a day or two more in the summer of 2090.
The Greens voters of Penrith and Broadmeadows might be pretty cheesed off in 2090 when it still turns out that it’s only those affluent coastal postcodes that get the sea breeze. The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald might encounter some sweaty subscribers with buyer’s remorse in the autumn of 2091.
In this climate of fearmongering and idiocy we need more reality checks. For starters we might ease the sense of crisis by levelling with the public that the prime reason many heat records have been broken in Australia in recent decades is because the Bureau of Meteorology revised most of its early temperature records downwards and because it ignores any records before 1910, thereby eradicating from calculations known hot periods such as the Federation drought. (It argues this was scientifically valid and necessary, but the fact it has been done is worth sharing more widely, for context if nothing else.)
Still, temperatures will do what they will, and global emissions are still rising. It is a scientific fact that whatever Australia does on emissions cannot affect global climate, and natural climate variations can easily override any human interventions, good or bad. From the upper echelons of state and federal governments we are fed two strands of argument that are seldom challenged. The first is the alarmism and the other tells us renewables are the only way to deliver the emissions cuts required.
“So, while moving towards a renewable grid is a massive transformation,” Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen says, “it is necessary for our economy, for our energy security and for the climate. Stop the delay, distraction, deception and denial. Get with the program.”
Clearly we need to address the practical reality of moving to net zero, and the pretence that this can be done easily without a heavy economic cost. We can start with the International Energy Agency, which works closely with the UN and is all on board with the net zero zeitgeist. In its Global Energy Transitions Stocktake it recognises that “half the emission reductions needed to reach net zero come from technologies not yet on the market”. Got that? We cannot ever get to net zero unless we develop technologies that are “under development” or yet to be invented.
Czech-Canadian scientist Vaclav Smil is the author of 40 books mainly focused on outlining complex realities and dilemmas. His 2022 book How the World Really Works contains bad news for those climate activists who just want to “do something” about climate change and believe the solution is easy – just decarbonise.
“The real wrench in the works,” warns Smil, is that “we are a fossil-fuelled civilisation whose technical and scientific advances, quality of life and prosperity rest on the combustion of huge quantities of fossil carbon, and we cannot simply walk away from this critical determinant of our fortunes in a few decades, never mind years.”
He is not a complete pessimist, just anchored in the reality: “Complete decarbonisation of the global economy by 2050 is now conceivable only at the cost of unthinkable economic retreat, or as a result of extraordinarily rapid transformations relying on near miraculous technical advances.”
This is because we rely on fossil fuels not just to generate most of our electricity but to fuel our road, rail, air and sea transport, heat homes, power industry, mine minerals, create chemical and plastic products, manufacture fertilisers and grow food. While wealthy countries such as ours can make some expensive changes to improve efficiency and reduce emissions, more than half of the world’s population is still racing to get the energy it needs, massively expanding global energy demand.
“Annual global demand for fossil carbon is now just above 10 billion tons a year,” writes Smil, “a mass nearly five times more than the recent annual harvest of all staple grains feeding humanity, and more than twice the total mass of water drunk annually by the world’s nearly eight billion inhabitants – and it should be obvious that displacing and replacing such a mass is not something best handled by government targets for years ending in zero or five.”
Other practical realities deepen the dilemma. The challenges for renewables relate largely to scale and efficiency. Smil again: “Large nuclear reactors are the most reliable producers of electricity, some of them now generate it 90-95 per cent of the time, compared to about 45 per cent for the best offshore wind turbines and 25 per cent for photovoltaic cells in even the sunniest of climates – while Germany’s solar panels produce electricity only about 12 per cent of the time.”
Other researchers have tried to quantify the mineral resources needed to manufacture enough turbines, solar panels, batteries and electric engines to get to net zero.
In his paper Mining for Net Zero: The Impossible Task, Alan G. Jones finds we will have to dramatically increase the mining effort, which is already higher than at any time in history.
“For example,” Jones writes, “one estimate is that there needs to be as much copper mined over the next 20-25 years as has been mined to date.”
Another geoscientist who has been based in Finland and Australia, Simon Michaux, has warned about the scale of replacing fossil fuel energy with renewables and hydrogen. “So, we are discussing bringing in a power system significantly larger than the one we have now,” Michaux reminds us, “with power systems that are not as effective and more expensive.”
Michaux has run detailed calculations on all the key resources such as lithium, nickel, copper and cobalt required globally, and the amount we are capable of extracting. The results are sobering.
“We don’t have enough mining production or mineral reserves to manufacture the first generation of renewable technology,” he finds.
But it is even worse than that because, as he points out, all the kit, from wind turbines to solar panels, from electric engines to batteries, will have to be replaced within 10 to 25 years, and again and again.
Chris Greig, a senior research scientist from Princeton University in the US, has costed the transition for Net Zero Australia. “Such is the level of investment required to build out new-generation storage facilities such as batteries and pumped-hydro, and transmission lines, that up to $1.5 trillion will need to be deployed by 2030 to put Australia on track to meet its 2050 commitments,” declares the study he co-authored. That is an amount proximate to the size of our entire GDP to be invested over just the next six years. Good luck.
And if the resources, innovation and funding required do not make this all fanciful enough, try considering the land, approvals and practicality of installing it. Bowen has boasted about needing to install 22,000 500-watt solar panels every day for eight years, as well as more than one 7-megawatt wind turbine every day connected by at least 10,000km of new transmission lines across the same period.
Most of this will be in regional and coastal communities that do not want them. And all of it, spread diffusely across the country, will be vulnerable to disruption by storms and bushfires.
Yet they seriously try to argue that nuclear power, sited compactly on existing industrial/generation sites, requiring no additional transmission lines, will be too slow and expensive.
It is time to take the ideology and fantasy out of energy policy and address the reality.
The climate and renewables zealots are in denial.
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4 March, 204
Heads Up Media – Texas Wildfires Have Nothing to Do with Climate Change
A few days ago, a wildfire started in north Texas and grew quickly, driven by strong southwesterly winds. Named the Smokehouse Creek Fire, it has burned more than 1.1 million acres and is now the largest wildfire in Texas history. The mainstream media has been quick to blame climate change for the fire, with headlines like this one from NBC News: Wildfires ravage Texas amidst climate change crisis, or this one from ABC13 in Houston: How climate change is increasing wildfire risks across Texas. These stories are false; multiple lines of real-world data refute any connection between these fires and climate change.
NBC News claims:
The Texas Panhandle is no stranger to face-blasting winds nor roller-coaster dips in temperature. But the fires would not have had the same chance to take off if not for unseasonably warm temperatures and dry conditions made more likely by climate change.
ABC13 claims:
Additionally, climate change could increase Texan’s risks for wildfires over the next 30 years. ABC13 Meteorologist Elyse Smith has previously covered this topic through ABC’s Weathering Tomorrow initiative, which uses data from our partners at the First Street Foundation. It shows how wildfire risk, as well as heat, flood, and wind risks, will be impacted by climate change through the year 2050.
If either of these news outlets had bothered to do a ‘fact check,’ they would find their claims are unsupported by real world data.
Data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for Texas show that the state has experienced a declining trend in number of very hot days and a slight increase in precipitation
With fewer hot days and increased precipitation recorded in the long-term climate records, the claim that Texas is more susceptible to wildfires now that in the past because of climate change is clearly false.
Both media outlets suggested that the area where the fires are is drier than normal. This too is false.
According to the US drought monitor, the area now beset by the wildfire is not abnormally dry and certainly not experiencing drought conditions:
Nor is the adjacent region of Oklahoma caught up in the wildfire suffering under abnormally dry or drought conditions.
According to Climate at a Glance: U.S. Wildfires:
Wildfires, especially in arid parts of the United States, have always been a natural part of the environment, and they likely always will. Global warming did not create wildfires. In fact, wildfires have become less frequent and less severe in recent decades. One of the key contributing factors has been that the United States has experienced fewer droughts in recent decades than in periods throughout the twentieth century.
According to the National Park Service, wildfires in Texas have always been a part of the state’s history. However recently invasive species now cover much of the region. According to the Texas A&M Forest Service:
Invasive species cause many negative impacts to the Texas landscape, from the displacement of native trees to potentially wiping out entire species.
Much of the Texas panhandle region is overgrown with cedar, acacia and invasive mesquite trees which use up a lot of groundwater. Previously, natural fires in the region helped control the spread of this problem, but with modern fire suppression, fuel loads have increased.
Even the most recent International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment of global climate agrees. On Page 90 – Chapter 12 of the UN IPCC Sixth Assessment Report. Emergence of Climate Impact Drivers (CIDs) the table in Figure 5 shows the incidence of “Fire weather” has not emerged from climate change:
Finally, recent satellite data show no correlation between wildfire acreage burned and carbon dioxide levels. In fact, global wildfire area burned declined substantially between 2000 to 2018, even as carbon dioxide levels increased. If climate change was driving an increase in wildfires you would see it in the global data, but it shows just the opposite.
Actual data and various lines of hard evidence show that there is no connection between climate change and the wildfires now ravaging parts of north Texas and Oklahoma, or anywhere else for that matter. Sadly, once again the media is pushing the “climate catastrophe,” narrative in which every extreme weather event or natural disaster is caused by climate change, despite the clear evidence that this is false. In this case, rather than doing investigative due diligence, neither NBC nor ABC bothered to check facts before publishing these scare stories, which suggests that their reporters and editors are either lazy, incompetent, blinded by political ideology, or all three.
See original for graphics
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Net-zero targets have hamstrung British prosperity
Britain’s ‘net-zero economy’ is booming, creating more better-paid jobs than any other sector, but it is all being put at risk by the government’s reversal on policies on electric vehicles and heat pumps.
That, at any rate, is what the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) and the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU) wants us to believe. In a report this week, these groups claim that the net-zero target has spawned an industry worth £74 billion, up 9 per cent in just a year. It has created 765,000 jobs which are 1.6 times as productive as the average UK job and which offer average wages of £44,600, compared with £35,400 for the rest of the economy. Yet, ‘at a time when the US and EU are ramping up investment and tax breaks in the pursuit of clean industries setting up shop on their soil, the UK has been chopping and changing’, with ‘mixed signals, policy U-turns and contradictory political rhetoric’ discouraging investment. In other words, never mind about such trifles as the 2,500 jobs to be lost at Port Talbot as the blast furnaces are closed, taking with them Britain’s remaining capacity for primary steel-making – there are better-paid green jobs out there for anyone who wants them.
To claim that net zero has sparked an industrial boom in Britain, you have to be pretty inventive with the figures
This analysis falls at the first hurdle. The EU is doing pretty much the same as Britain in retreating from net-zero targets when they collide head-on with reality. Just as Rishi Sunak’s government put back the proposed ban on new petrol and diesel cars from 2030 to 2035, the EU – which never planned to ban them until 2035 in the first place – has revised its rules so that internal combustion engines will still be allowed after 2035 as long as they are capable of running on synthetic fuel. The German government, like Britain’s, was forced to water down proposals to ban gas boilers when it became clear how much it was going to cost households. As for the US, while Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act has made subsidies available for green energy projects, it has never imposed such tight targets for decarbonising the economy as Britain has. Indeed, America has more than doubled oil and gas output in the past 16 years as it sought energy security.
Moreover, the CBI’s claims are at odds with what is really happening to jobs in renewable energy in Britain and Europe. The Danish wind company Orsted – formerly Denmark’s national oil and gas producer – cut 800 jobs and suspended its dividend last month after losing £2.5 billion in the third quarter of 2023. In the past six months eight European solar companies have either gone bust or reported financial difficulties as China increasingly corners the market for clean energy. According to the Inter-national Renewable Energy Agency, 5.55 million of the world’s 13.7 million jobs in renewable energy are in China, and only 1.8 million in Europe. Why China? Because energy is a lot cheaper there, for one thing. But China certainly isn’t using clean energy to manufacture Europe’s wind turbines and solar panels – 60 per cent of the country’s electricity is still generated by burning coal.
Investment and jobs are welcome in clean energy, just as in any industry. However, there is little joy in celebrating the creation of ‘net-zero jobs’ if, overall, the target to achieve net zero is costing you many more jobs while you lose your remaining industrial base due to high energy costs and excessive regulation imposed by net-zero targets. Ineos owner Jim Ratcliffe warned last week that Europe will lose almost all of its remaining chemicals industry over the next 20 years, in a speech that was woefully under-reported by a media more interested in his plans for Manchester United Football Club. One of the reasons, Ratcliffe said, was that in Britain his company is paying five times as much for its gas and four times as much for electricity as it does in the US. At the moment, Ineos in Europe is paying £130 million a year in carbon taxes, but by 2030 that will rise to £1.7 billion. The German industrials giant BASF has already announced that it is to shrink European operations while investing £8 billion in a new plant in China, as well as investments in the US.
To claim that net zero has sparked an industrial boom in Britain, you have to be pretty inventive with the figures. The CBI’s report doesn’t identify all the 23,750 businesses it claims as part of the net-zero economy, but the five it does name include a company that makes electrical transformers– which are used throughout the electricity industry, regardless of how electricity is being generated – and the waste company Veolia. The latter has been included, it says, because it manages landfill sites, which involves separating organic waste and collecting methane gas from waste tips. Yet landfill sites operators have been collecting methane for decades, long before net zero.
Investing in clean technologies is a good idea. Many of them will fail but some will go on to become great generators of wealth. But as China proves, you don’t need a legally binding net-zero target to make money selling the technology to others. As the US is showing, what really powers industrial growth is cheap energy. That is where Britain, like Europe, is falling down. If we are losing out on investment and job creation, that has less to do with the relaxation of one or two net-zero targets. Britain, after all, leads the world purely in terms of the reduction in territorial carbon emissions, which have halved since 1990. It has rather more to do with the expense and bureaucracy being imposed on businesses in a desperate attempt to reach overly demanding net-zero targets.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/03/net-zero-targets-have-hamstrung-british-prosperity/
***************************************************More Fabricated Nonsense About The ‘Hottest Evah’
Journalists are meant to be skeptical. But not on trendy causes, at least not in recent times
Thus a piece in The Daily Digest starts out “It seems impossible but some people still deny climate change science” and continues, beneath a caricature of Donald Trump:
“We all know somebody who thinks this ‘climate change stuff’ is a bunch of hogwash. Forty years ago, it was easier to understand, but as of late, it is pretty mind-blowing that some people can have this level of cognitive dissonance.”
But does the journalist (who we doubt was even around 40 years ago) really know such a person?
Or are they only talking to one another, and failing to examine assumptions or check facts because it’s, like, mind-blowing that anyone could disagree with us, man? But at a certain point even journalists sometimes check the details, and that’s when it really gets mind-blowing.
MSN ran the headline “US weather: Heat explosion to smash America in freak 20C winter heatwave” and said:
“The US is about to roast in a freak winter heatwave as a plume of sweltering air surges up from the tropics.”
Still, it’s a kind of progress that they then noted it’s a freak event, not a trend, and the heat is coming from the tropics not from your SUV.
And they also noted how cold weather elsewhere was breaking records in Alaska, even thickening fuel oil so furnaces and stoves stopped working, while NBC took notice of a snow storm that dumped two feet of snow on California.
These days we count it lucky when a story says “Norway hit by hurricane-force winds: Is climate change making Europe’s extreme storms worse?” and answers by saying “Unsurprisingly, many across the UK, Ireland, Norway, Sweden and other storm-hit European countries this winter will be wondering whether climate change is partly to blame” then admits it’s not.
As in:
“This is the furthest through the list we have ever been at this stage,” a Met Office weather service spokesperson confirmed to Euronews Green last week.
But since storms only started being named in 2015, it’s not the best way of measuring climate change impacts.
‘It’s quite a complex issue and not quite as simple as [the] increasing frequency of heatwaves in the UK as a result of human-induced climate change,’ they added.”
Even though ‘human-induced climate change’ is not increasing the frequency of heat waves, nor has the UK seen an increase.
Meanwhile in The Atlantic an article that started “California’s Climate Has Come Unmoored / The weather of catastrophe is here” soon went on to detail how “unmoored” California’s weather has always been, from Joan Didion’s 1968 “Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse” to “The damage from the 1862 flood was so bad that it bankrupted the state.”
But it then concludes that, as everybody knows, everything has changed:
“Meteorologists have described it [the 1862 flood] as a once-in-30,000-years disaster, but there is reason to believe that another one could come much sooner, because the planet is warming, and warmer air holds more moisture.”
Again, the narrative has run away from the facts. On purpose, it seems.
The flood that might be coming is more real, far more real, than the one that actually did come.
The British Red Cross advises that:
“In the coming decades, it is predicted periods of hot weather and heatwaves will be longer and more extreme.”
Note the passive voice, which makes it hard to check who made the prediction. But we tried anyway, and found instead that according to the official British Met Office the UK in 2023, the “Hottest year ever”TM, the hottest day came in September and the heatwave in question “would not have been particularly unusual” during the summer, adding:
“The seven consecutive days with temperatures exceeding 30°C in the UK was the longest such spell on record with the previous longest runs five days in the Septembers of 1929 and 1911.”
Given the urban heat island effect it is fair to say that in fact a stretch of hot weather in September 2023 was nothing out of the ordinary, having happened a century ago, possibly more frequently.
Especially since, the Met adds of the September peak of 33.5°C at Faversham in Kent, on the 10th, that “While this is a notably high value it was not record-breaking, falling well short of the UK September record of 35.6°C set at Bawtry (South Yorkshire) on 2 September 1906.”
Yes, 1906.
What’s more, the hottest day of the year rarely comes so late, having “only occurred in September on four previous occasions in 2016, 1954, 1949 and 1919.”
So it’s episodic, cyclical and typical.
Except that in this hottest year ever, Britain didn’t break 30C in August, didn’t break 31C in July, and didn’t break 33C in June.
The tendency nowadays is to rely on theory not evidence. For instance in the New York Times “Climate Forward”, Manuela Andreoni writes of storms and flooding on the American east coast and south to Louisiana that:
“So far this week, Californians have not seen the kinds of weather-generated disasters that struck last winter, with flooding in Ventura County in December and in San Diego in January, my colleague Jill Cowan reports.
Storms are part of the natural cycle that replenishes the water supplies that several states will rely on during the drier months to come, Judson Jones, The Times’s meteorologist, told me.
‘The problem comes when there’s too much at one time,’ he said. Climate change makes that a lot more likely. Warmer air holds more moisture, which means storms in many parts of the world are getting wetter and more intense, as my colleague Ray Zhong explained during deluges last year.
Coastal areas are especially vulnerable to climate change, not just because of storms and floods, but from rising seas and erosion.”
OK, more likely, you say. Though the amount of extra moisture isn’t specified and would, you’d think, at least reduce drought.
But the real question is whether it’s actually making it more common. Climate is a complex phenomenon even in a world where many things are more complex than some people seem to think.
There are a lot of hypothetical mechanisms that could operate and might be worth testing if the result they could produce actually seems to have arrived.
But is the U.S. having more flooding?
As we’ve noted, California has been notorious for cycles of searing drought and inundating floods since anyone started keeping track.
As for, say, Louisiana, the U.S. National Weather Service (yes, we have Google on our computers, apparently unlike many journalists) says “On this page you learn what types of flooding are typical in Louisiana”.
Types, you’ll notice. Not just one. And it lists “Significant Louisiana Floods in 2005, 1927, 1965, 2011 and 1995.
The 1927 event, aka the “Great Mississippi Flood of 1927”, was “the most destructive river flood in the history of the United States”.
A century ago. Before there was climate.
Still, everybody knows that if something bad happens now, or something unusual, it’s proof that climate is way more climatic than it was before it was.
https://principia-scientific.com/more-fabricated-nonsense-about-the-hottest-evah/
**************************************************Why new green jobs are at risk if old industries die
All the post-pandemic talk of resurrecting Australia’s manufacturing sector and securing local supply chains seems like a lifetime away, amid talk that yet another manufacturer could go quietly into the night this year.
The fate of Qenos’s Melbourne and Sydney manufacturing plants is not yet set in stone, and the fact that the company – owned by China National Chemical – has recently spent money rebuilding a cooling tower at its Botany Bay plastics plant offers hope not all of its Australian facilities will be closed.
But if one or both of the plants are shuttered, they will join a raft of major plant closures since all the hullabaloo about securing domestic supply chains during the pandemic – including Incitec Pivot’s Gibson Island fertiliser plant in Brisbane, Exxon’s oil refinery in Melbourne’s Altona, a similar facility owned by BP in Kwinana, south of Perth, and Alcoa’s alumina refinery also in Kwinana. Similar threats hang over BHP’s nickel smelter in Kalgoorlie and refinery in Kwinana.
All of these plants are old, sub-scale by global standards, and suffer – compared to international competitors – from higher labour, gas and energy costs, and from rising pressure to comply with environmental standards.
But the threat to Qenos’s local facilities is also a timely reminder of the knock-on effects of the closure of manufacturing plants.
Tight gas markets have played a part in Qenos’s troubles – its gas bills reportedly doubled in 2023. But the major cause of its most recent problems was the shuttering in 2021 of Exxon’s Altona refinery, which supplied the LPG used as a feedstock for Qenos’s plastics production lines.
That happened under the previous Morrison government – and amid plenty of warnings about the downstream effects of its closure, including from Qenos, which was forced to close half the lines of its own production facility in the wake of the exit of the Exxon plant.
Any decision by BHP to close its Kalgoorlie nickel smelter will also ripple through the broader WA mining industry. The smelter supplies sulphuric acid, a by-product of its operations, to other parts of the state’s mining industry – and, in particular, to Lynas’s new cracking and leaching plant outside of Kalgoorlie.
As Lynas boss Amanda Lacaze said, the manufacturing and processing industry in Australia is an ecosystem, not a collection of unrelated operations.
And perhaps more important is the loss of the technical know-how that comes with the closure of these type of facilities.
Much is made of the loss of blue-collar jobs in manufacturing. But workers in these types of plants need substantial technical skills to keep these plants open, along with the expertise of chemists and a host of other professionals. And, despite the hype around “green jobs” in energy, hydrogen, lithium and rare earths, it is difficult to build that kind of expertise from scratch.
Companies that rely on gas for power and as an input are caught between the pressure to ditch fossil fuel extraction and the political and commercial cost of requiring gas producers to reserve more production for the domestic market.
Those pressures may mean that Australia is destined to shed the remaining industries that are dependent on petrochemical products as a feedstock.
Saving Australia’s remaining manufacturing and chemicals industries – and building new ones – will take actual policy designed to attract investment, backed by long-term support from successive governments of both political persuasions.
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3 March, 204
BlackRock admits CEO Larry Fink’s ‘woke’ ESG activism focus could ‘materially adversely’ hit business
BlackRock CEO Larry Fink’s efforts to embrace “woke” environmental, social and governance policies, commonly known as ESG, could “materially adversely” slam the investment titan’s core business, the investment giant admitted in a regulatory filing.
“Risk factors” for BlackRock’s stock price include the fact that “BlackRock’s business, scale and investments subject it to significant media coverage and increasing attention from a broad range of stakeholders,” the firm disclosed in its annual 10-K filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
“Matters subject to scrutiny, such as ESG, may be viewed differently by various stakeholders and adversely impact BlackRock’s reputation and business, including through redemptions or terminations by clients, and legal and governmental action and scrutiny,” said the filing, which was submitted Feb. 23.
BlackRock — the world’s largest money manager — has an ESG portfolio reportedly valued at $700 billion, a small percentage of its $10 trillion in total assets under management.
It has projected that by 2030, at least three quarters of its investments will be with issuers of securities that have scientific targets to cut greenhouse gas emissions on a net basis.
The firm has pioneered go-green initiatives thanks to its CEO, Fink, who has boasted about climate change’s long-term threat to the economy — and investment opportunity — during his 50-year career on Wall Street.
However, ESG — which encompasses a range of ethically responsible business practices, from curbing carbon emissions to cracking down on discrimination in the workplace — has become politically polarizing, as BlackRock noted in its 10-K SEC filing.
Though Democrats have defended the need for ESG in the workplace, Republican politicians have attacked ESG as President Joe Biden’s “woke” way for the corporate world to implement what they argue is a politically liberal agenda.
BlackRock was even targeted back in 2022 by 19 state attorneys general in conservative states including Arizona and Texas, who alleged that the asset manager’s ESG-related policies hurt the American energy industry.
The move led to an investment boycott of BlackRock in Texas, when the Lone Star state barred its biggest pension fund from investing in any of the 350 funds run by BlackRock and other financial firms.
Fink said last year that he stopped using the catch-all term because of how politicized it has become.
“I don’t use the word ESG any more, because it’s been entirely weaponized … by the far left and weaponized by the far right,” Fink said, noting that dropping the term wouldn’t change BlackRock’s stance.
The firm would continue to talk to companies it has stakes in about decarbonization, corporate governance and social issues to be addressed, he added during the Aspen Ideas Festival last June.
“We had … one of the best years ever, but I’m ashamed of being part of this conversation,” said Fink, noting that his annual letters to investors that addressed ESG issues were never meant to be political statements.
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The incorrectness of clothing
To cope with the outrageous creep of authoritarian behaviour and inescapable globalism, sometimes citizens of the West refer to themselves as ‘peasants’. Call it a bit of lingering British gallows humour.
Increasingly, that is exactly how the Labor Party views Australians – as the ‘peasantry’. Our ancestors, who lived under the thumb of feudal lords and warring barons, paid less tax. You, and your family, are among the highest-taxed people to live and it is about to get worse.
No matter how hard Australians work, Labor’s greed has erected a perspex ceiling on wealth which it lowers a notch every year, pushing the middle and working classes down.
When Prime Minister Anthony Albanese talks about ‘closing the pay gap’ between men and women (gendered terms Labor can only define when there’s an election on the horizon), it is being done by making both poorer.
Equality in poverty, that is the mantra of socialism – Labor’s eternal paramour.
The beauty of capitalism has meant the creation of cheaper markets and cut-price products. These have helped to maintain a level of comfort in challenging economic times. Selling these cheap, admittedly inferior, products has kept a generation in work and the economy ticking over. It’s not perfect, but it is better than looking down over the edge of the gulag, shovel in hand, dirt blowing in your face.
As long as there is a free market, there is hope for recovery. There is hope for freedom.
While these markets make our lives livable, the World Economic Forum (and the ‘desperate to please’ political leaders hanging on their every word), have decided that this cheap capitalism is a threat to the planet because it creates ‘evil carbon emissions’.
I suggest it is a threat to their political power.
The list of carbon restrictions grows every day. Last week we learned that Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek has found a new capitalist foe to conquer – fast-fashion.
Alarm bells first rang at the World Economic Forum with the headline, Suits you – and the planet: Why fashion needs a sustainability revolution. It was a report based on the moaning of two ‘experts’ who insisted that 20 per cent of wastewater is produced by the fashion industry and 10 per cent of global emissions. These statistics rather miss the point that something, somewhere, will always be responsible for emissions. Humans need to wear clothes and the Australian Union movement made it impossible to manufacture them domestically where we’d have more control over the environmental result. Instead of regulating China, they are coming after Western retailers.
‘We cannot afford the trajectory of fashion increasing to maybe as much as 25 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 … how do we take out fossil fuels from the fashion industry?’
Of course, the ‘change needs to be radical … we have to reduce production and consumption of fashion by between 75 and 95 per cent. We’re not talking about snipping a bit off’.
The report is casually talking about destroying the fashion industry that keeps the clothes on your back.
That report was written in 2021 and subsequently ignored during the Covid years when the imminent threat of the evil fashion industry vanished for a while.
The ‘burn it to the ground’ rhetoric of the WEF has since camouflaged itself as ‘Fashionomy’, wearing the sheep’s wool of the new favourite buzzword ‘circular economy’.
‘Sharing the circular economy knowledge and the negative impact of the fashion industry will help people to be a part of the second-hand clothes cycle, and clothing repair shops can become the new option to encourage customers not to waste their money. If the community reduces textile waste, makes savings in the family economy, and helps the growth of the local economy, we will see an impact on the development of a sustainable lifestyle, helping mitigate climate change, and supporting sustainable cities.’
Notice the change in language? If the government knocks 95 per cent of the retail industry out, and all those jobs along with it, we won’t see a ‘growth in the economy’.
With no original ideas, Ms Plibersek has warned the clothing industry – one of the largest employers in Australia – that it must ‘turn its back on fast-fashion’ and if it doesn’t mend its ways, well, the ever-loving State will be forced to intervene.
‘Government is not sitting on our hands on this issue. The federal government has put the fashion industry on a watch list,’ said Ms Plibersek.
A watch list? Like a Stalinist watch list where government critics were lined up and quietly disappeared?
Her speech was a regurgitation of the World Economic Forum’s statistics from 2021, which is no doubt where Labor sourced them.
‘It’s the responsibility of government and the fashion industry to examine how we can be more sustainable in design, the materials used, and the role of the circular economy in extending the lifespan of the garment.’
Well, it’s only the ‘role of government’ to interfere with business if we’re talking about a fascist regime. I will leave you to decide if that describes Labor’s choice of words.
‘As an industry, there needs to be environmental sustainability of business models and the way products are marketed.’
This speech was part of Ms Plibersek’s ‘ultimatum’ to the fashion industry, although One Nation does not remember the Labor Party mentioning these demands during their election campaign. It’s an urgent ultimatum created five seconds ago – a doomsday that didn’t exist until Ms Plibersek decided it did at the launch of the Australian Fashion Council’s new initiative ‘Seamless’, which is another hopeless layer of bureaucracy we believe will punish and micromanage Australia’s fashion industry. A group of busy-bodies with infinite demands.
‘Seamless’ wants its members to pay a 4-cent contribution to the program for every item of clothing imported or created. According to the ABC, this is worth $36 million a year – and $60 million if they get their wish and make the clothing tax mandatory. Every single cent of which has been taken from the retail industry.
‘Improved affordability of clothes is a good thing. Parents shouldn’t have to choose between a new pair of school shoes and paying the electricity bill.’
What was that, Ms Plibersek?
Is the Environment Minister aware that the cost of school shoes isn’t the problem – it’s the nearly doubled cost of energy thanks to … Labor’s ‘green’ energy agenda? Australian parents know exactly what’s causing the cost of living crisis. Don’t blame the fashion industry for Mr Bowen’s expensive errors. If kids don’t have shoes to wear to school, you can thank the high priests of Net Zero.
But why this sudden assault on one of Australia’s most important industries?
We may speculate that this is Labor pivoting from electric vehicles after it became obvious that Europe – and thus Australia – will not be transitioning to ecars. Labor is desperate for a distraction to stop the press from calling them liars, so why not attack retail?
Well, there are good reasons to leave retail alone.
The clothing industry in Australia is worth $23.2 billion. It employs (directly) 121,000 people – and probably another 100,000 in industries dependent on its success such as IT, transport, storage, cleaning, accounting, training, surrounding cafes … the list goes on.
There are more than 16,300 businesses, most of them small to medium, many run by family entities. As of August 2023, fashion retail was paying out $4.9 billion in wages.
Which, we must remind Ms Plibersek, is heavily taxed and helps top up the coffers of the State.
The fashion industry was severely damaged by government interventions during Covid. Countless generational family businesses closed. People ended their lives having seen their life’s work evaporate overnight on the whim of health advice. The margins which used to drive a healthy industry have been cut by greedy shopping centres, excessive power costs, increased wages, and the introduction of impossible Fair Work complexity – not to mention rising manufacturing costs, fuel costs, and green tape. All of these things have meant that businesses in the fashion industry are barely scraping by. That said, the fashion industry is trying, so hard, to survive.
A sensible government would be desperately searching for ways to salvage those businesses that survived the great Covid culling. Perhaps they might consider cutting the excess taxes, or tearing up red tape?
Instead, Ms Plibersek has put her high heel on the head of Australia’s fashion industry and pushed it down under the surface of Net Zero to suffocate on bureaucracy.
‘If it’s the fashion industry that makes the profits, then it must be responsible for doing better by the environment.’
That’s a very communist-style thing to say. Does Ms Plibersek apply that rule to the renewable industry as it cuts down our old-growth forests, rips apart private farmland, and clogs up our seas with cement and steel? Or does the government hand out billions in subsidies?
‘And for those who manufacture in Australia, it means thinking hard about what they can do to create and sell products that have a longer shelf life, while still being affordable.’
Spoken by someone lacking experience and understanding regarding how the price of a clothing item is created.
How does Ms Plibersek expect the (very few) Australian fashion manufacturers to pay their staff more, cover excessive energy prices, pay additional taxes, pay more for transport, more for rent, more for storage, more for materials, more for IT services, more for accounting services, more for HR bureaucracies, and additional costs for the environment – all while lowering the cost and eventual sale price of the product?
If Ministers cannot understand basic maths they should not be proposing complex policies with the ability to decimate one of the most important industries in this nation.
The unintentional consequences of this cannot be overstated.
It is reckless, cheap, and nasty politics aimed at painting the fashion industry as the new climate criminal. An industry that Labor has been desperately trying (and failing) to unionise against the wishes of family-run entities and small businesses.
What is Ms Plibersek’s end result? An Australian industry dominated by union workhouses with a ‘Net Zero’ sticker on the front where citizens can choose which hessian bag they want to wear?
‘I have suits from an Australian designer that uses lots of remnant fabrics that would otherwise end up in landfill,’ said Ms Plibersek.
Has she walked down the poorer end of George Street where fast-fashion is packed wall-to-wall? There she would see students and the elderly picking out jeans for $5 and jackets for $12. Those customers know these aren’t the best clothes around, but fast-fashion allows them to have a wardrobe of sorts to distract them from the otherwise nightmare reality of surviving Labor’s Net Zero revolution.
If those stores vanish, people may be able to afford one pair of jeans – jeans with patches and repair marks – the same set of clothes worn until they fall to rags like the peasants of old living in a threadbare world.
‘I repeat what I said in June last year: I am watching. If I’m not happy with industry progress, I will step in and regulate.’
Did you hear that? That government is watching. The government is threatening you. The government will come after you.
Keep that in mind when the next election rolls around.
Ms Plibersek is coming for the clothes on your back
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Alberta to ban renewables on ‘prime’ land and preserve ‘pristine viewscapes’
Alberta will block renewable energy projects on “prime” agricultural land and limit the placement of wind turbines to preserve “pristine viewscapes”, a decision that increasingly pits the western Canadian province against environmental groups pushing green energy – and the companies investing in it.
The decision, announced by the premier, Danielle Smith, and utilities minister, Nathan Neudorf, on Wednesday, follows a controversial six-month ban on new renewable energy projects that is due to expire on 29 February.
Alberta’s moratorium, announced in August, left energy companies uncertain about billions in future investment, even as the region, with its clear skies and an abundance of wind, led the country in new renewable projects.
Nearly a third of Alberta’s grid is now powered by renewables and the province has shifted away from coal at a far faster rate than expected.
But Smith has pushed back against federal rules that aim to reduce the greenhouse-gas emissions of provincial power grids.
Last month, amid recording-breaking winter temperatures, Albertans were sent emergency alerts asking them to conserve power as the electrical grid buckled from the cold. Smith and others in the province used the cold snap to express skepticism about the feasibility of renewable energy.
On Wednesday, she framed the decision to put limits on new projects as one designed to grow the industry in a “well-defined and responsible” way.
“Alberta has led the country in renewable energy investment, and we will continue to lead the country,” she told reporters.
Under its new rules, Alberta will ban renewable projects on private lands that it believes have “excellent or good irrigation capability” as well as land that can grow specialty crops.
Landowners can request an exemption if they can show crops or livestock can thrive alongside the project. Developers of projects will be responsible for cleanup costs and must secure a bond with the government.
Smith said that the new rules reflect what she called “errors” in the way liability for oil and gas companies was structured in the past – and has since led to mounting crisis in the province as officials contend with roughly 170,000 “orphaned” oilwell sites.
“You don’t correct a problem by compounding it,” the premier said.
In order to preserve its vast open prairie landscapes and sight lines of the Rocky Mountains, the province will put in buffer zones at least 35 kilometres (22 miles) separating what the government believes is a “pristine viewscape” and wind turbines.
Neudorf admitted there was no “universal definition” of the term, but cited other jurisdictions, including the United Kingdom, with rules surrounding buffer zones.
Neudorf also said the policy would apply to the “vertical footprint” of all wind turbines – but that other industries that physically alter the landscape, such as coal projects or clearcut logging, would be assessed on a case-by-case basis.
The government decision was met with skepticism by renewable energy analysts, who warned the vagueness of the new rules amounted to a second “soft moratorium”.
“By introducing three new regulatory frameworks without details, investors and developers are left wondering what this actually means for their projects. Investors required certainty, and the government offered confusion,” Jorden Dye, director of the Business Renewables Centre-Canada, said in a statement.
He called the “unprecedented” 35km buffer zone a “backdoor land ban” that could eliminate the possibility of projects in three-quarters of southern Alberta.
“Overall, today’s announcement extends the climate of uncertainty and leaves us with the task of analyzing how many projects and how much investment Alberta will lose to other provinces,” he said. “Further details are needed to pin down exactly what the fallout will be. Failure to provide those details in a timely manner will also shift investment to other provinces and countries.”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/28/alberta-energy-renewables
***********************************************Fears of ‘mass bleaching event’ at the Great Barrier Reef as 1100km impacted
We get this scare every 2 or 3 years. The fact is that the reef is a living thing that waxes and wanes, as it has done for hundreds of thousands of years. Some recent years have seen record HIGH levels of coral growth
Heat stress is causing widespread bleaching across the Great Barrier Reef in Queensland.
Surveys by the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority and the Australian Institute of Marine Science showed the beaching was “extensive and fairly uniform across all surveyed reefs”.
Corals are a colony of marine invertebrates and they have a symbiotic relationship with algae.
They can turn completely white when water warms or cools dramatically, and they react by expelling the algae.
It doesn’t mean the corals will certainly die, but rather the bleaching makes them more susceptible to disease and hampers reproduction.
However, severely bleached corals are likely to die if the water temperature remains too high for too long. They can recover if the temperature stabilises.
James Cook University (JCU), stated in a press release last week that scientists had spotted the first signs of serious bleaching with “moderate to severe coral bleaching” seen offshore east of Rockhampton at the Keppels.
The bleaching was discovered during routine surveys in the tourist hotspot, which is also critical for recreational and commercial fishing.
Researchers believe fish are becoming less abundant around the Keppels due to factors including bleaching and overfishing.
The Guardianreports that bleaching had been seen across a 1100km stretch of the Great Barrier Reef from the Keppels in the south to Lizard Island in the north.
Of the 27 sites inspected at the Keppels, “most sites showing signs of bleaching”, with only corals in deeper waters unimpacted by the heat stress.
Scientist Dr Maya Srinivasan, from JCU’s Centre for Tropical Water and Aquatic Ecosystem Research (TropWATER), said the water temperatures around the Keppels were well above average, hitting 29C on multiple days.
“I have been working on these reefs for nearly 20 years and I have never felt the water as warm as this,” she said.
“Once we were in the water, we could instantly see parts of the reef that were completely white from severe bleaching. Some corals were already dying.”
She observed that the corals could recover if the water cooled. “We did see the temperatures begin to drop towards the end of the trip,” she added.
The Bureau of Meteorology warned in its recent climate outlook that temperatures were expected to be above the median for most of the country over the next few months due to record warm oceans globally and a weakening El Nino.
The current bleaching could be the seventh mass bleaching event to hit the World Heritage-listed Great Barrier Reef in recent history.
Mass bleaching events were observed on the Great Barrier Reef — which is listed as one of the Seven Natural Wonders of the World — in 1998, 2002, 2016, 2017 and 2020, CNN reported.
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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)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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