This is a backup copy of the original blog
30 October, 2020
Don’t Believe the Lies. Joe Biden Plans to Destroy Every Fracking, Oil, and Coal Job in America
Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden has spent the better part of the past month Skyping across America—because, you know, it’s much too dangerous for Joe to actually leave his basement—telling everyone who will listen that he pinky swears that a Biden-Harris administration would not “ban” fracking.
It’s all a “lie,” Biden says, cooked up by President Trump and his allies to ruin Biden’s chances in key swing states where fracking plays an important role in the economy, especially Pennsylvania.
Even Biden’s running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA)—a notorious hater of fracking—has attempted to come to Joe’s defense. During the vice presidential debate earlier in October, telling Americans, “Joe Biden will not ban fracking. That is a fact.”
Actually, Harris, it is absolutely not a “fact.” It’s a political promise, and an incredibly misleading one at that.
Follow the Evidence
Despite his constant pleas to the contrary, the available evidence strongly suggests Joe Biden would put policies into place that would result in the complete destruction of virtually all jobs related to fossil-fuel production in the United States, including the fracking jobs 32,000 Pennsylvania families are currently depending on to pay their bills, and the thousands of other jobs in the state associated with the natural gas and oil industries.
What’s the proof? Well, for starters, Biden has on numerous occasions promised voters on the campaign trail he will put America on the road to the elimination of fossil fuels. (If fossil fuel use is banned, then fracking would be totally unnecessary.)
For example, at a September 2019 campaign event in New Hampshire, he told one young girl, “I want you to look at my eyes. I guarantee you, I guarantee you we’re going to end fossil fuel …”
During the presidential debate on Thursday, Biden admitted he would impose a “transition from the oil industry.”
“Would he close down the oil industry?” Trump asked. “Would you close down the oil industry?”
“I would transition from the oil industry, yes,” Biden said. (“Transition” is political speak for “end,” “dismantle,” and “decimate.”)
Further, Biden’s own campaign website claims, “As president, Biden will lead the world to address the climate emergency and lead through the power of example, by ensuring the U.S. achieves a 100% clean energy economy and net-zero emissions no later than 2050.”
100 Percent Non-Fossil Fuel Economy
Biden’s website further promises, “On day one, Biden will sign a series of new executive orders with unprecedented reach that go well beyond the Obama-Biden Administration platform and put us on the right track. And, he will demand that Congress enacts legislation in the first year of his presidency that: 1) establishes an enforcement mechanism that includes milestone targets no later than the end of his first term in 2025 …”
Imposing an “enforcement mechanism that includes milestone targets” to push the entire country toward a “100% clean-energy economy” would require the end of nearly all fossil fuel use—and, again, that includes the natural gas and oil that comes from fracking.
Anti-Frackers Write Biden’s Energy Plan
Biden has also surrounded himself with environmental radicals who have for years called for truly radical alterations to the U.S. energy industry and American society.
Kamala Harris, for instance, co-sponsored—not merely supported—Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (D-NY) Green New Deal, and not some watered-down version of it, either. I’m talking about the cow-killing, end-of-air-travel, socialist version of the Green New Deal.
Biden also allowed Ocasio-Cortez, John Kerry, and the leadership of the eco-socialist Sunrise Movement to shape his policy platforms as members of the Biden-Bernie Sanders “Unity Task Forces.”
AOC, Kerry, and the Sunrise Movement, along with other Unity Task Force members, have demanded the end of fossil fuel use around the world—not just the United States—because they believe the carbon dioxide emissions produced by the burning of fossil fuels are creating an “existential threat” to the entire human race.
If Joe Biden is such a big supporter of fracking, why would he permit so many people who loathe fracking and all fossil fuel production to help write his climate and energy platforms? And how, exactly, does Biden plan to keep the fracking industry alive while simultaneously putting policies in place meant to end the use of oil and natural gas?
Costly Carbon-Capture
The only answer that makes even a shred of sense came from Biden at the presidential debate on Thursday, when Biden said he would “make sure that we can capture the emissions from the fracking, capture the emissions from gas.”
Or, put another way, Biden is saying some fracking might be allowed to continue, so long as carbon-capture technology is used to suck up all of the carbon dioxide emissions.
There’s only one problem with this part of Biden’s plan—and it’s a doozy—the cost of carbon-capture technology is so high, and has been for its entire existence, that it would make all fossil fuel use completely unmarketable compared to other kinds of energy production.
So, is Biden planning to “ban” fossil fuels? In some cases, yes, and in other cases, he’s just planning on making them so expensive to use that no one ever will. At the end of the day, the result is just the same as a ban. In Joe Biden’s America, every oil, natural gas, fracking, and coal job will, sooner or later, be eliminated—directly or indirectly—by the federal government.
Jobs Destroyed
If Biden has it his way, millions—not hundreds or thousands—of jobs will be destroyed.
It’s true that some of these jobs will be replaced by gigantic new government programs and subsidies meant to encourage the expansion of the wind and solar industries, but there is absolutely no way Biden can ensure that everyone in industries related to existing conventional energy sources will find work in a wind or solar facility.
The truth is, countless Americans won’t. Many people’s lives will be ruined.
Perhaps even more importantly, because scaled-up wind and solar costs much more and is much less reliable than existing conventional energy, hundreds of thousands—maybe even millions—of additional jobs will be destroyed, never allowed to come to fruition, or shipped overseas to places with lower energy costs.
According to the Center of the American Experiment, if 80 percent of the electric grid were reliant on wind, solar, or battery storage, it would force Americans to spend more than $1.4 trillion in additional electricity costs every single year.
With these costs in mind, it is clear many U.S. businesses, especially energy-intensive ones like those in the manufacturing sector, simply would not survive under Biden’s model.
Joe Biden’s climate and energy plans would devastate America and put the country on the road to economic catastrophe. Hopefully, more Americans will wake up to this reality before it’s too late.
https://heartlanddailynews.com/2020/10/dont-believe-the-lies-joe-biden-plans-to-destroy-every-fracking-oil-and-coal-job-in-america/
Trump lifts protections for Tongass National Forest, allowing logging, road development
President Donald Trump will strip Alaska's Tongass National Forest from protections put in place nearly two decades ago, opening up millions of acres of pristine wilderness to road development and logging, according to a notice from the U.S. Department of Agriculture posted on Wednesday (Oct. 28).
The Tongass, which covers most of southeast Alaska, is one of the world’s largest remaining temperate rainforests and serves as a major carbon sink, absorbing at least 9% of all the carbon stored in all of the continental U.S. forests combined, according to The Washington Post.
“While tropical rainforests are the lungs of the planet, the Tongass is the lungs of North America,” Dominick DellaSala, chief scientist with the Earth Island Institute’s Wild Heritage project told The Post. “It’s America’s last climate sanctuary.” It's also home to many ancient trees and magnificent wildlife, from brown bears to wild salmon.
Much of the Tongass was protected from logging and road construction by the 2001 Roadless Rule, which was put in place by former President Bill Clinton. But starting tomorrow (Oct. 29), the Tongass National Forest will be exempt from this rule, meaning that logging companies can legally build roads and cut timber throughout the forest.
This exemption is one of the biggest public land rollbacks Trump has enacted, according to The Post. Throughout Trump's presidency, the administration has expanded logging in Alaska and the Pacific Northwest, according to The Post. But several of the administration's plans, such as one that would involve the sale of 1.8 million acres (728,000 hectares) of timber on the Tongass's Prince of Wales Island, were thrown out in federal court.
Still, the Trump Administration has reversed, revoked or rolled back more than 70 environmental rules, including climate policies and rules around clean air, water, wildlife and toxic chemicals, according to The New York Times. The administration is currently in the process of revoking a couple dozen more.
https://www.livescience.com/alaska-tongass-national-forest-trump-lifts-protections.html
The Great Energy Non-Transition
One of the troubling characteristics of today’s civic discourse is the tendency to confuse predictions with reality. Nowhere is this problem more severe than in the debate over supposed anthropogenic climate change and its associated issues.
The last hundred years have seen increasing emissions of carbon dioxide, a natural and benign gas. The slight increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations from 0.03 percent in the nineteenth century to 0.04 percent today has brought only beneficial effects so far, including increased crop yields and greater drought resistance.
Nonetheless, climate alarmists argue that rising temperatures caused by carbon dioxide emissions are bringing catastrophic storms, disease, extinction, flooding, and general misery.
Unlike the benefits of CO2, which are clear and measurable, climate catastrophe remains nothing more than a prediction generated by computer models that have yet to produce accurate forecasts of climate impacts.
Energy Transition, Not!
A frequent corollary of climate alarmism is that the world has undertaken a radical transformation of the global energy system, replacing fossil fuels with zero-carbon, renewable energy.
A Google search of the term “energy transition” yields over 5 million hits, many accompanied by terms such as “unstoppable” and “irreversible.” But is this transition actually taking place? Three arguments are generally offered in favor of the claim this transition taking place—none of them are valid.
First, “energy transition” supporters point to the high growth rates for renewable energy sources, with wind increasing at over 20 percent annually since 2000 and solar at over 40 percent per year, compared to less than 2 percent for fossil fuels. Sounds significant, but the absolute numbers tell a different story.
In 2019, despite forty years and trillions of dollars of subsidies, wind energy contributed about 2 percent of total global energy use and solar just over 1 percent. Fossil fuels accounted for 84 percent, down just two percentage points over the last 20 years.
Second, even highly respected publications, such as the Financial Times, run articles questioning whether oil companies can survive the tidal wave of renewables.
The oil industry is indeed in serious financial trouble as a result of the pandemic-driven collapse of oil demand and the oversupply brought about by technological production advances such as fracking. However, oil is a transportation fuel with very few points of competition with renewables, which are primarily used to generate electricity.
To the extent renewables may be profitable today, it is only because of the huge support they receive from governments in the form of captive markets created by renewable energy mandates and massive subsidies. By comparison, oil companies live or die by the market.
It remains to be seen what will happen with oil company profits when the pandemic ends, but the issue deciding the fate of the industry will be supply and demand, not competition from renewables.
No Significant Electric Car Transition
Finally, the advent of electric cars is increasingly touted as the death of oil.
The US private vehicle fleet is currently on the order of 250 million vehicles, of which approximately 1 million, or 0.4 percent, are battery electric vehicles.
Electric cars are about twice as expensive to produce as comparable gasoline models and, like renewable power generation, depend on massive subsidies for their viability.
Take Tesla, the current darling of the auto industry, for example. In addition to direct subsidies for manufacturing facilities and purchase credits ranging from $2,500 to $7,500 per vehicle, Tesla sells emissions credits to other car companies to meet California regulatory requirements. The sale of these credits totaled more than $1 billion over the past year, accounting for Tesla’s entire free cash flow over the period. Tesla loses money on each car it manufactures.
Via an executive order, California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) has banned the sale of new gasoline cars beginning in 2035. As with many such political promises, this “ban” is simply a goal, not a policy. Newsom is 53 years old and will be long gone from office by 2035, and the media will lose interest in whether his objective was met or not. For the moment, however, Newsom can bask in the glory of his signaled virtue.
The world may someday transition away from fossil fuels, but it is not happening yet. All we have so far are predictions, wishful thinking, and large amounts of money wasted just to make a small impact on a non-problem.
https://heartlanddailynews.com/2020/10/the-great-energy-non-transition/
Australia defies international pressure to set emissions targets
Prime Minister Scott Morrison says he will not be dictated to by other governments' climate change goals, declaring he is not worried about the future of Australia's exports despite four of the country's top trading partners adopting net-zero emissions targets.
China, Japan, Britain and South Korea, which account for more than $310 billion in Australian annual trade between them, have all now adopted the emissions target by 2050 or 2060, ramping up pressure on Australia's fossil fuel industry. Coal and natural gas alone are worth more than 25 per cent of Australia's exports, or $110 billion each year.
"I am not concerned about our future exports," Mr Morrison said on Wednesday. "Australia will set our policies here. Our policies won't be set in the United Kingdom, they won't be set in Brussels, they won't be set in any part of the world other than here."
As the Prime Minister spoke in Canberra, the South Korean President Moon Jae-in was addressing his own parliament in Seoul announcing his country would also pursue a net-zero target by 2050.
"Transitioning from coal to renewable energy, the government will create new markets, industries and jobs," Mr Moon told the National Assembly on Wednesday.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson in a phone call on Tuesday encouraged Mr Morrison to take "bold action" on climate change and "emphasise the importance of setting ambitious targets to cut emissions and reach net zero".
Responding to the UK government's version of the phone call, Mr Morrison said Mr Johnson understood that Australia would make "sovereign decisions" on the targets it set.
"It shouldn't come at the cost of higher prices for the daily things that our citizens depend on," he said.
"One thing the British Prime Minister and I agree on is that achieving emissions reductions shouldn't come at the cost of jobs in Australia or the UK."
Major Australian export companies such as Rio Tinto, BHP, major agriculture groups and multinational food companies are pursuing carbon neutrality, which experts say is a move to avoid being stung with trade tariffs or charges by countries that have set net-zero targets.
The Morrison government has argued it will comply with the terms of the Paris climate agreement by reaching net zero by sometime in the second half of the century but has not set a firm target.
Mr Morrison claimed on Wednesday that Australia's emissions had fallen by 14 per cent since 2005, compared to 1 per cent for New Zealand and 0 per cent for Canada. The comparison of emissions reduction between different countries has been disputed with differences over methods and the use of carryover credits. Mr Morrison said the world would "not really make a lot of progress" without widespread renewable technology to ensure developing economies like India and Vietnam could also reduce emissions.
"Our record on this speaks for itself. When we make commitments in Australia's interests then we will meet those commitments as well," Mr Morrison said.
But top scientists contend that for Australia to honour the Paris agreement - which requires countries to follow the best available scientific advice on how to limit global warming to less than two degrees — the country must reach net-zero emissions before 2050.
The federal government’s opposition to commit to reaching the target by 2050 also puts it out of step with all states and territories, which are pursuing carbon-neutral goals.
https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/australia-defies-international-pressure-to-set-emissions-targets-20201028-p569ed.html
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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29 October, 2020
Oil and America's Energy Future
During last Thursday's debate, Joe Biden said his goal as president would be to "transition away from the oil industry." He has also said the future is in cars powered by electricity. Biden would build 500,000 charging stations across the country. It wasn't the first time he attacked the oil and job-producing industry in his worship of the cult of "climate change."
According to Energy Information Administration data, petroleum is America's No. 1 source of energy, providing approximately 40 percent of the nation's power needs. Biden claims oil is also a major pollutant. According to the website IQ Air, the United States ranks 87th out of 98 on a list of the "world's most polluted countries." We have done well in reducing pollutants without the overreaching arm of government forcing us into electric cars. We are also now energy independent.
My car gets 22 miles per gallon and can go 400 miles between fill-ups. As of 2016, there were approximately 111,000 gas stations in the U.S. The Bureau of Labor Statistics says they employ about 900,000 people. Would Biden force us to own electric cars and replace all those stations and convert every employee to jobs making windmills and solar panels?
Current technology does not support battery life sufficient to drive long distances. If a battery dies and no charging station is near, what then? Would Americans willingly give up the freedom the gasoline-powered car has provided for more than a century and embrace the apocalyptic predictions of politicians who likely will continue to enjoy transportation choices?
It is dangerous to predict the future. Americans should not be forced to accept such a radical lifestyle change that would have serious economic, political, and worldwide implications.
It is wise - even fun - to recall past predictions, which were sold at the time as certainties, but were wrong and, fortunately, not embraced by the public. As CNN.com notes, "According to various experts, scientists and futurologists, we would have landed on Pluto and robots should be doing our laundry by now. Oh, and we'd all be living to 150." Nanobots and ape chauffeurs were also predictions that were said to be the norm by this year.
There are more, which seem laughable now, but were taken seriously by some at the time. In 1800, Dr. Dionysis Larder, professor at University College London, said: "Rail travel at high speed is not possible, because passengers, unable to breath, would die of asphyxia."
In 1859, associates of American businessman Edwin L. Drake mocked his suggestion to drill for oil: "Drill for oil? You mean dig into the ground to try and find oil? You're crazy." Later that year, Drake successfully drilled the first oil well.
In 1876, an internal Western Union memo said of the newly invented telephone: "This telephone has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication." Western Union believed the telephone's inventor, Alexander Graham Bell, to be a competitor.
Reacting to Thomas Edison's invention of the light bulb, Henry Morton, president of The Stevens Institute of Technology, said in 1880: "Everyone acquainted with the subject will recognize it as a conspicuous failure."
The Wright Brothers had their critics, who said humans could not fly. There were people who said moviegoers did not want to hear actors talk, motorcars were only a fad, radio and TV are useless and won't last, there is no reason for anyone to have a computer in the home and online databases would never replace newspapers. If only.
And then there are the wrong predictions of climate catastrophes and other end-of-the-world forecasts that never materialized.
Risking our future on unproven claims and predictions based on wishful thinking has a bad track record. If Biden is elected and follows through on his promises, it would wreak havoc on an American economy that was booming before the virus struck and is on the verge of a major recovery.
https://townhall.com/columnists/calthomas/2020/10/27/cal-thomas-oil-and-americas-energy-future-n2578786
Americans Deserve Climate Facts, not Alarmist "Fact-checking"
In a statement submitted to the Senate Commerce Committee for its Wednesday, October 28 hearing on social media censorship, CO2 Coalition executive director Caleb Stewart Rossiter described a year-long censorship struggle with Facebook's climate "fact-checker," a group "founded and funded by long-time climate alarmist Eric Michelman for the express purpose of promoting the climate crisis narrative."
The CO2 Coalition is an alliance of 60 climate scientists and energy economists that was founded in 2015 by President Trump's former climate adviser on the National Security Council, Princeton physics professor William Happer.
Dr. Rossiter noted in his statement that climate science "covers literally everything from A to Z, from atmospheric heat dynamics to zooplankton. Why is Facebook treating varying analyses and opinions in this crucial area of public policy, one of great complexity and uncertainty, as if they were incitement to violence or hate speech? Why do we need fact-checking in the climate field?"
The Coalition's statement also comments on the call of Senator Brian Schatz (D-HI), one of the members of the committee, to ban the CO2 Coalition from Facebook. Senator Schatz claims that arguments that slow down "climate action" can harm public health, and so should be censored.
Rossiter said: "Yes, some mathematical models, based on uncertain scientific and economic assumptions, project that fossil-fueled global warming will harm public health in coming decades and centuries. But restrictions on fossil fuels because of this fear are already harming public health, right now. According to research for the National Institutes of Health, fracking saves 11,000 lives a year in America by making heating affordable. And the World Health Organization estimates that 439,000 Africans die from indoor air pollution each year because they lack electricity and must cook with wood and animal dung."
Via email
Meet the Climate Scientists That Social Media Censors Don't Want You to Know About
Before the Hunter Biden/New York Post/Twitter imbroglio blew up a little more than one week ago, one of the primary targets of social media censors and left-leaning activists was a small nonprofit operating out of Arlington, Virginia. That group is the CO2 Coalition, formed in 2015 to educate policymakers and the public about climate change and the benefits arising from increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide.
The coalition's leadership and members are a who's who of leading scientists studying carbon dioxide and climate change, including atmospheric physicists, climatologists, ecologists, statisticians, and energy experts.
The group's primary mission is stated as "educating thought leaders, policymakers, and the public about the important contribution made by carbon dioxide to our lives and the economy."
There is broad agreement in this diverse group that the 130 part-per-million increase in carbon dioxide over the past 150 years is not in any way harmful.
As you can imagine, these climate-science contrarians are not warmly received by the mainstream media or the social media giants. The mission of these platforms appears to be to silence any discussion that contradicts the so-called "consensus" that carbon dioxide is dangerous.
The mainstream media and social media giants are committed to defending the view that the modest rise in temperature of one degree Celsius over the past 150 years is mostly man-made and leading to catastrophe.
The social media giants' continued ability to stifle those who disagree will come under scrutiny Wednesday during a Senate hearing. More on that later.
Censorship of the CO2 Coalition and its chairman began a little more than a year ago, when the former president of the American Association of State Climatologists, Patrick Michaels, and the executive director of the CO2 Coalition, Caleb Rossiter, co-authored an op-ed in the Washington Examiner titled "The Great Failure of the Climate Models." They showed that the mathematical computer models used to promote global warming fears have been, for years, systematically predicting an exaggerated rate of warming in the tropical lower atmosphere-typically by a factor of three.
Climate Feedback, an organization that Facebook uses to "fack-check" climate-related content, labeled their opinion piece "false," which led the social media giant to block the distribution of the op-ed on its platform.
The CO2 Coalition and the Washington Examiner appealed to Facebook, providing a detailed scientific basis for their opinion. Confronted by the overwhelming body of evidence provided by the researchers, Facebook finally removed the label and again allowed the piece to be viewed and advertised.
One would have thought that would be the end of it, but the prognosticators of climate doom could not let it end.
First, a letter-signed by Stacey Abrams, Tom Steyer, and 13 leaders of groups working to ban fossil fuels-was sent to Facebook demanding that it shut down the Facebook page of the CO2 Coalition and to censor posts of its members' studies and articles on other users' pages.
Soon thereafter, four senators, including Massachusetts' Elizabeth Warren and Rhode Island's Sheldon Whitehouse, sent an open letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to censor the CO2 Coalition because "climate change is an existential crisis" and publicizing any view contrary to that claim "puts action on climate change at risk."
The attempts at censorship were not limited to the group itself but extended to its chairman, Patrick Moore, a co-founder of Greenpeace. His PragerU video, "What They Haven't Told You About Climate Change," which has more than 3.6 million views, was "fact-checked" by Climate Feedback as "misleading." Moore's supposedly misleading statement was: "Of course the climate is changing. It always has. It always will."
Only recently was the misleading label removed after extended appeals by both Prager U and Moore.
The ability of the giant social media companies to continue to target those who dare to present evidence that doesn't "toe the company line" will be tested during a Senate Commerce and Science hearing Wednesday October 28.
The title of the hearing is "Does Section 230's Sweeping Immunity Enable Big Tech Bad Behavior?" The CO2 Coalition will present testimony concerning its views on the role of free speech and censorship.
Twitter, Facebook, and Google should not be the arbiters of truth on complex scientific and societal issues.
Perhaps they should embrace the dictum often attributed to Voltaire: "I may disagree strongly with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." Some of us would settle for, "live and let live."
Via email
Negative prices: South Australia solar farms had to pay to produce in September
Perverse. Their output has no relationship to the need for it -- so it is often worthless
South Australia’s three large scale solar farms had to effectively pay to produce in the month of September – as the average price of solar power in the state’s grid fell to minus $9.70 a megawatt hour over the calendar month.
“Record low wholesale prices in September resulted in South Australian solar farms having to pay $9.70/MWh to generate,” the Australian Energy Market Operator notes in its latest Quarterly Energy Dynamics report.
Over the whole quarter, the volume weighted average price of large scale solar was $23/MWh, down some 62 per cent from the same time in 2019, while the average price for all electricity produced in South Australia for the quarter was $40/MWh.
There are several reasons for the negative price of South Australia solar – firstly the increase in output from large scale solar, as Bungala 2 finally reached full output, the continued rapid expansion of rooftop solar, which in turn is dramatically reducing operating demand in the middle of the day, and grid constraints which limited the amount of exports from South Australia into Victoria.
South Australia has three large scale solar farms, the 110MW Bungala One installation near Port Augusta, the neighbouring 110MW Bungala Two (which has only just reached full output after nearly two years of delays due to technical issues), and the 95MW Tailem Bend solar farm near the town of the same name.
Tailem Bend usually ducks negative pricing events, turning its output down to zero under the terms of its long term power purchase agreement with Snowy Hydro.
But the two Bungala solar farms, under long term contracts with Origin Energy, plough through the negative prices. The exact nature of the contracts is not known, but it is not necessarily a bad thing for either party, but it’s not a great market signal for more solar, or for more off-take agreements – although it is for storage.
Across the National Electricity Market, which comprises South Australia, Victoria, Tasmania, NSW and Queensland, the average price for solar fell to $29/MWh in the September quarter, and the average price for wind fell to $38/MWh, both representing falls of around 50 per cent from the same period a year earlier.
AEMO’s QED report notes that curtailment of wind and solar farms across the NEM rose to 5.5 per cent in the September quarter, a result of the record levels of negative pricing events in South Australia and Queensland, and newly emerging system strength issues in north Queensland.
In Queensland, two solar farms and one wind farm were told of system strength issues that would cause their output to be reduced significantly, or down to zero, depending on conditions, and then another nine solar farms were told the same thing as new modelling unveiled new problems.
In Queensland, the average constraint for wind and solar over the whole quarter was 49MW, up from 5MW in the same period last year. Ironically, the situation was worsened by increased outages at the state’s coal fired generators. New synchronous condensers may alleviate that issue.
Economic constraints – the decision by generators to “self-curtail” in the face of negative prices – meant that on average there was 50MW of curtailment of wind and solar farms through the September quarter. AEMO says 70 per cent of that curtailment occurred in daytime hours between 7am and 7pm.
https://reneweconomy.com.au/negative-prices-south-australia-solar-farms-had-to-pay-to-produce-in-september-77375/
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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28 October, 2020
The Climate Crisis Can’t Just Be Another Soapbox for the Left
By framing climate action as a progressive issue, the left is guaranteeing its failure.
The Warmist below has a moment of insight
For an established scientific fact, Europe’s take-it-or-leave-it approach to anthropogenic climate change and its associated dangers is an odd one. In my naive way I had hoped that impending environmental and societal collapse would be enough to snap politicians out of their murderous inaction and force them to collaborate. Alas, no. Even as Europe dries up and burns down, it seems the climate crisis has become just another victim of petty gammon-and-snowflake factionalism.
This isn’t to say politicians are silent on the subject. On the contrary, progressives across Europe and further afield proudly tout their green credentials. The past few years have seen various national parties and organizations propose Green New Deals with the ambitious aim of saving the planet by revolutionizing the economy along leftwing lines.
The urgency and ambition of these proposals are to be welcomed. However, by framing climate action as an inherently progressive concern, the left is virtually guaranteeing its failure. The combination of environmental measures with anti-capitalist or pro-union rhetoric—valid though the rhetoric may be—creates a political package that will almost certainly flounder when it comes to achieving the widespread political support it needs to be enacted. When politicians on the left present such unworkable environmental solutions like this, we can be forgiven for wondering if their hearts are really in it, or whether they see the climate crisis as just another soapbox.
At least the left is making the correct noises. Far less excusable are the actions of those on the political right, who have willingly handed the climate agenda over to the left in order to dust their hands of any environmental responsibility. The worst offenders are of course the climate change deniers, who promote such a thoroughly anti-science position that they might as well claim that the earth is flat. One such example is Bulgarian politician Neno Dimov, who inexplicably served as the president of the EU’s Environment Council in 2018. He had previously dismissed climate change as a “fraud used to scare people.”
Little better are the majority of outwardly sane conservatives who accept the reality of climate change but choose to do nothing about it. Their unwavering support for fossil-fueled industries is a green light to our species’ suicidal environmental practices, and their lazy attacks against the specter of cultural globalization thwart the concerted global action that is needed to save the planet.
“The left needs to stop combining urgent environmental measures with other progressive agendas.”
As a result of the political inertia caused by this polarization, the world’s ecosystems unravel at an ever-faster rate while we do next to nothing to effectively combat it. Meaningful action on climate change is far more likely if both the left and the right abandon the tit-for-tat partisanship that has allowed environmentalism to be seen—and, for many, dismissed—as just another progressive concern.
The left needs to stop combining urgent environmental measures with other progressive agendas that currently have no chance of achieving cross-party support, and instead propose practical legislation in a spirit of cooperation and collaboration.
The results won’t be perfect—such is the bittersweet fruit of compromise—but they will be better than nothing, and can serve as a foundation for further legislation.
“The right needs to grow up and accept some responsibility for this planet it calls home.”
The right, meanwhile, needs to grow up and accept some responsibility for this planet it calls home. One of the most frustrating things about the right’s squeamishness towards environmentalism is that there’s nothing inherently left-wing or right-wing about climate action. If anything, you’d have thought that conservationism and conservatism would go hand in hand. This was actually the case in the early 20th century, when European conservatives, alarmed by the accelerating rates of deforestation, soil erosion and desertification around the world, laid the foundations for the modern conservation movement. Think how much simpler climate legislation could be today if the right were willing to reclaim this heritage.
https://blendle.com/i/are-we-europe/the-climate-crisis-cant-just-be-another-soapbox-for-the-left/bnl-areweeurope-20201001-f0038a8fd5e
'Economic Death Sentence': Trump Slams Biden's Energy Plan in Pennsylvania
Speaking during the first of three campaign rallies in Pennsylvania Monday morning, President Donald Trump slammed former Vice President Joe Biden and Senator Kamala Harris for their policy positions on American energy.
"I want to begin today by discussing an issue of existential importance to Pennsylvania. Very very important. Last week Sleepy Joe Biden made perhaps the most shocking statement ever uttered in the history of presidential debates. In other words, he blew it," Trump said. "Joe Biden confirmed his plan to abolish the entire U.S. oil industry. That means no fracking, no jobs, no energy for Pennsylvania families, Texas, all the others."
"The Biden energy shutdown would inflict deep pain and misery on Pennsylvania. Mass layoffs, constant black outs and brown outs, soaring gas prices. It's nice to have that $2 gasoline isn't it? Surging energy bills, no air conditioning during the summer, no heat during the winter and no electricity during peak hours," he continued.
Trump also slammed the Paris Climate agreement, which Biden has vowed to rejoin.
"Biden's plan is an economic death sentence," Trump said. "He will eradicate your energy and send Pennsylvania into crippling depression."
During the final presidential debate in Nashville last week, former Biden dared Trump to produce footage of him saying he would ban fracking. Trump obliged and the Trump campaign has been hammering the issue.
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2020/10/26/trump-slams-biden-fracking-position-in-pennsylvania-n2578784
NY County opts out of green-energy tax exemption
Tuesday night at the Niagara County Courthouse, opponents of the proposed Bear Ridge Solar project in Cambria/Pendleton showed their support of a county law denying property tax exemptions to local solar and wind energy generation projects.
For Niagara County Legislator David Godfrey, Tuesday night's legislative battle over opting out of a state-authorized property tax exemption for solar and wind energy systems had nothing to do with going green.
Godfrey, R-Wilson, said the issue was "local control" versus a "top down" set of alternative energy incentives passed on from Albany. Legislator Dennis Virtuoso, D-Niagara Falls, argued those alternative incentives were not about local control but, rather, economic development.
"I'm worried about economic development," Virtuoso said as the legislature debated the opt-out proposal. "If there's one thing that unites this legislature it's economic development."
And Virtuoso suggested that the local lack of alternative energy incentives authorized in state law would have a harmful effect on the county's efforts to lure an Amazon distribution center.
"They are committed to solar energy. That means they're going to have solar panels on top of that distribution center," Virtuoso said. "Are they gonna say, 'We're outta here' 'cause we can't get a tax break if we put solar panels on our building?"
Legislator Chris Robins, D-Niagara Falls, echoed Virtuoso's concerns. "In today's day and age of climate change, I'm not sure this is something that we, as a county, should do," Robins said.
But Godfrey and Legislator John Syracuse, R-Newfane,, the co-sponsor of the opt-out local law, pushed back, saying tax breaks could be given to developers by the Niagara County Industrial Development Agency.
"(The IDA) can guide (developers) to locations (for alternative energy projects)," Godfrey said. "We are sending a message. If a project comes to Niagara County and has no community support, there will be no tax breaks."
The local law, Godfrey said, would bring back home rule to municipalities where energy companies are courting farmers to use their land for large-scale clean energy projects.
“I don’t care if it’s a landfill or a brownfield,” Godfrey said. “We will provide a pamphlet of conducive sites where such projects would be of benefit. Don’t take our farmland.”
Syracuse criticized Virtuoso's concerns, suggesting he would place economic development over the will of community residents.
The local law was approved by a 9 to 5 vote.
https://www.lockportjournal.com/news/local_news/county-opts-out-of-green-energy-tax-exemption/article_3093b09b-56c3-56f1-961c-19b63fbda453.html
Scientists all at sea with alarmist barrier reef warning
Fancy theories preferred to the real world
A new scientific paper, received with great fanfare among international media and Australia’s public broadcaster, the ABC, claims half the corals of the Great Barrier Reef are dead.
The paper is by academics at James Cook University’s ARC Centre for Excellence for Coral Reef Studies. It is a scary headline. But is it true?
This finding is not based on any tried and proven method. Rather, the researchers from James Cook University have come up with a new method of statistical analysis based on a complicated “proxy” to estimate “colony size”.
The study itself was undertaken in 2016 and 2017, just after a coral bleaching event at cyclone-damaged reefs. If they had used traditional methods and longer time frames, it would likely be found that there is actually nothing wrong with the Great Barrier Reef.
Great Barrier Reef photographer Julia Summerling wrote recently about how a section known as North Direction Island, saying that the island’s corals were “savaged beyond recognition” due to Cyclone Ita in 2014, cyclone Nathan in 2015, and a coral bleaching event in the summer of 2016. So it was probably not the most representative time to be sampling. But the headlines are based on proxy measures from just a few reefs at that time.
She now says those areas have since recovered. “What I saw — and photographed — I could hardly believe. Young dinner-plate-sized corals were crammed into every available space on the limestone plateau as far as I could see, bristling with iconic fish life, from maori wrasse and coral trout to bumphead parrotfish and sweetlips. I swam a long way on the dive, checking to see how far the coral shelf stretched. The further I swam, the denser the coral fields became.”
For a new Institute of Public Affairs film, in January this year I visited the Ribbon reefs with Emmy award-winning photographer Clint Hempshall to follow the edge of Australia’s continental shelf to find and film coral bleaching. It was meant to be one of the worst-affected regions — 60 per cent dead from bleaching, which the same scientists say is caused by climate change. But we could not find any significant bleaching. We mostly found jewelled curtains of coral, appearing to cascade down underwater cliff faces. So colourful, so beautiful, all in crystal clear and warm waters.
The problem for Professor Terry Hughes, who co-authored the research, is that his study was undertaken in 2016 and 2017 then extrapolated out to cover other years. All of the research and subsequent media attention points to a narrative that the Great Barrier Reef is at risk of imminent collapse from climate change.
It was for questioning this claim, and the quality of science behind it, that Dr Peter Ridd was eventually sacked from James Cook University. Part of those claims by Ridd were that a lot of the science coming out of JCU’s ARC Centre for Excellent in Coral Reef Studies “is not properly checked, tested or replicated, and that is a great shame because we really need to be able to trust our scientific institutions, and the fact is I do not think we can anymore.”
Neither James Cook University, nor Hughes, have ever rebutted Ridd’s criticisms of the research.
This is what objective observers need to put into context when examining Hughes’s most recent claims. Ridd also said: “I think that most of the scientists who are pushing out this stuff, I think that they genuinely believe that there are problems with the reef, I just don’t think they are very objective about the science they do. I think they’re emotionally attached to their subject and you can’t blame them the reef is a beautiful thing.”
One quick glance at Hughes’s Twitter account and you will find he is critical of the Morrison government’s gas-led recovery, cheerleading for a royal commission into the Murdoch media and constantly criticises the Adani Coal mine.
The new paper by James Cook University scientists claims both the incidence of coral bleaching and cyclones is increasing, but there is no evidence to support either contention. The available data from 1971 to 2017 indicated there has actually been a decrease in both the number and severity of cyclones in the Australian region.
Coral-bleaching events tend to be cyclical and coincide with periods of exceptionally low sea levels. As discussed in a new book, Climate Change: The Facts 2020, there were dramatic falls in sea levels across the western Pacific Ocean in 2016. These were associated with an El Nino event.
Until recently, coral calcification rates were calculated based on coring of the large Porites corals. There are well-established techniques for coring the Porites corals and then measuring growth rates. So why do Hughes and his colleagues stray from these tried and tested methods?
Since 2005, the Australian Institute of Marine Science has stopped using this technique to measure how well corals are growing at the Great Barrier Reef. The few studies still using the old technique suggest that, as would be expected, <font color="#ff0000"> as water temperatures have increased marginally, coral growth rates have also increased.</font>
But rather than admit this, key Great Barrier Reef research institutions have moved from such direct measures to new and complicated “proxies”. They thus have more flexibility in what they find because the measurement is no longer one that represents coral growth rates or coral cover.
As proxy votes are something delegated, this gives the researchers at JCU the potential to generate what might be considered policy-based evidence. And yet without question, the media reporting of the most recent research is that “there is no time to lose, we must sharply decrease greenhouse gas emissions”.
Far too frequently, climate science has demonstrated noble cause corruption — where the ends justify the means. We will only know exact coral calcification rates, and changing trends in coral cover, when our once esteemed research institutions return to more traditional methods of measuring such important indicators of coral health and growth.
We need a return to real science that is based on real observations and real measurements and then we may find written in journals what we see in the real world when we jump off boats and go under the sea.
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/inquirer/scientists-all-at-sea-with-alarmist-barrier-reef-warning/news-story/3b910197797f59e3761d1c9e55ef6155
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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27 October, 2020
Trump Explains the Middle East Peace deal in terms of energy independence
In the debate last night, President Trump finally talked about the most important impact of his energy policy. Energy independence means much more than low prices at the gas pump and on your utility bill. The widespread use of natural gas is also great for the environment and has lowered our carbon emissions. These are both great outcomes but they don’t hold a candle to the impact on foreign policy.
In ten seconds, President Trump gives the money quote:
“We are energy independent for the first time. We don’t need all of these countries that we had to fight war over because we needed their energy. We are energy independent.”
This obvious outcome is the secret sauce in President Trump’s success in the Middle East. While it is reasonable to assume that technology will eventually lead us away from sole reliance on fossil fuels, the United States becoming energy independent forced petrol-economies in the Middle East to start considering a future where their primary export was less in demand.
As such, there is far less incentive for the United States to spend blood and treasure in the region to mitigate centuries-old conflicts. The very idea that this expenditure would turn the Middle East into democratic states was simply absurd. The primary religion in the region discourages democratic elections and is prone to some form of theocracy. To think we were going to exchange American lives and expenditures on oil for a complete rejection of core tenents of the Muslim faith has been a fool’s errand since 1979.
Certainly, our post-World War II success in Europe, Japan, and the former Soviet Union fueled these fever dreams. However, the “experts” could never solve the significant cultural differences between the West and the Middle East. In reality, they did not even solve the region’s overwhelming cultural differences when it was carved up into countries with arbitrary borders.
As a result, the United States and the world have been dragged into these conflicts to preserve access to their rich reserves of oil. President Trump’s energy policy freed the United States from being one of the largest importers of Middle Eastern oil. This change caused the region to confront the idea that their economies must modernize to meet the challenge of evolving energy technologies at some point in the future.
For example, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has seen steady progress towards a workable solution for nuclear fusion. In September, MIT announced a significant breakthrough in the design of SPARC, a precursor to a practical, emissions-free power plant:
SPARC is planned to be the first experimental device ever to achieve a “burning plasma” — that is, a self-sustaining fusion reaction in which different isotopes of the element hydrogen fuse together to form helium, without the need for any further input of energy. Studying the behavior of this burning plasma — something never before seen on Earth in a controlled fashion — is seen as crucial information for developing the next step, a working prototype of a practical, power-generating power plant.
It appears much of the Arab world is choosing economic progress and modernization over continued wars. Israel has positioned itself as an entrepreneurial and technology-driven economy. The idea of technology transfer for economic growth as well as for water desalination is winning. It was most certainly helped along with less dependence from the United States on foreign oil.
The Trump administration’s putting an end to Iranian appeasement was also key to moving the Arab world in the right direction. The entire world saw Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speak in from the United States Congress to warn of the danger Iran posed during the Iran Deal negotiation. Apparently, many of their Arab neighbors also see Iran as an existential threat.
By gutting decades of failed Middle Eastern policy, the Trump administration made significant gains toward peace. As if we needed further proof, President Trump announced this morning that Sudan will be normalizing relations with Isreal. The Arab nation will be joining Bahrain and United Arab Emirates as Muslim nations leading a reframing of diplomatic relations with Isreal.
Ultimately, the Biden energy plan will reverse all of the gains in the region. Just like California imports fossil-fuel energy from Arizona and Nevada when their green energy is not sufficient, the United States will return to a dependence on Middle Eastern oil when wind and solar are insufficient to serve our high-density urban centers and industrial economy.
This is why the warmongers from both parties are coalescing around Biden. So, if you are tired of endless wars and endless investment in foreign nations rather than at home, another four years of the Trump policies will solidify a different approach. A vote for Biden simply turns back the clock.
https://pjmedia.com/election/stacey-lennox/2020/10/23/trump-explains-the-secret-sauce-for-middle-east-peace-in-ten-seconds-n1081804
Biden's 'Transition' From Oil Comment Becomes a Big Fracking Problem in Pennsylvania
Joe Biden campaigned in Pennsylvania on Saturday and in three separate interviews by local media, was pressed about his comments during the debate about wanting to “transition” from fossil fuels to wind and solar power. He was also closely questioned about his views on fracking, that he still has trouble answering.
This has become a genuine issue in Pennsylvania, an energy-producing state with tens of thousands of jobs in the industry.
Fox News:
“Look I’m from Scranton, Pennsylvania. My great grandfather was a mining engineer. So I come from coal country. And I’m not talking about eliminating fracking, I just said no more fracking on federal lands,” Biden told CBS Philadelphia. “With regard to gas, oil, coal all of it, the transition is taking place having nothing to do with anything I’m proposing. The fact is that the fastest growing industries in the country are solar and wind. We can move in a direction where the transition takes place, so that people are not left behind, and we we got to invest in the new technologies.”
First of all, Biden said he would ban fracking, period.
Regarding fracking, Biden has been inconsistent with his long-term goals. He has regularly said that he only intends on banning new fracking on federal lands, but during a 2019 Democratic primary debate, he took a much more sweeping approach. The former vice president was asked whether there would be “any place for fossil fuels, including coal and fracking, in a Biden administration?”
Biden’s response: “No, we would — we would work it out. We would make sure it’s eliminated and no more subsidies for either one of those, either — any fossil fuel.”
Secondly, even as president, he might not have much to say about it. It’s a certainty that Biden will name a radical green to run the EPA. They will ban fracking as a first order of business. And the rest of the party will obediently fall in line.
And the “transition” from fossil fuels will not go quite as smoothly as Biden is letting on.
“What I said was, we’re gonna stop the subsidies for oil, which is about $40 billion. We’re going to take that money, invest it in new technologies for what they call carbon capture. We’re going to still need oil. We’re gonna still have combustion engines, We’re still going to need oil for many things, but what’s happening is you have to do it, and we can work toward getting it done so you can capture the carbon that comes from that gas and that oil. That’s what has to be done.”
We are going to see “creative destruction” on a scale not seen since the replacement of steam with oil and gas. There is going to be nothing orderly about it. Workers will lose their jobs. Companies big and small will disappear.
There will be blackouts, gas shortages, perhaps even heating oil shortages during the winter. It will happen because the government won’t let it happen as a matter of course. They will force the issue, picking and choosing winners and losers. There will be a lot of blood on the floor in corporate America and in the workshops and on the line in American factories. It will not end well for many.
To so cavalierly talk about such a massive shift in our economy without even mentioning a downside is irresponsible.
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2020/10/25/bidens-transition-from-oil-comment-becomes-a-big-fracking-problem-in-pennsylvania-n1085890
Biden's War on Oil Causing Headaches for Democrats in Tight Races
At Thursday night's presidential debate, Joe Biden came out in support of eliminating the oil industry, albeit not overnight. Previously, Biden had come out against fracking and fossil fuels. But the Democratic nominee made it known on Thursday that he's in lockstep with AOC and the far left's plans to ban the entire industry, which close political observers already knew.
Biden's outing as an anti-oil candidate sent shockwaves across battleground states where Biden's fellow Democrats are in tight congressional races and are now having to explain away Biden's vow to eliminate oil. Millions of jobs would be terminated if Biden wins the election and kills oil.
(Via The Hill)
Biden has rolled out nothing short of an entirely left-wing economic agenda and has never been forced to defend it on a public stage until Thursday,” said Josh Holmes, a Republican strategist and McConnell’s former chief of staff.
Holmes said Biden’s comments on oil could have “profound effect” in states such as Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Texas and others were there is what he called “a culture of energy production.”
...
Biden’s remarks will give Republicans a chance to put the economy and regulation in the spotlight for the final 10 days of the campaign, something they’ve wanted to do for months.
The National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) released a new television ad in Maine attempting to tie Democratic candidate Sara Gideon to “liberal out-of-staters” who “want a green new deal raising taxes on home heating oil.”
Biden walked right into the Republican talking points by pledging to end federal subsidies for the oil industry. One such subsidy, the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program is especially popular in Maine.
...
The former vice president tried to soften his statement after the debate, telling reporters as he was boarding his plane: “We’re not going to get rid of fossil fuels.”
“We’re not going to get rid of subsidies for fossil fuels,” he added.
Biden flips back and forth when questioned about his position on oil, a telltale sign he's lying. Couple his flip-flops with his candid remarks at the debate, and rest assured that Biden won't get in the way of his party's war on oil.
Biden's running mate, Kamala Harris, the most liberal member of Congress, has endorsed AOC's Green New Deal. The Democratic Party wants to follow California's lead and ruin the entire country to fight "climate change." California has done the most to fight climate change and by their own admission, it isn't working. California's leaders blame "climate change" for the worst wildfire season on record. So why should America follow California off the cliff by adopting similar ruinous policies that clearly don't work?
The economy needs to be rebuilt from the lockdowns. President Trump took the economy to new highs while Joe Biden presided over the slowest economic recovery since the Great Depression for eight years. Putting the oil industry out of business and continuing the lockdowns are not what America needs for the next four years.
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/bronsonstocking/2020/10/24/biden-elimination-of-the-oil-industry-causes-headaches-for-dems-in-tight-races-n2578726
Fracking Has Made America Great Again – We are Energy Independent for the First Time Since 1957
Fracking has become public enemy No. 1 in Democrat circles. It continues to be characterized as a “dangerous, new extraction technology.”
The spread of such misinformation in part fuels fears about hydraulic fracturing -- the real name of what is a decades-old practice in the petroleum industry to increase the yield in oil and gas wells.
Much like driving a wedge into a log, hydraulic fracturing involves pumping a gelled suspension of sand, sintered bauxite or some other proppant under pressure into an oil or gas well. The pressure generated by the pumping forces the fracturing fluid into the cracks and crevasses in a petroleum-rich formation increasing a well’s yield.
The fracturing fluid – really a gel - ultimately breaks and is pumped back to the surface leaving the proppant behind to maintain open the newly formed fissures.
During the oil boom in the 1980s, when almost every farm in Texas and Oklahoma had an oil well on its land, I was working with a team of chemists in the laboratories of Dynamit Nobel of America. We developed and patented a technology to delay the gelling of hydraulic fracturing fluids that allowed them to be pumped into the ground with less friction.
What I learned was that the fears over fracking “injecting dangerous chemicals” into the ground were unfounded.
Ponder the irony: A reservoir of naturally occurring petroleum is on its face, a cavern filled with dangerous chemicals, consisting largely of a “flammable mixture of hydrocarbons and other organic compounds.”
In contrast, the three main constituents of a fracturing fluid are water, an inert proppant and some form of guar gum, a common thickener used in many foods including ice cream to improve mouth feel.
The results of a published study in the Aug. 13, 2014 issue of Chemical and Engineering News concluded that “[the] chemical additives typically make up only about 0.5% of the fracking fluid, which is mostly water and sand… [F]ew of the roughly 90 commonly used compounds are toxic to people.”
It is no wonder that a 2016 EPA report on the potential for contamination of drinking water by hydraulic fracturing was inconclusive.
While there is risk in the adoption of any technology on a large scale – planes crash and kill people as do automobiles – we still drive and fly.
The trade off to any perceived risk with fracking – real or otherwise – is that in 2019, America became energy independent for the first time since 1957.
As misguided environmentalists clamor for an end to fracking, American Exceptionalism pushes ahead with technology that has made modern automobile engines more fuel efficient. And despite pulling out of the Paris Climate Agreement, we continue to lead the way with the largest carbon footprint reduction of any developed nation in the world.
That’s great for all of us.
https://townhall.com/columnists/gregoryrummo/2020/10/25/fracking-has-made-america-great-again--we-are-energy-independent-for-the-first-time-since-1957-n2578732
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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26 October, 2020
The Biden Family Green New Deal
Some will profit, while most people’s life, living standards and environment take a big hit
Paul Driessen
Some 90% of all US wells are now hydraulically fractured. Fracked wells in shale formations open up vast supplies of oil, natural gas and petroleum liquids that previously were locked up and inaccessible. Fracking conventional wells expands and prolongs production, leaving less energy in the ground.
Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, AOC, the Democrat Party and US environmentalists are determined to make climate change, the Green New Deal, and replacing fossil fuels with wind, solar, battery and biofuel power the centerpiece of their foreign and domestic policies. They would ban fracking outright – or price and restrict it out of existence through a slow, painful death of a thousand regulatory cuts.
That would cost millions of jobs and billions of dollars in annual royalty and tax revenues, send energy prices soaring, and end America’s newfound status as the world’s foremost oil and gas producer.
It would also hammer environmental quality, especially in sunny and windy locations, such as Western, Midwestern and coastal states. Their fossil fuel revenues would disappear; their wind and sunshine would be exploited; their open spaces, scenic areas and wildlife habitats would be blanketed with wind turbines, solar panels, transmission lines, and warehouses filled with backup power batteries.
But some would benefit greatly – including those with financial and other interests in mining, mineral processing and manufacturing related to wind, solar and battery technologies.
Hunter Biden’s email trove and growing cascades of other evidence continue to reveal fascinating Biden Family connections to China, Russia and Ukraine: countries that would profit mightily from a US Green New Deal, because they supply most of the metals, minerals and components that are absolutely essential under any GND vision.
Many news media, social media and search engines routinely spike, censor or bury stories that could harm the Biden candidacy, sow doubt about manmade climate chaos, or undermine claims that the GND transition would be easy, affordable, ecological, sustainable and painless. It would not be.
Wind and sunshine are certainly clean and renewable. Harnessing them to power America is not.
Fossil fuels still provide 80% of US energy. In 2018, they generated 2.7 billion megawatt-hours of electricity. Another 2.7 billion MWh worth of natural gas powered factories, emergency power systems, and furnaces, ovens, stoves and hot water heaters in restaurants and homes. Cars, trucks, buses, semi-trailers, tractors, bulldozers and other vehicles consumed the equivalent of another 2 billion MWh.
That’s 7.4 billion megawatt-hours per year that the GND would have to replace! We’d also have to generate another 142 million MWh per year to charge batteries for each week of windless, cloudy days.
The more we try to do so, the more we’d have to put turbines and panels in low quality wind and solar sites, where they’d generate electricity only 15-20% of the year: 80-85% below “nameplate capacity.”
That means this transformation to an all-electric nation would require millions of onshore wind turbines, thousands of offshore turbines, billions of solar panels, millions of vehicle battery modules, billions of backup energy storage battery modules, thousands of miles of new transmission lines, millions of vehicle charging stations, tens of billions of tons of concrete, steel, copper, plastic, cobalt, rare earth elements and countless other materials – and digging up hundreds of billions of tons of overburden and ores!
Even if the United States and world could somehow mine, process and smelt enough metals and minerals – and manufacture, transport and install all those turbines, panels, batteries and transmission lines – the GND would require the greatest expansion of mining, manufacturing and land use in human history.
With Democrats and Greens still adamantly opposed to mining anywhere in the USA – even though the USA likely has all those metals and minerals literally beneath our feet – America would be dependent on China, Russia and Ukraine for the critical materials that make wind turbines, solar panels and rechargeable batteries possible. US foreign and domestic policies would be held hostage.
Nearly all this mining, processing and manufacturing would require gasoline, diesel, natural gas and coal ... in foreign countries ... because those operations cannot be conducted with wind, solar and battery power. Global CO2 and other emissions would increase. Global atmospheric carbon dioxide levels would continue to rise. They would simply come from locations outside the USA.
Moreover, that overseas mining, processing and manufacturing would mostly take place under nearly nonexistent workplace safety, fair wage and child labor laws. The horrors we already see Africa’s Congo region would be minor compared to what would accompany GND demands for cobalt and other materials.
Replacing oil and gas for petrochemicals, pharmaceuticals and plastics would require importing those feed stocks or planting millions of acres in canola, soybean and other biofuel crops. The water, fertilizer, pesticide, tractor, harvester, processing and transportation requirements would be astronomical.
The wind, solar, battery and biofuel facilities would impact hundreds of millions of acres of America’s croplands, scenic areas, and plant and animal habitats. Raptors, other birds, bats, and forest, grassland and desert wildlife would suffer substantial losses and even be driven into extinction in many areas.
The GND would also mean ripping out perfectly good natural gas appliances, replacing them with electric models, installing rapid charging systems for vehicles, and upgrading household, neighborhood, state and national electrical systems to handle the extra loads. That would require still more raw materials.
Would Biden AOC & Co. require “responsible sourcing” for all GND materials and components, meaning certified compliance with all US wage, workplace safety, child labor and environmental laws?
Would they require that wind and solar companies go through an extensive, multi-year NEPA environmental review process for every industrial installation and transmission line? Demand compliance with the Endangered Species Act, Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act, Migratory Bird Treaty Act, Clean Water Act and other laws that have been strictly enforced for decades for other industrial facilities?
Or will they claim all those turbines, panels, batteries and power lines are needed to “save the planet from imminent climate cataclysms,” and thus must be exempted from wildlife and environmental laws? Will they claim killing birds, bats and other wildlife is “inadvertent” and “unintentional,” and thus should be excused or legalized – exempting even the massive slaughter associated with GND-scale installations?
Families, factories, hospitals, schools and businesses accustomed to paying 7-11˘ per kilowatt-hour for electricity would pay 22˘ per kWh as they already do in “green” US states – or even 35˘ a kWh as families now pay in Germany. Gasoline and natural gas prices would also skyrocket, until the GND banished those fuels. How many businesses would survive? How many jobs would disappear? How many people would have to join the ranks of those who must choose between heating and eating?
When electricity supplies cannot meet demand, or when California-style rolling blackouts hit, who would get cut off first? Politicians who imposed the GND and Deep State bureaucrats who operate it? Big Tech servers? Environmentalist groups and schools whose teacher unions backed the Biden-Harris-AOC Deal? Or innocent hospitals, factories, workers and families? Who would get to make those decisions?
If states or counties are forced to erect wind turbines, solar panels and transmission lines, can they decide to meet their own needs during shortages, before exporting electricity to progressive states and cities? Could they declare themselves fossil fuel sanctuaries and refuse to close mines and power plants?
Who will design and enforce the GND income confiscation and redistribution schemes, in the name of “social, environmental and economic justice” – with much of the redistribution likely going to ruling elites and their corporate and activist allies? Do we really want to further enrich the originators of COVID?
All these issues demand open, robust debate – which too many schools and universities, news and social media outlets, corporate and political leaders, and Antifa mobs continue to censor and cancel. America deserves answers, before November 3, and before any actions are taken on any Green New Deal.
Via email
EU to pass law to change the weather, they hope
EU leaders may flatter themselves that they’re doing something that matters, but it’s wildly optimistic to think the climate could be changed – at vast expense – by passing laws based on unproven shaky theories. What planet are they on?
– – –
European Union environment ministers meet in Luxembourg on Friday to seek a deal on a landmark climate change law, but they will leave a decision on a 2030 emissions-cutting target for leaders to discuss in December, reports Yahoo News.
The climate law will form the basis for Europe’s plan to slash greenhouse gas emissions, which will reshape all sectors, from transport to heavy industry, and require hundreds of billions of euros in annual investments.
It will fix in law the EU target to reach net zero emissions by 2050 and define the rules for how future EU climate targets are decided, if new scientific evidence requires more ambitious aims.
Ministers, who take decisions by majority, will seek a deal on these parts of the law on Friday.
A decision on the most politically sensitive part of the bill – a new 2030 emissions-cutting target for the EU – will be left for EU leaders to agree, unanimously, at a meeting in December.
The law will give Brussels “the legal possibility to act when those who make promises don’t deliver on the promises,” said EU climate policy chief Frans Timmermans at Friday’s meeting, which is taking place in person, despite much of the continent restricting gatherings as coronavirus infections surge anew.
The price of permits in the EU carbon market climbed by more than 5% on Friday in anticipation of the ministers’ deal. The EU’s climate targets are expected to tighten the supply of permits in the market.
https://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2020/10/23/eu-to-pass-law-to-change-the-weather-they-hope/
Minnesota just suffered its Largest Early-Season Snowstorm in Recorded History
This could mark the onset of global cooling or it could be just a weather phenomenon.
The article below is written from a viewpoint which does predict global cooling, based on solar cycles
By the close of Tues, Oct 20, many Minnesotans had received a taste of what the Grand Solar Minimum has to offer, as a record-busting early-season shot of polar cold and snow blasted the Midwestern U.S. state.
As of late Tuesday evening, the Minnesota State Patrol reported that 1,100 crashes and spinouts had occurred amidst the unseasonable conditions: between 11AM and 8:30PM, there had been 493 crashes, 614 spinouts, and 22 jackknifed semi-trucks — all resulting in 48 injuries.
The wintry storm system, which dropped up to 9 inches of snow in parts of metro, has officially gone down as Minnesota’s largest early-season snowstorm in recorded history, in books dating back around 140 years.
As reported minnesota.cbslocal.com, 9 inches were reported in Lakeville; 8.9 inches in Ellsworth, Wisconsin; 8 inches in Granite Falls; 8 inches in Red Wing, 7.4 inches at MSP Airport; and 7.1 inches in Woodbury.
In addition to this being the largest early-season accumulations in history, Tuesday’s dumping was also the second largest October snowstorm on record, coming a close second to 1991’s historic Halloween blizzard.
All this fresh powder only adds to the heavy falls witnessed in MN over the past week-or-so, it also contributes to an already above average start to the Northern Hemisphere’s 2020-21 snowpack season.
And just look at what’s on course to hit starting this weekend (linked below). There’s every chance this next round of early-season snow could break the all time October record held by the historic Halloween blizzard of 1991.
The COLD TIMES are returning, the mid-latitudes are REFREEZING in line with historically low solar activity, cloud-nucleating Cosmic Rays, and a meridional jet stream flow.
Both NOAA and NASA appear to agree, if you read between the lines, with NOAA saying we’re entering a ‘full-blown’ Grand Solar Minimum in the late-2020s, and NASA seeing this upcoming solar cycle (25) as “the weakest of the past 200 years”, with the agency correlating previous solar shutdowns to prolonged periods of global cooling here.
Furthermore, we can’t ignore the slew of new scientific papers stating the immense impact The Beaufort Gyre could have on the Gulf Stream, and therefore the climate overall.
https://electroverse.net/minnesota-just-suffered-its-largest-early-season-snowstorm-in-recorded-history/
It’s Not Just Fracking
The second and final debate between President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden on Thursday, October 22 covered several concerns of interest to the American public. One of the most important issues discussed was the issue of “fracking,” which is colloquial shorthand for hydraulic fracturing – a method of extracting petroleum resources deep-seated in geological formations via high-pressure liquid blasting.
The topic was part of a larger discussion about “climate change,” energy policy and where the two candidates stand in terms of vision and approach. When the subject of fracking came up, the former vice president seemed caught in past conflicting statements – an opening which President Trump seized, and where a number of commentators and analysts have suggested Biden fumbled. As Biden attempted to clarify shifting positions on the future of fracking, the president went on to name several states where fracking – and the fossil fuel energy business writ large – constitutes a significant portion of the economy. At least one of these states – Pennsylvania – has emerged as perhaps the most pivotal state this election cycle.
Targeted messaging in energy states is critical politically, particularly when a candidate has not been clear on their position and how their approach would impact real people.
But it’s not just fracking.
The purposeful dismantling of one particular industry – or, in more palatable but deceptive parlance, “transitioning” – would result in wide-arcing circles of economic erosion. What about the truckers, and railroads who transport the oil from the fields to the refineries? Or the mechanics and machinists who service the oil-fields – or the H.R. and placement companies who help find good people to work good jobs? Or the geologists who identify and sample new fields? How about the miners, processers and transporters of silica sand – which is used as a medium in the hydraulic fracturing process – along the Mississippi River? What about the manufacturers of specialized equipment and tools – who form a part of the economy that we’re trying desperately to rebuild – and their role in the energy business? The list of affected businesses and people goes on and on.
In fact, when you start to look at how important American energy independence is – and the contribution of fracking to that independence – one quickly realizes how dependent the rest of the economy is, across all 50 states, on this entire industry. One need look no further than the global economic slowdown and its impact on an energy state like North Dakota to see what a purposeful dismantling of the energy business across the country would look like.
In any modern dynamic free market economy, one particular industry or business does not exist in a vacuum. They are interdependent, where the exchange of goods and services is both competitive and complimentary, and where other companies develop and expand to support one another and meet demand. Out of this, communities grow, roots are cemented, and livelihoods flourish. Reversing that course through the systematic elimination of a core industry – such as fossil fuel extraction – can be devastating.
And let’s be honest – “transitions” are never as easy as they’re made out to be. Fanciful are the notions that when a core industry is eliminated, everyone previously employed will immediately find a job, or that ancillary businesses can simply be re-directed to other markets in a short amount of time. Some trades might be able to shift to new ground – but only if that alternative prospect already exists and is looking to hire – and not everyone laid off will find a new gig. Even if a business transition took six months – a relatively short time – for a person out of work, that’s six months of bills, anguish, and pressure. The natural competition of business in America is tough enough – why should politicians make things more difficult by instituting policies that target parts of the economy – often arbitrarily – for “transition?”
And this is where the rubber of Washington DC policy meets the real road in America: What sounds great on paper in a government or campaign office on Pennsylvania Avenue doesn’t always play out in Pennsylvania the State. And it doesn’t play out in other states that weave together America’s energy sector – California, Alaska, New Mexico, Louisiana, Wyoming, Montana, and the Dakotas, or Mississippi, Indiana, Wisconsin, and Minnesota – or Texas, Oklahoma and Ohio as the President suggested in the debate.
The oil and gas business has always been an extraordinarily complex, lifeblood industry that has made fortunes, built nations, driven prosperity, and determined the course of wars. For anyone who has read “The Prize”, Daniel Yergin’s monumental and outstanding Pulitzer Prize winning history of the oil industry, these facts should not be foreign. And so, when politicians suggest or hint they are open to eliminating or reducing American industries through government policy, don’t forget that with those purposeful changes come innumerable consequences for a multitude of Americans.
We all need to remember that it’s not just fracking.
https://townhall.com/columnists/connormartin/2020/10/24/its-not-just-fracking-n2578693
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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25 October, 2020
Trump, Biden clash again over fracking, oil industry at final debate
President Trump and Democratic nominee Joe Biden clashed again Thursday night over energy policy and how reform would impact American workers.
During their debate in Nashville, Tenn., Trump accused Biden of embracing a radical environmental agenda that would ban fracking and destroy the oil industry.
"He was against fracking," Trump said. "He said it ... until he got the nomination, went to Pennsylvania, then he said -- but you know what Pennsylvania, he'll be against it very soon because his party is totally against it."
"Fracking on federal land, I said, no fracking and/or oil on federal land," Biden shot back.
The exchange highlighted a point of contention that has come up numerous times in the race as fracking has been credited with providing hundreds of thousands of jobs in the U.S.
During a 2019 Democratic primary debate, Biden was asked whether there would be "any place for fossil fuels, including coal and fracking, in a Biden administration?"
Biden's response: "No, we would -- we would work it out. We would make sure it's eliminated and no more subsidies for either one of those, either -- any fossil fuel."
During Thursday's debate, Trump pressed Biden on whether he would shut down the oil industry.
"I would transition from the oil industry, yes," Biden responded.
Biden has also endorsed the Green New Deal, which calls, among other things, for dramatic reductions in carbon emissions by 2050. Conservatives have criticized the plan, arguing it would impose burdensome costs on U.S. families and businesses.
However, Biden and others on the left maintain that the country faces catastrophic consequences if it doesn't act to combat climate change. They've also forecasted massive economic benefits from the associated investments in infrastructure and other energy projects.
Biden's website claims his investments would create "millions of good, union jobs rebuilding America’s crumbling infrastructure" in addition to "1 million new jobs in the American auto industry."
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/biden-trump-final-debate-fracking
Support Next Generation Nuclear Power Generation with Better Regulation
Nuclear fusion is always 20 years away, or so goes the saying. Yet scientists are convinced that this time, it is closer than ever. A group of researchers at MIT recently published a series of seven papers purporting to prove the viability of a compact nuclear fusion reactor that the former are developing. As opposed to fission plants that split uranium atoms to release energy, fusion reactors mimic the sun’s energy production by colliding hydrogen atoms. This “fusing” process releases four times more energy than a fission reaction, while producing far less radioactivity and waste. If the MIT research is accurate, then the future of nuclear energy is very bright indeed.
Small Modular Reactors (SMRs), a type of next-generation nuclear fission technology, are also being developed, largely through private sector leadership. Though not as revolutionary as fusion technology, these smaller nuclear plants promise to be cheaper, faster to build, and safer than their older counterparts. Importantly, the fission technology is already fully established and commercially viable.
Much of the optimism surrounding nuclear advancements pertains to private-sector innovations being generated and fine-tuned by scientists and engineers around the world. Indeed, these innovators are rightly seen as the flag-bearers of the most revolutionary energy source discovered by humanity. Yet, it is impossible to overlook a crucial hurdle for any kind of innovation: the regulatory process. And while it’s typically best to keep bureaucracies away from new innovations, it is here that the government has the opportunity to learn from past mistakes, and be both bold and pioneering.
The major problems facing next-generation nuclear power, be it fusion or small modular reactors, are the licensing and regulatory requirements prescribed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). For decades, the only commercially viable nuclear plants have been large, light water-cooled reactors that have more or less remained stagnant in terms of design. The NRC has taken a prescriptive regulatory approach to these existing technologies. That means that the agency creates specific safety features and designs that each project must adhere to, rather than setting safety standards that allow companies to experiment with the most effective design, to submit for approval.
Not only does such an approach stifle innovation in reactor designs, but it also is representative of a better-safe-than-sorry, over-zealous regulatory regime. Studies show that nuclear regulations introduced in the 1970s increased the quantity of concrete per megawatt by 27 percent, electrical cable by 36 percent, steel by 41 percent, and piping by 50 percent.
One of the reasons why regulators have taken such a heavy-handed approach to nuclear power is the perceived danger of nuclear accidents. While the safety concern is overblown even for traditional designs—studies indicate that nuclear power is responsible for the fewest fatalities of any energy source—the NRC approach is downright absurd for next-generation nuclear reactors. Indeed, both fusion and SMR designs build in passive safety mechanisms that automatically shut down a plant in case of an accident. Applying an outdated, existing regulatory framework to a new generation of different, advanced reactor technologies is the surest way to stifle much-needed innovation and scale.
While SMRs have already been going through this process with the NRC, at great cost in money and time, regulatory streamlining is needed to further boost the rollout of these small reactors, and provide fusion designs a smooth path to commercial viability. Ensuring certainty in the regulatory process is crucial to the future of nuclear energy.
First, it is vital that any licensing process designed by the NRC be performance-based and technology-inclusive, rather than prescriptive. Indeed, as the British scientist Matt Ridley and I have pointed out on this website before, innovation thrives off of experimentation, trial and error, and creativity. Allowing various reactor designs to compete for cost-effectiveness and safety will place upward pressure on innovation, and downward pressure on both time and cost.
Second, as has been called for by the Director of the Fusion Industry Association, nuclear fusion and fission should be entirely separated in the regulatory process. Given fusion reactors’ inherent safety designs, it would be counter-productive to confine them to the regulatory paradigm of fission reactors. A specific framework must be devised that only applies to nuclear fusion reactors, and avoids entangling older generation regulations with newer, safer plant designs. This framework should take into account fusion’s dramatically lower risk profile.
Ultimately, innovation comes from the private sector and scientists, but can only thrive when unencumbered by government distortion. While it is of course sensible for politicians to ensure that next-generation nuclear reactors are safe, a more market-based, light-touch regulatory framework is necessary to avoid stifling innovation. A clear pathway that provides regulatory certainty for decades to come is crucial in ensuring that the United States stakes its place as the world-leader on next-generation nuclear technologies.
https://www.humanprogress.org/support-next-generation-nuclear-power-generation-with-better-regulation/
World wheat crop tips record
Greenies are constantly warning that we about to run out of food. We're not
Thomas Malthus, Adolf Hitler and Paul Ehrlich are the best known prophets of food shortages but there are many others. It is a perennial scare
IMPROVED late-season yield prospects in greater Europe and Australia have lifted the estimate for global wheat production by 5.9 million tonnes (Mt) from the previous Agricultural Market Information Systems (AMIS) estimate released last month.
The lift was offset by a total 1Mt decline in projections in Canada and Argentina.
The net 4.8Mt increase lifts the forecast for the world 2020-21 wheat crop to a record 764.9Mt, pipping by just a few million tonnes the previous records set in 2019-20 and 2017-18 (chart 1).
This month’s upward revisions included Australia and the EU, both up 2.2Mt from last month’s estimate, a 1Mt lift for the Russian Federation, and Ukraine up 500,000t.
Utilisation in 2020-21 is expected to grow at a slightly faster pace than projected earlier, supported by stronger feed use in China.
Trade in 2020-21 (July-June) is also expected to grow following brisk import demand, especially by China and Egypt.
Stocks ending in 2021 are lifted by almost 3Mt following this month’s upwards revisions in the EU, the Russian Federation, and Ukraine.
Conditions mostly favourable
In Argentina, conditions are mixed, with recent rainfall in the south improving conditions. However, in the north and west regions, crop conditions are poor and mostly irreversible due to prolonged dryness throughout the season.
In Australia, conditions are generally favourable except for Queensland which experienced persistent dryness and Western Australia following a dry September.
By contrast, New South Wales is showing exceptional conditions with an expansion of sown area.
In Canada, spring wheat harvest is progressing under favourable conditions with slightly above average yields expected.
In the EU, winter-wheat sowing has begun under generally favourable conditions except for France and Romania where dryness from the summer persists.
In the Russian Federation, spring-wheat harvesting is wrapping up under favourable conditions. Winter-wheat sowing is progressing under dry conditions, particularly in the south, which is hampering emergence and more rainfall is needed before winter dormancy.
In Ukraine, sowing of winter wheat is beginning under mixed conditions due to drought across much of the country, which is delaying sowing for much of the crop.
In the US, sowing of winter wheat is ongoing under favourable conditions.
https://www.graincentral.com/markets/world-wheat-crop-tips-record-amis/
Cleaner Faster? Trump to Let Dishwashers Use More Water
The Trump administration has finalized plans to release a new rule allowing one class of dishwashers to clean a load in less than an hour.
Dishwashers on average take about two and a half hours to wash a load of dishes because of government regulations, more than twice as long as it took the appliances to clean plates, glasses, utensils and other items a generation ago, according to data from Competitive Enterprise Institute, a free-market think tank.
The Energy Department finalized the rule Monday, and the actual regulatory text will be posted in the Federal Register by the Department of Energy in two weeks, according to administration officials.
“President Trump has once again made good on his promise to free Americans from ludicrous government regulations—this time bringing a commonsense reform to dishwashers,” Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought said in a public statement. “Dishes now washed in an hour or less! This is yet another example of President Trump’s promises made, promises kept on deregulation.”
The Department of Energy received a petition from the Competitive Enterprise Institute to define a new class of products under the Energy Policy and Conservation Act for residential dishwashers.
The new product class would cover dishwashers with a cycle time, for the “normal” cycle, of less than one hour from washing through drying, according to the Office of Management and Budget.
The Energy Department published the petition and request for comments in the Federal Register on April 24, 2018. The department granted the petition for rulemaking and proposed the new product class.
The Energy Department will consider appropriate energy and water use limits for such a product class, if adopted, in a separate rulemaking, according to OMB.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2020/10/22/cleaner-faster-trump-to-let-dishwashers-use-more-water/
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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23 October, 2020
Five Things The President Should Say About Climate Change
Many Republicans likely grimaced when they learned that climate change was among the topics for the final presidential debate: They assume that’s a tough one for the President and any conservative.
But the President has a lot of good news and a positive policy agenda to share. Here are five key points that the president should hit.
1. The United States has consistently led the world in technological development to address new challenges, and climate change is no different.
Most Americans agree that climate change is real and want the country to take action to reduce our carbon footprint. The good news is that we are already doing that, and more successfully than about any other nation.
From 2005 to 2017, U.S. energy-related carbon dioxide emissions fell by 14 percent while the rest of the world increased emissions by 20 percent. Since then, U.S. emissions have only risen by 1 percent. America’s environment has improved and our carbon footprint has declined because of innovation: we are making traditional energy sources cleaner and using more renewable energy sources. This is the trend we want to continue.
2. Private companies are leading the way in developing improved renewable energy
Renewable energy producers are succeeding in the energy market, by finding more efficient and effective delivery methods. General Electric recently announced its Haliade-X offshore wind turbine, which will produce 45 percent more energy than any other offshore wind turbine today. Meanwhile, solar power utility production grew 74-fold from 2009 to 2018 and the small scale production on rooftops almost tripled in the four years following 2014. Finally, since its first use back in 1972, carbon capture and storage (CCS) usage has grown and today is being used through the United States with over two dozen additional projects in development across the country. The Shute Creek CCS facility captures approximately 365 million cubic feet per day of carbon dioxide, equivalent to removing more than 1.5 million cars from the road.
This kind of market-driven innovation is what we need, and would be stymied by heavy-handed government mandates such as those advanced in the Green New Deal.
3. Fracking and natural gas play an important role in America’s clean energy future.
Don’t attack Biden for his back-and-forth stance on fracking. Instead explain how critical fracking has been in creating a cleaner energy mix for America. The fracking boom of the early 2000s has made natural gas the main source of energy in America. The reliability of natural gas allows it to complement intermittent renewable energy sources while the affordability of the gas has led it to overcome coal and become the largest source of electricity in the United States, helping the nation to lower our emissions dramatically in the last two decades. Why would we want to reverse directions on this?
4. We need to improve energy storage capabilities so we can incorporate more renewable energy.
Climate change activists push for commitments by companies and nations to use a certain percentage of renewable energy by a certain year. As nice as these commitments might sound, we can’t scale up and rely solely on wind, solar and other renewable energy sources until we can store the energy produced by them. While energy storage technology has improved in recent years, it is nowhere near the capacity that commitments made by companies and nations across the world demand. In order to encourage private development of energy storage, the U.S. Department of Energy launched the Energy Storage Grand Challenge, a program designed to accelerate the development, commercialization and utilization of new energy storage technologies. This is the type of government policy that we need - innovative ways to incentivize the development of critical technology - not setting unrealistic goals or restrictive regulations.
5. The United States should continue to take a balanced approach to combating climate change.
Unrealistic energy mandates that lead to unreliable power are dangerous and destructive. We witnessed this in California, with the blackouts experienced by thousands in California. In Europe, we’ve seen mandates lead to crippling increases in energy costs, particularly harming lower-income families. America can do better. Americans need a reliable and efficient energy supply, while integrating cleaner technologies as the capabilities improve and further reduce our carbon footprint.
The United States has long been a climate leader. America should continue the work she’s begun by continuing to develop new and better technologies to combat climate change. We all want to fight climate change. But let’s take the practical and proven path forward.
https://townhall.com/columnists/charlottewhelan/2020/10/21/five-things-the-president-should-say-about-climate-change-n2578452
Climate “catastrophe” myths, realities and why you should care
Those of us who reject the idea that mankind controls Earth’s thermostat do so for many reasons. As yet there exists no physical evidence to link the steady growth of carbon dioxide beginning in the 1950s with the erratic atmospheric temperature record which goes back to the 1850s. Nor has there been any acceleration in the historical record of storm frequencies or intensities, droughts, floods, wild–fires, species extinctions, and all the rest of unsupported propaganda announced daily in the media. The oceans are rising, but at a constant leisurely 7 inches per century.
It is more logical to assume Earth’s temperatures are a result of natural causes, as has been the case for all time even before man or animals walked the Earth. We know we are rebounding from a Little Ice Age that ended around the time Washington was fighting near Valley Forge. This warming has caused the release of carbon dioxide from the oceans, which is responsible for the greening of the Earth in recent decades. For the record the total warming of the atmosphere since 1880 has been about one degree centigrade, in contrast with predictions of a 3-4 degree rise by the United Nations supported computer models.
The obvious reason the distorted ideas mentioned above are so prevalent is that more than a billion dollars a day is spent world wide promoting efforts to stop climate change regardless of man’s inability to do so. Much of that money is spent attempting to stop the use of fossil fuels which if ever achieved would destroy civilization as it is known today except in the most impoverished nations.
Major reasons why Earth’s climate has continued changing through billions of years are: variations in radiation coming from the sun, variations in Earth’s orbit and tilt, variations in cloud cover, ocean current oscillations, volcanism, drifting of the continents and many other poorly understood variable factors. It is incredulous that our government spends $billions of your taxes trying to pin down the earth’s thermostat with a few minor variables fed into mathematical computer models that never have nor ever will give sensible answers.
Prior to the industrial revolution which began in the early 1800s the temperature was as erratic as today with many periods in the past 12,000 years warmer than today. Alternating cold periods really made life most difficult with life expectancies below 30 years until fossil fuels came along to lessen man’s burden. Now in all parts of the world lifespan has risen above 70 years regardless of climate. Instead of terrible catastrophes predicted by environmental activists, humanity prospers.
The soaring global warming that was predicted never occurred, so it was renamed climate change where the activists could never go wrong as the climate and weather are always changing. They were terribly wrong about the warming. According to the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Agency, the warmest decade on record was the 1930s. NOAA records show that 23 state high-temp-erature records were set in the 1930s while only two state high-temperature records were set in the past 20 years.
And yet the real apocalypse is not global warming, it is the elimination of fossil fuels and nuclear power, which must be avoided at all cost or we will have to give up our very way of life. Without these fuels modern agriculture and food delivery services will no longer be able to feed the world’s people. Neither wind turbines nor solar panels, nor the enormous batteries required to back up these intermittent sources, nor anything made of concrete or steel or many other materials, can be manufactured without fossil fuels.
But fear not about vital materials or processes playing out as a result of environmental zealots or political wrong-headedness. Realistically the effect of any significant cut-back of fossil fuels will be much higher energy costs followed by soaring prices for all products we use including food, water, transportation, and housing. Any administration attempting such cutbacks will be faced with protests from the entire population wishing to have their comfortable lives restored. These inevitable effects have already occurred in several European countries and Australia as they attempted to cut back on fossil and nuclear fuels. Few of us desire to live without our I-Phones or Amazon deliveries, so it will be amusing to watch environ-mentalists boast about operating without carbon-based fuels in the coming decades as their lives come crashing down around them.
In reality, worldwide, a wind or a solar power plant has never and can never replace a coal or gas fired electrical generation plant, but always must remain a parasitic appendage to the electric grid. Because of intermittency, wind or solar plants create only erratic bursts of electricity, thereby placing stress on the grid, a grid that must maintain rock steady voltage and fre-quency even on cloudy and windless days. This can only be accomplished by supplementing the intermittent wind or solar power with electrical power from fossil fuel sources capable of changing power rapidly.
A further insanity regarding wind and solar are the areas they require to produce the same 1000 megawatts derived from a typical fossil fuel power plant taking up less than one square mile of land. A comparable wind farm consists of over 3000 turbines and requires over 200 square miles of land area. An equivalent solar farm would require millions of panels covering about half that amount of land.
Renewable energy zealots claim that industrial-scale batteries will solve the intermittency problems by storing power from the wind and solar farms, and then returning a steady stream of electricity as needed. Batteries with sufficient capacity to do this are now and will always be unaffordable. This includes even Elon Musk’s Tesla batteries which are planned for a huge solar facility near Las Vegas. Some such batteries are already being installed by electrical utilities around the country on a smaller scale. Keep your eyes peeled for future brownouts and blackouts resulting from these questionable projects.
We ran some numbers on Colorado’s desire to be an all renewable state, requiring shuttering all coal and gas fired power plants. With a population of 6 million Colorado would require 5.6 megawatt hours of battery storage costing over one trillion dollars or about $167,000 per person. Assuming battery storage for a family of four, using Tesla battery packs needing replacement every ten years, the cost of batteries alone would approach that of a mortgage on a $2 million home. Solar energy supplements with government subsides can reduce the cost of energy for some homeowners in some areas, but being totally off the grid is either expensive or without many amenities.
One of the main factors affecting rising electricity prices and higher utility bills, is the increased use of subsidized renewable energy. Operating costs for coal and nuclear power has traditionally been between 2 and 3 cents per kilowatt hour (kWh) and natural gas has been between 3 and 10 cents a kWh, while wind power with government subsidies is between 15 and 25 cents a kilowatt hour.
Since Germany became largely dependent upon wind and solar sources, average energy rates have risen to above 35 cents per kWh, compared with U.S. rates of 10 to 13 cents. Unless free markets are again allowed to govern our energy industries we can expect our energy prices to also double and triple in coming years under any federal administration that promotes renewable energy.
Today 29 U.S. states plus the District of Columbia have renewable Energy Mandates designed to force utilities to purchase certain specified percentages of their electricity from renewable energy sources. This is anything but a free market in energy. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the states with renewable mandates have electricity prices that average 26% higher than those without. How much more would we pay if renewable sources became the sole source of our electricity?
Coal, oil and natural gas have been the overwhelming choices of fuels particularly for developing countries. Worldwide fossil fuel usage doubled during the period from 1980 through 2015 and expanded by more than a factor of five in both China and India. Meanwhile instead of the predicted terrible climate disasters, life expectancy grew by 15% (from 65 to 75 years) in China and by 34% (from 49 to 66 years) in India; monthly income increased by 1500% in China and 400% in India. Infant mortality rates decreased by 70% in China and by 58% in India, and malnutrition plummeted by 40% in both countries during that same 35–year period of increased use of abundant and affordable fossil fuels.
Surprise, surprise all major measures of U.S. air and water pollution decreased during this period. All these beneficial numbers relate directly to the availability of inexpensive energy from carbon–based fuel. Carbon dioxide continued to increase this entire period, increasing the growth rates of our forests and food crops while having absolutely no negative bearing on our planet. There is more! Over the period we are discussing, climate related deaths declined 98% to near zero. Why? Again, more available inexpensive energy enabled more people to be rescued and saved from fires, floods, and storms, etc., and hospitals have become steadily more effective. Sadly, if Mr. Biden claims the Presidency of the United States, the nation probably will begin to move backward in time just as Europe appears to have done.
The example of Europe is pertinent. In June 2000, the European Union (EU) launched the European Climate Change Programme which promoted the build–out of wind and solar capacity. Feed-in tariffs established artificially high prices for electricity from wind and solar sources, while mandates established priorities for the renewables over conventional sources.
Wind turbines were constructed and installed by the thousands and roof–top solar panels by the millions, costing the various governments more than a trillion dollars between 2000 and 2016. Residential electricity prices soared across Europe, approaching 40 cents per kWh in both Germany and Denmark. Large subsidies are now required for both renewable and conventional energy in order to keep the lights on. California is headed down this road regardless of who claims the Whitehouse in November, and several other states are also flirting with these disastrous anti-fossil-fuel policies. These are crazy times when brilliant German engineers stoop down to shoot themselves in the foot. Can we be far behind
https://www.cfact.org/2020/10/21/climate-catastrophe-summary-for-thoughtful-friends/
A staggering rise in dishonesty
The UN did as only the UN can do, putting out a supposedly authoritative scientific report on a “staggering” rise in climate disasters over the last 20 years that was seized upon with enthusiasm by the usual suspects. Regrettably the report itself turned out to be a climate disaster when it was pointed out that according to the data in the report disasters have been declining globally over the past 20 years. Calls for the report’s retraction went unheeded, naturally, the fact that the conclusions were the exact opposite of the evidence being considered insufficient grounds for the UN to admit error.
If you’re wondering how they could be so stupid, it’s tempting to say lots and lots of practice. And to point to the undoubted fact that climate alarmists have become so accustomed to running the table in the media and politically by dismissing their opponents as moral and mental defectives that they’ve become lazy. But the technical answer is that they compared 2000-2019 with an earlier period, 1980-1999, in which data was known to be collected far less rigorously, so the number of disasters in the earlier period was understated.
As Paul Homewood observed, after citing readily available and widely known details of the process, “Put simply, many more disasters are recorded nowadays because of better reporting systems. But this does not mean more are actually occurring.”
If you think the UN was cherry-picking, you’re right. If you think it was shamelessly cherry-picking, you’re completely right. As Homewood shows, the improved (and better-funded by USAID) data collection system kicked in right at the end of… well, you saw it coming, right? The 1990s. Indeed, “there is a sharp jump in 1999/2000”. Exactly the break between the two data sets the UN compared. It’s not a subtle error; indeed it is hard to convince oneself it is innocent though as so often, people very sure of what they’re going to find often manage to find it in a process of unconscious self-deception rather than the deliberate deceit of others.
Homewood’s point is underlined by one category in which we do seem to have fairly reliable data, namely deaths from natural disasters or, as the UN prefers to call them, “climate-related disasters”. Deaths are more likely to be noticed and recorded than other less serious results even of very serious events. And, he says, “Note that despite the claimed increase in disasters, the death toll has nearly halved”, from 995,300 deaths due to “3,656 climate-related events” in the earlier period to 510,837 deaths due to a reported “6,681 climate-related disasters” in the latter.
It’s revealing that the report itself refers to “events” in the earlier period and “disasters” in the latter. Because it’s not science, it’s propaganda in the worst sense of that word.
https://climatediscussionnexus.com/2020/10/21/a-staggering-rise-in-dishonesty/
Australia: Financial case for Snowy Hydro 2.0 just doesn't hold water
A boondoggle initiated by former PM Turnbull to placate the Greenies
To begin, the true cost has not been admitted but is creeping up. This cost is in two parts – money paid by the government to take full ownership of Snowy Hydro and the cost of the project itself. The federal government, which only had shares in 13 per cent of Snowy Hydro at the start of this process, paid NSW and Victoria $6.3 billion to buy them out, based on a “fair market value” for Snowy Hydro of $7.8 billion. Allowing for inflation, this was more than double the value estimated as part of a failed privatisation attempt in 2006. The government’s total investment was increased to $9.18 billion with an equity injection/subsidy of a further $1.38 billion.
Sure, the government will now stand to get the full dividends but these are shrinking, as revealed in the latest annual report published this week ($218 million last financial year?), and indicate a poor investment return, even pre-Snowy 2.0.
In March 2017, the project was estimated to cost $2 billion. In April last year, a contract for part construction was let at $5.1 billion, to a syndicate made up of Italy’s Salini Impregilo, South Africa's Clough and US company Lane Construction. The latest cost estimate, declared in the recent Standard and Poor credit assessment, was $5.7-$6.2 billion, which excludes many significant costs, especially transmission, bringing the government’s total exposure to date to more than $15 billion.
It is significant that S&P downgraded the credit standing of Snowy Hydro to near junk status in September, even though the capital injection was ostensibly to prop up the credit rating so a final investment decision could be made.
S&P also noted that: "We could lower our ratings if we were to believe that ... timely and adequate support from the government is not forthcoming." They also said: "We expect that Snowy will not undertake any other major projects (such as additional gas-fired generation) in a manner that would place pressure on the balance sheet of the company, or without appropriate support from the shareholders."
This provides important context to Morrison’s threat to use Snowy to build gas-fired generation in the Hunter if the private sector fails to commit by April next year to provide an adequate replacement for the Liddell coal-fired power station.
Snowy Hydro has claimed exaggerated net benefits of $4.4 billion to $6.8 billion, way short of the likely cost. The business case just doesn’t stack up, with costs seriously understated and revenues overstated. The government has made extraordinary, open-ended commitments to Snowy – and taxpayers are carrying the risk.
The Australian Energy Market Operator's Integrated System Plan has indicated that Snowy 2.0 will not be needed for another 10 years, not today, as Snowy management has claimed. This is evidenced by the historically low use of the pumped storage component of Tumut 3 station. AEMO forecasts less than half the output that Snowy has assumed. Far more efficient and cheaper storage alternatives are available.
The government also claims that Snowy 2.0 will put downward pressure on electricity prices and create jobs. Yet its own modelling shows higher prices from 2032 to 2047, and these price forecasts exclude the significant costs of transmission. Generation may push prices lower, but pumping will push them higher. At 2000MW, Snowy 2.0 will be the largest demand in the market, and pumping is required for 133 per cent of the time of generation due to losses. Moreover, how much of pumping power will be coal-fired?
As to jobs, the partial EIS suggests just eight to 16 operational jobs after construction.
As a pumped hydro project Snowy 2.0 also has its weaknesses - the 27-kilometre gap between the two reservoirs is about double the longest anywhere else in the world, resulting in high water friction losses, and the storage capacity of the lower reservoir is smaller.
The significance of the environmental impact on Kosciuszko National Park should also not be dismissed. This includes the project's size, which covers thousands of hectares, including hundreds of hectares of crucial habitats; the dumping of millions of cubic metres of spoil (some contaminated); more than 100 kilometres of access roads and tracks; clearways measuring 120 to 200 metres wide for the 10 kilometres of two double-circuit 330kV transmission lines; depressed water tables above the tunnel; the compounding of bushfire damage; and the visible scars on the landscape. It is certainly the largest, and perhaps the only, significant commercial/industrial project allowed in our national parks.
It should also be recognised that this project is not vital to the transition to renewables and it creates about 50 million tonnes of greenhouse gases during construction and operation.
Even though government spending is essential to our COVID-19 recovery, taxpayers want assurances of value for their money. Energy experts have been sceptical about Snowy 2.0 from the outset. It is essential that there be a full and genuinely independent assessment of the project before another dollar is committed or spent.
https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/financial-case-for-snowy-hydro-2-0-just-doesn-t-hold-water-20201021-p5677c.html
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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22 October, 2020
Crisis looms in alarmist climate science
By David Wojick
Climate science is dominated by alarmists addicted to the idea that increasing carbon dioxide will cause dangerous global warming. How much warming is thus the central scientific question.
This question has been surprisingly difficult to answer despite 40 years of research, costing tens of billions of dollars. Now the issue is exploding because two different answers are emerging, one harmlessly low and the other dangerously high. This divergence is a crisis for the alarmist community. How they handle it remains to be seen.
What follows is a slightly technical explanation of the situation.
The issue centers on a benchmark estimate of the impact of increasing CO2 on global temperature. This is called the “equilibrium climate sensitivity” or ECS. The basic question is what will the global average temperature be when the CO2 level is double the supposedly original level of 280 ppm? That is, what will it be when we hit 560 ppm.
However, since it may take the climate system some time to adjust to this new high level, the question is what the temperature will be when the system equilibrates to this doubling, which may be some time after we hit 560. Also, this is about sensitivity, so ECS is not the new high temperature. It is the number of degrees C higher than the original temperature that this new high temperature will be.
So if the new high temperature is, say, 2.2 degrees C higher then ECS = 2.2 degrees.
Technically ECS is often an abstraction, something that only happens in climate models, but model ECS is taken as an important estimate of real ECS. In the models ECS is often estimated by simply doubling the CO2 instantaneously, whereas in reality this takes centuries.
All this said, I can now explain the emerging crisis.
For many decades the accepted model estimates of ECS have ranged from 1.5 to 4.5 degrees C. Different models give different values, but the acceptable range has not changed. That the range is so big has been a policy problem. Warming as little as 1.5 degrees might be harmless, while 4.5 might be dangerous. But the ECS range has been stubbornly persistent, refusing to narrow to a specific value.
Now, suddenly, there is a huge new problem. ECS has exploded! It is not that it is higher, or lower it is both. Two new lines of research have diverged sharply on the estimated value of ECS.
The first line of research takes a new approach called observational ECS. The idea is that since the CO2 level is almost half way to doubling we should be able to derive ECS empirically from the observed relationship between CO2 increase and temperature increase.
There have been a number of observational studies and many are getting ECS values well below 1.5, which are harmless indeed. Values of 1.2 and 1.3 are common. But at the same time there has been a new wave of modeling studies and these are getting ECS values way above 4.5, which would be truly dangerous. Here values of 5.2 and 5.3 are to be found.
Note that the modeling community is divided over accepting these new hot model numbers. After all, they imply that the modeling done over the last forty years or so has been wrong, including a lot of the recent modeling which is still within the old range.
The upshot of all this is that the science of ECS is in a shambles. Given that ECS addresses the core science of climate alarmism, this is truly a crisis. Has the modeling been wrong for 40 years? Is it wrong now? What about observation, which is supposed to rule in science? The scientific method says observation trumps theoretical modeling.
This is also a policy crisis. If we have no idea how sensitive the climate system will be to increasing CO2 levels then we have no basis for making climate change policy. If the observation values are right then there simply is no climate emergency.
How will this huge new uncertainty play out? Fortunately we will get at least a glimpse fairly soon. The latest IPCC assessment report (AR6) is presently under review and should be out in the next year or so. This report is supposed to review the state of climate change science, albeit from an alarmist point of view. How the IPCC handles the exploding ECS range will be interesting to see, at the very least. They may choose to ignore it because it has to hurt alarmism. They may simply drop mention of the ECS altogether, it now being very inconvenient. But this glaring omission will be easy to call out.
Or they may only acknowledge the hot higher values, which favor alarmism. Here they risk making modeling look stupid (which it is). Plus this omission of critical evidence will also be easy to call out. With the ECS range exploding the IPCC is caught between a hot rock and a cold hard place. So is alarmism. Stay tuned.
https://www.cfact.org/2020/10/20/crisis-looms-in-alarmist-climate-science/
Trump touts fracking policy in Pennsylvania rally, says Biden 'will shut it all down'
President Trump told backers at an Erie, Pa., rally Tuesday night that the battleground state is crucial to his chances of winning re-election, and his stance on fracking is crucial to the Keystone state.
“You know if we win Pennsylvania we win the whole thing,” Trump said.
Trump spent the rally promoting his pro-fracking stance in comparison to his challenger, Democratic candidate Joe Biden’s somewhat mercurial position on the subject.
“The Democrat Party hate fracking, they hate coal, good beautiful clean coal,” Trump said Tuesday night. “They hate American energy and Joe Biden will shut it all down.”
Trump used his rally in Erie to show why he thinks he would be better for American energy policy and used a portion of the event to show a campaign clip of Biden’s and vice-presidential candidate Kamala Harris’ stances on fracking.
The mashup of clips showed Biden saying “I guarantee you, we’re going to end fossil fuels. No new fracking. I’d gradually move away from fracking.”
Trump has taken issue with Biden’s stance on fracking after the former vice president recently said he would not “ban fracking,” but his energy policy does state that he intends to “move away” from the controversial energy practice.
Trump called his video debut a “Trump Broadway play,” and told his supporters, “I had it done specifically for the people of Erie because you guys look like people who like energy, you like being energy independent.”
Trump said that Biden would destroy American energy in an attempt to attack the middle class and gain a “socialist" foothold in the government.
Democrats are full of "hate and rage and scorn for the middle class, and for everybody,” Trump claimed.
“Only by voting for me can you save your fracking in Pennsylvania,” Trump said Tuesday night. “You are going to reject the radical left.”
The president then referenced an opinion article in the Wall Street Journal that claimed if Biden were to be elected, the average American family could lose $6,500 a year in income. Trump said this was likely because “for the last 47 years Joe Biden has been outsourcing your jobs, offshoring your factories and selling out the American worker.”
“And who knows it better than Pennsylvania?” Trump asked the crowd.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-touts-fracking-policy-in-pennsylvania-rally-says-dems-hate-fracking
Google Promotes Maine Shellfish Scare – As Production Sets Record
Google News is promoting claims that global warming is killing off Maine’s shellfish. However, objective data show that Maine is producing a record aquaculture harvest and Maine’s lobster catch is also setting records.
At the top of search results today for “climate change,” Google News is promoting a Sci Tech Daily article titled, “Iconic Food Web Threatened by Climate Change.” The article cites a dubious new study asserting a decline in Maine shellfish during the past 20 years.
“A dataset collected over two decades, including numbers of five species of mussels, barnacles, and snails, shows that all have been experiencing declines,” claims the article.
As the title of the article makes clear, the article blames the decline on climate change. Nevertheless, the authors speculate many factors may be causing the asserted decline, including invasive crabs that feed on shellfish, pollution, and overharvesting.
Data from the Maine Department of Marine Resources (DMR) throws cold water on the assertion that global warming is killing off Maine’s shellfish. The Maine DMR reports that Maine’s total aquaculture harvest value set a new record last year. The same is true for blue mussels, which were featured in the Sci Tech Daily article. The same is true for Maine oysters.
Some people may argue that aquaculture harvests are not necessarily an apples-to-apples comparison with the number of wild marine animals. However, if global warming were imposing stress on wild marine-life populations, that same temperature stress should show up in marine aquaculture production. Instead, Maine aquaculture production is setting records. Indeed, Maine mussel production is currently double what it was just a decade ago. Maine oyster production is quadruple what it was a decade ago. That is not what one would expect in increasingly temperature-stressed conditions.
Also, while the study promoted by Google News and Sci Tech Daily relies on a speculative assessment of shellfish numbers, Maine’s wild lobster catch is also setting records. The Maine DMR reports that each of the 10 highest annual lobster catches occurred during the past 10 years. Lobster catches in Maine are presently double what they were just 20 years ago.
If global warming is decimating Maine’s shellfish and other marine life, Mother Nature sure has a strange way of showing it.
https://climaterealism.com/2020/10/google-promotes-maine-shellfish-scare-as-production-sets-record/
Australian coal mining company says reactivated mine will be 'no risk' to Sydney's drinking water, but locals are wary
There's no such thing as a happy Greenie. They make themselves feel significant by opposing things
A New South Wales coal mining company that wants to expand a mothballed operation beneath Sydney's drinking water catchment says it has "engineered out" any risk to the environment.
Wollongong Coal is seeking approval from the State Government to extract 3.7 million tonnes of coal over five years from its Russell Vale mine.
During a two-day public hearing of the Independent Planning Commission (IPC), chief executive Warwick Lidbury said the company would use a bord-and-pillar mining method to mitigate subsidence.
"The board of Wollongong Coal has committed to complete this project and future projects utilising an environmentally friendly process," he said.
"It excludes longwall mining and has engineered out the risk associated with mining under the water catchment, as well as the noise generated, air quality, and the visual impacts on the pit top area.
"The extraction plan will ensure no cracking of the strata, no additional loss of water from the catchment, no adverse effects of the water quality on the surface, no adverse effects on the upland swamps, no effects that will increase bushfire risk and no effects on any Aboriginal sites."
The colliery has been in care and maintenance since 2015 and its owners are $1 billion in debt.
It is the third time Wollongong Coal, which is owned by Indian business Jindal Steel and Power Limited (JSPL), has significantly amended its expansion proposal since 2009.
The Department of Planning, Industry and Environment (DPIE) has now recommended the IPC approve the project after what it described as an "exhaustive process".
"The revised bord-and-pillar mining method addressed the key concerns raised in previous reports, in relation to the uncertainty around subsidence and groundwater impacts," director of resource assessments, Steven O'Donoghue, said.
"There'll be economic benefits to the Illawarra and overall, considering that the benefits outweigh the residual costs."
More than 80 parties, including residents, community organisations and businesses, made presentations to the commission on Monday and Tuesday, with fewer than a quarter in favour of the proposal.
Opposition to the project included concerns for water loss from Sydney's drinking supply and climate change, as well as truck movements, noise pollution, and the impact on air quality.
"We're constantly having coal dust descending on our homes," said Illawarra Residents for Responsible Mining spokesperson Alison Edwards.
"As soon as the mine starts up again, with its dropping coal from a high conveyer onto stockpiles, on unsealed roads, we will again be beset by heavy loads of coal dust falling in the vicinity."
Lock the Gate spokesperson Nic Clyde used his presentation to refute claims the bord-and-pillar technique would remove the risk to the water catchment.
"[The project] will cause the loss of about 10 million litres a year to surface waters, which adds up to 50 million litres of water over the five years," he said.
Members of the Seacliff Coasters running group also questioned the mine's impact on public amenity and recreational use of the Illawarra escarpment.
"We've been running for a very long time, but a virtual wall has now been imposed by Wollongong Coal on the Lower Escarpment Trail," said runner Tim Siegenbeek van Heukelom.
"A gate and a newly erected sign indicate no access and threaten prosecution for those who do.
"I call for you to reject the coal mine expansion proposal to enable us to keep enjoying and caring for this magical natural environment."
A boost to employment
Several speakers argued in favour of the proposal on the basis that it would create 205 direct jobs, 800 indirect jobs and 22 jobs during construction.
"If the Russell Vale mine does go back into full production, it will lead to more jobs and revenue for our office and supporting businesses," said Becker Mining spokesperson Geoff Pollard.
"The project will be required to use many different trades and contractors from many different fields and will continue to need these people for the life of the mine.
"This is a great opportunity for the Illawarra."
Danae Horsey, director of the Little School Preschool at Kembla Grange, said Wollongong Coal also made a significant financial contribution to the local community.
"We've had a very positive relationship with Wollongong Coal over the years," she said.
"They've been very generous in support of our community projects and keeping small services like ours viable.
"They make donations to our programs, they funded our early-learning languages program, they've funded our sustainability projects [by] donating money for water tanks and having those installed.
"I think it's under-reported, the good work that they do, and how they support small businesses like us."
In June 2018, the NSW Resources Regulator accepted an enforceable undertaking from Wollongong Coal to pay donations of $5,000 to a local charity or community group and to lease a portion of its property to the Little School Preschool for $1 per year until 2023.
The decision was made after an investigation into an alleged failure of the company to pay annual rental fees and administrative levies.
The IPC will make a determination on the Russell Vale Expansion Project in the coming months.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-10-21/russell-vale-coal-mine-expansion-no-risk-to-sydney-water/12785696
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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21 October, 2020
Cambridge university to dump fossil fuel investments by 2030
All this will do is hand a bargain to less loony share investors. It can't affect what the companies actually do. One wonders how the students behind this can be so brain-dead\
It would make more sense to buy up shares in the company. By buying in you become part owners and therefore have some influence
Cambridge university’s Ł3.5bn endowment fund has pledged to divest from fossil fuels over the next decade, in a landmark decision that follows a lengthy campaign involving protests, hunger strikes and petitions by students worried about climate change.
The move marks a symbolic step for the UK’s second-oldest university, which, despite being a leader on science and engineering research related to climate change, has faced sustained criticism over its links to polluting companies.
Oil companies, including BP, ExxonMobil and Shell, have donated money to the university. The fund’s exposure to the energy sector, of which fossil fuel companies are a sub-set, stood at almost Ł100m at the end of last year. It would not reveal details of individual investments.
The fund, one of the largest of its kind in Europe, announced on Thursday it would reposition its investment portfolio to remove all direct and indirect investments in the fossil fuel industry by 2030 and aim for net zero greenhouse gas emissions from any company in which it invests by 2038.
Separately, the university said it would from now on vet all future research funding and donations, which totalled about Ł700m last year, to ensure that those giving money were aligned with the university’s objectives to cut greenhouse gas emissions.
Stephen Toope, the university’s vice-chancellor, said the decisions reflected Cambridge’s desire to be “part of leading not following” in the move towards a zero carbon economy.
We know we have to get to net zero to avoid catastrophic climate change. We’re trying to align our investment strategy with the science
Universities around the world have come under pressure to divest from fossil fuels in recent years as concerns about climate change grow. According to campaign group People & Planet, Ł12.4bn of endowments across the UK higher education sector have dumped at least some fossil fuel stocks over the past few years.
Oxford university pledged earlier this year to sell out of fossil fuels across its Ł4.1bn fund. However, the university did not set a deadline. People & Planet currently ranks Oxford as having a partial commitment to divestment, having sold out of coal and tar sands but not other fossil fuels.
Tilly Franklin, the Cambridge fund’s chief investment officer, said it was incumbent on the university as a leader in scientific research to take action on climate change. “We know we have to get to net zero to avoid catastrophic climate change,” she said. “We’re trying to align our investment strategy with the science.”
She said the fund would measure emissions of every investment, from “food to transport to energy and manufacturing”.
Cambridge Zero Carbon, a group that campaigned for the endowment to dump oil and gas stocks, called the move “a historic victory”, despite coming “five years too late”.
The fraught divestment campaign at Cambridge, which has grown over the past decade, included students taking over buildings and disrupting the university’s annual rowing race with Oxford on the river Thames in London. Cambridge initially held its ground: in 2018 it ruled out divesting despite reviewing the matter at the behest of students.
But the appointment of Ms Franklin this year following an overhaul of the fund’s investment team in 2018 paved the way for changes. Further pressure was heaped on the fund in the form of a new university-commissioned report outlining the case for divestment “across moral, social, political, reputational, and financial dimensions”.
https://www.ft.com/content/8c9dafa3-542d-4582-8a72-28a388263113
Study Confirms Trump Is Right – ‘Clean’ Energy Isn’t Clean Or Green
Renewable energy is cripplingly expensive, hopelessly unreliable, massacres wildlife, destroys landscapes, destabilizes the grid, harms indigenous peoples, and causes climate change.
But apart from that, it’s great, says a meticulous review published in the scientific journal Energies by a team of Irish and U.S.-based researchers.
Actually, the part about renewable energy being ‘great’ is a joke but the rest is true. The scholarly review – Energy and Climate Policy – An Evaluation of Climate Change Expenditure 2011-2018 – is probably the most thorough meta-analysis published on the so-called ‘clean energy’ sector.
Its conclusion, though neutrally expressed, could scarcely be more damning:
…The reader may wonder whether the current proposed “zero-carbon” energy transition policies based predominantly on wind- and solar-generated electricity are truly the panacea that promoters of these technologies indicate.
It will confirm all President Donald Trump’s worst suspicions about renewable ‘clean’ energy and about utopian projects like the Green New Deal.
But it will make grim reading for Joe Biden, Boris Johnson, Greta Thunberg, Al Gore, the Prince of Wales, David Attenborough, the Pope, Leo Di Caprio and the rest of the rag bag of public figures who have sought to burnish their caring, eco-friendly credentials by championing ‘renewable energy’ as the best way to save the planet.
In fact, the review authors demonstrate, renewables – mainly wind and solar – do little if anything to reduce carbon dioxide emissions but are very good at wasting eye-watering sums of taxpayers’ money.
Concern for climate change is one of the drivers of new, transitional energy policies oriented towards economic growth and energy security, along with reduced greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and preservation of biodiversity. Since 2010, the Climate Policy Initiative (CPI) has been publishing annual Global Landscape of Climate Finance reports.
According to these reports, US$3660 billion has been spent on global climate change projects over the period 2011–2018. Fifty-five percent of this expenditure has gone to wind and solar energy. According to world energy reports, the contribution of wind and solar to world energy consumption has increased from 0.5% to 3% over this period. Meanwhile, coal, oil, and gas continue to supply 85% of the world’s energy consumption, with hydroelectricity and nuclear providing most of the remainder.
The report’s lead author Coilín ÓhAiseadha puts this expenditure in context:
“It cost the world $2 trillion to increase the share of energy generated by solar and wind from half a percent to three percent, and it took eight years to do it. What would it cost to increase that to 100%? And how long would it take?”
According to the review, wind and solar are bad for a number of reasons – not least among them being the harm they do to the environment.
One of the rationales used for wind power is that it reduces man-made climate change.
But, in fact, the study shows, it actually causes climate change at a local level, changing wind patterns, temperatures, precipitation, even causing flash flooding.
In particular, recent years’ research has produced considerable theoretical and empirical evidence that wind turbines can have significant local or regional effects on climate.
For example, Abbasi et al. (2016) explain that “large-scale wind farms with tall wind turbines can have an influence on the weather, possibly on climate, due to the combined effects of the wind velocity deficit they create, changes in the atmospheric turbulence pattern they cause, and landscape roughness they enhance”.
Green technologies are also incredibly resource-greedy. Part of the problem is their feeble ‘power density’ – which is the measurement of the amount of land required to produce a fixed amount of energy.
By far the most power-dense form of energy is natural gas, followed by nuclear, oil, and coal. Fossil fuels can produce large amounts of energy-requiring little land.
Renewables, by contrast, need huge amounts of land to produce relatively tiny quantities of energy. Fossil fuels produce on average about 1000 times more power for any given land surface area.
Renewables also require large quantities of minerals. Merely for the UK to fulfill Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s dream of making all cars in Britain electric by 2030 would, according to a group of experts led by Professor Richard Herrington, Head of Earth Sciences at the Natural History Museum in London, require:
“…just under two times the total annual world cobalt production, nearly the entire world production of neodymium, three quarters the world’s lithium production and at least half of the world’s copper production during 2018 […] If we are to extrapolate this analysis to the currently projected estimate of 2 billion cars worldwide, based on 2018 figures, annual production would have to increase for neodymium and dysprosium by 70%, copper output would need to more than double and cobalt output would need to increase at least three and a half times for the entire period from now until 2050 to satisfy the demand”
This expansion in mining is likely to have serious adverse social and environmental impacts in the often impoverished countries where the rare minerals are found.
As co-author Dr. Ronan Connolly says:
“The average household expects their fridges and freezers to run continuously and to be able to turn on and off the lights on demand. Wind and solar promoters need to start admitting that they are not capable of providing this type of continuous and on-demand electricity supply on a national scale that modern societies are used to.”
They also make poor people poorer by forcing them to use expensive ‘clean’ energy when fossil fuels would be much cheaper and more effective.
We suggest that even within developed nations, policies to reduce CO2 emissions similarly are often at odds with improving the livelihoods of the less affluent in society.
For example, one policy tool which is often promoted as being potentially useful for reducing CO2 emissions is the implementation of “carbon taxes”. Carbon taxes can take many forms, but typically penalize the use of forms of energy that are associated with relatively high CO2 emissions. Researchers studying the socioeconomic implications of various carbon taxes in multiple countries have found that carbon taxes “tend to be regressive”, i.e., the burden tends to be greatest on the poorest households.
The report drily concludes that whether the goal is protecting biodiversity, securing a stable and reliable electricity supply, increase economic growth, or reducing CO2 emissions, the answer in every case is NOT renewables.
According to Medium:
Cobalt mining, required to make batteries for e-vehicles, has severe impacts on the health of women and children in mining communities, where the mining is often done in unregulated, small-scale, “artisanal” mines. Lithium extraction, also required for manufacturing batteries for e-vehicles, requires large quantities of water, and can cause pollution and shortages of fresh water for local communities.
As lead author, Coilín ÓhAiseadha, points out:
“There was worldwide coverage of the conflict between the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and the Dakota Access Pipeline, but what about the impacts of cobalt mining on indigenous peoples in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and what about the impacts of lithium extraction on the peoples of the Atacama Desert? Remember the slogan they chanted at Standing Rock? Mni Wiconi! Water is life! Well, that applies whether you’re Standing Rock Sioux worried about an oil spill polluting the river, or you’re in the Atacama Desert worried about lithium mining polluting your groundwater.”
Even if they were as virtuous as their advocates claim, renewable technologies are hopelessly inadequate to the task of powering modern Western Civilisation.
https://climatechangedispatch.com/study-confirms-trump-is-right-clean-energy-isnt-clean-or-green/
New Study: E. Antarctica Was Up To 6°C Warmer 1,000 To 2,000 Years Ago
The good ol' Medieval warm period again. Greenies try to wriggle out of it by saying that the MWP was a purely North Atlantic phenomenon. It never was
And the report below confirms that. The Antarctic is as far as you can get from the North Atlantic. And note that it was a LOT warmer than today, despite the lack of SUVs and coal burning power stations back then
As recently as 2,000 to 1,000 years ago, spanning the Roman to Medieval Warm Periods, East Antarctica was 5-6°C warmer than it is today. The consequent ice melt resulted in >60 meters higher water levels in East Antarctica’s lakes.
East Antarctica has been rapidly COOLING in recent decades, with magnitudes reaching -0.7°C to -2.0°C per decade since the mid-1980s (Obryk et al., 2020).
A new study (Myers et al., 2020) reports that until about 15,000 years ago and throughout the Last Glacial Maximum, East Antarctica was 4-9°C colder than it is today.
Antarctica then abruptly warmed 15°C within centuries. From 12,000 to 6,000 years before the present, East Antarctica was about 5°C warmer than it is today.
And then as recently as 2,000 to 1,000 years ago, East Antarctica was so warm (~6°C warmer than present) that its lakes were filled with 60 to 80 meters more meltwater than exists in lake basins today.
“Resistivity data suggests that active permafrost formation has been ongoing since the onset of lake drainage, and that as recently as 1,000 – 1,500 yr BP, lake levels were over 60 m higher than present. This coincides with a warmer than modern paleoclimate throughout the Holocene inferred by the nearby Taylor Dome ice core record. … Stable isotope records from Taylor Dome (located roughly 100 km west of the MDVs) indicate mean annual air temperatures ca. 4-9 °C lower than modern during the LGM (Steig et al., 2000).”
“Between 12,000–6,000 yr BP, Taylor Dome ice core record indicates that regional temperatures were up to 5 °C warmer than modern conditions (Fig. 2) (Steig et al., 2000).”
“Permafrost age calculations indicate late Holocene lake level high-stands (up to ~81 masl, 63 m higher than modern Lake Fryxell) roughly 1.5 to 1 ka BP that would have filled both Lake Fryxell and Lake Hoare basins (Fig. 3b). … Taylor Dome ice core records show a highly variable Holocene, with short lived peaks up to + 6 °C above modern temperatures between 1-2 ka BP (Steig et al., 2000).”
“Lake levels were higher potentially during and after the LGM when an ice dam blocked the mouth of TV, allowing for lake levels to increase by over 280 m compared to modern level. Taylor Dome ice core records indicate an abrupt warming of >15 °C from 15 – 12 ka BP, (Steig et al., 2000), which may have coincided with the maximum lake level of GLW.”
“Short lived changes in temperature such as a 6 °C increase in the late Holocene could have resulted in anywhere between 60 to 80 m of lake level rise and subsequent drawdown.”
This substantial regional warmth can also be verified by the 1,000-year-old elephant seal remains that document a time when Antarctica was sea-ice-free 2,400 kilometers south of where sea-ice-free conditions occur today (Koch et al., 2019).
Elephant seals require sea-ice-free conditions to breed, and the same locations where they used to breed during the Medieval Warm Period are today buried in sea ice.
https://principia-scientific.com/new-study-e-antarctica-was-up-to-6c-warmer-1000-to-2000-years-ago/
Australia: Greenies versus fishermen
The global conservation status of a NSW marine park is at risk after the Berejiklian government weakened its sanctuary status without consultation to allow recreational fishing, documents show.
Montague Island, located off the south coast, was among the first 25 sites to be granted so-called Green Listing by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Documents obtained under freedom of information show both National Parks and IUCN raised concerns about the impact of easing protection.
Fisheries minister Adam Marshall announced last December six marine park sanctuaries would be open to recreational fishing without consulting either the public or the Batemans Marine Park Advisory Committee, according to an email sent that month by Joanne Wilson, a senior parks policy officer.
"Opening up the sanctuary zones in the marine park to line fishing, netting, and taking bait will remove all areas of refuge and breeding for fish that then spill over to other areas, and cause a reduction in the health and resilience of the marine ecosystems around Montague Island," Dr Wilson wrote.
It was "a worrying sign" the decision Fisheries hadn't bothered to consult with the parks service before the decision and "there is a risk" it won't be asked about other key issues, she said.
The move had also come just days before the renomination of Montague Island's Green List status, and it placed "future renominations at risk", Dr Wilson's email, obtained by the Herald, said.
A separate document, dated Christmas Eve, from the IUCN's Green List Committee, congratulated Montague Island Nature Reserve for achieving its status but "expressed its concern about any relaxation" of protections.
It said the extraction of fish from the two reserves – covering roughly a third of the waters around the 81-hectare island – would affect availability of food for seabirds. The committee "reserves the right to review [the Green List status] should there be adverse implications for seabird viability", the letter said.
Minister Marshall defended the proposed changes to fishing access – that are still to formally gazetted – as an election promise taken by the Coalition to the 2019 election.
"Community members will be given another opportunity to provide feedback on the proposed changes over a minimum of two months through the established public consultation process," he said, adding both he and Environment Minister Matt Kean have to sign off on any temporary or longer change.
Mr Kean said the marine parks were popular tourist destinations, "home to important marine biodiversity and a treasured part of the local community”.
“I am aware of the strong views of stakeholders, including the IUCN, regarding the future of the sanctuary zones in the Bateman’s Bay Marine Park," he said. "For this reason I intend to visit the Marine Park and see for myself this unique and precious part of our state.”
https://www.smh.com.au/environment/conservation/worrying-sign-rollback-of-protection-puts-marine-park-status-at-risk-20201019-p566h8.html
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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20 October, 2020
Donald Trump is the only world leader fighting ‘climate totalitarianism’
Only those who believe in the “new religion of climate change” will have any place in the new world if Joe Biden is elected president, according to Sky News host Rowan Dean.
He said anyone even dare debate the "fundamentalist dogma" of climate change will risk branding themselves a heretic.
Mr Dean pointed to the ‘Great Reset’ a “quasi-fascist version of the Green New Deal” which is supported by the IMF, the World Economic Forum, and the UN and aims to “by their own admission” use the tools of COVID suppression and adapt them to the “so-called crisis of climate change”.
“With over 80 per cent of the world's energy still reliant upon fossil fuels, these religious zealots wish to plunge us all into some post-COVID dystopian nightmare of climate subservience,” he said.
At this point in time, the only significant world leader who wants to “halt this slide into climate totalitarianism” is US President Donald Trump, according to Mr Dean.
“He withdrew from the Paris Agreement which is the first and fundamental political and legislative block that allows parliaments to begin implementing the ‘Great Reset’.”
https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/other/donald-trump-is-the-only-world-leader-fighting-climate-totalitarianism/ar-BB1a8rxT?ocid=msedgntp
The Great Green Energy Non-Transition
One of the troubling characteristics of today’s civic discourse is the tendency to confuse predictions with reality. Nowhere is this problem more severe than in the debate over climate and its associated issues.
The last hundred years have seen increasing emissions of carbon dioxide – a benign gas.
In reality, this slight increase in atmospheric CO2 concentrations (from 0.03% in the nineteenth century to 0.04% today) has brought nothing but beneficial effects, including increased crop yields and greater drought resistance.
Nonetheless, climate alarmists argue that rising temperatures are bringing catastrophic storms, flooding, disease, inundation, extinction, and general misery.
Unlike the benefits of CO2 which are clear and measurable, climate catastrophe remains nothing more than a prediction generated by computer models that have never produced meaningful forecasts of climate impacts.
A frequent corollary of climate alarmism is that the world has undertaken a radical transformation of the global energy system away from fossil fuels toward zero-carbon, renewable energy.
A Google search of the term “energy transition” yields over 5 million hits, many accompanied by terms such as “unstoppable” and “irreversible”. But is this transition actually taking place? Three arguments are generally offered – none of them valid.
First, “energy transition” supporters point to the high growth rates for renewable energy sources with wind increasing at over 20% annually since 2000 and solar at over 40% per year, compared to less than 2% for fossil fuels.
Sounds great, but the absolute numbers tell a different story. In 2019, despite forty years and trillions of dollars of subsidies, wind energy contributes about 2% of total global energy use and solar just over 1%.
Fossil fuels accounted for 84%, down just two percentage points over the last 20 years.
Second, even highly respected publications such as the Financial Times run articles questioning whether oil companies can survive the tidal wave of renewables.
The oil industry is indeed in serious financial trouble today as a result of the pandemic-driven collapse of oil demand and the oversupply brought about by technological production advances such as fracking.
But oil is a transportation fuel with very few points of competition with renewables, which are primarily used to generate electricity.
Renewables may be profitable today, but only because their profitability is supported by captive markets and massive subsidies, while oil companies live or die by the market.
It remains to be seen what will happen with oil company profits when the pandemic ends, but the issue will be oil supply and demand, not renewables.
Finally, the advent of electric cars is increasingly touted as the death of oil. The US private vehicle fleet is currently on the order of 250 million vehicles, of which approximately 1 million or 0.4% are battery electric vehicles.
Electric cars are at present about twice as expensive to produce as comparable gasoline models, and, like renewable power generation, depend on massive subsidies for their viability.
Take Tesla, for example, which is currently the darling of the auto industry. In addition to direct subsidies for manufacturing facilities and purchase credits ranging from $2,500-7,500 per vehicle, Tesla sells emissions credits to other car companies to meet California regulatory requirements.
These credits have totaled over $1 billion over the last year and account for Tesla’s entire free cash flow over this period. Tesla loses money on each car it manufactures.
California Governor Gavin Newsom has banned the sale of new gasoline cars beginning in 2035. As with many such political promises, this “ban” is simply a goal, not a policy.
Governor Newsom is 53 years old and will be long gone from office by 2035, and the media will lose interest in whether his objective was met or not. For the moment, however, the Governor can bask in the glory of his signaled virtue.
The world may someday transition away from fossil fuels, but it’s not happening yet. All we have so far are predictions, wishful thinking, and the waste of large amounts of money for a small impact on a non-problem.
I predict that the public will grow tired.
https://climatechangedispatch.com/the-great-green-energy-non-transition/
Faith and politics mix to drive evangelical Christians’ climate change skepticism
U.S. Christians, especially evangelical Christians, identify as environmentalists at very low rates compared to the general population. According to a Pew Research Center poll from May 2020, while 62% of religiously unaffiliated U.S. adults agree that the Earth is warming primarily due to human action, only 35% of U.S. Protestants do – including just 24% of white evangelical Protestants.
Politically powerful Christian interest groups publicly dispute the climate science consensus. A coalition of major evangelical groups, including Focus on the Family and the Family Research Council, launched a movement opposing what they describe as “the false worldview” of environmentalism, which supposedly is “striving to put America, and the world, under its destructive control.”
Studies show that belief in miracles and an afterlife is associated with lower estimates of the risks posed by climate change. This raises the question: Does religion itself predispose people against climate science?
Surveys of people around the world, as well as social science research on denial, suggest the answer to this question is more nuanced than a simple yes or no.
There are several ways that core aspects of modern scientific knowledge tend to undermine literalist or fundamentalist readings of religious texts. In particular, evolution by natural selection, the central concept underlying the biological sciences, is utterly incompatible with most creationist faith traditions.
Religion offers the comforts of a measure of control and reassurance via an omnipotent deity that can be placated by ritual. In contrast, the scientist’s naturalistic universe offers neither an intrinsic moral order nor a final reward, which can be unsettling for the devout and in conflict with their faith.
Because of these mismatches, one might expect those with a strong religious affiliation to be reflexively suspicious of scientific findings. Indeed, in a large international survey, 64% of those who described religion as an “important part” of their life said they would side with their religious teachings in a disagreement between science and their religion. Other studies find that, for the faithful, religion and science are at odds as ultimate explanations for natural phenomena.
Climate science denial may stem more from politics than religion
Social scientist Dan Kahan rejects the idea of an automatic link between religiosity and any anti-science bias. He argues that religiosity only incidentally tracks science denial because some scientific findings have become “culturally antagonistic” to some identity groups.
According to Kahan’s data, identification as a political conservative, and as white, is much more predictive of rejecting the climate consensus than overall religiosity. He argues that anti-science bias has to do with threats to values that define one’s cultural identity. There are all kinds of topic areas wherein people judge expert qualifications based on whether the “expert” confirms or contradicts the subject’s cherished view.
Social scientist Donald Braman agrees that science denial is context dependent. He points out that while conservative white males are more likely to be skeptics on global warming, different demographic groups disagree with experts on other particular topics.
For example, where a conservative person invested in the social and economic status quo might feel threatened by evidence for global warming, liberal egalitarians might be threatened by evidence, say, that nuclear waste could be safely stored underground.
White American evangelicals trend very strongly toward political conservatism. They also exhibit the strongest correlation, among any faith group, between religiosity and either climate science denial or a general anti-science bias.
Meanwhile, African-American Protestants, who are theologically aligned with evangelical Protestants but politically aligned with progressives, show some of the highest levels of climate concern.
North America is the only high-income region where people who follow a religion are substantially more likely to say they favor their religious teachings over science when disagreements arise. This finding is driven mainly by politically conservative U.S. religious denominations – including conservative Catholics.
A major new study looking at data from 60 countries showed that, while religiosity in the U.S. is correlated with more negative attitudes about science, you don’t see this kind of association in many other countries. Elsewhere, religiosity is sometimes even correlated with disproportionately positive attitudes about science.
And the U.S. is generally an outlier in terms of attitudes toward human-caused global warming: Fewer Americans accept the climate science consensus than residents of most other countries.
All this would suggest that climate science resistance has more to do with cultural identity politics than religiosity.
But the available evidence cuts both ways. A landmark study from the 1980s suggested that fundamentalist religious traditions are associated with a commitment to human dominion over nature, and that this attitude may explain anti-environmentalist positions.
Even after controlling for political ideology, those committed to an “end-times theology” – like U.S. evangelicals – still show a greater tendency to oppose the scientific consensus on environmental issues.
Perhaps some specific theologies bias the believer against the idea that human beings could be responsible for the end of humanity. This bias could show up as an automatic rejection of environmental science.
We are left with something of a “chicken and egg” problem: Do certain religious communities adopt politically conservative positions on climate change because of their religious tradition? Or do people adopt a religious tradition that stresses human dominion over nature because they were raised in a politically conservative community? The direction of causation here may be difficult to resolve.
It wouldn’t be surprising to find either religious dogmatism or political conservatism linked with anti-science attitudes – each tends to favor the status quo. Fundamentalist religious traditions are defined by their fixed doctrines. Political conservatives by definition favor the preservation of the traditional social and economic order.
https://theconversation.com/faith-and-politics-mix-to-drive-evangelical-christians-climate-change-denial-143145
Economy-Wide Electrification Costs between $18 and $29 Trillion, New Study Says
A new state-by-state analysis of the cost of transitioning the entire power supply to a 100 percent carbon dioxide emissions-free energy, made up largely of solar and wind power with battery backup, estimates the direct capital costs of such an effort would range between $18 trillion and $29 trillion.
The study by Tom Tanton, director of Science and Technology Assessment at the Energy & Environment Legal Institute, details the capital costs necessary for the “electrification” of the entire nation. Electrification is defined in the study as “converting the entire economy to use electricity as a fuel. This includes all appliances in residential and commercial buildings, as well as every transport vehicle.”
‘More Frequent Outages’
Completely electrifying the economy carries high costs and will result in a less reliable power supply for businesses, consumers, and residents, says Tanton.
“Electrification of everything is a poor means to reduce greenhouse gasses and exposes customers to more frequent outages,” Tanton writes. “Further, we’d just be substituting one set of environmental impacts for another … and we simply can’t afford to electrify everything as the report clearly shows.”
Tanton estimates the capital cost delivering the current level of demand for electric power from an electric grid powered 100 percent from “renewable” sources like wind or solar power would cost approximately $2.8 trillion.
“To ensure no bias is inadvertently input into the analysis, data come from the Energy Information Administration (EIA),” Tanton said. “This includes the consumption by state per fuel type, as well as technology costs.”
Tanton’s analysis does not account for anticipated growth in electric power demand.
The cost of converting the country’s entire on-road vehicle fleet to electric vehicles would range between $560 billion and $1.4 trillion, depending on the size of the federal tax credits for the purchase of electric vehicles.
Off-road vehicle replacement, for instance, construction equipment, lawn equipment, loaders, recreational vehicles, and tractors, would cost a further $415 billion.
Infrastructure changes necessary in aviation would cost $550 billion, while maritime infrastructure changes would total $200 billion.
The study does not provide estimates for the costs necessary to install batteries and electric motors in every airplane and boat in the country, or necessary to build replacement vessels, let alone provide any commentary over whether doing so is even remotely feasible.
Eliminating natural gas use in buildings would cost $1.6 trillion for residential structures, Tanton argues, and roughly $9 trillion for commercial structures.
Tanton notes, these cost estimates should be inflated by approximately $7 trillion to account for the excess electric power needed to replace natural gas during extreme weather events “like artic blasts, ‘bomb cyclone,’ ‘polar vortex,’ or extended low temperatures … when the adequacy of the delivery mechanism is most critical to human health and safety.” The facilities generating this emergency load would in effect be hugely expensive stranded costs for most of each year, either being idled or act as spinning reserve, during non-emergency periods of time.
State-by-State Cost Estimates
Tanton’s analysis finds, at $3.157 trillion, Texas will experience the highest total electrification costs, followed by California at $2.823 trillion.
By comparison, Tanton calculates completely electrifying the economies of Florida, New York, and Pennsylvania, will costs $1.721 trillion, $1.465 trillion, and $1.156 trillion, respectively. The The per capita costs of electrification do not mirror the total state electrification costs. The per capita costs of electrification were the highest in Alaska at $190,009 per capita, followed by Louisiana at $166,065, Wyoming at $158,961, North Dakota at $133,847, and Oklahoma at $122,568. The U.S. average per capita costs were $88,990.
In addition, Tanton estimated that the per-household indirect costs of the higher prices paid for goods and services, if the power supply were to be completely electrified, would top $5,000, and the “annual consumer expenditure for energy would roughly double.”
High Cost Emission Reduction Policy
Tanton found electrifying the economy is a very expensive way to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from energy use, ranging from a low cost of $4,814 per ton of carbon dioxide avoided in New York to a high cost of $28,938 per ton of carbon dioxide avoided in Florida.
By comparison, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) uses the “social cost of carbon,” an estimate of the theoretical damages avoided by reducing one ton of carbon dioxide emissions, to compare policies to cut reduce emissions. Depending on the year cuts begin, the discount rate used in the calculation, the estimate of how sensitive the climate actually is to carbon dioxide emissions, and whether one includes only domestic benefits or global harms avoided as well in the calculation, EPA estimates the harms avoided from reducing a ton of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere range between $11 and $212 per ton.
https://heartlanddailynews.com/2020/10/economy-wide-electrification-costs-between-18-and-29-trillion-new-study-says/.
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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19 October, 2020
U.N. Twists Climate Facts To Suit Its Radical Agenda
A report from the United Nations claims that there has been a ‘staggering rise in climate emergencies in the last 20 years’.
According to the report, ‘The Human Cost of Disasters’, there have been 7,348 recorded ‘disaster events’ worldwide during the last two decades, compared with 4,212 in the previous 20 years between 1980 and 1999. Most of these are said to be weather-related.
The claims have been met with astonishment and ridicule by experts, who have pointed out that the report itself contradicts its central claim with a graph showing that the number of disasters has been falling since 2000:
Benny Peiser, director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, has called for the report to be withdrawn. He said: ‘It’s a shambles; a catalog of errors. The UN should withdraw the report immediately and apologize for misleading the public in this way.’
Professor Roger Pielke Jr, a US-based expert in natural disasters, pointed out that the UN was misusing the source data, which measures human impacts of natural disasters rather than natural disasters themselves. He calls its conclusions ‘flawed’.
The UN report is based on data collected by the Emergency Events Database (EM-DAT), maintained by the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED) in Belgium.
There have been major changes in the way disaster events have been recorded and logged by EM-DAT over the years. Earlier annual reports from CRED, such as in 2004 and 2006, acknowledged that many disasters were not recorded in the past.
The 2004 report noted: ‘Over the past 30 years, development in telecommunications, media and increased international co-operation has played a critical role in the number of disasters reported at an international level.
In addition, increases in humanitarian funds have encouraged reporting of more disasters, especially smaller events that were previously managed locally.’
CRED began publishing statistics on disasters only in 1998, and that year coincided with a doubling in the number of disasters recorded, mainly due to more comprehensive reporting.
EM-DAT’s current definition of a disaster includes small local events affecting more than 100 people with ten or more reported killed.
Thousands of such events may have gone unrecorded by EM-DAT in the past when methods were much more ad hoc, and before the days of the internet.
The datasets about the two different periods are therefore too different in quality, says Pielke. ‘You should not draw any conclusions about a changing frequency in climatic extremes on the basis of this dataset.’
The UN claims are contradicted by the IPCC, whose reports consistently state that there has not been a change in the intensity of most weather extremes, and this is confirmed by Pielke’s own rigorous studies.
Time and again he has shown that despite an increase in financial damage from natural disasters, there has not been a change in the intensity of most weather extremes. Increasing damage is down to the growth of population, real estate, and properties in vulnerable areas.
The UN report is heavily politicized, and some of its language seems to have been inspired by the likes of the Extinction Rebellion.
Co-author Mami Mizutori, head of the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, claims: ‘Disaster management agencies have succeeded in saving many lives through improved preparedness and the dedication of staff and volunteers.
But the odds continue to be stacked against them, in particular by industrial nations that are failing miserably on reducing greenhouse gas emissions,’ adding that it was ‘baffling’ that nations were continuing knowingly ‘to sow the seeds of our own destruction, despite the science and evidence that we are turning our only home into an uninhabitable hell for millions of people.’
Language such as this is not backed up by any credible data.
It is hard not to draw the conclusion that the purpose of this report has more to do with furthering the UN’s political agenda, rather than an objective analysis of the facts.
https://climatechangedispatch.com/u-n-twists-climate-facts-to-suit-its-radical-agenda/
Climate change dogma lives loudly within Kamala Harris
During the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee hearings this week on President Trump’s nominee for the Supreme Court, Senator Kamala Harris, Joe Biden’s vice presidential running mate, revealed her climate change dogma with her flaccid attempt at “gotcha” questions for Judge Amy Coney Barrett.
During the three days of hearings, Democratic senators on the committee tried to get Judge Barrett to blunder in her responses. It was a fruitless pursuit. Rather, she refused to discuss any potential issue that may go before the Supreme Court, which is consistent with judicial ethics and past practice of prior nominees.
Committee senators were no match for Judge Barrett, whose poise and brilliance were on full display as she schooled them. That did not keep some senators from attempting to trap her somehow.
Sen. Harris asked a series of non-controversial questions with obvious answers in the hopes Judge Barrett would opine on weightier, controversial issues. She asked the Judge if “cigarettes cause cancer” and if “coronavirus is contagious.” Basically, yes and yes, the Judge responded.
Then (drum roll) Harris asked Barrett, “Do you believe climate change is threating the air we breathe and the water we drink?”
Judge Barrett responded to the V.P. nominee that climate change is a “very contentious matter of public debate” and that she will “not express a view on a matter of public policy …that is politically controversial because that is inconsistent with the judicial role.”
Sen. Harris thought she scored big! “Thank you, Judge Barrett; and you’ve made your point clear that you think [climate change] is a debatable point,” she said, with her familiar smirk. [Addendum: Sen. Richard Blumenthal also posed climate gotcha questions.]
In reality, Judge Barrett stated the obvious, while Sen. Harris appeared narrow and sophomoric. Climate change is a contentious public policy debate. The disturbing revelation in this exchange is that the possible next Vice President—and President in waiting—believes climate change and its impact are not debatable.
To paraphrase Sen. Diane Feinstein, the climate dogma lives loudly within Kamala Harris.
As with many others, climate change is tantamount to a religious faith for Sen. Harris, and thus inerrant. In contrast to traditional religious believers in America (e.g., Judge Barrett), a Vice President or President Harris will seek to impose her religious doctrine of climate change on America. This would cost trillions of taxpayer dollars and will harm our economy, job market and living standards, in exchange for the theoretical hope that average global temperature drops by a degree lower than its computer projection in 30 years. Indeed, the separation of church and state does not apply to Kamala Harris’ climate religion.
Not for the first time in history have authority figures declared a policy or scientific matter closed to debate. Just ask Galileo, who challenged the scientific orthodoxy of his day in the early 1600’s. In Judge Barrett’s case, all she did was make the evident point that climate change is a “controversial” subject, without indicating her own view, one way or the other.
Still, that was too much for Sen. Harris, who brooks no dissent, or even acknowledgement there could be various scientific views on climate.
Sen. Harris playing “gotcha” with her climate question also indicates how untruthful she and Mr. Biden are in downplaying their support for the multi-trillion dollar Green New Deal and banning hydro-fracturing of natural gas. They are all in on these issues.
Judge Barrett also wisely avoided the climate subject since climate policies have been, and will continue to be, litigated in the courts. Last January, for example, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the ninth circuit dismissed a major climate case, Juliana v. U.S. By a 2-to-1 vote, the court ruled that the “children” plaintiffs lacked standing and the judicial branch lacked the constitutional power to impose a “remedial plan” for the climate.
You can safely wager that a Harris-Biden administration will appoint judges who rule the opposite, at least as a fallback should Congress balk at passing the Green New Deal into law.
The close-minded dogmatism on climate change represented by Kamala Harris is ominous, considering the multitude of variables that affect the planet’s climate, which always is changing, and the litany of catastrophic global warming predictions that failed to materialize. It also is worrisome that such close-mindedness and groupthink on climate change from politicians and un-elected bureaucrats could lead to enormous economic harm to middle income, working class and poor Americans who are reliant on affordable energy and the millions of job-holders that depend on the same.
https://www.cfact.org/2020/10/16/climate-change-dogma-lives-loudly-in-kamala-harris/
House Democrats Ram More Government Intervention in Energy Markets Through Congress
While most people’s attention was focused on the presidential election or battling the coronavirus and struggling to survive the economic shutdown the pandemic inspired most states’ governors to impose, swamp creatures in the U.S. House of Representative have been working behind the scenes to impose more inside-the-beltway big-government mandates and subsidies on U.S. energy markets.
On September 24, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) rammed through HR 4447, the Clean Economy, Jobs, and Innovation Act, without any hearings or real debate. No congressmen had time to read the entire 900-page monstrosity before a final vote was taken. Like Obamacare, Pelosi thought it better to “pass the bill in order to find out what’s in it.”
A statement of policy offered by the White House Office of Management and Budget said it would recommend President Donald Trump veto the bill, because the bill “would implement a top-down approach that would … empower the government to select favored solutions [and] lead to higher energy costs and discourage innovation and entrepreneurship.”
HR 4447 is nothing more nor less than a down payment on the multitrillion-dollar, socialist, Green New Deal (GND). Like the GND, and Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s energy proposal, HR 4447 sets a goal for the country to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.
Also, like the GND, HR 4447 would require every federal agency to make “environmental justice,” central to its mission. The bill would establish a 26-person Environmental Justice Advisory Council to “ensure the ‘fair treatment’ of different groups based on race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status,” in part by incorporating environmental justice considerations into the already cumbersome National Environmental Policy Act review process.
It often takes years for critical infrastructure projects—such as bridges, pipelines, power lines, sewage lines, and roads—to get through the federal approval process, let alone built. And that is when the process is supposedly based solely on scientific and economic considerations—things that can be calculated, measured, and compared with some degree of objectivity. The process will become much more subjective, onerous, lengthy, and vulnerable to special-interest influences when amorphous, politically charged concepts such as “fairness” and “environmental justice” are made integral to it.
Even more projects will be delayed or cancelled, unable to get through the extensive and expensive process, which may be the point. Cancelled projects, or projects never proposed, don’t produce carbon dioxide emissions because they don’t create jobs or stimulate economic growth. Radical environmentalists have long called for an end to economic growth, and this bill would be a down payment on that goal.
In addition, although Democrats regularly chant or carry placards with the phrase “Follow the Science,” they inserted a provision in the bill that replaces science with mob-rule. HR 4447 would implement a new “community-based science” model unleashing “voluntary public participation in the scientific process.”
As the Washington Examiner describes, “This means that instead of allowing scientists to have the final say in conducting experiments, collecting data, interpreting results, and developing new technologies, the so-called ‘party of science’ would let everyone have a say. They call it the ‘democratization of science.’”
HR 4447 also contains provisions long sought by the powerful, taxpayer-funded wind, solar, and electric car lobbies. For instance, the bill would have federal taxpayers pony up $36 billion for the federal government to purchase electric vehicles and build electric charging stations across the nation.
Democrats’ big giveaway to the wind and solar lobbies comes in the form of a federal renewable energy mandate (REM), requiring the production of not less than 25 gigawatts of electricity from wind, solar, and geothermal energy projects by not later than 2025, on public lands.
For more than a century, states have had control over the power systems within their borders. To date, 29 states and the District of Columbia have enacted some form of REM.
Because REMs impose higher energy costs on residents and businesses in the states that have adopted them and cause significant environmental and public health harms, 21 states have rejected REMs.
Now, House Democrats would impose, for the first time ever, a national REM, saddling states that have said they don’t want REMs with one dictated by Washington, D.C. bureaucrats.
The aim of any energy legislation should be to deliver cheaper, more reliable energy, and to ensure America’s energy security and economic growth. Meeting those goals requires reducing the mandates, taxes, and subsidies that distort market incentives and innovation. HR 4447 does just the opposite, imposing greater intervention in energy markets through subsidies and mandates that support “politically correct” energy sources.
If Pelosi’s big green energy grab-bag bill ever reaches the president’s desk, whoever that president is, he or she should put the American people first and veto it.
https://townhall.com/columnists/hsterlingburnett/2020/10/16/house-democrats-ram-more-government-intervention-in-energy-markets-through-congress-n2578245
Australia: NSW conservatives defy Greenies on koala issue
After a bruising political battle that saw Gladys Berejiklian impose her authority over state Nationals, NSW Liberals have quietly backed down, supporting a bill to weaken planned reforms designed to protect koalas on privately-owned farmland.
Simmering tensions between the coalition partners exploded in September when Nationals MPs complained new laws to protect koalas after the bushfires introduced by Liberal MP and Planning Minister Rob Stokes would cut the value of farm land.
Mr Stokes had argued the new Koala State Environment Planning Policy (SEPP) and its expanded definition of habitat was needed to prevent koalas becoming extinct. He said it responded to warnings from the NSW Audit Office, Natural Resources Commission and an Upper House Inquiry - which said NSW's koala would be wiped out by 2030 without urgent action to increase protections.
But by September NSW Nationals Leader John Barilaro had threatened to withdraw his party from the Coalition unless the laws were changed. He said the koala SEPP was a "noose around the neck of farmers that will cause a slow and painful death".
At that time, Mr Stokes dismissed Mr Barilaro's claims as "mistruths" and argued farmers could still "engage in any routine agricultural practice".
Premier Gladys Berejiklian stood firm and threatened to sack Nationals Cabinet Ministers unless they supported the policy. Mr Barilaro backed down and Liberals hailed it as a victory over the bombastic Mr Barilaro.
But this week the Nationals introduced the Local Land Services Amendment Bill to Parliament, supported by the Liberals, which will exempt private rural landholders from having to recognise the new, expanded definition of koala habitat.
Environmental Defenders Office head of law reform Rachel Walmsley said the changes would prevent expansion of koala habitat protection on private farmland into the future.
"This bill is trying to freeze in time the small areas that are currently mapped, whereas it's clear from the science we need to protect more habitat," Ms Walmsley said.
Nationals MP and Agriculture Minister Adam Marshall spruiked the proposed changes on Thursday this week.
"There is already a strong framework in place to regulate agricultural land in NSW and what this legislation does is ensure farmers continue to be regulated under that framework – rather than the planning system," Mr Marshall said.
Mr Stokes said on Friday he was "pleased to say we have hit the mark" and the Nationals' bill showed there are "often important robust and passionate discussions as part of the decision-making process".
The current Koala SEPP is limited in its impact on farmers and mostly only affects significant property developments that require local council approval. Land clearing and routine agricultural activities are still permitted on farmland.
Significantly, protections only kick in if a local government has developed a Koala Plan of Management. But removing koala habitat isn't barred, rather the developer is required to get an expert ecological assessment.
The Nationals' amendment bill kicks in where local governments develop a koala plan of management.
There are only five local governments with plans of management mapping koala habitat in place - on the NSW North Coast - and they would be unaffected by the proposed changes.
But if any local government develops one in the future, the bill guarantees private rural landholders are exempt and the protections could only apply to public or peri-urban land.
Independent MLC Justin Field said he was "disappointed that the Liberal Party has given in to yet more anti-environment brinkmanship from the Nationals".
https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/liberals-back-down-on-koalas-after-barilaro-bluster-20201016-p565uf.html
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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18 October, 2020
Rep. Westerman Hopes to Steer GOP in Right Direction on Conservation Issues
Rep. Bruce Westerman (R-AR) stands out in Congress as the lone registered forester. The third-term congressman representing Arkansas’ 4th Congressional District has emerged as a leading conservative voice on conservation issues.
And for good reason. He recently told me his thoughts on forest management, why he supports market-based conservation, why conservatism isn’t at odds with conservation, and more.
Forestry: A Calling
Congressman Westerman said his love of the Great Outdoors greatly influenced his decision to pursue a career in natural resources.
After graduating from the University of Arkansas with an engineering degree, he obtained a Master of Forestry from Yale University in a program established with help from Gifford Pinchot—a seminal conservation figure who served as the inaugural U.S. Forest Service (USFS) Director under President Theodore Roosevelt.
Pinchot helped pioneer the “wise use” approach to public lands management. Today, this “multiple-use, sustained yield” view is administered on national forests under the Multiple-Use Sustained Yield Act of 1960.
Like Pinchot, Westerman strongly adheres to this public lands philosophy.
“I think people are gun shy about any time you cut a tree or you extract minerals from the land,” he said. “They think that the land [is] being raided, and that's really not the case if you use scientific-base[d] management.”
True Cause of Wildfires and Need for Management
Westerman warned both the economy and environment could suffer immensely with poorly-managed forests.
“If we do a good job with forest and have healthy forest, we're automatically going to have a healthier environment,” he stressed. “And the really cool thing about forest is we can also have a strong economy.”
“I would contend that without a strong economy, you're going to have a worse environment.”
Rep. Westerman also stated climate change isn’t the outright cause of intense wildfires out West. He said poor management is. In turn, he believes two short-term solutions can help address the issue.
One “pragmatic approach,” he said, is the One Trillion Trees Initiative—a global initiative pledging to “grow, restore and conserve one trillion trees around the world.” President Trump has touted it and recently affirmed his support for it through an executive order creating an interagency council to coordinate the federal government’s cooperation.
“It looks not only at planting more trees, but taking care of the forest that we've got,” he added.
A second solution? Reducing and eliminating fuel load created by buildup in areas highly susceptible to burning. If done correctly, he said, fires will weaken and occur less frequently.
Free Market Environmentalism is the Path Forward
I asked the House Natural Resources Committee member about his support for free market environmentalism—a view embraced by a growing number of Americans.
Why did it take nearly 40 years for market-based conservation and free-market environmentalism to become mainstream? Westerman said this could be attributed to misinformation.
“I think people saw an abuse of the environment and they often connected that to capitalism—to growth in the economy—and they saw the pendulum swing too far to use it,” he offered.
“...We've got to focus on market-based conservation—implementing these free-market environmentalism ideas—so that the economy and the environment wins.”
Conservation is Conservative
The avid waterfowler and angler is delighted to see his fellow Republicans having more stake on wildlife management, habitat restoration, and sporting issues.
“We should never shy away from the word conservation,” he said.
“Conservation is a derivative of the word conservative. And it was Republicans that started the conservation movement. I mean, Teddy Roosevelt is considered the father of conservation in our country. You look at the bedrock environmental laws passed in this country. Most of them happen in the Nixon administration with [the] Clean Air Act, Clean Water [Act], the EPA, Endangered Species Act—all well-meaning, good laws. And now we've got the Great American Outdoors Act, which was a Republican Senate initiative that President Trump pushed for.”
“As a conservative, I believe that I have an obligation—the blessing to the past, for the blessings I received— to be here today. Plus, I have an obligation to the future: to leave what we've got in better shape for the next generation.”
“It's something that Republicans should be leading on. And we can't allow this idea of political environmentalism to come in where you think you can just regulate everything into this state of utopia, because you can't do it.”
Conclusion
Westerman told me the story of his grandmother, an avid gardener, who helped plant the seeds of conservationist ethics into his mind.
“When I was a little kid, I would go down and help her work in the garden,” he said excitedly.
“And she took gardening to a new level. She tried to grow as much as she could in that garden space and she let nothing go to waste. She either ate it, canned it, froze it, gave it away, fed it to an animal, or saved it for seed. Literally nothing that [the] garden produced was allowed to be wasted.”
“It's [conservation] where you take care of the land knowing the land is going to take care of you and you're not wasteful with what the land produces. And that idea can be expanded all across the great resources that we have in this country.”
https://townhall.com/columnists/gabriellahoffman/2020/10/16/rep-westerman-hopes-to-steer-gop-in-right-direction-on-conservation-issues-n2578192
Environmental groups campaign against EU’s potential ‘veggie burger’ name ban
Environmental groups across Europe have hit out at an EU proposal to ban plant-based products from using terms such as “veggie burger”, saying it contradicts the bloc’s objective to encourage sustainability.
a cut in half sandwich sitting on top of a table© Provided by The Independent
The organisations’ grievance concerns two amendments proposed by Committee on Agriculture and Rural Development (AGRI) which would restrict the naming of meat and dairy alternatives to avoid consumer confusion.
Under the measures, plant-based products would be banned from being advertised using words such as “burger”, “sausage”, “yoghurt style” and “cheese alternative”.
Critics say this will favour the meat and dairy industries and will unfairly affect the growing plant-based food sector, which provides more sustainable products.
If MEPs vote in favour of the amendments next week, they could become part of the Common Agricultural Policy that would come into effect at the start of January 2023.
In a letter sent by 13 leading environmental organisations to MEPS on 8 October, the proposals were criticised for contravening the European Green Deal, which seeks to reduce the agricultural sector’s environmental footprint.
The groups argue that the move goes in the “completely opposite direction” to scientific evidence showing the harmful effects of the meat and dairy industries, and against growing demand for plant-based products.
Marco Contiero, the EU agriculture policy director at Greenpeace who was one of the letter’s signatories, told The Independent that there was “no justification” for amendments which go against environmental, health and economic considerations.
Mr Contiero added that they constituted an “attempt to prevent a new, very important business from actually conquering the market”.
Referring to the proposals, Mr Contiero said: “They are coming from a prehistoric age. And they are justified in a ridiculous way by stating that this will confuse consumers.”
Echoing this sentiment, Asger Mindegaard, a policy officer for agriculture with the European Environmental Bureau (EEB), said: “The Commission’s proposal is likely to confuse European consumers who are already accustomed to terms such as ‘veggie burger’ or ‘plant-based steak’. In many cases, people buy such products specifically because they want to replace one specific meat product with a healthier alternative.
“The common goal of governments, businesses and institutions should be to encourage the uptake of sustainable solutions and alternatives. Instead, in this case we are all wasting time debating a superfluous regulation that will benefit only a few big players in the meat industry.”
ProVeg International, a food awareness organisation, is also against the “veggie burger ban” and has started a petition calling on MEPS to vote against the proposed restrictions. It has so far gained more than 139,000 signatures.
Jasmijn de Boo, the Vice President of ProVeg International, said: “The proposals are in direct contradiction of the EU’s stated objectives in the European Green Deal and Farm to Fork Strategy to create healthier and more sustainable food systems.
“The Farm to Fork Strategy explicitly states the need to empower consumers ‘to choose sustainable food’ and to make ‘it easier to choose healthy and sustainable diets’.”
Next week’s vote comes one month after the UN released a report that people should eat more plant-based diets as part of a drive to halt “unprecedented” losses to the natural world.
According to the European Commission’s Plant Protein report, meat and dairy products are growing each year at a rate of 14 per cent and 11 per cent respectively.
https://www.msn.com/en-au/foodanddrink/other/environmental-groups-campaign-against-eu-s-potential-veggie-burger-name-ban/ar-BB19YIe2
The Great Energy Non-Transition
By Bruce Everett, Ph.D.
One of the troubling characteristics of today's civic discourse is the tendency to confuse predictions with reality. Nowhere is this problem more severe than in the debate over climate and its associated issues.
The last hundred years have seen increasing emissions of carbon dioxide - a benign gas. In reality, this slight increase in atmospheric CO2concentrations (from 0.03% in the nineteenth century to 0.04% today) has brought nothing but beneficial effects, including increased crop yields and greater drought resistance. Nonetheless, climate alarmists argue that rising temperatures are bringing catastrophic storms, flooding, disease, inundation, extinction and general misery. Unlike the benefits of CO2 which are clear and measurable, climate catastrophe remains nothing more than a prediction generated by computer models which have never produced meaningful forecasts of climate impacts.
A frequent corollary of climate alarmism is that the world has undertaken a radical transformation of the global energy system away from fossil fuels toward zero-carbon, renewable energy. A Google search of the term "energy transition" yields over 5 million hits, many accompanied by terms such as "unstoppable" and "irreversible". But is this transition actually taking place? Three arguments are generally offered - none of them valid.
First, "energy transition" supporters point to the high growth rates for renewable energy sources with wind increasing at over 20% annually since 2000 and solar at over 40% per year, compared to less than 2% for fossil fuels. Sounds great, but the absolute numbers tell a different story. In 2019, despite forty years and trillions of dollars of subsidies, wind energy contributes about 2% of total global energy use and solar just over 1%. Fossil fuels accounted for 84%, down just two percentage points over the last 20 years.
Second, even highly respected publications such as the Financial Times run articles questioning whether oil companies can survive the tidal wave of renewables. The oil industry is indeed in serious financial trouble today as a result of the pandemic-driven collapse of oil demand and the oversupply brought about by technological production advances such as fracking. But oil is a transportation fuel with very few points of competition with renewables, which are primarily used to generate electricity. Renewables may be profitable today, but only because their profitability is supported by captive markets and massive subsidies, while oil companies live or die by the market. It remains to be seen what will happen with oil company profits when the pandemic ends, but the issue will be oil supply and demand, not renewables.
Finally, the advent of electric cars is increasingly touted as the death of oil. The US private vehicle fleet is currently on the order of 250 million vehicles, of which approximately 1 million or 0.4% are battery electric vehicles. Electric cars are at present about twice as expensive to produce as comparable gasoline models, and, like renewable power generation, depend on massive subsidies for their viability. Take Tesla, for example, which is currently the darling of the auto industry. In addition to direct subsidies for manufacturing facilities and purchase credits ranging from $2,500-7,500 per vehicle, Tesla sells emissions credits to other car companies to meet California regulatory requirements. These credits have totaled over $1 billion over the last year and account for Tesla's entire free cash flow over this period. Tesla loses money on each car it manufactures.
California Governor Gavin Newsome has banned the sale of new gasoline cars beginning in 2035. As with many such political promises, this "ban" is simply a goal, not a policy. Governor Newsome is 53 years old and will be long gone from office by 2035, and the media will lose interest in whether his objective was met or not. For the moment, however, the Governor can bask in the glory of his signaled virtue.
The world may someday transition away from fossil fuels, but it's not happening yet. All we have so far are predictions, wishful thinking and the waste of large amounts of money for a small impact on a non-problem. I predict that the public will grow tired
Via email
Home Extreme Weather Floods Sinking Land, Not Faster Sea Level Rise, Is Causing Delaware Flooding
A letter to the editor in the Lewes, Delaware Cape Gazette, “Delaware in jeopardy due to climate change,” asserts human caused climate change is causing increased flooding in Delaware. This is wrong. Data demonstrate land subsidence, not accelerated sea level rise, is responsible for Delaware’s coastal woes.
In the article, Claire A. Simmer, a professor emeritus in the field of management, says climate change is causing the people of Sussex County (Delaware) “to have firsthand experiences with flooding due to global warming ….” Simmer’s claim is false.
Delaware has the lowest mean elevation above sea level in the United States. To the extent Delaware is losing slightly more land to the sea than many other states, Dan Leathers, Delaware’s state climatologist, reports it is not due to an accelerated rate of sea level rise or more intense storms. One must look for another cause to Delaware’s increased flooding, which Leathers provides: land subsidence.
Seas have been rising off the entire Atlantic coast, sometimes more rapidly and sometimes more slowly, since the end of the last ice age. Delaware has experienced approximately 13 inches of “sea level rise” over the past century. Only part of that rise is due to higher sea levels. Leathers says the rate of sea level rise is relatively steady at approximately four to eight inches over the century. Simultaneously, Delaware is experiencing approximately 1.7 millimeters of land subsidence each year, or nearly 7 inches over the century. So, land subsidence, due to the tectonic plate Delaware sits upon sinking, makes up at least half of the state’s sea level rise.
As explained in Climate at a Glance: Sea Level Rise, data from both the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and NASA show sea levels have risen a global average of approximately 1.2 inches per decade since the middle of the 18th century. There has been only an approximate 0.3 inch acceleration in sea level rise in recent decades. Assuming all of the modest increase in sea level rise is due entirely too human-caused global warming, it is only a fraction of natural sea level rise.
Human civilization has successfully dealt with sea level rise across the centuries. It will be able to adapt to rising sea levels even more successfully in the coming decades by utilizing twenty-first century technologies.
Climate change is not making Delaware’s coastal flooding worse. City, county, and state governments of Delaware have long battled rising seas through a combination of beach replenishment, altering zoning ordinances to reduce damage from flooding, and hardening infrastructure. There is no reason for believing these same efforts won’t improve in the future, reducing the impacts of rising seas on Delaware’s growing coastal population.
http://climaterealism.com/2020/10/sinking-land-not-faster-sea-level-rise-is-causing-delaware-flooding/
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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16 October, 2020
UK: Ł50billion on wind farms? You might as well spend it on unicorn tears
Speaking to the virtual Conservative Party conference, the Prime Minister was, for once, full of that old bluster and self-confidence, as he announced his new energy plan for the UK.
The answer to our electricity needs? Off-shore wind farms. Loads of them. Everywhere up and down our coast. He would make Britain the “Saudi Arabia of green energy”, he told a bemused public.
This from a man who once said wind turbines couldn’t blow the skin off a rice pudding. He was pretty much right then. I wonder what changed his mind?
It’s another flip-flop on policy, this time nothing to do with Covid.
Last year the talk was all about nuclear power. That was a genuinely exciting plan to reduce our carbon emissions through stable, almost renewable energy. It would have worked, even if nuclear power stations do cost a few quid to build.
But now it’s those bloody turbines. You may remember David Cameron had one on the side of his house in Notting Hill when he was Prime Minister.
That was five years ago. It’s probably generated enough energy to boil a cup of tea by now.
Wind turbines are for virtue-signalling politicians. They’re not the real answer to our energy problems.
There’s nothing wrong with them being part — a small part — of our cleaner energy policy.
Even if they do scar the landscape from Northumberland to Cornwall and have a seriously bad effect on local wildlife.
The real problem, though, is that they won’t do what Boris expects them to do. It won’t work. Don’t take my word for it.
Here’s what the environmental campaigner Zion Lights had to say (yes, I know, it’s British law that all environmental campaigners must have weird names — like Pixie Hempmuncher or Peregrine Hummus).
She says: “Even if we cranked up wind-power provision to the level the Prime Minister proposes (40 gigawatts), this amount would power only about half the homes in Britain — or seven per cent of the total national energy demand. “And that is only when the turbines are turning — a key point.”
No kidding, Zion.
One of the problems with wind is that it doesn’t always blow — and batteries to store the electricity generated are nowhere near advanced enough to overcome this little difficulty.
Wind turbines, especially off-shore turbines, are also expensive to build, expensive to maintain, polluting to construct and they need replacing very often indeed.
So we will be investing a massive amount of money — some experts reckon more than Ł50billion — in an energy source that will satisfy less than ten per cent of our need.
Frankly, you might as well spend Ł50billion harvesting unicorn tears. They would be about as much use.
It’s yet another policy reversal — and one that yet again seems to have been made on an impulse, on the hoof.
Nuclear power — by far and away the safest means of generating electricity and one of the cleanest — is the way forward.
As that campaigner Zion Lights admitted.
Come on, Boris, think again. Or come election time, the voters may take your mojo and shove it somewhere the wind occasionally blows but the sun don’t shine.
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/12873191/50billion-on-wind-farms-spend-it-on-unicorn-tears/
Windfarm farce that blew Ł1.4billion of YOUR money!
A botched green scheme is paying wind turbine owners seven times the value of the electricity they generate – and it is set to cost UK consumers an estimated Ł1.4billion.
The Daily Mail can reveal the eyewatering fiasco in the week Boris Johnson declared that wind power was the future for the nation’s energy generation.
The scheme was set up to encourage homeowners to install a small windmill to supply their needs and feed into the electricity grid.
But blundering civil servants set a subsidy rate so high it has been branded ‘a licence to print money’.
Owners are guaranteed bonanza pots of cash for 20 years, and the scheme is so lucrative, it has triggered a gold rush among investors, including leading pension funds. ,
The farcical initiative was set up in Northern Ireland, but the breathtaking costs will be felt in every corner of the UK thanks to higher ‘green levies’ on household and business utility bills.
It dwarfs the Ł500million wasted by an earlier botched green energy scandal in the province, dubbed ‘Cash for Ash’ which led to the fall of the Stormont Government three years ago.
A Mail investigation has found:
One turbine reaps about Ł375,000 a year, yet produces electricity worth just Ł51,000;
The bumper subsidy is available only in Ulster but adds Ł71million a year to energy bills across the UK;
As the subsidy is guaranteed for 20 years, the overall cost to UK consumers will be an estimated Ł1.4billion;
Incompetent officials tried to shut the scheme in 2016 – but loopholes let it run until March 2019;
In a stampede to erect turbines before the deadline, hundreds were put up, many owned by venture capitalists and even the Royal Bank of Scotland’s pension fund.
On Tuesday, the Prime Minister made a dramatic pledge to power every home by wind by 2030.
Mr Johnson told the Conservative conference he would work at ‘gale-force speed’ to usher in his ‘green industrial revolution’.
But the Mail’s investigation uncovers how an existing wind scheme is being abused at a vast cost to consumers.
It was set up to incentivise landowners to erect small wind turbines. They would receive fees for ‘clean’ power fed into the electricity grid. Even David Cameron erected one in his back garden.
Ministers called it a ‘clean energy cashback’. To fund it, they introduced a ‘green levy’.
This so-called ‘renewables obligation’ adds about Ł73 a year to a typical household electricity bill.
After 2009, these incentives were recognised as being too generous and were dramatically cut down in England, Wales and Scotland.
But Northern Ireland officials inexplicably kept the rate sky-high – sparking a rush among wealthy investors to install clapped-out turbines and claim practically risk-free handouts.
Last night green energy expert Dr John Constable said: ‘Someone made a mistake: simple as that. Clever business people see these mistakes. There was a total stampede. Some people must be getting fabulously rich.
‘I watched the PM’s speech and thought, “here we go again”.’
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8824707/Windfarm-farce-blew-1-4billion-taxpayers-money.html
Energy Policy Advocates Fight Back Against Anti-Industrial Forces
The anti-industrial Left is coming after your energy and a lot of other energy-related things that define your personal life. Every political defeat by the planning zealots results in doubling down on their agenda rather than moderating it. They have almost unlimited money (from private foundations as well as government) and strong emotions/ego that will not let go. Theirs is a road to serfdom where new extremes normalize previous extremism.
The good news is that the economic and civil libertarians are fighting back. A new group, Energy Policy Advocates, is working to unmask the dark forces of authoritarianism and government run amok.
Energy Policy Advocates (EPA, not to be confused with US EPA), with the tag line “where Energy, Environment, and Truth meet, describes its mission as follows:
Energy Policy Advocates is a nonprofit corporation … seek[ing] to bring transparency to the realm of energy and environmental policy. At EPA, we believe that you have a right to know who your government is talking to when it makes the decisions that affect you the most, and what the costs are of the policies bureaucrats make in the halls of government.
We don’t take policy positions, but we do use federal and state transparency laws, such as the Freedom of Information Act, to seek out information. Then, we share that information with you so that you can decide for yourself whether government is making the right choices for you and your family.
To date, Energy Policy Advocates has made Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests in a third of the states with more undoubtedly to come. EPA (not to be confused with the US EPA) is focused on the shadowy interplay between state attorney general offices and outside pressure groups. This June, Legal Newsline reported:
Attorneys general in multiple states are refusing to disclose their communications with private lawyers and outside groups that have a direct stake in climate litigation, citing the attorney-client privilege and other protections.
Energy Policy Advocates, a nonprofit policy group, and Government Accountability & Oversight, a public interest law firm, have sued the AGs in Michigan, Vermont and Washington to turn over emails and other correspondence among the AGs and with environmental groups and private attorneys.
Conclusion
The control-the-economy, control-your-life crusade to regulate the gas of life, Carbon Dioxide (CO2) has necessitated the productive sector of world economies and pro-liberty philanthropists to divert funds and other resources from human needs. In the shame of it all, it is necessary that groups like Energy Policy Advocates swing into action on behalf of individuals and groups that cannot organize themselves. EPA’s work deserves appreciation from us all.
https://naturalgasnow.org/energy-policy-advocates-fight-back-against-anti-industrial-forces/
China steps up trade war ‘by slashing Australian coal imports’
Australia is urgently trying to confirm reports that China has slashed its coal import quota, with analysts warning that Beijing could be stepping up its trade war with the world’s largest coal exporter.
China has already moved to restrict Australian agricultural exports severely, including beef and barley — moves that were taken after Australia’s prime minister, Scott Morrison, led the push in April for an international investigation into the Chinese origins of the coronavirus.
Australian coal analysts said on Tuesday that almost all major Chinese steel mills had been informed of the clampdown on Australian coal, including coal waiting to offload and sitting in China’s port stockpiles.
Australian coal miners could be forced to sell “distressed” coal cargos at cut-rate prices
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/world/china-steps-up-trade-war-with-australia-by-banning-coal-imports-clnrw6p8h
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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15 October, 2020
The Great Barrier Reef has lost half its corals
The heading above -- from a Warmist outfit -- is most implausible. If it were true,it would have been widely noted by now but it appears to be the first such claim. And the journal article they rely on contradicts it:
"The relative abundances of large colonies remained relatively stable"
And the reference to"greenhouse gases" is also not in the original report.
There has undoubtedly been some loss of coral cover in some places in recent years but the cause is conjectural. Many things affect coral abundance, not the least of wich is heavy weather in the form of cyclones etc.
One of the largest declines happened during a fall in the sea level in the general area. And that exposed corals to unusual dessicatory and other damage
And, finally, even research by doomsayer Hoegh-Guldberg has revealed that bounce-back of damaged coral is very good. So the mere fears in the article below are unpersuasive
Journal abstract included below
A new study of the Great Barrier Reef shows populations of its small, medium and large corals have all declined in the past three decades.
Lead author Dr Andy Dietzel, from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies (CoralCoE), says while there are numerous studies over centuries on the changes in the structure of populations of humans—or, in the natural world, trees—there still isn’t the equivalent information on the changes in coral populations.
“We measured changes in colony sizes because population studies are important for understanding demography and the corals’ capacity to breed,” Dr Dietzel said.
He and his co-authors assessed coral communities and their colony size along the length of the Great Barrier Reef between 1995 and 2017. Their results show a depletion of coral populations.
“We found the number of small, medium and large corals on the Great Barrier Reef has declined by more than 50 percent since the 1990s,” said co-author Professor Terry Hughes, also from CoralCoE.
“The decline occurred in both shallow and deeper water, and across virtually all species—but especially in branching and table-shaped corals. These were the worst affected by record-breaking temperatures that triggered mass bleaching in 2016 and 2017,” Prof Hughes said.
The branching and table-shaped corals provide the structures important for reef inhabitants such as fish. The loss of these corals means a loss of habitat, which in turn diminishes fish abundance and the productivity of coral reef fisheries.
Dr Dietzel says one of the major implications of coral size is its effect on survival and breeding.
“A vibrant coral population has millions of small, baby corals, as well as many large ones— the big mamas who produce most of the larvae,” he said.
“Our results show the ability of the Great Barrier Reef to recover—its resilience—is compromised compared to the past, because there are fewer babies, and fewer large breeding adults.”
The authors of the study say better data on the demographic trends of corals is urgently needed.
“If we want to understand how coral populations are changing and whether or not they can recover between disturbances, we need more detailed demographic data: on recruitment, on reproduction and on colony size structure,” Dr Dietzel said.
“We used to think the Great Barrier Reef is protected by its sheer size—but our results show that even the world’s largest and relatively well-protected reef system is increasingly compromised and in decline,” Prof Hughes said.
Climate change is driving an increase in the frequency of reef disturbances such as marine heatwaves. The study records steeper deteriorations of coral colonies in the Northern and Central Great Barrier Reef after the mass coral bleaching events in 2016 and 2017. And the southern part of the reef was also exposed to record-breaking temperatures in early 2020.
“There is no time to lose—we must sharply decrease greenhouse gas emissions ASAP,” the authors conclude.
https://www.coralcoe.org.au/media-releases/the-great-barrier-reef-has-lost-half-its-corals
Long-term shifts in the colony size structure of coral populations along the Great Barrier Reef
Andreas Dietzel et al.
Abstract
The age or size structure of a population has a marked influence on its demography and reproductive capacity. While declines in coral cover are well documented, concomitant shifts in the size-frequency distribution of coral colonies are rarely measured at large spatial scales. Here, we document major shifts in the colony size structure of coral populations along the 2300 km length of the Great Barrier Reef relative to historical baselines (1995/1996). Coral colony abundances on reef crests and slopes have declined sharply across all colony size classes and in all coral taxa compared to historical baselines. Declines were particularly pronounced in the northern and central regions of the Great Barrier Reef, following mass coral bleaching in 2016 and 2017. The relative abundances of large colonies remained relatively stable, but this apparent stability masks steep declines in absolute abundance. The potential for recovery of older fecund corals is uncertain given the increasing frequency and intensity of disturbance events. The systematic decline in smaller colonies across regions, habitats and taxa, suggests that a decline in recruitment has further eroded the recovery potential and resilience of coral populations.
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2020.1432
The ‘Great Reset’: Rule by Unelected ‘Experts’ – COVID-Climate Technocracy has arrived – ‘The danger of letting lab coats run the world’
The COVID-19 lockdowns and suspension of liberties have only emboldened climate campaigners to achieve their progressive vision of having “the masses” lives planned, monitored, and controlled for their “safety” — all in the name of “science.” The very real threat of oppressive rule by unelected experts in government is now threatening to engulf the world due to the ongoing COVID lockdowns and “phased reopenings.”
“If one lesson from the pandemic is that taking serious action in a timely manner is key – then shouldn’t this also be true in terms of climate change?” asked the Speaker of the House of Commons Sir Lindsay Hoyle at G7 Speakers’ Meeting in 2020.
Speaker Hoyle was amazed at how “compliant” the public was in accepting COVID lockdowns “No-one could ever imagine that we would be wearing masks so readily and that we would all be so compliant,” he said. “People were prepared to accept limitations on personal choice and lifestyle – for the good of their own family and friends.”
Hoyle claimed that the climate “tragedy is that unlike the pandemic, the climate crisis is not simply an external threat, but one in which we have had a clear hand”. He said: “In other words, it seems that we have brought this on ourselves. While this is again sobering, surely, it is in our hands to rescue it, if we have got the will to do it?”
The “will to do it” means the public has to prepare for climate lockdowns since they were so “compliant” in accepting the COVID lockdowns. A compliant public and ambition politicians and bureaucrats are a grave threat to liberty. The COVID lockdowns are being hailed by climate activists across the spectrum as a model for the coming climate lockdowns.
Former Secretary of State John Kerry noted that “the parallels [between COVID-19 and climate change] are screaming at us, both positive and negative.”
“You could just as easily replace the words climate change with COVID-19; it is truly the tale of two pandemics deferred, denied, and distorted, one with catastrophic consequences, the other with even greater risk if we don’t reverse course,” Kerry said.
French President Emmanuel Macron while warning citizens to stay confined to their homes during COVID-19 lockdown, urged: “We must all limit the number of people with who we’re in contact with every single day. Scientists say so.”
And the reason? Because “scientists say so.”
The COVID lockdowns and the attempt to impose a Green New Deal upon the USA herald another step into what is being called “scientism” that is leading us to a technocracy. “Technocracy” can be defined as the public’s acquiesce to a governing body composed of an elite cadre of unelected technical experts who are positioned to call the shots and manage society.
“The lockdown and its consequences have brought a foretaste of what is to come: a permanent state of fear, strict behavioral control, massive loss of jobs, and growing dependence on the state,” German Economic Professor Antony P. Mueller explained in August 2020.
“This coming technocracy involves close cooperation between the heads of the digital industry and of governments. With programs such as guaranteed minimum income and healthcare for all, the new kind of governance combines strict societal control with the promise of comprehensive social justice,” Mueller wrote.
“Earlier totalitarian regimes needed mass executions and concentration camps to maintain their power. Now, with the help of new technologies, it is believed, dissenters can easily be identified and marginalized. The nonconformists will be silenced by disqualifying divergent opinions as morally despicable,” Mueller detailed.
Mueller added, “Under the order envisioned by the Great Reset, the advancement of technology is not meant to serve the improvement of the conditions of the people but to submit the individual to the tyranny of a technocratic state. ‘The experts know better’ is the justification.”
“Overnight, our society is doing what radical leftist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and her fellow Green New Deal fanatics have demanded: An almost total end to air travel; personal automobile travel down to a trickle; promises of free health care for all quickly becoming the new status quo; and the ability of people to sit at home without working and receive a paycheck from the government. The Democrats want that to continue indefinitely,” Chowka wrote.
‘Lab coats run the world’
The U.S. is entering into a new phase where the “danger of letting lab coats run the world” is palpable. “It should be clear by now that most of the world’s leaders were stampeded over the lockdown cliff like so many lemmings. What caused the stampede is even more remarkable: a tiny coterie of obscure, soft-spoken epidemiologists in white lab coats playing with numbers…the aim was to cause panic,” wrote Bill Dunne in American Thinker.
“We were plunged into the grandest of experiments in authoritarian paternalism, whereby we plebeians — i.e., those without government jobs — are deemed incompetent to judge if it’s safe to take a dip in the ocean or a walk in the woods. We can, though, crowd into a Walmart or the local supermarket,” Dunne wrote.
Former UK Supreme Court Judge Lord Sumption explained this well in 2020: “Do we really want to be the kind of society where basic freedoms are conditional on the decisions of politicians in thrall to scientists and statisticians? Where human beings are just tools of public policy?” Sumption asked.
“To say that life is priceless and nothing else counts is just empty rhetoric…There is more to life than the avoidance of death,” he added. “To say that there are no limits is the stuff of tyrants. Every despot who ever lived thought that he was coercing his subjects for their own good or that of society at large,” he added.
“A society in which the Government can confine most of the population without controversy is not one in which civilized people would want to live, regardless of their answers to these questions. Is it worth it?” Sumption explained adding, “The lockdown is, without doubt, the greatest interference with personal liberty in our history.”
https://www.climatedepot.com/2020/10/13/the-great-reset-rule-by-unelected-experts-covid-climate-technocracy-has-arrived-the-danger-of-letting-lab-coats-run-the-world-special-report/?mc_cid=327209ae5f&mc_eid=1b6561548e
Banning Gas-Powered Vehicles Won’t Help the Earth
California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced an order this week to ban the sale of new gas-powered road vehicles in the state by 2035.
CNBC reports the proposed rule would not prohibit people from driving or owning gas-powered cars, but would ban the sale of all new gasoline-powered passenger vehicles in the Golden State in an effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 35 percent.
The proposed rule would make California the first state to eliminate sales of such vehicles, though several European countries, including Sweden and Denmark, have made similar commitments.
There are reasons to be skeptical of such policies, however.
Proposals to eliminate gas-powered automobiles are likely to win politicians media coverage and cheers at town hall meetings (at least in some places). But the actual environmental impact of such policies remains unclear.
It’s important to remember that CO2 emissions are not just about what comes out of vehicles, but also what goes into vehicles. Electric vehicles might not emit emissions through exhaust pipes like gas-powered cars, but they expend tremendous amounts of CO2 during their production and charging cycles, and require numerous elements—such as lithium, cobalt, and manganese—that must be mined from the earth.
While conventional wisdom says electric vehicles are more environmentally friendly and an effective tool to fight climate change, research suggests electric vehicles may have environmental costs that actually exceed those of internal combustion engines when the full cycle of production is included.
Jonathan Lesser of the Manhattan Institute, for example, has published research showing that electric vehicles are worse for the environment than modern gas-powered vehicles. Using the Energy Information Administration’s long-term forecasts for the number of electric vehicles through 2050, Lesser estimated how much electricity these vehicles would require. He then broke down the effects on three key pollutants that are regulated in the US Clean Air Act: sulfur dioxide (SO2), oxides of nitrogen (NOX), and carbon dioxide (CO2).
“What I found is that widespread adoption of electric vehicles nationwide will likely increase air pollution compared with new internal combustion vehicles. You read that right: more electric cars and trucks will mean more pollution,” Lesser wrote in Politico.
The fact is, modern gas-powered vehicles are not what your grandaddy was driving. Today’s vehicles emit very little pollution, Lesser concluded, about 1% of what they did in the 1960s.
Lesser’s findings are not isolated.
The World Economic Forum has also called attention to the “dirty secrets of electric vehicles,” which includes both adverse environmental impacts and children as young as seven working in cobalt mines in places like the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where more than half of the world’s cobalt is produced.
“[R]aw materials needed for batteries are extracted at a high human and environmental toll. This includes, for example, child labour, health and safety hazards in informal work, poverty and pollution,” the World Economic Forum’s Global Battery Alliance notes. “A recycling challenge looms over the eleven million tonnes of spent lithium-ion batteries forecast to be discarded by 2030, with few systems in place to enable reuse and recycling in a circular economy for batteries.”
Recycling is not the only environmental problem facing the lithium-ion batteries used in electric cars.
The bulk of these batteries are manufactured in places such as Japan, China, and South Korea, where generation of electricity remains heavily dependent on fossil fuels, including coal, which increases the carbon footprint of electric car batteries. For this reason, Amnesty International is calling on nations to disclose the carbon footprint of electric car batteries, so their environmental impact can be accurately assessed.
While it’s difficult to gauge the environmental costs of these batteries with precision, one German study found that every Tesla battery requires between 23,000 pounds and 32,000 pounds of carbon emissions. Considering that Tesla produced 368,000 cars in 2019 alone, that’s up to 11.8 billion pounds of carbon dioxide emissions in just Tesla batteries in a given year.
It’s unclear if Gavin Newsom truly has three Teslas—a New Yorker journalist found three in the driveway when he went to Newsom’s home in 2018 for an interview—but if he did that would put Newsom’s carbon footprint at close to 100,000 for just the Tesla batteries.
This of course is of little concern to Newsom or Tesla founder Elon Musk, who “liked” Newsom’s announcement on Twitter that California would be “phasing out the internal combustion engine.”
Of course Musk likes this news. Newsom is sidelining Tesla’s competition, which stands to increase the market share of the world’s most valuable automobile company even further. This isn’t capitalism, however, it’s crony capitalism—the use of government regulations to shift the market toward a favored company or economic sector.
As the regulatory state grows, so does the phenomenon of what economists call “rent-seeking.” It involves companies diverting resources toward lobbying efforts (versus production) that seek regulatory measures designed to hamstring their economic rivals to increase their own share of the market.
Rent-seeking is, unfortunately, often an effective business strategy. But it’s not capitalism and is unlikely to improve the environment.
The law of unintended consequences, one of the proverbial building blocks of economics, shows that actions, those undertaken by people but especially those undertaken by governments, have consequences that go far beyond their desired effects.
Many people of good faith wish to help the environment by rejecting or limiting the use of gasoline. The desired effect is lower consumption of gasoline. However, there are also unintended consequences of this action.
By restricting the use of gasoline, environmentalists increase the demand for electricity. This in turn increases the price of coal, which incentives production of coal, a fossil fuel that produces more CO2 emissions than gasoline.
The great economist Claude-Frédéric Bastiat (1801-1850), in his seminal essay “That Which is Seen, and That Which is Not Seen,” observed there was a tendency for humans to judge actions based on immediate effects (“a small present good”) while ignoring their long-term consequences (“a great evil to come”).
Bastiat said it was man’s inability to see the results of actions in their totality—the seen and the unseen—that resulted in mankind’s greatest depredations.
“This explains the fatally grievous condition of mankind,” Bastiat warned. “Ignorance surrounds its cradle: then its actions are determined by their first consequences, the only ones which, in its first stage, it can see.”
If we celebrate the decline in emissions from gas-powered vehicles but ignore the considerable environmental costs of electric vehicles, we fall into the trap Bastiat described 170 years ago.
https://catalyst.independent.org/2020/10/09/californias-gas-powered-ban-elon-musk-environment/?omhide=true
Jeff Bezos and Amazon Join the Religion of Green
Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and the world’s richest man, likes to depict himself as rising from difficult circumstances. His mother was still in high school when she became pregnant and his biological father left early on. Bezos as well as his former wife, Mackenzie, are members in good standing of what Charles Murray called the new upper class, in his book: Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960-2010. The Bezos couple exhibited high intelligence, were successful at the best colleges, and rose rapidly in their careers. Members of the new upper class marry each other, live in nice houses, send their kids to private schools or good public schools, and are very much out of touch with the thinking of ordinary people.
None of the new upper-class billionaires are monsters. They come from middle to upper middle-class origins. They are all brilliant entrepreneurs. They mostly use their power to damage Trump politically because they don’t like Trump. That is not usually illegal, but it does affect the future of the country because they do have great power
Amazon is a great company. I’m a faithful customer and I published my book: Dumb Energy: A Critique of Wind and Solar Energy using Amazon’s Kindle system. I hope I’m not going to wake up tomorrow and find out that my book has disappeared.
Lately, Amazon has jumped on the global warming/ renewable energy/ sustainability bandwagon. They are spending millions on television ads to tell everyone how virtuous they are. Amazon’s 2019 annual report is heavy with climate change, carbon footprints and renewable energy. Amazon is building wind and solar farms. They have signed a “climate pledge.” Previously, when Amazon mentioned climate, they meant the economic climate. Although Amazon has a history with renewable energy, it is necessary to keep in mind that in some circumstances, due to massive subsidies, renewable energy can be a profitable exercise.
Amazon is genuflecting to the Religion of Green, explained in this PragerU video. The Religion of Green is where the new upper class goes for spiritual sustenance, having given up on Episcopalianism. The Religion of Green claims to be backed by science. That is not necessarily a lie, because a lot of scientists are enjoying great success thanks to the Religion of Green. Since the popularization of global warming, climate scientists have risen from occupants of an obscure corner of academia into world-jetting celebrities. For these scientists, worldly fame has displaced scientific investigation. But Amazon is late to the green party. Apple and Chevron have been celebrating the Religion of Green for a long time.
Renewable energy is the concrete manifestation of the green religion. Yammering about global warming or recycling is mostly show. Renewable energy is billions of dollars for wind and solar farms that are absolutely a complete waste of money. Every claim made about the virtues of renewable energy is a lie and not a subtle lie. Further, the advocates of renewable energy that are technically literate have to work very hard not to see the truth.
Of course, not seeing the truth is easier if your paycheck depends on not seeing the truth. Climate Scientists for Nuclear agree with me. They say renewable energy is useless and won’t be remotely useful for reducing CO2 emissions. James Hansen, the most prominent climate scientist in the world and a proselytizer for global warming, calls renewable energy “grotesque.” You can see a video of Hansen and the prominent environmental advocate Michael Schellenberger making those points here.
Climate Scientists for Nuclear tell us that wind and solar will never be effective for reducing CO2 emissions. They are horribly expensive energy, requiring an 80% subsidy. If you get to the point of replacing about 25% of the grid electricity with wind and solar, the cost and difficulty of adding more becomes overwhelming.
Nuclear, on the other hand, does not emit CO2. Although nuclear is more expensive than fossil fuels, that is mostly due to the anti-nuclear movement launched by the same environmental groups that scream climate change. They have entangled nuclear in so much regulation and so many lawsuits that it is nearly impossible to build a new plant in the U.S. In other places, like France, South Korea and China, nuclear is progressing rapidly. The priests of the green religion are in a pickle. If they endorse nuclear, they will be endorsing what was formerly the work of the devil. But, if they don’t endorse nuclear, they are not serious about global warming.
Most likely, Amazon has jumped on the green train to deflect from the criticism it is getting for being a monopoly and stepping on toes of other interests. Bezos purchased the Washington Post newspaper, a virulently anti-Trump publication that has not become less anti-Trump under its new ownership.
President Trump has responded by suggesting that Amazon is ripping off the Postal Service by not paying enough for its package deliveries. If Trump is reelected, Bezos may have to start currying favor rather than promoting Trump hatred. Members of the new upper class are overwhelmingly Democrat voters with a low opinion of Trump. Manhattan and Marin County, California, hotbeds of the new upper class, voted better than 80% for Hillary in the last presidential election.
The billionaire members of the new upper class that run Google, Facebook, Apple and Twitter can’t stand Trump. My opinion is that jealously plays a big role in inciting this hatred. From nowhere and using only his native cunning, Trump got himself elected president. This is hard to bear, especially considering that Trump is a relative pauper compared to the tech billionaires. The less opulent, run of the mill members of the new upper-class sense that Trump is not one of them and doesn’t care about their class interests. They sense that the Democrat party is run by fellow class members, so they feel at home with the Democrats. The Republican Party, in contrast, is filled with people still following traditional religion, rather than the Religion of Green.
Since the Religion of Green is a religion, it can be difficult to counter with scientific or engineering facts or data. The facts and data concerning global warming (now called climate change because there wasn’t enough warming) lead directly to a swamp populated with computer models. But when it comes to wind and solar, the renewable energy that counts, the facts are very clear. The crippling handicap of wind and solar is intermittent and erratic operation. Because their operation is unpredictable, wind and solar can’t replace existing fossil fuel plants. The existing plants have to stay, in full force, to take over when the wind stops or the sun is obscured by clouds. Either wind or solar electricity costs, exclusive of subsidies, about $80 per megawatt hour. The cost is mostly the capital cost of the plant amortized over the life of the plant. The alternative is to burn natural gas in the existing plants at a fuel cost of $15 per megawatt hour. Renewable energy is a scheme to displace $15 electricity with $80 electricity.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/10/jeff_bezos_and_amazon_join_the_religion_of_greeen.html
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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14 October, 2020
Ontario’s green-energy catastrophe
A transition to renewables sent energy prices soaring, pushed thousands into poverty and fuelled a populist backlash.
In February 2009, Ontario passed its Green Energy Act (GEA). It was signed a week after Obama’s Economic Recovery and Reinvestment Act in the US, following several months of slow and arduous negotiations. It also had grand plans to start a ‘green’ recovery following the financial crash – although on a more modest scale.
This was the plan: increased integration of wind and solar energy into Ontario’s electricity grid would shut down coal plants and create 50,000 green jobs in the first three years alone. Additionally, First Nations communities would manage their own electricity supply and distribution – what observers would later call the ‘decolonisation’ of energy – empowering Canada’s indigenous communities who had been disenfranchised by historical trauma. Lawmakers promised that clean and sustainable energy provided by renewables would also reduce costs for poorer citizens. This won an endorsement from Ontario’s Low Income Energy Network – a group which campaigns for universal access to affordable energy.
George Smitherman, Ontario’s energy minister in 2009, when contacted for comment, remarked that ‘drafting and passing the GEA were not the greatest challenges’ compared to its implementation. He was ‘proud’ that the ‘GEA passed on economic benefits to First Nations populations’. It’s hardly surprising that Smitherman passed the GEA relatively easily. Who wouldn’t support a programme promising to kickstart the economy after a financial crisis, with social and environmental benefits to boot?
But on 1 January, 2019, Ontario repealed the GEA, one month before its 10th anniversary. The 50,000 guaranteed jobs never materialised. The ‘decolonisation’ of energy didn’t work out, either. A third of indigenous Ontarians now live in energy poverty. Ontarians watched in dismay as their electricity bills more than doubled during the life of the GEA. Their electricity costs are now among the highest in North America.
Energy officials I spoke to cited one apparent success of the GEA: the 2014 shutdown of coal plants. This may be commendable. But in actual fact, the regulation to phase out the coal plants came into effect in 2007 – two years before the GEA. Between 2007 and 2009, Ontario’s greenhouse-gas emissions from coal had already dropped by 55 per cent.
In truth, the GEA had a devastatingly negative impact. And the need to disentangle it will burden Ontarians – especially poorer ones – for at least a decade to come.
To understand how the GEA went irreparably wrong, we must look at Ontario’s contracts with its green-energy suppliers. Today, Ontario’s contracts guarantee to electricity suppliers that they ‘will be paid for each kWh of electricity generated from the renewable energy project’, regardless of whether this electricity is consumed. As preposterous as this may seem, it’s actually an improvement on many of the original contracts the Ontario government locked itself into.
Earlier contracts guaranteed payments that benchmarked close to 100 per cent of the supplier’s capacity, rather than the electricity generated. So if a participating producer supplied only 33 per cent of its capacity in a given year, the state would still pay it as if it had produced 100 per cent.
This was especially alarming in context, as 97 per cent of the applicants to the GEA programme were using wind or solar energy. These are both intermittent forms of energy. In an hour, day or month with little wind or sun, wind and solar farms can’t supply the grid with electricity, and other sources are needed for back-up. As a result, wind and solar electricity providers can only supplement the grid but cannot replace consistently reliable power plants like gas or nuclear.
Many governments, including other Canadian provinces, have used subsidies of all hues to incentivise renewables. But Ontario put this strategy on steroids. For example, the Council for Clean and Reliable Energy found that ‘in 2015, Ontario’s wind farms operated at less than one-third capacity more than half (58 per cent) the time’. Regardless, Ontarians paid multiple contracts as if wind farms had operated at full capacity all year round. To add insult to injury, Ontario’s GEA contracts guaranteed exorbitant prices for renewable energy – often at up to 40 times the cost of conventional power for 20 years.
By 2015, Ontario’s auditor general, Bonnie Lysyk, concluded that citizens had paid ‘a total of $37 billion’ above the market rate for energy. They were even ‘expected to pay another $133 billion from 2015 to 2032’, again, ‘on top of market valuations’. (One steelmaker has taken the Ontarian government to court for these exorbitant energy costs.)
Today, this problem persists.
In April this year, the market value for all wind-generated electricity in Ontario was only $4.3 million. Yet Ontario paid out $184.5million in wind contracts. Extraordinarily, if this trend were to continue throughout the whole of 2020, it would still result in a lower payout than under the former contracting system. Ontario corralled taxpayers into long-term electricity contracts at eye-watering prices for electricity that suppliers did not even produce.
Furthermore, electricity demand from ratepayers declined between 2011 and 2015, and has continued to fall. Ontarians were forced to pay higher prices for new electricity capacity, even as their consumption was going down.
Despite the mounting costs, the GEA still has its defenders. But even if we were to attribute declining emissions to GEA-backed renewables, was it worth the cost?
Ontario’s auditor general in 2015 stated that: ‘The implied cost of using non-hydro renewables to reduce carbon emissions in the electricity sector was quite high: approximately $257 million [Ł150million] for each megatonne of emissions reduced.’ Per tonne of carbon reduced, the Ontario scheme has cost 48 per cent more than Sweden’s carbon tax – the most expensive carbon tax in the world.
Clearly, bad policy has led to exorbitant waste. This wasn’t the result of corruption or conspiracy – it was sheer incompetence. It’s a meandering story of confusion and gross policy blunders that will fuel energy poverty in Ontario for at least another decade.
As democracies across the West respond to the coronavirus crisis with hastily prepared financial packages for a ‘green recovery’, they should consider the cautionary tale of Ontario.
The disaster of the GEA has had political consequences, too. Unsurprisingly, in the 2018 elections, the Liberal Party, which had drafted the GEA when in power, suffered the worst election results in its 161-year history, falling from first to third place – a defeat so terrible it lost is status as an official party. Disdain for renewable energy is now a key indicator of voting intention.
Ontario is now governed by a populist leader who has since taken a ruthless and costly approach to cancelling renewable-energy contracts. But this is understandably well-supported by the public.
The GEA’s stubborn defenders refuse to recognise that poor policy, even with the best intentions, discredits future efforts at cutting emissions. ‘Green New Deals’ for the post-pandemic recovery in the US and Europe should learn from the GEA. Clean energy at any cost will be rightfully short-lived and repealed, and its supporters will be unceremoniously booted out of power.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/09/17/ontarios-green-energy-catastrophe/
Dominion Green Energy Costs Grow Again
Dominion Energy Virginia’s major capital projects listed in its pending integrated resource plan. The SCC staff added the lifetime revenue requirement, the total dollars extracted from ratepayers over time which includes financing costs and the company’s current profit margin. Source: SCC
As sobering as they were, the initial estimates of how a green energy conversion will explode Dominion Energy Virginia rates have now been revised up. The State Corporation Commission staff now sees it costing an additional $800 per year for a residential customer to purchase 1,000 kWh per month by 2030, an increase of just under 60%.
The main drivers of the higher costs will be all the offshore wind and solar generation Dominion proposes to build, as outlined in its most recent integrated resource plan. That plan is now being reviewed by the SCC, and the staff filed its analysis late last week, summarized here on pages 4-5.
The separate cost analysis by Carol Myers of the SCC’s Division of Utility Accounting pushed up the utility-issued estimate by disputing assumptions the utility made. Staff disagrees with the utility projection that by 2030 less than half of its electricity will be used by residential customers. It is now about 55%. Should the portion shrink as Dominion projects, more of the project costs would be imposed on commercial users.
Myers reported it is also unrealistic to assume most residential households use 1,000 kWh per month, when the history show usage at or above 1,100 kWh. Plugging that into the data would increase the projected cost to families even beyond $800. Myers’ testimony also shows huge increase in commercial (60%) and industrial (65%) power costs by 2030, even larger on a percentage basis than residential. For the state’s economy, they also matter.
Reading her testimony demonstrates how many variables are involved in these projections. Behind the “gotcha” headlines, it is clear these estimates could easily be too high or too low. Much but not all of the coming price increases can be blamed on the 2020 Virginia Clean Economy Act, which is dictating the massive wind, solar and storage investments. The General Assembly is also responsible for the vast majority of the other recent decisions driving up your future bills.
There is also no reason to assume that a General Assembly which has rewritten utility law several times in the past decade will not continue to do so going forward. Each integrated resource plan seems to survive as a useful document only until the next General Assembly session, if that long.
One of the major unanswered questions is whether the North Carolina regulatory authority will impose these capital costs on its citizens served by Dominion. If not, that will further increase the bill on Virginians.
The new analysis by the State Corporation Commission staff confirms that the green energy law passed by the General Assembly is indeed the “Clean Energy We Don’t Actually Need Act.” Dominion Energy Virginia will be collecting $100 billion from its customers to build far more electricity generation than we need, either to meet renewable energy goals or to simply meet demand.
Environmental opponents of the plan will seek to stop continued operation of the coal-fired Virginia Hybrid Energy Center in Southwest Virginia, which on an accounting basis is actually a money-losing operation with a net present value of negative $472 million by 2030.
Along with fossil fuel plants not being closed, Dominion proposes to add 970 megawatts of new natural gas generation by 2024, “to address what (Dominion) characterizes as probable system reliability issues resulting from the addition of significant renewable energy resources and the retirement of coal-fired facilities,” the staff wrote.
SCC Staff versus Dominion estimates of residential cost increases by 2030. Plan B assumes a 25% solar capacity factor, and B19 assumes a 19% capacity factor.
Like Gaul, your future Dominion bill increases are divided into three parts in Myers’ testimony, as her table above illustrates.
First, identified in the document as Plan A, are increased costs not directly tied to the 2018 or 2020 legislation. Those include the Assembly-approved plans to remove coal ash, to place hundreds of miles of residential tap lines underground, and various demand management programs where customer A pays customer B to use less power. Also included are the cost of gaining new 20-year operating licenses for Dominion’s four nuclear reactors.
The second tranche of higher costs are projects which were mandated in the 2018 Ratepayer Bill Transformation Act (also called the Grid Transformation Act). That includes a portion of the planned solar, a broadband program subsidized by ratepayers, even more demand management, and a planned pumped storage facility to provide 300 megawatts of backup to renewables.
The third tranche comes from 2020’s VCEA: Four or more waves of wind turbines built off Virginia Beach, thousands of megawatts of new solar, battery storage, the cost retiring coal plants early, and the new carbon tax Virginians will pay as part of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative.
Myers includes a table comparing the new generation sources, the amount of energy generated when they operate and their initial cost and all-in cost, including financing and profits over time. That’s how $45 million in capital costs translates into $100.6 million in customer payments.
Do the division and it turns out the offshore wind will cost $7 million per constructed megawatt, solar will cost about half that at $3.7 million per megawatt, and the natural gas generation less than $2 million per megawatt. The disparity is even worse, in reality, because solar and wind are unreliable, intermittent producers.
https://jeffersonpolicyjournal.com/2020/10/dominion-green-energy-costs-grow-again/
UK: Boris Johnson Announces 200% Rise in Electricity Prices
Ignoring clear evidence that the underlying economics of renewables are disastrous, the Prime Minister has today committed the UK to a further expansion of offshore wind power by 2030, with frightening implications for electricity prices, which would have to treble to pay the real costs.
This is not only economically foolish, but incoherent climate policy since today’s decision will ensure that other low emission goals, such as the electrification of vehicles and domestic heating, become unaffordable for most Britons.
Despite the wind industry’s smoke and mirrors, offshore wind remains an extremely expensive way of generating electricity. Meeting the Prime Minister’s target will actually increase current costs still further because of the need to build turbines in deeper water with much higher operating costs.
In addition, the hidden costs of integrating high levels of intermittent wind generation into the electricity system add at least 50% to the direct costs of the wind fleet
This rash and misconceived pledge throws any prospect of post-Covid and post-Brexit recovery into desperate jeopardy. With the prospect of much higher electricity prices no reasonable investor will put money into any UK manufacturing or related businesses with above average electricity consumption.
The implications for net employment are also devastating. Subsidy may create some soft UK jobs in the wind industry, and many more in China and the Middle East where wind turbines are made, but will not offset the loss of real UK jobs in other businesses that are no longer viable because of high energy costs. The net effect for the UK will be severely negative.
https://www.thegwpf.com/boris-johnson-announces-200-rise-in-electricity-prices/
There’s no such thing as clean energy
All good environmentalists detest renewables and are appalled at the money wasted on the industrial renewables corporations.
All the rest are unwitting marketing agents who provide free advertising for banks and multinational conglomerate profits. In the process they hurt the poor and scorch the Earth.
In short: The world spent $3.6 trillion dollars over eight years, mostly trying to change the weather. Only a pitiful 5% of this was spent trying to adapt to the inevitable bad weather which is coming one way or another. Both solar and wind power are perversely useless at reducing CO2, which is their only reason for existing in large otherwise efficient grids. Wind farms raise the temperature of the local area around them which causes more CO2 to be released from the soil. Solar and wind farms waste 100 times the wilderness land area compared to fossil fuels, and need ten times as many minerals mined from the earth. Biomass razes forests, but protects underground coal deposits.
The role of large wind and solar power in national grids is to produce redundant surges of electricity at random or low-need times. They are surplus infrastructure designed in a religious quest to generate nicer weather. They always make electricity more expensive because the minor fuel savings are vastly overrun by the extra costs of misusing and abusing perfectly good infrastructure, which has to be there to provide baseload and backup, and yet is forced to run on and off, sitting around consuming capital, investments, labor and maintenance. It is simply impossible to imagine a situation where unreliable generators have some productive purpose on major grids other than to generate profits for shareholders or their mostly Chinese manufacturers.
Despite the extortionate, futile mountain-of-money paid to wind and solar parasites, they produced a pitiful 3% of all the energy needed on Earth, while fossil fuels produced 85%.
Everyone who loves renewables should be asking themselves how much they hate the poor.
http://joannenova.com.au/2020/10/theres-no-such-thing-as-clean-energy/
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My other blogs:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
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13 October, 2020
Biden Ad Claims Michigan Crop Crisis – As Michigan Crops Set New Records
Joe Biden has released a new ad in Michigan that claims climate change is punishing farmers in the state. In reality, Michigan farmers are setting new records for crop production as the Earth modestly warms.
“I think it’s very important to adopt measures to mitigate climate change,” asserts a farmer and Biden supporter in the video. “We’re having more challenges for tart cherries than ever before,” says the Biden supporter.
The facts tell a different story.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture forecasts record corn and soybean crops in Michigan this year. As reported by Michigan Farm News, “USDA forecasts record U.S., Michigan corn and soybean production.”
“Average corn yield is forecast at a record high 181.8 bushels per acre, up 14.4 bushels from last year. NASS forecasts record-high yields in Georgia, Kentucky, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Washington, and Wisconsin.”
Corn is Michigan’s most important crop, bringing Michigan farmers $1 billion in revenue each year. Soybeans bring Michigan farmers over $900 million in revenue each year.
To deflect attention from this good news, Biden focuses on Michigan’s less important tart cherry crop. Tart cherries bring Michigan farmers only a quarter as much revenue as corn or soybeans.
Michigan cherry production has been up and down in recent years, with late freezes in the spring of 2019 and 2020 damaging crops. Global warming reduces the frequency and severity of late-spring freezes, although they still occur. Nevertheless, Biden blames colder-than-normal spring temperatures in Michigan on global warming.
Despite the cold-induced harm to the minor cherry crop, Michigan farmers as a whole are enjoying record overall crop seasons that are only getting better as the Earth modestly warms.
SOURCE
German Prof: Climate Science Politicized, Filled With ‘Fairy Tales’
German professor, a co-founder of the modern environmental movement, says climate science is exaggerated, filled with fairy tales, and believes the Paris Accord is “already dead.”
In an interview with publicist Roland Tichy, Prof. Fritz Vahrenholt – one of the founders of Germany’s modern environmental movement – said we have in fact three generations time to revamp the world’s energy supply system to one that is cleaner and sustainable.
He rejects the Fridays For Future claim that there are only 12 years left.
Climate catastrophe not taking place
In the interview, moderator Tichy reminded that civilization began 7,000 years ago, a time when it was “3°C warmer than today” and Vahrenholt responded by saying he expects civilization to continue for another seven thousand years.
There was no tipping point back then, why would there be one today? “Warmth and moisture have always been good for mankind,” said Vahrenholt. “Cold has been man’s worst enemy.”
Plenty of time to move rationally
The German professor also said that the claimed catastrophe “is not taking place” and that policymakers are trying to use “panic and fear to get the people to act.”
Much of the warming measured since 1850 is the result of natural warming taking place due to the end of the Little Ice Age, he explained.
Germany’s green fantasy
Later the German professor of chemistry calls the belief that wind and sun are able to replace fossil fuels “fantasizing” and that Germany, with its 2.3% share of global CO2 emissions, can rescue the global climate “a fairy tale”.
Meanwhile, the warming of the last 150 years is in large part caused by natural cycles. “In the 20th century, the sun was more active than at any time over the past 2000 years.”
Economically, Vahrenholt believes that a frenzied rush to renewables will lead to “horrible” economic consequences from European industrialization.
On the topic of a scientific consensus, the German professor says this is a claim made by the IPCC, which run by the UN with an agenda behind it.
Electric cars a “crackpot idea”
Vahrenholt also believes electric cars powered by batteries is not a feasible technology, and that other experts quietly call it “a crackpot idea”, and don’t speak up for fear of losing research funding. The vast majority of funding comes from the German government.
“Paris Accord already dead”
The professor of chemistry, co-author of a recent bestseller, also describes Germany as a country in denial when it comes to the broader global debate taking place on climate science, and declared the Paris Accord as being “already dead”.
“The Accord is already dead. Putin says it’s nonsense. […] The Americans are out. The Chinese don’t have to do anything. It’s all concentrated on a handful of European countries. The European Commission is massively on it. And I predict that they will reach the targets only if they destroy the European industries,” said Vahrenholt.
He characterizes Europe’s recent push for even stricter emissions reduction targets to madness akin to Soviet central planning that is doomed to fail spectacularly.
SOURCE
Lake Erie and the 'Science of Climate Change'
Among the more insidious questions “moderator” Chris Wallace asked President Trump during the first debate was the one that dealt with climate change.
As he did on several occasions, Wallace set Trump up to deny what the people in America’s newsrooms just knew to be true, and he did so with a heart-wrenching build-up. “The forest fires in the West are raging now,” said Wallace. “They have burned millions of acres. They have displaced hundreds of thousands of people. When state officials there blamed the fires on climate change, Mr. President, you said, 'I don’t think the science knows.'”
Given that the debate was in Cleveland, Wallace might have asked a more locally relevant question: “Up and down Lake Erie and the other Great Lakes, sea walls are crumbling and homes are collapsing into the lakes. For at least a dozen years, Mr. President, climate scientists predicted continually lower lake water levels, and now they are at record highs.”
Here is how Wallace actually concluded his question: “What do you believe about the science of climate change, and what will you do in the next four years to confront it?” If those of us with lakefront property were able to answer, we might have said: “From our perspective, the science of climate change seems no more ‘settled’ than that of embryonic stem cell research or eugenics. We’ve been confronting its miscalculations for years.”
As it happens, I bought my property—two or so hours northeast of Cleveland in New York State—the same year that climate change alarmism kicked into high gear, 1988. Back then, of course, the phenomenon was called “global warming.” James Hansen, director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, lent NASA’s authority to his claim that “global warming is now large enough that we can ascribe with a high degree of confidence a cause and effect relationship to the greenhouse effect.” So saying, Hansen gave the international left a new rationale for global governance.
The following year, in an interview for Discover magazine, Stephen Schneider of the National Center for Atmospheric Research observed that although scientists were “ethically bound to the scientific method,” they also needed “to capture the public’s imagination.” To do so required media attention, and to get that attention they needed to “offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts [they] might have.” Schneider concluded, “Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both.”
That balance has proved elusive, especially for the media. In real science, dissent is expected, even welcome. In the media-driven “science of climate change.” dissent is discouraged, even vilified. In 2007, Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Ellen Goodman nicely captured the punitive spirit of the alarmist community. “I would like to say we're at a point where global warming is impossible to deny,” wrote Goodman. “Let's just say that global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers, though one denies the past and the other denies the present and future.” Oy Vey!
In 2007, Goodman was still using “global warming” as a term of art. Soon enough, with almost no public explanation as to why, “global warming” would yield to “climate change.” In 2013, the climate change-friendly Economist hinted at the reason for the rebranding. “Over the past 15 years air temperatures at the Earth’s surface have been flat while greenhouse-gas emissions have continued to soar.” This was a secret the media preferred to keep under wraps. Indeed, the Economist aptly titled the article, “A Sensitive Matter.”
Here on Lake Erie, scientists and their media champions have much to be sensitive about. Year after year, they have proven unreliable on any number of climate-related variables and especially the one that concerns property owners most—the lake level.
In 2002, National Geographic published a much cited article with the none too subtle title, “Down the Drain: The Incredible Shrinking Great Lakes.” That article seems to have vanished into the ether. I learned about it only from reading a 2012 National Geographic article by Lisa Borre that identified the culprit for this shrinkage as climate change, “Warming Lakes: Climate Change and Variability Drive Low Water Levels on the Great Lakes.”
According to Ms. Barre, “Down the Drain” documented “declining lake levels and the potential economic and ecological consequences for the region.” Ten years later, Barre tells us, “The story continues to unfold, as water levels remain lower than normal.” Although somewhat balanced, Barre’s article features several alarming images of stranded boats and sandy stretches where water once flowed. On a dozen occasions in the article, Barre cites “climate change” as the likely explanation for the shrinking lakes.
In 2013, Peter Sinclair, reputed to be “the sharpest climate denier debunker on YouTube,” headlined an article, “Lower Great Lakes Levels – Another New Normal?” Whether a shrinking lake was the new normal remained to be seen. What certainly appeared to be the new normal, however, was the vindictiveness of true believers such as Goodman and Sinclair.
Those of us on the Great Lakes could not be bullied into ignoring the obvious. Our evidence was much more tangible than the media’s. In 2014, the lake levels started rising and have continued to rise. In 2017, they reached crisis level on Lake Ontario. This spring, for the first time in 32 years, I had to pull my stairs back. The bank underneath the stairs had collapsed under pressure from the rising lake. Several of my neighbors lost their sea walls. ‘First World’ problems to be sure, but a little advanced warning might have been helpful.
By the summer of 2019, even the The New York Times had noticed. Wrote Mitch Smith, “The higher water, which set records this summer on some Great Lakes could be part of an expensive new normal.” Left unsaid was that this “new normal” fully reversed the old “new normal” from just six years prior.
If there were a Pulitzer for sophistry, it would have to go the headline writer for the 2019 Scientific American article titled, “Climate Change Sends Great Lakes Water Levels Seesawing.” Not wanting to be pinned down, the authors argued that “rapid transitions between extreme high and low water levels in the Great Lakes represent the ‘new normal’.”
As President Trump might say: “I don’t think the science knows.” And that, my fellow deniers, is the real new normal.
SOURCE
Australia: $1 billion pumped hydro scheme would open up NSW grid, backers say
Another idea that is great in theory but big in cost and unreliable in output. Pumped hydro requires the building of TWO dams -- and we all know how much Greenies love dams.
And in the end it only works when there is a substantial flow in the river. What happens during one of our frequent droughts? It's a nonsense
The Berejiklian government has given accelerated approval status to a billion-dollar pumped hydro project that will unlock twice as much renewable energy investment and reduce grid congestion.
The venture, backed by Alinta Energy, would generate as much as 600 megawatts of electricity by releasing water between two reservoirs near the Macleay River between Armidale and Kempsey.
Developed by the same consultancy EMM that is working on the larger Snowy 2.0 pumped hydro scheme, the Oven Mountain energy storage project is expected to support a further $2 billion in new solar and wind farms in the New England Renewable Energy Zone.
The closed-loop or off-river system would could also boost the water security of Kempsey, located about 75 kilometres to the south-east of the freehold site.
Among the benefits would be the displacement of some 876,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions, and a reduction of load-shedding risk to some 770,000 customers as coal-fired plants shut, according to an accompanying document seeking government fast-track approval for the project.
The new plant is within the New England Renewable Energy zone, one of three designated regions for supporting clean energy in the state. Its development would enable more clean energy to be added to the grid.
"[T]he current capacity to [can] host only 300 MW due to insufficient network infrastructure," the document says. "The project’s 12 hours of flexible and fast=acting
storage will directly help to overcome this challenge and accelerate the implementation of the [zone]."
Energy and Environment Minister Matt Kean said that pumped hydro was "essential for the state’s energy future", using off-peak power to pump water to the higher dam and releasing it went prices rise.
“The Australian Energy Market Operator says that NSW needs more than twice the energy storage of Snowy 2.0 again by the mid-2030s and projects like Oven Mountain can help us reach that goal,” Mr Kean said in a statement.
“It can take about eight years to deliver massive pumped hydro projects and we need to get going now to create jobs and improve the reliability of the energy grid.”
Adam Marshall, Agriculture Minister and the MP for the Northern Tablelands, said regional NSW had some of the best pumped hydro resources in the world. It would also support the local economy by creating some 600 new jobs during construction alone.
The New England Renewable Energy Zone is expected to expand to 8000 megawatts of clean energy generation capacity.
The New England Renewable Energy Zone is expected to expand to 8000 megawatts of clean energy generation capacity.CREDIT:GETTY
“This project is the jewel in our region’s renewable energy crown and cements the New England as the renewable energy powerhouse of Australia," Mr Marshall said.
“We’re already home to the two largest wind farms in NSW and the largest solar farm in Australia is about to start construction, so this project is the cherry on top of us.”
The government is providing about $2.5 million to support the Oven Mountain project's feasibility study from its $75million Emerging Energy Program.
The program is supporting investigations into the prospects for three pumped hydro projects in NSW.
The proponent will still need to request assessment requirements for the preparation of an Environmental Impact Statement Once received, the EIS will then on exhibition for community feedback and detailed assessment by the Department of Planning, Industry and Environment before a final decision is made, the government said.
SOURCE
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Preserving the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here
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12 October, 2020
Facebook ads sharing climate misinformation have been viewed more than eight MILLION times, despite the firm saying it is committed to tackling the problem
The newspaper article below has presented uncritically a "report" from a Greenie outfit. So it is written from a Greenie viewpoint. It accepts global warming as known truth, not the poorly supported theory that it is.
It is a testimony to how infinite repetition can make such a claim into accepted wisdom. Dr Goebbels lives again: If you tell a big enough lie often enough people will believe it.
It is however sad proof of how the real scientists -- climate skeptics -- have lost the PR battle. The Leftist stranglehold on most of the media and the educational system is hard to beat
Mr Trump has spoken of arranging a public debate between Warmists and skeptics. That might be what we need to restore well-deserved doubt in people's minds
A new report finds that dozens of climate disinformation ads have run on Facebook in the first half of 2020.
Produced by a variety of conservative groups, ads have received a total of 8 million views.
The report, produced by the climate group InfluenceMap, accuses climate-denialist groups of using Facebook's advertising platform to spread disinformation, 'intentionally seeding doubt and confusion around the science of climate change.'
The ads were predominantly targeted at men, people in rural states and Americans over the age of 55.
Most raised doubts about the science of climate change, including denying there's consensus or certainty about it, and attacked the credibility of climate experts.
Launched by Dylan Tanner on the eve of the Paris climate accords in 2015, InfluenceMap analyzes how corporations influence climate change opinion and policy.
Its newest report, 'Climate Change and Digital Advertising: Climate Science Disinformation in Facebook Advertising' found 51 climate-denial ads running on Facebook between January and June 2020.
The spots cost a total of $42,000 to run and received a total of 8 million impressions, though it's not clear how many people saw them in total.
InfluenceMap says that while the ads were produced by a variety of right-wing groups - such as Prager University, Turning Point USA, and the Mackinac Center for Public Policy - the ultimate source of funding 'is often opaque.'
To date, only one ad was removed by Facebook before it was scheduled to end.
Craig Strazzeri, chief marketing officer at PragerU, denied the company was running disinformation ads.
'Apparently 'disinformation' means anything Facebook or the left disagrees with,' he told The Guardian. 'The ad in question is an educational video on the truth about the Green New Deal.'
SOURCE
BlackRock not so Green
It sounds like they endorse only the less harmful proposals, which is responsible of them
BlackRock, the world's biggest money manager, made headlines early this year when it pledged to prioritize climate change in its investments and pare down its coal holdings.
But environmentalists say the company has failed to make good on this promise in a series of shareholder proposals at annual meetings this year.
Led by influential Wall Street player Larry Fink and overseeing some $7.3 trillion in assets, BlackRock in January vowed to take action to address climate change and sustainable development, raising the hopes of environmentalists.
"We applauded BlackRock for its statement at the beginning of this year.... and we acknowledge that they have taken some steps in that direction," said Ben Cushing, who leads the Sierra Club's financial advocacy campaign.
"But clearly it has not translated into fast-enough, or bold-enough action."
- Need for 'stewardship' -
Part of the skepticism comes from BlackRock's response to shareholder proposals to require companies to take action on the environment.
BlackRock supported only 13 percent of the green-oriented resolutions in 2020, down from 20 percent in 2019, according to Proxy Insight, which tracks global shareholder voting.
A September report from non-governmental organization Majority Action said the New York financial giant backed only three of 36 resolutions on climate change in proxy votes of S&P 500 companies.
And though BlackRock signed on to Climate Action 100+, a global investor engagement initiative, the company supported just two of 12 resolutions presented by the coalition.
BlackRock holds shares in numerous large companies, including Apple, Facebook and Exxon Mobil, as well as ConocoPhillips and Nike.
Cushing said BlackRock could make a big difference if its actions match its rhetoric.
"BlackRock is a huge contributor to the climate crisis through its financing of fossil fuels, deforestation and other climate damaging industries," he said.
"They are one of the world's largest shareholders in almost every publicly traded company," Cushing said. "That gives BlackRock tremendous power and leverage to steer the behavior of corporations in the US and around the world."
The company voted against proposals to require Chevron to develop a report on the risks from petrochemical plants and to make Delta Airlines evaluate how its lobbying strategy conforms with the Paris Climate Accord, saying the firms already had taken steps to address the issue.
But BlackRock has defended its record, saying it had taken other steps, like voting against board nominees who are not committed to environmental issues and prodding action in meetings with company management.
"It's worth noting that not all shareholder proposals are created equal," the company said. "Blindly supporting proposals is not a responsible approach to stewardship."
- 'Discouraging' voting record -
But Giulia Christianson, head of sustainable investment at the World Resources Institute, said other big investors are stepping up on the environment.
According to the report from Majority Action, investment heavyweight Pimco voted in favor of all the resolutions considered essential for the environment.
The same report credited French company Amundi with a 78 percent record and JPMorgan Chase with a 53 percent record. BlackRock backed only eight percent of the resolutions.
"The voting record that we've seen from BlackRock this year is discouraging," Christianson said, noting an apparent "disconnect" between BlackRock's actions and earlier statements that implied it viewed promoting sustainability as part of its fiduciary duty.
And Christianson notes that it makes good business sense: environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) investments have gained more legitimacy in recent years and many green-oriented companies have outperformed amid the tumult of the coronavirus.
"We're seeing ESG funds make it through the current stress test of market volatility pretty well and in many cases better than their traditional index counterparts," she said
SOURCE
Google, Boston Review Promote Rolling Blackouts to Cut CO2 Emissions
Among the top Google News search results today for “climate change” is an article published by the Boston Review calling for Third World-style electricity blackouts in the United States to fight climate change. According to the article, American households are unnecessarily spoiled by experiencing an average of only six hours per year without electricity. Instead, government should impose frequent “planned interruptions” of power to force households to use less electricity and reduce carbon dioxide emissions.
The Google-promoted article, titled “To Save the Climate, Give Up the Demand for Constant Electricity,” argues that “Each household demanding continuous electricity marginally exacerbates the climate crisis.”
“Waiting to ensure uninterrupted power for everyone as we transition away from fossil fuels will cost too much time – and too many lives,” the article adds.
A better model, according to the article, is the unreliable power grid in Zimbabwe. Wistfully recalling his days living in Zimbabwe under brutal former dictator Robert Mugabe, the author of the Boston Review article writes,
“ZESA [Zimbabwe Electricity Supply Authority] planned a rotation among the suburbs. Generally, that meant losing power for half a day per week. The power cut might have been shorter, had people not circumvented it by using their electric stoves immediately before or after. Still, rationing residences allowed hospitals and other essential services to keep running.”
The author follows up by saying the rest of the United States should deliberately subject itself to similarly unreliable electricity that has plagued Puerto Rico in the aftermath of 2017 Hurricane Maria.
“Zimbabwe and Puerto Rico thus provide models for what we might call pause-full electricity. Admittedly, neither Zimbabweans nor Puerto Ricans chose to accept this rationing. And in Zimbabwe, official incompetence has reduced electricity to a nearly unbearable degree. Still, Zimbabwe’s past and Puerto Rico’s potential indicate just and feasible ways of living amid intermittency. With a pause, life goes on. By abiding that interlude—by shedding their load—people can preserve life near and far.”
This isn’t merely fringe thought among the climate activist movement. It appears in the Boston Review and is promoted among the very top Google News search results under “climate change.” The Climate Left desires electricity rationing and frequent Third World-style electricity blackouts to subjugate the populace and fight global warming.
That is the choice between climate alarmism and climate realism.
SOURCE
Australia: Queensland Fisheries Minister Mark Furner labels Greenie plan to replace shark nets as 'pure madness'
Conservationists have sent a report to Queensland Fisheries Minister Mark Furner outlining a $33 million plan to replace shark nets and drumlines with non-lethal alternatives.
Biologist with the Australian Marine Conservation Society (AMCS), Dr Leo Guida, said their report offered non-lethal shark mitigation methods that "modernise and improve beach safety".
"The current methods are 60 years old, and there's nowhere else in our daily lives that we would accept safety standards that are 60 years old."
"The wildlife cost is too high and quite literally for no safety benefit whatsoever," he said.
But Mr Furner has described suggestions to remove drumlines and shark nets as "pure madness".
The renewed call for the replacement of shark nets comes as hundreds of images of marine life caught in nets and drumlines off Queensland's coast are released under a right to information request made by a documentary film crew that is associated with AMCS.
What are the alternatives?
There have been two fatal shark attacks at Queensland beaches with nets or drumlines in place since 1962, including at Greenmount Beach in September.
Alternative shark mitigation measures recommended by the report include the use of drones to monitor beaches and eco-shark barriers.
Eco shark barriers are made of plastic with 25 to 30-centimetre-wide gaps, aimed at deterring marine life from entering an area, without entangling them like nets do.
SMART (Shark Management Alert in Real Time) drumlines, which alert a Department of Fisheries contractor when a shark has been caught so it can be tagged and relocated, have not been recommended as a replacement to nets or traditional drumlines in the report.
The report, co-signed by AMCS, Humane Society International, Sea Shepherd, No Shark Cull QLD, Ocean Impact, and the documentary Envoy: Shark Cull, has called for both major parties to provide a timeframe for the removal of shark nets and drumlines.
The conservation groups have estimated that replacing nets and drumlines would cost $33.4 million, with ongoing costs of $4.1 million per year — based on a 2019 review of the shark control program and the market price of the suggested alternatives.
However, eco-barriers have had mixed success, with a trial in northern New South Wales showing they have a minimal impact on marine life but can be damaged in strong surf conditions, posing a moderate risk to surfers.
Call for more immediate action
The State Government removed drumlines from the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park after a 2019 Federal Court ruling found that killing sharks did nothing to reduce the risk of unprovoked attacks.
The State Opposition has since committed $15 million to replace drumlines in the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park with SMART drumlines.
Dr Guida said "it's great to see" both parties taking steps toward more modern methods, but more immediate, state-wide action is needed.
"We don't want to see our wildlife destroyed."
But Fisheries Minister Mark Furner said the State Government had allocated $1 million per year towards shark control innovation, including the use of drones along some Gold Coast and Sunshine Coast beaches.
"Their proposal to remove shark drumlines and also nets from the waters is just pure madness," he said.
But Mr Furner said drones could not be used along beaches close to airports, making drumlines and nets necessary.
"You would leave swimmers, surfers, beachgoers, unsafe by not having that protection."
According to data from Queensland Fisheries, at least 3,400 turtle, mammal and other bycatch species have been caught in nets or drumlines since 2001.
But Mr Furner said the state's shark control program has "served Queenslanders well in both persuasions of government".
"I'm convinced that the officers of Queensland Boating and Fisheries Patrol and contractors do their very best to make sure bycatch is released live."
State Government to re-visit potential trial
Mr Furner said the cost of replacing all nets and drumlines in Queensland had not been calculated by the State Government.
"We're looking at trialling different measures first and then coming up with a suitable alternative," he said.
In March, a Department of Fisheries Shark Control Program Scientific Working Group voiced its support for a trial that would see some nets replaced by traditional drumlines during the 2020 whale migration season.
"Shark drumlines aren't ones that you can go into Bunnings and purchase. It's something you need to manage and provide for." "We'll revisit that next year," he said.
The State Opposition's spokesperson for Fisheries, Tony Perrett has been contacted for comment.
SOURCE
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Preserving the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here
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11 October, 2020
More Green denial by Kamala Harris
The Democratic presidential ticket has, during the first two debates, effectively denied ownership of the Green New Deal. What gives?
Last week, former Vice President Joe Biden said, “I don’t support the Green New Deal,” even though he has supported it for more than a year. Biden’s “Unity Task Force” recommendations issued jointly with Sen. Bernie Sanders endorsed the tenets of the Green New Deal, and his campaign’s website embraces it.
At the Vice Presidential debate this week, Biden’s running mate, Senator Kamala Harris, was asked about Biden’s denial of supporting the GND and her own co-sponsorship of the plan in the Senate. She dodged the question by claiming Biden supports hydro-fracturing for natural gas, and that he will create jobs. Harris also mentioned the wildfires in California and storms on the Gulf Coast, and claimed, “the science is telling us this.” Climate change, she said, is “an existential threat to us as human beings.”
Curiously, Sen. Harris never mentioned the words “Green New Deal,” perhaps because it has never polled well. It is hugely expensive, in the multi-trillions of dollars, and envisions replacing fossil fuels, destroying jobs and empowering government with far greater control over the private economy and lifestyles of Americans. In the abstract, Americans may like “green energy” and “carbon free” concepts when push-polled, but they mostly oppose the socialistic specifics of what is required to get there. This explains why not a single senator, including Harris, supported the GND when it was put to a vote last year on the Senate floor.
Another factor is that every version of the Green New Deal is anti-fracking. Throughout the Democratic presidential primaries, Mr. Biden, Sen. Harris, Sen. Sanders and the other two dozen candidates were tripping over each other to tout their support for banning fracking. There were no caveats or ambiguity from Biden or Harris. The general election is a different matter since at least two battleground states, Pennsylvania and Ohio, have a large energy sectors dependent on fracking natural gas.
Sen. Harris claimed in the debate, “Joe Biden will not ban fracking. That is a fact.” Considering her own emphatic commitment to ban fracking, and Biden’s repeated prior statements to do likewise, her reassurance falls flat. I was next expecting her to don a Pittsburgh Steelers helmet to claim she was a fan since her days riding the school bus in suburban California.
The GND’s original sponsor in the U.S. House of Representatives is the one-and-only Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who happened to co-chair the committee that drafted the climate provisions of the Biden-Bernie Unity Task Force. AOC responded to Harris after the debate by saying “fracking is bad, actually.”
As with the first debate, the “moderator,” Susan Page of USA Today asked several loaded questions to Vice President Mike Pence, including on climate change. She asked, “Do you believe, as the scientific community has concluded, that man-made climate change has made wildfires bigger, hotter and more deadly? And it made hurricanes wetter, slower and more damaging (emphasis mine)?
Whatever inchoate description one can make of the “scientific community,” it has not “concluded” any such connection between a changing climate and wildfires and hurricanes. Yet, Ms. Page, a lifelong journalist, incuriously embraces such trope. At least she eschewed debating the subject with Pence, in contrast to the impervious Chris Wallace in the first presidential debate.
The Vice President properly responded with mention of the Trump administration’s environmental record that is impactful on people in the present day, namely, cleaner water and air, and investments in national parks and conservation. He also dismissed any connection to hurricanes, which haven’t changed in frequency in a century; and wildfires, which are caused by mismanaged forests. Pence then turned to challenge Sen. Harris on her and Biden’s embrace of the Green New Deal and their anti-fracking positions.
Mr. Pence also avoided the directly the issue whether climate change is “an existential threat” to humanity. His careful response stated, “Climate is changing. We’ll follow the science.” He returned to criticize the Green New Deal and its threat to American jobs, though he could have added that the climate was much warmer in centuries past.
A more robust climate discussion should involve “moderators” challenging politicians who insist on trillions of taxpayer dollars to attempt to lower global temperature by a single degree. Make them justify reducing America’s energy sources, job market and economy by explaining the actual science and data that purports to necessitate such drastic action. Instead, both debates peddled climate shibboleths.
Americans lose when alarmists—politicians and journalists alike— emotionally continue to invoke “science” generically to promote destructive and foolhardy climate policies.
SOURCE
Why wind won’t work
Unreliable and expensive renewables won’t give us the energy abundance we need.
Does Boris want to shut down the country long-term? I’m not talking about the Covid-19 lockdown (which will be over when the public tires of it), but the PM’s eyecatching announcement that wind farms could power every home by the end of the decade.
Johnson vowed to make the UK into the ‘Saudi Arabia of wind’. ‘As Saudi Arabia is to oil, the UK is to wind – a place of almost limitless resource, but in the case of wind without the carbon emissions and without the damage to the environment’, he told the Conservative Party conference.
Before we get swept away by Johnson’s breezy chatter, it’s worth putting this pledge into context. He was careful to use the word ‘homes’, which account for only a third of the UK’s electricity demand (the rest going mainly to industrial and commercial uses).
But even so, is wind really the cheap, limitless resource the PM claims it is? Unfortunately not, for the quite simple reason that the wind doesn’t blow how we want it to. When the wind blows too much, wind turbines have to be switched off. When it blows too little, back-up power sources need to be identified.
Wind power comes with a hefty price tag, too. In the UK, over a hundred million pounds is paid each year to wind-energy companies to reimburse them when they switch off their turbines during high wind. And when not enough energy is generated from wind, other sources (usually natural gas) have to be on hand to provide a backup. These generators also have to be switched on and off again to meet demand, pushing up the price further.
Wind’s unreliability is just one reason why it makes electricity more expensive, even as the construction cost of the turbines themselves is falling.
Reliance on renewable sources alone is simply not an option. Green-energy experiments across the world have led to disaster. California now experiences rolling blackouts, having tripled its supply of renewables and phased out the use of fossil fuels and nuclear power. Germany’s electricity prices are now among the highest in the world since embracing the Energiewende (energy transition), while carbon emissions remain stubbornly high as coal has made a comeback as a bridging fuel. But the track record of green failures and the unreliability of renewables never seem to be enough to dent enthusiasm for various ‘Green New Deals’ or, in Boris Johnson’s vision, the ‘green revolution’.
The bigger problem is that energy policy has for so long been based around constraint – politicians have tasked themselves with limiting demand and cutting carbon emissions. Instead, our priority should be creating a cheap, reliable and abundant supply of energy that can power the serious growth we need.
SOURCE
Uh Oh, Joe: Even PA Voters Know You're Full of Crap When It Comes to Fracking
Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are two unlikable candidates on the 2020 Democratic ticket, who have refused to answer whether they’ll pack the Supreme Court and have been caught lying regarding fracking. Energy issues are key in a state like Pennsylvania, which Biden has to retake this November if he has a shot of winning the presidency. With an anti-fracking stance, he may find conquering the Keystone State to be all but impossible. Natural gas has been great to Pennsylvania and the local economy. Both candidates have declared they will ban it. We have the receipts. We have the videos. On Biden’s campaign website, it says he supports the Green New Deal, which kills fracking. It also bans the internal combustion engine, but that’s for another time.
The point is that Pennsylvania voters know where both of you stand, guys. You’re not going to lie your way through this, and even if you didn’t want to ban it—you’re stuck. You’d owe too big a debt to the environmental left to do nothing on this. You’d have to subject scores of American families to economic destitution.
MSNBC went to Beaver, PA and found that voters here know exactly where these two clowns stand on energy and what will happen should they get elected.
And as of now, there’s not enough time to turn that ship around. There’s too many statements and videos showing them dead set on killing this industry.
SOURCE
Australia: The Black Summer bushfires that killed a billion animals and destroyed a fifth of the continent's forests last summer were a normal outcome of fluctuating weather patterns, a new book has claimed
'Climate Change: The Facts 2020', written by biologists, atmospheric physicists and meteorologists, rejected the claim that climate change could be linked to the devastating fires between October 2019 and March 2020.
A number of scientists have blamed the changing weather patterns and drought for the fires but the book says there is 'nothing unusual about the current rate or magnitude of climate change'.
Its authors state the earth regularly goes through cycles of dry and wet weather and that the fires were not unprecedented.
It claims the naturally occurring cycle was combined with poor hazard reduction burns and fire management which set the grounds for a catastrophic blaze.
Editor and Institute of Public Affairs senior research fellow Jennifer Marohasy said Australia had a history of bushfires that burned up large parts of the country as early as 1851.
Thirty-three people died directly from the fire while more than 400 are estimated to have lost their lives because of the smoke pollution.
More than 2,000 homes were burned almost 20 million hectares destroyed.
'A similarly vast area of 21 million hectares was lost to unplanned fires as recently as 2012-13,' Dr Marohasy told Daily Telegraph.
'However, this is not the largest area burned by uncontrolled fires. In 1974–75, 117 million hectares burned.'
Dr Marohasy went on to dismantle a number of studies that showed a string of unseasonably dry years had contributed to the ferocity of the fires.
She noted that Australia had recorded its wettest summer since 1990 as early as 2010.
'If anything, these official statistics suggest it is getting wetter, rainfall statistics for the entire Australian continent, available for download from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, also indicate that more recent years have been wetter, especially the past 50 years,' she said.
University of Melbourne's Andrew King conducted a study that looked at a phenomenon known as the Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD), which has a direct effect on rainfall levels in Australia and elsewhere.
Since 2017 much of Australia has experienced widespread drought, something the study attributed to a relative lack of negative IOD events.
This sees warmer than normal sea surface temperatures in the east Indian Ocean with cooler waters in the west.
These events tend to shift weather patterns and typically bring greater rainfall to southeast Australia, and are made less frequent as global sea temperatures warm.
Dr King and the team examined rainfall statistics and found that the winter of 2016 saw extremely heavy precipitation and a corresponding negative IOD event.
Since then, the Murray-Darling Basin has experienced 12 consecutive seasons with below-average rainfall, the longest period on record since 1900.
'With climate change there have been projections that there will be more positive IOD events and fewer negative IOD events,' King said.
'This would mean that we'd expect more dry seasons in Australia and possibly worse droughts.'
A comment piece from two researchers, from the CERFACS in France, claim the fires are unequivocally related to climate change.
'Mean warming levels are now sufficiently large that many high temperature extreme events would be impossible without anthropogenic influence,' Dr Benjamin Sanderson and Dr Rosie Fisher wrote.
'In the case of recent events in Australia, there is no doubt that the record temperatures of the past year would not be possible without anthropogenic influence, and that under a scenario where emissions continue to grow, such a year would be average by 2040 and exceptionally cool by 2060.'
Climate Change: The Facts 2020' is now available for sale.
SOURCE
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For more postings from me, see
Preserving the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here
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9 October, 2020
Reducing air pollution levels by 20 per cent could put children a month ahead in their learning every year, study finds
Same old, same old. Children in polluted areas do worse on tests. But who live in polluted areas? The poor. And we know that they do badly on tests. What we are seeing is a poverty effect
There is no end of these studies and if they do not forget to control for income, the effects are vanishingly small.
The fact is that humans cope well with fine pollution. They just cough it up and spit it out
Researchers believe inhaling microscopic particles MAY affect children's brains
Cutting air pollution outside schools could boost children's memories, putting them the equivalent of a month ahead in school, experts SUGGEST.
A reduction of a fifth in nitrogen dioxide pollution, produced by traffic fumes and industry among other sources, could improve schoolchildren's memory by 6.1 per cent, according to researchers at the University of Manchester.
Experts suspect that inhaling microscopic particles of pollution may affect the development of children's brains.
Researchers *did not actually test* British schoolchildren's memories or achievement in school.
But previous Spanish research has shown children at schools in highly polluted areas, similar to those in the UK, see slower than normal memory improvements over time.
A 20 per cent reduction in pollution could help children's memories improve up to four weeks faster in a year, based on the Spanish evidence.
The findings will raise concerns about further risks to children from dirty air beyond asthma and respiratory problems.
However some doubt remains on whether pollution really can affect memory, as previous studies have not always found a link.
But Professor Martie van Tongeren, an environmental health expert at the University of Manchester, who led the research, said: 'Pollution of indoor and outdoor air affects the health of our children.
'In addition, the available evidence indicates that it affects their cognitive development, which may affect educational attainment.
'Policies should be set out by ministers to tackle this urgent challenge, immediately.'
Last month new analysis, commissioned by Asthma UK and the British Lung Foundation, found more than a quarter of British schools, nurseries and colleges are in areas with 'dangerously high' levels of pollution particles called PM2.5, which can trigger asthma attacks in children.
To see how pollution might affect children's thinking skills, researchers referred to two recent Spanish studies.
These looked at nitrogen dioxide levels in school grounds, and PM2.5 levels inside school, as well as pupils' memory tests.
Children were shown a series of images, such as numbers, colours or words, and asked to remember one they had seen previously - up to three images ago.
In polluted areas, children were slower and less accurate on average, and this allowed researchers to work out how pollution in British schools could affect pupils.
They could also see the rate at which children's memories improved over a year, and calculate how many weeks of additional improvement a cut in pollution might provide.
Halving nitrogen dioxide levels in schools could give children the equivalent of up to seven weeks of extra learning in a year, the scientists suggest.
An air purifier in a classroom was found to reduce pollution by 30 per cent in a Manchester primary school.
The research was carried out to mark Clean Air Day, and commissioned by its coordinators, the charity Global Action Plan and the Philips Foundation.
Global Action Plan is calling for Government action to reduce pollution at schools and provides advice through its Clean Air for Schools Framework on measures such as improved ventilation and traffic-free streets (SUBS - pls keep).
Responding to the findings, Jonathan Grigg, professor of paediatric respiratory and environmental medicine at Queen Mary University of London, said: 'There is emerging evidence that air pollution has effects on the developing brain and this type of modelling, based on a peer-reviewed study, helps to showing the benefits of reducing air pollution.
'Reducing children's exposure will have many other positive outcomes, including less cases of asthma and better lung growth.'
SOURCE
Wind and Solar Developers Want To Force You To Pay Their Transmission Costs
Wind and solar energy are closer to going away entirely than they are to being the future of energy. Here in the Midwest, hundreds of wind and solar installations, representing thousands of megawatts (MW) of installed capacity, have been cancelled because their developers didn’t want to foot the bill for the transmission upgrades that would be necessary to bring these projects online.
According to an article in Midwest Energy News, which is run by Fresh Energy, wind and solar projects are not financially viable unless the costs for transmission upgrades are saddled on to customers like you.
“In all, 245 clean energy projects that had reached advanced stages of development were withdrawn between January 2016 and July 2020, the study found. While there are various reasons a project may be withdrawn, experts and developers say that especially in the western region of [the Midcontinent Independent Systems Operator] MISO, congestion and related grid upgrade costs are the main factors.
EDP Renewables recently withdrew a planned 100-megawatt wind farm in southwestern Minnesota from MISO’s queue for interconnection to the grid, because MISO said it would have to pay $80 million for grid upgrades. The company, which was in the midst of negotiating a power purchase agreement with a telecommunications company, had estimated the work would cost about $10 million and has since called the project off, said director of government affairs Vanessa Tutos.
It’s one of several that have faced a similar fate.
“What we’ve seen in the data and reports from developers is that the number of projects dropping out as a result of high network upgrade charges has significantly increased over time,” said John Moore, director of NRDC’s Sustainable FERC Project. “The network is reaching its limit.”
These are massive costs for transmission upgrades. According to the Energy Information Administration, it costs about $1.3 million dollars per MW to install wind turbines. This means a 100 MW facility would cost about $130 million. The additional transmission costs of $80 million are about 60 percent of the cost of building the wind turbines in the first place. Rather than realizing that wind and solar are not financially viable, renewable developers simply want to make you pay for the transmission expenses, instead of them.
“Power generators typically pay for the interconnection lines needed to get their power to the grid, and EDP regulatory and market affairs director David Mindham said there are few concerns about this arrangement. But as the long-distance, high-voltage interstate power lines are too congested to serve new projects, developers are required to pay for upgrades on these lines if they want to build.
The developers and clean energy advocates say that as these upgrades benefit many parties across multiple states, the needs and costs should instead be predicted farther in advance by MISO and passed on to a wider range of stakeholders, including ratepayers. MISO declined to comment for this story.
“Generators absorb those costs up front,” which is not feasible in many cases, Mindham said. “We need a better cost-sharing mechanism between generators and other beneficiaries of the system.”
What benefits are the developers referring to, exactly? Minnesota’s experiment with wind and solar has been an abject disaster. Minnesotans have spent more than $15 billion on wind turbines, solar panels, and transmission lines, and electricity prices have increased nearly 30 percent faster than the national average since 2005 as a result, according to the Energy Information Administration.
Now, wind and solar developers want Minnesota families to pay even more to build transmission for energy sources that don’t work when the weather doesn’t cooperate. The article continues:
“The current process ignores the reality of the way the grid is heading — it used to be that you’d build your generating facility close to load, but renewable resources need to be sited where the resource is best … and often in far-flung locations, the transmission system is not robust,” said Nicole Luckey, vice president of regulatory affairs for Invenergy. “Customers are seeing the benefits but they’re not funding those upgrade costs.”
Invenergy Senior Vice President Kris Zadlo noted that there were 27 projects submitted into MISO’s February 2017 west interconnection cluster representing 3,421 megawatts. MISO studies initially showed the need for about $3.4 billion in transmission upgrades for those projects, coming out to about $1 million per megawatt to interconnect. “To put this value in context, you are almost paying as much to interconnect as you are to build a renewable resource,” Zadlo said, and all but two of the projects were ultimately canceled.”
“There’s a breakpoint where bearing those costs makes the renewable project unprofitable and you just have to drop out of the queue,” Zadlo said.”
Renewable advocates need the public to believe that wind and solar are still the future of energy. If the public doesn’t believe this, the bottom falls out of their pitch to help themselves to more of your money. However, these same advocates are ignoring the reality that the grid cannot head toward higher levels of renewables without sacrificing reliability and affordability, as we have seen rolling blackouts in California.
The problem is that it becomes exponentially more difficult to incorporate more wind and solar on the electric grid over time, not less difficult, according to MISO. This is why the Star Tribune’s editorial “It’s Minnesota’s time to move ahead with clean energy,” was so pitfiully uninformed. The easy and affordable part of adding wind turbines and solar panels to the electric grid is over. It’s sharply uphill from here.
If your product requires federal tax subsidies, mandates, and other people to pay for your transmission expenses, it isn’t a viable product. This is especially true if your wind turbines can’t operate if it gets too cold in Minnesota, and “paying people to clean [snow] off panels is simply too expensive.”
Rather than squandering billions of dollars on wind turbines that only last 20 years, solar panels that last for 25, and transmission infrastructure to the middle of nowhere, those who claim climate change will be the death of humanity should be pounding on the table to legalize new nuclear power plants in Minnesota, and to change the Next Generation Energy Act to allow large hydroelectric generators to be classified as “renewable.”
Their focus on unreliable, expensive, and short-lived wind and solar projects suggest they don’t care very much about the environment.
SOURCE
Republican senators Push to Eliminate Wind Tax Credit
Senators James Lankford (R-OK), Kevin Cramer (R-ND), John Hoeven (R-ND), and Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV) along with Representative Kenny Marchant (R-TX) today introduced legislation to completely phase out the federal production tax credit (PTC) for renewables. The bill specifies that any new projects would need to begin construction by the end of this year in order to qualify for the credit, as is the case under current law. This affirms that the extension for 2020 is the last extension the credit will receive.
“This production tax credit was established years ago to help the fledgling renewable energy industry. Now, when you drive through my state and many others with countless wind turbines, you can see that the wind industry is no longer a start-up, new energy source,” said Lankford. “The wind industry is thriving and does not need federal taxpayers’ money to thrive. Even though Congress concluded four years ago that the wind tax credit served its purpose and should be phased out by the end of 2019, the PTC was instead unexpectedly extended for the twelfth time at the end of last year. With $26 trillion in national debt and ever-present deficit spending issues, we must return to the spirit of the 2015 agreement and allow this market-distorting credit to expire for new projects at the end of this year. I am grateful to work with Senators Cramer, Hoeven, and Capito and Representative Marchant to ensure we get this resolved.”
“The wind production tax credit is fundamentally unfair and has long outlived its expiration date,” said Cramer. “Our bill helps level the energy market by forcing this disruptive tax credit to finally expire.”
“We reached a bipartisan consensus to phase out the wind PTC in 2015, recognizing that the technology has reached commercial-viability,” said Hoeven. “This legislation ends the extension. We need to ensure that we have a level playing field, helping maintain a more diverse energy mix and better ensuring homes and businesses have power when needed most.”
“When the renewable energy production tax credit was implemented, it was intended by its authors to be a temporary support for a generation technology that was then too expensive to compete. Since then, we have seen renewables take ever greater market share, particularly wind energy production, and yet the tax incentive remains in effect. This creates an unfair advantage against other energy sources, such as power plants fueled with West Virginia coal and natural gas. This legislation would ensure that the wind PTC would not be extended past 2020, leveling the playing field within our electric markets. We should not be wasting more taxpayer dollars on a credit that completed its goal years ago,” said Capito.
“When the production tax credit was created in 1992, it served as a temporary boost for energy innovation,” said Marchant. “Almost thirty years later, it now acts as a taxpayer-funded handout to the multibillion-dollar wind industry. They regularly produce more energy than the market demands and there is no reason for the tax code to subsidize them while they rake in their profits. That is why I am proud to introduce this legislation that will end the PTC and save taxpayers billions of dollars over the coming decade.”
“For far too long, the electricity marketplace has been distorted by regulatory overreach and massive subsidies that are driving up the cost of electricity and reducing grid reliability,” said Rich Nolan, President and CEO of the National Mining Association (NMA). “Nascent technologies that originally needed support to achieve maturity can now stand on their own, and no longer need taxpayer support—especially at a time when taxpayers can least afford it. This legislation acknowledges the realities of today’s energy market and the need for balance, to ensure that the reliable, affordable baseload power Americans need to keep the lights on is not wiped off the grid by market-manipulation.”
The bill allows any project that previously qualified, or will qualify before the end of this year, to receive the value and duration of the tax credit that was in place at the time the project qualified. The bill would ultimately completely remove the PTC from the tax code once projects qualifying in 2020 finish receiving what is promised to them under current law to guard against future extensions of the credit and to provide certainty around when PTC-related tax expenditures will disappear. Lankford introduced similar legislation as a standalone bill in October 2015 and has offered the provision as an amendment to other previous legislation.
The PTC was established nearly three decades ago as part of the Energy Policy Act of 1992 and since its adoption, wind power has grown tremendously into a self-sustainable, multibillion dollar industry. Wind generation has grown more than 3,000 percent, and capacity has spiked from 1,500 million megawatts in 1992 to over 110,000 megawatts currently. Meanwhile, the cost to taxpayers for the PTC for all qualified renewables has increased from $5.7 billion over the first five years of the credit to $19.5 billion over the 2019-2023 period.
Roughly 35 percent of Oklahoma’s entire electricity generation comes from wind energy. Wind power is an economically sustainable industry, and 37 states, including Oklahoma, have production incentives in place through either renewable portfolio standards or renewable portfolio goals. Ultimately, the federal PTC is a redundancy that subsidizes policies that states are already pursuing through local resources and utility markets. The PTC also creates distortions in electricity markets. Wind producers’ negative bids are subsidy-driven and distort the market by sending incorrect price signals, which can harm the long-term reliability and cost effective operation of the utility.
SOURCE
NC: Gov. Cooper’s “Clean Energy Plan,” Raising Prices and Polluting More?
Governor Cooper’s “Clean Energy Plan” seeks to install more renewable energy including solar power in North Carolina. NC already has more installed solar energy than any other state except California. NC has more than double the solar power of 45 other states. NC’s solar plants operate at only 21% of their stated capacity, however, which is below the nation’s average. Are other states crazy, or are we? It turns out we are.
Solar plants generate power only when the sun is shining, and only when the sun is shining directly overhead do they generate a significant amount of electricity. Here are some actual electricity generating curves for a solar facility:
When not generating electricity, some other electricity generator must step in to fill the gap. Due to an unusual interpretation of federal law in NC, almost all of the power solar plants generate must be purchased by the utility company for delivery to the customers. This means that the dispatchable plants that step in to fill the gaps must idle when solar plants are generating electricity. This causes those plants to operate inefficiently, and means that customers are actually paying for twice the generating capacity during those periods.
The grid must also accommodate large fluctuations in electricity generation. When the sun shines, solar plants throughout the area send electricity across the grid for distribution to our homes. When clouds pass over, or at about 3:00 when that power evaporates, a number of large gas combustion turbines and coal plants must quickly ramp up to fill the gap. These large fluctuations strain the grid. As more and more solar plants are being installed, NC electricity customers will be made to pay billions of dollars to upgrade our grid to maintain its reliability.
Nuclear plants could fit into our current grid seamlessly. But even without including grid modifications, solar power is more expensive than even new nuclear power.
Solar power requires the use of fossil fuels. Solar requires fossil fuel–fired combustion turbines and coal plants to provide 79% of the load. It turns out that when fossil fuel backup generators operate in this fluctuating mode, their efficiencies drop, necessitating more fuel. So in terms of reducing greenhouse gases (GHG), the overall benefit of solar and wind is diminished. It also increases non-GHG pollution. To the extent manmade GHGs are impacting global warming, then, solar power cannot compete with nuclear power.
Enter the Battery Unicorn
While the Cooper plan does not compare intermittent sources plus their backup generators with nuclear plants, the plan discusses using battery storage as a way that could potentially extend solar power’s capacity and reduce the need to provide backup. The idea would be to store excess solar or wind energy when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing for release to the grid when sun and wind are absent. For this scheme to work, of course, a very large amount of batteries would need to be installed.
How large? The plan does not consider this obvious question, for obvious reasons. Other researchers have. It turns out that such a deployment of batteries would be absurd for the following reasons:
Monetary cost. Sufficient batteries would be extremely expensive, costing over $2.5 trillion to cover just the storage of 80% of the country’s needs,. That same $2.5 trillion could buy over 350 nuclear plants delivering 83% of the country’s electricity needs.
Environmental costs. Mining the raw materials needed would devastate the earth’s ecosystem and natural habitat. Producing wind and solar power requires 10 times the raw material in tons needed per megawatt for nuclear power and 100 times that required for natural gas generation. Both of the latter, of course, are dispatchable power sources. It also requires destroying natural habitat as well. Solar requires 75 times more land than nuclear to produce the same amount of power, while wind requires 360 times more land.
Explosive and corrosive. Battery safety is a work in progress. Lithium ion batteries can explode under various conditions. When they do burn, they emit significant quantities of hydrofluoric acid. George Crabtree, director of Argonne National Laboratory’s Joint Center for Energy Storage Research working on Lithium batteries, has stated that “no one’s been able to figure [the fire hazard] out.”
Abysmal working conditions and child labor. The mining for the exotic materials is notorious for abysmal working conditions in developing countries. Amnesty International has lamented that the need for cobalt for battery manufacturing is resulting in children being forced to spend long hours underground every day without basic protective equipment, carrying heavy loads for one or two dollars a day.
Neither solar nor wind energy will ever deliver the needed energy for our country without the significant use of fossil fuel as backup. Battery storage is not the answer for extended storage of large amounts of electricity. If Gov. Cooper is serious about cleaning up our energy sector, he needs to push for more nuclear plants and stop wasting billions of dollars on expensive, dirty, and ecologically harmful alternatives.
SOURCE
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For more postings from me, see
Preserving the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here
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8 October, 2020
Whoa! New study claims planets’ ‘5 C degrees hotter’ than Earth are the ‘ideal’ temperature & ‘more habitable’ – If so, why is there global panic about potential 2 C rise in Temps?!
Earth is not necessarily the best planet in the universe for life, a new study has found.
Researchers have found some 24 planets that are "superhabitable", offering conditions more suitable for life than they are here on Earth.
And some of them even have better stars than our own Sun, the researchers said.
The new study looked for worlds that would be even more likely to foster life than our own – including those that are older, bigger, warmer and wetter than Earth – in the hope of informing future searches for life elsewhere in the universe.
The study identified 24 of the “superhabitable” planets. They are all 100 light years away, making them difficult if not impossible to ever see up close, but research with future telescopes could give us much more information about those worlds.
With technological developments on board upcoming telescopes – such as NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, the LUVIOR space observatory and the European Space Agency's PLATO – researchers hope they may even be able to spot the signatures of life on distance planets.
"With the next space telescopes coming up, we will get more information, so it is important to select some targets," said Dirk Schulze-Makuch, a professor at Washington State University and the Technical University in Berlin, who led the study.
"We have to focus on certain planets that have the most promising conditions for complex life. However, we have to be careful to not get stuck looking for a second Earth because there could be planets that might be more suitable for life than ours."
Researchers identified a host of possible criteria for such superhabitable planets. They then looked through the 4,500 known planets outside of our solar system that have been found, in an attempt to identify which could have those important criteria.
That included looking for planets “K dwarf stars”, which are not like out sun. Those similar to our star – known as G stars – only have a relatively short lifespan, and given the Sun was almost half its age before any form of complex life arrived, many other similar planetary systems could die out before they are inhabited.
K dwarf stars, by contrast, are cooler, smaller and brighter than our sun. They also stay around for much longer – up to 70 billion years – meaning that the planets around them would have much more time to develop advanced life, too.
They also looked for planets that are about 10 per cent larger than Earth, with the idea that they are likely to have more habitable land. More mass would also mean that they would keep their interior heating longer, and stronger gravity to keep hold of its atmosphere for more time.
Superhabitable planets would also likely have a little more water than Earth, especially if it was kept as moisture. Being slightly warmer would also make a planet more habitable, with an ideal of about 5 degrees Celsius hotter than Earth thought to be the biggest improvement.
None of the 24 planets described in the study have all of the criteria, despite the vast number to choose from. But one of them has four of those criteria, meaning that it would theoretically be much more accommodating to life and more likely to be inhabited.
"It's sometimes difficult to convey this principle of superhabitable planets because we think we have the best planet," said Professor Schulze-Makuch. “We have a great number of complex and diverse lifeforms, and many that can survive in extreme environments. It is good to have adaptable life, but that doesn't mean that we have the best of everything.”
SOURCE
How To Reduce Urban Overcrowding
Many Americans live in units that are small, heavily populated, and excessively subdivided, in other words, overcrowded. In pricey coastal cities, large segments of the professional class live like this too, causing people to believe overcrowding is an inevitable fact of urban life. It is not.
First I’ll clarify what is meant by “overcrowding.” To the untrained eye, a dense city with tall buildings might automatically seem overcrowded. Urbanists define overcrowding as what happens inside the buildings. Jane Jacobs made this distinction in The Death & Life Of Great American Cities:
“Overcrowding means too many people in a dwelling for the number of rooms it contains. It has nothing to do with the number of dwellings on the land.”
The YIMBY movement has expanded on this sentiment, noting how density—especially within tall buildings—actually prevents overcrowding.
Tall buildings put more units on a given parcel than short buildings, meaning more people can have their own apartments rather than living in apartments together. Single-family homes, by contrast, are technically one unit but have multiple rooms. If one person lives in each room of a 4-bedroom home, that means 4 people share the kitchen, bathrooms and other common areas. Assuming these are 4 unrelated adults, I would define this as overcrowded, or at least unpleasant, as it deprives people of privacy and space. The Berkeley-based graphic design artist Alfred Twu drew this distinction between density and overcrowding in a meme for the organization California YIMBY:
Many U.S. cities, thanks to restrictive housing policies, provide the lifestyle drawn on the left side. They have large populations and high demand, but are under-zoned, with a predominately single-family housing stock.
Los Angeles is the perfect example of this mix, with the lowest per capita home permitting rate since 2004 of 20 major metros I studied. Thus it is the nation’s most overcrowded city (again, despite appearing from bird’s eye view to be sprawling and dispersed). According to HUD, it has the highest percentage of overcrowded homes (defined as more than 1 person per room) of any U.S. city. Its “severe overcrowding” rate (more than 1.5 people per room) is almost double second-place San Francisco.
I was able to learn, when visiting Los Angeles during a recent cross-country tour, what this does to people’s lives. I met people, young and old, working and professional class, who crammed in small rooms in small apartments filled with many other such rooms, all occupied. Sometimes even those rooms were divided by curtains, and the subdividing would extend to non-bedrooms, with people sleeping on living room couches or in closets. I even visited hostels filled not only with tourists, but local residents who worked full-time, but could afford nothing better than a bunk in rooms with a dozen other strangers.
I found the same in San Francisco. Steven Buss, a local YIMBY activist and Google software engineer, told me that despite making a low-6-figure salary, he and his coworkers share apartments with roommates, in his case inside The Mission District. He said that his friends who made less lived in further out parts of the metro, in even more substandard conditions.
“Through our bad housing policies we made it impossible for people to get by on anything short of a six-figure income job,” wrote Buss recently by Facebook chat.
There is a simple solution: build more housing. This means changing the types of housing developers can build. Urbanist Daniel Herriges wrote for Strong Towns about how America’s current housing stock is mismatched from the nation’s changing demographics. Over 80% of homes and apartments are built with two or more bedrooms, but single adults living alone account for 28% of households. Meanwhile the percentage of households featuring unrelated adults sharing a home is the same as the percentage of nuclear families. That is why so many singles must live together—with people they may not even know—in homes designed for large families.
Developers are restricted—through DUA laws, minimum unit size laws, and other zoning regulations—from building more studio and 1-bedroom apartments that would satisfy this growing singles demographic. Allowing developers to build this would let a greater number of people have their own apartment, meaning they wouldn’t need to live together. That would help reduce urban overcrowding.
SOURCE
Tesla has built an accidental convertible
An owner in the US has had the roof fly off his brand new Tesla Model Y SUV just after taking delivery. The panoramic glass roof flew off as the new owner drove down the highway on the way home from the dealership.
A reddit user claiming to be the owner’s son has said “Tesla’s quality control is embarrassingly bad”. He was in the car at the time and they heard a lot of wind buffeting noise and thought a window was open.
But a minute after hearing the intense wind noise the entire glass panel lifted off.
The owner returned to the dealership where the son claimed the manager said either the seal for the roof was faulty, or the factory just forgot to seal the roof on.
After returning to the Tesla dealership the owner called the police to report that a glass roof panel was somewhere on the highway.
It isn’t the first time Tesla’s quality has been called into question.
In 2019 American organisation Consumer Reports — which is similar to Australia’s Choice — savaged the brand in its latest reliability report.
Numerous faults led Consumer Reports to give the Model 3 a “do not recommend” rating. The Model Y shares its underpinnings with the Model 3.
At the time common issues afflicting the Model 3 include faulty infotainment functions (including instances of screen freezing), faulty paint, randomly cracking rear windows and numerous other hardware issues.
There were also reports of bumpers falling off Model 3s during heavy rain storms.
Tesla has since stated that it has corrected those issues.
In June this year Tesla finished last in a US initial quality survey. The JD Power survey records any issues within the first 90 days of ownership. Tesla recorded 250 faults per 100 vehicles. Kia was the best with 136 faults per 100 vehicles.
SOURCE
Australian Mining giant BHP splits with Greens
Multinational resources giant BHP has split with the state’s powerful resource lobby after it urged Queenslanders to vote for anyone but the Greens.
Multinational resources giant BHP has split with the state’s powerful resource lobby over its foray into the state’s political campaign after it urged Queenslanders to vote for anyone but the Greens.
The company issued a statement in which it said it had given notice to the Queensland Resources Council that it was suspending its membership immediately after advertising that targeted a specific political party.
“BHP has expressed to the QRC on several occasions its opposition to this advertising approach and had formally requested that it be withdrawn,” the statement said.
“Unfortunately this has not occurred.”
BHP said it supported campaigns around policy issues that affected the mining industry and its workers, and the current approach was “not consistent with that contribution”.
It follows the QRC publicly calling for Queenslanders not to support the Greens party this October 31, and to preference them last.
QRC chief executive Ian Macfarlane said: “The Queensland Resources Council has made a decision in relation to the anti-jobs policies of the Greens that is in the best interests of Queensland mining and gas members and the 372,000 people and 14,400 businesses who rely on the resources sector for their livelihoods.
“The resources industry will continue to support the economy and jobs of Queenslanders despite the Greens wanting to shut the industry down.
“The current situation is so dire the QRC has to stand up for its industry, particularly people in regional areas.”
The council also put out a media statement welcoming Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk’s “promise of ‘no deals’, ruling out a power-sharing alliance with the Greens to stay in office”.
“Now is not the time to risk a single job in Queensland by voting for the Greens or by putting them anywhere but last on your ballot paper,” QRC chief executive Ian Macfarlane said.
“The Greens want to stop jobs in our sector and others.”
Mr Macfarlane said he would continue to warn Queenslanders about the risk to jobs of voting for or preferencing the Greens up until 6pm on election night.
Greens MP Michael Berkman issued a statement acknowledging BHP’s criticism.
“We know the vast majority of Queenslanders support raising mining royalties and it looks like BHP has acknowledged this by splitting from the QRC’s nasty campaign to attack the Greens,” he said.
“The Greens terrify the QRC because if we win, multinational mining corporations will have to pay more in royalties so we can invest in jobs, health and education.
“The ultimate question for this election is who benefits from Queensland’s enormous mineral wealth. The Greens are the only party who have proposed raising mining royalties so every Queenslander can benefit, so it’s no surprise the QRC has had a little meltdown.”
SOURCE
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For more postings from me, see
Preserving the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here
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7 October, 2020
Joe Biden and the Green New Deal
When asked by moderator Chris Wallace during the first presidential debate of the 2020 campaign season if he supports the Green New Deal (GND), Joe Biden said, “No, I don’t support the Green New Deal.”
However, according to his website, “Biden believes the Green New Deal is a crucial framework for meeting the climate challenges we face. It powerfully captures two basic truths, which are at the core of his plan: (1) the United States urgently needs to embrace greater ambition on an epic scale to meet the scope of this challenge, and (2) our environment and our economy are completely and totally connected.”
In fairness, the Biden Plan for a Clean Energy Revolution and Environmental Justice does not go nearly as far as the super-radical GND.
In general, Biden’s plan does not include the vast array of social programs, such as Medicare for All, a universal basic income, a federal jobs guarantee, free college, etc. that make the GND one of the costliest and most socialistic bills in American history.
Yet, Biden’s plan is far from moderate. And does anyone actually believe that a Biden administration would not kowtow to the radical Left and end up supporting the GND, should he win the upcoming election?
For starters, the Biden Plan does include the following:
“Ensure the U.S. achieves a 100% clean energy economy and reaches net-zero emissions no later than 2050.”
“On day one, Biden will make smart infrastructure investments to rebuild the nation and to ensure that our buildings, water, transportation, and energy infrastructure can withstand the impacts of climate change.”
“He will not only recommit the United States to the Paris Agreement on climate change – he will go much further than that.”
“The Biden plan will make a historic investment in our clean energy future and environmental justice, paid for by rolling back the Trump tax incentives that enrich corporations at the expense of American jobs and the environment.”
“Biden will set a target of reducing the carbon footprint of the U.S. building stock 50% by 2035, creating incentives for deep retrofits that combine appliance electrification, efficiency, and on-site clean power generation.”
“Make climate change a core national security priority.”
These are just a few examples of the radical progressive elements in Biden’s plan.
But, again, if Joe Biden does emerge victorious in the upcoming election, it is almost naďve to believe that he would not inch closer to supporting more of the GND than he already has. There are many reasons why.
First, Biden’s running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA), is a co-sponsor of and leading advocate for the GND.
On March 26, 2019, Harris said, “Climate change is an existential threat, and confronting it requires bold action. I’m a proud cosponsor of Senator Markey’s Green New Deal resolution. Political stunts won’t get us anywhere. Combatting this crisis first requires the Republican majority to stop denying science and finally admit that climate change is real and humans are the dominant cause. Then we can get serious about taking action to tackle the climate crisis at the scale of the problem.”
And because 77-year-old Joe Biden, if elected, would be the oldest president to ever take office, one cannot ignore the fact that there is a likelihood that Harris could take over at some point.
Second, the most vocal supporter of the Green New Deal, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, recently said, “I think, overall, we can likely push Vice President Biden in a more progressive direction across policy issues. … Our main priority is to make sure that the vice president is successful and victorious in November so that we can have those kinds of conversations in the first place from a more effective stance with him in the White House.”
In other words, Ocasio-Cortez wants Biden in the White House because she thinks she can push him into supporting her socialist agenda, including the GND.
Third, if the Democrats win the White House and control of the U.S. Senate this November, current-Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) has said that he would do anything and everything to ensure that his party’s agenda comes to fruition.
Schumer has repeatedly said, “everything is on the table.” This would include statehood for Washington, DC, and Puerto Rico, which would increase the Democrat’s control of the Senate, possibly for decades. Schumer said, “I would love to make them states.”
Schumer has also pledged his support to end the filibuster, saying “As for the filibuster, I'm not busting my chops to become majority leader to do very little or nothing done.”
If Schumer’s wish list becomes reality, that would only increase the prospect that the GND and other radical policies are rammed through Congress.
And if the GND shows up on Biden’s desk, with his party and special interest groups in full-favor, do you really think he would veto it?
For now, Joe Biden is walking on a political tight rope. On one hand, he is trying to appeal to moderate Democrats and independents by trying to portray himself as middle-of-the-road. On the other hand, he needs to retain the support of his party’s increasingly powerful far-Left flank, which fully support the Green New Deal and several other socialistic proposals.
The $50,000 question is: If Biden wins, which version will occupy the White House, the moderate or the radical?
SOURCE
New Study: Strong Likelihood That Temperature Drives CO2 Changes
Prompted by the observation that dramatic COVID-related reductions in 2020 human CO2 emissions had zero impact on the Earth’s CO2 concentration, two scientists conduct extensive statistical probability analyses to conclude temperature changes lead to CO2 changes, not the other way around.
The nearly global acceptance of economically-devastating lockdowns as a mitigating response to the COVID-19 pandemic has inspired many to question the assumption humans drive changes in CO2 concentration.
As Drs. Koutsoyiannis and Kundzewicz point out in their iconoclastic new study, “despite an unprecedented decrease in carbon emission, there was an increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration, which followed a pattern similar to previous years.”
Utilizing the obvious condition that causes precede effects, or that effects do not lead causes, the authors first point out that the paleoclimate record shows CO2 changes follow temperature changes by about 1,000 years.
Then they examine the sequential relationship between global temperature and atmospheric CO2 concentration during 1980–2019.
While they find the causality direction for CO2 leading temperature (T) changes does exist, the results of their study clearly “support the hypothesis that the dominant direction is T ? CO2,” not CO2 ? T.
In fact, the statistical probability is so robust “the p-values in the direction T ? [CO2] are always smaller than in direction [CO2] ? T by about 4 to 5 orders of magnitude, thus clearly supporting T ? [CO2] as dominant direction.”
Temperature is shown to lead CO2 changes by about 6 months to a year.
Drs. Koutsoyiannis and Kundzewicz acknowledge the perspective “CO2 ? T prevails in public, as well as in scientific, perception.”
So they point out that an IPCC analysis has a natural ground (soil) CO2 emissions reaching 114 to 119 gigatons of carbon (GtC) per year, whereas ground (fossil fuel) emissions from anthropogenic sources only amount to 8 or 9 GtC per year.
Consequently, the “change in carbon fluxes due to natural processes is likely to exceed the change due to anthropogenic CO2 emissions” as the “the intensity of biochemical process increases with temperature [and] leads to increasing natural CO2 emission.”
This study is not without precedent. Another analysis of the temperature-CO2 phase relation for 1980-2012 (Humlum et al., 2013) indicated “changes in atmospheric CO2 are not tracking changes in human emissions” and “changes in global atmospheric CO2 are lagging 9.5-10 months behind changes in global air surface temperature.”
Atmospheric physicist Dr. Murry Salby authored a textbook highlighting the dependence of CO2 emissions on temperature. He insisted that “a significant portion” of the recent increase in CO2 “derives from a gradual increase in surface temperature” (pg. 253).
But there is also a “major inconsistency” in the currently accepted paleoclimate and straight-line (Mauna Loa) CO2 progressions, as they imply CO2 molecules do not respond to temperature like they are observed to do so chemically.
He concludes: “The two proxies of previous climate are incompatible. They cannot both be correct.”
A critical analysis of the paleoclimate CO2 record (Jaworowski et al., 1992) suggests the assumption we can accurately determine the entire Earth’s CO2 concentration by examining ancient polar ice bubbles – 36 to 100% of which are contaminated by exposure to today’s air – is “shown to be invalid.”
In Holocene-era ice cores, CO2 reaches 2,500 ppm, 2,900 ppm, even 7,400 ppm per measurements taken in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.
These values were selectively rejected by those seeking to reach “consensus” that modern CO2 concentration values are unprecedented.
To further illustrate the currently accepted paleoclimate CO2 records are likely to be invalid, consider the fact that modern CO2 concentrations beneath snowpack in forests and meadows range from 600 to 1,800 ppm and these concentrations can fluctuate by as much as 200 ppm within a period of just four days (Massman and Frank, 2006).
If this kind of flux can be observed for modern conditions, assessing the CO2 concentration beneath a snowpack that is thousands of years old is little more than fanciful speculation.
SOURCE
Media Still Hyping Sea-Level Alarmism Despite No Evidence
Among the top Google News search results today for “climate change” is the Associated Press (AP) story, “Leaders to UN: If the virus doesn’t kill us, climate change will.”
In the article, the AP claims that some island nations like Tuvalu will completely disappear within 75 years due to rising seas. Scientific evidence, however, demolishes such claims.
The current sea-level rise is not at all unusual historically. Also, several peer-reviewed studies in recent years demonstrate that, even as the world has warmed modestly, many island nations are seeing their landmasses increase, not shrink.
As detailed in Climate at a Glance: Sea Level Rise: sea level has been rising at a relatively steady pace of approximately one foot per century since at least the mid-1800s, which was long before coal power plants and SUVs.
Moreover, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) confirms here has been no significant recent acceleration.
It may be true that some low-lying islands are threatened by relentless but entirely natural sea-level rise.
However, as NASA reports, sea level always rises between ice ages as ice sheets retreat. Also, many islands and island nations, perhaps a majority in many locations, are actually seeing their landmasses increase.
The island of Hawaii, for example, added 543 acres of new land due to lava flows between January 1983 and September 2002.
In 2018 alone, Popular Mechanics reports, volcanic activity added an additional 875 acres to Hawaii Island. Volcanic activity is both creating a new Hawaiian coastline and adding height to the island, both of which diminish any threat to the island’s inhabitants from rising seas.
Research shows other natural factors are adding to the landmass of coastlines and tropical islands elsewhere around the globe, as well.
As discussed in Climate Change Weekly 356, recent research shows coastal mangroves are adding land to coasts.
Rising seas bring sediments and other materials that mangroves capture in their roots. The matter is then buried in the wet ground, storing the carbon dioxide and building up the land.
As early as 2010, research showed the small island nations of Tuvalu and Kiribati are actually growing, not being submerged beneath the seas.
As discussed by the BBC, one study examined 27 islands spanning Tuvalu, Kiribati, and the Federated States of Micronesia, and found that over the last 60 years, 80 percent of the islands either maintained their size or grew, with some growing dramatically.
The 2010 scientific findings were confirmed and expanded upon in 2015 when the same group of researchers published a peer-reviewed study of 600 coral reef islands in the Pacific and Indian Oceans.
The researchers found that approximately 40 percent of those islands remained stable, and 40 percent grew in size.
As National Geographic reported, “Some islands grew by as much as 14 acres (5.6 hectares) in a single decade, and Tuvalu’s main atoll, Funafuti—33 islands distributed around the rim of a large lagoon—has gained 75 acres (32 hectares) of land during the past 115 years.”
As a result, despite political gimmicks designed to induce climate “reparations” from Western democracies, Tuvalu’s government feels confident enough in its long-term future that it is building brand new government buildings.
In addition, the population on Fongafale, Tuvalu’s largest island, has increased by 33 percent.
Not only is Tuvalu not being swallowed by the sea, but research published in 2018 by GIScience & Remote Sensing found 15 of the 28 uninhabited islands on Tuvalu’s Funafuti Atoll saw their shorelines increase in recent years.
In 2019, the same group of researchers conducted laboratory experiments to explain the islands’ growth and found strong wave action washed sand and gravel inland resulting in many atolls and islands being “continually replenished by sediment from the surrounding reef.”
In other words, the natural interaction of land and sea protect islands from sea-level rise.
Even on islands where some shoreline is lost to the seas, the researchers found storms and wave action carrying sand and gravel inland adds to the height of such islands, making them more resistant to further rising seas.
Seas are rising and will continue to rise as they did, without any help by humankind, for centuries and millennia.
Even so, the evidence shows many coastlines and island nations are actually gaining acreage, gaining height, and supporting growing populations.
SOURCE
NYTimes Rains On Sea Walls Protecting Venice From Flooding
How miserable to you have to be in order to find the raincloud in every silver lining? This miserable:
After decades of bureaucratic delays, corruption and resistance from environmental groups, sea walls designed to defend Venice from “acqua alta,” or high water, went up on Saturday, testing their ability to battle the city’s increasingly menacing floods.
By 10 a.m., all 78 floodgates barricading three inlets to the Venetian lagoon had been raised, and even when the tide reached as high as four feet, water levels inside the lagoon remained steady, officials said.
“There wasn’t even a puddle in St. Mark’s Square,” said Alvise Papa, the director of the Venice department that monitors high tides.
Had the flood barriers not been raised, about half the city’s streets would have been underwater, and visitors to St. Mark’s Square — which floods when the tide nears three feet — would have been wading in a foot and a half of water, he said.
“Everything dry here. Pride and joy,” tweeted Luigi Brugnaro, Venice’s newly re-elected mayor.
So, good news — right? Not so fast.
At the New York Times, the Pravda of America, there can be no upside to the idea that mankind, blessed with inventiveness and determination, can overcome natural elements and triumph over them. It’s not only regrettable but bad form.
Imagine waking up every day and asking yourself, “how can I spin a positive news story — such as the potential rescue of one of Western civilization’s greatest treasures — and convince our gullible, guilty, fearful, timorous, locked-down readers in their lonely Upper West Side apartments to hate this development?”
It’s easy if you try. Having delivered the good news — San Marco is not underwater — the Times drags in a history of the sea wall project, merrily observing that “the mobile barrier system was delayed by cost overruns, corruption, and opposition from environmental and conservation groups.”
There were huge cost overruns, plus a characteristic Italian bribery scandal.
Further, the system is not fully operational yet — that is slated for the end of next year — but when it is, the gates will go up whenever high-tide levels reach four feet and are expected to protect the archipelago city from water levels as high as ten feet.
But… there’s a but (as you knew there would be with the Times and the “but” has to do with not “racism” but — “climate change”!
So without further ado, bring on the hypotheticals and the counterfactuals:
“With climate change, there’s a chance that the floodgates could be employed 150-180 days a year, becoming an almost fixed barrier and severing the lagoon’s relation to the sea,” said Cristiano Gasparetto, an architect and former provincial official who has long opposed the project.
“If the lagoon is cut off from the sea for long periods, it dies, because the natural exchange of waters stops, and all of its organic life risks decaying,” he said. “If the lagoon dies, Venice dies,” he added. “It loses its characteristics.” Concerns also remain about the costs of maintaining the floodgates and potential damage from saltwater.
Of course, they do. In Times-land, there are always “fears” and “worries” behind every new development, no matter how ostensibly good.
Like the Dreaded COVID, “climate change” is another almost wholly imaginary terror that can’t be seen, can barely be detected, and will end the world if left unchecked by the power of government in ten, twelve, twenty years, or maybe five minutes if we don’t do something right now.
On the hard Left, where the Times has unabashedly been squatting for the past several years, the perfect is always the enemy of both the good and the good enough.
Under current leftists thought processes, if it might not be work in the direst, barely foreseeable calamity, there’s no point in doing it at all.
No wonder the Left loves the lockdowns so much.
SOURCE
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For more postings from me, see
Preserving the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here
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6 October, 2020
Is Reforestation the Best Way to Fight Climate Change? This Study Says Yes
This is basic science. Trees EAT CO2. So if CO2 is a problem, trees are the obvious solution
And modern agricultural methods are so efficient -- partly due to use of "fossil" fuels -- that much less land is now needed to produce a given volume of food crops. So a lot of land has already gone back into pine plantations
And a lot of Africa -- particularly the Sahel -- could be used for trees if Third World farmers could be diverted from feeding goats on it. Giving them free grain could be seen as an incidental cost of forestry
Electric vehicles. Carbon-capture devices. Replacing cattle with bison. Lots of ideas have been tossed around for addressing climate change, but a new study suggests that one of the most effective solutions is pretty simple: Just plant more trees—a trillion of them to be exact.
The research, conducted by the Swiss university ETH Zurich, found that around 0.9 billion hectares (roughly 2.2 billion acres) of land is suitable for reforestation around the globe. If it were populated with trees, they could capture about 205 billion metric tons of carbon: That’s two-thirds of all the human-generated carbon emissions released since the Industrial Revolution.
“We all knew that restoring forests could play a part in tackling climate change, but we didn’t really know how big the impact would be,” professor and study co-author Thomas Crowther said in a press release. “Our study shows clearly that forest restoration is the best climate change solution available today.”
Trees are a natural defense. As they grow, they pull carbon out of the air through photosynthesis. That makes reforestation an especially enticing strategy for counteracting emissions, since there’s no expensive technology required—just water, soil, and sunlight.
To estimate the amount of possible tree cover, the ETF Zurich researchers first calculated how much forested land the planet could support under current climate conditions. To do so, they assessed tens of thousands of high-resolution satellite images to measure existing forests, The Guardian reports. Then they combined that data with information on soil types, topography, and climate to create a map of potential tree cover.
The map showed about 4.4 billion hectares of potential forest—a significant increase from the 2.8 billion hectares of forest currently spread across the earth. Then, Crowther and his team subtracted the areas that couldn’t support trees because they’re occupied by cities or farms. They included grazing land, since some trees on the pasture wouldn’t interfere with livestock, according to The Guardian. That left 0.9 billion hectares of land—an area slightly larger than the United States—not used by humans that would be suitable for trees.
Six countries stand out as the best candidates for reforestation, according to the study. The first is Russia, which has 151 million hectares of suitable land for forests; followed by the United States, with 103 million hectares; Canada, Australia, Brazil, and China round out the list.
What’s more, the authors refute the idea that a warming planet will increase forest cover. Their data shows that higher temperatures might enlarge forests in the northern latitudes, but the gains will be offset by losses in the dense tropical rainforests, which could become too hot to be habitable.
Although reforestation seems like a no-brainer, the study addresses a key gap in understanding how it would work as a climate-change strategy. Before the study, it wasn’t clear how many trees could be planted without encroaching on human living space or food production, and what effect the plants would have. It’s valuable information for organizations looking for effective ways to fight climate change.
“This is a hugely important blueprint for governments and private sector,” Christina Figueres, former UN climate chief, told The Guardian.
Not all the experts are convinced by the study’s numbers, however. Zeke Hausfather, an analyst at Carbon Brief, told The New York Times that the proposed reforestation would likely only capture about one-third of carbon emissions. Even so, he and other experts agreed that planting trees should be included in any comprehensive climate action plan.
In Crowther’s view, growing forests represents the cheapest and most viable strategy for dealing with carbon emissions. It’s also a way for everyone to help, either by planting trees themselves or donating to forest restoration initiatives.
“But we must act quickly, as new forests will take decades to mature and achieve their full potential as a source of natural carbon storage,” he said.
SOURCE
Global Warming controversy in Maine
On the evening of Sept. 15, just after the 6 o’clock news hour and a press cycle dominated by Dr. Anthony Fauci’s praise for how Vermont has handled the Covid-19 crisis, Republican Gov. Phil Scott announced he had vetoed the Global Warming Solutions Act.
Scott, who had long signaled he had concerns with the Democrats’ key piece of climate change policy, knew that his decision to veto H.688 — just seven weeks before the Nov. 3 election — would be viewed unfavorably by some voters.
Scott decided to go ahead with the veto, hoping Vermonters would understand that, while he does believe in climate change and that it must be addressed, he simply disagrees with the roadmap outlined in the bill.
The day before Scott’s decision, student activists sent out a call to protest outside the Statehouse and pressure the governor to support the climate bill.
“Gov. Scott has the opportunity to be a leader in environmental and social justice policy in this country, but if he vetoes the Global Warming Solutions Act (H.688), he will endanger young people, low-income groups, communities of color, indigenous communities, the disabled, women, and other frontline and marginalized groups,” Emily Thompson, the political coordinator of Sunrise Middlebury, wrote to the press on Sept. 14.
“Obviously I knew that there would be a very visceral type of response from the public who didn’t really understand why I would do this and come to the conclusion that I didn’t believe in climate change — which is not the truth,” Scott said in an interview the Saturday after his veto.
The governor would also like to remove language that opens the state up to lawsuits if it does not meet emission goals.
The Republican governor’s veto of the climate bill has presented his Democratic challenger, Lt. Gov. David Zuckerman, with an opening to attack the popular incumbent.
However, it remains to be seen whether the climate debate will have any effect on the gubernatorial result Nov. 3.
Zuckerman, an organic farmer who has touted his environmental bonafides for decades, has long made addressing climate change an integral piece of his policy platform and has criticized Scott for lacking the vision needed to lead on the issue.
“This veto fits in line with the old Republican trope that it’s business versus the environment,” Zuckerman said in a recent interview. “We have an incredible opportunity to create jobs and build our economy with a healthy climate future in mind.”
On the campaign trail, the governor has highlighted his work to create tax incentives for electric vehicles, expand access to large-scale battery storage, and push for more weatherization efforts throughout the state.
Zuckerman says these efforts are too shortsighted and there should be a full-scale Vermont Green New Deal to properly combat climate change in the state.
But while the Legislature overturned Scott’s veto, the governor has continued to oppose the Global Warming Solutions Act, recently signaling he is reflecting on another potential way to kill the plan.
On Sept. 29, during a press conference, Scott said his administration was thinking about challenging the constitutionality of the Global Warming Solutions Act — arguing that the Democrats have delegated the governor’s authority to a new climate council, negating the executive’s ability to fulfill constitutional duties.
“We’re still contemplating that,” Scott said of a possible legal challenge.
The governor also argues he has put forward more concrete ways to address climate change than the Democratic-controlled Legislature has during the past four years.
“I would put my record on action against the Legislature’s any day of the week,” Scott told VTDigger. “You have to be honest about this; they’ve had the majority.
“We have an overwhelming majority of Democrats in the House, I guess when you start pointing a finger at someone, you typically have three fingers pointing back at yourself, and I would ask them what have they put forward,” the governor said.
Scott points his own finger at his electric vehicle proposals, which include installing charging stations throughout the state, adding to the state fleet, and being part of a nine-state zero emission vehicles plan.
Poll says Scott is way ahead
Whether the climate bill and Scott’s veto will dent the governor’s popularity remains to be seen. But it seems unlikely as people remain focused on Covid-19 and the economy in the runup to the election.
A Vermont Public Radio/Vermont PBS poll that surveyed Vermonters Sept. 3-Sept. 15 has the Republican well in front of Zuckerman, 5% to 24%. In a sign of Scott’s strong support throughout the state, 48% of Democratic-leaning voters said they would vote for the Republican incumbent while 41% would cast a ballot for Zuckerman, the Democratic nominee.
“I don’t think this issue is going to have much effect at all,” said Eric Davis, professor emeritus of political science at Middlebury College, about the climate change veto. Davis said Scott is far too popular in the state and his steady handling of the Covid-19 crisis has made a successful challenge in this election nearly impossible.
“Dave Zuckerman can talk about climate change, he can talk about the minimum wage, he can talk about paid family leave — all those things he would have loved to have talked about back in January and February,” Davis said.
“But for Dave Zuckerman to win, he has to make a good case to the voters that the leadership of the state that has the lowest rate of Covid cases in the country should be replaced in the middle of the pandemic,” he said. “I don’t think Dave Zuckerman has any shot.”
SOURCE
Brazil: Bolsonaro calls Biden’s Amazon comments “disastrous”
SAO PAULO (AP) — Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro on Wednesday attacked U.S. presidential candidate Joe Biden for saying the South American nation should suffer “significant economic consequences” if devastation of the Amazon rainforest continues.
Biden said during Tuesday’s debate with President Donald Trump, an ally of Bolsonaro, that foreign countries should give Brazil $20 billion to stop Amazon deforestation, and that the country should face repercussions if it fails.
The Brazilian leader has insisted on economic development of the region, drawing condemnation from environmentalists, climate scientists and foreign leaders who say the forest is an important carbon sink and must remain standing to achieve climate change goals.
“The greed that some countries have over the Amazon is a reality,” Bolsonaro said on Twitter. “But the confirmation by someone who is fighting for the command of his country clearly signals that he wants to give up a cordial and profitable coexistence.”
Bolsonaro has repeatedly accused unnamed imperialist forces of trying to take over the Amazon, which harkens back to the stance of the 1964-1985 military dictatorship.
Bolsonaro also labeled Biden’s comments as “regrettable,” as well as “disastrous and gratuitous.” While Bolsonaro's original tweets correctly named the Democratic candidate, the English translation provided by his office referred to “Mr. John Biden.”
“What some have not yet understood is that Brazil has changed,” Bolsonaro said. “Its president, unlike left-wing presidents of the past, does not accept bribes, criminal land demarcations or coward threats toward our territorial and economic integrity. Our sovereignty is non-negotiable.”
During Tuesday's debate, Biden said Brazil's rainforests are being torn down.
“I would be gathering up and making sure we had the countries of the world coming up with $20 billion, and say, ‘Here’s $20 billion, stop tearing down the forest. And if you don’t then you’re gonna have significant economic consequences.’”
Preliminary official data published on Aug. 7 indicated that deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon region over the past 12 months could be at a 14-year high. The Brazilian Amazon lost 9,205 square kilometers (3,554 square miles) of vegetation in the 12 months ending in July, according to data from the country’s space agency.
Rubens Barbosa, Brazil's ambassador to Washington between 1994 and 2004, says the rift might not affect the relationship between the two countries in a Biden administration.
“Bolsonaro built a personal relationship with Trump. But he has a difficult relationship with French President Emmanuel Macron, and that did not harm Brazil-France relations," Barbosa told The Associated Press.
Maurício Santoro, a professor of political science at the State University of Rio de Janeiro, said the statements show that “Bolsonaro's relationship is with Trump, not with the U.S..” He said the international isolation around Brazil's leader could deepen if Biden wins the election.
“If Brazil wants to keep a good relationship with a Biden administration it will have to make many concessions in the environmental area, beef up the enforcement on deforestation, wildfires issues, and show that it is taking the criticism seriously," Santoro said.
Earlier on Tuesday Brazil's environment minister Ricardo Salles used Twitter to express doubt about Biden's pledge.
“Only one question: those $20 billion of aid from Biden, is that per year?.” Salles asked, adding that amount is “40 times bigger than the Amazon fund" sponsored mainly by European nations.
Under international pressure for action against fires in the Amazon, Bolsonaro put the army in charge in May. But The Associated Press found the operation dubbed as “Green Brazil 2” has had little effect and prosecution of rainforest destruction by ranchers, farmers and miners has almost halted.
SOURCE
TX: City officials declare disaster after brain-eating amoeba found in tap water
This is very Third World
Officials in the city of Lake Jackson, Texas, issued a disaster declaration on Saturday in response to drinking water contaminated with a brain-eating amoeba. The city is under a "do not use water order," and has requested an emergency declaration from the state.
"The City of Lake Jackson, County of Brazoria, Texas, is facing significant threats to life, health and property due to contaminated drinking water," the city said in its emergency request to Governor Greg Abbott. "The impact of this threat is severe. The potential damages include: sickness and death."
Mayor Bob Sipple wrote that the incident "is of such severity and magnitude" that the city cannot control the threat on its own.
The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality warned the Brazosport Water Authority late Friday of the potential contamination of its water supply by naegleria fowleri.
The authority initially warned eight communities not to use tap water for any reason except to flush toilets, but on Saturday it lifted that warning for everywhere but Lake Jackson. The city of more than 27,000 residents is the site of the authority's water treatment plant. The advisory also was canceled for two state prisons and Dow Chemical's massive Freeport works.
The advisory will remain in place until the authority's water system has been thoroughly flushed and tests on water samples show the system's water is again safe to use. The authority said in a statement that it was unclear how long it would be before the tap water was again safe.
The authority's water source is the Brazos River.
SOURCE
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For more postings from me, see
Preserving the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here
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5 October, 2020
Antarctic Penguin Remains Show Present Temperatures Are Normal
Scientists report they have discovered perfectly preserved, 800-year-old penguin remains exposed by a patch of melting ice along the Antarctic coast. The news media and climate activists are touting this as proof of an unprecedented climate crisis. In reality, the discovery reveals that temperatures in the not-too-distant past were as warm or warmer than present temperatures.
Reporting in the peer-reviewed journal Geology, scientists encountered what appeared to be the fresh remains of Adelie penguins in a region where penguins are not known to live. Carbon dating showed the penguin remains were approximately 800 years old, implying the remains had very recently been exposed by thawing ice. Further examination and testing of the site showed that penguins had colonized and abandoned the site multiple times between 800 and 5,000 years ago.
The scientists noted that the most recent period of penguin colonization began at the beginning of the Medieval Warm Period (approximately 900 A.D.) and ended at the beginning of the Little Ice Age (approximately 1200 A.D.). The scientists noted that penguins currently cannot live in the region because “fast ice” (ice that extends from the Antarctic shore many miles out into the ocean) prevents penguins from accessing the ocean from shore. During the warmth of the Medieval Warm Period, the absence of fast ice allowed penguins to colonize the area.
Further analysis of the site showed penguins were able to live and breed in the region during most of the past 5,000 years. The scientists described the period of greatest colonization as the “Penguin Optimum,” lasting from 2,000 B.C. to the time of Christ. Presumably, it was too warm for fast ice to extend from the Antarctic coast during these periods of penguin colonization.
The news media are proclaiming the newly discovered penguin remains as proof of a climate crisis. The claim is that Antarctic temperatures are warmer than they have been at any point in the past 800 years. See, for example, the UK Independent article titled “Climate crisis: 5,000-year-old penguin graveyard revealed by retreating Antarctic ice.” While that may be so, the more important revelation is that Antarctic temperatures have been warmer than today – warm enough to support large penguin colonies that depend on access to the open sea – for most of the 5,000 years. In other words, human civilization developed and thrived during temperatures that were warmer than today. For most of the past 5,000 years, humans and nature grew accustomed to – and thrived during – temperatures that were warmer than today.
Far from proof of a climate crisis, the new penguin discovery is proof of a return to climate normalcy.
SOURCE
Fracking Takes Center Stage In Debate Over Energy, Climate Change
President Trump and Joseph R. Biden have been talking about fracking on the campaign trail, but it’s about more than hydraulic fracturing. They’re talking about the future of U.S. energy.
The engineering feat that transformed a nation once dependent upon the Middle East into the world’s largest producer of oil and natural gas has become shorthand for the debate over whether America continues to ride the fossil fuel wave or shuts it down in the name of climate change.
Making the shale revolution possible was fracking, an extractive technology invented in the 1940s that injects a high-pressure mixture of water, sand, and chemicals into underground rock formations to release the oil and gas embedded within.
“We can’t do it without fracking,” said Kathleen Sgamma, president of the Western Energy Alliance oil and gas trade association. “Over 90% of the wells in the United States are fracked now. We have very few conventional resources, the Gulf of Mexico being one example. Otherwise, everything has to be fracked.”
With conventional oil fields, such as those in Saudi Arabia, “you poke that straw into the ground and it flows naturally,” she said. “But you poke that straw into the shale because the shale is very nonporous. It won’t flow without fracking.”
As Republicans cheer America’s long-sought energy independence and Democrats and environmental groups seek to move beyond the shale revolution to a green-energy future, hydraulic fracturing has risen to the campaign forefront.
Mr. Trump has embraced fracking. Mr. Biden says he would not ban fracking but would prohibit it on public lands and seek to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050, which would mean replacing coal, oil, and natural gas with renewable energy sources, rendering fracking obsolete.
“Nobody’s going to build another coal-fired plant in America. No one’s going to build another oil-fired [plant] in America,” Mr. Biden said at Tuesday’s presidential debate. “They’re going to move to renewable energy.”
Meanwhile, the president has wielded the fracking issue as a cudgel, especially in swing states such as Ohio and Pennsylvania, where hydraulic fracturing in the oil-and-gas rich Marcellus Shale has driven an economic boom.
“Biden reiterated his pledge to require net-zero carbon emissions,” Mr. Trump said at a rally last week in Pittsburgh.
“That’s basically saying, do you know what that is? There’ll be no more oil, there’ll be no more gas, there’ll be no more nothing, there’ll be no more industry, there’ll be no more country. That’s what it’s saying really.
“And that would instantly shut down fracking and mining immediately in Pennsylvania, sending your jobs overseas, sending your money to somebody else, not you.”
Mr. Biden has countered by promising his clean-energy transformation would create millions of jobs with a massive infrastructure overhaul, including retrofitting 4 million buildings, replacing gas-fueled cars with electric vehicles, and ending the electrical grid’s dependence on fossil fuels.
Mr. Biden’s Clean Energy Revolution and Climate Justice plan comes with a price tag of $2 trillion, but he said it would “pay for itself as we move forward.”
“We can get to net zero in terms of energy production by 2035,” Mr. Biden said. “Not only not costing people jobs, [but] creating jobs.”
While Mr. Trump has painted his Democratic opponent’s plan as a radical job-killer, Mr. Biden is a centrist compared with many in his party, including his running mate Sen. Kamala D. Harris, California Democrat, who called during the primary for a fracking ban.
Mr. Biden didn’t help himself during the Democratic primary by muddying his position. In March, he declared “no new fracking,” which his campaign later said referred to new drilling on public lands, but he has since insisted that “I am not banning fracking.”
Democratic strategist Rick Ridder said he believed most voters don’t see Mr. Biden as an anti-fracking kind of guy.
“The Trump campaign is obviously trying to push that Joe Biden is anti-fracking because so many of the other Democratic contenders were opposed to fracking,” Mr. Ridder said. “And so they’re trying to lump them in. But I don’t think they’ve been very successful at that.”
He added that “Joe Biden is perceived by most voters in every focus group I’ve ever done as sort of a moderate Democrat, and so, therefore, suggesting he would ban fracking, they don’t believe it.”
Mr. Biden also faces intense pressure on the left from the environmental movement, starting with San Francisco billionaire Tom Steyer, a former Democratic presidential primary candidate and top party fundraiser.
“That’s what Biden’s struggle is: how to worry about jobs in the gas and oil industry in Pennsylvania, and at the same time keep his environmental constituency,” said Floyd Ciruli, director of the University of Denver Crossley Center for Public Opinion Research.
“Tom Steyer is one of his top fundraisers and campaigners, and has been for several months, and so he’s got Steyer right on his shoulder.”
In addition, polls show that voters are split on fracking, even in Pennsylvania. A CBS/YouGov poll released last month showed 52% of Pennsylvania voters oppose fracking and 48% support it. Then again, a Cook Political Report/Kaiser poll taken in November found 57% opposed a fracking ban.
Also fueling the issue’s profile is California, which leads the nation in transitioning to green energy — and was forced in August to implement more power shutdowns as electricity demand exceeded supply.
“You can’t wave a magic wand and say all energy needs to come from wind and solar because then you get California and rolling blackouts,” Ms. Sgamma said. “So I do think people have connected the dots and understand that energy is important, which is why the issue has risen to that level.”
Renewable energy accounts for 19% of electricity production, according to the federal Energy Information Administration.
Environmentalists have argued that fracking is unsafe, which the industry denies, and incompatible with the push to lower atmospheric greenhouse gases to avoid a “climate crisis.”
“The corporations that hype fracking are trying to lock us into a dirty future powered by fossil fuels. It’s a future that leads to more gas plants, more leaky pipelines, more compressor stations, more processing plants, and more dangerous storage facilities,” said Food & Water Watch. “We know the only way toward a clean, renewable energy future is to ban fracking and to stop all new fossil fuel development.”
Industry supporters point out that the shale revolution has been credited with reducing U.S. emissions by driving the replacement of coal with natural gas, which emits fewer greenhouse gases, at power plants.
The U.S. Energy Information Administration said Wednesday that U.S. emissions fell by 2.8% in 2019, part of a long-term trend that has seen the nation’s carbon emissions fall by 14.5% since 2007.
Even though the reductions lead the developed world, they are still a far cry from net-zero emissions, which is increasingly the standard championed by Democrats.
The Green New Deal resolution proposed by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez calls for net-zero carbon emissions by 2030.
The New York Democrat heads the Biden campaign climate task force, leading to speculation that Mr. Biden, if elected, may renege on his promise not to ban fracking under pressure from the left.
“The primaries are over, and right now what is most important is to make sure that we ensure a Democratic victory in November and that we continue to push Vice President Biden on issues from marijuana to climate change to foreign policy,” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said in a Sept. 17 interview with Just the News.
She has co-sponsored the Fracking Ban Act in Congress with Sen. Bernard Sanders, Vermont independent, but if net-zero becomes the standard, such measures may not be necessary.
“Fracking may become one of those things that we remember from the past, simply because we have alternative energy,” Mr. Ridder said. “It may fade away.”
Ms. Sgamma said she believes Americans are too smart to buy the great leap forward into a green-energy utopia.
SOURCE
Your life under the Green New Deal
Your lives, living standards and world would suffer dramatically under a Biden-AOC-Harris GND
Paul Driessen
During the cantankerous September 29 presidential “debate,” candidate Joe Biden proclaimed “I am the Democratic Party.” He is in charge, he insisted, and his views will be Democrat policy. Others aren’t so sure – about that, about what his views actually are, or about how far to the left he would be pushed, prodded and pressured by Kamala Harris, AOC, Bernie Sanders, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Antifa mobs, and coastal and blue city governing, academic and technology elites.
Mr. Biden has pledged to eliminate the Trump tax cuts, but has refused to say whether he supports single-payer nationalized healthcare, Second Amendment self-defense, packing the Supreme Court, eliminating the Senate filibuster, or adding Puerto Rico, Guam and Washington DC as new (Democrat) states.
Like Nancy Pelosi on ObamaCare, he wants us to vote for him, so we can find out what his positions are.
When he’s in California or Manhattan, he says he’ll ban fracking – which he claims to support when he’s in Ohio and Pennsylvania, where he needs rural and blue-collar voters who support and benefit greatly from this amazing technology. However, Mr. Biden does say he will put controlling Earth’s climate at the center of US foreign policy. So he strongly supports the Green New Deal (GND), which would completely replace fossil fuels with “clean, green” electricity and biofuel energy by 2035.
GND proponents want us to believe this can be done quickly, easily, affordably, ecologically, sustainably and painlessly – almost with the wave of a magic wand. Not a chance. Those in power would undoubtedly protect their privileged status. But the GND would control and pummel the jobs, lives, living standards, savings, personal choices and ecological heritage of rural, poor, minority, elderly and working classes.
Dependable coal and natural gas power plants will be replaced by intermittent, weather-dependent wind and solar power; gasoline-powered vehicles with electric models. That’s obvious.
But our nation’s abundant coal, oil, natural gas and petroleum liquids provide over 80% of the energy that makes America’s jobs, lives and living standards possible. Locking them in the ground would have far-reaching impacts that are far less apparent, and have (deliberately?) received little media attention.
In 2018, America’s fossil fuels generated about 2.7 billion megawatt-hours (MWh) of electricity. But almost two-thirds of the nation’s non-exported natural gas served industrial, commercial and residential needs – including factories, hospital emergency power systems, and furnaces, ovens, stoves and hot water heaters in restaurants and tens of millions of US homes. That’s equivalent to another 2.7 billion MWh.
The nation’s 65 million cars, light trucks, buses, semi-trailers, motor homes, tractors, backhoes and other vehicles consumed the gasoline and diesel equivalent of yet another 2 billion MWh.
Altogether, that’s nearly 7.5 billion MWh that the Green New Deal would have to replace by 2035!
Even assuming the United States and world could mine, process and transport enough metals and minerals – and manufacture and transport all the components and finished equipment to make this happen – this brave new all-electric nation would require millions of onshore wind turbines, tens of thousands of offshore turbines, billions of solar panels, billions of vehicle batteries, billions of backup energy storage batteries, thousands of miles of new high voltage transmission lines, and billions of tons of concrete!
The GND would turn our Midlands – what elites denigrate as flyover country – into vast energy colonies. Millions of acres of farmland, wildlife habitat and scenic areas would be blanketed by industrial wind, solar and battery facilities, and power lines to electricity-hungry towns and cities. Windswept ocean vistas and sea lanes would be plagued by towering turbines. Birds, bats and other wildlife would disappear.
With mining still under assault in the USA, the metals, minerals, components and equipment would come mostly from China or Chinese companies in Africa, using vast quantities of fossil fuels, under minimal to nonexistent environmental, workplace safety, fair wage and child labor laws. This smells of slavery and racism – making us complicit in perpetuating it, and making it increasingly difficult for the United States to criticize or challenge China on human rights, pollution, military aggression or territorial expansion.
The GND would also mean ripping out, and throwing out, the natural gas appliances you now have, replacing them with electric models, and installing rapid charging systems for your cars. That will mean upgrading household, neighborhood and national electrical systems, to handle the extra loads.
Oil and natural gas are also feed stocks for pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, paints, synthetic fibers, fertilizers ... and plastics for computers, wind turbine blades, solar panel films and countless other products. Under the GND, we’d have to shut down those US-based industries, import feed stocks for them, or turn hundreds of millions of acres into biofuel plantations.
Up to 10 million high-pay petroleum, petrochemical and manufacturing jobs would be lost – with many replaced by low-pay, temporary or short-term jobs hauling, installing, maintaining, dismantling and landfilling wind turbines, solar panels and batteries. The GND would cost tens of trillions of dollars!
GND ringleader California wants the entire country to emulate its policies. Its families and businesses already pay the highest electricity prices in the continental USA – and are getting hammered repeatedly by blackouts. Now the state has mandated electric cars, cooking and heating. No more natural gas. How its legislators expect to generate all that extra electricity and avoid more blackouts, no one knows.
Families, factories, hospitals, schools and businesses used to paying 7, 9 or 11 cents per kilowatt-hour for 24/7/365 electricity better brace themselves for rude shocks. Under the GND, you’ll be paying 14, 18, 22 cents per kWh, as they do in green US states – or even 35 US cents per kWh, as they do in Germany. You’ll also be using twice as much electricity, and probably experiencing repeated power interruptions.
Get used to having electricity when it’s available, rather than when you need it, however “essential” your business services or family needs might be. How you will survive, whether your job will disappear, whether you will join the ranks of those who must choose between heating and eating, is anyone’s guess.
A week of cloudy weather will really reduce solar output – and wind turbines generate roughly zero electricity on the hottest and most frigid days. Be careful where you live or need to recharge your EV.
As to all those electric vehicles, a basic $39,000 Model 3 Tesla sedan has a battery module that weighs some 1,200 pounds and gets around 250 miles on a charge. Just don’t use the heater or AC, don’t take long family trips, and don’t get caught in a blizzard, or a traffic jam trying to escape a roaring forest fire.
How many tons of batteries a bus, semi-truck or mining excavator would require, where you’d put them, and how many hours a day you’d waste recharging them, are other important considerations. Perhaps Mr. Biden or Ms. Ocasio-Cortez has the answers.
The Obama Administration sent a heavily armed SWAT team into Gibson Guitar offices over a phony Endangered Species Act violation. Democrats refuse to condemn BLM and Antifa mob violence, arson and looting. How a Biden-Harris-AOC Deep State and its allies might respond to organized or even spontaneous resistance to Green New Deal dictates and impacts is pretty easy to imagine. So is their response to cities, counties and states declaring themselves “sanctuaries” to GND or gun control decrees.
Keep in mind, too: This entire GND energy, economic and living standards “transformation” is being justified by claims that we face a “climate emergency” and “ongoing ravages of climate change.”
It’s all a gigantic Climate Hustle. There is no climate emergency. Humans cannot control Earth’s climate and weather. Fossil fuel emissions have negligible effects. Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant; it is the miracle molecule that makes plant, human and animal life possible. Climate change and extreme weather have been “real” throughout history. What we are seeing today is in no way unprecedented.
Green New Dealers would bring us, our country and our planet enormous pain for no gain – except that they would get more money, power and control.
Via email
Controversial Aboriginal activist and incoming Greens senator declares she has NEVER sung the national anthem and finds the Australian flag offensive
You can see that she is just about as Aboriginal as I am. And my ancestry is entirely British. She's just a far Leftist approval-seeker. But she is in the right party. The Australian Greens are far-Leftists.
The question remains whether she is approprite to sit in our parliament. Before sitting, all members have to make the oath of allegiance. It is a constitutional requirement. It reads:
"I do swear that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II' Her heirs and successors according to law. SO HELP ME GOD!"
If she doesn't like Australia, she surely would not like swearing allegiance to our Head of State. But she must have taken the oath to be seated. So she is a fraud and an impostor
An incoming Greens senator has revealed she has never sung the national anthem and found the Australian flag to be offensive.
Lidia Thorpe will next week become the first-ever indigenous senator for Victoria when she swears an oath of allegiance to the Queen.
The 47-year-old activist and grandmother from Melbourne, who is replacing former Greens leader Richard Di Natale in federal Parliament, has declared she doesn't associate herself with Advance Australia Fair.
'I've never participated in the Australian anthem,' she told the ABC's 7.30 program.
Ms Thorpe has also expressed misgivings about the Australian flag, especially when it is displayed on Australia Day, January 26. 'Yeah, and I feel that pain in terms of, I know what it's like to feel offended,' she said.
'When I see Australian flags all over the media on the 26th of January and drinking and partying, when that day represents so much loss to our people. 'I feel that pain too.'
Like some left-wing indigenous activists, Ms Thorpe regards the 1788 arrival of the British First Fleet as an 'Invasion Day' and the start of land being dispossessed.
Last year, she told UK-born actress Miriam Margoyles' Almost Australian documentary she saw herself as an indigenous woman and not an Australian.
'I don't identify as being Australian. It's a concept that's been imposed on our people since we're invaded,' she told the program, which aired on the ABC in May. 'The colonisers came and set up the colony which they now call Australia. 'Mass genocide occurred.'
When she takes an oath in the Senate, Ms Thorpe will become just the eighth indigenous member of federal Parliament since Federation in 1901.
Ms Thorpe, who is the granddaughter and great-granddaughter of female indigenous activists, said she was more than just a campaigner for Aboriginal rights.
'I know that people see me as this radical angry black woman and, yes, I can be that, but I am a nice person too and I'm a mum, I'm a grandma, I'm a sister, auntie,' she said.
Ms Thorpe, who became a mother at age 17 and lived in public housing, will be among five indigenous MPs in Canberra, alongside Labor's Linda Burney, Malarndirri McCarthy and Pat Dodson, and Liberal Indigenous Australians Minister Ken Wyatt, who in 2010 became the first Aboriginal member of the House of Representatives.
Neville Bonner made history in 1971 as Australia's first indigenous senator when he filled a casual Liberal Party vacancy in Queensland.
Aden Ridgeway in 1998 became the next indigenous senator with the Australian Democrats in New South Wales.
Olympic hockey gold medallist Nova Peris in 2013 became the first indigenous senator for the Northern Territory after Labor prime minister Julia Gillard insisted she replace Trish Crossin at the top of the party ticket at that year's election.
Ms Thorpe in November 2017 became the first Aboriginal woman elected to the Victorian Parliament by winning the Melbourne inner-north seat of Northcote.
Ms Thorpe lost her seat a year after that by-election victory, sparked by the the death of Labor minister Fiona Richardson.
That led to her in June defeating Queens's Counsel barrister Julian Burnside for Greens preselection to replace Senator Di Natale in Parliament.
SOURCE
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For more postings from me, see
Preserving the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here
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4 October, 2020
Senate sets table laden with green pork
The US Senate is sitting on what could quickly become the biggest green pork giveaway in history, but it is almost impossible to see, let alone discuss or criticize. Untold billions for renewables and their kin. This would be funny if it were not so ridiculous, so a bit of scornful humor is called for.
It all began with an innocent little bill introduced in March by Energy Committee chair Murkowski. The bill would throw a bit of research money at geothermal power generation. You can still see S 2657 here. No big deal, right?
Then someone, probably not Murkowski, got the idea to make this little bill the vehicle for giving huge amounts of money and tax breaks to the whole realm of green technologies. Pure green pork.
John Droz does a great job of telling this story here. Droz is a leading critic of renewables. His website has what is likely the world’s biggest collection of critical studies and commentaries and his weekly newsletter listing more is very useful. He blew the whistle on this high pile of pork.
What happened is that something like 221 proposed amendments to S 2657 were tabled, many all at once. I have not looked at them all, possibly no one has, but the ones I have looked at really push renewables.
The trick is that there was no notice of this avalanche of pork. The Senate bills website still just lists the original bill because while the amendments have all been tabled, none has been voted on and passed.
There is however an amendments button that will start you on your way. I say start because there is still some serious digging to do. It turns out that these proposed amendments only exist in the obscure pages of the Congressional Record for early March, 2020.
The endless porky amendments start here on March 3, 2020. There may well be some later as I have not tried to find them all. I do know that there is one amendment to which there are then many amendments. There may be amendments to amendments to amendments, etc.
Once you find them the obstacles do not end. Many are written in what I call "opaque context" which means they incorporate references to other laws in such a way that you need to look at the references in order to know what the proposed amendment says.
SOURCE
The Plague of Renewable Portfolio Standards
There are few commodities that are more perishable than electricity. If it is not consumed at the moment it is produced, there are not very good options. Yes, it is possible to store electricity via a reversible hydroelectric scheme called pumped storage. It can also be stored in rechargeable batteries. Both options are exorbitantly expensive. With eggs or milk, cold storage for a period is feasible, and if that doesn’t work, there are powdered eggs and cheese. Electricity is produced by generating plants that are capital-intensive.
At a modern natural gas generating plant, two thirds of the cost is capital, and one third is fuel. If you idle the plant because at a particular time there is no market for the electricity, two thirds of your costs keep on running. At a nuclear plant, fuel is extremely cheap. Nearly all the cost is capital or staffing, and nearly all the costs continue if the plant is idle. Idling a nuclear plant saves practically nothing. That gives a clue why nuclear plants generally run flat out, turned on more than 90% of the time. With a wind or solar generating plant, nearly all the cost is capital. If you turn off wind or solar generation, because there is no market, all your expenses turn into losses.
Wind or solar plants, usually, can be turned off on command, but they can’t be turned on unless the wind is blowing or the sun is shining. They are erratic generators. Not only can you not be sure of turning them on when needed, but they are liable to turn off by themselves because the wind died or a cloud moved in front of the sun. This is worse than producing milk or eggs. The cows and chickens can be counted on to produce at a fairly predictable rate. When a substantial part of the electricity in a particular area is being generated by wind or solar, there have to be enough quick-response backup plants ready to compensate for a drop off in generation from the wind or solar. Usually the backup plants are natural gas plants due to their agility.
Wind and solar are feasible only because the operators of the grid agree to do everything possible to accept whatever amount of wind or solar is coming their way at any time. They assume this posture toward wind and solar because that is required by various regulations and contracts. All the other sources of power are ordered to decrease or increase output as needed to balance the amount of wind or solar power flowing at any moment. If wind and solar are minor players, the burden of accommodating their erratic nature is small. If they become big players, the burden starts to be a serious problem. In some places, like California, it’s starting to get serious.
Wind and solar are impractical due to their erratic nature. Another big problem is that they are extremely expensive, even with government subsidies. The alternative to purchasing wind or solar electricity is to use the natural gas plants, already in existence, that back up the wind and solar. To use the natural gas plants, the only additional expense is the marginal cost of operation, almost entirely the cost of the fuel. That cost is about $15 per megawatt-hour. You don’t have to build new backup plants to substitute natural gas for the wind or solar, because there already has to be enough backup capacity to 100% replace the wind or solar. Electricity from either wind or solar costs around $80 per megawatt-hour; nearly all the cost is the cost of capital, and the cost is five times more than it costs to use the natural gas plants that are already there. (Wind and solar cost about the same.) Government subsidies exist that may lower the cost of wind or solar to around $30, still double the $15 cost of using the backup plants. Many of these subsidies are under political attack or are scheduled to sunset.
The wind and solar industries claim that their products are competitive with conventional generation. They do this by making a false comparison. The total cost of natural gas electricity is around $45 per megawatt hour, the $15 cost of the fuel, the $30 cost of amortizing the capital investment. The cost of wind or solar with current subsidies is around $30. So they claim that wind or solar is cheaper than conventional natural gas, $30 versus $45. Adding wind or solar cuts only the fuel cost, not the capital cost of natural gas plants. The capital cost of natural gas remains because the plants have to stay in place to back up the wind or solar. Further, the government subsidies are not a real cost reduction. The pubic just pays for the electricity via taxes rather than via their electric bill. If you add wind or solar to a grid, someone has to pay $80 to save $15.
This situation, where everyone else has to bend over backwards and pay high prices to accommodate wind and solar, is sold to the public on the grounds that it reduces CO2 emissions and thus saves the world from global warming. One objection to this is that the predictions of global warming are based on junky science, while adding CO2 to the atmosphere greens the Earth and increases agricultural production. If we ask the most qualified people who firmly believe in global warming from CO2, such as the scientist James Hansen, they say that using wind and solar to cut CO2 emissions is a big lie, a grotesque and fantastical solution that won’t work. See here, here, and here. They say that only CO2-free nuclear energy can save us from global warming. Most environmental organizations are still advocating wind and solar. They have a problem with nuclear because during the ’70s and ’80s, they worked very hard to destroy the nuclear industry in the U.S. They largely succeeded.
The biggest government policies that keep the wind and solar fraud in business are the thirty states that have renewable portfolio standards. These laws require that a certain percentage of the electricity must come from renewable sources. Renewable sources end up being wind or solar. Hydro and nuclear are generally not feasible alternatives to satisfy the standards. Nuclear is arbitrarily banned by almost every state. Hydro is allowed but killed by banning hydro that involves dams. The Sierra Club hates dams.
There are other niche sources of renewable electricity, but they are too minor and too expensive to be important.
The renewable standards mostly have an accelerating schedule. In Nevada, 50% of the electricity must be renewable by 2030. In California, it is 60% by 2030. The end consequence of the renewable portfolio standards are the regulations and contracts that provide all the special accommodations that wind and solar require to be even remotely feasible. When wind or solar cross a threshold of supplying about 20% of the electricity in a grid, it becomes necessary to add storage, usually batteries, doubling or tripling the cost.
The state legislatures have enacted renewable portfolio standards because they have accepted the lie that wind and solar are competitive and the lie that wind and solar are a good way of reducing CO2 emissions. They also have largely accepted the poorly substantiated notion that we face a global warming crisis.
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Intermittent Renewables Are Nothing to Throw Money At
On July 18, 2019, Governor Cuomo signed into law the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA). It is among the most ambitious climate laws in the world and requires New York to reduce economy-wide greenhouse gas emissions 40 percent by 2030 and no less than 85 percent by 2050 from 1990 levels. This post looks at claims that using the green energy projects needed to meet the CLCPA goals will get the economy moving after the COVID pandemic.
I am following the implementation of the Climate Act closely because its implementation affects my future as a New Yorker. Given the cost impacts for other jurisdictions that have implemented renewable energy resources to meet targets at much less stringent levels, I am convinced that the costs in New York will be enormous and my analyses have supported that concern. The opinions expressed in this post do not reflect the position of any of my previous employers or any other company I have been associated with, these comments are mine alone.
Intermittent Renewables
Salt Tanks that provide thermal energy storage for the 280 MW Solana Generating Station in Arizona so that output can be provided after the sun goes down and scheduled to meet demand requirements. But, it is only designed to provide six hours of energy storage and allows the plant to but generate about 38 percent of its rated capacity, which isn’t enough close to a combined-cycle natural gas plant. It’s a cruel joke and anything but green; sheer folly.
Problems with a Green Energy Kick-Start
Advocates for the CLCPA claim that we should use clean energy projects to get the economy moving again. For example, at the August 24, 2020 Climate Action Council meeting Co-Chair Doreen Harris said this summer’s large-scale renewable project solicitations will kick-start the economy. In this post I evaluate Gail Tverberg’s post “Why a Great Reset Based on Green Energy Isn’t Possible” at her blog Our Finite World with respect to those claims.
Ms. Tverberg gives ten reasons why re-starting the economy after the Covid pandemic is not simply like resetting your computer. She explains some of the misunderstandings that “lead people to believe that the world economy can move to a Green Energy future”. I encourage readers to read her post. Despite her emphasis on the world’s economy there are important lessons for New York.
Her first point is that the “The economy isn’t really like a computer that can be switched on and off; it is more comparable to a human body that is dead, once it is switched off.” Ms. Tverberg argues that the economy and energy system are inextricably interconnected. She explains that the economy is only able to “grow” because of energy consumption. As resources change businesses change. A key point is that as energy sources are taken away systems like the economy fail quickly. While in this instance the economic collapse was not because of energy input it still cannot simply be turned back on.
Tverberg’s blog originally explored how oil limits affect the economy but, in my opinion, oil is only a surrogate for energy. In the “Getting Started” section on her blog she explains how limits to minerals and energy sources should be incorporated into economic modeling. This is related to her second point “Economic growth has a definite pattern to it, rather than simply increasing without limit”. Of particular interest to New York is that one of the economic limits ignored by economic modelers is “an energy supply that becomes excessively expensive to produce”. We are still waiting for an estimate for the cost of the CLCPA but experience elsewhere does not bode well.
Her post addresses the world’s economy but her third issue “Commodity prices behave differently at different stages of the economic cycle. During the second half of the economic cycle, it becomes difficult to keep commodity prices high enough for producers”, should be a direct warning for New York. In particular, we are waiting for the Climate Action Council to develop their scoping plan that will include an energy plan for New York. We can only guess at how many wind turbines, solar panels, and energy storage systems will be needed when heating and transportation are electrified.
Given that energy storage is expensive, one cost minimization approach is to over-build wind and solar to minimize the periods when a lot of energy storage is needed. The peak demand periods occur rarely but they are also the most impactful – think the coldest and hottest periods. However, if you over-build, the electricity commodity price will be very low most of the time when solar and wind output is greater than the load needed. Tverberg explains that too low oil prices make it more difficult for oil producers to survive and this will also be a likely problem for New York’s energy producers.
Her next point specifically addresses coal and oil prices. She is concerned that the low prices since mid-2008 seem to be leading to both peak crude oil and peak coal. In both cases she claims that investments in new oil wells and unprofitable coal mines are not occurring. Consequently, there will be less energy available for the economy.
Tverberg believes that economic “modelers missed the fact that fossil fuel extraction would disappear because of low prices, leaving nearly all reserves and other resources in the ground”. Importantly she points out that these “modelers instead assumed that renewables would always be an extension of a fossil fuel-powered system”. The following quote is directly applicable to New York’s CLCPA:
“Thus, modelers looking at Energy Return on Energy Invested (EROI) for wind and for solar assumed that they would always be used inside of a fossil fuel powered system that could provide heavily subsidized balancing for their intermittent output. They made calculations as if intermittent electricity is equivalent to electricity that can be controlled to provide electricity when it is needed. Their calculations seemed to suggest that making wind and solar would be useful. The thing that was overlooked was that this was only possible within a system where other fuels would provide balancing at a very low cost.”
The CLCPA assumes that political will is sufficient to over-come this problem but no one has shown how they plan to do it.
Tverberg makes the same point that I have been making that her concerns apply to other aspects of the economy: “The same issue of low demand leading to low prices affects commodities of all kinds. As a result, many of the future resources that modelers count on, and that companies depend upon as the basis for borrowing, are unlikely to really be available.” If New York continues down this path, then our only hope is that jurisdictions outside of New York won’t, so that future resources will be available elsewhere.
The following two issues addressed by Tverberg reveal fundamental flaws in the CLCPA. First, she notes that “On a stand-alone basis, intermittent renewables have very limited usefulness. Their true value is close to zero.” Recall that the CLCPA plans to replace almost all fossil fuels with intermittent renewables. I am sure she would agree with me that the CLCPA will likely end badly.
I could not agree more with the second applicable issue: “The true cost of wind and solar has been hidden from everyone, using subsidies whose total cost is hard to determine.” A common trope is that wind and solar are cheaper but those comparisons always include the cost of construction and exclude the costs to make the intermittent and diffuse renewable power available when and where it is needed. When those costs are included wind and solar are far more expensive. If subsidies are needed to make intermittent renewables viable then how can New York afford to maintain the subsidies indefinitely? She notes that the “ability to subsidize a high cost, unreliable electricity system is disappearing.”
Tverberg points out that “Wind, solar, and hydroelectric today only comprise a little under 10% of the world’s energy supply” so we have a long way to go to reach a “green” energy system. According to the New York Independent System Operator wind, solar and hydroelectric in New York totaled 25.8% of New York’s energy supply mostly because New York is in the unique geographical position to get 22.4% from hydro primarily at Niagara Falls and the St. Lawrence River. In my opinion the hydro capability for New York is tapped out so future renewables will have to come from wind and solar. Additionally, she makes the point that “None of these three energy types is suited to producing food. Oil is currently used for tilling fields, making herbicides and pesticides, and transporting refrigerated crops to market.”
I also agree strongly with Tverberg’s final consideration: “Few people understand how important energy supply is for giving humans control over other species and pathogens.” She ends that section with“We are dealing with COVID-19 now. Today’s hospitals are only possible thanks to a modern mix of energy supply. Drugs are very often made using oil. Personal protective equipment is made in factories around the world and shipped to where it is used, generally using oil for transport.”
Tverberg concludes:
“We do indeed appear to be headed for a Great Reset. There is little chance that Green Energy can play more than a small role, however. Leaders are often confused because of the erroneous modeling that has been done. Given that the world’s oil and coal supply seem to be declining in the near term, the chance that fossil fuel production will ever rise as high as assumptions made in the IPCC reports seems very slim.”
I conclude that two of the concerns raised in her article are fundamental flaws in the CLCPA. She explains that intermittent renewables have a true value close to zero and that the total cost of the subsidies needed to support wind and solar are hidden and hard to determine. The CLCPA mandates reliance on intermittent renewables which will inevitably eventually cause problems. I also believe that those flaws undermine the concept that the technologies will kickstart the economy. That can only appear to work until the subsidy money runs out. At a time when there isn’t enough money for basic services throwing money away on intermittent renewables is sheer folly.
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Reports of Reef’s demise greatly exaggerated
If we are to believe the Queensland Labor Government, sugarcane farmers are evil and are destroying the Reef in their pursuit of greater profits with their use of fertilisers.
To counter this, new regulations are going to be introduced.
These will have the handy effect of allowing the Government to trumpet its environmental credentials while at the same time pandering to the Greens, the latter being an article of faith held dear by Labor governments.
Given this, it was intriguing to hear the head of the Australian Institute of Marine Science, Paul Hardisty, concede under questioning before an ongoing Senate inquiry that only 3 per cent of the Reef, the inshore reef, was affected by farm pesticides and that even that 3 per cent was at “low to negligible risk”.
This in effect means that 97 per cent of the Great Barrier Reef, which lies 50km to 100km off the coast, is completely unaffected.
It is also worth noting that while scientists regularly shriek warnings that the Reef is dying and in so doing damage the tourism industry, no one has bothered to measure coral growth or the lack of it for the past 15 years.
Marine scientist Peter Ridd, who questioned the validity of claims made regarding the imminent death of the Reef by his peers, was sacked by James Cook University for his impertinence.
James Cook has since spent hundreds of thousands of dollars of university funds pursuing him through the courts.
AgForce reef taskforce chairman Alex Stubbs says cane farmers have been persecuted by the Queensland Department of Environment and Science over the issue of water quality and the health of the Reef.
The proposed legislation, he said, had been cooked up by bureaucrats, was fundamentally flawed and would do untold damage to the sugar cane industry. Guess which political party cane farmers will be putting at the bottom of their ballot papers at the October 31 state election.
If sugarcane farmers are the bad guys, then coal miners are the devil incarnate which is why the State Government keeps stalling approval of a planned expansion of the New Acland mine near Oakey.
There is also the small matter of pandering to – you guessed it – the Greens.
Coal is bad, we are told. Coal kills. It causes climate change, bushfires and if it continues to be mined, will lead to the extinction of civilisation.
The world, we are lectured, is abandoning coal and it’s pointless for Australia to keep mining it because nobody wants the stuff.
Companies that do business with coalminers are threatened with consumer boycotts, and cowardly executives acquiesce in the face of the baying of the mob and divorce themselves from coal.
Driven by fear, not reason, they abandon their responsibilities to their shareholders in their desperate efforts to appear to be ”woke.”
The Chinese, who don’t care in the least about being woke, must be more than a little bemused by all this as they continue to build and approve coal-fired power stations at a record rate.
Germany recently commissioned a new coal-fired power plant, Japan has plans to build more than 20, India is increasing its coal-fired electricity generation by more than 20 per cent, while Indonesia, Mozambique, Malawi, Bangladesh, Pakistan, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Philippines, Vietnam and Serbia are all building coal-fired power plants.
The Age of Reason may be dead, but on the evidence it appears that coal is not.
The Reef also stubbornly refuses to fulfil the prophesies of its imminent demise, even when it is forecast by such towering intellectuals as Leonardo Di Caprio, who has never seen the Reef but pronounced it to be near death in 2016, as did then US president Barack Obama when he treated Australians to his ignorance in 2014.
This brings us to politicians. Is it true or false that a person like, let’s say Victorian Premier Andrews, would lie after swearing on the Bible to tell nothing but the truth?
Have a guess.
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For more postings from me, see
Preserving the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here
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2 October, 2020
Greenland is on track to lose ice mass faster this century than during any other century in the last 12,000 years, according to a new study
"On track to". Just another prophecy using a foolish straight-line extrapolation. The future is often NOT like the past
US researchers simulated how different levels of carbon emissions would be likely to affect the Greenland Ice Sheet – a 660,000 square mile body of ice that covers around 80 per cent of the surface of the island.
Even if the world goes on a massive 'energy diet' the Greenland Ice Sheet's rate of mass loss this century is likely to exceed anything experienced in the past 12,000 years.
But under a scenario of high greenhouse gas emissions, ice mass loss could be four times higher than anything experienced during that period.
The researchers claim that societies need to 'sharply curb' emissions of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, to decrease the contribution of the Greenland Ice Sheet to rising sea levels, which could flood cities in the next 50 years.
The edge of the Greenland Ice Sheet - the second-largest ice body in the world, after the Antarctic Ice Sheet. If human societies don't sharply curb emissions of greenhouse gases, Greenland's rate of ice loss this century is likely to outpace that of any century over the past 12,000 years +5
The edge of the Greenland Ice Sheet - the second-largest ice body in the world, after the Antarctic Ice Sheet. If human societies don't sharply curb emissions of greenhouse gases, Greenland's rate of ice loss this century is likely to outpace that of any century over the past 12,000 years
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California’s Power Struggles Continue as Wildfires Reduce Solar Power Output
Smoke from California’s multiple wildfires darkened the skies in August and September, reducing the amount of electricity generated by solar cells across the state.
Just after noon on September 10, normally a peak time for solar power generation in California, the California Independent System Operator (CISO), the agency charged with managing the state’s electric power flows, reported statewide solar generation was approximately 33 percent below the levels normally generated at that time of day.
This drop in power comes just weeks after CISO was forced to impose rolling blackouts on businesses and residents as electricity demand during a heatwave exceeded supply.
News reports at the time attributed the states repeated power shortage to its embrace of renewable energy sources and exclusion of historically reliable and inexpensive fossil-fuel-generated electricity.
“California’s bet on renewables and shunning of natural gas and nuclear power, is directly responsible for the state’s blackouts and high electricity prices,” stated an article in the California Globe.
As reported in Breitbart, Gov. Gavin Newsom admitted California’s green power mandates and climate programs were responsible for the state’s episodic power failures.
“California Gov. Gavin Newsom said [on August 17] the state had to ‘sober up’ about the fact that renewable energy sources had failed to provide enough power for the state at peak demand, and needed ‘backup’ and ‘insurance’ from other sources,” Breitbart wrote. According to Breitbart, Newsom went on to admit the critical reason the state lacked power was its overreliance on wind and solar power, saying, “We failed to predict and plan these shortages.”
The wildfires and the smoke from them are adding to California’s electric power shortfall, with hundreds of structures, including many with roof-top solar power systems, being incinerated in the fires, and the smoke from the fires limiting the amount of sunlight reaching the large solar arrays at industrial solar facilities in the Western part of the state.
“We are seeing reductions to behind-the-meter and large-scale solar throughout the state,” Anne Gonzales, senior public information officer for CISO, said in a statement.
Solar power generation is hampered during the wildfires, and those effects will linger even after the wildfires are extinguished, Michael Bolen, project manager for solar generation at the Electric Power Research Institute told E&E News.
“With the wildfires that are burning in California and the Pacific Northwest, it’s very clear that with the smoke that’s in the air, there is a reduction in the amount of light that can reach solar panels,” Bolen said. “All those ash [and] smoke particles have to settle somewhere [and] if they land on the PV modules, then they could block light from entering the modules.”
Power Shortages Highlight Fossil Fuel Virtues
The persistent shortfalls in power from renewable sources in California, now exacerbated by the impact of the wildfires on solar power generation, have forced the state to import large amounts of electric power from outside the state, often generated by fossil fuels, and to allow the continued use of fossil fuels to generate electricity in the state.
On June 11, the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) approved the use of up to 450 megawatts of diesel generators to fill the gaps when renewable power sources failed to supply sufficient energy. Unfortunately for Californians, the power shortfalls during California’s August heatwave exceeded 1,000 megawatts, more than double the allowed diesel backup.
The wildfire- and smoke-induced decline in solar power generation has forced California to generate electricity using natural gas generators. However, the diesel and natural gas generators undermine California’s increasingly stringent restrictions on carbon dioxide emissions from power generation.
‘Natural Gas will be Unavoidable’
At a recent electric power leadership conference hosted on-line by the Edison Electric Institute (EEI), Ernest Moniz, Ph.D., the secretary of the Department of Energy during Barack Obama’s presidency, said California politicians and regulators were deluding themselves if they believed the state could transition to renewable power as quickly as its laws are demanding without reliable energy sources as backup.
Describing Moniz’s discussion at EEI’s conference, E&E News wrote, “Backing solar and wind up with natural gas will be unavoidable until new technologies are developed for longer-lasting batteries, energy from hydrogen and, eventually, technologies that clear carbon dioxide from the air itself, according to Moniz.
“‘Right now there is a shortage of [generating] capacity,’ Moniz said, citing ‘tremendous challenges’ with addressing the variability of renewable power on both hour-to-hour time scales and wider shifts in seasonal demand,” wrote E&E News.
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Modern dual-flush toilets intended to save water actually waste BILLIONS of gallons every year, reveals report
A bathroom innovation designed to save water is actually wasting billions of gallons every year.
Dual-flush toilets are wasting more water than they save, reports UK conservation group the Waterwise Project, which points the finger at frequent leaks and users being confused by the flush buttons.
Between 5 and 8 percent of UK toilets are leaking, the group says - adding up to about 88 million gallons of water a day - and most are dual-flush models.
'Because so many dual-flush toilets flow continuously, 'that water loss is now exceeding the amount of water they should be saving nationally,' Andrew Tucker, water efficiency manager at Thames Water, told the BBC.
'The volume of water loss is getting bigger every day as more people refurbish and retrofit their older toilets and as we build more homes, so we're actually adding a problem.'
When used correctly the high-efficiency models can save up to 68 percent more water than a conventional low-flow toilet.
Traditional toilets use a siphon system - the handle forces a high volume of water over a lip down into a tube. When air hits the siphon tube, it stops sucking in water.
Most dual-flush toilets use a drop valve, which sits underwater at the bottom of the tank.
Instead of relying on siphoning it uses gravity to do the job, which means less water for every flush.
But that valve can easily be stuck open by mineral deposits or other debris, causing the toilet to fill continuously.
'A siphon will not leak whereas an outlet valve - if we look at the figures we've got - they could leak within a week of installation. It could be two years but they will leak,' Jason Parker, managing director at plumbing manufacturer Thomas Dudley Ltd, told the BBC.
Even though dual-flush toilets are his biggest seller, Parker says he wants drop valves banned in the UK. 'If we're serious about wasting water and we want to stop it, the only way to do that is put a siphon back in.'
Aside from the engineering issue, there's also a communication problem. Thames Water found as many of half of its customers used the wrong button - or pressed both.
The first two-button toilets were developed in Japan in the 1960s but didn't migrate to the West until the 1980s, when they were introduced in Australia by Caroma Industries.
They were seen as environmentally friendly because they gave users a choice of how much water to use: A full 1.6-gallon flush for solid waste or a half-flush for urine.
Old-school toilets typically use at least 3.5 gallons in every flush.
The dual-flush became ubiquitous in water-deprived Down Under, and is commonly seen across Europe, Asia, and the Middle East.
It's increasingly popular in new construction in the US, as well.
Though they're more expensive than other types of low-flush toilets, many consumers believe they'll save money in the long run with lower water bills.
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Australia: Leftist Qld. government inks deal with coal miner, days out from election campaign
The Palaszczuk government has finally struck a deal with Adani for royalties from its controversial $2 billion Carmichael mine, days before the government goes into caretaker mode before the October election.
Treasurer Cameron Dick confirmed the government "settled terms for a royalty agreement" this week, more than one year after it was originally intended to be finalised.
"I can assure you that Adani will pay every dollar in royalties that they have to pay to the people of Queensland and the taxpayers of Queensland, with interest," he said.
"That is absolutely locked in now and that is something we have now concluded as a government."
"Obviously you spend a lot of time negotiating royalty agreements, not just in relation to this mine but to many mining projects across Queensland, because we want to work through the details."
A deadline for the deal, which Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk pledged to have finalised a year ago, was extended to November last year. That date also passed without any confirmation.
The project has led to divisions in the Labor Party at state and federal levels for years, after Ms Palaszczuk and then-Queensland treasurer Curtis Pitt agreed to a royalty holiday for the company without cabinet approval in 2017.
Former treasurer Jackie Trad later blocked the deal with the backing of the party's Left and Centre factions. Labor's deputy federal leader, Richard Marles, conceded the party's "clumsy" attempts to "walk the tightrope" on Adani during the federal election campaign had left its traditional voter base feeling abandoned.
The exact details of the deal will remain confidential, but it was reached under the government's Resources Regional Development Framework (RRDF).
The framework, drawn up after months of tense negotiation with the Labor caucus in 2017, allows mining companies to defer payments to the state government and then repay their debt in full, including interest.
A company may be eligible to defer royalties if it shared infrastructure and if it "assisted in opening up undeveloped resource basins".
A 388-kilometre track linking the project to Adani's Abbot Point coal terminal was originally slated, but later swapped out for a cheaper option.
Adani now plans to build a 200-kilometre rail line, valued at about $1.5 billion, to link its mine to Aurizon's Central Queensland Coal Network, near Moranbah, in central Queensland. The company will be required to share the rail line with other proposed mines in the Galilee Basin.
SOURCE
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For more postings from me, see
Preserving the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here
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1 October, 2020
Two of Antarctica's most important glaciers which together cover area the size of Norway are crumbling faster than ever, satellite images reveal
Boring! Melting from the West Antarctic rim again. There is known vulcanism there. You too would melt if you had a volcano under you. Nothing to do with global warming
Two key glaciers in Antarctica — which together cover an area the size of Norway — are fracturing faster than ever before, an analysis of satellite images has revealed.
An international team of experts warned that the Pine Island and Thwaites Glaciers — on the Amundsen Sea Embayment — are on the path to disintegrating.
Pine Island and Thwaites are among the continent's most dynamic glaciers — and their melting is responsible for some 5 per cent of global sea level rise to date.
Their complete loss, however — driven by the warming of the surrounding waters —would raise global sea levels by a whopping 3.3 feet.
Predicting the evolution of the Pine Island and Thwaites glaciers is therefore vital to understanding the future of our warming planet's seas.
'To reveal what’s really going on at Pine Island and Thwaites, we dug into imaging data from a number of different satellites,' said paper author and geoscientist Stef Lhermitte of the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands.
'We found structural damage at the "shear margins" of the glaciers’ ice shelves, where the ice transitions from fast- to slow-moving — large crevasses, rifts and open fractures that indicate that the ice shelves are slowly tearing apart.'
'Currently, the ice shelves are a little like a slow car in traffic — they force anything behind them to slow down. Once they’re removed, ice sitting further inland will be able to speed up, which in turn will cause sea levels to rise even faster.'
Crevasses were not seen in images of the ice taken back in 1997 — and the damage appeared far less widespread even in observations from just 2016 — suggesting that the deterioration has been accelerating over the last two decades.
Satellite data was collected by various missions — including the European Space Agency's CryoSat and Copernicus Sentinel-1, as well as the NASA/USGS Landsat program and the Japanese ASTER instrument aboard NASA’s Terra satellite.
The team tracked the spreading fractures, determined how the topography of the ice shelf and glacier had changed and assessed the speed at which the ice had been moving — from which they could model the impact of the damaged margins.
'This fracturing appears to kick off a feedback process — it preconditions the ice shelves to disintegrate,' said paper author Thomas Nagler of Environmental Earth Observation Information Technology (ENVEO) in Innsbruck, Austria.
'As the glaciers fracture at their weak points this damage speeds up, spreads, and weakens more of the ice shelves, causing further deterioration — and making it more likely that the shelves will start crumbling apart even faster.'
'The results from this study highlight a pressing need to include such feedback processes in model projections of ice shelf retreat, ice sheet mass loss and sea level change,' said European Space Agency CryoSat Mission Scientist, Mark Drinkwater.
'We know that a significant amount of glacial ice in West Antarctica is currently being affected by climate change — in fact, a recent study found 24 per cent of this ice to be rapidly thinning and unstable.'
'These new results underline just how quickly this damage is occurring, and reveal that Pine Island and Thwaites Glaciers are more vulnerable than ever before.'
The full findings of the study were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.
SOURCE
California’s energy scorecard fails on the world stage
California, with 0.5 percent of the world’s population (40 million vs 8 billion) professes to be the leader of everything and through its dysfunctional energy policies imports more electricity than any other state – currently at 32 percent from the Northwest and Southwest – and has forced California to be the only state in contiguous America that imports most of its crude oil energy demands from foreign country suppliers to meet the energy demands of the state.
State energy policies have made California electricity and fuel prices among the highest in the nation which have been contributory to the rapid growth of “energy poverty” for the 18 million (45 percent of the 40 million Californians) that represent the Hispanic and African American populations of the state.
Access to electricity is now an afterthought in most parts of the world, so it may come as a surprise to learn that 16 percent of the world’s population — an estimated 1.2 billion people — are still living without this basic necessity. Lack of access to electricity, or “energy poverty”, is the ultimate economic hindrance as it prevents people from participating in the modern economy.
Almost half the world — over three billion people — live on less than $2.50 a day. At least 80 percent of humanity, or almost 6 billion, lives on less than $10 a day. Other nations and continents living in abject poverty without electricity realize California, and large parts of the U.S. buying into green new deals, renewable futures, and zero-carbon societies are left with the dystopic reality of mass homelessness, filth and rampant inequality that increasingly characterize the GND core values.
Today, the current world population of 7.8 billion is projected to reach 9.8 billion in 2050 and 11.2 billion in 2100.
Over the last 100 years, climate-related deaths in developed countries have decreased by 95 percent, mostly attributable to the use of fossil fuels and the products made from petroleum derivatives, that have lifted more than a billion people out of poverty in just the past twenty-five years. We can thank fossil fuels and capitalism for that and more.
Currently, underdeveloped countries, mostly from energy starved countries, are experiencing about 11,000,000 child deaths every year of which more than 70 per cent are attributable to six causes: diarrhea, malaria, neonatal infection, pneumonia, preterm delivery, or lack of oxygen at birth. About 29,000 children under the age of five – 21 each minute – die every day, mainly from preventable causes.
When you include fatalities of “other than children” the world numbers get even worse…
More than 8,000,000 world cancer deaths per year.
5,000,000 tobacco related deaths per year, and current trends show that tobacco use will cause more than 8,000,000 deaths annually by 2030.
3,800,000 deaths every year as a result of household exposure to smoke from dirty cook stoves and fuels.
2,300,000 women and men around the world succumb to work-related accidents or diseases every year per.
1,230,000 world traffic deaths per year.
270,000 pedestrians killed on roads each year.
585,900 premature deaths caused by drugs per year.
After that slice of morbidity I’d like to present a tad of relatively good news as to why the world is looking at the safety of nuclear power reactors. The worldwide total of nuclear deaths – not annually, but from inception of nuclear – including Three Mile Island (March 1979), Chernobyl (April 1986) and Fukushima (March 2011) are LESS than 200.
As a result of safety and ability to provide continuous uninterruptable zero emission electricity, today there are about 440 nuclear reactors operating in 30 countries around the world with 50 more under construction. Significant further capacity is being created by plant upgrading of existing reactors. Additionally, there are 140 nuclear powered ships that have accumulated 12,000 reactor years of “safe” marine operation.
Even China, with thousands of coal-fired power plants, already has 46 nuclear reactors in operation and 11 more under construction to provide continuous uninterruptible zero-emission electricity.
California’s goal is ZERO nuclear power plants to generate zero emission electricity.
In 2016, natural gas-fired generators accounted for 42% of the operating electricity generating capacity in the United States with 200 more set to open.
California’s goal is ZERO natural gas power plants to generate continuous uninterruptable electricity.
California’s green goals are to only rely on intermittent electricity from wind and solar and hope that the Northwestern and Southwestern states can generate enough extra power to meet the electricity demands of the 5th largest economy in the world.
With countries around the world and other American states focused on providing continuous uninterruptable electricity, and the more than 6,000 products made from petroleum derivatives for use in the daily lives of their residents, we must give California a FAILING GRADE on the world stage for its energy policies.
If we continue to deny the growing poor populations the benefits of electricity, medicines, heating and countless other developments made possible by deep earth minerals and fuels, to ever achieve the lifestyle benefits afforded the climate activists, then we need to justify our reasoning for allowing those millions of preventable deaths from occurring every year in third world countries.
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‘No more wind.’ WA state utility questions efficacy of wind farms for power generation
A road trip through the amazing landscapes of Eastern Washington is like being in a classroom with wheels and a windshield. Even if you never venture off the interstate, you’ll learn a lot just through observation about geography, geology, modern agriculture — and energy policy.
A recent — recent, as in the last two decades — addition to those landscapes is the wind farm, each with dozens of three-bladed turbines distributed across ridge tops and slowly churning away as they generate electricity.
Those turbines aren’t just the recent past of the Northwest’s electricity generating future, they’re supposed to be a big part of its future. Renewables, a category that also can include solar and more exotic forms like geothermal or tidal, will, so the theory goes, help “de-carbonize” the region’s generating portfolio of coal and natural gas, leading eventually to an “all-green” electric grid.
Achieving that goal will require a whole lot more solar and a whole lot more wind, which makes it all the more interesting that one utility is breaking with energy orthodoxy by saying, “No more wind.”
Benton Public Utility District, based in Kennewick, has about 55,000 residential, commercial and industrial connections. Most of its electricity supply comes from the Bonneville Power Administration, the federal marketing agency for dams on the Columbia and Snake rivers and for one nuclear plant. Eighty percent of Benton PUD’s total supply comes from hydro; about 5 percent is generated by wind, through power purchase contracts with the operators of two wind projects in the state.
The future and composition of the Northwest energy portfolio are in flux with such factors as demand growth, retirements of coal-fired plants and mandates for utilities to go green. Benton PUD says it’s aware of “a resurgence in proposed wind power development activity in the Pacific Northwest, including projects proposed for eastern Washington and Benton County specifically.”
But in a recently released report, “Wind Power and Clean Energy Policy Perspectives,” the utility’s commissioners say they “do not support further wind power development in the Northwest.”
More large-scale wind farms they say, will “contribute very little to keeping the regional power grid reliable and will not help Benton PUD solve our seasonal energy deficit problems” (when it needs to purchase additional power for winter and summer peaks), will drive up customer rates, won’t make a significant contribution to reducing greenhouse gases that contribute to climate change, will hurt revenues that utilities like Benton receive from the sale of surplus hydropower and will needlessly clutter up the “scenic hillsides, canyons and desert vistas in our region for little if any net environmental benefit.”
“We are continuing to sound the alarm regarding the unacceptably high risk of power grid blackouts in the Pacific Northwest being precipitated by overly aggressive clean energy policies and deepening dependence on wind power to replace retiring coal plants,” the commissioners say in a news release. “Benton PUD is calling on Governor Inslee and our state legislators to learn from California’s experience and to believe what utilities in Washington State are telling them. Rolling blackouts jeopardize the health, safety and well-being of all citizens and cannot be accepted in a region that, thanks to hydropower, is the envy of the nation when it comes to clean and low-cost electricity ...
“While development of wind farms may be politically fashionable and appeal to many in the general public as a harmonization of nature with electricity production, the science and economics indicate powering modern civilization with intermittent generation resources like wind and solar power comes at a high financial and environmental cost.”
Nothing like some blunt and bracing talk to get a fight started.
Actually, a lot of fights, and these are fights that, like a wildfire, have been smoldering here but have burst into full-fledged conflagration elsewhere, like California.
Now it will be interesting to see if other utilities around the state join in and push back at mandates to sign up for expensive generating resources that those utilities don’t need, or at least don’t need or want in that form.
For the record, Tacoma Power gets 89 percent of its electricity from hydro, half of that from its own generating facilities, the balance from BPA purchases. It gets a small amount of wind energy, also from BPA. The utility’s current integrated resource plan says that it’s not currently in the interest of Tacoma Power to invest directly in solar or wind projects.
What Benton PUD is advocating for is using natural gas as a bridge fuel to accommodate growth and “firm up” the regional grid, while transitioning to the technology of small modular nuclear reactors.
It’s a technology that several companies in the Pacific Northwest are working to refine and one backers say answers many of the questions and risks of older design, mammoth nuclear plants, such as safety and waste disposal. The Benton PUD position paper says more investment in wind energy will hinder the development of next-generation nuclear.
Old-style nuclear has a tainted financial legacy in the Northwest — there are still some people around here who remember the WPPSS debacle — and new-style nuclear is still unproven at commercial scale and application.
Renewables are still going to get a look and attract some investment dollars as utilities figure out the best mix of resources to keep the lights on and rates reasonable.
But as the Benton PUD report illustrates, just because those wind-turbine farms are self-proclaimed “green” resources doesn’t mean they are exempt from pointed questioning as to just how much the regional grid, consumers and businesses that are being asked to rely on wind really ought to.
SOURCE
Australia: A controversial gas project in northern NSW has been given the green light to go ahead
A controversial gas project in northern NSW has been given the green light by the state’s independent planning authority.
The NSW Independent Planning Commission has given “phased approval” for Santos’ $3.6 billion Narrabri gas project in the north east of the state.
The decision allowing the coal seam gas project comes more than six months after the state’s planning minister referred it to the regulatory body.
Phased approval has been granted for the project with 134 attached conditions.
Santos has said the project will create up to 1300 construction and 200 operational jobs.
“Following its detailed deliberations, the commission concludes the project is in the public interest and that any negative impacts can be effectively mitigated with strict conditions,” the commission’s statement said.
“The commission has granted a phased approval that is subject to stringent conditions, which means that the applicant must meet specific requirements before the project can progress to the next phase of development.”
During the hearing process communities and scientists raised concerns the project would put the area’s water resources at risk.
In its consultation phase, the project attracted approximately 23,000 submission, with opposing views that it would hinder the quality of the groundwater and concerns surrounding greenhouse gas emissions.
Australian Workers’ Union national secretary Daniel Walton said the Narrabri project would ensure NSW was provided with lower gas prices, which would mean cheaper electricity for households.
“Our union has never accepted the false choice between gas and renewables – you need the reliability of the former to allow the latter to flourish,” he said.
“New South Wales should be a thriving global heavy manufacturing hub, and that’s exactly what we can become if we better harness our gas wealth. This approval is an excellent step.”
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