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
27 October, 2024
Net Zero Debate is Running Out of Ideas
At the weekend I attended the Battle of Ideas Festival in London.
It is a fascinating event, with interesting debates taking place across a wide variety of topics like free speech, culture wars, the economy, education and women’s freedom.
I was there primarily for the energy discussions. Unfortunately, I missed the book launch on nuclear power on the Saturday, but I did attend the two energy debates that took place in the scientific dilemmas section on Sunday.
First up was a lunchtime debate entitled “Is nuclear the future of energy… again?” Unfortunately, the speaker who was supposed to speak for this position had some sort of transportation nightmare and could not attend.
I did not catch the name of the man who replaced her, but he did put up a valiant effort considering he was drafted in at the last minute. Speaking against the idea of a nuclear renaissance was Robert Reid, policy development officer for the Alba Party who was in mourning for the late Alec Salmond.
We can therefore forgive him somewhat for advancing the hoary old chestnut that offshore wind is cheap: he claimed £41/MWh without citing any sources. Of course, the existing CfD funded offshore wind farms have cost us over £150/MWh so far this financial year and the new projects awarded in AR6 will cost us over £82/MWh in today’s money, more than twice Robert’s claim.
Emma Bateman, who is an environmental campaigner and founding member of Together Against Sizewell C, unsurprisingly spoke against the idea of nuclear power and made some spurious claims about safety that if nuclear power were a person would have resulted in the libel lawyers being called on Monday morning.
The gist of her substantive argument was that nuclear is too expensive and takes too long so we should therefore spend more on wind and solar.
In the ensuing debate, I managed to correct Robert Reid’s ‘facts’ and make the point that if your primary concern is the environment, then you should be an advocate of nuclear power because it has the smallest overall environmental footprint of all energy sources because it doesn’t take up much land and has very low mineral intensity.
I also made the point about the chocolate teapot fallacy. Arguing for wind and solar in place of nuclear power is akin to arguing in favour of chocolate teapots because you cannot wait for a ceramic one.
No matter how many chocolate teapots you buy, you can never make tea; just like no matter how many wind turbines and solar panels you install you can never run a modern economy on intermittent electricity.
The physics of nuclear power are far superior to any other energy source because of its extremely high energy return on energy invested, meaning we get far more energy out than we expend building the power plants, and the output is reliable.
There are even designs on the drawing board and beginning to be built that will allow nuclear power plants to follow fluctuations in demand.
The barriers to nuclear power are all political: the West over-regulates nuclear power and it is unsurprising that it takes so long because of all the paperwork that must be produced before a new reactor can be built.
We can fix man-made political and regulatory problems, but mere mortals cannot change the faulty physics of intermittent renewables, just like you can never make tea in a chocolate teapot.
We would be far better off committing to a significant nuclear power programme so we can deliver reliable electricity. If we fix the regulations, invest in rebuilding the skills base and supply chains and choose the right reactor design, we can even have cheap, reliable energy with only a small impact on the environment.
This is what the French did in the 1970s and 1980s and now they produce around 70% of their electricity from nuclear.
The next debate was on the “Great British Energy Crisis”. It was encouraging to see that three of the five panellists are subscribers to this Substack (you know who you are and thank you).
Two of the speakers, James Woudhuysen and Lord David Frost both made eloquent attacks on Net Zero and its consequences. Professor Michaela Kendall who is the U.K.
Hydrogen Champion for Mission Innovation suggested we needed more facts to inform the debate on energy, but managed to skirt around the fact that the Government agreed contracts for green hydrogen at £241/MWh, which is about seven times the current cost of U.K. natural gas, which in turn costs more than five times U.S. gas.
Dr. Shahrar Ali is a former spokesperson for the Green Party who has recently won a discrimination court case against the Greens because they sacked him for his gender critical beliefs.
It is a shame Dr. Ali cannot apply his critical thinking skills to Net Zero. The gist of his argument was the world is warming, it is going to be a catastrophe, it is all our fault, so build more windmills.
I managed to take him to task in the ensuing debate by pointing out that even if you believe CO2 causes warming, then it is a big leap to conclude that building windmills will change the weather.
This is the so-called mitigation strategy that can only work if 1) CO2 is the only climate control knob (we know this to be untrue from paleo-climate records) and 2) everyone else follows the strategy (you only need to look at charts of global greenhouse gas emissions to see this is also untrue).
A far better strategy is one of adaptation which has the advantages of being cheaper and will work regardless of the actions of others and regardless of the causes of global warming.
The mitigation strategy we are pursuing is one of unilateral economic impoverishment and the Net Zero “cure” is far worse than the alleged climate change “disease”.
It is encouraging that my intervention drew an enthusiastic round of applause which is testament to the growing scepticism about Net Zero among the general public.
It appears to me that cracks are appearing in the cosy green consensus in Westminster and if we get our arguments right, we can win this debate.
All in all, the Battle of Ideas is a thoroughly enjoyable event and I highly recommend everyone to attend next year, whatever your beliefs. It is only through free and open debate that we can get to the truth.
https://principia-scientific.com/net-zero-debate-is-running-out-of-ideas/
*****************************************************Overnight Success: Biden’s Climate Splurge Gives Billions to Nonprofit Newbies
Although there isn’t much public information available about the Justice Climate Fund, it appears to have been an overnight success.
After gaining nonprofit status in August 2023, the organization was awarded $940 million by the Biden administration just eight months later in connection with the White House’s $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, which aims to provide financial assistance to reduce carbon emissions and reduce pollution.
The Justice Climate Fund is not the only nonprofit newcomer suddenly made rich by the GGRF. Within a month of gaining nonprofit status from the IRS, Power Forward Communities, which reported 2023 revenues of $100, was awarded $2 billion.
The awards were made by the Environmental Protection Agency, which is new to the world of major grantmaking. The agency acknowledges it has never handed out such gigantic sums of money, and its inspector general told Congress last month it marked a “fantastically complex” and “unusual” setup that his small staff would be hard-pressed to follow.
Critics note that many of the awardees are run by politically connected figures. The single biggest winner in the awards, which were announced in April, was the Climate United Fund, which is slated to receive $6.97 billion. The fund’s directors include prominent Democrats, such as Phil Angelides, a former California State Treasurer. After this article was published Climate United told RCI that Anthony Foxx, who served as Transportation Secretary in the Obama administration, was “listed as a board member for our [grant] application but did not commit to serving post award.” A press release on the group’s website names Foxx as a member of its “Inaugural Board of Directors.”
The unprecedented nature of the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, which was created as part of 2022’s Inflation Reduction Act, is raising concerns about the Biden administration’s efforts to spend tens of billions of dollars in its final months, a gusher of taxpayer money that will flow into a poorly understood, untested, and difficult to audit format. The tremendous sums involved, the novelty of the program, and the EPA’s lack of experience in the field, as well as the unproven track record of some of the newly hatched recipients, have drawn the attention of lawmakers and others uncertain about how the taxpayers’ billions will ultimately be spent and who will keep track of it all.
“These groups are political front groups that are simply created to funnel billions of taxpayer dollars to Democrat campaigns under the guise of doing something good,” said Mandy Gunasekara, who served as EPA chief of staff in the Trump administration.
Daren Bakst, director of the conservative Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Center for Energy and Environment and a sharp critic of the Biden administration’s climate change spending splurge, said, “It’s worse than a slush fund – it’s a slush fund to create non-profit slush funds.”
The EPA describes the Greenhouse Fund as “an unprecedented opportunity to accelerate the adoption of greenhouse gas reducing technologies.” By investing in making residential homes and neighborhoods more “eco-friendly,” the money will pay dividends in both lower utility bills and higher employment, the agency says.
Neither the Justice Climate Fund nor Power Forward Communities responded to questions about their plans to spend the close to $3 billion in public funds they had received.
The $27 billion assigned to the Greenhouse Fund represents a fraction of the money the Biden-Harris administration has embedded in the Inflation Reduction Act for its green energy revolution. Biden acknowledged the bill’s true purpose this summer when he called the IRA a “climate” bill, thereby aligning the administration’s position with what leftist environmental groups such as the World Resource Institute hailed from the beginning as “the largest piece of climate legislation in U.S. history.” The IRA involved “hundreds of billions of dollars in clean energy, electric vehicles, environmental justice and more.” Billions more would be spent on the global warming front under the Biden-Harris Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act that passed in 2021.
The EPA has made it clear it views the bonanza as seed money. The agency expects that each dollar the nonprofit recipients spend in seeking to reduce America’s carbon footprint will attract seven times its value in private investment. This anticipated capitalist activity has led many media accounts to label the nonprofits “green banks,” and it has created an entirely new wrinkle in the EPA, according to its inspector general. The Fund’s requirements also carry mandates that at least 40% of the billions be spent in “low income or disadvantaged communities” or “tribal” lands, and in some cases, winners have pledged to spend up to 70% of the money in those same areas.
“I can’t say enough about how complex this system will be,” EPA Inspector General Sean O’Donnell testified to a House subcommittee in September. “It’s like they created an investment bank. It’s fantastically complex. I think it’s unusual.”
“I think it’s more than unusual,” responded Ohio Republican Rep. David Joyce.
EPA Special Advisor Zealan Hoover pushed back at the claim that unusual secrecy surrounded the process and criticism that there are flimsy guardrails to ensure the $27 billion is well spent.
Greenhouse Fund money has been divided into three programs. The biggest is in the National Clean Investment Fund (NCIF), which will divide $14 billion among three groups, followed by Solar For All, which has $7 billion, and then $6 billion divided among five groups under the Clean Communities Investment Accelerator (CCIA).
While the degree of competition involved was not immediately made public, the EPA did provide the numbers to RealClearInvestigations. Three National Clean Investment Fund winners were chosen from a dozen applicants, while Clean Communities Investment Accelerator winners came from a pool of 26 proposals. “Solar For All,” which has the smallest awards, had 60 winners and 150 applicants, according to the EPA. Some of the NCIF and CCIA winners are associated with one another and publicly speak of their collaboration.
“In some cases, the umbrella organizations are new, but it’s set up to help long established groups such as the United Way or Habitat for Humanity,” Hoover said. “These are partnerships and coalitions in which we are very confident, and they submitted remarkably comprehensive applications.”
Hoover also told RCI the EPA will retain spending and auditing oversight, though that responsibility was not spelled out in any of the press releases that have accompanied the Greenhouse Reduction Fund. None of the groups receiving the billions responded to questions or agreed to comment on their plans for spending and how the money will be tracked and audited.
*****************************************************
$24 billion is missing from spending on FAKE climate change! Was it stolen?
Climate science is a ruse. But the money spent on fake research and gifts to nations is real.
Between 24 and 41 billion dollars of that money is missing from the World Bank. No one knows where it went.
Oxfam, October 17: “Up to $41 billion in World Bank climate finance—nearly 40 percent of all climate funds disbursed by the Bank over the past seven years—is unaccounted for due to poor record-keeping practices, reveals a new Oxfam report published today ahead of the World Bank and IMF Annual Meetings in Washington D.C. [October 21—26, 2024]”
“An Oxfam audit of the World Bank’s 2017-2023 climate finance portfolio found that between $24 billion and $41 billion in climate finance went unaccounted for between the time projects were approved and when they closed.”
“There is no clear public record showing where this money went or how it was used, which makes any assessment of its impacts impossible. It also remains unclear whether these funds were even spent on climate-related initiatives intended to help low- and middle-income countries protect people from the impacts of the climate crisis and invest in clean energy.” (link in footnote)
A source at the World Bank told the NY Post that the actual amount of missing money “could be twice or ten times more…all the figures are routinely made up. Nobody has a clue about who spends what.” (link in footnote)
The World Bank gets its money from national governments’ donations, from its own issuance of bonds, and from repayment of loans it makes.
As mainstream reports on this scandal appear, they’ll be couched in terms of horribly deficient accounting practices, “mistakes,” lack of executive oversight at the Bank, etc.
I raise the distinct possibility that the money was stolen
https://jonrappoport.substack.com/p/real-24-billion-missing-from-spending-fake-climate-change
************************************************Indonesia Dumps Climate Politics in Favor of Energy Security
The archipelago nation of Indonesia represents just 1% of Earth’s land area, but it has set the stage for global geopolitics surrounding fossil fuels and climate policies.
As a part of climate negotiations between G-7 nations, Indonesia was expected to be the first among developing countries to announce early closures of coal plants.
In the spotlight is the 660-megawatt Cirebon-1 plant in West Java province, which had been scheduled to shut down by 2035. However, it is understood that Jakarta will not follow that timeline but rather continue to operate the plant to its originally projected end of life in 2042. A stumbling block to the early closure is a price tag of more than $1 billion to replace the coal plant with so-called renewable energy.
In reaffirming its commitment to the unrestricted use of coal, Indonesia makes a bold and sensible decision to put energy security and economic priorities ahead of international climate politics. The move sets up Indonesia as a model for other developing countries to defy the western agenda to reduce emissions in favor of their own self-interest.
Coal in Indonesia
For developing nations like Indonesia, the path to prosperity is paved with affordable energy. Coal, abundant and cheap, has long been the fuel of choice for powering economic growth. The country sits atop vast coal reserves, estimated at 37 billion metric tons, which are primarily located in Sumatra and Kalimantan.
Jakarta has approved a coal production quota of 922 million metric tons for 2024, a significant increase from previous years. This move has sparked international criticism, but it’s a calculated step to ensure energy affordability.
Coal remains the backbone of Indonesia’s energy sector, accounting for over 60% of its electricity generation. Also, Indonesia relies on coal-fueled smelters for most of its nickel production.
Producing about half of the world’s nickel, Indonesia is the top producer of the metal, which is needed to make batteries that run electric vehicles and energy storage devices.
Economic Case for Fossil Fuels
In the late 1990s, nearly 50% of Indonesia’s population lived in poverty. Today, that number is closer to 10%, thanks to unabated use of coal during the past two decades. At 70%, Indonesia manages to maintain one of the highest employment rates among the G20 countries.
“Despite challenges in 2023, Indonesia has demonstrated resilience to global shocks and an ever more diversified economic base is expected to mitigate adverse impacts,” says a spokesman for financial services company PwC.
Much of this success is due to a stable and reliable energy supply of coal, oil, and natural gas for electricity and industries. Coal and petroleum, along with nickel and ferroalloys, are among Indonesia’s top exports.
Poverty, though declining, remains a pressing issue, with over 26 million Indonesians classified as poor. Rapid industrialization and economic growth are essential for improving living standards and creating opportunities for millions.
Western Hypocrisy
Many western leaders lecturing Indonesia on the evils of coal had their own economies built with that very fuel and continue to rely on oil and gas.
The United States, for instance, underwent an energy revolution through fracking, which unlocked vast reserves of natural gas and oil. In 2023, U.S. was the number one oil producer in the world.
Similarly, Norway, often lauded for its commitment to “sustainability,” continues to issue oil drilling permits in the North Sea. If Norway, a country with a superior economy and high standard of living, can still prioritize its economic self-interest by extracting its oil, why should Indonesia be criticized for utilizing its coal reserves?
The $1.4 trillion Indonesian economy is in no mood to compromise its future or the continuing upward trend in economic growth. Count on Jakarta to exploit its natural resources well into the future.
https://climaterealism.com/2024/10/indonesia-dumps-climate-politics-in-favor-of-energy-security/
***************************************23 October, 2024
Molten Salt Reactor at ACU Receives Historic NRC Construction Permit
Molten salt is very hard to control. Expect disasters
ABILENE, Texas – September 16th: The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has issued a construction permit (CP) for the deployment of the Natura Resources’ MSR-1 system at Abilene Christian University (ACU).This marks the first construction permit for a liquid-fueled advanced reactor and only the second for any advanced reactor issued by the NRC.
“Natura recognized early on that the NRC is the gold standard of licensing of nuclear reactors.We made a conscious decision to work with the NRC to license our technology for deployment here in the States rather than taking our technology outside their jurisdiction or attempting to avoid the licensing process entirely.The NRC’s issuance of the Construction Permit for the Natura MSR-1 deployment at ACU shows that our technology can be licensed and de-risks the licensure of Natura’s 100MWe systems,” said Douglass Robison, Founder and President.
Natura Resources has taken an iterative, milestone-based approach to advanced reactor development and deployment, focused on efficiency and performance.This started in 2020 when Natura brought together ACU’s NEXT Lab with Texas A&M University, the University of Texas, and the Georgia Institute of Technology to form the Natura Resources Research Alliance.In only four years, Natura and its partners have developed a system that the NRC has successfully licensed.The successful deployment of the Natura MSR-1 system at ACU as the molten salt research reactor (MSRR) is going to provide valuable operational data to support Natura’s 100MWe systems and will also serve as a world-class research tool to train advanced reactor operators and educate students.
“We appreciate the thorough reviews by the NRC staff.The environmental review was completed in March and found that the MSRR would have no significant impact on the environment.The safety review that was just completed found that the Natura MSR-1 design and analysis meets the federal regulations and is safe to construct.This construction permit is the first step in the NRC’s two-step licensing process.It allows Natura and ACU to build and operate the MSRR without uranium.The next step is the operating license, which will authorize Natura and ACU to fuel the reactor and demonstrate the elegance of molten salt technology,” said Ben Beasley, Director of Licensing.
While this is a significant milestone, there is still work to be done.The advanced reactor deployment site that will house the reactor, the Science and Engineering Research Center at ACU, was completed in August 2023, and the issuance of the construction permit allows the team to begin fabrication of the reactor.Zachry Nuclear Engineering will complete the Detailed Engineering and Design of the Natura MSR-1 in the first part of 2025, which will be followed quickly by the submission of the Operating License application to the NRC.The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) provides fuel for the current operating fleet of university research reactors, and its commitment in 2019 to provide fuel and salt for the MSRR was the impetus for Natura Resources to develop and deploy the Natura MSR-1 with ACU.The fuel and salt needs for the MSRR are unique, and Natura Resources and ACU are committed to working with the DOE to finalize details related to the provision of fuel and salt.
“We are proud to have been working with Natura over the past year on the detailed design engineering for their first molten salt reactor system, a truly groundbreaking project in clean energy. This partnership highlights the innovative leadership both of our Texas-based companies bring to the industry as we work together to drive progress and shape the future of energy.Our shared commitment to advancing technology and economic growth makes this collaboration especially meaningful,” said John B. Zachry, President and CEO of Zachry Group.
“ACU is thrilled to have Natura as a partner as we work together to answer the world’s increased demand for reliable energy, medical isotopes, and clean water through the deployment of liquid-fueled molten salt reactors. With the NRC’s issuance of the construction permit, we are one step closer to making that a reality. The performance-driven approach of Natura Resources to advanced reactor deployment has quickly moved them from a relative unknown to a leader in the upstart advanced reactor industry,” said Dr. Phil Schubert, ACU President.
“If we're going to meet the growing energy needs, not only in the State of Texas but in our country and the world at large, we must begin deploying advanced nuclear reactors,” said Douglass Robison.
**********************************************
Climate Alarmists Now Attack Growing Your Own Food
Allotment produce, much prized by proud food-growing citizens the world over, has six times the ‘carbon’ footprint of conventional agriculture, according to a recent paper published by Nature
“Steps must be taken to ensure that urban agriculture supports, and does not undermine, urban decarbonisation efforts,” demand the authors.
What have these people been smoking? Surely not some of the puff circulating at the recent Psychedelic Climate Week in New York.
Highlights included a discussion on funding ketamine-assisted therapy and a panel on ‘Balancing Investing and Impact with Climate and Psychedelic Capital’.
The lead authors of the Nature paper are academics working out of the School for Environment and Sustainability at the University of Michigan. They suggest using urban farms as sites for “education, leisure and community building”.
Perhaps the locals could sit cross-legged and listen to early Pink Floyd music. Maybe clap the setting sun to some Atom Heart Mother.
Excuse your correspondent if he cannot take this paper seriously. It is a classic example of ‘greens’ picking on a human activity – almost any will do – and complaining that it causes the devil-gas carbon dioxide to be released.
At the recent New York climate happening, according to the Guardian, revellers were told that using hallucinogens can spark “consciousness shifts” to inspire ‘climate-friendly behaviour’.
What climate friendly behaviour, one might ask, given that almost anything humans do to improve their lot of Earth is demonised by an increasingly weird millenarian ‘green’ cult.
The authors of the Nature paper seem to have a particular down on home composting. Poorly-managed composting is said to exacerbate the release of ‘greenhouse gases’. “The carbon footprint of compost grows tenfold when methane-generated anaerobic conditions persist in compost piles,” it says.
This is particularly common during small-scale composting, apparently. With a seeming complete ignorance of how small allotments farming functions, the authors suggest that “cities can offset this risk by centralising compost operations for professional management”.
Wherever these cultists look, there are gases being released that are contributing to their invented existential climate crisis. The high application rates of compost in urban agriculture can also lead to nitrous oxide, we’re told.
Needless to say, “strategic management of application scheduling and fertiliser combinations may be required to minimise emissions”.
For allotment holders, few pleasures in life compare with a break from arduous work and a hot cup of tea in the shed. Surrounded by the tools of the trade, it is the labourer’s equivalent of passing around a few liveners at National Climate Week, with the added attraction that it doesn’t turn you into a self-important dope.
But such pleasure will come to an end if the climate cops have their way. Infrastructure, we’re told, is the largest driver of ‘carbon’ emissions at what are termed “low-tech” urban agricultural sites.
As well as sheds, this includes beds (for vegetables, not a crash pad for ketamine heads) and compost facilities. A raised bed built and used for five years will have approximately four times the environmental impact as one used for 20.
Other infrastructure supplies are said to include fertiliser, gasoline and weed block textile.
Plants need water, but only the ‘right’ sort of water can help ‘save the planet’.
In their site samples, the researchers found that most allotment-holders use potable municipal water sources or groundwater wells. Big no, no, of course, since such irrigation emits ‘GHG’s from pumping, water treatment and distribution.
“Cities should support low-carbon (and drought-conscious) irrigation for urban agriculture via subsidies for rainwater catchment infrastructure, or through established guidelines for greywater use,” it is suggested.
Presumably, the subsidies will come from the magic bread tree and the infrastructure will be of the special type that does not produce ‘GHG’s.
This crackpot climate paper is just the latest sign that the ‘green’ movement is riven with disagreements as its climate crisis grift starts to fall apart in the face of reality.
There are no realistic back-ups for intermittent wind and solar, while ‘carbon capture’ is a colossal and potentially dangerous waste of money.
Without hydrocarbon use, humankind is doomed. Billions will die and society will be returned to the dark ages.
Hydrocarbons are ubiquitous in modern society, and so almost everything that humans do to survive and thrive can be demonised.
Eventually, you end up with Sir David Attenborough making the appalling observation that it was “barmy” for the United Nations to send bags of flour to famine-stricken Ethiopia.
Or to read earlier this year the tweet from the UN contributing author and UCL professor Bill McGuire that the only “realistic way” to avoid catastrophic climate breakdown is to cull the human population with a high fatality pandemic.
Many ‘green’ extremists seem to take the view that anything humans do, including growing their own veg, is causing existential harm to the planet.
https://principia-scientific.com/climate-alarmists-now-attack-growing-you-own-food/
************************************************Overnight Success: Biden’s Climate Splurge Gives Billions to Nonprofit Newbies
Although there isn’t much public information available about the Justice Climate Fund, it appears to have been an overnight success.
After gaining nonprofit status in August 2023, the organization was awarded $940 million by the Biden administration just eight months later in connection with the White House’s $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, which aims to provide financial assistance to reduce carbon emissions and reduce pollution.
The Justice Climate Fund is not the only nonprofit newcomer suddenly made rich by the GGRF. Within a month of gaining nonprofit status from the IRS, Power Forward Communities, which reported 2023 revenues of $100, was awarded $2 billion.
The awards were made by the Environmental Protection Agency, which is new to the world of major grantmaking. The agency acknowledges it has never handed out such gigantic sums of money, and its inspector general told Congress last month it marked a “fantastically complex” and “unusual” setup that his small staff would be hard-pressed to follow.
Critics note that many of the awardees are run by politically connected figures. The single biggest winner in the awards, which were announced in April, was the Climate United Fund, which is slated to receive $6.97 billion. The fund’s directors include prominent Democrats, such as Phil Angelides, a former California State Treasurer. After this article was published Climate United told RCI that Anthony Foxx, who served as Transportation Secretary in the Obama administration, was “listed as a board member for our [grant] application but did not commit to serving post award.” A press release on the group’s website names Foxx as a member of its “Inaugural Board of Directors.”
The unprecedented nature of the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, which was created as part of 2022’s Inflation Reduction Act, is raising concerns about the Biden administration’s efforts to spend tens of billions of dollars in its final months, a gusher of taxpayer money that will flow into a poorly understood, untested, and difficult to audit format. The tremendous sums involved, the novelty of the program, and the EPA’s lack of experience in the field, as well as the unproven track record of some of the newly hatched recipients, have drawn the attention of lawmakers and others uncertain about how the taxpayers’ billions will ultimately be spent and who will keep track of it all.
“These groups are political front groups that are simply created to funnel billions of taxpayer dollars to Democrat campaigns under the guise of doing something good,” said Mandy Gunasekara, who served as EPA chief of staff in the Trump administration.
Daren Bakst, director of the conservative Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Center for Energy and Environment and a sharp critic of the Biden administration’s climate change spending splurge, said, “It’s worse than a slush fund – it’s a slush fund to create non-profit slush funds.”
The EPA describes the Greenhouse Fund as “an unprecedented opportunity to accelerate the adoption of greenhouse gas reducing technologies.” By investing in making residential homes and neighborhoods more “eco-friendly,” the money will pay dividends in both lower utility bills and higher employment, the agency says.
Neither the Justice Climate Fund nor Power Forward Communities responded to questions about their plans to spend the close to $3 billion in public funds they had received.
The $27 billion assigned to the Greenhouse Fund represents a fraction of the money the Biden-Harris administration has embedded in the Inflation Reduction Act for its green energy revolution. Biden acknowledged the bill’s true purpose this summer when he called the IRA a “climate” bill, thereby aligning the administration’s position with what leftist environmental groups such as the World Resource Institute hailed from the beginning as “the largest piece of climate legislation in U.S. history.” The IRA involved “hundreds of billions of dollars in clean energy, electric vehicles, environmental justice and more.” Billions more would be spent on the global warming front under the Biden-Harris Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act that passed in 2021.
The EPA has made it clear it views the bonanza as seed money. The agency expects that each dollar the nonprofit recipients spend in seeking to reduce America’s carbon footprint will attract seven times its value in private investment. This anticipated capitalist activity has led many media accounts to label the nonprofits “green banks,” and it has created an entirely new wrinkle in the EPA, according to its inspector general. The Fund’s requirements also carry mandates that at least 40% of the billions be spent in “low income or disadvantaged communities” or “tribal” lands, and in some cases, winners have pledged to spend up to 70% of the money in those same areas.
“I can’t say enough about how complex this system will be,” EPA Inspector General Sean O’Donnell testified to a House subcommittee in September. “It’s like they created an investment bank. It’s fantastically complex. I think it’s unusual.”
“I think it’s more than unusual,” responded Ohio Republican Rep. David Joyce.
EPA Special Advisor Zealan Hoover pushed back at the claim that unusual secrecy surrounded the process and criticism that there are flimsy guardrails to ensure the $27 billion is well spent.
Greenhouse Fund money has been divided into three programs. The biggest is in the National Clean Investment Fund (NCIF), which will divide $14 billion among three groups, followed by Solar For All, which has $7 billion, and then $6 billion divided among five groups under the Clean Communities Investment Accelerator (CCIA).
While the degree of competition involved was not immediately made public, the EPA did provide the numbers to RealClearInvestigations. Three National Clean Investment Fund winners were chosen from a dozen applicants, while Clean Communities Investment Accelerator winners came from a pool of 26 proposals. “Solar For All,” which has the smallest awards, had 60 winners and 150 applicants, according to the EPA. Some of the NCIF and CCIA winners are associated with one another and publicly speak of their collaboration.
“In some cases, the umbrella organizations are new, but it’s set up to help long established groups such as the United Way or Habitat for Humanity,” Hoover said. “These are partnerships and coalitions in which we are very confident, and they submitted remarkably comprehensive applications.”
Hoover also told RCI the EPA will retain spending and auditing oversight, though that responsibility was not spelled out in any of the press releases that have accompanied the Greenhouse Reduction Fund. None of the groups receiving the billions responded to questions or agreed to comment on their plans for spending and how the money will be tracked and audited.
State-directed spending on new technology raises major questions about the role of government in promoting industrial development and in “picking winners.” In other words, are neighborhoods clamoring for what the nonprofits will sell, and how will the award winners attract $189 billion in private investment?
“Is there really any organic demand for all this?” said Travis Fisher, director of Energy and Environmental Policy Studies at the conservative Cato Institute.
But Hoover said the answer lies in the gargantuan scale, and that the lump sum awards will actually be spent in myriad smaller projects throughout the country.
“The theory is that by unlocking the market we’ll create the market,” he said. “The top line numbers are large, but this will jumpstart lending.” That activity will also be spurred because the award winners will offer a smorgasbord of energy-efficient projects rather than one standardized one, Hoover said.
The EPA and the award winners speak in glowing terms of what they will accomplish.
“To date, the eight selected applicants have supported thousands of individuals, businesses, and community organizations to access capital for climate and clean energy projects,” the EPA said when announcing the awards. “With their awards, selectees will unleash tens of thousands of more projects like these across the country for decades to come.”
The press release went on to describe individuals who needed water heaters replaced, communities that are investing in solar panels, and even the “sustainable rehabilitation of the historic National Guard Armory building located in one of Owosso, Michigan.”
This sort of activity also contributed to the “green banks” label, and it aligns with IG O’Donnell’s testimony that the EPA had essentially created a “fantastically complex” investment bank.
Critics say such problems are compounded by the political connections of many of the awardees, whose boards and directors are peppered with people with careers in various credit unions and what are known as “Community Development Financial Institutions,” or banks that are focused on distressed communities.
The board of the Coalition for Green Capital, which got the second biggest NCIF award of $5 billion, includes Hugh Frater, who headed Fannie Mae at the end of the Obama administration. Another board member,Cecilia Martinez, was the top “environmental justice official” in Biden’s White House before moving to the advocacy and nonprofit sector. Stephen Brown, the Coalition’s chief network officer, began his Washington career in the Clinton White House, while Jessie Buendia, chief impact officer, was previously part of the California state government. Another highlighted officer with the Coalition is Daniela Nyiri, who worked on campaigns for Michigan Democrat Haley Stevens before moving to the Progressive Turnout Project.
The last NCIF installment of $2 billion was awarded to a group called Power Forward Communities, which was formed in 2023. It is led by Timothy J. Mayopoulos, who headed Obama’s Fannie Mae from 2012 to 2018. One of its directors is Shaun Donovan, who served in the Obama administration for all of its eight years, including a stint as secretary of Housing and Urban Development.
Power Forward Communities was granted its tax-exempt status by the IRS last March, one month before it landed the $2 billion award.
Some of the CCIA awards went to more established players, such as Inclusiv Inc., an outfit that has been around since 1977 and will get $1.87 billion, and the Opportunity Finance Network, which in 2022 had revenues of $76 million, according to tax records. Others are new arrivals on the scene, like the Justice Climate Fund, which formed in August 2023. The Justice Climate Fund’s CEO, Amir Kirkwood, had previously been with the Opportunity Finance Network, which received a $2.29 billion award.
Almost without fail, each award winner appears to have received a massive revenue boost from this surge of tax money under the Biden-Harris administration.
“The EPA does not have the wherewithal to handle $2-billlion grants – they were terrible at handling much smaller ones when I was there – much less an organization that previously disclosed a minuscule budget,” Gunasekara told RCI in an email. “There is very little oversight once the money goes out the door and even less accountability on whether the funds achieve the stated purpose in grant applications.”
House Republicans sounded a similar note at the September hearing, dubbed “Holding the Biden-Harris EPA Accountable for Radical Rush-to-Green Spending.” Democrats insisted that GOP concerns were hypothetical, given most of the actual spending has not yet occurred and is earmarked for a good cause. Republicans called attention to the unprecedented nature of the EPA’s arrangement.
“The Biden-Harris administration’s radical rush-to-green energy policies have fueled out-of-control inflation, which has driven up prices by more than 20 percent and destroyed the economic stability American families deserve,” said Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, who chairs the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
“While American families are increasingly worried about unaffordable costs, the Biden-Harris administration is working relentlessly to expand its radical energy agenda,” added the Washington state Republican.
O’Donnell acknowledged that his staff, which has not grown apace with the EPA’s massive surge under Biden, would not be able to keep tabs on the $27 billion Greenhouse Fund.
Republican representatives said the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund follows enormous sums of money the Biden-Harris administration had already sunk into the EPA in the form of some $100 billion via the Infrastructure and Inflation Reduction Acts, effectively doubling the agency’s budget for five consecutive years.
“Spending at this pace and scale for any agency should raise concerns, but especially for an agency like the EPA with a known track record of waste, fraud, and abuse,” Rodgers said. “Under the Obama administration the EPA was given roughly $7.2 billion – nearly doubling its annual budget at the time. Even at that level, the EPA was not able to responsibly manage the spending.”
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Offshore wind’s bogus benefits bragged on
Resources for the Future (RFF) has produced a combined cost benefit analysis for 32 U.S. offshore wind projects now in development. They proudly point to the benefits outweighing the costs by a whopping 14 times. But these supposed benefits are not just exaggerated; they are fabricated. They simply do not exist.
Their lengthy title is “Offshore Wind Power Examined: Effects, Benefits, and Costs of Offshore Wind Farms along the US Atlantic and Gulf Coasts”.
The analysis is fairly simple which makes it easy to see the fallacies. There are just four basic benefit claims. And of course it is all based on highly questionable modeling.
Before looking at each of these benefit claims it is worth noting a pervasive misconception. They assume that when a MWh of wind displaces a MWh of coal or gas fired power the emissions of the latter are reduced by the amount it takes to produce a MWh. As I have written at length this is not true.
Baseload fossil fueled power plants run on very high pressure steam produced by gigantic boilers. These plants have to be ready to produce power while wind and solar run intermittently. They are typically running while their output is temporarily displaced by offshore wind. The reduction in emissions is relatively quite small compared to the power displacement.
Each of the RFF benefit quantities is based on this mistaken displacement assumption. Thus each would be much smaller than they estimate if it were real. But as we shall now see they are not real.
The first and by far the biggest purported benefit is in changing climate change. This benefit is greater than the other three combined.
The claimed climate benefit is in reducing global climate change deaths for just under the next 300 years. I am not making this up. Here is their preposterous explanation:
“The GIVE Model, one of the three models on which the EPA (2023c) social cost of CO2 is based, projects that each million short tons of CO2 emitted in 2020 will cause 43 premature deaths globally between then and 2300 (after which the GIVE model does not project effects). Using this deaths-per-million-tons value, we estimate that the CO2 emissions reductions caused by the modeled offshore wind farms, in each year of their operation, will prevent 1,600 premature deaths. This mortality reduction is a major part of the overall estimated dollar value of the GHG emissions reductions caused by the offshore wind farms.”
Our emissions are not causing any climate change deaths, much less from now until 2300 so this benefit does not exist.
The next biggest benefit is in reducing the purported deaths caused by power plant pollution. Here is their summary:
“Our model estimates that the offshore wind farms will prevent approximately 436 premature deaths per year in the United States by reducing ground-level PM2.5. We estimate an additional 84 avoided premature deaths per year from reductions in ground-level ozone pollution; however, this is more uncertain than our PM2.5 related mortality estimate because ozone formation is more sensitive to background assumptions, and we base the estimate on a national average estimated ozone mortality rate of power plant emissions (EPA 2023a) rather than on modeling that accounts for the locations of the emissions changes.”
Power plant emissions are not causing these EPA dreamed up deaths so this benefit does not exist. In particular a great book on the PM2.5 hoax is Steve Milloy’s “Scare Pollution: Why and How to Fix the EPA”.
The third supposed benefit is “electric bill savings”. Again I am not making this up. That the cost of backup makes renewables expensive is well established and offshore wind is very expensive renewables so bills will go way up not down.
To get these supposed savings they basically rebuild the land based power generation system and given the offshore generation they build with cheaper stuff. Here is their opaque summary:
“In our results, building 35 GW of offshore wind farms reduces the average capacity factor of non-variable generation capacity and causes a change in the mix of such capacity. The change is a shift of several GW of capacity from types with higher fixed costs and lower operating costs to types with lower fixed costs and higher operating costs, which reduces costs and increases profits in light of the lower capacity factor.”
That lowering the capacity factor reduced people’s electric bill sounds like a model driven fantasy for sure. Moreover it sounds like the so-called savings are from what bills would otherwise be in some future scenario, not from what they are today. In that case the claim is a trick.
The last benefit is even more far fetched. It is “Natural gas user savings outside the electricity sector”. The simple idea is that so much gas is displaced by wind that the price of gas to everyone goes down. Not much mind you but a little bit.
They say “The offshore wind farms reduce the US and Canadian projected average natural gas price by 2.5 percent, from $4.12 to $4.02 per MMBtu, because of decreased demand for natural gas in the power sector.”
If only economics were that simple but it is not. Gas is a huge market besides electric power. Also most of the area in question is now served by fracked gas that runs around $2.00. So this tiny 2.5% change is not credible.
That is it for the bogus benefits. They are claimed to be 14 times the cost but they do not exist. The costs however are very real. At least RFF did not include jobs as benefits, as they are costs. They just used fairy tales.
Perhaps this report is written for politicians and other people who will cite it but never read it. Or maybe for people who believe the fairy tale of America’s tons of emissions killing people around the world for the next 300 years. I like to think my readers are smarter than that.
Offshore wind has no benefits; it is a destructive and wildly expensive policy mistake.
https://www.cfact.org/2024/10/07/offshore-winds-bogus-benefits-bragged-on/
***************************************22 October, 2024
Green Blob-Funded Report Calls for Massive Frequent Flyer Levies That Would Devastate International Air Travel
A radical new plan to reduce international air travel from Europe to minimal levels over the next few years has been proposed by a group of Net Zero fanatics led by the New Economics Foundation (NEF). Massive charges under a ‘frequent flyer levy’ are proposed, the effect of which could quickly destroy large sections of the international air transportation industry. Some of the money raised – or not as the case may be – will be sent abroad as ‘climate aid’ to less developed countries forced to stay poor by mandated restrictions on their use of hydrocarbons. Needless to say, the work is the product of what Ben Pile recently termed “bog-standard Green Blob fronts”. Writing and promoting the NEF publication involved a number of operations heavily funded by the usual suspects including the European Climate Foundation (ECF) and ClimateWorks.
The fantasy plan calls for large European surcharges to be added to ticket prices for multiple annual trips. Financial details are not provided in the press release but the report suggests €50 for a medium distance trip and additional levies of €100 for long and “comfort” classes. This would appear to suggest an extra €250 charge for long-distance business and first class travel. George Monbiot of the Guardian boasts of the report having been shared exclusively with his newspaper and writes that the €100 levy on both distance and class will rise with each trip. It is hoped the surcharges will raise €64 billion, a sum said to be equivalent to 30% of the entire EU annual budget. This would be spent, at least until the golden goose is killed stone dead, on accelerating Europe to a “fairer, greener economy”. More virtuous bungs can be sent to countries to stop them using hydrocarbons and recompense them for the non-existent climate crisis.
Although the report talks of reducing travel by around 25%, the blow will be much worse in financial terms. Many airlines rely on premium travel to keep economy tickets low and severe reductions would affect the economics of aviation, both in the air and on the ground. Reducing passenger traffic by a suggested 25% and very likely much more, would require massive restructuring across the board including air traffic control, baggage handling, security and border activities and airport management. Yet more lost jobs to be added to the increasing pile of Net Zero casualties.
Not that this is the end of the attack. Air travel has enabled countless millions to travel for pleasure, holidays, education, business and to connect with family over the last few decades. In pursuit of ther mad Net Zero policies, the eco-zealots tell us, further restrictions “would therefore be necessary”. These would include caps on the number of flights, airport slots, night flights, private jets and “limits on the more damaging comfort classes of travel”.
Want to know what is being planned by the Net Zero fanatics – look at what their Blob-funded puppets are writing. In this case, forget about flying within just a few short years.
The New Economics Foundation has been around for a few years pumping out Left wing propaganda. It is no surprise that the hard Left’s favourite money tree the Rowntree Trust has funnelled in cash, although much larger amounts have been supplied by the Laudes Foundation and the ECF. As Ben Pile noted recently in the Daily Sceptic, most of the organisations active in the climate domain in the U.K. are funded by the ECF directly, or by one of the half dozen or so of the ECF’s grantor philanthropic foundations. As Pile also observes, the “hapless consumer” is ensnared by the phantom institutions that represent the green-ideology-addled British Establishment.
The NEF report is co-written by the Stay Grounded Network which, perhaps to nobody’s surprise, is funded by the ECF. The aviation campaigner at this outfit, Magdalena Heuwieser, says that the single trip flyer is paying the same tax as a traveller making 10 trips. Except that the more frequent flyer is actually paying 10 times more tax. Designed to fit a political narrative, Left wing sums often diverge from reality. In his article, Monbiot notes that air travel, heavily taxed as most passengers are aware, is “heavily subsidised” since the fuel is exempt from duties. In Monbiot’s world, a lack of a specific tax is often seen as a ‘subsidy’, while an actual £12 billion annual subsidy loaded onto U.K. electricity consumers to pay for unreliable renewable power is passed off as an ‘investment’. One reason fuel duty is not levied on aviation is that mobile jet aircraft will ‘tanker up’ at cheaper locations.
Monbiot reports on the view of Marlene Engelhorn who states that the “mile-high club of private planet combustion, where wealthy people like me can ferment in our comfort zones, needs to close it doors”. Easy to say of course when you are a wealthy heiress who has inherited a fortune from the BASF chemical operation. Other people who work for a living and need holidays and some modest comfort as they travel to drum up business might take a different view.
According to Monbiot, the International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT) reviewed an early draft of the NEF report. Another Green Blob-funded operation of course, mostly it seems through ClimateWorks. This large operation channels considerable flows of money from other billionaire foundations such as Hewlett and Packard. These two latter operations are also direct funders of ICCT. Flying less is obviously the most effective solution to cutting emissions, states Sola Zhang, described by Monbiot as an aviation “expert”. Another operation quoted by Monbiot, More in Common, found that rich people would be most affected by a frequent flyer levy because they fly more. Again such value, such insight – funders ECF, the George Soros Open Society Foundation and Hewlett must be very pleased.
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Grid scale battery fires loom large
America faces a growing threat from grid scale lithium battery fires. Construction of huge battery arrays with no concern for potentially catastrophic fires is out of control. There are no established standards to follow and local permitting authorities seem oblivious to this very real danger.
The batteries are teamed with a big solar facility because until recently that was the only way to get the battery subsidies. Each lithium battery unit is the size of a tractor trailer or big shipping container and there are well over a hundred of them, with a rated storage capacity of 230 MW. This is a medium sized storage facility.
That these units can spontaneously burst into flames is well established. The question is how to design and prepare for this destructive event?
To scale the problem consider the following event. A battery powered tractor trailer rig recently crashed and it’s battery burned on an interstate in California. Lithium battery fires cannot be put out so this one burned for around eleven hours. In order to keep the fire from spreading to create a wildfire the fire crew continuously sprayed it using a reported 50,000 gallons of water in the process. The interstate was closed due to the toxic fumes from the fire.
One of these grid scale battery units is easily 10 to 20 times the size of that truck battery. If the water usage required to keep a grid battery fire from spreading scales with size that is 500,000 to a million gallons of water. The actual amount is an engineering calculation that needs to be established and incorporated into battery facility design standards.
Note that we are not talking about the fire spreading to create a wildfire although that is certainly a concern. The vital need is to keep it from igniting the nearby batteries. If this happened the whole facility could go up with a hundred or more giant batteries burning. That would be truly catastrophic.
So now look at the Desert Sunlight photo and note there is no water tank. There should be something like a million gallon water tank with a high volume system to deliver that water to every unit in the facility. Clearly there is not.
There is also the engineering question of how far apart these units should be to enable that water to work keeping the fire from spreading. I doubt the Desert Sunlight spacing is even close to big enough. It looks like just room to walk between them.
Now let’s turn to permitting these facilities where I have another example that speaks volumes. This is a facility that just got permitted by Washington State. It is a combined wind, solar and battery project with a proposed storage capacity of 300 MW, which is considerably bigger than Desert Sunlight. It might have 200 huge lithium battery units. That number is not disclosed.
The project is named the Horse Heaven Wind Farm despite its massive solar and battery components. The name, usually shortened to Horse Heaven, is truly ironic because it will be no place for horses. Horse Hell might be better.
The permitting authority is the Washington Energy Facility Site Evaluation Council or EFSEC for short. The permit is called a Site Certification Agreement or CSA and Horse Heaven just got one, with a big push from the Governor.
The astounding point is that there was no discussion, or even recognition, of the fire threat posed by this enormous lithium battery facility. The CSA has numerous requirements for lots of issues, big and small, right down to the facility having water to keep the road dust down. There is nothing on having a million or so gallons to prevent a catastrophic conflagration, nor on the environmental impact of such.
This is wildfire country so there should be liability insurance for harm to others from a fire. Other potential sources of harm are huge amounts of contaminated water runoff as well as toxic air emissions, especially if the whole facility burns.
This neglect no doubt flows from the Horse Heaven Application. The App is over 500 pages long and I can find just one sentence about battery fires. Buried in a long paragraph on PDF page 366 we read “Lithium-ion battery storage may pose a risk of fire and explosion due to the tendency for lithium-ion batteries to overheat.”
This single sentence does not even refer to the project. For that matter there are only a few paragraphs about the battery facility in the entire App, mostly just describing it in general terms. There is nothing about the number of giant battery containers or that it is a huge project in its own right, posing an equally huge fire threat. In fact the App says they might double deck these container sized battery units which is absurd given the risk of setting off a chain reaction in the whole complex.
One can easily think from the Application that the batteries are of no significance and that appears to be exactly what has happened at the EFSEC.
This systematic neglect looks to be what is happening around the country. We desperately need a national code or standard covering this issue. The National Fire Protection Association says it is working on one, but it is up to the permitting authorities to make something happen.
The growing threat of grid scale battery fires is a very serious issue calling for equally serious action.
https://www.cfact.org/2024/10/01/grid-scale-battery-fires-loom-large/
**************************************************IEA: The World Is Not on Track to Triple Renewable Capacity by 2030
Despite the surge in renewable energy additions, the world is not yet on track to reach the goal of tripling renewables capacity by 2030, according to the Renewables 2024 report published by the International Energy Agency (IEA) on Wednesday.
Global renewable capacity is expected to grow by 2.7 times by 2030, surpassing countries’ current ambitions by nearly 25%. But it still falls short of tripling, said the agency advocating for a swift move away from fossil fuels.
While climate and energy security policies have boosted the attractiveness of renewables by making them cost-competitive with fossil-fired generation, “this is not quite sufficient to reach the goal of tripling renewable energy capacity worldwide established by nearly 200 countries at the COP28 climate summit,” the IEA said.
The agency’s main case, assuming existing policies and market conditions, forecasts 5,500 gigawatts (GW) of new renewable capacity becoming operational by 2030. This implies that global renewable capacity additions will continue to grow every year, reaching nearly 940 GW annually by 2030 – 70% more than the record level achieved in 2023, the IEA said.
Solar PV and wind together are expected to account for 95% of all renewable capacity growth through the end of this decade due their growing economic attractiveness in almost all countries.
As a result of these trends, nearly 70 countries that collectively account for 80% of global renewable power capacity are expected to reach or surpass their current renewable ambitions for 2030. But this would still fall short of the COP28 pledge for tripling renewables capacity.
Growth is there, but governments need to boost their efforts to integrate variable renewable sources into power systems, the IEA said, noting that the rates of curtailment of renewable electricity generation have been increasing substantially recently, and already reaching around 10% in several countries.
In a separate report last month, the IEA said that the global goal to triple renewable energy capacity by the end of the decade is still within reach, but massive investments in power grids and energy storage would be needed.
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Australia is already a successful nuclear nation
ANSTO – the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation – recently celebrated 70 years since Australia’s nuclear age began in Sydney.
On April 15, 1953, Australia entered the nuclear science arena as the Atomic Energy Act came into effect. The Australian Atomic Energy Commission (AAEC) followed and in 1987 the AAEC evolved into ANSTO as it’s known today.
ANSTO is the home of Australia’s most significant landmark and national infrastructure for research. Thousands of scientists from industry and academia benefit from gaining access to state-of-the-art instruments every year.
Thousands of visitors, including many schoolchildren, have safely toured the site at Lucas Heights, which is located 40km southwest of the Sydney CBD. They had the opportunity to learn a great deal about nuclear science as a result of that experience.
I recently became one of those visitors when I was invited to a 3-hour escorted tour of their facilities. As former Executive Director of the National Safety Council of Australia (NSW/ACT) I was particularly interested in their WHS procedures as well as the management of waste, as the latter could impact on the wider community if poorly managed.
What impressed me most was seeing just how advanced we are as a nuclear nation. Despite being relatively small in scale compared to a full civil nuclear energy plant, it has much the same range of issues and complexities to deal with. And it certainly appears to successfully do so at both their Sydney and Melbourne campuses.
During his visit to Australia in July 2022, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director-General Rafael Grossi expressed deep confidence in Australia, acknowledging the solid foundations established through ANSTO since its formation.
The obvious question is, why is the Albanese Labor-Greens government, together with the Teals, opposed to extending our obvious expertise into producing nuclear energy on a commercial scale, as proposed by Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s LNP?
As you’d expect, there are a number of reasons for both their reluctance to accept nuclear despite it being cheap, reliable and emissions-free and their manic obsession with unreliable, hugely expensive, and environmentally/socially disastrous wind, solar, and battery renewables.
Political factors play a major part. The Greens and Teals are directly opposed to nuclear, but for different reasons.
The Greens have shown beyond doubt that they want to disrupt society across as many issues as possible. They are doing this on a regular basis – even appearing to stand with crowds that hold sympathies toward recognised terrorist groups.
People who think the Greens are still a well-meaning environmental group like they were under Bob Brown are fooling themselves – they are not!
In the case of the Teals, they started life as political entities via funding from Climate 200, whose primary financial supporters are deeply entrenched in the lucrative and heavily taxpayer-subsidised renewables industry.
The Teals are ignorant pawns in the high-stakes game of climate change and the hysterical pursuit of ‘saving the planet’.
There is a lot of money involved in this issue and ordinary Australians are being played by the so-called elites, including left-wing mainstream media such as the ABC.
A good example is the almost total lack of media reporting on the very recent and hugely important US Department of Energy’s Nuclear Lift-off Report that includes significant findings:
The system cost of electricity with nuclear and renewables combination is 30 per cent lower than just renewables.
?The jobs from nuclear are 50 per cent higher paying than solar or wind.
??Nuclear provides the lowest emissions, is the most reliable form of energy production, has the lowest land use requirement, and lowest material usage.
The report also outlines a pathway for the USA to reach their ambition to triple their nuclear energy capacity by 2050, in direct contradiction of our government’s refusal to even legalise nuclear energy.
It also directly contradicts the policy position of the Albanese government.
The report debunks repeated claims that nuclear is ‘too expensive’ and will ‘increase power bills’ and outlines various other benefits of nuclear energy.
The DoE report could not disagree more with Australian anti-nuclear campaigners and the Albanese Labor-Greens government, Teals, and other sources of ignorance.
Their report also completely debunks the much-criticised report produced by CSIRO GenCost that our Minister for Climate Change and Energy, Chris Bowen, refers to constantly as his renewables crusade ‘Bible’.
This is despite the fact that the CSIRO GenCost report totally failed to accurately estimate the likely total cost of renewables compared to nuclear.
It also used in its modelling a 30-year life for a nuclear plant instead of the far more accurate 80 years. This created a false financial outcome by not comparing the total cost of nuclear with renewables over an 80-year period.
It also totally neglected the fact that waste management costs for renewables will be many times greater than for nuclear. There will be the need to replace wind turbines and solar panels three or four times during an 80-year period.
And who is going to be responsible for dismantling and disposing of the millions of components – some of which have toxic ingredients?
Many people, including some of our top scientists and engineers, believe that the CSIRO GenCost report was simply designed to support the Albanese government’s narrative as depicted in their childish three-eyed fish media splash some months ago.
‘Blackouts’ Bowen promoted that infantile campaign in his usual gloating, arrogant manner and then compounded his evident stupidity by stating that he had not even read the US report – dismissing it completely!
And this typifies the problem we face with the Albanese government. They have Ministers like Bowen, Wong, Burke, Plibersek, Clare and, of course, Albanese whose sole objective is to win the coming election and thereby remain in power; they simply don’t want to suffer the ignominy of becoming a one-term government.
Hopefully, in the very best interests of our country, they will fail to achieve that objective because we need a government that protects our borders, controls immigration, decreases our cost-of-living, and helps young people to buy their own homes.
It’s becoming clearer on a daily basis that none of that will happen under the current Labor-Greens government.
One major impediment to reducing living expenses is the rising cost of energy.
Renewables alone will continue to increase the cost of electricity and that will in turn increase the prices paid at our shops and for commercial or residential electricity usage.
Nuclear energy will add to the range of resources available to us – as it has done in many other countries.
Nuclear power plants operate in 32 countries and generate about a tenth of the world’s electricity. Most are in Europe, North America, and East Asia.
The United States is the largest producer of nuclear power, while France has the largest share of electricity generated by nuclear power, at about 70 per cent.
The only way we are going to catch up with the rest of the world in relation to nuclear energy production is to replace our current government with Peter Dutton’s Liberal-National Coalition.
That might be hard to accept for some people – but it’s an undeniable fact.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/10/australia-is-already-a-successful-nuclear-nation/
***************************************21 October, 2024
In 2024 it can be difficult to sort wheat from chaff in the peer-reviewed literature.
There has always been better and worse science — that goes with the territory — but as I argued last week, we are now in an era of tactical research, with science curated to advance narratives over knowledge. That makes knowing what’s what even more difficult.
I spend a lot of time here at THB on the chaff, and by reader request, I am going to try to spend more time also on the wheat.
To that end, this week has already seen cross my desk an unusually large number of really interesting recent peer-reviewed papers that I’m sharing with you today. Let’s get to it . . .
A recent surge in global warming is not detectable yet (Beaulieu et al. 2024, open access). Top line results:
“Our results show limited evidence for a warming surge; in most surface temperature time series, no change in the warming rate beyond the 1970s is detected despite the breaking record temperatures observed in 2023.”
The paper employs the traditional IPCC framework for detection and attribution and assesses what levels of global temperature increases would have to occur to achieve detection. The authors find that the recent “surge” is not very close to that magnitude of increase:
“Accounting for the short-term variability in the HadCRUT GMST over 1970–2023 and the added uncertainty for the changepoint location, the second segment (2013–2023) would need a slope of at least 0.039?C/year (more than a 100% increase) to be statistically different than 0.019 at the ? = 0.05 significance level right now.
The estimated slope of 0.029 ?C/year falls far short of this needed increase. While it is still possible there was a change in the warming rate starting in 2013, the HadCRUT record is simply not long enough for the surge to be statistically detectable at this time.”
This paper is sure to motivate much debate as it is contrary to gobsmacking claims made by some visible scientists. Debate is good for science and for science in the public eye.
Crucial role of sea surface temperature warming patterns in near-term high-impact weather and climate projection (Zhao and Knutson 2024, open access). Top line results:
“Model biases in SST [sea surface temperature] trend patterns are shown to have profound implications for near-term projections of high-impact storm statistics, including the frequency of atmospheric rivers, tropical storms and mesoscale convection systems, as well as for hydrological and climate sensitivity.
If the future SST warming pattern continues to resemble the observed pattern from the past few decades rather than the model-simulated/predicted patterns, these results suggest:
A drastically different future projection of high-impact storms and their associated hydroclimate changes, especially over the Western Hemisphere.
Stronger global hydrological sensitivity.
Substantially less global warming due to stronger negative feedback and lower climate sensitivity.”
This paper identifies systematic biases in how climate models represent ocean temperatures and explores the implications of these biases for projections of the climate future.
The paper concludes:
“Our results indicate that if the future SST trend pattern continues to resemble the observed pattern from the past few decades rather than that simulated or predicted by climate models, we would anticipate a drastically different picture of future changes of high-impact storm statistics . . .”
This paper will also likely motivate some interesting discussions and future work.
The most important implication for consumers of climate research is to recognize that our near-term climate future likely encompasses a much wider range of possibilities than we (collectively) generally expect or hear discussed.
Robust future projections of global spatial distribution of major tropical cyclones and sea level pressure gradients (Murakami et al. 2024, open access).
I found this paper particularly interesting because it was published just a few weeks before Hurricanes Helene and Milton made landfall on the U.S. Gulf Coast, killing hundreds and resulting in tens of billions of dollars in economic losses.
I share this paper not because I believe its projections over other studies — actually, tell me what result you want for projected future hurricane incidence and I can produce a peer-reviewed study to support that view! — but because it is at odds with major media reporting and claims by activists (including some scientists) about trends and projections in hurricanes.
The gap between popular climate discourse and peer-reviewed research (including the assessments of the IPCC WG1) remains massive. This paper offers another timely example.
https://principia-scientific.com/more-studies-published-discrediting-climate-alarm/
**********************************************From Your Wallet to Theirs: How EV Subsidies Favor the Wealthy
“I grew up in the middle class,” Vice President Kamala Harris says repeatedly to show that she understands what policies would best support the average American.
However, Harris’ electric vehicle subsidies don’t help middle- and lower-income households; they go to upper-income households.
It’s one of many hypocritical policies of the Biden-Harris administration.
This year, the government has issued $2 billion in tax credits for over 300,000 electric-battery and plug-in hybrids—mostly to wealthy households that don’t necessarily need them.
Nationally, 14% of households earning over $100,000 own an electric vehicle, compared to 5% of middle-income households and 2% of those earning $40,000 or less, according to a recent Gallup poll.
In California, the state leading in electric vehicles, the Top 20 ZIP codes with the highest percentage of EVs have median household incomes above $100,000, while the lowest-income areas have almost no EV ownership.
Electric vehicles are simply too expensive for lower- and middle-class households. The electric version of the average compact SUV (the most popular class of cars) costs $53,048—49% more than the $35,722 price tag of the model with an internal combustion engine.
The federal government offers up to $7,500 in tax credits for a new electric vehicle, up to $4,000 for used electric vehicles, and up to $40,000 for commercial electric vehicles, all depending on domestic content requirements.
Tax credits are designed so that electric vehicles have more American components. However, contrary to congressional intent, a loophole allows people to lease (not buy) EVs without the domestic content restrictions. This benefits foreign automakers, primarily those making cars with components made in China.
The Biden-Harris administration also requires automakers to produce EVs or face financial penalties. The Environmental Protection Agency finalized strict emission standards that are projected to lead to 68% of new car sales being battery- and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles by 2032.
Similarly, the Department of Transportation’s final rule will bring the average fuel economy standard of a light-duty vehicle to 50.4 miles per gallon by model year 2031, a goal that is impossible to meet without EV sales. Currently, the average car runs on 26.9 miles per gallon.
An additional 13 states and the District of Columbia have signed up for California’s rules forbidding sales of gasoline-powered cars after 2035.
These three sets of regulations will force an oversupply of electric vehicles that will sit unsold on dealership lots. Not only are they too expensive for the average American to purchase, but they also take an hour or more to recharge and lose range in cold or hot climates.
People in cold climates are reluctant to purchase EVs because freezing conditions lower the vehicles’ average ranges by about 30%. EV registrations are low in Alaska (2,697), North Dakota (959), and Wyoming (1,139).
That’s why 26 Republican state attorneys general recently filed a lawsuit to challenge “unworkable” fuel economy standards that “leverage the weight of the federal government to require auto manufacturers to produce more electric vehicles.”
By a vote of 215-191, the House of Representatives last month passed a bill to repeal the EPA’s “out-of-touch regulation,” in the words of Rep. John James, R-Mich., sponsor of the legislation.
Other challenges to EVs make them impractical to many Americans, such as poor charging infrastructure and long-distance challenges. Those were two of the top three reasons why 46% of current EV owners say they would switch back to an internal combustion engine vehicle, according to the consulting firm McKinsey & Co.
In the aftermath of two recent hurricanes, Helene and Milton, electric vehicles exploded into flames and were difficult to extinguish, posing one more problem for EVs in areas vulnerable to natural disasters.
The choice of what car to buy should depend on the drivers, whose preferences are tecbased on affordability, climate, range, and other design features.
It’s clear now that drivers in hurricane-prone zones have one more reason to choose gas-powered vehicles.
https://principia-scientific.com/more-studies-published-discrediting-climate-alarm/
***********************************************IEA: The World Is Not on Track to Triple Renewable Capacity by 2030
Despite the surge in renewable energy additions, the world is not yet on track to reach the goal of tripling renewables capacity by 2030, according to the Renewables 2024 report published by the International Energy Agency (IEA) on Wednesday.
Global renewable capacity is expected to grow by 2.7 times by 2030, surpassing countries’ current ambitions by nearly 25%. But it still falls short of tripling, said the agency advocating for a swift move away from fossil fuels.
While climate and energy security policies have boosted the attractiveness of renewables by making them cost-competitive with fossil-fired generation, “this is not quite sufficient to reach the goal of tripling renewable energy capacity worldwide established by nearly 200 countries at the COP28 climate summit,” the IEA said.
The agency’s main case, assuming existing policies and market conditions, forecasts 5,500 gigawatts (GW) of new renewable capacity becoming operational by 2030. This implies that global renewable capacity additions will continue to grow every year, reaching nearly 940 GW annually by 2030 – 70% more than the record level achieved in 2023, the IEA said.
Solar PV and wind together are expected to account for 95% of all renewable capacity growth through the end of this decade due their growing economic attractiveness in almost all countries.
As a result of these trends, nearly 70 countries that collectively account for 80% of global renewable power capacity are expected to reach or surpass their current renewable ambitions for 2030. But this would still fall short of the COP28 pledge for tripling renewables capacity.
Growth is there, but governments need to boost their efforts to integrate variable renewable sources into power systems, the IEA said, noting that the rates of curtailment of renewable electricity generation have been increasing substantially recently, and already reaching around 10% in several countries.
In a separate report last month, the IEA said that the global goal to triple renewable energy capacity by the end of the decade is still within reach, but massive investments in power grids and energy storage would be needed.
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Australia's "renewables" policy in trouble
The wheels are falling off Mr Bowen’s energy policy as the Albanese government heads downhill like an out-of-control billy cart. Mr Bowen’s energy policy can be summed up as ‘not Mr Dutton’s policy’. That’s the extent of the substance to it, as each day brings more bad news for the 82 per cent renewables charade. Meanwhile, the rest of the world is turning to nuclear to meet future demand.
Rather than remove the prohibition on nuclear to enable market testing, the Albanese government will publicly fund a government-dominated inquiry to discredit the opposition’s nuclear energy plan. The aim is to ‘clear the decks’ for an election next year, rather than to deliver cheaper, cleaner energy for Australian households.
The Albanese government has gone on a crusade against nuclear. How Mr Bowen will produce costings for Mr Dutton’s plan when he is yet to provide costings for his own plan is anybody’s guess. This government is clearly afraid of nuclear and will do anything to put it down rather than face facts.
Microsoft is on the way to securing the Three Mile Island reactor to power a data centre. The reactor was the scene of the worst commercial nuclear accident in US history in 1979. Midnight Oil sang about it with the scaremongering lines, ‘And when the stuff gets in, you cannot get it out.’ Microsoft plans to restart Three Mile Island’s Unit 1, not Unit 2 which suffered the meltdown.
Both Google and Amazon plan to use nuclear energy to power their data centres, too. Artificial intelligence and data centres are driving up energy use and the trend is only likely to continue. How wind, solar, and batteries will be enough for Australia’s future needs is not clear from Mr Bowen’s policy.
In Australia, two major green hydrogen plans have recently fallen through.
Further, two major investors in the unpopular Illawarra Wind Zone have pulled the pin on deploying offshore wind turbines. The move comes amid community concerns over the size of the zone and the proximity to the coast. The smaller zone was part of a political compromise that apparently didn’t sit well with investors.
In the US, the Department of Energy has announced US$900 million to support small nuclear reactors. President Biden’s administration:
‘…believes nuclear power is critical in the fight against climate change because it generates electricity virtually free from emissions, and that US nuclear power capacity must triple to meet emissions goals.’
This is a blow to Mr Bowen who has mocked nuclear energy on a daily basis for some time.
The biggest problem with Mr Bowen’s energy policy is that the evidence doesn’t support his assurances. For example, the Australian Energy Regulator (AER) stated last week that the:
‘…cost of wholesale electricity rose during winter as periods of depressed renewable energy generation coincided with soaring demand for power in bitterly cold weather, data.’
Further, and although wholesale electricity costs were less compared to the previous quarter, the year-on-year costs were much higher. According to the AER:
‘Year-on-year prices were significantly higher across all regions, with Tasmania up 290 per cent, Victoria up 114 per cent and South Australia up 76 per cent.’
The $275 saving is long down amid such lofty numbers.
Unsuitable weather conditions for renewables generation in July and early August coinciding with increased demand was at the heart of the problem. Talk of batteries and pumped hydro (Snowy 2.0 is way behind its timeline and several times over its budget) are fantasy at this stage, with the reliance being placed on extending coal-fired power stations and increasing the amount of electricity generated by gas-fired stations.
Gas, too, is expected to remain at elevated prices for several years.
Yet the problem was recently exacerbated by wind drought – what Germans refer to as ‘dunkelflaute’ – and also that wind and solar projects are taking too long. So, any criticism of nuclear denies the lessons from overseas while pretending the current renewables rollout is progressing well.
Can renewables meet current demand? And can renewables scale-up like nuclear can? (As Microsoft, Amazon, and Google are betting on.)
The short answer is no. The long answer is that Mr Bowen’s Plan A is failing rapidly, and, by his own admission, he has no Plan B.
It will take more than hot air to fix Australia’s energy woes. It would seem that only a change of government will solve the crisis Mr Bowen got us into.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/10/it-will-take-more-than-hot-air-to-fix-labors-renewables-woes/
***************************************20 October, 2024
Poland: The Heartland Institute and Solidarity Labor Union Leaders Take Historic Steps to Oppose UN Climate Activism
Solidarity labor union leaders and The Heartland Institute signed an historic agreement Tuesday to work together to preserve conventional energy and individual freedom while opposing the United Nations’ oppressive climate change agenda.
In a pair of Joint Declarations (here and here) Solidarity’s National Secretariat for Mining and Energy, Solidarity’s Independent Self-Governing Trade Union for Individual Farmers, and three other prominent Polish trade unions joined The Heartland Institute in voicing serious concern that UN climate policies are destroying jobs, driving up the cost of living, and threatening precious personal freedoms that Solidarity fought so hard to win a generation ago from the Soviet communists occupying the Polish nation.
“In our view, such actions [to address the so-called climate crisis] aim solely to provoke widespread fear and a sense of threat, especially among young people, without finding – so far – confirmation in scientific research,” stated one of the declarations.
“The Parties declare mutual assistance in preparing for a referendum in which Poles will decide on the verification of suspension of the European Green Deal,” stated the second declaration. “The key actions in this area will include: preparing resources including analyses, assessments, forecasts, interviews, reports, and informational threads as well as securing international support from the strongest member states. Fully appreciating the Heartland Institute’s extensive experience in managing large international projects, we are convinced that such cooperation can significantly contribute to increasing the effectiveness of our joint actions in the future.”
This is not the first time Solidarity has called on Heartland’s expertise on climate and energy policy. Heartland and Solidarity signed similar declarations in Katowice, Poland, site of the 2018 United Nations Conference of the Parties on the Framework Convention on Climate Change.
Before and after the meetings, Solidarity officials introduced Heartland Institute President James Taylor to members of the Polish Parliament and Polish members of the European Union Parliament who share Heartland’s commitment to individual freedom.
“Fighting to advance climate realism in the face of a globalist climate-hysteria agenda is an international labor issue as well as a scientific, environmental, and economic issue,” said Taylor in Krakow. “After inviting me here to Poland, these union leaders emphasized how important it will be for Heartland to form and lead an alliance of organizations to fight for common-sense climate policy. I vow that Heartland will not let them down and we will provide as much information and leadership as humanly possible.”
Also, during the meetings, Solidarity advisors requested permission to translate and publish a Polish-language version of Heartland’s groundbreaking informational book, Climate at a Glance for Teachers and Students. Climate at a Glance provides concise, compelling climate-realist summaries of 30 frequently discussed topics related to climate change, such as hurricanes, droughts, coral reefs, etc. The book is also publicly available for free in digital format and as a free smart-phone app. Heartland will work with its Polish allies to make a Polish-language version speedily available in Poland.
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EV Owners Have Big Carbon Footprints
A recent report in the Daily Mail shows that while electric vehicle owners may virtue-signal by crowing about their green credentials, especially wealthy elites and celebrities, their carbon dioxide footprints are larger than those of most average folks who still drive vehicles that use gasoline and diesel for fuel. The Daily Mail reports:
Researchers from the University of Turku, Finland, found that on average EV drivers actually have a bigger carbon footprint than drivers who own petrol or diesel cars.
While their cars might cut down on emissions, the researchers say that EV owners’ glitzier lifestyles mean they contribute more to climate change overall.
The average EV owner churns out half a tonne more CO2 per year with owners of the sportiest models producing almost two tonnes more pollution.
The researchers surveyed almost 4,000 Finnish people about their car ownership, background and lifestyle.
The participants also provided answers about their housing, transport, and purchasing habits to estimate their carbon footprint.
Overall, someone who owned an internal combustion engine vehicle (ICEV) which runs on petrol or diesel created 8.05 tonnes of CO2 or equivalent greenhouse gases per year.
Considering that environmental concerns are a major reason for purchasing an electric vehicle you might expect EV owners’ emissions to be lower.
However, the average EV driver actually has a slightly larger carbon footprint than those who opt for cars powered by fossil fuels, producing 8.66 tonnes of emissions per year.
Owners of low-end EVs, smaller or less-expensive vehicles, who were less concerned about performance and reliability, had smaller carbon footprints than non-EV owners and EV owners concerned about those two factors. The owners of low-end EVs were also the smallest category of EV owners. Most EV owners are in the top income bracket. The average income of households with EVs in Europe was more than double the average income of households in the U.K.
According to the research, published in PLOS CLIMATE, the EV owners’ higher carbon footprint is a result of their lifestyle: multiple vehicles, including internal combustion engine vehicles, with the EV being a second or show vehicle; more travel; larger homes; multiple homes; more spending on nonessential goods, etc.
“Prior research has established that income is the strongest predictor of carbon footprint as higher income is associated with larger homes as well as more travel and consumption,” the researchers write. “’Since EV households tend to have a high income, their total carbon footprint is also above average.”
On this point the Daily Mail notes,
It’s no secret that the rich and famous who have most vocally championed electric vehicles are among some of the biggest individual polluters. This is especially true for those celebs who still enjoy flying around the world on their private planes. During a single four-hour flight, a single private jet can produce more than eight tonnes of CO2—more than the average person produces in an entire year.
Additionally, those who owned EVs typically owned more cars and reported driving significantly further than those who owned cars powered by petrol or diesel. On average, EV users drove 18,640 miles (30,000 km) which was more than double the 8,800 miles (14,200 km) covered by non-EV drivers.
https://heartland.org/opinion/climate-change-weekly-522-ev-owners-have-big-carbon-footprints/
*******************************************Heartland Institute Applauds Louisiana Governor’s Declaration Supporting Natural Gas
Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry on Wednesday issued a proclamation urging the Biden/Harris administration to “withdraw unlawful and senseless rules and regulations not authorized by Congress” that he said are leading to higher energy costs for Louisianans.
In Proclamation 68, Gov. Landry also announced that Louisiana “opposes efforts to limit, delay, or ban the approval of new and existing liquified natural gas export facilities in Louisiana” and across America. Landry, while endorsing an “all of the above” national energy strategy, also urged the Biden/Harris administration to “remove barriers to the production of natural gas.”
The following statement by Cameron Sholty, director of government relations at The Heartland Institute, may be used for attribution.
“Louisiana has all the pieces of the puzzle to be an economic power house and this move by Governor Landry sets the stage for a Louisiana Renaissance,” Sholty said.
“Affordable, reliable, clean energy is the most important input for economic growth from which prosperity flows. We hope the legislature in 2025 follows suit and capitalizes on the state’s abundant resources to bring opportunity to Pelican Staters.”
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The Irrationality of Western Energy Policies
What leads a country to begin winding down domestic oil and gas production while promoting the use of imported wood for power generation?
What leads policymakers to shut down a nation’s last and still-functional coal generating power plant after almost 150 years of using coal and within months arrive at a situation where blackout prevention notices have to be issued to its power generators?
The U.K. is by no means the only Western country to go down this perverse path of deindustrialisation and national economic suicide. Why are energy policies of leading Western countries afflicted by magical thinking and irrationality?
The Western World is in a hypnotic trance from 30 years of relentless propaganda pushing climate alarmism.
Energy Policy Mayhem
Evidence abounds of the mayhem that passes for energy policy in the West. It is only appropriate to start with Germany, the epicentre of the green trance that policymakers there have been hypnotised into. This follows decades of worship in the ‘Church of Climate‘ by the media and intellectual chattering class.
Let’s start with the destruction of thousands of acres of ancient Teutonic forests – the setting for the folktales of the brothers Grimm — to make way for wind farms. The irony is lost on Germany’s green ideologues that their energy policies threaten endangered species of birds and bats in their sacrifice at the altar of Mother Gaia. Consecrating thousands of eco-crucifixes with arms of petroleum-based glass-fibre-reinforced polyester resins manufactured in Chinese furnaces fuelled by coal or natural gas may seem particularly absurd to those not steeped in that miasma of green ideology.
Other examples of Germany’s green lunacy include the shutting down of the country’s nuclear power plants, only to then approve putting dirty lignite-fired power plants back online for German households to keep warm in the winter of 2022-23.
Adding to the economic gloom afflicting the country for the past two years, Reuters reported in July that the economy is expected to contract by 0.2% in 2024 from a previous projection of an anaemic 0.3% growth. It strains credulity to call this an “unexpected” contraction as the news wire does.
Irina Slav puts it succinctly:
In case anyone’s wondering how the least surprising thing ever could be described as surprising, that’s because economists and analysts did not expect the contraction and as we all know economists — and analysts — can never be wrong, especially when they’re actively turning a blind eye on obvious developments such as the cause-and-effect relationship between cost of energy and economic growth.
Let’s turn to other absurdities. We recently learned that in the wisdom of Scandinavian planners, dairy farmers in Denmark face having to pay an annual tax of 672 krone ($96) per cow “for the planet-heating emissions they generate”. This policy proposal came in the wake of widespread farmers’ protests in Europe which escalated across the width and breadth of the continent, from Sweden to Spain, Poland to Portugal, since they first started in the Netherlands in October 2019.
The Great European Farmer Revolt led to the shocking win in March 2023 by the populist Farmer-Citizen Movement (BBB) in the Netherlands, putting it ahead of the governing party in the Senate. In a reaction to Left-wing green parties in Government, farmers became an important part of the equation in the country’s political future. As part of the EU Green Deal to make agriculture consistent with being “carbon-neutral” by 2050, Brussels’ bureaucrats assured citizens that their farms would be rendered more “sustainable”, “environmentally friendly” and “biodiverse”.
Perhaps the pride of place belongs to Ed Milliband (“Mad Ed”), the U.K.’s Secretary of State for the oxymoronically-named Department of Energy Security and Net Zero. U.K.’s “Net Zero” policies, pursued by both the Conservatives, in power for 14 years, and the new Labour Government, have compromised the country’s energy security like nothing else. In Mad Ed’s short time in the office, the country’s last coal plant and its Port Talbot steel plant have been shut down, regulatory approvals for solar farms were rushed through over the heads of local community objections and the North Sea’s oil and gas field developments have been sacrificed to Greenpeace’s climate lawsuit.
Unsurprisingly, it was reported in July that Britain fell out of the top 10 manufacturing nations list for the first time. Mr. Miliband’s decision not to challenge a lawsuit filed by Greenpeace has compromised the country’s investment environment. According to Brendon Long, Director of Research at investment company Zeus Capital, Mr. Miliband’s decision would put wider investment in Britain at risk. He said:
London has fallen out of the top 10 capital markets in terms of monies raised from initial public offerings. That might reflect that financial markets are increasingly concerned with the U.K. as a jurisdiction that values and defends property rights and the sanctity of honouring agreements made.
To be fair to Mad Ed, some of these developments were already in train during the previous Tory Government’s term of office. Nevertheless, he has built up a CV that would be the envy of the wildest Left-wing Brussels bureaucrat.
But most egregious in the Labour Government’s short record of rule is its move to cut winter fuel payments for millions of pensioners while pledging nearly £22bn for projects in unproven technologies to capture and store carbon dioxide emissions. Rubbing salt into the wound, Ed Miliband insisted in July that Labour will honour its pledge of £11.6bn in overseas climate aid.
It is not much better across the pond. President Biden’s promised to make climate change front and centre of his administration’s policies across the whole of Government. This has been followed by the duplicitously-named Inflation Reduction Act, which unleashes a debt-driven tsunami of subsidies on favoured industries – solar, wind, EVs, batteries, hydrogen. I have written on Biden’s fractured and contradictory energy policies elsewhere (here, here and here).
Models Not Fit For Purpose
These absurd and immiserating “Net Zero” policies of the West imposed at great cost to ordinary working men and women are justified by the true believers in the Church of Climate by invocations of the “climate crisis”. Mr. Miliband and his ilk would respond along the lines that when the house is on fire, you don’t muck about but do “whatever it takes”. Doubtless, the lockdown and vaccination mandates imposed by “experts” in response to Covid would be offered as an example.
These twin hysterias – Covid and climate – share much in common. Both spring from not-fit-for-purpose and impossible to validate computer models that escalated alleged risks on flimsy assumptions. An infamous March 16th 2020 bombshell report by Professor Neil Ferguson of Imperial College, London, warned of 510,000 deaths in the country if the country did not immediately adopt a ruthless Covid suppression strategy.
By March 25th, Ferguson’s prediction of half a million fatalities in the U.K. was adjusted downward to “unlikely to exceed 20,000”, a reduction by a factor of 25. This drastic reduction was credited to the U.K.’s lockdown, imposed two days previously. It was later found that Dr. Ferguson’s model was not fit for purpose.
Much as Ferguson’s model drove governments to impose Covid lockdowns affecting nearly three billion people on the planet, Professor Michael Mann’s “hockey stick” model was used by the UN’s IPCC, mainstream media and politicians to push the man-made global warming (now called climate change or climate crisis) hysteria over the past two decades. But like Prof. Ferguson’s model, Dr. Mann’s work has been cited by credible scientists as more in keeping with junk science.
Yet these hysterias prove irresistible for governments which love to accumulate power, activist academics in search of research grants and Left-wing billionaire foundations that support the vast climate industrial complex. The great essayist H.L. Mencken had this to say about governments:
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
Yet it would be naïve to view the climate industrial complex as a vast conspiracy. Steve Koonin in his book Unsettled offers a more plausible explanation, seeing a “self-reinforcing alignment of perspectives and interests” among governments doing practical politics à la Mencken, hubristic academics ‘saving the planet’, grifting NGOs, businesses eager for crony capitalist rents, intellectuals virtue-signalling their luxury beliefs and the mass of followers who make the mistake of believing what they’re told.
https://dailysceptic.org/2024/10/19/the-irrationality-of-western-energy-policies/
***************************************17 October, 2024
Peeling White Paint on Weather Stations – Major ‘Cause’ of Global Warming
According to a new study, weather station data has been shown to non-climatically and erroneously record warmer-than-actual temperatures due to the steady and perpetual aging process almost universally observed in temperature gauges.
When a weather station temperature gauge’s white paint or white plastic ages and darkens, this allows more solar radiation to be absorbed by the gauge than when the gauge is bright white and new.
Within a span of just 2 to 5 years, a gauge has been observed to record maximum temperatures 0.46°C to 0.49°C warmer than in gauges that have not undergone an aging process.
This artificial warming is not corrected in modern data sets, and it builds up over time – even when the gauges are cleaned or resurfaced every few years.
If these systematic artificial warming errors were to be corrected rather than ignored, the 140-year (1880-’90 to 2010-’20) GISTEMP global warming trend plummets from the current estimate of +1.43°C down to +0.83°C, a 42% differential.
The temperature reduction can be even more pronounced – from +1.43°C down to +0.41°C – if a set of conservative assumptions (described in detail in the paper) are removed.
Interestingly, when the systematically erroneous temperature data are removed, or homogenized, at different intervals of time (2 years vs. 12 to 30 years, etc.)
The global temperature trend – indeed, the long-term global warming trend – can be shown to effectively disappear, depending on the time interval. This can be observed below, in Figure 7.
As this chart illustrates, temperature data can homogenized, or adjusted, to exhibit just about any trend or non-trend the creator of the chart intends to. Data can be bent and manipulated to show strong warming, weak warming, or even no warming over the last 140 years.
Perhaps the modern version of global warming is not nearly as unprecedented or even unusual as it is purported to be.
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Why EV Ownership Is a Ticking Time Bomb
It is now, or should be, common knowledge that electric vehicles—cars, trucks, buses, bikes, scooters—under conditions of even low humidity or water damage, are prone to catching fire, owing to the unstable nature of the lithium-ion battery
As Chris Morrison writes at The Daily Skeptic, EVs are known to explode “with the force of a bomb blasting super-heated jets of flame, melting and decomposing nearby structural materials including metal and concrete, and sending vast amounts of toxic fumes into any enclosed atmosphere.”
Jammed into underground parking garages or packed in ferries, EVs are harbingers of almost unimaginable disaster—ecological and safety menaces to which the ‘Net Zero’ fanatics among our political leadership are comatosely indifferent.
We have witnessed lethal battery explosions in South Korea and elsewhere with significant loss of life. QBE Europe reports that such fires are increasing at a worrisome rate and explains:
“Lithium-ion fires are the result of thermal runaway, where batteries start to irreversibly overheat, usually due to impact damage, over-charging or over-heating…
The resulting explosive fire incidents are significantly more energetic [than ordinary fires], causing extensive damage, and potentially injury or even death.”
They cannot be readily put out and will often re-ignite.
We read of an electric truck loaded with lithium batteries catching fire, closing down the Port of Los Angeles, Long Beach, and the Vincent Thomas Bridge.
We learn that Audi’s signature e-tron GT has been recalled multiple times over fire concerns. A massive fire at a Rivian Plant crisped over 50 vehicles. In 2022, Hurricane Ian caused 20 electric cars to catch fire “after they flooded with salt water, creating hazards for first responders.”
We have seen the damage that Hurricane Helene caused in Florida and other states, involving the volatile nature of EVs as well. According to Florida Politics, “Gov. Ron DeSantis urged owners of electric vehicles in Florida on Wednesday to drive them to higher ground to avoid them being exposed to seawater.”
A Toronto apartment complex has just banned all electric vehicles, including electric bikes, motorbikes, unicycles, hoverboards, mopeds, Segways, skateboards, and scooters, citing fire risk. These are only a few of the instances that are on record.
It is to be expected that EV advocates—government officials, industry executives, interested buyers, and committed owners—will claim that internal combustion fires far outnumber their electric competitors, which does make statistical sense.
Editor’s note: there are statistically more ICE fires than EV fires because EV’s represent only a small fraction of the total number of vehicles. If numbers were equal, EV fires would be many times more than ICE fires.
There is significantly more of one than of the other. According to various reports (e.g., International Energy Agency, Regie de l’énergie du Canada, etc.), EVs make up anywhere from only five percent to 18 percent of the market, depending on the country.
In any case, it is a sales number that is now markedly declining as consumers and major companies are turning off EVs.
As I have previously pointed out, Ford Motors is backing away from EVs and reconditioning an EV plant to build high-demand Super Duty trucks. Nissan’s EV earnings dropped 99% in the first quarter of the year.
General Motors delayed (perhaps indefinitely) the new Buick EV and a new electric truck factory. Hertz Global Holdings is selling off 20,000 EVs from its fleet. The Financial Post reports that Volkswagen has cut EV output in Germany as demand craters.
Indeed, The Telegraph reports that Germany suffered a “spectacular 70pc drop in electric car sales.” EV automobile manufacturer Stellantis has laid off thousands of Michigan workers. Italy has called for a review of the European Union’s coming internal combustion car ban, claiming that the “absurd” policy was ideologically driven and ignored the realities of the market.
But even if this were not so, EVs would continue to pose a much greater danger than ICE vehicles. I have only seldom heard of a gas-powered vehicle aflame, yet EV fires seem to be a regular event, giving off clouds of toxic emissions and burning almost uncontrollably.
They are a source of ecological havoc whose effects will grow increasingly evident despite government mandates and media silence.
Although I have written about the EV hazard on several occasions for this site and others, the issue’s implications recently came home to me with renewed force. Embarking on one of the myriad ferries that ply between Vancouver, the Sunshine Coast, and the Gulf Islands, I noticed a late-model EV among the hundreds of cars, trucks, and tankers making the crossing.
There were certainly more, but one was enough to get me thinking. A single “thermal event” would cause a near-unquenchable fire, release volumes of toxic emissions, and set off explosions in the confined hold of the ship that would likely result in its foundering and the death of many passengers from fire, poisonous fumes, and drowning.
This was a nightmare vision that I sensed would one day translate into the real world. I also knew that very few of the officials in charge of the ferry service would accept the very real possibility of such a cataclysm.
If such an event should occur, denial and subterfuge would be the response. The cause would have to be located elsewhere. The combination of inertia and vested interest, bureaucratic sluggishness, and profiteering avarice would constitute nothing less than criminal indifference.
I was encouraged to read that the Norwegian shipping firm Havila Kystruten, which operates car ferries around the coast of Norway, has banned the transportation of electric, hybrid, and hydrogen vehicles. And with good reason.
Neil Dalus of the freight insurer TT Club points out:
“During a lithium battery thermal runaway event… significant amounts of vapour can be produced in many common supply chain scenarios, including ships’ holds and warehouses.”
The potential toxic effects, as noted, can be and have been fatal. “Drivers, stevedores, ships’ crews and first responders attempting to control the blazes encounter what might appear to be smoke but is in fact a mix of toxic gases, generated quickly and in large volumes.”
The freight insurer warns that the failure of these batteries can occur “with such speed that there is typically no time to react.”
Such disasters may not be as improbable as we may have thought. They are just waiting to happen. Mike Gallagher, CEO of Ports Australia, warns of the ferocity of such fires:
“You can’t put them out. So you can imagine it on the street if you can’t put them out, imagine them on a vessel out at sea or in a port.”
In 2022, the Felicity Ace, a large cargo vessel carrying 4,000 cars, including EVs, not-so mysteriously caught fire and sunk. In July 2023, the Dutch vessel Freemantle Highway, with a cargo of 3,783 vehicles, including 498 EVs, burst into flames, the fire starting “in the battery of an electric car,” according to a crewman.
The National Transportation Safety Board has also advised of the inherent risks. EVs are ticking time bombs.
Of course, engineers and technicians are working to improve the safety co-efficient of the lithium battery, but success is years in the future—if at all. Moreover, the electrical grid cannot sustain the drain on its capacity, which in itself is enough to put paid to so ill-advised a project.
Whatever way we look at it, the EV revolution is premature and appears destined to failure.
One should keep in mind that many professional firms and the media will almost always gloss over the danger and the lethal radius of these fires in the same way that “fact-checkers” almost always manipulate rather than check the facts.
Believe them at your peril. The risk factor is not susceptible to standard data analysis.
Indeed, the purring statistical distributions we find all over the Net with respect to the comparative dangers of driving an EV and an ICE vehicle, assuring us we have no need to worry about EVs, depend on a selective approach to weak or imperfect data arrays.
The statistical apparatus that is usually brought to bear upon the events in question is not only starved of appropriate data but is meant to distort our perception of the situation. It cannot accommodate the scalene and empirical properties of certain sorts of phenomena—in this instance, what we might refer to as “crisis events.”
One EV fire can sink a ship; the damage is incalculably greater than any number of regular vehicles can give rise to. How do we compute so disproportionate a probability?
We are dealing with a category error. One apple, so to speak, may be far more septic than innumerable oranges. As the old saw goes, “Do not put your faith in what statistics say until you have carefully considered what they do not say.”
“Companies flourish in a free market economy not by serving bureaucrats but consumers, the true ‘bosses,” writes Jonathan Miltimore at The Epoch Times, condemning the “hamfisted” misallocation of government resources.
“Fortunately, the centrally planned EV Revolution now appears dead in the water, or at least in full retreat.” One hopes he is right.
Although governments everywhere continue to push for increased “adoption,” the time has plainly arrived to end EV mandates, wasteful government subsidies and incentives, and the political, corporate and media propaganda campaigns leading to the inevitable economic, ecological and life-threatening debacles everyone will come to regret.
The time is now, before the treasury collapses and the fatalities begin to mount up.
https://principia-scientific.com/why-ev-ownership-is-a-ticking-time-bomb/
*************************************************Expert Calls Out VP Debate Moderators’ Climate Lies
Climate alarmists, despite what CBS debate moderators asserted, “can't demonstrate that emissions are really having any effects on anything other than maybe they're helping the planet get greener, which means there's more life,” Junk Science’s Steve Milloy told PJ Media.
The CBS vice presidential debate moderators, Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan, tried to tie Hurricane Helene to “climate change” and pressured both Republican JD Vance and Democrat Tim Walz to endorse government climate action. But “the notion that this is a man-made or -enhanced or -caused weather event is just without a foundation,” Milloy explained.
Milloy, a Senior E&E Institute Legal Fellow and former Trump EPA Transition Team Member, insisted that there’s “been no increase in strong hurricanes. There's been no increase in the frequency of hurricanes. The sort of storm that hit the Big Bend of Florida has happened before.” Indeed, as of Jan. 2023, data indicated major hurricanes were becoming less frequent.
In terms of “observational data,” Milloy continued, the theory that “emissions have somehow warmed the ocean water is completely faulty, because it's physically impossible for the atmosphere to warm the ocean. So it's impossible for emissions to warm the ocean.” While Helene “may be a record weather event … that's not really going to be unexpected, because we've been through a pretty extraordinary past year, which is not explainable by emissions. It was an El Nino year. There are other factors.” Helene wasn’t caused or intensified by human actions.
Alarmists assert storms are “made more likely by climate change. I have no idea what they're talking about,” Milloy told me. “Storms have always happened. They always will happen. The ocean water … has warmed recently. But once again, the atmosphere cannot warm the ocean.” Rather, “the primary warmer of the ocean is the sun, and the other is [that] water can be warmed from beneath. That's probably how El Nino has developed. So both of these things are natural, have nothing to do with humans.”
Milloy cited an “ironic” article he found from last year saying people were moving to Asheville, NC, which has since been devastated by Helene, “because they thought it would be … safe climate wise. And of course, you know, climate is a ridiculous reason to do anything. They should have been thinking about the weather.” After all, “those mountains get storms,” Milloy pointed out, “it's a flood-prone area. And this time they got a really big one, and no one was ready for it, because I guess they're imagining that emissions are a problem.”
When you make decisions based on what climate alarmists say, disaster is sure to follow; not a single climate doom prophecy has come true in many decades.
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Organizations that manage, coordinate and monitor electricity service for 156 million Americans across 30 states are warning that the Biden-Harris administration’s power plant rule will be catastrophic for the nation’s grid
Four regional trade organizations (RTO), as they’re called, recently filed an amicus brief, also known as a friend of the court brief, in support of a multi-state lawsuit against the EPA over the rule.
The EPA released the rules in April. They require coal-fired power plants that will be operating past 2039 to begin implementing carbon-capture technologies in just eight years. New gas-fired power plants will also need to add the technologies, with those operating 40% of their annual capacity or more to add carbon capture starting in 2032.
Isaac Orr and Mitch Rolling, co-founder and researchers with Always On Energy Research, performed an analysis on behalf of the North Dakota Transmission Authority on the impacts the rules would have on the Midcontinent Independent Systems Operator (MISO), an RTO that covers a swath of the center of the U.S.
The researchers say they found a number of problems. The EPA grossly overestimated the ability of intermittent wind and solar to deliver reliable electricity during peak demand periods, according to the analysis, and it also found the agency didn’t perform any reliability analysis on the rules. The result would be blackouts lasting days in some cases.
The RTOs’ amicus brief points out these same problems. It argues that the EPA’s timeline is too short. The requirements for compliance assume feasibility of carbon capture technology that has not been “adequately demonstrated,” the RTOs explain, and the rules would result in vast retirements of coal-fired power plants while preventing investments in baseload generators, such as natural gas-fired power plants, to replace the lost capacity. The RTOs also noted that the EPA performed no reliability operational assessments. Baseload generation refers to the minimum level of constant power supply that a utility or power grid must produce to meet the continuous and consistent demand for electricity.
“It would be absolutely devastating for the grid,” Rolling told Just the News.
Rolling and Orr reached out to several regulatory attorneys, and none of them were aware of another situation in which RTOs filed an amicus brief asking the court to remand regulations back to the agency. The fact the RTOs intervened in the case suggests that they are especially concerned about the rules.
Supporters of the rules, such as the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), argue the rules are necessary to achieve net-zero by 2050. The target is a key goal for anti-fossil fuel advocates, because they say it would limit global warming to 1.5 degree Celsius above pre-industrial levels. The criticisms the EPA’s rules have received suggest the goal isn’t achievable without serious threats to the reliability of the nation’s grid. Net zero means cutting carbon emissions to a small amount of residual emissions that can be absorbed and durably stored by nature and other carbon dioxide removal measures, leaving zero in the atmosphere.
Rolling said that many grid engineers and planners know that eliminating thermal units — coal- and gas-fired power plants — on the time scale that achieving net zero by 2050 would result in frequent and lasting blackouts. He said, however, there’s a reluctance to be too vocal about it. The industries that contribute to the U.S. electricity supply are interconnected, and there’s pressure to maintain harmony and cooperation, to not rock the boat so to speak, which is a feature of many industries and organizations.
“So they don't say things out in the open, that maybe they should,” Rolling said.
The 2019 blackouts in California, the deadly Texas blackouts in the 2021 Winter Storm Uri, and the Christmas 2022 blackouts in the Southeast, Rolling said, should have been a wakeup call for the country that there are growing risks to our electricity grid. So far, they haven’t deterred the net-zero by 2050 advocates from their agenda.
Rolling said that RTOs and utilities have traditionally been policy takers, as opposed to policy makers. This is leaving a lot of the policymaking up to people who are not as knowledgeable or concerned about the impacts policies can have on the nation’s electricity supply.
“At a certain point, you can't be policy takers. You have to get in the mix of policy. These are the people that know this best. They know their regions the best. They know what their system needs to maintain reliability, and the EPA should listen to them,” Rolling said.
So far, the EPA doesn’t appear to be willing to do that. In its response to the arguments of the plaintiffs, the EPA defended its rule and its authority to enact it. The agency defended carbon capture, pointing to projects the agency claims were successful, and insisted the technology is financially viable. Rolling said he’s talked to engineers that tell him the technology is still in its infancy, but the EPA is trying to force it into primetime.
“We're jumping off a cliff and we're hoping to create the parachute while we're in the air,” Rolling said.
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16 October, 2024
Google will help build seven nuclear reactors to power its AI systems
Google is adding nuclear plants to its seemingly ever-growing portfolio. The company has partnered with Kairos Power to back the construction of seven small nuclear reactors in the U.S. It’s the first agreement of its kind.
The first plant is expected to come online by 2030, the company announced in a blog post. Other reactors will be deployed by 2035. All totaled, the deal will funnel 500 megawatts of power to the company’s AI technologies—enough to power a midsize city.
“Nuclear solutions offer a clean, round-the-clock power source that can help us reliably meet electricity demands with carbon-free energy every hour of every day,” Google wrote in the blog post. “Advancing these power sources in close partnership with supportive local communities will rapidly drive the decarbonization of electricity grids around the world.”
The smaller reactors created by Kairos, a nuclear-energy startup, are different from the towers most people think of when they conjure up an image of a nuclear reactor. The company uses a molten salt cooling system (much like the one that will be used for the on-site reactor being built on the campus of Abilene Christian University), which operates at a lower pressure. The company broke ground on a demonstration reactor, which will be unpowered, earlier this year in Tennessee.
Google did not unveil the cost of the partnership. The project site (or sites) have not yet been determined.
Google’s announcement comes weeks after Microsoft announced a partnership with Constellation Energy that will see the undamaged reactor at Three Mile Island, the site of the worst nuclear accident in U.S. history, resume operations to power Microsoft’s AI data centers.
Experts have warned data centers could become a big strain on the U.S. power grid, with the nine-year projected growth forecast for North America essentially doubling from where it stood a year ago. Last year, the five-year forecast from Grid Strategies projected growth of 2.6%. That number has since nearly doubled to 4.7%—and planners expect peak demand to grow by 38 gigawatts. In real-world terms, that’s sufficient to power 12.7 million homes.
https://fortune.com/2024/10/15/google-nuclear-reactors/
*****************************************************Global warming is NOT surging, scientists say - despite record-breaking temperatures
From the UK's hottest day to the hottest year on record globally, there's no doubt some worrying temperature records have been broken in recent years.
Many people think the rate of global warming has dramatically accelerated or 'surged' over the past 15 years – and is a cause of more extreme weather.
But a new study says there is not any statistical evidence for this so-called 'surge' or 'leap'.
Researchers looked at long-term global surface temperatures since records began back in 1850 and found no evidence of a surge since the 1970s.
While the academics agree that human-caused global warming is happening, they say it is not statistically 'surging' as some claim.
The team’s findings demonstrate a lack of statistical evidence for an increased warming rate that could be defined as a surge. In this graph, the circled part section is the part that some scientists have highlighted as a period of increased warming (the 'surge'), but the team say this model is 'not plausible' (inset)
The team’s findings demonstrate a lack of statistical evidence for an increased warming rate that could be defined as a surge. In this graph, the circled part section is the part that some scientists have highlighted as a period of increased warming (the 'surge'), but the team say this model is 'not plausible' (inset)
Recent years have seen record-breaking temperatures and heat waves globally, including the hottest UK record set in July 2022.
Last year was officially the hottest year since global records began in 1850, while that the 10 warmest years in the historical record have all occurred in the past decade (2014-2023).
However, the new study found a lack of statistical evidence for an increased warming rate that could be defined as a surge.
'Our concern with the current discussion around the presence of a "surge" is that there was no rigorous statistical treatment or evidence,' said co-author Professor Rebecca Killick, a statistician at Lancaster University.
'We decided to address this head on, using all commonly used statistical approaches and comparing their results.'
To learn more, Professor Killick and partners at UC Santa Cruz in the US studied 'global mean surface temperature' (GMST),
GMST is simply the average temperature of Earth's surface – and a metric that is widely studied to monitor climate change.
It's usually recorded by weather balloons, radars, ships and buoys, and satellites, over both oceans and land.
The experts looked at GMST from four main agencies that track the average temperature of Earth’s surface – NASA, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA), Berkeley and the UK's HadCRUT – since 1850.
Although GMST is rising long-term, in the short-term it tends to fluctuate due to natural phenomena – like major volcanic eruptions and the El Niño Southern Oscillation.
Therefore, the team deemed a warming 'surge' as statistically detectable if it exceeded and sustained a level above those temporary fluctuations over a long period of time.
'Imagine temperature records plotted on a graph – a small change in the slope would require more time to detect it as significant, whereas a large change would be evident quicker,' said Professor Killick.
After accounting for short-term fluctuations in the GMST, a warming surge could 'not be reliably detected' anytime after 1970, the team found.
'No change in the warming rate beyond the 1970s is detected despite the breaking record temperatures observed in 2023,' they write in their paper, published in Nature Communications Earth & Environment.
The team stress that a surge in global warming may be happening – just that it's not detectable yet.
'Of course, it is still possible that an acceleration in global warming is occurring,' said lead author Claudie Beaulieu, a professor of ocean sciences at UC Santa Cruz.
'But we found that the magnitude of the acceleration is either statistically too small, or there isn’t enough data yet to robustly detect it.'
Professor Beaulieu agreed that Earth is the warmest it has ever been since records began because of human activities.
She said: 'To be clear, our analysis demonstrates the ongoing warming; however, if there's an acceleration in global warming, we can't statistically detect it yet.'
In response to the findings, Richard Allan, a professor of climate science at the University of Reading, suggested that only one line of evidence was considered for the study.
'In fact, when all lines of evidence are scrutinized it is apparent that climate change is accelerating rather continuing steadily,' said Professor Allan, who was not part of the research team.
'Halting global warming by stabilizing Earth’s climate and limiting further damage from worsening extreme weather and rising sea levels is only possible through rapid and massive cuts in greenhouse gas emissions.'
Dr Kevin Collins, a senior lecturer in environment and systems at Open University, said there is a 'very real danger' that the findings are misinterpreted.
'With many people and places experiencing year on year record temperatures around the globe in the last decade, it is very human to assume global warming is accelerating or "surging",' said Dr Collins, also not involved with the study.
'However, through an authoritative statistical analysis of temperature increases since 1970, this research concludes that there is no detectable surge – yet.
'Instead, the results suggest global warming is occurring at a steady state.
'However, as the authors acknowledge, this may be because the size of any acceleration is either statistically too small, or there is simply not enough data to detect a surge in the last decade.'
'In other words, it is still too early to tell if the last decade – the warmest on record – represents a "leap" in the warming trend.
'By 2035 or 2040 we may look back and be able to see from 2015 onwards there has been a fundamental shift in the warming trend.'
*******************************************************
Another Captive Agency Weaponized Against White House Critics
Note from Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
On September 4, I received a letter from Mr. Todd J. Smith, Assistant Special Agent in Charge of the National Marine Fisheries Service, United States Department of Commerce. In the letter, the agency states that they are investigating the alleged claim that I collected a specimen from a rotting carcass found on a Massachusetts beach in 1994. It claims that I may have violated the Marine Mammal Protection Act.
The agency sent its letter just 12 days after I endorsed President Trump on August 23, raising the concern that this investigation is yet another instance of the systematic weaponization of federal enforcement agencies against White House critics.
Here’s my response to his letter, which I sent to Mr. Smith on Oct. 8:
October 8, 2024
RE: Alleged Violation of the Marine Mammal Protection Act
Mr. Smith:
This is my response to your inquiry about the unsubstantiated allegation that my collection, in 1994 on a Massachusetts beach, of a specimen from a rotting carcass may have violated the Marine Mammal Protection Act. I never collected a whale specimen in Massachusetts or transported marine mammal specimens across state lines, nor do I have such a specimen in my collection.
While I am impressed with the alacrity with which the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) launched its investigation of the fate of a 30-year-old specimen, the rapid reaction contrasts sharply with your stubborn intransigeance in addressing the apparent massacre of marine mammals by the offshore wind industry. Recently approved offshore wind farms appear to be putting several protected dolphin and whale species, including the critically endangered North Atlantic right whale, in dire crisis.
Your agency has idly watched the approval of 30 offshore wind leases from Maine to North Carolina effectively privatizing 2.3 million acres of ocean bottom, mostly on extremely productive fishing grounds and critical habitat for migratory whales and other marine mammals, including the critically endangered North Atlantic right whale.
Many Americans suspect that your agency’s anemic response to this serious emergency may be rooted in its reluctance to obstruct the profit ambitions of a politically powerful cabal of energy titans including Dominion, Shell, and General Electric, and U.S. financial houses Goldman Sachs, BlackRock, Wells Fargo, Citibank, J.P. Morgan, and Blackstone. These firms either directly own or are funding projects by foreign energy behemoths including Equinor (Norwegian government), Ørsted (Danish state majority-owned), Iberdrola (Spain), and TotalEnergies (France). The backing by those U.S.-based financial houses allows foreign governments and foreign-owned wind developers to collect tens of billions of dollars in U.S. subsidies and tax credits. These subsidies are provided for by the Inflation Reduction Act, President Biden’s signature “environmental” legislation. In the U.S., offshore wind is an environmentally destructive boondoggle. No financial institution will fund these projects in the absence of obscene government subsidies. Offshore wind farms produce energy 300% more expensive than cheap and abundant onshore wind, which I strongly support.
These companies, based on present offshore wind construction plans that have been approved or are in the process of being approved, will pile-drive 2,200 offshore wind turbines into the ocean floor at intervals of one mile or less across 5,816 square miles. Each turbine with blades will be approximately 1,000 feet tall, on par with the height of the Eiffel Tower.
The advent of the first wind project on Block Island and the arrival of seismic survey boats in 2016 and 2017 were coterminous with an alarming uptick in unexplained whale deaths so unusual that the NOAA Office of Protected Resources declared three Unusual Mortality Events (UMEs): one for humpbacks, one for minke, and one for North Atlantic right whales. The North Atlantic right whale has a total population of fewer than 360 individuals, so every stranding poses a threat to its total extinction.
Prior to the inception of increased seismic survey and construction activity for the wind industry, ship strikes killed 1.4 humpbacks annually from Maine to Virginia. In 2016, as the offshore wind gold rush gathered steam, 26 humpbacks stranded from Maine to North Carolina. Fifteen more stranded from January to April of 2017. Of the 20 humpback whales that were necropsied from that time period, 10 of them were ship strikes. There was no increase in shipping during this period. The only thing that changed was a flurry of offshore wind survey boats, from Massachusetts to North Carolina.
Mass deaths have increased in lockstep with expanding exploration and construction activities. In the 13 months beginning in December of 2022, there were 85 large whale strandings on the East Coast with zero entanglements. A total of 109 large whale deaths occurred from December 1, 2022, through June 6, 2024, mostly within range of offshore wind survey and construction vessels. This amounts to an average of 5.7 dead whales a month for 19 months — a record number of dead whales the likes of which have not occurred in a lifetime. Hundreds of dolphins and porpoises have also died. Only last month, a dead humpback washed ashore on Block Island in the vicinity of the Revolution Wind wind farm, and a dead fin whale landed on Cupsogue Beach on Long Island after being seen the day before floating 12 miles south of Shinnecock, while a young minke whale was found alive struggling in the surf in Montauk, only to die and then to float out to sea.
In September of 2020, 17 environmental groups conveyed to NMFS their “profound concerns” about NMFS’s systematic coddling of the offshore wind farm industry. In that letter, they discussed the 12 previous comment letters they submitted to NMFS since 2018 identifying your agency’s multiple failures in enforcing the Marine Mammal Protection Act (MMPA). They repeatedly urged your agency to “require even stronger protections … for marine site characterization surveys required for offshore wind development” in compliance with the MMPA. Despite their urgings, NMFS has taken no meaningful steps to mitigate the massacre.
Instead of calling an immediate moratorium on offshore wind development, government regulators continued to permit lethally deficient Incidental Harassment Authorizations (IHAs) that allow the wind farm industry to “take” Atlantic whales by the drove. Your reckless dereliction of your statutory obligations to protect these magnificent creatures has resulted in up to 108 vessels conducting geophysical survey activities over more than 10,000 survey days from 2017 to 2022. Independent analysis of your own data suggests that these activities have already resulted in more than 113,000 instances of “taking” of marine mammals, including 402 North Atlantic right whales, 647 endangered fin whales, 53 endangered sei whales, 93 endangered sperm whales, 494 humpback whales, 329 minke whales, and 12,493 harbor porpoises. These are all noise-vulnerable marine mammal species.
Newer analysis conducted in 2023 predicted that when NOAA’s currently authorized offshore wind activities were combined with then-proposed and yet-to-be-authorized offshore wind activities, the impacted number of marine mammals would rise astronomically to over 630,000 animals. Industry proposals included up to 996 requests for Level B harassment takes of critically endangered North Atlantic right whales. That number is now almost triple the population size of the species, suggesting that the species may go extinct as a result of your hand-sitting. NOAA has approved just one project off the coast of New England that, on its own, will “take” 126 North Atlantic right whales.
On January 9, 2023, after six large whales had stranded on New Jersey and New York beaches in as many weeks, five grassroots environmental groups demanded a federal investigation into the whale deaths.
They also submitted a letter to President Biden demanding:
“an immediate investigation into the marine mammal mortalities from Cape May, NJ, to Montauk Point, NY, and/or beyond, be conducted by qualified scientists including those of the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) and a halt to all current lessees’ offshore wind energy development activity within the Atlantic Ocean from Cape May, NJ, to Montauk Point, NY, including assessment, characterization, and construction-related activities until an investigation has been conducted.”
Instead of vigorously investigating these mortalities and taking steps to end this massacre, your agency has bent over backwards to enable the slaughter to continue. NOAA has protected the offshore wind industry — with its strong connections to the Democratic Party — by refusing to conduct basic science that might link the slaughter to industry activities. This strategic lethargy in conducting vital and obvious studies allows your agency, and by extension, the wind industry, to conveniently claim, as Benjamin Laws did on January of 2023, “There is no information supporting that any of the equipment that’s being used in support of wind development for these site characterization surveys could directly lead to the death of a whale.”
I offer just one of many examples of this species of agency sandbagging: The fin, humpback, minke, sei, and right whales that are now dying in droves are all part of the Mysticetes family of whales that all hear in low frequency. Yet your agency has stubbornly refused to collect direct hearing data from large whales to determine whether offshore wind survey boats and seismic survey machinery are emitting sounds within this hearing profile.
Here is another example: In the Gulf of Mexico, NOAA requires immediate survey shutdowns in the event of live mammal strandings or millings within 50 km of oil and gas survey activity. In deference to powerhouse offshore wind titans, NOAA has ignored those long-standing IHA rules for offshore wind in the Atlantic, despite the fact that the Gulf of Mexico surveys use the same equipment as the Atlantic surveys and NOAA permits the same levels of marine mammal impacts for both.
Furthermore, only Atlantic offshore wind surveys are expected to impact multiple endangered whale populations, and only in the Atlantic have energy development activities coincided in time and space with unprecedented whale deaths. This suggests that federal agencies should be providing more protections for impacted marine mammals in the Atlantic, not less. Yet NOAA continues to turn a blind eye, inexplicably applying weaker Marine Mammal Protection Act standards for Atlantic wind farms than for identical High-Resolution Geophysical (HRG) surveys in the Gulf of Mexico. The Marine Mammal Protection Act does not allow for differential application to the same activity; it is designed to protect mammals, not foreign energy companies and their Wall Street financiers.
Your agency has also stonewalled the issuance of uniform necropsy protocols that might point a finger at offshore wind. It’s obvious that the standardized protocol should include early examination of ear damage in dead whales. Despite the pleadings of the environmental community, you have refused to recommend this procedure. This step is so fundamental that it suggests a deliberate dereliction. In fact, your agency actually allows what partial or full necropsies of dead whales do occur to be conducted by Marine Mammal Stranding Network partners that have been funded by offshore wind companies and even maintain offshore wind executives, lobbyists, and third-party contractors on their board, ensuring that no “investigation” taken by such NOAA partners is objective.
In addition, commercial fishermen complain that the areas around the turbines — the Atlantic cod’s critical spawning grounds — have been emptied of fish. This outcome is consistent with your agency’s early warning that the turbines may cause the collapse of the cod fishery.
You sent the investigatory letter to me on September 4, just 12 days after my August 23 endorsement of President Trump, raising the issue that this investigation is yet another salient in the systematic weaponization of federal enforcement agencies against White House critics.
You acknowledge that you launched your investigation publicly on August 26, at the urging of the Center for Biological Diversity, a formerly effective NGO that now functions as a subsidiary of the DNC.
Your enthusiasm in launching an investigation based upon an unsubstantiated anecdote of a specimen collected from a rotting corpse three decades ago compares unfavorably with your abject failure to stop, much less investigate, the ongoing slaughter of whales by politically connected energy companies and financial houses that number among the Democratic Party’s biggest patrons. Your agency’s systematic insouciance is likely to result in the permanent extinction of the very species you are charged with protecting. Please let me know the steps that you plan to take to avert this agency-sanctioned calamity to Atlantic whale populations.
https://robertfkennedyjr.substack.com/p/rfk-jr-kennedy-whale-investigation
***********************************************************Green Hydrogen limps toward inevitable demise
Fortescue Metals Group, a leading Australian iron ore miner, has been actively pursuing green hydrogen as a key component of its decarbonisation strategy. Green hydrogen reportedly results in no carbon dioxide emission or production.
In May 2024, Fortescue launched its first US green hydrogen production project. It represented a $550 million investment in a facility to produce up to 11,000 tons of liquid green hydrogen annually. They renamed their green hydrogen facility in Buckeye, Arizona, to Arizona Hydrogen. However, recent developments have forced them to scale back their green hydrogen plans.
The same is true for Woodside, citing a lack of renewable electricity, and similarly for Origin Energy, when it realised that it is uneconomical. Each company withdrew from the market for the same reason – the lack of cheap electricity – which ‘renewables’ cannot provide. You need hydrocarbon (coal, petroleum, or natural gas) fired electricity generation for that.
Buying into what I call the Climate Cult dream, Fortescue had set an ambitious goal to produce 15 million tons of green hydrogen annually by 2030. The company invested in renewable energy projects and developed its own green hydrogen technology, including the PEM50 project, a 50 MW green hydrogen electrolysis production plant.
But in July 2024, Fortescue announced a significant scaling back of its green hydrogen plans, citing high electricity prices as a major factor. The company put its goal of producing 15 million tons of green hydrogen on hold until electricity prices fall. (That is like waiting for hell to freeze over.)
Additionally, Fortescue cut 700 jobs, affecting various parts of its business, including its green hydrogen operations.
You have got to love the irony there!
High electricity prices that have resulted from massive government (read ‘taxpayer’) subsidies to the green electricity sector are the reason companies cannot produce cheap enough hydrogen gas from electrolysis. As I explained in Hydrogen Gas: another Climate Cult myth busted the problem is basic physics.
And the dream of finding a pure source of hydrogen from a gas well is just that, more mythological than pink unicorns.
However, mining magnate Andrew Forrest, Fortescue’s chairman, appears to be unfazed and downplayed the cuts made to the industry, stating that they do not signal a retreat from the company’s green hydrogen ambitions. Forrest emphasised the importance of investing in renewable energy generation to drive down power prices, making green hydrogen production more commercially viable.
More dreaming! Or is it just wishful thinking?
Fortescue remains committed to green hydrogen and its potential to decarbonise hard-to-abate sectors, such as iron ore operations. To extract the metallic iron from iron ore you need to use copious amounts of coal, and to make steel from that you need an enormous supply of both coal and electricity.
Solar and wind power just will not do it. It was coal and cheap electricity that got us out of the poverty of the Dark Ages. Why do they want to send us back there?
On October 2, 2024, Forrest said that it’s time to walk away from the ‘proven fantasy’ of Net Zero. That sounds like he is coming to see the light! Well, not quite it turns out. So, what did he mean by that?
Australian mining tycoon Andrew Forrest, founder and executive chairman of Fortescue, says it is time for the world to walk away from the ‘proven fantasy’ of Net Zero emissions by 2050 and to embrace ‘Real Zero’ by 2040 instead.
What? He is a true believer, despite the fundamentals of the underlying physics of the universe. Forrest continues:
‘What they are really saying is that you can’t do it. And I’m saying to each of those chief executives and those political leaders who use the words, “I can’t…” Okay, what about you get off the stage and let on a young girl [does he mean Greta?] or wiser leader who can. Someone with a bit of ticker because the technology is there.’
‘We know the world can go Real Zero 2040 and I’m reaching out to the business people and politicians across our planet to say it is time now to walk away from this proven fantasy [of] Net Zero 2050 and adopt Real Zero 2040,’ Forrest said. ‘We can, we must, let’s do it.’
His company is retreating from green hydrogen because it is not economically feasible to produce hydrogen by electrolysis. Neither is it by the two methods that do it well – steam reforming and methane pyrolysis. All these methods are energy-intensive.
Currently, 95 per cent of hydrogen fuel is ‘grey hydrogen’ made from natural gas via the steam reformation process, but that method produces more carbon dioxide than burning an equivalent amount of petrol.
And by our current understanding of physics the Climate Cult dream of mythical hydrogen gas mined straight out of the ground is just that. More mythology! It is a pain when you come up against the laws of physics and chemistry.
No amount of religious cries like, ‘We can, we must, let’s do it!’ can change the laws of physics.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/10/green-hydrogen-limps-toward-inevitable-demise/
***************************************15 October, 2024
Bill Nye never was a science guy
He's really ga-ga now
Bill Nye on MSNBC claims we can prevent Hurricanes like Milton if we vote the right way – ‘The main thing is vote’
Bill Nye on MSNBC: "The other side, as we often call it, has no plans to address climate change. No plans for long-term dealing with these sorts of problems. If you have young voters out there, encourage them to vote. People say, 'What can I do about climate change?' If we were talking about it, associating it with big storms like this, that would be really good. But the main thing is vote."
A few points about @BillNye the Science Lie:
1. Americans could vote in 1921 and 1841 -- but the Tampa Bay area still got hit by massive storms.
2. Emissions can't warm ocean water. https://x.com/JunkScience/status/1809073798160736620
3. Recall Bill Nye thinks climate skeptics are not dying fast enough.…
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Kamala Harris Is Full On Hiding Her Climate Agenda From Voters – Pursuing ‘strategic ambiguity’ on climate — ‘otherwise known as deception’
Climate change does not poll well so Vice President Kamala Harris is downplaying the whole issue. Gone is the drumbeating that nothing is more important to the next generation than addressing climate change.
During the presidential debate with former President Donald Trump, Vice President Kamala Harris turned the moderator’s question about climate change into a discussion about housing insurance costs.
She declared climate change was “very real” and then she pivoted to what NPR described as morphing climate change into a “pocketbook issue.”
“You ask anyone who lives in a state who has experienced these extreme weather occurrences who now is either being denied home insurance or it’s being jacked up; you ask anybody who has been the victim of what that means in terms of losing their home, having nowhere to go,” Harris said during the debate.
Why has the climate issue, formerly known as an “existential threat” — complete with doomsday tipping points — now turned into a question of mere insurance costs for the Democratic presidential nominee? The Washington Post reported that Democratic Party leaders “appear to have calculated that climate silence is the safest strategy.” The Post explained, “Democrats see talking about the environment as a lose-lose proposition.”
When Harris was finally asked about “climate change” during her first sit-down media interview on CNN, she addressed her recent campaign reversals on fracking, EVs and net zero issues by claiming her ‘values’ have not changed.
Harris told CNN that there is a “climate crisis” and the way to solve it was by spending “a trillion dollars” and applying “metrics that include holding ourselves to deadlines around time.”
Huh? So, Harris’ position on the alleged threat of man-made climate change still duplicates her 2019 brief presidential run. Her repeated claims that she will no longer seek to “ban” fracking do not address the fact that continuing Green New Deal and Inflation Reduction Act policies will result in a death by a thousand cuts on fracking and other U.S. energy production methods.
She pledged to continue the ideological net zero fairy-tale that government spending and mandates can alter the Earth’s climate system. Harris’ energy plans will continue to hammer America first.
Let’s remember that Harris’ “values” have included being an original co-sponsor of AOC’s Green New Deal, casting a tie-breaking vote in 2022 for the Inflation Reduction Act, supporting gas-powered car bans, gas stove bans, looking at climate change as one of the “root causes” of illegal immigration, and meat restrictions via the administration’s EPA regulations on agricultural methane emissions.
In addition, the Biden-Harris administration has talked openly about the possibility of declaring a national climate emergency, which — according to NBC News — “can unlock special powers for a president in a crisis without needing approval from Congress.”
Bypassing democracy to impose a Green New Deal on America appears central to Harris’ “values.” But, somehow, her “values” have rapidly gone silent on the alleged “existential” climate threat of the 21st century during this heated presidential campaign.
If you listen closely, the Harris “silence” fades away. The Harris campaign raucously boasted to Reuters that the “climate silence” is all part of her master election plan.
“She has been pursuing a policy of ‘strategic ambiguity’ on energy policy, [Harris] aides told Reuters last month. She is anxious not to put off undecided voters in swing states, especially gas-producing Pennsylvania, by trumpeting her climate credentials too loudly.”
“Too loudly?!” The only Harris climate “values” that seem to matter are “strategic ambiguity” — otherwise known as deception.
The reality is that Harris’ “climate silence” is a concession to scientific reality and the failed solar and wind promises that are causing a pointless drain on the U.S. economy. The public has been hearing for years of how solar and wind are “cheaper” than fossil fuels and how they are about to replace fossil fuels. But the reality is starkly the opposite of these claims and the Democrat Party knows this.
Despite trillions of dollars in subsidies, green energy mandates, UN climate summits, net zero commitments and restrictions on fossil fuels, solar & wind power made up just 13.9% of the world’s electricity in 2023. Meanwhile, the U.S. still consumed 82% of our energy from fossil fuels in 2023.
When these energy realities are screaming in your face, silence may be the only answer.
The most surprising aspect of the Harris-Walz climate shush campaign may be why the climate establishment has no qualms about muzzling climate change. The New York Times reported that “[Harris] has mentioned climate change only in passing” and noted that “[c]limate leaders say they are fine with that.”
Why are climate activists suddenly “fine” with their standard bearers hushing up on climate during a heated presidential race? Perhaps the answer can be found in the advice of Democratic Party activist Rev. Mark Thompson at the August DNC convention in Chicago, when he declared, “We got 70 days to act right, y’all. Now, after 70 days, we can go back to acting crazy, right?” he said. Thompson added, “Just wait 70 days to go back, please. Be good.”
Let’s hope Americans can glean the climate “crazy” blaring from Harris-Walz’s sham “climate silence” campaign.
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Extreme Weather Expert Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. on ‘extreme weather event attribution’ – It’s ‘research performed explicitly to serve legal & political ends
By Roger Pielke Jr.
Weather Attribution Alchemy: A new THB series takes a close look at extreme weather event attribution, Part 1
Excerpt: In the aftermath of many high profile extreme weather events we see headlines like the following:
Climate change made US and Mexico heatwave 35 times more likely — BBC
Study Finds Climate Change Doubled Likelihood of Recent European Floods — NYT
Severe Amazon Drought was Made 30 Times More Likely by Climate Change — Bloomberg
For those who closely follow climate science and the assessments of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), such headlines can be difficult to make sense of because neither the IPCC nor the underlying scientific literature comes anywhere close to making such strong and certain claims of attribution.
How then might we understand such high profile claims?
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Weather event attribution does not appear in the IPCC Glossary, however it does appear in the body of the AR6 report, where the IPCC explains that event attribution research seeks to “to attribute aspects of specific extreme weather and climate events to certain causes.”
The IPCC continues:
“Scientists cannot answer directly whether a particular event was caused by climate change,1 as extremes do occur naturally, and any specific weather and climate event is the result of a complex mix of human and natural factors. Instead, scientists quantify the relative importance of human and natural influences on the magnitude and/or probability of specific extreme weather events.”
With this post I want to introduce three starting points for our discussions which will unfold over a series of posts in coming weeks and months.
First, event attribution research is a form tactical science — research performed explicitly to serve legal and political ends. This is not my opinion, but has been openly stated on many occasions by the researchers who developed and perform event attribution research.2 Such research is not always subjected to peer review, and this is often by design as peer-review takes much longer than the news cycle. Instead, event attribution studies are generally promoted via press release.
For instance, researchers behind the World Weather Attribution (WWA) initiative explain that one of their key motives in conducting such studies is, “increasing the ‘immediacy’ of climate change, thereby increasing support for mitigation.” WWA’s chief scientist, Friederike Otto, explains, “Unlike every other branch of climate science or science in general, event attribution was actually originally suggested with the courts in mind.” Another oft-quoted scientist who performs rapid attribution analyses, Michael Wehner, summarized their importance (emphasis in original) — “The most important message from this (and previous) analyses is that “Dangerous climate change is here now!”
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Weather event attribution methodologies have been developed not just to feed media narratives or support general climate advocacy. Otto and others have been very forthright that the main function of such studies is to create a defensible scientific basis in support of lawsuits against fossil fuel companies — She explains the strategy in detail in this interview, From Extreme Event Attribution to Climate Litigation.
As I recently argued, tactical science is not necessarily bad science, but it should elevate the degree of scrutiny that such analyses face, especially when they generally are not subjected to independent peer review. In this series I’ll apply some scrutiny and invite you to participate as we go along.
Second, extreme event attribution was developed as a response to the failure of the IPCC’s conventional approach to detection and attribution (D&A) to reach high confidence in the detection of increasing trends in the frequency or intensity of most types of impactful extreme events — notably hurricanes, floods, drought, and tornadoes.
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The underlying theory of change here appears to be that people must be fearful of climate change and thus need come to understand that it threatens their lives, not in the future, but today and tomorrow. If they don’t have that fear, the argument goes, then they will discount the threat and fail to support the right climate policies. Hence, from this perspective, the IPCC”s failure to reach strong claims of detection and attribution represents a political problem — a problem that can be rectified via the invention of extreme event attribution
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Biden labels people ‘brain dead’ to doubt ‘climate crisis’ fueled Hurricane Helene
President Biden called on Americans Wednesday to “put politics aside” to focus on Hurricane Helene recovery efforts — moments before stepping on his own message by saying that anyone who doubts climate change’s role in the disaster “must be brain dead.”
“In a moment like this, we put politics aside, at least we should put it all aside, and we have here,” the retiring 81-year-old president said during a recovery briefing in Raleigh, NC.
“There are no Democrats or Republicans, there are only Americans, and our job is to help as many people as we can, as quickly as we can, and as thoroughly as we can.”
The consoler-in-chief, seated next to the Tar Heel State’s Democratic governor, Roy Cooper, and emergency officials after an aerial tour of the Asheville area, pivoted moments later to an attack on the mostly Republican skeptics about the role of fossil fuel use in severe weather.
“Nobody can deny the impact of [the] climate crisis anymore — at least I hope they don’t. They must be brain dead if they do,” Biden jabbed.
“Scientists report that with warming oceans powering more intense rains, storms like Helene are getting stronger and stronger — they’re not going to get less, they’re going to get stronger. Today in North Carolina, I saw the impacts of that fury.”
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October 14, 2024
Solar farms ‘good’ for desert environments?
Solar farms are good for desert environments… That is what we are being asked to believe in a new study coming out of China.
For context, China has a stranglehold on the world’s renewable energy construction and is responsible for mining and distributing at least 90+ per cent of the rare earths and other raw materials required in the industry. Many of these are sourced from Chinese territories, but increasingly, China has set up mines in third world nations or inside contested areas of water in the South China Sea. Renewable energy is becoming a geopolitical conversation as much as it is an environmental debate.
Confusingly, if you like to live in a world of logic and consistency, China is also operating a record number of coal-fired plants (1,161) and constructing the world’s largest oil and gas pipelines from neighbouring regions. Australia has 18 coal-fired plants left. Meanwhile, Beijing drowns coral reefs and atolls in concrete to make military bases while also claiming to pioneer ‘planet saving’ energy. As we used to say, ‘pick a lane’.
Most people would reasonably assume that the best thing for fragile desert environments is to stop touching them.
Leave no footprints, remember? That was the mantra of the 90s.
Whether it is a desert, a rainforest, or a marine park – humans should not be industrialising these areas for profit.
The problem for so-called green energy is that it is not looking particularly green. Renewable projects do not leave footprints, they stomp around leaving boot-prints on the natural world.
Locals are watching hundreds and sometimes thousands of acres of habitat squandered to accommodate infrastructure. Once the construction is finished, these areas are more-or-less lost to the wildlife that once inhabited them.
Destroying the planet to save it, as sceptics are quick to point out.
These complaints are not speculative. We have years of research documenting harm. One of the best case studies is California where the deserts are slowly being consumed by solar farms described as ‘photovoltaic seas’ whose mirages are so convincing that the illusion of frozen waves has led some tourists to go in search of places to launch their boats.
There are dozens of articles containing the testimonies of residents who have suffered medical and psychological conditions caused, they believe, by the approaching green utopia which has taken over their lives.
It is interesting to read comments underneath some of these articles, left by a self-described pro-renewables audience. Some ask why the desert ecosystem cannot ‘adapt to having shade’ or insist that articles that highlight the impact of solar should ‘be taken down’ before they ‘fall into the wrong hands’.
‘Truth’ in the wrong hands? I wonder what that means to these individuals if we were to draw a discussion out of them. We can see here why support for the Misinformation and Disinformation Bill has festered within certain ideological groups. Are they worried that too much exposure to the sunlight might melt their solar panels?
Regardless of whether green voters like to hear it or not, environmental scientists and organisations continue to harbour concerns. Nature acknowledges, ‘…the global climate pattern can also be disturbed by massive deployment of solar energy. This is attributed to the resultant changes in land surface properties.’
ScienceDirect wrote:
‘The construction of a PPP significantly alters the surface disturbance of the soil, affects the balance between the photosynthetically active radiation and radiant flux, reduces the surface albedo, changes the precipitation distribution, and forms a heat island effect. These changes critically impact the driving factors of the local microclimate, such as evaporation, wind speed, temperature, soil moisture, and soil temperature, on both temporal and spatial scales, thereby increasing the land degradation risk in fragile arid ecosystems … it is usually necessary to perform liberal applications of dust suppressant and water to clean the panels and prevent large amounts of dust or sand from affecting the PPP operation. These chemicals are extremely toxic to the environment and may cause extensive negative effects on the local ecological environment in the long run.’
EcoWatch warned earlier this year that a solar farm planned for the Mojave desert in California could result in the destruction of endangered desert tortoise habitat and the removal of Joshua trees. There was also concern that the construction process would stir up the sand and with it, release ‘valley fever’ pathogens into the air.
‘The clean energy project, which is expected to power 180,000 homes – with that power estimated to be for wealthy residents along the coast, the Los Angeles Times reported – could also have lasting impacts on the desert ecosystem.’
The company website insists:
‘While individual trees will be impacted during project construction, clean energy projects like Aratina directly address the existential threat of climate change caused by rising greenhouse gas emissions that threaten vastly more trees.’
The solar farm creators were quick to insist the carbon offset would be ‘equivalent to planting 14 million trees’ but residents are wondering why governments don’t simply plant those theoretical trees if they want to save the world. ‘More trees’ is what the average voter envisions when they vote for ‘green energy’ and yet green energy is deforesting the world.
Returning to the study out of China.
The study opens with the admission that solar farms have had ‘significant impacts on the ecological environment’ and proposes the establishment of an ‘indicator system to assess the ecological and environmental effects of photovoltaic development’.
In their case, they use Driving-Pressure-Status-Impact-Response (DPSIR) as a framework to measure various types of environmental impact.
Their solar farm is a 3,182MW project which takes up 64 square kilometres and has a stated lifespan between 20-30 years.
The introduction claims, ‘Overall, the large-scale development of desert photovoltaics in Gonghe Country has had a positive impact on the ecological environment.’ In this case, the elevated area is described as ‘alpine arid desert’ and ‘semiarid grassland’.
These tests returned various scores including ‘good’ and ‘poor’ but the long detail of the study remains ambiguous.
To take one example. The study talks about soil evaporation and water content beneath the panels.
‘The construction of these power stations has led to a reduction in soil evaporation, while the cleaning of photovoltaic panels has increased the water content of the soil located under the panels. The cleaning frequency of photovoltaic panels in this study is once a month, as a result, the growth conditions for vegetation indirectly improved. This has led to an increase in both vegetation species and biomass.’
And read this alongside some of the ‘poor’ responses.
‘The analysis indicated that the ecological environment still faces tremendous pressure, with lower scores for various indicators in the status layer and lower scores for onsite indicators such as fungal abundance and daily photosynthetic radiation than outside the zone. These results may result in more significant impacts in the future.’
Aside from the obvious question, ‘How many of these are weeds?’ We know from other studies that cleaning the panels isn’t neutral to the environment. The water itself could be a problem as water is a scarce resource in deserts – so where do the solar farms source these enormous quantities of water from? Which other environment is losing out to put a garden hose on a solar farm?
If we look at solar farms across China and around the world, grass in otherwise arid areas can grow better beneath the solar panels where it gets tall enough to obstruct sunlight to the panel. It then carries a fire risk when it dries out during the winter months. Sheep have been brought in to some parks to address this problem – except if you ask the climate zealots at the UN, they think sheep, like cows, are killing the planet. Are we getting rid of farm animals and going vegan, or expanding livestock to keep the solar panels safe?
Grazing might be sustainable for the duration of the farm’s short lifespan, but it only takes one grass fire running through the solar panels to render the entire operation a net-negative for the environment.
No matter what, the original desert landscape and its biology is gone.
Farmers make landscapes ‘greener’ with intensive farming as well – but you would not see a headline from environmental movements praising them for it in this ideological climate.
It is very difficult to argue that these projects preserve fragile ecosystems, rather, they change them – for better or worse is up to the customer to decide.
The study, meanwhile, concludes, ‘Photovoltaic development in desert areas has significantly improved local ecological and environmental conditions.’
Which sounds good on paper, until you open up a picture…
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/10/solar-farms-good-for-desert-environments/
********************************************************Some Australian states are discovering what happens when they have too much rooftop solar
What a muddle!
When Victoria basks in mostly sunny spring weather this weekend, energy authorities will be monitoring how far electricity demand ebbs. If needed, they’ll turn off rooftop solar systems to ensure stability for the grid.
Such minimum system load events, as they are called, have emerged as a new challenge as households across Australia take advantage of plunging prices for solar panels to shield themselves from rising power bills and cut carbon emissions.
The Australian Energy Market Operator issued two such alerts for Victoria during the AFL grand final weekend a fortnight ago, and warned of two for this Saturday and Sunday.
Prior to this cluster, the state’s only previous warning was last 31 December.
The public has become inured to annual alerts to possible power shortfalls during summer heatwaves or extended cold snaps during winter.
It won’t be long before the obverse – a grid strained by too little demand – is common during mild, sunny spring and autumn days, when the need for cooling or heating abates, experts say.
“It’s all going to be uncomfortably interesting for energy system people,” said Tennant Reed, director of climate change and energy at the Ai Group, noting there are “emerging rules to keep the show on the road”.
Having a grid that is supplied entirely by renewable energy is something Aemo and state and federal governments have anticipated as they step up support for so-called consumer energy resources. Australian households have already embraced rooftop solar at a pace unmatched anywhere, with more than a third generating power at home.
Many options are available to source extra demand, such as encouraging people to use more of their generation at peak sunny periods, renewable advocates say.
Hot water heaters, now often operating at night, could be switched on during the day, while certain industrial users could be given incentives to increase production, much like they are now rewarded to power down during summer heatwaves.
Still, the looming challenges aren’t small, particularly as coal-fired power plants shut.
The grid’s system strength is “projected to decline sharply over the next decade”, Aemo said in its latest 2024 Electricity Statement of Opportunities report.
From October to December is likely to be when demand sinks to its lowest for most parts of the national electricity market. (The national electricity market or Nem serves all regions except Western Australia and the Northern Territory.)
Windy, sunny spring days – much like the coming weekend in Victoria – also mean an elevated supply of renewable energy in a season of minimal heating or cooling need.
A year ago, on 29 October, Nem grid demand hit a record minimum of about 11 gigawatts for 30 minutes. Small-scale solar, most of it on residential roofs, met 52% of underlying demand.
As more homes install solar, the Nem’s minimum demand may continue to shrink at the present rate of 1.2GW each year, Aemo said.
The Nem needs at least 4.3GW of electricity moving across its transmission network. If there are “unplanned network or unit outages”, the threshold rises to about 7GW – a level that may be breached as soon as next spring, Aemo said.
“While these periods of very high distributed PV levels relative to underlying demand are currently not frequent, they will increase over time and could occur during unusual events and outage conditions,” it said.
“A credible disturbance could lead to reliance on emergency frequency control schemes which are known to be compromised in such low operational demand periods, escalating risks of system collapse and blackouts.”
However, the market has a sizeable toolkit to address those risks. South Australia, where about half the homes have solar panels, already has coped with two minimum system load events of level 3 – the most serious – on 11 October 2020 and 14 March 2021.
For the latter, SA Power Networks, a company part-owned by the Hong Kong-based conglomerate Cheung Kong Infrastructure, was ordered to turn off 71 megawatts of photovoltaic systems. It was the first such intervention by Aemo.
So-called solar curtailment is now a feature of SA’s operating system even if such an intervention is meant to be a “last resort”, the network group said.
Before such action, large-scale solar and wind farms will be turned off, as will big solar systems on shopping centres and factories. Exports of surplus solar power from homes will also be halted before the systems themselves are turned off.
According to WattClarity, a leading energy data website, SA had at least eight such rooftop solar curtailments in 2022 and 2o23.
Victoria, which introduced similar “backstop” rules on 1 October this year, says consumers can do their bit. Solar curtailment should be authorities’ last move.
“We encourage households with solar panels to make the most of their clean energy and save on bills by using their solar power during the day – whether it’s charging electric vehicles, doing laundry or running dishwashers,” a Victorian government spokesperson said.
For Victoria, the backstop mechanism won’t affect a household’s ability to consume their own solar generation. Large batteries are part of the toolkit from this spring, with storage on standby to create additional demand by charging up.
New South Wales and Queensland are expected to face similar challenges in coming years. NSW, though, is yet to start public consultation on restrictions of solar exports, with minimum load issues not forecast until late 2025 or beyond.
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2024/oct/12/australian-states-too-much-rooftop-solar
********************************************************Australian Greens accused of ‘extremism crisis’ after candidate James Cruz’s Hezbollah post
An ACT Greens candidate has been forced to issue a clarifying statement after a social media post in which he appeared to suggest Iranian-backed militant group Hezbollah should be removed from Australia’s list of proscribed terrorist organisations.
James Cruz, Greens candidate for the seat of Kurrajong, came under fire after he said on X that “more and more” people were arguing that Hezbollah should be taken off the terror list, prompting Coalition calls for the Greens to address their “growing extremism crisis”.
Mr Cruz was replying to Guardian podcaster Nour Haydar, who suggested Jewish groups had led the charge for Hezbollah to be listed as a terrorist group.
Mr Cruz replied: “Remove Hezbollah from the list of terrorist organisations? You’re hearing it more and more.”
Amid a backlash over the post, Mr Cruz issued a statement saying he had only remarked that “other people have queried the listing”.
“Hezbollah is a listed terrorist organisation and the Greens are not arguing to change that,” Mr Cruz said. “I back that position of the Australian Greens.”
Opposition home affairs spokesman James Paterson said it was “utterly extraordinary” that an endorsed Greens candidate believed the remarks were appropriate, calling on the left-wing party to dump Mr Cruz from its ticket.
“Hezbollah are proscribed in Australia and around the world for very good reason – they are terrorists,” he said.
“Over a four-decade reign of terror they’ve killed tens of thousands of innocent civilians in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and even Argentina, where they blew up a Jewish community centre in 1995, killing 84 people.
“The Greens must address their growing extremism crisis and it should start with disendorsing James Cruz.”
During a recent wave of demonstrations marking one year since Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, the Australian Federal Police targeted protesters displaying the Hezbollah flag, which is a prohibited symbol due to concerns it could ignite violence.
The furore over Mr Cruz’s post came just a week out from the October 19 ACT election, which will see Chief Minister Andrew Barr pitch for another term after 23 years of Labor government.
ACT Greens leader Shane Rattenbury said the comments raised a “sensitive and complicated issue”, but declined to comment further.
Greens sources told The Weekend Australian Mr Cruz’s X account had recently been hacked and deleted by a third party.
Conservative group Advance accused the Greens of “standing with Hezbollah and Hamas at protests”, rather than acting as a “party of environmentalists”.
“Not only do they stand with Hezbollah and Hamas at protests, they float changes to how those barbaric organisations are treated by our national security apparatuses,” spokeswoman Sandra Bourke
“The Greens aren’t who they used to be, and more and more Australians are seeing it as the Greens show their true colours.”
The stoush followed federal Greens deputy leader Mehreen Faruqi’s refusal to declare Hamas should be dismantled.
Mr Cruz’s comments surfaced the day after revelations came to light that ACT Greens candidate Harini Rangarajan had reportedly written a blog post comparing 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden to Jesus Christ.
“I’ve gone on to idolise several other martyrs – Bhagat Singh, Husayn ibn Ali, Guru Tegh Bahadur, Che Guevara, Jesus Christ, Balachandran Prabhakaran, Joan of Arc, Osama bin Laden, etc,” her post reportedly said.
In his pitch to voters Mr Cruz said he was drawn to run for the Greens because of the party’s commitment to end homelessness and its recognition of housing as a fundamental human right.
“Growing up in poverty and living in public housing showed me the urgent need for a society that addresses inequality and the growing housing crisis,” he said.
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Greens Declare War on Growing Greens
Grow your own fruit and veg – and destroy the planet. Allotment produce, much prized by proud food-growing citizens the world over, has six times the ‘carbon’ footprint of conventional agriculture, according to a recent paper published by Nature. “Steps must be taken to ensure that urban agriculture supports, and does not undermine, urban decarbonisation efforts,” demand the authors. What have these people been smoking? Surely not some of the puff circulating at the recent Psychedelic Climate Week in New York. Highlights included a discussion on funding ketamine-assisted therapy and a panel on ‘Balancing Investing and Impact with Climate and Psychedelic Capital’.
The lead authors of the Nature paper are academics working out of the School for Environment and Sustainability at the University of Michigan. They suggest using urban farms as sites for “education, leisure and community building”. Perhaps the locals could sit cross-legged and listen to early Pink Floyd music. Maybe clap the setting sun to some Atom Heart Mother. Excuse your correspondent if he cannot take this paper seriously. It is a classic example of greens picking on a human activity – almost any will do – and complaining that it causes the devil-gas carbon dioxide to be released. At the recent New York climate happening, according to the Guardian, revellers were told that using hallucinogens can spark “consciousness shifts” to inspire climate-friendly behaviour. What climate friendly behaviour, one might ask, given that almost anything humans do to improve their lot of Earth is demonised by an increasingly weird millenarian green cult.
The authors of the Nature paper seem to have a particular down on home composting. Poorly-managed composting is said to exacerbate the release of greenhouse gases (GHGs). “The carbon footprint of compost grows tenfold when methane-generated anaerobic conditions persist in compost piles,” it says. This is particularly common during small-scale composting, apparently. With a seeming complete ignorance of how small allotments farming functions, the authors suggest that “cities can offset this risk by centralising compost operations for professional management”.
Wherever these cultists look, there are gases being released that are contributing to their invented existential climate crisis. The high application rates of compost in urban agriculture can also lead to nitrous oxide, we’re told. Needless to say, “strategic management of application scheduling and fertiliser combinations may be required to minimise emissions”.
For allotment holders, few pleasures in life compare with a break from arduous work and a hot cup of tea in the shed. Surrounded by the tools of the trade, it is the labourer’s equivalent of passing around a few liveners at National Climate Week, with the added attraction that it doesn’t turn you into a self-important dope. But such pleasure will come to an end if the climate cops have their way. Infrastructure, we’re told, is the largest driver of carbon emissions at what are termed “low-tech” urban agricultural sites. As well as sheds, this includes beds (for vegetables, not a crash pad for ketamine heads) and compost facilities. A raised bed built and used for five years will have approximately four times the environmental impact as one used for 20. Other infrastructure supplies are said to include fertiliser, gasoline and weed block textile.
Plants need water, but only the right sort of water can help save the planet. In their site samples, the researchers found that most allotment-holders use potable municipal water sources or groundwater wells. Big no, no, of course, since such irrigation emits GHGs from pumping, water treatment and distribution. “Cities should support low-carbon (and drought-conscious) irrigation for urban agriculture via subsidies for rainwater catchment infrastructure, or through established guidelines for greywater use,” it is suggested. Presumably, the subsidies will come from the magic bread tree and the infrastructure will be of the special type that does not produce GHGs.
This crackpot climate paper is just the latest sign that the green movement is riven with disagreements as its climate crisis grift starts to fall apart in the face of reality. There are no realistic back-ups for intermittent wind and solar, while carbon capture is a colossal and potentially dangerous waste of money. Without hydrocarbon use, humankind is doomed. Billions will die and society will be returned to the dark ages. Hydrocarbons are ubiquitous in modern society, and so almost everything that humans do to survive and thrive on a dangerous planet can be demonised. Eventually, you end up with Sir David Attenborough making the appalling observation that it was “barmy” for the United Nations to send bags of flour to famine-stricken Ethiopia. Or to read earlier this year the tweet from the United Nations contributing author and UCL professor Bill McGuire that the only “realistic way” to avoid catastrophic climate breakdown was to cull the human population with a high fatality pandemic.
Many green extremists seem to take the view that anything humans do, including growing their own veg, is causing existential harm to the planet. What they really hate, some may conclude, are humans themselves. Treble bongs all round.
https://dailysceptic.org/2024/10/14/greens-declare-war-on-growing-greens/
***************************************October 13, 2024
Indonesia Biomass Drive Threatens Key Forests
Indonesia's push to add wood-burning to its energy mix and exports is driving deforestation, including in key habitats for endangered species such as orangutans, a report said Thursday.
Bioenergy, which uses organic material like trees to produce power, is considered renewable by the International Energy Agency as carbon released by burning biomass can theoretically be absorbed by planting more trees.
But critics say biomass power plants emit more carbon dioxide per unit of energy produced than modern coal plants, and warn that using biomass to "co-fire" coal plants is just a way to extend the life of the polluting fossil fuel.
Producing the wood pellets and chips used for "co-fire" coal plants also risks driving deforestation, with natural forests cut down and replaced by quick-growing monocultures.
That, according to a report produced by a group of Indonesian and regional NGOs, is exactly what is happening in Indonesia, home to the world's third-largest rainforest area.
"The country's forests face unprecedented threats from the industrial scale projected for biomass demand," said the groups, which include Auriga Nusantara and Earth Insight.
Indonesia's production of wood pellets alone jumped from 20,000 to 330,000 tonnes from 2012 to 2021, the report said.
Auriga Nusantara estimates nearly 10,000 hectares of deforestation has been caused by biomass production in the last four years.
But the report warns that much more is at risk as Indonesia ramps up biomass, particularly in its coal-fired power plants.
The report looked at existing co-firing plants and pulp mills around Indonesia and the 100 kilometres (62 miles) surrounding each.
They estimate more than 10 million hectares of "undisturbed forest" lie within these areas and are at risk of deforestation, many of which "significantly overlap" with the habitat of endangered species.
Animals at risk include orangutans in Sumatra and Borneo, the report said.
Using wood to achieve just a 10 percent reduction in coal at Indonesia's largest power plants "could trigger the deforestation of an area roughly 35 times the size of Jakarta," the report warned.
Indonesia's environment and forestry ministry officials did not immediately respond to AFP's request for comment.
Indonesia saw a 27 percent jump in primary forest loss last year after a downward trend from a peak in 2015-2016, according to the World Resources Institute.
The groups also point the finger at growing demand in South Korea and Japan, two major export destinations for Indonesia's wood pellets.
They urged Indonesia to commit to protecting its remaining natural forest and reform its energy plans to focus on solar, while banning new coal projects.
Japan and South Korea should end biomass incentives and focus on cleaner renewable options, the group urged.
"There are no math tricks that can justify burning forests for energy," the NGOs said.
"Science has clearly proven the vital role of tropical forests for climate stability, biodiversity and human survival."
https://phys.org/news/2024-10-indonesia-biomass-threatens-key-forests.html
*********************************************UK: Some rare realism from a Greenie
The government risks a huge political backlash if it keeps pushing the public to install heat pumps to replace their boilers, one of Britain’s leading green entrepreneurs has warned.
Dale Vince, a major Labour donor and renewable energy advocate, called on Keir Starmer to rethink national programmes, championed by Boris Johnson, pushing the technology. Vince argued that Whitehall should explore alternatives to the devices, which he said were expensive, caused serious disruption and could end up increasing energy bills for some people.
Vince, whose criticism of heat pumps has proved divisive among environmentalists, said mass use could bring a bigger political backlash than London’s expanded ultra-low emission zone (Ulez), which led to a surprise byelection defeat for Labour last year in Uxbridge and South Ruislip.
“It’s a Johnson-era policy, and like most Johnson ideas, it wasn’t thought through,” Vince said. “It wasn’t meant for the real world, if you look at the amount of money committed. Electricity energy bills overall in our households will go up unless you assume heroic levels of performance.
“You’ve got this incredible disruption of home life for tens of millions of people – the need to change heating systems for a lot of people, not just the boiler – and substandard outcomes in a lot of cases.”
He added: “It’s politically threatening for any government to have a heat-pump programme. If you look back at the Ulez byelection and the fuss made about it in elements of the press, imagine a heat-pump programme where a household has just spent thousands of pounds on some technology that doesn’t do the job.” In June, Vince tweeted that heat pumps were like “Ulez on steroids”.
The entrepreneur’s latest comments expose divides even among environmentalists about the best way to move home heating away from the burning of fossil fuels via a regular gas boiler. Critics such as Vince state that heat pumps could increase bills because the electricity used to run them costs far more than gas. A study by the independent Energy Saving Trust put the cost at £20 a year more than using a new A-rated gas boiler. However, new specialist heat pump tariffs could make them cheaper to run.
Johnson’s government was an advocate of the technology, setting a goal of 600,000 new heat pumps a year by 2028. While installations in the UK have hit a record number this year, they have still only reached about 42,000 since January.
Air-source heat pumps cost just over £12,500 to buy and install on average, about four to five times more than a gas boiler. But the government currently offers a £7,500 grant for households installing the technology.
Vince claimed that he was speaking in the “national interest” in criticising heat pumps. He proposes an alternative – green gas, or biomethane, made from organic material, which his company Ecotricity develops.
Other environmentalists claim that the amount of land needed to produce enough green gas would be unrealistic, lead to food insecurity and damage biodiversity.
The Heat Pump Association, an industry body, insisted that the devices are a “proven, efficient, low-carbon heating solution which are readily available and scalable with the potential to reduce carbon emissions from heating by over 75% relative to fossil fuel heating systems”.
“Electricity prices are higher than gas prices in the UK,” it said. “However, heat pumps use three to five times less energy. Well-installed heat pumps that operate efficiently and make use of flexible electricity tariffs will in the vast majority of cases save the consumer money in comparison to their existing heating system.”
A Department for Energy Security and Net Zero spokesperson said of Vince’s concerns: “We do not recognise these claims. The energy shocks of recent years have shown the urgent need to upgrade British homes, and heat pumps are a critical technology for decarbonising heating.
“Biomethane also has an important role in the transition to net zero as a green gas that can decarbonise gas supply, reduce our reliance on fossil fuels and increase energy security.”
Vince also revealed plans to take advantage of the government’s decision to end the effective ban on onshore wind by “dusting off” a plan for 100 turbines in Gloucestershire, where his company is based, to power the county’s homes.
He said they could ultimately be transferred to the council’s ownership, handing it both an asset and long-term income. “If they were owned by the local authority, the windmills would bring £7m a year into local authority coffers,” he said.
“We will take the lead on this. We will find the sites, take them through planning and at some point in the future hope to work with local authorities to hand them over for public ownership.”
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Human CO2 Emissions Are Supercharging Corn Yields
How can carbon dioxide, which has been portrayed as a dangerous pollutant threatening the very existence of humankind, be considered even remotely beneficial? Sadly, such a question can be expected from people – children and adults – who have been fed irrational fears in place of well-established science that shows CO2 to be an irreplaceable food for plants and necessary for all life.
Even some who recognize CO2 as sustenance consider increasing atmospheric concentrations of the gas to be potentially catastrophic, a view devoid of scientific basis and inimical to the fortunes of malnourished millions.
Corn, or maize, is foundational—along with rice, wheat, soyabean—to global food security, serving as a critical source of nourishment for both humans and livestock. Over the past few decades, increases in atmospheric CO2 from industrial emissions have tracked with notable boosts in corn yields.
Between 1900 and 2024, the national corn yield in the U.S. rose to 183 bushels per acre (bu/A) from just 28 bushels. During the same period, atmospheric CO2 increased from 295 parts per million (ppm) to 419 ppm. Worldwide, corn yield rose from a mere 29 bu/A in 1961 to 86 bu/A in 2021.
This phenomenon is not merely coincidental; it is deeply rooted in the physiological characteristics of corn as a C4 category plant. C4 plants like corn – so named for the number of carbon atoms in their photosynthetic product — possess unique biochemical pathways that make their photosynthesis particularly efficient under high concentrations of CO2 and elevated temperatures. Such plants employ a mechanism that concentrates CO2 in specialized structures called bundle sheath cells.
Higher CO2 levels also improve water-use efficiency in corn, which is particularly beneficial where water supplies are limited or during droughts. This efficiency translates into enhanced growth rates and potentially greater yields. In fact, researchers say that “less water will be required for corn under a high-CO2 environment in the future than at present.”
Augmented corn yields driven by increased atmospheric CO2 have had profound effects worldwide, contributing to an agricultural boom that bolstered farm incomes and enhanced food security across diverse regions. Countries like the U.S. with significant corn production have experienced elevated export revenues, strengthening national economies and their positions in the global market.
But this remarkable impact of elevated CO2 is not just limited to C4 crops like corn. C3 plants, such as wheat, rice, potatoes, and soybeans, all rely on an enzyme called rubisco for carbon fixation. Rubisco’s efficiency improves significantly with higher CO2 concentrations because it reduces the enzyme’s tendency to bind with oxygen—a process known as photorespiration that limits productivity.
Consequently, elevated atmospheric CO2 often results in enhanced photosynthesis and biomass accumulation in C3 species, although to a lesser extent than with C4 plants. This is why rice and wheat yields can increase by up to 20-30% under elevated CO2 conditions. We have witnessed this in yield increases across most C3 food crops.
Notably, greenhouse farming—agronomy practiced inside a translucent tent to retain the sun’s warmth—often uses CO2 concentrations artificially increased to more than twice ambient levels to enhance growth.
The relationship between rising atmospheric CO2 and crop yields is clearly a positive one. So, ignore fearmongering media headlines about toxic human CO2 emissions. You, your family and the industries that support our society have greened the planet with daily emissions of carbon dioxide, making food more plentiful and affordable for those grappling with poverty and everybody else.
https://co2coalition.org/2024/09/18/human-co2-emissions-are-supercharging-corn-yields/
************************************************‘It’s almost beyond belief’: Findings blast Australia’s biggest carbon offset scheme
Australia’s biggest carbon credit scheme is barely removing any greenhouse gas from the atmosphere, according to a new study, despite hundreds of millions of dollars being pumped into it by businesses and the government.
One of the study’s authors, Dr Megan Evans from UNSW Canberra, said the findings about the Human Induced Regeneration scheme, known as HIR, pointed to “such huge failures that it’s almost beyond belief”.
Co-author and University of NSW senior lecturer Megan Evans.
Co-author and University of NSW senior lecturer Megan Evans.
The HIR is intended to allow farmers and project proponents to reduce stock and feral animals from vast areas of rangeland Australia which, they argue, allows forest to regrow there in a way it would not otherwise.
Credits are then issued for each tonne of carbon dioxide abated by the assumed growth in trees based on a model of how the forest should regrow in those areas, plus on regular audits.
The new research from a group of ANU and UNSW scientists, led by Professor Andrew Macintosh, used historical and current satellite images to suggest there was no meaningful change between forest growth on areas that were claiming carbon credits compared with neighbouring areas.
The new paper suggests that whatever trees have grown on the 116 projects surveyed was overwhelmingly due to recent rainfall, not the human management of projects.
The study found most projects showed “minimal impact on woody vegetation cover in credited areas” even though they had already generated about $495 million in carbon credits.
Their findings were immediately rejected by another ANU scientist, natural resource management associate professor Cris Brack, who has done extensive work for the government regulator, the Clean Energy Regulator.
Brack rejected the statement that little or no abatement had taken place, saying he had “personally reviewed numerous projects across NSW, Queensland and WA”, and had access to independent assurance-audit reports that proved projects were on track.
The HIR method is the largest single contributor of carbon credits to the Australian government and private industry, with 465 projects covering 42 million hectares – an area significantly larger than Japan. Having issued 44 million carbon credits, the Australian scheme is, according to the new study, the fifth-largest nature-based scheme in the world, making these findings of global significance.
The problem, the researchers say, is that HIR schemes are being credited on rangeland that was unsuitable because it was never cleared of forest in the first place, and is already close to its natural coverage of forest (trees above two metres tall over at least 20 per cent of the landscape).
Since 2021, Macintosh and a growing team of scientists have described the method as a fraud that would cost Australia up to $5 billion by 2030.
Their concerns have prompted a number of reviews, most notably by former chief scientist Ian Chubb. In 2023, he found the method was sound and said, “we have no reason to believe that there are substantial numbers of [Australian Carbon Credit Units] ACCUs not credible at the moment”.
But the new, peer-reviewed report, published by Macintosh and his team on Friday in The Rangeland Journal, closely analysed 116 sites in NSW, Queensland and South Australia using high-resolution satellite images.
Based on the number of carbon credits generated on the project areas, the tree canopy should have covered 30 per cent of the sites. Instead, they found the average cover was just 13 per cent. They also found the project’s management had made little difference to tree coverage.
“The areas are likely to be at or near their carrying capacity for woody vegetation, meaning any changes in tree cover are most likely to be attributable to seasonal variability in rainfall,” the report said. “Projects are being credited for regenerating forests in areas that contained forest cover when the projects started.
“Given that 2023 was the third year of a rare triple-dip wet La Niña, if the projects were performing as expected, observed levels of canopy cover across the projects would be significantly higher.”
The scientists said the real problem with this was that emitters would not alter their behaviour because they could buy offsets, then if those offsets did not produce real cuts in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, Australia would not genuinely reduce its emissions.
Another of the project’s authors, Professor Don Butler from the ANU, said the government body that administers the scheme, the Clean Energy Regulator, had “let us all down terribly”.
“They’ve used hundreds of millions of dollars of public money to build a house of cards that is enabling climate inaction ... The failure of this scheme will only become more obvious as time goes on.”
But Brack, who has audited the scheme for the Clean Energy Regulator, and found it was meeting its targets, said the other scientists had got their measurements wrong.
The satellite images they used were not picking up all the extra growth, he said, much of which could only be seen from photographs or “in situation measurements” on the ground.
Brack added that projects could still meet targets if there were small trees that had not yet reached full size.
In a statement, the Clean Energy Regulator said the HIR method had been reviewed and found to be sound, by Chubb, the Australian National Audit Office and most recently by Brack who had given “strong assurance that the projects are being managed properly”.
If a project was not compliant, carbon credits already paid out were clawed back, the statement said. “We only issue carbon credits where a project can demonstrate regenerating native forest,” it said.
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10 October, 2024
Democracies Stand In The Way Of Globalists Climate Agenda
I have frequently written over the last several years that the agenda of the climate-alarm lobby in the Western world is not consistent with the maintenance of democratic forms of government
Governments maintained by free elections, the free flow of communications, and other democratic institutions are not able to engage in the kinds of long-term central planning exercises required to force a transition from one form of energy and transportation systems to completely different ones.
Why? Once the negative impacts of vastly higher prices for all forms of energy begin to impact the masses, the masses in such democratic societies are going to rebel, first at the ballot box, and if that is not allowed by the elites to work, then by more aggressive means.
This is not a problem for authoritarian or totalitarian forms of government, like those in Saudi Arabia, China, and Russia, where long-term central planning projects invoking government control of the means of production is a long-ingrained way of life.
If the people revolt, then the crackdowns are bound to come.
This societal dynamic is a simple reality of life that the pushers of the climate alarmist narrative and forced energy transition in Western societies have been loathe to admit.
But, in recent days, two key figures who have pushed the climate alarm narrative in both the United States and Canada have agreed with my thesis in public remarks.
In so doing, climate alarmists are uttering the quiet part out loud about their real agenda.
Last week, former Obama Secretary of State and Biden climate czar John Kerry made remarks about the “problem” posed by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that should make every American’s skin crawl.
Speaking about the inability of the federal government to stamp out what it believes to be misinformation on big social media platforms, Kerry said:
“Our First Amendment stands as a major block to the ability to be able to just, you know, hammer it out of existence,” adding, “I think democracies are, are very challenged right now and have not proven they can move fast enough or big enough to deal with the challenges that we are facing.”
Never mind that the U.S. government has long been the most focused purveyor of disinformation and misinformation in our society. Kerry wants to stop the free flow of information on the Internet.
The most obvious targets are Elon Musk and X, the only big social media platform that does not willingly submit to the government’s demands to censor speech.
Kerry’s desired solution is for Democrats to “win the ground, win the right to govern by hopefully having, you know, winning enough votes that you’re free to be able to, to, implement change.”
The change desired by Kerry, Vice President Kamala Harris, and other prominent Democrats is to obtain enough power in Congress and the presidency to revoke the Senate filibuster, pack the Supreme Court, enact the economically ruinous Green New Deal, and do it all before the public has any opportunity to rebel.
Not to be outdone by Kerry, Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland of Canada, who is a longtime member of the board of trustees of the World Economic Forum, was quoted Monday as saying:
“Our shrinking glaciers, and our warming oceans, are asking us wordlessly but emphatically if democratic societies can rise to the existential challenge of climate change.”
It should come as no surprise to anyone that the central governments of both Canada and the United States have moved in increasingly authoritarian directions under their current leadership, both of which have used the climate alarmist narrative as justification.
This move was widely predicted once the utility of the Covid ‘pandemic’ to rationalize government censorship and restrictions of individual liberties began to fade in 2021.
Frustrated by their perceived need to move even faster to restrict freedoms and destroy democratic levers of public response to their actions, these zealots are now discarding their soft talking points in favor of more aggressive messaging.
This new willingness to say the quiet part out loud should truly alarm anyone who values their freedoms.
https://principia-scientific.com/democracies-stand-in-the-way-of-globalists-climate-agenda/
********************************************Ex-Green leader declares war on strawberries
Who remembers Natalie Bennett, the Aussie-accented eco-warrior whose car crash interviews briefly enlivened the 2015 election campaign? The onetime Green leader has since been installed as one of our great unelected masters in the House of Lords. But it seems that all that the institutional knowledge there has not yet rubbed off on Bennett, who continues to suffer a chronic case of foot-in-mouth syndrome. Many such cases…
In her never-ending quest to make life worse for the British people, Bennett has found a new scourge on which to direct her ire: strawberries. Yes, that’s right, apparently growing the popular red fruit in colder months is killing the planet and must be banned immediately. Talk about priorities eh? Taking to Twitter last night, the Green peer shared a Times article on a British farm which dared to use LEDs to grow strawberries for Christmas. It prompted Bennett to indignantly thunder that:
Do we _need_ strawberries in winter? No. Maybe
Put that on a poster and vote for it. When the Greens promised a new kind of politics, Mr S didn’t realise that Cromwellian Puritanism is what they had in mind…
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/10/ex-green-leader-declares-war-on-strawberries/
*****************************************Toyota's portable hydrogen cartridges look like giant AA batteries – and could spell the end of lengthy EV charging
Toyota is showcasing a series of sustainable developments at the Japan Mobility Bizweek later this month – including its vision of a portable hydrogen cartridge future, which could apparently provide 'swappable' power for next-gen hydrogen fuel cell electric vehicles (FCEVs).
Originally a project of Toyota’s mobility technology subsidiary Woven (formerly Woven Planet), the team produced a working prototype of a hydrogen cartridge back in 2022 but has since developed the idea further… and appears to be running with it.
The latest cartridges are lighter and easier to transport, with Toyota claiming the current iteration has been developed with the experience the company has gained in reducing the size and weight of the hydrogen tanks used in its fuel cell electric vehicles.
The concept involves hydrogen cartridges that are compact and light enough to be carried by hand, with one model wearing what looks like an oversized AA battery on his back in a specially design backpack.
Put simply, the cartridges would allow fuel cell electric vehicle drivers to swap out their power source when hydrogen levels run low, rather than having to refuel at a station like you typically would with a fossil fuel-powered car.
But Toyota also feels that these refillable and renewable cartridges could be used in a multitude of situations, such as to generate electricity in a fuel cell to power the home or even providing hydrogen to burn for cooking.
In fact, Toyota and the Rinnai Corporation are exhibiting a stove at Japan Mobility Bizweek that does just that. Similarly, in emergency situations, the hydrogen cartridge could be removed from the car and used to power any applicable device in the case of a blackout, for example.
Although just a concept for now, Toyota feels that these lightweight, portable cartridges could create a more affordable and more convenient way to deliver hydrogen to where people live and work, without the need to lay a huge network of pipes.
With advances in battery technology, the next generation of hydrogen fuel cell passenger cars, such as Renault's recent Emblème concept, could well boast more energy dense battery packs, so can harness the power of much smaller hydrogen tanks to help zero emissions vehicles travel further without lengthy charging stops.
Toyota’s vision of portable hydrogen cartridges has the potential to power a multitude of vehicles and everyday objects, from smaller capacity motorcycles to cars and even home appliances.
The company’s concept would see fresh hydrogen cartridges delivered, alongside food and other items, with the spent cartridges retrieved and refilled. As a result, Toyota says it is currently looking to find matches with technologies and ideas from companies and startups in different fields, including both service provision and the development and sale of devices using the cartridges.
Although much debated in the automotive space, hydrogen is a flexible fuel source, with the ability to generate electricity in fuel cells or used as a combustion fuel.
It emits nothing in the way of CO2 when used (water is the only byproduct), and it can help contribute to net zero targets if it is produced using renewable energy sources, such as wind and solar.
With demand waning globally for EVs, it feels as if hydrogen is back on the agenda, with the likes of Hyundai, BMW and Honda all exploring ways of making the technology commercially viable.
https://www.yahoo.com/tech/toyotas-portable-hydrogen-cartridges-look-105254958.html?guccounter=1
******************************************Australian conservatives commit to keep coal fired power stations open ‘indefinitely’
David Crisafulli will keep Queensland’s coal fired power stations open “indefinitely” if he is elected to ensure energy remains “reliable and affordable” during the transition to renewables.
The Liberal National Party leader has committed to net zero emissions by 2050, but is yet to release a detailed plan on how that would be achieved.
Speaking in Mackay on Thursday, Mr Crisafulli said Queensland had the youngest fleet of coal-fired power plants in the country and he would keep them maintained and operational.
“We will continue to ensure that they operate whilst they are needed to form part of the mix of affordable, reliable and sustainable electricity,” he said.
“There is no way the vast majority of thinking Queenslanders would want us to shut off baseload power before the capacity of the next generation of energy has been developed.”
Asked if that meant they would run indefinitely, Mr Crisafulli said: “Well, I guess the answer to that is yes”.
“We need the baseload power that comes from those coal-fired power generators, we need that there,“ he said.
“We also need to have a vision to make sure that we are part of a transition to renewable energy, but it’s got to be done in a way that makes sure that Queenslanders can continue to afford their bills whilst we work towards the future.”
Mr Crisafulli’s LNP voted to support Labor’s legislated plan to cut 75 per cent of emissions by 2035, but has not set a renewable energy target.
Labor is relying on the proposed Pioneer-Burdekin Pumped Hydro project, near Mackay, to enable it to shut down the state’s five coal-fired power stations and reach its target of 80 per cent renewable energy by 2035.
The project is still being subjected to financial, engineering and environmental investigations and is yet to get government approvals or substantive funding.
Initial estimates put the project at $12bn but that figure is expected to balloon after more detailed financial modelling is complete.
Mr Crisafulli has backed Labor’s other Borumba pumped-hydro station, near Gympie, but has rubbished Pioneer-Burdekin as a “hoax”.
He has pledged to fund Borumba and partner with the private sector to build smaller pumped-hydro projects.
On Thursday he refused to say how many pumped hydro plans would be built if the LNP won government, when or where they would be built and the estimated cost to taxpayers.
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9 October, 2024
Hurricane Milton Historic, Not Unprecedented
It is wrong to blame human activity and ‘climate change’ for strength of hurricane
ARLINGTON HEIGHTS, IL (October 8, 2024) – Hurricane Milton is on track Wednesday to be one of the biggest storms to ever hit the Tampa Bay, Florida area, and is one of the few Category 5 hurricanes on record in the satellite era (1966-onwards). It may join Hurricane Michael in 2018 as the only Category 5 hurricanes to form in the Gulf of Mexico in October and make landfall at that strength.
While the history of Gulf hurricanes growing this strong and making a direct hit on Tampa Bay shows this is a rare occurrence, it is not unprecedented and “climate change” driven by human emissions of carbon dioxide is not to blame.
Storms of similar size and strength struck the Tampa Bay area in 1848 and 1921. And the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has tracked at least 146 hurricanes that have formed in the Gulf since 1851.
Historical data show there has been little to no long-term trend since 1900 in Florida major hurricane activity through Hurricane Helene, which hit the panhandle last month.
People born in the 1950s or later did not experience the record-high hurricane activity of the 1940s, and the early 1900s activity was likely under-reported as virtually no one lived in Florida in 1900.
https://heartland.org/opinion/press-release-hurricane-milton-historic-not-unprecedented/
**************************************************The Guardian Tries, and Fails, To Link Firefly Endangerment To Climate Change
A recent post by The Guardian titled “Firefly species may blink out as US seeks to list it as endangered for first time,” claims that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is considering listing a firefly species native to the North Eastern United States as endangered because of climate change. This is false, or at least the focus on the climate element at the start of the article is false. The threats listed are not climate effects, and the U.S. government proposal even acknowledges that human development poses the true threat.
The article describes a firefly species called the Bethany Beach firefly, which is found in coastal parts of Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia, claiming that it is “facing increasing dangers to its natural habitat because of climate change-related events” including sea level rise over time and “lowering groundwater aquifers.”
It is important to note first that the article admits the sea level rise issue is projected to impact firefly habitat “by the end of the century” – about 76 years from now. According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), the firefly is only found in freshwater marshes near coastal dune environments. The FWS release is more specific, and says between 76-95 percent of those habitats may be lost to high-tide flooding by 2100… according to climate models.
This might be true, but it is not clear that those habitats will be lost forever because of rising sea levels, and not just pushed back inland gradually over the course of those intervening decades. Dune environments are by default extremely volatile, changing with every tide, and left to nature will grow and recede. The freshwater marshes (swales) associated with them likewise change by the season.
Climate Realism has on several occasions pointed out that sea level rise is hardly the accelerating danger that the media make it out to be, here, here, and here, for examples on the East Coast specifically.
Amazingly, the Guardian article itself quickly mentions a contributing factor to relative sea level rise on the East coast that is also damaging the freshwater environments the firefly needs, and that is “lowering groundwater aquifers.” These aquifers on the East Coast are not lowering due to climate change, they are lowering due to increasing populations necessitating greater water withdrawals. This causes the land to sink, increasing the relative rate of sea level rise in some areas. Delaware, for example, is seeing about 1.7 millimeters of land subsidence each year, which adds up to about 7 inches over 100 years.
The real crux of the issue comes later in the article, where the Guardian finally mentions the abrupt changes to the firefly’s habitat that actually impact its survival on the short term, and that is “growing threats from coastal development and light pollution, the latter of which can interfere with the insects’ ability to use their bioluminescent lights to communicate with each other.” The Guardian points out that the Bethany Beach firefly only flashes in full darkness, which is becoming less available due to light pollution from housing development on the coast.
Looking at human population trends for the three states that have Bethany Beach fireflies; Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia, all three have seen exploding population growth over the past few decades.
“Within the past several years,” the Guardian reports, “Bethany Beach fireflies have been displaced and populations wiped out because of development on coastal wetlands.”
This is obviously not due to climate change, and it comes across as cynical and misleading when the article, and the FWS report, try to make that connection as though climate change is the driver behind declining firefly numbers. The FWS went so far as to try to claim intensifying severe storms were also projected to cause more firefly habitat destruction, but the data simply does not support that hypothesis.
The Guardian and the FWS would be better served telling the truth upfront instead of allowing it to be buried at the bottom of an article, which fewer readers will end up seeing. It’s deceptive and doesn’t help the Bethany Beach firefly they allegedly care about.
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It’s Time for Climate Candor
The proposed global energy transition to “all-electric everything” and Net Zero by 2050 is not unfolding as we were told it would. Rather, it is unraveling as many of us thought it would. Rising energy costs, declining energy reliability, fuel selection mandates, reduced freedom of movement, dietary changes and other real and perceived issues have spawned resistance to the transition. The lack of candor regarding the transition is palpable. It is clearly time for climate candor.
The UNFCCC and the IPCC need to be candid about the continued existence and influence of natural climate variation and include research into the causes of natural variation in their programs.
The IPCC Working Group authors need to be fair in including all relevant research in their evaluations, not just research which supports the consensus narrative.
The consensed climate science community needs to cease its efforts to prevent publication of climate research which does not comport with the consensus narrative.
The IPCC Working Group authors need to insist that the IPCC Summary for Policymakers is a real summary of the conclusions of the Working Groups and not a gross exaggeration describing the current situation as a “crisis” or “existential threat” of an emergency.
The UN Secretariat needs to tone down the “earth on fire” and “boiling oceans” rhetoric intended to scare the population into precipitous action.
NOAA and NASA need to justify why and explain how they repeatedly “adjust” historic temperature anomalies.
The renewable generation developers need to tone down the “cheapest electricity” rhetoric, acknowledge that their generation systems are redundant capacity and will remain so until hey are combined with sufficient storage capacity to render their generating capacity dispatchable.
Electric utilities need to clearly communicate their need for dispatchable capacity sufficient to meet current and projected future peak demand.
Electric utilities and their ISOs and RTOs need to clearly communicate to both government and regulatory agencies that existing coal and natural gas generation cannot be shuttered until sufficient alternative dispatchable generation has been commissioned to replace their generating capacity and accommodate growth in expected peak demand.
Electric utilities and their ISOs and RTOs need to clearly communicate that additional natural gas generation capacity might be necessary to accommodate peak demand growth if dispatchable renewable generation capacity is not connected to the grid rapidly enough to meet growing demand resulting from “all-electric everything”
Federal and state agencies responsible for the energy transition need to acknowledge that the Dispatchable Emissions-Free Resources (DEFRs) they are relying upon to supplement renewable generation do not exist and are therefore not currently available for deployment. These agencies also need to acknowledge that the future availability of these DEFRs is uncertain.
Federal and state agencies also need to acknowledge that DEFRs, if and when they become available, render intermittent renewable generation redundant capacity to the extent that they are employed as backup capacity to renewable generation.
Federal and state agencies need to acknowledge that the promise of reduced energy costs resulting from the energy transition is a fraudulent fantasy.
While the above actions need to occur in the interest of candor, it seems highly unlikely that they will occur before there is a major grid outage followed by a self-serving “blame game”.
A repetition of the “Six Phases of a Project” appears inevitable.
https://edreid.substack.com/p/its-time-for-climate-candor
*****************************************Australia: Put Greens last: peak Jewish groups demand major parties agree to preferences swap
Two of the nation’s peak Jewish groups have taken the unprecedented step of seeking to influence the make-up of the future parliament by writing to Anthony Albanese and Peter Dutton, urging the major parties to preference each other above the Greens at the next election.
The letter sent on Tuesday morning by the Executive Council of Australian Jewry and the Zionist Federation of Australia also seeks a public commitment from both the Prime Minister and Opposition Leader that they will not allow the Greens to play any role in a potential minority government or make concessions to them in return for Greens support on confidence and supply.
Separate versions of the letter have also been sent to the five recontesting teal MPs – Allegra Spender, Kate Chaney, Monique Ryan, Sophie Scamps and Zoe Daniel – urging them not to form a negotiating bloc with the Greens in the event of a hung parliament.
Signed by ZFA president Jeremy Leibler and ECAJ president Daniel Aghion, the letter to the major party leaders says there is a precedent for such a step given Labor and Liberals “committed to preference One Nation last on multiple occasions, including by former prime minister Scott Morrison at the 2019 federal election.”
The letter sparked a ferocious response from Greens leader Adam Bandt who warned Labor that preferencing the Liberals above the minor party would devastate the ALP primary vote and trigger an exodus in support.
“Voters will desert them,” Mr Bandt told The Australian.
The letter urges Mr Albanese and Mr Dutton to work together to “counteract the shameful and cynical behaviour of the Greens” over the past 12 months, accusing the minor party of seeking “political gains by exploiting intercommunity tensions that have been heightened by overseas conflicts, without regard for the social consequences”.
Mr Leibler and Mr Aghion warn in the letter that the Greens have undermined social cohesion and “threaten the foundations of our freedoms and democracy”.
“The Greens have knowingly spread outright falsehoods, including the monstrous lie that this government is complicit in genocide,” the letter says. “In doing so, the Greens have joined forces with and incited political and religious extremists who have at times engaged in violence.”
“We are writing to each of you to make a public commitment that you will not permit the Greens to play any role in a potential minority government,” the letter says. “We are also writing to seek a public commitment from each of your parties to preference each other above the Greens.”
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6 October, 2024
AI could be giving natural gas a second lease on life
The inexorable rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is forcing a reassessment of the clean energy transition. Training and running AI models are both energy-intensive processes, adding significantly to the electricity needs of data centers. Despite the widespread use of renewable energy and progress to make processes more energy efficient, demand is expected to grow.
AI’s appetite for energy is colossal. Goldman Sachs estimates that around 47 GW of additional power generation capacity will be needed in the U.S. alone by 2030 to meet the burgeoning demand. They predict that some 60% of this new demand will need to be satisfied by legacy energy sources, most likely natural gas, or 3.3 billion cubic feet of additional incremental demand. This forecasted demand is being driven in large part by data centers, the humming engines driving AI, which require massive quantities of dependable power generation rather than relying on inherently intermittent renewables.
In the U.S., tech companies are planning a constellation of over 2,000 new data centers across the country. These data centres are in some regions reversing the trend towards renewable energy. For example, in Virginia, data center provider Vantage built a 100 MW natural gas power plant entirely off the grid to power its data centers. EQT, one of the largest providers of natural gas in the U.S., is also specifically targeting data centers in Virginia as part of its long-term growth strategy.
The dash for gas is not a U.S.-only phenomenon. Several utility-scale “private wire” agreements have already been struck around the world between natural gas companies and data centers, securing all the power produced by a power plant to a single private client. For example, Microsoft last year gained approval to use its own private wire natural gas-fired power plant to supply electricity for the company’s data centers at its Grange Castle Business Park in Dublin.
Victory Hill does not invest in natural gas in the U.S. However, we invest in a fuel storage terminal for low-sulfur fuel oils that are sold into Mexico. We are also investors in a flexible power natural gas plant in the U.K. that once fully operational will use carbon capture technology to capture over 95% of all its generated emissions.
The likely spike in demand for natural gas is not yet reflected in many models forecasting the energy sector’s transition to a low-carbon future.
The dominant narrative surrounding fossil fuels indicates natural gas functioning as a transition fuel that pushes us toward a future where renewables meet all our energy needs. However, the specific requirements of always-on data centers reveal an important challenge to the notion that natural gas assets will inevitably be stranded.
Current models fail to price in the cost of intermittency and the effect of spikes or falls on the demand for fossil fuels. Some models calculate future lost profits in the upstream oil and gas sector exceeding $1 trillion under plausible changes in expectations about the effects of climate policy.
With the advent of AI, natural gas could become a destination fuel rather than a temporary stopgap.
With an election supercycle this year that will see more than 40% of the world population going to the polls, incoming governments must weigh competing priorities—from squeezed budgets to rising emissions to the race to create ever more powerful AI. It’s a balancing act that will necessitate a change in their approaches to the energy transition to ensure their rulemaking is future-proof.
Similarly, investors rushing to divest from fossil fuels, with the view that this would preserve their clients' wealth, may want to reassess whether this continues to be true, particularly considering the continued demand for, and critical nature of, natural gas within our economy going forward.
The key to this challenge lies in embracing technological advancements. Carbon Capture and Reuse (CCR) technology is available today and can be scaled. It captures carbon emissions from natural gas plants, preventing them from entering the atmosphere. By reusing the captured carbon for various industrial processes, CCR creates a win-win scenario for both energy security and climate goals.
CCR commercially incentivizes power companies to create the most efficient carbon capture technology with minimal leakage when capturing and reselling carbon. Carbon dioxide is an in-demand industrial gas with a ready global market, used in everything from food production to brake pads. It can also be used to create lower-emission fuels such as methanol to bring down emissions in the transport sector.
We believe that the path to a clean energy future does not lie in a one-size-fits-all solution. It lies in a complex network with multiple players, each with its strengths and weaknesses. Natural gas, coupled with CCR, can be a vital bridge on this journey. It can ensure both energy security and the reliable power needed for AI innovation.
This doesn't downplay the importance of renewables. Solar and wind remain essential pieces of the clean energy puzzle. The ideal scenario lies in a diversified energy mix, where renewables take the lead whenever possible, with natural gas stepping in to fill the gaps and ensure a stable, reliable grid
https://fortune.com/2024/10/03/ai-natural-gas-demand-data-centers-finance-tech-environment-energy/
*******************************************An inconvenient truth: nuclear energy is cleaner and cheaper
Largely buried by a media that peddles climate alarmism was a key report from the US Department of Energy – yes, from Joe Biden’s officials – debunking the myth that renewables are the cheapest form of emissions-free electricity. The US report completely contradicts Chris Bowen’s constant assertion that the CSIRO’s “levelized cost of electricity” proves that emissions free nuclear power is much more expensive than firmed renewables.
The US report states that “levelized cost of electricity does not capture the full benefits of nuclear as a clean, firm resource. These include the value of an 80-year operating asset, the value of firm generation to provide power during key periods of grid need or when other variable resources are not generating, and the value of clean electricity relative to carbon emitting resources”.
Using modelling based on the experience of California, the report says that the cost, per megawatt-hour of renewables and storage ONLY, ranges from $129 to $150 – while the cost of renewables and storage WITH nuclear is just $80 to $94. In other words, using nuclear makes electricity 37 per cent less expensive.
It was always absurd of the Albanese government to insist that nuclear power is cost-efficient at sea (in our nuclear-powered subs) but prohibitively expensive on land. Now that this authoritative costing has emerged from Biden’s America, its clear that green ideology is the only thing stopping us from repealing the ban on civil nuclear power.
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Data centre emissions are soaring – it’s AI or the climate
Artificial intelligence (AI) is curating your social media feed and giving you directions to the train station. It’s also throwing the fossil fuel industry a lifeline.
Three of the biggest tech companies, Microsoft, Google and Meta, have reported ballooning greenhouse gas emissions since 2020. Data centres packed with servers running AI programs day and night are largely to blame.
AI models consume a lot of electricity, and the World Economic Forum estimated in April that the computer power dedicated to AI is doubling every 100 days. Powering this boom in the US, where many AI tech pioneers are based, have been revitalised gas power plants once slated for closure.
First, what actually is AI?
AI sucks (power and water)
“At its core, the kind of AI we are seeing in consumer products today identifies patterns,” say Sandra Peter and Kai Riemer, computing experts at the University of Sydney.
“Unlike traditional coding, where developers explicitly program how a system works, AI ‘learns’ these patterns from vast datasets, enabling it to perform tasks.”
While AI programs are being “trained” and fed huge sums of data over several weeks and months, data processors run 24/7. Once up to speed, an AI can use 33 times more energy to complete a function than traditional software.
In fact, a single query to an AI-powered chatbot can consume ten times as much energy as a traditional Google search according to Gordon Noble and Fiona Berry, sustainability researchers at the University of Technology Sydney.
“This enormous demand for energy translates into surges in carbon emissions and water use, and may place further stress on electricity grids already strained by climate change,” they say.
Data centres are thirsty as well as power-hungry: millions of litres of water have to be pumped to keep them cool.
These enormous server warehouses are vying with people for an increasing share of power and water, a situation which could prove deadly during a heatwave or drought.
Noble and Berry argue. One survey showed that just 5% of sustainability professionals in Australia believed data centre operators provided detailed information about their environmental impact.
Its fierce appetite aside, AI is feted as a Swiss army knife of fixes for our ailing planet.
AI’s ability to process mountains of data means it could spot the warning signs of a building storm or flood and track how the environment is changing say Ehsan Noroozinejad and Seyedali Mirjalili, AI experts at Western Sydney University and Torrens University Australia respectively.
“For example, it can reportedly measure changes in icebergs 10,000 times faster than a human can,” they add.
Kirk Chang and Alina Vaduva, management experts at the University of East London, highlight hopes that AI might make simulations of Earth’s climate more accurate.
AI could closely monitor an entire electricity grid and coordinate generators so that they waste less energy while meeting demand. AI models could identify materials for sorting in a recycling facility and analyse air pollution to pinpoint its sources. On farms, AI systems could track weather and soil conditions to ensure crops receive only as much water as they need.
However, AI’s claims to efficiency are sadly undermined by a well-worn problem. When humanity makes an activity more efficient through innovation, the energy or resource savings are generally ploughed into expanding that activity or others.
“The convenience of an autonomous vehicle may increase people’s travel and in a worst-case scenario, double the amount of energy used for transport,” says Felippa Amanta, a PhD candidate in digital technologies and climate change.
And while there is value in imagining what AI might help us do, it is important to recognise what it is already doing. An investigation by Scientific American found AI was deployed in oil extraction in 2019 to substantially increase production. Elsewhere, targeted advertising that uses AI creates demand for material goods. More mass-produced stuff, more emissions.
Does our answer to climate change need to be high-tech?
During a climate disaster like Hurricane Helene, which claimed more than 150 lives in the south-eastern US over the weekend, a reliable power supply is often the first thing to go. AI can be of little help in these circumstances.
Low-tech solutions to life’s problems are generally more resilient and low carbon. Indeed, most of them – like fruit walls, that used renewable energy to grow Mediterranean produce in England as early as the Middle Ages – have been around for a very long time.
“‘Low-tech’ does not mean a return to medieval ways of living. But it does demand more discernment in our choice of technologies – and consideration of their disadvantages,” says Chris McMahon, an engineering expert at the University of Bristol.
“What’s more, low-tech solutions often focus on conviviality. This involves encouraging social connections, for example through communal music or dance, rather than fostering the hyper-individualism encouraged by resource-hungry digital devices.”
https://theconversation.com/data-centre-emissions-are-soaring-its-ai-or-the-climate-240137
***********************************************ONS Reveals the Pitiful Number of New Green Jobs Being Created in the U.K. Economy
The problem with the green U.K. economy, and its associated destruction of the hydrocarbon environment, is that there are very few jobs being created.
The few remaining ‘workers’ in the ruling Labour party are starting to rumble all the luxury boondoggles that are set to further decimate well-paid jobs in their communities.
The figures compiled by the Office for National Statistics (ONS), trying to estimate the actual number of green jobs, are always a highly creative hoot, and the latest batch are no exception. Many jobs identified are simply displacement activity, with one repair or maintenance occupation taking over from another.
Around 6% of the total are to be found in ‘environmental charities’, an interesting way to describe elite billionaire political funding to push the Net Zero fantasy.
Such is the seeming desperation to rustle up a green job, the ONS even includes repairing home appliances, controlling forest fires and separating hydrogen by carbon dioxide-producing electrolysis.
The latest ‘estimates’ from the ONS cover 2021 and 2022, and they are said to show an increase in both years. But as the graph below reveals, the rises are pitiful over a decade, and the 2022 estimate of 639,000 is less than 2% of jobs in the economy as a whole.
As can be seen, environmental charities employ 40,000 people, almost as many as the 47,000 that work in renewable energy.
But the charities figure does not include all those make-work jobs in environmental consultancy and education or what is described as in-house environmental activities.
If all the displacement, invented or re-badged jobs in repair, electric vehicles, waste disposal, water treatment, energy efficiency, Net Zero promotion, teaching and the ubiquitous bureaucracy are rightly ignored, it is unlikely that more than 150,000 new jobs have been created.
Fairly small pickings, it might be thought, from all the cash sprayed at subsidy-hunting chancers over at least two decades. Even worse, any new jobs are easily offset by the occupations being destroyed in steel making, refining hydrocarbons, coal mining and oil and gas exploration.
Fracking for gas would transform a number of deprived areas in the U.K. at little environmental cost, as it has done in the U.S. Energy security would likely be achieved, and the tax take would be considerable. But fracking is anathema to the major political parties in the U.K., except the emerging Reform party.
Last week saw some real push back on the madness of Net Zero and the so-called green economy.
The boss of GMB, the third largest trade union in the country, told the annual Labour party conference that its plans to decarbonise the energy network by 2030 will cost up to one million jobs, decimate working communities and push up bills for the poorest. According to Smith, Government’s plans for Net Zero were “bonkers” and “fundamentally dishonest”.
In a week when it was revealed that British consumers, both industrial and private, had some of the highest electricity prices in the developed world, he charged that current energy policy amounted to virtue signalling by politicians.
He accused them of exporting jobs and importing virtue because the jobs were being created abroad rather than in the U.K.
Meanwhile, a recent paper published in Science came to a damning conclusion that will not surprise sceptics, namely that 96% of climate policies over the last 25 years, ultimately designed to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, have been a waste of money.
“That’s where green spin has got us,” writes George Monbiot, although these days the Guardian’s extremist-in-chief seems to have given up on all life enhancing processes that run the risk of disturbing anything on the planet.
“Finally, 15 years and a trillion dollars too late, George Monbiot says what sceptics have been saying all along,” observes the sceptical journalist Jo Nova. “Nearly every single carbon reduction scheme is a useless make-work machination that creates the illusion that the government is doing something,” she says.
As we can see, the ONS survey is full of these make-work schemes providing jobs that can only exist by rigging free markets and providing eye-watering subsidies from consumers and taxpayers.
As the more concerned trade unionists can see, much of the cost of these fantasy ventures falls on the poorest members of society forced to pay higher prices for many of the basic essentials of life.
In addition, as we have observed, most green schemes make mugs of the wider investing public, with the RENIXX, a stock capitalisation global index of the 30 largest renewable industrial companies, showing near zero growth since it was started in 2006.
None of this matters, of course, to the Mad Miliband and his weird wonks at the U.K. Department of Energy, who are ramping up ideological plans to hose cash at daft ideas like carbon capture, battery energy storage and hydrogen production.
But all is not lost on the jobs front – opportunities must be taken when they occur. Earlier this year, Gary Smith was able to point to some new employment clearing away the animal casualties of wind farm blades. “It’s usually a man in a rowing boat, sweeping up the dead birds,” he observed.
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2 October, 2024
The chattering climate class and their war on coal
Electricity is slippery stuff, in that it can be difficult to properly grasp what it is or how to quantify it.
We can blame the school system. Teachers who were taught social politics at University must somehow teach mathematics and physics.
There is a reason for everything in the world and that reason usually comes down to physics until politics gets mixed in. This is a problem. In politics, the same big lie can be repeated many times, as loudly as possible, until people accept it as truth or give up trying to argue the toss.
Readers will be familiar with the nameplate rating on wind farms and solar plants. It lists the rated output under ideal circumstances, measured in watts. If a heater has 1,000W we all understand it is telling us the output at one instant in time. Consumption is a different thing and is measured in watts/hour. Reversing this, we can understand we are seeing a generator’s nameplate watts as the size of the generator and watt hours as how much it provides.
Mr Bowen claims wind and solar are clean, green, and cheap.
An interesting idea making its way around the energy conversation at present is that there is no such thing as baseload energy. The lie is perpetrated by the political system which is, at present, intending to destroy the concept (and existence) of baseload energy. Baseload is created by heavy generators that operate all day, every day, and are typically cheap. The disadvantage of this structure is that baseload plants usually take time to reach full production. Then, they need to run for extended periods of time to be economically viable. Coal and nuclear are the only two types feasible for most of the Australian market.
Gas and diesel plants can provide electricity but they are expensive when operated in this way. Peaking power is where gas comes to the fore. It can be fired up quickly and make electricity rapidly. This is ideal for peaks when people come home from their day and want heating or cooling and to cook. Gas can cover this surge very happily. Diesel is lovely stuff and great in remote locations where there is no access to the grid or if the grid fails. It might not be pretty, but it delivers when needed.
In the whole clean grid argument, those words should be enshrined…
‘When it is needed.’
Coal, nuclear, gas, and diesel will deliver when needed. Reliability has been ignored by the chattering classes who have created the current disaster of high prices and brownouts that continue to destroy various industries.
Perhaps that is the whole point of ‘renewable’ energy.
I put that in quotes because the best figures I can find are that they only return seven-tenths of the power used to build them.
Every wind tower is a hallmark to coal-fired power being able to carry inefficient freeloaders. Freeloaders because renewable technologies can never produce energy when it is needed, only when it wishes.
Solar and wind dump themselves on the energy market, making it impossible for reliable supplies to remain economic. If they had to obey the same bidding rules, they would never survive.
Let’s compare the costs of wind, solar, and nuclear. To do this we can look at the Shepherds Flat Wind Farm, Topaz Solar Farm, and Barakah Nuclear Power Plant.
We can skittle the first anti-nuclear claim about taking too long to build. Barakah was completed within eight years. The global average for modern nuclear plant construction (globally) is between seven and eight years. Sadly in Australia we have a less than helpful public service that thrives on inefficiency that might drag out this timeline.
The nameplate ratings on these plants were 845MW for Shepherds Flat, 550MW for Topaz and 5,600MW for Barakah. Nuclear can appear expensive if you compare build cost against the nameplate rating but not markedly. Shepherds Flat cost $2 billion, Topaz $2.5 billion, and Barakah $24.4 billion. Comparing build cost to nameplate rating, Shepherds Flat cost 42 cents/MW, Topaz 22 cents/MW, and Barakah 23 cents/MW.
Looking at the size per dollar, nuclear is almost as good as solar and better than wind. The issue already demonstrated is not size as much as provision. That nameplate value is giving you one second of use. One second later, you are going to need that much again. This means the Watt/Hrs is crucial.
This is where wind and solar fail massively. The watts produced are not as important as the Watt Hours provided to the market. Assuming a generous 25-year life span for Shepherds Flat, 30 years for Topaz, and a mean-spirited 60 years for Barakah (when it is likely to still be running 100 years after it started), I calculated the GWh per annum compared to the Build Price over the life of the project. That is Build Price divided by annual GWh times lifespan. Shepherds Flat was $40,000, Topaz $75,000 and Barakah $9,300. On this measure, nuclear is significantly cheaper, but the price of firming wind and solar is not added to their totals. So that you can have power on those hot still days of summer when the wind doesn’t blow or the cold nights of winter when the sun is not shining you will need either nuclear or coal to provide you with the electricity you need.
We can discuss batteries some other time, but the new super battery has been coming about as long as perpetual motion and flying cars. Lithium ion batteries are old tech that has been developed to a point of maturity where there is little left to squeeze out of them and without mountains we are not going to get enough pumped hydro no matter how economically bad that model is.
If I magically had the power I would build more coal-fired stations, only because nuclear will need time to be made legal and that cannot be predicted. Nuclear however beats wind and solar to bits as far as costs and output and reliability are concerned.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/10/the-chattering-climate-class-and-their-war-on-coal/
**********************************************Solar Panels On Swiss Dam Already Cracked After Only Two Years
It’s often how the green racket works: Conjure up some ‘green’ energy-producing pie-in-the-sky project, no matter how unfeasible it may be, propose it to technically illiterate bureaucrats – who permit and fund it with little hesitation – build it, and, after realizing it won’t ever work, abandon it and let the next generation deal with the mess
In the meantime, you will have earned a tidy sum of money.
The latest likely example of such a project is “Axpo in Glarus Süd”, described at Blackout News here:
“Solar panels at Muttsee dam fail after two years – solar plant not suitable for mountain use.”
The Swiss Axpo Glarus Süd solar project consisted of installing solar panels on a dam with ideal orientation.
It was heralded as a pioneering project and designed to last 20 years while providing ‘green’ power (at least in the summertime) to nearly 3,000 people.
But, as Blackout News reports:
“After just two years, considerable problems are already apparent. Of the 5,000 or so solar panels installed, around 270 are damaged, reports the newspaper Südostschweiz.”
Solar panels in the harsh environment of the Swiss Alps? What could possibly go wrong?
Surely the builders and those approving the project had to have been familiar with extremely harsh winter conditions and massive snowfalls of the Swiss Alps, and that the system would never have a chance.
Obviously, no one cares much about reality anymore. The important thing, it seems, is to grab all that ‘green’ cash and make a stash.
Already, just two years in operation, 270 panels of the Muttsee project need to be replaced, and that is at an exorbitant cost.
Just check out the Axpo promotion video and take a look at the equipment needed to build the project. The helicopters, cranes, rigging, and this caliber of personnel aren’t cheap.
So far I haven’t found data on the project’s return on investment time.
Another embarrassing fact: “The full extent of the damage only became clear when the snow at 2,500 meters above sea level had completely melted,” reports Blackout News.
No one became aware of the damage until spring had arrived.
https://principia-scientific.com/solar-panels-on-swiss-dam-already-cracked-after-only-two-years/
*********************************************A few days prior to the games, French authorities fined the country’s second most popular news channel 20,000 euros for challenging the popular narrative about a purported climate crisis.
CNews, a round-the-clock news operation, was charged by the Regulatory Authority for Audiovisual and Digital Communication (ARCOM) with a broadcast’s failing to adequately challenge views skeptical of the global warming scare.
“This is the first time in France and internationally that ARCOM or a regulatory authority has issued a financial sanction for a breach concerning an environmental subject,” said QuotaClimat, an organization that reportedly has complained in the past about the climate reporting of various media.
The case of CNews raises serious concerns about press freedom – a cornerstone of democratic societies — and the public’s access to diverse perspectives on environmental issues. While the regulator argued that the channel failed to provide sufficient context and counterarguments, critics contend that the decision sets a dangerous precedent, effectively requiring media outlets to adhere to a specific ideological position.
The role of journalism in a democracy is not to parrot official viewpoints or consensus opinions but rather to investigate, question and present different perspectives on important issues. By imposing restrictions on how climate issues can be reported, France undermines this crucial function of the media.
This crackdown on climate reporting exemplifies a broader trend of using authorities backed by official powers to curb the expression of views that challenge a government’s preferred narrative, a concerning development for anybody favoring an open society.
The practice has become far too common in academic research as well. Scientists who challenge the crisis narrative are subjected to witch hunts and termination from their professions.
Many climate scientists, influenced heavily by funding sources, are transforming their discipline into something that hardly qualifies as science. While their work has the appearance of scientific research and is conducted by those with scientific credentials, both its methodologies and findings are heavily shaped by the agendas of special interest groups, political figures and international governing bodies.
Researchers and their organizations, in too many cases, have become harvesters of grants rather than seekers of truth. Such scientists are supplicants of governments and wealthy foundations wanting particular findings and willing to pay for them.
Those who champion genuine scientific inquiry must speak out against deliberate efforts by climate alarmists to discredit sceptics, whose questions are manifestations of critical thinking. Inquiry into popular theories should be welcome, not treated as sedition.
From Galileo’s astronomical discoveries to more recent controversies in fields like genetics and nuclear energy, attempts to protect the popular view have often backfired. slowing scientific progress and technological advancement.
In the case of climate change, this is true too. Restrictive energy policies — justified on the basis of addressing a “climate crisis” — already have impeded economic growth and increased prices. Ideologues seek to reverse decades of advancement in clean-coal power generation, oil and gas development and other technologies.
Scientific understanding of Earth’s climate is not furthered by silencing dissent but through rigorous research, peer review and open debate. By allowing a diversity of voices in the media, including those that challenge the so-called “consensus,” opportunities for truth arise.
Isolated intrusions on press freedom are annoying. But actions like that of the French regulator for reporting on a climate story can be replicated by other governments and for other subjects – a certain eventuality without the intervention of honest citizens
For this is the proverbial slippery slope greased by powerful people’s lust for control or money or both. Left alone, only the most ruthless of the politically connected get to say where it ends. Even they can’t say for sure, but history tells us it ends badly.
https://cornwallalliance.org/gag-on-climate-reporting-is-another-french-obscenity/
*************************************************Why There Will Never Be A Zero Emissions Electricity System Powered Mainly By Wind And Sun
“Net Zero” — That’s the two-word slogan that has been adopted as the official goal of every virtuous state or country for decarbonizing its energy system. The “net” part is backhanded recognition that some parts of the energy system (like maybe air travel or steelmaking) may never be fully de-carbonized. Thus some kind of offsets or indulgences may need to be accepted to claim achievement of the goal.
But the “net” thing is not for the easy parts of decarbonization. And by the easy parts, I mean the generation of electricity, and the powering of anything that can be run on electricity or batteries. In electrifiable parts of the energy system, there is to be no tolerance for “net”; only “zero emissions” will do. The official line is that zero emissions electricity is easy and cheap because it can be provided by the wind and sun.
The official line is wrong. As the build-out of these wind and solar generation systems continues to progress, it has become increasingly obvious that there will never be a zero-emissions electricity system powered mainly by wind and sun.
The reason should be obvious to everyone although, for some reason I cannot understand, it is not. The reason is that the intermittency of wind and solar generators means that they require full back-up from some other source. But the back-up source will by hypothesis be woefully underused and idle most of the time so long as most of the electricity comes from wind and sun. No back-up source can possibly be economical under these conditions, and therefore nobody will develop and deploy such a source.
This issue has already arisen in many places, as increasing generation from wind and sun has put natural gas power plants into back-up mode, running half or less of the time.
Now consider how things are supposed to proceed as we move to zero-emissions electricity. First, we build more and more wind and solar facilities. Second, we disallow natural gas or any other hydrocarbon fuel as the back-up. Now the back-up must itself be zero-emissions, and also dispatchable. In New York, our regulators have devised the acronym DEFR (“Dispatchable Emissions-Free Resource”). Several possibilities have been suggested as the DEFR, the main ones being nuclear, hydrogen, and batteries. All possibilities for the DEFR that have been suggested share the characteristic that they don’t exist today at anything close to the scale that will be needed to fully back up an electricity system powered mainly by wind and sun. In other words, somebody will have to make a huge investment in one or more of these things on a grand scale if we are to have an electricity system powered mainly by wind and sun.
Given New York’s political environment, the regulators who have raised the need for the DEFR have generally buried their discussion of the subject deep in lengthy documents. Roger Caiazza, the Pragmatic Environmentalist of New York, has done yeoman’s work in digging up and highlighting these items. Roger has created a “Dispatchable Emissions Free Resource Page” where he has accumulated the key information.
For example, we have the Scoping Plan of the Climate Action Council, which Roger describes as “the ‘official’ Hochul Administration strategy description of the Climate Act transition.” The document is some 800+ pages of text plus appendices. Somehow, Roger made it to page 49 of Appendix G, where he found this quote:
During a week with persistently low solar and wind generation, additional firm zero-carbon resources, beyond the contributions of existing nuclear, imports, and hydro, are needed to avoid a significant shortfall; Figure 34 demonstrates the system needs during this type of week. During the first day of this week, most of the short-duration battery storage is quickly depleted, and there are still several days in which wind and solar are not sufficient to meet demand. A zero-carbon firm resource becomes essential to maintaining system reliability during such instances. In the modeled pathways, the need for a firm zero-carbon resource is met with hydrogen-based resources; ultimately, this system need could be met by a number of different emerging technologies.
For reference, New York State’s current average electricity usage is well less than 20 GW. Meanwhile, even during this low wind/sun week there are times when this DEFR is not called on at all, and other times when it is called on for only a few GW.
So without saying so in as many words, they are telling us that as part of a predominantly wind/sun system we will need to build DEFRs of capacity equal to or greater than our entire current average electricity usage. But if the electricity system is powered mainly by wind and sun, then by definition the DEFRs are only going to operate a minority of the time. We will have now built an entire fleet of new nuclear power plants capable of fulfilling our entire peak electricity demand. Or maybe it’s an entire fleet of new hydrogen power plants of same capacity, or an entire fleet of grid-scale batteries of same capacity, only to keep them idle most of the time.
These are extremely capital-intensive facilities, which can only hope to be economical if they are operated to as much of their capacity as possible. Instead the proposal is that will be intentionally kept idle most of the time.
Who is going to make the investment in these DEFRs that will be kept mostly idle. Certainly, no private investors will do it without enormous government subsidies.
And if we were to build an entire system of these DEFRs capable of supplying all of our electricity needs to back up worst-case wind/sun lulls, wouldn’t it make far more sense just to leave out the wind and solar generation and go with the DEFRs all the time? Of course it would.
At some point this is going to become too obvious to ignore.
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1 October, 2024
The Political Contamination of Climate Science
Few scientific efforts have been so dramatically ruined by politics as climate science. For over 30 years, thousands of climate scientists have pushed the message that the world is in serious jeopardy because of human-caused climate change. They have signed manifestos saying we are in a “climate emergency” that will lead to “untold suffering,” that humanity is at “code red,” and that life as we know it is “under siege.”
Climate science should have provided us with facts on which we can debate policies.
It is curious, given all these scientists stating all these extreme warnings, that many Americans haven’t paid them a lot of attention. In fact, a Pew poll suggested that although most Americans showed concern about climate change, it is often viewed as comparatively unimportant.
In the words of the Pew survey authors, “[Climate change] is a lower priority than issues such as strengthening the economy and reducing health care costs.” This statement does not seem congruent with a “code red” emergency that suggests life is “under siege.” Why worry about mere health care costs when the world is ending via climate apocalypse?
This incongruent apathy isn’t just a conservative thing. That same Pew survey also found that although Republicans are more likely than Democrats to have negative attitudes towards climate change, climate science skepticism can nonetheless be found on both sides. What accounts for this bipartisan doubt? (READ MORE from Lucian G. Conway: Can We Please Give Philadelphia to New Jersey?)
The answer is easy: Climate science isn’t viewed as especially scientific. It is instead viewed as political.
Nothing makes people distrust sources of information like the belief that they are over-politicized. For example, recent research by Clark and colleagues shows that people distrust institutions they view as overly politicized, even when they agree with the political goals of the institutions. Even liberals distrust over-politicized liberal institutions.
No movement has cannibalized its own credibility with political contamination quite like climate science. Our lab’s research in the Journal of Environmental Psychology showed that a primary predictor of why people oppose climate change policies is that they think the claimed “97% scientific consensus” around climate change represents political agendas more than scientific fact. Americans began to suspect that the scientific consensus isn’t really a consensus about science at all.
Is this because the American public is anti-science? No. It is because climate scientists themselves insisted on blurring the lines between provable scientific facts and a far-left political agenda.
For example, in the original 1992 World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity — a document signed by over 1,700 academics that became a manifesto for climate science — scientists listed five things we “must” do. Number five is instructive: “We must ensure sexual equality, and guarantee women control over their own reproductive decisions.”
Whatever you think about those issues, it is noteworthy that on the surface they don’t have anything specific to do with the science of climate change. They don’t tell us facts or base conclusions on those facts. Instead, at least 20 percent of the recommendations signed by all those scientists were fundamentally political.
And it isn’t getting better. In the manifesto version updated in 2022, scientists claim that the original 1972 version was abhorrently too politically conservative, noting that the original “is a narrative rooted in colonialism and racism, and current-day unjust and inequitable socioeconomic systems.”
I’m not sure what that has to do with climate science — and that’s the point. Right now, this doesn’t strike me (or a lot of Americans) as especially about science, but rather about a giant political package that we’re required to accept whole or else be decried as heretics.
Science and Political Power
If climate scientists were only promoting an abstract political ideology, we could perhaps afford to dismiss this state of things with a sigh. But their political positions often push for extreme action. They want to make us use less fuel and eat less meat. They want to control the number of kids we have. They don’t want us to care about economic growth. Even if climate scientists prove to be right about some of the down-stream consequences of human activity — and I’m still open to that possibility — that uncertain outcome must be weighed against the costs of their proposed policies. (READ MORE: The Curious Case of Conservative Happiness)
Like the farmers protesting green policies in Europe, I see the costs of these policies with my own eyes in the present. Those costs seem far more certain than the vague uncertain outcomes pitched by the climate-science crowd. As a result, what we really need is a truly balanced discussion of climate policies that weighs the known real costs against the potential gains. With climate scientists, we generally get instead a lot of simple-minded political propaganda as a substitute for serious scientific thought.
Climate science should have provided us with facts on which we can debate policies. Instead, it took an axe to the scaffolding of scientific credibility that held it upright, and we’re all worse off as a result
https://spectator.org/the-political-contamination-of-climate-science/
*********************************************************The Texas Billionaire Who Could Bankrupt Greenpeace USA
Fossil-fuel billionaire Kelcy Warren is about to land a knockout punch on Greenpeace
The pipeline magnate’s company, Energy Transfer is behind a lawsuit that Greenpeace says could bankrupt the environmental group’s U.S. affiliate.
A courtroom victory, which some Greenpeace officials fear is likely, would be a coda in the nearly decadelong battle between the two sides over one of Warren’s signature projects: the Dakota Access Pipeline.
In 2016, Greenpeace, Native American tribal groups and thousands of other activists camped in a remote corner of North Dakota to block the project.
The monthslong protests impeded the oil pipeline’s completion and became a flashpoint in the fight over ‘fossil fuels’. Images of sometimes violent confrontations between protesters and law enforcement made international news.
Warren ultimately completed the pipeline, but the fight wasn’t over for him.
Warren sees green activists, who he once said should be “removed from the gene pool,” as a serious threat to the industry. Starting with protests of Keystone XL, which successfully derailed that project, activists have targeted pipelines across the country.
“Everybody is afraid of these environmental groups and the fear that it may look wrong if you fight back with these people,” Warren said in a 2017 TV interview. “But what they did to us is wrong, and they’re gonna pay for it.”
Now the pugnacious tycoon, who is valued at more than $7 billion, is within spitting distance of dealing a serious blow to Greenpeace—and the U.S. green movement.
Energy Transfer’s lawsuit alleges several Greenpeace entities incited the Dakota Access protests, funded attacks to damage the pipeline, and spread misinformation about the company and its project.
The case is set for trial in February in a North Dakota state court, where both sides expect a ‘fossil-fuel’-friendly jury. Energy Transfer is seeking $300 million in damages, which would likely wipe out Greenpeace USA, according to the group’s leadership.
Deepa Padmanabha, Greenpeace USA’s acting co-executive director, said the lawsuit is “an existential threat” to the group.
In court papers, Greenpeace says it played a limited role in the protests, which it says were organized by Native American groups, and never took part in any property destruction or violence.
The litigation is unlikely to affect Greenpeace’s international operations. While the Greenpeace network’s coordinating body in the Netherlands is also a defendant, Energy Transfer may struggle to enforce any award against it because it doesn’t own assets in the U.S.
But Greenpeace says losing its affiliate—and influence—in the U.S. would have a profound impact on the group’s ability to address ‘climate change’.
Environmental leaders fear the demise of Greenpeace USA would send a chilling message to their movement. Josh Galperin, an associate professor of law at Pace University, said that environmentalists have long recognized that they can choke off pipelines by challenging them on legal grounds.
Now, some oil-and-gas companies are realizing they can use litigation to stop ‘green’ activists.
Warren declined an interview request. “We support the rights of all Americans to lawfully protest and express their opinions,” an Energy Transfer spokeswoman said. “However, when it is not done in accordance with our laws, we have a legal system to deal with that.”
In the sedate world of pipelines—a low-risk, fee-based business—Warren stands out for his aggressive style. Since co-founding Energy Transfer in 1996, he has snagged one competitor after another and built one of the largest pipeline firms in the U.S., with about 125,000 miles of oil and gas lines and related assets and a market capitalization of roughly $55 billion.
His success has afforded him a $46.5-million ranch in Colorado, a castle-like home in Dallas, and a private island in Honduras, where visitors can ride a zip line over a lagoon and nearby sharks.
Warren has also emerged as a key oil industry supporter for Donald Trump. He co-hosted a May fundraiser in Houston for the former president, and he and his wife have contributed more than $20 million to Trump’s presidential runs since 2016.
Warren’s congenial demeanor belies his drive, his friends say. When he and Marshall McCrea, Energy Transfer’s current co-chief executive, were preparing to run the Athens marathon in Greece, Warren warned the executive he would beat him—despite only sporadic training. On race day, he finished ahead of McCrea.
“He enjoys business so very much because he sees it as a game,” said Charlie Waters, a former Dallas Cowboys football player who worked at Warren’s company. “He’s so damn competitive.”
The son of a Sun Oil Co. employee, Warren grew up in East Texas and was a pole vaulter in high-school. After graduating from the University of Texas at Arlington with a civil engineering degree, he got a job at a pipeline company.
Following the demise of Enron, Warren bought thousands of miles of pipelines. The shale boom, which saw scrappy drillers in Texas, Pennsylvania and North Dakota scramble for steel tubes to ship their product in, made the conduits hot property, and further whetted his appetite: Between 2011 and 2014, Energy Transfer splurged more than $12 billion on deals.
While his stature in the industry grew, Warren remained largely unknown to the broader public.
That changed in the spring of 2016.
That year, protesters descended on North Dakota to try to block the Dakota Access project, a nearly 1,200-mile pipeline designed to ferry about 570,000 barrels of crude from the Bakken Shale field to Illinois.
Native American leaders said the $3.8 billion pipeline threatened sacred sites and posed a drinking-water risk.
The protests saw a number of clashes between authorities and activists. At one point, law enforcement trained water cannons on protesters in freezing temperatures. President Trump ultimately reversed a decision by President Obama halting the pipeline and, after years of litigation, it was completed.
In Warren’s view, Greenpeace was largely to blame for a construction delay he said cost the company millions of dollars, and Energy Transfer sued the group for $300 million under a law created to prosecute the mafia that could allow the company to claim triple that amount.
When a federal judge dismissed the suit, the company filed a new one in a North Dakota state court.
Greenpeace says that it only played a supporting role in the protests, and that the lawsuit, which alleges the group spread false claims about Dakota Access, is an attack on free speech.
It has paid for radio ads in Dallas, where Warren lives, that say, “This is America, we all have a right to speak—but Energy Transfer disagrees.”
“That sets a really dangerous precedent no matter who you are or what your politics are,” said Greenpeace USA’s Padmanabha.
Energy Transfer’s claim has caught the attention of high-ranking Democrats. “Energy Transfer’s $300 million lawsuit against Greenpeace shows how megacorporations deploy legal strategies to strong-arm and crush their critics,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin (D., Md.), who has introduced legislation to establish a procedure to dismiss and deter strategic lawsuits against public participation.
The lawsuit has thrown Greenpeace USA, which has been active since the 1970s, into turmoil. It is preparing contingency plans for a number of scenarios, including a bankruptcy.
The group’s leadership and the board have clashed over what would constitute an acceptable settlement with Energy Transfer, according to people familiar with the matter.
The lawsuit poses its own risks for Warren. Some oil-and-gas investors expressed concerns about the claim, saying it makes the industry look vindictive and could result in a reinvigorated protest movement.
But people close to him say that Warren, who has gone to the mat with competitors and critics alike, isn’t the kind to lay down arms.
“You’re not going to wear Kelcy Warren out, I can promise you that,” said Matthew Ramsey, a director on Energy Transfer’s board. “He will fight to the bitter end.”
https://principia-scientific.com/the-texas-billionaire-who-could-bankrupt-greenpeace-usa/
********************************************************Multiple Media Outlets Claim Antarctica Seeing A ‘Heatwave’
Various media outlets have recently claimed Antarctia is seeing record high temperatures. Some have even described it as a ‘heatwave’ and claimed 70F above usual
SciTechDaily, CNN and The Economic Times all of course blamed these ‘record’ temperatures on ‘climate change’, when nothing could be further from the truth.
A peer-reviewed paper published on July 31st this year described these events in the abstract thus:
Record high temperatures were documented in the McMurdo Dry Valleys, Antarctica, on 18 March 2022, exceeding average temperatures for that day by nearly 30°C.
Satellite imagery and stream gage measurements indicate that surface wetting coincided with this warming more than 2 months after peak summer thaw and likely exceeded thresholds for rehydration and activation of resident organisms that typically survive the cold and dry conditions of the polar fall in a freeze-dried state.
This weather event is notable in both the timing and magnitude of the warming and wetting when temperatures exceeded 0°C at a time when biological communities and streams have typically entered a persistent frozen state.
Such events may be a harbinger of future climate conditions characterized by warmer temperatures and greater thaw in this region of Antarctica, which could influence the distribution, activity, and abundance of sentinel taxa.
Here we describe the ecosystem responses to this weather anomaly reporting on meteorological and hydrological measurements across the region and on later biological observations from Canada Stream, one of the most diverse and productive ecosystems within the McMurdo Dry Valleys.
Notice the words ‘for that day’, ‘weather event’, ‘may’ and ‘could’.
In other words, the temperature at four locations went above zero for ONE DAY, before dropping to BELOW what is usual for that time of year for several days, then returning to ‘normal’.
As usual, none of the MSM articles that covered it bothered to mention that fact.
All four locations were in the McMurdo Dry Valleys, one of the coldest and driest places on the planet.
Notice the paper calls it a weather anomaly and a weather event, not a change in the climate, and says this may be an indication of a future climatic state that could affect resident organisms.
That is pure speculation, and probably had to be included by the authors to avoid the paper being rejected by the reviewers.
The paper can be seen here agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com, with the title ‘Response of a Terrestrial Polar Ecosystem to the March 2022 Antarctic Weather Anomaly‘
By the time it came to the attention of the mainstream media, a ‘weather anomaly’ had morphed into ‘climate change’.
CNN carried an article on August 3rd this year with the headline ‘‘Astonishing’ Antarctica heat wave sends temperatures 50 degrees above normal‘
Two days later, The Economic Times carried an article entitled ‘Antarctica’s record heat wave: A threat to global sea levels and ice integrity‘
SciTechDaily seemed unaware of it until September 6th, with the headline ‘Earth’s Last Frontier Burns: Record-Breaking Heat Strikes Antarctica in Winter‘
All three of these articles completely ignored what the paper actually said, and automatically blamed this ‘heatwave’ on us.
None of them carried a link to the paper.
You can see the temperature spike does not qualify as being a ‘heatwave’ as it occurred for just one day.
The British Met Office describes a heatwave as being three consecutive days above the average temperatures for the time of year.
It should not be forgotten that for decades, a heatwave was seven consecutive days above the average for the UK, then about ten years ago it was reduced to three days, allowing people to claim heatwaves are becoming more common.
The American NOAA website describes a heatwave as being the same, but for just two days, which allows for even more propaganda.
The most annoying part is despicable reporting is that the indoctrinated and the gullible will believe these lies without question, and will be totally unaware of the existence of the published paper, let alone what it actually says.
The three alarmist articles also fail to mention that the following year; 2023, saw Antarctic tempertures in July and August much colder than usual, as reported by us here.
https://principia-scientific.com/multiple-media-outlets-claim-antarctica-seeing-a-heatwave/
**********************************************CBS Gets the Facts Wrong About Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Trends
A recent broadcast weather segment on CBS News, Los Angeles, titled “Helene gaining strength from climate change effects,” features a staff meteorologist claiming that hurricane Helene was strengthened by climate change, and that indeed hurricanes in general are increasing in intensity and power. This is false. It is actually shocking how wrong CBS is with regards to what actual hurricane data show, which is that hurricanes are not getting more intense, frequent, or powerful.
The CBS video description reads “…Helene is gaining strength from warmer waters in the Gulf of Mexico, an effect linked to climate change that appears to make hurricanes and storms more powerful.”
The CBS anchor hands the segment over to meteorologist Marina Jurica, who alleges that “the increasing intensity of hurricanes is basically rooted in physics… hurricanes draw energy from that warm ocean water and as that climate change causes sea surface temperatures to rise the energy available for these storms increases.”
It is true that warm sea surface temperatures contribute to hurricane formation, However, they are far from the only element, and in fact for most of this hurricane season, despite warmer-than-average sea surface temperatures, storms struggled to form at all.
Jurica asserts the usual claim that warm water causes stronger winds and more moisture which causes heavier rainfall, “one of the most significant effects of climate change is its impact on hurricane intensity… which is why we’re seeing more catastrophic flooding associated with all of these recent storms.” The anchor went on to assert that hurricanes have been more intense in recent years and “the level of the storms is rising,” and Jurica added that “over the last several decades storms are moving slower” using Harvey as an example of this effect. Most of these claims are made out of whole cloth, complete nonsense.
Starting with the Hurricane Harvey anecdote, when the storm hit Texas in 2017, it was the first major hurricane to make landfall in the United States since 2005, after a 12-year major hurricane drought in one of the most active tropical storm regions in the world. The longest such major hurricane drought since records have been kept in the United States.
Jurica claims in the CBS clip that Harvey was stalled and dumped more water on Texas because of global warming causing more moisture in the air, and while it is true that the precipitation was unprecedented for the area, reality shows that it was cooler-than-normal trough that stalled the storm out over Houston. Stalled storms are not new, as pointed out by professional meteorologist and hurricane-historian Joe Bastardi here. As a meteorologist herself it was Jurica’s job to look this up before going on live television.
No measured hurricane data supports the claim that hurricanes have been becoming more intense. This is only found flawed computer model outputs.
Publicly available data record no trend in increasing frequency or intensity of tropical cyclones in the Atlantic or elsewhere around the globe. Accumulated Cyclone Energy is a metric used to track the overall strength of tropical cyclones over time, and if anything, the data here presented by Dr. Ryan Maue suggest they have been getting less powerful since the 1990s.
Even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) agrees, stating that there is “only low confidence for the attribution of any detectable changes in tropical cyclone activity to anthropogenic influences.”
The CBS broadcast was before Helene made landfall, and while hurricane Helene proved to be very destructive, it is not unprecedented. Past hurricanes have likewise caused significant flooding and wind and tornado damage well inland in the Appalachians and surrounding regions, such as hurricane Gracie in 1959 which made landfall in South Carolina as a Category 4, during which 13 people died in Virginia due to tornados. There are many other examples, the most damaging of which was the Great Galveston Hurricane of 1900, a category 4 storm which took between 6,000 and 12,000 lives, most due to storm surge and flooding.
Every major storm involving loss of life and property is a tragedy, and they need to be taken seriously, which is why it is so appalling when the mainstream media takes advantage of peoples’ fear preceding dangerous storms, and their losses and misery following them, in order to make false claims about climate change. CBS’s meteorologist is either shockingly poorly informed about hurricane data or just doesn’t care about facts, despite her training as a meteorologist.
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