This document is part of an archive of postings on Greenie Watch, a blog hosted by Blogspot who are in turn owned by Google. The index to the archive is available here or here. Indexes to my other blogs can be located here or here. Archives do accompany my original postings but, given the animus towards conservative writing on Google and other internet institutions, their permanence is uncertain. These alternative archives help ensure a more permanent record of what I have written
This is a backup copy of the original blog
October 31, 2022
HSBC’s greenwashing and the myth of stakeholder capitalism
Oh, the irony! Five months after infamously standing down its Head of Responsible Investment, Stuart Kirk, to appease a few outraged lobbyists and ‘capital market influencers’, HSBC has been allegedly engaging in a bit of greenwashing. As humorous as it is, HSBC’s blatant hypocrisy serves as a stark reminder of the risks that arise when companies give in to ‘stakeholder capitalism’ and try to appease everyone but their shareholders.
Around the time of the COP26 summit in October 2021, HSBC ran two advertisements in the UK. Largely in black, grey, and white (no doubt to create a sense of doom and gloom), each sought to tout the Bank’s apparent contribution to addressing Climate Change.
The first ad, with a wave crashing on a beach in the background, promoted the $1 trillion of investment and financing HSBC says it will use to assist clients ‘transition to Net Zero’. The second, featuring a picture of tree growth rings, promoted the Bank’s planting of 2 million trees. As anyone who has ever landed at Heathrow would know, the advertisements could easily be construed as a suggestion that HSBC is attempting to single-handedly save the world.
Whilst the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority didn’t put it quite that highly, it did recently hold that the advertisements represented to consumers that the Bank was making a ‘positive overall environmental contribution as a company’. What the advertisements didn’t mention was the Bank’s financing of significant greenhouse gas emitting companies and sectors. In the ASA’s view, this made them misleading.
HSBC is reported by the ASA as having stated in its defence that high greenhouse gas-emitting companies will require financing during a transition to Net Zero, that fossil fuels will be critical to energy security up to 2050, and that the Bank preferred a phase-down and industry engagement approach over divestment. HSBC also suggested that because of the publicity surrounding the COP26 summit, the average consumer would have been aware of the debate regarding the role of banks in relation to Climate Change.
These arguments clearly didn’t help. The ASA found that the advertisements were misleading, banned them, and warned HSBC that future advertisements featuring environmental claims must be appropriately qualified and not omit material information about its contribution to GHG emissions.
Based on what HSBC submitted to the ASA, none of this should have been a problem. After all, unlike many of its peers, HSBC claimed to understand that fossil fuels are essential to energy security. Yet since December 2021, the Bank has made a series of decisions that are in direct conflict with what it submitted to the ASA.
First, in December 2021, HSBC announced that would phase out the financing of coal used for electricity generation. Displaying not a skerrick of concern for energy security, the Bank said it would stop financing coal-fired power and thermal coal mining in the EU and OECD countries by 2030, and in all other countries by 2040. A full 10-20 years earlier than the Bank expressly told the ASA fossil fuel companies would require financing!
In March 2022, the Bank addressed its approach to other energy companies. Whilst it said it would engage with those companies, HSBC also said that if they do not produce climate transition plans that are compatible with its own Net Zero targets, it will consider whether to continue to provide financing. In other words, it’s the Bank’s way or the highway. So much for debate. HSBC’s Asset Management division made a similar announcement in September 2022, stating that it would immediately stop investing in IPOs or primary fixed debt issuance of any company involved in thermal coal expansion and that it would divest from companies that do not have transition plans that align with its timelines.
By May this year, HSBC was not just refusing to acknowledge the existence of a debate as to the role of banks in relation to climate, it was showing utter contempt for the idea. Following a now well-documented speech, Kirk was stood down. Yes, the speech was a bit sensationalist and probably deliberative provocative, but its substantive content merely raised questions about the time, money, and resources spent by investors addressing climate risks and made the argument for investing in adaptation measures. Never mind the Bank’s position that average consumers would understand that is a debate worth having, the outrage those questions apparently caused some on Twitter was enough for the Bank to effectively show Kirk the door.
So, contrary to what it told the ASA is necessary for energy security, HSBC has committed to stop financing and owning fossil fuel companies well before 2050, foreshadowed divestment, and indicated that it considers there to be no debate about the role of banks in relation to climate change.
Such contradictions are not surprising. Like many companies around the world, HSBC seems confused about the interests it is supposed to promote and protect. This demonstrates one of the big problems with stakeholder capitalism; by requiring companies to act in the interests of multiple groups with disparate and often conflicting interests, stakeholder capitalism can result in a complete lack of corporate focus, inherent contradictions, misplaced societal demands, and ultimately, a situation in which there are no winners.
In trying to boost its green credentials and appeal to certain stakeholders, HSBC was accused of misleading the public. HSBC has tried to step into the shoes of elected public policymakers without the constraint of being answerable to society-at-large and has committed to taking actions that have been shown to be more likely to exacerbate negative environmental impacts than reduce them. One group to whom the Bank is truly answerable, shareholders, have seemingly been forgotten. Perhaps the biggest irony in this story is that if it prioritised shareholder interests, HSBC would probably deliver more environmental benefits.
Not only is shareholder primacy what the law requires, but it is also necessary to ensure that accountability for public policy remains squarely with elected officials, and probably what will bring about the most enduring benefits for the environment and other stakeholders. The concept serves more than just shareholders and should be fought for with vigor. We will know we are back on track when you’re greeted at Heathrow by an HSBC ad featuring a coal mine.
https://spectator.com.au/2022/10/hsbcs-greenwashing-and-the-myth-of-stakeholder-capitalism
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What's wrong with being an apocalypse denier?
Brendan O'Neill
This week, on BBC radio, I made a confession: I am a denier. Not a climate-change denier – an apocalypse denier. I thought it was a clever point – to distinguish between my acceptance that climate change is happening and my scepticism that it will imminently bring about the fiery destruction of Earth. Apparently not. You should have heard the intakes of breath. Apparently even apocalypse denialism is unacceptable in polite society now.
It was on Nicky Campbell’s show on 5 Live. I was up against a spokesperson for Just Stop Oil and the question was whether that movement’s art-splattering and road-blocking antics are justifiable. I made my point – that Just Stop Oil strikes me as an out-of-touch movement that is mad to agitate for less energy production during an energy crisis. Don’t you know that many people, including vulnerable elderly people, are worried about how they’re going to keep the heat on this winter, I asked?
But it was when we got into the question of why Just Stop Oil is doing what it does – because it thinks the end of the world is nigh – that things really kicked off. ‘The world is burning’, said the Just Stop Oil person. Nicky Campbell put the point to me forcefully: ‘Millions of people will die worldwide…’ I started to respond – ‘This hysterical representation of climate change…’ – but I was cut off by gasps and shouts. Campbell made a noise that I can only transcribe as ‘Ohhhhhhewwwww’. Clearly I’d committed blasphemy. I had dared to doubt the imminence of End Times.
Over the huffing I carried on with my point: ‘Everyone accepts that climate change is happening, everyone accepts that mankind has an impact on his environment, and that some solutions will be required to alleviate that impact.’ But, I continued, ‘The presentation of that as “the world is burning”, and there’s an apocalypse, and, in the words of Extinction Rebellion, that billions of people will die – that is untrue.’
It wasn’t enough. Campbell asked if I had read the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports (I have: I couldn’t find anything about billions of people dying). The Just Stop Oil spokesperson branded me ‘dangerous’ and said ‘deniers’ like me should not be ‘taking up precious airtime’. You are a ‘total denier’, she said. ‘I’m an apocalypse denier’, I replied. After that I was pretty much frozen out of the discussion. My sin was too grave. They carried on with their Armageddon chat.
It is no longer enough to accept that the industrial era has impacted on the environment. You must also repeat the millenarian mantra about the coming heat-death of humankind. Acceptance of science will no longer ward off accusations of denialism. You must also accept a hyper-moralised, hyper-politicised interpretation of that science as proof that mankind is a singularly destructive force, that modernity was a mistake, and that the world will end if we don’t stop oil, stop gas, stop nuclear and stop pretty much everything. Bow down to that dire ideology or you’re in trouble.
But it’s untrue. And it’s unscientific. As the American writer Michael Shellenberger has said, the Extinction Rebellion claim that ‘life on Earth is dying’ and ‘Billions (of people) will die’ is not substantiated by anything resembling science. ‘No credible scientific body has ever said climate change threatens the collapse of civilisation, much less the extinction of the human species’, Shellenberger points out. The IPCC predicts a sea level rise of two feet by 2100. That doesn’t sound apocalyptic, especially as we have 80 years to prepare for it. ‘There is robust evidence of disasters displacing people worldwide’, says the IPCC, ‘but limited evidence that climate change or sea-level rise is the direct cause’.
As for billions dying, the truth is that far fewer people die in natural calamities today than in the past. ‘In 1931, 3.7m people died from natural disasters. In 2018, just 11,000 did’, says Shellenberger. And that decline occurred in a period in which the human population quadrupled and more and more of the world was industrialised. The unscientific cry that ‘the world is burning’ – the world clearly is not burning – distracts attention from the provable and wonderful fact that billions of people’s living conditions, life expectancy and safety from calamitous weather have improved in recent decades.
So yes, climate change is happening. And it poses a practical challenge for humankind. But it’s not an apocalypse. I remain an apocalypse denier. Someone in that radio discussion was making scientifically questionable claims – it wasn’t me.
The most striking thing was Nicky Campbell appearing to gloat at the fact that the BBC no longer has to be balanced on climate change. ‘We don’t have to have balance on this topic on the BBC’, he said. ‘It’s like evolution. The science is absolutely clear. So the days of me not being able to say “You’re talking baloney” are over.’
That is extraordinary, is it not? Of course if the BBC wants to ban what it considers to be unscientific views on climate change, that’s its prerogative, though I think even that is a mistake, given that there must surely be contrasting scientific takes even on this issue. But if it starts to sideline people who call into question the politics of all this, who challenge the fearmongering of certain eco-hysterics, then it will be engaging in political censorship, pure and simple. So, BBC, you censor climate-change denialism, we know that. But what about apocalypse denialism? Is that still allowed? Is it still permissible to express faith in humankind and to defend modern society on your network?
https://spectator.com.au/2022/10/whats-wrong-with-being-an-apocalypse-denier/
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Fracking fury: Industry body hammers Sunak after shale gas U-turn
The UK’s leading onshore energy body has expressed its fury with Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s apparent decision to re-impose the ban on fracking – just weeks after it was lifted.
Charles McAllister, director of policy for UK Onshore Oil and Gas (UKOOG), warned banning fracking would risk the UK being reliant on imported supplies for a decades – undermining supply security and ramping up emissions.
He told City A.M.: “If this is true then we are stunned that such an illogical U-turn would be taken by the Government in the middle of an energy crisis, at the expense of UK households and businesses.
“If reports are accurate, then a decision has been made to lock the UK into reliance on imported gas for decades. The geopolitical, environmental and economic consequences of such a decision will last far beyond the two years remaining of this parliament.”
UKOOG highlighted that Sunak had previously expressed his support for fracking provided local communities supported it during the previous leadership campaign this summer.
Mc Allister said: “The scientific consensus is, as the Prime Minister noted a few months ago in his support of fracking, that the seismic activity from shale gas development is not out of the ordinary compared to other industries in the UK, such as quarrying, geothermal and construction.”
Downing Street confirmed yesterday Sunak will drop former Prime Minister Liz Truss’ plans to end the England ban on fracking.
He told MPs in the House of Commons that he “already said I stand by the manifesto on” fracking, which committed to maintaining a moratorium on the practice unless scientific evidence shows it’s safe.
Truss’ decision to end the shale gas extraction ban triggered a major backlash among Tory MPs, with a Labour vote on the issue last week leading to chaos in the House of Commons.
The vote, which saw confusion about the government’s instructions to backbenchers and alleged physical bullying by senior ministers, directly led to Truss’ downfall the next day.
Fracking: There and back again
Fracking involves injecting water, sand and chemicals at high pressure into boreholes deep underground to fracture rock and release shale gas.
The latest setback for the sector is only the latest chapter in a dramatic 12 months, which has seen fracking move from the verge of closure to reopening, only to be re-banned yesterday.
The Government imposed a moratorium on the practice amid concerns over tremors and safety.
Its manifesto in December 2019 said the party would “not support fracking unless the science shows categorically it can be done safely”.
Earlier this year, the North Sea Transition Authority (NSTA) ordered Cuadrilla to plug the UK’s two remaining shale wells.
However, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, NSTA gave fracking a reprieve – pausing its plugging requirement – before the Government decided to commission the British Geological Society (BGS) to conduct a scientific survey on the practice to assess whether the process could be made safer.
The survey suggested that while concerns over tremors remained, there was a case for exploration and drilling to determine the scale of opportunity and the viability of fracking.
BGS argued that more data collection is needed in the UK to ascertain fracking’s safety and potential.
UKOOG has has previously cited data from the BGS forecasting there could be as much as 37.6tn cubic metres of shale gas under the ground.
If ten per cent was recoverable, UKOOG argues this would be enough to help meet the country’s energy needs for the next five decades.
However, fracking remains unpopular compared to other energy activities, such as onshore wind and solar power, with YouGov polling from May suggesting the people oppose the revival of fracking by a 46-29 margin.
The Government’s most recent polling – conducted last autumn – found just 17 per cent of the public supported fracking, compared with 87 per cent who backed renewables.
UKOOG had pledged to work with the Government and local communities over potential shale gas extraction sites.
This included potential compensation and community funding.
https://www.cityam.com/fracking-fury-industry-body-hammers-sunak-after-shale-gas-u-turn/
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Australia: Cheap renewables, rising power bills?
James Macpherson
I cannot work out which is more incredible – the claims this government makes, or the fact that this government expects Australians to believe their claims.
Labor continually promises to reduce cost of living while increasing the cost of living.
Their strategy to lower prices is to increase prices.
If I could afford to laugh, I would.
Renewable energy is the cheapest form of energy, the Prime Minister chants zombie-like, as prices rise in direct proportion to his use of renewable energy.
I swear, every time he utters the words ‘renewable energy’, my power bill goes up.
Australians are caught in a kind of twilight zone where we are continually told to expect cheaper power while continually told to expect more expensive power.
Oh, but don’t worry, you’ll still get that promised $275 cut to your power bill. It’s just that your power bill will have gone up by a couple of thousand dollars before Labor cut it by a couple of hundred dollars.
The Prime Minister will then claim, with a straight face, that he has saved us money. And my teenage son worries that he is the one struggling with math!
This is a government that believes it can keep global temperatures in check when it can’t even keep a $275 promise to struggling families in the suburbs.
Treasurer Jim Chalmers explained today that the delay in providing the promised cut was due to a flaw in the modelling. ‘That model was done in 2021, and it referred to an outcome in 2025,’ he said.
But don’t worry, the government’s modelling about how taxing cow farts will stop the warming of the planet and the rising of the oceans is totally legit!
This Labor government insists that renewable energy is the cheapest form of energy, or at least it will be, just as soon as they spend another $10 billion of your money here, and another $10 billion there.
How much will it cost taxpayers to end up with cheap power? The answer is always the same. Just a little bit more.
If you believe the government’s obsession with intermittent energy will deliver cheap power, you have the one prerequisite necessary to do energy minister Chris Bowen’s job – wishful thinking.
Expect him to provide a unicorn with your next power bill.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/10/cheap-renewables-rising-power-bills/
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30 October, 2022
Greenland's ice is melting -- so what?
The NYT has out a long, beautifully illustrated artice by Bret Stephens which shows, fairly conclusively, that the Greenland ice sheet is retreating at the monent. It is written to be very persuasive. It would be very convincing to someone who had no prior knowledge of the subject. Problems with attributing the melting to global warming are mentioned and it even states deep into the aricle: "The point is, you can no longer predict the future by the recent past.” So does recent melting prove anything?
30 October, 2022
Greenland's ice is melting -- so what?
The NYT has out a long, beautifully illustrated artice by Bret Stephens which shows, fairly conclusively, that the Greenland ice sheet is retreating at the monent. It is written to be very persuasive. It would be very convincing to someone who had no prior knowledge of the subject. Problems with attributing the melting to global warming are mentioned and it even states deep into the aricle: "The point is, you can no longer predict the future by the recent past.” So does recent melting prove anything?
Stephens manages to glide over that problem in some way but there is no way that he reasonably can. Beautiful writing does not make up for two pesky facts:
1). You need a long time series to detect a consistent trend and he is talking about a very short time period. There can be all sorts of temporary fluctuations in a natural series of changes and what he sees could well be such a temporary change -- a small and not typical fraction of all the events at issue. So his article proves nothing.
2). A second thing that Stephens admits but glides over is that the Arctic is warming much faster than the globe as a whole: "at nearly four times the global average". So the warming is NOT global. Any global warming cannot explain Arctic warming. So what does? He completely ignores the role of subsurface vulcanism in Greenland. There is a lot of it there so any melting could be due to it. You would melt too with a volcano under your bottom.
The only mystery is that Stephens and the NYT think they can distract us from the plain facts by talented writing
See
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/10/28/opinion/climate-change-bret-stephens.html
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New Report Reveals Biden Administration Knows Its Policies Increase Energy Costs for Americans
Americans know all too well that soaring energy prices have raised costs throughout the economy. What isn’t as obvious is that the Biden administration knows it is blocking solutions that could decrease those costs.
Such an embarrassing admission likely won’t come in President Joe Biden’s next press conference. But it can be found buried in a 500-page report by the president’s Department of the Interior, sufficiently out of sight of Americans demanding answers from leaders.
The Interior Department recently closed the comment period for its 2023-2028 National Outer Continental Shelf Oil and Gas Leasing Proposed Program. The lease plan should have been done and agreed upon before June, when the previous five-year plan expired. Yet here we are, nearly five months later, with only a draft plan to study.
The administration is required, by statute, to produce the plan, which stipulates the location and the maximum number of offshore lease sales the federal government will hold. Roughly 15% of U.S. oil production comes from offshore, and 2% of U.S. natural gas production.
Critical as the plan is, there is no surprise that the administration has slow-walked it. The Interior Department’s 2021 Report on the Federal Oil and Gas Leasing Program made clear that it has no interest in seeing oil and natural gas produced offshore (or on it, for that matter). That report called for fewer leases, higher royalty rates, and a more burdensome bidding process to screen buyers.
It took a federal court and legislation from Congress to force the Interior Department to hold just one offshore oil and gas lease sale in the last two years. Until Biden, there had been at least one offshore lease sale every year since 1959, back in the early days of offshore energy production.
Despite soaring energy costs, the administration refuses to rethink its agenda. This year’s Leasing Proposed Program puts forward a notion never before seriously contemplated by any president: an offshore oil and gas lease plan with zero lease sales.
Buried in the Interior Department’s 500-page analysis of the proposed plan is a clear admission that the administration knows this will prolong the energy crisis. The department acknowledges that allowing offshore lease sales would reduce the cost of oil and natural gas for Americans, writing: “New OCS [Outer Continental Shelf] oil and natural gas production … lowers the price consumers pay and producers receive.”
Using the Interior Department’s midrange scenario, oil prices would be expected to decrease by 73 cents per barrel and natural gas by 6 cents per thousand cubic feet. Cents add up quickly, especially when considering that oil and natural gas meet over 90% of Americans’ transportation fuel needs and 68% of Americans’ total energy needs for heat, power, and transportation.
The report further acknowledges that blocking Americans’ access to offshore oil and gas won’t usher in an “energy transition” to green energy technologies. Instead, over half of the shortfall in production would be filled by oil and gas imports. The rest would be met by increased onshore oil and gas production, alternatives like coal, and consumer belt-tightening.
The Biden administration justifies its proposal for zero leases over the next five years by citing climate change. (Never mind that “climate change” and greenhouse gas emissions mitigation are neither the goals nor the metrics that the Interior Department is required to consider in developing and implementing an offshore lease plan.)
But even this argument falls apart by the administration’s own analysis. In a zero-lease sale option, the Interior Department estimates that forgone energy would be met with energy replacements that would increase both greenhouse gas emissions and emissions of traditional air pollutants.
The Biden administration’s offshore lease plan rests solely on an arbitrary animus against oil and gas for being oil and gas. The administration all but admits as much, defending a plan with zero lease sales based on what it pridefully believes the nation’s energy needs should be, rather than what they are.
The administration’s Proposed Program blatantly abuses the purposes and definitions in the law governing offshore oil and gas lease sales. It has refused to follow the processes laid out by Congress. The question is: Will Congress do anything about it, or will it be content to let the energy pinch worsen?
https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/10/28/biden-administration-knows-its-policies-increase-energy-costs-for-americans
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European countries increase coal-fired power as climate talks loom
Large swathes of Europe have pivoted back to coal as they wean themselves off Russian gas, pushing the price of the fossil fuel to all-time highs.
The sudden shift comes as world leaders prepare for the COP27 climate conference in Egypt, which will discuss how to limit global greenhouse gases at a time when both those emissions and the use of heavily-polluting coal are increasing.
Bold predictions were made at last year’s COP26 event in Glasgow that the “end of coal was in sight”, but this has proven to be premature, with Germany, Austria, Poland, Italy, the Netherlands and Greece turning back to coal-fired power in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Greenhouse gas emissions have also hit record levels.
In its World Energy Outlook this week, the International Energy Agency revealed demand for coal had soared 10 per cent in some countries, and production had “struggled to keep pace“ with the sudden surge.
But the pivot back to coal would likely be temporary, the IEA said, with demand in Europe set to slump 50 per cent by 2030 as more renewables enter national grids.
Climate Council researcher Dr Simon Bradshaw said Russia’s invasion of Ukraine would “likely accelerate the further transition to renewables” in the longer term.
“Europe is really trying to free itself from Russian gas as fast as possible, and it’s actually likely to exceed its renewables target and put forward a stronger one,” he said. “But there’s no doubt it’s been a year of great uncertainty and great disruption.”
Global climate politics expert Dr Jonathan Symons from Macquarie University said the “short term return to coal will be balanced by long-term decarbonising measures,” and the moment had parallels with the oil shocks of the 1970s, which led to tougher energy efficiency measures and the first research and development into renewables.
The focus of this year’s event would likely be less on the pledges to cut emissions that dominated the Glasgow talks, Dr Symons said, and more on adaptation measures and international assistance for nations experiencing the worst extreme weather.
https://www.couriermail.com.au/technology/environment/european-countries-increase-coalfired-power-as-climate-talks-loom/news-story/940985cd95612118a20520cd726c19db
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The inconvenient truth about electric cars
Prices are going UP, not down -- largely because battery prices are going up too
Rising battery costs are pushing up the price of electric vehicles, dampening hopes that they could close the gap to petrol vehicles by the turn of the decade.
Experts had tipped that EVs would cost the same as their petrol equivalents by 2030 as battery production scales up and economies of scale kick in.
But rising raw material prices are driving up the cost of batteries, and most EV makers have hiked up prices in the past year.
This week, Hyundai’s luxury offshoot Genesis, launched its GV70 large electric SUV at a higher price than originally predicted. In May, the brand said the EV would be priced between $105,000 and $115,000 plus on-road costs, but that has blown out to $127,800, or about $138,500 drive-away.
The brand is not alone in hiking prices.
Tesla increased the price of its Model Y SUV by $3000 to $72,300 (before on-road costs) within days of launching it in June, while rivals the Hyundai Ioniq 5 and Kia EV6 have also had multiple price rises in the past few months.
The Kia EV6, which launched at the beginning of this year, has risen from $67,990 (before on-road costs) to $72,590 in October for the cheapest model.
Hyundai’s Ioniq 5 Techniq AWD variant cost $75,900 (before on-road costs) early this year before jumping $1600 in August and increasing a further $2000 in October. The October price rise coincided with an increase in the size of battery, driving range and motor power.
An industry executive said further price rises were likely because the increase in raw materials costs hadn’t yet flowed through.
Despite the price rises, Aussies are lining up to get their hands on the machines and waiting times extend well into next year.
Australia isn’t the only market afflicted with high EV prices. A recent report by automotive research experts, JATO, showed EV prices had risen sharply in Europe and the US in recent years.
The average price of an EV in the first half of this year was €55,821 in Europe ($A87,412) and €63,864 ($A100,000) in the US – up from €48,942 ($A76,403) and €53,038 ($82,797) in 2015.
The average retail price for an electric car in Europe is 27 per cent more than a petrol vehicle, while in the US it is 43 per cent more.
Car makers say the cost of raw materials is the cause.
Ford has raised the price of its F-Series electric pick-up twice since August. The cheapest model is now $US12,000 ($18,810) more expensive, while the Mustang EV costs up to $US8000 ($12,510) more. Ford blamed “ongoing supply-chain constraints, rising material costs and other market factors” for the price hikes.
The world’s largest electric vehicle battery maker, China’s Contemporary Amperex Technology Co., reported a big surge in the price of its batteries.
A report in financial outlet Barron’s put the price per kWh of batteries at about $160, up from $150 earlier this year and $120 in 2021.
One of the major causes is the price of lithium, which is up 200 per cent in the past 12 months. The cost of the basket of materials that go into a battery is up about 62 per cent for the year.
Renault Group chief executive Luca de Meo told reporters at the Paris motor show last week that he didn’t believe electric and petrol cars would achieve price parity anytime soon.
He told Automotive News the industry had expected the price of batteries to drop to $100 a kWh three years ago.
He said raw materials made up 80 per cent of the battery cost, making it hard for carmakers to reduce costs.
He told Automotive News the company could come up with better battery chemistry and better power electronics, “but these gains would be erased when the price of cobalt doubles in just six months.”
https://www.couriermail.com.au/motoring/motoring-news/the-inconvenient-truth-about-electric-cars/news-story/8bfdf46a3c564d44f19a3e0e3f09d54f
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28 October, 2022
Sweden scraps its climate change department
It was a bit of a shock, but the citizens of Sweden have finally tired of the left’s green and pro-crime agenda and for the first time in decades tossed them out of office.
The first thing that the newly elected Prime Minister, Ulf Kristersson, did was scrap the country’s climate change department that promoted the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) agenda of net-zero carbon emissions by 2030.
Armstrong Economics provides more details:
“New Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson is not heeding to the Green agenda. He promptly eliminated the entire Ministry of Climate and Environment, marking the first time in 35 years that Sweden does not have a specific climate ministry. People are crying that the world will crumble without funding bureaucrats who pretend they have the ability to alter the weather cycle with enough funding.“
The Swedish government will also be restarting two nuclear reactors that were also shut down by the previous government’s green agenda and is also budgeting additional money for new nuclear power plants.
It is the WEF’s net-carbon emission schedule, Agenda 2030, which has resulted in several western countries facing severe energy shortages this winter after embracing the WEF’s radical climate change agenda.
This included not only cutting back on the use and development of carbon-based power plants but nuclear as well and in turn embracing unreliable and expensive green energy.
https://opentheword.org/2022/10/25/sweden-scraps-its-climate-change-department/
***************************************************Europe's energy crisis heaps pain on heavy industry
Makers of metals, chemicals and gases said on Tuesday that the outlook for the final months of the year had worsened as concerns intensify that a surge in energy and raw material costs will shrink Europe's heavy industry.
French industrial gases company Air Liquide (AIRP.PA) flagged slowing demand from some customers in Europe while Swedish steel maker SSAB said it will cut capacity in the fourth quarter as demand in Europe slows. It already cut construction-related volumes in the quarter to end-September.
German chemicals maker Covestro (1COV.DE) lowered its 2022 earnings guidance for the third time this year, blaming gas and raw material prices.
The company, whose main products include foam chemicals used in mattresses, car seats and insulation for buildings, said it was only able to offset part of the rise in costs through higher prices.
Gas prices in Europe have eased in response to an unusually warm October and projections of a mild winter.
Latest Updates
OPEC expected to stick to view of long-term oil demand rise
Oil falls as China widens COVID curbs; still set for weekly gain
China coal trade disrupted by COVID outbreaks as winter looms
Norway's Equinor profit hits record on gas price gains
European Union hopeful of striking energy deal with Argentina soon
But the continent is paying five time more for its gas than the United States, stirring concerns the region will struggle to compete on the global market in the long term.
"A mild winter alone can’t save the day in Europe. Growth is slowing, the European Central Bank (ECB) is tightening, while the single currency remains weak," Ipek Ozkardeskaya, senior analyst at Swissquote Bank, said.
BASF (BASFn.DE), the world's largest chemicals company, has reduced production of ammonia, a nitrogen fertiliser and input for engineering plastics and diesel exhaust fluid. The group, which relies heavily on natural gas, is buying from outside Europe, where prices are lower.
Data has also highlighted the impact. Euro zone manufacturing activity this month hit its weakest level since May 2020.
The downbeat manufacturing outlook is in contrast to food and consumer products companies, including Nestle (NESN.S) and Procter & Gamble (PG.N), which have passed on higher prices for goods ranging from Nescafe coffee to Gillette razors.
RACE TO CUT COSTS
Companies across Europe are racing to reduce their energy use ahead of the winter when demand increases as households turn up the heat.
For example, Covestro said on Tuesday it is using digital sensors to monitor its steam traps, which means it is using steam as efficiently as possible in production.
Chemical companies are among the hardest hit by the energy crisis because they use gas as a raw material for production and as an energy source.
Swedish engineering group Alfa Laval (ALFA.ST) on Tuesday launched a cost-cutting drive that could affect around a tenth of its workforce after a weak tanker market and soaring costs hit its marine business.
Mercedes-Benz (MBGn.DE) has laid out measures to reduce gas consumption by up to 50% but has yet to manage a cut of more than 10%, while Volkswagen has explored short-term measures such as stocking parts on ships and trains and, in the medium term, switching to suppliers abroad.
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Renewable energy is a failed path, scientist tells Utah legislators
A Utah legislative committee this week gave 45 minutes to a scientist who argued that policy makers across the globe are committing a grave mistake by turning to renewable energy.
William Hayden Smith, a professor of earth and planetary sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, wrote a research paper with colleagues in Switzerland and South Africa that claims to calculate a full cost of producing electricity from various sources. The paper was published this year in the Journal of Sustainable Development, a Canadian scientific journal.
“Now everyone will say that wind turbines and photovoltaics are cheaper than fossil fuels,” he told legislators. “That’s a stretch.”
He said the standard for comparing costs of electricity sources is called “Levelized Cost of Electricity,” which is calculated by adding up the total costs of a source over its lifetime and dividing it by the total energy expected from that source over the lifetime.
But Smith and his co-authors created an alternative metric they are calling the “full cost of electricity,” which he says factors in renewable energy costs not considered in LCOE, including the cost of storing power when renewables are not producing and the cost of replacing solar panels and windmills when they wear out.
He pointed to recent problems in Germany, where energy prices have shot up after Russia invaded Ukraine. He said Germany’s rush to renewables and decision to shut down nuclear plants is costing them now.
Beyond cost, wind and solar simply can’t meet the capacity, he said. “Every day the grid will collapse because you can’t meet the peak power.”
He also dismissed the idea that there is enough land available for the wind and solar farms to produce what fossil fuels do now. Thousands of square miles of wind and solar farms would be required. He added that windmills strike millions of insects, and no one is considering the biological effects.
Smith is a scientific and technical adviser to the CO2 Coalition, a nonprofit organization established “for the purpose of educating thought leaders, policy makers and the public about the important contribution made by carbon dioxide to our lives and the economy.” He is not compensated for his work, according to the coalition’s website.
Smith presented to the Public Utilities, Energy and Technology Interim Committee at the invitation of Rep. Ken Ivory, but Ivory had a conflict and could not attend. No other viewpoints were presented.
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Environmental extremists: iconoclasts without a cause
I wrote in June of a climate activist’s attempt to attack the Mona Lisa, smearing cake over its protective glass façade after failing to break it. In the short few intervening months there has been an epidemic of such recalcitrant acts of barbarity accompanied by unlettered lectures of vague Last Judgment prophesies.
In July, two students damaged Constable’s The Hay Wain by gluing large pieces of paper over the painting. Within days of each other in October, ‘protesters’ threw tomato soup at Van Gogh’s Sunflowers in London and mashed potato at Monet’s Les Meules in Potsdam. Earlier in the month, black-clad Extinction Rebellion acolytes glued themselves to Picasso’s Massacre in Korea in Melbourne.
It is lucky that none of the artworks were seriously damaged, but at this rate, soon an irreplaceable treasure will be.
The fanaticism fuelling the climate extremists are akin to the worst of religious zealotry, reminding one of the bonfire of the vanities (when supporters of Savonarola burned countless artworks and books that they saw as sinful, including paintings by the likes of Botticelli).
It is also reminiscent of the ideological radicalism of the Nazis, who stole an estimated one-fifth of all European art. Furthermore, ‘degenerate’ art, including many Cezannes, Picassos, Matisses, Gauguins, Braques, and Van Goghs, were simply destroyed. In the ignoble final throes of the Third Reich, many famous works were burned out of spite. One such lost work is Raphael’s Portrait of a Young Man, often seen as the most important piece of art lost since the second world war.
In the hellfire of an existentialist war, the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives Program of the Allied Armies came into being, with the express purpose to preserve cultural treasures. Compared to men and women who would risk their lives in war zones to protect art, those who live affluent lives in the first-world today – who self-righteously attempt to destroy art – seem rather paltry and contemptible.
While smaller in scale and (thankfully) lacking in competence, the new wave of eco-extremists share the same barbaric instincts to the puritans of yore, where anything is allowed given the conceit they have bestowed upon themselves, and the arrogance never to pause and consider that they might be wrong.
It is a new and fanatical religion with its own end-of-days prophesy (climate apocalypse), its original sin (petroleum), its priesthood (Greenpeace, Extinction Rebellion, Greta Thunberg etc.), and its sale of indulgences where celebrities and the elites like saint Leonardo DiCaprio, Al Gore, and all the VIP COP26 attendees are able to endlessly private-jet across the world to talk down to the proles about needing to cut back on indulgences such as heating their homes and driving to work.
Even minor acolytes, such as one of the students who damaged the Constable masterpiece, has admitted that she ‘impulse flew to the Canaries to escape chilly British weather’. Her Instagram shows her holidaying in places like Bali, Australia, and Greece. But redemption is possible, so she would seem to think, by taking out her guilt on old paintings in an act of petulant depravity.
Eco-activists obviously forget, in their delusion of an antediluvian world of prelapsarian purity, that their lives are ensconced by the comforts of fossil fuels and the thousands of other products derived from petroleum. They are ignorant of the consequences of their ideology, which is coming into sharp relieve as the Russians restrict gas to a Europe ready to shiver through a hard winter.
Preserving the environment is a worthy venture. It is also a complex and multifaceted issue, the science of which is not remotely ‘settled’. While every voice should have a place at the table, those who simply shout are not conversing, while those who engage in petulant destruction should simply be punished.
I warmly welcome Douglas Murray’s proposed cash prize for anyone who stops an attack on a painting. Up with this, we should not put.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/10/environmental-extremists-iconoclasts-without-a-cause/
***************************************27 October, 2022
Green New World: As heating oil runs low and prices soar in N.Y. and the northeast, news agencies tell Americans to grab a blanket
By Robert Romano
Home heating prices are soaring this coming winter, especially in New York and the northeast, where heating oil shortages are looming before the winter has even begun.
On Oct. 13, there was a 26-day supply of home heating oil left for the northeast U.S.
By Oct. 24, it was down to a 25-day supply, the lowest since 1993, as calls to release the Northeast Home Heating Oil Reserve have already begun, and it’s not even November yet.
According to Energy.gov, if released the Northeast Home Heating Oil Reserve could boost supplies for about a week or two: “The reserve would give Northeast consumers supplemental supplies for approximately 10 days, the time required for ships to carry additional heating oil from the Gulf of Mexico to New York Harbor.”
Amid the shortages — not merely confined to oil — the U.S. Energy Information Administration projects that the cost of heating American households will increase 27 percent to $2,354 this winter for heating oil, 10 percent by electricity to $1,359, 5 percent for propane to $1,668, and 28 percent for natural gas to $931.
This is what happens when every country in the world deliberately shuts down production, as it did in 2020, not just for petroleum but all commodities and other products during the Covid economic lockdowns. Production still has not caught up to pre-Covid levels, even as demand has continued to increase.
The short-sightedness, exacerbated by green policies designed to disincentivize oil and coal production and consumption, has meant the supply crunch was not met with a production surge as inflation instead consumed household spending, and with the crisis further exacerbated by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, another recession is already upon the global economy. In that sense, it is also wartime rationing.
Now, news agencies have even begun promoting the rationing, for example, Fox 61 in Connecticut interviews one elderly homeowner who is already stockpiling blankets for her home.
The Columbus Dispatch’s Mark Williams tells Ohioans, “Grab a blanket: Heating costs to soar this winter.”
Anecdotally, I listened to a similar report on local WMAL in northern Virginia last week, urging listeners to get blankets because of surging home heating costs this winter.
In Europe, where home heating prices are even higher, electric blanket sales (and prices) are soaring in the UK and Germany, a craze that could easily stretch across the Atlantic.
Dressed up as noble conservation, the language is plain and clear: We don’t have enough energy to stay warm. This is what a reduced carbon economy looks like in the winter, and over the longer term, in New York, the northeast and the rest of the U.S., blankets might be little comfort in what looks like it will be a brutal transition into the Green New World.
https://dailytorch.com/2022/10/green-new-world-as-heating-oil-runs-low-and-prices-soar-in-n-y-and-the-northeast-news-agencies-tell-americans-to-grab-a-blanket/
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EV Owners Pay Up: It Costs $6,100 Just to Replace GMC Hummer EV Taillights
Would you pay over $7,000 to replace a set of taillights?
According to Car and Driver, that could be the cost — depending on local taxes and the prevailing labor rates where you live — to replace the taillights on the new GMC Hummer EV SUT.
That expense, of course, would come only after you’d shelled out $110,000 to buy the thing in the first place — or, perhaps more likely, while you were repaying the bank for shelling out that amount on your behalf.
Of course, if you can afford that sticker price, maybe $3,045.48 per taillight plus labor and taxes wouldn’t mean much to you. Maybe you replace your car every time the ashtrays get full. (I know; it’s an old joke. I can’t remember the last time I saw a new car with an ashtray.)
The issue came up when an owner posted in a Hummer EV Facebook group about needing a “new passenger side rear light” for his vehicle, according to The Drive. (If I paid $110,000 for an automobile, I’d probably need to join a support group, too.)
That driver was quoted $4,040 for the part alone, plus labor.
Even at the MSRP, The Drive noted that replacing both taillights would run an owner more than 5 percent of the total purchase price of the sport-utility truck. That’s … something else.
The Drive was unable to confirm the reason for that pricing, but the website’s speculation seemed reasonable.
“The taillights in the Hummer EV have small microcontrollers installed within them,” they wrote. “These chips control unique lighting functions in their respective lights, like the animations in the headlamps.”
OK, cool, I guess. But it makes me wonder if I could get a cheaper, animation-less version that just, you know, tells drivers behind me when I’m braking and turning and stuff. Cars did that pretty well 60 years ago before microcontrollers were even invented, I believe.
“Additionally, the Hummer EV is a fairly limited-run vehicle thus far, meaning parts are generally more expensive until economies of scale kick in,” The Drive added. That I can understand, and it provides at least some reason to hope that parts prices will moderate over time.
That’s a reflection of the newness of the electric vehicle industry overall, in part. Another reflection of that newness has been the problems with electric vehicles that keep making the news.
One Hummer failed in spectacular fashion in the middle of the road when it inexplicably went into “safe” mode and had to be towed before someone rear-ended it.
That vehicle was reportedly brand new, with only 250 miles on it.
Then there was the Hummer that managed to pull a trailer only 128 miles before needing a recharge — which would require unhitching the trailer if the driver wanted to use the faster, more powerful charger.
Of course, electric vehicles are cheaper to run than gas vehicles in most cases, and if you have solar power to charge yours and do a little careful planning, you can practically drive it for free — locally at least. That’s assuming you can afford to buy it in the first place.
Obviously, fuel cost isn’t the only point at issue when choosing a new car, but it’s certainly not an unimportant one.
So, the question remains: Would you pay over $7,000 to replace a set of taillights?
Yeah … me neither.
https://thefederalistpapers.org/us/ev-owners-pay-costs-6100-just-replace-gmc-hummer-ev-taillights
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Long-term Greenie journalist Graham Readfearn is still looking at the world through one-eye
He does his best below to make a case against the use of coal in Australia, but mainly does so by quoting fellow Greenies. The blithe mention of "storage" as an alternative to burning coal is amusing. What storage? Snowy 2 is not yet up and may nevrer be, Qeeensland's pumped storage is pie in the sky and would be so expensive that it will remain there, and the available battery storage is tiny and short-lived relative to demand.
And there is some very stretched reasoning below. Look at the statement "I’m not aware of any time where we have had a blackout because renewable energy hasn’t supplied sufficient electricity.”
It's a true statement. But why? Because every time we were on the brink of a blackout because of failing wind and solar, coal and gas generators have stepped into makeup the shortfall. Lose those generators and the blackouts will be extensive and long
In Sydney’s Daily Telegraph, columnist Erin Molan turned the caps lock on to declare “WE NEED COAL”. It’s tempting to respond with “NO WE DON’T” and leave it at that. But there are certain expectations from a fact-checking column.
Molan argued clean and renewable alternatives to fossil fuels with the “infrastructure in place” to support them did not currently exist. Let’s test that.
Alison Reeve, an energy and climate expert at the Grattan Institute, said in the electricity market “coal has been doing two things”. “Providing electrons and system stability. The renewables can substitute the electrons and we can use other things – like storage and demand management – to find system stability. “So you only need coal to the extent that you don’t have those other things lined up yet.”
She said while there were legitimate concerns about the pace that storage and other measures were being added, “that’s not a case for keeping coal”.
The Australian Energy Market Operator’s blueprint for the expected future of the electricity market – a plan released after consulting more than 15,000 analysts and stakeholders – also disagrees with Molan. That plan includes several scenarios for the future, but the one Aemo says experts think is most likely sees 60% of coal generating capacity gone by 2030. Why?
“Competition, climate change and operational pressures will intensify [for coal] with the ever-increasing penetration of firmed renewable generation,” the plan says.
Oh yes, climate change. Burning coal is the biggest single contributor to the climate emergency.
Since Aemo’s blueprint was released in late June, both the Queensland and Victoria state governments have announced major energy plans mapping the exit route for coal that are broadly in line with Aemo’s plans.
Neither state sees a future in burning coal, with the polluting fuel practically gone in both states by 2035.
Coalmining is also responsible for about one fifth of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions from methane, according to official figures. The actual number, according to data from the International Energy Agency, could be double that.
As the Albanese government this week signed a global pledge to cut methane emissions by 30% by 2030, mining more coal will make those targets – nonbinding, but geopolitically significant – harder to reach.
Molan claimed in her column there was “ample evidence in recent years of times and occasions when renewables just haven’t been able to supply our energy needs”, but didn’t actually offer any evidence.
This is a strange interpretation of how the electricity market works. Reeve was puzzled. “It’s a mixed system and you will always have the generation you need to meet the demand. “The percentage provided by renewables fluctuates, but I’m not aware of any time where we have had a blackout because renewable energy hasn’t supplied sufficient electricity.”
https://www.inkl.com/newsletters/morning-edition/news/conservative-commentator-erin-molan-digs-herself-into-a-hole-in-defence-of-coal
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The chilling reality of The Australian Labor Party's green dream: Bills soar by 56% as $20 BILLION is spent on a 'renewables friendly' electricity grid and $46M for a UN energy conference - while the PM hands millions to extremists who dream of driving Australia into energy poverty
Despite constant claims renewables are cheaper than fossil fuels the billions being poured into greening Australia's power and hosting UN climate talkfests appears to be only driving up the price of electricity.
Labor went into the May election with a promise of slashing electricity bills by $275 a year, a pledge that was meant to be delivered by its commitment to renewables.
However, Tuesday's Budget instead predicted a staggering 56 per cent hike in prices in the next year on top of the already ballooning bills.
But at the same time the Albanese government announced they will funnel $10 million into climate activist groups the Environmental Defenders Office and Environmental Justice Australia.
When asked about this in parliament on Wednesday Prime Minister Anthony Albanese repeated the mantra of his government. 'The cheapest form of new energy in this country is renewables,' he said.
On budget night Treasurer Jim Chalmers told the ABC that despite him not being able to predict when prices would come down the $25 billion being spent on various climate change measures would help. 'Renewable energy isn't just cleaner energy, it's cheaper energy as well,' Chalmers said.
North Queensland Nationals Senator Matt Canavan, who is a strong proponent of mining and fossil fuel, strongly disagreed with both the Prime Minister and Treasurer. 'Power prices are going up because we are investing too much in renewable energy that is not on all the time,' Senator Canavan told Daily Mail Australia on Wednesday. 'Australia has been building more solar and wind per person than any country in the world.'
A particular Budget item that Senator Canavan latched onto was the almost $50 million the Albanese government has committed to 'restoring Australia's reputation'.
The centerpiece of this measure will be hosting UN-overseen conference in partnership with Pacific island nations to build clean energy partnerships and agreements .
'Labor can't help you with your power bills but they are going to spend $46 million of your money to host a UN climate conference,' Senator Canavan tweeted on Tuesday night.
He expanded on this in a response to Daily Mail Australia.
'Instead of spending money on helping rich people attend a climate talkfest, the Australian Government should be using our coal, gas and uranium to make more power and bring down living costs for struggling Australian families,' he said.
'The Government is wasting our money by funding more jobs for climate bureaucrats.'
The budget contains a mind-boggling multitude of green projects, subsidies and new government agencies to bring about the Albanese government's commitment of net zero carbon emissions by 2050.
There is even $8.1 million to improve the energy efficiency of seaweed farmers.
However, by far the biggest sum, $20 billion, will be for rewiring the nation's grid to make it more renewable energy friendly.
On top of this $275 million will be spent on getting more electric cars on the road while $224 million will toward the community batteries that will store power from household solar panels.
Re-establishing 'international climate leadership' will cost $296 million, of which $200 million will go to help Indonesia with green projects.
A new agency, the national health sustainability and climate unit, will inform Australia's 'health response' to climate change.
The green bureaucracy will also be beefed up by the injection of a further $194 million, with $102 million to restore the Climate Change Authority and $64 million to rebuild Treasury's climate modelling capability.
Senator Canavan delivered a scathing assessment of what the new public servants would achieve.
'Power prices won't be lowered from a desk in Canberra, they can only be lowered by building more generators across our nation,' he said.
The Environmental Defenders Office have campaigned to block laws aimed at stopping disruptive climate protests, such as the protests that halted coal loading at Sydney's Port Botany earlier this year.
Environmental Justice Australia lobbies against new coal and gas projects and organised a group of children and teens to claim Australia's lack of action on climate change violated their human rights to the United Nations.
To support his claim that renewables are cheaper Mr Albanese cited agreement from the Business Council of Australia, the Australian industry group, the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry as well as the National Farmers' Federation.
However, this has not been backed up by players in the electricity market. Major energy retailers told a conference in October that replacing coal and gas with renewable energy is the major reason power prices are sky-rocketing.
'Next year, using the current market prices, tariffs are going up a minimum 35 per cent,' Alinta chief executive Jeff Dimery said at the Sydney event. 'It's horrendous, it's unpalatable. We don't want energy consumers getting their power bills and setting fire to them.'
In September reports by sector watchdogs the Energy Security Board and the Australian Energy Regulator (AER) both pointed at switching to renewables as a major reason power price surges.
Dr Chalmers pointed to 'inflationary pressures' for the power price increase but electricity bills have been outstripping inflation by as much as 8 per cent.
The war in Ukraine is often pointed to as major contributor to worldwide inflation but Australia is energy sufficient in coal and gas and an exporter of those things, although international prices can influence the domestic price.
Coal prices are surging but this reflects a turning away from renewables in many countries.
With the Ukraine war threatening its gas supplies Germany has began bringing around 20 of its coal power plants back online.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11355319/Budget-2022-shows-renewables-spending-driving-power-prices-56.html
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26 October, 2022
Green Davos: Climate sceptics charm investors
Dr David Whitehouse
The Ballroom of the Dorchester Hotel in London is not somewhere I frequent very often, but the so-called Climate Change Forum conference is always held in such grand places. It’s a conference for what it calls high-net worth individuals, with not a few policy makers, royal families and international celebrities thrown in. The conference was called “Global Investment in Sustainable Development.” Delegates flew in from all over the world. Marc Morano of Climate Depot called it the “Green Davos.”
For the day I was there I was impressed with the ideas circulating around the informal areas. One person told me about his plans for recycling in Africa, another for removing plastic from the oceans, another about how to make hydrogen the fuel of the future. One person told me they founded an institute for global change. I spoke to a couple of others who ran a group advising firms how to achieve their net zero targets – weaving the words resilience, productivity and creativity into almost everything they said. Perhaps this is not the place for details. Offer the pitch, follow up later. One person told me that there are three ways to make money: one is with a good idea, one is to use the system of subsidies, grants and carbon credits to your advantage. And the third? I asked. “Look at the science soberly and then think long-term,” he said.
With investment in sustainability the topic of the day the science of climate change was always in the background. I asked many if they could tell me what the global temperature is and how it has changed in recent years. They couldn’t, adding that all they knew was that it was increasing, everyone knew that.
Outside the ballroom was a stand where a corporate health group had set up, not financial health but spiritual help. One of its proprietors told me that you make better corporate decisions when you are in spiritual harmony with the planet. He would be delighted to come to my boardroom and tell my company how to do it. I didn’t ask how much it would cost, seemed impolite.
At the conference proper someone talked about connecting humanity back to its heart’s values. I looked her up on social media – she had fewer twitter followers than me. Someone else was talking about how to avert the coming global disaster. I quickly looked him up: his investing firm lost more than a million pounds last year. I hope they don’t follow his advice. Another presentation was from Mastercard whose Vice President was talking about a new credit card that counted your carbon dioxide consumption and would cut off your access to money when you had reached your carbon allowance. I don’t think many of the attendees would be keen to use such a card! Someone else was talking about music for climate justice, pity Bono wasn’t here!
The presentations were a mixed bag. Some were fascinating, others were puffery. Many of them trivial, given by representatives of very small companies looking for a green niche and a break. A session on diversity, mainly women, sounded almost like a Meghan Markle speech given six times. It was clearly important to be photographed at the podium, presumably for their website alongside a “connect to me” tab. I got the impression that many delegates didn’t regard the presentations as the main thing.
Sceptical Debate
The reason I was at the conference was to watch the debate between so-called climate deniers Marc Morano and Christopher Monckton and two other speakers. Credit is due to Max Studennikoff, the chairman and founder of CC Forum, who withstood numerous demands and requests to de-platform Morano and Monckton. One of the participants withdrew, saying that in all conscience he could not share a stage with such heretics, presumably preferring his preferred pastime of glueing himself to government offices in protest. I forget his name, as did everyone else.
The other withdrawal was UK Climate Minister Graham Stuart who was to give a keynote speech. He suddenly had unexpected government business, perhaps – it was joked – he was going to be the next Chancellor of the Exchequer. Later DeSmog activists claimed the credit for dissuading him. One person told me they were unimpressed by his absence: “This is just the audience he needs to talk to if he wants to bring growth into the UK,” he moaned.
The debate itself was all rather surprising. There was no frisson of annoyance or expectation of fireworks as Morano and Monckton made their way onto the stage. There was nobody in the ballroom who was there to protest or cause a disruption. They were interested in what they had to say.
The session was opened by Max Studennikoff who started by saying that extreme events, hurricanes, droughts, heatwaves, were all on the increase and, what’s more, the moat around his medieval castle in France was dry for the first time in 600 years! I saw Lord Monckton smile as this was a gift for him to counter. Studennikoff took this with good grace. After the opening statements I got the feeling that the audience decided that the sceptics were rather more substantial than some had expected. A person on the table next to me muttered, “hmmm details!”
There was not that much about climate during the debate as one might have expected. Energy policy, subsidies, clean water, pollution etc. were discussed with not that much between the two sides. On the non-sceptic side one panelist said that after Krakatoa had put 20 million tonnes of sulphur into the atmosphere and cooled the world by one and a half degrees, just imagine what 50 million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year could do! Then he mentioned the 97% climate consensus which Monckton swiftly rubbished.
Gunter Pauli was a different matter. To my surprise he had a lot in common with Morano and Monckton and he clearly read the mood of the audience. Sometimes he veered into telling stories about himself, but the audience loved it. Unsurprisingly, the wealthy audience all seemed to agree that wealth is what was needed to clean up the environment. Morano said this came from cheap energy, Pauli said we needed a new system of business altogether and that Net Zero was nonsense and “the opium of the masses.”
The applause was slightly louder for the non-sceptic side, but not by much at all. But where was this applause coming from? One or two sceptical tables, I wondered. No, it was widespread, much of it from the quiet money. Such was the interest in the session that subsequent sessions were cancelled as it continued. No hostility, just some very good questions. Morano and Monckton were pleasantly surprised.
https://www.netzerowatch.com/green-davos-climate-sceptics-charm-investors/
********************************************************UK: Lloyds bank ditches project finance for new oil and gas fields
Britain's biggest domestic bank Lloyds (LLOY.L) said on Thursday it would not support direct financing to develop new oil and gas fields, joining a small number of lenders to push back on funding expansion of the industry.
Lloyds updated its climate policy to make the change, which bars project financing or reserve-based lending to greenfield oil and gas projects, although the policy would still mean it could provide general lending to companies in the industry.
Although Lloyds exposure to the sector is small, the move reflects growing pressure on banks to do more to accelerate the global transition to a low-carbon economy before the next round of global climate talks in Egypt in November.
It also comes just weeks after Britain pledged to give a green light for fresh exploration in the North Sea amid concerns about security of energy supplies amid the conflict in Ukraine.
Despite concern from campaigners that banks are helping lock in climate-damaging emissions, large lenders in the United States have faced political pressure to maintain the flow of capital and most continue to finance expansion in the sector.
Climate groups welcomed the Lloyds move and called on other British banks to follow suit.
"Lloyds' new policy marks an important turning point in the dangerous relationship that exists between leading UK banks and fossil fuel companies," said Tony Burdon, chief executive of pressure group Make My Money Matter.
"By becoming the first of the five largest UK high street banks to stop the direct financing of new gas, oil, and coal projects, Lloyds is making a clear statement on the future of financing for fossil fuel expansion."
Lloyds' exposure to dirty industries is smaller than some of its global rivals, given its focus on Britain's economy.
The bank provided about 1 billion pounds ($1.1 billion) of finance to commercial oil and gas customers last year, according to its latest climate disclosures report, and the sector accounted for just 0.2% of its overall lending
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Lord Frost rounds on British government over ‘invented’ net zero targets
Former Brexit Secretary Lord Frost has rounded on the Government over its “invented” net zero target. He argued that the stated goal of net zero carbon emissions by 2050 was passed with “limited debate” and claimed it has had negative impacts on the energy sector.
Lord Frost’s comments were made during a debate in the House of Lords over what steps should be taken to support behaviour change as a pathway towards net zero. He said: “We all agree that decarbonisation is a very desirable goal, but I would say that aspiration is different from the specific net zero 2050 policy.
“That target was essentially invented by the climate change committee in 2019, passed through secondary legislation in this Parliament with limited debate, and since then has been creating radical change to the economic structure of this country. “And I think my own party is just as much to blame for this situation, and possibly even more so than members opposite.”
He argued that technical measures required to meet this target are expensive, both to install and in its impact on everyday life, that they increase the unreliability of the energy sector and have led to the destruction of reliable supply.
The Tory peer said he finds it “troubling” that behavioural change is being used to “fill the gap”.
He critiqued this method of decarbonisation, arguing it “reduces human welfare” because it “makes it harder for people to do things they would otherwise choose to do”.
Finally, he claimed that behavioural change measures are presented as being voluntary, but in some cases are actually achieved through “legal compulsion”, shrinking the private space of individuals.
He said: “The climate change committee in 2021 said that behaviour change comes through consumer adoption of low-carbon technology such as electric cars. “Well, you don’t get any choice about that – in 2030, you have to buy an electric car. “That’s not a nudging, that’s compulsion.
“Similarly, heat pumps in 2025, that’s compulsion. Closing roads for cyclists, that’s all compulsion. “If people mean legal compulsion, they should say it.”
Lord Frost’s comments come after the Bishop of Oxford urged the Government to do more in terms of supporting behavioural change.
The Right Reverend Steven Croft referenced a new report from the Lords’ Environment and Climate Change Committee entitled ‘In Our Hands: Behaviour Change for Climate and Environmental Goals’.
The spiritual peer praised the Government for its stated commitment to net zero but argued there was a “significant gap” between what it wants to do, and the leadership actually being offered.
He argued that behaviour change was a “key element” of achieving net zero, an estimated 32% of change needed, adding: “We must all play our part”.
Another member of the climate change committee, Lord Browne of Ladyton hit back at Lord Frost’s comments about behaviour change, branding his warning a “groundless accusation”.
The former Labour Cabinet minister insisted that the role of Government is one of enabling people to make more sustainable choices, not compelling them to do so.
He said: “To address the concerns of those who feel that the cause of net zero is being hijacked by those who do wish this regression I encourage them, including with respect Lord Frost, to actually read the reports before levelling these groundless accusations.”
He added: “We do not wish this or any future Government to remove the power of decision-making from individuals, but we want it to fashion a context in which the gap between ethical and practical decision making is closed.
“For those who wish to preserve individual liberty, including Lord Frost, surely a context within which people can make the decisions they wish to make on an ethical basis rather than purely practical considerations is desirable.”
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Australia: ‘Over-designed’ government megaprojects are bad for environment and taxpayers
NSW megaprojects are being over-engineered with tonnes of unnecessary, costly materials driving up the price and carbon footprint of the multibillion-dollar builds, Infrastructure Minister Rob Stokes has warned.
Stokes said NSW would fail to reach its goal of a net zero economy by 2050 without addressing overservicing in its $110-billion infrastructure pipeline, where concrete and steel are being superfluously added to projects.
Carbon emissions from construction material – including concrete and steel – are estimated to represent up to 10 per cent of Australia’s carbon output. A new report produced by Stokes and Infrastructure NSW has flagged including those emissions in the business cases of future projects.
“We want things to be robust and well-built, but that shouldn’t mean just throwing more concrete and steel into our bridges, roads and railways,” Stokes told the Herald.
“There is an irony here. Because we’ve got very conservative design standards we’re actually putting more concrete and steel into roads and bridges and railways than anyone else in the world.”
Stokes pointed to the recent construction of the multibillion-dollar Metro rail lines as an example of a project that could have used less material without impacting design integrity.
“I think there is a general awareness that we have been very conservative and over-designed some of our station boxes on Metro lines,” he said.
The government is spending tens of billions of dollars on the Metro, which will connect the CBD to the west and south-west of the city, as well as a line to service the new Western Sydney Airport when it opens in 2026. The projects have been hampered by cost blowouts.
Station boxes are excavated for underground platforms, concourses and facilities, while major developments are often installed above them.
Infrastructure funding cuts leave NSW behind Victoria, Queensland
Stokes said a “compliance culture” in NSW had led to an intense focus on mitigating risk and liability in both the government and private sectors.
“I think every engineer that touches a project on the way through … just wants to ensure that their responsibility is entirely mitigated by throwing a bit of extra concrete and steel at it,” he said.
“The sum total of all these little decisions where people are just effectively covering their back means that we’re paying way over the odds, and also contributing toward global climate emissions because of our innate design conservatism, so we need to challenge that.”
The senior minister, who will retire from politics at the next state election, said that more thoughtfully designing the state’s largest projects would cut emissions, save time and taxpayer cash.
“We should be very proud of the fact that we are designing very, very robust structures, but the question we need to ask is, ‘Are we over designing them?’. There’s a cost imperative to that for the taxpayer,” he said.
“But there’s also a climate imperative because every bit of extra design constraint that adds to the bulk of a structure is making it more carbon intensive.”
The Infrastructure NSW discussion paper, set to be released this week, recommends a whole of government approach to measuring emissions in infrastructure.
The Decarbonising Infrastructure Delivery report says multibillion-dollar investment decisions were being made without any understanding of carbon mitigation or management over the life of the asset. It warns that could result in potentially higher costs to retrofit projects to achieve net-zero in the future.
The report also recommends maximising the use of recycled material in building.
The United Kingdom, including the Glasgow Airport Investment Area, and Europe are cited as examples of governments including the carbon impact of projects when weighing up their benefits and cost.
The NSW government earlier this year warned it would need to push back some of its mammoth infrastructure pipeline amid rising construction costs and limited workforce.
The government paper follows a report produced by Infrastructure Partnerships Australia which earlier this year called for ambitious, lower-carbon outcome requirements in major projects.
Stokes said future state governments would need to rethink the way they approached big projects, and instead start by questioning whether they should even go ahead at all.
“One of the very best ways we can decarbonise infrastructure is actually asking whether we need such an expensive megaproject design intervention in the first place. Maybe there are other ways to achieve the same objective,” he said.
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25 October, 2022
Dozens of Climate Models Wildly Exaggerate Extent of Global Warming
Further evidence has emerged that climate models are useless for the purpose of forecasting future temperature rises. A recent survey using American summer temperatures (June, July, August) over the last 50 years, found that 36 major climate models showed nearly twice the warming rate observed by the surface temperature measurements recorded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). At the high end, a number of models forecast warming nearly three times greater than observed data show
The research was carried out by Dr. Roy Spencer, the principal research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, and the compiler of the UAH monthly satellite temperature record. He says that the importance of his findings should be obvious. “Given that U.S. energy policy depends upon the predictions from these models, their tendency to produce too much warming (and likely also warming-associated climate change) should be factored into energy policy planning,” he said. But he doubted it was being, ”given the climate change exaggerations routinely promoted by environment groups, anti-oil advocates, the media, politicians, and most government agencies”.
The Spencer work follows recent research published by Professor Nicola Scafetta of the University of Naples. He found that almost all the global temperature forecasts produced by models between 1980-2021 were excessive, some extremely so, compared with the accurate satellite record. One of the reasons given as to why there’s no climate emergency in the World Climate Declaration is that climate models are “not remotely plausible as global tools”.
Yet as we have seen in numerous articles in the Daily Sceptic, climate models are ubiquitous and are at the forefront of promoting the climate scares pushing the command-and-control Net Zero agenda. They are at the heart of the pseudoscientific work that tries to ‘attribute’ single extreme weather events to long-term changes in the climate claimed supposedly caused by fossil fuels. In simple terms, computers compare an imaginary climate without human-caused carbon dioxide with the current one full of unknown complexities, and then the modellers announce they’ve ‘proved’ the ‘climate emergency’ hypothesis. Since the outputs of these models are unfalsifiable – how can you prove that a wholly imaginary scenario is ‘false’? – the notions are no more than worthless opinions.
The results of Spencer’s work will hardly come as a great surprise, but the conclusions are almost certainly more damaging to the climate catastrophisers’ case than the figures suggest. Spencer uses NOAA surface temperatures and, as we have seen, these are subject to ‘corruption’ from a number of causes in recent years. As Spencer notes, the NOAA figure could be an over-estimate “if increasing urban heat island effects have spuriously influenced trends over the last 50 years, and I have not made any adjustments for that”.
Earlier this year, the U.S. meteorologist Anthony Watts published his latest survey of NOAA’s nationwide weather stations. Describing the temperature record as “fatally flawed”, Watts found about 96% of US temperature stations failed to meet what NOAA itself considered to be acceptable and uncorrupted placement. Watts defined ‘corruption’ as caused by the localised effects of urbanisation, producing heat bias because of a close proximity to asphalt, machinery and other heat-producing, heat-trapping, or heat-accentuating objects. According to Watts, data that had not been corrupted by faulty placement showed a rate of warming in the U.S. “reduced by almost a half compared to all stations”.
There is further substantial evidence that NOAA’s U.S. surface temperature figures are too high. In 2005, it started compiling data from a select group of 114 stations across the country that had been specifically sited away from urban development. Called the U.S. Climate Reference Network (USCRN), it was intended to aim for “superior accuracy and continuity in places that land use will not likely impact during the next five decades”.
The graph shows the rarely referenced record up to last month. It shows oscillating temperature changes, but very little evidence to indicate a warming trend over the last 17 years.
Considering what is known about the ‘corruption’ of the NOAA’s main temperature dataset, it would be reasonable to significantly reduce the blue NOAA observational bar in Spencer’s graph. This of course provides further confirmation that the temperatures forecasts of most climate models have long lost any connection with reality.
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The Quiet Desperation Of Woke Fanatics
What's driving them? And how can they be defeated?
Over the last few weeks, climate activists in Britain have blocked highways (because cars emit carbon dioxide), poured milk onto the floors of supermarkets (because livestock emits methane), and thrown tomato soup at Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” (because climate change is more important than art. Or something). The activists are a kind of reboot of the Extinction Rebellion (XR) climate protests in the UK in the fall of 2019.
People in the UK are at risk of dying from natural gas shortages. Still, the climate activists with “Just Stop Oil” think it’s outrageous that their government is desperately trying to produce more natural gas for its people. But without more natural gas, there could be three-hour-long blackouts, which threaten the operation of medical equipment, and thus the lives of vulnerable people.
The various media stunts appeared authentically grassroots but were, in fact, financed by a $1 million grant from a philanthropic group called Climate Emergency Fund, which is funded by their heirs to the Getty and Rockefeller oil fortunes, and founded in 2019. The Board of Directors consists of a who’s-who of climate alarmism including “Don’t Look Up!” film director, Adam McKay, who donated $4 million, New Yorker writer Bill McKibben, and New York Times columnist David Wallace-Wells. The Fund and their grantees have been cheered on by the Secretary General of the United Nations and much of the mainstream media.
In a series of recent articles I have argued that what lies behind climate fanaticism and narcissism is an apocalyptic religion born from nihilism. The power of science to explain humankind’s place in the universe (e.g., the big bang, evolution by natural selection) resulted in a dominant narrative coming out of society’s elite institutions for over 100 years that human life has no inherent meaning or purpose (nihilism). We’re just animals like any other.
This depressing story has led the ostensibly secular elite, which are educated and indoctrinated in universities that teach nihilism as unquestioning scientific gospel, to create a new apocalyptic religion (climate catastrophe), complete with a new victim-god (nature), a new reason for guilt (sins against nature), and a path for redemption (renewables and low-energy living). It, and the broader Woke religion, have found intellectual ballast since World War II from Rousseau, Malthus, and Foucault.
But that account only partly addresses the motivations of the fanatics. It doesn’t answer why some people become fanatics and others don’t. It doesn’t explain the specific role of fanatics, particularly in relation to other actors, such as the intellectual architects of the movement, and the institution-builders. Nor does it address how fanaticism ends and what, if anything, can be done to hasten its expiration date.
As such, we need to ask, who exactly are the climate fanatics? And how can their power over Western cultural and political life be reduced?
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Reducing energy options doesn’t work. Just ask Europe—and the U.S. states where gas prices are rising
With midterm elections around the corner, energy and climate rhetoric is rising almost as fast as the price of energy in California.
While the public largely ignores Californian rhetoric, Europeans cannot escape the extreme cost of energy and must prepare for the most difficult winter in recent memory—a failure of the energy and climate policies of the past quarter-century. For U.S. states, there are lessons to be learned.
European policymakers have acted on the advice that solar and wind could scale up quickly, provide reliable electricity, and be cheaper than other options—none of which turned out to be entirely true. To be sure, there are factual components. But as a whole, the story was not factually complete. Europe is paying the price.
At the core of the problem is the reality that European leaders, led by Germany with Energiewende in 2010, have been eliminating energy options. Shutting down nuclear power plants. Banning production of natural gas from shale. Mandating electric vehicles. Importing energy and products from neighboring, often unfriendly, countries. Regardless of intentions, one must ask whether reduced optionality is working.
The result of reducing energy options is that the cost of energy in Europe has blown through the roof. Electricity is at 60 cents per kilowatt/hour, which is five to 10 times the cost of electricity in most U.S. states. Natural gas at $60 per thousand cubic feet is 10 times the price of natural gas in the U.S. Gasoline is $6 per gallon or more.
We no longer need to wonder what will happen with option-eliminating energy policies. It is happening, and the impact is being felt most by those who can least afford it. To be clear, it started long before the invasion of Ukraine by Russia. Russia merely took advantage of the situation created by long-standing policies.
In some ways, European countries are comparable to large states in the U.S. Just like most European countries, about 80% of U.S. states run energy deficits. New York imports 75% of its energy. California about 65%. Not that these states lack energy resources. Quite the contrary: They choose not to produce the energy they have, instead relying on energy imports from their neighbors.
The same goes for energy policy. California’s energy policy eerily mirrors Germany’s. California is the top importer of electricity. It’s banning gas hookups in some cities, mandating EVs, restricting oil and gas development, and shutting down nuclear facilities. New York refuses to build new gas pipelines and won’t develop the Marcellus Shale. Maine won’t mine its own major lithium deposit to make batteries to support its desired EV mandate.
As a result, people in California, New York, and Maine pay two to three times as much for their gasoline and electricity as those living in other states such as Texas. And just as in Europe, it hurts the poorest the most—and all in the name of “clean energy.”
If being clean means importing your energy from other emitters, it does not help the global climate. What if, as happened in Europe with Russian gas, neighboring surplus states decide not to send energy and products to energy deficit states such as California and New York? It would be devastating, just like in Europe.
Does this mean solar, wind, and batteries are bad? Of course not. They have a role to play. However, mandating them exclusively—and eliminating optionality in transportation, power generation, and other industrial processes—is not scalable, reliable, or cheaper.
Climate security, energy security, and energy poverty are major global challenges. They are not simple, but they are solvable. We must arm ourselves with all of the data, honor physics, and adhere to basic economic principles such as optionality.
The binary clean and dirty narrative is not just overly simple. It is simply wrong. It’s time to end factually incomplete energy rhetoric. It’s hurting us all. We need to find some humility again, engage in civil dialogue, agree to disagree at times, cancel shaming, and start seeking real solutions to complex energy and climate problems. Only then will we actually solve them.
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The cult of absolutism
How often have you been told that balance is essential? Balanced opinion, balanced diet, and everything in moderation. Well, think again, because the new cult of absolutism won’t stand for it.
Do you want to discuss inequality? It must be zero. Do you want to debate harm from Covid? Must be zero. Gender inequities? Zero. Emissions? That would be Net Zero… When you subscribe to these absolutes there is no room for compromise or tolerance. The end justifies the means. Every single time. Zero deviation. Zero discussion. Zero empathy.
This new world order is infecting every part of our lives, right down to the functioning of our critical energy systems. From the politicians creating policy, to the boardrooms complying, right through to the bureaucrats enforcing it – our electricity system is undergoing a zero-logic makeover.
Take Queensland’s glossy ‘brochure’ announcement that spending $62 billion (more likely double that) to close some of the lowest-cost electricity generators on the planet will save consumers $150 per year by 2032. Ironically, Queensland residents were recently treated to a ‘cost of living rebate’ worth $175. Zero relief for businesses though, with state-owned hydro generators setting the wholesale price more than any other.
New South Wales Deputy Leader Matt Kean believes wind and solar generators should have zero exposure to low wholesale prices. He’s designed a scheme ensuring these ‘cheap new generators’ can opt into a guaranteed minimum wholesale price, thus avoiding the black hole in the market he created.
Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews must believe he can duck down to Coles and fill the trolley with Duracells because his government recently announced the world’s largest battery storage target. Andrews hopes this will create over 12,000 jobs, but there are zero cars parked in neighbouring South Australia’s infamous, and now ‘not-so-big’, battery.
If you are looking for regulators, politicians, or the media to provide a cost-benefit analysis, a detailed plan, or even a robust debate on these matters, your expectations are exceeding their capabilities. Nobody can even produce the napkins on which these plans have been hatched. You should have zero confidence in any statement originating from politicians on the electricity system, and unfortunately this applies to bureaucrats and agencies managing the system ‘in the best interests of the consumer’. Those behind these schemes display zero interest in the consumer, except as a means to an end.
A recent example is Daniel Westerman, head of AEMO (Australian Energy Market Operator), in an interview with Angela Macdonald-Smith. As the ‘market operator’ AMEO receives offers for electricity generation in time, money, and volume; tells every generator what to generate and when; and calculates how much each generator gets paid. Macdonald-Smith offers zero challenge when Westerman frets:
‘The events of the winter really have reinforced the need for Australia to continue to urgently invest in the transition towards firmed renewables with efficiently delivered transmission.’
Westerman’s zero-care for consumers is matched only by his opinions on areas for which he bears no responsibility, as MacDonald-Smith writes:
‘Westerman highlighted the need for action in four areas in particular; building low-cost renewable generation; putting in place sufficient firming generation to support peak demand when renewable generation is low; getting transmission built efficiently and in as timely a fashion as possible; and improving the stability of the grid and equipping it to deal with a high penetration of renewable energy.’
This is the same guy who pretty much on his first day of the job declared we’d be dealing with a 100 per cent renewable grid for 30-minute periods by 2025.
Thus, the tally of zeros increases because there are zero other countries in this predicament. One might consider Germany and California to be on the way. The cold 2022 European winter, without Russian gas, will prompt some changes; but more temperate California is losing people and businesses fast.
What conclusions can be drawn if we continue down this path of absolutes?
There will be zero baseload generators, at least those owned by Origin, AGL, and the Queensland taxpayer. Gas and batteries are hoped to fill the 20,000 MW gap when it’s not windy or sunny – that’s the current plan.
Zero renewable developments will be knocked back – the state and federal targets are too large and the timeframes too short for any dallying with environmental assessments, community engagement, or feasibility studies. Our federal Environment Minister decreed, godlike, that she will allow zero extinctions. Hopefully, she will be faced with many difficult decisions.
There will be zero accountability at the top end when power bills remain high. When regular people are subject to rationing, big industries pack up and disappear, or food suppliers continuously edge up prices, those in charge will just say ‘it’s the cheapest new generation, build more’.
And sadly, zero care for people freezing in winter.
How long can this flawed reasoning persist? Perhaps a better question – why is the reasoning so flawed to begin with? I believe the key lies in the personal values of those in authority. If you value people, their wellbeing, and opinions, you display care. Care’s neighbours are empathy, compromise and goodwill. Conversely, a lack of care exposes limited appreciation for others. Without care you are only a stone’s throw from cruelty.
This cult of absolutism and zero worshipping demands tyranny. Fight back, use care.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/10/the-cult-of-absolutism/ ?
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24 October, 2022
MPs kill UK fracking prospects in huge gift to Putin
London, 20 October - Opposition and conservative rebel MPs have been accused of acting against the national interest by ringing the death knell for Britain’s shale gas prospects in the near to medium future.
While a majority of MPs last night voted against Labour’s motion to introduce a ban on fracking, it is now clear that no company will risk investing in the development of UK shale gas projects given that the next government is almost certain to pull the plug.
By killing the chances of exploiting Britain’s massive shale gas resources, anti-fracking MPs have caused significant economic damage while ensuring that the UK’s energy cost and supply crisis will get worse in coming years.
In the absence of Russian gas supplies, European countries will face an even worse energy crisis next winter after they have depleted gas they have stored for this winter, the International Energy Agency has warned.
While anti-fracking MPs don’t seem to realise the severity and existential threat of the energy crisis to households and businesses they have simply deferred the inevitable: There can be little doubt that at some point UK shale gas will have to be explored as the energy cost crisis threatens to devastate Britain’s economy and industry.
Net Zero Watch director Dr Benny Peiser said:
"The evident failure to embrace fracking is destroying the most promising chances of enhancing Britain’s energy security while driving up energy costs. MPs have been playing into the hands of Vladimir Putin as Britain will now be forced to rely more and more on costly gas imports rather than its massive shale resources.
If the Westminster bubble think the current economic and political crisis is bad, they are in for a shock next year when energy bills go through the roof and businesses go under."
Contact
Dr Benny Peiser
Director, Net Zero Watch
e: benny.peiser@netzerowatch.com
m: 07553 361717
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Net Zero Bombshell: The World Does Not Have Enough Lithium and Cobalt to Replace All Batteries Every 10 Years
Influential elites are either in denial about the horrifying costs and consequences of Net Zero – witness last Wednesday’s substantial vote against fracking British gas in the House of Commons – or busy scooping up the almost unlimited amounts of money currently on offer for promoting pseudoscience climate scares and investing in impracticable green technologies. Until the lights start to go out and heating fails, they are unlikely to pay much attention to a recent 1,000 page alternative energy investigation undertaken for a Finnish Government agency by Associate Professor Simon Michaux. Referring to the U.K.’s 2050 Net Zero target, Michaux states there is “simply not enough time, nor resources to do this by the current target”.
To cite just one example of how un-costed Net Zero is, Michaux notes that “in theory” there are enough global reserves of nickel and lithium if they are exclusively used to produce batteries for electric vehicles. But there is not enough cobalt, and more will need to be discovered. It gets much worse. All the new batteries have a useful working life of only 8-10 years, so replacements will need to be regularly produced. “This is unlikely to be practical, which suggests the whole EV battery solution may need to be re-thought and a new solution is developed that is not so mineral intensive,” he says.
All of these problems occur in finding a mass of lithium for ion batteries weighting 286.6 million tonnes. But a “power buffer” of another 2.5 billion tonnes of batteries is also required to provide a four-week back-up for intermittent wind and solar electricity power. Of course, this is simply not available from global mineral reserves, but, states Michaux, it is not clear how the buffer could be delivered with an alternative system.
Michaux sounds a clear warning message. Current expectations are that global industrial businesses will replace a complex industrial energy ecosystem that took more than a century to build. It was built with the support of the highest calorifically dense source of energy the world has ever known (oil), in cheap abundant quantities, with easily available credit and seemingly unlimited mineral resources. The replacement, he notes, needs to be done when there is comparatively very expensive energy, a fragile finance system saturated in debt and not enough minerals. Most challenging of all, it has to be done within a few decades. Based on his copious calculations, the author is of the opinion that it will not go fully “as planned”.
Last Sunday, Sir David Attenborough concluded six episodes of pseudoscientific green agitprop Frozen Planet II by demanding that the world embrace Net Zero, “no matter how challenging it may be”. Net Zero is a political command-and-control project, the full horror of which is yet to be inflicted on the general population. Michaux is quite clear what it entails: “What may be required, therefore, is a significant reduction of societal demand for all resources, of all kinds. This implies a very different social contract and a radically different system of governance to what is in place today.”
Of course, a radically different system of government is available in the People’s Republic of China, but here the position on Net Zero is a tad more nuanced. Having lifted about a billion people out of starving poverty in the last 40 years and become the workshop for an increasingly complacent western world – all powered by fossil fuel – the cause does not seem so pressing. Speaking to the Communist Party Congress earlier this week, President Xi Jinping sounded a note of caution and said “prudence” would govern China’s efforts to peak and eventually zero-out carbon emissions. All of this would be in line with the principle of “getting the new before discarding the old”.
Meanwhile, China’s coal production is reported to have reached record levels, while the Congress was told that oil and gas exploration will be expanded as part of measures to ensure “energy security”.
Michaux points out that nearly 85% of world energy comes from fossil fuel. By his calculations, the annual global capacity of non-fossil electrical power will need to quadruple to 37,670.6 TWh. In a recent report for the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), Professor Michael Kelly estimates that the U.K. electricity grid would have to expand by 2.7 times. This will involve adding capacity at eight times the rate it has been added over the last 30 years. If calculations are made for the need to rewire homes, streets, local substations and powerlines to carry the new capacity, the extra cost will be nearly £1 trillion.
In another recent GWPF paper, the energy writer John Constable warned that the European Green Deal seems all but certain to break Europe’s economic and socio-political power, “rendering it a trivial and incapable backwater, reliant on – and subservient to – superior powers”.
History provides us with many examples of weak, or weakened, tribes being overrun by stronger tribes. In the animal kingdom it is known as natural evolution. A 96-year old ‘national treasure’ preaches we have to pay any price to satisfy the new cult of the green god. Better costed and more rational views are available.
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Global Climate Summit Is Heading for a Geopolitical Hurricane
The last time world leaders got together for a climate summit, the backdrop was thoroughly menacing. A pandemic had decimated national budgets. Poor countries were up in arms over the hoarding of Covid-19 vaccines by the same wealthy nations whose fossil fuel consumption did most to warm the planet. Relations between the two largest emitters, the US and China, had devolved into zero sum skirmishes over everything from trade to Taiwan.
Those were the good old days.
As Egypt prepares to stage COP27, the geopolitical context that shapes all international diplomacy has gone from tense to precarious. The war in Ukraine has divided nations over what some saw as a fight between Russian and Western interests, and supercharged an energy crisis that risks shredding COP26’s most concrete achievement: a global consensus to cut down on coal.
As COP26 approached, falling prices for renewable energy seemed to have forced a reckoning for the dirtiest of fossil fuels. The final text of the summit included calls for a “phasedown” of coal power from any plant that doesn’t capture its carbon and an end to “inefficient” subsidies for fossil fuel. A year later, rampant energy price inflation has combined with a protracted energy crunch to revive demand for coal and put subsidies for fuel of any kind back on political agendas.
“COP27 is to be convened while the international community is facing a financial and debt crisis, an energy-prices crisis, a food crisis, and on top of them the climate crises,” says Egyptian Foreign Affairs Minister Sameh Shoukry, who’s also the conference’s president. “In light of the current geopolitical situation, it seems that transition will take longer than anticipated.”
The UK wrapped up its hosting duties at COP26 with a claim to have kept alive the Paris Agreement’s goal of capping warming at 1.5C above preindustrial levels. Those gains have now been at best stalled or at worst reversed by the wartime logic brought on by the invasion of Ukraine. Russia’s President Vladimir Putin has turned Europe’s energy spigot into an economic weapon in response to sanctions, and major developed economies faced with suddenly scarce natural gas supplies are racing to open up old coal-fired power stations.
The European Union voted in July to reclassify natural gas — in addition to nuclear power — as a climate-friendly fuel, improving prospects for investment.
The boost to fossil fuels may well prove temporary. The imperative for Europe to end its dependency on imported gas to heat homes and power industries has never been so clear. At the same time, the sheer cost of gas—as high as 10 times pre-crisis levels—should create a powerful incentive to look for alternatives, and the cheapest option will often be solar or wind power. US President Joe Biden has passed one of the most significant pieces of climate legislation to date. That will only accelerate on-the-ground growth in renewables, which already outpaces the expansion of power generation as a whole.
Yet it’s far from a given that either the war or the recent U-turn toward fossil fuels will be a blip. Now that Russia is intensifying its war effort with a recently announced mobilization, the race is on to lease or build new liquefied natural gas terminals all around Europe. If the continent with the most geopolitical pride in its climate commitments is backsliding, it doesn’t bode well for progress at Egypt’s Sharm El-Sheikh beach resort.
“There doesn’t need to be any more debate about gas,” Bruno Jean-Richard Itoua, the minister of hydrocarbons of the Republic of Congo, declared in September at an oil and gas conference that included Mauritania, Senegal, Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, and Guinea-Conakry. “We need to start producing as much as we can now.” Other African officials at the event echoed this up-with-fossil-fuel sentiment.
“A lot of countries now say it is hypocritical” to call for forcing out dirty energy sources, says Bill Hare, chief executive and senior scientist for Climate Analytics, a Berlin-headquartered think-tank. “So you are seeing this really big push to renovate oil and gas projects that have been on the back burner for years in Africa and Australia, far exceeding the level required for the European gas crisis.”
For every renewable producer pressing the case for an accelerated transition, Hare sees a traditional energy company urging investment in a time of crisis. “I have rarely seen such a concerted effort by the oil and gas industry to, in one way or another, push back against the climate agenda,” he says.
Al Gore, the former US vice president and climate activist, warned late last month, that it was essential for governments to avoid signing long-term contracts for fossil fuels in a rush to plug short-term gaps caused by Russia’s war. Subsidies that support fossil fuel use doubled from 2020’s Covid-induced low, to 2021, and continue to rise sharply this year, according to a September report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, an inter-governmental think tank in Paris.
There are other thorny issues that will be discussed at this year's climate summit, the first to be hosted by an African country in six years. Egypt is planning to focus this year’s COP meeting on how developing nations can get funding to adapt to rising temperatures and finance the transition to green energy. It’s also prioritizing loss and damage, a term for compensation for nations that did little to release greenhouse gases but are on the front lines of its effects.
Money to help less-developed nations mitigate and adapt to the impacts of climate change is still missing. Rich countries had agreed to provide $100 billion annually by 2020 and have fallen short by billions of dollars, pushing the target back to 2023. The Egyptian hosts are contending with inflation that spiked to 15% at the end of September from 5.9% at the start of the year. The national budget is being consumed by the need to provide basic food necessities, widening the current-account deficit in the first three months of this year by more than half, to $5.8 billion.
Shoukry wants COP27 to agree on additional sums to be transferred from rich to poor nations after 2025. The latest estimates to finance developing nations’ climate goals are in the scale of $6 trillion through 2030, according to the OECD. But with rich and poor economies alike grappling with rising inflation, falling revenue, and often political upheaval, finding that kind of money looks more difficult by the day. Shoukry acknowledged those concerns and called on governments to rise to the financial challenge, as they did during the pandemic.
Preliminary meetings held earlier this year in Bonn to discuss technical issues ahead of COP27 already saw flare-ups between the rich and poor camps, in particular over loss and damage. Those tensions are likely to be in evidence again at Sharm El-Sheikh.
“Rich nations have exploited and reaped the economic benefits of fossil fuels for decades,” says Gabriel Obiang Lima, Equatorial Guinea’s oil minister, describing calls on Africa to hold back on using hydrocarbons as simply unfair. “Now is our time to develop and monetize our resources, and developed countries should understand.”
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Australia's collapsing electricity system
Climate catastrophists are very keen to talk about tipping points. So let me steal their thunder and talk about the tipping point of the National Electricity Market (NEM) that connects five states and the ACT.
We were given a preview of the potential for collapse earlier this year when the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) suspended the market and took control as a last resort. Don’t think for a minute that this exercise was costless. There was an ex-post settling up with the companies ordered to provide power, adding several hundred million dollars to the escalating electricity bill that is then divvied up between households and businesses.
It’s worth pointing out here the ineptitude of AEMO. Most of us thought its leadership couldn’t get any worse than the now replaced American lawyer, Audrey Zibelman. (She left to join Google). But the current chief executive, Daniel Westerman, is even more committed to decarbonisation than Audrey, who at least placed a great deal of store on keeping the lights on.
Note here that there is a very small pool of potential candidates for this job – virtually all of them are big supporters of renewable energy. Because the states effectively own the NEM, they decide who gets the job. In other words, any reservation that the Coalition minister, Angus Taylor, might have had about this appointment would have made little difference.
The totally unbelievable modelling that AEMO puts out – see the latest Integrated System Plan – is a classic case of garbage in-garbage out. The assumptions ensure that there is no problem with the electricity grid quickly transforming to being almost totally reliant on renewable energy. In particular, heroic (and convenient) guesses are made about the average capacity factors of wind and solar – much higher than actual data from overseas – as well as the likelihood of lengthy periods in which wind and solar won’t work at all.
But when it comes to grid management, it’s not just about averages but also about catering for the tails of distributions – unlikely events but with potentially serious consequences. A grid cannot be deemed robust unless it is able to provide reliable power in these circumstances.
The alternative approach that AEMO uses is to hope these unusual events won’t occur but, in any case, some new affordable technology will miraculously emerge that should eliminate any problems. The more cautious approach to ensure continuous power is to insist that firming capacity is available on a 1:1 ratio – that is, enough firming capacity to fully stand in place of renewable energy for potentially lengthy periods. Needless to say, this redundancy makes the system very expensive, which is one of the reasons why higher electricity prices are inevitable.
Absent a capacity mechanism – the states won’t agree – and the ongoing early exit of 24/7 coal-fired plants, the NEM is becoming extraordinarily fragile. Where once it was extremely uncommon for AEMO to intervene in the daily operations of the grid, it is now a frequent occurrence. Further pressure will be felt with the closure of the Liddell coal-fired plant next year – at its peak, it had a capacity of 2000 megawatts.
Just three years later, the coal-fired and largest power plant in Australia, Origin Energy’s Eraring plant, is expected to close. Its current capacity is close to 3000 MW and supplies a quarter of New South Wales’ electricity demand. (It’s likely that the NSW government will have to step in to ensure that this plant continues to operate, in a deal akin to the secret arrangement that the Victorian government has with Energy Australia in respect of the Yallourn plant.)
The extremely badly run AGL Energy, egged on by major shareholder, Mike Cannon-Brookes (who holds just over 11 per cent of the registry), has announced that it will shut its coal-fired plant in Victoria – Loy Yang A – ten years earlier than expected, in 2035. This plant has a capacity of over 2000 MW, which is 30 per cent of Victoria’s demand. Not only is this plant relatively new but it also runs off brown coal for which there is no export potential. What this means is that a relatively low-cost input is guaranteed for this plant.
The broader point to be made is that the hastened exit of coal from the NEM – I haven’t mentioned that Queensland expects to be out of coal-fired generation by 2035 – should be ringing serious alarm bells right now. But if anything, the federal Climate Change and Energy Minister, Chris Bowen, seems to regard these developments as good news. After all, he keeps telling us about the importance of emissions reduction and the government’s legislated targets.
What he seems to be blissfully unaware of is the sheer impossibility of replacing coal-fired generation with alternative affordable and reliable sources within the necessary timeframe – if ever. He talks about the need for 10,000 additional kilometres of transmission lines. But given the need to obtain necessary easements (often in the face of strenuous local objections) and the shortage of workers and materials, that ain’t going to happen any time soon.
Even the rollout of renewable energy projects, including the growing popularity of the much more expensive offshore wind turbines, is likely to be slow notwithstanding the substantial subsidies that are on offer.
The decision by the states to essentially go their own ways by devising their own energy plans is further undermining any integrity the planning of the NEM may have had. It’s easy to see that, in the event of blackouts and power rationing, it will be each state for itself, with interconnectors possibly disabled.
The chief executive of one of the big energy operators, Alinta Energy, has belled the cat on what is going to happen with electricity prices. After rising by around 25 per cent this year, the expectation is that they will rise a further 35 per cent next year – figures endorsed by the Australian Energy Regulator. He points out that a coal-fired plant that cost his company $1 billion will need $8 billion in replacement expenditure on renewable installations and the necessary supports.
Of course, we can kiss goodbye to the $275 cut to the annual household electricity bill promised by our ‘I stand by the modelling’ Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese. But that loss may prove small beer in the future scheme of things.
https://spectator.com.au/2022/10/a-real-tipping-point/
***************************************23 October, 2022
Cost of living crunch forcing shoppers to ditch green products
The cost of living crisis is forcing consumers to make less sustainable choices as prices soar, according to new research.
Six in 10 (59 per cent) shoppers say they have been forced to choose less sustainable but cheaper options as prices increase – despite wanting to make more eco-friendly choices.
This rises to 70 per cent among younger adults who are feeling the financial strain more acutely, a survey commissioned by insurer Zurich’s Youth Against Carbon initiative found.
And nearly three-quarters (74 per cent) want the government to take steps to make sustainable behaviour and products more cost-effective.
Sustainable appliances like energy-efficient lightbulbs are the most likely to be left on shelves with almost half (45 per cent) of shoppers saying they are now having to swap them for cheaper, less environmentally friendly options.
Locally sourced and organic fruits and vegetables (41 per cent) are second on the list of green items on the chopping block, followed by eco-friendly cleaning products (39 per cent).
For young people, the biggest impact is being felt on clothing purchases, with 40 per cent saying they would choose more planet-friendly fashion if it wasn’t for the cost of living crisis.
John Keppel, chief sustainability officer at Zurich UK, said: “With the impact of the current economic landscape on the general public being so stark and immediate, it’s totally understandable that people prioritise making ends meet over living greener lives.
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Climate protesters accused of 'blood on their hands' after 2 die in crash amid traffic from bridge protest
Climate protesters in England are being accused of having "blood on their hands" after their protest scaling a bridge caused a traffic jam that reportedly kept first responders from quickly tending to two crash victims who died.
"The eco-warriors may have thought it was an innocent protest, but they’ve got blood on their hands," Mark Heap, 55, told the Daily Mail after suffering a broken back and a broken leg on Monday when he stopped to help a stranded motorist and was struck by a speeding car that was attempting to avoid a traffic jam caused by climate protesters who had scaled England’s Queen Elizabeth II bridge.
Lisa Webber, a mother of four in her 50s, was also struck by the BMW while attempting to help the stranded motorist on London’s busy M20 highway and was thrown into oncoming traffic and later died.
The Daily Mail reported that a second woman in her 40s was also struck and killed by the BMW.
Drivers were using the M20 motorway to avoid traffic backup after several "Just Stop Oil" protesters scaled the bridge causing a traffic jam that contributed to emergency vehicles taking 40 minutes to tend to crash victims.
"They may not have directly caused the M20 accident," former Metropolitan Police detective chief inspector Mick Neville told The Sun. "But had their irresponsible demo not taken place, the women and van driver would probably not have been there."
"Without the protest, the emergency services might have been able to get there in time to save the women," Heap said.
Two climate activists climbed the north side of the bridge early Monday morning, saying in a press release that they were demanding that the government "halts all new oil and gas licenses and consents."
The pair of activists were on the bridge for at least 24 hours and caused two-hour delays and a 6-mile traffic jam, according to reports.
"As a professional civil engineer, each year as I renew my registration, I commit to acting within our code of ethics, which requires me to safeguard human life and welfare and the environment," 39-year-old activist Morgan Trowland said. "Our government has enacted suicidal laws to accelerate oil production: killing human life and destroying our environment. I can’t challenge this madness in my desk job, designing bridges, so I’m taking direct action, occupying the QE2 bridge until the government stops all new oil."
Just Stop Oil did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Fox News Digital.
Trowland and fellow protester Marcus Decker were reportedly arrested after being brought down from the bridge on a cherry picker and charged with conspiracy to commit a public nuisance.
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Will the energy crisis crush European industry?
As European businesses brace for energy shortages, workers at one plant in south-eastern France are getting a new winter wardrobe.
Saint-Gobain, the French building materials group, has ordered extra-warm coats and gloves for staff at its warehouse in the Alpine town of Chambéry, who have agreed to turn down the heat this winter. In order to cut gas consumption, temperatures will be closer to 8C, instead of the usual 15C.
“It will be just like working outside so we have to give them all the tools to work in an outside environment,” says Benoit d’Iribarne, senior vice-president of manufacturing.
Turning down the thermostat is no mere cost saving for many of Europe’s industrial companies as they dig in for a hard winter. With energy prices soaring to unprecedented highs after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it has become a matter of survival.
Europe’s industrial base employs some 35mn people or roughly 15 per cent of the working population. The bloc’s leading industrialists warned earlier this month about the potentially devastating economic impact of the energy crisis.
“Soaring energy prices are currently precipitating an alarming decline in the competitiveness of Europe’s industrial energy consumers,” said the European Round Table for Industry in a letter to Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, and Charles Michel, head of the European Council. Without immediate action to cap prices for energy-intensive companies, “the damage will be irreparable”.
On the surface, European industrial companies are putting a brave face on it — talking about the energy-saving measures they are implementing and the other costs they are finding to cut. While some are looking to coal and other fossil fuels to get them through the winter, others talk optimistically about the green revolution that the crisis is spurring.
But there is already evidence that major companies are reducing production in some sectors because of the energy shortage, even before the winter kicks in. And executives from chemicals to fertilisers to ceramics businesses warn that they risk losing permanent market share and could be forced to move some of their production to parts of the world that can offer cheaper and more reliable energy.
The alarm bells are ringing among Europe’s politicians. “We are risking a massive deindustrialisation of the European continent,” says Alexander De Croo, Belgium’s prime minister.
Saving energy
In the meantime, companies in sectors from steel to chemicals, ceramics to papermaking, fertilisers to automotives are racing to reduce consumption both to cut crippling energy costs and to prepare for gas shortages over the winter, should governments impose rationing.
Many are finding ingenious ways to reduce energy use. French carmaker Renault, for example, is reducing the time it keeps paint hot — a process that accounts for up to 40 per cent of its gas demand.
Such innovations promise to deliver more efficient factories and processes in future. But first, these businesses have to get through the winter.
Those that could do so have increased prices. Cologne-based chemicals company Lanxess, which makes base chemicals and active ingredients for the pharmaceuticals market, increased base prices by up to 35 per cent when energy costs began to surge.
But price increases will not address the problem of gas shortages. Paper and packaging group DS Smith has ordered its factories to cut consumption by 15 per cent, a voluntary reduction agreed by EU member states in July. Machines that used to be idled between production runs will now be turned off, and thermostats turned down. “If we do things like this and turn down the thermostat from 20 to 18.5 degrees we reduce gas consumption significantly,” says Miles Roberts, chief executive.
Valeo, the French automotive supplier, has asked factories to reduce energy consumption by 20 per cent, with measures such as halting production at the weekend and turning down temperatures during the week. Solvay, the Belgian chemicals company, says it is organising its factories to operate on 30 per cent less gas using alternative energy and mobile diesel-fuelled boilers.
Gas is the single most important source of energy for Europe’s industrial companies. But gas is also an important feedstock, used in the chemicals and fertiliser industries. In total, industry consumes about 27-28 per cent of the bloc’s total supply, according to Anouk Honoré, ?deputy director of the gas research programme at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies.
But it is not that easy to cut the fuel out of many industrial processes. Roughly 60 per cent of industrial gas consumption is used for high-temperature processes of 500C and above, such as glassmaking, cement or ceramics. “For lower temperature processes, there are more options to use renewable energy and heat pumps,” Honoré says.
For that reason some companies are turning to fossil fuels, in a potential setback for the EU’s green transition plans. Bayer, the German pharmaceutical and biotech company, in 2019 announced plans to move entirely to renewable energy. But it has now reactivated oil as a fuel “just in case” it is unable to meet heat needs for production.
Carmaker Volkswagen is running power plants in Wolfsburg, its largest site, with coal for the next two winters, instead of switching to gas as planned as part of its decarbonisation efforts.
Even for the lower temperature industrial processes, alternatives are unusually scarce at the moment. The summer’s drought has depleted hydropower capacity, while France’s ageing nuclear reactors are unable to meet demand due to protracted shutdowns and maintenance issues
https://www.ft.com/content/75ed449d-e9fd-41de-96bd-c92d316651da?mc_cid=ce85aca412&mc_eid=cc88839e92
**********************************************************Government-owned electricity generation: What could possibly go wrong?
Australian State government boss is going to close all the coal-fired power stations. Not a single word about what will happen on windless nights and overcast days
A re-elected Andrews government will take back control of the state’s electricity grid and effectively end coal-fired power generation in Victoria in little more than a decade through a renewable energy target of 95 per cent by 2035.
Ahead of the November state election, Premier Daniel Andrews announced the new policy on Thursday, prompting warnings from energy experts that returning electricity generation to state hands could increase power prices, expose taxpayers to massive fiscal risk, and even make the government’s renewable energy targets harder to reach.
The plan was condemned by energy generators as a “back to the future” announcement and “retrograde step”, but was backed by the Electrical Trades Union as a “fantastic development” for Victoria.
It follows a joint Albanese-Andrews government “rewiring the nation” announcement earlier this week – which aims to fast-track Victorian renewable energy zones and offshore wind development – and the launch earlier this month of the NSW electricity infrastructure road map. And last month, Queensland Labor Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk announced a $62bn energy plan, which includes a renewable energy target of 80 per cent by 2035.
Mr Andrews claimed his policy would “deliver cheaper power bills and lower greenhouse gas emissions” in a state that is currently dependent on coal for 60 per cent of its power. He also took aim at the Kennett Liberal government for selling off the SEC amid Victoria’s post-Cain-Kirner Labor government recession in the 1990s.
“The Liberals sold off public power assets to private, for-profit companies. They sold off Victoria’s essential services and sent much of the profits offshore – with the generators alone making $23bn in profits at our collective expense,” the Premier said.
The plan to revive the SEC would give Victorian taxpayers a 51 per cent stake in the commission and its wind and solar projects, at an initial cost of $1bn.
Mr Andrews said industry superannuation funds were the government’s preferred investment partners for the remaining 49 per cent.
“Unreliable, privatised coal will be replaced by clean, government-owned, renewable energy,” the Premier said.
“We’ve already taken soundings from the super industry and to say they are excited is an understatement.”
A new SEC office will be established in the Latrobe Valley town of Morwell, in Victoria’s east.
Labor is facing electoral challenges from the Greens in at least three inner city seats, and is targeting the seat of Morwell, following the retirement of independent former Nationals MP Russell Northe.
Mr Andrews announced new renewable energy targets of 65 per cent by 2030 and 95 per cent by 2035, bringing forward the government’s net-zero emissions target by five years, to 2045.
He also estimated the initiatives would increase gross state product by about $9.5bn and support 59,000 jobs through to 2035.
The Andrews government says the new SEC will be responsible for generating 4.5 gigawatts of renewable power – the equivalent replacement capacity of Loy Yang A, Victoria’s largest power station, which is being closed by AGL in 2035, a decade earlier than previously planned.
The owner of the Loy Yang B coal plant, Alinta, said its staff were shocked by Thursday’s announcement, given the generator had been due to remain open until 2047, but will now be forced to close 12 years earlier.
Alinta chief executive Jeff Dimery said the company had taken “strong steps” to prepare for the transition to renewable energy, “but we need to understand more about how the government intends to manage the cost of the expedited transition, protect communities and workers, and support us to invest in the replacement generation required to keep the lights on in the state.
“Our immediate priority and focus will be supporting our employees at Loy Yang B who will be understandably shocked by this announcement,” Mr Dimery said.
Grattan Institute energy program director Tony Wood said the announcement, with recent statements by the federal government, Queensland and NSW, demonstrated a renewed push by state and federal governments to “renationalise” the power sector.
Mr Wood argued governments had effectively made a call that markets could not be trusted to deliver an increasingly volatile transition from coal power to clean energy.
“We just have arrived at a position where the ministers whose governments contributed to the problem have concluded that the markets cannot deliver what they want, someone has to take control and it should be them. They are probably right,” he said.
“That means that the risks now sit with governments and some combination of taxpayers and consumers.
“I suspect that, despite the claims that this will all reduce power bills, the most likely casualty will be cost – although delivering the targets might be a close second.”
Green Energy Markets analyst Tristan Edis said he suspected the policy would be “good politics as voters with rose-tinted glasses experience large hikes in their power bills, warning that state-owned power companies “can be incredibly ruthless, profit-oriented operators”.
“Some have been big blockers of emission-reduction policies. They have regularly exploited their market power (with) network charges higher than needed (because they’re) used to raising state government revenue. (They) ain’t saints,” Mr Edis tweeted.
Australian Energy Council chief Sarah McNamara said the move was a “back to the future” announcement and “retrograde step” which would damage market and investor confidence.
“The surprise announcement contains little detail but looks likely to chill private investment and see Victorian taxpayers carry the lion’s share of risk around new generation,” Ms McNamara said.
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21 October, 2022
Please, someone: hit the brakes on Biden’s gas and energy nonsense
Team Biden’s energy nonsense never stops. The latest: a bizarre claim that Americans are saving money — $120 a month, or $420 million in total since summer — at the pump.
Yes, gas prices are down from their scorching-hot $5.01-per-gallon June peak to a still-painful $3.85. But, by all accounts, the main reason for the drop was that Americans reduced their driving in response to the sticker shock.
And that $3.85 is still 62% higher than when Biden took office. So there have been no savings at all.
Nearly as pathetic is Biden’s new drawdown of our Strategic Petroleum Reserve: 15 million barrels, enough to cover a puny seven-and-a-half days of reduced OPEC output.
And this will draw the reserve down to near 40-year lows. Cross your fingers it’s not needed for its actual purpose, namely in case of military emergency.
Even when the prez calls for increased domestic production — the actual solution here; unshackling the enormous capacities of American energy as his predecessor did — he plays lickspittle to Green New Dealers. We “need to responsibly increase US oil production,” Biden postured Wednesday. “Responsibly” here means “not at all.”
All this after the Saudis wouldn’t play nice with Biden over oil output (maybe because he vowed to make the kingdom a “pariah” state and cozies up to Iran). Even now, his main idea is to burn foreign oil, as if Saudi or Venezuelan oil is somehow better for the environment.
Yet more proof Biden’s energy policies are as nonsensical as . . . everything else he argues for. And as damaging to average Americans and the nation.
https://nypost.com/2022/10/19/please-someone-hit-the-brakes-on-bidens-gas-and-energy-nonsense/
**********************************************************Earth records 600 millionth consecutive cooler-than-average month
The Earth just had its 600 millionth straight cooler-than-average month thanks to naturally-driven cooling.
An historical reconstruction of the Earth’s temperature by Northwestern University Adjunct Professor Dr. Christopher Scotese provides an illuminating and surprising comparison of today’s temperatures to that of the past. And it’s not what you think.
According to Dr. Scotese the Earth “has alternated between a frigid ‛Ice House’, like today’s world, and a steaming ‛Hot House’, like the world of the dinosaurs.”
That’s correct, he described today’s temperatures as frigid. It turns out that most of Earth’s history since the explosion of life in the Cambrian Period nearly 600 million years ago was hotter than our climate today — a lot hotter.
Scotese 2002 - An analysis of the temperature oscillations in geological eras.
Scotese 2002 – An analysis of the temperature oscillations in geological eras.
For fully two-thirds of that time the Earth experienced temperatures that were much warmer than today. During these periods of “Hot House” conditions there was no ice at either pole. We “only” entered our current “Ice House” conditions about 50 million years ago. Using the average temperature of the Earth for the last 600 million years, we have experienced 50 million consecutive years of below average temperature.
While factually correct and, for a climate geek and geologist like myself, quite interesting, this information has nothing to do with the current climate debate.
And neither does a headline-grabbing report (For 420 straight months, Earth has been…blazin’) by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) that the planet had its 420th consecutive month with above-average temperature. Bear in mind that the “average temperature” they were referring to was that of the 20thcentury. Well, duh.
Of course recent temperatures would be higher than the 20th century average. That is because the Earth’s temperature has been increasing for more than 300 years. Had NOAA used a 300-year average they could have added even more months of above-average temperatures because the average would have been even lower.
The blessed rise of temperature that we are experiencing is lifting us out of the death-dealing cold of the horrific Little Ice Age, when half the population of Iceland perished. The beginning of this warming started in the late 1600s, long before man could have had any effect on temperature. In fact, the rate of warming over the first 40 years of the trend, extending into the early 1700s, was several times the rate of the 20th century warming and was 100 percent naturally driven.
At least the first 150 years of our current warming were also entirely naturally-driven and contributed about the same amount of warming as the last 150 or so years during which we have been adding CO2 to the atmosphere.
The question is not whether the planet is warming. It is, and demonstrably so. We know this from both direct measurement and thousands of historical records.
The real question is did the natural forces that were driving the temperature increase in the 17thcentury, or for that matter over the last hundreds of millions of years, suddenly stop for some reason in the 20th century? Of course not, but that is what the Ayatollahs of Alarmism want you to believe.
So why the media firestorm and portrayal of the latest data as dangerous? H. L. Mencken warned us of imaginary “hobgoblins of alarm” that governments needed to create to frighten the population into accepting onerous regulations such as the Paris Climate Accords. Climate change today is one of those hobgoblins of alarm used to convince people that our current warming is “unusual and unprecedented” when it is neither.
Six hundred million months of below average temperature or 420 months of above average temperature? Both are true, depending on what metric you choose to use, but the media are publicizing what is designed to best promote fear of catastrophic climate alarm. We have seen in the recent COVID-19 pandemic that fear is one of the most potent motivators of public action. Those promoting the economically destructive green policies will be using this and any other event deemed out of the ordinary to further the climate of fear that they need for public acceptance of these harmful policies.
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Atmospheric Phenomena, Climate Science Manipulation, and Earth's Cooling: Eleven Important Atmospheric Phenomena
(from a physicist's perspective)
by Gordon Fulks, Ph.D. (Gordon Fulks received both his M.S. and Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Chicago)
Our knowledge of the physical phenomena contributing to climate is vast.
Adiabatic cooling (gravity)
Planck Heat Radiation
Properties of water, its abundance and high heats of vaporization and fusion.
Elastic Mie/Raleigh Scattering (clouds and blue sky)
Inelastic Raman Scattering (thermalizing, greenhouse effect)
Oceans (heat sink and source)
Convection/Advection
Two fluid problem with neither in equilibrium
Coriolis Effect with a circumpolar jet stream and large amplitude Rossby waves
Solar Cycles - Wilson Cloud Chamber/Svensmark amplification effects with cosmic rays
Milankovitch Cycles
But which dominate in particular situations is far from understood.
Attempts to combine these effects and keep track of everything that is going on are called 'Computer Simulations' or 'Climate Models.' Unfortunately, computer simulations of climate are just computer games USELESS in accurately predicting the future.
Professor of Mathematical and Theoretical Physics Gerhard Gerlich said:
“To derive climate catastrophes from these computer games and to scare Mankind to death is a crime.”
“It cannot be overemphasized that even if the [fluid] equations are simplified considerably, one cannot determine numerical solutions, even for small space regions and even for small time intervals."
Email from newsletter@co2coalition.org
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Australia: New coal mine approved
The Department of Regional Development, Manufacturing and Water has granted New Acland Coal its water licence, clearing the way for the mine to reopen and for New Hope Group to start hiring hundreds of staff.
The decision comes about a month after it was granted a mining lease.
The water licence comes with 35 strict conditions, including that NAC offsets underground water impacted by mining activities by surrendering equivalent water entitlements.
It must also monitor the impacts on aquifers and groundwater users, implement an underground water monitoring program to track any impacts that may occur and publish the volume of underground water taken.
New Acland Coal general manager Dave O’Dwyer said the mood at the site was ecstatic. “It is great news,” he said. “When the head office rang me up this afternoon I was a bit taken aback,” he said.
Mr O’Dywer said the team had some environmental processes to move through before he could hire new staff. ‘We are hoping within a few months we’ll be moving dirt,” he said
“We have worked so hard to get this far and there has been huge support from the community and through our expressions of interest portal.
About 800 people have put their hand up to work at the mine, with the vast majority coming from the Darling Downs.
All the water used at the site will be trucked in from the Wetalla Waste Water Treatment Plant in Cranley.
The water licence governs the incidental interaction with groundwater.
Mr O’Dwyer said while he expected the licence would be approved, he didn’t think it would happen so soon.
“We have had some interaction with the department talking about some things but we didn’t expect it to happen so quickly,” he said.
“We wanted to be sure the department went through its due diligence and we are really happy it has worked through that process and come forward with an answer for us.”
In December 2021, Queensland’s Land Court recommended the granting of the mining leases and issuing of a draft amended Environmental Authority for the Stage 3 development, subject to certain conditions being met.
Earlier this year NAC was granted a mining lease for Stage 3, which will see operations run for at least 10 years and employ an estimated 600 workers during construction and 400 during operation. It also means the area of mined land will roughly double.
The final approval comes after a 15-year battle between the mine’s owner New Hope Group and a collection Oakey farmers and residents.
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October 20, 2022
How more green space could narrow lifespan gap between rich and poor (?)
This study is an all-round joke. I have critiqued many others like it over the years so I will just make the most obvious comment here. How do we know that the causal arrow is not reversed? Could healthier people be better able to move into leafy areas? Healthy people presumably earn more than sickly people so can afford accomodation in more desirable areas.
Controls for income could have been attempted to rule out that possibilty but no controls of any sort appear to have been attempted. It's amazing the unscholarly rubbish that get into the academic journals these days
Greater levels of access to green spaces could have a sufficiently dramatic impact on people’s health that it could help reduce current lifespan gaps between the rich and the poor, new research shows.
A study examining various geographic areas, levels of wealth, and the proximity to private gardens and natural spaces such as woodlands, heathlands, and open water, found that each 10 per cent increase in access to private gardens and natural space is linked to a 7 per cent fall in the incidence of early death among those under 65 years old.
The research team, led by Dr Natalie Nicholls at the University of Glasgow, said their findings "could provide an additional public-health tool to reduce the large health inequities that exist for deprived populations, indigenous peoples, and other ethnic minorities".
While there is a large body of evidence already linking spending time in natural environments with positive health outcomes, the research is the first to explicitly examine whether access to nature protects against an earlier than expected death.
In order to assess whether this is the case, the team used the measure of "years of life lost" (YLL), and drew on YLL data from the 2016 Scottish Burden of Disease report, which recorded the gap between expected and actual lifespan for men and women under 65 who were resident in Scotland, UK, at time of death.
The team then mapped out various "datazones", which plotted geographical areas of between 500-1,000 households each, using physical boundaries and natural communities, which they said ended up dividing areas into units with broadly similar social characteristics.
Using Ordnance Survey mapping, they then assessed the inhabitants of each datazone’s access to natural space or private gardens, measured in square metres.
The researchers found that the areas with the highest income deprivation also had the lowest average percentage cover of natural space and gardens. People living in these areas had the highest levels of ill health.
Increased availability of natural space within local areas was also associated with a reduction in the disparity in YLL between the most and least deprived areas.
"Even moderate levels of natural space seemed to make a difference," the team said.
“In practice, not everyone can live in an area with a high percentage of green or natural space; however, this does not mean that even small amounts of such areas are not beneficial,” they said in the paper, published in the Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health – a title published by the British Medical journal.
But the research team cautioned that their observational study can’t establish cause and effect.
They also acknowledged that they didn’t have information on individual lifestyle behaviour and personal economic circumstances, or how much people used their local natural space or its quality, all of which may have influenced their findings.
Nonetheless, they said their findings echo those of other studies.
https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/news/green-space-health-lifespan-benefits-b2204559.html
******************************************************It was the energy bailout that blew up Trussonomics
Truss and Kwarteng must have thought it didn't count because it was a political imperative – but it doomed the project from the very start
Liz Truss has done many about-turns – on regional pay boards; corporation tax not rising; income tax being cut from 2023; the top rate being abolished. But far and away her biggest was announced immediately upon her becoming Prime Minister. Having stood on a platform of “no handouts” in response to the energy crisis, relying instead on a mix of benefits rises, short-term tax cuts and allowing market forces such as wage rises to do their job, as soon as she became Prime Minister she abandoned that stance and instead announced an absolutely massive energy price package.
By ministers’ own statements, the household element of that energy package alone was saving the average family around £4,000 per year. With over 25 million such families, that’s a bill of over £100 billion per year. Then there was the business energy package as well – perhaps £60 billion more.
And not only was this hugely expensive each year, it was in practice open-ended unless energy prices fell back dramatically. The household scheme was scheduled to last for two years, but that meant it would expire in late 2024, just before a General Election was due. No-one believed the Government would suddenly tell households their energy bills were going up by £4,000 just weeks before an election. So of course it would have been extended – perhaps made permanent.
Maybe one might have hoped the Government would find some way to curtail the cost once it realised the problem? But ministers immediately made that harder, tweeting out graphs showing that the UK’s energy package was much larger than those implemented in other countries – boasting of it in such a way that it would be even harder, politically, ever to backtrack from it.
So the Government had hundreds of billions of fiscal exposure in the energy package, in principle potentially lasting for many years ahead. Then, rather than say how any of that was to be paid for, they announced they were implementing all the short-term tax cuts Truss had said were the alternative to having an energy package during her leadership campaign. The energy package alone meant that there would need to be a huge fiscal consolidation – spending cuts and tax rises exceeding £100 billion, perhaps eventually even larger than those implemented in the 2010s. And with Labour way ahead in the polls, no Tory fiscal consolidation would ever be implemented anyway. It wouldn’t start in 2023 during the recession. It wouldn’t start in 2024 in the run-up to the General Election. And a Tory plan wouldn’t get implemented from 2025, because the Tories wouldn’t be in government by then.
So markets were being asked to fund hundreds of billions of extra deficit (mainly in the form of the energy package) with no-one even going to announce how it would be paid for until Labour entered office in 2025. Understandably, they took fright. This happened at the same time other issues were festering, including the Bank of England being too slow to raise interest rates, then announcing quantitative tightening at just the wrong moment, and pension funds getting into trouble with fancy financial instruments called “swaps”.
It was all a mess. But the biggest part of that mess – the Original Sin of Trussonomics – was that energy package. And even when there was massive market turmoil and Kwarteng started reversing elements of his mini-Budget, they still didn’t seem to grasp the real issue – as if some nonsense about the 45p rate, costing maybe £1.5 billion, was the real issue and the energy package, costing over £150 billion, was not. They didn’t circumscribe the energy package in any way – either in time (making it more credible it would end) or in scope (eg by no longer subsidising millionaires for heating their swimming pools). And the turmoil continued.
Only when Jeremy Hunt – acting, as some Twitter wags pointed out, like an IT guy switching the UK finances off and back on again – came in and ditched almost everything about the mini-Budget, including saying that Truss’ energy package would end after 6 months, has market stability been restored, at least for now.
I suspect that, because Truss and Kwarteng felt that the energy package was a political imperative, they thought it somehow “didn’t count” in the deficit, and they could do whatever other measures they fancied regardless of the fact they had introduced it and didn’t need any story as to how they paid for it. Financial markets have taught them, brutally and pitilessly, that that is not how these things work.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/10/18/energy-bailout-blew-trussonomics/
********************************************New paper shows glaring discrepancies between IPCC science and public statements
A new paper from the Global Warming Policy Foundation reveals how sober factual information in official climate reports is steadily distorted in moving from the original text (written by scientists), to the Summary for Policymakers (written by political hacks), to the official press releases (written by public relations officials), and then to the media coverage (written by journalists).
The paper, by physicist Dr Ralph Alexander, looks at two specific areas of the IPCC's Sixth Assessment Report: reconstructions of global temperatures over the last two millennia, and the coverage of marine heatwaves.
Dr Alexander explains:
"Take the global temperature reconstructions. The political hacks introduced Michael Mann's famous Hockey Stick graph into the Summary for Policymakers, even though this was not even mentioned by the scientists in the report itself. This graph is then used by the press officers to claim that current temperatures are 'unprecedented', but the scientists who wrote the original report said nothing of the sort, and indeed reported data that would contradict such a claim".
GWPF director Dr Benny Peiser said:
"Ralph Alexander's paper is a revelation, demonstrating beyond all reasonable doubt that the public are being failed by IPCC officials and the news media. The message is clear. You can't trust the habitual hype and exaggeration the green establishment would like you to believe on climate."
Ralph B. Alexander: "Chinese Whispers: How climate science gets distorted in translation" (pdf)
Contact
Dr Ralph Alexander
e: ralexander@ameritech.net
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The Bank of England's main priority? Net Zero targets
Energy companies looking to take advantage of the Bank of England's latest support package will have to meet climate conditions, the central bank and Treasury announced today.
The new Energy Markets Financing Scheme (EMFS), formally launched today, will provide government-backed guarantees to energy generators, shippers or suppliers facing financial trouble in the wake of soaring gas prices following the Ukraine war,
In a market notice published this morning, the Bank of England confirmed that to be eligible for funding, companies must disclose whether they have a net zero transition plan and, if so, deliver it to the Treasury within six months of drawdown of funds, or before termination of the guarantee.
Within the same timeframe, firms must also deliver "proportionate climate-related financial information" aligned with the recommendations of the Taskforce on Climate-related Financial Disclosures the Exchequer, according to the update.
The Bank of England and Treasury said the joint scheme had been designed to "address the extraordinary liquidity requirements" faced by energy firms operating in UK gas and electricity markets.
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19 October, 2022
Hole in the ozone layer has grown for a 3rd year in a row — but scientists aren’t concerned
Greenies are good at distorted views of the facts. So their mention of the 2015 ozone hole is interesting. They admit but downplay the fact that in October 2015 the Antarctic ozone hole was at that time the largest it had ever been. And it is apparently still large.
How does that square with the supposed shrinking of the hole? Refrigerant gases that supposedly open the hole have been banned for decades. So what we should see on Greenie theory is a gradual shrinking of the hole. It's clearly not happening. All we actually see is natural variability: No progress in shrinking the hole at all
The ozone hole that forms yearly over Antarctica has grown for the third year in a row. At nearly 10 million square miles (26.4 million square kilometers), the ozone hole is the largest it's been since 2015.
But despite that growth, scientists say that the hole's size is still on a downward trend overall.
"All the data says that ozone is on the mend," Paul Newman, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center's chief Earth scientist, told the Associated Press(opens in new tab).
The ozone hole was first observed in the early 1980s and reached its largest extent in 2006, according to NASA. This year’s ozone hole, which peaked on Oct. 5, was the biggest recorded since 2015. But scientists aren’t too concerned.
"The overall trend is improvement. It's a little worse this year because it was a little colder this year," Newman told the AP.
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A Governor Who Understands That Woke Corporations Undermine American Interests
“ESG is kind of rewriting how you invest. Instead of focusing on value for your shareholders, it’s more of a political agenda.”
These are the prudent words of Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt about environmental, social, and corporate governance standards, dubbed ESG, which are nonfinancial yardsticks applied to firms and used by money managers in decision-making on investments.
With clarity, Stitt, a Republican, further noted in a Fox News interview this week that corporate use of ESG standards “breaks down the free market principles of capitalism that we’re used to in investing, and so it’s anti-American.”
Indeed, ESG is the Left’s (and its corporate enablers’) blatant mugging of our free-market economy, which has generated prosperity by creating more and greater opportunities than any economic system in history.
The ESG agenda insists that policymakers and private-sector leaders see themselves as the stewards of a newly “woke” planet. In actuality, it’s a way to force companies to take positions in the political arena on issues that may have nothing to do with their actual business activities.
The true path to ensuring environmental, social, and governance improvements lies in focusing on policies that enhance economic freedom. As documented in The Heritage Foundation’s annual Index of Economic Freedom, the linkage of economic freedom, individual liberty, and prosperity around the world is unambiguous. (The Daily Signal is Heritage’s multimedia news organization.)
This prosperity is not just an end in itself. As the Index of Economic Freedom catalogues, preserving and advancing economic freedom enables individuals, entrepreneurs, and companies to care better for the poor and the environment, create better health care and education systems, ensure an abundance of food and clean water, and solve many other societal problems to make life better for a greater number of people.
Regrettably, under the tent of ESG activism, corporations around the globe have become woke. These corporations have weaponized capital, promoting a left-wing policy agenda.
Perhaps the not-so-surprising unfolding reality is that the environmental, social, and governance agenda largely is failing to produce what it promises in investment returns and positive impact. A recent Financial Times commentary headlined “Forget ESG. Bring on the BS Index” pointed this out in a witty, sarcastic way:
The jig is up for ESG. Regulators are swarming. Investor enthusiasm is waning. Executives are revolting. For the armies of asset managers, data providers, consultants and advisers that have sprung up in the past 10 years this is an existential threat. Here is our solution: pivot to bullshit. … Identifying BS is subjective but can be inferred with the help of several analytical frameworks, all of which can be used to charge more fees to companies and investors. Just like ESG.
Ill-guided and politically driven agendas such as ESG indeed present clear and present perils. And it’s people who seem to get lost in all of this.
For instance, under ESG, traditional American energy sources such as oil and gas are punished as part of the Left’s climate alarmism. Customers pay higher prices and receive inferior goods and services as companies become more focused on “social justice” than meeting the customers’ needs.
Stitt, Oklahoma’s governor, is right to point out that companies that embrace the environmental, social, and governance agenda are “not having an honest conversation about the needs of Americans.”
As underscored by Jessica Anderson, executive director of Heritage Action for America, at the launch of “ESG Hurts,” a new campaign by The Heritage Foundation and Heritage Action:
The United States leads the world in innovation and economic opportunity because of the policies we put in place to empower our businesses and individuals. If we allow the left to use ESG to turn businesses into social justice tools and shareholder reports into social credit scores, our economy will suffer and our adversaries like China will succeed.
It should be noted that economic freedom—not the environmental, social, and governance agenda—makes America and the world cleaner, safer, and better governed. It’s not hard to find the economic damage inflicted by heavy-handed and misguided government policies, which result in lingering uncertainty, deteriorating entrepreneurial environments, and lower employment growth.
The year 2022 should mark the end of that unacceptable trend and the beginning of restoring America’s economic freedom.
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China to prioritise energy security over transition to renewables, Xi Says
President Xi Jinping has promised a slow and steady end to the growth of planet-warming emissions in China, with energy security taking top priority as the country contends with a flagging economy and tumult on global fuel markets.
In a two-hour speech to kick off the weeklong Communist Party Congress, Xi said that prudence would govern China’s efforts to peak and eventually zero out carbon emissions. The cautious wording comes after a spate of high-profile power shortages in recent years, and as global energy costs have soared after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine upended trade flows.
Xi’s speech made China’s path to decarbonization clear: It won’t stop burning fossil fuels until it’s confident that clean energy can reliably replace them. The speech shows more emphasis on energy security and the significant role of coal in China’s energy supply given the resources endowment, said Qin Yan, lead analyst with Refinitiv.
“We will work actively and prudently toward the goals of reaching peak carbon emissions and carbon neutrality,” Xi said in his address. “Based on China’s energy and resource endowments, we will advance initiatives to reach peak carbon emissions in a well-planned and phased way, in line with the principle of getting the new before discarding the old.”
China is the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, and Xi electrified climate activists two years ago when he vowed to reach carbon neutrality by 2060 after peaking emissions before 2030. The announcement sparked a massive surge in investment in clean energy by local governments and state-owned firms.
But last year focus began to return to China’s mainstay fuel of coal after a shortage triggered widespread power curtailments to factories, slowing economic growth. The country vowed to increase mining capacity, and production has risen to record levels this year, keeping storage sites well stocked and reducing imports.
China will also expand exploration and development of oil and gas resources, and increase reserves and production as part of the measures to ensure energy security, according to a congress work report released after Xi’s speech.
***************************************************
Major finance firms tell UK they won’t phase out fossil fuel
Some of the world’s biggest financial firms including BlackRock Inc. and Vanguard Group Inc. have told the UK they have no plans to halt the financing of new fossil-fuel supplies, in response to a list of questions sent by British lawmakers tasked with figuring out how the country can meet its own net-zero obligations.
The inquiry is being led by the Environmental Audit Committee of the House of Commons. Britain, which was successfully sued by a group of climate activists earlier this year for putting forward an unclear net-zero plan, has asked firms to explain how they’re incorporating science-based requirements to phase out and ultimately halt the financing of new fossil-fuel supply, according to a statement published on Tuesday.
The Committee expects the finance sector “will play a significant role in helping determine whether the UK Government’s carbon budgets and its net zero target are likely to be met,” it said. Responses, which weren’t summarized by the Committee, were sent by more than 30 of the world’s biggest banks and investment managers.
BlackRock underlined that it is “obligated to always act in our clients’ financial best interests,” in its response. The firm also said its overall approach to the energy transition doesn’t include fossil-fuel exclusion policies, and that it doesn’t support the International Energy Agency’s net-zero scenario, which calls for no investment in new fossil-fuel supplies.
ESG is one of the largest, and most debated, investment approaches in markets today. Share your views on it. Take Bloomberg’s ESG survey. It’s not long, and we don’t collect your name or any contact information. Please click here to take the survey.
BlackRock’s goal “is not to engineer a specific decarbonization outcome in the real economy,” it said. And, like other firms surveyed, BlackRock said it’s the role of governments to set targets for private-sector actors. The asset manager also said it expects to remain a long-term investor in carbon-intensive sectors “on behalf of our clients.”
Vanguard provided a similar response, saying it “does not dictate strategy and operations in portfolio companies, and therefore does not have an enterprise view of the IEA net zero scenario and its recommendations for ‘no new investment.”’
The UK initiative to gather responses comes less than a month before world leaders are set to gather for the COP27 climate summit in Egypt.
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18 October, 2022
British Labour Party pledges to ban fracking 'once and for all'
Labour has pledged to ban fracking “once and for all”, calling it “an unjust charter for earthquakes”.
The party is working to bring forward an opposition day motion to maintain the ban on the controversial gas extraction method, after Liz Truss said she would lift it as part of her energy security plan.
The moratorium on fracking was imposed by the Conservatives in 2019 after a series of tremors, and their manifesto that year said they would not support it "unless the science shows categorically that it can be done safely".
Fracking involves injecting liquid at high pressure into subterranean rocks and boreholes to force open existing cracks and extract oil or gas.
A government-commissioned report by the British Geological Survey at the time said more data was needed, but despite the lack of scientific progress, Ms Truss's administration has torn up the manifesto commitment.
Ed Miliband, the shadow climate secretary, will visit Bassetlaw, Nottinghamshire, on Friday to meet the party's candidate Jo White and residents to listen to concerns about the possibility of fracking in their area.
"Labour will stand with communities in opposing the Conservatives' dodgy plans to impose expensive, dirty, and dangerous fracking on the British people," he said.
*****************************************************
New trend has teens dumping out milk in grocery stores
All across the United Kingdom, teenagers concerned about the environment are doing "milk pours." The new trend involves going into grocery stores, picking up cartons of cow-produced milk, and pouring out their contents, according to the animal rights group Animal Rebellion.
Videos that have popped up on social media show teens pouring milk onto the floor, over sales counters, and elsewhere in the store.
"The dairy industry is incredibly environmentally destructive. The world’s top 5 meat and dairy corporations are now responsible for more GHG emissions than Exxon, Shell or BP," the organization said in a tweet Saturday. "We NEED a plant based future now," it added.
The account also shared a report from Grain, an international non-profit organization, and the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP), which calls for the planet to "dramatically reduce its greenhouse gas emissions" by eliminating meat and dairy consumption.
According to Animal Rebellion, the "milk pours" took place at eight different locations Saturday, including London, Manchester, Norwich, and Edinburgh.
"Animal farming is THE leading cause of the loss of our wildlife and natural ecosystems," the group said in another tweet, which also called for the government to "support farmers in an urgent transition to a plant based food system and allow the freed up land to be rewilded in order to restore wildlife populations."
Several countries around the world have imposed regulations on the agriculture industry, such as limits on nitrogen emissions caused by dairy production. Environmentalists have encouraged the use of dairy alternatives, such as almond, soy, coconut and oat milk, though these too have been criticized.
The Biden administration has indicated that it intends to push changes on the US farming industry to tackle climate change.
In 2020, the EPA estimated that 11% of the U.S.'s total greenhouse gas emissions came from the agriculture sector, compared to 27% from transportation, 25% from energy, and 24% from industry.
https://www.fox5ny.com/news/teens-dumping-milk-grocery-stores
*******************************************************If Biden was actually concerned about high oil prices, he would prioritize more oil drilling
By Robert Romano
President Joe Biden is still reeling from the decision earlier this month by OPEC to curtail global oil production as the world prepares for another recession after Covid, induced by inflation levels not seen since the 1970s and 1980s as the post-Covid supply crunch and the war in Ukraine continue.
With less than a month to go before the Congressional midterm elections — every seat in the House and one-third of the seats in the Senate are up for election on Nov. 8 — the Biden administration had been lobbying Saudi Arabia to boost production even as prices have already fallen from their highs of $120 in June after the war began. Light Sweet Crude stands at about $85 as of this writing.
The trouble is, with inflation still north of 8 percent in the U.S., Biden needed the perception that something is being done, somewhere, to increase production. Just not here. That is because he is obeying two masters, the American people and the environmentalist interests that have similarly locked up future U.S. energy production in favor of green alternatives including electric vehicles.
And yet, even there, production is worse than that of fossil fuels, with months-long waiting lists for battery-powered cars and trucks.
That is because, during Covid when much of the global economy was locked down, production was forestalled across the board, resulting in months-long delays for basic orders in supply chains when demand picked up sooner than expected. So, even though petroleum was made more scarce — U.S. oil production is still 9 percent below its peak Dec. 2019 levels of 402 million barrels a month — so was everything else, with the result being higher prices across the board.
The limits on U.S. oil production are largely self-imposed — producible leases on federal lands were down 2.4 percent in 2021 compared to 2019 — as advanced economies have been attempting to transition to net-zero carbon footprints.
Another major factor are Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) investing incentives that have successfully pushed U.S. oil companies to restrict future production. ESG investing has increased dramatically the past decade via private retirement funds regulated under the Employment Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) thanks to a regulation by the Obama Labor Department in 2015.
Additionally, the $762 billion federal Thrift Savings Plan (TSP) for federal employee retirees began investing in ESG funds in 2022, following state government employee retirement funds in California, New York, Colorado, Connecticut, Maine, Maryland and Oregon.
A group of 19 Republican Attorneys General led by Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich and Nebraska Attorney General Doug Peterson have threatened the $10 trillion hedge fund BlackRock with antitrust legal action in an Aug. 4 letter to BlackRock CEO Larry Fink accusing the company of “intentionally restrain[ing] and harm[ing] the competitiveness of the energy markets” with its market dominance of retirement investments.
Brnovich and Peterson added, “coordinated conduct with other financial institutions to impose net-zero [carbon emissions by 2050] … raises antitrust concerns. Group boycotts, restraining trade, or concerted refusals to deal, ‘clearly run afoul of’ Section 1 of the Sherman Act [according to the Supreme Court]. Section 1 prohibits ‘[e]very … combination … , or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce.’ Regarding the definition of a ‘combination,’ the Supreme Court has held that this language prohibits ‘concerted action.’”
A follow-up letter has also been sent by the group of 19 Attorneys General to the Securities and Exchange Commission, declaring “BlackRock’s past public commitments indicate that it has used citizens’ assets to pressure companies to comply with international agreements such as the Paris Agreement that force the phase-out of fossil fuels, increase energy prices, drive inflation, and weaken the national security of the United States.”
These are two things that Biden had a lot of control over: Leases on federal lands are down and ESG retirement investment regulations have only been increased in his time in office, with both the Labor Department and the SEC institutionalizing ESG incentives rather than reducing them.
The idea is to reduce America’s carbon output. Biden has been telling the world we want less oil for years now. Now, with the global economy circling the drain into another recession he’s surprised that the global oil producers like Saudi Arabia are listening.
*********************************************************
Australian government betting nation's economic future on renewable energy delusion
You don’t have to be a climate sceptic to conclude that the government’s energy policy is bonkers. You just have to listen to the Energy Minister’s words. Last week, Chris Bowen outlined the challenge of meeting Labor’s 2030 emissions reduction target to a conference in Sydney. Reducing emissions by 43 per cent will require the installation of 40 seven-megawatt wind turbines every month from now until 2030, each one as tall as the Sydney Harbour Bridge. It will require more than 22,000 500-watt solar panels to be installed every day for the next eight years, 2.4 for every man, woman and child in total. New solar farms would cover an area dozens of times larger than the Melbourne CBD.
All this supposes we can buy the things in the first place. Polysilicon wafers are in short supply and 95 per cent come from China.
Let’s not even get started on the pink batts question. The rooftop solar installation business is plagued with the same shonky operators that turn up like wasps to a barbecue when subsidised, government mega-projects are announced.
Last month, the Clean Energy Regulator started investigations against a Perth company accused of fraudulently claiming $1.5m in solar panel installation rebates. NSW Fire and Rescue attended 151 solar panel fires in 2020-21, up from 56 in the previous year, faulty isolation switches being the main cause.
Jeff Dimery, the head of Alinta who has had somewhat more experience in the energy game than Bowen, says we’re on course for an energy transition “train wreck”.
“I personally don’t believe we can achieve the transition based on what we’re seeing to date,” Dimery told the AFR last week. “I think we’re headed for failure.”
Anthony Albanese was elected on a promise to cut household energy bills by $275 in his first term. A survey by Compass Polling last month found 70 per cent of Australians don’t believe him. Last week Australian Competition and Consumer Commission chair Gina Cass-Gottlieb told a parliamentary committee household energy bills had risen by $300 since April.
Dimery predicts energy costs will rise by at least 35 per cent in 2023. Jim Chalmers says energy is the most “problematic aspect of our inflation problem over the course of the next six or nine months”.
Yet Bowen stood as steady as the legless Black Knight in a Monty Python movie last week, refusing to budge. He told the conference that “getting more renewables in the system will mean lower power prices”. He added: “I don’t think that should be such a controversial statement in Australia in 2022.”
Bowen is betting the future of the economy on his counterintuitive assumption that a transition from hydrocarbons to solar, wind and batteries will bring the cost of energy down.
In every country that has gone down this path, the very opposite has occurred. Even before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, energy prices had risen between 60 per cent and 100 per cent in Britain and Germany since renewable investment began at the start of the century. In Australia, energy prices fell for 60 years until the start of the renewable era. Now they’re rising.
Bowen hasn’t said when the correlation between rising investment in weather-dependent zero-carbon energy and rising prices will start to reverse. He does, however, stand by the modelling he commissioned in opposition, which predicts that the average household energy bill will fall by $385 once we reach the magic 82 per cent renewables share in the energy grid in eight years’ time.
Rising electricity prices aren’t all bad news, according to Guardian Australia, which reported last week that sales of household solar arrays were through the roof. To illustrate what good news this supposedly is, the Guardian claimed rooftop solar supplied almost three-quarters of WA’s total energy demand on the weekend before last. Confirmation-biased reporting like this demands a little fact checking.
The Australian Energy Market Operator’s records show rooftop solar supplied 71 per cent of demand in WA at 12.30pm on Saturday, October 8. Between 6pm Saturday and 6am on Sunday, however, rooftop solar was supplying 0 per cent. During that period three-quarters of the power was supplied by coal and gas.
The answer to this little hiccup, as every Guardian Australia reader knows, is to install batteries, which, as every Guardian reader also knows, are getting cheaper by the minute.
The cost is falling so fast that electric cars and vans will be cheaper to buy than petrol or diesel vehicles by 2027, the newspaper reported in May last year. In February this year, however, economic reality reared its ugly head. “Gone ballistic” read the Guardian’s headline. “Lithium price rockets nearly 500% in a year amid electric vehicle rush.”
The cost of installing a Tesla Powerwall, a domestic energy storage unit the size of a fridge, has risen from less than $10,000 in 2017 to about $19,000 today.
None of this should surprise. Improved technology and manufacturing efficiency gains were only going to push battery prices downwards for so long. The International Energy Agency has analysed the cost of moving from a fuel-intensive energy system to a material-intensive one. Far from eliminating hydrocarbons, the IEA forecasts, the demand for minerals such as lithium, graphite, nickel, copper and rare earths will rise by 4200 per cent, 2500 per cent, 1900 per cent and 700 per cent respectively by 2040.
If nothing else destroys the delusion that renewable energy offers nothing but healing kindness to a desiccated planet, the rapacious hunger for minerals surely must. In an influential recent paper for the Manhattan Institute, Mark P. Mills predicts that meeting the world’s transition goals will require dozens of new mines for each of a dozen classes of minerals, each at the scale of some of the biggest mines in the world today and each requiring tens of billions of dollars of investment.
“The lessons of the recent decade make it clear that SWB (solar, wind, batteries) technologies cannot be surged in times of need, are neither inherently ‘clean’ nor even independent of hydrocarbons, and are not cheap,” Mills writes.
Having set Australia’s 2030 and 2050 emissions targets in stone, it falls on Bowen and Anthony Albanese to produce plan B. Assuming, of course, they have one.
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17 October, 2022
UK: No growth while Net Zero is in place
Energy costs will close two major ‘green’ manufacturing operations
* BMW is moving manufacturing of the electric Mini from the UK to China where manufacturing is powered by cheap coal.
* Britishvolt, a major battery manufacturing startup, is on the brink of collapse.
Both companies have cited high energy prices as the reason for their problems.
Claims that the UK’s economy will be based around ‘green industries’ are clearly false.
* Manufacturing of renewables and EVs will be built in places where energy is cheap, which means places where it is derived from fossil fuels.
* European wind turbine manufacturers are financially struggling and cutting jobs, losing market share to Chinese competitors benefiting from cheap coal.
* Net Zero is driving the wholesale deindustrialisation of Britain which threatens to make the UK uninvestable.
The economic crisis can only be solved by cheap energy
* There will be no economic growth without cheap energy.
* Cheap energy can only be delivered through increased supply of fossil fuels and nuclear, and elimination of renewables.
Net Zero plans must be cancelled as a matter of urgency.
Net Zero is unattainable and a danger to national well-being
Contact
Dr Benny Peiser
Director, Net Zero Watch
e: benny.peiser@netzerowatch.com
m: 07553 361717
https://mailchi.mp/42cab0fa853f/no-growth-while-net-zero-is-in-place-191899?e=cc88839e92
**************************************************Climate criminals
If an ordinary person walks up to a priceless work of art in a gallery and either glues themselves to the glass casing or throws food over it, they are arrested and fined – but if you vandalise art in the name of ‘climate’ you get to grace the headlines of the world’s Woke publications and bask in the gratitude of renewables barons and billionaire CEOs who stand to make a fortune from these childish antics.
Oh, and you might get a slap on the wrist if the cops manage to drag themselves away from policing wrong-think on social media.
When we say there is a ‘Culture War’ going on, conservatives didn’t realise that the physical treasures of Western culture would find themselves lobbed into the frenzy of misguided youth activism incited by communist lecturers still sore that their preferred ideology killed more people last century than Hitler.
It’s tricky, you see, to be a virtuous social warrior when the heroes of collectivism are all mass-murdering psychopaths. I imagine it’s also tough to reignite a Marxist revolution when the university-educated ‘working class’ use an underclass of UberEats drivers to summon their soy lattes, paid for by mummy’s credit card. They’re not exactly ‘workers’ so they’ve been re-imagined as terribly oppressed victims. There was nothing else left in Pandora’s Box of bad ideas.
Just Stop Oil – the group targeting art galleries – is a UK activist outfit founded in February of 2022 and funded largely by the American-based Climate Emergency Fund (CEF). There’s some heavy irony that the founder of CEF is quoted in a World Economic Forum article discussing the pressures of ‘climate anxiety’ – a phenomenon caused almost entirely by organisations telling children the world is going to end.
Groups like Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion, (and most of our politicians?) share cult-like doomsday rhetoric, quoting various ‘climate scientists’ who insist the world will either end or pass an irreversible moment of destruction in three or four years if we don’t agree to their demands. Conscripting impressionable young people into what amounts to a death cult used to be a matter for child protection services, now it forms the cornerstone of mainstream education.
There are thousands of these climate groups, continuously spawning and dying, shifting shells and shuffling their finances around – partly to hide the reality that their claims never come true, but also because it makes it more difficult to see who is behind them and how much money they are making from their ‘give us money or you’ll all die’ pleas.
The Christian Climate Action group assures us that the Just Stop Oil campaign is necessary. Oddly, their website is branded with the Extinction Rebellion logo topped by a cross – just as Rome is littered with Egyptian Obelisks with the same gesture.
‘Following our January gathering in Birmingham, and a recent zoom meeting with Roger Hallam, a growing number of people in CCA are feeling drawn to sign up for Just Stop Oil. The need for civil disobedience is greater than ever, as the world moves ever further towards climate disaster. Some have already signed up to take part in the action itself, others are acting in an admin / back office capacity, but whatever way you choose to be involved, please do consider carefully whether you can give your time and energy to this important campaign.’
Roger Hallam is the notorious co-founder of Extinction Rebellion.
‘Just Stop Oil is going to need lots of money,’ the website continues. ‘They are asking people to donate as much as they can.’
This is a religion and like all religions, it uses emotional manipulation as a means to convince people to hand over their money to the collective. Considering Just Stop Oil encourages people to commit crimes in the name of ‘activism’ – whether that be gluing their hands to artwork, holding up traffic, or interfering with the lives or ordinary people – one wonders why they are allowed to keep that money if it is in whole or part benefiting from criminal activity.
While many thousands of ordinary people are probably being fleeced of their cash based on some wishy-washy promise to ‘save the planet’, there are plenty of elite donors and philanthropists with green-shaped share portfolios that prop up these disruptive campaigns and ensure that the topic of ‘climate’ continues to rise to the top of the public conversation.
Those who stand to benefit from the sale of renewables technology, businessmen whose financial interests lay in the increased prices of minerals used in their production, CEOs who sell otherwise useless climate-stalking ideas (such as carbon credits and footprints), and banking interests who would love nothing more than to create a system of social punishment to ‘save the planet’ (and quietly control the behaviour of their customers) – are all lining the pockets of these rag-tag climate groups.
It’s time we look past the abuse of our children (who are told they will die if they don’t throw soup over a Van Gogh), and drag out the conspirators behind the curtain – the rich end of town that is using child soldiers to manipulate Western Civilisation onto a self-destructive path that uses our collective empathy against us.
While the kids think they are saving the planet, the businesses that fund them are tearing the planet apart. Renewables technology is driving the largest mining boom in human history while simultaneously robbing civilisation of reliable, affordable energy. The poorer we get, the more powerful and rich these CEOs become.
They are not saving the planet, they are buying it, one soup-splashed oil painting at a time.
Let’s pretend that we agree to the demands of Just Stop Oil. Most of these kids are vegans who like to eat a lot of food grown in different parts of the world. What do they imagine their avocados are going to look like after six months on a sailing ship? They aren’t ready for an oil-free world and I wager their masters have no intention of creating one.
https://spectator.com.au/2022/10/climate-criminals/ ?
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Western leaders must share the blame for the energy crisis
Since the beginning of the Ukraine war and the sanctions it triggered, energy prices have skyrocketed. Liz Truss has warned that soaring energy bills are a ‘price worth paying’ in order to stand up against Vladimir Putin. President Joe Biden has called this year’s rocketing bills ‘Putin’s price hike.’ Margrethe Vestager, vice president of the European Commission, has encouraged Europeans to take short, cold showers to conserve energy. ‘When you turn off the water, say ‘Take that, Putin!’’ she urged.
But are the high prices really Putin’s fault? He didn’t sanction himself, after all. It’s the West that chose to cut itself off from the Russian fossil fuels upon which it had come to rely. Moreover, the sanctions haven’t been an unqualified success — Russia’s corporate profits leapt 25 per cent between the imposition of the sanctions and the end of August.
So what are the origins of the current energy crisis? When did it really begin?
Let’s play a game. Guess which year these headlines are from: ‘Curtailed ammonia production in Antwerp and Ludwigshafen.’ ‘High natural gas prices lead to a shutdown of British fertiliser plants.’ ‘Diesel Shortage Amid Soaring Prices: Truck Stops Resort To Rationing.’ If you guessed 2022, you’d be wrong. Those are all from September 2021.
The truth is that the energy crisis began to take effect late last year. A combination of post-Covid demand rebound, a wind drought in Europe and depleted fossil fuel storage on the continent all collided to put serious pressure on the world’s industrial systems. Add the longstanding over investment in unreliable renewables, nuclear plant closures across the world in the wake of the Fukushima disaster and a global drop of more than 50 per cent in oil and gas investment — from $700 billion (£635 billion) to $300 billion (£270 billion) — between 2014 and last year, and you have everything you need to kick off a global energy crunch. Russian tank treads running from the Donbas to Kyiv just made it all worse.
When politicians point the finger at Putin, they’re deflecting from their own failures. It’s hard to blame them, especially if they’re European. Aluminium smelters in the EU have had to shutter operations, as have fertiliser plants, glass factories and various other manufacturers. Germany, the continent’s largest economy, is about to lose much of its manufacturing base to high energy prices. Industry and union leaders have been sounding the alarm for months, warning that Germany’s manufacturing sector could collapse without sufficient energy. And it’s not even clear Germany’s better-than-expected storage numbers are enough to get them through the winter without any flows from Russia.
Meanwhile, in the UK, the number of people behind on their utility bills mushroomed from three million to nearly 11 million between March and August. Eleven per cent of the British population — nearly six million people — are already forgoing food to pay their energy bills. Would you want to be on the hook for any of this? It’s way easier to blame the evil Russian guy.
Don’t be fooled into thinking America is immune from the crisis. Sure, the US has incredible domestic resources, but the country is also moving in the European direction. Over the last few years, America has shut down nuclear plants before their time, including Palisades in Michigan and Indian Point in New York. The fossil-fuel industry isn’t interested in risking capital on expansion when the Democrats continue to sabre-rattle about destroying it. Not since Truman has a president leased so few federal lands to the oil and gas sector. To make matters worse, most of the new capacity being added to the grid is intermittent and unreliable wind and solar.
The result of all this? America’s energy and electricity sectors look anaemic, fragile and expensive. Over the summer, the National Energy Assistance Directors Association reported that about 20 million households in the United States — one out of six homes — are behind on their utility bills. Some parts of the country have seen electricity prices increase by 233 per cent since last year.
The North American Electricity Reliability Corporation has warned that a huge swath of the country is becoming increasingly vulnerable to blackouts. In August, a heatwave pushed the Texas grid to new demand limits for a week straight. The next month, the California grid operator had to beg consumers to consume less juice to avoid rolling blackouts. And don’t forget New England. Despite its proximity to the Marcellus Shale Formation in the mid-Atlantic states, the region lacks the pipeline infrastructure to import natural gas from it. The Jones Act, which bars foreign-owned vessels from delivering goods between US ports, has also hamstrung the region. New England’s liquefied natural gas, or LNG, import terminals cannot receive from the Gulf of Mexico’s LNG export terminals because while the United States produces the most LNG in the world, it does not make LNG tankers. So New Englanders will have to compete with Europe and Asia for pricey LNG to light and heat their homes this winter. That’ll be painful: natural gas is 53 per cent of the New England grid’s resource mix.
But America doesn’t have to follow in Europe’s footsteps. Rather than doubling down on the ‘energy transition,’ America should desensitise itself to the sobering truths of external events and commit to energy realism. After all, energy is indispensable to maintaining the economy. So, what would a more realistic energy policy look like?
First, we need more hydrocarbons. Fossil fuels are the master resource, like it or not. Everything that could possibly move us away from fossil fuels in the long run will need cheap fossil fuels for their construction in the near and medium term: from nuclear power plants to battery storage. We need to cut the red tape on permitting to fast-track more pipeline construction. We should also eliminate all carbon taxes, which increase our energy costs. And we must lease more federal land to the fossil-fuel industry. Eliminating the Renewable Fuel Standard, which has turned into an expensive financial boondoggle the burden of which companies pass onto consumers, wouldn’t hurt either.
Second, we need to liberate the atom. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has adopted safety standards so extreme that no design offered since its inception in the mid-Seventies has ever been completed. Its chosen radiation safety standard — ‘As Low As Reasonably Achievable’ — relies on an incoherent measurement of radiation dosage and creates too much opportunity for regulatory activism. And the NRC’s approval process takes too long. The agency needs to be reworked so that its standards are fewer and clearer and its approval processes faster and cheaper.
Third, we need to harden our grid. Wind and solar, when built in large amounts, have a free ride on the reliable power plants that can be called on at will to ensure the grid keeps running. They also tend to stop producing power when they’re needed most. According to the Energy Information Administration, when California was on the brink of blackouts, solar and wind production plummeted. Natural gas stepped in to save the day, making up more than 50 per cent of the resource mix after sundown. The fastest way to curb their growth and spare the grid more entropy would be to eliminate all production tax credits for wind and solar in perpetuity. That removes the incentive for overbuilding and spares electricity markets the subsidised negative prices that push reliable power plants off the grid.
Of course, embarking on this plan will mean taking on the environmental establishment, which views anything outside of renewable energy as an existential threat to mankind. But the choice should be obvious: one road leads toward liberty and abundance, another leads toward tyranny and austerity. We can live in a country where bureaucrats decide when we get to run our washers and dryers to spare our poorly managed infrastructure, or one where we can enjoy the freedom to pursue our own interests. We’re years down the road of the former, and the Inflation Reduction Act won’t help: it makes us even more dependent on unreliable electricity from wind and solar, increases taxes on oil and gas, gives the EPA nearly limitless power to curb fossil-fuel use and utterly fails to decriminalise nuclear. But it’s not too late to correct course.
During the energy crises of the 1970s, Amory Lovins, godfather of the renewable energy ideology, also invoked a choice between two energy paths: the ‘hard’ path of large power plants or the ‘soft’ one of wind, solar and biomass. He premised his vision on a misreading of Robert Frost’s poem, ‘The Road Not Taken.’
In the poem, the paths present no real difference. Only in hindsight, as a post-hoc rationalisation, does the illusion of choice appear. The speaker of the poem flatters himself by pretending he ‘took the one less traveled by.’ Lovins was a bad reader and a poor thinker — he also consulted on Germany’s Energiewende, its ‘turnaround’ to renewable low-carbon energy production. European leaders, and later American ones — not Putin — have chosen the soft path and volunteered for disaster. And that has made all the difference.
https://spectator.com.au/2022/10/western-leaders-must-share-the-blame-for-the-energy-crisis/
*******************************************Banks Try Quiet Quitting on Net Zero
For some bankers, net-zero is like a new year’s resolution—a pledge one makes and often breaks before a year has passed.
Several of the largest banks, including JPMorgan, Bank of America, and Morgan Stanley, headed into the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) as members of the world’s biggest zero-carbon finance club. Their membership in the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ), a group of roughly 500 financial sector entities, publicly committed their banks to reach net-zero carbon emissions by midcentury.
By September they were among a faction ready to quit, according to sources familiar with the matter. JPMorgan, Bank of America, and Morgan Stanley declined to comment.
A year on from COP26, some big banks seem worried they jumped on the bandwagon too soon, especially as oil and gas companies have experienced a market resurgence. What makes the prospect of net-zero—or at least the vow to come up with near-term benchmarks toward that goal—such an anxiety-provoking proposition?
The revived fortunes of fossil fuels, especially coal, may explain some of the weakened resolve for decarbonization. Global bank lending to fossil fuel companies is up 15%, to over $300 billion, in the first nine months of this year, from the same period in 2021, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
This is Wall Street just doing its job: making money. Banks earned more than $1 billion in revenue from fossil lending during the first three quarters, in line with 2021. Why quit business with a booming sector over a distant climate goal?
Harald Walkate, the former head of environmental, social, and governance investing at Natixis Investment Managers and now a sustainable finance consultant, says some banks may feel their hands are tied as their fiduciary duty requires them to maximize financial value for clients.
“While from an ethical or ideological perspective many people might not like the idea of investing in fossil fuels, it’s certainly not illegal,” he says. “And it may in fact be very good business for some time to come.”
GFANZ members voluntarily pledged to completely negate greenhouse gas emissions from their balance sheets by 2050. Some banks may have felt peer pressure to join GFANZ last year, perhaps swayed by its co-chair, former Bank of England Governor Mark Carney. But no one forced them into it. (GFANZ is co-chaired by Michael Bloomberg, the founder of Bloomberg Green parent Bloomberg LP.)
Banks may not have originally understood the full litigation risks tied to signing net-zero commitments. DLA Piper is among the law firms saying any company making a net-zero claim without scientific underpinnings may be viewed as having misled consumers.
On this issue, banks were irked when a United Nations-backed group known as Race to Zero earlier this year proposed binding restrictions on fossil-fuel finance as a necessary condition for net-zero claims to be credible. GFANZ’s affiliation with Race to Zero started before COP26 as a way to boost its credibility, but this relationship now “looks like it will soon snap,” says Ben Caldecott, director of the Oxford Sustainable Finance Group.
In a statement sent to Bloomberg News in early October, GFANZ said each of its sub-alliances are “subject only to their own governance structures,” essentially giving GFANZ members freedom to ignore Race to Zero’s proposals. GFANZ also said the group has “received no indication from any of our members that they intend to leave.”
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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16 October, 2022
Army’s Misplaced Priorities: Recruitment Shortfall More Problematic Than Climate Change
The word “incongruous” immediately came to mind last week when two news headlines appeared at about the same time concerning the U.S. Army.
The Army Times last week reported that at the end of fiscal year 2022 (on Sept. 30), the Army came up 20,000 soldiers short of its authorized end strength.
The Army was authorized to have a strength of 485,000 active-duty soldiers in 2022, but because of severe recruiting challenges, instead ended the year at 465,600. This is a bona fide crisis because a shortfall like this has never been seen in the modern Army, and if it continues, it will result in a greatly diminished force.
Similar challenges are being seen in the Army National Guard and Army Reserve.
The second news headline, appearing that same day, trumpeted the news of the Army releasing its new implementation plan for its climate strategy. Declaring climate change an “immediate and serious threat to U.S. national security,” the 50-page plan detailed all the methods the Army will use to fight climate change, including the application of hundreds of millions of dollars to build microgrids, greenhouse gas-free power plants, and fielding a 100% zero-emission nontactical vehicle fleet by 2027.
Reinforcing the message, Army leaders simultaneously appeared at a think tank event to herald the wisdom of the climate plan.
The same week that the Army fails to achieve its recruiting goal—a direct measure of its health—it released a major news announcement trumpeting the release of its climate change remediation plan. The climate plan, clearly the result of months of arduous work, represents an incredible amount of organizational effort.
That’s effort that to an outside observer seemingly should have been first applied to its current recruiting crisis, as opposed to the direction to establish climate-related training programs, mandates to use only sustainable building materials, and experiments to make tactical vehicles (howitzers and armored personnel carriers) all electric.
Perhaps we should take comfort in the knowledge that while the Army plummets in size and capacity, what is left will at least be producing less carbon dioxide.
Granted, the individuals who produce “climate change implementation plans” are not the same ones who would develop strategies and plans to turn around dwindling recruiting numbers. But planners are planners, and the skills they use to write a climate change plan could reasonably be applied to the recruiting crisis.
It’s about priorities. It’s also about optics. A popular saying nowadays is “read the room.” That doesn’t seem to be happening.
At the time when the Army most needs the support of the nation to persuade young people to join its ranks, it is busy releasing climate strategies. What message does that send?
While the Army didn’t have any choice whether to produce a climate plan (it was required by President Joe Biden’s executive order), the contents of the plan are the Army’s, and some reflect a prioritization of climate ideology over warfighting skills.
The Army’s plan, among other things, contains the requirement to modify unit designs to account for soldiers and civilians that hold “approved climate credentials.”
There is direction to incorporate climate change into “strategic and operational-level wargame and exercise designs.” And the most damning of all is a requirement to “ … produce a digital handbook of potential unit-level collective training modifications that would reduce direct Army [greenhouse gas] emissions.”
Reading between the lines, the Army is considering modifying its unit training programs to reduce greenhouse gases.
A changing climate has always been a challenge the military has had to confront in planning and carrying out its mission. But a consistent failure by the Army to meet its recruiting targets carries dire national security consequences—not sometime in the distant future, but today.
Building a strong national defense is a deadly serious endeavor, one that demands a narrow focus on a few key priorities. That appeared to be missing last week.
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UK Climate Minister Pulls Out of Event with Climate Science Deniers
The truth can sometimes be deeply unfashionable
The UK’s new climate minister has pulled out of an event hosting two of the world’s most prominent climate science deniers, DeSmog can reveal.
Graham Stuart MP was listed as a keynote speaker on Tuesday at the four-day Global Investment in Sustainable Development conference in London, hosted by the CC Forum, a company which touts itself as the “green Davos”.
His speech would have been followed by a debate about global warming featuring Lord Christopher Monckton, who has a history of promoting climate science denial, and Marc Morano, a prominent U.S. climate science denial activist.
However, when contacted by DeSmog, the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) said Stuart would no longer be attending the event, and that he was not told who else would be on the bill when he agreed to speak.
The reason for his cancelling was not immediately clear. While BEIS referred to other speakers, conference organisers said Stuart’s team had cited “unforeseen urgent government business” for his decision to withdraw. Stuart did not respond when contacted for comment.
Prime Minister Liz Truss is facing criticism over her support for new fossil fuel projects, including fracking, and plans to block solar farms and scrap environmental protections.
Stuart defended the government’s support for almost 100 new licences for oil and gas drilling this week, telling a panel of MPs that domestic production is “good for the environment” because it creates fewer emissions than importing oil and gas.
“This government, which still holds the COP Presidency, continues to share the stage with individuals and organisations that are undermining national and global attempts to tackle the climate crisis, despite UK citizens being shown to be committed to more urgent action”, Green Party co-leader Carla Denyer told DeSmog.
“We’ve had the Business Secretary Jacob Rees-Mogg opening up the North Sea to further exploration by fossil fuel corporations and now the Minister supposedly appointed to counter Rees-Mogg’s climate scepticism speaking at a conference that is welcoming climate sceptics.
“We need a government that understands the actions needed to reach net zero.”
The minister’s speech at the CC Forum event was to be followed by a “VIP Networking Lunch”, and then a debate titled “Is Global Warming the World’s Most Pressing Problem?”, according to the online programme.
The debate will feature Marc Morano, an American activist who Greenpeace once dubbed a “central cell of the climate denial machine”, and Lord Christopher Monckton, a former advisor to Margaret Thatcher, who in 2010 led Tea Party crowds in the U.S. in a call and response chant of “Global warming is?”, with the crowd shouting “Bullshit!”.
Morano runs the climate science denial website Climate Depot and the think tank CFACT, which has received funding from Exxon Mobil and Chevron.
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Cutting back the development of oil and resources in the name of addressing climate change concerns is getting energy backward, according to J.P. Morgan bank CEO Jamie Dimon
“Well, I think we’re getting energy completely wrong, which is, you know, ever since the war started, we’ve known that Europe is going to have a problem and that it was pretty predictable that Putin was going to cut off some gas and certain oil, and oil prices go up,” he said in an interview released Tuesday.
“And by the way, for the climate folks here, it’s made the climate worse, because people had this bad assumption that high oil prices and gas prices reduce consumption, reduce CO2. No. Poor nations, India, China, Indonesia, Philippines, Vietnam, are turning back on coal plants, as are rich nations called Germany, Netherlands, France,” he said.
“We have it completely backwards,” he continued.
“In my view, America should have been pumping more oil and gas, and it should have been supported. You know, we’re trying to have our cake and eat it too.”
During the interview with CNBC, he said, “America needs to play a real leadership role. America is the swing producer, not Saudi Arabia. We should have gotten that right starting in March.”
“It’s almost too late to get it right because obviously, this is a longer-term investment,” he said.
Dimon said short-term shortages linked to the war in Ukraine can be overcome.
“But we have a longer-term problem now, which is the world is not producing enough oil and gas to reduce coal, make the transition [to green energy], create security for people,” he said.
“I would put it in the critical category. This should be treated almost as a matter of war at this point, nothing short of that.”
Dimon spoke of the volatile times in which the world tries to function. “Don’t be surprised. Like, I was not surprised at Nord Stream One being blown up,” he said, suggesting tankers could be blown up if they are “in the wrong place.”
During the interview, Dimon touched on the Russian invasion of Ukraine and said, “It’s Pearl Harbor, it’s Czechoslovakia, and it’s really an attack on the Western world.”
“It’s a chance for the Western work to get its act together,” he said. “You know, the autocratic world thinks that the Western world is a little lazy and incompetent — and there’s a little bit of truth to that. This is the chance to get our act together and to solidify the Western, free, democratic, capitalist, free people, free movements, freedom of speech, free religion for the next century,” he added.
“Because if we don’t get this one right, that kind of chaos you can see around the world for the next 50 years.”
Last month, Dimon told a congressional panel the bank will not embrace a ban on investing in oil and gas development, according to Forbes. “Absolutely not, and that would be the road to hell for America,” he said.
“We are not getting this right,” Dimon continued. “The world needs effectively 100 million barrels of oil and gas every day, and we need it for 10 years. To do that, we need proper investing in the oil and gas complex.
“Investing in the oil and gas complex is good for reducing CO2, because as we have all seen, because of the high price of oil and gas, particularly for the rest of the world, you’ve seen everyone going back to coal. Not just poor nations like India, Indonesia and Vietnam, but wealthy nations like Germany, France and the Netherlands,” he said.
In August, Dimon tried to state his case that addressing climate concerns and developing oil and gas projects are not mutually exclusive, according to Yahoo.
“We should focus on climate. The problem with that is because of high oil and gas prices, the world is turning back on their coal plants. It is dirtier,” Dimon said.
“Why can’t we get it through our thick skulls, that if you want to solve climate [change], it is not against climate [change] for America to boost more oil and gas?” he said.
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The green investments that threaten Australia's future with their failures
Investments with essentially no return. A system of windmills and solar panels has added nothing to the good electricity availablity that we already had: A vast investment that has done nothing to improve our lives
Productivity growth is the key to income growth – we can’t have the latter without the former. A matter that has troubled many economists in the Western world during recent decades is a slowdown in productivity growth.
Australia is typical. Multi-factor productivity – the overall return on labour and capital inputs combined – has been growing at only 0.3 per cent per year in recent years, while the more commonly understood, labour productivity, has also seen growth at only 0.9 per cent a year. These are half the levels seen in the 1990s.
That slowdown is less evident in many countries that are nowadays referred to as ‘developing’. Some such countries that had been lagging behind Western world living standards for centuries started to catch up once their governments stood back from directly controlling their economies and created the conditions for individuals to accumulate savings and to invest these with much reduced fears of expropriation.
First, beginning in the 1960s, we saw the so-called Asian Tigers – Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Korea – start to emerge as industrial powerhouses; these countries now have income levels that surpass those of most developed western economies. This was followed by phenomenal growth rates achieved by China; in more recent years we’ve seen India, Vietnam, Indonesia, and even some African countries starting to show high levels of economic growth.
In contrast to the liberalisation and lessening of investment constraints and regulations that powered those nations’ growths, most western economies have imposed increasing layers of regulation on investment opportunities. These measures have forced down investment returns through requiring additional spending on environmental, heritage, and social matters – including the preparation of lengthy reports – and lengthening the approval time required to operationalise an initial idea.
For Australia, the slowdown in per capita growth has taken place notwithstanding increases in investment. Per capita annual real capital expenditure is currently 50 per cent higher than in the late 1980s.
But much of the investment in recent years is simply in dead-weight assets like the many idle desalinisation plants that have been constructed around Australia, plants that owe nothing to commercial decisions.
For the rest, increasing red tape reduces the efficiency – the payoff – of nearly all investment. And using subsidies to force funds into particular venues can lead the investment to have a negative effect by destroying the productive capabilities of other investment. This can be seen with new investment in electricity, which dominate the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS)category: ‘electricity gas, water, and waste services’. The category comprises about six per cent of Australia’s total new investment the bulk of which is for weather-dependent wind and solar and for the increased transmission, batteries, and pumped hydro necessary to support these generation sources.
This expenditure would not take place without subsidies either from government directly, or from regulatory measures that pass the costs of transmission and wind/solar onto consumers. In favouring these intrinsically high-cost forms of electricity, the subsidies force out of the market lower cost and more reliable forms, especially coal generators that comprise 60-70 per cent of supply. This has resulted in overall generation costs trebling and in measures to facilitate wind/solar that include replacing the present transmission system, valued at some $21 billion, with one at a cost that the government says will be $80 billion.
Regulations and direct subsidies to wind/solar have already forced the closure of coal generation capacity and the number of coal generating units in Australia is expected to be half their level of 10 years ago by 2025. On top of this is the Queensland Government’s radical plan to replace all its coal stations by wind/solar and two mythical pumped hydro schemes.
In measuring new capacity from investments, the ABS assumes its returns are constant and invariant to time, and ‘a change in the quantity of capital services delivered from any given capital asset is tantamount to a change in its productive capital stock’.
The sad fact is that certain investments, especially those taken for political purposes, yield no return at all and others are akin to investing in computer viruses that actually destroy value and cause considerable extra expenditures in attempts to offset the detrimental effects of the malware.
Subsidised expenditures in weather-dependent renewable facilities, rather than constituting investments, are parasitic outlays that destroy genuine income-producing assets.
https://spectator.com.au/2022/10/dead-weight-drowning-productivity/
***************************************14 October, 2022
Europe hopes Finland’s new reactor will hail a golden atomic age
If the human race is still around tens of thousands of years from now, our distant descendants may come across a small island off the west coast of Finland, and on it they would find the walled-up entrance to a tomb beneath a grassy hillock.
Behind a thick layer of rubble, a tunnel will snake down three miles through the bedrock to a 50-mile warren of high-ceilinged artificial caves, with tunnels branching off into burial chambers that hold one of the most dangerous substances known to humanity.
This is the Onkalo spent nuclear fuel repository, the world’s first deep geological repository for atomic waste, designed to keep nearly 3,000 24-tonne canisters of spent uranium fuel locked safely away for the next 100,000 years.
Described as a “game-changer” by the International Atomic Energy Agency, the global nuclear regulator, it finally offers an answer to a problem that has bedevilled the sector from its beginnings: what to do with chemicals that will continue leaking heat and radiation for at least as long a period as our species has been farming and building settlements?
It sounds simple enough. At present there are about a quarter of a million tonnes of radioactive waste on the planet, just about enough to fill a single very large oil tanker. It is currently either reprocessed or contained underwater in lead caskets known as “bottles” that are kept at interim storage sites next to atomic facilities round the world.
This works for the time being. Yet these installations require constant monitoring and security measures, which are not only expensive but may also ultimately be unsustainable in the event of some kind of civilisational breakdown.
In the Sixties and Seventies most states reached a consensus that the only truly viable solution for the long term was to bury the waste deep underground.
That is not as easy as it might appear. In 1967 the West German government began sealing up 127,000 drums of low and medium-level radioactive material in an old salt mine beneath the hills at Gorleben, close to the East German border.
Over time, however, the authorities realised the salt dome was gradually collapsing at a rate of 15cm a year, raising the risk that the bunker would become flooded and some of the waste would escape into the groundwater. Last year they decided to close the facility and backfill the mine with spoil.
Geology is not the only challenge. In the 2000s the US tried to establish its own deep storage facility below Yucca Mountain in Nevada, only to run up against strident opposition from local communities. The project was effectively shut down by the Trump administration in 2017.
Where America and Germany failed, Finland has succeeded. It began looking for a site in the 1980s, shortly after its first reactors came online at Loviisa, a town on its south coast, and Olkiluoto island in the west.
Unlike in the US, Britain and Germany, where winning consent for this kind of thing has proved tricky, both of the Finnish local authorities competed for the right to host the repository. They had learnt to trust nuclear power and to appreciate the substantial income and property tax revenues that came with the facilities. The most recent polling suggests 70 per cent of Finns support atomic energy, with only 11 per cent opposed, compared with 39 per cent of Britons who are in favour and 17 per cent who are against it.
“People [in other countries] are asking the same questions that we were asking in Finland 20 to 30 years ago,” said Pasi Tuohimaa, a spokesman for the Onkalo repository on Olkiluoto. “Maybe this is because we are very practical and people of our generation think that if we need something we’re not going to leave it for the solidarity of future generations to deal with. This is very widely accepted in Finland.” [...]
Yet the EPR has at times been in serious danger of turning into a white elephant. Both prototypes in Europe, at Olkiluoto and Flamanville in France, have run gravely behind schedule and over budget, with the cost of the Finnish reactor ballooning from €3.7 billion to €8 billion. In the end China stole a march on the Europeans, opening the first two operational EPR plants at Taishan on its south coast in 2018 and 2019 respectively.
Olkiluoto 3 is at last ready to go, pending the results of tests to determine whether it can be hooked up permanently to the Finnish electricity grid without causing instability. When The Times visited last week, it was plugged in and supplying about 16 per cent of Finland’s total power requirements. It should be fully online before Christmas, generating enough electricity for a million people and presenting a heartening light at the end of the long tunnel for Hinkley Point C. Even the press in Germany, where nuclear scepticism dies hard, has taken to calling Olkiluoto 3 the “reactor of hope”.
Yet Finland, like Britain, believes the long-term future of nuclear power is not so much behemoths like Olkiluoto 3 as small modular reactors (SMRs), which would have only a third of its capacity but could theoretically be built much more cheaply and swiftly, and close enough to large population centres to provide heat as well as power. The SMR division of Rolls-Royce, which hopes to be at the forefront of the technology, is understood to be on the point of opening a Finnish branch.
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Yet again, IPCC’s climate math doesn’t check out
Don’t let anyone tell you 'the science' demands we simply accept the increasingly lethal climate policy agenda
The high and rising costs of climate policy — now including the inability of jurisdictions that bet big on renewables to guarantee enough energy for their citizens to survive the coming winter — don’t just entitle us to question the basis for it: they demand we do so.
Ultimately, the justification for renewables is the view that carbon dioxide emissions have a big effect on the climate that will cause devastating harm at some point in the future. Scientists measure the effect using a concept called “Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity” or ECS, which estimates how much long-run average warming will occur as a result of doubling the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Some important new evidence pointing to a low ECS value just emerged in the scientific literature.
ECS has long been uncertain. In 1979 the U.S. National Academy of Sciences estimated it to be between 1.5 and 4.5 degrees Celsius, with a best estimate of 3.0 degrees C. That range, which runs from “no big deal” to “very bad outcomes,” was accepted by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its first report in 1990 and thereafter until 2007 when, citing greater warming projections in newer models, it raised the bottom end to 2.0 degrees C.
But over the next few years a literature developed using, not model simulations, but observed warming rates since the late-1800s to estimate ECS. Its results typically centred around 2.0 C or less. So in 2013 the IPCC reduced the bottom end of the range back to 1.5 C and declined to offer a best estimate. In other words, after three decades climate science hadn’t narrowed the uncertainty at all.
The economic implications of ECS being 2 C rather than 3 C are enormous. Economic models used by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and others assume ECS is 3 C when computing the social cost of carbon. Some co-authors and I have shown that if the ECS parameter is instead centred around 2 C, the estimated social cost of carbon plummets and becomes very small at least through the middle of this century. The justification for costly climate policy essentially disappears.
Given the discrepancy between models and observations, the IPCC changed the way it handled the ECS issue in its latest (2021) report. It no longer relied on model estimates, but neither did it go with the existing estimates in the empirical literature. Instead it turned to a 2020 paper by Australian climate scientist Steven Sherwood and 10 co-authors, who used a new technique to combine data from modern climate change with that from the end of the last ice age and even further back. They concluded the likely sensitivity range was from 2.6 to 3.9 C. On this basis the IPCC revised its estimate of the likely ECS range to between 2.5 and 4.0 C with a best estimate of 3.1 C. And it specifically ruled out ECS being less than 2.0 C.
But as so often happens when a new paper appears in the literature that solves a political problem for the IPCC, they pounce on it before experts in the field have had a chance to check the numbers — which is what a new paper in the peer-reviewed journal Climate Dynamics by U.K. mathematician Nicholas Lewis does.
Lewis shows that the Sherwood paper made some mathematical errors and also relied on outdated data. Interestingly, many of the data updates were done by the IPCC itself in other parts of its 2021 report but weren’t applied in the Sherwood study. Other data updates were done in the wider peer-reviewed literature by specialists in the field.
Lewis shows that correcting the math actually increases the sensitivity estimate slightly. But updating the data does the opposite: the ECS best estimate drops to 2.2 C with a likely range from 1.8 to 2.7 C. And if the analysis focuses only on the period after 1870 (recognizing that most of the world has little or no reliable temperature data prior to that) the best estimate drops even more: to 1.8 C. In other words, with updated data the Sherwood paper would largely confirm the empirical literature the IPCC had passed over.
This is a big deal. But amid the nonstop stream of climate news you won’t hear about it: the world’s climate journalists aren’t trained to follow important topics like this — though that never stops them from lecturing their readers, viewers and listeners about what to think about climate science.
It will be five years or more before the IPCC issues a new report. If history is any guide, months before that a group of authors heavily involved in the report-writing process will rush a paper into print that drags ECS back up to the 3 C range just long enough for the new IPCC Summary for Policymakers to declare the same old best estimate. But reality keeps pointing to lower values.
Don’t let anyone tell you “the science” demands we simply accept the increasingly lethal climate policy agenda. It would fail a cost-benefit test even if ECS were 3 degrees C. But it’s even less justified with an ECS of 2 degrees C, which is the level the evidence seems to insist on.
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Church of England’s net-zero plan in peril due to high costs
Churches are installing new gas and oil boilers because environmentally friendly ones are too expensive, putting their net zero plan at risk.
In February 2020, the General Synod, the Church of England’s legislative body, voted in favour of setting a target for the institution to achieve carbon neutrality by 2030.
Following the vote, guidance was issued to churches telling them to switch from fossil fuel boilers to more environmentally friendly alternatives and to only install gas ones “if there is no alternative”.
However, green heating systems such as electric boilers or heat pumps are either too expensive for parish churches, which are buckling under financial pressure, or they cannot be fitted in historic buildings.
The findings have been revealed in an analysis of church court rulings and comments made by ecclesiastical judges, one of whom warned that this “is likely to lead to the 2030 target being missed”.
The analysis of Consistory Court rulings since the 2020 target, carried out by The Times, showed that that permission has been granted in 90 per cent of cases for parish churches to install new fossil-fuelled boilers instead of environmentally friendly alternatives.
‘No green options at a reasonable cost’
Among the rulings detailing this issue is the church of St Mary the Virgin in Welling, London, which asked to install a new gas boiler.
Philip Petchey, the church judge, said last month that there was “not a green option at a reasonable cost”. “If churches do not begin to take steps now [it] will not be achieved within the eight years remaining.”
St Mary’s in Oxted, Surrey, requested permission to install a new gas boiler last February. The ruling noted that the gas boiler would cost £1,800 per year, and the electric one £8,000 per year.
Judge Petchey, who also presided over this case, warned: “It does seem that, absent new technology coming to the rescue … a whole series of decisions like the present case is likely to lead to the 2030 target being missed.”
Also last February, St John the Evangelist in Donisthorpe, Leicestershire, asked to install a new oil boiler, having already looked into heat pumps and biomass boilers.
Lyndsey de Mestre KC, the church judge, ruled: “It is cost that has forced [their] hand… The use of an oil-fired boiler is not a zero-carbon heating system in line with [the church’s] commitment [to hit net zero]. It is, however, the only feasible and affordable outcome for this parish.”
The church of St Thomas and St Luke in Dudley, West Midlands, was allowed two new gas boilers last May. Granting permission, Jacqueline Humphreys said: “I know I am not the only chancellor faced with the difficult decision whether or not to permit the introduction of new heating systems that … do not accord with the objective of achieving net zero carbon by 2030.”
In only one case over the period - that of Christ Church in Dore, Sheffield - was a parish told to reconsider “fully the alternatives to the use of fossil fuel”.
The analysis comes just months after the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, the leaders of the Church of England, admitted that they “got it wrong” by not prioritising rural parishes over city churches.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/10/10/church-englands-net-zero-plan-peril-due-high-costs/
****************************************************Coal and gas are still Australia's economic saviours
With Australia in desperate need of economic golden eggs as we struggle with a massive debt burden and face a possible world recession, they’re trying harder than ever to kill the goose that is laying them. The huge $50 billion slash in the 2021-22 budget deficit, cutting it by two-thirds from $80 billion to $32 billion, largely resulted from record company tax collections of $126 billion. These were driven up by our highest-ever resources and energy exports of $421 billion, led by the condemned-to-death fossil fuels of coal, oil and LNG which together made up almost half the total. And in the current 2022-23 financial year, the golden eggs will be even richer as resources and energy exports are officially forecast to reach even higher to $450 billion as coal export revenues surge to $120 billion to exceed iron ore.
But governmental net-zero targets, investment bans by woke climate-catastrophe-obsessed boards of directors and super funds, a court system happy to be the plaything of climate-activist lawfare that has made Australia the world’s most litigious developed nation for mining projects, have all combined to bring the campaign against fossil fuels – and thereby against Australia’s historic dependence on reliable cheap energy and status as an exporter – to a serious tipping point.
Unless there is a truce in this war against fossil fuels, the current financial year will be the last time they will be capable of coming so significantly to our economic rescue. Already, next year’s official forecasts of an expected decline in the Ukraine war’s high commodity prices, of a Western world economic slowdown and for its rush to renewables (as self-destructive emissions targets are imposed), are together likely to result in a cut in our fossil fuel export revenue by almost a quarter in 2023-24. This, along with Australia’s deliberate official obstructionism to fossil fuel investment, particularly in coal, will all combine to kill off this economic lifeline whose current significance has been deliberately downplayed by those seeking environmental purity.
So while this year’s forecast iron ore exports at $119 billion takes the headlines, the fossil fuels of metallurgical coal at $58 billion, thermal coal at $62 billion, natural gas at $90 billion and oil at $15 billion are together officially forecast to be almost twice as big as iron ore’s export earnings this financial year and to make up, at $225 billion, half of Australia’s total minerals and resources export revenue. While, on their own, coal exports are earning more than iron ore, so effective has the campaign been against coal that not even the organisation that is supposed to represent it, the Minerals Council of Australia, was prepared to acknowledge coal’s primary role when it issued a press release last week welcoming the latest official resources and energy forecasts by the Department of Industry, Science and Resources, ‘as a strong reminder of the of the economic benefits delivered by the mining industry’.
In noting the forecast that Australia’s resource and energy export earnings will reach a record $450 billion in the current financial year , the MCA correctly asserted that, ‘Australia is only in a position to take advantage of these [high international] prices due to increased production across a range of commodities. In the last decade, over $250 billion of investment in new mines, processing equipment and infrastructure has resulted in Australia’s bauxite mining increasing 41 per cent, iron ore production increasing 84 per cent and lithium output rising nearly 400 per cent’.
Not a word about the biggest single revenue earner, coal, which became the mineral that MCA pretends does not exist ever since an emissions-obsessed BHP threatened to quit the MCA if it continued to lobby for coal; note the absence of coal in MCA press releases in recent years.
But when MCA campaigns against pressure for rises in mining taxes and royalties, as it has this month, by boasting of mining’s record $43 billion contribution made to the Australian economy in 2020-21 (with 2021-22 sure to be even considerably larger), coal’s existence is re-discovered and its multi-billion-dollar share is included – without acknowledgement. And by asserting that the effective tax rate on Australian mining investment is already high relative to many jurisdictions in other mining countries, it reminds governments that while Australia needs to attract more investment in mining (but you must not mention coal!) in order to benefit from growing international demand, there is strong competition for investment from other mining countries.
However, at least coal has proselytisers on a state basis. As Stephen Galilee, CEO of the NSW Minerals Council pointedly told me, ‘Some people want to ignore the fact that our coal sector even exists This is despite coal continuing to be NSW’s most valuable export commodity, worth around $22.6 billion in exports, and delivering a record $4 billion in royalties to the NSW government this year alone’.
But what of the future, given the high demand for NSW coal that Galilee claims is some of the highest quality available anywhere in the world, producing more energy with less emissions than coal from elsewhere? ‘There are currently 17 potential coal-mining proposals in the planning and development pipeline in NSW representing a further $4.6 billion investment.’ But nearly all are proposals to expand or extend operational lives of NSW’s forty existing coal mines; greenfield projects face too many hurdles.
The same goes for Queensland, where my old parliamentary colleague Ian Macfarlane who runs the Queensland Resources Council, said the latest official forecasts ‘reinforce the significance of the resources industry to the budget bottom line. Coal exports underpin both the Australian and Queensland governments’ budgets’. But Macfarlane warned that governments, particularly Queensland’s, ‘can’t take future investment and future returns from coal exports for granted’ and that the Queensland government’s decision to hike up coal royalty taxes to the highest rates in the world has resulted in ‘large mining investors already rethinking their investments in Queensland’.
Is it time someone brought another lump of coal into parliament to remind MPs of its economic significance?
https://spectator.com.au/2022/10/business-robbery-etc-102/ ?
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13 October, 2022
Electric vehicles are exploding in Florida - country's second biggest EV market - because Hurricane Ian's water damage has caused batteries to corrode and catch fire
I mentioned this problem a little while back. I am reverting to it because of a story from where I live in Brisbane, Australia. Brisbane does sometimes get flooding in low lying areas and I hear of someone who got his small 2006 Kia van flooded recently. It went a fair way under so was not driveable after the flood had receded. As it was an old and humble vehicle, the owner decided to sell it for scrap.
So a scrap dealer arrived to tow it away. The dealer asked the owner if he had the key to it. "Sure", said the owner and promptly proceeded to put the key in the ignition and turn it. The motor started! It had just needed to dry out. A much preferable experience to what hit the Florida electic car owners. No car should be flooded but even a humble combustion car can survive it
Firefighters in Florida are dealing with a new problem in the wake of Hurricane Ian's damaging floods - explosive fires caused by waterlogged batteries in electric vehicles.
When EV batteries take on a large amount of water, they're at risk of corrosion that can lead to unexpected fires, according to a top fire official in the state - which is America's second largest EV market after California, with 95,000 registered vehicles.
'There’s a ton of EVs disabled from Ian. As those batteries corrode, fires start,' Florida's fire marshal and top financial officer Jimmy Patronis tweeted Thursday. 'That’s a new challenge that our firefighters haven’t faced before. At least on this kind of scale.'
'It takes special training and understanding of EVs to ensure these fires are put out quickly and safely,' he continued in a follow-up tweet. 'Thanks to [North Collier Fire Rescue] for their hard work.'
It's not clear exactly how many EVs were impacted by the storm's flood waters.
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Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg has told German television that it is better for Germany to keep using nuclear power than restart coal plants
Thunberg’s comments signal an about-turn on the subject of nuclear energy. The 19-year-old previously attacked nuclear energy and gas as “greenwashing” and “false solutions” to cutting emissions.
Germany’s former chancellor Angela Merkel has previously credited Thunberg with inspiring her government to move faster towards carbon neutrality.
Merkel immediately shut down eight of Germany's 17 nuclear reactors following the Fukushima disaster on Japan in 2011 and ramped up its reliance on Russian gas instead.
Last year, Russian gas accounted for 55 per cent of Germany’s total gas imports in 2021.
But following Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine, Germany now wants to wean itself off Russian gas by 2024.
This is sooner than Germany’s pledge to quit coal, which is set for 2030. Germany faces the challenge of trying to shore up enough energy supplies, particularly this winter, given the 2011 decision to phase out its nuclear industry is due to be completed by December.
Germany now wants to keep two of the reactors on stand-by until April and is paying nearly half a billion euros to the operators of coal-fired power plants to have their stations also on standby.
The policy has set off a fierce debate within Germany about whether or not to keep its nuclear industry for good.
Questioned on German television whether nuclear or coal is the better option, Thunberg backed nuclear. “It depends,” she said. “If we have [nuclear] already running, I feel that it’s a mistake to close them down in order to focus on coal.”
She described the debate as “very infected”.
Germany’s Finance Minister and head of the free-market Free Democrats Party (FDP), Christian Lindner, welcomed Thunberg’s comments. “I welcome the support of Fridays for Future founder Greta Thunberg for the FDP position to keep our nuclear plants on the grid,” he said. “In this energy war, everything that generates electricity must be on the grid ... The reasons speak for themselves — economically and physically.“
France and the UK have set out plans to ramp up their nuclear ambitions to secure independent and carbon-neutral energy sources following the energy crisis.
At the recent Labour Party conference, leader Keir Starmer berated the Conservatives for not opening a new nuclear plant in their 12 years in power.
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Weather chief: Ukraine war may be ‘blessing’ for climate
GENEVA (AP) — The head of the U.N. weather agency says the war in Ukraine “may be seen as a blessing” from a climate perspective because it is accelerating the development of and investment in green energies over the longer term — even though fossil fuels are being used at a time of high demand now.
The comments from Petteri Taalas, secretary-general of the World Meteorological Organization, came as the world is facing a shortfall in energy needs — prompted in part by economic sanctions against key oil and natural gas producer Russia — and prices for fossil fuels have risen.
That has led some countries to turn quickly to alternatives like coal. But rising prices for carbon-spewing fuels like oil, gas and coal have also made higher-priced renewable energies like solar, wind and hydrothermal more competitive in the energy marketplace.
The energy crunch has also led many big consuming countries in Europe and beyond to initiate conservation measures, and talk of rationing has emerged in some places.
Taalas acknowledged that the war in Ukraine has been a “shock for the European energy sector,” and has prompted an upturn in the use of fossil energies.
“From the five- to 10-year timescale, it’s clear that this war in Ukraine will speed up our consumption of fossil energy, and it’s speeding up this green transition,” Taalas said.
“So from climate perspective, the war in Ukraine may be seen as a blessing,” Taalas added.
U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and other leaders in the U.N. system have repeatedly made the point “that as well as the tragic human impacts, the conflict underscores the rising costs of the world’s fossil fuel addiction, and the urgent need to accelerate the shift to renewables, to protect people and planet,” U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric said.
Taalas was speaking as WMO issued a new report that said the supply of electricity from cleaner sources of energy needs to double within the next eight years to curb an increase in global temperatures.
The latest “State of Climate Services” annual report — based on contributions from 26 different organizations — focuses this year on energy.
Taalas said the energy sector currently is responsible for about three-quarters of emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases, and he called for a “complete transformation” of the global energy system.
He warned that climate change is affecting electricity generation — and it could have an increasing impact in the future. Among the risks, nuclear plants that rely on water for cooling could be affected by water shortages, and some are located in coastal areas that are vulnerable to sea-level rise or flooding.
In its report, WMO noted that in 2020, some 87% or global electricity generated from thermal, nuclear and hydroelectric systems — which produce less CO2 than plants run by fossil fuels — depended on water availability.
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Methane emissions pledge a blow for Australian farmers
Multiple sources close to discussions between the government and industry say an announcement to commit to the global methane pledge is imminent, possibly as early as next week.
They said the government was eager to head to next month’s UN COP27 climate change conference in Egypt with a solid commitment to meet the pledge, which the Morrison government rejected at COP26 in Glasgow last year.
The livestock sector, mainly due to the digestive functions of cattle and sheep, is responsible for about 48 per cent of the country’s methane emissions, which make up about 25 per cent of Australia’s total greenhouse gas emissions.
New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern on Tuesday flagged plans to tax from 2025 greenhouse gases produced by farm animals through burping and urinating, outraging producers. The industry’s main lobby group Federated Farmers warned the plan would “rip the guts out of small-town New Zealand’’.
Australia’s livestock sector, which aims to be carbon neutral by 2030, has argued against legislated methane targets and says it is voluntarily headed in that direction.
National Farmers Federation chief executive Tony Maher fired a warning shot last Friday amid concerns from farmers that Australia would sign up to the global methane pledge. He cited street protests by Dutch farmers over their government’s plan to tackle nitrogen emissions, which locals said would lead to a loss in livestock numbers and farm closures.
“We won’t support any outcome that would lead to a reduction in livestock numbers, and we’ve had assurances from government on that front,” Mr Maher said.
“Ultimately, punitive regulatory measures in isolation only serve to provide perverse and weaker outcomes for everyone, and we do not want to see farmers protesting because they were not adequately consulted prior to the announcements of schemes that challenge their very existence.”
Tougher methane emissions targets would also capture gas companies and landfill operators, with nearly 30 per cent of methane emissions coming from the extraction, distribution and combustion of fossil fuels and more than 10 per cent from waste management services. The European Union and Quad nations have linked their strategies to slash methane with fast-tracking lower emissions across the oil and gas sectors.
Research into methane-suppressing supplements has ramped up in recent years to tackle the problem, but farmers say they are not yet commercially viable.
The Australian understands growing pressure from the Biden administration and South Pacific nations for Australia to embrace stronger climate change action on the world stage has influenced the Albanese government’s global methane pledge position.
Ten South Pacific nations, including Fiji, PNG and Samoa, are among 122 nations who have signed the non-binding pledge. While China, India and Russia are not backing the target, Egypt, Oman, Qatar and Uzbekistan have recently committed.
A spokeswoman for Climate Change Minister Chris Bowen said the pledge was an “aspirational, global goal rather than a binding domestic target”, which was why so many countries had “joined the effort”.
Mr Bowen – who will lead Australia’s delegation at the COP27 Sharm El-Sheikh conference alongside Assistant Climate Change Minister Jenny McAllister — previously said that as the world’s 12th largest methane-emitting country “we want to see concrete plans to work with farmers”.
“The Australian government is currently consulting across resources and agricultural sectors about signing up to the global methane pledge,” the spokeswoman said.
“The government’s reforms to the safeguard mechanism mean that our largest emitters, many of which release methane, will be required to reduce their emissions – and the Safeguard Crediting Bill … will incentivise facilities that overachieve on their reductions”.
Mr Bowen’s spokeswoman said the $15bn National Reconstruction Fund would be used to help farmers adopt new livestock feed technologies. The government has committed $8m to fast-track commercialisation of seaweed as a low-emissions feed supplement.
Anthony Lee, the head of vertically integrated beef company Australian Country Choice, urged against binding legislation and said the government must support methane-reduction technology.
“There’s a lot of people in the industry, its allied agencies, in the industry RDCs (research and development corporations) and peak bodies, who are working on methane emission reduction,” Mr Lee said.
“There’s a few major projects that, if commercialised, will see significant reductions to these target levels and beyond.
“I don’t support legislation to limit emissions. What we need is government supporting and helping the industry to invest in technology. We need the government working with us, not taxing us.”
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12 October, 2022
HALF of Earth's reefs will be permanently damaged by 2035 if temperatures continue to rise, study warns
The usual Warmist rubbish. Corals THRIVE in warmer conditions. Bleaching is caused by water-level falls, not warmth
Half of Earth's coral reefs will be permanently damaged by 2035 if climate change continues unabated, a new study has warned.
Researchers from the University of Hawaii predicted the effects to Earth's coral reefs based on changes to sea surface temperature, ocean acidification, tropical storms, land use and human population.
Their findings suggest that, under a worst-case scenario, half of all coral reef ecosystems worldwide will be damaged in just a dozen years.
'While the negative impacts of climate change on coral reefs are well known, this research shows that they are actually worse than anticipated due to a broad combination of climate change-induced stressors,' said lead author Renee Setter.
Coral bleaching
Corals have a symbiotic relationship with a tiny marine algae called 'zooxanthellae' that live inside and nourish them.
When sea surface temperatures rise, corals expel the colourful algae, causing them to bleach and turn white.
While corals can recover if temperatures drop and the algae return, severely bleached corals die and become covered by algae.
Previous studies have shown how coral reefs are extremely sensitive to changes in their environment.
For example, research has shown how marine heatwaves can cause huge swathes of reefs to bleach.
But in the new study, the researchers set out to understand the timeline for these effects.
The researchers used climate models to look at global projections of five environmental stressors - sea surface temperature, ocean acidification, tropical storm, land use and human population projections.
Their results revealed that, when looking at a single stressor under current conditions, half of the world's coral reefs will be permanently damaged by 2050.
However, when multiple stressors are considered, this date falls to 2035.
'It was enlightening to find that coral would face multiple stressors – posing an even greater hurdle and challenge that would need to be overcome to increase the possibility of survival,' Ms Setter said.
In addition, the researchers found that by 2055, 99 per cent of the world's coral reefs will face unsuitable conditions based on at least one of the five stressors.
And by 2100, 93 per cent of reefs will be under threat by two or more of the stressors, according to the study.
'We know that corals are vulnerable to increasing sea surface temperatures and marine heatwaves due to climate change,' said Erik Franklin, co-author of the study.
'But it is important to include the complete anthropogenic impact and numerous stressors that coral reefs are exposed to in order to get a better sense of the overall risks to these ecosystems.
'This has great implications for our local Hawaiian reefs that are key to local biodiversity, culture, fisheries and tourism.'
The team now plans to carry out further studies to assess how climate change will affect individual coral species
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Some facts
Ian Plimer
I don’t have opinions. I have facts. They are repeatable and validated.
Fact #1: No one has ever proven that human emissions of carbon dioxide drive global warming. For more than two decades I have been asking scientists for this proof. If proven, it would also have to be shown that natural carbon dioxide emissions, 97 per cent of the annual total, don’t drive global warming. This also has never been done.
Fact #2: Basic chemistry and ice core drilling show that after a natural temperature rise, atmospheric carbon dioxide increases 650-6,000 years later yet we are told that we will fry and die from human carbon dioxide emissions. This is a lie.
Fact # 3: The main atmospheric greenhouse gas is water vapour. When water evaporates, such as from the oceans or sweat, it requires heat to convert to vapour. When water vapour condenses into rain, snow or hail, exactly the same amount of heat is given out. The Earth’s atmosphere contains up to 4 per cent water vapour and operates like a giant air conditioner.
Fact #4: Since the time of Christ, there have been thousands of predictions about the end of the world. If just one prediction was correct, we would not be here. All climate predictions in the 20th and 21st Centuries were incorrect. If a climate activist knocks on your door to tell you we are facing a climate emergency, sool the dog onto them. History is on your side.
Fact #5: Past climates have been cyclical with tectonic (400 million years), galactic (143 million years), orbital (100,000, 40,000, and 23,000 years), solar (11-year cycles of variable strength and Grand Solar Cycles), oceanic (60 years) and lunar tidal (18.6 years) with the non-cyclical impacting and massive explosive volcanoes. Cycles have not changed because humans are alive today and cannot be changed by feelings, ideology, or legislation.
Fact #6: There has been ice on Earth for less than 20 per cent of the time. Over the history of time, there have been 6 major ice ages when ice expanded during glaciation and retreated during interglacials. We are currently in an ice age that started 34 million years ago. The current interglacial started 14,400 million years ago in the Northern Hemisphere and we were at the peak of the current interglacial 7,000-4,000 years ago in the Holocene Optimum.
Fact #7: Compared to today’s global temperature, the planet has been warming for the last 14,400 years ago, cooling since the Holocene Optimum, cooling since the time of Jesus, warming since the time of the Vikings, cooling since Medieval times, and warming since the Little Ice Age which peaked 300 years ago in the Maunder Minimum. Since the intense use of coal in the Industrial Revolution some 170 years ago, the planet has had three slight warmings, two slight coolings, and one period of stasis. If human emissions of carbon dioxide drive warming, then there should have been no coolings or stasis.
Fact #8: Carbon dioxide emissions increased during the second world war, a period of cooling. During the Global Financial Crisis and the Covid epidemic, carbon dioxide emissions reduced due to contraction of industry and travel yet temperature increased.
Fact #9: Carbon dioxide is plant food, if the atmospheric carbon dioxide halved there would be no plant life on Earth and hence no animal life. It is a colourless, odourless, tasteless, non-poisonous gas. We breathe in 0.04 per cent carbon dioxide and, as a result of metabolising carbon-bearing foods and drinks, we exhale 4 per cent carbon dioxide. If it was toxic, people would die from kissing, swilling a carbonated drink, or eating bread.
Fact #10: Australia is already at Net Zero because the adsorption of carbon dioxide by grasslands, crops, rangelands, forests, soils, and continental shelf waters is far greater than human emissions. There are a finite number of atmosphere-derived carbon atoms in grass eaten by cattle which are transformed into meat, gas, liquid, bones, horns, and skins. Most of this carbon is returned to the atmosphere. By using leather, we sequester carbon atoms and hence beef farming saves the planet.
Green Marxist activists have captured the language with terms such as climate crisis/emergency, carbon capture, transition, and Net Zero yet they don’t live in caves as hunter-gatherers.
These hypocrites emit carbon dioxide to fly around the world to lecture those who they regard as morally inferior and they support wind and solar power and EVs as a mechanism of transferring money from the poor to the rich
Support of renewables means activists are happy with widespread pollution around wind turbines by the toxin bisphenol A, slicing and dicing of birds and bats, sterilising pastures, and dumping of toxic turbine blades that poison soils and waterways. Promoting solar panels means support for widespread sterilising of productive croplands which become contaminated with poisonous selenium, tellurium, and lead while also supporting the building of solar panels in China by slave labour.
Climate activism has nothing to do with the environment or climate. It is immoral and kills people.
If Australia becomes a renewable powerhouse of the world, we weaken the nation. When short-life turbine blades and solar panels made in China need replacing, they may refuse to provide them and, with neither coal nor nuclear power generation, Australian industry, farming, and domestic life would be destroyed.
As the European gas crisis shows, we must quickly become energy independent. We are reaping the rewards of 50 years of dumbing down education, tampering with the primary temperature data record, and the dismissal of common sense as extreme right-wing politics. There has been a deliberate attempt to frighten ill-educated young people using lies about a hypothetical climate emergency by the mainstream media uncritically acting as stenographers for the Greens.
It is time to stand up to the scam of the ideological policy and politically-created energy crisis. If carbon dioxide emissions really do drive global warming, then financially-crippling emissions reduction by Australia will have no effect whatsoever on total emissions. Why even bother?
We must fight for energy independence, freedoms, and true environmentalism.
https://spectator.com.au/2022/10/my-cpac-turpitudes/
**************************************************************False predictions fuel climate ‘consensus’
In its 2020 State of the Climate report the [Australian] Bureau of Meteorology informs readers, ‘Observations, reconstructions and climate modelling paint a consistent picture of ongoing, long-term climate change interacting with underlying natural variability’. Such vague prognostications, even when technically correct, are essentially worthless. Surely for half a billion dollars a year taxpayers deserve better than that?
Specifically, the Bureau predicts ‘Further sea-level rises along with the likelihood of more frequent and severe bleaching events in coral reefs ….’ Really? Eighty per cent of Pacific islands and atolls are stable or growing and GPS satellite observations tell us the Australian continent is sinking. Moreover, a recent Australian Institute of Marine Science report finds that coral coverage on the northern and central parts of the Great Barrier Reef is at its highest level since monitoring began 36 years ago.
But then, grim forecasts are in the Bureau’s DNA. Its long-range forecaster, Andrew Watkins, predicted in November 2019 that, ‘Summer is looking hot for most of the country and dry for the east. The highest chances of it being drier than normal, unfortunately, are in those drought areas through central New South Wales, southern Queensland and eastern Victoria’.
A month on, the prophesy became, ‘February to April has roughly equal chances of being wetter or drier than average for most of Australia’. Take your pick. Two weeks later an extreme deluge hit south-east Queensland and northern NSW dumping up to 325mm in a few hours, triple the monthly rainfall.
Undaunted, and contrary to American forecasts, the Bureau declared ‘the 2021-2022 La Niña season is finally over.’ After three months it changed to, ‘will last through to 2023’. Who knows?
Lest Mother Nature should suggest cooler, wetter, the Bureau is there to enlighten us. Even if the 2022 winter seemed colder to some, those who shivered through it were reassured that the national mean temperature was still 0.36 degrees Celsius above the 1961 to 1990 average, which includes a decade of 0.20 degrees cooling.
And should people washed away by the east coast floods think this was wetter than normal, they get comfort from the knowledge that, ‘the nationally averaged rainfall data has not threatened any records’. It matters not that the national average for a continent the size of Australia is meaningless.
But, for the BoM, the medium is the message, so it is important to frame a narrative which aligns aberrant weather events to its catastrophic global warming thesis. By targeting policymakers and the public, it hopes to create a permanent feedback loop.
But it can be a tough gig keeping temperatures rising. It may mean remodelling the record three times in nine years and ensuring things are warmer than thermometer readings had previously measured. This is difficult when more reliable UAH satellite observations record a ten-year pause in Australian temperatures.
Respected scientist and long-time Bureau critic, Dr Jennifer Marohasy, despairs. She says, ‘I have shown repeatedly, including in peer-reviewed publications, that without scientific justification historical temperatures are dropped down, cooling the past. This has the effect of making the present appear hotter – it is a way of generating more global warming for the same weather.’
The public was alerted to these practices through the Climategate emails, and similarly in Australia the BoM’s lack of transparency, unscientific practices and appalling quality control were exposed. Weather-stations continue to be discovered in heat traps. Record low temperatures have been underreported or ‘lost’ and a much touted ‘hottest-ever’ day had to be quickly retracted when it was demonstrated it wasn’t.
It’s easy to dismiss these criticisms as carping. After all, Australia is a big place and weather forecasting is fraught. But surely the most benevolent analyst would conclude that global-warming politics, not science, predominantly drives people and culture at the BoM. Indeed, it is an active member of a global political consensus which is intent on weaponising the climate to achieve social change. Within this coven there is no room for agnostics or dissenters.
Finally, after decades of deceit and denial, mass delusion is colliding with reality. Months before winter’s onset, gas and electricity prices in Europe are ten times higher than usual. Fertiliser production is down 70 per cent and the metals sector faces an existential threat. Nationalisation beckons.
True, Russia is a significant contributor, but the real pain is self-inflicted and comes from irresponsible emissions-reduction policies which have exposed populations and economies to the mercies of Moscow and the weather with no Plan B.
Predictably the poor and infirm will pay the highest price. More people die of cold than heat and for many this winter it will mean choosing between already unaffordable heating and, skyrocketing food prices.
The perpetrators of this disaster will use it to demonstrate how, ‘Capitalism has run its course and must yield to environmental concerns’. Unsustainable growth has long been pushed by the Club of Rome and the climate collective as an existential threat and Malthusian authoritarians now largely control the agenda.
This is not conspiracy theory. A recently leaked IPCC report argues the current capitalist model must be discarded ‘to avoid exceeding planetary limits’. In other words, unless growth is abandoned, global warming will cause more frequent catastrophic weather events and millions more will die of heat and starvation.
Yet, despite rising emissions, the UN’s own World Food Program reports the planet is producing enough food to feed one and a half times the present population. The problems are storage and distribution. The anti-capitalists don’t explain how limiting economic growth and making energy unaffordable for refrigeration, transport and cooking, assist in delivering nutrition to the needy.
Well, ours is not to question. The anti-growth consensus knows best and is re-setting capitalism to become the ‘sharing economy’ of the future. In this utopia ‘you will own nothing and you will be happy’. What could possibly go wrong?
https://spectator.com.au/2022/10/false-predictions-fuel-climate-consensus/
*****************************************************************Reality check: European wind industry ‘struggling’ with rising costs
European wind turbine manufacturers are financially struggling and cutting jobs, putting them at risk of losing market share to Chinese competitors, despite the energy crisis, major industry players have warned.
Turbine makers General Electric Renewables and Siemens Gamesa both announced job cuts in recent weeks, and European manufacturers were “all financially struggling,” Jon Lezamiz Cortázar, global head of public affairs at Siemens, told the Financial Times.
“Everything is getting much more expensive in an already stretched wind industry supply chain,” he said. If the situation did not improve, “it may happen that the European Green Deal is installed with non-European technology”.
The Global Wind Energy Council said it was likely to downgrade its forecasts for the amount of new capacity added this year globally from around 101 gigawatts to 94-95 gigawatts. This amounts to almost no growth since last year, with 2021 being a peak year for offshore wind installation.
The challenging picture comes even as European leaders scramble to boost their supply of domestically produced renewable energy in the context of a global energy crisis fuelled by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The EU wants to increase its target for renewable energy from 32 per cent of total power production to 45 per cent by 2030.
“Companies are laying people off, at a time when the supply chain should be ramping up,” said Ben Backwell, chief executive of the Global Wind Energy Council.
Inflation and the rising cost of key materials, such as steel and copper, have pushed up the cost of making turbines. But long lead times and turbine prices that are locked in by customers years in advance have made it difficult for manufacturers to pass on higher costs. Many have now started raising prices and renegotiating contracts with customers.
The industry is also grappling with supply chain delays, already strained by the lockdowns during the pandemic and exacerbated since the war in Ukraine. That put companies at risk of having to pay so-called “liquidated damages” to customers, or compensation payments related to project delays, analysts said.
Vestas Wind global head of marketing and public affairs, Morten Dyrholm, said the current situation amounted to “a pretty critical period in time for the supply chain”.
Shares in Vestas, turbine maker Nordex and offshore wind farm developer Orsted have all been sliding since their peaks in early 2021.
Vestas missed analyst expectations for its second-quarter results, posting an underlying operating loss of €182mn, while Siemens reported its first quarterly loss in nearly 12 years.
Morningstar analyst Matthew Donen said western companies were at risk of losing out to Chinese competitors, many of which were more financially resilient and could build turbines for less.
https://www.ft.com/content/0e747284-64da-4690-b416-3acabaaf4943
***************************************11 October, 2022
Germany Finally Says the F-Word: ‘Fracking’
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has produced a string of surprising changes in Germany over the past seven months: substantially higher defense spending, delivery of lethal weapons to a combat zone, new realism on the limits of trade-based diplomacy.
But the surest evidence that Europe’s largest economy is veering into “signs and wonders” territory is that politicians are uttering with increasing frequency that dirtiest F-word of all—“fracking.”
Germany’s energy crisis is a crisis of choice, or rather a crisis of two choices, the second following directly from the first. The choice most German politicians seem to want to talk about is the second of the two, the choice to source so much of the country’s energy imports and especially natural gas from a single, unsympathetic vendor, Russia.
A solution to this problem is achievable without an excess of policy imagination or political skill. If importing gas from Russia no longer is an option, the gas will be imported from somewhere else. Pledges to accelerate construction of terminals to accept liquefied natural gas from the U.S. and Middle East have lent Economy and Climate Minister Robert Habeck of the Green Party an image of vigorous activity in pursuit of Germany’s voracious energy needs.
But Germany is as dependent as it is on foreign fuel only because of the first decision Berlin made: not to tap the country’s substantial domestic gas reserves, which by some estimates could satisfy much of Germany’s gas demands for the next two decades.
The manifestation of this choice was hostility to the hydraulic fracture, or fracking, technology that could tap Germany’s shale-bound gas reserves. Berlin in 2017 all but banned, on dubious safety grounds, the fracking techniques that could reach most of Germany’s gas.
Now some politicians are asking whether the country can afford to leave that gas in the ground. A split has opened within the unwieldy governing coalition of Chancellor Olaf Scholz. Two of the coalition’s three parties are staunchly anti-fracking—Mr. Scholz’s Social Democrats (SPD) and Mr. Habeck’s Greens. The third, the free-market Free Democrat Party (FDP), is for it.
The FDP “supports the significant expansion of domestic gas production,” the party’s energy guru in Parliament, Michael Kruse, told a newspaper in June. Another party leader, Torsten Herbst, challenged the objections: “As scientific studies show, under modern safety standards fracking doesn’t cause any relevant environmental damage.”
Some opposition politicians are picking up the theme. Bavaria’s conservative state premier, Markus Söder, in late July posed the obvious question: “Wouldn’t it be appropriate for Germany to think about whether it wants to use its own gas capacity?”
That interview came with a broader, not-so-subtle point about energy trade-offs. Mr. Söder is cool on fracking in his own state of Bavaria, but keen on fracking in the northern state of Lower Saxony. Lower Saxony also happens to be the site of one of the three remaining nuclear reactors Berlin may keep running into next year, and the state is a hotbed of antinuclear resistance. Mr. Habeck currently plans to shut Lower Saxony’s reactor on schedule in December while keeping the other two plants (one of which is in Bavaria) running.
Mr. Söder’s fracking message is that the energy has to come from somewhere. One can extract it from shale or from the atom—Mr. Söder is enthusiastic about the atom—but not extracting Germany’s fuel resources is no longer an option. Message received, apparently. As of this week, even the left-leaning Spiegel news magazine found itself wondering why exactly fracking remains such a taboo ahead of state elections in Lower Saxony.
Don’t hold your breath for this debate to lead to German fracking any time soon. Opinion polling over the summer found only 27% of respondents supported fracking, compared with 81% support for more wind and 61% support for burning more coal as solutions to Germany’s looming energy crisis.
Yet don’t entirely abandon hope. The real surprise of that poll was that “only” 56% of respondents opposed fracking outright, with the remaining 17% undecided. This after voters have been bombarded for years with antifracking messages, and with fracking supporters launching the latest debate from a standing start. That the opposition isn’t near-universal suggests that the harsh realities Russia’s war has imposed on Europe may be opening the door to more skeptical thinking about German energy policy.
Germany is deciding if it wants to play a more active role in a range of foreign, security and economic policy debates around the world. Up to now, the idea that Germany is resource-poor seemed to underlie many foreign-policy discussions, and it encouraged Berlin to take supine positions. But this perceived resource poverty is more a form of learned helplessness than a geological reality. Whether Germany can wake up to this fact will shape what direction Mr. Scholz’s “turning point” ends up taking.
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Out of control solar farm development is a threat to British food security
London, 11 October - Net Zero Watch today welcomed media reports that the Secretary of State for the Department of Food, Environment and Rural Affairs (DEFRA), The Rt Hon Ranil Jayawardena MP, is minded to tighten planning advice to discourage the development of large scale solar photovoltaic power stations on farmland.
Net Zero Watch has warned of this misuse of farmland and its threat to food security in two papers by our energy editor, Dr John Constable.
The most recent of which was published in March this year: The Case for Reform of Solar Energy Planning Guidance.
The loss of agricultural land is on a highly significant scale with 30,000 acres or more currently facing proposals for solar photovoltaic, and much more in the early stages of development, putting further pressure on land use.
The UK currently has approximately 14.8 million acres of arable land, the lowest level since 1945. In the decade 2009–2019, the arable area fell by about 740,000 acres, and the area of land lost to agriculture currently stands at about 99,000 acres per year. The area facing solar development is a highly significant increment to an already undesirable trend. The UK is approximately 61% self-sufficient in food production, and 75% self-sufficient in indigenous food types.
However, this relatively reassuring picture is put into doubt by the decline in agricultural area under cultivation and by population growth, which adds approximately 400,000 people to feed each year. On these assumptions, within twenty years the UK will be feeding a population that is considerably larger, but from an arable landbase that has shrunk by 13%. This would imply an import dependency of about 50% or more.
Against this background Mr Jaywardena’s move to restrain development is obviously wise. We must hope that the government is not deflected by protests from vested interests in the solar industry and their followers in parliament.
NZW’s energy director, Dr Constable, said:
"Farmland is already a solar converter making food, which is much more valuable than third-rate and very expensive electrons from solar photovoltaic cells. The fact that some green campaigners would rather have low grade electricity than high quality British farm produce shows how bizarrely irrational environmentalism has become."
Contact
Dr John Constable.
Energy Director, Net Zero Watch
e: john.constable.1837@gmail.com
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Big range problems with an electric truck
Our Ford F-150 Lighting Towing Test Raises Concerns
We didn’t miss the chance to tow with the new Ford F-150 Lightning. We needed to see how pulling loads affected the range for ourselves. Now we have a first-hand experience with how the 2022 Ford F-150 Lightning is both good and bad for towing.
The 2022 Ford F-150 Lightning towing capacity depends on which model you have. The standard range model can pull up to 7,700 lbs and carry a payload of up to 2,235 lbs. With the extended-range model, you can tow up to 10,000 lbs and carry a payload of up to 2,000 lbs.
We have an extended-range Lariat model, with a 320-mile range on a full charge, and used a 5,000 lb camper for our test. We started with 240 miles of charge and entered the trailer’s specs.
After creating a trailer profile for the 25-foot camper, the range was chopped down to 140 miles. Due to Columbus Day traffic and the Asheville area being crowded due to leafers, we decided to only take the camper out for 30 miles.
On back roads at lower speeds of 35 to 40 mph, the Lightning did great. It held a steady charge, even while going up steep inclines, and handled curves extremely well. If you go slow the entire way, you might have enough juice.
However, on I-26 at speeds between 50 to 65 mpg, the Lightning struggled. The range was instantly updated due to rising heat and the trailer’s weight. The range started dropping at a rapid pace. We used 89 miles of range during our 30-mile route.
So, an even heavier trailer could destroy the range at a faster rate. If you plan to tow with the Ford F-150 Lightning, have charging stations mapped out, or try to keep your trip under 100 miles.
It’s like the Ford F-150 Lightning has a good start for towing. The tech definitely makes things easier, and it feels confident. However, the range seems to struggle, making us concerned about towing heavier loads.
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An electrical tank!
One wonders about range limitations
“An army marches on its stomach,” Napoleon is often quoted as saying.
The actual sentence was “an Army, like a serpent, goes upon its belly,” and it was spoken by Frederick the Great, but let’s not get caught up in details. The point is, if you want to win the battle, logistics are at least as important as tactics.
And had Frederick not died in 1786, when horse-mounted cavalry ruled the battlefield, he might have rethought that phrase. Petroleum products — gasoline, diesel and aviation fuel, lubricants — are what fuel the modern military.
Or they did until the advent of the latest main battle tank from General Dynamics Land Systems, anyway, which announced last week that it would be exhibiting its new “AbramsX technology demonstrator” during the Army’s Annual Meeting & Exposition in Washington, D.C., this week.
Described in the company’s news release as the “main battle tank for the next generation,” GDLS says the newest Abrams version will weigh significantly less than those currently in service, which could make the tank both more mobile and more easily transported to far-off battlefields.
The tank’s “hybrid power pack” will also consume half the fuel that current versions do and run more quietly; it “even allows for some silent mobility,” according to the company.
There’s only so silent a multi-ton vehicle is ever going to be when it’s on the move, of course, but things are relative on the battlefield.
This may be making a virtue of necessity, as the U.S. military — like every branch of an out-of-control federal government run by un-elected bureaucrats and increasingly left-leaning idealogues — has climate-change-related goals it must meet.
“The AbramsX’s hybrid power pack supports the U.S. Army’s climate and electrification strategies,” the company announced.
Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, obviously — so long as the platform’s lethality isn’t negatively impacted by the changes. The company’s release didn’t go into specifics about that; in its defense, it’s probably too early in the tank’s development even to know for sure. You never really know how a weapon is going to serve you until it’s been fired in anger.
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10 October, 2022
The future?
Satellite Temperature Data Show Almost All Climate Model Forecasts Over the Last 40 Years Were Wrong
A major survey into the accuracy of climate models has found that almost all the past temperature forecasts between 1980-2021 were excessive compared with accurate satellite measurements. The findings were recently published by Professor Nicola Scafetta, a physicist from the University of Naples. He attributes the inaccuracies to a limited understanding of Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity (ECS), the number of degrees centigrade the Earth’s temperature will rise with a doubling of carbon dioxide.
Scientists have spent decades trying to find an accurate ECS number, to no avail. Current estimates range from 0.5°C to around 6-7°C. Without knowing this vital figure, the so-called ‘settled’ science narrative around human-caused climate change remains a largely political invention, not a credible scientific proposition. Professor Scafetta has conducted extensive work into climate models and is a long-time critic of their results and forecasts. In a previous work, he said many of the climate models should be “dismissed and not used by policymakers”. Along with around 250 professors, he is a signatory to the World Climate Declaration which states there is no climate emergency and also notes climate models are “not remotely plausible as global tools”.
Scafetta’s latest work grouped 38 major climate models into low, medium and high ECS values, ranging between 1.8°C and 5.7°C. He found that models in the medium and high category “ran hot” in over 95% and 97% of cases respectively. The lower models were said to have done better when compared to global warming calculated for the period by the major surface datasets of 0.52-0.58°C. But the UAH satellite data showed warming up to 30% less during this period, suggesting even the low warming models produced “excessive warming” from 1980-2021.
According to Scafetta, these results are showed that the ECS figure could be as low as 1.2-2°C. Particular concern is expressed about surface temperature records that “appear to be severely affected by non-climatic warming biases”. Scafetta concludes that surface-based temperature records are likely to be affected by warming biases, such as the urban heat island effect due to expanding urban development, and subject to natural oscillations that are not reproduced by climate models. He concludes: “The global warming expected for the next few decades may be even more moderate than predicted by the low ECS-GCMs [Global Circulation Models], and could easily fall within a safe temperature range where climate adaptation policies will suffice.”
Scafetta’s work is vital in providing a realistic insight into the dominant role played by climate models in promoting the command-and-control Net Zero political agenda. Many of the constantly promoted climate thermogeddon scares use forecasts based on high ECS values. The higher values are behind every statement from bureaucrats, politicians, green activists and journalists that we are heading for a 2-3°C increase in global temperature in the near future. In the absence of any definitive ECS figure, these predictions are guesses.
In fact, once the ECS figure falls to around 1°C, it is moving into margin of error territory. However, many scientists have more or less given up trying to calculate ECS, since measuring the non-linear atmosphere is proving as difficult as it ever was. The atmosphere is a chaotic system with many powerful influences reacting unpredictably with each other. The huge heat transfers that obviously have a considerable part to play in climate are far from completely understood. Recent suggestions that modellers can ‘attribute’ single event weather events to human-caused climate change are unprovable, and little more than figments of over-active, agenda-driven imaginations. Furthermore, it is possible that carbon dioxide becomes ‘saturated’ beyond certain levels and its effect as a warming gas rapidly declines.
What we do know is that over the last 20 years, global warming has started to run out of steam. The latest September UAH satellite data, considered in some scientific circles as the most accurate measurement we have, show the current standstill has been extended to eight years. But whereas satellite data are common and invaluable in many geographical fields, these temperature results are less welcome. It is not hard to see why. Scafetta calculates that the results since the start of recordings around 1980 are 30% below surface temperature datasets. As it happens, the two adjustments since 2013 by the U.K.’s Met Office to its HadCRUT global surface temperature record have increased recent warming by a similar amount. Similar upward adjustments are to be found in the other major global datasets. A previous temperature pause from about 1998-2010 is no longer visible in these records.
Claims of ‘record’ heat years and ever higher temperatures are taken exclusively from the surface records. The satellite record is largely ignored. There are even attempts to cancel the inconvenient figures, with Google AdSense recently ‘demonetising’ the site of Dr. Roy Spencer, the Principal Research Scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, one of the main compilers of the UAH satellite record. The record, of course, that is a vital part of Professor Scafetta’s work investigating the accuracy of climate models.
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Trees are growing larger than ever before as a result of global warming
Trees are getting bigger because of more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and are likely to be helping to mitigate global warming more than climate models suggest, scientists believe.
A new study from The Ohio State University has found that tree trunk volume in the US is up to 29 per cent bigger than it was 30 years ago, a finding that is likely to be mirrored elsewhere in the world.
Trees are known to act as a buffer zone against climate change by pulling in carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, but the latest research shows just how much they have been bulking up on the extra fuel.
“It’s well known that when you put a ton of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, it doesn’t stay up there forever,” said Brent Sohngen, professor of environmental and resource economics at Ohio State.
“A massive amount of it falls into the oceans, while the rest of it is taken up by trees and wetlands and those kinds of areas. Forests are taking carbon out of the atmosphere at a rate of about 13 per cent of our gross emissions.
“While we’re putting billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, we’re actually taking much of it out just by letting our forests grow.”
The team used historical data from the US Forest Service Forest Inventory and Analysis Program to compare how the wood volume of certain forest groups has changed over the past few decades.
The study estimates that between 1970 and 2015, there was a significant increase in the wood volume of trees, which correlates with a distinct rise in carbon emissions.
Elevated carbon levels are likely to have led to the equivalent of an extra tree ring growth for each tree in the 10 different temperate forest groups across the US, suggesting that trees are helping to shield Earth’s ecosystem from the impacts of global warming through their rapid growth, researchers said.
The phenomenon is known as “carbon fertilisation”, whereby an influx of carbon dioxide increases a plant’s rate of photosynthesis, spurring growth.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere mixes almost evenly, so every place on Earth has nearly the same amount, researchers said, suggesting other forests and wooded areas would have seen a similar increase in biomass.
Significant volume increase
The team found that trunk volume had increased by 12.3 per cent in 75-year-old forests and 28.8 per cent in 25-year-old forests.
Some studies from Europe have recorded greater tree heights over time, which researchers have speculated may be due to carbon fertilisation.
Experts had previously speculated that the amount of carbon dioxide that trees would be able to take up would be capped by a lack of other elements needed for photosynthesis such as nitrogen and phosphorus.
However the researchers said that did not appear to be the case. Instead, a lack of carbon dioxide appears to be the most important limiting factor in tree growth.
The team are hoping to repeat the research using global data, but said they hope it would show policymakers and others the value of trees in mitigating climate change.
The research was published in the journal Nature Communications.
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UK looks to cap renewable electricity generator revenues
The UK government is pressing ahead with plans to cap revenues that renewable electricity generators are making from sky-high wholesale power prices following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Companies generating power from wind and solar fear the plans, similar to proposals already announced by the European Union, will effectively amount to a windfall tax on renewable energy.
The businesses involved in renewable power generation that could be affected include EDF Energy, RWE, ScottishPower and SSE.
The government had been hoping to persuade electricity generators to agree voluntarily to 15-year fixed-price contracts well below current wholesale rates for their output.
But talks with the companies have collapsed and government legislation, which could be unveiled as early as next week, will be used to underpin a revenue cap on the generators, said people familiar with the plans.
With UK households contending with soaring energy bills, the government indicated to generators at a private meeting last week that it would pursue a cap, said people briefed on the discussions.
People briefed on last week’s meeting said prices of about £50 to £60 per megawatt hour were mentioned as a starting point for the cap, well below current prices of about £490/MWh, although no final decisions have been taken.
Ministers have been alarmed at profits being made by some electricity generators that are still benefiting from a government subsidy scheme that dates back to 2002, when the renewable industry was in its infancy.
The government has been examining potential levels for the revenue cap using evidence such as wholesale prices prior to the energy crisis.
A “high percentage” or all of the revenues above the cap set by the government would be paid to the Treasury, added one of these people.
The EU has announced a similar cap as part of plans to raise €140bn in windfall taxes.
Electricity generators fear the UK government’s plans will be more damaging to the sector than a 25 per cent windfall tax imposed on oil and gas companies in May by the then chancellor Rishi Sunak.
His 25 per cent “energy profits levy” was accompanied by a new investment allowance that energy companies can use to offset their tax bills if they press ahead with projects to boost UK production of fossil fuels.
“The major issue is not that the government is doing a windfall tax in some shape or form,” said one industry person who attended last week’s meeting between the government and electricity generators.
This person objected to how oil and gas companies affected by the recent windfall tax benefited from an investment allowance, and accused the government of effectively endorsing fossil fuel investment over renewable technologies.
The government is committed to the UK reaching net zero carbon emissions by 2050.
Another industry person briefed on the talks between ministers and the electricity generators said: “You’re disincentivising technologies you can build quickly to lower [energy] bills.”
The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy declined to comment on the plans.
https://www.ft.com/content/5187f160-eecd-4d7f-b523-82f973bc68a7
********************************************US Coal Prices Top $200 as World’s Energy Desperation Intensifies Ahead of Winter
U.S. coal prices soared past $200 per ton last week, according to new data from the Energy Information Administration (EIA).
Spot Central Appalachia coal prices climbed to $204.95 per ton for the week ended Sept. 30, up more than 3 percent from the previous week. That’s the highest price since 2005.
Newcastle coal futures, the benchmark for Asia, touched a record high of nearly $450 per ton, before easing to around $400.
Domestic coal production has been holding steady. EIA numbers show that U.S. coal output totaled 12.1 million short tons, up 1.9 percent year over year. In addition, year-to-date coal production totaled nearly 438 million short tons, up close to 4 percent from the same time a year ago. (A short ton, or just ton in the United States, equals 2,000 pounds. A long ton, used in the UK, is 2,240 pounds.)
In 2021, coal represented more than one-fifth (22 percent) of U.S. electricity generation, behind natural gas (38.3 percent). By comparison, wind and solar accounted for just 9.2 percent and 2.8 percent, respectively, last year.
But the fuel source has been surging on strengthening global demand, particularly as the Northern Hemisphere braces for cold and snowy weather.
Global Energy Demand Crunch
S&P Global data note that total spot transaction volumes rose 22 percent in the third quarter, up from the April–June period.
In July, the International Energy Agency (IEA) projected in a market update that worldwide coal consumption would return to all-time highs in 2022.
“Global coal demand is being propped up this year by rising natural gas prices, which have intensified gas-to-coal switching in many countries, as well as economic growth in India. Those factors are being partly offset by slowing economic growth in China and by the inability of some major coal producers to ramp up production,” the IEA stated in its report.
Indeed, Chinese coal imports slumped about 15 percent year over year in August. Beijing’s zero-COVID strategy has resulted in lockdowns in multiple pockets of the country, which has weakened economic growth and applied pressure on demand for a broad array of commodities, from soybeans to crude oil to coal.
However, that’s been offset by robust European demand. In the first half of the year, coal was Germany’s largest source of energy production, representing almost 30 percent, according to confirmed data from the Institute for Energy Research (IER). That’s a result of the European Union’s (EU) ban on Russian coal imports, forcing eurozone members to search for alternative sources. Moscow had provided approximately 70 percent of the EU’s thermal coal prior to the restrictions. In the first seven months of 2022, Australia exported 2.9 million metric tons of coal to Europe, up 73 percent from all of 2021.
European seaborne thermal coal demand is also forecast to increase 14 percent, or 12 million metric tons, in 2022.
“With many European nations increasing thermal coal use, an additional nine gigawatts (GW) of coal-fired capacity has been made available to meet energy demands and make up for the decline in Russian energy imports. Coal prices are surging, but they are still more affordable than record-high gas prices,” Adam Woods, Wood Mackenzie’s senior research analyst, wrote in a recent research note.
It isn’t only European households that have been struggling. The National Energy Assistance Directors Association warned that more than 20 million U.S. households are behind on their utility bills. The organization estimates that the average cost of home heating during the winter season will rise more than 17 percent, to $1,202, the highest in a decade (pdf).
Electricity costs surged close to 16 percent on an annualized basis in August, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).
The situation could intensify, as coal-producing firms have been running at near maximum capacity without the infrastructure to boost output. Moreover, supply-chain snafus could prevent companies from even expanding production capabilities, experts say.
“The growing energy crisis created originally by the underperformance of renewable energy was exacerbated by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, resulting in Russia’s closure of the Nord Stream 1 pipeline due to sanctions imposed by the West,” the IER noted last week. “But the high prices are caused by energy shortages, and Europe is looking for enough energy supplies to get through the winter.”
According to Fitch Solutions, coal prices are expected to fall next year and in 2024.
While businesses and households are feeling financial pain, coal stocks are climbing on price growth. Peabody Energy, for example, shares jumped more than 3 percent on Oct. 5, to above $27, lifting its year-to-date gain to nearly 139 percent. Arch Resources rose roughly 2 percent, to $138 midweek, bringing its year-to-date increase to more than 50 percent.
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9 October, 2022
UK: Forcing farmers to join the rush for Net Zero will see MILLIONS go hungry, warns cattle and wheat farmer of 40 years
There are so many threats to British agriculture. Too much sun, not enough rain. Rising costs for fuel and fertiliser. Catastrophic labour shortages. And shockingly low profit margins which have left farmers scrabbling to survive or selling up entirely. So self-inflicted wounds on top of these are a serious matter.
I’m talking in particular about the rush for Net Zero, at least as it applies to agriculture. Net Zero is the aim to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. But what this means in practical terms is farms have been told to abandon the tried and trusted aids to food production – pesticides and chemical fertilisers – that have done so much to feed the nation since the war.
Farmers have also been urged to pull out of traditional meat production in the cause of cutting methane in the atmosphere. Who is demanding these changes? Bureaucrats, of course – namely the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs, plus the vestiges of diktats from the European Union.
I’ve spent 40 years growing food and today run a mixed farm in Aberdeenshire with grass-fed beef cattle, barley for the Scotch whisky industry and wheat for chickens. So I know that what has been proposed is simply unworkable. Pesticide and fertiliser reduction targets for between 2030 and 2050 are not so much ambitious as impossible. Impossible, that is, if we want to continue feeding the country.
I realise there’s plenty of support for green virtue-signalling, mainly from people who have never set foot on a farm. But let’s get real about organic food, which is what the Net Zero drive is demanding we produce. That is to say, livestock and crops raised without the benefit of pest control and chemical fertiliser.
EU officials have been pushing an unworkable ‘farm-to-fork’ plan, which involves a 30 per cent rise in such food by 2030. Despite Brexit, we seem to be adopting this.
I believe the organic movement is no more than a fad. It is certainly not a national food plan for a country of 67 million.
Organic farming is suitable only for gardening at home, for allotments and for the rich, who choose to spend a lot more money. For conventional farmers like myself, it is clear organic production requires significantly more land – and therefore is hugely inefficient.
It’s not that I am anti-environment. Where green schemes are practical and appropriate, we put them into practice on our farm. There’s mixed woodland to encourage wildlife and we leave natural corridors across the land to help small mammals escape the plough.
But anything other than smart, modern farming is self-indulgent, low-yield and unsustainable. Retreating to the methods of the 1940s cannot be part of the plan for any farmer. It will punish the poor and leave us dependent on foreign food supplies – a state of affairs thrown into clear focus by Putin’s monstrous invasion of Ukraine.
Food prices in Britain have risen by nearly 12 per cent this year, mostly as a consequence of an event a couple of thousand miles away. The cost of fertiliser, which depends on petrochemicals, has gone through the roof. No wonder civil servants are scrambling to redraw the more fanciful plans for green conformity. To say we have been caught with our trousers down is a gross understatement.
Then there is the fashionable war on meat, driven partly by the ‘methane myth’. This is the claim that livestock, such as cows and sheep, damage the environment by burping and farting. Cows, in particular, are accused of being a major contributor to global greenhouse gas emissions. Each year, one cow can produce up to 200kg of methane, which – as Joe Biden has lectured us all – is ‘one of the most potent greenhouse gases’, with more than 80 times the warming power of carbon dioxide.
Is this true? Recent research from Munich University suggests that the methane contribution from livestock could be overstated by a factor of three or even four. It is also the case that methane, unlike carbon dioxide, is broken down entirely after a few years. This war cannot be dismissed as some deep-Green fad. A recent editorial in The Guardian newspaper went so far as to suggest it is time to put official limits on the amount of meat sold.
Never mind the weight of evidence that grass-fed British meat is sustainable. Or that the fields themselves remove vast quantities of carbon from the atmosphere. Or the fact that, without artificial fertiliser, the arable production so prized by teenage vegans is impossible… without the excrement from animals to enrich the soil, that is.
I have long suspected that a drive towards synthetic meat production – and the money-making opportunity it promises – is a hidden factor in this disgraceful attempt to abolish animal husbandry. Does anyone really want to eat synthetic meat?
Sadly, the public is as confused as it is misinformed by zealots blinded by self-important activism. It’s not just a British problem. In Germany, half the population think back-to-nature farming can fight global hunger. It cannot.
The World Bank and the UN are part of the problem. Their Left-wing views dominate and give credence to anti-meat reports. They declare adopting alternatives to meat produces ‘progressive’ outcomes, such as ‘rewilding’.
I am convinced we can protect our landscape and produce more quality food for our own needs. Critics of modern farming often disparage current systems as industrial or intensive but it is only by producing more food from fewer hectares that we can keep the population fed and leave more land for biodiversity and wildlife.
Why not support more farming in cities, where technology allows crops to be grown indoors? Or do more to develop policies which avoid unnecessary ploughing and the consequent release of carbon dioxide locked in the earth?
The world’s sheer diversity of crops, terrains and weather systems means we will always need not just traditional farming skills but modern methods, too. That’s why it is essential that British agriculture finds a way to promote farming systems that encourage biodiversity and production.
Whimsical concepts such as fertiliser-free food or rewilding will salve the consciences of the well-to-do. But what good is that if millions go hungry?
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Biden Claims Hurricane Ian Proves Climate Change, Despite Hurricane Expert’s Dismissal
President Joe Biden attributed deadly Hurricane Ian to climate change and suggested people “should do something about it,” despite such a conclusion going against the nation’s top hurricane expert.
Biden traveled on Oct. 5 to Florida to survey the devastation of hurricane-ravaged Florida and meet those who had lost homes and businesses. While the president put up a rare united front with Gov. Ron DeSantis in the wake of the Category 4 storm, as the two toured the damage and praised each other for collaboration, Biden opened his remarks by underscoring climate change.
“We’re in a situation where the Colorado River looks more like a stream,” Biden said during his Wednesday speech in Fort Myers Beach, a hard-hit town in southwest Florida during the Ian landfall, as DeSantis stood behind him.
“There’s a lot going on, and I think the one thing this has finally ended is a discussion about whether or not there’s climate change and we should do something about it,” the president continued.
When Hurricane Ian, described by DeSantis as a “500-year flood event,” slammed into the state last week and caused widespread destruction, flooding, and power outages to coastal communities, it spurred a bevy of Liberals and left-wing media outlets to push hard the climate agenda, asserting that carbon emissions and global warming have intensified hurricanes.
Biden administration’s top hurricane expert, however, has rebuked such claims due to lack of evidence.
“I don’t think you can link climate change to any one event,” Jamie Rhome, the acting director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) National Hurricane Center, told CNN during a Sept. 27 interview, after being pressed about how climate change had contributed to the storm and its “rapid intensification.”
“On the whole, on the cumulative, climate change may be making storms worse. But to link it to any one event, I would caution against that,” Rhome added.
‘Premature’ Conclusion
NOAA recently released a study with similar conclusions, saying “it is premature to conclude with high confidence that human-caused increases in greenhouse gases” have impacted hurricane activity in the Atlantic.
“After adjusting for a likely under-count of hurricanes in the pre-satellite era there is essentially no long-term trend in hurricane counts,” according to the federal agency.
Michael Shellenberger, the founder and president of Environmental Progress and author of “The Death of Environmentalism,” pushed back the long-term trend of increasing hurricane intensity at CPAC Australia, known as the Conservative Political Action Conference, in Sydney.
“The best available science predicts that there will be a 25 percent decline in hurricane frequency in the future, even alongside a five percent increase in intensity, which we are not seeing at this point,” the California-based environmentalist said on Oct. 1.
As part of his Wednesday remarks, Biden stressed the amount of federal help Florida will receive for storm aid and as part of Democrat-backed spending, including $13 billion over the next five years for highways and bridges.
The death toll from Hurricane Ian has climbed past 100, while nearly 400,000 homes and businesses remained without power in Florida as of Oct. 4.
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Hundreds of billions in new subsidies will bring expensive, unreliable, eco-destructive power
Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) wanted regulatory reform, in part to reverse some of the Biden Administration reversals of Trump era reforms intended to expedite permits for fossil fuel projects.
Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) needed Manchin’s vote in the 50-50 Senate to enact his latest spending extravaganza, the Inflation Reduction Act, which was primarily a massive climate and “green” energy subsidy arrangement. It gives Schumer allies some $370 billion in wind, solar, battery and other funding, tax credits and subsidies. In exchange, Schumer would offer a path for Manchin’s reform bill.
Manchin voted YEA, and promptly got bushwhacked. Once he’d helped enact the IRA, he had zero leverage. Schumer, he discovered, had promised an opportunity, maybe a vote, but not actual support. House and Senate members told him, we weren’t part of your secret negotiations with Schumer; we didn’t shake hands on any deal; we don’t want easier permitting for drilling, pipelines and LNG terminals that could help send US natural gas to Britain and Europe.
In the end, it’s probably a good thing Manchin’s bill went nowhere.
Yes, it provided some much needed and long overdue reforms to curb the paralysis by analysis and endless litigation that have plagued fossil fuel, highway, airport and countless other projects for decades.
But it also had Trojan horse provisions that would have unleashed hordes of newly subsidized wind, solar and transmission marauders on much of the Lower 48 USA, to send pseudo-clean electricity to mostly Democrat cities and states that don’t want even “renewable” power generation in their own backyards.
As the Wall Street Journal and energy analyst Robert Bryce observed, Manchin’s “reforms” would give the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) and other bureaucrats the power to issue permits and force multiple states to acquiesce to new transmission lines and 200-foot-tall towers across their scenic, habitat, agricultural and even residential lands – if the feds decide the lines are in the "national interest.” This could easily transform into federal powers of eminent domain, to take the needed acreage.
The feds could decree that thousands of miles of new transmission lines are in the “national interest” if, for instance, the lines “enhance the ability” of faraway wind and solar facilities to connect their intermittent, weather-dependent energy to an electric grid; or enable distant blue states to reach their renewable energy goals; or help achieve Biden Administration goals of stopping manmade climate change, “advancing environmental justice” and having “a net-zero economy” by 2050. Hopefully while avoiding blackout-a-week nightmares.
Populous states like New York could also work with FERC & Co. to have offshore wind turbines installed off less populated coasts, like Maine or North Carolina – and have the electricity delivered to the Empire State. New York’s peak summertime needs alone would require 2,500 monstrous 680-foot-tall 12-MW offshore turbines, operating 24/7 – when we’d be lucky if they generated electricity 40% of the year. (Imagine how many offshore ... or 6-MW onshore ... turbines we’d need to power the entire USA.)
Compounding the energy colonialism, the Manchin reform package would also give FERC authority to allocate and “socialize” transmission line costs, so that residents of states that don’t even get any of the electricity being sent along the newly imposed transmission lines would still have to help pay for them.
In short, the feds would be able to ride roughshod over states, local communities and federalism.
Let me say it again: Wind and sunshine are free, clean, green, renewable and sustainable. But harnessing this diffuse, unreliable, weather-dependent energy to power civilization definitely is not. And every bit of “renewable” power must be backed up with other power – so double our cash and material investments.
The Green Lobby and its legislator and regulator friends really seem to think they can just pass laws and earmark subsidies, demanding energy transformations by 2050 – and it will just happen. The raw materials will just be there, perhaps with a little MAGIC: Materials Acquisition for Global Industrial Change. That is, they simply assume the necessary raw materials will also just be there.
Not one of these luminaries has given a moment’s thought to – much less attempted to calculate – what this net-zero transition would require:
How many millions of wind turbines, billions of solar panels, billions of EV and backup batteries, millions of transformers, thousands of miles of transmission lines – sprawling across how many millions of acres of wildlife habitat, scenic and agricultural lands, and people’s once-placid backyards?
How many billions of tons of copper, steel, aluminum, nickel, cobalt, lithium, concrete, rare earths, composite plastics and other materials? How many trillions of tons of ores and overburden? How many mines, across how many more acres – with how much fossil fuel energy to operate the enormous mining equipment, and how much toxic air and water pollution emitted in the process? Where will it be done?
To cite just one example, just those 2,500 wind turbines for New York electricity (30,000 megawatts) would require nearly 110,000 tons of copper – which would require mining, crushing, processing and refining 25 million tons of copper ore ... after removing some 40 million tons of overlying rock to reach the ore bodies. Multiply that times 50 states – and the entire world – plus transmission lines.
How many processing plants and factories would be needed? How much fossil fuel power to run those massive operations? How many thousands of square miles of toxic waste pits all over world under zero to minimal environmental standards, workplace safety standards, child and slave labor rules?
How many dead birds, bats, and endangered and other species would be killed off all across the USA and world – from mineral extraction activities, wind turbine blades, solar panels blanketing thousands of square miles of wildlife habitats, and transmission lines impacting still more land?
How many will survive hurricanes like Ian or Andrew? Where will we dump the green energy trash?
Not only do the luminaries and activists ignore these issues and refuse to address them. They actively suppress, cancel, censor and deplatform any questions and discussions about them. They collude with Big Tech companies and news agencies, which too often seem all too happy to assist.
The hard reality is, there are not, will not be, and cannot be, enough mines, metals and minerals on the entire planet – to reach any “net-zero” US economy by 2050, much less a global “green” economy.
Here’s another issue: electric vehicle and backup lithium-ion battery modules can erupt spontaneously into chemical-fueled infernos that cannot be extinguished by conventional fire-fighting means. That raises an important analog to rules Alec Baldwin should have kept uppermost in mind a year ago. Treat every firearm as if it is loaded. Never point your muzzle at anything you are not prepared to destroy.
In the Biden-Newsom-Kerry-IPCC energy arena: Treat every electric vehicle and backup battery system as if it is loaded and ready to ignite. Never park an EV, install a PowerWall or locate a backup power facility near anything you are not prepared to destroy.
That includes in your garage; near other vehicles; in parking garages under apartment and office buildings; in residential neighborhoods and highway tunnels; or on cargo ships like the Felicity Ace.
And yet we’re supposed to go along with Green Energy schemes – as we did with masks, school lockdowns and vaccinations to stop Covid – because our government, media and “public interest” groups insist that we “follow the science,” on which there can be no doubt (certainly none permitted) that we face a “manmade climate crisis” that threatens the very existence of humanity and “the only Earth we have.”
Because we have to destroy the planet (with green energy) in order to save it (from climate change).
It’s time to short-circuit this electricity nightmare, by asking these questions, demanding answers, and ending the notion that governments can simply issue edicts and compel reality to change in response.
https://www.heartland.org/news-opinion/news/the-coming-green-electricity-nightmare ?
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UK: Companies collapse at fastest rate since financial crisis as energy bills soar
UK companies are collapsing at the fastest rate since the height of the global financial crisis as surging energy bills drive thousands of firms out of business.
There were more than 5,600 insolvencies in England and Wales in the second quarter – the highest level since 2009, according to the Office for National Statistics.
The sharp rise in energy bills was cited as the biggest problem for businesses, while difficulties paying debt, rising costs of raw materials and supply chain disruptions also took their toll.
While the squeeze on finances has hit all businesses, construction, retail and accommodation and food services suffered the highest number of insolvencies in the first half of the year.
The Government has outlined support to help companies and public sector bodies struggling with their energy bills. However, the scheme for businesses will run for only six months, unlike the two-year programme aimed at households.
Insolvencies slumped in 2020 as the Government rolled out support to protect businesses during the pandemic. But the number of failures has since spiked sharply as companies grapple with fresh challenges even after lockdowns ended.
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7 October, 2022
Media Falsely Links Hurricanes to Climate Change. Here Are the Facts
The weather is difficult to predict. Media narratives aren’t. The media bat signal is up to exploit the latest crisis for left-wing policy goals.
As Florida deals with the cleanup from Hurricane Ian—which ravaged the state, killed hundreds, and displaced thousands more—media outlets have peddled the idea that this tragedy is the result of climate change.
Some even suggested that Florida shouldn’t get aid because some of its elected officials oppose federal legislation that would pump billions of dollars into various green initiatives.
The New York Times ran a piece headlined “Florida Leaders Rejected Major Climate Laws. Now They’re Seeking Storm Aid.” The subheadline read, “Senior Republican politicians in the state have opposed federal action against global warming, which is making storms like Hurricane Ian more destructive.”
The Times report said that while Republicans in the state are requesting aid, they “don’t want to discuss the underlying problem that is making hurricanes more powerful and destructive.”
What was the cause, according to the Times? “The burning of fossil fuels.” Of course.
There was a somewhat amusing admission in the Times piece, pointed out by commentator Erick Erickson on Twitter. The “climate” legislation the writers highlighted was the “Inflation Reduction Act.”
It turns out, President Joe Biden’s spending bill—labeled and sold as a method to reduce inflation—had little to do with stopping inflation and was a whole lot more about jamming through Democrat spending priorities and controlling people’s lives. Now that it’s passed into law, the media doesn’t even have to maintain the pretense.
The Times wasn’t alone in saying that supermassive hurricanes are on the rise while insinuating that more big storms are on the way if we don’t spend billions to tackle man-caused climate change as the Democrat Party suggests.
Of course, the Biden administration uses this kind of information to enact sweeping climate initiatives.
Corporate media outlets like ABC, The Washington Post, and others ran with headlines suggesting that we got Hurricane Ian and other big, recent hurricanes because of man-caused climate change. ABC rolled with the headline, “Here’s how climate change intensifies hurricanes.” The Washington Post went with “How climate change is rapidly fueling super hurricanes.”
But is any of it true? Are fossil fuels and climate change really causing more and larger hurricanes?
Evidence suggests that the narrative about an increase in deadly hurricanes is more a media creation than anything else. In fact, it appears that there has been a slight decline in major hurricanes making landfall in the United States in the past century.
Michael Shellenberger, author of “Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All,” wrote a brilliant takedown of the “fossil fuels + climate change + Republicans = deadly hurricanes” thesis on Substack.
First, Shellenberger explained that the “increasing cost of hurricane damage can be explained entirely by more people and more property in harm’s way.” He compared pictures of Miami Beach to what it looked like a century ago. It’s clearly filled out a great deal in the past hundred years as the area built up.
It’s a similar phenomenon to how wildfires in California burn down many more homes now. The cost of housing in cities pushed more people to live in areas with significant fire hazards, so the property damage is naturally much higher than in the past.
As far as numbers, Shellenberger pointed to data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that shows “no long-term trend in hurricane counts” since the 1880s.
NOAA expects a 25% decline in hurricane frequency in the future. Sure, the prediction could be wrong, but available information clearly demonstrates that there is no sudden increase in hurricanes as media headlines suggest.
Furthermore, Shellenberger pointed to NOAA data about increasing hurricane intensity. The numbers showed no evidence of an increase in the size of storms during the same time frame. From NOAA:
We conclude that the historical Atlantic hurricane data at this stage do not provide compelling evidence for a substantial greenhouse warming-induced century-scale increase in: frequency of tropical storms, hurricanes, or major hurricanes, or in the proportion of hurricanes that become major.
The study predicts a 5% increase in hurricane intensity by 2100, but so far there is no evidence of an increase up to this point. And this predicted intensity increase will happen as the overall numbers of hurricanes decrease.
What’s truly deceptive from the Times and other outlets is that they use the 1980s as the starting point from when they say hurricanes have increased. But the 1980s were a historic low point for hurricanes
Shellenberger concluded that much of the reporting on hurricanes has been an exercise in subtle and sometimes direct distortion of the truth. Numbers have been cherry-picked and the data has been misrepresented to concoct the narrative corporate media wants to present to the public.
“It’s clear that reporters are deliberately seeking to convince their readers and listeners of the false impression that hurricanes are becoming more frequent and intense,” he wrote.
It’s also important to note that while there has been more property damage from hurricanes, due to more people living in areas they commonly hit, there has actually been a sharp decrease in death and overall economic impact as a result of them.
Bjorn Lomborg, former director of the Danish government’s Environmental Assessment Institute in Copenhagen and a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, wrote in 2021 about how the world is getting better at mitigating the deadliness of hurricanes.
Even though the total damage due to hurricanes has gone up—mostly because more properties are in their way—the overall cost to societies has gone down.
“The trend of weather-related damages from 1990 to 2020 declined from 0.26% of global [gross domestic product] to 0.18%,” Lomborg wrote. “A landmark study shows this has been the trend for poor and rich countries alike, regardless of the types of disaster. Economic growth and innovation have insulated all sorts of people from floods, droughts, wind, heat and cold.”
It’s worth pointing out that the economic growth that’s allowed societies to better tackle the impact of hurricanes and other natural disasters was largely made possible by fossil fuels.
What’s more dramatic than the economic numbers is how much death tolls have gone down.
A century ago, Lomborg wrote, half a million people a year used to die in natural disasters like “storms, floods, droughts, wildfires and extreme temperature.” Since then, according to Lomborg, global annual deaths from natural disasters “declined 96%, to 18,000. In 2020, they dropped to 14,000.”
So if anything, the news is generally good, but you certainly wouldn’t guess this based on media coverage. Instead, we are led to believe that hurricanes are getting worse. If you don’t buy it, then you clearly don’t believe in capital “s” Science, according to the Left and its media allies.
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Electric vehicles catching fire in Florida after Hurricane Ian
As the Sunshine State recovers from the punishing Category 4 storm that made landfall last week, first responders have faced further destruction from electric vehicles that were submerged in water from the extensive flooding and later caught fire, Jimmy Patronis, Florida’s chief financial officer and state fire marshal, said on Twitter.
“There’s a ton of EVs disabled from Ian,” he tweeted. “As those batteries corrode, fires start.
“That’s a new challenge that our firefighters haven’t faced before. At least on this kind of scale.”
In his tweet, Patronis posted a video of firefighters with the North Collier Fire Rescue District in Naples putting an electric vehicle fire out as a bystander is heard saying it’s taken thousands of gallons of water to extinguish it.
“It takes special training and understanding of EVs to ensure these fires are put out quickly and safely,” Patronis tweeted.
Additional footage of the same vehicle fire posted on Facebook by the North Collier Fire Rescue District shows firefighters dousing the car’s top and underbelly with water to eliminate any sparks.
The rescue district said firefighters received the call while Patronis and state Rep. Bob Rommel visited the area. The two state officials were brought to the incident so they could see the difficulty of putting EV fires out and said it took firefighters hours to ensure the blaze was extinguished.
“This is an issue many fire departments across [southwest] Florida are experiencing right now,” the district wrote on Facebook. “These vehicles have been submerged in salt water; they have extensive damage and can potentially be serious fire hazards.”
Florida is only behind California for most electric vehicles on the road at more than 95,000 registered in the state, according to the US Department of Energy.
https://nypost.com/2022/10/06/electric-vehicles-catching-fire-in-florida-after-hurricane-ian/
************************************************The Choking of Our Energy Industry Is to the Detriment of Both Canada and the World
What is the number one most essential resource in the world today?
Obviously, it is energy. Oil and gas and (yes, it’s making a return) coal during this fretful time have a value enhanced beyond their normal use. And considering that normal use is nothing less than powering the way of life of—literally—all of us, any “added” or enhanced value makes every energy source vital beyond value.
Mr. Putin’s wicked actions in Ukraine in addition to their cruelty have for the first time since the Cuban Missile Crisis thrown up the shadow of possible nuclear conflict. We may speculate forever, and it seems we have, on his psychology, on what goes on in that dark mind, and whether—due to pride or the deep ruthlessness of which he has given much evidence—he would indeed move to the ultimate terror.
The anxious truth is, we do not know. What we do know, and it is utterly unconnected with Putin’s mindset, is that he has been “allowed” or better still been given licence to act as he has acted because of his energy leverage over Europe. The European press is full of warnings and cautions about a possible energy shortage—it is already in evidence—for the coming winter.
The European Union, that tattered and failing project, gave Putin that leverage. Under the mesmeric fascination with global warming and the careless and even negligent pursuit of so-called green energy, the commitment to the industrial mirage of “net zero” goals, and tying their economies to the unproven (and by any logic unattainable) renewables such as solar and wind power—while maintaining their dependence on Russia for the proven resource—EU nations have made themselves vulnerable and weak. And so it comes to pass that in 2022, with all our magnificent technology, all our advances in a computer age, some of the greatest economies in the world are wondering if they can make it through the coming winter without tragedy.
The radical embrace of green thought and green ambitions by the most progressive of Western leaders may prove to be one of the most costly and incompetent moves in governance of the century. Those who pushed feverishly for the abandonment of the energy sources that have served well for the last 100 years and went on a rabbit’s chase for the folly and fantasy of net-zero carbon-dioxide-emitting energy supplies now see the grim harvest in the present crisis.
Will it wake them up? Will the desperate actions of continental governments (and ours and the United States) to underwrite fuel costs, pouring out money from already COVID-depleted treasuries, and soaring inflation finally alert them to how foolish and dangerous the lure of green energy has been?
I doubt it greatly. Very greatly indeed. The woke are the very last to awake. And for irrefutable evidence of that we may leave Europe and the UK and look at the sad and mad Canadian experience.
We have in abundance the most critical resource of all the world. Yet for the last seven years under the Trudeau administration, “climate change” has been both the official and number one priority policy of the Canadian government.
And as a marker of that policy, as a definitional illustration of how absurd it is, the increase of carbon taxes to $50 a tonne on April 1 (an unnoticed or deliberate choice of day) by Messrs. Guilbeault and Trudeau cannot be matched.
Except of course that same day’s sweet promise to raise them to $65 a tonne in 2023. And except again the even sweeter promise (please play the Hallelujah Chorus here) to $170 by 2030!
The world needs real energy supplies. Inflation is biting every lower-income Canadian severely. Gasoline prices are unreal. The economy is burdened by debt and huge deficits. Food prices flare upwards. The housing market is spinning.
And in defiance of reality, the facts of global geopolitics, the urgencies in Europe, and Putin’s uncontrollable rage, our country—which has in abundance a product that could provide real strength and benefit to us and half the world—is blunderingly piling on taxes to our greatest resource under an obsessive climate change government. And, not at all incidentally, aiming at Canadian agriculture at the same time. Hobble the oilfields, wound our agriculture—that seems to be the plan.
This government has choked the energy industry. Fastened itself like no other Western country to the fata morgana of climate change and the insolent ambitions of the Davos world masters—to our detriment at home, and our (lost) ability to play a significant part in the current world crisis.
No sadder sentence could I find from that April announcement than this one: “Guilbeault says the government is not going to stall or move backward on its climate action plan, of which the carbon price is seen as a ‘cornerstone’ policy.”
Madness. It’s enough to make you want to climb some very tall building as a protest.
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Australia: Coal is booming but you won’t hear about it from Green/Left sources
Having seen the disastrous economic and social outcomes of Europe’s energy crisis, Australia, perversely, perhaps uniquely, is determined to inflict similar damage on itself. The decisions of the Queensland government, and AGL, to get rid of coal-generated electricity by 2035 will likely be, if implemented fully, disastrous.
I say “likely” because it’s possible that some great technology fix may show up in the meantime. But based on what we know of technology today, these moves mean much higher electricity prices and in time almost certainly unreliable supply and intermittent crises.
Nothing is certain, of course, least of all the future. But if as a nation we wanted to replicate the European mess, this is the way we’d go about it.
There are times in Australia when the plain truth is so unfashionable that almost no one speaks it. Here is one simple truth about Australia. We are a wealthy society – with first-class hospitals, affluent universities that can indulge their postmodern critical theory nuttiness, modern transport, modern if ineffective defence forces, a vast welfare system and everything else – for one reason: we make an enormous amount of money exporting commodities.
But the anti-fossil fuel sentiment has become so great that now there is a corporate wariness even about gas exploration and development. Yet we are completely dependent on coal and gas ourselves, as well as for export income. Incidentally, substituting gas for coal has been the main way many developed nations have actually reduced their greenhouse gas emissions.
However, remark this central fact which is never allowed into the debate. Coal is booming. That’s right. Coal is booming.
I am indebted to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute website for highlighting two recent international reports that make this clear, one from the International Energy Agency and one from BloombergNEF. No rhetoric or argument could be as powerful as the facts. So let me offer you a selection of facts from these reports.
Last year, global coal-fired electricity jumped a staggering 8.5 per cent, far in excess of the 5.6 per cent rise in total global power generation. Overall, never in human history has more electricity been generated by coal.
Yet how many times per day do we hear on the ABC that the world has turned away from coal? Whenever I’m on an ABC panel and point out that coal is booming, I cause the most terrible conniptions among my fellow panellists and ABC hosts. It’s as though I’ve committed a morally shocking crime of modern heresy speak. But there’s something else. Their view of climate change is religious but, while fervently religious, it’s also intellectually fragile, and if they admit certain unarguable facts, such as global coal use, the whole dogmatic structure underlying their world view threatens to collapse. Thus the moral panic in the reaction.
But I digress. Some more fun facts. The majority of countries pledged to phasing coal out altogether actually increased their coal-fired power production in 2021. Coal, in fact, accounted for the majority of the global net energy increase in 2021. It’s not only in Australia that climate change happy-talk bears only a glancing relationship with reality.
One of the special wrinkles in the Australian debate is the way we ignore Asia. Here are the 10 top countries, in order, for coal power expansion in 2021: China, India, Vietnam, South Africa, The Philippines, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Indonesia, Bulgaria, Japan. Eight out of 10 of those nations are in Asia. Economic growth is still centred much more in Asia than anywhere else. Power usage tracks economic growth, and coal use tracks overall power usage. Those basic equations haven’t changed.
When people talk airily about the world transitioning away from fossil fuels, what they are really describing, so far at least, is that Europe has cut fossil fuels a bit and is in crisis as a consequence, while the US has partly moved from coal to gas.
There’s a lot of renewable energy being installed as well, vast amounts in fact. If your story is only about the uptake of renewables you can produce an alternative set of facts that seem pretty impressive. But you can’t pretend that coal, gas and other fossil fuels have suffered absolute decline. In 2021 coal surged not only absolutely but also proportionally.
It’s also fair to remember that 2021 was a special case. The world economy was recovering from Covid, droughts produced shortages of hydro-electricity and Russia caused high gas prices in Europe. But every year is a special year. Not only that, the long-term trends do not suggest the world is ditching coal either. Indonesia relied on coal for 49 per cent of its power in 2012 and 61 per cent in 2021. The Philippines went from 39 per cent coal power in 2012 to 59 per cent in 2021. Indonesia and The Philippines are high-population, big-growth economies as far as the eye can see.
Of course they themselves are small fry compared with China and India, still the fastest-growing big economies in the world. Between them they accounted for 83 per cent of new coal power in 2021. According to Climate Action Tracker, China increased its greenhouse emissions by 11 per cent from 2015 to 2021. In the same period, the US, that world imperialist neoliberal terrible progenitor of every Western ill, which moreover was ruled for most of that time by Donald Trump, reduced its emissions by 6 per cent. Much of that was switching from coal to gas. Yet the Australian green-left demonises gas almost as wildly as it demonises coal.
Coal provided 64 per cent of China’s energy in 2021. Despite being told endlessly by wish-fulfilment-addicted government climate agencies that China is committed to action on greenhouse gases – I’ve often in ABC appearances encountered that amiable chimera, the China national carbon market – China is expanding coal massively.
The Wall Street Journal reports the Global Energy Monitor assessing that by July 2022 China had 258 separate coal-fired power stations, involving 515 individual units, proposed, permitted or under construction.
Further, the vast majority of zero-emissions energy the world does have is either nuclear or hydro. Chris Bowen scoffs at nuclear energy. He might want to let France’s Emmanuel Macron in on the joke. The French President won re-election promising 14 new nuclear power plants. France gets 70 per cent of its electricity from nuclear and is the world’s biggest electricity exporter. Nuclear is much more reliable than hydro. Sometimes it doesn’t rain, and some countries, like Australia, are topographically difficult for hydro.
Nationals senator Matt Canavan deserves praise for introducing a bill to remove the legal prohibition on nuclear energy in Australia. Our greenhouse emissions are down to about 1 per cent of the world’s total.
Bankrupting our economy won’t help the global climate. We should gradually reduce our emissions and replace high-emissions energy with lower-emissions sources such as gas, or zero-emissions sources such as nuclear. And before that, we should occasionally allow the facts to participate in the debate.
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6 October, 2022
Concentrated solar thermal power touted as part of Australia's clean energy future
LOL. What's old is new again. Solar thermal is an old idea that has often been tried but always disappoints. The best known example was the huge Ivanpah project (from 2013) in the Mojave desert.
You don't hear much about it now as it never functioned anywhere near its capacity and produced very expensive electricity. And there has NEVER been any return on the couple of billion spent constructing it.
The most amusing thing about it is that it used vast amounts of natural gas to get itself going in the morning and when it was cloudy. There was at one stage a proposal to reclassify it as a gas-powered power station because on many occasions more of its output came from burning gas than from its solar furnaces
The thing such plants are best at is chewing up subsidies from deluded governments
The most comparable previous project to the one described below was the Tonopah project in the Nevdada desert. In it, more than 10,000 mirrors were to focus the sun’s heat on a tower to produce steam and heat a tank containing molten salt that would generate power at night. However, the technology proved unreliable and expensive to build and operate.
Since it began operating in 2015, repeated leaks from its molten salt tank resulted in the power plant going off-line repeatedly. Unable to solve that and other problems at the facility, the power plant ceased all operations in April 2019.
Super-heated NaCl (salt) is a very hard substance to handle and that generates big costs and losses
An Australian company says its technology can help solve the problem of around-the-clock clean energy as Queensland gears up to become a renewable energy powerhouse.
A chronic issue for the most common renewable energy sources — such as solar panels and wind farms — is an inability to store power, which forces the national grid to rely on coal-fired power overnight.
Vast Solar has been developing new technology for concentrated solar thermal power, a renewable energy source that powers more than 7 per cent of the Spanish national grid, and in which China is heavily investing.
Chief executive Craig Wood said the company had been developing concentrated solar power (CSP) technology for 13 years and was ready to scale up its prototypes — manufactured and tested in Goodna, near Ipswich — to contribute to the national grid.
"It's a direct replacement for the overnight energy that is provided by coal-fired power stations," he said.
"And importantly the technology uses the same skill sets that are currently used in those thermal power stations, just in a renewable context."
The technology uses large mirrors, or heliostats, to beam sunlight into an array on a tall tower.
Molten sodium is then pumped through the array and heated to more than 500 degrees Celsius.
That heated sodium can then be stored and used to generate steam to spin a turbine and drive electricity into the national grid — or as a clean energy source for large industry.
CSIRO head of solar research Greg Wilson said the technology could be located alongside a traditional photovoltaic solar farm, with the grid using solar panel energy during the day and switching to stored power at night.
"After hours when the batteries are all flat, and people want to continue with their air conditioner, or large industry wants to continue to work, that 12 hours of storage that the CSP plant provides allows us to have 24-hour renewable energy," Dr Wilson said.
The CSIRO has been working with Vast Solar on developing and testing its newest research in the field.
Mr Wood said CSP was now cheaper than coal or gas and emitted almost no carbon dioxide when deployed in a full-scale facility.
Released last week, Queensland's $62 billion renewable transition plan makes no mention of CSP technology but emphasises the role of solar power in its seven-year plan.
Mr Wood said the plan was "hugely exciting" and one in which CSP could play a role, "allowing us to use existing transmission infrastructure while providing new jobs for power plant workers".
Energy Minister Mick de Brenni said in a statement there would be "ample opportunities" for industry to work with the state government on the plan, "including proposals like CSP".
Vast Solar is developing a 30-megawatt test plant in Port Augusta, in South Australia, to demonstrate to government and investors that the technology can effectively contribute to the national grid.
The project has $110 million in federal concessional funding and once it has the go-ahead, could be up and running in three years, with a life span of three decades.
"We're working on securing the grid connection for that project," Mr Wood said.
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Tough times for fake meat
Beyond Meat was founded in 2009 by Ethan Brown who wanted to revolutionise the meat supply chain with a portfolio of fake meat products. Brown’s motivation for starting the company was to fight climate change by reducing global cow flatulence. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) claims animal agriculture is responsible for more than 14 per cent of global greenhouse emissions, with beef and dairy livestock accounting for 65 per cent of those emissions.
Climate activists also claim that livestock farming takes up too much land and water to produce enough food to feed the growing global population which is why they argue the only animals people should eat are insects.
In reality, all that is needed to feed a growing global population is to make agriculture as productive in developing countries as it is in the developed world. Yields on conventional crops have been rising at one per cent or more per annum and have been for decades. The developing world could dramatically increase yields in existing farms just by applying existing first world farm management practices. In addition, around 50 per cent of food produced in the world is wasted, mostly in the developing world due to lack of storage facilities and inefficient distribution systems which means that it ends up being eaten by bugs. With proper infrastructure, instead of eating bugs, as the FAO and the World Economic Forum advocate, we could eat the food that the bugs are eating.
Still, those sorts of incremental changes are of no interest to celebrity revolutionaries. With the global market for meat substitutes predicted to grow to more than $230 billion dollars by 2030, Brown’s fake meat protein wouldn’t just be good for people and good for the planet, it would be good for profits. Beyond Meat shares would be gilt-edged because they were guilt-edged.
Gates provided venture capital funding Beyond Meat’s shares, priced at $25 on the day of the initial public offering in April 2019 and soared to over $223 in the first three months. In February 2021, Gates was singing Beyond Meat’s praises proclaiming ‘all rich countries should move to 100 per cent synthetic beef’. ‘You can get used to the taste difference,’ he enthused, claiming that the ‘green premium is modest enough that you can sort of change the (behaviour of) people or use regulation to totally shift the demand’.
Using regulation to shift demand is a business model that has been remarkably profitable for Gates. His $55 million investment in 3.1 million shares of BioNTech in September 2019 was worth $1.7 billion by August 2021 thanks to mandatory vaccination policies. So far, however, he has not persuaded governments to outlaw meat consumption or mandate fake meat patties.
Perhaps that’s why, despite claiming that Beyond Meat had ‘a quality road map and cost road map’ that made it ‘totally competitive’ in the move to a meatless future, Gates had already cashed out most of his investment in 2019 selling $28 million worth of shares. No doubt his endorsement in February 2021 helped keep the price high a while longer. Did he still have a few shares to sell? A case of pump and dump? What is certain is that from June 2021, despite Gates’ ringing endorsement, Beyond Meat’s shares started an inexorable decline from $150 to around $15 a share this month.
Yet when Ramsey, the head of retail poultry at Tyson Foods was poached in December 2020 to manage Beyond Meat’s fast growing relations with fast-food companies – Taco Bell, McDonalds, KFC, Panda Express and Pizza Hut – the company’s prospects looked great. With his prior experience as president of Tyson’s global McDonalds business, Ramsey was quite a catch.
Yet as 2021 wore on, the company’s sales, which had been expanding at triple-digit rates, slowed significantly as rampant inflation, ironically driven by President Biden’s green agenda, ate away at Americans’ disposable income forcing them to eat cheaper food. McDonalds launched its Beyond Meat McPlant Burger in Veganuary 2022 but the deal dumped as a nothing burger with underwhelming sales of only selling 20 McPlants per day, instead of the targeted 40-60. A major complaint was that fake meat was more expensive than the real thing. The company reported larger-than-expected second-quarter losses and a gross loss of $6 million.
The prospects for Beyond Meat do not look tempting. Its shares have fallen 75 per cent since the start of the year bringing its market value down to less than a billion dollars from $13.4 billion only three years ago. The takeaway from some analysts is that with anaemic growth in a lean market, Beyond Meat may be beyond saving. Certainly it is beyond Ramsey, suspending him indefinitely. As for Gates, it seems he isn’t actually beyond meat. In July 2022, his foundation donated over $3.5 million to Nindooinbah, a Queensland cattle station that breeds top quality beef cattle breeding stock. But as for any comment from Gates on the tough times for fake meat. Crickets.
https://spectator.com.au/2022/10/tough-times-for-fake-meat/
****************************************************Euro energy crisis: A rare opportunity to recalibrate priorities?
At least one developed economy is waking up from an energy slumber induced by the obsession with climate change. The new prime minister of the UK is seemingly leaving no stone unturned in her pursuit of energy liberation by appointing climate-skeptic ministers.
Given the decade-long dominance of anti-fossil fuel policies in the Western economies, this monumental policy shift is nothing short of a great awakening, one that may have been forced upon leaders by an existential energy crisis.
The Russian war in Ukraine, the uncertainty with OPEC oil production, and the post-pandemic economic recovery have together created a situation that cannot be ignored anymore. The political class has been forced to address the energy shortage. Sensible policies must be pursued and probably will be this winter if only out of a need to keep people from freezing to death.
In 2016, the Paris climate accord was signed by almost all countries. The objective was to address global warming through reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. Nations pledged to reduce their dependency on conventional energy sources like coal and oil.
What followed were the decommissioning of coal fired plants, closure of coal mines, high taxes on CO2 emissions and mandatory transition of electric grids to inefficient renewables. In the last five years alone, “half of Europe’s coal fleet has announced plans to close before 2030.” Even nuclear energy was snubbed in the mad rush for wind and solar technology.
These, along with a plethora of other measures, made the European and UK economies highly dependent on Russian natural gas.
With their quixotic parade to green utopia rudely interrupted, political leaders of the developed West face a crisis of soaring electricity costs and energy shortages.
Some utilities in the UK said they cannot provide new power connections to certain small businesses. Businesses that do have a power connection are dismayed by unaffordably high price quotations for the coming year — as much as 10 times more than current levels. An average household in Europe is expected to pay three times more for energy bills in 2023 ($500 per month) compared to 2021 prices ($160 per month). Goldman Sachs has warned that Europe’s household electrical bills could surge by $2 trillion by next year.
Neither wind nor solar could address the grave energy situation as both are intermittent technologies that are incapable of delivering large amounts of baseload electricity and meeting on-demand needs. With no choice left, the European countries have turned to coal and nuclear. While France is readying its dormant nuclear plants for winter, Germany has already increased its reliance on coal.
However, perhaps the bigger news is that the UK’s new cabinet will now allow fracking to resume in the UK, thus providing Britons with domestic gas that would be cheaper than imports and eventually bringing down astronomical energy bills.
The UK’s move to utilize hydrocarbons to address the energy crisis, in a surprisingly unashamed and open manner, may very well trigger a revival of the fossil fuel sector across Europe. The coming winter will require increased energy production in the temperate European regions, and leaders cannot continue to hide behind the Russian gas shortage as a justification for their inaction. With the World Meteorological Organization predicting a cooling of oceans due to the La Niña weather pattern, the 2022 winter has the potential to bring brutally cold spells for Europe.
Britain’s leaders have enough time to make alternative arrangements to meet the oncoming winter’s energy demand. They can finally do away with the “no-coal policy,” and their sovereign status gives them enough freedom to use more coal to keep the lights on. However, if they take a defensive approach — like French President Macron who has asked consumers to reduce energy consumption — they will be in an unprecedented energy crisis with the cold weather taking a toll on businesses and people, especially the poor.
This is the perfect opportunity for European leaders to move beyond the veneer of deceptive green policies that threatens economic disaster and misery for citizens. For some, unfortunately, it may be too late to avoid either.
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Man Buys $115,000 Hummer Electric Truck - It Immediately Left Him Stranded in Middle of Road
It must be one of the more dramatic failures of an electric vehicle chronicled thus far. And it could have ended up much worse.
In a video posted on YouTube on Tuesday, Roman Mica, publisher of the website The Fast Lane Truck, recounted how his website had purchased a brand new General Motors Hummer EV. Price: $115,000.
After only a few days, and with fewer than 250 miles on the vehicle, the Hummer had problems in spectacular fashion. Alone on a busy highway, Mica found himself stranded. In true journalistic fashion, he pulled out his camera and documented what had gone wrong.
The Hummer ceased to budge. The shifter wouldn’t move. The trunk refused to open.
The only things working during the ordeal were the windshield wipers and the hazard lights.
As if to underscore the absurdity of the situation, Mica recorded himself switching between two dash-mounted LCD panels, flicking through screens, trying to reboot the Hummer out of “safe” mode, to no avail. Had it not been for the timely arrival of a police car, the Hummer could have been rear-ended by another vehicle.
Fortunately Mica’s son Tommy soon came to the scene. Followed by a tow truck, which had the unenviable task of loading a 9,400 pound vehicle that wouldn’t get in gear.
The Micas were finally able to get the Hummer rolling again. An article about the incident by The Fast Lane writer Zach Butler described how the team went through a complicated procedure that involved unhooking the battery to force a hard reboot of the system, then rolling the windows down in sequence, while stepping on the brake.
“Fortunately, Tommy and Roman were able to drive the vehicle back to the dealer after getting the Hummer EV out of this dicey situation,” the article states.
Chalk it up as another incident in the already troubled history of the model. The automotive news website Jalopnik reported in August that the supposedly “offroad” Hummer now risks severe malfunction if a car wash goes awry.
According to an article published in March by Elektrek, a website focused on electric vehicles, the Hummer EV also suffers from faulty tail lights caused by bad software. That issue prompted a recall by the manufacturer.
And then there is the simple matter of recharging the battery. Something that under some conditions may take days to build up for the Hummer EV.
Perhaps General Motors was too hasty in bringing an electric-powered truck to market. It seems that there is an abundance of design issues with the vehicle.
But if some Hummer owners are having buyer’s remorse about buying an electric vehicle, they are far from alone in the EV world.
As Breitbart reported in September, Hoovies Garage, a YouTube channel with 1.4 million subscribers, posted a video about the “total disaster” that came about from testing the new Ford F-150 Lightning electric pickup truck.
In July, the 17-year-old owner of 2014 Ford Focus Electric, purchased used for her by her parents, found out it needed a new battery that would cost $14,000 — more than the $11,000 the car cost in the first place.
In June Toyota issued a recall for its first electric vehicle.
Consumer research group J.D. Power published a study three months ago indicating that EV owners are far less satisfied with their cars than are those who own traditional gas-powered vehicles. And it seems that unreliability of battery power is but one of the issues.
And yet, “progressive” politicians and “green energy” advocates remain obsessed with forcing Americans to buy electric vehicles in spite of the many problems that continue to plague the industry. The most rabid proponents of electric automobiles refuse to let the free market decide if such cars and trucks are truly wanted or even necessary.
Liberals such as President Joe Biden and California Gov. Gavin Newsom believe that they can drag the American people kicking and screaming into buying cars that they cannot afford.
Nobody wants to drive an unreliable car or truck or SUV or minivan. Americans want to buy vehicles they can trust to take them where they need to go, whether it’s getting groceries or going to work, driving to church, or rushing to the hospital with a medical emergency.
Traveling by vehicle — like any activity in life — will always involve risk. But it should not be compounded by turning a car into the physical incarnation of the blue screen of death.
Biden believes that he can “executive order” the American people into defying their own wisdom about purchasing an automobile. He, and many others, are blind to reality. Two million people had power restored in Florida within days of Hurricane Ian. It’s doubtful that many, if any, in the army of out-of-state line workers who helped accomplish that arrived in electric vehicles.
Roman Mica’s experience with a Hummer EV will likely prove to have not been an outlier — just the first of many still to come.
If so-called “progressives” get their way there will be millions of electric vehicles on the road, each one rife with potential “software error” and shorted-out batteries. Countless cars and trucks, waiting to break down without warning. Or conceivably going completely out of control on the highway: Computerized missiles homing in on innocent targets.
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5 October, 2022
Wax worm saliva rapidly breaks down plastic bags, scientists discover
So is that panic over?
Enzymes that rapidly break down plastic bags have been discovered in the saliva of wax worms, which are moth larvae that infest beehives.
The enzymes are the first reported to break down polyethylene within hours at room temperature and could lead to cost-effective ways of recycling the plastic.
The discovery came after one scientist, an amateur beekeeper, cleaned out an infested hive and found the larvae started eating holes in a plastic refuse bag. The researchers said the study showed insect saliva may be “a depository of degrading enzymes which could revolutionise [the cleanup of polluting waste]”.
Polyethylene makes up 30% of all plastic production and is used in bags and other packaging that make up a significant part of worldwide plastic pollution. The only recycling at scale today uses mechanical processes and creates lower-value products.
Chemical breakdown could create valuable chemicals or, with some further processing, new plastic, thereby avoiding the need for new virgin plastic made from oil. The enzymes can be easily synthesised and overcome a bottleneck in plastic degradation, the researchers said, which is the initial breaking of the polymer chains. That usually requires a lot of heating, but the enzymes work at normal temperatures, in water and at neutral pH.
“My beehives were plagued with wax worms, so I started cleaning them, putting the worms in a plastic bag,” said Dr Federica Bertocchini, at the Biological Research Centre in Madrid. “After a while, I noticed lots of holes and we found it wasn’t only chewing, it was [chemical breakdown], so that was the beginning of the story.”
In terms of commercial application, it is early days, the researchers say. “We need to do a lot of research and think about how to develop this new strategy to deal with plastic waste,” said Dr Clemente Arias, also at the Spanish research centre. As well as large recycling plants, the scientists said it might one day be possible to have kits in homes to recycle plastic bags into useful products. Other scientists are currently investigating beetles and butterfly larvae for their plastic-eating potential.
Previous discoveries of useful enzymes have been in microbes, with a 2021 study indicating that bacteria in oceans and soils across the globe are evolving to eat plastic. It found 30,000 different enzymes that might degrade 10 different types of plastic.
A super-enzyme that quickly breaks down plastic drink bottles, usually made from PET plastic, was revealed in 2020, inspired by a bug found in a waste dump in Japan and accidentally tweaked to increase its potency. An enzyme that breaks down PET has also been produced from bacteria in leaf compost, while another bug from a waste dump can eat polyurethane, a plastic that is widely used but rarely recycled.
Millions of tonnes of plastic are dumped every year, and the pollution pervades the planet, from the summit of Mount Everest to the deepest oceans. Reducing the amount of plastic used is vital, as is the proper collection and treatment of waste, and full recycling could cut new plastic production.
The research, published in the journal Nature Communications, identified 200 proteins in the wax worm saliva and narrowed down the two that had the plastic-eating effect. “This study suggests insect saliva might [be] a depository of degrading enzymes which could revolutionise the bioremediation field,” the researchers said.
https://www.fontoura.com/english/2022/10/04/wax-worm-saliva-rapidly-breaks-down-plastic-bags-scientists-discover
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It's no surprise eco zealots targeted Captain Tom
What drives someone to do something as morally depraved as throw human faeces on a monument to Captain Sir Tom Moore? The video allegedly showing a climate-change campaigner dousing a likeness of Sir Tom, in what was reportedly a mixture of urine and excrement, is deeply chilling.
The person in the video is part of a pressure group called End UK Private Jets. The woman allegedly executed the vile stunt in order to raise awareness about the polluting impact of private jets. Quite how defiling a monument to a national treasure in such an appalling way is going to raise the public’s eco-awareness is anyone’s guess. It’s far more likely to make people feel sick, and angry.
Call me an old-fashioned moralist, but my view is that you shouldn’t throw crap at any monument. Least of all Sir Tom’s. A British army officer who became globally famous in his 99th year of life for raising millions of pounds for the NHS – he’s hardly Edward Colston, is he?
Perhaps it should go without saying but pouring piss and poo on a public monument to a late, much-loved elderly man is not normal behaviour. So it seems to me there are two possible explanations for this wicked act. First, perhaps this protester has ‘issues’, to use modern parlance. Perhaps she’s a troubled individual. If so, let us hope she gets the help she needs.
Or perhaps this foul act is yet another expression of the misanthropy that lurks at the heart of so much modern green campaigning. Perhaps this speaks to radical greens’ lowly view of humankind in general.
There is unquestionably an arrogance and a dogmatism in a great deal of green agitation today. And it isn’t hard to see why. It’s because these people genuinely believe they are saving the planet from mankind’s monstrous and toxic impact. The more eco-activists convince themselves that the end of the world is nigh – and that only they, the enlightened ones, have the intellect and wherewithal to do something about it – the more they will believe that any kind of action is justified to achieve their urgent ends.
There’s a direct link between the End of Days mindset of modern greens and their increasingly haughty and irritating forms of protest.
Whether it’s Extinction Rebellion occupying central London for days on end, or Insulate Britain blocking motorways and preventing people from getting to work, going on holiday or visiting loved ones, eco-agitators clearly think little of disrupting daily life.
And that’s because they’ve convinced themselves that the apocalypse is just around the corner. And you can’t be doing with niceties, can you, when you have an extinction-level calamity to hold at bay?
There is a religious, cult-like feel to eco-activists’ conviction that they must do everything they can – including disrupting oil production, holding up ambulances and even throwing excrement around – to stave off the doomsday they’ve been having feverish nightmares about for yonks.
Some have said the horrible befoulment of Sir Tom’s likeness will not convince anyone of the need to take environmental action. That’s true, but it somewhat misses the point. It might have been the aim of traditional forms of political activism to persuade people, to try to bring us on board. But eco-protesting has an altogether different goal. Its object is to save us, not convince us; to hector us, not persuade us; to punish us, not help us.
As George Monbiot once said, climate-change activism is ‘a campaign not for abundance but for austerity. It is a campaign not for more freedom but for less. Strangest of all, it is a campaign not just against other people, but against ourselves.’
He’s right. Environmentalism is, at root, a campaign against people. That’s why it has an undeniable streak of contempt in it. Perhaps the alleged vandalism of Sir Tom’s likeness was that contempt taken to its most despicable level yet.
https://spectator.com.au/2022/10/its-no-surprise-eco-zealots-targeted-captain-tom/
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The Brink of Darkness: Blackout fear in UK as gas supply to gas power plants and industry could be cut
Britain is at “significant risk” of gas shortages this winter because of Russia’s war in Ukraine and undersupply in Europe, the energy regulator said.
Ofgem said there was a possibility that Britain could enter a “gas supply emergency” in which supplies to some gas-fired power plants could be cut off, stopping them generating electricity.
The admission is likely to increase fears of blackouts because the UK relies on gas plants for the biggest share of its electricity supplies.
Industry rules mean power stations that do have their gas cut off could then have to pay huge charges that effectively penalise them for failing to deliver promised electricity supplies.
Ofgem says this risks the “potential insolvency of gas-fired generators” and the issue must be addressed urgently to prevent a “significant impact on the safety and security of the electricity and/or gas systems”.
The regulator was responding to a request from SSE, which owns several gas power stations and is calling for the rules to be changed.
SSE and RWE, another gas plant owner, say generators are so concerned about the potential penalties if their gas supplies are cut off that they are limiting advance sales of electricity, and that in turn is pushing up prices.
Russia has curtailed gas supplies to Europe in retaliation for sanctions over Ukraine, leaving countries braced for shortages and raising doubts about whether the UK will be able to get enough gas imports.
Wholesale gas prices have fallen from record highs in the summer but rose last week after sabotage on two gas pipelines from Russia to Europe, which raised fears that other gas infrastructure could be attacked.
National Grid, which is responsible for keeping the lights on and gas flowing, has issued a tender for more back-up gas supplies to help manage any short-term disruption this winter, in a move reported by the Sunday Telegraph.
It is due to publish its outlook for gas and electricity supplies this week, but concern is growing in the industry.
SSE said there was a “credible risk” of “one or more gas emergency scenarios this winter”. Industry rules mean that if power plants fail to deliver electricity they’ve promised, they must cover the costs National Grid’s electricity control room incurs to deal with the resulting shortfall, such as paying for back-up power plants.
Generators would incur such charges even if the cause of non-delivery was National Grid’s gas division cutting their supplies.
SSE estimates that an average gas-fired power plant could incur penalties of up to £276 million for every day it is unable to generate, or £475 million for the biggest plants, “potentially causing them to become insolvent”.
The risk will force generators to reduce their advance sales, “raising costs for electricity consumers”, it warned.
Tom Glover, UK chairman of RWE, said it was worried about “severe financial exposure under current rules” and that this was “one of the many reasons why many gas generators are reducing their forward sales”.
Ofgem said it expected “this winter to be more challenging than last year” and was taking “reasonable regulatory steps to mitigate and reduce the risks”.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/blackout-fear-as-gas-supply-could-be-cut-bgnr9vhqg
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Australia: Energy aspirations all well and good but unrealistic
Cheap electricity forever and cities filled with electric vehicles gliding silently along emission-free streets – the future has never looked brighter. This green-tinged nirvana is of course a target or more prosaically, an aspiration.
Aspirations are fine. You can aspire to lose weight, drink less and be nice to idiots but the likelihood of achieving any of these is dubious. This is not to say that they are unworthy, but that they are unrealistic.
Aspirations have been very much in vogue these past weeks as our leaders race to be the first to grasp the Holy Grail of environmental politics, net zero emissions!
The Queensland government put on an impressive burst of speed by lifting the state’s target from 70 per cent renewable energy generation by 2032 to 80 per cent by 2035. A quick reference to your mobile phone’s calculator will reveal that this is 13 years away.
Anyone who can confidently predict what our world will be like in 13 years’ time is possessed of powers more usually attributed to a higher being yet federal and state politicians, some of whom it could be easily argued are not the sharpest shovels in the shed, trot out these statistics with absolute certainty to what they hope is a gullible electorate.
To reinforce these incredulous flights of fancy, they rely on modelling, easily the most discredited science in the universe.
It doesn’t matter that, like your determination to achieve a sylph-like figure by Christmas, the target is unachievable because by 2032 or 2035 – pick a number, any number – the current crop of politicians will be long gone and enjoying second careers as overseas trade commissioners, foreign diplomats or resting their feet up on the boardroom tables of union-controlled super funds.
Queensland has embraced pumped hydro as its path to lowering emissions from electricity generation.
Energy Minister Mick de Brenni said that, after researching about 1000 sites, one west of Mackay had been found to be “simply the best”.
Within 24 hours of this revelation, it was revealed that “simply the best” was actually simply not quite the best and that simply put, the government was now looking for another site that could provide the massive areas of land required for water storage for the upper and lower dams without significantly damaging the environment, a site that could be connected to the grid to supply the power necessary to pump the water and transmit the power generated.
How much will this cost when they find simply the best placed to build it? The figure is $12bn, with the total cost of achieving that mirage-like figure of 80 per cent shimmering on the 2035 horizon, being $62bn.
Where will the money come from? Tricky one, that. The federal government and private infrastructure funds will be relied upon to bring this wondrous scheme to fruition. How much has been committed thus far? Not a cent.
It is worth noting that Snowy Hydro 2.0, the result of a Malcolm Turnbull thought bubble, was budgeted to cost $5.1bn. That now looks like blowing out by a further $2.1bn and is beset by problems.
Meanwhile, if you are leasing a servo, it might be good time to start looking for an exit strategy because, according to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s pre-election policies, by 2030, 89 per cent of new vehicle sales in Australia will be electric vehicles.
How did the Labor Party arrive at this incredibly precise figure? You guessed it – modelling. What percentage of new car sales were electric in Australia last year? Two per cent.
Federal Energy Minister Chris Bowen has been talking about getting tough on vehicle emissions. I don’t envy him the task of telling the nation’s tradies that they’ll have to give up their treasured four-wheel-drive utes and buy something more environmentally friendly.
He might also get a less than warm reception from the caravanning community who will have to say goodbye to their Toyota Land Cruisers and Nissan Patrols and park their vans in the yard because electric vehicles are incapable of towing heavy loads over long distances.
There will come a time when electric vehicles will be practical in this vast country and when renewable power will replace that generated by fossil fuels but it will be determined by technological advances and not grandstanding politicians with both eyes fixed firmly, not on the well being of the next generation but the next election.
And that sylph-like figure by Christmas? Good luck with that.
https://www.couriermail.com.au/news/opinion/mike-oconnor/mike-oconnor-energy-aspirations-all-well-and-good-but-unrealistic/news-story/69207acab380cdf7a3d02a4fc7570239
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4 October, 2022
Climate change policy: a greater risk than climate change?
Pragmatism is belatedly beating carbon purity as the West seeks to survive the economic consequences of Russia’s monstrous Ukraine war. Only months after its Glasgow swearing of allegiance to the climate catechism that requires faith in scientifically untested computer-programmed prophesies, the West has seen the light – and the energy needed to power it.
By grabbing at the vilified, carbon-emitting economic lifeline of fossil fuels, by rediscovering the energising virtues of the spurned coal, by embracing the scorned fracking in a desperate search for gas, by re-opening the closed off-shore petroleum leases to keep industry working, and by preferring ‘dangerous’ nuclear power to winters of freezing in the dark, a severe dose of reality has slowed the West’s race to economic destruction. The two wheels of the climate change cart – the scientifically unprovable words ‘catastrophic’ and ‘irreversible’ – that is carrying the democratic world to economic subjugation under a Putin-Xi authoritarian axis, are looking increasingly wobbly.
These two words, the key to the climate debate, have never been the subject of empirical, observed scientific proof. There is little disagreement that there is climate change; the climate has always been changing. But ‘catastrophic’ and ‘irreversible’ (beyond a computer-generated ‘tipping point’) that occupy the central role as drivers of the claimed climate crisis, exist only in computer modelling of what many scientists, in good faith, believe to be the likely outcome of observable current trends. The dogma that ‘the science is settled’ on climate change requires a belief not in proven scientific facts but in the accuracy of scientists’ computer projections of the yet-to-be-demonstrated future consequences of observable facts.
So why should these scientists be believed? The traditional ‘scientific method’ of examining a theory provides the best, but by no means certain, prospect of believable outcomes. This involves surviving the ‘falsification’ principle of rigorous endeavours to refute the theory, so that the scientific consensus eventually accepts it as truth. That is the rock on which the climate change crisis rests. But as an article in last week’s Conversation noted, ‘even if scientists have repeatedly tried, but failed, to refute a given theory, the history of science suggests at some point in the future it may still turn out to be false when new evidence comes to light.’
After decades of steadily increasing support for the ‘climate crisis’ theory, evidence to the contrary is raising its head. This is in addition to the negative impact of repeated failures of a multitude of past official forecasts of impending climate disaster. Earlier this year, four leading Italian scientists from universities in Milan, Verona and Padua and the National Institute of Nuclear Physics, published a review of historical climate data, finding no clear positive trend of extreme events and concluding that the current fear of a ‘climate emergency’ is not supported by the scientific data.
This means, they said, that altering our priorities with negative effects ‘could prove deleterious to our ability to face the challenges of the future, (and) squandering natural and human resources’. Their paper, A critical assessment of extreme events trends in times of global warming, is a survey of recent research (mirroring the IPCC’s approach) that appeared in the European Physical Journal Plus. ‘Since its origins, the human species has been confronted with the negative effects of the climate; historical climatology has repeatedly used the concept of climate deterioration in order to explain negative effect of extreme events (mainly drought, diluvial phases and cold periods) on civilisation. Today, we are facing a warm phase and, for the first time, we have monitoring capabilities that enable us to objectively evaluate its effects’. These show that, ‘On the basis of the observational data, the climate crisis that, according to many sources, we are experiencing today, is not yet evident.’
The scientists found that rainfall intensity and frequency was stationary in many parts of the world. Tropical hurricanes and cyclones showed little change over the long term, and the same is true of US tornadoes. Other meteorological categories including natural disasters, floods, droughts and ecosystem productivity showed no ‘clear positive trend of extreme events’. Regarding ecosystems, the scientists noted a considerable ‘greening’ of global plant biomass in recent decades caused by higher levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Satellite data show ‘greening’ trends over most of the planet, increasing food yields and pushing back of deserts
But the scientists nevertheless believe there is a need for action on the climate: ‘We should work to minimise our impact on the planet and to minimise air and water pollution…. How the climate of the twenty-first century will play out is a topic of deep uncertainty. We need to increase our resiliency to whatever the future climate will present us…(But) we need to remind ourselves that addressing climate change is not an end in itself and is not the only problem the world is facing.’
This cautionary note was echoed in a report quoted in the latest Weekend Australian from some of Australia’s most senior climate scientists led by UNSW Professor Andy Pitman. It warned that bank regulators, with little understanding of the uncertainty inherent in climate model projections, could cause ‘major systemic risk to the global financial system’ by their continued use.’ It is not science designed for the financial sector’, as physical climate models do not represent weather, so imposing a serious limitation in determining future climate risk for the financial sector. Yet Australia’s Reserve Bank will use network-derived climate scenarios in its internal analysis of climate-related risks. Most regulators, banks, insurers and investors are using projection-based scenarios ‘without fully accounting for uncertainty’.
This follows Pitman’s submission to APRA on its draft guidelines on climate risk that the corporate sector could be preparing for the financial costs of climate change based on misleading and flawed advice from the prudential regulator. ‘There is next to no capacity to provide advice to business on how the joint probability of multiple extreme weather events will change in the future.’
The only thing certain about climate science is uncertainty.
https://spectator.com.au/2022/10/business-robbery-etc-101/ ?
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Car makers secretive about price of EV replacement batteries
Car makers are baulking at revealing the cost of replacement batteries for electric vehicles, with good reason.
Lexus has revealed that a replacement for the battery in its UX electric SUV is $43,476 plus GST. That’s more than half the price of the car, which retails for about $82,500.
An engine replacement costs about $12,000 for the popular Ford Ranger ute or roughly $6000 for a small hatchback such as a Hyundai i30.
News Corp asked ten manufacturers to reveal the cost of their replacement batteries and Lexus and Nissan were the only two to reveal any prices.
Tesla, Mazda, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Hyundai, Kia, MG and Mitsubishi did not provide any numbers.
Car makers argue the replacement cost is a moot point because most of the cars on sale have eight-year warranties and battery prices are expected to fall dramatically in the intervening period.
Lexus has a ten-year/unlimited kilometre warranty for its batteries, provided the customer “adheres to servicing requirements outlined in the owner’s handbook”.
If battery capacity dips below 70 per cent within 10 years or 160,000km, the brand will replace it.
The average age of a car in Australia is roughly 10 years, so most long-term owners – or second hand EV buyers – will face a period where the battery is no longer under warranty.
Nissan, which has been selling the Leaf EV in Australia since 2012, says the “overwhelming majority” of Leafs are still using their original battery pack.
For those whose battery is no longer under warranty, the brand has a replacement program that costs $9990 plus labour.
The original Leaf had a battery “state of health” warranty period of five years, while the new model, launched in 2019, has an eight-year, 160,000km warranty.
A spokeswoman for the brand said all batteries lost capacity as they aged but “the extent of this degradation is highly dependent on usage and conditions”.
“The cost of a replacement battery after this period is purely speculative at this point as the cost of manufacturing batteries continues to decline over time,” she said.
She said the company had not come across a situation where a battery was damaged and the vehicle involved was repairable.
“Given the location of the battery in the floor/chassis of the vehicle, any impact or damage that has occurred to the battery (requiring a replacement) has also come with high level of structural damage to the vehicle and therefore the vehicle is not typically repairable,” she said.
She said the Nissan Leaf had a battery state of health readout in the centre screen that clearly showed the remaining capacity. The display has 12 bars and Nissan will replace a battery if it falls below nine during the warranty period.
The display also serves as a good guide for people looking to buy a used Leaf.
Australia’s top-selling EV brand, Tesla, wouldn’t disclose battery replacement costs for its vehicles, some of which have been on sale locally since 2014. Many of its Model S vehicles are approaching the end of the brand’s eight-year battery warranty.
The brand covers its Model Y and Model 3 vehicles with an eight-year/160,000km warranty, promising 70 per cent retention of the battery capacity in that period.
Mercedes-Benz guarantees the battery life of its EQS and EQE models for up to 10 years or 250,000, with a degradation target of 70 per cent.
Its EQA, EQB and EQC EVs are covered for eight years and 160,000km.
A spokesman said: “No general information can be given about the cost of exchanging batteries as this can vary. The cost depends on the type of battery and the vehicle model at the time a replacement battery is required outside of warranty,” he said.
Hyundai has a eight-year/160,000km warranty for its EVs but won’t reveal replacement costs. In the United States, it has a battery refurbishment program that costs significantly less than replacement.
Sister brand Kia has a shorter seven-year/150,000km warranty and also declined to reveal replacement costs by our story deadline.
BMW, MG, Mitsubishi, Mazda were contacted but have not provided any details on replacement costs.
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Electric Plane's 8-Minute Flight Celebrated as Milestone, But Look What the Wright Brothers' Flying Machine Was Doing in 1905
“Zero emissions” advocates are hailing the first flight of an all-electric commuter airplane. However, aviation enthusiasts may chuckle in the knowledge that almost 120 years earlier the Wright Brothers trounced that achievement with a few basic materials.
Eviation, a startup based in Washington state, built the proof-of-concept plane to demonstrate the viability of electric-powered flight with a range of a few hundred miles.
Last week the plane took off from an airport at Moses Lake, Washington. It circled the airfield for eight minutes before landing, TechCrunch+ reported.
It could be described as an impressive feat. Although one that arguably is overshadowed by the experimentation of history’s very first aviators.
Not resting on their laurels after achieving the first-ever powered flight, the Wright Brothers spent the years after their 1903 triumph attempting new aircraft designs that would greatly increase engine size and load weight, as well as accommodate passengers on trips that would be longer and fly further.
By 1904 the Wrights had moved their activities from Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, and relocated to Huffman Prairie near Dayton, Ohio. They began designing an aircraft that could carry more weight while also soaring much further than the original Flyer.
Their efforts culminated in an unprecedented flight on Oct. 5, 1905. With Wilbur at the controls, their new airplane made more than 29 circles around the field, traveling more than 24 miles within a span of over 39 minutes.
That’s almost five times the length of the Eviation craft’s flight.
It was also a better calculated risk for the Wrights. Fuel supply and consumption in a normal aircraft can be easily computed. Margins for safety can be tabulated with more confidence. Contrast this with batteries, which deteriorate over time resulting in lessening of assured charge.
The difference in performance between standard aircraft and the best of electric-powered technology is a vast one. One that cannot be ignored by anyone with concern for either airplane economics or safety.
According to Aviation Pros, the Eviation test plane is powered by over 21,500 Tesla-type batteries, taking up fully half the weight of the plane. The aircraft is intended to make relatively short commuter hops before having to recharge.
On the other hand, the Gulfstream G200 — a typical midsize jet comparable in size to the Eviation plane — carries eight passengers and has enough fuel capacity to cross the Atlantic Ocean, according to Flying Magazine.
Batteries simply cannot compare to fuel derived from hydrocarbons in terms of energy storage. While there is little current data on aircraft recharging, this issue is well-dcoumented with automobiles. A recent article highlighted the uncertainty that comes with traveling great distances with electrical vehicles.
An Australian TikTok user had difficulty driving between Canberra and Sydney, News.com.au reported. A journey that should have taken a few hours instead occupied an entire day because locating charging stations proved difficult. Notably, at one point it would have taken four hours to achieve a fully charged battery.
Similarly the new owner of a GMC Hummer was shocked — no pun intended — when he discovered it would take four days to draw enough current from his home outlet to recharge his vehicle — using Level 1 charging.
Ponder, then, how long it will take to recharge even smaller commuter jets. It becomes economically more feasible — and more convenient — to simply hop into a car and drive from one city to the next. By the time the airplane has completely charged, it’s possible to have gone to one’s destination and returned by ground vehicle.
That is not stopping aviation providers like Air Canada from purchasing electric planes in bulk despite openly acknowledging that the aircraft will not seat the same number of passengers as traditional planes
It can be argued that for all its technological simplicity, the Wright Brothers’ 1905 airplane was the more reliable aircraft compared to the plane from last week’s battery-powered flight. While Eviation’s craft is primarily made of carbon composite and other exotic materials, the Wrights were accomplishing much more with balsa wood, paper and an internal combustion engine.
The conclusions that can be drawn are quite clear. Electric-powered aviation is a lofty goal. But for the time being, there it must remain. Electric-powered aircraft have neither the assurance of safety or the requisite infrastructure to support them. Which are, incidentally, the same issues facing widespread adoption of their land-borne brethren.
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Rising Energy Prices Fuel Growing Angst Across Party Lines, Poll Finds
Economic data released recently reveals that the U.S. economy is still laboring under debilitating inflation.
Rising prices for essential goods and services act as a drag on discretionary spending and will make our current recession all the more painful and long-lasting.
Recent polling by TIPP/Insight provides useful insights into how Americans view the impact of spiking energy prices on their lives, and their concerns about further potential disruptions.
The three questions fielded by TIPP explored how Americans prioritize energy security in the context of combating climate change, concerns about Europe’s energy crisis coming to the U.S., and whether or not increasing energy prices are affecting other spending.
Across the board, a broad, bipartisan majority of the American people expressed considerable anxiety about energy supplies and cost, suggesting that will be a key issue going into the midterm elections in November.
The first question—“Which is more important to you, ensuring a stable, plentiful energy supply or combating climate change?”—revealed that a significant majority of Americans either thought they were roughly equivalent or ranked energy security first, with 42% giving them equal importance and 34% prioritizing energy security.
Only 21% put combating climate change first.
There was some variation across party lines, with half the Democrats saying the two issues are equivalent, compared with 30% of Republicans and 43% of independents, while half of the Republicans surveyed prioritized energy security compared with 21% of Democrats and 32% of independents.
On the second question, “How concerned are you that the European energy crisis will impact markets in the United States?”, there was remarkably strong bipartisan agreement that this is indeed a cause of anxiety: 72% of both Republicans and Democrats and 63% of independents all had strong or somewhat strong concerns that the situation in Europe would spill over to the United States.
Somewhat surprisingly, only 11% of those surveyed answered “don’t know” about the potential impact of the European crisis, suggesting that Americans are following the situation more closely than might have been assumed.
The final question—“Have spikes in energy prices forced you to reduce spending on other things?”— revealed that, across party lines, a majority of Americans have changed their spending patterns, with 75% of Republicans, 64% of Democrats, and 62% of independents all responding in the affirmative.
These majorities held across the board, regardless of geographic location, age, gender, ethnicity, and income bracket, indicating that more than half the country is feeling some degree of economic distress because of increased energy prices.
These stark numbers suggest that despite President Joe Biden’s recent protestations that inflation really is not that bad, the American people are still feeling increasing economic pain and are concerned it could become worse.
Going into the fall as they make their decisions at the ballot box, a dominant issue is going to be how they are going to keep their cars on the road and lights on—and what they’re going to have to sacrifice to do so.
Candidates of both parties should take note.
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3 October, 2022
Nearly all of Australia's coral reefs are at risk of being wiped out in less than two decades
There is NO evidence given for this. Just a Warmist claim, possibly based on models but that is guesswork, not evidence
The idea that warming is bad for corals is completely unscientific anyway. Barrier reef corals are most diverse in the Torres strait, which is the WARMEST part of the reef. Like most living things, corals LIKE warmth
SHOCKING evidence has been released claiming that nearly all of Australia's coral reefs are at risk of being wiped out in less than two decades.
The report by the World Resources Institute claims that by 2030, 90 per cent of Australia's reefs will suffer from the overwhelming effects of climate change like warmer seas and acidification.
It also outlines the threat to the rest of the world's coral reefs, with research suggesting that many could be obliterated by 2050 due to pollution, climate change and over-fishing.
The report encourages Australia not to waste any time in fighting the prediction, particularly because of the impact reef degredation will have on tourism and the economy.
Dr Clive Wilkinson, the United Nations sponsored Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network coordinator, urged Australia "to be part of the global solution to climate change, as our reefs will suffer like others around the world and this will threaten the $5 to $6 billion per year that the Great Barrier Reef means to the Australian economy."
"Australians have no right to be complacent as the vast majority of our reefs will be seriously threatened by rising sea temperatures and increasing acidification in less than 20 years," he said.
Today, 40 per cent of Australia's reefs are under pressure from rising sea temperatures and other threats linked to climate change.
However, 75 per cent of the reefs are in marine protected areas, which is a contributing factor to the improvement in fish numbers and reef resilience.
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How ‘Net Zeroists’ will keep their lights on
Picture a Teal, perpetual querulousness of mien sharpened by the chill of the morning, shuffling fluffy-slippered across the freezing travertine from her bathroom, where the hot water’s run out, to her designer kitchen where, for all the glittering imported gadgets, she has trouble striking a match, the packet being so damp, to light the primus stove retrieved from the shed to make a cup of coffee on.
Or a climate scientist, lab coat drenched with sweat, fanning himself with The Guardian as he climbs onto his desk to bash the inactive Fujitsu vainly with his shoe in the hope of extracting a flow of cooling air.
You can picture it but it’ll never happen. The sun mightn’t shine and the wind mightn’t blow but the kind of zealots who, in their quest for Net Zero, will have reduced our power supply to an irregular flicker will be fine. Whatever shortages lesser mortals have to put up with, the people who run things in this country won’t be short of electricity and gas, you watch.
I used to think a few cold showers and the gas running out while the soufflé was in the oven would be enough to induce our Green-washed ruling class to take a more sceptical attitude to ‘renewable energy’. But not if the soufflé rises as it should and the hot water flows uninterruptedly.
This class imposes its pet projects and the rest of us pay for them through taxes, surcharges, or in the case of Net Zero, the inconvenience and privation to come. They may occasionally burble about ‘the welfare of all Australians’ but they don’t care about people on lower incomes, as they’ve shown by pursuing energy policies that have given us shamefully rising power prices many people scrimp to pay but the rich can easily afford and, if themselves ‘renewables’ investors, make fortunes out of.
You might have expected that the unions, representing so many workers on a fixed wage, would have opposed climate fanaticism and forced their Labor puppet government to protect reliable sources of energy. But no, as in Nineteen-Eighty-Four, the union bosses and the people who run things are all pals together. The bosses have swallowed all the climate fiddle-faddle and are loftily uninterested in helping their members pay the soaring power costs.
The sensible thing to do, to ensure the growth and prosperity all governments claim to want, would be to abandon the obsession with ‘renewables’. It’s clear by now that the climate apocalypse so long predicted isn’t going to happen. But common sense will not prevail. There are too many vested interests in energy alarmism to allow the whole charade to be called off.
Faced then with the inevitable failure of wind and solar energy, which even if we could count on endless gales and sunny days and clothe the landscape with forests of skeletal windmills and drape every roof in photovoltaic panels would not generate enough power to make up for the fossil fuels we are banishing, how will the ruling classes cope? They have set themselves such absurd targets – Net Zero non-renewables by 2035 is one of the wilder flights of fancy – that it would be a most embarrassing climbdown to follow the European example and stay with dirty old coal to keep the country lit and heated.
No, they will cope by entrenching even deeper the differences between the haves and the have-nots. There won’t be enough power to keep everything going so they will make sure they get all they want, and whatever’s left can be shared among the rest of us. They will do this as they do everything else, through their superior wealth. They will create a category of ‘premium consumers’ – platinum users, gold users, some name like that, who by paying extra to the energy companies will be guaranteed a constant supply of power, especially at times of peak use.
This extra fee will be set high enough so that, when added to the already exaggerated costs of energy, it is beyond the resources of the average household. It is ordinary families who’ll have to put up with the shortage of power for every household task. See if you can find an ancient carpet sweeper at an op shop: the vacuum won’t work.
This power shortage will be presented as progress and wrapped in weaselly advertising. ‘Energy that’s tailored to your home needs’, the unctuous voice-over will intone through an image of swirling steam. ‘When you sign up with GoodGas you get just the amount of power you want, with no waste.’ Translated, this will mean you’re offered a ‘budget’ contract with the gas or electricity company stipulating supply at certain hours of the day or week. (The small print, naturally, will ‘regret that it may not be always possible to maintain supply at the contracted times’.) You’ll be ordered to switch everything off at peak times, as already foreshadowed by the European Union president, or have it switched off for you.
Then what? Having condemned us to shiver and starve, do Net Zero enthusiasts imagine that our ‘good example’ will touch the hearts of polluters like China and India, whose huge emissions make ours look like a puff of smoke from a Greenie’s spliff? That these industrial giants will convert their coal-powered economies to ‘renewables’ just in time to prevent the planet from becoming a molten ball or whatever the prediction is.
Are they dumb enough to believe that, or is the whole Net Zero crusade a fraud, just another weapon from the Marxist armoury in the never-ending strategy to weaken and ultimately destroy our civilisation? Either way, climate fanatics will soon have undermined the West from within, making us literally powerless.
Man Plugs $80k+ Electric Truck Into His House, Finds Out It Will Take Over 4 Days to Charge
Congratulations. You’ve just purchased one of the most expensive high-performance electric trucks on the market.
You’ve gone green and you’ve done it in style with the GMC Hummer, starting at $86,645. That’s right — the Hummer’s now a green vehicle! What was once the biggest villain in the left’s war on fossil fuels is now the poster child for responsible off-roading.
That’s a hefty chunk of change, but at least you’ll be able to save a bit with government incentives. Most importantly, you can charge the car at home just like it was any other appliance. Easy, convenient and cheap, right?
Well, if you have a day or four to spare, sure.
In a viral video from a YouTube channel that specializes in electric vehicles, a man who tries to plug the Hummer into his home to charge finds it will take, at best, one day to charge — and that’s with special equipment installed.
Without it, you could be there for four days.
The video begins with standard 120V charging — or Level 1 charging, to use official jargon. This is the standard current your home already offers.
“Right now it’s about 6 p.m. on Tuesday,” the man says. “And it says it will be full by Saturday at 10:55 [p.m.], which is four-plus days of charging. Wow.”
To be fair, however, this won’t be how most Hummer owners will be charging their vehicle. Level 2 chargers are upgraded home stations which deliver a significantly higher amount of electricity than your regular home circuit would be able to deliver — but they require special equipment and installation.
According to Compare.com, the cost of a Level 2 charger is about $500 without installation, which must be done by a professional electrician.
However, our intrepid Hummer owner had one of those — the JuiceBox, a 240v charger, installed in his garage.
How much difference did that make? Not as much as you might think.
“Now it says it will be done tomorrow by 6:30 [p.m.],” the video narrator says. “So about 24 hours of charging from four percent to 100 percent.”
Of course, you don’t have to go to full charge; the vehicle’s screen says the Level 2 charger was adding 14 miles of range per hour. However, when you can fill a gas-powered truck in five minutes and not have to worry about installing a fast charger or leaving your truck plugged in every night, that’s not exactly easy or convenient.
And by the way, it’s not entirely cheap, either — especially if you decide you don’t want to charge your Hummer at home but at fast-charging stations that can get the job done in two hours.
Car and Driver went to an Electrify America charging station, where it cost over $100 to “fill up” the Hummer at 43 cents per kilowatt hour.
This is roughly consistent with how much it would cost to fill up a gas-powered Hummer made in the final production year — although Electrify America does provide a membership program that reduces the cost by roughly one-quarter. If you charge it at home, you’ll only be spending about $35 to fill it up — but you’ll be waiting quite a while.
And, by the by, don’t expect to use your electric truck to do truck-like things quite as well as gas-powered trucks do.
Automotive YouTuber Tyler “Hoovie” Hoover put Ford’s F-150 Lightning — another electric truck, although somewhat more modestly priced than the Hummer — to the test by towing an empty aluminum trailer 32 miles, and then assessing how well it handled its maximum towing capacity by then ferrying a recently purchased 1930 Ford Model A pickup truck back to home base.
Hoovie called the experience a “complete and total disaster from beginning to end.” He started with a 200-mile charge but lost 68 miles of range in the 32 miles he was towing just the aluminum trailer. Once the Model A was aboard, he lost “almost 90 miles of range in 30 miles.”
Cheer up, Hoovie. Plug that baby into a Level 1 charger and you’ll be ready to make a return trip in another few days.
Now, I don’t pretend that most — in fact, almost any — Hummer owners are going to be using Level 1. If you can drop a cool $86k on a retro-styled EV pickup truck, you can also get a Level 2 charger installed in your garage without your bank account incurring too much of a scrape. That still means 24 hours of charging, though, something that could be critical in an emergency.
Say you live in the state of California, which plans to outlaw the sale of new gas vehicles by 2035. Let’s also say your residence is suddenly threatened by a wildfire — I know, a very unusual thing in California, but we’re just spitballing hypotheticals here. If you only have 10 percent charge and you have to load everything you can into your vehicle, you don’t have a day to get a full tank. Good luck getting far and good luck finding an open fast-charging station on the highway, particularly in times of natural disaster.
Look, this isn’t to say electric vehicles don’t have their time and place. If you don’t mind the charging times and high price, the Hummer is actually a pretty sweet ride; it can go from 0-60 mph in 3.3 seconds, something the original Hummer might not have been able to do in 3.3 hours. It’s a high-tech, versatile vehicle that, from all appearances, is a blast.
But let’s be clear: The Hummer and its electric brethren aren’t at the point where they can replace gas-powered trucks, the same way EVs across the spectrum aren’t at the point where they can replace equivalent internal-combustion vehicles. Why are we on the precipice, then, of forcing new-car buyers to pay more for a vehicle that’s less convenient and often can’t do the work they need it to do?
EV technology won’t be ready to replace gas-powered cars anytime soon, and ignoring reality doesn’t make it go away — no matter how many pro-EV laws the Democrats pass.
Energy crisis in Europe exposes the shortcomings of renewable energy
The global energy picture has changed drastically since the United Nations Climate Change Conference last November. Several European Union countries that once depended on Russia for their energy needs sought to cut ties with Moscow as a retaliation for the invasion of Ukraine.
While Europe attempts to find fast and affordable energy alternatives, the restrictions on Russian energy imports have raised concerns over the global energy security—and renewable energy transition.
Ukrainian environmental groups have logged 514 cases of potential environmental impacts caused by Russian forces so far, ranging from damage to industrial facilities to impacts on ecosystems. Two leaking Russian gas pipelines to Europe were discovered this week, and countries are turning to non-Russian gas and reopening coal-fired power plants, despite pledging to speed up the end of fossil fuel at the COP26.
In the U.S., some governments are even considering gasoline subsidies in response to the surging gas and oil costs. All seems to imply that in efforts to keep the lights on, the fight against climate change is falling off the priority list amid skyrocketing energy prices and supply shocks.
According to the European bureau chief for The Globe and Mail and award-winning reporter Eric Reguly, the ongoing energy war could threaten the European Commission’s bid to become climate-neutral by 2050.
“This crisis in Europe exposed the shortcomings of renewable energy,” said Reguly. “There just was not enough of it around to make up for the gas shortfall when Vladimir Putin turned off the taps.”
Reguly is one of the few foreign correspondents left in the world of journalism. Currently based in Rome, Italy, he has primarily covered stories on business, economic, financial, environmental, and war.
“The 2009 financial crisis, which I was here for, was very, very severe, but this is a different crisis,” he said. “It's more broad-based. It's not just a banking crisis. It's not a debt crisis. This is affecting every consumer, family, and business.”
For the EU, U.S.compressed natural gas, called liquified natural gas (LNG) has turned out to be the easiest and cheapest solution—the real “winner in this energy war,” told Reguly.
With the looming cold winter months without Russian gas flow, the European economy is believed to import almost 40% more LNG, while heating bills are expected to double from last year.
Due to the growing trend of corporations making ESG-related commitments, energy prices began rising well before the war, said Reguly.
Ironically, the current global state reveals that a green energy shift might be further than advertised, Reguly said.
“[Green energy] grew faster 20 years ago than it is now, which not many people realize,” he said. “You read the press, you read the hype, you go to the COP climate change conferences, and you hear that renewable energy is going to save the day. This crisis really showed, to me anyway, that green energy is just not there yet.”
On the other hand, the opposite is also believed to be true despite the crisis’ setbacks. Soaring oil and gas prices might have a similar effect as a carbon tax and push the need for green innovation and its commercial deployment, leading to greater climate action in the long-term.
What’s sure is that energy costs are bound to stay high for a while. We must hope and push our governments to ultimately stick to climate policies and accelerate the path toward a greener, fairer future for all.
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2 October, 2022
Never Let a Devastating Natural Disaster Go to Waste
4 October, 2022
Climate change policy: a greater risk than climate change?
Pragmatism is belatedly beating carbon purity as the West seeks to survive the economic consequences of Russia’s monstrous Ukraine war. Only months after its Glasgow swearing of allegiance to the climate catechism that requires faith in scientifically untested computer-programmed prophesies, the West has seen the light – and the energy needed to power it.
By grabbing at the vilified, carbon-emitting economic lifeline of fossil fuels, by rediscovering the energising virtues of the spurned coal, by embracing the scorned fracking in a desperate search for gas, by re-opening the closed off-shore petroleum leases to keep industry working, and by preferring ‘dangerous’ nuclear power to winters of freezing in the dark, a severe dose of reality has slowed the West’s race to economic destruction. The two wheels of the climate change cart – the scientifically unprovable words ‘catastrophic’ and ‘irreversible’ – that is carrying the democratic world to economic subjugation under a Putin-Xi authoritarian axis, are looking increasingly wobbly.
These two words, the key to the climate debate, have never been the subject of empirical, observed scientific proof. There is little disagreement that there is climate change; the climate has always been changing. But ‘catastrophic’ and ‘irreversible’ (beyond a computer-generated ‘tipping point’) that occupy the central role as drivers of the claimed climate crisis, exist only in computer modelling of what many scientists, in good faith, believe to be the likely outcome of observable current trends. The dogma that ‘the science is settled’ on climate change requires a belief not in proven scientific facts but in the accuracy of scientists’ computer projections of the yet-to-be-demonstrated future consequences of observable facts.
So why should these scientists be believed? The traditional ‘scientific method’ of examining a theory provides the best, but by no means certain, prospect of believable outcomes. This involves surviving the ‘falsification’ principle of rigorous endeavours to refute the theory, so that the scientific consensus eventually accepts it as truth. That is the rock on which the climate change crisis rests. But as an article in last week’s Conversation noted, ‘even if scientists have repeatedly tried, but failed, to refute a given theory, the history of science suggests at some point in the future it may still turn out to be false when new evidence comes to light.’
After decades of steadily increasing support for the ‘climate crisis’ theory, evidence to the contrary is raising its head. This is in addition to the negative impact of repeated failures of a multitude of past official forecasts of impending climate disaster. Earlier this year, four leading Italian scientists from universities in Milan, Verona and Padua and the National Institute of Nuclear Physics, published a review of historical climate data, finding no clear positive trend of extreme events and concluding that the current fear of a ‘climate emergency’ is not supported by the scientific data.
This means, they said, that altering our priorities with negative effects ‘could prove deleterious to our ability to face the challenges of the future, (and) squandering natural and human resources’. Their paper, A critical assessment of extreme events trends in times of global warming, is a survey of recent research (mirroring the IPCC’s approach) that appeared in the European Physical Journal Plus. ‘Since its origins, the human species has been confronted with the negative effects of the climate; historical climatology has repeatedly used the concept of climate deterioration in order to explain negative effect of extreme events (mainly drought, diluvial phases and cold periods) on civilisation. Today, we are facing a warm phase and, for the first time, we have monitoring capabilities that enable us to objectively evaluate its effects’. These show that, ‘On the basis of the observational data, the climate crisis that, according to many sources, we are experiencing today, is not yet evident.’
The scientists found that rainfall intensity and frequency was stationary in many parts of the world. Tropical hurricanes and cyclones showed little change over the long term, and the same is true of US tornadoes. Other meteorological categories including natural disasters, floods, droughts and ecosystem productivity showed no ‘clear positive trend of extreme events’. Regarding ecosystems, the scientists noted a considerable ‘greening’ of global plant biomass in recent decades caused by higher levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Satellite data show ‘greening’ trends over most of the planet, increasing food yields and pushing back of deserts
But the scientists nevertheless believe there is a need for action on the climate: ‘We should work to minimise our impact on the planet and to minimise air and water pollution…. How the climate of the twenty-first century will play out is a topic of deep uncertainty. We need to increase our resiliency to whatever the future climate will present us…(But) we need to remind ourselves that addressing climate change is not an end in itself and is not the only problem the world is facing.’
This cautionary note was echoed in a report quoted in the latest Weekend Australian from some of Australia’s most senior climate scientists led by UNSW Professor Andy Pitman. It warned that bank regulators, with little understanding of the uncertainty inherent in climate model projections, could cause ‘major systemic risk to the global financial system’ by their continued use.’ It is not science designed for the financial sector’, as physical climate models do not represent weather, so imposing a serious limitation in determining future climate risk for the financial sector. Yet Australia’s Reserve Bank will use network-derived climate scenarios in its internal analysis of climate-related risks. Most regulators, banks, insurers and investors are using projection-based scenarios ‘without fully accounting for uncertainty’.
This follows Pitman’s submission to APRA on its draft guidelines on climate risk that the corporate sector could be preparing for the financial costs of climate change based on misleading and flawed advice from the prudential regulator. ‘There is next to no capacity to provide advice to business on how the joint probability of multiple extreme weather events will change in the future.’
The only thing certain about climate science is uncertainty.
https://spectator.com.au/2022/10/business-robbery-etc-101/ ?
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Car makers secretive about price of EV replacement batteries
Car makers are baulking at revealing the cost of replacement batteries for electric vehicles, with good reason.
Lexus has revealed that a replacement for the battery in its UX electric SUV is $43,476 plus GST. That’s more than half the price of the car, which retails for about $82,500.
An engine replacement costs about $12,000 for the popular Ford Ranger ute or roughly $6000 for a small hatchback such as a Hyundai i30.
News Corp asked ten manufacturers to reveal the cost of their replacement batteries and Lexus and Nissan were the only two to reveal any prices.
Tesla, Mazda, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Hyundai, Kia, MG and Mitsubishi did not provide any numbers.
Car makers argue the replacement cost is a moot point because most of the cars on sale have eight-year warranties and battery prices are expected to fall dramatically in the intervening period.
Lexus has a ten-year/unlimited kilometre warranty for its batteries, provided the customer “adheres to servicing requirements outlined in the owner’s handbook”.
If battery capacity dips below 70 per cent within 10 years or 160,000km, the brand will replace it.
The average age of a car in Australia is roughly 10 years, so most long-term owners – or second hand EV buyers – will face a period where the battery is no longer under warranty.
Nissan, which has been selling the Leaf EV in Australia since 2012, says the “overwhelming majority” of Leafs are still using their original battery pack.
For those whose battery is no longer under warranty, the brand has a replacement program that costs $9990 plus labour.
The original Leaf had a battery “state of health” warranty period of five years, while the new model, launched in 2019, has an eight-year, 160,000km warranty.
A spokeswoman for the brand said all batteries lost capacity as they aged but “the extent of this degradation is highly dependent on usage and conditions”.
“The cost of a replacement battery after this period is purely speculative at this point as the cost of manufacturing batteries continues to decline over time,” she said.
She said the company had not come across a situation where a battery was damaged and the vehicle involved was repairable.
“Given the location of the battery in the floor/chassis of the vehicle, any impact or damage that has occurred to the battery (requiring a replacement) has also come with high level of structural damage to the vehicle and therefore the vehicle is not typically repairable,” she said.
She said the Nissan Leaf had a battery state of health readout in the centre screen that clearly showed the remaining capacity. The display has 12 bars and Nissan will replace a battery if it falls below nine during the warranty period.
The display also serves as a good guide for people looking to buy a used Leaf.
Australia’s top-selling EV brand, Tesla, wouldn’t disclose battery replacement costs for its vehicles, some of which have been on sale locally since 2014. Many of its Model S vehicles are approaching the end of the brand’s eight-year battery warranty.
The brand covers its Model Y and Model 3 vehicles with an eight-year/160,000km warranty, promising 70 per cent retention of the battery capacity in that period.
Mercedes-Benz guarantees the battery life of its EQS and EQE models for up to 10 years or 250,000, with a degradation target of 70 per cent.
Its EQA, EQB and EQC EVs are covered for eight years and 160,000km.
A spokesman said: “No general information can be given about the cost of exchanging batteries as this can vary. The cost depends on the type of battery and the vehicle model at the time a replacement battery is required outside of warranty,” he said.
Hyundai has a eight-year/160,000km warranty for its EVs but won’t reveal replacement costs. In the United States, it has a battery refurbishment program that costs significantly less than replacement.
Sister brand Kia has a shorter seven-year/150,000km warranty and also declined to reveal replacement costs by our story deadline.
BMW, MG, Mitsubishi, Mazda were contacted but have not provided any details on replacement costs.
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Electric Plane's 8-Minute Flight Celebrated as Milestone, But Look What the Wright Brothers' Flying Machine Was Doing in 1905
“Zero emissions” advocates are hailing the first flight of an all-electric commuter airplane. However, aviation enthusiasts may chuckle in the knowledge that almost 120 years earlier the Wright Brothers trounced that achievement with a few basic materials.
Eviation, a startup based in Washington state, built the proof-of-concept plane to demonstrate the viability of electric-powered flight with a range of a few hundred miles.
Last week the plane took off from an airport at Moses Lake, Washington. It circled the airfield for eight minutes before landing, TechCrunch+ reported.
It could be described as an impressive feat. Although one that arguably is overshadowed by the experimentation of history’s very first aviators.
Not resting on their laurels after achieving the first-ever powered flight, the Wright Brothers spent the years after their 1903 triumph attempting new aircraft designs that would greatly increase engine size and load weight, as well as accommodate passengers on trips that would be longer and fly further.
By 1904 the Wrights had moved their activities from Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, and relocated to Huffman Prairie near Dayton, Ohio. They began designing an aircraft that could carry more weight while also soaring much further than the original Flyer.
Their efforts culminated in an unprecedented flight on Oct. 5, 1905. With Wilbur at the controls, their new airplane made more than 29 circles around the field, traveling more than 24 miles within a span of over 39 minutes.
That’s almost five times the length of the Eviation craft’s flight.
It was also a better calculated risk for the Wrights. Fuel supply and consumption in a normal aircraft can be easily computed. Margins for safety can be tabulated with more confidence. Contrast this with batteries, which deteriorate over time resulting in lessening of assured charge.
The difference in performance between standard aircraft and the best of electric-powered technology is a vast one. One that cannot be ignored by anyone with concern for either airplane economics or safety.
According to Aviation Pros, the Eviation test plane is powered by over 21,500 Tesla-type batteries, taking up fully half the weight of the plane. The aircraft is intended to make relatively short commuter hops before having to recharge.
On the other hand, the Gulfstream G200 — a typical midsize jet comparable in size to the Eviation plane — carries eight passengers and has enough fuel capacity to cross the Atlantic Ocean, according to Flying Magazine.
Batteries simply cannot compare to fuel derived from hydrocarbons in terms of energy storage. While there is little current data on aircraft recharging, this issue is well-dcoumented with automobiles. A recent article highlighted the uncertainty that comes with traveling great distances with electrical vehicles.
An Australian TikTok user had difficulty driving between Canberra and Sydney, News.com.au reported. A journey that should have taken a few hours instead occupied an entire day because locating charging stations proved difficult. Notably, at one point it would have taken four hours to achieve a fully charged battery.
Similarly the new owner of a GMC Hummer was shocked — no pun intended — when he discovered it would take four days to draw enough current from his home outlet to recharge his vehicle — using Level 1 charging.
Ponder, then, how long it will take to recharge even smaller commuter jets. It becomes economically more feasible — and more convenient — to simply hop into a car and drive from one city to the next. By the time the airplane has completely charged, it’s possible to have gone to one’s destination and returned by ground vehicle.
That is not stopping aviation providers like Air Canada from purchasing electric planes in bulk despite openly acknowledging that the aircraft will not seat the same number of passengers as traditional planes
It can be argued that for all its technological simplicity, the Wright Brothers’ 1905 airplane was the more reliable aircraft compared to the plane from last week’s battery-powered flight. While Eviation’s craft is primarily made of carbon composite and other exotic materials, the Wrights were accomplishing much more with balsa wood, paper and an internal combustion engine.
The conclusions that can be drawn are quite clear. Electric-powered aviation is a lofty goal. But for the time being, there it must remain. Electric-powered aircraft have neither the assurance of safety or the requisite infrastructure to support them. Which are, incidentally, the same issues facing widespread adoption of their land-borne brethren.
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Rising Energy Prices Fuel Growing Angst Across Party Lines, Poll Finds
Economic data released recently reveals that the U.S. economy is still laboring under debilitating inflation.
Rising prices for essential goods and services act as a drag on discretionary spending and will make our current recession all the more painful and long-lasting.
Recent polling by TIPP/Insight provides useful insights into how Americans view the impact of spiking energy prices on their lives, and their concerns about further potential disruptions.
The three questions fielded by TIPP explored how Americans prioritize energy security in the context of combating climate change, concerns about Europe’s energy crisis coming to the U.S., and whether or not increasing energy prices are affecting other spending.
Across the board, a broad, bipartisan majority of the American people expressed considerable anxiety about energy supplies and cost, suggesting that will be a key issue going into the midterm elections in November.
The first question—“Which is more important to you, ensuring a stable, plentiful energy supply or combating climate change?”—revealed that a significant majority of Americans either thought they were roughly equivalent or ranked energy security first, with 42% giving them equal importance and 34% prioritizing energy security.
Only 21% put combating climate change first.
There was some variation across party lines, with half the Democrats saying the two issues are equivalent, compared with 30% of Republicans and 43% of independents, while half of the Republicans surveyed prioritized energy security compared with 21% of Democrats and 32% of independents.
On the second question, “How concerned are you that the European energy crisis will impact markets in the United States?”, there was remarkably strong bipartisan agreement that this is indeed a cause of anxiety: 72% of both Republicans and Democrats and 63% of independents all had strong or somewhat strong concerns that the situation in Europe would spill over to the United States.
Somewhat surprisingly, only 11% of those surveyed answered “don’t know” about the potential impact of the European crisis, suggesting that Americans are following the situation more closely than might have been assumed.
The final question—“Have spikes in energy prices forced you to reduce spending on other things?”— revealed that, across party lines, a majority of Americans have changed their spending patterns, with 75% of Republicans, 64% of Democrats, and 62% of independents all responding in the affirmative.
These majorities held across the board, regardless of geographic location, age, gender, ethnicity, and income bracket, indicating that more than half the country is feeling some degree of economic distress because of increased energy prices.
These stark numbers suggest that despite President Joe Biden’s recent protestations that inflation really is not that bad, the American people are still feeling increasing economic pain and are concerned it could become worse.
Going into the fall as they make their decisions at the ballot box, a dominant issue is going to be how they are going to keep their cars on the road and lights on—and what they’re going to have to sacrifice to do so.
Candidates of both parties should take note.
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3 October, 2022
Nearly all of Australia's coral reefs are at risk of being wiped out in less than two decades
There is NO evidence given for this. Just a Warmist claim, possibly based on models but that is guesswork, not evidence
The idea that warming is bad for corals is completely unscientific anyway. Barrier reef corals are most diverse in the Torres strait, which is the WARMEST part of the reef. Like most living things, corals LIKE warmth
SHOCKING evidence has been released claiming that nearly all of Australia's coral reefs are at risk of being wiped out in less than two decades.
The report by the World Resources Institute claims that by 2030, 90 per cent of Australia's reefs will suffer from the overwhelming effects of climate change like warmer seas and acidification.
It also outlines the threat to the rest of the world's coral reefs, with research suggesting that many could be obliterated by 2050 due to pollution, climate change and over-fishing.
The report encourages Australia not to waste any time in fighting the prediction, particularly because of the impact reef degredation will have on tourism and the economy.
Dr Clive Wilkinson, the United Nations sponsored Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network coordinator, urged Australia "to be part of the global solution to climate change, as our reefs will suffer like others around the world and this will threaten the $5 to $6 billion per year that the Great Barrier Reef means to the Australian economy."
"Australians have no right to be complacent as the vast majority of our reefs will be seriously threatened by rising sea temperatures and increasing acidification in less than 20 years," he said.
Today, 40 per cent of Australia's reefs are under pressure from rising sea temperatures and other threats linked to climate change.
However, 75 per cent of the reefs are in marine protected areas, which is a contributing factor to the improvement in fish numbers and reef resilience.
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How ‘Net Zeroists’ will keep their lights on
Picture a Teal, perpetual querulousness of mien sharpened by the chill of the morning, shuffling fluffy-slippered across the freezing travertine from her bathroom, where the hot water’s run out, to her designer kitchen where, for all the glittering imported gadgets, she has trouble striking a match, the packet being so damp, to light the primus stove retrieved from the shed to make a cup of coffee on.
Or a climate scientist, lab coat drenched with sweat, fanning himself with The Guardian as he climbs onto his desk to bash the inactive Fujitsu vainly with his shoe in the hope of extracting a flow of cooling air.
You can picture it but it’ll never happen. The sun mightn’t shine and the wind mightn’t blow but the kind of zealots who, in their quest for Net Zero, will have reduced our power supply to an irregular flicker will be fine. Whatever shortages lesser mortals have to put up with, the people who run things in this country won’t be short of electricity and gas, you watch.
I used to think a few cold showers and the gas running out while the soufflé was in the oven would be enough to induce our Green-washed ruling class to take a more sceptical attitude to ‘renewable energy’. But not if the soufflé rises as it should and the hot water flows uninterruptedly.
This class imposes its pet projects and the rest of us pay for them through taxes, surcharges, or in the case of Net Zero, the inconvenience and privation to come. They may occasionally burble about ‘the welfare of all Australians’ but they don’t care about people on lower incomes, as they’ve shown by pursuing energy policies that have given us shamefully rising power prices many people scrimp to pay but the rich can easily afford and, if themselves ‘renewables’ investors, make fortunes out of.
You might have expected that the unions, representing so many workers on a fixed wage, would have opposed climate fanaticism and forced their Labor puppet government to protect reliable sources of energy. But no, as in Nineteen-Eighty-Four, the union bosses and the people who run things are all pals together. The bosses have swallowed all the climate fiddle-faddle and are loftily uninterested in helping their members pay the soaring power costs.
The sensible thing to do, to ensure the growth and prosperity all governments claim to want, would be to abandon the obsession with ‘renewables’. It’s clear by now that the climate apocalypse so long predicted isn’t going to happen. But common sense will not prevail. There are too many vested interests in energy alarmism to allow the whole charade to be called off.
Faced then with the inevitable failure of wind and solar energy, which even if we could count on endless gales and sunny days and clothe the landscape with forests of skeletal windmills and drape every roof in photovoltaic panels would not generate enough power to make up for the fossil fuels we are banishing, how will the ruling classes cope? They have set themselves such absurd targets – Net Zero non-renewables by 2035 is one of the wilder flights of fancy – that it would be a most embarrassing climbdown to follow the European example and stay with dirty old coal to keep the country lit and heated.
No, they will cope by entrenching even deeper the differences between the haves and the have-nots. There won’t be enough power to keep everything going so they will make sure they get all they want, and whatever’s left can be shared among the rest of us. They will do this as they do everything else, through their superior wealth. They will create a category of ‘premium consumers’ – platinum users, gold users, some name like that, who by paying extra to the energy companies will be guaranteed a constant supply of power, especially at times of peak use.
This extra fee will be set high enough so that, when added to the already exaggerated costs of energy, it is beyond the resources of the average household. It is ordinary families who’ll have to put up with the shortage of power for every household task. See if you can find an ancient carpet sweeper at an op shop: the vacuum won’t work.
This power shortage will be presented as progress and wrapped in weaselly advertising. ‘Energy that’s tailored to your home needs’, the unctuous voice-over will intone through an image of swirling steam. ‘When you sign up with GoodGas you get just the amount of power you want, with no waste.’ Translated, this will mean you’re offered a ‘budget’ contract with the gas or electricity company stipulating supply at certain hours of the day or week. (The small print, naturally, will ‘regret that it may not be always possible to maintain supply at the contracted times’.) You’ll be ordered to switch everything off at peak times, as already foreshadowed by the European Union president, or have it switched off for you.
Then what? Having condemned us to shiver and starve, do Net Zero enthusiasts imagine that our ‘good example’ will touch the hearts of polluters like China and India, whose huge emissions make ours look like a puff of smoke from a Greenie’s spliff? That these industrial giants will convert their coal-powered economies to ‘renewables’ just in time to prevent the planet from becoming a molten ball or whatever the prediction is.
Are they dumb enough to believe that, or is the whole Net Zero crusade a fraud, just another weapon from the Marxist armoury in the never-ending strategy to weaken and ultimately destroy our civilisation? Either way, climate fanatics will soon have undermined the West from within, making us literally powerless.
https://spectator.com.au/2022/10/how-net-zeroists-will-keep-their-lights-on/
****************************************************Man Plugs $80k+ Electric Truck Into His House, Finds Out It Will Take Over 4 Days to Charge
Congratulations. You’ve just purchased one of the most expensive high-performance electric trucks on the market.
You’ve gone green and you’ve done it in style with the GMC Hummer, starting at $86,645. That’s right — the Hummer’s now a green vehicle! What was once the biggest villain in the left’s war on fossil fuels is now the poster child for responsible off-roading.
That’s a hefty chunk of change, but at least you’ll be able to save a bit with government incentives. Most importantly, you can charge the car at home just like it was any other appliance. Easy, convenient and cheap, right?
Well, if you have a day or four to spare, sure.
In a viral video from a YouTube channel that specializes in electric vehicles, a man who tries to plug the Hummer into his home to charge finds it will take, at best, one day to charge — and that’s with special equipment installed.
Without it, you could be there for four days.
The video begins with standard 120V charging — or Level 1 charging, to use official jargon. This is the standard current your home already offers.
“Right now it’s about 6 p.m. on Tuesday,” the man says. “And it says it will be full by Saturday at 10:55 [p.m.], which is four-plus days of charging. Wow.”
To be fair, however, this won’t be how most Hummer owners will be charging their vehicle. Level 2 chargers are upgraded home stations which deliver a significantly higher amount of electricity than your regular home circuit would be able to deliver — but they require special equipment and installation.
According to Compare.com, the cost of a Level 2 charger is about $500 without installation, which must be done by a professional electrician.
However, our intrepid Hummer owner had one of those — the JuiceBox, a 240v charger, installed in his garage.
How much difference did that make? Not as much as you might think.
“Now it says it will be done tomorrow by 6:30 [p.m.],” the video narrator says. “So about 24 hours of charging from four percent to 100 percent.”
Of course, you don’t have to go to full charge; the vehicle’s screen says the Level 2 charger was adding 14 miles of range per hour. However, when you can fill a gas-powered truck in five minutes and not have to worry about installing a fast charger or leaving your truck plugged in every night, that’s not exactly easy or convenient.
And by the way, it’s not entirely cheap, either — especially if you decide you don’t want to charge your Hummer at home but at fast-charging stations that can get the job done in two hours.
Car and Driver went to an Electrify America charging station, where it cost over $100 to “fill up” the Hummer at 43 cents per kilowatt hour.
This is roughly consistent with how much it would cost to fill up a gas-powered Hummer made in the final production year — although Electrify America does provide a membership program that reduces the cost by roughly one-quarter. If you charge it at home, you’ll only be spending about $35 to fill it up — but you’ll be waiting quite a while.
And, by the by, don’t expect to use your electric truck to do truck-like things quite as well as gas-powered trucks do.
Automotive YouTuber Tyler “Hoovie” Hoover put Ford’s F-150 Lightning — another electric truck, although somewhat more modestly priced than the Hummer — to the test by towing an empty aluminum trailer 32 miles, and then assessing how well it handled its maximum towing capacity by then ferrying a recently purchased 1930 Ford Model A pickup truck back to home base.
Hoovie called the experience a “complete and total disaster from beginning to end.” He started with a 200-mile charge but lost 68 miles of range in the 32 miles he was towing just the aluminum trailer. Once the Model A was aboard, he lost “almost 90 miles of range in 30 miles.”
Cheer up, Hoovie. Plug that baby into a Level 1 charger and you’ll be ready to make a return trip in another few days.
Now, I don’t pretend that most — in fact, almost any — Hummer owners are going to be using Level 1. If you can drop a cool $86k on a retro-styled EV pickup truck, you can also get a Level 2 charger installed in your garage without your bank account incurring too much of a scrape. That still means 24 hours of charging, though, something that could be critical in an emergency.
Say you live in the state of California, which plans to outlaw the sale of new gas vehicles by 2035. Let’s also say your residence is suddenly threatened by a wildfire — I know, a very unusual thing in California, but we’re just spitballing hypotheticals here. If you only have 10 percent charge and you have to load everything you can into your vehicle, you don’t have a day to get a full tank. Good luck getting far and good luck finding an open fast-charging station on the highway, particularly in times of natural disaster.
Look, this isn’t to say electric vehicles don’t have their time and place. If you don’t mind the charging times and high price, the Hummer is actually a pretty sweet ride; it can go from 0-60 mph in 3.3 seconds, something the original Hummer might not have been able to do in 3.3 hours. It’s a high-tech, versatile vehicle that, from all appearances, is a blast.
But let’s be clear: The Hummer and its electric brethren aren’t at the point where they can replace gas-powered trucks, the same way EVs across the spectrum aren’t at the point where they can replace equivalent internal-combustion vehicles. Why are we on the precipice, then, of forcing new-car buyers to pay more for a vehicle that’s less convenient and often can’t do the work they need it to do?
EV technology won’t be ready to replace gas-powered cars anytime soon, and ignoring reality doesn’t make it go away — no matter how many pro-EV laws the Democrats pass.
https://thefederalistpapers.org/us/man-plugs-80k-electric-truck-house-finds-will-take-4-days-charge
***************************************Energy crisis in Europe exposes the shortcomings of renewable energy
The global energy picture has changed drastically since the United Nations Climate Change Conference last November. Several European Union countries that once depended on Russia for their energy needs sought to cut ties with Moscow as a retaliation for the invasion of Ukraine.
While Europe attempts to find fast and affordable energy alternatives, the restrictions on Russian energy imports have raised concerns over the global energy security—and renewable energy transition.
Ukrainian environmental groups have logged 514 cases of potential environmental impacts caused by Russian forces so far, ranging from damage to industrial facilities to impacts on ecosystems. Two leaking Russian gas pipelines to Europe were discovered this week, and countries are turning to non-Russian gas and reopening coal-fired power plants, despite pledging to speed up the end of fossil fuel at the COP26.
In the U.S., some governments are even considering gasoline subsidies in response to the surging gas and oil costs. All seems to imply that in efforts to keep the lights on, the fight against climate change is falling off the priority list amid skyrocketing energy prices and supply shocks.
According to the European bureau chief for The Globe and Mail and award-winning reporter Eric Reguly, the ongoing energy war could threaten the European Commission’s bid to become climate-neutral by 2050.
“This crisis in Europe exposed the shortcomings of renewable energy,” said Reguly. “There just was not enough of it around to make up for the gas shortfall when Vladimir Putin turned off the taps.”
Reguly is one of the few foreign correspondents left in the world of journalism. Currently based in Rome, Italy, he has primarily covered stories on business, economic, financial, environmental, and war.
“The 2009 financial crisis, which I was here for, was very, very severe, but this is a different crisis,” he said. “It's more broad-based. It's not just a banking crisis. It's not a debt crisis. This is affecting every consumer, family, and business.”
For the EU, U.S.compressed natural gas, called liquified natural gas (LNG) has turned out to be the easiest and cheapest solution—the real “winner in this energy war,” told Reguly.
With the looming cold winter months without Russian gas flow, the European economy is believed to import almost 40% more LNG, while heating bills are expected to double from last year.
Due to the growing trend of corporations making ESG-related commitments, energy prices began rising well before the war, said Reguly.
Ironically, the current global state reveals that a green energy shift might be further than advertised, Reguly said.
“[Green energy] grew faster 20 years ago than it is now, which not many people realize,” he said. “You read the press, you read the hype, you go to the COP climate change conferences, and you hear that renewable energy is going to save the day. This crisis really showed, to me anyway, that green energy is just not there yet.”
On the other hand, the opposite is also believed to be true despite the crisis’ setbacks. Soaring oil and gas prices might have a similar effect as a carbon tax and push the need for green innovation and its commercial deployment, leading to greater climate action in the long-term.
What’s sure is that energy costs are bound to stay high for a while. We must hope and push our governments to ultimately stick to climate policies and accelerate the path toward a greener, fairer future for all.
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2 October, 2022
Never Let a Devastating Natural Disaster Go to Waste
Be prepared for Democrats to exploit the devastation of Hurricane Ian to peddle demodernization. And because there is no conclusive way for anyone to prove that global warming isn’t triggering every natural disaster—and because nature offers a continuous flow of these terrifying events and always will—the exploitation will never stop.
The effort began in earnest after 2005’s Hurricane Katrina, a Category 3 hurricane that devastated an unprepared New Orleans.
There was Al Gore, with his grade-school “science” charts and cartoonish satellite images (water, the color of fire!), emotionally manipulating audiences with images of destruction and suffering. The problem was that “An Inconvenient Truth” suggested—among numerous other dire predictions that would never come to pass—that climate change had not only caused Katrina, despite negligible warming, but that it portended the dawn of an age of shocking and intense hurricanes.
After 2005, Florida didn’t get hit with another hurricane until 2016 and Louisiana didn’t see a major one until 2020 (also the fault of climate change.) It is debatable that storms that do make landfall do so with more intensity or that Category 3-plus hurricanes are increasing.
Overall, the frequency of hurricanes has slightly declined since 1900. From 1851-1860, 19 hurricanes made landfall in the United States. From 2011-2020, 19 hurricanes made landfall in the United States. The average per decade between 1860-2011 is about 18. In the decade of 1941-1950, 10 major hurricanes hit the United States.
“Hurricane Ian gets nasty quickly, turbocharged by warm water,” explains The Associated Press, which has been true since the first hurricane formed. More “climate havoc,” says The New York Times, as Ian threatens to hit the same exact places that storms have always hit.
Today’s media simply can’t report on any flood or tornado or hurricane or brain-eating amoeba without making it about their favorite policy hobby horse. It just feels like things are worse, you know?
“What effect does climate change have on this phenomenon?” CNN’s Don Lemon asks Jamie Rhome, the acting director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Hurricane Center, about Hurricane Ian. “Because it seems these storms are intensifying.”
“I don’t think you can link climate change to any one event. On the whole, on the cumulative, climate change may be making storms worse. But to link it to any one event, I would caution against that,” answers Rhome.
“OK, listen, I grew up there. And these storms are intensifying,” responds Lemon.
He grew up there.
Joy Behar, co-host of “The View,” noted Wednesday that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis says he is “not in the pews of the church of the global warming leftists.” “This is what he thinks about climate change. And now, his state is getting hit with one of the worst hurricanes that we will ever see!”
This is a quite common attack, but it’s a non sequitur. Even if we accepted every alarmist forecast about anthropogenic global warming, and embraced the Democrats’ net-zero plan and banned gas-powered engines and fossil fuels by 2050 or 2030 or even 2024, the temperature wouldn’t be any different today. Forget India and China: Not a single major economy that signed onto the Paris accord has met its goals.
Of course, the underlying claim is also untrue. Since Behar’s birth in 1942, Florida has seen 48 hurricanes make landfall. Three of them have been Category 5 (so worse), nine of them have been Category 4 (including Ian), and 11 of them Category 3.
Granted, Behar was not around for 1900s Great Galveston hurricane, which hit eight years before Model Ts began emitting carbon into the air; it likely killed somewhere around 10,000 people in Texas. The 1926 Great Miami hurricane killed 372, causing an estimated, inflation-adjusted $164 billion in damage. Only around 150,000 people lived in all of Dade County back in those days. The Great Labor Day Hurricane of 1935 was tied with 2019’s Hurricane Dorian for strongest maximum sustained landfall winds (185 mph). Those were pretty bad storms, as were many others.
Critics will, no doubt, point out the rising cost of insurance payments due to hurricanes and other natural disasters. This is largely due to the concentration of people and wealth in coastal regions, a consequence of both rising population and wealth, and federal insurance programs that incentivize people to take on this risk.
Critics will also point out that hurricanes are far less deadly now than they have been in the past because we’ve instituted warning systems and improved infrastructure and preparedness.
And that’s right. Acclimatizing to the realities of climate is far cheaper and more effective than any state-compelled dismantling of modernity. No amount of scaremongering can change that reality.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/09/30/never-let-a-devastating-natural-disaster-go-to-waste
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Democrats blaming climate change for Hurricane Ian at odds with science, experts say
Multiple experts contacted by Fox News Digital argued that there isn't sufficient evidence to suggest climate change caused Hurricane Ian or any individual natural disaster.
The experts' comments come as a series of media outlets, Democrats and progressive commentators continue to blame the hurricane on human-caused global warming. Hurricane Ian slammed into southwest Florida as a Category 4 storm on Wednesday, causing more than a million residents to lose power and prompting stark safety warnings from Florida officials.
"What they're trying to do is politicize the pain and suffering of these people to promote their green agenda," Gregory Wrightstone, the executive director of the climate policy think tank CO2 Coalition, told Fox News Digital in an interview. "Well, their policies and their agenda to promote renewables will do far greater economic destruction to the country and Florida."
Over the last several days, media outlets, including the New York Times, Associated Press, Politico, NPR and Axios, have published news stories reporting that climate change is to blame for Hurricane Ian and the storm's rapid intensification. A Time magazine article said the "science is well known" that climate change created the conditions for Hurricane Ian.
In addition, Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., appeared to suggest that Americans need to vote for Democrats to avoid future hurricanes during an interview Tuesday. Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, D-Ill., tweeted Thursday that "the rapid storm intensification we're seeing with Hurricane Ian will become more common and more dangerous" as the climate changes.
And a series of progressive commentators and climate activists took to social media to similarly peg the hurricane on global warming.
"Ian is a climate change hurricane," Pam Keith, a former Democratic Senate candidate and founder of left-wing firm Center for Employment Justice, tweeted Wednesday.
"[Hurricane Ian] is a textbook example of climate change impacting people," Nina Turner, a senior fellow at progressive think tank Institute on Race, Power and Political Economy, added. "Climate change isn’t political, it’s reality."
However, Wrightstone and the other experts contacted by Fox News Digital rejected those arguments, arguing that individual storms cannot be linked to climate change.
"If you read what [the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)] says on hurricanes, there's just not enough data," Steve Milloy, a senior legal fellow at the Energy & Environment Legal Institute, told Fox News Digital.
"There's nothing to back up what they're saying is," he continued. "There were about 16 major hurricanes between 1916 and 1965 but only six since 1965. So, clearly major hurricanes happen with lower levels of carbon dioxide. That doesn't add up for them."
A NOAA study last revised in July concluded that its models and analysis didn't support the notion that greenhouse gas-induced warming leads to large increases in either tropical storm or overall hurricane numbers in the Atlantic. The study, authored by senior NOAA scientist Tom Knutson, added that it was "premature to conclude with high confidence" that human-caused increasing greenhouse gases have had any impact on hurricane activity in the Atlantic.
Jamie Rhome, the acting director of NOAA's National Hurricane Center, echoed the study's findings in an interview with CNN on Tuesday, pushing back against anchor Don Lemon's argument that Hurricane Ian's intensification is tied to climate change. Rhome said he "would caution against" linking any one storm to climate change.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/democrats-blaming-climate-change-hurricane-ian-odds-science-experts-say
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Will crucial rare metals run out?
Researchers from the State Key Laboratory of Geological Processes at the China University of Geosciences, the Department of Earth Science at Adelaide University and the Faculty of Science at Kochi University in Japan, say that the lack of vital components means it may not be possible to build enough electric vehicles in the future, and the supply of rare metals to some countries for computers may also be disrupted.
They argue that future projections suggest that the critical metals required for low carbon solar and wind technologies and electric vehicles and their chargers indicates that many of those metals, particularly Co, Ni, Cu, Se, Ag, Cd, In, Te, and Pt, may be severely to terminally depleted by 2060 if current Net Zero plans are followed, making further low carbon technology production impossible.
They point out that because many of the uses of these rare metals are non-renewable to ensure their supply would require increased exploration with an emphasis on unmined deposits not so far exploited because of their high risk factors and mining difficulties. Such exploration would mean excavating lower grade ores in more inaccessible or deeper mines. This would lead to even further increases in conventional energy use for mining and metallurgy that would be added to the costs of future low carbon technology.
They warn that there is no current indication that recycling can replace the critical metal stocks that are slowly being used. In addition, the uneven spread of mineral deposits containing the critical metals and production points could become a geopolitical issue if global security declines. China dominates the world supply of many of these resources and is responsible for 80% of global mineral refining.
The researchers suggest a pause to reconsider global Net Zero ambitions stressing the need for discussion among companies involved in mineral exploration, mining, metallurgy, manufacturing, renewable energy, recycling, and waste management.
https://www.netzerowatch.com/net-zero-risks-global-stability-loss-of-key-technologies-researchers-warn/
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Controversial Australian fertiliser plant to get green light by the end of the year
A gas-fed fertiliser plant on the Burrup Peninsula opposed by campaigners for the preservation of ancient rock engravings will likely be fully financed and go ahead by the end of the year after the federal government lent $220 million towards construction costs.
The US$4.2 billion ($6.5 billion) Perdaman urea plant that will process gas from Woodside’s Scarborough project will receive the funds from the Northern Australia Infrastructure Facility that has already lent the WA government $255 million to improve port and water facilities for the project.
Perdaman chair Vikas Rambal said the project won federal support because it offered local manufacturing of a commodity vital for Australian farmers.
“In four to eight weeks we should get financing done,” he said, with project approval expected before the end of the year and production beginning four years later.
Construction will require 2500 workers at its peak in the Pilbara where labour supply is already tight and Woodside is expanding its nearby Pluto LNG plant, which will need a similar number of workers.
Financing is likely to be a mix of debt and equity investment for the project that is currently wholly owned by the Rambal family’s private company Perdaman.
Minister for Resources and Northern Australia Madeleine King said Australia currently imported around 2.4 million tonnes a year of urea for agricultural use.
“The Perdaman project will have the capacity to reduce imported volumes and secure local farmers’ access to fertiliser,” she said.
When asked if the financing had any conditions to supply to the local market NAIF chief executive Craig Doyle said he “anticipated that a material portion of the urea produced will go to the Australian market.”
Higher gas prices due to limited supply from Russia after its invasion of Ukraine have caused global fertiliser prices to rise significantly.
Urea provides 40 per cent of Australia’s fertiliser needs according to Incitec Pivot, which agreed to buy all the plant’s output for 20 years.
The ASX-listed fertiliser and explosive manufacturer in September told investors that the plant’s large-scale cost-competitive supply would allow it to target new markets in Australia and overseas.
The Burrup Peninsula, called Murujaga by traditional owners, is home to more than one million rock engravings that are up to 40,000 years old.
Perdaman’s plant is opposed by some traditional custodians who object to the relocation of rock art for construction and the plant’s emissions that would add to the industrial pollution in the area that some scientists conclude is damaging the art.
Two weeks ago environment minister Tanya Plibersek under section 10 of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Heritage Protection Act appointed an independent consultant to determine if the Murujuga engravings were under threat.
Murujuga traditional custodian Raelene Cooper said the NAIF funding was a bailout from the federal government aimed to reassure investors who are spooked about supporting a project that will remove sacred Murujuga rock art over the objections of Elders.
“The government propping up this toxic project when they have just commissioned a full cultural heritage assessment of all industry on the Burrup,” she said.
“A government that claims to support an Indigenous Voice is still refusing to listen to First Nations communities on the front line of this crisis.”
Rambal said he was not worried about the Section 10 report as the Perdaman plant was environmentally friendly with the latest technology.
The plant will initially emit 650,000 tonnes of greenhouse gases a year.
The WA government has required a gradual reduction in emissions to zero by 2050
https://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/national/western-australia/controversial-6-5b-burrup-fertiliser-plant-to-get-green-light-by-the-end-of-the-year-20220930-p5bm9l.html
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