This document is part of an archive of postings on Greenie Watch, a blog hosted by Blogspot who are in turn owned by Google. The index to the archive is available here or here. Indexes to my other blogs can be located here or here. Archives do accompany my original postings but, given the animus towards conservative writing on Google and other internet institutions, their permanence is uncertain. These alternative archives help ensure a more permanent record of what I have written
This is a backup copy of the original blog
30 May, 2023
China is going for coal
Builders of electricity grids find themselves constantly navigating between crises.
Construct too few generators, and blackouts will spread whenever demand peaks. Construct too many, and you have a financial crunch, as an oversupply of electricity pushes prices below what investors expected. Add to that the risk of a climate catastrophe if you depend on fossil fuels rather than renewables and nuclear, and the road to success is a narrow one.
Right now, China seems to be worried only about the first problem. The country approved 20.45 gigawatts of new coal-fired power in the first three months of this year, more than it did during the entirety of 2021, according to a review last month by Greenpeace East Asia. Combined with the 90.72 GW given the green light last year, that’s equivalent to adding all the coal-fired generation in Japan, Germany and Poland — three of the biggest users of the fuel — in just 15 months.
Taking the shortest route to keeping the lights on in a dysfunctional grid is being prioritized above financial and environmental concerns. Those latter issues won’t go away, however, and threaten to come back to bite Beijing’s economic planners.
The problem for China is that it’s treating coal-fired power the way the US and Europe treat gas. Electricity demand tends to rise and fall throughout the day. To accommodate this variability, grids were traditionally structured around always-on, so-called “baseload” power plants, plus a fleet of “peaker” plants that could be switched on and off to follow the morning and evening surges in demand.
As anyone who’s tried cooking with both a gas and charcoal-fired grill will know, solid fuel is ill-suited to this sort of operation. Coal plants, like charcoal barbecues, take a long time to be coaxed to and from their operating temperatures. On top of that, the brute machinery needed to shuttle sooty rocks around means that they’re simply more expensive to build — around $505 per kilowatt of capacity in China at present, according to BloombergNEF estimates, compared to $290/kW for gas.
That makes it challenging to use coal to provide peaking power the way US and European grids use gas turbines. Their slow ramp-up and ramp-down means you’re more likely to be generating outside the peak and below your operating costs. The strain that the temperature cycles place on the structure of the plant shortens its operating life, too.
Those high expenses per kilowatt aren’t a problem if you’re operating 60% of the time, but Chinese coal plants hardly ever hit those levels. Generation costs go up as utilization goes down, so that a technology priced at $69 per kilowatt-hour in baseload operation may be several times more expensive when run as a peaker. Faced with a shortage of domestic gas supplies and an excess of coal, Chinese engineers have been working hard to design coal plants that can be switched up and down like gas plants. (Read this fascinating Twitter thread by Lantau Group analyst David Fishman for an example.) Still, the laws of physics and economics are unyielding.
It’s the latter that may prove most damaging. Those $505 per kilowatt costs mean that every gigawatt of coal adds half a billion dollars to China’s teetering $23 trillion mountain of debt.
Indeed, in many places it’s the stimulus provided by that lump of cash, rather than any fundamental need for fresh generation, that appears to be driving development. “Of the 25 coal power projects in development in Guangdong last year, 19 were in part intended to help boost local economies,” especially in undeveloped parts of the province, according to a study this month by Zhang Xiaoli, a consultant at the Beijing-based Green Development Program.
Worse still, excess capacity doesn’t just damage its own profitability, but that of the entire remaining fleet which must sell power into the same oversupplied market. More than half of China’s coal-fired power plants lost money in the first half of 2022, according to the China Electricity Council, an industry group. Losses in 2021 came to 101.7 billion yuan ($14.5 billion), based on official data.
Even after depreciation, China’s 1,129 gigawatts of coal plants represent hundreds of billions of dollars of assets, whose ability to create cashflow and pay off their debts is damaged every time a fresh generator is connected. There’s as much as 200 gigawatts of renewables coming online this year as well — power that’s usually cheaper and cleaner to run than even the lowest-cost coal plants.
The pockets of China’s state-owned enterprises seem so deep that it’s tempting to think losses simply don’t matter. But the fate of India’s indebted, state-owned electricity distributors shows that’s not the case. Their chronically late payments to utilities are one reason that generators have been keeping dangerously low coal stocks in recent years, since they lack the cash to buy more.
China’s provincial governments hope that adding excess coal will help save them from a power crisis — but in doing so, they’re raising the prospect of both a climate crisis, and a financial one.
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Majority of United States Faces 'Elevated Risk' of Summer Power Blackouts Amid Green Energy Push
America's increased reliance on green energy in favor of coal and gas has a majority of the United States facing an "elevated risk" of summer power blackouts, according to a leading grid reliability watchdog.
The North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) last week published its 2023 summer reliability assessment, which found that two-thirds of North America could face power shortages this summer during periods of extreme heat. That vulnerability, the watchdog group said, stems from America's increase in green power generation and decrease in fossil fuel power plants. While coal and natural gas plants can be turned on and off at the flip of a switch, green alternatives such as wind and solar rely on favorable weather conditions to operate at full capacity. If those conditions aren't met, power demand can outpace supply.
"The system is closer to the edge," NERC director of reliability assessment and performance analysis John Moura said last week. "More needs to be done."
Moura is far from the only expert sounding the alarm on America's unreliable power grid. Both state and federal officials in recent weeks have warned that high summer temperatures, combined with low nightly winds, could bring power blackouts across the country. "I'm afraid to say it, but I think the United States is heading towards a catastrophic situation," Federal Energy Regulatory Commission member Mark Christie said during a May Senate hearing.
Despite those warnings, President Joe Biden has moved forward with plans to accelerate U.S. coal plant retirements. With nearly half of America's coal power already set to disappear by 2030, Biden's Environmental Protection Agency earlier this month unveiled new standards that force coal and gas power plants to slash their carbon emissions by a whopping 90 percent between 2035 and 2040. In order to meet the near-impossible standards, those plants will have to spend big on infrastructure upgrades—costs that may prompt the plants to shut down rather than comply.
"Coal is more than five times as dependable as wind and more than twice as dependable as solar when electricity demand is greatest," America's Power CEO Michelle Bloodworth said in a statement, "yet bad public policy and EPA regulations are forcing the closure of coal plants."
In addition to his far-reaching fossil fuel regulations, Biden has spent hundreds of billions of dollars on tax breaks and subsidies aimed at increasing electric car use. And in April, Biden's Environmental Protection Agency announced a new rule that imposes strict tailpipe emission limits on vehicles sold—so strict that it effectively forces automakers to ensure that two-thirds of the cars they sell are electric by 2032.
Those moves could also put strain on the nation's power grid. As more Americans plug in their cars instead of filling them up with gasoline, grids across the country will need to put out more power to keep up. The issue has already plagued some U.S. states—in September, for example, California urged electric car drivers to stop charging their vehicles due to power grid strain. Still, the ordeal did not stop state officials from moving full steam ahead with plans to outlaw gas-powered vehicles and eradicate fossil fuel power plants.
"We understand we cannot have the lights go off," California Energy Commission vice chair Siva Gunda told the Washington Post. "But the fear of these questions being brought up is not a reason to slow down from what we know is morally and societally what we need to do."
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Green Germany: Europe’s Economic Engine Is Breaking Down
Germany has been Europe’s economic engine for decades, pulling the region through one crisis after another. But that resilience is breaking down, and it spells danger for the whole continent.
Decades of flawed energy policy, the demise of combustion-engine cars and a sluggish transition to new technologies are converging to pose the most fundamental threat to the nation’s prosperity since reunification. But unlike in 1990, the political class lacks the leadership to tackle structural issues gnawing at the heart of the country’s competitiveness.
“We’ve been naïve as a society because everything seems fine,” BASF SE Chief Executive Officer Martin Brudermüller told Bloomberg. “These problems we have in Germany are accumulating. We have a period of change ahead of us; I don’t know if everyone realizes this.”
While Berlin has shown a knack for overcoming crises in the past, the question now is whether it can pursue a sustained strategy. The prospect looks remote. Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s make-shift coalition has reverted to petty infighting over everything from debt and spending to heat pumps and speed limits as soon as the risks of energy shortfalls eased.
But the warning signals are getting hard to ignore. Despite Scholz telling Bloomberg in January that Germany would ride out Russia’s energy squeeze without a recession this year, data published Thursday show that the economy has in fact been contracting since October and has only expanded twice in the past five quarters.
Economists see German growth lagging behind the rest of the region for years to come, and the International Monetary Fund estimates Germany will be the worst-performing G-7 economy this year. Nonetheless, Scholz again sounded upbeat.
“The prospects for the German economy are very good,” he told reporters in Berlin after the latest economic data. By unlocking market forces and cutting red tape, “we are solving the challenges that face us.”
The risk is that the latest numbers aren’t a one-off, but the sign of things to come.
Germany finds itself ill-suited to sustainably serve the energy needs of its industrial base; overly dependent on old-school engineering; and lacking the political and commercial agility to pivot to faster-growing sectors. The array of structural challenges points to a cold awakening for the center of European power, which has become accustomed to uninterrupted affluence.
To its credit, industrial behemoths like Volkswagen AG, Siemens AG and Bayer AG are flanked by thousands of smaller Mittelstand companies, and the country’s conservative spending habits put it on a stronger fiscal footing than its peers to support the transformation ahead. But it has little time to waste.
The most pressing issue for Germany is getting its energy transition on track. Affordable power is a key precondition for industrial competitiveness, and even before the end of Russian gas supplies, Germany had some of the highest electricity costs in Europe. Failure to stabilize the situation could transform a trickle of manufacturers heading elsewhere into a stampede.
Berlin is responding to concerns by seeking a cap on power prices for some energy-intensive industries like chemicals through 2030 — a plan that could cost taxpayers as much as €30 billion ($32 billion). But that would be a temporary patch, and shows Germany’s desperate situation in terms of supply.
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Australia: The renewables backup problem
In the Snowy 2.0 project,‘Florence’, the gigantic tunneller, has fallen through some soft ground and become hopelessly stuck. She is now wedged in tonnes of earth and rocks and appears to be immovable.
But who can forget the promises made by Malcolm Turnbull, then prime minister, about the potential of Snowy 2.0? Pumped hydro would be one of the missing jigsaw pieces that would enable a deep penetration of wind and solar generation in our electricity grid. It was going to cost around $2 billion, although this had the same credibility as the original estimates of the cost of the NBN, which were devised on a drink coaster.
Moreover, the figure of $2 billion never included the cost of the additional transmission needed to hook the project up to the grid. That would cost more billions and would be subject to fierce local opposition as the required pylons and cables cut an ugly swath through rural land.
Even so, those were the salad days for the project. Water would be pumped up during the day to the upper dam – electricity prices would be cheap and generated mainly by renewable energy – and released when needed to the lower dam, thereby generating electricity. OK, there’s a lot of energy lost in the process and, of course, no new electricity is actually generated. And given the capital costs, it’s not clear it would ever generate a rate of return. But what the heck, when you are saving the planet.
We were told that Snowy 2.0 would act like a giant battery, providing needed backup to intermittent renewable energy. The nominal capacity was around 2,000 megawatts, about the size of a standard coal-fired power station, although it would only be able to operate for several hours each day. It was to be ready in 2023-24, which now sounds hopelessly optimistic.
The most likely scenario now is that the project will be completed by the end of the decade and the total cost, not including transmission, will be around $10 billion. Let’s not forget that stuck-Florence is costing an arm and leg because this type of specialised machinery – she was built in Germany – is leased and daily fees will still be ticking over. One way or another, the operators will find a way around the Florence problem.
The bigger picture is this: renewable energy will simply not work without sufficient backup and it’s the backup conundrum that has everyone stumped. Even if Snowy 2.0 had gone well, it is only a tiny part of the backup solution. The trouble is that Australia’s topography simply doesn’t lend itself to multiple pumped hydro projects.
The Kidston project in far-north Queensland has been nearly a decade in the making and this was starting, by chance, with two dams at different levels that existed because of a former mining operation. The biggest capital contribution to the project has come from governments, with the investors contributing a smaller amount. When it is eventually finished, it will help power households in the area but any cost-benefit analysis would show that this project should never have gone ahead.
The hope of the side was always batteries, the bigger the better. But the assumed technology leaps have simply not occurred. They provide a few hours of power and do help with stabilising the grid through frequency control. But given the components required to build these batteries – think lithium, cobalt, nickel – and the shortage of them, it’s not clear that batteries are a universal solution. They also remain expensive, in part because so many countries around the world are following the same path: renewable energy plus batteries.
Gas plants are the obvious solution, but they of course emit carbon dioxide. While closed-cycle gas turbines are much more efficient than the open-cycle ones – they use less gas and emit less carbon dioxide – it is the latter which are best designed for backup because they can be cranked up at short notice to cover shortfalls from renewable sources. In other words, to make solar and wind viable means of generating electricity, they need to be backed up by relatively emissions-intensive gas plants. You know it makes sense.
It’s also important to note here that the buildout of land-hungry wind and solar means that any existing coal-fired plant is made obsolete before its time. That is because these plants are simply not designed to provide backup power; rather they are designed to provide continuous power with constantly turning turbines. When made to provide backup power, their operating and maintenance costs skyrocket.
The fact is that even the pious Climate Change and Energy Minister, Chris Bowen, cannot make the wind blow or prevent the sun from setting. Even in his true-believing world, there is a need for backup power. Building more and more solar and wind installations doesn’t overcome this problem and is highly inefficient of itself.
A number of countries, including the UK, Canada and France, have become very lukewarm about nuclear energy but are now having second thoughts. These governments are committing to substantial investments in new nuclear installations, which are not necessarily well-designed to provide backup but can do so without any emissions.
Over time, these governments may conclude that it’s just easier (and cheaper) to go fully nuclear and forget the turbines and solar panels. After all, these renewable installations wear out quickly – probably off-shore turbines last only 15 years – and will need to be replaced. This will leave Australia in a pickle, with a motley collection of wind, solar, gas plants, ugly big batteries and possibly Snowy 2.0, adding up to unreliable and expensive power.
Just perhaps a future government will see sense and take a different path that involves nuclear power. This could be about the same time that Florence is finally rescued from her uncomfortable resting spot.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/05/florence-gets-stuck-in-a-pickle/
***************************************29 May, 2023
So much for sustainable non-polluting power
Greenies have always hated dams with a passion
WHEN you see the abandoned construction site, it isn’t hard to marvel at what could have been. We floated round a bend in the river on our raft and there it was: two colossal artificial banks beneath scarred hillsides, stranded diggers and cement hoppers.
These are the forlorn remains of the Kalivaç dam project on the Vjosa river in Albania, which has been dubbed “Europe’s last wild river”. If the developers had had their way, this would now be the site of a 43-metre-high hydroelectric dam with a vast reservoir behind it. Instead, in March, the Albanian government declared the entirety of the Vjosa and many of its tributaries a wild river national park, the first (and probably last) of its kind in Europe – saved in perpetuity from a fate that has befallen too many of the rivers in this part of the world.
The Vjosa is special because it is entirely free-flowing. Aside from the remains of the Kalivaç project, there are no dams, barriers or artificial banks. It will now stay that way. Mostly.
Dams generate hydroelectric power, but are disastrous for biodiversity and other crucial ecological gifts rivers bestow upon us. So the saving of the Vjosa is a big win for nature – including the critically endangered Balkan lynx and European eel – and an inspiration for other river conservation projects. It is also a rare bit of good news against the backdrop of the shocking state of many of the world’s rivers
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Supreme Court Acknowledges God Was Right: ‘Land’ Really Is Different From ‘Water’
Michael and Chantell Sackett have waited for well over a decade to learn whether the federal government would allow them to build a home on land they own. (Yes, you read that correctly.)
How is that possible in America? That’s easy. America might be “the land of the free” and “the home of the brave” in the national anthem, but it’s in the stranglehold of the administrative state everywhere else.
“Land” and “water” might be different to most people. Indeed, we have it on good, long-standing authority that they are and that their separate nature is “good.” Just read Genesis 1:9-10 (King James Version: “And God said, ‘Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear’ and it was so. And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters He called the Seas, and God saw that it was good.”)
The Environmental Protection Agency and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers mustn’t have read that. They claimed that the Sacketts’ land in Idaho is actually a “water of the United States” under the Clean Water Act, even though their land is not connected to an ocean, lake, river, or stream. Only a lawyer (or maybe a heathen) could make that argument.
The Sacketts wanted to build a home on land that was not on or touching water. The federal government claimed that the Sacketts needed a permit, however, because disrupting the land on their homesite might affect a “water of the United States.”
Fortunately, five justices of the U.S. Supreme Court found Genesis persuasive and ruled Thursday in favor of the Sacketts in Sackett v. Environmental Protection Agency.
In His response to today’s opinion for those in the Great Beyond, God likely wrote: “And it was good.”
In an opinion for five members of the court, Justice Samuel Alito—joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, and Amy Coney Barrett—concluded that the term “waters of the United States” in the Clean Water Act refers only to the following: (1) geographical features that “in ordinary parlance” would be described as oceans, lakes, rivers, and streams, and (2) adjacent wetlands that are, practically speaking, “indistinguishable” from those bodies of water because of a continuous surface connection with them.
Relying heavily on the Clean Water Act’s text and the common understanding of the terms “waters” and “navigable,” the majority concluded that the term “waters” reached only relatively permanent, standing, or continuously flowing bodies of water forming what in ordinary parlance are oceans, lakes, rivers, and streams.
The majority rejected the government’s interpretation because it would have required every body of water, however small or isolated, to be evaluated whether it is a Clean Water Act-covered “water.”
The other four justices agreed with the majority that the Sacketts’ land was not a “water.” (Whew! Common sense unanimously prevails.) But they would have left room for wetlands in the vicinity of oceans, lakes, rivers, and streams to qualify as “waters” in other cases.
How did this happen? How could the Sacketts’ case have taken two trips to the Supreme Court and two sets of opinions to resolve what, on its face, should have been an easy issue?
The answer, ironically, is rather simple. Two factors came together to make the Sacketts endure the trials of Job to be able to avoid $40,000 per day fines for what was once thought of as the American dream; namely, building a home on land you own.
First, Congress did not define the terms “navigable waters” and “waters of the United States” with the specificity necessary to prevent lawyers from turning this case into an environmental Jarndyce v. Jarndyce of Charles Dickens’ “Bleak House” fame. (The latter has become a literary metaphor for seemingly interminable legal proceedings.)
Maybe Congress thought that those terms needed no further explication. That’s what Thomas, in a separate opinion joined by Gorsuch, thought.
Maybe the members of Congress decided to punt the interpretive problem to the courts to avoid having to negotiate and debate the issue. That’s a common problem with Congress today. Whatever the reason, agencies and their lawyers committed to environmentalism uber alles were able to muck up the Sacketts’ dream for 10-plus years.
Second, the EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers approached this issue with an environmental engineering mindset. They asked themselves, “How can we ensure that every actual and potential body of water, wetland, or even dry land that yearns to be wet can fall under the Clean Water Act?”
“That’s easy,” they concluded. “Just make any body of water or parcel of land that has any hydrological connection to a lake or river a ‘water of the United States.’”
The effect was to examine the issue not as a matter of deciding what water bodies can be navigated from one state to another, which was the approach that Thomas and Gorsuch found critical.
No, if H2O goes from Water Body A to Water Body/Land Parcel B, then the latter is a Clean Water Act-covered water. How can we know whether that transfer does or can occur? Again, the EPA and Army Corps concluded, “That’s easy. Just ask us, or hire your own expert hydrologists, botanists, biologists, or whatever-ists.”
Then, perhaps a decade later—and/or your wallet $50,000 to $100,000 lighter—you might know.
That’s nonsense, as the Alito majority rightly noted. The law is not always sane, but the Supreme Court surely was Thursday.
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Giant Wind Turbines Keep Mysteriously Falling Over. This Shouldn't Be Happening
Multiple turbines that are taller than 750 feet are collapsing across the world, with the tallest—784 feet in stature—falling in Germany in September 2021. To put it in perspective, those turbines are taller than both the Space Needle in Seattle and the Washington Monument in Washington, D.C. Even smaller turbines that recently took a tumble in Oklahoma, Wisconsin, Wales, and Colorado were about the height of the Statue of Liberty.
Turbines are falling for the three largest players in the industry: General Electric, Vestas, and Siemens Gamesa. Why? “It takes time to stabilize production and quality on these new products,” Larry Culp, GE CEO, said last October on an earning call, according to Bloomberg. “Rapid innovation strains manufacturing and the broader supply chain.”
Without industrywide data chronicling the rise—and now fall—of turbines, we’re relying on industry experts to note the flaws in the wind farming. “We’re seeing these failures happening in a shorter time frame on the new turbines,” Fraser McLachlan, CEO of insurer GCube Underwriting, told Bloomberg, “and that’s quite concerning.”
The push to produce bigger wind-grabbing turbines has sped production of the growing apparatuses. Bloomberg reports that Siemens has endured quality control issues on a new design, Vestas has seen project delays and quality challenges, and GE has seen an uptick in warranty costs and repairs. And this all comes along with uncertain supply chain issues and fluctuating material pricing.
With heights stretching taller than 850 feet, blades 300 feet long, and energy generation abilities ratcheting up accordingly, the bigger the turbine, the more energy it can capture. But the bigger the turbine, the more that can go wrong—and the farther it falls.
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Bleaching the truth about the reef
For years, the Australian public has been subjected to an unremitting narrative that the Great Barrier Reef faced an existential threat from climate change. Last year a UN-backed mission concluded the world’s biggest coral reef system should be placed on a list of endangered world heritage sites saying, climate change presented a ‘serious challenge’.
Who knew that last year, to very little fanfare, the Australian Institute of Marine Science found, despite six serious bleaching events since 2016, coral cover was the highest it had been in its 36 years of monitoring? Certainly not the Australian public. An Australian Environment Foundation survey of 1,004 Australians found only three per cent were aware of this reality.
Following a relentless campaign of formal complaints by former prime minister Kevin Rudd, the Australian Communication and Media Authority obligingly censured a segment on Sky News’s Outsiders programme for failing to mention that the reef’s splendid recovery was still at risk.
Perpetuating the image of a threatened Barrier Reef is critical for those who see global warming as a vehicle for social change. They worry that the AIMS report could lead impressionable adults to question the claims of climate change ‘experts’, thereby undermining the credibility of emissions abatement policies.
Australia’s state broadcaster, the ABC, is a serial worrier. Despite its declining audiences, it remains a reliable and important megaphone and a go-to for like-minded political advocates like the Bureau of Meteorology. It dutifully carried the AIMS report along with an environmentalist’s warning, ‘that unless fossil-fuel emissions are drastically cut, the reef remains in danger from rising temperatures and more mass-bleaching events’. In other words, don’t be misled.
Fear is an important weapon in the centralist’s arsenal and the ABC, and the mainstream media generally, are willing accomplices in uncritically spreading it. That’s not a conspiracy theory but reality. In this echo chamber only one view is allowed. After all, weighty issues like global warming, healthcare, education and pronouns are beyond the ken of most ordinary people and should be left to experts.
Thomas Jefferson was right. ‘The price of freedom is eternal vigilance’. That vigilance is visibly absent. Indeed, bribed with their own money and falling prey to a divisive political agenda, the public has become ever more obedient and dependent upon government. Likewise business. With the media ideologically aligned, carrots and coercion are deployed to control it. Political careerists conflate their desire for power with the national interest and recruit like-minded bureaucrats to further regulate an already over-regulated society. It’s a self-perpetuating coalition which thrives on controls and complacency.
Australia may not yet be China where there is a facial recognition camera for every five people, but as government expands, Australia’s political class is demonstrating an insatiable taste for power and, with it, a growing contempt for the rule of law.
For example, during Covid-19, governments seized extraordinary powers when they employed apps and QR codes to collect personal data. It was on the basis that information gathered was for ‘public health purposes only’. It would be destroyed 28 days after collection.
We now know that the Victorian government lied about access and tried to suppress a secret Supreme Court ruling which confirmed personal data did not have ‘absolute protection’. Then acting premier, Jacinta Allan, reassured Victorians that the government’s repeated and deliberate attempts to hide the information were to avoid a ‘baseless scare campaign’– never wrong, never accountable.
Still, there was no public outrage. Nor in South Australia when it was revealed its government had secretly kept personal data beyond the mandated four weeks. Nor in Western Australia after its police had used this information as part of criminal investigations. Where is that data now?
Contempt for the law and disdain for civil liberties thrived under Covid. Doctors who put their professional judgement ahead of health bureaucrats’ advice were threatened with disciplinary action if they undermined the national vaccination programme. Contrary views, however well-credentialed, were characterised as sourced from anti-vaxxers’.
Now it has come to light that the regulator, the Therapeutic Goods Administration, knew that vaccines carried greater risks than it disclosed. Rather than ‘undermine public confidence’, it withheld vital causality data from health professionals and the public. This included hiding the deaths of two children, aged seven and nine, who died after Pfizer vaccinations.
In such an environment, wherever political authority can be established or expanded, it will be. Like the new monetary policy board which will politicise the Reserve Bank and deprive it of its traditional independence. Just one more subtle level of control.
Not even the justice system escapes political influence. The trial of Cardinal George Pell and, the ACT’s Sofronoff inquiry into the conduct of criminal justice agencies, demonstrate how the political vibe can override the presumption of innocence and the rules of evidence.
With their parents and grandparents behaving like frogs in slowly boiling water, seemingly in denial of the unrelenting intrusion of government into every aspect of their lives, younger generations believe this is the way things are around here. Indoctrinated in the classroom about their evil colonial heritage and the prospect of an uninhabitable planet and, the need for a more ‘caring’, and a ‘fairer’ society, they accept big government is good whilst believing that capitalism leads to selfishness and environmental destruction.
Banking on continued public complacency, Australian governments have gone where, outside of emergencies, they have never gone before. The blurring of lines between the major parties along with a divide-and-rule political agenda have created a de facto one-party state where opposition to the continuing erosion of civil liberties is not tolerated.
But in the end, even boiling frogs start to jump. When that time will come is difficult to determine. However, whenever it will be, Covid emergencies and climate change directives may have so weakened the public’s resilience and determination it may be unable to escape the pot. In which case, investing in facial recognition camera makers may be a wise precaution.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/05/truth-bleaching/ ?
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28 May, 2023
Climate change could trigger gigantic deadly tsunamis from Antarctica, new study warns
This is all just theory but in any case the prehistoric events they are using as a model took place when the oceans were 3 degrees warmer than today. At the minuscule rate of global warming today, we are a long way off getting that far. Global warming at the moment is in fact stopped. Nobody knows if it will resume
Climate change could unleash gigantic tsunamis in the Southern Ocean by triggering underwater landslides in Antarctica, a new study warns.
By drilling into sediment cores hundreds of feet beneath the seafloor in Antarctica, scientists discovered that during previous periods of global warming — 3 million and 15 million years ago — loose sediment layers formed and slipped to send massive tsunami waves racing to the shores of South America, New Zealand and Southeast Asia.
And as climate change heats the oceans, the researchers think there's a possibility these tsunamis could be unleashed once more. Their findings were published May 18 in the journal Nature Communications.
"Submarine landslides are a major geohazard with the potential to trigger tsunamis that can lead to huge loss of life," Jenny Gales, a lecturer in hydrography and ocean exploration at the University of Plymouth in the U.K., said in a statement. "Our findings highlight how we urgently need to enhance our understanding of how global climate change might influence the stability of these regions and potential for future tsunamis."
Researchers first found evidence of ancient landslides off Antarctica in 2017 in the eastern Ross Sea. Trapped underneath these landslides are layers of weak sediment crammed with fossilized sea creatures known as phytoplankton.
Scientists returned to the area in 2018 and drilled deep into the seafloor to extract sediment cores — long, thin cylinders of the Earth’s crust that show, layer by layer, the geological history of the region.
By analyzing the sediment cores, the scientists learned that the layers of weak sediment formed during two periods, one around 3 million years ago in the mid-Pliocene warm period, and the other roughly 15 million years ago during the Miocene climate optimum. During these epochs, the waters around Antarctica were 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit (3 degrees Celsius) warmer than today, leading to bursts of algal blooms that, after they had died, filled the seafloor below with a rich and slippery sediment — making the region prone to landslides.
"During subsequent cold climates and ice ages these slippery layers were overlain by thick layers of coarse gravel delivered by glaciers and icebergs," Robert McKay, director of the Antarctic Research Centre at Victoria University of Wellington and co-chief scientist of International Ocean Discovery Program Expedition 374 — which extracted the sediment cores in 2018 — told Live Science in an email.
The exact trigger for the region's past underwater landslides isn’t known for sure, but the researchers have found a most-likely culprit: the melting of glacier ice by a warming climate. The ending of Earth’s periodic glacial periods caused ice sheets to shrink and recede, lightening the load on Earth’s tectonic plates and making them rebound upwards in a process known as isostatic rebound.
After the layers of weak sediment had built up in sufficient quantities, Antarctica’s continental upspringing triggered earthquakes that caused the coarse gravel atop the slippery layers to slide off the continental shelf edge — causing landslides that unleashed tsunamis.
The scale and size of the ancient ocean waves is not known, but the scientists note two relatively recent submarine landslides that generated huge tsunamis and caused significant loss of life: The 1929 Grand Banks tsunami that generated 42-foot-high (13 meters) waves and killed around 28 people off Canada’s Newfoundland coast; and the 1998 Papua New Guinea tsunami that unleashed 49-foot-high (15 m) waves that claimed 2,200 lives.
With many layers of the sediment buried beneath the Antarctic seabed, and the glaciers on top of the landmass slowly melting away, the researchers warn that — if they’re right that glacial melting caused them in the past — future landslides, and tsunamis, could happen again.
"The same layers are still present on the outer continental shelf — so it is 'primed' for more of these slides to occur, but the big question is whether the trigger for the events is still in play." McKay said. "We proposed isostatic rebound as a logical potential trigger, but it could be random failure, or climate regulated shifts in ocean currents acting to erode sediment at key locations on the continental shelf that could trigger slope failure. This is something we could use computer models to assess for in future studies."
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UK: We need to talk about Just Stop Oil’s class privilege
I have never felt such a strong desire to buy a man a pint as I did when I watched that builder clear Just Stop Oil protesters off the road. The clip has gone viral. We see an irate bloke take direct action against doom-mongering posh irritants. They were doing one of their funereal marches on Blackfriars Bridge in Central London, to raise awareness about the coming eco-apocalypse or some nonsense, when the man appeared out of nowhere, fuming.
He ripped their daft banners from their hands. He pushed one of them off the road. He looked furious, and why not? A man being prevented from getting to work by the upper middle-class retirees of the green death cult – we should all be angry about that. My WhatsApp has been buzzing all day with friends and family sharing the clip and cheering the heroic builder, the man with no name, the productive member of society who finally said to the road-blocking End-is-Nigh nutters: ‘Enough’.
The police, however, see things differently. They won’t be buying him a pint. In fact, they arrested him, roughly. One swore at him. It was a surreal scene. The builder was only doing what the police have flat-out refused to do – clear the public highway so that citizens can go about their business. And yet the police manhandled, cuffed and arrested him. Disgraceful behaviour by the state, if you ask me.
That builder should know that if he needs funds for a trial, there are many people out there who would be willing to help. The public has had enough of the road-blocking antics of eco-doomsayers. There have been many instances over the past couple of years of working-class people angrily confronting these self-indulgent disruptors of daily life. We’ve seen builders, truckers and busy mums stand up to the time-rich hysterics and tell them to stop making life harder for ordinary people.
A few months ago, on the Strand in London, I saw some very young men in paint-stained workgear pleading with a gaggle of Just Stop Oil activists to get off the road. ‘Let us go home’, one said. One of the very plummy eco-agitators mumbled something along the lines of: ‘We’re doing this for you, and for everyone.’ Their paternalism and arrogance was astounding.
What have the police done about all this? Nothing. Actually, it’s worse than that – they’re providing protection to the green road-blockers. We’ve seen cops offering Just Stop Oil water, and in one case feeding water to an eco-vicar who had glued himself to the road. The arrest of the heroic builder of Blackfriars Bridge is confirmation that the police are putting a forcefield around Just Stop Oil, to protect them from the plebs. They’re not policing these marches – they’re stewarding them.
We need to talk about Just Stop Oil’s class privilege. It isn’t hard to fathom why these protesters are treated with kid gloves by the cops and fawned over by the liberal media. It’s because they are ‘nice’ and well-to-do. It’s because they are adherents to the grim climate-change ideology that is supported by every wing of the establishment. Do you think Brexit voters, if they were to block the roads to register their frustration with the latest UK-EU deal, would be given such soft, cuddly treatment? Not a chance. They’d be truncheoned off the street and the Guardian would laugh.
Just Stop Oil and its mother-ship movement – Extinction Rebellion – are famously upper class. They’re all called Edred or Tilly. Harry Mount calls them ‘Econians’, a green spin on Etonians – the ‘public school boys and girls who rule the wokerati world’. A survey of the 6,000 XR people who brought London to a standstill in April 2019 found they were ‘overwhelmingly middle-class [and] highly educated’. The establishment likes these people because they look and sound so familiar. ‘They’re just like us.’
An unspoken class war is unfolding on the streets of Britain. The intermittent run-ins between working-class people and comfortably-off greens speaks to a deeper disagreement over the future of the country. Working people tend to want more growth, more wealth creation, decent jobs, and cheap and abundant energy. Greens, meanwhile, want less of everything: less development, less driving, less coal, less nuclear, less energy. The clash between that builder and the road-blockers was really a clash of competing visions, competing values, and I know whose side I’m on.
Isaac Foot, the Liberal MP and father of Michael, was fond of saying that he judged a man by one thing – which side he would have fought on in the Battle of Marston Moor during the English Civil War. We can do similar today. Are you on the side of the self-righteous peddlers of fact-lite doom, or ordinary people who want to keep earning a wage and keep the country running? We can tell an awful lot about you by your answer.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/05/we-need-to-talk-about-just-stop-oils-class-privilege
******************************************************EU’s Burdensome Green Deal Has Some in France, Germany Seeing Red
There is a famous one-word line in Gustave Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary” wherein our bourgeois heroine Emma has just about had it with her doctor husband Charles’s stultifying ways: “Enough,” she gasps, in French. That exasperation seems to encapsulate the new prevailing sentiment in France and Germany as the two countries push back against the European Union’s so-called Green Deal.
The lofty goals of that deal, which include zero net emissions of greenhouse gasses by 2050 and economic growth completely decoupled from resource use. Also, the European Commission is aggressively seeking to engineer the EU’s current energy, transportation, and taxation policies with a view to curtailing net greenhouse gas emissions by at least 55 percent by 2030.
The pressure from Brussels is not going down well at Paris and Berlin.
Earlier this month President Macron literally called for the EU to hit the “pause” button on its increasingly oppressive tangle of environmental regulations. Speaking at a meeting to promote a new “green industry” bill at the Elysée Palace, he said, “We have already passed a lot of regulations at the European level, more than our neighbors.… Now we have to execute, not make new rule changes, because otherwise we will lose all the players.”
“We don’t just want to be a green market, we also want to produce green on our soil,” Mr. Macron told a group of ministers, business leaders, and trade union representatives. More telling than what he said was where he said it — in the heart of Paris, not Brussels.
As France grapples with inflation and a rising cost of living, and with Mr. Macron slowly emerging from a nadir of popularity following his much-loathed pension reform, he is prioritizing protecting French workers over keeping Brussels bureaucrats happy. Now is the time to court new investments, not jeopardize existing ones.
In Germany, there is also growing discontent with the EU’s top-heavy green dictates. After months of political infighting over climate legislation, the country’s three ruling parties, the socialist SPD, the Greens, and the liberal FDP, came to an uneasy compromise over a ban on new gas boilers that threatened to unravel a landmark climate protection law passed in 2019 because parts of it had to be scrapped. By 2030, at least in theory, Germany wants to cut its emissions by 65 percent relative to 1990 levels before achieving so-called climate neutrality by 2045.
The political squabbling over how to put some of those aims into practice dovetails with a majority of Germans doubting that the government will achieve its climate targets, let alone those set by Brussels. For one thing, there is no getting around the shortfall in tax revenue that imperils the future subsidization of a full pivot to renewable energy.
The bickering picked up again this week as members of the three-party ruling coalition fought over new legislation concerning home heating. If passed, it would mandate that starting in 2024, newly installed heating systems will have to run 65 percent on renewable energy. But the heat pumps required for that cost more than $20,000 more than a standard boiler.
Disagreements over the bill are such that they threaten to splinter the coalition, which includes the Social Democrat party of Chancellor Scholz. Blows have been traded via Twitter, where the Greens lashed out at the FDP for what they say is unacceptable on formally submitting the bill to the Bundestag.
The Social Democrat whip, Matthias Miersch, said on social media, “People are increasingly fed up with the bickering over heating and want clarity.”
It is now very unlikely that any such clarity will come in the form of new legislation before the summer.
By some leading indicators Germany’s economy is now in recession. The country’s main statistics office released data released Thursday that showed Germany’s GDP dropped by 0.3 percent in the period between January and March. That isn’t much, but it followed a drop of 0.5 percent during the final quarter of 2022. By most definitions two consecutive quarters of contraction means a recession.
That is not good news for Europe’s biggest economy, nor for the health of the European project as a whole. Tiring too are the weeks of acrimony over such a simple thing as how to keep one’s house warm in winter. Genug, Madame Bovary might say — if she were German.
https://www.nysun.com/article/eus-burdensome-green-deal-has-some-in-france-germany-seeing-red ?
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Australian Labor party’s coal-fired green dream
With cost-of-living pressures really starting to hurt Australians, Labor’s green dream would be a complete nightmare if it wasn’t for coal.
When then Treasurer Scott Morrison brought a lump of coal into the House of Representatives, the left-leaning media were quick to respond:
‘What a bunch of clowns, hamming it up – while out in the real world an ominous and oppressive heat just won’t let up.’
Fast forward to 2023 and Labor’s budget surplus has little to do with sound economic management, and much to do with unexpectedly high prices for exports of fossil fuels. And this is despite Labor’s running mates, the Greens, doing everything to demonise coal and gas.
In the real world, it takes more than just dreams to power the nation.
But the economic bonus provided by plentiful coal and gas reserves is only the most obvious benefit. Our ability to provide coal and gas to Korea and Japan provides energy security for our strategic partners. This is important for the energy sector in Korea and Japan if they are to avoid Germany’s fate. The disruption of supply in coal and gas in Europe resulting from the war in Ukraine should be proof enough that Australian exports of coal and gas are more important than ever.
The government’s approval of a new coal mine in Queensland’s Bowen Basin has barely raised an eyebrow from the major news media players. Nor should it. This is good news for the economy but confirms that Labor is facing up to the reality of its green energy dream.
Countries that pursued carbon emissions strategies by relying heavily on wind and solar farms are now changing tack. Nuclear is back on the agenda everywhere except for Germany and Australia it seems. The green dream is also impacting European farmers who are protesting against tax burdens created by ‘radical environmentalists far away from farms’. This trend is now starting to impact farmers in Australia.
Australian farmers make a major contribution to our budget bottom line, with wheat production reaching record levels in 2022-23. Although next year’s crop is expected to remain steady (a bit below record levels), Labor was quick to dip into farmers’ profits with a new ‘biosecurity tax’. It makes no sense for farmers to pay a tax to ensure imports from their offshore competitors do not create a biohazard. What’s worse, the levy will ultimately increase the price of fresh food at the checkout when the cost of living is already biting struggling families.
Europeans are starting to turn against Net Zero policies, led by French President Emmanuel Macron with his call for a ‘“pause” of more EU environmental red-tape’. The UK, however, appears to be pushing beyond the EU’s aspirations with goals to end internal combustion engine vehicles by 2030 compared with the EU’s later and less stringent vehicle laws lobbied for by the likes of German manufacturers BMW, Audi, VW, and Mercedes-Benz.
Labor’s push for increased fuel efficiency standards for vehicles is another area where the green dream can easily turn into a gas-guzzling nightmare. Fuel efficiency standards are meant to encourage smaller, fuel-efficient vehicles. The reality or indeed the perverse outcome of such policies is that vehicles are becoming bigger and more powerful.
The idea that consumers can’t wait to get their hands on an EV is not reflected in Australian vehicle sales, with the Ford Ranger currently the biggest selling vehicle, followed closely by the Toyota Hilux. Woke city folk forget that many Australians can’t get around in regional and remote communities on an electric scooter or in the best-selling EV that has a range of barely 500km.
The big problem at the moment is that there might not be enough electricity to live the green dream where everything is powered by renewables. With no Plan B, Australia’s energy security is at risk should Labor’s ‘crash through or crash’ approach to energy policy fail.
Energy industry leaders such as Dr Kerry Schott have cautioned against demonising coal and gas as part of the energy transition to renewables. And former head of Snowy Hydro Paul Broad recently called BS on the 80 per cent renewables energy target. But Warren Mundine summed it up most succinctly on Spectator TV last week, when he said ‘if you believe in climate change and you don’t believe in nuclear power, then you don’t believe in climate change’.
But Labor is pushing a certain type of green dream without facing up to the reality that Europeans are now realising – renewables alone can’t do the job. With some of the largest reserves of uranium in the world, it’s a no-brainer for Australia to embrace nuclear energy now rather than waiting to learn Europe’s lessons.
The Albanese government is happy to claim the glory for a budget surplus due to responsible economic management while minimising the importance of coal for the nation’s continuing prosperity.
In the meantime, without coal there is no green dream.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/05/labors-coal-fired-green-dream/
***************************************25 May, 2023
Climate Change Gave Us the Great Salt Lake, but It’s Not the Reason It’s Shrinking Today
The Great Salt Lake, or the “Bad Water,” as it was known to the Shoshoni, exists thanks to climate change.
The present lake was formed from a much larger lake, Lake Bonneville, about 30,000 years ago. A drier climate reduced Lake Bonneville to the Great Salt Lake’s current dimensions. The lake has persisted within its historical size range for nearly 13,000 years. Records show the lake was largest in 1985 at 8,500 square kilometers, and then shrank to 2,500 square kilometers in 2021, only 40 years later.
The evaporation of the lake seemed imminent just last year. Such concerns can change quickly.
Up to 1985, rapid lake growth resulted in flooding. At that time, as older residents of Utah will remember, the West Desert Pumping Project diverted nearly a cubic mile of water into a depression to the west to prevent flooding of farms to the east of the lake. The pumping stopped in 1989 as inflows from the Bear River and smaller rivers again declined. The pumps are in place still, just in case.
Changes in climate over thousands of years reduced the depth of Lake Bonneville from nearly 1,000 feet to today’s average of only 16 feet for the Great Salt Lake. The lake still contains nearly 4.6 cubic miles of water. The Great Salt Lake is a terminal lake — that is, water flows in, but does not flow out. Lake Bonneville did drain to the Snake River, at times, before 13,000 years ago. Since then, as a terminal lake, the lake exists due to a balance between inflow from rainfall and rivers competing with evaporation by the sun.
A simple calculation shows that the sun heating the Great Salt Lake could evaporate all its water in a year, leaving only salt pans and saline puddles behind. For millennia, the lake has been constantly replenished by inflow, but the inflow is changing as humans increasingly divert water for other purposes.
Today, as much as two-thirds of the potential river inflow never reaches the lake. Consequently, the lake is shrinking. However, it is not climate change, but human water use that’s cutting the Great Salt Lake’s lifeline. Humans take the water and then mutter something about “climate change,” hoping that no one will notice what they’re doing to Utah’s most famous natural symbol.
Manicured green lawns consume vast amounts of water, not to mention fertilizers and pesticides. The proposed Bear River Development Project would take 30% of the average Bear River water flow, mostly to water lawns. Thirty percent of the average Bear River water flow amounts to 100% in dry years. Then, the lake would shrink or even vanish.
A perfect green lawn, once a symbol of suburban bliss, is seen increasingly as an environmental threat, not just in semi-arid regions like Utah, but all over America. For Utahns determined to have a green lawn, “gray water” — waste water from individual homes— could be a way to keep their lawns green. That was the solution at Pebble Beach Golf where perfect greens trumped imperfect water. A better solution is to dispense with the perfect green lawn entirely, substituting native plants, which are beautiful as well as commensurate with the local environment.
Let’s take a closer look at the long-term history of the water level in the Great Salt Lake. Hydrologists have reconstructed the level of the lake over the past 600 years. The level changes constantly, but the average remains close to 4,202 feet above sea level. Utah’s geology agency data shows the same variations for more than 180 years. The ups and downs closely correlate with rainfall changes. If rainfall is high, the lake rises, and if low, the lake level sinks, just as one expects for a lake in close equilibrium with the climate. If human-originated climate change were altering the lake, the average would decline (or rise), but nothing remarkable is found during the entire industrial age, from 1800 to today. Climate change, clearly, is not the main threat to the lake.
The Great Salt Lake has important environmental, ecological and dollar values. The lake is responsible for a local “lake effect precipitation” — typically 10% of the average 16 inches a year is provided to areas toward the east. The semi-arid Great Salt Lake region has highly variable annual rainfall. The year 1979 was the driest year on record with 8.70 inches of measured rainfall, while only four years later, 1983 was the wettest year on record, with 24.26 inches.
The large variation in annual rainfall is due to weather, not climate change. The “average” Great Salt Lake level has been nearly constant over hundreds of years. The rapid variation in area results from evaporation and water diversion in the shallow lake.
The Great Salt Lake is a major tourist attraction for water sports, for viewing migratory birds and for enjoying the spectacular Utah scenery in quiet contemplation. If the Great Salt Lake is strangled by water diversion, its benefits — and a part of the soul of Utah — disappear. The Great Salt Lake wetlands are, biologically, highly productive sites and a critical wildlife habitat. The lake’s wetlands are essential resting and feeding sites for migratory birds. The rapidly expanding wind turbine “farms” on the Great Plains are directly in the paths of migratory birds, increasingly slaughtering them. Eliminating the migratory bird habitats could easily be a coup de grâce for those beautiful birds.
“Climate change” is blamed for lots of things, but water diversion is the greatest threat to the Great Salt Lake. Utahns should oppose water diversion for real estate development, and work to maintain natural water flows into the lake. The lake will still fluctuate, but as for thousands of years, it will not disappear.
Decisions affecting Utah’s land and natural resources should be made by Utahns, not by unelected bureaucrats in the federal government or real estate developers. Utah needs to take back control of its land, as Eastern states have already done, and then do what’s best for Utah, and for its beautiful resource, the Great Salt Lake.
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Those Crazy Environmentalists Are at It Again
Climate activists around the globe pull stunts from time to time to protest whatever latest grievance they have. Sometimes their complaint is against people using gas-powered cars; sometimes it’s against deforestation. This time some ecofascists in Italy were protesting fossil fuels and attacked one of Rome’s most famous landmarks.
Members from an environmentalist group called Ultima Generazione (“Last Generation”) clambered into the wading pool of an 18th-century marble masterpiece, the Trevi Fountain.
The Trevi Fountain is a beautiful landmark first designed by the famous sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini but was actually constructed and completed by two others: Nicola Salvi and Giuseppe Pannini. Completed in 1792, the fountain is a popular tourist destination. Legend says that if you turn around, close your eyes, and throw a coin over your left shoulder with your right hand, you’ll return to Rome someday. Throw two coins in the manner described, and you’ll find your true love!
The climate activists opted to throw something else into the Trevi Fountain: diluted charcoal. It turned the water a startling shade of black. Then the protestors shouted about how the country is dying.
The group later explained on its website that its attack was motivated by the recent flooding in northern Italy that killed 14 people. The activists believe that public subsidies that went toward fossil fuels were the cause of the floods … somehow.
Rome Capital Police quickly arrived and yanked the protestors out of the western marvel while tourists watched and hopefully cheered.
Then the real work began to save the fountain. Rome Mayor Roberto Gualtieri posted that the “indifferent environmental damage” that the thuggish protestors wrought is not insignificant. The fountain needed to be emptied of the tainted water first to prevent the black sludge from being sucked up by the porous marble, but also because the fountain functions as a water recycler (i.e., a closed system). It wasted roughly 300,000 liters (just shy of 80,000 gallons) of water.
Gualtieri went on to emphasize: “Such gestures are completely wrong and damaging, because they risk damaging precious common goods such as our monuments, and force public administrations into very expensive and environmentally impactful restoration interventions. So they are completely counterproductive, and they also risk reducing the consent in public opinion regarding the right battle for the environment and climate.”
With the exception of the slight pandering to the environmentalists at the end of his statement, this is a point that myself and others have repeatedly made, and yet the environmental cultists continue to wantonly attack works of art.
To quote a recent sentiment from historian Victor Davis Hanson, “Like Byzantines, Americans have become snarky iconoclasts, more eager to tear down art and sculpture that they no longer have the talent to create.” To which we’d add: Not just Americans, but anyone who cynically destroys art.
Ecofascists are happy to damage and destroy works of art, but their acts of terrorism never achieve anything except contempt. It’s hard to grasp their motivation.
Are they so bored with their own lives that they feel the need to spread that misery around? Or is it because of the dread of fictitious apocalyptic doom?
Either way, it’s inexcusable and akin to a petulant child throwing a tantrum.
Another aspect of that same line of thinking is that these wackos aren’t defacing modern art pieces. No activist has yet tried to stick themselves to Boston’s new Martin Luther King sculpture “The Embrace” to bring attention to climate change.
A prominent social media handle articulates a possible answer: “This is not about the climate, it’s about destroying Western civilization and anything it has built.”
The next question we have to ask is: Are we willing to let the “Byzantines” continue to degrade and corrupt our great works of art, or are we going to finally bring down the hammer?
https://patriotpost.us/articles/97528-those-crazy-environmentalists-are-at-it-again-2023-05-24
**********************************************Three bat species at risk of becoming endangered as wind turbines take heavy toll on wildlife
Wind turbines – towering emblems of the shift toward renewable energy – have been cited as a primary reason why three of Canada’s native bats species are in existential peril.
The Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada, an independent body that reports to the federal government, recommended on Wednesday that the three species be listed as endangered.
Such a designation would represent the highest level of risk under Canadian law – a fact made all the more striking because it is the first time any of those species have been assessed by the committee.
“There’s lots of indication that all three have been precipitously declining,” said Stephen Petersen, director of conservation and research at Winnipeg’s Assiniboine Park Zoo, who co-chairs the committee’s work on terrestrial mammals.
Among the causes that the committee identified as contributors to the bats’ decreasing numbers, “the mortality at wind farms seems to be the top threat,” he said.
The recommendation for listing the species was issued following the committee’s semi-annual meeting, which concluded last week in Regina.
Included in the recommendation are the hoary bat, the silver-haired bat and the eastern red bat. All are high-flying migratory species that spend their winters in the southern United States or Mexico. The first two range across Canada during the summer, except in the Arctic, while the third mainly occurs in the central and eastern parts of the country.
During their migration, the bats encounter an array of human-made structures along their flight paths, both in the U.S. and Canada, including the swiftly whirling blades of wind turbines.
Studies based on counts of bat carcasses near wind turbines have shown that the toll can be heavy when multiplied across all the units that are currently operating. With each turbine killing on the order of 10 bats per year, the impact works out to tens of thousands of individual animals removed from the population annually in Canada alone.
In 2019, an Ontario government-led study used the trend in bat deaths at wind turbines in that province to demonstrate that populations of all three species, as well as the big brown bat, have declined significantly.
The study, which was part of the supporting evidence for the committee’s recommendation, ruled out the possibility that bats are learning to avoid the structures.
“We’re unintentionally harvesting them out of the air space every year,” said Christina Davy, a conservation scientist who was lead author on the study and who is now based at Carleton University in Ottawa.
The effect is compounded by habitat loss, pesticides in the food chain and other threats that bats must cope with.
“The good news is that we have tools to reduce the mortality from wind turbines,” Dr. Davy added. “They’re not ones the industry loves, but they work.”
Those tools include shutting turbines down during periods of low wind when bats are likely to be flying but the energy return is low, as well as during the peak of the fall migration season.
Brandy Giannetta, vice-president of the Canadian Renewable Energy Association, said the domestic wind industry is aware of the issue and has been taking steps to reduce the impact on bat populations.
“We are not surprised by the recommendation for listing,” she said.
She added that turbine operators, using sound-based devices, can also detect when bats are near and, in some cases, can emit sounds that are intended to ward bats away.
But others say the measures deployed to date are not sufficient, as is made apparent by the three species now recommended for listing.
The toll of wind turbines on bats is “one of the best-kept secrets – in a bad way,” said Cori Lausen, director of bat conservation with Wildlife Conservation Society Canada.
WCSC and other groups have been warning of the danger posed to bats by wind turbines for years, but the warnings seemed to have little impact, she said.
Because bats can live for decades and tend to have only one pup per year, high losses because of wind turbines have an enduring effect that is difficult to reverse.
“They have no way to bounce back from that kind of mortality rate,” Dr. Lausen said.
The measured pace of Canada’s species law means that the committee’s recommendation will not be formally submitted until later this year. If Ottawa agrees with the recommendation and lists the three species as endangered, the designation will apply only on federal land. Such an outcome is unlikely to have a meaningful impact on bats unless it is supported by provincial regulators who oversee the wind industry.
“The provinces need to step up and recognize that these three species have a very dire outlook if something isn’t done soon,” Dr. Lausen said.
Dr. Petersen said that the committee’s recommendation can serve as a wake-up call that draws more attention to the issue.
“I’m hoping that even though this is not great news, it’ll spur some action,” he said.
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New push to lower speed limits for SUVs and other high-emission vehicles in Australia to combat climate change
Lowering the speed limit for larger vehicles must seem easy for an academic but would be murder for drivers. A less onerous policy might be to make the registration costs so high that only those who need big vehicles for work would buy them
A top professor has called for Australia to lower motorway speed limits for SUVs and other high-emission vehicles to combat climate change.
Australia's love for dual-cab utes, large SUVs and older vehicles is making the country one of the biggest petrol consumers in the world, a new report by The Australia Institute found.
Professor Lennard Gillman from Auckland University of Technology said one way to drastically reduce petrol consumption and carbon dioxide emissions is to drive slightly slower.
He believes Australia should introduce differential speed limits for high-emission and low-emission vehicles so cars that put out more pollution are forced to drive slower to reduce their environmental impact.
'Lowering the speed limit for high emission vehicles has the double effect of cutting emissions but also incentivises people to buy low-emission cars,' he told Daily Mail Australia.
'In a vehicle like the Ford Ranger V6 you'll be expending 260g (of fuel) per kilometre. That's more than twice as much as a Toyota Corolla.'
He believes Australia should introduce differential speed limits for high-emission and low-emission vehicles so cars that put out more pollution are forced to drive slower to reduce their environmental impact.
'Lowering the speed limit for high emission vehicles has the double effect of cutting emissions but also incentivises people to buy low-emission cars,' he told Daily Mail Australia.
'In a vehicle like the Ford Ranger V6 you'll be expending 260g (of fuel) per kilometre. That's more than twice as much as a Toyota Corolla.'
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24 May, 2023
How Climate Change and 'Heat Islands' are Killing Black People
There are some failures of logic here. The author acknowledges several reasons why blacks experience more hot weather but attempts no analyis of the quantum due to climate change. As the temperature change has been minuscle to absent in recent years, the effects of climate change would likely be nil.
If the late Marvin Gaye could add climate change to his ecological masterpiece “Mercy, Mercy Me,” he might ask: Where did all the cool nights go? Heatwaves in the ‘hood, no shade from the sky, no AC to keep grandma from dying.
Why might the late Motown crooner sing that? Because on Wednesday, the World Meteorological Organization announced that Earth will almost assuredly see its warmest average temperature yet over the next five years. To that end, there is a better-than-even chance that one of those next five years will see the planet temporarily breach limits set by the Paris climate accords to avoid the catastrophic effects of climate change. The Paris Agreement recommended that nations reduce greenhouse gas emissions to hold Earth’s warming to 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees Celsius) over preindustrial levels.
The heat is already on this year, with the onset of summer still a month away. Las Vegas had a record day of 93 degrees in April. Seattle and Portland, which broke summer records two years ago with 108 and 116 degrees respectively, set new May records in the 90s. Globally, new spring records up to 114 degrees Fahrenheit were set across Portugal, Spain, Morocco Algeria, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and Thailand.
Temperatures like that mean death. Extreme heat kills more people in the United States annually than any other weather-related event, such as hurricanes, floods, or tornadoes. In North America, the most recent searing evidence of that was the more than 1,400 deaths under the “heat dome” in 2021 that suffocated Oregon, Washington state, and western Canada.
Because of the demographics of that part of North America, most of the victims of that historic heatwave happened to be white. But close attention to the key factors associated with the deaths in Vancouver, British Columbia, Portland and Seattle, reveals threads all too common with the day-in, day-out conditions of many African Americans. Typically, the victim was a socially and materially deprived elder, had underlying health conditions, and possessed no air conditioning in neighborhoods lacking the cooling effects of greenspace.
Black people share those conditions to the level of being disproportionately sealed under the dome of a hotter world, with dire consequences likely if the nation does not fight climate change. According to a 2021 study of the nation’s 175 largest urban areas, people of color in the U.S. were more likely than white people to live on what are called “heat islands.” This is the modern term for the “concrete jungle,” referring to parts of cities where the concentration of buildings, roofs, roads, sidewalks, and parking lots relentlessly absorb and radiate the sun’s heat. Such neighborhoods are often marked by a lack of trees, parks and ponds, creeks, and lakes that naturally cool and moisten the landscape.
Black people, according to the study of 175 cities, have the highest surface urban heat island exposure of any racial or ethnic group, with Hispanics coming in second. It is not an issue of poverty. The nation’s history of redlining and many other forms of housing discrimination in neighborhoods that white interests see as cooler—figuratively, and now, literally—have resulted in Black people being marooned on heat islands regardless of their income.
No one yet knows what that means in actual number of deaths. The federal government says about 700 people die annually in the U.S. from heat-related illnesses, but a 2020 study estimated that number is much closer to approximately 5,600 deaths a year. A Los Angeles Times analysis calculated that California alone suffered 3,900 heat-related deaths from 2010-2019.
What we do know is that Black people are being disproportionately affected. In New York City, where the health department says 370 people die annually from heat-related causes, Black people are twice as likely to die from heat stress than their white counterparts. A 2021 New York Times story found a 35-degree difference on a blazing day in August between the 119-degree sidewalk temperature on a tree-less section of the South Bronx and the 84-degree sidewalk temperature on the thickly-treed Upper West Side near the urban forest of Central Park.
In California, racial disparities have been bubbling up like lava from a volcano. From 2005 to 2015, the rate of emergency room visits for heat-related illnesses soared by 67 percent for African Americans, 63 percent for Latinos, and 53 percent for Asian Americans. It should be noted that the rate of Black emergency room visitors was more than twice the 27 percent increase for white Californians.
Technically, these disparities in heat risk are not new. In the 1995 Chicago heatwave that killed more than 700 people, Black residents had an age-adjusted death rate that was 50 percent higher than white residents. The highest risk was for Black seniors, who had a death rate nearly double that of white seniors.
Worse, it’s not like Black people don’t know they are in the crosshairs of a sizzling climate. A 2020 poll commissioned by the Harlem-based WE ACT for Environmental Justice and the Environmental Defense Fund found that 52 percent of Black respondents were “very concerned” about heatwaves, nearly double the 28 percent of white respondents who were very concerned.
The question is this: Will the part of our nation that enjoys the cooling cross breeze under an oak canopy ever sweat enough to care about climate change? Or even hear the S.O.S. from our blistering heat islands? Mercy, mercy me. Things ain’t what they used to be. What about this overheated land? What more abuse from man can she stand?
https://www.theroot.com/the-heat-is-on-1850462642
****************************************************Cyclone Mocha: Don’t Fall for the Climate Bait
On May 14, Cyclone Mocha made landfall near Myanmar and Bangladesh. It was not surprising to see many mainstream media blame climate change for it. The pattern has now become common.
Every time there is a major cyclonic event, the media fan fear of climate change and argue that human-induced emissions of carbon dioxide are causing more extreme weather. However, an examination of relevant data shows such reports to be misleading.
As I write this, Mocha has made landfall close to the Myanmar–Bangladesh border. Residents of coastal districts of Chattogram and Barishal are likely to experience the worst impact of the cyclone for weeks to come.
Among the most vulnerable are refugees who fled persecution in Myanmar and have been living for half a decade in Bangladesh camps without the protection of storm-resistant shelter. As sad as the situation is, cyclones are not unprecedented for the region.
Incidence of Cyclonic Storms are Decreasing
According to the Indian Government’s “Assessment of Climate Change over the Indian Region,” overall cyclone frequency in the Indian Ocean is showing no increase. In fact, there has been a decrease.
“Long-term observations (1951–2018) indicate a significant reduction in annual frequency of tropical cyclones” in both the North Indian Ocean basin and the Bay of Bengal, the report states.
The data clearly show a decrease in frequency of cyclones for more than 100 years in the North Indian Ocean, the birthplace of storms affecting more than 1.5 billion people. However, this information is obscured by cherry picking data for shorter times frames to suggest alarming weather trends.
Hurricane Data Reveal Similar Decrease in U.S.
It is not just the Indian Ocean region. In the U.S., there has been a decrease in the number of landfalling hurricanes per decade since 1850. According to data from the Hurricane Research Division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the number of major hurricanes have been declining since the 1950s.
“In summary, it is premature to conclude with high confidence that increasing atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations from human activities have had a detectable impact on Atlantic basin hurricane activity,” NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory states.
The mainstream media is good at tricking people into believing a false emergency. In instances like Cyclone Mocha, they prey on people’s compassion for storm victims and use the calamity to drive fear into people’s minds.
Don’t fall for the climate bait. We will see more and more of it in the coming days, as the climate doomsday bandwagon loses steam in many parts of our world. And desperate times call for desperate deceptions embedded onto the public psyche through repetitive, aggressive media programming.
https://co2coalition.org/2023/05/15/cyclone-mocha-dont-fall-for-the-climate-bait/
***************************************************Lord Frost warns: Hurtling towards Net Zero at any cost will be a mistake
With 800,000 British car-making jobs on the line because we’re not making enough batteries for electric vehicles, leading motor manufacturers are demanding renegotiated trade rules with the EU to give us more time to catch up.
Lord Frost, Britain’s chief negotiator for Brexit from 2019 to 2021, is clear where the fault is.
“The underlying problem is that we’re rushing at electrification of cars far too fast for the technologies we’ve got,” he insists.
“What it shows is that the expectation we had in the trade agreement when we negotiated it was that things would have moved by 2024, and that is not true.”
Vauxhall’s parent company, Stellantis, told MPs earlier this week that it would be unable to keep a commitment to make electric vehicles in the UK without changes to the Trade and Cooperation Agreement with the EU.
From next year, under the agreement, 45 percent of an electric vehicle’s parts should originate in the UK or EU to qualify for tariff-free trade between the two.
Without meeting the requirements, cars made in the UK would face a 10 percent tariff if sold in the EU – rendering them uncompetitive. Electric car batteries are mainly sourced from Asia and can be up to 50 percent of a car’s value.
But it’s not only car manufacturing, Lord Frost believes, but that is also under intense pressure from the rush to achieve net zero – a government commitment to ensure the UK reduces its greenhouse gas emissions by 100 percent from 1990 levels by 2050.
In an exclusive interview with the Daily Express, Lord Frost insists: “Everyone can see we’re not ready. The [electricity supply] grid is not ready, the costs are too high; all we’re doing is needlessly causing problems for our own industry.”
Not only that but the poorest are hit hardest by the transformation.
“We are told constantly that net zero 2050 is not only something that must be done, but it’s also something that’s going to be good for you and is going to increase economic growth and everyone’s going to be better off,” he says.
“I don’t think that is true. We are replacing a lot of perfectly good ways of generating electricity with gas and nuclear for bad ways of generating it with wind and solar, so why would you not expect costs to go up?
“If we’re requiring poor technologies like heat pumps to be installed then that’s going to hit the poorest worst. If it’s good technology, people will install it anyway.
“If it’s bad and expensive technology, the Government has got to make people do it.”
Once dubbed the “greatest Frost since the Great Frost of 1709” by Boris Johnson, the 58-year-old is considered by many Tories to be a leading voice of common sense and even a potential future party leader.
A former diplomat, civil servant and Minister for State, he will be giving the annual lecture next week at the Global Warming Policy Foundation.
He strongly believes the Government’s policy of net zero going too fast will cause considerable damage to the UK economy, making us all poorer, especially the less well-off.
Lord Frost does not dispute that climate change is happening. Nor is he repudiating the need for green policies to combat global warming.
“But that’s not the same as saying we’re in climate crisis or emergency, and it’s not the same as saying the only choice we have is to do net zero by 2050,” he says.
“Those are political choices – they’re not scientific choices. And with all political choices, you’ve got to weigh up the pros and cons; the costs against the benefits. And that’s what we’re not doing. You don’t have to deny science to say we need to look at the way we’re going about this and whether it makes sense.”
Lord Frost says what’s especially frustrating about this debate is that many people assume if you’re sceptical about net zero then you’re not interested in protecting the environment. “They’re not the same thing at all,” he insists.
“We all want a cleaner environment. That has nothing to do with the net zero ideology. When this country was first industrialising, the environment was much more polluted than it is now. What has enabled us to improve the environment is economic growth; more efficient ways of doing things. When we get richer, we can spend on clearing up pollution.”
With China set to dominate the electric car market in Europe, and the US supplying us with shale gas, the former minister is incensed we are making other countries richer while making ourselves poorer.
“It obviously makes no sense as a policy,” he says. “As a country, we’re [responsible for] about two per cent of global emissions. We could shut down the British economy tomorrow and it would make no difference to the nature of the problem.
“We are helping [China] by off-shoring our own production and making energy more expensive. We’re going along with that and making ourselves weaker. It makes no sense in a world that’s got more dangerous.”
Energy security has to be a prime concern for Britain, especially as we import so much of our energy from unreliable foreign nations.
“More than ever now, since the Ukraine War, we need an energy system that is productive,” says Frost. “One that we can rely on and we have control over. We’re going in the other direction. We’re installing unreliable technology that has to be backed up. The wind doesn’t blow all the time so you need a back-up to fill the gap. Well, why would that not be more expensive?
“Why not just have the back-up and forget about the wind farms? With our current state of technology, the idea that renewables are going to make us more secure seems to be a total fallacy.”
He stresses how it’s all the more frustrating when we know what the solution is.
“It’s gas, moving to nuclear – that’s the way of reducing emissions in a way that powers the economy,” Lord Frost adds.
“It isn’t reducing our capacity to produce energy, crushing the economy, and making people live in a different way. I don’t think people are going to put up with that.”
Lord Frost is exasperated by the current moratorium on shale gas exploration.
“We have so much shale gas in this country that we could be tapping. A shale gas facility that’s about the size of Parliament Square can produce the same amount of power as a wind farm 10 times the size of Hyde Park.
“This is not a disruptive technology unless your vision of the future is that we don’t have any industry. All of us politicians have to care about voters but I think, in the interest of the country, you have to take on the argument.”
There’s a suggestion that we have removed the shackles of the EU, only to replace them with net zero.
“Yes, a lot of the net zero legislation is inherited through the EU and it is now in our hands to change it, but we don’t seem anxious to do so,” Frost says.
"I think people have got captured by this ideology. They believe the messaging without thinking about it rigorously.”
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Forced labour in China is helping to fuel Australia's love affair with cheap solar
Ms Chanisheff is an ethnic Uyghur hailing from the north-western Chinese province of Xinjiang, or East Turkistan as she calls it. Xinjiang is one of the world's biggest producers of polysilicon, a crucial ingredient in modern-day solar panels.
About 45 per cent of the world's supply comes from the province, where metallurgical grade silicon is crushed and purified in huge factories.
But researchers and human rights activists claim those factories are also home to the widespread use of forced Uyghur labour.
Ms Chanisheff says getting direct accounts from affected workers is hard because of what she says is a vast orchestrated crackdown on Uyghurs by Beijing.
Clouds gather over sunny story
But she says many people in the Uyghur diaspora in Australia and elsewhere in the world know of family members or friends caught up in the industry.
"The Uyghurs that live in Australia, they know their families are in these labour camps working for the solar panel industry," she said.
"But they're unwilling to speak up due to further persecution of their family members."From an almost non-existent base 20 years ago, China's solar industry has grown to become the world's dominant supplier of panels.
In polysilicon, China accounts for almost 90 per cent of production, having crushed competitors including the US during its rise. China's success has been a boon for consumers, who have benefited from sharp falls in the price of solar panels.
But ethical questions about parts of the industry in China appear to be growing. Despite insistences by Beijing that its policies in Xinjiang are aimed at countering terrorism and alleviating poverty, many remain unconvinced.
Nicholas Aberle, the director of energy generation and storage at the Clean Energy Council, says the reports of human rights abuses in the solar supply chain are a worry.
Dr Aberle said while "this is not an issue peculiar to solar", consumers and governments could not afford to turn a blind eye. "We condemn modern slavery and forced labour," Dr Aberle said.
"It's not something that anyone wants to see anywhere in the world or involved in any of the products that they're purchasing. "Unfortunately, there is some quite good evidence that this is occurring in Xinjiang in Western China."
Claims labour coercion rife
Strategic Analysis Australia director Michael Shoebridge said defining the use of Uyghur labour in the solar industry was difficult because workers, at least notionally, had a choice about whether to participate in it.
But Mr Shoebridge said the choice often seemed to involve working in the factories "for long hours and low rates of pay" or drawing the ire of authorities. As a result, he said many workers were effectively "coerced contractors".
"Really, the Xinjiang economy is propped up by cheap Uyghur labour," Mr Shoebridge said.
On top of this, Mr Shoebridge noted Xinjiang's polysilicon producers also relied on cheap, heavily subsidised coal power to maintain their cost advantage. "It's an underbelly of the solar panel industry," he said.
"People feel very virtuous slapping these solar panels on their roofs. "But if they understood the industry supply chain and its entanglement in the rather nasty human rights abuses and dirty coal in Xinjiang, they wouldn't feel quite so happy when the sun shone on their solar panels."
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-05-17/the-dirty-secret-behind-australias-cheap-solar/102288954
***************************************23 May, 2023
Current climate policies will leave more than a FIFTH of humanity exposed to dangerously hot temperatures by 2100, study warns
The prophecies never stop but nothing much ever happens
But the article is an amusing one. Very old-fashioned in its way. It examines -- wait for it -- "numbers of people left outside the ‘human climate niche’—defined as the historically highly conserved distribution of relative human population density with respect to mean annual temperature. We show that climate change has already put ~9% of people (>600 million) outside this niche." -- https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-023-01132-6
Fortunately, as a retired academic I can understand academic gobbledegook. More simply put: Heat is bad for you
It can even be regarded as racist to claim that climate has any effect on human beings but they are gaily doing just that. They imply that the tropics are lightly populated because heat is distressing and global warming will put more people into distressingly hot situations.
As someone who grew up in the tropics, I completely reject that. I loved my home in Far North Queensland and dream of going back there. Warmth is comforting and relaxing. You drink a lot of cold beer there but that is pretty good. It is cold that is threatening.
So why are the tropics lightly populated? I know why but dare not say it. Let me simply point out that most of the lightly populated tropical areas are in Africa
Current climate policies will leave more than a fifth of humanity exposed to dangerously hot temperatures by 2100, a study has warned.
Led by scientists at the University of Exeter, the study found that the legally binding measures currently in place will result in global warming of 4.9F (2.7C) by the end of the century.
This means two billion people - around 22 per cent of the projected end-of-century population - will be exposed to dangerous heat, with average temperatures of 84.2F (29C) or more.
At these high temperatures, water resources could become strained, mortality could increase, economic productivity could decrease, animals and crops could no longer flourish, and large numbers of people may migrate.
Globally, there are 60million people already exposed to this heat.
However, the researchers suggest there is 'huge potential' for decisive climate policy to limit the human costs of climate change.
They say the forecasts show that limiting global warming to 2.7F (1.5C), in line with the Paris Agreement, would mean five times fewer people are exposed to extreme heat.
The study, which was in association with scientists from the Earth Commission and Nanjing University in China, also found that the lifetime emissions of 3.5 average global citizens today would expose one future person to the dangerous conditions.
And in the US, this was even more concerning, as it was found just 1.2 US citizens' emissions would have the same result. This means that for almost every average person in America, their individual contribution to climate change over their lifetime could result in another person living in dangerous heat in the future.
***************************************************
"Degrowth"?
In 1972 a collective of grandees known as the Club of Rome set out to establish the limits to economic growth. Worried about the state of the planet, they fed a computer all they knew about farming yields, natural resources, population trends and so on. The rudimentary machine crunched the data and spouted a grim answer: given ecological constraints, the highest standard of living possible was one stagnating at half the American level of the time. Anything beyond that risked imminent disaster, a “sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity”.
Half a century later, the global population has doubled and GDP more than quadrupled: the limits to growth turned out to be as surmountable in the 20th century as they had been when first posited in the 18th. But anyone thinking that another 50 years of evidence might have settled the debate has not met the European left. At a threeday “Beyond Growth” conference held at the European Parliament in Brussels this week (and organised by 20 mainly leftleaning MEPs), an audience of youngsters whooped and cheered as speakers proclaimed that, this time, the limits of growth really have been reached. Driven by ecological concerns and riled by social injustice, to them the question is no longer how to mitigate the effects of human activity, for example by investing in green technologies. Rather, some form of “degrowth” —décroissance, in the original French—is necessary today to avoid societal collapse.
Human beings are born small and stop growing as adults, says Philippe Lamberts, cohead of the Green group in the parliament and the conference’s leading light. Similarly, “when your economy is mature, well, it doesn’t need to grow any longer.” The metaphor falls short of what most economists would think of as convincing evidence. But it has clearly struck a chord. A similar growthastherootofallproblems jamboree five years ago was sparsely attended and confined to the parliament’s committee rooms. This time, thousands packed into the EU’s vast hemicycle and beyond. The big beasts of Brussels came to pay homage, led by Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission.
One participant gushed at being there at the “Woodstock for systemchangers”. That may be to overstate the impact that can be wrought by a cast of minor academics, trade unionists, green lobbyists and fellowtravellers on stage. Still, many a progressive idea has germinated in Europe, and Brussels is where some of them get turned into policy. So when those roaming its halls, even if only for a few days, discuss moving “from the welfare state to the socialecological state”, it is worth paying attention.
It turns out that the animus against economic growth comes in 50 shades of red. Some merely decry the use of GDP as the primary gauge of a society’s success, pointing to how it fails to measure ills ranging from environmental degradation to slumping mental health. Fair enough. A bit further from the mainstream are the “postgrowth” advocates, who think people can be just as happy with economies going up or down. If policymakers stop caring about everhigher output, they can throttle bits of societal activity campaigners don’t like, for example big cars, private jets and so on. Instead of trying to grow the pie, the idea is to take what there now is and share it more equally. One panel decried the “addiction of labour to growth” by advocating a fourday week. In the very seats where MEPs crafted rules for minimum wages, campaigners were discussing maximum allowable wages.
There is an even more exalted tier—the actual degrowers. By far the majority at the conference, their aim is to shrink the pie deliberately. Growth damages the planet, and only benefits the rich anyway, they maintain. The idea that emissions can be cut enough while economies keep growing is “a fairy tale” designed to prolong the neoliberal world order. It is better—necessary, even—to force a diet now, and get rid of any aspirations for growth later. How, exactly? “We need to determine democratically what kind of production we need to be doing,” and nix the rest, one participant advocated. Panels of citizens can advise what is wasteful and what is socially desirable. Any resemblance to some of the more stringent policies of the early Soviet era are presumably not intended.
A spectre is haunting economics
Sometimes utopians fail to notice that they have already reached the promised land. For what is Europe, if not a postgrowth continent already? Parts of it, like Italy, are scarcely bigger than they were 20 years ago. Yet, somehow, that has not prompted the contemplative contentment that the degrowers expect. It turns out voters do not much like stagnation; the newish premier, Giorgia Meloni, rails against “Greta Thunberg’s ideology” killing jobs.
Where the growthsceptics are right is that the environment has suffered as GDP has soared. But they too readily dismiss the obvious solution, which is to green the economy, not throttle it. As Mrs von der Leyen explained to the sceptical crowd, her political breed already accept that the old economic model centred on fossil fuels is “simply obsolete”. Europe wants to cut the carbon it spews into the atmosphere by over half by 2030 compared with 1990—it is busily enacting law after law to reach the target—and to reach netzero carbon emissions by 2050. Already, its emissions are coming down even as the economy is growing. That is a remarkable pivot for a continent whose prosperity was built through burning coal, oil and gas. To dismiss such efforts as “greenwashing”, as degrowers do, is an overstatement.
Beyond the confines of the conference, Europe is grappling with nearintractable problems. How much can it spend to assist Ukraine as it fends off Russian aggression? How will Europe’s welfare state be financed as society ages? How can the best ideas to continue decarbonising the economy be turned into reality? Finding suitable solutions will require hard graft and much human ingenuity. That is the very stuff that economic growth is made of.
The more of it, the better.
*******************************************
Global cooling? It looks like it in India
On May 4, India’s capital of New Delhi recorded the third coldest May morning since 1901. At 16 degree Celsius (60 Fahrenheit), the region’s 32 million residents woke up to a relatively cold morning in what is usually the hottest month of the year.
So why is there a record low temperature when the dominant mainstream narrative tells us that climate change has made our environs warmer than before? Is this just an aberration?
While Western media obsessed with the warm weather in Spain, India’s capital recorded a very cold summer morning. In fact, most of the cold-weather records in Delhi have gone unreported in Western media, which are mainly interested in showcasing the city’s extreme summer temperatures.
Neatly concealed from the public’s eye are the record low winter temperatures that Delhi has been witnessing since 2017. In December 2018, Delhi recorded an average minimum temperature of 7°C (44°F), the third lowest in the last 50 years. On December 30, 2019, the maximum temperature settled at 9°C (49°F), making it the coldest December day in 122 years.
As is the case globally, winter cold in Delhi is a bigger killer than summer heat. According to studies, short-term exposure to extreme temperature accounts for 6.5 percent of all deaths in India, with 88 percent of that amount caused by cold weather and only 12 percent by hot weather.
This is an example of media bias towards advancing a narrative of apocalyptic warming when reporting weather events. Also, part of this slanted reporting is the media’s failure to acknowledge the real reason behind the recording of all-time high summer temperatures: the urban heat island (UHI).
Urban Heat Island, Not Climate, Sets Records
During my stint as a climate consultant in New Delhi, I lived close to the Safdarjung temperature-measurement station. As per the Indian Meteorological Department, the highest maximum temperature ever recorded at Safdarjung was 47°C (117°F) on May 29, 1944.
This high temperature recorded nearly 80 years ago for this station has yet to be toppled by the 21st century warming that supposedly threatens us with doom, and the reason is probably the station’s location.
Unlike the other temperature monitoring stations in Delhi, the Safdarjung station is in a relatively greener section of the city. Thus, it is less susceptible to the Urban Heat Island effect, and, therefore, has not been registering the insanely high temperatures of 49°C (120°F) witnessed in and around Delhi.
Mahesh Palawat, vice-president of Skymet Weather Services, says, “Safdarjung weather station is located in a fairly green area, as compared to the rest of Delhi, which has a lot of heavily concretised spaces without much green cover. Temperatures in these parts of the city will therefore, understandably, be higher.”
So, the reason thermometers record new all-time highs in Delhi is because of urbanization’s concrete structures and pavements and other landscape changes. Weather officials also note that some of the newer automatic weather instruments used in highly urbanized areas may be prone to error.
“Most observatories in Delhi have automatic systems, which have a scope for error because they use bimetals, which can contract and expand during different weather conditions,” says an official of the India Meteorological Department in the Hindustan Times. He added that abnormal temperature spikes of the error-prone stations should be compared to the readings of older stations like Safdarjung to obtain “a more precise idea of the temperature.”
It takes just a bit of common sense to understand the artificial urban heat island impact on thermometers in cities and airports. However, preconceived notions of catastrophic warming pose serious hurdles to grasping this reality.
Delhi’s case illustrates that warming is not a continuous and unprecedented phenomenon as some claim it to be. Instead, we see at play a chaotic climate system at work with unpredictable weather patterns. Additionally, we must be mindful of the urban heat island impact when reading news bulletins about record-high summer temperatures.
https://co2coalition.org/2023/05/15/media-ignore-delhis-coldest-may-since-1901/
*****************************************Australia: Santos boss Kevin Gallagher says gas is the key to moving to net zero, not renewables
Gas, not renewable energy, is the “main game” in the transition to net zero, Santos managing director Kevin Gallagher says, while warning the industry’s opponents are focused on “killing oil and gas”.
Speaking at the Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association conference in Adelaide on Thursday, Mr Gallagher also championed carbon capture and storage (CCS) as integral to the transition, saying Santos’s Moomba project would equate to the carbon impact of taking 200,000-300,000 cars off the road.
Mr Gallagher said Santos was not looking for a government handout for its CCS ambitions, which include three hubs starting with the $US165m Moomba CCS project which aims to start injecting CO2 next year. But the industry did need “a supportive regulatory framework’’ to be able to move forward with confidence, he said.
Mr Gallagher said “abated oil and gas” was crucial to the move to net zero, with CCS a vital part of the equation.
He also said gas was at the core of the long-term shift to net zero, while downplaying the role of renewables.
“Renewables are part of the solution, but they are not the holy grail,’’ he said.
“The main game is gas because it makes renewables possible, it provides feedstock for fertilisers and chemicals, and it fires the high temperature furnaces required for bricks and cement.
“However, while getting to net zero should be all about emissions reductions, our opponents are only about killing oil and gas. Which is why they now seek to discredit carbon capture and storage as well.’’
The conference being held in Adelaide this week – the industry’s major annual get-together – has focused heavily on the role of CCS in the national and global transition to net zero.
APPEA itself has called for the creation of “net zero industrial zones”, where heavy-emitting industries would cluster together and have their emissions collected and sequestered.
However the federal government appears split on the issue, with Resources Minister Madeleine King this week expressing strong support for CCS while Industry and Science Minister Ed Husic said he had not been shown evidence that it was viable at a large scale.
Mr Gallagher said Santos had been injecting gas into depleted reservoirs in the Cooper Basin for “decades”, which made him “very confident” that Moomba CCS would be a success.
On a global scale, Mr Gallagher said there were 30 projects in operation, storing 44 million tonnes of CO2 annually, and it was clear that “abated oil and gas” – gas with the CO2 stripped out and stored – had a role to play for decades to come.
“To achieve the government’s targets under the Safeguard Mechanism, industries like steel, cement, aluminium and ammonia need us to succeed in delivering large-scale, low-cost abatement and affordable abated gas,’’ Mr Gallagher said.
“Otherwise, Australia will lose those industries and those jobs as well.
“We want to work with ministers like the Minister for Industry and the Minister for Energy to build support and confidence with these customers so that we can keep a viable manufacturing sector in Australia.’’
Mr Gallagher said there was also an equity issue involved in ensuring the supply of affordable gas, with “energy poverty” a growing issue even in developed countries such as Australia, while globally, gas was needed to feed the world.
Mr Gallagher said the industry’s ideological opponents had given “no thought to the human cost of a world without oil and gas’’.
“The world could not feed itself today, or anytime soon, without fertilisers made from gas,’’ he said.
“Without ammonia-based fertilisers made from natural gas, we could feed about four billion people, roughly half of today’s global population.
“And we do not yet have replacements for the materials that are fundamental to our modern civilisation – steel, cement and plastics.’’
Mr Gallagher, when asked about the public perception of the oil and gas sector and the political fight over issues such as the gas market intervention and recent proposed changes to the petroleum resources rent tax, said the industry needed to make its case forcefully.
“As an industry, we’ve sought to keep our head down and try to stay out of the firing line, but we’re in the firing line and so we do have to fight back but I don’t think that’s going to war with everybody.
“But I do think standing up for ourselves means that we have to be there telling our story and making sure that people understand the benefits of gas and that the need for gas will be here for a long time.’’
On the political front, Mr Gallagher said regulatory stability was the key issue.
“When I speak to my Japanese and Korean, Malaysian, French partners, they are all very concerned with the rate of change and the rate of market interventions,’’ he said.
“So whatever happens now I think we need stability going forward and I’ll be working with both sides of politics to try and encourage them.’’
Opposition leader Peter Dutton, in a video address delivered before Mr Gallagher’s speech, cast the political situation in a much stronger light, juxtaposing the “renewable zealotry” of the Labor Government against the free market ideology of the federal opposition.
Mr Dutton vowed to wind back the government’s intervention measures if elected, and urged the industry to “fight for yourselves’’ against “financially crippling” measures which threatened to de-industrialise the nation.
Mr Gallagher also said Santos’s direct air capture (DAC) trials were also progressing well, and the ambition was to bring the cost down to $US75 per tonne of carbon captured by 2030.
“Just last week, I visited Welshpool in Perth to witness commissioning of a DAC technology that we will soon be trailing in the Cooper Basin,’’ he said.
“It’s been running intermittently for several days now and it is working as planned, with lower energy inputs than other direct air capture technologies that we know of.
“The trial unit is able to capture a quarter of a tonne of CO2 per day and will soon be transported to Moomba where we will optimise its performance.
“Later this year, we will scale the technology up to build a one tonne per day unit for delivery to Moomba and further trials next year.’’
Mr Gallagher said he believed the company could hit the $US75 target, “an order of magnitude lower than average global costs of DAC technology today’’.
“This puts us in reach of the possibility of eliminating Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions from natural gas production and use,’’ he said.
The pilot plant’s costs are currently about $US200 per tonne of carbon, however that was inflated by the small size of the project, Mr Gallagher said.
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22 May, 2023
Thorough analysis by Clintel shows serious errors in latest IPCC report
The IPCC ignored crucial peer-reviewed literature showing that normalised disaster losses have decreased since 1990 and that human mortality due to extreme weather has decreased by more than 95% since 1920. The IPCC, by cherry picking from the literature, drew the opposite conclusions, claiming increases in damage and mortality due to anthropogenic climate change.
These are two important conclusions of the report The Frozen Climate Views of the IPCC, published by the Clintel Foundation.
The 180-page report is – as far as we know – the first serious international ‘assessment’ of the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report. In 13 chapters the Clintel report shows the IPCC rewrote climate history, emphasizes an implausible worst-case scenario, has a huge bias in favour of ‘bad news’ and against ‘good news’, and keeps the good news out of the Summary for Policy Makers.
The errors and biases that Clintel documents in the report are far worse than those that led to the investigation of the IPCC by the Interacademy Council (IAC Review) in 2010. Clintel believes that the IPCC should reform or be dismantled.
With the recently published Synthesis Report, the IPCC finished its sixth assessment cycle, consisting of seven reports in total. An international team of scientists from the Clintel network has analysed several claims from the Working Group 1 (The Physical Science Basis) and Working Group 2 (Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability) reports. This has now led to the report The Frozen Climate Views of the IPCC.
In every chapter the Clintel report documents biases and errors in the IPCC assessment. The errors are worse in the WG2 report than in the WG1 report. Given the political relevance of what is known as “Loss and Damage” (at the yearly COP meetings, countries currently negotiate donations to a Loss and Damage fund) one would expect a thorough review of the relevant literature. However, Clintel shows that the IPCC has totally failed in this respect.
For example, a review article on the subject, published in 2020, showed that 52 out of 53 peer reviewed papers dealing with “normalised disaster losses” saw no increase in harms that could be attributed to climate change. The IPCC highlighted the single paper that claimed an increase in losses. That paper is – unsurprisingly – flawed, but its cherry picking by the IPCC suggests they found its conclusions irresistible.
Climate-related deaths
“We are on a highway to climate hell”, said UN-boss Guterres recently. But an in-depth look at the mortality data shows that climate-related deaths are at an all-time low. Well-known economist Bjorn Lomborg published that important information in a 2020 peer-reviewed paper, but the IPCC, again, chose to ignore it.
The strategy of the IPCC seems to be to hide any good news about climate change and hype anything bad.
Erasing climate history
The Working Group 1 report is not free from bias and misleading conclusions either. The report documents problems in every chapter. The IPCC has tried to rewrite climate history by erasing the existence of the so-called Holocene Thermal Maximum (or Holocene Climate Optimum), a warm period between 10,000 and 6000 years ago. It has introduced a new hockey stick graph, which is the result of cherry-picked proxies. And it has ignored temperature reconstructions that show more variability in the past, such as the well-documented Little Ice Age.
The IPCC claims there is an acceleration in the rate of sea-level rise in recent decades. Clintel has shown this claim is flawed, because the IPCC ignores decadal variability in sea level. We also show that its sea-level tool – made available for the first time – shows a mysterious and improbable jump upward in 2020.
Climate sensitivity
Canadian economist Ross McKitrick has pointed out that all global climate models used by the IPCC show too much warming in the troposphere, both globally and in the tropics (where models predict a ‘hotspot’). This probably indicates some fundamental problems in the way that these models simulate the climate system.
A ’spectacular’ result of the IPCC AR6 report was the rise of the lower bound for the climate sensitivity likely range from 1.5°C to 2.5°C, therefore claiming that low values for climate sensitivity are now unlikely. The Clintel report shows this rise is not justified. The Clintel report suggests that observed warming and other evidence indicates that the true figure is more likely to be below 2°C than above 2.5°C. This also means that the best estimate for climate sensitivity, which the IPCC says is 3°C, is not justified.
On top of that, the IPCC is ‘addicted’ to its highest emissions scenario, so-called RCP8.5 (or now SSP5-8.5). In recent years, several papers have demonstrated that this scenario is implausible and should not be used for policy purposes. Deep inside the WG1 report, the IPCC acknowledges that this scenario has a ‘low likelihood’ but this very important remark was not highlighted in the Summary for Policymakers, so these important audiences are unaware of the issue. RCP8.5 is the scenario most often referred to in the IPCC report.
IAC Review
Back in 2010, errors in the WG2 report of the Fourth Assessment led to the investigation of the IPCC by the Interacademy Council (IAC). This review recommended, amongst other things, that “[h]aving author teams with diverse viewpoints is the first step toward ensuring that a full range of thoughtful views are considered.” This important recommendation is still being ignored by the IPCC. Worse, we document that Roger Pielke Jr, a scientist with considerable expertise in these areas, is regarded as a kind of ‘Voldemort’ by the IPCC, and they deliberately avoid mentioning his work or even his name. This leads to biased conclusions.
Reform
We are sorry to conclude that the IPCC has done a poor job of assessing the scientific literature. All countries rely on the IPCC reports to support their climate policies and most of the media blindly trust its claims. The Clintel report The Frozen Climate Views of the IPCC shows that this trust is not justified.
In our view the IPCC should be reformed, and should include a broader range of views. Inviting scientists with different views, such as Roger Pielke Jr and Ross McKitrick, to participate more actively in the process is a necessary first step. If, for some reason, such inclusion of different views is unacceptable, the IPCC should be dismantled.
Our own conclusions about climate – based on the same underlying literature – are far less bleak. Due to increasing wealth and advancing technology, humanity is largely immune to climate change and can easily cope with it. Global warming is far less dangerous to humanity than the IPCC tells us.
https://clintel.org/thorough-analysis-by-clintel-shows-serious-errors-in-latest-ipcc-report/
***********************************************Is Macron finally taking on the cult of Net Zero?
Hell hath no fury like an environmentalist scorned and Emmanuel Macron has felt a wave of green wrath since his declaration last week that France has gone far enough in pursuit of Net Zero. ‘We are ahead, in regulatory terms, of the Americans, the Chinese and of any other power in the world,’ said Macron in a speech at the Élysée. ‘We must not make any new changes to the rules, because we will lose all the players,’ he continued.
Calling for a ‘pause’ of more EU environmental red tape, Macron said member states required stability if they were to attract future investment.
One could argue that 21st century western workers are being exploited by the powerful and aggressive environmental lobby
A day later, the president doubled down on his remarks while on a visit to Europe’s leading steel producer in Dunkirk. ‘I prefer factories that respect our European standards, which are the best, rather than those who want to add more and more standards, but without having any more factories,’ declared Macron.
There was a reason Macron chose Dunkirk. It is Marine Le Pen territory, a region where unemployment is at 9 per cent, 2 per cent more than the national average. ‘The Dunkirk basin has lost 6,000 industrial jobs in 20 years,’ acknowledged the president. ‘We will recreate 16,000 by 2030.’
The steel workers approved of what they heard, and so do many on the centre-right. An online poll by Le Figaro received 160,000 respondents in the first 24 hours, 70 per cent of whom agreed with their president that there is too much bureaucratic green tape.
But from the left there has been only rage. ‘Absolutely irresponsible’ cried the Green MP Sandrine Rousseau, who said it wasn’t fewer environmental regulations that were needed: ‘On the contrary, we have to increase them.’
Her party colleague Sandra Regol levelled that most damning of accusations at Macron, that of ‘climate denial’, adding that he was ‘taking France back to the 1980s’.
The far-left France Insoumise were also outraged. ‘It’s not as if there’s a [climate] emergency’, tweeted a sardonic Damien Maudet. One of the party’s MEPs, Manon Aubry, thundered that Macron ‘is now using the same rhetoric, word for word, as the European right and far right, who want to kill the implementation of the rest of the European climate package’.
Curiously, the hard left trade union, CGT, which has been at the forefront of this year’s pension reform protests, joined the chorus of disapproval at the president’s declaration. ‘We are not going to sacrifice the environmental issue to the economic issue,’ said Sophie Binet, the CGT secretary general. ‘It’s extremely serious to do that.’
That statement is curious because the CGT was established at the end of the 19th century to, in the words of its charter, defend workers’ rights in the ‘class struggle’ against exploitative bosses. One could argue that 21st century western workers are being exploited by the powerful and aggressive environmental lobby, which imposes regulation after regulation to the detriment of industry and prosperity.
But the CGT is no longer an organisation that battles on behalf of blue-collar workers; like most trade unions and left-wing political parties in Britain and France, it has been captured by the progressive managerial class. A generation ago the leader of the CGT was a man who was an apprentice railwayman at 15; now it’s led by someone who read philosophy at university.
The CGT seems more interested in social justice – marching in the cause of ‘Islamophobia’, the environment and LGBTQ rights – rather than striving to support those suffering the effects of deindustrialisation. This dereliction of duty might explain why the membership of the CGT has declined so dramatically in the last 20 years.
At the same time that the CGT and the French Socialists have been shedding supporters, Marine Le Pen has been attracting followers, many of them blue-collar workers who once voted left. Her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, founded the National Front in 1972, growing it from a fringe party to one that reached the second round of the 2002 presidential election by latching onto the two preoccupations of the working-class: immigration and deindustrialisation.
In a 2005 speech Le Pen urged his supporters to vote ‘No’ in the impending referendum on the EU Constitution. He blamed Europe, as much as the French elite, for the fact that in 30 years the number of people employed in the industrial sector had fallen from six to three million. ‘Unemployment has taken hold in a structural manner, born of deindustrialisation and the drastic reduction in the number of people working in agriculture, trade and crafts,’ said Le Pen.
This same sense of grievance accounted for the success in April of the newly-formed Farmer Citizen Movement in the Dutch regional elections. As Eva Vlaardingerbroek wrote in the Spectator, the Movement had tapped into the ‘larger conflict between the authoritarian green agenda being pushed by our government and the silent majority paying for it all’.
If the French establishment wants to avoid their nightmare scenario of a Marine Le Pen presidency in 2027 they will do so only by addressing mass immigration and deindustrialisation. Ignoring these issues, while foisting on the public an authoritarian green agenda, will ensure Le Pen becomes the first female leader of the Fifth Republic.
Macron appears to be getting the message, though one can never be sure with Monsieur ‘En Meme Temps’ [At the Same Time]. There is a reason why he’s acquired that nickname among his opponents: he has a habit of saying or doing one thing and the next week the exact opposite.
Last year Macron relaunched France’s nuclear industry – just as Germany closed the last of its reactors – and in the next decade or so six new reactors will be built and 100,000 jobs created. Apprentice schemes are coming back into fashion, providing opportunities for young men and women of different classes and ethnicities.
When the nuclear energy bill was presented to parliament in March this year it passed without problem; the centre-right Republicans supported it, so too Marine Le Pen’s National Rally and the Communists. The Greens, the Socialists and La France Insoumise all voted against.
The truth is that Net Zero has become a bourgeois cult, and their self-absorbed domineering has been tolerated for too long.
As the Yellow Vests told the environmental lobby as they took to the streets in 2018 to protest against a green fuel tax: ‘You talk about the end of the world while we are talking about the end of the month.’
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/05/is-macron-finally-taking-on-the-cult-of-net-zero/ ?
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Embrace of LNG by G7 a setback for climate goals, experts warn
The Group of Seven's move to promote deliveries of liquefied natural gas as a temporary response to the energy crisis prompted warnings from environmental groups over the continued embrace of fossil fuels, with one expert pinning blame on the hosts.
At their summit in Hiroshima, G7 leaders also stressed the importance of making a green transformation and pledged to ramp up clean energy investments. Specifically, they mentioned a collective increase in offshore wind capacity of 150 gigawatts by 2030 to meet a joint commitment to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 60% and fully or predominantly decarbonize the power sector by 2035.
But it was the G7's approval of new gas investments to survive the ongoing energy shortages stemming from the Russia-Ukraine war that caught the attention of environmental organizations.
While Germany, which has been hit particularly hard by the cut off of Russian gas supplies, has been boosting investment to diversify its LNG sources, NGOs said it contradicted what experts said was needed to achieve decarbonization goals.
“If Germany continues to focus its negotiation power on new gas investments rather than leading the way for a future free of fossil fuels, this won’t be possible. Worse, the G7 is ignoring the International Energy Agency’s call to refrain from any new investments into fossil fuels, not just coal, to keep global warming to 1.5 degrees,” said Friederike Roder, vice president for Global Advocacy, Global Citizen.
Others noted that the decision on LNG means more delays on transitioning out of fossil fuel.
“By further investing in fossil fuels, the G7 leaders are missing out on the rapidly accelerating competitive edge of clean energy, and the wide range of associated benefits for people, businesses and economies,” said Gillian Nelson, policy director of the We Mean Business Coalition.
The G7 also backed Japan's efforts to promote the abatement of carbon emissions from fossil fuel plants through introducing controversial new carbon capture utilization and storage technologies.
However, only conditional support was given to Japan’s push for ammonia co-fired coal plants and hydrogen energy in the power sector.
Such technologies should be developed only if they can be aligned with the 2015 Paris Agreement's goal of keeping the global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial levels, the joint communique said.
The G7’s reaffirmation of its commitment to jointly mobilize $100 billion annually until 2025 to help mitigate climate change and supporting climate-vulnerable groups was praised, although concern was raised about how the G7 countries would achieve this.
“While it is encouraging to see a commitment to finally meet the $100 billion international climate finance promise in 2023, no new pledges have been made to give this promise some credibility,” Roder said.
Kimiko Hirata, executive director of Climate Integrate, put the blame for the G7’s continued push for fossil fuel investments on Japan, and what she said was a lack of a sense of urgency about the climate crisis on the part of the Japanese government.
“Japan didn’t prioritize the climate agenda throughout the negotiations, but rather blocked key issues that needed to be progressed, such as setting a timeline for a coal phase out. Japan also pushed new fossil-based technologies for the thermal power sector (such as carbon capture utilization and storage technologies), driven by its domestic interests,“ she said.
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2023/05/21/national/g7-climate-plan-concern/ ?
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Solar power uses more energy than it produces
In Australia, great reliance is being placed on electricity generation from solar panels, both roof-mounted and solar farms. The aim is to replace generation from coal and gas to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. Researchers recognise that, for this to succeed, the electricity generated and used must be greater than the electricity expended in making and installing the panels (embodied energy). The number of years it takes for this energy recovery is called Energy Pay-Back Time (EPBT). It is clear that pay-back times should be short because, until the embodied energy is replaced, there cannot be any positive output.
Numerous studies have determined that the pay-back time is between one and five years for rooftop solar and longer for solar farms. This is all very well, but solar panels alone are not a practical, generating system. Nothing is generated from late afternoon through the night to the next morning. No electricity every night… Clearly, a battery has to be added for continuous supply and the embodied energy from the manufacture of the battery has to be included in the analysis. Electricity consumed overnight is replaced when the battery is recharged by the solar panel during the next day.
What happens if the next day is cloudy? Clearly, a bigger battery and a bigger solar panel would be needed. The embodied energy of the bigger battery and panel must be included in assessing pay-back time and the viability of the system. What if the day after that is also cloudy? An even bigger battery and panel than needed. How many cloudy days need to be accounted for?
Any electricity generation system that cannot recover the energy embodied in its manufacture, in a short time or not at all in its lifetime, cannot be considered viable for electricity supply or for emissions reduction.
Yooko Tsuchiya et al reported on two cases of PV electricity generation systems in sub-Saharan rural Tanzania, concluding that EPBT analyses showed unsatisfactory performance. They reported that: ‘At one site, the EPBT even exceeded the lifespan of the PV panel, indicating that energy recovery was impossible.’
The question arises as to whether PV electricity generation can replace coal/gas generation in Australia. This study examines the energy recovery potential of rooftop solar for three cities in Australia representing the extremes of climate, viz. Melbourne, (worst case state capital for sunny days, excepting Hobart), Perth, (best case state capital for sunny days), and Alice Springs (central Australia).
The Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) has records of solar radiation day-by-day for years 1990 to 2022. These data sets show that, of these 33 years, 16 have radiation below average and that May, June, and July are the months most likely to risk electricity shortages, ie. blackouts.
Using these data, a new study has calculated the sizes of solar panel and battery which give the least, combined, embodied energy, then calculated the Energy Pay-Back time for Melbourne, (least sunny days capital excepting Hobart), Perth (most sunny days capital), and Alice Springs (central Australia). Full details of the study are available on request.
The results show that:
The Energy Pay-Back time for roof-top solar generation of electricity is 22 to 24 years for Melbourne, 14 to 15 years for Perth, and 14 years for Alice Springs.
For Melbourne, Perth, and Alice Springs, EPBT’s exceed the lifetime of the battery, therefore, batteries have to be replaced twice in the 30-year lifetime of the solar panel.
Accounting for this, the energy embodied in the manufacture and installation of the system is not recovered in the lifetime of the system.
Storage of excess summer generation for practical use requires very large batteries, resulting in unfavourable EPBT.
The following conclusions can be drawn:
Since prior research indicates that solar farms are worse than rooftop solar, solar farms are not a feasible replacement for traditional coal/gas-based electricity generation.
Given equal dollar value eg dollars per kWh, assigned to both input and output electricity, the cost results will echo the energy results, that is to say that the cost incurred in manufacture etc. will not be recovered in the lifetime of the system. Given that, within that lifetime, the batteries would be replaced at additional cost, it follows that electricity generated by the solar system will always be more expensive than the input coal/gas electricity which established the system. Statements by politicians such as, ‘the reason electricity is more expensive now is because we do not have enough renewable energy’ is the reverse of the facts. The more solar generation we have, the more expensive electricity will become.
Subsidies to adjust input and/or output dollar charges do not change the costs. They transfer costs to another element of production, for zero added value. Such subsidies are therefore inherently inflationary.
Continued purchase of solar panels and batteries from low-cost, coal/gas-based producers while, at the same time, inhibiting and closing domestic coal/gas-based electricity, presents national security issues, for no economic or environmental benefit.
Persistence with the widespread installation of PV panels and batteries and closure of coal or gas-fired power stations, will result in greater not lesser emissions of carbon dioxide, higher electricity charges, and higher inflation.
Put simply, Australia mines coal and exports it to China where coal-fired power stations generate electricity, which is used to manufacture PV panels and batteries, which Australia buys and uses to generate electricity from the rays of the sun. In their lifetimes, the solar panels never generate enough usable electricity to replace the coal/gas electricity they originated from.
Reliance on solar combined with closing down coal and gas generation is definitely premature and will lead to power shortages, inflated energy costs, compromised national security, and increased carbon dioxide emissions. Australia would be better off for supply reliability, emissions, costs, and sovereign security, to use coal and gas domestically for electricity generation.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/05/solar-a-risky-waste-of-time-and-money/
***************************************21 May, 2023
Net Zero’s artificial food crisis paves the way for ‘future foods’
The Left can push us only so far into a dystopia so I doubt that the following scenario is fully realistic
Net Zero rules employed by the United Nations, European Union, and domestic political parties across the world are expected to cause the imminent shutdown of high-production farmland, or at least, significantly reduce its capacity.
Yes, after centuries of perfecting food growing techniques, a bunch of bureaucratic regulators have decided to deliberately massacre the industry. Farmers in the Netherlands are first on the chopping block, with their historic estates being forcibly purchased by the State in what amounts to a complete erasure of private property rights.
As these policies are primarily targeting the world’s food bowls – the Netherlands, Canada, Sri Lanka, the United States, and Australia – the global agricultural supply chain can expect a prolonged artificial shortage of critical food items in the near future.
Food shortages, where demand remains the same or rises with population growth, results in the rapid increase of cost. Add to this problem huge changes to fertilisers, transport, red tape, pesticides, biosecurity, packaging, and labour.
We are already seeing the early stages of these policies play out in supermarkets across the Western world where gaps are appearing on the shelves, the diversity of products is in swift decline, and of the food that remains – its price is becoming a financial burden, even to the lower-middle class who have not struggled to afford food for three generations.
How convenient that some corporate and ideological partners of the international bureaucracies pushing these Net Zero policies are waiting in the wings with ‘planet saving’ food products!
In a world where fresh food is plentiful and cheap, no one would dream of sniffing around a lab for their next meal, but poverty is a powerful motivator to accept barely palatable crap sweetened with false virtue. Instead of counting calories, the next generation will be calculating their carbon footprint at the dinner table.
Keep in mind that this is a menu for the poor. Fresh food, real meat, and French wine will continue to fill the kitchens of the ruling classes. It’s the family of five squished into a city apartment, unable to turn the air-conditioner on for more than an hour a day, that will be faced with a range of cheap, depressing items at the supermarket.
The two emerging food groups for the latter half of this century are bugs and printed food – both of which are frequently grown in a lab.
Astonishingly, it is the ‘bug’ portion of this food pyramid that is rapidly making its way into the European shopping trolley, with crushed bug bits being approved as a filler or replacement for wheat. Whoever made that decision should be sat down in front of a plate of crickets and told to mash them up by hand before eating a loaf of bread made from the bits. Let’s see if they really think bug-meat is an appropriate substitute…
Within a few years, it will be extremely difficult for the average European to ensure that their meals are bug-free. Just as our food is currently tainted with chemicals and additives we’d be unlikely to pick if we knew what they were – the future of bread, flour, pasta, and sauces is sealed.
Nothing says ‘civilisational success’ quite like eating the critters that crawl over our mounting piles of garbage.
And yes, these bugs are grown in the lab, but in some ways this is worse. They are fed on a diet of chemicals, locked in tiny boxes, killed en masse, crushed up, and fed to us. At what point do you say that we had it ‘better’ thousands of years ago, salivating over a freshly roasted mammoth steak?
Vegans and vegetarians will want to avoid the eating of sentient insects. (Or maybe not? Who knows… Might be worth laying some money down on that.)
If these two groups of picky eaters remain true to their moral core, they will find their shopping experience rather patchy. The world’s farms are shrinking and the costs of transporting produce around the world is becoming fatally high. At some point Gen Z will realise that their local fruit market was put there by jumbo jets, ships, and vans. What sort of selfish vegan would insist a nation waste their carbon footprint flying fruit and vegetables in from another country? That would be literally destroying the world.
The supply problems of fresh produce may even be accidental, caused by incompetent governments failing to realise that the forced closure of oil and gas will create transport price hikes that no farmer can sustain and no customer can carry.
Regardless of how events play out, vegans and vegetarians will be offered lab-printed food as their ‘cheap’ and ‘convenient’ alternative. You can still have those cashews you love… We printed them out of chemicals for you this morning. They look a bit like a downloaded TV show from the early 2000s, but we promise they taste practically the same!
To compensate, there is a new ‘fad’ mulling around in its infancy. 3D-printed food is somewhat of a mixed bag. It covers everything from what a Mars expedition might expect – up to 5-star dining – and everything in-between. There are genres of 3D-printing, which vary wildly in quality and appeal.
At the high-quality end we have ‘fun food’, where 3D-printed food functions as a gimmick for restaurants. One Italian pasta company has been printing elaborate pasta shapes that serve as the centre pieces of dishes that are impossible to create with real pasta.
This variety of 3D-printing is a quite palatable, as the base pasta mix is still handmade and then fed through printing machines. There is no doubt a future in this type of elevated cuisine in the same way that the Industrial Age led to factory-cut food shapes and the mass production of pasta.
On the more futuristic end of the scale, we have Tokyo’s Sushi Singularity. It describes its mission as:
‘Beyond the future of sushi. A world that sees sushi going digital and linked with the net will come about. Two revolutions are envisioned: 1) Sushi will connect people around the world, and will be produced, edited, and shared online in the form of “new sushi”. 2) Sushi combined with biometrics will enable hyper-personalisation based on biometric and genomic data. Sushi will break away from conventional concepts of food and be continually revised and updated at exponential speed! Humans know nothing about Sushi!’
These guys have a full futuristic enterprise going on where the dream is to digitise food, build a food database, transmit food digitally, and then reprint it.
According to American Scientist:
‘Their 3D-printed food experiments include cell-cultured tuna in a filigreed cube, and octopus sculpted in a honeycomb lattice with negative stiffness. Most of their printing appears to be extrusion-based, using components that undergo computer-controlled mixing to generate the right flavours and textures. They also use a powder-based printing technique that incorporates high-powered lasers to fuse powders together.’
Forgive me if I prefer a quick trip to Croatia for a bit of freshly poached octopus or lightly fried calamari on the Ligurian coast. Some people like future-foods, I prefer old-style simplicity.
Other 3D-printing restaurants focus on meat-replacements which, more often than not, are actually printed from lab-grown fat and sinew. While the first form of 3D-printed restaurant food is about putting on a flashy, futuristic show, meat-replacements are more ‘on vibe’ with saving the planet. It’s about ‘responsible eating’ and finding ways to make the otherwise unpalatable tolerable. If we are honest, it also provides a way for vegetarians and vegans to cheat on the whole no meat pledge.
There is likely to be a backlash to all the bugs and sci-fi food if it goes from being a market option to a government-mandated initiative, as we have seen with electric vehicles. People may start trying to grow their own food – or at the very least, barter outside the government’s field of view with those who have the means to grow food. In some regional communities, this is already happening. Fresh produce is being shared amongst farms away from the greed of supermarket oligarchies and excessive agricultural regulators. If you ask most people whether they’d rather eat something grown in a lab or trust their mate farmer Jeff and his watermelon crop well… I know what I’m eating.
As we watch the wilful and reckless destruction of the world’s agricultural heartlands, we should ask ourselves, ‘Is this progress? Do we want politically-aligned laboratories controlling food production?’
A recent article on the topic writes:
‘Some believe that 3D-printed food could be the answer to global issues such as world hunger. It’s projected that the globe’s population will reach about 8 billion by 2025, which will put a heavy strain not only on food producers but also on food sources themselves. 3D printers can make use of abundant sources of nutrients, such as algae, and transform them into appetising foods that can be mass-produced fairly easily.’
Hmm… Maybe we should all join the farmers’ protests in the Netherlands instead before we reach the point of 3D-printed algae.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/05/net-zeros-artificial-food-crisis-paves-the-way-for-future-foods
*********************************************EVs and the Fermi gap
Enrico Fermi was one of the fathers of Quantum Physics. It was he who identified what has come to be known as the Fermi Gap. You see, embedded deep in the electronic structure of any conductor or semiconductor, is a fundamental inefficiency that no amount of technology can overcome.
This should come as no surprise to us. The lead–acid battery has been starting cars since 1859 (or at least from when cars were invented). There have been many advances made in their design since then, but one thing that hasn’t changed is their charging time. Even today a $400 Glass-Gel battery will charge no faster than a $100 cheapie. In the normal course of events, the battery is charged by our car’s alternator, after delivering several hundred amps in a couple of seconds to start the car. But if we leave our lights on, and the battery becomes depleted, there is no quick way to get charge back into the battery, and it generally requires an overnight charge. The only differences between the cheap batteries and the premium ones are the amount of current they deliver, the amount of maintenance they require, and their life. But there is no difference in charging rates.
Here’s why.
In just the same way that a car can run out of fuel, we can think of a flat battery as running out of electrons. Charging the battery is essentially putting back the electrons that were lost when the battery discharged. And so when we connect our battery to the charging circuit, electrons flow from the connecting electrodes into the battery cells. Unfortunately, however, the electrons do not flow quite as easily as the fuel from a bowser.
Although, in principle, an electron will flow from a position of higher energy to lower energy, a substantial energy (voltage) gap must be created for the process to start, and this differential is known as the Fermi Gap. It’s an inefficiency that can only be managed, but never eliminated.
So how does it work? Imagine you have an early model 80 Series Landcruiser (notorious for their poor handbrakes) sitting on a ramp, in neutral, with the handbrake on. Suppose we now raise the ramp. At first nothing happens, but when the ramp is steep enough the gravitational pull will overcome the handbrake’s resistance, and it will start to roll down the ramp.
Suppose we now wish to increase the rate at which it rolls down the ramp. Well, all we do is increase the slope of the ramp. Now it rolls faster. But when it gets to the bottom and we examine it, we find that the brakes are hotter than when it rolled slowly.
So it is with batteries. We can increase the charging voltage (the slope of the ramp) to push electrons through faster, but the result of this is increased heat in the battery (caused by internal resistance). And as anyone that knows anything about batteries knows, nothing kills a battery (any battery) faster than heat. This is the reason many European cars place the battery under one of the seats or in the boot – a hot engine bay is not an ideal spot for a battery.
But there’s another problem. As the battery charges, the efficiency decreases – more heat is generated at lower currents as the battery fills with charge. For this reason, smart chargers will begin charging at a higher current, then trail off as the battery approaches maximum charge.
So where does all this leave us with EVs? Firstly, degradation of the batteries is inevitable, even if they aren’t overheated. Eventually, the crystal structures morph into more stable structures that are less reactive (in chemical terms, that’s what ‘stable’ means), and so that portion of the battery’s recharging capacity is lost.
Secondly, we are stuck with slow charging and have to manage it. There are essentially two options here. The first one is to simply put bigger batteries into the cars. Suppose I were to charge a battery from 20 per cent to 80 per cent. I now double the size of the battery and charge it from 20 per cent to 50 per cent. The amount of charge in each case is identical, but the charging of the larger battery would be more efficient, and could therefore be carried out more quickly than in the first case with the smaller battery. This approach, however, has two obvious disadvantages – the cars become both more expensive and heavier.
A lot of people seem unaware of this latter issue. The entry-level Tesla 3 weighs in at 1,800kg, a substantial increase over an equivalent-sized Hyundai at 1,300kg. As the battery comprises generally about 25 per cent of the weight of an EV, doubling the battery would increase the weight to 2,250kg, as much as a Landcruiser… This option, therefore, quickly loses its viability.
The second approach to the battery recharging issue is having removeable batteries, like in a torch. Believe it or not, such a car exists – the ‘Silence SO4’ – a tiny car resembling a Smart Car. How this approach could be implemented in larger cars such as Teslas remains to be seen.
There are other logistical issues with EVs, such as the availability of lithium and the problem (and it’s a big one) of waste batteries. These are beyond the scope of this article.
No doubt more charging stations will pop up here and there, but the problem of slow charging is embedded in the electronic structure of the batteries, and there simply is no way around it.
At this point I normally finish an article with some pithy comment, but on this occasion, I can’t think of one. I simply make this unavoidable observation – the widespread use of EVs is simply not viable. When that become clear to our leaders, and what the fallout from that is, is anybody’s guess.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/05/evs-and-a-tale-of-two-italians/
*********************************************Will Rishi Sunak admit the truth about Net Zero?
Grant Shapps, the energy secretary, popped up on television at the weekend to explain that the cost of installing a heat pump is only about £3,000, the same as a gas boiler. Hmm. Good luck with that.
That number is only true once a £5,000 grant from the government (of which only 90,000 are available) has been considered. It ignores all the costs of insulation and pipework. A friend of mine with a heat pump says about £15,000 is a more accurate number.
A lower carbon economy is a good thing, but the Net Zero policy as legally implemented in the UK has been a disaster
Inflation, largely a consequence of energy costs, remains the biggest issue not just in Britain but the world right now. We feel it particularly acutely here because UK inflation remains stubbornly high, partly due to our daft energy policy and the delusional state of discussion of this critical subject in the City, Westminster, universities, and the media.
A close watching of Prime Minister’s Questions last week was a reminder of this. There was a total of six questions about energy. The latest public opinion and social attitudes survey from the Office for National Statistics found that a resounding 93 per cent believe that the cost of living is the most important issue facing the country, while 51 per cent are worried about the cost of food and 48 per cent about the cost of energy. Those are big numbers.
Rishi Sunak’s answers at PMQs made more sense than the cries of his detractors and offered a hint of something more rational than we have now. It raises the seductive possibility that if he adopts the same practical and pragmatic approach he has to other subjects, he might recover from the impossible hole he finds himself in.
Sir Keir Starmer’s signature policy is to raise £13 billion by increasing the windfall tax on North Sea oil and gas companies. He also wants to remove their investment allowances in order to fund an ambitious and expensive Green Prosperity plan. He accuses the Prime Minister of ‘giving handouts to oil and gas giants’ and ‘protecting oil and gas profits’ rather than using the money to freeze council tax bills.
But as oil and gas prices fall, the additional windfall tax will collect nothing like the £13 billion Labour hopes. Despite its theoretical attractions, the Green Prosperity plan is a fantasy, impractical policy. Nor is it true that the government has given handouts to the oil and gas industry.
The green lobby are busy condemning the approval of the Rosebank oil and gas field in the North Sea for development by Equinor of Norway, which, they claim (wrongly), would receive nearly £4 billion of subsidies. These are simply the usual corporate investment allowances, not subsidies.
But it is to defend a deeply unfashionable industry, just as Bernard Looney, the CEO of BP did last week, when he proclaimed that fossil fuels ‘have done an enormous amount of good’ for humanity.
Intriguingly, Labour supports, in principle, a huge investment by Equinor and BP in Teesside. This project is includes a carbon capture and storage project. But obviously, it is contingent on there being carbon to capture from North Sea production in the first place, which Labour is apparently against. So the party’s position is contradictory. Reports of allegedly sharp practice among local property developers may provide political way out of that jam, if nothing else.
Meanwhile, British electricity is the most expensive in Europe and probably in the advanced world, at 40p per kilowatt hour, according to the HEPI index. That is nearly twice the European average and three times the American average. This is despite the fact that renewables generators are boasting that their costs are falling and that British solar and wind power produced more electricity (32.4 per cent) than natural gas (31.7 per cent) in the first quarter.
That is good news from a carbon emissions perspective, but absolutely terrible news from a cost of living and price perspective. Contrary to myth, and it is important to understand this, wind and solar are not always cheaper on a system-wide basis. This is because they depend not only on subsidies, but on having a large fleet of gas power stations on standby for cold days, for when the wind is not blowing or the sun not shining. The two systems are therefore run side by side. Currently, that means higher costs.
This is one of the reasons lower oil and gas prices globally are not being passed on to British consumers in cheaper electricity prices. Our energy system, reflecting 20 years of wonky policies, is all bent out of shape.
A lower carbon economy is a good thing for multiple reasons, but the Net Zero policy as legally implemented in the UK has been a disaster. We are one of only a handful of countries to have put the target of Net Zero emissions by 2050 into law. But this policy has the potential to be a bigger fiasco than Brexit or Covid. It has already resulted in higher costs, with huge impact on society and the economy. It has led to higher emissions (because coal power stations have been kept on), encouraged Vladimir Putin, and increased our dependence on China.
Judging by the polls, a good proportion of people understand this. They can see their energy bills for themselves, and they can spot the flaws in the claim that heat pumps cost only £3,000 after a few minutes on the internet. We aren’t stupid. As for the policy that new gas boilers are going to be banned from newbuilds from 2025, i.e. in 18 months, we know that is not going to happen. It is absurd.
It is not hard to see where this might head if Rishi Sunak has the courage to take the pragmatic stance he has taken towards other controversial issues. He can say ‘I am practical and sort things out. I am committed to a low carbon economy, but I also recognise the reality of needing fossil fuels for the moment. Vote Labour if you want to, but it will result in you being forced to install a £15,000 heat pump, even higher energy bills and much higher taxes. You will have to buy an expensive electric car. These crazy policies could tip thousands more into poverty. It will also mean higher inflation and higher interest rates. By contrast, I will keep your bills down.’
In order to do this, Rishi Sunak will himself require a realistic energy policy that makes more practical sense. He will have to match Labour’s ambition and be honest about simple but important things, like boilers and cars and roads. He will also have to admit that hard Net Zero is an ideology. Whether he has the courage and authority to do so is a different matter.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/05/will-rishi-sunak-admit-the-truth-about-net-zero-2
******************************************************Carbon capture and storage works, but its high cost has slowed its uptake
Carbon capture and storage is “complicated and costly’’ to do on a large scale, and its lack of affordability in part explains why the mature technology is not widely used, the Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association conference has heard.
The key role CCS will play in reaching net-zero carbon goals has been a key theme of the conference, being held in Adelaide this week, along with calls for more government support for the technology which aims to permanently store carbon emissions underground in depleted oil and gas reservoirs.
And while Resources Minister Madeleine King told the conference this week that CCS was “perhaps the single biggest opportunity for emissions reduction in the energy resources sector’’, her colleague, Industry and Science Minister Ed Husic yesterday said he wasn’t yet convinced.
“If the technology stacks up, great,’’ Mr Husic said in a radio interview. “I haven’t taken the view that it’s all bad and I haven’t taken the view that it’s all great. I haven’t seen it yet to be honest … it really hasn’t shown that it’s able to work at scale.’’
Mr Husic said “it would be great if we can do it’’, but that remained to be shown.
While Ms King’s comments to the conference were strongly supportive of the role CCS could play in reaching net zero, there were no commitments made in terms of supporting the technology through incentives or subsidies.
Her comments follow the government stripping $250m in previously committed funding from CCS projects in last October’s federal budget.
APPEA says a carbon capture and storage strategy is essential at a national level and is pushing for the creation of “net zero industrial zones” where heavy carbon-emitting industries can be co-located, and their emissions captured and stored.
The conference also heard from many speakers that Australia risks falling behind the US and Europe, which are pouring billions into net zero programs including support for CCS projects, with the US allowing them to use a key tax credit.
To date there is only one commercially-operated CCS project active in Australia, at Chevron’s Gorgon project offshore Western Australia, while Santos’s Moomba CCS project is 60 per cent complete, with first injection expected next year.
The Chevron project is underperforming, with Chevron Australia general manager energy transition David Fallon telling the conference on Wednesday that pressure management issues were still hindering the $2.5bn project.
Mr Fallon said the $2.5bn Gorgon CCS project was working and was “the world’s largest stand-alone storage facility’’, but admitted it was only operating at about one third capacity.
It had to date stored about eight million tonnes of CO2, Mr Fallon said.
The Gorgon CCS operation is designed to store CO2 stripped from the natural gas stream in depleted in reservoirs more than 2km beneath Barrow Island, offshore Western Australia.
The company aims to inject about 100m tonnes of CO2 back underground over the life of the LNG project with the system to eventually capture four million tonnes of greenhouse gases annually.
Mr Fallon said there had been some “misleading reporting’’ saying the project did not work, but the high level message was that “the CO2 storage, it is working’’.
“It’s safely storing CO2. Even with the challenges we’ve had it remains, as I understand it, the world’s largest stand-alone CO2 storage facility solely focused on storage, so we’re working through the challenges and we’ve got lots of engineers and plans to remediate the system,’’ he said.
“There’s often some misleading reporting saying ‘it’s a failure, it doesn’t work. I can say it does work.’’
When challenged on why the technology, which has been in use at a modest scale for decades overseas, has not been more widely adopted, Mr Fallon said “it’s not cheap”, while reiterating that it needed to be part of the net zero toolkit.
“The times are changing, it’s not cheap, but as the world’s evolved and lower carbon is a higher priority there’s certainly more interest in CCS and it becomes a more attractive investment from a cost point of view.
Ms Gao said there were several hurdles the industry had to surmount to make it more viable, which differed by jurisdiction. In the US for example, the permitting time frame for a CCS project currently sat at about six years, while countries such as South Korea and Japan lacked the geological structures to store CO2 underground.
Ms Gao said the growing focus on building CCS hubs provided some “promising hope’’ for the technology.
She said while the cost of capturing CO2 was “actually quit high”, carbon prices were also high and would make projects viable.
“I think the bigger problem with CCS is … the scale and the scale comes more around … the transportation and storage side of it,’’ she said.
Ms Gao said transporting CO2 for storage could double the cost of the endeavour, meaning hubs were a better option.
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18 May, 2023
White House ‘Weaponized’ ESG Movement, State Financial Officers Foundation CEO Says
The chief executive officer of the State Financial Officers Foundation says “we never really saw the [environmental, social, and governance] movement weaponized in a way that this White House and administration [have] weaponized it.”
“Certainly, fund managers like BlackRock, State Street, Vanguard have weaponized it, and so it’s really just been in the last two years that we’ve seen them use funds, like pension retirement funds, in a way that leverages those dollars to push these social agendas,” Derek Kreifels says of the so-called ESG movement.
“And so, our simple premise and argument has been, if most Americans knew how their pension fund dollars were being invested, they would probably be appalled and shocked,” Kreifels says. “And so, we launched a campaign called ‘Our Money, Our Values.’”
Kreifels adds:
It’s available at our website OurMoneyOurValues.com, where we’re trying to educate Main Street America on the dangers of ESG investing and what they can do specifically at the retail level to go to their neighborhood financial adviser and ask certain questions about the kind of fund managers that are managing their dollars and how to change that if there are companies that are managing dollars that they don’t necessarily agree with their actions.
Kreifels joins today’s episode of “The Daily Signal Podcast” to further discuss environmental, social, and governance policies, some of the ways that the State Financial Officers Foundation is helping states navigate the ESG issues and what resources are available to them, and what the media are missing in their coverage of ESG.
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UK: Carmageddon: the electric vehicle boondoggle
Toby Young
A couple of years ago I thought seriously about buying an electric car. Not a hybrid, but the full monty. There was one in particular I liked the look of and I even contacted a dealership to ask whether they’d accept my diesel-powered VW Touran in part-exchange. The answer was yes, but it was still eye-wateringly expensive. Was it worth it? I tried to persuade myself it would be, given the savings on fuel costs, the waiving of the congestion charge, etc.
Boy, am I glad I dodged that bullet. Scarcely a day passes without a new horror story about electric vehicles in the press. Over the past week alone, we’ve learnt that some popular models are depreciating at twice the rate of petrol cars, that the number of free electric chargers on Britain’s roads has dropped by 40 per cent in the past 12 months, and that the sheer weight of their batteries means these cars could be banned from bridges and multi-storey car parks. It’s carmageddon!
The model I was eyeing up supposedly had a range of 275 miles, which meant I could drive to any QPR [Football Club] away game on a single charge. The northernmost club in the Championship is Sunderland, which is exactly 275 miles from my house in Acton. But we now know that the manufacturers’ range estimates are wildly optimistic. For instance, Giles Coren was told his Jaguar I-Pace, which he bought in 2020, had a range of up to 292 miles, when the reality was 220. Being a Hoops fan like me, that’s one of the reasons he’s ditched it. I cannot imagine the frustration of desperately searching for a rapid charging point as a succession of warning lights comes up on the dash, with 70 miles to go and kick-off less than two hours away.
But what would have really annoyed me is the feeling I’d been sold a pup by a government keen to burnish its green credentials. OK, I might have got in under the wire for the plug-in grant of £1,500 – the government scrapped that on 15 June last year – but what about the exemption from road tax I’d been promised? Jeremy Hunt announced in the Autumn Statement that electric car owners will have to start paying vehicle excise duty from 2025.
Then there’s the fact that electricity costs have increased by 66.7 per cent in the past 12 months, wiping out most of the savings I would have been banking on. That may not be entirely the government’s fault, but failing to invest in nuclear, banning fracking and inflating energy bills with green subsidies hasn’t helped.
Perhaps the biggest betrayal, though, has been the failure to invest in the necessary frameworks to make electric cars viable. In March 2022, the government’s EV Infrastructure Strategy estimated that the UK would need between 280,000 and 720,000 charging points by 2030 and set a target of 300,000. But to meet that, 100 new chargers would need to be installed daily, whereas the current number is around 23, according to the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders. The situation is already dire, with EV owners reporting that two out of three roadside chargers are busy or broken, and this will only get worse as the number of new electric cars on our roads grows. In March, 46,626 new EVs were registered – a record high – but only 713 new chargers were installed.
In light of these failings, it beggars belief that the government is still proposing to ban sales of new petrol and diesel cars by 2030. Even the EU isn’t proposing to do it before 2035, but Boris Johnson’s administration decided to bring that target forward, thereby putting the UK on course to be the fastest G7 country to decarbonise cars and vans. Announcing this major change without putting the proper investment in place – as if environmental policies don’t come with a massive cost – is typical of the headlong rush towards net zero.
A recent report by the Global Warming Policy Foundation estimated that the cost of replacing natural gas back-up in Germany with large battery storage facilities – necessary because wind and solar power are so intermittent – ‘is a multi-trillion dollar project, likely costing a multiple of the country’s GDP, and thus completely infeasible’. The claim often made by western governments that policies like the phasing out of ‘wet’ vehicles will spearhead a ‘green economic recovery’, which will boost GDP and create millions of jobs, is for the birds. The truth is that virtue-signalling politicians have pledged to wean us off oil and gas without any serious plan for what to replace them with.
I’m glad I never fell for the electric car boondoggle, but I won’t be feeling smug for long. In most areas of life, we have no choice but to accept green policies, even when we know they’re going to cost us an arm and a leg.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/05/electric-dreams
*************************************************Joe Manchin Unexpectedly Blocks Biden Nominee Slated to Oversee Admin's War on Gas Stoves
In a turn of events that caught many off guard, a Senate Committee meeting slated to greenlight President Biden’s nominee for a key energy post was abruptly altered.
Senator Joe Manchin, a Democrat from West Virginia and Chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, unexpectedly pulled the agenda item concerning Jeff Marootian’s nomination to head the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE).
The committee, which had initially planned to progress Marootian’s nomination to a full floor vote, will now redirect its attention to the other 21 agenda items. This decision represents a critical juncture in the Biden administration’s efforts to fill a key post integral to his administration’s woke energy agenda.
“Even though I was in favor of Mr. Marootian’s nomination back in December, since then, the office he’s been selected to lead has introduced stove efficiency rules that I have serious reservations about,” Senator Manchin shared with media outlets.
“I believe it’s part of a broader, administration-wide effort to eradicate fossil fuels,” he added, explaining his hesitation in supporting Marootian’s nomination at this juncture.
Marootian, whose professional career has spanned multiple roles within the Biden administration and Washington, D.C.’s Department of Transportation, was initially nominated to lead the EERE office in July 2022. His nomination was a bid to fill the vacancy left by Daniel Simmons, the Trump administration’s pick, who left the DOE in early 2021.
Jennifer Granholm, the DOE Secretary, subsequently appointed Marootian as her senior advisor for energy efficiency and renewable energy in September. Despite his confirmation hearing taking place in November, Marootian’s nomination found itself in a state of limbo by the end of the session, leading President Biden to renominate him in January.
Last year, Granholm expressed confidence in Marootian’s abilities to lead the DOE’s most extensive applied energy office and assist the administration in achieving its ambitious clean energy objectives.
Yet, the committee’s Ranking Member, Senator John Barrasso, a Republican from Wyoming, openly opposed the nomination, arguing Marootian’s qualifications were better suited for a Transportation Department role.
Simultaneously, the DOE has implemented several energy efficiency regulations affecting various household appliances, including natural gas-powered stovetops, since Marootian began advising Granholm. Critics, including consumer advocates, have lambasted these efforts as excessive governmental overreach.
The overarching objective of the EERE office is to decarbonize the U.S. economy, primarily through appliance regulations. Ben Lieberman, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, pointed out the extent of these regulations in a recent interview, stating, “It seems that almost everything that plugs in or fires up around the house is either subject to a pending regulation or soon will be.”
He warned of consumers’ likely backlash, explaining, “These rules are almost always bad for consumers for the simple reason that they restrict consumer choice.”
Over the past five months, the DOE has revealed standards to enhance the energy efficiency of numerous appliances, including ovens, clothes washers, refrigerators, air conditioners, and dishwashers.
Its rules targeting stoves, which were introduced in February and are projected to remove 50% of current models from the market, have drawn significant criticism from Senator Manchin, Republicans, and consumer groups alike.
According to the current federal Unified Agenda, a semiannual government-wide list that details regulations agencies plan to propose or finalize within the next 12 months, the Biden administration is proceeding with rules impacting several other appliances. These include consumer furnaces, pool pumps, battery chargers, ceiling fans, and dehumidifiers.
Secretary Granholm, however, remains unwavering in her defense of the administration’s actions, emphasizing their commitment to saving American consumers money while promoting innovative solutions to reduce carbon emissions and tackle the climate crisis.
“On May 5, after unveiling rules targeting dishwashers, electric motors, and beverage vending machines, she declared, “This administration is using all of the tools at our disposal to support healthier, safer communities for the American people.”
The Secretary added that the DOE is “making rapid progress to strengthen outdated energy efficiency standards — as directed by Congress and in coordination with our industry partners and stakeholders.”
The blocking of Marootian’s nomination by a member of his own party demonstrates the challenges faced by the Biden administration in its efforts to advance a progressive energy agenda, one that is intent of forcing the transition from fossil fuels to more “sustainable” energy sources. There is definitely dissension from some democrats, like Joe Manchin.
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Australia: Federal conservative leader promotes energy realism
Peter Dutton will reverse Anthony Albanese’s sweeping market and regulatory interventions in the oil and gas sector, and rally resources companies to “fight” alongside the Coalition against energy policies driven by Labor’s “renewable zealotry”.
Amid emerging rifts between cabinet ministers over the role of carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies in cutting emissions across the resources sector, the Opposition Leader on Thursday will invoke former US president Ronald Reagan and pledge to wind back government interventions.
Speaking by videolink to the Australian Petroleum Production & Exploration conference in Adelaide, Mr Dutton will warn oil and gas executives that “we’re witnessing one of the most interventionist governments in our nation’s history”. With energy and competition regulators warning of severe gas shortages and blackouts, Mr Dutton will accuse the government of being “deeply sceptical of the free market, of individual enterprise and autonomy”.
“Labor sees businesses and industry as instruments of the state,” Mr Dutton will say.
“It wants to use the chains and whips of regulation and tax to control and cannibalise the private sector. Nowhere is this more visible than in energy policy and its interference in the gas industry.
“Anthony Albanese and Chris Bowen will say publicly that they’re behind the gas industry. But of course, their actions betray their words. Labor wants gas gone. The government’s not on your side – let’s be very clear about it.”
Mr Dutton’s broadside against Labor policies comes as Industry Minister Ed Husic and Resources Minister Madeleine King clash over the viability of CCS technologies in reducing emissions across oil, gas and mining sectors.
Nationals MP Keith Pitt says Energy Minister Chris Bowen wants to turn Australia into an intermittent wind and… solar energy “super-unreliable power”. “I’d like them to withdraw their promise on nuclear, because it’s the right way to go,” Mr Pitt told Sky News host Rita Panahi. “If you More
After Mr Husic on Wednesday cast doubt over whether CCS would effectively slash emissions, Ms King told The Australian it was a “proven technology” and crucial in achieving net-zero emissions by 2050.
Ms King – who will announce on Thursday $50m in grants to accelerate the development of new critical minerals projects in Western Australia, NSW and Queensland – said the government was committed to examining opportunities providing regulatory and administrative certainty for CCS across industries.
“The Albanese government announced $12m in the 2023-24 budget to review the environmental management regime for offshore petroleum and greenhouse gas storage activities to ensure it is fit-for-purpose for a decarbonising economy,” Ms King said.
“(CCS) is an important part of getting to net zero and we are focused on making sure projects that are commercial have regulatory certainty so they can get on with it. The (International Energy Agency) notes that around the world, deployed CCS has the capacity to sequester up to 45 million tonnes of carbon dioxide on an annual basis.”
Mr Husic earlier said that CCS had not shown that it was able to “work at scale” and the government should prioritise investments in wind and solar to “give us the best bang for buck”.
With major trading partners Japan and South Korea raising concerns about Labor’s crackdown on the oil and gas sector, APPEA is preparing a national advertising blitz pushing back against the government’s market and regulatory interventions.
Mr Dutton will attack Labor’s gas price caps, reduced funding for gas exploration and projects, additional support for activists waging lawfare, mandatory code of conduct, higher taxes on gas companies, radical industrial relations laws and the safeguard mechanism imposing climate targets on heavy industry.
He will warn that Labor policies are pushing up prices and businesses will have no choice but to pass costs on to consumers or “pack up shop and move offshore where it’s cheaper to operate”.
“In such cases, there won’t be any environmental benefit,” he will say. “In fact, there will be more emissions into the air. All this carbon tax will do is damage our own economy and have a de-industrialising effect.”
Mr Dutton will explain how Reagan managed the oil crisis in 1981 by decontrolling the price of domestic oil and stopped the government from “putting ceilings on its pricing and production”.
“He did these things despite all the scare tactics and dire warnings,” Mr Dutton will say.
“Five years later, Reagan spoke about the success of these policies. He let ‘freedom solve the problem through the magic of the marketplace’ – as he said. That episode in US history is an important lesson about the perils of government intervention. It’s a lesson ignored by the Australian government in 2023.”
The warning on prices and emissions comes after Mr Dutton used his budget reply speech to ramp up pressure on Labor for small modular nuclear reactors to be included in the energy mix as part of the transition to net zero.
Mr Dutton will urge oil and gas producers to “fight for yourselves” and make the case against policy decisions.
“We need you to speak up frankly and more avidly,” he will say. “And to have a discussion with the Australian public just outlining the facts. I know it can be difficult, I understand why, particularly in an age of social media, where companies have absented themselves from the public debate … But if you don’t speak up now, I think it’s just going to put the sector at even more risk. It’s our country’s future prosperity that we’re talking about.”
After business groups last week lashed Jim Chalmers’ budget for failing to include measures to boost productivity and more investment incentives, Mr Dutton will describe Labor’s energy policy as being “driven by renewable zealotry”.
“It’s doing everything possible to shut down coal and frustrate the gas sector,” he will say. “We understand that you need to balance commercial viability with national environmental goals. Yet Labor’s new carbon tax (safeguard mechanism) will force businesses and industries to meet aggressive emissions reduction targets or pay hefty fines. And for many, by design, this tax will be financially crippling.”
Mr Dutton will warn oil and gas companies that the “worst is yet to come”, with the government preparing a shake-up of the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act.
“We all want to protect and improve our environment,” he will say.
“But we also have an obligation to promote the longevity of Australian industries and businesses which underpin our economic prosperity.”
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17 May, 2023
More than a third of the area charred by wildfires in Western North America can be traced back to fossil fuels, scientists find
More modelling madness. If you look at the underlying journal article, you find that the so-called "findings" below were in fact just model output. And when the models are made by the far-Left Union of Concerned Scientists, you can be sure that the models had Greenie results built in. What a con!
Millions of acres scorched by wildfires in the Western US and Canada — an area roughly the size of South Carolina — can be traced back to carbon pollution from the world’s largest fossil fuel and cement companies, scientists reported Tuesday.
The study by the Union of Concerned Scientists, published in the journal Environmental Research Letters, found that 37% of the area burned by wildfires in the West since 1986 — nearly 19.8 million acres out of 53 million — can be blamed on the planet-cooking pollution from 88 of the world’s major fossil fuel producers and cement manufacturers, the latter of which have been shown to produce around 7% of all carbon dioxide emissions.
The amalgam of megadrought and record-breaking heat that’s drying out vegetation due to climate change has stoked the West’s wildfires. And researchers found that since 1901, the fossil fuel activities of these companies, including ExxonMobil and BP, among others, warmed the planet by 0.5 degrees Celsius — nearly half of the global increase during that period.
Carly Phillips, a research scientist with the Science Hub for Climate Litigation at the Union of Concerned Scientists and co-author on the study, said the findings add to a significant library of research that directly links climate change or the impacts of the crisis to burning fossil fuel.
The sun sets over the University District in Seattle, Saturday, May 13, 2023. Saturday's temperatures reached record-breaking highs for several cities across western Washington.
“We know that many of these companies have known for decades about the consequences of climate change,” Phillips told CNN, referring to several studies and award-winning reports that have shown fossil fuel executives knew of but downplayed the growing threat. “But instead of sharing that information with the public, they engaged in this deliberate misinformation campaign to deceive the general public and cast doubt on climate science.”
Fossil fuel companies have denied the conclusions of those reports.
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/05/16/us/western-wildfires-fossil-fuels-study-climate/index.html
***************************************************Not so easy to turn Texas Green
Bobby Tudor made a fortune in fracking. The clean-cut financier opened shop in 2007 and spent the next 10 years backing large-scale projects in West Texas, supercharging one of history’s greatest oil and gas expansions. But over lunch in February, even as he predicted that oil and gas would be around for the foreseeable future, Tudor offered a dimmer view of the industry’s role in the region. “Oil and gas is just not going to be the same engine for growth,” he told me. “It will flatten, and then it will decline.”
Which is why Tudor, a consummate Texas fossil-fuel money man, is betting big on green energy.
It’s not hard to see why. The state is already the largest producer of renewable energy in the U.S. Clean-technology startups are flocking to the Houston region, and big energy companies are pursuing hydrogen projects across the state. The city of Houston alone could receive as much as $250 billion in annual investment in the emerging energy sectors by 2040, according to data from Mckinsey, thanks in part to its existing infrastructure and skilled labor force. Tudor has started a new firm focused on cutting emissions, and is chairing a powerful business coalition dedicated to the transition and composed of some of the biggest names in energy, including Exxonmobil, Chevron, and Shell. “In Houston, when we see $1 laying on the ground,” he said, “we bend over and pick it up.” There’s just one problem: politics. While many cities, states, and even countries are fighting for the trillions of dollars in public and private green investments that are transforming the energy industry, many Texas leaders, including a powerful segment of the state’s political leadership, are opposing the new opportunities. Some fear that clean energy will hurt the state’s incumbent fossil-fuel business. But many oppose the energy transition as a proxy for opposing Democrats, another way to prove to the conservative base that they are the reddest around. The result is a raft of measures that could hamper green-energy projects and incentivize carbon-heavy ones.
These divisions are setting up a surprising, high-stakes fight. Tudor’s coalition, the Houston Energy Transition Initiative (HETI), is organized by the city’s most prominent business group, and its members are putting serious cash behind new energy efforts. But some politicians are pushing back, launching efforts to slow renewable energy and publicly vilifying environment initiatives. “[Major oil and gas firms] may have supported us in the past, but they certainly don’t align with us now,” says Jason Isaac of the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation. “They’re going to go and chase money—and it’s unfortunate.”
The fight in Texas can tell us a lot about the bigger push to address climate change. A wellexecuted transition would help cut global emissions, create wealth and opportunity for millions of Texans, and set an example for the world. But the unfolding debate also shows why it’s not so simple. Politics and culture are powerful forces everywhere, and despite mounds of evidence about the value of transition, it’s unclear whether long-term economic considerations will win out. We all have an interest in the outcome. “We need to do it for commercial reasons,” says Tudor, but “we have a responsibility to do it too. The challenges of climate change, and the energy transition broadly, are so enormous that they’re not going to be solved without us.”
On the news and in popular culture, Texas can seem like a MAGA fever dream as politicians race to pass antiabortion laws and grandstand about critical race theory. But the business community driving the state’s economy gives a different impression. Chatting at a sleek Italian restaurant in Houston’s eclectic Montrose neighborhood, Tudor sounds more patrician than partisan. We talk about oil prices, yes, but also about Houston’s diversity and civic life, and the divergence between energy-industry financial returns and the region’s economic development. It’s an old-school vision of companies as pillars of the community that Tudor and many of his fellow executives share, one where business and government are partners in the greater good.
It’s a reading rooted in history. Before the 20th century, Texas was a largely rural, agrarian state; the discovery of vast oil reserves in 1901 changed that almost overnight. Within a matter of years, the oil industry expanded rapidly and so did the state’s urban centers. Whether by necessity or ideology, the government has largely stayed out of the way of the private companies that drove rapid growth and economic prosperity.
That has left Texas well positioned to capitalize on the energy transition. Building big infrastructure projects in Texas is easy thanks to a light regulatory environment. Much of the existing infrastructure—think pipelines—can be converted to carry carbon dioxide or hydrogen. The state has the highest concentration of chemical engineers in the country, jobs well suited not just for oil and gas but also for new energy technologies. And the local higher-education system, funded in large part by industry, has top programs to continue churning out energy workers.
But it’s hard for a transition to catch on when there’s so much money to be made in petroleum. At times over the course of the past 50 years, oil and gas has constituted 15% of the state’s economic output, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, and the state’s broader economy in turn oriented toward fossil fuels as well. The industry’s prospects have whipsawed lately. The sector already had been underperforming the rest of the stock market in the years before COVID-19 hit. As energy demand tanked worldwide amid the lockdown, the price of oil briefly went negative, sending shock waves throughout the industry.
This unprecedented upheaval coincided with the beginning of Tudor’s campaign to get the industry to embrace the transition. An energy price spike driven by the Russian invasion of Ukraine and COVID-19 reopenings has led to dramatic profits for the industry and softened the shortterm financial urgency of embracing the transition.
But the immense volume of capital flowing into clean energy, especially as a result of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), has sparked newfound resolve in the local business community to go green. “The IRA was a turning point,” says Greg Matlock, who leads EY’s Americas Energy Transition practice. “We were on the phone with clients, and within a week you could see tangible movement on transactions. It was quick and it was palpable.”
In Houston, it’s easy to see this on the ground. The downtown skyscrapers are full of incumbent oil companies, but a couple of miles away, in what city officials are calling the Innovation District, a new energy ecosystem is taking shape. I visited the office of Ara Partners, a private-equity shop with a self-proclaimed “industrial decarbonization strategy” that sees profits in helping companies cut their carbon footprint.
“Houston was the right place because the world of made things is made here,” says Troy Thacker, the firm’s CEO. Across the street, I visited Greentown Labs, an incubator where dozens of startups are working on everything from installing wind turbines more efficiently to turning cow manure into an alternative fuel source. Houston startups alone received $1.95 billion in venturecapital money in 2022, with energy-related startups raising almost as much as the next three sectors combined, according to data from the Greater Houston Partnership.
Across the state, investments from new and incumbent players aim to make Texas a world leader in green hydrogen, a clean way to store renewable energy. In Matagorda County, south of Houston, a company known as Highly Innovative Fuels, funded in part by old-school energy players like Baker Hughes, is building a massive facility that will use renewable electricity, green hydrogen, and technology that captures carbon dioxide. A venture-capital-backed energy company named Humble Midstream is building a hydrogen-export facility. Mckinsey estimates the hydrogen economy alone could be worth $100 billion to the state’s economy.
in Austin, i watched Jane Stricker, the executive director of HETI, present a vision of Texas as a capital of the energy transition to a gathering of lobbyists, regulators, and legislators. Her pitch: policymakers should join with business leaders to speed the shift. “We can solidify our position if we really lean into our role,” said Stricker, a former BP executive. “We have the opportunity to create massive economic growth.”
But for all of Texas’ business-friendly swagger, not everyone views a public-private green collaboration as a good thing. Responding to Stricker at the energy gathering, a Texas energyindustry insider questioned whether the state’s businesses were actually on board, then challenged the entire premise. “Can you articulate: transition from what to what?” he asked. In the discussions that followed, academics, elected officials, and business leaders laid out a range of positions. A renewable-energy lobbyist decried
GOP attempts to stomp out his industry. A state regulator laughed offa question about using funds from President Biden’s infrastructure law.
Business leaders try to play down the political opposition they face, arguing that ultimately lawmakers won’t turn down easy money. But while there are mixed opinions in Texas’ GOP, today opposition to clean energy and climate policy is defying the state’s business-friendly reputation and threatening to slow the transition in Texas.
Nowhere is that opposition clearer than in state government offices in Austin. The state legislature is crafting policies to stymie renewable energy. One bill would create new permitting requirements just for renewable-energy projects, requiring plant developers to evaluate the impacts on wildlife. Fossilfuel power plants would be exempt. Other measures would provide those plants new state subsidies. “There definitely is a contingent that’s looking to push up natural gas by pulling renewables down,” says Daniel Cohan, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Rice University.
And then there’s the anti-ESG rhetoric, a new front in the culture wars. Texas has banned a group of financial firms from doing business with state and local governments for using environmental, social, and governance metrics. These moves send a signal that green businesses aren’t welcome. “It could go faster if the state political forces were less antagonistic,” says Kay Mccall, president of the Renewable Energy Alliance Houston. “When you look at it, it’s almost silly.”
As a fly on the wall in startup conference rooms in Houston and Austin, I got a sense of the mood: outraged, but optimistic that economics will prevail over politics. Texas will realize some of its potential because of the direction of the market and the allure of tax incentives. The state’s pro-business roots, skilled workforce, and abundant natural resources have set it up to do big things in the energy transition.
But the outcome is not preordained. State politicians seem determined to limit green opportunities that big energy companies are eager to pursue. Even if they can overcome the political hurdles, activists worry that a business-led approach to the energy transition may not be the best for the world, as companies don’t want to give up profits to be made in oil and gas. Which means Texas may end up less green, and less prosperous, than it could be. ?
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The Green Movement Is a Jobs Killer. Are Unions Finally Figuring This Out?
Could it be that union bosses are finally waking up to the cold reality that the greatest threat to steel workers, the United Auto Workers, miners, machinists and the Teamsters is the radical climate change agenda of the environmentalists?
The green movement has taken the Democratic Party hostage -- and President Joe Biden's all-in embrace of far-left green policies is wreaking havoc on rank-and-file union jobs.
The United Auto Workers recently announced it would withhold its endorsement of Biden as he runs for a second term. "The federal government is pouring billions into the electric vehicle transition, with no strings attached and no commitment to workers," UAW President Shawn Fain recently declared. "The EV transition is at serious risk of becoming a race to the bottom" for America's workers.
My only question: Why did it take five years to figure this out?
What a shock that a union that makes automobiles would have second thoughts about endorsing the reelection of a president who, just a few weeks ago, announced new regulations that are intended to end production of all gas cars within a decade. That's a death sentence for UAW workers.
Meanwhile, California Democrats have proposed new rules to end the production of nearly 2 million diesel trucks. Has anyone alerted the Teamsters?
These rules would crush unions like Godzilla stomping on a twig. Perhaps the UAW is finally realizing that Biden's goal is to get all traditional cars and trucks off the road. That's not going to leave many card-carrying UAW members left to pay dues. Meanwhile, the electric cars and the parts will be made in China and developing countries controlled by Beijing.
To his credit, Biden is only doing what he promised back in 2020. He declared war on energy and the combustible engine -- and yet the union bosses endorsed him. Most amazing was the United Mine Workers and some of the Pipefitters unions endorsing Biden. Apparently, they weren't paying attention to his stated goal of shutting down every coal mine in America and most oil and gas pipelines.
Talk about selling the rope to your hangman.
Rank-and-file hard-hat union members are on to this gambit -- which is why most private-sector union voters went for former President Donald Trump in the last two election cycles, even as the union bosses endorsed and gave tens of millions of dollars to Hillary Clinton and then Biden.
Even now, as Biden cozies up to the Sierra Club and Greenpeace and places a metaphorical blade at the neck of the blue-collar union workers, the union bosses are reluctant to call for a divorce with "lunch bucket Joe."
After acknowledging the threat that Biden posed to the livelihoods of tens of thousands of union members, the UAW's Fain warned that "another Donald Trump presidency would be a disaster."
How? Union workers saw huge job and wage gains when Trump was president. Fain even muttered some disingenuous mumbo-jumbo about getting behind a "pro-worker, pro-climate" agenda for the working class. That's an oxymoron.
This isn't complicated. The leftists' religious pursuit of "zero emissions" leads to a green holy land with no smokestacks, no power plants, no cars, no trucks, no steel mills, copper mines, pipelines, gas stoves, air conditioners, airplanes, nuclear plants, washers and dryers, pesticides, plastics, or cows and other livestock.
Oh -- and as we sprint to a new post-industrial-age America, with no need for blue-collar unionized workers. The green "degrowth" movement isn't about creating prosperity for union workers but about putting them on unemployment lines.
It's good news that the Big Labor bosses are finally expressing some doubts about what the climate change agenda means for hard-hat workers. But if they keep working to elect climate change crazies, the demise of our union workforce will be swift and brutal.
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Australia: Unattainable energy targets
"It is bullshit". Former Snowy Hydro boss Paul Broad is far from alone in his expert, if refreshingly colloquial, view that Australia’s farcical state, federal and corporate greenhouse gas emissions targets are simply unattainable – and never were. And now, the head of the world’s second-biggest miner, Rio Tinto, says his company’s scope 1 and 2 emissions targets were a mistake – and he won’t join rivals BHP, Vale, Glencore and Fortescue (with its ambitious net zero by 2040) in pretending he can set achievable targets for the scope 3 emissions of Rio’s overseas customers, over which Rio has no control. He likens such scope 3 targets to greenwashing.
Even some stock-market tipster sheets are confidently promoting a surge in demand for fossil fuels, ie. coal, oil and gas, as the growing recognition that politically correct emissions targets cannot be achieved, will provide soaring share prices as the current green virtue-signalling by banks and investment managers of superannuation funds, is replaced by the pragmatism of market forces – and the national need for reliable energy.
In regretting having set his company’s emissions reduction targets of 15 per cent by 2025 and 50 per cent by 2030, Rio’s CEO, Jacob Stausholm, warned that it would take ‘hard choices’ to meet them as it is now clear that ‘decarbonising at scale is a lengthy process’. This follows his Davos warning earlier this year that governments and corporate executives were ‘fooling ourselves’ on how long the process of de-carbonising would take. He followed up last week in Perth with the view that, ‘People still do not understand how much work was required to meet these goals…. You have to be realistic on what it takes.’ And added that for solar power, ‘I don’t think people have realised the amount of land that is necessary.’
Paul Broad, former-CEO of Snowy Hydro 2.0, the chaotic, massively delayed (planned for 2021 and may be ready by 2029) and hugely over-run costs (from an estimated $2 billion to the current $20 billion including transmission and still rising; economically it will never pay for itself), says Labor’s ‘unrealistic’ renewable energy plans would ‘risk the lights going out…. The notion that you’re going to have 80 per cent renewables in our system by 2030 is, to use the vernacular, bullshit. This transition, if it ever occurs, it will take 80 years, not eight. There are massive changes that need to occur’.
On top of all this, the former Snowy Hydro boss warned that more than $10 billion in electricity transmission projects were unlikely to be built on time, threatening the transition from coal generation to renewables. ‘Not enough would be in place by 2030 to allow Australia to reach its target of tripling the current level of renewables by the end of the decade.’ So coal will be needed: ‘You can’t close Eraring and Vales Point; closing Liddell was bad enough…. And we need more gas.’
But will we be able to get enough coal and enough gas?
Labor governments, state and federal, face a dilemma at a time when their priority is gaining popular support for the Indigenous Voice to parliament. Do they approve contested gas and coal developments on economic grounds or oppose them in support of Aboriginal objectors who in many cases appear to have been manipulated by climate activists into drawn-out costly lawfare that is aimed more at meeting activists’ zero emissions agendas than bringing the benefits of income, jobs and prospects to remote areas?
After years of toing and froing, two multi-billion gas developments with governmental approval still face uncertainty. This month’s announcement by the Northern Territory government that it would approve fracking in the massive Beetaloo basin, has generated strong opposition that will inevitably lead to further delays on top of the five years between the Territory accepting fracking in principle and doing so in practice. The federal Department of Industry, Science and Resources says Beetaloo ‘has the potential to rival the world’s biggest and best gas resources’ and provide gas for the next 20 to 40 years.
But in an open letter to the Territory government, almost 100 scientists have urged it to abandon its fracking plans for Beetaloo, warning of ‘the damage it will inflict on our climate’, with one claiming the rise in emissions will intensify bushfire seasons and floods and accelerate the death of coral reefs.
Significantly, in the context of prospective lawfare, the scientists assert that fracking poses risks to Aboriginal people and their culture ‘at an unacceptable level’.
The other major gas project on hold is the Santos’ $US 3.6 billion Barossa offshore development 130 kilometres north of the Tiwi Islands, some of whose traditional owners demonstrated successfully in the Federal Court that they had not been satisfactorily consulted as required by law when Santos dealt directly with the Tiwi Land Council.
Now that Santos is taking action to meet this requirement (even with nationwide newspaper advertisements) there is still no certainty that drilling, which was suspended by last September’s legal action, will resume so that Santos can meet its commitment to deliver gas by the first half of 2025 to its Japanese and Korean partners, both of which are increasingly concerned about energy security. With the personal assurance from Prime Minister Albanese to the Japanese Prime Minister late last year that Australia would remain ‘a steady and reliable supplier’ of energy to Japan, the Albanese undertaking will be tested against his support for indigenous rights if further traditional owner legal action causes more delays.
One traditional owner has made clear his continuing opposition: ‘We have fought to protect our sea country from the beginning to the end and we will never stop fighting. Our sea is like our mother – we are part of the sea and the sea is part of us.’
And other traditional owners, who had lodged human rights claims against the group of banks, including ANZ, Westpac and NAB, involved in a $1.5 billion loan to the project, have followed it up by targeting superannuation funds for ‘failing to meet international human rights standards [by] investing in the companies’ as the project breaches ‘the economic, social and cultural rights of the Impacted Tiwi communities’, with a spokesman adding, ‘We do not want Santos to build a pipeline or to drill off the coast here… and we want the super funds to hear us and act.’
This combination of the pursuit of unachievable emissions targets and the unrestrained use of lawfare against major fossil fuel projects (even before the Voice provides an added weapon) means that Australia’s much-needed $20.5 billion coal and gas-led improvement over the past six months in the budget bottom line is unlikely to be repeated.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/05/business-robbery-etc-113/
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Toxicity of Lithium-Ion Batteries at Odds With Push for Electric Vehicles
Government leaders are pushing for the widespread adoption of electric vehicles (EVs), but there are concerns about the vast amounts of mineral mining necessary for battery production and the ensuing waste management issues taking a toll on the environment.
Lithium, the primary component of an EV battery, can be highly environmentally polluting in its extraction and discarding phases.
A major issue with lithium mining is the quantity of water required. Mining just 1 ton of lithium can use up to 2.2 million gallons of water, according to AZO Cleantech. This results in the depletion of water sources close to mining regions and drying out of land, posing a threat to not only the environment of the region but also communities living in the vicinity.
Lithium batteries use various elements like nickel, copper, and lead, which can all be toxic.
The open-pit mining method of extracting minerals required for batteries involves clearing out vegetation and digging a deep pit, creating the circumstances for erosion, according to UL Research Institutes.
According to a January 2023 study by the Climate and Community Project, if America’s current EV demand is projected to 2050, the U.S. market would need three times the current world supply of lithium to meet the demand. This requires a massive expansion of mining activities that can bring about enormous changes to landscapes and living conditions.
The Real Carbon Footprint
A 2019 study by Circular Energy Storage (pdf) calculated that production of an NCM111 lithium battery results in 73 kilograms of carbon dioxide-equivalent emissions per kilowatt-hour (kWh). NCM111 batteries contain one-third nickel, one-third cobalt, and one-third manganese in the cathode.
This means a considerable carbon footprint is generated by an electric vehicle before it hits the road compared to cars with an internal combustion engine.
Over 50 percent of the world’s lithium resources are said to be lying beneath salt flats in the Andean regions of Chile, Bolivia, and Argentina, according to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development.
Lithium mining and other mining activities have consumed 65 percent of the water in Salar de Atacama, the largest salt flat in Chile. This has depleted groundwater and contaminated the soil.
In Tibet, lithium mining from Chinese operations has reportedly leaked chemicals like hydrochloric acid into the Liqi River, which ended up killing livestock and poisoning the fish, according to the Harvard International Review.
Deadly Lithium Fires
Fires triggered by lithium-ion batteries are another concern with the increasing use of EVs.
In New York City in 2022, there were 220 fires caused by the batteries in e-micromobility devices, such as e-bikes, up from 44 fires in 2020, Mayor Eric Adams’ office announced in March.
“These fires are particularly severe and difficult to extinguish, spreading quickly, and producing noxious fumes,” officials said in a news release.
Between 2021 and 2022, such fires resulted in 226 injuries and 10 deaths, city officials said. In the first two months of 2023, 40 injuries and two deaths have been linked to battery fires. E-bike usage shot up during the COVID-19 pandemic after the bikes were legalized in New York.
Thousands of delivery workers rely on these devices for their jobs, officials said.
Fire Department of the City of New York (FDNY) Fire Marshal Daniel Flynn pointed out that incidents of electric batteries exploding have happened both when they were being charged and otherwise. This has resulted in many areas of the city opting to ban the batteries in the devices.
“Lithium-Ion batteries are known to unexpectedly re-ignite (without warning) minutes, hours and even days after all visible fire has been put out,” the FDNY warned in a report on safety recommendations (pdf). The batteries “can enter an uncontrollable, self-heating state. This can result in the release of gas, cause fire and possible explosion.”
In January, a Tesla Model S burst into flames in California while the driver was on Highway 50, causing two eastbound lanes to close. The battery reportedly “spontaneously” caught fire, according to the Sacramento Metropolitan Fire District.
Firefighters used about 6,000 gallons of water to extinguish the blaze as the lithium battery “continued to combust,” with officials making use of car jacks to lift the vehicle in order to put out the fire underneath it.
The amount of water needed to put out lithium fires is much higher than in fires from gas-powered vehicles.
Electronic Waste Risks
The increasing use of electric lithium batteries also poses a challenge about how to discard them without harming the environment.
Scott Thibodeau is the general manager of environmental services and solutions at Veolia North America, the second largest hazmat removal service in the United States. Thibodeau told The Epoch Times in September that safety is the greatest challenge associated with these batteries.
Thibodeau pointed out that lithium-ion batteries can’t be dumped or recycled as easily as other materials because of the chemistry of the components. Over 6 million EV battery packs are set to become scrap by 2030.
In China, decommissioned electric car batteries are estimated to hit 780,000 tons by 2025.
“A 20-gram cell phone battery can pollute a water body equivalent to three standard swimming pools. If it is buried in the ground, it can pollute one square kilometer (247 acres) of land for about 50 years,” Wu Feng, a professor at Beijing Institute of Technology, told The Epoch Times in 2021.
Electric car batteries are much larger than cell-phone batteries and will thus have bigger impacts. According to Li Yongwang, a chemical engineering expert in China, burying electric batteries poses a danger to people’s lives since they can explode from heat.
In the United States, the federal government and various state governments are currently promoting the shift to electric vehicles by insisting that it will be good for the environment.
The Biden administration is offering incentives for the purchase of such vehicles via the Inflation Reduction Act.
In August 2021, Biden announced that half of all cars and trucks sold in the United States by 2030 should be electric. States like California intend to ban the sale of gas cars by 2035.
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The Hypocrisy of the Left on Energy Policy
Democrats say they represent working Americans, but their energy policies tell another story. President Joe Biden’s environmental regulations are focused on slowing fossil-fuel development and promoting electrification, resulting in higher prices for electricity, cars and gasoline.
Democratic Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, is holding hearings to support Biden’s efforts. I testified at one this week that poor and middle-class Americans are disproportionately paying the price.
The goal of the Biden regulations is to mitigate climate change, described by the president in his February State of the Union Address as “an existential threat.” But if American energy-intensive production and manufacturing with their associated emissions are simply displaced to China and other poorer countries, global temperatures will not change.
To comply with the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) recent proposed rules to regulate auto emissions, 60% of vehicle sales would have to be battery-powered electric in 2030, and 67% in 2032. The agency is considering rules that would make electricity production more expensive by reducing carbon emissions from power plants.
As well as being more costly, electric cars take 45 minutes to recharge and lose battery range in cold climates. On average households in the lowest fifth of the income distribution have one car, while those in the top fifth have three cars. Families with two cars can have an electric car for short trips and a gasoline-powered car for longer trips, but poor households don’t have that luxury.
These regulations would make new and used cars disproportionately more expensive for the poor and middle-class people, who can least afford them. And the cost of charging the required electric vehicles would rise too.
To produce the solar panels, wind turbines and electric batteries demanded by the West, China is increasing its construction of coal-fired power plants. America has 225 coal-fired power plants, and China has more than 1,000 (half of all the coal-fired plants in the world). China has not committed to reducing emissions before 2027.
Research by Kevin Dayaratna, chief statistician and senior research fellow at The Heritage Foundation, using an EPA model, has shown that even completely eliminating all fossil fuels from the United States would result in less than 0.2 degrees Celsius in temperature mitigation by 2100.
Auto workers endorsed President Biden in 2020, not knowing that new EPA regulations on automobile emissions would require electric cars. Americans’ auto jobs are being sacrificed to Chinese workers (including slave and child labor) making batteries and mining for rare earth minerals.
Last week Stellantis, after closing an Illinois plant in December, announced that it would be cutting 3,500 jobs in Detroit due to its forced transition to electric vehicles. GM and Ford are also laying off workers.
United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain said on April 26, “This is a slap in the face to our members, their families, their communities, and the American people who saved this company 15 years ago,” United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain said on April 26. “Even now, politicians and taxpayers are bankrolling the electric vehicle transition.”
Requirements for renewable energy mean that Americans’ oil and gas jobs are being sacrificed to Chinese making wind turbines and solar panels, even though wind and solar power produce less than 6% of U.S. domestic primary energy consumption.
As the federal government spends billions on connecting wind and solar to the electricity grid, people’s electric bills rise. Households in the lowest fifth of the income distribution spend 10 percent of their after-tax income on electricity, natural gas, and motor and heating fuels, but people in the top fifth spend an average of 1 percent. International aid organizations don’t lend for nuclear or many fossil fuel projects in emerging economics, with the result that many of the world’s poor remain without reliable electricity, clean water, and sewage systems.
Poor Americans are paying the price for Democrats’ plans to transition away from fossil fuels in the name of a cleaner environment. They are paying more for cars and electricity, and they are losing their jobs. But global emissions won’t be reduced if industrial production leaves America and sets up in China.
https://www.heritage.org/energy-economics/commentary/the-hypocrisy-the-left-energy-policy ?
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The Dutch farmers’ stand against green tyranny
‘The whole point of bureaucracy is to reduce the possibilities of your life to the greatest possible degree when it doesn’t simply succeed in destroying them; from the bureaucratic point of view, a good citizen is a dead citizen.’
Or so wrote the French author Michel Houellebecq in his 2019 novel, Serotonin.
Michel Houellebecq has garnered a reputation as a prophetic novelist with an uncanny talent for timing. His 2015 novel, Submission, about a future France where an Islamic political party won the election and ruled France under Islamic laws, was released on the same day as the Charlie Hebdo shooting, when almost the entire editorial staff of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo were massacred by Islamists for ‘insulting’ the prophet Muhammad. It also anticipated a flurry of deadly Islamist terrorist attacks in France and the rest of Europe.
In Serotonin, one of the central elements was the description of French farmers being deracinated by EU laws and globalisation, driven to violent protests, despair, and suicide. This book was written before the Yellow Vest Protests began in France – a movement of the working class against policies that squeezed their lives, such as increasing diesel tax, while the comforts of the upper, metropolitan classes were spared.
Many of these policies were the manifestation of the elites’ quixotic pursuit of extreme green agendas. The Yellow Vest Movement has spread globally, from Europe to Asia and the Americas. This is because many working-class people are faced with the same problem – a faceless elite who get together at immaculate and lavish conferences, download unproven and often naïve ideologies into their craniums, and who then try to implement policies that will ruin the lives of the working class, whom they see as raw material to be moved around like chess pieces, not people with lives, dreams, yearnings, and rights.
This is exactly what is happening in the Netherlands. In early May, the European Commission gave the green light for the Dutch government to start buying out farms to meet the EU’s climate targets. The EU’s 2021 European Climate Law set a goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by a minimum of 55 per cent by 2030, less than 7 years from now.
To meet this impracticable goal, the Dutch government has decided to target their farmers, blaming them for high greenhouse emissions. Dutch estimates suggest that up to 3,000 farms will have to be closed down. The government is offering buy-outs, with force-outs likely if they refuse. This radical policy is despite that the Netherlands only contributes 5.2 per cent of EU emissions, and that its emissions have reduced by 13.4 per cent between 2005 and 2019. Agriculture only makes up 9 per cent of Dutch greenhouse gas emissions, and its emission has been falling, even as its income increases.
In response, in an eerie echo of Houellebecq’s novel, Dutch farmers have been driven to protest en masse. In March, more than 10,000 farmers and their supporters gathered to protest in The Hague, days after similar protests by Belgian farmers, who blockaded Brussels with thousands of tractors, against plans to drastically limit emissions.
The Dutch policies are particularly puzzling, as Dutch farmers are among the most efficient in the world. The Netherlands, a tiny country both in terms of land and population, is nevertheless the second largest food exporter in the world, after the US, a country infinitely larger and with around 20 times the population. It has achieved this amazing feat by being a leader in agricultural technology innovation, as acknowledged even by the World Economic Forum, which is itself a leader in the push of the extreme green agenda. It is therefore mind-boggling that the Dutch government and the EU would want to uproot this industry rather than to promote and emulate it in a world that is running out of food.
As if to emphasise the EU’s foolishness, there is a condition for farmers who accept the buy-out, which is that they are not allowed to start another similar operation in any EU country, obliterating their world-class expertise and knowledge. Imagine being told by your government that your hard-earned skills cannot be used to make a living again, not only in your own country, but in your continent.
Some think that there is a hidden motive – the Netherlands is desperately short of new housing, but has very little land to build them on. This is shaping up to be a major election issue. The seizure of farmland is therefore suspected to be a land grab by the government.
Whatever the reasons, the farmers’ cause against the government’s immiserating policies that will end their livelihoods have garnered a lot of sympathy and generated equal measures of anger. The farmers’ protest party, the BoerBurgerBeweging (BBB, Farmers-Citizen Movement), scored an astonishing victory at the March provincial elections. The BBB is projected to take 15 seats in the 75-seat senate in the late May senatorial elections, giving them an equal majority. Amazingly, it won the popular vote in all 12 provinces.
We seem to be living the imagination of Houellebecq, who has been a resigned chronicler of the self-mutilation of Western culture for decades. However, counter to the pervasive pessimism and heart-wrenching ennui in his novels, the Dutch farmers, as well as the populist protests sprouting around the world, show that there is a deep sense and yearning for freedom, as well as disgust for tyranny, whatever guise it may present itself. The Dutch farmers’ peaceful and democratic revolt is to be celebrated and duplicated.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/05/the-dutch-farmers-stand-against-green-tyranny/
****************************************************Battle Looms Among New York Democrats Over High Cost of Green Energy Plans
The stage is set for a battle royale within the New York Democratic Party over climate policy. Governor Hochul has suddenly realized that the cost of the state’s planned emission reduction scheme will be “extraordinary,” and is challenging her own party to make the climate law less damaging to New Yorkers’ pocketbooks. Will the left wing of her party go along?
In this year’s budget negotiations Ms. Hochul and the legislature agreed to a cap-and-invest program as recommended by the state’s Climate Action Council. Cap-and-invest programs put an annual limit on the amount of greenhouse gas emissions New York businesses collectively emit, with the amount declining each year. Businesses will have to bid for an ever-decreasing number of permits and naturally will pass the costs on to consumers by raising prices.
But a wrinkle in the Climate Act will make those costs more than half as much as they would be under Hochul’s proposed change.
Most countries and states compare emissions of different greenhouse gases using a 100-year time frame. New York’s Climate Law is unusual in that it uses a 20-year time frame. The issue is complex, but New York’s choice has two effects: it would reduce greenhouse gases faster, but at a much higher cost.
The governor has recognized this and wants to change to the more commonly used 100-year time frame, which would reduce greenhouse gases more slowly, but would have less sticker shock for average New Yorkers.
Under the Climate Act’s 20-year time frame, cap-and-invest would add 63 cents to the cost of a gallon of gasoline. Ms. Hochul’s proposal would reduce that to a still hefty but more bearable 39 cents per gallon.
For users of natural gas, the current approach would add $595 to the average family’s average annual bill. Changing it would reduce that to a $330 cost increase.
And for users of heating oil, the annual hit under the current law would be $605, while Ms. Hochul’s requested change would drop that to $410 per year.
Either way, the price increases are going to be considerable, but if Ms. Hochul gets her way, many New Yorkers would be spared hundreds of dollars per year in Climate Act costs.
This could be important politically, because while the public overwhelmingly supports taking action against climate change, people’s willingness to pay for that action is very limited.
A recent Siena College poll conducted for the industry group New Yorkers for Affordable Energy found that three-quarters of New Yorkers were unwilling to pay $480 per year to combat climate change, and more than half balked at paying just $240.
Granted, the cap-and-invest program is intended to use the proceeds from sales of emissions allowances to give rebates to poorer New Yorkers to offset their costs. Yet those folks will still have to scrounge up the cash to pay upfront costs. And middle-income New Yorkers will suffer the blow without any rebates at all.
This poses an urgent political problem for Ms. Hochul, whose gubernatorial win last year was by the slimmest margin in more than a generation. People vote their pocketbooks, and fair or not they tend to blame the chief executive when their wallets get emptied.
Yet that doesn’t mean the Democrats in the legislature will go along with the governor. While gubernatorial candidates must appeal to middle-of-the-road voters, many legislators represent lopsided districts where the political voice is dominated by activists.
And climate activists are outraged at the governor’s proposal to change the Climate Act’s greenhouse gas accounting method. Their sentiments are summed up in the words of a Cornell Professor and Climate Action Council member, Robert Howarth, who said the governor’s proposal would be “disastrous for the NY climate law.”
Even some Democratic legislators who might personally agree with the governor about reducing the financial blow to New Yorkers may balk at changing the Climate Act out of fear of their most vocal constituents’ response.
So Ms. Hochul and legislative Democrats have an intra-party battle on their hands because they don’t share the same set of voters.
Ms. Hochul tried to get this change made during budget negotiations but was shot down. How hard she’ll push during the rest of the legislative session is anyone’s guess.
In the short run the activists may get their way again. But how long they can dominate a public that’s increasingly financially pressured remains to be seen.
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15 May, 2023
Oxford University's "Our World in Data" falls for renewables industry spin
Campaigning group Net Zero Watch has called on Oxford University’s Our World in Data (OWID) site to withdraw its webpage on the cost of renewable energy.
In a letter to OWID’s director Max Roser, NZW’s Andrew Montford explains that the site is putting its reputation at risk by ignoring the highly transparent UK data in favour of numbers that are not replicable, and most likely to be based on “hearsay”.
Mr Montford said:
"The UK is almost unique in having a high penetration of renewable energy and freely available financial accounts data. A series of reviews of this information confirms that the cost of offshore wind power is high, and hardly coming down at all. It is hard to comprehend why Our World in Data would ignore this hard data in favour of unsubstantiated spin from the renewables industry. Their page on the subject should be revised before anyone else is misled.”
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From: Andrew Montford
To: Dr Max Roser
11 May 2023
Dear Dr Roser
Our World in Data (OWID) is usually a rather reliable source of information, so I wanted to draw your attention to what I believe is an uncharacteristically flawed article on your website. This is ‘Why did renewables become so cheap so fast?’, which examines the levelised cost of renewable energy.
Firstly, I should point out that the levelised cost of electricity (LCOE) isn’t actually data at all. In simple terms, LCOE divides the lifetime costs of a generator by its lifetime output, but neither of those figures are known until the generator closes down at the end of its life. So while the Capital Expenditures (capex) element of lifetime cost is knowable at the start, the lifetime Operational Expenditure (opex) and the output have to be modelled. So whether a site called Our World in Data should be discussing LCOE at all is worthy of consideration.
Where LCOE is discussed, the data used as input needs to be grounded in reality, the modelling assumptions need to be made clear, and caveats spelled out. This is not the case for the sources you cite. For example, while widely cited, the assumptions used by Lazard are demonstrably false. For example, for offshore wind, the version of the report you cite (version 13) claims a capital cost of £2.3-$3.5m/MW, roughly half the cost of offshore windfarms in the UK, and a third of the cost of the only (admittedly experimental) offshore windfarm in the US. As I have pointed out elsewhere, the assumptions for capacity factor and opex are similarly divorced from reality.
You also cite the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), whose figures are similarly problematic, notably because they convert all their numbers into US dollars, giving them a large and entirely spurious downwards trend as a result of the appreciation of the dollar against most other currencies.
It’s not clear where Lazard and IRENA are getting their input figures from, but it’s unlikely to be anything that could reasonably be called ‘data’. IRENA is supposed to be global in nature, and Lazard are vague about whether their estimates are for the US or for the world. Either way, the majority of the financial inputs cannot be data because such information is not available for most of the world: word of mouth and/or developer announcements seem the most likely sources. In the UK, developer announcements are typically 15-20% lower than outturn cost.
The clear exception to this rule is the UK, where financial data is freely available for all offshore windfarms and many large onshore ones (as well as a few solar parks). This then is the only reliable data for estimating the levelised cost of renewable energy. I refer you to the paper by Aldersey-Williams et al. (2019) on the LCOE of offshore wind, which presents a very different story to the one in your article, and which has been replicated by others.
By basing your article on figures that can only be based on hearsay, rather than on empirical data, you are risking your hard-won reputation as a reliable source. I would advise you to revise the article accordingly.
With best regards
Andrew Montford
Director, Net Zero Watch
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The wind and solar power myth has finally been exposed
Many governments in the Western world have committed to “net zero” emissions of carbon in the near future. The US and UK both say they will deliver by 2050. It's widely believed that wind and solar power can achieve this. This belief has led the US and British governments, among others, to promote and heavily subsidise wind and solar.
These plans have a single, fatal flaw: they are reliant on the pipe-dream that there is some affordable way to store surplus electricity at scale.
In the real world a wind farm’s output often drops below 10 per cent of its rated “capacity” for days at a time. Solar power disappears completely every night and drops by 50 per cent or more during cloudy days. “Capacity” being a largely meaningless figure for a wind or solar plant, about 3000 megawatts (MW) of wind and solar capacity is needed to replace a 1000 MW conventional power station in terms of energy over time: and in fact, as we shall see, the conventional power station or something very like it will still be needed frequently once the wind and solar are online.
The governments of countries with a considerable amount of wind and solar generation have developed an expectation that they can simply continue to build more until net zero is achieved. The reality is that many of them have kept the lights on only by using existing fossil fired stations as backup for periods of low wind and sun. This brings with it a new operating regime where stations that were designed to operate continuously have to follow unpredictable fluctuations in wind and solar power. As a result operating and maintenance costs have increased and many stations have had to be shut down.
In fact it's already common to see efficient combined-cycle gas turbines replaced by open-cycle ones because they can be throttled up and down easily to back up the rapidly changing output of wind and solar farms. But open-cycle gas turbines burn about twice as much gas as combined cycle gas turbines. Switching to high-emissions machinery as part of an effort to reduce emissions is, frankly, madness!
Certain countries are helped because their power systems are supported by major inter-connectors to adjacent regions that have surplus power available. The increasingly troubled French nuclear fleet, which formerly had plenty of spare energy on tap, for a long time helped to make renewables plans look practical across Western Europe.
But this situation is not sustainable in the long term. Under net-zero plans, all nations will need to generate many times more electricity than they now can, as the large majority of our energy use today is delivered by burning fossil fuels directly. Neighbouring regions will be unable to provide the backup power needed; emissions from open cycle gas turbines (or new coal powerplants, as in the case of Germany at the moment) will become unacceptable; more existing base load stations will be forced to shut down by surges in renewables; more and more wind and solar power will have to be expensively dumped when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing.
Power prices will soar, making more or less everything more expensive, and there will be frequent blackouts.
None of this is difficult to work out. Building even more renewables capacity will not help: even ten or 100 times the nominally-necessary “capacity” could never do the job on a cold, windless evening.
Only one thing can save the day for the renewables plan. Reasonable cost, large scale energy storage, sufficient to keep the lights on for several days at a minimum, would solve the problem.
What are the options?
First we need to consider the scale of the issue. Relatively simple calculations show that that California would need over 200 megawatt-hours (MWh) of storage per installed MW of wind and solar power. Germany could probably manage with 150 MWh per MW. Perhaps this could be provided in the form of batteries?
The current cost of battery storage is about US$600,000 per MWh. For every MW of wind or solar power in California, $120 million would need to be spent on storage. In Germany it would be $90 million. Wind farms cost about $1.5 million per MW so the cost of battery storage would be astronomical: 80 times greater than the cost of the wind farm! A major additional constraint would be that such quantities of batteries are simply not available. Not enough lithium and cobalt and other rare minerals are being mined at the moment. If prices get high enough supply will expand, but prices are already ridiculously, unfeasibly high.
Some countries are gambling on hydro pumped storage. Here the idea is to use electricity to pump water uphill into a high reservoir using surplus renewables on sunny, windy days: then let it flow back down through generating turbines as in a normal hydropower plant when it’s dark and windless.
Many pumped systems have been built in China, Japan and United States but they have storage sufficient for only 6 to 10 hours operation. This is tiny compared with the several days storage that is needed to back up wind and solar power through routine sunless calm periods. Much larger lakes at the top and bottom of the scheme are needed. There are very few locations where two large lakes can be formed with one located 400-700 m above the other and separated by less than 5-10 km horizontally. Such a location must also have an adequate supply of make-up water to cope with evaporation losses from the two lakes. Another problem is that at least 25 per cent of the energy is lost while pumping and then generating.
Hydro pumped storage will seldom be a feasible option. It cannot solve the problem on a national scale even in countries like the USA which have a lot of mountains.
Carbon capture and storage (CCS) for fossil fuel stations is also touted as way of avoiding the problems of wind and solar power. But this is not a technology, just a case of wishful thinking. In spite of many years of work and enormous amounts of money spent, nobody has yet devised a technology that can provide large scale, low cost CCS. Even if capture worked and didn't consume most or all the energy generated, storing the carbon dioxide is a huge problem because three tonnes of carbon dioxide are produced for every tonne of coal burned.
Hydrogen is another technology which is often suggested for energy storage: but its problems are legion. At the moment hydrogen is made using natural gas (so-called “blue” hydrogen). This, however, will have to stop in a net-zero world as the process emits large amounts of carbon: you might as well just burn the natural gas. Proper emissions-free “green” hydrogen is made from water using huge amounts of electrical energy, 60 per cent of which is lost in the process. Storing and handling the hydrogen is extremely difficult because hydrogen is a very small molecule and it leaks through almost anything. At best this means that a lot of your stored hydrogen will be gone by the time you want to use it: at worst it means devastating fires and explosions. The extremely low density of hydrogen also means that huge volumes of it would have to be stored and it would often have to be stored and handled cryogenically, creating even more losses, costs and risks.
The conclusion is simple. Barring some sort of miracle, there is no possibility that a suitable storage technology will be developed in the needed time frame. The present policies of just forcing wind and solar into the market and hoping for a miracle have been memorably and correctly likened to “jumping out of an aeroplane without a parachute and hoping that the parachute will be invented, delivered and strapped on in mid air in time to save you before you hit the ground.”
Wind and solar need to be backed up, close to 100 per cent, by some other means of power generation. If that backup is provided by open-cycle gas or worse, coal, net zero will never be achieved: nor anything very close to it.
There is one technology that can provide a cheap and reliable supply of low-emissions electricity: nuclear power. Interest in nuclear power is increasing as more and more people realise that it is safe and reliable. If regulators and the public could be persuaded that modern stations are inherently safe and that low levels of nuclear radiation are not dangerous, nuclear power could provide all the low cost, low emissions electricity the world needs for hundreds or thousands of years.
But if we had 100 per cent nuclear backup for solar and wind, we wouldn't need the wind and solar plants at all.
Wind and solar are, in fact, completely pointless.
Bryan Leyland MSc, DistFEngNZ, FIMechE, FIEE(rtd) is a power systems engineer with more than 60 years experience on projects around the world. He is a member of the GWPF's Academic Advisory Council
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Alarming drop in mining derails drive for Net Zero
Green transition will take six times the mineral output world is producing now
The latest key Canadian and global mining production numbers are out, and they’re grim. The International Energy Agency says that to reach net-zero emissions by 2050, we need to be producing six times the current global output of mineral inputs just to build the turbines, transmission lines, batteries and other items essential for low-carbon energy infrastructure. Instead, we are mining less than we did in 2019. While policy-makers constrain new investments in fossil fuels, the raw materials we need in order to develop alternative forms of energy are not coming along quickly enough. The result seems likely to be an energy crunch.
The 38th edition of the World Mining Data report, published annually by the Austrian government, finds that mining production is not meeting the hopes of governments working to increase their own domestic and friendly sources of minerals. Rather, production has roughly plateaued, with the sector yet to match the peak production of 18 billion metric tons achieved in 2019. Far from growing our outputs, we’re struggling to maintain them.
Even more troubling: more than a third of global mining production remains controlled by our two biggest geopolitical adversaries. China is still responsible for over a quarter of the total and Russia another 9.2 per cent on top of that. China is the world’s largest producer of 29 different commodities and dominates the processing and refining of many others.
Global mining financing is barely a third what it was a decade ago
In Canada, meantime, we are punching below our weight, ranking only eighth in world production, well behind our peers, the U.S. (second) and Australia (fourth). We do lead the pack in new exploration spending but our actual production of critical minerals is falling, despite renewed attention from the federal government and bilateral agreements with most of our closest allies to increase supply.
Natural Resources Canada released its annual mining production results in mid-April, confirming that in 2022 we produced fewer critical minerals — the copper, cobalt, nickel, zinc, uranium and platinum-group metals that are essential to the energy transition — than in 2019. Output of gold, which is a hedge against inflation and economic uncertainty, did increase, as did output of silver, iron and potash, a key ingredient in fertilizer. But they won’t help us hit our climate goals, and output of metals that would won’t be taking off any time soon, according to the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada.
Mining investment is anemic around the world, having plummeted 35 per cent between 2021 and 2022, a victim of high interest rates and price volatility. Overall global mining financing is barely a third what it was a decade ago, falling from US$119 billion at the peak of the last commodity cycle in 2013, to a dismal US$42 billion last year. Far from growing mineral production for a future net-zero world, we are living off investments made in the past.
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Australia: Federal Minister approvess Hunter coal mine expansion
The Environmental Defenders Office sought to overturn an approval allowing the expansion of Mt Pleasant mine. The Independent Planning Commision approved and application to extend the mine's life by 22 years to the end of 2048.
Environment groups have slammed federal environment minister Tanya Plibersek's refusal to stop the approvals of four coal projects, including the Mt Pleasant mine expansion near Muswellbrook.
The NSW Independent Planning Commission conditionally approved MACH Energy's expansion plans late last year.
The approval will extend the mine's life by 22 years to the end of 2048, a result that opponents argue would result in more than 800 million tonnes of carbon emissions.
Mt Pleasant was among 19 coal and gas projects Environment Justice Australia, acting on behalf of Environment Council of Central Queensland, applied under federal laws to have thrown out before they had completed their full environmental assessments.
The group argued that the potential emissions from the projects should rule them out of any further consideration.
But in order to stop a project from proceeding, federal laws require proof that its emissions would be a substantial cause of climate change effects on the Australian environment.
Ms Plibersek's department said on Thursday night that this had not been proven in regard to Mount Pleasant, the Narrabri Coal mine expansion, the Ensham coal mine extension and the Isaac River coal mine, both of which are located in Queensland's Bowen Basin
"The Albanese government has to make decisions in accordance with the facts and the national environment law - that's what happens on every project, and that's what's happened here. Since the election we've doubled renewable energy approvals to a record high. The government will continue to consider each project on a case-by-case basis, under the law," federal Department of Environment spokeswoman said.
The Environment Council of Central Queensland said it was considering all legal options including a Federal Court challenge and any injunctions needed.
"Today's decision means Minister Plibersek joins a long line of federal environment ministers who have said it's not their job to consider the climate risk of new coal and gas mines," President Christine Carlisle said.
"We're already dealing with floods, bushfires, and droughts and the evidence shows these new coal and gas proposals will make the devastation much, much worse.
"This is the real test for the minster. Australians who voted in favour of climate action have a right to feel betrayed by these decisions. We want our kids and our grandkids to be able to experience our natural wonders."
In giving its conditional approval for the expansion last year, the planning commission said the project would provide up to 447 direct and indirect jobs in the Muswellbrook and Upper Hunter, 643 jobs in the wider region, and 444 jobs elsewhere in NSW.
Mt Pleasant is also one of the few known habitats of the Hunter Valley Delma. The Delma is a species of legless lizard endemic to the Hunter Valley and Liverpool plains and was found on the mine site by researchers from the Australian Museum in 2022.
The Climate Council said Ms Plibersek's ruling was 'reckless' and 'out of line with the science'.
"This decision takes us in entirely the wrong direction to protect Australians from the worsening effects of dangerous climate change," Climate Council head of advocacy Jennifer Rayner said.
"The environment minister has a responsibility to scrutinise all risks of harm to the environment, and it is irresponsible that she has refused to look at the immense and indisputable climate harm that all new coal and gas projects pose.
"We cannot have new, highly polluting coal as we're living through the age of climate consequences. What we need is far more action to boost clean energy sources which can replace coal altogether, like the renewable hydrogen investments the government started in this week's budget."
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14 May, 2023
Sen. Manchin Vows to Block All Biden EPA Nominees Over Regulation Targeting Power Plant Emissions
Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, has threatened to oppose all Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) nominees proposed by President Biden due to a forthcoming regulation aimed at power plant emissions.
Manchin criticized the administration for seeking to close fossil fuel-fired power plants without considering the impact on the national power grid.
Manchin highlighted that neither the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law nor the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) provided the EPA with the authority to regulate power plant emissions.
He stated, “However, I fear that this Administration’s commitment to their extreme ideology overshadows their responsibility to ensure long-lasting energy and economic security and I will oppose all EPA nominees until they halt their government overreach.”
The EPA regulation, expected to be released shortly, would require coal and natural gas-fired power plants to cut or capture the majority of their carbon dioxide emissions by 2040. The Biden administration believes the IRA allows the EPA to regulate greenhouse gas emissions extensively.
Manchin expressed his concerns about the administration’s climate agenda, saying, “This Administration is determined to advance its radical climate agenda and has made it clear they are hellbent on doing everything in their power to regulate coal and gas-fueled power plants out of existence, no matter the cost to energy security and reliability.”
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Cantuar's climate confusion
It is widely expected that Justin Welby, having now screwed the crown on Charles III’s head, will shortly retire as Archbishop of Canterbury and put himself out to grass. If so, he is not going quietly. This afternoon, in the House of Lords, he launched a wholesale attack on the government’s Illegal Migration Bill, which includes measures to offshore the processing of asylum-seekers in Rwanda, describing it as ‘isolationist, morally unacceptable and politically impractical’ to leave developing countries to handle the world’s refugees.
But one comment in particular stands out in the Archbishop’s speech. He asserted that ‘the IPCC forecasts that climate change by itself, let alone the conflicts it is causing, will lead to at least 800 million more refugees a year – in total – by 2050’.
It is an extraordinary claim, but is there any truth in it? If the Archbishop was trying to say that 800 million people would be displaced by climate change every year that would mean one in ten of the world’s population having to do a runner every single year. But let’s assume – which seems fair given his delivery – that the words ‘a year’ were an error and that the Archbishop was correcting himself when he added the words ‘in total’. It is still a stark figure, that 800 million people could be displaced by climate change by 2050, so did the IPCC really predict that?
The IPCC’s 85-page synthesis report, published in March, does not mention the word ‘refugee’ once. Nor does the Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability report published last year. What the synthesis report does say is that between 3.3 billion and 3.6 billion people ‘are living in contexts that are highly vulnerable to climate change’ – in order words, there is some negative form of climate change going on where they live. It does not, however, speculate on how many of them will at some point have to flee their homes.
Others, however, have made predictions which include a number similar to that quoted by the Archbishop. The closest match appears to be a report published in 2015 by a group of scientists calling themselves Climate Central. That forecast that ‘carbon emissions causing 4 degrees celsius of warming (7.2 degrees Fahrenheit) – a business as usual scenario – could lock in enough eventual sea level rise to submerge land currently home to 470 to 760 million people globally’.
Climate Central was not saying that these people would be driven from their homes by 2050 (indeed, the IPCC’s central estimate is for 32-62cm of sea level rise over the course of the 21st century, which would not cause mass evacuation of land anywhere save for marshlands, and communities built on marshland without sea defences). What it was saying was that were global temperatures to rise by 4ºC – which itself would only happen if the world took no action on climate change whatsoever – then eventually (which could mean several centuries’ time) sea levels would rise to flood land currently inhabited by between 470 and 760 million people.
That is somewhat different from the Archbishop’s alarmist claim of mass exodus by 2050. But will anyone notice? Or will Welby prove yet again that prominent figures rarely get into trouble by making exaggerated and scientifically-illiterate claims about climate change.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/05/justin-welbys-climate-confusion/ ?
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Forest Service Wants to Permanently Close 226K Acres to Recreational Shooting
The Biden administration continues to wage war on public lands access to deter activities like hunting, fishing, and shooting sports. Mind you, these activities pump back billions to conservation funding annually.
The U.S. Forest Service, a subsidiary of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), is considering a rule to permanently close over 226,000 National Forest Service (NFS) lands to recreational shooting opportunities. The affected areas will include three locations in Colorado: Arapaho and Roosevelt National Forests and Pawnee National Grassland. The national forests cumulatively comprise 1.4 million acres. Public comments closed on May 5th, 2023.
Under multiple-use management of public lands, recreational target shooting is allowed on National Forest Service lands. Efforts to increase access on public lands are underway as more Americans lawfully purchase firearms and desire to go outdoors to do some safe target shooting.
This rule, if implemented, would deprive visitors to these public lands of opportunities. This recommendation first originated from the 2019 Recreational Sport Shooting Management Decision and Forest Plan Amendment, which determined these areas are “unsuitable” for shooting sports. The three reasons given include “residential housing density,” “high-use recreation areas on NFS and other government lands, and existing conflicts between recreational shooting” and “other uses on NFS and other government lands.”
The rule, if enacted, seeks to do the following: “When fully implemented, the 226,113 acres identified as unsuitable for shooting will be closed. The three geographic areas included in the current Dingell Act notice comprise 141,095 acres of that, including 94,900 acres when Devil’s Nose opens and 46,195 acres when the Clear Creek Shooting Sports Park opens.”
What’s the reasoning for pursuing permanent closures here? Naturally, it’s under the guise of “protect[ing] public safety by improving management of recreational sport shooting.”(It’s reminiscent of talking points employed by gun control advocates to ban firearms under the guise of “safety.”) An initial draft claimed legal hunting opportunities won’t be affected. But the Biden administration is not to be trusted here either.
Unfortunately, the Forest Service rule is not the first of its kind by this White House. As I’ve noted here at Townhall, the Biden administration has worked behind closed doors with anti-hunting preservationist groups to undo a Trump-era opening of 2.3 million acres to new hunting and fishing opportunities on national wildlife refuge lands.
Additionally, the Biden-appointed Alaska Federal Subsistence Board voted to close off 60 million acres of public land to moose and caribou hunting to non-locals last spring. According to Outdoor Life, the proposal known as WSA21-01 isn’t “supported by science or data of big-game harvests.”
Moreover, the Commerce Department is mulling obtuse vessel rules for recreational and commercial boating activities under the guise of protecting endangered right whales. But anglers and boaters worry these closures–upwards of six months–throughout the East Coast would create no-go zones, have negative economic ramifications, and displace countless Americans from recreational and boating industry jobs.
And there are, sadly, more public land and public water closures being mulled as we speak.
Whenever closures to sporting activitieson public lands occur, access is usually never restored. A prime example is California instituting Marine Protection Areas (MPAs) in the 1990s.
California regulators claimed overfishing was decimating Pacific fisheries. Despite evidence showing recovery, the California Fish and Game still refuses to reopen MPAs to recreational fishing as of 2016. Why? They operate as if there’s still a “fisheries crisis”--yet the Golden State created “draconian no-fishing zones that prevent recreational anglers and their families from going out for a day’s fishing…”
Several years ago, the American Sportfishing Association (ASA) concluded the Marine Life Protection Act, which created MPAs, is “having serious negative financial impacts on coastal communities and on California’s $2.2 billion saltwater recreational fishing industry, while attempting to address a fishing crisis that no longer exists.”
Their document continued, “While there are examples of overfishing and declining fish stocks in oceans around the world, such is not the case off the Pacific coast. The fisheries crisis that the MLPA is supposed to solve has been effectively addressed by implementation of traditional fishery management tools.”
Exporting California policies nationwide–including preservationist environmentalist ones–is a recipe for disaster. Federal agencies, naturally, are replicating the same misguided policies on public lands nationwide.
Let’s not kid ourselves: the Biden White House isn’t a friend to true conservationists who fish, hunt, and partake in shooting sports. On the contrary. It’s actively undermining our way of life, despite lauding the $1.6 billion generated in conservation funds by the Pittman-Robertson Act last year.
While these prohibitions may not be overt, they’re coming. If you think your preferred style of fishing or hunting is safe from regulators or preservationists, think again. They’re inevitably coming for all facets of the sporting lifestyle.
Let’s defend our way of life by opposing bad rulemaking emanating from Washington, D.C.
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Australia: Federal environment minister Tanya Plibersek has indicated that will approve the coking coalmine near Moranbah
The Australian government has approved a new coalmine development for the first time since it was elected last year.
Tanya Plibersek, the federal environment minister, indicated she would give the green light to the Isaac River coalmine in Queensland’s Bowen basin. It was announced late on Thursday.
The mine, to be developed by Bowen Coking Coal, is planned for 28km east of Moranbah, next to five other coalmines, and expected to produce about 500,000 tonnes of metallurgical coal a year for five years. Metallurgical coal, also known as coking coal, is used in steelmaking.
“The Albanese government has to make decisions in accordance with the facts and the national environment law – that’s what happens on every project, and that’s what’s happened here,” a spokesperson for Plibersek said.
“Since the election we’ve doubled renewable energy approvals to a record high. The government will continue to consider each project on a case-by-case basis, under the law.”
The government said no submissions had been received about the project during the public consultation period, including from environment groups.
However climate campaigners had made public statements calling on Plibersek to reject the mine in line with scientific advice that no new fossil fuel developments should go ahead if the world is to limit global heating to 1.5C.
“Scientists, energy and climate experts have said that the climate cannot afford new coalmines, and they’ve said it so many times I’ve lost count,” said Rod Campbell, research director at The Australia Institute.
“The fact that this is a small coking coalmine is beside the point – fossil carbon needs to stay in the ground. We’ve already got more than enough coalmines approved to cook the planet, including coking coalmines that could run into next century.
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11 May, 2023
World not ready yet to 'switch off' fossil fuels, COP28 host UAE says
The United Arab Emirates said on Tuesday that countries should agree to phase out fuel emissions - not the production of oil, gas and coal - at the upcoming U.N. climate change negotiations that it will host this December.
The comments reflect deep divisions between nations over how to combat global warming ahead of the COP28 talks. Some wealthy Western governments and climate-afflicted island nations have been pushing for a phase out of fossil fuels, while resource-rich countries have campaigned to keep drilling.
UAE Minister of Climate Change and Environment Mariam Almheiri told Reuters in an interview that phasing out fossil fuels would hurt countries that depend on them for revenue or can not easily replace them with renewable sources.
She favored phasing out fossil fuel emissions using capture and storage technologies while ramping up renewable energy, saying this strategy lets countries fight warming while continuing to produce oil, gas, and coal.
"The renewable space is advancing and accelerating extremely fast but we are nowhere near to be able to say that we can switch off fossil fuels and solely depend on clean and renewable energy," Almheiri said on the sidelines of the Agriculture Innovation Mission (AIM) for Climate conference in Washington.
"We are now in a transition and this transition needs to be just and pragmatic because not all countries have the resources," she added.
The UAE is co-hosting the AIM conference with the United States.
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Ryanair dismisses Net Zero aviation agenda as it places biggest ever order for Boeing jets
Ryanair has unveiled its biggest-ever aircraft order as one of its top executives said the switch to hydrogen or electric powered planes will not happen “in my lifetime”.
The budget carrier has agreed a $40bn (£31.7bn) deal with Boeing to buy 150 of the manufacturer’s 737 Max 10 jets with an option for a further 150.
The planes will be delivered by Boeing to Ryanair between 2027 and 2034 and be powered by conventional aircraft engines.
Neil Sorahan, Ryanair’s finance chief, who was in Washington to sign the landmark deal with Boeing, said that the deal was a clear sign of what the future held for commercial aviation.
The 51-year-old said: “They [hydrogen or electric powered planes] may be the future. But I’m not sure they will get there in my lifetime,” he said, before likening hydrogen jets to space rockets that carry a handful of passengers with huge tanks of fuel.
Unlike sustainable aviation fuel, made from used cooking oils and other waste, hydrogen was not a “drop-in solution” and would require “massive investment in the infrastructure”, he added.
“So I’m afraid it ain’t going to get there,” Mr Sorahan said. “Batteries don’t have the capacity at this stage to get the range that is needed.”
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Scots favour North Sea drilling over importing oil and gas
A large majority of people in Scotland oppose the SNP government’s stand against new oil and gas exploration in the North Sea and believe the industry must continue to meet the country’s energy demands, a poll suggests.
The government’s draft energy strategy proposes a “presumption against” new developments despite licensing being reserved to Westminster.
Consultation on the plan has ended but the poll suggests 75 per cent of people believe the UK should meet its demand for oil and gas from domestic production rather than importing it from overseas.
The research by Survation, for True North, an advisory firm, suggests voters are against “pulling the rug” from under the sector and it suggests that 61 per cent of the population think energy companies operating in UK waters provide a boost to the country’s economy.
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Glaring electric car problem exposed after man’s tyre goes flat
An Australian driver has revealed a glaring problem with electric vehicles after finding himself stranded on the side of the road when one of his tyres went flat.
Eddy May was driving home in his electric Mercedes-Benz EQC-400 on Sunday just before midday when his rear left wheel deflated, leaving him and his wife stranded on the side of the road in Adelaide.
Making use of an in-car customer service offered in the luxury model, he pressed a button and spent five minutes on the phone with Mercedes about the tyre.
“I’ve spoken to them, they’re sending a tow truck,” Mr May told his followers in a clip shared to TikTok.
“Quick five minutes on the phone, a $200 cab charge voucher to get home, [and the] car’s going to get towed to Mercedes and the car’s going to be fixed tomorrow apparently,” he said.
About 35 minutes later, the $128,000 vehicle was loaded onto a tow truck and the couple’s taxi arrived.
By just after 12pm, they were on their way home. “Pretty good. Well done Mercedes,” Mr May said.
But his video praising Mercedes for their service raised questions over why a spare tyre wasn’t kept inside the car as it would be for petrol cars.
“There’s no spare in this f**king car because all the room is taken up with batteries and so forth,” Mr May said.
Most electric vehicles don’t come with spare tyres given the extra space and weight they require.
“I would be severely unimpressed with needing a tow truck, taxi ride, loan car and what 1-2 days without my car over a flat tyre,” one comment on the video read. “I would much prefer the 10 minutes to change the tyre,” another wrote.
“Great service, interesting way of saving the planet and reducing carbon emissions. Taxi ride and tow truck compared with carrying a spare tyre,” a third said.
Mr May argued the vehicle still worked out to be friendlier on the environment overall, even though it used a lot of resources when a tyre blew out.
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10 May, 2023
Net Zero Grid Batteries Alone Would Bankrupt America
Senate Budget Committee Chairman Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) cites “the climate crisis” at almost every opportunity.
President Biden calls it a greater threat than nuclear war.
They and their allies champion “carbon-free” electricity generation by 2035 and nearly fossil-fuel-free energy by 2050. [emphasis, links added]
Achieving “net zero” carbon dioxide emissions will be painless, they assure us. Costs will be so low you’ll need a magnifying glass to see them.
Governments merely have to enact mandates, provide subsidies, and the transformation to “clean” energy will just happen. Almost like in a fairy tale.
Here in the real world, however, we would need literally millions of weather-dependent wind turbines, billions of equally unreliable solar panels, millions of half-ton battery modules for vehicles, billions more modules to back up intermittent electricity generation, millions of transformers, and tens of thousands of miles of new transmission lines.
All these technologies must be manufactured from metals, minerals, and petroleum extracted from the Earth, via mining on scales unprecedented in human history.
The dollar costs alone — just for a U.S. transformation — are almost incomprehensible.
Science and policy analyst David Wojick calculated that just the batteries needed to back up wind and solar electricity generation in a “net zero” USA would cost $23 trillion — America’s entire 2021 gross domestic product (GDP) — and probably many times that.
Energy and technology consultant Thomas Tanton found that battery backup to replace current U.S. fossil fuel electricity — and convert vehicles, furnaces, water heaters, and stoves to electricity — would cost at least $29 trillion in initial outlays.
Trillions more would be needed to cover financing, repairs, maintenance, replacements, burying broken and worn-out non-recyclable equipment, and building systems strong enough to survive hurricanes.
Professional engineer Ken Gregory determined that grid-backup battery costs could reach $290 trillion (12.6 times the USA’s 2021 GDP), based on actual 2019 and 2020 hourly intermittent electricity-generation data, rather than annual average data utilized in the other studies.
None of these estimates includes the costs of turbines, panels, transmission lines, or transformers.
Energy analyst Francis Menton estimated that New York’s plan to procure 24,000 megawatt-hours of battery storage would provide only 0.2% of what the state would actually need as backup.
But even that would require 300,000 Tesla Long Range 80-kilowatt-hour battery modules — before New York mandates electric automobiles and home heating and cooking systems.
Each of those modules weighs over 1,000 pounds and holds 6,000 individual lithium-ion cells.
Each one contains 25 pounds of lithium, 60 pounds of nickel, 44 pounds of manganese, 30 pounds of cobalt, 200 pounds of copper, and over 550 pounds of aluminum, steel, graphite, plastics, and other materials, energy analyst Ron Stein reports.
To manufacture each module, we must mine 30,000 pounds of cobalt ore (much of it with child labor in the Congo), 5,000 pounds of nickel ore, and 25,000 pounds of copper ore, plus inject and extract 25,000 pounds of brine to get the lithium.
Backing up New York’s peak summertime electricity needs for just 45 minutes (those 300,000 battery modules) would require 3,750 tons of lithium, 9,000 tons of nickel, 6,600 tons of manganese, 4,500 tons of cobalt, 30,000 tons of copper, and 82,500 tons of other materials.
Together, we’d need to mine more than seventy-five million tons of ores for those New York grid-backup batteries — after removing at least as much overlying rock to get to the ore bodies.
Backing up California’s currently planned wind and solar electricity generation would require nearly 310,000,000 Long-Range modules.
Imagine the batteries, materials, and ores that we would need for the entire USA — or the world!
Processing those ores into finished metals requires acids and other chemical processes, and results in extensive toxic wastes that cause horrific air and water pollution if not handled properly.
This is absolutely not clean, green, affordable, ecological, or sustainable.
The bottom line: “Net zero” is aptly named — if what is meant is the sum total of our nation’s bank account and natural resources after it’s implemented.
https://climatechangedispatch.com/net-zero-grid-batteries-alone-would-bankrupt-america/
**************************************************Biden's New 'Green' Power Plant Rule Is Probably Illegal
Despite taking a major loss at the Supreme Court of the United States last year in West Virginia v. EPA, President Biden and his administration are set to announce another regulatory policy affecting power plants later this week that will drive energy costs even higher and is probably illegal, too.
Politico called the forthcoming EPA policy "aggressive" for "ushering in the most stringent regulations on fossil fuel plants in the nation’s history." After reportedly making the rule even more restrictive over the past several months, it looks like the final version will "require power companies to capture most of their carbon emissions rather than letting it enter the atmosphere," according to Politico. Currently, however, "[n]o commercial power plants in the United States use carbon-capturing technology." So, as Politico noted, Biden is again throwing caution to the wind and "testing the limits of what the court will tolerate" by enacting another extreme policy.
So, Biden is going to try forcing the change — the Constitution and American consumers be damned — and conservatives are already hitting the White House for its latest attempt to force its radical supposedly "green" energy policies that run afoul of the law and make already high costs even more untenable for Americans.
Steve Milloy, who served on the Trump-Pence EPA transition team, said that, "like his proposal to essentially ban gas-powered cars by setting stringent emissions standards, Biden’s proposal to set stringent emissions standards so as to ban fossil fuel plants without carbon capture is illegal and has no chance of withstanding legal scrutiny in light of last year’s SCOTUS decision in West Virginia v. EPA." Milloy warned that "it may take years for SCOTUS to rule on this controversy and, in the meantime, much damage will be done to the fossil fuel plants that our electricity grid depend on."
"Biden’s EPA proposed power plant rule ignores the fact that U.S. air quality is better than ever, and worldwide coal use is growing," noted Frank Lasee, the president of Truth in Energy and Climate. "Communist China uses more than half of the 8 billion tons of coal used annually," Lasee reminded, adding "China and 14 other nations are growing their coal usage."
That reality, Lasee explained, means "closing our coal and natural gas plants will not change the weather or the climate" and instead "will needlessly cause our electricity prices to go up even more. By forcing reliable electricity plants to close, it will lead to more blackouts caused by shortages and heavier reliance on taxpayer subsidized, unreliable, part-time wind and solar," he said.
Tom Harris, the executive director of the International Climate Science Coalition, pointed out that, "contrary to the assertions of activists, politicians and most mainstream media, we are close to the lowest levels of CO2 in Earth’s history." What's more, Harris noted that "the Climate Change Reconsidered series of reports of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change summarized thousands of studies from peer-reviewed scientific journals that either debunk or cast serious doubt on the hypothesis that emissions of CO2 from human activities will cause catastrophic climate change."
"The Biden administration's proposed rule will cause an additional spike in energy costs to American households," said Heartland Institute President James Taylor. "Apparently, $4-per-gallon gasoline is simply not enough to satisfy this president's blood lust for higher inflation and less available American energy."
So, exactly how bad will the EPA's new emissions policy be? We'll have to wait for the official announcement to find out. But if the Biden administration's repeated losses at the Supreme Court have shown Americans anything, it's that the president and his cabinet are unconcerned with legal guardrails. And, if Biden's energy policy so far as displayed anything, it's that Biden — or those handling him — will stop at nothing to force the so-called "transition" to more expensive and less reliable "green" energy.
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Unicorn Dreams: Biden Clean Energy Push Expensive, Environmentally-Destructive
The Biden administration is adamant about ridding our nation of fossil fuels. It has a goal of attaining “a 100% clean electricity grid by 2035 and net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.” Dare oppose these goals and you’re guilty of wanting to “perpetuate the climate crisis.” You’ll even be accused of harboring “antiquated views.”
Despite the frequent bullying and accompanying gaslighting for pointing out net-zero’s deficiencies, decarbonization is merely a unicorn dream devoid of reality. How can one be environmentally virtuous yet support paradoxical measures that require destroying the environment in order to save it? This is not remotely conservationist.
Of late, aggressive onshore and offshore wind pushes have been scrutinized– and for good reason. The White House wants to harness 30 gigawatts of offshore wind energy by 2030, describing it as “bold” and claiming it’ll be safer than offshore oil and gas. They also are bullish on onshore wind despite communities across the U.S. rejecting them.
The industrialization of our oceans will have ruinous environmental effects and not reduce energy bills. Wind is not reliable, as it doesn’t boast a 24/7 baseload. These structures aren’t cost-effective and boast a short shelf life. The WSJ recently reported, “GCube, a renewable-energy insurer owned by Japan’s Tokio Marine HCC, sees a downside. It found that component failures in turbines with 8-megawatt capacity or greater occur on average after just over a year. That compares with over five years for turbines of 4-to-8 megawatts.” The alternative energy source also contributes to light pollution.
The blades undoubtedly kill countless birds–including eagles. The Department of Energy even concedes, “Turbines produce noise and alter visual aesthetics. Wind farms have different impacts on the environment compared to conventional power plants, but similar concerns exist over both the noise produced by the turbine blades and the visual impacts on the landscape.”
Not to mention, these structures pose immense threats to endangered North Atlantic right whales. Repeated denials, however, only result from the Biden administration–namely NOAA Fisheries and the Marine Mammal Commission (MMC). MMC, however, said there are Level A and B harassment concerns that emanate from ocean industrialization, in such “devices used by wind energy developers for geophysical and site characterization surveys can generate sound that may affect a marine mammal’s behavior (e.g., habitat use) and may lead to more serious consequences (e.g., stranding).”
And even the Pentagon warned proposed construction of wind turbines in the Mid-Atlantic poses significant national security risks. But mounting evidence against wind is unconvincing to Biden and company. Very troubling.
What about solar? Like wind energy, solar energy is not a viable substitute for coal, oil, and gas. Additionally, it boasts many trade offs and negative impacts on the landscape. Not only is it an intermittent energy source, it takes destroying productive agricultural lands - by means of deforestation - to prop up these structures.
Real Clear Investigation reports, “Although done in the name of fighting global warming, some amount of deforestation will be the inevitable result of clearing land for ground-mounted solar panels. Environmental groups say they hope to steer solar farms to "disturbed" or degraded land and rooftops, but those options are often expensive and impractical.”
The American Farmland Trust claims 3,900 square miles nationwide are required to accommodate these lofty solar goals–meaning 1.5% to 6% of Eastern states will lose undeveloped productive farmland to solar projects.
Other potential ecological impacts include habitat destruction, altering drainage and rainfall patterns, and killing species–endangered or not. More problematic: solar panels - especially those made in China - emit more carbon emissions than nuclear.
Let’s not forget the problematic nature of forced electric vehicle pushes from Washington. Last month, the White House announced it wants 50 percent of new cars sold to be electric by 2030 and for 66 percent of new cars sold to be electric by 2032.
EVs, however, aren’t viable without subsidies and only benefit already affluent customers. More troubling for these EV endorsers: there’s little appetite among the general public to “go electric” either.
An April 2023 AP-NORC poll found 59 percent of Americans are unlikely to purchase EVs, even with financial incentives. The Energy Information Agency (EIA) also poured cold water on EVs, stating, “We project that the total electric vehicle share?including BEVs and PHEVs?of on-road LDV stock grows from less than 1% in 2021 to 9% in 2050...”
With inflationary pressures still weighing Americans down, investment in so-called clean energy projects are taking a backseat—despite promises from the “Inflation Reduction Act.” Why? These investments are proving risky and will lead to a poor return on investment–a byproduct of the Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) movement.
This past week, American Electric Power announced plans to sell off “$1.5 billion sale of its 1,360-MW unregulated renewables portfolio to IRG Acquisition” by July. Yikes. That certainly casts doubt of our supposed clean energy future.
The evidence is clear: The U.S. can’t and shouldn't abandon coal, oil, and gas anytime soon–unless Americans want to forgo their first-world living standards.
Nuclear and geothermal are the only viable alternative supplements - or complements - that won’t destabilize our electric grid.
Enough of the unicorn dreams; let’s stick with reliable, cheap energy sources.
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Western Australia’s government dreams an impossible climate dream
Western Australia’s biggest electricity system will need to roughly triple in size over the next 20 years, as the state seeks to wean itself off fossil fuels and go green.
In a landmark report released today, the WA government outlined the massive scale of building that would be required to replace coal-fired power stations and meet surging demand from customers — particularly industry — electrifying their operations.
WA Energy Minister Bill Johnston revealed an extra 4,000km of new high-voltage transmission lines would need to be built by 2042 under the government’s central plans.
Within the same time frame, Mr Johnston said peak demand for electricity from the state’s main grid — the South West Interconnected System (SWIS) — would treble to about 13,000 megawatts.
The minister also revealed the amount of generation capacity in the system would need to jump by a factor of 10 to account for rocketing demand and the intermittent nature of wind and solar power.
Despite the monumental scale of the flagged expansion, Mr Johnston said just $126 million would be initially set aside to help “kickstart early network planning”.
Mr Johnston said the report, titled the SWIS Demand Assessment, would be the blueprint to guide the overhaul of WA’s biggest grid, which covers Perth and much of the state’s southern half.
“The SWIS Demand Assessment provides a vision of what the future grid might look like as industry seeks to decarbonise,” Mr Johnston said.
“An expanded grid is the most cost-efficient way of supporting decarbonisation as it can reach further for wind and solar.
“The SWIS cannot rely on other electricity systems to support it, so having a strong transmission backbone is critical for reliable supply.”
Cost of plans unclear
Under the plans outlined by Mr Johnston, several new high-voltage transmission lines would need to be built to connect renewable energy zones, particularly in windy and sunny areas north of current SWIS footprint.
However, Mr Johnston said how much the upgrades would cost and how they would be paid for — and by whom — were still open questions.
The minister acknowledged that big industrial users, such as mineral processors and manufacturers, would ideally help pay for the work.
He noted it was these customers who would drive much of the extra demand on the grid by using electricity — rather than fossil fuels such as gas — to power their operations.
According to Mr Johnston, it would be unfair to spread the costs of the required upgrades on to household and business customers who contributed much less to the increase in demand.
While anticipating a massive increase in the amount of renewable energy, Mr Johnston argued gas would continue to play a key role in keeping the system stable.
But he insisted this would not derail efforts to decarbonise the WA economy, noting electrification of gas-heavy industrial processes would have a much bigger effect.
'Transition plan does not work': Opposition
Speaking after the announcement, Shadow Energy spokesman Steve Thomas said today's report was embarrassing for the government.
"This document demonstrates that their transition plan does not work," he said.
"It's not costed, it's not funded, and it can't deliver the transition that government is talking about, and this document actually reinforces that."
Dr Thomas said he expected the total cost of the state's transition away from coal to be closer to $15 billion – with the 4,000 kilometres of new transmission infrastructure accounting for about $8 billion of that.
"You'd think with the biggest surpluses, the greatest boom in our history, if you were going to transition the electricity system you might have the money to do it, but the government has not invested anything like the amount of money necessary," he said.
"They've got the time frame wrong, they've got the infrastructure requirements wrong, they've got the budget wrong, there's not much they've actually got right on the transition to renewable energy and at this stage it will not work."
The ability to cope with the loss of generation that closing coal by 2029 would have was another significant issue, according to Dr Thomas, as well as finding the people and resources to drive the transition in a globally-competitive market.
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9 May, 2023
The Pentagon Tilts at Windmills
We know climate change tops the White House agenda, but it’s still depressing to see it supersede even national defense. Witness how the Department of the Interior rolled over Pentagon warnings that offshore wind installations in the mid-Atlantic could interfere with military training.
President Biden has set a goal of generating 30 gigawatts of offshore wind power by 2030. Waters off the coasts of North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland and Delaware are prime real estate for wind farms because they are relatively shallow. But they are also training grounds for the Navy and Air Force, including North Carolina’s Dare County bombing range.
Offshore wind turbines three times the height of the Statue of Liberty could interfere with training and radar. As the Energy Department explains, “if not mitigated, such wind development can cause potential interference for radar systems involved in air traffic control, weather forecasting, homeland security, and national defense missions.”
National defense appears to have been a fifth or sixth thought for Interior, which is in charge of offshore wind leases in federal waters. Interior last November identified six potential leasing areas after consulting with the fishing industries, environmental groups, shippers, the wind lobby and states in the region.
Interior said it considered input from these “stakeholders” as well as state and local renewable energy mandates and “information on domestic and global offshore wind market and technological trends.” Notice who was missing: the Pentagon. Four of the six potential lease areas were flagged by the Defense Department as “highly problematic” on a map dated last Oct. 6 that was published by Bloomberg News.
The Interior lease proposal from November says that it doesn’t “reflect a final assessment of the Department of Defense (DOD) regarding compatibility of the proposed [wind energy areas] with DOD needs.” But why didn’t Interior consider the Pentagon’s concerns before issuing its proposal?
It’s possible the military could modify exercises and operations to accommodate wind farms, but this shouldn’t be necessary. Power generated by offshore wind isn’t needed to keep U.S. lights on. The only purpose the installations would serve is to help Mr. Biden, states and utilities meet their green energy goals.
Offshore wind is three times more expensive than onshore wind or gas power and could make the electric grid less reliable. But the Biden Administration’s climate agenda won’t surrender to energy reality or national defense.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-pentagon-tilts-at-windmills-7acd2c73
**************************************************Green Energy Is Stuck at a Financial Red Light
After years of uncertainty, last year’s Inflation Reduction Act finally gave America’s renewable-energy industry a long, green signal. Now the economy is blocking the road.
The wind and solar industries have always suffered from the short-term nature of subsidies, with federal tax credits often extended in nail-biting one-year increments. Last year’s climate bill changed that, giving the industry subsidies that last at least a decade. But just as policy winds blow in their favor, two critical growth drivers—interest rates and equipment costs—are moving in the wrong direction.
Wind and solar projects are especially sensitive to rates because debt can comprise as much as 85% to 90% of capital expenditures. Renewable developers have known only low rates for most of their history. Nearly all U.S. utility-scale solar facilities and 85% of onshore wind farms were installed since 2009, during which period the target federal-funds rate was close to 0% in eight out of 13 years. Not any more: After the most recent hike, rates are the highest since 2007.
Renewable energy projects tend to be financed with floating-rate loans that rise and fall with the benchmark interest rate. Thankfully, most of those projects are well-shielded from rate risk because lenders require them to hedge at least 75% of their loans through swaps, according to Elizabeth Waters, managing director of project finance at MUFG. Most ended up hedging 90-95% to lock in low rates, she noted. But those swaps won’t help new projects. Some new solar and wind projects facing higher borrowing costs than when they were planned might not make it off the drawing board.
Borrowing isn’t the only thing that costs more. Following years of price declines thanks to technology and economies of scale, equipment is getting more expensive too. Trade policies aimed at Chinese manufacturers have caused delays and shortages for the solar industry, which relies heavily on the country for its components. German utility RWE, an active developer in the U.S., said in its annual report released last week that imports of solar modules from Asia are now subject to “stringent checks” and said it could fall behind on its expansion plans if the U.S. continues to “impede the procurement of solar panels.”
After falling to a record low in 2020, the average price of a solar photovoltaic system rose in 2021 and then again in 2022, according to data from the Solar Energy Industries Association and Wood Mackenzie. Meanwhile, the average cost to build an onshore wind farm in the U.S. rose in 2020 and 2021 before leveling off last year, according to data from BloombergNEF. Supply-chain issues and interconnection delays already started slowing the clean power industry last year: In 2022 it installed 25.1 Gigawatts of total capacity, a 16% decline from a year earlier, according to the American Clean Power Association, which tracks solar, wind and energy storage. While that’s still enough to meet roughly half of Texas’ electricity demand, it was nonetheless below expectations–though part of the drop was driven by an preplanned phase-down for tax credits commonly used by the wind industry before the Inflation Reduction Act was passed.
Ultimately, solar and wind’s ability to absorb cost and interest-rate hikes depends on how willing utilities and corporations are to pay higher prices. Many onshore wind and solar projects have been able to renegotiate pricing on their power purchase agreements because demand is robust, according to industry executives. But cracks are showing for offshore wind, which is more exposed to rising costs and rates because it takes longer to develop. BloombergNEF estimates that the weighted average cost of capital for U.S. offshore wind projects rose to 5.25% in 2022 from 4.41% in 2020.
Developer Avangrid Renewables, for example, is trying to terminate its power purchase agreement with utilities in Massachusetts for a 1.2 Gigawatt offshore wind project after an unsuccessful attempt at renegotiating its fixed-price contract. If built, Commonwealth Wind would generate enough energy to power 700,000 homes. The company cited “historic price increases for global commodities, sharp and sudden increases in interest rates, prolonged supply chain constraints, and persistent inflation” since the project secured a contract in late 2021. Avangrid plans to bid the same project into the state’s next competitive offshore wind procurement, a spokesman said over email. Danish power company Orsted said in its annual report released February that it incurred an impairment of 2.5 billion Danish kroner, the equivalent of $369 million, on its 50% interest in the Sunrise Wind project off the coast of New York, noting that the project cost has increased substantially since its bid in 2019.
As the name implies, the Inflation Reduction Act is supposed to relieve some of these cost pressures. But it won’t feel like a bonanza without clarity on how the rules apply. Expanding the eligibility of tax credits to more technologies, for example, has spread the limited pool of tax equity investors—that is, those with both the tax burden and the know-how to use renewable tax credits—more thinly across more projects. Ironically, that has shrunk the pool of tax equity available to solar and wind in the near term. The bill tries to address this by making such tax credits transferable, but industry executives said that pool of capital will remain constrained until there is more guidance.
There are two other more recent developments worth watching: One is the plummeting cost of natural gas which, if prolonged, could impact demand for solar and wind on the margins. The U.S. benchmark Henry Hub has fallen 49% year to date. Secondly, banks’ recent turmoil could shrink their ability to lend. Ted Brandt, chief executive of clean-energy focused investment bank Marathon Capital, notes that the industry has always had cheap debt, cheap equity and “massive liquidity chasing it.” How the industry will respond to expensive capital is still an open question, he said.
It isn’t enough for policy winds to blow in the right direction for a renewable energy boom–economic headwinds need to abate too.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/green-energy-financing-interest-rates-3f0e3dc3
********************************************Wind-power auction at Morro Bay shows how money matters in climate projects
The auction awarded rights to build vast flotillas of wind turbines 20 miles off the coasts of San Luis Obispo and Humboldt counties. This was supposed to be a clarifying moment in California’s commitment to wind energy. The Golden State, for all its supposed climate leadership, has lagged the East Coast in developing offshore wind power.
This is partly because of all the local opposition here — from fishing industries, Indigenous communities, and local stakeholders — to changes anywhere near our beloved shoreline.
In response, the rules of the federal government’s lease auction considered not just the amount companies bid, but whether bidders engaged with local communities. Under the formula, companies who reached benefits agreements with a community could earn credits, giving them an edge in the auction. One bidding company did exactly that. But was it worth the effort?
This head-scratching story is centered on Morro Bay. When offshore wind development became a public issue there nearly a decade ago, citizens expressed concerns about the impacts of turbines on birds, fisheries, or, even at a distance of 20 miles from land, the natural beauty of the coast.
But in 2015, Castle Wind LLC — a joint venture between Washington state-based Trident Winds and the subsidiary of a Germany utility — started a dialogue with residents and stakeholders. Castle Wind, following local leaders’ advice, talked first with fishermen, whose struggles are well-known. After two-plus years of discussions, Castle Wind and two fishermen’s associations forged a novel mutual benefits agreement.
The 2018 agreement offered three main benefits for fishermen: a new fund for infrastructure improvements for the commercial fishing industry, new training and employment opportunities, and a process for the local fishers to help shape wind project design.
With the fishermen on board, the Morro Bay City Council subsequently approved its own community benefits agreement with Castle Wind. The company agreed to hire local residents, create internships and training programs at local schools and universities, establish a maintenance and monitoring facility in the Morro Bay harbor, and promote local businesses.
Both agreements proved popular. Indeed, last year, Castle Wind and the fishermen deepened their partnership by creating a “mutual benefits corporation” as a legal vehicle for carrying out future joint projects. Alla Weinstein, the Castle Wind CEO who conducted the conversations, said last fall in a statement announcing the corporation: “Our approach has been to acknowledge, as early as possible, that impacts may occur…Castle Wind has created a platform for the developers to mitigate anticipated impacts of offshore wind to the commercial fishing industry without causing stakeholder fatigue.”
But when the auction was held in December, the benefits agreements and the corporation didn’t make any difference. Castle Wind, even with credits, did not win a single lease. Instead, the leases in areas off San Luis Obispo County went to three higher bidders — each of whom bid over $100 million, among them Equinor, a Norwegian state-owned oil company. None had reached agreements with Morro Bay locals, as Castle Wind had.
The auction has raised many questions about the future of climate and community. Federal officials, Castle Wind, and other bidders have been tight-lipped about the result.
Locally, city officials and fishermen’s groups have expressed disappointment, and noted pointedly that the winning bidders had not forged agreements and did not have their support. In Morro Bay, there is still considerable hope that winning bidders will approach the fishermen, the city, and others to execute agreements and make partnerships like those forged with Castle Wind.
That hope is based on the widespread view that Castle Wind’s agreements were thoughtful and well-drafted, and stood to benefit everyone — from the company, which wanted the lease, to the city and its fishermen, who sought to create new job and development opportunities for the city.
That hope also reflects political reality. California needs clean energy, but constructing wind farms will take years — and is unlikely to succeed if local communities and their state and federal representatives stand in the way.
https://www.fresnobee.com/opinion/op-ed/article274806076.html
***********************************************8 May, 2023
Brits would be told to eat bugs under bonkers green plans by civil servants
A leaked Whitehall draft of the Carbon Budget proposed the “development of more sustainable protein sources for human diets”. Along with promoting a vegan diet, it said that “insects may offer environmental benefits”.
Both references were axed from the final document published last month. It only says more research is needed on “alternative protein”.
Government insiders were especially angry at moves to copy the EU with plans for a creepy-crawly diet. Earlier this year, Brussels approved crickets and mealworms to be sold as “novel foods” for humans.
Scientists claim insects have a smaller carbon footprint as they require fewer resources to be farmed.
But Countryside Alliance chief Tim Bonner said: “Civil servants need to get real about what the public are prepared to swallow and I can’t see there being very much of an appetite for mealworm burgers.
“We already have a vastly sustainable red meat sector in this country that has incredibly high animal welfare standards.”
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/22219500/brits-eat-bugs-bonkers-green-plans-civil-servants/
************************************************The climate scaremongers: How the ‘world disaster’ figures lie
According to AP last year: ‘A disaster-weary globe will be hit harder in the coming years by even more catastrophes colliding in an interconnected world, a United Nations report issued Monday says. If current trends continue the world will go from around 400 disasters per year in 2015 to an onslaught of about 560 catastrophes a year by 2030, the scientific report by the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction said. By comparison from 1970 to 2000, the world suffered just 90 to 100 medium to large scale disasters a year, the report said.
‘The number of extreme heat waves in 2030 will be three times what it was in 2001 and there will be 30 per cent more droughts, the report predicted. It’s not just natural disasters amplified by climate change, it’s Covid-19, economic meltdowns and food shortages. Climate change has a huge footprint in the number of disasters, report authors said.’
Last week it was the turn of the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) to bang the climate change drum. Their State of the Global Climate 2022 report commented: ‘From mountain peaks to ocean depths, climate change continued its advance in 2022 . . . Droughts, floods and heatwaves affected communities on every continent and cost many billions of dollars. While greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise and the climate continues to change, populations worldwide continue to be gravely impacted by extreme weather and climate events.’
The WMO is, of course, a UN body, so unsurprisingly this report has little to do with science and everything to do with politics.
But have natural disasters become so much more common in recent years? A closer look at that graph above reveals that the number of disasters has actually been declining since 2000, a fact which should immediately cast doubt on the ‘global warming is making everything worse’ meme.
The real reason for the ‘increase’ is that many natural disasters in years past were never officially logged in the UN database, called EM-DAT, which is compiled by CRED, the Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters. The database was not created until 1998, and CRED relied on informal reports for disasters prior to that year.
CRED has acknowledged that many events were missed by them in the past. In their 2006 report, they warned that earlier data was incomplete and should not be used for comparing long-term trends. In particular, over the past 30 years development in telecommunications, media and increased international cooperation has played a critical role in the number of disasters reported. In addition, increases in humanitarian funds have encouraged reporting of more disasters.
In fact the unreliability of the database in earlier years is much worse than we thought. Take a look, for example, at the official data for the number of deaths from floods in the UK:
Now look again, and see if you can spot what is missing. Yes, the North Sea floods in 1953, recognised as one of the worst natural disasters ever to hit Britain, and which left 307 dead on the east coast alone. The death toll in 1952, by the way, reflects the Lynmouth disaster, which killed 34.
How any supposedly reputable database can omit an event like the 1953 flood and still claim to be credible is beyond me. Other bad flooding events have also been missed, such as those in Somerset in 1968 which killed 15 people.
Flooding events in the UK have been thoroughly recorded as far back as the 19thC and beyond. If CRED cannot even get accurate data for the UK, what chance is there of compiling full and accurate data for the rest of the world?
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Energy security first: Norway set to accelerate Arctic oil and gas drilling
Companies operating in the Norwegian Continental Shelf are planning for more drilling in the Arctic areas in the Barents Sea, encouraged by Norway’s government which wants more oil and gas discoveries to boost energy security and help European partners with energy supply.
At a conference on the Barents Sea in Hammerfest last week, Norway’s Petroleum and Energy Minister Terje Aasland called on oil and gas companies to fulfill their “social responsibility” and “leave no stone unturned” to find more natural gas resources in the Barents Sea, the area estimated to hold most of Norway’s undiscovered oil and gas resources.
“The petroleum adventure in the north has only just started,” Aasland said, adding that the government would help the Barents Sea industry as Norway must develop, not liquidate, its petroleum industry.
Apart from being in a harsher environment so far north, the Barents Sea poses another roadblock to developing oil and gas resources—the north lacks the infrastructure in the more developed areas on the shelf that would make tie-ups and resource development easier.
Still, operators are not giving up.
“Even if we want to maintain production, we have to explore more, we have to find more,” Torger Rod, CEO of Barents-focused energy producer Var Energi, told Bloomberg in an interview.
In March, Var Energi confirmed an oil discovery in the Countach well in a production license northwest of Hammerfest near Goliat, one of two operational oil and gas fields in the Barents Sea.
Var Energi will consider potential commercial development options and tie-in of the discovery to Goliat FPSO.
“This discovery is yet another in a series of successful exploration wells in the Barents Sea in recent years, including Lupa – the largest discovery on the Norwegian shelf in 2022. At the same time, the discovery confirms our exploration strategy and our position in the area,” said Rune Oldervoll, EVP Exploration and Production in Var Energi.
Equinor, which plans to start production from the Johan Castberg field in the Barents Sea at the end of 2024, is also betting on obtaining more licenses in the Arctic.
Early this year, the Norwegian Ministry of Petroleum and Energy proposed including additional areas in the Norwegian Sea and the Barents Sea in the next licensing round for Awards in Predefined Areas (ARA) expected to be awarded in early 2024.
“The North has always been important for us,” Grete Birgitte Haaland, senior vice president for exploration and production north at Equinor, told Bloomberg.
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Ford is losing roughly $60,000 for every electric vehicle sold
Ford lost tens of thousands of dollars per electric vehicle sold in the first quarter of 2023, as the division remained on track for roughly $3 billion in yearly losses, according to the company’s Tuesday evening earnings report.
Ford’s electric vehicle division — which was separated from its traditional gas and professional-grade vehicle departments in a late March reorganization — lost $722 million in the first three months of 2023, while selling just 12,000 units, according to the company’s first quarter earnings report. This amounts to a roughly $60,167 loss for each vehicle sold, according to calculations made by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
“Because the auto industry is very capital intensive and has high fixed costs that need to be spread out over thousands of units, it is not uncommon to have steep losses initially which are followed by profits,” Heritage Foundation economist E.J. Antoni told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “Imagine, for instance, needing to retool a factory and rebuild an assembly line to build different vehicles. That is much more expensive than the revenue from the first few vehicles that are produced.”
Despite this, however, Antoni characterized the decision to go “all-in” on electric vehicles as a “tremendous risk” that required ongoing support from government subsidies. Private analysts expect that the total cost of the green manufacturing subsidies offered by President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act will top $1 trillion, with subsidies for the electric vehicle battery packs alone topping $130 billion.
https://dailycaller.com/2023/05/03/ford-losing-tens-of-thousands-per-ev/
***************************************7 May, 2023
Sodium technology could create batteries from seawater
And how do you get the sodium out of seawater? Via a HUGE expenditure of energy. So it will make energy sourcing worse. It USES energy in order to store it
New research has brought sodium battery technology to the point where it’s starting to replace lithium, the metal that powers our laptops, phones, electric cars and energy grids. That includes a battery created with molten salt, which can be derived from seawater, at the University of Sydney.
Dr Shenlong Zhao’s low-cost sodium-sulfur battery has four times the capacity of lithium, which he described as a significant breakthrough for renewable energy storage.
“When the sun isn’t shining and the breeze isn’t blowing, we need high-quality storage solutions that don’t cost the Earth and are easily accessible on a local or regional level,” Zhao said.
“Storage solutions that are manufactured using plentiful resources like sodium – which can be processed from seawater – also have the potential to guarantee greater energy security more broadly and allow more countries to join the shift towards decarbonisation.”
Lithium has received the lion’s share of research and industry interest over the past few decades because it’s extremely lightweight and energy-dense, general manager of Deakin University’s Battery Research and Innovation Hub, Dr Timothy Khoo, said.
“Lithium itself as an element is smaller and lighter than sodium. It’s number three on the periodic table right down the bottom. Sodium’s number 11, so it’s a big ion and it’s heavier.”
But research priorities are shifting from designing the most energy efficient, powerful batteries possible to creating cells that can be made from sustainable and cheap materials.
That’s where sodium comes in. It’s chemically similar to lithium, but it’s about 1 to 3 per cent the price and is one of the earth’s most abundant elements (a little pile can be found on most dining tables).
Lithium-ion batteries also rely on cobalt, a metal mined mostly in Africa in operations plagued by human rights violations, whereas sodium batteries can operate without cobalt, said University of Wollongong energy storage specialist Dr Jon Knott.
“There are some significant concerns around the sourcing of cobalt. Sodium-ion batteries not needing to use cobalt could actually be a good benefit beyond a technical benefit.”
Australia’s first large-scale sodium-sulfur battery was installed last week at a mine southeast of Kalgoorlie by researchers testing how the technology could be used in Australian power infrastructure.
“They can function in really harsh climates,” National Battery Testing Centre QUT project lead, Dr Joshua Watts, said. “The battery itself runs hot, so it doesn’t need any air conditioning, so it’s perfect for the desert.”
Watts will be monitoring the battery’s functionality and potential to fully power remote communities and mine sites, and support the integration of wind and solar energy into electricity grid.
In China, which is driving the boom in sodium battery technology, manufacturers CATL and BYD will produce sodium-ion batteries to power electric cars for the first time this year.
But sodium battery technology is best suited to large-scale applications such as power grids and storing renewable energy, and both Khoo and Knott said it’s unlikely to supersede lithium’s use in smaller applications such as cars, phones and airpods.
“I don’t see it as something that’s going to replace lithium, in the same way that lithium hasn’t completely replaced lead acid batteries, for example,” Khoo said. “We’ve got both of them running side by side and certain for certain applications. It’ll be the same case with sodium batteries.”
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King Charles III Has a Climate Record to Live Down
This Saturday’s coronation of King Charles III marks a significant moment in Britain’s history. No previous constitutional monarch has expressed his political views so openly. Unlike his mother and grandfather, whose opinions, if they had any, remained unknown to the general public, the king’s record-setting seventy years as heir apparent to the British throne saw him define himself as a deeply committed environmentalist.
In 2000, the BBC invited the then-Prince of Wales to give the last of the 2000 Millennium Reith lectures on sustainable development. Charles spoke of his belief in the “bounds of balance, order and harmony in the natural world which sets limits to our ambitions and define the parameters of sustainable development.” He name-checked the founders of the modern environmental movement—Rachel Carson and Fritz Schumacher, authors, respectively, of Silent Spring and Small is Beautiful. He embraced the precautionary principle, warning that the absence of hard scientific evidence of harmful consequences from genetically modified (GM) crops should not be taken as a green light to exceed nature’s limits.
Instead of looking to science for all the answers, mankind should work with the grain of nature, Charles argued. If a fraction of the investment going into GM technologies was devoted to improving traditional systems of agriculture, “the results would be remarkable,” he declared. He then praised fellow Reith lecturer Vandana Shiva, an environmental campaigner and director of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology in New Delhi, for condemning large-scale commercial farming “so persuasively and so convincingly.”
Unfortunately for the people for Sri Lanka, Shiva also convinced the Sri Lankan government to ban GM crops and chemical fertilizers and switch to organic farming. The results were worse than remarkable; they were disastrous. According to Matt Ridley, within months of Sri Lanka going organic, “the volume of tea exports had halved, cutting foreign exchange earnings. Rice yields plummeted leading to an unprecedented requirement to import rice. With the government unable to service its debt, the currency collapsed.” Soon after, the government collapsed, too. Street protests forced President Gotabaya Rajapaksa to flee to the Maldives in an air force jet.
In a 2013 speech on protecting rainforests, the prince’s rhetoric became distinctly unroyal, accusing those who questioned the need to act as belonging to “the incorporated society of syndicated skeptics and the International Association of Corporate lobbyists.” This would have come as news to his father and sister. Asked in a 2020 interview whether she discussed farming with her brother, Princess Anne replied, “Yes … occasionally, but rather short,” adding “I don’t even go down the climate change route.”
According to the terms laid down by his son, Prince Philip would also be numbered among the syndicated skeptics and corporate lobbyists. In 2018, Philip wrote to Ian Plimer to congratulate him on his book The Climate Change Delusion. Prompted by Ridley’s 2016 Global Warming Policy Foundation lecture on how carbon dioxide emissions were greening the earth, Prince Philip had lunch in the House of Lords with Ridley and Nigel Lawson.
Father and son clashed on wind farms. In 2011, a wind farm developer reported that Prince Philip had told him that wind farms were “useless, completely reliant on subsidies, and an absolute disgrace.” In his movie “Harmony—A new way of looking at the world,” Charles speaks of wind energy “working with nature’s freely-given forms” and the need to “end our dependence on fossil fuels.” In the film’s opening sequence, showing a wind turbine in a meadow, Charles intones, “Time is running out.”
Indeed, time has run out for Charles’s forecasts of climate apocalypse. In March 2009, Charles warned that only 100 months remained to avert “irretrievable climate collapse.” That forecast expired in 2017, with no climate collapse. Subsequent dating of doom was pushed further out and became less precise. In 2015, the 100-month deadline was stretched to 35 years.
A 2021 paper on extreme climate forecasts tabulates 79 predictions of climate-caused catastrophe dating back to the first Earth Day in 1970. Charles has the distinction of being the only individual to be featured three times, with separate predictions of climate apocalypse. As the paper’s co-author David Rode of Carnegie Mellon University comments, alongside Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich, Prince Charles has “warned repeatedly of ‘irretrievable ecosystem collapse’ if actions were not taken, repeated the prediction with a new definitive end date. Their predictions have repeatedly been apocalyptic and highly certain . . . and so far, they’ve also been wrong.”
Here’s hoping that the reign of King Charles will be a happier affair than his failed forecasts of climate doom. Long live the King.
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Will Electric Vehicles Disappoint You? Beware of the range claims on the sticker
No doubt many taxpayers have already developed a healthy skepticism if not distaste for government-subsidized electric vehicles. But consumers may also have reason to beware, based on a recent report from automotive magazine Car and Driver.
Also in the news is one more reminder that it can be a bumpy road to the energy transition envisioned by the White House.
Why, it was just three months ago that a Reuters report from David Shepardson noted: Two senior Biden administration officials got behind the wheel of new electric vehicles (EV) Wednesday at the Washington, D.C. auto show to urge Americans to consider buying a zero-emission model.
Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm and White House climate adviser Ali Zaidi took spins in a Ford F-150 Lightning and a Chevrolet Bolt as they touted revamped $7,500 EV tax credits and new $4,000 second-hand EV credits.
But perhaps all subsidized things must someday come to an end. The Journal’s Mike Colias reports on General Motors today: The Detroit auto maker... said Tuesday it would drop the Chevrolet Bolt from its lineup, killing off its first mainstream electric vehicle as it moves to newer battery technology...
GM’s decision to unplug the Bolt—while expected by analysts—ends a troubled run for the model, which had become a black eye for the company after battery fires and costly recalls dented its early push into electric vehicles.
Fortunately many car shoppers seemed to be aware of the vehicle’s problems long before the federal officials who kept urging them to buy.
Now there seems to be another concern that goes beyond Chevy. Regardless of the manufacturer, taxpayers looking to get some of their money back from the feds by purchasing a subsidized e-car should be careful to restrain their expectations.
Caleb Miller reports for Car and Driver: A new paper published by SAE International uses Car and Driver’s real- world highway test data to show that electric vehicles underperform on... efficiency and range relative to the EPA figures by a much greater margin than internal-combustion vehicles. While the latter typically meet or exceed the EPA-estimated highway fuel economy numbers, EVs tend to fall considerably short of the range number on the window sticker.
The paper, written by Car and Driver’s testing director, Dave VanderWerp, and Gregory Pannone, was presented this week at SAE International’s annual WCX conference. It points to a need for revised testing and labeling standards for EVs moving forward. “Basically we’ve taken a look at how vehicles perform relative to the values on the window sticker, looking at the difference between what the label says and what we actually see in our real-world highway test,” explained VanderWerp.
“We see a big difference in that gap between gas- powered vehicles and the performance of EVs. The real question is: When first-time customers are buying EVs, are they going to be pleasantly surprised or disappointed by the range?”
On Car and Driver’s 75-mph highway test, more than 350 internal- combustion vehicles averaged 4.0 percent better fuel economy than what was stated on their labels. But the average range for an EV was 12.5 percent worse than the price sticker numbers.
The column will go out on a limb and predict that ensuring e-car benefits are not overstated will not be the top priority of the Biden Environmental Protection Agency. Looking at the happy federal officials pictured in the doomed car model at the top of this page—and considering all the lobbying that went into subsidizing it—one can only wonder: Would you buy a schmoozed car from these people?
https://groups.google.com/g/alt.tv.pol-incorrect/c/uRDCCBJ3ZVY
****************************************Green New Deal Appeasement Leads Nowhere
It is frustrating to watch people who should know better, including politicians, state regulators, and even leaders of traditional energy companies, play along with the green energy transition. Any day now, I expect a modern-day Neville Chamberlain to say that in the war on carbon, it is peace for our time.
The rationale offered is that cooperating with the Net Zero agenda will buy some time for traditional energy producers. I understand that there is pressure concerning quarterly financial disclosures, but appeasement will only end one way. The time is coming when your upcoming quarterly financial reports will be your last. Efforts to go along to get along will not be enough.
The sad story of North Dakota’s largest coal-fired power plant, Coal Creek Station, should be an important lesson for anyone involved in carbon-based energy. The prior owner of Coal Creek was Minnesota-based Great River Energy, which has come under growing pressure from the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission to rethink its coal dependency and was looking at its options, including mothballing the dependable plant that was producing reliable and affordable electricity for 1.7 million consumers in Minnesota and Wisconsin.
In 2021, Rainbow Energy, based in North Dakota, agreed to buy the plant. The sale closed in mid-2022. Rainbow Energy’s plan to save Coal Creek Station included a large-scale carbon capture and storage project. That plan should have been music to the ears of Green New Dealers.
Rainbow Energy’s carbon sequestration plan had several significant technical hurdles and it was also going to be expensive. The company’s initial estimate was that pumping the CO2 back underground would take 30 percent of the power produced by Coal Creek, and that estimate will be low if the plan is fully implemented.
The plan got another boost when the (ahem) Inflation Reduction Act was passed by Congress, which included a boost in the 45Q tax credits from $50/ton to $85/ton. The carbon capture and storage plan not only checked the 45Q tax credit boxes, but it made the electricity produced green enough that Great River Energy agreed to buy the electricity (at least the output left over after capturing and storing the CO2) for 10 years. Great River Energy CEO David Saggau said, "Purchasing energy and capacity from Rainbow was not in our original plan, but it will serve as a reliable steppingstone in our power supply transition.”
It looked like a win for coal and a win for appeasement, but there was a catch. There is always a catch.
Earlier this year, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) gave notice to Coal Creek Station, now named Rainbow Energy Center, that it is considering the denial of a permit for its coal ash disposal system. The comment period for this proposal closed on April 15, 2023, and if EPA follows through, the power plant will be shut down for three years.
The impact on the electric grid will be significant. According to reports, Rainbow Energy Center generates nearly half of the electricity in North Dakota and 40 percent of the power exported to other states.
North Dakota governor Doug Burgum said the EPA “is moving the goalposts after the game started.” He is right, but the larger lesson is not getting through to the coal, oil, and natural gas sectors. Appeasing those who want you gone is a fool’s errand.
Rainbow Energy Center is the poster child in the multi-front war on carbon, but the signs are everywhere. In April, EPA announced aggressive plans to crack down on power-plant emissions. For anyone who believes in karma, these rules also target natural gas-powered plants. Early on, the natural gas sector quietly, and not so quietly, applauded the attacks on coal. A short-lived tactic, as it turns out. Also, last month, EPA announced three settlements with natural gas plants for air pollution violations.
Then last week, in an example of the ever-shortening time lapse between conspiracy theory and fact, New York lawmakers and Gov. Kathy Hochul agreed to ban natural gas hookups in new construction.
At the federal level, the three-letter agencies continue to make laws as actual lawmakers navel gaze. The U.S. Supreme Court announced it will finally take up a case aimed at the agency authority under the Chevron Doctrine next term. So, maybe a year from now, the out-of-control federal agencies may lose a bit of their power.
The future looks increasingly dark for the coal, oil, and natural gas sectors.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/05/green_new_deal_appeasement_leads_nowhere.html
***************************************5 May, 2023
Prepare for a Jolt to Your Power Bill
It gives us no pleasure to say it, but de Maistre was right: We Americans are getting the government we deserve.
Mencken, too, was right when he said we deserved to get it “good and hard.”
We’re getting it good and hard all right, and nowhere is this more obvious than in the realm of energy, where Joe Biden continues to make all the wrong moves. This time, it involves a cockamamie process called carbon capture. As The New York Times reports:
President Biden’s administration is poised to announce limits on greenhouse gas emissions from power plants that could compel them to capture the pollution from their smokestacks, technology now used by fewer than 10 of the nation’s 3,400 coal and gas-fired plants, according to three people who were briefed on the rule.
If implemented, the proposed regulation would be the first time the federal government has restricted carbon dioxide emissions from existing power plants, which generate about 25 percent of the planet-warming pollution produced by the United States. It would also apply to future plants.
Why, you ask, are fewer than 10 of our nation’s 3,400 fossil-fuel power plants using this technology? Answer: because it’s ungodly expensive. And guess who’ll be on the hook for that added expense? Yep, you.
Robert Zubrin, an aerospace engineer by trade, does a lot of number crunching to determine that, if implemented, Scranton Joe’s latest “green energy” regulations “would increase the overall cost of electricity in the United States by at least 50 percent, with that portion of the bill being sent to the taxpayers.”
At least fifty percent. If kilowatt hours are your thing, knock yourself out. Like a good mathematician, Zubrin shows his work.
All of this is compliments of Biden’s diabolically laughably named Inflation Reduction Act, which provides $135 in tax credits (read: taxpayer credits) to utility companies for every ton of CO2 they capture. If we assume no growth in U.S. electric production — which, let’s face it, seems overly optimistic — the total taxpayer bill for these carbon-capture credits would be around $246 billion per year.
But wait: That’s just the taxpayer subsidy. And the subsidy won’t fully cover the cost incurred by these utility companies. “If it were,” Zubrin notes, “utility companies would be rushing to take the [Inflation Reduction Act] subsidy and implement carbon capture technology now, without any new EPA regulations forcing them to do so.”
Zubrin continues: “Between the tax subsidy and rate increases, the Biden initiative could multiply the cost of American electricity as much as fourfold. This would represent a massive, highly regressive tax not only of the American public, but also upon U.S. industry, accelerating the deindustrialization of America, costing millions of jobs, and critically weakening our defense-industrial base.”
Have a nice day.
It’s indeed a fine mess those, ahem, 81 million Biden voters have gotten us into, but there is a way out: nuclear energy.
As our Nate Jackson noted last week, we Americans get 60% of our electricity from the aforementioned coal- and gas-fired power plants. The idea that we could, at any time in the foreseeable future, replace three-fifths of our energy supply with the Left’s twin fantasies of wind and solar is lunacy. But with nuclear, it’s entirely doable — if only we can summon up the collective will.
“Democratic administrations from FDR though LBJ,” notes Zubrin, “had a leading role in creating and expanding nuclear energy. But since the 1970s, the Democratic Party policy has been to try to kill it through hyperregulation and obstruction on every front. In the ‘50s and '60s, they supported nuclear power because it reduces air pollution.”
Since then, of course, the Left has targeted the nuclear industry for destruction, filling gullible folks’ minds with thoughts of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl instead of the other-worldly energy density of nuclear and its carbon-free footprint. Thus, the Democrats have all but forbidden the building of any modern nuclear plants for the past half-century.
And Joe Biden has been there to witness it all.
If the Democrats really do believe, as Zubrin argues, that carbon emissions pose an “existential threat” to humanity, then their resistance to nuclear power is even more unforgivable.
https://patriotpost.us/articles/96979-prepare-for-a-jolt-to-your-power-bill-2023-05-03
************************************China's manufacturing wobble may drive coal use even higher
China is already on track to emit the most coal-fired power emissions in history in 2023, but may now push coal use up another gear after the manufacturing sector unexpectedly contracted in April following a strong start to the year.
The softer manufacturing data is expected to trigger fresh stimulus measures designed to spur increased industrial output, as well as steps to help the country's ailing property sector, which will lead to greater energy use throughout the world's largest manufacturer, exporter and polluter.
In turn, power producers are expected to increase use of high-polluting but cheap coal as the main source of power generation, as the tentative nature of the economic recovery means that authorities will be keen to ensure that power costs are as low as possible for businesses and industries.
Beijing has already taken several steps to restore China's economy to a growth path in 2023, following a COVID-19-hit 2022 that curtailed industrial activity and goods production.
The stimulus measures included financial support for export-oriented manufacturers and the easing of movement restrictions so that workers and goods could move more freely, and seemed to have had the desired effect by generating strong growth over the opening three months.
Output of a slew of key appliances including refrigerators and air conditioners, and industrial materials such as crude steel, also increased sharply since late 2022 as the revival measures took root.
However, there are signs that momentum slowed in April after an official measure of manufacturing activity receded into contraction territory due to a patchy global consumer marketplace that could not economically absorb the flood of goods and materials emerging from China's re-invigorated plants.
To combat any further slowdown, Beijing unveiled fresh supportive measures last week, including plans to boost auto exports through cheaper financing, and is expected to drive fresh investment into the country's property sector, which has historically been a key pillar of the Chinese economy.
The combination of new incentives for large manufacturers alongside anticipated support for the construction and property markets will result in greater total power consumption in China over the coming months, and in turn even higher emissions.
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Survey: Growing portion of US shoppers are rejecting EVs
Despite strong EV sales growth, the ratio of U.S. car shoppers uninterested in buying an EV is increasing, according to a new J.D. Power survey.
"Top-line metrics on overall EV market share, availability and affordability have been on a long-term upward trend," J.D. Power said in a statement, "but beneath those headline numbers we are starting to see some consumer behaviors that suggest a possible bifurcation of the automotive marketplace."
J.D. Power's data show the number of shoppers "very unlikely" to consider an EV purchase in the next 12 months reached 21% in March. That's up 2% from the month before and the highest "very unlikely" response J.D. Power had ever seen.
Price and charging were the biggest reasons survey respondents rejected EVs. Of those "very unlikely" and "somewhat unlikely" to consider an EV, 49% cited both "lack of charging station availability" and "purchase price" as reasons for their disinterest in EVs. "Limited driving distance per charge" and "time required to charge" were also frequently cited, with 43% and 41% of respondents, respectively, listing them as factors in avoiding an EV purchase.
On pricing, J.D. Power pointed to the continued confusion over the federal EV tax credit and its tighter requirements, which the firm argues impacts affordability but reduces the number of qualifying EVs. EV prices themselves are also quite volatile at the moment, which could also be dissuading consumers.
On charging, J.D. Power has found in previous studies that customers are much more satisfied with the Tesla Supercharger network, although they've soured a bit with home charging due to surging home electricity prices, mainly in the Northeast.
However, it's worth remembering that these findings come in the context of strong EV sales growth. EVs represented 7.3% of all U.S. new-car sales in March, according to J.D. Power. That's down from 8.5% in February, but still a big increase from EVs' 2.6% market share in February 2020.
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Australia: New Hope’s New Acaland Stage Three Coal mine finally opens 16 years after first mining application
Huge delay mainly due to Greenie opposition
Sixteen years after it began its mining application one of Australia’s most scrutinised mining projects officially opened on Wednesday morning, with the Queensland Government declaring its full backing for a coal mine set to re-invigorate the south east’s economy.
The New Acland Stage Three Project owned by New Hope has survived six prime ministers and four state premiers across 16 years of environmental scrutiny and legal challenges, one of which reached the Australian High Court.
Queensland’s Resources Minister Scott Stewart, who was on hand on Wednesday to cut the blue ribbon, was unequivocal in declaring the State Labor Government’s full support for the project.
“I can bring it down to three words,’’ Mr Stewart said, referring to the long struggle to get the mine up and running. “We did it.’’
Mr Stewart said kids sitting in schools across the Darling Downs would be the major beneficiaries of the project whether as miners, tyre fitters or hairdressers, and all could stay within the community they grew up in.
The mine hires almost its entire workers from the surrounding community, and pours back in millions of dollars in corporate sponsorship to local clubs and organisations.
New Hope Group CEO, Rob Bishop, said the first coal would be extracted well before the end of the year while the company would be continuing to hire for the construction phase.
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4 May, 2023
RFK Jr. Says Climate Change Being Exploited to Push ‘Totalitarian Controls’
Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. said that climate-related issues are being “exploited” by wealthy individuals in a bid to enact “totalitarian controls” over society.
“Climate issues and pollution issues are being exploited by … mega billionaires” like Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, Kennedy told radio host Kim Iversen over the past weekend. “The same way that COVID was exploited to use it as an excuse to clamp down top-down totalitarian controls on society and then to give us engineering solutions.”
“And if you look closely, as it turns out, the guys who are promoting those engineering solutions are the people who own … the patents for those solutions,” Kennedy said during Iversen’s show. “It’s a way they’ve given climate chaos a bad name because people now see that it’s just another crisis that’s being used to strip mine the wealth of the poor and to enrich billionaires.”
“I, for 40 years, have had the same policy on climate and engineering,” said Kennedy, the scion of former Attorney General and New York Sen. Robert F. Kennedy. “You can go check my speeches from the 1980s, and I’ve said the most important solution for environmental issues [is] not top-down controls, it’s free market capitalism.”
Kennedy—a longtime environmental activist and lawyer—wrote in a 2014 blog post for corporations and other groups that “sponsor climate lies” should face punishment. But he wrote that he “support[s] the First Amendment which makes room for any citizen to, even knowingly, spew far more vile lies without legal consequence” before adding at the time: “I do, however, believe that corporations which deliberately, purposefully, maliciously, and systematically sponsor climate lies should be given the death penalty,” Kennedy wrote for EcoWatch.
Kennedy’s comments about climate change years ago were highlighted by Fox News and other right-leaning publications after he declared his candidacy for president last month. Although he’s better known for his comments about childhood vaccines, Kennedy worked as an environmental lawyer for New York City and also for the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).
Also in the Iversen interview, Kennedy suggested that other than Gates, the World Economic Forum is also exploiting climate-related policies to produce a totalitarian society. The Davos, Switzerland-based group hosts annual meetings each year that include world leaders and top business executives, while in January, speakers at the forum said that governments and businesses should pursue a “net-zero” policy around carbon emissions and that people don’t need cars.
“What we have in this country now is not free market capitalism—it’s corporate crony capitalism. It’s … a cushy kind of socialism for the rich and a brutal, barbaric, merciless capitalism for the poor,” Kennedy also stated in the interview.
Kennedy filed paperwork with the Federal Election Commission to launch his 2024 bid on April 5. He’s joining self-help writer Marianne Williamson as well as President Joe Biden, who announced his reelection bid last week via campaign video.
When he announced his 2024 candidacy, Kennedy said that he has a desire to work with “rural and working-class Americans, and particularly hunters and fishermen.” Those individuals, he said, have been “alienated from the mainstream environmental community.”
He’s also said that he’s running because he believes Democrats have gone astray, becoming the “party of war,” corporate interests, and “censorship.”
While Biden remains the favorite to win the Democratic nomination for president, a Fox News poll recently showed Kennedy has around 20 percent support among Democrat voters. He also recently drew headlines after being interviewed by ABC News and accused the Disney-owned broadcaster of censoring his comments about vaccines.
“We should note that during our conversation, Kennedy made false claims about the COVID-19 vaccines,” ABC News Live anchor Linsey Davis said last week after his presidential announcement. “We’ve used our editorial judgment in not including portions of that exchange in our interview.”
On social media, however, Kennedy accused the network of violating federal election laws by editing out his remarks about vaccines. “ABC showed its contempt for the law, democracy, and its audience by cutting most of the content of my interview with host Linsey Davis leaving only cherry-picked snippets and a defamatory disclaimer,” Kennedy said.
“I’m happy to supply citations to support every statement I made during that exchange. I’m certain that ABC’s decision to censor came as a shock to Linsey as well. Instead of journalism, the public saw a hatchet job,” he added.
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Global Warming Trend Is 'Only One-Half of the Climate Model Simulations,' Says New Paper
Let's first take a look at research using surface thermometer data assembled from weather stations, ocean-going ships, and buoys. The Berkeley Earth team reports that since 1980, the global average temperature is increasing at the rate of 0.19 degrees Celsius per decade. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) finds that the global average temperature has been increasing at the rate of 0.18 degrees Celsius per decade since 1981. NASA's GISTEMP data set reports an increase of 0.19 degrees Celsius per decade. The U.K.'s Hadley Centre finds the increase is about 0.20 degrees Celsius per decade.
The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts reports the global average temperature trend generated by its fifth-generation atmospheric reanalysis (ERA5). Reanalysis is a blend of observations with past short-range weather forecasts rerun with modern weather forecasting models. From 1979 on, the ERA5 calculates that the global average temperature has been increasing at a rate of 0.19 degrees Celsius per decade. The Japan Meteorological Agency's JRA-55 reanalysis finds the per-decade rate of increase is 0.18 degrees Celsius.
Climate researchers also have access to temperature data sets derived from satellite measurements that essentially measure temperature trends in the whole atmosphere (troposphere) beginning in 1978. The first satellite data set was devised by University of Alabama-Huntsville (UAH) climate researchers John Christy and Roy Spencer. According to UAH measurements, the rate of global average temperature increase is running at 0.13 degrees Celsius per decade.
Researchers don't just read numbers off satellite feeds to discover temperature trends. They must take into account the orbital decay of satellites, the deterioration of instruments, and changes related to replacing satellites over time. Another team of researchers at Remote Sensing Systems has parsed the satellite data and derived a tropospheric temperature trend of 0.18 degrees Celsius per decade. Clearly, this more closely matches the surface thermometer trends.
In March, another team associated with NOAA's Center for Satellite Applications and Research (STAR) reported in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres its analysis of the satellite temperature data. Earlier, the STAR researchers had calculated that the temperature trend for the total troposphere (TTT) was about 0.16 degrees Celsius per decade. After making further adjustments, the STAR team in March lowered the trend to a bit over 0.14 degrees Celsius per decade.
"The total TTT trend found in this study was only one-half of the climate model simulations," the STAR researchers note. "Possible reasons for the observation-model differences in trends may include climate model biases in responding to external forcings, deficiencies in the post-millennium external forcings used in model simulations, phase mismatch in natural internal climate variability, and possible residual errors in satellite data sets." Translation: The models simply run too hot, the historical inputs like volcanic aerosols and ozone to the models may be wrong, a temporary natural cooling trend could be masking warming, and adjustments to the satellite data may be wrong.
The STAR researchers tellingly add that their findings are "consistent with conclusions in McKitrick and Christy (2020) for a slightly shorter period (1979–2014)." In that 2020 study, environmental economist Ross McKitrick and Christy compared the outputs of the latest suite of climate models to satellite, weather balloon, and reanalysis products. They found that every one of the 38 new generation "climate models exhibits an upward bias in the entire global troposphere as well as in the tropics." The models are predicting much more warming than appears to be occurring. Again, they are running too hot.
Time series of model and observation temperature anomalies, global lower troposphere. Individual model runs (gray lines), model mean (black line), and observational mean (blue line). All series shifted to begin at 0 in 1979.
The new STAR study researchers do additionally observe, "A striking feature is that trends during the latest half period (around 0.21–0.22 K/decade) nearly doubled the trends during the first half period (around 0.10–0.12 K/decade) for the global and global ocean means. These large differences in TTT trends between the first and second half periods suggest that the tropospheric warming is accelerating." It is worth noting that this accelerated trend is still about a third lower than the average of the model projections.
However, McKitrick in a preliminary analysis over at Climate Etc. finds, "the new NOAA data do not support a claim that warming in the troposphere has undergone a statistically-significant change in trend."
Given that climate science is continually evolving, it's a good idea to heed University of Colorado climate policy researcher Roger Pielke Jr.'s admonition to "be careful celebrating the results of any one study too much, because science moves ahead and there is no guarantee that any single paper stands the test of time."
In his comparison of new STAR data with other temperature data sets, NASA climate modeler Gavin Schmidt gamely points out, "The upward trends differ slightly for sure, but they are all recognizably describing the same climate change." But, in fact, all of the surface and satellite temperature trends are considerably lower than the average of the projections made by the most recent set of climate models.
Average global temperature has increased by about 1.1 degrees Celsius since the late 19th century. If the rate of warming is not in fact accelerating, rough extrapolations of the lowest and highest rates of warming derived from the observational records suggest that unabated global warming would further boost average temperatures between 1 and 1.6 degrees Celsius by the end of this century. Such an increase is in line with recent research that finds that the average global temperature is likely to rise by 2100 to about 2.2 degrees Celsius above the 19th century baseline. That's not nothing, but such an increase is unlikely to be catastrophic for future generations.
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A not-so-green reality behind green transition
In the rollicking world of net-zero policy-making and initiatives, Canada aims to be a global leader. The country’s bankers, mining executives, auto companies, electricity producers and political leaders have merged into a unified machine around the idea that a new green economy can be achieved via a just transition to a global energy system free of carbon emissions.
The nationalist clatter last week around the possible sale of Teck Resources of Vancouver to Swiss mining giant Glencore reflected the new official Canadian corporatist approach. As a key global player in the business of producing “critical minerals” — copper, zinc, molybdenum — Teck is seen as a vital cog in the wheel of economic fortune swirling around the net-zero objectives.
The Trudeau Liberals’ enthusiasm for the new national economic model was captured in “The Canadian Critical Minerals Strategy,” a report released last December by Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson and Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne. “Critical minerals are the building blocks for the green and digital economy. There is no energy transition without critical minerals: no batteries, no electric cars, no wind turbines and no solar panels. The sun provides raw energy, but electricity flows through copper. Wind turbines need manganese, platinum and rare earth magnets. Nuclear power requires uranium. Electric vehicles require batteries made with lithium, cobalt and nickel and magnets. Indium and tellurium are integral to solar panel manufacturing.”
But exactly how clean and green is the net-zero economic strategy? It’s a question raised in a revealing commentary by veteran Canadian environmental journalist Andrew Nikiforuk. Writing in The Tyee, a Vancouver-based online publication, Nikiforuk reviews the work of academics and a “rising chorus of renewable energy skeptics” who believe that the great transition to a renewable energy future is a green techno-dream that is “vastly destructive.”
Nikiforuk is not writing for NetZeroWatch, the insightful climate and renewable energy skeptic website operated by the Global Warming Policy Forum in London. Nor is he in the same camp as anti-renewable author Alex Epstein, whose book, Fossil Future, rips the renewable alternatives and champions oil and gas. At The Tyee, Nikiforuk continues his work as an anti-fossil-fuel environmental writer whose books include Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent, and The Energy of Slaves: Oil and the New Servitude.
In his new commentary, which has received far too little attention in the media and among policy-makers, Nikiforuk spares no one and pulls no punches. “For largely ideological reasons,” he writes, “many greens and ‘transitionists’ have presented the transition to renewables as a smooth road with no potholes.” Drawing on the work of an array of analysts and scientists, Nikiforuk describes the destructive forces that will be unleashed by the global push to replace fossil fuels.
A dirty wake-up call from the environmental left
Much of the impact of the renewable crusade should be obvious. Solar panels, wind mills or electric cars cannot be built without mining more copper, lithium, iron and aluminum. “That means vastly more destructive scraping and digging of ocean floors, rainforests and tundras on a scale inconceivable to most environmentalists.”
Nikiforuk then lists some of the inconceivable, citing various sources, including Simon Michaux at Finland’s Geological Society. Michaux calculates that to replace 46,423 power stations run by oil, coal, gas and nuclear energy would require the construction of 586,000 power stations run by wind, solar and hydrogen.
Another example: “Every electric vehicle contains about 75 kilograms of copper or three times more than a conventional vehicle. A single wind turbine generally contains 500 kilograms of nickel. That nickel requires 100 tonnes of steelmaking coal to be refined. And every crystalline silicon solar panel contains 20 grams of silver paste. It takes 80 metric tons of silver to generate approximately a gigawatt of solar power.”
On copper, Michaux states that current copper reserves at 880 million tonnes are equal to approximately 30 years of production. “But industry will need 4.5 billion tonnes of copper to manufacture just one generation of renewable technologies,” he estimates. “That’s six times the volume of copper mined throughout history.”
No wonder Glencore wants to get its financial paws on Teck Resources’ copper operations in South America and Canada.
Nikiforuk’s summary of the work of renewable skeptics outlines the reasons green enthusiasts and activist politicians should put a yellow light over their critical mineral campaigns, as should the bands of corporate activists eager to capitalize on being green.
The ideas of renewable skeptics lead logically to an even more troubling implication. If fossil fuels are destructive, and renewable alternatives are maybe even more destructive, then what? The only option left is some anti-development strategy. Growth is bad, no matter how it’s pursued, which means we need de-growth and depopulation.
That conclusion would be the logical outcome that arises out of the underlying green environmental premise, which is that humans are enemies of nature. For those of us with a different perspective on human existence, the real alternative is to scrap both the anti-fossil and the anti-renewable movement and get on with the business of improving the lives of humans.
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Australia: Northern Territory clears way for fracking to begin in Beetaloo Basin
The Northern Territory government says it is satisfied the recommendations of an independent inquiry into fracking have been met, clearing the way for gas production and the expansion of wells across the Beetaloo basin.
The NT chief minister, Natasha Fyles, announced Wednesday morning her government was giving a green light for gas production in the region between Katherine and Tennant Creek, a move environment organisations and scientists have warned will have an unacceptable impact on the climate.
Wednesday’s announcement means gas companies can apply for production licences and environmental impact assessments.
“Along with our world class renewable resources, our highly prospective onshore gas resources will support the energy transition to renewables not only for the Northern Territory, but for Australia and the world,” Fyles said.
The territory’s deputy chief minister, Nicole Manison, said “we want nations to be able to decarbonise the economy in a safe and sustainable way and gas will be that important fuel of transition, the onshore gas industry will also be good for the territory’s economy.”
Companies will still need to make financial decisions about whether to proceed, but if the Beetaloo did reach full production it could see thousands of wells across the landscape.
Analysis by Reputex in 2021 estimated a high production scenario in the Beetaloo could lead to an additional 1.4 billion tonnes of life cycle emissions - which includes emissions from when the gas is sold and used - over 20 years.
On Wednesday, 96 scientists published an open letter calling for the Northern Territory government to ban unconventional gas projects because of their effects on the climate.
The International Energy Agency and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have said no new coal and gas projects can proceed if the world is to limit global heating to 1.5C.
“This is a profoundly sad day for the Northern Territory. As we look down the barrel of unliveability here in the Northern Territory due to climate change, the Chief Minister has today given the green light for a carbon bomb that will hurtle us towards climate collapse,” Kirsty Howey, the executive director of the Environment Centre NT, said.
Environmental groups said that despite the government’s announcement, several of the 135 recommendations from the Pepper inquiry in 2018 had not been fulfilled, which Howey said was a broken promise to Territorians and an “unacceptable capitulation” to the gas industry.
They include an expansion of the water trigger, which the Albanese government has proposed but not yet made law, comprehensive assessment of likely cultural impacts of fracking on First Nations people and cultural rights, and provision of “reliable, accessible, trusted and accurate” to Aboriginal people about fracking.
They said recommendation 9.8 – which requires the NT and federal governments to ensure there will be no net increase in life cycle greenhouse gas emissions in Australia from gas projects in the Beetaloo – had also not been met.
Traditional owner and chair of the Nurrdalinji Aboriginal Corporation Johnny Wilson said “the government has broken its promise to us that it would implement all recommendations of the Pepper Inquiry before fracking starts”.
“Fracking companies are still not listening to the wishes of Traditional Owners who do not want thousands of flaring wells that will destroy our country,” he said.
Lock the Gate Alliance National Coordinator Carmel Flint urged the Albanese government to meet commitments on water and climate and “step in and stop the NT government jumping the gun with a dangerous rush to fracking”.
Flint said while an expansion of the water trigger to all forms of unconventional gas had been promised it was not yet law, with reforms to Australia’s environmental laws still to be drafted.
She said the issue of how to implement greenhouse gas controls in the Beetaloo had also only been referred to Energy and Climate Change Ministerial Council a month ago.
Changes to the safeguard mechanism that passed the federal parliament last month require scope 1 – direct onsite emissions – for Beetaloo projects to be net zero.
Environment groups said this did not address all of recommendation 9.8 which requires that domestic scope 2 – the energy used by gas companies - and scope 3 emissions – when the gas is sold and burnt – also be net zero.
Fyles disagreed on Wednesday that 9.8 had not been met, telling a media conference “we have absolutely met the recommendation”. She later said she acknowledged work needed to be done with the Commonwealth government on scope 2 and 3 emissions.
A spokesperson for the environment and water minister Tanya Plibersek said expanding the water trigger was part of the government’s environment reforms and draft legislation would be released for consultation later this year.
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3 May, 2023
18 Spectacularly Wrong Predictions Made Around the Time of the First Earth Day in 1970, Expect More This Year
In the May 2000 issue of Reason Magazine, award-winning science correspondent Ronald Bailey wrote an excellent article titled “Earth Day, Then and Now: The planet’s future has never looked better. Here’s why” to provide some historical perspective on the 30th anniversary of Earth Day. In that article, Bailey noted that around the time of the first Earth Day in 1970, and in the years following, there was a “torrent of apocalyptic predictions” and many of those predictions were featured in his Reason article. Well, it’s now the 51st anniversary of Earth Day, and a good time to ask the question again that Bailey asked 21 years ago: How accurate were the predictions made around the time of the first Earth Day in 1970? The answer: “The prophets of doom were not simply wrong, but spectacularly wrong,” according to Bailey. Here are 18 examples of the spectacularly wrong predictions made around 1970 when the “green holy day” (aka Earth Day) started:
1. Harvard biologist George Wald estimated that “civilization will end within 15 or 30 years [by 1985 or 2000] unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”
2. “We are in an environmental crisis that threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation,” wrote Washington University biologist Barry Commoner in the Earth Day issue of the scholarly journal Environment.
3. The day after the first Earth Day, the New York Times editorial page warned, “Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction.”
4. “Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make,” Paul Ehrlich confidently declared in the April 1970 issue of Mademoiselle. “The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years [by 1980].”
5. “Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born,” wrote Paul Ehrlich in a 1969 essay titled “Eco-Catastrophe! “By…[1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.”
6. Ehrlich sketched out his most alarmist scenario for the 1970 Earth Day issue of The Progressive, assuring readers that between 1980 and 1989, some 4 billion people, including 65 million Americans, would perish in the “Great Die-Off.”
7. “It is already too late to avoid mass starvation,” declared Denis Hayes, the chief organizer for Earth Day, in the Spring 1970 issue of The Living Wilderness.
8. Peter Gunter, a North Texas State University professor, wrote in 1970, “Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China, and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions….By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.”
Note: The prediction of famine in South America is partly true, but only in Venezuela and only because of socialism, not for environmental reasons.
9. In January 1970, Life reported, “Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support…the following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution…by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half….”
10. Ecologist Kenneth Watt told Time that, “At the present rate of nitrogen buildup, it’s only a matter of time before light will be filtered out of the atmosphere and none of our land will be usable.”
11. Barry Commoner predicted that decaying organic pollutants would use up all of the oxygen in America’s rivers, causing freshwater fish to suffocate.
12. Paul Ehrlich chimed in, predicting in 1970 that “air pollution…is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone.” Ehrlich sketched a scenario in which 200,000 Americans would die in 1973 during “smog disasters” in New York and Los Angeles.
13. Paul Ehrlich warned in the May 1970 issue of Audubon that DDT and other chlorinated hydrocarbons “may have substantially reduced the life expectancy of people born since 1945.” Ehrlich warned that Americans born since 1946…now had a life expectancy of only 49 years, and he predicted that if current patterns continued this expectancy would reach 42 years by 1980 when it might level out. (Note: According to the most recent CDC report, life expectancy in the US is 78.6 years).
14. Ecologist Kenneth Watt declared, “By the year 2000 if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate…that there won’t be any more crude oil. You’ll drive up to the pump and say, `Fill ‘er up, buddy,’ and he’ll say,`I am very sorry, there isn’t any.’”
Note: Global oil production last year at about 95M barrels per day (bpd) was double the global oil output of 48M bpd around the time of the first Earth Day in 1970.
15. Harrison Brown, a scientist at the National Academy of Sciences, published a chart in Scientific American that looked at metal reserves and estimated the humanity would totally run out of copper shortly after 2000. Lead, zinc, tin, gold, and silver would be gone before 1990.
16. Sen. Gaylord Nelson wrote in Look that, “Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, believes that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.”
17. In 1975, Paul Ehrlich predicted that “since more than nine-tenths of the original tropical rainforests will be removed in most areas within the next 30 years or so [by 2005], it is expected that half of the organisms in these areas will vanish with it.”
18. Kenneth Watt warned about a pending Ice Age in a speech. “The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years,” he declared. “If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an Ice Age.”
MP: Let’s keep those spectacularly wrong predictions from the first Earth Day 1970 in mind when we’re bombarded again this year with dire predictions of “gloom and doom” and “existential threats” due to climate change. And let’s think about the question posed by Ronald Bailey in 2000: What will Earth look like when Earth Day 60 rolls around in 2030? Bailey predicts a much cleaner, and much richer future world, with less hunger and malnutrition, less poverty, and longer life expectancy, and with lower mineral and metal prices. But he makes one final prediction about Earth Day 2030: “There will be a disproportionately influential group of doomsters predicting that the future – and the present – never looked so bleak.” In other words, the hype, hysteria, and spectacularly wrong apocalyptic predictions will continue, promoted by virtue-signaling “environmental grievance hustlers” like AOC, who says we have “only 12 years left to stop the worst impacts of climate change.”
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Buy Into The Globalist Climate Hysteria At Your Own Peril
The globalists say that ‘climate change’ is the biggest threat to humanity and that we need to give up our privacy and freedom in order to stop it. They are wrong on both counts
In December 2020, Karl Lauterbach, the health minister of Germany, said that addressing ‘climate change’ will require restrictions on personal freedom, like the ones that were put in place to “flatten the curve” of COVID.
In the same way, British economics professor Mariana Mazzucato said:
“The world may need lockdowns again soon, but this time to deal with a climate emergency.”
The World Economic Forum (WEF), the United Nations and the World Health Organization (WHO) have all written how they want to shut down society to “fight climate change.”
They want dietary controls, energy controls, ‘carbon’ restrictions and ‘climate change’ linked, whether it makes sense or not. The future effects of this are huge.
The 2022 WEF article by the director of WHO’s Environment and Health Department, “How to Fight the Next Threat to Our World,” said:
“World leaders must put health at the center of climate action and social justice.”
With WHO in control of course.
If WHO ends up being the primary organization with control over global health, WHO will have de facto power over world society as a whole.
And communist China will be exempt, just as they are now, on their ever-increasing use of coal and growing emissions.
China emits more CO2 than the next 28 industrialized countries combined and is building four times more coal electricity than the U.S. has.
China uses more than half of the eight billion tons of coal used each year and gets 58 percent of their energy from coal. Our ‘decarbonizing’ efforts are undermining our national security and benefiting our rival, China.
WHO could order climate lockdowns to reduce ‘pollution’, which they say is good for public health. This is why President Joe Biden has wrongly, for world and U.S. interests, joined with WHO for management of world health.
The UN and WEF’s The Great Reset plan include ‘smart’ (15 minute) cities, limits on travel, new food systems (insects replacing meat), a full switch to ‘green’ energy (wind and solar) and more. All of these changes will go more smoothly if there is a central power, such as WHO.
If WHO orders restrictions on freedom to ‘save the climate’, Biden and those of a certain political leaning can just blame them. Like the Netherlands, the number two (after the U.S.) exporter of food in the world is doing now.
They are attempting to shut down or limit food production of half the farms in their country to satisfy their EU climate mandate. This will drive up food costs even more.
They want us to give up our way of life and freedom to ‘save the planet’. Except those at the very top of the power pyramid. Think Joe Biden, John Kerry and Bill Gates jetting around the world.
But “green solutions” are a huge, expensive, scam. Wind and solar don’t do much to make the environment cleaner or change the climate either.
WHO wants to ration personal ‘carbon (CO2) footprints’. Their argument is ‘pollution kills’. If you don’t go along, you’re responsible for the deaths of others.
This means that when you use up your ‘carbon allotment’ for the month, you can’t buy that plane ticket, hamburger or steak, beer or soda or buy gas for your car.
If you still can afford a car.
Authoritarian and totalitarian regimes often require regular people to give up their freedom and rights to “serve the greater good.” They used the “care for others” argument during COVID.
To force people to do lockdowns, social isolation, wearing masks, and getting the jab.
Covid policies were a warmup for climate lockdowns and freedom limits.
The globalists are not dumb. They know that they can’t get rid of all gas-powered cars by 2030 or 2050.
They know that once the EV goals and mandates are in place, you won’t be able to drive very far, so you won’t need a car in the first place. Poor people will not be able to afford cars at all.
They also support 15 minute cities. That will control everyone by limiting us from coming and going as we please. All for the nonexistent ‘climate crisis’.
Oxford UK, has proposed fining people $70 if they leave their 15 minute city zone more than 100 times a year. That is just twice a week.
And they call this a conspiracy theory and isn’t about taking away freedom and controlling people. Really?
We need to resist these globalists at every turn. Our Republican Congress’s opposition to the false UN ‘climate emergency’ hysteria is welcome and needed.
We need to vote every one of our elected legislators out of office that agree with the climate hysteria anti-freedom, control agenda.
Your personal freedom, affordable living and energy security are at stake.
https://principia-scientific.com/buy-into-the-globalist-climate-hysteria-at-your-own-peril/
***********************************************Climate Alarmism Is A Lie That Must Stop
Since 1992 and the Earth Summit in Rio, the West has been living under the spell of a “climate emergency” that is repeatedly renewed but never happened
Since then, the West – and only the West — has set itself the main goal of reducing CO2 emissions (and other ‘greenhouse’ gases, implied in the rest of this article).
It is now 2023, time for a review:
CO2 emissions have not stopped growing and will continue to grow.
Since 1992, global CO2 emissions have continued to rise. With China opening an average of two new coal-fired power plants a week and India apparently more determined than ever to continue its development curve, as is the entire non-Western world, global CO2 emissions will continue to rise for the foreseeable future.
There is not yet any available, inexpensive alternative to fossil fuels.
This increase in global CO2 emissions would be inevitable even if the West persists in its efforts to reduce emissions: Western reductions are — and will continue to be — more than offset by the increase in emissions in the rest of the world.
Will the warming target of the Paris Agreement — “to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels” — be met?
Achieving the Paris Agreement target requires drastic reductions in CO2 emissions (says the IPCC). This has not happened. We are not on track. This global reduction will not happen.
Therefore, the Paris Agreement target will not be achieved. This is now a certainty or, in the words of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a projection with a very high degree of reliability.
Will the EU’s target of “decarbonisation by 2050” be met?
Even more extreme than the Paris Agreement is the EU’s goal of decarbonisation. As stated earlier, even if the EU ceased to exist, global CO2 emissions would continue to rise. From this perspective, reducing European emissions only makes sense if it is part of an effective global framework, not a national or regional one.
“Setting an example” to regimes and countries around the world that often hate the West simply enables those countries to grow stronger, while the countries setting the example weaken themselves by committing themselves to severe economic disadvantage — while having no effect on the climate.
Do we really believe that China, Russia and India will let the West dictate their economic conditions and CO2 emissions? Meanwhile, as they grow, they would doubtless be extremely happy to see the West hobbling itself.
Frans Timmermans, First Vice-President of the European Commission, probably the most zealous extremist to come to power in Europe since 1945 — whose chief of cabinet is the former leader of Greenpeace’s anti-nuclear campaign — multiplies measures, initiatives and declarations aimed at drastically reducing European CO2 emissions — even at the cost of Europe’s economic devastation, at the cost of freedom, and at the cost of causing a cruel increase in Europe’s dependence on China’s rare earth minerals.
The climate knows neither Europe nor Asia. Nothing that Europe and the West accomplish in this field has the slightest meaning if reduction of emissions is not global.
Would the economic consequences of even the most pessimistic IPCC global warming scenario matter?
Let us now look at the issue of the economic impact of CO2 emissions.
The climate expert and physicist Steven Koonin, former Under Secretary for Science during the Obama Administration, notes in his latest book Unsettled that even if the IPCC’s most pessimistic warming scenario were to come true, the global economic impact would be negligible (Unsettled: Dallas, BenBella Books, 2021, chapter 9, ‘Apocalypses that ain’t’, page 179s.)
In its fifth and latest (full) report, the IPCC estimates that a 3° warming — twice the Paris Agreement target — would reduce global economic growth by three percent.
Three per cent a year? No, three percent by the year 2100.
This amount represents a reduction in global economic growth of 0.04 percent a year, a number that is barely measurable statistically. That is in the IPCC’s pessimistic scenario. In the more optimistic scenarios, the economic impact of warming will be virtually non-existent. The IPCC, AR5, Working Group II, chapter 10 states:
“For most economic sectors, the impact of climate change will be small relative to the impacts of other drivers…. Changes in population, age, income, technology, relative prices… and many other aspects of socioeconomic development will have an impact on the supply and demand of economic goods and services that is large relative to the impact of climate change.”
In other words, according to the data of the IPCC itself, the economic growth and well-being in Europe and the United States are more threatened by extremist and delusional environmental policies than by global warming.
As Jean-Pierre Schaeken Willemaers of the Thomas More Institute, president of the Energy, Climate and Environment Cluster, noted on February 22:
“The EU and its Member States have focused on climate policy, mobilizing enormous financial and human resources, thereby reducing the resources necessary for the development of its industry and weakening the security of energy supply.”
The lesson of all this is simple: future generations will judge us harshly for allowing extremist environmental activism to enfeeble us in the West, while a hostile East – China, Russia, North Korea and Iran — continue to advance their industrial and military capabilities.
Instead of trying to fight CO2 emissions, we would do better to invest in researching ways to make reliable supplies of energy both cleaner and less expensive so that everyone — by choice — will rush to use them.
https://principia-scientific.com/climate-alarmism-is-a-lie-that-must-stop/
************************************************Australian Pumped Hydro project in big trouble
Australia’s power grid faces a fresh threat from blackouts after the federal government-owned Snowy Hydro revealed a potential two-year delay to the $5.9bn Snowy 2.0 expansion along with a further cost blowout.
Snowy said the commercial operation of all units may be delayed until the end of the decade with a potential latest start-up date of December 2029 and an earliest date of December 2028.
First power is now due between June and December 2028 at the latest with an easiest date of June to December 2027.
“Snowy Hydro anticipates that the timeline for full commercial operation is delayed by a further 12-24 months from the current publicly released dates,” the company said in a statement.
Newly installed Snowy Hydro chief executive Dennis Barnes told The Australian the new completion forecast was a “realistic, achievable range”, with the company hoping to bring the project as early as it could. “My expectation – and obviously my objective – is to refine it to the upside,” he said.
The Snowy project has been dogged by a series of project issues including the collapse of one of its contractors, Clough, delays through Covid-19 and, more recently, a major tunnel boring machine getting stuck in the Snowy Mountains.
The delay of the massive hydro expansion will now significantly hike the risk of blackouts in the power grid later this decade as coal plants exit the system. It may also increase pressure on Origin Energy to rethink plans to close its giant Eraring coal station in NSW by August 2025.
Any delay will also add to electricity system risks after the grid operator warned of worsening forecast reliability in NSW in 2026 and 2027 should Snowy not hit the original 2.0 deadline.
Mr Barnes said extra detail on the “budget implications of the project reset” will be released in July 2023, and this will be clearly communicated with key project stakeholders, with a renegotiation of the original fixed-price contract with the contractor, the Future Generation Joint Venture (FGJV) – now run by Italy’s Webuild – on the cards.
“The contract has been a struggle. We want them to be motivated around a realistic time frame. So it’s appropriate to want to reset, which will inevitably mean some renegotiation of the contract,” Mr Barnes said.
“My job is to try and get everybody going in the same direction, and a fixed price contract in this inflationary environment doesn’t have everybody going in the same direction.”
Snowy blamed the delays and cost hikes on four factors: the mobilisation and resourcing implications of the Covid-19 pandemic; the effect of global supply chain disruption and inflation impacting the cost and availability of a skilled workforce, materials, and shipping. Snowy said design elements also required more time to complete due to their technically complex nature, with the final design now being more expensive to construct.
Mr Barnes said Snowy’s contractor had been forced to build more roads than initially forecast to ensure equipment and materials could be moved safely, as well as more complicated changes to the scope of the project, including the need to line a key incline tunnel with steel.
Snowy also pointed to the impact of variable site and geological conditions, including the soft ground that has “paused” tunnel boring machine Florence’s progress at Tantangara since before Christmas.
Mr Barnes said a slurry plant that should allow Florence to get moving again would be commissioned within a few weeks, and Snowy and FGJV were also looking for other ways to make up for lost time on the headrace tunnel.
“One of the things we’re thinking about is whether we tackle this headrace tunnel from both ends,” he said.
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2 May, 2023
Another 0.5 Degree of Warming Will Kill Us All?
The Climate Industrial Complex warns us that we dare not cross a temperature threshold that exceeds 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7°F) of increase from those that existed before the Industrial Revolution. We have already seen an increase in temperature of about 1.0 degree Celsius, so they are trying to forestall a rise of another 0.5oC (0.9°F) before catastrophe strikes. Does this seem plausible to you?
In fact, a 0.9°F rise is barely noticeable sitting in your own temperature-controlled home where the thermostat likely isn’t even triggered to respond to a temperature change that is that small. Let’s take a look at just how small this is:
* The temperature will rise more than 0.9°F between 10:00 AM and noon on
most days.
* 0.9°F is the temperature change you get from an elevation change of about
500 feet.
* At mid-latitudes, 0.9°F is about the temperature change you get from a latitude change of just 30 miles.
So, if you are living in fear of a pending climate catastrophe over a less than a one degree rise in temperature, you could easily solve it by moving to a slightly higher elevation or a few miles northward. For example, if you currently reside in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, a move 30 miles up the road to Wilmington will ease your fear quite nicely.
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The Lehman moment for the ESG movement
As the current banking crisis continues to roll through the global financial system, one common denominator among all the bank failures to date has been corporate ESG policies promoting climate action, diversity, equity, and inclusion, and other progressive initiatives.
Silicon Valley Bank , the first bank to collapse, lent to more than 1,500 start-up climate tech firms, the majority of which had no cash flow or ability to service bank debt. Most of the directors on the bank’s board had no banking experience but were instead chosen for the DEI boxes that they ticked.
Signature Bank, the second institution to be seized by federal regulators, prided itself on being “the first bank in the United States to have an openly gay man on the board” and held internal seminars on the use of proper pronouns in the workplace. The bank was also an official supporter of the Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures and had started to disclose its lending portfolio emissions as the first step toward a net-zero banking model.
First Republic Bank, which recently required a $30 billion bailout from its industry peers to stay afloat, became the first large U.S. bank to stop lending to the fossil fuels industry back in 2021, achieving carbon neutrality that same year.
Even Credit Suisse, the most systemically important bank to fail thus far, believed in “sustainable finance for a better world” and did its part to direct capital toward the achievement of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals for 2030. The Swiss bank also actively promoted its transgender “allyship” by having a high-profile, non-binary, gender-fluid section head within its Global Markets Technology group.
In response, the hashtag “GoWokeGoBroke” has gone viral over the last month. But sustainability activists have been quick to argue that ESG was not the direct cause of any of the recent bank collapses. Technically speaking, this is a valid point. Rising interest rates, hot deposits, and faulty asset-liability management doomed Silicon Valley, Signature, and First Republic, whereas Credit Suisse was a slow-motion, scandal-ridden management train wreck for years.
Nonetheless, the recent spate of bank failures may still spell the end for ESG on Wall Street since, in all of the above cases, a corporate focus on ESG was more than just a distraction and time-sink for executives and employees. It was symptomatic of more deep-seated fundamental operating problems with these financial institutions, and clearly a comorbidity of weak management.
Touting one’s sustainable finance credentials now correlates with bad “G” governance under the ESG system’s own rubric. It raises a red flag for analysts to perform enhanced due diligence around any financial firms that fully embrace ESG. Shareholder activists scoping out poorly run corporate targets and hedge funds looking for short candidates should probably start including a pro-ESG filter in their initial screening criteria.
Investors would be well advised to charge more for the capital that they allocate to banks that publish glossy hundred-page sustainability reports and splash 17-color pinwheels across all their corporate presentations, which is ironic since this is the antithesis of what the ESG movement is trying to accomplish.
At the very least, the recent run of bank collapses offers still more proof that ESG does not lead to better business performance or investment outcomes. This is fatal to the core ESG argument that activist groups have been making for years that such policies “build long-term value” for companies and investors.
While a showy sustainable image may attract the marginal millennial customer or consumer during good times, such corporate virtuosity won’t prevent a bank run when the going gets tough. No matter how much the two terms are conflated, sustainability (or the appearance thereof) is not the same thing as financial solvency, with the latter being the only thing that really matters to investors and the markets.
Ever since the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers triggered the 2008 global financial crisis, Wall Street has been bracing for the next “Lehman moment,” often mistaking minor volatility events for something more catastrophic. While the current problems centered in the bank market are likely to continue spreading, the more-seismic systemic shock this time around may be to the progressive ESG movement.
Overlooked in all the Lehman post-mortems over the past 15 years has been the failed investment bank’s own ESG policy proclivities toward the end.
In the last few years of Lehman’s existence, its president and COO, Joe Gregory, spent almost all his time promoting diversity and inclusion programs at the company. Instead of meeting with clients and participating in quarterly earnings calls, Gregory regularly hosted internal off-site conferences where he lectured the firm’s managing directors on how clients and customers wanted to “see people that looked like them on the other side of the table,” as opposed to the best bid or best execution.
During the 2000s, race and gender considerations increasingly factored into Lehman’s management and personnel decisions, even as the company’s decision-making became more sclerotic and its proprietary risk tolerance and balance sheet leverage both spun wildly out of control.
As with today’s vintage of failing banks, ESG was not a direct cause of Lehman’s collapse, just a coincident indicator. ESG history is now repeating itself.
The last financial crisis in 2008 spurred Wall Street to double down on sustainability to burnish its ethical image and counter criticism of the industry for taking government bailout money after wrecking Main Street. Hopefully, the current banking crisis flushes ESG out of the financial system once and for all.
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15-Minute Cities Are ‘Complete Impoverishment and Enslavement of All the People’: EU Lawmaker
"15 minute cities" appear to be the latest version of the Greenie "smart growth" ideal
Christine Anderson, a member of the European Parliament, believes that COVID passports and QR codes that became widespread during the pandemic were only test runs for implementing “15-minute cities” aimed at tightening government control over people.
A 15-minute city is a neighborhood where a resident can reach everything they need, like a grocery store, doctor, and so forth within a 15-minute walk. According to Anderson, such cities are the beginning of tighter government control of people. The administration can exert control by deciding “you are no longer allowed to leave your 15-minute immediate area. They don’t have to fence it in or anything. It will be done via digital ID,” she said in an interview with Jan Jekielek’s “American Thought Leaders” program published on April 25.
“If you now fancy another store and it does not happen to be in your neighborhood, guess what? You won’t be going to that store anymore. Like I said, total control is what we’re talking about.”
In Europe, legislation is being pushed forward to set up 15-minute cities. According to Anderson, the Digital Green Certificate, the COVID pass introduced during the pandemic, was only a test run designed to get people used to producing a QR code and related requirements.
“Now, they’re slamming us with these 15-minute cities. Make no mistake, it’s not about your convenience. It’s not that they want you to be able to have all of these places that you need to get to close by. It’s not about saving the planet either,” Anderson said.
“With the 15-minute cities, they will have to have those before they can lock you down, and that’s what we were talking about here.”
“In Great Britain, some counties have already passed legislation. They will be able to impose a climate lockdown. That’s the next step. That’s what we are talking about. In order to do that, they will have to have these 15-minute cities.”
The next step, Anderson says, will involve restricting people within their localities, only allowing them to leave the place two or three times a year. However, the rich will be able to get away with these rules as they can buy off exit passes from the poorer segments, she stated.
“The poor people will be left in these 15-minute neighborhoods while the ones that are better off get to go wherever they want to go. This is what we are talking about.”
An article featured on the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) website in March last year called the concept of 15-minute cities “a lot more than a fad” and a consequence of the current times, specifically the pandemic.
“With COVID-19 and its variants keeping everyone home (or closer to home than usual), the 15-minute city went from a ‘nice-to-have’ to a rallying cry,” it claimed, adding, “As climate change and global conflict cause shocks and stresses at faster intervals and increasing severity, the 15-minute city will become even more critical.”
Digital Tyranny
Anderson pointed out that Chinese communist-style “social credit” systems are already being tested out in Europe. “There are pilot projects already going on in Bologna. There, it’s called the ‘Bologna Wallet.’ In Vienna, it’s called the ‘Vienna Token.'”
“It’s voluntary for now, and it’s only pretty much enticing people. If you do this, you get some tickets for a little less, to go to the theater. Voluntary. Once again, [it’s the] first step,” she said.
“But soon, there will be a time when you don’t have a choice anymore. You have to have this Digital Green Certificate with this QR code. Then, they will tell you where you can go, what you can do, and what you cannot do.”
Anderson criticized “The Line” project being constructed in Saudi Arabia. A 200-kilometer-long, 200-meter-wide, 500-meter-high structure, The Line is projected to house up to 9 million people.
“If I wanted to get total control of the people, that’s exactly where and how I would house them, and then, have them on a three-meal-a-day prescription. Guess what will happen if you do not do as you are told—they will probably cancel those meals. It’s so easy,” she said.
“That’s what we’re talking about. When you really take all of this together, there is no other way for me to actually say this—it will be a complete impoverishment and enslavement of all the people. I’m stating it so clearly because that’s what it seems like, and that’s what it looks like to me.”
The concept of 15-minute cities is drawing heated debate on social media. When documentary maker Carla Francome posted a thread in February about the benefits of such cities, it soon attracted criticism.
One person suggested that though 15-minute cities sound great in theory, it would become a problem once the government tries to enforce it.
Another pointed out that if 15-minute cities were to become a reality, Francome would have to take a special permit to visit her father if he was living 30 minutes away from her.
“One day, you’ll be trapped in your 15 minute city, waiting for a drone to deliver your sweet and sour bugs and trying to remember what it was like to be on holiday,” author Lisa Keeble said in an April 22 tweet. “You’ll ask yourself- when did it all go wrong. When you applauded lockdowns and masks.”
Government Fearmongering
Anderson also highlighted the fearmongering employed by governments to control people during the COVID-19 pandemic. “In Germany, there was a manual, an outline on how to get the people to do what the government wanted them to do to adhere to these restrictions,” she said.
“They outlined it there specifically, ‘Even though kids are at no risk of this COVID, we have to make them afraid. If they catch it and then they infect their grandparents, they’re responsible for having killed their grandparents.’ That’s the kind of thinking that went on in the governments.”
“A completely blown out of proportion kind of pandemic. For what? It was so the pharmaceutical companies could make billions and billions of dollars.”
Jekielek noted that there’s “unequivocal evidence” that the UK government was involved in sowing fear among its populace with regard to COVID-19 and had a specific strategy for doing so. Similar things were done in other countries, including the United States, he pointed out.
When asked whether this was the result of some kind of global coordination, Anderson replied, “Absolutely.”
“That is actually the scariest part of all of this. Had it only been two or three countries going rogue, we would have had the hopes another country would step in and put a stop to it,” she said.
“They were in lockstep with all of this. They literally read from the same script, repeating the same lines, ‘Build back better, safe and effective.’ Every single Western democracy was pretty much doing the same thing.”
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These States Have Taken Action Against ESG in 2023
The governors of Utah, Kentucky, West Virginia, Arkansas, and Montana have so far in 2023 signed legislation into law aimed at combating environmental, social, and governance policies.
More than a dozen states have introduced or are considering taking action on similar bills, including Montana, Kansas, and Florida.
“Over the last few years, misguided ESG policies in investments have left fiduciary responsibility behind, forcing money into funds that line up politically with the ideology of activist investors,” Kansas House Majority Leader Chris Croft, a Republican, told The Daily Signal in an emailed statement. “Implementation of these policies go against free market principles, and it’s not what is best for Kansans.”
“Our goal this year was to reassure our constituents that Kansas won’t let anyone play politics with taxpayer dollars or state contracts and ensure that fiduciary responsibility takes precedence over ideological credit scores,” Croft said. “I am proud to stand with many Kansas legislators, passing legislation that puts our taxpayers and retirees first by making certain that state funds are managed to prioritize the highest return on investment.”
Republican Utah Gov. Spencer Cox signed two bills into law on March 14.
SB 96 “addresses fiduciary duties for funds managed by public entities.”
The bill, sponsored by state Sen. Chris Wilson, a Republican, in the Senate and state Rep. Susan Pulsipher, another Republican, in the House, also “requires a public entity to invest public funds in accordance with the prudent investor rule; addresses a public entity’s proxy voting duties; requires a public entity to provide the state treasurer access to proxy voting reports upon requests; and makes technical and conforming changes.”
The law will take effect on May 3.
SB 97 relates to economic boycotts and “addresses public entity contract requirements.”
The bill specifically “defines terms; subject to exceptions, prohibits a public entity from entering into a contract with a company that engages in certain boycott actions,” and “prohibits a person from penalizing a company that agrees not to engage in certain boycott actions while under contract with a public entity.”
The bill also “provides that a person who penalizes a company for agreeing not to engage in certain boycott actions while under contract with a public entity interferes with the state’s interest in administering state programs and maintaining commercial relationships” as well as “makes technical and conforming changes.”
Wilson was the bill’s chief sponsor while its House sponsor was state Rep. Rex Shipp, a Republican. The law also takes effect on May 3.
Republican Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear signed HB 236 into law on March 24.
“Kentucky now has the strongest anti-ESG legislation in the nation. For many years, pension investments were about maximizing returns,” Kentucky State Treasurer Allison Ball, a Republican, told The Daily Signal in an emailed statement. “Recently, however, there has been a destructive shift in investment methodology to use the savings of Americans as financial muscle to push ideological causes through the ESG movement.”
“Kentucky has said no to this shift by passing HB 236, which clarifies that pension fiduciaries must base investment decisions solely on financial metrics, not politics,” Ball said.
Republican state Reps. Scott Sharp, Shane Baker, Daniel Elliott, Patrick Flannery, Steve Rawlings, Walker Thomas, and Wade Williams sponsored the legislation.
Republican West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice signed HB 2862 into law on March 28.
“The purpose of this bill is to ensure that all shareholder votes by or on behalf of the West Virginia Investment Management Board and the Board of Treasury Investments are cast according to the pecuniary interests of investment beneficiaries,” a summary of the bill says.
Republican delegates Dean Jeffries, Eric Householder, John Hardy, Evan Worrell, Chris Phillips, Walter Hall, Riley Keaton, Laura Kimble, and Marty Gearheart sponsored the legislation.
Republican Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders signed HB 1307, which is “concerning the regulation of environmental, social justice, or governance scores; and to authorize the treasurer of state to divest certain investments or obligations due to certain factors,” into law on March 30.
Republican Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte signed HB 228, which is “an act revising public investments by prohibiting the consideration of nonpecuniary factors; providing definitions; providing enforcement by the attorney general; and providing an immediate effective date,” into law on April 19.
Other states that have introduced or are considering similar bills include South Carolina, Iowa, Oklahoma, Indiana, Texas, Tennessee, Ohio, Missouri, Arizona, and Alabama.
“ESG policies push the Left’s progressive agenda on the American people through businesses and corporations, disregarding American values and giving beneficiaries fewer financial returns in the process,” Jessica Anderson, executive director of Heritage Action for America, the grassroots arm of The Heritage Foundation, told The Daily Signal in an emailed statement. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)
“States all across the country are joining Utah, West Virginia, and Kentucky to pass and enact legislation clarifying fiduciary duty, combating the threat of the ESG movement on American livelihoods, and stopping woke fiduciaries from using public retirement and investment funds as political pawns.”
“Last week, the Kansas Legislature notably passed HB 2100, legislation clarifying that fiduciaries must only consider financial factors when making investments, ensuring that Kansans’ savings are being invested in companies that fit their values,” Anderson said.
Anderson added:
Other states across the country—like Florida, Oklahoma, Ohio, and Tennessee—are adding to Kansas’s momentum as they push to protect jobs and investments from the Left’s extreme political agenda, putting Americans’ money back into their hands.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/04/14/these-states-have-taken-action-against-esg-in-2023/ ?
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1 May, 2023
Europe backs off climate push as voters rebel
Europe is beginning to back off its aggressive carbon-zero policies. Why? Because consumers are balking. European Union administrators have gone too far, too fast, and the citizens of France, Germany and the Netherlands, among others, have had enough.
There is a lesson here for President Biden. Unfortunately, he and his White House climate zealots are unlikely to learn from what is going on across the Atlantic.
Ironically, it is the French Green Party that most recently tried to block plans pushed by the European Parliament to put a carbon tax on fuel used in heating and transport. Its members fear that the measure will reignite the protests of the Gilets Jaunes, the yellow vest group that emerged overnight to oppose a proposed carbon tax on diesel fuel and whose protests all but shut down France.
It is not that the Greens have gotten realistic about the need for oil and gas as a bridge fuel, or have suddenly recognized the economic risks of betting on unreliable renewable fuels; rather, they worry that, as one legislator put it, “in a few years’ time, people will hate climate policies. People will go to the far-right parties.”
The proposal to force businesses to buy emissions allowances on fuel and heating would increase household costs by an estimated 50 percent — too much to be politically acceptable. Nonetheless, the EU Parliament approved the measure, which will not go into effect until 2027 and could be postponed if energy prices increase.
The squabble is a follow-on to the German government’s fight against the EU’s proposed restrictions on auto emissions, which would essentially ban the sale of new cars with internal combustion engines after 2035. Similar to Biden’s recent tailpipe emissions diktat, which would squash sales of gasoline-powered cars in the same time frame, the EU wants to force automakers to reduce new car emissions 55 percent by 2030 compared to 2021 levels and 100 percent by 2035.
In Holland, meanwhile, the government’s proposal to force a significant portion of the country’s livestock farmers out of business (and reduce the number of cows, pigs and chickens in the nation by one-third) to lower nitrogen emissions led to riots last summer. It also led to a surge in the popularity of the nascent Farmer-Citizen Movement, which came from nowhere to win 15 seats in the upper house of the Dutch national parliament last month, putting the populist group on par with other important voting blocs.
Here at home, as it barrels toward a fanciful green economy devoid of gasoline-powered cars, the Biden White House is ignoring polling that shows decidedly tepid enthusiasm for electric vehicles.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recently issued a new directive on tailpipe emissions that would effectively require that 67 percent of new cars and light pickup trucks and 46 percent of medium-duty trucks sold in the United States by 2032 be all-electric.
This goal is a significant step up from Biden’s earlier target of 50 percent new cars being EVs by 2030 and would require a massive investment by automakers; it would also require a monster build-out of our electric grid, significant expansion of available battery materials and huge number of new charging stations. Last year fewer than 6 percent of all new cars were electric; the proposal is so extreme that he faces serious push-back even from his pals in Big Labor.
According to The New York Times, the stricter emissions standards were originally to be rolled out in Detroit, home to the U.S. auto industry, but pushback from the United Auto Workers was such that the announcement was moved to EPA headquarters in Washington, and boycotted by union reps.
It’s no wonder. Manufacturing an electric vehicle requires fewer than half the number of workers that are required to produce an internal combustion engine. Not only will the industry’s workforce shrink as car makers switch to EVs, but most of the new plants making the electric cars and batteries are located in right-to-work states, where the costs are lower.
Why would Joe Biden put his excellent relations with organized labor at risk? Because desperate times call for desperate measures. President Biden wants very much to run for a second term, but he’s buried under low approval ratings and a darkening economic outlook. He is desperate for a win.
That’s why he’s doubling down on policies that he and his managers think appeal to groups absolutely critical to his campaign: climate activists and young voters. A poll last summer showed a shocking 94 percent of voters between the ages of 18-29 wanted someone other than Biden to be the Democratic nominee in 2024. That reading lit a fire under Biden’s camp, prompting, among other things, a renewed push to cancel student loan debt, even though his program would cost an estimated $450 billion and has been criticized as unfair to the majority of Americans who do not attend college or who have already paid off their student loans.
In seeking the youth vote, climate is key. A recent Economist poll shows climate to be one of the top three issues for people under the age of 29; for no other age group does it rank so high. But the effort to win over environmentalists is not only an appeal to Gen X — it is also about money. The 2020 election established climate activists as a significant new source of Democrat funding, contributing some $50 million to Biden’s campaign. Joe needs that backing.
Biden especially needs to re-energize climate voters since he did the unthinkable and allowed Chevron to drill on Alaska’s North Slope. Greenlighting the Big Willow project breached the president’s campaign promise to halt drilling on federal lands and marred his almost perfect anti-oil record.
Before Biden proceeds further down the new green road, he should consider that his aggressive (some say impossible) and expensive proposals could cost the climate effort significant popular support. It is happening in Europe, and it could happen here.
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India's power generation grew at the fastest pace in over three decades in the just-ended fiscal year, fuelled by coal
Intense summer heatwaves, a colder-than-usual winter in northern India and an economic recovery led to a jump in electricity demand, forcing India to crank up output from coal plants and solar farms as it scrambled to avoid power cuts.
Output from plants running on fossil fuels rose 11.2%, the quickest growth in over three decades, thanks to a 12.4% surge in electricity production from coal, the analysis showed, offsetting a 28.7% decline in generation from cleaner gas-fired plants as a global spike in LNG prices deterred usage.
In the new fiscal year that began April 1, Indian power plants are expected to burn about 8% more coal.
The rapid acceleration in India's coal-fired output to address a spike in power demand underscores challenges faced by the world's third largest greenhouse gas-emitter in weaning its economy off carbon, as it attempts to ensure energy security to around 1.4 billion Indians.
Total power supplied during the last fiscal year was 1509.15 billion kWh, 8.4% higher than a year earlier but still 6.69 billion units short of demand, the widest deficit in six years.
Electricity generated from coal rose to 1,162.91 billion kWh, the data showed, with its share in overall output rising to 73.1% - the highest level since the year ending March 2019.
India's Central Electricity authority estimates that 1 million kWh of power produced from coal generates 975 tonnes of carbon dioxide, while the same amount of power generated from gas produces 475 tonnes. A plant fired by lignite, known as brown coal, emits 1,280 tonnes to produce equivalent power.
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South Africa’s Energy Chief Opens Coal Mine as Blackouts Persist
South Africa’s energy minister attended the opening of a new coal mine, promoting use of the dirtiest fossil fuel as the government struggles to control an energy crisis.
Africa’s most industrialized nation has been subjected to controlled blackouts almost every day this year to prevent a total collapse of the grid as state utility Eskom Holdings SOC Ltd. fails to meet demand. The outages have the potential to deepen during the winter, and officials and lawmakers have been meeting to consider alternatives to bolster the electricity supply.
One option would be to extend the life of Eskom coal-fired plants that were due to be retired over the next few years, but that would undermine South Africa’s plans to transition to cleaner forms of energy — a process that rich nations have pledged $8.5 billion to help fund.
“Coal is going to be here for a long time,” and clean-coal technologies could help prolong its use, Minister of Mineral Resources and Energy Gwede Mantashe said Friday while touring Seriti Resources Holdings Ltd.’s Klipspruit Colliery in the coal-rich Mpumalanga province. A video of his remarks was posted on his Twitter account.
Mantashe, a former mine worker and labor union leader, who has previously said he doesn’t have a problem with being identified as a “coal fundamentalist,” has overseen a stop-start program to boost renewable power generation. South African President Cyril Ramaphosa appointed Kgosientsho Ramokgopa as electricity minister earlier this year and tasked him with overseeing the government’s response to the blackouts, but has yet to clarify what powers he will have.
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Carbon dioxide shortage threatening supply of key consumer goods
A strange irony here. Where's all that CO2 that the Greenies have "sequestered"?
There are growing concerns within the supermarket, food, grocery and beverages industries that a carbon dioxide shortage might threaten the supply of hundreds of consumer products – from baby food to packaged meat – highlighting once again the fragile state of Australia’s food supply chain.
The tightening supply of manufactured carbon dioxide was revealed by Coles chief executive Steven Cain on Friday and acknowledged by Ritchies supermarket boss Fred Harrison, as well as the nation’s largest chicken producer, Inghams, a host of beverage companies including Coca-Cola, and a range of grocery manufacturers contacted by The Australian over the weekend.
“Some of the (supply) challenges are ongoing, some of them are returning. There is now a CO2 shortage again, and that is impacting obviously carbonated drinks and a few other products as well,” Coles boss Steven Cain said on Friday.
“Obviously, things that are carbonated are in short supply. I understand there is more CO2 heading our way but there’s just two main suppliers in the world … and I think there is just a shortage caused by the environment at the moment.”
Already the supply issues for carbon dioxide have left Woolworths desperately short of its private label soda water and mineral water products, with many stores sold out for weeks. Many of its shelves are also showing thinning supplies of branded soft drinks.
“Due to challenges in the supply chain, we do have lower volumes of our own-brand carbonated beverages than we would like but we expect supply to get back to normal in the next few weeks,” a Woolworths spokesman told The Australian.
Mr Harrison, the boss of one of the nation’s largest independent supermarket chains, Ritchies, said the CO2 shortage was a growing concern within the industry.
“The further we moved away from Covid you would have anticipated that these sorts of issues are going to go away, but right now there is a major issue around CO2 and I think this could be a threat to industries such as the carbonated soft drink category … it is a high risk and I think some companies have tried to anticipate this and tried to order but there is a shortage of getting product into the country.”
It isn’t just the fizzy drink sector that is being hit by a shortage of carbon dioxide, with CO2 used in the production of hundreds of consumer products such as packaged meats, baby foods, fresh foods and baked products. It is also used for dispensing drinks in pubs and in a number of medical procedures. CO2 is used as a pure gas or in mixtures with other gases for anaesthesia, stimulating breathing and sterilising equipment.
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